How's Life in a Bigger Prison?

Hello friends, it feels nice to get back to blogging, so let us waste no time and get right into the thick of things. The hour I spent phone-less passed with relative ease; no severe panic attacks or massive hemorrhaging and so forth. One thing I did notice about the phone free challenge was that I stressed more over the simple ability not to use my phone rather than my self-induced social isolation. The inability to do something weighs out as more distressing than actually not performing the action for me. This got me to thinking about how the priorities, if switched, would play out. I figured an hour would not suffice, so I increased my theoretical isolation to days, then weeks, and so on. I eventually drifted into years upon years of social isolation, a prison like removal of all social interaction.

At first I had a lot of trouble trying to find a film to connect this to and still have enough to talk about; I didn't want to make some simple connection to a film and say "Oh yeah, Super has a guy who's totally socially isolated and has no friends, also he's played by Dwight from the Office". I had waited for a time to talk about Korean Cinema, and now the time has come, and there is one quintessential film that I must talk about: Oldboy. The premise to the film is that Oh Dae-Su, a new father and a bit of a drunk, gets imprisoned in a hotel room for 15 years for no known reason to him, his captors then release him and give him a total of 5 days to discover who locked him up and for what purpose. While the actual screen-time of the imprisonment only lasts around 20 minutes, the experience obviously influences every part of Oh Dae-Su's existence. For example, the saying "Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone" is etched on his hotel room wall, Dae-Su takes this saying to heart, forcing himself to smile during situations of stress and anguish. His isolation also had more than mental effects on the protagonist. The Korean language went through a massive change through the 80s and 90s, dividing into two sects a written, very formal version, and a simple speaking version derived from the former. Oh Dae-Su misses all of this change, however, and speaks in a tongue akin  Elizabethan English for Americans. This independent development displayed by the protagonist of Oldboy leads me to my point: the South Korean film industry has grown independent of Hollywood for decades, and they now produce some of the most diverse, intelligent, and amazing films today. Sometimes removal from the mainstream turns into something wonderful, in this case, while still paralleling the mainstream in terms of content. Korean westerns exist, Korean dramas are the best today, Korean horror alienates and disturbs unlike most modern American films of the same genre, and I think you can see where I am going with this. The funny thing about this blog entry is that Oldboy happens to be the film that put this country on the map as a major film producer.

Anyways, I'm making a small amendment to my general structure, so here's a trailer of the film Oldboy

Attack the Blog

Throughout the entire blogging process I have learned so much about my fellow classmates; how they write, their interests and internal personalities, and so on. The most fascinating thing about this entire experience came from reading other students' blogs and gaining insight into the characteristics of their inner monologues. Anyways, writing these blogs have also improved myself when it comes to my writing style and creative drive. I have not written with such few rules for years, the last memorable time coming from Mr. Stuart's Creative Writing course that I took as a sophomore. The freedom of these blogs has really given us, in my opinion, a great insight into human nature and our day-to-day lives. Every week that I noticed multiple reoccurring themes of some kind throughout the entire AP English blogging community it served as a reminder to me that we do share a lot of similarities, despite pressing thoughts of nonconformity and feelings of separateness. We really have grown into a sort of family and I really do appreciate that sense of community that we have together. Blogging has also allowed me to drone on about film without any kind of social norms prohibiting me. Where else can I talk and analyze books, films, and my personal experiences weekly and not receive chastising criticism? If any of my reader could not tell, I really do love the art form, and blogging has served as a very fun outlet for my love for said art form. I am just realizing this now, but it seems as if I also pulled a book ending out for my movie-related blogs; I happened to begin them with discussions of murder and the  mental decline of Ignatius J. Reilly, and ended with discussing a mentally disturbed serial killer, Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, in relation to book-to-film adaptations. Of course, this end also comes with a bit of a disappointment; I still have many films I want to discuss, but alas, we have to move on to other things. The ultimate film I leave my audience with is "The Fall", the most aesthetically beautiful film I have ever seen, all done with absolutely minimal special effects (only done to accomplish the impossible, all of the sets exist).

So, to do the film justice, here's the trailer in 720p:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Saeavj0b37Y

"So, enough with words, actions speak louder than. Action now. Observe all"