In Tranzit + Jeepers Creepers 1 + 2

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

WWII movie, quite a few recognizable faces, foreign accents, love, oppression, defiance, suicide. Shouldn't this make a great film? Apparently not. In fact, it's hard to even find a decent-sized poster for this movie online.

A group of about 50 German POW's are sent to a Russian camp where all the guards are female. Vera Farmiga (The Departed, Nothing But the Truth) plays Natalia, the female doctor at the camp while John Malkovich plays the sadistic superior officer, Pavlov. Thomas Kretschmann (you may know him from the Nazi officer who is kind to the titular pianist at the end of The Pianist) is Max, the prisoner who keeps his head down most of the time but is secretly sweet on Natalia.

For any of the female guards and staff members, falling in love with the prisoners is obviously a bad move. For a reason, too. This is where the movie is vastly unrealistic. There are some sentiments that cannot be that easily overcome, especially when the war was barely over. Having a ball (literally, a dance ball) with prisoners who may have killed your husband on the battlefield... think again, filmmakers.

As to the plot, well... Pavlov wants Natalia to gain the prisoners' confidence so they would tell her which ones of them are war criminals who lied about their identities upon capture. The rest is just moral dilemmas. Should you forgive your old enemies, are they even your enemies (because they surely aren't the same ones who shot at you during the war), should you treat them with kindness or despise because they are Germans who fought against you but also have wives and children at home, that kind of stuff.

So, if you are going to watch this movie, watch it for the people, not for the story, because the story is just ridiculous.

And now...


Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
3.5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
4/10

Fun, campy, over-the-top acting. I've always wanted to see Jeepers Creepers. Heard there's a third one coming out in 2011.

It did not disappoint. Maybe my expectations were low to start with (rightfully so). The Creeper is an ancient creature who wakes up every 23rd spring to feast on humans for 23 days. He has wings and really sharp teeth. He scares humans and selects among their body parts by smelling their fear (he only eats one part from each human), kind of like his way of selecting premium meat. He can regenerate damaged body parts by eating the corresponding part of a human. He is really fast, both on his rusted old truck and when he is flying/running. He has some sense of aesthetics, judging from his gruesome but fascinating wall art (he sewed bodies together in poses on the wall around his lair).

In the first movie, a brother and a sister driving home for spring break are preyed on. In the sequel, it is a high school football team traveling home on bus after winning the state championship.

It's always fun to marvel at how much the special effect department is growing. The first movie was made in 2001. Looks ancient. Everything (the blood, the bodies, the Creeper) looks so fake that you want to laugh at some points. The sequel, made in 2003, is only slightly better. But look at horror movies now. I'm so happy I'm alive at this time in history to witness the growth of horror movies.

Rainbow Eyes + The Machinist

Okay, finally got a chance to get to the second half of the original quadruple entry...

Introducing Rainbow Eyes:


Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
7.5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
8/10

I can count the number of Korean movies I've seen on one hand. Not a huge Korean fan because for the longest time, I couldn't place the style of Korean movies. It's stuck somewhere in-between the traditional and the modern. Of course, I mostly watch horror movies and thrillers, so I can't say much about the drama or comedy genres. Korean horrors often suffer from a severe case of Japanese-copying syndrome. Indeed a lot of American or even Japanese horrors suffer from the same disease. The stereotypical Asian horror movie was so successful that so many copycats sprang up, only to exhaust the genre and the horror-watching population. So now the genre has become sad, sad history.

Alas, "Rainbow Eyes" did not redeem the genre because... IT'S NOT A HORROR MOVIE. It's a thriller, it's a drama, it's eye candy. I don't exactly mean the actors. The male protagonist is fine, the two female leads (especially the right one in the poster) are very pretty, though two completely different types. But no, the eye candy is the shots. Everything is so colourful, so drunk on euphoria and melancholy, so saturated and rich. Pure visual pleasure.

I'm gonna give a straight-forward synopsis without spoilers first. The protagonist is a young cop investigating a gruesome murder. A rich gym owner is found dead in his apartment, sitting in a pool of his blood, stabbed over 20 times. Cops find a hair in his nail and some blood at the crime scene that are not his. From this, the police deduces the suspect is a male with blood type AB. Since the murder occurred late at night and the victim's voluptuous jazz singer lover left his apartment an hour before the murder, the police suspects he had a male lover who killed him in the heat of the moment. But none of his friends and certainly not his lover can picture him being gay. One of the trainers at his gym comes under suspicion when pictures surface of them being intimate at a party . The trainer is also the jazz singer's lover and denies being gay. When he is brought into the police station for questioning, it is revealed he served in the army with the victim and a third person (a rich club owner). Together, the three might have done horrible things to a fellow young soldier, who is the protagonist's childhood friend's younger brother.

