Almost Buddhist - 戲‧論

★★★☆☆ A so-called motivational firefighters story is usually an action film, where the fires are actually the main character, and the firefighters are supposed to be underplaying! In ‘Only The Brave’, things are quite the opposite. The director makes sure that everybody has enough screen time to tell their backstories. This is a film of more than 2 hours. Conversations take up like 99%! The left 1% is the final firefighting scene that may not seem so spectacular to some but it certainly gives goose bumps as it might’ve kept you waiting for long! I prefer melodramas to mindless actions, so I don’t have a problem with it. If you’re looking for constant actions to feel high, ‘Only The Brave’ is more or less of boredom to be honest! The film is watchable thanks to its terrific score and sound effects in particular. It manages to help stir up your emotions a notch, and make the wildfires sound and look like a real beast. The story is nonetheless, a bit dragged out, and the conversa...

★★★★★ It’s really been along while since I last saw a great historical drama that is ‘ Lincoln ’ from whoa, 6 years ago, which helped Daniel Day Lewis grab his third Academy Award for Best Actor. In director Joe Wright’s latest ‘Darkest Hour’, Gary Oldman, with help of makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji’s amazing touch, totally disappears into Winston Churchill, a very honorable figure, and undoubtedly the most important during the Second World War, and probably even in the human history. Frankly speaking, if Gary Oldman’s not to win this year’s Academy Award for Best Actor for his truly stunning transformation in ‘Darkest Hour’, I don’t know who else would. This is the best performance he’s ever pulled off in his acting career, hands down. The way he walks, stares, and stutters, his whole body language makes you feel like there can’t possibly be Gary Oldman under the makeup. It’s purely magic and so convincing! It’s like seeing Winston Churchill come to life, though some of us may ...

★☆☆☆☆ The title reminds me of a song relevant not to this film but to another ; the story, of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, of which I’m not interested in checking out any version anyway, because I find the love between a beast and a beauty sort of weird and spooky and gross. So, there’s no romance or comfort or thrills for me in ‘The Shape Of Water’. Yeah, the close interactions between HER and IT are expected but it takes place all too sudden and easy. The final kiss in the final act, and a poem to wrap it up… phew… give me a break here! ‘Love’ is somewhat different than ‘compassion’. If you, say, love a flower, you’d pick it and take it with you and make it yours. But if you have compassion for it, you’d leave it where it is and nurture it instead. ‘Love’ is just another expression of selfishness and obsessions, while ‘compassion’ that is the manifestation of giving freedom and absence of judgment, is indeed what you should show when you really are not giving up on someone or som...

★★☆☆☆ Screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh has, I gotta admit, a definite talent in making black comedies that would make you laugh and cry and sigh over a bit at the same time! ‘In Bruges’ is certainly my favorite! 5 years after ‘Seven Psychopaths’ that is however, not my cup of tea, he introduces ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ that doesn’t really excite or thrill me in any way, but as a black comedy if you will, it does live up to certain expectations. The thing is, not every one could be in the right mood to get it or accept such absurdity while it seems to be making it a big deal sometimes. So I guess you’d either like it or hate it. There should be no so-so feeling about it! The story seems like a real case but if you lack a sense of humor, or get too serious about it, you’d be rather let down. This is not a crime story but a story after the crime. It’s not getting you to solve the case. Even though it’s about a gruesome murder, there’s nothing disturbing or...