Park Chan Wook's Vengeance Trilogy: 11/24/09

Press release from Palisades Tartan popped up in my mail today. I had originally thought that this release was just going to be the three 1-discs with a box set sleeve over it, but I guess not.





The Ultimate Park Chan-Wook Vengeance Trilogy Box-Set
Palisades Tartan’s 8-Disc VENGEANCE TRILOGY box-set available in stores November 24th

LOS ANGELES — September 28, 2009 — For Immediate Release — You’ve been asking, we’ve been planning and this November Palisades Tartan will release the most exciting, impressive and comprehensive VENGEANCE TRILOGY box-set the world has ever seen! Featuring 8-discs and more special features then any other set on the planet (including the Korean version), celebrity essays as well as a few surprises, Palisades Tartan will release Park Chan-Wook’s VENGEANCE TRILOGY November 24th in DVD stores across the country.

SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE is the first film in Park Chan-Wook’s acclaimed Vengeance trilogy. The sister of a simple and deaf factory worker, Ryu, falls ill and needs a kidney transplant, however he is not a match so he looks to the black market which he can’t afford. After being fired from his job, his rebel girlfriend suggests that he kidnap the child of his former boss, Park. When the girl accidentally dies, her father seeks vengeance for her death.

OLDBOY is Park Chan-Wook’s classic genre-defining revenge tale of a man who’s wrongly been imprisoned for 15 years and is then suddenly released. Given money and a cell phone, he’s challenged to discover who incarcerated him in the first place, but he only has five days to uncover the truth. Even with a mysterious young girl to help him, his tortures have just begun. Cannes-winner championed by Tarantino, OLDBOY regularly appeared in top ten best movie polls across the country and is listed as one of the all-time best films as rated by IMDB users.

LADY VENGEANCE, the final film in the trilogy was created by Chan-Wook for his daughter. After being wrongfully convicted of kidnapping and murdering a young child, a beautiful young woman (Lee Young-ae) is imprisoned for 13 years. While in prison she gains the respect and loyalty of her fellow cellmates, all the while plotting her vendetta on the man responsible (OLDBOY’s Choi Min-Sik). Upon her release she sets in motion an elaborate plan of retribution, but what she discovers is a truth so horrifying, even revenge doesn’t seem punishment enough.

Director Park Chan-Wook’s most recent film THIRST won the Jury Prize at Cannes (2009) and was released in the US earlier this year by Focus Features. All three films in his celebrated Vengeance trilogy collection have garnered an impressive 28 Film Festival wins at prestigious venues including Cannes, Venice, Chicago, Fantasia, Stockholm, Hong Kong and the Sitges International Film Festival to name a few.

Each film is recorded in their original language (Korean) and offer English and Spanish subtitles. Each title is presented in anamorphic widescreen, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and DTS Surround Sound 5.1. Special features include an essay on each film by celebrated filmmakers, actors and writers, including Eli Roth. Additional features include but are not limited to: audio commentary by Park Chan-Wook and actor Ryoo Seung-wan, behind the scenes, “The Process of Mr. Vengeance”, “My Boksu Story”, storyboards, photo gallery, filmographies, film notes and crew interviews (SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE); three audio commentaries, five behind-the-scenes featurettes, “Le Grand Prix at Cannes” and deleted scenes with commentary (OLDBOY); regular and “Fade-To-White” versions, character interviews (Lee Geum Ja, Prof. Baek), “Prisoners”, “Families”, “Lady Vengeance at the 62nd Venice Film Festival”, trailer, film notes, making-of and deleted scenes (LADY VENGEANCE).

Tartan Films was originally founded in 1984 in the UK and is credited with bringing Asian Extreme film to the West as well as some of the most compelling art house films of the last quarter century. In May 2008, Palisades Pictures acquired Tartan Films US library assets and two months later, acquired a majority of Tartan Films UK’s 400+ film library assets. The new company Palisades Tartan has operations both nationally and internationally. Palisades Tartan will continue to expand an already distinctive and provocative slate of films by focusing on quality film acquisitions, thus significantly increasing the size of their overall library in both territories. Palisades Pictures and its parent company Palisades Media Corp is a prestigious financier of print & advertising for the independent film market. Together with its affiliate, Palisades Media Asset Fund, Palisades has securitized and financed more than 550 films.

www.palisadestartan.com

VENGEANCE TRILOGY Box Set - (SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE/ OLDBOY / LADY VENGEANCE)
Palisades Tartan Video
Genre: Thriller/Foreign
Rating: Not Rated (Special Features Not Rated/Subject to Change)
Language: Korean (English Subtitles)
Format: DVD Only / 8-disc (Box-set)
Running Time: Approximately 361 minutes (not including special features)

SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE – 129 min (not including special features)
OLDBOY – 120 min (not including special features)
LADY VENGEANCE – 112 min (not including special features)

Suggested Retail Price: $49.99
Pre-Order Date: October 27th 2009
Street Date: November 24th 2009
Catalog #: TVD8307
UPC Code: # 842498000076

$50 for eight discs? That's a steal.

