Freedom, well that's just some people talking

It is the last day of school before my vacation.  I have spent the last fourteen work days at my desk from the hours of increasingly later than nine o'clock to four-thirty. I eaten many of the Twix that remained in my desk, I have reached spiritual enlightenment, I have occasionally shared the Twix but never the enlightenment. Today I ate squid and rice cakes because I am a very very polite boy.

Lets get to our feature presentations.

Wings

(Hey! You broke the blogger!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsM6-gPqkMI&feature=youtu.be

The only submission from a class peppered with assholes comes this gem. The boy wearing the wings made them himself and he told me they took about four hours of work. That's not four of your hours either, where at least one of them is spent on facebook but billed to the company as vital. These are four of the kind of hours that the kids back home are buying study drugs in the library just to get a chance at. 

Three Good Boys, Three Bad Boys

This video was the winner of the 9th grade wide vote on best boys video. It's not hard to see why. Handsome stars, one of whom is the lead singer for the school's only rock band, (hint: he's the one that looks like he's wearing eye makeup), solid premise, they got in a dumpster, they used 'Party Rock' and they included an outtakes reel. All the girls now have giant crushes on them. It's likely besides the voucher to the movie theatre, each of these boys has won holding a girl's hand over the winter break. This is what happens when the cool kids also work hard in school. It's largely not fair to the rest of us.

The Lonely Girl

The winner of the voting for Girl's best picture. This is a great movie, good idea, good execution, fantastic use of extras who are too shy to show their face on camera and the quickest turn of a violent scene to slapstick that I've ever seen. I shouldn't hold anything against this film, but I do. You see...

This Is The Film I Like Best

From the same class as the winner, these girls stayed after school for two hours one day to finish shooting their film. Where as the other group relied on repetition and slapstick, this group had wit, they had humour, they had an old woman music video selling Sun Chips. When it was time to announce the winner we went to their classroom and I realized that I should have created another prize, something like critics choice or best musical performance or anything because the girls' faces just fell when I told everyone the other group had won. I feel like I let them down, allowing them to work as hard as they did without getting any recognition. 

It's too late now, this was all weeks ago. An hour after the winners were announced school was out for the winter. Although they probably haven't thought about it since, and this is the emptiest of empty gestures, I post it here as my favourite with the vague idea that if you watch it and think "yeah, those girls were great," the net result of more people in the world believing they are ballin' can only be a good thing. 

I am now on vacation. 

I am growing a cyber-gut.

I cannot complain about my retirement. I sit on the sunny beach of this public school's main office every day from 9 until 4:30 as has always been my wish. I have staked several lucrative claims on virgin territory of the internet. I believe I may build a modest log cabin on Google's back forty. Yesterday I brought my laptop to school and played a Star Wars based mass multiplayer online game because it's the sort of extreme nerdity that I like to flaunt about now that I am retired. I order in lunch every day, and every day I get just what I want. I do not get my hair cut and I am considering wearing a toque. I have access to a very large box of mandarin oranges. 

And yet for all I have, there are still troubled thoughts that can roll in early in the day and leave me unable to youtube for hours. Is this really the meaning of life? Do we teach for two years till the ripe age of twenty-five just so that we can poke away our remaining months in Korea as kept men, (or women), of the public school system? It might be that there is more to this, but it is for the younger ones who come after me to discover it. I am already too deep in this dream.

Also, I still have more videos!

The Smoker Who Died

A tour de force from a group of boys who I in no way expected to actually complete this project. Filming some of the opening scenes, the boys absolutely kicked the shit out of the bathroom door. I couldn't even get mad at them, I was too excited they were speaking English. Expect to see these boys in the NBA.

Girls! Girls! Girls!

The most avant-guard of the films turned in for the Bummul Film Festival, 'Girls! Girls! Girls!' tells the story of a young boy driven mad by lust, his subsequent running afoul with a teacher, and then some stuff that I do not understand culminating in a beating. Despite repeatedly telling them that their movies might be shown to all of the 9th grade students, the male lead in this piece expressed extreme distress when he was told that the girls had seen his film. This simply goes to show that if you give a ninth grade boy a rope he'll embarrass himself in front of girls with it. 

Extra! Extra! Newspaper is incredible useful!

A great premise that ends in a glittery celebration of newspaper. The monks who shaved just the tops of their heads and started the printing press would be proud. Scandal rocked this video though as yet another student complained that it was terribly unfair that we were going to do what we said we'd do and show the boys classes their great work. A much better tactician than the boy above, she petitioned her Korean English teacher and pleaded extreme shyness. She won her case and we didn't show this video to the boys classes and I am not bitter at all no not at all. (It's the lead dancer, be sure to pay extra special attention to her.)

