Ip Man: Review

Aight ya'll sing it with me.. Everybody wants kung fu fighting.. Hoo!

Ip Man is some sort of a biographical film about the legendary master of Wing Chun in China and is also prominent for being the teacher of Bruce Lee. The film follows Ip Man's rise to prominence in the 1930's and the struggle he faces with his family during the Japanese occupation.

You know.. If I am ever getting myself into a bar fight, Imma make sure that Ip Man is my drinking buddy. Cause damn this man kicks some serious ass in this movie. The movie has some of the most intense and well choreographed fight scenes I have seen in a long time. Casting Donnie Yen to play Ip Man was a really great choice. This guy is the total shits!

He's a fantastic actor and he does a great job in this. I'm not sure how close his portrayal was to the real Ip Man but I bought his character as a man who feels like Wing Chun is a dying art and though it's his responsibility to pass the art on, he doesn't want to sacrifice his relationship with his family to do so. But that changes in the character when the Japanese comes and we then see Ip Man losing everything and really doesn't give a shit anymore.

 

  

There is once scene where Ip Man's taking on 10 fighters and this dude practically snaps one of the fighters leg out of it's socket. I kid you not. And then he goes and hails a billion punches one after another on some poor guy's face. But what made all of this really frightening was the look on Donnie Yen's face. He had no soul in his eyes, and it almost felt like Ip Man was enjoying it. I'm scared of Donnie Yen hahaha.

I love the cinematography of the film. In the first part it's very clean with shades red and gold to symbolize the renaissance age of kung fu in China. Then it transitions to gritty, harsh and gray once the Japanese takes over to signify the loss of innocence in the land. And it all helps make that transition of the movie from a happy movie into a violent one. And the score of the film is pretty great to. Especially for the fight scenes, it adds that extra oomph to the scenes.

And there is a chick in this movie who plays Ip Man's wife. I got her name right here.. Lynn Hung. Damn she's fine. It's really sad that she doesn't have much scenes in this movie and is more or less a pretty backdrop in the film.

But one thing that I would complain about the movie is the portrayal of the Japanese army in the film. We get a sense that these people have no soul whatsoever and are only doing this for pleasure. We get scenes where they are literally bashing children and making up this gladiator kind of match ups where their karatekas are beating poor ordinary folk for pleasure. C'mon......

Fantastic kung fu movie, hope they make an Ip Man 2 and have Ip Man vs. The Hulk or something hahahaha.

RATING: 7/10

2009 Oscar Nominations Are Out! And I'm Pissed!

What the hell? This is the biggest bunch of bull I've seen from the Academy. What the hell? The Dark Knight was completely left out from the top categories. No Best Picture, no Best Director, not even the bloody screenplay.

Sure it still got 8 nominations but it does not do The Dark Knight justice. You know why they left The Dark Knight out? Because it wasn't artsy enough or dramatic enough or maybe just because it's freaking based on a comic book. I mean, give credit where it's due man. The Dark Knight Is the best film of 2008. Nothing can even compare. It was the most talked about, it earned the most and it's the most raved about. This makes no freaking sense at all.

But I won't complain much about the other Best Picture nominees cause I've seen all of them and they're all great. Except for The Reader which totally doesn't deserve to be nominated. It's just not as good as the other films.

Now with The Dark Knight out of the running, I'm all for Slumdog to win. Anyways, here is the complete set of nominees and who I think should win and who I predict will win.

BEST MOTION PICTURE

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Who will win?: Slumdog Millionaire. Benjamin Button and The Reader can suck my genitals

BEST DIRECTOR

Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire)
Stephen Daldry (The Reader)
David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)

Who will win?: Danny Boyle. The best genre director ever.

BEST ACTOR

Richard Jenkins (The Visitor)
Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon)
Sean Penn (Milk)
Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler)

Who should win?: Sean Penn. He made me like gay people
Who will win?: Mickey Rourke. No problems with him winning either but Sean Penn was still the best.

