Oldboy [Blu-ray]

Oldboy [Blu-ray]
by Chan-wook Park

Oldboy [Blu-ray]

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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Dae-han Ji, Dal-su Oh, Hye-jeong Kang, Ji-tae Yu, Min-sik Choi
Director: Chan-wook Park
Brand: Genius
Blu-ray: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Korean (Original Language); English (Original Language); English (Dubbed)
Format: Color
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 120 minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: 2007-11-06
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Model: TVD7004
Studio: Tartan Video USA
Product features:

Oh Dae-su is an ordinary Seoul businessman with wife and little daughter who. After a drunken night on the town, is abducted and locked up in a strange and private "prison." No one will tell him why he s there and who his jailer is. His fury builds to a single-minded focus of revenge. 15 years later, he is unexpectedly freed, given a new suit, a cell-phone and 5 days to discover the myster

Movie Reviews of Oldboy [Blu-ray]

Movie Review: "Whether it be a grain of sand or a rock, in water they both sink alike"
Summary: 5 Stars

A movie driven by madness is the shortest and best way I can sum up this film as it seems to be a plot focusing around which man can be the most insane; the one seeking revenge against his captor or the one who has done the capturing. I will need to be careful as the way the film's structured, in order to really tell anything of the story, I may have to spoil a few important moments of the movie so you have been warned.

The story focuses around a man known as Dea-Su who, at the start of the film is seen drunk, being held at a police station waiting for his friend to pick him up and take him home. Suddenly Dae-Su goes missing and wakes up a few days later locked in a room with no knowledge or where he is or why he's there. He is locked in captivity for 15 years and is released without warning. Driven mad by his own solitary confinement, upon release he immediately sets upon a mission to find his captor and discover the reason for his imprisonment.

While out he encounters a young girl named Mi-do, a sushi chef who takes pity on him and brings him into her home as he has nowhere else to go. Dae-Su, discovers that his captor is an old school friend by the name Lee Woo-Jin and the reason behind the imprisonment is that Dae-Su never kept his mouth shut and spread a rumour that destroyed Woo-Jin's family. Driven by the passion for revenge against Dae-Su, he looks to destroy Dae-Su in the same way that the rumours destroyed him.

The film itself takes on a comic book style of storytelling, darting from one scene to the next whilst consistently narrating the story to explain exactly what's going on. The character of Dae-Su is a fairly complicated one, but turns into a sort of anti-hero movie as he moves from one depraved and sadistic act to the next in order to find the answer to the question of why. Park Chan-wook does a splendid job of directing this and it's something you can really get into, once you have become used to following the subtitles and the on-screen action simultaneously.

The acting is superb, especially that of Choi Min-Sik (Dae-Su) as he portrays a man driven mad by his captivity and his own passion for revenge superbly. The main antagonist, Lee Woo-Jin, played by Yu Ji-Tae is played so well, the character itself is as disturbing as I'm sure he was intended to appear. Almost too cool and calm to be the villain of the piece, I found myself expecting something more behind the whole scheme as he certainly did not initially appear to be the man who would be behind this torture of Dae-Su.

Overall, this is simply a masterpiece of Asian Cinema and it is unfortunate, in a way, that the only real way we would get movies this masterful in the west, is if they were independent films that would ultimately not get the exposure they would deserve because the premise and outcome of the film aren't commercial. The worst news possible, relating to this film, is that there was a planned American remake and would undoubtedly poison the brilliance of this absolute masterpiece by putting a pointlessly optimistic spin on the story. Thankfully, it doesn't look like this will be happening, so I would strongly recommend this for the purposes of witnessing brilliant storytelling very rarely seen.

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Summary of Oldboy [Blu-ray]

Oh Dae-su is an ordinary Seoul businessman with wife and little daughter who. After a drunken night on the town, is abducted and locked up in a strange and private "prison." No one will tell him why he?s there and who his jailer is. His fury builds to a single-minded focus of revenge. 15 years later, he is unexpectedly freed, given a new suit, a cell-phone and 5 days to discover the mysterious enemy who had him imprisoned. Seeking vengeance on all those involved, he soon finds that his enemy?s tortures are just beginning.

In the realm of revenge thrillers, you'd be hard pressed to find more ultra-violent vengeance and psycho thrills than in the creepy story of Oldboy. This Korean import made a pop splash at the Cannes Film Festival and during its limited theatrical run thanks to the imprimatur of Quentin Tarantino, who raved about it and its visionary director, Chan-wook Park, to anyone who would listen. It's easy to see why QT fell in love with the grindhouse attitude, fast-paced action, violent imagery, and icy-black humor, but it's a disservice to think of Oldboy as another Tarantino homage or knockoff. The darkly existential undercurrent in the themes that Oldboy traces over its life-long narrative arc is much more complex and deeply disturbing than anything of its kind. The movie's tagline is, "15 years of imprisonment... 5 days of vengeance." The imprisonee is Oh Dae-Su, an ordinary Joe who is snatched off a Seoul street corner and locked away in a dank, windowless fleabag hotel room for the aforementioned 15 years. Just as abruptly he is released, and thus the five days begin. Why did this happen to Oh Dae-Su? Ah, but that would be telling, and in fact we don't know ourselves until the final wrenching scenes.

Oldboy breaks into a classic three-act saga, the first of which details the hallucinatory period of imprisonment in which Oh Dae-Su wades from mild insanity to outright psychosis in the hands of unseen yet attentive captors. Act 2 is the revenge, when an entirely different tone takes over and Oh Dae-Su moves with single-minded purpose and clarity. It's this section that has gained the most notoriety, primarily for the claw-hammer dentistry scene, the one-man-army tracking shot, and the wriggling octopus that Oh Dae-Su consumes in a sushi bar (he's been dead so long he simply needs life back inside him in any way possible). In act 3, answers finally start to emerge and the sinister atmosphere grows even more profound--not without a healthy dose of extra bloodletting, of course. Oldboy is an undeniably poetic masterpiece of tension, fury, and dynamic craft. Ultimately, its epic cycle of tragedy is of the sort that mankind has been inflicting upon itself for all time. Some of the images may be gruesome, but all converge into a kind of beauty. It's in the telling of this lurid tale that these details become one and the memories of pain ultimately heal. --Ted Fry

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