A comedy that sharpens to a pointed edge

Director Bong Joon-ho’s streak of memorable movies continues with Parasite.

A good portion of Parasite — director Bong Joon-ho's biting look at South Korean’s class divide — plays like a comedy with farcical flourishes. But if you know the work of Bong (Okja, Snowpiercer, The Host, and Memories of Murder), you also know the movie will take some unsettling turns.

In outline, the story seems simple: One-by-one, a poor family insinuates itself into the life of a wealthy family.

The tale begins when poor young Kim Kai Woo (Choi Woo-sik) is asked by a wealthy pal to pose as an English tutor for an affluent college-bound girl. Kim quickly senses a larger opportunity. Not only will he find a job for himself, but he'll see that his whole family lands work with the same wealthy family. Full employment represents a marked step up for a group that dwells in a miserable basement apartment, earning what passes for a living folding pizza boxes.

As it turns out, Kim's family members are all good actors. They never tell their employers that they’re related to one another and they play their roles with incredible ease. During the course of the story, Dad (Song Kang-ho) becomes a chauffeur; Mom (Jang Hye-im, a housekeeper; and the family’s daughter (Park So-dam), an art-therapist for the affluent family’s young, unruly son, a kid who spends most of his time pretending he's in a western. He fires rubber arrows at any available target.

As the first person to penetrate the world of the wealthy, Kim is both a hustler and an insecure kid who eventually must come to grips with the fact that he’s playing a role. He’s giving a performance. But what’s underneath the role he’s playing? And will he be able to turn that role into something real?

Much of the story takes place in a beautifully modern home that stands as a fortress of contemporary design. It’s amusing to watch the poor family play at being servile. And it’s equally funny to see how the affluent family responds.

The aspiring college student begins to fall for her new English tutor. A study in bourgeois nervousness, Mom (Jo Yeo-jeong) seems oblivious to anything beyond her well-insulated world. Dad (Lee Sun-kyun) runs his tech business while insisting that a good servant knows how to be friendly without ever crossing the line that suggests he or she might be equal to his or her employer. We’ve seen the type before: Dad believes that his success makes him superior to those around him. We guess that he's new to money.

Of course, plenty of issues bubble beneath the film’s comic surface. But what are those issues and how will they finally play out?

I’m not going to provide spoilers here, which puts a real burden on any review because it’s natural to want to talk about the way that Bong brings his movie to its explosive boil.

Still, it seems fair to say that Parasite poses an intriguing question: What happens when those who’ve been pretending start cracking under the strain? And how do those with power, money, and status react when addressed not as employers but as human beings?

I won’t say more, but pay attention to the way Bong plays with the notion of how reality can be projected on screens. The poor family lives in a basement with a window that resembles a movie screen. Through it, they watch the life of their neighborhood unfold in miniature. A drunk insists on urinating against a wall. The family recoils in disgust. The family’s only guests are hordes of stink bugs.

And then there’s the wall-length window in the home of the wealthy family. It, too, resembles a movie screen and Bong shifts our view depending on who’s looking out of or into that window.

Gradually, what appears to be an amusing but relatively safe screwball comedy turns out to be anything but.

Parasite plumbs the depths of class divisions and personal delusion, as well as the fragility of a social order that seems secure.

At times, Parasite can feel like other movies, maybe even one beckoning for an American remake. But be wary. Bong’s not playing around — at least not all the time. When you revisit the movie in your mind, you may see more sadness and serious than you initially would have expected.

'Okja:' A very big pig movie

Once you know that Okja is a pig the size of a hippopotamus, you'll understand that the movie named after her isn't going to be a typical affair. It's also worth knowing that Korean director Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer and The Host) isn't trying to turn Okja into an updated version of Babe, the endearing Australian charmer from 1995.

Ever ready to expose greed and deception, Bong has made a movie about the ways in which a callous corporation exploits both the pig and the pig's keeper, a quietly determined Korean girl named Mija (An Seo-hyun).

Early on, we learn that the Mirando company has created enormous genetically modified pigs. Wanting to keep the pigs under wraps for a decade, the company sends each animal to a far-flung keeper. The keepers are responsible for raising the pigs. Mija is one of those keepers.

It soon becomes clear that Mija, who lives in the mountains with her grandfather, has developed a strong Bond with Okja. Okja servs as Mija's constant and loyal companion. The two play together, and Mija believes that her grandfather plans to purchase the pig so that Okja can continue her idyllic life in Korea.

But even grandpa can't be trusted: He has no intention of keeping Okja from becoming someone's dinner -- or in the case of this pig, dinner for a multitude of consumers.

The company is represented by its CEO Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton); a fading TV celebrity (Jake Gyllenhaal); and the company's smooth-talking flak (Giancarlo Esposito).

It doesn't take much italicizing by Bong for us to know that this trio -- coupled with Lucy's twin sister (also Swinton) -- represents the soulless evil of contemporary life.

An animal rights group led by the super-sincere but still conniving Jay (Paul Dano) also joins the fray, a group with its own agenda.

