Sunday, August 17, 2008

Great movies comes with great hearts

One of the best quote I’ve ever heard is “When you ask God for greatness, you think that God would hand you greatness or a chance to be Great? When you ask for bravery, you think God will filled you up with bravery or a chance to be brave. And if you ask God for love, you think God would give you warm and fuzzy feeling or a chance to love? And when you ask God to bring your family together, you think What would God show you?”
Ironically they quote come from the comedy “Evan Almighty”. Ironically, I’ve watched 2 best movies I’ve ever watched last weekend, And it’s not in the cinema, it’s the new DVD I just bought. It’s “August Rush” and “Juno”.

August Rush, a little bit of Oliver Twist-y, and a little bit of music genius-y. It is a fusion of the both. You get the best inspiring story of a young kid. Born without knowing about his parents, the only connection he has is his ability to hear music in all sound. Father is a Rocker, Mother is a violinist. The movie tells the story of 2 person who came together and separated by faith, and when their child is born, he is given away. Following his heart and the music, August Rush ran out of his orphanage and into the city. Here he befriended a homeless kid and taken to his gang led by a thug. August showed his talent and the Thug try to exploit it to gain money. Fortunately, when police raided the gang’s hide out August came to a church. Inspired by his talent, the priest helped enrolled August into a prestige music school. While in the school. August composes a great orchestra piece and it’s been suggested to the New York Philharmonic orchestra to perform in the Central Park. Following her heart, August mother came to decide to rejoin the same orchestra for the performance the same night. And his father resigned from his job and rejoin his band in New York the same night. In the end all come together perfectly in the concert, where the three is reunited under the music by August. A Beautiful and inspiring story. No matter the story is real or not, it’s great cinema. There’s enough reality so cinema is as it suppose here, cinematic again.

As for Juno, on the contrary, is as good as it is. The best Script movie. Reality, hardship of life. It shows the perfect combination of love, determination, come of age lesson and family values, peers pressure, marriage and divorces, and of course the main line, premarital and teenage pregnancy. It does present one question though. How old is adult enough. some people is not even grown up when they are 30, some simply need to avoid the responsibility simply because they don’t have the money. So if you have the money, does that makes you a teenager not a good parent later? All that is in question. With close to 30% of black teenagers dropping out of schools and getting pregnant at that age. If makes me wonder, where the line really is drawn? Back to the movie, it is the simplest story line, nothing even fancy and cinematic about it. Yet, because of the writing of the script and the performance of the ensemble, the story has great dynamics that attracts people to watch it.
Well, coming back from DVDs to movies, I’ve actually watched Wall-E and Clone Wars back to back during the weekend. Both movies are great to watch and enjoyable.

Both have their own advantages and tradition. Clone Wars are in full force, the old Star Wars writing. Jedi, Temple, light sabre fights, Tattoine the sand filled planets. It just lack the lust of realistic since it’s animation and all. If you like the Star Wars saga and would like to relive the who culture. This is a good way to go. Jaba the huts little sons been kidnapped and once again Anakin Skywalker to the rescue, in his usual rough tactics that is. As I said, there’s nothing much but reminiscent of some memories.


Wall-E on the other hand is another tradition, the Tradition of Pixar. As usual, it’s as beautiful as any of Pixar animations and as realistic as any smooth old Pixar animation. Aside from the set back that the Robots doesn’t speak a single words for the first 30 minutes. The love story between the robots is believable. And this time to teach human a lesson and show them what people will be like in the future. It’s a good animation and good value. And the story line is good enough. Well-E been cleaning the earth for ages and one day he found love in an Alien Robot. Just to find out it’s sent to earth by human living out of space. And when Wall-E follow her to outerspace to save her. He helped, human to come to realisation and come back to Earth in the end. Of course I’m just leaving out the juicy detail of the whole story here. You’ll have to check it out and have a great trip out of this world.

No comments: