Tag: Bong Joon-ho

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Never Seen It: Watching Parasite with Memphis Flyer Writer Julia Baker

Cho Yeo-jeong and Song Kang-ho in Parasite.

My mission as a film critic is to get people to watch more and better movies. For the Never Seen It column, I watch a classic film with an interesting Memphian who missed it the first time around. Julia Baker is the person who runs the We Recommend section here at the Memphis Flyer. She was so busy recommending stuff to the Bluff City, she missed Bong June Ho’s Palme d’Or and Best Picture winner. From quarantine in our respective homes, we watched Parasite together.

Before Parasite

Chris McCoy: Tell me what you know about Parasite.

Julia Baker: Before you came to me about watching this with you, I didn’t know much. I knew it was a Korean film, and that it did really well last year. It won a bunch of awards and everybody was talking about it. But for some reason, maybe because of the name, I thought it was a horror movie. Like, up until like a few minutes ago. When I read the description online, I found out that it’s, I guess, a comedy plus a thriller.

CM: I think it’s all of those things.

JB: Okay, so I wasn’t too far off.

CM: Anyway, just open your mind, because it’s weird.

JB: Okay

Nothing can wrong at this beautiful birthday party!

132 minutes later…

Chris McCoy: You, Julia Baker, are now a person who’s seen Parasite. What did you think?

Julia Baker: I had this realization, kind of in the plateau, where the man who’s been living in the basement was chasing the son, and the son didn’t think to pull off the neck wire. It kind of reminded me of a Korean version of Knives Out, with how ridiculous it was.

CM: I can see that. I hadn’t really thought of it in in those kind of terms. But the plot’s all twisty, and everybody’s out to get everybody.

JB: It was called Parasite, not only because the poor family members conning them were parasites, but also the man living in the basement and his wife, the old housekeeper, they were parasites, too. They were kind of feeding off that rich family.

CM: But then, also, the rich people are parasites as well. That’s the classic communist propaganda line — the rich are parasites on the working class. The rich people are feeding off of the misery of all the poor people.

JB: That sounds like a symbiotic relationship

Park So-dam and Choi Woo-shik search for free wifi in the bathroom of their basement apartment.

CM: Basically. I think the title has layers of meaning in it. Because you’re right, they’re all parasites. The guy in the basement is the parasite off of the rich family. But you know it also goes the other way around, too. Why is this guy so desperate that he has to live in the basement? Why does he think this is a good existence?

JB: Better than getting attacked by his creditors, I guess. Interesting. Then, right before everything went down, you see the landscape rock sinking in the water. I thought that was interesting. I’m guessing this was on purpose, but you know you see you notice that the guy in the basement is doing Morse code with the lights on the stairwell And then they [The Kim family] go back to their basement apartment, and their lights are flickering. I’d like to know if the lights actually say something.

CM: I noticed that this time too, because it’s a visual echo. It’s so striking And then the little boy signals his parents with light in that same room. You know, he shined a light at them when he’s outside in the teepee, and they’re inside watching him.

Never Seen It: Watching Parasite with Memphis Flyer Writer Julia Baker

CM: So, was it what you had expected?

JB: Um, no. Like I told you earlier, I just thought Parasite sounded like a horror movie. I was expecting some kind of parasitic monsters to coming crawling out of the basement. I definitely didn’t expect it to be kind of more on the thriller side, and kind of clever.

CM: Did it feel like a horror movie at any point to you?

JB: Yeah, when they have the the sex scene in front of the whole family. That was kind of horrific … When I think of horror, I think of ghosts and monsters and things like that. But in this movie, the people were the monsters.

CM: You know, when the kid sees the guy in the basement, he thinks he’s a ghost. I love that shot of the man just peeking the top of his head above the stairway. And I noticed this time that when she starts to tell the story, the birthday cake appears is in the room. There’s not a clear cut between, this is the present, and this is the flash-back. The past kind of creeps in. It’s not exactly uncomfortable to watch, but it’s like he’s always just on the border, making you feel not at ease.

JB: I guess he somehow knew when the when the husband came into the house and was walking up the stairwell, so he would turn the lights on for him?

