"If you make a plan, life never works out that way."

Rating: 8/10 (26 January 2020)

This film's ranking here on IMDb is somewhat of an anomaly. Usually, when a hot new release makes it's way into the Top 250, it manages to remain in it's general range for a while and then slowly decline as more and more reviewers add their vote. "Parasite" entered the list in the mid Fifties if I correctly recall, and since then has managed to improve it's position to #26 as I write this. No one knows if that will hold obviously, so I'm curious to see how the movie rates over time.
Having stated that, I thought the film was brilliant in the way it opened and had the Kim family maneuver it's way into the life and home of the Park family. What was questionable to me was why the Kim's weren't able to improve their condition in life prior to the break they received when Min (Seo-joon Park) suggested the tutoring job to Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi). Each of the Kim's demonstrated a cleverness and facility at their respective talent in such a way that none of them should have remained unemployed for very long. It's not sufficient or accurate to say that they were lazy or lacked ambition, because once that ambition kicked into gear, there was no stopping them from infiltrating into the lives of the Park's. Not that it wasn't done by underhanded or devious means, but with those kinds of street smarts, they should never have been living in a ghetto neighborhood. But that was the set up, so you have to go with it.
Where the story begins to go off the rails is when the Kim's luxuriate in their new surroundings and throw caution to the wind so to speak. Personally, I would never have allowed the former housekeeper Moon-gwang (Jeong-eun Lee) unescorted access to the Park home when she came calling to rescue her husband. Though it revealed the hidden areas of the Park home, they would have been discovered by the Kim's had they followed and observed Moon-gwang to begin with. Instead, the lapse in judgment allowed for a potential escape and as it turned out, a blackmail attempt that would have fired all the Kim's from their lucrative positions.
I have to admit, I was somewhat baffled by Mr. Kim's (Kang-ho Song) stabbing of Park Dong-ik (Sun-kyun Lee), but reading some of the more thoughtful reviews here helped put that into perspective. I can't say that I agree wholeheartedly, but at least the reasons offer some semblance of a motive, all revolving around the idea of 'crossing the line' that the Kim's were guilty of. Even so, by giving the story a Tarantino-esque spin for it's denouement was going more than a bit over the top. And to venture even further into the realm of unreality, Ki-woo's survival after getting smacked in the head by a twenty pound landscape stone, not once but twice!, was entirely incomprehensible to this viewer.
As for the ultimate finale, who's to say that Kim-woo's plan to rescue his dad wasn't a viable one - grow up, get rich and buy the house! Good luck with that idea, because in the very words of Mr. Kim himself - ""If you make a plan, life never works out that way". And on top of that, it would be a decade long mission at the very least. In the final analysis, if the story had kept on track with the devious infiltration into the lives of the Park's, I could envision a scenario in which the parasites might have eventually dominated their hosts in their own home. But it didn't turn out that way, and as a result, I think it misses the mark as the year's Best Picture at the Oscars.
Addendum**** 2-10-2020 - Well, I'm not embarrassed to admit I was wrong about the picture's chances at the Oscars. It won 'Best Picture' last night in a pretty competitive field. Congratulations!