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Reviews
Gisaengchung (2019)
Wonderfully funny, warm, surprising, and beautiful...though not ever astonishing
Parasite (2019)
With the hype around this movie ("best in ten years") I had unreasonable expectations. This is a funny, almost silly story with great acting, and with a couple of twists that make it inventive. It's also filmed (photographed) with gorgeous care, lots of gently moving camera, a lot of planning of shots from one to the next to tell the story visually. It's an example of classic great moviemaking.
I thought the acting was especially sharp, like the complex job the leading woman, Yeo-jeong Jo, had of seeming a bit ditzy and selfish and yet not completely lost at sea. And the rest of the cast played types that didn't tumble into stereotypes. The story was smart enough to give them room to be complex, but this isn't a probing complex movie, actually. The content is in the improbable situation and how it leads, almost in a Chaplin-like building of absurdities, to comic tension.
The cameraman, Kyung-pyo Hong, deserves credit, for sure, because he holds the visual structure together in a range of scenes-racing down dingy steps, a downpour in the slums, and graceful geometry in the fabulous house. Director Bong Joon Ho deserves the praise he is getting.
That said, the next thoughts are more a reaction to the praise it's been getting: there are more impressive movies out there in various ways. Even just this year there are movies that have movied me more, or made me laugh more, or were more inventive. (I'm not naming movies.) Maybe since this movie manages all three it's notable, but I'll keep my admiration in place!
Enjoy it!
T-Men (1947)
The visuals are among the very very best
T-Men (1947)
There are two reasons to see this movie: director Anthony Mann and cinematorgrapher John Alton. I don't know who is more imporatant, but the truly vigorous visuals are astonishing. They make the movie.
In a way, you might think a noir depends on exactly this to survive. Maybe so. But there is a lack of character development that brings the plot down to earth. It's all about getting the bad guys, not about the drama faced by the leads.
The documentary style is only interesting as an historical oddity. The serious voice-over basically drains the movie of more serious layers. Which is too bad, because I can easily picture the movie as a more straight up film noir drama, and succeeding really well.
But we have what we have, a stiff and not unexciting crime drama. With photographic visuals that will blow you away. The progress of the plot has force even with the FBI inspired voiceover so this still operates as a narrative drama. And the intereference of this outsice intention diminishes as it goes, so it resembles a more usual movie over time.
So give it a go, despite the drawbacks. The solid acting and intense situation almost make for the contrived style. In fact, some viewers might like the narration for its almost campy drama. But the photography, scene by scene, will surely with the day.
Not Wanted (1949)
An uncredited Ida Lupino film, and a stellar acting job by Sally Forrest
Not Wanted (1949)
The draw here is not the plot (which is a somewhat worn story, today, of a woman falling in love with the wrong guy and getting pregnant) and not the director (Ida Lupino) but the leading actress Sally Forrest. She plays with conviction the simple girl with dreams of something better, caught up in misleading romance, and elegantly embroiled in a real romance after all.
Lupino of course is the famous hook, and this is her first directorial role (and she is uncredited, mostly because she stepped in for a man who had just had a heart attack). The film is sharp. It's no brilliant mostly because of the writing, in my view-it gives what seems like the obvious plot turns for a girl caught up between the lover who doesn't love her and the man who really does. And she can't quite see which is which.
I rather liked the movie, but mostly because it's crisp, well photographed, and dealing with a real predicament. "You know what the real trouble is." She demurs. "You're going to have a baby." And there it is. Her life turns over and over.
The key here for contemporary audiences, which might not connect at all to the social service attitudes here, is whether the expectant woman might want to keep her baby. The scenes with the woman in a supportive institution surrounded by other women in the same situation make it a bit superficial, but the problem is real.
The sincere man in her life is a bit of a likable guy, simple, probably not a great actor but I liked him a lot here. (His name is Keefe Brasselle, and he had a small role in a number of decent low budget movies at the time like "Railroaded!" and "T-Men" as well as "A Place in the Sun").
There are the usual glosses over reality in a movie from this period, like when the woman has her baby, she is wheeled down the hall in a kind of passive stupor. Where is the screaming that is part of childbirth? (That was forbidden by the all male Hays Code people.) That's only the most obvious of the lack of actual reality in the film. It comes off as a pleasant metaphor, stripped of something deeper.
And that sadly is despite the really sincere, moving depiction of her character by Forrest. It's for her this movie remains. And perhaps that reminder of how difficult it was to be pregnant out of wedlock in that era, which in many ways seemed so modern.
As a photographer, I'll add the small footnote: the cinematographer, Henry Freulich, also shot "It Happened One Night," and that film is of course a classic, and this one is also very well shot. Which boosts it a notch all through.