Cinema Hype

Remember the early ’00s, when happy movies were all the rage? When we’d all go to the drive-in and pay 50 cents for a malted and with our best girls, and Chicago and The Return of the King won Best Picture? Those were the days. But wait: even now, as we’re deep into awards-show season and even deeper into national-consciousness territory, maybe we haven’t dropped completely out of the range of whimsy. After all, we’ve got Slumdog Millionaire.

The premise of Slumdog Millionaire is fun: an eighteen-year-old boy from the slums of Mumbai competes on an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. How he came to be there, and how he knows each answer, comes out in the course of the movie. The story is full of tiny coincidences, but that’s okay—suspension of disbelief is part of the deal (if you’re looking for deadly realism, go see The Wrestler or Revolutionary Road; cynicism won’t help you here). It’s a high-concept premise, and it all clicks neatly into place, and although tidy endings may be out of fashion, writer Simon Beaufoy and director Danny Boyle pull this one off confidently.

But then there’s Slumdog Millionaire awards fever—sweeping victories at the Golden Globes. Whether this movie deserves the glory, laud, and honor it’s getting depends on how strongly you believe in Boyle’s fairy-tale vision and how much you’re willing to overlook in its service. It’s a good movie—good because it’s creative, and because it develops a strong emotional story, and because it doesn’t waver from the sensibility it’s trying to create. It’s also loopy and cheesy and a little predictable. And maybe those things are part of its fabric, part of its charm, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Boyle fans, and people who just want to see something work out for once will be able to enjoy the cheese. Other people—those without hearts, Boyle might say—just…won’t.

Beaufoy and Boyle are the minds behind Slumdog Millionaire, but lucky (or skilled) casting makes them look good, as well. Each of the main characters is played by three different actors of approximately elementary, junior high, and high-school age. The potential for awkwardness here is tremendous, and almost totally unrealized—the performances, even of the very young actors, are uniformly excellent. Dev Patel is a graceful male lead, considering he looks a little like an Indian Michael Phelps (those ears!); perhaps even more significantly, we can expect to see his love interest, Freida Pinto, plastered everywhere for the foreseeable future. She’s just that pretty. In all cases, expect to see these kids again, charming the pants (or, as the case may be, tourist dollars) off of audiences for years to come.

Slumdog Millionaire is this year’s bandwagon movie—the one that everybody loves, and that may be a bit of a head-scratcher in retrospect. Boyle and Beaufoy have created something different, something of relative quality that gives audiences a break from the downers filling the theaters, and for that they are (and should be) thanked. The sensation may not last, but we can enjoy it while we can.

Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto

I think I first knew I’d love Once when I watched the Oscars. “Falling Slowly” won for Best Song, and then there was that incident with Glen Hansard using all of Marketa Irglova’s talking time to give a wholly endearing victory speech, prompting Jon Stewart to let her come out and give her own adorable and inspirational remarks. I don’t have a ton of experience with low-budget Irish indie-music romantic dramas, but somehow this confluence of events—these people, rather—appealed to me.

Deep down, Once isn’t so far off the romance-movie track, complete with one especially improbably-lit scene involving a grand piano and an unfinished song. But then, if you can believe it, it’s also far simpler than most of what makes it to the theater: Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy and girl record music together. Something like that. In fact, the straight-arrow plot is refreshing, considering the obvious and recitable formula we see in so many studio romances. Once lacks wacky friends, over-witty dialogue, and any kind of mid-wedding/pre-flight confrontation at the end—it turns that standard on its ear, actually—but instead, it has feeling and timing and a kind of quiet watchfulness that’s like a good, bittersweet folk song. (It’s also worth mentioning that this is a musical—not a massive dance-numbers-in-the-streets musical, but a story told through music. Be prepared.)

One of the best and most surprising parts of Once is how Hansard and Irglova—both professional musicians—wear the hat of “actor” so convincingly; neither comes across half as self-consciously as half the trained actors in Hollywood. If someone told me that Hansard—who looks, kind of hilariously, like a combination of Hugh Laurie and Dr. Cox from Scrubs—were the only lonely Irish musician in Dublin (or at least the loneliest Irish musician in Dublin), I’d probably believe it. Irglova sings and plays the piano beautifully, but even more importantly in this instance, she sparks. She’s the chemistry behind the movie; the light and warmth she brings to her onscreen relationship with Hansard isn’t far off from what she brings to their songs. This is a movie where the main characters don’t even have names (the credits call them “Boy” and “Girl”), but where character is built from the inside out and speaks without shouting, and the writing and acting mesh so that all the audience gets is ambience, in the best way.

Check out Once. You’ll get a song and a story stuck in your head, but you probably won’t mind too much.

Once, Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, The Frames, folk music, Dublin, Irish movies, Oscars, Best Song, Falling Slowly, Jon Stewart, Hugh Laurie, Scrubs

I wish Eagle vs. Shark had come along a few years ago. It just doesn’t seem fair: make a movie about love among the socially awkward and you’re always going to be trailing along behind Napoleon Dynamite, regardless of what you were aiming at in the first place.

