A Persistent Vision

Iron Man 2 (2010)

2010-05-01T16:41:00.000+08:00

What OS would Tony Stark use?

Isn't Robert Downey Jr the go-to guy for action hero movies these days?

Can he save the Iron Man series from the law of sequels?

Can Mickey Rourke survive the curse of Best Actor Oscar winners and lackluster summer follow-ups?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 29 April 2010

How to be (2008)

2010-05-01T16:35:00.000+08:00

Everything feels better when you're sharing your woes with people who have it worse

What if perpetually mopey Edward Cullen were just an average, real-life 20-something?

What if you could tell Edward Cullen that he's a self-centred narcissist and an emotional hypochondriac?

What if you could cast Robert Pattinson in this?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 28 April 2010.

Ip Man 2 (葉問 2) (2010)

2010-05-01T16:19:00.001+08:00

He wished then that he didn't have that itchy spot on his nose...

Which unsuspecting hoodlum will Donnie Yen beat up and maim this time round?

What's the moral of the high-falutin' speech that will accompany the beating?

Can Sammo Hung still fight, and without using wire-fu?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 28 April 2010.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2010)

2010-04-29T17:22:00.003+08:00

It was a dark and stormy night at the museum...

Two headstrong, avant garde artists having a torrid affair might be something you've seen before.

But surely, there has to be something worth seeing if it's the creators of Chanel no. 5 and the Rites of Spring?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 21 April 2010.

Shutter Island (2010)

2010-04-15T11:27:00.000+08:00

Spoiler alert: Everything about this movie spoils itself

How does Martin Scorsese turn a mystery into a dreary and predictable not-thriller?

Is it possible to overdo a stylistic tribute to noir?

Is it possible to create a film with atmospherics so stratospheric, they call their atmospherics to attention than create any atmosphere?

Read my joint review with Hee Enming at Fridae.com, first published on 14 April 2010.

Monga (艋舺) (2010)

2010-04-15T11:23:00.002+08:00

A true gangster never needs a chair to sit on

What would you get if you crossed the first arc of Godfather with the visual style of City of God, set it in Taiwan, and tell it like an Taiwanese afternoon soap?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 14 April 2010.

Prince of Tears (淚王子) (2009)

2010-04-15T11:17:00.001+08:00

"Green Bottles" was never a happy car song for these children...

Political purges, paranoia, professional informers, and death camps.

These are all features of a capitalist dictatorship.

Now, watch this tale told from the eyes of children.

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 14 April 2010.

Greenberg (2010)

2010-04-15T11:00:00.000+08:00

He was always bothered by that speck in his eye

Antonioni knew all about film when he made his anti-film, L'Avventura.

Did Noah Baumbach really know all about comedies when he made Greenberg?

Come watch Ben Stiller in this anti-comedy about nothing!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 14 April 2010.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

2010-04-09T19:07:00.003+08:00

Zeus felt more at ease with sparkly laser lights than shimmering armour

How does Liam Neeson say "Release the Kraken!" this time round?

Does it still look like a man in a rubber suit in a tokusatsu feature?

Was Bubo the original Jar Jar Binks of the Greek mythology genre? Is it in the remake?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 7 April 2010.

Tenshi ko noi (天使の恋) (2009)

2010-04-09T19:02:00.003+08:00

He possessed the unique ability to fall asleep in a sitting position

Ever wondered how Trainspotting would look like with Japanese schoolgirls looking for trouble?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 7 April 2010.

A Single Man (2009)

2010-04-05T17:51:00.000+08:00

Tom Ford likes angora sweaters too

Can Tom Ford adapt a book by Christopher Isherwood without going overboard with visual excesses?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 31 March 2010.

Men who stare at goats (2009)

2010-04-05T17:47:00.000+08:00

The fluffer turned up on time at the set

Love a shaggy dog story?

Love a good conspiracy theory?

1970s secret military experiments meet the war on terror. Psychic ninjas to the rescue!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 31 March 2010.

Fire of Conscience (火龙) (2010)

2010-04-05T17:42:00.000+08:00

The mirror universe has a Leon Lai too

Has the recession finally forced Hong Kong directors to make better films?

Does Leon Lai's add on facial hair mean he's a better actor now?

Can Hong Kong make good cop shows that don't reference Infernal Affairs?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 31 March 2010.

Le Concert (2009)

2010-03-25T15:50:00.000+08:00

The conductor called for more cowbell

Hadn't enough of the "In soviet russia" jokes?

Want to see more broad national and ethnic stereotypes on film?

And perhaps you would like some Tchaikovsky while you're at it?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 24 March 2010.

How to train your dragon (2010)

2010-03-25T15:41:00.000+08:00

The perfect picture for a Dragon for Dummies guide?

Viking boy meets dragon.

Viking boy falls in love with dragon.

The rest is history.

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 24 March 2010.

City of Men (Cidade dos homens) (2007)

2010-03-21T21:53:00.002+08:00

And daddy and his best friend make three

City of God: music video and gangland drama on acid, and muse for Royston Tan's 18.

Five years later, the boys are all grown up and back for more trouble.

What new stories do they have to tell of Rio's favellas?

Read my full review on Fridae.com, first published on 17 March 2010.

Confucius (孔子) (2010)

2010-03-21T21:45:00.002+08:00

Survivors ready? Go!

Ever wondered about the real Confucius?

I mean, the extremist ideologue who was a threat to stability all across China.

Yes, the one who is constantly outwitted, outplayed and outlasted by his political opponents. All for your entertainment!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 17 March 2010.

Kaiji (カイジ：人生逆転ゲーム) (2010)

2010-03-21T21:37:00.002+08:00

This is the only thing that makes wage slavery bearable

Ever wondered if the rat race, capitalism, and work were just a trap?

Ever felt like you're still a wage slaves and modern serf at the end of the day?

Clearly, you're not taking enough of the opium of the masses!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 17 March 2010

The Lovely Bones (2009)

2010-03-21T21:04:00.003+08:00

Yes, Suzie: Heaven does look like a timepiece, jewellery, or automobile advert

What's left of a murder mystery if you know whodunnit in the first half hour?

What's left of a ghost story if the script isn't interested in retribution or redemption?

Hirokazu Kore-eda might have an idea, but does Peter Jackson have anything to offer besides CGI?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 17 March 2010.

The Book of Eli (2010)

2010-03-21T20:54:00.003+08:00

In the post-apocalyptic future, everyone will still dress like runway models

Mad Max without the crazy cars? Six String Samurai without the camp?

Are the Hughes brothers off their rockers again or have they emerged stronger from the cinematic hell that was From Hell?

Should you watch this or is it reserved on perpetual loop for a circle of hell specially reserved for bad moviemakers?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 17 March 2010.

Japan Society, NY: Mad, bad, and dangerous to know

2010-03-20T00:46:00.002+08:00

I'm not sure exactly how many readers I have in New York, but since I was asked:

20 March
Zatoichi on the Road
Scar Yosaburo

As the Japan Society puts it: The films star Shintaro Katsu and Raizo Ichikawa, respectively, each highlighting the unique skills of their stars, one brutish yet charming, the other suavely enigmatic.

(note: Scar Yosaburo is not available in the Singapore's DVD library at the Esplanade)

March 31 - April 18: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to know

The Japan Society presents 13 rare films of actresses Ayako Wakao, Meiko Kaji and Mariko Okada. At the opposite end of the stereotype of docile Japanese women-heroic good mothers, chaste daughters and hardworking faithful wives-the three actresses embodied the transgression of limits, breaking rules, flouting norms and generally upsetting everyone.

Location:
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017

Crazy Heart (2009)

2010-03-11T19:29:00.003+08:00

How many roads must a man walk down...

Is it true that this was just a remake of The Wrestler, but with a country singer?

Did Jeff Bridges really have a voice to pull off his character?

Does the music in the movie serve as a good compilation of country music?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 10 March 2010.

Yona Yona Penguin (よなよなペンギン) (2009)

2010-03-11T19:23:00.002+08:00

And then she saw the zombie clown...

The Japanese normally don't bother with 3D animation. That's not a mistake since they've proved that they have the better imaginations, artists, and writers - so much so that Pixar is a wannabe Ghibli (see "Up").

But what happens when a veteran animator takes on 3D animation?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 10 March 2010.

Up in the air (2009)

2010-03-11T19:19:00.003+08:00

But who was the one living vicariously?

Do you like to be an asshole?

Do you like to be paid to be an asshole?

Now for the clincher: do you like to be an asshole and travel around the world?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 3 March 2010.

The Last Station (2009)

2010-03-11T19:14:00.003+08:00

Mmmm, they go so well with chianti...

You're Leo Tolstoy, the greatest Russian novelist of all time, and the founder of a religious movement.

You have an army of minions and admirers. And a wife who adores you.

You're all set to conquer the world. Right? Right?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 3 March 2010.

Agora (2009)

2010-02-28T19:39:00.002+08:00

She wanted to know who left their panties at her house during the orgy...

How does a republic die?

How would you make your last stand in a doomed battle?

How do you like living in the all-new, all-improved Christian Rome?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 25 February 2010.

Summer Wars (サマーウォーズ) (2009)

2010-02-28T19:17:00.003+08:00

He was hoping the reflection from his cellphone would turn the Medusa into stone

What keeps society together?

Is it the family, with its building blocks of kinship networks?

Or is it civil society, with the voluntary associations of relationship networks?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 25 February 2010.

A Serious Man (2009)

2010-02-28T19:12:00.004+08:00

It was then that he realised he needed to drill a hole into the back of his head...

Think you have a bad day, week or month?

Do you really want to ask "Why me?"

And do you really want to know the answer?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 18 February 2010.

A Bright Star (2009)

2010-02-28T19:02:00.004+08:00

A portrait of the artist as a consumptive young man

How easy is it for a Romantic poet to fall in love?

This being the England of Jane Austen, how easy is it for a earn a living, become respectable, and win a lady's hand?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 18 February 2010.

The Wolfman (2010)

2010-02-28T18:58:00.003+08:00

Going somewhere, Mr Anderson?

Do you miss the old days of horror movies?

Do you think old school prosthetics, fur, makeup and masks are far superior than CGI?

Well then, let's do the monster mash!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 18 February 2010.

Nine (2009)

2010-02-28T18:52:00.004+08:00

Who were you expecting, Fellini and Mastroianni?

Would you watch an animated adaptation of a Disney "On Ice" adaptation of a Disney cartoon?

Would Disney even make an animated adaptation of a Disney "On Ice" adaptation of a Disney cartoon?

Why oh why then are we getting these hollow adaptations of vapid musical adaptations of Fellini classics?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 18 February 2010

Little Big Soldier (大兵小将) (2010)

2010-02-13T13:10:00.002+08:00

Can there be a Chinese martial arts film that doesn't make an obligatory political statement about how glad everyone is to have one tyrant ruling the land?

Is there such a thing as an anti-war Chinese martial arts film?

Will Wang Leehom escape with no psychological scars from a movie's worth being bound, gagged, tied, and humiliated by Jackie Chan?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 10 February 2010.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010)

2010-02-13T13:06:00.003+08:00

Can Chris Columbus not make a shallow, tired adaptation of a popular children's fantasy series?

Does he have what it takes to turn Riordan's books into actual cinema?

And what's with all the campy cameos and his naughty revisioning of Greek mythology?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 10 February 2010.

14 Blades (锦衣卫) (2010)

2010-02-13T13:02:00.004+08:00

Will Daniel Lee stumble and falter once more before the end of the first act of his new movie?

What wonderful, far-fetched premise does he draw upon this time in his wuxia tale?

How does he fail miserably (but still, entertainingly!) to fulfil this premise?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 3 February 2010.

Kisses (2008)

2010-02-13T12:55:00.003+08:00

Can we stop making movies that give a blinkered notion of childhood and innocence?

Have we forgotten Huckleberry Finn and The 400 Blows on their depiction of real childhood?

Well, the director of Kisses believes he can set things right. Welcome to the world of runaway kids in Dublin!

Real my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 3 February 2010

Armoured (2009)

2010-02-13T12:45:00.003+08:00

Was Werner Herzog right? Does a recession really inspire good film noir?
Will Nimrod Antal do the genre right with his East European film credentials?
Or will having too many celebrities spoil his creative control of the film?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 3 February 2010.

Edge of Darkness (2010)

2010-01-31T11:03:00.003+08:00

Can Mel Gibson play a man who doesn't go over the edge?

Does his character go on a righteous killing rampage at the end of the movie?

Can he handle the truth when he investigates a high level military-industrial conspiracy?

Is this remake of a UK series worth watching?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 29 January 2010.

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus (2009)

2010-01-31T10:44:00.003+08:00

Did the death of Imaginarium's lead actor compromise Terry Gilliam's movie?

Is this another Lost in La Mancha? or is this a brilliant mid-career allegory on the nature of cinema?

Or perhaps, did the director win his battle against Mr Nick for the hearts and minds of audiences?'

Read my full review on Fridae.com, first published on 27 January 2010.

My Ex (แฟนเก่า) (2009)

2010-01-31T10:17:00.003+08:00

You'd heard of the ex from hell, but Ken is about to meet THE ex from HELL!

Will Thai horror survive the director's decision to ditch all the storytelling innovations of the previous decade?

Will this be scary enough for modern audiences?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 27 January 2010.

My one and only (2009)

2010-01-23T18:50:00.004+08:00

Renee Zellweger continues her reign as eccentric romantic lead actress of Hollywood.

Watch as a prim and proper Southern belle drags her sons on a road trip across the United States on a husband-hunting expedition!

It's a dating disaster comedy meets road trip movie meets 50s nostalgia!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 20 January 2010.

Legion (2010)

2010-01-23T18:41:00.004+08:00

The day of judgement is at hand, for God has decided in his infinite wisdom to exterminate humanity.

Face the wrath of the angelic horde as they possess human beings, turn them into putrefying, flesh-eating monsters, and hunt down the second coming of Christ!

Believe me, this was much more coherent when it was called Neon Genesis Evangelion, Angel Sanctuary, or even The Prophecy. But then, this may be more campy.

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 20 January 2020

It's Complicated (2009)

2010-01-16T09:21:00.003+08:00

You're never too old to be in a romantic comedy.

In fact, you're never too old to start a torrid love affair with a married man.

In fact, you might want to consider having a love affair with your ex-husband.

Meryl Streep and Nancy Meyers achieve the perverted romcom trifecta!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 13 January 2010.

New York, I love you (2009)

2010-01-16T09:17:00.003+08:00

Did you like Paris, je t'aime?

Did you catch Sawadee Bangkok and Tokyo! because you couldn't get enough of the cities of love concept?

What if I told you the producers of Paris... made an official follow-up?

And that it has Natalie Portman directing?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 13 January 2010.

Daybreakers (2010)

2010-01-16T09:11:00.002+08:00

Is there a vampire movie this decade that doesn't suck?

