Parasite (new Bong Joon Ho movie)

I enjoyed this much more than Burning, which I didnt like very much tbh. Both heavy-handed allegories that arent really as deep or challenging as they first appear, but Parasite was at least more entertaining.

I don't think it's an allegory -- they're poor and they're smelly and they have no wifi!

also we're gonna burn down their greenhouses

Every once in a while a movie comes along I just know I'm going to love, so I somehow manage to avoid 100% of spoilers and reviews. This was one of those movies, which I've kept away from since its premiere. What a movie. I haven't seen "Joker" and likely won't ever, but this is the radical call to arms that movie (possibly) pretends to be.

Alternatively, this is the Korean "The People Under the Stairs."

watched Mother because of the favorable comments by Ulysses and others above. I liked it a lot and was surprised by the turn it takes in the last half hour. I still haven’t seen Memories of Murder and Parasite, but this is my favorite of the four Bong films I’ve seen

glad to hear!

damn this was extremely entertaining

can’t wait to see it again

can’t quite believe that house was a set - what an incredible piece of production design

Wow, it was? The basement part, that I can believe, but the yard and exteriors and stuff?

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/10/parasite-house-set-design-bong-joon-ho-1202185829

Holy shit. Between stuff like this, Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, we are clearly living in a golden age of elaborate production design.

can’t quite believe that house was a set - what an incredible piece of production design

and the half-basement and street outside was a set too! just amazing

another great interview with bong’s dp

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/parasite-cinematographer-hong-kyung-pyo-1202189824/

Bong Joon Ho's galaxy brain take on superhero movies. pic.twitter.com/vPjTMhYB9n

— The Film Stage 📽 (@TheFilmStage) November 19, 2019

i think this is his elliptical method of saying "i like comic books and the idea of comic book movies but not so much marvel"

OK, somebody get him a run of Bernie Mireault's The Jam.

damn cant believe he would torpedo his career like that, tragic

hee, that's kinda the perfect Bong property.
Also maybe Doop. Or Stig's Inferno.

that's hilarious

I was very intrigued by the trailer when I saw it before The Lighthouse. Had no idea it had won big at Cannes.

Finally saw this a couple weeks ago when it finally opened in my market at the local arthouse. Very very good. This may very well be the best film I've seen this year
And since then it's really spread via word of mouth I think. Lots of people talking about it in my circles IRL and on social media and starting to see articles in the mainstream media about it.

This film definitely has legs financially, too, which is impressive for a foreign (particularly a Korean) film. This time a month ago it was playing in ~30 theaters nationwide, bumped to ~400 at the start of November, currently at 620 locations; where it's pulled in a whopping $15 mil. That in and of itself is pretty impressive.

By comparison, in the recent indie flick world, The Lighthouse's wide release went to just shy of 1,000 theaters at its peak (made about $10 million domestic and unlikely to go much further). Of course, the breakout A24 hit of the year "Midsommar" had a HUGE promo push beforehand and opened in 2,700 theaters right out of the gate... hanging around bit by bit for about three months to gross about $27.4 in total domestically.

Would love to see this movie really cross over in the states commercially, and particularly, would be nice to see it get enough attention to make it a contender for stuff like the Oscars rather than the sort of boomer bait that usually sweeps.

Definitely a breath of fresh air in a year that, like no other, has been dominated by sequels, remakes, reboots, and other such cash-grabs of existing Marvel/Disney, etc. corporate properties clogging up screens.

Not that I'm inherently adverse to that stuff, but to be honest, most of the big flicks of late have been lacking creatively. It's always nice to walk into the theater and totally immerse yourself in a brand new set of characters/a different world, rather than "Oh, good this is yet another movie in the _____ franchise".

Went into this not knowing anything and with no familiarity with Bong Joon-Ho (I'm one of those "basically never see movies" people like crut). My favorite movie so far this year, out of like uh 5. It's unbelievable that someone can make a film like this feel cohesive - definitely need to see more of Bong's films

his more recent ones would not be described as cohesive, imo

Yeah, and tbf, the lack of cohesion of "The Host" - that is to say, its crazy tonal shifts from horror to family melodrama to comedy to satire and so on - I want to say was heralded at the time as one of its attributes. Which it is! As it is for "Parasite," too, except that "Parasite" is more, you know, cohesive.

Yeah I meant it more to say that it takes talent to make this at all cohesive, not that cohesiveness is the quality I am looking for. I think based on what y'all have said in the thread, I'll probably check out Memories of Murder or Mother next anyway

This was so much fun. I was cracking up.

Saw Memories of Murder tonight - excellent, possibly as good as Zodiac. Coincidentally, I was looking up the real-life cases after watching the movie, and it turns out the police finally solved them in the past few months!

Thinking about going to Atlanta in early December, hope it's still showing somewhere then.

This is the only thread in ilx history where I agree with Ulysses more than Brad Nelson

Good but found the second half idk ... somewhat arbitrary in parts despite its obvious straightforwardness ... not sure it delivered on the perfection of the initial premise. It wants to be get out but it’s more like black panther

But really it's like Us in some very obvious ways.

i mean this is also the kind of movie where i can understand people disagreeing with the second half. my main issue with this film is the last ten minutes or so felt a little loose, but i wonder if i'd feel that way rewatching it

also i have not seen memories of murder or mother so i do not feel like i'm speaking with the depth of knowledge ulysses has of the bong joon-ho oeuvre

It wants to be get out but it’s more like black panther

what

lol

Idk what’s so hard to understand about that ... it may not literally end w a community center in the slums but it’s vision ends up being similarly limited imo ... I honestly thought the film would take its initial premise to its logical conclusion and end w the family murdering and replacing the original one but instead his plan is to make enough money to buy the house his dad is trapped in ... kind of a depressing ending & not in the sense that it pointed out a depressing reality but that it created a depressing reality ...

