"Scared of the Moon"

It's my last days of summer school! For only being a 4 week session of 1/2 days, it sure felt longer.

My treat for my students is showing them a movie and bringing them snacks. My Friday classes usually were treated to movies such as The Simpson's Movie and Eagle Eye, but my Tuesday and Thursday classes haven't had the pleasure yet. After perusing the local DVD rental store, and looking up running times on my cell phone, I finally found a movie they seemed to love. 1408. (Thank you IMDB!) Koreans love horror films for some reason, and the student watched wide eyed (except for the majority of the girls who covered their eyes when they thought something really scary was going to happen -- it's cute).

As a side note for those who care: As it is in every country, Korean DVD's are coded to work only on DVD players that are in the same region. (ie, Region 3) This provides copyright protection and tries to thwart selling cheap pirated DVD's. There are ways to get around it, such as hacking the region codes, or downloading DVD player programs for your computer that are region free such as Windows Media Player Classic. My computer at work had issues with this though, so I have decided to keep my computer at work set to the Asian region code, and my personal computer to the US region code. I figure if I want to watch a movie on my computer at work, it's most likely it'll be a Korean film or I downloaded it and therefore has no region code. On the negative side, I can't rent a movie to play on my personal computer. Not a big loss.


This past Monday night, Jordan and I took the train into Gangnam-gu to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (aka HP6). It has left most theaters (including the one attached to my building which apparently is lousy), so we only had a limited time to see it. It was playing in the COEX mall, which I'm told is the largest underground mall in Asia. It doesn't seem that big at first, but in reality is is pretty darn big for all being underground. The theaters in Korea are a little different than back home. I have read that it is a lot harder to get tickets to movies as they are sold out well in advance. But since HP6 was on its way out of theaters we didn't have a problem. Ticket prices range from about 5000W for matinee's to 8-9000W for night shows. Relatively cheap compared to the $10 prices back home. You purchase your seat (such as B4, B5) rather than sit wherever you want. We were stuck up front, but it wasn't bad. Snacks aren't too bad either. You can get 2 sodas, popcorn and a hot dog for about 7000W.

COEX Mall
(above: outdoor view of Gangnam/Mall entrance)
(below: underground shopping area)

The movie itself was really good. I've never read a Harry Potter book besides the first one (after I had seen the movie). This probably is the best way to go, as I wasn't in for much disappointment. It's pretty cliche to state that the book is better than the movie. It's hard not to find someone who thinks of that for ANY movie based on a book. Either way, I think it was really well done, the special effects were realistic and not too over the top, the storyline was understandable, and even without knowing the book I could still infer on smaller aspects that were not explained. The only part of the movie I thought was weird was that Hogwarts seemed to be basically just a place for wizards to make-out without any adult supervision. There was more sexual innuendo placed in the script than in the past, which I found amusing. But overall, the movie is not for younger kids (not like they would understand the innuendo anyways). Maybe that, along with the scary themes, (ie, the freaky underground lake full of corpses) is why it gets an Adult (R) rating in Korea.


You may go ahead and disagree with me - but I'm willing to bet those who do probably read the book first!