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Movie review: Parasite (Gisaengchung)

Writer/Director Bong Joon Ho

ParasiteI have no idea how to review the movie Parasite (Gisaengchung). Except this. This movie is LOL funny at some points, utterly horrific at others.

Bong Joon Ho is a South Korean writer/director. The first people we meet are the Kim family, parents, college-aged son and a daughter a bit older. They live in dire poverty, all but jobless, dealing with life’s indignities.

Then by chance, the young man Kim Ki-woo gets a fill-in gig as a tutor for the daughter of the Park family. These are well-off, aspirational people, especially the father. Once Kim Ki-woo gets his foot in the door, he wonders if he can get gigs for the rest of his family.

This is a tricky task, because there are people already in a couple of these positions. But the Kims are creative and the Parks are fairly oblivious. And the first part of the movie ends. We discover, though that it’s not only the Kim family in the parasite role. Also, you can’t always get rid of the stench of poverty.

I suppose I should mention that the movie is in Korean, with subtitles. Well, except for those moment the Park mother tries out her minimal English.

What the writer said

Lessee, what did Ken Levine have to say? “So far PARASITE is my pick for movie of the year…

“Writer/Director Bong Joon Ho has achieved the near impossible – making a movie so engrossing that no one in the theater had to tell someone to turn off their phone. Now, THAT’S filmmaking.” Well, actually there was that one woman in my row…

“Happily, PARASITE doesn’t fall into any one genre. It cleverly and stylishly combines a few, bends a few, and creates a few into one compelling cohesive film. I was knocked out by the storytelling. I guarantee you won’t be able to predict what happens next. You’ll laugh, you’ll shriek – and isn’t that what entertainment’s all about?”

I went to this in early January 2020, without my wife or child, and it’s probably just as well. Naturally, I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

Yet another JEOPARDY! post

“What is Palestine?”

jeopardy.logoYou may not be aware of this, but I am Constitutionally required to write a JEOPARDY! post at least once a year. Maybe it’s because J! is one of the two reasons I decided to create a blog in the first place.

I’ve been watching the show since the original series with Art Fleming with my great-aunt Deana. Since she died in 1966, it’s been a long time. Not all that much has changed. The dollar values have gone up considerably. The cheapest clue used to be $10, then $100 when the show returned in 1984. That amount doubled to $200 in the early 2000s, alas after my appearances.

Another thing that has changed is that they got out of the prize business, and instead award $2000 for second place and $1000 for third. This makes a lot of sense. Arranging for my trip to Barbados in May 1999, with my new bride, was terribly complicated.

Win until you lose

Only one rule change has substantially altered the game itself, and that is ending the five-win and done rule. Virtually anyone winning five games would be back. With players now able to win more games, it turned the formula on its head.

When Ken Jennings was on the Tournament of Champions, after winning 74 regular-season matches, there was a “mere” three-time winner in the group. It’s clear, though, that at least the casual fan of the show likes the big winners. James Holzhauer, the 32-game winner, got people to watch. He, like Jennings and others, even made the national news and became stars.

Personally, this is inconvenient. I might be several shows behind in my J! watching, only to hear that player X has won their 10th game. So when I actually DO watch those matches, I already know the outcome. The downside of time shifting.

JEOPARDY! can also make the news in other ways. For instance, A Contestant Asked, “What Is Palestine?” The Game Show Gave the Wrong Answer. The show accepted Israel as the site of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. This after another contestant was penalized for answering “What is Palestine?”

As Dan noted, “Details of that particular game aside, there’s the matter of her giving the right answer and being denied. That can shake your confidence at a very vulnerable moment and affect your subsequent playing. There’s no way to measure that.”

Oops

NOTE: “Katie’s score displayed $4,600 at the end of the round after being ruled incorrect and $4,800 at the beginning of the next round, with no explanation. This clue caused a break in taping for judges’ deliberation in which compliance officials were involved.

“A replacement clue, ‘Bascilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe’, which Jack got correct with the response of “What is Mexico?”, was played and recorded, but, due to human error, was not included in the originally aired edit of the show. The show uploaded video of the replacement clue to Facebook on 2020-01-13.”

On another front, I didn’t mind that Greatest Of All Time tournament. The redeeming factor is that it was on primetime on ABC-TV and didn’t cut into the chance for “regular” players to have a chance. Of course, I learned the outcome before I watched it, but so it goes.

Conversely, I hated Team JEOPARDY! last year because it minimized the opportunity for folks like me from having a chance to be on the stage. What is the end of this JEOPARDY! post?

Movie review: Bombshell (2019)

a pretty good TV movie

BombshellThe movie Bombshell is about the denigration of women at FOX News. The chief bad guy is the head honcho, Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), who created the media empire. He is sufficiently villainous.

This is a really important story being told. Issues of power, consent, body image abound. It is quite timely in the #MeToo era, with that ripped-from-the-headlines vibe about breaking the silence.

It’s interesting that the two more powerful female news performers operated largely in their own circles. that would be Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman). Whether by the competitive design of the FOX management or happenstance, this allowed the abuse to go on without people comparing notes.

BTW, the makeup for Kidman and especially Theron, is amazing. But I was distracted by many of the men whose approximation of the real guys went from not bad to laughable.

