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Oldboy

Garudian review as it is out in cinemas in the UK:

Lady Vengeance

****

Peter Bradshaw
Friday February 10, 2006
The Guardian


Park Chan-wook is the Korean director who cranked the extreme-dial up to 11 with Oldboy, his ultraviolent movie of obsession and revenge. It was similar in style and substance to his earlier, equally intestine-curdling thriller, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, and now Lady Vengeance repeats the grisly motifs of abduction, imprisonment and retribution - which again originate, interestingly, in the cruelty of school days. It is supposed to complete a "trilogy" of films about revenge, but it could just be the latest in a blood-splattered production line, expanding into a tetralogy or pentalogy: Vengeance Boy, Vengeance Dog, Vengeance Anything. I wouldn't put it past Park to make them all horrifying, and all unspeakably ingenious.

It is a well-worn trope to compare modern violent films and plays to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, with a view to excusing their excesses. Yet Lady Vengeance really does justify this specific comparison. It is a pulp-guignol nightmare, a charnel-house of horror that, though not as immediately scary as Oldboy, builds inexorably to a truly stomach-turning finish, which is then topped off with a chilling coda of considered revulsion that will send you staggering for the exit. And it is managed with such icy self-possession and beady-eyed narrative concentration that the story's potential for absurdity and implausibility vanishes.

Lee Yeong-ae plays Geum-ja, a delicately beautiful young woman who 13 years previously astonished the nation by confessing to a horrendous crime: the kidnap and murder of a five-year-old child. She has been released from prison, now in her early 30s, and over this long time has amassed a new reputation: that of saintly conversion to Christianity. She is a veritable modern Magdalene whose purity surrounds her like an aura. But Geum-ja has a secret - a secret from the news media, from her fellow prisoners and from us, the audience. And the secret begins to unfold when an evangelical Christian group is coldly rebuffed when they greet her at the jail gates with a tambourine-rattling hymn. Geum-ja has spent the time refining a mysterious obsession with the man who used to be her high-school teacher, Mr Baek. He is played, inevitably, by the actor whose extraordinary face has come to symbolise the extravagance of extreme Asian cinema: Choi Min-sik, the avenger from Oldboy, and now the target for righteous anger. His leonine features are made even more disquieting by being slimmed and groomed into that of a respectable pillar of South Korean society.

As Park's story progresses, it is seductively interspersed with flashbacks to our heroine's grim prison life, sharing a minuscule dorm-cell with about half-a-dozen other inmates. Each of them is introduced with name and imprisonment term flashed up on screen and each has a role in Geum-ja's secret apprenticeship in the vocation of payback. Her reveries of violent reprisal happen in a semi-stylised wintry terrain, adjoining a shadowy forest. It's the kind of landscape that looks as if it belongs in a fairy-tale or video game, but actually exists in Geum-ja's past, and is the scene for the awful finale.

Park's Lady Vengeance does not deliver the intravenous frisson of Kill Bill, but it has a sinuous sense of storyline which Tarantino's film lacks: a succession of revelations delayed and motivations explained. His urban locations and semi-fantasised pastoral moments in the snow are all convincingly realised, though there is no serious intent in this "trilogy" to consider revenge in any but the most stylised way. The idea of revenge being messy or futile or counter-productive, as it tends to be in the real world, has not played a serious part. Nor will it, I suspect, in any future adventures. The absence of this consideration is a conscious act, however: it reduces revenge to pure idea, pure motif: like the traces of blood in the opening titles. As drama, Park's vengeance movies have their limits, but as essays in style, and excursions into nightmare, they exert an incredible grip.
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http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/C ... 52,00.html
 
I managed to see Sympathy for Lady Vengeance at the Amsterdam film festival, without having seen Oldboy/Mr. Vengeance. From the opening credits alone you could tell it was going to be a stylish and bloody affair, but it also presented a unique twist (to me, at least). Usually the villain in films gets off with a quick death, but in SFLV the tables were turned and the protagonist has her way with him: read, long bouts of righteous torture. The movie also seemed to tap into the collective consciousness; when you read about paedophile-killers in the news invariably the mental response is "ooh, what I'd do if I got my hands on him..." Well, here they present just that, and not just one person doing it, either. Darkest comedic moment was, as the victims' relatives line up outside to wait their turn for revenge, one of them takes out a long stick. "You're just going to beat him with that?" Guy gives a side-long glance, and without saying a word snaps on blades making it a double-edged battleaxe.

Then I got around to seeing Oldboy on DVD, and barely recognisable was the paedo-villain from SFLV, Choi Min-sik, as the main character. Oldboy was even more stomach churning, as others have mentioned, the octopus slurp and the tongue-chop being etched in my mind for the foreseeable future. Might as well ask since I'm here; what did people make of the ending? Did he remember or not? Or was it the octopus making a valiant effort to escape at long last?
 
Watched this the other night . This is an excellent film , although the octopus scene grossed me out , and the tooth extraction was painful to watch. Highly recommended. :D
 
Mighty_Emperor said:
Park sinks teeth in cyborg, vampire pics

Korean helmer to shoot off-beat rom-com in March and neckbiter movie in 2007

By DEREK ELLEY

LONDON — Hot South Korean helmer Park Chan-wook ("Old Boy," "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance") looks set to continue pressing the envelope in his next two pics — a love story set in a mental asylum and a modern-day vampire movie.

Park, in Europe attending tributes at the Thessaloniki and Stockholm fests, told Variety he'll start shooting his next movie, which he described as an "offbeat romantic comedy," in March, for fall '06 release. It's one of a series of eight pics funded by CJ EntertainmentCJ Entertainment, all shot on HD-24p by name helmers, including Hur Jin-ho and Ryu Seung-wan.

Story is centered on two inmates — a man, and a woman who thinks she's a cyborg. First draft of the script is already completed, though no English title has finally been decided on. Korean title ("Saibogeu jiman gwaenchanha") literally means "Even If You're a Cyborg, It's No Problem."

Budgeted at $2.5 million, pic will have "at least one big star and quite a lot of CG effects for the woman's fantasies," according to Park. Shooting will last three months, fairly rapid by modern-day South Korean standards.

...
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www.variety.com/article/VR1117933732?categoryid=19&cs=1
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Trailer:

www.twitchfilm.net/archives/008087.html
 
Saw Old Boy again tonight in the cinema, 4K Re-release. I'd forgotten a lot of the details. As shocking as ever with a wicked line of dark humour running through it
 
ramonmercado said:
Saw Old Boy again tonight in the cinema, 4K Re-release. I'd forgotten a lot of the details. As shocking as ever with a wicked line of dark humour running through it
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The original rather than the remake?
 
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