In “The Host,” the new film from the Stephanie “Twilight” Meyer’s fantasy factory, most humans have been “occupied” by a race of aliens who take on the bodies of their hosts. They don’t change the world, they just perfect it—there’s no hatred, no violence, no fighting and everyone is polite. Sounds like Toronto in 1956.
When we first meet Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan) she is a human girl on the run from the Seekers, aliens in human form who have taken over the planet. To protect her brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury) she is captured and injected with a parasitic ET soul that resembles an iridescent silver fish. The alien, named Wanderer or Wanda for short, is now in control of Melanie’s body, but, using sheer strength of will, she fights back, winning over her alien invader who helps her find her brother and other human loved ones.
“The Host” is to sci fi what “Twilight” is to “Dracula.” The alien plot is an anchor for the love story, not the other way around.
That’s right, Meyer is back with another otherworldly love story.
This time around it’s a love tetragon between Melanie—or at least her consciousness—Wanderer—in the form of Melanie’s body—and two human boys, Jarrod (Max Irons) and Ian (Jake Abel). Mel loves Jarrod but Wanda loves Ian and Melanie’s inner mind becomes jealous of Wanda’s shell and her desires for Ian.
Got it?
Asimov this ain’t. It does contain some interesting speculative ideas—ie: if our memories are still alive, are we?—but the framework is inherently uncinematic. For instance the push-and-pull between Melanie and her alien intruder is played out via a voice over of Mel arguing with the alien. Ronan has the unenviable task of not only delivering a massive amount of narration, but also reacting to it.
Then there is the frequently awkward way characters have to interact with Mel, Wanda or any combination thereof. At one point Ian asks Wanda, in Mel’s body, “Is there anyway Melanie could give us some privacy?” When she’s asked about having two souls trapped in her body Wanda says, “It’s crowded.” With so many characters trapped in one body Sybil has nothing on this girl.
Occasionally Melanie’s suppressed will physically manifests with a tic—she’ll force her old body to throw a pencil to the ground rather than draw a map for her Seeker captors—but instead of feeling organic to the character it looks more like an homage to a 50s b-movie camp.
“The Host” has elements of camp—unintentional probably—but it’s not “Plan Nine from Outer Space.” It’s an earnest story about love conquering all that is a little too earthbound to be called sci fi and a bit too spacy to be taken terribly seriously as anything but a Harlequin for teens.
Is Saoirse Ronan the new Meryl Streep? For years Streep was almost as well known for her facility with world accents as she was for her acting ability. Her aptitude for everything from Danish (“The Bridges of Madison County”) to Polish (“Sophie’s Choice”) to New Zealand (“A Cry in the Dark”) to Bronx (“Doubt”) to Midwestern (“A Prairie Home Companion”) dialects became such a topic of conversation that even her Wikipedia page has a section titled “Accents and dialects.”
Now, along comes Ronan, a prodigiously talented young actress, who speaks with an Irish brogue in real life, but uses a variety of inflections on-screen. Scottish (“Atonement”), American (“The Lovely Bones), Polish (“The Way Back”) and English (“Death Defying Acts”)—she can do it all.
In her new film, “Hanna” she aces a German accent putting her one step closer to Streep territory. She plays the title character, a blonde, blue-eyed killing machine, the right age to be a Hannah Montana fan, except she’s never heard music and has no idea who Miley Cyrus is. She was home-schooled with über tough love by her father and ex-CIA agent Eric (Eric Bana) in the remotest part of Finland. He trains her to survive, to adapt or die. When her boot camp is completed she activates an electronic signal and with the words, “Marissa Wiegler, come and get me,” begins a wild life-or-death chase through Morocco and Europe. CIA operative Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) is desperate to bring Hanna in before a secret about her past is revealed.
“Hanna” isn’t exactly an action movie, although there are a number of breathless fight scenes, it’s more of a coming-of-age story about a feral girl learning about the outside world. Director Joe Wright weaves the action sequences throughout, but never forgets to develop Hanna’s character. Ronan plays her almost like an alien or someone from another time. She’s unaccustomed to TV, electricity and the comforts of modern life and you can really see the learning curve on the actresses’ open face. It’s a remarkable performance aided by Wright’s sure handed direction. Set to an anxiety inducing soundtrack by The Chemical Brothers he frames every scene with its own personality. For instance, when Hanna is with an English family she adopts for a time, the pace is gentle, there’s music and the tone is poignant as she observes a real family for the first time in her life. When she’s on her own the settings are discordant and strange.
