If you are one of the people who rated Wall-E as a 1-out-of-5-stars movie, then you are one sad and pathetic soul. I had the chance to watch Wall-E today, and at the same time tried out a first impression in watching at Platinum XXI. Not bad, by the way. In terms of graphic quality, Wall-E is exactly what you can expect from a world-class animation studio that has never seized to amaze me with their creations. Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Cars, Ratatouille, they are all superb animated movies in both story and craftsmanship.

As for Wall-E, it is much more special than that. Not only that it is a very enjoyable movie, it performs as a good educative movie as well, both for children, and adults, even though as I read somewhere, the producers didn’t actually intend to make this movie other than a love story. From what I’ve seen today, Wall-E gave us at least several moral lessons for us to think about.

• At least 700 years in the future, as Pixar predicted, Earth is totally covered with trash and junk. Even the orbit is covered with space trash. And we humans are definitely the ones to blame. And we Indonesians definitely fail on this one.
• In that future, people have become dependent to technology that they don’t even bother to move their ass around on their own. Every single human being in the Axiom is obese.
• When EVE and Wall-E aided the Axiom’s captain to turn against Auto’s mutiny, this shows that even robots have soul and to aid humans and to stick to their good directives.
• Wall-E and EVE showed us what it is like to have a life full of compassion and loyalty with each other. I don’t see if that’s something in common now.

Pixar has managed to develop robot characters that can only communicate verbally at a certain limit, but have deep character and emotion on screen. Who can resist the sweet and innocent Wall-E? He’s gone great lengths to stand on what he believes in. Even his pet cockroach didn’t move waiting for Wall-E’s return to Earth. Bottom line, I give this movie 11 out of 10 stars. It is outstandingly superb.

By the way, for you art history geeks, stay put for the ending credits. It’s a summary of art movements since cave wall paintings in an implicit animation. Very good stuff.

Iron Man is no doubt one of the movies that we’ve been waiting for this year, and guess what? It exceeds all expectations. I went to watch it today with Arleen, Yero, Disti, and Irlanto, and we did enjoy it from the beginning until the end. The movie was a perfectly blended super hero flick, well-played characters, extremely cool special effects with lots of details, and added with a few lines of comic relief.

In particular, I really like the execution of the armors. They are both extremely good and realistic. I see that it’s been remodeled a bit here and there to add the extra “coolness” compared to the ones in the comics or cartoons, but all the parts seem to make sense. And as Rhodey said in the movie, “That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

I watched the movie last night with Arleen, Yero, Andreas, and Jimmy. And so the long awaited trilogy has finally come to a conclusion. Watching Pirates of the Carribean has never been less than entertaining with its good special effects, a thing that has been in common when watching movies with ILM on the backend, and the movie’s comical scenes. As always, Johnny Depp plays astoundingly good as Jack Sparrow. So even though that this is an entirely different genre, how does this movie performs compared to Spider-Man 3? Spider-Man 3 is a piece of shit… Shame on Marvel for letting that happen to Spidey. Watching Pirates is definitely a good relief after my disappointment to Spider-Man 3.

Two days ago, I finally went to see the movie with Yero, Karina, and Enroe. Right from the beginning, the movie was hilarious and fun to watch. Compared with the last one, I don’t see much improvements on the animation, but apart from that and Scrat’s continuity (Remember when he got stuck in an ice cube and got his way to present day?), the comedy was fantastic and I really loved the characterizations, nothing has changed with Manny, Diego, Sid, and Scrat. This movie is indeed a two thumbs up!

I went to the movies with Kara, Trixie, and Joshua today, and tt’s been a while since I watched a drama movie, the last one was Autumn in New York perhaps. And I found that occasional drama movies are quite entertaining.

First of all, I am amused with the cinematography. Especially when Chiyo ran under the series of Shinto gates (Or whatever they call those), it was amazing. And it is quite surprising that Chinese actresses such as Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang could portray Japanese women in such a way, that I thought they were Japanese =). For you action movie buffs, don’t bother watching, I don’t think you would enjoy every minute of the movie. Drama fans, I think you should block two hours of your time for this. But who am I to tell? I’m just a sci-fi junkie…

Click here for the official movie site.