Meanwhile, the protagonist is having problems with his beautiful nail artist girlfriend, whom he loves sincerely. She wants to break up because he's been saying another person's name in his sleep. He goes to meet the childhood friend whom he hasn't seen in 10 years. She is now a single mother. Long ago, she had asked him to look for her missing younger brother. Now he tells her that he never looked because... I guess you should find out for yourself.

I don't understand exactly why the movie is named "Rainbow Eyes." I have a suspicion that in the original Korean, the movie's name has a meaning that does not translate to "Rainbow Eyes." But I'm not Korean, and I can't read Korean, so I'm just going to let it go.

I'm also not going to burden you with the Korean names of the cast and crew (forgive me if you can read Korean and will not be burdened at all). If you wish to find more about any of them, just google "Rainbow Eyes movie" and you'll know all about them.

The emotions in the movie are very complex. It all boils down to love, but it is also a mystery case, cops trying to solve multiple bloody murders. How the victims are connected to each other and to the protagonist drives the movie. Who committed the murders may not be clear, even at the end. (Maybe I just need a re-watching.) A lot of clues and a lot of internal emotions are ambiguously hinted and different interpretations are possible at multiple points in the story.

The movie has a lot of layers. Perceptions of things -- who is the murderer, what is the motive, the character of the characters, their desires -- constantly change as more information is revealed. At each step, you form rational theories to explain what is going on, theories that are then shattered as contradictory evidence appears and new theories form. Very complex.

Homosexuality and gender identity are surprising themes. I mean, the movie is about murders and love and not about gay rights, but the gender issues add another dimension.

You may also be surprised to learn that the mystery person is one of the characters you meet really early on in the movie.

All in all, very satisfying and intriguing at the same time.


On to The Machinist


Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
7.5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
8/10

Christian Bale is disgustingly skinny in this film. On purpose. Weighed somewhere in the 120's range. Scarily skeletal. Part of the character description.

This is also a very intriguing thriller. Bale plays Trevor, a blue-collar worker who operates machines in a factory. From conversations and the way people treat him, you learn that the chronic insomnia and the weight loss started about a year ago. He's pretty friendly with the guys at work, he is a good tenant and always pays his rent early, he is a good customer and a regular of Stevie's, a prostitute who develops a genuine love for him. He also spends a lot of nights sitting at an airport diner, with Maria, the kind waitress, keeping his company.

One day, he meets an unfamiliar co-worker named Ivan. During machine operation, he gets distracted by Ivan and causes an accident that costs another co-worker an arm. He gets the blame, and when he brings up Ivan, no one at the factory has heard of him nor does he have any records there. Trevor becomes more and more paranoid and becomes convinced that the whole world is playing a sick joke on him by hiding Ivan's existence. Thus begins a gradual downward spiral that results in Trevor's physical and mental deterioration until he discovers the truth.

The film is full of allusions and symbolisms. The shirts that Trevor wear, the rides at the amusement park, the conversations... like "Rainbow Eyes," this is definitely worthy of a re-watch. But I've got so many movies to get through so the re-watch will probably not happen any time soon.

Quarantine + Cloverfield

Another double entry. Was gonna do quadruple, but that can get out of hands and bore you to death too quickly.

First off...



Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
6.5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
7.5/10


There was an original Spanish version called "Rec". Pretty original zombie movie. I know, there is no such thing as an original zombie movie, but "Rec" was refreshing. And this movie is basically the exact same thing as "Rec" with minor changes.

The female protagonist is one half of a TV crew shadowing firefighters for a night. The other half of the crew is the cameraman, whose camera is the eye that shoots this whole movie (so yes, it's first-person, which makes it more real for the audience).

They follow two firefighters to a call to an apartment building. Apparently there is an old lady who has been screaming. There are also 2 cops present, and some of the residents of the buildings have come down to the atrium due to the disturbance. The cops and the firefighters followed by the TV crew open the old lady's door and see her standing in her nightgown covered in blood and groaning "no." When they approach her, she bites a cop in the neck.

All heck breaks loose. And worse, the government has sealed the building so no one can get out, including the TV crew and the firefighters and the cops. Anyone who approaches a window or any other exit is threatened with a bullet from the outside. Plastic sheets seal all the openings. And everyone who is bitten by the infected shows rabies-like symptoms, becomes really aggressive and attacks everyone else. Let the human drama commence.

I have to say the original Spanish version plays much more into the human interest aspect. The tenants are a diverse group. Racism, sexism, selfishness, possible homophobia all have a part. The American version downplays all except for the selfishness.

But upon watching the story a second time, I did get some things out of it that I missed before. The extra features helped greatly. For example, the ending used to not make any sense to me, but The Thin Man (no, not from "Pan's Labyrinth") at the end is the progressive stage of the disease, what all the people will look like if they stay infected and alive long enough. (You won't know what I'm talking about until you've seen the ending, so this doesn't count as a spoiler.)

