jeudi, mars 18, 2004 I caught two movies yesterday, because I quite like the garish pink cinema at Clementi, and because it's $5 on weekdays ($7 on weekends). I saw Haunted Mansion with Vanessa, who's a primary 1 school friend - I've been meeting her on the 8:05 bus these couple of days because her present client is located in Clementi (she's an accountant). We caught the 6pm show, which ended at 7:20, but then she had to go off, so I went and bought another ticket for The Butterfly Effect at 7:15, and kept watching till 9pm.Haunted Mansion Verdict: Unless you're below the age of 16, don't even bother. Nothing's new; old plot, obnoxious Eddie Murphy, wife who looks like ghost's dead lover, secrets, and the worst cliché of all: the butler did it. All 1hr20mins of nothing-much-really. The Butterfly Effect If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, a tornado breaks out in Hawaii. (or something to that effect, I can't really remember the geography of the analogy.) The title of the movie is derived from the basis of chaos theory, if I remember my Michael Crichton clearly (see Jurassic Park 2 - the book, not the movie). Something about changes in the first stage of evolution having massive effects later, after many years of event magnification. That's what the movie is about - hence the tagline: Change one thing. Change everything. For some implausible reason (could be that his dad was in a mental institution, and tried to strangle him during one of his visits, but ended up being accidentally cludgeled to death by the orderlys) , Evan (Kutcher) has always been prone to blackouts. When he was 15 or so, he and his friends accidentally killed two people. He blacked that out, and after the ruckus died down, his mother decided to leave town. The kid grows up (into Kutcher with stubble), keeps journals so that he won't forget, and studies psychology and memory rentention (big surprise there.) On the night that he celebrates his 7th year without blackouts, he passes out (while making out with a pretty hot chick), and flashes back to the horrible events of his childhood. Needing to verify that they were real memories, he looks for his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh (Smart), and asks her what happened. She doesn't want to remember the events of the past, and winds up suiciding. He attends her funeral, then keeps reading his journal - and the same weird blackout occurs, except that he can take over his 7 year old body (or 15, or 18, or whatever journal-age he's at), and change what happens then. He flips back to "real life" - and suddenly he's got designer stubble, and is sleeping in Kayleigh's pink sorority bed - and she's alive and in it. Of course, things go bad, he winds up in jail, but then he gets his journals out, reads them, and changes some other thing in the past, and flips to a "new" future, one where another one of his pals is stuck in a mental institution. Then he flips to another future where Kayleigh is a hooker, or he has no arms, and on and on. The story finally ends with him burning the journals - everyone's fine, even him, but as Amy Smart shares the credits with Kutcher, it's ultimately a love story: the only future where everyone comes out well-adjusted and with all their limbs intact is if Evan and Kayleigh had never hung out together in the past. Verdict: The whole idea of parallel universes (universi?) is nothing new, and so the concept behind the movie is nothing new. I'd still recommend the movie because it's got a lot of background dialogue and loose ends that still give you pause for thought - like the fact that Evan's dad apparently went through the same thing, and got stuck in a world where he had no "journals" to use as his instrument to travel between the different futures. Hereditary insanity perhaps? I read a review on the movie - I think it was from The Straits Times. The reviewer blasted the movie for being "too slow" - after all, the review argued, the concept is nothing new. I like it because the movie takes its time to spin a proper story - telling a story on alternate realities is never easy, and gets repetitive after a while (can anyone say Sliders?), but TBF hits the right pace for me. It's still a $6.50 show, maybe $7.50, but not $8.50. (I guess those are my ratings for any movies that I post up. $6.50, $7.50 or $8.50. Pretty self-explanatory for the Singapore audience.) [Local haunts and butterflies] |
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