Thursday 29 September 2016

Deepwater Horizon ... Blown out of the water

DIRECTOR Peter Berg's Deepwater Horizon is a commonplace disaster film with the requisite
rescue scenes and inevitable moments of courage by the hero. He sets up the hero's familial background and actually does a pretty good job using the hero's 10-year-old daughter's project to explain the workings of an oil rig. A Coca-Cola can never got better product placement than in this scene.
   The film, based on the true events of the worst oil spill in US history in April 2010, goes behind the scenes to show how BP brought pressure on the rig's boss to get the rig started. Money is the main culprit, says the film.

Thursday 22 September 2016

Dirty Harry ... Harry harries baddies

WOULD San Francisco homicide detective "Dirty" Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) been put on a
pedestal in 2016 for using tough-guy and unorthodox methods to catch a serial killer?
   This 1971 film by director Don Siegel takes potshots at the civil rights of criminals, especially Miranda rights. The Miranda warning is a right-to-silence warning given by cops in the US to criminal suspects in police custody before they are interrogated. This is to preserve the admissibility of their statements against them in criminal proceedings (Wikipedia).

Wednesday 21 September 2016

The Magnificent Seven ... Early death

IT'S always a danger when you remake a classic film, The Magnificent Seven (1960), based on Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954).   Director Antoine Fuqua's remake, starring Denzel Washington (Fuqua directed Washington in The Equalizer, 2014) as the leader of a multiracial bunch of ragtag shooters, is heavily dependent on its violent scenes, especially the finale, which reminded me of the finale in Saving Private Ryan (1998).
   Fuqua is known primarily as an action director, although his direction of Washington in Training Day (2001) garnered the latter an Oscar for Best Actor. In The Magnificent Seven, he could not handle the task of focusing on seven actors and a female sidekick.

Thursday 15 September 2016

Billionaire selling Malaysia's largest movie theatre chain

SEPT 13: Billionaire Robert Kuok is seeking a buyer for Golden Screen Cinemas
Sdn., Malaysia’s largest movie theater chain, in a deal that could fetch as much as $500 million, people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg.

Monday 12 September 2016

Sully ... Sept 11 balm

IT'S not a coincidence that director Clint Eastwood's Sully is released during the 15th anniversary of
the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the US. What people remember most of that fateful day is the two passenger aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center buildings.
   Sully is based on the real story of Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger, a pilot with 42 years of flying experience, who glided his stricken plane onto the Hudson River on Jan 15, 2009, thus saving all 155 people on board.