Parasite (new Bong Joon Ho movie)

Kinda surprised there's no thread for this considering the director, that it won the Palme, getting considerable buzz, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isOGD_7hNIY

Anyway, saw it last night and it absolutely floored me. It's pretty much the movie that I wanted Us to be.

Is it too early to discuss the ending

yes

great movie, his best since MoM

high praise indeed, can't wait to see this.

Simon, how can I discuss the ending with you

lol let's just wait a couple months

yeah this was awesome and best enjoyed if you didn't know anything about it beforehand imo.

no spoilers, but while I thought the whole cast were uniformly good, Park So-Dam was particularly great as Ki Jung/Jessica.

the sheer level of craft on display in like every second of this thing just puts so, so much other shit to shame, even if there's some stuff near the end that faltered a teensy bit for me

even the "eccentric" ending that you aren't allowed to talk about wasn't enough to undo how fine this movie was. Best Bong Joon Ho since The Host.

It was actually the climax I took slight exception to; felt less inventive than the rest of the movie

there are a few things I didn't like about the last act, but just minor quibbles really, after seeing a totally ace director back on his game after making dross like Snowpiercer and that awful tv movie, I'm not going to criticise them.

Good interview/profile of Bong Joon-Ho: https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/bong-joon-ho-parasite.html

I totally agree with "Best Bong Joon Ho since The Host" but that's not much of a bar to rise to. This was good! It was not great.

Finding out that Bong storyboards the shit out of his films and then gives the actors the storyboards as scripts explained a lot to me. He's filming comic books i think and there's nothing wrong with that. Some of those shots (the "ghost" surprising the child rising from the downstairs in particular) feel indelible for it.

OK, it's out this weekend in most of North America. Let's go

Anyway, saw it last night and it absolutely floored me. It's pretty much the movie that I wanted Us to be.

otm. I didn't think it was a masterpiece, but close. pacing felt off in the finale, feel like some momentum was lost between the family suddenly coming home and the birthday party. I loved that ending of course, but was shocked that there were 30 mins left when the rich couple fucked on the couch.

I thought Burning was better but this is a more accessible movie about class/wealth stratification in South Korea. Glad it's doing such great business.

by Bong I've only seen this and The Host, which was fine but nothing special. did Okja ever come out on disc?

thought this was fine

burning was a lot better, on similar themes

This movie was just awesome. Kid wanted to see it (she’s into kpop so it made sense.)

This is something else.

as far as class warfare movies go, i would say

Burning=Shoplifters > La Ceremonie =Parasite >>>>Snowpiercer=Sorry to Bother You

still need to see Us, Ready or Not, Hustlers

It's pretty much the movie that I wanted Us to be.

Oh good, other people picked up on the doppelganger element. I liked it as a black comedy of inequality and the "problems" of one-percenter parents. The subsequent excursion into thriller/horror fits, but I agree that the film would have profited from a tightening up of the running time.

I loved Us! I think as much as Get Out

haven't seen Parasite yet but based on Okja, Snowpiercer I'm only somewhat hopeful

Parasite is so much better than either Okja or Snowpiercer.

never seen okja but snowpiercer is hot garbage.

Memories of Murder and Mother are both capital G Great films and The Host is a double capital G Great Genre film

i've avoided seeing Okja because he is sure as shit gonna make me feel for the big hippo thing and then kill it. i've played the last guardian; can't fool me again

I liked this a lot. The symbolism is club-you-over-the-head, but it works despite/because of that. And it's pretty funny through the first two-thirds. I didn't mind the ending, it felt like that was where it was always headed.

this was kind of a hot mess? it definitely shook me but i'm not sure i enjoyed the ride. idk so many "powerful" things leave me feeling exhausted these days.

Didn't really seem like a mess to me, I thought it was pretty tightly constructed.

oh no it was extremely tight of course (although maybe there were some pacing / pov issues near the end that could have been handled more carefully?), it was just too slickly constructed and hyper-meaningful for my tastes. like i think i respect that it's aiming to be a shakespearean tragedy about capitalism but it's also in the form of a 32 oz monster energy drink and it was all too much for me tbh.

i mean i definitely *felt* a lot during this movie but it was ultimately kind of exhausting. of course it was also funny throughout but the humor was also too frenetic for me. like i laughed louder when renee zelwegger pushed the bad sculpture off its pedestal in front of her ex's house in the otherwise very sad but also similarly profound judy garland biopic that i saw last weekend, maybe because the humorous moment had a bit more space around it and r.z.'s performance in that movie is extremely good.

