Okay, let me figure this out. Girl is dating Boy, but Girls best friend is also in love with Boy. Said best friend and Boy are getting together on Girl’s birthday not to celebrate, but in memory. This is doubly sad for best friend because she still has the hots for Boy, who is sitting across the table crying [rather convincingly] over his lost love.

Moral of the story: everybody’s sad because life sucks.

Ah, I don’t mean to sound so crass. Boy’s anguish seems very real [can't say I sympathize much with the best friend; she needs to get over herself], and this mv did actually make me sad. This is why I don’t watch Asian dramas — I would like my love life to work out perfectly without worrying about all the random crap that could go wrong.

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In May 2009, ZIM had referred to the ‘mute’ response of Indian Media on one of history’s biggest crimes.

Recent cacophony pertaining to Ruchika Girotra’s persecution by a SPS Rathore made ZIM revisit what remains a criminal behavior by Indian Government Authorities and media.

Brother Paul Alan was someone who escaped justice in Western Australia for fraud and operates in India as a Catholic Christian Missionary and a respected Doctor.  He led Mother Teresa’s “Missionaries of Charity’ Mass. Among other things he set up his own Missionary enterprise “New Hope”, solicited funds through advertorials.

Some of Brother Alan’s actions pertain to practicing medicine and worse doing surgeries on gullible poor, all without having a medical license.

But this was nothing compared to what you will read now. For three full decades, mind you, not just a day or a week or a month, Brother Paul Alan sexually abused and assaulted hundreds of teenage boys across eastern India in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.

One boy, 14 year old Anil Kumar, same age as Ruchika, who was deaf and mute but not dumb and who lived with Brother Paul Alan committed suicide (We do not know if it was a murder).

Deaf, Mute boy Anil Kumar who ended up dead with Pedophile Brother Paul:

It is not as if the news is not in the public domain. Sally Sara, ABC’s Indian Correspondent did outstanding investigative journalism to dig out the details on the outlaw.

As Sally Sara captures, Brother Paul Alan has been released on bail multiple times, doing more evil every time and Prosecution non existent.

Cover up in India has been massive. Government, Media, So called Social Rights Activists all went on “Omerta” on this one.

There are many in the Government who need to provide answers on this one:

Navin Patnaik Chief Minister of Orissa

P Chidambaram, Home Minister, India

Rosaiah, Chief Minister, Andhra Pradesh

Local and State Administration in Brother Paul Alan’s places of operation – Titlagarh and Pure in Orissa and Vishakapatnam in Andhra Pradesh need to provide answers. In fact Pradesh Kumar Maharana, Mayor of Titilagarh said on camera that he knew about the ugly happenings and yet preferred not to act.

Some Questions

Indian Media: Why despite knowing the details, they have preferred to be “deaf and mute”.

Why have civil rights organisations both local and national not acted on this case which is far more gruesome in magnitude than  SPS Rathore’s behavior?

Brother Paul Alan was from Australia and operated for a long time in Orissa with Leprosy Missions. Was he connected to Graham Staines?

What was the connection of organizations like World Vision? There are important stories that directly impact well being of India.  Where are the intrepid reporters that can provide us answers?

Will the Government face the problem or run away from it, and worse try and influence/persecute Sally Sara and work with ABC to have the information removed from public domain?

What are Governance mechanisms to monitor Christian missions and christian funding on evangelizing initiatives which have skyrocketed?

Will civil rights organization file questions to administration under RTI? And will Government come clean?

Answers to the above questions will outline how effective is Indian Democracy.

Natty-dressing Canto-pop star Aaron Kwok has been getting fit for this series of 16 consecutive concerts. He needed to – despite having a fondness for wearing suits on stage, his dance routines are high energy and bound to have his legion of female followers in a froth. Musically, expect a run through of all his hits over the past five years including soppy love songs and some more predictable dance numbers.

The National Company of Classical Theatre’s delightful adaptation of works by the Great Man of Spanish letters is back in Barcelona after a brief but successful run in July. Directed by the leader of the Comediants theatre group, Joan Font, these five short farces provide a bawdy and satirical glimpse into 16th-century society. With extracts from ‘The Cave of Salamanca’, ‘The Jealous Old Man’ and ‘The Altar of Wonders’, among other works, the sketches are vibrant visual poetry, portraying an outlandish world on ‘permanent moral holiday’.

This seafood-themed eatery is a homage to the great seafood houses of San Francisco, with close and boisterous rooms and an emphasis on fresh shellfish taken from the Chesapeake Bay. There aren’t a lot of fancy items on the menu, since the focus is on quality ingredients not overdone by preparation. Besides being a great place to people watch, you can bring folks who aren’t enamoured with seafood – the lunchtime hot dog was recently voted best in the city.

With the festive season fast bearing down, it’s time to think about those party outfits, and with over 75,000 outfits to hire this ‘costumier’ is in a league of its own. Hire prices start around 600F, and there are professionals on hand to advise (it’s essential that you make an appointment). There are hundreds of accessories starting from as little as 11F. You won’t find tacky make-up here as only serious cosmetics round off the sophisticated fancy-dress look. This place is ideal for those wanting to make a supreme effort and come up with an entirely original disguise.

The arrival of the Bouglione Circus in Belgium is an event as predictable as that of St Nicolas. The Bougliones have been a circus family since 1830, which makes them as old as Belgium itself. Seven generations have been bringing a spectacular show to town for young and old alike. Love it or hate it, this is one tradition that won’t be leaving Brussels for a few years to come.

With the soon to be released Nine on its way, I had to finally dust off my Criterion DVD of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 for a viewing since that new musical is based off it. Besides all the praise lauded on it, I really had no idea what to expect. It only took about ten minutes or so to discover that we would have no Charlie Kaufman if it were not for this, Fellini’s interpretation of his inner thoughts, both creatively and personally road-blocked. Synecdoche, New York borrows a lot from this opus and Adaptation takes the rest. I say this not to demean anything Kaufman has made—I love both of those films—but instead to praise this Italian master for doing it almost fifty years earlier, as well or better. The movie soon causes you to be disoriented in regards to what is real and what is imagined. Inventive transitions are connected by actions or thoughts in the scene, leading us through the mind of Guido Anselmi as he himself seeks answers to the chaos.

Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido is a stand-in for Fellini himself, at a crossroads in his life, desperately trying to discover what it is he needs to do next. So many people have come and gone in his life, connections that he could have reached out and loved unconditionally, but all of whom he pushed away, creating the isolated loneliness he despises. He can tell any of his actresses, producers, or mistresses exactly what he feels, causing them to hate him and leave without a second thought. The one woman he truly cares for, however, his wife Luisa, is left in the dark. Throughout the film we see Guido whisper to himself about how much she means to him, but when in her company, all he can do is lie or act disinterested. He is lost in life; unable to find true happiness and feeling bored by those he surrounds himself with. It is a self-imposed torture that he can no longer run away from. Who else would invite both his mistress and his wife to the city he is filming in? Only a man looking to be cleansed of his demons would play with fire such as that. Guido just may not be strong enough to do it; sitting back and watching each opportunity pass him by.

Even the script doctor he hires to hopefully make some sense of the incoherently abstract script he has written cannot get through. His notes attempt to drive out the symbolism and personal moments that make no sense to an audience unknowing of his past, commenting on the memories that play for us as though we are watching the film he is about to begin shooting. I wonder if the notes he makes are real notes made on the script for 8 1/2. And that is the genius of the movie—what we are watching is the film the character is refusing to make. While Guido drags his feet, bringing every woman that has ever crossed his path back into his consciousness, we get to watch it all take place inside his head. His memories are what have been put on paper to eventually shoot, (although I’m still not sure where the spaceship comes into play, maybe as an escape hatch to leave his true self behind), and they are shown to us as he remembers them. We see the first women in his life, his mother and nanny, give him a bath; his first glimpse of sexuality with La Saraghina’s full-figured Rumba; the chorus girls he bedded; his wife of which he has taken for granted; the mistresses he has used and thrown aside; and the actresses he has made perform for his films and possibly himself. This is a man who has treated women as objects at his disposal for as long as he remembers and the unfilmable movie he has written is a way to air out all that dirty laundry.