Next time - wrapping it up with the final four videos. Do you think I saved my favourite for last? I'll give you a hint:  

      Oh Yeah!

Don't cry for me, I'm already in bed

I rolled out of bed this morning to turn off my alarm, but it wasn't my alarm. It also wasn't the morning. It was 1:30 am and The Nice Man was drunk. He really wanted me to be drunk too. I was very confused because I didn't know any of these things until I tried to turn my phone's alarm off and accidentally answered the call. When I told him it was 1:30 at night he said "REALLY?!" 

Today we're going to look at three movies from a single class. This project involved breaking eleven classes into between six to eight groups. The average size of a group was five students. Out of approximately sixty-five to seventy groups total we received twenty-five movies. Three movies from a single class ended up being the record. Lets take a look at what made these girls so special.

If You...

What made these girls special was their gumption to make the first half of their movie utter nonsense. Who is throwing the paper balls? The teacher? And what is "shaking legs"? I didn't dare ask them, because it would have completely ruined the movie for me. 

I would also prefer to live in a world where the lunch lady was from Top Gun II: Farm Town - Fighter Bombers and Barley.

Do-do-do do do Do! do

About a dozen groups claimed that they were going to make a meticulous stop motion movie complete with miniature scale models of people sneezing and what not. This is the only group who actually did it. Kudos to them as well for perhaps the best special effects of the entire competition with their teleport maneuver. 

ceo FRIEND

This movie is being rejected by the servers, probably for being too big. Here's a youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB4QHfLd6tA&feature=youtu.be

Let me know if it doesn't work. I've never uploaded to youtube before.

Despite no one speaking a word of any language in this video, it came second in the school's vote for best film by only one vote. There was awhile there where I was worried democracy didn't work. With slick production value like this, you can sell anybody on anything.

Sunrise, Swingset

I was considering marking this occasion with a transcription of song lyrics that I find pertinent and meaningful, but then I realized that I'd already had a contractual obligation to show you the best films to come out of Bummul's film festival. I'm not usually a man of my word but I'm currently being vetted for office so I'll have to follow through.  I will follow through in the form of a Top 10 semi arbitrary list of 13 movies that I want to show you over the next few days.

Dangerous Motions

The boys here do a great job of using a television to pad their film with contextual and unlicensed footage. The stunt work is a bit wooden but the boys' demonstrate a reoccurring theme with an awkward tagline that would make a great film title.

The Poor Boy

The sad tale of a boy who drives himself into poverty. If you don't have a tear in your eye during the poor boy scene at the end you don't have a heart. Of special note is the actor's dedication to the roll of 'bad apple'. Yi Seung Jong put on fifty pounds just for the final scene where we peer into the boys future. Incredible.

Mix Daum Pot

Quite simply the greatest fake smoking I have ever seen.

I have taught my last class an achieved office ornament status until the end of February. This is a great time for us to really solidify our relationship.

Render as a blog post

These days are fast.

Lately my last dreams of the night have been strange ones. I met President Obama and his old wrinkled white wife in the crowd while I waited for the parade that he was supposed to be in. He wanted to hang out. Last night I was a bee. I wake up when my cell phone plays jazz sax and I look at the same dark room I've been looking at for nearly two years now and think "again". The three minutes I take to stretch like an inflexible dog and roll out of bed to find my sweatpants are the three minutes that feel the longest. Maybe that's why everything seems to rush back to them.

This morning after I showered the first thing I put on were my socks. I don't know why, but it was a nice change. I followed through with this impromptu dressing freestyle by putting on a shirt, then a sweater, then underwear and pants. I'm aware that this is the least attractive way to get dressed, but this morning I didn't pretend there was a camera in the corner of the room to strut for. This morning was just for me.

There are a lot of things I've never, depending on your point of view, bothered to or been able to do in two years here. One of them is fabric softener. When I take my towel off the drying rack it holds it's bend and folds with an impressive rigor. The fabric is very rough when it's freshly washed, but this reminds me of some unspecific positive time in my childhood.

The past three weeks I have been cajoling the 9th graders into making movies, specifically public service announcements, for a film festival that has finally arrived. Next week all the movies will be shown to all the classes and they'll get to vote for their favourites. We were going to have a preliminary round this week to pick the best film from each class, but so few films were turned in that they'll all getting into the event. Lucky for you, we'll be deconstructing the films all together over the coming days I feel like it right here at no dog.

Have a taste.

I might get to go home early today, so don't you work too hard.