geezer cinema: parasite (bong joon ho, 2019)

It was my turn to pick a movie for Geezer Cinema, and it wasn't hard to choose ... I've been looking forward to Parasite for a long time. This is because I've become interested in recent Korean films, and Director Bong is probably my favorite, having seen five of his movies prior to Parasite and liking them all: Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother, Snowpiercer, and Okja. Parasite isn't like the others, but that itself is a bit of a Bong tradition, as is my response. When I look back at earlier reviews, I see I repeat myself time and again. As I wrote about Okja,

Even as his films test different genres, there is a consistency to the quality of his work.... If there's a problem with this consistency, it's that I am running out of things to say. But I was also prescient ... there is no telling what he'll do next ... Snowpiercer was a futuristic sci-fi dystopia; The Host was a monster movie; Memories was a procedural. And now Okja, an anti-corporation tale where the title character is a genetically-modified "super pig" and the main human character is a young Korean girl (played by Ahn Seo-hyun).

I'm not sure I can even reduce Parasite to a specific genre, which may be a sign that I liked it even more than the others. I'll avoid a spoiler here, but I'll nonetheless note that the film's title describes the movie, if you account for the twists that take Parasite into areas you didn't expect. It is a study in class, which is a common theme in Bong's films, perhaps most clearly in Snowpiercer. It features Song Kang-Ho, who has been in four of the Bong films I've seen. Parasite starts off as one kind of movie, almost a comedy, gradually and almost unnoticed takes a turn into another kind of movie, reflects on the notion of parasites, and somehow at the end you realize it was never just one kind of movie, but always all kinds of movies. It is constantly surprising, and Bong pulls off an interesting trick: you realize something is about to happen just before it happens, but not long before ... you don't think that birthday cake is going to be important until the moment when it becomes important.

And I haven't mentioned the house that is the center of much of the action. Here is an article (with spoilers) examining the work of Bong and production designer Lee Ha Jun creating "the year's best set".