WORDPRESS ARCHIVE - MONTHLY FILM SERIES
March 2025 - Bong Joon Ho
MARCH 2025 – BONG JOON HO
“What type of detective sleeps well?” (Memories of Murder (2003)
At first when I started this series, my goal was to do a deep dive into movie genres/subgenres/actors/directors and any other movie elements that were interesting to me and that I wanted to investigate and write about. As I did a few months, I realized it might work out well to cover a certain subject in correlation to a given movie that was scheduled to drop that month. In march, we got a new Bong Joon-Ho film; Mickey 17 (2025) starring Robert Pattinson. In response, I decided to visit all of Ho’s movie’s to get a better understanding of his film style and the stories he is interested in telling.
Bong Joon Ho is one of the more prominent directors operating out of South Korea at the moment. Korea has a rich history of film that have permeated American culture such as Burning (2018), Train to Busan (2016) and Old Boy (2003) that might be worth a month of their own someday. Ho was the director of Parasite (2019), the first foreign made film to win the Academy Award for best picture and my main frame of reference in regards to Ho. I saw this movie when I came out and I quite enjoyed it. I didn’t even rewatch it for this month partially because I was a bit busy, but also because I have seen it about 3 or 4 times since. It tells the story of a low-income Korean family that slowly enters the life of an upper-class Korean family and antics ensure. The movie looks great and Ho explores the relation of social and economic class in capitalist society. It’s really brilliant and is a great rewatch. Looking back, I wish I rewatched it this month.
My other frame of reference for Bong Joon Ho was Snowpiercer (2013), which came out when I was a young buck entering high school in the mid 2010s. Just the plot line alone of the last bits of society forced onto a moving train; the poor working-class people at the back, the elites at the front, was enough to hook me. I remember seeing in and finding it interesting and thought-provoking, but assigning a bit of a B/B+ rating in my mind. Upon rewatch this month, I recall some of those qualities, noting the captivating combat scenes, the great character work from Tilda Swinton and what Ho is trying to question about class in world society. I found that this was a common question and series of themes throughout his films; class and the rich relating to the poor. I’ve noticed in the film paradigm recently that there are many people reacting to the phenomenon of “Eat-the-rich” films- I don’t know if they are called that. These films with entries such as The Menu (2022), and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) tend to have a message that is essentially: “Rich=bad, poor=good.” which, as pointed out by others, is a bit less nuanced and able to satisfy a sentiment in the film-going public without really making specific critiques of capitalism. I kept this idea in mind when engaging with Ho’s movies this month. I watched a few video essays on the director and a lot of them covered that Ho is interested in exploring these issues of class in his films. The following is from the Trivia section for this film of IMDB…
“Bong Joon-ho felt that in many monster movies, it’s always the scientist or the muscle-bound hero who saves the day. He wanted the heroes of his film to be everyday people, namely a dysfunctional family. He took the same approach with his previous film, Memories of Murder (2003), in which the police investigating the serial killer case were “stupid.” Critic and longtime friend of the director Tony Rayns mentions this is common in Bong Joon-ho’s films, the idea of a lower to middle class character who is on a downward track. The director mentions with these characters he can bring out the humanity in them, whereas the typical superhero types don’t bring out much real drama.”
Clearly, Ho likes to show lower class people as being capable of big things; heroics despite being lacking in resources and upward mobility in their world. He also touches on the idea that many of these characters are quite flawed themselves. I think of one of the protagonists in The Host who makes a series of significant blunders, but is still capable of rising to the occasion and beating the odds. Overall, I don’t know if Ho has any concrete answers in this debate, yet he is interested in exploring what it means to be human and I find that worth watching. Stories like this remind me of knowing that there’s so many meaningful stories around us and learning how to find them unlocks a certain type of magic. The variety is what makes film such a great form; or perhaps what makes art worth it as a whole. Also- this film reminded me how great movies have smart-clever details at every turn and great directors incorporate that.
