Random Notes - Vol 3, No. 5

Just getting ready to head down to this year' Pusan International Film Festival. Which for me principally means ironing a lot of shirts, then stuffing them into a suitcase to get all wrinkled anyway.

I was thinking that I would be able to cut back on my time there this year, just go for a few days during the film market, but some additional work suddenly turned up and now I need to go down for the opening night, too. But for various reasons, my workload should not be too bad. I might even have the time to watch a few films (what a crazy thought).

At the moment, the weather forecast for Busan says warm (but not brutally hot) and sunny... at least until Sunday or Monday, when that typhoon down by Hong Kong now might start moving up this way.

The Chosun Ilbo recently had an article on the grand old Dansungsa movie theater going bankrupt. Except that it was not the grand old Dansungsa, at least not in my mind. The original building was one of the great movie theaters (I saw BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS there, soon before it was torn down), but the ugly multiplex that replaced it was not. Anyhow, here is a pic of the original theater and its replacement.

PJ O'Rourke has cancer. Odds are he will survive it, but in the meantime, it is good to see him tackling the subject with all the wit and bad taste that O'Rourke is famous for. In fact, that is probably the best column of his that I have read in years.