I remember how it was

Does Atonement deserve the Best Picture award it got from Oscar last year? Can you believe that United Kingdom is such a beautiful place? The cinematographer has done a tremendous job in creating Atonement, and even though I didn't like the story, I love how the movie looked. It was a visual extravaganza.
Sitting in the comfort of my living room at home, I was treated with a story that started before the Second World War broke out when all the characters were younger. The beginning of the movie captures viewer's attention by showing the same image of the front of the dollhouse and the front of the country estate the main character lives in. This is a story about a misunderstood Romeo and a spoiled Juliet, but the way the story is told somehow ruined the beauty created in the beginning of the film. Perhaps that's exactly what the director wanted, Atonement is about repentence of a woman who told a lie that affected people's life. It's about love that was lost due to the misunderstanding of a young child. It was unjust for the man who didn't commit the crime to go to jail. It was not right for the girl to grow up and marry the man who raped her when she was a teenager so he will never go to jail. This monstrous result also gives us enough evidence to speculate that maybe she was not raped at all. The movie is about the ugliness of war. London is transformed into a place where lovers have little time to see one another, and most men have no tomorrow. To think that the story will have a happy ending is naive, and we are not watching a Disney film. There's no justice. The girl grows up never telling the truth in court, never clearing Robbie's name, never atone her sins. Romeo and Juliet died on two continents, alone, just days short of D Day.
I like watching war movies. They bring out the worst, and they bring out the best of us. We can learn from this movie because one lie can't damage you right now, but you can never take the lie back. A lie will always hurt somebody, and it will never go away. It saddens me that there's no real Atonement in this movie, but maybe I am wrong. By telling us this story, the girl has atoned her sins even though nothing will make it better for the people who died in the war. I also think that this movie is close to my heart because my family is affected by the war. Granddad fought in the Pacific and nearly lost his family in China, if he didn't find my grandma then my dad wouldn't even be here. Mum's family also suffered greatly from the war, losing everything and taking on the responsibility of close to twenty people with one income. Mum told me that she couldn't afford to buy shoes for singing recitals in primary school, borrowing someone else's shoes was the norm and they were way too small. Who would listen to a young girl's complain then? Yes, we've come very far from then. I wish we can remember how painful it was and never make the mistake of warring again.

Who's your knight?

With so much build up to the movie, Batman: The Dark Knight is the film anticipated by the public after much hype and controversy. My biased opinion about two male actors, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger will undoubtedly come through in this review, but bear in mind that these two men have matured (slowly) on the big screen from teenager to adults. Christian Bale was in Newsies, Little Woman, and Treasure Island as the young boy who went on an adventure that most of us have read about in the childhood. He sailed with Long John Silver, for God's sake, how bad can he be? Heath Ledger was in Ten Things I hate about you, The Knight's Tale, and recently in Brokeback Mountain as a gay cowboy. Yes, he was also Ned Kelly, the notorious bandit in the Outback. Apart from these two young men, we have a star studded cast, and the civilians (extras) with more morals than the main characters! We have a winning combination of the ultimate bad guy who enjoys chaos and the flawed good guy who takes the law into his hand under the mask. Being a hero in America is not easy, and that includes Batman. If you choose to watch Batman, don't complain about how close to home or how real it feels because the movie tells it like it is. We have been treated with the Joker killing everybody who robbed the bank with him, and the subsequent murder of the Police Commissioner and the judge who resided on Harvey Dent's case. Harvey Dent's creation is also very interesting to watch, much better handled than the chemical he received in the previous Batman movie. Joker is almost a lovable villain because he's so mad, so bad ass, and so mysterious that you can't find his fingerprints anywhere (he's never been caught before or done anything bad before). You have to wonder whether he was telling the truth about his father and mother, too. Who will trust such an evil creature? I am fascinated by villains like him, Darth Vader, and Hannibal Lector. Why can these people be free to do what they want and kill without mercy? In the criminal's eyes, the Police Commissioner and the Judge were the dealer of suffering, the other small time criminals who robbed the bank were bad, too. So did Joker did the people of Gothan a favour? No. He did himself a favour. He doesn't care about anybody else. He enjoys other people dying. He completely stole the show from Batman this time. Let's turn our focus to Batman and look at him closely.
We see Batman in green and Grey tops with Alfred in the new Batcave, underneath the container in an undisclosed location. We watch him jump off a building in Hong Kong with the villainous Chinese accountant. Small note in the language that they used: they didn't speak Cantonese this time, just Mandarin. It's weird and confusing, maybe all the people employed are from China? Why don't they speak Cantonese? I think his most moving performance is at the end when he takes on the blame for people who were murdered by Harvey Dent.
The problem with this movie is that every time you want it to end, it doesn't. It is tortuously honest. There's no way out. Just when you think that they will live happily ever after, something else happens that leave everyone sad. Fortunately, the screenwriter and director didn't blow all the people up. They were very PC about it and taught us that criminals and everyday people will not blow one another up before twelve o'clock. Good on you. The fight scenes are also very sketchy. You can't see very much and that was a bit disappointing. You can argue that this is the style of the movie, but to me it's cheating.
Why is Batman: The Dark Knight worth watching? It's because the movie develops all the characters properly (not so much Rachel Dawes, but she wasn't the main character anyway). It's got depth. It doesn't rely on special effects to tell the story, and we know that these never happen in real life. It's the people who we like to watch. The criminal who threw the detonator out of the window, and the guy who put the detonator back into the box instead of blowing the other ship up. It's how Batman, Harvey Two Face, and the Joker morph into their role that fascinate us, capture us, and keep us hooked when we sat in the movie theater. No, we don't have fancy cars or suits or panthouse like Bruce Wayne, but we salute you. We enjoyed the ride immensely.