Life Has Move On

Looking back, I realized I have started writing way before when blogging was considered hip and huge by today's standard. I started writing, not wanting even to have an audience in mind, to read what I write back then. It was merely my passion for writing, for documenting all my thoughts in life, and how I see it. 

How life has evolved and changed. These days, I blogged about films on our wherestorymatters blog here. I started blogging about lifestyle, fashion and beauty and all things I love at LUMINNEJ here, since last year. It has been great. 

But mymomentswithin will always be that very first blog I started with, harbouring all the love and personal thoughts I have for life, and beyond. I will definitely miss this personal space I have created for myself. Perhaps I will come back here, once in a while, to pen my racing thoughts that will always occupy my thinking brain! If you were one of the few audiences that had been following my journey here, I sincerely apologize for not writing for such a long time, I feel as though I have let go of our grip, but forgive me for I never knew that I had friends here in the first place... I felt like I have led a secret life all these while, revealing myself here, yet not completely share every ounce of me. like the amazing film that I love so much, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Hope life has been treating you well. Take good care, whoever you may be and wherever you may be out there. My love is to you, always, though I may not have felt your obvious presence.

See you at my other new spaces! 

Just Give Me A Reason

Do we need a reason to love? I think PINK says it best. We need to learn to love and to unlearn how to love and just simply FALL in love, with your gut feeling, with the one you feel would make you happy. Yet, happiness can be elusive, sporadic and unpredictable if happiness is from a very different place, and from someone other than yourself, perhaps? Love is, to a certain extend, unreal, if one relies too much on your senses and fulfilling the wants of the senses we possess. I simply love this music video, everything about it, the song, the art direction, the drifting floating bed, the glowing-eyed-teddy bear (my childhood fetish, in a way), PINK's well built tattooed body, her hair, her silhouette, her singing, her sensual underwater scenes. She is everything a woman should be, I feel - strong, sexy, empowering, lifting and positive in her creative work. Her work speaks to the depths of a woman's heart and soul. I remembered the first time I listened to the song, I was driving. I immediately fell in love with it. It's strange that, I feel the most sense of "freedom" whenever I am driving, GOOD music uplifts your drive even more so. Yes, everyone can learn to love again, once in a while, because as time goes by, you may think that you know love, but you know nothing about love at all...LOVE LOVE LOVE this song and video!! 

Cold War

Cold War (2012)

Directed by Sunny Luk and Longman Leung, starring Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Charlie Yeung, Aarif Rahman Lee, Gordan Lam, Chin Kar-lok, Terence Yin, Eddie Peng, Andy Lau.

A slick Hong Kong flick, one of the best I have seen this year, Cold War oozes a sense of intensity, right from the beginning, till the very end. The intensity is not just the action and story, but as well as performances by all the actors. I was utterly impressed by these first time directors. Their ability to control their actors (such top notch ones like Tony Leung Ka-fai) is amazing. The surprise for me, personally is the suppressed performance by Aaron Kwok here. I have never really thought that Aaron was a great actor until this film. I guess as one ages, one tends to be more subtle in your approach, but I believe it has a lot to do with the directors and how they wanted to approach the film. The plot twist is to say the least, exciting, but definitely worth following how the story unfolds. You would naturally feel for the characters, especially the character of Aaron, Sean K.F. Lau, has to go through to shoulder such great responsibility for the Hong Kong Police Force. One of the best scenes, amongst many others, for me is the scene when Tony Leung's character, M.B. Lee, Deputy Commissioner of Police was being interrogated by Billy (played interestingly by Aarif Lee) in the interrogation room. Tony's performance was immaculately powerful and precise. Awesome acting there. it is intriguing to see how the power struggle between the characters gradually being revealed. Well, the film has great combination of psychological thrills, action, anchored down with human emotions and turmoil, and how greed and power struggle can change everything in this modern capitalistic world. A great watch indeed. 

We Are The Night

Directed by Dennis Gansel, starring Karoline Herfurth, Nina Hoss, Max Riemelt and Jennifer Ulrich.

Am not really a big fan of horror movies, but this one caught my attention. Sitting at the comfort of our living room, it is, bearable then, watching a horror vampire sci-fi flick on TV. Sleek, fluid, stylized, action, this film feels far more real than the Twilight saga, as it is quite rooted down to the female lead's journey and struggle trying to comes to terms with her transformation from a human to an immortal, cleverly played by the multi-faceted Karoline Herfurth. Her looks varied and changed as the story progresses. Women in this film are extremely strong, hunting and kissing-a** along the way. As the story is based in Berlin, Germany, it brought back quite some memories watching it. (We were in Berlin for the Berlinale Talent Campus). The locales look familiar and refreshing, rather than watching the usual Hollywood flick. Overall, it was an entertaining piece, grounded with characters development, rooted on certain emotional angles between characters. Definitely a fun movie to watch with a bunch of friends.  

