#Geomijip

[moviemosaics]

Cobweb

directed by Kim Jee-woon, 2023

[shagrathmovies]

Geomijip - 2023 - Jee-woon Kim

[tinyreviews]

They keep telling us how great the ending(of the story in a story) is going to be, and allude to a twist ending(of the movie itself), and then keep throwing complications in the way. But the ending is an absolute miss! What a disappointment!

Also, what’s with the retro setting in so many 2023 South Korean flicks?

Cobweb (Korean: 거미집; RR: Geomijip) is a 2023 South Korean period black comedy-drama film directed by Kim Jee-woon starring Song Kang-ho, Im Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Jeon Yeo-been, and Krystal Jung

[genevieveetguy]

Cobweb (Geomijip), Jee-woon Kim (2023)

[disappointingyet]

Geomijip (Cobweb)

Director Kim Jee-woon Stars Song Kang-Ho, Krystal Jung,  Jeon  Yeo-bin, Oh Jung-se, Lim Soo-jung South Korea 2023 Language Korean (with English subtitles) 2hr 15mins Colour, black & white

Pleasing wild film biz comedy

A key question with art about the artistic process is: how much you do show of the results? If you’re claiming that the painting or record or TV show is great, then it’s best if you keep it off screen. (I was listening to a podcast the other day where they digressed for over 10 minutes just remembering the sheer awfulness of the show within-the-show’s comedy sketches in Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, which, to be clear, were supposed to be cutting-edge good.) If we’re meant to be laughing at it, though, you’ll need it front and centre.

In Cobweb, we end up seeing a lot of the film director Kim Yeol (Song Kang-Ho) is reshooting. That film is in luscious black & white, with the behind-the-scenes stuff in colour. He’s reshooting because he’s had dreams with a better ending that he thinks will turn his film into a masterpiece. 

He feels he needs it to be the best thing he’s ever done because the critics say he’s never escaped the shadow of his late mentor. But the owner of the studio doesn’t see the point of the reshoots and doesn’t want to pay for them. Plus, this is Korea in the 1970s, and tight censorship controls films before, during and after production – the original version was already struggling for approval and the radical rewrite is even less likely to get a pass. 

In the end, Director Kim gets just frantic two days to reassemble the cast and crew (most of whom are busy working on other productions by this point) and rework the main storyline of the movie. Meanwhile, he doesn’t actually have the studio owner’s approval and he’s hoping the censors don’t find out what he’s up to. 

We get filming mishaps, back-stage intrigue, lots of people getting very drunk, emergency cast substitutions… the full chaotic production experience. Woven in with this is the footage from the increasingly unhinged melodrama that Kim is filming, to the bafflement of much of the cast.

A useful selling point for non-Korean audiences is Song Kang-Ho, who starred in Parasite, along with several other Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook movies. He’s excellent value as a director with that familiar mix of intense insecurity and deluded self-belief.

But is it funny? I laughed a lot. I’m sure there are specifically Korean and probably specifically Korean-film-buff gags I’m not getting, but Cobweb can face up to comparisons with film-set-set classics like Living In Oblivion and not be disgraced. And the film-within-a-film is a treat.