u/drakepig

I just watched 'Hope' and I'm a little disappointed.

I'm not saying it's a terrible movie. As a popcorn movie, it's quite good enough. Maybe my expectations were just too high.

I remember posting here after seeing 'No Other Choice' early and saying I was disappointed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Koreanfilm/comments/1npumk9/no_other_choice_was_disappointing_no_spoilers/

Ppl who had not even watched it yet - since it opened much earlier where I live - buried the post with downvotes. Then, a few months later once it finally came out in your countries, the upvotes slowly started rolling in lol.

So I'm expecting to get downvoted again for posting this one, but whatever. Let's see when Hope opens in your countries.

For the first hour, I felt so great. It was one of the best. It reminded of 'Exhuma' before the oni shows up. But after that, it became like 'Exhuma' after the oni shows up. Later then I caught myself checking my watch to see when the movie was going to end.

I was not expecting much from CGI. I loved Sci-fi even back when CGI was much worse. But it still disappointed me.

The director said a sequel is possible if the film does well and I felt like the story sacrifices its own completeness to leave the door open for the possible sequel. The ending made very little sense to me.

And the dialogues... were just terrible. I lost count of how many times the same lines were repeated. HOLY SHIT. As a native Korean speaker, the dialogue was just awful. Maybe ppl who watch with subtitles may have a better experience if the translation smooths things over but that will not be easy.

Also, there are just too much comedy scenes. The problem is, none of them was funny. I don't remember hearing anyone in the theater laugh. You could cut those scenes out entirely and the movie would not lose anything, but there are just too many of them.

I wrote a lot about its flaws but it does have its strengths too. The thing is, while I can easily point to its flaws in detail, but it's very hard to explain about strengths. I mean, 'Hope' has some strenghts. But I just cant't explain lol. I can't even do that in Korean so it's not the language issue.

As I said earlier, it's a good popcorn movie. I think 'Hope' is so much better than 'Mickey 17'. I don't feel this was a waste of money or time. It's just okay to good sci-fi action movie, not more than that.

You might think this is a philosophy book when you see the title but it's a novel. Since English is not my native language, I'm not even sure this phrase makes sense but I would describe it as 'a postmodern novel that isn't particularly difficult or inaccessible' lol.

So there is a scholar who studies Goethe and one day he comes across the quote "Love does not confuse everything, but mixes - Goethe" and starts investigating whether Goethe really said it.

The book is filled with, full of quotations, reference to literature, philosophy, music, movies and even religion. What I found great is that all of these unrelated things eventually connect together.

I think it's possible to understand and enjoy the novel without having extensive background knowledge but the more you know about those things, the better reading experience you will have.

So I'd be happy in hearing from philosophy majors or serious bookworms who have read a lot of books, I'd love to know what reading this novel felt from them.

Some parts of this book that, I think can only be fully understood if you know how the English was translated into Japanese - I read the Korean version and since Korean and Japanese share many linguistic similarities, for example, they have the same word order, so I think I understood them - so I'm really curious how those were translated for English readers and what's English reader's impression about.

Last, there's a line in the book that says like "In Germany, if you want to quote something but you can't remember who actually said it or if you just made it up and want to give it some authority, you simply add 'as Goethe said."

If any German here, is there actually a saying like that in Germany? or the author just make that up for the novel?

In Korea, if you're on a date, order a fried chicken, and one person eats both chicken legs(drumsticks), that's a red flag.

Generally, chicken legs are considered the best part of the chicken in here, - I know they are not in many other countries lol - so taking both legs is often seen as selfish.

Sometimes we joke like 'I ate chicken with him/her and they let me eat both drumsticks! Is that a green flag?'