I’ve actually seen the first two films, Atonement and Gone Baby Gone more than a month ago, but academics and the student council elections took most of my time so I wasn’t able to blog about them. I saw Le Grand Chef, a Korean film, around a week ago.

Atonement (2007, UK, dir. Joe Wright) is a period film adapted from a celebrated novel in the UK about Briony and her recollection as a young 13 year-old dramatist, slightly jealous of her sister, who accuses her sister’s lover of a crime he didn’t commit. Her act, destroys not just the romance and breaks the heart of her elder sister and her lover, but their entire lives as well amidst the tragic backdrop of World War II. In a nutshell, for me it’s a nicely shot and narrated melodrama. Notable for me is the film’s musical score (as it of course won the Academy Awards’ Oscar for Original Score), and the use of the sound of the typewriter’s keys that pace up into beautiful musical pieces used in sequence transitions. The film also delivered an excellent recreation of wartime England and France and the English countryside as the movie’s settings.

Gone Baby Gone (2007, USA, dir. Ben Affleck) is also a film adaptation this time of an American novel. It’s a well-told crime drama about a private investigator’s passionate pursuit of a missing-child case in suburban Boston. It follows the standard flow of a crime investigation flick, with enough twists to keep it engaging for its entire duration without the usual action-packed exaggeration of other crime thrillers. The film felt largely honest and straightforward, with genuine performances from the lead actors. In the end, it also poignantly raises some moral and ethical questions about such things as parenting and family life that may interest some viewers into going through that sort of discourse after watching the movie.

Le Grand Chef (2007, South Korea, dir. Jeon Yun-su) is about two chefs, our protagonist and his rival, battling it out for the coveted Royal Chef blade and its title. Nothing pretty exceptional with the movie, but it’s entertaining nonetheless. The film is quite glossy and colorful, with the Korean countryside serving partly as the film’s setting and all and various colorful foods making their presence. Cooking films usually induce viewers’ appetites, but some scenes of cutting and cleaning live blowfish and butchering cows might not exactly induce the appetite of some people. Such cooking processes were quite enjoyable for me, though. The film’s melodramatic and romantic comedy angles were okay.