Welcome back to Your Favorite Movie, where a friends discusses exactly what the title indicates he or she will discuss. I've been writing this column for fifteen years, and after the first eleven years, it felt like home.
In a private prison of his own making this week is Sunny K*********, a former friend-of-a-friend whom I'm lucky to now just call a friend. I've maybe only hung out with Sunny a couple dozen times in my life, but I've grown to appreciate the times we do hang.
Okay, enough of the sappy shit, let's talk about gritty revenge stories! Sunny's favorite movie of all time is the South Korean thriller Oldboy. The less said about that movie in this paragraph, the better, mostly because I don't want to spoil shit for you and ruin it.
I was surprised how many of my friends had seen this shit, and so it was okay when travel plans forced Stephan C****** (who has appeared here before) and Sean E**** (in his first appearance, if you don't count album reviews) at hammer-point to take part in a movie interview. The gang hung out at a brewery before a book club meeting... actually, I should clarify. The place we were at didn't sell beer until 10 AM, and we were there at 9 AM.
So you are about to read the first completely sober Your Favorite Movie interview, which, let's be real, is probably a good thing. I need to chill a little bit. And the interview still went great! Maybe I don't need alcohol after all! (It helps when you surround yourself with smart, well-spoken friends!)
Anyways, here's our discussion, transcribed with Sunny's permission, and edited slightly (but honestly not as much as usual because, again, sobriety).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sunny: After that movie closes, and the credit scene runs, what's the first thing that goes through your head.
Joe: Honestly, this was my reaction—"What?!"
Sunny: When did you see it?
Joe: A couple days ago, for the first time. I had never heard of it before you said it was your favorite.
Sunny: Has it hung with you? Has it crawled back into your thoughts, and you try to push it away, like the boogie monster?
Joe: Yeah, sure. That's a good way of describing it.
Sunny: That's definitely how I felt when I first saw it. To give you the context—I moved here in high school, so I didn't have a lot of friends. I found a friend in one kid, Kevin, who really loved Asian films, for some reason. And yes... he's Asian. [laughter] He, I, and one other friend would watch old Bruce Lee films, we loved Jackie Chan, we liked Gorgeous. But like a drug, Kevin needed harder and harder stuff. So he started to bring some real experimental Asian film in. And so one day—and this is 2004, so a year after the movie came out and had won the Grand Prix or whatever—he said, "I heard about this Korean film, Oldboy. It's supposed to be good." It's all he said about it. So it's the three of us, all fifteen years old, and his eleven-year-old sister, all sitting there watching this movie.
Joe: That's worse, that you watched it with his sister!
Sunny: Oh, it's terrible. Before we even got to the climax, just during the sex scenes, she was like, "Kevin, what are you doing? What did you pick?!" But our little minds were in such a place of... movies were not "art" to us yet, and this was one of those big movies that transformed our little brains into seeing movies not just as stuff like Lion King—which was great—or The Matrix—which was great—but as something that could be more. That they could evoke emotions that were in a deeper, and maybe even a darker, place than was before. And after that, all three of us—his sister left halfway through the movie, she didn't even see the climax, which is probably for the best.
Joe: So she didn't see the brother-sister nipple scene.
Sunny: She didn't see the nip scene, didn't see... all the good shit. [laughter] The three of us... normally, after a movie, we'd go get food, hang out for a while. After this, we all just kind of stood up, had your reaction, like, "what..." and just quietly went home. And for the next days and weeks, it just kept crawling back into our minds, until we slowly started recommending it to other people. And they all had the same reaction too. A little disgust. A little disappointment in recommending it to them in the first place. [laughter] But also, a slight opening in their third eye. So it stayed with me since then. And that was fifteen years ago! And "fifteen years" is a theme in this movie. And pretty much every five years, I've seen it, and had a different experience with it, but it always leaves me changed in some small but significant way.
Joe: What's the line? "After eleven years... it felt like home." Maybe it took you eleven years to think of this as your favorite movie?
Sunny: It kind of did. And I think it wasn't until—and a lot of your other guests have pointed this out well—it's a little bit of a bullshit question to ask someone what their favorite movie is, I think.
Joe: Sure! Absolutely.
Sunny: That's capitalism talk!
[laughter]
Joe: Don't get me started, man!
Sunny: Oh, don't get me started!
Joe: Jesus.
Sunny: It's been interesting watching you, for the past fifteen weeks, through this blog, by the way. You've also seemed to evolve with the art.
Joe: Just like, tearing my hair out more and more?
Sunny: Yeah.
Joe: Wait till you read Wolf of Wall Street. It's just an hour-long argument about, "How can you look up to Jordan Belfort as the hero?!"
Sunny: Gordon Gecko, watch the good shit!
Joe: So this is a "friendship movie" to you, personally?
Sunny: Well when you say it like that, it's weird, but... yes. My "coming-of-age movie" is watching another movie.
Joe: I dig it. Would your friend Kevin feel the same way about this movie?
Sunny: I was about to ask him yesterday when I saw him. I was going to play it casual, like, "Hey... Oldboy was on, and I saw the whole thing. Have you seen it since? What are your thoughts on it?" [laughter] But I didn't have the nerve. I might still.
