Any Bong Joon-ho movie is worth getting excited about. But
when it’s about a little girl trying to rescue her best friend, a best friend
that just happens to be a giant pig monster, it has my full attention. The
Korean auteur’s latest premieres at Cannes tomorrow, and Netflix dropped a wonderful
new trailer for Okja.
Okja is going to make me cry, isn’t it?
This isn’t exactly what you expect when you hear “giant pig
monster,” is it? When we first heard about Okja, I anticipated
something more in line with Bong’s The Host, which, while
very much doing it’s own thing, was still a pretty traditional monster movie
framework. This is way, way more adorable. Hell, I just want to snuggle with the
titular “super pig.”
Okja looks cute and cuddly and thrilling and
weird as all hell. Tilda Swinton appears deliciously evil as the head of the
Mirando Corporation, who wants to use Okja and his ilk as a cheap, tasty food
source. She also reportedly plays twins; a task she’s undertaken on screen
before. Jake Gyllenhaal is positively unhinged as a zoologist and nature show
host. And Paul Dano is obviously up to no good even though he purports to be on
the side of the young heroine (Ahn Seo-hyun). Lily Collins, Steven Yeun, Devon
Bostick, Daniel Henshell, Shirley Henderson, and Giancarlo Esposito round out the
rest of the fantastic cast.
Okja marks Bong Joon-ho’s second consecutive
English-language picture, after Snowpiercer. And while he’s
not working in his native tongue, he’s still shifting gears and doing different
things with each successive movie, as he’s done his entire career. In addition
to the fact that he makes incredible movies, that’s part of why he’s such an
exciting filmmaker to track. Though there may be aesthetic and thematic
similarities, his movies are never quite what’s expected and he bounces from
genre to genre with aplomb.
Okja premieres at Cannes tomorrow and
hits Netflix on June 28. There have been reports it will get a theatrical run,
but there haven’t been any concrete details about that yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment