Posted on 12/26/2023 2:59:54 PM PST by sphinx
Of all the writers retreats in all the summer towns in all of New York, he had to walk into hers. As the sun fades on a perfect Montauk night — setting the stage for a first kiss ... Nora (Greta Lee) tells Arthur (John Magaro) about the Korean concept of In-Yun, which suggests that people are destined to meet one another if their souls have overlapped a certain number of times before. When Arthur asks Nora if she really believes in all that, the Seoul-born woman sitting across from him invitingly replies that it’s just “something Korean people say to seduce someone.”
... Nora’s family makes the decision to leave Seoul when she’s still just a kid, and that choice has such a one-way impact on the trajectory of her life that her Korean has gotten rusty by the time she reconnects with Hae Sung over Skype in her twenties. His traditional Koreanness becomes a foreign object to her. Not only is it a kind of screen unto itself, but also one so impenetrable that Nora doesn’t even seem to notice how beautiful her former math rival has become as a grown man. (How convenient it is for both of these people that each of their childhood sweethearts turned out to be ridiculously attractive. And also inconvenient.) To her, Hae Sung is every Korean guy, and maybe even Korea itself. At the same time, he’s also the only man among a planet of billions who knows who Nora was before she was reborn into the hyphenate identity she’s maintained and expanded upon for her entire adult life. He knows the only Nora who Arthur will never be able to meet and couldn’t hope to understand even if he did.
(Excerpt) Read more at indiewire.com ...
In the spirit of the season, here is my holiday gift to the "nuke Hollywood from orbit" folks. As always, I wish to remind those who think that no good movies are being made today -- or that none have been made since 2000, or 1975, or [pick a date] -- that (1) yes, there are some good current films but (2) you will not know that unless you actually take the time to step out of your rut and watch a few. Here is one. By "good movie," I do NOT mean that I think this is necessarily your cup of tea. It will appeal to some, but as a group, freepers are strong on science fiction, war movies and westerns. Past Lives is not any of these. There are smaller pockets of support for other genres. Indie character dramas are a minority taste on FR. Put that aside, check your genre preferences/prejudices at the door, and strap on your culture war helmet.
For purposes of the movie ping list, "good" movies are conservative. Nothing woke. No leftist propaganda films. Set in a coherent moral universe. Recognizable characters and motivations, not freakshow weirdness to drive moronically fantastical plotlines. I'm willing to allow for plenty of scoundrels and villainy as long as a movie has a coherent sense of right and wrong, so that evil is recognized as evil and is not glorified. The plot doesn't have to be developed as I might like, but the film needs to be honest about real costs, hard choices and dilemmas. Etc. etc., etc. You have probably read my standard rant on this before.
Past Lives premiered this past January at the Sundance Film Festival. It got terrific reviews and I put it on my watchlist, but I hadn't gotten around to watching it until now. It hits the mark for me on several levels. It is an immigrants' story -- and there is nothing more American than that. In my family, the immigrant on my dad's side was born in Westphalia in 1805; we are not sure exactly when he immigrated, but he was part of the great wave of German immigration that settled so much of the midwest. My mom's side of the family got here even earlier, with a young Scottish feller showing up as an indentured servant in tidewater Virginia in 1653. He and his kin drifted west with the frontier; I don't have an ancestor who shivered with George Washington at Valley Forge because mine were in the mountains fighting Indians, and they were north of the Ohio River and into the Old Northwest soon thereafter, so they wore blue during the Late Unpleasantness.
Plenty of immigrant stories have been written about my ancestral tribes. The Irish and then the Poles and Italians and Greeks and Jews all got the Hollywood treatment. Now the Asians, both the East Asian and South Asian tribes, are getting their innings -- and it turns out that they are making some pretty good movies as their populations are reaching critical mass and getting mainstreamed in U.S. cinema.
I regard immigrant stories as classic Hollywood, and there have been many good ones. My recent favorites include Brooklyn, which IMHO is still the best thing Saiorse Ronan has done: loneliness, homesickness, a foot in two worlds, a choice made at great cost. Columbus and After Yang, Kogonada's first two films, are also excellent; Kogonada was born in Seoul, came to the U.S. as a child when his parents immigrated, grew up in the midwest, and somehow got into filmmaking. As a first generation immigrant who was old enough to remember the old country, he is very conscious of having a foot in both worlds and facing the question of what to jettison and what to retain as he constructs a new identity. That of course is very much a first generation immigrant perspective; assuming he remains in the U.S., I expect that his grandchildren will be as American as you and I, and if they think about Korea at all, it will be because they have Bibimbap on their list of top five American dishes, along with pizza, Kung Pao chicken, Texas chili, and cheeseburgers with fries. With shrimp creole and fried catfish heading up the next five.
