Tuesday, August 23, 2011
The most important thing in life is seeing
By Edward Copeland
A group of children frolic on a river bank until one of them notices a body slowly drifting its way downstream. Those are the opening images of the film Poetry (also known as Shi), South Korean director Lee Chang-dong's very strong feature which won the best screenplay prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Poetry was released theatrically in the U.S. earlier this year and arrives on DVD and Blu-ray today with exclusive online streaming rights for the film beginning on Fandor today as well.
Lee belongs to a large wave of exceptional South Koreans filmmakers who have been capturing the world's attention in the last decade or so. Lee's 2002 film Oasis won him the best director prize at the Venice Film Festival. Of course, his peers include Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother), Kim Ki-Duk (3-Iron, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring) and Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy) to name but three others.
In some respects, writer-director Lee's Poetry shares some story strands with Bong's masterful Mother from last year, but the resemblances remain mostly superficial and, while Poetry is good, it doesn't come close to approaching Bong's masterpiece.
Poetry made news in its country of origin by marking the first screen appearance in 16 years of veteran South Korean actress Yun Jung-hee as Mija, a 67-year-old woman raising her sullen and obnoxious teenage grandson Wook (Lee David) alone after her daughter dumped him on her when she moved to Pusan following her divorce from his dad. We don't learn all this about Mija immediately. The viewer first encounters her as she visits a health clinic complaining about a tingling in her right arm, but she can't remember the word to use to describe it. She laughs to the doctor that she's been forgetting a lot of common words lately such as bleach. The tingling doesn't worry the doctor, but the forgetfulness does and he suggests she go to a big hospital in Seoul for a more thorough examination.
Mija keeps the doctor's concern to herself, only telling her daughter on the phone that he recommended more exercise to help with the tingling. She then reports to her part-time job as maid and caregiver for an elderly man named Mr. Kang (Kim Hi-ra) who suffers from the effects of a major stroke. Once Mija finally gets home, she hears on the TV the report about that body we saw at the beginning. It turns out to have been a girl who attended the same school as Wook and committed suicide. She asks Wook if he knew her, but he's aloof as usual, saying he doesn't know everyone in his class. His grandmother does manage to get Wook to hit a badminton birdie back and forth in the street in front of their apartment though Wook seems completely disinterested, so much so that when a group of his friends come by he just takes off without much of a word.
As Mija wanders one day, she spots a sign at a cultural center that reads:
YOU TOO CAN BE A POET!
Though she's too late to sign up, the teacher (Kim Yong-taek) lets her sit in the less-than-filled-to-capacity class anyway. Mija enters as the teacher displays an apple to the class, telling them that while they may think they've seen apples many, many times in their lives, they will find in his twice-a-week, monthlong course that they've never truly looked at an apple. He also tells the students they will only have one assignment in his class: write one poem of their own by its end. So he advises them to keep their pencils sharp and their notebooks handy. Mija interrupts him to proudly promote her pencil-sharpening abilities, giving the class a good laugh. She does take the teacher's words to heart though, taking a notebook with her everywhere because, as he said, poetic inspiration can come at any time.
Soon, poetry becomes the only thing in Mija's life in which she finds any joy. She quits her job with Mr. Kang when the old man tries to get her to service him sexually while she bathes him. Wook grows more distant, usually out with his friends or hidden in his bedroom with them at late hours. As Mija goes to the poetry class one day, she gets a phone call from a father of Wook's friend Ki-bum who says he needs to meet with her. She tells him that she's heading to class and he agrees to pick her up when it's over. The poetry teacher enthralls Mija again with his philosophy of poetry, telling the class that poetry exists all around them — they just have to open themselves up so they can see it. "It's about discovering true beauty in everything we see in our everyday life," he explains to his class. "Every single one of you carries poetry in your heart, but you've imprisoned it. It's time to free your poem. The poetry imprisoned in you must be given wing to take flight." Mija raises her hand and asks him where they should look because she's having trouble finding the inspiration. He tells her she could find it anywhere, even in the dishwashing basin.
