Category Archives: Netflix

Park Seo-joon: ‘I actually couldn’t believe Marvel wanted to speak to me’

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The actor talks about joining the MCU, his friendships with BTS’s V and the rest of the ‘Wooga Squad’, and the social and economic issues behind his TV hits Itaewon Class and Fight for My Way

In an early scene of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a brief conversation between rich student Min-hyuk and his friend Ki-woo proves a crucial moment in the multi-Oscar winning film. “Tutor a rich kid. It pays well,” the scooter-riding Min-hyuk tells the impoverished Ki-woo, who lives in a semi-basement home with his family. And when Min-hyuk offers Ki-woo the opportunity to take over his job as a tutor for the rich Park family, he acts as a bridge between the two worlds, and sets the plot of the film in motion.

Min-hyuk is played by Park Seo-joon, and despite the brevity of Park’s appearance in Parasite, it will have been the first time most international audiences will have got a good look at him. Park is a big name in South Korea however, thanks to a string of successful domestic TV series – mostly romantic comedies such as She Was Pretty and Fight for My Way – and the Netflix hit Itaewon Class. Now his international profile is about to be raised, after it was confirmed he will be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe for Captain Marvel 2: The Marvels, appearing alongside Brie Larson, Iman Vellani and Zawe Ashton, making him the third South Korean actor to join the MCU.

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Netflix to pause all projects and acquisitions in Russia

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The streamer has halted work on four original series as a result of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine

Netflix has paused all future Russian projects and acquisitions as a result of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

According to Variety, the streamer is “assessing the impact of current events”, which has led to four Russian original series being indefinitely paused. Zato, a crime series set after the fall of the Soviet Union, directed by the Belarus-born director Darya Zhuk, was already in production but has now been put on hold.

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‘I feel like a competition winner’: Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan on luck, social media and her ‘nice’ list

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Five years ago, she was working in an opticians. Then came Derry Girls and Bridgerton. Now she’s a Hollywood name, no wonder she can’t believe her good fortune

I have a nice list,” declares Nicola Coughlan. She pauses, perhaps to catch her breath at the end of another mile-a-minute answer, or perhaps for dramatic effect. “Of celebrities!” The disclosure comes somewhat out of nowhere, 40 minutes into our Friday-afternoon interview on Zoom. I’d asked the star of Derry Girls and Bridgerton about her public love-in with Kim Kardashian – not the tabs she’s been keeping, privately, on her new famous friends.

In fact, Coughlan explains, “ideally” her nice list is of names she hasn’t met herself. “People are always going to be nice to you, aren’t they? This has to be evidence from several sources that they’re nice.”

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‘All those agencies failed us’: inside the terrifying downfall of Boeing

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In the damning new Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, the errors and oversights that led to two crashes are examined

For the vast majority of travelers, stepping foot on an airplane entails a tremendous act of near-blind faith. We control our own cars, trains operate on set tracks at ground level, but flying requires us to put total trust in the expertise of a complete stranger to operate a machine too complex for us to understand. Every time these gargantuan hunks of metal don’t plummet screaming from the sky towards a certain fiery doom, it feels like a miracle, even if that’s how the majority of flights play out. Rory Kennedy’s damning new documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing takes a close look at two incidents included within the small number of flights when things go wrong, and shows us the tragedy that strikes when that sacred compact between passenger and airline is violated.

“I fly a good deal, and the truth is I’ve got a bit of a fear of flying,” Kennedy tells the Guardian from behind the wheel of her car, talking transit in transit. “I like to think that when I walk down that jetway, the manufacturer of that plane is invested in keeping it up in the air, that the regulatory agencies focused on safety are doing in their job, and that at least in our country, the government is making sure the regulatory agencies enforce those safety measures. In this case, it seems that all of those agencies failed us.”