It’s engrossing filmmaking—check out Hanna’s introduction to the modern world in a hotel in Morocco—that wordlessly brings the viewer into Hanna’s world.
“Hanna” is as good a thriller as we’ve seen for a long time, but it’s about more than just the thrills. There’s genuine heart here and that’s what makes it great. That and the mini-Meryl acting skills of Saoirse Ronan.
If the latest film from “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson is to be believed the afterlife looks a lot like a Pink Floyd album cover from the late 1970s. In “The Lovely Bones,” a loose adaptation of the bestselling book by Alice Sebold, he goes heavy on the computer generated imagery to create a slick looking world, which despite the best efforts of the cast, is almost bereft of emotion.
In case you’re not a member of Oprah’s book club, who chose “The Lovely Bones” and propelled it up the best seller charts like a rocket, it is the story of Susie Salmon (“like the fish”) a 14 year old girl murdered in suburban Pennsylvania in 1973. Susie, however, didn’t go quietly into the long goodnight. From a place somewhere between Heaven and Earth she watches over her distraught family and tries to guide them through their time of despair.
Some of the now controversial CGI—early trade reviews called the film indulgent and “evocative of “The Sound of Music” or “The Wizard of Oz” one moment, “The Little Prince” or “Teletubbies” the next”—is quite beautiful and some of it is overkill. When Susie is making her arrival in “her heaven” it is a beautiful representation of a spirit floating away. Hugh shots of her never-to-be boyfriend Ray, reflected in a body of water that separates them and Ray again on a gazebo, surrounded by an undulating landscape, are a bit heavy handed. Jackson is the real deal, a skilled filmmaker and visualist, but he has to learn to trust the story and not let the technology do the talking.
Performance wise Jackson has cast well and gets good, solid work from his actors, particularly Rachel Weisz as the grieving mother, Susan Sarandon as the boozy grandmother and Rose McIver as the spunky sister Lindsey but it is the two central roles that the whole movie hinges on.
As the murderous Mr. Harvey Stanley Tucci is creepy; all twitchy movements and squeaky voiced. He’s Norman Bates without the overbearing Mom and wonderfully cast. Tucci, it appears can do anything. Earlier this year he played Julia Child’s loving diplomat husband in “Julie & Julia” and held his own opposite Meryl Streep. Now he’s the creepiest bad guy this year since Hans Landa drank a glass of milk with a French farmer in “Inglourious Basterds.”
At the heart of the film, however, is an arresting central performance by Saoirse Ronan as Susie, the little girl who never got to kiss a boy or see her fifteenth birthday. Her luminous presence gives the film whatever soul it has and her generous screen presence is a good tonic for the effects heavy scenes she plays in the “in between,” the blue horizon between heaven and earth.
“The Lovely Bones” should have been a better movie. It’s not terrible, mind you; it just doesn’t push the emotional buttons that a story about the murder of a young person should. Jackson is still in epic “LOTR” mode, taking a small, intimate movie and needlessly cluttering it up with bigger than life images that get in the way of the feeling of the piece.
City of Ember, based on the 2003 book by Jeanne DuPrau, is the newest example of a brand new genre: post-apocalyptic kid’s flicks. Following hot on the heels of WALL-E, the Pixar cartoon about a robot in charge of cleaning up a deserted, dead Earth, City of Ember is another dark vision of an underground world solely reliant on one failing energy source (sound familiar?) that plays like a cross between a subterranean Nancy Drew’s Passport to Danger and Blade Runner.
At the beginning of the film, once again humans have destroyed Earth. In order to save mankind a group of forward thinking scientists—known as “the builders”— create a self-sufficient underground world, with the ultimate plan that after 200 years people would return to the surface and start again. Of course over time their plans get lost, only to be discovered, decaying and damaged, by twelve-year-old Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan), the great-great-great grand daughter of the seventh Mayor of Ember. With the help of Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) she must escape the clutches of the corrupt Mayor (Bill Murray) and find a way to the surface before Ember is plunged into darkness forever.
