Movie Review: Claustrophobia

Claustrophobia is about an affair between two people in an office. One is a married man with kids, Tom (Ekin Cheng), the other is Pearl (Karena Lam), a young marketing executive. Tom is also Pearl’s boss. Now, office romances aren’t that rare, but a romance between employee and boss (that actually feels like romance rather than a sexual bribe to move up the corporate ladder)? Pearl needs to stop wallowing in self-pity. How many bosses are there out there who’re actually decent? 

Uh huh.

But an affair is an affair. It’s inappropriate, scandalous, and dramatic. At least, it OUGHT to be, if I’m to sit for a whole hour to watch it. Claustrophobia is none of the above. It’s hardly awkward, despite the noticeable age difference between Tom and Pearl.

There’s never been a movie so aptly named, because all I felt like doing was getting out of the screening, as someone claustrophobic yearns to do in an enclosed space. Sure, the movie makes itself out as a poetic observation about love, but why does it make me feel so awfully hollow and indifferent about it? The monotonous, perhaps even pretentious unfolding of the story is less than engaging, spending its 100 minute runtime cowering behind the term “arthouse”. Karena Lam was especially boring to watch, with her sweet, demure, constipated and terribly artificial portrayal of a model employee and probable girlfriend. She finally decides that she deserves more than just an affair, and… well, thanks for taking close to two hours to arrive at that conclusion.

Man, what happened to good dialogue? Some drama, at least? I’m not familiar with screenwriter/director Ivy Ho’s works to pick up the so-called “subtlety” she apparently uses, but Claustrophobia won’t be enticing me to watch the rest of her work at all.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: DIVE!

DIVE! is approximately 120 minutes long. Like the title says, it’s about diving (the springboard kind, not the underwater kind). But what movie about a sport could possibly take so long? Well, a movie that’s over dramatic, beats around the bush, and desperately needs to showcase how very good-looking its three main stars are!

Okay, it’s really not as bad as I just made it sound. It’s a lot better than a lot of other films that star current “it-boys”. And I am honestly quite impressed by their apparent “crash course” in diving, because it doesn’t take much to convince me, a non-swimmer, that diving from a height of 10m without making a splash is indeed a feat. Most movies about sport hardly go anywhere – they’re all motivated by competitions, and even though DIVE! isn’t a lot different (characters are motivated by the Olympics), the direction is pretty sublime and rather entertaining in ways that keep your eyes glued to the screen despite its near-predictability. The longer-than-average duration isn’t that noticeable, and provides the movie with several interesting turns only exclusive to films with too much celluloid to burn.

Kento Hayashi plays Tomoki Sakai, a kid whose fascination for diving is born when he one day sees the silhouette of somebody jumping off a diving tower. I presume he first thought it was a suicide or something, because it really did look like one to me. He joins the diving club, and his love for diving grows to include a fellow student at the club, Yoichi Fujitani (Sosuke Ikemaytsu). 

Wait, that just sounded wrong. His admiration for Yoichi grows, I mean, and Yoichi comes from a family of former Olympic divers. His father is the head coach of the diving club, in fact. Unfortunately, the club is at a risk of being closed down, unless it’s capable of producing an Olympic competitor. Kayoko Asaki (Asaka Seto), a beautiful new coach, joins the club and works to produce such a pawn. Tomoki learns from her that he has something divers would kill to have – “diamond eyes”. (Not joking. That’s really what they called it. I Googled the term and the only results that come up are related to the movie, so I don’t think it’s a real diving jargon.) There’s some suspense about what exactly that is, which is revealed during the middle part of the film, after which Tomoki learns to use to his advantage. 

The movie is decent, more TV material than silver-screen release, which means to say it neither deserves the $8.50 you spend on it at the cinemas, nor the thirty plus bucks for a DVD. Perhaps a rent, but it’s best as something to watch while flipping channels on free-to-air TV. 

(Did I mention that I really, really dislike the poster? They don’t look nearly old enough to be  taking protein supplements and running around getting blown up as promotional material. I’d rather have that silhouette of the diving tower. Meh.)

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: Fight Club

I finally got around to watching Fight Club. Friends kept recommending it to me, and I thought, “Cool why not, a movie about two guys starting a Fight Club”. It wasn’t like that at all. I don’t know what I got from the movie. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get. It was a strange little cinematic experience. I’m no virgin to black comedies or gritty films, but I’m no expert either, so this movie left me scratching my head. Like, am I supposed to get something? I don’t know. I think I liked it but I can’t be sure. I’m pretty sure I’m missing something, but after heading over to Wikipedia… no, I more or less got the plot. Fight Club reminds me of Requiem Of A Dream, a movie I sat through for 15 minutes before deciding it was too high a calibre for a stupid person like me to understand. Same for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Me and reality-within-reality movies? Not good friends.

I did enjoy the characters and how they all had this habit of tossing their stuff away though. Unfinished toast, cigarettes, etc. Edward Norton was excellent in it too.

I’d love to pass this off as a review but I’m sure no one’s getting fooled.

Movie Review: Ploy

Put it this way: Ploy, at 105 minutes, could’ve easily been condensed into a 60 minute movie. It’s about an American-Thai couple who try to understand the cracks appearing in their seven-year marriage while boarding in a Thailand hotel. Director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang says he got inspired to do the film after a relative had to return to Thailand to attend a funeral, and having lived in the US for several years, they have nowhere to stay but at a hotel. Is it that odd, really? A Thai couple living in a Thai hotel in Thailand? I know a couple of people who’ve spent nights at local hotels, and personally don’t see anything THAT strange about it.

Similarly set in a hotel, the movie is anything but uneventful despite this one main backdrop. The movie begins linearly before breaking up into two separate storylines (one of the couple when Dang meets and invites a teen into their room after he learns she is waiting for her mum, and the second an odd and random sexual relationship between a hotel maid and the barman. A third is born out of the first story when Wit is unable to bear with Dang’s indifference and leaves the hotel on her own. At one point the teen mentions how she dreamt of the hotel maid and barman “doing it”, and this revelation only throws the movie out of synch. Was the sexual encounter just part of a dream then? It seemed real enough. The movie doesn’t ascertain that it is, and this portion of the film becomes rather meaningless. I still don’t get the significance of the sexual encounter, actually.

Ploy moves at an incredibly slow pace, but it’s interesting enough to lure you into the story. It leaves you wondering, out of your own curiosity or because of the movie’s peculiarity you’ll never quite know. It’s the sort of film that you’d either like or dislike; the kind of movie that’ll end up getting mixed reviews. I personally can’t settle on whether I liked it or not. Hmm.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: The International

I despise movies that make me feel like an absolute idiot, and The International is one of them. I didn’t get it, and I didn’t get what I didn’t get, and everyone else at the screening had their eyes glued to the screen, like they knew what the hell was going on. The International is the kind of movie where everyone’s afraid to admit what they don’t understand, because it’s supposed to be this extra-smart thriller about bank corruption and greedy CEOs. Don’t fall for it – chances are the confusion is probably a result of the movie’s ultra-convoluted plot, not your own lack of neurons.

The movie stars Clive Owen and Naomi Watts who investigate a bank they suspect is eyebrow-deep in illegal activities after Owen witnesses the sudden and unnatural death of his partner. I don’t know what “illegal activities” they are, and if the movie mentioned them they didn’t make it easy enough for ordinary people like you and I to understand. Someone else is assassinated, again who I can’t recall because the movie has a hobby of introducing too many characters with impossibly long titles and names. I may have covered my ears at some point during the movie, I don’t know.

The few lines that I did get, however, are smart. One that stayed in my mind was a particularly good comeback the next time someone tells you to “relax” or “chill out” – “I’m much comfortable tensed.” Owen also has the ability to sleepwalk through a movie with his eyes wide open without us really hating him… a good thing, possibly? Watts wasn’t impressive, and if there was one thing the movie did right, it was the action sequences (there’s one set in the Guggenheim Museum in New York that’s worth noting). They were bloody, with purpose, were at times hilarious, took casualties, and were perfectly paced, being neither excessive nor meager. There’s clearly too much gobbledegook about banks and international laws when the movie could have just been a good action piece.

The International is Bourne made for businessmen and CEOs, for everyone else just watch Bourne.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: The Meerkats

It must be a good thing that meerkats only have a lifespan of 12-14 years, and their lives revolve around boring things like hunting, playing, looking for danger, running from danger, and reproduction. Relatively easy to cram all this into a full-length feature film without being repetitive, since after about eighty minutes or so a meerkat‘s life is more or less covered, just in time for a sneak preview into the next generation of meerkats, before the credits roll. This is the only direction nature can go, so in movie terms The Meerkats is predictable as hell.

But wait! So much can happen in a lifetime in the wild! The movie follows a clan of meerkats living on the Kalahari Desert, with particular focus on Kolo, an inquisitive, bold, and adventurous individual whose tendencies of straying away leads him into several life-or-death situations. The end credits admits to dramatizing certain elements of the story – a bit of a let down for something called a documentary – but Man has a habit of caring for something he’s familiar with on a deeper level, so there you have it, a meerkat by the name of Kolo, as opposed to a group of Kolos. As Nature gives, Nature takes, so don’t get too attached to any of them. 