Joe: "Have you talked to your sister recently?" [laughter]
Sunny: I'll also say this about Oldboy. I was thinking about your question, "What makes a movie 'good'?" As an old consultant, I made this framework of categories. A movie that is someone's "favorite" should fulfill at least two of these three categories—
Joe: I appreciate that you thought about this.
Sunny: The movie should be good, in the sense that it's entertaining. It shouldn't drag, it shouldn't be boring. This movie does that—it's exciting, it's thrilling. I think that it changed action movies a little bit. Pre-Oldboy, you had you Armageddon days, and your Matrices, sort of these big, blockbuster actions. Post-Oldboy, you still have those of course, but you also see these John Wicks, these Takens, a sort of "one man thriller" things. I think it's fun. It's a fun movie to watch. Maybe a little too fun?
Joe: Ahhh... sure.
Sunny: But it's fun to watch! I think it is important for cinema. For South Korean cinema. It gave us a renaissance. From that, there was Little Drummer Girl, this guy made The Handmaiden in 2016, which was very good. Snowpiercer—and that is an anti-capitalist movie. That's a South Korean guy. I don't think it we would have that without Oldboy.
Stephan: Stoker is another one that he did.
Joe: This is all the same director?
Sunny: It's a couple different directors, South Korean directors. But it opened South Korean cinema to American audiences, and I understand that this is not a word you'd use for this particular movie, but—in an "approachable" way. Most other Asian cinema, the other hard shit that Kevin was bringing, was almost drivel to an American audience.
Joe: Interesting.
Sunny: So I think that's important. And then we want to talk about the hallway scene. I still think that that is the finest action scene in cinema.
Joe: That was pretty fucking wild.
Sunny: I wanna hear some thoughts on this.
Stephan: I think that scene alone is what really pulled me into that movie. I saw this in college, sophomore year maybe. very drunk. [laughter] I think it was at Kyle A****'s, pre-B9B [a La Salle on-campus townhouse], so that might tell you the setting. I was mad drunk, watched this movie very late at night, and that was the one thing that stuck with me. I remember, at the end of the movie, I was like, "What is this movie?" And I remember the next day, I was like, "Man, that plot was really fucked up... but that action scene was so cool." The one take, everyone down the hallway...
Joe: It highlights how gritty the movie is. It's brutal.
Stephan: Like Sunny, I grew up watching a lot of Bruce Lee films. Martial arts. There's some gritty stuff, but a lot of it is stylized choreography. This was very brutal. He's just taking a hammer and whaling on these guys.
Sunny: You see him get tired. When they put the knife in him, and everyone stops because they think he's dead. They're all just breathing heavily. It would be what a real gang fight might feel like.
Stephan: Yeah, it has such an authenticity, that feels really cool. And you touched on it earlier, how before Oldboy, movies weren't doing that. With that hallway scene, they kind of replicate that in the first season of Daredevil.
Joe: I guess I did hear about that.
Sunny: Pretty lame! [laughter]
Stephan: I didn't finish Daredevil. I had some issues with the story moving forward. But the first season has such good action sequences, because they are gritty and authentic.
Joe: Did [the showrunners] say that they were influenced by Oldboy?
Stephan: They didn't, but you can kind of see. You can line them up, shot-for-shot, and it's kind of the same thing.
Joe: I always appreciate any kind of one-shot take in anything. Was that the first of it's kind in action?
Sunny: As far as I know. And I'm not a scholar in this. As far as I understand it, that was the most ambitious one-shot action take in that sense. Children of Man has that one-shot action take when they're in the car. As far as a fight scene like this? This is probably the first, and I would say still the best.
Joe: I think the fact that he's using a hammer might put it over the top for me.
Sunny: The hammer is very fun. It makes it very unique. And you get some of those Asian cinema flairs. When he breaks into thing, he threatens the first guy with the hammer, and it pauses and does the [camera movement] down to his forehead. You see some of that in Tarantino's work. I think he's influenced by some of this Asian cinema.
Joe: He was the one that championed it at the Cannes movie festival or whatever, right? When he was making Kill Bill, around that time?
Sunny: Yup. Kill Bill is very fun action movie.
Stephan: It's not until you mentioned it—Kill Bill was on a couple weekends ago, very randomly. Now that you mention it, I kind of forgot there was all those little Asian flairs.
Sunny: The fast zooms and stuff. And then my third category is that a movie has to be meaningful, to me. So my short list—which I would say, but it'll just get cut from the final transcription, so I'll save everyone the time—they're all meaningful to me, in some emotional way. Or relate to me in some particular emotion, in some deep way that I would not have been able to get to otherwise. This movie hits two that I thought were interesting. One was the idea of "voyeurism." The whole movie is three layers of voyeurism. The inciting event—"Oh Dae-su seeing the nip" scene, the sexy nip scene, which starts this whole progression of events. But then, the movie doesn't say it outright—maybe they do say it—Woo-jin has been watching Oh Dae-su pretty much exclusively for fifteen years. Obsessing over him in a voyeuristic way.
Joe: "You were the subject I'm studying," I think he said.
Sunny: Exactly. And then afterward, with him, his life has lost all meaning, and he dies. I still haven't quite cracked what that means, or if there's anything deeper to it. But it's interesting take on, what would it take for someone who had unlimited power to be a voyeur for their whole life, how might that warp him? I think it's interesting.
