Classical education and philosophy turn up in such interesting places

Some day I hope to have time to read a bit of Confucius.  Having read a bit of Plato and a lot of Lewis, I'm discovering that Confucius ought to be part of the Classical tradition.  I wonder if Asian Christians read him like we read Plato and Aristotle.

Last night the two oldest girls and I watched the Korean film "The Fatal Encounter," starring Hyun Bin as King Jeongjo.  If you have any familiarity with K-drama at all you'll know who that is, but for those of you who don't I'll give a bit of background info.

King Jeongjo of Joseon

Jeongjo became king in 1776 on the death of his grandfather, King Yeongjo, who had been forced by one political faction to put to death his own son, Crown Prince Sado (Jeongjo's father), for siding with the other political faction.  So it was a mess he inherited, and it is said that on the day he took the throne, he sat there and said to everyone in the court, "I am the son of the late Crown Prince Sado," which was practically a declaration of war against the faction that had had his father put to death.

The movie covers the 20-hour period leading up to an assassination attempt the year after Jeongjo became king.  I'm not sure whether the event is actually historical, but it's a wonderful piece of storytelling, beautifully filmed, well-acted, and I'm going to show this one on our next family movie night.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Well, I said all that to say this -- a few minutes into the film, Jeongjo quotes a passage from Confucius' book The Doctrine of the Mean:

What Heaven confers is called Nature.

Accordance with this Nature is called the Way.

Cultivating the Way is called Education.

Isn't that perfect?


~*~ ~*~ ~*~

The literal title is "The King's Wrath,"
which I like much better than the one under which
it was marketed to English speaking audiences.

This isn't a movie review, but I thought I'd mention to anyone who's interested in watching it that it would probably be a PG-13 on account of lots of blood during the assassination attempt, plus some blood and implied cruelty of a horrific nature when one person is accused of treason and is "questioned," and a few scenes involving cruel treatment of slaves.

Randomness: Music, poetry, and Star Wars edition

Sometimes I play a piece of classical music to call the children to Morning Time.  Usually it's something by whatever composer we're studying, but today it was the beautiful Kyrie from Haydn's Missa in tempore belli, which my fifteen-year-old daughter and I will be singing this spring (the whole Mass, that is, not just the Kyrie).



There's a point where the words "Christe, Christe eleison," are sung dramatically with a long pause on the last note and the music stops for a breath.  Then the soloist comes back in with "Kyrie eleison, eleison."  It happens at about 3:17 in the video above.

When the soloist started singing again, my eleven-year-old said, "I thought that wasn't the end!"

After the song was finished, we talked about how you can tell whether a song is finished by the way it feels -- it has resolved the conflict.  That Christe eleison ended on a cliffhanger.

Then someone mentioned "The Empire Strikes Back," and somehow we started talking about all the Star Wars movies and how the Anakin Skywalker that was portrayed in episodes two and three couldn't possibly have grown into the magnificent Darth Vader, and eventually we segued into our day's reading from The Fairy Queen.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

From Canto V:

VII

The Sarazin was stout, and wondrous strong,
And heaped blowes like iron hammers great;
For after blood and vengeance he did long.
The knight was fierce, and full of youthly heat,
And doubled strokes, like dreaded thunder's threat:
For all for praise and honour he did fight.
Both stricken strike, and beaten both do beat,
That from their shields forth flyeth fiery light,
And helmets hewn deep show marks of eithers might.


VIII

So the one for wrong, the other strives for right;
As when a Gryffin seized of his prey,
A Dragon fierce encounters in his flight,
Through widest air making his idle way,
That would his rightfull ravine rend away;
With hideous horror both together smite,
And souce so sore that they the heavens affray:
The wise Soothsayer seeing so sad sight,
The amazed vulgar tels of wars and mortal fight.


