Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead man's chest (2006)

A pirate's life for me!

Great Disney and Pixar movies get made into roller coaster rides at Disneyland Park. When I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl 3 years ago in the cinema, a sense of incredulity struck me. That movie was outrageously fun, energetic, whimsical and exceedingly silly, but never for once did the adult in me disapprove or feel stupid for liking it. And then, imagine my surprise when I realised that I have seen this before. On a pirate themed ride in the New Orleans Square section of Disneyland Park. And yes, the name of that ride is Pirates of the Caribbean, and that opened in Disneyland Park in 1967, and since then has been a fixture at every Disney resort of note.

What can we expect from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest this year? The same as the last film: pirates, curses, and treasures! Johnny Depp returns as Jack Sparrow, now rightful captain of the Black Pearl. Unfortunately it appears that Jack is a victim of a most frightful curse. In return for certain favours in the past, Jack owes his soul to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the King of the Sea, and the time has come for the Cthulhu-lookalike to collect the debt. That’s unless Jack can find a way to destroy or control Davy Jones, or find a treasure that the octopus-faced man will willingly trade the debt for. Unless Captain Jack tries running away, but remember, the King of the Sea has a crew of undead ex-pirates and a great kraken at hand.

Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightley), on the verge of getting married, are once more swept into into Captain Jack’s adventure, no thanks to the machinations of Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) of the British East India Company. But what is the East India Company’s top representative doing in the West Indies? The enterprising man has figured out that in order for the company to rule the sea, he needs a certain item in Jack Sparrow’s possession, and that only with the help of Will and Elizabeth can he obtain what he seeks.

Can Jack escape his debt to Davy Jones? Can Will and Elizabeth have their moment of peace together? Will the East India Company rule the world? Do these questions even matter – because what we really want to know is: Is this just as fun as Curse of the Black Pearl? Are the action scenes and setups even more wild? Is the humour still as off-kilter and whimsical as before?

Yes, even as the wheelings and dealings get more baroque. Yes, and you’d think (wrongly) that some of them must have been inspired by a Disney theme ride. And yes. The script sparkles with even more dizzy wordplay than the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Jack Sparrow gets the best lines here, punning and reverse punning as if the writers had gone wild on the Black Adder series, while the absurdity of a running commentary in a certain extended joke reminded me of vintage Python.

Should you watch it? Yes! I would watch it again!

What might be Captain Jack’s Song
(sing it to... the Lumberjack Song!)

I’ve always wanted to be a pirate!
Sailing from port to port!
As I float down the islands of the Caribbean
Port Royal!
Tortuga!
Isla da Muerta!
The smell of the fresh sea, the crash of mighty waves!
With my best girl by my side – we’d sing, sing, sing!

Oh! I’m a pirate and I’m okay
I sail all day and plunder all night!

I set my sails, I eat my lunch,
I hunt for cursed treasure.
On Wednesdays I go shopping
and have buttered scones for tea

I set my sails, I raid and loot
I like to press wild flowers.
I put on more mascara than Lizzie
and hang around in bars.

I set my sails, I brave the seas,
a-swaying with each passing wave!

First published at incinemas on 13 July 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

Click

Click doesn't quite click, despite Sandler's pretensions to being Frank Capra

Aside from computer mice and their graphic representations as pointers on my computer screen, there aren’t any objects that you use to point and click. You can point and click with mice and mobile phones. However, the buttons on remote control are made of rubber; you don’t click with remote controls, unless it’s a special one with buttons taken from an old school calculator, the type with gigantic plastic buttons and an optional print-out receipt. Like its title, Adam Sandler’s latest movie is a confused mixed of imagery. Click does not click. Not even when David Hasselhoff, Henry Winker, and Kate Beckinsdale are roped in this time to fill out the movie as Sandler’s newest co-stars.

By now, you would have known from the trailer that Michael Newman, a frazzled architect on the verge of losing the fine balancing act between satisfying his slave driver boss (David Hasselhoff) and his family (helmed by a tolerable Kate Beckinsdale, who manages to channel Diane Keaton in her performance), chances upon a universal remote control with the power to remotely control his life during a shopping trip to Bed Bath & Beyond, an American domestic furniture chain store. Michael soon turns out that the trusty gadget has the power to slow down, fast forward, reverse and even skip any chapters of his life that he chooses, and uses the device in several sketches that may amuse the audience in the first half of the movie - until he decides to use the remote to fast forward to his promotion.

As eccentric tech support guy Morty (played with reckless abandon by Christopher Walken) puts it when he gives Michael the remote, good guys deserve a break sometimes, but there’s always the danger of getting what one wishes for. After a dizzying rundown of classic Sandler bad taste gags (fat people jokes, speedo jokes, gay jokes, fart jokes, cruelty to young children jokes, and dog humping jokes), the movie negotiates a sharp turn into melodrama and schtick, and showcases Sandler’s potential as a dramatic actor. You can almost hear the screech of the wheels on the tarmac as Click careens into the celluloid desolation known as “the moralising, heart-warming tale”.

If the first half of Click plays like a lowbrow Bruce Almighty, with Adam Sandler as a mean-spirited version of Robin Wiliams in RV, armed with a remote control that enables him to turn his life into Pleasantville, the second half is a spiritual successor to Mister Destiny, It’s a Wonderful Life, and A Christmas Carol.

The second half of Click aims squarely at the emotional points of the audience, along with their tear ducts and sentimentality bones. Small wonder why the first half feels like a throwaway section, a product of self-indulgent Saturday Night Live scriptwriters more interested in mass producing every gag they could think of involving a remote control. Then, there are more signs of poor scriptwriting: Sandler’s illustrious co-stars aren’t given much to do with their roles, leaving him quite unable to deliver what any audience expects of a dramatic leading man in a melodramatic and sentimental movie. It’s definitely not a case of miscasting, since we have seen Sandler deliver as a dramatic actor in Spanglish and Punch-Drunk Crazy, both written by people who aren’t tainted by the SNL connection.

In the hands of more competent writers, Click would’ve been a homage rivalling the sentimentality and power of Capra, Belushi, and Dickens. Instead with lazy writing there is no way Click can live up to the potential of its concepts.

First published at incinemas on 3 August 2006

King and the Clown 왕의 남자 (2006)

Korea’s Kurosawa epic brims with Shakespearean sensibility

It has been 8 years since the passing of Akira Kurosawa, but this hasn’t stopped directors from evoking his style, replicating his panoramic battle scenes. or remaking his movies. The battlefield is littered with carcasses of failed films like The Last Samurai, The 13th Warrior and Tsui Hark’s twice-removed ripoff, Seven Swords. Finally, in the darkest hour, Lee Joon-Ik, whose film company imported several jidai geki flicks – including Kurosawa’s – to Korea in the past, has succeeded where many have failed, and created a film that evokes Kurosawa, yet looks like nothing the great auteur has directed.

Lee Joon-Ik’s tale revolves around the historical figure of Yeonsan, 10th king of the Joseon dynasty. Infamously memorialised in the official Joseon annals as a most profligate and cruel king (a traditional portrayal that Jewel in the Palace reaffirms), director Lee revisions the monarch as Richard III – an unpopular but emotionally-damaged king whose reputation has been subject to vilification at the hands of the nobles who deposed him, and the Confucian scribes in court.

Bringing salve to the king’s tortured psyche are street performers Jong-gil and Jang-sang. Arrested and tortured for putting on burlesques that satire the excesses of the king, his consort, and the imperial court, the duo make a bet with a courtier: Allow them to stage the burlesque once more for the king himself, and let them off if they manage to get a laugh out of Yeonsan. “What kind of a madman would laugh at this?” their accomplices ask, feeling the imaginary blade coming down on their necks. And yet the King does burst into a jolly fit, and fetes the clowns and their troupe as his official court jesters.

That signals the beginning of an ambiguous and unstable relationship between the king, his fools, and the Confucian courtiers. At times, the script appears to play like a doctoral thesis on "Parody and Subversion in the Masque" or "The Fool: Laughter and Danger in Elizabethan theatre" (The fools realise each time they put on a burlesque or masque for Yeonsan, someone ends up executed or murdered). It feels like a dramatic adaptation of an academic treatise on elements of Shakespeare’s plays, especially when some scenes are reminiscent of Hamlet (Yeonsan is eager to find out the truth behind his mother’s untimely death) or even Lear (Jong-gil the fool is the only human Yeonsan can strike up a semblance of a normal relationship with), and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (the tragedy of Yeonsan is indeed told through the eyes of the two fools).

While the tension and danger amidst the court intrigue are well-written, the movie may come across as more scriptable than lisable. Part of this feeling of misalignment comes from the fact that the Shakespearean feel is achieved at the price of anachronism – Korean never had a tradition of court jesters. The very idea that someone – much less a fool – would be allowed to openly mock a king, and to tell the truth at the same time, is completely alien to period and social hierarchy maintained by the Confucian courtiers. The sense of wild historical improbability does detract from this movie. There is precious little effort on part of the scriptwriter to square the circle and reconcile the idea of a court jester working within a Confucian system, or to examine the factionalism amongst the courtiers during the period.

Visually, the film boils over with frantic excitement and wide angle shots, with at 1 masque, 2 burlesques, 1 Chinese opera, 2 street performances featuring tightropes, acrobatics, 2 puppet shows, and 1 wayang kulit performance, while the charismatic interaction between the 3 main characters also serve to fill out emotionally the academic feel of the movie. The English subtitles, translated by professor Kim Yong Ok, are far superior to the Mandarin translation, and contribute to the rough and tumble verse of Shakespeare at times.

I’m bowled over by the audacity of the concept for King and the Clown, and despite its (very few) shortcomings, it’s a completely fresh take at Shakespeare, an original Kurosawa. Lee Joon-Ik evokes the great masters while pilfering none of their material, and I venture that he has created a classic that can count among the best Kurosawa interpretations of Shakespeare, and yet stand on its own.

First published at incinemas on 22 June 2006

C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)

Dad may be crazy about Patsy Kline, but Ziggy Stardust has my heart

There’s something creepy about Zachary Beaulieu. The child fidgets and looks anguished during the Christmas midnight service, and his hand keeps touching the back of his head, where there’s a certain birthmark on his scalp. There’s obviously something annoying him to the extent that he practically gives the camera the evil eye. Zac’s born on Christmas Day, 1960, and you begin to wonder if you’re watching the remake of The Omen. Hastily, you check if you’ve stepped into the wrong cinema hall.

Relax, you’re watching C.R.A.Z.Y., one of the best films from Canada this decade. It’s about the pain and confusion of growing up, the joy and madness of family life, the love-hate relationship between siblings, between parents and their children. It’s about being special – Quebecois, Roman Catholic, and having the best and coolest father in the world. The film is suffused with touches of Quebecois old wives’ tales and beliefs and an honest, reverent religiosity that makes it much more than Growing Up meets The Wonder Years meets The 70s Show. In other words, it’s a film on universal themes, yet unique to its corner of the world.

Like every child, young Zac hero worships his macho father Gervais, who fired a machine gun in WW2, wears aviator shades, and as befitting an audiophile, has the complete collection of vinyl records from Patsy Cline, Charles Aznavour and other great classic singers. Thanks to his unique birthmark and birth date, the family believes Zac is gifted with a talent for healing wounds. Gervais takes his favourite son on secret car trips to get French fries, buys him the biggest Christmas/birthday presents of the siblings, and for a while, the pair are the best buddies in the world.

But children do grow up, and they eventually do something to disappoint their parents’ hopes in them. In Zac’s case, it is his “softness” and inability to be masculine enough for his father. Will the love between father and son be strong enough to bring them together again? Does Zac love his father enough to do everything possible to regain his favour, and not end up as a “fairy”? Does Gervais love his son enough to accept that all his sons are different from one another, to accept Zac as much as he accepts the drugged out second son Raymond as his own? Can mum Doris, who shares a special bond with her son, convince her husband to accept Zac’s uniqueness?

Families, I was once told by a cynic, are the only institutions in civilised society where people are legally allowed to be mean or even violent to one another. This film proposes that families are both a source of joy and pain – and that you can never extricate one from the other. Gervais may be a strict disciplinarian, but he’s still charismatic, charming and has a sense of cool. Raymond may be Zac’s greatest tormentor and nemesis, but it’s impossible for anyone to maintain their ill feelings for their most hated sibling for long. This film, then, is a love letter to families everywhere, whether they rock or suck, and precisely because they rock and suck at the same time.

Script-wise, the film is equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming, terrifying and witty. It’s extremely well-written and so tight-knit that I couldn’t find any unnecessary scenes. The movie is filled with gorgeous music from the 1950s to the 1980s, from Patsy Cline to David Bowie, from Elvis Presley to The Rolling Stones. Like guardian angels, the film soundtrack watch over the growth of the five Beaulieu brothers and their parents through a most difficult transition in Quebecois society, the misnamed Quiet Revolution.

Visually, the composition of the film is top notch. The sunlight falls on faces just so, the camera closes up and dances a slow mambo with the characters, seque. Director Jean-Marc Vallee, armed with a delirious sensibility, provides us with several wickedly funny and imaginative scenes that despite being way off-the-wall, actually work emotionally (One of them is the infamous melding of Sympathy for the Devil and the Christmas mass).

C.R.A.Z.Y. is a film that you might just want to watch more than once, if just to figure out how on earth its creators managed to produce a masterpiece from a rather mainstream subject.

First published at incinemas on 15 June 2006