Bong Joon-ho

With two high-profile films premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Netflix is hard at work proving to filmmakers and financiers alike that it deserves to be taken seriously as both a commercial and artistic distribution platform. And while fans might be excited to watch Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja or Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories from the comfort of their own home, Netflix’s success may have run afoul of French law, putting its relationship with both the film festival and the entire French marketplace in a precarious position.

Good morning! Chances are that you’re just getting up and at ’em now, but a few time zones ahead in sunny France, the film industry has had a busy day. This morning saw the official announcement of the Cannes Film Festival’s class of 2017, with the full Competition and Un Certain Regard slates announced by head honcho Thierry Frémaux in a live press conference in the wee small hours of this morning. As ever, the Competition lineup (the most prestigious program in the world’s most prestigious film festival) boasts a deep roster of cinema’s most respected auteurs, ready to pull back the curtain on some tantalizing-sounding new projects. But let’s not talk around the real news here: Adam Sandler’s going to Cannes, baby.

I come bearing good news for all readers currently struggling to pull themselves out of the weekly Monday-morning existential spiral of perspective — what am I doing here, will this all amount to anything, what’s left, etc. etc. Those questioning the purpose of their labors here on Earth can take some small solace in a new report on Bong Joon-ho’s impending follow-up to Snowpiercer, the left-of-center creature feature titled Okja. In the period of grave self-doubt that begins every work week, it can be helpful to pin your hopes and sense of personal meaning on something greater than yourself. So, without further ado, to those feeling lost in the world and perhaps in need of a new god, I give you: BRACES TILDA.

At the risk of editorializing: Bong Joon-ho rules. The South Korean filmmaker has made a name for himself as a master of off-kilter takes on well-worn genres, most recently transforming the post-apocalyptic action flick into an intricately designed work of Communist agitprop with Snowpiercer. He took on the cop procedural with Memories of Murder, but his most beloved work may be the 2006 creature-feature The Host, in which a shaggy river monster terrorizes the citizens of Seoul. His newest feature will see him returning to the grandly ignoble tradition of movies about supernatural beasties, and with the first trailer having recently surfaced online, we’ve gotten a fleeting look at this lovable freak of nature.

2016 saw one of South Korea’s finest filmmakers resurface with a stone-cold masterpiece, as Oldboy and Stoker director Park Chan-wook demolished audiences at Cannes with his beguiling erotic drama The Handmaiden. In 2017, another one of South Korea’s proudest filmmaking sons will make a grand return, as Bong Joon-ho prepares to unveil his latest feature Okja. A master of blackly humorous genre work (the guy never met a B-movie he couldn’t make into high art), Bong last appeared on American shores in 2014 with Snowpiercer, his first foray into English-language filmmaking. To employ a critical parlance, it ruled, and with the first photos from Okja now trickling out in advance of its debut next year, we have every reason to believe Bong’s latest will rule just as hard.

We’re still not sold on the idea of director Bong Joon-Ho‘’s iconic Snowpiercer joining the ranks of movies remade as TV series, even with Joon-Ho’s involvement, but the train is officially leaving the station. TNT has given out an official pilot order to an adaptation of the 2013 South Korean sci-fi, with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles scribe Josh Friedman at the controls.

The success of 2013’s Snowpiercer can’t be overstated, between director Bong Joon-Ho fighting the Weinsteins for an uncut version, and earning a wider release by word-of-mouth praise, but we can’t say we expected a TV adaptation to follow. And yet, Tomorrow Studios has optioned the rights for a Snowpiercer series based on the South Korean sci-fi, as written by Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles scribe Josh Friedman.

Netflix just keeps getting bigger and more ambitious.

Following his impressive english-language debut with the dystopian sci-fi Snowpiercer, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho is set to reunite with star Tilda Swinton for his follow-up, the mysterious monster movie project Okja. And like Snowpiercer, Bong’s new multilingual film is looking to cast a slew of well-known, english-speaking stars, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Kelly Macdonald and Bill Nighy.

This week sees the release of ‘Jupiter Ascending,’ the latest sci-fi adventure from Andy and Lana Wachowski. And while in all likelihood ‘Jupiter Ascending’ will not go down in history as one of the great works of its genre, the occasion of a new sci-fi epic from two of the modern masters of the form seemed like a good time to assess and celebrate the recent highlights of science fiction cinema, which has taken audiences from the furthest reaches of the cosmos to the deepest recesses of the human mind.