Hacker Cinema
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
복수는 나의 것
2002 · Film · 129 min
Directed by Park Chan-wook
A deaf man and his girlfriend resort to desperate measures in order to fund a kidney transplant for his sister. Things go horribly wrong, and the situation spirals rapidly into a cycle of violence and revenge.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
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2 comments on Hacker News
This brought memories back for me, years ago there was a small VHS store that stocked a lot of these. Looking at there catalog is like a trip down memory lane. List of there titles I saw many years ago. (Pretty much all great movies) A Tale of Two Sisters Audition Battle Royale 1 + 2 Chaos Dead Or Alive 1 + 2 Gozu Happiness of the Katakuris, The Hard Boiled Infernal Affairs: The Trilogy Lady Vengeance Oldboy R-Point Ring Trilogy Save the Green Planet Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance Tetsuo: The Iron Man Visitor Q
> MUBI has spent years cultivating that audience with a selection of artsy, obscure films that don't usually appear on Netflix or Hulu. (It originally launched under the name "The Auteurs," before rebranding in 2010 as MUBI — a play on accented pronunciations of "movie," and after a city in Nigeria.) On Monday, the titles available on the company's US site included Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 classic The Conformist, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, by Chan-wook Park. Occasionally, it features more mainstream movies like Sin City, currently available on the French site, though the majority are far more obscure. A new title is added every day as another drops out, meaning that only 30 films are available for streaming at any given time.
In defense of Netflix (not that the "Goliath" in this comparison needs defenders)...but "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" has been available on streaming Netflix for, as far as I remember, the time that I've been a customer, which was basically when streaming started. "Mr. Vengeance" is the first in "The Vengeance Trilogy" that includes the more well-known "Oldboy" [1] and "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance"...I think the entire trilogy has been on Netflix for years (including the regrettable American remake of Oldboy, but can't fault Netflix for having it...)
Even as Netflix's blockbuster selection has faded (with the ending of the Starz deal, and in comparison to HBONow)...I've never had a complaint about their selection of the most well-known and recent foreign indies. "Let the Right One In", "The Hunt", "Force Majeure", The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy...though sure, they could always have more (and obviously, I don't know enough of the foreign scene to know all of the gems that they don't have).
But I imagine the problem for Netflix isn't that they do a shitty job of curation...but that the deals end up not being financially valuable to them, as it was in the Starz case. Ang Lee's movies ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Lust, Caution") were long-time selections, but I've just noticed they are no longer available for streaming.
edit: if you liked Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is definitely worth checking out. But whereas Oldboy was entertaining on top of being emotionally extreme...I'd argue "Mr. Vengeance" is much more of an artistic achievement, but at the cost of being "entertaining". In fact, I get a little ill at the thought of re-watching it, even though I own it on DVD.
[1] http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oldboy-2005 -- Ebert's review here is so glowing that not only did it get me to seek out Oldboy, but it changed the way I think of foreign movies in comparison to Hollywood.