Anyhow, that bring us back to Past Lives, another Korean diaspora story. (Hey, if the Jews could do it, the Koreans can do it. This is the nature of American cinema.) This is the first film from writer/director Celine Song, whose family immigrated from South Korea to Ontario, Canada when she was 12. She went to college in Ontario and then came to the U.S. for an MFA in filmwriting at Columbia. She met an aspiring writer feller in the U.S. They married in 2016, when she would have been 28, and they live apparently in the U.S. (I'm not 100 percent sure.) The lead character in Past Lives is a Korean girl whose family immigrated to Canada when she was 12, who immigrated a second time to the U.S. to study writing, and who meets and marries an aspiring American writer feller. They live in New York ... and you will get the gist of the rest from the trailer. Autobiographical? Ya think? The question is how much.
My guess is that Nora's old flame from Korea in the movie -- remember, they were 12 when they parted; they had an age-appropriate crush on each other but nothing more -- is fictional and is there to represent all her bundled-up memories and feelings of everything she had left behind. An immigrant's story: the price of change, the haunted memories of the paths not taken, the echoes of past lives. This is NOT played as a matter of identity politics; it is presented as a question of homesickness, nostalgia, and consciousness of loss, with no antagonism whatsoever directed at anyone else.
Put aside whether you have a particular interest in immigrants' stories per se. What elevates this film is that the immigrant's story is merely the particularistic setting for a story that punches straight through to universal themes. Are there any among us who don't wonder about the paths not taken, or who don't have a golden memory of something gone beyond recall, or who perhaps don't still (in some sense) love the memory of a girl we once knew? If we have the sense that God gave us and haven't gotten addled in old age, we don't confuse such memories with present realities and try to live in a dream, but that doesn't mean the memories weren't real once and that we don't treasure them today. Really ... I mean, why else would I have a wall plaque hanging proudly on my wall today, said plaque being a section of the old basketball floor from IU's Assembly Hall on which Bob Knight's greatest teams played? 50 year old pine planking can't be more precious than that. Holy relics are holy relics, including memories.
Is Past Lives a conservative movie? You decide. There's a universal human theme at speaks to mystic chords of memory. There are no villains. Every character acts with great consideration and kindness towards every other character. No one acts out. The two lead characters -- who had parted at age 12 and have not seen each other in 24 years -- are both surprised and somewhat overwhelmed at the power of the memories they unlock, but they have both moved on, the young woman is married and committed to her new life and career, and both know that the past is past. The husband is not a bad guy; that might have led to a very different story. But he understands that his wife is being visited by a ghost from her past, and that her feelings are not just about a boy she once know but a whole world she had left behind. Nothing happens behind anyone's back, and the husband and wife communicate openly and honestly throughout. At no point is Nora on the cusp of cheating or even running away; as she even says explicitly at one point, she has made her choices, she has chosen a life, and she is not about to throw it away. There is no sex, no nudity, and no betrayal. To sum it up in a phrase, the characters live the little virtues. In my book, that makes Past Lives a conservative film.
I am on a mission to populate a top ten conservative film list for 2023. I was getting pretty pessimistic a couple of weeks ago, but the holidays provide some quiet time for watching a few movies while recovering from overdoses of hospitality at the dinner table. I'm not up to seven, maybe eight, good conservative movies of the year. They span multiple genres. I'm still a couple short, so if you've seen a good one, sound off.
And if you are one of the freepers who likes Korean films, check this one out. The writer/director is a Korean immigrant, most of the actors are Korean, a lot of the dialogue is in Korean, and -- I'm going out on a limb here -- the cultural grounding of the movie is deeply rooted in Korean themes. Woke Hollywood it ain't. The film industry is quite internationalized and A24 is the production and distribution company; that too will catch some freepers' attention.
I have to head out and eat my way through another holiday obligation. Have at it. I will be back if and when I survive. Enjoy, and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Movie ping list.
“people are destined to meet one another if their souls have overlapped a certain number of times before”
So THAT’S how all those insurance salesmen are finding me!
This is a better review than the linked essay. One of the virtues of social media is being able to hear from people far too intelligent and capable to settle for jobs in journalism. This is a fine example of the gold that occasionally peeks out from the dross of the random drive-bys.
Better insurance salesmen than parole officers.
Destined to meet because of entanglements in past lives. Some reviewers have suggested that there are some Korean and Buddhist themes lurking there, but I have to punt on that. I was, however, reminded of Eye, Origins, an interesting film with an ambitious concept. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it involves a hardheaded, completely atheist and materialist scientist who starts noticing ... well, coincidences that he finds difficult to believe are coincidental. Reincarnation and the transmigration of souls are the ideas flitting through the shadows. And what said scientist will accept as evidence. I don’t think it was made by Hindus.
