I saw two movies in the last week, The Host and 300. I'd say skip both, but at least wait for The Host to come out on DVD.

Let's begin, shall we? All right, The Host is basically a monster movie with politcal overtones. The politics belong to Korea, where The Host was shot, and you don't have to have kept up with Korea to have some fun at this movie. The story is pretty basic - after a lot of formaldahyde is dumped into the Han River in Seoul, a monster is born. A large, CG monster that blends rather seemlessly into the background. Kudos to the guys who did the effects here. It's better than a lot of what Hollywood puts out.

So, in the first act, the monster comes out of the water in the middle of the day. It's a big reveal, and it's really early in the film. Normally, this might kill any suspense a monster movie has, but it's loads of fun, a little bloody, and a great ride. Our hero, Park Gang-du, helps his dad run a food stand on the river. Gang-du is rather lazy, falls asleep at odd intervals, and so on. His story is pretty clear. He's going to rise to the moment.

His daughter, Park Hyun-seo is taken by the monster to its lair where she's kept for a later meal. Then the second act begins, which is where The Host runs into problems. It's flabby as second acts go. A good script editor could have shaved a good 15 minutes off this thing, and nothing would have been lost. But the third act does kick in, and Gang-du and his family come to the rescue of Hyun-seo in a spectacular face-off with the monster.

Final verdict: Wait for the DVD, but see it.

Then there's 300. I've been kind of hyping this to my friends, but I admit that a few weeks before it premiered I was already getting ambivalent about it. The Spartans were a pretty rigid group. I read somewhere that rooting for them was like rooting for North Korea. And the fact that they were pedarests to the man, well, you can see why I'd be kind of bothered by rooting for them.

Now, in the movie, the Athenians become the boy lovers, and everyone fights wearing leather loincloths, and so on. I can accept the loincloths. But don't bring up the man-boy love thing if you're going to distort it. Just let it drop.

Then there was a feeling I had, that the whole thing was a little more than vaguely racist. It was Greek versus Persian, but in the movie it was a bunch of white guys against a bunch of brown people and yellow people. There was one scene that had a fade out straight from the 20s. I wasn't too uncomfortable with it, because it didn't really surprise me. But I had to wonder what the filmmakers were communicating to the audience. Does Zack Snyder really know what he's saying with this movie? Does he care?

It was pretty, but it wasn't very groundbreaking. This style of filmmaking has already been done in so many other movies, like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City, Immortel, Casshern, and arguably the Star Wars prequels (especially 2 and 3).

On top of all of this, the dialogue, which kind of worked in the comic, just doesn't work here. Mostly there just needed to be less of it. In one scene, when the Spartans are watching the Persian boats lashed by a storm, the narrator says something along the lines of "Only one of us kept his Spartan reserve." The camera goes to Leonidas, whom we already know is the king of the Spartans. The narrator continues: "Our king. Leonidas." You know, just in case we missed it or weren't sure. There are more moments like that, but that's the one I remember most clearly.

There were scenes added to the story from the graphic novel, of course, in order to flesh out the run time. These scenes are of King Leonidas' wife, Gorgo, trying to get the council in Sparta to send the army to Leonidas' aid. Whenever they came up, the pace of the film ground to a halt, or nearly so. Dominic West, who plays Theron, the bad Spartan, is the only saving grace in these scenes. But because they were so not great, I'm not sure if they - in their concept - should have been excised from the script or not. I just can't tell. They didn't add anything to the story that I could see, but if they hadn't been there, the movie would have been exhausting to sit through.

It's too late to warn you all away, of course, because 300 has made an ass-load of cash. And it was destined to. Nevertheless, if you haven't seen it, skip it. Don't even wait for the DVD.