Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Tiberious aka Sparkles]

If you haven't yet seen Oldboy for some incomprehensible reason, be forewarned: spoilers and journalistic idiocy below:

Read Rex Reed's (hey! I love alliteration!) "review" of Oldboy here (scroll down to the bottom of the column):



http://www.observer.com/pages/onthetown.asp

A quote:

[Swiss James]

I used to write for a newspaper, once I missed a gig I was supposed to review, the editors response: Review it anyway.

[I mean granted it was just a university paper, but it still pays to take everything you read with a pinch of salt]

[paperbag princess]

movie reveiws are lame.

oh dae-su was an awful movie content wise, but beautiful aesthetically speaking.

[Swiss James]

[dogbert]

LOL...I was thinking "three hours of theremin music? i'd pay to hear that".

[On the other hand]

Speaking as a confirmed hater of OLD BOY, I have to say Reed's rant went far beyond the boundaries of accpetable comment.

But here's a theory: For a guy so dismissive of Korea, he sure seems to know which buttons to press to get a possible rise out of the Korean nationalists. I mean, he claims to hate kimchi so much, but then he's also apparently gone out of his way to find out how the stuff is made. And comparing OLD BOY to Japanese kabuki is a nice touch.

Now, my impression has always been that while Reed might have been an eminent critic back in the 60s or so, he's pretty much past his prime and doesn't cut much of a swath in the public consciousness these days. I suspect that, after seeing the attention that Leno and Oprah got after making midly disparaging remarks about Korea, Reed figured that jumping in guns ablazing with a bigoted screed would guarantee him vitriolic editorials from every major Korean newspaper, a few effigy-burnings by college kids in Seoul, death threats galore, maybe even all-party denunciation from the Korean legislature. So the next time someone says that Rex Reed is a washed-up has-been, he can haul out is scrapbook of Korean newspaper clippings to show that he really is a world famous celebrity.

[Swiss James]

I think he just went to the Pusan film festival one year and caught crabs from a hooker.

[bucheon bum]

on the list of reviews on the yahoo oldboy site, the lowest grade was a B I think.

Although I've seen it once, I'm itching to see it again so I bought the DVD on e-bay. Amusing I can get the DVD before it comes out in the theatres here in America (4/8 and 4/15 for those outside NYC, LA, and Chicago)

[Deconstructor]

[Swiss James]

[Billy Pilgrim]

My short review: (from a long time agoO:

Oldboy

Putting the bitter in bittersweet, this is a blood-soaked, deep-fried twist on the standard Korean melodrama (the whole underlying basis of the film is Melodrama 101, albeit with, how do I put it? A queazy twist?), lensed with bucket-loads of style that is fortunately matched with a confident narrative savvy. After all, you hear the concept - man gets locked away for 15 years, then released for apparently no reason - you expect (or at least, having been raised on a steady diet of Hollywood thrillers and TV dramas, I did) it to plod the path marked Who?, populated with the usual assortment of oddballs and suspects, red herrings and sneaky clues. Of course, your whole viewing angle is shunted rudely to one side, however, when Who turns up a third of the way in, Bateman-like and grinning like some feline colleague of Alice.

What follows is a remarkably mature - I mean, for a film involving graphic scenes of teeth being pulled and live octopi being consumed - take on the nature of revenge, how it can consume you, envelope you, until it does as much damage to your life as the original slight or injury; and just how desparately our minds craves hard concrete knowledge about the things that go on around us. Director Park Chan-Wook graduates the film nicely in this respect - the nominal villain is such a slimeball, we want to see him smoked by the nominal hero (I could go on for pages and pages on just how brillliant Choi Min-Shik is in the role of Dae-Su, creased and weathered, seething and wounded, but it's better if you just all go out, hunt the DVD down, and watch the performance of the year for yourselves) as quickly as possible as well, but slowly we are drawn into craving the why as well, and the film carefully lays it all out in a way that is both satisfying and genuinely distressing, and downright sad. Much has been said (most of it negative, at least in comparison to the rest of the film) about the ending, the final confrontation, but it is really is a wrenching culmination of all the areas the film toys with in the guise of high-concept thriller - revenge, knowledge, redemption, forgiveness, despair and obsessive pursuits.

[Hollywoodaction]

Why is it that I feel like I was reading one of Don Cherry's rants about European hockey players?

[dogbert]

Is it at all OK for a person not to gush over this film?

[Billy Pilgrim]

[eamo]