Looks like it will be interesting. Thanks for the tip
Thanks for the review. I am always on the lookout for something decent to watch.
I watched Past Lives a few weeks ago. Exactly the type of film I seek out but seldom find. Very moving but not the type of story that would appeal to many of the people I know.
Sounds like an interesting film.
Thanks
Sounds like an interesting film.
Thanks
Have you ever watched PRIMER?
TRULY enjoyed.
Watch with friends. Two or 3 times.
Saw Godzilla Minus One in theaters in Christmas Eve with the family.
It was outstanding. The score was magnificent. You cared about the characters. Godzilla was terrifying.
It was made in Japan, for Japan, at only $15M, and was better than anything the “panderverse” has put out at 20X the price.
Sounds like an enjoyable movie - as usual - thanks for sharing with us.
Primer? Thanks for the recommendation. I do add all freeper suggestions to my watchlist; I figure it’s the reciprocal obligation I owe since I am forever pushing my finds — always oriented towards good, non-woke, morally grounded RightWorld movies — on them. But I glanced at Primer and it immediately shot near the top of my list for a reason I don’t mention enough. IMDB says the budget was $7,000, most of which was spent on filmstock.
$7,000.
Coherence was made for $50,000. My Road to Damascus movie (the one that suddenly showed me that I had a huge blind spot) was Columbus, which was made for $700,000. Those are just three that come to mind; I’d like to build out a list of very low budget movies that I would feel comfortable recommending from a conservative viewpoint.
The big studios are spending tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars to produce absolute garbage, conceived as generic content for generic global audiences, terminally infected with the woke mind virus, and increasingly prone to flopping at the box office. Disney has lost money on almost every film they’ve released this year, and that’s good news for us. Go woke, go broke. As the giants have locked themselves into a race to the bottom, I’ve gotten increasingly interested in the remaining independent studios that are still aspiring to make great movies.
It’s a high risk business. Many of the little indie films will not make money, and very few of them will be great art. But at least the people involved are still trying. Enough of these films are good enough that, on my optimistic days, I think there will a saving remnant to start the rebuilding after Woke Hollywood crashes and burns. For the moment, I have a particular fondness for the little indie films with a writer/director team of one and a group of backers who stake their personal savings, pawn the cat and the baseball card collection they inherited from Uncle Bob, and check under the couch cushions to find the cash to make the movie. At least they’re still trying, and we should be attentive to preserving an ecosystem that gives them a chance to find an audience without being swallowed by the Borg.
Primer was made for $7,000, which wouldn’t even pay for the business lunch to pitch a Hollywood star on doing a Disney comic book movie. It won some prizes in festivals including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and then made over $500,000 at the box office plus whatever it has earned since on VOD. I hope everyone involved got paid on the backend, because they sure didn’t make anything on the front end. Bootstraps and barnstorming are pluses in my book.
Maybe the big studios will self-correct. Maybe they won’t. They are now mostly owned by the streamers, and that is part of the problem. The streamers are ultimately in the subscription business, not the movie business. They regard movies as just generic content and theatrical movies are well down the list of content types that attract subscriptions, with sports and trash tv being bigger factors.
The movie industry has always had its problems and its ups and downs. But in the final analysis, until recently it was at least its own domain, with the studios, large and small, being run by people who lived, ate, and breathed movies. That’s no longer the case. The industry is now dominated by people who are answering to bosses with other priorities. And it shows.
When you read the credits T the end you will understand how the film was put together.
Do you ever watch the John Sayles films. Mattapan is one of his bigger one and I didn’t enjoy it half as much as the secaucus 7. Roan ornis or brother from another planet.
Sayles is a film writer who who saved up money to occasionally make a film.
I will also freely admit to an advantage in my comments here, as compared to outside reviewers who are writing for different audiences. I am always mindful of the very vocal "nuke Hollywood from orbit" crowd on FR. One colorful description stuck in my mind, from a freeper who was anathematizing Hollywood as a pack of moral degenerates who were all high on coke and swinging from chandeliers. Hyperbole, yes, but it captures the spirit. I've adopted the phrase. They aren't all high on coke and swinging from chandeliers, but unless people are willing to open their eyes and stop ranting long enough to actually watch a few good contemporary films, it's easy to get carried away with the nonsense.
If someone is simply no longer interested in movies, that's fine. There are other ways to spend the time. But from a culture war standpoint, we should at least be ready to acknowledge people who are doing good work in whatever domain, including fields like cinema which are dominated by the other side.
My testing for recommending a movie here is pretty simple. It can't be woke. It has to be set in a morally coherent universe. It has to tell the truth about serious issues. It can't be a dishonest propaganda film, so even if the filmmakers are liberal or left liberal in orientation, they need to at least give conservative themes, perceptions and themes room to breathe. This is basically a matter of telling an honest story, which means giving both sides their innings. And the film should not be vulgar and aggressively nihilist on the moral and sexual issues. Do that, and I am happy to recommend the film.
