The NYT’s Manohla Dargis is apparently disturbed by the violence in Park Chan-wook’s films:
To dispense with the obvious: the ascendancy of Mr. Park in the last few years is partly a testament to his talent. He knows where to put the camera, how to build tension inside the frame and through editing, and he has an eye for how striking fake blood can look pooling over the ground or blooming underwater. But the filmmaker’s success in the international arena, his integration into the upper tier of the festival circuit and his embrace by some cinephiles also reflect a dubious development in recent cinema: the mainstreaming of exploitation. Movies that were once relegated to midnight screenings at festivals - and, in an earlier age, grindhouses like those that once enlivened Times Square - are now part of the main event.
And glory be hallelujah to that. Beats most of the crap otherwise known as mainstream cinema. Personally, I think the rest of the critique is absolute bull and indicates a real lack of understanding of the social and cultural background to Park’s films (see Ms. Dargis’s concluding paragraph), but I don’t write for the NYT, so what do I know. Seems she didn’t like Fight Club much, either. Go figure.
Anyway, check out the page for the Brooklyn Academy Music’s Park Chan-Wook film festival.
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7 Comments
Like some of the crap coming out of Hollywood is any better?
Yeah, I’ll stick to family entertainment like Kill Bill Vol 1.
heh, you have a point
“the mainstreaming of exploitation”, wtf does that even mean? Does the writer just have sand in her shorts? I haven’t seen Park’s movies, but they don’t sound any worse than Tarantino’s.
agree. and definitely “kill bill” was more violent as were other similar hollywood films. i wasn’t a fan of “oldboy” since i thought the storyline was so-so, but his direction and cinematography was excellent.
You guys need to take a deep breath and reread Dargis’ piece. She doesn’t comment unfavorably on Park vis-a-vis “mainstream” films, at all; instead she seems to think his work is of a piece with e.g.,Trantino’s, insofar as it introduces what she believes to be gratuitous, exploitative violence to the mainstream of the auteur driven film festival world just as Tarantino’s does in the mainstream of commercial Hollywood productions. (Wasn’t Tarantino the chairman of the panel of jusdges at Cannes who chose to honor Old Boy? ) (BTW: my vote at Cannes would have been for the other Korean entry, “Woman is the Future of Man”, by Hong Seong-su. Both he and Park try to work very much in the auteur mode, but Hong, I believe, does so with infinitely more imagination and originality than Park, who is very derivative, in fact, pretentiously imitative, of the French of thirty years ago.)
Isn’t Manohla Dargis a guy?
Anyhow, I basically agree with what Sperwer said. Park uses good art designers, but his stories are basically pretty-looking exploitation films, with little inside of them.
Yes, well, Manohla Dargis is something else. I live in Los Angeles, where she wrote for the LA Weekly and then the Times. I observed that she lacks very basic competence as a reviewer, making gross errors of simple description and the like. How she gets her positions is beyond me, it obviously isn’t on account of her ability.