This assignment has us analyzing a film as a form of art. I looked over the AFI’s top 100 movies of all time. That list has pretty much been untouched for years, occasionally something moving up and something moving down. I won’t deny that all the films on the list are creative works of art, but many of the works are extremely dull to me. I believe that if Citizen Kane was made today, it would be more like a B-movie then the greatest movie of all time.

The first movie that came to mind to do for this was ‘Ip Man’. It’s probably my favorite kung fu action movie at the moment and I’ve watched it several times. As I was watching one of the beautifully choreographed fight scenes, it made me think of an even more impressive fight scene from another movie that also had subtitles. That movie is ‘Old Boy’ and is truly what I’d call a work of art. For those of you unfamiliar with Old Boy, it is a movie that was based of a manga of the same name. The main hero is imprisoned for 15 years without being given a reason why and then released just as suddenly without reason and given 5 days to track down the person behind his capture and why they did it. ‘Old Boy’ is a dark film and part of a trilogy of movies all centered around the concept of revenge.

Being centered around revenge you can guess the movie has some darker lighting and cinematography.  The movie is also great about not using special effects, except were necessary to touch up a scene.  One example is the scene below called the corridor fight scene.  Unfortunately embedding for both videos was disabled by request of the users so you’ll have to follow the links on youtube to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRK_2KCDmtY&feature=youtu.be

This scene was done in a single take and is reminiscent of old school side scrolling fighter games.  The only special effects used were to help with the knife wound and to connect a couple of missed punches.  Roger Ebert said that left is weaker and right is more dominant and in this scene we see the lead Oh Desu work his way from the left to the right in this fight.  The camera just slides along following the action.

The other scene I found was from toward the ending.  This scene also incorporates some music to really help pull the drama out of the scene.  Lots of tilts in this scene and the camera angles were cool.  I also like the transitions in this scene as it starts to cut between the past and the future all ending with his fingers curling around his gun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur31IcG-1qg&feature=related

If I had to chose a genre for ‘Old Boy’ I would place it as a drama/thriller.  It’s very thrilling to say the least and drama is usually defined as a genre that deals with realistic people and situations.  While the situation might not be the most realistic the people are realistic and the emotions that they experience are real.