Reason #8

I like living in Hong Kong for a number of reasons. First there's the job, and the lifestyle that it affords me. Then there's the city itself. And the things I have access to here that I didn't in Manila....

...like the library of foreign (i.e. non-American) films I have at my fingertips. Over the last four weeks I've seen the following movies:


The Sea Inside (Spain). Sobrang sad 2000. Not weepy sad, but tragic-hand-me-that-butter-knife-and-watch-me-perform-harakiri sad. The Sea Inside is based on the life of Ramon Samperdro, a quadraplegic who wants to be euthenized. Plot summary pa lang, gusto mo nang mag-laslas. Watch this movie. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (2004) for a reason.




The Banquet (China). Hero meets House of Flying Daggers meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon meets Greek tragedy (complete with chorus). You get the idea. It's formulaic, but still oh so beautiful. Cinematography will make you salivate. Fight sequences are entrancing.




First Love (Japan) [apparently, hindi uso ang movie poster sa Japan]. Yet another movie to remind me how bad Filipino cinema is. This movie was so simple, but so well executed. Set in the 1960's, the film follows the story of a young girl who gets involved in the biggest bank robbery in Japanese history. As this movie will show, making a good film is not rocket science. I don't understand why we just can't connect the dots.

Happily Ever After (France). Yvann Attal is my boyfriend. He's short, average looking, but oh so funny. Like Kevin Spacey (my other boyfriend). He teams up with his real-life wife Charlotte Gainsbourgh in this story about the innate intricacies of romantic relationships. Definitely not his best work (I actually enjoyed the pop-corn flick Athony Zimmer more than this one) but he's still cute, and he's still my boyfriend.



I look forward to the other movies I'll get to see. There's an HMV on the first floor of my office building with a wall of movies dedicated to "World Cinema". Now I know where all my money will go.