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For the week of January 27th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Bong Joon-ho's blistering social satire Parasite to Blu-ray. If you can, go into the film with as little advance knowledge as possible. It's not so much that Parasite hinges on narrative twists and revelations (although there are a couple of doozies). Rather, the very nature of the storytelling involves Bong slowly, patiently drawing you into an increasingly untenable situation alongside his four protagonists (Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin, Choi Woo-shik, and Park So-dam). See, Bong's social agenda is such that he wants to implicate all of us, which means being able to see yourself in the main characters. Even as far back as his serial-killer procedural Memories of Murder, Bong has been a stridently political figure, often melding high-concept genre premises with political agit-prop (U.S. chemical in Seoul creates a mutated fish monster; a futuristic train literally partitioned off into the haves and have-nots). And Parasite grounds itself into the disparity between rich and poor. [READ ON FOR MINOR SPOILERS] It's no accident that this film's first big "setpiece" involves the search for Wi-Fi as Bong's four leads scramble around their basement apartment trying to leech off an unprotected wireless network. The stakes are human-scaled and all the more dire for it. Our heroes can't afford Wi-Fi, but they also won't be able to look for work to pay their bills if they can't use the internet, so their bumbling search masks life-or-death desperation. It's the whole movie in microcosm, and if you can access the panic in this opening, then Bong's got you for the remaining two hours. What else can I tell you? The filmmaking command has the precision of people like Alfred Hitchcock or David Fincher. Plus a little Tati just for sport: Bong loves breaking the frame into precise frames-within-frames, only to let the viewer sort the relationship between all the different elements. And like those filmmakers, Bong succeeds at mining just as much humor from tension. This is one of the funniest movies of the year. And if you're familiar with Bong's movies, you'll know they're willfully insane. Parasite uses that expectation against you. Bong knows you're waiting to see if and how far he will go, and as a result, he imbues the most placid seeming of circumstances with roiling dread. After a certain point, I had no idea where the hell Parasite was going. I covet that feeling. You should, too.
Martin Liebman noted that "The film's technical mastery proves as exquisite as its narrative constructs. Bong Joon-ho's direction and Hong Kyung-pyo's cinematography are fit for the art house but accessible to the mainstream. The movie uses visual cues and set construction and height and depth to expert technical merit and finessed narrative support. Nothing appears without careful consideration but also not without seamless visual flow and natural assembly. More, the cast is phenomenal. There's an artistry to the performances that certainly capture the broader stroke genius in the writing but also explore the deeper nuances and subtly both within the characters and through the interactions they share, whether directly or indirectly, verbally or silently. Each player commands their space with eerie completeness and complexity. The performances are not practiced but rather authentic: whether the Kim's peculiar camaraderie or the cold aloofness in the Park's togetherness and certainly in the family intermingling, the cast understands the superficial realities and deeper ramifications of physical and emotional closeness with powerful exactness. Few films intermix cinema as art and cinema as entertainment so well."
Why is it so hard to make a good Terminator movie? I thought about that question a lot watching Tim Miller's Terminator: Dark Fate, a sequel/soft-reboot that pretty much ignores every Terminator after Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I get the instinct at play: James Cameron's first two Terminators are still the best, so it would stand to reason that preserving that particular timeline could yield more interesting narrative developments than the okay Rise of the Machines, the sluggish Salvation, or the dunderheaded Genisys, especially considering that Cameron himself helped develop the story for Dark Fate. And I do like a lot of the pieces Cameron designed. The film opens with a nasty surprise that obliterates whatever hope remained at the end of Judgment Day (it involves some CGI de-aging of that film's three main stars), and for a while, we're throttling along on the audacity of that twist and the work of Mackenzie Davis and Linda Hamilton, both of whom are splendid. Davis manages to finally make good on Salvation's lone innovation to the franchise (like Sam Worthington's lead, she's a