The Host
With 13,000,000 visitors in the cinemas (which is over 1/5 of South Korea’s population), “The Host” has lead to an incredible result, if you ask me. In my opinion, films reflect a country in a fascinating way, for example, “Tre metri sopra il cielo” was highly successful in Italy – and so unknown everywhere else that you can’t even find english subtitles for it on the internet. “The Host” is indeed very, very korean, especially its amazingly sympathetic humour.
Basically we have a funny, totally unpretentious, suspenseful “some nice losers fight against a monster” film that made me wonder where the incredible success came from. There is no deeper message, no love story, no really big name except for Song Kang-ho who is simply brilliant in this film. But despite that, or maybe because of that, the film basically has no faults – it never gets boring, it has great characters (every single one of them is simply adorable) and it has the amazing motto “stupidity makes the world go round”. The characters fail in such incredibly lovely way that you can’t help but keep rooting for them, and they are portrayed with the subtle korean humour that you probably can only appreciate when you are familiar with it.
Finally: Yes, as always, they are showing the americans in the worst way possible – they dumped the formaldehyde into the river, they treat our dear main characters like shit, and they caused all the uproar about the virus etc. etc., harr harr. But for those who don’t care about anti-american sentiments, I think “The Host” is exactly the right thing for a relaxed evening.
When I caught The Host in the cinema with my friends 2 years ago, I came out beaming. I totally enjoyed the movie but was shocked to hear that my friends had not! One of them said that the humor was annoying in a movie marketed as a horror flick and the other thought the movie was boring.
Glad to see that someone else enjoyed it as much as I did.
Oh hey bassment, welcome to my second blog! I actually really didn’t expect anybody to read this, so thanks for lurking :)
I did find quite a few comments on the internet where people didn’t understand the humour in the movie – which is why I suspect that the humour is quite ‘korean’ in some sense I cannot really grasp myself. Marketing it as horror movie is a big mistake of course – it’s a bit scary and surely a monster movie, but not “horror” per se. But yeah, I definitely found the movie really enjoyable indeed.