Okay forgive me for utterly hijacking this week's theme to write a blog post that is mostly not about the theme. I am also quite behind on blog posts (what is new, what is new) and I'll be catching up this week. Really looking forward to hearing your guys' responses to this week's theme and the past couple!
THEME: A movie you hate.
While I don't hate very many movies (usually if I don't like a movie I feel mostly just apathetic toward it and tend to not think about it after I hit it with that 1.5 or lower on Letterboxd), one movie franchise that embodies so much about what I hate about movies is Michael Bay's Transformers.
I honestly cannot think of a more puerile, imaginationless, juvenile series than the live action Transformers movies. I'm not a huge action movie person, but I can appreciate fight scenes, car chases, and explosions when they're incorporated into a movie actually worth watching. The Transformers series is just not that for me.
I think I realized how much I hated Transformers after seeing the first movie, but through some cruel twist of fate, I have seen nearly every Transformers movie in theaters, including the Mark Wahlberg ones (blessedly, I have not had to endure the John Cena one). The movies have no plot, world, or ethos beyond giant robots, the US military, buildings exploding, and a sexy love interest. To watch a Transformers movie is to shut your brain off and watch what amounts to a CGI fireworks display with the ugliest color scheme you can imagine. And this is coming from someone who watched and quite liked the Transformers cartoons as a kid.
Also, I recently watched a clip of Megan Fox talking on Jimmy Kimmel about how Michael Bay made her do a bunch of sexualized stuff in the role even though she was only fifteen and other people told him that it was weird. She criticized the way he behaved on set in a GQ interview in 2011 and Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay fired her from the franchise and basically blackballed her in the industry.
Anyway, moral of the story: Transformers is stupid, Megan Fox is great. I never want to watch another Transformers movie in my life.
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At this point, you can feel more than free to "x" out of this webpage, because the rest of this post has nothing to do with the theme. Basically, I've been trying to get back into studying Korean because I've really fallen out of the habit and my Korean is getting really bad. But I'm also lazy and really busy with my internships right now so to try to inspire myself to at least passively study, I've been listening to Kpop again.
I definitely feel like I am too old for Kpop now, considering most idols debut when they're in high school and I honestly just feel tired when I imagine trying to watch reality shows about a Kpop celebrity to learn about their group. Boybands and girl groups have forever been the territory of teens and it is perhaps not heartening but certainly nostalgic to occasionally stumble across stan Twitter tweets and recognize some part of my old Kpop fan self from high school in them.
That said, I feel like my proximity to Kpop during much of my adolescence makes me qualified to be a Kpop fan historian of some sort. Well, I was listening to songs and ended up putting together some playlists of my favorite performances and music videos. These are my Favorite Performances (it was going to be 10 but it ended up being 12 because I'm indecisive.) This will likely be long and I honestly do not expect anyone to read this let alone watch any of the performances but I got inspired so here they are.
This will also likely reveal to you all that I know way more about Kpop than any of you have previously guessed. I'm done hiding [inspirational emoji] This is (or was) the Real Me.
No particular order :^)
1) Vixx - Voodoo Doll
Vixx has some of my favorite Kpop choreography and this might be my favorite of their dances. At its core, Kpop is very, very camp and Vixx just really get that. Their performances are always full of drama and cool themes. As the name might suggest, this song's theme is Voodoo Dolls and the members all take turns controlling a pin and controlling each other with it. Fun fact: choreography and theme were deemed too violent for television, so they had to edit it to get it past the censors. There are two moments in the performance where a member shoves the staff into the ground, but they're actually supposed to stab themselves in the original choreography, but they had to change it for television performances.
2) Jonghyun - Hyeya
Kim Jonghyun was a member of the group SHINee, who are really popular in Korea. He passed away in 2017. For a solid two weeks after I heard about his passing, I pretty much only listened to this performance of this song. It's a Korean language cover of the Spanish language song Y Si Fuera Ella by Alejandro Sanz. The lyrics, the vocals, and the theatrics of this performance are gorgeous and even though it's sad to watch now, it's still one of my favorite performances of all time.
3) BTS - Perfect Man
This is the only BTS in this list, and that is a promise. BTS performances aren't as fun anymore for me because they've gotten too popular. I miss the good old days when BTS were forced to do shitty dance covers of Uptown Funk with another boy group at award shows. Now, they perform at the Grammy's and Korean award shows let them do 30-minute concerts in the middle of shows. Anyway, this is from 2015, the height of my BTS phase. It's a cover of a Shinhwa (Kpop boyband most popular in the 90s-2000s) and it is simply perfect.
4) Red Velvet - Dumb Dumb
Everything about this song and performance? Outsold. The choreography, the slap bracelets, Irene's rap that's just a collection of Michael Jackson song names? This is what peak performance looks like. Joy is the Megan Fox of Kpop no I will not elaborate.
5) Back - Wonder Girls
If you watch any performance in this (if you're even still reading) please let it be this one. It's..a revelation. I was talking to my sister recently about how Kpop rappers sometimes believe they can rap, and this is a mistake. This is the most compelling evidence I can offer. This song should never have existed, but I'm so glad it does. I actually think Yubin is pretty decent but so much else about this video is just, wowie. The majesty of Hyerim's second verse (I'm still O.K.~), Yubin's hat falling off five seconds into the performance. The piece de resistance is surely Yeeun and Sunmi coming in from offstage randomly during the choruses. Yeeun providing perplexing adlibs, Sunmi literally just standing there and half-heartedly dancing. A masterpiece.
6) Don't Tease Me - Speed
Camp AND dangerous. I don't know if this is the most dangerous Kpop dance, but it certainly looks like it to me, especially that flip at the end. This group also released a song where they performed on heelies. Plus, a circus theme. Gorgeous.
