The Host (2007, pro)

There's a handful of Korean directors whose movies could be remade in Turkish effortlessly with almost no need of a complicated cultural mapping, and Bong Joon-Ho is no exception (Kim Ki-Kuk, on the other hand, probably is). The style of verbal banter between friends or family members would find itself at home in the context of a Turkish film, verbatim, without the injection of cultural tweaks,* as would the style of ad-lib violence. The family mourning scene near the beginning of the film is by far the funniest shit I've seen in the last few months. Where in a tried & tested & tried Western blockbuster there would be a responsible father and mother with a "crazy uncle" as a sidekick, in The Host it is the aunt, uncle, who stand-in for the (not so) responsible parents, and as for the "crazy uncle," that actually happens to be the father.


*(In Memories of Murder, the setting is 1986 South Korea under a military coup (feel familiar?). Upon hearing evidence regarding the pubic hair (or lack of it) of the suspect, the bull-headed cop heads to the town public baths (again, no cultural mapping needed) hoping to catch a matching crotch amidst the steam (hilarious). Polis, one of the few Turkish films I've seen in recent days, kept reminding me of Memories of Murder with its attitude towards violence. The weary but violent trigger-happy cop comes home to a family dinner, where his little granddaughter gives a him "colorful" picture she drew of him blowing a guy's head off. While he is telling her what a nice picture it is etc, her father slaps her for drawing such a picture and then her grandfather tells him not to hit the kid etc. The rest of the movie, unfortunately, is weighed down by a rather annoying combination of classic Turkish soapy melodrama w/ soundtrack and poor advertisment/music-video inspired camera effects. and also, this footnote is too long.