Just in case you're as slow as I am:
Oh my god:
Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warm bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.
-- Goethe, Roman Elegies
Lethe: In Greek mythology, one of the rivers of Hades whose waters will cause complete forgetfulness.
I must read Goethe.
(I found the line from a review of You, The Living.)
During the Q&A after Village People Radio Show, director Amir Muhammad said that the Malaysian government had banned his film, giving him seven reasons why. He said he responded with 14 rebuttals. He didn't win, but just read reason number five. Or rather, butir nombor lima:
5. Filem ini boleh sahaja dimulakan oleh perkataan yang tertera di skrin, contohnya “Amaran Oleh Kerajaan Malaysia: Fahaman Komunisme Dilarang Dan Anda Ditegah Daripada Meniru Ideologi Merbahaya Ini!’ Ayat ini boleh terbit dalam saiz font yang amat besar. Ayat ini juga boleh berkelip-kelip seperti lampu neon supaya lebih jelas. Kalau tak cukup satu tanda seru boleh guna lima atau sepuluh.
Fuck lah this is hilarious but I can't even begin to capture the humour in English, because -- need I say it again -- things just sound very funny in Malay. (Especially things to do with technology and modernity, because these words just don't exist in Malay and so we have to adopt the English words and pronounce them in Malay, which sounds terribly weird but also painfully funny when given the right context.) But let me try anyway:
]]>5. This film could just be prefaced with some words emblazoned across the screen, for example "Warning from the Government of Malaysia: The Communist Ideology Is Against The Law And You Are Forbidden To Adopt This Dangerous Ideology!" This sentence could be shown in a very large font size. This sentence could also flash like a neon light so that it will be clearer. If one exclamation mark is not enough, you can use 5 or 10.
I watched my last two films of the SIFF today, and it was a wonderful SIFF this year. I attribute this mainly to the fact that I have gotten better at picking which films to watch, from the past 4 years of hits and many, many misses.
I want to write about my favourites, because they made me so happy, and because I think you should watch them if you ever get the chance. I really hope some of these make it to wide release and/or DVD.
Grbavica
14-year old brat of a daughter wants to go on a school trip, and her mother takes on a third job to save up money for it. Thing is, the daughter could go for free if she just brought a certificate to school showing that her father was a shaheed, a soldier who died defending Bosnia in the war. For some reason the mother doesn't have this cert and comes up with many excuses about why she can't get a copy of it. The daughter begins to suspect that her mother's been lying to her about her father's identity all this while. The secret's finally unravelled in an explosion of a climax that shows how war can still tear people's lives to pieces 14 years after it's ended.
I liked how this movie was political without mentioning politics at all. Solid acting and wonderful dialogue. From the Slate review: "Didn't I see you at a postmortem identification?" It's a pickup line no one should ever have to use. But Grbavica, like its heroine, is brave enough to try to find love among the ruins.
We Shall Overcome
I'm just a sucker for Danish films. I started out my SIFF adventure 4 years ago thinking Iranian films held the key to my soul, but now I realise I love Danish films.
This film was based on a true story. It's set in a rural Danish village in the 70s. It starts with a 10-year-old boy, Fritz, witnessing his father going into an anxiety attack and getting shipped off into a mental asylum. He returns soon enough, but by that time another problem has cropped up: Fritz gets badly abused by his school principal. His family decides to try and get him fired, but this means a long and difficult fight against the school board, which is in the principal's hands. Consequently, his mother, who's the school nurse, gets fired and his dad falls into a relapse of depression. Amidst all of this, Fritz makes friends with a hippie school teacher who encourages his interest in history, civil rights and Martin Luther King, and decides to change his name to Martin, which then leads to many surprisingly funny moments in the film.
Well it was just a nice, enjoyable film. The children were very good actors. I liked how all the different sub-plots weaved into each other and created a satisfying whole. One might say that the director was taking it a bit far, trying to equate Fritz's fight against the principal with the American civil rights movement, but I think it was more a way of showing that Fritz was a weird, sensitive kid with interests that were unusual for a 10-year-old Danish boy.
Ten Canoes
The film's narrated by an aboriginal Australian, speaking to us today. He's telling a story about his ancestors - two brothers. In this story, the older brother is telling the younger brother a story about their ancestors, whom our narrator calls the ancients. (Still with me?) So basically we're really watching a movie about the ancients. The ancients (and the ancestors too, for that matter), all walk around naked. I thought you might like to know.
Ok so anyway the story about the ancients: a younger brother lusts after his older brother's third wife. What follows is a really funny and touching morality play about why younger brothers shouldn't lust after their older brothers' wives. This story is being told by ancestor-older-brother to ancestor-younger-brother because -- guess what -- the latter is lusting after the former's third wife.
Bah. This all sounds way too complicated. In short, it's a brilliant film. It's really funny and charming. Unlike watching a documentary, this film doesn't exoticise this aboriginal, butt-naked tribe. Each member of the tribe has his/her own unique personality and quirks. I mean, it's really like watching any other film about any random bunch of people in modern society. You don't for a moment think, oh this is so eye-opening, these people have such cute customs or anything like that. You do come away realising that these people are exactly like you -- they have the same feelings and jealousies and idiosyncracies and human flaws and sense of humour -- and I think that's more effective than any documentary or history book in making you realise just how cruel colonial rule was.
This film was screened alongside Ten Feet Tall, a short film also from Australia. It was a shite short film, but it amused me and Um.a in that after the first line was spoken by a character, she turned to me and said, "For a moment I forgot that Australians spoke English and I was wondering where the subtitles were," and I replied, "Oh my God... me too." Signs you're too fucking artsy-fartsy for your own good, anyone?
Village People Radio Show
Well I'm partial to any film that's made by articulate, funny, intelligent and yet down-to-earth directors. The documentary's about ex-Communist Malaysians now living in a village in southern Thailand. How they lived in jungles for decades, fighting the colonists and then fighting Malaysia's own independent government. Old people are the best interviewees, they say the funniest things in the most offhand manner. And this while talking about living a lifetime of guerilla warfare.
Best line: "Korek, korek, korek, bakar." (Dig, dig, dig, burn.)
This was an old man talking about how he dug into his own leg and cauterised himself when he got shot and paralysed. He healed himself, too: "I could climb mountains after that."
Oh, also --
Old man: We would use jungle herbs as medicine. Collect them and pound them with chicks.
Amir: With chicks?!
Old man: With chicks.
Having Amir Muhammad there himself to explain some of the things in the film was great. His Q&A session was almost as entertaining as the film itself. He said, "If you liked this film, please tell your friends to watch it. If you hated it, please tell your enemies to watch it."
It's being shown in theatres here from May. Go watch it!
Black Gold
Coldplay fans already know what this documentary's all about: Make Trade Fair. I wouldn't bore the rest of you.
Not the most well-made or gripping documentary I've ever watched. Not as captivating as say, The Corporation or Supersize Me. But makes a good point and sends it across effectively enough. I would have liked it if it had examined whether products with the Fairtrade logo really do give their third world producers a better life or if they're just there to make us bourgeois capitalist pigs feel a bit better about ourselves.
Well, as my public service, I urge you to visit these websites: The Official Black Gold Site and Make Trade Fair.
After the Wedding
My second Danish film of the festival. Mads Mikkelsen, who looks like Viggo Mortensen, plays Jacob, a social aid worker in India. One day a Danish businessman mysteriously offers him a load of money to help fund his ailing orphanage. But to get the money Jacob must return to Denmark. One meeting with the businessman leads to a wedding invitation, and from there a major family drama spirals.
What a satisfying film. The kind of human drama in the likes of In the Bedroom. Nothing is predictable and everything that happens, every line that is spoken, has a point. Mads Mikkelsen has a commanding screen presence. He's like the Danish Edward Norton. And I really like that the ending isn't wrapped up too nicely. I don't like super-happy, neat endings.
The Boss of It All
I LOVE THIS FILM. No synopsis will do it justice. It's a Dogme film, which is this Danish filmmaking movement which encourages directors to strip their films down to the barest essentials -- no lighting, no props, no costumes, a lot of improvisation by the actors. Lars von Trier was one of the founders of the Dogme movement and he's known for directing a lot of super-artsy, weird films that people either hate or love. Well this film I think everyone can love, because it's a satire of von Trier's own filmmaking style.
It was hilarious. The entire theatre was laughing like mad throughout the whole film. It was magic. Best film of the festival for me. I had high expectations for the film because it's said to be von Trier's best yet, and after coming out of After the Wedding I was really thinking, this film better blow me away or it'd be a depressing end to the SIFF for me and it did! It blew me away!
In short: Ravn hires Kristoffer, an out-of-work actor, to pretend to be the boss of his company. Ravn is the real boss, but ever since he started the company 10 years ago he's been pretending that someone else, "the boss of it all", has been making all the decisions - especially the unpopular ones - in the company. (The staff in the company think that the boss of it all lives in the US.) But now Ravn needs the boss of it all to come to life because he wants to sell the company, and the Icelander who's interested in buying the company will only deal with the boss of it all. But what should have been a very simple job -- all Kristoffer needs to do is sign a fake name on a contract -- becomes complicated when Kristoffer befriends the the staff and realises that they're all being exploited by the system.
The film starts out very strong but ends a bit flatly, but it doesn't really matter. I had a fantastic time.
]]>Now, up to a certain point, that's absolutely fine. I mean I'm all for semi-clad oiled men shouting at each other with beards, that's fine, it's not a problem. The problem is that people start interpreting this thing politically and some people said ah well it's a proto-fascist tale... and people have compared it to Leni Riefenstahl, the whole thing about its Nazi mentality. Other people have said no actually it's a parable of Iraq. There have been statements from some people in Iran saying it's anti-Iranian. The fact is none of the above are true. It is a film about well-oiled men in their pants shouting at each other. Now, that's all it is. That's not necessarily a bad thing but historically it has nothing to say whatsoever, philosophically it has nothing to say whatsoever, politically it has nothing to say whatsoever. Aesthetically it's just that -- it's pecs and abs and dabs and oil and sweat and grunting and shouting.
-- Mark Kermode on 300, BBC Five Live
Azur and Asmar
I watched Azur and Asmar at The Cathay's 1st Anniversary Film Festival this evening. It's an animated feature in French and Arabic, based on one of the stories in A Thousand and One Nights.
Two boys are brought up as brothers, one the blond and blue-eyed son of a nobleman and the other the son of a Moroccan nurse who regards them both as her children. One day the nobleman carts his son off to study in the city and kicks the nurse and her son out of his house.
Years later the French boy returns, an adult now, and tells his father that he's venturing to the land across the sea to find and free the Fairy Djinn of the childhood tales that his nurse had recited to him. The story then follows his travails in Morocco as he goes in search of his long-lost surrogate mother and brother and the Fairy Djinn whom he knows he is destined to marry.
Ok, it sounds really corny when you read the plot summary, but I really couldn't help but adore this film. It contains no pretences or irony whatsoever. Unlike the animated features you get from Hollywood these days, there are no puns, no wisecracks, no bizarre kitschy elements that wink at the parents: "we know you're only here because of your kids, and you'd really rather watch a proper film, so here's a little thanks from us". But because it doesn't try, it really is a sweet and loveable film. Just sincere and child-like -- a real family film.
The art is beautiful too. The drawings are old-school, they look like paper cutouts. Of course the film looks like a child's work compared to the computer-designed animations of Pixar and Dreamworks, but I actually prefer it. Maybe because it takes me back to the cartoons of my own childhood, before cartoons started looking creepily like real people? The colours come in the shades available in a box of crayons, but nevertheless dazzling to look at, especially when the characters are walking through the Moroccan forest of palm trees, in the Moroccan souk in daylight and in the final setting, the Cave of Light.
The Russian commented that the film was rather blatant about its message of - for lack of a better phrase - racial harmony, but as he himself reasoned, you have to remember that it's a show for children.
I'd totally get this film on DVD if I see it, and watch it with my mother.
Familia
Ironically, Familia is about mothers and daughters, but I would sooner blind myself than watch it with my mother.
Don't get me wrong -- I liked this film, but a) there's a blowjob scene and b) there's a blowjob scene. Do you really need more than one reason not to watch a film with your mum when there's a blowjob scene in it?
Familia is a Canadian film. I am guessing Quebecois, specifically, because it's in French. I watched it at Alliance Française last night with Joon, who got free tickets from the Canadian High Commission. It pays to hang out with entertainment journalists!
The film follows the lives of two women and their daughters. Michelle and Janine are complete opposites: Michelle's a free-spirited gambling addict who barely notices what her daughter's up to, Janine is her sister-in-law, an uptight, successful interior designer whom her daughter Gabrielle calls "Hitler". Michelle gets into heavy debt and runs away with her daughter Margeurite -- they seek shelter in Janine's house.
Throughout their stay, which was initially meant to last just one night but stretches into weeks, the two daughters, Margeurite and Gabrielle, become best friends. Margeurite brings Gabrielle to her first party where she drinks and smokes pot for the first time. Gabrielle shows Margeurite the wonders of online sex and Internet porn.
In the meantime their relationship with their mothers become increasingly tense. Margeurite resolves never to turn into her mother but is it too late? Gabrielle is just trying to break free of her mother's increasingly suffocating over-protectiveness.
The mothers too, have their own problems: Michelle's trying to break her gambling habit but keeps failing and eventually resorts to stealing from Janine. Janine is coping with her husband's infidelity, as well as an unwanted loafer in her house. And both mothers are slowly realising that their daughters hate them.
The film starts with a slow shot of a foetus, and a voice-over rambling on about DNA and whether we inherit genes that determine how we behave as a person, or whether we can try to "disown" some of the genetic traits that our parents have given us, such as agressiveness or addictive personalities. And so we are meant to understand that the film will be an examination of this question. Will the two daughters turn out just like their mothers against their own wills?
Personally I think the film could do without this introduction. It works just fine simply as a depiction of two families, their struggles and their resolutions. It's an emotionally satisfying film -- the characters grow throughout the narrative and become better people by the end of it, more well-rounded, enriched people. It wasn't saccharine nor utterly depressing. It was completely believable and I could relate to almost every one of the main characters. The acting was spot on. But it would have been more satisfying had the film not made me this promise of some kind of pseudo-scientific dissection of genetic inheritances -- that's just impossible to do in a two-hour family drama.
Anyone with a mother or a daughter (especially if you're female yourself) would probably be able to relate to this film: the conflict between not wanting to turn out like your mother but realising that you are anyway, the frustration that comes with loving someone you didn't choose to love and thus having to accept all the ways that they are imperfect or different from you, the sheer torment of being an adolescent girl (and raising one).
I'm reminded of a scene from The Virgin Suicides, when the doctor says to Cecilia Lisbon after her attempted suicide, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad it gets," and Cecilia replies, "Obviously Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl."
The schedule for the 20th Singapore International Film Festival is out. I've spent the past three days making and refining my list. This is the final, pretty-much-confirmed version. Would you like to catch any of these with me? Tell me by Friday -- I'll be booking tickets on Saturday.
The Russian had to review Borat on Thursday. He invited me. He told me the press screening was at Yangtze. I said, are you serious? He said yes. I still thought he was joking. Then I asked the reviewer from my station if she was going to watch it too. She said yes. I asked, it's at Yangtze right? She said, when my girlfriend told me about that I thought she was joking but now that you've said it I guess it must be true.
