A problem for anti-Trumpers in Hollywood is that a US president in a Michael Bay movie who spoke like Trump (eg, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, pledging to annex Canada) would be the hero. Meryl Streep as a female Trump in “Don’t Look Up” didn’t quite work (she’s too innately high-class) but the most entertaining part was Jonah Hill burlesquing as Stephen Miller crossed with Don Jr.
Have Michael Bay, David Fincher, James Cameron or Christopher Nolan ever commented on the Trump Era or DEI?
Nolan is currently making an adaptation of the Odyssey with the very northern European-looking Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway playing Odysseus and Penelope. Greek-washing?
This sounds mediocre but I loved Parasite. Perhaps we gain something enjoying a movie in such a foreign context, so we can impose our own politics on the result, but there was never any sense the poor family was good or the rich family bad.
They upload the contents of his brain during his weekly brain upload. But that means he wouldn't know what death felt like because he'd be missing on average the last half week of his previous life.
“The Avengers” movies worked because they had two leading males who 1) talked like an East Coast speed-freak (RDJ) and 2) who if he couldn’t exactly do a 1940s accent at least learned to end his sentences on a masculine low note (Chris Evans). Since then Marvel seems mostly to have flailed around. The last two actors to play Spider-Man grew up in the UK. The range problem also seems to apply to actresses - Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton seem to be the go-tos for ambiguous or unsympathetic parts.
Emma Stone has started producing her own movies presumably to allow her to play a wider range of roles than usually allowed (eg, “Poor Things”). I think you’re right: Hollywood likes leading actresses who look like princesses. That means that as they age there are fewer parts available. Amy Adams and Anne Hathaway whose breakthrough roles were playing actual princesses are good examples. Australian actresses meanwhile often break through in sitcom/soap opera-type TV shows (“Neighbors” being particularly important) so tend to have a wider range of physiognomies and comic gifts.
I couldn't finish the review. It is no fault of Steve's but the movie's plot sounds so absurd I couldn't stay interested enough to even read about it. I don't see Hollywood putting out content meant to entertain a wide swath of Americans ever again. Hoping many more people choose to quit funding an industry who obviously hates us.
Mickey sounds like the ghola Duncan Idaho in the later novels of the Dune series.
Confused takes about class struggle and cartoonish evil white people are common in korean movies and occasionally even in kpop. The new thing is that now there is a western audience that laps them up.
Korean movies often have as a main character a likeable scoundrel that eventually turns in a moral guy like in the Squid Game series. The entire shtick of Parasite was that it toyed with the expectation of a moral turning point and eventually refuted it. I was surprised that Parasite was so successful with audiences who are not familiar with this korean scoundrel trope but I guess the Academy voters liked the vague class struggle noises and voted out of leftism even if they were confused about what everything meant.
"The usual problem satirists have with Trump is that he’s one of them: He’s self-aware that he’s playing a comic character."
This is a good insight. In 2016, his supporters said of Trump's critics, "They take him literally but not seriously; we take him seriously but not literally." Ruffalo hates Trump. Norm Macdonald, who did Bob Dole for SNL, said you can't do a good impression of someone you really hate. (I haven't seen the movie, so I'm not sure if Ruffalo was doing an impression.) Alec Baldwin had the same problem doing Trump for SNL--he hates him. The boss character Baldwin played on 30 Rock was based on Trump, but he made him likable, as it was okay at the time to like Trump.
I began listening to Scott Adams' podcast during the first Trump administration and feel he has the best understanding of the man.
By contrast, I read a tweet (Xeet?) by super satirist Seth MacFarlane that was a melon-juice-soaked tongue bath of Kamala Harris. Satirists aren't supposed to go wobbly. By the same token, their literal hatred of Trump renders their satire flat. All we get is "Blonaldolf Trumpler Putinsky sure is StUpiD!!!" [uproarious laughter, standing ovation].
As our host has pointed out, Obama ruined comedy, as all these critical observers of the human condition suddenly can't figure out that Obama's MIL lived in the WH.
