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 21st 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

1. A sponsorship that I brought to life when I was CEO of Booksellers Aotearoa from 2019 to 2023.