Cheap Thrills: Fair Game (1995)

Cheap Thrills is a column on The Following Preview featuring movies that can be had new at certain stores for $5 or less. Today's movie is the action-thriller Fair Game (1995), which I found at a Big Lots! store for $3.00.

Note: Normally I write spoiler-free reviews, but this one talks about the ending. Obviously, Fair Game is full of shocking twists you'll never see coming, so consider yourself warned.

My memory of the early 1990s is pretty vague and as the years pass, it gets all blurred together, but for whatever reason, 1994 sticks out in my head as the year when I first heard of Cindy Crawford. I also remember the buzz about Fair Game being her first starring role in a major motion picture, but this was long before I cared about movies, so it isn't until now that I've had the pleasure of viewing her first big foray into big-screen work. The verdict? Cindy Crawford is a knockout with limited acting talent, and the movie is hilarious.

Lots of movies have clothesline plots, but Fair Game is almost deliberately uninterested in the details of why Ilya Kazak (Steven Berkoff) would want to kill Kate McQuean (Crawford), other than the broad strokes: she's a lawyer, and somehow her lawyering is going to interrupt his attempt to steal $900 million dollars. Kate is out jogging when Kazak's silly Russian henchmen try, and fail, to kill her for the first time (as far as I can tell, the bullet is deflected by her armband Walkman). She ends up making a statement at the police office where Max Kirkpatrick (William Baldwin) works, he forgets to have her sign it, and is conveniently there for the first in a string of situations where he manages to save Kate's life.

Mediocre action movies only have one card to play for the audience's approval, and that's the action. At first I was worried the movie was going to bore me to death, slogging through character development for Kate (plot-relevant lawyering with an uncredited Dan Hedaya) and Max (not-relevant ex-girlfriend wackiness with Salma Hayek), but when Kate's huge mansion of a house gets seriously explosion-y, the movie becomes entertaining in a hurry. It's a cliche that men like to see stuff blown up real good, but the pyrotechnics experts working on Fair Game knew what they were doing: while the non-action operates on an indeterminate level of sincerity, the explosions are firmly over-the-top, setting the tone for the rest of the movie. For whatever reason, it's mostly cars: cars that get shot in the gas tank, cars in parking garages, cars being swung into other cars, and even an old yellow beater that Max crashes into a railroad crossing sign while boarding a train in the most complicated, stupid and wasteful way possible.

Speaking of which, the other tone-defining element is William Baldwin. Will falls in the middle of the three Baldwins whose film performances I can recall from memory (I've seen Nothing But Trouble, but I'll be damned if I remember Daniel). Occasionally, he's got Alec's charisma, and he delivers his lines with a little nuance, but his facial expressions are extremely goofy. From the moment he springs into action, guns ablaze, flying through the air, it's like a 1980s-era Nicolas Cage has time-traveled into the film, only with more intense, deliberate mugging. IMDb says Fair Game had more than a handful of reshoots. I don't know what's new and what isn't, but a positive side effect I'd credit to this process is that Baldwin's chances to emote alone appear to be cut down significantly. More than a handful of scenes seem like they were meant to go on longer, but don't, giving the audience a mere hint of William's upset-face instead of a full dose.

Meanwhile, Kazak does amusingly stupid things like fire a gun while standing in the bottom of a boat and explain his plan to Kate for pretty much no reason at all. He's eternally optimistic and memorably slimy; while most of his screen time is spent in the front seat of an SUV looking angry at Max's ability to escape death and/or yelling at more henchmen to go try some more, he elevates himself out of forgettability with extra-exaggerated snarling. His crew is intense too: perpetually Eeyore-faced Olek Krupka, a totally underutilized Jenette Goldstein, and Marc Macaulay at his most Michael Ironside-ish. They drive around in the aforementioned SUV with a hacker named Stefan (Gustav Vintas), tracking credit card numbers and using heat scanning to try to spot Kate and Max, but Max fools them by accident when one of his cop friends flushes the toilet and the cold water takes him off their grid. Awesome!

