The Host

....A nervousness-afflicted archereuse from Seoul destroys a colossal mutant-fish-beast by the simple expedient of firing a burning arrow into it's eye at just the moment when the creature is coated in petrol, greedily glugging it down.

How else would you devise a denoument for a movie about colonisation, social unrest, and the sticky underbelly of the global city (a riverside squid bar, the concrete tunnels within the entirely automotive bridges over the Han River)?

There is some wonderful black socio-political comedy in "The Host", largely centred around the cruelly bureaucratic, knee-jerking or incompetent political and health-service response to the above described monster attacking unfortunate citizens. It rains, or is foggy, or is near-dark, throughout the film. A family, bickering and confused throughout, tries to save their grand-daughter, despite the 'rescue' effort failing to proceed around them.

A man-made threat, entirely indiscriminate and ruthless, causes havoc. The political-military response is laughable or sinister or distant. A dysfunctional family works, after a fashion, to co-operate and survive.

So, a feel-good family movie, then.

Lady Vengeance

We saw "Lady Vengeance" last night; third film in the Park Chan-Wook revenge trilogy. It was spattered with visual tours-de-force: The initial gaggle of Santas waiting forlornly in the snow outside a cleanly functional prison; the dank and dusty curtain getting yanked across in a cloud of dead skin to illuminate the deserted school where the final, hopelessly drawn-out murder occurs; the regular close-ups of the pearl-esque, opalescent Geum-Ja.

The tone veers wildly from pitch-black comedy ("do you lose interest when women do... this?"), bleakly sparse and suggestive atmospherics, long shots of half-dark stairwells, leading directly to bizarre non-sequiturs and incomprehension (in particular Geum Ja's arrival, blank and blunt ("Yes, I'm thinking about killing someone else"), at her probation job to cheerfully aggressive, sepia and unshowy prison violence.

Incoherent, but incredible.

Discourses (originally: Comings and Goings)

The things that get pushed to the touchlines and sidelines when the sheer unarguable force and flow of life becomes fuller and unequivocal. Fragile and translucent pastimes. The movies. So there was some time to see the second half of "The Red Shoes" yesterday.

The ballet sequence itself is hallucinatorily good. Vast hallways, balustraded promenades, clifftop skyscapes shape-shift and flood into eachother, as Vicky Page pirouettes and leaps across them. Clutches of dream-demons and progressively disfigured statuettes beckon, crawl and grasp. For an ostensibly pleasant romantic drama centred on a ballet company, it's gruesome and oneiric stuff.

The scenes in which Lermontov, the Diaghilev-esque impresario, gives vent to his opinions of the emotions of others are wonderful and ghastly. "Oh. Charming", he intones, with a corpselike mask. "I see", he says, only his teeth appearing to move. A deathly pallor seems to overtake any character who speaks of anything as irrelevant and selfish as their love; particularly Julian Craster, the hopelessly English composer, who appears to lose most of the blood and oxygen in his face as he attempts to tell Lermontov how he is 'feeling'.

Somehow the passage in the hotel, as Lermontov licks the wound of losing Vicky from the company and smokes continuously surrounded by fusty velvet and upscale chintz, reminds me of the late-period Sopranos episode in which Tony holes up in an NYC hotel-room, unsure of how to proceed with himself and over-exposed. Strange times.