Okja

2017 giant pig movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A greedy corporation tries to chop up and sell the meat of a Korean girl's best friend.

I'd heard good things about Joon-ho Bong's follow-up to Snowpiercer, but I was profoundly disappointed. I agreed with its liberal sentiments, but they were childish and heavy-handed, and there's never a consistent tone established. Bong tries to straddle the line between wacky comedy and serious drama and instead just kind of stomps all over it. It's a mess and often very unpleasant.

It might be that I'm just not mature enough for this movie. Initially, I couldn't stop giggling at Okja's ass. You might be wondering why I was paying so much attention to the posterior of a giant pig created from 2002 CGI technology, but Bong seemed to enjoy filling the screen with the thing and it was unavoidable. It was oppressive. Also oppressive were the amount of fart and shit jokes in this thing. Those added to the inconsistencies that made it difficult for me to figure out who the audience for this crap was. This has this glossy flimsiness that made it seem like a movie for children, but there are too many f-words. So it's like a kid's movie where the characters say fuck a lot. And things get really dark. I don't mind a little darkness in my movies, of course, but it was a clumsy clash between that and the silly action scenes and fart jokes.

The acting was odd in this, too. The little girl was played by Seo-Hyun Ahn, and she's good because she doesn't do anything distracting. You can't say that about the seasoned veterans in this. Tilda Swinton is a little too wacky as a villianess, and her scenes at the beginning with this dopey animation nearly gave me a seizure. Even worse is the almost-always-solid Jake Gyllenhaal who plays a character who's a cross between Steve Irwin, Pee-Wee Herman, and Bobcat Goldthwait. It's almost painful to watch, and I'm not sure I agree with a single decision he made as an actor in creating this character. Paul Dano is also in this, and I didn't really like him either.

The best thing about this movie was the use of John Denver's "You Fill Up My Senses." That's a great song.