Joe: So when you're putting it in the category of "this is meaningful to you in a personal way," you're not saying that you're a voyeur.
Sunny: I'm saying that, for me, there is half of all human emotions that I'm locked out of. If I was in a Psych 101 thing, they would say, "He just doesn't have the capacity to understand this." Voyeurism is one of them. And the other big one is revenge. Revenge is interesting.
Joe: Yeah, I guess I did want to get into that.
Sunny: Let's get into the revenge stuff.
Joe: So it's a movie about revenge, right?
Sunny: It's like Count of Monte Cristo on steroids. On cool Asian steroids. Great revenge film. It's this long-form mediation on: "If you got obsessed with revenge, and revenge consumed you, what would that turn a person into?" All we see is monsters. The only sympathetic character in the movie is Mi-do. Think about her. She's three, her dad gets kidnapped. Allegedly her dad kills her mom and then leaves. She's by herself for eighteen years, and then she's hypnotized, and having sex with her dad... and that's it!!
Joe: [looks around the coffee shop to see if anyone heard that]
[laughter]
Sunny: "Oh, they're talking Oldboy!"
[laughter]
Sunny: So we see Woo-jin obsessed with revenge.
Joe: Was his revenge justified?
Sunny: Obviously not! Oh Dae-su did a little peeping, and all he said was "I think those two were nipping, don't tell anyone." Really, the friend was the one that did the bad thing—I mean, I guess he gets it in the end too—and he's the one that spread the rumor around!
Joe: When Oh Dae-su gets out of prison, and he is locked into getting his revenge... is that justified?
Sunny: I think justification is a hard thing to know. That's an ontological and moral question, as to what's "justified." The movie does a good job framing it in that one scene, where he first meets Woo-jin, and he has the hammer next to his temple, and Woo-jin says, "What is more important to you, the revenge, or knowing the truth?" At that point, he choose the truth, right? He could've just killed him. Woo-jin says the line, "Revenge can be good for you. It can heal you." The flip of it is, at the end of the movie, the final act, Mi-do says, "Let's just leave. You know what happened, we're together, let's just fucking leave." And he could have! But he says, "Revenge has consumed me." Had he left, had he realized, "Revenge is destroying me, and pushing me down this ladder." Or, "The person I'm fighting is that, and I'm becoming that." The Nietzschean "if you fight monsters, you become monsters too." He didn't turn away. For him, it was necessary. For me, personally, I've never felt slighted by anyone.
Joe: Yeah, let's talk about you. You're not a vengeful person?
Sunny: I've never had feelings of revenge. I can't even remember the last time I was angry. And yet I know it's such a poor thing in art—much like video games and the media I saw as a kid were revenge-driven fantasies. In the real world too! Medieval conquests were fueled by revenge. The first al-Assad, when he was betrayed by Kissinger, he was said to be motivated by revenge. Creating ISIS, creating al-Qaeda, all this shit—one man's desire for revenge. I've never felt that. So how can normal humans like me feel something that I've never had a touch to, and this piece of art lets me see that through these angles and these crystals that I couldn't otherwise access?
Joe: So you're not relating to this, but this is like a case study for you, I guess.
Sunny: That's a good way to put it. It's a case study into revenge, through the medium of movie.
Joe: I guess that was one thing I was thinking about after I watched the movie, examining my own self. Like, do I feel like I am a vengeful person? I feel like the movie clearly makes the case that revenge is a bad thing, and people motivated by revenge are ultimately lead to terrible ends. Like you were saying, ISIS was created. Or, you're going to chop your own tongue out when you're that consumed by revenge. I guess I was self-reflecting, whether I was ever consumed by revenge.
Sunny: Do you have any nemeses?
Joe: Yeah, I dunno. I... I feel like I had one in college...
Sean: [laughter]
Sunny: You know who he's talking about? Say more.
Joe: Our R.A., back in freshman year, I guess had a problem with some of my actions. And I was a drunk shithead teenager.
Sunny: Sure.
Joe: And this from the vantage point of being thirty now, and being well removed from the situation. But, at the time, it was—"This dude is a piece of shit, how can we get revenge?"
Sunny: Give me an example, one instigating incident. You guys were drinking, and he busted you guys up?
Joe: Basically. Sean came up to my dorm room. We were playing beer pong on St. Patrick's Day. I guess Mehow had a vendetta against me, and came up, and he wrote us up for drinking Natty Lights.
Sean: I actually didn't get written up at all.
Joe: Well good for you, man. [laughter] How'd you not get written up?!
Sean: I don't know. I was literally drinking a beer. I guess he still liked me at that point? And he was like, "Sean, if you pour it out, I won't write you up." I mean, I didn't pour it out either, I finished the beer...
Stephan: I will say... I do really feel like Mehow was out for you. I do think it was a personal thing.
Joe: I think that was legitimately the case. My ex-girlfriend at the time said, "Mehow told me he's going to try to write you up."
Sean: Yeah, he was jonesing for you.
Joe: But, okay, so this was...
Sunny: So you wanted revenge?
Joe: At the time, I did. Nothing satisfactory. I was spitting on his door, every time I passed it.
Sean: I peed on his door.
Sunny: Peed on his door? That's a significant act of revenge.
Sean: I wasn't angry for getting written up. I was just drunk. [laughter]
Joe: It didn't feel good, the spitting. He probably saw a loogie dripping down his door—
Sunny: "Someone spit on my door. This wasn't here before."
