Farewell, My Column Scribe and the Price of Aggression

Sydney Pollack.

Jim McKay.

And now Stan Winston.

Gone.


<~>


I was looking through an old email account and found the following saved as a draft. I don't remember where I was going to post it, so I'm putting it here:


So many filmmakers make "war" films about the futility of war. Do politicians ever listen? No.

No matter how passionately filmmakers or other artists voice their "war is good for nobody" mentality, there's always going to be war. Still, some people say that accepting "theres always going to be war" doesn't help.

What I liked about Taegukgi (Kang Je-Gyu, 2004) is the idea that maybe people shouldn't be soldiers of ideologies if it's not just about defending your country. I think what the director was really trying to say was "civil war should not be..."

One of the making-of featurettes mentionedhow disconcerting and sad it was that your enemy spoke the same language as you...and before the US and the Soviet Union made their tension "official," the fight between capitalism and socialism was happening in Korea.

So then I thought, 'But hey, we had the civil war....there were families broken up. What about the Revolutionary War....families were broken up there too." Whenever there's a conflict of interests between humans, it always gets ugly.


The theme song of Taegukgi: "Oori" (We). Performed by BoA.