at Everything is Terrible!Brought to my attention by friend Luke, and featured on Everything is Terrible! This is indeed the world’s most action packed movie. Which, if you’re curious means lots of gun shots, punching, screaming and a man being beaten with his own severed arm of course.
Director Park Chan-wook's revenge thriller Oldboy is a noted entry in the cinematic canon of Asian Extreme… which is an apt moniker for the genre – and this movie in particular. The plot is extreme: a man is imprisoned in a room for fifteen years without any reason only to be unexpectedly released into a bazaar game of cat and mouse.
The violence and action sequences are extreme: some scenes will make you squirm and, unlike most cinematic combat scenes, the ones here are memorable and pop off the screen – one in particular took seventeen days to perfect and was shot in a single, continuous take. The movie leaves you feeling socked in the gut – and liking it.
It's based on a manga series by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya who, someone along the line, must have been inspired by my favorite sci fi writer, Jack Vance. We were thrilled to see so many of his classic ideas on screen, even if it is just a coincidence (nowhere online can I find any concrete evidence of his influence… perhaps I'm the only pseudo scholar with a dual Vance/Park Chan-wook interest?).
The movie itself falters at the end; as is often the case, the conclusion of a compelling mystery can never be as intriguing as the initial investigation. Still, it's a worthy investment if you crave an action thriller and find that Hollywood just hasn't been delivering.
Chan-wook has a new vampire thriller out in theaters now called Thirst.
Truth be told, it's been quite awhile since I've been smitten with Mr. Tarantino. I know people love his recent films, but Jackie Brown was the last one to hit home with me. So, I really had no expectations going into Inglourious Basterds and, to my shock, I absolutely loved it.
It's a ballsy, insane movie with pops of extreme violence, unexpected laughs, and cinematic beauty. Not to mention a cast of extremely handsome, strapping young Jews and allies. There were so many armed and bloody men to swoon over, that it will take some time to include them all in my hunks list.
Clearly taking cues from suicide mission military films like The Dirty Dozen and the original Inglorious Bastards, which shares very little with this film except the title and Nazi bad guys, he is equally inspired and paying homage to classic spaghetti westerns – punctuated with the clever use of music by our favorite Ennio Morricone.
It's an odd bag of tricks and the result is all just a little bit off: Mike Myers is strangely cast in a Peter Sellers role (but is his usual old bullshit self) within a fairly straightforward scene, a tense confrontation between old enemies over dessert is interrupted by extreme close ups of fresh whipped cream, and David Bowie's song from Cat People plays over a putting-make-up-on-to-kill-Nazis montage.
Like his revolutionary hit, Pulp Fiction, the movie has a way of knocking you back after you've seen it. In part because of the graphic gore, but moreover – it's a talky, unique and shocking remixing of popular movie genres turned completely inside out. Unlike the typically somber tone of films like Defiance, Tarantino actually rewrites history so that we all get the bloody revenge we always wanted in an extremely satisfying, cinematic way.