As for Crawford, she stumbles over more than a handful of lines, and the emotional state of her character varies wildly from scene to scene at the beginning of the film (potentially not her fault; might be the editing again), but she has enough personal charisma to coast through the film. Her scene with Hedaya is solid, and a later scene where she puts some moves on a computer nerd is fun. She also gets to participate in the action from time to time, taking the wheel during a great chase sequence involving a tow truck, and guns down at least one villain (while topless, of course). Clearly, she wasn't destined to be a movie star, but for the purposes of a film like Fair Game, what she pulls off here is more than adequate.

At the end, all of the elements come together at once: a magical bomb that looks like a tape recorder goes off, sequentially blowing up every part of the ship except the part that Kazak is in (which is strange, since I think the bomb is two feet away from him). Max and Kate jump off (Crawford gets wet, Baldwin makes a hilarious face) and Kazak manages to drown (still trying to pull his money out despite the boat sinking and exploding) on one of the most explosive boats of the 90's. The DVD is full-frame, but the original version was 1.85:1 (and the picture here may be open matte, although I'm guessing it's cropped). There aren't any features. Was Fair Game worth the $3 I spent on it? Certainly.

Here's the trailer for Fair Game, which isn't on the DVD. It's about as amusing as the film, with the painfully cliched voice-over (Kate and Max don't hate each other that much in the movie) and lots of dialogue that didn't make the final cut.

Cheap Thrills: Leonard Part 6 (1987)

Cheap Thrills is a column on The Following Preview featuring movies that can be had new at certain stores for $5 or less. Today's movie is Leonard Part 6 (1987), which I found at a Big Lots! store for $3.00.

I'd heard many things about Leonard Part 6 long before I finally got the chance to see it. When I was younger, I was a fan of the movie Ghost Dad, and later the movie Meteor Man, which also had Bill Cosby in it, and if I can find it, will be the subject of a later Cheap Thrills. During those Ghost Dad years, I considered renting Leonard, but ended up choosing not to for some reason. Now, almost a decade later, I find myself wishing I could buy Ghost Dad on DVD, but apparently I saw a TV version with several scenes I feel I'd miss too much, so I have to settle for Leonard Part 6.

This movie has a long-standing reputation as being one of the worst movies ever made -- so bad, in fact, that Cosby went from talk show to talk show telling people not to see it. He won three Golden Raspberries for it, which he requested be made of 24k solid gold and Italian marble. Is it as bad as they say? Actually, no. I've seen plenty of movies that were more painful to sit through, and most of Leonard Part 6 is just dull, but that poses another question: how can a film with the extremely likable Cosby playing an ex-secret agent called back into duty to stop a mad vegetarian from using mind-controlled animals to kill all the humans be this boring?

The problem is mostly the direction by Paul Weiland, who is apparently still directing films (like last year's crowning Patrick Dempsey achievement Made of Honor). Half the jokes are painfully telegraphed (mainly anything involving the awful narration), and the other half fall disappointingly flat. Most of them seem to have been thought up on a whim, such as a late-breaking joke where Cosby tries to say something mildly romantic to his estranged wife, but water falling from above is dropping right onto his face, and he splutters through the sentence. Did someone really think this would be funny? During a fight, Leonard forces his opponent to eat a hot dog, and the guy's head explodes. Was he allergic? Was it an explosive hot dog? Why am I asking these questions?

Occasionally, however, a joke or two will shine through. Cosby sells a handful of gags pretty well, despite looking extremely bored at all times, and even Weiland executes a couple of gags with directorial finesse (frogs hopping a car holding a CIA agent into a pond is visually amusing, and a finale involving Alka-Seltzer and dishwasher fluid looks pretty spectacular). Fans of The Matrix will note that the first Oracle, Gloria Foster, plays the vegetarian villain.

Leonard Part 6 is not worth your three dollars. If it had a little more verve, it might have been a demented little cult classic, but for all the random jokes in the movie that have psychotic yet clever payoffs (a fortune-telling woman, speaking a gibberish language not even Leonard understands, gives him butter, and when the punchline arrives, the reasoning makes some sort of drug-induced logical sense), the movie just can't pick up enough energy or enthusiasm to be more than a flop. Foster's character sums it up best, cackling as she watches Leonard using ballerina shoes to out-dance her flock of gymnastic, man-sized chickens: "Clever...but dumb."

Leonard Part 6 on IMDB.