
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Caught one of the last cinema screenings of this film. There has been a surge of this genre of family films coming from Japan in the past few years. The films obviously is targetted towards the movie going families primarily with kids or pet lovers. This series of 'pet' genre films usually bring audiences through the joy of having a pet, living with one and dealing with the death of one. At once cheery and later on teary, these kind of films does remind us that there is after all a little bit of humanity inside these creatures or vice versa. This film is the first film to make me cry uncontrollably in years, after Ice Age (please forgive me, the death of the mammoth's family is very sad) and 1996's Good Will Hunting. Although this is not the first film of its sort, I am supremely amazed at the narrative structure in how it is able to reduce grown men to tears. I must really try to understand how this film is able to allow audiences to connect to the relationship between the girl and her pet and successfully lets individual audiences sink in and relate our own lives to their connection. When I was crying, I was thinking of everyone important in my life and my immense fear of regret. Damn dog.
2. Help Me Eros
This is the second feature of Li Kang-Sheng (Tsai Ming Liang's muse), following The Missing. This story, sadly for the horn-dogs and Yang Tze 'umbrellas', is not really about eroticism. Yes, sex scenes a couple but they make up less than 20% of the film and I would prefer to think of them as neurotic sex that exists in an almost imagined space. Firstly, let's give LKS some credit by not assuming this film is a TML rip-off. This film is by my own standard not 'slow' cinema. The pacing picks up pretty well actually (either that I've learn to appreciate TML better) and is jammed packed with subtle visual puns and symbolisms. All in all the character developments I would say is not extremely spot-on believable but is 3D enough to understand their motivations. What I would think really works in this film by LKS is the storyline and the visual elements. We all should give LKS a chance. This is seriously not bad!
3. Red Cliff
Massive production costs just makes it harder for me to stomach this. I would expect a lot of cheesy but still expensive CGI which I imagine someone saying 'My God That's Awesome' to be quite prevalent throughout but actually, their choice of CGI inputs were by far quite tasteful for me. I guess most money went to the cast and extras which is pretty impressive in terms of performance and quantity respectively. Romance of Three Kingdoms brought on screen by John Woo brought out the skeptic in me for I, never liked Three Kingdoms as literature and never really think John Woo is capable beyond what he does previously. However, I sat through the 2.5 hours films without once feeling bored and the film caught my attention every second. The deployment of tactics and the executions were enthralling to watch and Zhu Ge Liang was the most memorable character of all so far, for the first of two installments. I just wasn't so ok with the ending dove scenes (I told myself Aska Yang is gonna appear and start singing) and the very low class text zooming out to alert us to watch Part II. Other than that, went beyond my expectations.
Waiting to catch
- Summer Rain
- The Dark Knight
- Wall.e
- The Mummy III
- 12 Lotus
- The Go Master
- The Book of Revelation
Friday, July 18, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
I hear silence, and keyboard sounds and background TV.
Silence is saying nothing, for I went on about
what I thought would be listened to.
Perhaps silence can tell me what I can do.
But silence drifted away somewhere.
This silence tells me I think too much, I try too hard.
This silence tells me to leave silence be.
Silence let me hear myself clearly and answered my questions with silence.
Two planets can travel across space side by side
because of gravitational forces between them.
Then one of them, started drifting into another course, creating distance.
One screams into silence, but nothing is heard.
Perhaps one day they might collide once again without warning.
Perhaps that is that.
The lonely planet would never understand in silence.



















