In Theaters
Oldboy- Chanwook Park's hallucinatory revenge picture is poised to be the first real crossover hit from the booming South Korean movie industry. 2nd prize winner at Cannes and slated for a Hollywood remake (helmed by the team behind Better Luck Tomorrow) Oldboy will make director Park one of South Korea's most bankable exports. Detractors find the film a shallow genre exercise, designed to make fanboys and manga-readers swoon (as if that were a bad thing.) I'm not sure I saw the same movie Manohla Dargis and Scott Foundas did!
Oldboy may be polarizing, but its also never less than exhilarating to watch. It's full of jaw-dropping set pieces and breathtaking emotional depths. Park traces the dizzying story of Oh Dae-su (the fearless Choi Min-sik) a Korean businessman who is kidnapped one rainy night and inexplicably detained in a private cell for 15 years. When he is finally freed, Oh Dae-su is hell bent on finding out who imprisoned him and why. It's a simple premise which grows more absurdly contrived as the film builds to its Shakespearean climax.
Oldboy is a bit too show-offy, and its dramatic payoff depends on an elaborately schematic plot. It's also perhaps too cruel and pitiless by half. Park nearly reaches the sadistic heights of Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer, but without Miike's manic glee. Despite these faults, Oldboy stands as the most exciting movie import of the year so far.
Finally, I think Oldboy perhaps unwittingly taps a political nerve at the moment. In its depiction of indefinite detention without charge, in prisons beyond the reach of law, the movie unavoidably invokes comparisons to the plight of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. It's not hard to imagine detainees (some of whom are no doubt innocent) being pushed to the kind of blind hatred, and determined revenge that Oh Dae-su develops in the confines of his dank cell. I don't know whether that makes the film a cautionary tale, or just a disturbing reminder that for all of its contrivances, Oldboy's traumas aren't far from our front page.
On DVD
The Terminal AKA Forrest, Full of Grace- In Steven Spielberg's appallingly-bad romantic comedy, Tom Hanks grafts his everyman shtick onto another cliche, that of the lovable, naive Eastern European immigrant (see also Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson.) Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man stuck in bureaucratic limbo in the international terminal of JFK airport, while his country undergoes a military coup. Navorski, forced to live, sleep and eat in the airport, bravely weathers the administrative crackdown of an anal-retentive airport official, played by Stanley Tucci and effortlessly befriends an idealized assortment of oddball airport employees. But it's his romance with a flight attendant, played by Catherine Zeta Jones, that's the biggest embarrassment here. Poor Zeta Jones is forced to play a thankless type: that of the self-sabotaging career woman. She repeatedly demurs nice guy Navorski in favor of her caddish, married flyboy lover. All of the scenes between this mismatched romantic pairing are cringe-inducingly bad.
Also, Spielberg's penchant for using depressing true stories to craft uplifting affirmations of the human spirit (see also Schindler's List) is particularly telling in our post 9/11 paranoia state. The Terminal is actually based on the true story of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian national who has lived in the Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris for nearly two decades. His true story is ill-suited to the shallow optimism of Spielberg's screwball comedy. When Nasseri was finally granted French residency after a decade of living at Charles De Gaulle, he was psychologically broken and unable to leave. By all accounts he will probably die in the airport.
Despite its considerable flaws, The Terminal is a great-looking film and no small technical achievement. The JFK we see here is actually a massive replica built inside an airplane hangar. Spielberg's command of the medium is extraordinary and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski nimbly moves the camera through the well-oiled buzz of the airport. For once, the product placement in a Spielberg film (in this case the various franchises contained in the terminal) perfectly suits his frenzied vision of globalization limbo. But the modern American airport and all of its psychic baggage is ill-suited to light comedy. Perhaps only a horror film or a dark comedy will do.
Code 46- Michael Winterbottom's sci-fi romance is a minor-key masterpiece and a worthy counterpoint to The Terminal's chipper take on the modern security state. Winterbottom's chilling dystopia is just about the most convincing vision of the future (rampant globalization, extreme class polarization, severe global warming, polyglot English) I've ever seen. Made on the cheap, but still gorgeously shot on 35 mm in megacities like Shanghai and Dubai, Code 46 has a wonderful look and a spontaneous, almost improvised quality.
Thankfully, Frank Cottrell Boyce's script dispenses with exposition instead focusing on the love story between insurance investigator Tim Robbins and black market passport forger Samantha Morton (one of the best actresses in the English language, and simply amazing here.) The plot elegantly touches on themes found in that other recent sci-fi romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (and to a lesser degree, the Korean film Oldboy): amnesia, romantic destiny and the taboo of incest.
She Hate Me- Spike Lee's fantasia about capitalism and American ethics finds the writer/director at his most self-righteous, while simultaneously thinking with his dick. It's not an appealing combination. Corporate whistleblower Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie, stranded) is fired from his high-paying executive post at a shady drug company. In order to make ends meet, he enters the lucrative world of sperm donation for wealthy lesbian couples. The catch here is that the lesbians in question are all femme, gorgeous and dying for dick. Eschewing the turkey basters, these man-hungry dykes insist on inspecting the goods (his big dick- in a scene meant to invoke slavery) before hopping into bed with our virile hero, for some mutually-orgasmic, procreative (and wildly unsafe) sex. It's all totally ludicrous.
But it's not nearly as embarrassing as Lee's attempts to fold everything from the Enron scandal to Watergate to a Mafia subplot into the baby batter. At nearly 2 1/2 hours, She Hate Me is politically-confused, visually-drab and self-indulgently digressive. Supposedly sex columnist Tristan Taormino was Lee's technical consultant on the lesbian characters. Judging from the finished product however, it's hard to believe that Lee consulted with anyone before releasing this mess.
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