Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Misteri Jalan Lama

Watched Misteri Jalan Lama at Sunway Pyramid yesterday. What i can say about the movie experience is that the popcorn in TGV is awesome! Heheh.

So I went with very careful expectations. (Note : Careful, not low). Because it is an Afdlin Shauki movie. Correct me if i am wrong, but this is his first horror/mystery movie. Hence, the nervous energy. 

What i thought didn't work in the acting was the awkward BM. This might be the director's choice, because i have seen Que and Hans Isaac act before with natural conversational BM. 

The slow pacing didn't work either. It was established that Que's character has some sort of special power and we could guess right from the first 10 minutes of the movie who he was (trying not to spoil the ending for you guys).  Also, after establishing that the brothers are not close, the plot just didn't move much from there onwards until later on. 

Some quirky jokes worked, but most didn't. For me at least.

Some issues were unresolved. What happened to Hans at the end? Did he solve the money issue he has with the Bookie? (Namron) How did he get back to KL? Did he get back his car?. I thought that these issue could've been resolved by including the bad guys more in the chase in the forest with all the monsters. At least that would provide an oppoturnity to resolve the plot.

The choice of costume did not work for me either. Some of the audience laughed when they saw the King wearing medieval King Richardesque armour. It just does not fit with the Nian (short for Bunian) image that the audience had in mind, i think. It feels very alien and out of place. Also, Vanida Imran is already pretty. She did not have to put the make up on.

CGI was tacky. To me, good CGI is like acting. You don't get caught doing it.

Having said that, there were very positive things about the movie. I liked the fact that Namron played a straight bad guy. That character could've easily been played like a retard by some other actor. That is plain good acting. Non-obvious choices.

Also, the choice of locations were great and i can see so much effort being put in the set. The props were very detailed. If you haven't seen it yet, notice the scrap book that Hans was flipping through and how the newspaper cutting was properly organized for good news, and as he flip through, he finds unhappy news which were not as organized. Attention to details.

Although i mentioned earlier that there were unresolved plot issues, i still think that at least, Afdlin and Christina had the intention to have a plot and move it. Unlike some other movie who did not even bother to have a decent plot line.

I walked out not feeling angry. but rather i felt that it was a rather good effort, production wise.

Nice try, Adflin. 





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