Oldboy (2013)

[schild]

I just watched it last night. Enjoyed it as well. Brolin is no Choi Min‑sik. But then, Park Chan-wook is no Spike Lee. It's tough, I tend to enjoy Asian originals to #whitepeoplemovies (yea yea, Spike Lee is black, but he stopped Doing the Right Thing years ago), but in this case, I think I liked the latter just as much as the former but for different reasons. The new one, hammer fight scene aside, I think is more successful as a piece of cinema. But the old one was far more gritty.

Either way, I waffle back and forth on Chan-wook as his best work was probably Cut (part of Three Extremes) and even then it wasn't as good as Fruit Chan's Dumplings.

Anyway, short version: Critics are wrong on this one. It is a very good movie.

Edit: Actually, to put my opinion of the original more succinctly - everything Chan-wook does strikes me as low-rent Miike shit. It's not that he's bad, it's just so close in genre to Miike's stuff that I can't help but wonder what a better director would do with the source material.

[Hoax]

Saw the remake. I thought it was not nearly as good as my memories of the original. The long fight scene, of all things, was awful awful shit in the American version. How did that happen? It was less intense, less interesting and it made zero sense because this is the land of guns.

Brolin was amazing. The young Olsen was good. I imdb both of them and they are both already part of the Marvel universe, pretty awesome.

Its not dreck by any means and contains some cool stuff its worth watching on netflix instant IF you have seen the original.