Monday, July 14, 2008

Cautionary Tale - Do NOT watch this one !!

Serves me right for going with star ratings a movie gets !

Serves me right to experiment with world cinema !

I definitely deserved what I got, to watch a movie, because Quentin Tarantino apparently raved about it !!

Some very disturbing imagery, some very troubling memories, an upset mind and consequently a slightly affected purse - What do I owe all these to ? A Korean movie called 'Oldboy' !! Our own 'desi Tarantino' aka Sanjay Gupta remade the movie as Zinda in Hindi.

I was hoping for a better original, since the premise seemed interesting to me. A man gets kidnapped by some unknown person on the eve of his daughter's birthday and is locked up inside a hotel room. He does not know the name or face or voice of the captor ! He is fed on a staple diet of fried dumplings through a small opening in the door. (SG did not want to waste his creativity on this trivial point and proceeded to change it to Samosas ! How creative is that !!)

The room has a toilet, a bed and a TV. Once in a while, the hero hears a certain tune, when some sort of gas is released into his room and he faints. This goes on for about, hold your breath, 15 years !! Meanwhile, the hero tries hard to remember the names of all the people that he has harmed in the past. He also tries to tunnel his way out of the building with a fork. While in captivity, his wife gets murdered and he is blamed for the murder.

At the end of 15 years, he is suddenly released and left on the terrace of the building. The hero decides to find the person who ruined his life for so many years and to avenge himself. He meets a young female chef, who tries to help him in his quest for revenge.

The man who was responsible for this and his reason for the punishment are too hard for a normal person to digest. It is scary and troubling to think about the dark depths of the human psyche and the extent to which a person can go to wreak havoc in the life of the person he hates !

The end of the movie shook me completely and not in a good way. I was feeling nauseated and disgusted ! To think that a person was able to conceive such a plot itself seems revolting !

Funny how I always thought of myself as a strong person ! I realized I was not ! Most reviews that you read on the net about this movie would talk about the intelligent screenplay, amazing cinematography etc and almost all of them will mention some sequences that totally gross you out, like the one where the hero eats a live octopus and another where in a tight close-up the teeth of a guy are pulled out with a hammer.

Well, if you ask me, I think those are the slightly more decent scenes in the movie, if you compare them with the psychological torture the movie portrays !! Some of the movie directors intend to shock and to achieve that, are willing to go to any lengths ! There seems to be no relationship that holds any sanctity to these people and their idea of a good movie is a movie that will disturb.

My cousin read out a review of the movie by the noted film critic Roger Ebert. These lines in particular were the highlight of the review :

'I am not an expert on the Korean cinema, which is considered in critical circles as one of the most creative in the world ("Oldboy" won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes 2004). I can say that of the Korean films I've seen, only one ("The YMCA Baseball Club") did not contain extraordinary sadomasochism. "Oldboy" contains a tooth-pulling scene that makes Laurence Olivier's Nazi dentist in "Marathon Man," look like a healer. And there is a scene during which an octopus is definitely harmed during the making of the movie.'
Sadomasochism !! Thats the term I was looking for !! That is definitely not my cup of tea !! I dont take perverse thrill in watching suffering or gory and gross sequences on screen !! I cannot take, relationships that I have been taught to treat as sacred, being slaughtered in the name of shock value and in the name of art !!

Thanks to this extremely bizarre and depressing movie, I/we had to get out of the house to get some air, see some normal people (all the while wondering what kind of people they actually were !!) and spending some money on stuff that we definitely did not need to get the stupid movie out of our minds !!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

hey i too have watched zinda.... and it was not samosas in hindi,there too it was momo's / dumplings....so eee adichan copy dhaan....