IX

So the one for wrong, the other strives for right,
And each to deadly shame would drive his foe:
The cruell steele so greedily doth bite
In tender flesh that streams of blood down flow,
With which the armes, that earst so bright did show,
Into a pure vermillion now are dyed:
Great ruth in all the gazers hearts did grow,
Seeing the gored wounds to gape so wide,
That victory they dare not wish to either side.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I'm having to rethink our school day.  Mike has been home on furlough since the beginning of April -- the contract his company was working on came to an end and the bidding and selection process for the new contract dragged out for weeks and weeks.  We've finally found out that the whole thing is done and he'll be officially out of a job on Friday... maybe.  The way things have been going I wouldn't be at all surprised if it works out differently after all.

So our days feel different and flow differently, and because some of the new jobs he's looking into are work-from-home jobs this might be the new Normal.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

By the way, you could consider that a prayer request.  We really, really, really want to be closer to my mom, so ideal for us would be a job somewhere between Little Rock and Oklahoma City.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

The girls and I are watching a new drama, a melodrama called Angel Eyes about a girl who loses her sight in an accident.  She is befriended by a guy and his family, they fall in love (well, I mean the guy and the girl, but really it's his whole family and the girl), but then the family suddenly has to leave the country because Reasons, and it's years before the guy is able to go back to Korea and find the girl.  In the meantime, a corneal transplant surgery has restored her sight... so she doesn't recognize him when he comes looking for her.

So far, this show has been just perfect -- the acting, the music, the script, the camera, the directing and editing, the characterization... Just perfect.

Of course, we're only eight episodes into a 20-episode show, so that could always change.

Here's the title sequence.



I think it's going to have a happy ending, even though it's a melodrama -- they sometimes do.  I'm thinking especially of Missing You, which was the melo-ist melo I've ever watched and had such a happy, well-written ending.

K-drama review: Three Days

Photo credit: SBS.co.kr

2014

Action/thriller

16 episodes

My rating:  3 out of 5 stars

Starring

Park Yoochun as Han Tae Kyung

Park Ha Sun as Yoon Bo Won

Son Hyun Joo as Lee Dong Hwi

So Yi Hyun as Lee Cha Young

Plot Summary

Han Tae Kyung is a presidential bodyguard whose father, the country’s Minister of Finance, has just passed away after a car accident.  Tae Kyung is told that his father fell asleep at the wheel, and doesn’t know the truth – that his father was desperately trying to reach President Lee Dong Hwi by phone, when a large truck deliberately ran him off the road, on an isolated stretch where there were no traffic cameras.  Thankfully, the first person to arrive at the scene after the accident is a conscientious young police officer, Yoon Bo Won.  She finds the whole thing suspicious and investigates in spite of being ordered by superiors to drop it.

When he arrives home after his father’s funeral, Tae Kyung’s house has been broken into and he learns that whoever it was is looking for a document called “Confidential 98” that was in his father’s possession at the time of the accident, but disappeared immediately after.  Following clues leads Tae Kyung to a man who has been stabbed who tells him with his last breath that the president will be killed the next day.  Tae Kyung does his best to prevent the assassination but winds up being framed for it instead.

And then things really get bad.

What I liked about it

Throughout the show, Tae Kyung has to deal with issues of trust and loyalty.  What do you do when you have conflicting loyalties?  How do you decide how far your duty goes?  What if someone you have every reason to trust begins acting very suspiciously?  Do you keep on trusting him?  How far do you trust people and on what basis?

Yoochun is growing as an actor and I enjoy watching his work -- he's good at conveying his character's thoughts and feelings in subtle ways, and this character was a really reserved guy.  It was kind of a relief after watching the weeping and wailing of his previous drama, Missing You, which I loved, and the shouting and goofiness of his earlier rom-com, Rooftop Prince, which I also loved.  He worked a lot on his martial arts skills to prepare for the role and it shows – and I do love a good fight scene.

The story was many-layered – intrigue, conspiracy, suspicion, betrayal, disillusionment.  As Bo Won helps Tae Kyung try to clear his name and investigate his father's death, they discover that both circumstances are related to a recent house fire that killed four people, and even to an incident that occurred sixteen years earlier in which rogue North Korean troops attacked a South Korean village, resulting in dozens of deaths.  And that's just the stuff you find out in the first two episodes.