Joe: —and he probably knew it was me. The head of La Salle Security called me, and was like, "Are you spitting on Mehow's door?" And I said, "No."
Sunny: You denied it.
Joe: And he was like, "We're going to put cameras in that hallway!" And I was like, "Go ahead, man. Everybody hates him." Okay, but... this is not...
Sunny: When you spit on his door, did you feel a little better?
Joe: No! I didn't! And, ya know, this is still me telling this story as a nineteen-year-old. 30-year-old Joe, I've already reflected on this enough to know that I was in the wrong for a lot of that.
Sunny: Maybe. But Sean wasn't written up, so it does raise some questions... [laughter]
Joe: Regardless. Regardless of what his intentions were, or whatever, I was in the wrong for a lot of it. Thinking about it now, I feel like shit about it. I've come to terms with the idea that maybe I was the bad guy in this situation. Maybe being motivated by revenge for his alleged "crimes" against me wasn't necessarily a good thing, at the time. And still, talking about it now, I'm dreading transcribing this. I've already written about this. I've already... somebody's going to read that my "revenge story" was about Mehow and think that it's fucking pathetic! It was fucking twelve years ago!
Sean: Is it pathetic—
Joe: It's fucking pathetic.
Sean: —or is that a positive sign for you, though, that that was the only story you could think of as "revenge"?
Joe: I mean, I guess.
Sean: I think it speaks volumes of you as an individual, and your interactions with others.
Sunny: That's true. If you had told me a revenge story where like, "And yeah, I had the gun pointed at him through the window, but then I put it away..." [laughter] I'd be like, "Well, yeah Joe, I think you have some interpersonal issues."
Joe: I dunno man.
Sunny: You spit on the guy's door, it was college... so he couldn't have been more than a couple years older?
Joe: Yeah, two years older.
Sunny: Twenty years old. It's not like he was some zen master and you were some dumb freshman.
Joe: It'd be interesting to get his perspective on this.
Sunny: What if he has been planning revenge for the last twelve years?!
Joe: There's no fucking way. Well... maybe...
Sunny: And when you're 35, he's just gonna pull down your pants at work? [laughter] I dunno, some wild embarrassment.
Joe: Like I said, I already wrote about this, and I sent him the essay I wrote on Facebook, like, "Hey man, I want you to know I've thought about this, and I know I was in the wrong for a lot of it. Let's grab a beer next time you're in Philly." He didn't respond, maybe just because Facebook is weird sending messages when you're not Facebook friends. Mehow, if you're reading this right now, let's sit down and talk about your favorite movie.
Sunny: A second offer! A beer and a movie!
Joe: I dunno. How do you guys feel? Have you ever been revenge-motivated?
Stephan: No, not really.
Joe: Everyone's too nice here. I picked the wrong crew to talk about revenge fantasies.
Sunny: Bunch of lame-os!
Sean: I've had thoughts of revenge against people. But I've never acted on it.
Sunny: Are they still seething in you?
Sean: Not really...
Sunny: What's an example?
Sean: A good example... So there was this girl that I dated in high school, and her dad was such an epic asshole to me all the time.
Sunny: What kind of stuff would he do?
Sean: He described me as a "bullshitter that wasn't going to amount to anything."
Joe: That's why you got your Ph.D., to prove him wrong? [laughter]
Sean: There is part of me that... if I ever saw him, I'd be like, "Fuck you!" Ya know? But no, so he was a doctor, or surgeon. I saw him years after I broke up with this girl, when my dad was in the ICU. We locked eyes, and he totally knew me, and didn't say shit to me. It was just like, "You're such a dick! Fuck you!"
Joe: But had you told him "fuck you," would you feel better after that?
Sean: I don't know. That's the thing. I've thought of all different ways to get back at the guy, and I guess if I did... he would know that I gave that much of a shit?
Sunny: If he just didn't care about you for the past fifteen years, then you've kind of won.
Sean: Exactly. I dunno... I often operate on the idea that my feelings are mine, and not anyone else's, and when I share them with someone, it becomes theirs too. Especially in a revenge context, it's like I'm giving something up, by making him aware that he, at the time, bothered me that much.
Sunny: Does it concern you one way or the other whether he cares or not? Or would you just rather live in the ambiguity?
Sean: At this point, no. You know?
Sunny: Well, I don't have revenge feelings, so I don't know what you mean.
Sean: At this point, I could care less. If he still thought about me, I'd kind of feel sad for the guy. [laughter] It'd be like, get a hobby! At the time, it would've meant something. Back in the day.
Joe: I guess that's similar in the movie, how Oh Dae-su started a rumor, kind of innocently—he certainly didn't want someone to commit suicide over it...
Sunny: Right, he was just a twelve-year-old kid being like, "I think I saw some nip stuff."
Joe: And that's why, after he found out the truth, he was like, "This is why I've been in prison for fifteen years?!" And we as the audience agree with him: "That's the reason you locked this dude up in a private prison for fifteen years?!" That's kind of pathetic, that he thought about it for that long!
