![]() ![]() ![]() But maybe, Young-ho doesn’t want to join the rat race. Young-ho’s brother wants him to work hard, step into the real world, and join In-Seoul college for a better future. His father, Man-dol, runs a leather workshop in Seoul, and his brother is an accomplished white-collar guy. Park Young-ho fails his examination due to his lack of understanding of mathematical problems. Two pen pals communicate with each other without actually meeting in person. As if by faking it for long enough, you’ll make it real.Directed by Jo Jin-mo, Waiting for Rain (also titled Rain and Your Story) is a South Korean romantic film that follows a Cyrano de Bergerac narrative. And if you’re too cranky, you need to eat more, and drink more and be merry more. Come Christmas time (mistletoe and wine) – everyone wants to insist that everyone else has a great time. And don’t even get me started on Christmas carols! And every year, more musicians try to jump on this shortcut line to immortality – even the great Bob Dylan has a Christmas album. Boney M, for instance, is like that strange piece of wedding cake on the top shelf of the closet that just never seems to rot away… and everyone’s hoping that this year someone will just throw the wretched thing away. Oh no… it just gets put out there year after year after year. The best ones hang on for a while longer – kept fresh by sentimentality and true artistic merit. (Does everything have to remind me of the parable of the Emperor’s New Clothes?) But perhaps people realize that this is a slippery slope, and once they begin talking about what it really all means, they will end up with nothing***. Just because they’re young, doesn’t mean they’re stupid. I wish people would do their kids a real favor and stop filling their heads with nonsense. It’s traumatizing to many kids when they are set on a strange man’s knee and asked to whisper what they want into his fake beard. It’s creepy having an obese Coca-Cola inspired elf-man end up in your house somehow – especially if you don’t have a chimney. And we expect kids to swallow this, while for the rest of the year, their teachers are trying to get them to think critically. Most adults know this, and go with it for ‘the sake of the children’. There is nothing about any of this that is even biblically correct. Hopefully, once he gets down, he will not upset the nativity diorama on the sock-draped mantelpiece. He is transported there and to every house in the world by a team of flying reindeer with admirable bowel-control on one single night. There are a host of very strange goings-on come Christmastime: People hang ornaments on a tree and wait for a fat white man in a red suit to come shimmying down the chimney to drop off presents. Christmas rituals subject kids to a great deal of silly mumbo-jumbo.Not to mention the ridiculous amount of power needed to keep Christmas lights burning through the night. It will make for staggering reading, I am sure: discarded gift-wrapping, wasted food, unwanted gifts, redundant cards, and all the packaging that comes with them. Somewhere someone is compiling an infographic on the waste produced during Christmas.Christmas is to the lonely and disenfranchised what fashion magazines are to the homely. Christmas makes people miss the things they don’t have, instead of celebrating the things they do. Not all of us have large loving families, not all of us have that special someone in our lives, and not all of us can afford to lavish gifts and food on the people we do love. Even in the midst of a large celebration, people often become downcast. This is the worst thing about Christmas: It makes people feel bad.I’ve actually seen jingle-bellers in shops wrestling over things they wanted to buy as gifts for someone else… which really defeats the whole purpose of giving gifts and the whole spirit of the ‘most wonderful time of the year’, doesn’t it? (Not to mention the sulkiness caused by disappointing gifts, the drunken slobbery of the parties that get out of hand and the skirmishes between clans that only see each other on the Yuletide.) Christmas really does bring about the worst in people.You certainly don’t see adverts reminding us that it is, after all, the thought that matters… All retail stores have to do is to drop a little discount or a shiny new gadget into the water as chum. ![]() Even the most enthusiastic chestnut-roasters cannot disagree that Christmas has become a consumerist feeding frenzy.They really can be quite ‘sniffy’ indeed.) Why not prolong this charitable attitude throughout the year? (And even then, as much as people try, they’re never really as convivial as they imagine they are around Christmas time. It’s about caring and sharing and family and peace and goodwill… once a year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |