Alright, let-s see how an average cinema-worthy week in my life looks like. For the sake of the lulz.
This is my current list for this week.


Downloading:
Jasmine Women (China)
Winning Pass (Japan) (thank you KimKim!)

Watching:
Exiled (China) (Anthony Wong and Francis Ng win)
On The Edge (China) (epic Anthony Wong and Francis Ng bias, twice in one night, dear lord, I am hyperventilating)

To Watch This Week:
No Regrets (Korea) (apparently it-s a good piece of gay cinema too)
Breathless (Korea)
Candy Rain (China I think) (gay cinema again)
Murderball (Hmm...U.S, right?) (Thank you for the recommendation, KimKim!)
Spider Lillies (Taiwan) (gay cinema owns this week it seems)
The Blue Wolf (Japan)
Shamo(China) (re-watch actually)
The Man Who Can-t Get Married Ep. 01-02, TV Series (Korean) (Ok, I have no excuse, watching this solely for Yoo Ah-In-s sake)


I never said I am not a movie geek. I truly am and I hope it will never change or stop. If some people say it should, well, fuck you, it-s magic!


B.

This.


Finished watching The Chaser a few minutes ago and I am very satisfied.
I am listening to Alice In Chains Down In A Hole and it fits how I feel about his film so well, heh. Seriously, believable script and fantastic acting, good camera work.

Wait, what ?.... should be the best word to describe the ending of the film, in spite of it being thoroughly understandable, but it left me with that feeling I really enjoy being left with, especially when it comes to cop thrillers, like a missing moment, as if nothing has been really solved, just moved out of the way, but not ended with.

Joong-ho is also, officially on my favorite movie characters list.
Cop turned pimp, turned detective, turned chaser, turned...something between an empty shell and a man with a new start or the start of an ending. I-m not really sure.




But the epic is there and dear god, can this man act or what ? Kim Yoon - seok is so believable in the role of this Joong-ho like it was made for him and his anger issues were totally believable (yes, this was a pun on Kwon -Sang Soo-s unintentionally funny antics in Running Wild and Fate), his despair was my despair and he made me just as frustrated as he was concerning everything that was failing going on around him.

If I was to sum the film in a single sentence I think it would be: this is not a film only about the failure of the Korean police force, but also about our failure as human beings and our insistence in persevering in our own mistakes, the refusal to take a step forward and the decision to always take one behind.


B.

Yes, it was a rather average cop thriller, true, but by god was it entertaining or what ?
Finished watching Running Wild, and despite of how much I am fascinated by political/organized crime thrillers, sometime during the trial scene I got distracted by the sheer thought of: this film has a certain amount of homoerotic content.
But seriously, it can be just me because I got shipper eyez and I see stuff even when there-s nothing to see. And even if there-s nothing to see, I-ll make you see something if I really want to, but you only have to squint a tad bit here to see it, it-s there, it-s there I say!

On the other side, I now I must see more of Kwon-s films because after watching Fate and now this, I must know if this is his only way of portraying characters...kinda reminds me of Angelina Jolie-s acting style: one style of crying, one style of fighting, one style of antics = same stuff in every movie, regardless of context. I read that he is a pretty versatile actor but I lost the versatility part somewhere, maybe it fell under the couch, dunno, I-ll search. Problem is versatility for me means the likes of Christian Bale (back in the old days) or Edward Norton (master at it!)
Either way, if he always portrays his on the edge characters like this, he truly is a master at being unintentionally funny! Watching Fate was the lulz due to his antics only!

The film would of had potential, seriously, and I am keeping it on a CD with that excuse only (men in suits and saturated, clean cut cinematography has nothing to do with it, no, no), but it-s no Infernal Affairs, true.
Sorry, I had to bring that up XD everyone knows how much I love, love, love IA.

Umm... yes it is 1 in the morning but I-m gonna make some coffee now and play my next cop movie with Anthony Wong (oh come on now you know I can-t resist the man !!!!!!) until morning comes.



B.

I thought only Dream could make me feel like this, leave me such a strong impression and teach me once again how bitter sweetness tastes like.
I should just finish this entry saying: fantastic script. Fantastic actors. Chang Chen-s performance is worthy of any prize you can hand the man, considering he has no lines in the film. Not even one, he doesn-t even let out a proper scream throughout the whole movie.
Message ? Good luck figuring that one out, but in a way, it-s one of the common themes in Kim Ki Duk-s films: the passage of time, symbolized through the constant mention of the seasons, the never ending circle of life, as they call it. And in this passage of time, and almost, I daresay, rite of passage (towards life again and on the flipside, towards death) no one is innocent.