The "making of" featurette also shows how hard it is to shoot a movie first-person. I thought the thing could be low-budget, since they can just cast a real cameraman as the cameraman and he can just shoot the whole movie that way. But NO, was I wrong. It's extra hard because the shots are all really long in terms of time (multiple 5-minute shots in one movie can kill any movie crew) so if you screw up, it's all the way from the beginning. Again. So this means all the actors have to spend more time rehearsing together to make sure they get it right in as few takes as possible.

It's hard to arrange for lighting. It's hard to do all the special effects (e.g. blood spewing) because the camera is constantly moving so you can't have a blood tube running to a tank 10 feet away out of the camera's view. So now I have a new respect for this movie. And then...


Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
5.5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
4/10


The idea is good. The imageries are sharp and memorable. The plot and camerawork.... suck.

This is a much bigger-budget movie than "Quarantine." MUCH bigger. But the end result is so disappointing.

What's-his-face is moving to Japan so his friends are having a going-away party for him in NYC. His best friend is documenting the party with a video camera. In the middle, a monster hits NYC and wreaks havoc. He and 3 people decide to go downtown TOWARD the monster to rescue his bittersweet girlfriend who has just broken up with him. His friend decides to document the trip, and the movie results.

A lot of fancy CG fireworks, the monster, a wrecked NYC, the trashed Lady Liberty on the cover, missile fire, etc etc etc. I'm impressed with that. Producer J.J Abrams ("Lost") said he got the inspiration for a monster movie from Godzilla in Tokyo. But this monster is too vague. You do get a close-up of the monster near the end, but it's supposed to be giant, 30o-foot tall and all that. In the shot it looks about 10-feet tall, if that. Inconsistencies like this really ruins the movie.

And the camerawork. "Quarantine" had the good excuse for the somewhat steady camera because the character is a cameraman. "Cloverfield" has no such excuse so they made the camera really unsteady, really amateurish (not even amateru, just downright shaky and horrible). Gives you headaches and makes you dizzy and basically makes you miss all the shots of anything you'd want to catch, like a glimpse of the monster.

The plot is very chaotic. There is basically no plot. There is no plan, no train of thought to follow through. And the characters are mostly... either jerks or wimps. I know it's harsh, but it's just very hard to care about them at all. Live, die, why am I watching you again?

I got a really bad review of the movie from a friend at the time it came out in theaters. Which is why I'm a hard-core horror fan and I haven't bothered to see this movie any sooner. I would never have seen it, but this was a family rental so I might as well. The DVD's extra features kind of explained the things a bit better, how the monster is actually just a baby and is lost and scared, which makes it more dangerous because it doesn't know what it's doing and it's cornered so it will do anything. But if the creature creator didn't say these things in words, I would never have gotten them out of watching the movie.

Really, for such a great idea (monster in NYC! Like King Kong but more bloodthirsty and having less regard for a particular blonde) and such a great location, this movie really should have delivered more.

Dead Snow (aka Død Snø)

Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
6.5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
7.5/10


Nazi zombies. The Nazis were bad enough before they turned into zombies. I was actually surprised to find out that the Nazi zombie idea has been used several times before. Well, this is the first time I've seen it executed, and it is pretty hilarious.

The movie is a clear combination of gore and laughter. The massive squirting of fake blood and the loud Euro heavy-metal make everything funny, and then the amount of gore you can tolerate and still laugh aloud kind of makes yourself shudder. What a heartless bastard I've become.

The plot of this Norwegian gorefest is pretty stereotypical. A bunch of medical school students go up to a snowy mountain cabin to have a weekend of fun. Nazi zombies turn up and ruin everything. The plot may be a tad bit less ridiculous in the movie than I've described here. There's a whole backstory about how the Nazies were here during WWII and tortured the locals and were eventually driven deep into the mountains where they presumably froze to death.

The beauty of this film is that it's not afraid to poke fun at itself and its genre. Right in the beginning, one of the characters actually asks "isn't there some movie where a bunch of young people go on a trip where they can't get cell phone reception and then get slaughtered?"

Also, it breaks away from some American zombie horror standards. You know the kind of horror movies where you take one look at the ensemble of trapped individuals and know which ones will make it out alive and which ones are just dispensable comic relief? Well, this movie ain't one of them. People don't die in the order you think they will; there is no clear rule of death. This is an anything-goes world where Nazi zombies not only exist but can be bitten in return for biting you. Nerds can wield chain saws and hack zombies apart.

