South Korea – Memphis Flyer

I generally don’t get too bent out of shape about the Academy Awards. I guess my attitude comes from a lifetime of disappointment stemming from the fact that Oscar voters don’t like the same things I like. Academy Awards nominations and wins are best viewed as conversation starters, not any objective (whatever that means) measure of the best films of the year.

Having said that, Past Lives was ROBBED! Yes, I’m YELLING ABOUT IT!

Maybe it seems strange to be crying — no, YELLING foul about such a quiet film that has been lavished with accolades. Yes, it is nominated for Best Picture, and writer/director Celine Song was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Both of these nominations are well deserved. But Past Lives deserved more.

The film opens in millennial Seoul, South Korea. Na Young and Hae Sung (played as children by Seung Ah Moon and Seung Min Yim, respectively) are middle-school classmates. Just as they move from fast friends to puppy love, they are separated when Na Young’s family immigrates to Toronto, Canada.

Twelve years pass. Na Young has Westernized her name to Nora Moon, and is now played by Greta Lee. She has moved to New York City for her education and to pursue a career as a playwright. Hae Sung (now played by Teo Yoo) is finishing up his hitch in the South Korean military and trying to figure out what to do with his life. Hae Sung does some internet searches for Na Young, but since he’s unaware of her name change, they come up empty. He puts out an open call for help in reconnecting with his long lost not-quite-girlfriend via Facebook, and word gets back to now-Nora via the Korean diaspora. It seems she has never stopped thinking about him, either.

From opposite sides of the world, they reconnect on period-appropriate video conferencing app Skype. (Song may be the first director to induce nostalgia with Skype’s “boodle-oodle-oodle-oop” incoming call alert sound, but she probably won’t be the last.) It’s these conversations where Teo Yoo and Greta Lee shine. They’re subtle, quiet, and totally relatable. Nora and Hae Sung are hesitant at first. They’re happy to see each other, for sure, but also feeling each other out. Emotions are complicated on both sides. A lot can change in 12 years, especially when that time period is half a lifetime. They become each other’s comfort, something to run to after a hard day. But the distance between them seems unbridgeable. Eventually, Nora breaks it off, saying she wants to devote herself to her career by taking a slot at a prestigious writer’s retreat, while Hae Sung goes to China for language lessons. The first person Nora meets at the writer’s retreat is Arthur (John Magaro), a fellow writer, and they immediately hit it off.

Then, 12 more years pass. Now Nora and Arthur are married and living in New York City, both with reasonably successful careers, but no children. Out of the blue, Nora gets a message from Hae Sung. He’s going to be in New York on business and was wondering if they could finally get together and see each other in real life for the first time since Seoul. Nora accepts, but when they finally do lay eyes on each other, things become a lot more fraught and complex than either one of them ever imagined.

Lee, who has been low-key brilliant in Russian Doll and What We Do in the Shadows, absolutely deserved a Best Actress nomination for her work as Nora. She juggles conflicting motivations and feelings with remarkable subtlety — which is perhaps a strike against her with an Academy that tends to equate good acting with MORE acting.

The same with Teo Yoo. In lesser hands, Hae Sung would have been a whiny loser or a John Cusack-ian perfect (yet kinda toxic) boyfriend. Instead, he’s a successful, otherwise well-adjusted guy who is following a deep impulse he doesn’t fully understand. And while we’re at it, John Magaro could have easily come off with a Best Supporting Actor nomination as the long suffering Arthur.

Maybe if it had been released in 2024, Past Lives would have gone on to a big Oscar sweep. But 2023 was the best year for film in recent memory, so the competition is crowded with worthy nominees. Even the ones I would have swapped out for Past Lives (I’m looking at you, Maestro) are still well-made and enjoyable films. Just like the star-crossed lovers it portrays, there’s an alternate world where things worked out better for Past Lives.

Past Lives
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The first sporting event ever broadcast on television was the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The Olympic movement was four decades old at that point, but, for better or worse, it came of age with the birth of television.

In 2018, the television medium is in a state of flux. The moving pictures on the screen are better than ever, but online streaming is changing the audience’s taste and expectations. Live sports is supposedly what the traditional TV delivery system does best. It’s the strongest argument for the continued existence of the networks and the pay cable system. NBC long ago won the rights to broadcast the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, and its parent company Comcast, which hold the lion’s share of the Memphis broadband duopoly, intends to make the most of the situation. In my case, that meant relentlessly pushing me to send in my old box and take up their new X1 system.

Now, if you’re going to be making the case that your rent-seeking business model is still viable in the Netflix age, your best first move is to deliver a working product. After a promised $50 drop in my monthly rate finally cajoled me into plunging into the hell dimension of frustration and inconvenience that is dealing with Comcast, I ordered the new box on the Xfinity website. Surely, in our current age of techo-wizardry, the city’s largest communications company could deliver a working product to me. After all, my Apple TV was streaming content into my eyeballs only minutes after I hooked it up, and it’s much more complex than a cable set top box. If Comcast is shipping product, they’ve got this stuff nailed down, right?

I was so wrong. It took five days to get my new box up and running. I spoke to no less than six Comcast techs on the phone and two on Twitter. Day of this seamless process was Super Bowl Sunday, so I missed the big game. Finally, a tech came out to my house and got it running. I asked him why none of the eight people Comcast had put me in contact with had been able to fix the problems. He shrugged, “I guess they didn’t know what they were doing.”

Fortunately, two days later, the South Korean organizers of the PyeongChange Olympics proved that they did know what they were doing. The opening ceremonies came off very smoothly on television, despite the fact that there was an ongoing cyberattack of probable Russian origin trying to derail the festivities.

The games are one of the few moments when the entire world comes together, so there’s always a geopolitical angle to proceedings. This year’s two biggest stories are the Russian team’s banning for a systemic doping program and North and South Korea fielding a unified team. The Russian athletes who could pass drug tests are competing under the Olympic flag, even though the team’s banning was the likely motive behind the cyberattack. As for the two Koreas, they certainly didn’t seem like a people staring down the possibility of a catastrophic war, no matter how Vice President Pence was there to spin it. Maybe you can count that as a win for the Olympic ideal.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I like the Olympics. Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with the way the Olympics are handled and presented in 2018. But there are problems with every human organization and endeavor in 2018. At least someone is taking the Olympic truce seriously. The comity and good sportsman- (sportsperson?) ship of the games seems to be in full effect, temporarily, at least, overcoming the darkness and horror all around us.

As a TV spectacle, this year’s games have already exceeded the glum, vaguely scary 2014 Sochi games. The organizers have fought gusty winds and extreme cold, but the artificial snow has been groomed to perfection, and the competitions have been very well administered. NBC seems to have taken the criticism of the last couple of games to heart, and their coverage is much improved. The commentary is more thoughtful and informative and, crucially, seems to lack the urge to keep talking even when they have nothing to say, with a couple of exceptions such as the women’s snowboarding competition, which was plagued by a chatty announcer as well as a high winds, and downhill skier-turned announcer Bode Miller’s thoughtless comment that a female competitor’s recent struggles were the result of her getting married.

Visually, the games have never looked better. The 4K video brings out incredible detail and contrast in the often washed out white snowy environment. The use of drones has been exceptionally well handled, bringing cross country skiing and the halfpipe snowboarding events new perspectives that add to the depth of viewers’ experience.

With everything going so well, it was immensely jarring when the coverage was interrupted yesterday afternoon with breaking news reports on the latest mass gun slaughter in America, this time in a Florida high school. That night, as victors dedicated their performances to the victims, it felt like the spell had been broken. The Olympic ideal, it seems, is no match for the harshness of American reality.