Monday, 16 May 2016

Malaysia, oh tanahairku!

After 8 days in London, we boarded the MH001, heading towards home. Up till 47 years of age, I don't remember traveling much accept to a few pilgrimage spots in India.

My very first 13 hours of flight two years ago was quite astounding for me. I did not sleep a wink. Got down in Paris with fever.

Now I'd say I'm like a pro.

Waited for dinner to be served. Then decided to fall asleep.

Once getting about 6 hours of sleep, I woke up feeling nostalgic for homeland.

The balance few hours would no doubt be filled with two to three movies.

I watched Ange et Gabrielle first. It was a flawless movie. It started and ended beautifully.

I switched to watch Maari. It dragged and really bored me with total ridicule.

I quit halfway and started to watch Langit Cinta, a movie by Osman Ali.

The movie starts in an aesthetic note in Pulau Tuba.

Story begins with Datuk Jalaludin Hassan/ Datuk Affendi, who plots to buy innocent islanders land in order to build sky scrapers in Pulau Tuba.

This plan is disturbed by the intervening of Khadejah who opposes to her ancestral land being misused for materialistic development. 

Matters worsen for the Datuk when his son Aliff falls in love with Khadejah.

Later the story revolves around how Aliff goes against the father and marries Khadejah. They live happily till Aliff gets a call that the father is ill.

The story goes well till here. Then the mess begins. On his way Aliff meets with an accident. He loses his memory.

Khadejah who is pregnant waits for Aliff for more than four months before deciding to go look for Aliff. This seems very impractical as this is the era with mobile phones.

She goes alone. A 6 months pregnant girl from a remote island will not do this!

When she visits Aliff, the mother does not give a clear picture of the situation to Khadejah. That scene is misty and camouflaged. It looked rather fake with many missing links.

The man who is directed to send Khadejah off after a thorough scolding from Datuk tries to behave badly to her. I thought men in our culture treat women well. I think it is even more ghastly to misbehave to those pregnant. The man, who is a Moslem, drinks alcohol.

Our movies should not highlight this.

Khadejah gets an opportunity to use a mobile phone of a passersby. One, she could have asked those people to call the police to save her or use the phone to call the police herself.

She calls her island friend instead. She doesn't give a proper address to him but he manages to appear there somehow. Finally, she is saved. Delivers her baby and life continues. She loses herself in sorrow when divorce letters come from Aliff.

Climax is somehow predicted with Khadejah sitting in the altar waiting to remarry her island mate.

Aliff meanwhile recovers his memory. Rushes to Pulau Tuba in the nick of time to stop the wedding.

As we're moving towards a high era of technology, movie makers should not hint too much on superstitions.

One would think that the heroine is highly jinxed. There's a limit too to tragedies to fall on one particular person. Khadijah the heroine seems to be full of it.

The flow in the story just got lost quarter way of the movie.  I liked this movie but I would have liked it better if it had been molded a little differently. The plot lacked smoothness in odd places.

Our movie makers have come a long way. But there's still room for improvement.




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