Parasite (2019)

South Korean media, especially music and movies, has been on the rise in international popularity lately. From Train to Busan, to Parasite, to Minari, to Squid Game, we are in an absolute golden age of Korean entertainment. However, the more Korean films you digest, the more likely one question will pop up: what's North Korea doing? There's not much the general public knows about North Korea except for what's put on the news. However, since it's a closed society, people can't help but be curious as to what lies inside. As a naturally curious person, I wanted answers, and to me, one of the best ways to get a quick helping of culture is by watching their movies. As you can imagine, there aren't many (at least that we know of) North Korean films and many of them were created by dictator Kim Jong-il who had a passion for film. Though, that is when I discovered the famed Pulgasari (1985), the North Korean Godzilla film with a wild story.

Kim Jong-il loved cinema so much that, he established an underground operation to get bootleg copies of international films that were banned in North Korea, much to the dismay of his father Kim Il-sung. He supposedly gathered a library of over 15,000 movies and especially liked action movies such as James Bond. Eventually, he decided he wanted to make his own films and was employed as the director of the Motion Picture and Arts Division in the Propaganda and Agitation Department. Soon, Kim discovered that he hated how inferior his casts and crew were in comparison to the West’s. So, he began to obsess over Shin Sang-ok, a proclaimed director in South Korea.

Kim Jong-il was convinced that Shin was the only person who could save the North Korean movie industry, so he created an elaborate plan to kidnap him. He managed to lure Shin's recently divorced wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, with a forged offer to direct movies in Hong Kong. She was then abducted in Hong Kong and brought to North Korea. All according to plan, Shin Sang-ok began to search for his ex-wife and traveled to Hong Kong, where he was chloroformed and brought to North Korea.

Shin attempted to escape the country multiple times, resulting in him being imprisoned in a North Korean prison camp. After four years of imprisonment, Kim decided that Shin was ready to direct films, released Shin and Choi, and brought them to a meeting. The dictator asked them to make communist propaganda and to claim that they came to North Korea due to repression in the South. Shin agreed to cooperate and was showered with the greatest luxury the country could gather. To create the special effects for the film, Kim also tricked a Japanese special effects team (the one who created the original Godzilla movies) to come to North Korea when they were believed to be working in China.

The 94th Academy Awards are right around the corner and with some truly wonderful films like The Power of the Dog, Dune, CODA, Belfast, and Licorice Pizza, the race for Best Picture is incredibly tight. But there's a film that has been gaining momentum at the perfect time - Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car. Since the inception of the ceremony, The Academy had long avoided awarding foreign films the honor of Best Picture, even going as far as to award Alfonso Cuaron Best Director for Roma, then proceeding to give the Best Picture award to Peter Farrelly's Green Book in 2019. But in 2020, they finally broke this near century-long habit and awarded Bong Joon Ho's masterpiece Parasite with not only Best International Feature but Best Director and of course, Best Picture, becoming the first foreign film to ever do so. Now Drive My Car has the chance to do the same.

Drive My Car exudes a palpable sense of dreariness and lifelessness that is further embodied by Yusuke, portrayed tragically by Hidetoshi Nishijima, which is historically, exactly what The Academy loves. This film is a slow-burn that demands your attention in every scene, and by slow-burn, I mean glacial. You feel every second of its three-hour runtime and it asks for long periods of empathy and introspection that you have no choice but to give. It can be exhausting being enveloped in such monotony and gloominess, but this isn't the only experience Hamaguchi gives the audience - we also get to witness a journey to acceptance, albeit a lackadaisical one, that eventually leads to a moment of incredible emotional surrender and catharsis. This no doubt puts Drive My Car in a great position for Best International Feature (which it's surely a lock for) but also Best Picture being as there's one thing that The Academy has proven to cherish above all else, no matter what...the Drama.

But it's not exactly a shoo-in. There is stiff competition this year - whether it's Jane Campion's The Power of The Dog, which is very similar in style with a very slow and permeating feeling of dreariness, or Sian Heder's CODA which takes enormous steps forward in the way of deaf representation, we also have to acknowledge films like Paul Tomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza or Denis Villeneuve's Dune where the craftsmanship and quality are among the best Hollywood has to offer but lacking major representation. But Drive My Car is in an interesting position being the first foreign film nominated for Best International Feature and Best Picture since Parasite, while The Academy has been getting better at nominating the films that belong in both categories, they've been rather choosey about awarding foreign films the honor of Best Picture. It's possible for this narrative to change of course, but in a year with so many excellent films deserving of the award, I can't help but feel it might be overlooked. But of course, I'm no insider, I'm basing this entirely on the history of The Academy and their shoddy history of selecting Best Picture winners.

So. You’ve been quarantined. For many of us in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, we find ourselves locked in our houses, with not much to do. We can’t report to our jobs, or our jobs are being done remotely, or our ability to work is vastly restricted. And with all of this free time we have on our hands now, this is the perfect time to catch up on all of those movies we’ve been continuously putting off for a “rainy day.” Well folks, it’s pouring outside, so let’s watch some movies!

These picks are all based on my own subjective opinion, but I’ve compiled a list of different films of different genres across Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, and Hulu that I think everyone should watch. If you’ve already seen them, watch them again! These are the movies that, in my opinion, can’t steer you wrong.

1 | Alien (1979) | Amazon Prime 

Directed by: Ridley Scott

Okja, Bong Joon-Ho’s 2017 masterpiece, is a satire on corporate greed and comments on animal cruelty with a very diverse perspective. The film takes place in a post-modern world where The Mirando Company has genetically modified giant pigs and placed them with farmers around the world to see what farming techniques will rear the best “super pig.” The (fictional) Mirando Company will hold a contest after 10 years, hosted by zoologist and spokesperson Dr. Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal) to present the world’s best super pig at a ceremony in New York City. Mija (Seo-hyun Ahn) and her Grandfather (Byun Hee-bong) live in South Korea with Okja, Mija’s best friend and an incredibly intelligent super pig. After visiting the farm in the stunning mountains of South Korea, Dr. Johnny Wilcox chooses Okja to attend the celebration of super pigs in NYC. Mija, an unbelievably strong young female lead, goes on a ridiculously dangerous and chaotic adventure to rescue her best friend, Okja. 

Space Sweepers takes place in an all-too-plausible future where the Earth has been rendered almost uninhabitable by pollution and climate change. Those who can afford to have fled to space, with the wealthiest living in luxury on a colony owned by the UTS corporation. A Mars colonization effort is also underway, spearheaded by UTS’s founder and CEO, James Sullivan (Richard Armitage). The less fortunate survive by fighting over space debris to sell as scrap metal.

The premise requires a healthy dose of exposition, and the first 20 minutes of the film occasionally drag as a result. It helps that an exhilarating chase-sequence and stunning shots of the colony’s artificial biosphere break up the rounds of info-dumping. Eventually, the film focuses on the ragtag crew of a scavenging ship called Victory, led by the hard-drinking and unscrupulous Captain Jang (Kim Tae-ri). Her crew includes Tae-ho (Song Joong-ki), a jaded ex-soldier who defected from UTS’s private military; Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu), an engineer and former drug kingpin who narrowly escaped execution on Earth; and Bubs, a former military robot in the process of forging her own identity. The plot takes off when Tae-ho discovers a stowaway on board the Victory: an adorable young girl named Kot-nim (Park Ye-rin) who may or may not be a dangerous android in disguise. What ensues is both a surprisingly heartfelt tale of found family and a scathing indictment of classism.