RIFLE RANGE BOY

Bunohan (2011, Malay) Dain Said, Director. After hearing many rave reviews again and again about this Malaysian movie, produced by Universal Studios, I decided to give it a peek. It was a film done spoken completely in Kelantanese Malay and shot in Kelantan Thai border where beliefs of mysticism and spirits of the land is rife. This piece of nobody's land is a waste land where nothing much is happening. People cross the border at their whim and every guy looks like a bad dude. In fact there were no ladies at all in this movie except for an apparition of the protagonist's dead mother later in the movie. One have to digest the whole movie in order to understand the flow of the story which appeared disjointed initially where everybody is fighting and is being killed ruthlessly. It starts with Adil, a Muay Thai boxer, absconding from a fight, with his buddies after he injures his Thai opponent early on the fight (which he was not supposed to). Meanwhile Ilham, a hired ass...

Danger, Professor Robinson! The unquenchable thirst of mankind for knowledge seem insatiable. From the time of cavemen, people had always wanted to know what is on the other side - of the river, of the horizon, of the hill, of the rainbow, of the sky and so on... There are a lot of things that man is learning every day. Some are pure theories but seem to make sense so everybody accepts it as the gospel truth - like the Theory of Evolution for example. It makes sense and man cannot dispute it, hence he accepts it, putting two and two together.Now, people in power in certain countries think they should withhold some information away from public knowledge in the name of national security and government secret. Others will cry that this abuse of power and that the public should be made available to this important information for their scrutiny. Information is power they say, hence, people will little knowledge would think they know everything. However, if the...

Pather Pancholi ( Bengali, Song of the road 1955) Director: Satyajit Ray In a book I am currently reading on biographies of MK Gandhi and Winston Churchill, the author says that Bengalis (at least during Gandhi's era) had a chip over their shoulders. They thought that Bengal should be the cradle of Indian civilization after producing many literary figures, including Rabindranath Tagore, who received the Nobel prize with an almost 100% literacy rate in the state. This film is further proof of this effect, a revolutionary movie, a deviant from your typical idea of how an Indian movie would be. Done on a shoestring budget, a relatively novice cast, minus the razzmatazz of glitz of affluence, depicting utter poverty without tear-jerking melodrama, it still managed to win our hearts and won many international accolades. Durga passing stolen guava to grand aunt   Impressed by Nehru (then the Prime Minister), who decided to nominate it to the Cannes film festival despite i...

Like a goose forced fed for the liver to prepare foie gras or like a wharf labourer diet, the preceding days before the full marathon was high carbohydrate intake to build up the glycogen storage. Our parents educated us as not to end up as labourers but we have end up eating like them at least before a run! This would mark the lull period after 6 months of intensive training which was sometimes ridiculed by non runners. Remarks like "you know mortality during marathon is a concern, you know", "I offer my services to anaesthetise you when you undergo total knee replacement", " you are trying to act like a young chap", "midlife crisis" were hurled left, right and centre all the time and seem like the only thing coming out from the orifices of naysayers. After setting out the regalia of armamentarium the night before, I hardly could catch any sleep. The sheeep just kept jumping over the fence and they just kept on coming and coming. With so much ...

To have and have not! (1944) This Ernest Hemingway story based film is anything but the typical Hemingway type - the one which has a convoluted story with a lot of travel and scenes of Europe. Apparently, the story was modified from the real one. It is a simple story of an world-weary American boat captain and his tribulations of being a boatman set in the seaside town in 1940 France which was at war. Morgan (Humphrey Bogart), the boat man has to put up with dumb non-paying tourist who use his services to fish and French Resistance freedom fighters who plead with him to transport their agents. Along comes Slim (Lauren Bacall), Morgan's love interest, a mysterious wandering American tourist. Due to financial reasons when a would-be payer is shot, he relents to the Resistance's insistence. He picks up two agents from a hide-out island, an agent is shot during a shoot-out with authorities, manages to bring them across safely and nursed him to he...

Hugo (2011) A family themed movie set in the 1920s Paris which seem to be teaming with orphans (probably because their parents might have been killed in the Great War), so much so that a goofy policeman (Sacha Baron Cohen, Yes! Borat) with leg braces and an expression full Rottweiler make it their full time duty to hunt them down, often with comical sequel! Hugo, an orphan, stays alone in a clock tower in a Paris railway station without bothering anybody but maintaining the clock and occasionally pilfering to satisfy his hunger. His father, a curator in a museum had earlier died suddenly and Hugo was cared for by his drunkard uncle in the tower before he also dies. Papa George (Ben Kingsley), a toy shop owner, accuses Hugo of stealing his things but hires him to help around when Hugo managed to impress him with his skills of repairing mechanical toys. George had earlier confiscated a mysterious note book that was found on Hugo. The book contained notes about a mechanical...

By Farish A. Noor MANY SIMILARITIES: The peoples of Indonesia and Malaysia should celebrate their inter-connected past SCHOLARS who follow the long and complicated historical relations between Malaysia and Indonesia are sometimes baffled by how and why certain parties in both countries tend to view each other with incredulity and a lack of comprehension. For many years now, some quarters in Indonesia have raised the question of why Malaysia has "claimed" some of Indonesia's symbols, artistic products and cultural practices as theirs, and this has been accompanied by demonstrations of anger and frustration. Before going any further, allow me to reiterate for the umpteenth time that as a scholar who works and teaches in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, I see nothing but similarities between all three countries; and that these similarities can be traced back to a common history that they all share -- even if some quarters do not wish to admit it. The recent spat...

Feb. 31, 1869? My son has this fascination that borders on insanity with calenders, dates and time in general - from space, outer space to time travel and everything in between. Just give him a date between 1900 and 2300 and he would tell you correctly its day through mental calculation. So, one day he asked me (to test my intelligence) whether if there ever existed a 30th February. Annoyed, I told him no and advised him to use his resources for something more productive! It turned out that there existed twice in the history of mankind the dates February 30th and I had to eat humble pie. And he went on rattling about the Swedish calendar (during the conversion of Julian to the Gregorian calendar) and the Soviet revolutionary calendar when the months were jumbled up to serve certain reasons. And of course, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Hobbits had a February 30 in their calendar! (...from www.timeanddate.com) February 30 was a real date February 30 was a re...

Sculpture depicting the churning of the ocean at Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok, Thailand Now that everyone can fly, everyone has a chance to see the wonders of nature and man made structures near and far! A point in question is the mammoth man made structure in Swarnabumi airport in Bangkok. Incidentally, 'Swarnabumi' is a Sanskrit word meaning 'land of gold'. It was initially used by Indian traders to describe the strip of land protruding from the mainland of south east of Asia, i.e.peninsular of Malaya. The giant elaborate structure depicts an event in Hindu scripture (Puranas) of Lord Vishnu's second avatar. It all started when the God of Sky (Indra) was given a garland by a passing sage. Indra placed on his elephant's trunk who threw it away because of the strong scent. The sage, angered by this action of throwing away God's offering, passed a curse rendering all the demi Gods and Devas powerless. ( Hey! I thought saintly sages are supposed to...

Blind Chance (Polish: Przypadek) 1987(release) I suppose, in conjunction with the Euro 2012 finals co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, it is only proper to review a Polish film. Actually, it the movie upon which 'Sliding Doors' (which I discussed earlier) is based on. Even with excellent subtitles, the first half-hour of the film just whisks by without giving a clue what was going on! Characters were coming and going leaving us wondering what was actually going on. The story starts with Witek screaming on top of his lungs. In the next scene, bodies of dead people are dragged by doctors and attendants along a hospital corridor, leaving a trail of blood along the way. Then it goes to the time when Witek was a child, and his friend Daniel moves to Denmark. And a young Witek with a girlfriend. A cadaver is dissected in full view of the audience stirring up a medical student who could not stomach the gore. Then we see Witek, a 4th-year medical student, coaxing her, who actually...

Manchurian Candidate (1962) This is not the one where Denzel Washington acted in 2004 but rather the original one cast in black and white from a time before I was an embryo. It starts with scenes of Korean War when some American soldiers are caught by their enemies (Russian and Chinese) and transported away on a helicopter. After the show of credits, Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) arrives home from Korean War to be feted as a war hero, much to his annoyance. The whole brouhaha is his mother's mastermind, a conniving opportunist lady who has only one thing on her mind - to make her senator husband, Raymond's stepfather the President of USA. Raymond has had a strained relationship with his mother (Angela Lansbury of 'Murder! She wrote' - Boy, that lady was old even then) and his stepfather. Instead of working for his stepfather, Raymond decides to work as a confidential secretary to a reputable political journalist. The said journalist is, however,...