The type of zombies... is quite interesting. The typical American zombies are sluggish, dragging their feet while groaning "aaaaahhh". "28 Days Later" is quite revolutionary with its fast-acting zombies who have a rabies-like disease. The zombies in "Dead Snow" are kind of like wild beasts. They don't necessarily move really fast, but they move really heavily. They breathe really heavily. They have a language made of grunts. They punch through wooden boards. They have heavy Nazi uniforms and coats and helmets. They have enough coordination that you can have a melee fight with them.

The amount of intestines in the movie is ludicrous. At one point, one protagonist hangs over a cliff with a zombie's intestines that he has grabbed before being pushed over the edge. Another protagonist runs into a tree and keeps running, only to find out a few seconds later that his intestines were punctured and got caught on to the tree and dragged out of his abdomen.

And why exactly does the Nazi colonel on the cover (and in the movie) have a jolly roger on his hat? I'm pretty sure that is NOT one of the Nazi symbols.

There's way too much fun here to watch this movie by yourself. The best way is to gather a few horror fan friends and have a horror marathon that includes this movie. Everybody else's comments and derisive laughter will make this movie so much more fulfilling.

Nothing But the Truth

Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
6.5/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
5.5/10



Political thrillers are often accused of having an agenda. Especially political thrillers that are based on true events. Well, you can't blame the filmmakers for taking sides because... that's what movies do. They take sides. They try and succeed or fail to make you take their side.

I can't say I liked this political thriller TOO much. "Nothing But the Truth" is kind of dense, not in the number of plot twists but the pacing. I appreciate the effort it is making to pass on a message, but I'm just not in love with it.

This film is very loosely based on the events surrounding Plamegate, in which former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame's covert CIA operative status was revealed in retribution to Wilson's article accusing the Bush administration for falsifying intelligence and misleading the public.

The premise is simple... enought. Covert CIA operative and former ambassador's wife Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga, who seems to take on more of these gritty roles after "The Departed") went to Venezuela to investigate the Venezuelan government's possible involvement in a recent attempt to assassinate the US president. She came back and reported she believed Venezuela had nothing to do with it, but the president went ahead and bombed Venezuela anyway. Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) is a newspaper reporter who writes an article exposing Van Doren's CIA identity and the whole deal with Venezuela. Since her source leaked classified information concerning national security, a grand jury is formed and a special federal prosecutor (Matt Dillon) demands that she gives up her souce. When she refuses, she is thrown in jail until she gives up the source's identity so the source can be prosecuted.


----------------------Spoilers-------------------------


Armstrong still refuses to give up her source, so her stay in jail is lengthened. Her marriage falls apart, as her husband thinks she's putting her principles ahead of her family and starts to cheat on her. Her little boy grows distant from her, since she won't let him visit her in jail. Her story has lost the public's attention. Some extreme right-wing conservatives murdered Erica Van Doren because they thought she leaked the information herself to undermine the president. Armstrong basically rots in jail and then prison after the Supreme Court debates the issue of national security vs. the First Amendment and eventually decides national security takes priority.


------------End of most compact spoilers so far in the blog------


The movie is actually more exciting than what I just said (d'oh) but not by much. That's the problem with it: it's not moving enough. Most of the movie Rachel Armstrong just ... rots in jail while other people argue out the "principles." The acting, overall, is pretty excellent. Alan Alda, as Armstrong's top-notch defense lawyer, is ... a mixed message. I really thought he would turn out to be evil or incompetent or something. He is always so preoccupied with what name brands he's wearing. But he sticks by Rachel to the end and comes to respect Rachel greatly. Kate Beckinsale, who's British, carries an impeccable American accent. Vera Farmiga has a fragile yet tough-as-nail quality that is really alluring. Matt Dillon, as the jerk prosecutor, is merciless and heartless with ambition.

The movie is quite dismal from beginning to end. Or... at least in the beginning it seems it could be uplifting, but it just gets more and more depressing. Basically not a single character got a clearly positive ending and certainly not the main ones. The message seems to be... don't write any articles exposing some government conspiracy because it will just ruin everyone involved while the government keeps on doing whatever it is that you are writing about.

If you are already in a bad mood, I would say leave this movie for another day.

Bride War

Objective Rating (How much merit I think it deserves):
4/10
Subjective Rating (How much I personally like it):
4.5/10


Just as a point of reference for the ratings, 5/10 is a neutral point of indifference. 10 is... pretty perfect, I guess. And 1 is absolutely horrid. I'm not a person for extremes, so I would rarely use 1 or 10's. Unless there is absolutely no other number to describe the film.

Okay, Bride War. First of all, kudos for the filmmakers to get Anne Hathaway to star in the movie. I don't think I would have even sat down to watch the movie if I didn't see her name attached. In my head, she's a pretty respectable actress who's trying hard to break away from her early Princess Dairies image of... well, a princess. So far, she's succeeding pretty spectacularly, which is so tricky for so many actresses. My first movie review was actually for "Rachel Getting Married," in which Hathaway also stars. She's very... versatile in her attempt to lose the goody-two-shoes association.

