Free movie - The International

Caught KLue's free screening of The International at Cineleisure last night with the cut out coupon from this month's issue with Hsu, who's back for a couple of weeks. We waited a little too long in the lobby because I was looking at the wrong redemption counter, while the actual one was out of my line of sight. Whoops. I needn't have to worry as the screening room wasn't fully occupied and we got in, anyway.

There were also several other screenings going on that night, but most of the crowd (as far as I could tell) in the lobby were women waiting for Emmagem's screening of Confessions of a Shopaholic (which you still cannot pay me enough to watch), some with boyfriends in tow. Oy.

My sole reason for watching was merely to cuci mata see Clive Owen only :D

The plot, I gathered, is about an Interpol guy, Louis Salinger and a NY Assistant District Attorney, Ellenor "Ella" Whitman (Naomi Watts) who tried to take down the fictional world banking organization, the IBBC (International Bank of Business and Credit), suspected of their involvement in some arms dealing thing to control the debt is to control the power. It's not so much a conspiracy movie as it is more a paranoia-thriller movie. All I heard was that it was based on actual events.

One of the questions I asked myself was, "Of all the last names on the planet, why Salinger?" because the only Salinger that most people would know of is JD Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye. Frankly I've no idea why they even bothered with Naomi Watts's character, who walked out 2/3 into the movie at Owen's behest. What a waste.

This is one of the movies with an original screenplay and not based on some book/short story/comic book, making it refreshingly unpredictable.

Throughout the whole movie, we had to keep telling each other, "zho hee" (which is the Hokkien economical version of the phrase, "it's just a movie") while we saw some illogical stuff happening. It's not a movie set in Europe without actual Europeans in it - I didn't recognise most of the secondary cast.

In the end - for a free movie it's okay lah, cannot complain so much: Even with the not-that-engaging plot, Clive Owen is always a plus in my books ;)