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Charlie Brooker: ‘Mr Dystopia? That makes me sound like a wrestler’

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As he releases the latest fruits of his new megabucks deal with Netflix – an interactive cartoon about a cat – the Black Mirror creator discusses gaming, nuclear war, and why his generation has wrecked the UK

Charlie Brooker is sitting at a desk, a big cardboard box in the background, miscellany spilling out of bookshelves. “What you can’t see,” he says, since we’re on Zoom, “is all the shit all over my desk. I’m shambolic.”

He got his first gig doing a comic strip when he was 15, for 80 quid a week; he dropped out of Westminster University as the only dissertation he wanted to write was on video games, and scrambled into a career in journalism – “there was no planning, I wasn’t somebody who was out hustling” – via working in a shop and writing video game reviews. He shifted, via Screenwipe, Gameswipe, Newswipe and Weekly Wipe, into screenwriting, and achieved astonishing success with the anthology series Black Mirror. His production company with Annabel Jones, Broke and Bones, has just been bought by Netflix for an unspecified sum; the rumour is that it’s so enormous that, well, I had to get out a calculator to work out what “nine figures” over five years means ($100,000,000). I just can’t wrap my head around why he still has Billy bookcases from Ikea.

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The Cuphead Show! review – this fast, funny spin-off has perfected the original video game

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Netflix’s giddy, knowing adaptation sees the indie game reach its ideal form: a cartoon that has great fun splashing around in the tropes of 1930s animation

Few video games in recent years have managed to equal the sledgehammer disappointment of Cuphead. For those of you not in the know, Cuphead was an independent 2017 game that captured gamers’ imagination like little else before.

This was almost entirely down to how it looked. An out-and-out love letter to 1930s cartoonists such as Max Fleischer and Grim Natwick – with a main character inspired by a 1936 Japanese propaganda cartoon about an invasion of an evil Mickey Mouse army – Cuphead thrummed with a gloriously authentic Betty Boop feel. The animations were hand-drawn and imperfect. The big-band jazz soundtrack was recorded on analogue. The voices crackled and hissed as if recorded from worn vinyl. No detail was spared, to the extent that the creators had to remortgage their home to pay for it. And people fell for Cuphead hard. After some initial footage was shown as proof of concept, anticipation hit fever pitch and stayed there for three years.

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The Tinder Swindler fallout shows the dark side of Netflix fame | Adrian Horton

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The subject of the hit documentary, who conned women out of hundreds of thousands, is trying to launch a celebrity career, a depressing but inevitable next step

When I first watched The Tinder Swindler last month, in anticipation for an interview with director Felicity Morris, I was, like many viewers, completely absorbed by the story.

Several women meet a man on Tinder who claims to be the billionaire heir to an Israeli diamond fortune, lavishes them with attention, flies to them on actual private jets, then swindles them for hundreds of thousands of dollars? I’m a single woman in my late 20s in New York: of course I ate it up. The documentary was also much, much better than it could have been; I appreciated that Morris didn’t have much interest in probing the psychology of its swindler, Simon Leviev. Instead, she foregrounded three women’s first-person accounts of getting conned – why they believed him, why they cared for him, what such manipulation and confusion does to someone – as well as the journalists at the Norwegian paper VG who unspooled his lies for an initial exposé in 2019.

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Ex-Cheer star Jerry Harris pleads guilty to child sexual abuse image charges

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Harris, a Chicago native, was first arrested in September 2020 on a charge of production of child sexual abuse images

Jerry Harris, the former star of the Netflix documentary series Cheer, pleaded guilty on Thursday to federal charges of receiving child sexual abuse images and soliciting sex from minors that could keep him in prison for decades.

During a change of plea hearing in federal court in Chicago, Harris pleaded guilty to one count of traveling with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and one count of receiving child abuse images, a US attorney’s office spokesman said.

In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International.

