K-POPS! (EUA, 2024)
Original title: K-POPS!
Director: Anderson .Paak
Writer/Screenplay: Anderson .Paak and Khaila Amazan
Main cast: Anderson .Paak, Jee Young Han, Soul Rasheed, Jonnie Park, Cathy Shim, Kevin Woo, Will Jay and Emi Kim
Runtime: 114 minutes (1°54’)
Knowing the idea behind the film K-Pops! helps you understand the whole film. Anderson .Paak, the grandson of Koreans, was also married to Jae Lin, a Korean woman, and together they had two children. During the pandemic, they were all stuck at home and .Paak realized that his children listened to a lot of K-pop. He became interested in the genre, got to know a little about the music through his children, and developed a script that involved ancestry, family, and, of course, K-pop.
He then created BJ (Anderson .Paak), a middle-aged man who never matured and learned to work as a team with a band, and has had the same job as a drummer in a bar for decades. So, through a plan devised by a friend, he goes to South Korea to become a drummer for a successful show in the country, looking for a fresh start. What he didn't imagine was that, in the process, he would end up meeting a son he didn't know he had, Tae Young (Soul Rasheed), who is one of the contestants on the reality show he works on.
Although the film is well-intentioned and tells a light and relaxed story in the best 1980s style, but with the modern touch of globalization, there are some issues that could have remained in the 1980s that seem to be repeated on screen. These are structural issues of the theme and narrative that continue to perpetuate some very outdated ideas that no longer have space in today's society, despite still being present in reality, especially in relation to what fatherhood is. There’s an attempt to make the viewer trust the protagonist and his process of learning to be a father which ends up patting BJ on the head too much. It’s understood that the work is about his process of maturing, but it fails to give due value to the feelings of those around him.
In the film, this does not cause any surprise because it’s really very competent in telling its story. There’s a very classic structure in acts, which works, and all the people involved in the key departments are extremely competent and successful in their fields. All of this gives the work an extremely professional and correct ending, and it’s necessary to think a little beyond the end of the film to consider how it’s culturally rooted in a society that forgives men much more easily than women.
And the issue of bringing in the element of the influence of Korean culture on Americans in the present day is also carried out in a strange way, if we consider that it was conceived based on Soul Rasheed's taste for K-pop. This also ends up being reversed with BJ's trip to Seoul, where he talks about the American influence on Korean culture.
Although the overall experience of the film is enjoyable and entertaining, the aftertaste of American imperialism cannot overcome the barrier self-imposed by the proposal.
Translated by: Renata Torres
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