Is it okay if we cross a vampire movie with a peak oil allegory?

Will there be a vampire Al Gore in this one, and will it be played by Ethan Hawke, Sam Neil, or Willem Dafoe?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 13 January 2010.

Hear Me (听说) (2009)

2010-01-11T15:58:00.002+08:00

Is making a romantic comedy the best way to celebrate the Deaflympics, as opposed to making a sports movie?

Does director Zheng Fenfen offer an interesting spin on the been here done that, boy meets girl genre?

Does Deaf culture get respect from the script and cast?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 6 January 2010.

Did you hear about the Morgans? (2009)

2010-01-11T15:51:00.004+08:00

Hugh Grant's return to comedy rests on his new image as a funny has-been who makes fun at his loserhood, just like in Music and Lyrics.

Will he extend his stroke of luck this time round, as a philandering husband embarrassed and sorry about his infidelities?

Will his pairing with Sarah Jessica Parker make us even more sorry for him?

Or will Ben Elliot and his moustache chew up the scenery instead?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 6 January 2010.

Mother (마더) (2009)

2009-12-31T09:14:00.004+08:00

Life is hard when you're a single mother living with an adult son with learning disabilities, making ends meet as the town's herbalist and illegal acupuncturist.

Life is much, much harder when above said son is the prime suspect in a murder mystery - prime because retarded people are always convenient suspects for police investigations short on leads.

Your task, if you should accept it: Take on City Hall, prove son's innocence, solve murder mystery, and perform acupuncture for client!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 30 December 2009.

Treasure Hunter, The (刺陵) (2009)

2009-12-31T09:05:00.004+08:00

What happens when Chinese Ed Wood makes a movie with Jay Chou?

For better or for worse, is The Treasure Hunter actually (respectively) worse or better than Fantasy Mission Force?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 30 December 2009.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

2009-12-28T09:31:00.003+08:00

Did Guy Ritchie dodge the infamous post-Madonna divorce career slump curse?

Is Sherlock Holmes really a suited to be an action hero?

Do Holmes and Watson bicker too much over trivial things like who owns the dog, the flat, and the money?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 23 December 2009.

No puedo vivir sin ti (不能没有你) (2009)

2009-12-28T09:21:00.005+08:00

Will Taiwan's 2009 Academy Awards entry make it to the shortlist for Best Foreign Film?

No pudeo vivir sin ti is a piece of neorealist cinema set in modern Kaohsiung, focussing on the plight of poorest of the poor in society: squatters and itinerant workers.

Read my full review on Fridae.com, first published on 23 December 2009.

Avatar (2009)

2009-12-22T00:20:00.002+08:00

James Cameron took 15 years and a budget fit to bail out a bank to make this film.

Has Cameron Rip Van Winkled himself into irrelevance?

Does he prove that even with Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro on the scene, that he's still the king of the world?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 16 December 2009.

Bodyguards and Assassins (十月围城) (2009)

2009-12-22T00:11:00.002+08:00

Sun Yat-sen. To some, a patriot, revolutionary, and father of the nation. To others: a traitor and a target for assassination.

Will Dr Sun Yat-sen ever be safe from the imperial assassins?

Will he see to his revolution before the Manchu court has his head?

Will Donnie Yen yet again bash someone's head in for no apparent reason?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 16 December 2009.

The Storm Warriors (风云 2) (2009)

2009-12-22T00:05:00.002+08:00

The Pang brothers revive the 风云 franchise after a long 10 years. Will their CGI flick hold the key to Aaron Kwok's 3rd Golden Horse Best Actor?

Will Simon Yam out-do Sonny Chiba's scenery mastication?

Will Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng once again cross their huge swords with each other?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 16 December 2009.

Princess and the Frog

2009-12-15T00:20:00.005+08:00

How does Disney fare with its first hand-drawn animation in years?

Is a pic about a very dated classic the right way to herald a comeback for Uncle Walt's studio?

And really, casting a black princess in pre-War New Orleans? Really?

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 9 December 2009.

Private Lives of Pippa Lee, The (2009)

2009-12-15T00:16:00.005+08:00

A Desperate Housewives for the SuicideGirls generation, Private Lives is an ambitious meditation on the frailty of identity and ego, as well as probably the first coming-of-age story of a middle-aged housewife.

It's something that Virginia Woolf would approve of, and might have made if she were a filmmaker...

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 9 December 2009.

Zombieland (2009)

2009-12-04T23:23:00.007+08:00

Join Woody Harrelson and gang on a wild road trip across America (or Zombieland, as it's known post-apocalypse), killing zombies and smashing up property in the search of the last surviving heavenly twinkie on Earth!

You know this is really good stuff when the zombie designs come from the creator of the undead creatures in Michael Jackson's Thriller video...

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 2 December 2009

New Moon (2009)

2009-12-04T23:20:00.006+08:00

Forget about vampire lore. Forget about movies constantly reinventing vampire lore. New Moon's teen vampires and werewolves just want to fall in love, and you will fall in love with them too.

New Moon is written so that you too can appreciate the beauty of shirtless Native American types prancing around, without having to read the novel or even know about the previous instalments of the Twilight franchise...

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 2 December 2009

Couples Retreat (2009)

2009-12-04T23:15:00.006+08:00

Welcome to the couples retreat, where a very ditzy Jean Reno plays spiritual guru and relationship counsellor to a group of 4 married partners in search of happiness - and not necessarily with each other!

A very average romantic comedy, Couples Retreat shows far more discipline, coherence and consistency than Hollywood's other recent romcoms, which is a plus in its point.

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 2 Novemeber 2009.

An Education (2009)

2009-11-27T19:01:00.004+08:00

Nick Hornby's tale of seduction is both a comic unfolding of a seduction fuelled by the oldest and cheesiest lines in the book, as well as a sensitive coming of age tale.

This Sundance favourite fuelled by the comedy of watching the seduction of a precocious teen who mistakes book smarts for intelligence for wisdom, is wicked fun to watch.

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 26 November 2009

Mulan (2009)

2009-11-27T18:48:00.004+08:00

Jingle Ma proves that he can make a credible Chinese epic movie without an Olympic-sized budget, artsy pretensions, forced Shakespearean comparisons, strained dialogue, or Jay Chou!

Chinese cinema is in such a bad shape that it takes a Jingle Ma, with very modest directorial skills and cinematic sense, to make a decent epic...

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 26 November 2009

The Informant! (2009)

2009-11-20T19:16:00.006+08:00

While Mark Whitacre is no Maxwell Smart, his goofy antics are sure to drive his FBI masters up the wall and send audiences into laughter in Steven Soderbergh's latest spy comedy...

Watch Steven Soderbergh conduct a wild spin on the spy drama, and Matt Damon parody his Jason Bourne superspy routine in The Informant!

Read my full review at Fridae.com, first published on 19 November 2009.

Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)

2009-11-20T19:06:00.005+08:00

Fantastic Mr Fox may well be the best-written and most engaging animated movie of 2009. Yes, Mr Wes Anderson is an auteur, and he should be proud of it.

He proves very decisively that you don't need no stinking 3D CGI to make an animation picture, and that you don't need to make your audiences wear 3D goggles either.

It's the scriptwriting, the directorial vision, and the storytelling. And that sense of humour.

Read my full review at Fridae.com, published on 19 November 2009.

A Frozen Flower (쌍화점) (2009)

2009-11-17T17:14:00.003+08:00

Speaking both as a God-fearing Christian movie-goer and a member of the general public, allow me to full-heartedly endorse Korean director Yoo Ha’s effort in making a historical court drama with homosexual themes.

Anticipating Jane Austen's novels by a few centuries, this domestic melodrama is about inheritance, power, and marriage. The unhappy king, chafing under his status as a vassal prince to the great Mongol Empire, stands to lose his power, his land and his title if he does not produce an heir to his throne. Unhappily married to the Mongolian princess, the king seeks solace in the arms of his strapping bodyguard.

It probably seemed like a good idea at that time to order the bodyguard to serve as the breeding stallion to the princess, but that will expectedly lead to a romantic triangle, a royal melodrama, and other gruesome and bloody political intrigues that dominate this picture. That and a host of explicit scenes.

Comparisons to King and the Clown will not suffice as director Yoo Ha is intent on marching to his own beat, one not sanctioned by the gay lobby and the politically-correct sanctions of the elites. While the homosexual angle is used very sparingly – there is but just one short, strangely unpassionate sex scene and plenty of saccharine dialogue commonly seen in gay-themed dramas produced for straight female fangirls – what drives this movie is the genuine passion and affection from the heterosexual bonding and secret trysts between these two victims of the king.

While this means that the expected romantic triangle is more like a tripod with 1 very short leg, the director's courage in sending the message that gays can change, and that heterosexual love has no substitutes, is something to be admired.

First published at incinemas on 23 July 2009
(Yes, I know I forgot to upload it here)

2012 (2009)

2009-11-15T21:09:00.004+08:00

[It's been a long while since this blog has been updated, but I'm back in the reviews circuit - this time with Fridae.com

I haven't been slacking, though. DVD reviews will feature more prominently here in the near future.]

Roland Emmerich destroys the Earth once again this year, in 2012. How would you like your planet and civilisation destroyed? Emmerich serves us apocalypse Mayan-style this time. CGI-fans are in for a treat: we have earthquakes, an exploding super-volcano, tsunamis and more for you...

Full review at Fridae.com

Taking Woodstock (2009)

2009-10-01T16:30:00.006+08:00

Dream a little dream

As the joke goes about Woodstock: If you remember it, you weren't there. On a more serious and bleak note: If it is seared into your cultural consciousness as a mythical feel-good event, chances are you weren't born then.

While not a direct indictment of the 1960s, Ang Lee's adaptation of the reactionary melodrama The Ice Storm (1997) depicts the social and existential aftermath that followed the bursting of the decade-long dream. We are not surprised at its reception in the US: when wide-eyed optimism, social liberation, and activism fail to solve any of the world's problems, the social pendulum swings back into reactionary conservatism. The backlash guarantees that even 'decent liberals', in very embarrassing attempts to gain credibility, have to badmouth the decade and engage in wholesale character assassination of the Left, SDS, flower children, hippies, et al. In short: commemorating Woodstock, Stonewall, the sexual and chemical liberation, love and peace - all this is a lost cause in American cultural politics.

But don't tell that to Ang Lee. Lee was still in a Taiwanese middle school when Woodstock kicked off, but he certainly has a good impression of the decade and its flower children. If The Ice Storm was a downer on the 60s, this movie tells us what the decade stood for and the hope it held out to a generation.

The very modest Ang Lee shies away from recreating Woodstock in Taking Woodstock. In the interest of diminishing disappointments, let me forewarn that what you get in Taking Woodstock is the making of Woodstock. You won't get a re-creation of the legendary festival itself. There will be no documentary footage or re-enactments of the now-legendary performances by Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. Bob Dylan does not appear as himself. You will not see the stage or the crowds at the stage.

Instead, what you'll get is the the organisers' misadventures in getting the festival up and running, from inception to cleaning up, almost like a reality show done as a feature film. There are plenty of boo-boos, close shaves and pure mayhem to provide the laughs: recurring gags feature closeted protagonist Eliot Tiber who gives up his big city life, returning to save his very eccentric parents' decrepit motel from going down, his avaricious money-pinching mom's antics, and a local theatre company with a penchant for public streaking. And that's just for starters. Who would've thought Ang Lee had a healthy sense of humour?

Lee instead builds the festival from the ground up, from the perspectives of not just the organisers or the local community but the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who went there, got caught in the traffic gridlock, ended up miles from the stage, and turned the music festival into a good-natured, sprawling picnic, carnival, and camp site. I am told Lee was impressed that this beyond critical mass of counter-cultural youth did not spark a riot - this movie conveys that impressiveness and I think could go some way to rehabilitate the cultural memory of the 60s.

What Ang Lee brings to this retelling of Woodstock is not just his non-judgemental respect for the decade and its actors, but his treatment of Woodstock as one of those logistical nightmares - say a Chinese wedding banquet. It is perhaps from this cultural perspective that Lee treats his comic characters with equal reverence and concentrates on the celebrants who were there for more than just the music itself. The man understands that Woodstock wasn't really a music festival but something far greater, something whose meaning was collaboratively created by the majority who came but never got to see Janis Joplin, Jimmi Hendrix, or Bob Dylan.

I Love You, Man (2009)

2009-06-20T00:01:00.001+08:00

Go on, shout it to the world

The quintessential Judd Apatow movie without the involvement of Judd Apatow, I Love You, Man takes Apatow's 'bromantic' twist on classic Hollywood romantic comedy to its exquisite, logical conclusion, while employing Apatow's stable of actors and co-directors and refining his usual tricks of the trade to one-up the genre's creator by a fair bit.

I love you, man is both a traditional romantic comedy and a bromantic comedy at the same time. The wedding plans of the lucky groom to be (Paul Rudd), having gotten past the all-important proposal to the luckier bride to be (Rashida Jones), stutters on the couple's realisation that the groom has a grand total of zero close male friends in his life and needs to race against time to produce a proper best man for the wedding. I don't know why this is even an issue of social embarrassment, but time for misadventures in male bonding, I say!

While in general the bromance movie does not allow the groom to run away with the best man, the shenanigans in this movie come very close to this. Its innovation: trashing out the bromantic genre's vague unease with the homosocial/homosexual ambiguity, along with the but this is-a-macho-movie uncomfortably comic moments where the ambiguity rears its head. Replacing all this is a willingness to acknowledge and explore the homosocial/homosexual ambiguity as part of a feel-good comedy, to build into comfortably comic punchlines.

Here, it is achieved through the 'serial date' structure of the movie and the screen chemistry between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel. Paul Rudd, of course, is a comic actor who has been playing the feminine coded male stock character since The Object of my Affection, and part of the intertextual comedy comes from just how female coded his "best girlfriend with a dick a girlfriend would want" character here is.

Like Anthony Perkins's character in The Trial, Paul Rudd acts almost so instinctively guilty that some people might be inclined to watch this as a subtle gay comedy.

As a result of the more relaxed, less hung up storytelling attitude of Hamburg and his collaborators, I Love You, Man is the least macho of bromantic comedies to date. Its comedic sensibilities should in fact appeal to a much broader audience than say Superbad: this one goes easy for movie watchers of all genders and persuasions.

An earlier version of this review was published at incinemas on 18 June 2009

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

2009-06-13T00:01:00.004+08:00

I see you didn't wash your hands after using the urinal!

Take A Christmas Carol, turn it into a romantic comedy, and you have Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. In this retelling of the well-worn classic (whose adaptations and deformations are as hoary and tired as the classic itself), Matthew McConaughey plays the Scrooge character as a cad and womaniser who humbugs at the idea of Love, and sees his life-long mission to set Olympic records for wooing, bedding, and leaving women in succession. In other words, Matthew McConaughey plays the same annoying character he's been playing in his last 10 or so movie features. Hopefully, the twist in this adaptation is that he DIES.

