Minari

First a note on watching this. A24 has a "screening room" to buy streaming access to this. They mention you can watch it via Roku, but what they really mean is you can (with certain Roku models) stream it from a computer to the Roku. You'll still need the computer to stream it. Rather than stream it twice wirelessly (once to computer, once from computer to Roku), we used an HDMI connection to my wife's Mac.

The other thing about the streaming access that stands out as "needed more explaination" is the times. When you buy access to this it comes at a particular date and time. Turns out that particular time is the start of a multihour (five? six?) window to watch it.

And a minor note. The video stream has customer identifying watermark that jumps around. It sticks to the very edge of the screen but moves up / down and switches sides. This was distracting at first but eventually ignorable.

On to the film.

This is an autobiographical story of the director's childhood, focusing on the first year of living in rural Arkansas with his Korean immigrant parents, and later his maternal grandmother, moved in to both care for her and provide some child care.

It is very striking that it avoids pretty much all of the cliches of a foriegner story. There's essentially no racism, no white savior, no special Asian wisdom to save the day. It's a story of people with conflicting desires, health problems, and farm troubles. The meanest line in the film is from a local teen directed at a local old man, overheard by the immigrant kids. There is a bit of a running joke about misundertanding that Mountain Dew is not some sort of natural mountain stream water.

Much is made of the boy's "cuteness" in accompanying commentary. The boy is the young director, and given a lot of significance in the story, but to me it was the grandmother who was the most interesting character. Her fascination with professional wrestling on TV, for example, was quite funny.

It's a slice of life film, and as typical for those, a little slow. But I didn't regret a moment of it. Call it a tad better than three amateur exorcisms out of four.

I watched the interview with the cast special feature afterwards. I felt that was largely a waste of my time. The title refers to one of the plants grown (this is clear in the movie), but Lee Isaac Chung (director) notes this was the rare plant that ultimately did well at the farm.

Minari at imdb

Children of Men

This movie by Alfonso Cuarón came out in 2006 and is set in 2027. When it was new, someone I know commented that the lack of electric cars was hard to believe. Sitting in early 2021, having just watched Children of Men, the lack of electric cars seems quite plausible.

The basic story is for some reason, unknown to the characters, women, at least humans, stopped having babies in 2006. The story opens with the death-of-Princess-Diana level news about the youngest person, an 18 year old, having been killed. The coverage gives his age to the day. I get the sense that after the infertility set in, people just gave up on preserving the world for the future and doubled down on pollution.

It's clear that what's left of society has given up most hope, Britain is shown as a rare place where life sort-of continues normally, and thus is a huge destination for displaced peoples from the rest of Europe. It is a point of great friction in that world.

Background details show quite believable tech advances like the fancy monitors in an office, a TV as an alarm clock, and video ads on the sides of buses. And seeing the refugees get left in cages and having a reference to a flu pandemic made this seem rather 2020-topical.

Anyway, the main character, Theo, is a former activist now numb to pretty much everything. "At least with a hangover, I feel something." Then his ex-wife approaches him to ask for a favor. There's a young woman who needs to get to safety — she's pregnant and everyone wants to have the baby for propaganda reasons.

This story doesn't break ground with themes. To me, it seems like a tale ripped from 1970s dystopia, with the 1970s taste for setting it twenty to thirty years later, but with much more modern budget and production values.

The whisk-a-woman-to-safety (with some precious cargo) story has been done before. My mind went to The Ultimate Warrior (1975, Yul Brenner as title character) there. The prison camp scenes made me think of Escape from New York (1981, late for 1970s).

The details, filming, world realization, war scenes, etc, all those are much, much better than the 1970s versions of this story. As such, it's good entry into that escape collapsed society niche, just time shifted.

Five security checkpoints out of six.

Children of Men at imdb

The Platform

The Platform on IMDB

This is a Spanish film dubbed by Netflix for world-wide play on their service. I had it recommended to me by a Swede. Some people have compared it to Waiting for Godot and other Beckett works. It's certainly heavy (and heavy-handed). If you interpret it as a parable of modern capitalism, you can find a message here, but the parable is a bit flawed.

The general set up is there is a vertical hole-in-the-ground prison. One cell per level, two people per cell, very little in the way of rules enforced. Saving food is the only thing we ever see punished. And food is a problem. Once a day a platform (the one of the title) is lowered through the prison for people to eat at for two minutes, then it is on to the next floor. When the film starts, a new prisoner has just started on level 48. The platform is a complete mess, and he is surprised his roommate can eat at it. Level 48, his roommate explains, is so much better than the deeper levels.

Not much about this prison arrangement makes much sense. It becomes clear that between the monthly floor assignment resuffles a lot of people die from hunger, murder, and suicide thus freeing up space for newer prisoners. Nothing about this experience will make anyone better negating all benefits of this over a fast execution. The food prepared is lavish at Level 0 and nothing but broken plates by Level 100 or so. It does not look like enough food for the 250 levels the main character guesses the place has. Why go to all that trouble preparing it?

That said it does leave an impression.

Four snails out of a plate of twelve.

Casino Royale (1967)

Maybe, like me, you've never seen it and been waiting for an opportunity. If so, perhaps your chance has arrived. Or maybe you don't subscribe to HBO. I watched it on HBO Now this week.

It's ... got continuity problems. But it's also a very over the top spoof. In one sequence Mata Hari's daughter Mata Bond leaves MI-6, gets in a cab and goes to Berlin (the London cabbie is rather angry at the pedestrians blocking the streets of the red light district next to the Wall). Then Mata Bond enters a dance school that is a cover for a spy organization which specializes in placing au pairs in important households. As soon as she enters the door it becomes a German Expressionist film, you know like Nosferatu. So with sequences like that, I can forgive the muddy story line. YMMV.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061452/ "Casino Royale at IMDB"

Scott Dorsey, who gave me the dud recommendation for Vanishing Point, believes this movie has Woody Allen's best role. I can't say I've watched enough of his films to agree 100%, but the small time he's on the screen is better than the Allen directed Match Point.