Dreamy, Scary War :)

This weekend was again a movie weekend, movies that I saw include:
The Dreamers
Ju-on
No Man's Land

Lets go one by one.

The Dreamers. I am still not sure why I saw it, no one recommended it, I was actually searching for 'Last tango in Paris', one of those controversial movies by Bertolucci, But it was out, so I thought why not 'The Dreamers'. I had read a review of this movie, which was OK types. Now the big question is did I like it. I will say 'No' and there are some reasons for it. One of the most obvious reason is, it deviates too much from the point and comes back to the point again when the viewer is not interested in it. The sexual escapades of the twins and their American friend are given more weight age than the unrest of 1968 France. There is whole lot of talk of movies and some interesting quizzes about movies too. But, as I said there are too much distractions to get into the plot.This film interests you when it deals with the youthful idealism, breaking of social fences imposed on them by elders, interesting discussions about movies and when it try to recreate the socio-political structure of an era. But this interest dwindles down as Bertolucci enters the sexual side of characters.

Ju-on (The Curse). I have seen one of the Japanese horror movie sometime back when a series of such movies were shown on HBO, so I thought to see one on DVD at night with some DOLBY effect. But this one failed to interest me, or rather scare me. The story was told as a chapter for each character in the movie, and they were not chronologically shown. I admit that I didn't get lot of story and the horror associated until I watched some of the 'Special Features' in the DVD, but by then it was too late. I was able to get the ending when I saw 'The detailed alternate ending' under delete scenes. May be I am too dumb for spooky stuff.

No Man's Land. I saw this movie for the second time and what a treat to watch it. Its like watching 'Catch-22' on screen, except that the situations are more real. There may be two types of war movies, one which glorify war and its heroes and the ones that expose the sheer futility of war (In India, unfortunately, we have only seen the former type). No Man's land is a powerful anti-war testimonial. Director, Danis Tanovic, served in Bosnian army, side by side shooting footage of war and after completing his military services, went on making 'No Man's Land'. No Man's land acts at several different levels, one is the deep-rooted hatred. second is the role of UN, third is about the role of press, and fourth is about the absurdity of above three. The tension (or rather helplessness) in the movie is interestingly shown as soldier lying on a "bouncing" mine which will explode if he gets up. With all this going on there is first-rate humor in explosively funny dialogues.

Soldier I: Hey, do you know the difference between a pessimist and an optimist?
(The soldier II shrugs as if he couldn't care less.)
Soldier I: A pessimist thinks that things couldn't be worse. An optimist knows that they can be.

Next week I am going to Bangalore so there will be no weekend movie-watching. But I have bought something for the weekdays. This is the recommendation which I got for this movie from one of my movie-buff friends:

"One very beautiful movie that I'll recommend is "In the mood for love" by Wong Kar-Wai. See if you can get it. There isn't much of a narrative here but if you talk of "mood", movies don't come better than this."