Oldboy (Spike Lee, 2013)

[flyonthewall2983]

[willoneill]

so it's not a Spike Lee Joint?

[FakeBonanza]

Well, at least Sean Bobbitt is the DP.

[flyonthewall2983]

And music by...Bruce Hornsby? Wonder if he brought The Range with him.

[Kirkinson]

Hmm, Bruce Hornsby and...Michael Nyman?

[Reverend Drewcifer]

Brolin is styled similar to Lou from the back cover of "Lou Reed Live" (1975):

[Gregory]

And music by...Bruce Hornsby? Wonder if he brought The Range with him.

Hornsby also composed the score for Lee's Red Hook Summer, and Lee has used his songs a couple of other times as well. (And his band "The Range" hasn't existed for a couple of decades.)

[knives]

Red band

[flyonthewall2983]

And music by...Bruce Hornsby? Wonder if he brought The Range with him.

Hornsby also composed the score for Lee's Red Hook Summer, and Lee has used his songs a couple of other times as well. (And his band "The Range" hasn't existed for a couple of decades.)

Was a joke, I do like some of his stuff though. Didn't realize he'd worked with Spike before.

[Kirkinson]

As per his previous hints on Facebook, Michael Nyman is officially on board. Bruce Hornsby is apparently out.

[Dylan]

Michael Nyman's score has been rejected by the producers. From his Facebook:

OLDBOY UPDATE!!!! Spike Lee loves my score. Unfortunately the producers, Matt Leonetti and Audrey Something-or-Other [of WeTakethePiss Productions] don't like the soundtrack and [despite, or because of, their boast that 'we know nothing about music'] have rejected it. But at least some good comes out of it: my 11th Symphony will be called 'Spiked' [by analogy with journalists' work which is commissioned, printed in galley proof form, rejected and consigned to oblivion by being hung on a spike sticking out of the wall close to the editor's desk].

[Kirkinson]

I guess I'm not surprised, but that's really disappointing.

[knives]

Poop, it sounds like Lee has a potentially great film on his hands, but nobody is letting him get it out.

[warren oates]

Producers notoriously love to fuck with film scores because scoring almost always happens so late in the game and because they still can. At this point, it's almost the only decision they can influence. The whole rest of the film is what it is by now. And the dread of "shit we have to open this/man how the hell can we sell it?" has fully sunk in. So there's an irresistible urge to exercise their last little smidgen of control, if only to punish the director for having made a film that they are now suddenly terrified of marketing. And scoring is one of those weird aspects of a film everybody feels both compelled and qualified to offer their opinion on even if -- as some apparently freely admit -- they don't know anything about music. Producers who couldn't give a coherent script note to save their life will confidently declare that a score "isn't working" just because reasons, which often include the fact that it doesn't sound like the temp score anymore or enough like the score of the last hit they worked on.

[mfunk9786]

Or maybe Lee doesn't like the score and is letting him off easy?

[FerdinandGriffon]

The score was the only thing that had me excited about this one. Oh, well.

[Dylan]

The new composer is Roque Banos (who did brilliant work on The Machinist and many other films, to date mostly Spanish productions or co-productions). An inspired choice albeit a very different kind of composer than Nyman.

[rohming]

Pretty sure this is another remake i'll be filing next to Chris Nolan's Insomnia and Gus Van Sant's Psycho under "Why?"

[knives]

A new adaptation can hardly be called a remake and van Sant's Psycho is pretty interesting intellectually at least.

[rohming]

Not for me, it isn't, but to each his own.

[FerdinandGriffon]

A new adaptation can hardly be called a remake and van Sant's Psycho is pretty interesting intellectually at least.

From that trailer and the production design and visual style on display in it I think it's pretty clear that this a remake of Park's film more than a new adaptation of the manga.

[knives]

Production design could very well just be a reference to the comic and of course marketing is going to play up similarities to the more well known property. Even if, though, this were more of a remake so what? Many great films have been made with the same shows this one is wearing right now.

[FerdinandGriffon]

The Park film had very distinctive and baroque production design that had no counterpart in the original manga, which had a much plainer, grittier, noirish aesthetic. And it is a little weird that an American remake should ape so closely all these distinctly Korean visual motifs, plus add new ones (like the girl with the parasol) that have less to do with the original film than with Orientalist cliches in general. It's almost intriguing, but I think there's a much greater chance that it's just silliness rather than something interesting and apparently metatextual.

[zedz]

I am 101% certain that this film was greenlit as an American remake of Park's notorious and very successful international hit, and not as an adaptation of an obscure manga (that was only released in the US as a direct result of the success of the film) that just happened to have already been turned into a movie by somebody else.

[feihong]

To echo what zedz said, I remember way back when they commissioned Justin Lin and Fabian Marquez to work on the film they spoke of it in interviews as a remake of the Park Chan-Wook film, not an adaptation of the manga. They had Nicholas Cage supposedly attached and they were going to have him locked up all those years eating tacos, instead of dumplings.