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Post by Ripley on Dec 27, 2016 19:36:34 GMT -5
"Netflix unveiled on Friday the first batch of stills and a storyboard image for Bong Joon Ho's much-anticipated fantasy film Okja, ahead of its release in 2017. Written by Bong and Jon Ronson (Frank), Okja follows Mija, a young girl who must risk everything to prevent a powerful, multinational company from kidnapping her best friend, a massive animal named Okja. South Korean actress Seohyun An, who was cast by Bong through an extensive series of auditions, plays the lead role. Still cuts featuring An and her co-star Lily Collins (To The Bone) were released along with a storyboard image. "With Okja, I want to show the beauty that can exist between man and animal, and also the horror between them," said Bong. Other cast members include Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal and Paul Dano, along with Devon Bostick (The 100), Byun Heebong (The Host), Shirley Henderson (Anna Karenina), Daniel Henshall (The Babadook), Yoon Je Moon (Mother), Choi Wooshik (Set Me Free) and Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead). ...Okja will premiere globally on Netflix in 2017 and will also have a limited day-and-date theatrical release in the U.S. .." stills linked link
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Post by dark sister on Dec 27, 2016 21:07:34 GMT -5
So excited for this one! I love this cast. It's too bad Steven wasn't in one of those stills.
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Post by Ripley on Feb 28, 2017 11:43:54 GMT -5
Teaser dropped-date is June 28 "South Korea’s Bong Joon-Ho has been compared to Steven Spielberg in his prime, but it’s been a good ten years since he ventured into classic Spielberg territory. That looks set to change with Okja, whose first trailer reveals that it centers on the friendship between a young girl and a genetically engineered dinosaur-type creature. Said creature appears to be the creation of Tilda Swinton, who exults, “I took nature and science, and I synthesized” before getting made up to share her findings with the world. But the movie’s capsule synopsis suggests that it won’t be long before nature and science find themselves at odds, as a multinational corporation tries to lay claim to the “beast in all of us.”..." www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/02/28/trailer_for_bong_joon_ho_s_okja_starring_tilda_swinton_jake_gyllenhaal_on.html
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Post by dark sister on Feb 28, 2017 13:04:53 GMT -5
I can't wait!
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Post by dark sister on Apr 27, 2017 12:01:52 GMT -5
Another teaser dropped today.
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Post by murph on Apr 27, 2017 12:12:58 GMT -5
Another teaser dropped today. Quite right! Pigs do indeed deserve happy dreams!
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Rosie
Daryl's Jasper Stone
Goddess
Posts: 1,440
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Post by Rosie on Apr 28, 2017 16:59:58 GMT -5
Tilda Swinton is so talented. My goodness she amazes me.
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Post by dark sister on Apr 28, 2017 22:23:08 GMT -5
The cast in this movie is amazing. I can't wait.
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Post by reckon on Apr 29, 2017 0:05:58 GMT -5
This looks incredible! I'm anxious to see Steven Yeun on screen again, too!
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Post by dark sister on May 14, 2017 22:55:29 GMT -5
New poster
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Post by dark sister on May 18, 2017 8:27:53 GMT -5
New trailer finally featuring Steven!
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Post by merelei on May 18, 2017 9:50:58 GMT -5
Oh my gosh I'm excited now!! I can't wait!!
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Post by Ripley on May 18, 2017 16:30:11 GMT -5
Yes! Glad we see him and his role is not Okja. Steven is in Cannes this week for the film festival presentation.
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Post by dark sister on May 18, 2017 19:32:23 GMT -5
Ugh his beautiful face. I love seeing him on screen.
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Post by honkytonkwoman on May 18, 2017 22:55:14 GMT -5
I cannot wait
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Post by Ripley on May 23, 2017 12:12:46 GMT -5
Slate
"Despite Boos at Cannes, Okja Shows Why We Need Netflix Making Movies"
This article originally appeared in Vulture.
Perhaps my sympathy is misplaced when it’s extended to a multi-billion-dollar, industry-dominating superpower, but as Netflix’s new movie Okja began to unspool at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday morning, I had to wonder, Can Netflix catch a damn break? The streaming-video giant has had a controversial first foray onto the Croisette: Though its two titles in competition, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, appear to be exactly the sort of auteur-driven fare a Cannes programmer could want, reps for French theaters strenuously protested their inclusion, since Netflix has no plans to actually release either film into European theaters.
Advertisement The argument got so heated that Cannes officials were forced to make a rule change: Beginning next year, studios must pledge to put their films into theaters or lose their shot at a prestigious Cannes slot. Still, the damage was done, and the anti-Netflix sentiment was so strong among the French critics here that when Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck debuted at Cannes on Thursday, the French jeered the Amazon Studios logo simply because Amazon is another streaming service, though at least that company promises a theatrical window for its marquee films.
