The original Oldboy is not an easy movie to take, at least from an American perspective. There is mass cruelty and rape and vulgarity and violence (including not one, but two “tooth torture” sequences that rival anything you might’ve seen in Marathon Man or American History X). This, of course, opened the door for Spike Lee – a director who remains equal parts luminous and maddening – to direct his own English-speaking version of the film (a critical flop, if ever there was one). Chan-wook Park‘s Oldboy succeeds because there is beauty in the butchery, poetry in each passing blow, all of it wrapped inside a treatise about sex and death and the choices people make once they have been locked inside a box. These four quotes encapsulate what Chan-wook Park was after via this movie, and why the joy of watching Oldboy is more about mass metaphor
than malice:

1. “The TV is both a clock and a calendar. It’s your school, your home, your church, your friend and your lover.” While that statement might require an update, truer words have not been uttered. We are slaves to mass technology, consumers in the manufactured sense. We believe what we believe because the media – in all its forms – lets us know what’s deemed acceptable. As Don Draper once put it, “You know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing, it’s OK.” That’s what happiness is, despite whatever pipe dream Pharrell Williams might be hawking.
2. “Remember this: Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same.” One might recall a few weeks back when rapper T.I. and Floyd Mayweather came to blows inside a Vegas Fatburger over a personal disagreement involving T.I.’s Tiny (Allow yourself a moment to let that statement settle in). In the aftermath, 50 Cent, who’s maintained a long-standing beef with Mr. Mayweather, took to social media, insisting, “Your upper-cut ain’t gonna mean shit when niggers start shootin’.” Therein lies the wisdom of the boulder and the grain of sand. It’s a reminder that while people may be separated by tax bracket, social status, birth right or physicality, every one of us is still susceptible once the stakes are raised to life and death.
3. “They say that people shrivel up because of their imaginations. So don’t imagine anything. You’ll become brave as hell.” There is nothing new about this sentiment, delivered prior to the would-be extraction of Dae-su’s teeth. The idea has been echoed throughout pop culture, from Agent Cooper – in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – declaring, “All things considered, being shot is not as bad as I always thought it would be, as long as you can keep the fear from your mind,” to Bob Dylan, who once reacted to a death threat – in D.A. Pennebacker’s Don’t Look Back – by saying, “I don’t mind being shot, man. But I don’t dig being told about it.” It is the thought, rather than the injury, that intensifies the pain. This is what lies at the root of all anxiety, the notion constant dread is eons worse than any beating.
4. “One word makes you pregnant, another makes you fall in love.” “One pill makes you larger/and one pill makes you small,” quoteth Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane. At its core, Oldboy is – at least partially – about the power of suggestion. This quote delivered toward the end of the film crystallizes what that power means in the most uncharitable of terms.

(The original Oldboy is currently streaming via Netflix. Spike Lee’s version will be available June 18th.)

There were three carloads of them, disembarking on North Clearfield. All of them were drunk, some of them were high, and one or two were carrying weapons in the form of small appliances. Gerry Vessels took the lead, leather duster swinging open. He made a left turn onto Frankford, came to a halt outside of Chuckle’s.

“You know you ain’t allowed,” the owner shouted. He was seated on a barstool just beyond the rust-brown entrance. The owner leaned forward, took a headcount of the sidewalk. He pushed his stool into the shadows, slammed the door without a warning. Gerry Vessels kicked the door wide, blitzkrieged his way onto the pool room. A battle cry rang out and patrons bottlenecked the entrance. Someone took a swing at Gerry, tagged him square across the jaw.

There was a rumble out on Frankford – flesh pounding, cotton tearing. A friend of Gerry’s was unloading on some asshole near the ground. That friend – a six-foot Kenzo named Chris Shanahan – had just tucked in both arms when someone stabbed him from behind. The blade entered near his kidney, splitting up and through a pair of ribs. It plunged in deeper near the tricep, cutting clear across the bone.

There was a scream and then a whistle, followed by the sound of bootheels clapping. Gerry Vessels fought his way clear, hurried east toward the corner. There was a car there waiting for him. He grabbed the handle, hopped inside. Continue reading →

“The function of all the granular details in background and in setting is to suggest this corruption at the root of the world, this poisoned garden. And what it suggests is that the world itself is poison and there’s something ruinous at work here. And the poison at the root of the world is humanity, which is also its only vehicle for meaning. It’s a chicken-and-the-egg type thing. The world is a reflection of who we are, and our values, and our concerns. However we’re all born into situations we didn’t create, inheritors of situations we didn’t create, we’re also subject to these things. In some ways I go back to the first story I ever heard, [which was] a noir story called The Book of Genesis. If you think about it, there’s sex, there’s palace intrigue, there’s sexual betrayal, there’s vengeance, and then there’s two brothers, and one of them kills the other one, and this is in the first two pages. So it’s always been suggested in our oldest literature that we’re living after some kind of spiritual or metaphysical fall.”

