My thoughts on Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (버닝; Beoning) has been sitting in my drafts for a minute now. A recent realization that it is now available in digital format inspired me to get on with it and complete the thoughts I jotted down a few months ago.
I remember almost as if it were yesterday. It was late April 2017 – as I am apt to do on any given day, I found myself thumbing through my multiple social media accounts, check checking up on the latest news.
I don’t recall exactly at what time, but suddenly my various feeds were inundated with a slew of posts talking about the disaster that was taking place down in the Bahamas; something called the “Frye” Festival? Yeah, I thought it was a festival sponsored by one of my favorite leather goods brands. My bad.
Of course I was soon corrected – it was the FYRE Festival which, pun intended, was going up in flames. Posts containing real-time photos of cheese sandwiches and disaster relief tents filled my head. What exactly was going on? Who is involved/responsible for this mess? Well in a matter of days, most of my “burning” questions would be answered. In the immediate wake of this story dropping, I am (almost) embarrassed to say that I was filled with a great deal of bemusement. My fascination with the events of the Fyre Festival were punctuated by moments when, while chatting with friends, I would find myself crying with laughter at the poor folks who got duped into paying for a “luxury festival experience” on a (not) private island in The Bahamas.
The Netflix original documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, looks back on those harrowing days as well as the calamitous lead up to the event which reverberated through social media for days.
Well, this started out as being my final post for 2018 but it looks like it will be my first post for 2019.
I admit it – I am little late to the game, but I am now just getting around to posting some quick thoughts to the Netflix “sensation” Bird Box.
Starring Sandra Bullock, Bird Box is the second thriller of 2018 to give audiences a fright while losing one of our senses (the other being A Quiet Place). And while I still have not had the pleasure of seeing the latter, I very much looked forward to seeing (pun intended) a post apocalyptic world where your very survival depended on your inability to see what was in front of you. (Near) futuristic hellscapes are my jam.
By now, I assume most folks have a sense of the direction of the story – so I will simply drop a few of my quick thoughts/observations below.
