Movie:: Click

Hey people,

Last week I saw this movie called Click, which has Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, ChristopherWalken, David Hasselhoff and Sean Astin. The movie must be good, I thought with a cast like that. Well, yes, it was a good movie and I enjoyed it, despite it sharing a Bruce Almighty-ish theme.

Adam Sandler is an over-worked architect (!) who has no time for his wife and two kids. He hasn't complete the treehouse he started for the kids, and now he doesn't have time to go camping with them. Even at the family barbecue he is on the phone with his boss, who offers him a lucrative deal to get him promoted in the company. Stressed out and tired from his family, he heads to Bed Bath and Beyond, where he sees a small door with the signboard saying Beyond. In goes our man, to meet with Walken, who gives Sandler a universal remote.

With this remote, Sandler can control the people and situation around him by pausin, rewinding, forwarding, muting and pausing them. He mutes his barking dog, fast forwards his wife's constant nagging, rewinds to his past to remember something for the present, and slo mo the sexy stuff. Everything seems to be going well, till the moment where the remote feeds into its memory the most repeated action by Sandler, and auitomatically fast forwards his life.

Sandler finds himself growing older and older, to the point where he sees his little kids all grown up and his wife leaving him for another man. Sandler becomes old enough to suffer medical complications and before we know it he is at the end of his life. At the cost of forwarding through his life, he realizes that he has missed out on quality time with his family, and wishes he could go back and spend more time with theminstead of making it big in his career.

Being a Sandler movie, this movie is not without the typical Sandler gags of farting and kicking in the groin parts, but surprisingly enough, barring those scenes, Sandler is actually playing an endearing man with emotions. One of my favorite scenes is when he rewinds to the part in his life where he ignores his ailing dad and tells him to leave. It was an emotional scene to see him rewind that part, and tell his dad, who is in a paused moment, that he loves him.

One other scene which got me thinking was when Sandler realizes that he can view any part of his life, and that reminded me of the Book that God keeps on our life. On Judgment Day, everything that we have done in our lives will be exposed, and as the Quran says, every little good and bad thing you have done, it will come out in the open. When seeing Sandler go through his past life, I realized there were some parts of my life that I would like to keep hidden and not re-visit, but wil have to one day.

Don't read too much into the movie- just enjoy it for what it is: a comedy about spending more time with your family because "family comes first!"

Mansur

Movie :: Silent Hill

Hey friends,

On Monday night, at 1210am, I went to see a movie called Silent Hill. I hadn't heard much about this movie, except that it's based on a video game a la Final Fantasy, Resident Evil and Doom. Rarely do movies based on video games do well (remember Mario Bros, what a disaster!). But, reading lukewarm reviews to this movie made me want to see it, and in short, I was genuinely surprised at how good this movie turned out to be.

Sharon, the young daughter of Rose, suffers from sleepwalking and when she is in that state, she keeps on saying Silent Hill over and over, and so Rose, determined to help her daughter get better, takes her to Silent Hill. Silent Hill, which is now a ghost town, used to be a coal-mining town which had a disaster. However, some people claim that there are still fires burning beneath that town. A cop tries to stop Rose from taking her daughter to Silent Hill, but Rose refuses and speeds up, and just before they enter the town, a small girl crosses her path, leading Rose to crash her car. When she gets up, she sees her daughter is missing, and thus begins her search for missing kid in a creepy, eerie town called Silent Hill.

If you keep in mind that this movie is based on a video game concept, I think it's one of the better movies than Doom and Resident Evil. There are times in Silent Hill, when Rose is in a school or hotel, that you can sense you are in a video game, leading Rose from room to room picking up clues and fighting off the evil monsters. Silent Hill works as a creepy horror movie too, because very little CGI is used, and mainly real people, which gives it a more scary effect (remember the faceless nurses?)

The story line may get muddled up, but the creepy atmosphere and scary monsters, and great visuals and set up make up for the story line, which tries to make take into account the different dimensions/ time/ space concept. It worked for me. It did not work for others. A friend of mine wants to kill me after I had told how much I enjoyed this movie at the theatres.

Maybe it was because I watched it at the end of a tiring day when I was begging for some entertainment and this movie more than just made up for it. Also, the actress Radha Mitchell, who was superb in Pitch Black, does a commendable job here. And THAT ending..no one could see it coming!

Mansur