Colin Farrell

2022 - 3 - 4

How Colin Farrell Mastered the Techno Dance-Off Moves for 'After Yang' (unknown)

The new sci-fi indie movie, 'After Yang,' kicks off with an exciting dance competition featuring Colin Farrell, as his character Jake, performing a ...

"I've learned to work with actors over the years to make them feel comfortable dancing and to take out the fear of dance," she says. And while there are dancing robots à la Ex Machina, which could function as a spiritual cousin to After Yang, Rowlson-Hall wanted the gestures to seem militaristic but not overly mechanical. "If the camera is the perspective of the screen that's reading this dance and judging these people, my idea was that, in order for some kind of scanner through these TVs to be able to know when people are out of the dance, I need to create a very two-dimensional dance, which you can see we're already doing in the era of Instagram," Rowlson-Hall says. "Some of the actors were very excited to take on the challenge, and others were like, 'Oh my god, I'm going to die,'" Rowlson-Hall jokes. "I thought it was fun to keep heightening the stakes, and also the imagery inside of it, so that you get a sense of the different personalities of the different families." He did a spirited salsa dance in Miami Vice, a listless slow dance in The Lobster, and a cowboy-hatted line dance before he was famous.

'After Yang,' with Colin Farrell, is a beautifully human glimpse of a posthuman world (unknown)

'After Yang,' the latest gem from the South Korean-born filmmaker Kogonada, is opening in theaters and on Showtime.

Another way of putting it is that “After Yang,” for all its restraint, is alive to the special power of actors. But as he demonstrated in “Columbus,” Kogonada has a gift for merging the meditative distance often associated with art cinema and the beats of an absorbing, character-driven narrative. (“After Yang” was shot in mostly rigid widescreen compositions by Benjamin Loeb; Kogonada served as his own editor.) There is something of Ozu’s restraint in the way this movie dramatizes a sad moment of change, a transformation that impacts a family not through noisy eruptions of melodrama but through small, almost imperceptible ripples of emotional disturbance. Some of the tenderest moments transpire between Yang and Mika, whose close bond suggests that a shared species can be less unifying than a common culture. The same is true of some movies, and “After Yang,” the second feature from the Korean American writer-director Kogonada (“Columbus”), is very much its own subtle, bittersweet and curiously intoxicating brew. The taste, certainly, but also the fullness of what that taste conveys: the leaves that were harvested and processed; the soil from which the plants sprang; the rain that watered the soil; the people who cultivated the soil and their entire culture, history and way of life.

Colin Farrell and Director Kogonada on ‘After Yang,’ Their Visionary Sci-Fi Drama (unknown)

Out in theaters and on Showtime March 4, the warm, unassuming film centers on a family whose resident “technobeing,” Yang—a companion for their adopted ...

Do you have any favorite teas?Farrell: I really enjoyed the oolong teas I had when I was in New York. Kogonada was kind enough to furnish me with a day spent with the owner of the Brooklyn tea shop we shot in, and we did a tea ceremony, and it was slow and patient and deliberate and fucking quiet and so beautiful. I’m the result of choices my parents made, and I understand their history more now, but it’s always going to be a part of what I’m wrestling with.“When I read the script, I got this sense that there was going to be nowhere to hide if we were going to tell this story honestly,” Farrell says. Both of my boys are adopted from Korea, and the minute I first saw my sons, I can’t explain it—I thought there would be some little obstacle, but, God, they just felt like my kids in a way that was so existential. Having seen Columbus, having felt how thoughtful and quiet and deliberate a filmmaker Kogonada is, I felt that After Yang was going to be an experience that was going to be an exposé of us all, as people and as actors. How was it to dial it back?Farrell: When I read the script, I got this sense that there was going to be nowhere to hide if we were going to tell this story honestly. So this film was about trying to navigate this construct of Asian-ness and trying to understand where I belong. We grabbed any opportunity to integrate plants, so that’s why there are plants in the tunnels and cars—there was a real desire for it to be like a city in a forest. My choreographer [Celia Rowlson-Hall] put it in the most lovely way, that this was like a pop of confetti at the beginning of the film, and everything else was like the confetti falling down to the ground.Colin Farrell: It was just really fun. It’s almost a judo-like feeling.Kogonada, you’ve talked about how the short story that the film is based on made you reflect on your Asian American identity and Asian-ness as a construct.Kogonada: I was in Korea last year, and I just thought, God, I struggle so much with feeling like I belong anywhere. And at the time, it was gutted, so we got to design it from scratch. And because so much of the movie happens in the home, there had to be something open and interesting about that architectural dynamic. And there’s a fascination with architecture that was also evident in Columbus.Kogonada: Production designer Alexandra Schaller and I discussed the future we wanted to put on screen.

