Momotom Films

Unlikely love stories

2006-07-27T16:02:00.001+01:00

You were made of every love and each regret

A recent post discussion over at Dr Mabuse segued into a small conversation about love stories in films or, rather (and more interestingly), unlikely love stories... ie, not your straightforward they-meet-and-fall-in-love types and variants, but films which aren't really about a romantic relationship at all, but, in the final analysis, are actually nothing but.

Which leads me to think about July Rhapsody as probably one of the most unlikeliest-love-story-films I could come up with. An astonishing film, it revolves around the lower middle-class family of Lam Yiu-Kwok (Jacky Cheung), who is a hardworking teacher, a family secret and Lam's complex relationship with Choy-Lam (Karena Lam), one of his students. In lesser hands, the Lolita motif, in its easy attraction and scandal, would simply take over the film, but the deftness of director Ann Hui is that she manages to balance all three key aspects of the plot (the family, the secret, the relationship) with beautiful skill, so that the sum is more than its parts: in the ensuing mesh, the film ends up being about all three aspects, yet at the same time none of them.

Why is this an unlikely-love-story-film? Because (without giving too much away), in the end it is a film about a couple who stays together because of a romance they did not share and a fate they did not ask for but a life which they have made together over twenty years. There is devotion, there is duty, yet one cannot help but ask in the end: is there love?

"You were made of every love and each regret", from Elvis Costello's "Still", is probably one of the most beautiful lyrics I have ever heard. "Still" is a love song, sung by a man "to a marvelous girl covered up in my coat". It is not just an assertion of the conventional "I-love-you-warts-and-all" banality, but an expression of being, of her being: you are made of love and regret and joy and sadness and a past which I cannot touch but which I can love.

So, is there love? Of course there is. They went through twenty years of poverty and hardship and raised two children together... and while the last scene is certainly ambiguous, that Lam holds his wife (Anita Mui) with at least tenderness is surely not. Then again, of course there isn't. Because it is a past which I cannot touch but which I can love, and which perhaps now is the time to let go.

(click here for comments)

On remembering Before Sunrise

2006-07-14T15:57:00.000+01:00

That the still photograph is intimately associated with memory is beyond trite - in its most obvious sense, the photograph is, after all, the "capture" of a moment so that we may (among other things) remember it. Hence, the phrase "souvenir shot", with the notion of a memento in the noun "souvenir", and not least of all the connotations of its original French meaning, "to remember". In that sense, the photograph takes on a role akin to a substitute memory, albeit one that registers only a single instant. Thus, in this idea of photograph-as-memory also lies the full poignancy of the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise: nearing the time (before sunrise) when they are about to part, Jesse turns Celine around and says, "I am now going to take a photograph of you so as to remember you forever." However, he does not (as might be expected) pull out a camera, but simply gazes at her for almost a full minute.

(click here for comments)

When is it enough?

2006-07-12T21:32:00.000+01:00

Zinédine Zidane has finally spoken. In an interview on Canal+, he expressed apology ("Ce n'est pas pardonnable, je m'en excuse") for his now infamous headbutting of the Italian defender Marco Materazzi 10 minutes from the end of extra time in the World Cup final a few days ago between France and Italy, but was explicit that he had no regrets ("Je ne peux pas regretter mon geste").

The coup de tête, then, was over insults Materazzi had made about Zidane's mother and sister. The Times reports that support in France is very much given to Zidane: "It was understandable that he should defend his honour in the face of an insult, the argument goes." Typically (yet how I love them for it), the French somehow has to express everything as a beautiful philosophy: "This logic has spread among the intellectual classes who are now depicting Zidane's gesture as an 'existential act'."

To his credit, my viewing companion had come up with this observation that very night, right after Zidane had been sent off and long before any of this was in the press. Like everybody else, we had speculated like crazy what could have been said; like everybody else, the first thing that came to our minds was that it must have been some sort of racial slur. But we established one thing: whatever it was, it had tipped Zizou over the edge. "So maybe he was sick and tired of racist abuse and he didn't want to take it anymore. And to make that stand he would sacrifice everything, even the glorious end to a great career."

The Times has followed this story with a limpid article: "When is it right to lash out?" The article was dull, but the question is valid. When is it right? When is it enough?

The film Bus 174 was brought up the other day by Ian, friend and fellow supervisee, over at Dr Mabuse's. The director José Padilha calls it "a theoretical documentary" (as opposed to "an observational documentary"), by which he means it is a documentary more emphatic on exploring questions and issues than the narrative of the event. Very briefly, the film is about a youth, Sandro do Nascimento, who hijacked a bus one day and held its passengers as hostages for four hours. The event was almost entirely captured on Brazilian television and Padilha's film made extensive use of the footage, right up till the denouement of the event, namely, the fate of Sandro.

The questions in the film are clear: who is Sandro? How did he come to hijack the bus? What were his purposes? Was it for money (a criminal - robber and cop-killer, to be exact - interviewed in the film wryly commented: "why would you hijack a bus for money? If you want money, you rob rich people")? By and by, the film revealed some answers: the harshness of reality for Brazil's street kids; the massacre of Cadelaria, where police killed dozens of homeless people, many of them children, sleeping in a square in front of a church; the inhuman conditions of state juvenile centres and prisons, conditions which, argues the director in his interview, are responsible for breeding more violence ("you put a thief who stole a purse into a prison shared by 30 inmates, why would you not expect him to become violent?"); the police brutality; the economic inequities of the country; the social ills which are all ignored by a government too involved in politics to care. And, right in the middle of all that was Sandro, who hijacked a bus but did not kill anyone in it (although he pretended to, and the fact that he didn't actually do it says alot). Sandro, who by an account changed his behaviour once he realised the cameras were on him, that for once people were watching, seeing him, listening to him. This was, of course, the film's thesis: perhaps that was all he wanted.

But there is one other question the film didn't address: when is it enough? More specifically: when is it enough for violence? Honour? Equity? Justice? Freedom? When? I've had many thorny and emotional discussions about this with D, but I am still ambivalent: when is it freedom-fighting, and when is it terrorism?

I thought about a few other films I'd watched before which were similar to Bus 174, principally Kossivitz's La Haine and Panahi's Crimson Gold (it is not a coincidence that I only remember films I write about). Films which similarly explored iniquities and inequities, films which not only asked "why", but also "when". In relation to Crimson Gold, I wrote this at the end of the post:

Because in the end, Hussein, having observed and suffered the inequities of his society, eventually commits robbery and murder. The whole point of the film is to explore why. And I am realising I understand.

But now I am realising the fact, though, is that I don't.

Send in the clowns - reciprocal

2006-06-24T15:11:00.000+01:00

A weekend in the country
How amusing
How delightfully droll
A weekend in the country
While we're losing our control

If I told you all the crazy coincidences in my life, you wouldn't believe it for one minute. Serious. It's not the magnitude of coincidence-ness per se, but the frequency of them. Anyway, here's a small example: by and by I've managed to haul all my CDs over to London, but I almost never look at them since it's incomparably easier to just click and look up a song on the net, even if I did have it on CD. Last night, I had wanted to blog something on Renoir's La Règle du jeu and Altman's Gosford Park, and it suddenly occurred to me that something might be relevant in Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music" (though I didn't blog it in the end because my thoughts about the two films were still fuzzy). But instead of firing up Napster as usual, for some unknown reason I went over to the DVD cabinet, got down on my knees (CDs are in the bottom shelf) and hunted out the CD instead. Maybe I just wanted my particular recording, who knows. The CD booklet was lying right in front of me on my desk this morning when I turned on the computer and found a surprise e-mail from my friend Marc in Boston telling me to check out a song he had put up in his latest post. The song is "Send In The Clowns". And I don't even know why he was looking up the song in every probability at the same time as when I was taking out my CD (why were you checking out "Clowns", anyway?)

