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Oct-Dec 2010 Screenings
Old Boy
2003 - Park Chan-Wook - 119 mins - Republic of Korea
Fri 20 May 2005 at 8.30pm
Astor Cinema, Scariff
Midnight Court Rating: 3.5 (2 votes)
Storyline: Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-shik), incarcerated for years in a private prison, hooks up with a young female sushi chef Mido (Kang Hye-jeong), to locate the man (Yu Ji-tae) responsible for robbing him of fifteen years of his life. Old Boy is definitely not the kind of film that can win the endorsement of every viewer. A sizable number of the audience will no doubt find the film’s resolution or even thematic material repulsive. Others may be turned off by its excesses that occasionally slip into plain weirdness In the end, though, even its excesses and manic quirkiness are part of Old Boy’s design. Unwatchably ugly and breathtakingly beautiful, gut-wrenching and delicate, heartbreakingly emotional and coldly manipulative; it is unclear at this point whether the movie can eventually claim the position of a world-class masterpiece, but one thing is certain: Old Boy is without doubt the most purely cinematic (both in form and content) piece of work, the truest motion picture, released in South Korea last year.
Verdicts from the Midnight Court