Oldboy

Arnaud Mirloup	3.75
Carth	4.25
drélium	2.75
El Topo	1
Ghost Dog	4.75
Gillesc	4.5
jeffy	4.5
Junta	1.75
Marc G.	1.25
Ordell Robbie	0.5	Old Tricks
Tenebres83	5
Yann K	3.75

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Old Tricks

Oldboy surely is a landmark in Korean movie industry's recent boom. It was the movie to whom Tarantino wanted to give the Palme d'or in Cannes but didn't get it because Tilda Swinton managed to convince a short majority of the jury to give it to Michael Moore. But its Grand Prix in Cannes earned Park Chan-Wook and Choi Min-Sik Prizes from the Korean State. In a country in which a Prize won in a major festival in the West is the best shield against detractors, Park became Korean movie industry's most powerful man.

But Oldboy is trying so hard to impress that it ultimately is forgetting to be great cinema. Just like being a great guitar player doesn't mean you're a great songwriter, virtuosity isn't enough to make a Scorsese of a any director. A scene such as the famous one shot corner sequence is difficult to realize technically but it is nothing more than the pale imitation of videogame's most basic directing. For the rest, Oldboy is nothing more than a compilation of tricks already too much used in contemporary cinema: split screens, sadistic moments turned into a joke, overpresent voiceover accumulating aphorisms smelling like cheap cynicism, pompous use of classical music, accumulation of twists with a final one so ridiculous that it feels like "All of this for this?", characters with cool attitude overplayed by their actors, shifts in tone not well handled, accumulation of movie references never managing to create a coherent universe...

In Oldboy everything is about façade: it wants to be brilliant but is just flashy, it wants to be a black comedy filled with deep tragedy but its purpose is nothing more than cheap philosophy. In a way, it is to B movie with thematic ambitions what Lars Von Trier's recent movies are to great arty cinema: bad counterfeit. Being pure B cinema with high thematic ambition was achieved better by A History of Violence.