Oldboy

Much lighter than Chan-wook Park's demented bitter construct, Spike Lee's Oldboy is still illicit enough to provoke degenerative thoughts of decay, bathed in a regenerative yet psychotic ludic lotion, like a transgressive pantomime, cauterizing ruin.

Suppose this particular narrative inevitably comes across as dark.

Even if you throw in Ron Burgundy and his chipper news team.

The vindictive carousing of an insatiable werehyena.

A leather apron.

And a codified shield.

The game plan's the same.

Asshole. Locked in a room for more than a decade for no apparent reason. Suddenly released. Abounding tension. A set of clues. The diagnostic hammer.

Seismic atrophy.

The tension abounds but it lacks the all-encompassing sense of discombobulated dread cultivated by Park.

But I did prefer the new ending.

So dismal it brought a tear to me eye.

Why do people excel at imploding such vivid monstrous moral vivisections?

Vision. Goal. Cyanide.

The discipline of the Real.