Verdict - 4 out of 5
The Social Network is about lots of things. It probably tells you about friendship, about competition, revenge, creativity, or about invention. But, among other things, I see The Social Network the way I see an irony. It was bitter at most part yet funny and laughable. It contains triumph yet feels very tragic. It has some cheerful moments but at the core, it was dark.
The movie opens with an unbalanced, ‘confusing’ conversation between Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eissenberg), a Harvard student on his second year, and his date, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). From the moment Zuckerberg opens his mouth, we will know already that we are looking at an extra ordinary guy. He talks too fast with a straight face, too difficult to be understood, but strangely he always wins conversation, and at the end leaves his opponent speechless. Albright, on the other hand, is more than speechless. Offended as she appears, she makes a point that she is not interested with Zuckerberg anymore, especially when Zuckerberg mentioned her university - Boston University - in a very impolite way a guy could say to his girlfriend.
That said, Albright left Zuckerberg cold, confused, and heart-broken. Walking back home single, he conveys his feeling with the geekiest act he could do: venting on his personal blog, and creates a new website called FaceSmash who turns out to be a big hit and also very offensive. Here, David Fincher as a director and Aaron Sorkin as scriptwriter shows their masterwork with re-introduce us to the internet world again.
How many of us do blogging? How many of us have a Facebook account? Yet, how many of us realize that what we write on our status or our blog, has a big fat chance to be read? And that, is when the idea pops, and the movie really starts. When Zuckerberg realize that this tiny little information of his life might appears interesting for other people. That this face-thing, is more than a webpage. It is an invention.
But how far he could pull of this invention, and with whom? (For we all know that this means another problem.) The story gets darker but also funnier from there. Fincher portrays Zuckerberg as a genius geek with a weird, sometimes annoying personality that makes us like him and hate him at the same time. With a non-linear storyline, - the movies jumps between one court to another court, with a story about them in between - The Social Network increases a mixed-feelings within an audience when they perceive Zuckerberg’s character. Is he supposed to be a nice guy? But, if he were a nice guy, why is his only friend Eduardo Saverin - played beautifully by the future Spiderman, Andrew Garfield - end up sit on the court room as his opponent?
Although it has flaws, the movie is a perfect statement about how characterization and a good, sophisticated script is still alive in our era of Hollywood. It still sells! The Social Network is not a movie merely about Facebook. Facebook is only a metaphor when the biggest thing about this movie lays on the relationship between new ideas and how it affects people. It contains a sad, tragic irony about how the way friendship should and how it actually turned. FaceMash, TheFacebook, and Facebook were build from a revenge, from the fact that the world does not treat us the way we like to be treated. Just like someone said: disappointment and vengeance are one of the best engines for creativity.
We have our own ‘Zuckerberg’ in all of us. A hurt, narcissist human being looking for a revenge. But how far can we creates it? How many enemies we would made to have our hundreds ‘friends’? Our own irony?
Our own Facebook.
Trailer of ‘Toy Story 3: INCEPTION’
new poster for Let Me In
An excerpt from a live performance at the Inception premiere in Hollywood. Hans Zimmer, ladies and gentlemen.
verdict : 4 out of 5
It’s very hard to describe my thoughts about this movie without spoil it over, but I’ll try.
Inception is a movie that works outside our logic. We feel like our mind had been played all along, it’s like the movie contains some puzzling, unsolved codes scattered all over places. The moment we walk out theater, our mind process the movie, we interpret things, looking for many many possibility of answers over the questions we’ve just experienced. And this is why Inception works outside our logic; because no matter how hard we think and discuss this movie, we won’t go anywhere. It’s a decent analogy of a tricky labyrinth.
Like a discourse that some elements - I would say some key - had gone missing, or simply were not even there at the first place, Inception is a piece that Christopher Nolan as a director creates and how he wanted it to be: To create questions in our head. While I think these questions aren’t supposed to be vital, but this makes Inception special on a very intriguing level.
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief who works with stealing another person’s mind. He used a special method by letting himself into a person’s dream, hence explored those dreams while in the same time took a very important information that those persons won’t share to any one. Once, a billionaire named Saito (Ken Watanabe), whom supposed to be his victim, offered Cobb a very interesting idea about doing his work differently. Instead of stealing thoughts, Saito asked Cobb to plant idea, to incept something in a person’s mind. The logic is - according to this movie - if it’s possible to stole any thought, it would also be possible to embed a whole new idea into a person’s subconscious.
