Under the Skin (2013)

Scarlett Johansson oozes sex appeal that can melt a man into a puddle in this update of Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Elizabeth Arden advertisement

The Zero Theorem (2013)

Watch Brazil instead

The Best Offer (La migliore offerta) (2013)

Artsy art porn take on classic tale of conman getting beaten at his own game

Before Sunset (2004)

Last week, we began viewing Richard Linklater’s Before... series in reverse order, starting with Before Midnight. What could one possibly profit from this exercise, you ask?

Only God Forgives (2013)

"What if David Lynch went to Bangkok and made a surreal Bangkok Dangerous with Royston Tan as his DP?"

It Begins with the End (Ca commence par la fin) (2010)

This would be the French arthouse version of 500 Days of Summer, telling the ins and outs of a failed romance out of chronological order.

Unlike 500 Days of Summer, this isn't really good at all. It's a first film by a director who makes the typical mistakes in storytelling, concept, casting, editing, and so on.

Watch for: every other scene beginning with the first eight bars of the Brandenberg Concerto no. 4, movement 2, as if to signal that you're watching something important and intense.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 24 October 2012.

Life during wartime (2009)

Todd Solondz perfects his cinema of misanthropy in Life during wartime, where an ensemble of characters create their own hell even as they convince themselves they're out of it.

Eschewing the surreal, over the top feel of his previous attempts, Life during wartime is actually enjoyable and funny because of the its perfect timing and understated humanism.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 8 August 2012.

Brown Sugar (น้ำตาลแดง) (2010)

This erotic anthology is to Bangkok what Paris Je'taime is to Paris.

Bangkok here is a sensual city whose inhabitants fall under its spell, succumbing to the multitudinous aspects of love. Old love, new love...

Sadly, the shorts are very hit and miss. It is the final poignant short, a beautiful meditation on loneliness and alienation, that truly deserves the stamp of arthouse erotica.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 13 July 2011.

Red Dragonflies (2011)

An artist returns to Singapore to hold an exhibition; memories of teenage years and a vastly different Singapore landscape are evoked.

Red Dragonflies is more video installation than a film to be consumed.

It's also one of those films that examines the nature of nostalgia and sentimentality without resorting to either.

Read my full review on Fridae, first published on 4 May 2011.

Spring Fever (春风沉醉的夜晚) (2009)

A gay man, his accidental bisexual lover, and that lover’s girlfriend form the inverted Jules et Jim triangle of the film

Spring Fever was shot on the sly in Red China with its director serving a lengthy ban from making films.

We gather the director's ban was just too much to bear. There's just too much happening, so much being said that the film feels out of place with itself.


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

I am love (Io sono l'amore) (2009)

Tilda Swinton is matriarch of a ridiculously wealthy family, The Woman behind The Man, and all-round successful mother - and all that will change when she falls in love.

A more mannered, deliberate reworking of Teorema and its critique of capitalism and the family, love is set loose and all that is solid melts into the air.

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

Mother and Child (2009)

I'm not a fan of Latin/South American fatalism. That's why I steer clear of melodramas from R Garcia Marquez and the team of Innarritu and Arriaga.

But when Mother and Child is the creative love child of the son of Garcia Marquez and Innarritu, I threw all caution to the winds and entered the cinema...

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 5 May 2010.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2010)

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, first published on 21 April 2010.

A Serious Man (2009)

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, first published on 18 February 2010.

Henry Poole is Here (2008)

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.

I don't want to sleep alone 黑眼圈 (2006)

Love in the time of haze

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is Tsai Ming-liang's latest film. We know the director as the strange Malaysian emigre who's made a career out of making incomprehensible but very beautiful, erotic, moving, and very slow-moving Mandarin films, all of which tend to feature Taiwanese daytime drama actor Li Kangsheng in various states of undress. This time round, Li Kangsheng gets to play two roles in the movie, which means that there's double the exposure here. I'll try to top Li's act by splitting myself into 3 imaginary roles to give a rambling, but beautiful meditation on the movie.

