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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