Results tagged “Violence”

So now we get to the inevitable hand-wringing about violence in the media, in this case trying to tie the Virginia Tech massacre to Oldboy:

“The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran [sic] Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.”

The link is tenuous, and the assertion is utterly ridiculous. As Bob Cesca mocked:

“The lead character in Oldboy is Asian, which is weird and freaky because Oldboy is an Asian film and there are rarely any Asians in Asian movies. And ... the character appears to be grasping a hammer in the movie.”

But let’s say for the sake of argument that we found definitive proof that Cho Seung-Hui believed himself to be something akin to Oldboy’s protagonist. So what? All we’re doing by making that connection is adding obfuscation to what is already difficult to fathom: the unmotivated murders of more than 30 people.

Three days after the event, it seems increasingly clear that the shootings were the actions of a person with serious mental illness. Movies have nothing to do with it.

Despite (and because of) its pedigree, Natural Born Killers is undoubtedly trashy, reveling in the killing spree of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) and joyfully joining in the public and media fascination with mass murderers. And it’s an invigorating, brilliantly assembled movie celebrating the way that cinema can make the ugliest human behavior thrilling.

A History of Violence is a bizarre, challenging film dressed up as a mainstream entertainment, a subversive work bordering on parody yet also deadly earnest. The movie confirms that David Cronenberg has grown into one of cinema’s most sophisticated, rigorous, and probing filmmakers.