Saturday, November 24, 2007

The Enchanted Kingdom

Hi peeps! The title of the post comes from the 2 movies that I watched so recently, The Kingdom and Enchanted. I will talk about it soon. Meanwhile, this post will again come in points.

1. Life has been okay since Monday. I've realized I have many things to complete (among which 8 movies to watch, yet to be determined) before I go. Seriously though, I have many things to do and it's pretty scary because I may just fail. One step at a time, I suppose.

2. On an interesting note, I went to a talk by Gerry Ellis yesterday. Apparently he's quite a famous photographer but coming into the talk I really haven't heard of him before. After the talk, I see him more as an environmentalist rather than a famous photographer. His talk was more about his passion for the environment and his way of raising awareness on environment issue especially to kids. He talked much about his experience taking pictures of the wildlife and the website which he obviously is very passionate about, Glossopedia. He talked about his experience taking pictures of panda in China, there were pictures (awesome pictures) and videos and I learned a few interesting things about panda, like the fact that panda actually has tail. He also mentioned that just days ago he was in a place in India where there's half a million camels. I found this interesting because my oh my, that's a lot of camels! It may be possible that there's more camels than human in that place at that time. He showed us the Glossopedia website and we watched a very interesting video about lemurs. You should go and watch it, here. I had a good laugh watching it The talk was interesting and I had a good time attending it.

3. Now about movies. First up is The Kingdom which I watched yesterday with La Gioia and Gascoigne. As I told La Gioia, I don't know I just really want to watch some manly movie. She said, yeah maybe because now you are having so much angst inside you. Yeah, she is maybe right since I have been having Linkin Park therapy a lot these days. Anyway from entertainment point of view, The Kingdom is not bad. However, I cannot help feeling that the movie is way too American. I found it to be quite one sided. The story centered around a bombing done by extremist muslims in Saudi Arabia. After the movie, I was thinking that man! there are just so many movies recently that took that as the theme. I wonder if the muslims found it to be demeaning. I find it damaging to improve the image of Islam. Maybe I'm too sensitive? So there was a big suicidal bombing in an American compound in Saudi Arabia. The motive of the perpetrator wasn't elaborated, just take it as they are extremist and crazy muslims. The FBI team led by (I am the cool leader) Jamie Foxx came to Saudi Arabia to investigate the bombing. The bureaucracy really hindered their investigation but of course the "cool" Jamie Foxx managed to persuade the Saudi Prince to allow them to do more investigation and capture the bad guys. Jamie Foxx appeared slick, smart, tough and of course he had to hold a gun and shoot some rounds and be heroic. He's the typical hero. Jennifer Garner was also in the movie. I found her to be a bit fat. She was okay, not as tough as she was in Alias. Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman, and Jeremy Piven provided some comic relief with their witty lines. They made quite a laugh. I quite liked the Colonel, Faris Al Ghazi. I told La Gioia that, and I said why ya? She said because he's cool Unfortunately he had to die. Yeah, typical American movie, someone had to die. There were some scenes which I found to be so American (as in it made the American appear as the real good ones) like the one where the terrorist was ready to slit Jason Bateman's neck. It was quite a suspense that I was kinda closing my eyes. The tension was nicely built with all the screaming and music. Then Jennifer Garner came in the nick of time to save him. So she had to fought the bad guy and it was quite a bad fight and in the end she managed to killed the bad guy in a very very violent manner but it was portrayed as really cool and after the fight, there were many people in the cinema who gushed "whoaa". So she appeared cool despite of her committing as violent of an act as the terrorist. Yeah you can argue she was doing it for self defense and yadda yadda yadda, but I just found it to be a bit bias Then another scene of showing that the American is the good ones was when Jennifer Garner had to be compassionate and all and gave a frightened little girl a lollipop. It was such a small matter perhaps in the movie, but again I found it to be rather too much positive points on the American side. Maybe it's just me Did I give too much spoiler? Overall, it was not a bad movie, I suppose. I really don't know how the muslim will take it if they watch this movie. I didn't have time to ask Gascoigne what he thinks about it, but I don't think he will think about such issue, he would just see it as a movie. From entertainment point of view, there were suspense, nice action scenes, good lines, funny moments, so it's all quite interesting. It was quite an entertainment, I suppose.

4. Moving on, watch Enchanted with Vivy today. Actually I wasn't that interested in it because I know it's so not brainy, however I just feel I need to watch something, so off we went to watch it. The cartoon was Disney traditional 2D. The type of cartoons that filled my childhood days. I found that the drawing was pretty and all but I do realize that such cartoon may not be able to captivate kids at this time and age as it did to me last time. The fairytale side of the story was very fairytale like. It was really traditional Disney. The human part of the movie was just okay for me. I've never been a fan of Patrick Dempsey and James Marsden here was too dumb or perhaps plain for my liking. Amy Adams as Giselle was oh so sweet! The singing was sweet and a source for laughter. The singing scene in the park was quite Bollywood for me and I think they did try to make it that way. They have nice songs which I will surely try to locate. I didn't really like the ending. Ah, stupid me! The ending was pretty obvious just by seeing the poster of the movie but I had hope that Giselle would just end up with Prince Edward. Overall, it was somewhat entertaining. The characters were interesting at times (like pip the squirrel) and the cartoon was kinda nice for me. It was definitely a lighter entertainment than The Kingdom and it also requires less brain.

Okay, that's pretty much it. I actually bought a book today. It may not be a good decision since having more stuffs in my room is never been a good thing to do but I just felt like I need to use my time better. I guess I've been using much of the time recently to read and all and now that I didn't have anything to read or complete I feel rather empty, hence why I bought the book. Anyway, reading is enriching right? The book that I bought was The Kite Runner. Again may not be a good idea as well, since I feel that story centered in Middle East is a bit too saturated, but I chose the book since ... well it kinda stayed in my head since the Mr told me that it was in Mrs. Thyme's book club years ago. So what the heck, let's read it. I hope I can finish it soon because I heard the movie is coming out in December. Another thing to finish before I go.

Alrighty, that's all peeps. Take care okay!

:) eKa @ 8:13:00 PM •