Caveat: Джунгли

As I've mentioned before, just sitting and watching Korean television on some random channel can often lead to seeing unexpected or unusual things, not necessarily of high artistic merit.

Yesterday I got home from work and it was very hot. Summer has arrived. I turned on my A/C for the first sustained run this season, took a short nap, and then vegged in front of the TV.

I watched a very bizarre Russian comedy called Dzhungli ("The Jungle", 정글), subtitled in Korean. Obviously my level of comprehension was rather low, but between my rusty two years of college Russian and my low-vocabulary but high-frequency Korean, I picked up more than I might have expected. Mostly pronouns.

Fortunately the plot was so facile that it sustained my interest. It was full of the kinds of social and cultural stereotypes that became unpopular in the west about half a century ago. Some married couple with relationship problems gets stranded on a remote tropical island. At first they're sabotaging each other's efforts to survive on the island, like a never-ending lover's quarrel devolved into a lord-of-the-flies scenario, but then these highly caricatured "natives" show up, who, despite wearing blackface, rather humorously all speak German (bear in mind that the Slavic term for "German" [nemets] means, roughly, "can't talk" – so this may be a kind of complex joke). The natives attempt to kill the couple, but they fight them and eventually escape the island and return to Russia and marital bliss.

Actually  it reminded a lot of some lost episode of Gilligan's Island, with better special effects and marginally less coherent dialogue, and where Ginger and Gilligan finally become an item and have their own private adventure in the jungle somewhere.

I don't recommend this movie. Unless you're really bored watching Korean broadcast TV on a Saturday afternoon.

[daily log: walking, 1km]

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