Movie Review: Adjustment Bureau

 

AB Movie Review: Adjustment Bureau

It all started when Mel suggested that we try eating lunch at this “char siew” restaurant in Shah Alam at a restaurant called Spring Golden. During lunch we toyed with the idea of catching a movie that night and at 5pm I received a call from BK and he said that there were tickets for the “Adjustment Bureau”, I just said, “yes” without much thought.

Fast forward a couple of hours, the 7 of us went into the cinema and I had totally no expectations of the movie. I didn’t read the synopsis and I thought this was gonna be some Bourne Identity style type of movie. Only did I realise that after a couple of minutes into the show, the story line did become a little weird.

The movie centered around a character called David Norris (played by Matt Damon) who was running to be elected as senate. He was deemed as the youngest one ever to run for office and just before he was supposed to deliver his speech right after the polls were in, he met a girl whom he fell head over heels over. But because he was a high profile figure with a promising career in front of him, there are people who deemed that this relationship shouldn’t continue and are trying their all to keep them apart.

So basically, it sounds straight out of a bollywood plot. Rich boy from upper class meets girl of his dreams from lower class and everyone is trying to separate them.

Thats where it gets interesting. Trust me, it gets real interesting.

I shouldn’t really spoil it for those who have yet to watch it. I personally thought that it was rather entertaining and I would give it a 7/10 stars.

An Evening With Simon Yam

Exactly a week ago, me and munz decided to take up an offer by Canon Marketing Malaysia to attend an event for photographers where Simon Yam (yup, Canon’s ambassador) would be there in person for a quick question and answer session with everyone as well as provide a couple of photo opportunities for the attendees. This was then followed with a free movie screening of “Echoes of the Rainbow” which helped Simon win the award for Best Actor in the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards.

SimonYamCanon 001 An Evening With Simon Yam

SimonYamCanon 003 An Evening With Simon Yam

SimonYamCanon 004 An Evening With Simon Yam

The event was held in Pavillion, so by the time me and munz battled through the Monday evening traffic, we arrived there slightly late where we saw Simon entering the Gold Class Lounge at GSC Pavillion. There he was speaking to a couple of reporters while a huge crowd of 200+ photographers filled up the main hallway before entering the cinema.

SimonYamCanon 005 An Evening With Simon Yam

Whilst the rest were waiting at the main area where Simon would be speaking, I tried to enter into the Gold Class Lounge but didn’t manage to get past the guards!

So I decided to take a couple of shots of the folks I know who was there.

SimonYamCanon 006 An Evening With Simon Yam
Yup that is camera shy Xavier in the photo above

SimonYamCanon 002 An Evening With Simon Yam
A shot of Jason, he tried to get me into the Gold Class Lounge to get up close to Simon but the guards wouldn’t let me

SimonYamCanon 007 An Evening With Simon Yam
Jason and Mun Tzin

Once Simon left the Gold Class lounge, I managed to sneak in near the door to capture a couple of shots.

SimonYamCanon 008 An Evening With Simon Yam

SimonYamCanon 009 An Evening With Simon Yam

SimonYamCanon 010 An Evening With Simon Yam

By the time he arrived at the main hall, there were so many photographers there that I could hardly get a glimpse of him so I ended up chatting with Jason. Most of the time I didn’t know what he said because he was answering questions in Mandarin as well as Cantonese, so me being a “banana“, I was just “lepaking” in front of the air con vent because it was getting a little hot in the hallway.

SimonYamCanon 012 An Evening With Simon Yam

I even took a couple of shots of the people surrounding him trying to get photos of Simon.

SimonYamCanon 013 An Evening With Simon Yam

SimonYamCanon 014 An Evening With Simon Yam

After he has completed his Q&A session and adjourned out, everyone was ushered into the cinema to catch the show where they even provided free popcorn and a tin of coke. Not too shabby at all.

 4336echoesoftherainbow04061 An Evening With Simon Yam

Overall I thought the movie was actually quite good. It was a proper serious type of show which depicted life in Hong Kong in the late 60′s for a shoemaker and trying to make ends meet to send his two sons to school. The movie talks about how the sons went through life, private school (yes, the parents worked very hard to pay for their school tuition), bribing police officers with moon cakes and facing harassment all around.

My rating for the show is a good 3.5/5 stars!

p.s. Check out Jason’s blog post as well with his up close and personal shots with Simon.

Movie Review: Avatar

avatar11 Movie Review: Avatar

In case you have been living under a coconut shell lately, or haven’t even caught up with the amount of movies you need to watch or if you have 2.45 hours to spare in your busy life, let me tell you what you should do. First of all is to head over to your local cinemas and buy tickets to watch this amazing show, Avatar. Why is it amazing? Let me tell you why.

My first thoughts about the show when I watched the trailer was that it was going to be a fully a computer generated film. That was my benchmark for the film. Only to be surprised that it wasn’t fully (although it was considerably made with CG), but the storyline and how the plot was built up made it very very entertaining.

Directed by James Cameron (Titanic, Alien), the story talks about a marine by the name of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) who is handicapped due to a previous combat experience taking the place of his deceased brother on an alien planet inhabited  by blue locals called the Navi.

avatar21 Movie Review: Avatar

In this show, the humans are depicted as the enemy (much like how I saw a tweet about the movie depicting America going to war against Iraq), where they went to this planet in search of extremely minerals called unobtanium. During their survey, the humans discovered a large  deposit of those minerals sitting directly beneath a tribal village of the Navi.

avatar31 Movie Review: Avatar

In their attempts to move the village/settlement away peacefully, the humans developed Avatar‘s which is a combination of the human DNA as well as the Navi where the humans will link up with the Avatar‘s and go undercover amongst the Navi and interact with them. Each Avatar could only be controlled by the folks whose DNA was used and when Jake Sully’s brother (a scientist) died, he was then tasked to take over his brother’s role.

The movie then talks about how as Jake Sully used his Avatar and learned the ways of the Navi and only to learn that they weren’t the ones who are really savages.

The movie is indeed visually stunning and it contained enough action films to keep us at the edge of our seats. If you get the change to watch this show, please watch it in 3D! I missed that out so I am going to catch it again in 3D. Personally, the movie is indeed fantastic and I rate it only second to Star Trek (of all the 2009 movies).

Still don’t believe me that it is worth going? This is a movie that was rated 83% by Rotten Tomatoes!

pixel Movie Review: Avatar