Love In Each Day

"The echo of your laughter, the lingering of your words, the intimacy of your thoughts, as if embracing each space across those time we shared together, so vivid yet distant, so familiar yet almost like a stranger, each time we meet, on that ONE DAY. Are you a friend who speaks the truth that cuts right deep into my psychic or are you my love who fills up all my senses whenever you are around me, and make me all nervous and jittery. Your whispers into my ears, your voice at the end of the line, they fade away more and more, as the years go by. Do we still share the same innocent moments when we first met, or have we fallen into the entrapment of boring conversations to fill the gap of formality? Have my love for you faded away, so very gradually as each moment passes me by? I could not bear that very thought, yet I am helplessly hopeless in bringing you closer, bringing you back to me. But I have never dreamt that there would come a day I dread seeing you, I could not believe that I could even say such words, "I love you, I just don't like you anymore!" How could that be possible? We went our separate ways, we even fell in love with different people in our lives. But are you happy? Am I truly happy in your absence. I tried, I tried very hard to forget you, but your image haunts me, your shadow chases me down memory lane, like a persistent stalker and hunts me down, fiercely. How am I to resist? How could I let go of so much that we seem to have and share. Life is our ally, but time is our enemy. When I thought I could finally be with you, after all these years, life comes and takes me away from you, forever, on that very split second. Goodbye my love. Love me for the brief moments we were finally united, but more so, love me for those times I spent loving you, away from you for each of those time were my most difficult, not being able to be with you! I have loved you and I will always love you..."

If I were Em (played by the talented Anne Hathaway), this would be the letter I would write to Dexter (played by Jim Sturgess). A hypnotic, haunting and painfully beautiful piece of work. I love the film for its simplicity and realistic portrayal of two people's lives and buried love for one another. Lone Scherfig's style of storytelling is sensitive yet straight forward - sugar-coating yet direct, poetic yet honest. You are pulled into the course of their development in life and relationships. You have come to believe and vested in their progress and love for one another, through the years, though unspoken, yet solid and true. Only time can heal and only life can tell such great love story. I am impressed. One of the most memorable love story I have seen this year! Great acting and performance by the both of them. 

The Fairy Tale Lives On

I went into the film without much anticipation or expectation, just curious how will one of the age-old and beloved fairy tales of all time be re-told to look and feel fresh and updated on big screen. To my surprise, it is pretty entertaining to a certain degree. It is a period piece in its setting in terms of story and characters, but contemporary in its delivery, art direction, graphics, animation and presentation. I have to say the two most interesting characters in the film, for me at least, are the huntsman role played by Chris Hemsworth and the evil queen, played by Oscar winning actress Charlize Theron. Of course, Kristen Steward is commendable as a fierce-fighting snow white who leads the revolution and revenge over her evil stepmother, who has a little background story of who she is, why she is so the way she is. Pretty interesting layering of background stories of characters in the film. One would have thought that snow white's true love would be her childhood love interest, William, the young duke (played by Sam Claflin) but turns out otherwise. With a pure heart, she manages to defy all odds and triumphs over the queen. For more details, please check out their official website at Snow White and the Huntsman Official Site

Feeling A Little Blue

Been waiting for an interesting film to come by lately, which have yet to happen. I know I should go watch THE LADY, but somehow it seems very heavy. Maybe I will get around watching it, eventually. A family wedding is coming right up, in fact, this coming weekend. It's always great have a get together with family again, with special occasion to celebrate. Tomorrow is yet a very different get together with my family, one that requires much strength to stay strong together, as a family, for someone really dear and close to me, to all of us. I know it will be a challenging journey ahead, especially for her, but I will try my best to be there for her, emotionally and psychologically. I truly hope that I could have done more, truly! I LOVE you so much, even though I hardly say that, out loud.

