ething more diplomatic, anyway, than "How come you all suck?" Maybe this is better: "You guys all try to rip off the Japanese and Korean films that straddle the barrier between horror film and art film. Is it just the lack of subtitles that make your versions suck, or do they suck in other languages too?" I'll be in Austin to check out a passel of the low-budget American indies and documentaries for which that appealing festival has become known -- as well as its great weather and pleasant hangout potential, which make it quite unlike a certain other film festival I could mention in a much colder part of the American West. There are also a few higher-profile events, including the premiere of "The Lookout," the thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of "Brick") and directed by Scott Frank (who wrote Steven Soderbergh's "Out of Sight") and a presentation by Robert Rodriguez, who will offer a peek at "Grindhouse," his mind-bogglingly self-referential new anthology project with Quentin Tarantino. But before I catch that plane for warmer climes, let's talk movies. Beyond the messy excellence ("messcellence"?) of "The Host," we've also got a documentary about an even scarier monster, the goblin of credit-card debt on which our entire shaky economic edifice is built. There's a terrifying drama shot on actual locations of the 1994 Rwanda massacre, and a comedy about an almost-forgotten country called Yugoslavia. "The Host": It rose from American slime to destroy the Korean family! It must be destroyed! Yes, the fishy, flippery, 60-foot-long thingummy who emerges from the polluted waters of the Han River in central Seoul to terrorize the populace in "The Host" is the result of poison from an American military facility. Well, what the hell else would cause such a horrible mutation? The fertilizer off Uncle Hang-soo's farm? I don't think so. There's no question that Bong Joon-ho's film, which is the most satisfying monster movie in many years, takes some easy shots at the American military-technological colossus, and at the Korean government's sheepdog-like subservience to it. I'm inclined to interpret pretty much any junky old movie as a dialectical critique of whateverness, but in this case both the sanctimonious leftists and the contrarian critics are reading way too much into this simultaneously big-hearted and farcical adventure. "The Host" may have one foot in the allegorical and mysterious world of contemporary Asian horror cinema, but the other one is closer to the sentimental big-screen spectacles of Steven Spielberg, or even Frank Capra. Bong's human villains are about as ambiguous as his monster: The Americans are diabolical Strangeloves and the Koreans are two-faced sycophants. His hero, on the other hand, is Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), a middle-aged loser with a bad blond 'do who slumbers away the days at his dad's riverside squid shack. (That isn't any kind of a joke: Koreans really, really like squid.) Gang-du's dad (Byeon Hie-bong) is a grump and complainer, his beautiful sister (Bae Du-na) is a champion archer who loses an international match through indecision, and his brother (Park Hae-il) is an embittered alcoholic. About the only sensible one is Gang-du's daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung), a resourceful little person of about 9 who puts up with this family as patiently as she can manage. Do you suppose coming face-to-face with a giant mutant whatzit will give this struggling family a chance at redemption, or what? There's tragedy beneath the funniest bits of "The Host" and humor beneath the most serious passages, which is one reason why I don't think it should be viewed as some earnest political parable. When the big kahuna emerges from the muddy Han and begins gnawing up picnickers, the resulting chaos is both upsetting and comic -- at least until it grabs Hyun-seo and disappears. Even then, the film's tone is constitutionally unsettled: At the stage-managed ceremony of public grieving after the monster's first attack, the entire Park family collapses in a slapstick heap. As a stern orange-suited bureaucrat seeks to quarantine those who (like Gang-du) have actually touched the beast -- reputedly the host of a dangerous virus -- he wipes out in a pratfall worthy of Oliver Hardy. Hyun-seo is gone, all right -- but is she really dead? After Gang-du gets a cellphone call from somewhere deep in the Han River sewer system, there is hope. Of course, as Gang-du explodes to a sinister American doctor late in the film, "Nobody ever fucking listens to me!" But our plucky family of working-class washouts doesn't give up easily. Infighting and bickering all the way, they take on the Korean cops and military, the evil and meddlesome Yanks (who want to release a poison gas called Agent Yellow in the city center), and, oh yeah, a hideous mutant creature who has their beloved Hyun-seo stashed somewhere for some future snacktime. While the ignorance, hypocrisy and lies on display in "The Host" may result from America's increasingly clumsy quest to subjugate the earth in the name of freedom, those are the tools of authority in all historical eras and all nations. It's always those at the bottom of the food chain (those whom nobody ever fucking listens to!) who must battle the mutant monsters. On the margins of high-tech consumer society, the squid-shack proprietors will always be with us (as Jesus observed). "The Host" is a thrilling ride and a sometimes dry, sometimes sweet comedy, but beneath all that is a humane and tragic view of life worthy of the greatest films. Even those without rubber monsters. "The Host" opens March 9 in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Honolulu, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Washington, Seattle and Austin, Texas; and March 23 in Albany, N.Y., Baltimore, Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Des Moines, Detroit, Hartford, Conn., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Milwaukee, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, New Haven, Conn., Providence, R.I., Richmond, Va., Sacramento, Calif., Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Santa Fe, N.M., and elsewhere, with more locations to follow. "Maxed Out": One nation, under God (and the jackbooted heel of the credit-card companies) Given that James D. Scurlock's documentary "Maxed Out" is a resolutely uncinematic progression of talking heads -- and they're talking about a subject most of us would rather not even think about -- it's a remarkably entertaining film. Maybe his next film should be about tropical skin diseases, or provide a complete history of dentistry. Tastes vary, of course, and I'm admittedly using "entertaining" in a dark, paranoid, confirming-your-worst-fears sort of way. The subject in question is credit-card debt, and by interviewing scores of experts and ordinary citizens Scurlock builds a damning incremental case that the old-fashioned banking system, in which credit was extended to those who were actually likely to pay the money back, belongs to the era of cave paintings and WordStar. In case the hair-raising interest rates and oh-so-clever hidden fees on your monthly hadn't clued you in, Scurlock argues that the U.S. economy is now based on ever-increasing and unsustainable levels of debt. As Harvard economics professor Elizabeth Warren (a former advisor to the banking industry) explains in the film, people coming out of bankruptcy are the perfect credit-card customers. Why? Because they can't file for bankruptcy a second time -- and filing a first time has recently gotten harder -- and because, as one executive told Warren, "They've got a taste for debt. They're willing to make minimum monthly payments. Forever." Sound like anybody you know? A business-school graduate, Scurlock (who is often confused with Morgan Spurlock, the director of "Super Size Me") takes a straightforward, almost anthropological approach to his subject. He obviously has terrific interviewing skills, because even the oleaginous creeps who buy and sell other people's delinquent debt on the Internet, and the debt collectors who style themselves as modern-day pirates skirting the outermost edges of legality, seem eager to explain their innovations for his camera. Perhaps accidentally, Scurlock has assembled a grimly hilarious collection of Middle American characters, from Christian financial guru Dave Ramsey to Dave Ballew, a former Indiana banker driven out of the profession by its endless avarice, to Doris Gohman, a Minnesota homemaker who has been unable to convince the major credit reporting agencies that she isn't dead. (I suppose eventually she will be, and then they'll be right.) There are heroes like consumer advocate Bud Hibbs and investigative journalist Mike Hudson, who has exposed the shocking predatory home-loan practices of the nation's largest and most respected banks. I first saw "Maxed Out" last year at South by Southwest, and I can testify that when people do show up to see it, they respond with laughter, howls of outrage and sometimes with tears. (More than one college student -- a favorite credit-industry target -- has committed suicide under a rising mountain of debt.) Like most film critics, I