The Terminal

This was one of those films that I've managed to put off watching since its release four years ago in 2004. And even when I had it on my hard drive, I didn't watch it immediately because the audio was totally out of sync with the video. I'm talking about a 15 seconds delay in the audio track here, can you imagine some of the most memorable moments in film history with a 15 seconds audio delay?

I tried hard to think of an example but they weren't as witty as I thought so...yeah...15 seconds delay is a long delay yeah which is a long time to delay ANYWAY, I managed to fix the problem using a technique I've learnt in my teenage years from badly-ripped porn. You open two different video players and place one of them in the background, that'll be your audio track, and maximise the other but mute it, that will be your video track. After two months of sitting idly in my E:/ drive, the video finally saw me put together enough effort to watch it.

It's funny (not really) how there was so much waiting involved in my watching of the film when waiting, is in fact the main theme of The Terminal. Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), with his Borat-esque mannerisms and accent, travels to New York from the fictional country of Krakozhia but because of a government overthrow in his country, he ended up as a stateless person. And because of that, he can't get the necessary authorisation to step foot out of the airport onto official American soil.

Viktor ends up living in the airport and making friends with a black guy, an Indian (dot kind, not the howling kind) and a Mexican. As in the case of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Gupta (the Indian guy) ends up as the comic relief of the show including a rather out-of-place scene of him as a performing waiter but thankfully, he had a perfect deadpan expression for that scene.

Along the way, he meets Amelia Warren (Catherine Zeta-Koh) and of course, a romantic relationship was teased and withdrawn, teased and withdrawn and I fucking fell for it. I haven't been affected by love stories in films for a long time and this really drew me in, probably because that's one of my wives you're trying to court there, Mr Navorski.

I think this is as much as I can tell without spoiling any more because you should watch the film. There are good comedy bits, heart-warming romantic bits, war-films-style manly-ly emotional bits and small little jabs at Bureaucracy and the American government. There's a healthy amount of cheesiness such as the last line from Gupta, which was unnecessary and wrecked the awesome build-up to that climatic scene.

Still, go watch it, don't wait.