Movie Geek's Blog

Cast: Ulrich Mühe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch

Directed by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Genre: Drama, Thriller

A Guest Review by Nafees Ahmed

Reviewer's Rating: ★★★★½

The plot of 'The Lives of others' at its outset, may seem very familiar to psychological surveillance drama , "The Conversation" directed by Francis Ford Coppola, where lead protagonist of both the movies sit around the clock with headset clamped over their ears, stone faced, expressionless and surveying a romantic couple.  But the similarity ends here, and 'The Lives of Others' slips into psyche of three principle characters who are struggling to live a normal life and honestly peruse their career and aspiration with no restriction, midst of all the chaos during 1984 Cold War, at Berlin Wall.

This dark and gloomy drama about three struggling souls, written and directed by first-timer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, was a deserving winner of 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Lives of others tries to examine the human nature and subtle love that somewhere beneath never blossoms, during the tragic struggling phase of exploiters and exploited people. The Stasi, the GDR's secret police, whose had vast network of informants( 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll during 1984), were sinister exploiters who never shy to bug the house of suspects and exploit their personal life.

Minister of Culture Bruno Hempf seizes an opportunity to take an undue advantage of vulnerable Actress Christa-Maria Sieland whose Playwright boyfriend Dreyman is under suspicion after he escaped state scrutiny due to his pro-Communist views and international recognition. While Stasi Captain, Gerd Wiesler, starts his surveillance by bugging Dreyman's apartment, sooner he realizes that he himself is a part of more sinister plan that involves  personal gain.

Film is about two honest individual who are disillusioned at the way they see their society and their own personal life .One of the focal points here deals with the issue of an honest man who takes his job religiously, but how possibly he reacts to circumstances that ask him to deflect his own path of an honest and righteous being.

But sooner Wiesler sympathizes with Dreyman and Christa's exploited artistic and personal life, and ultimately he jeopardizes his own career. At the other end, handsome Dreyman is passionate about his work and passionately in love with his beautiful girlfriend; oblivious to the fact that his apartment is under surveillance. Character of Dreyman is flawed but good guy who has earned himself name among theater people & GDR, and seeks removal of culpable theatrical colleagues from the blacklist, and who ends up writing a sensational article for the western press.

The Lives Of Others is highly compelling political thriller that horrifically thrives on backdrop of Berlin Wall, East Germany; it is profoundly emotional film that has ability to shatter you. It is powerful film that is perfectly constructed blending human drama, romance and thriller that is devoid of any ho-hums and cliché, twists are unpredictable and never seem forced while climax will definitely give lump in your throat.

When great actors and great filmmakers collaborate, we get to witness a great film. Be it the Marlon Brando-Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather, Brad Pitt-David Fincher's Fight Club, Clint Eastwood-Sergio Leone's Dollar Trilogy or any other pair. The list is endless.

However there is one actor-director duo, who never worked together, which I always wanted to see; Heath Leadger and  the Coen Brothers. Ledger worked with great directors like Ang Lee and Christopher Nolan, but couldn't work with Joel and Ethan Coen before he died in January 2008.

But, the fact is that Heath Ledger had his chances to work with the Coens. He was offered the role of Llewelyn Moss in "No Country for Old Men", but he refused to do the role to take some time off from work.

This role went to Josh Brolin, he was more than happy to win the part for Llewelyn Moss. 2 days later he broke his shoulder in  a motorcycle accident.

Later in an interview with a magazine, Josh Brolin recalled the moment when he was hit by the car at the time of the accident. He was saying to himself  "Fucking Shit, I really wanted to work with the Coens."

In spite of that, his injury didn't hamper his role in the film as the character he played was shot in the shoulder very early in the film.

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"My name is Harvey Milk and I am here to recruit you"

This movie is all about getting intrigued in 125 minutes; I must admit, I am truly awed and zapped at the same time to believe in the infinite connection that Mr. Milk makes throughout the movie. The details, reach, assembles, characters in the movie just doesn't let you get away from them. 

It is a biopic about first openly elected gay politician and an activist rising to the horizon by the revolution in the status of homosexuality in the year of 1977 in the US. He changed life of the community and the history of that era all together by sheer hard work and his reach to the heart nature. Watching Academy Award Winner Sean Penn in the lead role of Harvey Milk was a delight. His mannerism, his flow and his presence is something that will not slip from your mind for a long time. 

I believe, Director Gus Van Sant did the very right choice of getting Penn play the heart melting role of Milk. The movie initiates with a start of an audio tape marking all the details in the journey of Milk’s life. In a gush of doing something with his life and mind, Milk decides to fight against the wisdom, space and rights of homosexual people. Having said that, this line makes me remember his dialogue: “Forty years old and I haven't done a thing that I'm proud of.” 

Deeply in love with Scott Smith (James Franco), he decides to move to San Francisco, and opens a camera shop in the midst of Castro Theater, where large number of homosexual community are down eyed left, right and center by the other group including the police. Campaigning for gay rights, stabilizing the heated crowd and playing very calm yet smart leader, proves the ability of Mr. Harvey Milk. The movie is not about being a hero and changing life of people but about the rightful right of a gay/lesbian citizen of a country. Friends, romance – new or old, rivals, fame all intertwined with each other makes the movie connected to you from the first scene till the last. 

Playing the role of Milk as “I am as normal as you are” to “We will make a change starting now”, Penn draws a remarkable perception about his presence in the industry for all better reasons. The screen play and the dialogues either melt your heart or force you to fight against the cause with the characters. Direction and other detailing work are simply flawless. Background score not being in the movie beside the after credit list scene doesn't really itch you much since you are too engrossed with the biopic drama. Supporting actors also do a mind-blowing job proving their particular role to utmost justice.

I recommend this movie to each of those people who understand the true sense of film making and its thought process. Concluding with HARVEY MILK’s best dialogue from the movie – “Without hope, life is not worth living.” 

Movie Geek's Rating: ★★★★½

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Author: Deepshikha Deb

A drunken man [Oh Dae-Su] is arrested by the police. His friend bails him out and when this friend was making a telephone call, the man disappears only to wake up in a place that looked like a cheap hotel room. Little did he know that, he will be in that room for the next 15 years, day in, day out? 

Oldboy tells the story of that man.

Time and again, a little tune plays and the room is filled with some kind of gas so as to faint him. He wakes up and notices that the room has been cleaned, his clothes have been changed and his hair and beard has been trimmed. This same routine goes for 15 years.

He doesn’t know who imprisoned him and why. There is a TV in the room being the only source of new information for him. There is a desk with a pen and a journal, he writes, finishing journals one after another. Through TV, he finds out that his wife has been murdered and his fingerprints and blood were found at the place of the crime. Thus he has been framed for the murder of her wife. He also found out from TV only that his little daughter is adopted in Sweden.

TV taught him everything, the martial art, the tragedies of the world and the fact that the world is racing ahead at a great pace. And then one day he has been released; he became unconscious after that regular tune and the gas and wakes up in a Red box only to realize that he is not in that room anymore and that the city where he was taken from has become faster than ever.

His abductor left some cash in his court pocket and a cellphone, intentionally leaving him resourced so that he could survive and find; who did it and why? 

Now this is half the plot, the other half is even more complex, devastating and shows you the truest colors of revenge and vengeance.

Upon being free, he meets a young woman who he saw on the TV as Korea’s Chef of the year. This young woman is Mido. They talk and she comes to know of all he has gone through, she sympathizes with him, cares for him and falls in love with him.

When Oh Dae-su was abducted, for 15 years, he was only fed pot stickers, which is why its taste was imprinted on his memory. With the help of Mido, he visits every restaurant in the city and orders Pot Stickers so as to recognize the same taste, in order to find a trail to his abductor.

In an important scene, when Oh Dae-Su fights with more than 25 of his previous jailers with just a hammer in his hands. In this scene, more than a two dozen men are blocking his way to get him out of a building and because he is so occupied by revenge, he doesn’t even slow down after somebody injected a knife on his back.

