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Oldboy

In the realm of revenge thrillers, you’d be hard pressed to find more ultra-violent vengeance and psycho thrills than in the creepy story of Oldboy. This Korean import made a pop splash at the Cannes Film Festival and during its limited theatrical run thanks to the imprimatur of Quentin Tarantino, who raved about it and its visionary director, Chan-wook Park, to anyone who would listen. It’s easy to see why QT fell in love with the grindhouse attitude, fast-paced action, violent imagery, and icy-black humor, but it’s a disservice to think of Oldboy as another Tarantino homage or knockoff. The darkly existential undercurrent in the themes that Oldboy traces over its life-long narrative arc is much more complex and deeply disturbing than anything of its kind. The movie’s tagline is, “15 years of imprisonment… 5 days of vengeance.” The imprisonee is Oh Dae-Su, an ordinary Joe who is snatched off a Seoul street corner and locked away in a dank, windowless fleabag hotel room for the aforementioned 15 years. Just as abruptly he is released, and thus the five days begin. Why did this happen to Oh Dae-Su? Ah, but that would be telling, and in fact we don’t know ourselves until the final wrenching scenes.

Oldboy breaks into a classic three-act saga, the first of which details the hallucinatory period of imprisonment in which Oh Dae-Su wades from mild insanity to outright psychosis in the hands of unseen yet attentive captors. Act 2 is the revenge, when an entirely different tone takes over and Oh Dae-Su moves with single-minded purpose and clarity. It’s this section that has gained the most notoriety, primarily for the claw-hammer dentistry scene, the one-man-army tracking shot, and the wriggling octopus that Oh Dae-Su consumes in a sushi bar (he’s been dead so long he simply needs life back inside him in any way possible). In act 3, answers finally start to emerge and the sinister atmosphere grows even more profound–not without a healthy dose of extra bloodletting, of course. Oldboy is an undeniably poetic masterpiece of tension, fury, and dynamic craft. Ultimately, its epic cycle of tragedy is of the sort that mankind has been inflicting upon itself for all time. Some of the images may be gruesome, but all converge into a kind of beauty. It’s in the telling of this lurid tale that these details become one and the memories of pain ultimately heal.

I have not had my Playstation 3 for very long, but thanks to some pretty low prices from Amazon I am already off to a good start on my collection.

Movies!

So what should I add to my collection next? What movies do you currently have and how do they look? I am open to all sorts of suggestions. As you can tell from what I have so far, I am a big fan of science fiction and action in general, but I can enjoy a good movie whatever the genre is.

My current musical addiction is now The Glitch Mob. Its rare for independent artists to hit it big, but that is exactly what it appears they have done. Their self-published debut album Drink The Sea debuted on the iTunes Electronic Chart at number five and peaked on the CMJ Top 200 Chart for College Radio at #57. The album’s debut led Electronic Musician to run a cover story on the trio.

The album can be downloaded from Amazon. If you are more into the physical CD, you can purchase that from their website.

Inspired by the Half-Life Video Game series, this is an action packed short film centering around Adrian Shephard and a band of resistance fighters struggling to get out a warning about the impending invasion.

The film’s website can be found at http://beyondblackmesa.com/.

Another one of my favorite bands that is also releasing an album this year is God is an Astronaut. The new album, titled Age of the Fifth Sun, is coming out on May 15th. They have been doing a terrible job marketing it though. You have to seriously search online to find out about it. They don’t have much of an official website, and all that I could find from the new album was one single titled In The Distance Fading. You can hear it on their MySpace page.

Anyway, you can hear the first track off the new album below:

I have decided to start posting about music more then I have been, since I have gotten some messages from people telling me they are enjoying some of the music I have posted from artists they have never heard of. This year is going to be awesome for me. Two of my favorite musicians have already released new albums (These Hopeful Machines, Disappear Here), and some more are on the way from other bands that I really like as well.

One of these upcoming albums is Immersion from Pendulum. The album is set to be released this May. They have already started to release some material about it, including the first single and a music video to go along with it. What I have heard sounds great, and I will certainly be ordering this the day its released.

You can listen to their first single, Watercolour, below. You can follow Pendulum from their website.

Pendulum is an Australian drum and bass/rock group originally from Perth, Australia formed between producers Rob Swire, Gareth McGrillen and Paul Harding. They have gained major popularity in the UK, and have started making a name for themselves overseas. After a shift in musical style incorporating a rock-oriented sound and more electronic influences other than drum and bass, ranging from dubstep to house music, Pendulum is now better known for their energetic live shows, with live band setup and advanced visual displays.

First I get BT’s These Hopeful Machines and now I get a new Hybrid album? This is becoming an awesome year for music.

Since first bursting onto the scene with the now classic album Wide Angle in 1999, the Swansea, Wales-based Hybrid have been known as one of the most forward thinking and technically skilled acts in electronic dance music. Blurring the line between in-studio production and live presentation, Hybrid are one of the few remaining dance acts to perform live with a classic band setup.

Though, much has changed on the road to Hybrid’s fourth artist album Disappear Here. Most notable is the addition of Hybrid’s third member – singer/ songwriter Charlotte James – to go along with founders Chris Healings and Mike Truman.

Charlotte’s impact is marked as Disappear Here is truly an album of real songs and not merely dance beats with vocals on top. It offers a lot more than anything Hybrid has ever previously written and pushes boundaries in every way.

With Disappear Here, Hybrid have managed to create an epic and unique sound which has progressed dramatically from its original dance inception but still retains much of what makes electronic music so exciting. The album features guest vocals from Tim Hutton, drums from Alex Madge and the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.

You can buy the cd here (comes with a digital copy so you can start listening now) or buy only the digital album here.

Hybrid – Break My Soul (Music Video) from Hybrid on Vimeo.

My friend over at Strike a Pose Films is releasing a new film tonight. His past work has been pretty impressive, and this new film is no different. This one, titled Line of Sight, is his first choreographed action movie.

SYNOPSIS:
A few hundred years past our time…

Stray is a ruthless cage fighter, exiled from his hometown of Canine, the militaristic training grounds of The Peregrine Saga. In a rage, Stray ruthlessly beat his opponent to a bloody, near dead pulp during a major match. Problem was, this time his rival was the Boss’s son, so Stray was given a choice: get lynched by the locals or get the hell out of dodge. Given a gun with a single shot and told never to return, Stray makes a run for it into the scenic “wastelands” of the forgotten world.

Along the road he encounters a monk, crossing his path at a slow but steady pace. Doing their best not to agitate each other, the two initially pay the other little mind. However, the Boss from Canine town has placed a bounty on Stray’s head, going against his own promises, and has sent the former Caliber town survivor, the gunman Flintlock, to collect.

It is here the two warriors from different sides of the Appalachian Range find themselves stuck in a duel to the death, both of them trapped in a mad bounty hunter’s Line of Sight.

As he explains in his introduction, the movie was originally shot three years ago. It has been sitting on his hard drive over the years in various stages of completion. I have known about it for a while, and have been bugging him to finish and release it. At last he finally has. Click here to watch Line of Sight.