Sunny: If you told somebody, "I'll give you all the money and all the resources in the world, do the most revenge thing, what's the most revenge thing you can do?" I can't think of a plot more outrageous than this. And exactly to your point—you go all the way to the logical conclusion. What's the most revenge thing you can do? If it was like a meter, that you could fill up to a 100 points, what would you do, and how would you feel afterwards? Uh... you'd just kill yourself. You put your whole life into it, and then you did it... and then what?
Joe: I don't want to say it was "tragic," because it was the villain who killed himself...
Sunny: I mean, it's tragic in a Greek Tragedy sense. Both are flawed characters, and they both fall at the end.
Joe: I guess he was called "Oh Dae-su" in reference to Oedipus? Speaking of Greek tragedies.
Sunny: There does seem to be a lot Oedipus references. At the start, they do say that "Oh Dae-su" roughly translates to "getting through one day at a time." Which is also a theme of this movie. Getting through the fifteen years one day at a time, and then afterwards, you have the five days to do whatever.
Joe: It was the second movie in a trilogy, right?
Sunny: A very loose trilogy. More of an anthology of three "revenge films."
Joe: Have you seen the other ones?
Sunny: I've seen the other ones. They're good...
Joe: Similar themes?
Sunny: Yeah, they're just lesser versions of this one.
Stephan: The plots are not nearly as compelling. I think Oldboy does a good job in that a lot of the elements make you sympathetic toward Oh Dae-su. I feel like, while I can't relate directly to his feelings, all the feelings of revenge, I do feel like there's something about this movie that feels relatable, in a weird sense. I think Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance are the other two?
Sunny: Yup.
Stephan: Something about them, there's no real human connection. They just kind of exist almost as "revenge porn."
Joe: I read Roger Ebert's review of Oldboy—he gave it four out of four stars—and that's kind of the point that he made about this movie. How it was a thriller, but the thrills had a purpose. In retrospect, that's probably the reason I had a problem with The Last Boy Scout, that I talked about. It was just thrills for thrills' sake. You understood the motivations of Oh Dae-su in this. Whether you agreed with it or not is something we've already discussed. You understood why he wanted this revenge, and why the fireworks are happening in this movie. I know you said you watched the remake. Is that something that was lacking in that, or what?
Sunny: Oh yeah. Let's talk about the remake for a second. Has anyone seen the remake?
Joe: You might be the only one.
Sunny: A Spike Lee joint. I'll put this out there now. Obviously Spike Lee is talented. His directing is great. But this guy fucking blew it! [laughter]
Joe: How so? What made the remake bad, and the original good?
Sunny: Part of the brilliance of movies and art, and my lack of words for it, is I have a hard time explaining art, and finding any meaningful way to compare them. I just know, sitting down for the two and a half hours of Oldboy 2013 were just miserable. I was just having a bad fucking time.
Joe: Was that just because someone remade your favorite movie?
Sunny: No. I will pose this to the group. Are there any good remakes that you love?
Joe: Hmm... A Star Is Born?
Sunny: Okay, I'll give you that.
Sean: Baz Luhrmann's 1996 version of Romeo + Juliet?
[laughter]
Joe: "Tune in next month, when we discuss Sean E****'s favorite movie."
Sunny: My point is that remakes inevitably suck.
Joe: A majority, for sure.
Sunny: Two problems in Oldboy's remake. One, it just felt like no one cared.
Joe: The characters, or the people making it?
Sunny: The people making it. And then the characters, as an extension of them. And I'll say this—and this is a bit of an aside—part of the reason I first liked Oldboy in 2004 is that it's fun to see a movie when you don't know any of the actors. If you see a George Clooney movie, you're always like, yeah, as good as an actor as he is, he's still George Clooney, just a dude with swagger. If you see people you don't know who are acting well, I can almost imagine this is a story somewhere else, and these are actual people doing it.
Joe: So, when Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen fucked, that took you out of it?
Sunny: Yeah, "What is this, The Avengers?!"
[laughter]
Sunny: Josh Brolin fucking phones it in. Fat Josh Brolin is just him on water-bloat, and then he loses the water-bloat when he gets fit. And there's these subtle differences. Like, when he gets out of prison in 2013, for some reason, the Asian woman who hypnotizes him is there, even though there's no hypnotism plot in this one. She's just in the movie for shits. And he chases after her, and he catches up to her, and he's about to kill her or whatever. And the only reason she gets away is some random football bros come up to him and just deck him in the face. Just sucker punch him. Because... that happens in the real world?
Joe: Don't jinx it, man. We're in Phoenixville right now. You never know.
Sunny: So then Josh Brolin gets up, and straight-up murders these guys. He smashes one guys ankle, he's breaking heads over knees. The original Oldboy is over-the-top where it's fun, but it still keeps it gritty. It somehow makes a 50-versus-1 fight work, because it's in a very constrained corridor, it's in South Korea, they're thugs, he's been training for fifteen years. But with Josh Brolin, he just becomes Thanos when he leaves the prison, and he's straight-up murdering people. And then they change the incest storyline. Instead of just a little nip-slip, and a "hysterical pregnancy"—maybe Woo-jin's making that up, that's an interesting thing too—but in the remake, his name is Joe Sutherland, or something like that [Editor's note: Joe Doucett]. Boring-ass Joe. Sorry.
Joe: It's alright. It's a boring name.
Sunny: And he goes to the greenhouse... and Josh Brolin is a full-ass alcoholic. Like, obviously Oh Dae-su is a drunk in this movie, but in the remake, he's an alcoholic—
Joe: Even after he gets out of prison?
