Has anyone noticed that the satirical website Talkingcock.com has been down since National Day? Or that Colin Goh's fortnightly column failed to appear as scheduled in last Sunday's newspaper?

Hmm.

How I wish I, wish I'd done a little bit more
Now "Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda" means I'm out of time
'Cos "Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda" can't change your mind
And I wonder, wonder what I'm gonna do
"Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda" are the last words of a fool.

The SGFilm forums now have a blog -- http://www.sgfilm.com/blog/

Want your China and HK movie fix? MonkeyPeaches !

The photos don't look too promising, but who knows what this giant book sale might throw up?

I'm supposed to treat it like a conversation. A chance for them to get to know me better.

I'm just a boy whose intentions are good /
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood!

Doesn't seem fair to talk about Jarmusch and not Ho Yuhang's Min which I also watched last week. So let's give it a go. Before that, here's a synopsis:

Min (2003) by Ho Yuhang
Running time: 78 min
Country: Malaysia
Language: Malay with English subtitles

Min (2003)This film is about a young teacher named Yasmin ("Min"), a young Chinese girl, adopted by a Malay family, who goes to look after her biological mother.

Min, a 20-year-old Chinese girl, discovers that she was adopted as a little child. Her old school friend is charged with finding out that her biological parents are. Min informs her adoptive parents about her plans and sets out on a long journey for her roots. All she has got is the address of the factory where her mother is employed.

Ho Yuhang's style is reminiscent of Taiwanese directors like Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. With calculated modesty and nearly perfect visual expression, this Malaysian independent director has made the purest art cinema.

Ho refuses to play up the melodramatic potential of the plot (a Chinese woman adopted by Malay parents goes to look for her natural mother) and gives us a far more significant take on the loneliness of urban life. Music is kept to a minimum. Instead the mundane events of the film, depicted through long takes and long shots, play out against an unceasing soundtrack of harsh, grating urban noise. This incessant din extends into the extended full blackouts that throw audiences from scene to scene. Min is not a comfortable movie.

Wanna watch one of Tsai Ming Liang's films even more.

Thanks to a friend with a spare preview ticket, I got to watch Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes. The movie's a collection of black and white clips, with a fairly star-studded cast that includes Bill Murray, RZA (wearing a Ghost Dog hat I wish I had), GZA, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Cate Blanchett, and for the indy music fans -- Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Jack and Meg White (a.k.a. The White Stripes). Even Roberto Benigni makes an appearance.

As you might expect, not all the clips are equally interesting or funny. The only things that tie all of them together are coffee (well, tea in one case), cigarettes, and the idea that speech is the worst form of communication between two people.

The dialogue is often funny and quirky but the things left unsaid are more crucial and this is where it falls to the actors to really differentiate the scenes from one another. For instance, put character actor Alfred Molina and established British comedian Steve Coogan together and you have a segment that shines with the contrast between Molina's effusive enthusiasm and Coogan's dry, understated wit. This makes the reversal at the segment's end much more satisfying. Also kudos to Cate Blanchett for talking on double roles in her episode and filling both -- a rich, well-heeled celebrity and her poor punk-rocker cousin -- admirably. In contrast, the musicians' episodes fall flat when there's no obvious visual quirk, like Jack White's Tesla coil.

I admit I'm not familiar with Jarmusch's work. I've only watched Ghost Dog and that was more accessible than Coffee and Cigarettes. So arm yourself with more patience if you're going to see the latter. Caffeine may help.

My ability to write essays in an exam setting is in severe disrepair. And just when I thought I'd left those dog days behind.

The itinerant booksellers have returned to my neighbourhood. Guess what I found today? Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation With Stig Bjorkman.

Mostly done with A Defining Moment: How Singapore Beat SARS. I went through the main text first, leaving the little side panels and appendixed stories for later. Chua Mui Hoong treats this book as a blow-by-blow account of healthcare and governmental reactions to the unfolding crisis. Even as she carefully avoids any explicit bias towards the Government, our Ministers and top civil servants end up looking really good.

Chua asserts that the main factor behind our relatively successful control of SARS is a certain collective mentality shared by the rulers and the ruled that have led us to be labelled as a "nanny state".

Like a trusted nanny, the state was successful in getting its messages across because it had a deep reservoir of trust with its citizens, built up over the years, to bank on.
----- p. 139

To this effect, Chua gives adequate space to the errors and mistakes made, but takes care to emphasise that these occurred because of time pressures and the need to err on the side of caution. Throughout the book she takes as given that the decision-making structures put into place (or already planned for, as the case may be) were the best possible ones to contain the SARS outbreak. Moreover, she paints a largely rosy picture of all levels of society humming in tune with Government measures. Any resistance is either glossed over or rendered incredulous -- like the story about the Cat Welfare Society planning to send stray cats to a Johor pet shelter in protest at increased cat culling by the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority here. In all, the book isn't so much an account of a society coming to grips with a deadly disease as it is a story about a well-oiled machine going through its paces. But no-one's perfect, and you can't argue with results.

The photographs are nice, but paper quality was selected with affordability in mind -- and rightfully so. There is little doubt that this is a feel-good book, meant to appeal to the masses and inspire Singaporeans everywhere. There is truly much that rank-and-file Singaporeans (especially our healthcare professionals) can be proud of. Just don't expect any deep analyses behind decision-making processes or public policy implementation and so on. If you're into that kind of meatier, more critical stuff, you will want The New Global Threat, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and Its Impacts. And hey, it's conveniently available at Select Books (hint! hint!).

I'm looking for the lyrics to The Hives' infectious Walk Idiot Walk, but it's clear that the vast majority of lyrics sites just copied the same wrong lyrics from one another. Annoying as heck.

Oh, and I haven't found an accurate version of said lyrics. Would someone like to help?

Singapore celebrates 39 years of nationhood today. If you're not from Singapore and reading this, go out and have a drink (non-alcoholic counts too) and be happy just like the 4.2 million people here.

The classic The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy has been with us for almost 25 years now. Be happy for that too (drink optional) and think that Douglas Adams is laughing as well, somewhere out there.

Kinokuniya here launched their Privilege Card this weekend. At $21 a year for a 10% discount on all purchases, I see no reason to get it since I spend less than $210 a year at Kino. In any case, I can always wait for the 20% storewide discounts that they offer three times a year.

Speaking of which, if you're thinking of picking up a copy of A Defining Moment: How Singapore Beat SARS at the sale, don't bother 'cos the discount doesn't apply to "government publications", and this is one of them. Go get your copy from Select Books -- support local independent bookstores (assuming they have copies in stock)!

I am looking for a system to organise my life by. I want to be able to see all that I need to do, in all their categories with as few transitions or glances as possible. I would prefer not to have to cross-reference because I know I will forget to cross-reference in the first place. In other words the problem isn't remembering what the string on my finger does, but remembering to put the string there in the first place. And then you have to remember what it does...

The ideal might be my own personal internet, with the ability to creat hyperlinks on the fly. As I type this I'm imagining a holographic construct -- a cube, say -- with a glove of some sort like the one Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report to interface with it.

I don't know how saner folk like Justin can manage with pen and paper. I tried that too, but the inability to rearrange and reorder my notes on the fly is infuriating. And then there's the problem of quick access to what I wrote before. No search engines for notepads.

Perhaps I should look into investing in a PDA. That gives me the added advantage of being able to carry and read long documents (like theses) on the bus or MRT without having to expend ink, pulp and time.

