Perhaps it is wrong for me to name Ta Prohm the Tomb Raider Temple.
How could a Hollywood movie starring Angelina Jolie as the famous heroine Lara Croft upstage the importance and significance of this temple to the culture and history of Cambodia?
And yet, Tomb Raider was instrumental in making Ta Prohm one of the most famous temples in the Angkor Wat Archaeological Park.
Most of the scenes in Tomb Raider were shot here and they were quite faithful to the temple's actual appearance.
But what really attracted me to Ta Prohm were the trees growing out of the temple ruins!
The trees were huge and tall! At the entrance to the Ta Prohm, I got my own picture taken under a huge tree! (with my face blanked out of course!)
After we left Preah Khan, our driver Xiao He drove Jam, his friend and I straight to Ta Prohm, which was located one kilometre east of Angkor Thom.
Built in the late 12th and early 13th century in Bayon style architecture by King Jayavarman VII, Ta Prohm was used as a Buddhist monastery and university. Unlike most Angkorian temples, Ta Prohm was left mostly preserved and not restored so that the original atmosphere of the place still lingered after all these centuries.
Trees growing out of the temple ruins is a major feature of Ta Prohm. I had to wait for tourists to leave before I could take this picture below. Most tourists love to stand at this spot to have their pictures taken!
Look at the giant roots of this tree merging with the temple structure!
I had a hard time waiting for tourists to get out of the way before taking this shot!
Another shot of the huge roots with tourists in the picture.
I like the sepia mode of this photo. Looks more authentic doesn't it? Haha!
We then arrived at the most popular spot in the whole of Ta Phrom! Everyone wanted to have his or her photographs taken at this spot!
I can't quite remember but does this scene appear in the Tomb Raider movie? Looks like I have to re-watch the movie! Haha!
More trees spotted growing out of the temple ruins.
Nice statue carvings!
Another huge tree pressing down on a temple structure, as if strangling it.
This is another photography spot for tourists!
Does this scene appear in Tomb Raider too? Looks like I really should watch the movie again!
Intricate carvings on the rocks.
Although we did not spend a long time in Ta Prohm, I enjoyed this place immensely. Somehow it was different from other temples in the Angkor Wat Archaeological Park. Perhaps the beauty of Ta Prohm could be felt in its decadence, in its lack of care - as if forgotten and left to the elements.
Now if only I had met Lara Croft here. That would certainly made my trip to Ta Prohm complete.
Coming Up Next : My Lunch At Khmer's Family Restaurant
1. I am getting more and more upset with my current telco. I did a speed test of their Edge connection and this was the result.
It was so freaking slow I could not even get my Twitter timeline updated on my iPhone!
When I switched to 3G expecting a faster connection, guess what happened? My phone line suddenly vanished! Poof! People could not even call me after that! How ridiculous is that?!
2. I noticed more and more restaurants are installing this call button. At the press of the button, we can summon the waiter to our table to get the menu, make an order, pay the bills or make a complaint. How convenient!
The only problem is when customers misuse it when they let their children play with it. Can you imagine what happens when a young kid keeps pressing the button? I pity the poor waiter!
3. I normally eat nothing but fruits for breakfast. But once in a while, I like to go to OldTown White Coffee for my breakfast. I would either eat their Western Platter...
Or their steamed bread with butter and kaya.
But sometimes I rather go PappaRich to eat their half boiled eggs, toasted bun with butter and kaya plus a cup of hot coffee! Yummy!
4. Take a look at this photo. Make a guess. Do you think this is coffee, milk tea or Milo?
Hint : It is not sweet
5. I love desserts!!! Do you? My current most favourite dessert shop is Snowflake Taiwanese Dessert! For those of you who have eaten there, do you prefer the Grass Jelly, Taroballs or Soya Ice series?
I love the pearls, lotus seed and the chewy taro balls! A perfect dessert on a hot day!
Usually I would add more taro balls as it is my favourite topping! Want to learn how to make your own taro balls? Read HERE.
6. Last week, I watched the much anticipated movie, Kungfu Panda 2. It was pretty awesome. But somehow, I felt it was not as good as the first movie. What do you think?
The one thing I like about the movie is the very cute and adorable Baby Po!
Isn't he cute? I wish I can have a baby panda as my pet! Haha!!
Well, the movie was filled with lots of funny jokes and wisdom one-liners. So it was definitely still a good and enjoyable movie! Just that I went in the cinema hall with too high an expectation I guess.