You don-t want things in this movie to speak out to you and you don-t want to say you sympathize and you don-t want to say you are repulsed and in the same time you don-t want to admit it to yourself that you are charmed, sucked in and thrilled to be part of it in some voyeuristic, strange way.
Kim Ki Duk has been praised one too many times, so I see no reason why I shouldn-t do it myself because from the array of asian films I had the pleasure of watching these days, Breath is one of the very, very few that will find a place in my collection.

Reading some comments, despite how I should try to back off from them because at times it just makes me want to spit in the faces of most so called reviewers, I did notice most of them tend towards the wtf area, but then again, that would be expected.
I normally don-t get all worked up about most things I like because I live and let live, each with their own opinions, but this time I was almost tempted to leave a shout of my own. Stopped in time because I have enough sense of myself and I like to believe enough maturity to practice what I preach.
But I believe that only a limited amount of people would be moved by this film, and those would be the people who had felt a far wider array of emotions and had far more experiences than your average Jane-s or John-s out there.

I liked her character in the beginning but by the end I almost disliked her, I sympathized with him at the start, disliked him in the middle, then almost understood him in the end. There-s so much information in a film that has such a limited amount of lines like Breath does, colors, a paragraph that hints towards something else and a gesture that makes you wonder.
There have been enough moments in the film that made me turn my eyes away, and not because of violence or anything of the kind, but because the acting was so intense I felt like I was prying into someone else-s intimate life, where I shouldn-t be prying.

Cruel ? Yes. Detached ? In a way. But I don-t think anyone will be left indifferent to it, love it or hate it, you will think about it more than once after you-ve seen it.
I am touched, in so many ways this would turn into a long entry if I would sit back and try to dissect everything it left me, mentally and emotionally so maybe I will edit this some other time or just leave it like this and make someone else out there curious enough.


B.

It was not excruciatingly bad....well it was at times....actually it made me do the eyeroll thing (the unpleasant one) quite a few times...
Translation: I just finished watching T4 about 20 seconds ago.
And it was....uh.....well....yeah........

I'll come back tomorrow with an edit on this entry.


EDIT Two days later


I don't know where to begin to write about the fail because I'm not sure where it ends and where it begins.
My husband also told me that they're planning a Terminator 5 in the near future......? If only someone would stop milking it already, it's over, done with, kaputt, finished, finito, basta!

I will introduce a bunch of spoilers ahead so be warned. I don't even know where to begin, seriously, I normally watch a film without interrupting it, unless it's not that good, but while I was going through it I could barely abtain myself from skimming here and there because the pain was unbearable.
I'll just make a few points because I don't have the patience to go through every single failed scene in that movie, regardless of how much of all of it was impregnated on my retina.

Whatshisname......Marcus ? - Fail. Marcus was only there because the director loves himself too much, hence he needed to self-insert himself in some way. That's the only explanation I have for Marcus (no, seriously, if you put the actor and the director next to eachother there is a certain Mary Sue-ish resemblence. As in 'how I would like to look and act and steal the spotlight from all other characters' - type of resemblence)

Blair (I think that was her name?) - Fail. When she first appeared on screen I thought : oh, some girl power! Wrong. She needed to be saved over and over again and felt tru wuv for Marcus for reasons that at the moment escape me, unless she was sexually frustrated and saw him as a piece of meat, which makes much more sense than anything they might have tried to portray with whatever their relationship can be called. I won't mention the endless cliche of tight leather pants and other bits of revealing clothing any kickass female "warrior" seems to have in the movies in the past decade.
As a sidenote, did anyone notice when she gave her jacket to Marcus, it fit him perfectly ? In case no one noticed, her jacket fit her perfectly, as in, was sewed to fit her body and curves. I thought that was funny.

Bryce Dallas/Claire - Win as an actress but fail in the film. Not because of her, but because of the epic fail the movie is. Her character got close to NO screen time, we see she's pregnant but we don't hear a single word about it, we see she's in the medical division of the Resistance, but we barely see any action from her, or at least something to give us some insight about her character how she has changed, matured or grown since the war started. Bryce Dallas was too good for this film and for Claire's character, but then again , I hate T3 as much as I hate the TV series so anything that happened there is irellevant to me.