Also less than satisfying for me was the character played by Margot Robbie. Maybe it was because Kayla Pospisil was not an individual but rather an amalgam of several FOX employees. Still, she suffered the most on-screen humiliation, and it was mighty uncomfortable.

In another era, I’d say this was a pretty good TV movie. Once that term was generally understood as “not bad for television.” Of course, that line has long since been blurred. The storyline was uneven, and somehow not as compelling as I wanted it to be.

Trumped

It is ironic, as one critic noted, that “Bombshell glorifies/reframes notoriously racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic Fox personalities as #MeToo heroines.”

Megyn Kelly, in particular, I found to be a loathsome on-air personality. I did feel for Megyn, both the real her and movie her, when the 2016 Republican nominee for President said untoward things about her. And I thought she was soft on him during their next encounter. So that narrative rang true.

The Pospisil/Jess Carr (Kate McKinnon) relationship did not. I did buy that Carr could be a closet liberal working at FOX, though.

I guess I wanted to pump my fist when – no spoiler – Ailes’ machinations are revealed, as I did in Spotlight or even The Post. My wife liked it more than I when we and our daughter saw it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in late December. My daughter thought it was good too.

Lydster: here comes the knight

one could

mountney-coat-of-arms-mountney-family-crest-7The tricky thing about redoing the family tree is to be representational. On one hand, I have this whole new biological tribe to represent. On the other, I don’t want to ignore the import of my non-biological grandfather McKinley Green.

As it turns out, Ancestry.com has a mechanism by which one could change McKinley Green from grandparent to step-grandparent. Then one could add Raymond Cone as biological grandfather. And by “one could,” I mean my daughter could. Even when I read the instructions, nada. She did it in a couple of minutes.

Then she became a bit obsessed. Once you add a name on an Ancestry tree, it suggests Hints. Some verify what I already knew. Others are frustratingly unclear. Two different names of people with similar names but different dates, e.g. Was that guy a bigamist with wives with the same first name? That sort of thing.

But some Hints, usually coming from Census or other family trees, seem credible. And as she went further and further back on one strand of the Cone tree, the more people from England she found. And there were other Ancestry folks who were keeping track of them.

Ye Jolly Olde

William Garret “Garrard” Sir, Knight of Derby, Brickmason, Immigrated to Jamestown-1607(First ships)
B:1583 Derby, Leicestershire, England
D:1640 St Botolph Bishopsgate, London, England
That’s eleven generations back. And through his wife’s line, she got back to:

Thomas Mounsey V
–1573
Birth 31 JAN • Mountney Plain, Norfolk, England
Death 1573 • Mountney Plain, Norfolk, England
14th great-grandfather
I’m actually thinking it’s Thomas Mountney V from some hints – crests and, more importantly the geography – which suggests investigating even further. I’ll have to double check some of these, but wow.

My daughter worked on this for at least three hours straight. This in lieu of doing homework, I later discovered. The trick is that the more names you accept, the more Hints you’re provided. I had over 300 Hints when she started, and now there are over 600. It’s rather like an infectious disease.

And all of this on this brand new genealogical strand that I didn’t know about until extremely recently.

Bridge Over Troubled Water – S&G

country, disco, soul…

Bridge over Troubled WaterSomeone wrote to me this week: “Waiting on your blog post that commemorates [the] 50th anniversary of the “Bridge Over Troubled Water” single.

It is a great song, released on January 20, 1970, the title track of an album released six days later. The single hit the charts on February 7 and spent six weeks at #1 pop and the same on the adult contemporary charts.

Moreover, it was the Grammy Record and Song of the Year, Top 50 on Rolling Stones Top 500 songs, and a bunch of other accolades. It’s my second favorite Simon and Garfunkel song, after The Boxer.

If memory serves, my sister Leslie received the single from her boyfriend that winter. I bought, or was given, the album shortly afterwards. I swear that the single and the album track were in different keys. Maybe that was just the production values of the single.

Who will sing the song?

I suppose Bridge Over Troubled Water makes me sad because it was the swan song of the duet, the last song recorded for their final album. Paul Simon felt his partner, Art Garfunkel, should sing the song solo, the “white choirboy way.” Art initially declined, liking “Simon’s falsetto on the demo.”

“At the suggestion of Garfunkel and producer Roy Halee, Simon wrote an extra verse and a ‘bigger’ ending, though he felt it was less cohesive with the earlier verses.” While Paul is technically correct – the last verse is not as strong, even with Simon’s harmonies – it doesn’t matter.

Even before their breakup, Paul had his regrets over giving the song to Artie. “Many times on a stage, though, when I’d be sitting off to the side and Larry Knechtel would be playing the piano and Artie would be singing ‘Bridge’, people would stomp and cheer when it was over, and I would think, ‘That’s my song, man…”

This is one of the most covered songs, ever. These are the ones that charted in the US, to my knowledge, plus one more.

Simon and Garfunkel
Aretha Franklin, #6 pop, #1 for two weeks RB in 1971
Buck Owens, #119 pop, #9 CW in 1971
Linda Clifford, #41 pop, #49 RB in 1979; remix
Paul Simon, live in Central Park, 1991
Glee cast, #73 pop in 2010
Andrea Bocelli & Mary J. Blige, #75 pop in 2010
Tessanne Chin, #64 in 2013

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