The Biden WH was similarly deadly serious. Nobody can figure out anything funny about a senile old machine politician who has to be corraled by a Secret Service agent in an Easter Bunny costume.
Rob Henderson (half-Korean) had an interesting analysis of Parasite, where he claimed both families had been middle-class or upper-middle-class, then one rocketed upwards and the other downwards. That's why the poor family couldn't fold pizza boxes.
Apparently to Asian audiences it’s clear that the wife of the wealthy family is embarrassingly nouveau riche in ways that western audiences don’t pick up on. There’s also something about the poor mom being a former shot-putter, which may or may not be a reference to the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
There haven’t been many American class-conflict movies since, say, “It’s a Wonderful Life” because Americans tend to admire rich people and movies are about wish fulfilment. But there is perhaps a sub-genre in which frustrated workers team up to get revenge on their horrible bosses (“Fun with Dick and Jane”, “Tower Heist”, um, “Horrible Bosses”). Maybe “Parasite” is closer to those?
While watching "Parasite," I felt like I was missing out on a lot of class clues that would be visible to Koreans. In contrast, while watching "My Fair Lady," I can follow most of the class clues.
For me, the most interesting line in the review was "his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea." How insane do you have to be to defect to NK? Grandpa Park Taewon defected in 1950, so maybe he didn't have complete information, but he was 'purged' already in 1956, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire would say.
It’s probably not an exact parallel but the German Nobel laureate Günter Grass was born to an East German-Polish family in the Free City of Danzig when the borders of Germany stretched much further east. During the war he was lucky to be taken prisoner by the Americans and commence his career in West Germany but I presume he must have had family who ended up in Stalinist East Germany. His political positions favoring eastern Germans (eg opposing reunification) ended up hitting his popularity in confident post-1989 western Germany.
A general impression I have is that Korea, especially Korean politics, is more complicated than Americans would guess. The U.S. did a good job handling Japan from 1945 onward, in part because we invested a lot during WWII in getting ready to occupy Japan. (Lots of Japanese language instruction for officers and bureaucrats, lots of effort put into books about Japanese culture like Ruth Benedict's the Chyrsantheum and the Sword.) d
But we wound up with half of Korea in August 1945, and we didn't seem to have much of a clue what we were doing.
A big problem in the postwar world in places like Korea was that everybody who was competent in modern bureaucracies got their experience either in the Communist Party or in collaborating with the colonial power (in this case Japan). So the US inherited the collaborators, who weren't popular with either the Communists or the peasant masses who mostly wanted to throw out all the foreign devils.
The US found one non-Communist anti-Japanese nationalist who had been in exile in America and put him him charge, but Syngman Rhee was erratic and unpopular, with lots of uprisings against him. The Truman Administration worried more that he'd invade North Korea than that North Korea would invade South Korea.
This encouraged Stalin and Kim to invade, which eventually dragged the more reluctant Red Chinese in.
Nobody seemed to be a reliable decisionmaker in Korea in those years, even though the participants were mostly men who been the big winners in WWII.
The forcing out of the recent South Korean lady president who was the daughter of South Korea’s murdered dictatorial 1970s first couple over her ties to a cult called the Church of Eternal Life would seem like good material for a paranoid South Korean thriller in the vein of “Parasite” or “Squid Game”.
A problem for anti-Trumpers in Hollywood is that a US president in a Michael Bay movie who spoke like Trump (eg, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, pledging to annex Canada) would be the hero. Meryl Streep as a female Trump in “Don’t Look Up” didn’t quite work (she’s too innately high-class) but the most entertaining part was Jonah Hill burlesquing as Stephen Miller crossed with Don Jr.
Have Michael Bay, David Fincher, James Cameron or Christopher Nolan ever commented on the Trump Era or DEI?
Nolan is currently making an adaptation of the Odyssey with the very northern European-looking Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway playing Odysseus and Penelope. Greek-washing?
Page may be playing the gray-eyed gender-bending goddess Athena. Then again, maybe not.
"I think like Charles Bronson he could conceivably play everything from any of the 4 corners of Europe."
Dunno about that. Bronson had a kind of Tatar cast of features that I don't think really exists in , say, Britain.
