1054 Parasite

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quim_font
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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#51 Post by quim_font » Sun Oct 20, 2019 10:24 am

Regarding the charge of its central motif being over-determined:
SpoilerShow
To the charge of the deluge being over-determined, the answer is simple, it’s not a thematic choice, but one of verisimilitude.

Millions of people have lost their homes, the vast majority of the lower end of the social scale, from flooding in the last year. 200,000 currently in Sudan, and the current flooding in Florida, not to mention Harvey, Ilmeda, Karen, Dorian.

Mitang flooded hundreds of homes in South Korea this month.

How can an audience charge a theme as over-determined when it plays out nearly daily? And, further, what does it say when a audience can pin events in their social context so easily on the screen, but not as it happens in their life?

Bong made a great choice with the deluge, almost a challenge to his audiences to tie the film to back to reality. Some would live within the movie and critique it as obvious, looking simply how it functions on a thematic level. (Bong has a habit of this, he threw the challenge of the slaughterhouse in a Okja, knowing it’d be read as some absurd, over-wrought horror creation, but no, it was true to the machinery in any slaughterhouse.) The question seems to be this: do you simply view the movie, or do you also view the world around it?

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#52 Post by quim_font » Sun Oct 20, 2019 2:17 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 2:07 am
SpoilerShow
that it didn't quite go far enough? All those party attendees framed in the picture window led me to believe that the events of the party would be much more combustible and cathartic considering what had come before. Perhaps I just have chronic Tarantino disorder.
SpoilerShow
Call it Tarantino disorder, the idea of twisting everything into a revenge flick, because this was not one, by any means. That would be too simple, too stupid. The Kim family never wanted to take revenge on the Park family, hell, one even wanted to marry into it. The real “battle” of the film is the battle between the working class. Due to the material conditions imposed by the upper-strata, the working class must battle, kick, and bludgeon one another to survive. Their solidarity is broken, no matter how many times one calls another “sis” (only to then turn around and call each other “a filthy bitch”).

The killing of the Park patriarch was not pre-determined, or even cathartic, it just simply was a rash release created by the conditions: the conversation in the car, in which Mrs. Park remarks how favorable the rains were for the blue sky, ignoring the hundreds like him that’d had lost their home, the ignoring of his daughters wounds, and, of course, the smell. To the Parks, despite their niceties, he will always just a be a poor person who smells bad. A person who can never cross the proverbial “line” into the lives of people like the Parks.

The killing was a release of failure, of expectations thwarted, of plans unrealized.
Last edited by quim_font on Sun Oct 20, 2019 3:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#53 Post by zedz » Sun Oct 20, 2019 2:53 pm

A good post that I don't think needs to be spoilered, as the event discussed isn't even a major plot point.
quim_font wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 10:24 am
Regarding the charge of its central motif being over-determined:

To the charge of the deluge being over-determined, the answer is simple, it’s not a thematic choice, but one of verisimilitude.

Millions of people have lost their homes, the vast majority of the lower end of the social scale, from flooding in the last year. 200,000 currently in Sudan, and the current flooding in Florida, not to mention Harvey, Ilmeda, Karen, Dorian.

Mitang flooded hundreds of homes in South Korea this month.

How can an audience charge a theme as over-determined when it plays out nearly daily? And, further, what does it say when a audience can pin events in their social context so easily on the screen, but not as it happens in their life?

Bong made a great choice with the deluge, almost a challenge to his audiences to tie the film to back to reality. Some would live within the movie and critique it as obvious, looking simply how it functions on a thematic level. (Bong has a habit of this, he threw the challenge of the slaughterhouse in a Okja, knowing it’d be read as some absurd, over-wrought horror creation, but no, it was true to the machinery in any slaughterhouse.) The question seems to be this: do you simply view the movie, or do you also view the world around it?
I think the deluge counts as "over-determined" - though I don't know if any of its detractors actually used that term - because of the way Bong films it. It's not just a sudden flood, it's a downpour that we physically follow from the upper class mansion on the hill down through the various echelons of the city to the 'lower depths', where the sewers overflow and the homes of the poor are destroyed. It's given a deliberate metaphorical weight by this presentation. The fact that floods often actually happen is no inoculation against a director using one to make a point. If this were mere verisimilitude, the flood could have been an overflowing river, or a tsunami, or just a hell of a lot of rain. Instead, Bong shows a flood that, cinematically, trickles down from the rich, unscathed suburbs to cataclysmically inundate the poor ones.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#54 Post by quim_font » Sun Oct 20, 2019 3:09 pm

