Kerenblog

I�ll open my writing about �The Imitation Game� with the exact question that opened my writing about �The Theory of Everything� : what do we know about Alan Turing? Only, the answers are not similarly various. Alan Turing is... a mathematician. It is what he only is. Or is it? read more �

My deepest condolence is for those who lost their loved ones in the tragic crash of Indonesia�s AirAsia flight QZ8501. When the missing of Indonesia�s AirAsia flight QZ8501, flying from Indonesia�s Surabaya to Singapore Sunday (12/28/2014), became news, I was at the airport waiting for my flight (I was about to go back to my work town after a short holiday of Christmas). I wasn�t watching TV at the time (there are TVs on the airport obviously but they were out of my sight), but Twitter got me informed about the news. However, tweets with hashtag #matikanTVlokal (#turnofflocalTV) flooded my timeline, complaining about how some news channels so insensitively interviewed the relatives of the flight passengers. It was obvious that the relatives were mourning and worried about the missing airplane but these news reporters kept asking them about how they felt about the incident over and over again. Perhaps the reporters thought that this kind of �drama� could skyrocket their rating, but it�...

I am a 22-year-old male, single. You know what is in most of my chats with friends? Marriage. Wedding. Proposal, at least. Engagement. All those things. Here comes the ages all my friends are so concerned about those things more than anything else. But how lovely is it really to get married? �Gone Girl� gives you a new perspective on marriage, about how it actually is a crossing of not only the good but also the bad of two people, and how it may turn into a nightmare when you can�t end it even though you know it doesn�t work anymore. �Gone Girl� scars the viewers with a pill about marriage, so bitter it haunts. read more �

LOCKE is the (last) name of the only character appears on this film, Ivan Locke, which is portrayed so genuinely by the only actor appears on screen, Tom Hardy. The other actors' performances are voice-only, because the entire story of LOCKE takes place on a car: Ivan is driving while making/receiving tens of phone calls to and from them. Many filmmakers are dealing with some big-budgeted film projects that involve some bunches of actors in some spectacular shooting locations, but here Steven Knight is writing and directing a small film with BIG performance that dictates genuineness in its truest definition. read more �

Jake Gyllenhaal is both Adam Bell, a history professor trapped in his boring life; and Anthony, a third-class actor with passion. ENEMY starts by focusing on Adam teaching his students, going home, and having sex with his spouse Mary ( Melanie Laurent ). Everyday is exactly the same, until he saw himself playing in a movie. Well, if you know that there is a person that looks exactly ( exactly ) like you, what will you do? Will you call him and ask him to meet? Will you be excited? The feeling doubles if you�re a history teacher that teaches totalitarianism and dictatorship and Karl Marx and Hegel. Parts of your lecture come to life; it�s like history repeating itself. read more �

You can say that last night was my second visit to THE RAID 2: BERANDAL (my first visit was on March 28 when it first released in Indonesia�until a sudden chat message broke my mood into pieces and got me walked out of the cinema before the film ended ). Note: this is the first film I see in Bandar Lampung! (please say, "YEAAH!!", just to make me feel better). read more �

Inside us lives a killer . I believe there is a point in everyone�s life where one feels betrayed, done, and giving up on life that never runs along. Maybe you feel it, too. But I bet you didn�t (and don�t want to) realize that in the very deep corner of your soul, there hides this bleak, gloomy, dangerous, and scarying �another you� waiting for the whole time, painstakingly, to show up and replace the �current you� you made just to be accepted by the society. And when it does show up, you feel very confident to do bad things, even the sickest things you could ever imagine, because no matter it is right or wrong, you just need to win over and gain the satisfaction of victory after life beats you with problems and misfortune the whole time. This is what Killers is factually all about. read more �

This post is written as part of the series "the films of... Joel Coen amd Ethan Coen" . What is interesting from �Blood Simple.� , the Coens� debut film, is its originality. It was a classic, low-budgeted crime-thriller from which Joel and Ethan Coen started to get attention from Hollywood. You can even tell what an indie project �Blood Simple.� is just by counting down the film goofs (which are apparent to see), but no one will doubt the originality of both the film�s story and style. read more �

I�m not exactly sure about how I should start my writing about �Gravity� , not because the movie is so bad that I can�t crystalize my opinion about it (and not because I haven�t written anything in the last three weeks either), but I am afraid my poor English can not describe how spectacular �Gravity� is. But let me put it this way: �Gravity� does not only offer a story�it offers an unforgettable cinematic experience you can�t buy by watching it on DVD. Edgar Wright once tweeted that we should watch it on the biggest screen we can find in our town, again because Alfonso Cuar�n does not only deliver a sci-fi with lots of visual effects�he brings a bare side-by-side comparison between human powerlessness and the enormity of the universe. read more �

