Film Reviews by KH

This is a wonderful film, slow, serious, sympathetic, funny, humane and question-raising. I watched it in two sessions because it is 3 hours long, but this was not a problem since it is not plot-based but community-life-based. The actors were non-professionals who were absorbed in their task and clearly understood what it must have been like to live in their grandparents' world. Perhaps not so different from their own, forty-odd years ago. 

  I particularly liked the warm relationships between fathers and children. Many scenes included lots of  taken-for-granted physical affection which is not normally shown enough on screen, and lots of practical work in which the children are taught about how to live in a very matter-of-fact but affectionate way. 

Despite its winning prizes at the Cannes Festival, I thought Parasite was not only a most unpleasant film but also a pointless one. It begins as an amiable comedy about a poor family finding work with a ridiculously rich family (so no satire just  rather silly farce) and turns into a gratuitously violent, bloody film.. A potentially striking scene in which the poor family's home was  flooded waist-high with filthy sewage was wasted - there was no empathy, no grief, just a comic grubbing around to rescue a large stone. And then with one bound they were free - rescued in a gym with nice clean clothes and about to go off to a party. I expected to enjoy it and really disliked it.