Making fun of white Evangelical christians is so 2024
Indeed.
The movie's release was delayed more than a year.
I'm guessing the writer at Salon didn't want to actually write the eldritch words "mayonnaise" and "tartar sauce" lest Bodies Of Color be attacked?
This sounds mediocre but I loved Parasite. Perhaps we gain something enjoying a movie in such a foreign context, so we can impose our own politics on the result, but there was never any sense the poor family was good or the rich family bad.
" For example, why is the poor family defeated by simple paying tasks such as folding pizza boxes, "
This is S Korea - China level IQ. Of course box folding is too easy.
How does Mickey 17 know what happened to the others?
They upload the contents of his brain during his weekly brain upload. But that means he wouldn't know what death felt like because he'd be missing on average the last half week of his previous life.
“The Avengers” movies worked because they had two leading males who 1) talked like an East Coast speed-freak (RDJ) and 2) who if he couldn’t exactly do a 1940s accent at least learned to end his sentences on a masculine low note (Chris Evans). Since then Marvel seems mostly to have flailed around. The last two actors to play Spider-Man grew up in the UK. The range problem also seems to apply to actresses - Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton seem to be the go-tos for ambiguous or unsympathetic parts.
Emma Stone has started producing her own movies presumably to allow her to play a wider range of roles than usually allowed (eg, “Poor Things”). I think you’re right: Hollywood likes leading actresses who look like princesses. That means that as they age there are fewer parts available. Amy Adams and Anne Hathaway whose breakthrough roles were playing actual princesses are good examples. Australian actresses meanwhile often break through in sitcom/soap opera-type TV shows (“Neighbors” being particularly important) so tend to have a wider range of physiognomies and comic gifts.
I couldn't finish the review. It is no fault of Steve's but the movie's plot sounds so absurd I couldn't stay interested enough to even read about it. I don't see Hollywood putting out content meant to entertain a wide swath of Americans ever again. Hoping many more people choose to quit funding an industry who obviously hates us.
Mickey sounds like the ghola Duncan Idaho in the later novels of the Dune series.
Confused takes about class struggle and cartoonish evil white people are common in korean movies and occasionally even in kpop. The new thing is that now there is a western audience that laps them up.
Korean movies often have as a main character a likeable scoundrel that eventually turns in a moral guy like in the Squid Game series. The entire shtick of Parasite was that it toyed with the expectation of a moral turning point and eventually refuted it. I was surprised that Parasite was so successful with audiences who are not familiar with this korean scoundrel trope but I guess the Academy voters liked the vague class struggle noises and voted out of leftism even if they were confused about what everything meant.
Korea, one peninsula, two dystopias.
I've watched a few South Korean TV shows. I was struck by how American their culture and system is compared to other Asian countries (' TV shows)
"The usual problem satirists have with Trump is that he’s one of them: He’s self-aware that he’s playing a comic character."
This is a good insight. In 2016, his supporters said of Trump's critics, "They take him literally but not seriously; we take him seriously but not literally." Ruffalo hates Trump. Norm Macdonald, who did Bob Dole for SNL, said you can't do a good impression of someone you really hate. (I haven't seen the movie, so I'm not sure if Ruffalo was doing an impression.) Alec Baldwin had the same problem doing Trump for SNL--he hates him. The boss character Baldwin played on 30 Rock was based on Trump, but he made him likable, as it was okay at the time to like Trump.
I began listening to Scott Adams' podcast during the first Trump administration and feel he has the best understanding of the man.
Mark Ruffalo is a B-lister who has been getting a huge push from Hollywood because of his leftist politics, not for any special acting ability.
The man is a good actor. A little whiny, but he has talent.
Denise Richards as nuclear physicist was stunt-casting at its best!
We'll disagree on that; it's subjective, of course. I find him whiny and much too beta-male for the "macho" roles he's given.
By contrast, I read a tweet (Xeet?) by super satirist Seth MacFarlane that was a melon-juice-soaked tongue bath of Kamala Harris. Satirists aren't supposed to go wobbly. By the same token, their literal hatred of Trump renders their satire flat. All we get is "Blonaldolf Trumpler Putinsky sure is StUpiD!!!" [uproarious laughter, standing ovation].
