Parasite

We finally catch up with the film Parasite which was the first ever non-English language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Not only did it win Best Picture but it also won Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Film.

The film is about two very different families from opposite ends of the spectrum as regards class and wealth etc. Without trying to sound too ‘Family Fortunes’, there is the Kim family who live in a small basement apartment, have jobs as pizza box folders and freeload on other people's wifi and there is the Park family who live in a mansion and have servants.

The paths of these two families cross when the Kim’s son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is offered the chance to take over a friend’s job as tutor to the wealthy Park’s daughter Da-hye (Jung Ziso). He has no qualifications for this but his artist sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) is adept at forgery and supplies him with a fake certificate to bluff his way into the job.

Mrs Park is so impressive with him, now known as ‘Kevin’ and not knowing he’s already seduced her daughter, that she asks him if he could recommend an art tutor for their son (Jung Hyun-jun).

Enter Ki-jung, or rather ‘Jessica’, allegedly the cousin of a friend and she is quickly hired too. Together they contrive to frame the family chauffeur, getting him fired for having sex in the family car where ‘Jessica’ has left her underwear. They already have a replacement in mind, their father (Song Kang-ho).

They then remove the family’s housekeeper after they exploit her allergic reaction to peaches but passing it off as tuberculosis. When she is dismissed they install their mum (Chang Hyae-jin) instead.

Although still living mostly in their dank basement apartment, they all seem to scrub up surprisingly well when they need to. However the Park’s Son notices that for a bunch of strangers that claim to not know each other they all smell remarkably alike, and like they have come from a dank basement apartment.

When the Parks leave on a camping trip, the Kim’s all move in and revel in the luxuries of their borrowed abode but the old housekeeper appears at the door saying she has left something in the cellar. This something turns out to be her husband, who has been secretly living there for years, hiding from his debts.

Parasite is a clever black comedy that is set up brilliantly in the first half and which descends into farce and violence in the second half as rain curtails the Park’s camping trip forcing them to return home as a violent battle erupts between the Kims and housekeeper's family for parasitic rites to the mansion.

The violence continues the next day at the Park’s son's birthday party leading to several deaths and eventually a new family moving into the mansion while a new resident hides out in the cellar.

It’s wonderful stuff and best seen before the inevitable Hollywood remake.

The Artist

Tonight, in the age of 3D and CGI, we watch Golden Globe winner 'The Artist' which is a silent film, made in black and white and not even widescreen. Ho hum. I must be feeling rebellious.

Hollywood 1927, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a silent movie star of huge proportions. After another successful premiere, a pretty young fan throws herself at him (1920's style) and he poses for photos with her. The young girl is Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), who starts to audition for the movies herself and gets a role as an extra. George is even more impressed when he meets her legs. It's lust at first sight (1920's style).

Times are a changing though, movies with words are on the way... 'talkies' they call them. George scoffs at the mere thought but audiences want change he's told. It's time to move on but filled with a sense of his own importance and perhaps a little fear, he doesn't. Meaning his fall from grace is almost as swift as the rise of the new star and the pin-up of the 'talkies'. Some chick called Peppy Miller. Ouch.

George stumbles on, from one crisis to another. His self-funded film, silent of course, flops. The stock market crashes, leaving him destitute. His wife leaves him and he is forced to fire his loyal butler Clifton. Then when he runs out of alcohol in which to drown his sorrows he auctions off everything he owns. When that fails to solve his problems he sets fire to his old film reels and, with them, his apartment. This leads me nicely on to the star of the film, who rushes to his aid, Uggie the dog.

Meanwhile bizarrely, frighteningly, Peppy Miller not content with backwardly slagging George off in public, has started to stalk him. Maybe she's just taking pity on him, but come on she bought ALL his possessions. Obsessive or what. She even takes on his discarded butler. She’s one scary woman, steer clear, but he doesn't and he convalesces from his fire damage at her house where he finds out the extent of her obsessive behaviour/kindness. He puts a gun in his mouth in an attempt to kill himself. For God's sake man, think of the dog, the one that is anxiously pulling at your trouser leg.

