* Today at Robot 6: Tom Brevoort, the Lord Emperor of Twitter, talks about the Siege/Blackest Night trade-in offer and Neil Gaiman’s Marvelman plans.
* Brendan McCarthy’s Spider-Man: Fever arrives this April. GLO-FI AS FUCK
* I only skimmed it since I haven’t seen the movie yet, but CRwM’s piece on Park Chan-wook’s vampire film Thirst takes some provocative shots at the horror blogosphere. Sample quote:
This is why the general mediocrity of the Great Zombie Revival is actually the key to its success: A subgenre that reinvents itself in mind-blowing ways every two or three films is going to exhaust the mental bandwidth of its audience as well as sow some discord among people who latch on some particular configuration of the genre elements and decide to become purists. But a certain pandering familiarity, spiced with only slight hints of novelty, neither taxes your audience nor risks alienating them.
I skipped Thirst because I thought it was directed by the guy who did The Host, which was a piece of shit, so that’s my bad.
* Matthias Wivel, Tucker Stone, and Noah Berlatsky explain their choices for the Best Online Comics Criticism of 2009. I recommend Matthias’s and Tucker’s posts, but not Noah’s, since he thinks Ganges is boring.
How much of your bad reaction to The Host was based on that one scene where their mourning for the kid got a little slapsticky? It seemed to take up a disproportionate amount of space in your review…if that scene hadn’t been in there do you think the other issues you had (plot holes etc.) would have been more easily passed over?
To me that scene didn’t register as callous or simply mocking the character’s grief, I think the audience was still supposed to feel sympathy for them even while seeing something humorous about their reactions…lots of movies depicting characters grieving about a death do something similar. But YMMV of course.
Well, I mean, the review says it all. Yes, that was a big part of it but no, it wasn’t all of it. Yes, I’m usually able to overlook plot holes when I feel a film has other things to offer, but no, I didn’t think this one did. No I’ve never seen a movie turn the death of a kid into a slapstick yukfest like this one did. Finally, that monster is still really lame-looking. 🙂
I know I’ve said this before, but the sudden tonal shifts in The Host are more characteristic of Korean movies in general than they are specific to Bong Joon-ho’s work (although his Memories of Murder also whiplashes between serious and sitcom).
Didn’t Heather and Twin Peaks have comedic funeral scenes following the death of a young person?
I haven’t seen Heathers so I couldn’t tell you. In Twin Peaks Leland threw himself on top of the coffin in the ground; having seen it recently, I can assure you that the effect was a million miles away from The Host’s yukfest–and moreover was right in line with the way Leland’s grief was always treading an uncomfortable line between Peaks-style parodic melodrama, genuine devastation, and outright mental illness. At any rate a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.