Spoiler alert for Inside Man.

Watching Inside Man requires a test of patience that can usually be found in M. Night Shyamalan's movies. It requires you to hold on to all your burning questions and sit through the entire movie till the end, hoping against hope that the punchline delivers and makes the price of the movie ticket entirely worth the experience. If all goes well, you walk out of the cinema lavishing praise onto the flick while your slightly befuddled mind attempts to come to grips with the ingenius of the film. However, if the experience was like mine after viewing Inside Man, you'll spend the next two days scouring IMDb and other Internet forums trying to properly understand what was the whole premise of the show without ever formulating a satisfactory answer.

Simply put, Inside Man bit off more than it can chew. The star-studded cast comprising of 'old reliable' Denzel Washington, 'Hollywood's current 'It' man', Clive Owen,'The Man to Watch', Chiwetel Ejiofor, with side players Jodie Foster and Willem Dafoe, performed well enough with a script that delighted in observational humour but lacked substance in the grand scheme. The movie should been gold. The execution of the bank robbery was shot with 'A grade' flair. The plot exposition was well paced throughout the story. The screen chemistry between Owen and Washington captured the intensity of the film and propelled the story further. So what went wrong?

Well, plenty. Infact the more I thought about the movie, the more grating I found the film to be. The movie took great lengths to justify a lot of things, which unfortunately failed overall to appease this viewer's questions. I'll just say this much. As great as a movie's premise can be, it all fails when the credits rolling and you're left never quite knowing the motives of the character's actions.

On a side note, I am happy to say that I have renewed my faith in Roger Ebert, the movie critic on Rottentomatoes and the Chicago Sun-Times. For a while there I doubted his ability to critique a movie properly, believing that his 'star power' had blinded him to the basic foundations of his job. Then I read his review for Inside Man. And my faith was restored.

Also, I should probably make clear that my reference to M. Night Shyamalan at the beginning of my post is based upon nothing but admiration and respect. Shyamalan ain't no one-trick pony. But then I suppose this requires a separate blog post on it's on. Suffice to say that he's a demigod in my world and I heart him.

I think Brokeback Mountain, the film, is probably one of the best, if not the best movie adapted from a story. I read the book and I think about the movie, and I can't help but marvel over how the movie successfully captures everything in the story. You know how it is. Movie adaptations usually come out either trashing the original story (case in point, any movie that was adapted from a book by Stephen King), falling below the expectations of the viewer/reader (any movie that was adapted from a book that featured a kid wizard named Harry) or becoming something else altogether from the original (any movie that was adapted from graphic novels/comics). The novella, all 56 pages of it, by Annie Proulx is such a gem to keep.

In the hunt for the digital camera I have narrowed my search to a couple of models.

#1. The Casio EXILIM EX-Z750
#2. The Pentax Optio 750Z
#3. The Leica D-Lux 2

Truthfully speaking, I'll probably won't buy a digital camera anytime soon. Partly because I couldn't be bothered splashing out for one and also because I can't bear to put down my Pentax film camera yet. But how will you experience the thrill of first glimpsing upon physical photographs right after they've been processed without film cameras???

But, if I did go out and get one, I will most probably go for the Pentax model. One, because unlike the Leica, it has an optical viewfinder which I still value in cameras whether film or digital. Two, because I've been taking pictures with a Pentax camera all these years, I'm apt to be biased towards the brand. Three, Leica is almost dead and buried now, so if I do get it, I could face a lot of problems when it comes to repairing it. Four, and this is by far the most important factor of them all, the Pentax model, while not as pretty as the Leica, is sure as hell prettier than the Casio EXILIM.

I am such a girl.