So, I don’t want to rain on Anthony Lane’s parade, but I’m not sure I get all the love flowing toward Bong Joon-ho and The Host. It’s an entertaining genre movie, for the most part, and it does stretch generic conventions in unique ways, but I’m not entirely sure it adds up to a coherently good film (and it could have benefited from a few more judicious cuts). If you want a good monster movie, this ain’t it (I’d recommend Carpenter’s The Thing, Spielberg’s Jaws, and Dante’s–with caveats to John Sayles–Piranha). If you are interested in a film about a histrionic dysfunctional family who band together over the loss of a loved one while traveling in a van, well . . . insert your own Little Miss Sunshine plug here. If you like your foreign films to couple wall-to-wall action with an incisive critique of post-industrial, post-Cold War national identity, I’d say Beckmambetov’s Night Watch is the better, more entertaining, more culturally engaging genre flick (as Reynolds’ enthusiasm seems to suggest when he pointed us to the trailer for part two of that trilogy). If you like narratives about the ironies of miscommunication in a digital world, I’d say pop The Departed (or even Infernal Affairs) back in the DVD player. I guess I’m saying I’m not the fan I thought I would be and that’s too bad . . . I’ve been tracking this film with great enthusiasm for well over a year. It’s a solid film but nothing I want to see again with any zeal (though there is a lovely moment over dinner where a missing character’s presence is so deeply felt, she finds her way into the mise-en-scene . . . I wanted more of that and less of everything else). I also think the film has some gender issues worth examining, particularly in the way a “changeling” appears to make everything a bit more ok in the film’s final moments.
Monster movie number two?
The Lives of Others! Now here’s a terrific and gripping piece of filmmaking which belongs on the same shelf with films like Peeping Tom, The Conversation, and Caché. An East German ideologue, an expert in surveillance who works for the Stasi and is so efficient he might as well be an automaton, is thrown irretrievably off balance by corrupt Party officials who want to manufacture “dirt” on a popular and loyal playwright because the Minster of Culture wants to fuck the playwright’s girlfriend. Ulrich Mühe gives a multi-layered performance full of despair, sadness and emotional poignancy as he is forced to question his own existence (and therefore, yes I’m going to say it, his humanity) while monitoring his subject 24 hours a day. Sebastian Koch, as the playwright, is also very good playing a man who is forced to take action after years of unquestioning servitude. Though I might quibble with the last ten or eleven minutes (we can talk), this is certainly the best film I’ve seen in 2007.
i really like this post. i learn things from you, jeff.
where is michael? i miss michael.
I miss me, too.
should i come and find you?
please, gio. I think I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque on my way to Pismo Beach.
Pizzz-mow Beach!
i liked The Lives of Others very much, too, except for the last few minutes, which we can discuss. it is a powerful reflection on the mediated pleasure of the work of art’s consumer, and the power such pleasure can exert on him/her. *** SPOILERS *** of all the characters, the one who really gives his life for art is the consumer, wiesler, not the artists (well, hauser, too, but wiesler’s sacrifice is really the heart of this film). his awakening to art is moving and interesting and beautifully portrayed. the most moving aspect of it is its great loneliness.
this is in many ways a brutal film, but it’s definitely worth going to the theatre for.
more when more people jump in…
The Host was awful. At least the first 45 minutes were.
Homecoming is great. Karl Rove getting his head slammed again and again and again and again into a piece of metal, well, I could watch that all day.
I wouldn’t use the word awful, but I was underwhelmed by The Host throughout.
I agree that ‘The Host’ was disappointing, though I think I liked it more than Mauer and Jeff. I would be interested in trying to figure out why it failed. There were some sublime shots, particularly near the end as people and the monster drifted in and out of smoke, and I loved the scene when the monster vomits up a seemingly endless stream of bones. The little girl was wonderful. But I can’t help thinking that something got lost in either the translation or the editing. There are references throughout the movie to government conspiracies, and the student protests against the use of Agent Yellow closely parallel resistance to the authoritarian government (one of the characters talks about being unemployed because he spent his college years fighting for democracy). But, for me at least, that story never quite intersected closely enough with the monster story. It was all done by allusion and thrown-away comments, and perhaps Korean audiences could figure out the hints better than I could.
I never posted on this when it came out–despite having rushed to see it, with bated breath. I was probably a bit disappointed, or more correctly my expectations (rip-roaring, genre-busting, wham-bang entertainment) were not met. But I rewatched this last night, and I want to toss some love, because the movie’s more sophisticated and more effective than comes across in our commentary. (And I’ll just cede Mauer his intense distaste, as Hungarians are notoriously difficult to please.) I guess I’m simply trying to see this film more in keeping with Bong-Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder, both films using a very smart but conventional central generic structure as framework for far more subtle personal and social revelations. I think, for those who haven’t seen it, you should give it a go.
