The Pensieve

What i like about the show:
- female empowerment and having stylo-mylo big shot males like brad pitt being clumsy and lousy
- the music…. the dance scenes… bógota… the hotel… everything. ooh charged with sexual tension… hehe that’s what i like about those tango-ish, salsa-ish dances… one day in the FAR future i must go learn
- ANGELINA JOLIEEEEEE! and what more can i say, she sizzles! love her lips and facial structure and legs that seem to go on forever!!!
- one of the theme songs… it keeps playing in the background… in the scenes in bógota and when the couple was having the final showdown with their bosses

What i hate about the show:
- ending a bit, no, ending VERY unrealistic
- i might wanna kill them both off together, i can think of just the right music, facial expression and appropriate flashbacks ;)
- the final scene with the couple firing at like 30 men armed with machine guns yet killing them all while remaining totally unscathed - damn fake lor….

‘Hotel Rwanda’ is a film based on a true story that happened during the four months of civil unrest and blatant massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus. For more than ten years, Rwanda has been rift with fighting between the two tribes. The massacre was sparked off when the president (a Hutu) died in a plane crash. It was believed that the crash was due to the Tutsis, and thus, the Hutus started methodically killing the Tutsis.

Although the UN forces were in place in Rwanda, they were as useful as a bag of rocks in a fight… can’t use them as weapons, only can hide behind them… this might not be a really great metaphor, oh heck, it’s probably an odd AND lousy one. But anyway, it didn’t do anyone much good when they couldn’t fire at the rebels. Our hero is a Tutsi, placed in charge of a Belgian hotel during those 4 months. He opened up the hotel to take in close to 1,200 refugees, using all ways and means to forestall attacks from the Hutus. He bribed the Hutu leader to save a group of Tutsis (including his own family), bought booze and all the comforts that only a hotel could afford, using them as bargain chips to keep the pple in his hotel safe, just for another hour, another day.

Apart from revealing much about the lives of these people, this film also reveals much about the selfishness or rather, the practical nature of the ‘big’ countries… ie. those who call the shots in the UN. In fact, they refrained from calling the slaughter of the Tutsis as ‘genocide’ because such a situation would require the US and UN to intervene. Had there been any other value of Rwanda… if she held vast amounts of oil, if she were a potential market or had some other economic value, there wouldn’t have been close to a million corpses left at the end of the four month reign of terror of the Hutus. It goes to show us just how much the ‘people of Rwanda’ meant to these so-called peacekeepers. Somehow, it also disgusts me, the way the ‘big and powerful’ nations are. It rather disgusts me. Reinforcements were only sent to rescue their own pple from the war torn areas. It’s finally up to our hero to help his own people.

“no one to help us but ourselves”

The film, with all its colour and richness, manages to portray the entire gamut of emotions, from relief, to absolute fear.

This is a very powerful, and moving film… yeap. The intensity of the film is further enhanced by the wonderfully beautiful music.

great hopes shattered…

picture this:
1. as a mexicano holding an artifact (dagger-looking, didn’t look like spear to me) walks through a brown field with sheep grazing, each sheep totters and then keels over sideways. dead. now how corny is that? i think what they had in elektra was far far better… at least it was more beautiful and looked more deadly in a beautiful way. haha…

baaaaah.

totter totter… oooh… go left, go right, oh manz, i’m dead. baaaaah.

2. picture lucifer sticking his arms into constantine’s chest.. and… euw, taking out all the tar in his lungs for him??? omg. how cheesy is that?!?! on the other hand, maybe med oncology has some use for this special technique! ha…

there sure was lots of ciggies used in this movie, constantine smoked NON-STOP! i mean it. it gets really irritating. then they have got this scene with a tag saying: ’surgeon says smoking kills… emphysema, lung cancer…’ very um… singapore government, reminds me of jack neo’s productions. i tot it’s us copying hollywood and not the other way?

3. now picture constantine caught between heaven and earth… um… as he is ascending to this beautiful kingdom above, he turns slightly and um… shows his third finger, thus ruining this wonderful, pictoric moment… baaaah.

bah bah black sheep.

sorry… the sheep’s got over me today.

anyway, it was a weird show. the only thing interesting is gabrielle… hmmm and i thought those extra chapters in the ‘bible’ were interesting too… maybe can do some research in this area. i’ve always been interested in religion, mainly the historical parts of it. heh. call it a quest for knowledge, cuz i don’t believe in ‘the faith’ though.

btw the female actress was lousy! she just altered between looking snobbish and spooked. eh, so boring!

Genre: philosophy

i’ve embarked on the 1073-page, font size 7 (times new roman) paperback. here’s one paragraph that i really like:

The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot on the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. he felt safe in the oak tree’s presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

One night, ligntning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside - just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.

Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal - the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.

— from ‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand

Nombras el árbol, niña
Y el árbol crece, lento,
Alto deslumbramiento,
Hasta volvernos verde la mirada.

Nombras el cielo, niña
Y las nubes pelean con el viento
Y el espacio se vuelve
Un transparente campo de batalla.

Nombras el agua, niña
Y el agua brota, no sé dónde,
Brilla en las hojas, habla entre las piedras
Y en húmedos vapores nos convierte.

No dices nada, niña
Y la ola amarila,
La marea de sol,
En su cresta nos alza,
En los cuatro horizontes nos dispera
Y nos devuelve, intactos,
En el centro del día, a ser nosotros.

Mis opiniones:
Los tres versos primeros de este poema expresan los sentimientos que el poeta posea por su hija. El verso último resuelve el poema completamente. Los tres versos primeros demuestran un mundo hermoso en su corazón donde solamente contiene su hija. También, su hija es la cosa más importante en su mundo. Aunque ningunas cosas puedan controlar la Naturaleza en el mundo real, la hija del poeta tiene la capacidad para controlar las fuerzas de la naturaleza. En el verso final, se describió la relación muy intima entre el padre y su hija. Quizás quiere decir que nada destruirá la relación entre los dos, ni siquiera cuando los dos son muy lejos uno al otro. Siempre, la hija ocupa un lugar especial en el corazón de su padre.

La usa de aparatos lingüísticos, por ejemplo, la imaginería, hace muy vivas e intensas las descripciones. También, el estilo del poeta crea una pintura animada, especialmente con sus descripciones del árbol creciendo, las nubes peleando con el viento y el agua brotando. Me encantan mucho el poema y la usa de las palabras del poeta.