geezer cinema: godzilla x kong: the new empire (adam wingard, 2024)
music friday: 1986

revisiting the 9s: parasite (bong joon-ho, 2019)

[This is the twenty-first in a series that will probably be VERY intermittent, if I remember to post at all. I've long known that while I have given my share of 10-out-of-10 ratings for movies over the years, in almost every case, those movies are fairly old. So I got this idea to go back and revisit movies of relatively recent vintage that I gave a rating of 9, to see if time and perspective convinced me to bump that rating up to 10.]

In 2019, I wrote about Parasite:

"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.... 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."

If anything, I was more locked in than ever to the class warfare angle. This really is a great movie, deserving of all its many awards (Best Picture Oscar, #242 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time, #11 for 21st-century pictures). It is the perfect example of my tendencies to hesitate over the greatness of newer movies ... I have no idea why I didn't give this my highest rating the first time I saw it.

This wasn't an exact revisit, though, for on this second viewing, I decided to watch Director Bong's black-and-white version. Honestly, it quickly became normal, and I didn't spend much time thinking about how it looked it color. It was still great.

And here is one of Bong's memorable acceptance speeches at the Oscars:

Comments

Tomás

Such an amazingly brilliant movie. And now I'm interested--how many of your revisited 9s have become 10s? I re-read your posts for this and I think (because sometimes it's interpretive sot say you are bumping it up or not) it's about 9 of 21. Not bad.

Steven Rubio

It's funny I never calculated this before. I also noticed the first movie I did was L.A. Confidential, which is from 1997, although I thought I was only doing 21st century movies. Anyway, by an eyeball count, 11 got bumped, and 3 got demoted. It also seems that I am giving out 10s more frequently in recent times for this series. I have no idea why, but I like doing it, because it seems to prove that I really do knock a point off the rating for great movies that are new. Watching them again often shows how silly that is.

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