This couple of months I’ve been watching so many movies I can hardly keep track. I watched Passion of the Christ, The Shawshank Redemption, Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Home Alone, Red Cliff 2 and Seven Pounds. I’m not sure if there’s more but that’s all I can remember. The wonderful thing is that these are not watched in the Cinemas; most of them rented, some are DVDs borrowed from friends and the last 2 I watched on board flights for my trip – I guess the cost was included in the airfare since the budget airline offers no such thing.
There was a time when I thought I could do reviews for all the movies I watched but it’s too much information overwhelming me in a very short time and I lacked the time (and possibly attention) to sit down and devote myself to plainly writing movie reviews and not getting paid for it. But here I’m, trying to at least say something about stuff I watched. I watched Seven Pounds on board Cathay Pacific from Singapore to Hong Kong. It was a great movie at least to me although the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes turned out to be a rather pathetic 28%.
I guess the mainstream people thinks the movie is too much of a monologue but I really appreciate the aesthetic of it and the story-telling method. And I was positively touched by it. This is one of the movies in Will Smith’s series of serious movies and I think his performance in Seven Pounds deserves loads of credit.
On my flight back to Singapore from Hong Kong, I watched Red Cliff 2 since previously I already watched Red Cliff and this movie is a continuation of the story. Many people on board the same flight was also watching this particular movie as evident from the sudden coordinated sitting up of people in the cabin all around me almost at the same time as the movie ended.
The story adapted from one of the major story recorded in the history during the Three Kingdom was more or less accurately portrayed although not without dramatization. The problem is that stories revolving the Three Kingdom era are always woven with fiction nobody knows what really happened. Anyways the film was well shot, especially those typical Chinese war scenes where you see mass movements of people, it’s really different from the footage of modern warfare where you have people shooting, covering each other and then alternating between running and staying in prone position. You don’t see medics running around and saving lives while the war goes on and most of the time, people can get injured by arrows but continues fighting.
There are some illogical parts of the story here and there but generally the film is well shot, the things the character say are mostly meaningful and have lots of subtle messages hidden in them.
I would recommend anyone to watch both of these movies, for Red Cliff 2, even if you didn’t watch the first part, you would still enjoy this part because they try their best to fill you in on what has happened in part 1 before they start off with the movie and also because this part is already entertaining enough.