What then becomes even more profound is how, while Guido couldn’t stand tall to make the film, although he could let the screen tests be viewed by his wife as a way to tell her what has been happening without actually opening his mouth, Fellini himself has. The real director of 8 1/2 has made himself emotionally naked here, sharing with the world his mistakes and insecurities. Talk about a catharsis as art form, the underlying meaning to the film only makes the finished piece that much more astounding. It opens with our ‘hero’ being trapped in a glass box for all to see, a celebrity held up to immense scrutiny without any secrets, attempting to break free only to find his foot tethered to the Earth and his producers, the ones paying his way of survival. The vicious system is its own predatory circle of life that has barred him in to serve more powerful people, himself a pawn in their games much like the women in his. Life is a system of power struggles and that, I believe, is at the forefront of this cautionary tale of ego. Even the actors, so excited to be working with a prolific auteur such as Guido become impatient to learn what their parts and motivations are. They use agents to threaten for information, their guiles for an upper hand, and yet they still must wait until he is ready to let them into the loop.

It all culminates to an extended sequence in Guido’s mind, a world consisting of all the women he has ‘loved’ and the ruled hierarchy they must adhere to. He is their master, whipping them when they are out of line or insubordinate, and they love him unconditionally even though his own feelings for them are fickle and ever changing. Once you are too old, you are sent to the upstairs, never to be seen again except as a memory of younger times. It is a world created for his own comfort, a world he thought he had constructed in real life, but only recently realized never existed anywhere but in his head. Even the muse he imagined at the start, a shining face of youth amongst the cattle-driven lines of elderly folk at the day spa he is seeking treatments at, isn’t enough. Claudia Cardinale’s Claudia is sent for to be this angelic, fresh, new beginning, but her arrival in reality is not as he imagined it. Instead of the jumpstart to a new life, her youth and vitality only serve as a mirror to how broken and unloving he truly has become. She is the catalyst to finally end his lamenting, end the prospect of this new film, and finally accept the people in his life as more than just chess pieces he can move and discard whenever he feels.

The inventive camerawork at the hands of Fellini is stunning in its dream-like quality, creating distinct divisions of place when we are in real time, Guido’s mind, or fantasy worlds. Compositionally precise, every frame is meticulously put together, drawing our eyes in and tricking them with quick edits, replacing actors seamlessly at times and transitioning from scene to scene with the use of a common point. I was impressed early on when seeing an out-of-place woman washing nonexistent windows inside a hotel room soon being the static detail as we move scenery, watching her now wash the windows of our new locale. And the acting is fantastic as well, especially Mastroianni who must carry each and every scene. The women are beautiful and talented—Anouk Aimée’s Luisa morphing from the quiet victim with her depressed, glasses-wearing face to the stunningly happy housemaker in his vision and Sandra Milo’s Carla just as you’d think a mistress would be, flaunting her body even though she herself is married. Everyone plays his/her role so as to continue Guido’s progression to the enlightenment of truth. The final scene’s destruction of the scaffolding built to bolster the lie, as the people who have cared for him reenter for a farewell parade, is the perfect footnote to a complex and intricate tale. This Fellini guy just may be as good as I’ve always heard.

8 1/2 10/10

This post, which I want to keep pretty short, feeds off my post on re-orienting national security priorities.

I read a fascinating paper provocatively entitled “How the US Lost the Naval War of 2015″ (PDF), by James Kraska.

It takes a look at what is happening now as the US Navy flounders and the Chinese Navy quickly ramps up, and then suggests what might happen if China decided to sink the USS George Washington in 2015.

What fascinates me about this is that US Navy dominance is sort of seen as a given these days, something not worth worrying about, but naval supremacy has always been a significant factor behind any superpower’s reign of world affairs.  The US gladly took over the mantle of naval superiority and its positive externalities for world security after the United Kingdom found it in their best interest to ally with the US.  The Royal Navy’s battleship-style fleet did not transition well into the age of submarines and aircraft carriers.  The loss of the Suez Canal was a significant barrier, as well.