When Ki-bum’s father (Ahn Nae-sang) arrives, he takes Mija to a restaurant where the fathers of four of Wook's other friends sit and wait. After brief introductions, the father (Min Bok-gi) of another of Wook's friends, Soon-chang, explains to Mija what's going on. It seems that Heejin, the girl who killed herself, did so
because she had been being raped for months by their sons and Wook. Keejin wrote it in her diary and her mother took it to the school and the police. Apparently, Soon-chang's father says, it began with Soon-chang and Jong-chul, who claim it was consensual, then the other four joined in. Mija appears to be a blank as the story is told then, without saying a word, she leaves the restaurant and goes to the flowers in front of it and starts taking notes. The men find it rather odd, but think nothing more than that and continue their discussion. The school wants to keep it out of the news and the police want to avoid being forced into an investigation (are South Korean police ever not corrupt in any of the great new films coming out of that county?)so the fathers have agreed to try to calm Keejin's mother down with a cash settlement of 30 million Won (nearly $28,000), meaning each of the fathers and Mija would have to come up with 5 million Won (roughly $4,600 each). Ki-bum’s father tells the other that Wook's grandmother lives on social security and as a part-time maid and had to raise him when his mom left after the divorce. He finally goes outside to see what Mija had to write in her notebook and she says the flowers reminded her of blood.
As if the situation weren't complicated enough for Mija, who has no means to come up with her part of the settlement, she finally goes to Seoul and takes the tests and gets confirmation that she is indeed in the early stages of Alzheimer's, prompting her to write in her poetry notebook, "Time passes, flower fades." It's the main reason I used the quote from the poetry teacher as the headline since it should be apparent to most around Mija that something is amiss with Mija, but everyone is too wrapped up with themselves to have spotted the signs of the disease earlier.
Poetry isn't really a film that depends on plot twists, yet it's best not to go much further into how the film unfolds because that's part of its pleasure, despite the fact that at 2 hours and 19 minutes, it could have used more judicious editing. There isn't any reason to stretch it out that long even though so much of it is good. Kudos should also be given to the wonderful cinematography by Kim Hyun Seok.
Without question, what truly provides the meter for Poetry is Yun Jung-hee as Mija. The actress, while virtually unknown in the West, was recently voted by the Korean public as the greatest Korean actress and she
certainly impresses here. Yun appears in practically every scene and has lots of standouts. She doesn't overplay her growing dementia. When she tries to confront Wook about what he did and he goes off to hide in his bedroom, burying himself under his blanket, and she keeps asking, "Why did you do it?" while he pulls the blanket tighter and tighter over his head and she tugs with all her might trying to whisk the covering off him. In a series of scenes interspersed throughout the film, the students share the most beautiful moments of their lives. Most involve some degree of pain, but her classmates seem to tell the stories happily, especially in the case of one man who keeps smiling and laughing as he admits he never had a beautiful moment. When it's Mija's turn, her childhood tale is a happy one for the most part but in contrast, she breaks down in tears. As with many poems themselves, much of what happens in Poetry, especially its ambiguous ending, is open to interpretation.
Yun gets to show a completely different side when she visits Ki-bum's father's karaoke bar to ask for a loan and while she waits, breaks into song whose English lyrics including the telling translation "drink a glass of oblivion." Mija also stumbled upon a restaurant that hosts a weekly open mic night for poets where she takes offense at a particularly drunk man (Kim Jong-gu) she feels disrespects poetry with his dirty jokes. She's shocked further when she encounters her poetry teacher one night and he tells her that poetry is dying. "The day will come when no one will read or write poetry," he predicts.
In a director's statement included in the press notes for Poetry, writer-director Lee Chang-dong wrote:
Some lament such loss and others claim, “Poetry deserves to die.”
Regardless, people continue to read and write poetry.
What does it mean then to be writing poetry when prospects of an ongoing future seem
dismal?
This is a question I want to pose to the public.
But in fact, it is a question I pose to myself as a filmmaker:
What does it mean to be making films at times when films are dying away?
As long as there are filmmakers such as Lee making movies as good as Poetry, even if it could use some cutting, he may be premature in writing cinema's obituary.
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Labels: 10s, Awards, Bong Joon-ho, Foreign
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Friday, October 08, 2010
A '60s film search for a serial killer
By Edward Copeland
We've become so accustomed to movies about the hunts for serial killers, both real and imagined, that it's a bit unusual to see one that dates back to 1968. Granted, I would never have put The Boston Strangler into the Netflix queue if it hadn't been for the recent passing of Tony Curtis, but it was interesting to watch the film because it's more of a detached crime procedural than some of the serial killer romps that have come around in the past couple of decades. It also was surprising to find that as much as it's sold as a Curtis vehicle, we don't even meet him until the film is half over and the ostensible lead (if there really is a lead) is Henry Fonda.
