Changeling

Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
8/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
7/10

Again, a slightly out-of-fashion film, since the Oscar buzz over it is over and most people who want to see it have seen it already and most people who haven't seen it just don't want to see it ever. I often get these movies in the heat of the moment and then either lose interest or have no time to see them, and then after the buzz I become more reluctant so they just sit there. Until someone forces me to watch it with them. My other roommate, in this case.

The premise is quite intriguing, I have to say, and can be taken to several different directions. A single mom, Christine Collins, in the 1920's L.A. comes home from work one day and finds her 9-year-old son Walter missing. She calls the LAPD, and after 5 months, a boy is returned to her. Except she claims it isn't her son.

Now this could be psychological thriller if you are left to doubt her sanity. Maybe she goes insane during that period of tribulation and it IS really her son, but she loses her mind and can't recognize him. Or maybe aliens or some other supernatural force changes her son and people's memory. Either way, that would be a little like The Forgotten, starring Julianne Moore.

But I'll give you a hint: this is based on a true story, so nothing too unrealistic happens.

LAPD is known for its corruption and incompetence in that time period. They desperately need some positive publicity. So when a little boy is found in Illinois, they assume it is Walter and return him to Christine, forcing her to accept him as Walter because they cannot be embarrassed by the fact they have made a mistake. When she tries to speak out because her real son hasn't been found so the search shouldn't stop, she is persecuted.

The film turned out to be a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. There used to be a period when I liked human interest stories like this, but that period has passed. I still find them interesting at times, but I think I've just grown a little immune to them. There's too much happiness and sadness in the world, and it takes too much time and emotion to be affected by each little bit of them. This film, however, had other aspects of a thriller, a mystery, and unexpected twists in it that keep it going beyond the initial intriguing premise. There is a neat feeling of everything falling nicely into place.

I'm not that crazy about Angelina Jolie in most of her blockbuster roles like Lara Croft or Mrs. Smith or Fox from Wanted. I know she's sensual and dangerous and all that, but that kind of cool sexy woman who can snap your neck gets a bit old after a while. I still like to watch those movies for the action and visual effects and the fun factors, but I don't give them that much respect. In roles like Christine, or Mariane Pearl in The Mighty Heart, she seems more relevant and personal and ... real. This movie definitely makes me like her just a little bit better.

The director, Clint Eastwood, is a person of constant surprises. I mean, really, he does so many things that you would not think that Dirty Harry would do. He is a highly respectable director of films with passionate emotions and quiet contemplation combining into a mellow mixture. He speaks Italian. He wrote the music score for a lot of his films, including Changeling and The Flag of Our Fathers. The music definitely adds to the mellow reflection aspect of those movies.

Overall I would recommend this film to people who would not think of watching it. It's really more exciting than you think it would be. More emotional too. Don't be so easily manipulated by the movie into screaming at the police for their incompetence. Remember this is a movie, and things have been dramatized. But remember that it is based on a true story of real people and real events. It's thought-provoking enough that way.

Grudge 3 and Walled In

Apparently I watch things a lot faster than I can write about them.

This is a double entry for two horror flicks I saw.



Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
2/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally liked it):
3/10

Grudge 3, the American version, I can put down as being pretty horrid in the completely wrong sense.

If you are not familiar with The Grudge series, you should definitely begin with the Japanese version, Ju-On. It basically concerns of a curse born when someone dies a violent death. The person's energy lingers at the place death and kills all who come into contact with the place. It's like the haunted house story except much more expansive. Once you enter the house, you are doomed, even if you leave quickly. The curse will follow you to wherever you go and kill you eventually. It can even be spread to other places by people's movements.

But by the time we reach the threequel of the American version, the plot is... lame. Just lame. Stories are fun because they have endings. The Grudge story line seems to lack that. I mean, I get it that the curse seems more horrifying because it's never ending and you never know when it can get to you, but at the same time, after a certain you just don't care anymore. You stop sympathizing with the characters because you know no matter what they do, they are screwed. At which point you start to enjoy their misery and all the different ways they can die. That is generally a bad point.

The original typical ghostly images are kind of old and out of proportions now. The little ghostly white Asian kid isn't even the same actor anymore, so the credibility is greatly diminished. And instead of terrifying, the way Kayako (the ghostly white woman) crawls around is more funny. You just can't care less about what they could do to the protagonists, who are not all that enjoyable when they are not being tortured.

But I gave it a 3 out of 10 just because I like horror movies and I really liked the Japanese version of Grudge 1 and 2.



Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally liked it):
4/10

Walled In was ... kind of hard to watch because it's so slow at times, and it had Mischa Barton from The O.C. in it, which kind of made me lose interest in it (I didn't know about her being in it when I decided to watch it). It had lots of interesting concepts, and I like horror movies that obsess over one aspect of life (in Walled In, it was architecture).

Samantha is a young demolition expert who will become a partner at her dad's demolition firm if she successfully completes her first demolition on her own, which is to blow up a famous architect's last building. It's a hotel/apartment building that almost looks like a pyramid. People's bodies have been discovered in the concrete inside the building, including the architect's, due to the work of a serial killer who lived there, and that's why the building fell into dilapidation and now it's going to be torn down.

There are a few last remaining tenants, none of whom are normal. The building's caretaker, Mary, lives there with her teenage son Jimmy, who has no friend other than their dog. Jimmy's dad is one of the people killed there, so Mary stayed on to be close to where he died. Jimmy doesn't go to school and develops a crush on the first young woman he has seen, Samantha. The two explore the building and what the mysterious architect left behind.

The director is French, and at times the lighting, the cinematography and the production design has an artist's feel to them. But unfortunately the plot is not as strong. The script can have insightful lines about architecture and demolition and how they are opposites and how little it takes to bring down a building when you get to know it well enough. But overall, not too scary and doesn't generate enough for us to care.

The acting... well, Mischa Barton is not as bad as I thought. Cameron Bright, as Jimmy, is a surprise though. He has always had this stubborn little boy quality to him (like in Birth with Nicole Kidman or in X-Men 3), but in this film he is becoming a man. His voice is much deeper and his facial features are a lot sharper, with a lot less baby fat. I can't say I'm entirely pleased with it because it simply reminds me how old we are all getting.

Oy, I need a break already.

The X-Files

Yes, the X Files. Just finished the 3rd season. I know, still miles to go before I sleep, but I feel as a long-time X Files admirer and as someone who has gone through 60 episodes already, I am somewhat qualified to say something about it.

I really wish I had seen it on TV when it was still on air. AKA if I saw it in real-time. I know it is silly, but sometimes it's really hard to get past the 90's fashion statements. Like Scully's hair. Or her innumerable power suits. Over all, I find Gillian Anderson very fitting to Scully's character, and Anderson is an attractive woman who exhibits this subtle vulnerability that is the perfect combination with her scientific, rational exterior. But the hairstyle, the shoes, call me superficial, but they are important too.

Which is why I can't wait to get past the earlier seasons so I can reach the more contemporary episodes. I'm not one for skipping around and watching episodes out of order, so I guess I'll have to labor through.

That's not exactly accurate though. It's not laboring through; the earlier episodes have its charms. They have this 90's paranoia about the government, about conspiracy theories, about extraterrestrial life. Which brings us to the slightly ridiculous visual effects.

I know, I know, it was the 90's, they did the best they could, I should give them a break. I understand that. But that doesn't mean the make-up, the visual effects were good. I think they really suffered from a more-is-better mentality. Pile on more to make a person look older, or weirder, or more monstrous. Pile on more to make a person look younger or more normal. Pile on more to make the person look like themselves. Okay, you get the idea. The wrinkles and the aliens all look so... superfluous. With that said, I want to re-emphasize the fact that I know it was in the 90's and they did their best. And it doesn't look... THAT bad.

I know the alien storyline is actually the most important plot because it spans across seasons and never goes away, but I have to confess that I don't like it that much. The smaller, single-episode cases are much more fascinating and freer, because they all have different writers and you can feel the difference. A lot of them explore seemingly mundane or cliched supernatural topics and turn them into something fun and worthwhile. The alien plot kind of takes away from them. Alright, there are aliens, we get it, Mulder. We also get it that you will never catch them. Now go catch a flesh-eating bug or something.

