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Tag: bong joon ho

  • Bong Joon Ho Recalls Film School Days As He Hits Marrakech In Jury President Role Alongside Jenna Ortega & Anya Taylor-Joy

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    Korean Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho fondly recalled his film student days as took up the baton of Jury President at the 22nd Marrakech Film Festival on Friday.

    He was joined on stage at the opening night ceremony by jury members Celine Song, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jenna Ortega, Karim Aïnouz, Hakim Belabbes, Julia Ducournau, and Payman Maadi.

    Over the course of the next eight days, they will judge 14 first and second features in the running for the festival’s Golden Star Award.

    Joon Ho cast his mind back to his own filmmaker beginnings at the opening ceremony.

    “22 years. What were you doing when you were 22-years-old? Or what are you planning to do when you turn 22?,” he said.

    “At 22, I was greedily devouring movies as a student of cinema. I watched three, four films a day. I wanted to make them myself. Why did they put the camera there? Why is the actor facing that direction? Why did they cut away from that scene at that moment?”

    “Those were the questions that consumed me at 22. Looking back, my 22-year-old self was brimming with energy and passion for cinema. I feel that Marrakech is also buzzing with a special energy as it enters its 22nd year.”

    He noted the festival’s strong Korean connections.

    Korea has won the main competition twice, with Park Jung-bum’s The Journals of Musan clinching the Golden Star in 2010, followed by Lee Su-jin’s Han Gong-ju in 2013, which received the prize from a jury presided over by Martin Scorsese.

    Joon Ho is the festival’s first Asian jury president.

    Speaking on the red carpet, festival director Mélita Toscan du Plantier said she had been courting the director for the jury president role for years.

    “He is always busy, but he said if you ask one year ahead, I will commit. I was like ‘really’, and he is here. That’s very rare. People often, say they’ll come, and then they’re busy.”

    Toscan du Plantier suggested her longtime friend Martin Scorsese, regular guest and past Joon Ho collaborator Tilda Swinton (Okja and Snowpiercer), and Korean Marrakech winner y Lee Su-jin had also pressed upon him to attend.

    Friday’s opening ceremony also saw veteran Egyptian actor Hussein Fahmi feted with a career achievement award.

    Egyptian star Yousra read out a tribute to the actor celebrating the diversity of his roles and support for cinema  across his 50-year career.

    The Marrakech Film Festival runs from November 28 to December 6.

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    Melanie Goodfellow

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  • ‘The Host’ Showing Off Its Kaiju in Broad Daylight Is Still a Huge Flex Worth Celebrating

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    A widely understood trademark in contemporary monster films is that you don’t show off your creature in broad daylight. We’ve seen this phenomenon in Gareth Edwards’ lukewarm Godzilla and Guillermo del Toro’s kick-ass Pacific Rim (which, famously, never got a sequel). In adherence to this unwritten rule, the latter vexes by cloaking its mechs and kaiju in darkness, adding to their cool factor by having their distinct silhouettes loom imposingly. The former frustrates with a feature-length tease, too gun-shy to actually show the big monsters fighting in all their glory without obscuring the gargantuan details.  Rarely, whether in good or bad monster films, do filmmakers make the bold choice to reveal their creatures outright in broad daylight. Then again, not every filmmaker is Bong Joon Ho.

    What’s radical about the Academy Award-winning director’s 2006 monster movie, The Host, is that it wastes no time serving its dessert before dinner by answering every question one could have about its titular kaiju in the opening moments of the film. We get a breezy opening about some doctors, one of whom is a pre-Walking Dead Scott Wilson, and their wanton medical malpractice: dumping a bunch of formaldehyde into the Han River (something that actually happened in real life). What comes of it is a mutant tadpole that rampages on some unsuspecting beachgoers trying to have a lovely afternoon. It’s utter chaos. But amid the pandemonium, Bong doesn’t just have the creature mindlessly rampage about as every other kaiju does. He establishes the fish-like beast and its toolkit of monstrous attributes.

