The English Patient (1996) Review

“Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.”

     I saw the English Patient about nine times when it was first released in the cinemas. It was the most mesmerizing cinematic experiences I ever had and it left a stain inside me. I was tormented with the pain and anguish Ralph Fiennes character went through. Years later, I finally watched it again. I fell in love with the English Patient even more. It touched me so deeply that I considered it the best film ever made for a long while because I learned to respect it even more since I could relate. We all had a love that is by no means forgotten and its distributed intimacy only a dream. The English Patient shares such ideals of the risks we are prepared to take. The jeopardy to dream and to live such a dream.

    Every actor provided a subtle performance filled with depth and history. The audience feels their emotions, whether it be an adoring lust or excruciating suffering. The best thing in the film was Ralph Fiennes delicate performance in this masterpiece of a film. He plays Almasy, a man who falls in love gradually but ever so intensely with Katherine. As he opens his heart he leaps into this forbidden affair. The most touching tear-jerking scene for me will forever be when Almasy carries his hurt love and he noticed a thimble he bought her around her neck. He points it out in which she responds, “I’ve always worn it, I’ve always loved you” and right after she tells him this he begins to cry with such a pain flowing from inside his inner being. Of course the music really helped with this scene’s emotional journey. The English Patient is one of the most striking and heartbreaking romances ever to be written and put on film. It beyond a doubt will disturb and captivate you long after it’s over.

    This is one of the better films made within the past twenty years. So I don’t comprehend why several people are so against this film. Immediately people point out that it was way too long, but what they don’t realize that there were a number of fantastic films that were “way too long”. Such films include The Godfather, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, etc. The original cut of the film was four hours and ten minutes, so the edited version was two hours and forty-five minutes is not horrific. The audience wouldn't have received an impact if it were only ninety minutes.

     It’s a broad epic much similar to Titanic’s approach, but The English Patient is much more established and touching. It has a certain type of cinematic poetry much like Cinema Paradiso, that I hardly ever see enough of in films today. This film should be a part of any cinema lover’s film collection. It’s pacing may be slow, yet it’s satisfying, the viewer finds themselves folded up in it and by the end they can’t look away. It’s a modern day Casablanca. Not to be missed! 

4.7 out of 5

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) review

      I have been a Tintin fan ever since I first saw the cartoon when I was a small child. Years passed and I discovered the comics along with finding the complete animated series (which was bootlegged). I read the Tintin comics innumerable times, so I’d call myself a fan of Tintin. When I first saw the trailer to the film, by god I was thrilled. After reading some good reviews on the film, I decided to go see it in IMAX 3D with some friends, I thought it would be at least okay… I was dead wrong. I watched it… *sigh* it was god awful. A very poorly made film indeed. It’s a film for insomniacs because if you have difficulty falling asleep, this film would lend a hand. Actually half the people were asleep in the cinema. I tried to watch it, I very much wanted to like it, and my friends wanted to like it too but they were uninterested. For it is boring, irritating, motionless, and just plain annoying much like Tintin himself in the film.

  The film is a total disaster. Come on Hollywood! It’s the 21st century and you guys are still passing garbage like this as a movie? What happened to the good animated films like The Iron Giant and My Neighbor Totoro (which I will do reviews on soon)?!

   There are many things that made this film rubbish. 1) The story is empty, so imagine it’s a Michael Bay film. 2) The characters! This is where I hated the film the most. The villain Sakharine was never a villain in the series, simply an art collector. 3) The editing! The development of the story was ruined with rushed pace and all the action scenes. 4) The visuals aren’t spectacular; Polar Express was much better visual wise. 5) Sadly the music had nothing special to it. It was so sad to see, one of the greatest composers of our time, John Williams doing something that felt like he didn’t care.

   Spielberg and Jackson’s luck ran out with this so called film. I wanted to imagine that all of it was just a bad dream gone wrong so it doesn’t ruin the comics and classic animated series for me. For most Tintin fans, this will be a major disappointment. This film brought back terrifying memories of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It just made no sense; Spielberg blew it up big time. Spielberg, Jackson, and everyone involved should be embarrassed of themselves. To take such a masterpiece and turn into this typical Hollywood form of nothing. It’s a shameless massacre of my childhood memories. 

2 out of 5

Cinema Paradiso (1988) Review

“Life isn't like in the movies. Life... is much harder.”

     Cinema Paradiso is one of those rare films that I relate to on such a personal level. There are few films that have such a power over me. I have never been so emotionally affected like I am with this film. That final scene truly tears my soul apart and my eyes become instant waterfalls. When people ask me what the film is about I simply say, “it’s about a man who must choose between two things. The girl he loves or his love of film”, but it’s so much more than that. Cinema Paradiso is about friendship, how the cinema can affect us, and our first true relationships that are filled with passion. 

   The story centers on Salvatore who is a young boy that matures slowly as he discovers lessons about life, develops a hunger for cinema, falls in love with a girl during his teen years, and later in life is rewarded with being a famous filmmaker; yet, he stays unsatisfied without true love only to receive a gift of love that surpasses death, space, and time to be discovered in the final scene. Don’t get me started on the music, my god this film has the best score. It puts most films to shame. Cinema Paradiso can cause you to laugh or cry. It portrays those innocently pure emotions and feelings such as: love, fear, sorrow, remorse, the longing of wanting to go back to our youth, experiencing memories of places that are there no more, and the painful recollections of loved ones who are no longer with us. Most films are simply there just to entertain or scare the audience. Then there is this film. A film that is there to affect your feelings and to make you remember things you may have forgotten by the time the end credits roll. There are two different versions of the film: the original theatrical version and the extended edition. Watch the original first then the extended and make sure you bring a box of tissues for you will cry. 

5 out of 5

달콤한 인생 AKA A Bittersweet Life (2005) Review

   South Korean films have always had a soft spot in my heart. They know how to make films and sometimes they put Hollywood to shame. Like with this film, A Bittersweet Life. This film will make you open up your mind and make you question humanity itself.  A Bittersweet Life is a visual work of art which is something rare in gangster films. This film turned violence into a thing of beauty, that’s something rarely seen.  The tale to the film walks a complicated and tasteful tightrope connecting philosophy and aggression, expression and carelessness.

    Sun-Woo played by the multi-talented Byung-hun Lee (J.S.A, The Good the Bad and the Weird) is the anti-hero of the story. He is lonely, serious, calm, sophisticated, and an unpopular enforcer who has served his boss Kang, a brutal gangster, for seven years without a single complaint when he does Kang’s dirty work. Sun-Woo is seen as the most trusted of Kang’s men. Kang has a job for his most trusted man because he knows Sun-Woo has never been in love or even had a lover. Kang’s precise orders are to watch over his girlfriend while he’s away and to execute her if Sun-Woo discovers she is having an affair, the coming drama is quite obvious.  She indeed is having an affair and Sun-Woo makes a critical decision not to kill her which relied on his personal judgment in disagreement with his boss’s. When Kang finds out he feels like a father betrayed for the first time. Kang pursues the procedure of the underworld and makes a decision on punishing Sun-Woo who has been like a son to him. Before Kang goes through with the punishment, he asks Sun-Woo why he betrayed him, in which Sun-Woo responds “I thought if she promised never to cheat on you, everything would go back to normal, everything will be okay.” Kang pauses and asks if he had fallen for her. Sun-Woo goes quiet almost perplexed. As the punishment is about to happen he realizes that throughout his whole life of never finding love he falls for his boss’s girlfriend. He feels like his boss is insulting him. When the boss leaves, Sun-Woo breaks away from custom by declining his punishment and escapes by fighting lots of his boss’s men. Now the film turns into a quest of vengeance against his boss’s men and his boss.  In this bittersweet world full of sorrow and calamity there is space for comedic moments, particularly the scenes where Sun-Woo tries to buy guns from some unskilled gangsters. I won’t get more into the story for I might give it away.