Sunny: All the time. All the time. Fully drunk. So in the flashback, when he's thirteen, he sneaks vodka behind the air conditioning unit, he's drinking behind the greenhouse, and he sees the girl fucking her dad, who's a professor at the place. And they're in plain view. And he jizzes inside her or whatever... And so obviously he spreads that rumor, and everyone calls her a whore, and they move to Germany or whatever. What doesn't happen is that the Woo-jin character never sleeps with his sister to have the inciting event. Then that whole family is like the Aristocrats—they're all fucking. The inciting event is a flashback to the Woo-jin character being like, "I love my dad." And they show this short scene where the dad loads up a shotgun, and goes in the daughter's room. The daughter starts stripping her clothes off, and the dad blows her away. And then he goes downstairs, and the wife comes out, and she starts stripping, and he blows her away. He takes the shotgun, and loads two more shells, and he goes to the son, the Woo-jin character, who starts taking his clothes off, and the dad blows him away... but I guess he misses? And then he kills himself. So then you get back to the present-day, and the Woo-jin character is like, "You took all that away from me." The Joe character, rightfully so, is like, "I didn't do any of that shit, man. I'm sorry your dad was fucking everyone, but what the hell does that have to do with me? What does that that have to do with anything?"
[laughter]
Sunny: And you as the audience are like, "I don't care about any of these characters, the plot doesn't make sense." It's just grotesque and weird for no reason at all. And then the last bit is that they change Oh Dae-su's motivation from one that's consumed by revenge, and what does that mean, how that looks, to him just feeling bad about being a bad dad. Even though, in the Korean one, he's never shown as a bad dad. He's a drunk, but he got his daughter a present on her birthday, he's excited to see her. In the remake, one of the opening scenes is him talking to his ex-wife, like, "I don't fucking care about my daughter! She's three, she's not going to remember this anyway!" But then in jail, he's like, "You know what, I do care about my daughter." And I think that's a very American, dumbed-down thing to do. Like, "Oh, the only thing that can motivate a man is love for his kid." Of course that's motivating, but I've seen that so many times that it's not interesting, versus the vengeance thing. And so that carries on through the whole movie, and that doesn't sell you either. So... Spike Lee, if you're reading this—fuck off!
[laughter]
Joe: I definitely had no motivation to watch that version of the movie.
Sunny: Don't. Don't. Unless you're a masochist like me, just don't do it.
Joe: How about the manga comics that it was based on?
Sunny: I haven't read those. That's the next frontier, I guess. Have you read them, Stephan?
Stephan: I haven't, no. I didn't even know it was based off a manga.
Sunny: Everything's based off manga. Shakespeare was based off manga, just a little known fact.
Stephan: Well, I have read those. [laughter]
Joe: Did he eat the octopus in the Josh Brolin version?
Sunny: No. Who would man up for that?
Joe: Not even CGI?
Sunny: No.
Joe: I appreciated the IMDB trivia saying that the Oh Dae-su actor said a Buddhist prayer before he ate all the octopus. He felt so bad about eating all that octopus.
Sunny: You gotta respect that.
Joe: That probably grossed me out more than the incest.
Sean: ...Eating an octopus grosses you out more than incest?
Joe: I was exaggerating to make a point.
Sunny: Allegedly.
Joe: Here's something I found kind of interesting. Apparently the Virginia Tech shooter, the media made a big deal—as they are wont to do—about there being a picture that exists of the dude holding a hammer.
Sunny: Oldboy-style?
Joe: I guess that was his favorite movie, or one of his favorite movies. I'm probably preaching to the choir when I say I don't think Oldboy was the reason...
Sunny: The inspiration for the V-Tech shooting?
Joe: Yeah, that he shot three dozen people. But do you have any thoughts about someone so villainous appreciating this movie just as much as you do?
Sunny: Um... it doesn't bother me. It's two problems with media under liberal capitalism. One is that you have to turn these villains—like the V-Tech shooter, or Elliot Rodger, or whoever—you have to characterize them in such a way that they were incited by a few events, or a few media pieces, when it's really a much larger system that has impacted them. Further reaching consequences, right? And the other piece—and you're hearing this about Joker right now—"This movie is so dangerous that it's going to incite these white kids to go wild and start killing people." I don't think any average person views art that way. Like, takes art as a meal, and just consumes it, and then makes it their motivating factor. I think there are troubled people who will gravitate their thoughts around it, will use it as a seed to personalize around. But I think that crystallization can't happen without a society that's inherently isolating and alienating, like capitalism is, right?
Joe: Yes.
Sunny: A piece of media can be inciting, but ya know what? The bible can be inciting. Religious texts have been inciting. Any number of things with any sort of doctrine could be inciting. But you need to build a person around the inciting factor. And blaming the inciting factor itself is just playing whack-a-mole. It's not fixing the issue, it's just pushing down art that might actually help people connect, if you look beyond the inciting factors, but doesn't. That's just my thought. I'd love to get your take on it.
