The State of Film and a TV Recommendation

Long time, no post. I wanted to share a recent Twitter thread by TV and film critic Matt Zoller Seitz in which he decries the state of the film industry and its reliance on tentpole properties, which has had the result of shunting many directors toward working in television. (Not that that’s bad, just different.) Agree or disagree, it provides food for thought.

And on that score, I have a limited-run TV show to recommend: Stranger (originally Secret Forest or Forest of Secrets), a 16-episode South Korean police/legal/political thriller loosely based on corruption scandals in the prosecution service starring Jo Seung-woo, who usually performs in musicals, as an emotionless prosecutor and Bae Doo-na, who’s been mostly working in the West, as a dedicated police officer. It mines similar material to The Bad Sleep Well. It’s available on Netflix in the US. I don’t know about its availability elsewhere.

Preview
Script reading

Hi Lawless! Thanks for the recommendation for ‘Stranger’, it looks very interesting, I’ll watch anything with Bae Doo-na in it. I can confirm that its on Netflix in Europe. I was thinking of doing a Korean language course next year so I guess immersing myself in a good series is a good way to see if I could handle it..

That Twitter thread is interesting. Sadly, when you look at the box office for even the most successful non-tentpole films – like Little Bird or Three Billboards this year, they are pretty much rounding errors for the usual big CGI features. I tend to think these things come to a natural equilibrium eventually. The likes of Netflix and Amazon are putting billions into both series and small budget (relatively) films, so at least thats keeping talented people in work.

another fan of bae duna here!

thanks for the heads-up, lawless. will be putting that in my queue / kyu.