Parasite (new Bong Joon Ho movie)

no disagreement there, I can't stand Haneke

Outis, your response is interesting - it's funny tho, I feel like most of the negative reactions i've heard on the movie (which are not numerous obv) have been to do with finding the class analysis sledgehammer-y in the sense of "poor good, rich bad."

what's fascinating to me is how clearly it's the system which creates the poor/rich gulf that's evil here, and how we see the ways it infects people (parasitically) based on their relative class positions. so yeah, everyone is bad, but the ways they're bad and the kinds of harm they do are specific, and not symmetrical.

"poor good, rich bad."

dunno what movie these people watched tbh! Seemed very nuanced to me. The poors do some shitty things (get people fired, perpetuate fraud, struggle with/murder other poors), the rich do some shitty things (primarily acting snooty and entitled), but every character is given some shading to indicate that there is never much in the way of malice on anyone's part.

Uh, I would say there is a good amount of malice all the way around. The poor families are fully prepared to stomp on each other to get the opportunity to leech off of the rich family and the rich family, aside from the son who is really in his own hyper kid bubble, literally couldn't care less about the humanity or well-being of any of the people working for them; even the relationship between the poor son and rich daughter is shaded by the fact that she had the exact same relationship with the poor son's best friend and was obviously using her tutors as interchangeable relationship bots (which is partially due to the fecklessness of youth but also tied to the fact that she knows it's a temporary dalliance, while the guys in the tutor role are clearly looking at it as "this is my future wife whose inheritance will lift me into the social stratum where I naturally belong")

I didn't read any of that as malice so much as opportunism. There's no cruelty involved, the motive is never to hurt the other - it's to get them out of the way or use them to one's advantage.

Characters that are capable of making poor choices, wanting to do the right thing, being upset at the hand life has dealt them, and being inured to their own privilege. What a shallow cartoon this is!

which is a function of the class system and central to its design and hierarchies - decisions or actions that harm others are framed through the lens of self interest (something everybody is expected to identify with, no matter what their position), and not from an explicit desire to harm others. So when people suffer as a result there's this "don't blame me, I was just looking out for myself, just like you would've done!" excuse.

But up until the mayhem at the end, none of the characters are shown doing anything explicitly to hurt another just for the sake of hurting another.

xps

There's no cruelty involved

The poor family gets the driver fired and triggers a potentially-fatal allergic reaction in the housekeeper so they can take their jobs
The rich father has a protracted conversation with the rich mother about how much the poor father smells like a lower-class person
The poor family's reaction to discovering the old housekeeper's husband in the basement is to try to imprison him down there with his wife
Then there is the aforementioned "love affair" where both parties are blatantly and opportunistically using each other

I'm not sure how any of this goes by on screen and doesn't register to you as even the tiniest bit cruel and malicious.

The poor family gets the driver fired and triggers a potentially-fatal allergic reaction in the housekeeper so they can take their jobs means to an end
The rich father has a protracted conversation with the rich mother about how much the poor father smells like a lower-class person garden variety entitlement
The poor family's reaction to discovering the old housekeeper's husband in the basement is to try to imprison him down there with his wife again, means to an end. they're surprised and desperate
Then there is the aforementioned "love affair" where both parties are blatantly and opportunistically using each other yeah, idk if this counts as cruelty, this is kind of how a lot of relationships function sadly. It's not like there's rape or abuse involved.

My point is that you seem to be the one handwaving and making excuses for the bad behavior, not the movie. In fact, I'd argue that the violent escalation at the end is intended to highlight the passing cruelty everyone was slinging around up to that point of the movie.

xp plug-n-play Morbs' assertion that marriage is an economic institution and nothing at all more here

it's definitely bad behavior, I'm just saying the movie makes it believable and relatable! No one's portrayed as a sadist or a psychopath. Nor is the bad behavior limited to one side of the economic divide or the other.

