Movie : Parasite (2019)

I will simply stick to the first names in this review. This is definitely a very different movie. It won a lot of praise and accolades and created the biggest buzz when it won the best film in Oscar for films released in 2019. So I went with very high expectations and perhaps that was the problem but the movie did not live up to the hype in my mind. 

The movie starts as a comedy where a poorish Kim family tries to make ends meet. Then by chance they hear of the need for an English tutor and the son Ki-Woo decides to apply for the job. Problem? He does not have the qualifications for it. So his sister Ki-Jung comes to the rescue. By photoshop, she creates a fake graduation certification from a well known South Korean university and he gets the job. Things are looking up for the Kim family now. When he realizes that the family needs a comforter for their traumatized son (who claims to have seen a ghost)  who also needs to know ‘art’ he recommends the ‘perfect replacement’ who is “Jessica”. It is simply his sister Ki-Jung. Then they both plot to frame and get rid of the driver so that their father can come in as a recommendation. They all pretend to be from different families of course. Then they get the taste of wealth and now frame the maid and bring the mother. The maid has allergy to peach and they induce the allergy and convince the Park family lady that she has TB and so should be let go!

So all of them are ensconced with the very rich Park family and are thriving as parasites. Suddenly the movie takes another turn – the Parks have gone away for a camping trip, and this gang is occupying the house, enjoying all the amenities when suddenly the expelled maid comes back and they realize that she has been keeping her husband in a sub basement room reached by a secret pathway that even the Parks were not aware of. Well we then know that the ‘ghost’ the son saw.

And so starts a tense cat and mouse game. They want to expel the maid and the husband but she overhears them and films them on her cell phone where they reveal they are all from the same family. So now she has a hold on them and meanwhile the Parks phone the cell phone announcing that they are returning early due to bad weather! The family has barely enough time to clean up and are trapped in the house!

Then the movie takes another bizarre turn and ends in tragedy. It is like watching snippets of three different movies and so is confusing to me. What does the director want us to see? A comedy? A thriller? A tragedy?

Contrary to popular opinion, maybe, I did not enjoy the movie much. 

3/10

— Krishna

Book: Mr Mercedes by Stephen King

The book has a prolog that, unusually for King, has nothing to do with the rest of the story. 

And yes, Stephen King being one of our favourite authors (and this book is an example of why), we have reviewed many of his books including, for example, Dolores Claiborne and Four Past Midnight. 

August (“Augie”) Odenkirk, having lost a job goes to a job fair to try to find another. There comes a Mercedes plowing down the mob waiting for the job. 

The scene shifts to Bill Hodges, who has retired and finds life so boring that he is frequently thinking of ending it. Only TV shows and loneliness greet him every day. Then he gets a letter from “The Mercedes Killer” who praises him but boasts that his case was one of the failures. He further states that he, not being tempted to repeat his crime, will never be caught. 

He is goading Hodges to complete his suicide mission in humiliation and even supplies intimate details about Hodges’ family including her daughter. However Hodges for the first time has a purpose in life : to find and capture this unknown, elusive killer. 

He requests a lunch with his erstwhile partner. 

Meanwhile, we are introduced to the murderer – Brady, who works with Freddi Linkletter (a gay punk girl) in a shop called Electronix Cyber Patrol. This is a computer shop that is in trouble, and their boss is Frobisher. 

Brady happens to be a computer genius. He has invited the ‘fat retired cop’ to talk to him in Blue Umbrella, a shady website. The cop wants to take the help of Jerome, who is a brilliant black boy to ensure it is safe. 

Bill meets the sister of the woman whose Mercedes was stolen by Brady. She shows him letters which seem to have induced the woman to commit suicide and hires Bill to investigate the murderer, which Bill was already going to do anyway. 

Jerome helps Bill know the dangers/ authenticity of the website Blue Umbrella. While Brady is seething with impatience that the ‘fat cop’ has not taken his bait, Bill proceeds cautiously. He has seen Mr Mercedes portray two different persona – one of taunting, jeering man with Bill himself and a diffident, shame filled one with Trelawney where he goaded her to suicide by chatting with her in the same site as Blue Umbrella, Bill does not want to scare him away with the wrong move. 

He wants to infuriate him and tells him that he is an imposter and it works. He also suggests that if the person who was talking to him in The Blue Umbrella, an anonymous chat site, was the real killer, he would have mentioned the withheld evidence from the police. 

Billy goes crazy with anger. He then gets another taunting letter from the ‘fat cop’ and decides to take revenge. First on Jerome’s dog; then the fat cop and finally a great suicide bombing and go out in glory. 

Meanwhile Janette Patterson (Janey) and Bill Hodges sleep together, much to the amazement of Bill. 

When Brady takes three days off by switching duties with another and makes a meatball hamburger laced liberally with arsenic to target the dog which he knows accompanies Jerome’s nephew and niece always to a downtown store, he does not expect the accident that causes another victim to accidentally consume it. (No spoilers here).

He now knows he needs to kill Bill Hodges and sends him a direct message. 

