Memories of Tomorrow

It's not the latest movie, it was on the screen in 2007 and it's one of my favorite film. Since I watched it on television again recently, I decide to introduce this touching film.

At first it’s a matter of a missed word, a forgotten name. Then he forgets how to drive a familiar route. The advertising executive keeps his worries to himself, but he can’t hide his problems, and eventually a doctor delivers a dread prognosis: Early- onset Alzheimer’s. He is only 49.

“Memories of Tomorrow” is a movie about the disease that is told from the sick person’s point of view, not that of family members. The subject of the film, Saeki, is a high-octane ad executive with a young and eager team, and as a perfectionist it depresses him to discover his own imperfections mounting. He forgets dates, times, business meetings. In one breathtaking scene, he gets lost in Tokyo’s urban maze and takes instructions from a secretary over his cell phone while literally running back to his office.

The character is played by Ken Watanabe and there is a personal element in his brave and painful performance. I learn from the Japan Times, he had been fighting leukemia. His Saeki is just as determined to fight Alzheimer’s, and is much aided by his patient and courageous wife Emiko (Kanako Higuchi), who writes notes naming everything in their house, prepares his daily schedule, and keeps up a brave front.

He holds on as long as he can, even accepting a lesser position and a smaller pension to stay with his company, but finally he must retire, and return to a home where now it is his wife who goes out every morning to earn a salary. He has better days and worse days, and a day fraught with fear when he must make a speech at his daughter’s wedding. He loses the text of his speech. “Just say anything,” his wife whispers. “I’m here for you.” She takes his hand.

She has the patience of a saint, but one day his wife snaps, telling him with cold anger what a distant husband he has been, and then he physically hurts her, how flawed, how cruel.The director handles this painful moment with great visual tact, not showing it but instead cutting to the sudden darting of fish in an aquarium.

There are moments of almost unbearable sadness, as in what he reveals to a nurse that he is the one who is coming to the nursing home at the end of a tour of a nursing home. And we observe the indifference of the company where he has been a salaryman all his life: Yes, thanks for your contribution, now go quietly, please, and don’t let the clients know. Some films on Alzheimer’s attempt to show an upside. I don’t think there is an upside somehow. I really love this film, I was so touching about the relationship between Saeki and his wife. (and I always moved to tears through almost the whole film! haha)




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Letters to Juliet

You know how it is when you go off to Italy with your boyfriend and he ignores you and so you go to the house of a fictional character where lovesick ladies leave heartbroken letters stuck to a wall and then you find one that's been there for 50 years and then you meet the widowed lady who wrote it and go off on a a road trip through one picturesque Italian village after another until you find the now-70-year-old guy she's been pining for her whole life? And the widow's seemingly snooty but secretly warm-hearted and deep-thoughts-having grandson comes along and you fall in love with him?

“Letters to Juliet” is about Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), an American girl who visits Verona with the man she’s engaged to marry (Gael Garcia Bernal). He’s always leaving her behind to investigate wine and truffles for his New York restaurant. She visits the house allegedly inhabited by Shakespeare’s Juliet. Below the balcony there, lovelorn women for years have posted “letters to Juliet,” asking for advice.

Sophie finds a letter 50 years old, written by a young British girl about a Tuscan boy she met, fell in love with and allowed to fall out of her life. Sophie writes to the girl, the letter amazingly finds its way, and soon Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) and her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan) arrive in Verona. So now, if you are an experienced moviegoer, you definnitely will know what must happen by the end of the story.

All of this is wrapped up in unimaginably beautiful shots of the Italian countryside, the warmth of the friendship between Sophie and Claire, and visits to many of the men named Lorenzo Bartolini, which was the name of the boy Claire loved so long ago. “Letters to Juliet” requires the three of them to visit the candidates in person, leading to a series of false leads and at last, of course, to the real Lorenzo Bartolini (Franco Nero).

To me, the story seems like a fairy tale, but it's really romantic somehow. As the movies goes, I can feel sweet elements in the whole film, and it's indeed a lovely story.

The Last Station

"The Last Station" focuses on the last year of Count Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer), a full-bearded Shakespearian figure presiding over a household of intrigues. The chief schemer is Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), his intense follower, who idealistically believes Tolstoy should leave his literary fortune to the Russian people. It's just the sort of idea that Tolstoy might seize upon in his utopian zeal. Sofya (Helen Mirren), on behalf of herself and her children, is livid.

