These are some of the movies I have watch over the past 1 month or so…

Fool’s Gold (Watched: Sunday 2-March 2008)
My first comment when the show ended was: “It begins with the sinking of a boat, and ends with the sinking of an aeroplane.”

Starring Matthew McConaughey as Ben Finnegan and Kate Hudson as his estranged wife Tess Finnegan, the story revolves around finding the legendary 18th century Queens Dowry – 40 chests of exotic treasure that was lost at sea by the Spanish Armada in 1715, after Ben discovered a vital clue to the treasures whereabouts.

It was not as exciting as Nicholas Cage’s National Treasure, but while most of National Treasure’s hunt for treasure is on land, a lot of this movie is filmed at sea. In fact, it made up for the minor deficiency in excitement with fun and laughter with the other characters: Billionaire Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland), daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena) and mentor-turned-nemesis, Moe Fitch (Ray Winstone).

A worthy watch, in my personal opinion.

CJ 7 (Watched: Tuesday 19-Feb 2008)
This is truly an atypical Stephen Chow movie. If you were expecting the usual witty remarks that’s common in movies such as Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu; or the usual mindless humor and laughter, you will be quite disappointed. Many of my friends who are Stephen Chow fans finds the movie uninspiring in spite of the technology behind the making of the computer animation: the alien CJ-7.

I would say we give credit where it is due. The computer graphics blend in quite well with the real cast and it is not easy to act as if something is there when it isn’t. Although the animation isn’t as awesome and ground shaking as that of Monster, Inc, it was still made with the state of the art computers, not to mention with far less computers with higher processing power. Above which, the child actress Xu Jiao was playing the role of a boy in the movie and she has done quite well.

In the movie, Chow played the role of a single father earning a living at the construction site in his attempt to give his son a proper education and a better future. After feeling sorry that he couldn’t afford to buy his son (Xu Jiao) a mechanical dog toy, Chow bought home something he found in the garbage dump which he thought would have been the perfect toy. Soon his son would discover it to be what it really is, and the story would evolve around the relationship between Chow and his son, the school and classmates, and the alien creature nicknamed CJ 7.

Though it would be quite uninspiring compared to the typical Stephen Chow movies, the social divide depicted in the movie between China’s nuevo richie and the less affluent masses was very realistic. This is the same stuff you read regularly on Yazhou zhoukan, but now you see it with your own eyes. One needs to open his heart to appreciate this movie, and I would consider it a break through by Stephen Chow from his usual roles.

Jumper (Watched: Sunday 17-Feb 2008)
David Rice (Hayden Christenson), the son of an abusive father (Michael Rooker) and a mother (Diane Lane) who abandoned him when he was 5 years old, is a jumper – a human being with the supernatural ability to teleport to any part of the world instantaneously. David left home when he was a teen, after surviving a harrowing experience of near death when he almost drowned in an icy river, and discovering his super natural powers.

Unknown to him, there are ohters like him, and he has enemies known as the Paladins, headed by the ruthless Roland (Samuel L. Jackson) who have been mercilessly hunting and killing them. He soon run into fellow jumper and orphan Griffin (Jamie Bell), who would reveal to him the stark reality after David escaped from his first encounter with Roland. They soon form an temporal alliance of convenience as they deal with the threat presented by Roland and the Paladins.

I love the special effects of the movie and I wished I could jump too. Then I don’t need to suffer on our ‘Worse Class’ Transports anymore and every weekend I can just jump to any place in the world to have fun. However, the movie was not at all breath-taking or captivating. In a matter of 3 weeks I had almost forgotten the name.

And one thing bugs me in the movie. Roland became aware of David after David robbed a few banks. But by presenting Roland and the Paladins as merciless murderers, it seems to justify David and some of the Jumpers’ crimes. It sort of reminded me how some people cheered the rogue trader from SocGen who lost the bank 7 billion dollars as a champion fighting against capitalism and as some kind of financial Che Guevara. Is this how our world is coming to, where we either cannot differentiate right from wrong, or see a wrong for what it is as long as a bigger wrong is being done?