Spring 2015 #8: Oldboy (2003) - Park Chan-wook

I’m sort of procrastinating this review because this is one of those movies that you see once and then never want to think about again. And it’s still amazing. For real.

So a businessman named Oh Dae-su is randomly kidnapped one day after being rescued from the police station (for drunkenness?) by his best friend. He remains in a small room for 15 years without a single person telling him why, and then one day, he is released without explanation. And he is NOT happy.

He soon meets a girl, Mi-do, and starts living with her while he tracks down his captor. After Oh Dae-su finds the man who imprisoned him, Lee Woo-jin, he is given the choice between finding out the truth of why he was imprisoned or killing him right then. Lee Woo-jin is a rich businessman and a scary dude.

The search for answers leads Oh Dae-su down a horrifying path from which he can never return (or can he?). There are crazy fighting sequences, including one that took three days to film and is one amazing continuous take.

Excuse the bad gif quality.

The film kind of reminded me of Kill Bill a little, since it’s a revenge story and Kill Bill is inspired by samurai films, and Oldboy is based on the Japanese manga of the same name, despite it being a South Korean film. But Oldboy is much richer in complexity and much more horrifying in the reveal.

The tone is incredibly dark but also very twisted, as things like hypnosis and incest start to enter the plot. Also Oh Dae-Su eats a live octopus… which the actor really did.

Also the ending is intentionally ambiguous and terrifying and left me in shock for at least an hour after the film ended.

The film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, and is now #70 on the IMDb Top 250.

Fall 2014 #6: Taxi Driver (1976) - Martin Scorsese

Okay so not only am I behind in finishing my “Fall 2014 Moviecation List” I am behind in writing a few reviews as well. Seeing as I basically have nothing but free time now, I thought I’d give myself something productive to do. The sixth film I saw on my list, which was, granted, a few months ago, was Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

Yes. Featuring this line. Which Robert Ebert calls “the truest line in the film…. Travis Bickle’s desperate need to make some kind of contact somehow—to share or mimic the effortless social interaction he sees all around him, but does not participate in.”

Heavy stuff. So Robert De Niro plays an ex-Marine insomniac, Travis Bickle, who takes a job as a taxi driver to give himself something to do during the long nights of meaningless existence. After Bickle plunges himself into the happenings of late night 1970s New York, he is exposed to a world of darkness that quickly begins consuming him.

That’s when he meets a teenage prostitute, played by Jodie Foster, who insanely enough was 14 when the film was released in the US.

Bickle straddles these worlds of night and day, trying desperately to cling to the goodness inside of him by romantically pursuing Betsy, a presidential campaign volunteer. This battle expresses an internal struggle in Bickle, both as a war veteran and as a mentally unstable outsider coming to terms with the darkness in society.

The film was an instant hit, both financially and critically. Many praised the film’s controversial and up-for-interpretation ending, which needed excessive color correction just to lower it down to an R rating. 

Taxi Driver won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, with four Oscar nominations (for both Jodie Foster and Robert de Niro) but no wins. It’s an impressive look at the darker side of society, with some disturbing influences, including the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. 

Also important to note that the film directly inspired John Hinckley Jr., who attempted an assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. At the trial, Hinckley stated that his actions were an attempt to impress Jodie Foster, including his mimicking of Bickley’s mohawk.

Crazy. The film is #52 on the AFI Top 100 and #78 on the IMDb Top 250. 

Side note: It also allowed for this to exist.

Day 10: January 12th, 2014: Pulp Fiction (1994) - Quentin Tarantino

I just realized that I watched the two films from 1994 back to back, which was unintentional but shows just how massively different two critically acclaimed movies from the same year can be.

Okay I guess I’ll get to the point. Every time in my life where I have heard Pulp Fiction come up in conversation, my immediate thought afterwards is always “Okay, I guess this is a movie I really need to watch.” That is because, 20 years later (yes, 1994 was 20 years ago), Pulp Fiction still has a lasting impression on pop culture. And now that I’ve seen it, I can finally understand why.

There’s no point in trying to explain the plot, so I won’t. Pulp Fiction is the product of decades of film history, all compiled by Quentin Tarantino and revealed to us in a colorful and violent display of humor and wit.

Okay very violent. But there’s an interesting quote I found on the Wikipedia page that I think is one of the best ways of explaining Pulp Fiction. Ken Dancyger says that Pulp Fiction represents “a new phenomenon, the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life. The consequence is twofold—the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns, horror films or adventure films. And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form, a different experience for the audience.”

Pulp Fiction is one of the most critically acclaimed postmodern films of all time. It is self-referential in that it looks and acts like a highly stylized reference to the gangster films of the past, but it still manages to make fun of those tropes in the process.

Here Tarantino plays a random man, a friend of Samuel L. Jackson’s character, and he is calling his own two main characters, Jackson and John Travolta, dorks. That’s about as self-referential as it gets.

The film also includes a random cameo from Christopher Walken, as well as a supporting role played by Bruce Willis. This storyline hardly relates to the main storyline that the film begins and ends with, and yet its characters intersect with the other world only in that Willis plays a boxer who is paid by Travolta and Jackson’s boss to lose a fight.

This seemingly random storyline told right in the middle of an almost completely unrelated tale (following Jackson and Travolta, two gangsters) is what makes Pulp Fiction so enthralling to watch. Not to mention the absurdity of Uma Thurman’s character, the wife of Travolta and Jackson’s boss.

Everything that happens is so flashy and stylized, and yet all of the characters get their own quiet moment where they reveal their view on how the world works. It’s a twisted world of gang members, petty thieves, rapists, and a crackhead wife, but they all have a perspective to offer the audience about this messed up world. And the film kind of just laughs at itself, stares at the audience, and says

Pulp Fiction is the first independent film to ever gross over $100 million. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and also the Oscar for Best Screenplay. It ranks #4 on the IMDb Top 250, but #94 on the AFI Top 100.