So, Kim Jee-woon’s new film, I SAW THE DEVIL, has gotten slapped with the prohibitive “restricted” rating by the Korea Media Ratings Board. In effect, it means the film cannot be shown in Korea (well, it can be shown, but only in a few special locations, so it is a de facto ban). Not a huge deal, though, as the filmmakers have another week to re-edit and get a more acceptable rating.
But it is annoying, not least because it has forced the producers to cancel all the premiere screenings that were going to be held later today (Thursday). As the film stars Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-shik, it has the potential to be one of the biggest movies of the year, so canceling the screenings is a pretty big inconvenience. Hopefully things will work out over the next few days.
Like a lot of Korean thrillers these days, DEVIL features a lot of ultra-violence. But apparently the eating-human-flesh thing was too much for the KMRB. As is normal for Korea’s soft and mushy censorship system, the reasoning is vague — “destroying human dignity” is how I think you would translate it. Lord forbid the standards were actually measurable in some way. If the KMRB had a less subjective ratings system, it could help avoid these sorts of embarrassing situations. Or, better yet, the KMRB could just stop treating Korean citizens like children and let people here judge for themselves what they want to watch.
(Note: I originally wrote a stronger post that was probably premature. So I took it down and put this one up instead. Will wait and see what the KMRB does before writing any more about this).
There’s also no discounting the possibility of extremely astute PR stunt. After all the crux of a good revenge tete-a-tete well told, is still about story, character development and performance over “how much” explicit, graphic depravity you show. It’s a slippery slope on road to “effective story-telling”, and that’s exactly how existing resentment against administration can be spun into public favor for an Event Film in the making/hyping (viz kneejerk reactions one can righteously indulge in to defend “freedom of expression”, esp with existing fondness for “top auteurs”.) Also, Kim is a “genre chameleon” tackling everything under the sun in the past hundred-plus years of film history. Grindhouse exploitation seems to be the menu choice this year – do those genres typically get the widest release unless it’s playful, tongue-in-cheek servings of eye-popping visuals and “film history/tropes kaleidoscope revisited” by Tarantino? Alternately, we may also chalk it up to the established “bigger” names holding onto their place vis-a-vis the encroaching Na Hong-jins, what with Chaser’s success “blurring” what’s permissible in “mainstream well made feature”. Finally, Good Bad Weird is still the most extensive and elaborately involving PR campaign yet seen in K-film history. It makes little sense for the PR gurus to suddenly hang up their shoes, no?
The PR tail is not wagging the movie dog, no. They might be trying to spin the restricted rating (for publicity or to pressure the KMRB to loosen their standards), but they did not plan this. It is too disruptive to the bulk of their publicity plans, and the movie’s PR team simply does not have that much power. Also, The Good The Bad The Weird was CJ, while I Saw the Devil is Showbox, so there is no continuity between the PR teams on those films.