Chris/John - Failfailfailfailepicfuckingfail !!! *headdesk* Chris, Chris, Chris........when exactly did you stop making good films that challenged you as an actor and went heads first for the money and fame ? I think his performance as John Connor was ok, but nothing beyond ok...I can't compare it to a lot of stuff, but fail has started to happen since the Batman franchise (and before you start to rant about it, I am a Batman fan ever since I was little so I have the right to say wether it was fail or not) so it was to be expected. Harsh Days ? The Machinist ? Velvet Goldmine ? Empire of the Sun ? Equilibrium....anyone ? No......? It's almost as if Christian Bale has lost most of his acting ability since he started to make big money.
Everyone knows I like him a lot as an actor, he gave me amazing moments in his films from joy to absolute disgust, in Harsh Days, if he would have been in front of me I would have spit him in the face, I hated his character so much, because he morphed into being that man so well. But right now I was just disappointed.
Speaking of John Connor, I did not get the vibe. I'm sorry, but I just didn't. It was ok, but just ok, problem is John Connor didn't speak to me, I didn't feel him there.
Not to mention the story seemed to be more focused on Marcus the Mary Sue rather than on Connor himself, considering he got less screen time than I expected. I didn't really saw John Connor out there, I saw a cliche action hero who follows a script, not a man with the brains of a machine and the heart of a man, a cool calculated man, but with an unmatched humanity and inner strength. I just didn't saw that, maybe that was what I expected from an adult John and maybe I expected too much.

Yelchin/Kyle - no complaints here. He needed more screen time too, but didn't get it because Marcus the Mary Sue had to steal the spotlight. Yelchin, just like Bryce, is too talented to play in this joke of a sequel.
I'd throw in Chris there too, but I'm so disappointed with him at the moment I'm not talking.

The references to the older films - Obvious fail. I thought they lost it when the T-100 Arnie model came out of a box, but the fail was at its best when they tried to re-create the melt&freeze scene from T2. The disappointment on my face in that moment was so obvious I am surprised the screen didn't crack.
I did like the scar on his face the Terminator gave him, I don't know though how many people noticed that scar on adult John's face at the beggining of T2, that, indeed, I thought it was a nice touch, though when I watched T2, that scene gave me the impression that happened at the beggining of the Resistance movement but anyway.
The only scene I really, really liked was the "You Could Be Mine" scene, as I baptized it. Where John distracts a machine with the Guns'n'Roses song. A lot of you will remember it was a re-occuring theme for John in T2. I really, really thought the movie could be saved once G'n'R came into focus, honestly, I really wanted to believe that. That scene got me going a big "YEAH!!" and I started to sing along, hoping the film can be saved.
Well it got worse, but none the less, that scene was good.


All and all, why the film was named Salvation still puzzles me since they left such a huge and obvious opening for a 5th film. Linda Hamilton agrees with us this should have been stopped at the 2nd film too.

Music -wise, I love Danny Elfman, who doesn't, but I don't think he should have been entrusted with the score. The score sounds good enough to save it on my computer, two-three songs are pretty nice, but I don't think he was the most fit touch. I was very disappointed the original theme was not present, just hinted at in the score, but nothing more. You don't do that, it's wrong, it's the ultimate touch you can bring to a sequel.
Hell, even Hans Zimmer followed Klaus Badlet's melodic line for the Pirates of the Caribbean series and for crying out loud, Hans Zimmer is GOD, he can be free not to give a damn about what others did before him, but he didn't abandon the original.

Anyway, the movie is one big explosion after the other and I suppose that was the idea to begin with. Nothing but big explosions, one special effect after the other, no decent storyline and no character development.
Actually I believe the whole film was made for the teenage audience who wants nothing but explosions and fast machines and lots of random killing.
Marcus is ridiculous, but the yaoi/slash fangirls will take it out of the context and solve that off-screen, I smell it, the glares and the whole heart change just screamed for it XD but he's still ridiculous and he was not needed for the story, you had endless possibilities for a plot and a half machine half human was not the best idea. I still insist he's a Mary Sue.

The film in itself has no excuse, and it can be entertaining for someone who is not such a hardcore fan of the original two movies like I am, there is no emotion and nothing to make your heart skip (unless you have a crush on whathisname who played Marcus or feel some chemistry between him and Blair), so it's fit to watch with friends over a beer and some popcorn and poke fun at, but nothing more than that.
Decent enough, though you sense the fail 6 minutes into the beggining of the movie, a skilled sequel ? No, not at all. If anyone would make the film, it should only be James Cameron but he gave up on a 3rd or 4th film because he knew what was there to be said, was said.

End of story.



B.

Author:B.
Name: B.
Nationality: I don't stay for long enough anywhere to belong somewhere.
Interests: coffee, cigarettes, writing, reading, graphic art, living/being alive, traveling, how things work/function, history, music.
I Love: coffee, cigarettes, tea, big cities, the sea, the ocean, seashells, cherry tomatoes, rain, rain clouds, rice, sand, kashmere, a big city's noise at night, city lights by night, learning, listening, being alone, dead leaves, silence, 5 a.m's, music.
I Hate: lies and liars, prejudice.
I believe in: not much.
This journal:is the place I write just like I dance - like no one is watching. This is why everything I write is like a monologue to me. I don't care who is reading, my thoughts flow like this and this is how they will be written down.
These are my thoughts, my opinions, not my friends', not my country's, not your mother's and not your dog's.

; g o s s i p m a n !

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