Chertkov, the quasi-leader of Tolstoy's quasi-cult, hires a young man named Valentin (James McAvoy) to become the count's private secretary. In this capacity, he is to act as a double agent, observing moments between Leo and Sofya when Chertkov would not be welcome.

After almost fifty years of marriage, the Countess Sofya, Leo Tolstoy’s devoted wife, passionate lover, muse and secretary—she’s copied out War and Peace six times…by hand!—suddenly finds her entire world turned upside down. In the name of his newly created religion, the great Russian novelist has renounced his noble title, his property and even his family in favor of poverty, vegetarianism and even celibacy. After she’s born him thirteen children!

When Sofya then discovers that Tolstoy’s trusted disciple, Chertkov—whom she despises—may have secretly convinced her husband to sign a new will, leaving the rights to his iconic novels to the Russian people rather than his very own family, she is consumed by righteous outrage! This is the last straw! Using every bit of cunning, every trick of seduction in her considerable arsenal, she fights fiercely for what she believes is rightfully hers. The more extreme her behavior becomes, however, the more easily Chertkov is able to persuade Tolstoy of the damage she will do to his glorious legacy.

It's a tale of two romances, one beginning, one near its end, The Last Station is a complex, funny, rich and emotional story about the difficulty of living with love and the impossibility of living without it.

I like the movie, in the movie I can see harmonious and beautiful pastoral life. And I like Helen Mirren very much!

It's Complicated

The movie stars Meryl Streep, who has rich white people problems, like dealing with her lingering feelings for the ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) who’s now married to his much younger mistress and figuring out where to put the second kitchen add-on in her sprawling Santa Barbara ranch house. Moreover, she’s over 50 and single, so with the exception of her mousy architect (Steve Martin), her ex is the best dating option she’s got. Oh, what’s a beautiful older woman with a thriving bakery business and an amazing home and three normal grown children to do? Writer-director Nancy Meyers has a solution for Meryl’s terrible, horrible life problems: have an affair with your ex-husband!

It’s Complicated rolls along with a crackling energy as it sets up the love affair between Jane (Streep) and Jake (Baldwin). Grown-ups will relate to the feelings behind their illicit reconciliation, though adultery is always a tough sell in the movies and Baldwin comes off as a bit of a cad. (Since Jake’s cheating on his evil current wife, who used to be his mistress when he was married to Jane, we’re supposed to think it’s totally ok.) Thankfully, Meyers sees the absurdity in the ups and downs of the post-mid life crisis and dances a fine line between seriousness and humor, serving up a romantic comedy with maturity.

“It’s Complicated” was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, a Hollywood filmmaker who makes female-specific indulgences that, at their irresistible best, are testaments to the power of fairy tales. Perhaps that's why I like this movie so much, it depict a sweet story about a woman in late middle age, who, after years of going it alone in bed and out, suddenly becomes sexually and romantically involved with two very different men. In the end of the film, Jane(Meril Streep) seems not choose anyone as her lover, but to me this is the best and proper ending to this film. In my opinion, any chose she made would make the story unrealistic.

By the way, Meryl Streep is one of my favorite actress, and she looks so energetic and beatuful in the film and she really makes the film much more attractive. This is really an interesting movie, it makes me laugh all the time!

Remember Me

Tyler is a dirty, damaged NYU student who chain smokes and beds coeds to amuse his roommate, although he's only that way because his rich dad is a capitalist and the whole family is still grieving the death of Tyler's older brother. Ally is a poor but sunny girl who takes care of her anger-prone cop father, although both of them are still grieving her dear dead mother. Needless to say, they're a match made in daddy issues heaven -- until secrets threaten to tear them apart, and an even bigger tragedy interrupts their lives.

"Remember Me" tells a sweet enough love story, and tries to invest it with profound meaning by linking it to a coincidence. It doesn't work that way. People meet, maybe they fall in love, maybe they don't, maybe they're happy, and maybe they're sad. That's life. If, let us say, a refrigerator falls out of a window and squishes one of them, that's life, too, but it's not a story many people want to see.

The fact is that "Remember Me" is a well-made movie. I cared about the characters. I felt for them. Liberate them from the plot's destiny, which is an anvil around their necks, and you might have something.

The film opens on a New York subway platform. A young girl witnesses the senseless murder of her mother. We meet her again as a young woman. She is Ally Craig, the daughter of a police sergeant. Having lost his wife, he is intensely protective of her.

