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Netflix War Epic to Open Asia’s Largest Film Festival

In this file photo taken on October 4, 2023, children pose for photos next to large letters displayed for the 28th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) at the Busan Cinema Center in Busan. (AFP)
In this file photo taken on October 4, 2023, children pose for photos next to large letters displayed for the 28th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) at the Busan Cinema Center in Busan. (AFP)
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Netflix War Epic to Open Asia’s Largest Film Festival

In this file photo taken on October 4, 2023, children pose for photos next to large letters displayed for the 28th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) at the Busan Cinema Center in Busan. (AFP)
In this file photo taken on October 4, 2023, children pose for photos next to large letters displayed for the 28th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) at the Busan Cinema Center in Busan. (AFP)

A Netflix period war drama produced by South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook will open Asia's largest film festival Wednesday, the first time a streaming title has kicked off the event.

Directed by Kim Sang-man and featuring Korean megastar Gang Dong-won in a lead role, "Uprising" is one of 224 official entries at this year's Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), which runs until October 11.

The film has attracted significant attention ahead of its world premiere thanks largely to the involvement of Park, best-known for ultra-violent thrillers like 2003's "Old Boy", which played a key role in bringing South Korean cinema to the global forefront.

Park was a screenwriter and producer on "Uprising", a story set during Korea's Joseon Dynasty about two friends who grow up together -- but become enemies when war breaks out in the country.

"I believed it was a work that could appeal to the public (the most) among all the (BIFF) opening films in history," Park Do-shin, the festival's acting director, has said of the choice.

Streaming-only content like Netflix's "Squid Game" and the Apple TV+ series "Pachinko" have contributed to a significant surge in the global visibility of Korean and Korean diaspora stories in recent years.

Busan's 2024 line-up reflects how that content has become an "important part of our culture," BIFF programmer Jung Han-seok said.

On Wednesday morning, ahead of the opening ceremony, visitors were already queuing at festival venues, while the red carpet for the star-studded opening ceremony had been laid out.

- Why streaming? -

The decision to open this year's edition with a major streaming title, however, has sparked criticism within South Korea's cinema community, as BIFF has long been dedicated to supporting emerging talents in Asia as well as small-scale, independent films.

"I find it disappointing that a streaming title was selected as the opening film," Kay Heeyoung Kim, who owns film studio K-Dragon, told AFP.

"The challenges confronting the theatre-based physical film market and filmmakers can be partly attributed to the streaming platforms."

This year's edition also comes as organizers still grapple with the fallout from former festival director Huh Moon-yung, who resigned last year amid accusations of sexual misconduct. The director position remains vacant.

The South Korean government's budget for supporting film festivals including BIFF was also slashed by half this year.

Despite those setbacks, this year's 29th edition is presenting about 15 more films than last year, organizers said, with 86 world premieres.

- Award winners -

BIFF will posthumously honor South Korean actor Lee Sun-kyun, screening six of the actor's film and television works, including "Parasite", "Our Sunhi" (2013) and a portion of TV series "My Mister" (2018).

Best known globally for his starring role in Bong Joon-ho's 2019 Oscar-winner "Parasite", Lee was found dead in an apparent suicide last year after a two-month investigation into suspected drug use, sparking public outrage over what many perceived as an excessive police interrogation.

Meanwhile, filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for his contributions to the Japanese horror genre, will receive the festival's Asian Filmmaker of the Year award, joining the ranks of previous winners such as Hong Kong legends Tony Leung and Chow Yun Fat.

The Japanese filmmaker is showcasing two new films at BIFF this year: the violent thriller "Cloud" and "Serpent's Path", a French-language remake of his 1998 film of the same name.

Other notable world premieres include "RM: Right People, Wrong Place", a documentary on K-pop sensation BTS member RM and the making of his second solo album.

Chung, Yu Chieh, a 39-year-old visitor from Taiwan, said she was excited about South Korean director Hur Jin-ho's latest film, "A Normal Family" - a psychological thriller featuring two upper-class couples seemingly leading perfect lives.

Featuring some of the most celebrated veteran performers in South Korea - including actress Kim Hee-ae and actor Jang Dong-gun - the film is one of the most anticipated homegrown films to be featured at BIFF this year.

"I believe (the festival) will be very special," she told AFP.

BIFF's industry platform, the Asian Contents and Film Market, will host a conference focused on the integration of AI in content production -- a current hot-button issue in Hollywood.

Companies including South Korea's CJ ENM, Chinese VOD service iQIYI and Microsoft will take part.

