Early in Bong Joon-ho’s last feature, 2006’s The Host, there’s a scene in which the dysfunctional Park family assembles to publicly mourn their youngest member, whom they (as well as the audience) believe has been eaten by a giant aquatic mutant that has emerged from the Han River. Each of the Parks is uniquely, comically pitiable: the poor, overindulgent father; the daughter left with a bronze medal in archery after choking at the last minute; the belligerent, unemployed alcoholic son. Each of the characters bawls loudly for their departed, but this mourning goes just a bit too far. Soon the scene moves from bathos to slapstick: they fall on the floor, thrashing about and kicking one another, as Bong demonstrates his total mastery of mood, converting tragedy to comedy in a series of very precise set-ups and carefully measured performances.
The Host remains the highest grossing South Korean film of all time, a ten-million-dollar monster movie with both a heart and a healthy dose of awkwardness. It mainly succeeds by deftly balancing the personal, the political, and the paranormal: coy jabs at political ham-fistedness and media-driven hysteria sit comfortably alongside quotidian family squabbles and knowing action-movie operatics. (It pays as much attention to the preparation of instant ramen as it does to large-scale carnage.) On the surface, his latest film, Mother, seems somewhat less ambitious by comparison. Concerning a small-town murder that has been hastily pinned on a young retarded man, it seems to lack the showmanship and entertainment value of The Host. But in its achingly precise mise-en-scène, its deeply affecting elegiac tone, its finely calibrated performances, and, yes, its straight-up knee-slapping silliness, Mother represents the work of an astonishingly talented narrative filmmaker at the height of his abilities—the precise ratio of restraint and exaggeration is expertly calculated in every scene. Read the rest of Leo Goldsmith’s review of Mother.
In honor of this weekend’s Oscar ceremony, we’ve rounded up all of Reverse Shot’s predictions, think pieces, and insider trivia about the awards that we’ve posted this season. Hold on, actually we don’t have any. We’re not saying that makes us special, or somehow above it all . . . wait a second . . . actually, yes, that does make us pretty special.
So rather than run down yet another list of “fearless” predictions about who will win the big prizes (Bigelow or her ex-husband?! Streep or a frosted-tipped gorgon?! Waltz or Waltz?! Mo’Nique or a flying pig just arrived from a frozen hell?!), we thought this year we’d pay tribute to our favorite past Oscar winners: you know, those movies that really make one appreciate the joy and magic of the Oscar season, when all is right with the world and everyone appreciates film as an art form. So, breaking with our own Oscar tradition, here are the five “greatest” Academy Award winners, one that perhaps The Blind Side, Precious, and Up in the Air can soon join, should they emerge victorious:
1. “I will sell this house today!”: American Beauty for Best Picture, 1999
Annette Bening doing her best Faye Dunaway impression stands out in our minds as the most blatantly horrendous thing about American Beauty, but there’s SO much to hate about the debut film from Sam Mendes, who has gone on to terrorize moviegoers with a succession of misogynistic, idiotic treatises on that fallow place called America. A real Alexis de Tocqueville, that one: Mendes’s crassness never fails to astonish, but never more so than in the glib Beauty, which was so “subversive” about contemporary American values and mores that it ends up making a savior of . . . a wealthy, straight, white American male. One whose regression into pot-smoking, responsibility-shirking infantilism is honored as transgressive. One whose real estate-hawking materialist demon wife (who slaps herself in the face over and over when she doesn’t excel at work) and sullen daughter hamper his happiness from every side. One who gets to die in a perfect moment of shotgun-assisted bliss, spiritually cleansed after deciding not to fuck the nubile, willing teenage girl on his couch (because she’s a virgin), and while staring at a framed photo of his baby girl. One whose death is manipulated into a distasteful faux murder mystery in which everyone who’s not him (a nonsensically gun-wielding shrew wife, a self-loathing gay neighbor, his black-cloaked outsider son) just might be a killer. To the unending blood-boiling of the smart few who at the time saw through this vacuous, perhaps unintentional upstander of traditional values, American Beauty is perhaps the single most hateful Best Picture winner, outdoing even the insipid Crash due to its Hollywood polish and sheen, which only make its transparencies all the clearer.
In 1922, a formerly blue-collar pharmacist named Dr. Albert C. Barnes used his newly acquired millions to create a most unusual art museum in South Merion, a small suburb near Philadelphia. With no previous exposure to the art world, Barnes made brave purchases based on his own tastes rather than those of the respected art institutions, acquiring artists unknown or unpopular among elite American society at the time, including Picasso, Monet, Manet, Matisse, and Cezanne. Barnes amassed what later came to be known as the largest and most significant collection of Impressionist, Postimpressionist, and Modernist art in the entire world. Unfortunately, the Philadelphia art scene failed to notice its importance, laughing his one public exhibition out of town, and leaving him with a lasting chip on his shoulder about “the man.”
Those of us who get easily swept up in the tender, boundless empathy of Yi Yi may find it difficult to remember (or, due to the general lack of availability of Edward Yang’s other films, may not even realize) that much of this great Taiwanese director’s career sprang from his bitter sense of irony. While Yang’s final masterpiece suggested an artist beginning to make peace with an unjust world, his other major works were made in a spirit of indignant protest against a culture he felt was actively suppressing its own history and cheating its youth. Now that the World Cinema Foundation’s newly restored print of the 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day is finally making its stateside debut as part of this year’s Film Comment Selects slate, Yang fans will get a stronger dose of the anger that only occasionally disrupted Yi Yi’s chastened world-weariness and Ozu-like tranquility. Where Yi Yi was dominated by brightly lit compositions contrasted with a handful of melancholy nighttime sequences, A Brighter Summer Day traps its audience in a permanently murky atmosphere—one that seems intended to precisely capture the political anxiety of its historical moment, but that also renders our relationship to time and space unstable. Read Andrew Chan’s review of A Brighter Summer Day.
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