In the past week, I have seen two things that made me want to claw out my eyes Oedipus-style and run screaming down Amsterdam Ave. One was the live octopus scene in Oldboy, a movie that’s worth seeing for the hallway fight sequence alone but, lordy, is hard to watch. (The tongue and teeth parts ain’t much better. I’m learning I just can’t hang with the edgy Korean cinema, but I still find it preferable to grotesque Miike stuff like Ichi the Killer. That film is just plain sick.) The other: Karl Rove rapping. Is it the token black guy standing next to him? NBC’s David Gregory forced to bob up and down in the background? The porcine lack of rhythm and gesticulating of Mr. Rove himself? Or the whole sheer staggering whiteness, bordering on minstrelsy, of the scene taken together? (Paging David Roediger.) Whatever it is, it is straight-up cringeworthy.
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