You know, I’m looking as foward to seeing Bong Joon-ho’s “The Host” as the next guy, but reading all the pre-release mumbo-jumbo about this being such a ground-breaking film, I couldn’t help but thinking that even if we were to acknowledge that it represents Korea’s first real “monster movie,” in the end, it’s a movie about a big ugly fish.
Heck, I’m sure Frank and Gar have caught worse.
I was looking at a Cine 21 interview with Bong, coincidentally, and he noted his people have been shopping the film around in the States. He joked that if the film were remade by Hollywood, we could see the monster climbing out of the Hudson or Mississippi rivers.
As a general rule, I don’t like Hollywood remakes. “The Host,” however, might work. A big mutant catfish climbing out of the Mississippi, for instance. But it would need one subtle plot change that I’m sure no one will really notice. Instead of evil U.S. soldiers pouring chemicals into the Han, you could have suitably “shifty” Koreans dumping industrial waste from the Hyundai Motor plant in Montgomery into the Big Muddy. Like I said, just a minor change nobody will notice, least of all on this side of the Pacific.
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I still favor my plot for a U.S. remake.
Aren’t you forgetting Yonggary? (And we won’t even mention Pulgasari… after all, we all know which Korea you’re talking about.
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Horror movie about an ugly fish in the lake? Sounds like we are talking about how to Hollywood remake a film that Korea took from Hollywood called Lake Placid.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139414/
> Horror movie about an ugly fish in the lake?
Make it a larger body of water, and it could be MOBY DICK. There hasn’t been anything new under the sun for some time.
As for Hollywood remaking films that Korea already took, I give you FREQUENCY => IL MARE => THE LAKE HOUSE. See, that’s already been done, too.
Frequency, Il Mare, and Ditto (which is much more similar to Frequency than Il Mare, as it also features contact over decades via radio) were all released in 2000. Who was influencing who?
Make it a larger body of water, and it could be MOBY DICK. There hasn’t been anything new under the sun for some time.
Someone should make a movie or a documentary about the Angry Expat in Korea, a far more interesting creature than some mutated fish.
Read an interview with Bong recently (can’t remember where right now) in which he said basically that a good genre movie has to have some basis in reality, i.e., current events, which explains to some extent why he put the USFK business in the film: that’s his “reality.” While I can accept that explanation (and agree about good genre movie=reality) it shows to me a naive perspective, that the USFK is the villain simply from expedience, because the Han River dumping incident is “reality” in Korea, without seeming to recognixe they way it might be interpreted by people like Mr. Marmot for example. Bong is obviously a talented director, so I wonder if he is not unaware of how that part of the film would be received.
Bong’s comment certainly seems less than honest, especially considering the current “reality” in Korea and especially considering what goes into the creative process of making movies.
Bong’s alleged contention is like claiming that one fired a gun because their finger happened to be on the trigger and not because they wanted to shoot someone. The end result is the same.
My feeling is that the movie is kind of overrated.
http://www.koreanfilm.org/dc/d.....&page=
Talking about a remake of a remake, I like this film when it was called the “Alligator” (1980).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_(film)
Mutated monster film is nothing new in Hollywood, It goes way back to the 50’s, I believe when Cold War and nuclear holocaust was the boogeyman. Mutated monster films in Hollywood seems to involve alligators for some reason or tomatoes.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080391/
“…with a lot of overlapping cast members and technical staff, beautiful yet grungy cinematography, excellent, pounding music score by Lee Byung-woo (TALE OF TWO SISTERS, RED SHOES)”
As if Memories of Murder wasn’t good enough… consider me fucking sold.
RK: Instead of evil U.S. soldiers pouring chemicals into the Han, you could have suitably “shifty” Koreans dumping industrial waste from the Hyundai Motor plant in Montgomery into the Big Muddy.
I can’t see that. The yellow peoples are touchy about negative portrayals on celluloid. I think evil US corporations would do the trick - both villains and henchmen would, of course, be lily-white, since white folks don’t take it personally.