Today I watched two movies called “Contact” and “Secret”.These two movies is totally different genre but it has same point in some way. I want to warn you if you have not seen these movies this article could spoil the movie.

Contact is movie from 1997 but It is about the main actress who tries to contact with an alien and try to get their with message from another universe. However the interesting thing is she didn’t get there because the kind of spaceship didn’t work even actaully she experienced to meet the alien and also saw a developed city. This movie showed how to get there, she travlled through a “black hole” and it created a time change. Even in earth time is a second, she experienced 18 hours with evidence of 18 hours of recorded static. But the USA kept secret. This show has many intereting topics to talk but I want to talk only about the relation with time.

Secret is a movie about love but the intereting thing is she can travel in time, and she met soul mate in future. she can travel to the future after playing some piano music in the same place. It means she can go future to meet her love and can go back her own time. But people didn’t believe her and during the movie she had a misunderstanding with the guy. It makes the girl die. In future the guy knew what is going on, then try to travel time in the same way she did yet his situation is totally emergency. Actaully it is hard to explain all. If you guys wonder it would be better to understand. I think at the end of movie, the guy goes back to meet her and changed the her future which she does not die.

Anyways there are many movies related with time. People say we could travel time in past and future. Also, there are many things that we can not know. It is really a mystery and nobody can deny it is impossible. Our world and Universe is really incredible.

   Have you ever watched the TV show named “We are married!”? This is one of my favorite TV shows and I really enjoy watching it. In this show, there are 4 couples who pretended to be married and each couple  is dramatically different. Among them, what I want to talk about is Jung Hyung Don who is a husband of Saori in the show. He doen’t want to help his wife, acts like typical Korean husband who most women don’t like and almost every his word is based on patriarchy so Saori is distressed and annoyed at him. So were many female viewers.  Some people say he is the only husband in this show who is exactly realistic and there are no reasons for him to be blamed. On the other hand, other people say that he deserves to be spoken ill of because he is overly indifferent to his wife and he shouldn’t act like that. However, I would like to ask people who defend Jung Hyung Don a question. Does ‘realistic’ mean ‘ok’ or ‘alright’? Is his behavior ok enough to be forgiven only because it’s realistic? I don’t think so. (Of course, it’s a diffent problem that whether we have rights to blame him or not just because his acts are wrong)  He is nothing but an indiffernt husband and it’s not right and it’s not ok at all. He definitely needs to be changed and that’s the only way to make the viwers think that he is a good husband.  

http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2008/04/16/2008041601310.html

( I’m really sorry that I link to an Korean article. It was impossible to find an article that was translated into English. )

 In short, the article reports that a film production company restricted pressmen not to ask any questions about racism. Since Korean gangs appear on the movie, the company expected that pressmen would ask about the racism on their movie. I do care how Korean described on movies, so I’m happy with it, too.

 However, we talked about ‘stereotype’ in a class that I take this semester. I learned that lack of information leads to stereotype on something. I believe that racism that we express through media  is also a part of stereotype caused by lack of information.

  On the other hand, we are able to get much information since foreigners live next to us. Many people are going abroad to live there or getting a job and they settle down together to build up their communities including Korea town, China town. All these things that happening around us could help us to understand foreigners’ culture, so that we can be friends with them.

  As I said, we have more chance to understand each other, but why don’t we stop misunderstanding? 

I watched TV right after coming back home. The news is going on the TV. The news was dealing with our president, Lee Myung-bak. I also watched the president and Ban Gi-moon, the UN secretary general had official meeting. I believe that those two people are Korea’s pride.

First of all, I am proud of our president very much. He addressed at investment meeting hold in the plaza hotel,New York. I heard he introduced himself as the Korea’s CEO. In fact, he is the president from the CEO. His efforts to attract foreign assets look great as a president. He also held a meeting with Ban Gi-moon, and asked him for dealing with the problem of North Korea’s human right. I believe that he is doing well in the USA now.

Moreover, I like Ban Gi-Moon as well. He is first Korean as the UN secretary general. He is working at the UN as a leader, dealing with lots of international issues. I really envy him, because I am also interested in working at the UN. I think that he who is from minister of MOFAT, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has strong diplomatic ability, and it is being helpful to take the job.

In short, if I have a chance to introduce great Korean to foreign people, I will tell them about the two people. In addition, I would like to be the one of great Koreans as well.    

   The bucket list is a list contained things to do before we “die”  This is originated from the phrase “kick the bucket” which means die. This is because in the execution by hanging, people usually have the prisoner stand on the bucket and kick it to kill him/her. Actually, this movie was pretty good except two things that I didn’t like.

   First, even though this movie made me think about the life and death one more time, almost everything on the bucket list is impossible if we don’t have enough money. Of course, things like “laugh until we cry” and “help other people” don’t need money but what about the traveling the world with personal airplane and car racing with an expensive car ? To the normal people like me, it looked totally impossible to do before I die. I just wish that the movie would be better if it focused more on simple things.

