OLDBOY
The United States has a lot to worry about with our friends from the East, It's not just nuclear proliferation, nor Asia's growing economy and its increasing demand for oil. It's their cutting edge superiority in filmmaking.
Fifty years ago, we didn't even know Asian cinema existed. RASHOMON changed all that with its showing at the Venice Film Festival. Now I see almost as many Asian films as I do American. Ten to fifteen years ago, it was all John Woo (THE KILLERS, HARD BOILED. BULLET IN THE HEAD (better than THE DEER HUNTER)) and the fifth generation filmmakers like Xiang Yimou (RED SORGHUM, RAISE THE RED LANTERN, NOT ONE LESS) that startled us with the combination of genre awareness, social complexity and sheer filmmaking brilliance. With HERO and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, Yimou continues to astonish, while Woo with FACE OFF and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2, has only been intermittently successful in Hollywood. But there are new faces.
In this decade, my favorite film remains Wang Kar-Wei's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and INFERNAL AFFAIRS (hopefully not to be damaged through the decreasing talent of Scorsese with his American remake)
But now there's OLDBOY by Park Chan-wook, one of the astonishing talents from the emerging Korean cinema. In the handful of Korean films I have seen (thank the gods that the programmers at the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle follow these films, and that small distributors are able to release these films through chains like Landmark), I've often thought of the energy of the French New Wave - twisting genres, taking changes with form and technique in ways alien to almost all American filmmakers and most European filmmakers.
OLDBOY, a baroque, almost Kafka-esque tale of capture, imprisonment release, search and painful discovery, is filled with a narrative freshness that reminded me of when I saw Francois Truffaut's SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, when he was reviled for mixing tones (remember, the oval show of the gangster wanna-be saying, "If AI'm lying may my mother drop dead"?)
There's plenty of that sense of trying out new things with the freedom to experiment and to fail that energizes OLDBOY, which, with its tour de force stylistics and astonishing lead performance, is a powerful, and certainly painful journey into the dark night of the soul (Peter Keough of The Phoenix calls it "Seoul Searching") Some of the scenes are almost operatic, an certainly, as often in opera, occasionally over the top, but there is a vigor in the filmmaking, along with not flinching from the darker side of sexual and physical pleasure, danger and pain, that make this director and his colleagues, talents not only to watch, but who might lead the way .
Fifty years ago, we didn't even know Asian cinema existed. RASHOMON changed all that with its showing at the Venice Film Festival. Now I see almost as many Asian films as I do American. Ten to fifteen years ago, it was all John Woo (THE KILLERS, HARD BOILED. BULLET IN THE HEAD (better than THE DEER HUNTER)) and the fifth generation filmmakers like Xiang Yimou (RED SORGHUM, RAISE THE RED LANTERN, NOT ONE LESS) that startled us with the combination of genre awareness, social complexity and sheer filmmaking brilliance. With HERO and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, Yimou continues to astonish, while Woo with FACE OFF and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2, has only been intermittently successful in Hollywood. But there are new faces.
In this decade, my favorite film remains Wang Kar-Wei's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and INFERNAL AFFAIRS (hopefully not to be damaged through the decreasing talent of Scorsese with his American remake)
But now there's OLDBOY by Park Chan-wook, one of the astonishing talents from the emerging Korean cinema. In the handful of Korean films I have seen (thank the gods that the programmers at the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle follow these films, and that small distributors are able to release these films through chains like Landmark), I've often thought of the energy of the French New Wave - twisting genres, taking changes with form and technique in ways alien to almost all American filmmakers and most European filmmakers.
OLDBOY, a baroque, almost Kafka-esque tale of capture, imprisonment release, search and painful discovery, is filled with a narrative freshness that reminded me of when I saw Francois Truffaut's SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, when he was reviled for mixing tones (remember, the oval show of the gangster wanna-be saying, "If AI'm lying may my mother drop dead"?)
There's plenty of that sense of trying out new things with the freedom to experiment and to fail that energizes OLDBOY, which, with its tour de force stylistics and astonishing lead performance, is a powerful, and certainly painful journey into the dark night of the soul (Peter Keough of The Phoenix calls it "Seoul Searching") Some of the scenes are almost operatic, an certainly, as often in opera, occasionally over the top, but there is a vigor in the filmmaking, along with not flinching from the darker side of sexual and physical pleasure, danger and pain, that make this director and his colleagues, talents not only to watch, but who might lead the way .
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