Saturday, March 10, 2007

The Host

Is it less than three hours driving time to the only theater playing The Host?

Drive it.

People were screaming. Some people backed up so fast in their seats from the monster charging the screen they nearly came over the top of their chairs. People cried. People cheered. For the final thirty minutes, all critical faculties of my brain shut down and I was, Lord bless it, just an audience member for the first time in a very, very long while. After seeing this, there are very famous directors in Hollywood who claim to be able to direct action who should snap their own necks in shame at even coming within ten feet of a lens.

I will buy it. I may make finger puppets and form little clubs wherein we re-enact crucial moments of the film.

I trust I've made myself clear. This thing is pure movie. Plot development and character that would never escape intact from the Hollywood development process. Go.

Go go go go.

58 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought it sagged a bit in the middle, with all the soul- and Seoul-searching, but although I didn't have the benefit of watching it on the big screen, I'd say it's still worth the three hour drive just for the opening twenty minutes or so. That first rampage is pure fucking brilliance.

Also, I'd recommend hunting down Memories of Murder, the director's previous movie. It's stronger overall, and probably my favourite serial killer movie.

Unknown said...

Saw it at the Arclight. Big screen, with the BOOMING sound system, it was bloody sick.

Anonymous said...

I've heard and read three great reviews, and now this!

I love Portland. Even the suburban multiplexes play indie and foreign films.

I'm going tomorrow.

(I saw a sneak preview of "The Last Mimsey" today. A lot like E.T., and I mean that in a good way. Some fine freakish futuristic technology falls into the hands of two suburban moppets. Virtually nothing like the Padgett short story.)

Anonymous said...

I wonder if I can convince my wife to see this.  She got me to see Memories of Murder (the director's previous film, which we both enjoyed), but she's never been one for monster movies....

I'll see it either way.

Speaking of Memories of Murder, have you seen it?

Lady Antonym said...

Playing at three theaters in Boston.

Can I put in a plug for google movies? It's made my life so much easier. Go to google, type in movies and your zip code and it has all the films showing in your area, sorted by title, theater distance, popularity, and rating. AND it shows not only today's times but three days out, so you can find out what's playing and what time on Saturday on Wednesday (and what's not going to be around next week on Thursday night.)

Also, if you like the odd-ball films, popularity=boxoffice, so the indie/foreign flicks are at the bottom of the page.

Apparently, the engine for this was written by a summer intern. Hope they got the job.

Anonymous said...

god, i have to wait until the 23rd. there are a great many times when i hate being a midwesterner.

Iain said...

I've seen it three times already (two on the big screen) and it just gets better and better.

My prediction is that it will change monster movies the way the Ringu films changed horror films.

But hopefully in a good way.

JS said...

OK... so I'm female and older than KFM's demographic... Just came from a Sunday screening here in Houston and I don't get what all the fuss is about. It's OK; it's interesting. It's not, IMHO, brilliant, genre-changing or a cinematic milestone. I thought it was too self- conscious and telegraphed its multiple "messages" very loudly.

Anonymous said...

CRIPES, was that one grim movie!

PIPER said...

I was able to purchase the DVD and I watched it this weekend.

I wrote about it at my blog. Like Hitchcock did with making birds scary, The Host does with making a tadpole scary.

The addition of the SARS scare took this movie to the next level, surpassing just a basic monster movie.

The first discovery of the monster rivals that of anything Spielberg has ever done with a dinosaur or Jaws.

Unknown said...

I think part of the thrill is if you are a monste rmovie fan, and so used to seeing bad ones. It's like seeing a golfer with a great chip shot -- no idea how ward it is until you actually try it.

Opinions will vary, of course, but I thought that was a fine piece of work -- IF it's the type of movie you can surrender too. Everyone's different. There are movies other people rave about, but because it doesn't get me emotionally, I just remain unconnected.
.

Anonymous said...

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Lantern Festival

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Oil - Braised Prawns (Beijing Style)
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Empty Kingdom said...

hell yea! the host is the bomb!

Anonymous said...

I saw this a few months back when it played over here. Not really sure what the fuss is about either.

Nice monster (and the first rampage is fantastic) but the pacing was very uneven IMO and a couple of the characters did immensely stupid things for no apparent reason (in fact, the end 'message' seems to be "Only the dumb survive" - in that sense it does subvert the normal Hollywood convention since the usual party line is that cleverness , courage and/or moral purity are rewarded).

Character development ? Well, i'm occidental and not that used to Asian cinema so maybe I missed something but a lot of it seemed inconsistent. I liked virtually no-one in the film (and absolutely no-one by the end) if that's what development means.

And I also think the various messages were hammered home a bit heavily.

