P.S: It pains me to realize I suck at writing rhymes. HAHAHA!
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Cinta. meaning love."Cinta" is a film of five modern-day love stories with the metropolitan skyline of Kuala Lumpur as the backdrop. While each story is independent, the characters are connected to each other by circumstance, coincidence or location.With love as its universal theme, the movie takes us through the lives of five couples who search, find and lost their love in the beautiful city. Through them, we experience five different facets of love. -
Yahoo!The new Malay Movie which has been playing Malaysia now. I just caught it in the weekend. And I reckon you to watch it too.
Sorry No English Subtitles though if you don't understand malay. Hopes it does in the VCD /DVD verison.Now to my review. It is the
Best Movie without a doubt to wrap up my 2006 year, no doubt about it. You'll have to agree with me once you watch it. I'll be too nice to give it 5 out of 5 stars, so i rather give it a generous
4.5 stars!
Picture
Love Actually in Asian, Malay Style - without the whole intimacy and sex scenes please. Still a conservative Asians. Period.
The stereotype formula for succesful Romantic Love films = physical intimacy. In most films which falls victim to this genre, an absolute abundance of physical love intimacy is a taboo. You must have it at least a minute or even 5 seconds of lip locking scenes. Hollywood is the first victim of this strategical business formula. Mind you, even Action or Horror Movies can't escape from this vicious entrapment.
I have to give the biggest credit and applause for
Cinta, being a Romance/Family film, it got away with this stereotype formula. Intimacy is translated to the audience through psychological and emotional interpretation. And that factor won most of my votes.
Unlike the multi million epic love story production,
Puteri Gunung Ledang,
Cinta, conveys its message through the simplest word which the Malay community is closely related to. Push aside all the flower literature Shakespeares like profound language in PGL, you get another 'epic' love story production
Cinta, which obviously doesn't cost as much as the latter.
Cinta is set amidst Malaysia's busiest city, Kuala Lumpur. It follows the story of 5 couples - a naive girl in search of her 'love' one, a married couple who's marriage falls apart, a siblings unconditional love, an eligible romantic bachelor who's afraid of commitment and last but not least, a widow love and care for an old man who suffers Alzheimer.
But what really stole my heart was the fact the film was able to capture the lifestyle and culture of the society, and it was daring in revealing some of the nitty gritty dirty little things which presently is happening in the city. For example, lookout for a man chasing another with a Parang, and also how cleanliness and hygiene is not part of the Malaysian society. For a lame hopeless romantic movie goer, such elements which I have seived, won't be a prominent significant message that the movie is trying to convey. So, my recommendation while you watch this movie, try to spot and appreciate the several underlying messages be it family-romance-social issues, and i bet you'll appreciate and love this movie, making it the best movie of the year.
I'm sad to say in my opinion,
Cinta and almost any Malaysian production social issues films in any genre, has no doubt bloomed the Malaysian film scene,
NOT PGL.So do look out for this kinda films from the Malaysian counterparts. Check out
Sepet and
Gubra and the upcoming horror movie,
Dukun.
City of Weirdos. 12:33 PM
