Armond on the Oldboy Remake

Armond White on Oldboy

Like the British filmmaker Steve McQueen, Lee is pledged to hipster art world cynicism, the liberal-academic-bohemian attitude that encourages Black artists’ commercialized rebellion–selling transgression, anarchy and anti-authoritarianism in the guise of Black political opposition and cultural privilege. Lee didn’t need to remake Oldboy as a Black man’s story because that phony rebellion is now cultural fashion–that’s why so many white hipsters embraced Lee’s fatuous The 25th Hour; it remade Do the Right Thing for wiggers.

When I watched the Korean version of Oldboy several years ago I was enthralled by it. The brutality of the story was so interestingly contrasted with the playfulness of the filmmaker. It was a film that I loved watching, but wasn’t sure if I would ever revisit.

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Turbo the Snail

This past weekend we rented Turbo to watch with our daughter. I vaguely remember hearing from a few people that it was a solid Dreamworks flick, so I thought we would give it a shot.

Despite it being set in the exciting world of tomato harvesting garden snails it gets off to a slow start. About 20 minutes in my daughter proclaimed, “I don’t like this snail movie”. I pretty much agreed with her.

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Disney's Frozen

We decided to take our daughter to the theater to see Frozen for her first ever trip to the theater. I was pretty sure she was going to like it because it has princesses and it has singing; two things she is a pretty big fan of these days. At one hour and 20 minutes Frozen was right at her limit of being able to sit still in her seat. Remember, you have to count the 30 minutes because Dad insists on getting there early, and 15 minutes of previews and the Mickey short at the beginning. Overall the trip to the theater was a huge success. Our daughter loved everything about the movie except for the monster. She wasn’t a fan of him, and at one point was ready to leave the theater. We made at through and overall she had a great time, and I had a great time taking her.

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Letterboxd

I started writing about movies on my MySpace page back in 2006. That was far from ideal, so I eventually decided to set up a blog. While that blog has changed names several times, and looks totally different every year or so, I keep on posting. However, if something like Letterboxd had existed back then I never would have set up this blog in the first place.

I heard about Letterboxd almost a year ago and created my profile. I then proceeded to never update anything on it. For some reason I have come back to it in the last couple weeks. It is fun to read through other people’s reviews and see what everybody else is watching. The list creation functionality is pretty cool also. It is a lot of fun.

I think Letterboxd is an awesome way to track what you are watching and share your thoughts. It has some really good summary reports too. Back in 2006 I watched a ton[1] of movies, and it would have been perfect for what I wanted to do. But I am glad it wasn’t around. I’ve had fun creating and writing on this blog.

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1. “Ton” is completely relative. I watched a lot more back then than I do now, but I follow people on twitter that watch more in a month than I did in a year.  ↩