kalrela ronyah marcey
Samantha Figueredo
I saw this for the first time last night at my local theatre, where they were showing the remastered version to honor the 20-year anniversary, including the post Critic for Oldboy movie trending review that you mentioned. I felt like this was pretty ideal circumstances to watch it for the first time, not knowing much about the plot beyond the basic synopsis.
Park Chan-wook mentions before the movie begins that it deals with incredible violence, feelings of loneliness and sadness, and told first time viewers to brace themselves, which I was grateful for. This movie hit me like a train, I laughed, cringed, felt sick to my stomach, and watched in awe at the cinematic beauty of it all. Truly a masterpiece.
This was the movie that changed my perceptions of what a movie could be. Putting this movie into the dvd player in 2003 was like opening gateway to a different world that I never knew existed. Before watching Oldboy i thought of movies as entertainment and this was the first movie to make me more culturally aware of what a movie could be. I searched out a load of other foreign language films after seeing this. It will always have a special place in my heart for that.
The Metaplex is a movie review, editorial, and discussion website. We have the goal of delivering high quality content by combining in-depth film analysis with mainstream journalism, finding a healthy balance of insight and readability.
Oldboy attained critical acclaim and accolades worldwide, including winning the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where it garnered high praise from Quentin Tarantino, the president of the jury. In the United States, film critic Roger Ebert stated that Oldboy is a "powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare". The film's action sequences, particularly the single shot corridor fight sequence, also received commendation for their impressive execution.
The film is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time and has been included in numerous "best-of" lists by many publications.[6][7][8][9] In 2008, Oldboy was placed 64th on an Empire list of the top 500 movies of all time.[10] In 2020, The Guardian ranked it number 3 among the classics of modern South Korean Cinema.[11]
In 1988, businessman Oh Dae-su is arrested for public drunkenness, causing him to miss his daughter's fourth birthday. After his friend Joo-hwan picks him up from the police station, Dae-su is kidnapped and awakens in a sealed hotel room, where food is delivered through a pet door, and the only form of diversion from his captivity is a television. From it, Dae-su learns that his wife has been murdered and that he has been framed as the prime suspect by his captors. As years of imprisonment pass, Dae-su grows deranged from solitude. He attempts suicide by slashing his wrists, but is kept alive by his captors. After this, Dae-su spends years practising martial arts against the solid wall and attempting to dig an escape tunnel so that he might seek vengeance upon his captors.
In 2003, 15 years into his imprisonment, Dae-su is suddenly released after being sedated and hypnotised. Dae-su awakens on a rooftop, where he meets a suicidal man. After he tests his fighting skills on a group of thugs, a mysterious beggar gives him money and a mobile phone. Dae-su enters a sushi restaurant where he encounters Mi-do, a young chef. Upon receiving a taunting phone call from his captor and consuming a live octopus, he collapses and is taken in by Mi-do. Dae-su attempts to rape Mi-do and then regretfully attempts to leave her apartment, but they reconcile and begin to form a bond. Once he has recovered, Dae-su tries to find his daughter but gives up after learning she was adopted following his kidnapping. Now focused on identifying his captors, Dae-su locates the Chinese restaurant where his prison food was prepared, then follows a deliveryman to find the hotel room.
Dae-su learns the hotel is a private prison where people pay to have others incarcerated. He tortures and interrogates the warden, Mr. Park Cheol-woong, who divulges that Dae-su was imprisoned for "talking too much". Park's guards attack Dae-su, and a fierce fight ensues in a corridor. Dae-su is stabbed but manages to defeat them all. His captor is then revealed to be wealthy businessman Lee Woo-jin, who gives Dae-su an ultimatum: If he can uncover the motive for his imprisonment within five days, Woo-jin will kill himself; otherwise, he will kill Mi-do. Dae-su and Mi-do grow closer and eventually have sex.
Joo-hwan contacts Dae-su with important information but is murdered by Woo-jin while they are on the phone. Dae-su recalls that he and Woo-jin attended the same high school, where he witnessed Woo-jin committing incest with his sister, Lee Soo-ah. Dae-su told Joo-hwan what he had seen, leading his classmates to gossip about Soo-ah. Soo-ah later committed suicide following a false pregnancy, leading a grief-stricken Woo-jin to seek revenge. In the present, Woo-jin cuts off Mr. Park's hand, so Park and his gang join forces with Dae-su. Dae-su leaves Mi-do with Mr. Park and sets out to face Woo-jin.
