Jack Kevorkian, whom the media oftly refer to as "Doctor Death", gained notoriety in the medical world for audaciously promoted a peaceful termination to agonising lives of people struck with incurable diseases. You Don't Know Jack is a biographical movie of his dealings with the issue of mercy-killing, starring the legendary actor Al Pacino as the lead role.
The intro started with Kevorkian regretting to have seen his own mother dying in such pain during the last days of her life. Partially blaming himself for not taking action, he henceforth intended to give peace to those people who no longer have any satisfying or fulfilling lives, such as those sentenced with Lou Gehrig's disease, pancreatic cancer, and other terminal illnesses. However, he was not the Grim Reaper as some cult fiction portrays him to be. For one, he does not even charge those patients. Also, before he could end a patient's life (painlessly) with a gas device, he always made sure that he videotaped one last interview with the patients and their family, in order to ensure the legal system in the future that he did not just murder those patients on a whim. He even dissuaded most patients from ending their lives when there was still hope. Such a case was shown when Kevorkian asked a patient whose body was slightly scarred from a fire accident to refrain from suicidal wills. Kevorkian told him that the real problem was not the fire burns but clinical depression, which was curable. Eventually, that patient decided to choose life, which Kevorkian happily obliged.
The latter half of the movie deals with Kevorkian's legal battles against the state of Michigan, which sparked a ferocious nationwide debate on the issue of mercy-killing.
I personally find the movie highly amusing due to the fact that it is well-produced. Al Pacino plays Kevorkian so well that he even adopts Kevorkian's Detroit accent. The movie also carries a sardonic, comical undertone by showing Kevorkian's genius outside the medical field (he sold some surrealistic paintings to art galleries) and the soundtrack of Bach played throughout the duration(who is Kevorkian's favourite musician).
In the end, it does not matter whether you are a conservative religious or an atheist...it is highly likely that you will find this movie as amusing as I did. You Don't Know Jack does not attempt to argue on whether physician-assisted suicide is right or wrong. It is, simply put, a movie about Kevorkian's dealings with euthanasia, his patients, and the consequences he would face later on in public.
The morality behind euthanasia is for yourself to decide.
Rating: 8 stars out of 10
In deciding whether a movie is worth watching, I tend to have several aspects in mind. I favour movies that are:
A friend of mine who happens to be effectively bilingual on Indonesian and English once complained about Western movies screened on theatres with an Indonesian-language subtitle.
He said it slightly distracts him from enjoying the entire movie fully.
Ah.
As an effective speaker of both Indonesian and English myself, I disagree with him to a large extent.
I personally think that having subtitle does indeed add to my enjoyment in watching the movie, particularly because it helps me to notice certain things I might have missed or misheard in the first place.
On "mishearing" them, I am not referring to my lack of proficiency in either languages. Of course not.
It does not matter whether it is an English movie with Indonesian subtitle or Indonesian movie with English subtitle (The first time I watched the legendary Ada apa dengan Cinta? in full was in a Singaporean channel, with English-language subtitle).
On the other hand,I do not mind on having no subtitles at all. It is just a matter of having them as additional options.
Read more...First of all, I must remind you that if you hadn’t watched this movie yet, I suggest you to skip reading this blog entry altogether since this movie is very worth watching. I promise you, you won’t waste your money on watching this movie.
I had known that this movie was adapted from a novel of the same title. Thank God I didn’t have enough spare time to read it, because I know that if I had, I would’ve been as enraptured as I had in watching Atonement yesterday.
It could’ve become a marvellous movie if not for its ending. Will Smith playing as Robert Neville perhaps wasn’t quite right after all; Smith always plays on great movies and this “I am Legend” movie could damage his reputation as an actor.
I’m not gonna start with the summary of the whole movie, as you could look them up yourself. The opening was great, it greets us with all the wild animals and the “New York Jungle”. It was 50% sci-fi and 50% horror then. But unfortunately, as it reached the climax of the movie (which was the death of Neville’s allegedly only companion left, the dog Sam), the whole movie took a whole new direction into a 100% horror.
The pair of immune survivors who could manage to save Neville from the zombie made us moviegoers pose a question: if Neville, the strong guy there, couldn’t even manage to escape the wrath of the zombies, how could Anna and Ethan manage to do so?
As there were only a pair of human couple that were left (Anna and Neville), and the possibility of a survivors’ camp isn’t proven yet, one could wonder why they hadn’t chosen to had sex yet. You know, even if there were a survivors’ camp, their number wouldn’t suffice to fill in enough of the world’s important positions (namely, governmental positions, hospitals, police stations, etc). Hence reproducing (i.e. having sex) for the sake of preventing Homo sapiens’ extinction would be the most sound logic.
The ending was drafted poor enough, with Neville (the main protagonist) dead and Anna and Ethan finally finding the alleged survivors’ camp, one could be disappointed as to see the ending not as fantastic as the opening.
My verdict: **** (4) out of ********** (10)
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