What I didn’t like about it

The incessant flashbacks were such a nuisance.  They were effective when used to give us insight into the characters and their relationships, but too often this wasn’t the case. We would be shown something happening in a way that seemed designed to build tension – the Good Guys appearing to walk into a trap, or about to be cornered – but then it would turn out to be a grand sleight of hand wherein the Good Guys evaded the Bad Guys, and then we’d be treated to a flashback in order to reveal the clever thing that had actually happened.  Only most of the time we had already figured out what was going on so the “reveal” was unnecessary and even a little embarrassing.  These frequent, unneeded flashbacks interrupted the action, slowed the pace, and were generally counter-productive -- they became so annoying that it was hard to stay focused on the action.

The "three days" motif was irrelevant.  At first it seemed that the entire show would take place over the course of three days, but then it became apparent that the time frame was three sets of three days. But even then, the date/time stamp that flashed on the screen periodically was more a distraction than anything and added no sense of urgency to the plot.

The villain owed most of his success not to his superior resources (and believe me, they were superior) but to the ridiculous incompetence of the good guys, which is generally a sign of lousy writing.

While the music was good sometimes, more often it got cheesy, smarmy, and/or emotionally manipulative.

Almost half of the last episode was devoted to flashbacks of the central characters and their relationships with each other.  In two cases, I can only see it as fan service -- the longest flashback was made up entirely of scenes between our Hero and the Girl He Ends Up With, which played like a music video, and then followed another set of scenes with him and the Girl He Does Not End Up With.

Favorite scene

That moment after HOURS of show, after working on the case together for days, constantly in each other’s company, when Tae Kyung finally notices that not only is his cop-buddy a girl, but a very pretty one.  The change in his countenance was priceless.

Should you watch it?

Honestly, unless you are especially interested in political intrigue dramas or want to see any of the actors in this show, I wouldn't recommend it.  The story was interesting enough and I cared about the characters enough to watch it all the way to the end, but by the last episode we were mocking the show almost non-stop, and Mike quit watching it as soon as the major action ended.  The only thing left was to find out whether a certain character had actually died in an earlier scene, and that info didn't even affect the story's outcome.

Also, you have to be able to overlook the kind of errors that inevitably come up in a show that involves police or medical issues or technology.

This trailer gives you a good idea of the tone and style the director was aiming for.  Too bad he didn't achieve it more consistently.

Update 28 May 2014
DramaFever took down the teaser I had linked to before. Here is the same teaser, but sadly, it's without English subs.






[I'm leaving the old trailer here in case DF brings it back.)

K-drama review: God's Gift — 14 Days

Photo credit:  Dramabeans.com

2014
Genre: Melodrama, crime/mystery
16 episodes
My rating:  4 out of 5 stars

Starring:
Lee Bo Young as Kim Soo Hyun
Cho Seung Woo as Ki Dong Chan
Kim Tae Woo as Han Ji Hoon
Kim Yoo Bin as Han Saet Byul

Plot Summary

Kim Soo Hyun is an investigative journalist who writes for a television show that covers unsolved crimes in an attempt to present all the evidence, expose the perpetrator, and encourage viewers to call if they have any leads.  Her current project involves a serial killer who’s been killing young women in back alleys, and she’s pretty sure she’s found the culprit.  While they are on air, the show’s hotline receives a call from a man who claims to be the killer, but says he’s bored with what he’s been doing and has decided to do something different – this time he has kidnapped a child and she will die, and this will be the president’s fault.  He puts the child on the phone to prove he actually has her... and it’s Soo Hyun’s nine-year-old daughter Saet Byul.

Soo Hyun spends the next week regretting what a lousy mom she’s been and is devastated when her daughter’s body is found in a reservoir.  Apparently she drowned while trying to escape from her captor. At the end of the traditional forty-nine day long period of mourning the police have gotten no closer to finding the culprit, and in a fit of despair Soo Hyun goes down to the place where her daughter died and throws herself in.

