NYT’s top 100 films of the century got some things right, but not everything

Slotting an unassailable masterpiece in the top slot of a “best of” movies list is a shrewd way to forestall readers’ quibbles over the output—either the number one pick is ranked too high in the final tally, or doesn’t deserve ranking at all. Everyone’s a critic. So give the New York Times a pat on the back for landing on Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s “eat the rich” 2019 awards season monster, as the greatest film released to date in the 2000s, the champion in a 100-entry contest. It’s rare anyone gets it “right” with exercises like this, because there’s no objective measure of victory in art evaluation. All the same, with Parasite, the Times has hit as close to “correct” as “best of” selections get.

Bong’s tale of guerilla class war, a Russian nesting doll of descending strata entombed within one of contemporary cinema’s most lavish mansions, is indeed superb, and perhaps makes the last word on income disparity drama that the movies writ large needed to make. Six years hence, pop culture’s fixation on society’s elites, whether as protagonists or antagonists, continues trending in shows like The White Lotus and Sirens, and films like Triangle of Sadness and Saltburn. Not even the better iterations on the theme match Parasite for the thoroughness of its arguments about class hierarchy as an all-consuming plague, its chemically reactive ensemble performances, and its deft cross-stitch of gallows humor with incandescent outrage.

Parasite plays a trick on the audience to begin with, framing its core characters, the Kims, as the bloodsuckers: Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), and Ki-jung (Park So-dam), desperately poor, compressed into a basement apartment where they siphon Wi-Fi off of nearby cafes. It’s a necessary sin. The Kims earn a meager paycheck folding boxes for a local pizza parlor, and study Breanna Gray’s YouTube videos for tutelage, where she flips together a whole stack with Olympian dexterity. Not even 10 minutes in, and they’re already pantomiming parasitic activity in their daily lives—but they’re not the film’s title creatures. Rather, that’s the Parks, the obscenely wealthy family the Kims hoodwink into hiring them as their chauffeur, tutor, and housekeeper: Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun), Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), and Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun).

The Parks seemingly cannot function without the help—a basic observation, but core to the film’s thesis about who, exactly, in society relies the most on domestic handholding for survival. Without a lower rung of the ladder for the poor to hang on, from where they perform all the mundane routines and operations required for getting through the day, the rich don’t get to lead rich lives. If the underclass unceremoniously quit and rejected their station, the rich wouldn’t eat, or have clean clothes, or make it to work on time. No sentiment than that resonates more strongly among folks barred from entry into the one percent; this makes Parasite a good choice for the Times’ list speaking to taste as well as optics. There is a narrative fulfilled by anointing Bong’s film as the single finest achievement in cinema released in the last 25 years: it speaks with utmost clarity to the evils of the wealth gap, arguably the greatest threat to mankind’s endurance today.

But a further look at the other 99 assembled films reminds us not to be deceived by appearances. On any “best of” list, curated according to whatever criteria that comes to one’s mind, Parasite is almost undoubtedly at the top of the pile. The Times’ pile is so void of Asian and Asian American representation, though, that over time, the film’s occupation reads as the paper’s attempt at covering its *ss. Nobody in their right mind would either protest Parasite’s position on the list, or the other unimpeachable classics joining it: Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, and one of Bong’s early career bangers, Memories of Murder. (Somebody might kvetch about the admission of the modern darlings, being Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once and Celine Song’s Past Lives.)

Perhaps, the logic seems to go, including films of such high esteem as these legitimizes the list as diverse. But Asia comprises more countries than South Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan. Frankly, the biggest surprise in the total 100 is The Act of Killing, an incredible act of documentarian daring rooted in Indonesia, whose films don’t usually register on Western critics’ radars unless Gareth Evans directs them. Meanwhile, the cinema of India, Vietnam, and Thailand is notably absent here, each of which claim movies equally as deserving of acknowledgment as the Times’ picks: Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court, Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, and take your pick of anything Apichatpong Weerasethakul has done since starting his career in the early 2000s. (And moving away from Asia, we find not one film from any African country in the list.)

Grant that the Times’ list came together through a body of more than 500 voters. As such, it’s unlikely there’s any specific agenda enacted by the list’s makeup; people cast their ballots, the editors count them, and what we see is what we get. But the Times’ votership is broadly caucasian, and unconscious bias exists. Whiteness is consequently overrepresented, both in the movies chosen and in voter remarks sprinkled throughout the piece, including six from Benny Safdie, whose film Uncut Gem, co-directed with his brother Josh, also shows up on the list. (In fairness, Safdie is a conversationalist, and it’s hard to hold the repeat highlights of his effusive praise for his choices against the Times’ editors.)

Lulu Wang shares her thoughts on a handful of movies, as does Simu Liu. They remain, however, in the minority, alongside Asian diasporic voters including Karyn Kusama, Joel Kim Booster, Lee Chang-dong, Kevin Kwan, Dolly de Leon, and, of course, Bong. Maybe this is progress, a meaningful step forward as media and movie criticism strive for greater diversity of cinema and of voices in the room. For that matter, the fact of Parasite’s predominance on this list is itself a progressive outcome, as far a cry as it is from the watershed moment of its 2020 Oscar wins; orderings of this sort historically don’t favor international movies, especially by directors of color. But if the Times means to arbitrate the best the medium has offered in the 2000s, then emphasizing consideration outside of the canon, and deemphasizing “whiteness” as the default, are essential first steps.

Besides: I think Oldboy should be higher than 43.