Joe: No, it's definitely... the fact that the media would worry about this picture, or show this picture, or even give this dude a time in the spotlight for whatever fucking reason—like, I'm not going to say his name right now, because I don't want his name printed on my blog—the dude's a fucking murderer. His motivation is a concern, but the fact of the matter is, it doesn't really matter if he watched Oldboy, or what he thought about Oldboy. He killed 33 people. It's insane to me that the media would be concerned about a picture of him holding a hammer. I feel like that's irresponsible of the media to even have to delve into what movies he liked, ya know?
Sunny: Right.
Joe: And, it is something that I'm interesting in thinking about. Like I said, I spent a few hours this week transcribing the argument I had with my friend Ant, who was circling around the idea of, "I look up to Jordan Belfort," who is, not a murderer, but absolutely a criminal, and they made that clear in Wolf of Wall Street that he is a shitbag person.
Sunny: Jordan Belfort, like the Joker, is not someone who you're supposed to empathize with.
Joe: Right. So that was—and I was pretty drunk at the time—
Sunny: Tuesday at 1 PM or something?
Joe: ...it was a Sunday morning.
[laughter]
Joe: But it was a very long argument, and I just couldn't get that through my brain, why anyone would think that. How could you watch that movie and still think that that is someone to emulate? In any capacity? So, I guess that is a piece of the Joker argument now. "What if someone watches Joker, and tries to emulate the Joker?" and then, "What if someone watches Oldboy, and tries to emulate the dude from Oldboy?" If that happens, they're definitely missing the point of the movie, for sure. But... I guess it's something that could happen? I guess it's something that you could worry about if you wanted to? But it's not...
Stephan: I don't think that's something that ever actually happens. You had a good point, Sunny. It's easy for the media to say, "Someone shot up this school, someone committed this act," and then they relate it to Joker, they relate it to Oldboy. That's easy. That's something that the average person can hear and just let it wash over them, like, "Okay, now all these movies are bad." Or, "This child was playing a violent video game, and that's why he did this." That's a cop out. It allows you to not challenge yourself to think about all the other things in society that are shaping these people. Yes, it could be a catalyst for them to take the next step. But this isn't the beginning of those violent thoughts. A lot of these people have histories of underlying mental health issues. They have really fractured family dynamics. That's not because of Oldboy! These are things that existed before 2003 for some people. I always get frustrated when they try to say certain pieces of art, certain content we're consuming, is the reason for violent actions. Sure, they can be a catalyst. They can continue to help that pot grow. But it already existed.
Joe: They're used as a scapegoat. People don't want to consider that society itself is fucked. It's easier to say—
Sunny: It's easier to blame a symptom than to say something is wrong in the root cause.
Sean: But it's also through violence, historically, that humans have found meaning in their lives. "You're gonna remember me because I did this thing." And because riding into battle isn't as glory-filled as it used to be—I don't know any soldier who did anything notable in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars—but if you feel like you are angry at all these people, and want your life to mean something, but you feel like a loser, one way to feel powerful is to exercise violence over others. If anything, it would have been better if we had better gun laws, because then he would've run around hitting people with a hammer, and he would've done less damage.
Sunny: Right. If someone went on a knife-spree—yes, that would be bad, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad.
Sean: Not three-dozen-people bad.
Sunny: Exactly. This level of hyperviolence can only happen if you live in the gun country. The corporation-owned gun country. Two points. One—how ludicrous would it be if the guy's favorite show was Three's Company? And he had big diaries all about Three's Company, and the media was like, "Three's Company is corrupting our youth"? "This arrangement of two women and one man pretending to be gay is corrupting our youth!" [laughter]
Joe: I think it's a matter of, are you going to take this mass murderer's word for it? Whatever he states is the reason? Does that mean it's the actual reason he did this?
Sunny: "Oh yeah, the mass murderer, he must be completely trustworthy."
Joe: Right! So that's another issue. He didn't straight-up say, "Oldboy is the reason I'm getting revenge on these people who have supposedly slighted me." But had he said that, it still wouldn't make it true.
Sean: It's like the guy who shot Reagan, who thought The Catcher in the Rye was speaking to him. I've read that book a bunch of times, and never once—
Sunny: "A bunch of phonies! I gotta kill the phonies too!"
[laughter]
Sunny: The second point on this is... the Jordan Belfort thing is interesting, because I've also met a lot of pretty smart people—sometimes total idiots, but a good mix of people—who empathize with Gordon Gekko, with Jordan Belfort, who will... like, Masters from Penn who will be like, "Yeah, greed is good. Greed is motivating force in society." To me, that is a product of the society itself. We're seeing now the intergenerational effect of neoliberal capitalism forcing thoughts to—kind of like Sean said, there's no more riding into glory in battle, but that social trend has continued, and now you've tied it to economics. You need to have a job, you need to do really well, you need to be productive, even to live and not be homeless. That's base stakes now. So all that tied together, the wanting to be the top of the hierarchy, the biggest and the best, and seeing the world formed as a winner-take-all, dog-eat-dog world, forces you to have to reflect on that. If you look at that picture long enough, and believe it long enough, it's easier for you to be like, "Yes, that's true, that's what I believe too." You have to be able to go against that system, and force yourself to think, "The world would be better if we were more cooperative." But that's a fundamental change in principles. It's not reaffirmed by society. So it doesn't surprise me that these people exist. But yes... I also get frustrated by it.
Joe: I mean... I'm glad that no one is empathizing with any character in this movie now.
