Have you seen...

"Can you imagine hating your life so much that you'd wanna bring a backup razor?" - Lila Culpepper

Stay
They say your whole life flashes in front of your eyes before you die. They did not tell you that for the last few minutes before you slip into eternity, everything slows down. You feel an unforgivable guilt. You cry the depressing fear. You search for questioned answers. You slip into an alternate universe. Where everyone is you. But not you. But is you. There are doublets and triplets. People coming and going, saying senseless and random things. Everyone feels what you feel. There is tension hanging in the air. A tension you cannot cure but to pull the trigger and wake yourself up.

Stay is immaculately depressing. The modern furniture arranged so insanely perfect. The pills you count before you go to sleep. The paintings you hang to see sanity through unexplainable strokes. The melancholic piano. The crying guitar. End the movie and be sad for sadness' sake. Cry. Why. Cry. Cry. Kill yourself.

25th Hour
This is the first movie I have seen set after the 9/11 incident. It has an eerie opening sequence where all you see is streams of lights flowing along with one of the best composed (by Terence Blanchard) theme song for a movie. The lights are the symbol of the WTC that lit up every September 11.

Characters unfold. When faced with moment that they cannot get out of, the strong becomes the meek, the friends become the foes, the quiet becomes the guilty, the assured becomes the confused. It feels like dying of cancer. Fair warning. It does not do anyone any good. What is there left to do but wait for the day to arrive. You can do everything to live the day "normally". But that is not going to change anything.

DVD rentals: Quickflix

Have you seen...

"Hello, beautiful." - Don Johnston

Broken Flowers
The movie has the best non-verbal conversations I have ever seen. It is about a story of a Don Juan who has had his time, and he sets off on a journey to visit his ex-girlfriends and find out which one was it that had his child 19 years ago. One would probably expect a lot of reminiscing going on. Awkward moments when they recount bad times and maybe all of them would end up in the bed with him again. Not much was said in this movie. Most of the time, Don Johnston (by Bill Murray) was staring off into space, his thoughts unknown to us. But the little times he spent with the ex-girlfriends, one would know so much. Laura (by Sharon Stone) was the one who would go weak on her knees whenever Don did something sweet for her. A skank. Their relationship was merely physical. Dora (by France Conroy) was the one who loved him, but Don did not love her back as much as he should. And here she is, stuck with a man who is madly in love with her, but Dora just is not as happy as she should be. Carmen (by Jessica Lange) would rather have never met Don in the first place because she could manage life by herself anyway. Their relationship was a sour one, which resulted in her still disgusted of him even all these years. And Penny (by Tilda Swinton). She was the one wearing the pants in the relationship instead. And she still hates him as much as Carmen does, maybe much much more. And Michelle would be the one Don loved out of the bunch. The way he told the florist to wrap the flowers perfectly and they "have to be all pink". The way he walked up to her grave and greeted, "Hello, beautiful", something he never did with the others. The way he sat under the tree by the grave and cried, something he never did with the others.

Good Will Hunting
We will at least run into people like this at least once in our lifetime. You know. Those smart kids but from the wrong side of town. And sometimes, we will hope to be a hero and get them out to the right side of town. In movies, it always works. But in real life, it rarely works. Because. Not everyone sees an intelligent kid when he is cleaning up the offices. Not everyone will give him the benefit of the doubt, put their life on hold just to tweak his messy one right. Not everyone will be this patient. The kid may not even give a fuck what you do for him. The kid may not even listen. And one would spend nights drinking scotch and wonder what is the matter with the kid. One would cry to sleep every night and ask oneself what is not enough, what is never enough, for him. Then. Perhaps one would wake up one morning and decided he is not one's problem to begin with, and move on. What then happens to the kid? He remains as intelligent as he was borned with it, and remains on the wrong side of town since the day he was borned into it.

DVD rentals: Quickflix

Have you seen...

"Stop it! Stop staring at me! You've never seen a human pizza before?" - Dan Dark

The Singing Detective
Apparently, film noir style movies seem to captivate me. Perhaps it is the cocky way the protagonists narrate. They seem to always be so poetic and descriptive. Vivid. Beautiful words. Or the private eye old skool settings. Granted this movie is in Technicolors, but if it were to be in black and white, there is not much to be missed out on anyway.

I have not watched a lot of Robert Downey Jr (as Dan Dark) movies, but it seems like I have. I think he is a brilliant actor. He is quite a singer too. Maybe I have seen too many Ally McBeal episodes with him in it. This happens to you when you spent too much time hogging the television with nothing more to do but switch channels.

I have wondered constantly if I will ever turn out to be those insane writers. You know, the ones that hide in their house forever trying to write something good. The ones that fall off the real world and see nothing but their fiction playing in their heads come to life. The ones that talk to themselves. The ones that end up in the cuckoo house. Hmm.

Traffic
Mexico will always be a hot orange to me, someone who has never been to Tijuana. Always in gold. The women with shimmering sweat-stained skins. The men with thick moustache and a bad guy look. Dirty and dusty streets. Cars parked with such liberty. Noise. Fiesta. Noise. Noise. Noise. Honk honk.

The movie is one of those Oscar big-bangs. One of those all-star castings like Alexander and Crash and Troy. One of those movies about worldly issues the US is trying to tackle. You know. Those that make you want to get your butt off the couch you are in and go out and do something about it. Depending on how passionate you are about things.

The movie is pretty much a flat line. You kind of know what is going to happen. The bad guy will surely be caught. There will definitely be crooks working within the force for their own benefit. A cop will die. Someone will die. The official will stop focusing on the big picture, and go back to being a father and worry about the drug addict daughter. The cop that sold the right news will end the movie watching the junior baseball league. Ahh. Happy ending.

DVD rentals: Quickflix