Director Kim Ki-yeol (Song Kang-ho) only needs two more days of filming to create a new ending for his latest film, and it will no longer be the trashy trash everyone thought he was making. It will be, he frequently declares “A masterpiece!” Director Kim Jee-woon doesn't seem to harbor similar aspirations for his meta-movie "Spiderweb," his loosest, least substantial, sloppy film in quite some time, though it's safe to say the gulf between it and masterpiece status is a bit. wider than a two-day reshoot could cover. A movie that contains another movie; a filmmaker referring to a filmmaker's evidence: it's a film with many layers, all flashy and silly, none great.
That's an assessment that would certainly cut Ki-yeol off, because, as played by Song Kang-ho of "Parasite" with typically tacky charm, he certainly dreams of greatness. In the false triple opening, literally. . The black-and-white psychological thriller that initially plays, all thunderstorms, spiral staircases, and checkered floors, is revealed to be a scene being filmed on a set, later revealed to be a dream. Kim wakes up with a start to his early 1970s reality, in which he is an official genre director who has just delivered a final cut of his latest film for censorship approval.
Director: Samuel Bodin
Writer: Chris Thomas Devlin
Stars: Lizzy Caplan, Antony Starr, Cleopatra Coleman
However, in his pill-induced reveries, he has glimpsed a rewrite so potent that it will bring him the acclaim he craves, the likes of which he hasn't received since his debut. All he needs is a couple more days of filming before the set opens and the studio turns to another production. But how do you get tough studio head President Baek (Jang Young-nam), the sister of Principal Shin, Ki-yeol's late revered mentor, to agree? Not to mention remembering his entire cast, including his favorite leading lady Min-ja (Lim Soo-jung), womanizing lead Ho-se (Oh Jung-se), secretly pregnant ingénue Yu-rim (Jung Soo-jung) and veteran pragmatist Madam Oh (Park Jung-soo).
An ally appears in the unlikely form of Mido (Jeon Yeo-been), President Baek's niece, who becomes an ardent believer in Ki-yeol's new vision who vows to bring production back on track by any means necessary, even threatening to kill him. expel his aunt. of the administration of the company of her father died of her. Meanwhile, a man from the censor's office shows up to shut down the production (there's some interesting stuff about this period of Korean cinema and the restrictions placed on creative expression, but much of it gets lost in all the squawking), and it has to be kept. . distracted somehow. And on-set tensions rise when the delicate and pregnant Yu-rim refuses to try too hard.
Meanwhile, we're plunging back and forth between the increasingly soap opera antics on set and the black-and-white of fiction, throwing flashbacks, dream sequences, and fire effects for good measure. This is far from cinematographer Kim Ji-yong's most distinguished work, which would be Park Chan-wook's pristine "Decision to Leave," but it might well be his funniest work.
Farce is an unwieldy form, and criticisms of its excesses are open to accusations of missing the point, of overthinking a genre that is essentially designed to blow a raspberry at such a pretense. Given the disdain that Ki-yeol often expresses for critics, or "people who can't make art," that may be one of the things that drew Kim to the project, given the bad reviews for his latest film "Ilang: The Wolf Brigade". .” But even starting from a looser, less serious baseline, "Cobweb" is a disappointing entry, especially coming from a director who has previously done gonzo, free fun so well ("The Good, the Bad and the Weird") and whose artisan credentials have been just as impeccable in the past.
The performances occupy one of two registers: raucous or bizarre. The aesthetic is mostly forgettable. And there's a lack of rigor in the way the film is put together, including that irritating trope where scenes that are apparently just being filmed are now played as edited sequences with score and sound effects instead, which makes make it hard to believe that the film takes the place. the same filmography as the extraordinarily stylish period spy film “The Age of Shadows”. Where it should be convoluted, it's just exhausting and long before the movie has reached the last of its many endings (Ki-yeol wants to reshoot the ending of his movie, but if Kim did the same, we'd be forced to ask." Which one?”) “Cobweb” has run out of spin.
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