Remember Me (2010 film)

Remember Me is a 2010 American romantic drama film directed by Allen Coulter based on a screenplay written by Will Fetters.

In the romantic drama Remember Me, Robert Pattinson plays Tyler, a rebellious young man in New York City who has a strained relationship with his father (Pierce Brosnan) ever since tragedy separated their family. Tyler didn't think anyone could possibly understand what he was going through until the day he met Ally (Emilie de Ravin) through an unusual twist of fate. Love was the last thing on his mind, but as her spirit unexpectedly heals and inspires him, he begins to fall for her. Through their love, he begins to find happiness and meaning in his life. Soon, hidden secrets are revealed, tragedy lingers in the air, as the circumstances that brought them together threaten to tear them apart. Set in the summer of 2001, Remember Me is a story about the power of love, the strength of family, and the importance of living passionately and treasuring every day of one's life.

Director: Allen Coulter
Producers: Nicholas Osborne, Trevor Engelson & Erik Feig
Writer: Will Fetters
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin & Pierce Brosnan
Composer: Marcelo Zarvos
Language: English
Budget: $16,000,000
Gross revenue: $56,223,951


Review

Very rarely has a film left me utterly speechless. And I've been speechless for the last hour contemplating on what to say. Let me first start out by saying that Remember me is a brilliant film one of the best I've ever seen. A motion picture that feels so real, so genuine you can't help but be engaged. The experience of seeing this film and not knowing whats coming is the films brilliance in delivery. It's a small story about seriously flawed individuals trying to deal with love, loss and life. That if you suffer from any type of depression you should think twice before seeing it. This is a film although ultimately hopeful makes you feel suicidal. Robert Pattinson, Emile DeRavin and cast are brilliant and it is without a doubt the most powerful and jaw dropping film I've seen in quite some time. It's a film that deserves to be seen, a film that should be seen if only to remind us of so many things that we take for granted. A masterpiece.

Connected (2008 film)

Connected is a 2008 action-crime thriller film co-written and directed by Benny Chan. A co-production between Hong Kong and China, the film is a remake of the 2004 film Cellular. Connected stars Louis Koo as a man who receives a distressing phone call on his cellular phone from a young woman who has been kidnapped by a gang of corrupt Interpol agents who have a hidden agenda.

Director: Benny Chan

Producers: Benny Chan, Albert Lee, Jiang Tao & Kevin Yung

Writer: Alan Yuen, Benny Chan & Xu Bing

Cast: Louis Koo, Barbie Hsu, Nick Cheung & Liu Ye

Budget: HK$45 million

Bob (Louis Koo) is a single father with a dead-end job as a debt collector. Essentially an easygoing, helpful guy, Bob tries in earnest to perform well in his new position while dealing attempting to clean up his act so his sister won't move to China with his son. He's making progress too, so when he receives a frantic phone call from a woman named Grace who claims she's been kidnapped, he reports the disturbing call to the local police. Although the detective on duty dismisses the call as a prank, Bob's instincts tell him differently and he quickly makes the decision to investigate. Realizing that he's the only personal capable of saving Grace and her daughter from a painful demise, Bob prepares to risk everything - including his own family - in order to save two people he's never met, and may not even exist.

The film was shot entirely in Hong Kong under a budget of HK$45 million (US$5.8 million), a conservative figure among growing Chinese movie budgets. Benny Chan described the film as the most demanding film in his career, as he and co-screenwriters Alan Yuen and Xu Bing tried to make the film appeal to Chinese audiences. The director first filmed Barbie Hsu’s scenes before filming Louis Koo’s portion. Both actors, however, share one scene together. During filming, the Hong Kong Government refused to grant a permit to film a flying car scene in a busy city district, thus the filmmakers could only shift filming to the outskirts of Hong Kong, proving that they could do the same without the government’s help.

Louis Koo performed his own stunts, stating, "Whether it’s a car chase, rolling down a hill or jumping out of a falling car, I’m fine with the stunts as long as the outcome gives the effect we want." He later revealed that he suffered from external injuries. For the film's car chase sequence, Koo persuaded Chan to let him perform the stunt himself, feeling that the “result of which would be more believable.”