But not such a good move to take on a movie like Bride War. From Kate Hudson, we kind of expect this kind of chick flick that is a no-brainer pretending to have a message. They are not that deep and don't even make that much sense a lot of times. Don't get me wrong, I've watched many a Kate Hudson movie. They are fun, she's pretty and blond and... what other reasons do you really need? Oh, the leading actor is usually good-looking enough. But really, I've come to expect more from Anne Hathaway.

The story's kind of all in the title. Two best friends since childhood want to have a dream wedding at the same location. Through some freakish double-booking accident (just lesion out the reasoning part of your brain and it'll be all right), they end up having to get married on the same day. They start to get more and more competitive and start sabotaging each other's wedding (Ha ha ha... okay not that funny).


-----------Spoilers..... skip only if you are really dying to see this movie---------




Things don't work out so well. Both weddings are kind of ruined. They realize what they have done and how much of the bigger picture they are missing and make up. Oh, and one of the two weddings actually fall apart because the couple finally realizes they don't want the same things anymore and shouldn't be together.


-----------It's alright, uncover your eyes (figuratively) ---------------------


I do find some fo the bridezilla antics amusing, but only to a degree. The whole thing is too cliched and too unrealistic at the same time. Yes, everyone gets nervous for their wedding and yes, it sucks to marry at the same time as your best friend (unless you are marrying each other...?), but really? Blue hair, really? Orange spray tan, really? (It's starting to sound like Seth Meyers on SNL's Weekend Update) No, really.

The movie does have some tender moments and some great fun, so I can't completely fault it. If you are just looking for some weak laughs and not too much brain power on a girls' night (or boys' night? If you have really feminine taste?), this would be the movie. And oh, of course it has a happy ending so don't worry about getting depressed afterwards.

Charisma

Okay, this time there is no way anyone can mistake this comic for a shojo manga. It's dark, it's psychological, it's psychotic, it's all-around crazy. Introducing...



Japanese: カリスマ
Romaji: Karisuma
English: Charisma
Chinese: 異教主
Original Author: Shindou Fuyuki 新堂冬樹
Series Composition: Yashioji Tsutomu 八潮路力
Artist: Nishizaki Taisei 西崎泰正
Status: Complete
Volume #: 4


Oh man, I can't even decide if this series is a scarily accurate portrayal of humanity or just melodramatic. A lot of the plot is ... sick and perverted. Things get graphic, sexually at times. People die. This is definitely a seinen series (designation for adult men).

Okay, I'll stop tantalizing you. It's about cults and how they break people down mentally and the ensuing consequences. Lost interest yet? Read on. If you are actually interested, don't read too far here. Instead, go find the series and read that. You'll get a much better deal that way.

It starts out with a little boy being dragged out of school and beaten up by his mother, who has taken up a new religion and sees everyone as the devil. When her husband comes home and starts talking about institutionalizing her, she goes nuts and stabs him with a kitchen knife, looking for "the demon that possessed him and is making him talking such terrible things." She then stabs herself because she believes she was contaminated. All of this happens in front of the little boy's eyes.

Fast forward some years. There is this wonderful family of three. The housewife is from a very wealthy family, is very beautiful, and stays young 13 years of marriage and a kid later. The husband is quite plain, not rich, not super good-looking, just your normal salaryman, and still can't quite believe his luck that such a pretty princess married him. The couple is very much in love. Or lust. Or both. The kid is in elementary school and already under tremendous pressure to enter the star middle school to make sure his career stays on track.

The wife's father has always looked down on the husband, especially after he refused to take over the huge family corporation. The wife rather loves him more for that, because she thinks it's a sign that he's in love with her person and not her money. The real reason is he is afraid to be in control of so many people and so much power. He's just kind of wimpy that way. As a result of the huge differences between him and his wife, he is extremely jealous sexually and mate-guard his wife closely.

The wife hears about this program that parents enter, which changes their entire mentality about parenting and education and helps their children do really well in school. She enters this expensive program with the help of the leader of the program, who has waived her fees. What she doesn't know is that this program is actually a part of a cult, and all the parents who provided testimony are just cult followers who were told they were lying for a good cause. The leader of the cult is a fat, huge, bald man who presents himself as the Savior. The program basically takes all the parents to the middle of nowhere and brainwashes them into cult members.

******* REAL Spoilers Alert**************



The Savior is actually the little boy from the beginning of the series. After the whole incident with his parents, he lost all faith in any higher power and decided to take matters into his own hands by punishing anyone who's gullible enough to believe in a cult. He started this cult where all members are made to feel guilty about their lives and become spiritually dependent on him. He extracts money out of them and has sex with the young pretty female ones, disguising the act as a healing ritual.

