Last year, "Parasite" won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Film at the Oscars, bringing Korean films to the top of the list of honors.
This year, South Korean filmmakers continued to shine at the Oscars. 74-year-old Yoon Yeo-jung won the Best Supporting Actress for "Minari", the first Korean and the second Asian to win this award.
Of course, while "Parasite" is a pure Korean movie, "Minari" is an American movie with Korean elements.
The film's director and screenwriter, Lee Isaac Zheng, is a Korean-American born in the 1970s. Chinese fans may not have heard of him before.
The male protagonist, Steven Yuan, is a Korean-American born in the 1980s. He is featured in Feng Junhao's "Okja" and Li Changdong's "Burning".
The heroine Han Yili, a Korean actress born in the 1980s, has previously worked on "Dream Team of North Korea" and "The Worst Day".
The one who plays the heroine's mother is Yin Ruzhen. She has been nominated for the Blue Dragon Award, Dazhong Award, and Baeksang Arts Awards in South Korea. "Grandma Jichun" and "Miss Bacchus" are her classic heroine works, and she has also acted in them. She has many outstanding supporting roles, and she is also the soul of the famous Korean slow variety show "Yin Shitang".
The film's dialogue is mainly in Korean, supplemented by English.
"Minari" has a good reputation, with a 98% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a strict MTC score of 89. It has won many awards this awards season, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. But Oscar's influence is undoubtedly higher.
At the Oscars, Grandma Yin was graceful and elegant, and she spoke English the whole time.
And there is a topic derived from social networking sites, that is, although English pronunciation and fluency are slightly lacking, it is more important to speak properly and humorously, and to be naturally not cramped.
Minari, the name seems inexplicable at first glance, but in fact Minari is an English transliteration of Korean "water celery", and Chinese is transliterated to English so that "Minari" is obtained.
Water celery has strong waterlogging and cold resistance, and can be eaten as a vegetable. Its taste is delicious, and it is also used for medicinal purposes. In this film about the American dream of Koreans, water celery is used as a metaphor to praise the vitality of Koreans regardless of national borders, and even refers to the living conditions of Asian immigrants.
In the 1980s, the male protagonist Jacob moved with his wife Monica, a pair of children Anne and David from California in the western United States to Arkansas in the southeastern United States.
Jaco is an expert in chick sex identification. After ten years of hard work, he is still in a mediocre situation. He is determined to start a farm business in this "most fertile soil in America".
Monica was dissatisfied with her new home, which was sparsely populated and with poor conditions. An argument broke out with Jacob, but her husband insisted, so she had to be forced to sing along with her, on the condition that her mother from Korea moved in with her, and by the way, she could take care of her heart disease. sick youngest son David.
Jacob is very motivated to devote himself to outdoor work, digging water sources, buying second-hand machinery, and reclaiming land for sowing. He wants to grow Korean vegetables and Korean fruits.
Daughter asked him, would it be better to grow American vegetables?
He laughed and said that there are 30,000 Koreans who immigrate to the United States every year. Will they miss Korean food?
The arrival of the grandmother brought vigor to the family, and also caused some minor conflicts due to some cultural and conceptual differences.
My grandmother is both traditional and unconventional. She came all the way from Korea to bring Korean specialties to her daughter's family, and she also gave her daughter money to subsidize her family. The flower card, the greeting gift for the grandson is a set of flower cards, and playing cards with two children will also speak swear words.
David said more than once that she didn't look like a real grandma.
Seven-year-old David, who has never been to South Korea, said with disgust that his grandmother smelled Korean.
This time the farm was seen as a last-ditch effort by Jacob, who told his wife that if he didn't succeed, she could do what she wanted to do, and even leave with the children.
Monica frequently thinks that this place is out of the country, and thinks that building a farm is expensive and slow to achieve results, and after a long period of family life, the relationship between husband and wife has entered a period of burnout, and the difference in their acceptance of Christianity is also a hidden danger.
The husband works hard to make a better life for his family, but he does not get the understanding and support of his wife, and his heart is bound to be quite depressed.
