Category: Movies

This movie had a lot of potential. A step away from the clichés of common Hong Kong Triad movies, but the movie ended in a very weird state, one that I couldn’t really comprehend. It also left many unanswered questions and there were actions with no reason. I originally was going to rate it as high as an 8, but dropped it back down to 6 when the movie ended in limbo.

IMDb: 5.8/10 (27 votes)
LoveHKFilm
LoveAsianFilm
Trailer
MY RATING: 6/10

Spoilers: (Show)

The movie starts of with the release of Yip Chau, who has been imprisoned in Thailand for 8 years. Before that he was a leader of a Hong Kong Triad. During these 8 years, he has been reading about economics and studying and planning what he’ll be doing when he gets out.

I’m not going to talk much about the storyline, as it basically was Yip Chau turning over a new leaf and how his past keeps catching back up to him. In the end, he basically disappears.

So there were a couple of people he really trusted. He borrowed a large sum of money from “The Professor”, a nick name of the leader of weapons/drugs dealer, promising double that amount in 2 years. Afterwards, he begins donating money to everything, doing charitable works, etc. He even starts his own finance company.

In the end, he fakes his death, and disappears from the world. And my question is, what the heck was his purpose?

He started out saying he wanted to test something, to test his plan that he had designed for the past 8 years. Obviously it worked to some point, but in the mean time, his friend goes into a coma and a police officer gets killed, which was so random may I add, as nothing really provoked it. What’s even worse is that he didn’t even see his friend who died trying to let him getaway one last time, but instead goes off and rescues a girl that he doesn’t even quite know that well. He also left everyone in the black, every single friend that was there with him.

Gwai Jai’s girlfriend also disappeared from the story after he dumps her.

Also, when the police broke into the lawyer’s house and took snapshots of letters and crap, they didn’t really use it. They didn’t even bother to use it to verify Yip Chau’s signature.

For the longest time, I though Yip Chau’s brother was the one who put the hit on him in Thailand. That was why he was crying that night when Yip Chau was about to get killed. That was why he never visited Yip Chau in prison. But that story really never got resolved either.

It was also obvious that Yip Chau was set up by his own lawyer to not let him go rescue the girl. However, that doesn’t get revealed at all either.

An interesting and decent documentary and I applaud him for his research, but his main quest throughout the movie wasn’t exactly exciting. This movie is about the MPAA and how they review movies and gives them ratings (i.e. R, PG13, etc). They have a bunch of good research and insight and how wrong our system is.

Official Site
IMDb: 7.9/10 (751 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B / Yahoo! Users:B-
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 83% / Average Rating: 7.2/10
IFC Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
MY RATING: 6.5/10

Due to the fact that the movie posters are NOT WORK SAFE, I’ll only be posting links:
This Film Is Not Yet Rated Poster 1
This Film Is Not Yet Rated Poster 2

Spoilers: (Show)

The overall theme of the story is how the MPAA, which strives to protect “our children” by having this movie rating system, is not transparent and clear on how they rate movies. There is no specific guidelines and it appears to be on the whim of the few reviewers that watch it. Even after a movie has been rated, there appears to be people who can overrule their decision.

Also, there is no set of guidelines of where the line between each rating is. How does one define when a movie can be PG-13 and when is rated R? Another interesting fact is that the MPAA doesn’t disclose any of the reviewers and makes it somewhat like a secret society. One of the film’s main quest is to expose all the current reviewers. I personally don’t really care who the reviewers are, unless they’re like some big shot studio CEO. If they’re just regular people working, I could care less. I mean I guess some people would like to know, but I’m more interested on the overall process, which they also do a very good job of.

What’s always been funny to me and they iterate this point over and over again, is the fact that they are much more lenient on violence than on sex. People can have their body parts chopped off, heads decapitated, and blood squirting everywhere and still get an R rating. But if people have sex in the wrong position or focus too long on the pleasure, they automatically get an NC-17. And as I found out, if you get an NC-17 rating, basically no theater will play your film as there just isn’t any audience for it. Seems somewhat backwards right?

When you get a specific rating, if they’re nice, they’ll tell you what you can cut and make it a lower rating. If they’re not feeling nice, they’ll just tell you that the overall movie felt like an NC-17 and leave you at that. There is an appeal process, which is even more funny. Apparently, you can try to state your case, but you’re not allowed to refer to any other movie. How the heck are you suppose to appeal if you can’t refer to other movies and their ratings? Also without a clear guideline on where the line is exactly between ratings, you’re on the whim of the appeal board, which are different from the reviewers. The director asked if he could know the people on this appeal board as any public appeal system should allow you to know who’ll be judging you. But apparently that’s a no-no too. Funny thing is, the appeals board is sat in by CEOs of theaters, movie studios, etc, basically Hollywood moguls.

A very very beautiful movie. It talks about the time after WWII where Germany was split between the East and West. The party that was ruling East Germany was known as the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or German Democratic Republic). They themselves had their form of NSA or KGB. This movie will tell you the story of a watcher and the person being watched.

Official Site
IMDb: 8.6/10 (2,039 votes)
Yahoo! Movies
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 94% / Average Rating: 8.2/10
Apple Trailer
MY RATING: 8.5/10

Spoilers: (Show)

This movie was really beautiful from all perspectives. The story was really beautiful; the cinematography was really beautiful; everything was just so beautiful.

It starts off with a scene show you the interrogation methods used to get people to talk. They wouldn’t let the person sleep, who you could tell was really tired. They would only let him sleep after he gave them what they wanted. This reminded me of the Nazi experiments performed where they figured out how long before a human dies due to lack of sleep. I can’t find the original page anymore, but I found this: Death Due To Sleep Deprivation. According to the Nazi studies, humans can last 264 hours without sleep before dying.

Anyway, back to the story. What you heard apparently was a recording of the actual interrogation. This ex-interrogator is now a professor. When a student questioned his methods as inhumane, he actually marked the student down, and one can imagined that he’d probably be watched from the remainder of his life.

The movie jumps into Georg Dreyman, a writer, and how the government doesn’t really like the ideas he’s been expressing. The government decides to “watch” him. So they tap his phone lines and listen and watch every movement that goes on in his house. This professor/ex-interrogator was asked to lead this project and bring him in the 1st moment he suspects anything that may be anti-government.

This man was pretty much for the party and the government and the whole socialist thing. But I think his switching point was when his boss told him to not write down anything between the minister and Georg Dreyman’s wife. The minister had been threatening to ban Dreyman and his wife’s (who’s an actor) from performing their works if she doesn’t have sex with him. The watcher asks why and he says it’s for the party and how they shouldn’t make the party look bad. So he started to feel sympathetic for the couple. He even meets up with the wife and convinces her to be true to herself and doesn’t have to give up her body in order to secure freedom to perform.

Dreyman continues to work within the boundaries of the rules, however when Alex his mentor killed himself, he sort of snapped. The government had pushed Alex to the point where the only way he could express himself was to kill himself. Dreyman decides to write an anti-government piece and gathers help from friends. They even test his house to see if it was tapped, but unfortunately, their plan fails in detecting that they’re being watched.

The editor of The Mirror comes and meets up with Dreyman and they discuss how the article was going to be written. He even brings in a tiny typewriter so it can be easily hidden in the event their house gets searched. For some strange reason, the typewriter had red ink. Meanwhile, the watcher falsely reports back on nothing’s really happening and that they’re just talking about the anniversary play script.

The article is finally published and the NSA/KGB people are really angry. They get an typewriter engineer to examine the original manuscript and the reports it’s a foreign typewriter and really tiny, but according to the experts, the form of the article most follows Dreyman’s writing. They contact the watcher, and the watcher says nothing of such sort happened. They arrest the wife and tries to make her talk and she broke quite easily and tells them the article was written by her husband. They barge into his house and search for the typewriter, but wasn’t able to find it. The watcher gives a sigh of relief.

The watcher gets pulled back to interrogate the wife and was told this was his last chance to recover the mission. I’m not sure if the wife didn’t recognize him or if she was playing dumb, but she gives him where the typewriter is located. The watcher rushes back first and takes the typewriter for himself. When the other NSA agents arrive, they find nothing again. The wife couldn’t bear the guilt and runs out onto the street and kills herself. What I didn’t get was why they released the wife before searching the house, as she could’ve returned fast enough to warn the husband and rehid the typewriter.