(Excerpted from “To The Best of Our Knowledge” radio interview.)

Catch a wave. I’ll see you when it’s over.

Flash, long believed to represent the bane of street photography, became an integral part of Mark Cohen’s approach throughout the 1970s. Cohen reimagined flash as a means by which to elicit a reaction. Provocation was the goal, or – at the very least – a byproduct. In that spirit, Cohen would wander the streets of Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, invading people’s personal space just prior to shining a flash bulb in their eyes. The results represent a strange, frenetic alchemy, 1,000x more relevant given the state of citizen photography. Critics maintain Cohen straddles the line between commentary and perversion, citing images that tend to exploit young children in a manner that can only be described as sexual. And yet, it is precisely this uncertain area which renders Cohen’s work an ongoing topic for discussion. In the age of Instagram and Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter, the mainstream sexualization of minors hasn’t only become commonplace, it’s uncharacteristically rewarded.

(Mark Cohen continues at the Danziger Gallery through 6/20, free, 527 West 23rd Street.)

Five More For The Offing: 

• European Trip: Photographs From The Car, 1968 by Joel Meyerowitz @ Howard Greenberg Gallery (Free, through 5/31, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406)
• The Studio Recreated by Ultra Violet @ Dillon Gallery (Free, through 6/3, 555 West 25th Street)
• Holy Terror: Photographs From Inside Warhol’s World by Bob ColaCello @ Steven Kasher Gallery (Free, through 5/4, 521 West 23rd Street)
• Beyond Fashion by Charles James @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Free, through 8/10, 5th Avenue @ 83rd Street)
• they thought I were but I aren’t anymore … by Larry Clark @ Luhring Augustine (Free, 6/7 through 8/1, 531 West 24th Street)

The most effective pre-publicity IFC could have employed prior to releasing Cold In July would have been to stream the first five minutes of the film via internet. I mention this because the first five minutes of Cold In July are absolutely riveting, a master class in tension, exceptionally conceived, shot and executed. Unfortunately, those first five minutes serve as a lead-in to the movie, which unravels like a ball of yarn. 

The problem with Cold In July isn’t the acting, and isn’t the directing. The problem with Cold In July is a screenplay so damn earnest it puts most Grisham novels to shame. The character choices are unlikely, the camaraderie is absurd, and the climax introduces more questions than it provides in terms of answers. Somewhere in between Michael C. Hall goes full-on drawl beneath a mullet and Sam Shepard makes his presence felt in spades. Don Johnson’s character comes on far too big for any actor’s britches and Vinessa Shaw seems out of place as the down-home Texas bride. What the entire thing adds up to is one unfortunate mess of a movie. But the first five minutes will hold you fast onto your seat. You can bet the goddamn house on that.

(Cold In July opens in limited release this Friday.)

Native – or even transplanted – New Yorkers will often refer to a specific emotion they experience upon reentering the city after an intermittent time away. There are variations on this theme, yet the majority of them center upon one moment, emerging from the steps outside Penn Station, the soft white lights from Times Square somehow illuminating high-rise windows more than a half-mile down the road. There is safety here, a sudden warmth, the embrace of something both ethereal and palpable … the smell of vendors, the fast-vanishing horns, more layers of white noise than early man could imagine.

While I do not arrive by train on this particular evening, the maudlin calm remains the same. After 15 days out on the road, my legs have grown tight and both palms have grown calluses. My apartment here is smaller than most hotel rooms where I’ve stayed. Yet as I return to it tonight I feel an overwhelming sense of joy. I am home now, free and clear. Tomorrow will offer new stories to be told.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

I empty all my change into a meter less than three blocks from the Capitol, then follow Pennsylvania as it spans the White House lawn. The Lincoln Monument’s a mob scene with dueling preachers on both pillars and the yuppies play flag football on the north side of the mall. I swing out wide along the war memorials before doubling back toward the car. The Washington Monument remains closed. It’s been that way for 15 years.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

Those eyes, those eyes … Marion Cotillard can beat the world back with those eyes. And she does throughout The Immigrant, a rich and gorgeous period picture that is equally well-realized and well-acted. Set in 1920s New York City, James Gray’s motion picture shares both the palette and the pace of The Godfather, Part II (particularly the young Vito Corleone segments). The set up is similar – a fleeing immigrant escapes to America where she is left to make it on her own – and the two films maintain a similar stance on how American culture praises money most of all. But the broad-stroke similarities end there. Jeremy Renner, Joaquin Phoenix … all the major players are superb. But in the end it all comes back to Marion Cotillard, and the way she beats the world back with those eyes – a French actress playing a Polish refugee living in a Russo-Jewish neighborhood in post-war New York City. How’s that for an American dream?

(The Immigrant opens in limited release today.)