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‘If we are honest, it wasn’t particularly good’: looking back on the first Netflix original, 10 years later

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Why a little known streaming service put its faith in Lilyhammer, a decidedly average show about the Norwegian adventures of a mafia boss

When you think of Steven Van Zandt’s acting work, your mind will automatically flick to The Sopranos. A vast, swaggering monument of a show, The Sopranos quite rightly holds the reputation of playing a pivotal role in the history of television. But let us also not forget that – 10 years ago this week – Van Zandt followed The Sopranos with another show. And it was a show which was every bit as important a milestone in TV’s evolution. That’s right, let us all wish a happy anniversary to Lilyhammer.

You remember Lilyhammer. It was a Norwegian show about the messy misadventures of a mafia underboss living in the witness protection programme 100 miles north of Oslo. It ran for three seasons and Bruce Springsteen had a cameo in the final episode. If we are being completely honest, it wasn’t particularly good. But, when it debuted in 2012, it was the very first Netflix original series. And what better way to mark its 10th anniversary than rewatching it to see how Netflix has changed over the years? There isn’t any. So we did it. Here are our learnings.

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First female chess grandmaster sues Netflix over false claim in Queen’s Gambit

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The series incorrectly said the trailblazing player Nona Gaprindashvili had ‘never faced men’

Netflix will face a $5m defamation lawsuit by a Georgian chess master who alleges she was defamed in the hit series The Queen’s Gambit, after a judge refused to toss the suit on Thursday.

Nona Gaprindashvili, the first woman to be named a chess grandmaster, sued the streaming company in federal court in September. Gaprindashvili alleges that a line from The Queen’s Gambit, where a character incorrectly states that she had “never faced men”, is “grossly sexist and belittling”. Gaprindashvili had played against 59 male competitors by 1968, the year the show is set.

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Golden Globes: The Power of the Dog and Succession win at celebrity-free ceremony

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Jane Campion’s Netflix drama and HBO hit triumph as stars distance themselves from Hollywood Foreign Press Association

The Power of the Dog and Succession were the big winners at an unusual, stripped-back Golden Globes.

Traditionally, the ceremony is a glitzy telecast with A-listers in attendance but after a year of controversies surrounding diversity and amoral practices, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lost its footing in the industry, with publicity firms, studios and celebrities choosing to distance themselves.

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How The Lost Daughter confronts one of our most enduring cultural taboos

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Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, adapted from the short novel by Elena Ferrante, unravels the myth that motherhood comes naturally to women

It is clear from the opening minutes of The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s melancholic, bristly directorial debut on Netflix, that a dark secret stalks the sunny Mediterranean vacation of Leda Caruso, (a luminous Olivia Colman), a 48-year-old English professor of comparative literature. Her “working holiday” at a Greek island is immediately beset by increasingly ominous intrusions: a spectral foghorn, a bowl of rotting fruit, a shrill cicada, a boisterous Italian American family from Queens who disrupt her beachside reading. Memories pull at her focus; when the young daughter of Nina (Dakota Johnson), a beautiful, languid member of the Queens bunch who immediately catches Leda’s attention, goes briefly missing, Nina’s panic elides with a flashback to twentysomething Leda’s (Jessie Buckley) frantic search for her daughter Bianca at a beach.

It’s a familiar language of buried secrets, sinister subtext and unspooling memories – the building blocks of suspense – but the landmines in The Lost Daughter aren’t the usual culprits of dark revelation: unspeakable trauma or abuse, evil spirits, suppressed desires, the ravages of capitalism or greed. Instead, the molten core of The Lost Daughter is one of our culture’s most enduring and least touchable taboos: the selfish, uncaring, “unnatural” mother – one who doesn’t shift easily to care-taking, who does not relish her role, who not only begrudges but resents her children.

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‘People said I didn’t have enough talent’: the rise of Italy’s graphic novel gonzo

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Michele Rech aka Zerocalcare’s book signings attract huge crowds and now he has a hit Netflix animated series inspired by his life

Michele Rech is uncomfortable with success. The shy 38-year-old comic book artist, who works from a modest apartment on the outskirts of Rome, does not use the word “fame” but refers instead to his rise to national prominence as a “thing” he struggles to manage.