So the US took over after World War 2 and has since controlled the oceans.  This has enabled it to push an era of free trade and open water travel that has made it cheaper to ship resources than even to fly them, so much that the cost is almost negligent.  In terms of protecting capitalism, having the US superpower in control of the oceans has been incredibly successful.

Now the US focuses more on satellite/overhead imagery, and more recently, on asymmetric warfare.  Which has left several gaps in the American strategic security worldview.

The paper suggests that China could destroy a US carrier, which would have a psychological effect on Americans perhaps bigger than a physical effect, although with a Chinese contractor shutting down the Suez for “repairs” and China throwing up other roadblocks, this could delay the US in appropriately responding its massive, yet diffused fleet into the Pacific.  Control of the Pacific would shift as China’s neighbors, by sheer proximity, would be reluctant to move to counter China’s naval aggression.  What would the US be able to do?

It’s a fascinating paper although obviously it only looks at an American military perspective and not all the other factors:  economic, cultural, etc.

But it also makes me wonder why the US is so focused on a small group of jihadists when there are bigger fish to fry for continued American dominance.

1) It is in the US interest to ensure continued and unfettered control of the oceans, to ensure open trade, safe shipping lines, and access to necessary strategic hold-points like Guam, Hawai’i, Okinawa, Europe, and other navy bases.

Robert Kaplan is associated with the neo-cons but he is an excellent security historian.  What he says about US naval moves against China is that we should focus on building our presence so enmeshed with Pacific interests that China will be more inclined to ally with us than to try to displace us.  This is a strategy akin to the UK realizing it had to partner with the US after WW2, and akin to the argument that alienating Japan before WW2 would push them to attack the US for control of the Pacific.

Some quotes:

“None of this will change our need for basing rights in the Pacific, of course. The more access to bases we have, the more flexibility we’ll have—to support unmanned flights, to allow aerial refueling, and perhaps most important, to force the Chinese military to concentrate on a host of problems rather than just a few. Never provide your adversary with only a few problems to solve (finding and hitting a carrier, for example), because if you do, he’ll solve them.

“Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam’s northern tip, rep- resents the future of U.S. strategy in the Pacific. It is the most potent platform anywhere in the world for the projection of American military power. Landing there recently in a military aircraft, I beheld long lines of B-52 bombers, C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, among others. Andersen’s 10,000-foot runways can handle any plane in the Air Force’s arsenal, and could accommodate the space shuttle should it need to make an emergency landing. The sprawl of runways and taxiways is so vast that when I arrived, I barely noticed a carrier air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, which was making live practice bombing runs that it could not make from its home port in Japan. I saw a truck filled with cruise missiles on one of the runways. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry as Andersen: some 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time. Andersen also stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force’s biggest strategic gas-and-go in the world.

“Guam, which is also home to a submarine squadron and an expanding naval base, is significant because of its location. From the island an Air Force equivalent of a Marine or Army division can cover almost all of PACOM’s area of responsibility. Flying to North Korea from the West Coast of the United States takes thirteen hours; from Guam it takes four.

“”This is not like Okinawa,” Major General Dennis Larsen, the Air Force commander there at the time of my visit, told me. “This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory.” The United States can do anything it wants here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out. Indeed, what struck me about Andersen was how great the space was for expansion to the south and west of the current perimeters. Hundreds of millions of dollars of construction funds were being allocated. This little island, close to China, has the potential to become the hub in the wheel of a new, worldwide constellation of bases that will move the locus of U.S. power from Europe to Asia. In the event of a conflict with Taiwan, if we had a carrier battle group at Guam we would force the Chinese either to attack it in port—thereby launching an assault on sovereign U.S. territory, and instantly becoming the aggressor in the eyes of the world—or to let it sail, in which case the carrier group could arrive off the coast of Taiwan only two days later.

“During the Cold War the Navy had a specific infrastructure for a specific threat: war with the Soviet Union. But now the threat is multiple and uncertain: we need to be prepared at any time to fight, say, a conventional war against North Korea or an unconventional counterinsurgency battle against a Chinese-backed rogue island-state. This requires a more agile Navy presence on the island, which in turn means outsourcing services to the civilian community on Guam so that the Navy can concentrate on military matters. One Navy captain I met with had grown up all over the Pacific Rim. He told me of the Navy’s plans to expand the waterfront, build more bachelors’ quarters, and harden the electrical-power system by putting it underground. “The fact that we have lots of space today is meaningless,” he said. “The question is, How would we handle the surge requirement necessitated by a full-scale war?”

“There could be a problem with all of this. By making Guam a Hawaii of the western Pacific, we make life simple for the Chinese, because we give them just one problem to solve: how to threaten or intimidate Guam. The way to counter them will be not by concentration but by dispersion. So how will we prevent Guam from becoming too big?

“In a number of ways. We may build up Palau, an archipelago of 20,000 inhabitants between Mindanao, in the Philippines, and the Federated States of Micronesia, whose financial aid is contingent on a defense agreement with us. We will keep up our bases in Central Asia, close to western China—among them Karshi-Khanabad, in Uzbekistan, and Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, which were developed and expanded for the invasion of Afghanistan. And we will establish what are known as cooperative security locations.

“A cooperative security location can be a tucked-away corner of a host country’s civilian airport, or a dirt runway somewhere with fuel and mechanical help nearby, or a military airport in a friendly country with which we have no formal basing agreement but, rather, an informal arrangement with private contractors acting as go-betweens. Because the CSL concept is built on subtle relationships, it’s where the war-fighting ability of the Pentagon and the diplomacy of the State Department coincide—or should. The problem with big bases in, say, Turkey—as we learned on the eve of the invasion of Iraq—is that they are an intrusive, intimidating symbol of American power, and the only power left to a host country is the power to deny us use of such bases. In the future, therefore, we will want unobtrusive bases that benefit the host country much more obviously than they benefit us. Allowing us the use of such a base would ramp up power for a country rather than humiliating it.

“I have visited a number of CSLs in East Africa and Asia. Here is how they work. The United States provides aid to upgrade maintenance facilities, thereby helping the host country to better project its own air and naval power in the region. At the same time, we hold periodic exercises with the host country’s military, in which the base is a focus. We also offer humanitarian help to the surrounding area. Such civil-affairs projects garner positive publicity for our military in the local media—and they long preceded the response to the tsunami, which marked the first time that many in the world media paid attention to the humanitarian work done all over the world, all the time, by the U.S. military. The result is a positive diplomatic context for getting the host country’s approval for use of the base when and if we need it.

…

“The first part of the twenty-first century will be not nearly as stable as the second half of the twentieth, because the world will be not nearly as bipolar as it was during the Cold War. The fight between Beijing and Washington over the Pacific will not dominate all of world politics, but it will be the most important of several regional struggles. Yet it will be the organizing focus for the U.S. defense posture abroad. If we are smart, this should lead us back into concert with Europe. No matter how successfully our military adapts to the rise of China, it is clear that our current dominance in the Pacific will not last. The Asia expert Mark Helprin has argued that while we pursue our democratization efforts in the Middle East, increasingly befriending only those states whose internal systems resemble our own, China is poised to reap the substantial benefits of pursuing its interests amorally—what the United States did during the Cold War. The Chinese surely hope, for example, that our chilly attitude toward the brutal Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, becomes even chillier; this would open up the possibility of more pipeline and other deals with him, and might persuade him to deny us use of the air base at Karshi-Khanabad. Were Karimov to be toppled in an uprising like the one in Kyrgyzstan, we would immediately have to stabilize the new regime or risk losing sections of the country to Chinese influence.”

2) To reinforce naval supremacy will require control of the skies and space.  Orbital satellites provide significant communications for all American forces and commercial interests, and a satellite war would cripple American capabilities.

