Monday 29 August 2016

Don't Breathe ... Non-stop action

DON'T Breathe is the best break-in film I've seen this year. The plot is tight, the setting is filled with
tension, the motives are blurred and ambiguous, the editing and music are in tune, and there's a twist that will make you wonder if you can ever look at your neighbour in the same way again.
  At the heart of the film is whether the burglars or the home owner have the right to draw guns on the other party. This question will give viewers something to chew on.

Tuesday 23 August 2016

Top 100 films of 21st century by BBC Culture

'Mulholland Drive'  tops list of 177 film critics  
Naomi Watts (left) and Laura Harring in David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive'


Top 100

1 Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
2 In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
3 There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
4 Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
5 Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
6 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
7 The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
8 Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
9 A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)

Thursday 18 August 2016

The Purge: Election Year ... Sacrificial lamb

 A QUESTION that has always perplexed me about The Purge trilogy is people staying put in country and not attempting to flee the Purge before it starts.
   The three films make no mention of this, but it posits in the The Purge: Election Year that blood-thirsty foreign tourists are willing to risk their lives to kill others with impunity.

Thursday 11 August 2016

Kabali ... Gangster's paradise

DIRECTOR Pa. Ranjith's Tamil film Kabali pits the mainly poor and oppressed Tamil Malaysians against the mainly rich Chinese Malaysians, and when you have Indian superstar Rajinikanth playing a Tamil gangster don, you can guess how the film will end: with Rajinikanth sitting in his own Game of Thrones chair.
   Ranjith, an Indian national, obviously feels a strong link to Tamils in Malaysia. Tamils are referred to as Indians in Malaysia, and they first came to Malaysia to work as labourers before the nation achieved independence from Britain in 1957.

Wednesday 3 August 2016

Suicide Squad ... Death by indifference

I WASN'T getting into writer-director David Ayer's (Fury and End of WatchSuicide Squad. The
characters were cardboard thin and the violence was over the top, probably so that viewers gloss over the film's inadequacies.
   In short, I was indifferent to the wham-bang permeating the film. It's hard to empathise with any character when Ayer introduces them to us in a flurry of disjointed editing that takes way too long. They're supposed to be evil prisoners, the creme de la creme of society's faecal matter, but Ayer presents them as people who have simply slipped of the straight and narrow path.