    The nightmarish axolotl creature, just as dangerous on land as at sea, is armed with brutish strength, a dagger-like prehensile tail, and a gaping maw. It crawls at a brisk pace, but when hunting or making a tactical retreat, it uses that tail to swing under bridges like monkey bars before swan-diving back into the river to drown victims it drags back to its sewer hovel. In a single short scene, Bong establishes the creature as a palpable threat that refuses to obey a curfew, while also adding a layer of mystery to its “kill everything that moves” psychology. It’s equal parts King Kong and Godzilla, localized into a compact package. More importantly, it’s a kick-ass creature build.

    Another strike against most monster movies is that they tend to fail at making their human characters as interesting as their creatures. The Host is a glowing exception to that. That’s not because its characters are superpowered oddities, part of a hypercapable militia, or a whiny group of sods you can’t wait to see bite the dust. They make you care because they’re a palpably fallible, relatable, dysfunctional family weathering this storm.

    There’s the failed son, Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho); his dutiful yet unprosperous salaryman brother, Park Nam-il (Park Hae-il); Park Nam-joo (Bae Doona), their soft-spoken archer sister who tends to choke when the chips are down; and Park Hei-bong (Byun Hee-bong), their patient and nurturing father just trying to keep everyone afloat.

    They’re all assholes to each other, but they’re the kind of relatable assholes you can look at your own family and see your loved ones in those bright spots, blemishes and all. And they come together because they love Gang-du’s daughter, Park Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), a girl who just so happens to have been kidnapped by the monster and taken to its sewer dwelling. And just like that, The Host hooks viewers already leaning forward in their chairs for the creature, leaning even further forward to root for this family. They’re out of their depth, especially with the background American interest in messing with South Korea to use the environmental disaster of a monster it aided in creating, but are determined to rescue the smart sunspot their family revolves around.

    The Host stands as a unicorn of a monster movie, firing on all cylinders, daring to make audiences laugh and cry in equal measure. Unlike so many of its peers, it’s unafraid to parade its creature in broad daylight for all to see. It’s a huge flex, even all these years later, and a delightful rarity in the genre worth celebrating, especially since its early aughts special effects still hold up. That Bong could muster a monster film—better yet, his first monster film—without feeling derivative of those that came before it and craft a work equal parts heart-wrenching, frightening, and goofy, without any one element diluting the others, is downright remarkable.

    In a pantheon of monster movies that rarely shoot for the moon, The Host manages to have its cake and eat it too: proud of its creature design, yet telling a profoundly human story that’s far more than just a vehicle for the climactic kaiju money shot.

    The Host is streaming on Hulu.

    Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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    Isaiah Colbert

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  • What to Stream: ‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Mickey 17,’ Kevin Hart and ‘A Grand Ole Opry Christmas’

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    Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17,” a new batch of “Stranger Things’” final season and Kevin Hart debuting a new comedy special on Netflix are some of the new television, films, music and games headed to a device near you.

    Also among the streaming offerings worth your time this week, as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists: “Everybody Loves Raymond” gets a 30th anniversary special on CBS, the Hallmark’s special “A Grand Ole Opry Christmas” with Brad Paisley and Mickey Guyton, and a new Beatles documentary series hits Disney+.

    New movies to stream from Nov. 24-30

    —Taiwanese filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou, known for collaborating with and producing several Sean Baker films including “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project,” makes her solo directorial debut with “Left-Handed Girl,” about a single mother and her two daughters who return to Taipei to open a stand at a night market. Netflix acquired the film after it was warmly received during the Cannes Film Festival and Taiwan has already selected the film as its Oscar submission. It begins streaming on Netflix on Nov. 28.

    —Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” arrives on Prime Video on Thursday, Nov. 26, for some dystopian holiday viewing. In her review for The Associated Press, Jocelyn Noveck praised Robert Pattinson’s performance (or, rather, performances) as an expendable who is constantly being reprinted anew. She writes, “It’s his movie, and he saves it from Bong’s tendencies to overstuff the proceedings. In an extremely physical, committed, even exhausting performance, Pattinson takes what could have been an unwieldy mess and makes it much less, well, expendable.”