3) Protecting satellites and increasing outer space security will require something akin to George Friedman’s (CEO of STRATFOR) battle stars (read “The Next 100 Years”), large manned orbital stations that provide armaments and increased surveillance for protecting satellites, providing imagery and comms to the ground, and even shooting down rockets, planes, or attacking ground targets.  Friedman suggests 3 battle stars could be required, orbiting continually in line with the earth’s orbit to always provide overhead support in certain regions.

Says John Reilly in a fair review (read the rest) of George Friedman’s book:

“The section on the Third World War allows the author to wax techno-thrillerish on the matter of mid-21st- century weaponry. We learn a great deal about hypersonic weapons and their ability to blow up unsatisfactory objects anywhere on Earth in a matter of minutes. He has plainly thought a great deal about the military applications of space which, again, he views as an extension of Mahan’s strategy of controlling the world’s trade routes. We get a description of geosynchronous Battle Star observation-and-command stations. (He adopts the term “Battle Star,” without noting the implications of that term for his optimistic view of the military and civilian applications of robots of all kinds.) We also get an excursion to bases on the Moon that sounds not altogether unlike Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.””

4) UAVs will continue to improve in sophistication and lethality, and are already providing extra eyes for American border security (see San Diego), Afghanistan/Pakistan targets, and eventually everywhere.  They are rapidly getting improved optics, more dangerous armaments, higher altitudes, and more time overhead (like these UAVs that can hover instead of do racetracks).  UAVs will probably be complementing increasingly robotic android armies, taking humans off the front lines to be replaced with dispensable robots to do war-fighting and perimeter security.

These seem like very far-off strategic priorities but these must be driven by intentional funding, innovative projects, and understanding by the citizenry of their importance.  I am far more in favor of continued intelligence dominance by the US than I am of attempting to do neo-colonial counter-insurgency and nation-building abroad, when domestic security and international respect for governments would suffice in building networks against terrorist plots.

There are plenty of other questions, too, such as whether it would be bad for China to compete with us or take over the seas.  Or what the impact would be of increased naval presence in the Pacific (see below the long comment about Guam).  Or whether alternatives are viable (building floating bases instead of using land).  I’d like to see more discussion on all of that below, if you could take the time.

The Leather Club Roma goes from strength to strength. After organising popular high-profile events at this year’s World Gay Pride, the group keeps the blue and black leather flag flying over the city with this Immacolata bank-holiday weekend bash. Venue is the cavernous Qube club, scene of last summer’s party, which, now that the weather is more conducive to heavy-duty boots and tackle, will probably be even hotter than July.

This exhibition documents the work of Wassily Kandinsky between 1896 and 1921. It demonstrates the influences of two cities on his career – Munich, where Kandinsky became one of the leading figures of the Blaue Reiter group, and Moscow, where he continued along the path towards total abstraction and total colour. Over 100 paintings, watercolours and etchings are on display, many on loan from the State Museum of St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

The Arden Theatre presents Irish wunderkind Conor McPherson’s Broadway hit, ‘The Weir’, in its Philadelphia première. Winner of two 1998 Olivier Awards including Best New Play, ‘The Weir’ is a stirring tale about people losing and looking for kindred spirits. Taking place in a rural Irish pub, a fascinating story unfolds as a mysterious outsider, bringing promises of a new lease on life, captures the imagination of the bar’s regulars. Drinking ensues and the barroom chat soon becomes a series of increasingly spooky and distressing tales.

This is the first major exhibition of Picasso’s works in Belgium. The unmissable show is stunning. There are 150 works from around the world including sculptures, ceramics, paintings, drawings and sketches. There is also a display of his prints at the nearby ‘Cabinet d’Estampes’, just across the river. The exhibition is in Liège so you can take the opportunity to check out where ‘Inspector Maigret’ creator Simenon found at least some of his inspiration.

Thanks to the overwhelming success of Twilight, it seems that everyone is making a vampire flick. If you every had an idea for a vampire film this is the time to make it as every studio seems to be attempting to riff off the success of the vampire craze. Some of the most surprisingly good stuff has come out of international cinema such as Let the Right One In. Thirst, Korean vampire flick from well-known director Park Chan-wook continues this trend of international vampire cinema.

