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This sounds great - I do have a bit of trouble getting friends to go and see serial killer/mass murer or Asian movies and this has them both but it sounds like some arm twisting might b in order:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,,1326996,00.html
Oldboy
Cert 18
Peter Bradshaw
Friday October 15, 2004
The Guardian
Don't let that title fool you. Nothing could be less English and clubbable than this horrifying new revenge thriller from Korea's new dark maestro Park Chan-wook, who gave us the stomach-churning Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and right about now is making the British and American offerings in this genre look pretty quaint. Oldboy has touches of Kafka, and echoes of British paranoia thrillers like The Ipcress File and The Prisoner. But it opens up a whole new sicko frontier of exotic horror, and more or less reduced my intestines to guacamole both times I watched it, not so much with its violence - although heaven knows there's a super-sized helping of that - but with a queasily ingenious imprisonment-torture impossible to contemplate without a prickling of cold sweat.
It's a movie that you feel you're not so much watching on screen as having beamed directly into your skull from some malign, alien planet of horror. I've seen thrillers where I identified with the bad guys, with the victims or with the cops. This is the first time I've fervently identified with a small, live octopus - of which, more in a moment.
Park's claustro-nightmare begins on a rainy night in Seoul in the late 1980s: a drunk and obnoxious guy called Oh Dae-su is forcibly detained in a police station waiting room for being drunk and disorderly. It is only when a long-suffering buddy turns up to vouch for him and pay off his bail that Dae-su is allowed out, but while his friend is calling his home from a pay-phone to explain what's happened, Dae-su is abducted and wakes up, locked in what appears to be a tatty hotel room.
The terrible truth dawns on him, and us, only slowly as Dae-su alternately screams with rage at his captors and pathetically pleads for mercy. Someone hates him so much that killing or maiming isn't good enough. They have engaged an underground criminal contractor offering the satanically horrible niche service of imprisonment: Dae-su is going to be locked up - for 15 years. He is fed, clothed and drugged so that he cannot try to kill himself, and apart from the TV he has only one means of passing the time: trying to guess who he has offended. And at the end of all this time - which we see pass on a montage of TV images: the Berlin wall, the Hong Kong handover, Princess Diana's death, South Korea's World Cup run - he is deliberately released and encouraged to seek out his tormentor for an Old Testament showdown of retribution.
Dae-su is played by Choi Min-sik, a heftily built presence last seen here playing an artist in Im Kwon-taek's period drama Drunk on Women and Poetry: the title of this could be Drunk on Hatred and Revenge. He has a massively ravaged and ruined face which in itself is fiercely expressive of unbearable, unassuageable emotion. His scarecrow features betoken an ecstatic embrace of madness: a belief that only in psychotic levels of hatred will he be able to summon up the necessary conviction for his survival and revenge.
Once on the outside, Dae-su finds himself in a Japanese sushi bar, befriended by a beautiful young woman, and this meeting ushers in the movie's most extraordinary scene, which must have given the BBFC censors some sleepless nights. In a flourish of self-hatred and self-laceration that Titus Andronicus might have admired, Dae-su orders a live octopus, and gobbles it all down as the unfortunate beast writhes and slithers around his chin - just to show the world what he is capable of. Later, his coldly silent confrontation with the underling jailer is blood-freezingly bizarre. Dae-su holds up a hammer and a white dotted line appears on the screen joining his weapon and his victim's face: flat-pack assembly- instructions for a theatre of violence. He then takes on dozens of aggressors, and Park's camera tracks along the narrow corridor watching the pitched battle in profile, right-to-left, like a video-game graphic or a Bayeux Tapestry of urban warfare: another extraordinary coup du cinéma .
His opponent turns out to be a smooth-mannered sociopath called Lee played by Yu Ji-tae, who in his own way has a magnificent face: so perfectly handsome, but with a touch of minatory knowingness. He is pure Bond villain, with his extravagant penthouse lair and a disability that is straight out of Ian Fleming. Lee has had a heart-bypass operation and carries a tiny remote control device which he says will turn off his pacemaker: he could commit suicide and Dae-su would never know why his life has been destroyed. When the answer to this riddle comes, it is somehow sickeningly convincing that it lies not in the grown-up world of crime or business, but the teenage world of school.
Oldboy certainly shows that it's Asia where the farthest reaches of extreme cinema are to be found, and the worst nightmare is that 15 years in prison, which leaves the numbed viewer wondering if that is an unspeakably long time - or perhaps an unspeakably short time in the nihilist wasteland Park conjures up. "What happens after you've revenged yourself?" wonders Dae-su. "I bet the hidden pain will come back." This is cinema that holds an edge of cold steel against your throat.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,,1326996,00.html