Click images for desktop size: City Of Goth" by 3dFiction Just getting ready for the long weekend.
Should be filled with fun: Used bookstores, dogs in the park, trying to believe its spring. That sort of thing.
And movies, I hope, too many beautiful stories. I saw a film yesterday that was disturbing and beautiful: "Welcome To Dongmakgol". Korean. It seems all the great movies I see recently are Korean.
I guess you'd call this a war movie. It uses war to show the insanity of people and as a way to show people bursting out of the self imposed confines to be the something better that they actually are. I prefer sports to war, in real life anyway.
This one is about a remote Korean village during the Korean war. It opens with a pretty but slightly off center girl playing in a kodachrome field delighting in the butterflies. She looks up and watches an American fighter plane fly so close she tries to reach up and touch it.
The image is gorgeous and would be enough to be the star attraction at an art exhibit installation.
The plane crashes. The American pilot survives and is rescued by the people of the village.
Then we meet the members of the People's Liberation Army. They are a group that has had the worst of it, blooded, wounded near death. The Political Officer orders the High Officer to execute those who are too wounded to continue, they are slowing them down.
The High Officer refuses and the Political Officer draws his gun to execute him. Before the Political Officer can pull the trigger he is shot. The rag tag group is ambushed by the American Allied Forces. This sequence is brutal beyond believe, climaxing with the Americans surrounding a North Korean who is unarmed and missing a leg and blowing him to pieces. Its made more poignant as this same soldier had begged the High Comrade to not execute him, that he wanted to live.
The other "outsider" main characters are two South Koreans
Click images for desktop size: "Boarding The Stars" by Sinai B who have deserted their units in the face of fire. The medic stops the Lieutenant from committing suicide.
Eventually all these people will end up straggling to the village of Dongmakgol, a small village that was unaware of the war outside their valley. They live a carefree live. Boars digging up their cornfield are of more concern than bombs and guns.
They really don't understand and feel no loss in not understanding. They are people just happy to be alive.
A large part of the film is funny and amusing, light to the touch. Watching enemies try to co-exist while they try to replace the village grain that their war, that they, stupidly destroyed.
What happens is sort of obvious but no less delightful for that. They learn that they are merely people and that uniforms are just a tool to keep them unaware of that.
There's an historic fact here. The USA in order to wipe out the red communists, ordered entire villages to be bombed into extinction. America had the tech and the resolve and the insanity to do this. We continued to do this in Viet Nam and in Iraq. We learned this scorched earth policy from the Nazi's, perfecting their Blitzkrieg approach and using it as a method of defense as opposed to attack. We seem to have forgotten the Nazi's lost the war.
A rescue team is sent in to save the American fighter pilot. The rescue squad has 24 hours to save him because they intend to level the entire region to drive the commies out of the caves and valleys. Donmakgol is going to be destroyed.
The American, North Koreans and South Koreans form their own allied army. The six of them intend to save the village.
The villagers don't understand: "Why did you come here if you only intended to leave?"
This final section is melodramatic and walks a tight line avoiding dripping into bathos. It works. I don't want to spell out details of the conclusion because I hope that you'll seek this movie out.
Its worth it.

My little blind dog isn't doing much better. I am. Sleeping on the floor has helped my back. I don't sleep well but I look on it as therapy. The little dog wandered around, hacking and bugging me. He only comes to me when he's scared and wants comforting, so I don't mind at all.
I started out today to respond to some emails. I don't hate Egypt or India.
If I've time this weekend I'll explain.