The housewife looks extremely like his mother, whom he still adores (pre-cult and pre-murder, that is). He has deep psychological problems (no kidding) and he's still looking for images of his kind, loving mother. Thus he wants the housewife for both a mother and a sexual object.

When the housewife returns home from the program, she is completely changed. Brainwashed and numb, she is entirely converted and turns into a spitting image of the Savior's mother years ago. The husband gets really scared and is contacted by an anti-cult group, spearheaded by a psychiatrist, who isolates the housewife from all outside contact (including the husband) and de-brainwashes her. Meanwhile, the anti-cult group strikes out, releasing videos of the Savior's lavish and debaucherous lifestyle on TV (videos obtained by a long-time undercover follower). The cult falls apart except for a handful of hardcore believers, whom the Savior uses to try to take back the housewife from the anti-cult group. In the final showdown, it is revealed (*gasp) that the psychiatrist is actually the minion of the cult leader who caused the Savior's mother's madness years ago. He's been waiting for years for the wind to die down and resurrect his cult when he noticed the Savior's cult. He decided to wait for the new cult to grow bigger and mature before killing the Savior and replacing him, thus obtaining a large cult with virtually no effort. He was also in love with the Savior's mother, and when he saw the housewife who looks so similar, he decided the wait was over and he needs to take more drastic action. Instead of de-brainwashing her, he had the psychiatrist "rewire" (so to speak) her so he becomes her new Savior.

In the final fight, most characters die. The husband musters up some courage and saves the wife, and the Savior and the old cult leader supposedly burn to death together. The husband and wife return to their normal lovely life. Their son doesn't get into the star middle school but is working hard to prepare for a star high school. BUT! In the final final scene, it is revealed (didn't I say this once already) that the Savior survived the fire and is already gathering followers again. Moreover, he is still looking for the housewife.


***************End of Spoilers... I promise************


The series can go as deep or as shallow as you want. On the shallow side, maybe it's just a thrill ride. There's a lot of violence, a lot of trickery, a lot of corruption, a lot of sex, a lot of plot twists in it. It's fun, it's relatively fast-moving, the artwork is not superb but quite suitable to the content material (the Savior is one grotesque human specimen).

But then, you can say that it makes a lot of social commentary on a lot of social issues and human qualities. Religion, for one. What makes established religions any less ridiculous than the cults? It's probably just my anti-religion-ness talking. (Disclaimer: I'm anti-religion, not against God or gods or anything that can be out there. I'm technically not even an atheist.)

I'm just going to make a list of interesting topics that arise from this series:
* The Savior's retaliation against society
* The husband's obsession with his beautiful wife-- not so different from the Savior and the old cult leader's obsession with her
* The one way the cult was able to reach the wife was through her son: his education, his grades, where he is going to end up... in middle school. You know the pressure is too big when your mom would join a cult if it means you go to a nice middle school.
* The husband's lack of courage. He was ALMOST not going to make it when his wife needed him the most. He loves her, it's true, but he's still reluctant to fight for her sometimes.

Just the extent of personality loss that these people suffer under the cult is astounding. I know I know, this is a work of fiction and who knows how real cults operate in real life. But this series is great in that everything is pretty realistic and nothing is TOO forced. People just can't be themselves anymore. And it is so easy to lose yourself, a lot easier than most people would expect.

Bottom line, don't ever join any sort of suspicious group, not even to just try it out.

The Talented Mr. Ripley

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

Real old, I know, real old. 1999 feels like a year ago but it's actually 10 years ago, and that is when this movie was released. I can't quite believe it either, that such a good movie took me this long to watch. I mean, I really should have seen this movie a long time ago. It matched my taste pretty closely. Almost perfectly, in fact, except for a few minor details.

And look at the cast. Yes, just stare at it. Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Davenport. All A-listers now, but back then the last part of the list was mostly unknown. This movie used a lot of talents, much of whom are not well-known at the time. The director Anthony Minghella and the producer Sydney Pollack, both of whom recently passed away, are also quite famous in the industry.

The movie's based on the 1955 thriller of the same name, written by Patricia Highsmith. Tom Ripley, a lower-class young man, is mistaken by the rich Greenleaf family to be a graduate of Princeton and a friend of their son Dickie's. They hire Tom to go to Italy and bring Dickie back to the US to run the family business. Dickie is a free, charismatic, spoiled playboy who is living with his beautiful girlfriend Marge and refuses to return home. Tom gets into their lives and pretends to like all the things Dickie likes (jazz, for one). He lives off Dickie and the money he's getting from Dickie's father, and they have some great fun before Dickie gets tired of him and wants to part ways.