In lots of ways, Eagle vs. Shark is a better movie than Napoleon Dynamite. Or maybe it’s just made of slightly stronger stuff: it’s heavier, sadder, funnier in parts, and it has a clearer plot arc. The leading man, Jarrod Jemaine Clement, now of Flight of the Conchords), is like Napoleon with trust issues and a post-high school blood vendetta, and his long-suffering love interest, Lily (Loren Horsley), is therefore required to be even more redemptive by the power of her love and devotion. So maybe it’s like Napoleon Dynamite for grown-ups.

So that’s the bad news: we’ve seen some of this before, and even when it’s funny, the recycled-air feeling doesn’t quite go away. The good news is that the parts we haven’t seen are really pretty good. Writer/director Taika Cohen does an impressive job of letting Jarrod be utterly off-putting and then using Lily’s lovability to make up for it: seen through her forgiving eyes, he becomes understandable, at least, even if he’s still being a complete twit. And he is a complete twit much of the time. But there’s something refreshing about a movie that doesn’t feel the need to prove that its characters are cool, or that they’ve somehow become cool over the course of the two hours you’ve spent with them, and Eagle vs. Shark doesn’t put itself out trying to convince us. Maybe that’s the point: these people were awkward when they met, and they’re still awkward, and yet here they are, trying to work things out. And trust me: if they can, anybody can.

Eagle vs. Shark, Flight of the Conchords, Jemaine Clement, Loren Horsley, Taika Cohen, DVD review

A few things about The Host (Gwoemul). First of all (because I know you want to know): It’s not scary. If you can handle, say, Jurassic Park, The Host is small potatoes, cowering-in-terror-wise. Second of all: Not so much of a “monster movie” as a “family dramedy with incidental slimy creature.” Third of all: They really don’t like the ‘mericans so much, do they? (I can’t imagine why not…)

As a complete unit, The Host is either multi-textured or inconsistent, depending on your point of view. Director Bong Joon-ho tells a good story–a classic “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances” story–in a way that isn’t so much concerned with consistency of tone as it is with the capturing of moments. He’s a director who seems to care about what’s best scene by scene, which makes for polished scenes that don’t fit together in the traditional way. Instead, he mixes elements of comedy, family drama, action-adventure, and political satire to get his particular brand of storytelling. It’s an unusual recipe, and it works with varying success. Much of the film is beautifully shot, particularly the very beginning and the very end–the climax is especially artistic, all swirly and foggy and surprisingly quiet (it’s essentially a family moment)–but it’s so much more highbrow than the rest of the movie that it may as well be from a different piece of work.

Furthermore, the term “monster movie” is misleading, or maybe incomplete. Maybe it’s just that this monster movie is what more monster movies should be, and what many American monster movies of recent years have failed to grasp–that it’s the people that count. The creature is an impressive bit of CGI–an overgrown people-eating tadpole rampaging through Seoul–but if all goes well, he(?) is just a set-up, a force for change in the lives of characters. The Host carries this off well, focusing on the Parks, an ordinary Korean family struggling with the kinds of ordinary troubles that all families seem to have. When the monster runs off with Hyun-seo (Ah-sung Ko), the daughter/granddaughter/niece, the story becomes about the Parks in relationship to one another more than it becomes about their relationship to the monster. In fact, the monster is literally out of sight during most of the climax scene, which works because it’s true to what the movie is doing–using a monster to tell a story about people. In that way, The Host is unlike many of the monster movies made in recent years (I’m thinking the forgettable Godzilla remake), because long stretches of the movie are monster-free, but it’s also very much like the Platonic monster movie, because it gets what it has to do.

If The Host is about family relationships, it’s also about the relationship of a nation to its own government and to the government of an occupying nation. Bong portrays anybody with political power as the enemy–the South Korean government is inept, and the Americans simply don’t care what kind of havoc they cause. The entire story begins when an American military scientist orders his Korean assistant to dump hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde into the Han river (resulting in an extremely well-preserved monster egg?). The scene is inspired by actual events that occurred on an American military base in 2000, causing public outcry and anti-American sentiment among many Koreans. If The Host is unusually character-based, its political stance is right in line with generations of sci-fi and monster films: eventually, the blame lies with both governments, and the movie adopts a classic monster-movie moral: monsters are dangerous, but people bring real destruction.

movie reviews, The Host, Bong Joon-ho, Gwoemul, Korean cinema

Readers, I need help. (And yes, I “need help”–ha ha, right?–but that’s not what I mean. Focus for a minute here. Eyes on me.)

My question is: will The Host scar me, disdainer of all things horror, for life? I’ve been invited to see it this week. I know practically nothing about it, except that it’s a “monster” movie (which apparently is different from a horror movie) and that it was the highest-grossing film in South Korean history. According to Wikipedia, it has “elements of comedy and drama films.” All this sounds great, but what I really want to know is whether every sudden noise will send me running for cover afterwards. Will I wake up in the night, screaming for my mother (in Korean)?

Readers? Tell me what you think.

The Host, Korean film, horror, monster movies