With all that tension in the air, it was anyone’s guess how the Okja press screening would go, but I doubt that Cannes or Netflix expected it to begin with a disaster. As the lights went down, the Netflix title card before the film provoked the expected loud jeers, but also competitive applause from a segment of the audience clearly prepared for countermeasures. That was a mere prelude to the real action, though: As Okja began with a high-energy scene where eccentric entrepreneur Tilda Swinton rolls out a line of giant, genetically engineered pig-creatures, the film was misprojected, with the top part of the image playing well above the screen.
Now there were jeers of a different sort for Okja to contend with. As the movie continued with no resolution to the framing problem, viewers shouted, booed, and hissed, trying desperately to call attention to the issue. A fix was long in coming: Seven rowdy minutes into the movie, the film finally came to a halt, the lights went up, and the whole audience was buzzing. It took even longer for the problem to be solved, with the film restarting in the proper ratio. Once again, the Netflix logo was booed, this time even more lustily. The misprojection was the fault of the festival, not the streaming-video giant, but if anything could further strain the relationship between a Netflix movie and the big screen, it was exactly this snafu.
How could Okja recover from this misbegotten start? I think a quiet film would have had trouble retaining such a riled-up audience, but the bright and busy Okja eventually proved to be the right match. At its core, Okja is about a little girl who goes on an incredible journey to reunite with the titular super-pig pet, but Bong Joon-ho has dressed up that simple story in flashy clothes and big ideas, embroidering his film with chase sequences and over-the-top performances. Swinton is a strenuous hoot as the businesswoman who kicks off the super-pig project, but it’s Jake Gyllenhaal who will have people talking: As a short-shorted TV show host who tangles with Okja a time or two, Gyllenhaal delivers a performance so flamboyant, you can see it from space. I can’t wait for the whiplash in his inevitable lifetime-achievement montages when Gyllenhaal’s sensitive, subtle work in Brokeback Mountain runs right up against a clip of him shrieking, “Half-wit degenerate banned words!” from Okja.
That kind of wild seesawing between different performance styles, tones, and even genres would have likely made Okja a hard sell for major studios. Netflix spent $50 million on the effects-laden project, but I can’t imagine a conventional theatrical release would have recouped: You’d have to go wide and spend tens of millions more to even entice people into theaters, and the movie is just too weird to survive that kind of thing. (Even Bong’s embattled Snowpiercer was, in its own dark and genre-driven way, a somewhat easier sell than this.) On Netflix, Okja will be touted first by the film fans who are predisposed to like it, and then embraced as a discovery by a second wave of watchers who feel they’ve stumbled upon something singular; but in theaters, it’s exactly the kind of bracing, bold vision that would have been branded with a C-minus CinemaScore in its opening weekend and dinged for fooling audiences with a mainstream marketing campaign. If, say, Warner Bros. had paid $50 million for this girl-and-her-giant-pig movie, they would have stormed to set after the first crazy dailies of Gyllenhaal rolled in, and they never would have let the film go out with a slaughterhouse denouement so brutal, it could convince a shark to go vegan. While the French may jeer Netflix, there’s no question that few other places would have let Bong Joon-ho execute his vision just as he’d wanted.
Ultimately, that’s what matters, according to Swinton. “Let’s be honest: There are thousands of films that are screened in the Cannes Film Festival that people don’t see in the cinema,” Swinton said at the press conference after the screening. “The most beautiful, the most esoteric films that people never see in the cinema.” What did Swinton, who has served on Cannes juries before, make of jury president Pedro Almodóvar’s comment that he couldn’t imagine awarding the Palme d’Or to a movie that might not play in theaters? “The truth is, we didn’t actually come here for prizes,” said Swinton.
I believe that’s true, though Netflix certainly wouldn’t mind a prize if one came. The streaming-video service came here to make a splash, and that they did, though the water looked choppy for a moment. While Netflix has had countless successes with shows like Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, and 13 Reasons Why, the company has not yet had an original movie release that earned that same level of buzz. Perhaps Okja, which has already earned so many headlines, can change that up. “It’s truly a blessing when any art gets to reach one person, let alone hundreds of thousands or millions of people,” Gyllenhaal said at the press conference. We’ll see how many people Netflix is able to reach when Okja is released to streaming on June 28.
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Post by Ripley on May 23, 2017 12:19:07 GMT -5
Variety review
"Most people think the problem with genetically modified food is that consumers don’t know what they’re eating, but if you ask Korean director Bong Joon-ho (“The Host”), the real trouble is that some of these lab-engineered animals might actually make perfectly fine pets — because what kid wouldn’t want to have a hippopotamus-sized miracle pig as a new best friend? Downright charming at times and irrepressibly gonzo at others, “Okja” hews to an all-too-familiar trajectory — the kind seen in countless children’s movies — as a bunch of mean meat-eaters attempt to separate a girl named Mija (An Seo-hyun) from her precious “super pig.”