CM: Yes, exactly. You assume it’s some sort of automatic system, but actually it’s just invisible labor. There’s this guy who’s taking it as his job to to greet the master of the house whenever he comes. He kind of worships Mister Park.

JB: Yeah, I know! He absolutely worships him!

The Kim family tries to eek out a living folding pizza boxes.

CM: How did it feel watching this movie in this particular moment?

JB: I didn’t think about it that way, but that that is an interesting way of looking at it. We’re not completely locked in like the main in the basement, but being in quarantine, we almost feel like that … locked in. We can go outside, and I guess he gets to go outside sometimes, too. But you know, it is kind of similar.

CM: I really felt that this time. The whole bit with the TB, how they get the old housekeeper fired by claiming she’s diseased, wow, that lands completely differently.

The Kim family yukking it up as they hijack the Park family home.

CM: So, did you like it?

JB: I did! I like it when movies can kind of incorporate comedy with a level of seriousness. And I feel like that’s kind of where movies are going these days. You can see it with the superhero films. They used to be so serious, and now they have humor in them. It just makes it more interesting.

CM: If a movie is all one emotion anymore, it really gets me down. I love a story that’s going to like have ups and downs, and filmmakers who have the ability to make you feel all kinds of different emotions. I think all too often, young filmmakers get really focused on, like, I’m going to have one emotion, and it’s going to be really intense through the whole thing. I think being able to modulate, to fine-tune your mood like Bong Joon Ho does in Parasite is the sign of a true master.

Jung Hyeon-jun as Park Da-song

JB: It kind of got you comfortable. I think probably three quarters of the movie was comedy. There’s a level of seriousness, but it was more comedy than anything. Then it got really serious. It kind of got your attention and got you laughing, then got you wrapped up in it. You got to understand all of the characters, where they were coming from. Although I kind of got to where I hated the rich family, Because the guy turned up his nose to the poor people, and it was all kinds of wrong to bring in the Native American thing. They’re just pretty much insensitive to everybody around them who’s not in their immediate family.

CM: And that’s what that’s what drives Mr. Kim over the edge at the end. He’s trying to save his daughter’s life, and the rich guy only wants his car keys.

JB: He’s disgusted by the smell of them, too.

CM: Would you recommend this movie to somebody?

JB: I would. Definitely.

Never Seen It: Watching Parasite with Memphis Flyer Writer Julia Baker (2)

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Parasite Returns, The Harder They Come, and After Parkland In Theaters This Week

Jimmy Cliff as Ivanhoe Martin in The Harder They Come

It’s a gloomy week in February, but there’s lots to see on the big screen in Memphis.

Tonight the International Jewish Film Festival continues with Crescendo, a German-Israeli production about a conductor (Peter Simonischek) tasked with creating an orchestra of Israeli and Palanstinian players for a peace concert. The film starts at 7 p.m. tonight at Malco Ridgeway.

Parasite Returns, The Harder They Come, and After Parkland In Theaters This Week (2)

On Wednesday, Feb. 12, Indie Memphis is bringing the one-night-only national screening of After Parkland to Malco Powerhouse. The documentary was made by ABC producers Emily Taguchi and Jake Lefferman, who rushed to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in the wake of the 2018 mass shooting that killed 17 students. Their cameras watched as student survivors David Hogg and others launched a national movement gun control movement. Wednesday’s coordinated national screenings mark a day of action to commemorate the second anniversary of the massacre. Tickets are available at the Indie Memphis website.

Parasite Returns, The Harder They Come, and After Parkland In Theaters This Week (3)

On Thursday, Feb. 14, Crosstown Arthouse presents one of the greatest music films of all time at the Crosstown Theater. Jamaica in 1971 was a pressure cooker of sound, with reggae, ska, and rock steady tracks pouring out of a hardscrabble independent studio scene that would look familiar to Memphians.

All that musical genius came to a head with The Harder They Come, which introduced the world to reggae and made Jimmy Cliff the music’s first international breakout star. This is a low-budget indie film before such a thing had a name.

Since director Perry Henzell and company couldn’t afford sets, they took the streets and shot guerilla style. The resulting inadvertent documentary footage of Jamaica is worth the price of admission alone. The plot is also ahead of its time—think Boyz n The Hood with a patois. The incredible soundtrack includes Cliff’s titular mega-hit and Toots and the Maytal’s immortal “Pressure Drop”. The show starts at 7:30 p.m., $5 at the door.

