Dance With Me – Waltz with Bashir

I saw this way before ‘Carmen Meets Borat’, and I had half a mind to write a full-blown review of it then. Still, my mind was caught up as to whether I should get into reviewing documentaries. I’ve half-written about it before here, but for the sake of summary, I basically felt that there should be some sort of separation, a line, that I shouldn’t really cross in terms of writing. After all, when you think about it, though the name of the blog is ‘Thoughts of Films’, the term ‘film’ itself can be construed in so many ways. In other words, where do I stop? Do I get into short films? Short documentaries? Music videos? Films made way back when in the 50s? 60s?

Then I just thought to myself, “Oh, Fikri, just shut up and write it already.” And so here I am now.

What is Film?

On the surface, it seems like a simple enough question.

What is film?

It seems simple enough, primarily because as a single-line question, it masks the layers and layers of other, different kinds of questions that would inevitably arise before any sort of answer could be articulated. What kind of film? In which country? At what time? By who? For what purpose?

Not Citizen Kane – Terminator Salvation

A few weeks ago, I had a very short hair-cut. I came back home and my little brother laughed at me and said “WTF, are you trying to look like John Connor?!” Then, I thought that since I already have his haircut, might as well keep the goatee as well, which I did. So the whole of this week, I have been going around telling people how I am trying to look like John Connor. I was simply being annoying and so full of myself.

All this of course, makes the anticipation for ‘Terminator Salvation’ even greater. Just last month, I couldn’t actually give a damn about the film but this week alone, after re-watching ‘Terminator 2′, after watching the awesome 4 minutes trailer for the film, after realizing just how much I like Christian Bale, and after realizing how much I look like John Connor (kidding ok?), the anticipation just sky-rocketed. Now I wish it didn’t.

It’s NICE! – Carmen Meets Borat

We browsed through the festival’s website together, my friend and I. With the proliferation of semi-professional documentaries (always, always shaky camera – painful to my eyes, at times, much like the early works of my own career: “Sorry, Hakim, Ibu pening lah tengok video tu…”) and dozens upon dozens more of the same works touching upon the same issues and themes over and over again, there are few works that truly jumped out at me and grabbed my attention. But then again, it was the Women’s International Film Festival in Seoul, which, while it focuses on an important, if slightly over-exposed issue, limits itself in terms of the kinds of work that it can show.

But jump out it did when my eyes doth laid itself upon it: ‘Carmen Meets Borat’. “You know what,” I told my friend, “I have no idea what that is all about, but that is one film that I feel I can not miss.”

Terminated Salvation? – JCVD

“Sometimes,” so goes the adage, “in order to get to a good line, you have to write a thousand lines that are terrible.” That’s actually more related to scriptwriting, a line that has actually turned up almost without fail in every other scripwriting book. I’m more tempted to say ‘every’ without the ‘other’, due to the frequency of its appearance in such books. Come to think of it, perhaps it is one of the thousand lines referred to by itself. I can understand why, since it’s mainly to force people to write. Whether it works is probably another story, since it depends on the taste.

In a way, both of the same principles would apply to Jean Claude Van Damme’s film, ‘JCVD’. I would start by saying that ‘JCVD’ is a most unique line in itself.