I watched two movies.
The first was 時をかける少女(toki o kakeru shoujo, The girl who traveled through time), a Japanese film from 1983 about a girl who starts spontaneously hopping back and forth through time – as the title suggests. It’s a rather stark, haunting work, but beautifully filmed and with memorable actors in the key roles, and a silly 1980’s JPop music video at the end, almost completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the film.
It’s interesting listening to Japanese after all my hard work in Korean – as I’ve read many times, knowing some Korean seems to make Japanese more “accessible,” even though my passive Japanase vocabulary is probably limited to at most 30 or so words and phrases (and my active vocab includes 2-3 fixed phrases, no more). This weird accessibility comes about despite the fact that Japanese and Korean actually seem share very little mutually comprehensible vocabulary. I think it must have to do with the similarities in grammar, word order, and pragmatics (i.e. how the language is deployed conversationally). One line in that movie that I liked: “It takes millions of years for people to meet,” from a recurring song sung by the character Fukushima.
The other movie was a bit of decadance. Or regression. A movie may qualify as being only great in its transcendent badness: Flash Gordon, Saviour of the Universe. This is the 1980 remake of the original 1930s series, and is one of those movies that was so bad it has since been elevated to high camp. But, with its Queen soundtrack and retro special effects, I have harbored an inordinate fondness for it, and it’s been so long since I’ve seen it. It came up in conversation with Basil yesterday, and last night I found it on a torrent and downloaded it. It was awesome. One memorable line, of many: “Are your men on the right pills?!” says Emperor Ming to his creepy number two, Clytus.
-Notes for Korean-
context: here and there… going through some old scraps of paper I wrote things down on
싸려 = 아닥 = shut up
곤란 difficulty, suffering, distress, hardship (and with ―하다 )
당황 confusion, consternation (and with ―하다 )
방언 dialect, slang
재촉하다 press, urge, request, command
서두르다 hurry up, get a move on,
website says: 깝치다 = 서두르다
꼭 tightly, securely
깝치다 = to put on airs
달팽이=snail
기다릴게요=[I] will wait for [you]
진짜 스님 될려고 그러세요?=(really monk become-INTENTIVE is-true-DEFERENTIAL-POLITE)=”do you really want to become a monk?”
