Saw this at the London Film Festival, and the audience was laughing throughout the whole film. The film renders the hardship of making great artistic work into a deliciously funy and absurd rollercoaster. The plot revolves around a film director convinced that an additional 2 days of shooting can turn his film into a true masterpiece. The grandeur and delusion of his visions contrasts beautifully with the fanatic enthusiasm of one of the studio's younger producers, the self-obsessed and frail ego's of his actors and mostly the soap-opera, B-movie quality of the final outcome, which comes to life through black-and-white movie-within-a-movie scenes. All this is set against the backdrop of a heavily censored Korean film industry in the seventies, adding an additional layer of obstacles. Even though the level of chaos and length of the overall movie can sometimes stretch too far, the film keeps you hooked and curious to see whether we've been finally watching the making of crap or art, which must be what every film crew goes through on every film set. The final shot of the film is us as the audience looking out at an audience on screen, mirroring the movie-within-a-movie construct, and ends with a director in despair of not having made the one true masterpiece he had imagined. Luckily it gave us a very entertaining and smart film about the passion it really takes to make anything great, and the joy and despair of movie making.