1. The lascivious auntie views Li Kang-sheng's exposed butts

Tsai Ming-liang makes art films that critics at Cannes rave about, but normally close within a week of their commercial release. Way too arty, except for the fact that you can always count on the obligatory scene(s) where Li Kangsheng bares his bottom (and more). The actor may be a mainstay on Taiwanese daytime soaps (Fiery Thunderbolt, Taiwan Ah Seng, just to mention a few), but aunties who have grown to know and love the boyish-faced actor will be hard-pressed to see any revealing footage of him in these family fare. Instead, they'll have to enter the cinematic clutches of Tsai Ming-liang in order to get their fix.

The auntie will get more than what she's bargained for as the director casts the actor in two roles that drive the plot of the movie - or are driven by the plot of the movie: Li is a bed-ridden quadriplegic man who is almost a living dead. He's lovingly fed, clothed, bathed, powdered, and fanned by his elder sister, who turns on the radio to Cantonese opera, Mandarin evergreens, and the occasional Italian opera to lessen the hell he is suffering. But even then, paralysed bed-ridden men have feelings and urges, as do their selfless caregivers... Li also plays an itinerant beggar who is so badly beaten up by the hoodlums of Kuala Lumpur that he is now slowly recovering in a long convalescence in the loving care of a Bangladeshi labourer who found his broken body on the streets. The feverished man is lovingly fed, clothed, bathed, powdered and nursed by the complete stranger, but in the long companionship of social outcasts, even feverished beggars have feelings and urges, as do their selfless caregivers. Everyone's feelings and urges, and fears of having to sleep alone, will end up enmeshing both stories.

To an auntie, this movie could well be a triple-hanky weepie teledrama, with its theme of unrequited love, helpless heroes, and melancholic, even futile longing that screams to be fulfilled.

2. The Malaysian censor contemplates the represention of life in KL

The Malaysian censor wishes Tsai Ming-liang would make a much more arty film out of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. Even hopes that perhaps the director will restore the missing 1 hour of exposed Li Kang-sheng goodness to the theatrical cut. But no, the problem is there's way too honest-to-goodness eroticism in this film. The problem is that the movie is set in Kuala Lumpur, one dominated by scores of abandoned building projects home to illegal Bangladeshi labourers, where a Chinese beggar is beaten up by a gang of Malay bomoh conmen, and where the provincial government is unable to combat the haze problem (PSI reading: over 600).

It's not just about KL's haze problem, poverty problem, or even race relations that must surely be under attack by Tsai's movie, but that the director manages to find really humorous ways of highlighting the absurd in each situation. How else can one view a recurring joke about a makeshift mattress that is discarded, reused, washed, and moved from construction site to constuction site, shophouse to shophouse? I can think of at least 5 politicians (a former PM, a former DPM, the leader of an opposition party, and the current PM) who would be uneasy with the irreverence Tsai shows to the most sacred of courtroom witnesses in the country... or at least would be very uncomfortable with a film set in KL, but only featuring the poor - and only telling the stories of poor minorities.

It is with great regret that the Malaysian censor had to ban Tsai's movie. Aside from last year's After This, Our Exile, there hasn't been a local film that basically showcases popular music sung in the streets, aired on radio, or screened on roadside VCD/CD shops. Tsai is at his best when he crafts entire scenes to the rhythm and lyrics of local music - whether it be Mandarin evergreens, Cantonese opera, Bollywood musicals, or even Malay folksongs. It's a loving tribute to multiculturalism that sadly will be unknown in Malaysia because this movie is apparently banned because it offends racial and political sensitivities.

