Caught a couple of movies over the CNY weekend(judging by the number of patrons at the cinemas, i bet every singaporean has caught one too)..
Among the movies i caught are It's a Great, Great World, The Swan and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives. The genre ranged from nostalgic to intense to just plain weird(in that order).
Great World is acceptable for a local production..and maybe it's Great World(one of my preferred hangout in today's context), so i'm more lenient towards it. Am rather surprised by the liberal use of dialects(and how it's not classified as a 'foreign' language movie)
The Swan is a showcase of Natalie Portman's acting chops(pity Winona Ryder though). I didn't exactly like the storyline, a bit too dark and depressing..but i'll have no issues if NP wins the Oscars for the role(as if i'm a deciding factor..ha)
And oh..Uncle Boonmee..the movie got me raising my eyebrows(^.-) and someone asking if we can leave halfway..It left me with more question marks than my economics textbook(Purchasing Power Parity, anyone?) This is a review lifted off 8 Days:
'The 40 year old Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has landed on the world map by reinventing the language of cinema with his mystical tales Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century.
Apichatpong won the 2010 Palme d'Or top prize at Cannes for Uncle Boonmee, which Tim Burton, the head of the jury, likened to a 'beautiful, strange dream.'
Many may simply find this gentle, beguiling, mysteriously hypnotic movie strange.(i guess i fall into the 'many' category)
A dying farmer, Uncle Boonmee, returns to the jungle in northeast Thailand to spend his last days clsoe to his loved ones and is visited by the ghost of his wife, by his long-lost son in the form of a red-eyed monley spirit, and by memories of his own previous human and non-human incarnations. The last involves a pricess having sex with a catfish under a waterfall(yes, one of the eyebrow raising moments for yours truly)
We are the sum of each other, passing through death and rebirth into interconnected lives of shifting states of being. The Buddhist precept of transmigrated souls informs Apichatpong's animist fable, even as the director, who is possibly better known back home for his anti-government stance, maintains a sidelong glance at his country's concrete troubled politics with allusions to the Laos-Thailand tensions and the 1960s Communist suppression.
His is world of commonplace, matter-of-fact magic, where the mundane is at the same time made sublime. (rated:4/5)'
It was the high rating and the fact that it won the top prize(didn't really take the fact that Tim Burton was the head judge into consideration) that got me curious about the show. Other than the fact that i understood probably 15% of the storyline, it was extremely slow-moving(and i'm generally ok with slow movies, so i thought) with some pretty amateurish effects(of cos this is no Hollywood production)..so i really dun quite understand the rave reviews about the show.
Oh well..i guess there's always the King's Speech and Winter's Bone to look foward too, at least they won't leave me with tired eyebrows..hopefully.
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