There's an intriguing subplot. Tyler's parents are divorced. His father is the immensely wealthy Charles Hawkins, whose office looks larger than small airplane terminals. Diane, his mother, has remarried. Tyler's beloved kid sister Caroline lives with her. Only with Caroline can Tyler relax and drop the sullen facade, showing warmth and love. Until he meets Ally -- and then there are two safe harbors, and his rebirth begins.

These people and their situation grow more involving as the movie moves along. Then there's a perfect storm of coincidences to supply the closing scenes. That's what I object to. I still think that it’s a great movie, though it has a tragic and surprising ending. (Well, if you want to know what I refer to, than you should go see the film.) Some people say that they don’t like the story and even say that they hate the big surprise ending because it’s cheap and shallow. However, I think that it’s just a story, it doesn’t matter what its meaning is, seeing a movie is like reading a story. And to me, it’s not a bad story, I can’t exactly say what I feel or what I realize after seeing it, but somehow I do get something.


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The Lovely Bones

Cute little Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl preoccupied by photography and boys, is brutally killed by a creepy neighbor in 1970s suburbia. As her family struggles in the wake of the murder, Susie watches from an otherworldly realm between Earth and heaven while coming to terms with death and pining over Ray Singh, the classmate she’d been majorly crushing on. Meanwhile, her father Jack becomes so obsessed with finding Susie’s killer that his marriage disintegrates and he finds himself on a dangerous collision course with the murderer.

"The Lovely Bones" is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?

The story is based on the best-seller by Alice Sebold that everybody seemed to be reading a couple of years ago. I had read it two times several years ago. (By the way, I do think that the book is better than the film, so if you are thinking of whether you are going to see the movie, I recommend reading the book first!)The murder of a young person is a tragedy, the murderer is a monster, and making the victim a sweet, poetic narrator is creepy. This movie sells the philosophy that even evil things are God's will, and their victims are happier now. Isn't it nice to think so? I think it's best if they don't happen at all. But if they do, why pretend they don't hurt? Those girls are dead actually. Anyway, this is just some of my opinion.

Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland is like a famous story known by lots of people. And this new story tells about how Alice goes back to the “underland” and starts a new adventure.

Having forgotten her trip to Wonderland as a child, 19-year-old Alice is now a misfit teenager in England, where her parents’ high society friends keep pressuring her to stop asking silly questions all the time and start thinking about grown-up responsibilities. Running away in a panic from her surprise engagement party, Alice again finds herself falling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, where she discovers her old friends living in terror under the iron rule of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). Faced with another destiny not of her own choosing, Alice must decide if she can be brave enough to save her pals from the evil queen by slaying the deadly dragon known as the Jabberwock.

As a young reader, I found Alice in Wonderland creepy and rather distasteful. Alice's adventures played like a series of encounters with characters whose purpose was to tease, puzzle and torment her. Few children would want to go to wonderland, and none would want to stay. The problem may be that I encountered the book too young and was put off by the alarming illustrations. Why did Alice have such deep, dark eye sockets? Why couldn't Wonderland be cozy like the world of Pooh? Watching the 1951 Disney film, I feared the Cheshire cat was about to tell me something I didn't want to know.

The new 3-D version of "Alice in Wonderland" somehow answers the questions. This has never been a children's story. There's even a little sadism embedded in this fantasy. "Alice" plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how it is brilliantly interpreted it until a pointless third act flies off the rails. It was a wise idea to devise a reason that Alice is now a grown girl in her late teens, revisiting a Wonderland that remains much the same, as fantasy worlds must always do. And perhaps the meaning of a fantasy is to make people to be “mad.” Just as in the movie, young Alice asked her dad,
“Am I mad? ” and her dad replied to her, “Yes, you are,” “but all the great people are.”




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A Single Man

As soon as I first saw its trailer, I was attracted by the film. The film is directed by a fashion designer, Tom Ford, who made his directorial debut with this dramatic outing starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, and Matthew Goode. Ford and David Scearce adapted the story from a book by Christopher Isherwood, which tells the tragic tale of a professor's loss of his longtime partner.

The time is in 1962 and Colin Firth is a gay college professor whose longtime lover has died in a car accident. Still grieving the loss, he spends a full day moving through Los Angeles with one destination in mind: his own heartbroken suicide. Along the way he lectures his students, meets a hustler, encounters his routinely homophobic neighbors, methodically ties up loose ends, and dines with his boozy pal Julianne Moore and then skinny dips with a flirtatious male student. That he does all this wearing an impeccably tailored suit and living in an astoundingly cool, glass-walled, Mid-Century Modern home, makes you feel only slightly less sorry for him and his melancholy state.

