Parasite: “Damn! That’s good movie!”
Marijuana Movie Reviews with Cory Showtime
Holy FUCK this was a good movie! I see why it won the Oscar. I’m gonna knock a few points off for it making me read so much but dammit this was a good-ass film!
Parasite follows the story of a poor family of con-artists (The Kims) that maneuver their way into a rich family’s household (The Parks) as the help. In fact, this is the Korean version of The Help…except their shit-pie is waaaaaaay more than a prank.
The story follows the Kim’s son as the protagonist. They are dirt poor; I mean, subterranean. Like, literally. This movie is WROUGHT with symbolism and the poor literally live under the rich, literally under ground. And as their lives improve, there’s a theme of height/elevation. Its one of those things you notice after its over but can’t miss if you watch it again.
The son’s friend recommends him to the Park family as a tutor for their daughter. The father is always working and the mother is dumber than kimchee, so the son enlists the rest of the family into their roles as art teacher, house keeper, and driver for the sister, brother, mother, and father subjectively.
The star of this movie is its theme: class and elevation. There’s a continuous upward look to everything involving the Park family. Their house is high on the hill, its several stories, and just about anytime any one of the Parks is talking to the Kims, they are physically higher than them. And whenever the Kims have to go back home, its a long decent down the hill, down the street, down into their basement apartments.
There’s a HUGE twist at the midpoint of this film that makes it impossible to comment further on the plot without giving it away so go see this movie for yourself. But in the interest of spoilers, I can say that SMELL makes a huge impact in this film. The rich can smell poverty, and a lot of us can too. If you’ve ever been near a homeless person, sitting on a bus, etc, you can smell that weird stench. The Parks can smell it on the Kims but they don’t concern themselves with it too much since they’re their servants. But what ultimately breaks this movie in half is the fact that the poor, no matter how much they try to blend in, cannot get the smell of poverty off of them. And the rich will do anything to avoid it.
THE VERDICT: Overall, I give this movie a 95% Chronic on the Bammer scale. This film is a top-shelf Hybrid that will make you laugh, cry, angry, ashamed; you can and should feel all the feels in this film. 2 thumbs way up and I wanna watch it again to see what I missed. Oh, and always close your basement door.
