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Fa yeung nin wah (2000)
A Masterpiece
This movie is about two married persons - Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan - who live in neighboring apartment units and whose spouses have an affair with each other. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan spark a friendship in order to understand and cope with their shared predicament.
This movie was masterfully shot. There was no frame in the movie that was unnecessary. Frames of Mrs. Chan's shoes, their food in the restaurant, Mrs. Chan's coworker in front of the stairs, these all had a purpose. This can be said as well for the camera work, most notably in the first restaurant scene of the main characters, when the camera quickly panned back and forth between them. Even the choice of always shooting the two main characters in a frame of any kind and always having them in narrow spaces is very symbolic for the kind of environment Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are living in. More than showing the audience that they are constantly being watched, it is also symbolic of being imprisoned, of having no space to move and to be themselves.
Costumes, lighting, and set design for this movie are also great. Mrs. Chan's dresses were used not only for their beautiful colors but also as a tool for signifying the passage of time in the movie. I mean, I'm color blind but even I appreciated how well they shot that corridor with the red curtains. The close-ups of their faces in room 2046 were also great. Certainly, this is one of the most beautiful films of the 2000s.
The actors were exceptional as well. Maggie Cheung was great as Mrs. Chan. I think it takes an expert actor to portray a character as complex as that. Mrs. Chan is a very conservative and reserved character but within that tough, seemingly cold exterior is someone who also has a great capacity for emotions (love, dare I say) and Maggie Cheung played the role perfectly. Tony Leung also did a good job in playing Mr. Chow. Though he doesn't display the same range of emotions that Maggie Cheung demonstrated, I think the character of Mr. Chow necessitated that from him.
The only problem I had with the movie is actually them not ending up together. I don't know what was running through Mrs. Chan's mind when she left Mr. Chow's room in Singapore but after all they've gone through, I think they both deserved to be happy. Since the start, the movie has shown how "normal" it is to cheat on your spouse and how dirty people are but the two main characters are so proper that they allow such behavior to persist in the people around them. However, when it comes to them actually being involved in such an affair and even though they have really strong emotions for one another, they just can't do it because they said to themselves that they won't be like their spouses.
This is my only problem about this movie. But then again, if the ending were changed, this movie wouldn't be as impactful and as beautiful as it was.
Dead Kids (2019)
Good Set-Up But The End Is Lacking
Dead Kids is about a group of boys who plot to kidnap the class bully and ask for ransom from the bully's drug lord father.
I liked this movie up until 2/3rds of the way because the acting by all of the main cast was superb. Being a Filipino, and having gone through High School here, the 4 main boys all put up convincing performances (although a bit exagerrated by the script). The pacing was also good - it wasn't too rushed or too slow. The cinematography and music did a good job of establishing the film's atmosphere.
I just have a problem with the ending, and undeveloped characters. I know that film is about show, don't tell but I think some details about the main character weren't really fleshed out or were too subtle. The decision he made at the end really did not make sense to me. The character of Sue Ramirez was also underdeveloped (I agree with one of the reviews posted here) that her speech before the ending felt forced or out of place and her last scene just puzzled me and I didn't know what it meant.
There was a bit of social commentary also in the film about social class but again, it fell short for me. I know the film makers didn't want to be too preachy but I would've preferred a bit more preachiness instead of grasping at straws as to what it was the makers were trying to stand for.
Nevertheless, I would still recommend that people watch this movie. It would be interesting to see what else the Red Brothers will come up with in their future projects.
Bird Box (2018)
Falls Short
This movie is about a mother (Sandra Bullock) and her experience during an apocalyptic event wherein people commit suicide when they see an entity or being with their own two eyes, causing survivors to just put on blind folds to prevent being victimized by this entity.
The Good:
I think that the movie delivered its share of thrill. The beginning scene was excellent in that it set the stakes for their perilous journey, as well as introduce our main character and what kind of person she is.
Though I'm not a big fan of this format (alternating between real time and flashbacks) since it removes some of the thrill from the events in the house, it was done well enough and it made sense as to keep the pace going near the end.
The focus given to the relationships of the people inside the house was also a good thing about the movie though some characters may have been a bit one-dimensional. I also enjoyed seeing the growth of Sandra Bullock's character. Through the threat of losing her two children, she was able to move past her hesitations about being a mother and show them that deep inside she actually cares for them. Exceptional acting by Sandra Bullock, by the way.
The Bad:
I just had so many questions about the apocalypse that they were experiencing that I hoped would get answered later on in the movie but never were answered. The danger and the threat of death was there but I wish I just knew more about what they were up against. What started these events? What were these entities? Why were a certain subset of the population seemingly immune to the effects of these entities? I know that sometimes, some questions have no answers, but I think a good movie should leave you with less unanswered questions than you started with. A Quiet Place was able to do that for me despite the mystery surrounding the aliens. I think this is because of the sufficient exposition given to the aliens at the beginning of the movie. Bird Box differs in that it never reveals anything certain about these entities so they could practically do anything with them narratively. The ambiguousness of Bird Box's unseen antagonists is one of the movie's major weak points.
Another one is the ending. The ending was so predictable in that halfway through watching the movie, I already could tell where they were going with this and jokingly blurted it out and surprise surprise, they really went with that ending.
The Girl with All the Gifts (2016)
Good enough
On my first watch, I think that the movie was very good in getting me to care a lot about the main characters, specifically Melanie, Miss Justineau and the kind of relationship that they had with each other. They were able to do this because they spent a considerable amount of time showing the audience the dynamics of their relationship in the first 20 minutes of the movie, which is something that I don't see a lot of "zombie" movies do (let's face it, even though they passed off these zombies as a fungal infection, it is still a zombie movie).
And I have got to applaud this movie for showing the restraint to give more emphasis to the relationships of the characters rather than to exposition and setting up the world that they are living in (at the start). This is another positive for this film because unlike most movies in the zombie genre that have five to ten minutes of exposition at the beginning, this movie just gives us breadcrumbs or clues as to what kind of world they are living in, and who these children are scattered throughout the movie. And I really like that they did that.
Through the several suspenseful scenes in the movie, I could feel my heart racing because I had gotten to care about these characters (mainly Melanie, and Miss Justineau in the beginning and the rest as the story went on) and I knew that one wrong move and they would end up dead or infected.
The story isn't refreshingly original because there are similarities between the movie and a video game that I played, as well as with one recent zombie movie. But what differs in this film is the execution and the focus on the characters. I was puzzled at the ending after I first watched it because it didn't seem to make sense to me but upon thinking about the movie more and thinking of this movie as Melanie's story, I understood.
Now, the bad. Upon watching a second time, there were several events in the movie where I wondered why these things happened the way they did? Why were the infected waking up one at a time when they were going through the horde in London? Why did Melanie get hungry faster after eating a whole cat rather than after eating two bites of human the previous day? Why does Dr. Cauldwell believe that Melanie is the key and why does she only start trying to produce a vaccine after all this time?
There were other questions but they could just be attributed to human error. I guess having questions like these were the result of the movie being character-focused rather than exposition-focused. And as viewers of this movie, we're just supposed to accept the events in the movie as how they are without asking questions. For movie-goers who are very logical, like to think, and ask a lot of questions, there are several instances where this movie does this and can provide no concrete answers.
However, other than these inconsistencies, I found the movie very enjoyable and would still advise people to watch this movie because of its character-driven approach to the zombie movie genre.