BEST ACTRESS

Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married)
Angelina Jolie (Changeling)
Melissa Leo (Frozen River)
Meryl Streep (Doubt)
Kate Winslet (The Reader)

Who should win?: Anne Hathaway. I never knew she could act that well.
Who will in?: Kate Winslet. Yea yea same old emo faced Kate Winslet bla bla bla.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Josh Brolin (Milk)
Robert Downey Jr (Tropic Thunder)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt)
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road)

Who should and will win? You know lah.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams (Doubt)
Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona)
Viola Davis (Doubt)
Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler)


Who should win?: Marisa Tomei. Cause she flashed her boobs like no bodies business. She's hot.

BEST ANIMATED FILM

Bolt
Kung Fu Panda
Wall-E

Who should win: Waltz With Bashir. It should have at least been nominated to.
Who will win?: Obvious right.

Original Screenplay

Dustin Lance Black, Milk
Courtney Hunt, Frozen River
Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky
Martin McDonagh, In Bruges
Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon, WALL-E

No comment

Adapted Screenplay

Eric Roth and Robin Swicord, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
John Patrick Shanley, Doubt
Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon
David Hare, The Reader
Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire

Who should win?: Slumdog Millionaire. "Maximum pineapple!"

Best Foreign Language Film of the Year

The Baader Meinhof Complex (Germany)
The Class (France)
Departures (Japan)
Revanche (Austria)
Waltz With Bashir (Israel)


Who should win?: Waltz With Bashir

Original Score

Alexandre Desplat, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
James Newton Howard, Defiance
Danny Elfman, Milk
A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire
Thomas Newman, WALL-E

Who should win?: A.R. Rahman. Enough dramatic violin scores. Let modern tempo win for once

Original Song

"Down to Earth," Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman; WALL-E
"Jai Ho," A.R. Rahman and Gulzar; Slumdog Millionaire
"O Saya," A.R. Rahman and Maya Arulpragasam; Slumdog Millionaire

Who will win?: Jai Ho. Damn beautiful song. Even more catchy then HSM.

Achievement in Art Direction

Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Duchess
Revolutionary Road

Achievement in Cinematography

Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Achievement in Costume Design

Australia
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Duchess
Milk
Revolutionary Road

Best Documentary Feature

The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
Encounters at the End of the World
The Garden
Man on Wire
Trouble the Water

Best Documentary Short Subject

The Conscience of Nhem En
The Final Inch
Smile Pinki
The Witness—From the Balcony of Room 306

Achievement in Film Editing

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

Achievement in Makeup

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

Best Animated Short Film 

La Maison en Petits Cubes
Lavatory—Lovestory
Oktapodi
Presto
This Way Up

Best Live Action Short Film

Auf der Strecke (On the Line)
Manon on the Asphalt
New Boy
The Pig
Spielzeugland (Toyland)

Achievement in Sound Editing

The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Slumdog Millionaire
WALL-E
Wanted

Achievement in Sound Mixing

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Slumdog Millionaire
WALL-E
Wanted

Achievement in Visual Effects

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man

Slumdog Millionaire: Review

 

The Malaysian government may not have the cojones to put Slumdog Millionaire in theatres but Limewire sure does!

Slumdog Millionaire baby! If you had a childrens version of Cidade de Deus, you'll get Slumdog. It's a movie about a guy named Jamal Malik, who practically has the worst life ever. His life sucks. He saw his mom killed in front of him by anti-Muslim zealots, almost had his eyes plucked out a few months later and has a gangster for a brother who sold the love of his life into prostitution. So to try and get her to notice him, Jamal goes on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and because of the events of his life......... he knows all the answers.

This is my first Bollywood movie and it was awesome! Besides the fact that I thought it was really stupid that he knew all the answers, I felt that Slumdog Millionaire was brilliant. It just makes you fall in love with it with the story of the main character but at the same time, it rips your heart out when you see all this shitty stuff happen to him. It's really brutal to watch but charming at the same time.

This movie is really fun to watch. Even teens who can't take all these art films would be entertained because of the modern-tempo direction of this film has. And this movie used the hell out of M.I.A's Paper Plane song. They played it over and over.

