One-timers I worry won't hold up

The movie Juno came up for discussion on Filmspotting in a recent episode -- an episode I was listening to on my way in to work on Wednesday -- where they were talking about great father-daughter pairings at the movies. (I'm actually wondering about the wisdom of mentioning Juno in this context nowadays, considering that Elliot Page was clearly playing a daughter in that movie, but identifies as a man now.)

They played a clip that reminded me how much I liked that movie, having named it my #3 movie of 2007. And also how the writing was specifically one of the things I liked about it, something it's easy to forget since we all turned on Diablo Cody rather quickly.

But I haven't gone back to watch Juno again, in part because I'm worried that when Rainn Wilson calls Page "home skillet," it'll seem pretty cringey. Is that reason enough not to rewatch a movie that once made my top three for a year? Almost certainly not.

So I decided to go through my Flickchart and identify other favorite movies I've seen only once to see if fears like this are holding me back there as well. For the purposes of this exercise, a "one-timer" is just as simple as it sounds: a movie I've seen only once. I'm clarifying because sometimes we use that term to describe a movie we can bear to see only once because it's so confronting or triggering, even though it may be excellent.

I'll do ten, and I'll list them in order of where they appear on my Flickchart, with the number serving as the number this movie is ranked out of 6182 films. And just to make the project slightly easier, I won't exclude Juno from the group.

173. Rushmore (1998, Wes Anderson) - This remains one of the movies it's weirdest that I've never rewatched. It took what I thought I had discovered with Wes Anderson in Bottle Rocket and absolutely crystallized it. I still think of it as one of my top few Anderson movies. However, I've also turned on Anderson enough over the years -- specifically his last film, The French Dispatch -- that I'm worried some of his later fussy quirks might spoil my so-far pristine feelings about Rushmore, since I'll be confronted with the fact that they were there all along. There's still no excuse for not watching this again, though, so I probably will. I should be further encouraged by the fact that a recent rewatch of The Royal Tenenbaums actually turned me from a Tenenbaums hater (or disliker, at least) to a Tenenbaums lover.

353. Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005, George Clooney) - This ranked even higher than Juno, ending its year as my #2 movie, behind only Hustle & Flow. I'm not so much worried that this has aged poorly as that my affection for it was inflated to begin with. The fact that it feels like a chore to potentially watch it again is a good indication of how my thoughts may have changed on it -- though it's not like I'm always stumbling across it on streaming and choosing not to watch it. 

372. Face/Off (1997, John Woo) - This is another case, as with Rushmore, of later-developed feelings about a director likely ruining a film for which I had uncomplicated affection the first time around. When I think of John Woo today, I think "That's that hack who puts doves into scenes of slow-motion gunplay, no matter how ridiculous." Yes, there are incongruous doves in the climax of the Ben Affleck vehicle Paycheck -- even though that scene takes place underground. 

378. Oldboy (2003, Park Chan-wook) - I think I really like Oldboy -- at least I'm ranking it that way on Flickchart -- but am I sure? I am not sure. I think I may have constructed a narrative here. I do remember that when I was watching it a friend's house, we were into it, but we did find some things confusing. I also remember that another friend was in the room but was not reading the subtitles, and then complained that he didn't know what was going on -- which is sort of hilarious, because obviously. I worry that if I watch this again, the fact that Park has been more hit than miss for me in the past ten years -- The Handmaiden being the exception -- will make me realize we were right to be confused about the poor storytelling the first time.

381. Juno (2007, Jason Reitman) - Home skillet. As discussed. 

422. Mr. Nobody (2009, Jaco van Dormeal) - The extremity of my positive reaction to this the first time around -- I gave it five stars on Letterboxd -- is more why I'm including it here than me secretly thinking it might not be good, and avoiding it for that reason. I'm actually not avoiding this movie per se, and have a couple times considered watching it again. But I think it slips in and out of availability on streaming, and the fact that I'm not willing to pony up to rent a movie I gave five stars suggests I think there was some excess positivity in my response. 

