Oldboy (2003)
Oldboy (2003)
2xDVD9 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 16:9 (720x480) | 01:59:51 | 7,30 + 5,22 Gb
Audio: Korean DTS/AC3 5.1 @ 755448 Kbps; English AC3 5.1 @ 448 Kbps | Subtitles: English, Spanish
Genre: Mystery, Thriller | 17 wins | South Korea
2xDVD9 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 16:9 (720x480) | 01:59:51 | 7,30 + 5,22 Gb
Audio: Korean DTS/AC3 5.1 @ 755448 Kbps; English AC3 5.1 @ 448 Kbps | Subtitles: English, Spanish
Genre: Mystery, Thriller | 17 wins | South Korea
An average man is kidnapped and imprisoned in a shabby cell for 15 years without explanation. He then is released, equipped with money, a cellphone and expensive clothes. As he strives to explain his imprisonment and get his revenge, Oh Dae-Su soon finds out that his kidnapper has a greater plan for him and is set onto a path of pain and suffering in an attempt to uncover the motive of his mysterious tormentor.
IMDB - Top 250 #93
Also Known As: Oldeuboi
With 2002's Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance Chan-Wook Park consolidated a somewhat cultish reputation in the West. An Asian filmmaker, he slotted into the critical spectrum somewhere between Wong Kar-Wai and Miike Takeshi - his distinctive films featuring something of the former's romanticism and the latter's madcap, often violent, inventiveness. More specifically, Park is at the forefront of a new energy in South Korean filmmaking, along with Ki-Duk Kim (Bad Guy), Joon-Ho Bong (Memories Of Murder) and Ji-Woon Kim (A Tale Of Two Sisters), among others.
Oldboy (2003)
![Oldboy (2003)]()
A remarkable film, Oldboy concerns Dae-Su Oh (Choi), introduced as a boorish salaryman before he's abducted and imprisoned in a cell decorated like a 1970s bedroom. He's there for 15 years, slowly going mad, possibly, but also educating himself from the TV, training up his body and focussing on just what deed in his life could have put him in such circumstances; he sees on TV that his wife has been murdered and that he is the main suspect. "I thought I had an average life. But I've sinned too much," he says, in the years of introspection. The 15-year ellipsis isn't entirely convincing, but Park concludes the incarceration sequence with a split screen (just one of many devices he uses confidently), Oh on the left, world history on the right - Diana dying, 9/11, Korea in the World Cup semis.
Oldboy (2003)
![Oldboy (2003)]()
Suddenly, Oh is out in the world - a "larger prison". His fighting skills are impressive, as is his knowledge for trivia, but his social skills are rudimentary. It doesn't seem to matter to sushi chef Mi-Do (Kang), and the pair become an awkward item, the much younger woman intrigued and moved by his story. Together they set about trying to solve the riddle of Oh's damaged life, aided by his old friend Joo-Hwan (Ji) and even by cryptic phone calls from the man behind it all. "Why? Why did you imprison me? Who did you think I am?" asks Oh not unreasonably. "I'm a sort of scholar. And my thesis is you," replies the perpetrator, Woo-Jin Lee (Yu), a rich man with a mysterious, manipulative agenda. But why?
Oldboy (2003)
![Oldboy (2003)]()
On his way to solving the riddle, Park and his co-screenwriters Jo-Yun Hwang and Chun-Hyeong Lim really put the protagonist through the mill. It's pretty Jacobean stuff - violent, vengeful, impassioned, angry. In one incredible sequence, the camera tracks slowly left to right alongside a corridor as Oh fights his way through a mob of heavies armed with clubs and blades. No balletic martial arts here, instead it's brutal but compellingly so, the hero resisting pain and defeat due to his all-consuming motivation. Well, almost all-consuming. To balance the heavy, nay sadistic scenes, Park also tells a troubled, tender love story, as Oh discovers a type of humanity through Mi-do, and she has her naive life opened up. To call it unconventional doesn't cut it; this is amour fou in the maddest of circumstances.
Oldboy (2003)
![Oldboy (2003)]()
Like Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, this is a revenge story, but it's a richer, more mature film, in terms of its twisted plotting, its intriguing characterisation and its continual inventiveness (right down to a fantasy involving a giant ant). The initially chubby Oh hardly has the imposing physicality of Lee Marvin in Point Blank, one Western point of comparison, but he's psyched and he's got little else to live for other than solving the riddle. The notion of his life being manipulated draws comparison with David Fincher's The Game, but the circumstances here have a more credible intensity, even if the theme - of one man's catharsis and salvation - is similar.
Intense and dark but also humorous and moving, this is an ambitious film that fulfils its promise, despite an arguably overly protracted denouement. Excellent.
Oldboy (2003)
Park Chan-wook's Old Boy is a delirious, confronting ride, a movie full of visceral shocks and aesthetic pleasures: it has an explosive immediacy and a persistent afterlife, a lingering impact that is hard to shake. While it has scenes of considerable brutality, its violence is expressed in a range of ways: its shock value lies most of all in what it tells us about its characters and their emotions.
Oldboy (2003)
![Oldboy (2003)]()
Full of visual and auditory pleasures, it is a dense, carefully structured film, an enigma laid bare with merciless inevitability and moments of lyrical beauty. Some of its patterns and repetitions are apparent on a first encounter, but its intricacies need more than one viewing. It is, in the most disconcerting and disorienting of ways, an exhilarating movie.
Oldboy (2003)
![Oldboy (2003)]()
Old Boy begins in a flurry of chaos, in a scene that is echoed in a flashback at the end of film. We are then back in time, to the moment when Oh Daesu (Choi Min-sik), after a drunken rampage at a police station, suddenly disappears from view. He undergoes an extraordinary experience. He is kidnapped, taken prisoner, confined to a room, fed, maintained and spied upon. Television is his only contact with the outside world: he watches Korean political upheavals and Princess Diana's wedding, and discovers that he has become a murder suspect.
Oldboy (2003)
![Oldboy (2003)]()
During his captivity, he tries to imagine who could have wished this fate on him: he has a rollcall of potential names, but no one of whom he can be sure. He devises strategies for marking the passage of time, for escape, for preparing himself to find out who ordered his imprisonment, and exacting revenge.
When he finally leaves his cell, he's a man on a mission. But he discovers that his unknown opponent is waiting for him: the task of retribution will be more difficult than he thinks. The question, furthermore, becomes not who imprisoned him, but why: what is it in his past that has put him in this position?
Oldboy (2003)
![Oldboy (2003)]()
Choi's performance is remarkable: he makes Daesu a figure at once terrifying, and pitiful, magnetically watchable. Yu Ji-tae, as the urbane, controlled nemesis Daesu encounters, quite early in the proceedings, plays a crucial role in maintaining the extremity of the film's premises.
Old Boy, in its richness and intensity, its weightiness and its lightness, feels like a compendium of movies and mystery stories, fables and case histories, myths and legends, distilled into a single devastating experience.
Oldboy (2003)
Special Features:
Disc 1:
Commentary track (korean), Interview, Deleted Scenes, Photo Gallery, Trailers
Disc 2:
- Behind the Scenes Documentaries
- Cast & Crew Interviews
- Featurette: Le Grand Prix at Cannes
- Previews
Oldboy (2003)
Many Thanks to Original uploader.
No More Mirrors.