International Flair

1) The Sea Inside (directed by Alejandro Amenabar): Rating 8/10

No matter what movie Amenabar makes in the future, I will duly watch his work. Why? Because a man who can make conceive such movies as Thesis, Open Your Eyes and The Others is no ordinary film-maker. With The Sea Inside, Amenabar changes gears and goes for a dramatic movie as opposed to a thriller. But as Amenabar mentions in the DVD his fourth movie still contains the notion of death, like his previous three movies. This time however, it is a question of having the right to die – Euthanasia. The movie is based on the true story of Ramon Sampedro, a man who lost the use of his limbs during a swimming accident at the age of 19. Since then, Ramon has wanted to die. The movie picks up 26 years after that incident and Ramon still persists in ending his life. His requests are constantly denied by the courts. So finally, he hires a lawyer who has a physical disability hoping that she can help him, that she can understand his frustration of being bed-ridden and not being able to move.

The movie contains engaging performances by all the actors; Javier Bardem (as Ramon) plays his role wonderfully. The cinematography is just excellent, especially the camera work when Ramon imagines himself flying through the Galician skies. My only complaint is that the movie was 20 minutes longer than it should be. This is a fact that both writers (Amenabar and Mateo Gill) acknowledge in their interviews as well. But both felt that this movie had to be this long to show all the aspects of Ramon’s life – his writing, his accident, the women in his life, his daily struggle with the authorities, etc. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting movie which highlights a sensitive topic – assisted suicide.

2) Days of Being Wild (1991 movie directed by Kar-Wai Wong): Rating 7/10

Unlike Wong Kar-Wai’s other movies (Chunking Express, In the Mood for Love), I was not bowled over by this effort. Sure it is a simple story told at a leisurely pace but I just didn’t find it interesting enough. The story starts off with a bored young man (Leslie Cheung) stopping by a food/drink stand. The young man, Yuddy, takes a liking to the girl working there (Su Lizhen, played by Maggie Cheung). Yuddy duly asks her out, and after sleeping with her, dumps her. That is how Yuddy is -- he moves from one woman to another. Afterwards, he goes to threaten his mother’s boyfriend (over a pointless pretext) and picks a fight with him. While smashing stuff at the club, he asks the by standing exotic dancer out. When Su Lizhen discovers Yuddy’s affair, she is dejected and leaves him. Andy Lau plays a police officer who takes a liking to Su Lizhen and tries to console her after witnessing Yuddy’s behavior. Eventually Yuddy tires of the exotic dancer and leaves her as well. She is distraught and finds it hard to come to terms. In the meantime, Yuddy decides to leave to the Philippines where his anger gets him into trouble with some gangsters. What follows are sequences that I felt could have been left on the editing table.

On the plus sides, the movie has a soothing background score with good mood cinematography (rainy streets, dreary rooms, picturesque Philippines landscape, etc).

3) House of Fury (directed by Stephen Fung): Rating 8/10

Spy Kids meets Kung-Fu. A retired secret agent tries to keep a low profile by running a medical centre. He has spent his life raising his kids by telling them stories of his secret agent days, his adventurous exploits. When the kids were younger, they believed his stories. But after their mother passed away, the kids just considered their father’s tales as make-believe and nonsense. Now in their teens, the kids can’t stand their father – they find him annoying. One day, the father disappears. When his son goes to his father’s office, he finds everything broken. He stumbles into his father’s secret office where he sees proof of his father’s secret agent days. Everything starts to make sense now to the son. All those years of martial art training by his father, his father’s advice, etc seem to fall into place. When the son goes to tell his sister about all this, he finds that she is being attacked. The two kids manage to escape and start to go about finding the truth. Where is their father? Why are people after them? What follows is an entertaining action movie where the two kids (the son is played by Director Stephen Fung) manage to fight their way to the truth.