If you want to see some terrible acting, watch a K-drama from the 2000s that has a white "American" character in it. It's always some guy with a moderately thick accent (probably central European) who seems like they just grabbed him off a college campus, forced to memorize a few lines of dialogue, and then put in front of the camera. I strongly suspect it seems like that because that was exactly what they were doing.
The woodenist performance ever is Kim Tae-hee in Love Story at Harvard. It's like teak. She's as bad as the random white people. But she's one of the most beautiful women in the world so they kept casting her and eventually with experience she got pretty good.
And the writing was done by some gook who knows English about as well I know French. Sometimes they're so incoherent you can't even understand what the character is trying to say even though they're supposed to be from your country. Why did you not get a fluent English-speaker to look over this dialogue before you put in a big production worth millions of dollars? It's not like they're a rare commodity. There's about 25,000 American troops in Korea and God knows how many there for college, business, heck even tourists. (It's probably because of fricked-up labor laws, but that's a story for another time.)
I wanted to show something really really badass but google doesn't even give you relevant images these days.
You could go to Gwanghwamun Square and grab some random American tourist and give them a sheet of paper with the white guy scene and ask them to make it more natural. They take 10 minutes to fix your mistakes. You reward them by making them extras. They're the scary soldier with a gun standing behind the "American" character or something. They go home and watch your drama and are beyond overjoyed when they see themselves on the screen.
Yi Sun-Sin. Now there's a chad for you. Defeated the Japanese, a fierce and worthy opponent, on many occasions despite the odds. Right now he's up there on the couch with Nelson and de Ruyter rewatching the first season of 24.
They show it to all their relatives, of course. One is a college student who tells her friends that they have got to see this. Another is some kid who goes to friends and says "dude, look at this weird chingchong stuff I found". Soon it becomes a cultural phenomenon. Ordinary people walk around wearing gats and saying "anyang" to each other as a greeting. By 2015 Americans are mostly making dramas now, shows that actually bring the story to a conclusion at the end and don't try to set up a new season. Netflix's selection now: K-dramas, telenovelas, these new American dramas, Star Trek, or the Rockford Files.
How the average American man dresses in 2025. (He actually made it himself which I think is pretty cool.)
In this new interplay of cultures, while we're under Korean tutelage sometimes the teacher learns as much as the student. Concepts like:
How to tell a story where there is no romantic relationship at the core of it.
Eating food that actually tastes good, not what your grandmother did.
How to not eat dogs. (Remember our fantasy is in the 2000s when that was still not completely over.)
Aspects of Christianity beyond just pissing off your neighbors with a gigantic neon cross lit at all hours.
Why building codes are supposed to be followed, not considered a challenge to be beaten.
How to use the advanced features of the dishwasher. It does more than just store your dishes!
Why it's better for your kid to actually learn than just bribe their teacher.
Men and women can actually get along reasonably well sometimes if they want to.
Long after our cultures have fused, when brave men and agassis roam the stars, they will look back at this time and think "Aigoo! Who were our people back then? The Koreans or the Americans?" What a silly question. It's like trying to decide if Goryeo, Baekje, or Silla were the real Koreans. Is this a story about nations, or is it a story about all people learning that we have one common heart?
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Off topic but I miss the kind of TV, movies, or games that are set in the future but like the future 30-100 years from now. I would call it Future realism but I don't know what the actual name of the genre is. Think of Deus Ex series ( excluding 2 ), call of duty advanced warfare, and the new SCP fragmented minds demo till the part where you open the curtains and turns out you are on Mars.
It is almost like tv and gaming has stopped looking forward to the future and instead only believes in future that looks like outright fantasy ( foundation series on tv, superhero movies, the hunger games series ), instead of a more grounded futurism that still looks like a natural offshoot of where we are today.
The closest recent media I find that has come to grounded futuristic aesthetic would be "umbrella academy" ( superpowers slop ) and even there the only part of grounded they appear to have embraced is uglier people as the main case instead of the usual 9/10s.
I want my tech to feel more techy, but in a way that feels like it naturally evolved from the things that we have today. For military movies and tech they don't even need to create new technologies necessarily but just implement every single DARPA project as if they all succeeded already.
Elysium and district 9 were the best grounded sci-fi films till date that I have ever seen. Where the sci-fi aspect still feels connected to our own world in a way that does not diminish either the tech or the human aspect, in a way that makes it feel like the world and the people in it could indeed exist right next to the technologies on display.
Oftentimes most films and tv sci-fi appears to work by a strange disconnect between the culture of the people and the level of technology that they have. Like watching a movie about people pretending to be in a sci-fi universe or a universe with sci-fi mumbo jumbo that is completely made up.
Minority Report is also another example of sci-fi done right where every piece of sci-fi technology actually feels like it belongs within the setting and the world around it, without the world itself being disconnected from our own.
And therein lies the problem with most sci-fi that exists today, science-fiction today has become a genre that might as well be called alternate timeline fiction as the way those worlds and technologies appear to work and look is in complete disconnect with how these things would or at the very least are expected to evolve within our own world.
Science fiction to me is at its best when it embraces having products and technology that looks like it has actually been through human hands, that is capable of wear and tear, and that looks like a factory was involved in building it. If a science fiction concept can make their setting and technologies successfully check these 3 requirements, it automatically becomes possible for it to be one of the best sci-fi movies of the decade.
In conclusion:
We need more near future science fiction where the tech doesn't exist as a plot mcguffin but instead is a normal everyday part of society with an aesthetic that makes it look like it was indeed built in a factory somewhere.
I love sucking peepee except for circumcised mutilated peepee.
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Wow. Looking into this
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I actually like a AAA game and it's even a sequel and then you tell me it's bad.
They made exactly what you want but you're not gonna like it. It's called Max Headroom (1985). Each episode starts with the titles ominously saying "15 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE".
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Hmmmm
Might as well recommend me the twilight zone for the most original ideas in current year.
I am talking about deus ex invisible wars not deus ex mankind divided. The problem with mankind divided was that they had main story content in dlc.
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Yeah, if nothing else it's worth watching to see what people back then imagined a future dystopia would be. I love watching scifi from other times. It tells you a lot about the people who made it.
It's hard because they were ripping off pulp magazines, later shows, ripped off them. they ripped off themselves in later seasons, Rod Serling ripped himself off for Planet of the Apes.
I'm sorry I'm a bit old and I don't keep with the slang. What does mean?
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current year meaning the present as in current times. That's what I always thought it to be.
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