A century from now, the citizens of the future will look back and judge the current era for our eating habits. Oddly enough, even though many in the filmmaking community have strong feelings about respecting animals’ rights not to become dinner, the cause seldom finds its way on screen, which is perhaps the thing that sets “Okja” apart from, say, Paramount’s “Monster Trucks” — well, that and a potbellied Jake Gyllenhaal playing an in-your-face TV host; a guerrilla animal-rights group led by Paul Dano; and a double-dose of Tilda Swinton as a pair of ruthlessly competitive twins.
Of these two Swinton characters, we meet good sister Lucy first, outfitted in Chanel and lisping through braces as she announces the publicity stunt that could save Monsanto — er, “Mirando Corporation,” an agrochemical company that manufactured nerve gas during the war, but has since cleaned up its act, sort of. Mirando now specializes in genetic engineering, having tweaked a breed of Chilean pig until it grows the size of a safari animal. Lucy’s plan is to distribute “thwenty-sith miracle pigleths” to different farmers around the world and see which one grows up to be the biggest, fattest and tastiest.
Fast forward a decade to somewhere far from Mirando HQ, where Mija lives in a state of total naïveté, spending her days at Okja’s side. These are charming scenes, reminiscent of “Pete’s Dragon” (as she tosses real fruit to the animated creature) and “My Neighbor Totoro” (right down to the way Mija naps on the giant beast’s belly), featuring great visual effects work on the creature, designed to look adorably dog-like. Early on, Bong encourages us not only to fall in love with Okja, but also to recognize the animal’s unusual sensitivity and intelligence, inserting a manipulative scene of animal altruism in which Okja risks her life to save her owner (when, more likely, both would have ended up dead).
Ah, those were the days — before Mija realized her super pig was destined to become super pork. Like the unsuspecting turkey that enjoys a spoiled life being fattened only to get a rude awakening the day before Thanksgiving, neither Mija nor her enormous pet has any idea what’s in store for Okja — which makes the young girl all the more devastated when Dr. Johnny (Gyllenhaal, sweaty and screechy in a performance that’s three times as weird as it needs to be) shows up to meet Okja and bring her back to New York City. Naturally, Mija wants to recover Okja, and so she sets off, armed with her solid-gold dowry, to beg, steal or buy back the big pig.
If all of this sounds like a pretty routine kids movie, that would be true, if not for the steady use of the “F-word” and a few eruptions of rather intense violence — no less distressing because Dano’s Jay and his ski-masked Animal Liberation Front are so apologetic during their attacks, politely insisting that they never meant to hurt anyone. There’s also a tough-to-stomach scene in which Okja is introduced to her “boyfriend,” resulting in some rough breeding. Bong has clearly included this scene just to upset, since Okja is sent to the slaughterhouse long before she could have piglets. And then, of course, there are the horrors of the slaughterhouse itself, in which hundreds of super pigs are penned in what looks like the yard of a German concentration camp, then carved up for meat inside.
Whether genetically modified or not, most people don’t want to know where their food comes from, but Bong insists, creating a sequence that’s more frightening than anything in “The Host.” If Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was able to galvanize the public into insisting upon reform in the meat-packing industry, perhaps “Okja” could bring about change as well — though it’s important to remember that Sinclair was more concerned with the working conditions in such factories than the ethics of what we eat.
Certainly, this is a far different kind of creature feature from Bong’s “The Host,” although audiences can’t help but recognize the same mix of over-the-top flamboyance and reductive philosophy. (Toxic waste is bad! Meat is murder!) Nearly all the scenes involving Gyllenhaal and Swinton play like those unhinged Asian game shows where exaggerated personalities in eyesore costumes hyperventilate on camera. It’s Bong’s prerogative, but still bizarre to see Westerners depicted this way, and Swinton in particular seems to have beamed in from some parallel dimension. When the actress’s two characters finally meet, we expect them to clash, but instead, Hillary-haired Nancy leans in to light her sister’s cigarette, and Lucy is never heard from again.
Shot in bright, cinematic widescreen by DP Darius Khondji, this Netflix-produced feature belongs on the big screen, where no one would mistake Okja for a real animal, and yet the CG is convincing enough to suspend disbelief. Bong has chosen to make Okja a larger-than-life animal, but she could just as easily be a talking pig (there’s plenty of “Babe” DNA here already) — the key is that his audience be able to recognize her soul. And yet, Mirando employees repeatedly insist that super-pig meat is quite the delicacy, which puts audiences in the strange position of wondering how the movie’s main character might taste.
