| Cookie Settings. The ALF tries to outsmart Mirando’s cadre of suits — especially Lucy and her chief henchman (Giancarlo Esposito) — and everything gets wildly out of hand. Music: Jaeil Jung 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. Producers: Dooho Choi, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Woo Sik Seo, Lewis Taewan Kim They’re not actually connected. Okja is a highly relevant critique of current methods, but also a guide to sustainable, humane farming. (I was on the orchestra level.) This is in direct contrast to the horrifying cruelty of Mirando, where maximum profit is the bottom line. 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 result is kind of a masterclass in how vocabulary can be twisted for insidious ends. It may be largely destined for small screen consumption, but it looked lavish and cinematic in Cannes. 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. 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. Okja is an animal, a beloved pet with intelligence and feelings. It is a thoroughly repulsive character. Okja extends a more standard anti-factory farming stance in order to skewer the absurd ways in which corporations co-opt the language of environmental and localist movements to reel in consumers. Director: Bong Joon-ho Production companies: Plan B Entertainment, Lewis Pictures, Kate Street Picture Company, in association with Netflix There are childlike, wondrous moments that reinforce the bond between Mija and Okja. The genius here is the delivery of the message. She runs away from the farm on a mission. We take for granted the ease of our food supply. Production designers: Lee Ha Jun, Kevin Thompson Okja is a highly relevant critique of current methods, but also a guide to sustainable, humane farming. Festival bosses have now agreed to bar any future films that do not qualify for local cinema release. 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). Then it was fixed, and the movie started over. It will be streamed on Netflix in the west, but get a theater release in Asia. New Okja Trailer Is E.T. But they treat animals with respect. The production of cheap animal protein becomes difficult to stomach when we peek behind the curtains. Screwball comic clowning is plainly not his forte. For the first seven minutes of the film — as Tilda Swinton, in a blond blunt-cut wig and braces, introduces herself as the new CEO of pharmachemical giant the Mirando Corporation — the noise grew louder and louder, with loud rhythmic clapping from both levels of the theater. 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. Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) once again challenges convention with his latest brilliant film, Okja. Netflix Booed at Cannes Despite Strong Okja Reviews, Okja Trailer: Get Ready to Fall in Love with a Pig Monster. Her journey is indeed a profound one. 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. No one and nothing will stop her from getting her best friend back. And Bong cleverly extends this to show how it affects cultures far beyond the borders of the US. But I love him. Only Meji's innocent love for Okja is presented as pure and sincere. One of those little piggies was sent to a mountain farm in South Korea. We were all catching on to what was going on. Editor: Yang Jinmo They will use their homegrown, organic farming techniques to raise the super pig. She has two roles in the film. EMAIL ME Wonderstruck is an excellent one, from Carol director Todd Haynes. 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. In the film's muddled moral schema, human exploitation of animals for naked profiteering, political virtue-signaling or corporate image enhancement are all suspect. He also introduces other factions that want Okja for their own purpose. Meets Goonies with an Eco-Terrorist Twist. If factory farming is an ugly product of the corporatization of American culture, so is the twisting of activist movements — from environmentalism to feminism to political ideologies — into corporate lingo, ideals cynically transformed into sales slogans. It is a must see. Here’s what one week of online school is like for my 7- and 5-year-old kids. That goes double when Bong has co-written the screenplay with Frank screenwriter Jon Ronson. The surprisingly touching new film about factory farming, from Snowpiercer director Bong Joon Ho, premiered to acclaim and controversy. Sitemap | As Bong notes in an interview with The Guardian, Okja’s dog-like playfulness and pig-like fate are meant to shine a light on our differential treatment of domestic and food animals, a societal inconsistency as arbitrary and unjust as human supremacy. The biggest surprise for me was Jake Gyllenhaal. The New York Times’s major new story reveals that Trump had political, legal, and financial reasons to hold back the returns. Real-Life Sea Monster Washes Ashore in Indonesia, Is It an Alien? America keeps making the same mistakes over and over. With a burning sense of injustice only the young can feel, Mija refuses to take the loss of Okja lying down. Gyllenhaal continues to prove his immense versatility. Inspiration Behind M. Night Shyamalan's Old Revealed Along with First Story Details, The Rock Welcomes Aldis Hodge to Black Adam as Hawkman Casting Is Confirmed, Constantine and Zatanna TV Shows Are Happening at HBO Max with J.J. Abrams. She is primarily CGI, but not cartoonish or anthropomorphized. Distracted by her grandfather, Mija returns home to discover that Mirando has repossessed Okja. (Thankfully, nobody minded seeing that Swinton scene twice.). And the idea of having local farmers raise superpiglets is, of course, a handy way to camouflage what’s really going on at Mirando Corporation (in Paramus, New Jersey, of all places). Why the Cannes Film Festival matters (and how to pronounce it). The bombastic new CEO, Nancy Mirando (Tilda Swinton), announces with great flourish the dawn of a revolution in the pork industry. As a director, Bong’s great skill is soulful social satire, juxtaposing the absurd with surprisingly touching moments that help his films retain a kind of humanism that can sometimes be lacking in satirical works. While their intentions may be noble, the tactics used certainly require scrutiny. Audiences have never seen him like Dr. Johnny. The fleshy physicality of Okja herself is mostly well-realized, and pleasingly more rooted in grunting, farting, snot-dribbling reality than sanitized Disney fantasy. Netflix Original Movie Review: ‘Okja’ Is the Must See Film of the Summer. This is the second year in a row in which Paul Dano starred in a satirical indie movie with a strange premise featuring fart jokes that will no doubt have a cult following. Under the love and care of the precocious Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), Okja grows to be the size of an elephant. Cannes loves its controversy, whether it’s about Woody Allen or high heels on the red carpet. Costume designers: Choi Seyeon, Catherine George newsletter. Get our newsletter in your inbox twice a week. 