Here's an interesting discussion by Grady Hendrix in Slate about the film, Oldboy, that some say inspired the Virgina Tech killings:
It's taken professional pundits several days to link the Virginia Tech shootings to a violent piece of pop culture—frankly, I think they're slipping. A photo of Cho Seung-Hui wielding a hammer—included in the package that Cho mailed to NBC News—mimics a scene from the Korean movie Oldboy. Over on her blog, showbiz reporter Nikki Finke demonstrates the standard-issue rending of garments and crying to the heavens that comes when a violent movie seems to inspire a horrific act: "I just don't understand how critics with even a shred of humanity keep supporting films that celebrate violence in all its awfulness."Oldboy, the 2004 Cannes Grand Prix winner, is hardly a celebration of violence, although it does depict bloodshed with all the graphic panache of 300. It's the second film in Park Chan-Wook's unofficial "Vengeance Trilogy," which started with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and ended with Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005). Despite being a trilogy, the three movies have nothing in common beyond their determination to map humanity's self-destructive drive for revenge.
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In the end, Oldboy bears no more responsibility for the Virginia Tech shootings than American Idol, but it's fortunate that it has come up. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter a few years ago, Oldboy's director Park said, "My films are the stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves." And that's one of the smartest things that anyone's said so far about the motives of Cho Seung-Hui.
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