Idk i thought lots of parts of this movie were good but it’s not “get out” or “gone girl” level as far as having the courage of its ideological convictions imo ... it also feels like it’s getting a substantial critical boost bc of proximity to the new socialist zeitgeist

Having the family kill/replace the other in the end would not have made it a better or "more courageous" movie, just a lazier and less resonant one.

but it's funny you should make a Get Out comparison 'cause this Outline piece ties it to Us as part of the "Revolutionary Gothic"

Interpreting Parasite and Us in tandem, regardless of their differences, helps us understand crucial and complicated elements they share. In both movies, the violence enacted by the subterranean specters is emotionally and morally fraught — exactly who deserves to suffer or die like this, and why? Is it doing anyone any good? Once we understand these movies as Revolutionary Gothic, it becomes clear that’s the wrong question. We’d have to start with: Why wouldn’t we expect spectacular violence to erupt from the hidden violence of forcing human beings underground? Why would we expect the ghosts we’ve created not to haunt us?

Such violence may not be successful in destroying the dominant order; it may not even be coherent. Parasite makes a series of intricate moves with its characters’ insurrectionary impulses: Geun-sae nurtures an unhinged love for the patriarch of the Park family, to whom he sends a series of increasingly deranged, wholly unreceived Morse code messages from his basement cell. When Geun-sae emerges from his dungeon, he genuflects to his idol Mr. Park, even as the circumstances that have led him to revere the man collapse all around him. In the end, it’s the father of the Kim family, Ki-taek, who stabs Mr. Park to death. There are many reasons that lead to this final murder, but the most immediate is the consuming rage Ki-taek feels when he sees that Mr. Park finds the body of Geun-sae — a man who died gasping out his respect for his perceived better — repulsive and stinky.

Here, violence is less a clean solution to oppression than a messy response to despair and desperation. The violence doesn’t even necessarily disrupt the hierarchies it responds to, as we see in Parasite’s catharsis-denying ending. Revolutionary Gothic is less about the inevitability of overthrow than the inevitability of rupture, of all that haunts us coming back for a reckoning. These stories don’t try to comfort us with victory; they unsettle us with the implications of ongoing defeat.

https://theoutline.com/post/8279/parasite-us-revolutionary-gothic?zd=1&zi=ojs7ot2u

Having the family kill/replace the other in the end would not have made it a better or "more courageous" movie, just a lazier and less resonant one.

― Simon H., Sunday, 24 November 2019 20:05 (fourteen minutes ago) link

Lol how is it lazier? Sincere question. There was never a moment I was really *surprised* by this film—despite not knowing the details of who was going to be stabbed or when from a symbolic POV it doesn’t matter; the entire story exists as documentation of a shared status quo that reaffirms its audiences understanding of the way things are rather than undermining or subverting those expectations

Coincidentally, I was looking up the real-life cases after watching the movie, and it turns out the police finally solved them in the past few months

It wants to be get out but it’s more like black panther

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Sunday, November 24, 2019 1:25 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

But really it's like Us in some very obvious ways.

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Sunday, November 24, 2019 1:28 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

get out > parasite >>>>>>>>> Us >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> black panther

Simon H otm - the Kims replacing the Parks would have been a terrible ending.

The scene where they’re reunited again at the end is a fantasy and they all know it - Ki Woo was never going to be rich enough to save his father. They’re all stuck in the same place they’ve always been because late stage capitalism and the dream of upward mobility is a lie. Maybe that’s not a surprising ending but it is the logical one to me and which also underscores Bong’s aversion from making heroes out of the plucky poor family against the evil rich people. There are no such heroes in (t)his world.

he was a little disappointed in that the film is no longer relevant in the same way. Then quickly buttressed that with "well, obviously it's good they solved the murders"

Lol I understand feeling slightly annoyed in his position, but c'mon. Anyway I read the murders are past the statute of limitations so the movie is still very relevant: in both the movie and irl, justice can't be served!

There was never a moment I was really *surprised* by this film—despite not knowing the details of who was going to be stabbed or when from a symbolic POV it doesn’t matter; the entire story exists as documentation of a shared status quo that reaffirms its audiences understanding of the way things are rather than undermining or subverting those expectations

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Sunday, November 24, 2019 8:25 PM (yesterday)

Oh, I forgot a third: Geun-sae watching his wife die on the floor of the basement a few yards away from him, unable to move closer or offer her any sort of comfort in her final moments. (Almost too on-the-nose, at least as regards the United States.)

But anyway the point I am trying to make is that if I want to be challenged by a discursive presentation of novel ideas – I'll read an essay.

A film can have the most banal ideas in the world (Post-industrial capitalism pits poor people against one another for the opportunity to catch rich people's crumbs in degrading service positions??? You don't say!) and still move me with the force of its vision.

I also found the movie struggling to hold itself together in the second half fwiw

Gratifyingly, though, the normal non-critic people whom I've talked to also acknowledge it doesn't quite work but are thrilled anyway. In that respect, it reminds me of the Get Out era two years ago when a mass audience responded to a film that didn't condescend to them because it dared to work in populist terms.

this was great. why not have a popular, accessible movie that addresses class issues? I think it's great that a foreign film is doing this well at the box office in the US as well.

the most banal ideas in the world (Post-industrial capitalism pits poor people against one another for the opportunity to catch rich people's crumbs in degrading service positions??? You don't say!)

shrug

I saw this tonight and was very impressed by it. It's hard to say I "loved" it bc it's not really a loveable film, but it was an intense experience, visually excellent, and an unusual mix of tones and styles (which I found to be a strength rather than weakness).