Parasite and Greed, back to back.
A lot has already been said about Parasite. I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite a few gaping holes in the plot, but I agree that it was a surprising choice for the Oscar. The sense of events spiralling out of control is exhilarating and the ending is unexpectedly moving after what immediately precedes it. However, I'm very pleased that it has become a success in its own right rather than optioned by Hollywood and remade for a US market. I could see the setting being shifted to Silicon Valley with a family living in a trailer park, and thus losing / trampling all of the cultural nuances that make the film work.
Greed is good, but only good. Probably best to wait for it to pop up on Netflix or similar. Coogan is entertainingly convincing as the spivvy retail tycoon, who may or may not bring to mind a real character, and Isla Fisher is good as his brassy ex-wife, but David Mitchell's presence is an irritant as he simply wheels out the "David Mitchell" character from his incessant appearances on comedy quiz shows. It attempts to make valid points about the treatment of clothing workers in the Indian sub-continent and SE Asia, but this is done in such a heavy-handed way that it fails to make the kind of impact it should, while a couple of plot strands about Syrian refugees and scripted reality TV shows are insufficiently developed to be engaging but given sufficient time to be distracting. It's saying something when the best line in the film is about James Blunt charging "only" £75,000 to sing outside Fisher's window.