Life always likes to strike by surprise. Jacob's crop was successful at first, and he was about to send it to Dallas on order, only to be returned by his Korean boss. The shopping mall is like a battlefield. If you don’t care about credit and morality, let alone fellowship. So angry that Jacob scolds the Koreans and the people in the city as untrustworthy.
Another feature of life is that misfortunes do not come singly. After Jacob's farm went bad, he also went wrong in the breeding factory. David injured his foot by being smashed by the drawer of the chest of drawers at home. Anne, who was originally gentle, also complained when she saw chicken feathers all over the house.
But life is often accompanied by unexpected achievements. David's injury has instead made a positive breakthrough in his relationship with his grandma. David has never been praised for being strong or running because of his illness since childhood, but the unconventional grandma thinks " Injuries are part of a child's growth," giving David more encouragement than ever before.
Grandma planted water celery by the stream and took her grandson to look after it. Grandma’s explanation was the title of the whole film: water celery is very good, and it can grow anywhere, just like weeds, so that anyone can You can pick it up and eat it, no matter whether you are poor or rich, you can eat it as a vegetable. After eating it, you can put it in kimchi, you can stew the meat and make soup, and you can eat it as medicine when you are sick. The water celery is very good. The cress swayed in the wind, like a bow of thanks.
However, my grandmother suddenly suffered a stroke after a sleep.
The family's life was even more difficult. Monica once again wanted to move back to California. The relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, which had just recovered, quickly declined. David blamed his parents' quarrel on the fact that his grandmother should not have come to the United States.
What is the old saying in the East, fortune and misfortune depend on each other? Or in Western terms, the law of conservation of energy? My grandmother lost some of her energy after a stroke, but her grandson David was pleasantly surprised that her heart condition improved, and her son-in-law's vegetable business also turned around. Actually, I have a secret idea. It means a conditional exchange.
Although life is about to turn a corner, Monica has been completely disappointed with Jacob's "You choose the farm, not me and the children", and the couple's breakup is almost a foregone conclusion.
At this moment, the disabled grandmother wanted to help her son-in-law tidy up the warehouse, and accidentally caused a fire when burning the garbage. When the couple got home, the fire was already burning into the sky. Jacob told his family not to come near and rushed into the fire alone to save the goods, but Monica was not at ease. The husband also rushed in. However, the husband and wife have united and warmed their hearts after a long absence. The two people whose names have been reduced to "child's mother" and "child's father" called each other "wife" and "husband" in the sea of fire, and the dormant love came back. .
Even though the warehouse was finally reduced to ashes and the farm business was about to start again, the husband and wife had decided to work together, and Jacob also accepted the ritual of finding a water source with a sense of religion.
Life is so magical, the power of family love can really generate electricity, and it is difficult and difficult to pass.
At the end of the story, Jacob took his son to the piece of water celery that his grandmother planted and said that it looked delicious.
The film is very life-like. Although the life of the Jacob family is like a turbulent flow, the filming is like a gurgling water, and there is almost no intense plot except for the fire.
It's like a very sad and healing "Under the Sea" that was adapted and sung by Phoenix Legend and became a healing sense of Buddha's light.
This year's two hugely expensive sci-fi blockbusters in South Korea, "Victory" and "Xu Fu", although starring Korean superstars, both received word of mouth. smell.
Although this "Minari" is produced by the United States, it has a Korean flavor and oriental emotion, and it integrates well with the context of foreigners chasing the American dream, so it can enjoy both the East and the West.
Although the cast of "Minari" is not top-notch, the acting skills of the leading actors are not much better, and they stand firmly in the story. In fact, I prefer Steven Yuan, maybe the Oscar judges are more interested in the grandma played by Yin Ruzhen, although she is not the head of the family, but she calibrates the direction of the family's life.
In the film, the Jacob family is not specifically shot with water celery as ingredients, but I think my grandmother might want to make soup with water celery to keep the chicken soup flavor down:
Life can't be as good as you think, but it won't be as bad as you think. The most important thing is that the family is neat and tidy.
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