As for my room, I'd love a large whiteboard with markers.

Breaking his long silence, Trudeau sat down with Rolling Stone in the modest studio in Manhattan where he creates "Doonesbury." Despite the flecks of gray in his hair, at fifty-six he has the easygoing, curious manner of a grad student still fascinated by the world around him. It's no exaggeration to say that Trudeau revolutionized the funny pages, creating a space where reactionaries and radicals alike squabble over the issues of the day. His style is part Charles Schulz, part Charles Dickens. Over the years his characters have grappled with everything from AIDS and abortion to Alzheimer's. But with the election of George W. Bush, who attended Yale with Trudeau back in the Sixties, "Doonesbury" has taken on an urgency and relevance reminiscent of its early, gleeful assaults on Nixon.

Spent all Sunday helping my bro sell toys from his personal collection at the weekly Clarke Quay flea/toy market. He's unloading all his Be@rbricks, and has a very comprehensive collection up to Series 7. So if you read this and you're interested in procuring some of these figures, just drop me an email or leave a note in the tagboard or a comment or something. ;)

So the week's begun, and it's gonna be a busy one for me. The wheels began turning a while ago, but it's only now that they're picking up speed. Gotta do my bit to see what kind of a ride I'll be getting for the next, oh, 6 years or so. Fun fun fun. :p

Unfortunately, Zhang Yimou has fallen to the seductions of CGI and gratuitous slow motion shots. House of the Flying Daggers (Shi Mian Mai Fu) starts out okay, but gets sluggish in the second half and dies a slow tortuous death from ludicrous setpieces, excruciating melodrama and uninspired fight scenes. Everyone struggles with the pseudo-classical Mandarin lines, and there's little chemistry between any of the three leads. The plot borrows heavily from Infernal Affairs (Wu Jian Dao) -- in fact House might as well be titled Infernal Affairs: Tang Dynasty instead. Heck, it's even got Andy "Wo Shi Jing Cha" Lau in it.

The only things going for the movie are Zhang Ziyi's acting, Kaneshiro's impishness, the beautiful landscapes and Emi Wada's lusciously reimagined period costumes. And yes, there are a few gems -- the bamboo forest sequence is actually rather cool to watch. The CGI is fun at first, but tires extremely quickly. You will want to throw a few daggers yourself after watching, for the umpteenth time, close-ups of a CG-rendered dagger as it flies. The gratuitous slow-mo makes the film even worse.

In all, don't believe the hype (incidentally, the guys who came up with the promo displays should be fired -- a crucial plot point is given away in the publicity photos!). There're many good reasons why this film wasn't in competition at Cannes.

Is there anyone who didn't think The Return was very, very good? Watched it yesterday and was impressed too. A hermetic blend of motif, fable and allegory tied by parallels, efficient dialogue and brilliantly constructed visuals.

Here is another face of a woman spun out of the familiarity of years, concealing a lifetime of episodes, splendidly recorded by a listening photographer. It is a face, I thought when I first saw it, of our life at home. Six months later I was showing the pictures casually to my sister. "There's Mrs. Farraj," she said. Indeed, it was. I first saw her in 1946 when my cousin married her daughter, who was the first beautiful woman I encountered in real life. Then I saw her in the fifties, and then again now, in Jean Mohr's picture. Connected to me, my sister, my friends, her relatives, her acquaintances, and the places she's been, her picture seems like a map pulling us all together, even down to her hair net, her ribbed sweater, the unattractive glasses, the balanced smile and strong hand. But all the connections only came to light, so to speak, some time after I had seen the phototgraph, after we had decided to use it, after I had placed it in sequence. As soon as I recognized Mrs. Farraj, the suggested intimacy of the photograph's surface gave way to an explicitness with few secrets. She is a real person -- Palestinian -- with a real history at the interior of ours. But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.

-- Edward Said, After The Last Sky

The Scriptwriting for Film seminar yesterday was mostly quite basic and rushed, as expected. No surprises, and a lot of handouts and worksheets. For my part I was hyped up on caffeine most of the time, thanks to periodic infusions of the instant coffee provided. However, as Justin stoically and sensibly pointed out, the trick was staying hyped up in the days-weeks-months after the seminar.

Watched The Ronggeng Dancer (Nji Ronggeng) and Magnifico in the evening.

The Ronggeng Dancer, made in 1969, is one of the first colour films made in Indonesia. I'd let the writeup provided by the Arts House describe the remarkable nature of the film:

... the film reconstructs performances of the ronggeng dance as they are supposed to have occured in village squares and carnivals in West Java in the 1930s.

The ronggeng dance, similar to the Balinese joget, is a subtle and sensuous dance performed in public spaces by both paid and unpaid female dancers. In these dances -- which duly provides an erotic spectacle as the woman, usually a professional dancer, invites men from the crowd to dance with her -- the woman sometimes has the power to dismiss their partners if their dancing is not satisfactory to her. In the film, the form of ronggeng dance is one wherein male partners are invited to try to touch the woman's hair, and where, through her dancing, she tries to evade them and even deflect their attempts to touch her hair by using defensive hand movements used in silat (a traditional Indonesian form of self-defence). Hence, the dance, as depicted in the film, is more than simply an erotic spectacle. Like the Balinese joget it is a highly structured social ritual in which the male partner's attitude to the woman, his exhibitionism, his pride and his capacity for self-control, also become part of the public spectacle. This, in fact, becomes the dramtic subject of the film Nji Ronggeng.

The blurred distinctions between martial art/combat and dance was particularly interesting imho, and this is clearly shown throughout the film. The opening credits of the film are imposed upon a ronggeng performance, and halfway through the dancer begins going through silat patterns -- first barehanded, then with small parangs in each hand. In another instance, young men take part in a kind of sparring contest with short bamboo cudgels, while music plays in the background. The men approach each other using dance and react accordingly as the music changes tempo. In another instance, when the villain's henchmen attempt to kidnap the "damsel" in the dance troupe, combat comes easily (if not too effectively) to the troupe members -- including the "damsel" herself.

The lush music was also a joy to listen too. Alas, the acting wasn't too good, and the plot was very simple with erratic pacing. An interesting ending with a political moral. All the same, Ronggeng is a visual and aural feast -- if you have the patience.

I liked Magnifico as well, even if everything fell into place in that movie a little too neatly. The soundtrack was hideously overbearing and stagnant -- out-Glassing Philip Glass even. I wanted to rip my ears out halfway through. The acting in that film was quite competent -- the child actors deserve the most praise. Solid direction and visuals; solid crowd-pleaser

I used to have lots of foolscap paper pads lying around, but now that I want to find them they all seem to have disappeared.

Maybe they went off and wrote on themselves, having tired of waiting. Wouldn't that be pleasantly efficient?

Since I last posted, I've seen Mean Girls and Osama. The former is actually a well-scripted comedy, as far as the American obsessions with high school shenanigans go. The latter is sombre, brutal and uncompromising in its portrayal of the zealotry of the Taliban, particularly with respect to their dehumanising of women. Well-crafted stuff.

Naturally, the movies are worlds apart in every sense. An image of galaxies furiously spiralling away from each other comes to mind.

All realize the reality

Finally got round to watching Red Beard (Akahige). I feel fulfilled.

Over the weekend, I picked up some old anime VCDs for cheap. The first two Patlabor movies and Bubblegum Crisis 2040. I have no idea when I will get around to watching those.

I've always had a soft spot for Patlabor, which unfortunately is an extremely underrated series outside Japan. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that there're no babes (the main protagonist is a tomboy and actually looks like one), no fancy dogfights and no fanservice. Instead, the series deals with the everyday efforts of policemen -- albeit policemen who get to pilot giant mecha -- in 20th Century Tokyo. It deals with their personal lives, with inter-unit politics, and with the simple but difficult matter of just getting along with your colleagues. Then throw in a shadowy conspiracy for some added punch -- it is anime after all.

The Patlabor movies were directed by Oshii Mamoru. I don't care if the picture quality sucks -- I love his work. Which reminds me that I should get around to reading that Kerberos Panzer Cop manga someday. Yeah, someday :p

I have to stop buying more books. Even if they're interesting, in used but good condition and cheap(er).

Must. Stop. Hoarding. :p

Managed to catch The Other Side of the Bed last night. Superficial Spanish comedy of musical-chair-sex. The actors randomly burst into charming, slightly off-key song and dance. Witty dialogue (although the best lines are at the breakup at the beginning), and the slightly goofy, sincere acting save the day. Not to mention Paz Vega and Natalia Verbeke are great eye candy. Predictable and all feel-good but immensely likeable stuff.

Alas, I could have gone for One Day In The Life of Andrei Arsenevitch too but it completely slipped my mind.

'All that was once directly lived', wrote Debord, 'has become mere representation.' Nowhere is this dictum more starkly illustrated than in the case of Che, who, in the four decades since his death, has been used to sell everything from china mugs to denim jeans, herbal tea to canned beer [...] Today, Che lives! all right, but not in the way he or his fellow revolutionaries could ever have imagined in their worst nightmares. He has become a global brand.

Been sleepy all day. Watched the disappointing To Kill A King last night. I thought Tim Roth was a bit disappointing as Cromwell, with a forced accent to boot. Dougray Scott was a passable Fairfax, but not convincing at all. The best acting came from the supporting cast imho -- Olivia Williams as the conflicted Anne and Rupert Everett as a desperate yet dignified monarch facing certain doom. It was a good effort at a character-driven movie. Above average, but not remarkable.

I originally wanted to catch The Other Side of the Bed, but I was concerned about getting home too late and not sleeping enough. The irony, of course, is that I ended up sleeping close to 2am anyway. Must find time to go watch that, if only to make up for To Kill A King.

Picked up this awesome figure for cheap this evening. It's the redesigned RX-78-02 (the original Gundam we all know and love) in the Gundam The Origin manga series. Running now in the popular bi-monthly Gundam Ace comic anthology, Gundam The Origin reunites original character designer Yasuhiko Yoshikazu and original mecha designer Okawara Kunio for a retelling of the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime.

Yasuhiko is a good storyteller in his own right, and there's a kind of chic 70's aesthetic in his and Okawara's designs. The latter's mecha are more organic and curvy, compared to Katoki Hajime's angular, crisp designs for the Gundam franchises. For better or for worse, Katoki's designs now dominate all Gundam product lines and anime.

What I love most about the figure -- other than the price, the detail (the beam rifle has a detachable clip!), the paint, the design and the height :D -- is the amazing articulation it has compared to the standard MSiA line of mecha action figures. I tried to demonstrate this in the picture above.

The main flaws are that the multitude of joints are all quite loose (in fact, the elbows won't hold straight poses), and that some holes don't fit their corresponding pegs very well. I had to do some shaving with a craft knife. And I don't understand why the shoulder cannon (unique to this redesigned Gundam) wasn't included at all.
 

Good heavens! After reading Justin's blog, I realised I'd omitted Ishiguro from my last post.

Kazuo Ishiguro!

was born in Nagasaki, and moved to England when he was 6. For him too English was not a first nor familiar language, yet he found literary acclaim in that medium.

I wonder if I can add Ha Jin to this lot of uneasy, uncomfortable writers? He, too, started writing while in the US. Exclusively in English.

So, how fertile is exile?

Have put aside Na Han for a bit, and started on Edward Said.

Said's work was inspired by the deep feelings of dislocation and loss that he felt for most of his life. From his original work on Joseph Conrad, to the groundbreaking Orientalism, to his Palestinian activism.

Conrad was of particular interest to Said, who saw a kindred exile in the Polish-born writer. Conrad only wrote in English, and that these novels are considered some of the best of the 20th Century is amazing -- English was Conrad's third language.

Said himself specialised in literary criticism, and was a fine writer in his own right. Like Conrad, English was not Said's native tongue.

It must be said, of course, that both writers did manage to immerse themselves in an English-speaking society. Conrad became a naturalised Englishman, while Said spent almost his entire academic life at Columbia University, New York. Nonetheless, these writers were never quite at home in their Western (for lack of a more precise term) environments.

And then there is the attractive unpretentiousness of the Kings of Convenience. Norwegian-born, Norwegian-bred, but somehow ending up writing and singing in English. I wonder if they feel the same kind of uneasiness that Conrad and Said felt? Maybe not exactly, but maybe there is an essence of the exile at work (play?) here. In looking in, everything seems clearer. But the price of vision is friction.

I bought a budget release of Kurosawa's Red Beard about 2 weeks ago, but have yet to watch it. I hereby resolve to watch it before the week runs out and falls over into the abyss.

I bought a budget release of Zhang Yimou's Ba Wang Bie Ji (Farewell, My Concubine), which I impulsively popped into the DVD player as soon as I got home. Was surprised by the picture quality (the sound quality was probably top-notch too, but I can't quite tell without a proper home theatre system now, can I?) and the good English subtitles (which I turned off -- ha!). The viewing experience was marred by the logo of the releasing company which appeared in the top-right hand corner occasionally. Irritating and distracting. Otherwise, a wonderful three hours.

But I should go back and raid the Esplanade library's DVD collection soon too.

If I had been in Osaka over the weekend, I'd probably be broke by now. The Gundam speciality store there just reopened on Saturday. You can see pictures here (courtesy of G-Spirit).

It looks like everything was on sale at 20% off. Wish I could've been there :(

http://www.whatisvictoriassecret.com/

BLACK MAGE: I have a friend.

WHITE MAGE: What you have is a highly dysfunctional relationship based exclusively on abuse.

BLACK MAGE: Right, a friend.

A special edition PS2, coated like a Hyakushiki. So cool. So, so damn cool. But I wonder if the coating tarnishes?  

The third Harry Potter movie continues the fine tradition of being largely faithful to the source material. Alfonso Cuaron works The Prisoner of Azkaban with a decidedly darker, more gothic sensibility, and he handles shots and drama with far more skill than Chris Columbus ever did.

I had to abandon my UK Bloomsbury paperback editions of the first four Potter books, together with many others, when I moved from Chicago. It was painful at the time of course, but I don't miss those books at all now. Not even the Potter ones. Hmm... is The Order of the Phoenix any good?

If only life were as easy as resetting a blog template.

I switch to Firefox, and my blog layout goes to heck. Fiddlesticks.

It's gonna take me a while to finish Lu Xun's iconic Na Han (Call to Arms). I picked up a copy in the original Mandarin at Kinokuniya on that last day of discounts, attracted especially by the photographs and illlustrations scattered throughout the pages. These provide explanations of places and activities referred to in the stories, while footnotes are reserved for the more esoteric and literary allusions.

I've always wanted to read Lu Xun in Mandarin, even though it feels like running with a ball and chain sometimes. It's even worse when I'm trying to read Japanese. I'm far more comfortable in English, like the vast majority of my peers, but I'm also a bit of a stickler for reading and watching media in their original languages. I have come to a comfortable understanding with translations, but dubbing remains grostesque to me. In my opinion, the struggle to understand someone isn't so much an issue of language as it is of time. Or is it just semantics?

What Anime Mech Are You?

Good. I love Evangelion. ^_^

Bad weekend, bad weekend for me. Solid soap opera material.

You never know what will turn up at church sales. Once I found an old Charlie Parker CD -- Swedish Schnapps + Great Quintet Sessions 1949 - 1951. Today I picked up a Hamasaki Ayumi remix album. 2CDs for $2. There's some merit to this electronica, but I was never a fan of Hamasaki's music to begin with. To me Ayu-mi-x III: Non-Stop Mega Mix Version's main utility is to shut the world out. My kind of elevator musak.

Spiderman 2 was entertaining and competent. Really liked the dizzying, swooping, darting camerawork. No real complaints, although the train rescue was stretching things a little bit -- even for our friendly neighbourhood superhero. Look out too for the camp horror influences; probably Sam Raimi having fun with his earlier films like the Evil Dead trilogy and Army of Darkness. Chainsaws, lots of screaming. :)

Sony Pictures is really pouring money into the franchise. There will be a third movie, of course, and I hope it doesn't drown under a deluge of easy money and fancy CGI. We'll have to wait till 2007 to find out.

Changed the comments feature. Back to Haloscan, so no more discrimination against non-Blogspot folk and those to lazy to log in. C'mon people, let's hear from ya!

This is just... too damn cool for words...

/speechless




A small internet phenomenon on Futaba Channel, the OS-tan (OS for Operating System, and -tan as an overly cute Japanese honorific for a person) or simply OS Girls are the personification of several OSes, most famously Windows, by various amateur Japanese artists. A pure fan creation, the appearance of each character is generally consistent among artists. OSes are always portrayed as women, the Windows girls usually as sisters, despite sometimes seeming the same age (or younger).

/collapses and dies

The massive blackout we had on Wed night is quickly fading from the minds of most. The whole experience was creepy more than scary, and I think some people are finding fault for the wrong reasons. For instance, some have complained that they weren't able to reach the police to ask for information, like "Was it JI?" and "When's the power coming back?"

These critics should reflect for a bit and then whack themselves smartly on the head for panicking. The police hotline is for emergencies, not information. If they want information, well, that's what radios are for. Besides, so what if the blackout was because of a terrorist attack? Would that have stopped these critics from wringing their hands? Maybe, if it made them panic some more.

The main concern here should be why this widespread blackout happened in the first place. Five blackouts in the last two years is unacceptable to begin with, and this recent one is by far the most severe of the lot. When all it takes is one malfunctioning valve on Jurong Island (effectively the same as cutting off the flow of natural gas from Indonesia) to result in 70%-80% of Singapore reading the papers by candlelight, it doesn't take a Clausewitz to realise that there's a blatant vulnerability there on the magnitude (or ineptitude) of the Death Star's thermal exhaust port. Government is making the right noises, but we'll see.

... and the freaky-cute limited edition Murakami Takashi piece that came with Figure Oh Issue 71. Sorry 'bout the shakiness, but it was either this one or another with a lot of glare from the plastic packaging. Yeah, can't bear to open it... yet. 

My haul from Kinokuniya last night and tonight.  

I've taken a liking to Ladytron. And Boney M's Ra Ra Rasputin was stuck in my head all of yesterday.

I'm trying to find some common thread between these, and maybe Daft Punk. I've always had trouble telling people what kind of music I like, mainly because I don't think I'm able to properly convey what I mean. How do you represent an aural experience in words? So I usually end up resorting to names of performers rather than naming a genre. I especially have this problem when it comes to electronica. I like some house, but not all house. I like some lounge, but not all lounge. I like some stuff with 80's-style electronica, but I don't go for all 80's-style electronic music. And so on.

That's not really what people expect in response to the question: "What kind of music do you like/listen to?", is it?

Teck Loon brought this to my attention: The Shell Economist Prize. I admit that the first thing that leapt to my mind was the prize money. US$20,000 for the top Gold prize. Two Silver runners-up get US$5,000 each, and five Bronze award winners will take home US$3,000 apiece. Not bad for an essay that's less than 2000 words.

Winning essays from previous years are also on the website. Worth a look.

Given that I've watched Interstella 5555 more than once, it seems fair to conclude that I like that movie:

Like Pink Floyd's The Wall, the music for Discovery and the storyline for Interstella 5555 were conceived simultaneously. The videos for "One More Time" and "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", which had both seen a fair bit of MTV rotation around the time of the album's release, were not simply clever vignettes for the songs, nor was Discovery purely a film score -- in fact, Interstella 5555 makes clear the degree to which each influenced the shape of the other. Ultimately, Daft Punk intended Discovery to be heard in the context of Interstella 5555, and it's no wonder: Matsumoto's animation enlivens some of the less formidable tracks, and the details of scenes in Interstella 5555 often are inspired by the music itself.

Beautiful 70's style animation seamlessly integrated with great electronic tunes, with fine direction. What's not to like about good storytelling?

I had a fantastic weekend, filled with animation, music and laughter. Thank you all! :)

There was an article about the growing popularity of manga drawing courses in today's paper. As usual, our papers do an excellent job of spotting a treand long after it's entrenched itself here.

What was interesting was the unanimous opinion of instructors from all three schools -- that the work produced by students and manga enthusiasts here "lacks maturity".

How true. Technical skill was never an issue, not here. It's imagination; the ability to break out of rehashed plots, slapstick and cliched devices that we lack.

In my personal opinion, this is because the artists tend to be in their teens or young adulthood, and they don't read much outside of Japanese manga. In fact, often not outside particular genres of manga. Without exposure to other forms of story-telling and other drawing styles, no wonder their work lacks depth.

Just watched The Seventh Seal. Gripping stuff, and I'm amazed by the economy of the whole film. Black and white of course, and a modest budget with 35 days of shooting only. The film manages to convey its weighty, existential and theological dilemmas so well with so relatively little. Pure allegory -- and not afraid to flaunt it.

Picking up Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft was one of the best things I did all month. This little gem was lying amidst a messy pile of books in one of the bins at a book fair.

I have come to believe that there is usually little point in rummaging though stacks and mounds of anything at reduced prices, searching for that one object to buy. It's simply not worth the effort. I'm a firm believer in serendipitous finds. If I'm supposed to read it, it will find me. Stephen King's candid little autobiography/writing guide, only proves my point.

If you have been wondering why I have not been writing lately, it's not that I've been doing anything that productive. On the contrary, I was preparing for what turned out to be a tortuous Legend of the Five Rings tournament (termed a Kotei) this past weekend.

I did guess how the weekend was going to turn out. That I actually went ahead with it is probably a testament to my idiotic optimism. Even so, I did not anticipate the degree to which vastly different outcomes depended on the smallest decisions. Almost like butterflies causing hurricanes. I say almost, because it was all luck.

Hence, even though many will call it a learning experience (and I did learn a couple of things too), I still think I would've spent my time more fruitfully by burning the money I've spent on the game and flogging myself repeatedly with one of those flails in Mel Gibson's presumptuous Passion of the Christ.

Without saying, in the grand scheme of things all this is nothing compared to the sheer madness out there. But my regrets twisted like knives in flesh, and the pain is not all gone yet.

To me, Jack Neo's films are the equivalent of morality tales for heartlanders. Unpretentious, straightforward characters coupled with an equally straightforward narrative heavily flavoured with moral messages.

This not to say that the films are inherently bad. On the contrary, Neo makes excellent entertainment with the mix of verbal and visual comedy, original songs that act as commentary, and a script packed with lively dialogue and amiable and sympathetic characters. Home run is the clear exception to this -- Neo's originality zings and zooms when it isn't crimped while reinterpreting someone else's work.

What sets Neo's latest -- The Best Bet (Tu Ran Fa Cai) -- apart from his earlier modern-day parables is a more focused narrative, the predominantly-Hokkien dialogues and experimentation with darker, more violent undertones. Unfortunately, focus groups apparently disliked Neo's attempts at growth as a filmmaker, and he was forced to adjust the movie accordingly, including tacking on an anti-climactic ending out of a Primary Three student's written composition. A criticism of artistic cowardice may be in order here.

But who cares? The Best Bet looks to be another money-spinner for Raintree Pictures (and thus Mediacorp). Jack Neo, in all likelihood, will not see the lion's share of the profits and royalties. The in-your-face product placements do bear slight hints of irreverence but at the end of the day Jack Neo knows that film-making, for his backers, is a business. Some of us may want to sneer at his pandering to the masses, but artistic freedom doesn't pay the bills.

How to make a strangeknight

Ingredients: 1 part intelligence 1 part ambition 1 part empathy

Method: Combine in a tall glass half filled with crushed ice. Top it off with a sprinkle of sadness and enjoy!

Username:

Personality cocktail
From Go-Quiz.com

Am reading Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, the first novel to feature "Lucky" Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. The book is bursting with nautical and historical detail, dialogue slathered with slang and accents, understated humour and vivid glimpses into the risk-filled, uncertain life of a ship's crew.

Fun stuff, fun stuff. I've always had a soft spot for old sailing ships. Nautical terms fascinate me, knots and navigation continue to flummox me. I wished I'd ended up in the Navy for my National Service, even though a former close friend of mine who did receive a posting there complained vehemently about life on a ship. If I recall correctly, his diatribe revolved around seasickness and violent puking. Especially during storms.

Superficially, this site looks like a set of FAQs about a novel that I wrote entitled QUICKSILVER. As time goes on, we hope that it will develop into something a little more than that. We don't know how it will come out. It's an experiment.

Why put the information on such a complicated system, when a simple FAQ is easier? Because we are hoping that the annotations of the book on this site will seed a body of knowledge called the Metaweb, which will eventually be something more generally useful than a list of FAQs about one and only one novel.

Didn't know Shostakovich composed the music for The Battleship Potemkin. I thought that was his 5th Symphony I heard, but when it turns out the 1976 recreated score was a combination of the 10th and the 11th.

I borrowed The Emperor and the Wolf for a kind of trial reading, to help me decide whether I should actually buy it. I doubt I'll be able to go through all 630+ pages (the last 200+ pages comprise an extremely extensive filmography of Kurosawa's and Mifune's works. Mmm... Reference value!) within the three weeks the library has allotted to me. Particularly since I don't have space in my bag for the bulky mass of the US hardcover version, so I won't be lugging it to work too often.

I have tried to explain to people Neal Stephenson's novels Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver and most recently The Confusion, and I find that I fail horribly. Although the flashback-present day method of narration is hardly surprising, I find my explanations sidetracked and warped by attempts to convey the wit, the imaginatively-constructed setpieces that stretch ideas of historical fact, the candid portrayals of characters. Most of all, Stephenson's uncanny ability to take the most esoteric and complicated topics and infuse them with a startling energy and clarity. Suddenly topics like cryptography, trade and chemistry are essential elements in a rip-roaring adventure spanning the entire globe. I can't convey the depth of these ideas purely through words, let alone in an off-the-cuff conversation on an MRT train or over a meal.

We went to see two Iranian films at the Goethe Institut here last night. Fortuitously, copies of this collection of photos by Beat Presser of Herzog at work were still on sale. These volumes were brought in for the Werner Herzog Retrospective, part of the Fringe at this year's Singapore Film Festival. Grabbed a copy at $15, with scenes from Aguirre, The Wrath of God still raw and bleeding in my mind.

Close Up by Abbas Kiarostami was a curious mix of truth and fiction, constantly challenging the divide between some objective reality and the fundamental deception behind acting. But as so many others have already realised and imbibed (and subsequently the fact no longer astonishes them), the camera makes no such distinction.

I enjoyed Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Cyclist more. Everyone naturally gravitates towards pain and suffering.

The Mathematics of the Chinese Calendar.

Ah. Found the font I wanted.

The devil opened up his case
and he said, "I'll start this show."
And fire flew from his fingertips
as he rosined up his bow.

And he pulled the bow across the strings
and it made an evil hiss.
Then a band of demons joined in
and it sounded somethin' like this.

(violin plays)

When the devil finished, Johnny said,
"Well, you're pretty good, old son,
but sit down in that chair right there
and let me show you how it's done."

Fire on the Mountain. Run, Boys, Run!
The Devil's in the House of the Rising Sun.
Chicken in the Bread Pan Pickin' Out Dough.
Granny, Does Your Dog Bite? No, Child, No!

-- The Charlie Daniels Band, The Devil Went Down to Georgia

Well, u-- um, can we come up and have a look?

What Monty Python Character are you?
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Have you read Murakami Haruki's Tony Takitani?

Have you seen the movie website? (requires Japanese browser support).

The one day I don't bring a book or my discman to work, just has to be the day when I have nothing to do, and gobs of minutes to spend reading. Maybe listen to music too.

Ah well. There's always writing.

Hmm. Should I stick with this template? Or go back to my old one?

Decisions, decisions.

Enjoyed Shrek 2 a lot. By now you probably would have heard all about the spoofs, the fine animation, the witty dialogue and the admirable voice acting. So I won't go any further into those. Special mention goes to Antonio Banderas -- his Puss in Boots stole the show imho -- and also to Pui Kwan who burst out singing Holding Out For A Hero together with the Fairy Godmother.

Another good song from the '80s! I used to disown that decade of gaudy hair and bad fashion sense, but I cannot deny the fact that some of the most memorable songs stuck in my head are from that period. Part of the reason has to be that I grew up listening to those songs, but I like to also think that the music back then was better-composed, the singers less mass-produced.

It's incredibly annoying to spend a long time picking a suitable font, and then not have it show up on your screen 'cos your browser doesn't support it.

Thought I'd change my blog template. Bear with us for a while folks, but it's business as usual in the meantime.

This is what the OST for "The Story of Qiu Ju" looks like. The pic's a bit bleached, so make the colours a little bit darker using your imagination.  

To watch this week: Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Battleship Potemkin.

I always stop by HMV whenever I'm in Citylink and have time to kill. This is for three reasons:

1) To sample music

2) To peek at their unofficial bargains table. Wandered in there last night with Amanda and picked up a 1999 Wu Bai and China Blue album -- Bai Ge (Dove) -- and the OST for Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiu Ju Da Guan Si). The former to satisfy my curiosity, the latter purely because of the cool packaging.

3) To gaze lovingly at the Akira Kurosawa: Four Samurai Classics DVD box set. The massive irony that I could have bought that box set instead of blowing my money on L5R cards, is hardly lost on me. In fact it comes to mind every time I heft the package off its place on the shelf. I want to draw comfort from its weight -- The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro . Instead, the burden in my trembling hands reprimands and shames.

btw, Thai Express is a very good place to eat at. Contrary to the smarmy-Chinese-takeaway connotations of the word "Express" in a restaurant name, the food's fine value for money and the decor chic and bright. Am definitely going back.

I missed Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World here the first time round, and regret has been gnawing a little pit in my heart ever since. But no more! Not after rushing to catch the inaugural MDA-Kodak Master Lecture yesterday, at the insanely early time of 6pm. Fortunately I made it with time to spare (and I didn't even need to take a cab).

Master and Commander is awesome on the big screen. Supremely awesome. Intensely detailed. Beautifully shot.

I hung around for the dialogue with cinematographer Russell Boyd, responsible for Master and Commander's Best Achievement in Cinematography Oscar this year. The good man gamely took on all questions with sincerity and honesty. He came across as a bit shy, without any airs whatsoever.

The key points I took away from the dialogue/Q&A were his thoughts on what a cinematographer does (doesn't just work to fulfil the director's vision at the least, and provides his own interpretation and input to complement and enhance that vision at best) and a patient "can-do" attitude towards working with diverse people in a film. Particularly fickle actors. "Roll with the punches," he said.

I'm satisfied with the cheap $12 replica of the One Ring that I got at the Lord of the Rings Exhibition yesterday. Tomorrow's the last day, so I should have expected a crowd. Particularly on a public holiday. Perhaps I should've gone this evening (Open till Midnight!). Then maybe I wouldn't have to bump against parents with irascible kids in tow, find ways around bored girlfriends listening patiently to their boyfriends rationalise Middle-Earth and generally tolerate the bustling throng of humanity crowded into a small space.

It was great seeing all the cool weapons. I continue to be immensely impressed by the sheer amount of detail on the costumes, armor and weapons. Detail is all. The little things count.

Proceeded to Toa Payoh to visit a gaming store tucked away in a little corner of Toa Payoh Central, nestled within an agglutination of HDB flats. I wasn't expecting much, but it really was a hole-in-the-wall kind of shop. No air-conditioning, with enough room inside for one table only.

Considering that L5R is a fairly niche market compared to the slavering hordes that play Magic, WWF Raw and whatever card game is being marketed on Saturday morning cartoons, to hear that a new shop in firm HDB heartlander territory was selling and *gasp* successfully introducing the game to others was more than enough to pique my curiosity (which, admittedly, is an easy enough thing to do).

Went to join Justin for the SFS screening of Young Adam in the evening. I liked the movie better after sleeping on it. Other than the languid pace and some slight suspension of disbelief, I can't really think of anything to criticise. Script, most of the acting, editing and camerawork all very good. It's just that I don't particularly enjoy films about an aimless, amoral character who cannot or will not commit to anything in his life.

Here, the Sight and Sound review does a better job.

A great Hopper, in the paint, is all stillness, silence, solidity. Not the stillness of Vermeer, of stopped yet reverberating time, but a stillness all of his own: the hiatus, the lapse, the longueur, the moment between significant moments. A man staring out of the window while a girl sleeps beside him. A woman seated in the dead light of a theatre during intermission, blank as the safety curtain.

You don't hear the waves of Cape Cod in Hopper's seascapes or the cicadas in his landscapes. There are no crowds or sirens in his cities. All is silence; the mind turned in on itself, thinking, or not quite thinking, the only action. How implausible it would be to enter a Hopper and hear actual sound.

I have been expecting a day like this. When mind and body feel just that little bit out of sync.

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship�s smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can�t hear what you�re sayin�.
When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I can�t explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

----- Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb

Monday already? For a Few Dollars More and The Ipcress File remain unwatched.

I borrowed those two DVDs thinking: "Ok, it's just two. I can handle two. I can watch two at my leisure and not rush them on Monday and Tuesday night."

Should've known better :p

I was on medical leave on Friday for my sore throat and blocked nose (flu?). Spent the afternoon at Kino with Justin, and ended up buying The Edward Said Reader after vacillating over the pricey The Emperor and the Wolf. About S$50 after the 20% discount, but can't I get it for cheaper online? Besides, the library has it. (One copy in Singapore, and on the other side of the island no less.)

In fact, can't I get all of my books for cheaper by shopping online? Sure, spending an afternoon wandering aimlessly and browsing at will has its charms. But for the perenially cash-strapped and frugal, the internet is alluring. Shipping costs can be offset somewhat by ordering in bulk and using vPost. Kinokuniya's 20% discount coupons are not quite beeswax against these virtual siren songs.

First, I need to finish The Confusion. Stephenson has the uncanny knack for weaving the technical and the esoteric into gripping adventures populated by vivid characters and wit. Finance and international trade never sounded so exciting as they do here.

Saturday? Work. Then L5R trading at PI. Then mahjong session with friends. Mahjong's a great game and I enjoy playing it so long as there's no real money involved.

Sunday? Church, nap, then my bro and his family came over.

There we go. A brief accounting of my weekend. Now if my sore throat would just go away...

That boy needs therapy, psychosomatic
That boy needs therapy, purely psychosomatic
That boy needs therapy
Lying down on the couch, what does that mean?
You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!
What does that mean? That boy needs therapy,
I'm gonna kill you, that boy needs therapy,
Ranagazoo, let's have a tune,
Now when I count three,
That... that... that.. boy.. boy needs therapy,
He was white as a sheet, and he also made false teeth

Avalanches above, business continues below,
Did I ever tell you the story about,
Cowboys! M... M.. M.. Midgets and indians and... Fron.. Frontier Psychiatrist,
I... I felt strangely hypnotised,
I was in another world, a world of 20,000 girls,
And milk! Rectangles, to an optometrist! The man with the golden eyeball,
And tighten your buttocks, pour juice on your chin,
I promised my girlfriend... a violin

-- The Avalanches, Frontier Psychiatrist

Out of the 4 I borrowed last week, I only managed to watch two. Fellini's 8 1/2 and Danny and Oxide Pang's Bangkok Dangerous. Much has already been written about the former. All I will add is that I enjoyed the fusion of fantasy and memory immensely.

(I will bite off a more manageable chunk next time. 2 DVDs?)

Bangkok Dangerous is a good debut, although I don't care much for the Pang Brothers' constant use of cuts to speed up the movie. Prepare yourself for a very shaky camera, and the most straightforward of plots with equally simple characters. Which isn't too bad with me so long as it's told well. The Pang brothers' no-frills treatment of violence is refreshing. Death straight up and undiluted; people die and hitmen run like mad. There is nothing cool about this underworld.

The problem is, it's been done before. For all the Pang brothers' stop-motion, quick filter changes and other camera tricks, their movie just isn't exceptional in any way, like a competent cafeteria cook.

The soundtrack was horrible though. Mostly limp techno, and the final piece did not sound appropriate at all.

The use of different film media within the movie itself is an interesting touch. For instance Kong's childhood looks like it was shot in grainy overexposed Super 8, like an old home video. But sometimes the effect obscures, as in Kong's final assassination which is nearly impossible to decipher due to the intense graininess.

In all not a bad flick, not as pretentious as some of the stuff we're seeing out of HK (e.g. Blood Brothers). And Premsinee Ratanasopha (Fon) is such cute eye candy ^_^

Bhutan's stunning mountainous landscape and straightforward characterisation are the main selling points of Travellers and Magicians. The landscape is simply spectacular. The cast, mostly first-timers, give refreshingly believable performances. Director Khyentse (pron. KINT-say) Norbu has a fine visual sense (for instance, the scene where Deki peeks out at Tashi from behind lush blue cloth) and his script is simple without being inane, if a bit slow-paced. Depending on how much patience you have, your interest may flag quickly.

If there's a moral to this fable (and it's tempting to extract one since Norbu is supposed to be the third reincarnation of a Lama), it's simply to not take what you have for granted. Then again if I were the government official in the film, well-respected by all, with job security and the distinct possibility of marrying a cute, gentle wife, I wouldn't be going to America either. But maybe that's just me.

I liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the clever script and the visuals. My heart has a soft sympathetic spot for goofy, maladjusted individuals trying to get by. Moreover, the literal disintegration of memories was a joy to watch, together with the visual representation of a mental landscape where geographical distance and physical presence have no meaning.

Justin appears to hate the movie (and Kaufman) for its narcissism. After all, Joel isn't really speaking to Clementine in his memories. He's actually interacting with his idea of Clementine.

(This of course begs the question of what relationships really consist of -- do we really fall in love with people? Or ideas of people?)

So Joel is essentially playing with his own mind, and this does follows Kaufman's tendency towards obsessive / narcissistic scripts where the audience endures his (or a character's) navel-gazing. The worst culprit is of course, Adaptation.

The fact that Joel is essentially messing within the confines of his head on a solo adventure reveals some major plotholes and a deus ex machina. The role of Patrick is there specifically to trigger Joel's resistance. And how did Joel know where to go at the end? If his memories of Clementine were all wiped out, you would have to conclude that there must have been something beyond memory that egged him on to go. I suppose you could attribute that to some concept of the Subconscious or Unconscious (and indeed Mary's and Clementine's behaviour indicate that love is more than memories, coincidence and conscious choice).

So is love hardwired in us somehow? Or predetermined? Eternal Sunshine seems to indicate through well-paced clever visuals, quirky characters and good dialogue that there is some innate element to attraction beyond the conscious. Depending on your outlook on life specifically your opinion of love, this is either depressing, uplifting or trivial.

In all, Eternal Sunshine is a clever film. Interesting and funny with bubbly performances from all. Justin calls it "psychotherapy for the masses". At S$8.50, it's a cheap but engaging thrill.

btw, Lacuna, Inc

Weekend movie report:

Travellers Eternal and Sunshine of the Magicians Spotless Mind

If you didn't know already, the "thousand ships" reference is not from the Iliad at all, but from Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Basically Faustus meets Helen, who ended up in Hell, and he says:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships /
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Mmm. Iambic pentameter rolls so nicely off the tongue.

Watched Troy yesterday with my bro. I was reluctant to do so, but there wasn't an evening screening for Van Helsing at that cinema. Not that I thought the latter was any better than the former. Van Helsing is just shorter and less pretentious in a Marvel vs. Capcom kind of way. But it's always been Wolverine vs. the whole frigging world anyhow :p

The only things I enjoyed in the entire film (seeing as I'm a heterosexual male and hence do not lust after well-built, half-naked men in skirts) were:

1) The balls of fire scene. Very cool concept.

2) The Hector vs. Achilles duel. Excellent forms and choreography. The sequence appeared to have been inspired by 70's and 80's kungfu flicks. Elements like Eric Bana's exaggerated fatigue and Brad Pitt's pauses while in stance and trapping moves. And the end of the fight comes abruptly after a blurred flurry of strokes. If you still fail to get the idea, the background music for the duel comprises solely drumbeats a la Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi's night fight in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

3) Some nicely composed shots e.g. Achilles against a soft morning sky, with the smouldering pyre dominating the screen.

Things I found curious:

1) Characterisations. Achilles as uber-soldier with the EQ of a 5 year-old. Agamemnon as slimy politician.

2) Why can't Eric Bana inflect?

3) Why did the scriptwriters create such a flimsy premise for the wooden horse? Odysseus, brilliant strategist and cunning fox that he's supposed to be, gets inspired by a soldier who's whittling a toy horse from his kid. (That was when we walked out, by the way. Out of all the characters in the Iliad, I'd always liked Odysseus the best.)

4) James Horner seems to have run out of ideas for his music. For Troy, he seems to have dipped liberally into Shostakovich's 5th Symphony at least (I've heard Stargate and Star Trek II as well, but will need to confirm that), and apparently hired the same singer who ululated in Gladiator.

I'm not gonna spend more time stringing together whole sentences for this underwhelming effort. Slow-paced, with bland dialogue peppered with throwaway lines that I will use with heavy irony in social situations for hilarity. At least the script is internally consistent (e.g. we see Lego -- umm... Paris training his archery skills early on. Guess how Achilles dies?). The constant references to the plight of the common soldier and his family do add a little more depth and variety to the dialogue. Then again this pretty but emasculated Iliad needs all the help it can get.

Where are the good movies? Is there no-one else? Is there no-one else?

Added Errant Story to the side menu. Poe's pretty talented, and he's clearly improved since Exploitation Now ^_^;;; Like having a real plot, for instance.

If you were to look at the disaster area my desk has become, you will notice 4 DVDs, all bearing labels indicating that they are the property of the National Library Board. These borrowed materials are the happy consequence of the upgrading of my membership to the exalted rank of Premium (S$21 including GST). It's a great way to raise funds, and one of the ways in which our public library system has been shaken up (mostly for the better) in the last 5-6 years.

Unfortunately I will not be able to watch 8 1/2, M, The Graduate and Bangkok Dangerous all within 7 days (with no renewal of loans). Not with all the other things I should be doing. Like paperwork for interviews later this year. Like watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and other good recent releases. Like playing with the well-used 2.0 megapixel digicam that Amanda wants to sell me for cheap. Like listening to music. Like sleeping more than 4 hours a night.

I am saturated with possibilities. That makes it more difficult to choose. I have nothing to complain about. :)

Caught Blood Brothers (Jiang Hu) last night with Justin at the SFS core screening. Now for my take on Infernal Affairs: The Alternate Universe.

It's an oft-hackneyed theme in slick packaging. No grittiness, no blood and gore (very odd to see parangs and knives remain shiny while people are slashing with them. Did the director run out of money for fake blood? Either that or teflon-coated steel.). Instead, if this were your first movie about HK triads, you'd think that every gangster had smooth baby-bum complexions when young and dress in a combination of expensive clothes and accessories without any modicum of fashion sense.

Whatever. The vets more or less perform as expected, but only Andy Lau and Jacky Cheung get things to do. Edison Chan and Shawn Yue still cannot act their way out of a meadow.

But that's assuming that you haven't been disoriented by all the camera changes, rapid cuts and visual tricks that director Wong Ching Po throws around. Blood Brothers is damn pretty. There's no doubt about it. If you want to study lighting, costuming and composition, you can't go very far wrong with this.

I hesitate to call it style though. That sounds like the director actually knew what he was doing other than throwing lots of disparate elements together.

Well, actually, maybe there was some kind of consistency. Mostly low shots, rapid cuts and slow-mo overkill.

What's with all the slow-mo? Any cinematic excuse for slow-mo, no matter how cliched, is in this film. Smoking a cigarette? Slow-mo. Cocking an automatic? Slow-mo. Stepping outside? Slow-mo. Fighting and getting slashed? Slow-mo. Big fight at the end? Slow-mo slow-mo slow-mo slow-mo slow-mo. I'm surprised he didn't shoot someone peeing in slow-mo.

Some call that style. It looks to me like a cover-up for lousy storytelling.

Plotwise the film is predictable in its set-pieces. No surprises there even though the director tries his darndest to confuse the audience at the beginning with rapid cuts back and forth across the conversations of 3 sub-bosses. So-so execution of the twist at the end. And if you didn't understand the temporal shift by the climactic (and incredibly cliched) fight scene, the director rams it down your throat through two lengthy sequences after that. Y'know, for all those viewers with IQs below 100.

The pacing was actually quite good up till the part where Yik goes back to look for Yoyo. After that the movie starts to drag considerably. The robbery sequence has a nice dreamlike touch, but it boggles the imagination that so many moneychangers would remain open so late into the night. A few Wong Kar Wai touches -- the 60's style ballad and the shot of Yoyo leaving the hotel room. Otherwise, Blood Brothers is a mishmash of techniques, more MTV special than thriller.

Heard an ad for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on the radio this morning, and consequently ELO's Mr Blue Sky was stuck. in. my. head all the way till after lunch.

I'm genuinely looking forward to this movie. Adaptation was a blast, and I wish I'd caught Being John Malkovich on the big screen. The world could do with more writers like Charlie (and Donald, bless 'is soul) Kaufman.

I gave in and bought Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, Book 2 of The Baroque Cycle. This time I went for the US hardcover version over the UK trade paperback. The warm coppery dust jacket of the former appealed to me far more than the UK version, and Borders was selling both at the same price. Moreover, I think hardcovers stand a better chance of not deteriorating in the hands of my older brother :p

I realise that when placed back-to-back, Books 1 and 2 will not match since my copy of Quicksilver hails from England. I figure I will try to look for the US hardcover of Quicksilver sometime. The dust jacket for that is rather attractive too, done up in gunmetal. The only reason why I got the UK one is because the US ones were sold out at the time.

And when I find it, I will have an excuse to read it all over again.

It costs far too much to drink alcohol here.

HMV's having a sale. Picked up The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Better late than never I guess! And under the benevolent influence of Vaya), a budget DVD of Kurosawa Akira's brilliant epic The Seven Samurai and a similarly no-frills VCD of the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou. The bill came to about S$30 altogether -- which was how much I spent drinking with some friends later in the evening, after a dinner to celebrate a birthday.

Alcohol costs far too much here. I'd rather have good movies and music.

Gnocchi Seauton! #63

Your score was 92. Very quirkyalone:
Relatives may give you quizzical looks, and so may friends, but you know in your heart of hearts that you are following your inner voice. Though you may not be romancing a single person, you are romancing the world. Celebrate your freedom on National Quirkyalone Day, February 14th!

How quirkyalone are you?

Got no time for some of your fave horror classics?

The Exorcist in 30 Seconds with Bunnies

The Shining in 30 Seconds with Bunnies

I passed a neighbourhood electrical appliance shop on my way home last night, and playing over the speakers was some crappy Eurobeat remix of the Ending Theme from Vandal Hearts.

This turn-based strategy game for the Playstation was quite good, and the Ending Theme (the Opening Theme is a variation on the Ending) is unique. It's sung in a Slavic language (Serbian? Croatian? Whatever it is they speak in Yugoslavia :p) with bits of French in it. A lilting, haunting melody that tugs at the senses despite the unintelligibility of the lyrics.

The lousy techno in the remix ruined the song completely.

Yikes! I don't blog for a weekend, and I come back to a redesigned Blogger that looks like a preschool textbook.

I still suck at L5R :p I will probably stop playing after Kotei on 19 June, and spend my time on money on more fulfilling pursuits -- like photography or film. Or a new digicam, or thumbdrive/MP3 player -- you get the idea.

And if anyone -- anyone! -- can tell me where to find a copy of The Avalanches Since I Left You here please let me know? :(

In daylights,
In sunsets,
In midnights,
In cups of coffee,
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife

525600 minutes to ORD!

I arrived back in Singapore on Monday. Since then, I've been busy and have been surviving on about 4 hours of sleep since Monday.

Don't feel like blogging at all.

Oh yes -- welcome home Justin. Now I want to travel some more :/

Last blog before I head up to KL for the weekend.

Finished Oryx and Crake. The road to Hell is paved with corporate intentions and personal tragedy.

My final films of this year's Film Fest:

City Bus: Fun.

High Noon in Jakarta: Interesting look at Abdurrahman Wahid's standoff with Wiranto early in the former's presidency. Hindsight adds layers of pathos onto the events depicted. As everyone knows, Gus Dur was effectively ousted (though he still remains a popular leader in the NU) and Wiranto stands an excellent chance of becoming the next President of Indonesia -- the exact inverse of the odds of him ever being hauled in front of a human rights abuses tribunal.

Zombie Dog: Directed by outspoken and eccentric S'porean film critic Toh Hai Leong, this is supposed to be a mockumentary about the making of a splatterhouse film by Toh. A better attempt than Djinn's Perth, but too many Eric Khoo influences and the film appears to be all about Toh's personal neuroses. The script is by and large darkly funny, but sometimes the self-referential irony gets too repetitive and cumbersome. Nice try, but no cigar.

See y'all later.

I'm pushing an elephant up the stairs
I'm tossing out punchlines that were never there
Over my shoulder a piano falls
Crashing to the ground

-- REM, The Great Beyond

Perth by Ong Lay Jinn a.k.a. Djinn, was average. Nice effort, but an unfocused and rambling movie, with not a few inconsistencies and stilted dialogue. The screening was made worse by the constant power trips in the building that interrupted the film several times.

Lim Kay Tong gave a decent performance, but the stage veteran had an atrocious accent. He sounded like a cardboard Italian don half the time while the other half was spent straining (and failing) to prevent his usual British-tinged diction from slipping out.

Sunny Pang's and Victory Selvam's performances were the best part of the movie, imho. Both flesh their roles out admirably with flair and panache, considering that they had secondary roles based on stereotypes: Pang as a gangster and Selvam as an old army buddy of Lim's character.

I really, really wanted this movie to be good. But it was so-so, at best. :(

Finished Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Chabon is hardly economical with his words. The prose is extremely descriptive and florid, the profusion of long latinates and unusual metaphors threatening to crowd themselves off the page. The result is a vividly imagined, well-written blend of history, fiction and changing zeitgeist. It's a good book to travel with -- short chapters, undemanding of the reader.

Takeshi Miike's Gozu is weird. Just damn weird. Funny, surreal and the strangest film I've ever seen.

Took the day off to sleep. Got up and watched Otomo Katsuhiro's Roujin Z on DVD :P The aged issue is always relevant of course -- maybe that helps explain why 13 years on, the film still hasn't lost any of its ridiculous, satirical bite.