By First off, if you haven’t seen Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy, you better get the f**k up and go watch it at least a dozen times. Only then will anything to do with Spike Lee’s remake have any relevance to you. Only then will you realize that we are inching closer and closer to what may be a brilliant reinterpretation or outright abomination, and now that the film has found a U.S. distributor in FilmDistrict, that time of reckoning grows nearer.
I don’t mean to be so dramatic, but Oldboy is a pretty big deal for us here at Flixist, and now that the remake has a distributor, there’s a whole other group of people who can influence the outcome of the film. We’re already off to a bad start, with FilmDistrict’s Peter Schlessel calling Park’s film “one of the most talked about thrillers” and stating that the cast and producers will be able to “elevate the material and engage audiences.” Now I don’t mean to sound defenseive (yes I do), but the original Oldboy is about as elevated and engaging as a film can get, and the reason why it is such a “talked about” movie is that it is one of the most brilliant thrillers of recent times. Period.
I hope my anxiety is for naught, and I do have faith in Spike Lee and the cast he has assembled, but my skepticism will only grow as random executives and business men try to get their grubby hands on the finished product. Of course, that’s really just how movie making works, but one would think there would be some reverence in place for such an amazing film. If nothing else, we can always count our blessings that we didn’t get the Will Smith version that was rumored for so long.
[via Deadline]