Coming so soon after I caught up with Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, which in turn reminded me of David Fincher's great Zodiac and an aborted attempt at watching The Red Riding Trilogy, it proved especially interesting to watch a film that was one of the forerunners of the low-tech large-scale murder investigation movies. (If anyone thinks I should have given Red Riding more of a chance instead of bailing out after watching much of part one, read Craig's great review at The Man from Porlock who did sit through all three and came to the conclusion I already was starting to form.)
Based on Gerold Frank's book about the string of slayings that terrorized the Boston area in the early 1960s, The Boston Strangler was adapted by Edward Anhalt (Oscar winner for Becket — talk about range) and directed by Richard Fleischer, whose filmography stretched all over the map from the solid thriller The Narrow Margin (1952) to Doctor Dolittle, perhaps the worst best picture nominee in history. His directing career stretched from 1943 to 1989 and included the good (Fantastic Voyage), the bad (Conan the Destroyer) and the ugly (The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond). I'll let you decide where to place Soylent Green.
Thankfully, The Boston Strangler belongs on the list of Fleischer's better efforts and it takes some kind of director who can switch gears from the tomfoolery of Doctor Dolittle to the darkness of this story the very next year. He does go a little overboard with the use of split screen and multiple images projected at once. The technique can be very effective and works quite well at times here, but Fleischer uses it so much that it kind of wears out it welcome.
The Boston Strangler contains an amazing number of familiar names and faces in roles large and small in roles of cops, suspects and victims. Look at this list of performers in minor parts: Hurd Hatfield (the third time he's appeared in a movie I've written about this week), Jeff Corey, Sally Kellerman, William "Blacula" Marshall, George Furth, William Hickey, James Brolin, Dana Elcar, Carole Shelley, David Lewis and Alex Rocco.
As in Zodiac, part of the problem for investigators comes from the murders crossing jurisdictional lines, meaning different departments have different pieces of the puzzle so Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke (Marshall), who would later go on to become the state's first African-American U.S. senator, taps one of his lawyers John Bottomly (Fonda) to head up a task force to collect all the investigations under one umbrella. Bottomly has no interest in the job since he has no law enforcement experience — he'd rather keep working on eminent domain issues — but Brooke basically orders him, despite the fact that the state really doesn't have funds to provide him for his investigation.
Even before Fonda enters the picture, we get the grunt work of various detectives trying to get a handle on what kind of maniac has descended on their city, leading to possible suspects and many dead ends. Two of the detectives who stand out the most are played by George Kennedy, fresh off his Oscar win for supporting actor for Cool Hand Luke, and Murray Hamilton, the year after playing the cuckolded Mr. Robinson in The Graduate and one of the rare times I can recall Hamilton being a good guy (this was the Amity mayor in Jaws, after all). By now, it's a staple for homicide detectives to have a streak of dark humor running through their veins, and Hamilton actually gets some of those best lines, welcome because the tale needs levity to lessen the darkness.
At one point, Bottomly even consults a psychic who amazingly describes the scene of a murder and the contents of a letter they received from a seemingly troubled man named Eugene O' Rourke. They believe they have their man and go to question him and, while he's not the strangler, he does need psychological help. More importantly, he's played by William Hickey and having never discovered the man until his wonderful Oscar-nominated turn as Don Corrado Prizzi in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor, it's always great to find Hickey in another film, especially when he gets as meaty a scene as he does here.
When the film hits the hour mark, we suddenly meet Albert DeSalvo (Curtis) and see things from his point of view briefly through the last of his 13 murders. For fans of the TV series Dexter, his introduction will seem awfully similar to the fourth season scene when Dexter follows John Lithgow's character home and discovers that he's not the loner that he presumed but a family man. In fact, the scenes mirror each other so closely, I can't help but believe that the writers on Dexter had this movie in mind for that plot twist.
DeSalvo's capture and identification happens because of a series of mistakes by him and a happy accident on the part of Bottomly and Detective DiNatale (Kennedy). Because of DeSalvo's seeming inability to understand charges against him (which are unrelated to the murders), he's sent to a mental hospital. The remainder of the film mostly consists of Bottomly questioning DeSalvo, who they believe suffers from a split personality, to see if they can find the part of him that committed the crimes. When we first see DeSalvo in the room where he will be questioned, it is a blank room with just a table and a one-way window where people can watch him. He's dressed in all white and again it's hard not to believe that there's not some inspiration found in The Silence of the Lambs. Many of the obituaries for Curtis said that he was disappointed that he didn't get the Oscar for this and some even called it his best work and while he's very good in a part unlike any other he played, I still think his best is Sweet Smell of Success, followed by Some Like It Hot.