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



During a confrontation on a boat, Dickie and Tom have a fight. Dickie starts it but Tom finishes it by bashing in Dickie's head in a rage. I don't think he meant it, but after it happens he sinks the boat with the body in it and starts a dangerous game. He goes to another city and starts posing as Dickie while keeping up Tom Ripley's activities, i.e. checking in two hotels in two different names under two appearances to keep up the pretense that Dickie's still alive. He forges Dickie's signature to live off the dead man's ample allowance. Things are going well for a little while before Dickie and his acquaintances arrive at the city at the same time. He has to kill a friend of Dickie's who gets suspicious. This only leads to more complications and the involvement of the police. Marge also arrives at the city, and Tom tells her Dickie refuses to see her and is thinking about dumping her altogether. She gets very upset.

Tom eventually fakes Dickie's suicide note along with a letter addressed to himself under Dickie's name. In the note, "Dickie" confesses having killed his friend and getting depressed. Marge gets very suspicious and increasingly convinced that Tom's the one who killed Dickie, but everyone (including Dickie's father, who comes to Italy to collect his son's body along with a private investigator) thinks it's just hysteria gone off the rockers because of Dickie's death. Every time you are convinced Tom's not gonna get away with it... he does.


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


I have to be honest, I went into the movie thinking Tom is going to be a talented murderer. Everything's going to be completely with cold precision, and he would be kind of like Frank Abagnale from "Catch Me If You Can", sliding in and out of identities like a weasel. But Tom isn't like that at all. He's conflicted at all times. He doesn't really want to do the things he does, but he is driven by a yearning to appear respectable, to have money, to live like a millionaire (or a millionaire's son), to be liked by everyone. And when people turn away from him, he is really hurt and forlorn. He longs to be like Dickie, to be Dickie, who's "like a sun" that everyone turns their face to (according to Marge). He is really insecure and knows no other way to attract people beside living and presenting himself extravagantly.

This is a real thriller. There are so many moments when you are so sure everything is falling apart, but it stays miraculously intact. Well-executed tensions. I only wish Tom were a bit colder and less riddled with psychological issues.

Hyakki Yako Sho 百鬼夜行抄

First Comics entry! Perhaps I should lay down a few ... structural normalities of how I will proceed.

I guess the more correct term is "Manga" instead of comics, for this series anyway, because it IS from Japan. But I feel the term manga is more limiting since it only covers comics from Japan.

If the comic is foreign (as it most likely will be), I will give the original name, the English translation, and other names I can find. I will provide a cover art or other sample of what the comic looks like. I may provide a link where the comic may be found.

My synopsis can never do the original series the justice it deserves. All synopses somehow lose part of the original's luster and sound either boring or silly or both. You can be assured that I found the series worthwhile if I decide to put it up here, so I hope you will check it out. I have reasonable confidence in my taste, but of course you may not share the same taste so it is for you to judge.

ON TO THE COMIC ALREADY!

Okay, the one I'm currently reading and obsessing over is...

Japanese: 百鬼夜行抄
Romaji: Hyakki Yako Sho
Author: Ima Ichiko 今 市子
Translated: Nighttime Procession of a Hundred Demons
Associated Names: Selected Pandemonium, Tales of Night-Prowling Ghosts

Other beautiful wallpaper art by the original author can be found here.

I still don't quite understand why this comic would qualify under shojo, the Japanese division of manga for adolescent girls. Like the title, this manga is about ghosts and spirits, and I imagine not all girls would prefer to read about those over boys. I, for one, kind of detest most shojo manga, so I kind of hate how this lovable comic was categorized.


There are 17 volumes published, and it is still an ongoing series. I mean, I guess one of the reasons it is shojo is the drawing style. The characters are more dainty-looking, more handsome, less gritty than real life people. But still, the subject is so much more interesting than your usual shojo topics.

Ritsu Iijima is a young man who inherited his maternal grandfather Ryu's ability to see spirits, monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural beings residing in this world. He was raised dressed as a girl because Ryu believed that helps protecting him against unwanted attention from those beings. Ryu was a bestselling novelist who wrote about these beings, except everyone thought he was a fiction writer. He interacted with them and could even control some of them to do his bidding. When Ritsu was 5, one of the monsters under Ryu 's control went wild and accidentally killed Ritsu's father, Takahiro. Ryu was sorry about his son-in-law's death and made a powerful servant spirit enter Takahiro's corpse and reanimate it. The spirit, usually in the form of a dragon, is named Ao-Arashi (Indigo Storm) and under Ryu's order to protect Ritsu forever. To everyone else, it seemed Takahiro died of a heart attack and then came to life mysteriously. Only Ritsu knows the person is no longer his dad but a corpse animated by a spirit who has no particular fondness for him but is under order to protect him until his death. A few years later, Ryu dies too. Dealing with spirits has drained some of his life force.

