TIFF Report: The Host Review

REGION 1 DISC!!! RIGHT NOW!!! SOMEONE MAKE IT HAPPEN!!!!!!!!!!

Oh my God! I can't wait to see this film. Memories of Murder is my fav Korean film.

I'm moving to Seoul next March, am I going to have to wait until I get there to see it?! I can't go to TIFF (though I live in Toronto).

Great movie! Bong is really a talented director.

To Todd:

*SPOILERS!*

Did *** die in the end? Stupid question, I know, but when they had pans of this person's picture at the end I was wondering if somehow this character managed to survive.

Thanks!

Sorry to gloat, but The Host opens tomorrow here in Singapore, and I caught the preview today. I'm so glad I managed to watch it in a cinema -- I've had to watch too many Korean movies on DVD, and this one really needs to be seen on a big screen. It's every bit as brilliant as I'd expected -- a wildly entertaining movie that is also intelligent, insightful and genuinely moving. And casting those 4 very distinctive actors from Bong's previous 2 features as members of the same family -- well, that's just a stroke of genius.

Forget the R1, I want to see the Korean R3 LE!!!

Also, I hope it's for sale longer than that special edition of Re-cycle. Gone within a week! Is that a record?

Boring, boring, boring. Totally disappointed. Nothing I haven't seen done better in a dozen other films. I can not believe the good reviews this film has gotten. Take my advice and stay away!

The people who gave a glowing review of this movie must all be Korean and are biased. This movie was a waste of time for me. Today is the North American release day and I'm pretty sure that it shouldn't last for more than 1 week in the theatres here. It just needs real audiences to realize how poorly this movie was made. The director seems to be some kind of amateur because there is no continuity. One example is the main father character getting a large needle shoved into his shoulder/throat area but next camera shot there's no marks on him. At the end when the homeless guy who comes out of nowhere pours gasoline all over the alleged monster only some parts of the creature burn. I would consider this a comedy. There was some advertising saying that this is the best movie ever to come out of Korea. If that is true then I feel sorry for Korean cinema.

Was a pretty damn funny movie! but really it sucked! not as much as The Village though, but still pretty bad. Wasted my money in the theatre, the first scene where ppl laughed was when the family was all 'crying' when they first thought the girl was dead. Their 'dramatic' overly emotional display of sorrow was totally over the top to teh point where ppl started laughing!! That was the turning point where this movie became stupidly funny! I thought this was a horror... Other faults:
1. The kid was stuck in the sewer. She tried to hide in a hole inside the sewer. There was a scene where the monster tried to attack her when she was in the hole. Why couln't the creature just use it's tail to fish it out. the tail was small enough to reach her.
2. When the alcoholic uncle ran towards the monster at the end throwing fire bombs at it, these fire bombs (there were many he threw) magically appeared in his hands when he had his backpack over both shoulders. The backpack was closed. Made no sense at all.
3. where the hell did the bum at the end come from? the amount of gasoline the bum poured over the monster was like 10 litres, but yet in the scene it was endless amounts of gas being poured on the monster.
4 No continuity between scenes, lots of littles things missed.
5. the music confused the viewers on the type of movie this was. Seriously it's more a comedy.
6. agent Yellow... um it's supposed to kill all in it's path, but the family that was exposed to it...... survived???? why was it released in the mass public? for them (the government) to release the agent yellow at that time in that place, they would have to know somehow that the monster would appear at that spot exactly at that time... which is stupid of course because that was something they couldn't control. It's not like they had a plan to lure the monster there at that time, not the monster ended up there by fluke!!
7. wehre the hell was all the military.....???? (budget cuts for the film?)
8. the woman with the archery. what a joke. totally unrealistic.
9. apparently the monster was supposed to be a mutation from the formaldehyde but formaldehyde is for preserving things, it shouldn't be a mutagent (maybe carcingenic). again it doesn't make any sense.
Conclusion: waste of time! Seriously the movie made no real sense. For a korean movie they spent a lot of money for it, too bad they couldn't pay for a better script and director. this is the second worse movie I had ever seen. the first being "the village"

I actually liked the quirky mix of comedy/horror/drama in this movie. Then again, I also walked into the theatre knowing that this was an atypical monster film.

What's kind of funny is that, after reading some of these comments bashing the movie, I hardly recognized the continuity errors that people have been pointing out. I thought the homeless guy at the end was comically random and that the military was inept (again, to a comic effect), but absent needle marks? Overly volumous gasoline containers? Didn't catch that.

Of course, I don't know why anyone would stew over these details. Nobody seems to question Ahnold's infinite bullet supply or the Vietcong's inability to shoot Rambo. But retrieving an item from a zipped backpack? Blasphemy! "Real" audiences deserve better. Maybe next time those Koreans will learn that if they wanna make a monster film, they better get their mutagents and carcingenics straightened out, because if there's anything audiences hate, it's an unrealistic fictional monster.

Wow...Is it just me or is "george" the only person here who properly understood this film. This was not a film that strived for realism, or one that was driven by the science of the idea. Rather it worked on multiple levels. It was not only driven by the familial values of this surprisingly quirky family, but it also functioned as a social and political criticism, as we live in a time where governments can an have imposed their own ideals onto their people without first listening to what those people have to say.

To strip away the quirks and the comedy of this movie would result in something not dissimilar to another "anaconda" film. Do not focus on trivial issues such as how many litres of petrol you saw emptied but rather praise them for the seemless intigration of the computer generated monster into the environment to create something truely terrifying.

For those of you who left comments such as those mentioned by me and "george," i suggest you try watching this film again with a little less skepticism and a bit more of an open mind.