The relationship between Mulder and Scully is also fascinating. They are more than friends; they trust each other with their lives. Yet they will never be lovers because... that's just not who they are. There are moments, though, when you are not so positive. They sure have feelings for each other, but ... well, friendship lasts longer anyway, so we should be happy.

And it's an obvious reversal of sex roles where Scully's the more logical, more scientific-minded one and Mulder relies more on instinct. But there are still adherences to the rule. For example, Mulder is always the one who drives.

David Duchovny kind of breaks my heart by taking on series like Californication and by having sex addiction problems. He will always be Spooky Mulder. And what exactly were his parents thinking when they named him Fox? I know exactly what the writers were thinking when they gave him that name (it's kind of obvious, isn't it. He's suspicious and tracks things down all the time), but what do they think Mulder's parents' thought process was?

Alright, I should give it a rest before I start writing about Grudge 3 and Walled In.

Harper's Island

Have you read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None? Well, me neither, but I have seen it as a pretty old movie and it gave me chills for weeks (I was also less than 10 years old... I would have dreams of what I would do if I was trapped on an island with a homicidal maniac... the solution? Become a homicidal maniac yourself). That's the premise for the book: 10 people were invited to a party on an island and they get picked off one by one.

The TV series is somewhat like that. Trish is a really rich pretty "princess" who's marrying Henry, the handsome but not-so-rich young man. They decide to have the wedding party on the island near Seattle where Henry spent his childhood summers. So a group of their friends and relatives get ferried onto this island, where 7 years earlier, a homicidal maniac called John Wakefield killed 6 people and strung them up on a tree. Henry's best friend, Abby, lost her mom in the incident. Her dad sent her away to LA and this is the first time she's returned to the island.

There's a lot of other tangled storylines, like Trish's father is not happy about Henry's economic and family situation (Henry only has a brother, JD, and Uncle Marty left for a family. JD is antisocial and somewhat deranged. Trish's dad sees Uncle Marty as coarse and rough). There are other couples who are not in the ideal relationships they want to be. The whole island is also traumatized by the John Wakefield murders, which were the first murders on the island.

In my opinion, there are way too many blond and/or good-looking young people running around, and that makes everything a bit less realistic. But I sure do like the part when people start dying, which is... right off the bat. Multiple people may die in every episode and no one is safe. That's why there will only be one season of 13 episodes (because I suspect no one will be left). Sounds pretty exciting, so I'll be following it for a little while longer at least. It's on at CBS on Thursdays at 10 EST.

It is still a REALLY new TV show and the verdict is still out. Someone at the office was talking about it and I thought the premise was really intriguing, and she said she had to stop watching it because it's so chilling and bloody and kept her at the edge of here seat. So of COURSE I had to check it out, except I didn't catch the show's name and then I just forgot about it. I was surfing the net when I randomly saw it again and I finally decide to get a glimpse (it takes a lot for me to start a new TV show because ... well, I'm much of a movie person than TV, and once I start I usually like to stay with it until the end, which can be a lot of commitment if the show is actually not worth it.)

Bedtime Stories

It's a bit strange that I'm so in love with horror movies yet sometimes I crave dumb comedies. A balanced diet is important, after all. I can't be depressed all the time. Which is why sometimes I lament the little number of comedies I own.

But yes, I did watch Bedtime Stories, starring Adam Sandler. Premise? Happy-go-lucky hotel maintenance dude has to baby-sit his little niece and nephew. Tells them bedtime stories, except every part that they chirp in becomes true. Raining gumballs, damsels in distress, that whole charade.

Okay, maybe I wouldn't go into the details of the plot because... there was barely a plot, and I can't say anything without spoiling everything, since there is so little of it.

Perhaps I'll say more about the acting. Adam Sandler is his usual goofy self (this time called Skeeter), good-natured, not deviating from his usual roles. Keri Russel was surprising as the romantic interest and I really thought they lacked chemistry together. They just don't seem like the kind of people who would click, and even they click, the result doesn't seem that exciting anyway. The two little kids are very adorable and lively. Guy Pearce, as the major butt-kissing nemesis, is just sad. I remember days when he was in major roles in major movies with substance, like Memento. I don't want to diss comedy. Like I said, I wish I see more of it, and there are certainly major roles in comedy that take serious skills, and I really have lots of respect for Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller and Will Farrell, but there are also roles that are just ridiculous and 2 dimensional.

