Tag: 12 Movies

I guess the easy thing would be to go along with the swathes of glowing reviews from experts and take note of the huge array of awards that this movie has won and seems to continue to win. Wait. For. It. … Just a little more…

But.

I really didn’t like this movie. I did want to. I just didn’t. I was searching for a way to describe how I felt, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It looks lovely, but that, for me is about it. The story is stupid, the characters ugly. It’s a good thirty minutes too long and, well, boring. The best way I could think of to describe how I felt watching Parasite was thus:

Imagine you are sitting in front of a washing machine that has a lovely white cotton towel in it, the really fluffy one you just bought that totes gets you and then you half notice what looks like a flash of red. A rush of adrenaline, but then it abates because it was just a figment of your imagination. You turn to look away, but WOAH just as you glance back, there in the window is a big dark blue sock and it is clinging to the glass taunting you.

THEN BAM. The red sock appears and pushes the blue sock off its perch. You reach of the off button, but know that despite your need for this disaster to be over the off button on a washing machine is more an indication of future intent than a strict instruction and this horror show is going to continue for some time and you’ll just have to deal with it.

You sit, horror-struck in front of the washing machine unable to move, you watch as red follows blue follows white and then it all starts to blend into one indescribable shade of grey. A really crap grey that ruins everything. It ruins the blue sock, it ruins the red sock and worst of all it ruins is the white towel – everything looks awful and all you can do is sit.

THEN BAM, the washing machine inexplicably lurches forwards and falls on you trapping you until help arrives – it never does. As you sit there, trapped, you try to work out why this happened and how on earth the washing machine could have fallen on you, but this story has no need for logic or sense it’s just a collection of things thrown together. Not unlike Parasite.

I didn’t like it.

It cost me forty-five quid to watch this movie. And, at the end, as the credits rolled, it wasn’t something I was obsessing over, so I guess all-in-all that must mean it’s a good movie. It is.

However, I can’t help thinking that this would have made a much better 6-part mini-series on BBC4 than a two-hour movie. There are so many lovely scenes, but it felt to me there could have been a lot more lovely scenes and the movie format couldn’t allow for them even at £45.

All the cast are great, the way the story flows through the scenery never gets messy or weird or jarring. Though I did want Malcolm Tucker Mr. Micawber to swear at the bailiffs a bit. Well, quite a lot really.

I do wonder if it might be of its time as a movie though – in a way that you watch it 3 times now and rave over it and then in five years watch it again and don’t maintain the same sense of joy or excitement. Even though you remember that feeling it’s like there’s something missing, somehow. I felt that way a bit after The Madness of King George. Watched it three times when it came out, loved it. Saw it again a few years later, didn’t like it half as much. What what!

So, it’s a fun escape – if you like Armarretto Averivaderci movies, TV shows or comedy output, you’ll like it too, all the punchlines are in all the right places and all the actors are acting at the right time. Jolly good show!

Though you may want to avoid the Vue at Leicester Square if you want to pay less than a king’s ransom to watch a movie and have some popcorn and a drink or you’ll end up as destitute as a third-act character in a loose movie adaptation of the fourth most popular Dickens novel.