Exhibit 1.10

Song Kang-ho

I spent half of The Host trying to figure out if the sweet, stunted father was the same actor who played the loquacious, bull-headed cop in Bong Joon-ho's last movie (Memories of a Murder). It is the same actor, and he's fantastic. So are both the movies, for what it's worth.

Memories of a Murder notable for how it re-imagines--at least to this American--the cop-drama, making it less about psychological horror and investigative brilliance than frustration and entropy. Confronted with the country's first real serial killer, Song Kang-ho's character is an aggressively cocky oaf initially more concerned with appearing to be a clever investigator than actually being one. As the murders continue and he doesn't find answers in his slapdash borrowing from film and television police procedurals, his violence becomes increasingly out of control while the killer's is undertaken with an opposite dispassion. It would be easy to say the movie is about this small Korean town's loss of innocence at the hands of "unspeakable evil," but Song Kang-ho's character makes it clear the murders--and the government's impotence in stopping them--is an inevitability of the country's rapid industrialization and erratic political situation at the time the film was set (mid-1980s). That Song--like the killer, like the government--preys on the weak seems all too natural for him.

Likewise The Host takes what is otherwise a genre movie and instills it with a political awareness, both of S. Korea's own democratization and of America's international motivations. As much as the monster, America is the bad guy here (though S. Korea's government doesn't exactly get a free pass). That said, the politics are really just background to a thoroughly engaging creature feature. Here Song plays an almost man-child whose first interactions with his 13-year-old daughter go from her telling him about parents' day (which his brother attended instead of him), her laughing at his attempts to save dimes to buy her a new cellphone, and then him sweetly giving her a beer. Both roles require an intense physical presence, but where Song's character in Memories is a leaky powder keg, his character here is so soft at times it's as if he is going to collapse, blob-like, into himself.

Much more could be said for the direction of Bong Joon-ho's direction was is beautiful, disturbing, and highly accessible. Without insult I might think of Bong as a kind-of Korean Spielberg, but I can't begin to think of an actor like Song in American cinema. Russell Crowe, maybe, but Song has more of a doughy false bravado where as Russell Crowe probably actually does believe he could take down the Roman Empire single-handedly. And that comparison only really works in Memories. I can't see Russell playing down like Song does in The Host.

Paul Giamatti? Philip Seymour Hoffman? But I can't see either of them mercilessly beating suspects and pulling it off. I'm at a loss. Would love to hear suggestions.

P.S. If you have Netflix you can stream Memories of a Murder. Do it. Now.