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Post by Ripley on May 23, 2017 12:24:50 GMT -5
THR review
"An ungainly mix of benign monster movie, action comedy and coming-of-age fable, Okja marks South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's contentious debut in the official Cannes competition selection. This effects-driven ensemble piece is a tonally uneven affair, cluttered with tone-deaf dialogue and crudely sketched characters that recall Luc Besson at his most obtuse. But such minor flaws did not prevent Bong's previous adventures in socially conscious sci-fi fantasy, notably The Host and Snowpiercer, from earning critical raves and healthy box office numbers.
Bong's unorthodox creature feature is already a focus of Cannes controversy after French industry body CNC protested the festival's inclusion of films destined to bypass domestic theaters altogether. Okja is actually scheduled for a wide big-screen run in South Korea, plus more limited U.S. and U.K. outings in parallel with its global Netflix launch June 28. Festival bosses have now agreed to bar any future films that do not qualify for local cinema release. But this was not enough of a compromise to prevent a disruptive coordinated campaign of audience booing and clapping during the first press screening in Cannes, presumably objecting to the Netflix connection.
An international co-production made by Brad Pitt's Plan B outfit, among others, Okja is Bong's biggest project yet. Shot in two languages and three countries (South Korea, the U.S. and Canada) for a budget reportedly around $50 million, Okja boasts visual effects by Oscar-winner Erik-Jan De Boer and a sumptuous Panavision-style digital look courtesy of Darius Khondji, the French-Iranian cinematographer renowned for his repeat engagements with David Fincher, Michael Haneke and Woody Allen. It may be largely destined for small screen consumption, but it looked lavish and cinematic in Cannes.
Cherubic, moon-faced big-screen novice An Seo Hyun stars as Mija, a 14-year-old orphaned girl living with her grandfather in mountainous farm country in South Korea. Her only friend is the eponymous Okja, a cuddly 6 ton "super piglet" from a genetically modified new species that seemingly combines elements of hippopotamus, pig and devoted pet pooch.
But Mija's blissful prelapsarian worldview is cruelly ruptured when Okja is suddenly hauled away to New York by her creator, corporate CEO Lucy Mirando (Swinton), who is seeking to erase her company's dubious track record with eco-friendly, feed-the-world, ethical-capitalist publicity stunts. Inevitably, however, Mirando's real plans for Okja turn out to be far more sinister.
Making her second film with Bong, this time with her own co-producer's credit, Swinton gives good brittle diva here, all sparkling surface gloss and seething neurosis beneath. Her American-accented performance is a caricature, but thankfully dialed down from her overcooked Nanny McPhee grotesquerie in Snowpiercer. Despite their minor roles, Giancarlo Esposito and Shirley Henderson also bring welcome flickers of Shakespearean nuance as scheming courtiers in Mirando's corporate queendom.
Sadly, Jake Gyllenhaal opts for much broader slapstick mugging as Mirando's boozy sidekick Dr. Johnny Wilcox, a former TV zoologist whose reputation went into a nosedive after he signed on as a paid corporate shill. Channeling Jim Carrey at his most grating, Gyllenhaal is wasted here. Screwball comic clowning is plainly not his forte.
With a burning sense of injustice only the young can feel, Mija refuses to take the loss of Okja lying down. Embarking on an audacious mission to rescue the beloved beast and bring her home, Mija joins forces with a gang of dapper but ethically conflicted animal welfare activists led by Jay (Paul Dano) and K (Steve Yeun). A superbly staged truck chase through Seoul, climaxing with Okja smashing up a subterranean shopping mall to the ironic strains of John Denver's sappy pop classic "Annie's Song," provides one of the film's set-piece action highlights.
The fleshy physicality of Okja herself is mostly well-realized, and pleasingly more rooted in grunting, farting, snot-dribbling reality than sanitized Disney fantasy. Combining puppetry, hydraulics and CG visuals, Bong fleshed out his voluptuous leading lady with help from conceptual artist Hee Chul Jang, who also designed the monster in The Host, plus visual effects supervisor De Boer, who won an Academy Award for creating the tiger in Ang Lee's Life of Pi. Tender scenes in which Okja and Mija sleep alongside each other, and fight to save each other from a dramatic cliff fall, are superlative marriages of digital and live-action.
Typically for Bong's work, Okja works as both fast-moving action comedy and allegorical fable grounded in heavy-handed critique of business ethics. The captive beast takes on metaphorical meaning as a kind of trophy for competing characters with conflicting self-interested agendas. In the film's muddled moral schema, human exploitation of animals for naked profiteering, political virtue-signaling or corporate image enhancement are all suspect. But killing and eating them seems to be fine. Only Meji's innocent love for Okja is presented as pure and sincere. That makes their climatic reunion in a blood-soaked slaughterhouse feel jarringly dark.