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Entertainment

Movie Review: ‘Saturday Night’ Is Thinly Sketched but Satisfying

This image released by Sony Pictures shows, from left, Kim Matula, as Jane Curtin, Emily Fairn, as Laraine Newman, Gabriel LaBelle, as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott, as Rosie Shuster, and Matt Wood, as John Belushi. (Hopper Stone/Sony Pictures Entertainment via AP)
This image released by Sony Pictures shows, from left, Kim Matula, as Jane Curtin, Emily Fairn, as Laraine Newman, Gabriel LaBelle, as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott, as Rosie Shuster, and Matt Wood, as John Belushi. (Hopper Stone/Sony Pictures Entertainment via AP)
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Movie Review: ‘Saturday Night’ Is Thinly Sketched but Satisfying

This image released by Sony Pictures shows, from left, Kim Matula, as Jane Curtin, Emily Fairn, as Laraine Newman, Gabriel LaBelle, as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott, as Rosie Shuster, and Matt Wood, as John Belushi. (Hopper Stone/Sony Pictures Entertainment via AP)
This image released by Sony Pictures shows, from left, Kim Matula, as Jane Curtin, Emily Fairn, as Laraine Newman, Gabriel LaBelle, as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott, as Rosie Shuster, and Matt Wood, as John Belushi. (Hopper Stone/Sony Pictures Entertainment via AP)

We are at the apex of “Saturday Night Live” appreciation. Now entering its 50th year, “SNL” has never been more unquestioned as a bedrock American institution. The many years of cowbells, Californians, mom jeans, Totino’s, unfrozen caveman lawyers and vans down by the river have more than established “SNL” as hallowed late-night ground and a comedy citadel.

So it’s maybe appropriate that Jason Reitman’s big-screen ode, “Saturday Night,” should arrive, amid all of the tributes, to remind of the show’s original revolutionary force. Reitman’s film is set in the 90 minutes leading up to showtime before the first episode aired Oct. 11, 1975.

The atmosphere is hectic. The mood is anxious. And through cigarette smoke and backstage swirl rushes Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), who’s trying to launch a new kind of show that even he can’t quite explain.

“Saturday Night,” which opens in theaters Friday and expands in the coming weeks, isn’t a realistic tick-tock of how Michaels did it. And, while it boasts a number of fine performances, I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone hoping to see an illuminating portrait of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

No, Reitman’s movie is striving for a myth of “Saturday Night Live.” Michaels’ quest in the film — and though he never strays farther than around the corner from 30 Rock, it is a quest — is not just to marshal together a live show on this particular night, it’s to overcome a cigar-chomping old guard of network television. (Milton Berle is skulking about, even Johnny Carson phones in.) In their eyes, Michaels is, to paraphrase Ned Beatty in “Network,” meddling with the primal forces of nature.

In mythologizing this generational battle, “Saturday Night” is a blistering barn-burner. In most other ways (cue the Debbie Downer trombone), it’s less good. Reitman, who penned the script with Gil Kenan, is too wide-eyed about the glory days of “SNL” to bring much acute insight to what was happening 50 years ago. And his film may be too spread thin by a clown car’s worth of big personalities. But in the movie’s primary goal, capturing a spirit of revolution that once might have seized barricades but instead flocks to Studio 8H, “Saturday Night” at least deserves a Spartan cheer.

A clock ticking down to showtime runs as ominously as it might in “MacGruber” throughout “Saturday Night.” Nothing is close to ready for air. John Belushi (Matt Wood) hasn’t signed his contract. Twenty-eight gallons of fake blood are missing. And, most pressing of all, the network is poised to air a Carson rerun if things don’t take shape. An executive pleading for a script is told, “It’s not that kind of show.”

What kind is it? Michaels, himself, is uncertain. He’s gathered together a “circus of rejects,” most of them then unknown to the public. There is Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien). Also in the mix are Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), who spends much of the movie complaining about the untoward things the cast has been doing to Big Bird, Andy Kaufman (Braun again), Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) and the night’s host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys).

Most of them pass too quickly to make too much of an impression, though a few are good in their moments — notably Smith, playing up Chase’s braggadocio, O’Brien and Morris. Garrett Morris, the cast’s lone Black member, is in a quandary over his role — because of his race and because he was a playwright before being cast. Though “SNL” was revolutionary, it hardly arrived a finished product. Morris here is a reminder of the show’s sometimes — and ongoing — not always easy relationship to diversity, in race and gender.

It also wasn’t always such a break from what came before. When Chase faces off with Berle in a contest over Chase’s fiancee, Jacqueline Carlin (Kaia Gerber) — one of the movie’s few truly charged scenes — they seem more alike than either would like to admit.

It’s not a great sign for “Saturday Night” how much better the old guard is than the young cast. Along with Simmons’ Berle is Willem Dafoe’s NBC executive David Tebet. He provides the movie its most “Network”-flavored drama, seeing “a prophet” in Michaels and, despite wavering skepticism, urging him to be “an unbending force of seismic disturbance.” Also in the mix — and a reminder that the suits had newbies, too — is Dick Ebersol (a refreshingly genuine Cooper Hoffman), a believer in Michaels but only up to a point.

Ultimately, this is Michaels’ show, and he’s played winningly by LaBelle, the “Fabelmans” star, even if the characterization, like much of “Saturday Night,” is a little thin. Sometimes by his side, as he races to get the show ready is the writer and Michaels’ then-wife, Rosie Shuster (the excellent Rachel Sennott), who you want more of.

It seems to be an unfortunate truth that dramatizations of “Saturday Night Live” inevitably kill it of laughter. That’s true here just as it was in Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” The exception to that, of course, is Tina Fey’s “30 Rock,” which was smart enough to abandon all the “SNL” mythology and focus on what’s funny.

This “Saturday Night” may have a legacy of its own; a lot of this cast, I suspect, will be around for a long time. And, ultimately, when the show finally comes together, it’s galvanizing. The cleverest thing about Reitman’s film is that it ends, rousingly, just where “SNL” starts.