July 2019 – Partial Review

Is Mother the best non-Hitchcock Hitchcock film? ¹

I had been dying to revisit this one. As usual, director Bong Joon-ho is juggling a lot of balls at once while spinning a very taut yarn. One of the more subtler balls (concrete blocks?) in the air is his world building. It’s a unique skill of Bong’s that he exercises much more overtly in his science fiction & monster features, but one that is perhaps most successful here.

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Notice how many people in this nameless town roll their eyes when they see Mother enter the room; or how many young men determine the course and roadblocks for Mother’s vigilant(e) investigation; and how many of these young men she has known since they were children. Marginal town figures – drunks, homeless, ex-military conscripts, slimy lawyers, feebleminded school boys – populate the script, kept in check by unscrupulous cops, politician’s wives and big shot professors merely in town for the golf course.

Consider that Mother runs a shop selling medicinal herbs, roots, and fungi, in addition to unlicensed acupuncture. One of the opening shots is from Mother’s perspective looking out of her cavernous storefront, the walls overflowing with her dry and withered products, framing her adult son dancing with a dog on the street. Much later we hear an echo, a blood-curdling scream when a long-suppressed murder-suicide attempt is unearthed.

As much as this film is a portrait of Mother, it’s also a portrait of a town on the periphery of the modern. This is a society transformed by a future out of reach, dragged along with a past it’s trying to forget. A story where the real action has already happened and all we are seeing is the complicated aftermath. This is a film about the folks that were left behind.

Likewise, Bong’s film is akin to a peculiar and precarious chanterelle, decomposing and processing the runoff.

¹ Bong’s newest film Parasite should have US distribution this Fall. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a challenging picture that still provokes one’s definitions of heroism and vigilantism more than a decade later. It depicts torture as a somewhat effective means of intelligence gathering. It depicts extraordinary rendition as helpful. It demonstrates secretive mass surveillance of citizen’s cell phones to be extremely effective and necessary under the right circumstances. It’s a film that presents the obstruction of justice for the murder of 5 cops as justifiable for social cohesion and a cleaner narrative. And it depicts a city government telling this lie to its citizens.

In case it wasn’t obvious then, or now, The Dark Knight is a parable for the United States’ vigilante role of sheriff of the liberal world order, with special emphasis on the Iraq War era. Nolan’s achievement is realizing the potential of a philosophical battle between Batman and Joker to server as an imperfect mirror to current events and a politically plural audience.

A few observations that stuck with me on this recent viewing:

The expansive mob network that effectively runs Gotham City is operating as a money laundering outfit for dark money emanating from mainland China via Mr. Lau’s company. The implication is that dirty money from China is directly empowering the rot in Gotham.
The reason Mr. Lau runs to Hong Kong is because China will not extradite one of its citizens to a foreign power under nearly any circumstances. That Nolan is including irregular international extradition law as a key plot challenge for Batman went way over my head when I first saw this.
- A digression: This is the second Nolan Batman film where China and Chinese culture plays an elliptical role in the proceedings. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is seen speaking Chinese after committing a robbery abroad, eventually finding himself in a prison in Bhutan. And notably, the terrorist organization Bruce briefly joins called the League of Shadows, headed by Ra’s al Ghul, is depicted as a vaguely Indo-Chinese faction by their fighting style, garb, set design and from the casting of the other members.
The final action sequence takes place in an under-construction building from which Joker is conducting his ferry-prisoners-dilemma spectacle and holding hospital patients hostage in clown mask disguises. That building was then under-construction Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. . .