By Frequent readers know that I don’t watch trailers, but going to a movie theater makes it somewhat unavoidable. So when I went to see Skyfall a few weeks ago (if you haven’t seen it yet, you seriously have to), I found myself forced to watch trailers for some of those movies that are coming out soon. One of those movies was Kim Ji-Woon’s upcoming English-language debut: The Last Stand.
And you know what? I was mortified. How could the man who made The Good, The Bad, and the Weird and I Saw the Devil make something so… generic? Kim Ji-Woon’s last film, a segment in Doomsday Book, was disappointing, but it was conceptually interesting. This is not that. This is a generic action movie that looks like it could have been made by basically anybody. Instead, it’s being made by one of the most versatile and incredible directors on the planet.
But it seems like the experience hasn’t been all that great for Kim Ji-Woon, who has decided that his next film will be made in the good old South of Korea. His next film is a live-action remake of a Japanese animated film, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. There isn’t much information outside of that, other than a title, Inrang, which literally translated to “Man-Wolf.” Given that the original is set in an alternate history Japan, I imagine that this new film will be pretty drastically different than the source material. And that is absolutely awesome.
It will be interesting to see if Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder) makes the same move after his English language debut Snowpiercer releases. Given that Park Chan-Wook has another two English-language projects in the works post-Stoker, it seems he’s pretty set on staying on this side of the Pacific.
I’m curious what role (if any) the language barrier has played in this. I’ve heard that Park Chan-Wook does a lot of his work through a translator, which must be hell to work with.
Very interesting.
[Via The Film Stage]