Even the violence at the end - the audience has been led by the hand to understand what led up to that moment, that the characters that lash out snap out of grief and frustration and desperation. These are not Haneke's sociopaths from Funny Games or the upper class predators of "Society".

So... why does making it believable and relatable undercut the social commentary about class disparity? You are making an assertion and not really providing any argument beyond "because it does"

the class system clearly benefits the upper class and is explicitly designed to do so. A more polemical film would have emphasized this by painting a more traditional "poors good/rich bad" dichotomy. But as Doc Casino notes, ultimately the *system* is revealed as the true evil, rather than the people who are at the top of it. And the filmmakers were clearly not interested in a "eat the rich" sort of screed. Making everybody on either side of the divide believable and relatable means that no single group (apart from the Americans, who are implicated more by our absence and the use of English) comes out as deserving blame for the situation.

So in the sense that a class-conscious film involves motivating people to undo the class system... this doesn't really do that. There's no villain, there's no readily identifiable obstacle to be overcome, everyone's just kinda trapped.

just like real life

you could behead every capitalist and not end capitalism!

stop bumming me out!

I'll try to dig up some of the recent writing on the film I ran across but it's amazing how the one thing that's taken for granted by most audiences in these parts is how much American imperialism permeates the film's atmosphere and there's subtle and not-so-subtle commentary on it!

good piece linked by Ned upthread about that

you have nothing to lose but your heads

Understandable, he can't read.#Parasite #BestPicture #Bong2020 https://t.co/lNqGJkUrDP

— NEON (@neonrated) February 21, 2020

He hasn't seen Gone With The Wind (too long) but his Klan Dad rated it.

Gotta love how all of Trump's cultural reference points seem to be from the 1930s.

Anyway, it's interesting to see the breadth of reactions people have had to this movie. I for one did not find the Parks sympathetic at all. They're not cartoon villains, but they're clearly characterized as cluelessly entitled (the wife) or callously manipulative (the husband). The brilliant thing is that Bong makes the Kims sympathetic even though they're ruthless to the point of near-sociopathy. You want them to succeed, even though their success must be predicated on the dispossession of others.

this remains an exceptionally strange and bewildering timeline

Gotta love how all of Trump's cultural reference points seem to be from the 1930s.

Sunset Blvd (1950) mentioned last night...

about a lone megalomaniac who used to be big, and DOES get arrested when she shoots somebody near her swimming pool.

It's tempting to think about what Billy Wilder would say about him.

Caught this last night - in the cinema, which is a rare treat at the moment. I've seen a few Jong-Ho films so had a bunch of references but I'd managed to avoid any spoilers at all (apart from that it had a 'gory ending'). I loved it.

My initial feeling was that it was a caper film and that the Kims were veteran con artists: even with the pizza box shambles, there was something so slick about their performances that they must have done this, or something like it, before. It wasn't really until the visitation from the former housekeeper that it became apparent they were grifters and from there it all started to come apart. I did find the ending a little chaotic but I felt expertly corralled and was egging on the Kims and dungeon guy.

I keep thinking about the suseok and its grand metaphorical resonance. One way of thinking about it is as an avatar of the old ways; a remnant of real nature. Nature's only presence in the film is as a part of the grand architecture of the house - and is only experienced in a spectacular form, through the massive screen of the window. It seemed to be part of a grander narrative of capital supplanting and commodifying nature. Even the rain seemed allegorical and couldn't eradicate the 'real' of the suseok.

Anyway, ill-thought-through babble aside, what a film to win the Oscar.

the more i think about it, the less unlikely i find its oscar win to be--as a domestic drama of sorts that tragically boils over into violence, it doesn't feel like it's part of an unfamiliar prestige cinema mode beyond how stylized it is.

it's a pretty good movie. i wish it had more breathing room but my sense is that bong wants his movies to be sewn up pretty tight as far as what you're supposed to get out of them. there were some scenes in the back half of the middle that dragged. the epilogue stuff sucked if i'm being honest. but the characterizations were great and it was well-acted and well-observed.