The Host (2006) was a new film for me, that I hadn’t even heard of before this month. It captures the inhabitants of a town in South Korea as they react to a monster that was brought about due to an American who carelessly and illegally dumped toxic waste into the local water ways. The monster starts terrorizing the people, while also infecting those who come into contact with it. It’s always interesting watching these types of infection movies post-covid because it gives an interesting perspective into what we thought before it happened. The authorities are almost always a bit incompetent and unprepared. Has anything changed? This movie was captivating and very rewatchable. Song-Kang Ho (to Bong Joon Ho as DeNiro is to Scorcese, I imagine) is such a presence in this one and he is so easy to connect to. Watching him cook is typically one of the most familiar and fun parts of watching a Ho film and it reinforces my love for when a director takes an actor and runs with them. It just makes sense because over a great time of working together, a good director is understanding of their actor and how to get the best performance out of them. It’s a very effective choice in my opinion.
Mickey 17 (2025) was one I had been looking forward to for a while. Ever since Parasite, Ho has been on my radar as a director of note, and I was interested to see what he had to say in his latest film. I think I saw it in the theatre on opening day and overall- I was entertained but not blown away by this movie. I thought the story was interesting and the message was good. I liked the originality of it and there were some really great performances. I thought Pattinson was really effective in changing his acting style to portray two different characters, which can’t be an easy feat. Bravo to him. Personally, it’s hard to get into science fiction and even fantasy films. I think they aren’t my cup o’ tea, so to speak. I think the reasoning behind that connects to the idea that it can be a bit harder to suspend disbelief in a film like this. 20 minutes into the scenes with intense CGI and I just think, man what am I watching here. I tend to enjoy stories that work less to create new worlds that we have never seen before and more to explore the problems that we live with in the world today. Some say that Sci-Fi is, in a way, just putting a futuristic or fantastical lens on the problems that we have in our day-to-day lives, and that perhaps it might be beneficial to view these things in a newly-created light. Avatar was able to do this and on the largest possible scale. To this idea, I agree, and is why I will continue to watch this genre, however preference will remain preference for now.
Memories of Murder (2003) is a film about some detectives in South Korea in the 80s that try to varying degrees of success to find the serial murderer in their town. Ho plays to the trope of this genre of the experienced city cop coming to the small town to aid the often foolish and incompetent local cops in their investigation, and in the end they end up complimenting each other with their styles. All-in-all, this film is brilliant and has become one of my all time favorites. This was my second time watching it and it was even better on a rewatch. There’s something so hard to describe about the feelking in me that is evoked through watching this movie. It’s something similar to the first season of True Detective on HBO in which two gristled and unlikely heroes come together in their ultra-gritty environment to do good. It’s raining almost the whole time in this movie and it adds the perfect backdrop to the grit and grimy feeling that it evokes. The color palette is gray and sad and all the characters are gloomy. It’s very Fincher. It’s very 90s grungey. It tosses the viewer around like a rag doll in a time machine. It’s so interesting to me and Ho is able to tap into it perfectly. How do you define morality? What is morality? Is morality having the choice of doing the wrong thing, but doing the right thing? Is forced morality morality? Is morality objective? One of my favorite parts of this movie is the ending when its about 20 years later and one of the detectives whose moved on and changed careers casually returns to the scene of the original crime; a golden field in the middle nowhere. As he looks down in the ditch, a girl passes by and asks him why he’s looking down there. She then tells him that another man was just there that day who told her he was reliving something that he did there a long time ago; Memories of Murder. Chills.
“You’re dumping shit on cooked rice here.” (Memories of Murder, 2003)
Overall, I am a tad disappointed in myself because I only watched about 4 relevant films this month. Ho doesn’t have an extensive filmography, but he definitely had a few more I could have sunk my teeth into. Ho is a brilliant director on the cutting edge of the mainstream/yet still artistic and intellectually pertinent, and I will continue to watch his films.