half-machine hybrid with a host of technological upgrades and an unmarred human soul), and Hamilton is so tough and flinty as Sarah Connor that you lament all the action-movie opportunities she should have received post-Judgment Day. Eventually they intersect with Arnold Schwarzenegger as...well, I probably shouldn't say, but his character is one of the most interesting things in this whole franchise. Suffice to say, I don't know if Schwarzenegger has ever been this good on screen. But despite all these neat wrinkles, Dark Fate suffers from the same problem that afflicts most movies in this series – it just can't justify its existence. Narratively, we're getting a Judgment Day do-over with a new evil digital overlord and another trip to the past to undo our future. Even the action sequences don't offer much in the way of thrills considering Miller's willingness to lean into digital weightlessness. Nor does it help that the new Big Bad (a very good Gabriel Luna) has Captain Marvel Syndrome: he has a host of terrifying, ill-defined powers (he's made of nanites / he can go all liquid-metal-y and stabby / he can separate his nanite form from his robot form and tag-team his opponents), yet he's never able to weaponize them against our heroes in a way that seems all that threatening. The film ends, as this series has so many, many times before, with a smackdown inside an industrial plant and the implicit promise of another sequel. For all that Dark Fate wants to achieve, it can't help but stay too focused on the realities of franchise building. Maybe this time will take, but I doubt it.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "struggles to find its own footprint, even when there are new heroes and villains in play. It's the same thing with the action scenes. They are unquestionably big - huge - and are by far the most completely realized, high end, ultra kinetic examples yet seen in a Terminator film (and several are amongst the best ever captured on film). At the same time, they're just expected, and it's difficult to buy into the danger when the movie is all but forced to walk down a mostly predictable path. Dark Fate does it all very well; it's just gotten to the point of so much saturation and familiarity that the movie can't escape the clutches of conformity. "
Still, at least Dark Fate is merely irrelevant, as opposed to Edward Norton's long-gestating passion project Motherless Brooklyn, which emerges from Warner Home Entertainment as a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. I respect Norton's audacity in trying to bring Jonathan Lethem's detective novel to the screen; Lethem uses noir tropes to introduce us to Lionel Essrog, a P.I. struggling with both the death of his mentor and his own Tourette's Syndrome. It's an electrifying bit of first-person storytelling, so fully does Lethem dramatize the synapses firing in atypical patterns and sequences within Essrog's head, but the novel is also reliant on perspective and language to the point that it might be unfilmable. In order to counter that challenge, Norton makes two fatal miscalculations. The first: he tosses out almost everything besides Essrog and plants the character in 1950s New York so he can investigate how the death of his mentor (Bruce Willis, in the film's best performance - Norton woke him up for the first time since 2012) dovetails into how an unscrupulous real-estate mogul (Alec Baldwin, delivering a full-on ham sandwich) plans to gentrify all of Brooklyn. I get that Norton wants to make an East Coast Chinatown, only Lethem's relatively slender text can't support this lofty infusion of politics and history (Norton is practically shooting a fictionalized version of Robert Caro's 1100-page The Power Broker), and thus the film flounders under all this excess sociopolitical intrigue. It does not help that Baldwin is essentially playing Donald Trump again - Norton gives Baldwin a speech larded with Trumpian rhetoric, like Norton is desperate for Motherless Brooklyn to have ALL the contemporary relevance. But the even bigger miscalculation is Norton's own performance as Essrog. Norton can be a thrillingly electric actor (see: Birdman, Fight Club, or Rounders), and he can also overload his work to the point of incoherence. To wit, Norton gave one of the most offensive performances I have ever seen when he pretended to be cognitively challenged in The Score, and he's almost as unwatchable here, taking all of Essrog's complexities and reducing them into a nigh-unending stream of unmanageable tics and quirks. I get that he's trying to replicate the experience of reading Lethem's prose, but his translation is fundamentally broken: I got flashes of Eric Cartman in South Park's "Up the Down Steroid," except that episode was criticizing bigots and opportunists who prey on the disabled. Motherless Brooklyn, on the other hand, plays like pure exploitation. Awful.