Post cover — Image courtesy of "Den of Geek"

After Yang Review: A24 and Colin Farrell Robot Movie Will Make ... (Den of Geek)

The second feature from director Kogonada, After Yang, explores grief and memory in a sci-fi setting.

After Yang is both unsatisfying and cathartic at the same time, providing a poignant payoff to a story that leaves the viewer reaching out for more understanding. After Yang may actually be too suggestive sometimes, depriving us of some sort of context for this world and the events taking place in it. As Jake begins to realize Yang may be the glue holding his family together, and thereby just how incalculable his loss could be, he also discovers that Yang seemingly harbored an inner life and memories of his own.

Colin Farrell goes back to the future in director Koganada's dreamy sci-fi experiment 'After Yang' (unknown)

Movies about the future tend to come in one of two forms, aesthetically: Cold Apple Store (gleaming white surfaces, chilly existentialism) or Unhinged ...

If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.Turn off use of cookies for targeted advertising on this website. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and personalisation. If you do not allow these cookies then some or all of these services may not function properly.These cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. Within those constraints, Turner-Smith and particularly Farrell work to add subtext to all the things that seem to go unspoken between Jake and Kyra — their marriage, if not exactly strained, certainly doesn't seem to be thriving — and Min (The Umbrella Academy) hints at depths that Yang, amiable to the point of blandness, rarely betrays. Characters speak in a hushed, almost flat affect, as if not to wake a giant sleeping in the next room, and veteran actors like Clifton Collins Jr. (as an eager-to-please neighbor) and Sarita Choudhury (as a bio-scientist anxious to study Yang's secrets) aren't given much to work with, beyond a few brief expositional scenes (and God bless, that title-card choreography.) Koganada, who premiered the film at Cannes ahead of its simultaneous release in theaters and on Showtime March 4, reveals all this in careful, often elliptical layers; the science and sequence of things seems to hold less interest for him than the overarching mood of it all. Together they've scraped together enough money to buy their little girl, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), an AI "sibling" (Justin H. Min) who functions as both a nanny-companion and a sort of informal cultural attaché, affirming and exploring Mika's Asian heritage in ways her adoptive parents can't. Yang, a so-called techno-sapien or just "techno," looks and acts like any ordinary man, albeit one with exceptional patience and a seemingly endless well of what the family affectionately calls "Chinese fun facts."

Colin Farrell grapples with the loss of his android son (unknown)

"Tone poem" and "memory play" are two of the most overused terms when it comes to indie arthouse films, yet it's hard to think of better descriptors for ...

The platform gives fans of entertainment, news and sports an easy way to discover new content that is available completely free. Filmed entirely in "first person shooter" mode (i.e. from the perspective of the protagonist), this sci-fi shoot-‘em-up delivers a creative riff on action filmmaking with a gimmick it’s hard to believe someone hadn’t tried before. Hardcore Henry (2016): "Hardcore Henry" isn’t based on a video game, but it replicates the gaming experience more directly than any proper adaptation of the past two decades. The Fountain (2006): Auterist filmmaker Darren Aronofsky directs Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in this densely-packed, emotionally rich film, which chronicles "a man's thousand-year struggle to save the woman he loves as he embarks on three quests across three lives." Jake’s quest to have Yang fixed soon becomes both an external and internal journey towards deeper understanding of his technospaien son and how he viewed the world. In contrast to something like "Westworld," which imagines a deeply cynical future between man and machine, "After Yang" takes a more hopeful view.