Once I lost my faith in horror films. Nothing they could do to reinvent horror films, I once thought, so this genre might be just full with remakes and old formulas. "Berberian Sound Studio" breaks that assumption. I'm not saying that this film is really that great, but I'm just so surprised by how different this film delivers horror to the viewers. Call me exaggerating, but my call is "Berberian Sound Studio" never tries to scare the viewers; instead it puzzles them and leaves them in mild confusion�which is worth the same to being scared that any mainstream horrors even fail to do. read more �

It might sound silly that I have not heard anything about Brit Marling . It turns out that this actress is also a script writer and a producer. �The East� is one of the films that she takes part not only as an actress but also as a screenwriter (together with director Zal Batmanglij ) and a producer. Marling and Batmanglij have spent some months experiencing freeganism and joining anarchist groups before writing the script of this provocative thriller. It might become a proof of how original �The East� is, regardless of whether it is as amusing as it is original or not. read more �

Internet has become our second life. We are currently wired in a new world where to know about something you prefer doing a Google search to finding a book about it in the library. Students prefer knowing about the new boy in the classroom from Facebook to greeting him directly. The advancement of technology has entirely changed the way we live and�most noticeably�the way we interact to each other. �Disconnect� rounds them up, as it proposes some of the most familiar issues in our current internet-based social life. read more �

This film is a real fun. What can you expect from a crime or gangster movie, beside its American-styled jokes and characters? �Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels� has all of them, except that it comes from United Kingdom. Director Guy Ritchie wrote a story that connects four friends, weed sellers, gangsters, debt collectors, and loan sharks with lots of British punchlines, bleak jokes, and�the most interesting�accents in a very interesting approach. read more �

I have never predicted that �Trance� can do more than I expected. It�s been so long for me not seeing such a twisting, un-predictable, multi-layered crime-thriller like this one. I didn�t keep good track on Danny Boyle �s filmography but I�m sure that he is also the one who turns the great story into such a tidy, chic presentation. I just think that this is the movie every crime-thriller lover should see. Read more to understand why. read more �

The first question: where have you been, Bar? The answer: nowhere. I have been nowhere, but I am busy with my mind and I lost my mood to write, so... I spent a week with not even a single writing posted. The second question: what movies have you watched in cinema recently, Bar? The answer: I haven�t gone to cinema for the past two weeks (the last time I went to cinema is to watch �Man of Steel� ) so perhaps I skip �World War Z� , �Monsters University� , �White House Down� , and more. Sigh. Anyway, I have been watching some past-year movies and in case I can not write one review for each of them, I wrapped them into one post. Here they are: read more �

Currently we have �World War Z� and �Monsters University� newly coming to our local cinema but I haven�t watched them. Poor me. LOL. Anyway, in my spare time I often browsed for some one-shoot entertainments in the internet. I mean, yeah, short films! I always love short films because there are times when I don�t have enough time to watch full-length films, or I�m just too lazy to do it. So all I had to do is opening either Youtube or Vimeo , and searching for short films. read more �

This is Park Chan-wook �s debut film in Hollywood. The most popular film from this South Korean director, �Oldboy� , is one of my favorites. However, I can say that compared to �Oldboy� or any other Park�s films, �Stoker� is much tamer. No blood, not even thrills. Supported by great performances from actors like Mia Wasikowska , Matthew Goode , and Nicole Kidman , is it fair to conclude that �Stoker� is not as interesting as �Oldboy�? read more �

Now you see me. Now you don't. Okay. When a few friends of mine knew that "Now You See Me" is about magicians and stuffs, they asked me, "So what makes it different from, say, Christopher Nolan 's 'The Prestige' ?". All I could tell them is that "Now You See Me" is a more than just a sort of mysterious, grand magic performances. There's a taste of heist crime in this movie, there's a lot of it. I mean, imagine what will happen if four talented magicians team up to rob a bank. It surely will bother the cops, right? read more �

I was intrigued to watch "The Vanishing" , a 1988 movie from Netherlands , after reading an article on the internet. I don't put the link here because I'm afraid the article is a bit spoiler-y (and I actually only read the first paragraph of it to avoid getting spoiled). The author of the article addressed one of the character in this movie as the most terrifying psychopath in movies he has ever seen. For me, it gave me a different look on sociopath which has never been done in any other movies. A very different presentation of a thriller with twist that terrifies me mostly because of its appropriateness and normal-ness. read more �

As a beginner movie-buff, I don�t know Steven Soderbergh that much. To be honest, the only film of him that I have watched is �Contagion� , and I wasn�t very impressed by it. That�s why, the news of him de-listing himself from the world of cinema after directing �Side Effects� may be not that fantastic for me (at least, compared to how fantastic the news of Sir Alex Ferguson retiring is, LOL). But, I did list �Side Effects� in my watch-list this year because of some reasons. Is it really a nice closing for the director�s career? read more �