Posts

Showing posts with the label choi min-sik

LUCY - REVIEW

Image
Well this was a movie and it happened. As to what movie this was and what happened in it, I'm not entirely sure. Initially, Luc Besson's latest looked like a fun but dumb sci-fi thriller about Scarlett Johansson going around kicking all sorts of butts with super powers. Admittedly, that does take place in this movie but somehow, it doesn't really work. The main problem is that Lucy is REALLY dumb, to the point where each aspect of it becomes distracting. Hell, even the film itself is distracted as, during its first half, it keeps cutting to random footage of animals or whatever someone's talking about. If someone mentions reproduction, we get a montage of people and animals having sex, if someone mentions space, we cut to space. Some of it is obvious symbolism, some of it I think was meant to be a joke, none of it is new, edgy, funny or clever in any way. It's mostly irritating, frankly. Luckily, the plot kicks in quick and it makes even less sense than Li

OLDBOY - REVIEW

Image
Based on a manga (not an anime, I'm cheating a bit here), Oldboy was the second and, arguably, best part of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy. It cemented Korean cinema in the West as something to really look out for and received a cult status pretty quickly, even spawning an upcoming remake by Spike Lee, starring Josh Brolin. Taking a page out of Alexandre Dumas' classic tale The Count Of Monte Cristo , Oldboy follows an average guy, played by Choi Min-sik, who is inexplicably kidnapped by an unknown enemy and kept locked away in a room for 15 years without any clue as to why he was taken or by whom. Finally, he is released and sets out to find his incarcerator and get his revenge. Along the way, he meets a young girl called Mi-do (a terrific Kang Hye-jung) who befriends him and starts helping him with his disturbing quest. What follows is a truly brutal and unpleasant journey full of teeth-pulling, live octopus eating, head hammering, tongue-cutting and horrible r