The watcher sees the car crashed into the wife and is left with a sense of guilt that he had ultimately caused this. The watcher was then reassigned to inspect mail (all incoming postal mail was opened, inspected, and resealed) for the next 20 years as punishment for failing the mission. Fortunately, the Berlin wall fell a little short of 5 years later.

Dreyman bumped into the minister during a play and the topic came up whey the NSA didn’t watch over Dreyman. The minister tells him that he was watched 24/7 and even the phone lines were tapped. Dreyman couldn’t believe it as all the anti-government meetings took place in his house. The NSA archives were also open (not sure if it was opened to the public or to specific people), but I would’ve thought they’d burn everything already. Dreyman looks up his data and there’s like 2 giant piles worth. He goes through them bit by bit, and can’t believe he was being watched all this time without knowing. He finally gets to the part where they talked about the anti-government article, and he could see the person writing the report had delicately changed everything to refer to the anniversary play. He’s thinking, whoever was watching him, purposely let him slip by.

He finally gets to the his wife’s confession and either he couldn’t believe that his wife betrayed him or the fact that it brought back the memory of his wife, he starts crying. The last entry was that nothing was found in the apartment during the 2nd raid, however, there was a red thumbprint on the report (from the red ink from the typewriter) and Dreyman realizes who had saved his butt once again. There was no name on the report, besides a agent code, but guess what, you could look up the agent’s name by giving them the code up front, another thing that was weird that didn’t sit right with me.

Dreyman locates the watcher, and the watcher was now delivery advertisements as his job. He wanted to go up and meet him, but I guess that would’ve been kind of weird. A couple years later, Dreyman releases a new book. The watcher sees the ad for his book in front of a book store. He goes in and opens the book and flips through a couple pages and on the 3rd page, it writes: “HGW XX/7 gewidmet, in Dankbarket.” It basically translates into “Dedicated to HGW XX/7”, where HGW XX/7 was his agent code.

I got this movie awhile back (as the ratings were pretty high), though what convinced me to watch it was a bunch of coworkers talking about it one day. A very intriguing low budget film. When I initially skimmed it, it didn’t look that interesting, but it has a very cult like sense to it, like what’s that film called, Donnie Darko.

I just realized I don’t think I’d ever give a film below a rating of 5. If it’s that low, I either stopped watching it midway or I would not bother to review it on my blog at all.

Official Site
IMDb: 7.7/10 (11,259 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B / Yahoo! Users: B
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 77% / Average Rating: 7/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com DVD
Amazon.com Soundtrack
MY RATING: 8/10

Spoilers: (Show)

For the longest time, I thought Brain was going to come out and stab him in the back. I thought he was the “king pin”, but not all my guesses are correct. He just felt like with his brain, he could be the king pin.

The premise is basically about a young high school boy Brendan trying to uncover why his girlfriend Emily died. Before she was killed, she had called him and told him 4 word: brick, pin, frisco, and tug. Look back at the conversation: “Look, I did what she said with the brick.” It really all becomes clear what really happened halfway through the movie. Though, by missing the keyword ‘she’, I didn’t figure it out till I saw the cigarette.

Basically, there’s a drug cartel, ran by high school students (which I guess if you can imagine, the the rest of the storyline flows pretty well). There’s the “pin” who’s in charge of things, and then there’s Tugger, who’s basically the muscles. Then there’s the beauty and you know what they say about beautiful women, their hearts are usually pure evil. Maybe that gave away too much already. This beauty’s actually played by that short brunette hair from Heroes. The cute one that got killed. Boooo. The beauty doesn’t seem to have a side, she’s playing both fields.

On Brendan’s side, there’s the Brian. He’s like some really smart kid, a nerd. He was introduced playing with the Rubik’s cube during lunch break.

As Brendan starts shaking some trees, pieces fall into place. You learn that Frisco got really sick because one of the bricks (cocaine or heroine) was bad. You also find out that Emily had a complicated relationship between Brendan, Tugger, and Bonehead(?). Emily was also pregnant or so the rumor says (though it doesn’t appear to really matter if she was or not).

Bit by bit, the story unravels and the cinematography was really neat, considering the budget. War breaks out, Tugger vs the Pin. Stick in that Brendan also works 3 sides (Tugger, Pin, AND the school staff), and you have a rather amazing story.

Excellent movie. One of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time. The movie was just the right length. Not too short where nothing is really told and not so long that you’ve wished it ended 4 or 5 endings ago. Though I would’ve wished the ending did show a bit more, but I guess that’s left to our imagination. I really had a hard time giving it a rating. It was between an 8 and 9, but I felt it didn’t deserve an 8, but wasn’t quite worthy of a 9 either. But all in all, a movie I’d definitely recommend seeing.

Official Site
IMDb: 8.1/10 (16,880 votes)
Yahoo! Movies: The Critics: B+ / Yahoo! Users: B
Rotten Tomatoes: Rating: 91% / Average Rating: 8/10
Apple Trailer
Amazon.com Book
Amazon.com Showtimes
Amazon.com Soundtrack
Amazon.com Score
MY RATING: 8.5/10

Spoilers: (Show)

Story takes place in 2027 I believe and this was in the day and age when for some reason, women were no longer fertile. The movie starts off with a news report telling you that the youngest person (age 18 and change I believe) has just been killed. Most people were really upset over the news. Most countries seemed to have already killed themselves. London seems to be the only place on earth that still had much of a civilization. People would try to immigrate into there (legally and illegally). Most “fugees” as they were called, were usually deported or locked in concentration camps.

London was also a police state, where most things were controlled by force. There was an anti-government group called FISH (or maybe PHISH) which was led by Julianne Moore, ex-wife of Clive Owens. They used to have a son, but he died during the flu pandemic, and I guess that was the reason for them to break apart.

Moore comes to ask Owens a favor. He needed his help to get transit papers for a women that apparently was pregnant. There was another group called the Human Project (what they do, I’m not sure), but I’m guessing they’re similar to FISH. They were in the midst of transporting her when project UPRISING was initiated. Several members of FISH felt that the baby should stay with them, to support their cause. Having a baby in their hands would mean many more people would join their fight. However, Moore was against this and was killed.

The pregnant lady, Kee I believe, is a funny one. Every remark she makes is rather witty, given her situation. Kee tells Owens that Moore choose him because he was the only one she could really trust, and he proved to her that he was the only one trustable.

Zoom past the escaping and the trying to meet the Human Project, they sneak into a concentration camp. The FISH people follow. Kee went into labor and the baby was born ahead of schedule (8 months). The baby was like Jesus, and I think that’s what the director or author wanted you to view him as. Earlier in the story, Owens asks Kee who the father was, and she responds that she was a virgin (rather seriously). See what I mean when I said she was witty. She cracks up and tells him she doesn’t even remember the names of the wankers anymore.

However, when the people in the concentration camp realized there was a baby, everyone wanted to see him, everyone wanted to touch him. It was like they were experiencing a miracle. When the rebels heard the baby crying, the let Kee and Owens walk by. When the army heard the baby, they yelled “CEASE FIRE!” over and over again. Every soldier stopped in their tracks and looked at the baby. One even kneel down and did that cross over their chest thingy. Like I said, it was like they had just saw Jesus.

Soon after, the fighting continues and Owens and Kee escapes. Owens brings Kee to the meeting point, but because he was shot earlier, he bleeds to death. The last thing you see is Tomorrow, the Human Project’s ship. Like I said, it would’ve been nice if they showed a glimpse of the future, but I guess leaving that to imagination is pretty good too.

For more up-to-date instructions, please visit HD-Trailers.net

<update>

For simplified instructions, see: Tutorial: Download from Apple

I’ve also added instructions to download HD trailers from Yahoo! Movies: Tutorial: Download from Yahoo!

Finally, I’ve made a simple and elegant page to make downloading HD trailers super easy:
HD-Trailers.net

</update>

So Quicktime sucks and is a horrible video player. That’s why there’s VLC and Media Player Classic with Quicktime Alternative. However, HD trailers on Apple.com forces you to use Quicktime to watch the HD versions. However, the decoding of the video is so poorly done, I can’t even watch 480p through Quicktime.