7. If you have been reading my blog or following me on Twitter, you will know by now that I love the rain. One afternoon it rained so hard I could not get out of my own car! So I took out my iPhone and recorded a short video of the rain from inside my car.
Oh my, I just love the sound of the rain hitting my car windscreen! Call me weird but I find it so therapeutic!
Luckily I was not rushing for an appointment or any important event, so I waited for the rain to become less heavy. With such heavy rain, it would be pointless to leave the car even if I had an umbrella with me, don't you agree?
8. Talking about rain, I hope it would rain tonight. I just love sleeping while listening to the rain! But if it does not rain, I do have another option - create fake rain sound!
Yes, with this amazing Sleepmaker Rains app on my iPhone, I can select the kind of rain sound that I like and play it while I lie in my bed! Haha!
9. I don't know what's freaking wrong with me, but I am starting to get addicted to this song that features a flying cat called Nyan Cat, with the body of a Pop-Tart, and a rainbow trailing behind it!
Play this video and see if you like it. And read about the origins of Nyan Cat.
Well? If you like it, you can try the longer version (about 3 and a half hours!!!) HERE and see if you can sit through the whole duration without killing yourself! Good luck!! LOL!
OK, confession time. I did not know the meaning of this wordINSIDIOUS.
A check with Merriam-Webster site revealed the following definitions: 1. awaiting a chance to entrap (treacherous) 2. harmful but enticing (seductive) 3. having a gradual and cumulative effect (subtle)
If you didn't already know, INSIDIOUS is the title of a new horror movie playing in cinemas right now. As a horror movie fan, I heard some good reviews about this movie and decided to catch it yesterday.
Before you proceed, take note - SPOILERS AHEAD!
But first, you might want to watch this trailer from the movie.
Frankly speaking, I was not at all impressed with the trailer. It didn't look that scary to me, but on learning that INSIDIOUS is a collaboration between Saw co-creators James Wan & Leigh Wannell and the Paranormal Activity team comprising Oren Peli, Jason Blum and Steven Schneider, I decided to give it a go.
Director James Wan on the set of Insidious
I did not expect it to be scarier than The Exorcist - still the scariest horror movie to me - and it wasn't. Well, I was hoping it would be scarier than The Eye, my No.1 horror movie from Hong Kong directed by the Pang Brothers, but it still wasn't.
You know how it's like after I watched The Eye? Right after I stepped out of the cinema, I started to imagine things whether I was in the lift, in my room alone or in the bathroom! The Eye really freaked me out for weeks! Now that's what I call a real horror movie!!
In fact, I even find The Ring (the original Japanese horror movie), Shutter (the original Thai horror movie) and The Exorcism Of Emily Rose much scarier than Insidious.
The Ring was horribly disturbing, especially with that video thingy; Shutter gave me the goose bumps especially with the nightmarish shocking ending and Emily Rose made me worry about waking up at 3am every night!
Insidious? Let's just say I was not at all traumatized leaving the cinema hall. Haha! Perhaps I watched too many horror movies and it's getting harder to scare me? Maybe.
But that does not mean Insidious is not a good movie. It was simply not scary enough for me, but it was engrossing enough to keep me at the edge of my seat, at least for the first half of the movie. Yes, it was more suspenseful than it was scary, at least to me.
Briefly, the movie is about a couple Josh and Renai Lambert (played by Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne respectively) whom upon moving into their new home with their three kids discovers that their house is haunted and that their son Dalton has inexplicably fallen into a coma. In order to escape the haunting and save their son, they move again only to discover a shocking truth - it is not their house that was haunted, but their son!
Now that revelation may be shocking for the couple but definitely not to us viewers. That's because the filmmakers had already revealed that the boy is the source of the hauntings in the trailer! I thought this sort of hurt the movie a bit since I would have preferred to discover it myself during the movie! Oh well, maybe they needed a twist since not many would want to watch another movie about some haunted house!
Anyway, to cut the story short, Dalton is found to be gifted at astral travel in his sleep. Don't know what astral travel is?
Astral travel or astral projection is an out-of-body experience where the person who practises it is able to project his "astral self" or consciousness out of his physical body and travel in the astral plane. It appears that some people are more gifted in this than others but experts in astral travel claimed that everyone can do it if one practises enough.
In fact, some experts said that all of us travel out of our body in our sleep every night! Read more HERE.
Since astral travel seems like a foreign topic to most people, many are afraid of trying it out of fear that they may not be able to return to their physical body. Some people are also afraid that evil spirits will possess their physical body while they are away on astral travel.
