Friday, April 6, 2007

A Very, Very Large Tadpole


Quote of the day:
“Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.”
--Albert Einstein

Quote of the day no. 2:
“Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers $20,000 to $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful of ineffective way of providing healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms.”
--Chip Ward, former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library, from Tomdispatch.com.

We had another post-hospital first this evening--our first trip to a monster movie. We saw The Host, a South Korean film that’s a 2007 version of Them! which came out in 1954.

In Them!, a nuclear test causes a colony of ants in the desert to mutate to the size of hippopotami, and boy are they mad. Some of them wind up in the storm drains below Los Angeles, and they are fought back by Army troops led by James Arness.

Them! is fun for all the reasons any monster movie is fun. The ants, in spite of being crude by today’s standards, are actually a bit scary. They have a tendency to sneak up on unsuspecting people. And it takes a while to figure out exactly what variety of Raid (actually, fire) will bring the critters down. James Arness displays just the right amount of 1950s bravado.

In The Host, a chemical deliberately dumped into the river results in a giant, mutant, slobbering, human-chewing tadpole who can swim, walk and do Tarzan on bridges. While the film is set in South Korea, it is American authorities who both cause this mutation and make it difficult for the hero to deal with it. And these authorities are not so much nasty as goofy and simply wrong.

There are many parallels between the films. In various ways, The Host! seems to be Them! with the perspective of the enormous shift in culture and attitude that’s happened over the last 53 years.

But I was most interested in how American authority is viewed in these two films. In 1954’s Them!, authority is treated with respect, and the army can do no wrong. In 2007’s The Host, Korean authorities are treated as bullies and Americans are seen as obsessive buffoons.

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