Spike Lee's remake of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy doesn't hit theaters until October, and that just seems way too long to wait. I'm genuinely excited to see what Lee does with the material and am envisioning a revenge (and blood)-soaked 25th Hour. The good news is that FilmDistrict has finally dropped a tiny morsel from the upcoming film. The bad news: it's chicken scratch. more »
Park Chan-wook's reverence for Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch shines through in his English-language debut, Stoker. It's a tightly wound thriller with psychosexual undertones and shocking — yet artful — violence in which, it seems, no detail is accidental and the details, both visual and auditory, add up to a lavish cinematic experience. more »
When South Korean genre iconoclast Park Chan-wook decided to bring his peculiar gifts to a Stateside production, anything could have happened — and anything pretty much does in Stoker, a splendidly demented gumbo of Hitchcock thriller, American Gothic fairy tale and a contemporary kink all Park's own. Led by a brilliant Mia Wasikowska as an introverted teenager whose personal and sexual awakening arrives with the unraveling of a macabre family mystery, this exquisitely designed and scored pic will bewilder as many viewers as it bewitches, making ancillary immortality a safer bet than Black Swan-style crossover biz for Fox Searchlight's marvelously mad March hare. more »
Park Chan-wook is one of a few successful Korean filmmakers attempting an English-language foray into Hollywood this year (also see: Kim Jee-woon's Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Stand) and his moody March thriller Stoker continues to tease with a new clip ahead of its Sundance debut this weekend. Take a peek at just under two minutes of Nicole Kidman absolutely owning the screen with a riveting, sinister mother-daughter chat opposite Mia Wasikowska.
more »
Spike Lee's Oldboy is getting some bad ass company in the Park Chan-Wook remake business, as the Korean director's ultraviolent femme-fronted Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, the third pic in Park's Vengeance trilogy, will be remade into a Charlize Theron-fronted Americanized adaptation by Departed writer William Monahan.
more »
Also in Tuesday morning's round-up of news briefs, Charlie Kaufman has turned to crowd funding (seemingly quite successfully) for a stop motion animation project. Richard Gere's Arbitrage is set to open a Middle Eastern film festival. And Park Chan-wook is set to direct a Corsican mafia story.
more »
Oldboy producer Roy Lee recently spilled some vague details on Spike Lee's Josh Brolin-starring remake, promising a "darker" retelling of Park Chan-wook's Korean thriller also adapted from the original manga. "It's very similar, but we've added new elements. Or, Mark Protosevich has come up with new elements to it that will throw off the audience who have seen the original movie because there are new characters and new situations that present themselves in a way that changes the story but eventually go in the same direction." Sure, Spike. Let me just go get my hammer... [Collider via Slashfilm]
Looks like Spike Lee got his rumored dream star for the Oldboy film he's helming: Deadline reports that Josh Brolin will lead the English-language remake of Park Chan-wook's 2003 thriller about a man held prisoner for 15 years who sets out for revenge upon release. With Brolin onboard, will Christian Bale sign on next as his mysterious foil? (And how faithful will Lee's remake be to the brutality of the original?)
more »
When Harmony Korine's short film Umshini Wam screened alongside the latest from Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Thirst) at SXSW, both efforts had an unproven element to unveil. For Korine, the wild cards were his stars, the South African hip-hop act Die Antwoord. But for Park, it was something even more groundbreaking: he filmed the mystical, spiritual ghost story Night Fishing entirely using the iPhone 4.
more »
