So... The Host. I hate to be one of the few to piss on it; I'd like for us to get more movies like this getting better releases here. If you check out its rating at Rotten Tomatoes you'll see there are only two negative reviews out of twenty-one, but I do find myself agreeing more with one of the negative reviews then, say, the nearly hysterically positive praise given by some others.
Specifically reviewer Luke Y. Thompson, who says (this is his entire brief review I'm pasting here, because it's pretty spot-on):
But here... the people in The Host - specifically the Park family upon which the story centers - tipped a bit far into cartoonishness for me to wholly appreciate their plight. And the story has so much back-and-forth, so many false starts, that by about 2/3 of the way through you begin to feel like months have passed and they haven't gotten anything done that they could get done if they weren't total bozos.
Bozo is the word the director, Bong Joon-ho, used to describe his own characters while introducing the film, by the way.
All this sounds like I hated the movie, but I didn't; the monster bits are thrillingly realized and on several ocassions jaw-dropping. The CG work on the monster is nearly first-rate - the seams showed here and there but Bong Joon-ho's defiant insistance in constantly showing his creature fully revealed in the frame and in broad daylight got to be unnerving because of its rejection of the Jaws "show a little bit of the monster at a time" school of thought that we've become so accustomed to. Like, right off the bat he throws the whole thing at us, and it's so suprising, to be given this view right away, that every time the monster does appear we're a little off balance because of it. And then the way this thing moves... it takes us some time to fully comprehend the range of it's movements, which throws us off balance as well.
So yes, the movie's fun. But the movie's too long, and the familial and political ideas it's trying to manage don't completely work. I'd personally say that Joon-ho doesn't manage the shifting tones nearly as deftly as some other reviewers have maintained.
What really got my brain going was the thought of the inevitable remake - what city should they set this thing in? Is the Hudson River a little too obvious?
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Specifically reviewer Luke Y. Thompson, who says (this is his entire brief review I'm pasting here, because it's pretty spot-on):
"I don't know about you, but when I hear someone say something like, "Oh, this movie isn't REALLY a monster movie -- it's actually a family drama at heart!", I just want to tell them to fuck off. Who decided that family drama audiences and monster movie audiences were compatible in the least? I want to see the monster eat people, and I don't care what their issues are. Director Bong Jun-ho gives us a great monster movie in the beginning, as a giant carnivorous fish with legs walks out of Korea's Han river and starts eating people -- the early sequences with it chasing down crowds of potential victims are amazing. But then the monster disappears, and we get into a red herring plotline about how contact with it apparently causes disease, and the family of one of its victims are quarantined, where no-one listens to their pleas that the apparent victim is actually still alive. This is no drama, though -- the family are all a bunch of overacting dullards, and when all we want is to see the monster again, it takes forever to get back to it.
Some of the film is a lot of fun. The rest is way too long."
Basically.... yeah. I can enjoy and appreciate political and societal gravitas being ladled upon a horror film. The best ones do it - if you don't see, say, Poltergeist as an attack on middle-class apathy, then you're just not looking.
But here... the people in The Host - specifically the Park family upon which the story centers - tipped a bit far into cartoonishness for me to wholly appreciate their plight. And the story has so much back-and-forth, so many false starts, that by about 2/3 of the way through you begin to feel like months have passed and they haven't gotten anything done that they could get done if they weren't total bozos.Bozo is the word the director, Bong Joon-ho, used to describe his own characters while introducing the film, by the way.
All this sounds like I hated the movie, but I didn't; the monster bits are thrillingly realized and on several ocassions jaw-dropping. The CG work on the monster is nearly first-rate - the seams showed here and there but Bong Joon-ho's defiant insistance in constantly showing his creature fully revealed in the frame and in broad daylight got to be unnerving because of its rejection of the Jaws "show a little bit of the monster at a time" school of thought that we've become so accustomed to. Like, right off the bat he throws the whole thing at us, and it's so suprising, to be given this view right away, that every time the monster does appear we're a little off balance because of it. And then the way this thing moves... it takes us some time to fully comprehend the range of it's movements, which throws us off balance as well.
So yes, the movie's fun. But the movie's too long, and the familial and political ideas it's trying to manage don't completely work. I'd personally say that Joon-ho doesn't manage the shifting tones nearly as deftly as some other reviewers have maintained.
What really got my brain going was the thought of the inevitable remake - what city should they set this thing in? Is the Hudson River a little too obvious?
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