Saturday, June 7, 2008
My Life Up To nOw
Hi Everyone,,,As you all know I failed to secure a JPA scholarship due to the racial bias in our beloved country. However I have learned to move on , and to accept God's Will In MY Life. Well I will be going to Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN) , a private university fully owned and run by TNB. I will due my one-year foundation and then pursue a degree in MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. This degree from UNITEN is recognised by the Institue of Mechanical Engineers of the UK (ImechE) , therefore is of very high quality. Btw only Uitm and Uniten's mechanical Engineering is recognised by ImechE. About 85% of their graduates are employed, thus I foresee(hopefully) a bright future.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
The Strangers Movie Review
From Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” to Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” the home-invasion thriller has proved adept at eliciting the fear and dislocation that accompany the violation of our most sacred space.
“The Strangers” is no exception, raising the stakes with a bloody preview of the ending before flashing back to the horrors that precede it. But this is no splatter movie: spare, suspenseful and brilliantly invested in silence, Bryan Bertino’s debut feature unfolds in a slow crescendo of intimidation as a young couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, both terrific) arrive at a country getaway after a friend’s wedding.
While navigating a tense crossroads in their relationship, the pair are interrupted by a sinister threesome whose identities and motivations are concealed. Alternately innocent and threatening, the intruders bang on the door and manifest as masked, blurred shapes behind the unwitting lovers. But even as the campaign of terror escalates, the movie remains levelheaded, smartly maintaining its commitment to tingling creepiness over bludgeoning horror.
Claiming inspiration from true events, “The Strangers” builds tension with tiny details — a moved cellphone, a looping song on the record player — and empathy with victims whose intimacy is affectingly real. Like Nimród Antal’s recent “Vacancy,” this highly effective chiller suggests that a relationship in extremis is the most honest of all.
Sex and The City Movie Review
There may be a problem with a film when a narrator constantly tells you the meaning of what you have just seen, gift-wrapping each scene with a moral.
There may be a problem with characters who shop with such conviction while the audience looks up from the trough of a credit crunch.
None of these problems seemed apparent to the women who sat around me in the cinema in Leicester Square, laughing and weeping in quick succession. After a while I began to reason like one of the characters: maybe the problem was me.
Everyone else, being in possession of more than one X chromosome, seemed entirely satisfied by what they were served.
The dialogue was still sharp even if, to an audience now rather more used to women characters talking frankly about sex, it may no longer seem so daring.
There were still attempts to shock. Now they were talking about sex in front of a child, referring to the act euphemistically as “colouring”. How often did Miranda do colouring? Not nearly enough. Samantha, the goddess single of older women, of course liked to use all the crayons, while Carrie Bradshaw, our narrator and lead, said that when Big coloured “he doesn’t always stay inside the lines.”
Perhaps the child was needed to remind us that this was shocking, because since the series began, we have all become a lot more grown up.
If the atmosphere inside the cinema bordered on the devotional and the theatre was filled with the sounds of women emoting, outside the atmosphere was hysterical.
New Line, the studio behind the film, had attempted to pacify critics, curious as to why a film in which a major character is the city of New York, should open first in London.
The company claimed that the event would be “much smaller” than the New York premier, but all four women were there in their heels and dresses, and thousands had arrived to see them and scream their names.
Each in turn diplomatically affirmed their love of the city and denied or brushed aside rumours of tensions between the them during filming.
If none of the four actresses has enjoyed comparable success since the end of the series four years ago, the crowds cheered louder than they have for established film stars. Many felt they were welcoming back friends who had lived on their screens for six years and were returning for one last blast.
It was almost as if the director was feeling the nostalgia. The opening scenes are broken up with musical montages, softly lit like Hallmark adverts.
Carrie Bradshaw, (Sarah Jessica Parker), is finally to marry her Mr Big (Chris Noth). The news features in New York gossip columns, she is the forty-year-old bride featured in a wedding edition of Vogue.
The plot twists and turns like that of a pot boiler. Having inspired an entire genre of ‘chick lit’, Sex and the City the film feeds off its own progeny. Is it a film, one wonders, or an extended soap opera, will any of these crises be resolved and, if they are, will it matter, for they will surely soon plunge themselves into another dilemma, for which the only cure is an expansive shopping trip.
At the last, there is at least a brief concession to the meaner times in which we live now. And at the last, does Carrie finally marry her Mr Big? Well, dear reader, I can tell you that she...
3 out of 5>>>
You Don't Mess With The Zohan Movie Review
The very idea of an Adam Sandler movie with political content is enough to make anyone a little edgy, but when the man who coined the word "poopiscle" decides to address the Israel-Palestine conflict through farce, even mild-mannered film critics may feel compelled to seek safe distance.
The material is so explosive, and the rhetorical landscape so booby-trapped, it would seem impossible to comment on 5,000 years of war-torn history without some extreme casualties.
Yet, thanks to some cross-cultural vulgarity and some gross -- truly gross -- references to genital hirsutism, Don't Mess with the Zohan tiptoes through a minefield of political content and ancient religious history without losing a single appendage.
The charm stems from the titular hero: Zohan (Sandler). A highly revered Israeli counter-terrorist, Zohan is a genius with a grenade and a wizard when it comes to mortal combat. Yet after fighting the enemy for years without any real downtime for himself, Zohan is losing his taste for war.
All the blood and the killing has left him empty. He needs a change and a chance to pursue his real passion: Cutting hair.
Armed with his Paul Mitchell style book and a pair of cut-off jean shorts, Zohan heads to New York after staging his own death in the hopes of starting his own salon.
Things don't go as planned, but when he meets urban cyclist Michael (Nick Swardson) and saves him from a run-in with an angry suit, Zohan finds a home in the New World -- and it looks a lot like the old one.
Gravitating to the Middle Eastern hub of Brooklyn, Zohan finds work with struggling stylist Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and morphs into a hairier, hummus-eating version of Warren Beatty in Shampoo.
That's about the size of the gag, and while it fits easily into Sandler's newly exaggerated Y-fronts, it's not the hairdresser gags or the lusty sex with older women jokes that keep the movie off the ground: It's the built-in tension that keeps the audience watching as Sandler plays jump-rope with one tripwire after another.
Adopting the rather foolproof method of mocking everyone to avoid appearing biased in favour of one group over another, Zohan's screenwriters ensure everyone looks a little silly.
And super-talented. For instance, the film came under early criticism for glorifying Mossad agents as James Bond-styled spies. Yet, with John Turturro playing The Phantom, a highly trained Palestinian killer who dreams of selling shoes, both sides get an equal share of the so-called heroics, as well as screen time.
Even the requisite romance features a cross-cultural angle when Zohan falls for Dalia, a Palestinian woman with activist roots.
Sandler goes to such extremes to balance the movie that even risky scenes such as one featuring electronic phone menus for terrorists seem to land in something soft and squishy.
It's not always pretty. In fact, it's often disgusting, but Sandler's boyish sensibilities and schmaltzy sentimentality overcome the jittery moments with the notion that in America, even sworn enemies can find amity -- especially if they're united in their cause to save the neighbourhood.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time Hollywood has suggested hair salons offer social and cultural salvation for the oppressed, and for what it's worth, it's a nice idea to ponder. But for all the lather and conditioner Sandler pours into this effort, Don't Mess with the Zohan still wrestles with split ends and proves world peace is a lot more complicated than a Paul Mitchell hairdo. Well One advice though, Leave your thinking caps and Your Brain at home(you wont need them!)
Kungfu Panda Early Movie Review
KUNGFU PANDA MOVIE REVIEW
First, about that title, "Kung Fu Panda." On the plus side, it kind of says it all, doesn't it? Just lays it right out there. On the downside, well ... it kind of says it all, doesn't it? This is a movie about a kung fu fighting panda. And because it's an animation - and because animations tend to be overly skewed toward the rags-to-riches plot formula - you know at once the general outline of the story from beginning to end.
He's going to start off a little sad. He's going to be under-estimated. Then he's going to be challenged. And, oh, maybe along the way he might get into a kung fu fight or two. Do you think he's going to lose? Get a concussion? Get killed? Or by chance, do you think he might be triumphant and get hailed as a hero. That's a multiple-choice question, and if you're over the age of 8, you know the answer.
Now what most filmmakers do with a movie like this is figure, hey, this is a movie for children 8 or under, so what if this is an old formula? The kids haven't seen it all before, and if their parents have, so what? No one asked them to have children. These parents made a choice, and now they have to watch a lot of ghastly children's movies. "Sex and the City" is playing in the auditorium next door, and "Iron Man" is on the other side, but they have to spend Saturday afternoon watching kids' movies, take it and like it.