The film bucks a lot of the conventional vampire stories, going for a tale about a priest named Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho) who becomes a vampire after he becomes the test subject in a project trying to cure a deadly sickness. As he slowly becomes a creature of night he feels the conflict emerge between his spiritual upbringing and beliefs and this thirst for the blood of human beings. It also doesn’t help that his miraculous survival of the disease makes him this messianic figure among many of the people.

The film takes it time completing the entire transformation, subtlety dropping hints as to his change. Some are so subtle that I didn’t realize them until after the fact. Most of the times watching the transformation in a vampire film is either this almost instantaneous jump or an elongated process of the character stupidly ignoring all the signs. By exposing the priest to this disease, the film allows itself some plausibility in letting this character gradually understand that the nature of his transformation isn’t just some after effect of the desease.

And the idea of transforming this priest into a vampire is a brilliant one as it allows for all these nuanced conflicts. Priest in certain traditions are taught to repress many of their human urges and take a vow of celibacy. By transforming into a vampire his conflict becomes a metaphor for the desire of carnal pleasures, the pleasures he has taught himself to live without. It takes the idea of the conflicted vampire and gives it this perfectly succinct background that makes his dilemma plausible.

However, the film undercuts this brilliance by completely missing the entire idea of vampires as storytelling devices. Vampires biting people has long been held as a metaphor for sex but the film simply sees it as a source of nourishment. Instead, this priest must actually be enticed and taken in by actual sex, ruining the nuance and relative subtlety of the vampire metaphor by explicitly using sex throughout the film.

Yet this allows for a number of powerful scenes between Sang-hyeon and his lover. The almost wordless last five minutes of the film is one of the finest scenes of the year. There are a lot of similar understated moments where the film lets these great moments unfold and this interesting relationship evolve. And once the couple has committed a horrible crime together their haunting is this almost wordless persecution of an old presence.

Where the film is not as understated is in the violence. Park Chan-wook is well known for his use of violence and he certainly doesn’t shy away from any of it here. At its best, the film has this Hitchcockian edge where there’s this almost unbearable threat of violence. On the other end of the spectrum are a number gross out scenes involving decapitation, the expunging of various bodily fluids and a copious flow of blood. A lot of the visceral scenes of violence I found more off putting than effective.

There’s a lot of compelling material in Thirst but by taking the vampire subtext and making it explicit a lot of nuance is lost. If it had toned it back and left a lot to implication this would easily stand as one of the best vampire flicks of all time as the core conflict is brilliant. But the graphic sex and equally explicit violence makes the film a picture that lacks tact. In a lot of ways I feel like I had to put up with childish and crass filmmaking choices in an otherwise excellent picture.

© 2009 James Blake Ewing

Oh my goodness. This man’s hair…

Why are rappers so boring to watch? ]Sorry Mr. Tyfoon, but you’ll need to do more than the typical sitting around if you’re to keep anybody’s attention.] Do they think they actually look interesting? Ugh.

This song is pretty sweet, which makes up for some of the strange styling. I spotted dance moves that are reminiscent of SeungRi’s “Strong Baby” as well as TaeYang’s “Wedding Dress“; I’m not making any accusations, just pointing them out for humorous purposes. At the end of the video I realized that we barely get to see anyone’s eyes. What’s there to hide, hmm?

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What. The. Hell?

I don’t know if it’s the quality of just this video, but I wish the animation were a bit clearer; the heart looks like a semi-polygonal Sims character. This mv certainly does a good job of portraying whatever grotesque emotions the song is trying to get across. I can appreciate the symbolism, but that doesn’t make all this any less cringe-worthy.

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According to figures from 2000, the top ten languages were:

- English → French (~30%)
- English → German (~25%)
- English → Spanish (~25%)
- English → Japanese (~22%)
- English → Italian (~20%)
- English → Chinese (Simplified) (~15%)
- English → Portuguese (~12%)                
- English → Swedish (~10%)
- English → Dutch (~8%)
- English → Korean (~7%)

In the last few years, this trend has changed with translation into Asian languages rapidly gaining momentum.

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