The Host (2006)

     It seems like only a half a decade ago that I was roaming about inside the local Blockbuster video when I came across the box for The Host (2006), a mildly praised Korean creature feature.  It looked like it may have been worth seeing, but at the prices the old blue & yellow used to charge, I never took the plunge and actually gave it a chance.  Now, there is no local Blockbuster (there actually is, but it is not very accessible and the idea of driving to and from a store to rent a movie feels a little ridiculous at this point) and the cost to see The Host has dropped to $0.  That made it much easier for me to sit down and watch it.
     I don't think I can give a fair review of The Host, though.  The humor went beyond just not appealing to me; I actually was offended – intellectually, not culturally – by it.  It wasn't just that the humor was juvenile and dependent on the idea that the single father is a total loser (from a family of questionable abilities), but that it stood in an odd contrast to the monster horror that was competing for screen time in the movie. Rather than serve as a counterpoint to the tension of the terror of a beastie running about, the humor undercut the supposed seriousness of the situations and made it harder to simply give a damn about the characters.
     As far as the horror element went, I found it lacking.  The creature is appropriately havoc-inducing when it is introduced to the people on the banks of the Han River, but quickly becomes a beastie that seems to have an agenda.  That would be awesome if it were true, but beasties don't get to have agendas.  So it becomes a monster that has several filler scenes and can't figure out an efficient or logical way of killing the inhabitants of the film world it is destined to kill. 
     I was more than a little surprised by how anti-American the film was, though in a mild way.  The beastie is the result of an American doctor deciding it was a good idea to dump toxic materials down the drain (and thus into the local river).  Then again, there is some heavily implied that there were Koreans who were also complicit in these activities.  An American serviceman is first seen as the supposedly heroic foil to Gang-du (Kang-ho Song), but then becomes a means to introduce a type of panic that results in a government crackdown on the people that is supported by the American military and CDC.  The Americans are not so much concerned with saving any Koreans from the beastie or some sort of plague that may be spread by the beastie as they are in keeping the oppressive regime in charge (and maybe American troops within the country).
     I don't know that I have been as mildly disappointed in a movie as I was with The Host.  I have no idea what the people who gave it high praise were thinking or expecting.  I am not the type to be so easily impressed that a foreign film has a budget of more than $100,000.  While I may be missing out on so much by not being fluent in Korean (though I'm betting that the jokes are largely the same as many rely on the physicality of the scenes), I think that the lack of consistent central tone (humor with shades of horror or horror with shades of humor) make it an inherently flawed movie.

My Time with Netflix - Part Four: The DVD Gems

     Something I never did when renting from RedBox, Blockbuster,Oak Park Video, or Orland Video was rent foreign language films.  I kind of viewed my renting dollars as too valuable to risk checking out a movie I didn't know much about and would have to read all the way through.  This was a foolish outlook, and not just because I've learned to watch movies with the subtitles on even when they are in English.  Netflix, however, made me feel a little more free to add the movies I had heard good things about to the queue (I was already filling it up with absolute crap), and this included two fantastic foreign language films.
     As these are – on the balance very – good movies, I know that my reviews of them will not do them justice.  I will make an attempt to explain what I saw in them that made them more than worthwhile, but I recommend taking a look at real reviews of them or (better yet) giving them a chance yourself.  I will also note that there are only a few titles that made this list, and that is one of the reasons why I feel that – even if Netflix is a good deal for the price – I wasn't using it correctly.

The DVD Gems
Winter's Bone (2010)

     Writer-director Debra Granik adapts Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel of the same name into a tight, intense look at the determination of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) to do right by her family in the wake of her father's disappearance.  There is no romanticism here; Granik presents the present day Ozarks as a criminalistic feudal society living on the fringe and sharing some trappings with mainstream America culture.  Family and lineage, no matter how worthless they may seem, mean everything in this land, and the sins of the father can and will be rained down upon the children if Ree cannot find a way to satisfy the forces on both sides of the law who are working against the Dollys.  While Jennifer Lawrence gives an Academy Award nominated performance, the true soul of the movie is presented in the powerful portray of Teardrop Dolly by John Hawkes. While Ree undergoes a more geographic hero's journey, it is Teardrop who takes the emotional journey from one brand of darkness to another, sadder brand of darkness.  To audiences born and raised in affluent suburbia, Winter's Bone may seem slightly overwrought in its portrayal of rural desolation and criminal activity as the norm.  It isn't.  And it story being told could easily fit into nearly any time period in American history. 

Mongol (2007)

     Sergei Bodrov's seemingly revisionist (I am not particularly strong on Temujin's personal history, but much of this version feels different and arbitrarily changed from what I have read) take on Genghis Khan features beautiful cinematography, well-done (if not breathtaking) effects, and fine acting. The story is told in a somewhat haphazard manner, leaving out many important moments -- I'm supposing these would appear later in the trilogy -- in order to focus on "Temudjin" the man who is dominated by his "love" for his bride. I clearly did not understand some of the imagery, but I don't think that affected my appreciation for the look of the film.
     I was disappointed with Bodrov's direction and Staenberg & Óskarsdóttir's editing, making a film that could have at once been both a sweeping epic and intimate portrait (into the driving forces behind one of the world's most successful warlords) into a lumbering, too-modern feeling homage to a figure largely unexamined even as he was being presented. I would probably give the next movie a chance, but I am hoping for tighter storytelling.