As it is, The Boston Strangler works best now as a time capsule item. It seems to have wanted to make larger points about helping people with mental problems earlier, but it almost seems tacked on as a justification.
As a footnote, I discovered an interesting thing as I searched IMDb for the name of the actor who portrayed the psychic. I'd forgotten the character's name and though I was fairly certain which actor it was, I didn't want to make a mistake. I thought perhaps if I perused the external reviews, I might stumble upon the answer but though I didn't, I did discover in reviews written at the time of release, one by Roger Ebert, the other by Renata Adler at The New York Times, that The Boston Strangler was viewed as quite exploitative at the time. Ebert thought it was a good film, but questioned if it should have been made and was disturbed by the reaction of two young girls and its promotional materials while Adler found the movie absolutely repugnant.
Is my generation (and those coming up behind) really so jaded that we view something such as The Boston Strangler as tame? Is there some truth to the idea that mass media has hardened our hearts and minds to the point that we're harder to shock? It's sort of a running gang between me and a friend whenever some talking head declares "the loss of our innocence," how many times does that make that we've lost it now?
A key scene of the movie takes place on the day of JFK's funeral. When I was growing up, we knew about all of the upheaval of the 1960s: the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King as well as Vietnam. When John Lennon was murdered and Reagan and Pope John Paul II were shot and Sadat assassinated in an 11-month time period, they didn't hold the same trauma because we all knew of the ones before we were born and while they were awful events, it almost seemed like business as usual in our dangerous world. It really took horrific events such as 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing to capture our attention and leave scars, because those catastrophes were beyond our imaginations.
On the other hand, should people be protected from the horrors of the world to the point that when they grow up and learn of them, the shock could prove too much to bear? The girls laughing that Ebert saw would disturb me too: Not feeling or having empathy is a bad thing, but not being able to deal with the fact that bad things happen isn't right either. Movies can be exploitative but, in the end, it's just a movie. It's the so-called news when it's exploitative that disturbs me more.
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Labels: 60s, Bong Joon-ho, Ebert, Fincher, G. Kennedy, H. Fonda, Huston, Kurosawa, Lithgow, Netflix, Television, Tony Curtis
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Thursday, September 16, 2010
It's hard to hit a home run your first time at bat
By Edward Copeland
As faithful readers know, I've been on a Bong Joon-ho kick of late after loving this year's Mother and greatly admiring his earlier work Memories of Murder. The one title still recommended for me to see was his 2000 feature debut Barking Dogs Never Bite, which never received a U.S. release outside of festivals until its DVD premiere this year. I believe there may be a reason for that: It's the first time Bong has disappointed me so far.
Admittedly, I'm a dog lover, but that hasn't stopped me from liking films that placed canines in jeopardy before (Amores Perros being one example), but the setup of Barking Dogs Never Bite just doesn't justify its main character's actions.
Lee Sung-jae plays Yun-ju, living in a large apartment complex with his demanding pregnant wife Eun-sil (Kim Ho-jeong) after finishing grad school and pining for a professorship he fears will never be his without a payoff to the right people. As the film opens, he's talking on the phone to a friend while a dog is barking in the background. Even the person on the other end of the conversation can hear it and Yun-ju complains about it.
Before long, Yun-ju spots a cute, little ragamuffin of a dog (a suspiciously quiet one) and steals it. After a few failed attempts to kill it, he locks it in a cabinet in the apartment building's basement.
On another side of the giant complex, a young girl named Hyun-nam (Bae Doo-na) works in the building's management office, but her boredom finds her spending less time there and more time with her friend Jang-mi (Go Soo-hee) at a convenience store and helping people work up flyers for the sudden rise in missing dogs. One little girl, whose dog was the one Yun-ju locked in the closet, seems particularly upset.
When the flyers go up, Yun-ju learns that the dog couldn't bark because of a throat problem. He returns to the basement, but it's too late: The dog has died and is about to become a meal for the building's janitor. Later, Yun-ju spots another dog and hears it barking. He grabs it from its elderly owner and hurls it from the roof an act witnessed by Hyun-nam and Jang-mi.
I consider myself a connoisseur of dark comedy, but the tone of Barking Dogs Never Bite doesn't work for it to succeed on that level. Part of the problem, at least for me, is that there's no explanation for Yun-ju's anti-dog jihad. Perhaps if we had a longer opening showing how the barking was truly driving him crazy. The film's resolution leaves a lot to be desired as well.
