Tag: “Squid Game”

Go Away With … Mai Whelan of “Squid Game: The Challenge”

Jae-Ha Kim

“At eight years of age, it was an easy transition [to the U.S.],” said “Squid Game: The Challenge” winner Mai Whelan. “The hardest was learning English, because there are so many tenses. In Vietnamese, we have general, formal and no tenses.”

Go Away With … Reagan To

Jae-Ha Kim

“I wasn’t told about the violent scenes with the doll [in ‘Squid Game’], so all I was imagining was a friendly doll that was staying calm but was getting more excited to play,” said Reagan To, 10. “I was thinking back to when I was playing with my friends back in school, and that helped me to create a young and innocent voice. I think that made the character even more scary and creepy.”

In ‘Squid Game,’ children’s games get awfully bloody

Jae-Ha Kim

NPR asked me to share my thoughts about the Korean series, “Squid Game,” for their Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. We discussed the controversy about the subtitles, whether the Western actors in Episodes 7 lended anything to the series and whether a Season 2 would be a good thing or not.

“Squid Game” Is a Social Allegory Informed by Korean History

Jae-Ha Kim

“Squid Game” is not this year’s “Parasite,” so much as it is a satire in the vein of “A Modest Proposal.” Just as Jonathan Swift pointed out the abject brutality of telling the poor to satiate their hunger by eating healthy, plump babies, Hwang depicts the cruelty of lording a huge sum of money – literally – over desperate people’s heads, knowing that most will die as they lived: penniless.