Adam Nayman
he Host is everything Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds tried and failed to be: a seamless, rough-intrusion-of-the-fantastic B-movie with a hard and real glint of contemporary relevance and resonance.
Where are we? When are we? But there’s no question about what we’re looking at. The names and places and whys are irrelevant: this is what genocide—actual, unimagined, twentieth-century genocide—looks like.
This is a snuff narrative in which the guilty not only go unpunished but wind up free to continue the cycle—the movie ends with a wink and a smile and the promise of an identical home invasion a few cottages down the lake.
Where, exactly, to slot everybody’s (ok, not everybody’s) favorite Austrian provocateur in the movies-as-politics continuum?
It’s a movie about Louis, an aged soldier of fortune (Michel Subor, resplendently craggy) whose body appears to be breaking down. He brokers himself an under-the-table heart transplant and then tries, at great expense, to reconnect with his estranged son, who may or may not be in Tahiti.
Ultimately, Nolan’s film is a triumph of casting: fan-types have been clamoring for Christian Bale since American Psycho. Because really, what is Patrick Bateman if not the slightly crazier, NC-17 version of Batman: a fantastically endowed sociopath-playboy in thrall to his deep-seated obsessions?
With Birth, Jonathan Glazer saves critics the troubling of anointing him a filmmaker to watch—he enacts the benediction for them, with every attention-grabbing shot and ostentatious directorial gesture.
When a film as bad as The Grudge, Takashi Shimizu's remake of his own 2002 Ju-On, makes so much damned money ($40 million in its opening weekend), it's pertinent to ask “why?”— preferably bellowing from one's knees, arms open to the dark and indifferent sky.
Pitt’s personality vacuum as Achilles means that we don’t particularly care if this super soldier goes along. Meanwhile, as Troy is governed by the doddering old fool King Priam (played by that expert doddering old fool, Peter O’Toole) and its young prince Paris is, basically, a self-absorbed knob, there’s not much reason to care about its citizens’ fates.