The Dark Knight

The Super Hero formula seems to be great for feature length films. Having action, romance, comedy, and whatever else most people go to the movies for. Luckily, not all of them turn out like Hancock. Unluckily, not all of them turn out like Batman.

The Dark Knight obviously has a "hero" and a villain. But it has its own style that sets it apart from other super hero movies (and other movies for that matter.) I haven't read the comic, but I assume its nature and Mr. Nolan's direction is the reason why. The Dark Knight manages a moral battlefield and a darker atmosphere among the normal super hero dilemmas.

Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is easily the biggest reason to see this next Batman installment. The Joker consumes every shot he's in, and really creates a brilliantly insane character. That being said, other aspects of the film felt more like after thoughts than anything else, both for their mediocrity individually and relatively.

I appreciated the ride on themes rather than consecutive cheap thrills. The stunts were great, thankfully making rather dull fist fights into something interesting. And the cinematography compounded the good scenes into better ones, and left the mediocre ones as is. Overall, the mood, the themes, and the film as a whole surpassed Batman Begins, but didn't earn itself a place among the "Elite."

The final verdict: watch. The Joker was spectacular. Most of the accompaniment was good. It was very well done, but didn't tap into my style.

The Host (괴물)

Just finished watching "The Host" (aka 괴물 in korean). So I'd thought I'd take this chance to kick off a new blog of small movie reviews.

The movie was first introduced to me as the Korean Godzilla, a movie which has held some of the records for Korean film. Of course, the plot does involve a monster and water but the similarities end pretty quickly. The movie is obviously in Korean but there are English subtitles and an easy to follow dialog making it an easy movie to watch for foreign audiences.

There is plenty of humor in the cast as well as a good balance between action scenes and more of the paced story telling. The movie starts out with cheerful afternoon by the Han River but quickly develops into a national disaster zone. While the characters tend to fall into a few basic tropes they have their own little twists which makes the movie fun to follow and adds to the gung-ho attitude that dominates much of the film's progression.

The filming was not anything spectacular but they do manage to pull of some exceptionally good angles for some of the encounters making the film a bit suspenseful at moments. One of the more impressive aspects of the film includes the special effects (the creature itself is impressively crafted using CG). All in all, there is a polished feeling to the movie.

The final verdic: watch. It is good to see foreign films reaching this quality of production in film making and I look forward to more samplings of Korean films.