434. A Beautiful Mind (2001, Ron Howard) - I ranked this movie in my top ten of 2001 and remember being genuinely moved by its climax. I'm now more ashamed of the type of movie it is, and having this reaction to a movie that seemed so pointed at Oscar glory, than I am doubting that I'd tear up again at the end of a second watch. A Beautiful Mind is not in the same category of regrettable Oscar winner as Crash or Green Book, but it's not something people regularly talk about today, and there's probably a reason for that. 

485. Erin Brockovich (2000, Steven Soderbergh) - Erin Brockovich was, until recently, my highest ranked Soderbergh film -- but you also know from this post that I don't tend to rewatch any Soderbergh. Out of Sight has now gone ahead of it, Traffic is just behind it, and I've also now rewatched both Side Effects and Full Frontal, the former confirming my affection for it, the latter dropping it significantly in my estimation. When I first discovered that Brockovich was my highest ranked Soderbergh, I instantly doubted it, because (like A Beautiful Mind) of the type of film it is -- a legal drama about an unlikely crusader. Does not seem as worthy as his other output, and I haven't checked again to confirm whether it actually is. 

494. Argo (2012, Ben Affleck) - Another questionable best picture winner that made my top ten in the year of its release. I assume I would still actually like Argo, but it feels like a strange best picture winner in retrospect -- not a film anyone hates, but a film we all kind of forgot won. If you were recounting the best picture winners from the 2010's, this is the one you would forget. (You wouldn't forget Green Book, even though it's a worse movie, just because of how mad it made you when it won. Argo didn't make anybody mad. In fact, I'm not sure it inspired great love or great hatred in anybody.)

503. Away We Go (2009, Sam Mendes) - A friend of mine was the one who gave me doubts about this one. I really embraced this movie, again ranking it in my top ten for the year, but a friend had a wildly different reaction to it at the time, as I wrote about here. Apparently I have secretly wondered since then if he was always right. 

That's ten.

And yet an argument can be made that if I am ranking a movie in my top 500 on Flickchart -- Away We Go is the only one of these that (narrowly) misses that cutoff -- it's something I do really like. Or at worst, I should watch it again to ensure it deserves its lofty ranking. If it doesn't, I should begin busting it down to where it really belongs in my rankings. (A fate that befell the aforementioned Full Frontal, among other that spring to mind, such as Igby Goes Down.)

Given then I've already identified ten and it would be easy enough to come up with two more, it might make for a good monthly series one of these years -- except that I've already done something like this with what was then a weekly series in 2010, conducted over a couple months, called Double Jeopardy. At that time I subjected such films as Disney's The Kid, Click, U-Turn, Alpha Dog and Bedazzled to a new viewing to confirm my previous affection. But in none of those cases were the films ranked as highly as these are. (However, the series also helped boost two others into this rarefied air, as it made me realize my love for The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Story of Us were intense enough to call them legitimate personal favorites.)

For now it's useful just to have identified this list. That way, if I have a random night where I can't figure out what to watch, and one of these titles appears before me on Netflix or Amazon, I'll remember I have this unfinished business. 

Old Oldboy vs. new Oldboy

I have been wanting to see Spike Lee's Oldboy since it came out ... but I have also been wanting to reacquaint myself with Park Chan-wook's Oldboy before I did so.

Both are streaming on Netflix, so I figured, might as well make it an Oldboy Weekend. So I did this past Friday and Saturday nights.

I realized recently that although I hold Park's original, the middle of his Vengeance Trilogy, in very

high esteem, I could remember very little about it.
There was the classic fight scene and the classic tooth removal scene, but I couldn't even remember why the character needed vengeance in the first place. A little jogging of my memory reminded me that he was locked away for 15 years and then mysteriously released back into the world, but what happened from there remained a blur.

In fact, I probably would have watched it again long before now if I hadn't persisted in the belief that the version streaming on Netflix was dubbed into English. My friend Scott watched over an hour of it while he was babysitting for us back in the first few months of my older son's life. The restlessness of my son kept him from watching the whole thing, but he didn't get back to it on his own (at least, I don't think he did) because he wasn't enjoying it as much as he thought he was supposed to be -- and that could have everything to do with the fact that it was dubbed.

When I found it again on Netflix, I marveled at two things: 1) It's no longer dubbed, and 2) Netflix wanted to know if I wanted to "resume" my viewing. That's right, Netflix still had a record of the fact that someone on this account had started watching this movie on December 22, 2010. Talk about a long memory.

I'm glad I saw it again rather than just going into Spike Lee's cold, because it gave me a good means of assessing the success or failure of Lee's effort. (You can argue whether it's fair to judge a movie against the movie it's remaking, but it's only human nature that we do so.)

And honestly, I was expecting to hate Lee's version. People I trust have said it's terrible, and Lee is someone I have trusted a lot less in recent years (I greatly disliked Red Hook Summer and avoided The Miracle of St. Anna altogether).

You know what? Lee's version is fine. Really it is. Better than fine, maybe.

Not better than the original. I will never go that far. But a worthy attempt to remake a popular Korean film? Sure, why not?

I think what struck people as so strange about Spike Lee remaking Oldboy was that this director had chosen this project in particular. Nothing about his resume suggests that it is a good match for him.

But let's set aside Lee's affiliation and look at it merely as a business idea. Remaking Oldboy is no stranger than remaking any of the dozens of other hot Asian properties from which Hollywood has tried to spin gold, most notably the horror franchises The Ring and The Grudge. Those films are not Korean, but Bong Joon-ho's The Host had been lined up for an American remake that has apparently stalled out. The objection you could have to remaking Oldboy is the objection you could have to remaking any great film whose legacy should not be tarnished.

It's actually almost too shrewd, too Hollywood a move for someone like Lee. It did not seem to fit his character, and in fact, the movie does not have a major studio's backing. It was distributed by FilmDistrict, which has since been absorbed into Focus Features. But wouldn't that almost suggest that Lee would be free to bring something fresh, something original, something funky to the project?

Maybe that's why people were so disappointed -- there is very little of Lee in this film, or so it would seem. One of the supporting roles goes to Samuel L. Jackson, whom Lee put on the map back in 1991 with Jungle Fever, and there's one instance of Lee's trademark dolly shot, where a character appears to be floating through his environment. Beyond that, though, any studio hack probably could have made this.

Which is not to say it's clumsy. In fact, it feels quite technically accomplished in a lot of ways, in the sense that it is a clean, crisp, unfussy telling of the story that excises details of the original story that, indeed, may have been superfluous.

Of what do I speak? Well, I may be getting into a bit of spoiler territory now, so look away if you don't want anything spoiled.

One thing I noted is that the character the main character tells his story to is gone. In the original Oldboy, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) emerges from his suitcase atop a building, where a businessman is contemplating suicide nearby. He saves him, momentarily, from this suicide attempt by grasping his tie as he starts to plummet over the edge of the building. After Oh tells him the story of being imprisoned for 15 years, and leaves the man by himself, he actually does go through with it, caving in the roof of a nearby car. It's as though this final glimpse at man's inhumanity to man was what convinced him to go through with it, rather than the story saving him in some way.

Is this character really necessary, though? It wouldn't seem so -- though the shot of Oh hanging on to the man creates a visual parallel to the method Lee Woo-jin used to kill his sister, an event that occurred in the past but has not yet been visualized in the movie.

Yeah, so Lee just gets rid of him altogether. No great loss, really.

Lee also lessens the screen time of the villain (Sharlto Copley's captor has only a couple scenes, and is not nearly the unhinged scenery chewer I was led to believe he'd be), and does away with the explanation for how the villain got the captive and his daughter to fall in love. Park has them both hypnotized, whereas in Lee's film, their meeting relies on the meddling of an intermediary (played by Michael Imperioli) who pretends to be on the captive's side (he's named Joe Doucett in this one, and played by Josh Brolin). The hypnotism element comes back in to Park's film at the end, when Oh wants to forget that he shagged his own daughter and tries to have the memory hypnotized out of him (though possibly not successfully -- the ending is vague on that front). But you don't really feel its absence in Lee's film.

Naturally, then, the ending is a bit different too. In neither film does the daughter find out that she has had incest with her father, but the fate of her father is quite different in the two films. While the ending of Park's film is clearly tragic, Lee opts for optimism, with both Joe (who has chosen to return to his imprisonment, somewhat inexplicably) and his daughter Mia (Elizabeth Olsen, who drives off to start a new life) with smiles on their faces. I wouldn't call it a happy ending, exactly, but it certainly leaves the characters pointing in the direction of a brighter future.