Anyways, Slumdog was fun to watch. We see lots of great moments like when he's trying to get an autograph from a Bollywood star, pretending to be a tour guide at the Taj Mahal to earn money and steal tourist's shoes to when theres a riot going on and people were dying. I mean, this film goes from very sweet and funny to very tragic at the same time.

And also very gross to. There's a scene where Jamal practically dives into a pile of shit. On one hand, your stomach will churn just like it did when you saw 2 Girls 1 Cup but you will still laugh your ass off.

It's a really well made movie, I enjoyed the hell out of it. And rightly so, it's been generating a lot of unlikely Oscar buzz. And, just like all Bollywood movies, they end with a dance sequence. By far, Slumdog is my 3rd best film of 2008. Number 1 is obviously The Dark Knight and Number 2's review is coming real soon.

RATING: 8/10

Cicakman 2 Planet Hitam: Review

WTF man! I paid RM7 for this piece of shit? Hey KRU Studios, go to hell!!

This movie was terrible! And for whatever reason known to mankind, I still paid to watch it. ARGH! Why? Why do they do this to me?? This show reminded me of why I never watch Malaysian films.

So Cicakman 2- Black Planet is the follow up to "Malaysia's highest grossing film of all-time" Cicakman. It's about Cicakman's arch-nemesis Dr. Klon coming back to destroy all of Metrofulus. God even the setting's name had to be unoriginal. So Dr. Klon plans to turn all the Earth's water into black stuff in 72 hours (yeah, turning 80% of the planet's composition into black goo in 3 days sounds very convincing, especially since it's coming from a technology-ridden place like Malaysia) And with all the nuclear weapons US, Russia, North Korea etc. etc has, the only person the world turns to is a loser named Saiful Apek that eats flies. Catch my drift?

Calling this fuck up a comedy is an embarrassment to the genre. It's like a Malaysian version of Meet The Spartans. Every joke has to be introduced to the audience like they are too stupid to get the jokes without Cicakman telling them to laugh. Then again, this movie was intended for Malays.

 

And it's like every character had their balls pulled 1 cm from it's original position. There's this two guys called the Ginger Ghosts or something (which is a clear ripoff from the white Matrix guys) and all they do is scream at high pitched voices. Why? Because the writers have no other way of making the movie funny.

Oh shit did I say writers? Sorry sorry sorry. No freakin body wrote shit! There was no plot, no good dialogue, just shit! These guys had the nerve, they had the audacity! To put at the end of the credits "Ditulis oleh Yusry Abdul Halim." Hey, news flash you losers, there are thousands of aspiring filmmakers who could write a much better movie than you at half the price of your budget.

Oh what's the budget you ask? Try RM2.5 million. TWO MILLION RINGGIT! Smart, so our government puts us through months of high priced petrol, increases food prices, but still could find RM2.5 million to burn for this piece of shit. And guess what? The Cicakman suit alone costs RM50, 000. WTF?! That porn star rubber outfit costs more than my entire degree course!!

This whole film industry is a joke. Every bit of it is pathetic. Look at all the shit they've made. The last good movie to come out of this hell hole was Sepet and even then, the whole film industry condemned it. They have no idea what good movies are but they are too dumb to realize it under all that Datukship titles and money.

And one more thing. And I don't mean to be racist but why are there no non-Malay actors in this whole entire movie? Not even the extras in the background. Even the only Chinese character in the movie was played by a Malay. Wheres the multi-racial country our government keeps talking about? What kind of image are you trying to portray to foreign countries? That Malaysia consists of Malays only? Would it hurt that much to put in an Indian guy walking in the background? No all must be Malay

And I know what they say, "Oh, don't take this shit so seriously, not all movies have to be art, it can just be stuff people enjoy and laugh at," Then make me laugh you overrated sons of bitches! The only laughs I had in this movie was those kind of "I can't believe they passed this as a movie laugh."

You know how pedophiles aren't allowed to go near children? Well I want these motherfuckers get a restraining order against going anywhere near a video camera, visual photography camera, handycam, anything that can capture moving pictures. They should not make another film ever again!

RATING: 0/10