Every so often you stumble across a movie that turns out to be far better than you anticipated. Veronika Decides To Die is one of those. Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (The last time I saw her, she was stabbing long-teethed sun-haters for a living) and Jonathan Tucker and David Thewlis and a few others I didn’t really recognize. Both Sarah and Jonathan surprised me with very good acting, further emphasized by the mesmerizing filmography, similar in style to the brilliant Blindness (2008) and the belgium movie Blind (2007).
The movie starts without much introduction in Sarah’s home, her attempting suicide. For a moment it leaves you wondering why she tries, but the movie gives you an answer to that question soon enough, albeit without all too many words. Overall I must say the movie managed to answer all question that would come up at one point or another, which is very nice for a change.
I enjoyed the movie from beginning to end. The story was inspirational, the acting superb and the filmography breath-taking. There’s an underlaying message in this movie that I think everyone should be reminded of every now and then. Check out the movie, you won’t regret it.
Where The Wild Things Are is one of those movies where I knew nothing about it before I watched it. I saw it casually walking by, shouted ‘Hey, he looks like Forest!’, and watched the movie. And boy am I glad I did.
Where the Wild Things Are is brilliantly put together. Awesome filmography and great acting by Max made me curious about the movie right off the bat. The story starts out with a young boy, seemingly quite lonely. His mother busy with work, big sister being, well, a big sister, Max is angry. After an event at the house one evening, Max makes a run for it, finds a boat, and there the story begins.
What I enjoy about this movie is it’s unique mood. This is definitely not your run-of-the-mill fantasy movie. It’s touching, fun, crazy and gorgeously evil. It also beautifully leaves the question whether it’s really real or just a little boy’s vivid imagination right there for you to answer however you like.
The soundtrack by Karen O And The Kids fits beautifully with the movie, and I highly recommend you pick up the album after watching the movie.
All in all, a highly recommended movie. Capitalized. Italic. Emphasized. Pie.
Fracture is a typical Anthony Hopkins movie, which is most certainly not a bad thing (though makes it feel somewhat unsurprising). Fracture starts by Hopkins plain shooting his wife in the head, for she’s cheating on him. The movie takes an ‘uhm..?’ spin when he simply confesses to the murder when the cops arrive, making you wonder where this movie can go after that. The interesting stuff begins here, though, with Hopkins carefully planning out every little piece of the plan, which apparently is to commit the perfect murder.
The movie manages to keep your attention and make you wonder what will happen next. The ending (while not being too spoiler-y) felt kind of ‘meh’, but that might be just my personal opinion. It’s a somewhat fresh approach to making a thriller movie, and entertaining enough to spend an evening on the couch for. Hopkins makes you giggle quite a few times in awkward but highly entertaining situations, and almost makes you forget he is in fact a cold-blooded wife killer.
So I was fortunate enough to witness Marcel Sarmiento’ latest creation called Deadgirl. What appeared to be an interesting horror movie (yeah, I know), turned out to be an.. well, how to put this.
It’s hard not to end up in completely ripping on the movie. I guess I liked the filmography, that’s something. For the rest, the characters were anything but believable, and if I understand this movie, literally all (american) teenagers are necrophiliacs, have no common sense and are, well, retarded.
The movie starts out normal enough with your usual 26 year old actors pretending to be 17, using the F-word more often than my colleague gargles his throat (and I tell you, that’s impressive), complete with shitty-ass hairdo’s and apparent need to constantly fondle your male friends. You know, the usual. Things quickly turn for the messed up, though.
When our two main ‘teens’ discover a living dead girl in the basement of an abandoned (mental?) hospital, things get freaky. Instead of, you know, calling the cops or, hell, bringing her to the hospital themselves, one of them decides to ‘keep’ her.
F***ed up bell ring numero uno, I guess.
The other guy starts whining like a little girl, and off they go on a discussion for about 5 minutes on why it’s a bad thing to do, but alas, it inevitably ends in them both doing exactly that; keep her.
F***ed up bell ring numero dos.
I called her ‘living dead girl’ before, because she’s still alive, but apparently can’t really get killed. How do you find out? Well, the first night alone, one of the guys raped the girl, and when she wouldn’t stop struggling, beat her until her neck broke. She didn’t die, though, and to prove that, he showed it to his friend by shooting her three times.
F***ed up bell rng numero tres, quatro, cinco and seis.
Why we didn’t turn off the movie at this time, I have no idea. Anywho, soon another friend joins in with seemingly no understanding of that what he’s doing, and later on in the movie two more guys ‘drop by’.
F***ed up bell ri– you know what, forget it.
