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Mou seung (2018)
Felix Chong's Four Seasons
As I was blabbering to my girlfriend how this movie has Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, and Ocean's Eleven all over itself, she turned to me and said, this movie is actually director Felix Chong's "Four Seasons".
At the "It'll End in Tears" exhibition (4AD? nice touch!), Painter started dissing Lee's Four Seasons painting, saying how it was just a piece of monstrosity, a mishmash of popular ingredients, lacking heart and originality.
For all intents and purposes, Project Gutenberg is Chong's Four Seasons.
Chong had Chow Yun-fat say, "when it's done to perfection, the copy becomes art." And this line even appeared twice in the movie: "sometimes the copy is better than the original."
Chong is actually laughing at himself, at the movie industry, at his investors, and the audience. Has Chong let loose the Tyler Durden in him? Is it safe?
Overall the movie is very enjoyable though it drags in a few places.
The one thing that bugged me the most was that awful song. Oh, just awful.
To go with the theme of the movie, I would choose music like John Luther Adam's Four Thousand Holes. This is a piano + xylophone piece that imitates wind chimes, at times sounding better than real wind chimes...
Eien no 0 (2013)
A Surprise Gem
We heard it all before: enemies are people too who have families to which they long to return. But rarely do we see the protagonist change his mind about going home at the last moment. Love, sacrifice, promises, priorities, obligations, guilt, consequences. How important are these things at time of war? Less? Or more? Which takes precedence? Why? And who's to say? 60 years after the war is probably a good time to ask these questions. Not ancient enough that everyone that was there are dead and not recent enough that it still hurts (badly).
The dinner conversation that ended abruptly with the diners comparing Kamikaze pilots and modern-day suicide bombers was a particularly good call by the filmmakers.
Spectre (2015)
Money not very well spent
They did a fair job on the background story: the history of Bond, of the villain, and of the damsel in distress, and how their lives intersect. They did a fair job on the general plot: why, what and how Spectre wants to achieve. Honestly, these things matter only to a certain point.
But it's the unnecessarily labored and occasionally farcical and ultimately unsatisfying action sequences that killed it. And what's more, they all looked dreadfully expensive to film. It's understood that audiences generally enjoy some preposterousness in a Bond film but not when they make little to no sense. For example: (SPOILER) a torturing device automatically releases its captive when the controls are destroyed. (SPOILER ENDS) The fact that many things in this movie are too convenient only undermines James Bond's true ability to confront a situation.
The producers should have looked at Casino Royale (2006) again – in every film-making regard – before they did this movie, or the next one.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Is it really that good?
Now that 2 years have passed and everybody has calmed down, (or has seen it more than 20 times) ask yourself this: if it weren't for the superbly awesome beginning and ending action sequences, isn't this just as routine and regular as any other war movie in memory?
If there's brilliant writing I don't see it. What else, besides those 2 sequences, do 99.9% of the people marvel over when you mention the name "Saving Private Ryan"? The tear-jerking scene of Tom Hanks jerking tears?
Those 2 mind-blowing scenes rendered us defenseless, turning us into turnips, forcing us to willingly nod our heads to an otherwise corny story.
For me, I watched this movie 4 times in the theater. From the second time onward, I left the cinema shortly after "It's a Hitler youth knife" and came back a little before "Reiban, get on that rabbit!".