Oldboy

Oh. My. God. If you ever thought a movie twisted the fabric of your mind as to what is and isn't possible in this modern world of cinema, watch Oldboy and I'm sure it will surpass all your previous notions. Chan-wook Park is a Korean director who specializes in incredible stylistic camera work and artistic cinematography within a carefully constructed narrative. Oldboy is the second film in his aptly named "vengeance trilogy." It is about a man who is imprisoned 15 years for unknown reasons. After enduring painful loneliness for all this time, he is released, only to find out he has five days to find out why he was imprisoned. It starts off strange and different, yet don't get discouraged. Everything echoes throughout the film to end with one of the most twisted and stunning climaxes I have ever witnessed. My jaw was left wide open for the last fifteen minutes of this movie, and then about ten more after the credits finished rolling. If it hadn't been so late I might have hit the play button again as soon as I made it back to the DVD menu. It was utterly mind blowing.
I was most definitely not prepared going into this film, but it only served to heighten the experience of watching this practically perfect film. Oldboy hits the ground running and within five minutes of the film we get an incredible taste for what Chan-wook Park's filmmaking is all about. It's fast. It's fun. But it's also smart. Amidst the vibrant colors and the beautiful cinematography there is an incredible narrative. As the mystery of this film unravels we are pulled farther and farther in. And of course at the end of the film it just explodes in our faces without hardly any warning. You will be amazed. You will be disturbed. It will most definitely catch you off guard. It was all so expertly done and I just couldn't avert my eyes for one second in fear of missing the mysterious grandeur of this film. Every moment and every character serves the plot to some avail. There isn't a moment in Oldboy that felt unnecessary or overdone. It's one of the brilliantly made films which comes full circle by the end, only wanting you to rewind and watch the whole thing over again, immediately. I can't come up with enough words to describe how awesome this story is. It is definitely one of those you absolutely must see for yourself.
I'm sure it's a ballsy statement to make, but Chan-wook Park could be the next Akira Kurosawa, only this time slightly more hardcore, obviously. Every shot of Oldboy is so incredibly crafted, down to the most finite detail. The entire film is handled with such care and precaution, and the results are astounding. There are moments in the film which resonate the style of other master directors. There are multiple shots in the film which are heavily Scorsese influenced, for example. However, there is still an extremely definitive style here which belongs to Park. This style is what prevails over any of the specific influences scattered throughout the film. If Park continues to make films like this he will most likely go down in history as one of the genius auteurs of the 21st century. However, on that same note I would be amazed if he ever made anything that could top Oldboy.
Oldboy is one of those films which you will never be able to get out of your head. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to you, but to me it was a great thing. It's a one of a kind film which could never recreated in it's full glorious essence. There was once talk of an American remake of this film, and I'm not sure I could have stomached that, knowing for a fact that any American team could never top the demented perfection of the original. Oldboy is utterly incredible. Every moment is perfect. It gets everything right and goes farther than you could ever imagine. The best part is that Oldboy doesn't fall into one specific genre of film, making it an example of how practically any film should be made, in essence. It would be a crime to go through life never seeing this film.

Lady Vengeance

When it comes to vengeance movies, "Kill Bill" is the most immediate and most "pop" representation. Although, before the first chapter of Tarantino's bloodbath (2003), Chan-wook Park had already began his Revenge Trilogy, releasing "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" in 2002. The second part, "Oldboy", was an instant classic, winning the 2004 Great Prize of the Jury in Cannes. Now, "Lady Vengeance" comes to America, ending the trilogy in grand fashion.
This story is about Geum-ja Lee (Lee Young-ae). She went to prison for 13 years for kidnapping and killing a young boy. Without telling anyone the truth, she knew she was innocent. With her awaited freedom, she can put to work her long-term plan of avenging the real criminal, Mr. Baek (Min-sik Choi), with a little help from people she met in jail. She gets a job in a bakery of a former volunteer in prison, Mr. Chang, asks Woo So-Young's husband to build her personalized pistol and talks to her case's detective, Choi, (Il-woo Nam) to achieve her dreamed vengeance. Meanwhile, she must find her long-lost daughter in Australia, where she was adopted.
Since Lee spent 13 of her years in a female prison, almost all her acquaintances are women. Many jail companions told her their stories, which are shown with rich details in the movie. These numerous subplots are told in the slow first half of the film, with little impact on the main plot, but, at least, are told with style and sharp black humor. This is the most stylized Vengeance installment, full of colors, surreal effects (which exaggerate only in few scenes) and elegant visual metaphors. For an example, when Geum-ja is described as a "girl whose face is enlightened", director Park literally puts a bright, almost divine light in her expression as she prays at night.
Geum-ja's strong character asked for an even stronger performer, found in Lee Young-ae. From an apparently sweet person in jail to a cold-blooded killer in her revenge path, the beautiful actress plays complex Lady Vengeance with fierce and sensitivity, achieving her climax when she shows a weeping, raging smile. Kim Si-hu is Geun-sik, a young and naïve baker, who achieves a shallow proximity to Lee, and his sweet performance is fundamental in key-scenes. Nam is also great, having a difficult role to play and restraint to keep Detective Choi as little emotional as possible, and Min-sik proves himself as a standard of excellence. In the final third of the movie, 8 new characters appear, almost all gifted to great actors as well.
Director Chan-wook Park is also responsible for many of the movie's assets. His aesthetic vision is wonderful, presenting a beautiful cinematography and some interesting scene compositions. He also imprints an unbelievable amount of pain on the story – helped by the melancholic and sublime score. When Mr. Baek's crimes are unraveled (and shown), the scene is so unbearable that it rivals to the twist in "Oldboy", determining the Revenge Trilogy as a study of how excruciating the bitter truth can be.
"Lady Vengeance" has almost all the assets that represent the Oriental cinema – it only lacks some graphic violence. Even without much blood in its hands, this is a poignant tale of hate, lost innocence, redemption and revenge, and the painful beauty of this work is enough to hypnotize viewers.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

If you've ever been poor if you ever had to work by a dirty machine for minimum wages just to be able to stay alive, you'll appreciate that director Chan-wook Park knows something about the pure desperation such conditions can bring about. And if you've ever lost somebody that you truly loved more than yourself, the most emotional scene in this film will probably make you cry.
Vengeance is one of humanity's more lamentable instincts, and one we'll have to overcome as a species one day. When one acts out of vengeance one seeks only to hurt, and when people start hurting each other because they're hurt themselves, everybody ends up hurting and nobody really gains anything. That's what happens when the main character's lack of one sense drives the film, both form and function wise. Occasionally, we lose one of the two ways in which we interact with the film (sound, sight). The loss of one sense adds value to the other. It makes the normally assumed other seem all the more there. Unlike most Hollywood takes on this particular sense absence, we get a bit of a glimpse into what the absence means to the character, and not just what it means to us looking at the character as third person. What results are some very nice moments that are film using itself as a medium to one of its potentials.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a very original and well-done film. It takes a very common theme(especially for Asian films...) - revenge - and turns it on it's head. Usually in a revenge-style film, there are clear-cut "good guys" and "bad guys". The good guy is wronged and seeks vengeance against the bad buy - end of film. But SYMPATHY is very different, as there are several people wronged in one way or another, and the only clear-cut "bad guys" may be the shady organ dealers (explained below), but are really just bit players in a much larger and more complex picture. SYMPATHY is really a sad film of desperation, and the lengths that individuals may go to for family.
This is the story of Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin). Ryu is both deaf and mute. He has a sister (Ji-Eun Lim) that needs a kidney transplant. Ryu lost his job, therefore he has no money to pay for a legal transplant. So he tries to buy a kidney from the black market, but he is fooled by the smugglers and loses his own kidney and the little amount of money he had. Then his girlfriend, Cha Yeong-mi (Donna Bae), gives Ryu the idea to kidnap his former boss', Park Dong- jin (Kang-ho Song), daughter, Yu-sun (Bo-bae Han). What follows then is a series of events, all evolving acts of revenge and violence. Being a part of the 'Vengeance Trilogy', you would expect that the script is about revenge, but the story Park and his crew created is truly amazing. I'm not gonna spoil it here, but the script takes a few terrific, mind-blowing turns. The characters make weird but real decisions, which provokes a chain of events that you won't believe. The dialogs are also quite well written, so is the rest of the movie. There is also quite a nice share of touching scenes, and also lots of violent and bloody ones. In my opinion, the screenplay is for sure the strongest point of 'Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance'.
The film is comfortably uncertain of its genre and impartial to the characters it follows on such a subjective journey as a mortal vendetta. Think of how contrived it would have to be though, in order to submit to more widely accessible conventions. Watching this film, we realize why it's difficult in some revenge tales to make one character sympathetic and the other rotten to the core. No matter what impression we get of them, there are still certain things that could happen to them that require a kind of justice society is not made to allow. If the film remained purely within the confines of a thriller, it could not have seize and squeeze all the dramatic, comic and voyeuristic possibilities of each scene. 

The Quiet Family

 Remade as The Happiness of the Katakuris by Takashi Miike, The Quiet Family may lack that film’s zombies, claymation sequences and The Sound of Music parodies, but has much which Miike held on to. Essentially, the plotlines are the same – a family buys a mountain lodge; a number of guests are killed off either by themselves or by others; the family attempt to cover them up – whilst Kim Ji-Woon’s original is a similarly odd concoction. After all, it features one of the more eclectic soundtracks to feature in a Korean movie, from the mariachi-flavoured hip-hop of Tres Delinquents, which accompanies the opening credits, to the likes of the Partridge Family, the Stray Cats and long forgotten eighties goth band Love and Rockets elsewhere. Indeed, The Quiet Family may best be regarded as an acquired taste.
That said, this is a film which is likely to travel well. The cast members’ subsequent credits include the likes of Joint Security Area, OldBoy and Shiri, which is likely to attract interest, whilst director Kim went on to make A Tale of Two Sisters. Moreover, The Quiet Family possess a fine, mordant wit; it’s not so much a black comedy as bleak comedy. Certainly, anyone expecting something a little more madcap owing to its subject matter may very well come away disappointed. Rather the humour is decidedly deadpan, a situation which serves the film to a better degree. There are no noisy attempts at winning the audience over, simply an acceptance that those with a taste for such comedies – and The Quiet Family is primarily a comedy – will find the film on their own terms.
Yet in being so low key, Kim does have a problem in sustaining momentum. The bodies may pile up soon enough, yet it’s questionable as to whether he has anywhere to go. From the opening scenes we get nods towards the horror genre (ominous crane shots and aural rumbles à la The Evil Dead), yet these are never truly latched onto. Likewise the thriller elements – courtesy of the arrival of a gangland hitman as well as a police officer in the latter stages – are never developed as fully as they could be. As an aside consider Shallow Grave or Les Diaboliques which both gained more mileage from a single corpse – perhaps Kim has simply bitten off more than he can chew?
Indeed, The Quiet Family has a ragged quality which is perhaps unsurprising for a debut feature. It succeeds in the quieter moments (many of the film’s delights come through the petty family antagonisms as opposed to the bigger set pieces) and more than gets by on them, but there is a continual feeling that in order to be more than just a good film it needs something a little extra – most likely a dash of suspense or a greater sense of direction. Certainly, the latter element can be detected during The Quiet Family’s conclusion as rather than build to a finale, it simply peters out.