Parasite Returns, The Harder They Come, and After Parkland In Theaters This Week (3)

Did you wake up feeling strange on Monday? That’s because the night before, the best film of 2019 (which was, by the way, a great year for quality films) actually won Best Picture at the Academy Awards! On Friday, Feb. 14, celebrate Valentine’s Day by taking your boo to Bong Joon-Ho’s brutal satire of late-stage capitalism, Parasite. This one is a must-see.

Parasite Returns, The Harder They Come, and After Parkland In Theaters This Week (4)

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Who Will Win at the Academy Awards? The Flyer’s Critic Has No Idea.

I have a confession to make: I’m not very good at the Academy Awards.

Oscar night is a big deal in the Hocking-McCoy household. We clear off the coffee table and put out a big spread of sushi. We parse each acceptance speech down to the syllable level. We print out ballots and compete to see who gets the most categories right. The prize for the winner is bragging rights for the year.

I can’t remember the last time I held bragging rights. Have I ever bested Commercial Appeal writer John Beifuss in his annual “Beat Beifuss” competition? I got close once.

You’d think that someone who reads about, watches, and occasionally makes movies for a living would be better at predicting Oscar winners. But, it turns out, my tastes rarely match the outcome of the Oscar voters’ poll. I’ve tried voting strategically, making my choices based on the conventional wisdom in the trades and among critics with bigger circulation than me. I’ve also tried voting my conscience, picking the ones I thought should win and letting the chips fall where they may. Neither method seems to work.

This is, of course, very similar to the choice voters face in the Democratic primaries. Do you vote your conscience or do you vote for the candidate you think has the best chance to beat Trump? Let my experience be a lesson to you. You simply don’t have enough information to vote strategically, so use the system the way it was designed to be used and just vote for the candidate you think will do the best job.

My Oscar ineptitude is one of the reasons I usually don’t do a preview pick-’em column. But the voices of my writing teachers are in my head saying, “People love it when you make yourself vulnerable.” So here goes: my picks for the 2020 Academy Awards.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is the only truly great part of that film, but Adam Driver’s clueless art-dad Charlie in Marriage Story is the year’s best naturalistic performance. I’m going with Driver.

Supporting Actor: Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers better than anyone else could have in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but Brad Pitt elevates Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood to greatness. Plus, his T-shirt clearly says “CHAMPION.” Pitt is it.

Little Women could clean up in multiple categories.

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: This is the hardest category for me. Cynthia Erivo’s Harriet Tubman is close to perfect. Scarlett Johansson is Adam Driver’s equal in Marriage Story. I’m going with Saoirse Ronan as Jo in Little Women.

Best Supporting Actress is a little easier. It’s down to Laura Dern as a divorce lawyer in Marriage Story and Florence Pugh as Amy in Little Women. I think Pugh nudges Dern.

Missing Link

Best Animated Feature: I desperately want Missing Link to win. The stop-motion wizards at Laika have been killing it for a decade, and this is their year for recognition!

For Cinematography, it’s Roger Deakins in a walk. 1917 is a next-level achievement. This is the only Oscar that film deserves.

For Costume Design, Jacqueline Durran for Little Women barely beats Arianne Phillips for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Excellent work by both women.

Best Documentary Feature is Honeyland, an environmental fable masquerading as a character study. Highly recommended.

Any other year, Achievement in Film Editing would be Thelma Schoonmaker’s for the taking, but The Irishman is more than three hours long. Jinmo Yang’s work on Parasite should carry the day.

Honeyland makes a strong case for Best International Feature, but I’ve got to go with Parasite.

I’m going to take a pass on makeup because I haven’t seen two of the nominees. Best Original Song is “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin from the underrated Rocketman. Original Score should and probably will go to John Williams for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, so he can retire a legend. Go ahead and give Skywalker Best Visual Effects, too. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood‘s 1969 mixtape should take home the two sound awards, as well as Production Design.

Greta Gerwig’s tear-up-the-floorboards reimagining of Little Women deserves the Adapted Screenplay statue. I’m giving the Original Screenplay to Knives Out … probably because I’m giving everything else to Parasite.

