Knowing the story where this movie was banned 40 years ago will make you realize how society has changed around us since then. Produced in 1971, this movie is finally screened in Singapore for the first time (I guess) last Friday as one of the movies in Perspective Film Festival, organized by WKWSCI, NTU.
If you are really a conservative religious person, particularly Christian, I do not suggest for any of you to watch this movie (there is one particular scene that might offend Christian people). For the first half of movie, Stanley Kubrick as Writer and Director of movie, will bring you unbelievable scenes where it was something controversial during 1970s (I believe). I believe those scenes are some of the reasons why the movie was banned 40 years ago, because they give some ideas to people for doing crimes that they never think of. But nowadays, such crimes have been replicated everywhere, so those kind of ideas are not really controversial anymore.
On top of that, the movie also told us about changing someone personality and preferences will have drawback to the person, where in this movie, after Alex went thru the treatment trial, he became a defenseless guy. It was shown in few scenes where he cant help himself when he was intimidated by other parties. In real life perhaps, it also applicable to a group of people who want to change those people who are not following current society norms i.e. personality disorder, sexuality, etc. So if you try to change it, please watch the drawback as well, because you never knew what you turned men into when you tried to change them.
Protagonist Alex is an "ultraviolent" youth in futuristic Britain. As with all luck, his eventually runs out and he's arrested and convicted of murder and rape. While in prison, Alex learns of an experimental program in which convicts are programed to detest violence. If he goes through the program his sentence will be reduced and he will be back on the streets sooner than expected. But Alex's ordeals are far from over once he hits the mean streets of Britain that he had a hand in creating.
To be honest, I did not really have time to catch any recent movies lately. Recent here means in the past 2 weeks. Pretty busy juggling of school and work at the same time. And as you can see, this blog has been never updated for quite some times, more than a month.
Back to title of this post, I always wonder, why do some movies need hot stars for their movie. First is Abduction, an action family movie. Girls will agree with me that Taylor Lautner is hot, as he showed of his topless body in Twilight Saga in some scenes. In another hand, Lily Collins is a cute girl, yet she also being portrayed as a hot sexy girl in the movie. Sometimes, I simply get bored with the scenes where they tried so hard to make it as hot scenes, yet they failed to make it hot. So I think, to make the hot scenes not so fail, it is better to use hot stars, so audiences can have their own imagination during the movie or maybe after the movie, no?
Second is Friends with Benefit, a comedy "sex" movie. It is not as literally sex what you can think of, but it is more to the frequency of the "sex" scenes a movie shall have in general. It is sometimes too much, yet entertaining for some people. This movie justified their selves why they chose "hot stars", because they need to show to audiences the sexiness of stars on the bed when they do "the action". Can you imagine if the stars are not hot, maybe we can categorize it as over-weight? Few people might find it nice, but not people in general though.
Okay, let's talk about other stuffs related with the cinemas I experienced. As you can see from the picture, I watched at 2 different cinemas, and among those 2, Golden Village or Cineleisure, Cineleisure won. Why? Let me drill it down later in another post.
Interesting facts about who you going with for watching movie is matters as well. I went with my psychology-major study friend for Abduction movie and my friend analyzed it in the term of psychology point of view I think. You might want to read the synopsis about the movie first as following:
Nathan, a teen, along with his friend, Karen finds a website that has photos of children who are missing or believed to have been abducted. They decide to age one of the photos and discover that is of Nathan as a child. He contacts the person who placed the photo to find out what's going on. The person on the other end only wants to know info about Nathan so Nathan hangs up. The person then contacts someone in Europe and shows him a photo of the one who called. He then heads for the U.S. Nathan then wonders is it true, was he abducted. He tells his "mom" who then tells him she and his "father" will tell him. But before they can, two men claiming to be cops show up wanting to talk to Nathan, and when he isn't found they pull guns and demand Nathan be given to them. His parents fight them but are killed. Nathan runs but remembers that he asked Karen to come over...
And guess what my friend told me after the movie? He said something along these statements:
Actually the movie represents our life. The adopted parents is our parent in the world, while the father is God. We, as the kids, only being "adopted" by our parents from God, while at some points of our life, we must walk away and stand by ourselves from our parents and God will watch over us for what we doing since then on.
Contrast to Abduction movie, I went with one of my female friends from high school from for Friends with Benefits movie. We were laughing and was not really discussing into deep about representation of subtle meaning of the movie. We talked more about the catchy words, statements, brands and so in the movie. Well, it might be due to her interest as well, where she major in marketing for her undergraduate study. For not discriminating Friends with Benefits, let me put the synopsis of the movie as well:
While trying to avoid the clichés of Hollywood romantic comedies, Dylan and Jamie soon discover however that adding the act of sex to their friendship does lead to complications.
So, have you guys watched those 2 movies? FYI, Friends with Benefits has higher rating than Abduction in IMDB.