To make it all happen, Cobb needs to recruit a bunch of people with their speciality. There’re Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt); a guy who always worked with Cobb all the time, Adriane (Ellen Page); a brilliant architecture student whom able to create dream’s environment, Yusuf (Dileep Rao); a chemist whose drugs are able to provide a powerful sedative, and Eames (Tom Hardy); a forger who stands like an actor on every person’s dream. These experts has one objective: to incept an idea into one mind: Robert Fischer Jr (Cillian Murphy).
The film rolls with how these experts trying to deliver this inception. Later on the movie, we would have a perception about how complex and intricate this inception method is, and how dangerous a dream could be. Apparently Cobb is keeping a dark thought on his deepest subconscious, this one includes Cobb’s two children and his former beautiful wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). Mal has been disturbing Cobb’s mind, it’s almost impossible to get rid of her from his dream. Every time Mal appears, his work and life are in a great danger.
Without giving too many spoilers, I would continue my review concentrating on how I perceive Inception holistically. Inception goes in a way that it looks very complicated and confusing, and it’ll makes us believe that we have to think hard in order to understand anything this movie delivered. While the truth is, in my opinion, Inception is a complex-looking movie with a very simple concept underneath it. The movie looks very confusing at some point, and then later on it’d become clearer, and then it looked like it’s very surprising and mind blowing at the ending scene, it’s something that Nolan creates on purpose so the audience would think like they’d been mind-tricked.
And that preceding paragraph would come to my early statement: Inception works outside our logic. No matter how ‘ambiguous’ the ending is, no matter how detail the script looks like, we as an audience simply won’t solve this puzzle because Nolan won’t let us do so. It’s impossible to conclude a research if we miss some data, so to speak. I’m not implying that Inception is a waste of time, or saying that this is a movie that doesn’t have a true meaning. On a contrary, Inception is a work of genius. Instead of making a movie that goes over every one head, Christopher Nolan produced something simple that would be taken very seriously with the audience.
I believe, on the first 30 minutes of Inception, lots of people are trying too hard not to get lost. While the story is going to automatically solve its puzzles on the next two hours, we as the audience is preparing ourselves hard to understand it. Once the ending came, the movie ended, we felt satisfied and intrigued. We felt smarter. We opened our interpretations, threw some insights and reasons, while the truth is actually been there all the time. I myself don’t count the ending as ambiguous, since to be ambiguous the story needs to support its ambiguity. And in my opinion, while there are hints here and there, it’s not enough to make it ambiguous.
We don’t need an extra intelligence to understand this movie. What we need is to relax, throw away our preconceptions, and let the next two and half hours entertaining you on its own tricky way.
Howl Moving Castle, for me, is not Miyazaki’s best. But the scoring probably one of Hisaishi’s nicest work
Verdict: 3 out of 5
First thing that came across my mind after the credit rolled was: Why Knight and Day? What’s with the lousy title? Of course, it was not until the third act of this movie that I’d encountered the main idea that later on shaped the meaning of the title in my mind. Still it doesn’t explain much nor clear. Also, Knight and Day has lots of holes hanging in its story. However, this is still a fun flick to watch. Weird? Apparently not.
June Havens (Cameron Diaz) is a single, beautiful woman who doesn’t seem to have a dangerous trouble until she met Roy Miller (Tom Cruise); a charming, suave guy that doesn’t talk much but somehow getting his way easily to Havens’ attention. One thing led to another, Havens accidentally led herself into Miller. Soon the audience will recognize that Miller is currently have something to hide, and it will put Havens’ life into jeopardy.
One of the most important thing about an ‘action-comedy consisting some secret agent conspiracy’ flick such Knight and Day, is that the director/writer are expected to be able to present the movie without making the audience bored. On the other words, since people don’t have to be very smart to guess the ending, especially on this kind of movie, the director (on this movie, James Mangold) has to be creative enough to make it as interesting and entertaining as it could be.
Knight and Day turned out to be entertaining in a very mediocre way. There are lots of funny dialogue and decent chasing scenes. There is also a ‘supposed-to-be-twist’ that is kind of shallow but yet still acceptable. One of the nicest thing on Knight and Day is how surprisingly good the chemistry between Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise. Those are two of the biggest paid hollywood actor and actress today - who I think are overrated - and somehow they still able to take it up a notch. Also, the movie is delivered on a controlled pace, with a pretty scenes on Salzburg, Austria and Andalucia, Spain (which I don’t think has something to do with the plot, but still fun anyway).
At the end, Knight and Day is a proper summer flick that no one has to think hard when they watch it. It’s far from perfect yet still valuable to kill your time and let yourself have some good laugh. The only thing that intrigue me about Knight and Day is the title, which I think kind of had been put randomly and therefore make it irrelevant and tacky at some way.
New trailer from the latest Studio Ghibli animated feature; Arietty The Borrower
Verdict : 5 out of 5
Some movies were meant to live in our heart forever. We know it once the movie ends, we are going keep those feelings and memories. I walked out from Toy Story 3 with a teary eyes, a throbbed chest, and a blissful feelings. Knowing that this is it, not only this movie ends their journey, but also ours. Our friendship, our laughter, and all our lovable moments with Woody and friends altogether.
Now let me leave that off for a while, for I am going to look back on 1995, when the first Toy Story changed the history of filmmaking - especially animation - forever. I was an eleven years old boy when I saw the first Toy Story, enthralled and jaw dropped through the whole movie. There was a scene when Andy played with Woody, put him on the bed afterwards. When Andy was walking out from his room, Woody - the doll - blinked his eyes. It was magical (well, at least for me) to see a realistic animation came to live and performed effortlessly. At that very moment we knew that the new age of animation has started.
On 1999, the sequel - Toy Story 2 - comes. It supposed to be a straight into home video sequel, thanks to the mighty Disney empire, whom at that time was milking cash from TV series and direct to video sequels (to name a few: Cinderella 2, The Little Mermaid 2, The Lion King 2, etc). Apparently the guys from Pixar - John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs - tried very hard to convince Michael Eisner (CEO of Disney at that time) for not letting Toy Story 2 into another The Return of Jafar. Fortunately Disney bosses were convinced, Pixar released Toy Story 2 as a full feature movie with a wide theaters release, which turned out to be a brilliant, if not one of the best sequel ever made. These guys manage to nailed it off again. So when on 2008 Pixar announced their plan to make another Toy Story, with Lee Unkrich on board as a new director (Lee co-directed Toy Story and Toy Story 2), every one in the room was surprised. It was a wonderful news, of course. Even so, one could not help to not laying a judgement that somehow Pixar is doing this for the sake of money only. As a fanboy myself, I was even in a doubt that Toy Story 3 will be as good as its predecessors. Look at any third movie out there; Spiderman 3, Pirates of Carribean 3, Shrek The Third, Transformer 3, which ended up to be a big disappointment. Even some people considered The Godfather, Part III and Return of The Jedi as a dismay (in my opinion, The Godfather Part III and Return of The Jedi counted as a disappointment due to how great the previous sequels are). Even though Pixar has a flawless filmography (even Cars, which people addressed as their weakest, hold a 74% fresh reviews at rottentomatoes.com), the second sequel looks kinda overwhelming even for them. Eventually I was wrong.
Toy Story 3 starts within Andy’s wildest imagination, and Pixar presented this one into an amazing action chasing scene. It was fun and also poignant for us to see how big and fierce those toys’ world inside a child’s mind. Unfortunately, that was a long, long time ago. Woody and friends now suffer the state where Andy has outgrown them. He is going to college anytime soon, hence, he is not going to play with his toys anymore. Andy planned to keep their toys - except Woody, the only toy that Andy is going to keep to college - on the attic. One thing let to another, these toys and also Woody are accidentally stranded in a day-care called Sunnyside.
The movie rolls with its superb jokes which turned to be hysterical; a spectacular prison escaping scenes that makes you glued to your seat; a complex story that fits on any age; an animation so stunning yet effortlessly beautiful; and to end it all, a heart-breaking, sad goodbyes that will turn the audience into a deep silence. During the climactic ending scene, I practically bite my lower lips to prevent the outburst tears.
Beautifully ended, Toy Story 3 is one of the most sentimental movie I have experienced on the last 5 years, and deserve my first spot as the best tertiary ever created, followed by The Lord of The Rings; The Return of The King. Toy Story 3 is not only about toys looking for their owner, trapped in a deadly adventure. It is more than that. The movie is about an abandonment, a process of self affirmation, a friendship, a desperate needs for nostalgia, a final goodbye, and most of all, love.
I am going to leave it on that, since I do not want to spoil anything more. The bottom line is basically how amazing it is to finally experienced happiness and tears with Woody, Buzz, and friends again. As simple as that. We do not know if we will meet them again, but we know that they will live and grow with us forever. It is always amazing to experience this heartwarming art-form on this world full of sorrow and hypocrisy. Toy Story 3, with Toy Story and Toy Story 2, are something to be treasured, a story to be told, characters to be loved.
