Word: oldboys
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...triggered by The Basketball Diaries. Another movie is now raising questions in the Virginia Tech massacre - because the killer, Cho Seung-Hui, made a photo in which he looks fierce and holds a raised hammer, in a manner similar to a shot in Park Chan-Wook's 2003 film Oldboy. Both Cho and the film are originally from South Korea. Both have undergone Americanization: Cho by moving to the U.S. when he was a kid, Oldboy by getting remade as a Hollywood movie that, last I heard, was to come out next year...
...There are loads of violent moments in Oldboy (which was very loosely based on a Japanese manga), and even more in the first and third films in Park's so-called Vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. But movie violence, as anyone who's seen Saw and its quillion imitators, is not unique to Asia. And if you want to argue that this violent film provoked this disturbed young man to commit this atrocity, you should be prepared to explain why all those who saw Oldboy, and The Matrix, and Saw, didn...
...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...
...outgrowth of the published, broadcast and webcast images is that a Virginia Tech professor saw what he believed were similarities between one of Cho's photographs and the South Korean movie Oldboy, by the director Chan-wook Park, about a man who seeks vengeance on the man who kept him unjustly imprisoned for 15 years. Cho photographed himself flourishing a hammer, the movie 's trademark weapon, in a pose that the professor, Paul Harris, said resembled one from the film. Another possible outgrowth of the media storm is that, according to the Korea Herald newspaper, Cho's parents are currently...