In this review, I will write and analyze about the Malaysian film called Sepet (2005), directed by Yasmin Ahmad and its representation of Asian cinema from the mise-en-scene and cinematography.


Sepet is a drama comedy story of a Chinese boy with a bad background falling in love with a Malay girl with a good background. An unlicensed VCD seller Ah Loong's entire life changed when he meets Orked a student with good results, and from that day on, they will face a number of social and racial problems that stopped them from loving each other. There are multiple elements in this movie that highlight the uniqueness of Asian Cinema that separates it from Hollywood, and most of the aesthetics also speak out the multi-racial culture of Malaysia. Although it is seen as a low budget film, it has accurately mirrored the culture and environment of Malaysian society.

In Asian Cinema, the languages used is very different from Hollywood, in Sepet, languages other than English has surfaced, like Cantonese, Chinese, and Malay. This is because it is the languages used in Malaysian society. One of the other elements of Asian Cinema is the culture, in Malaysia culture, people are more shy to strangers as they are not as open as Western culture, it limits the actions the actors could do, but at the same time tells the audience how they should expect from the actor's behavior. Furthermore, the movie uses the settings and locations that represent Malaysia, there is no need for additional sets because most of the scenes are existing places.

The characters used in the film has multiple races like Malay, Chinese and Indian which is the majority race in Malaysia, the audience of the movie will notice that the characters of the movie are not entirely focused on one race, also there is some cultural difference between the characters. The issue of Malaysia identity in this movie is complicated because, in past Malaysia history, there is the incident 513 which the Japan invade and ruled Malaysia. The Japanese treated the Chinese poorly because of the communist in China and the Malay friendly.

From that on, the ties between Malay and Chinese have become rotten, government policies were set by races, but the Malays feared the Chinese would be replaced the economy because of the relationships from China. The gap between two races has not been treated well but widen decade by decade, additional reasons Chinese would stay away from marrying a Malay is due to the fear of force religion conversion.

To summarize this review, Sepet is a notable movie that separates Malaysian film with other movies made in Asia. It also is one of the Malaysian movies challenged the norm to include cross racial relationships, which includes restrictions and stereotypes from both races.

In this review, I will need to analyze the director, Wong Kar-Wai's film style in Chungking Express. Discuss how his style portrays the aesthetics of Asian Cinema.

Chungking Express is one of the weirdest films I have seen, other than the fact Wong Kar Wai was directing the film, the film does not have an ending and it feels like two films were hamburger together to play as a movie. Wong Kar Wai is famous for making films with subliminal message hiding in every action, Chungking Express is one of the bizarre films made by him. It is a romance film, but it is about two different types of love, at the beginning of the film it is about a desperate officer 223 (Played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) in search of his ex-girlfriend May. Officer 223 has a habit of collecting cans of pineapple that expires every next 30 days, which gives himself a countdown to finding another girl.


Right when the movie continues, he meets a girl in a wig that is involved in drug dealing (Played by Brigitte Chin-Hsia Lin) at the bar, she then was taken to a hotel room and the woman falls asleep. As officer 223 eats all of his canned pineapples in one night, he was recovered from the lovesickness. Before he leaves the hotel room, he polishes her shoes and went for a jog. From that scene, we can feel a bit of sadness in his love life, but we know he is free from being trapped. Right when we expect that there will be more story, the movie cuts into another officer who just broke up.

Officer 663 (Played by Tony Leung) who has just broken up with his girlfriend is a regular customer of a midnight snack place, the waitress (Player by Faye Wong) falls in love with him deeply but he does not notice it because he is still recovering from his past relationship. She eventually sneaks up into his apartment to do some cleaning when he was not at home.

In this film, there are a lot of point-of-view and distant shots to let the viewers participate in the story, in some scenes, we feel like we are the characters, understanding what is happening. In some, we are just a passerby, looking at their emotions from a distant. With this technique that Wong Kar Wai used, we can easily sympathize the characters and feel what is like to be them. The emphasis on blue tones also presents their emotions of sadness, but the vibrant colors represent there are still hope in every relationship, it makes us want to cure the characters lovesickness.


The film plays an important part in Asian cinema, it shows how directors could take modern culture to a deeper level. Every scene in this movie portrays the Hong Kong culture, how they live, where they live, how they think without much explanation, it is very a different from Hong Kong action and comedy movies.

Wong Kar Wai made films that let us think a lot about life, because life is not always simple, with each detail taken into consideration, same as love. Chungking Express demonstrated very well on how guys felt after a breakup, and how each lovesick is different from one another. Wong Kar Fai leaves us with two unfinished love story, but the thing is it doesn't have to be finished because there is no beginning and ending in real life, the process is what's most important.

For this review, I will have to analyze the style of the filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock by citing an example from his film, Psycho (1960).

Alfred Hitchcock is a remarkable film maker who has directed a huge number of films that left a mark in film history like Dial M for Murder, North by Northwest and the famous film Psycho. Psycho is the most popular film among his creations, and it is known by the girl who got stabbed in the shower scene. As my research from the internet, Hitchcock is often defined by his subjective camera, he wants the viewers to get into the point of view of the characters, placing their sympathy into the characters. Psycho is the first film he used to experiment with the style he has to develop, and it created a great example for future filmmakers to follow.


Starting with the opening scene where he uses this technique. The shot pan through the city of Pheonix and fade to the window of an apartment, even if there are few edits, but it looks like a continuous shot. It reflects the view of the audience, entering the movie scene, looking for the subject to observe on. There appear to be two characters, and as the scene progresses, the camera starts to focus on Marion, the main character. In the next shot, we see the camera panning from the money to the suitcase, showing that she is choosing between running away or deposit it for her boss, the music does a great job to increase the tension of the situation. When she got to the office, the owner of the money is shown as a show off for his wealth, this makes the audience easier to agree on Marion's criminal act.

The coming scenes are where Marion runs away with the money, and the audience only sympathizes her if they are in her shoes. When she reaches her hotel, another secondary character enters the scene, giving us a sense of the character is another important character in the movie. When Marion is having a conversation with Norman Bates the motel's owner, the scene is longer than usual, giving us time to get used to his role and existence. Their conversation gets more intense as time goes by, and this has made Marion the prey for Norman, even if we don't know what is going to happen. The scene where he peeps on Marion when she is getting ready to bath told us something bad is going to happen.


After Marion got stabbed when she was bathing, the camera shifted from her dead body to the newspaper wrapped money, and to the window when we could see Norman running to the scene. We were tricked into believing that the killer was Norman's mother when he is shocked after seeing her laying down on the ground. At this moment, we sympathize Norman for what is happening and were put into his point of view. Even if he was cleaning the mess we assumed was made by her mother, we do not suspect that Marion was killed by him. After that, Lila and Sam which is Marion's sister and her boyfriend came into the scene, following by the investigator Milton Arbogast, the scene started to change focus on each character.

With Hitchcock's style, we were brought into the villain's perspective of seeing the world, but there are no points to support the main character as the good guy. This also reflects what would happen in real life, anyone could be the villain, there is no pure good. But with Hitchcock's way of directing, each murder is greater than another murder, making it difficult to know who is the good guy, and this brings fear to the audience.

In the review, I will need to analyze the editing techniques in Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer) and discuss how the techniques are important to the narrative development.

Run Lola Run, originally named Lola Rennt in German is a 1998 German action film, the story begins where a woman attempt to get 100,000 German marks for her mob boyfriend because they accidentally left in in the subway car while delivering a smuggled loot. She has 20 minutes to find the best ways to get the money, and the whole story is about her thinking what would happened if she choose one of those ways to get the money before her boyfriend tries to rob the grocery store beside the phone booth.




In this article, I will be talking about the editing techniques used in this film because it was very well rated by the internet. According to the IMDB website, the film consists of 1581 transitions including edits, dissolves, wipes, fade and etc in 81 minutes, averaging at 2.8 seconds between every transition which makes this a fast paced movie. There are 3 alternative plot and each plot is limited to 20 minutes of story. After watching the movie and looking at some analysis, the continuity in this movie despite having a tonne of editing is superb in terms of timing, music and space.

