Film Reviews

Rocketman

Biography, Drama, Music
Directed by Dexter Fletcher
(UK, USA, Canada, 2019)

Review by Lois Siegel

Rocketman is outstanding. It’s a must-see. The film is essentially a musical. The dramatic biographical scenes from the life of Elton John are interspersed with musical fantasies with a stage full of dancers and singers performing.

Reginald Dwight, who later changed his name to Elton John, was born on March 25, 1947 in Middlesex, England. Taron Egerton is an excellent actor who portrays Elton John so that we feel how tumultuous his life was. We’ve read about his use of alcohol, cocaine and other drugs, but we don’t always understand why all this happens. Quick success and confused sexuality are possible factors; his home life as a young boy might be another. His mother hated him and had affairs; his father was often absent, showed absolutely no affection and basically ignored him.

We follow as Elton’s natural talent for playing the piano is revealed. At a very young age, he can hear any tune and play it by ear. His grandmother encourages him and enrols him at age 11 in the Royal Academy of Music where he receives a scholarship. At first, he has to perform classical music, which he doesn’t like. We see him switch to electrifying rock and roll.  He writes songs, then records in studios. His tunes are unforgettable

His agent gets him a gig at the Troubadour in New York when he is only 23. Elton starts to change his look, wearing more flamboyant, colorful costumes – for example, a shirt of stars with white overalls, stylish boots and the oversize decorated glasses that became his trademark. He starts a song slowly, then speeds up, jumps to his feet and kicks the music bench out of the way while still banging the keyboard. His antics fire up the audience.

His performance of “Your Song” on January 14, 1971, was Elton’s second appearance on Top Of The Pops.

He becomes famous, wearing white furs, with a boyfriend now in the picture. Elton John’s screen character explains his transition from unhappy child prodigy to rock superstar: “You have to kill the person you are to become who you want to be.”

The film shows but doesn’t fully explain his sexuality. He briefly marries a woman. They have separate bedrooms. He cavorts with men on the side. His parents don’t care about his fame. Cocaine, pills and booze send his personal life into a downward spiral. He splits with his agent.  His music expresses his loneliness – at one point we hear a one-note tune. He has to learn to love himself. A new boyfriend, Canadian David Furnish, whom Elton John would later marry, helps to get him sober. The film story stops there. An afterword on screen explains that he has been sober for 19 years.

The acting in the film is superb.

Rocketman director Dexter Fletcher is also an English actor. He is credited with finishing the film Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer was fired. Sources claim that the film’s lead actor, Rami Malek, and the crew had grown tired of Singer’s behaviour; the director reportedly showed up late on set on multiple occasions and repeatedly clashed with Malek. On December 4, 2017, Singer was fired, with about two weeks remaining in principal photography.

DVD release: August, 2019.
Running time: 2 hours, 1 minute

Parasite

Directed by Bong Joon-Ho
(South Korea, 2019)

Review by Paul Green

This film feels a little like Down And Out In Beverly Hills meets Nightmare On Elm St., but that hardly begins to do it justice. Parasite is a parable or social satire on class relations in contemporary South Korea. Or what can go wrong in a country where the distribution of wealth and income is so skewed and upward mobility so restricted that an underemployed, working-class family living in a roach-infested basement hovel must resort to appalling stratagems in order to move up the proverbial ladder?

Kim Ki-woo and his brainy sister Ki-jung live with their well-meaning parents in a Seoul slum where they struggle to make a living by folding pizza boxes for a local restaurant. One is tempted to laugh but for the realization there are people who must do this if they want to eat.

This family is nothing if not resourceful – they scam their Wi-Fi from the upstairs neighbours by walking about with cellphones held high. And they find it above the toilet which sits on a raised platform. Perhaps this is meant to tell us something about the Internet.

Then opportunity knocks. Ki-woo learns from a well-off friend that a rich family needs an English tutor for their daughter. Ki-woo’s sister Ki-jung, who is an ace with Photoshop, works up a fake diploma for her brother. This suits Ki-woo who wants to attend university some day, so why not arrange for a diploma to begin with?

When Ki-woo shows up to apply for the position, the film’s locale has shifted dramatically. Now going under the name “Kevin” – Ki-woo is aware that wealthy Koreans have a penchant for American first names – he finds himself standing in a verdant, cloistered compound staring at a modernist structure that resembles something designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, all glass, angles and concrete. This is the abode of the Park family, and the contrast with the roach-infested hovel that Ki-woo calls home could not be more stark.

The Parks are classic upper class twits, Korean style. They are helicopter parents who spoil their children and outsource their lives. All the cooking, cleaning, driving and child-rearing chores are performed by paid help. Kevin, who is clever enough to tell these people just what they want to hear, lands the job and is soon scheming to find employment for his sister and parents in the same household. This takes some doing, as it includes getting rid of the Parks’ maid who used to work for the architect who designed the house for himself, then stayed on when the Parks moved in. It seems the maid more or less ran the household. In a nice touch, sister Ki-jung, now “Jessica,” is performing bogus, Internet-inspired “art therapy” on the unmanageable younger son who thinks he is a North American Indian. It’s all quite comic but darkly so.

Ki-woo and family are now running the place. The Parks are rich but still nice, says the father. His wife corrects him, pointing out that they are nice because they are rich. Park is a CEO at a high-tech firm. He seems personable enough, but is always muttering about servants “crossing the line.” And the poor smell funny, he tells his wife. Soon the Parks are off on a high tech camping trip while Ki-woo and his family – the Parks haven’t the slightest idea that their new servants are related – kick back and enjoy their new surroundings.

At least until late one rainy night, when the Parks’ former maid shows up at a most inopportune moment and everything starts to go south. What started as comedy satire shifts ground and morphs into something violent and almost biblical.

For a film with a running time of 133 minutes, Bong Joon-Ho (Mother, Snowpiercer) keeps things moving at a fast clip. As for the social satire, it is hard to know which of these two families is more deserving of our scorn. In a remarkable sequence toward the end, an antediluvian downpour washes away nearly everything Ki-woo and his family hold dear in their basement apartment. It seems they live on a flood plain and neighbours in the slum are killed. Cut to the Park compound on the hill, where the ditzy Mrs. Park rhapsodizes about how beautiful everything is after the rain. Back in his hovel, Ki-jung sits calmly on the toilet, trying to smoke a cigarette as backed-up sewage spews in all directions from under the toilet cover.  I haven’t witnessed a scatological scene like this since the toilet exploded in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film Blow-Out (La Grande Bouffe).

This is bravura filmmaking that won Parasite the Palme d’Or in Cannes earlier this year. It tells us something about ourselves, surely, and offers a scathing comment on just where South Korean society may or may not be headed. One might well argue that it is not these two families who are parasitical but rather the prevailing socio-economic system that dictates such a yawning gap between them. I hope to see this film at least one more time.

Korean with English subtitles.
Running time: 133 minutes.
Rating: 14A.