I picked the review that I did partly because it linked the trailer. I should also have been mindful of the time honored freeper tradition of not reading the linked article, so I should have posted the trailer separately as well. So here it is for those who didn't click on the link:
At the risk of a small spoiler but for the benefit of people who will never watch the film, note that the trailer shows Nora and Hae Sung, who have not seen each other in 24 years, talking in a bar. They are obviously getting lost in shared memories. The trailer, however, doesn't show us that Nora's husband is sitting there with them. Hae Sung's English isn't very good. He and Nora slip effortlessly into Korean from time to time. She will turn and translate a bit for her husband from time to time. She is not slipping around behind his back. He is sitting there realizing that she had a whole world before immigrating, now gone beyond recall, of which he can never be a part. But Nora is always emphatic that she is committed to her new world and her life with Andrew.
Thanks. I have seen some very positive reviews of Godzilla Minus One from some of the YouTube reviewers that I follow. My first reaction was that it’s just not my kind of movie, but as the good reviews continued to stack up, I decided to add it to my watch list.
My New Year’s resolution a couple of years ago was to avoid dumping on movies I’ve not actually seen. First and foremost, I want to try to stay focused on the good stuff. But it’s also unsound practice to unload carelessly about movies based on nothing more than online chatter. That’s just venting my prejudices, and there is too much of that all around us.
Another recent resolution is to (at least occasionally) step outside of my longstanding genre preferences and watch some things to which I would formerly have turned a blind eye. I still have strong personal preferences, but my larger interest is woke vs. unwoke, and I am especially looking for movies that plant a conservative/traditionalist/moral flag on hilltops worth defending. If I limit my viewing to my own narrow preferences, I will miss some allies worth knowing. A movie doesn’t have to be explicitly conservative as long as it’s not obnoxiously leftist and woke. Pure escapism is fun too. I mentioned Renfield recently in another thread. There is no deep hidden message in the film. It’s just a comic romp through vampire lore with a very funny running gag about Renfield joining an Al Anon style group for codependents.
When you find them, let me know. I like these kinds of films as well.
Quiet character dramas with stoic, emotionally restrained people who would sooner die than bleed publicly and who treat others with great respect? Movies without villains? Movies in which ordinary people are living the little virtues, sometimes at heroic cost? Movies that valorize normies behaving decently and honorably?
I had drifted away from movies over the years prior to my Road to Damascus moment a few years ago. Then I started exploring. My tastes have certainly changed as I've gotten older. I've seen enough of X, Y and Z and have a lot more patience. So let me suggest these:
The Holdovers (2023); Love at First Sight (2023); Past Lives (2023); Causeway (2022); The Banshees of Inisherin (2022); Living (2022); To Leslie (2022); Living (2022); The Humans (2021); Montana Story (2021); Drive My Car (2021); Compartment No. 6 (2021); After Yang (2021); I'm Your Man (2021); Petite Maman (2021); Jockey (2021); On the Rocks (2020); Another Round (2020); Mr. Jones (2019); Leave No Trace (2018); The Florida Project (2017); Columbus (2017); Blue Jay (2016); Paterson (2016); Manchester by the Sea (2016); Brooklyn (2015); Her (2013); Never Let Me Go (2010); Lost in Translation (2003).
My list of "conservative" movies is broader, and my list of "non-woke" movies is even broader than that, but those I've listed here lean deep into stoicism and introspection.
Mark
I run the gamut on movies I like.
Among the list of my favorite movies is Black Hawk Down, Aliens, The Ten Commandments, Die Hard, and While You Were Sleeping. As a woman, no one looks askance at my love of romance.
I know that Netflix is a no-go zone for a lot of people, but they have some awesome Korean and Chinese dramas. Since I became seriously ill, I’ve moved to watching a lot of romance, so expect some in each of these.
A Time Called You (wild time travel that will keep you on your toes).
Sweet and Sour (excellent movie with surprise ending).
Because This Is My First Life (understated romantic comedy with great character development).
Love Between Fairy and Demon (female lead has a high pitched, almost childish voice for the first few episodes; her voice deepens as the show goes on. If you can look past that, you will be hooked). Took 4 years to create this series. Amazing sets, costumes, acting, soundtrack, great character arc.
Descendents of the Sun
Crash Landing On You (the first episode has an implausible set up, with a rich S. Korean mogul accidentally crossing over to N. Korea, but episode 8 will have you dropping the remote in horror). Most moving execution scene in recent memory.
Thanks very much for that list. I have seen some of them and will certainly check out the others. I will keep you in mind if I run across others in that vein.
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