Scripted by Bong, then adapted into English by British author and screenwriter Jon Ronson (Frank, The Men Who Stare at Goats), Okja is peppered with lost-in-translation lines and clunky tonal shifts. While the dialogue and themes are adult, the zany cartoon humor and fuzzy, warm, feel-good elements seem to be pitched at pre-teens. Like the cumbersome hybrid animal at its heart, this beast is no beauty. But it is a technically impressive and boldly original statement from a rising Asian auteur with increasingly international ambitions.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Production companies: Plan B Entertainment, Lewis Pictures, Kate Street Picture Company, in association with Netflix Cast: Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, An Seo Hyun, Byun Heebong, Steven Yeun, Giancarlo Esposito, Lily Collins, Yoon Je Moon, Shirley Henderson, Daniel Henshall, Devon Bostick, Woo Shik Choi Director: Bong Joon-ho Screenwriters: Bong Joon-ho, Jon Ronson Producers: Dooho Choi, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Woo Sik Seo, Lewis Taewan Kim Cinematographer: Darius Khondji Editor: Yang Jinmo Production designers: Lee Ha Jun, Kevin Thompson Costume designers: Choi Seyeon, Catherine George Music: Jaeil Jung 118 minutes
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Rosie
Daryl's Jasper Stone
Goddess
Posts: 1,440
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Post by Rosie on May 24, 2017 14:32:27 GMT -5
Mixed reviews for sure.
One praising Jake Jake Gyllenhaal's performance - another one trashing it.
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Post by Ripley on Jun 7, 2017 9:37:49 GMT -5
Big news here- Steven's film is not going to be shown in some major theater chains in Korea. "Netflix’s ‘Okja’ Shut Out of Hundreds More Screens in South Korea Lotte Cinema and Megabox, South Korea’s second and third largest cinema chains, will not screen “Okja,” the Netflix fantasy drama that controversially bowed in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last month. The decision follows a similar refusal this week by CJ CGV, South Korea’s No. 1 exhibition chain, and means that native son Bong Joon-ho’s film will be shut out of 93% of the country’s screens. Lotte and Megabox followed CJ CGV’s denial of screens on the grounds that Netflix’s plan for a day-and-date cinematic and online release flouts the usual three-week hold-back before a film becomes available for streaming. CJ CGV calls the delay “an important business practice in Korea.” The company also contends that Netflix’s simultaneous opening policy disturbs the distribution ecosystem in South Korea... ...“Okja” had been a much-anticipated summer release for Korean audiences. Made on a reported budget of $60 million, the film is distributed locally by Next Entertainment World. The distributor said it would “look for other ways to open ‘Okja’ in physical cinemas on the scheduled date” of June 29, to ensure that Netflix could pursue its policy of simultaneous release. That means Next Entertainment World will now negotiate with independent cinema operators, who only account for 7% of South Korea’s screens..." link
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Post by Ripley on Jun 21, 2017 12:24:09 GMT -5
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Post by dark sister on Jun 21, 2017 12:24:53 GMT -5
I can't wait to see this in a few days!
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Post by Ripley on Jun 21, 2017 19:03:01 GMT -5
Please let us know what you think of the film of his performance!
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Post by Ripley on Jun 28, 2017 8:45:24 GMT -5
Out NOW On Netflix!
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Post by dark sister on Jun 28, 2017 9:15:45 GMT -5
Okja drops at 8:00am PST today!
