Tag: Monster

  • Cannes: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Monster’ with a big heart

    By AFP

    CANNES: Japan’s Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda unveiled his new movie “Monster” (“Kaibutsu”) at Cannes on Wednesday, a heartwarming tale despite its ominous title.

    Treating issues including bullying and domestic abuse, “Monster” bears many hallmarks of Kore-eda’s tender cinema about tough lives and unconventional families that already won him the top prize in Cannes in 2018 for “Shoplifters”.

    “Monster” begins as a disquieting tale of teacher-pupil harassment with a clear baddie, but judgements are swiftly revised as the film switches points of view.

    “I wanted the spectator to be able to search in the same way the characters were doing in the film,” the 60-year-old director told AFP about the movie’s central mystery: who is the monster?

    Shameful systemBut while Kore-eda’s characters emerge with their humanity intact, Japan’s education system does not come off so well.

    “When an institution puts protecting itself at the very top of its priorities… then ‘what really happened is not important’,” said Kore-eda, quoting a line from the film.

    The phrase, he said, “is relevant not only for Japan’s education system but also the majority of collective institutions that have a tendency to want to protect themselves at the cost of many other things”.

    Kore-eda’s film comes just a year after his last one, “Broker”, premiered in competition at Cannes and scooped the best actor prize for Song Kang-ho, the South Korean star best-known for the multi-Oscar winning “Parasite”.

    In a break from his usual working method, Kore-eda did not pen the script for “Monster” himself, but turned to screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto.

    “As it’s not me who wrote it, I can say without a second thought that I think it’s really a very good screenplay!” he joked about the intricate, multiple viewpoints narrative.

    Since his first fiction film in 1995, Kore-eda has made more than a dozen critically acclaimed features.

    He was first in competition for the Palme d’Or in 2001 with “Distance”, about the devastating personal toll of a cult massacre.

    His breakthrough outside Japan came three years later with “Nobody Knows”, inspired, like many of his films, by a real-life event, this one set around four young siblings abandoned in an apartment by their mother.

    The Cannes Film Festival runs until May 27 with 21 films in competition, including other past Palme winners such as Britain’s Ken Loach and Germany’s Wim Wenders.

    CANNES: Japan’s Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda unveiled his new movie “Monster” (“Kaibutsu”) at Cannes on Wednesday, a heartwarming tale despite its ominous title.

    Treating issues including bullying and domestic abuse, “Monster” bears many hallmarks of Kore-eda’s tender cinema about tough lives and unconventional families that already won him the top prize in Cannes in 2018 for “Shoplifters”.

    “Monster” begins as a disquieting tale of teacher-pupil harassment with a clear baddie, but judgements are swiftly revised as the film switches points of view.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    “I wanted the spectator to be able to search in the same way the characters were doing in the film,” the 60-year-old director told AFP about the movie’s central mystery: who is the monster?

    Shameful system
    But while Kore-eda’s characters emerge with their humanity intact, Japan’s education system does not come off so well.

    “When an institution puts protecting itself at the very top of its priorities… then ‘what really happened is not important’,” said Kore-eda, quoting a line from the film.

    The phrase, he said, “is relevant not only for Japan’s education system but also the majority of collective institutions that have a tendency to want to protect themselves at the cost of many other things”.

    Kore-eda’s film comes just a year after his last one, “Broker”, premiered in competition at Cannes and scooped the best actor prize for Song Kang-ho, the South Korean star best-known for the multi-Oscar winning “Parasite”.

    In a break from his usual working method, Kore-eda did not pen the script for “Monster” himself, but turned to screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto.

    “As it’s not me who wrote it, I can say without a second thought that I think it’s really a very good screenplay!” he joked about the intricate, multiple viewpoints narrative.

    Since his first fiction film in 1995, Kore-eda has made more than a dozen critically acclaimed features.

    He was first in competition for the Palme d’Or in 2001 with “Distance”, about the devastating personal toll of a cult massacre.

    His breakthrough outside Japan came three years later with “Nobody Knows”, inspired, like many of his films, by a real-life event, this one set around four young siblings abandoned in an apartment by their mother.

    The Cannes Film Festival runs until May 27 with 21 films in competition, including other past Palme winners such as Britain’s Ken Loach and Germany’s Wim Wenders.

  • Evan Peters to play serial killer Jeffery Dahmer for Netflix drama ‘Monster’

    By Express News Service
    Evan Peters is all set to join hands with Ryan Murphy for the latest Netflix project, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.

    Peters, who previously worked with Murphy on the American Horror Story anthology series, will essay the role of the titular serial killer.

    Co-created by Murphy and Ian Brennan, the show will trace the life of Dahmer, one of America’s most notorious serial killers largely told from the point of view of his victims.

    The series will dive deeply into the police incompetence and apathy that allowed the Wisconsin native to go on a multi-year killing spree.

    It will dramatise at least 10 instances where Dahmer was almost apprehended but ultimately let go, while also touching upon his white privilege.

    As a clean-cut, good-looking white guy, Dahmer was repeatedly given a free pass by cops as well as by judges who were lenient when he had been charged with petty crimes.

    Oscar-nominated actor Richard Jenkins will star as Dahmer’s father Lionel, a chemist, who showed him how to safely bleach and preserve animal bones when he was a child, a technique Jeffrey later gave a sinister twist with his victims.

    Also joining the cast is actor Niecy Nash as the female lead, Glenda Cleveland. A neighbour of Dahmer, Cleveland had alerted police and the FBI of his suspicious behavior, but they did not listen. Penelope Ann Miller has been cast in the role of Dahmer’s mother, Joyce.

    Carl Franklin will direct the pilot episode of the series. Janet Mock, who worked with Murphy on Hollywood, will direct and write several episodes.

    Dahmer took the lives of 17 males between 1978 and 1991. He was captured in 1991 and sentenced to 16 life terms, and was killed by convict Christopher Scarver.