Stoker (Park Chan-Wook)

[Ezee E]

IMDB

[Ezee E]

Not out around me yet, but can't wait.

[EyesWideOpen]

Not out around me yet, but can't wait.

Same here. My most anticipated of the year.

[number8]

His best since Lady Vengeance. Unmistakably a Park Chan-wook movie, even with the adamantly American script. It's like a Korean New Wave adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play. Absolutely delicious. Some of the scenes—piano sex, confrontation shot through double doors—are already guaranteed to be one of my favorites of the year, I think.

Finally, a good Jacki Weaver performance in a good movie.

[DavidSeven]

Sigh. I was really hoping to love this. The film definitely has its share of visual Park-isms that are worth admiring, but there's little else to take away from it. I'm not opposed to an exercise in style over substance, but this script seems fairly ridiculous in every respect. The concept is hard to swallow, and the dialogue is cringe-inducing. Every scene involving school-age bullies is truly risible. I'm also not convinced Park's sensibilities are well-suited for English-speaking actors. The characters seemed uncomfortable but not for the benefit of the film. This just felt kind of awkward.

The ending is actually exceptionally well done, but you have to sit through a whole lot of silliness to get there.

[Morris Schæffer]

His best since Lady Vengeance. Unmistakably a Park Chan-wook movie, even with the adamantly American script. It's like a Korean New Wave adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play. Absolutely delicious. Some of the scenes—piano sex, confrontation shot through double doors—are already guaranteed to be one of my favorites of the year, I think.

Finally, a good Jacki Weaver performance in a good movie.

What I really want to know is: how was wentworth miller's script? Cuz I remember you found it really weird that he scripted a Chan-Wook movie.

[EyesWideOpen]

This was amazing. Fantastic direction and I can't imagine another actress pulling off the performance Wasikowska does.

And if you like match cuts this movie has all the match cuts.

[ciaoelor]

This was totally enjoyable until Matthew Goode's character was explained. I was really hoping he was something more insidious and fantastic, what with the title of the movie being Stoker. Nevertheless his performance is actually creepy and charming in equal measure without the aid of make-up, over-acting or acting like a villain. In retrospect it's kind of like a gothic Lolita, with Nicole Kidman playing the "Haze woman". Her monologue late in the movie, shot in close-up, and revealed in trailers is awesome, but it gives you the wrong impression about her character; she's totally the "Haze woman", rather than a villainess. And it's a beautifully directed movie, and I can't wait to watch some of the others films by this director. In fact, before the movie began I sat in the back (there were maybe 20-30 people sitting in the front to middle seats of a smallish room), but barely a minute into the film I found the images so engaging that I had to sit closer.

[ciaoelor]

And I just remembered that Harmony Korine made a cameo in this as an art teacher.

[Boner M]

I've never thought that Park's films have been more than the sum of their parts, but man, this thing moves from its one 'immaculate' shot to the next like the cinema equivalent of a kid playing drums for the first time; I said elsewhere that it's the kind of lumbering film where you can say "the first half of the opening credits sequence was great, the second half of it bad".

It was pretty nonsensical and mostly uninvolving because of the tone-deaf script and Park's apeshit handling of it, but I enjoyed it like an omnibus film, starting afresh with each new image (eg, distractingly fastidious though it was, sitting near the front row for that dissolve from Kidman's combed hair to the bird's eye view of the field of grass blowing in the wind made me feel like I'd spent my $13 wisely).

[eternity]

I wish I hadn't forgot about this movie so soon, because I was laughing too hard in the parking lot to drive home when I saw it. It's telling that the two easiest things to compare it to are The Brady Bunch Movie and an episode of Family Guy.

[Henry Gale]

Well, I saw this a couple of days ago, and I thought it was really tightly-crafted, engaging stuff.

I mean, I have no idea what's even left if you remove Park's direction from the equation, but thankfully it's intact, in full force, guiding this material incredibly. Maybe in retrospect the script is a tad weak, but it almost plays like a basic foundation for such a bolstering collaboration of entrancing images and performances, yanking me on-board so early to just revel in it to really even care to nitpick until well after it was over.