In the art world, he is known as Zerocalcare and is the cartoonist’s equivalent of Hunter S Thompson. Rech’s graphic novels are a form of gonzo journalism – inspired by his own adventures as a protester on the frontlines of police violence in Italy, and in Syria, where he was embedded with Kurdish forces.

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Look away: why star-studded comet satire Don’t Look Up is a disaster | Charles Bramesco

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Adam McKay’s celeb-packed Netflix comedy aims to be a farcical warning of climate change but broad potshots and a smug superiority tanks his message

When persuading someone to change their mind on a major topic, what’s being said isn’t always quite as important as how it’s said. If a person feels attacked or disrespected or condescended to, they’ll turn off their brain and block out the most rational, correct arguments on principle alone. Homo sapiens are odd, emotional creatures, more amenable to a convincing pitch than poorly presented rightness. It’s why we vote for the guy we’d gladly have as a drinking buddy over the somewhat alienating candidates with a firmer grasp on the issues. It’s why we feel heartbreak when the worst person we know makes a great point.

Adam McKay’s new satire Don’t Look Up, a last-ditch effort to get the citizens of Earth to give a damn about the imminent end of days spurred by the climate crisis, appears to be at least somewhat aware of this defect in human nature. It’s all about the difficulty of compelling the disinterested to care, in this instance about a gargantuan comet hurtling toward the Earth on a collision course of imminent obliteration, an emphatic if rather ill-suited, metaphor. (Everyone’s blasé about global heating in part because it’s so gradual, because it isn’t a force of instant destruction with a due date in an immediate future we’ll all live to see.) Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence portray astronomers Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky, flummoxed to find that no one’s all that alarmed about the “planet-killer” they’ve discovered – not the grinning daytime cable-news dummies played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, not the White House led by Trump-styled president Meryl Streep and not the American people.

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Why it’s time to say goodbye to Tiger King

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Netflix’s continued obsession with the pandemic hit has brought a follow-up special, a second season and now a spin-off but enough is enough

To think of Tiger King is to immediately transport yourself to the heady days of lockdown 2020. Remember it? Remember how filled with artificial purpose we all were? We did Zoom quizzes with all our friends! We made banana bread! We clapped for frontline workers!

Looking back, it seems relatively clear that all those things were stupid. Nobody wants to spend more time on Zoom than they have to. Nobody likes banana bread. The clapping didn’t change anything. And as for Tiger King? With the benefit of hindsight, Christ, we chose the wrong show to obsess over. Looking back, Tiger King was grubby and exploitative. Once you’d crossed the “Are these people for real?” hurdle, you found yourself sitting through a carnival of monstrous behaviour. Tiger King was the documentary equivalent of that old Black Mirror episode: as fun as it sounds to watch someone have sex with a pig, at the end of the day you actually have to watch someone have sex with a pig.

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Adam McKay: ‘Leo sees Meryl as film royalty – he didn’t like seeing her with a lower back tattoo’

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After politics in Vice and finance in The Big Short, director McKay is taking on the climate crisis in his star-studded ‘freakout’ satire Don’t Look Up

Adam McKay calls it his “freakout trilogy”. Having tackled the 2008 financial crash and warmongering US vice president Dick Cheney in his previous two movies, The Big Short and Vice, McKay goes even bigger and bleaker with his latest, Don’t Look Up, in which two astronomers (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a giant comet headed for Earth, but struggle to get anyone to listen. It is an absurd but depressingly plausible disaster satire, somewhere between Dr Strangelove, Network, Deep Impact and Idiocracy, with an unbelievably stellar cast; also on board are Meryl Streep (as the US president), Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Mark Rylance, Jonah Hill and Ariana Grande. It has been quite the career trajectory for McKay, who started out in live improv and writing for Saturday Night Live, followed by a run of hit Will Ferrell comedies such as Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys. “The goal was to capture this moment,” says McKay of Don’t Look Up. “And this moment is a lot.”

