Memories of Murder
Categories: Host, The,offscreen space,Bong, Joon ho,Van Dyke, WS
First, repeating/expanding something from the Comment pit – a reader was inquiring about one of many TCM-broadcast hieroglyphs, W.S. Van Dyke’s Eskimo (1933), which he deemed extraordinary, and about which I could only find one mention, brief as could be, in Paul Rotha’s 1949 revision of The Film Till Now, where he described it as "a synthetic Nanook." Nanook was, it would seem, synthetic enough (though not recognized widely as such in the ‘40s), but Eskimo remains, for those of us now waiting for it to reappear on TCM’s celestial rotation of lost solar systems, a phantom body. If anyone has any info on it, feel free to feed the chipper.
Second, I’m delighted, because I did not have the opportunity professionally, to comment on Bong Joon-ho’s The Host. I’ve been a Bongiste since 2000's Barking Dogs Never Bite, but there was something about the universal celebration of The Host that gave me cause to worry about an effort at Hollywoodization – all those digitals, all those monster-movie reflexes, all those goddamn-good-monster-movie accolades from commonly clueless critics. Did Bong simply please the entirety of the South Korean citizenry (over $68 million in b.o.) with a Roland Emmerich cloning? The commonly clueful critics loved the movie, too, of course, and it turns out that everyone, including South Korea, was right, just as it turns out that American audiences, forking over only around $2.5 mil for tickets, proved once again so close-minded, so terrified of change afflicting their Happy Meals, so thoroughly indoctrinated to a certain narrow spectrum of formulized entertainment beats and rhythms, that what might simply be the best and most imaginatively executed pulp movie in years has passed them by.
What’s different – or shall we say, unAmerican – about The Host is specifically what makes it Bongian, and spectacularly entertaining: the scent of narrative risk; the nutso tenor of the social satire, which as always with Bong can spike and nova in the middle of a serious scene so suddenly you’re left rubbing your eyes in shock; the beautiful unpredictability of the screenplay story; the explosion of Korean emotional blitzkrieg in uncomfortable places and often to discomfiting degrees; the weird and possibly unquantifiable attainment of genuine pathos amid a torrent of goofiness, grue and farcical hyperbole. How does Bong do it? – the screaming brawl in front of the lost girl’s memorial photo, the layering in a classical-style etude over the climactic chase-with-Molotovs, the breathcatcher when the film’s dysfunctional family pauses in their monster-hunt to eat pilfered food, and the little girl they’re looking for – or, we understand in the next scene, their imagining of her – walks up and lets them calmly feed her.
It’s that ludicrous, idiotic, neurotic family, of course, that provides the film with its structure, and represents exactly the kind of screenplay thinking no American studio would allow within a square kilometer of an expensively digitized movie monster. But despite their cartoonishness they acquire, somehow, between the lines, an iconic resonance. This may partly derive from Bong's principle of allowing for the possibilities and likelihoods of off-screen action and event; at least 30% of The Host happens outside of our perspective, and any lover of Asian art film (Ozu to Hou, Tsai and Hong Sang-soo) is intimate with the power and almost cosmic empathy that kind of filmmaking can create. Usually, it’s not accompanied by mutant snakehead-fish behemoths. Bong’s film is a goddamn wonder, and I didn’t even touch on its helter-skelter satiric assassination of Korean and American governmental response to disasters, which is virtually Chomskiian in its unblinking portrait of kneejerk crisis-exploitation and public poisoning. Whew.
For a definitive examination of "The Bong Show," pre-Host, see Ed Park's essay featured in my upcoming book from SUNY Press, Exile Cinema: Filmmakers At Work Beyond Hollywood, coming in '08.
"The Host" is one of my fav movies this year. So refreshing to see a 'monster movie' where the creature is seen pretty much in all of its glory in the first 5 minutes. And that tracking shot when the creatures rises from the river and casues mass hysteria is one of the more exhilerating times I've recently had the theater.
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The style of Bong's films is clearer in the top-shot of the family, crying, in the floor. And, suddenly, in that scene, we hear: "the owner of the X car please remove it", or something like that. First, the soap-opera, then the comedy. (And then, the monster). Great movie. In Mexico The Host it will premiered, nation-wide, next August (although the movie is avalaible in imported DVD, of course).
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Love the advice. Thank you.
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