Sunny: I empathize with the internet café owner! Just this dude, his friend goes missing for fifteen years, and comes back, and he gets stabbed to death.
Joe: But he was the one that perpetuated the rumor, right?
Sunny: Listen. It was just boyhood talk! Just childhood talk!
Joe: Would you consider this a "cult" movie?
Sunny: A little bit. It's not... I've seen this in your previous interviews. Say there's a movie that 99% of people have watched, that still means that three and a half million Americans haven't watched it. Like, I've never seen Wizard of Oz. I would say most people would say "everyone's watched that." So, for something to be a cult movie, maybe one in ten people, or less, have to have watched it. It's probably around there. But then, we went to the Poconos house, and I found out that everyone fucking watched it. You watched it, Brian watched it, Sam watched it...
Joe: Right. I was surprised. I had never heard of it, and then asking you guys [Sean and Stephan] if you wouldn't mind talking about it, it was like, "We've all seen it."
Sean: I was surprised this morning when everyone said they'd seen it. I saw it in high school, and I almost have never met someone who also has seen it.
Sunny: Part of it is maybe you don't want to say you saw it? Especially when you're younger.
Joe: It might also have to do with the people we typically associate with? My friends are the type of people who watch a lot of movies.
Stephan: We do consume similar kinds of content. So it did not strike me as weird that a lot of people in our group had already seen it. If I went to work, and mentioned this movie, there would be far less people that had seen it. [laughter]
Joe: I was watching this at work, and had to hide it a little bit. "What the fuck is that dude watching? Tentacle porn?" [laughter] But I guess the whole idea of "this is a movie that's special to me and my friends" would fit the idea of "cult movie." It's definitely interesting to me the reasons why people get into certain movies, and hearing about the first time someone has seen the movie, and how that effects your enjoyment of the movie now. I don't know if I've talked to too many people who were like, "Yeah, I don't really remember the first time I watched this." It's always, "I remember when I watched this, and who I was watching it with." It makes it special to look back and remember how one appreciated it at the time.
Sunny: Movies—and songs do this too, and smells—can sort of transport your memory in a very vivid way, back to the past.
Joe: Do you feel like I am doing myself a disservice by even trying to understand that, while not having those same feelings about these movies? Ya know, I watched Oldboy a fucking week ago on my little cell phone at work in between calls. I don't have those same feelings about Oldboy that you do. Am I ever going to be convinced that Oldboy is a special movie? I don't know, because I don't have that... I haven't sat with it for more than a week. So I'm curious, is that necessary for someone to consider a movie their favorite movie. Do you need that? Do you need that nostalgia piece? Or would you actually be able to convince someone, "Watch this movie, it's my favorite movie of all time," and you could find someone that immediately agrees with you in that scenario?
Sunny: I think you could find someone who agrees with you. I think there are other people now, who've seen it more recently, or saw the Korean one after the remake—like, they saw the Josh Brolin one independently, said "this movie blows," and then were told it's based on a better movie, and eventually agreed, "yeah, this movie's great." That happens. But for the purposes of you and this project, and this question more generally, I think generally no. I think about It's a Wonderful Life. I only that movie maybe a couple years ago. And I thought it was great! But obviously, I don't have the same connections that someone would have watching it at Christmastime with their family. But I don't think you need to. I think there's value you can get in hearing about that from somebody else. It's impossible for you to live every single life. So to have all these be your favorite movies in a way that's nostalgic, you'd have to be some sort of Multiple Man. But hearing about it from other people, you can still see the prism of, "Yes, this movie is great, I think it's great"—or, ya know, it sucks—"and I could definitely see how it could be someone's favorite, if it hit them at the right time in their development."
Joe: That's definitely the general thread through all these. This is interview number 23, I think. Everyone has a personal story, and their experiences with the movie. Barely anyone says, "It's just a fucking good movie." Or, "I watched it a few weeks ago, and it seems great." [laughter]
Sunny: Part of it is the people you're interviewing—like Drew is obsessed with movies, right? Everyone you've interviewed is into art, or movies, or something like that. They've thought about it a bit more, so that's part of it. The thing I was wondering when I was reading your blog was—if you're reading this project in five or ten years, do you think anyone's favorite would change? Do you think someone would see a new movie, and it would change? Or maybe they would revisit their movie and say, "Ya know, I hate this movie"?
Joe: I dunno. I think the nature of the question makes people want to choose something that was older. I think there's been two movies from the 2010s that I've talked about so far. The pressure for people to want to say something about themselves makes them to want to choose an older, nostalgic movie.
Sunny: What, they don't want to say, "Yeah, I saw Hangover 2, and I had taken five tabs of L, and it was awesome"? A short interview, not too interesting... [laughter]
Joe: Alright, so we'll end like this. What do you want this movie to say about you? The fact that this is your favorite movie. Someone who's never met you before is reading this. What does this say about Sunny, that we've been talking about this for an hour?
Sunny: I think it would say... that I have a few marbles loose. But, that I'm someone who can appreciate a good action film. And there's very few action films that I like, so if I'm going to recommend one to you, it better be very good. And a good, fun action time. And, two, that I find interesting the concept of "revenge," and the idea that this "obsession" with needing people like me, and also having people dislike me, finding that balance. That's something I've wondered about for a long time. I think this movie does an interesting job of viewing that through the medium of movie.
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