The Host with the most. Last night I saw one of my favorite films of the year, Bong Joon-Ho's The Host. You cannot take away from me the sheer love and devotion I have for this film. I'm sure a lot of you have seen it already, but if you haven't you're missing something expectional that I promise you haven't seen before; even though you have.
I haven't seen his other films but Memories of Murder is the next thing I have to hunt down, especially given this is only his third feature as a director. This movie is the perfect rejoinder for why I'd take a movie like 300 so seriously, because it proves that a genre film with a humanist, realist approach can reach the exhilarating highs you know from really great movies that hardly seem possible today. If you ask me it's a perfect antidote for and example of everything that's wrong with Hollywood today, and why directors from South America and Asia are running circles around them.
Let's get this out of the way, because there are people who are going to think it's no big deal and I know I'm going to lose you here. First of all it's a monster movie. It's pure genre. Environmental neglect and the hubris of man (here not very subtly in the form of a US military base pathologist) leads to the creation of a mutant monster who wreaks havoc by emerging from the Han River, hungry and surly. That's the setup. But about ten minutes into the movie everything takes a left turn and every cliche and convention you know of the genre is completely subverted but made lovingly all the better for it. It takes the premise seriously but knows how to have fun with it.
Take the initial monster introduction (which is a scene that even the people who hate this movie - and there are very few of you apparently - have to admit is damn good). It takes place in broad daylight. They don't hide the creature for a money shot later. It's in the water, and tourists and citizens alike come up to it and pelt it with snacks, which is pretty much how i expect people to react should Nessie ever poke her head out of uppermost Scotland. Then the rampage begins. The creature itself is one of the best designs we've seen in years. It's perfectly emblematic of the id and predators and yet has no air of stylization about it. It looks like a cryptozoological aberration, something that could possibly exist. Sometimes it's graceful. Sometimes it's clumsy. And mostly it just wants to eat and be left in peace. Every rule of the genre is broken right here, and it's revelatory. It feels like trading in a dirty straitjacket for a cashmere sweater. Not even Spielberg reached these heights with his Jurassic Parks, ransacking the primordial for thrills but forgetting to give us people and situations we can care about.
The film is manic in its tonal shifts - going from darkly funny, affecting, thrilling, comedic, overwrought, subtle, overtly political, realist, ludicrous... Sometimes in the same scene. It's the epitome of smart entertainment, entertainment that has something to say and really truly cares about its characters. After all, its characters are losers. But it makes you care about them all the more. And when they go down, you feel it. You actually feel in your gut for the characters in what is ostensibly a horror film. It renders our heroes with enormous flaws and they often do things to themselves and one another that get in their way. They seem in fact like real people. And that helps you as an audience member to take seriously what's going on, empathize with them, root for them, and more than that, relate to them.
That same respect for the actors and their characters is applied to everything else here, which merely makes the radical move of scaling everything back and treats the silliness as if it were reality. When people run in this movie they don't run very fast or far. That's a subtelty amongst many other details, as people are often seen to be falliable while panicking, but it's sort of how everything else works. Like a real tragedy, our family gets caught up in just as much surreally lunatic bureaucracy that in some way is more horrifying than the monster coming into their life. All authority is suspect. Not a single soldier, policeman, or doctor provides any safety or comfort in the movie. There are angry grieving people who want answers, and get none. As much as the movie is critical of the US it may have accidentally captured one of the most frustrating things we know of here, in the wake of Katrina and the Walter Reed scandals.
I need more time to think about my love for the movie, especially how it wears its political heart on its sleeve. But for now it's something I have to urge you all to see. And please let me know what you thought of it or if I've got it all wrong.
I haven't seen his other films but Memories of Murder is the next thing I have to hunt down, especially given this is only his third feature as a director. This movie is the perfect rejoinder for why I'd take a movie like 300 so seriously, because it proves that a genre film with a humanist, realist approach can reach the exhilarating highs you know from really great movies that hardly seem possible today. If you ask me it's a perfect antidote for and example of everything that's wrong with Hollywood today, and why directors from South America and Asia are running circles around them.
Let's get this out of the way, because there are people who are going to think it's no big deal and I know I'm going to lose you here. First of all it's a monster movie. It's pure genre. Environmental neglect and the hubris of man (here not very subtly in the form of a US military base pathologist) leads to the creation of a mutant monster who wreaks havoc by emerging from the Han River, hungry and surly. That's the setup. But about ten minutes into the movie everything takes a left turn and every cliche and convention you know of the genre is completely subverted but made lovingly all the better for it. It takes the premise seriously but knows how to have fun with it.
Take the initial monster introduction (which is a scene that even the people who hate this movie - and there are very few of you apparently - have to admit is damn good). It takes place in broad daylight. They don't hide the creature for a money shot later. It's in the water, and tourists and citizens alike come up to it and pelt it with snacks, which is pretty much how i expect people to react should Nessie ever poke her head out of uppermost Scotland. Then the rampage begins. The creature itself is one of the best designs we've seen in years. It's perfectly emblematic of the id and predators and yet has no air of stylization about it. It looks like a cryptozoological aberration, something that could possibly exist. Sometimes it's graceful. Sometimes it's clumsy. And mostly it just wants to eat and be left in peace. Every rule of the genre is broken right here, and it's revelatory. It feels like trading in a dirty straitjacket for a cashmere sweater. Not even Spielberg reached these heights with his Jurassic Parks, ransacking the primordial for thrills but forgetting to give us people and situations we can care about.
The film is manic in its tonal shifts - going from darkly funny, affecting, thrilling, comedic, overwrought, subtle, overtly political, realist, ludicrous... Sometimes in the same scene. It's the epitome of smart entertainment, entertainment that has something to say and really truly cares about its characters. After all, its characters are losers. But it makes you care about them all the more. And when they go down, you feel it. You actually feel in your gut for the characters in what is ostensibly a horror film. It renders our heroes with enormous flaws and they often do things to themselves and one another that get in their way. They seem in fact like real people. And that helps you as an audience member to take seriously what's going on, empathize with them, root for them, and more than that, relate to them.
That same respect for the actors and their characters is applied to everything else here, which merely makes the radical move of scaling everything back and treats the silliness as if it were reality. When people run in this movie they don't run very fast or far. That's a subtelty amongst many other details, as people are often seen to be falliable while panicking, but it's sort of how everything else works. Like a real tragedy, our family gets caught up in just as much surreally lunatic bureaucracy that in some way is more horrifying than the monster coming into their life. All authority is suspect. Not a single soldier, policeman, or doctor provides any safety or comfort in the movie. There are angry grieving people who want answers, and get none. As much as the movie is critical of the US it may have accidentally captured one of the most frustrating things we know of here, in the wake of Katrina and the Walter Reed scandals.
I need more time to think about my love for the movie, especially how it wears its political heart on its sleeve. But for now it's something I have to urge you all to see. And please let me know what you thought of it or if I've got it all wrong.
1 Comments:
My brother saw it in Korea (before he moved to NYC) and he recommended highly, too. I won't be able to see it in the theaters. I'm tempted to just buy the Korean version of the DVD from YesAsia. Region-free DVD players are SO worth it!
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