At the same time, our other main character, private investigator Ki Dong Chan, has been chased down by goons (long story), tied up and thrown into the reservoir just downhill of where Soo Hyun has thrown herself in.  Somehow his ropes come untied and he’s able to swim over to her and pull her out of the river.  After they get back to their homes they each realize that they’ve been sent back to 14 days before Saet Byul’s death.

The mother is determined to do everything in her power to stop her daughter’s death, but her only ally is Dong Chan, since he’s the only one who knows what’s going to happen – her husband understandably thinks she’s lost her mind when she starts babbling about their daughter being kidnapped and killed.

What I liked about it

The characters are well-written.  They have solid, believable motivations and the conflicts are built in, not ginned up for the sake of furthering the plot or creating emotional tension.  The acting is really good, especially by Cho Seung Woo who plays Dong Chan.  He is a bitter ex-cop, who’s really sweet underneath, and he’s clever and can be funny at the most unexpected times.

There’s lots of politics (which I mostly didn’t understand) and cover-ups and scandals and red herrings, and the mystery begins to seem impossible to unravel.  Obviously there are many layers of intigue or Mom would simply be able to prevent the kidnapping.  I like complications in this kind of show, trying to figure out what was really going on, who was really behind all this, who knew what when.

The pacing was good – the plot kept moving forward, sometimes rapidly, sometimes more slowly, which was a good mix to keep it from getting either overwhelming or boring.

Complaints

Sometimes it was TOO complicated and I lost track of the details and all the sub-plots and sub-sub-plots and who was actually a suspect and who’d been cleared, and sometimes there were plot threads that got dropped and never picked up again. 

I didn’t much care for the end, but that’s a common failing of Korean drama.  It wasn’t a bad ending... it just seems like, given the way things worked out it should have felt inevitable, and it really didn’t. Maybe the writers meant for it to be sort of open-ended, but it didn’t feel that way, either.  But unsatisfactory endings are so common with K-drama that I’ve come to accept them – I just rewrite them in my head if I dislike them enough.

Would you enjoy this show?

If you like crime or mystery shows where you have to pay attention to the clues, this should be a good fit.  There’s no romance and there’s nothing light and fluffy about it except for a few scenes with the little girl and some of her grown up friends, but even those are bittersweet, given the context.

Watch it on DramaFever or Viki.

Randomness

I had a head cold earlier this week that made me feel so woolly-brained I could hardly think.  Consequently we got zero schooling done.  The kids are obsessed with Minecraft and World of Tanks.  Minecraft is endorsed by The Libertarian Homeschooler, and WOT by my husband and adult children who often play it with the youngers, so I assuage my guilt by telling myself that they are learning Strategy and other Important Life Skills while playing these games.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

This Ancient Greeks class is killing me.  Even on a good week I usually read the biography in my kids' copy of Famous Men of Greece instead of from Plutarch, Herodotus, or Thucydides, as the syllabus calls for, but owing to the head cold and the inability to think properly, I skipped nearly all of the readings and I'm just listening to the lectures.  They're sooo interesting, though.  It's not a waste of time.  This week we're covering the reforms of Kleisthenes and the Persian Wars.  When I have time I want to think about the differences between earlier Greece under Solon and what it became under Kleisthenes.  Under Solon's laws it was more aristocratic and feudal.  Under Kleisthenes' it was more democratic and statist.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

The two oldest girls and I have been been watching a Korean drama called Two Weeks that just ended, and I'm feeling a little empty.  It was really exciting (action, intrigue, romance, treachery, heartbreak, murder... and that's just the first episode), and it ended well, with the bad guys getting their just desserts (plus redemption for more than one of them), the good guys who did bad things acknowledging their errors and making restitution, and all the right people on their way to getting a happy ending.

Lee Joon Gi (the Magistrate from "Arang and the Magistrate") plays Jang Tae San, a good-for-nothing piece of trash who doesn't care whether he lives or dies.  His ex-girlfriend shows up one day to tell him he has an illegitimate daughter he never knew about who's dying of leukemia because they can't find a bone marrow donor, and asks him to take a blood test to see if he might be a match.  Miraculously, he is a match, and he feels that for the first time in many years he has a reason to live.  But that day, his gangster boss discovers some things that send him into a rage, and he frames Tae San for murder.

