Great film. Will be a classic decades from now.

It left me with a lingering feeling of something I can’t quite pin down. Makes you think.

i..well, i guess i just hadnt thought of that before.

but man, i really liked this movie. i watched it last night, and its been popping up in my head all day. i think this is one of those i’ll need to go back and watch in a month or so. fantastic.

Two years later, I suppose I better screen this thing, Asian Extreme getting hot all over again. ;)

That fight scene in the prison was cool.

This is one seriously sick and twisted movie… you’ve been warned.

I love South Korean Films. I’d seen a whole bunch of them at the Vancouver International Film Festival years ago, and haven’t attended since I left. When I read the review of this movie, Old Boy, I was intrigued and had to go. I liked it, especially the Squid-eating scene (I didn’t give too much away, did I?). Anyway, the question wasn’t who kidnapped our protagonist, but why, which was the more interesting question that gets answered in the end. I had an incling that that was the reason, but I’m not saying what it is if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s out on DVD now, so take a gander, eh?

A man gets drunk and is kidnapped on his daughters birthday. After 15 years of being held in a crappy motel room, he’s released with no explanation as to why this has been done to him, and the film follows his pursuit for this explanation to it’s horrifying conclusion.

Thanks to hype from various sources (plus a big fat spoiler), the effect of the film was diminished somewhat. But this is a great piece: one of the problems of flicks that contain violence, is that they lack the heaviness of real body to body contact. This film has that heavy physical quality: skin, blood, muscle, bone – and pure human desperation. There’s a lot of desperation in this film, very often going below the line of basic humanity to something shocking and raw. It reminds me most of Daron Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream” – if you like those character’s spiral of doom, you’ll probably like this film (I don’t think “like” is the right word though).