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Post by Ripley on Jun 28, 2017 18:50:46 GMT -5
NYT review! "...The pursuit of Okja jumps from Seoul to New York, and ends up at a nightmarish meat-processing plant in New Jersey. Mr. Bong, one of the great visual storytellers working in movies today — earlier films like “The Host” and “Snowpiercer” have shown him to be an artist of Spielbergian exuberance and skill — never muddies the frame with extraneous stuff or slows the narrative with tedious exposition. The picture, which never stops moving, is dense with information and feeling. Barbs of satire pop up and are washed away on streams of strong emotion. It’s all marvelously preposterous and yet, at the same time, something important is at stake. A conventional name for that something would be humanity, since “Okja,” not unlike “E. T.,” is about how a young person achieves moral insight by connecting with and fighting for a nonhuman creature. Okja’s oppressors, like E. T.’s, are part of a system that refuses to recognize her as anything more than a thing. In this case, that system is specifically the food industrial complex, and her tale is a clear and effective animal rights fable, or at least a protest against factory farming and genetic engineering. (Nobody advocates for the fish and chickens Mija and her grandfather eat at home.) This might make the movie sound heavier and more dogmatic than it actually is. But if you have seen “Snowpiercer,” a parable of global inequality set aboard a high-speed train, you know that Mr. Bong juggles delight and didacticism with exquisite grace. Rather than turn out cardboard heroes and villains, he savors the eccentricity of his characters, in the sheer weirdness of our ingenious and idiotic species. He is fascinated by the petty doctrinal arguments and personal rivalries in the ranks of the Animal Liberation Front and also by the boardroom intrigue within the Mirando Corporation. Keep your eye on Giancarlo Esposito, and your ear out for Lucy Mirando’s sister, Nancy. The human performers are all brilliant, but the movie belongs to its title character and her digitally conjured, genetically modified ilk. Okja is a miracle of imagination and technique, and “Okja” insists, with abundant mischief and absolute sincerity, that she possesses a soul..." link
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Post by Ripley on Jun 29, 2017 10:38:43 GMT -5
Slate "...One of Okja’s great charms lies in its director’s ability to vary tone, pacing, and style between scenes without losing the viewer’s patience and sympathy. Mija and her grandfather’s domestic life is introduced in a series of gently comic scenes that take up nearly the entire first half-hour. Yet when the gears shift abruptly for a wild pig chase through a busy Seoul mall, our attention never wavers; we’re ready to dive right in to what has all of a sudden become an action movie. Soon Okja will veer into other, equally unforeseeable zones, all of which seem to make sense once you get there... Eventually, Mija—who speaks no English and has never been to the big city, but who’s smart, strong, and unbelievably stubborn—crosses paths with the (real-life) animal rights group the Animal Liberation Front, which has devised a plan to infiltrate the experimental labs at Mirando and expose the company’s abusive practices. The ALF’s harm-no-living-thing credo means everything to the group’s leader, Jay (Paul Dano), a true believer whose extreme gentleness hints at a skillfully applied tincture of menace. Jay’s Korean American translator and right-hand man K (Steven Yeun) is caught in a moral dilemma: Should he obey the girl’s wish to be sent back home with her pet, or, as the only one present who understands what she’s saying, should he find a way to enlist the two of them in the liberatory scheme even against Mija’s will, for the greater good of superpigs everywhere?
Okja is generous enough to spare even a tertiary character like K a real moral arc, one that ends in a joke I won’t spoil but that could have served as the movie’s epigraph. Bong bounces freely between Mija’s rural home, where an ancient way of life is just beginning to be changed by digital technology, and the selfie stick–bearing, endlessly image-conscious realm of global consumerism. The cinematography by Midnight in Paris wizard Darius Khondji also bounces, from cold corporate whites to rich forest greens to gaudy carnival colors. The latter appear most prominently in the wardrobe of Dr. Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal), a TV huckster who carries out the evil experiments meant to help turn Okja and her kind into the most cost-efficient meat products on Earth..." www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2017/06/okja_bong_joon_ho_s_new_netflix_movie_reviewed.html
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Post by Ripley on Jun 29, 2017 17:50:34 GMT -5
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Post by Ripley on Jun 30, 2017 7:20:00 GMT -5
TheWatch
"Found in Translation
How Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Okja’ produced the most realistic Korean-American character in film history
The pivotal scene in Okja, Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix-produced film about a girl and the genetically-enhanced “super-pig” she loves, is performed in a mishmash of three languages: English, Korean, and Konglish.
In the back of a moving tractor trailer, Animal Liberation Front leader Jay (Paul Dano) is attempting to communicate his crew’s mission to Okja’s owner, a young Korean girl named Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun). To translate his message into Korean, Jay leans on his Korean-American colleague, “K” (played by Steven Yeun), to act as an interpreter.
The translation begins smoothly enough, but unravels as Jay’s words become more complex. “For 40 years,” says Jay, “our group has liberated animals from places of abuse.” A trace of anxiety creeps onto K’s face as his brain processes the vocabulary. He utters: “우리 맨날 해,” with a reassuring wave of his hand — slangily: We do this every day. “Is that it?” an incredulous Jay asks K, as Mija looks on apprehensively. (In fact, K’s rewordings will turn out to deliberately not be “it” in a way that has plot-turning ramifications.) Translations, we later learn, are sacred. Yet it is their imperfections that make for a perfectly realized piece of dialogue.
“That was a really surreal experience to film that scene,” says Yeun, who told me he actually made his spoken Korean a little worse to play K. “That role can’t even be played by a Korean person who knows how to speak English really well. You literally have to give it to a Korean-American,” he says. “And it was nice, man, because — that’s the shit we go through, right?”
Okja is an uncommon achievement for a variety of reasons: the technical acuity of Bong’s filmmaking, the allegorical rebuke of the food industry, the film’s unorthodox streaming release, and the kickass force of nature that is Mija. But to me, Okja is exciting for another singularly remarkable feat: It is not only the first major film to seamlessly integrate English and Korean (an estimated 20 percent of the film’s dialogue is in Korean), but it also features what might be the most realistic Korean-American character in film history. Indeed, I’d argue the best way to fully appreciate Okja is if you understand both Korean and English — even though it won’t alienate those on either side.
“I remember watching it and thinking,” says Yeun, “‘Dude, I’m in the best seat for this movie.’”
Okja is far from the only Korean-directed film to include both English and Korean, and not even the first by Bong. In 2013’s Snowpiercer, Chris Evans and veteran Korean actor Song Kang-ho communicated in their native tongues via voice-translating contraptions that were mysteriously rendered unnecessary by film’s end. There is also a spatter of English dialogue in Bong’s 2006 monster movie, The Host. Beyond Bong, if you’re an Anglophone who’s heard English spoken in a Korean movie, you’ve likely cringed. Hard.
The “new wave” of Korean film traces back to 1999 and the release of the spy action flick Shiri. Prior to that, censorship rules and sparse financing had thwarted Korea’s efforts to build an internationally recognized film industry. But — as explained in Euny Hong’s excellent The Birth of Korean Cool — a strong government push (in the form of a quota limiting foreign film imports and an explosion of investment in infrastructure) helped boost domestic profits and inch Korean cinema toward the global stage. With this groundswell came the rise of homegrown directorial talent like Bong, Kim Ki-duk, Hong Sang-soo, and Park Chan-wook.
As Korean film budgets grew, more expansive plots called for an increasing number of English-speaking, non-Korean roles. One classic example is Joint Security Area, the breakthrough 2000 hit by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden). The taut political thriller, about relations between North and South Korean soldiers in Korea’s demilitarized zone, is full of superb acting performances — with the notable exception of the choppy, awkward English exchanges in the film’s opening minutes between a Korean-Swiss officer (played by Lee Young-ae) and her Swiss colleagues.
As in JSA, the majority of English-speaking roles in Korean film over the past decade have only been means to a narrative end. “In my opinion, the problem has had little to do with English itself, but with Korean nationalism and the resultant inability to write convincing ‘foreign’ characters into their films,” says Kyu Hyun Kim, a professor of Asian history at UC Davis. You could hardly blame Korean moviemakers for treating English-speaking characters like an afterthought — until recently, most Korean films were still primarily consumed by Korean audiences who ostensibly wouldn’t care that the English was bad. (Think for a second about the gibberish that passes for Asian languages in many American movies.) Common roles for English speakers in Korean film have been army men (Welcome to Dongmakgol), love interests on foreign soil (Love Talk), or generic Western businessmen (The Taste of Money). In nearly every case, they’ve been filled by no-names whose primary draw is simply being Caucasian.
Of course, stilted English in Korean movies isn’t limited to non-Koreans; when Korean actors themselves are asked to speak English, the results have been just as clumsy. “I think it’s a real challenge for a filmmaker to work with actors who are not speaking in their native language,” says Darcy Paquet, who started the essential site koreanfilm.org in 1999 and now teaches at the Busan Asian Film School.
“The instinct for a lot of directors is to find someone who speaks English perfectly and to have them write out the dialogue and then to ask the characters to memorize it. The thing is, when the audience senses a gap in the actor’s real ability — and you can feel it through the way they use intonation and their accent and if they speak with perfectly formed sentences — then it just feels really weird.” There is an irony here; Korean education emphasizes a mastery of English, but with that comes a neurotic obsession with speaking English flawlessly, which is a hindrance to natural-sounding dialogue. “Actors try their best and they try to be perfect, but sometimes trying too hard to be perfect ends up making it feel awkward,” says Paquet. Mimicking broken English, as it turns out, is as challenging as capturing fluency.
Paquet is well-equipped to speak about the use of English in Korean cinema, and not just because he’s a K-film expert. As a result of his friendships with Korean directors, Paquet himself has appeared in Korean films, speaking in both languages. “Eventually they began to call me when they needed a Caucasian actor,” he says. His biggest role thus far was as that generic Western businessman in 2012’s The Taste of Money, directed by the esteemed Im Sang-soo. Paquet now calls his appearance “slightly embarrassing,” and with all due respect, it is not the performance of a trained actor.
More recently, even the wrangling of a big name hasn’t helped. In 2016, Liam Neeson cashed a presumably large check to play General Douglas MacArthur in Operation Chromite, a portrayal one American critic called “hilariously funny in its tin-eared dialogue and country-pulpit earnestness.” One look at the trailer is proof enough.
