hi marissa!
annyông haseyo!
how’s your weekend? mine was hectic, saturday went barbecuing at the beach with a group of friends and on sunday went hiking. i’m now all washed out.
let me share something humorous with you, that i have discovered how to eat mooncake at a barbecue! i have this funny ingenious friend who put a large chunk of mooncake on a bbq fork to roast , and while another friend was roasting marshmallows, they started joking and somehow ended up playing swords fighting with their forks. the marshmallow was dripping all over the hot mooncake, i tasted it and it was really nice!
back to our topic of the K&C,
i’m new here in this forum and i am glad i have found this place.
and if ever i find the time to log on, i like backtracking to the past and read up as much as i possibly could about all that was said and printed about this movie. i did read about that article about kim gi bok . he didn’t exactly say that all the relationships were not homosexual, just presuming some were and some were not. if you were to reread that article again, try to read between the lines of what he was trying to convey about these relationships without putting himself in a position of having to commit or admit anything directly or openly.
as i mentioned b4, since the characters in K&C are fictional, any interpretation is really up to individual liking. you could choose to mould these characters into anything according to your whims and fantasies or you could choose to see them as they really are on screen. we can be kind and generous towards these characters or we can simply judge them harshly according to our likes and dislikes. i know many people do not like gays, but hey, welcome to the real world, gays do exist and we need not be afraid of them. i am not for gays nor am i against them but homosexual people are humans too. they can love as deeply as any love between a man and a woman and their love as equally sincere and strong. after watching K&C, any bias i may have towards homosexuals b4 were all gone and now i see them differently.
you asked did i think gong gil and jang saeng had a sexual relationship, i’ll say yes. i choose to be generous towards the character jang saeng, because since gong gil could have sex with other men, why not with jang saeng too!
concerning how he loves her to such distractions, of having to endure being beaten and kicked and nearly had his foot smashed and finally to go blind. it would be too cruel if he didn’t have the pleasure of having of gong gil while others did.
from the onset of the movie, when jang saeng screamed at the captain of the troupe “stop pimping off of gong gil” is a good indication that that wasn’t the first time gong gil has been pimped off. when he saw the captain talking to that ugly old patron, he lost his mood to perform and drop from the rope on purpose, that showed that pimping off gong gil had happened b4. and this indicates gong gil isn’t a virgin, so i don't think their relationship is a platonic one.
i greatly admire the character jang saeng for his courage and strength, of how he protects and loves his gong gil, the light of his life. when he thought that light was gone, he rather go blind. he really thought that gong gil had fallen for the king. i wept so bitterly when i finally understood his lost and his desperation in the last scene. that was after watching the dvd listening to the spoken chinese instead of reading the english subtitles. the english substitles is not good enough in revealing the emotional depth of what was being said most of the time. the chinese translation was much better. the spoken chinese is far more accurate in exposing the emotional depth of how jang saeng felt. one line made so much difference was when he said in chinese “the murdering thief has HIS heart stolen away” whereas the english subtitle says “the murdering thief has stolen a heart” . blah. big difference!
oh jeezuz, i am typing this in a hurry, and i have to go now, please forgive me if you’ve spotted too many grammar mistakes. and i know my typing sucks.
please do continue to give your comments. i enjoy reading your opinions. there is nothing better than reading others’ opinion and then share with them what you think too. cheers!