The transitions along with each and every shot will have to be related in order to maintain the mood and feel of the movie. Tykwer's editing is unique from ordinary films which only have one plot, for his movie, he uses three different plots starting with the same beginning and ended with very different endings, but with the same goal. One of the contributions to continuity is the characters and locations used in the 3 different plots, all of these scene shared at least 3 same locations like the bank Lola's father worked in, the phone booth her boyfriend is standing in, and the scene where his father's friend meets the tough guys.


When talking about film editing pace, there are both slow pace editing and fast pace editing, slow paced editing is used to highlight the crucial moments of the characters and let the viewers take time to focus on what is happening, for example when Lola and her boyfriend were surrounded by the police and they are going to die. Fast pace editing is used most of the time when Lola is running towards a destination, and it intensify the scene along with the music. There is also diegetic sounds in this movie, the scenes where Lola was not talking but the viewers can listen to her voice, stating that is a voice from her mind and the sound of clock ticking reminds the viewers that she is running out of time.

In conclusion, this is a great movie, in terms of editing and story line, I really enjoy the way Tykwer used a technique which packed in 3 different story line, this movie taught filmmakers that they don't have to make a long movie to tell a long story. Action films usually has a linear story line, but this movie uses its own way to tell an action story, it's a movie worth watching.

The cameras are set as needed from the stoyboard.


These are the few scenes I have set the camera for.





Additional tasks needed to be done, like adding the gun and sacks to the characters. There are also refinements needed to the textures. So, this is what so far I have completed.

In this article, I will have to analyze the mise-en-scene in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, supported with relevant examples. And also discuss how the filmmaker's style enhance the psychological horror genre.

The Shining is once a famous novel in 1977 written by Stephen King and turned into a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick a few years later in 1980. Although the movie is one of the 80's masterpiece also a horror masterpiece of all time, there are some parts that confused me and leave me thinking. In this review, I am going to talk about how Stanley Kubrick implements mise-en-scene in his movie The Shining.

I have never read the book before watching this movie, and I have already predicted what will happen at the end of the movie. The mise-en-scene in this movie will be explained by in three ways, the lighting, setting, and composition.



First and foremost the lighting, it plays a huge role in The Shining because scary movies tend to have dark and dimmed lighting to show evil which indirectly relates to the darkness. Poor lighting is one of the best ways to blind the courage of the viewers because it is hard to see anything and it could enhance the effects of horror in this movie. There are a lot of lighting techniques in this film that different from ordinary horror films, the well-lit Overlook hotel could make the audience more afraid because it could relate them to real life situations. In the bar scene where he is in this dim ball room with only a few lights coming from the wall and the bar table suggested Jack's paranoid and messy mind, the dark wooden design compliments the scene adding more fear to the audience, where anything bad could happen later.

German Expressionism is also found in this movie, the lighting used in the scene where little Danny got chased by this father in the maze. With three point lighting, the maze looks super dimmed and the only strong light points at his father Jack, which making him looks like a monster chasing down his food. The horrible colored hotel rooms do not have bright lighting like the public areas, but a romantic yellow tone light at all of the places which make the scene unsettling.

The settings used in the movie shows how small the characters can be, and how vulnerable they are, danger can come in any direction. The movie starts off with a scene showing mountain beside a huge lake, the music used in this scene is horrifying and strange. These scenes want to show how isolated is the characters are to the human society, this place is where anyone doesn't want to be when there are in a horror movie. Most of the scenes were shot inside Overlook hotel, on the inside, it is a huge hotel with spacious hallways leading to nowhere, and on the outside, the hotel looks like a beast pointing out how magnificent it is. Right beside the hotel, there is a messy shaped maze with tall hedges, it could easily be a nightmare for a knife chase for the victim.

The part that scares me the most is where little Danny rides his tricycle through the hallways, the carpet is colored with dark and unsettling colors with weird geometrical patterns. With him sitting on his tricycle making the scene look more creepy and him easy to chase down by something from behind. Back to the presidential suites, there are not many obstacles for the victims to hide in but the toilet, from the bedroom to the toilet, the victims are cornered with nowhere else to go but outside in the snowy night. The movie shows how a luxurious hotel could easily be turned into a hell hole when it is empty because the large spaces make it easier for the killer to look for the target.