The rundown; This movie is beyond ridiculous with no apparent meaning nor link to reality. Or I so to god hope not, or these (amerian?) teenagers are freaking screwed up. It’s a pathetic attempt to be unique, I highly recommend you do not watch this. You can thank me later.
Score: 2 (that’s out of 10, in case you were wondering)
Zenitum, the company I currently work for, released their first iPhone Augmented Reality application, amazingly non-creatively called iNeedCoffee. As the title implies, the app allows you to find nearby coffee shops in and around Seoul using either the map view or the Augmented Reality view which, basically, shows a couple of floating icons on top of a camera view.
The application is still in it’s earliest of early stages (one wonders why they even released it), but I for one like to think positive when looking at Zenitum’s future. I’m very curious to see if they can go beyond this phase and come out with an application and/or use for Augmented Reality that works well, looks good and makes me want to use it.
I didn’t really want to do the whole twitter shouting and/or dry-ass article-writin’, so instead decided to head out to Starbucks with a camera and cameraman and whip up a quick-’n-dirty video overview of the application. As the original video was a bit, ehm, out of focus, I made a second video with the camera completely focussed on the iPhone. I also asked my friend JuSung (the cameraman) to take a shot at giving an overview in Korean. Aren’t we just super awesome?
Hopeo you guys enjoy, or at least get a giggle out of my god-awful stage skills. Woo.
A week or two ago I watched Up In The Air, a new movie starring George Clooney and a few others I haven’t heard of before (I sucketh with names). I knew little about this movie but figured it would be pretty clooney-esque, so I was readying myself for an evening of kinda-good-but-not-really-memorable funtainment. Turns out I was wrong.
Up In the Air is about Ryan Bingman (Clooney) who travels all over the country (by airplane, in case you didn’t figure that out by now to fire people. Companies that need to fire a bunch of people but don’t have the, ehm, cojones, to do it themselves, so they hire Ryan to do it for them.
Ryan lives a life most of us would find repulsive. He spends most of his days in airports, airplanes or hotels and loves every bit of it. He loves the structure and repetition in his life, like how people always great him the same way when checking in. While it sounds weird and shallow, it seems to make him happy.
When at one point Ryan is called in, things change a tad, though. Anna Kendrick (Natalie Keener), has been awfully creative while he was out doing his thing, convincing his boss of a ‘revolutionary’ way to optimize the company and –what else– reduce costs drastically; Fire people using long-distance, using webcams. Ouch.
Ryan obviously thinks this new method is anything but good, and ends up taking Anna along to let her experience what the business is all about. To her surprise it’s a whole lot more personal than she originally thought.
The movie had a similar mood to it as 500 days of summer. It was somewhat slow-paced but never made me feel bored. I enjoyed Clooney in this indie-like movie, and made me appreciate him more than I did before. Overall, I highly recommend you watch this movie, it’s entertaining, touching and helps you ask the right questions about what is important in your life.
Being a big fan of Robert Downey Jr., I had high hopes for this movie. Other than that it’s about Sherlock Holmes (hey), I knew nothing about this movie, but that’s how I like to go in one.
Having learned most of Sherlock Holmes by the weekly Donald Duck magazines I used to read, it came to a surprise that, according to this movie, Sherlock is a fantastic figher. The movie throws you right into the action, and introduces you to the amazingly quick senses Sherlock has, allowing him to plan exactly how a fight will go before it even starts. It might sound a bit awkward, but they made it look fantastic and not entirely unbelievable. He’s just a darn quick thinker, ’s all.
Watson is a lot less fat than Disney made him look, and also a great fighter. This whole slightly more aggressive attitude of both main characters took some getting used to, but in the end worked out quite well.
The cinematography is very nice, especially in some high-paced action scenes. The slow-motion, slightly longer than usual scenes (a la 300) really work out well in this movie. They really managed to make the setting feel authentic, as there was not a single moment during the movie I felt like ‘hum’.
On the less positive side, the movie felt quite long. A few times I felt like ‘ok, wrap it up folks, we’re here now’, only to be pulled into yet another chapter of the story. While I enjoyed the movie, it would’ve probably been better if it wasn’t so long (The movie lasts for 128 minutes, but feels longer). Some of the jokes in this movie felt quite forced, something they really didn’t have to do as Robert seems quite humorous on his own.
In closing, if you’re a fan of Robert Downey Jr. or Sherlock Holmes, I recommend you go watch this movie. It’s a great movie to watch in the Cinema, with quite a few action-packed scenes. The ending not bad, just awfully open-ended. They managed to close the story (or chapter, if you will) opened in this movie though.
to fire people. Companies that need to fire a bunch of people but don’t have the, ehm, cojones, to do it themselves, so they hire Ryan to do it for them.