The highlight of the movie would have to be Russell Brand's Mickey, Skeeter's best friend who's a server at the hotel. Silly, has no serious bone in his body, sexually ambiguous, reliable when it counts, and just an excellent sidekick all around. I was really not that into Russell Brand because I thought he just wasn't my type of comedian, with the wild long hair and flamboyant rock star looks. He's quite famous in Britain apparently and is bridging over to the American market (pretty successfully, so far). He had a role in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, also a comedy. In the past he has suffered through drug, alcohol and sex addiction problems but has been clean since 2002 ('cording to wiki, anyway). Quite the ladies' man, and politically active. Again, really did not think I was going to appreciate his brand of humour, but there's a sweet and unassuming air about him, despite all that hair and make-up.

Pulse 2

I will try to be really brief, because I'm dying of exhaustion and this movie really wasn't that great. I mean, really. I only watched it because a) it's a horror movie and my expectations weren't that high and b) my roommate kind of forced me. It's the only horror movie we will ever watch together, I think, because she hates them and only wanted to watch this one because it has Jamie Bamber (her celebrity crush) in it. Jamie Bamber's also in the recently ended Battlestar Galactica, which she is also super crazy about.

Anyway, Pulse 2 is obviously a sequel, adapted from the Japanese horror movie Kairo, or Pulse to the English world. To be fair, the original was much praised and was pretty original and thought-provoking, which is rare for Asian horror movie these days. Maybe someday I'll write a proper tribute to it, but currently I'm talking about the horrendous Pulse 2. Horrendous for the completely wrong reasons.

To recap, Pulse was about ghosts who spread though technology (computer, internet, cell phone, etc) and infect people and make them turn to dust and become ghosts. The original makes a statement about the loneliness of the modern world, where no one knows who their next-door neighbor is and your best friend is someone online you've never met face-to-face. Soon we all lose our mind ... and our existence to that hungry loneliness that sucks people in. And the worst part is, ... it's not much worse than our previous daily existence anyway.

The American version of Pulse was less ambitious in that aspect but had some nice visual effects. This sequel, however, is even less confident about the size of the crowd it would draw. There is almost no visual effect to speak off, the cinematography and production design are... amateur at best. The storyline makes no sense, starts to make a little sense, then loses the train of thought all over again. All in all, just horrible.

I won't even bore you with a synopsis, since I myself don't really know what happened. Jamie Bamber is a divorced father who's trying to keep his little girl safe from the mother, who has apparently gone to the other side. There, I've ruined the one semi-surprise the movie had in store for you. Oops. It's not like the mother was sooooooooo lively and cheery that it's a shocker that she's already dead. From the start she just absolutely stinks with negative energy.

Oh, did I mention the acting and the script are also quite hard to accept? And I had a low expectation to start with. Final verdict? Got an hour and a half to waste? Take a breath, make sure you have no work due tomorrow, and go watch Kairo the original. It takes some patience and there are slow spots, but the absolute sense of despair and desolation you get is more than worthwhile. If you are a horror fan, that is.

Doctor Who

I actually have quite a few things to talk about, and I will hopefully get to them in the next couple of days, but I picked Doctor Who for now because otherwise I'm going to forget what I was gonna say about the show's Easter special. Or about the show in general.

Well, I first started watching the show because of my roommate. To be honest, I never was quite passionate about the show and only watched it because occasionally I pretend to be a polite person and also because I don't want to be that person who refuses to watch the thing everyone else in the room has decided to watch on a Friday night. Especially when they want to watch it on my giant monitor. The party pooper, in other words.

In short, Doctor Who is a British sci-fi TV show, and apparently quite long-running. It was started in the 70's (I think...) and has been on and off until now. It's quite popular and often has cameos by semi-famous people (I say semi-famous because I'm not British and therefore do not know most of these people, but that doesn't mean they are not famous in Britain). Come to think about it, it has some quite special and clever features that allow it to be so long-running.

