Paul and I went to check out The Host tonight. I've got a soft spot for horror as a genre, and of late have found myself particularly enjoying foreign horror movies. They're far more inventive -- pushing the envelope of acceptability in ways that seem more nightmarish than incoherent (compare Miike's Audition to Roth's Hostel), or bending genres in audacious directions (cf. the prolific Miike's Happiness of the Katakuris).
The Host falls in this latter category. Though the Minneapolis Star Tribune is not widely known as the home of insightful film criticism, its reviewer sums up The Host nicely as a cross between and Jaws and Little Miss Sunshine. Although it does have its share of shocks and ooky monsters jumping out of nowhere, director Bong Joon Ho seems less interested in the creature than in the struggle for redemption of a family that totters between self-destructive and indolent. In fact, the monster is quite clearly seen in its first appearance, and is never hidden from the audience. The film also contains political themes (the US army inadvertently births the creature through petty behavior, then makes the situation worse when they come to solve it) and it doesn't quite come together, but hell, I don't care. It was as much fun as I've had at the movies in a long time -- scary, funny, touching, with enough underbaked subplots to add up to two or three well-baked ones.
But as Paul and I were talking about it later, it occurred to me that I'm quite willing to forgive foreign films for much more than I'm willing to forgive American horror films. With Hostel, Eli Roth allegedly wanted to use the slasher genre to critique American cultural imperialism, but his clear enjoyment in the torture sequences undercut this critique, and I find the film to be dull -- a better overall film than Cabin Fever, but not a success. But Dario Argento clearly loves his gory set pieces, and his films are about as coherent as a bowl of soggy AlphaBits, and I love the hell out of them. Same goes for The Ring and a quite interesting Korean horror film, Phone: quite a few scenes that make no sense internally or within the context of the film, but fascinating all the same.
So, am I anti-American? Do I fetishize foreign horror films -- or perhaps find their foreignness part of the reason why they are creepy; not so much that those foreigners are scary, but the fact that they occur in a culture that I am not familiar with already adds an element of the unusual/alien?
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2 comments:
Yes, I was underwhelmed by The Host. I was able to resist its awesome foreign powers over my taste.
I liked the movie, just not as much as it seems like most other people or critics.
I actually get what Mookie is talking about, I think I do cut foreign language films more slack than similar American films. The Host seems to have benefitted from this phenomenon in its stateside critical reception. A certain slackness of plot, characterization and theme that would have been torn to pieces had this been an American monster flick was given a pass by many American critics because there so many other elements of the film that seemed to have a certain unique charm for them.
One of those elements was the film's seeming genre bending fusion of monster flick and family drama. The reference to Little Miss Sunshine showed up in a couple of reviews of the film.
I think that's what makes the film so much more enjoyable than a straight horror film but it doesn't handle it as well as say a film like Independence Day which feature three different family subplots all handled with a much tigher narrative arc which, while well-received by and large, is still written off as simply a tongue version of classic Hollywood formula. The Host, on the other hand, is one of those kinds of films that gets held out as the kind of thing Hollywood used to do but doesn't anymore. Why? I think it hasa lot to do with its foreigness and how critics process that.
I think one reason why I like the family subplot in The Host better than the family subplots in Independence Day is precisely that it's not "tight." The family subplots exist in ID4 to present rote emotional moments -- we know the little girl will say something heart wrenchingly heartwarming in a time of crisis, that the teen boys will eventually realize their alcoholic, apparently psychotic father is really a hero. In The Host, the family manages to sort-of work together to resolve the crisis, but those rote emotions are absent; the climax is kind of a downer. But we do get moments that might seem slack in terms of plot movement that make the characters warmer, more endearing.
I just realized something... if this was a French film, I probably would have hated it.
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