Bong Joon Ho
2019
132 minutes
You missed this one when it was popular as well. Upon finally watching it, you are pleasantly surprised that people liked this enough to see it despite the language and cultural difference.
The squalor of the family's flooded basement apartment is particularly gut-wrenching and visceral for you. One of your friends when you drove cab lived in a particularly horrifying basement apartment that flooded frequently. Sometimes you and other drivers would end up in his pathetic dwelling as a sort of afterbar. It usually smelled at least somewhat funky--this was not a finished basement. And after one particularly bad flood it became particularly off-putting. Your friend had spread a lot of soggy newspapers on the floor--copies of the free local weekly he had taken from one of the machines around town--and never picked them up. Much of the water was absorbed but still locked in the apartment within their filthy, reeking, stuck-together pages. He'd pass around a handle of vodka to help keep the sobriety away until the sun rose and then offer you whatever snacks or illicit substances he may have laying around. You usually declined, but your less-choosy friends would frequently indulge and listen to him telling stories about the glory days of driving cab and bemoan losing his license. You were thankful for your thick boots as you squished and squelched your way around his basement hovel.
Your friend was a playwright, and unlike a lot of playwrights he actually possessed enough dynamic energy to will his productions into a brief life on stage in front of semi-enthusiastic audiences. He was also a widower--his wife had suicided in a particularly horrifying manner, which he would sometimes talk about when he got a few drinks in him. He had also lost his son-in-law on 9/11. They would occasionally trot him out for this fact at various memorials, even though he seemed to be estranged from much of his family including his children.
The thought of all this depresses you a bit and gives you a little more sympathy for the impoverished Korean family as their travails play out on the screen before you.
Time to choose something different: