BELLAMYBUDIMAN

I finally watched Star Trek with nine other people today and it turned out that it is better than my expectations. I can only say two things: J.J. Abrams is nuts :D, and that the new Trek blows me away! I could care less about the canonical events here, since it’s a reboot anyway, and it involves time travel that ultimately changed the fate of everything since the birth of James T. Kirk. But whoever thought of putting the time travel business so smoothly and perfectly here is one damn genius.

Of course, as a geek, I am obligated to ask these questions. Since everything changes since the destruction of the USS Kelvin, what would happen to the rest of the timeline? What would happen to Kirk himself? Would he get married, have a child of his own, lost it and repeat the occurrences of Star Trek 3? What would happen to Picard? Would he be involved in a fight with the Nausicaans and got his heart transplanted? And furthermore, would he still be captain? We are yet to find out :D

Geez, today felt like geek orgasm since, I don’t know, Revenge of the Sith?

I don’t know about you, but I despise sinetrons. To me it’s one of the dumbest things that Indonesians have done. In fact, if I was elected to ever lead the country (which is most unlikely, and like I wanted it anyway), sinetron is probably one thing that I will ban from appearing in this God forsaken country.

I just had lunch earlier on a Padang restaurant just at the corner of my neighborhood. The restaurant has a TV set, turned on, and tuned in to SCTV, one of the country’s leading sinetron broadcaster (Hell, in fact, all of them are probably are). And just right there, it’s showing a God awful sinetron called “You’ve Got Ma’il”. Yes, you read it right, “You’ve Got Ma’il”. It turned out to be a cheesy (and obviously alay) love story about a guy named Ma’il (And no, he wasn’t played by Tom Hanks). Can you seriously believe this? They ripped a whole movie title out of no reason, they “creatively” name the character just to fit that ripped off title, and people throughout the country seemed to like it! Now, instead of broadcasting actually good TV shows with quality and a sense of educating the masses a bit, no, they chose to broadcast this dumbfoundingly moronic sinetron.

And this is not all, I’ve heard that there is a children’s sinetron that ripped off Ben 10. So if it’s not ripped off, it’s probably hideous that your IQ could drop down every hour you watch the damned shows.

So given the question “Where would Indonesia be in the next five to ten years?”, I would say “NOWHERE”. I don’t think I’m being pessimistic here. It’s the fact that I’m sure deep down inside, everyone agrees.

I watched the Day the Earth Stood Still yesterday. It was nothing as spectacular as when ID4 hits the theaters, but nonetheless, long story short, the movie was great.

Today, when I was browsing around, I stumbled across this. It is a review of the movie, by KapanLagi.com, one of Indonesia’s apparently-popular portal sites. When I read the review, I was shocked that the one who watched and wrote this thing was probably an idiot. My personal site is not that popular, I must say, but in case they changed the review after reading this post, I’m gonna quote it part by part, unedited. So here is the review, along with my comments, and yes I watched the movie, so I know what I’m talking about:

Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) adalah makhluk luar angkasa yang mendarat di Washington DC bersama Gort, sebuah robot canggih, dengan sebuah pesawat ruang angkasa. Pada saat baru keluar dari dalam pesawat, Klaatu ditembak oleh tentara yang merasa terkejut dengan kemunculan pesawat aneh ini.

WRONG. They landed on Manhattan. For your idiotic geographical and demographical knowledge, Central Park is in New York, not DC. He may have landed in DC on the original version, but not here. And the army? Surprised? So the writer explained this as if Klaatu just popped out of thin air and they mistakenly hit the triggers because of reflex. THEY WERE ORDERED TO FIRE.

Untungnya Gort kemudian datang dan melelehkan senjata para tentara yang ada di sana tanpa melukai seorang pun yang ada di lokasi tersebut. Ternyata, Gort memang tak pernah bermaksud melukai siapa pun. Gort hanya bermaksud melindungi Klaatu.

WRONG. GORT deactivated the weapons, not melting them.

Klaatu kemudian dibawa oleh para tentara ke rumah sakit untuk mendapatkan perawatan. Saat berada di rumah sakit, Klaatu kemudian memutuskan untuk melarikan diri agar dapat membaur dengan penduduk planet Bumi ini.

WRONG. They took him to a military medical facility. And did he escape just to blend in? Definitely not. At this point, I really wondered whether the article writer really gets the whole idea of the movie or not.

Klaatu kemudian bertemu dengan Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) yang kemudian mengajak Klaatu untuk berkeliling kota. Helen awalnya tak menyangka bahwa Klaatu adalah makhluk dari planet lain. Namun seiring kedekatan mereka, Helen mulai curiga dan meminta penjelasan pada Klaatu.

Klaatu akhirnya membuka rahasia dan menyampaikan maksud kedatangannya ke Bumi. Klaatu dan Gort adalah makhluk luar angkasa yang bertugas memutuskan apakah sebuah planet harus dihancurkan atau dibiarkan tetap ada.

Dude, seriously, Helen WATCHED Klaatu went out from an impossibly fast sphere with a controlled trajectory, WATCHED him turned from a heap of alien placental meat into a man, and even HELPED the medical officers analyze his DNA. In what way can she really doubt that he’s an alien? You must be lacking brain cells.

Remake dari film berjudul sama yang dilepas sekitar tahun 1951 ini mencoba mengusung tema yang mirip dengan WAR OF THE WORLD. Scott Derrickson, sang sutradara, berusaha untuk tetap konsisten terhadap naskah asli dari film yang dulunya diadaptasi dari sebuah cerita pendek karya Harry Bates.

Dari waktu ke waktu, film dari genre fiksi ilmiah memang sering kali dijadikan sebuah ‘kamuflase’ untuk menyamarkan pesan moral atau politik yang sebenarnya ingin disampaikan. Dan dalam beberapa kasus, pesan tersebut memang tersampaikan dengan baik seperti pada versi original dari film ini. Di saat itu, isu mengenai perang dingin dan penghancuran umat manusia dengan nuklir memang sedang gencar-gencarnya. Dan film ini mencoba menyelipkan pesan-pesan moral ini lewat metafora yang terwujud dalam alur kisah film ini.

Yang jadi masalah pada versi tahun 2008 ini adalah bahwa isu itu sudah bergeser dan tak lagi relevan dengan kondisi saat film pertama dibuat. Konsekuensinya memang sang sutradara harus membuat sedikit penyesuaian agar tak terasa janggal. Dan anehnya di sini Scott Derrickson malah berusaha membuat film ini ‘sedekat mungkin’ dengan naskah film versi tahun 1951 meski sebenarnya ada beberapa detail yang mulai diubah. Hasilnya, film ini jadi terasa janggal dan tak sesuai dengan kondisi saat ini.

Okay, the 1951 version was talking about the cold war and nuclear missiles. This year’s version was talking about how humanity destroys the world by their own consent. In what way does this make the movie irrelevant with the current conditions?

Untungnya, dari sisi visual film ini cukup ‘menyenangkan’ tentunya ini hasil dari para pakar efek visual yang berdiri di balik pembuatan film ini. Walaupun begitu, untuk menyebut efek visual yang disajikan film ini sebagai sesuatu yang benar-benar fresh mungkin agak sulit. Beberapa film sebelumnya sebenarnya juga menyajikan efek visual yang tak kalah hebatnya.

Okay, nothing so “spectacular” here. Move along…

Pemilihan Keanu Reeves sebagai pemeran Klaatu memang tepat. Wajah Keanu yang memang terlihat seolah tanpa emosi rasanya pas sekali memerankan tokoh Klaatu yang sebenarnya adalah robot. Namun akting Jennifer Connelly yang memerankan Helen Benson juga tak bisa dianggap remeh. Sebenarnya, film ini cukup enak untuk dinikmati selama Anda tak terlalu mementingkan pesan moral yang dibawa oleh kisah fiksi ilmiah ini.

And this is the punch line! According to the writer, Klaatu is a robot, no, not an alien, but a robot. And how can you say that we shouldn’t pay attention to the moral of the movie? THAT IS WHAT THE MOVIE WAS ALL ABOUT!

Idiot. While probably thousands of good journalists may probably still trying to get themselves a decent job, idiots like this one can stay along and write dumbfounding and misleading reviews. If there are going to be layoffs in KapanLagi.com, I’ll vote for whoever kpl/roc may be.

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.”