Love Drives You Crazy

Drive

Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn

Starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan and Bryan Cranston, screenplay by Hossein Amini, book written by James Sallis

What drives love and fuels passion to love so deeply that it cuts right through? Drenched with unexpected twist of storytelling and plots, soaked with the intensity of rooted feelings between those unspoken words of the two main characters (played splendidly by Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan respectively), DRIVE delivers an out-of-this-world sort of love that is almost suffocating that it leaves me breathless and all choked up inside. It wrenches with such great pain (psychologically) and violence that I had to clinch with fear at some points of the film. Nonetheless, it manages to cast an invisible spell over me that I almost had no choice but to follow the revelation of the film right up till the end. An extremely smart film with very intelligent dialogues (the lack of it) makes it a pleasure just to observe the nuances of the two main leads and how feelings are being exchanged through pure great acting (body language). What's more important and meaningful is which that is not being spoken at all. I was mesmerized, especially by the scene in the elevator, how Ryan's character moves over, protectively and gives Carey's character a long kiss, at that point, the lighting and mood of the whole scene alters to such perfection that I could almost feel the intensity and urgency of what will ensue after. It was a pivotal moment for the two characters. It plays out so well that it stunned the life out of me. The film drains you, emotionally. It brings you down right at the bottom and picks you up again, to only drop you crashing even harder each time. Crude and ruthless, almost like the situations and circumstances that Ryan's character are forced to be in. It moans with such crazy pain that I could hardly forget what I saw. A film worth taking a second look again, once my emotions are more settled down...

Love That Man

Directed by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult. Music by Abel Korzeniowski

When you love that much, you forget who you truly are, yet that intensity of love remains ingrained in your heart, like a piece of that written note left in the drawer of your memory, waiting to be rediscovered one day. When you love that much, the sheer absence of that special someone in your life no longer holds the significance of how you feel in their absence, but more of how well and how much you could remember of that person, your recollection of the person's once existence in your life. Anguish, pain, loneliness, suffocation, happiness, blissfulness, contentment, all feelings that you are entitled to, should be right in front of you, when you contemplate suicide. You can no longer bear such pain of emptiness. I could feel how Colin Firth's character is feeling, through the vivid portrayal of him playing a man who has lost the love of his life, in the film. Can the brief encounter and appearance of another person in your life make any difference? It can and it won't at the same time. It can alter your perception towards how much you have missed your special someone (Nicholas's role as Kenny makes Colin changes his intention of ending his own life), it won't simply because you intend to keep those memories of yours private anyway (yet Colin will always love his lover, played by the charmingly handsome Matthew Goode). It is amazingly intoxicating to see how Tom Ford, in his first debut as a director, manages to capture such minute details of emotions in a man and how this man (Colin Firth) then inches his day, hours, minutes, seconds, towards his own death (intentionally or otherwise). Tragic ending indeed. Julianne's performance has always been that top notch. Completely mesmerized by the way the story was told, by the way it was shot, by how the music sounded, and how sensitive Tom Ford is in peeling the layers away to reveal true human emotions, at times buried so deep within that it is screaming on top of one's lung to break free. Brilliant casts, beautiful visuals and haunting music. Stylishly done!

WUXIA

Directed by Peter Chan, starring Donnie Yen, Tang Wei and Takeshi Kaneshiro

Nudged by my hubby to go watch WUXIA, I went into the theatre without any prior notion of what this kung-fu film is all about, except knowing the director, Donnie Yen, Tang Wei and Takeshi. They made up of some of my favourite people in the film industry, hence I gave it a go. My my I was in for a ride. It was such a different kind of kung-fu film that it made me think hard and fast. Hard was the fact that it reveals itself not like your typical Chinese martial art film as it was very investigative, almost detective-like, similar toCSI crime solving film. Thinking fast was the fact that the action sequences came really fast and swift when watching Donnie Yen fight. I was impressed. I love how this martial art film disguised itself smartly by heavily concentrating on the character(s) development and storytelling. I have not seen Donnie Yen played his character in such a understated manner and tone. It almost seem out of this world. Takeshi takes on a very complex role, investigating this case related to Donnie Yen, but at the same time, he pulls himself out from those re-anacted scenes to look at how each fight scene unfolds, a 3rd person point of view, which makes his character the more engaging and interesting. Tang Wei's performance has always been subtle yet powerful. The film explores the notion of one's judgement and decision to leave the past behind, and change for the better. But can you do so when the past seems to be catching up with you? I love the simplicity of the film, yet, I adore the many levels and layers that it presented and how it was told. I am sure many kung-fu fans may find this hard to digest as it is not your typical fight film (actions all the way). It has a heart, and a soul, and most definitely, smart. Definitely one of my favourite kung-fu films this year!