So a year back or so, I decided to figure out a way to download these High Definition trailers so I can watch them through VLC or MPC. I believe with VLC, you don’t need the QT alternative codec, but with MPC or WMP, you do. Anyway, if you go to an HD trailer page, e.g. Apple – Trailers – Breach- HD, you’ll usually see 3 buttons: 480p, 720p, and 1080p. My machine’s not fast enough to decode their 1080p, so I always opt for the 720p version. Trailers are usually a couple hundred megs, depending on how long it is. When I showed Derek this trick, he noticed that even though trailers said 1080p, they were hardly ever 1920×1080, usually something a bit smaller.

Anyway, once you’re on an HD trailer page:

1. Go to view source (CTRL+U in Firefox)
2. Search for 720p or 1080p (or 480p if you want) and it’s the 2nd hit you want.
3. You’ll find something close to this:
   QT_WriteOBJECT_XHTML(‘http://movies.apple.com/trailers/images/hd_btn2_720p.mov’, ’67’, ’24’, ”, ‘bgcolor’, ‘FFFFFF’, ‘controller’, ‘false’, ‘href’, ‘http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/breach/breach-tlr1_720p.mov‘, ‘target’, ‘QuickTimePlayer’);
4. The 1st hit (i.e. hd_btn2_720p.mov) is just the image of the button. The 2nd hit (i.e. breach-tlr1_720p.mov) is actually a file that points to where the real trailer is ‘hidden’.
5. Take the 2nd URL and add an h between the _ and the resolution:
   From: http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/breach/breach-tlr1_720p.mov
   To: http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/breach/breach-tlr1_h720p.mov
   For 1080p, it would be:
   http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/breach/breach-tlr1_h1080p.mov
6. Next you can enter that URL into your browser and save it when it finishes downloading or whatever. I usually just use wget which came with Cygwin

Before, I used to keep all the trailers on my HDD:

