Old Boy, Election 2 and Protege
iView Author: Vishrant (India)
Email: withheld
Old Boy
movie opens and you forget to breath. and that’s how it is going to be for total length of the movie. it is not going to give you a chance to inhale oxygen. you have to spare moments here and there so that you can survive to see the climax. which is going to put all the neurons in your head in a knot and left you numb. a climax so brilliant apt for a movie like this. climax is so much outstanding that after going through the whole movie which is visceral when screen go blank you go blank. it is like a musical crescendo.
this movie is a cult. we are introduced to oh daesu (choi min sik) cooling of in police station. seeing his behavior we know that this is not his first time is police station neither last. after coming out of the police station he calls home to wish his daughter happy birthday and hand over the phone to his friend. after finishing the call when his friend look around oh daesu is gone.
oh daesu is now in a room. with him you will also think why? but neither he is going to get any answer nor you. when you are put in a room without any explanation first you wait for the door to open. standing just by the side of the door. door doesn’t open. after some time you get a little back from the door. after waiting for some more time you will look for the chair. so that you can sit and wait for the door to open. when you will be tired of sitting and door is still closed you will slant a little. and finally tired you will fall into sleep against your wish. or the tiredness will take over the hope of door being opened. when you will awake and door will be still closed again you start waiting with freshness. just a little more at ease because you have already spend some time in the room and are now a little familiar with the atmosphere of the room. and that’s how it will go on. after some time you will pay more attention to the tv than to the door. and thinking about future prepare yourself to take the revenge, when you will get out. oh daesu get out of the room after fifteen years. and now he want answers.
movie has a corridor fight scene. it is a cult in a cult. there is fight scene at the climax and after watching choi min sik in the climax all your concepts about acting are going to need a overhauling.
——————————————————————————————–
Election 2
this movie is sheer brilliance on direction. the quality of direction also depends upon the story. directors input is also important. a good director can uplift a normal story. a bad director can destroy a good story. than there is a director who can make a masterpiece with the bare minimum of the story. same story given to some other director will amount to nothing. but a director with brilliance will turn it into a masterpiece. election 2 falls in this category. where sheer power of story telling has turned it in to a movie that will blow your brain out.
election 2 takes the story further from election. the 2 year term of lok as chairman of the society is about to end. the election of next chairman is on the card. jimmy is now trying to turn into a legal business man. he is not willing to run for the chairman seat. the other strong contender is kun. who does not entertain much favor among the uncles because of his reckless behavior. lok also is not ready to let go the chairman ship. he wants to get elected again as the chairman. law of society does not permit it.
uncle teng tells lok to learn how to let go. he tells him that tradition can not be broken so jimmy will be the next chairman.
jimmy was not willing to run for the election. but after certain events he is in the run. and the battle between lok and jimmy has began. society is bifurcated in two camps of lok and jimmy.
this part of the movie is awesomely gripping. you are lost in the movie totally. finally after a lot of blood wash society gets its new chairman. but you will not listen a single gun shot. men wield their grip on choppers.
in the sea of underworld every fish survive by eating up the weaker fish. that fish also will be eaten by some bigger fish. there is always a bigger fish ready to eat up the weaker fish. or some times the bigger fish play a little with the weaker fish and let him believe that he is the biggest.
——————————————————————————————-
Protege
movie is about a drug lord and an undercover cop. but it is not that much more about drugs as it is about these two persons. its more of a character study kind of thing and yet maintains all the thrill necessary to be called a thriller. watch it as a thriller and mull over it as a character study. it is magnificent on both these accounts.
quin (andy lau) is a drug lord and is suffering from diabetes and ailing kidney. he prefers to be treated in government hospital over private clinic to avoid undue attention. he appears an easy going character. he is not only at ease in his demeanor. he is meticulous too. he is a drug seller. he is not in under any delusion, positive or negative. he is a business man. for him consumer is responsible for demanding, not him for supplying. and his relation with his customers are strictly limited up to the trade. he is not concerned about what customers are going through. though if time arise he can offer an point blank insight about them because of this detached observation. he is a family man, a father troubled by a rebellious daughter.
nick (daniel wu) is his right hand man, and an undercover cop. quin saved him when he was in trouble. and make him join his trade. with time nick has managed to climb the ladder in trade. he has also gained quin’s confidence. quin does not trust people easily. quin manages his affairs in the way so that his various links stay at the safe distance from each other. people of distribution racket do not know anything about warehousing. warehouse in-charge does not know about the suppliers of the material.
this is why it has taken eight years for nick to reach to the place where supply of raw drugs is prepared for local market consumption. all this time nick has been living a low key life in an apartment. in the same building lives a single mother junkie named jane. movie opens with the scene of jane taking a shot and scene closes with her little daughter taking the syringe. movie opens with the question of why people take drugs, and ends with the same question and with the answer in the form of jane’s daughter.
Tags: Election 2, Old Boy, Protege, World Cinema
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Oldboy is a great movie and coincidentally, just today news broke out that Spielberg is remaking it in hollywood – starring will smith. now, that should be interesting.
of course Zinda was a bollywood version of it – no comments on that !!!
i might be the only one who thinks oldboy is overrated. i liked it’s poetic structure, the awesome alley fight scene, and the acting. but the ending did not entirely work for me (SPOILER ALERT) because i thought the plan was to grandiose, and hypnosis could not have worked so magically well. there are millions of things that could have and should have gone wrong but oh daesu and his love interest do exactly what his kidnapper had planned. i was watching it and thinking “this is too much.”
Will Smith in remake of Old Boy? I’m highly skeptical.
I think the Sanjay Gupta remake was better.
j/k.