The meerkats encounter eagles, snakes, a rival gang of meerkats, on top of dehydration and starvation on one of Earth’s driest habitats. As Kolo learns how to stay alive, we as audiences are treated to spectacular, stunning, brilliant, breathtaking – I’m fast running out of adjectives – footage of wildlife and landscapes. From harsh grasslands, to mountainous terrain, to underground burrows from various point-of-views, even Paul Newman’s narration is undermined by the spectacle that is Mother Nature. Still, he does a respectable job compared to the slang-ridden, slapstick-driven narration of Queen Latifah in Arctic Tale. The boldest attempts at deviating from the style of a documentary are perhaps some cutesy descriptions and the introduction of a story, both forgiven on account of the gorgeous cinematography. 

The meerkats are constantly contrasted with their massive surroundings and other beasts from what can only be helicopter shots, and yeah, this is worth paying to see on the big screen. Forget Hollywood special effects, Mother Nature does it just as well without a single cent, and with absolute ease and grace. Scenes like clouds strolling across skies, of the first raindrops hitting parched land… the things we take for granted have all been magnified a thousand times lest our blind souls continue to overlook the simplistic beauty of nature. The Meerkats, “shot using ground-breaking techniques” according to BBC, is no doubt a documentary filmed for the silver screen. It’s too beautiful to hate.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: Jangan Tegur

Why do characters in horror movies like to do the silliest, stupidest things imaginable?

There’s this point in Jangan Tegur that has a character surfing Google Earth in complete darkness. I hate, HATE characters who go searching for things in the dark in horror movies, and always root for them to die first. Jangan Tegur is annoying like that. 

Like Shutter, Jangan Tegur opens with the main character, Natasya (Julia Ziegler), hitting someone while talking and driving on the road. The movie then sidetracks to a funeral, and at first you think it’s the victim of the accident. It’s only when you see the body that you realise it looks way too… normal to have been hit by anything, much less a chunk of solid metal. Either someone did a good job stitching the guts back in, or this is a completely different dead person. 

Almost on cue, the cheap thrills begin when the body is seen sliding across rooms, floating behind unsuspecting family members, and sitting up in awkward, freaky positions. But before you’re given a chance to speculate who or what is possessing the body/haunting the house, the movie drops that idea, and re-opens a different story altogether. This time, we’re re-introduced to Natasya post-accident, and she seems to be haunted by a girl named Baizura. She spends the rest of the movie finding out the cause of this Baizura haunting, and we’re left slacked-jawed wondering what the earlier funeral is all about.

Going hand in hand with this train wreck of a plot is the film’s superior suck-ass, inconsistent editing. I suppose I’m being rather harsh for a low-budget film, but skimping on areas that would adversely affect the quality of the movie is, after all, unprofessional. They could have done away with certain pointless scenes, and made do with less in-your-face scares. Can’t find enough sound effects? Use the power of silence! Trouble rendering special effects? Leave it to the audience’s imaginations!

Jangan Tegur also resorts to one of the most overused, cliched and lazy storytelling tools – flashbacks. Not only do these appear frequently, they occur during the most awkward moments and serve only to break up the pace of the film. And then there’s Natasya’s sudden psychic ability. Where did that come from? You’d think if supernatural abilities were so easy to achieve more people would be in self-induced comas.

Still, I guess Jangan Tegur IS something different. Given that we’ve more or less had horror movies from Japan, Korea, Thailand and good o’ Hollywood, it’s a bit of an eye opener to watch horror inspired by Malaysian folklore. If i had to flatter the movie by saying something positive, I’d give that honour to the set decor. Houses truly look creepy with open windows, and because they’re mostly built on stilts and have low roofs, it’s hard to stop the imagination from thinking about things lurking above and below. Put it this way: if the movie and your own imagination were to go head to head in a potato sack race, your imagination would have no trouble flouting the film.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: The Horsemen

Violence in the name of religion, or anything tip-toeing about that category, can either end up intriguing or utter rubbish. The Horsemen tries so hard to relate the grisly murders within to Bible quotations it’s scary how easy it is to bat an eyelid and lose track of it all. The thing about these movies are that they don’t spend nearly as much time on whatever Bible references they’re basing events on as they should (The Da Vinci Code, anyone?).

Assuming you know the Biblical prophecies about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the movie has Aidan Breslin (Dennis Quaid) as a detective trying to solve a series of murders having to do with the Bible references. The murders, as with majority of violence committed in the name of religion, are both grisly and breadcrumbs laid down to a dramatic “apocalypse”…which doesn’t quite happen. Confused yet? Me too. They don’t tell you anything more about the Horsemen, or their relevance and significance in the movie’s context.

