BEFORE: Three films in to a four-film chain with Will Patton, who carries over again from "Fled". Who does a film tribute to Will Patton? I mean, I'm sure he's an upstanding person and all, but he's a character actor, not a headliner. Well, this is where I step in, this is my niche purpose in life. Who linked five films with Dale Dickey together? You're looking at him. Who linked together six documentaries just because they used footage of Walter Cronkite reporting the news? Come on, anybody could watch three films in a row with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you've got to admit it takes a special kind of film geek to find the more obscure connections, to point out that THIS guy with a small role in THIS film was also in THAT one. If only this were a marketable skill, I would be all set in this world.
THE PLOT: A Korean family starts a farm in 1980's Arkansas.
AFTER: Back when I first programmed this section of the chain, I had to drop a couple of films because there were too many to hit the target of Mother's Day with one of three films that were themed around motherhood. The two films that had to go were "Old Henry" and "Minari", but I consoled myself with the knowledge that the films connected to each other, and keeping films in pairs makes them twice as linkable, I think. So I figured I'd just program them again somewhere else down the road at the next possible opportunity. Ah, but THEN I realized I was using the wrong date for Mother's Day, I think I confused it with Easter because I had it as May 9, instead of May 13. OK, by correcting my calendar I suddenly gained four more slots, so "Old Henry" and "Minari" were back in the plan, and I added just one more Christian Bale film, and I was back on track. It's a good thing, too, because "Minari" seems like a very tough film to link to, with a cast that's half Korean (half of the people are Korean, not a cast that's all half-Korean) so if not now, I don't know when I'd be able to work this one in. I guess maybe Steven Yeun was also in "Nope", so I could link from that, but the two films otherwise have nothing in common...
"Minari" was up for 6 Oscar nominations in 2021 (for the 2020 movie year), so that's was the impetus to get to it sooner, rather than later. And it won one Oscar, for Youn Yuh-jung for Best Supporting Actress. There were 8 films nominated for Best Picture that year, I've now seen all of them except "The Sound of Metal", which is not on any streaming platform except Apple+ TV, so it's going to be a while, unless I join the service again JUST to watch that movie and then cancel the service immediately - again. I think I've done that twice now, will they let me do it a third time? If so, that means nobody should ever pay the monthly fee for this service, they should just sign up every time they want to watch an exclusive movie, then quit. Other nominated films from that year which I have NOT yet seen include "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" and "Pieces of a Woman" (both for Best Actress) and a couple animated features, "Over the Moon" and "Wolfwalkers". They're all on my list...
But let's cross "Minari" off that list. The title refers to a kind of water celery that the Korean grandmother, Soon-ja, plants in the swamp near the Arkansas home of her daughter's family. Soon-ja travels from Korea to the U.S. to help look after her two grandchildren, Anne and David,
while their parents are working sexing chicks in a hatchery. Because the family lives in a small trailer, Soon-ja has to share a room with her grandson, David, who doesn't understand or like her at first, but eventually comes to accept her presence in his life.
Meanwhile, Jacob, the father of the family, who chose and bought the land, has aspirations to grow Korean vegetables on his land, because he believes that there's a market for them, since so many Korean immigrants have settled in the Midwest. Jacob and his wife Monica argue over this, and a few other issues, and you get the feeling Jacob promised her a better life in Arkansas, and in her mind at least, he hasn't yet delivered it to her. Son David also has some kind of heart condition, and his parents are overprotective, they don't let him run around or play sports for fear he'll over-exert himself.
That's it, really, it's all just slice-of-life type stuff. There are some hardships that follow, but no spoilers here. It's tough being a farmer, and this film reflects that, but I don't know if there's really enough here to hold my interest, even with the big stuff that happens late in the film. The director is of Korean descent and grew up on a farm in Arkansas, so this appears to be largely auto-biographical, which often makes for a story that doesn't conform well to expected narrative rules (see "Belfast") and often also creates a story with elements that are very, very important to the storyteller, but for the general audience out there, eh, maybe not so much.
I guess it found its audience, though, because in addition to the Oscar nominations it had won two prizes at the Sundance Festival before getting released. I mean, it's about immigrants, and the U.S. is a country full of immigrants (mostly) or the children of them. For me personally, I don't have kids and I've never lived on a farm, so I found it hard to connect with the story.
The chicken sexing thing is a little off-putting - the female chicks are kept for their egg-laying capability, while the male chicks are discarded (you can look up the gruesome process on Wiki, I don't have to describe it here...). Years ago, the male chicks were raised to become adults and then chicken dinners, while the females were kept to lay eggs before becoming dinner. But advances in genetics separated the best egg-laying breeds from the best "chicken dinner" breeds, so that means that ALL of the male chicks from the egg-laying breeds are culled and disposed of. I don't usually stand with the vegans and the PETA supporters, but this is a species-wide genocide going on. There are calls for this practice to be abolished, but the egg industry has been slow to make changes, saying that they aren't feasible. One potential solution is to identify the genders of the fertilized eggs, and then simply not allow the male eggs to hatch - those can be sold as eggs for consumption, they're just fertilized eggs, aka "chicken abortions". The U.S. currently culls about 300 million male chicks per year, and it's 7 billion worldwide, so you have to imagine there's got to be a better way to do this.
Also starring Steven Yeun (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Han Ye-Ri, Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho, Darryl Cox (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Esther Moon, Ben Hall, Eric Starkey, Youn Yuh-jung, James Carroll, Jenny Phagan (last seen in "J. Edgar"), Tina Parker (last seen in "Unplugging"), Chloe Lee, Scott Haze (last seen in "Old Henry"), Jacob Wade, Skip Schwink,
RATING: 5 out of 10 paper airplanes
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