TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'Oldboy' and 'The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants'


Reviews by yours truly in today's Oregonian. Click on the title links for the print versions.




Oldboy
(dir. Chan-wook Park)

"Oldboy" was the talk of this year's Portland International Film Festival, and it returns to town with fanboys in its wake -- hailed as an instant classic of the New Korean Cinema.

A gaggle of Internet geeks and Asian-cinema nuts have been sounding off on the film almost since its 2003 release. They've run out of exclamation points looking for new ways to praise director Chan-wook Park's revenge thriller -- a movie that's part mystery, part tragedy, part bloodbath and 100-percent audacious. They've extolled the South Korean director's knack for playing with film grammar like a cracked-out David Fincher, using his camera to adrenalize and disturb.

And they're not wrong. "Oldboy" is startling and amazing -- a cinematic hammer to the skull.

Park starts out telling a simple, albeit strange, revenge story. A drunk businessman named Oh Daesu (Min-sik Choi) is kidnapped, framed for murder and imprisoned for 15 years in a tiny hotel room -- and then, inexplicably, set free.

With only a television to keep him company for a decade-and-a-half, Daesu has gone utterly barmy, hardening himself into an insane fighting machine in captivity. After he's released into the wild, as it were, he follows clues left by his captor -- embarking on a roaring rampage of revenge full of sex, surprises and creative brutality.

(Consider one scene where Choi takes on a dozen thugs with a claw hammer; shot in a single long take, it may go down as one of the nastier fights committed to celluloid.)

It's not for the squeamish. Or the inattentive. Because Oh Daesu faces his tormentor (Yu Ji-tae) fairly quickly, and then the real mystery -- why he was imprisoned to begin with -- begins to unfold. And "Oldboy," which has been a wildly cinematic revenge story up to that point, becomes something far stranger, crueler and more tragic. The final scenes, packed with revelations, will have moviegoers dropping their jaws or scrambling for the exits. It's merciless.

Min-sik Choi's transformation -- from a sloppy old fool to a 20-pounds-lighter bruiser with a weed-whacker haircut -- is astonishing. (For a few minutes, I wondered if Oh Daesu was played by two different actors.) Choi's face can shift from desperate to brutal to deadpan on a whim; it's not surprising to hear that Nicolas Cage, a man prone to similar emotional extremes in his younger days, has expressed interest in starring in an American remake.

Not that I can imagine anyone having the fortitude to faithfully reproduce this story within the Hollywood system. "Old Boy" is dripping with shocking images; you can almost hear Chan-wook Park cackling from the projection booth. A man plummets from a skyscraper roof onto a parked car in the background of one shot. In a sushi bar, in a single take, Oh Daesu stuffs his mouth with a live octopus. The movie freezes so a dotted line can show us the path a hammer will take to a man's skull. Tongues and teeth are treated with what might be called a casual disdain. And Park even finds a new way to film a flashback, as Oh Daesu hunts for elusive truths on a school campus.

A few critics have accused "Oldboy" of being a meaningless exercise in style. But to my thinking, the film has genuine tragic heft. Ultimately, this is a story in which minor, long-forgotten crimes arouse horrifying feats of wrath -- a story in which men do terrible things to themselves and others in the name of love, even when their passions have warped their moral compasses. It's positively ancient-Greek in that regard.
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The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
(dir. Ken Kwapis)

On its surface, "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" is a pop-song movie.

Adapted from Ann Brashares' young-adult novel, "Pants" is aimed squarely at 'tween and teenage girls, and it knows exactly what buttons to push -- and what songs to play while doing so. It's the sort of film where a pretty young woman (Alexis Bledel) has a crisis of faith on a gorgeously photographed Greek island and then, prompted by the girl-folk swelling on the soundtrack, jumps in the Aegean Sea as a gesture of independence, only to have a cute boy jump in after her.

There are moments like this scattered throughout "Sisterhood." (Lord knows I had to check my estrogen levels after exiting the theater.) But to its credit, the film also digs a little deeper than that -- occasionally embracing life's messier truths and making room for some terrific performances by its young leads.

Bledel and her three friends (Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera and Blake Lively) are 17-year-olds about to part ways for the summer. Before they split up, they consecrate a pair of jeans that magically adapts to their different body types. ("The pants equal love," says Bledel, somehow managing to deliver this line with a straight face. "Love your sisters and love yourself.")

They make a pact: Each of the four will wear the jeans for a week in their far-flung locales, then mail the pants to the next person in the group along with a letter detailing their adventures. From there, the movie brisky intercuts between four stories: Bledel has a Romeo-and-Juliet romance in Greece. Ferrera tries miserably to bond with her long-lost father (Bradley Whitford) and her soon-to-be-step-family in suburban Charleston. Lively puts some wildly inappropriate moves on her coach (Mike Vogel) at soccer camp. And Tamblyn bickers with the 12-year-old leukemia patient (Jenna Boyd) who's helping her make a documentary about working-class losers.

Yes, the movie has some emotionally too-tidy endings, some old-world stereotyping in Greece, and a few too many speeches where the moral is spelled out in big block letters (as when Boyd commandeers Tamblyn's camera to say, "Being happy isn't having everything in your life be perfect"). But it also offers full-bodied, tearful performances from Ferrera and Tamblyn, and some surprisingly harsh, human moments as Ferrera is shut out of her dad's new family and Lively owns up to some bad choices as she naively seeks a father figure.

Like a pop song, "Sisterhood" contains mostly simple messages -- love yourself, love your sisters, learn from your mistakes, be brave. But they're decent messages, wrapped in a sweet, well-acted and not-too-counterfeit package.

'Oldboy' new classic
'Traveling Pants' carries its messages well
(The Oregonian, June 3, 2005)


Posted: Fri - June 3, 2005 at 12:00 AM        

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