Think of City of Ember as Terry Gilliam lite. It breathes the same air as Brazil, his post-apocalypse masterpiece, but has had many of the rougher edges smoothed out to appeal to a teen audience. It features Disney-esque mild action, strong female role-models and engaging performances, particularly from Murray as the crooked Mayor and Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan, who is a natural in front of the camera. Best of all, the crumbling together city is beautifully rendered as a nightmarish vision of the future, complete with tilting tenement buildings, a giant gold generator that looks borrowed from the movie Metropolis and lots of futuristic grime and rust.
City of Ember drags a bit in its final moments, not really building the head of steam necessary to give the climax the edge-of-your-seat feel it should have, but it ends on a poetic note and should please the whole family from teenagers on up.
In The Host, the hotly anticipated new film written by Twilight scribe Stephenie Meyer, a parasitic alien is injected into the body of Melanie Stryder, played by Saoirse Ronan.
Sounds grim, but remember, this is from the lady who gave us sparkly vampires and undying love, so the alien inside is kind of a lovesick creature who helps the host body find her loved ones.
That’s a lot more benign than other parasitic alien movies.
The most famous alien organism — in the movie Alien, naturally — literally burst on the screen, poking its horrible head through the chest of John Hurt in one of cinema’s most indelibly creepy moments.
To get a natural reaction from his actors, director Ridley Scott didn’t fully explain what was about to happen as they shot the scene.
“Everyone (on the crew) was wearing raincoats,” said Sigourney Weaver. “We should have been a little suspicious.”
When the alien came careening out of Hurt’s body the actors were genuinely surprised.
Blood oozed all over the set and the shock was so intense it’s alleged that Veronica Cartwright passed out and Yaphet Kotto was so freaked out he went to his room and wouldn’t talk to anyone.
Much less bloody is The Puppet Masters, which sees the earth invaded by alien “slugs” that piggyback on people’s backs, controlling their minds.
Based on the Robert A. Heinlein 1951 novel, the film starred Donald Sutherland, who also appeared in one of the genre’s classics, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The original movie of the story, taken from Jack Finney’s classic novel The Body Snatchers, dates from 1956 and has been declared by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or esthetically significant,” but it is the Sutherland version, from 1978, that is truly chilling.
The story of alien infiltration — humans are being replaced one by one by emotionless ETs — was called “the best film of its kind ever made” by The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael and a movie that “validates the entire concept of remakes,” according to Variety.
The strangest movie parasite wasn’t an alien, but a bug that feeds on fear.
In the Tingler, these parasites attach themselves to their host’s spine and tingle when the host is frightened or scared.
In its original 1959 run it was shown with the Percepto! gimmick that gave some of the theatre seats a small electrical jolt — or tingle — during the movie’s climax.
Chances are the first movie assassin names that pop into your head are The Jackal, Martin Q. Blank or El Mariachi. What do they have in common, other than flashy names and a predilection for gunning down their on-screen enemies? They’re all men.
What about the ladies? Beatrix Kiddo, Charlie Baltimore or Jane Smith?
Jean Luc Goddard said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” and often these days filmmakers are placing that gun in the hands of female film assassins. Nikita is back on the tube and earlier this year Saoirse Ronan played a deadly 16-year-old in Hanna. This weekend, Avatar’s Zoe Saldana is back as a stone-cold killer in Colombiana.
As Charlie Baltimore, Geena Davis created one of the screen’s most loved female assassins in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Suffering from amnesia, when her past catches up with her she flip flops from suburban mom to killer. Best Line? “They’re gonna blow my head off, you know. This is the last time I’ll ever be pretty.”
Angelina Jolie’s deadly demeanour has pumped up several action movies. Lara Croft was a gun-slinging super-heroine, but she’s also played assassins in two movies.
In Mr. and Mrs. Smith she’s a hitlady assigned to kill her own on-screen (and future real life) partner, Brad Pitt. “Still alive, baby?” she purrs after trying to shoot him through a wall.
Also, as Fox in Wanted she was a member of the Fraternity, a deadly group of killers with the useful ability to shoot around corners. Best line? “We kill one, and maybe save a thousand. That’s the code of the Fraternity.”
The highest body count must go to Beatrix Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. As a bride done wrong by her former Deadly Viper Assassination Squad colleagues, (including Vivica A. Fox who plays Vernita Green and Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii), Kiddo slices and dices her way through more than 100 opponents.
