Joshua Hale Fialkov

Purveyor of sheer awesomeness.

Joshua Hale Fialkov is the Harvey, Eisner, and Emmy Award nominated writer of graphic novels, animation, video games, film, and television, including:

THE LIFE AFTER, THE BUNKER, PUNKS, ELK'S RUN, TUMOR, ECHOES, KING, PACIFIC RIM, THE ULTIMATES, I, VAMPIRE, and JEFF STEINBERG CHAMPION OF EARTH. He's also written television including MAX’s YOUNG JUSTICE, NBC's CHICAGO MED and NETFLIX’s AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER.

Old Boy

August 27, 2005  /  Joshua Fialkov

Checked out Old Boy finally. It's got moments of greatness, but, ends up being a bit over long, and a bit too on the nose. The twist is a bit obvious, although Dina didn't see it coming as early as I did, and it suffers a bit from that awkward Asian logic in that the motivation for the bad guy is just positively over the top and somewhat illogical. The main difference between American and Asian cinema, I think, is that the Asian directors manage to take outlandish concepts, flawed logic, and simplistic character motivations and make them work, where as in the US you just end up with "Must Love Dogs."

Anyways, the movie has some gorgeous sequences, the plot's pretty engaging, the visuals spectacular, and the performances overall pretty good. The movie has a quote on it something along the lines of "Made to be recommended by Quentin Tarantino," which I suppose is somewhat true, but, I don't think the movie quite makes it up to the levels of the Kill Bill movies, or even kickass recent Asian action films like Volcano High and Ichi the Killer.

Comment
categories / Uncategorized