The Host and Old Boy

On Saturday, I also watched The Host and Old Boy with one of my roommate Sarah's friends and her niece. Both are Korean movies, but I think it makes them better.

The Host is a sci-fi flick about a government experiment gone wrong that kidnaps a schoolgirl and sends her family on a wild chase to retrieve the girl and kill the monster, which ironically looks like a giant mudskipper (I wonder if that's how sci-fi writers get their ideas: nature-watching on LSD). My favorite character by far was a man with bleached hair whom I lovably named "Sweats." He proceeded to wear sweats until quarantine, where he fought with his sister's boyfriend in a male-version cat fight (including the slaps) and scratched himself in all the wrong places while sleeping. But I have to commend him on impaling the monster at the end, even though the little girl died. It was an interesting movie, made even more interesting by our disability to locate the option for English subs. It's a funny movie to watch (without the intent of being comedic in any manner).

Old Boy was more dramatic. It began with a drunk man (Dae-su Oh) at a police station making a complete fool of himself who was eventually kidnapped and held in a hotel room for 15 years against his will. I personally didn't think it seemed all that horrible, except for the daily sleep-gas releases and injections. Oh, and don't forget the lack of sunlight. Anyway, Dae-su finally escapes looking like he just wandered onto the highway from being lost in the wilderness for 20 years and ends up at a sushi bar. He orders a live octopus to eat and manages to choke on it (surprise, surprise; wouldn't have expected that to happen with all those survival instincts apparent in writhing tentacles), alarming his waitress (Woo-jin Lee) and prompting her caring side to take him in and bandage him up. He wakes up in her apartment and, after discovering she removed his clothes to bandage him, sets out to the bathroom on a mission to have sex with her. She fends him off and tells him that she'll signal her horniness with a song he wrote in his journal (which pisses him off even more because she read his diary like a little brother bent on embarrassment-related blackmail). In order to get revenge, he starts searching for the man who kidnapped him (which is funny because he has a list of probably 50 enemies) and locates his hotel of imprisonment. He cruelly tortures the security guy by ripping out his teeth with a hammer and takes on a score of men in order to escape. He discovers the identity of his enemy, but while he's talking to him, the man with the ripped-out teeth (who I'm going to nickname Gold Caps) is in Woo-jin's apartment with her half-naked and tied to the bed. Dae-su comes back to the apartment and fights Gold Caps and his crew but fails to defeat them. They leave on the enemy's orders, and Dae-su takes Woo-jin, and they leave town. While they're in the car, she starts singing the song from his journal (which I don't see how I would be aroused by being almost killed by a man with 30 gold caps in his mouth), and they rush to a hotel. Dae-su tries to remember how he upset his enemy in order to better understand his reasons, and he talks to an old friend about their high school days. It turns out that the enemy was in love with his own sister and performed an act of incest, which Dae-su accidentally saw and spread as gossip. He finally heads to his enemy's place to kill him, but I missed the fight scene and the end because my source of movie left. :( But I will finish it someday. Despite everything, it was interesting. :D

Anyway, I am adding Donnie Brasco to my list of movies to watch, and I'm adding Dear God to Laura's. She needs to see Tim Conway in that movie. :D Also, I'm placing Thelma and Louise and Bonnie and Clyde on my list of movies. They are classics that I've never finished, and I would like to watch them.