#55. Parasite, Capitalism, and Cosplay with Sonny

The Best Picture winner finally gets its hearing, and Parasite divides them along familiar lines. Sonny found the first half — the Kim family conning their way into the Park household one job at a time — deeply entertaining, something close to The Sting, but says the film curdles once the ex-housekeeper's husband turns up in the bunker and it becomes a didactic hammer-over-the-head parable, which is why he still prefers Snowpiercer; he can't get worked up about the Oscar because he neither hates nor loves it, and argues the most interesting thing in the picture is that the wealthy family does nothing wrong while the poor family are liars, thieves and eventually murderers. JVL counters that the movie has been massively misread and poses the question the title demands: who is the host? His answer is the house itself — a machine of capital that warps everyone inside it and keeps manufacturing new Parks and new Kims, whether the owners are Korean or German. He runs the whole Bong Joon-ho filmography to support it (Snowpiercer's fake war and child-powered engine, Tilda Swinton modeling Mason on Gaddafi, Hitler and Thatcher; Okja's genetically modified pig; The Host's lobotomizing American military), calls Bong the Korean Spielberg with four of the country's hundred highest-grossing films at fifty, and floats a theory that only a liberal democracy where a fifth of the population lives fifteen miles from certain death could produce such class-obsessed cinema — living beside North Korea being less like living beside Scarface than beside the Manson family. Producer Paul Crookston, dragged in as the show's Korea expert and on his fourth viewing, endorses the esoteric reading and notes that Bong's viral "we all live in the same country, capitalism" line was actually the most left-wing thing he said all press tour, sounding otherwise more like Arthur Brooks. Vic gives it a straight A+ on the quadrant — plot easy, two hours twelve but briskly paced, "blunt trauma" for violence, no nudity but one very touching sofa scene — compares it to The Talented Mr. Ripley, admits his wife had to explain the peach-fuzz and fumigation business to him, and offers the perspective none of them have by recounting his teenage job under Mr. and Mrs. Yim at a Hallmark store in Toms River, where he despised Mylar balloons and stole coconut clusters from behind the display case, "because I'm a parasite myself." Box office is thin gruel — Sonic the Hedgehog holding at $26.3 million, Call of the Wild at $24.8 million (Sonny: not terrible once you accept it's an animated movie, though the dog moves like a cartoon and Harrison Ford barely appears until the last forty minutes, his voiceover about as energetic as his Blade Runner one), Birds of Prey down to $7 million and unlikely to clear $85 million, while Bad Boys for Life sails past $200 million domestic. Before all that: Sonny reports on the VFW red-carpet premiere in Dallas, where a very tall listener turned up in a captain's hat holding a cocktail glass, giving him his first-ever cosplayer; JVL is giddy about a one-night Inception tenth-anniversary Atmos screening, which detours into an extended argument that Snow Job, Gung Ho, Airborne and Torpedo were the apex of G.I. Joe, and Vic's confession that he ruined a Storm Shadow's resale value with a black paint pen; and there is a full accounting of Fat Tuesday, with JVL downing filet mignon, two-thirds of a sourdough loaf, two pints of Ben and Jerry's and a bag of popcorn to stay awake for a debate, and Vic putting away twenty McNuggets for $8.37 before bringing Shake Shack home. For Lent, JVL surrenders popcorn and powdered cheese, Vic surrenders Civilization, and they close by plugging their live Q&A at Georgetown, which JVL intends to attend in a full complement of team gear and a foam finger.