fright night (2011). directed by craig gillespie.

two weeks ago i watched a stupid non-gore, non-horror fest in final destination 5. thank goodness fright night is a much better movie. colin farrell CAN act, and deliciously devilish too. it has just enough gore and suspense so i quite enjoyed it. 

final destination 5 (2011). directed by steven quale.

my first final destination movie. ever. my first 3D movie too. this movie is horrendously bad. even the gore is bad. no redeeming feature whatsoever. 

the other woman (2009) (love and other impossible pursuits (original title)). directed by don roos.

hollywood always go for easy endings. or cheesy endings. and easy story line that doesn't hurt the brain. i remember watching step mom (1998) and shuddered at the eventual reconciliation. 

may be it happens in real life. may be. though i think not often. 

the characters in this movie are real people who are pissed off when a husband left her for a much younger woman and she is hell bent to make the other woman pay for it. great performance by scott cohen, natalie portman and lisa kudrow. i especially liked the complexity of portman's emilia greenleaf - the confident young woman who underestimated the nature of being a sudden mother, while battling her own childhood demons of her broken family. the movie has no happy ending, which i liked better, but in the end, everyone grows up. 

that's the point, after all. 

invictus (2009). directed by clint eastwood.

i cried buckets, ok. really, you don't want to let down a man who has gone to jail for you, for your country. i think harimau malaya should watch this. and it got me started to read on nelson mandela. 

eastwood keeps churning great movies at his age. i hope he'll have many years down the road to save me something worthwhile to watch. bravo!

i am number four (2011). directed by d.j. caruso.

the flight to houston from dubai took 16 long, tiring hours in which one has very little space to move. i for one can not for the life of me sleep on a plane. i don't know why. it took 21 hours to get from kl to houston and i failed to get a minute worth of wink. i ended up watching seven movies, back to back. 

this is one of them. 

first of all, i read a really bad review from roger ebert. i decided not to watch it when i was back home in kl. my brother the movie demi-god then said to me that ebert has gone bonkers and no longer reviews movies objectively, and he mentioned, how bad d.j. caruso can get. i've seen one of his earlier movies, the salton sea (2002) and really liked it. so i thought, on the plane where everyone was sleeping soundly, what the heck i am going to give this a watch. timothy "the body" olyphant was in it too - how bad can it be, right?

bad. purely because i am no longer 25 and don't enjoy stories like that - hold on, is there a story at all? i am not going to elaborate further. other than it passed my time on the plane and it could not make me sleep.  

crazy, stupid, love (2011). directed by glenn ficarra and john requa.

crazy? stupid? love?

more like stupid, actually. i wouldn't have watched this movie if not for ryan gosling and his glorious slender body. and the fact he fits seamlessly into that tight fitting suit that could burst any time out of sheer sexiness. this guy really carries it. he's like megan fox, the male version. 

so i endured. despite the bad, if not cliched story line of infidelity and havoc concerning everyone living within the 2 miles radius of cal and emily. seriously i expect more from a movie starring ryan gosling, julianne moore and kevin bacon. the climax consists of everyone ruining the vowing-again party cal throws for his estranged wife moore - i am shocked that it was a tired version of mozart's finale of the marriage of figaro. come on people, mozart had been dead for more than 220 years ago, can't you come up with anything remotely original? 

my first movie in the states, though. i like the movie theater. it was spacey and the seats were good and no one talked or played with their phones. it's like being in a different planet. 

the deer hunter (1978). directed by micheal cimino.

i am going to say it again. i love war/anti-war movies. and this one has got to be on top of the list of my favorite anti-war movies alongside grave of the fireflies (1988), the thin red line (1998) and apocalypse now (1979), to name a few. the theme of war is rich with emotions, characters, events, action sequences, motivations and effects. only an unimaginative writer/director would make a war movie devoid of all these elements and choose to show explosions and shootings. war, is definitely more than that. it goes beyond power hungry and stupid politicians and conquering nations - it's about people who often have no idea why they are fighting the other side and are forced to put their lives by mere chance of bullets; it is about the people who were left behind in their hope, grief and loneliness that their loved ones would come back alive someday and it is about wrecking the lives of people they are fighting with. 