For example, the titular Doctor can regenerate his body after a fatal injury, which alters his appearance, allowing different actors to portray him plausibly through the years. He only has 12 regenerations though, so after the 13th death he's supposed to be done for good, though due to the popularity of the series I'm sure the writers will think of some way to bring him back or continue the series through some other way.

Currently we are on the 10th Doctor, who is played by David Tennant, who I have to concede is quite charming and quirky as the Doctor. When he's not playing the Doctor though, as I have seen him in some other movies (case in point, the 5th Harry Potter movie. He was Barty Crouch Jr.), he can be quite boring or just plain creepy. Here is a pretty typical shot of him as the Doctor, standing in front of the TARDIS (his time-traveling box) and holding the sonic screwdriver (which has gotten him out of many a tight spot):


The premise of the show is... the Doctor is a Time Lord, from a planet of Time Lords and Ladies who are time travelers who can basically go to any point in time and space. Yes, they are aliens, and there are many many MANY other types of aliens as well as many other planets and galaxies and alternative universes.

The Doctor is the last one of the Time Lord because his people and planet were all destroyed in the Time War with the Daleks, an evil belligerent xenophobic intolerant race that basically want to kill anything that is not a Dalek. They look like this:

So now the Doctor time travels with a human companion, taking the human to see wonders and to fix evil that springs up. It's obviously a bit more dramatic than that, and some of the evil creatures they have to face (either on Earth or elsewhere) are pretty fascinating. The human companion changes regularly because... well, they rarely die, but something bad usually happens, like their memory has to be sacrificed and erased or they are in love with the Doctor but can't be really with him (many reasons: he ages much more slowly, he's a different species, he has 2 hearts, etc.) so they choose to leave or some other dramatic reason. The Doctor is presented as this highly moral character, so he's obviously not going around picking hot chicks up (though most of his recent companions are good-looking young women) one after the other. He does suffer emotional pain when one companion leaves, but sometimes chance brings him another human that he really clicks with and ... off they go.

The series is currently on a hiatus year and only airs "special" episodes on special occasions (like Easter). David Tennant is leaving the project before next season starts, so expect the Doctor to die and regenerate into another person (actor Matt Smith, in this case, who is more creepy-looking than David Tennant) . Tennant is off doing some play called "Hamlet" and then will probably just enjoy the incredible career boost Doctor Who gave him.

One of the main reasons I'm not soooooo in love with the show is that though pretty well-written, the plot has minor holes sometimes. Some details just don't hold up when you go through the logic more carefully. It's not air-tight, and I find that not completely acceptable by science-fiction standards. There's also some cheesy British national sentiments in some episodes. The special effects and the music work pretty well if you consider the fact it's only a TV show, but you can get critical if you judge it by higher standards. I mean, it's still a very good show. If you don't want to watch the whole thing and get the whole story, I highly recommend the episodes written by Stephen Moffet because they are so creatively creepy and have smoother storylines that can withstand closer scrutiny, especially episodes The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances (the two form one story), The Girl in the Fireplace, and Blink.

The Reader

Upon roommate requests, we decided to see another Oscar film. Just to be sure, our lives do not only concern movie-watching. We do do a bit of other stuff once in a while.

My dad once said most Oscar films are not very entertaining, and he would be right. They often show their ambitions way too early and spend way too much on publicity and campaigning. The film has to be "good" in some sense, and they usually are, but they often risk being boring as well. Though I find it very amusing that Kate Winslet did win an Oscar for this Holocaust-related movie after she joked on Extras that the only way to win an Oscar is to do a Holocaust movie, and she had been snipped in the past precisely because her movies had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

I think I'm just not in the right mood for depressing movies recently because ... well, real life has been bad enough. I just don't want to see more downsides of human nature, and there are a lot of them. In The Reader, no one is moral. Everyone is so guilt-ridden and self-righteous and you find it hard to sympathize with anyone.