Directory of F:\Downloads\apple trailers

16_blocks_h720p.mov
300-journal_5_h480p.mov
accepted_h720p.mov
aeon_flux_h720p.mov
akeelahandthebee-tlr2a_h720p.mov
alpha_dog_h720p.mov
american_hardcore_h720p.mov
an_american_haunting_h720p.mov
apocalypto-tsr1_h720p.mov
art_school_confidential-tlr_h720p.mov
atl_h720p.mov
a_scanner_darkly-tlr2_h720p.mov
babel_h720p.mov
basic_instinct_2_h720p.mov
black_dahlia_h720p.mov
cars-tlr_1_h720p.mov
cars-tsr4_h720p.mov
children_of_men-tlr1_h720p.mov
click-tlr1_h720p.mov
da_vinci_code-tsr2_h720p.mov
devilanddanieljohnston_h720p.mov
district_b13_h720p.mov
downinthevalley_h720p.mov
eight_below_h720p.mov
employeeofthemonth-tlr2a_h720p.mov
fast_food_nation_h720p.mov
firewall-tlr1_h720p.mov
friends_with_money_h720p.mov
ghost_rider-tsr-intl_h720p.mov
ghost_rider-tsr_h720p.mov
goal_h720p.mov
guys_and_balls_h720p.mov
happy_feet-tlr2a_h720p.mov
happy_feet_h720p.mov
hard_candy_h720p.mov
hoot-tlr1_h720p.mov
hoot-tsr_h720p.mov
house_of_sand_h720p.mov
ice_age_2-tlrD_h720p.mov
imax-deep_sea_h720p.mov
joyeux_noel_h720p.mov
ladyinthewater-tlr2_h720p.mov
ladyinthewater-tlr3_h720p.mov
ladyinthewater_h720p.mov
lamujerdemihermano_h720p.mov
larrythecableguy_h720p.mov
lastkingofscotland_h720p.mov
leonard_cohen_h720p.mov
little_miss_sunshine-tlr_h720p.mov
little_miss_sunshine_h720p.mov
lost_city_h720p.mov
l_enfant_h720p.mov
madeas_family_reunion-tlr2a_h720p.mov
meet_the_robinsons-tsr_h720p.mov
miami_vice-tlr2_h720p.mov
mission_impossible_3-sb_h720p.mov
monster_house-tlr1_h720p.mov
night_watch-tlra_h720p.mov
one_last_thing_h720p.mov
open_season-rev_h720p.mov
open_season-tlr2_h720p.mov
over_the_hedge-tlr1_h720p.mov
over_the_hedge-tsr2a_h720p.mov
peaceful_warrior_h720p.mov
phat_girlz-tlra_h720p.mov
poseidon-intl_tlr_h720p.mov
poseidon-tlr2_h720p.mov
poseidon-tlr3a_h720p.mov
pulse-tlr2_h720p.mov
pulse-tlr3_h720p.mov
quinceanera-tlr_h720p.mov
ratatouille-tsr1_h720p.mov
renaissance_h720p.mov
ridingalonefor1000sofmiles_h720p.mov
roving_mars_h720p.mov
rv-tlr_h720p.mov
school_for_scoundrels_h720p.mov
see_no_evil_h720p.mov
silent_hill_h720p.mov
sketchesoffrankgehry_h720p.mov
spider-man_3-tsr_h720p.mov
stay_alive_h720p.mov
stick_it_h720p.mov
summer_storm_h720p.mov
superman_returns-tlr1_h720p.mov
superman_returns-tlr2_h720p.mov
talladega_nights-tsr_h720p.mov
tcm_thebegining_h720p.mov
thankyouforsmoking_h720p.mov
thehillshaveeyes_h720p.mov
thesantaclause3-tlr1_h720p.mov
thescienceofsleep_h720p.mov
theusvsjohnlennon_h720p.mov
the_benchwarmers_h720p.mov
the_departed-tlr1a_h720p.mov
the_departed-tlr1b_h720p.mov
the_descent_h720p.mov
the_fountain-tlr1_h720p.mov
the_fountain-tsr_h720p.mov
the_italian_h720p.mov
the_lake_house_h720p.mov
the_namesake_h720p.mov
the_night_listener_h720p.mov
the_omen_666-tlrb_h720p.mov
the_pink_panther-tlr2_h720p.mov
the_prestige_h720p.mov
the_promise_h720p.mov
the_quiet_h720p.mov
the_shaggy_dog_h720p.mov
the_wicker_man_h720p.mov
the_wild_h720p.mov
tmnt-tlr1_h720p.mov
trust_the_man_h720p.mov
united_93-fte_h720p.mov
united_93_h720p.mov
viva_pedro_h720p.mov
volver_h720p.mov
v_for_vendetta-tlr2_h720p.mov
whenastrangercalls_h720p.mov
whokilledtheelectriccar_h720p.mov
wolf_creek-internet_tlr_h720p.mov
world_trade_center-tlr1_h720p.mov
xmenthelaststand_h720p.mov

123 File(s) 11,848,500,131 bytes
2 Dir(s) 51,537,440,768 bytes free

But then I decided that it wasn’t really worth keeping all these trailers, since I hardly ever rewatch them, so they went bye bye one day.

I usually visit the Apple Trailers site once or twice a month and watch all the trailers. For the trailers that have HD, I just paste all the links into notepad and do a replace all like:

wget http://images.apple.com/movies/disney/bridge_to_terabithia/bridge_to_terabithia-tlr1_h720p.mov http://images.apple.com/movies/sony/offside/offside_h720p.mov http://images.apple.com/movies/universal/the_good_shepherd/the_good_shepherd-tlr2_h720p.mov http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/harry_potter-phoenix/harry_potter_phoenix-tlr1_h720p.mov http://images.apple.com/movies/lionsgate/happily_never_after/happily_never_after_h720p.mov http://images.apple.com/movies/wb/lettersfromiwojima/lettersfromiwojima_h720p.mov

Update: Apple made an adjustment to deal with the Avatar trailer traffic which only allows QuickTime to download trailers directly. Please refer to this blog post for more details and workarounds: Direct Download Links from Apple Are Not Working. Here’s to hoping it’s only temporary.

Update #2: Apple links work when you change the domain from movies.apple.com to www.apple.com. For most up-to-date instructions, please visit HD-Trailers.net