Best Director goes to Bong Joon Ho. I was willing to give it to Quentin Tarantino, but then I found out that the Parasite house was a set with CGI background, and I was shook. Masterful execution is what this category is all about.

Best Picture has to be Parasite. This was a very good year for movies. Little Women, Marriage Story, and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are all worthy films. But Parasite captures the spirit of 2019, and it deserves the biggest prize of all.

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Film Features Film/TV

2019: The Year in Film

The year 2019 will go down in history as a watershed. Avengers: Endgame made $357 million on its opening weekend, which was not only the biggest take for any film in history, but also the most profitable three days in the history of the American theater industry. It was the year that the industry consolidation entered its endgame, with Disney buying 20th Century Fox and cornering more than 40 percent of the market. Beyond the extruded superhero film-type product, it turned out to be a fantastic year for smaller films with something to say. Here’s my list of the best of a year for the history books.

Worst Picture: Echo in the Canyon Confession: I decided life is too short to watch The Angry Birds Movie 2, so Echo in the Canyon is probably not the worst film released in 2019 — just the worst one I saw. Laurel Canyon was brimming over with creativity in the 1960s and 1970s, with everyone from Frank Zappa to the Eagles living in close, creative quarters. How did this happen? What does it say about the creative process? Jakob Dylan’s excruciatingly dull vanity documentary answers none of those questions. The best/worst moment is when Dylan The Lesser argues with Brian Wilson about the key of a song Wilson wrote.

‘Soul Man’

Best Memphis Film(s): Hometowner Shorts I’ve been competing in and covering the Indie Memphis Hometowner Shorts competition for the better part of two decades, and this year was the strongest field ever. Kyle Taubken’s “Soul Man” won the jury prize in a stacked field that included career-best work by directors Morgan Jon Fox, Kevin Brooks, Abby Myers, Christian Walker, Alexandra Ashley, Joshua Cannon, Daniel Farrell, Nathan Ross Murphy, and Jamey Hatley. The future of Memphis filmmaking is bright.

Apollo 11

Best Documentary: Apollo 11 There was no better use of an IMAX screen this year than Todd Douglas Miller’s direct cinema take on the first moon landing. Pieced together from NASA’s peerless archival collection and contemporary news broadcasts, Apollo 11 is a unique, visceral adventure.

Amazing Grace LLC

Amazing Grace

Best Music: Amazing Grace The year’s other direct cinema triumph is this long-awaited reconstruction of Aretha Franklin’s finest hour. The recording of her 1972 gospel album was filmed (badly) by director Sydney Pollack, but the reconstruction by producer Alan Elliott made a virtue of the technical flaws to highlight one of the greatest performances in the history of American music.

King Ghidorah, Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: King Ghidorah, Godzilla: King of the Monsters Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a tasty treat for megafauna fetishists. Godzilla, the Cary Grant of kaiju, looked dashing, but he was upstaged by his three-headed arch enemy. King Ghidorah, aka Monster Zero, whose pronoun preference is presumably “they,” is magnificently menacing, but versatile enough do a little comedy schtick while pulverizing Boston.

Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore

Slickest Picture: Dolemite Is My Name Eddie Murphy’s comeback picture is also Memphis director Craig Brewer’s best film since The Poor & Hungry. Murphy pours himself into the role of Rudy Ray Moore, the comedian who transformed himself into a blaxploitation hero. The excellent script by Ed Wood scribes Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski hums along to music by Memphian Scott Bomar. Don’t miss the cameo by Bobby Rush!

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

MVP: Brad Pitt Every performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is great, but Brad Pitt pulls the movie together as aging stuntman Cliff Booth. It was a performance made even more remarkable by the fact that he single-handedly saved Ad Astra from being a drudge. In 2019, Pitt proved he’s a character actor stuck in a movie star’s body.

Beanie Felstien as Molly and Kaitlyn Dever as Amy in Booksmart

Miss Congeniality: Booksmart I unabashedly loved every minute of Olivia Wilde’s teenage comedy tour de force. Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are a comedy team of your dreams, and Billie Lourd’s Spicoli impression deserves a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Booksmart is a cult classic in the making.

Chris Evans in Knives Out.