If, like me, you know anything about donating bone marrow, certain aspects of this show you'll just have to ignore.  Tae San has lived so badly in the past several years that I don't think he'd even qualify as a donor, and then over the next several episodes he suffers several injuries, and of course he's not supposed to be getting any infections just now, on account of the bone marrow harvest coming up.  I just had to decide that Tae Sannie has magic healing blood, and get over it.  I guess it's like any show -- if you're a lawyer you can't bear to watch courtroom dramas; if you're a cop, police shows will drive you crazy, and so on.

But the depiction of the relationships between the characters is so well done.  Their backstories are slowly revealed throughout the show and add depth and meaning to their present choices.  The little girl is adorable.  The characters' emotions and reactions are believable.

The music is mostly forgettable, so that's a mark against my hypothesis that the quality of the music is a decent indicator of how well I'll like the show.  I'm glad it worked out that way -- some of the music in the early episodes is so schmaltzy that I was afraid I'd wind up hating the show and I really wanted to like it.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Oh, and I have to share this with you.  Bought this drying rack at Walmart a month or so ago and love it.  I line-dry a lot of my clothes and when I can't put them on the clothes line, I hang them in the shower in my bathroom, which is small and crowded even without laundry hanging around.  And then, if I don't get things hung up early enough in the day and they're still damp when it's time to take our showers at night, we have to move them, and, well, it's just a hassle.

I know. First world problems.  But I love this rack.  It's collapsible so I can keep it in my closet when I'm not using it.

Best $15 I've spent in a long time.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Well, tonight's Razorback game will be starting soon and I have to quit blogging so we can set up the computer and watch it.  Y'all be good.

Edited to add:  Alas, no ballgame.  I usually watch them on ESPN.com but they don't air every game -- this is two weeks in a row now.  This is the one time of year I wish we had TV.  Wish I could just get a football season package.  I know.  More first world problems.

Can't get enough of this song

It's from Master's Sun, the drama about the girl who sees ghosts, which I mentioned the other day.




[Translation by pop!gasa]

When you pass by my finger tips
Warmth spreads throughout my cold heart

I want to softly go to you and lean on you
But the distance between us is not narrowing

It’s okay even if I can’t touch you
It’s okay even if I can’t hug you
Lonely love
Yes I love you, like my destiny
I can feel you

Lalala lala lala
Lalala lala lala
Lalala lala lala lala
My heart can reach you

I want to reach out my hands and hold you
But it feels like we’ll get farther apart so I just linger around you

It’s okay even if I can’t love you
It’s okay even if I can’t reach you
Lonely love
Yes I love you, even from far away
I can see you

It’s okay even if I can’t touch you
It’s okay even if I can’t hug you
Lonely love
Yes I love you, like my destiny
I can feel you

Lalala lala lala
Lalala lala lala
Lalala lala lala lala
My heart can reach you

Lonely love

Confessions of a K-drama addict

I really have the Deputy Headmistress to blame thank for introducing me to Korean drama.  She started blogging about it last year and after a while I started reading her posts, and then her description of one show, Stars Falling from the Sky, caught my attention (it was her mention of a family with five super-cute adopted children in the family) and I decided to watch it.

Eldest Daughter caught me watching it and scolded me horribly, because she'd tried before to get me to watch some K-drama with her and I wasn't interested.  I don't even remember her asking me about it.  After the conversation, I vaguely remembered knowing that she'd watched some Korean shows (along with Japanese ones), and I knew she liked Korean pop music (along with Japanese), but honestly.  I'm sure my take on it at the time was, "That's nice, dear."  My only excuse is that a positive review by one of my peers carried more influence than a positive review by my own offspring.  I have since learned that my daughter was raised well enough that I can trust her taste, not only in books, but also in entertainment.  Go figure.

I've watched a little over two dozen of them, which is an embarrassing thing to say, because these shows tend to run sixteen to twenty one-hour episodes (and I've watched some of them more than once).  But last winter I was sick in bed for several days and watched several hours during that time.  Also I've been devouring K-drama instead of books.  But in my defense I'll say that their stories are so well-told and complex that you're not going to have your brains melt by watching them, unlike with most American television shows.  Really.  The plots are positively Dickensian.