This isn’t actually a bad plot when you write it all down but it’s all old school silent, complete with the overblown gestures and storyboards of the day. Oh, apart from a brief dream sequence where we had sound, which teased you into thinking the plot would develop in that direction. It was certainly odd for the film to continue completely silent with Miller now acting in ‘talkies’ but not being able to hear her.

Its hard work, the lack of dialogue just keeps you focused on trying to lip read what everyone is saying. This is perhaps why I’ve never made it through a silent film before and why everyone unanimously thought ‘talkies’ were such a big step forward. The chap next to us clearly agreed, he went to the loo or the bar at least three times.

At the end Valentin is back in the spotlight tap dancing, partnering Peppy Miller. So is the message of the film that unless you adapt to the times you become obsolete... and to make their point they make a silent film about the end of silent films, in black and white and not even widescreen. Ho hum. Now who's obsolete? Confused? I am.

Ok... it's not a bad film... it’s a well crafted period piece with some excellent attention to detail... but you still walk out thinking that there was a valid reason why silent movies disappeared. Well I did. However, I am clearly in the minority. There appears to a Best Picture Oscar waiting for ‘The Artist’. Which I think will be a bit of a kick in the teeth for the actors and actresses who have put in great performances this year, that is if they get beaten by two people who do not speak.

Well at least everyones favourite character has already had his recognition. In Cannes last year, Uggie was awarded the 2011 Palm Dog award for Best Canine Performance in a film. Bless.

Hurt Locker

‘Hurt Locker’ opens with a failed bomb disposal attempt in Baghdad, during which the team’s leader and disposal expert gets killed. The story concerns his replacement, Sergeant Will James who at best can be described as a maverick. When James arrives, Bravo Company have thirty-nine days left to serve. It will be a long thirty-nine days for James’s team of Sanborn and Eldridge, who are simply happy just to keep their heads down and stay alive. Consequently they are shocked by James’s unnecessary risk tasking and rightly so.

I didn’t understand the opening scene. The bomb that kills his predecessor is triggered by a mobile phone but rather than shooting the guy with the phone, the other soldiers rather tamely shout him to ‘put down the phone’. This kind of sets the tone for the rest of the film. It’s all good exciting gritty stuff with a good dollop of suspense thrown in but it's also probably totally unrealistic.

Hurt Locker is not my usual sort of film but I felt I had to see it when it won lots of awards. It’s a decent film, well acted and well made but, as you watch it, it certainly doesn’t strike you as anything that would be likely to win any awards. It’s entertaining but at the time it didn’t really occur to me just how unbelievable it all was until I started writing a review of it.



For a start the bomb disposal team hardly seemed professional even before James arrives to disrupt them. They seem to wander around Iraq a bit like we used to around Nottingham as students in between lessons at Uni.

Then James arrives and things get even more reckless. He clearly gets an adrenaline rush from disarming IEDs (improvised explosive devices), regardless of the risk to his safety or that of others. Preferably he’d like to be peppered with sniper fire whist he’s doing it. Which may be fair enough, maybe, but would the army really let him get away with being so reckless? His attitude puts others at risk. Anyone behaving in that way would either be severely disciplined or severely dead.



He refuses to use the bomb disposal ‘robot’ and annoys his colleagues by removing his radio headset. At one stage when he encounters a car bomb he removes his protective suit as he looks for the trigger wire. Brave or just plain stupid?

Then when he encounters the dead body of what he thinks is a young Iraqi boy he had befriended, that has been turned into a body bomb, he goes off on one and attempts to find out who is responsible. In Baghdad, on his own, at night. Then he simply wanders back through the streets to the compound. A bit far fetched I would have thought. Then he enlists his team to help him pursue his personal quest and gets one of them shot in the leg.



We never quite get to the bottom of why he behaves like this. We just assume he’s a nutter. We do see him back at home with his family, visibly bored. Without the stimulation of war he is nothing. So at the finish we find him back in Iraq, ready for another year in the war zone.

So it's another gung-ho American war film then, realism suspended, but gets the best picture Oscar. Sorted.