"eye-scorching screen candy"

Glenn Gaslin described the movie as an "eye-scorching screen candy, a
gorgeous effects driven fantasy flick" in E! online. the movie in questions is Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask. he is absolutely right.
i've been waiting to get my hands on the DVD since i knew of the movie going into production. since it's one of those small company, low budget films without any famous stars, i was sure that it will never reach malaysian cinemas, and i was right.
well, not even that, none of the DVD shops that i asked at, since september last year, even heard about the film. so when i bumped into this in a DVD shop earlier in the evening, i just bought it and hurry home. :)
so. it really is eye candy right from the DVD menu to the ending credits.
as what i've mentioned in a previous post here, the movie is really filled with tons and tons of weirdly creative and brilliant ideas, both in the storyline and the audio visual presentation of it. if i'd not known beforehand that this movie was done on a very limited budget, i wouldn't have believed that this film actually only had a budget of four million dollars. just as a comparison, the first lord of the rings movie had a budget of 137 million. the acclaimed fantasy film labyrinth, from the same company as mirrormask, had 40 million.
seeing dave mckean's designs brought to live is a shocking experience. i'm talking about designs with similar color schemes and psychotic feeling as those from sandman comic covers. cats with human faces, fishes that swims through the air, orbiting giants... mixing that, with all the crazily original ideas from neil gaiman - flying books, a dumb sphinx, monkey-birds with beaks that keep falling off, shadows that turn into eyeballs with spidery legs... this is fantasy film at a whole new level. (which also kinda make me wonder what kind of movies will the sandman series make)
it's too bad that this film did not reach cinemas here.

mirrormask@sony pictures
traliers@apple

more pictures, which doesn't really reflect how marvellous things actually look in the movie:

what a way to start the year

a friend of mine killed himself the friday before valentine's.

it came as quite a shock when another friend informed me about this over the phone. i have never thought that any of my friends would really do something as drastic as taking one's own life. (killing another, maybe. ) all i could react to when i got the news over the phone was to agree with pooling together money for the family.

i'm not very close with this friend, so this is not some kinda orbituary or memorial post. just me, not understanding why people would wanna take their own lives.

i still remember him being a very active student back in high school. the fella's always somewhere among the top 20% of the class, did very well in public speaking and singing contests, ok in sports. he was in the school band, and was even the head prefect in school.

he didn't really get far after high school, from what i heard. family didn't do great and he couldn't get a good enough scholarship to get through college, since he was never anywhere near the top 5% in class.

the last time i heard from him was mid last year at another friend's wedding. a few of us car-pooled to KL for the banquet. he came across as a lil depressed, lacked confidence and pretty much tried to hide most of his feelings.

then came the phone call about him jumping off the top floor of the place he was living in.

come to think of it, i didn't do much better than he did, even in high school. even though i was a nerd and basically ended up in the top 3 in class every year, i was never very active in school activities. well, that's mostly because i hate the school's discipline. deliberately failed the prefect exam twice cos the diciplinary master's a bitch. after high school, i never really pour myself into studies anymore until i got back from the states. most of the time, i'm just enjoying myself by indulging in whatever fancies me at the time.

i probably wouldn't be suffering where i am now, if i'd lived paying more attention to my future. compared with most of my friends back from high school, i have really done much for a career.

so, i'm at a point in life where i should already be somewhere, but i'm still way behind on schedule. but i haven't lost hope yet. i still think i can hurry up and get back on schedule if i work hard enough.

one thing about playing games, especially RPGs, a lot is that it really made me realize that real life is not that kinda game -- you can't die and reload from a previously saved game; nor do you have extra lives to play with.

life's just a complicated one-way maze with more branches at every turn. you don't have a map, you can't go back and you're not sure whether you're headed to the correct exit (or if there really is an exit instead of all dead ends). kinda sucks if you think of it that way but i still think that there's always an exit, even if you came to a dead end, you might find a hidden door. :)

i guess that's what's interesting, not knowing where the path will really lead. that, and the other thing i learnt from games -- the bull-headed, stubborn insistence to make it all the way to the end.