But the two most unlikely female assassins on film were found in Leon: The Professional and Kick-Ass. In the former, Natalie Portman was a 12-year-old who learns how to kill from her teacher, Léon (Jean Reno), a skillful but sensitive hitman.
In Kick-Ass, a 2010 action-comedy starring Nicolas Cage and Chloë Moretz, Hit Girl (Moretz) asks her father (and assassin mentor) for a Benchmade model 42 butterfly knife for her eleventh birthday.
Almost twenty years after dressing up Brad Pitt as an undead marionette, “Interview with a Vampire” director Neil Jordan is back at it with “Byzantium,” a gothic tale of secrets and blood sucking.
Based on a play by Moira Buffini, “Byzantium” gives a new spin to the Dracula mythology. Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) are two-hundred-year-old vampire mother and daughter trying to survive in modern day England. Setting up shop in a British seaside town, Clara goes into business as a Madame, turning the dilapidated Byzantium Hotel into a brothel, while Eleanor, frozen in time at age sixteen, befriends a local hemophiliac boy named Frank (Caleb Landry Jones). Their lifestyle choices—prostitution, sanguinary pursuits and general melancholy—soon bring unwanted attention from the townsfolk and an ancient brotherhood.
Like “Interview with a Vampire,” this movie centers around an account of the past. Eleanor, a melancholy child tired of the burden of her family secret, pens a story outlining the lurid origins of their immortality. “It’s like Edgar Alen Poe and Mary Shelley had a very strange child,” says her teacher. As the story passes hands, the movie flits back-and-forth between modern day and 1804, slowly unfolding the bloody tale.
Atmospheric and gothic, “Byzantium” is a vampire tale that will leave “True Blood” fans wanting more. With no fangs—these succubae pierce their victims with pointed thumbnails before draining them dry—coffins or capes—although Clara does wear a bustier emblazoned with he word SUCK—in sight, these vamps are unlike anything we’ve seen before.
The revisionist horror history is engaging enough, but seems a little lifeless, even for a movie about vampires. Lacking any real dramatic tension, it meanders through time—past and present—failing to work up any real momentum. It’s slow and contemplative in Eleanor’s scenes, more rapid fire in Clara’s, who is a bit more enthusiastic about the wet work.
All in all “Byzantium” is an elegant, if slightly dull film, that tries to bring something new to the “Twilightized” vampire genre, but staked by flawed storytelling.
Not since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has there been a novel so faithfully modified for the big screen. Atonement, adapted from the popular 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan—sometimes called Britain’s greatest living novelist—perfectly captures the tone of the novel reproducing many scenes and much of the dialogue directly from the book.
Set in pre-World War II England Atonement begins as an idyll. A rich family with two daughters, the fetching and flirty Cecelia (Keira Knightley) and 13-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan), are vacationing at their rural country home. The handsome son of the family’s housekeeper Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) is the object of affection for both girls, but he only has eyes for Cecelia. When Briony catches the two in a passionate embrace she is overcome by jealousy. To keep the young lovers apart she impulsively comes up with a childish, but devastating plan to accuse him of a crime he didn’t commit.
There are serious repercussions to her impulsive of jealousy and years later she must atone for her actions.
Leading the cast is James McAvoy in a role that should catapult him to the ranks of a-list stardom. His emotionally rich take on Robbie follows the character from youthful innocence to the hardened edge of someone who was forced to grow up too quickly. There’s a range here he has never displayed before and it is one of the best performances of the year. Knightley—who looks like she was born to play 30s era flappers—is her usual charismatic self and brings much sexual energy to her scenes with McAvoy. And yes, for fans of the book, the green dress is very much on display.
Atonement is an epic tale disguised as a human drama. At its heart it is a love story, but through the trio of main characters—Robbie, Cecelia and Briony—it also tells us of the class structure of mid-century England, how deceit and remorse can ruin a life and how, sometimes, love can win out. Directed with raw power and compassion by Joe Wright, the movie is chock full of big ideas but never loses sight of the romance that is at the core of the film.
In “The Host,” the new film from the Stephanie “Twilight” Meyer’s fantasy factory, most humans have been “occupied” by a race of aliens who take on the bodies of their hosts. They don’t change the world, they just perfect it—there’s no hatred, no violence, no fighting and everyone is polite. Sounds like Toronto in 1956.
