The Host

Poor Gang-du! He toils ineffectively with his gruff dad in their snack bar on the banks of the Han River in Seoul, failing to even stay awake at the register. Is he dim-witted? Or just lazy? Maybe a little of both, but he has one redeeming quality: he loves his daughter Hyun-seo more than anything else. He squirrels away dimes and quarters here and there, saving them in an empty soup can, to buy her a new cell phone one day.

Then, sunbathers and people lunching on the riverbank spot something hanging off the Wonhyo bridge. It glistens and unfolds and slips silently into the muddy water.

Caught up in the crowd’s curiosity, Gang-du finds himself at the edge of the Han … watching with the others as an amorphous black shape nears. He throws a beer can in the water. It floats, then disappears with a splash. Then the black shape is gone.

What is it? Is it dangerous? People stare at each other, then out at the brown water, asking questions and shrugging.

Then the screaming starts. Gang-du whirls around, and – is he the only one that sees it? Something bigger than a truck is on the shore, something black and slimy but incredibly fast, and it’s rushing towards them all, gaining speed and leaving bloodied bodies in its wake. After a moment’s hesitation, the crowd dissolves in frenzied panic, Gang-du among them, dodging this monster that’s tearing through them.

The thing kills its way through the riverbank, selecting victims at random to ingest (to be regurgitated for later feeding), and Gang-du and an American manage to wound it while saving the lives of some helpless folks trapped in a camper. Gang-du escapes down the embankment, but the American … not so lucky.

Hyun-seo! His daughter! Where is she? Gang-du races back to the snack bar and finds her, seizing her hand, pulling her out of the path of the enraged monster. He stumbles, grabs her hand again, then manages to reach safety – only to find that it’s not his daughter’s hand, but another child’s, he’s holding.

Then, a hundred feet away, Hyun-seo is looking at him, puzzled, and quite suddenly the creature’s tentacle-tail wraps around her and she’s pulled with it into the Han river as it flees to its hidden lair …

The Host (2006) is hands-down the best monster movie I’ve seen in the past couple of years. The director, Bong Joon-ho, in a sharp break with Hollywood movies of the past thirty years or so (see Alien, 1979), is not afraid to show his monster early – the creature makes an appearance 13 minutes into the movie. Yes, Spielberg’s tripods were more awe-inspiring, or should I say, dread-inspiring, but that movie was populated by jerks. Gang-du and his family of eccentrics who wind up doing very personal battle with the beast were actually quite endearing. The special effects of the Host, which fall approximately midway between Spielberg’s hundred-million-dollar extravaganzas and a typical SciFi Channel movie, are convincing enough that I wasn’t thinking about them.

The Host broke all box-office records when it was released, becoming the highest-grossing film ever in South Korea, and won best film and best actor at the Asian Film Awards. If you’re into this genre, see it. See it. It’s subtitled, and I’d recommend viewing it that way for a more authentic experience as the English overdubbing tends to sound kinda silly. Oh, and see it!

Aquinas I

Just finished a book by Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols entitled Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction to His Life, Work, and Influence. As far as an introductory book goes, it ain’t. I had the impression that the author expected a prior familiarity with Thomas and his times. He seemed to tread water around Thomas' philosophy, too, kinda supplying a rambling overview and diving here and there into peripheral waters that looked pretty to him. I must admit that my mind would wander quite often, but I will spend the week to re-read it simply because I was drawn in several times.

I liked these two long sentences, at the end of the chapter entitled "Thomas in History":

Moreover, the realism and sobriety of the Thomist metaphysic – that is, the particular way in which the Thomist philosophy exercises those rights – enables the doctrinal theologian to speak to the common man (or at least the common reasonably well-educated man!) with some well-founded expectation of being heard. Its clarity is refreshing in a post-modern world where parodistic allusiveness, randomness and incoherence are frequently erected into pseudo-virtues that make reflective life an intellectual mess.

Hey – the "common reasonably well-educated man" – that’s me!

And the description of the post-modern world is the clearest statement of everything I hate about modern philosophy.

I’ve also been working my was slowly – and I really, really mean s-l-o-w-l-y – through the Summa Theologica. It’s an unbelievably massive work. I have the two volumes from the Great Books series and it's something like just under two thousand pages in length. I think I'm 9 pages in. So it’s obviously something you don’t read during a long holiday weekend. But for the past couple of days I read a few of the "articles" with absolutely no thought of being rushed or even completing it. My only goal is to keep reading it. If I could get through my Hegel anthology in a couple of months, this should be cake.

Cryptonomicon I

I’m 40 percent done with Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, and I can safely make one pronouncement with certainty: I have never read a book quite like this one.

According to this man, Stephenson’s the best science fiction writer working today. Though Cryptonomicon isn’t (so far) science fiction, I’ve come to agree after some initial hesitation. The book’s probably best described as part historical fiction, part cutting-edge business textbook (!?!). The story shifts back and forth between the 1940s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, generally switching time periods every chapter or so.

During World War II we partake in some very gripping adventures shadowing a cryptographer assigned to a joint American-British special forces unit. The visuals here would make a phenomenal summer blockbuster. I can see the CGI and hear the Dolby stereo! The best vignette so far has to be the team salvaging a locked safe from a grounded German U-boat on the verge of sliding back into the sea during a violent thunderstorm. Stephenson mixes a bunch of colorful fellows with actual historical personalities, the most prominent of which is Dr. Alan Turing, one of the forefathers of the computer.

Flash forward sixty-five years and we’re knee-deep in the process of Epiphyte Corp’s creation of a "data safe haven" in the Philippines. Stephenson’s knowledge of startups and state-of-the-art computer technology is quite simply unbelievable. Makes me wanna shake my head and throw in the towel – how can I write anything with as much authority? Our heros (one of which happens to be the grandson of the WWII cryptographer … hmmmm) are up to their eyeballs in the shark-infested waters of the high-tech high-finance world that’s almost as dangerous as Europe or the Pacific during the Big One.

But that’s just a two-paragraph teaser of the book a little less than halfway in. Now: why do I say I’ve never read a book quite like this one?

Stephenson writes as if he had all the time in the world. That’s it, if I had to sum it all up in a sentence. Long, lazy paragraphs, packed with beautiful imagery, witty turns of phrase, ideas thrown at you from out of left field, a blunt laugh unexpected as an uppercut. Slowly his characters unfold, and they’re more real than the people in the cubicles surrounding you forty hours a week at work in the "real" world. Every word, every picture, every sentence spoken, every metaphor and simile, all in the confident hands of an artist, a craftsman, and you only have to trust it will lead somewhere rewarding. An unrushed master doing work he loves. That’s Stephenson, and the result is Cryptonomicon.

Examples, you say? Sure. I love this single powerful sentence describing the mind of Alan Turing:

He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain.

What about the humor, and the historical figures you said he wrote about, you ask. Okay. I liked this paragraph enough to mark it, found in the chapter describing in painstaking detail the untimely demise of Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind of Pearl Harbor:

That is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of plane "Betty," an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again, the Yanks name even their own planes after woman, and paint naked ladies on their sacred instruments of war! If they had samurai swords, Americans would probably decorate the blades with nail polish.

Oh, and the novel is ultimately about cryptography, so remember: Every number in the book has some special significance. They’re all prime numbers, or products of primes, or primes plus one to disguise the fact that they were primes. Hmmmmm.

Full review to follow in a month or two when I’m done with the gigantic lumbering beast of a book.