zedz wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 2:53 pm

I think the deluge counts as "over-determined" - though I don't know if any of its detractors actually used that term - because of the way Bong films it. It's not just a sudden flood, it's a downpour that we physically follow from the upper class mansion on the hill down through the various echelons of the city to the 'lower depths', where the sewers overflow and the homes of the poor are destroyed. It's given a deliberate metaphorical weight by this presentation. The fact that floods often actually happen is no inoculation against a director using one to make a point. If this were mere verisimilitude, the flood could have been an overflowing river, or a tsunami, or just a hell of a lot of rain. Instead, Bong shows a flood that, cinematically, trickles down from the rich, unscathed suburbs to cataclysmically inundate the poor ones.
True, and when you put it that way, it reminds me of Ki-Woo and the rock. It’s almost as if Bong is holding up his found object, like the rock, and saying “isn’t it metaphorical?”

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#55 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Oct 20, 2019 3:18 pm

quim_font wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 2:17 pm
mfunk9786 wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 2:07 am
SpoilerShow
that it didn't quite go far enough? All those party attendees framed in the picture window led me to believe that the events of the party would be much more combustible and cathartic considering what had come before. Perhaps I just have chronic Tarantino disorder.
SpoilerShow
Call it Tarantino disorder, the idea of twisting everything into a revenge flick, because this was not one, by any means. That would be too simple, too stupid. The Kim family never wanted to take revenge on the Park family, hell, one even wanted to marry into it. The real “battle” of the film is the battle between the working class. Due to the material conditions imposed by the upper-strata, the working class must battle, kick, and bludgeon one another to survive. Their solidarity is broken, no matter how many times one calls another “sis” (only to then turn around and call each other “a filthy bitch”).

The killing of the Park patriarch was not pre-determined, or even cathartic, it just simply was a rash release created by the conditions: the conversation in the car, in which Mrs. Park remarks how favorable the rains were for the blue sky, ignoring the hundreds like him that’d had lost their home, the ignoring of his daughters wounds, and, of course, the smell. To the Parks, despite their niceties, he will always just a be a poor person who smells bad. A person who can never cross the proverbial “line” into the lives of people like the Parks.

The killing was a release of failure, of expectations thwarted, of plans unrealized.
SpoilerShow
Revenge was not what I had in mind - chaos between classes was. It did not quite play out as I expected, though I suppose the message is there if you root around in the unusually shot scene and find it. Considering how neat and tidy and inventive the rest of the film is, I found it strange that the climax and the finale were the only two elements that didn't quite land.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#56 Post by quim_font » Sun Oct 20, 2019 3:48 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 3:18 pm
SpoilerShow
Revenge was not what I had in mind - chaos between classes was. It did not quite play out as I expected, though I suppose the message is there if you root around in the unusually shot scene and find it. Considering how neat and tidy and inventive the rest of the film is, I found it strange that the climax and the finale were the only two elements that didn't quite land.
I see, and I’d be lying if I wasn’t expecting larger chaos as well. But I think that was only due to the trajectory of the plot, and how as how viewers we were able to analyze it as class conflict. This was another example of Bong turning our expectations against us, like in the faux happy ending. It wasn’t class warfare for the Kim family, they were simply going to work, wanting to keep their jobs for another day. It important to remember that they weren’t going to the party with anger and desire for retribution, but merely just going through the routine of another day. This isn’t a family that reads State and Revolution, just one that wants to put food on the table.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#57 Post by zedz » Sun Oct 20, 2019 4:01 pm

Maybe one of the ideas Bong was working with in that scene was that 'class conflict', and privilege, and injustice, is something that's often only seen by the disadvantaged party. All of those things, and even the disadvantaged themselves, are generally invisible to the privileged. The upper classes physically rising up against the working classes is something you only see in movies (and usually at the point where satire has failed and desperation sets in). In the real world, they don't have to.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#58 Post by quim_font » Sun Oct 20, 2019 4:07 pm

I do think it’s fair to say that Bong is one of the premier moralists of the current time. Despite him never adopting a paternalistic or scolding tone, as does, say, Haneke, his films are all moral tales. And, like Haneke, genuinely distressing. This film, and Okja, contain some of the most disturbing and nausea inducing scenes of recent.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#59 Post by Brian C » Sun Oct 20, 2019 7:27 pm

I think this is my least favorite of the Bong films I've seen (his last 5 now). It's extremely well-made, of course, but it felt very empty to me. There are a lot of twists and turns in the story, and while I wouldn't say they're exactly predictable, I didn't feel like a lot of them were surprising, and not many of them really pay off, and some of them don't make any kind of actual sense (e.g., why on earth would they have let the housekeeper in?).