We'll end with Shout Select's new special edition of Peter Berg's 1998 farce Very Bad Things. If you're only familiar with Berg's heartfelt, patriotic docudramas (Patriots Day; Friday Night Lights), then Very Bad Things will knock you for a loop. This is a jet-black comedy awash in lurid gore and sex - had Jim Thompson lived long enough to update his brand of acid noir (The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me) to the 1990s, he could have penned Berg's film. We begin with the pre-wedding jitters of Jon Favreau and Cameron Diaz's soon-to-be-married couple: he's going through all the expected insecurities and anxieties, and she's a Bridezilla determined to have the perfect ceremony. Favreau and Diaz are good together, and there's a whole movie to be mined out of their nervy dynamic (Diaz, in particular, is terrific as a shark in human skin - she's practically doing a test-run for her Any Given Sunday manager). But Very Bad Things has other ideas, and soon we're in Vegas for Favreau's bachelor party, complete with his cadre of besties (Jeremy Piven, Leland Orser, Daniel Stern, and the great Christian Slater), a willing stripper (Kobe Tai)...and a nightmare situation that spirals violently out of control. Even twenty-plus years later, I still can't fully process the level of depravity on display - impalings, stabbings, electric-saw dismemberment, vehicular homicide - and I totally understand why so many critics turned on the film. To some extent, Berg is trolling his audiences; just the casting of Tai (a former adult-film performer) suggests how far he's willing to push things. But he also maintains a manic, antic sense of pace, particularly once the bachelor party ends, and Favreau's crew starts crumbling under the pressure of what they've done. We could be watching a more brutal episode of Fawlty Towers in terms of the various complications that pile up, with Slater's smoothly ruthless motivational speaker presiding over the chaos like an evil M.C. The dictionary definition of an acquired taste.
Brian Orndorf wrote that "Berg unleashes his id with [the film], trying to make a distinct impression with a manic effort that's not short on macabre incidents, but remains laugh-free as it lovingly details ugliness…Performances tap into the nervous energy of the screenplay, with Slater the standout of the bunch, leaning into Robert's oiliness and lack of moral core, trying to keep the gang as calm and focused as possible as they set out to butcher the bodies for easier disposal, also organizing a promise of silence as the friends return to their everyday lives. This type of ghoulish focus is passably entertaining…but Berg doesn't want it, preferring to bathe the effort in tedious argumentative behavior, botched slapstick with Adam's runaway nerves, and jokes that deliberately aim for bad taste (including making fun of the physically disabled), giving the feature an unshakable vibe of desperation. Add in overlength, and Very Bad Things grows exhausting in a hurry."
Parasite will be a blind buy for me...but I've seen MOST of the director's previous movies, so I'm expecting something good. I won't lie, though, the hype concerns me.
Was not a fan of Dark Fate, but I have to complete my collection so will eventually pick it up on 4K, but will be when the price drops down to 10 or less. Nothing else releasing I have any interest in. Parasite will be a PPV as I always find these heavily touted movies to not be "all that" when I eventually see them.
Did Josh Katz just give a halfway decent review of the abomination that is Terminator Dark Fate, and then go on to completely destroy Motherless Brooklyn??!!
Motherless Brooklyn is easily the better film of the two! He didn't even mention the great Daniel Pemberton/Thom Yorke score or the fantastic production design.
I've wanted to see Parasite since it debuted at the Telluride Film Festival. I don't even care about paying full price for it. It will be here tomorrow, and I'm excited beyond description. My only experience with Bong Joon-ho's work as a director came from Snowpiercer, which I thought was fantastic. Since I'm making a concerted effort to expose myself to more contemporary foreign film, this was a must have. I'm also pumped that Fail-Safe is finally getting a long overdue blu-ray release. A century from now, when all that are now living are dead and buried (save for Keith Richards, who will never die) Sidney Lumet will rightfully be looked upon as one of the Twentieth Century's great directors. Fail-Safe is on the same level, for me, as Seven Days in May, and the Manchurian Candidate. All are eerily relevant today. It may not be as well known as some of his works-Network, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, 12 Angry Men-but it's on their level. I'll grab Bell, Book and Candle, also, when it comes down in price a bit.
Already got my copies of Parasite and Set 5 of JoJo in the mail. I'll be getting the SteelBook for Terminator on Thursday, and I might pick up that re-issue of the Kite Runner because I haven't bought it previously.
Tried to watch Dark Fate. Didn't get past the first 30 minutes, just couldn't take it anymore. I'm a huge terminator fan (yeah, even 3), and that's the problem.
Pre-ordered "Dark Fate" last week, picked it up yesterday. HUUUUGE "Terminator" fan who was completely on board with the change of direction and unexpected opening. I'd love to be able to say "Bring on more", but I know there won't be anything beyond this. If nothing else, I consider it to be a wonderful goodbye to the T800, in what might be Arnold's finest, most-nuanced performance as the character.
I watched Tammy in 4K on Shudder. In my opinion, spend the $6 or free trial for that instead of buying the 4K unless you already know you're a fan. It's an... interesting film.
I'll wait on the inevitable announcement of the Parasite 4K, and as with others, I'll wait until Black Friday pricing on Dark Fate.
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