The Mummy (2008)

Another sequel of Mummy movies is now involving the history of ancient China, where the great Emperor Qin (Jet Li) was buried along with his 10,000 terracotta army. The story starts with the young Alex O'Connell (Luke Ford) successfully excavated the tomb of Emperor Qin in China. As it normally goes, trouble sneaks in by itself. The mummy of Emperor Qin was then resurrected by a group of people who wanted him to rule again. Now that the mummy had revived, even Alex didn't have enough experience dealing with some kind of problems like this. So his father, Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) came to save the day.

This movie is not a comedy, supposedly so. However, I found a lot of dialogues in the movie that try to attract viewers' laugh or just a smile. But they are not attracted, though. Most of the comedy parts are just misplaced, I think. Imagine that somebody in the middle of chaos was able to throw a joke. I think that would just ruin the suspense, yeah, it was ruined.

Talking about the adventure, there are a lot of eye-catching computer animations. Really nice to see that. But it doesn't really help to support the settings. Oh yeah, some of fictitious creatures are there in the movie! However, what's that Yeti doing in the movie? Isn't it just too weird?

My friends were not too satisfied with the movie. I guess that should help you identify how good the movie is.

Wanted (2008)

Life is about choice and every single person has the right to choose what they want to be. Boldly, this movie stresses on somebody’s choice of being a loser or being the man in all occasions. It’s about change that occurs in a man’s life.

Based on a comic story, the movie tells about Wesley (James McAvoy), whose life was nothing but being a regular accountant and all-time loser. His marriage was even on the verge of failure (what a lame guy :p). His life changed just when a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie) saved him from a man trying to kill him in a supermarket. He was then involved in an adrenaline-pumping scenes. It then turned out that he was a son of a great assassin, who affiliated with the Fraternity. The Fraternity was a group of assassins that attempted to create balance in humans life. And the cool thing is they are able to bend the motion of their gun’s bullet!

Wesley’s father was assassinated and the killer was after him. Sloan (Morgan Freeman), the leader of The Fraternity, then convinced Wesley to join the group. Wesley threw away his ordinary life and then worked out himself to be an assassin in order to take revenge while Fox trained him.

The action scenes are quite nice. Remarkably, those scenes that involves car chasing. Jumping car and rolling car were all there. The Viper Dodge Fox was driving was nice to see too. However, I see that the camera movement is so quick that I did not really know what was going on. Another thing is about the bending bullet. I bet you’ve never seen such thing like inclined bullet movement just before taking the target down.

The shooting scenes might remind of you of Shoot’Em Up (2007), whereby no bullet was wasted to shoot those multiple targets. One bullet, one’s down, and blood would splash out.

Overall, I would say that the movie is quite nice to see. It’s not only showing superb action animation, but also not boring storyline. It’s a cool movie!

The Kite Runner

No wonder that The Kite Runner has been granted a lot of acknowledgments and has been the top number 1 bestseller book by New York Times for over two years. The author himself, Khaled Hosseini, was eventually endowed a Humanitarian Award by UNHCR in 2006. I would say, this book is amazing!

It’s a story about friendship, brotherhood, love, and betrayal. Amir was the only son of a respected man in Kabul, Afghanistan. Brought up only by his father who was expecting his son to be a tough boy, Amir struggled on the fact that he couldn’t fulfill his father’s expectations. Deep inside Amir’s heart, his only wish was to win his father’s love and attention, since his father had always been disappointed by his son’s weak attitude. He grew up with Hassan, the son of the house’s janitor. Being as a servant as well as a friend, Hassan was always so loyal to Amir. But, Amir betrayed Hassan. He threw Hassan away of his life and for decades Amir was living in regret. After that, Amir and his father moved their lives away from Afghanistan because of political uncertainties. Colonialism by Russian was causing chaos that time. They moved to America and lived there. Twenty five years had passed and his dark past was aroused, opening another chance for Amir’s atonement. In a very doubt state, Amir came back to Kabul, where it all began, leaving his family and hoping to be able to settle his guiltiness once done in Afghanistan.

This book is so emotional. Hosseini’s style of narrating the story perfectly makes me reading as though I am watching a movie. Each of the roles in the story are fully described. I can capture the scenes and all the emotions Hosseini trying to convey. The book also clearly presents the culture of the characters, which mainly emphasizes on Afghan culture.

Having sold over eight million copies and translated in 42 languages apparently implies that the book is worthed and I recommend you read this book. It’s a real touching story and all the acknowledgments are true about it.

Children of Men (2006)

Imagine that human beings are facing its own extinction, where baby is no longer born, and the youngest human on earth is 18 years old. That’s what happened in Children of Men. The infertility defect causes human unable to reproduce and the population is definitely going to an extinction. In such condition, the world was thrust into chaos. However, a light of hope seemed to appear while a young woman was found pregnant. Theo (Clive Owen) strived to bring the infant and its mother into safety in the middle of chaos.

In this movie, the world is described so gloom. Terrorists attacks was spreading. The world citizens were in a great concern of the humanity extinction. It is described by the scene where the people were all mourning on the news of the death of the youngest person on earth. There is another interesting part, whereby a battalion of army was attacking the terrorists in a destructed town. The armies were all holding their fire while they saw the baby whom Theo was trying to save and everyone there were looking at the baby as if they had looked a god’s presence. People were astonished by the presence of a hope to the humanity.

Actually, I did not really understand the story since the DVD I was watching is not a good one. I couldn’t catch the voice clearly.