Still, each to their own of course.

barsoomcore said...

Not enough monster.

GREAT monster.

But needed more. More monster.

Saw it at the Vancouver FF, was hoping it would be as AWESOME as "Volcano High". Wasn't, but still.

GREAT monster.

I just wanted more, is all.

Anonymous said...

>>>Can I put in a plug for google movies? It's made my life so much easier. Go to google, type in movies and your zip code and it has all the films showing in your area

OMG! That is GREAT!! Thanks much!!

I'll have to mention this on my blog!

Unknown said...

. I liked virtually no-one in the film (and absolutely no-one by the end) if that's what development means.


That's fascinating, because I loved them all by the end.

That is a distinctly American/Western character structure, though, and one that we're kind of hardwired not to dig. These people are fuckups. They are venal, selfish fuckups. But it's infinitely more interesting for me to watch people who would make precisely the same bad decisions ordinary humans would make still try to be heroes, rather than the "right person right place" model of American cinema.

Damon said...

It showed at the, what, LAFF? I guess that's what it was in November last year. I ended up going to the Friday show and then again the next day. I don't do that any more, and have only pulled that stunt three or four times (once with John Woo's The Killer, which I had to keep watching every day for about a week) but I couldn't help myself.

To me, you (JR) nail it when you say it's the monster movie for people who love monster movies, though know there's about three other good ones (King Kong, Godzilla and Jaws), with the rest being junky men in suit pictures, or Jaws knock-offs that achieve varying levels of ironic appreciation. Even the homage to the Shaw Jaws speech is perfectly measured. But the director just gets it. Like when the Molotov cocktail bottle breaks. If you're not getting that, I don't get the point in going to movies.

Anonymous said...

I caught "The Host" at the San Francisco Animation Festival last year, and loved it even if the finale could have done with a little more computing power to make it look visually seamless. What made that screening special was that the venue was an art museum usually given to screening films a lot more highbrow than monster movies. Also, several of the guys from The Orphanage (they did the animation of the monster) had a presentation where they showed sample models, nature footage used in research, and other cool stuff.

Frankly, I don't hold out much hope for the American remake that's already in the planning stages. The bits about the U.S. military's role in creating the monster and doing damage control will probably get cut out or neutered. Thank God Bong Joon-ho won't have anything to do with it.

Anonymous said...

So here's a thought. If it's easier to get a good script through The Process in the Asian markets... why don't some American directors ever give it a try over there? It's not like a lack of fluency in English stopped John Woo here...

Unknown said...

that finale had a lot pf fire. Fire, for CG, is a royal bitch.

Anonymous said...

That's fascinating, because I loved them all by the end.

That is a distinctly American/Western character structure, though, and one that we're kind of hardwired not to dig.


Yeah, i'm happy (OK, not happy ;) to admit I think it might have mixed tones a bit too much for my tastes or maybe just too haphazardly. As I was coming out of the cinema I said to a friend that it ignored the vocabulary of film (yeah, I do live up my own arse, why d'you ask ?) with e.g. the 'slow archer' non-payoff (trying not to spoil). Maybe I just meant 'western film' and am being a bit parochial.

I'm British, however, and we have a slightly less Hollywood (i.e. more sympathetic) view of 'losers' but in 'The Host' the characters are, with one or two exceptions not sympathetic in any way (except maybe their tenacity). That's got to make them hard for anyone to like surely ?

Dig the blog, BTW, long time reader blah blah.

Alex said...

I don't know. As everyone else has said, the first act is damned good, but the movie loses most sense of it's own momentum after that.

The "politics" of the movie are fairly trivial and superficial - certainly for a Korean movie, which not uncommonly have a sure and subtle grasp on politics.

I didn't have much problems with the characters - they're fairly stock roles in Korean movies - but this aspect in The Host was again more trivial and superficial than the other Bong movies I've seen.

Anonymous said...

Some parts of the movie were okay, but the overall mix of comedy, horror, and political commentary didn't connect with me at all. Especially watching the bumbling characters was like having an itch I couldn't scratch - annoying.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with having characters that make errors and have imperfections, but I just wanted to slap almost every single character at several points throughout the movie. There's only that much suspension of common sense I can take.
After all, what's fundamentally so different about the bumbling characters in this movie than the stereotypical dumb teenagers in US horror films who always do stupid things like crawling into dark places without a flash light, etc. I haven't heard anybody calling those characters a refreshing change from the American hero-protagonist template, so why is stupid all of the sudden cool when it's in a foreign horror film?

Anonymous said...

Sigh. I link without reading it first. No time.

The Sky Fell over Cheap Korean Monster-Movie Scenery

The Host / Dustin Rowles

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