In another brilliant scene, Oh went into a restaurant and asks “I want to eat something that is alive.” This shows his starvation is for life and not the food, considering the fact that he has not seen one living person in the last 15 years.

When the film started, Oh Dae-su was a good man who got drunk because he couldn't be with her little daughter on her birthday, and these 15 years made him a hardened vindictive man who reacts weirdly against emotional actions or any other act of kindness towards him.

Once Oh Dae-su finally confronts his abductor, there are some shocking revelations that unfold one after another. These revelations affect the viewers emotionally and mentally. They are shocking and deep. 

All the three performances were class apart, the prisoner Oh Dae-Su [Min-sik Choi], the chef Mido [Hye-jeong Kang] and the abductor Woo-jin Lee [Ji-tae Yu]. 

Oldboy is a harsh film that offers no sympathy, leaves you devastated for what you watched and at the end make you have pity on the characters. This is a film which will be respected even after 50 years from now. Director Chan-wook Park has made something even he will find difficult to imitate. 

This is why I hated the idea of its remake, but Spike Lee remade it and failed miserably. Some films should never be remade, tampered or even touched but only be respected for its existence.

Movie Geek’s Rating: ★★★★★

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[This post is a part of the A to Z Challenge in April 2014. Let's celebrate blogging.]

If you haven't seen Into the wild, you should. Buy it, download or borrow. But do watch it.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone [also released as Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone worldwide except India, Srilanka, Pakistan and USA] was an absolutely brilliant adventure film. 

The book was a huge success and the people behind the film worked upon every little detail to make the film successful as well. Very often, we come across movies adapted from popular books and feel that the kind of atmosphere and setup you imagined while reading the book was very different than the kind of images you are given to watch. This is something which was perfected in the Sorcerer’s stone, we imagined a similar Dursley’s place and a similarly dark Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; the set decoration was so well crafted.

This is not a film which adults usually wave off; instead this was a fully fledged adventure film for people of all age group. JK Rowling’s book was muscular and vibrant and director Chris Columbus made sure that the movie version does not end up being a cute film about kids for the kids.

It can be very well compared to Star Wars and Indiana Jones, though I am not sure about the latter one. What Star wars must have been for someone born in the late 60s and early 70s, Harry Potter is something like that for those born in the late 80s and early 90s. The supernatural stuff like a three headed dog never looked out of the place and as a viewer I was glued to the screen while thrilled if the trio will be successful in their little endeavors.

Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint were only 11, 12 and 13 respectively at the time Sorcerer’s stone was released. Daniel as Harry Potter was almost like every one of us has imagined him to be. Hogwarts looked dark and comical, which is something I love about Harry Potter films, because computers could make it look real but the director chose to maintain the atmosphere JK Rowling created in her books.

Apart from the three prime characters, the castings for the adult’s role were done fantastically. Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Richard Harris and Robbie Coltrane as Professor Snape, Professor McGonagall, Headmaster Dumbledore and Hagrid respectively were the most appropriate choices to make for the persona of the characters Rowling created.

Here is an interesting part from Roger Ebert’s review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone, which he wrote 12 years ago, just after the film was released. Read more about Roger Ebert Here.

“Computers are used, exuberantly, to create a plausible look in the gravity-defying action scenes. Readers of the book will wonder how the movie visualizes the crucial game of Quidditch. The game, like so much else in the movie, is more or less as I visualized it, and I was reminded of Stephen King's theory that writers practice a form of telepathy, placing ideas and images in the heads of their readers. The reason some movies don't look like their books may be that some producers don't read them.”

Harry Potter is a classic which stays with you for life; you will make your kids watch it. It is that kind of film. Harry Potter can very well be put with E.T, Jurassic Park, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It is the film you grew up with, how can you not love it?

"They say the first part is always the best part, they don't lie."

Note: I have not discussed the plot of the film but other details assuming all of you have already watched Harry Potter films.