So we went to Yangtze. It was creepy. After taking a lift to the fourth floor, you see a dinghy corridor and it's not at all clear how you're supposed to get to the cinema. And once you reach the box office, you will look around and think, this is a cinema???!! There were four movies showing at the cinema: three soft- to hardcore porn films and Borat.
Inside the theatre, the floor was sloping. The seats were worn with decades of use and quite uncomfortable. The screen was small. The curtain covering it actually looked like a curtain; it was maroon and scalloped. The last time I was in a theatre like that, I was watching He-Man: Masters of the Universe.
It also smelled bad.
Obviously, the film distributors thought it would be "cool" to make us feel as if we were watching the film in Kazakhstan itself. But it was not "cool". It was more "gross" and "like totally creepy".
Before the film started I was convinced that the whole set-up was a hoax for Channel 5's latest gag show, tentatively titled "Laughter Nation" and at the time the movie was supposed to start, a person would instead come out to the front of the theatre and announce that this wasn't, in fact, the media screening but an elaborate prank, haha!
This did not happen, but there was a man who walked around before the film with a video camera, shooting everyone and trying to make people talk like Borat to the camera, so I am not fully convinced yet that my suspicions will not come true.
My only resolution for 2007: Watch more films!
Ok ok, also: Don't stop learning French!
I don't have much time to check movie listings regularly, so if you happen to know that any of these are showing and want to catch it too, drop me a line:
Borat (duh)
The Last King of Scotland
The Science of Sleep
The Queen
The Aura
Fast Food Nation
Running with Scissors
Volver
A Guide to Recognising Your Saints
The History Boys
Little Children
Marie Antoinette
Our Daily Bread
Shut Up and Sing (if they do show it here. Do we have a Dixie Chicks fan base here?)
The Good German
Notes on a Scandal
Quinceañera
There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction.
...The last celebrity to be consulted on his pre-apocalypse plans was a reclusive, mustachioed novelist not known for his interest in golf, tennis or bridge (though he had once tried checkers, and twice aided in the launch of a kite), a man who had spent the last fourteen years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woolen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bed lamp.
-- Excerpt from How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, Alain de Botton
I've wanted this book for a long time but I can't find it in stores here. But anyway, I posted this excerpt because I read a post on So.o Hia.n's blog with the same title, and it prompted me to google the book in case there were free copies to be found online, and then I found this excerpt, and I liked it.
I like the whole first paragraph of this excerpt. We spend most of our time each day with people we don't really know. We act happy around them -- of course sometimes we truly are, but we put on a smile and a carefree air even when the suffering of Afghanistan is resting on our haunches -- and they, too, keep up the pretense of being so contented always. But there are so many of them, and one of you, so you think you must be the only one who's truly sad. The whole world is happy, but why does it always rain on me?
But it's not true. Everyone's fucked up in their own little way. But it helps to maintain the facade. We can only tolerate the unhappiness of a few certain people. These are the people who become our friends -- the people we don't find annoying when they're whining.
Be grateful you have friends.
And that second paragraph I like because it's just neatly written. This is a guy who barely made it out of bed each day, but with vivid imagery the writer makes his life sound endearing, amusing. I particularly love the line "though he had once tried checkers, and twice aided in the launch of a kite". The magic's in the details.
I also like that line because it reminds me of my own lack of talents (as a good and wise musician-painter-philanthropist-filmmaker friend said, "But you can read and write!") and makes me feel better about it, because it shows that if I ever had to write an autobiography (I can also dream), I can just use cute imagery to make the reader fall in love with my persona.
The google search also brought me to this New York Times review of the book. The article was titled The Nine Habits of Highly Effective Proustians and it contains this line:
How Proust Can Change Your Life is witty, funny and tonic -- and it provides ample justification for all the college courses that make Proust required reading. Mr. de Botton reminds us that À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, like all great literature, isn't just a means of garnering academic credits or an esthetic height to be scaled. It's good medicine: it can cure what ails us -- but only if we stick with the nine-step program.
Am I the only one who thinks this article might have been the inspiration for Little Miss Sunshine?
Just in case you're as slow as I am: