a grain of sand

Last month I posted a review of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the first film in Korean director Chan-wook Park's vengeance trilogy. You can read that here. SFMV was not a good movie. There were some moments that showed talented composition and cinematography, but the plot(s) and acting were not worthwhile. Thankfully I was able to remain as excited to see Oldboy as I had been for about a year since I first heard about it, and I didn't let SFMV prevent me from watching the second film in the trilogy.

Let me try to organize my thoughts about Oldboy. It is very good, just like everyone says. It is violent and twisted and made me think. And now I'm trying to figure out why I wasn't as haunted by it as many of my friends were. So let me break things down.

(SPOILER ALERT!)

1) Violence. I have certainly heard quite a few people say that Oldboy is the most violent movie they've ever seen. Certainly, it ranks high on my list, but I think the award for that one still goes to The Passion of the Christ. All of the unbelievably gruesome images in Oldboy happen just out of frame (except for the octopus - which was awesome), whereas in Passion we are forced to watch images of flesh being ripped from bone. The attention to detail in the violent imagery was fantastic, though...Dae-su's calloused knuckles were such an amazing reminder of what he'd put himself through while in captivity.

2) Identity. This is, I think, why I was not as disturbed by the film as my friend Evan was, who was watching it for the second time when he watched it with me last night. I was particularly struck by the making and unmaking of the Beast. My reading of the film was that he was Dae-su at the beginning, the Beast by the time his fifteen years of captivity were over, able to transform back into Dae-su after meeting Mi-do, and the Beast again once he found out the secret. Not without having his memory wiped clean of the secret can he be Dae-su again. This reading was reinforced to me by the separation of the two identities by the hypnotist during the epilogue. Evan could not differentiate between Dae-su and the Beast, and so he felt especially disgusted by the events surrounding the man.

3) The villain? Okay, so I definitely understood Woo-jin to be villain in this movie. Certainly he is the antagonist, but I could see how some people could think that Dae-su/Beast is as much of a villain as Woo-jin. However, he is clearly evil because of how his sister's death has tortured him, and by the time the movie begins, his vengeance has overtaken what was once human in him. I had the hardest time understanding Woo-jin over any other character in the movie though, perhaps because his hatred was so extreme that I had to wonder what his personality was like before Soo-ah's death.

4) Style. Park's directing in this movie is so far beyond what he did with SFMV, and I think I was captivated by every scene. The contrasting foregrounds and backgrounds, the balanced wide-angle shots, the colors and the textures - every moment was beautiful. I was especially impressed by the two shots that I felt bookended the movie. After Dae-su's first year of imprisonment, the camera holds on the painting that hangs in his prison cell. A man's crazed face is dripping with blood, and the first lines of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poem "Solitude" are painted below his smile, reading, "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." The camera then cuts to Dae-su's face, which is grinning, wildly framed by his out-of-control mane, and wide-eyed with dementia. Towards the end of the film, when Dae-su is fighting Woo-jin's bodyguard, his hair covers his blood-covered face, and he grins, the Beast once more.

So, what exactly is Park trying to say about vengeance in this trilogy? Maybe I won't be able to know until after I watch the third film, Lady Vengeance. Until then, I'll keep thinking about it. For now, I'm going to be so glad I didn't let SFMV ruin my expectations for Oldboy, and ruminate on the other amazing bookend to the film, the line, "Even though I'm no more than a beast, don't I, too, have the right to live?" I don't know...

what? why? huhhh?

For months and months, everyone has been telling me how much I need to see Oldboy. I was all set to add it to my Netflix queue, when I realized that director Chan-wook Park had created a sort of stylistic trilogy in 2005, and I wanted to watch them in order. I'm very picky about watching movies or reading books in order if I can, so I waited and waited to watch Oldboy until I had time to watch the first film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. In fact, I still haven't seen Oldboy, though it is coming next on my queue. Last night I settled in to watch Sympathy, which I was expecting to be a suspenseful gore-fest. What I got was...something else.

I've seen some weird movies, both domestic and foreign. I've seen crazy game shows and other random snippets of things on TV that have thrown me for a loop. And that's not even talking about the internet. Online, there is a whole world of strange that a single person can only scratch the surface of. When I was finished watching Sympathy last night, I turned to my friend Evan and said something which most adequately describes what we had just experienced. "I've seen a video of a Japanese girl in a pleather kitten costume fellating a severed octopus tentacle, and that made more narrative sense than this movie."

(SPOILER ALERT!)

The beginning of Sympathy is promising. The plot and character motivations are set up, and bad things start to happen that cause that perfect sense of suspenseful unease that a viewer is supposed to feel at the beginning of a horror movie, before all the really bad things happen. Our protagonist (?), Ryu, is a deaf-mute factory worker whose sister is in desperate need of a kidney transplant. Since he is the wrong blood type, they are waiting for an organ to become available from a suitable donor. Increasingly panicked that this isn't going to happen, Ryu contacts a black market organ tradeswoman, who says she will find him a kidney in return for one of his own, and 10 million Won. He wakes up naked in an abandoned building, missing a kidney and without any of the money he had saved up. The junkie "surgeon" has escaped the deal and will not be providing a kidney for his sister. A few weeks later, their real doctor informs them that there is finally a match off the donor list. "You still have that 10 million Won saved up, right?"

Ryu's girlfriend Yeong-mi, some sort of political activist (frankly, I never understood her manifesto), encourages him to kidnap Yu-sun, the daughter of Park, who is the president of the company who had fired him for missing too many days at work after his dirty kidney surgery, and use the ransom money to pay for Ryu's sister's surgery. Since they are not bad people, they kidnap her, but they treat her very well, and tell her that they are friends of her father's who are babysitting for a while. This is also the story that Ryu and his girlfriend tell to his sister. For some time they all live together quite happily, waiting for the ransom to go through. While Ryu and Yeong-mi are out getting the briefcase full of money from Park, Ryu's sister finds out that Yu-sun is not a friend's daughter, but a kidnapping victim. (Sidenote: Bo-bae Han, who plays Yu-sun, is possibly the cutest little girl ever. All little kids should wear big glasses to remind me of myself as a little girl!) Distraught, and worried that she is too much of a burden to her brother because of her illness, Ryu's sister kills herself. Whoops. Ryu takes her body to the lake where they played as children, because that is where she wanted to be buried. Of course, he can't leave Yu-sun alone, so she has to come along. Poor thing. Of course, she drowns.

This is when things start getting weeeeeird. I can't even really describe the rest of the movie. The cops get involved. There's a mentally retarded guy who comes out of nowhere and just changes everything up. There's a totally random sex scene, a couple of murderous rampages, and at least two autopsies which Park is a witness to for NO reason whatsoever. Honestly, I have no idea what the message of this movie was supposed to be. Evan was able to gleam some sort of communist sentiment from it, based off of the apparent victory of Yeong-mi's terrorist group above all the other characters, but that was a bit of a stretch.

Really, I don't even know what to say. It was an experience. Some of the scenes were certainly visually appealing, and I am still quite looking forward to Oldboy. But Sympathy wasn't even that gory or frightening. It was just totally confusing. After watching it, Evan and I tried to come up with a list of movies we'd seen that were worse, and when movies like Battlefield Earth and Must Love Dogs are out there, it really throws off the whole curve. More to come when I get to see Oldboy and Lady Vengeance next.

*the movie ends*
Kat: Um...
Evan: For real?
Kat: F'real?
Evan: Fuh reeeal?
Kat: 4Real?
Evan: Was this worse than Serendipity?