I was made to recommend this movie- OLDBOY
First off... THERE WILL BE NO SPOILERS IN THIS BLOG.
Instead of trying to summarize (and potentially spoil) this classic for a broader group of people with no intention of watching it, I am going to ignore the readers who randomly clicked on this blog looking for a summary and simply recommend this movie to the smaller handful of people who might actually take my recommendation.
(I just read the run-on sentence I just typed above and it nearly gave me a stroke… What I meant to say is that this blog is a blind movie recommendation aimed at people with similar tastes to mine.)
Park Chan-wook's ultra-violent tale of revenge, Oldboy, is celebrating its 20th anniversary by running for a limited time in a small number of theatres, and I urge you to find one of those theatres and either watch it for the first time or revisit it on the big screen… It has been remastered and restored for modern theaters, so the experience will likely trump the one you had in 2003.
I'm not sure anyone reading this is a South Korean film aficionado, but I will say if you liked the Oscar-award-winning movie Parasite, then you may not necessarily enjoy Oldboy, but you do owe Oldboy a certain degree of thanks because Parasite probably doesn't get the run it had without Oldboy blazing the trail for Korean films over a decade prior. Oldboy was one of the first Korean hits in the US, so it set a template for a lot of the films we would see later on.
There are hammers, and octopi, and arrows, and dentists, and plot twists that make Squid Game seem like an episode of Family Feud.
So before football season starts and your attention turns elsewhere, hunt out a theatre showing Oldboy (and for Christ's sake, make sure it isn't the Spike Lee/Josh Brolin remake from 2013), and strap in for a distinctive cinematic ride.
40 Acres A Mule Filmworks. Shutterstock Images.
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(No.)
It's sick. It's twisted. It's violent. And it's graphic. But it's a film that has left a dent in me that still exists 20 years later and will do the same to you.
Trust me, and take a report.
-Olderboy