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. He straddles this line with deft aplomb. That makes their climatic reunion in a blood-soaked slaughterhouse feel jarringly dark. 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. In Okja there are psychopaths, for sure, but there are also people for whom practical concerns get in the way of ideals: Dr. Johnny is a self-proclaimed “animal lover” who finds himself in bed with Big Farming, and Jay can’t quite keep his crew of idealistic activists to their total no-harm stance. 5:09 AM PDT 5/19/2017 Millions rely on Vox’s explainers to understand an increasingly chaotic world. Whoops. Okja isn’t perfect; it falls down when the absurd and the serious ricochet back and forth between scenes, making it hard to track with the film’s tone. It's the kind of odd story telling that I love the most. Bong Joon-ho juxtaposes those scenes with the terrifying, grotesque animal plants and research labs. Cannes Film Festival 2017: news and movie reviews, Cannes 2017: Netflix’s Okja is a bonkers corporate satire starring Tilda Swinton and a superpig, Cannes's famous standing ovations and jeering boos don’t actually mean that much, Miranda July’s enduring love for the weirdo in all of us, One Good Thing: Vintage Nintendo games are good vibes made playable, One Good Thing: The trick uniting the internet’s funniest videos, Here’s how much you had to make in 2017 to pay more income tax than Donald Trump. Her favorite person in the world is Mija (Ahn Seo Hyun), an orphan living with her grandfather (Byun Hee-bong). © Watchr Media • All rights reserved. The festival announced a new policy (beginning in 2018) in response, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings voiced his disapproval, and at the opening press conference on Wednesday, Will Smith feuded with Pedro Almodóvar over it. Audiences will decide if Okja makes a difference, or is just a film about a kid and her pet super pig. Bong Joon-ho wants his audience to see her as such, not a pork chop or plate of ribs. Then we jump forward to 2017. by That this market critique comes from a movie so closely tied to Netflix, which has come in for all kinds of economic and corporate critique both here at Cannes and in general, makes it more than a little ironic. Mija and her grandfather are meat eaters. 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. Stephen Dalton Okja is a South Korean and American production. Paul Dano is a weird, weird guy. Bong Joon-ho has delivered an incredible, masterful film. Sign up for the It wasn’t anti-Netflix protests: The theater was just projecting the film wrongly, with the top of the screen masked so that it cut off Swinton’s head at one point. It would have been more surprising if nobody made a sound. Mija and Okja are inseparable. The story unfolds from there, combining madcap chase scenes and wry (but savage) corporate satire with touches borrowed from torture horror — except this time it’s about factory farming. Okja begins in 2007 at the New York City headquarters of Mirando Corporation, a global agricultural supplier. … Mirando has their grand prize winner. The false link between Amy Coney Barrett and The Handmaid’s Tale, explained. Okja is a jarring story on many levels. The pair exists in harmony with the environment. The captive beast takes on metaphorical meaning as a kind of trophy for competing characters with conflicting self-interested agendas. The idea is that each superpiglet will be bred according to local farming practices, and in a decade they’ll be judged in a globally broadcasted contest helmed by Mirando’s new face, television personality Dr. Johnny Wilcox (a sweaty and unhinged Jake Gyllenhaal, pitching his voice into every register imaginable). We take for granted the ease of our food … There was no surprise (and a lot of laughter) when people booed at the appearance of the Netflix logo before the film. South Korean Director Bong Joon-ho delivers a thoughtful, visceral satire of the meat industry with his adventure thriller Okja. The film ramps up violently in the second and third acts. The hell that is remote learning, explained in a comic. The Hollywood Reporter, LLC is a subsidiary of Prometheus Global Media, LLC. Words like “natural!” and “eco-friendly!” are splashed across the screen behind Lucy Mirando as she announces the superpig competition. For example, Mija uses Okja to help her fish, but she only takes the big one for supper; throwing the little fish back in the water. Experts say Covid-19 cases are likely about to surge. Despite their minor roles, Giancarlo Esposito and Shirley Henderson also bring welcome flickers of Shakespearean nuance as scheming courtiers in Mirando's corporate queendom. 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 Like the cumbersome hybrid animal at its heart, this beast is no beauty. Title: Okja (2017) Director: Joon-ho Bong Writers: Joon-ho Bong and Jon Ronson Reviewed by Li . Cinematographer: Darius Khondji Kids deserve great films. I've been really pumped for Okja since I saw that first trailer for Netflix. FACEBOOK 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. While the dialogue and themes are adult, the zany cartoon humor and fuzzy, warm, feel-good elements seem to be pitched at pre-teens. The film stopped, the lights came up, journalists started frantically tweeting about it, inventing a (mostly joking) rumor that it was sabotage from Netflix to undercut the pro-theater case that all movies are meant to be seen on the big screen. 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. She is akin to your family's dog or cat, a treasured part of life. TWITTER The Mirando representatives arrive on the mountain, where Dr. Johnny proclaims Okja the best of the superpigs. Screenwriters: Bong Joon-ho, Jon Ronson Mija was only 4 when Okja joined the family, and the pair grew up together frolicking in the woods, each the other’s caretaker. The movie kicks off in 2007, when the Mirando Corporation, founded by the father of CEO Lucy Mirando (Swinton), is in search of a serious image revamp after committing some light atrocities against mankind. But it is a technically impressive and boldly original statement from a rising Asian auteur with increasingly international ambitions. But Okja is also a rare breed of movie: it boasts a multi-hemispheric setting and cast, extended use of two languages, and the distinction of combining action, arthouse, and political satire in one funny, biting, disturbing, often kind of adorable package. 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.