More media stuff

[inulro]

Despite feeling pretty bad last weekend, I manage to watch a couple of films which made an impression.

First up was the original Chinese version of The Eye, in which a young blind woman gets a cornea transplant and starts to see dead people. This film is not really scary as such, and I don't think it's meant to be. Instead, it's surprisingly substantial - it's about dealing with being a sighted person after a lifetime of blindness. The dealing with seeing dead people is on top of that, and while the film is not that frightening to the audience, it shows effectively how the girl seeing the dead people is confused and terrified. The end is pretty much what I expected, but it gets there by a somewhat unexpected & roundabout way.

I can't wait to see what Hollywood did to it.

The other one was American Gangster, which I liked so much I didn't even object to the length of it (it clocks in at nearly 2 1/2 hours). Denzel Washington playing the bad guy was novel; and Russell Crowe was very good too. The only problem I had with it is that it isn't The Wire, but I'm at the stage where everything (except possibly Supernatural[1]) suffers by not being The Wire.

[1] In answer to your question, a_carnal_mink, we watched the last disc of series 3 yesterday. The first half of series 4 is out, but my rental tells me there's quite a wait.

Comments

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

I'm really enjoying the The Wire too. Did you catch Spiral when it was on? That had me hooked too.

[girfan.livejournal.com]

I loved Spiral so much, I got the DVD of the series.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

It's on my rental list. So are a lot of things, but I'll get to it eventually.

[naturalbornkaos.livejournal.com]

I finished Season Five of "The Wire" a few months ago and whilst the feeling isn't quite as strong as it was at the end of Season Three, I am STILL failing to enjoy things on the grounds that they're not "The Wire". :(

[ivory-goddess.livejournal.com]

1) The Eye is Korean.

2) It is bloody scary! Floatingdeadmanwithhalfaheadinalift!!

[inulro.livejournal.com]

That would be a different version then - this was definitely Hong Kong Chinese (they refer to being in HK a lot & speaking Mandarin in the Thailand segment) and the dude in the lift was just a ghost in this version.

I've been told that the Koreans often do their own versions of films that are popular in Japan, that probably extends to China as well.

[ivory-goddess.livejournal.com]

My mistake - IMDB confirms the locations as Hong Kong and Singapore. I always thought it was defined as Korean - maybe the finance was? Or maybe I'm getting mixed up with another film (possibly A Tale of Two Sisters).

The lift dude was a ghost, hence the floating, but half his head wasn't there!