FILM REVIEW: Parasite (기생충) - Dir. Bong Joon-ho

Director Bong Joon-ho with Parasite's Academy Awards

As I am writing this, the 92nd Academy Awards are still fresh in my mind. Some Academy Awards, such as Joaquin Phoenix's well-deserved Best Actor award for his performance in Joker were. for me very much expected. One film I really didn't expect to win many Oscars was the South Korean film Parasite, or 기생충 (Pronounced Gi-saeng-chung). Sweeping through the categories of Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film, Best Director, and Best Picture, Parasite and its Director Bong Joon-ho made history; not only did Parasite have the most wins that night, but they also became the first Korean film to be nominated for and win an Oscar, and also became the first non-English language film to win Best Picture. While to a degree I expected Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film, I did not expect the film to win Best Director and certainly not Best Picture. As a Korean myself, I was overjoyed that Parasite did so well and I do hope that this will allow Korean films to come into the light more and be recognized for their talent.

Alongside his film, Director Bong has become a very popular figure in the film industry, loved by many for his eccentric sense of humour, humbleness when receiving his awards (he was especially well-loved for acknowledging all of the other directors during his Best Direct acceptance speech, putting fellow nominee Martin Scorsese on a pedestal), and his genius directing skills. While Director Bong has only received full international acclamation recently, it is important to note that he is by no means an unknown in the film industry. He is well-known in Korea for his films Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006), and the 2013 English film Snowpiercer. I have seen the three films myself and I can attest to Director Bong's genius skills in film-making as I recall thoroughly enjoying all three of them, especially Snowpiercer.

It's interesting to note that Snowpiercer, a film I really liked, and Parasite are quite similar in terms of theme. They both revolve around the themes of appearance VS reality and social inequality, and it's brilliant how Bong used two films that are fundamentally about different things to deliver a similar message and theme. In Parasite, it is very clear that social inequality is an obvious theme. The film refers to a number of times the extravagant lifestyle that the Park family live in comparison to the Kim family, who has to struggle just to survive on a daily basis. The film even goes further and ingeniously uses levels to highlight the wealthy disparity: while the wealthy Parks live literally on a higher ground from everyone else, the poor Kims live in a sub-basement, with the window as their only view to the outside world, symbolizing that while the Kims do not live in complete poverty, they may as well be.

The title of the film "parasite" is also a very clever way to describe the two major families in the story. The Kim family are the most obvious 'parasites', lying their way into the Park household and leeching off of their wealth. The Park family are also parasites in a sense to the Kim family and perhaps even to each other. The Parks rely quite heavily on the Kims to live their every day lives to the point that none of them can function without the other. The father and mother of the Kim family, Ki-taek the chauffeur and Chung-sook the housekeeper, are two people the Park family relies very heavily on; the mother of the Park family Yeon-gyo is almost useless in the household, being incapable of doing the simplest tasks such as using the dishwasher. She heavily relies on both Mr. and Mrs. Kim for shopping and the housework, and the father Dong-ik, while not completely reliant on their employees like his wife, still uses his authority over them.

The main theme in Parasite is clearly social inequality and social divide. The movie shows this social divide very well foremost in the use of levels like I mentioned above, but they also show it in the form of the employees of the Park family; the Kim family, former housekeeper Gook Moon-gwang, and former chauffeur Mr. Yoon are all treated as expendables and not as real human beings. While I won't go into the specific details, there's a scene towards the end which shows very clearly that the Park family (ESPECIALLY Mr. Park) clearly treats not only their employees, but people of lower class then them as just expendable parts rather than real human beings. There is very much a sense of detachment that the wealthy Park family has from the poorer Kim family and others around them; a main example of this is the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Park fetishize the concept of being poor and therefore "dirty" and imagines themselves as of being lower class to "get themselves going". This really shows how detached the Park family is from the rest of society as they are so completely unaware (or even uncaring) of the less-wealthy's misfortunes and struggles that they can use something that's a bitter reality for many people as a strange fetish to the point that it's revolting. The class division in the film and the detachment from reality that the Park family has is so strikingly well-presented, from major things like the characters' actions down to the tiny things like the crazy expensive sirloin they use to make the instant noodles ram-don (짜파구리, or Cha-pa-gu-ri in Korean) or the VOSS water that they exclusively drink.

Parasite overall has amazing scenes, plot, acting, characters, dialogue, and cinematography. Bong Joon-ho was fantastic as the director and the film really deserved every single Academy Award it got. The film I think did so well because the theme of the disturbingly large divide between the rich and poor is a concept that is so universal that it is adaptable to pretty much every country in the world. The entire cast really performed outstandingly, and it really was a well-made film overall. I think that Parasite is the beginning of a new era in film where Korean movies will begin to become more and more recognized on the international stage of films, and I really hope to see more Korean movies nominated for Academy Awards. I also don't think this will be the last time we see Bong Joon-ho on the stage either... 

