cage

I don't mean to get into the habit of starting every post this way, but here's another thing a student wrote:

This was written by a 9 year old girl:

to: juliet. Hi Juliet! I'm [student's name].  I'm from korea. I met you in famous book named "romeo and juliet". love with romeo was so sad and envy you. so the deepest love like such thing. well, can I ask you a question? When you ate a pill and woke up, romeo had been died. How did you feel? Maybe broke your heart! It's ironical fate, what a pity. If you didn't ate a pill and went to romeo, this accident wouldn't have happened. See you again! Bye! from [student's name] 

This is one of my favorite things a student has ever handed in to me. I have so many questions about it. Where did she read the story of Romeo and Juliet? How did she get the idea of writing a letter to a 400 year old fictional character? How on Earth did she come to write the sentence, "It's ironical fate, what a pity"? And who taught her how to use the present-perfect tense?  I know we haven't gotten to that yet.

I don't watch very much TV. What I do watch habitually I get via the internet, so I don't usually just turn on my TV to flip through the channels. For one thing, 90% of the channels are in Korean. And another thing, the English channels don't play much worth watching.

What I refer to as the "English channels" are pretty much just a few movie channels that often air American movies. However, all the movies they play are crap. As I sit here typing this, I have Blade 3 on, muted. Blade 3 is the perfect movie to summarize the kind of stuff these channels play: a shitty Hollywood action flick.

Another thing that they always seem to have on are Nicolas Cage movies.  More specifically, god-awful Nicolas Cage action movies from the past ten years. Those National Treasure movies are on from time to time, as is Ghost Rider. Some movie called Next, which I'd never heard of before and was the worst half of a movie I've ever seen, is on once a week; as is a sci-fi film called Knowing, which actually wasn't terrible.

Lately there's been a lot of this other movie called Drive Angry. It seems to be on every time I turn on the TV. I haven't watched it yet but his hair looked ridiculous in the 30 seconds I did see. I asked Mi-Hyun why Korea plays so many Nicolas Cage movies. She kinda looked at me quizzically for a moment, as though she was surprised I didn't already know the answer. "He's America's best movie star," she explained to me. I, in turn, explained to her that no, he isn't. She was surprised.

I guess it's one of those things that you occasionally hear about, some middling American celebrity being huge in another country. Here in Korea, I guess that's Nicolas Cage.