Best Screenplay: Knives Out In a bizarre twist worthy of Rian Johnson’s sidewinder of a screenplay, Knives Out may end up being remembered for memes of Chris Evans looking snuggly in a cable knit sweater. The writer/director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi dives into Agatha Christie mysteries and takes an all-star cast with him. They don’t make ’em like Knives Out anymore, but they should.

Lupita Nyong’o in Us

Best Performance: Lupita Nyong’o, Us If Jordan Peele is our new Hitchcock, Get Out is his Rear Window, an intensely focused and controlled genre piece. Us is his Vertigo, a more complex work where the artist is discovering along with the audience. Lupita Nyong’o’s dueling performances as both the PTSD-plagued soccer mom Adelaide and her sinister doppleganger Red is one for the ages.

Parasite

Best Picture: Parasite Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winner absolutely refuses to go the way you think it’s going to go. There was no better expression of the paranoid schizophrenic mood of 2019 than this black comedy from Korea about a family of grifters who infiltrate a wealthy family, only to find they’re not the only ones with secrets. It was a stiff competition, but Parasite emerges as the best of the year.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Parasite

Choi Woo-shik, Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin, and Park So-dam as a family of grifters in Parasite.

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite premiered in Memphis while I was neck deep in watching films for the Indie Memphis Film Festival, so I’m just now getting around to seeing it. All I have to say is, Ho-ly crap.

Actually, that’s not all I have to say. I’ll have to watch it again to be sure, but I think Parasite may be a perfect film. There’s not a shot out of place or that is redundant, not a false character moment, not a bad or even mediocre performance, and not a wasted line. It’s a riveting — often jarring — watch from beginning to end, and it couldn’t be more relevant to the moment we live in.

Earlier this year, the director, who is probably best known in America for Snowpiercer, became the first Korean to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. He expressed surprise that the film, which he thought was about a very specific dynamic in Korean culture, had been so universally well-received. But the story it tells, as outlandish as it is, is instantly relatable to anyone living in a capitalist society.

The protagonists of the story are the Kim family, who live a marginal existence scraping by in a Seoul semi-basement apartment. Their introduction, when they learn that their upstairs neighbor has discovered that they have been leeching off his wifi and password protected it, is a textbook of efficient and effective characterization. When son Ki-woo’s (Choi Woo-shik) well-meaning friend Min-hyuk (Park Seo-joon) gifts the family a “scholar’s rock,” a Korean keepsake said to bring wealth to the household, their fortunes seem to turn around. First, Ki-woo gets an opportunity to become an English tutor to the cute teenage daughter of the wealthy Park family, Da-hye (Jung Ji-so). But first, he has to get his sister Ki-Jeong (Park So-dam, first among equals in this amazing cast) to forge his college credentials. The pair of siblings camping out in a crowded Seoul cyber-cafe, while Ki-Jeong “earns her degree in document forging,” is one of those perfectly constructed, fleeting shots that stuck with me long after the film was over.

Searching for free wi-fi in the Kim family bathroom.

Once Ki-woo is ensconced in the wealthy Park household, he sets about setting up his family by driving off their hired help, and replacing them with Kims. First is Ki-Jeong, who effortlessly scams the young, anxiety-ridden mother Yeong-gyo (Choi Yeong-gyo, using her real name for the part) into believing she’s an art therapist for their disturbed young son Da-song (Jung Hyun-joon). Then father Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) muscles his way in as a driver. Finally, mother Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) displaces the elderly housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun). The money is rolling in for the Kims, and they have all the food and booze they can steal from the Parks’ overflowing larders. But Moon-gwang has a secret that goes beyond any scam the Kims are pulling, and deception after deception starts piling up as the two lower-class families are pitted against each other in an effort to keep getting paid for menial tasks.

I feel like I’ve already given away too much of the plot of Parasite, but the film’s second half goes completely off the rails in constantly surprising ways. The most striking thing about Bong Joon-ho’s vision of class is that wealth completely fails to bring pleasure to the wealthy, and poverty is all about avoiding pain for the Kims. Parasite is at once a comedy and a Hitchcockian thriller with shades of mid-period Cohen Bros thrown in for good ironic measure. This film is a solid must-see for anyone who values quality filmmaking with something to say.

Parasite