Word: oldboy
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...shared Jury Prize had to be a disappointment for its two recipients. Arnold had taken the same award three years ago for her first feature, Red Road, and Park snagged the Grand Jury prize in 2003 for Oldboy. But the really startling awards were in the supporting categories. Kinatay, which depicts the torture, beheading and dismemberment of a prostitute, was almost universally reviled. In the critics' poll for Film Francais magazine, this grotty little melodrama from Brillante Mendoza, the forlorn hope of Filipino cinema, was given the lowest rating of any official selection. But somebody must think that Mendoza really...
...first caught Oldboy at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Prix du Jury, or second prize. (Only Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 finished higher, copping the Palme d'Or.) The Jury that year was headed by Quentin Tarantino, and at the closing night ceremony, when Tarantino read out the Oldboy award, he proclaimed that his panel was "delighted" with its choice...
...Cannes regular described Oldboy as a Tarantino movie that Tarantino would be afraid to make. It surely has its quota of Quentinian quirks, including cool bad guys dressed in black, a revenge motif that won't quit, some acts of abuse that would have given de Sade appreciative shivers - and, most important, an expert's joy in expanding and subverting the rules of the genre...
...That's where Oldboy and the Tarantino oeuvre part company. The Korean movie proposes that guilt, not vengeance, can be the spur to a man's darkest deeds. The film's big set pieces - the devouring of a live octopus, a tongue removal without benefit of anesthetic, even a bout of lovemaking - are essentially acts of self-mutilation, in a world where original sin blots out the sunlight of redemption. Oh essentially takes the major blame for all the awful things that have happened to him. And when he finally faces his captor, he goes medieval on himself: ripping...
...vigorous rewrite.) It's also worlds removed from what happened in Blacksburg. That was closer to a standard American revenge scenario, where the hero takes violent action against those he thinks wronged him. (Death Wish, anyone?) And don't forget that the weapon of choice in Oldboy was a hammer, which no one planning a mass murder would pack in his arsenal...