Wonderfully offbeat film!

Great Film overall

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Lars von Trier has said art or film should be like a rock in your shoe. Well, Chang-dong Lee's film Oasis is that rock. Beautiful, well written, well acted, subtle use of camera-work to create a tighter, more claustrophobic experience with characters that you do not want to be forced to stare at. Oasis will make you cringe, cry, laugh, think...think about many things, one of which being the genius that is Chang-dong Lee. The man made his debut with Green Fish around 1997 and it was a mediocre low-level gangster genre film; it had its nice flourishes, good writing, etc. But since then, starting with Peppermint Candy in 1999, Lee has only made masterpieces.

If deep humanism and filmic craft are your criteria, it's one of the best world movies ever made. Period. I'm just dumbstruck. It's just soul-shredding. Devastating. Astonishing. I'm speechless. No words.No spoilers, but it's about a young man, what you might call a "f**k-up", the black sheep of his petit-bourgeois family, who falls in love with a quadriplegic girl.A profound indictment of a modern, numbed, pitiless, hyper-urbanized Korea. The two lead actors deliver stunning, world-class performances.The film will make you feel every emotion under the sun, and profoundly. It is perfused with a humor of the darkest, slyest variety, which belies the gravity and pathos of the story.Profoundly original, I can't compare it to anything I've ever seen before, except perhaps to humanistic pictures like 1965's A PATCH OF BLUE, or 1975's DOG DAY AFTERNOON.This movie will make you pray that the Bible is right when it says "God keeps His eyes on the sparrow." Connoisseurs of the finest world cinema simply cannot miss this movie.

Oasis is a dark film that is not suited for everyone. It requires an open-mind and some deep thinking as well. Aside from that, the characters and their actions requires sympathy and understanding. Chong-du is a jittery, wiry man with an extremely short attention span whose level of energy sometimes borders on the psychotic. He returns home after serving a sentence for vehicular manslaughter, only to be treated with contempt by family members and ostracized by friends.The film provides the viewer a realization that even physically disabled people have their own emotions to fulfill and satisfy just like normal people. The acting in the movie was great. Unfortunately, it didn't deliver into a brilliant film like Oldboy for it lacked the requirements to become a masterpiece. But nevertheless, it is a must-see especially for people who want to understand what people with disabilities undergo through their daily lives and to realize their needs that could not be understood by normal people.

The greatest love story I have ever seen on film. A bold assertion that I made some seven years ago as I floated out of the theater completely blown away by the magnificence of this motion picture. Whenever I doubt that claim, I know it is time to revisit Chang-dong Lee's amazing expression of love on film. There is a point early in the picture where you will think that I am insane in my declaration. That's what helps to make it such a great story. So-ri Moon and Kyung-gu Sol both give phenomenal performances as the imperfect people who discover that love exists in its own plane, and this perfection is available to them. When I read the first part of this review, I sound like "Mr. Chick Flick"; which I am not. And after reading the preceding gushfest, I wouldn't and didn't change a word. It really is that good. It is on my all time top ten list most days (admit it yours has a degree of fluidity to it as well) and always in my twenty best of all time.