    Recording artist Brad Paisley perform the national anthem prior to Game 3 of baseball's World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers, Monday, Oct. 27, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

    —OK, “The Last Duel,” streaming on Hulu on Sunday, Nov. 30 might be four years old but it’s a far better option than, say, “Flight Risk” (on HBO Max on Wednesday). Ridley Scott’s medieval tale, written by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, is a brilliant spin on the historical epic told from three different perspectives, Damon’s Jean de Carrouges, Adam Driver’s Jacques Le Gris and Jodie Comer’s Marguerite. In his review for the AP, film writer Jake Coyle wrote that it “is more like a medieval tale deconstructed, piece by piece, until its heavily armored male characters and the genre’s mythologized nobility are unmasked.”

    — AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr

    New music to stream on Nov. 24-30

    — In 2021, over Thanksgiving, Disney+ released Peter Jackson’s six-hour “The Beatles: Get Back” to its streaming platform. The gargantuan project provided fans with a deep-dive into the band’s “Let It Be” sessions – including footage of their entire rooftop concert, shared in full for the first time. It was an ideal release date, to say the least. After all that delicious food, who doesn’t want to settle in for a lengthy journey into one of the greatest musical acts of all time? Well, in 2025, there’s yet another reason to be grateful: Starting Wednesday, “The Beatles Anthology” documentary series hits Disney+. That’s nine episodes tracing their journey. Lock in.

    — ’Tis the season for Hallmark holiday films. And for the country music fanatic, that means “A Grand Ole Opry Christmas.” The film follows a woman forced to confront her musical past and heritage in the esteemed venue – and there may or may not be some time travel and Christmas magic involved. Stay tuned for the all-star cameos: Brad Paisley, Megan Moroney, Mickey Guyton, Rhett Akins, Tigirlily Gold and more make an appearance. It starts streaming on Hallmark+ Sunday.

    — AP Music Writer Maria Sherman

    New series to stream from Nov. 24-30

    — It’s hard to believe that “Everybody Loves Raymond” has been off the air for two decades. The multicamera sitcom starred Ray Romano and Patricia Heaton as Ray and Debra Barone, a young married couple whose daily lives are interrupted regularly by Ray’s meddling parents, played by Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts, who live across the street. CBS recently taped a 30th anniversary special to air Monday which will also stream on Paramount+. Hosted by Romano and creator, Phil Rosenthal, it recreates the set of the Barone living room and features interviews with cast members including Romano, Heaton, Brad Garrett and Monica Horan. There will also be a tribute to Boyle and Roberts who died in 2006 and 2016, respectively. It’s fitting for the special to come out around the holidays because its Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes were top-notch. All nine seasons stream on both Paramount+ and Peacock.

    — ” Stranger Things” is finally back with its fifth and final season. Netflix is releasing the sci-fi series in three parts and the first four episodes drop Wednesday. Millie Bobby Brown says fans will “lose their damn minds” with how it ends.

    — Also Monday, Kevin Hart debuts a new comedy special on Netflix. It’s called “Kevin Hart: Acting My Age.” The jokes center around, you guessed it, aging.

    — A new “Family Guy” special on Hulu pokes fun at those holiday movies we all know, love and watch. It’s called “Disney’s Hulu’s Family Guy’s Hallmark Channel’s Lifetime’s Familiar Holiday Movie” and pokes fun at the commonly-used trope of a big city gal who ends up in a small town at Christmas and falls in love. It drops Friday, Nov. 28 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

    — Alicia Rancilio

    New video games to play from Nov. 24-30

    — Artificial intelligence: friend to all humanity or existential threat to the planet? In A.I.L.A, Brazilian studio Pulsatrix leans toward the latter. You play as a game tester who’s asked to try out an AI-created horror story. But while you’re busy fighting off ghosts, zombies and ax murderers, the AI may be up to something more nefarious in the background — which could be bad news if you own a smart refrigerator. It all has the potential to be very meta, whether or not you welcome our new robot overlords. It arrives Tuesday on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S and PC.

    — Lou Kesten

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  • Robert Pattinson to Finally Awake from Cryogenic Sleep As Mickey 17

    Robert Pattinson to Finally Awake from Cryogenic Sleep As Mickey 17

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    Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures/YouTube

    Robert Pattinson’s last space sci-fi film saw the actor playing a prisoner made to serve his sentence on a shuttle hurtling toward a black hole (among other human-rights offenses, including really messed-up sexual harassment). His next space drama? Mickey 17, a Bong Joon Ho joint based on the novel Mickey7, by Edward Ashton, which tells the story of an employee on an expedition to colonize an ice world — but he’s doing it only for the check. He is cloned so he can continue the dangerous mission, and the number 7 is a reference to how many times he dies. Bong — who wrote, directed, and produced the film — explained the title change via an interpreter at CinemaCon. “I killed him 10 more times!” he said, per Variety. The Oscar-winning Parasite director said that Pattinson was perfect for the part because “he’s got this crazy thing in his eyes,” adding that he believed the actor had the creativity to play all the different variations of the character. Meanwhile, Pattinson — who called Bong his “hero” — said he was told the part was “impossible” when he first got the script, which excited him.

    A press tour has been a long time coming for this Warner Bros. film, which was originally set to hit theaters on March 29, 2024 and was later delayed indefinitely. According to Variety, the movie needed more time to finish after the Hollywood strikes and other production shifts. It finally received a release date, and is now set to hit theaters on January 31, 2025.

    Not much has been said about the script, but the first look at the film depicts a comatose Pattinson emerging from sleep in what appears to be a cryogenic freezer in what seems like a tricked-out MRI machine in a long, sparse room. Steven Yeun (Minari), Naomi Ackie (I Wanna Dance With Somebody), Toni Collette (Hereditary), and Mark Ruffalo (the Hulk) round out the cast. If Bong’s previous films are anything to go by, Mickey 17 is likely shaping up to be another social thriller. We just hope it’ll thaw on schedule.

    This post has been updated.

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    By Zoe Guy

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  • ‘Godzilla x Kong’ Moves Up Release in Theaters to Late March, ‘Mickey 17’ Delayed

    ‘Godzilla x Kong’ Moves Up Release in Theaters to Late March, ‘Mickey 17’ Delayed

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    Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire will stomp into theaters two weeks earlier than expected, Legendary and Warner Bros. announced Tuesday.

    The fifth installment in their MonsterVerse series will now open March 29 instead of April 12.

    Godzilla x Kong is taking the date previously occupied by Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-Ho‘s Mickey 17, whose release is being delayed due to post-strike production shifts. A new date is expected to be announced soon for the feature. (The shift was not exactly a surprise, as there has not been a trailer for the film yet.)

    The latest feature film entry in Warner Bros./Legendary Entertainment‘s MonsterVerse follows the events of Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), where fans got to see the two apex kaijus finally fight for supremacy. A trailer for the film shows Godzilla x Kong delving deeper into the mysteries of the Hollow Earth and the reveal of a Titan menace that will necessitate the alliance of Godzilla and Kong.

    Godzilla vs. Kong filmmaker Adam Wingard is back in the director’s chair, and reunites with returning castmembers Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry and Kaylee Hottle. Dan Stevens joins the franchise as a lead in The New Empire.

    The franchise also includes Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). There have also been two television entries in the franchise, the anime series Skull Island (2023) released on Netflix, and the live-action series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023) released on Apple TV+.

    Based on Edward Ashton’s novel of the same name, Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo. Bong penned the adapted script based on the book Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton.

    The book, published in early 2022, centers on a man known as an expendable on a mission to colonize a distant planet. Each colony features one crew member who takes on the most dangerous jobs on the mission — jobs that will assuredly lead to their deaths. However, their memories are backed up and they are restored to cloned bodies when they die.

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    Pamela McClintock

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  • Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Mickey 17’ gets trailer and release date | CNN

    Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Mickey 17’ gets trailer and release date | CNN

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    A first look at “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s new movie is here.

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