But this being a romantic comedy, he will end up falling in disgustingly in lurve with his greatest critic and long-term crush, and this being an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, he will reform his ways thanks to ghostly visits from a deceased mentor (played by Michael Douglas) and old associates (this time former girlfriends).

Look, it's not a bad concept and the plot practically writes itself. So you have to wonder what took them so long to get this movie off the ground (production was canned in 2003 after Ben Afleck got axed by studio execs, and revived only last year).

It could be the script – due to the lack of writing talents, the romantic comedy has been in the doldrums for the past decade. The Jon Lucas-Scott Moore team is hardly the epitome of brilliant screenwriting, and it shows in how much they messed up this a no-brainer of a story idea.

There's something very wrong, for instance, with how unbelievably slimy, dislikeable, and off-putting a "Mr Sex On Legs" character turns out to be – for a character who charms women into his trousers, McConaughey's character has zero effective charm in the script. For some reason, Mr Sex On Legs becomes even more creepy and disgusting after his reform, thanks to horrific lines that sound either cheesier and cheaper than his pre-reform cad routine.

Then again, it could be Matthew McConaughey himself, or his legendary lack of chemistry with any female co-stars, or his semi-permanent annoying smirk. After all, Michael Douglas plays his mentor and deceased uncle, and him you can believe charming women into his bed and having them still love him after he's dumped them.

On the whole, this movie has a few genuinely funny lines and gags that are spaced out too far apart between some seriously tedious exposition, and boasts a strong and quirky supporting cast (notably Michael Douglas, and his Fatal Attraction co-star as the mother of the bride) whose efforts are eclipsed by the blandness of the leading actors.

While based on a very interesting and creative twist on the Scrooge tale, this movie ends up making Scrooged look like a revolutionary retelling.

An earlier version of this review was published at incinemas on 11 June 2009

Still Walking, 歩いても　歩いても (2008) (SIFF 2009)

2009-05-28T17:12:00.005+08:00

Happily families stop at ZERO

Families. Don't we just love them? Religious nutters see everything they object to as threatening the sanctity of the (fragile? endangered?) family. The Singapore Government desperately wants people to get married early and have more children, in a decades-long, unintentionally humiliating series of cloying, pollyanna-ish commercials. People living in advanced industrial societies (that includes Singapore nowadays) know better: it's an open secret that the family is one of the most upsetting and unpleasant social institutions to be invented. And better yet, we have an entire genre of eccentric family dramas from East and West to prove it, from Oedipus Rex to The Royal Tenenbaums.

I have no doubt that Kore-eda Hirokazu's film will yet receive a commercial release in Singapore, courtesy of its Ministry of Community Development. It is, after all, a warm family drama that optimistically reaffirms the value of the family. That said, Still Walking presents a quietist Asian take on the more familiar eccentric/broken family more often seen at Cannes and Sundance.

Taking place within the space of 24 hours of a family reunion and death anniversary, the Yokoyama clan - an elderly couple living alone are visited by their children's families - get together for some quality time, amicably chatting away while performing the mundane rituals of family: cooking, eating, looking at old photographs, reminiscing, and gossiping.

But (repeat after me!) it's a family and everyone has problems and resentments. The beauty of Kore-eda's script and dialogue is its naturalistic, anti-theatrical feel. Instead of building emotions to melodramatic crises that demand catharsis, the quotidian presentation of the generic fraying family is low-key and simmering - and very much more realistic than theatrical or deliberately fictional.

Aided by script and ensemble acting, long chapters of bonhomie amidst subtle tensions flare up for the briefest moments to demonstrate Kore-eda's understanding of why family life is resented and feared: Asian families operate on a fine balance between politeness and passive aggressiveness; behind every act of familial generosity is a potential moment of deliberate, tender cruelty and a lifetime of simmering resentment.

The beauty of Still Walking and Kore-eda's script is its optimism - even when the family is the site of passive aggression, people do turn out all right most of the time, despite their very rare and nasty moments.

Son of the Northeast, ลูกอีสาน (1982) (SIFF 2009)

2009-05-25T12:59:00.003+08:00

The anxiety of influence

Ostensibly, Son of the Northeast is a historical drama set in the 1930s Thailand, in its Isan (Northeast) province, telling the travails of a small clan of subsistence farmers and their village as a particularly bad drought reduces them to bush living.

I suppose one could enjoy this movie on a literal level, which is encouraged by director Vichit Kounavudhi's moving, documentary-like presentation of this work of fiction. The story plays out like a Thai version of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (পথের পাঁচালী), but like many other films, history has caught up with Son of the Northeast, and we can no longer watch it with naive eyes.

I'm referring to the unfolding political turmoil in Thailand, where the source of the troubles hail from its Northeast province and its turbulent denizens - the only beneficiaries of the otherwise questionable reign of Thaksin Shinawatra, and understandably the only parties angry enough to derail the post-Thaksin political process.

And I'm also referring to the fact that the Northeast province has historically been troublesome for Bangkok: the last territory to be incorporated (or annexed) into the Kingdom during its final stage of expansion just prior to the 20th century, its culture, language, and people are more Lao and Cambodian than Thai, and politically rebellious. That the province was renamed "The Northeast" at the beginning of 20th century is a hint at the Bangkok's simultaneous nation-building agenda and anxiety of influence, under which the film actually operates.

While this story is set in the 1930s, the director behind the camera and the author holding the pen are strictly creatures of the 1980s, an era where Bangkok was already casting its nervous to the Northeast.

The nation-building message and its corresponding anxiety over Isan in the film becomes more apparent and unsubtle through time: the villagers (coded as Thai) are set against their ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese and Laotian neighbours (coded as foreigners), who fight a cold war between themselves. The villagers are entranced by a gramophone playing a nationalist song praising the monarch and the unity of the Thai state. They happily send their children to Buddhist temples that double up as schools for the Thai language - a function that came only with the region's annexation by Thailand. And best yet, they call themselves Northeasterners.

With that heavy a burden of historical revisionism and nation-building, it is no surprise then that the film does not end up being the Thai Pather Panchali. As a straightforward documentary-like drama, the film is more than watchable in its recreation of rich ethnographic detail of early 20th century life in Isan, but far more can be gleamed if one is aware of the political anxieties expressed inadvertently in this work.

The Young Victoria (2009)

2009-05-23T00:05:00.005+08:00

Playing at royalty

Before Queen Victoria was a size 50 matriarch, formidable Grandmother of Europe and the most powerful empress Britain had seen, she was an unremarkable princess whose tragedy was being the under-aged heir apparent to her uncle’s throne, and hence a powerless pawn in an aquarium of power-hungry monarchs, politicians, royals, and ambitious men.

The historical drama is 3 parts politics, 1 part romance. The intricacy of portraying power politics of Europe, the royal politics of British monarchy, and the popular politics in parliamentary Britain is tempered by the courtship of Victoria and her cousin and eventual prince consort Albert. As an impoverished minor royal, the prince is yet another pawn in the Great Game, and in a case of real life playing like a good story, the two meet, fall in love, marry, and solve their political problems.

The director's approach is commendable; in the age of trashy, sexed-up, more fictional than historical royal dramas (The Tudors, The Other Boleyn Girl) that The Young Victoria hews to decent storytelling and a reasonable level of historical accuracy. Julian Fellowes's script is respectful to its subject, and displays an ability to carry several simultaneous sub-plots coherently, a skill he last displayed to better effect in Gosford Park.

Alas, The Young Victoria is not the best that it can be. Fellowes may have turned in a competent script, but one does not attract praise for its middling performance: where the movie is a romance, it is not a captivating romance; where it is a political drama, it is not a riveting or engaging political intrigue.

This may not be the worst costume drama ever, but the researchers do make complete amateur-level howlers in their depictions of Victoria's coronation ceremony and royal protocol in the first 10 minutes of the film. In a movie where none of the actors end up speaking in an American accent, everyone speaks in too modern an English accent - and everyone except for the foreigner mispronounces the name of Lord Melbourne. This is disappointing, given that the co-producer is Fergie, Duchess of York. It's perfectly understandable why Queen Elizabeth II kept wincing during her premiere screening of the movie.

The Young Victoria is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who turned in a brilliant C.R.A.Z.Y. a few years ago. It's clear that the costume period drama is not a forte of the director, and we wish him the best in his future endeavours.

An earlier version of this review was published at incinemas on 21 May 2009

Der Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

2009-05-23T00:01:00.002+08:00

The director wanted chicks with guns...

The Summer of 1969 was the closest the West had to its own Cultural Revolution, with an entire generation of students in open revolt against the political establishment in France, Germany, and the United States. It was a time of peace-loving young hippies, but it was also a time of student revolutionaries who blew up commercial buildings, police and state installations. We call them terrorists today, but these groups had the tacit support of a wide section of their societies. Here, director Uli Edel tells the gripping story of the founders of the German Red Army Faction, depicting their radicalisation from middle class roots, activities as an urban guerilla group, eventual capture, trial and suicides.

All this is too big to be told in a 2.5 hour film. The pacing of the movie suffers from the director’s decision to tell the entire story, spanning over 10 years, multiple generations of the RAF, the changes in its ideology and tactics, and the clampdown by different arms of the not-entirely-innocent German state.

If there is too much to be told, the director compounds his mistake by telling it in a cacophony of Hollywood genres, all badly executed: the Michael Mann action film with Michael Mann camerawork, the documentary on the brutality of German post-war authoritarian leaders, the Bonnie and Clyde criminals on the run film, the procedural noir film with a government agency dedicated to the neutralisation of the terrorist forces and ending the radicalisation of society, the Sophie Scholl prisoner of conscience film, and also the terrorist hijack film.

When a director throws in everything and the kitchen sink to tell everything there is to tell, he loses the overall coherence and flow of his story. By abandoning his directorial duty to set clear boundaries for the story he wishes to tell, Edel ends up skimming the surface of things in an attempt to tell everything.

The Baader Meinhoff Complex could have easily been shortened by an hour, the storytelling tightened and more focused to a laser-like precision. We see the potential for a very German movie about the RAF as the unfortunate inheritors of a strong national tradition of principled and moral defiance of unjust rulers. The bloat also obscures a darkly humorous noir procedural about an Agency man trying to capture and thwart a group that has lost its way despite its high principles, while half-realising his own government has lost its moral authority and purity through the downright dirty actions of its politicians, judges, and police. Quentin Tarrantino himself might have directed an 80 minute dark comedy about the botched training, botched plans, botched leadership, and botched thinking of a wannabe-terrorist group.

If not for the historical importance of his subject and its enduring significance to our times, this bloated and undisciplined movie would certainly try the patience of most audiences.

An earlier version of this review was published at incinemas on 21 May 2009

White Days (2009) (SIFF 2009)

2009-05-22T16:39:00.006+08:00

Hell is other people, but when they're your friends, it's a divine comedy

Lei Yuenbing's debut feature film looks and sounds like any feature film from his self-professed director-idols Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien: there is minimal action on the screen, from the camera, and the actors in the film. While Lei's penchant for languid pacing, long shots, and completely unscripted dialogue may point towards yet another indie film's indie film-wannabe, this is more of an alibi for Lei's true project - to offer a parody and tribute to local indie filmmaking.

Three protagonists play more or less versions of themselves in real-life: Vel Ng is a translator with a life-long dream to travel to Taiwan to catch Hou and Tsai films where they are made; Chris Yeo is a talkative raconteur in search of a greater meaning to life; Daniel Hui acts out a depressed character from a short film he might have directed.

Bound together by the commonality of their yearning and their articulation of this yearning, the trio stand apart in solidarity from the rest of their world. What makes this film watching though is the commonality of their yearning and their conversations that ironically sets the trio apart from each other. We normally think of dialogue as a bonding process; here in this film, Lei's actors can just speak pass and above each other, building walls of isolation that leave everyone alienated.

Surprisingly, this is not a depressingly angsty film. Lei and his collaborators are fully aware of the ridiculousness of the indie genre as practised in Singapore, and they play up this sense of the ridiculous through their mutually alienating interactions, making even uncommunicative, thwarted, and self-thwarting dialogue sardonically funny.

Much of this film's good-natured ridiculousness comes from Chris Yeo's monologues. He plays his character like John Goodman's Jewish convert and macho man in The Big Lebowski, confidently making completely illogical and incoherent claims about life, the universe and everything while expecting his friends to convert to the saving grace of God. We are sure there's nothing like this character in film, but we certainly remember the hordes of well-intentioned but unwise and annoying Singaporeans doing the same thing in real life.

All in all, White Days is an experiment that is bound to fall either from the weight of its ambitions or its long, dialogue-heavy scenes. The vision of hell as other well-meaning friends, though, is one that you'd gladly pay the ticket price to watch.

Eid milad Laila (Laila's Birthday) (2008) (SIFF 2009)

2009-05-20T17:17:00.004+08:00

You won't guess who I ran into today, dear

Students of international relations freeze up when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is raised. But naturally: even the United Nations, that force for global peace and reconciliation, is powerless to solve that most shameful and outrageous problem.

We're talking about a state whose existence was guaranteed as a form of blood payment by Europe for its apartheid and genocide of the Jews through the centuries, yet whose existence currently implies the apartheid of Palestinians and the destruction of their own state.

It's enough to drive anyone batty. Yet the beauty of Rashid Masharawi's short feature (weighing in at a restrained 74 mins) is its refusal to hurl itself into the abyss, to gibber mindlessly at the uncaring stars even when it documents, with a slowly ratcheting moral outrage, the hellish everyday life of citizens living in the Gaza.

In a series of vignettes, the film follows the work and travels of judge turned taxi driver Abu Laila on his daughter Laila's birthday. The fares he picks up form the director's investigation of everyday Palestinian life under Israeli state terrorism, Palestinian state corruption, and a populace struggling between madness and sanity, humiliation and dignity, anger and resigned humour.

While refusing to put on rose-tinted glasses, Rashid Masharawi still manages to avoid the typical liberal shrillness of fellow Middle Eastern directors dealing with the same topic (Amos Gitai et al), and eventually finds the sliver of optimism that fuels the continued existence of everyday Palestinians.

The Uninvited (2009)

2009-05-16T00:05:00.006+08:00

Momma dishes out tough love

Korean cinema is still recovering from the financial collapse and the flight of liquidity that began circa 2007. Let's just say that I'm not one to miss the recent 'heyday' of its films, fuelled by excess liquidity, banking solely on idols, and made with mass production cookie cutter plots.

It's ironic then that the recovery of Korean cinema has relied on the kindness of Hollywood remakes and adaptations of its second-rate offerings, often improving on them in the process (see The Lake House).