So, what do I love about K-drama?

First, how important family is.  This was the reason I watched the first drama.  In that show, the parents die in a car accident and the oldest daughter, who is twenty-five and amazingly irresponsible, has to grow up fast so she can take care of her five adopted siblings.  On one occasion the oldest boy scolds her for her bad behavior and she listens to him and promises to do better, and she really does.  That may sound disrespectful of an older relative, but he is the oldest boy after all, which carries a lot of responsibility, so even though he's only twelve years old, he's the man of the family.

Second, how shy they are about physical contact between the sexes.  This makes the love stories very sweet, for the most part, and so much more romantic than shows that convey the couple's feeling for each other by, well, physical contact.  I'll just point out here that even though these shows are very clean by American standards, I don't let my younger children watch many of them, because romance is such a big part of the stories and I don't want them feeding very much on that fare.

Then there's the music.  Faith, aka The Great Doctor has gorgeous music, some of it classical-style soundtrack stuff like you'd expect, but also a lot of music by pop stars, which I didn't expect in a drama set in the 1300s.  The first time this particular bit was played during the first episode, Number One Son came out of his room to listen and was hooked on the drama ever after.



I'm testing a hypothesis of mine -- if I love the music, I'm going to love the show.  If the music is bad, or forgettable, the show will be too.

I also love listening to the language.  Korean is structured so very differently than English, and that difference fascinates me.  Where we would say, "I'm sorry for being rude," or "Thank you for giving me a ride," in Korean it's something like "For being rude, I'm sorry," or "For giving me a ride, I thank you."  That's not a literal translation because I don't speak Korean -- it's just what I've noticed from picking up a few words here and there.  I love listening for the ways people address each other, the honorifics and endearments, the way old people are all called grandfather or grandmother, even by strangers.  I love the fact that they have informal or comfortable speech for family and close friends and formal speech for everyone else.  I love listening for when two characters transition from formal to informal words because of what it means in their relationship.  It kills me that I don't know Korean.  In some of these shows I love the characters so much and want to know their language so I can know them better.

This is closely related to loving the language difference -- I love seeing the world through a different culture's eyes, seeing what they value and how they go about solving their problems.

A big attraction for me is how they create their characters and tell their stories.  For example, in American movies and TV shows, generally the characters are non-religious and they live in a world where religion doesn't exist, unless it's necessary to the plot.  But in Korean dramas, characters are Christian or Buddhist or non-religious in the same way that people are in real life -- it's a part of their being and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the plot.  It's just the way people are.  Characters are generally well-rounded with strengths and weaknesses that tend to go hand-in-hand in real life.  There are exceptions to this, of course, notably the cartoon villain who is evil just because he loves being evil.  There are also stock characters who aren't realistic at all -- the evil girl who does everything in her power to break up the main couple just because... well, the plot needs some conflict, right?  Preferably several layers of conflict.  The evil mom or mother-in-law is another common one.  But the main characters are usually believable individuals.

There's more, but I'll stop here since this is getting pretty long.  This was just meant as fair warning:  I'm going to be blogging about some of the shows I've watched.

Currently, my two oldest girls and I are watching one called Master's Sun.  Today episode 8 was aired and I'm liking this show more and more as it goes on.  It's about a girl who had some unspecified accident a few years earlier and has been able to see ghosts ever since.  Of course, since she can see them they harass her, wanting her to give messages to loved ones, or buy coffee for them to drink, or various other things, and some of them are really scary.  She's exhausted because she can hardly sleep at night and then one night, running away from a scary ghost, she bumps into a man and the ghost vanishes.  She's so excited to have a refuge and wants to hang around him all the time just to keep the ghosts at bay, but of course the man doesn't want a weird girl hanging onto him.  Until he discovers that someone who can see ghosts can be very useful.  And then he falls for her.  It so cute, and creepy in a campy way.  The title sequence conveys the feeling of the show perfectly.





.