The film's best asset is Bae Doo-na's performance. She's delightful. The film, however, leaves a lot to be desired, and shows little evidence of what great things were to come in the future from Bong Joon-ho's directing career.
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Labels: 00s, Bong Joon-ho, Foreign
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Thursday, September 02, 2010
Bong Joon-ho's Zodiac
By Edward Copeland
After loving Bong Joon-ho's Mother so much, I received so many notes insisting I must see his 2003 work Memories of Murder (which didn't receive U.S. release until 2005) that I had to seek it out. I'm glad I did.
Of course, my post's title refers to Memories of Murder as being similar to David Fincher's great Zodiac except that Bong's film premiered four years prior to the release of Fincher's. If I'd seen Bong's film first, perhaps my Zodiac review would have been titled David Fincher's Memories of Murder.
Actually, that truly isn't accurate either. Aside from being about a police investigation into a serial killer in a low-tech age, there's not much else in common between the two films other than their excellence.
Memories of Murder takes places in the South Korean province of Gyunggi in 1986 where someone is brutally raping and murdering young women. As in Mother, the detectives assigned to the case seem to find that the easiest way to solve a case is to beat, coerce or otherwise twist a confession out of the person they think most likely did the deed on that particular day.
This especially is the case with the lead cops on this case, a pair of none-too-bright bulbs, Detectives Park Doo-Man and the excessively brutal Cho Yong-koo (Song Kang-ho, Kim Roe-ha). After embarrassing the department (and getting the press sniffing around) by trying to railroad a mentally challenged man (Park No-shik), the chief (Song Jae-ho) sends to Seoul for a more experienced detective, Inspector Seo (Kim Sang-kyung), to try to help solve the most difficult case his department has ever faced.
As dim as Park is and as angry as Cho is, Seo always displays quiet contemplation, quick to dismiss the local cops' methods and theories in favor of approaching the rising body count the seemingly careful killer leaves analytically. Naturally, the tension an outsider would naturally bring to take over an investigation heats up even more than it would otherwise.
Unfortunately, whenever a break seems near, it seems to lead inevitably to a dead end, frustrating every one. When a young female officer notes that a radio station keeps receiving postcard requests to play a certain song every time it rains, an event that follows with another brutal slaying, Seo feels they've got what they need to stop the killer before his next victim. However, the chief's request to Seoul for additional manpower to spread out to stake out the province gets a big no because the country's government's priority is putting down an uprising elsewhere.
Bong moves the film at a swift pace and there aren't really twists to spoil because it does resemble Zodiac in that the mystery has no resolution. It's the effect of the crimes and the investigation on the main characters that are at the heart of Bong's film. It delivers a different sort of heartbreak as the final frustration of an early DNA result (which they have to send to America to get) doesn't return the expected result prompts an almost Persona-like transference between Park and Seo.
Memories of Murder, preceding the fun frolic of The Host and this year's great Mother, makes me want to see what else Bong Joon-ho has been up to in South Korea. I'm glad I checked Memories of Murder out, though I think Mother is the best of his three films I've seen so far.
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Labels: 00s, Bong Joon-ho, Fincher, Foreign
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Friday, August 20, 2010
A mother's work is never done
By Edward Copeland
Prior to Mother, I've only seen one of South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's films, the incredibly fun monster flick The Host. Mother could hardly be more different, but it's a film that constantly surprises, thanks to the incredible lead performance by Kim Hye-ja in the title role.
You really don't know what to expect from Mother based on the film's opening image. Over the credits, Kim stands in the middle of a field doing a strange little dance to the film's riveting score by Lee Byeong-woo, which can seem comical when the moment calls for it and the perfect accent to the suspense when appropriate.
Mother (we're never given her full name) prepares herbs and solutions in her small shop as well as performing unlicensed acupuncture on her customers. She also keeps a close eye on her 27-year-old son Do-joon (Won Bin), a young man who obviously has something amiss about him. He may be mentally challenged or just a bit slow. In the film's opening moments, Do-joon is holding up a dog across the street from his mother's shop to wave when a speeding BMW strikes him and speeds away. A horrified mother runs to his aid. Though he's slightly injured, he appears OK, but egged on by his hothead friend Jin-tae (Jin Goo), the two hop in Jin-tae's car in pursuit of the hit-and-run vehicle.
Since it was a BMW, Jin-tae assumes it belongs to well-off members of the country club, so that's where they go, finding the car, which Jin-tae smashes the sideview mirror of before the two enter the golf course trying to track down the vehicle's occupants, with Do-joon collecting lost golf balls from a water hole along the way. When they find the golfing party in the cart, a melee ensues that ends up with both parties at the police station.
The authorities urge both sides to settle, since they were both at fault, until the wealthy golfer mentions the damage to the car as well. Finally, that matter resolves itself but a worse matter rears its head when a schoolgirl with a bad reputation (one the addled Do-joon has attempted to pick up unsuccessfully) turns up slain, a golf ball with Do-joon's signature found nearby.
Mother won't accept that her son did the killing, especially when he's tricked into signing a confession, so she tries hiring a lawyer and doing her own investigating to prove his innocence. In some respects, it's reminiscent of Tilda Swinton's character in The Deep End, but Mother's actions go deeper and darker.
The twists in Bong's film often come as quite a surprise and though it has abrupt shifts in tone, they always work. He has a masterful suspense scene where Mother is hiding in the closet of someone she's investigating when the suspect comes home for a tryst with a woman and falls asleep on the floor. Mother has to sneak out of the place without getting caught and the floor is a literal minefield of water bottles and other objects she must navigate to get to the exit.
It's not often that a movie can produce reveals that take me by surprise, but Mother does it frequently and it makes for a riveting film experience.
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Labels: 10s, Bong Joon-ho, Foreign, Tilda Swinton
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Monday, August 06, 2007
Something dark in the water
By Edward Copeland
I tried to scratch my memory for the last time I saw a true, old-style monster movie, one where the creature is the result of some man-made mistake and it's up to civilians to try to clean up the resulting mess. That's certainly the case with the South Korean film The Host, though its tone is more often one of fun than fright.
Director Bong Joon-ho summons a great 1950s monster movie feel almost from the beginning, where a thoughtless government entity (this time the U.S. military, personified in a cameo by American actor Scott Wilson) unwittingly creates a mutant destined to wreak havoc on unsuspecting civilians.
The pace seldom sags and while the scares aren't really that tension-inducing, the fun tone certainly makes up for it. The story focuses on a single Korean family who runs a convenience store and gets swept up in the chaos when the creature rises from the sea and takes the daughter (Ko Ah-sung) of the store owner's ne'er-do-well son (Song Kang-ho).
However, the plot hardly is as simple as it sounds as in addition to the rampaging monster, a slimy, fast-moving creature equally at home on land and in the sea and with multiple sets of teeth, there is the concern of a virus that ignites a quarantine (ordered by the U.S.) and later a plan for extreme measures to clean up the mess.
The metaphors for U.S. strongarm tactics and incompetence certainly are there, but the movie doesn't lay them on thick enough to distract from the general mood of the romp, especially the kooky performance by Song Kang-ho, who concocts an intriguing mix of concerned father, puzzled slacker and bureaucratic victim as he tries to stop the slimy beast.
The movie ends on a somewhat poignant note that doesn't quite mesh with the tone of what's preceded it, but by then you've developed such affection for the characters, that you're willing to let it go.
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I tried to scratch my memory for the last time I saw a true, old-style monster movie, one where the creature is the result of some man-made mistake and it's up to civilians to try to clean up the resulting mess. That's certainly the case with the South Korean film The Host, though its tone is more often one of fun than fright.
Director Bong Joon-ho summons a great 1950s monster movie feel almost from the beginning, where a thoughtless government entity (this time the U.S. military, personified in a cameo by American actor Scott Wilson) unwittingly creates a mutant destined to wreak havoc on unsuspecting civilians.
The pace seldom sags and while the scares aren't really that tension-inducing, the fun tone certainly makes up for it. The story focuses on a single Korean family who runs a convenience store and gets swept up in the chaos when the creature rises from the sea and takes the daughter (Ko Ah-sung) of the store owner's ne'er-do-well son (Song Kang-ho).
However, the plot hardly is as simple as it sounds as in addition to the rampaging monster, a slimy, fast-moving creature equally at home on land and in the sea and with multiple sets of teeth, there is the concern of a virus that ignites a quarantine (ordered by the U.S.) and later a plan for extreme measures to clean up the mess.
The metaphors for U.S. strongarm tactics and incompetence certainly are there, but the movie doesn't lay them on thick enough to distract from the general mood of the romp, especially the kooky performance by Song Kang-ho, who concocts an intriguing mix of concerned father, puzzled slacker and bureaucratic victim as he tries to stop the slimy beast.
The movie ends on a somewhat poignant note that doesn't quite mesh with the tone of what's preceded it, but by then you've developed such affection for the characters, that you're willing to let it go.
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Labels: 00s, Bong Joon-ho, Foreign
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