The details of the scandal the main character witnesses differ as well. In Park's film, Oh sees his eventual captor fooling around with his own sister, a rumor he ends up sort of passively spreading, without any malicious intent. In Lee's, it's his captor's sister and her father he sees in sexual congress, and spreads the rumor willfully and mean-spiritedly. Perhaps Lee thought that in the age of bullying as a serious social issue, the film needed to come down strongly and unambiguously against bullying -- even if it means his protagonist is more guilty and less sympathetic. Lee's film is further on the side of Copley's character in the sense that it's his father, not himself, who is ultimately responsible for taking his sister's life.

Then there are the more minor details, like how Oh and Joe tortue the man hired to keep him locked up. (And yes, I am just now realizing that Oh Dae-su and Joe Doucett are nearly identical sounding names.) Oh engages in that aforementioned act of tooth removal, while Joe performs a ritual that's supposed to be more gruesome but ultimately has less effect on the viewer -- he removes little bloody chunks from Sam Jackson's neck as part of a plan to eventually pull his head off with his bare hands.

The other scene you're probably wondering about is how Lee handles that famous fight scene, the one where Oh has only a hammer and has to fight off an alley full of henchmen trying to get him. The famous things about this shot are two: 1) It is shot entirely from a side angle, like the character in a video game walking left to right and seeing what he encounters next, and 2) It is performed all in one take. While the fight choreography might be slightly less accomplished in Lee's version, and there's a notable lack of blood involved, Lee doubles down on the complexity of the shot by having it continue down a ladder and on a second level, where the challenge essentially resets for Joe. The effect of this little bit of cinematic bravura is pretty much what Lee would have intended.

But I guess the real issue with Lee's version is that it's just not, I don't know, weird in the ways Park's version is. One of the great moments in Park's film is when Oh eats a live octopus, kind of stuffing it into his face as the legs continue to squirm around, making it certainly seem like Choi actually did eat the live octopus to get this shot. Then there's the desperate pleading of Oh in the final scene when he wants to prevent his daughter from finding out that he's her father. Not only does he promise to be his captor's dog, licking his shoe and crawling around on all fours, but he then puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak, by cutting out his own tongue. It's a mad moment of atonement that really resonates. In Lee's film, both of these scenes are alluded to, but that's it -- one in a shot where Brolin examines an octopus hugging the glass wall of a fish tank, and the other in the form of a severed tongue (of Imperioli's character, I believe) being sent in a box to Joe from his captor. One senses that he considered trying to match the outrage of Park, but just went limp in the attempt.

I should probably point out a couple of moment of real awkwardness in Lee's film, as well. Notably, the first 15 minutes are just terrible. They involve Joe sabotaging an important business deal in the most ridiculous manner imaginable -- he essentially has his client on the hook, but then blows it by making a pass at the client's girlfriend while the client is in the bathroom. Even if this is meant to indicate that Joe is a real jerk, and the rest of the movie is supposed to function as a redemption of that jerk, I didn't buy it for a second and in fact thought it was clumsy as hell. Brolin's performance of his subsequent drunkenness is pretty over-the-top, but that's actually consistent with Park's approach, as we meet Oh in a police station where he's a soused mess.

Speaking of Brolin's acting, his reaction to learning that he has slept with his own daughter needed to be re-shot, as it has a bit of an "Annakin Skywalker realizing Padme is dead" quality to it. Given that this is the movie's emotional climax, Brolin and Lee really needed to sit down and re-think it.

Still, this movie doesn't quite deserve its bad reputation. And lo and behold, after finishing Lee's Oldboy, I discovered that the movie's reputation is not quite as bad as I thought it was. Metacritic's 49 score for it translates to "mixed or average reviews," which include a 91 from none other than one of my personal critical heroes, Owen Gleiberman, who was then of Entertainment Weekly. That's to balance out the zero from The New York Observer's Rex Reed, I guess.

Okay, that's just about enough of that. Out with the Oldboy, in with the new.