Movie Geek's Rating: ★★★★

[This post is a part of the A to Z Challenge in April 2014. Let's celebrate blogging.]

Amores Perros is a Mexican film released in 2000 with the English title “Love’s a bitch”. This film is often compared to Pulp Fiction because of the non-linear style of storytelling. But let’s not go there; instead we should admire Amores Perros for its own substance; It is director Alejandro González Iñárritu's first film.

It is the story of three people living three totally different lives and how they connect because of a car accident. These characters belong to the rich socialites to the working middle class to the homeless tramps of Mexico City.

There are three different segments in this film that play one after another and all of them have some common elements, which bind the three plots into one.

The first segment is called “Octavio and Susana”. Octavio is having an affair with his brother’s wife Susana. Seeing the way his brother beats teenager Susana, he thought she deserves better and plans to run away with her, but needs money to execute his plans. He indulges in the dog fighting where guys make their dogs fight and make money out of it. One of those fights went too intense and a guy shoots Octavio’s dog Cofi in order to spare a defeat. Octavio ran away from the place in his car and gets into an accident at the intersection of the roads and injures himself badly. 

The second segment called “Daniel and Valeria” is about the rich TV people. Daniel, a TV producer abandoned his family and is living with his beautiful girlfriend and young actress Valeria. Daniel rented a new apartment for Valeria where her little dog disappears under the floorboards while chasing a ball into a hole in the floor, only to never return. Later during a car accident Valeria severely injured her legs and is now permanently out of her modelling and acting career. This was the same accident which injured Octavio, only this time we see it from another point of view.

In both of these segments, we come across a tramp El Chivo.  El Chivo is who we learn about in the third segment, “El Chivo and Maru.” Although he seems like a beggar by his appearance but he actually is a professional hitman with a revolutionary past that ended on a bad note. He also has an estranged wife and daughter Maru. El Chivo is hired by a man to kill his business partner and when he was about to do the execution, that car accident which affected Octavio and Valeria interrupts him. El chivo steals Octavio’s money and his injured dog Cofi and nurses him.

After the road accident, there come unexpected revelations in the lives of Octavio, Valeria and El Chivo. Perros in English means Dogs and indeed the director has showcased dogs as a significant entity in this film. Dogs are symbols of loyalty and in each of the three stories; there is disloyalty by the characters in it, whether it is Octavio being disloyal to his brother, Daniel to his family or El Chivo's client to his business partner. 

It is interesting to see that how one car crash changed the course of time for the three main characters of this film. This film is melodramatic, sensational and violent at different points of the plot. Depicting elements of disloyalty in the company of an animal who is a symbol of loyalty is a notable contrast in Amores Perros. 

Amores Perros lost to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for the Award for the Best Foreign Film at Academy Awards 2001. It was the first film of director Iñárritu's Death Trilogy; the other two films were 21 grams and Babel.

Today I am going to write about the 2007 Richard LaGravenese film P.S. I Love you based on the book of the same name by Cecelia Ahern. This story has a couple where the man expresses his love for his wife even after his death. 

Time changes everything in a relationship, attitude towards life, priorities or even people involved in it, but one thing that sticks is Love. Love never change. 

For the first 15 minutes, we see Holly [Hillary Swank] and Gerry [Gerard Butler] arguing over some silly issue, still loving each other passionately, before the end of the night. We see a 9 year old married couple, an optimistic Gerry and a restless yet loving Holly, for they are still not totally settled considering their financial stature.

The next scene, we find out that Gerry has died because of a brain tumor and a little funeral ceremony is going on, that’s when we realize this film is not about a whining wife and a playful husband, but something sad but more romantic than that.

The lead actors, Hillary Swank and Gerard Butler have done a fantastic job and looks totally in love with each other; I guess this was their only film together, so the casting was well improvised. 

After Gerry dies, Holly receives letters from Gerry, which he scheduled in a way that it will reach Holly only when he is no more. Each letter asks Holly to do a certain thing, like celebrate her birthday, go to a karaoke, get dressed properly for a girls night out and a few more so that Holly could stop mourning for Gerry’s departure and move on. 