there's several indelible images stuck in my mind from this film even now (the "ghost" shocking the boy eating cake, the kick down the stairs, shaving peachfuzz) but this isn't a super thoughtful or challenging movie... i'm fairly certain it was never meant to be.

the image stuck in my head is the dogs eating the meat on the skewer stuck in the corpse

yeah that's a good one

at least what it says about the trauma of capitalism is true. it may not be super challenging or whatever but it's otm, and in the form of a slapstick comedy/thriller. for instance, how the trauma of capitalism perpetuates itself across generations and how it's larger than any bogeyman character. idk these aren't exactly the easiest concepts to present in a mainstream film? but tbh i don't watch very many movies so.

quoting myself upthread but if you want to see some other films in the same vein that are as good/better:

Burning=Shoplifters > La Ceremonie =Parasite >>>>Snowpiercer=Sorry to Bother You

haha thanks though i'm not sure i have it in me to watch a film with similar themes for .. a while

it's also in the form of a 32 oz monster energy drink and it was all too much for me tbh.

haha, yeah that's a fair description.

Its central arguments and symbolism are super on-the-nose, but for me they landed with some oomph because the writing, acting and filmmaking were all sharp and often funny. (Until they weren't.) The long scene where they descend and descend and descend from the rich house to their semi-basement apartment, in a growing flood, only to find their home literally submerged in shit — on the paper that's grindingly obvious, but in the execution it was scary and heartbreaking.

I actually liked this more than Burning — or enjoyed it more, I guess. I liked Burning but it felt a little remote to me, unsurprising given its source material.

i dunno, there's so many moments in Burning that felt like pure honest complex dreams to me. it's a more mystical film i guess, don't think i'd say remote?
my sense is that a lot of folks who fell head over heels for parasite (and why it's so very popular) is that audiences are self-congratulating themselves on appreciating the complex class issues of what amounts to a cartoon. but maybe i'm being snobby i dunno.

i have at least four friends who basically never see movies who were raving to me about how brilliant this was and i feel like a total dorkus malorkus saying "yeah, i love the director and i saw this twice and it was... very good" and then they're all like "WHY DON'T YOU LOVE IT?!?!?" and there's no way to adequately explain that without referencing a lot of his films and other people's films that i know they haven't seen.

maybe the right answer to "why don't you love it" is to give them a thumb drive with Mother and Memories of Murder on it and ask them to check back with me in three months when they get around to watching it to see it they agree?

i was SO taken with those two movies and then host was such a great oddball genre film that i was psyched to go wherever this guy wanted to go and then, well, snowpiercer.
with parasite, i think i've come to the conclusion that Bong is an immense and great stylist but that he's not going to likely level up into something more highbrow and affecting now that he has more money and fame a'la Park Chan Wook or Lynch. Maybe you could make a comparison to Miike? Dunno.

Yeah he's definitely more of a populist/popcorn director than e.g. Lee Chang-dong. But he's an interesting and talented one, I think. I agree that Mother is probably his best movie, and it is surprising in a lot of ways — stylistically and narratively — that Parasite isn't.

i really like him! i'm just in the unpleasant indie fuck position of being unable to avoid saying "his earlier films are much better"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCqjR1gHyIQ
in any case your post made me realize i should see more Chang-dong, so thanks for that! recommendation for the best one to jump into?

Besides Burning I only know Secret Sunshine and Poetry, both good.

will try poetry and report back

mother was the one for me too

it's been a while but i remember thinking it was on par with great hitchcock

I liked this a lot more than Burning but I would never think to compare them.

I seen him say anime and that worried me before watching (I've seen a lot of bad acting that looked that way) but I thought it worked really well

oh, i thought he was great. ren & stimpy are great influences. i didn’t care for the film but i have started to audibly groan whenever learning that the latest movie is, once again, produced by A24

Does A24 make films worse than they would otherwise have been?

i thought this was fun. it's not much more than fun, but at times it's really fun.

Never really understood the hate / coolness towards A24 really. I like their films on the whole

there were three a24 trailers before mickey 17, at least one of them looked like complete pish (death of a unicorn) - it gave the impression they're going for quantity over quality.

i think theyre going for a process/vibe rather than either and thats not really much use either

I've only seen a fraction of A24's slate, but I can't say I've seen a recurring aesthetic pattern that makes me want to especially like or dislike them. Obviously they're known for the way they market films and they clearly take on many films that major studios sadly no longer do, but C'mon C'mon, The Florida Project, The Brutalist, The Zone of Interest, Under the Skin, Uncut Gems, First Cow, Showing Up, The Souvenir I & II, The Eternal Daughter, First Reformed, Lady Bird, Moonlight, High Life, Stars at Noon...I don't think they're all great films, but if this is what they distribute, long may they run.

midsommar! hereditary! i saw the tv glow! love lies bleeding!

i'm as pro-a24 as i can be toward a production company. they throw their money at a lot of things i end up loving

great physical media releases as well

huh I only notice entertainment companies when I get sent a batch or something during awards season. I couldn't distinguish Sony Picture Classics from A24, for example. Their box sets are lavish, though, in the best way.

I loved Funny Pages so much

i think of A24 as like, the dream of 90s indie is alive in horror

A24 has become a cool brand for a lot of young cinephiles, in the way that an indie music label like Matador or Sub Pop was in the 90s. Sony Picture Classics puts out a lot of good movies but doesn't have its own merch or dedicated subreddit.

It's the only one my students recognize, which surprised me.

In a way, they've taken Oscilloscope's original blueprint and became much more successful. To be clear, Oscilloscope remains a success (and they may have been Kelly Reichardt's first notable distributor before A24), but for various reasons, I don't think they were ever going to blow up the way A24 has. Part of it sadly has to do with Yauch dying - it was always his baby and some time after he passed away, it felt like the company became comparatively quiet for a while. Also, IIRC it was mainly funded by the money he made with the Beastie Boys, which gave it a lot of independence, but it also meant they couldn't be reckless with their spending either. (It's a lot of money, but not, say, the Oracle money Megan Ellison had.)

I went to a panel with someone from A24 (I think it was around the time Room came out, which was their first big Oscar-winning movie) and I think he said that the company really needed every film they did to succeed because one bomb would have been enough to sink them completely. This was presented as a common reality among indie companies of that size. But they definitely took some calculated chances, and he used Spring Breakers as an example. I don't remember all the details, but they said they purposely marketed it in misleading fashion because they realized they could make much more opening weekend than they were accustomed to if they attracted a crowd looking for an MTV teen comedy, enough that they would break even right away. The catch was they'd get a huge backlash, and indeed that's what happened (the audience scores were really low), but they also banked on critical word-of-mouth attracting the arthouse crowd, which would probably trickle in after the first week.

A24 has some great merch.

https://shop.a24films.com/collections/collectibles

Yup. Again, not unlike Oscilloscope (who still offer Shortbus lube!)

I liked Parasite, but I thought this was just a complete mess. So much expository voiceover, pantomime baddies, narrative all over the place, characters you don't care about and are hardly characters, a conceit that's been done many times before and done much better, attempts at humour that fall flat...

It really does feel like a whole bunch of stuff was cut out of this m. But that doesn't explain why they decided to leave so much in. I keep thinking about the nightmare dream sequence at the end and what purpose it served. And the whole Kai/love-rectangle storyline that gets set up but gets totally dropped. And how Narsha's whole character and way of being seems to switch constantly throughout the film, from being friendly and easy-going, to aggressively possessive, to wildly irrational and irresponsible, to being fiercely defiant and upstanding - it's very inconsistent, and I wasn't sure even what to think of her as a person for a lot of it

Idk I kinda liked how uh fluid many of the character personalities were. 18 wasn't a total villain, Kai wasn't fully a partisan or a revolutionary, Nasha obv had a lot of facets. You could say its sloppy writing or weird editing, or that it makes them feel less one-dimensional and that your (my) imagination fills in the gaps.

my friends walked out of this and claimed it was 'bad terry gilliam'. I see their point, but I still found it enjoyable.

I saw it last night and it was a very fun theater experience. But yeah, it's a bit weird in that it's already long and I didn't want it to be longer, but it felt like there was a lot left to be explored. Especially with the expendables/human printing (I think the nightmare at the end was meant to bring it back around thematically, but it felt tacked on for sure).

The way the human printer printed out humans did make me laugh though, just like a paper printer

At the end, was it meant to be implied that they'd reprinted the girlfriend who died earlier?

I thought that too, but no, my friends confirmed that was a different character (shown early on in the first cafeteria scene looking skeptical of Ruffalo). Good because it wouldn't have made much sense with the way they set up the technology.

Bong Joon Ho season at BFI kicks off in April.

maybe if you were in the mood for something extremely broad & unsubtle & daft you'd get something out of it.

had a great time!

i didn’t care for the film but i have started to audibly groan whenever learning that the latest movie is, once again, produced by A24

A24 did not produce this film.

If you want to argue with the A24 aesthetic as perceived through theatrical experiences, this is probably a complete list of narrative and documentary releases: Moonlight (2016), The Lovers (2017), It Comes At Night (2017), Lady Bird (2017), Hereditary (2018), Eighth Grade (2018), Mid90s (2018), Midsommar (2019), The Farewell (2019), The Death Of Dick Long (2019), The Lighthouse (2019), Waves (2019), Uncut Gems (2019), Minari (2021), The Green Knight (2021), C'Mon C'Mon (2021), Red Rocket (2021), X and Pearl (2022), EEAAO (2022), Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), Funny Pages (2022), God's Creatures (2022), Aftersun (2022), The Inspection (2022), The Whale (2022), When You Finish Saving The World (2022), Showing Up (2023), Beau Is Afraid (2023), You Hurt My Feelings (2023), Past Lives (2023), Earth Mama (2023), Dicks: The Musical (2023), Priscilla (2023), All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt (2023), Dream Scenario (2023), The Zone Of Interest (2023), The Iron Claw (2023), Occupied City (2023), Problemista (2024), Love Lies Bleeding (2024), Civil War (2024), I Saw The TV Glow (2024), Tuesday (2024), Janet Planet (2024), MaXXXine (2024), The Front Room (2024), Look Into My Eyes (2024), A Different Man (2024), Heretic (2024), Y2K (2024), babygirl (2024), On Becoming A Guinea Fowl (2025) and Opus (2025).

it gave the impression they're going for quantity over quality.

They've built gradually over a decade to about a film a month; I probably see a little over half of that slate in theatres (almost never knowing the production company beforehand) and certainly don't feel I've been shovelled makeweight looking back at that list, regardless of how much I've liked individual films.

Nah that is a fecking list of bangers imo

Only seen about half a dozen. Midsommar and The Zone of Interest were really thin portraits of fascism.

Favourite one of these was Uncut Gems.

I saw the TV Glow, Moonlight and Past Lives were somewhere in between. Solid.

Was Midsommar a portrait of fascism?

it wasn’t

Kind of what I picked up on anyway it sucked

Beau Is Afraid / Dicks: The Musical makes a for a good-time double-dong-feature

I liked Midsommar quite a lot for many reasons. Not sure where the fascism bit comes in - it had a lot of different themes but I really don't think that's what they were exploring at all.

Zone Of Interest was pretty good, I thought. It had one trick, but it did it well in exemplifying the banality of evil; but having one trick didn't make it thin

loved Midsomar, don't see anything in it related to any sort of totalitarianism, it's about cults and wanting to belong

Different readings: let's have them and be happy.

yeah it would help if the reading had any fucking thing to do with the movie

ah, I get it. you get to immolate your boyfriend if you join fascism

sorry, that was what popped into my head and I was giggling

I enjoyed this except for Ruffalo and Colette, who were supremely unfunny. Ruffalo in “comedy mode” is rarely a good thing. Thought Pattinson was excellent.

I disliked Ruffalo in this in the same way I disliked him in Poor Things.

But I quite liked this movie! Surprised by RPatz's comedy chops. He had a vibe not unlike Tim Blake Nelson. In fact for some reason it was making me think of Slaughterhouse Five (not that Ive ever seen a film of that!).

Are y'all qualifying? I love Ruffalo when he's loose and crinkly, not when he's self-consciously playing funny?

Ruffalo isn't one of my favorite actors out there in any case. Like Pedro Pascal and a few other contemporary favorites I find the guy to be a bland presence, merely serviceable. But when he extends himself into doing comedy it's kind of embarrassing. "Cringe", if you will haha

Also, what happened to the Kai character? One minute she's negotiating with Nasha and then she's gone. Anamaria Vartolomei...my heart stopped a little when she was onscreen.

There are characters, like Kai for example, who get introduced and then barely show up again...

― DLC Soundsystem (dog latin), Thursday, March 13, 2025 7:16 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I see DL already made this point way upthread, oops. Overall, it's the kind of well-made, "zany" (sci fi) flick I'd normally run away from if a less skilled director had tackled it.

aye, if i had to pick just one frustration with this film it was this. Baffling that the film forgets about almost everything that happened in the first part to make way for a limp Arrival / Avatar pastiche

I was mostly enjoying this until the last half an hour or so when it seemed to fall to pieces completely

I enjoyed this while I was watching it but it hasn't left much of a lasting impression. Way too much of a sense of studio interference in the script (whether this was the case or not), leading to a dog's dinner of a storyline. "We need cute aliens!" etc. Would have worked better as a smaller scale black comedy if you ask me, which they didn't.

The only thing I liked about this was RPattz, basically.
It all just kind of washed over me.

However I did enjoy the physicality & visuals of the “human printer”, the way it judderingly prints ppl like a laser desktop printer & they keep forgetting to set up the tray so the printed Mickey just flops lifelessly onto the floor

i think if i enjoyed edibles i would like this a lot more maybe