I think it says something that when my wife saw the DreamWorks logo appear, she adjusted her expectations accordingly, especially in the context of this being a film about white and black race relations in 1960s United States. We’d look out for a competently put together film that is aimed squarely at the mainstream market, a strong social message, plenty of entertaining bits and most of all an uplifting and hopeful ending. In the event, this was exactly what we got.

Continue reading The Help (2011) →

A few minutes into this second film on my upcoming course’s watch list, I can guess at some of the reasons why the professor picked it and the previous Street Angel. Both are silent films and both are ultimately love stories. Yet the two are very different films. Where the first film was elegant and timeless, The Docks of New York is gritty, dirty and very much rooted in the New York of the steam-ship era. The opening shot sets the tone for the whole movie: deep within the bowels of a ship, a gang of stokers shovel coal into the engines. Sweat runs down their bodies and drenches their shirts. Gravel and goal scrunches under their boots. The flame from their cigarettes and the fires of the engine cast stark shadows within the tight confines.

Continue reading The Docks of New York (1928) →

I like to think that we watch a fairly broad selection of the best films from everywhere around the world, as represented in the posts written here. Some regions are under-represented, such as South Asia and Africa, because I’m not sure how well their output matches up to the best the world has to offer. But as my wife notes, some regions are known, including South America and the Middle East, but it isn’t always easy to know what to watch out for.

Continue reading Cronos (1993) →

Yes, occasionally I do pick movies based on a personal indulgence instead of inherent cinematic value. This is one of those times. We actually watched the first movie not too long ago, but that was before I started my film writing spree. I recall seeing ads for the movies in the comics I had when I was kid but never watched them. Years later, I discovered that while they’re aren’t exactly paragons of cinematic excellence, they do have a decent reputation among geeks and I knew I had to watch them eventually.

Continue reading Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) →

I am planning on taking a course on Coursera called The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color in February. The course specifies a list of movies to watch and as such I am slowly working through that list. As I watch them, I’ll write about them and this 1928 silent film is the first of these.

Continue reading Street Angel (1928) →

As an aspiring writer herself, my wife is always drawn to movies about writers. Since this film is a biography of one of the most prominent female writers of early-20th century China, it was on my wife’s radar long before its release. She was very pleased to see it being played in Malaysia, even if only in a select few theatres. When we first entered the hall, it was empty so we believed that we were the only ones going to watch it. But actually around a dozen people in all turned up, so it seems that there is at least some audience for serious dramas of this type among Malaysians.

Continue reading The Golden Era (2014) →

It’s the last of this series for the year, so let’s get cracking.

• The first one of these is more boosterism than anything else, but it’s hard not to feel especially enthused about space development after the successful comet landing last month. This Bloomberg article talks about the successful initial test of NASA’s Orion spacecraft, the platform that should eventually carry humans back to the moon and beyond. Of course, this is just an unmanned test of the crew module and they don’t even have a rocket, but progress is progress.
• The next article is more boosterism. It is in fact an advertorial from BWM but I found it fascinating enough to link to here (and not be paid for it). It talks about how modern car engineers spend a lot of time and effort on carefully designing what sound a car makes when you close its doors. Apparently consumers expect to hear different types of sounds depending on what type of car it is and are more influenced by the sound they hear than they are consciously aware of.
• The next link goes to the Daily Mail (sorry about that) but it’s about real science. It’s about the discovery of the largest desert necropolis ever in Egypt. So far some 1,700 mummified corpses have been found but calculations based on the area of the burial grounds suggest that the mass cemetery holds over a million corpses. They are said to date from around 1,500 years ago and are common citizens instead of royalty. No doubt it will be an important archaeological resource for decades to come.
• This one is great just for the reading pleasure alone. It is a New York Times article about the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical calculator that dates back to around 100 BC. It can be considered a very early computer, though it is not programmable. It can be used to predict lunar and solar eclipses and calculate the positions the sun, the moon and the other planets in the solar system.
• Finally everyone knows how bad the air pollution in China’s big cities is, but I enjoyed this Guardian article. It covers not only how the population has adapted to the situation over time but also some of the suggestions of how to deal with it, including outlandish proposals like large-scale vacuum cleaners to suck the smog out of the sky.