I can't say that the giant animated pig looks exactly like an inflated version of the real thing, but it quickly becomes apparent that Okja has a heroic, self-sacrificial streak that makes her even more of a pal to Mija. Only the motives of animal and girl show anything close to unalloyed purity.

A simple plot finds company reps traveling to Korea to bring Okja to New York for a competition to determine which of the company's many genetically modified pigs qualifies as best of the breed, a major PR stunt.

The rest of the movie follows Mija's efforts to reunite with Okja and return to the uncorrupted simplicity of mountain life.

The grown-up, non-pig performances tend toward exaggeration bordering on caricature. Gyllenhaal, for example, speaks in a distractingly odd voice. Always clad in shorts, his character looks like a demented kid who has gone off the rails at summer camp.

Don't mistake Okja for a kids' movie, though. Among other dark moments, Bong includes a harrowing trip to a slaughterhouse where Okja is supposed to meet her terrible fate.

Fat with thematic intentions, Bong's movie never quite scores a bullseye. It should be seen as a kind of irresistible oddity that hammers home its message (or messages) without much finesse but is made watchable by the bond between a girl and a pig that only the cruelest carnivore ever would want to eat.

The point: In a world dominated by commerce and self-interest, the real pigs are all walking on two legs.
Okja bows on Netflix and is available in limited theatrical settings.

All aboard for a compelling ride

A wild, weird dystopian journey that demands to be seen.

Lately, I've been wondering why we can't seem to get enough of dystopia? I don't need to recount all the ways in which the world's a mess, but it's intriguing that just about every tentpole movie (from Edge of Tomorrow to Transformers: Age of Extinction to The Hunger Games) mires itself in the gloomiest possible vision of a future we once saw as endlessly bright -- or at least that's the story we tell ourselves about the past.

TV, of course, has joined the vigorous march toward doom. This week, I watched the opening episode of HBO's The Leftovers, which (happily) is not another cooking show. The jury may be out on the show's merits, but it brings dystopian flavor to a present in which a third of the population has vanished -- for no apparent reason. The great disappearance seems to have resulted in a thorough demoralization of those who remain, the leftovers of the title.

That shows airs at the same time as The Last Ship, a TNT production about the lone surviving naval ship in a world vanquished by a plague-like virus.

As a culture, we seem to be wallowing in mass depression -- and even if the box office has flagged a bit -- we seem to be enjoying our gloom immensely.

Me? I've grown weary of the dystopian thinking that has burdened the artistic imagination. But maybe even that attitude reflects the general malaise. What the hell's wrong with me? I'm having trouble enjoying mass destruction.

Now comes Snowpiercer, an international hybrid of a movie from Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host), and it may help restore my faith in hopelessness.

Perhaps because its director is Korean and perhaps because Bong bases his movie on a French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige, Snowpiercer has become an art-house offering.

Don't be misled. Snowpiercer is an action movie wrapped in an iron-clad vision of a society in which survival depends on brutally enforced class divisions that may have resulted from an intense competition for limited resources.

Bong's refreshingly preposterous movie takes place on a train that circles the globe. The lives of those on board are maintained, but the train goes nowhere. The whole idea of destinations seem to have vanished.

How did this happen? Global warming was heating the planet to intolerable levels. Someone figured out how to cool the planet, but the solution went too far, turning the entire Earth into a snow-covered wasteland. The only survivors are on the train to nowhere, lurching endlessly through sub-zero temperatures.

As can happen when a group is totally suppressed, the lower classes who occupy the rear of the train are becoming restless. Curtis (Chris Evans) and his friend Edgar (Jamie Bell) decide it's time for a revolt.

This means organizing their fellow sufferers and fighting their way to the front of the train, where people haven't been reduced to living in squalor and eating nothing but protein bars that look as if they're made from a combination of recycled rubber and Gummy Bears. They're not.

A mysterious figure we don't see until the film's final act presides over the train and its regimented inhabitants.

Bong creates plenty of excitement as the rebels attempt to traverse the train's length, exposing the train's social structure as they go, and pouring on plenty of revolutionary violence.

Bong obtains fine performances from a cast that includes Octavia Spencer as the mother of a boy who's taken to the front of the train for unknown reasons, and John Hurt, as a sagacious old man who became a peon when he was banished from the front of the train.

We also meet Mason (an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton), a bureaucrat who travels the length of the train making announcements for the purportedly revered leader and doling out punishments to those who express dissatisfaction.

Alison Pill has a wonderfully exuberant turn as a school teacher who instructs young people and who also leads them in insanely cheerful devotions to the unseen leader.

Korean actors Kang-ho Song and Ah-sung Ko, play a father/daughter team of drug addicts who join the fray.

Intricately realized and totally unhinged, Snowpierecer can't be watched without feeling a bit of trepidation, probably because much depends on what happens when our revolutionaries finally reach the front of the train, where actor Ed Harris becomes a presence.

It pains me to say that the finale is a bit of a letdown. How could it not be? Harris doles out a bits of expositional and philosophical dialogue that don't quite deliver the hoped-for payoff.

But don't let that stop you from seeing one of the most creative, strange and propulsive movie's of the year. Flaws and all, Snowpiercer -- like its perpetually moving train -- takes us on one hell of a trip.