Brady’s younger brother Frankie is a sad story. Already a little slow on the uptake, he chokes on an apple piece and comes home brain damaged. A poor woman, the mother, has a lot of trouble looking after him and Brady sometimes has to babysit Frankie.  Finally, when it looks like they will be driven to street, they collude and Brady pushes Frankie down the stairs.

Brady wants to go in a blaze of glory and goes to a concert with explosives in his seat. He is on a disabled wheelchair with his hair shaved off and a fake glass on his nose and he manages to get in through the tight security. 

Hodges, Jerome and Holly manage to find out (by cleverly taking over the computers in command centre by voice) and are horrified to discover the plan. They rush to the MAC centre where the event happens with Hodges unable to reach any security folks at all. The tension is amazing and you keep turning pages as fast as you can. 

Brady is seated in the disability area and just waiting for the right time to get the explosives activated. 

What follows is pure adrenaline and does not let go until the climax. No, not the end of the book. There is some aftermath discussions but very close to the end, and it is all very readable, Stephen King in full swing. 

8/10

— Krishna

Book: The Anatomist’s Wife by Anna Lee Huber

Lady Lydia screams in terror and her escort Mr Tuthill seems completely taken aback. They had come across Lady Godwin’s dead body. Lady Darby rushes to their side. 

When they know that Lady Darby was in the crowd, suspicion falls heavily on her – due to her past. But Lady Alana, her sister, takes her away forcefully, browbeating the scandalous accusations leveled at Lady Darby. 

Philip, Alan’s husband, declares to the guests that he is not allowed to take part in the investigation because the murder happened in his own property and so he is biased. He has called for investigators from the next town but it will take three days at least for the person to arrive. In the meanwhile no one is allowed to leave his house as they could be potential witnesses or even indeed the criminal.

Lady Darby married a surgeon (who is now dead) for her drawing skills. He wanted a free artist to draw the insides of humans. She got a vile reputation but she gained experience on dead bodies. Philip now asks Mr Gage, the son of a detective to start the investigations until official help arrives and asks Kiera (Lady Darby) to help him due to her knowledge. 

She finds that Mr Gage is both perspicuous and sympathetic. Lady Darby goes with him to examine the corpse – which had been moved to an underground vault – and finds that Lady Godwin was pregnant and the child was savagely cut out of her stomach! (Her husband was away for several months which adds a salacious twist to the whole thing). 

On the way back, Lady Darby is attacked and the attacker is one of the guests who claims that he thought she was going to destroy the evidence. Lady Darby is determined to push on and goes to the murder place with both Philip and Gage. She finds that there was kohl mixed with the blood. 

Then with Gage, she goes to interview Lady Stratford. The latter admitted that she did not like Lady Godwin who was nasty but was her friend because Lady Godwin wanted her to be. She also said that Lady Godwin was in liaison with two men that she knew, when her husband was away. Lord Marsdale and Mr Calvin were with her and Lady Stratford also claimed that her husband was aware of it and let her have her peccadillos as ‘she had already provided him with two heirs’. 

The one thing different from the other mysteries is that Gage and Lady Darby keep eliminating suspects one by one even in the early stages of the investigation – ‘No it cannot be Mr Fitzpatrick’ or ‘No it cannot be Mr Abingdon’ that kind of a thing. I thought an author wanted to keep the readers guessing but… not in this book!

They finally figure out that the baby in the stomach of Lady Godwin was Lord Stratfords. And ominously for Lady Stratford, she was aware of it, and she used to use the flowered knitting scissors and also her maid Faye lost an ornate shawl that was found earlier wrapped around the body of a dead infant buried in the grounds – Lady Darby is the one who saw the moved stones and led Gage and Philip there in the first place. 

Lady Stratford claims that she was planning to keep the baby with a childless relative as Lady Godwin did not care what happened to it and Lady Stratford wanted a baby badly. When Lord Startford made Lady Godwin pregnant, he flaunted the fact that he was fertile in her wife’s face, augmenting her misery. But was that enough to provoke her anger and murder Lady Godwin? 

Lady Darby is not convinced. Even Gage does not believe her. But when she goes sleuthing with dogs, she finds a regular kerchief in the hold in a tree and it is bloodied. She waits for Gage to come back – he has gone in search of a footman – a possible accomplice to Lady Stratford – who disappeared on the very day that Lady Godwin was murdered. 

When she goes to Lady Stratford to ask some questions, we know who the real murderer is. (And it is known well before the end of the book, another deviation from other mystery books). And the murderer arrives with a gun and binds both Lady Stratford and Lady Darby to take them to another location. Lady Darby has no idea what the murderer plans to do with them. 

The rest of the story is about how when all else seems to be lost, they are rescued. And includes Lady Darcy’s bravery and the unspoken attraction between Lady Darby and Gage, which is fated to continue into the series. 

Also we learn the trivia from the epilog as to how there were no books on anatomy that could help scientists and doctors until the first one called ‘Anatomy : Descriptive and Surgical’ was published in 1858 by Henry Gray and came to be more commonly known as ‘Gray’s Anatomy’!

A very enjoyable mystery, not at all on the lines of famous sleuths who carry the investigations until the every end with dramatic revelations. For all that, the descriptions draw you in and the period details seem to be on the spot. 

It deserves a 7/10

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