[Grouchy]

This was so awesome. The screenplay was less meaty than Park's Korean films, which almost always manage to cram a lot of substance inside a lot of style. This was clearly more a case of style over substance, but what style! A new marvelous image every five minutes is not something every director can pull off.

The one thing I would bring up as a negative, why is it called Stoker? I don't even know what that means. I would've called it "India".

[number8]

It's... The last name of every character in the movie.

It's also obviously supposed to be a metaphor for how Charlie stokes the fire of the other family members.

[Grouchy]

No, I know it was the last name of the family, although the "stoke" pun went over my head. It just doesn't sound appealing to me, specially next to a great word like "India".

I'm pretty sure very few people have seen the Isabel Sarli film:

[Irish]

I voted "nay" on this by accident; it was meant to be a "yay."

Love the way this was shot. Every other frame was just gorgeous and I liked the way Park played around with color, editing, and sound.

Similar to ciaoelor's reaction, I thought the film was much more interesting before the third act when there was more mystery at play. I think this sort of story is hard to pull off, because the audience becomes invested in the reveal a bit too much. After a dozen years of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and "Criminal Minds" and a few seasons of "American Horror Story," outré, fucked up stories like this lose something of their vibrancy. I feel I've become far too jaded, as a viewer, for that third act to have the punch it's intended of have.

The film says some interesting things about the protagonist toward the end, but it doesn't linger enough for those to be menaingful. It doesn't given the audience enough time for all of it to sink in.

Still, "yay" for the framing and the shots and the skill all around.

[ledfloyd]

I thought this was pretty awful, and I'm surprised to see so many people that felt it was worthwhile.

DavidSeven's thoughts echo my own.

It's just such a terrible script. There wasn't much Park could do.

[plain]

i don't dislike it as much as led, but he's right, it's not good. found it to be quite the slog despite all the stylistic flourishes. doesn't help that the entire cast comes across as a non-presence.

[transmogrifier]

Oh dear. No, no, no.

No.

[ThePlashyBubbler]

Oh dear. No, no, no.

No.

But that cut from Kidman's hair to the grassy field AMIRITE?

[transmogrifier]

The story is terrible. A half-arsed mystery with the most boring possible explanation and then a half-arsed coming of age piece of nonsense.

If Park is going to get anywhere in the States, he needs to get his hands on better material.

[Lucky]

The Sleepy Hollow of the decade. The director's style and cast's charisma surpass the weakness in the story and make the whole project pulse. Doesn't add up to greatness, but a damn beautiful thing.

[Ezee E]

The Sleepy Hollow of the decade. The director's style and cast's charisma surpass the weakness in the story and make the whole project pulse. Doesn't add up to greatness, but a damn beautiful thing.

Weird. As I was watching this, I thought of how it seemed like a Tim Burton movie if he had some restraint in the art department area.

Ultimately, I'm incredibly disappointed by this. Chan Wook-Park shows plenty of talent with the staging, camera placement, and editing choices, but the direction of the dialog, and the words they have to speak are pretty horrid.

Which kind of leads to the best match cut in years. What a fantastic idea and it looks beautiful, but with the dialog and how it pertains to the story kind of wastes it all.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I really dug this. A minimalist story with a premise that wouldn't be out of place in the 50's alongside obvious inspiration Shadow of a Doubt and The Bad Seed, but filmed with a fresh, off-kilter style where meaningless details get ominous close-ups and the editing is so joyfully free-associative at times that just watching the images move in and out of place is satisfying. I thought all three actors did good work, although Kidman had less of a story all her own - her monologue at the end is good, but it feels like the culmination of an emotional journey we only see intermittently. Regarding the reveal about Charlie's past, I suppose it takes away some mystery, but it avoids assigning his psychology some trite origin. We see its first symptoms, not its cause. Like little Rhoda Penmark, he may've simply been born bad.

Also, on a very basic level, I just appreciated seeing such a confidently odd piece of work.

Sidebar: damn you, SNL. When I saw Dermot Mulroney, I thought, "Is that Dylan McDermott?"

[Watashi]

Am I the only one who thought [

Show Spoiler

the big twist was going to reveal Charlie as a vampire and India a vampire as well? It seems like a lot of the images were foreshadowing this.

]

Dug the movie a lot. Definitely an exercise in mood and style. Nothing wrong with that.