   Second, I could still can see the racial discrimination. Morgan Freeman who is black is a mechanic and Jack Nicholson who is white is a chairman of a conglomerate in this film. Why do always non-white people have lower social rank than the white. Moreover, in the movie, Jack Nicholson makes a black women hit on Morgan Freeman. Why a black woman? Why can’t be a white woman who attracts a black man? I thought this is unfair.

   I am not saying that this movie is a bad one. However, I could see the limitation of people’s thought about wealth and race and realized that we still have a long way to go.  

These days we learn the value of Korean and American in the class of ‘Inter-communication.’ Yes, I raelly think they are direct and have individually composed concept. Whereas, Koreans are try to be kind to others, and have the vertue of humble. We’ve learned that we should always admire older people and adults. These are all from the Confucianism.

But Koreans usually feel awkward to the strangers. I think the Americans have far more wonderful skills of dealind with the stranger. They usually use smile to the stranger. They can say ‘Hi’ to the stranger. They have the courage of start conversation without hesitation than Korean, I guess.

These different cultures should ge Inter-culturally and mutually changed.

When I saw the news in a newspaper I got some information about spring. That was there are many flowers of the spring, At that time, it made me want to have a picnic so I called my friends and I asked them to picnic. We searched some information about the most beutiful place and then we chose the grand park of Seoul. As a result, I went to the park last saturday, we looked around the park and took many pictures with many kinds of spring flowers. My last saturday was very delighting. I think the media always gives us a lot of information so in the modern life, the media is very necessry for people. Therefore, we should learn the media more so in my opinion, our class is very important to us… ^^

I didn’t use on-line shopping mall to buy clothes before because I thought that photos make clothes look better than it is and I couldn’t be sure if it fits me well without trying it.
But even though there are these weak points of online shop, the number of people who run online shopping mall has increased as well as the number of customers who use it because the price of products on an onlineshop is lower than off-line shop and it’s more convenient to shop online.

In media class we talked about stage of internet as well as phone technology
I think Internet is still in ‘cash cow’ stage
We can do many things that make our life more convenient through Internet from shopping to getting useful information.
and sill lots of people make profit using Internet.

I watched again a movie named ‘King and the Clown’ which was released a few years ago. When I watched for the first, I became just a fan of that movie like many people did but I didn’t think much of that movie. I just liked beautiful images and lee jun-gee who was one of main characters. However I felt different feeling when I watched it again yesterday and it was really different movie because it is director’s version which have some scenes added.

I thought the main story of this movie was about two clowns who lived lives full of ups and downs. I thought it was side story love between King and Gong-gil. However, I saw the director’s version in a different view because there were many scenes which show love between King and Gong-gil and also love between Jang-sang and Gong-gil. I could definitely read love triangle and the situation was more persuasive than the version before. If I were a director of this movie I would focus more on the love triangle than others to make the story clearer. (I felt it’s not quite clear what the director wanted to say or there are too many things the director wanted to say)

However, I guess there was more than what the director wanted to say. Since it was all man whose are in the love triangle, the story had to face homosexual issue if the director focused on that. It’s true that there were scenes showing homosexual love in original version but those were not clear enough. That could be read as strong friendship and admiration. The fact that many scenes cut in original version but added in director’s version makes me think that it was the director’s intention to avoid homosexual issue by deleting scenes  and making the story vague.

I don’t think the director’s choice was bad. I am not saying that this movie was supposed to be homosexual love story. However, I think it could be better if the director chose one theme to focus on. I could see director’s hesitation and lingering throughout the movie and it was not comfortable to see. I would also hesitate if I were the director, but we know that there are saying ” simple is best.”

We sometimes saw the banner “You Can Get Married Vietnamese Women by Only Seven Million Won.” Whenever I see these banners, I’m impressed that Vietnamese Woman was considered as goods by Koreans. I think that these advertisements by the company giving unmarried men interviews with prospective brides have serious problems.  

These days, the marriages between unmarried men who are living in the country and doing farming and women from Southeast Asia are drastically increasing because Korean women are reluctant to get married men who are doing farming. In the process of it, the company for international marriage helps them to meet each other.  

These companies treat completely them with the commercial value. In other words, the industry like others is also mercenary. There are so many sites for intermarriage on the Internet. It means that the industry is highly competitive.  

In order to draw people’s attention, therefore, they tend to use the sensational banners: “Vietnamese women are much more obedient to their husbands than others” or “Filipinas are good for children from the educational standpoint because they are good at English.”  

These things contain male-dominated perspective that looks upon women as instruments for giving birth to children and taking care of children. Also, these regard women from Southeast Asia as Korean men’s property. Therefore, such banners have two discriminations: sexual discrimination and racial discrimination.