It’s been a while since I watch a movie at the theaters, the last one was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I guess. So the movie today was a good use of the 25.000 rupiahs I spent for the ticket. Narnia may not be as grand as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it is surely fun to see when every animal have names of their own and talk lively. Sometimes, they even have more characters than the humans in the movie.

As it was based on the seven books by C.S. Lewis, the film showed great details on almost every scene. And with Liam Neeson as the voice, Aslan just plain rocks, and portraited perfectly with high-quality CG renderings. That goes to the Centaurs, Fauns, Griffins, and every other imaginary characters you could possibly think of.

As I predicted before, the battle scenes were created by WETA using their Massive software, so rest assured that the scene will have at least the same quality as the battle of Mordor and Helms Deep.

The storyline itself is quite straight-forward, so it’s not really a heavy watch. I can safely assume that it goes along with children as well, except for the stabbing and slashing scenes of course.

It’s been quite a while since I got the chance to watch a Tim Burton movie, and up until now, I have not watched Big Fish yet. And since yesterday, for some reason we were unable to watch this movie, and I was going to go to MediumRare anyway, we decided to watch the movie today, and it was worth the wait. The four of us (Kara, Joshua, Trixie, and Me) went to PIM2 after the ensemble rehearsal at church, and queued for the first show. And at the same time, testing out the new theater, hehehehe.

The movie itself was, well, since I’ve watched the old version, I pretty much knew what was going to happen along the movie. But seeing all the cinematography, the make ups (especially Johnny’s), the sets, and even all the same-looking faces of the Oompa Loompas (Hahahahaha, they remind me of Jango and his clones, in a weird way), the movie was very nice to see. In short, if you watched Tim Burton’s movies before, you’ll pretty much get that, but not that dark.

And BTW, we saw the trailer for Peter Jackson’s King Kong right before the movie… And it’s a potential to be put in our movie-watch queue.

I am really pissed since the Fantastic Four has the same abbreviation with that stinkin’ Taiwanese boyband called the Four Fuckin’ Freakin’ Faggots (F4)… Nevertheless, it’s a good movie. I went to WTC Serpong to watch the movie, together with Kara and Josh, well, the theater is cheap =). Anyway, as far as I realized, most people already knew what happened to them, and all the story since the first comic was published. So this is just an interpretation movie. It may not be as good as the Spiderman series, or Batman (Sans Batman and Robin, of course), but overally the movie is nice to see, and Jessica Alba is also nice to see… Hehehehe.

So, although Fantastic Four, IMHO, is quite a public knowledge already, the following thought of mine could be a spoiler for you who haven’t watched it:

If Reed managed to get that reversal machine worked, that means, they can be the Fantastic Four or not at will? Hmm… An investment indeed, for Ben perhaps.

Oh yeah, click here for the official website.

My last Singapore holiday trip really does pay off. I finally got a copy of THX 1138, one of the movies I’m very curious about. I finally got to see one of Lucas’ ver first works. What I really like about the movie is the graphic quality, and the exceptional cinematography for such an old movie. Lucas did a good job showing us a possible future for our world, and it’s not even close to what we would like it be. Cold, barren, too organized, to don’t even live for yourself anymore. You live for those who rule you, and sex is the ultimate criminal. Not a very pleasing concept, huh? Although it may not be my preference of the future, but it does have some things that I really like, the clean environment, and the simplistic buildings. I’m not too fond of the jetcars though, it looks too much.

Another movie-watch before I’m off for my holiday week, today at PIM. Finally, after several years of absence, Batman returns with a prequel, and yes! It is indeed far better from that clowny Batman and Robin (Batman with Batman credit cards? What could be even more cheesy than that?)… I really enjoy the movie because until now, I never know Batman’s history, and this is a good chance for me to know what really turned Wayne to Batman. A recommended watch for the week =). Nevertheless, my favourite Batman movies would still be Batman and Batman Returns… Tim Burton rules!

Visit www.batmanbegins.com for details.