3. A musuem visitor on time and thought

At some points during the screening, I felt like a watching one of those installation art films that seem to be in the rage all over museums. You know, the glacial pace, the lack of dialogue, the scenes that seem to drag on and on. But whereas one might (and quite justly so) label these museum pieces as largely self-indulgent, one cannot escape the sensational epiphany that Tsai is so far beyond that. Every scene doesn't feel self-indulgent, they feel just about the right length. Take for example the scene where the paralysed Li is getting his morning ablutions performed by a caregiver. A cursory, 10-second shot is the conventional choice of all filmmakers; it establishes what is happening and moves on to other scenes where Things Happen. Stretch it 10 seconds further - it becomes an angsty scene where Li is subject to ablutions. Stretch it 10 seconds more, and you'll have the stereotypical self-indulgent "art piece" that museums show, but unfortunately is too grating on your patience because unlike a museum visitor, you can't get up and walk to the next film installation. Stretch that 10 seconds more, and you're in Tsai Ming-liang territory. You pass through the cursory understanding of the scene, to feel the angst, and yet when all that is done (and because the scene is still playing) you begin to ask: how does that feel for the character, really? Why this certain camera angle, that both obscures and highlights his face? How would it feel, if done in your stead?

Because Tsai Ming-liang gives full measure to time and rhythm, his film escapes the realm of pure entertainment, and enters the domain of pure contemplation. You won't enjoy watching this movie (aside from admiring Li's exposed body parts), but you will remember it days later, and you will continue to ask questions about the film, even then.

First published at incinemas on 5 April 2007

Time 시간 (2006)

Almost a commentary on the dating game

Kim Ki-duk’s latest offering was not invited to Cannes, although Time harks back to the director’s sometimes harsh commentary on contemporary Korean society in his early films. Looking at the film, I can almost see why. Time’s appeal comes through its very weird premise: Sae-hee (Park Ji-yeon), possessive to the point of unhealthy obsession, decides that her hold over her still very devoted boyfriend Ji-woo (Ha Jeong-woo) is waning, despite her daily shrillness, tantrums, and demands for proof of fidelity. Giving in to her suspicion that her boyfriend would rather date someone new, the girl decides to disappear from his life, undergo extensive plastic surgery, then stalk the poor man before seducing him under a new identity (Seong hyeon-a) – but retaining her original name, just to freak him out a little since he’s still pining over her (the old her, that is).

There are a few things about Korean culture that you will have to understand before you can 'get' this film, though. The possessive, borderline psychotic, sassy girlfriend in so many Korean romantic comedies isn’t so much a convenient plot device or an exaggeration, but an almost realistic portrayal of how many Korean girls behave in a relationship. And apparently, this sort of behaviour is considered appealing and direct, and much favoured by Korean boys. So instead of being repulsed by the utter insanity of Sae-hee, puzzled by why Ji-woo pines over such a character and actually looks for her characteristics in other women he dates during her absence, I suppose audiences should fall over themselves at the depiction of a perfect relationship. And instead of complaining about how Ji-woo is a picture of passive-aggressive pathology (he’s a wimp when attached to Sae-hee but non-Korean audiences would consider his more than forthright dating techniques border almost date-rape), we should realise that this is how males actually behave in real life, at least in the Korean dating scene.

In other words, instead of a psychologically disturbing thriller dealing with the loss of identity brought on by plastic surgery (a very popular cosmetic enhancement procedure in Korea), or a dark comedy about the psychotic side of everyday dating, or a satire about how dating couples take photographs at the most kitschy and artistically pretentious (ergo grotesque) locations, Kim Ki-duk delivers an honest and conventional romantic drama with an extremely devoted couple (slightly more devoted that others, but still a conventional couple nonetheless) with gratuitous shots of "Sculpture Island", an outdoor installation art gallery located at a beach.

In other words, Kim Ki-duk wastes a perfectly perverse premise to make an artsy but hollow romantic drama filled with eye candy. I can imagine David Lynch using exactly the same plastic surgery premise, main characters, and dating scene to produce an absolutely horrifying and surreal masterpiece. And I’m sure that’s why the Cannes committee regretfully decided to skip the usually spot-on satirist’s work this year.

First published at incinemas on 16 November 2006

Little Red Flowers 看上去很美 (2006)

Irresistible child actors steal show!

In a previous life, respected director Wang Yuan made unflinching movies on social issues like Mama (a mother caring for her mentally-challenged son), Seventeen Years (a girl is released from prison after serving 17 years for killing her stepsister), and East Palace, West Palace (a gay writer facing sanctions from state authorities). We miss the Wang Yuan who had the keen eye of a sociologist and a documentarian. We dread the day where he follows up Little Red Flowers with a martial arts epic, in a lemming-like move that follows the double career suicides of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, who have proved in the past year their incapability to churn out decent movies on a big budget. You don’t have to wait for that martial arts epic to witness the artistic fall of Wang Yuan, though – you can see his degradation in this misguided film.

Little red flowers are what the staff at a 1950s kindergarten boarding school give out to nice children who show they can dress themselves, tie their shoelaces, poop in the morning at the communal latrines, obey their teachers, and treat their fellow boarders well. Little red flowers are both little shiny stickers stuck on a whiteboard that chart the performance of each little tyke for all to see, as well as the little crepe flowers that the teachers give out to the students. Sort of like how you were rewarded with golden stars in kindergarten and lower primary school for work well done. Yet from this innocuous measure comes a tale by the director on the struggle between individualism and conformity, the little people against authority figures, and so on.

With minimal dialogue, Wang Yuan establishes Dong Bowen as the latest addition to the boarding school for tiny tots. When you first see him, the crying child is literally dragged by his pilot father and deposited to the care of the ugly minders at the kindergarten. It’s clear you’re meant to take the side of the tyke. Over the next 90 minutes, you will learn through a series of incidents that

1. Conformity is the enemy of individualism. And in case you didn’t notice, conformity is evil!
2. Little children, when left to themselves, can invent their own games. The games and exercises teachers organise in school for the mass participation of kids are evil because they encourage conformity.
3. The more disciplined the regime, the harsher the rebellion.

There are several problems with this line of reasoning, problems that make Wang Yuan’s final social film simplistic and naïve, falling short of the meticulous compositions of his entire oeuvre. Perhaps Wang Yuan should have applied the Socratic method on himself, posing questions such as:

Is rewarding young children to reinforce positive behaviour always wrong? (Parenting in early childhood would be impossible if you say yes)
How else should you potty-train 80 young kids?
Is all structured learning and group playing always wrong? (We might as well abolish school and close down all the Montessori playschools as well)

For a fair comparison, one would have to look at how accounts and movies about how children grew up in kibbutzim (for example, The Children’s House). Or just read Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window for a more subtle and nuanced take on conformity, individuality, and creativity in a playschool environment. And then one might come to the conclusion that Wang Yuan is lashing out at the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

The problem with Little Red Flowers is it’s not so much that the rewarding is bad, but that the teachers begin to isolate the non-performing children and punish them through by encouraging their classmates to shun them. That happens only in the second act, and is developed for all of 5 minutes, and feels tacked on as an afterthought to the 3 central premises of the movie. If the real evil in the kindergarten isn’t the little red flowers, but something else entirely, why the obsession with the little red flowers? It is the mystifying refusal to delve into the subtleties and nuances of the topic at hand that makes the message behind Wang Yuan’s film seem unsophisticated, despite its gorgeous camerawork.

The saving grace, or perhaps the most obvious sign of this film’s failings, is the chockfull of awwwwwww moments where little tykes do their cute little tyke things with their cute little tyke antics, like running around without clothes on, urinating on snow, and playing doctor/patient. This is the sole factor that will either save or break the movie for audience, given its relatively thin plot and thematic development.

In the end, Little Red Flowers feels like a short film that got padded into a feature length movie, with a weak second act and an even weaker ending that is atypical of Chinese cinema. It feels like the first 1/3 of a movie about a fictional boy who grows up during the Cultural Revolution and matures as an adult during the Tiananmen Massacre. Now, that movie would be a must-watch.

First published at incinemas on 5 October 2006

4:30

This boy stands for the Singaporean art film: Constipated, angsty, pretentious.

Like those books we buy but never get down to reading, those books that we buy anyway because we fear being caught dead without one on the bookshelf, so is Royston Tan’s entire oeuvre to the Singapore public. Tan has a reputation that precedes him, so much so that everyone I know claims to have watched at least one of his films – inevitably, the short film “15”, or if you’re meeting a smart aleck, the feature length “15”, or if you’re up against a misanthrope, one of Royston’s more obscure short films.

So there exists, wholly as an aside to the really existing Royston, the Royston of our common imagination and invention: he of the rebellious streak, thumping his nose at authority, conventionality, ministers and civil servants, the director with an MTV style, angrily spitting out tales of teenage angst, alienation, and anomie, sullenly archiving the state’s extinguishing of age-old buildings, professions, and places. Yet Tan’s second feature takes a sharp turn away from this image. The teenaged gangsters and rebels, the MTV style editing, the saturated colours – all these, as well as Tan’s characteristic rage, are missing from the film.

If you’ve never watched any of his films, 4:30 is not an ideal introduction to the work of Royston Tan, especially. This is a movie where nothing really happens, where the audience never really knows what happened even as the curtains are raised, or what the movie was about. This is a movie made for the festival film circuit, a movie that may require film professors and Roystonologists to decipher and explain.

A 13-year-old boy lives in a SERS flat with a Korean tenant. Leading separate lives in the same space, away from all effectual aid for whatever it is that haunts them, Xiao Wu and Jung perish every day, each alone. Everyone has their poisons: Xiao Wu gulps down bottles of cough syrup to induce sleep while Jung toys with more potent forms of suicide. Only during that magical time in the morning, at 4:30am do the pair experience what can charitably be described as “peace” or even “bonding”, where Xiao Wu crawls into Jung’s rented room, rearranges his belongings, sleeps in his bed, and leaves a glass of orange juice at his door.

In a movie that does away with plot and dialogue, there is nothing to witness, aside from pure acting, in the body language of the actors. Tan should be commended for creating a movie that should remind audiences of early childhood, a magical period of life where children have an unreal and illogical sense of time, conjure up imaginary friends, imagine they are invisible to adults, and recognise or mis-recognise themselves in others, and experience someone else’s physical pain and emotions as their own.

Yet loneliness, angst and boredom are hardly original material, and hardly sufficient material to sustain a feature film, and very painful to endure without any dialogue or plot. As a 30-minute short film, this might be considered a brilliant piece of art. At 90 minutes, this is a dreary exercise that will create adverse reactions in audiences unaccustomed to extreme art films.

Is this film made by the real Royston Tan? 4:30 feels like a film by Tsai Ming Liang, especially with the run-down, dingy apartment settings. The poster, as well as Jung’s suicide scenes might well be lifted from Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe. An intimate scene between Xiao Wu and Young Jun would have touched my heart had it not been a near copy of Eric Khoo’s Be With Me poster (the one that got pulled out following objections from the MDA), and Xiao Wu’s sneaking into Young Jun’s room to do redecoration-cum-spying is straight of out Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express.

Given this movie plays far longer than its material can support, what can you do in the cinema? There is a deliberate incoherence in 4:30, audiences will have fun picking out the inconsistencies in the plot, to perhaps arrive at a guess at what has really happened in the movie. They may also pass time by pointing out the fantastic array of 1970s-themed objects on the interior set, as well as how almost every scene is shot to deny the existence (or visual tyranny, if you prefer) a modern Singapore, and to spot the inconsistencies in the set design, and what it might mean. I suppose this is an old move Royston pulled from his earlier short film “177155”.

This is a type of film where inconsistencies do not drive the plot, and are perhaps irrelevant to what really happens in the movie. In a perverse way, we can see this as a bona fide Royston Tan film: whereupon, having rebelled against every form of temporal authority, the latest thing he rebels against is a good movie. Some people will be insulted to watch a long movie about such a trivial and banal subject that worse still, is given no deep treatment and development.

For the die-hard Royston Tan fans and true art film lovers, 4:30 is a much-watch. Audiences who expect to be entertained by movies are advised to stay clear of this, while those who expect another “15” should be disabused of the notion.

First published at incinemas on 20 June 2006