This is not even the freakiest of stories I could tell, but anyway I took it as a sign that I should blog about Règle and Gosford Park. So ok. I was thinking the English (or French) countryhouse is as much a trope of place as, perhaps, the American motel, or the European middle-class apartment block. It is as if the holiday sense of "going to the country" rips off metaphorical corset strings, releasing tensions (Règle), setting loose memories (Gosford Park), reviving old and discovering new loves (Night Music). It is always the same structure - the beginning is always stable and orderly, everything in its place, then something happens while they are in the country and the whole structure gets turned upside down, usually with a tragedy. It is cathartical - how many times have we also wanted to rip our own lives inside out, upside down, but not daring to do so for fear of the unknown, the consequences of shaking up the familiarity? And it is also instructive, because in all the turmoil people also discover new relationships (Christine and Octave, Anne and Henrik) and new things: pasts they thought they had forgotten but hadn't, romances which they thought were over but weren't, games they thought they were playing but in which they were outplayed.

Just when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines...
No one is there.

Maybe Later

2006-06-24T14:58:00.000+01:00

Dan mungkin bila nanti kita kan bertemu lagi
Satu pintaku jangan kau coba tanyakan kembali
Rasa yang kutinggal mati
Seperti hari kemarin saat semua disini

1. Recently, I've been thinking about women in films who die suddenly and violently. Two examples, both conveniently in Godard films, keep coming up in my mind: Nana (Anna Karina) in Vivre sa vie and Camille, the Brigitte Bardot character in Le Mépris (who can forget Camille, stretched on the bed, ostensibly naked yet resolutely never explicitly shown, langurously discussing her body with Paul (Michel Piccoli) in Godard's "fine-you-want-a-steamy-Bardot-shot-I'll-give-you-anything-but" scene?)

Both deaths are violent, sudden and, worst, inexplicable. Camille's marriage with Paul unravels turbulently, tearfully and tragically in the second act of Le Mépris (but doesn't everything unravel in the second act of Le Mépris - ideals, dreams, hopes, moral and artistic integrity...?) Yet she seems to have obtained a moment of peace as she waits at the filling station, before leaving and her car is unexpectedly hit by an oncoming car. In the silence following the squeal of brakes and the dull crunch of metal, the handwriting of her words in her love letter appears on the screen, read by her in voice-over like ironic famous last words in a voice from the grave.

Nana's death is even more abrupt - after leaving her marriage and forced by poverty into prostitution, she seems to achieve an odd equanimity about her lifestyle in an astonishing sequence of scenes of her entertaining clients while carrying on an extremely factual voice-over conversation with Raoul, her pimp, about the risks, options, medical benefits etc of prostitution. Like Elisabeth Vogler, the silent actress in Bergman's Persona, Nana, herself with vague aspirations to be an actress, struggles with her doubts of communication and its abilities to represent meaning and convey truth. In the penultimate, eleventh story (this, after all, is Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux), Nana carries on an extensive conversation with the philosopher Brice Parain, playing himself, where we are shown for the first time the Nana beneath - her doubts, her questions, her illusions, her disillusions, Nana as we have never seen her before. In the next and last story, she is sold by Raoul and, in the transaction gone awry, she is suddenly, sickeningly, stupidly, shot.

2. The very first film that Quentin Tarantino made was a "black and white trial run" called My Best Friend's Birthday. In it, Tarantino relates a story, told straight to the camera, with the dash of Tarantinoian humour that always cracks me up:

Out of the blue, I felt depressed for no reason whatsoever, just this dark cloud hanging over my head. I was gonna commit suicide... I was gonna go up in the bathroom, fill the bathtub with hot water, and open my veins. I was actually gonna do it. ... You know what saved me?... It was The Partridge Family. The Partridge Family was coming on, I really wanted to see it, so I said, "Okay, I'll watch The Partridge Family, then I'll kill myself." Well I watched it, and it was a really funny episode.... And uh... I didn't feel like killing myself afterwards. It all kind of worked out.

I read somewhere - someone once said, "that's the best thing about committing suicide - you can always do it later."

3. I think back on the sudden and violent deaths of Nana and Camille... would they have been as shocked as we were? Having lived most of their lives without hope, would they have died without hope too? Or would they not have regretted, would they not have looked back at what they left behind? Had they known what was going to happen to them in the last scene of the film, would they have turned and said, "no, later?"

