kikit's kit

It's a true to life story of Władysław Szpilman, a famous pianist in Poland during World War II. It has a simple plot but it I think it has greatly affected me that I reviewed what happened in WW I and II (hihihi). After watching the film, I thought we should feel fortunate that we were born after those wars have ceased.

For details, please visit www.thepianistmovie.com.

Hero is a popular TV series that has recently caught my attention. Its main character is Takuya Kimura, another gorgeous Japanese actor. His leading lady, Matsu Takako, looks like Pops Fernandez.

The link at the bottom of this review provides a synopsis of the plot, pictures of the cast and some reviews. But I go to youtube.com to watch the videos. And don't worry if you don't understand Japanese because the videos have English subtitles.

Personally, I like this one because the story is not dragging. The story is fast, smartly presented and funny.

link: http://www.jdorama.com/drama.461.htm

I thought destiny was cruel when I saw Legolas in the Lord of the Rings. But still, I was charmed by Will Turner in the Pirates of the Carribean. And just before I started fantasizing the guy behind these characters, Claire met Drew Baylor in Elizabethtown.

Honestly, this review is neither about Orlando Bloom (ok, he's good-looking) nor about the simple story of Elizabethtown. This is about the character of Claire (yeah, Kirsten Dunst, not Claire Apigo) that I love. Soulful, artistic, high-spirited, sweet and smart. She's a student of names and she has a way with people. As the official website describes,

"She is the ever-optimistic airline attendant who enters Drew's lost life and gives him a new perspective."

The Green Mile is about many things, but mostly it's about a man named John Coffey - "like the drink, only not spelled the same." John (Duncan) is a hulk of a man who has just been brought into custody for the murder of two little girls. He was found holding their tiny dead bodies by a river, crying and slathered in their blood. Sentenced to die for the crime, John is brought to death row in a Louisiana prison. The floors and walls are covered in a lime green tile, thus the nickname christened upon the corridor - the "green mile". The person in charge of the mile is Paul Edgecomb (Hanks), a kind and fair man who has a problem of his own - he's got himself a doozy of a bladder infection. He and his fellow guards, Brutus (David Morse), Dean (Barry Pepper), Harry (Jeffrey DeMunn) and Percy (Doug Hutchison) watch over an ever-rotating round of convicts headed for old "Sparky". Their job is to feed them, care for them and when the time comes, kill them. Most of them try to make the job as humane as possible, but at last one finds perverse joy in other people's pain.

When Coffey is brought in, Paul can tell that something is different about him. He has a gentle kindness and child-like quality about him that no other prisoner has had before. He's even afraid of the dark. Paul starts to investigate the charges against Coffey in his spare time, to determine on his own whether or not his sentence is deserved. But if Coffey isn't guilty, then who is? The three-hour journey to answer that question will surprise and move you.

Source: http://www.thedigitalbits.com/reviews/greenmile.html

Like the Flowing River, page 222...

A rose dreamed day and night about bees, but no bee ever landed on her petals.

The flower, however, continued to dream. During the long nights, she imagined a heaven full of bees, which flew down to bestow fond kisses on her. By doing this, she was able to last until the next day, when she opened again to the light of the sun.

One night, the moon, who knew of the rose's loneliness, asked: 'Aren't you tired of waiting?'

'Possibly but I have to keep trying.'

'Why?'

"Because if I don't remain open, I will simply fade away.'

At times, when loneliness seem to crush all beauty, the only way to resist is to remain open.

11 Minutes, page 86...

"For a night? Now come on, Maria, you're exaggerating. It's really only forty-five minutes, and if you allow time for taking off clothes, making some phony gesture of affection, having a bit of banal conversation and getting dressed again, the amount of time spent actually having sex is about eleven minutes."

Eleven minutes. The world revolved around something that only took eleven minutes.

And because of those eleven minutes in any one twenty-four-hour day (assuming that they all made love to their wives every day, which is patently absurd and a complete lie) they got married, supported a family, put up with screaming kids, thought up ridiculous excuses to justify getting home late, ogled dozens, if not hundreds of women with whom they would like to go for a walk around Lake Geneva, bought expensive clothes for their wives, paid prostitutes to try to give them what they are missing, and thus sustained a vast industry of cosmetics, diet foods, exercise, pronography and power, and yet when they got together with other men, contrary to popular belief, they never talked about women. They talked about jobs, money and sport.

Something was very wrong with civilization, it wasn't the destruction of the Amazon rainforest or the ozone layer, the death of the panda, cigarettes, carcinogenic foodstuffs or prison conditions, as the newspapers would have it.

It was precisely the thing she was working with: sex.

The Zahir, page 45...

In Buenos Aires, the Zahir is a common 20-centavo coin; the letters N and T and the number 2 bear the marks of a knife or a letter opener; 1929 is the date engraved on the reverse. (In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java, it was a blind man from the Surakarta Mosque who was stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah ordered to be thrown into the sea; in the Mahdi's prisons, in around 1982, a small compass had been touched by Rudolf Karl von Slatin...)

A year later, I wake up thinking about the story by Jorge Luis Borges, about something which, once touched or seen, can never be forgotten, and which gradually so fills our thoughts that we are driven to madness. My Zahir is not a romantic metaphor - a blind man, a compass, a tiger, or a coin...

It has a name, and her name is Esther.