Almost Buddhist - 戲‧論

  ★★★☆☆ 'Stowaway', like the title suggests, centers on an incident where a space mission to Mars is interrupted by a launch engineer hiding onboard, endangering the lives of the original crew of three! If you've seen ' Arctic ', Director Joe Penna's previous film about the spirit of sticking around in an extremely harsh environment, you'd probably have a sense already of what 'Stowaway' is going to give. Penna's way of escalating the tension bit by bit to a seemingly dire scenario is as ingenious here, despite flaws like how that engineer is supposed to be stuck up there unconsciously without being noticed at all before the take-off; and his back story told awkwardly afterwards seems too cheap and corny to do any justice anyways! 'Stowaway' is by no means a typical sci-fi flick. By typical I mean there're spectacular scenes involving jaw-dropping action, visually stunning special effects or camerawork like those in ' Gravity ...

  ★★☆☆☆ The film opens with a middle-aged man, bruised and battered but seemingly not defeated, sitting in an interrogation room, getting ready to tell how he ends up like that. Then we're flashed back to his daily grind that's more or less like yours and mine! No sooner had we been briefed about this aloof, depressed family man's everyday routine than the burglars broke in that starts to give 'Nobody' the momentum to go where it's supposed to go. As a whole it's nothing serious or hard to take though. It's solely for fun and time killing. It might be able to help release your stress and anger but that's a bonus y'know not necessarily working for everyone. 'Nobody' looks inevitably John Wick-ish since it's got the same crew behind ' John Wick ' to make it happen. Hutch in 'Nobody' and John in 'John Wick' are both trying to forget they are somebody and to live like a nobody but their 'somebody nature' ...

  ★★★★☆ The Buddha said, there're four kinds of inevitable pain in life: the pain of birth; of aging; of sickening and of dying! We sentient beings are too deluded and ignorant to realize that birth is the root of all problems. If you don't want death, you gotta avoid birth. Birth and death are like two sides of a coin. You can't just get one without the other! So are aging and sickening! 'The Father' is a film about the pain and poignancy of getting old and sick, and more pathetically, being left alone and trapped in one's own confusing memories! It reminds me of films such as ' Amour ' and ' A Simple Life ' made to let us face the cruel aspect of the circle of life, especially the final stage where you literally become like a helpless baby! Watching 'The Father' is quite an intriguing experience indeed due to its ingenious storytelling where the beginning is already the end, and the end is actually the beginning. Of course there's...

  ★★☆☆☆ 2014's ' Godzilla ' is surprisingly fresh. 2019's ' Godzilla: King of the Monsters ' is ridiculously dumb. This year's 'Godzilla vs. Kong' is a little bit better than its predecessor but still a mind-numbing turn-off, more or less. I didn't intend to check it out honestly but since Hong Kong's involved and my mind wants to be numb at times so... Well, the film's not a complete letdown though, if all you want is eye-catching, above-the-average choreographed non-stop action. Again, I guess it's just me tending to find stuff like that boring and exhausting far too easily. Anyways it works in terms of switching off my mind for a while. Now I'm gonna spoil it, so if catching 'Godzilla vs. Kong' is still your only choice of fun for the time being, stop reading on then. Last time in 'Godzilla: King of the Monsters', Godzilla is the hero. This time it's the villain reluctantly, not because of Kong, but becaus...