Jon Hastings at The Forager offers his take on two recent, controversial genre films: first 300, then The Host.
Several interesting points are raised in the 300 review, from a likening of the movie to a sort of Western wuxia picture to a (favorable) comparison of the way this movie translated the comics imagery of Frank Miller to the screen versus the way Sin City did it (for the record, since I’ve seen a lot of people make the same comparison, I actually liked them both a lot).
Jon also kicks off the review by saying “The teenage goth girl who sold me and my brother tickets for this told us that it was the best movie she had seen since The Matrix.” As you can probably tell from the grosses alone, even aside from anecdotes like this and several I’ve experienced on my own, this film is playing awfully well with females. After seeing the movie, I’ll admit I was surprised at this–more so than I was going in, at which point I figured the oceans of beefcake would win women over. The thing that really threw me here was the rape scene, to be honest. After one Identity Crisis too many, I’m sort of at the point where if a given work of fiction isn’t more or less about rape, I’d prefer it not tackle the topic at all; I feel as though far too many writers don’t realize just how completely rape overpowers a story if it’s handled in a perfunctory fashion.
On the Host front, Jon shares my skepticism about mainstream critics’ penchant for political allegory in their genre films, but says that in The Host‘s case, you barely notice it, seeing as how it’s just one of a myriad of different tones and themes chucked into the mix willy-nilly in what is apparently the predominant mode of Korean cinematic storytelling. As a bonus, he also points out how reductive a reading of the original Dawn of the Dead as an anti-consumerist parable really is, and claims that the reason Land of the Dead feels flat is that Romero (perhaps buying into his own press) set it up so it’s difficult to read any other way. (Again, for the record, I like Land, and don’t think it’s as allegorical as all that.)