I think it is astonishing that Parasite won the best picture oscar

I loved the epilogue! doom-laden and affecting. I don't quite get that you thought it needed to breathe more but also found it draggy

xp not sure I understand your point exactly, but I didn't think it was sewn up at all, beyond the initial premise it seemed chaotic and completely unpredictable to me

the dragging comment is just about pacing; it got a little slow at times. the breathing room comment is about ambiguity, of which this movie had none.

I've seen all of his movies since MoM and I really just do not think he cares for ambiguity whatsoever

went back, watched Mother and loved it, but haven't seen Memories of Murder yet

"parasite isn't political" is still the most mind-boggling stupid take i've read on this site in a while pic.twitter.com/cAvL9VSzL2

— 红色娘子军🌹 (@detachment_red) February 23, 2020

That second quote is kind of enlightening, actually

In terms of informing us about...certain sorts of minds

she admitted in the next tweet that she hadn't yet seen the movie.

I feel like she's infamously said other stupid shit though too, looking to see if it's the account I think it is.

Simon otm

Probably useless on an English language board, but I did a deep dive into the Korean film archive and made a list of ten films to see from Korean film history, with legal youtube-links to them all. Google translate might be your friend: https://pov.international/koreansk-film-er-mere-end-parasite-10-film-du-kan-finde-pa-youtube/?fbclid=IwAR3iwQpVQCmC1ZJZsXKV500BsYNhQHrskLW0A0Ih71cCS70aW-JAyZ52k6U

*sic voice* fbclid=IwAR3iwQpVQCmC1ZJZsXKV500BsYNhQHrskLW0A0Ih71cCS70aW-JAyZ52k6U

Outsourcing done right

who will be the first to quietly sneak in routing FROM text as a secret message

https://pov.international/koreansk-film-er-mere-end-parasite-10-film-du-kan-finde-pa-youtube/?fbclid=IhweAyRs3iicwiQkpnVoQwCymoCu1aZrJeZrseXaKdVi5n0g0tBhsiYsNbhaQbHarbsokoLeWy0bAa0bIahb7o1oceCy

I posted a few referrer links a while back in the hopes that sic would notice but he didn’t bite

the text was “sic is gonna love this” base64 encoded iirc

In Opinion@MaureenDowd writes, "It’s funny that Donald Trump doesn’t like a movie about con artists who invade an elegant house and wreak chaos. He should empathize with parasites."https://t.co/ceHxQIwbdI

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 23, 2020

what's fascinating to me is how clearly it's the system which creates the poor/rich gulf that's evil here, and how we see the ways it infects people (parasitically) based on their relative class positions. so yeah, everyone is bad, but the ways they're bad and the kinds of harm they do are specific, and not symmetrical.

― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, 19 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I think there would need to be a bit more work on part of the audience to go from this really effective dramatization of the hurt caused by inequality -- which is done in all sorts of ways: from the party you are invited to by the back door, to smells of clothing, the judgement of behaviour, all the microaggressions scattered along -- to a conclusion of systemic failure. Part of why this was so successful (though who could've predicted it would be as successful as this) was surely the humour (lots of laughter by the audience I was at throughout) and a deployment of a Carrie-like shock finale (although it wasn't the very ending of the film) to carry the audience around those tougher undercurrents.

It was rare to see something so successful where everyone is so unlikeable (this is very much dour Euro arthouse territory) (although the son turned out to be somewhat likeable with the scene in the gym showing a love for his father that is there right at the end in the letter).

“Unlikable characters” is a fake idea and banned.

So weird how people keep referring to the family in this as 'con artists' they are all clearly very good at the job they were hired to do. She's amazing with the kid, he turns corners incredibly smoothly and is nice, gentle company. The house is spotless.

I think the script cut a corner on showing how effortlessly good they were at everything they put their hand to (including the con artistry, of course)

The con part is in their credentials, which is simply a gatekeeping mechanism to keep undesirable people out

The dad frequently takes his eyes off the road while driving