Movies 2007 #39 Lady Vengeance

Lady Vengeance I saved the best for last with this final entry in Park Chan-Wook’s Vengeance Trilogy. While I enjoyed the other two entries (Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), neither of them were quite as suited to my taste as this film. For my money Lady Vengeance is a great movie. I loved everything about it. The performances are great- Lee Yeong Ae is mesmerizing as the “Kind-Hearted Ms. Geum-Ja” of the Korean title; the soundtrack is infectious; the cinematography is gorgeous and the story is both clever and positively evil. In other words, my kind of movie.

As a note, I was crazy late on the Korean cinema boat even though I watched dozens of people who I knew from the Hong Kong movie scene transition themselves into Korean cinema junkies. With some of the recent stuff I’ve seen recently I’m regretting it just a little bit. Only a little bit though, since I spent a lot of those intervening years watching cool stuff like the real classics produced in Hong Kong during the period (Infernal Affairs being a primary example) and French caper films. The coolness of Alain Delon can cure many ills.

Still I feel like I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Which is cool by me, I’d hate to see my netflix queue actually shrink 🙂