And this is exactly what this movie Insidious is trying to exploit. That fear that you cannot return to your physical body and forever trapped in the astral world while an evil spirit takes over. Creepy.
Experts on astral travel had however, debunked such thoughts as myths. Some maintained that you are connected to your physical body by a silver cord and this cord cannot be severed under any circumstances unless you are to leave your body forever like in the case of death. Others said that actually it is only your consciousness that is traveling, your soul is still in your physical body. But with no concrete proof of this, would you believe in the experts?
The bottomline is, are you daring enough to try astral travel? If yes, here is a step-by-step guide on how you can travel out of your body. Do it at your own risk yes? : )
Back to the movie, Dalton is highly gifted in astral projection and because he had traveled a bit too far into the dark realm called "The Further", he could not find his way back. His physical body lapses into a coma and this attracts all those spirits who are craving to possess his body.
That certainly explains all the hauntings that the couple experienced, but that's not their only problem. It seems that in the dark realm, there is a demon who is hell-bent to possess their son's body and will stop at nothing to achieve it.
And from then onwards, the movie started to remind me of Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist with the arrival of the three ghost hunters with their gadgets and mumbo jumbos. It all still remain quite engrossing and entertaining until the descend into the dark realm.
I was really quite put off with all those dead souls, like the bunch of dead family members in the living room, the laughing child that runs across the hallway, and the demon himself. It was not even scary anymore! Oh by the way, did anyone notice that the demon looks like Darth Maul from Star Wars? Or is it just me?
And to see Dalton with his legs chained to the floor presumably by the demon? I mean, seriously? This just makes it look like a scene taken out from Charmed or Supernatural! Gosh!
So yes, the movie started off really well and managed to build up its suspense and momentum effectively. There were many creepy moments like the raspy whispers on the baby monitor and the front door of the house found wide open in the middle of the night. And of course the sudden appearance of the demon behind Josh almost threw me off my seat!
The actors all did a great job and this include excellent performances from Barbara Hershey as Josh's mom and Lin Shaye as the ghostbuster.
Unfortunately, it started to go downhill from the moment Josh crossed over to the other side towards the later part of the movie. Maybe they showed too much of the ghosts? Over exposure is never a good thing in horror movies and I think the filmmakers made a mistake of doing just that.
Also I thought some of the scenes in the later part of the movie looked funny and probably a bit corny. If they wanted to be funny, then I think that Sam Raimi did a better job with his movie Drag Me To Hell. Now that was one hell of an entertaining horror movie!
Still, I consider Insidious to be one of the better horror movies among all those mediocre horror movies churned out by Hollywood. I am rating it as follows: Scariness : 6/10 Suspense : 9/10 Storyline : 7/10 Acting : 9/10
One thing's for sure though. I will never attempt astral travel. Not after watching this movie!
I was a little late in catching the movie Source Code which created quite a stir recently. I am glad that I did not read any reviews before watching it. Just like the movie Inception, people were either hating it or loving it. I belong to the latter category.
Many people did not like the movie because it did not make any sense to them. And I don't think I can really blame them. It is hard to understand about parellel universes or alternate realities, which was explained quite briefly in the movie. In fact, I don't think I am smart enough to really understand completely anything that has to do with Quantum Physics!
But first, a little about the movie Source Code. It is basically about Colter Stevens (played by Jake Gyllenhaal ) an American Army helicopter pilot who woke up on a train and discovered he had assumed the identity of another man named Sean Fentress. Before he could learn more about himself, the train exploded and he found himself in some kind of pod where he soon learnt that he was in a project to save Chicago from a bomber via a program that enters him into alternate realities.
This is as brief as I could get. For the full story, read HERE.
The movie got me engrossed right from the beginning all the way to the end. The way the story developed each time Colter enters a different reality was really interesting. Character development was also executed perfectly and I really think the actors and actresses did a great job!
I particularly like Vera Farmiga as Colleen Goodwin, the mission controller. Her facial expression was excellent and her acting very believable.
Michelle Monaghan who played Christina Warren, Colter's love interest, was very natural and Jake Gyllenhaal was totally warm and compelling in his role as Colter.
The only problem with the movie is the inability of the audiences to fully understand the plot. Or to be more exact, the scientific theory behind it. My friend who watched this movie with me thought the Source Code is a simulation device. It is not, as told by Dr Rutledge (played by Jeffrey Wright) to Colter at one point in the movie. This is not Matrix or Avatar.