The Uninvited is a remake of third-rate K-horror flick A Tale of Two Sisters (장화, 홍련). The original is a typical K-horror flick, exhibiting the best and the worst of its national approach to film in general, and the genre in particular.

The crimes are innumerable. Overweening art house ambitions create a "so lurid my eyes hurt" set design (a twee overdecorated genteel 'English-style' house) just so director Kim Ji-woon can hammer the heads of his audiences with the European faerie tale/Wicked Stepmother motifs, as if they wouldn't get the allegory had he been more subtle about it. Had the script been less pretentious, more coherent, less over-directed, its attempts to make some form of social and psychological commentary might have been appreciated. But no... that commentary hammers its point home through yet another incomprehensible "can you top this?" surprise twist ending.

As the first film of directors Charles and Thomas Guard, this Hollywood remake attempts to take the best of the original film while jettisoning its worst excesses. They generally understand the expectations of non-Korean cinema audiences when it comes to cinematic grammar, script and storytelling, mostly through filming the movie in naturalistic tones and avoiding the over-directed antics of the original.

The result is a modest horror film that more than stands its ground against other Asian horror remakes as well as Hollywood's home-grown gore and shock fests.

Oh, if you must know: Young Anna survives a traumatic household accident that took the life of her invalid mother and is institutionalised in a hospital for several months, reliving that unfortunate night in a series of recurring ghoulish nightmares. The doctor says after 10 months of therapy, she’s ready to go home. Dad hasn’t actually told her she’s getting a new mum, Sis hasn’t actually told her what a bitch their stepmother is, and the director hasn’t actually told her she’ll be getting even more ghoulish visions and nightmares...

An earlier version of this review was published at incinemas on 14 May 2009

Henry Poole is Here (2008)

2009-05-16T00:01:00.004+08:00

And all the time, I kept wishing this were directed by Monty Python instead

There's something perverse about Henry Pool is Here. A Sundance film, it technically has the prerequisite traits of a small Sundance indie - a depressed, terminally-ill man (title character, played by Luke Wilson), an assortment of eccentric neighbours with histories, secrets, and private hurts.

What's perverse is its take on faith and the idea of miracles: they do happen, and not in the metaphorical sense. All you need to do is believe. This may be the first ever entry for Sundance which plays like "When you wish upon a star" for adults.

While Henry Poole slowly wastes away from his illness while angsting in self-seclusion (please leave me alone!), a literal miracle happens literally in his backyard. A water stain on Poole’s backyard wall seems to be the face of Jesus, attracting the attention of his neighbours, the local parish pastor, and even more people. As all Henry wants is to be left alone.

If this were an indie film, hilarity would ensue (either in a dark or irreverent style - think of how Kaufman, Monty Python, or Kevin Smith would have approached this material), and a point be made eventually about the human need to believe in miracles.

Except every moment you expect the punchlines to begin, director Mark Pellington decides to play it straight, laboriously and unimaginatively making and reiterating how a childlike, trusting surrender to belief can heal people – both physically and emotionally. And every moment he does that, your bored mind will be rewriting the script according to how you think Monty Python might have written each scene.

By avoiding any critical approach to its subject matter, Henry Poole is a family-friendly, heart-warming film. It is also simplistic and too straightforward to really take on the issues of belief and disbelief. This may be indicative of how fraught with difficulty any discussion of faith is at this point in American history, and the film suffers for it.

While one may fault its approach and predictable script, Mark Pellington's training in making music videos does ensure that at least this film is beautifully shot.

Henry Poole is available on DVD at the Esplanade library as of 25 March 2009.
An earlier version of this review was published at incinemas on 14 May 2009.

Call if you need me (2009) (SIFF)

2009-05-13T15:25:00.006+08:00

Still life, deep waters

In the digital age of filmmaking, a lone holdout stands firm. In an era where savvy indie filmmakers put out increasingly slick feature productions thanks to cheap DV cameras, Malaysian director James Lee insists on using a single basic video camera to tell his tales on film.

For his latest offering, Lee and his single video camera takes on the gangster film. As an indie director, he has something radically different to say about the genre, something that he has the guts to stick with and develop to its exquisite end. Lee's highly original premise - as a sort of weird counterpart to Ip Man - is that stripped away of the glamour of the big screen, really-existing street gangsters are just about as charming, dangerous, and pathetic as middle-aged chavs in a mid-life crisis.

The action centres on village boy Or Kia (Sunny Pang), newly arrived to the big city lights of Kuala Lumpur and his cousin and gang boss Ah Soon (musician Pete Teo). Presumably Soon runs some sort of a gang, but we're not sure what they do for a living. They're either a loansharks, debt collectors, or outsourced finance officers for a bank. They're good at what they do, without resorting to violence.

In another continent and another age, this would have been the launching point of a good noir or an anti-noir. There are the grey moral zones (the collectors sort of move in between the margins of legality, dealing with legit businessmen, lawyers, and down and out luckers), the cynicism (it is the police who initiate the first on-screen illegal violence), the world weariness (exemplified by the casting of Peter Teo, who looks like everyone's black sheep sad-eyed jailbird uncle), and the romance of it all...

Yet when it comes to the scenes where the middle aged men downs their ecstasy, downers, pills and beers - there is a sense of quiet, existential pathos than glamour. And their uneasy awareness of an asymptomatic rot in their lives. These are basically decent men in what might be a vaguely indecent world, especially Soon, who despite being a good employer and a nice family man (all that's missing is a tender scene where he pets a stray dog...) ends up being the one who stares into the abyss.

If the self-imposed limitations of short films are said to inspire beautiful filmmaking, James Lee's self-imposed limitations for his feature films have helped him to master the aesthetics of film, the strength of storytelling through long takes, and the parsimony of editing and cutting. While camera movements may be inexorably slow, each long shot is paced briskly, telling as much as it can.

Dean Spanley (2008) (SIFF 2009)

2009-04-21T21:09:00.004+08:00

Not a shaggy dog story

Watching Dean Spanley at the Singapore International Film Festival, my mind was brought back on several occasions to memories of listening to the BBC Radio 4 quiz/comedy show Just A Minute, where celebrity guests ("contestants", in the Iron Chef-esque parlance of the show) are made to speak extemporaneously on an unseen subject - without hesitation, repetition, or deviation, for just a minute.

The most entertaining results tend to happen when a guest approaches the given subject from an unexpected, unorthodox angle, to tell a hilariously absurd yet coherent story. And it is this strange, wonderful clash of the absurd and coherent that meet in this film adaptation of Lord Dunsany's short novel, Dean Spanley.

It is - on the surface - a tale about reincarnation, but like the performance of a good, mischievous guest on Nicolas Parsons's show, the magic lies in the eccentric and absurd angle the film takes on the subject, and how coherently it all comes together - even as you're grinning at the sheer lunacy of it all, and wondering how the cast managed to deliver all their lines without bursting into fits of laughter to ruin every take.

But while you're regaled by the sight of Sam Neil as a bland if affable clergyman recalling his past life as a devoted spaniel and raving about the bond between master and dog, there is a simple, emotional tale existing by its side, created through the masterclass performances by Peter O'Toole and Jeremy Northam, who play a wintry, emotionally abusive patriarch and his unhappy filial son.

As a movie, neither the comedy or the emotional drama stand well on their own; yet they come together in a wondrous, sublime manner.

The Dish (2000) (SIFF 2009)

2009-04-19T09:38:00.003+08:00

My first film selection from the Singapore International Film Festival for this year, The Dish is a charming and laid-back Australian comedy set during the moon landings.

Yes, those were great times, when people felt the potential of mankind was limitless and were inspired to greatness, seeing all the records of spaceflight broken. For the first time in decades, people had something to be proud of - first man in flight, first dog in space, first unmanned module to make it in space - as opposed to the dismal firsts of a few decades ago - first global war, first deployment of a thermonuclear explosion on a civilian population... you get the idea.

When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, it felt great to be human. It felt better to be an American. Everyone else just lived vicariously through the snowy television footage. Unless they were Australians, who were somewhere between vicarious second-hand pride and actual pride, since they provided the titular dish that transmitted the footage from Apollo 11 to the rest of the world.

Of course, this mixture of provincialism and the curse of being aware of one's second banana status doesn't go unacknowledged in this comedy; the disasters and comic situations that happen in the movie all revolve around Australia's second banana and provincial status. It helps that the producers of The Dish are the comedians behind the Jetlag travel guides to fictitious countries - the comedy is light without being lightweight, the social and political observations cutting without cutting it.

The Dish owes a huge debt to Japanese film and in particular, the situation room drama. Most of the action in the movie occurs in the control room of the satellite receiver, and the writers must have made a detailed study of the entire genre, pouring the right amount of personalities, conflicts, and minor disasters and triumphs into the mix. All the characters in this film - from its avowedly apolitical mayor to its mailman - are endearingly and eccentrically drawn in the style of Japanese small-town dramas and comedies. Even the feel of being second banana, without the expectations of bristling angst and wounded pride, is almost what you'd get in a Japanese film with an international plot.

Like I said, the debt owed is huge. But The Dish is probably one of the best and well-balanced control room dramas there is.

Revolutionary Road (2008)

2009-04-18T00:01:00.000+08:00

Why so serious?

Early last century, the Americans invented their own genre of cinema: the film noir. At the closing end of the century, another genre: the suburban angst movie. At the heart of both lies a love-hate affair with the city, but unlike the film noir, the suburban angst movie tends not to have any subtlety.

Part of the problem is that urban angst has far less creative room to manoeuvre: it's about how people are slowly driven to boredom, depression, and madness in their failed attempts to escape moral sterility, stifling conformity, and the puritan judgementalism of their neighbours.

In noir, one could at least make its characters in strange situations, make them do very interesting or outrageous things. All while being set in a bleak, fallen world. In urban angst, the furthest one could artistically go would be Little Children.

And then, we have Revolutionary Road, the 1961 novel by Richard Yates that kicked off the entire suburban angst cottage industry. Its cinematic adaptation by Sam Mendes (American Beauty) provides an unwitting lesson about the limitations of the genre, especially in an era where Desperate Housewives is the title of a suburban comedy, not angsty tragedy.

Picture this: Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett star as an artistic and angsty (movie stereotype alert: it's all the same anyway!) couple who cannot take suburbia at all and are falling apart while making plans to quit and uproot themselves to Paris. Everything proceeds to fall apart because their plans meet a seeming wall.

I suppose one could sleepwalk through the movie and come out of the cinema convinced they've seen a most tragic film. But even the worst intentions of Yates and Mendes fail to deceive us here: this is a startlingly realistic movie about quitters, in the sense that Woody Allen's Sleeper and Terry Gilliam's Brazil are realistic movies about dictatorships and intellectuals in dictatorships.

Just like how the most efficient of dictatorships tend to historically produce the most navel-gazing, ineffectual and politically unaware 'intellectuals', suburbia tends to produce more angsty dilettantes with pretentious to artiness than truly angsty artists.

Hopefully, audiences not sleepwalking or in other states of somnolence will realise by middle of the movie that it is secretly a brilliant and daring comedy whose premise is how people who bitch and moan about how insufferable and soul-destroying suburbia and conventional life are really are insufferable and soul-destroying mediocrities themselves.

The clues are strewn all over the place - the histrionic, tripe-filled and overwrought declamations by the couple, the comedy of manners style naming of every character in the movie, and an otherwise annoying holy fool character whose sole purpose is to make too-accurate observations and analyses about the motive of every character. The screen time is filled with passive-aggressive dialogue where people batter and shame each other into submission, go on and on talking melodramatically about not talking to one another, or worse, about being honest with each other while communicating absolutely nothing. Comedy gold, this is.

As a tragedy, this movie is too full of theatrical tripe to work - you can blame the direction of Sam Mendes for this, and its success as an unintentionally campy flick. As a comedy, this movie is as black as they come. Still, one wonders what Ernst Lubitsch would have made about this American film genre. I suspect he might have laughed Revolutionary Road off, saying "Why so serious? Don't you know that suburbia and middle-class boredom isn't an American invention? Or even that devastating? Go on, it's okay to laugh at it!"

An earlier version of this review was published at incinemas on 16 April 2009

Valkyrie (2008)

2009-03-12T12:41:00.000+08:00

And then they discovered his head made great eraser material

Do not be mistaken: a movie may be based on real people and true events, but it ultimately stands as a piece of narrative where out of a universe of possible facts, only a few are selected and framed to achieve a dramatic or emotional effect in its audience.

Even Bryan Singer's mostly straightforward and by the facts accounting of Operation Valkyrie is not exempt from the artifice of storytelling. The dramatic turning point of Valkyrie occurs near the end, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's martial coup falls apart as the voice of the Fuhrer on the radio rings through the conspirators' makeshift headquarters. The director's treatment of this scene provides a lesson on the deliberate choices that a director takes and those he consciously moves away from, and simultaneously illustrates the movie's strengths and weaknesses.

Told as a political thriller, the scene caps off half an hour of ominous dread of Things Going Wrong, beginning with botched instructions, hesitating coup conspirators, and a German Resistance leadership determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. From here on, the failures begin their cascade, culminating with the tragic end of one Col. Claus and the mass execution of the German Resistance.

Yet it's not too hard to picture this scene as an emotional turning point. With just a whisper on the wireless, the Fuhrer puts an end to the coup; his voice sweeping away all compunctions on the part of undecided military commanders to cooperate with Claus's plan, and the previously unshakeable loyalty of most of Claus's rank and file conspirators to his cause. And instead of pointing towards a thriller, the scene suggests rather a character study on loyalty and charisma, and questions that the director elided:

How did Colonel von Stauffenberg manage to break Hitler's charismatic hold on the loyalty of the German army?
How did Colonel von Stauffenberg manage to command, up to that point, an equally mesmeric hold on the loyalty of his co-conspirators?
Why was Colonel von Stauffenberg made the commander of the coup, despite coming to the conspiracy late?

Bryan Singer's political thriller has the Colonel as a German version of an all-American blue-eyed boy. Perhaps it is understandable that given the casting of Tom Cruise, it would have been box-office suicide for Singer to focus on the colonel as a German poet, war hero, and moral philosopher whose aristocratic pedigree, bearing, and moral conviction made him a larger-than-life opponent whose charisma did match Hitler's.

Eschewing the moral and idealistic dimensions of tyrannicide completely, Singer and his scriptwriters concentrate on the story as pure thriller, avoiding the ire of audiences who rarely take kindly to "overacting", especially from actors of Cruise's calibre. Though pacing is generally taut and the tale succinctly told, I am not convinced the tradeoff was worth it - given that the ending was never in doubt (hint: they FAIL).

The second, and greater strength of Valkyrie lies with the quality ensemble acting by its cast, culled almost entirely from the British stage. Far outshining the pared down, almost bland performance of the lead, the veterans offer subtly drawn portraitures of the historical players involved, far beyond what the script provides.

Compared to efforts like Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, Bryan Singer's Valkyrie is a much more mainstream, streamlined, and perhaps too conventional product that takes next to no risks in its treatment of the various attempts by ordinary Germans to protest against Hitler. The movie, though, has no glaring missteps to recommend against it.

An earlier version of this review was first published at incinemas on 19 February 2009

18 Grams of Love (2007)

2009-03-10T17:07:00.000+08:00

More than love, the idea of love itself, and the words employed to incite the state of love..

Cosi fan tutte, the sex comedy about spouse swapping and mistaken identities, is as politically incorrect as they come. While no one batted an eyelid at the subject matter in Vienna in the 18th c., the moralistic turn in Europe condemned the opera to a historical footnote till its post WW2 revival.

You'd think that Mozart's opera would find new favour in cinema, especially in the age of Judd Apatow flicks and the American Pie franchise, but sadly, no. It might be the idea of mistaken identities; few of Shakespeare's comedies (the ones involving twins, crossdressing twins, and multiple impersonations) have had a decent showing. One could say that the idea of mistaken identities is so dreadfully passe it could only work in a hoary, stodgy narrative like the superhero movie.

And yet, we keep trying. The Singapore Lyric Opera production of Cosi fan tutte in 2006 attempted to keep the shenanigans of the plot realistic by having the impersonations and multiple identities take place in the virtual world, with giant video screens standing in for cyber-relations.

Perhaps learning from the over-enthusiastic and stagey update, Han Yew Kwang's 18 Grams of love romcom posits the 4 lovers in the modern time, but uses a romantic, slightly outdated, and very charming conceit: the anonymous love letter as the means to the spouse-swapping shenanigans.

It's a mature acknowledgement that the story is only slightly outdated (presumably letter writing was the fashion in Singapore's Chinese schools 3 or so decades ago), but still romantic and charming as hell. Accordingly, the set design is suitably boudoir-ish while the cinematography is a succession of whimsical Amelie-esque visuals.

As a comedy, 18 Grams of love is a strong showcase of Han's sense of sight gags, offbeat humour, and cinematography. What pushes it to the top is the cleverly written dialogue, which bears more than a trace of producer Kelvin Tong's fascination with the idea of words, as per Love Story.

The movie benefits from Han's unusual and bold decision to rip out the typical first act, allowing the narrative to hit the floor running without unnecessary preambles found in Hollywood's tired, mass-produced romcom genre. For this reason alone, (though there are more, and more justifiable ones), a trip to the cinema to watch this movie is recommended. Romantics and cynics alike, 18 grams is after your heart.

22nd Singapore International Film Festival

2009-03-10T16:30:00.000+08:00

My picks for the festival, which begins 14 April.

16 Apr: The Dish
17 Apr: Call me if you need me
18 Apr: Dean Spanley
19 Apr: Disengagement, Laila's birthday
21 Apr: White Days
22 Apr: Son of the Northeast
24 Apr: Kippur
25 Apr: Still Walking

Random thoughts

The Chinese directors seem to be amply represented in lineup. Pity that their fare this year are as appealing as their compatriots' entries in last years' ARTSingapore 2008 festival. All about boredom, whining about urban life, they seem to be cynically produced and cynically flogged off to festival directors...

The Asian Features in the Silver Screen Awards have synopses that either sound so wrong or are downright awful. I wasn't quite willing to part with my money for Boy - I fully expect the film to have a small release in Singapore after this. The words "idealistic coming-of-age film of a sensitive boy" doesn't suggest a dramatic departure from the director's charming naive art style in his first film, The Blossoming of Maximo Olivero.

The Singapore Film Awards is a failure of curatorship. Are you trying to say that none of the local entries for this year's SIFF deserved their nomination? Are you trying to say that as long as any Tom, Dick or Harry made a film last year, they'd be up for nomination - even for weak attempts like Kallang Roar the Movie, Lucky 7, Money No Enough 2? 12 Lotus for Best Film, Jack Neo and Kelvin Tong for Best Director RLY?

My money's on 18 Grams of Love. Just catch it and ignore the rest of the entries.

The Korean film industry imploded in 2008. Apparently its directors are still recovering, and still searching for ideas that would work.

Honourable mentions (aka "If money and geography weren't an issue"): Before Tomorrow, Yuri's Day, Rain of the Children

Doubt (2008)

2009-02-10T16:34:00.000+08:00

Our three weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency! Aaaaand an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope...

The best ideas in the field of physics, like those in theatre, exist in the form of thought experiments. In both endeavours, the skilled author/auteur is primarily concerned with how a theory (about a facet of human nature, or the nature of the universe) would play out in its entirety, even if the experiment itself is impractical and cannot be performed.

Amongst the more infamous thought experiments in physics is the Schrödinger's little set-up involving a feline trapped in a black box, whose death ray is triggered by quantum principles. The solution to the experiment is at once logical and bizarre: the kitty is both alive and dead until you open the box.

Without being facetious, Doubt - itself an adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning play - can be savoured as a Schrödinger's cat of a play: liberal Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in an example of stunt casting) may or may not have molested a child studying in the school run by the parish in the Bronx. Or he could just be a nice Vatican II priest of the people.

Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep channelling Cruella de Vil and Miranda Priestly), the conservative principal who relishes putting the fear of Sister Aloysius in the minds of kids, is determined to bring the priest to account by any means necessary, despite the lack of evidence. She may or may not be a guardian who feels it's a lesser evil to err on the side of caution, especially when the child molestation is the issue. Or she could just be running a personal vendetta against her ideological foe.

The thought experiment of Doubt centres on the authorial decision to withhold the central 'fact' surrounding the epic test of wills, shouting matches, wistful monologues, and the contest for the hearts and minds of the parish by Flynn and Aloysius in the movie.

Whether or not a crime has occured, the playwright and director of the movie is more interested in how humans respond with doubt and certainty to situations that scream 'insufficient evidence' and 'response needed now!' How and why do some people react with indefensible and immovable certainty in the face of ambiguity (of course, Doubt is in part an oblique commentary on America's rush to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein)? How and why do some people manage to operate with a healthy amount of doubt and humility?

The movie is best savoured upon the realisation that the themes of doubt and certainty work best only if the audience keep the Schrödingerian both/either logic in mind as they attempt to decode the story. In other words, the clash between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep works well if they can be seen as acting in two separate movies at once (crafty molester vs principled marm? crafty marm vs innocent priest?). And it works best if they can be seen as acting in THREE separate movies, the third being one that simultaneously suggests the existence of both possibilities.

Being more of a conceptual play, Doubt eventually demands more than what its principal actors could give - Hoffman and Streep appear to be inhabiting 2 different plays and not meeting each other in the middle, although they do their best to hone the ambiguity of the situation to a knife's edge.

Directorially, John Patrick Shanley fails to breathe cinematic life into his vision. Set pieces may appear contrived and stagey (lightning and thunder during shouting matches! telephones ringing in the middle of a tense stare-down!), while editing is unimaginative and conventional. The transition from stage to screen preserves the central thought experiment of the original play, but offers very little beyond that.

Milk (2008)

2009-01-13T21:46:00.001+08:00

Watching Milk, you can almost understand the pain of gay people... living in the decade fashion and music forgot

To be sure, marketing and PR would have you believe that this is the gay movie of the decade. Even self-avowed gay people who derive their sense of self-validation from this movie or plays like this might have you believe this as well. The truth: in Capote, you have the very model of an openly gay person who lived life in his own terms, created true and lasting things, and 2 superior biopics, Capote and Infamous. Coming late to the party, director Gus Van Sant has to settle for Harvey Milk as the subject of his gay biopic.

It's really slim pickings: by age 40, the openly gay Truman Capote would be a nationally acclaimed author; at age 40, Harvey Milk was still a closeted stock analyst who by his own admission, "haven't done a thing". By age 50, the openly gay Truman Capote would be feted as the American writer of the century; Harvey Milk never lived to 50, though he did become the first openly gay man to serve and die in public office (but not the first openly gay person to be elected to public office, despite the mythologising and PR by the gay community after his assassination).

In other words, there's really no contest aside from the mythologising of Milk as gay martyr, and this movie's awareness of the historical importance of its subject.

The historical importance appears to been the top concern in the mind of Van Sant, and the best parts of Milk occur when Van Sant deftly captures the sense of community, the whole "interesting people living in interesting times" feel, with just the camera panning over conspiratorial crowds crammed into the little drawing rooms or marching through the streets of the Castro district of San Francisco. Clever weaving of archival footage into the movie and recreations of other classic period snapshots add to the movie's brilliant evocation of the mood of a nascent movement in an age long past.

Yet the biopic's weakest link appears to be its subject, who just doesn't seem to bristle with the energy of the movement he found himself entwined with. Part of the blame may be laid at Van Sant's door: taking an entirely conventional approach, the biopic hits all the historical signposts of Harvey Milk's final decade, but leaves the depths (and hence the emotions) unstirred.

Consider: for a closeted, unremarkable man of 40, how did Harvey Milk actually get the idea and inspiration to change from Mr boring insurance salesman to Mr shrill activist? Just what radicalised him? The process itself would have made interesting filmmaking. Gus Van Sant doesn't go there.

Consider: How did Milk learn to get and then cultivate the support of non-gay people like the union leaders? Surely there's an interesting story somewhere, but Van Sant merely reports that Milk joined hands with them during a crucial boycott.

Consider: How did Milk turn from a three-time political failure to such a good politician? Surely there's an interesting story in there.

Consider: How on earth did Milk get the cooperation of his fellow supervisors at SanFran's city hall? How did the 'most liberal' slate of supervisors at the city hall feel like and work? But as above, Van Sant constantly skips over the process to bring us to the next Station of Milk's Cross. This is neither good documentary-making or filmmaking, if you believe stories are about the process of how people change, that the interesting bits are always about how one gets there, and not the destination itself.

As a portrait of Harvey Milk, there is a certain weakness in Van Sant's hands-off approach, which is inappropriate for a non-fictional film. While Van Sant wisely avoids lionising or mythologising Milk, he also avoids showing both good and bad sides of Harvey Milk or making any facet feel significant.

In this manner, I suppose any self-validating gay person might go into the cinema and have the biopic of Saint Milk he always wanted, and miss out a rather interesting, possibly dramatic, and very literary story lurking within the screenplay.

Take for instance, the secret movie about Milk the creepy manipulator and schemer: there's something disturbing about a pol who would deliberately hire community organisers to whip an angry gay crowd into a near riot so he could step in as a mediator, something extremely troubling about a gay activist who is actually prepared to lose a referendum fight he deliberately escalated so that lots of angry gays who will riot in the streets, and something rather cavalier about an activist who not only advises his campaign staff to out themselves, but make the decision to out other gay people on their behalf. A few eggs need to be broken to make an omelette isn't an assertion that normal people believe in.

Or take for instance, the secret movie about Milk the coalition builder par excellence: there's something positively tragic about how Harvey Milk builds coalitions with everyone in the political world, promising quid pro quos and unconditional support from his gay voters to his allies in city hall, yet chooses to single out constantly this one fellow to break promises, deliberately refuse to cooperate, and humiliate politically (Milk armtwists the mayor to reject the overturning of Dan White's resignation).

In the hands of a more confident director, the core of this movie could very well be about the tragedy and hubris of building coalitions, or about the simultaneous political genius and assholery of its central character. That it never even begins to feel like a proper biopic or a proper drama suggests Van Sant was not at all ready for Milk. After all, Capote showed us how one could make a proper literary drama about a flawed character, and Infamous showed us how one could make an engaging period piece full of life.

What saves Milk in the end are the acting of Sean Penn, and Van Sant's ability to create the feel of a community.

Answers to queries

2009-01-13T21:16:00.000+08:00

Hopefully an occasional series...

It appears that I do have readers, and I wouldn't bear to delete my first genuine fan mail, even if it's just a query.

A reader named Questions for TSFF, linking himself to a wikileaks page about the Toronto Singapore Film Festival, asks the following, presumably in addition to the questions already raised on the wiki page:

As the Programme Director of the Toronto Singapore Film Festival, can you also confirm whether the festival is indeed a registered non-profit organisation - ie provide its official registration number and a link to the relevant Toronto city registration website?

The festival had been claiming non-profit status from its inception in its literature for sponsorship to potential sponsors in Singapore, but was allegedly only registered in 2008.

Dear Queries for TSFF,

As the Programme Director of the 3rd Toronto Singapore Film Festival, serving from roughly 1 August 2007 to about 1 April 2008, my list of duties were as follows:

Collecting the entries for the TSFF in Singapore through my mailing address
Curating the films with Ms Kristin Saw of the Substation
Programming the festival with Ms Kristin Saw
Advising the Singapore committee on an ad hoc basis on various issues, mostly funding and sponsorship

In the course of my duties, I came to know that the TSFF was not a registered non-profit organisation, and that the Canada committee intended to register it officially shortly before or after the festival.

Although I was privy to earlier drafts of the letters that were drafted for potential sponsors, I do not have access to the actual versions that were sent, and cannot confirm if the TSFF, its then-director Chia Yeow-tong, or the Singapore committee had presented themselves as a non-profit organisation.

In the course of my duties, I had no dealings with the Canada committee - all decisions being either made by the director Chia Yeow-tong or passed on by him personally to the committee in Singapore. Hence, I am unable to confirm if TSFF was indeed eventually registered.

Do visit the website for TSFF and direct further queries to info@tsff.org, or the addresses provided on the wikileaks page, which seem to be correct.

Ip Man (葉問) (2008)

2009-01-12T12:44:00.000+08:00

In a telling sign, the Grandmaster called the dummy he beat up regularly The Missus (老婆大人)

The eponymous character of this movie happens to be the grandmaster of modern Wing Chun, and this is a mostly fictitious folk legend retelling about the man who would end up teaching a young Bruce Lee martial arts in Hong Kong. Why Wilson Yip chose to fib and outrageous spin the life of a person living in very recent and very recorded history - and present it as a biopic - is a mystery to me, and its rewards are not apparent.

Act 1 of Ip Man is interesting: its pseudo-Marxist prologue explains that due to the long economic boom (the Roaring Twenties, anyone?) in Foshan city, its inhabitants live in a Kuomintang paradise, with money for new clothes every year, and sufficient free time for heads of households to be gentlemen of leisure, engaging in hobbies such as opening martial arts schools.

That's a bold and refreshing take that suggests potential for development: the Grandmaster and his kungfu master colleagues as male tai-tais who engage politely in kungfu and yum-cha, instead of mahjong and yum-cha! Who of course get their male dilettantish tai-tai butts kicked by the real thing: a gang of hooligans from Northern China who rely on their fists and legs for day to day living.

The promising theme and lessons are ditched after Act 1 when the Japanese invade. I'm sure there's a reason why the Japanese army wanted Yip Man to teach them Wing Chun kungfu. The disagreeable general of the occupying forces, as per the tradition set by Fist of Fury, et al, does nothing but karate lessons all day long instead of occupying cities and terrorising civilians. Yet within the established 'historical interpretation' of Act 1, one would expect the General in charge of the occupation to be a Japanese tai-tai and for the story to develop from that foundation.

Character-wise, Wilson Yip fails even at creating a passable folk hero figure. The most simple formulation of heroism: The central character must face a moral dilemma, and chooses the painful, self-denying and sacrificial choice. Sadly, Ip Man is all about watching Donnie Yen play Chinese Steven Seagal, beating up Chinese opponents and maiming Japanese ones in disproportionate, one-sided matches while mouthing about the non-violent, civilised Confucian spirit of Chinese kungfu as opposed to the savagery of Japanese martial arts. Oy!

And worse yet, the characters who do find themselves in heroic situations, making difficult choices and sacrifices are the Japanese general who decides not to fix the final match/fight, and the collaborator who decides to take the punishment from both sides for collaborating. Oy!

There were 2 ways this movie could have gone: as a biopic, with a dedication to telling the truth or at least not blatantly telling untruths while embellishing the tale; or as a fictionalised folk legend full of heroism and whatnot. Wilson Yip fails at the biopic without trying, and fails at even the fictionalised folk legend that he tries for.

The only engaging part of the movie is in its first act, which no doubt is a holdover from the first draft of the screenplay. In what is a telling sign of the shameful tate of HK film industry standards, the writer of the first draft is only credited at the end credits, whereas everyone knows writers - regardless of which stage of production they were involved - are above the line credits.

Sophie Scholl: The final days (Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage) (DVD) 2005

2008-12-10T22:55:00.000+08:00

University students make excellent protesters and activists; Max Weber would have argued that university students, by virtue of their privileged position as state-sponsored intellectuals, are morally bound to be protesters and activists against the state. Yet there exists a problem of evil in academia: Why, if there is a moral duty to protest, do most students across nations and cultures remain largely apathetic?

Such is the uncomfortable position the members of the White Rose society find themselves in, during the final year of World War II. While the immorality of the war and Germany's impending defeat is clear to Sophie Scholl and her collaborators, it is likely that the general silence, fear or even apathy in the German public and their classmates provide that impetus towards their daring acts of resistance. We're not talking about terrorist acts or sabotage here, but a coordinated effort to blanket major German cities with fiercely written, relentlessly logical, and morally couched anti-Hitler missives. (Where else do you think "impeach him, impeach him now!!! came from?)

Understandably, the Gestapo is not amused and when the happy group make a mistake during the dissemination of their 6th pamphlet, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans are in for a world of pain. To be more exact, the high treason leading to capital punishment type of pain.

Much of this movie is set in the Munich Stadelheim Prison, where criminologist Robert Mohr interrogates Sophie Scholl over many sessions. This sort of set up normally makes for a good play and a bad movie; coupled with Julia Jentsch's too-reverent portrayal of the title character as a diffident and moralistic political martyr, it is a surprise that Sophie Scholl is as watchable as it ends up.

Here's a rule of thumb: political martyrs come across as less sympathetic the more they are self-assured of the justness of their cause. Simply put, the smugness that comes along with young political martyrs barely into their 20s tends to alienate them from the viewer, as well as run counter to good storytelling. And when the Garden of Gethsemane moment comes for the young girl, we feel that far too much of the movie has set her up as a smooth operator and knowing martyr: her self-doubt and true fear ring strangely false.

What saves this movie comes from Gerald Alexander Held as the sympathetic interrogator who seems hell-bent on finding an escape clause for the girl despite having to do his duty as a political officer, as well as betray a certain lack of confidence in his cause. While Sophie Scholl is a known, unwavering moral entity, the movie rides on the shoulders of Held's Robert Mohr, and flies on the wings of Andre Hennicke's very shrill and even more smug high judge Friesler.

As a movie based on historical events and personages, Sophie Scholl: The final days seems to hold its heroine on too high a pedestal to tell a story, and even to attempt a truer story.

The clues lie in the extra features on the DVD, which contain historical interviews with the survivors of the White Rose society, and family and friends of the Scholls. I'll put it simply: there has been a fair amount of whitewashing in the telling of this story. The real Sophie Scholl was a very more humane and human character than the political martyr we are presented with; and contrary to the expectations of Sophie Scholl, the reaction in the universities to the execution of the White Rose society members was that of either apathy or approval.

It's as though these university students and their descendants have a serious case of "let's pretend most of us intellectuals and survivors of that era didn't break out the champagne or continued to be apolitical when the heroes were executed" guilt, and the very turgid political martyr of Sophie Scholl was created.

While acknowledging the problematic concept and storytelling of this movie, I would just like to say that however compromised it is, this movie still shows clearly why it is immoral and wrong for students to resort to violence and terrorism, even to protest against an unpopular and unjust war. Yes, I'm talking to you, Bill Ayers.

The Sky Crawlers (スカイ・クロラ) (2008)

2008-12-04T19:53:00.000+08:00

The literary genres known as "science fiction" and "fantasy" are subject to strict boundary maintenance, least of all by their fans and audiences. Yet these boundaries tend to collapse in the face of realisation that both genres are merely two sides of the same coin: speculative fiction, and deal primarily in the same currency of world-building. For every JRR Tolkien, with their endless maps and faux historical footnotes of Middle-Earth turned into books in their own right, there is a Frank Herbert, with their endless maps and faux historical footnotes of the Galactic Empire turned into books in their own right.

So: the enterprise of world-building as an inherent and key part of both science fiction and fantasy. You build a world, then set a story in that world, and then let the story unfold in that world, with every difference and peculiarity of that world serving as a womb where the story gestates. One could build an entire world from scratch; the result is wondrous and alien: fire-breathing dragons and scions of Cain, space-faring alien civilisations beating off or dealing with the problem of relativity.

Or one could take our world, make just one or two changes in its parameters and let the ball roll from there, to see how the pins will fall, and how far they fall: social culture, individual psychology, ethics... The Sky Crawlers belongs to this mode of science fiction: speculative fiction as an extended thought experiment.

At its very basic, The Sky Crawlers is a genre flick: a WW1/WW2 flying ace movie. Yet it is also an extended thought experiment; set in a world where only 2 details differ from our own (one of which is stated in the poster, and the other is very different from what other reviews state) the ball rolls, the pins fall, and what we know should go into such a genre flick is made new again.

That's one method of measuring the genius that went into writing The Sky Crawlers. Another is to consider the subtlety of how the story is told. Much of anime and science fiction films make it far too clear how their alternate world is set up: you are invited by the 5th minute of the narrative to witness the construction cranes behind the world-building, introduced to the authoritarian villain behind the new world, who is then confronted and denounced by the angsty teenage protagonist before the end credits. There is nothing of this sort in The Sky Crawlers.

Where much of science fiction and anime storytelling has centred on show and tell, The Sky Crawlers believes in letting the audience infer from what is shown from the periphery of where the 'real action' is. The movie moves at a leisurely pace that forces the mind to question and speculate on the significance of each detail that is shown. Even if you do get the story by the end, the story is so subtly written and subdued: the horrors of the war in The Sky Crawlers, as well as the full story, can only be gleamed from a second viewing.

Animation-wise, The Sky Crawlers bucks some nascent trends in Japanese animation. Sole use of 3D CGI occurs for dogfight scenes, but the rest of the anime is predominantly 2D-CGI. The look, as with everything else in the movie, is calculated to take the focus off the showiness of science fiction, onto introducing the viewer to the subtle aesthetics and intellectual appreciation of extreme thought experiments.

About this blog

2008-01-01T16:00:00.000+08:00

Hi, I was the sole full-time film critic at incinemas.com.sg from February 2006 to August 2007. I've had the honour of serving with Kristin Saw of The Substation in the 3rd Toronto Singapore Film Festival, as its Programme Director and a member of its film jury. And I had a load of fun writing scripts for the second season of The Noose last year.

As I concentrate my time on freelance journalism and writing, I'll continue to view movies, but at a much reduced rate. Offers for resident film critic or in-house reviewer are greatly appreciated...

Updated 13 March 2009

Willow Tree, The (2005)

2007-08-08T15:11:00.000+08:00

From the Iranian director who gave Children of Heaven to moviegoers everywhere and Homerun to Jack Neo, comes a rare movie revolving around adult characters. One might be forgiven for thinking that this marks a move away by Majid Majidi from his trademark magic realist, sometimes rustic, but always emotionally effective directing style, but nothing can be further from the truth. Yet at the same time, The Willow Tree does offer a subtle and sophisticated philosophy of cinema to critics who say the director relies too much on trite metaphors and cliched symbolism.

In Majid Majidi's latest masterpiece, Youseff (Parviz Parastui) is a kindly and awkward university don who has been living with blindness since a childhood accident involving fireworks. It is not an uncomfortable life that Youseff leads: he has a loving wife who reads his students' thesis for him, as well as perform clerical tasks like typing transcripts of his essays, a child who adores him, and an extended family who is there for him, no matter what. Hampered by his disability, true and complete happiness eludes him until the man regains his sight through a cornea transplant procedure - and this is where the film begins in earnest.

From the setup, it's clear in advance how the film will roughly proceed: the rediscovery of the delights of sight, the end of Youseff's long childhood and innocence, and the deflating of his dreams of having his sight complete his happiness. What makes this film a piece of art are the eventual choices that the director makes to cover these plot points, out of the scores of far easier, emotionally hamfisted, or visually showy options available.

Take for example the representation of sight regained - in the hands of a showy, less creative director, you'd have lots of camera candy, distorted, oversaturated, or just overdone visual effects to present to the audience the world from the eyes of the formerly blind man. It's just the sort of cheap repertoire that gives cinema the reputation of being an overly literal medium, where every visual metaphor is unimaginatively direct. In fact, audiences only get to see directly from the eyes of Youseff about three times in The Willow Tree. What we see, and what is more important in this story, is how Youseff begins to see things for the very first time, and not what he sees. In a way, Majid is far more acquainted with the limits of film as a representational medium than any of the younger, MTV-inspired directors of this day and age. Yet there is no doubt that when you are watching Youseff see things anew, that there is a certain mood of exuberance and uncertainty that is conveyed, far better than any distorting lenses or filters. What Majid has done here is to create a highly symbolic, but anti-symbolist visual language - an achievement in itself. This visual language is paralleled and augmented by the director's painstaking efforts to evoke the lost sense of touch in cinema - the audience can only see Youseff grasp, grapple, play with surfaces and textures, but can never do so themselves.

In a way, the director's ironic treatment of the representation of sight and touch in film leads on naturally to the twist and the true story of the movie: the end of Youseff's prolonged childhood and his simultaneous loss of innocence. What is paradise to a blind man - will it remain a paradise once he regains his sight? What is love and care to a blind man - will his relation to his caregivers and loved ones remain the same once he is able-bodied and able to fend for himself again? Filmed at times as a tone poem, the transition to emotional drama that begins to take over is handled very well - as the film burst with ironies and seething with resentment, what's noteworthy is how Majid's script and directing is extremely subtle and restrained, compared to how a Mediacorp television drama would play out the exact same scenarios. And if this isn't enough, do note that the emotional drama is infused with a philosophical and melancholic touch, courtesy of Sufi devotional poetry by Rumi.

Acting-wise, this marvellous if subtle film is bolstered by the efforts of Parviz Parastui, who effectively plays two different roles that are not entirely separate from each other: the likeable if helpless, childlike don and the troubled but reborn, re-sighted man who grows in self-hood. Roya Taymourian shines, in a classic movie sense, as his onscreen wife - she compares well to a younger Lee Heung Kam!

The Willow Tree is a movie I'd recommend for arthouse fans, as well as any moviegoer hankering for some subtle fare after last month's summer blockbusters. Buy a ticket, take in the movie slowly, and you won't be disappointed.

Invisible Target 男儿本色 (2007)

2007-07-16T15:34:00.000+08:00

Party like it's 1980 again!

If you comprehend the Mandarin title of Invisible Target, you'd realise it's just two characters away from similarity to John Woo's A Better Tomorrow. That, by the way - and I kid you not - is the gimmick of Invisible Target. It's almost as if John Woo was still making cops and robbers movies in Hong Kong, and Infernal Affairs hadn't happened to its film industry, but Invisible Target is indeed a movie where the theme of brotherhood, loyalty and justice plays out as much for the cops as for the robbers. Now, I'm not sure why Benny Chan has the fascination for a long-past genre, but this movie would have been a breath of fresh air from the deluge of Infernal Affairs wannabe cop thrillers of this decade, if it hadn't been almost a facsimile of the old 1980s and 1990s cop and robber movies.

But anyway, we have a trio of cops (yes, they're an "odd trio"/mismatched buddies pairing) all going after a newly resurgent violent professional gang of mercenaries. Nicholas Tse wants revenge because the mercenaries' last heist blew up his girlfriend, while a scrappy Shawn Yue has a personal grudge against the gang because they humiliated him in public recently, and freshed-faced rookie Jaycee Chan wants to know if his missing elder brother, another cop, is working undercover with them and hasn't actually turned rogue. They may come from disparate sources, but the squabbling cops will learn the value of brotherhood in a nice bonding session involving massage oils, in order to come a step closer to apprehending the bomb, parkour, and kungfu crazy crooks. The professional gang of mercenaries just want their money back after an insider behind the scenes stole it from them after their final heist. They too are motivated by a strong sense of brotherhood and loyalty, and have a touching backstory somewhere about growing up in the same orphanage and having no one else to trust and depend on. So, whose cause is superior; whose sense of brotherhood will reign supreme? Find out in Benny Chan's modern resurrection of 1980s John Woo style cops vs robbers thriller!

There are only a few things I would judge a film that defies modern fads and goes for an older genre: Does Invisible Target do the older cop genre justice? Does it offer new insights to the older genre? Revitalise it? Provide a compelling reason for audiences and filmmakers not to follow the trend of Infernal Affairs wannabes? In its defense, I'd say that Invisible Target is a very competently-written movie with excellent directing, and Benny Chan's attempt at resurrecting the old genre benefits from the production values of the modern HK film industry. The setpieces are as old school as they come and some even more old school, like a pivotal fight scene (in terms of boding for the cops) in a teahouse that looks and feels like a setpiece in a classic Shaw wuxia flick. All the conversations (and their eventual payoff) about brotherhood and loyalty also remind us of the range of emotions that Infernal Affairs wannabes tend to leave out. The impact of this film could be even far greater, though, if Benny Chan remembered the basic rules of the old cop vs gangster films and followed them more thoroughly, especially at the end. I'm also puzzled at the scripting - it feels that there's one cop too many - Nicholas Tse and Shawn Yue play almost identical characters, and their interaction and setup in this movie tends to obfuscate the real cop buddy dynamic that's central to the old school cop genre Benny Chan is resurrecting.

