Oldboy, finally a great comic book adaptation?

I love everything about movies except taking time to watch them. I know this is problematic as movies reflect our culture. I'm interested in cultural conversations so I'm trying to address this problem.

I am working a new shift at work that leaved me with two days at home during the week. I've decided that I am going to try to watch a new movie every weeek. I have a lot of them on my Netflix instant queue so even if I don't feel like watching one it can be on in the background while I'm playing Maple Story.

Seven Samurai is on Hulu Plus but I didn't want to bring the PS3 into the living room and the subtitles make it difficult to focus on something else while watching it. I decided to go ahead and finally watch Oldboy. I'd heard great reviews of Oldboy when it was released in the states around 2003/2004. And the reviews are right; the movie is really well done.

For those of you haven't seen it Oldboy tells the story of Oh Dae-Su, a man held captive in a room for 15 years for reasons he does not know. He wakes up one morning free and spends the remainder of the movie trying to find out who did this to him and why. My friend Nathan described it as the best revenge movie ever. I would have to agree; there's nothing quite like it.

My favorite scenes (in brief with spoilers)

The fight Oh Dae-Su has in the hotel hallway after torturing his warden: this isn't a slick martial arts treatment, it is a desperate man with a hammer fighting his way through a hallway of thugs.



There is a flashback scene where Oh Dae-Su remembers meeting the young girl, Soo-ah, and witnessing her sexual relationship with a young man he would only much later learn was her brother. The cuts between past and present were incredibly effective.

The final confrontation between Oh Dae-Su and his captor. There is some fighting but it is secondary to the conversation where we actually learn why Oh Dae-Su was held captive for 15 years. Why is that length of time significant?






There are several gotchas in this movie but the biggest one came when I learned that Oldboy was based on a comic book. Like most movie gotchas if you pay special attention throughout the movie it becomes obvious:



  • The incest plot

  • The extreme amount of physical abuse an average person can survive

  • Oh Dae-Su is told if he doesn't figure it out why he was inprisoned they will kill him in 5 days.

  • If Oh Dae-Su does figure out why he was imprisoned his captor will kill himself,

  • His captor has a killswitch in his pacemaker that his doctor added at his request.

This sort of ridiculousness is pretty common in manga and would normally jump out at me. It is a testament of great filmmaking that I didn't notice them sooner.

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Video Games and Aesthetics (A response to Magical Wasteland)

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I would like games to be seen as art if someone can clearly place them within an understood artistic tradition. It hasn't really happened yet.

Video games are a young medium and if the community wants to push to re-define art as it is currently understood they need to have clear understanding of art as it is currently understood.

Wikipedia isn't a lot of help here in finding the two-sentence blurb on art definition. To be sure, there is plenty of subjectivity to be found when discussing art but there is also much to draw upon in terms of artistic tradition and history.

The recent N+1 article Cave Painting was an attempt to discuss that context. It touched on general aesthetic understandings as articulated by Kant and refuted by Nietzsche. Its conclusion in brief was that to the extent that they are both currently understood, games are not art.

Author and journalist, Tom Bissell submitted a thoughtful reply which disagreed with the article and suggested comparing game interactivity to theater.

Matthew S. Burns from Magical Wasteland also replied on his website and questioned N+1's understanding of gaming, art and aesthetics.

I am not a game designer or student of Kant; however; I feel that many of N+1's points were misunderstood.

Much of Kant's discussion of beauty centers on the context within which it is found. Therefore the suggestion of beauty qua beauty is problematic because its meaning is not objective. This is what N+1 means when they say "Art-beauty is not the same as being good-looking, or else Bond movies might be the most beautiful films ever made." Context is paramount or meaning is lost.

And while we're fairly certain Kant never thought about video games this does not mean his concepts are invalid. As you'll note from the link below Kant spoke generally enough to remain relevant.

All that said, any headway in this discussion will be helped by writers and thinkers who are able to have meaningful discussions in both art and gaming contexts (even if the intent is to re-imagine that context). Nietzsche understood Kant's arguments clearly so he could adequately refute them.

Unfortunately discussions on games as art rarely touch on any sort of nuanced understanding of artistic tradition or criticism. Most immediately understand art's problematic subjectivity to mean that nothing has (or can) be said on the matter, thus games must be art. N+1 acknowledges this when it asks "If video games have turned out to be art, then what has art turned out to be?"

At least with Tom Bissell there's the idea (the hope?) that his training as a journalist has conditioned him to try to see all sides of the argument as he frames the narrative.

Here's a great primer on Kant's ideas of beauty. http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest/#SH2a