A lot of people thought this is about time travel and that Colter was travelling back to the past to uncover who the bomber is. Again, this is NOT correct. There is no time travel involved at all. If it is time travel, Colter would have gone back to the past and changed history. But he could not and did not. Those people who were killed in the train were still dead and even after he prevented the bombing and saved everyone towards the end of the movie, they still remain dead.
Source Code is all about parellel universes or alternate realities, a mind boggling topic even for the most educated and intelligent amongst us. If you go into the cinema with absolute zero knowledge about this topic, you will have a hard time trying to make sense of it all. Consequently, most people will come out of the cinema saying the plot is unbelievable or ridiculous or even far-fetched.
Luckily for me, I was exposed to this topic of parellel universes a few years ago. Thus, I think I was a bit more successful in making sense of the movie and more accepting of the storyline.
So what exactly are parellel universes? If I am not mistaken, Quantum Mechanics defines parellel universes as universes that are separated from each other by a single quantum event.
I am definitely not an expert but this is what I understand from my limited knowledge about parellel universes. It would seem that there is an unlimited universes or realities co-existing with our present reality. All the universes are happening in the moment of NOW. Do I make any sense here?
Simply put, whatever choices you make defines your present reality. In another reality, you will be making a different choice which leads to different pathways or consequences. For example, you are reading this post now. You decide to leave a comment after you finished reading. This is your present reality. In another reality, you are reading this post and decide not to leave any comments. Your actions in both realities will lead to different consequences which will lead to more decisions to be made later which will play out in yet many other realities or parellel universes.
In other words, all the different pathways you choose are already happening all at once, but in different realities. Mind boggling? Absolutely.
Back to the movie Source Code. OK, this is my take on what actually happened. I may be wrong here and this is of course, open for discussion.
In the very beginning before the movie even starts, there is this man named Sean Fentress who got onto a train and a bomber blowed up the train, killing him and all the passengers inside. The crazed bomber planned to continue with a second bombing. To prevent this, the Government or the authorities needed to find out the identity of the bomber. They enlisted the help of Dr Rutledge who is the inventor of Source Code, a program that can place someone's consciousness into another during the latter's last eight minutes of life at a different reality.
Dr Rutledge and his team discovered that Colter Stevens who supposedly died in a war, was most suitable to take over Sean and therefore, they kept him alive (or at least his brain alive) and connected him to the Source Code.
Colter was sent to a different reality each time to progressively identify the bomber. As you can see, all the different realities were almost the same but with some events changed because Colter took a slightly different action in each of them. Basically, he was just jumping from one parellel universe to another. In the process, he fell in love with Christina Warren, a passenger in the train.
Finally, he found out the identity of the bomber and informed Colleen and Dr Rutledge. With the information, the bomber in this present reality (which I shall call the Original Universe) was tracked down and caught, thus prevented a second bombing.
Dr Rutledge decided to erase Colter's memory so that he could use Colter again to help with another case. But Colter himself wanted to die, so that he is free to go to the alternate reality to save Christina and the passengers of the train and live happily ever after in that reality. He managed to convince Colleen to help him.
So Colleen pushed the button and Colter died in the original universe but lived happily in the parellel universe. And the movie should have ended there and then and I would get out of the cinema happy and satisfied.
But no, they had to come out with a twist at the ending and that's where I started to get confused.
In the last part of the movie, Colleen received a text message from Colter on her phone. Now a text message sent from a parellel universe cannot possibly reach the original universe. So I figured that the last scenes in the movie are actually showing Colleen in an alternate universe, the same universe where Colter is already living happily, having saved Christina and the passengers in the train!
And because in that universe, the bombings did not happen and no one died, that means the Source Code had not even been used yet! Yet, how come we see Colter's body there and connected to the Source Code? He's supposed to be alive in that universe!
But of course I forgot! Colter's consciousness was already in Sean Fentress so the person who saved everyone on the train was actually Sean but with Colter's consciousness! In other words, Colter has two consciousness in that particular universe, one in Sean and the other in his own body! Astounding!
I hoped I figured it out correctly. But I may be wrong so if you have a different idea, do share with me here.
There are still a few unanswered questions.
One, why did Christina's face glitched in one of the scenes? She is real and alive in that particular universe so why the glitch? This is not a simulation!
Two, why and how did they choose Sean for Colter's consciousness to go into? There are so many other passengers in that train they could have chosen.
Three, why did Colter felt cold in the pod at one point in the movie? Besides, the pod is not real, but only what his consiousness sees.
Still, I enjoyed this movie tremendously. I'm rating it 8.5/10. Entertaining and absorbing, with an ingenious plot and superb acting all round. A movie you cannot afford to miss!
