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Reviews
The Other Half (2019)
A heavily underpowered version of a real life monster.
I'm curious if there is any sort of mysterious moderator who is ready to banish hours of hardwork a connoisseur like me put here into oblivion, in the means of praising the little amount of quality a film has, all the while ignoring a plethora of reasons why it could be an unsatisfying drag of time.
I'm not saying that this film is an entire piece of junk at all. Vishama Bhaaga (The Other Half) does bring up about two real life monsters. Although, these two are unrelated with each other in the sense. One being the elevated levels of contaminents from herbicides and pesticides such as Glyphosate, Cadmium and Fluorides present in water sources and soil spelling doom on humans with CKDu. And the other being local teacher-centered education curriculum making the younger generation dumb and basically useless with their creativity, social skills, and cognitive abilities brutally being numbed down in the long run. This is a duo of such powerful topics and they can be executed at perfection in separate movies or documentaries... In my point of view.
But here we are, watching a slow-cinema-esque movie (slow cinemas are actually faster than this imao.) made up by mixing up both of these and leaving basically nothing to watch but overly sharpened and procAmp-saturated set of CGI-looking-yet-real-human characters swaying here and there in eternities of painfully unnatural silences that missed me a once-in-a-good-while opportunity to meditate to that faint hum coming from my TV set. All of the slo-mo scenes other than the bell ringing, was so darn cheap, as they didn't utilize some sort of optical flow, let alone frame blending, making it all so jarring to watch. Maybe the editor gave up using optical flow after rendering that one scene due to a CPU bottleneck. Lucky for you, I found one thing fun. And that is the slight resemblance to Wes Anderson Movies, e.g. The symmetry of the bucket captured at the doorstep, the school uniforms precisely equidistantly hung on the clothline, and a scene where the protagonist kid sitting on the middle of the porch. And also the color saturation and sharpness as I've mentioned earlier.
The only piece of background music this had was annoying as hell as it didn't match the scorching vibe of north central province, let alone the difference of day and night. And that poem about a bird, which supposed to be heart-touching was a hit and miss for me cus I didn't like the key that was sung in, except, my sister got it all looping inside her head and throat, since the melody was some classic folk tune. So far, this is an issue with me, right?
And, I hate that "uncle dial eka" as he was too rude at the protagonist kid. Jackson Anthony was surprisingly good at depicting the second monster I talked about, and man! Why would a teacher prioritize his ego and humiliating a particular kid for not doing homework?
BlackBerry (2023)
So that's how you honor mistakes?
Whether you examine it or not, mistake is a mistake. Even though it was a failure. That was the first smartphone ever. So then, the goal of this movie is to humiliate it, and entertain ones who flex iPhones? Like the noobs who hate NTSC video format and embrace PAL as if NTSC was a choice despite NTSC is actually the first of its kind with its own faults of rendering colors correctly.
So if iPhone is now the godfather of smartphones, why wasn't I able to buy one since? It's expensive, feature-packed and bandwidth hungry. For life, all I've had was a Nokia 1280, a Greentel X1 Light which ran on Android 8 Oreo, and Now an Oppo A54 on Android 10 and 11 after an update. So you can also call Android an OS for broke while iOS is the superior. I have no point to get surprised if another movie comes up for humiliating the Androids and Praise Apples just like this one.
I might have digressed and so you have lost the interest to reading this further. I'm more of a tech nerd, let's say. Well, I've searched the video by Ex-blackberry employee Matthias Wandel, reviewing about this movie and that caught my heart. Jim Balsillie was way too rude in this movie, our main character (?) Mike was shy like a nerd and Douglas was an informal sporty guy. I'd say, what the hell is this? Is this another Weird Al Yankovic styled movie where everything is the opposite of reality? (I'd blame YTS first for recommending this movie just like it recommended Tetris (2023)) This film (as well as Tetris) is rated R for the unneccesary amount of swearing. They, especially Jim doesn't have to swear this much. AND THEY SHOULD HIRE A BETTER CAMERAMAN AND A FOCUS PULLER SO THAT WE CAN WATCH THIS IN PEACE!
