The first time I ever heard about this film was on CNN when I was in Greece. It received quite a bit of airtime and seemed to be considered as a fairly serious movie. I really liked the short clip that aired, showing Abduwali Muse entering the bridge of the Maersk Alamabama and menacing the captain. The scene was tense. The villain looked appropriately un-Hollywood. That was enough to pique my interest. I am therefore sad to report that after viewing it, it does turn out to be standard Hollywood action movie fare after all.
My wife and I usually watch movies on the weekends and television shows on weekdays. One of the shows that we had on rotation over the past few months has been Breaking Bad and we’ve just finished with it. I’m reasonably certain that this show needs no introduction so I’ll jump straight into a list of what I liked and what I didn’t like about it, though it will unavoidably contain lots of spoilers.
The show feels like an experiment into how evil and despicable you can make the protagonist of the story and still have your audience root for that character. It’s pretty fantastic in that regard. Episode after episode, season after season, Walter White graduates to ever greater depths of crime and villainy. And yet since the writers successfully depict him as such a smart, hyper-competent bad ass, you want to see him win anyway.
Over the past few months, my wife and I have been slowly working through a list of some of the more notable Japanese animated films. Among the recurring names is that of director Makoto Shinkai. After watching a few of his works, I have to say that he isn’t one of my favourites. His works do tend to have absolutely gorgeous animation but are light on plot. They seem meant more to convey a specific mindset or emotional state than telling a story. They also seem overly fond of some of the most common tropes in Japanese animation without enough original ideas or perspectives. There’s a certain poetical beauty in his works but for the most part, they’re not to my taste.
I’ve been paying more attention to films recently so I think I should try to write more about them. My wife and I originally tried to watch this film a couple of years ago, based on the recommendation of a film aficionado friend of ours. But my wife fell asleep halfway through the film and I didn’t feel dedicated enough to continue watching without her. Recently the same friend remarked that South Korea has been producing quite a few films of high calibre recently and reiterated this recommendation, saying that our film appreciation abilities have probably improved enough by now to properly watch it.
This film has been amazingly successful in Malaysia, receiving not only overwhelmingly positive word of mouth reviews on social networks but also breaking local box office records. I was inclined to ignore this film since I was unimpressed by such local favourites as Tiger Woohoo and Ice Kacang Puppy Love. But after reading this enthusiastic review on The Star Online which comes close to calling it a better film than even Yasmin Ahmad’s Sepet, I felt that I should at least give it a fair shake.
It’s only been a little over a year since the last installment of this series. Previous updates to this list were in 2007 and 2009. Part of the reason is that I’ve been watching many more films recently. I was still surprised by how long it took to get to the five films worthy enough to write one such installment but now all of the movies included were released within about the past two years which is more timely than what I’ve managed in the past. As usual the standard disclaimers apply and spoilers follow.
Back when I started my series of “Favorite Films” posts in 2007, I took extra pains to define what that title meant. It isn’t sufficient for a film to be merely entertaining and likeable. A film must pass that test, I thought, but more than that it must also aspire to be a work of art. Either by conveying a profound meaning or by expanding the vocabulary of cinema through innovation.
However I failed to consider that it might be possible for a film to fail the first test but completely blow the competition out of the water on the second. For this reason, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is in a class of its own. I do not find it entertaining. Yes, it is utterly captivating to watch but it is also so intense that it is too mentally exhausting to be considered entertaining.
