Watching too much

I watched a movie and a half today. A movie and a half? Yeah. A movie and a half and a documentary.

It was loosechange911.com followed by The Constant Gardener. So how did I come up with a movie and a half and a documentary? Well, The Constant Gardener felt like one whole movie and half a documentary while Loose Change felt like half a documentary and half a movie.

Let's go to Loose Change first. This little video should be on every Americans' computer. Everyone who felt for the victims of 9/11 MUST watch it. It's only and hour twenty minutes but I guarantee you, after that 80 minutes, if you are not trembling, you are either George Bush or you have no idea what 9/11 entails. The aftermath especially. I would love to go on with the conspiracy theory and how 9/11 had allow Americans' presence to be a welcome here in this region but....there are just somethings that I had better not talk about. Basically what this video tries to do is to as best as it can, explain why two Boeing Jets flying into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in downtown Manhattan would not have caused the towers to collapse. It was a commercial airliner that crashed into the Pentagon. And there wasn't any heroics done by Americans who averted certain disaster by downing their hijacked plane in Pittsburgh instead of the intended target which was the White House. It's very compelling. The facts seem less hodge-podge than Farenheit 911 by Michael Moore (which was still great anyway) mainly because there seems to be alot of physical facts given. Watch and be scared.....be very scared.

Next was The Constant Gardener. Well, I suppose Rachel Weisz did deserve her Best Supporting Actress award on Oscar night. She was a firecracker from the start of the movie and finally a movie that can stretch her. Somewhat at least. The background story, which really was more gripping to me, was about the sinister acts that pharmaceutical companies are accused of doing - conducting live experimentations on poor Africans so as to reduce both the time and cost of perfecting drugs manufactured in anticipation of expected epidemics. In this story, the epidemic was TB and what the movie suggested was that Britain had benefits to bring in a pharmaceutical company, KDH, and conduct testing of a drug through an already established British company operating in Kenya, Three Bees. So the British High Commission tries their best to facilitate by conniving with both companies with the promise that KDH will open a pharmaceutical facility in Wales so as to provide 1500 jobs. Of course it is ethically wrong to test drugs on humans, Africans or not. Again bringing back to the point of why I think Africa will not improve much in the Pacific Century. There are lots of conspiracy work going on around like citizen spies, Big Brother controls, etc etc. The side story is of course the romance of Rachel and Ralph Fiennes. Lots of intelligent lines spoken by the main characters and super scenes of the African landscape. Somehow, this movie is more heart wrenching that Brokeback. But that's just me.

Observed that this year's Oscars is full of quality work despite some people thinking otherwise. And the topics that were handled were really tough ones. And many which addresses the big issues involving governments. Munich, Syriana and The Constant Gardener had focussed on this. Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Crash and Transamerica were more on the major social issues like race, capital punishment, transgenderism(?), homosexuallity....but the funny thing was, it wasn't a year where the major nominees were box-office winners as well. Not the same as Titanic, Million Dollar Baby, Forrest Gump, Lord of The Rings etc.