AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Old boy spike lee1/2/2024 ![]() ![]() Spike Lee’s moral universe is more orderly (which can be taken as a compliment, if you wish) and his Oldboy feels like an exercise: brutal, effective, and without any obvious reason for being. And though what happens is often unspeakably vile, Park views the bloodbaths with morbid detachment. Revenge is never clean: There’s little correspondence between tit and tat. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance, the obsession with an eye for an eye - or an eye, nose, and many teeth for an eye-inevitably leads to catastrophe. The plot made no more sense in Korean, but the original Oldboy (loosely based on a Japanese manga) fit perfectly into Park’s cruel universe. ![]() What’s even more inexplicable is that the man behind his ordeal appears to be steering him toward the truth - which turns out to be so garish and perverse that after the movie ends you might feel like getting a chemical peel. (It was fifteen in the South Korean original.) Then he’s inexplicably released with a nice suit and a wad of cash and sets out to find his daughter and get revenge, not necessarily in that order. Oldboy centers on a mean, violent ad executive who’s inexplicably kidnapped and held prisoner in a small room for twenty years. Jackson in a pivotal role, and savor his power. So Lee could grab the rights to a favorite Tarantino flick, cast Tarantino favorite Samuel L. Plus, Tarantino headed the jury in Cannes that gave Oldboy the Grand Prix. In Oldboy, Lee stages hand-to-hand fights between Joe and hordes of bad guys in fluid, elegant single takes - an answer to Tarantino’s overblown production numbers in his revenge movie, Kill Bill. ![]() to Quentin Tarantino, with whom Lee has traded nasty barbs over Tarantino’s use of African-Americans in Jackie Brown and Django Unchained. (He does call this a “Spike Lee Film” instead of the usual “Spike Lee Joint.”) Maybe he was attracted to the story as a way of spelling out the decadence and vileness of the white prep-school elite, a class to which the thuggish protagonist, here called Joe (Josh Brolin), belongs. Maybe after a line of box-office failures and difficulty getting financing for personal projects, he wanted to prove he could make a fast, violent action picture that didn’t have his trademark placards or harangues - that he could play the game. Watching Spike Lee’s decent but unmemorable remake of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture Oldboy, I kept trying to figure out why he’d done it. Photo: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/OB Productions, Inc. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |