If there was one movie that wowed critics and audiences at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival it had to be Lee Isaac Chung’s beautifully sweet and simple “Minari.” So much so that it ended up winning both the Audience and Grand Jury Prize — a first for a movie since Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” in 2016. I saw the movie back in January at Sundance, here’s what I wrote:
“Based on the director’s own upbringing in the 1980s as a seven-year-old Korean American boy, the film has on-screen father Jacob (Steven Cheung) disapprovingly moving his son, David, and daughter from the West Coast to rural Arkansas with frustrated wife, Monica — she’s irked by the relocation to a mobile home in the middle of nowhere. Troublemaker David and his sister are bored by the vast plains, but have their lives quickly disrupted when their grandmother arrives from Korea to live with them and set the family dynamic straight again, but life gets in the way, and things don’t go as planned. Meanwhile, Jacob passionately wants to use their 50 acres of crop to open his own farming business of Korean vegetables, throwing the family’s finances in danger, his marriage out of loop, and the stability of the family into freefall. Chung tackles the American Dream with the highs and lows of this Korean emigree family. There are shades of Ozu’s bittersweet nature here, ditto the perceptive details that made the Japanese master’s films so indelibly memorable. Each character is fully sketched by Chung, who throws episodic melodrama at his audience to tell his story. A film like “Minari” getting overpraised could be dangerous to its overall impact. Make sure to go into this film fully aware of its simple but substance-filled frames. The lack of any showiness is, in fact, part of Minari’s charm. Whether it can build up an audience upon its release this summer is still up in the air due to the aforementioned subtleties, but this is a film whose every scene was carefully chosen by its director.”
A release date has not yet been set for “Minari,” but expect this one to be released sometime before Oscar eligibility ends in February 2021.
The source material, for the uninitiated, is Arrowhead Game Studios' co-op shooter — muscle in power armor defending "Super Earth" from bugs and robots in a war game.