Spoiler Alert!

I enjoy movies. But more over I enjoy nitpicking at movie; studying the plot, characters, dialogue, cinematography and anything else about it in detail. All my friends know that I love discussing the film in great details after walking out of the cinema, and sometimes I feel for the poor souls who had to be driven home by me, forced to listen to an extra 10-20 minutes of rambling on about things they probably didn't even notice while watching.

I also realize that majority of the movie going audience associate the word "nitpicking" with negative criticism, well this is half true. Most films, maybe all films, are not perfect, and it is much easier to see blemishes in a production simply because we often have our own interpretation of "ideal" as the benchmark. So yes, nitpicking at bad parts of movies is much easier and far more common.

However, there are cases where the beauty, ingenuity and entertainment value of a film is embedded in the details. For example, Idiocracy is a film that I truly love and have watched at least a dozen times, and each time I would discover something new either through the scenes or the micro-concepts within the plausable near-future dystopia portrayed by the film. Take this screenshot for instant:

It only appears for a few seconds in the film, but every single panel contained a separate joke which was hilarious, probably even better than most well constructed Internet memes I've seen floating around these couple of years. Okay these jokes don't make sense unless you know the premise of the film, but trust me check this film out and you'll probably have a load of fun with each repeat viewing!

I think the film production crew is treating their audience with respect when they pay attention to details, earning every laugh, every tear, every thought-provoking moment, every awe and every second of our attention by constantly throwing great dialogue, smart references, suitable music and eye candies while combining it with a convincing characters, strong plot and flawless execution. And being able to discovering these tiny reasons to love (or hate) each movie is what draws me to them.

I have seen quite a number of films in the past as well, but for this blog I'll focus on what's current. Maybe if there's nothing that interests me at the moment I'll do a stroll down memory lane. And if you're one of the lucky few that found my blog before I've even written the first review (which will be a retrospective of Nolan's Batman trilogy), here is the warning: all my reviews will contain spoilers. So if you're just looking for a ballpark estimate on whether a film is worth your wallet, go check rotten tomatoes or metacritic. My views will probably not be a good indication of whether a film was good overall since I look at the details, and not to mention the review would give away (in most cases) the story and any surprises along the way.

But the most important thing to me when talking about movies is engagement. If you think there's something I missed, feel free to start a discussion via comments and if I'm not too busy I'll read, join in the conversation and even append good parts of the discussions to my main review. But as usual please be friendly, rational, courteous and gentle with each other!

I'll try to find time to get the Batman review done by the weekend so I can catch up with the other films I watched so far this year. In the meantime, go check out the remake of Total Recall. It's not great but if you saw the original one with Arnold Schwarzenegger you might appreciate this film a bit more (or a bit less)!

Joey out.

P.S. Just kidding nitpicking the bad things about a film is more fun :P