Emotionally, it will make you feel sad but romantic; logically, the same set of events will make you feel depressed and may be weird about love. It depends on how you choose to address this story, using your heart or the brain.

My favorite part of the film is when Holly returns from Gerry’s funeral and make consecutive calls to their basic phone only to listen to Gerry's voice mails on the answering machine, meanwhile trying to get some sleep. You may wet your eyes there.

PS I love you has beautiful songs, the kind, you keep with you in your music collection. “I love you till the end” is perhaps the one I believe is the signature song of this film.

This film was way too long, they could have told the same story in an hour and 30 minutes. You "cannot" watch PS I Love You twice [not at least in a year], it lacks the charm we felt while watching "The Notebook" or "A Walk to Remember." Apart from that, it was a pretty decent film.

Some say, it’s a tearjerker film, others say, it’s a romantic comedy, I’d say it’s plain Romance between a woman and the memories she has of her deceased husband and everything that follows. You don’t have to feel sad for Gerry’s departure or have pity on Holly’s solitude. Just respecting the writer’s idea of portraying love will do. 

Also featured in IMDb Critic Reviews


Okay, so I was having a little chat with my friend some days back about movies, movie reviews and about The Movie Geek’s Blog. He asked me if I am only going to maintain a blog that praises every film, or I am going to be harsh as well to those who deserves.

This remark was like an eye opener for me, and I rushed to check my previous reviews and I found out that most of the reviews I write are for the films I liked. 

How can I call myself a movie critic when I am resisting to grab all my chances to criticize films I hated watching. I am not being funded by Warner Bros or the Fox studios, I have all the rights to let go my words, however abusive it may sound.

Following the advice he gave, I decide to write about a film franchise, which went from Alright to Bad to Garbage after every new part that came. I am talking about the Resident Evil Pentalogy [I don’t even know if that word exist or not].

So I watched Resident Evil: Retribution [the 5th part] a few weeks back only because I have this syndrome to finish off movie franchises I started, and I had to watch this film and I will continue watching it even if they come with a 6th part, which they will.

When the original film; the part 1, Resident evil came in, I kind of enjoyed it [okay I watched it in 2005, forgive me for saying that], it was one of the first few zombie films I watched. I can’t fake to be sophisticated enough saying I did not like it at all and totally trash this film; instead I admit I liked the first film of the franchise. The whole concept of the Umbrella Corporation was fascinating; they remained untouched even after the greatest of apocalypse.

Zombie films are a very dangerous investment for the producers if they are looking for some critical reception; most zombie films fail because of several reasons. The authorities do not consider such films for any form of accolades or awards, critics do not prefer rating them anywhere above a 6 on a scale of 10. These films have to be extremely innovative to climb the ladder of success and critics &  user ratings. 

Some of the coolest zombie films I saw in the recent times are Shaun of the Dead, Zombie land and Go Goa Gone. They were successful because they used the element of humor in the background to present the supposed Horror.

Resident Evil on a completely different note tried a serious approach to present an apocalyptic tale that failed miserably as it became more and more unrealistic with every new addition to the franchise. 

A zombie film is kind of a fantasy film itself, so in a good zombie film, there should be no other fantasy element. This keeps the horror intact, while in this franchise, you will come across a dog with 4 faces, zombies with 4 tongues, some characters that never die, characters that multiply, laser beams and many more things that you will ultimately regret being a witness to a crap like this. I will make some honest remark that you can like the 1st part as it had a story to go after and save the curiosity of the viewer till the end, you can continue to see what happened later to Alice and the others she befriended in the 2nd part.

In the 3rd part, you can see some really nice cinematography and lots of brightness and sun in this otherwise dark patched film also do not miss the little section that showcased Las Vegas covered in deserts after the T-Virus infected everyone. 

Do not go any further; if you are into good movies only, the 4th and the 5th part are real shame to this otherwise entertaining franchise.

If you are only into great cinema, do not bother yourself to watch any part of the Resident Evil franchise.