Review

When we hear of remakes, we lament Hollywood raiding Asian content, repackaging and most of the time dumbing them down for mass consumption, often to dismal results. Some get A-list cast and crew attached, while others put whoever's the flavour of the moment to attempt to be the next scream or drama queen. With Benny Chan's remake of Hollywood's Cellular, I guess the remake street cuts both ways now, and while I had enjoyed the original with Chris Evans running around like a headless chicken, I embrace this version with Louis Koo in the leading role wholeheartedly as well.

If you've not seen the original, then you might just want to start with the remake instead. It surpasses in its intensity, frustration, and the leads, while almost never sharing the same scene together, individually made themselves very believable as the damsel-in-distress, and the knight in shining armour. Benny Chan adds a whole lot of fresh air to his filmography with this effort, even if it's from remake territory and adopting the same way to close the credits, but does an excellent job out of it.

Assembly (2007 film)

"Assembly" is a 2007 Chinese war-drama film written by Liu Hengand directed by Feng Xiaogang.  It is among the first Mainland-produced films to portray the Chinese Civil War in a realistic style. The film is an adaptation of the novel Guan Si (A Legal Case), which is based on the real-life account of a veteran army captain upholding his company's honor.

The film won the 2008 Hundred Flowers Awards for Best Film and the 2009 Golden Rooster Awards.

The story begins in 1948 during the Huaihai Campaign of the Chinese Civil War with Gu Zidi, a captain of the People's Liberation Army, fighting the Kuomintang (KMT) and winning a battle with severe casualties. The loss of his political officer in the fight causes Gu to order the shooting of the surrendering KMT prisoners, but the command is met mainly with refusal. As punishment, Gu is imprisoned, and he quickly befriends his cellmate: an army teacher and pacifist named Wang Jincun, who had been jailed for cowardice. Gu's commanding officer, Colonel Liu, soon sends Gu and his 46 remaining men off on a new assignment; to defend to the last man (with limited resources) the battalion's flank — an old mine on the south bank of the Wen River — and not to retreat until he hears the bugle call for assembly with the regiment. Gu then receives permission to take Wang (who is condemned anyway) as his new political officer.

Just as the platoon fortifies the position, the Kuomintang suddenly attack with artillery, infantry, and tanks; the company fiercely fends off the enemy, while Gu orders the dead and severely wounded to be carried into the mine. Barely a handful are alive when a wounded soldier recalls that he heard the bugle call in the distance. The others begin to say that they heard the bugle as well, and allege that Gu, deafened by multiple explosions, was not able to hear it. Duty bound, Gu resolves to stay, which moves the remaining men to follow him and fight to the death. An undetermined amount of time later, Gu is seen in an army hospital, the only apparent survivor of the battle. Incredulously, he is treated as a POW for wearing a scavenged enemy uniform when he was found, and he realizes that no records of his regiment remain, due to a sudden change in the army's unit numbers — therefore no one believes his claim as a Liberation Army officer, nor his accounts of the heroic battle.

Gu remains guilt-ridden over the next several years: he goes on to fight in the Korean War and is wounded in the face during a sabotage mission by a landmine. At the end of the conflict, he recovers and returns to the old battlefield, determined to restore glory to his lost men, only to find the mine reactivated and the old entrance buried under a ton of coal. Encountering Wang Jincun's widow and a friend from the Korean War, Zhao Erdou, during his search, he convinces the two to marry. Zhao's help would then allow him to uncover records of Gu's old battalion, leading him to Colonel Liu's grave and its keeper, his unit's former bugler. He learns from him that Liu died recovering from wounds sustained in the Korean War, and that the bugle call was never sounded at the Wen River battle; instead, Gu's company was used to hold off the KMT so that Liu and the rest of the regiment could retreat. The betrayal enrages Gu greatly, but he decides to forgive Liu, promising to join him in the afterlife.