it is most often about the senselessness of fighting strangers we have no problem with in the first place. in this universe, where humanity is at its lowest point. 

the deer hunter is about a group of friends who volunteered to fight in vietnam in order to escape their monotonous lives in a small factory town. little did they know that the fight in vietnam is real and bloody, and in their attempt to escape hell, not all of them get out of the war in one piece - robert de niro the hunter who insisted to his hunting buddies that the one shot is all that matters to kill a deer gets a a dose of his own medicine when he is being hunted in the vietnam jungle, john savage who played steven the new groom went home with his legs missing and a broken man; unable to face his bride. the saddest of all is nick, played by the then 35 years old very handsome christopher walken (before he looked scary, yes the guy possessed teutonic good looks in his youth), who is the kindest and most considerate of the bunch mentally crumbled in the horrors of war. 

films like these are sad. i wept at the loss of lives for no good reason, of men returning from the battle field less than a human being. micheal cimino's direction is emotionally taxing, superbly captures the horrors of war through the eyes of the common men who have no idea what a war actually consists of.

where is justice and sense of sending these young people to their deaths, well before their time?

hamlet (1990). directed by franco zeffirelli.

 hamlet (1990). directed by franco zeffirelli.

i have watched three different movies of hamlet. this one, another directed by kenneth branagh (poster) and one directed by laurence olivier (poster). my brother has another hamlet directed by micheal almereyda released in 2000 which has ethan hawke and diane venora in it - however i have not watched that version. you can safely say that i have a thing for this particular play of the bard's. i used to stay up at night reading the play. the good old days. when i was at uni i caught several live plays, in which one of them had hamlet played by a girl.

hamlet (1996). directed by kenneth branagh. 

hamlet (1948). directed by laurence olivier.

amongst the three hamlet-s, i must say that i like zeffirelli's version the best. i find branagh's version too long  as it spans over 4 hours. my failure that i could not concentrate more than 3 hours for a movie and another thing that bothered me is the fact that the movie was too festive. as for olivier's version, which was shot back in 1948, is black and white and i only watched it once. perhaps i could not pass judgement as to how good it actually is, only that i realized i like zeffirelli's the most which sort of sits in the middle between the two extremes. mel gibson played the moody prince of denmark who hesitantly wants to avenge his father's death, there is an interesting subplot of internal guilt when he finds himself lusting after his mother, played by glenn close.

aren't we all freudians, now?

something to talk about (1995). directed by lasse hallström

should anyone wants to see a young julia roberts and dennis quaid. this movie is about cheating husbands and the positions women put themselves, or resigned rather, when their husbands cheat. women tend to become depressed and angry at the betrayal, but men treat it like it's not a big deal. i like the part when roberts was advised by an aunt to serve her cheating husband (quaid) a dish that would heal him of his cheating ways. he ended up spending a night at the hospital.

we should all get that recipe.  

she hate me (2004). directed by spike lee.

i know spike lee has many, many things to say. he wants to talk about corporate corruption, black power, dis-empowerment of black men, lesbians need to procreate and the emotional games that they play; i bet there is a hundred and one things if not more that he wants to say in a movie. so this movie becomes a pastiche of his unformed thoughts; they appear anywhere, everywhere like it is nobody's business. the story is incoherent and exploitative judging from the amount of sex scenes in the movie, no i don't enjoy watching naked people in my free time especially when the scene does not call for naked people to be in it. ah well. i am just worried sick because he will direct the remake of chan-wook park's old boy (2003) (oldeuboi (original title)) and he will in all likelihood fuck it up. why can't the studio execs give the movie to darren aronofsky or david fincher, for god's sake?!

ramblings. ok i hate this movie. i have seen only one coherent movie from lee and that is 25th hour (2002). the rest, i don't know - summer of sam (1999) captured the frenzy and panic during david berkowitz's murder rampage in the late 1970's, but it's strictly frenzy and panic. alas, i require more than as a content in a movie if i were to enjoy it.