In The Beginning

In the Beginning is the story of a small time crook who falls into a big con and thereby becomes both a hero to the locals and a mensch in his own eyes. The con and the project are doomed, but both are sweet while they last.
This suspenseful and curiously moving film includes a virtuoso lead performance by François Cluzet, was in competition at Cannes, and received eleven nominations at the French César awards. Director Xavier Giannoli (of The Singer) has again made a picture that's a sensitive study both of in individual and of a region. He also succeeds, like Lucas Belvaux in Rapt, in turning a news story that might seem on the face of it rather trivial into psychological and philosophical thriller. It makes you think, it keeps you on the edge of your seat, and it shows once again that the French really know how to make movies.
Paul (Cluzet), who uses the fake name Philippe Miller, is a petty con man who travels all around France Xing off construction projects on his highway map of the country. Taking down names and phone numbers from roadside signs and making deft use of product catalogs, he steals and resells parts and equipment from suppliers by pretending to be a project manager.
Miller hits pay dirt, and ultimately gets in much deeper than he plans, when he comes upon a highway project abandoned two years earlier due to its invading the habitat of a protected beetle. Faking involvement with the parent company in the project, he collects money and starts it up again.
Miller meets the eager, energetic Monika (Stéphanie Sokolinski, the singer known as Soko), who works at his motel, and her fresh-faced, sensitive boyfriend Nicolas (Vincent Rottiers). Before long he also meets the local mayor, Stéphane (Emmanuelle Devos) and becomes her lover.
Miller gets a local bank to issue him checks and advance funds for payments to suppliers that demand immediate payment. The bank wants a piece of the action too. But they will require authentication that Miller can never provide.
As the project takes off, Cluzet, as Miller, at first seems to be imploding. When asked embarrassing questions, he has a dozen ways of deflecting them. If all else fails he just says he has another appointment and runs off. The situation is too tempting for Miller to resist. He knows he's getting in way over his head. But isn't it the nature of the con man to seek bigger and bigger deceptions? Actually nobody loses much here.
The whole thing that terrified Miller begins to delight him. For once he is somebody. "I have wasted a lot of time" is one of his saddest lines to Stéphane, in bed. Of course ultimately Miller is going to go to jail, but he starts desperately trying to get the segment of highway completed before the time limit on payments ends and many bills become due. He's now paying out in salaries to the workers all the many thousands he accumulated at the outset. The money doesn't matter to him any more. He becomes a worker himself, pushing a broom to spread the asphalt in the rain. It's winter and the project is becoming more and more difficult to finish.

In the Beginning is a nail-biter all the way through, and in the end you will react as the local community did to the real con man in this story: some of you will take him for a real S.O.B. Others will believe him to be a pretty nice guy. Environment and action create identity. We are what we do. Here, Miller is what he makes happen. Workers don't always care about the utility of their employment. They don't much care about beetles. (What happens to them is barely mentioned. In fact they were transplanted to a forest.)

Cluzet, an extremely busy and popular French actor most recently seen by American audiences in Guillaume Canet's Tell No One (another hit thriller), is a neutral Frank Capra everyman, an individual who can seem shut down, but with a twinkle in the eye, a grump with a jovial chap hiding inside waiting to be let out. The film gradually lets out that chap, and then, when the big corporation comes in and the police descend, the highway project lit up at night like a film set, Miller is a little man who's strangely triumphant in defeat, waving the battered flag of his fake company.
This is another marvelous French film that transcends genre, turning a crime thriller into celebration of work. Judging by this and Giannoli's The Singer/Quand j'étais chanteur, he has great sensitivity to solitary wanderers and paints rich psychological portraits in a complex social environment. He doesn't know so well how to end things. There is a little uncertainty whether we can take À l'origine as a mood piece about economic desperation (as Up in the Air partly is; but this is Down on the Ground), a process picture, or a crime thriller. But it achieves success in each genre, because of the energetic world the director creates, the rich moral ambiguity he preserves. The secondary characters are of course a bit schematic, a bit obvious, but with such actors, they never seem that way. Like Laurent Cantet's study of a strike and of class conflict within a family, Human Resources, In the Beginning is about the human need to be doing work.

Chris Knipp, Berkeley, California