In my mind, there still isn't that extra something that will convince me that Invisible Target is a sufficient effort to reverse the trend of HK cop films. It is, however, an excellent antidote to any audience feeling the jaded feeling from watching too many similar HK cops and gangsters films in the past few years.

First published at incinemas on 19 July 2007

La vie en Rose (La mome) (2007)

2007-07-13T20:45:00.000+08:00

Happy new year!

I doubt most people would be familiar with the name of Edith Piaf. Mention "La vie en rose" to an average passerby in the street and all you'd get is a look of incomprehension or confusion. And yet Edith Piaf remains one of the most captivating singers of the last century, whose voice captivated millions, whose music has endured beyond her death, and there's something about her hard-living ways and her tragic life that makes her brittle singing so much more alluring, her public memory so much more precious. Larger than life (with such a talent, she'd have to be a diva!), Edith Piaf deserves to be the subject of a biopic.

Now, faced with a personage like Edith Piaf, director Oliver Dahan has made the choice to film the biopic of the legend, as opposed to the biopic of the person. What this means is you won't get a Great Person Biopic (think Ben Kingsley's Gandhi), but a more impressionistic, bravura retelling of the life a larger than life character who is by now a legendary figure. As such, La vie en rose does not take the expected biopic step of demystifying the legend behind the figure or to put a more human face on Edith Piaf so that audiences can relate to her as a normal person. Perhaps it's because there are no reliable accounts of the singer's early life, or that Mme Piaf's childhood has been shrouded in mystery and embellished in various versions by herself over the years. And perhaps it's because the Edith Piaf who became a public figure and professional singer since the age of 15 really did live life in a larger than life manner, drinking, wooing, and singing in an excess that would shorten her life and age her prematurely, but strangely also make her singing even more irresistible at the same time. Here is the woman who really did live and die for her art, the original diva and artist type whose private life and public music straddled the boundaries between the vulgar and the beautiful - how else can you tell her story?

What makes La vie en rose very much watchable is its stream of consciousness editing and non-linear approach to telling Edith Piaf's story. The movie intercuts freely between her childhood, early years as a performer in Parisian cabarets, her later tours in America and her final years, but where it would normally throw any audience off, the strong editing and musical interludes linking various time periods help create a coherent mood. It's so well done that by the end of the movie, you can't help but want to cheer the frail old hunched-over lady on as she struggles to sing her closing number. I can't imagine this movie being told linearly - Mme Piaf's life story would then look like several long stretches of soul-sucking misery, illuminated by brief, blinding glimpses of hard-living and intoxicating happiness - such a story might be unpalatable for most.

As far as musicals go, La vie en rose is creatively filmed, with very few static, stagey angles. Marion Cotllilard does an impressive impression of Edith Piaf, which is augmented by the director's decision to have the actress lip-synch to the vocals of Edith Piaf heself, digitally restored from her old recordings. A constant sore point I have with this film, though, is the decision by its distributors not to subtitle most of the songs performed here - and when they do, they have taken an odd decision to water down the translations - Piaf's songs were well-known for their strong use of language. This is unfortunate - a whole new generation of fans could have been nurtured if the distributors had made the right decision.

La vie en rose deserves to be watched, despite its minor flaws. Like Kevin Spacey's Beyond the Sea, it is an utterly unconventional telling of the life of an utterly unconventional, strong-willed but physically fragile individual who went down not without a fight. La vie en rose is the definitive biopic of the life of Edith Piaf, until the day when a director decides to adopt the playful and postmodern approach from Beyond the Sea to tell the story of Edith Piaf.

First published at incinemas on 26 July 2007

Condemned, The (2007)

2007-07-12T15:23:00.000+08:00

Yet another WWE film. Remember, kids: FUCK BEER!

Think of this as a more adult and Americanised (by way of Survivor: Vanuatu!) Battle Royale, and you would have the premise of The Condemned down pat. Step 1: take 10 criminals on death row around the world, dump them on an island in Indonesia, and let them fight to death for the grand prize of freedom and loads of cash to help the lucky winner to start their life anew. Step 2: broadcast this over the internet as a pay per view event. Step 3: Profit!

There isn't much to say aside from pointing out that WWE's Steve Austin and perennial tough guy Vinnie Jones are the star actors in this movie. Luckily, they're not tag-teaming at all - Vinnie Jones is a psychotic badass rouge British special forces officer who takes pride in eliminating all opposition, and far more joy in personally ensuring that the deaths of his opponents are painful, unpleasant, and very humiliating, while Steve Austin is the tough but fair guy with a mysterious past and a girlfriend back in town whom you know you should root for. The island, the scenery, and the other 8 contestants are just cannon fodder for these 2 giants to chew up as they approach the final showdown, of course.

Make no bones about it: The Condemned sets out to tell a story about 10 people trying to kill (openly, or by subterfuge; bare-handed, or with exotic weapons - anything goes!) each other while millions on the internet watch on. Like Battle Royale, most of the runtime here is devoted to how the contestants hunt down and kill each other. The movie's almost workmanlike in its singlemindedness, but what saves it is the enthusiastic acting by Vinnie Jones (he's clearly having fun here), and Steve Austin's heroic rebel attitude. And if you're a fan of entertainment wrestling, do keep a close watch on the various wrestling manoeuvres that are performed in the fight sequences. Try to ignore, if you can, the slightly high count of plot holes in the script that you'd expect to have taken care of for a movie with this budget.

The only things that make The Condemned a lesser film than Battle Royale is its lack of levity, wit, and satire - it is, after all, a very American action film. In its defense, however, I would like to point out that Scott Wiper adds a very interest angle to the old premise by turning the spotlight onto the media, and audience's taste for watching violence. The buildup is handled very slowly, so that when the eventual denouncement comes, it's only when things have built up to a slow boil - and not because the director decided to insert a moralistic speech at the end of the movie. Of course, if violence in movies doesn't do anything for you, maybe it's not a good idea to watch The Condemned. For everyone else, and for die-hard fans of WWE and Vinnie Jones, this B-grade action flick isn't a bad deal at all.

First published at incinemas on 19 July 2007

Rise: Blood Hunter (2007)

2007-07-09T15:18:00.000+08:00

Lucy Liu plunges into B Movie depths

There's no reason to watch Rise: Blood Hunter if you're not a fan of Lucy Liu, or if gratuitous female nudity doesn't get a rise out of you. This is basically a vampire and revenge movie with lots of nudity, as far as I can tell, but due to its ridiculously low budget, it has even less production values than anything playing on television right now (aside from straight to TV telemovies starring Jean Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal!). Ordinarily, genre movies can be made on lower budgets and flimsier scripts, but beyond a certain point, what you get on your hands is a really bad or rather badly-produced movie, where clearly the director of photography couldn't do much with the equipment they gave him (and ends up shooting and framing every scene like a television director), where clearly the scriptwriter was constrained by the lack of budget to flesh out his script, and where the director was constrained again by the lack of budget to bring the script to some semblance of cinematic life. This is Blood Hunter. And this stars Lucy Liu.

Perversely, if you're not a fan of Lucy Liu, and gratuitous female nudity doesn't get a rise out of you, Blood Hunter might be the ideal low budget diversion (watch this on a Monday night or rent the DVD!). Remember, every A-list actor has made at least one unforgettably bad film in their past, but it's rare for actual A-list actors to end up starring in an unforgettably bad movie in the peak of their careers. This is why you might want to watch Blood Hunter!

But enough, on to the plot! Lucy Liu is an intrepid reporter for some tabloid rag whose last assignment on the poseur goth subculture (literally poseurs - angsty goth girls pretending to be vampires) leads her into an accidental initiation into the world of real vampires, who live for sex and murder. The end result: an undead Lucy Liu hungry for revenge, amongst other things, and a very angry cop hungry for the truth behind his estranged goth daughter's death, as well as revenge. Strangely enough, it is the cop character who does most of the investigating and unearthing of the truth, while Lucy Liu's vampire reporter gets the beans spilled by some David Carradine-wannabe mentor. And then, it's just a matter of hunting down the vampire coven who started all this, and killing them all. YAAARRGH!

Clearly Blood Hunter takes a few pages out from the Blade franchise: it's one of these modern films that have vampires in a modern setting, and radically remakes the vampire mythos. I would like to remind readers though, that Blade itself failed the Blade test - simply put, Blade was just a gangster movie that merely happened to have vampires as gangsters. It's not surprising that Blood Hunter also fails the test (it's just a police/investigation drama that merely happens to have vampires as underworld criminals), but that it fails the test so spectacularly. Why on earth would we have a movie where vampires are immune to sunlight and crosses, yet cast no reflection in mirrors? Why have all this... and yet offer no explanation?

Blood Hunter may pretend it's about vampires. It may pretend that it's about gratuitous nudity. Yet its script is so brain-dead to the point of squelching any interest that normal B-grade movies would evoke, while its camerawork is so uninspired that any other television serial would look better, and its acting is just flat-out flat. And unfortunately, the almost 40-year-old Lucy Liu doesn't actually appear nude in this movie (sorry, guys and gals!), but her body double.

First published at incinemas on 19 July 2007

Cashback (2007)

2007-07-06T15:05:00.000+08:00

Clerks meets science fiction

There is something about directors who graduate from other professions and training - often, they bring a radically different paradigm of filmmaking to their craft, and cross-pollinate their own trained sensibilities with those of film to create something new. Occasionally, like what happened over the last decade with music video directors crossing over to feature film (take Michael Bay and Len Wiseman, for example), they can even transform how mainstream movies are made. The there is something about the first film of every director - often, they either have some major obsession to get off their chest (like making the quintessential American/Singaporean/British/etc Movie) or they want to pull off all the neat tricks they've learnt in film school, showing off their technical proficiency and art design.

Now, knowing director Sean Willis used to be a fashion photographer and that Cashback is his first feature film, which is in turn an expanded treatment of his Oscar-nominated short film (also his first film project), everything becomes clear and understandable. Cashback is a romantic comedy that looks as if it's done by a very good first-time director: it's highly cerebral (jilted art student Ben Willis develops insomnia and the power to freeze time, the upshot of which he uses the extra 8 hours of his life to work for cash at a supermarket, and freeze time there), and full of shots, sequences, and special effects that show off the filmmaker's visual creativity and technical proficiency.

Normally, these maiden film efforts tend to reek of self-indulgence, superficiality and surface style, but Cashback manages to rise above all this into a class of its own, because behind the effects-heavy movie is a strong story laced with disarming humour. While it's true that the short film was just a showcase of Sean Willis's skills, and used the fantastic setup as an excuse of the special effects, the treatment in the feature film is far more sophisticated. For one, the theme of alienation of modern work and underemployment plays out more strongly, that Cashback feels at time like Dilbert or The Office (the UK version, of course) set in a supermarket. Willis also makes use of the additional hour of runtime in the movie to fully flesh out Ben's fantastic power of time-freezing, in a way that fully justifies the liberal use of speeded-up, slowed-down, and frozen sequences in the movie. And best of all, the sense of humour that was already evident in the short film is even more engaging and hilarious in this movie. Willis has managed to blend the dark cynicism of a movie commenting on the exchange of time for money in modern society and the witty satire of work-place comedies with his own unique, loopy and quirky style of narrative and observational comedy.

How on earth do you manage to make an Oscar-nominated short film into an even better feature film? I suppose only Sean Willis knows the answer, and we can only gape in amazement. After all, it's far too easy to do the opposite: I remember how Royston Tan's feature film version of 15 continued from the ending of the short film version, and how that extension of the story didn't quite feel as tightly-plotted and disciplined as the short film. In contrast, Willis wisely keeps the beginning and ending of the short film intact, with the feature film filling in all the scenes within, and yet writes with such economy and creative fecundity that every scene feels so necessary, that you can't imagine the feature film as a padding out of the original short.

Cashback is easily one of the better independent films to screen in Singapore this year, and my only hope would be for Sean Willis to make more movies.

First published at incinemas on 2 August 2007

Paprika (2006)

2007-07-06T14:59:00.000+08:00

This is anime on brains!

It's all a matter of timing and missed chances, but if things had happened just slightly differently, Singaporeans would have the opportunity to watch two Japanese animations at the same time in cinemas, both adaptations of novels by science fiction author Yasutaka Tsutsui. I cannot recommend more highly Mr Tsutsui as the preeminent modern writer of his generation, whose prose smashes together science fiction, social critique, dark satire, and groundbreaking originality. And I cannot recommend more highly the recently concluded The girl who leapt through time as well as Paprika to any animation fan. Unlike the first movie which was a readaptation of a fluffy Yasutaka Tsutsui novel, Paprika is an adaptation by a director whose last 3 anime projects subjected Japanese society to a playful yet sharp comic satire, of a novel whose author wasn't in a fluff-piece writing mood. In other words, dear reader, you have been warned: Paprika is the highest order of anime and science fiction to come out of Japan this decade, and will thoroughly disabuse audiences of any impression of the childish, childlike, or geeky nature of Japanese animation.

The story begins when the prototypes of an experimental device that allows psychoanalysts to enter and participate in the dreams of their subjects is stolen. An inside job, this theft must be taken care of by the inventor of the device and his research team before the somewhat illegal project is halted either by the conservative chairman of the board, a police discovery of the theft and illegal research, or a demonstration of the psychological warfare capabilities of the dream device by terrorists. However, the investigation that takes place in the real world isn't quite the story that we watch in Paprika. The interesting thing is how Tsutsui's novel takes the standard investigative narrative model and tosses it away - after all, if the villains have stolen a device that enables people to enter into others' dreams, with the intention of driving the world insane, why not have the investigation start from tracking down the perpetrators through the dreams of their victims? And since this is an animated movie, why not make Dr Atsuko Chiba the chief researcher the most proficient user of the device, complete with her own alter-ego (the Paprika of the title) in the dream world that she steps in and out of?

So even as the movie dances around the in between space of dreaming and waking, sanity and madness, the plot is driven by an inexorable logic that makes its zaniness and far-out surrealism bearable and even comprehensible. Clearly Satoshi Kon (Millennium Actress, Paranoia Agent), with his brilliant obsession with making movie that blur reality and fiction, is the perfect director to trust the adaptation to, and he doesn't disappoint here. The director continues his meditation on film from Millennium Actress, adding a new layer that resonates with the theme of liminality in the original novel, by having the investigation take place parallel to Dr Atsuko and Paprika's counselling of a policeman plagued by recurring dreams that take off from the movies? Ah, such sweet, intoxicating cleverness and insanity!

