Great Moments in CINEMATIC FAIL: The Asian Edition
There comes a point in every niche-specific blog when you've got to stretch that extra inch to pump out a post. Maybe you're a movie blog, ankling to finish that last post of the day. Maybe you're lacking the caffiene to get the first post going?
Whatever the case, confusing a South Korean director for a Japanese is grounds for being a great moment in cinematic fail.
Japanator's Holiday Shopping Guide is made up of films and recommendations that read like a 10-15 minute Google search of recent releases. It even goes between one writer's love of HKFlix to the second group of suggestions being solely based around Amazon.
And you know, that's fine. To reveal my own inner (despite my hatred for the term) otaku, I read Japanator daily. So it's with that I burned inside a bit when one of the "Japanese films" suggested for the holiday season was Chan Wook-park's The Vengeance Trilogy, which was a definite DVDon't.
My main problem with the listing? Wook-park is Korean, not Japanese. Thus it is a lazy list recommendation, especially when the author only cites OldBoy as a reason for the boxed set. In no way should it knock Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which is an incredible film, but a majority of viewers coming into the series would do so after OldBoy. And for good reason.
OldBoy is a swan song. Oddly, it represents the culmination of Wook-park's stylization that would be absent from Lady Vengeance. In fact, compared to the rest of the films suggested, OldBoy is a gigantic leap from the live-action Detroit Metal City or Crows II. The entire list reads like a haphazard mess thrown together in order to appease some list-making God that would otherwise smite a village unless this was cobbled together in five minutes.
The fact that 20th Century Boys, K-20: Legend of the Mask or Love Exposure would be left off this list of import DVDs proves there's something wrong here. Not to mention they would be "Japanese" releases instead of Korean.
But regardless, choosing a haphazard and "variety pack" edition of Chan Wook-park's work is more than enough reason as to why that list is a Great Moment in CINEMATIC FAIL: The Asian Edition.
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- groups:
- movies blog
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- tags:
- Great Moments, OldBoy, Chan Wook-park