   The action scenes were beautifully choreographed, in particular the escape fight scene and the climatic finale fight scene. Numerous of the scenes portraying brutality and fights are well positioned into the film to illustrate delicate emotional transformations of Sun-Woo and the unanticipated circumstances he stumbles upon. Nevertheless, director Kim Ji-woon explains them extremely precise as beautiful photographs at times can be very romantic, which is far from those gruesome gunfights we learn to expect from gangster films. Particularly the use of the lighting makes it very sensitive and creative. Ji-woon indeed has an astonishing artistic intellect; his direction is a spectacle to behold. He made the ending open to the viewer for their own personal interpretation which is quite enjoyable.

  A Bittersweet Life has been compared to Scorsese and Tarantino and it should, but it maintains itself firm in its own credibility. 9.1 out of 10

DRIVE (2011) Review

(Sorry I haven't written anything in a while)

  What happens when a film has chase sequences that Steve McQueen would be proud of, great performances, pumps the adrenaline, ultra-violent much like a 1980s neo noir, remarkably fresh, and is like Black Swan in overdrive? Well you get one of the major surprises in film of 2011, Drive. It overflowed with critical praise and became an immediate cult classic.  It absolutely deserved more than one Oscar nomination. The film is the finest of its sort. No one can truthfully judge it against any film because it is beyond a doubt that different. If the viewer is searching for a regular action film or searching for a striking love story, this is not the film for the viewer. Drive is definitely not for everybody. What begins as a calm film develops into authentic scenes of carnage accompanied by a fantastic score which goes perfectly with every scene. If the viewer can handle the bloodbath then they should see this film. Drive is in every way a different, surreal, unforgettable, fresh, fun, beautiful, revolting, mesmerizing, thrilling, and striking film due to its fantastic score and marvelous acting.

    Drive shows Ryan Gosling like the viewer has never seen him before as he delivers his best work to date. Gosling is absolutely astonishing, instantaneously iconic. He brings an unbelievable performance even though the character has no name and hardly talks throughout the entire film. He brings “the driver” character a depth that no other critic thought possible before seeing it. There is no back story to the driver just like Eastwood’s “Dollar Trilogy”, which makes the film better. He’s not the typical Rock or Vin Diesel mindless action hero. He is a classic action hero. Countless people did not comprehend this and instantly thought it was awful acting or directing. The audience learns just enough to be on his side, a decent but imperfect hero fighting for the innocent, a modern day Shane. Actually all of the actors in Drive are marvelous, most namely Albert Brooks for his disturbing portrayal of Bernie Rose, who is razor sharp, reckless, and unpredictable. Of course this is really Gosling’s film and he lives in the character completely.

    There’s something unquestionably retro about Drive from the radiantly splashed opening neon pink credits, accompanied by the eighties infused synthesizer-pop soundtrack which is so unforgettable that it stays in the ears for numerous days. Cliff Martinez’s perfect score fits flawlessly with each and every scene, in addition to Chromatics whose song “Tick of the Tock” gave more tension to the opening scene, there are also other various artists such as Kavinsky, Desire, and College. It adds a unique and to a great extent wanted stylistic, artificial, and overall lush style to a lush film. It’s filled with beautiful imagery of the LA underworld which Michael Mann would be proud of.  Drive is full of stylish passages, non-central structures of characters, amazing camera movements, and astounding chopper shots of neon lighted L.A. It’s quite obvious that director Refn is a guy who takes his style serious. Refn’s unique art-house flair and Hollywood-style action is that to be praised.

       Despite its absolute craftsmanship, there have been some negative comments from certain viewers on Drive, which are not credible at all. Like “It’s too boring because there is hardly any dialogue and the driver doesn’t talk”. First off, a silent role is more successful due to the detail of the performance. Gosling shows an ability to create tension using the slightest widening of his eyes and tensing of his jaw-line. This is the most focused performance in quite some time. Second the director expresses a story to the viewer by visuals and conveying emotion without heavy dialogue. It makes the film a great work of art. The viewers were most likely raised on Transformers and those terrible Fast and Furious films.

     Intelligent action filmmaking is so hard to come by these days, Drive delivers a refreshing variety. The music makes the film more unique, much like the acting and cinematography. It pins the headlights on the gloomy suggestions of unbridled fascination and good meaning gone haywire. Drive in its cursive fluorescent pink nature, positions out as the best film of 2011, pure cinematic excellence, and cinema gold.  Be smart and see this film.

9.8 out of 10