cinema and all

“The first rule is that there are no rules.” Such is the opening advice Dragonball Evolution’s protagonist, Goku, receives from his Grandfather, Gohan. While the advice figures prominently into the plot of the movie, I have to wonder if the filmmakers behind the adaptation realized how much that same aphorism was guiding their creation. While Dragonball isn’t anywhere close to being as painful as other similar type adaptations, the movie is pretty much nothing but eye candy, a live action anime that will appeal to fans of the original, but offers nothing of substance or interest to anyone not already familiar with Goku’s story. Read the rest

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Nicolas Cage has brought us plenty of crazy movies in the past few years, but Knowing is a doozy of an entirely different level. Dark City and I, Robot director Alex Proyas peppers his take on the disaster movie with a whole host of other genre elements, including ghost stories, conspiracy thrillers and a dash of whacked-out sci-fi. The five credited writers, Proyas included, may deserve the blame for this mishmash, but Proyas clearly thinks he’s presenting us with some kind of directorial vision. Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did with figuring out what that vision is.

The movie that’s been advertised in the trailers, in which cynical astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) discovers a mysterious set of numbers that may predict the end of the world, is really only the half of it. Maybe only a quarter of it. The movie opens in the 1950s, with a The Omen type prologue about a troubled little girl named Lucinda (Lara Robinson) who scrawls down the numbers and puts them in her elementary school’s time capsule. 50 years later John’s son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) is a student at the same school when they open the capsule, and he’s already hearing some of the same voices that plagued Lucinda when he receives her message. Read the rest

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Body of Lies will probably get credit as the first Iraq War movie that people actually bother to see. It’s misleading, though, to assume that the movie has anything to do with politics in general, or that war specifically; it’s mostly a thriller involving double-crosses and moral ambiguity, using the bombed-out desert as its backdrop. The movie is fine by your general thriller standards, but not up to the usual standard of its creators, and either unable or unwilling to have anything to say about the War on Terror it pretends to be part of.

Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the best parts of this average-at-best movie, stars as CIA operative Roger Ferris, who spends his time all over the Middle East smoking out Al-Qaeda operatives by whatever means necessary. He’s guided from Washington, via frequent cell phone conversations, by Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), a pudgy and sarcastic Southerner who has little use for the Middle East at all, and can’t bother with questioning the purpose of the Iraq War. All he cares about is winning the thing. Read the rest

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Ketika menunggu film ini akan diputar timbul pertanyaan bagaimana film ini akan dibuat? Apakah ada cerita yang dirubah? Dan pertanyaan pamungkas yang refleks keluar adalah mana yang lebih bagus antara novel dengan filmnya?, karena saya memang telah membaca novel Laskar Pelangi. Untuk pertanyaan pamungkas ini sebenarnya menurut saya agak bodoh, karena buku dan film adalah media yang berbeda dan memiliki keunikan yang sangat sulit untuk dikomparasikan.

Akhirnya film pun dimulai. Saya sangat menikmati film ini dan ketika film ini berakhir, satu kata yang ada dibenak saya mengenai film ini ; Cerdas!

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