As our host has pointed out, Obama ruined comedy, as all these critical observers of the human condition suddenly can't figure out that Obama's MIL lived in the WH.
The Biden WH was similarly deadly serious. Nobody can figure out anything funny about a senile old machine politician who has to be corraled by a Secret Service agent in an Easter Bunny costume.
Okja was so bad that it made me dislike the guy's other movies
Rob Henderson (half-Korean) had an interesting analysis of Parasite, where he claimed both families had been middle-class or upper-middle-class, then one rocketed upwards and the other downwards. That's why the poor family couldn't fold pizza boxes.
Apparently to Asian audiences it’s clear that the wife of the wealthy family is embarrassingly nouveau riche in ways that western audiences don’t pick up on. There’s also something about the poor mom being a former shot-putter, which may or may not be a reference to the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
There haven’t been many American class-conflict movies since, say, “It’s a Wonderful Life” because Americans tend to admire rich people and movies are about wish fulfilment. But there is perhaps a sub-genre in which frustrated workers team up to get revenge on their horrible bosses (“Fun with Dick and Jane”, “Tower Heist”, um, “Horrible Bosses”). Maybe “Parasite” is closer to those?
You don’t think tower heist had a class thing going on. Great movie!
While watching "Parasite," I felt like I was missing out on a lot of class clues that would be visible to Koreans. In contrast, while watching "My Fair Lady," I can follow most of the class clues.
For me, the most interesting line in the review was "his maternal grandfather was a distinguished novelist who defected to North Korea." How insane do you have to be to defect to NK? Grandpa Park Taewon defected in 1950, so maybe he didn't have complete information, but he was 'purged' already in 1956, pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire would say.
I wondered about that too. What goes through people's minds?
Angela Merkel's father moved from West to East Germany, right? Hmm...
It’s probably not an exact parallel but the German Nobel laureate Günter Grass was born to an East German-Polish family in the Free City of Danzig when the borders of Germany stretched much further east. During the war he was lucky to be taken prisoner by the Americans and commence his career in West Germany but I presume he must have had family who ended up in Stalinist East Germany. His political positions favoring eastern Germans (eg opposing reunification) ended up hitting his popularity in confident post-1989 western Germany.
A general impression I have is that Korea, especially Korean politics, is more complicated than Americans would guess. The U.S. did a good job handling Japan from 1945 onward, in part because we invested a lot during WWII in getting ready to occupy Japan. (Lots of Japanese language instruction for officers and bureaucrats, lots of effort put into books about Japanese culture like Ruth Benedict's the Chyrsantheum and the Sword.) d
But we wound up with half of Korea in August 1945, and we didn't seem to have much of a clue what we were doing.
A big problem in the postwar world in places like Korea was that everybody who was competent in modern bureaucracies got their experience either in the Communist Party or in collaborating with the colonial power (in this case Japan). So the US inherited the collaborators, who weren't popular with either the Communists or the peasant masses who mostly wanted to throw out all the foreign devils.
The US found one non-Communist anti-Japanese nationalist who had been in exile in America and put him him charge, but Syngman Rhee was erratic and unpopular, with lots of uprisings against him. The Truman Administration worried more that he'd invade North Korea than that North Korea would invade South Korea.
This encouraged Stalin and Kim to invade, which eventually dragged the more reluctant Red Chinese in.
Nobody seemed to be a reliable decisionmaker in Korea in those years, even though the participants were mostly men who been the big winners in WWII.
The forcing out of the recent South Korean lady president who was the daughter of South Korea’s murdered dictatorial 1970s first couple over her ties to a cult called the Church of Eternal Life would seem like good material for a paranoid South Korean thriller in the vein of “Parasite” or “Squid Game”.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus has a piece about South Korea's birth dearth in the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population-implosion
The widespread open hostility to children is depressing. Like, even if you hate the opposite sex, don't you still like kids? Kids are great!
The movie has too much of an irreverent Deadpool vibe. Sick of movies making light of death.