At his penthouse apartment, Woo-jin shows Dae-su a family album with photos of Dae-su, his wife, and his infant daughter together fifteen years earlier, progressing to pictures of his daughter as she grew up, which reveal that Mi-do is Dae-su's daughter. Woo-jin reveals that he orchestrated events through hypnosis to guide Dae-su to the restaurant so that he and Mi-do would fall in love, for Dae-su to experience the same pain of incest that he had. Woo-jin reveals Mr. Park is still working for him and threatens to tell Mi-do the truth. Dae-su desperately apologises for spreading the rumour that led to the death of Woo-jin's sister. Dae-su begs for Mi-do to be kept ignorant and debases himself by begging on all fours, acting like a dog, and licking Woo-jin's shoes. When Woo-jin is unmoved, Dae-su cuts out his tongue as an act of penance. Woo-jin finally accepts Dae-su's apology and instructs Mr. Park not to reveal the truth to Mi-do. He then drops what he claims to be the remote to his pacemaker and walks away. Dae-su activates the device in an attempt to kill Woo-jin, only to find it is the remote for a reel-to-reel tape recorder that plays an audio recording through large loudspeakers of Dae-su and Mi-do having sex. As Dae-su collapses in despair, Woo-jin enters the penthouse lift and, as he recalls his involvement in his sister's suicide, shoots himself in the head.
Sometime later, Dae-su locates the hypnotist and writes to her requesting that she erase the knowledge of Mi-do being his daughter so they can remain happy together. At first, she expresses how she did not feel the need to help him but was touched by a specific line in his letter, something said by the man on the rooftop where Dae-su was first released.[a] The hypnotist guides Dae-su to envision the part of himself that knows the truth dying. Afterward, Mi-do finds Dae-su lying in the snow, but there is no sign of the hypnotist. Mi-do confesses her love for him, and the two embrace. Dae-su breaks into a broad smile, slowly replaced by a tortured grimace.
The corridor fight scene took seventeen takes in three days to perfect and was one continuous take; there was no editing of any sort except for the knife stabbed in Oh Dae-su's back, which was computer-generated imagery.[citation needed]
The final scene's snowy landscape was filmed in New Zealand.[16] The ending is deliberately ambiguous, and the audience is left with several questions: specifically, how much time has passed, if Dae-su's meeting with the hypnotist really took place, whether he successfully lost the knowledge of Mi-do's identity, and whether he will continue his relationship with Mi-do. In an interview with Park (included with the European release of the film), he says that the ambiguous ending was deliberate and intended to generate discussion; it is completely up to each individual viewer to interpret what is not shown.
Oldboy received critical acclaim,[20][21][22] and is considered an influential cult classic.[22][23][24][25] Praise was also given to the film's action sequences, specifically highlighting the "all-timer" single shot hallway fight sequence.[26] As per the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 83% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 159 reviews, with an average rating of 7.40 out of 10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Violent and definitely not for the squeamish, Park Chan-Wook's visceral Oldboy is a strange, powerful tale of revenge."[27] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 78 out of 100, with 82% positive reviews based on 33 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews."[28]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars. Ebert remarked: "We are so accustomed to 'thrillers' that exist only as machines for creating diversion that its a shock to find a movie in which the action, however violent, makes a statement and has a purpose."[29] James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three out of four stars, saying that it "isn't for everyone, but it offers a breath of fresh air to anyone gasping on the fumes of too many traditional Hollywood thrillers."[30]
Jamie Russell of the BBC movie review calls it a "sadistic masterpiece that confirms Korea's current status as producer of some of the world's most exciting cinema."[35] In 2019 on The Hankyoreh, Kim Hyeong-seok said that Oldboy was the 'zeitgeist of the vigorous Korean cinema in early 2000s', and a 'boiling point that led history of Korean cinema to new state'.[36] Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called the film "a trivial genre movie," writing, "The fact that Oldboy is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (its all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys."[37] J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader was also not impressed, saying that "there's a lot less here than meets the eye."[38]
c01484d022