For my next review, I will be reviewing a satirical comedy on Nazi Germany made by a Polynesian Jewish film director who plays Hitler in the film. The film won the Oscar for Best Adopted Screenplay and was nominated for five others. As always, thank you for reading my blog, and I always will enjoy hearing from all of you, so if you have any comments, feedbacks, opinions, suggestions, etc., please feel free to comment, and I WILL respond to ALL comments!

Your Most Faithful Blogger, 

The Connoisseur

NOVEL REVIEW: The Library Policeman by Stephen King (From his collection Four Past Midnight)

So we're once again back to Stephen King, the genius maniac masquerading as an author. I recently got for Christmas one of his novella collections called Four Past Midnight. The four novellas are: The Langoliers, Secret Window, Secret Garden, The Library Policeman, and The Sun Dog. This time, I'm going to be reviewing my favourite novella out of the four, The Library Policeman. I really liked this story because it reminded me very strongly of IT, one of my favourite King novels; just like how IT is about overcoming your fears to defeat a greater evil, The Library Policeman is about confronting and overcoming a childhood trauma to defeat the greater evil, and the two main antagonists of the novel, Pennywise the Clown in IT and Ardelia Lortz in The Library Policeman, are also very similar types of Lovecraftian horrors, Pennywise and Ardelia both feeding off of fear from the children.

The overall theme of the story was great, and I really liked the idea of the "Library Policeman" being used as a monstrous villain and a personification of Sam Peebles' (the protagonist) childhood rapist coming back to haunt him. I'm not sure if the library policeman is a concept unique to the United States since I've never heard of it here in Canada, but it's really interesting how King used something from one's childhood memories that might have been just a little scary and turn it into a stuff of NIGHTMARES. I don't even know what about the Library Policeman scared me so much, but it terrified the hell out of me. It felt so real and the fact that it kept triggering something in Sam that he didn't know how to deal with.

Sam was terrified of this library policeman for some strange reason, and he didn't know why. The reader follows through Sam's journey of discovering himself and coming to terms with his childhood trauma, where we eventually learn that he was raped in front of the library by a man who called himself the library policeman. Sam had been repressing this memory in fear that the rapist would return for him if he ever let anyone knew, and the repressed trauma eventually took the form of the library policeman, who was the exact, terror-inducing incarnation of Sam's rapist. 

Ardelia Lortz, the main antagonist is a creature akin to Pennywise the Clown. Her MO is that during story time at the library when it was just her and the kids, she would put them into a trance of some sort, terrify them, and drink their tears/fears in form of tears, which was what she used to sustain herself. Even in her sweet, human form she's pretty terrifying. As a young woman she can seduce anyone she wants to essentially do her bidding; as an old woman, she's supposed to be this kind, friendly woman, but is so oddly terrifying in everything she says and does. One of the things that King knows how to do best is writing compelling characters, SPECIFICALLY terrifying villains. It was a pretty cool concept and she bears a striking resemblance to IT: they both are shape-shifting demons posing as a friendly figure to children so that they could feed off of childrens' tears; they even share the same silver eyes and the characteristic of using puppets to do their bidding! Combining this with the the sorrow-feeding Outsider (from The Outsider) and Dandelo the emotion-feeder (from The Dark Tower series), it seems as though Stephen King was really keen on these types of Lovecraftian monsters.

The most scary part of the novel was definitely right at the end when Sam is confronting his childhood traumatic memory of being raped. King describes the scene in such horrific and graphic detail and yet keeps it as suspenseful as possible so when the rape is described, you do a big double take of horror. When he comes to face with the trauma and announces out loud that he WAS raped, he is able to confront the monster in the form of his rapist and defeat it, which I think is a really good message by King for victims of abuse: you shouldn't be suppressing your trauma, but be confronting it, and that's how you can start the healing process. I went into this story expecting a really good horror story; I got exactly that, but I also got a story that is essentially the MeToo movement before MeToo was even a thing. Stephen King is so great at weaving the theme of the MeToo movement into the story in a way that you don't even realize it's actually about confronting and defeating your rapist until you think about the story after it's over. It is absolutely brilliant/

I know I usually do a summery and a rating out of five here, but I don't think I'll be doing that anymore. I don't want my number rating to affect someone's views on a novel or a film, and honestly it is getting hard to give ratings lower than four out of five since all the stuff I'm reviewing are usually stuff that I really like. But overall, The Library Policeman is a great story. It's reminiscent of IT and The Outsider, and the overall theme of overcoming your childhood trauma and facing your fears is a really great message. Stephen King is VERY good at making his novels revolve around very real-life themes such as childhood fears or the death of a loved one, and these stories I think can really help people actually deal with these issues because of the focus King puts on these themes. 

My next two reviews are two films that are the recipients of Academy Awards in 2020. The first film is a Korean one which has received FOUR Academy Awards (including Best Picture). The second one is a film set in Nazi Germany and is the recipient of Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award. I think you can guess which movies they are, so keep your eyes peeled for them! As always, thank you for reading my blog, and I always will enjoy hearing from all of you, so if you have any comments, feedbacks, opinions, suggestions, etc., please feel free to comment, and I WILL respond to ALL comments!

Your Most Faithful Blogger, 

The Connoisseur