In truth, Paul Dano, Jake Gyllenhaal, Tilda Swinton, and the rest of the non-Korean cast of Okja had a low hurdle to clear. It’s Steven Yeun — speaking English, Korean, and Konglish — who was the key to bridging the lingual gap.
“I think Director Bong is one of a few, if maybe not the only person that could have pulled something like this off,” says Yeun. Bong wrote the entire story for Okja, but also enlisted Welsh journalist and screenwriter Jon Ronson to help develop lines for the English-speaking characters. “In terms of fleshing out those parts and working on the dialogue, Jon played a big part in that, because my English is quite limited,” the director told Deadline. Bilingual producer Dooho Choi, who collaborated with Bong on both Snowpiercer and Okja, told me that Bong is actually underselling his abilities. “Even though English is his second language, he really understands the nuances of the way people talk,” says Choi.
The capital-A actors certainly help bring that understanding to life. That said, despite the precision of the script and the undeniable grandeur of the story, I couldn’t help but find some of the English-speaking performances — Swinton and especially Gyllenhaal, whose eccentric costumes and elaborate mannerisms veer treacherously close to SNL territory — to be a bit overdone. As a Korean-American, Yeun had told me, “You’re the best person to watch it. Or maybe the worst person to watch it, I don’t know.” I get what he means.
To my eyes, the movie loses a bit of steam in its second half when it fully pivots from Korea to America. For the purposes of Bong’s narrative, the corporate overlords are meant to be outlandish caricatures. When juxtaposed with the unfailingly naturalistic acting of the Korean performers, the overacting is jarring, as I’m sure Bong intends it to be. (Compare their acting with that of Yoon Je-moon, who also plays a caricature — that of an ineffectual, glory-hunting company yes-man — only with understated ease.) On its own, the Hollywood hamminess can be distracting and threatens to undermine one of the director’s greatest strengths: realistic, believable human characters.
Which is why Yeun, who was one of the last actors to be cast in Okja, is such a crucial connective thread. “It was actually really hard to get Steven in the film,” says the producer Choi. “There was a moment there where our collaborators were going, ‘What’s all the fuss about? We have to start shooting on this date and there are other actors that can play the part.’ But for Director Bong and myself, it was almost like we couldn’t imagine making the film if we couldn’t work out Steven’s schedule.”
It wasn’t just Yeun’s ability to converse in Korean and English that made him a perfect fit. “Director Bong loves to tell this story about why he cast me,” says Yeun. “He’ll say, ‘Steven has this ability, he looks like a liar — but a liar that you forgive for his lies. That’s what Steven’s face says to me.’” Adds Choi, “You can’t hate the guy. He’s very charming and cute, if you will, and that’s a quality that’s very rare.”
In broad strokes, Yeun could relate to the plight of his character, K, and the weight of the hyphen separating his Korean-American identity. “You feel like you’re like a man with no country, right? So that to me is K’s journey too,” he says. “I feel like a lot of his motivations and even why he seeks out redemption is because he wants to belong to something.” This explains K’s subterfuge, but also his later repentance — and the permanent reminder (“Translations are sacred”) on his forearm. “It’s like the dumbest fucking tattoo,” says Yeun, “but it’s also, like, everything.”
The duality of the character resonates. “Many Korean-Americans feel a sense of displacement as they don’t quite fit in with either of their cultures,” says Christina Oh, of Okja coproducer Plan B Entertainment. In conception and execution, K is a resoundingly faithful depiction of a real Korean-American person — a rare cross-cultural cinematic milestone in a film with no shortage of them.
That list shouldn’t overlook a much smaller turn by Choi Woo-shik — who grew up in both Vancouver and Korea — as a Mirando Corporation Korean truck driver. In just a few minutes of screen time (don’t close your Netflix window until after the end credits), he manages to leave a lasting impression. “He’s this young kid who’s probably really highly educated and therefore he speaks English,” says producer Choi (no relation), “and yet he can only get a job doing part-time truck driving for a company.” In Bong’s world, the specificity written into even the smallest of characters is the glue that holds everything together.
Even with my quibbles about its biggest stars, Okja is the most memorable film I’ve seen in a long while. The Koreans, led by the unforgettable Ahn as Mija, are the most developed, intricate, and layered characters; the Westerners, for a change, are the exaggerated stereotypes. In the middle, most authentic of all, are a couple of hyphenated Koreans trying to make sense of everything.
After I watched the film, it left me wanting to see more of Yeun, and more of the truck driver Choi — for that matter, I still wanted more of Ahn. May the next great Korean-English film star all three of them.
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Post by dark sister on Jul 1, 2017 8:09:37 GMT -5
I watched this on Wednesday and really enjoyed it. Glad to see SY along one of my favs Paul Dano.
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