At the Movies: Batman Begins, The Bank Job, The Orphanage

There's no movie house in this town. There used to be a couple of movie houses but in the early nineties, the last one closed shop and converted to a storage due to lack of audiences. Since then, we locals of this town could only watch movies in the big screen whenever we go to the nearest city. Otherwise, movie watching is pretty much a VHS, VCD or DVD affair. Dibidi rules here. 60 pesos for a 20-in-1 compilation. I used to be a dibidi collector. That was before the arrival of the poorly packaged 8-in-1s or 20-in-1s. Back then dibidis are packaged like the originals. Whenever I go to Manila, a half-day dibidi-hunting trip to Quiapo is always in the sked. I pretty much stock-up a couple of months worth of film binge.

Then I discovered bit torrent and the rest is history. My ISP hates bittorrent. Whenever i run my favorite client, net surfing speed crawls to zero bytes per second. So I usually do the downloading after my internet fix and leave the computer running overnight - with monitors closed for energy saving. I heard that in Japan, you could download an entire film in less than five minutes. I could only dream of that speed. Here in our town, a film a day is really fast. Mostly with my setup, the average is 3 to 4 nights for an 800 MB divx film. I'm not complaining. At that rate I could add one film in my to-watch folder per day. And I only have time to watch movies on weekends. Now I have a 20 film backlog.

This weekend I managed to watch three movies. All in divx encoded .avi files. I'm not in reviewing films I watch. I'll just post this stuff for records purposes. Just like what I used do in college where I have a ledger of every movie I watch and every book I read. I still the lists.

I think Batman Begins came out back in 2005. This is the first time I saw the movie. I thought it was another one of those bad Batman franchise that started with Michael Keaton and ended with Val Kilmer so I avoided it. This one reboots the superhero and I love it. Can't wait for The Dark Knight. The Bank Job is another one of those heist films with all the ingridients thrown in. There are just some added twists and more time was devoted to the aftermath of the heist. The best of the three films i watched this week is The Orphange, a Spanish horror, suspense, drama that is not unlike another fave spanish film Pan's Labyrinth. Gotta search more foreign language films on the Pirate Bay.