While regular watchers of anime will not be surprised with how Paprika plays out (plot points may be a tad predictable), the surprising thing is how the plot is executed, and how the story is animated. Simply put, this movie is full of mind-blowing images that are a proof of a genius the apex of his powers: Satoshi Kon manages to fashion the raw chaos of dreams into an animated art. I'd advise audiences to be fully rested before they enter the cinema, because the visuals in this film demand your absolute attention in order for you to appreciate their inspired brilliance and hilarity. While it is a 2D animation, Paprika is convincing proof that 3D CGI will never supplant its place completely; the entire movie itself is a showcase of the unique power of 2D animation to depict and evoke the sense of the fantastic that 3D CGI animators, with their trend towards 'realism', have all but given up on.

It is fortunate that a deep writer like Yasutaka Tsutsui can be paired with an equally imaginative and daring director like Satoshi Kon, and joined with the luminary voice talents of Megumi Hayashibara in this animated project. Paprika is a visual spectacle, full of creative images and creative imaginings - it is a must-watch for all animation fans.

First published at incinemas on 19 July 2007

Good Shepherd, The (DVD) (2007)

2007-07-04T14:51:00.000+08:00

As a high concept non-action spy thriller (no car chases! no explosions! no showdowns with bowler hat tossing henchmen!) The Good Shepherd is something best watched on DVD. Robert De Niro and Eli Roth fully deserve their Oscar nomination with this movie, but due to its non-action status and running length, it is best appreciated in your favourite cushion at home, with a glass of Chardonnay in your hand. And any tome on American history written by Noam Chomsky by your side - you might end up consulting its pages more often as the movie progresses.

Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) is the central character, and the movie spirals around his role in two periods in American intelligence history - the years leading to the creation of the CIA, and his role in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and its aftermath. The most audacious thing that Roth's script does is to turn the spy genre on its head. It's not a furious denouncement of the failure and corrupting nature of American intelligence at all (and one might argue that perhaps its subtlety and very understated criticisms may have cost it the crowdpleasing quality that a major Oscar contender should have). Instead of say, a generic angry denouncement or an overblown morality tale of innocence lost, the script of The Good Shepherd surprising and audacious, stripping both Yale's Bone and Skulls secret society (which provided both candidates for the 2004 US presidential election!) and the CIA of their aura, mystery, and mythology ever so effectively. According to De Niro and Roth, what damns these two elite institutions together is the fact that the secret rituals and cloak and daggers are nothing more than grown-up boys recreating their atavistic love for playground games, Hardy Boys novels, and the whole need to be approved by the select few. In other words, behind the two most powerful secret societies of the modern world lies a petty juvenile impulse.

Better yet, the duo further damn the CIA and their patriotic subterfuge by stripping the spy game of its heroics and excitement - Edward Wilson, his masters, collaborators, and enemies could very well be faceless, boring bureaucrats who work in offices full of cabinets and boxes - little insignificant men who use domestic housework terms to describe their spy operations, very little men of little heart and stature who must imagine they are doing a greater duty, who call their skills the "dark craft", as though they are in some Harry Potter movie. And of course, these heroic bureaucrats, these masters of the dark craft are responsible for their complete and utter failure at Cuba.

Perhaps because of its high concept and the dedication of the director and scriptwriter to the original premise, the end result is The Good Shepherd turns out to be the least exciting spy movie in existence. It is most a series of anticlimaxes, disappointments, and as lethargic as watching a few good men wasting their lives away in a two and a half hour film. Because this movie moves and plays more like a hefty 4-part miniseries, you might want to watch this DVD a little by little, but I assure you the genius and subtlety of the story will seep through by the end.

DVD review

Most Oscar nominees and winners of 2007 got what I call the "rush to DVD" treatment, where in some unholy haste to sell these movies to home audiences, DVD publishers and distributors have chosen to produce frills-free basic DVD packages. The Good Shepherd lacks a director and scriptwriter commentary track (most disappointing, I know), as well as what I consider almost compulsory: a featurette on the life and career of James Angleton, the CIA chiefs whom Edward Wilson is based on.

What we have as form of compensation are 7 deleted scenes, which are all worth watching. An entire subplot was taken away, as well as more buildup towards the breakdown of Edward Wilson's marriage. The last deleted scene feels like an alternate ending, and I suspect some might find it a far more appropriate way to end the movie than what De Niro has chosen. There's no fatal flaw in these deleted scenes at all, and I rather suspect that if included in the final cut of the film, it would make the total runtime for a 4-part mini-series.

First published at incinemas on 3 July 2007

Die Hard 4.0 (2007)

2007-06-30T14:42:00.000+08:00

Hello tech support? Yipee-kai-yay to you!

Because Justin Long is the trusty sidekick to Bruce Willis's Officer McClane, this review will be formatted in part as a hypothetical Mac Switch campaign ad.

Justin Long: Hi, I'm a Mac. You can tell from this movie because my character is a cool dweeb, slightly geeky but very adorable, and comes with his own MacFarlane Spawn figurines. Did I say I'm a Mac? You can tell that like most Macs, I'm not built for anything productive and useful, because Bruce Willis, aka John McClane, does all the real work here, while I go into panic mode and turn all 7 colours at once and spin around in circles once the gunfights begin. (looks at Bruce Willis) Why are you so calm, man? Have you done that kind of stuff before?!

Bruce Willis: If you remember Die Hard, Die Hard 2, and Die Hard with a Vengeance, of course I've done that kind of stuff before - you know, singlehandedly foiling terrorists and saving the day, and not to mention, dispatching off the criminals myself. I get the job done all the time, no matter how dirty or difficult it is. Hi, I'm a PC (smug grin).

Cyberterrorist: And I'm a virus. The kind that blows up computers - literally! - and brings down the entire national infrastructure. Now you can't even call tech support because all the phone lines are down. MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

I mean, there isn't any point to write a serious review for Die Hard and kill all the fun, because the movie is meant to be a silly but fun action picture that has lots of exaggerated yet PG rating-friendly violence. This is why Die Hard 4.0 was chosen to be directed by Len Wiseman, the visual stylist who brought us both Underworld and Underworld Evolution. For a script that demands every scene and set end with a huge explosion, Wiseman is the action director du jour whom Hollywood can count to make action scenes and big setpieces look stylish.

But say you beg to disagree. You might not be unjustified, but perhaps you might be watching the wrong movie in the wrong cinema at the wrong time, but there's indeed something fishy about Die Hard 4.0 - despite the massive explosions, the almost non-stop explosions, Wiseman's direction tends to sap the aura of suspense and thrill out of the movie, so that we're left with just very well-crafted action scenes. These may suffice for most moviegoers, but probably not all. Thing is, Wiseman's predilection for throwing in the blue filter in every camera lens is a little like his technical proficiency at action scenes: Wiseman, you see, has the directorial equivalent of Zoolander's Blue Steel: soulless, overused, predictable, plastic, incapable of evoking the sense of the real.

Die Hard 4.0 actually starts with a great premise - old school cowboy McClane must team up with new school hacker Farrell in order to stop this installment's terrorist from destroying civilisation and bring American to its knees. This premise holds good promise, but in the more than technically proficient hands of Wiseman, somehow the explosions and action start before the actual plot and drama begin, and somehow the detail to action is counterbalanced by the squashing of any sense of suspense from the script. And somehow, Farrell doesn't actually do anything hackerish to save the day at all. Puzzlingly, he doesn't do much hacking at all in the movie. He just hyperventilates a lot, like a Mac.

Old Die Hard series fans will probably love the action-packed nature of this installment, but that's only 1 of 3 things they'd consider, aside from suspense and tautness of script. What's the third consideration for an action film fan, you'd ask? Nothing is more important than the villain in any Die Hard movie, and I'm sorry to say that Olyphant's cyberterrorist villain has even less charisma than Blackheart of the Ghost Rider movie, and is nowhere near the sheer meanness, magnetism, or brilliance of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) or Simon Gruber (Jeremy Irons). Still, one out of three isn't that bad, since Die Hard 4.0 clearly beats any of the Die Hard movies hands on the action portion.

First published at incinemas on 5 July 2007

Transformers (2007)

2007-06-29T10:39:00.000+08:00

Shrapnel in my eye!

Perhaps the beauty of the Transformers franchise is its resilience to any strange or outlandish innovations. reimaginings, and reboots various production teams have subjected it to in its 2 decades of existence. One can afford to chuckle at the horrendous Hong Kong English dubbing of the 3 first Japanese Transformer animation series, the sheer power rangers style of Robots in Disguise, and even the Pokemon "collect them all" Transformers: Armada. Good or bad, or just plain weird (like the heretical yet mature and philsophical take in Beast Machines), nothing is capable of derailing the franchise. Not even if Michael Bay comes up with an Alien Invasion Disaster Transformers movie.

Here's the good news - fans of Michael Bay's style will not be disappointed with this movie. There has to be at least 1.5 hours screen time which is crammed from screen to screen with lots of silly explosions, scrap metal and debris flying all over the place, all orchestrated to loud music or the combined fury of detonating bullets and other ammunitions. I mean, that's what people go to watch a Michael Bay film for, right?

Oh, wait. You, sir, sitting over there, think it's different just because its the Transformers. For the fans, fetishists, and fashion-of-the-week followers, there should be just one consideration only about this movie, and it's not whether Michael Bay's new robot designs do justice to the original, whether Starscream manages to double-cross Megatron, or whether Megatron is killed at the end of the movie by Optimus Prime. No. Because this is Michael Bay, we must adopt the simplest of tests - the one a friend of mine calls "The Blade Test". Simply put, Blade was just a gangster movie that merely happened to have vampires as gangsters. And unfortunately for fans of the cartoon franchise, most parts of Transformers really play like an alien invasion movie that merely happens to have transformer robots as the aliens. There's also a second blow to this: Transformers is also a generic "rival factions struggle over a priceless Artifact of Power" movie, with Autobots and Decepticons being the rivals.

But what of people who would foolishly step into the cinema expecting a film? You know, people who care about scripting, dialogue, pacing, and all that jazz. Here's the good news: if you take out all the scenes with the robots in them, Transformers makes a really good alien invasion comedy, spoofing Men in Black, ID4, and government conspiracy movies and TV shows. To me, the levity, genre-parodying and self-parodying was the best part of this movie. Thing is, I just don't quite understand how the robot sequences could end up this disappointing, though. Don't get me wrong, lots of things blow up, but the robots are basically a dud. Take for example the Autobots - Bay and his writers apparently can't decide whether they're supposed to be the less dangerous faction of alien invaders singleminded after the prized Artifact of Power, or whether they're bumbling fools who learnt bad English through the internet (!!!11111), or whether they're highly noble creatures. Bay and his writers can't decide whether they want to give the old Transformers canon a kick in its nuts, or whether they want to pay a homage to it. The upshot: We're still wondering how Optimus Prime is capable of surviving a fall from a skyscrapper, and not damage the soft squishy human in his hands... when he practically mangles the lawn of a home while "reconnoitering". We're also wondering why Optimus and Megatron rehash their old Transformers (cartoon) Movie argument about protecting the innocent human race - it's a nice touch, but wasn't the entire movie was about their clash over the Artifact of Power?

Here's the killer, though: for a live action Transformers movie helmed by Michael Bay, all I wanted was a remote control in my hand with pause button at my thumb. For the seemingly neverending battle sequences, the most flabbergasting thing is how the overproduced feel of the film ensures that you never really get to see what exactly is happening. Like every other aspect of the movie, the battle scenes are just too incoherent - way too many explosions, human vehicles getting tossed around, too many projectiles and bullets whizzing around for you to actually know what is exactly happening. Oh, sure, we know what roughly happens, but it is obscured by the countless other things happening, that you won't know how what is happening, actually happened. Chalk it up to either overproduced and unfocused CGI, or the director and writers' inability to visualise properly what actually happens, but the result is a growing wish to watch this movie on DVD instead.

Since we've established that this is a Michael Bay movie, it wouldn't really be fair to go into considerations of how well-written the plot is, and how well-balanced the story is (though I have to note that it has a really long first act, a 20-minute second act, and a really long all-action third act), or whether the story is coherent or logical. For what it sets out to do, Transformers is a most decent movie. And the Transformers franchise has seen far worse than this.

First published at incinemas on 28 June 2007

Hooked on you 每当变幻时 (2007)

2007-06-27T10:32:00.000+08:00

Nothing screams 70s than a wet market comedy!

For some reason, Hooked on you is marketed as a romantic comedy, when it really is an incredible homage and reworking of Michael Hui's brand of social comedy. Perhaps the Hui name carries connotations of a satire too sharp for modern, post-handover sensibilities, but every second of Hooked on you indicates that even though Hui has not directed or written for more than a decade, his comic sensibilities are making a comeback through a new generation of filmmakers who have grown up watching his movies. Regular readers of my reviews will be familiar with my despair at how Hollywood insists on resurrecting and remaking old genres that it has neither the means or talent to pull off (currently, the romantic comedy). Yet there's something really interesting happening here in Hooked on you: not only are Law Wing-cheong and Fun Chi Keung reviving the Michael Hui comedy, but they're updating it for the modern day, in a respectful and credible manner.

So, instead of seeing this as a quirky romantic comedy - as the official poster and website art would have you do - I'd rather tell it like it is. Hooked on you takes place in a wet market and revolves around the lives of its stall operators. In other words, it's a social comedy about the ordinary, small people in their element. And all you have to do is just place the denizens of the wet market (appropriately given the typical Michael Hui name of "Prosperity Market") in and let the comedy unfold naturally, like clockwork. And this is how we'd get various skits linked together, about the silly games and tricks rival fishmongers play on each other, about how the entire wet market plans a comeback after a Cold Storage supermarket opens next door, how the stallholders get involved in a silly pyramid scheme, and even the continual success story of a former wet market stallholder turned smuggler and conman. The concept of all these comic skits and the sheer ensemble work required to pull them of is typical for a Michael Hui at the top of his game - except of course, Michael Hui isn't on the credits.

And much to my amazement, the director and scriptwriter actually do succeed in reviving the old style of comedy. While it's true that the most pungently satirical and slapstick sequences of Hui are nowhere to be found here, what you can savour is how the spirit of the comedy gets transfered into the at times absurdist dialogue. Armed with the benefit of the modern HK film industry, Law and Fung manage to not just recreate Hui's comedy and sociological imagination, but also turn out a slicker production that will no doubt be more suited to the tastes of modern audiences.

Now, don't get the impression that Hooked on you is any lesser for its romantic comedy angle, which covers about a third of the runtime and plot. What I like about the director and writer is that having developed such a homage to Hui, they aren't going to sell out at all by inserting a fluffy and stupid romantic comedy involving impossibly cute leads falling in love in the most improbable manner through the most impossible coincidences. You'd be far better off watching something else if you had that in mind, but if you had any curiosity about how Michael Hui might have incorporated a romantic theme and premise ("A woman slowly turning 30, still in search of a mate") into his social comedies without compromising his satirical vision, Hooked on you would be a good movie to watch.

On the whole, Hooked on you is highly recommended for fans of 1970-1980s social comedies directed by Li Han-hsiang and Michael Hui.

First published at incinemas on 28 June 2007