mickey 17 (w&d bong joon-ho)

What happens when success catches up with you and you can make all your dreams come true? You go big budget and make a sci-fi parody. Bong Jung-ho’s bloated extravaganza is leaden, pacey, and permits Pattinson to execute some bravura acting. It’s like a train ride which slows down and speeds up. Thinking specifically of  a train we took in Bolivia, through the Chaco, where sometimes we were rolling merrily along and at others we were stuck, gazing at a few bushes, twigs, a suspicion of life. Looking back on the journey it was, all-in-all, enjoyable, albeit with moments of frustration. I don’t know if there’s anything much to take away from Mickey 17. The premise is Phillip K Dick lite, (Dostoyevsky lite?) and never quite extracts the full potential of the idea of a one person (soul?), inhabiting two bodies. It’s played for laughs, which is fair enough, but works against any pretension to actually have any underpinning philosophy. There is the constant sense of a project that has had money thrown at it, seeing what sticks. Fortunately in Pattinson the film has a protagonist who is charismatic enough to just about hold the whole thing together. 

parasite (w&d bong joon-ho, w. han jin-won)

Parasite escaped me when it emerged to a smorgasbord of acclaim. There’s a chutzpah to the direction which anchors the movie as it goes through various phases. The build-up, the takeover, the long night, the catastrophe, the coda. Perhaps something Shakespearian in this structure, and the film is rangy, shifting focus, with scope for surprises and new characters. Evidently the Upstairs Downstairs thematic is present, but at times it feels as though the film is too mired in narrative and humour to really get to grips with what it means to be poor in South Korea. It might be said that this is encapsulated by the way the deluge floods the Kim family home, but equally this could be a metaphor for a sinking planet (and has strong echoes of Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness with their mutual exploding toilets). The film’s humour and the warmth of this family unit clearly help to explain why Parasite became such a break-out hit. Bong Joon-ho’s direction is assured: he knows exactly which buttons to push to maintain the pace and keep the audience on-side.