MONSTER IN THE HOUSE (And Fakery Afoot)

Rating: 6/10 (11 February 2020)

Crime doesn't pay. Just ask the sociopathic poor Kim family featured in the dark tale PARASITE, an overrated, B/B- slasher film dressed up as high art: the latest runway walk sporting the Emperor's new clothes.
First the perps hoodwink a nice wealthy family, taking out the nice poor chauffeur and loyal kind poor housekeeper along the way, then make life a living hell for a third nice family. Ouch. Don't get in this ruthless mean family's way or you'll be sorry.
I am.
I liked the movie's opening shot. Painterly. Black writing appears on the right window pane of the Kim family's semi-basement hovel. For a while, everything was going OK. I liked the first act. Then WTF. Talk about bad choices. What an artistic, intellectual, sense-and-sensibility nose dive.
Tough to give this harsh and disappointing mean-spirited flick higher than a 7. Because even if I give it a 7 for FORM (nice production values, acting, and visuals, but an achievement of FORM at best only slightly better than the architectural quality of the deluxe modernesque house that PARASITE features as the main stage set of its story), I can't give the movie's STORY more than a 6.
Which averages a FORM & STORY score of 6.5.
That's about where it left me when I left the theater: pleased on an emotional and artistic level about 6.5, a bad taste in my mouth, feeling played. But at least I know what all the hyperventilating groupthink hype's about.
But then the filmmaker didn't give himself the awards. The overblown fanfare isn't his fault. He just wrote, directed, and made the best movie he could.
And a 6.5 isn't a bad score or in any way derogatory in my book, especially for a story that feels like a stage play more than a motion picture. For me, any movie that gets a 7 is darn good.
So. Enjoy. See PARASITE over and over if it's your cuppa tea and you find the movie relevant to your life, your vision of the world, your artistic aspirations and work. Different strokes for different folks.
But here's the thing: Actually, all we know for sure is that PARASITE may not have been--and most likely wasn't--the majority of the 10,000 Academy voters' first choice for Best Picture but somehow still managed to eke out a win for that misleading category. PARASITE may have merely been the majority of the 10,000 Academy voters' second and third place choice for Best Picture, thanks to the complex "preferential ballot system" (Google it), pushing PARASITE over the top to KO works that may have gotten more first place votes.
How else can we characterize this non-transparent balloting paradigm, based on non-disclosure of the balloting results, than Fakery Afoot?
Or to steal a line from THE GENTLEMEN, "F*%@ery Afoot."
The Academy won't tell us the truth. How many first place votes did PARASITE get? How many first place votes did the other 8 nominated movies get? Why won't the academy show us the math?
We can handle the truth.
Instead, the Academy treats us like sheep, preferring to keep us in the dark, misleading us, relying on our gullibility and the necessary illusion (as they see it, in their screwed up marketing way) that PARASITE was the top vote getter for #1 film.
Maybe.
But unlikely.
I ask the Academy to prove me wrong.
Show us the math.
Truth be told, who knows (other than The Academy's Threshold Guardians) how many other so-called Best Picture award winners since 2009, when the Academy expanded the number of nominees from 5 to as many as 10, won an award not for what we're led to believe, Best Picture, but for a category that would be more accurately named Top Consensus Picture.
Or, oxymoronically (and moronically), Top Second and Third Place Picture.
Or how about Most Preferred Picture.
Academy Awards are a self-promotional corporate crap shoot, fueled by politics, social trends, self-interest, personal biases, PR, hidden agendas, mass mind meld, and money. PARASITE simply reflects the latest Academy enabled intellectually dishonest connection between the secret and screwy preferential balloting system results and the name of the award--the fake connection between what goes on behind the curtain and what goes on in front of the curtain in the merry land of Oz.
In other words, to use an analogy: Like our federal elections for President, the Best Picture award doesn't go to the popular vote winner. The award goes to the Electoral College winner. But in our elections for President, though we might not like the set up and feel it's unfair, at least we know how the system works, it's fully disclosed, and the vote tallies do not remain behind closed doors.
My hunch?
PARASITE, true to the meaning of the word, ironically enough, benefited by deriving nutrients at the expense of other movies.
I suspect that PARASITE landed the award for Top Consensus Picture/Most Preferred Picture not by leading in the number of first place votes but by siphoning off lots of second and third and maybe even fourth and fifth place votes, thereby outflanking films of more surpassing quality like LITTLE WOMEN (8.0) and ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (8.75).
Again, I ask the Academy to prove me wrong.
Show us the math.
I don't know which force-feeds us a bigger Monster In The House, PARASITE or The Academy of Motion Pictures.
At least PARASITE's ugly monster roams the house out in the open.
(Aside: For Best International Film, PARASITE oddly beat out the brilliantly written, shot, and acted, truly modern and original, artistically and socially astute no-false-note gritty LES MISERABLES (8.5). I haven't yet seen Almodovar's PAIN AND GLORY, also nominated for Best International Film, but I'm guessing I'll like that more than PARASITE too. And, by the way, how did the Academy manage to overlook the remarkable unnominated edge-of-your-seat film-wonder UNCUT GEMS (8.5)--too cutting edge? Not good enough to make the empty 10 slot? Really? And you got robbed Adam Sandler.)
PARASITE not only trots its monster, the downtrodden Kim family, out in the open, painting the family with a thin brush, hiding nothing, and therefore leaving little if anything surprising to foreshadow, reveal, or shock us about their inner life, history, motivations and what makes them tick besides inept pizza box folding, manipulation, high jinks, and greed.
PARASITE also does another thing really well, which goes hand-in-glove with the story's two-dimensional nefarious family. PARASITE reminds us that pressure reveals character--and the arc of the parasitic self-serving Kim family's character is simple.
None.
Nasty family starts out F'd and poor. Nasty family hits the jackpot through fakery and fraud but hits a snag. Nasty family turns violent then becomes poor again and more F'd than before.
Unrepentant.
Unchanged.
And all an empty way for the filmmaker to set us up for some nasty, gratuitous horror and gore.
I was almost ready to accept the poor family's mooching off the rich family as an inspired metaphor for capitalism mooching off society, doing whatever it takes, including lie, cheat, steal, smile, swindle, and kill, to parasitically feast off our commonwealth.
But then capitalism wouldn't likely end up back in the basement.
...........
One final thought. PARASITE tells a story about rich and poor that goes beyond the obvious economic one.
The story takes place mostly inside of a house. A house is a metaphor for human character: Character is a house. You have your interior and exterior. I speak as an architect when I say that in terms of the quality of architectural design, the house has a rich, developed interior but a poor, undeveloped exterior. And I speak as a screenwriter when I say it's the opposite for the quality of the character design: PARASITE's characters have a rich, developed exterior but a poor, undeveloped interior. They are little more than paper-thin characterizations.
The movie's building architecture and character architecture are reciprocally related, creating a kind of symmetry, conflict, clash but not a pleasing kind--because in Story Architecture, what matters most isn't the quality of the stage set design but the quality of the character design. And that's where PARASITE fails most glaringly as a work of art.
The filmmaker created a monster, patching together a subpar exterior building architecture and subpar interior character architecture to create a FORM & STORY 6.5 Frankenstein.