Does everyone have that moment, when the concrete, impossibly straight lines of our rigid lives seem too much to bear?  When we come to the realization that we've lost sight of happiness, of truth and beauty in simplest purity?  And then there's that yearning, the urge to break away with form, with the convention of our existence and just go away, pick up a rucksack, a tattered old paperback and just move.

I know that when I first came upon the story of Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp in John Krakauer's incredible piece of journalism, it was at a time when I was far from that state of mind.  My son was three months old, it was the dog days of Summer, and I read sitting outside on the back porch, Jack sleeping in a tiny cradle covered with mosquito netting by my side.  Chris' story - a bright, charismatic young man who donates his savings to charity and leaves home without a word, traveling the country dealing with life on unbridled terms until he makes his way to Alaska where he vanishes for good - stuck in my head and refused to leave. It was one of those reading experiences where the time, place, and frame of mind mattered just as much as the words on the page.

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Bad start to the challenge: I had about half the review written when upon hitting the Save button Firefox decided it needed to ask for my Squarespace password again, and then promptly lost my entire post. Working on Safari now, so fingers crossed)

Coming off the heels of LADY VENGEANCE, the final entry in the critically acclaimed Vengeance Trilogy (the other two films being SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE and the global phenomenon OLDBOY), Park Chan-wook decided to travel off the well worn path of revenge thrillers and brutal violence and move in an unexpected direction: a romantic comedy.  of course, this being a Park Chan-wook film, it's a romantic comedy filled with brutal violence and revenge.

Did you expect anything less?

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