Was there a particular event that inspired Don’t Look Up?
Somewhere in between The Big Short and Vice, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] panel and a bunch of other studies came out that just were so stark and so terrifying that I realised: “I have to do something addressing this.” So I wrote five different premises for movies, trying to find the best one. I had one that was a big, epic, kind of dystopian drama. I had another one that was a Twilight Zone/M Night [Shyamalan] sort of twisty thriller. I had a small character piece. And I was just trying to find a way into: how do we communicate how insane this moment is? So finally, I was having a conversation with my friend [journalist and Bernie Sanders adviser] David Sirota, and he offhandedly said something to the effect of: “It’s like the comet’s coming and no one cares.” And I thought: “Oh. I think that’s it.” I loved how simple it was. It’s not some layered, tricky Gordian knot of a premise. It’s a nice, big, wide open door we can all relate to.

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Hannah Gadsby – Body of Work: a joyful guide to blasting Netflix and messing with Christian bakers

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Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
The Australian comedian has opted for a feel-good show, but without any easy sentimentality

What better way to symbolise your favourable turn in fortune than with adorable bunnies, the sign of good luck? Comedian Hannah Gadsby has marked her return to the Sydney Opera House with four rabbits across the stage, though you will probably first notice the one in the Joan Sutherland theatre that functions as a lantern, a beacon of hope.

Of course, none of these rabbits are alive, which turns out to be apt, given the desecration of one unlucky bunny that hopped into the middle of the performer’s toxic relationship with an ex she struggled to shake off and another that emits a high-pitched squeal of terror as it crosses paths with Gadsby, her new wife and producer, Jenney Shamash, and their two dogs, Douglas and Jasper, on an outdoor stroll.

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‘It’s absolutely insane’: the US-based camp where Jews guarded Nazis

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Semi-animated Netflix documentary short reveals the secret story of the Jewish soldiers who watched over prisoners of war on US soil

Too vast in scope to be contained within war drama, the Holocaust movie constitutes an entire genre unto itself, collecting a potentially infinite number of tragedies great and small. The history of the 20th century’s most massive atrocity comes with thousands of footnotes now gradually expanded upon by media depicting the unsung courage and untold evil. Israeli documentary film-makers Daniel Sivan and Mor Loushy singled out one such extraordinary tale for their latest joint project, Netflix’s short film Camp Confidential, drawing attention to a highly covert military operation only recently released from behind redaction-marker bars. “The first thing is, when producers Benji and Jono Bergmann approached us with this and told us of the story, we didn’t believe it,” Sivan tells the Guardian. “It was just so out-there.”

The black-op facility tucked away in northern Virginia’s Fairfax county sounds like something out of a pulp paperback: Jewish soldiers, many of them refugees from the devastation in Europe, watched over Nazi prisoners of war in a surreally domestic setting. Known as PO Box 1142, it housed such notables as spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. But those in charge of the base were also tasked with maintaining a baseline quality of life for the inmates, leading to bizarre scenes such as a department store outing with former members of the Third Reich to purchase unmentionables for their wives. Bulldozed after the war and buried in secrecy until the National Parks Service unearthed some remnants in the early 2000s, the clandestine camp now doubles as a cautionary tale for modern Jews and a memorial for those who came before them.

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Netflix’s Emily in Paris to focus on diversity, says star Lily Collins

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Cliches aside, new hires and storylines add inclusivity to the menu in show’s series two

It has been criticised for trotting out cliches about France and the French and mocked for its idealised portrayal of Paris. But now the Netflix show Emily in Paris will focus on diversity and inclusion for its second series, according to its star, Lily Collins.

The actor, who stars as Emily and is also a producer on the series, said she had heard viewers’ concerns about the show, which first hit our screens last year, and efforts had been made to address them.

The second series of Emily in Paris is scheduled for release in December.

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