----------------------------Spoilers Alert---------------------------------




I assume you know the basic premise of the story. An adolescent boy in post-WWII Berlin, Michael, has a summer affair with an older woman, Hannah. She always wants him to read to her. One day, she simply disappears out of his life Later, when he's a law student, he sits in the court where she is being tried as a war criminal responsible for the deaths of hundreds of concentration camp prisoners under her care as a guard. He recalls all the little details from when they were together and concludes she is illiterate, but in the court all the other guards try to push all responsibilities onto her by saying she was in charge and she filed the report for everything. Ashamed of her illiteracy, she admitted guilt rather than providing a writing sample. Michael wants to help her by proving her illiteracy after talking about it over with her, but chickens out on the way to the prison because he feels she's guilty after all. She got life sentence while the other guards got 4 years in prison.

Michael, feeling guilty for not having helped her, sends her tapes of him reading books. She learns how to write from those tapes. 20 years later, she is to be released early. The prison calls up Michael because Hannah doesn't have any other contacts. Michael comes to talk with her and believes she is possibly not repentant for her actions and therefore becomes cool toward her. She hangs herself in her cell after he leaves. Her will leaves her savings to Michael, to be given to one of the concentration camp victims' daughter, who was at the camp herself.

Character Dissection (because I feel like it right):

Michael: emotionally damaged by Hannah's abandonment (he was really in love with her), he becomes distant in all his relationships, with his parents (didn't even go to his dad's funeral), with the random girl in law school (whom he sleeps with but doesn't marry, contrary to what roommates and I thought initially), with his eventual wife (they got a divorce), with his daughter (he's never around, and when he is, he never tells her anything about himself). His guilt does not allow him to a fulfilled life, and he basically lives unhappily ever after. His assumption of Hannah's lack of repentance may be a direct cause of her suicide, since he's the only person who still has contact with her out of the entire world.

Hannah: simpleton, can be tender at times but also temperamental. Follows order strictly, seems to have (or used to have) very little moral judgment on her own. But rather than that, I would like to think that she understood what was going on but chose not to think about it because it was too difficult and she couldn't handle it. Her guilt slowly builds up as she spends more time in prison and learns to read, and Michael's attitude finally pushes her over the edge.


-----------------------------End of Spoilers------------------------

The thing is, I believe all human beings would do what Hannah did if in her situation. We are all selfish, and so few (or none) of us would stand up for other people if the costs of doing so are high enough, like they were in the war. Of course it is easy to try other people for these kinds of acts after the war, when you are sitting on the judge's bench or in the audience. But the roles can be so easily switched, and it could be you sitting there trying to explain why you watched as other people died. I'm not saying human evil is inevitable (at least not in the magnitude like in WWII) and excusable, but perhaps we should be less ready to point fingers toward others.

Slumdog Millionaire

Yes, yes, I know, it's an old movie of fashion. Meaning that most people who saw it recently only saw it because of the Oscars it raked in. And the Oscars are over, and I'm a late bandwagon rider.

My roommates who saw it with me definitely liked the movie a lot more than I did. I mean, it was a decent movie, with decent shock values and decent plot developments and decent messages. The music is pretty upbeat. But for me, something is just missing.

I read EW (that's Entertainment Weekly for you, miss, or mister, or whatever you are) less and less now, but I did read that the regular columnist (was it Mark? I think so) did not like the movie 100% either. I mean, it won 8 Oscars so something must be working right, but it just didn't hit me the way I expected it to. Maybe it's a case of expectations built up too high.

One of the reasons was ... everything worked out too well. For sure, it wasn't a complete happy ending, there is quite a bit of bittersweet in it, but it's still pretty much a fairy tale and I never liked fairy tales. They just don't happen in real life, so giving people false hope only makes the reality harsher.

I also don't believe in incorruptible people. Everyone has a price, and it of course doesn't have to be money, but everyone has a bottom line for which they will do absolutely anything. Maybe I'm too cynical (okay, I know I am too cynical), but I would rather be pleasantly surprised by a lovelier world than being too idealistic and then finding out the world is actually a dark place.

The casting is actually surprisingly good. The child actors who portray the characters in childhood and the teenage ones and the adult ones have a clear resemblance.

So overall, it was a pretty great movie. Worthy of 8 Oscars though? Perhaps not.