THIS MOVIE IS TOTAL BS AND THIS MAY BETTER SUIT AN AUDIENCE ON CRACK!
Angara Dangara (2011)
Waste of time
Watching this first time, I feel that the movie is ruined in the dubbing or VDR stage. The intonation of dialogues is highly unnatural, as if only a set of news anchors were left to dub the dialogues back. Audio mix was not satisfying, (in the TV(?) version) Camera technique and cinematography level is too old to be of a 2011 movie but unfortunately it's Sri Lanka. The use of music had made the beginning of this movie a bit too dramatically ironic. The changing/dancing montages of the apparently protagonist girl looks like straight up from any disney original movie. Overall, the name does not suit the movie.
Fukrey Returns (2017)
A jam-packed movie. Well,
This is great for a one-time watch. The movie has retained some of the essence from the first installment including the background music score and the whole main cast intact. But what happened to the college entrance? Now they are just back in trouble of earning some good amount to do what?
Look, I'm a bit of a technical person and I'm probably not gonna dive into plotholes cus I mostly don't care them as I just miss them. Speaking of the music score, I love the way how the original background score made a comeback in here with some more songs which were good, except the ones with those big'ol dance moves. (I just hate those dance-songs because they are just distracting and I feel that each one's meaning is going to be a cliché. Our sinhala films are somehow the culprit for making me hate so.)
I am not clear whether this is a BGM or a song, but that "song" played at the chase scene, which goes somewhat like "Run" by AWOLNation (Even some vocals did say "RUN!" in Hindi - "BHAAG!") was the peak!
Is it me or did this get a bit surreal to be using animations? Anyhow, if that snake, and the tigress and cub at the zoo weren't specially trained real animals, they are way better than any work of animations I've seen in hindi movies. (If you are curious about how far animations can go awful in Hindi Films, then watch PM Narendra Modi (2022).)
However I felt that the flashlights/torches were acting up a bit. Everytime a torch beam hits the camera, the camera sensor or something weird at the post-production desk starts suffering from tinnitus at various frequencies. That ringing sound is better to be heard just a very few times cuz everyone's flashlights are not supposed to have some PWM Brightness control to excite our eyes like microphones.
When they found the tigress who managed to spawn from deep beneath the cave, those torchlights shone at its direction were bouncing like crazy as if each circle of light created by each torch were nothing but some random-motion screensaver thing.
And I'm just curious how Discharge lamps could appear in an ancient looking cave/tunnel network that our team just managed to reach by digging the ground down. That's not about the low-pressure sodium lamps at the end of it that looks like a sewer, but the greenish light at the middle of this maze-looking section.
Well, this all is just about some very brief spots of a great screenplay! And I beg you pardon for bothering about small things without thinking of the big picture like you guys.
To sum the things, Furkey Returns is more likely a different approach of bringing up those characters involved. The first movie from 2013 is just decent, down-to-earth and according to some others' words, experimental. Moreover, it has its own spirit that is way stronger than this one has.
Cheers!
Over the Moon (2020)
So over the top but cringeworthy.
What a copout! A huge nerd girl shouts 24x7 singing on moon lore, makes herself a rocket with nothing but propulsion, lands on moon which has to be uninhabited because of no atmosphere but gets dragged by some neon dogs to a colorful UFO-shaped kingdom where ruled by a KPOP QUEEN?
This is overloaded with unnecessary, distractive songs, an artificial nerd girl, violations of science and a hell of "humor" which is just hit and miss. The story plot is hollow and that's it.
Ginnen Upan Seethala (2018)
Excellent!
These kind of movies are very rare here in Sri Lanka, and it is a must to be promoted in our film industry. Technically, this is a leap forth! That's why (the only reason) I love this movie. Lots of effort there. An excellent color palette. Great Sound designing. Great Music and such an outstanding and realistic perfomance! I had a lot of nostalgia as well as my family. Well done CinePro!
But when it comes to the story plot and roleplay, the script had made this very boring. (maybe, as this is a slow cinema composition)