Ritsu now lives with his maternal grandmother, his mother, and Ao-Arashi in his father's body in the old quiet house his grandfather left. He has quite a few maternal cousins, since his mother has 5 surviving siblings, all of whom hate to come to the house because they feel it's haunted (well, it is). The cousin who appears the most often is Tsukasa, a girl who's 3 years older than Ritsu. Ritsu's mother and grandmother both wish they would hook up and get married (yes, I'm aware they are first cousins, but apparently it's not borderline incest), but they feel more like siblings and therefore refuse to get together. They bicker quite a lot, and my feelings are they will eventually get together. Tsukasa also has some of Ryu's abilities, but hers are less strong and she kind of tries to deny the possibility of those beings' existence, so she is not as powerful as Ritsu.

Ritsu does his best to live a normal life and ignore the things only he can see, but somehow he always ends up tangled in supernatural events that require his assistance. He doesn't have friends, and everyone in school knows his reputation of being "spooky," so they come to him when they need "help."

Each volume has 4 or 5 short stories that are not continuous but have threads of connections, like recurring minor characters or references to past episodes. There are also some faint overarching stories like Ritsu and Tsukasa's developing relationship and the Iijima family members' life stories. Ritsu is also growing up. At the beginning of the series, he was a high school student who sucks when it comes to grades (with all those supernatural events going on, it's hardly a wonder). He had no hope of passing the college entrance exam to a respectable college, but by a freak accident he helped some gods, who asked him what his wish was and he didn't realize who they were so he said "I wish I'd pass this exam" as a joke. This is how the author was able to move on to his college life.

The stories are very touching and ... always unexpected. They all start out kind of confusing but everything makes sense by the end in a surprising way. I'm actually amazed by how the author always manages to surprise us. Things and people are never what they seem to be. Ghosts and monsters have feelings too, and they act according to those feelings.

Okay, here's that link that I may have promised you. You can find the comic in English here.

Hannibal Rising

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


First, let's be clear about some important things. I love Hannibal Lecter. I love The Silence of the Lambs. It's one of my all-time favourites. In fact, I just re-watched it two days ago for fun. Every time, you get something out of it that you didn't extract the time before. It's like an onion: it has layers.

But Hannibal Rising is ... just sad. Not in terms of the ending, but in terms of how much it makes me want to weep for the poor, poor, poorly done childhood sketch of the fabulous Dr. Lecter. Surely he deserves better. Much better.

Just like the title says, this movie is about how Hannibal the Cannibal becomes, well, Hannibal the Cannibal. It's an origin story. Except dear Dr. Lecter needs no such thing. The existence of such a story simply destroys part of Dr. Lecter's character, which is pure evil. Evil doesn't need reason, evil needs no explanation. That's why evil is evil and that takes it to a whole new level of terrifying.

Apparently Thomas Harris (the creator of Lecter, since he wrote the novels the movies are based on) thought differently. Actually, he was a bit coerced because the owner of the Lecter character said he was going to make an origin movie with or without Harris' help, so Harris thought it was best that he had some control over how badly they were going to butcher the character.

Well, I can certainly think of better ways to create a little Hannibal Lecter. The aristocratic upbringing is appropriate, but the subsequent tragedies are not. His parents got killed in WWII, a bunch of Nazi deserters ate his little sister Mischa. He escaped and eventually got adopted by Lady Murasaki, his uncle's widow in Berlin, who teaches him the ways of the samurai sword. He hunts down his sister's killers and torture and kill them and yes, eat some of them.

No no no, this is now how Lecter is. He doesn't need the whole Freudian series of childhood traumas to make him who he is. He can do that all on his own. He's the amazing Dr. Lecter. He should be born into a wealthy family. He might have observed some cruel things in his childhood, but they didn't happen TO him or anyone he really cared about. Actually, he doesn't really care about anyone. He should have a little sister or a little cousin or some other little relative that disappeared mysteriously, aka he killed them because they were rude in some way, like he killed Miggs in The Silence of the Lambs. He develops a taste for human flesh because... of all the gourmet food he's had and his own curiosity. He is of course brilliant, and he hides his unusualness with such effectiveness.

This movie got a pretty bad reception, as I recall. So that's why I didn't jump on it and watch it right away when it came out first. I was bored recently so I picked it up, and yep, it is as bad as they say. I do like Gaspard Ulliel (left, who plays Hannibal in this movie) because he has an ethereal aura and I did like him in A Very Long Engagement with Audrey Tatou. But he's too good-looking and too tall and lanky for Lecter.

So overall, the movie does not impress. It kind of destroys, actually. The acting is so-so, and can be over the top sometimes (especially with the weird sadistic Nazi deserter leader). The camera-work wants to be cool but just ends up being cliched and annoying at times. The graphic content is way sub-par. Oh, I need to go wash my eyes out with the REAL Hannibal Lecter, aka the fantastic Sir Anthony Hopkins.