But "Kung Fu Panda" is different. Yes, it essentially follows the broad outline of a rags-to-riches children's movie, but it wakes up the formula with imaginative scenes, lively and likable characters, genuinely funny moments and animation that's detailed and beautiful to behold. At times, it looks almost three-dimensional. (I didn't see the IMAX version and can only imagine how good that looks.) This is a streamlined, opulent and thoroughly enjoyable kids movie.
In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is probably the best movie so far this year about a kung-fu fighting panda - and that it will probably stand as the best until "Kung Fu Panda II," if that ever comes along.
It has a good hero. He's fat and cuddly. He's not homely like Shrek. He's cute, and he has nice teeth. He's voiced by Jack Black, who brings lots of energy and new shadings and colors to his vocal work. The latter could also be said for Dustin Hoffman, who plays the tiny kung fu master. His is one of the most recognizable voices in movies. (Listen very closely ... "Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?" You can hear it, right?) Yet it takes a while to realize the master is indeed Hoffman.
"Kung Fu Panda" is neither sentimental nor does it try for overly clever anti-sentiment. It tells the straightforward story of Po the panda, a kung fu fan whose life is limited by his endless work in his father's noodle restaurant. There's a brilliant early sequence in which Po rushes off to the Dragon Warrior competition, a huge stadium event. The camera pulls backward over a bustle of activity, then drops and drops to find Po at the bottom of a long stairway with his noodle wagon. He watches the proceedings from a porthole and from a crack in the door and never stops trying to get in until, by accident, he finds himself in the center of the arena.
In that sequence and throughout, "Kung Fu Panda" gets across important and inevitable plot information in ways that are novel and unexpected. Things simply don't happen the way they usually happen in animated stories. Martial arts training, for example, is usually accomplished through a montage with some loud triumphal music blaring over the soundtrack. Here, the filmmakers come up with a funny way for Po to be trained, involving his prodigious (bear-appropriate) appetite for goodies.
Other famous voices featured are those of Angelina Jolie (Tigress), Jackie Chan (Monkey) and Seth Rogen (Mantis), but directors Mark Osborne and John Stevenson keep the performances self-effacing and in service of the story. They don't perform their star personalities, and if you didn't know who they were, going in, you probably wouldn't guess. Overall It was not too bad although I can say that it's missable! 3 out of 5!
Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Review
- INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL MOVIE REVIEW
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the fourth instalment in the Indy series. The movieonce again brings together the three biggies, Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who gave us the first three thrilling movies and are now back together after 19 years for the fourth flick.
The movie, which is set in 1957, revolves around how Indiana Jones and Mutt evade the ruthless Soviets, follow an adventurous trail of mystery, fight with enemies and sometimes, even friends, to stop the powerful Crystal Skull from falling into the wrong hands.
The movie begins with Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) being captured by the Soviets. They take him and his assistant Mac (Ray Winstone) to a warehouse (remember Raiders of the Lost Ark?) to hunt for some artifacts. But Indian Jones as usual escapes from their clutches. But this adventure negatively affects his job in the Marshall College. He is forced to quit his job as a professor. During this time, he hears about the disappearance of his colleague Oxley (John Hurt). Oxley was searching for one of the most spectacular archeological finds in history -- the Crystal Skull of Akator, a legendary object of fascination, superstition and fear.
Indy then joins forces with rebellious young Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), who believes he knows the whereabouts of the skull. So the duo sets out for the most remote corners of Peru to find the skull. But they are not the only ones in this land of ancient tombs, forgotten explorers and a rumoured city of gold. Also interested in this crystal skull are Soviet agents. The agents are headed by an icy cold, devastatingly beautiful Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett). She, along with her military unit, is searching the globe for the fascinating Crystal Skull. The agents believe that with the skull and its secrets, they would be able to dominate the world.
The action sequences in the movie are simply spectacular and bring back memories of Raiders of the Last Ark. Harrison Ford, despite his age, brings to Indy the same vigour and power that he did almost two decades ago. The actor has completely immersed himself in the role and it is impossible to imagine any one else in the role. As the chief Dr. Spalko, Cate Blanchett is her sexiest and scariest best. Shia as Mutt is very good and proves a worthy accomplice to Indy's adventures.
John Hurt and Ray Winstone play their parts well. And, of course, there is Karen Allen who returns as Marion, Indian Jones' love interest. Age has not affected her energy and vigour and it is great to see her again
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Overall It was definitely worth the watch, and although it can never come close to The Temple Of Doom, nevertheless it was a great experience to be cherished!