Realizing he is now his company's only living witness, he camps out in a mining hut near the old battlefield and starts to dig at the huge coal pile daily with a pick and shovel, despite protests from the miners. A month into his ordeal, the old battalion's political commissar is found, and the men are finally honored through an official notice, but Gu remains inconsolable, as he still cannot unearth the bodies. A memory then surfaces of the Wen River battle: Gu and a mortally wounded Wang are the sole survivors, and after pulling the last of the dead into the mine and setting up explosives, Gu orders Wang to blow it up to prevent the corpses from being captured. Wang follows this order before dying, as Gu Shot down a Nationalist M4 Sherman tank by the mountain gun and got knocked unconscious at the same time by the M4 Sherman tank blast in a final defensive effort.

Years later, excavations for an irrigation project eventually unveils the hidden tomb containing Gu's men; a large monument is erected and a formal burial performed, finally putting Gu at peace. The epilogue captions reveal that Gu dies thirty years later at a veteran's retirement home, and the origin of his name being the place where he was found as an orphan; a millet field ("guzidi").

Director: Feng Xiaogang

Producers: John Chong, Feng Xiaogang, Wang Zhongjun & Yadi Guan

Writer: Liu Heng

Cast: Zhang Hanyu, Deng Chao, Yuan Wenkang, Tang Yan, Wang Baoqiang, Liao Fan, 
          Hu Jun, Ren Quan & Li Naiwen

Music: Wang Liguang

Cinematography: Lü Yue

Budget: $16,000,000

Review

"Assembly" is billed as the most expensive war epic made in China. In its dramatization of a communist army captain's fight to validate his unit's unacknowledged martyrdom, the film aspires to Hollywood standard-bearers like "Saving Private Ryan" by striving to be superior to any Chinese film in the same genre. The real challenge is not technical but rather the ability to navigate the ideological minefield of a subject considered highly sensitive in China. 

The Chaser (2008 film)

The Chaser is a 2008 South Korean film, and is the feature film debut of director Na Hong-jin.

Eom Joong-ho is a former police officer turned pimp, and several of his girls have gone missing. One night he gets a call from a customer and sends Mi-jin, one of his few remaining girls. Later he realises that the same customer was the last to see the missing girls, and believing that Mi-jin might be in danger, he goes to look for her. While searching for her, he dents another car in an alley, and when he sees blood splattered on the unharmed driver's shirt, he senses that the man, Jae Yeong-min, is the suspect. Yeong-min tries to run away but Joong-ho catches him, and both men are taken to the police station.
At the police station, Yeong-min confesses to the murder of the women, and says his last victim, Mi-jin, could still be alive. But despite his confession, the police have no evidence to imprison him and cannot detain him for more than 12 hours. As the police search for the bodies of his victims, Joong-ho is the only one who believes that Mi-jin is still alive, and must find her before the killer is released.
The movie was inspired by a real-life serial killer in Korea, Yoo Young-chul.

Director: Na Hong-jin
Producer: Kim Su-jin & Yun In-beom
Writters: Na Hong-jin & Lee Shin-ho
Cast: Kim Yoon-seok
         Ha Jeong-woo
Runtime: 125 min
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean

Review
Few years ago Korean society was shocked by a horrible serial killer mayhem. Dozen of call-girls are disappeared and never returned when they visited unknown customer. The serial killer also murdered innocent old men and women on his loose. After caught of serial killer the revealed fact was beyond one's imagination. He killed girls with hammer, chisel and amputated the victims. Some of them were cannibalized. He mashed victim's liver with food processors and drank it. Now the serial killer is sentenced to death and his existence throw serious questions about execution of death sentenced prisoner to the Korean society. For ten years Korean government never executed prisoners and now UN approved Korea as a No Execution country.

This movie is a product of these social circumstance. Of course any modernized country can have notorious serial killers. But this is most brutal and abominable criminal act as reported to the public.

Another phenomena described in this movie are the inactive police act and ugly politician. Koreans are very disappointed at this and this movie is quite accurately visualized the situation.

Whether or not crime is the best motif for movie and this movie successfully hold the breath of viewers. I am waiting another movie from this director.

Good work.