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Sorry, I don't know how the hell I posted four times. Ignore this and the next two posts.
Bonk fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Sep 21, 2005 |
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Sep 21, 2005 09:59
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Bonk fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Sep 21, 2005 |
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Sep 21, 2005 10:06
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Bonk fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Sep 21, 2005 |
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Sep 21, 2005 10:07
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I just watched this tonight, so some of this may be knee-jerk, and some of my thoughts may change once everything settles in a little more, but I'm just a tad confused about what I just watched. Sorry for the spoiler tags, but I can't really express my feelings about this movie without citing a few examples. Acting? Excellent. Cinematography? Amazing. Score? Wonderful. In fact, about the only thing I didn't like about this movie, is unfortunately the biggest part of it: The story. There are no redeeming factors in the story at all, it's just one long elaborately set-up chain of horrible events designed to torture people, and in return to torture the torturers. Nobody is redeemed and nobody comes out of it having learned anything or understood themselves any better. At its core it's basically just a story about a disturbed man who tortures others until they're driven to the point of insanity, and then the mood never lets up or gets any more uplifting. Particularly toward the end when instead of getting his revenge, Daesu becomes a sniveling, pathetic coward. In effect he kicks his own rear end, while Woo-Jin shrugs off all that intended vengeance and just shoots himself, because the 15 years of clueless imprisonment wasn't enough payback. I wish that what Daesu did in his past turned out to be far more horrible. I know Oh Daesu's not supposed to be a Boy Scout or anything, but he's not built up as a villain either because he never really deserved any of it, and that I had a problem with: No sense of balance. Plus there's a whole sequence where the main character simply "remembers" a big and important key to the mystery, which he somehow didn't dredge up out of his memory during his 15 years confined to a single room. There's really only one innocent character, but even her whole love story comes on impossibly quickly, and the whole part that explains why becomes a major deus ex machina by the end, which is pretty implausible anyway. I understand the point of the characters and their motivations to some degree, except possibly Woo-Jin who is just a straight one-dimensional villain if you think about it. What I don't understand was the point to the story, unless the director's just big on ripping off Greek tragedy (except with Daesu's tongue instead of Oedipus stabbing out his eyes). The only difference is that the play I refer to was a story about fate, where Oldboy was a story about a family being tortured and torn apart for a very petty reason in comparison. Maybe there's some deeper meaning that I just didn't get, but it certainly doesn't feel like it. It had a lot of redeeming factors, but the story being told is the biggest part of any movie, and they had me pretty interested up until the big twists came, which I thought sort of shattered everything they had built up to that point. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I didn't feel like the story accomplished anything. Pros: Interesting story for the majority of it, great acting, cinematography, music, and cool fight scenes. Cons: Shock and mindfuckery can sometimes make a great movie, but I didn't feel that in this case. 2.5 for what I did like about the movie, but it seems the story just tried to shock itself into people's top 10 lists, and it seems like it worked for a lot of you.
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Sep 21, 2005 10:10
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