Kimchi Bitchin'

In his bizarre review of the controversial, though much acclaimed Korean film Oldboy, critic Rex Reed writes:

For sewage in a cocktail shaker, there is Oldboy, a noxious helping of Korean Grand Guignol as pointless as it is shocking. What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots sold at the Seoul airport as souvenirs? Directed by Chan-wook Park, a film-festival “comer” in this nation of emerging cinematic schlock, a cheerful drunk named Dae-su Oh disappears from the phone book and is sealed in a room for 15 years. [...] Blood flows, there is much vomiting and incest, and more screams than Japanese kabuki. Part kung fu, part revenge-theme Charlie Chan murder mystery, part meta-physical Oriental mumbo-jumbo, all of it incomprehensible.

In the span thus of just a single paragraph, Reed manages to pack at least one cultural, ethnic, and/or racial insult for just about every sentence he scratches out. What makes Reed's "review" especially worthy of comment, however, is the particularly clichéd nature of his abuses, which display all the marks of the classic racist jeer, namely:

• Gross and spurious generalization: On the basis of a single film, Reed not only denigrates the entire Korean cinematic tradition, he denigrates the entire Korean nation, culture, and people (and in a sly way, all Asians--see below).
• Deliberate indistinction: Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees.... all the same, right? Wrong. Reed's gratuitous references to Japanese kabuki, Chinese kung fu, and perhaps most disturbingly, the American yellow-face Charlie Chan, are all wildly inappropriate in the context of a review of this Korean film.
• Jeering Condescension: "What else can you expect from a nation..." Enough said? Well, if you can describe Chan-wook Park, who has been making feature films for 13 years, some of which have broken box-office records in Korea and other Asian nations as a "film festival 'comer' in this nation of emerging cinematic schlock," you could at least dismiss a film that won the second highest prize at Cannes with something more than a shameful display of personal prejudice.
• Yellow-peril stereotyping: From the inscrutable Chinaman ("Oriental mumbo-jumbo") to the smelly food ("raw garlic...rots"), trinket mercantilism ("sold at the Seoul [sic] airport as souvenirs"), and Asiatic cruelty (later in the review he wonders aloud whether an actual tongue has been severed), Reed deploys a wide range of stereotypes so ingrained in his imagination that he remains oblivious to the profound cultural and racial offense he gives.

Reed's indignation at the film's violence (he says he walked out of the film when the protagonist excises his own tongue with a pair of scissors) rings a little hollow when one considers how he gushed and raved at the arguably more brutal film Saw (2004): "The gore is relentless and in your face...you won't want to miss a minute of the mayhem!"

Of course Reed has cultivated for himself a bitchy, self-caricaturing tone and image in his reviews for years. If only he could find a way of humiliating himself in his nationally syndicated column without debasing others in the act.