The Host: Koreans give Hollywood a run for its money.
One of the best parts about living in Los Angeles for a movie lover is the numerous avenues available for experiencing films from all over the world. Today at the AFI (American Film Institute) Fest, I watched a mainstream South Korean blockbuster called “The Host”. In this 2-week long festival, I will of course be watching a lot more movies that are yet unreleased in the US, and I’ll keep you updated as best as I can on the movies I like. There are some phenomenal ones in the line-up. But more on that later.
“The Host” is essentially a monster film like “Godzilla”, “Alien” and various other names that Hollywood continues to endlessly recycle every summer. According to its director Joon Ho Bong, it is South Korea’s first all out monster spectacle. So what is so special about this movie you say? Heck I had a great time watching it. It was suspenseful, had some great scares, fairly decent special effects, solid performances, but most of all, wonderful storytelling and characterization.
Ok, so the last two adjectives don’t necessarily go too well with a monster flick. But what sets “The Host” apart from most other monster flicks is the fact that at the core, it is about a dysfunctional, malfunctional, crazy Korean family coming together under very devastating circumstances. When I say dysfunctional, think the kind of dysfunctional, fascinating characters you see in indie-Japanese/Korean cinema. Take such a family, weave a story about them coming to terms with each other’s failures in extremely, morosely comic ways, and set it against the background of a mutated monster rising out of the Han river, terrorizing Seoul, and you get the thoroughly enjoyable “The Host”.
The editing and sound design are fantastic and scary. The visual effects, though not quite the stuff we would see in a Peter Jackson flick, are quite admirable. Designed by Korean artists and executed by the San Francisco based VFX company, The Orphanage, the film’s monster is very believable, very slimy, and very scary. The film also boasts of very high production value and scale, conveniently comparable to that of any big Hollywood disaster flick. But as I said before, “The Host” is one of the better monster films made in recent times because it has great characters, and a very engaging story, confidently and smartly directed.
Despite the fact that the film was in Korean with English subtitles, it did not take away at all from the overall experience (from the point of view of someone who does not understand the language). 2 consecutive 400-seater screenings were sold out, and more than anything, it was a pleasure to finally see Asian cinema competing on a mainstream scale with Hollywood, and hinting that it won’t be long till they’re going to get quite a run for their money.
Tags: Korean
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
For those of you living in the US, The Host releases this weekend – March 9. Don’t miss it! Check out the trailer here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/thehost/trailer/
Thanks Vijay
Some of them are really pushing the boundaries of filmmaking.
cheers