First, The Host is structurally a classic monster movie, not a reinvention. What struck me watching again was how carefully it hews to fairly mainstream conventions; despite the ‘shock’ of showing the beast early on, the film then obeys the organizing principles of every big-thing B-movie: a disjointed band of losers finds a way together to combat a creature the authorities are completely clueless (or, as here, conspiratorially disingenous) about. Each team member gets her or his subplot, working out a weakness in relation to the creature to display their real talents. Etc. Climactic community-building, all linked, after some losses, and finding a way to defeat It. My own–and perhaps others’–disappointment seemed a bit unfair, as the film was artfully doing exactly what it set out to do, which was very old-fashioned in some ways.
But, second, the level of emotional complexity is really quite fine. I don’t mean that we empathize with the characters, or that their back-stories are more carefully developed–‘though we do, and they are. I mean that the movie hits its series of affective beats just under the bombastic thrum of the plot, in a manner that can perhaps too easily be discounted. Jeff mentioned the scene where the lost little girl appears in the cobbled-together dinner her family, hunting forlornly, have stopped to eat; it’s gorgeous. She is ravenous, and each family member stops in sequence to offer her a bite of what they’re eating…
But I found equally moving, and in many ways more emotionally complicated, some other sequences (MINOR SPOILERS). When dimwitted Gang-Du is isolated for his exposure to the beast, behind plastic he tries to convince a dismissive guard that his daughter is alive and had called. He’s behind a thin layer of plastic, and his face as he tries to show–by inserting and then spitting out a cellphone–what the beast did to her is so lost. All of the family members are marked by deep strains of loss that we only get glimpses of, what Chris calls (in reference to politics) “allusion and thrown-away comments,” and this is actually one of the movie’s strengths for me–beneath its blustery galumphing monster-tadpole rhythms is a whole symphony of human experience. The father in brief exposition describes his mistreatment of the family, his drunken disappearances, as explanation for Gang-Du’s “softness,” trying to win over his other children’s sympathy for the seriously-aggravating G-D. (The scene is even more interesting because they fall asleep during this defense; the monster shows right up and further displaces the emotional revelation.)
And this gets at some of the social-political subtext that Chris wanted more of. I kept circling around the metaphorical resonance of the false virus, the titled “Host” and its corollary parasitism. I was struck by the obvious–the US as a kind of parasite feeding off South Korea; this kind of monster metaphor is pretty typical for the genre. But I also saw a deep distrust of social structures and government, likened perhaps to monsters feeding off the people–the college-grad son’s bitter comment about how he’d given his best years fighting for democratization only to be left jobless. The small but precise delineation of different social behaviors: college-grad hostile to guards and authority, while his father pushes him to the side and tries to bribe and wheedle obsequiously to get what he wants. There’s a subtle sense of how this monstrosity reveals social relations with authority. We also see the two homeless boys, ‘borrowing’ food from the family’s snack-shack and likening it to the stealing of melons in small-towns, references to poverty and hunger and an accepted ‘parasitism’ between the dispossessed and others. Or relations between the powerless and the powerful at the family level, where children suffer (and emerge damaged) as a result of parental abuses …
Again, I think there’s much going on in this film, and for me it confirms–rather than minimizing–my sense of Bong-Joon Ho’s talents as a filmmaker. It isn’t quite as strong or as surprising as Memories, but it’s still a very good movie.
have not seen the host but i am interested in reading more about gio and jeff’s objection to the closing of the lives of others, which we just watched. i thought the ending was deeply moving.
I have Others at home right now and hope to watch it again with Nicola tonight. SPOILERS: I guess I just thought the whole bookstore scene to have been unnecessary; I wish the film had ended when the playwright discovers the forged name (or was it simply a red typewriter ink smudge that clued him in to the “truth”) at the Stasi archive. That was a powerful moment, and I guess I didn’t need the sentimental final scene. Plus, after the death of the actress, I question the need for such a tidy, audience-friendly conclusion. Anyway, that’s what I remember but I’ll take another look at it tonight. It is still one of the best films I have seen in a theatre this year (that and Zodiac, and, maybe, Bourne 3.0).
well, i didn’t think it was that audience-friendly. i thought it actually played with that desire: seeming to lead to the spielbergian recognition moment but pulling away. i agree that it would have been a tougher movie if it had left that out completely but i don’t think it necessarily would have been a better movie. the way it ends now, there is a kind of reversal: wiesler has become the writer of the text that dreyman reads in the archive; dreyman takes on the role of powerful knower/surveiller; the only connection they have still is through a text. i think dreyman’s refusal to know any more is a very powerful moment. so, okay, maybe the bookstore scene is a brief sentimental lapse, but certainly not the last 10 or 11 minutes.
muhe is very good indeed, but i couldn’t shake the feeling that he was doing an impression of ian holm doing an impression of hopkins’ hannibal lecter.
Certainly not the last 10 or 11 minutes; still, I could have done without the bookstore coda (I’ll have to take a look at the final moments with the commentary on, but it feels like something added after a less than encouraging pre-release screening). I like your reading of the text(s) which stand between the two men though I do believe the reversal you note to be problematic (Dreyman as powerful knower/surveiller).
why is it problematic? it is the new germany–dreyman is now an unfettered, celebrated playwright, his plays being mounted without restrictions (see the difference in the stagings we see of the same play). meanwhile, wiesler has gone from steaming open envelopes in the stasi basement to delivering mail. he is no longer the reader but the read.
and after further review, i am willing to rehabilitate the bookstore scene as well, as striking a small note for the possibility of a humanist connection surviving the east germany they were on opposing sides of. or alternatively of the (textual) recognition between writer and reader.
No just the idea, perhaps misinterpreted, that the two characters have reversed roles is what I find potentially problematic. The surveilled becomes the surveiller. The way I read the ending (and somewhat reinforced by the director’s commentary) is that Dreyman cannot “know” Wiesler? That a great distance separates them (literally and figuratively). All Dreyman can do is write a work of fiction, and we’re not really sure what the novel is about (the title, “Sonata for a Good Man” references Jerska, the suicide theatre director, who gave the sheet music to Dreyman on his birthday, ironically perhaps, but with the hope that Dreyman would wake up from his affable apathy). All we know is that the novel is dedicated to Weisler and maybe that’s enough. The commentary. for the most part, was relatively boring. I was curious how Dreyman might be compared to someone like Heiner Müller. In an interesting essay published in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash writes:
“Watching the film for the first time, I was powerfully affected. Yet I was also moved to object, from my own experience: ‘No! It was not really like that. This is all too highly colored, romantic, even melodramatic; in reality, it was all much grayer, more tawdry and banal.’ The playwright, for example, in his smart brown corduroy suit and open-necked shirt, dresses, walks, and talks like a West German intellectual from Schwabing, a chic quarter of Munich, not an East German . . . Some of the language is also too high-flown, old-fashioned, and simply Western. A playwright who knew on which side his bread was buttered would never have used the West German word for blacklisting, Berufsverbot, in conversation with the culture minister. I never heard anyone in East Germany call a woman gnädige Frau, an old-fashioned term somewhere between ‘madam’ and ‘my lady’ . . . I would bet my last Deutschmark that in 1984 a correspondent of the West German newsmagazine Der Spiegel would not have talked of Gesamtdeutschland. This strikes me as more the vocabulary of the uprooted German aristocracy among whom the director and writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck grew up—both of his parents fled from the eastern parts of the Reich at the end of the Second World War—than that of the real East Germany in 1984.”
Now I’m not bound to some kind of idea of GDR authenticity, but I did find the film to be a bit too generous (why, for example, did we need the punch line of the former Stasi jokester now steaming letters along with Weisler) and, at times, too melodramatic for its own good. Coppola’s The Conversation, to which this film owes a great deal, is far less romanticized and far less tidy than Lives. But as Ash notes, “The point is that this is a movie. It uses the syntax and conventions of Hollywood to convey to the widest possible audience some part of the truth about life under the Stasi, and the larger truths that experience revealed about human nature. It mixes historical fact (several of the Stasi locations are real and most of the terminology and tradecraft is accurate) with the ingredients of a fast-paced thriller and love story.”
i think you’ve taken my statement too literally. it is not something that the film makes a big deal about–the reversal thing–but it is suggested: dreyman finding out about wisler without him being aware of it, reading wiesler’s writing, tracking him down, following it. the film leaves it there without making any facile suggestion of equivalence. i brought it up to suggest that the ending does have structural coherence.
it’s been a while, and i don’t plan to watch this again, but i too remember finding the end melodramatic. that wiesler and dreyman should find each other (or that dreyman should find wiesler) at the end seemed totally beside the point, not adding anything to weisler’s poignant drama of discovery, self-discovery, and choice.