7) Tonight and You Don't Love Me - SPICA
Okay, the reason that this list ended up being so long is mostly because I couldn't pick just one SPICA video so I picked 3. SPICA were one of my favorite groups back in the day. They were considered pretty old when they debuted back in 2012 (all of the members were in their mid-20s, when most Kpop idols are in their teens when they debut), and they were best known for having really talented vocals but they never really got popular. They ended up disbanding a year or two ago, but the members seem to have stayed on pretty good terms. So, I don't really know the full context of this club, but basically Bohyung and Jiwon were on this show for Jiwon's birthday, and they surprised them with the other members for them to perform together. I think this is the first time that they all performed together for at least two years and it's a very sweet vid, please two great songs :')
8) It's Raining Men - SPICA
Or: "Men Came Down From the Sky Like Rain."
9) Warning - Bohyung
Bohyung was my favorite SPICA member :') She was on this show basically for underrated girl group members and she was the breakout number one and won the show. She's a really good vocalist but she raps a little in this song and she's honestly better than most of these Kpop "rappers" out here...Also they keep cutting to these shots of Jiwon who came to support her. :') My last SPICA performance but a great one.
9) Exo - Growl
Now THIS is a camp masterpiece. Exo debuted with a superhero theme and then in their second big release shifted to a werewolf theme. In this performance, Luhan is rescuing a girl and stumbles across an abandoned classroom? Where a class of young werewolves have been chained to their desks? The world of this performance is extremely confusing. They dance battle, naturally. And Luhan and Kai face off directly in a "fight." Before four members left Exo and sued their company (oop!), Exo had 12 members, divided into two subgroups: Exo-K (for Korean) and Exo-M (Mandarin), but the groups of six in this performance are not Exo-K and Exo-M they're just randomly in groups of six I guess. I'm assuming they chose Luhan and Kai for the fight because they're, like, the respective visuals of the two subgroups of Exo, because it is perplexing that they would not have Tao, who's actually trained in martial arts, be part of the performance. But anyway, the big band dance break of Growl is pretty great. I would recommend stopping before the second song begins however. "Beauty and the Beast," more commonly known as "Wolf" is known for being the worst song Exo ever released, famous for the line, "I'll put you in my mouth like cheese."
10) 그것만 내 세상 - Sojung (cw: car crash, death)
From King of Masked Singer, a Korean reality show which has recently been exported to the US as well. Sojung is a member of the girl group Ladies' Code. I had been a really big fan of them in high school. In 2014, they got into a really bad car accident and two of their members died. Pretty shockingly, even after that, the three survivors have released a few songs together. This performance, though, was the first time any member had made a public appearance since their car accident, about two years after. Sojung in particular had been in critical condition for a while but made a full recovery. The performance is pretty incredible.
11) SHINee - Like A Fire
Every song by SHINee is a bop and this one is so fun. I remember in high school seeing a meme about the part around 2:55 onward, where Jonghyun, Onew, and Key start ad-libbing pretty hard that was like, "When you're in a group project but you're being graded individually." I think about it a lot still.
12) Break it - Produce 101 group (Nayoung mostly tho)
Okay, honestly I could make a whole other post about Produce 101 and the most iconic moments. This show came out when I was a senior in high school I think and it was an instant phenomenon. Basically, they took 101 girls (technically it was only 98 girls I think because a few people dropped out) who were trainees, meaning they've been signed to an entertainment agency but they haven't debuted, and made them compete for 11 slots in a girl group, based mostly on viewer votes. The greatest girl group of all time, ostensibly. The show was incredible and kind of a trainwreck and I watched all of it.
This performance was one of the earliest in the show. I put this here mostly because after this many years I have not gotten over my favorite contestant losing. Nayoung, the girl in the center at the beginning of the performance, was one of the breakout favorites at the beginning of the show. She was a captain for putting together a performance for their second evaluation/elimination but she ended up getting close to last pick for the song and members she wanted, so she performed this song, "Break it" by Kara, which she didn't know. And her team was made up of some of the people who had ranked lowest in their first evaluation. But even still, she put together an arrangement that really worked and delivered a pretty solid performance. The one moment where they cut away to that woman she basically says Nayoung is doing really well. But their team ended up losing to the other team by one point.
After that, Nayoung did well enough to avoid elimination every round but ultimately didn't make it into the final group of 11, even though the other two trainees that she had auditioned in a group with did. Even after all these years, I will still go to bat for Kim Nayoung. She deserved better dude :( They say time heals all wounds, but this one still feels fresh bros.
Anyway, no one asked for or wanted this, I just realized I have a lot of opinions so now they're here. Please ignore this if I do this again.
This took me a whole hour to get through! As for your most hated movie, I can respect your opinion. I am a relative fan of the movies but I can definitely see how it is very over-stimulating and pretty mindless due to its overly simple plot and lack of anything really thought provoking (like why are the deceptigons(?) bad? Why do they want power so badly). I listened to the songs/performances and I really liked their aesthetics like their outfits and stage sets. Listening to a few songs tho, I was like “hmmm, this songs familiar to a song my mom played.” For example, that song by BTS sounded a lot like the song called “My Prerogative”. Anyway, I remember…
Wow when i saw this was a 9 min post i thought it was a mistake lol. Thanks for sharing your interest it’s really cool to see what high school erin was doing. Ummm you know how i feel about K-Pop, but i went through and gave each at least a minute. I feel like the sample a lot of r&b and rap music with no credit T_T it’s kinda messed up (i mean i told you this before, but actually listening to so many songs I’m like heyyy that’s not an original song, but hey black culture is always appropriated and stolen am i right 🙃)