I know I’m doing a shitty attempt at summarising what the movie is about – that’s because most of it went by in a huge bloody blur. It’s a movie bordering on being sadistic porn, yet not really. Even worse, there’s virtually nothing about the film I can read up on. I don’t know if they’re trying to pull a Cloverfield marketing scheme on this by withholding information, but it’s not working to their advantage. Are the horsemen the victims or the murderers? The twist towards the abrupt ending further complicates things. Does it all boil down to a bunch of antsy teenagers craving for attention? I expected more. If you took all the question marks in my head and told them to hold hands, they’d easily reach Canada.

I can only offer you the following advice: if you’re squeamish about torture (think human skin and fishhooks) but are still insistent on watching this, go in with an empty stomach. Or, you could not watch the movie at all – it simply just isn’t worth the kind of confusion you’ll feel later on. In the meantime, I’ll spend my time finding someone who actually understands this mess.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: 17 Again

Who would’ve thought Zac Efron, star of the High School Musical movies, could do more than prance around singing and playing basketball? Who would have imagined that he’d have a funny bone in his body? As reluctant as I am about to admit, 17 Again was good fun. And most of the credit actually goes to Efron. Yeah, I’m as bewildered as you are.

I’ll tell you right away that I had this movie screening marked on my calendar because honestly, I found the trailer too promising to behold. A movie with Efron without Hudgens clinging to him 24/7? A movie about time travel/body switching? The trailer was enough to hook me like a pot dealer on weed. Yes, it’s been done before in 13 Going On 30, Freaky Friday, Hot Chick, etc., so sue me if I like body-switching, time-travelling comedies.

Matthew Perry plays Mike, someone whose idea of life turns out below expectations. On the verge of a divorce, with two teenage kids who can’t quite stand him, he wishes he didn’t throw his future away to pre-martial sex. He meets a weird all-knowing old man, and the next thing he knows, he’s Zac Efron, high school basketball star once again! With the help of an old friend Ned (Thomas Lennon), he enrolls himself in the same school as his kids, believing he can re-live his golden years. And he wants to watch over his adolescent children at the same time. Is this starting to sound creepy? It gets creepier! His daughter thinks his concern for her means something else, and at the same time teenage Mike still lusts and loves Scarlett (Leslie Mann), adult version. 17 Again is one of those PG movies that will make you think about the rating twice, because incest and pedophilia are completely okay for children.

Which really, is what makes me like 17 Again. It’s uncomfortably hilarious, and doesn’t shy away from being super inappropriate. You need to suspend your belief a little, seeing how his grown wife can’t seem to accept the fact that Young Mike looks exactly like how Adult Mike used to look like. I also don’t believe for a moment that his own kids couldn’t recognise their dad, aged 17 or not. Still, it is this convenience that makes the movie the comedy it is.

A thoroughly enjoyable popcorn flick, and one that points Efron in the right direction. Looking forward to more of this stuff.

(First published at InCinemas)

Movie Review: Knowing

This is a hard one to review without spoilers. The movie works hard at keeping you mystified, and since that is the only thing that works out, I shan’t go all out to spoil it.

Knowing is part religious, part mystery, part thriller, and part Sci-fi. It begins with a class burying their homework, which is pretty ridiculous if you think about it. At first it sounds cool – forty or so kids draw what they think will be the future on a piece of paper, place these drawings into a metal container (a “time capsule”, though we know that’s just a fancy name for the sake of the children), and have the school bury the container. Fifty years later, another class would dig the same container out, look at the drawings, and… be inspired, or something.

I can’t remember why the original class was chosen except they won some competition to do the honors. I don’t think they mentioned why the second class was chosen to open the capsule, because everything happens within ten minutes of the movie. I guess they just got lucky because Nicholas Cage’s son happened to be in that class, and Nicolas Cage is the main character of Knowing.  But most of all, I don’t get the significance of what they’re doing. Why bury drawings of a near future of 50 years? Why not two hundred, or longer? 

Anyway, Caleb happens to get the weird drawing with lots of numbers on them, and Nicolas Cage finds it and sees the date of the September 11 attacks on it. He immediately thinks it’s a conspiracy, and proceeds to Google consecutive numbers on the paper. It brings up dates (Co-ordinates? Death tolls?) of major disasters in the last 50 years, because Hollywood is convenient that way. Again, what is the definition of “major”? Do they mean the scale of the disaster, or just the number of casualties, or both? Would twelve people dying be big enough a number to be listed?

These questions are just the tip of the loophole berg. Incidents happen so deliberately and with so much coincidence it puts a weight on the movie’s rather interesting premise. Nicolas Cage may be born for such roles, but it’s not exactly a must to cast him in it, is it? The cast delivers such a wooden performance I’d be rooting for what’s causing the disasters too.

(First published at InCinemas)