"A Single Man" is told from the point of view of its hero, George (Colin Firth), the single man. He is single because he's unmarried and single because he's homosexual. It has been eight months since his lover died, and he still grieves. He is empty. His only friendship is with Charley (Julianne Moore), a sad alcoholic of a certain age with whom he once, briefly, had a try at a heated affair. She gives him gin and sympathy, but it's more ritual than comfort. She tries to kiss him, says maybe "we could still make a go of it," but that's a lie neither one believes.

The film follows the stylish, impeccably dressed Firth as he goes about his daily routine and lays the groundwork for his impending suicide. Firth wants everything to be in place when he exits the earth; in his mind, death via self-inflicted gunshot need not be sloppy or disorganized. But life has a way of messing up even the best-laid plans.

After seeing the movie, I was so impressive by the sorrow of George. Hemingway wrote something that returns to my memory from time to time: "Isn't it pretty to think so." Never mind what he was referring to. The words apply for me to those situations where we imagine the reality to be quite different than it really is. Perhaps our imagination is a protective strategy, and it may work for George.

The Road

The movie released on November 25, 2009 in America, but not until February 26, 2010 did it release in Taiwan.

A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son make their way across a post-apocalyptic United States in hopes of finding civilization amongst the nomadic cannibal tribes in 2929 Productions' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's thrilling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road.

It’s a straightforward story about like the end of the world--all the trees are dead and the only food left is rotting in ransacked homes. A man and his son wander the destroyed landscape of the United States scavenging for something to eat, trying not to freeze and, most importantly, desperately trying to keep away from the gangs of roving cannibal rapists. America has been devastated. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed, and the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared. This has happened in such recent memory that even The Boy, so young, was born into a healthy world. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea; perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in this film.

Viggo Mortensen portrays The Man as dogged and stubborn, determined to protect his boy. Kodi Smit-McPhee is convincing as a child stunned by destruction, depending on his father in a world where it must be clear to him that any man can die in an instant. The movie resists any tendency toward making the child cute, or the two of them heartwarming.Flashback scenes star Charlize Theron as the wife and mother of the two in earlier, sunnier days. These sequences show the marriage as failing, and these memories haunt The Man. I'm not sure what relevance this subplot has to the film as a whole; a marriage happy or sad -- isn't it much the same in this new world? It has a lot of relevance, however, to The Man and The Boy. In times of utter devastation, memories are what we cling to.

In the movie, No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. However, this is a movie that offers a warm, heartbreaking vision of the possible bonds between fathers and sons, a pervasive mood of tension almost as frightening as in No Country for Old Men and, in some moments, true horror you won't even find in most "thrillers."

The Blind Side

Synopsis: Taken in by a well-to-do family and offered a second chance at life, a homeless teen grows to become the star athlete projected to be the first pick at the NFL draft in this sports-themed comedy drama inspired by author Michael Lewis' best-seller The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. Michael Oher was living on the streets when he was welcomed into the home of a conservative suburban family, but over time he matured into a talented athlete.

Memphis teenager Michael Oher (newcomer Quinton Aaron) is a statistic: he’s homeless and poor, long abandoned by his absentee father and addict mom. Accepted into a Christian private school on the basis of his athletic potential, Michael is still years behind thanks to a childhood spent in – gasp! The public education system, and on top of that, he’s got serious emotional trauma dating back to mysterious events in his childhood. Enter Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), a local interior decorator and the power blond matriarch of an affluent Memphis family who takes Michael in on one rainy night. Through their Christian graces and sheer kindness, the Tuohys offer Michael things he’s never had before: a home, a family, and opportunities.

The movie is based on the real life experience of Michael Oher, an offensive tackle who went on to go All American at Ole Miss and is currently in his rookie season playing for the Baltimore Ravens. The film is at an inspirational sports movie and a moving true story. But despite moments of extreme tear jerking, The Blind Side is an entertaining and heartwarming story.

After watching the movie, I think that on its face, the idea of a rich white woman taking in a poor black kid is semi gag-worthy. It tries to address the challenges of balancing a story full of racial stereotypes, mostly succeeding when it comes to explaining why the Tuohys care enough to adopt Michael.


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