As a class-war parable, it feels like a lot of posturing to me. Bong brings a very safe, distinctly middle-class perspective, combining a resentment of the rich with condescension towards the poor. The Park parents are ridiculous figures, but the Kim family are far worse - the kinds of utterly shameless hucksters that affluent people like to stereotype poor people as being - at least until Bong abruptly decides towards the end that these people are sympathetic figures after all. And for what reason? As far as I can tell, just because sympathy for the poor is the "correct" political position to take, despite the fact that they're complete monsters for the first two-thirds of the film.

Question for possible discussion:
SpoilerShow
What was Ki-woo intending to do when he took the rock down into the basement? I kind of assume he meant to gift it to them, believing in its power to grant financial success. But for a few obvious reasons this doesn't completely add up, and I can't think of any other possibilities that make sense to me either.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#60 Post by quim_font » Sun Oct 20, 2019 8:26 pm

Brian C wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 7:27 pm

As a class-war parable, it feels like a lot of posturing to me. Bong brings a very safe, distinctly middle-class perspective, combining a resentment of the rich with condescension towards the poor. The Park parents are ridiculous figures, but the Kim family are far worse - the kinds of utterly shameless hucksters that affluent people like to stereotype poor people as being - at least until Bong abruptly decides towards the end that these people are sympathetic figures after all.
I’m struggling to understand where the resentment towards the rich or the condescension towards the poor is in the film. In fact, Bong succeeds in doing neither, and in not sentimentalizing or turning the families into cheap political avatars. The Parks are insulated and gullible, yes, but fundamentally they are not evil people. The Kims scrap and fight, yes, but only because it’s required by the material conditions they experience.

And, loaded language aside, the Parks as shameless hucksters? If so, it’s because that’s their only choice. Bong refused to make them simply the pious little peasants that popular culture has told us only deserve respect. Yes, they step on the heads of others, stab them in the back, but only because they have to, because they are playing someone else’s game. It’s not a moral failing. It’s survival.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#61 Post by Brian C » Sun Oct 20, 2019 8:58 pm

quim_font wrote:I’m struggling to understand where the resentment towards the rich ... is in the film.... The Parks are insulated and gullible
Yes, right there. They're presented as people just born to be made marks out of, and on top of that, you've already pointed out how severely the Parks look down on Kims.
quim_font wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 8:26 pm
The Kims scrap and fight, yes, but only because it’s required by the material conditions they experience.

And, loaded language aside, the Parks as shameless hucksters? If so, it’s because that’s their only choice. Bong refused to make them simply the pious little peasants that popular culture has told us only deserve respect. Yes, they step on the heads of others, stab them in the back, but only because they have to, because they are playing someone else’s game. It’s not a moral failing. It’s survival.
Have you ever actually met a poor person? I assure you there are plenty who do not, in fact, "step on the heads of others [and] stab them in the back," yet manage to survive anyway.

This is exactly the sentiment that I was talking about, this misplaced sense of noblesse oblige where those of less means come out looking good no matter what. I don't think you actually believe that the Kims' actions in the film are justifiable due to their circumstances - at least not beyond a certain point - so why pretend?

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#62 Post by Cremildo » Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:07 pm

Edited.
Last edited by Cremildo on Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#63 Post by quim_font » Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:14 pm

Brian C wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 8:58 pm
quim_font wrote:I’m struggling to understand where the resentment towards the rich ... is in the film.... The Parks are insulated and gullible
Yes, right there. They're presented as people just born to be made marks out of, and on top of that, you've already pointed out how severely the Parks look down on Kims.
quim_font wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 8:26 pm
The Kims scrap and fight, yes, but only because it’s required by the material conditions they experience.

And, loaded language aside, the Parks as shameless hucksters? If so, it’s because that’s their only choice. Bong refused to make them simply the pious little peasants that popular culture has told us only deserve respect. Yes, they step on the heads of others, stab them in the back, but only because they have to, because they are playing someone else’s game. It’s not a moral failing. It’s survival.
Have you ever actually met a poor person? I assure you there are plenty who do not, in fact, "step on the heads of others [and] stab them in the back," yet manage to survive anyway.

This is exactly the sentiment that I was talking about, this misplaced sense of noblesse oblige where those of less means come out looking good no matter what. I don't think you actually believe that the Kims' actions in the film are justifiable due to their circumstances - at least not beyond a certain point - so why pretend?
Being gullible is not a moral failing. It’s simply a character trait. The Parks look down on the Kims, yes, but again that is not a moral failing.

You keep trying to turn the characters into moral avatars for their class. No, not every poor person scraps and fights, but the Kims do. As do others of every class. Is it justifiable? That is a useless question. Is it expected? Is it inevitable? Do the material conditions necessitate it? These are the useful questions.
Last edited by quim_font on Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#64 Post by hearthesilence » Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:21 pm

I never thought of the Kims as being wholly representative of the poor. FWIW I went in fresh, knowing close to nothing about the plot, so when the film established itself as a light-hearted suspense film, I took the Kims as simply a family on con artists, atypical of any other. When the sociopolitical aspects fully emerged, it came off as a welcome surprise that accompanied the actual plot twist.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#65 Post by Brian C » Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:22 pm

quim_font wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:14 pm
Being gullible is not a moral failing. It’s simply a character trait. The Park’s look down on the Kim’s, yes, but again that is not a moral failing.
That seems extremely debatable to me on both counts, especially the latter, but who cares? I didn't say anything about it being a "moral failing," that's just you putting words in my mouth. What I said is that the film shows "resentment" towards the rich.
You keep trying to turn the characters into moral avatars for their class. No, not every poor person scraps and fights, but the Kims do. As do others of every class. Is it justifiable? That is a useless question. Is it expected? Is it inevitable? Do the material conditions necessitate it? These are the useful questions.
How are "is it justifiable" and "do the material conditions necessitate it" different questions?

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#66 Post by quim_font » Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:32 pm

Brian C wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:22 pm
quim_font wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:14 pm
Being gullible is not a moral failing. It’s simply a character trait. The Park’s look down on the Kim’s, yes, but again that is not a moral failing.
That seems extremely debatable to me on both counts, especially the latter, but who cares? I didn't say anything about it being a "moral failing," that's just you putting words in my mouth. What I said is that the film shows "resentment" towards the rich.
You keep trying to turn the characters into moral avatars for their class. No, not every poor person scraps and fights, but the Kims do. As do others of every class. Is it justifiable? That is a useless question. Is it expected? Is it inevitable? Do the material conditions necessitate it? These are the useful questions.
How are "is it justifiable" and "do the material conditions necessitate it" different questions?
Let’s not kid ourselves, everyone looks down on or judges another at some point—whether it be to class, knowledge, taste, physique—it’s simply a human trait, not a moral decision. Judgement is nearly involuntary.

Justifiable implies a moral component. The fact you chose a legal term here, as in warranted or sanctioned by law (I.e. justifiable homicide), is particularly telling. Let’s take, say, the act of drug dealing, or more broadly black market sales. It is an illegal, and many would say immoral, act. But in the case of certain material conditions, it is inevitable. If faced with Y, some resort to X. A cursory glance in history tells us that, for there has been a “black market” ever since the material conditions of society has necessitated it. This requires no moral judgement or attempt to decide if it is “justifiable.”
Last edited by quim_font on Mon Oct 21, 2019 9:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#67 Post by Brian C » Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:42 pm

quim_font wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 9:32 pm
Let’s not kid ourselves, everyone looks down on or judges another at some point—whether it be to class, knowledge, taste, physique—it’s simply a human trait, not a moral decision. Judgement is nearly involuntary.

Justifiable implies a moral component. The fact you chose a legal term here, as in warranted or sanctioned by law (I.e. justifiable homicide), is particularly telling. Let’s take, say, the act of drug dealing, or more broadly black market sales. It is an illegal, and many would say immoral, act. But in the case of certain material conditions, it is inevitable. If faced with Y, some resort to X. A cursory glance in history tells us that, for there has been a “black market” ever since the material conditions of society has necessitated it. This analysis requires no moral judgement or attempt to decide if it is “justifiable.”
I find it difficult to deal with your constant goalpost-shifting and complete irrelevancies, and it's clear to me that you'll just say anything that pops into your head whether it makes a lick of sense or not. So, enjoy the rest of your evening ... have some cake and watch out for ghosts.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#68 Post by Shrew » Mon Oct 21, 2019 11:24 am

Brian C wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 7:27 pm
Question for possible discussion:
SpoilerShow
What was Ki-woo intending to do when he took the rock down into the basement? I kind of assume he meant to gift it to them, believing in its power to grant financial success. But for a few obvious reasons this doesn't completely add up, and I can't think of any other possibilities that make sense to me either.
SpoilerShow
I thought Ki-woo was planning to kill them with it. It follows Ki-woo's apology to his father in the gym for "getting them all into this" and his promise "to take care of everything," plus the way he's sneaking through the basement makes it seem like his intent isn't benign. I think it's also meant to contrast with the scene where Ki-jung and the mother want to make amends with the basement dwellers and bring them food. Up to this point, Ki-woo has been the most moral of the family and Ki-jung arguably the most immoral (she's the forger, the most natural actor/con-artist, and the one who most misrepresents her qualifications and upsells the mother on "art therapy"), so I think it's meant underline a clear shift in where things are heading.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#69 Post by Black Hat » Wed Oct 23, 2019 2:19 am

quim_font wrote:
Sun Oct 20, 2019 10:24 am
Regarding the charge of its central motif being over-determined:
SpoilerShow
To the charge of the deluge being over-determined, the answer is simple, it’s not a thematic choice, but one of verisimilitude.

Millions of people have lost their homes, the vast majority of the lower end of the social scale, from flooding in the last year. 200,000 currently in Sudan, and the current flooding in Florida, not to mention Harvey, Ilmeda, Karen, Dorian.

Mitang flooded hundreds of homes in South Korea this month.

How can an audience charge a theme as over-determined when it plays out nearly daily? And, further, what does it say when a audience can pin events in their social context so easily on the screen, but not as it happens in their life?

Bong made a great choice with the deluge, almost a challenge to his audiences to tie the film to back to reality. Some would live within the movie and critique it as obvious, looking simply how it functions on a thematic level. (Bong has a habit of this, he threw the challenge of the slaughterhouse in a Okja, knowing it’d be read as some absurd, over-wrought horror creation, but no, it was true to the machinery in any slaughterhouse.) The question seems to be this: do you simply view the movie, or do you also view the world around it?
It also allows the essential line from Mrs. Park highlighting upper class obliviousness...
SpoilerShow
"We really needed that rain"

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#70 Post by Cremildo » Wed Oct 23, 2019 11:20 am

Edited.
Last edited by Cremildo on Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#71 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Oct 23, 2019 11:36 am

That's stretching though, every form of weather can be "needed" in the right context, but what Black Hat says is pretty spot on given what we're dealing with here - one urban environment where you're both physically and socially isolated from other classes.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#72 Post by nitin » Wed Oct 23, 2019 10:16 pm

The context of that scene makes it obvious that the statement is made selfishly without any regard for the impact on anyone else but themselves.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#73 Post by Brian C » Wed Oct 23, 2019 11:22 pm

I wouldn't say "selfishly", but rather "obliviously". That's the plane the movie is operating on - it's not so much that the Parks don't care about the damage the storm causes, it's that they don't have to. Their wealth completely insulates them from any need to concern themselves.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#74 Post by Black Hat » Thu Oct 24, 2019 1:42 am

Either hell has frozen over or B and I are finally on the same page with something.

The film as a whole tho, wow so fucking well done. The fact that he built both homes and the poor neighborhood from scratch is a staggering achievement, especially when you consider how important setting (and architecture) is to the story. Bong's one of those filmmakers who just has that 6th sense for where to place the camera, he's so good that here that it makes you want to stroke your fucking cock out in admiration in the way Hitchcock would.

Contrary to what a couple of you wrote, he totally nailed the ending too. Dazed you with a couple of love tapping jabs, before demolishing you with a massive uppercut.

What's really amazing is that he struck the perfect balance between arthouse and mainstream sensibilities where you can enjoy it with the straight forwardness of a steak frites or with the rich, complex textures and delicacy of a bourguinon.

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Re: Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)

#75 Post by nitin » Thu Oct 24, 2019 2:54 am

Brian C wrote:
Wed Oct 23, 2019 11:22 pm
I wouldn't say "selfishly", but rather "obliviously". That's the plane the movie is operating on - it's not so much that the Parks don't care about the damage the storm causes, it's that they don't have to. Their wealth completely insulates them from any need to concern themselves.
I don’t know, I think if you are that oblivious, it is selfish. I guess I don’t see selfishness as only arising when you don’t care.

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