Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 1 July

Parasite (Bong, 2019)

Last week I men­tioned the New York Times and their sur­vey of the 100 best films of the 21^st cen­tury to date (gift link) and yes­ter­day they com­pleted their count­down and announced a winner.

It should be no great sur­prise that a win­ner of the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best Picture should top the list but it’s no less sat­is­fy­ing for that. Parasite is prob­ably that I have rewatched most in the past 25 years and it delights every single time.

I was lucky enough to review Parasite for RNZ on At the Movies almost six years ago to the day (3 July 2019):

Finally, to South Korea where one of the finest film­makers work­ing today plies his idio­syn­crat­ic trade. Bong Joon-ho has made anoth­er fas­cin­at­ing treat­ise on class, inequal­ity, and a mod­ern eco­nomy that sees 99% of its par­ti­cipants as dis­pos­able fod­der for the mass-consumption machine.

…

The Kim fam­ily live in a base­ment with one job between four people – fold­ing pizza boxes, badly as it turns out. The son gets an oppor­tun­ity to teach English to the chil­dren of a wealthy busi­ness­man and the fam­ily slowly and intric­ately weaves itself into the lives of the bliss­fully obli­vi­ous Parks. Firstly, he gets his sis­ter a job as an art ther­ap­ist for the chil­dren, then his fath­er becomes the chauf­feur and his moth­er man­ages to replace the housekeeper.

All should be golden at this point, but the Kims can’t help but push their luck a little too far and the whole house of cards comes crash­ing down in shock­ing and sur­pris­ing ways. Director Bong – as he has through­out his career – man­ages to del­ic­ately bal­ance the extremes of genre film­mak­ing – in this case the home inva­sion thrill­er – with social satire and some broad comedy.

…

Incidentally, I just did a quick count and I own phys­ic­al cop­ies of 13 out of the top 20 films in the list which prob­ably means that my taste is too canon­ic­ally main­stream and I should branch out a bit more. My copy of Parasite is the 4K UHD edi­tion put out by Madman and it is a cork­er if you can still find it.

Where to watch Parasite

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix or digit­al rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Streaming on Netflix or Stan

Canada: Streaming on Crave, Paramount+ or Hollywood Suite

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Netflix

India: Streaming on Sonyliv

USA: Streaming on Netflix, Max (when do we start call­ing it HBO Max again?) and Kanopy from par­ti­cip­at­ing libraries

Further reading

Not an online read­ing option but last night I fin­ished Nick Bollinger’s excel­lent work of social and cul­tur­al his­tory, Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Mapping the tra­ject­ory of the vari­ous altern­at­ive life­style and polit­ic­al move­ments in this tiny nation – the loc­al influ­ences as well as the inter­na­tion­al trends – it does an excel­lent job of show­ing us some of the ways in which we got to here from there.

Because we are such a small coun­try, indi­vidu­als – and some fam­il­ies – appear to have an out­sized influ­ence: The Campions, the Sutches, the Alleys, the Baxters, Beliches and Beagleholes, not to men­tion the Bollingers themselves.

Musicians (and then film­makers) John Charles, Geoff Murphy and Bruno Lawrence mar­ried three of the Robins sis­ters – Pat, Judy and Veronica – and their young­est broth­er Kerry ended up pro­du­cing Goodbye Pork Pie and Utu before going into exhib­i­tion and teach­ing me the trade at the Paramount and the Embassy.

There’s a great Murphy story in the book about him going primary school teach­ing in the early 1970s and grow­ing 120 marijuana plants in the classroom as a “sci­ence pro­ject”. Also on the sub­ject of dope, I was very taken with the image of jazz legend Thelonious Monk – tour­ing New Zealand under the aus­pices of the Chamber Music Society in 1965 – ask­ing for­lornly where he could get some “spe­cial cigar­ettes” in places like Hamilton and Tauranga.

Anyway, the book does a great job of prov­ing that New Zealand cul­ture in the 60s and 70s was more than just a few middle-class fam­il­ies, but also con­cludes that the coun­ter­cul­tur­al scene was only pos­sible dur­ing times of plenty. Dropping out was a lux­ury when there was no unem­ploy­ment to speak of. As the eco­nomy foundered in the 1970s thanks to oil shocks and the like, more con­ser­vat­ive approaches to life­style took hold, lead­ing to the neo­lib­er­al years of Rogernomics and the eco­nom­ic ortho­dox­ies of today.

Jumping Sundays won the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction1 at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and you can find a copy near you here.