k_yohanes

May 1998 riot is one among the darkest tragedy in Indonesian history, and until now the incident remained unsolved muddled beneath complicated political agenda. It takes a courage to make a movie about May 1998 riot, and director Viva Westi has taken her chance to direct it. This is not a historical movie, but a story that takes place during that tragedy and the impact felt by several characters in this movie, who seem to be unrelated but eventually form a beautiful thread of a story about love, passion, and humanity. Though filled with flashbacks the director managed to arrange everything neatly thus keep the audience excited until the film ends.

The cinematography, location selection, art directing, are very good, very realistic. No pretense or over exposure of luxury or dream life as shown in most mainstream Indonesian movie nowadays. This is what you will most likely see in real life everyday in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the story takes place.

All the casts give their best performance, and certainly a great start for a newcomer named Jenny Chang, although I feel she's rather awkward during singing performance, or maybe it's the singer voice (the dubber) that's not really matched Jenny's voice.

However, for a personal reason I feel the ending is rather unsuitable - I expect a bleaker finale due to the severe tragedy all characters have experienced. Nevertheless, the director might have other intention to present this story, so here it is. Despite some other minor technical problems like typos during subtitles or some rather off description of Chinese people, May is still a great Indonesian movie, and strongly recommended. Viva Viva Westi! Bravo.

I don't know whether the filmmakers of Genderuwo are truly filmmaker or simply a bunch of stupid guys who happen to gain enough capital to create such a disgusting creation. The promotion of this movie is translated, "The scariest ghost in the world, prepare yourself! A different and quality horror movie"... Once you watch it, you will experience a deep torture on your brain, logic, intelligence, everything. Stupid story, stupid acting, crappy picture, crappy sound effect, and the ghost itself is super duper crap! Genderuwo is terrible, horrible, in every aspects in movie-making you can name, just stay away from this junk, it's abomination in Indonesian movie industry, and it doesn't even deserve any amount of rating whatsoever!

Indonesian movie industry in its awakening period during the recent years have been flooded with mostly horror films, which are mostly, unfortunately, lack of originality, made in a hurry, messy editing, silly script and plot, terrible sound FX (only to shock you with loud bang), and other disadvantages mostly caused by lack of seriousness in making a film, possibly also due to the profit-crazed producers. The recent release "Suster N" provides different taste. While not scary or shock-fest, it gives something that Indonesian horror movie never provides before: suspense and mystery. The plot flows nicely, keeps the audience guessing. We have wonderful young talents here, Atiqah Hasiholan and Wulan Guritno (although doesn't talk much, her presence is already mysterious enough...), along with great cameos made by a bunch of Indonesian veteran actors and actresses like Henky Soelaiman, HIM Damsyik, Ratna Riantiarno, Jajang C. Noer, Ade Irawan, and many others. Unfortunately the male actor's acting (Ben Seven) is rather wooden. The location (a villa with Dutch colonial architecture converted into an old folks' home) is great, giving that eerie Gothic surroundings, like old-school horror movies. Setting in other "mainstream Indonesian horrors" are mostly sloppy and never arranged seriously.

However, among the good things mentioned, it's such a pity that the filmmaker rather failed to show "scary ghost" - and still can't completely release heavy dependence to "The Ring" and "Ju-On" type of ghosts, like other Indonesian horror trash movies. Anyway, I think it's just a minor thing and for me, not decreasing my enjoyment of this movie. Yes, it's a different Indonesian horror movie, and I recommend at least to watch it once and judge it by yourself.