Oldboy
Monday, April 09, 2007
Ingredients:
1 Park Chan-wook
1 Choi Min-sik
A claw hammer, scissors, a broken CD
1 Octopus (live)
Put Park on a chair, lock Choi up for 15 years, release, add crude weaponry and octopus. Watch the ensuing spectacle on a couch for 120 minutes. Add beer when needed.
It's hard to go wrong with Choi Min-sik (Shiri, Taegukgi) in your movie. He looks like a bit of a boat person in most of his movies, carefully balanced on the edge of hysteria and psychopathic murder. One of either usually happens. In this particular case, it's both. What happens when one Korean locks up another Korean for 15 years without giving him a reason or any form of contact with anyone else, and then sets him free with the message "if you find me in five days, I will kill myself. If not, I will kill that girl you really care for because you just met her at the restaurant you went to after I set you free just now"? This movie, that's what happens!
Basically, Korean 2 (Choi) complies like a good boy (but old, hence the movie title), but first he needs to relearn his social skills. He practices on a suicidal man on top of a roof by forcing him to listen to his story, and then leaving without listening to the suicidal man's story. Cut to a scene of the man crashing into the pavement below. With that out of the way, Choi starts looking for a restaurant that serves the exact same dumplings as he was fed every day for fifteen years, because I guess they were so delicious. Having found the place, he shows off his newly trained social skills by eating a live octopus to impress a nearby girl. The girl, named Mi-do, instantly falls in love with the primate.
The next half hour or so this movie turns 18+ as Korean 2 finds out that Korean 1 used to go to school with him and goes by the name of Woo-jin. He does this by making love to Mi-do, pulling teeth with a claw hammer, and beating up a corridor full of gangsters. It turns out the reason for Woo-jin to imprison Choi was that back in high school, he'd seen Woo-jin have sex with his sister and spread the news, leading to the girl's suicide. Choi tracks Woo down, confronts him with this information, and now probably expecting Woo to kill himself, he learns something different instead. Woo-jin has played the ultimate prank on him, because Mi-do turns out to be Choi's daughter, and thus the circle of incest is complete!
For reasons that must make sense in Korea, Choi starts barking like a dog and then cuts his own tongue off. Woo-jin gets into an elevator and blows his own brains out, and the entire thing cuts to a frame in a snowy landscape in the middle of nowhere. There's a strange encounter with a hypnotist and the movie ends in an attempt to leave viewers somewhat puzzled. The real clue to this scene however, is that they took the entire set and moved it to New Zealand for five minutes of snowy footage where you really don't get to see anything apart from Choi and his therapist frollicking in the snow. They could obviously not have done this in Korea.
Well, aside from the wickedly cruel plot and excessive violence with a variety of household items, this movie is further awesomified because the live octopus Choi bit into at the restaurant, was an actual live octopus! About three or four of them died just to make this movie. That, my friends, is a shining beacon of hope in the world of PC movies and animal rights protestors today.
Final rating:
Five stars!
Oldboy is both exceedingly violent and cruel and the hysteric characters go completely bonkers during the final scenes, which got me bouncing on the couch like a 5-year old with ADD!
Labels: Choi Min-sik, five stars, Kang Hye-jeong, Korea, Park Chan-wook
posted by Mab at 15:23,
1 comments:
-
At 11 April, 2007 01:10,
Andytgeezer said...
-
I would just like to say before I begin that I AM indeed a 5 year old child with ADD and I immensely enjoyed this even though the weird twist at the end left us all physically repulsed.
What a film!
