Minari (2020)

Too much of this semi-autobiographical family drama is spent trying to be cute rather than trying to develop its themes, with the challenges of farming Korean vegetables in Kansas perhaps meant as an analogy for the migrant experience, except that this family is American - they hail from California and are welcomed into smalltown USA, its church and farming community without much drama beyond the wife's loneliness and the son's health problems - and the farm is just a patch producing a first small harvest once, not back-breaking, soul-destroying labour over ten years producing only failed crops that drive a farmer to suicide, so the punchline at the end of the movie about the effortlesssness of growing minari feels glib, especially after the randomness of a housefire, and might as easily be an indictment on unsustainable agricultural practices or a comment on Steiner child-rearing as much as it is saying something about the perserverence required to successfully plant roots in foreign soil - it isn't clear, but look at how the little boy pouts!

★★★☆☆

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Burning (Beoning) (버닝) (2018)

Lots of thrillers featuring writer's block-stricken main characters are let down when it turns out the thrills are just metaphorical (it was in their imagination, an author's struggle manifest, or worse, just a dream) (Swimming Pool, Secret Window, etc. etc..) but that's not the case here with this beautifully acted, chilling, thrilling Murakami Haruki short story adaptation in which North Korean propaganda announcements, porsches, dilapidated shacks and swanky apartments are the all too real indications of the divides that exist between the have-nots (like wannabe-writer Jong-soo, who doesn't even have a mother in his life and looks like losing Hae-mi, the girl he is interested in) and the haves like Ben (a mysterious playboy who seems to be coming between Jong-soo and Hae-mi) and greenhouses, stones, and fires suggest what is being written is something real that thumps in your chest and strips you bare; the trick in the end is that this thriller leaves you devastated, wishing it were just a metaphor or, even better, just a dream - please, just wake up.

★★★★★

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