4. "Mungkin Nanti"

Should we possibly meet again later
Please do not make the one request for me to return
The feelings that remain have died
Like the whole of yesterday

("Mungkin Nanti" (Maybe Later), by Indonesian band Peter Pan, from their album Bintang di Surga (Star of Heaven))

Eureka (1984, dir. Nicolas Roeg)

2006-06-24T14:55:00.000+01:00

"What do you do
when you look to the left and to the right
And find no clues
To the questions you ask yourself at night..."

Eureka is a retelling of the Midas story - man tries to be rich, man gets rich, man loses daughter, man becomes unhappy. Jack McCann (Gene Hackman) becomes the richest man in the world after discovering a river of gold in the Yukon (in one of the most stunning sequences I've seen in a long time), but for all his money fails to stop his daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell), the only love of his life, from marrying a man he hates. The result is pain, grief, heartache, anguish and, ultimately, the violent murder of McCann.

But the similarities are superficial. The Midas tale is about value, of course - a quasi-literal fable lesson of how all that glitters is not gold. But, for all the prominence given to the gold, the story of Eureka is not about value, but motivation: what happens after you have achieved your life's sole purpose? What happens after you have found the gold, metaphysical or otherwise? And what do you do when you ask yourself those questions and can find no answers?

When Garry Kasparov won his momentous World Championship in 1984 against Anatoly Karpov, the wife of a fellow grandmaster and former world champion (Spassky? Botvinnik?) said to him, "I pity you, Garry." Kasparov looked at her in surprise: "Why? This is the greatest moment of my life." The woman answered: "That is why - because you have already achieved it."

In the film, it is strongly suggested that Jack McCann faced the same impasse: Tracy, in what I felt was a painfully awkward courtroom scene (even if every other reviewer raved about it - I cringed throughout: she can't act, her voice is too raucous, the script was embarrassingly gawky...), cries out: "He was dead a long time ago - he died when he found all that gold." The idea is certainly conceivable, yet the film is never explicit about it: Nicolas Roeg started out as a film editor, and his craft shows - his cuts are all elegant, evocative and extremely imaginative. The man who found all that gold turned into the unhappy man in one fluid flash-forward - we have no idea what happened inbetween. All we know since seeing him in Yukon is that he has bought his own Caribbean island and he now hates the man his daughter is seeing. But what did he do afterwards, what ambitions did he seek, what questions did he ask? And was he really already dead?

What do you do when you ask yourself questions which you can't answer? What do you do in that huge void? And is death really such a respite?

"I'll be sending a letter to God."

("Letter To God", Sheryl Crow)

Moolaadé and The Man In My Basement

2006-03-29T11:30:00.000+01:00

What I read and watch seem to pick themselves: Two works - a film and a book - in two months on the same themes of freedom and the imprisonment of a society:

(i) Moolaadé, the 2004 film by the esteemed "Old Man" African director Ousmane Sembene: an African village's overcoming of the ritual of female circumcision;

(ii) Walter Mosley's "The Man In My Basement": a novel-fable which prescribes the means for a black man's achievement of freedom, namely, by the white man locked in his basement. If this sounds vague, it is meant to be - Mosley's book is easy to read but difficult to deconstruct, and his conclusions remain highly controversial.

The two works present a similar yet diverse deliverance: knowledge is the only key for a society locked in the chains of ignorance, hierarchy, fear and tradition. In Moolaadé, this comes from the modern world outside the little African village, transmitted crucially through media: this was clear from the radios which the women carried that played the music they danced to, and most importantly, imparted what little education they had - it is not a coincidence that Collé Ardo, the main inciter against the ritual, is also the character portrayed to most cherish her radio. When the men, angered at their women's resistance to "purification", confiscated their radios, piling them up into a bonfire, the message is clear. So is the message of the final two shots, in the style of Kubrick's famous cut in 2001 - a shot of an ostrich egg atop the mosque, the egg having apparently been there for eons, replaced by one of a television antenna. Modernisation is therefore that which will advance civilization - it will do away with a barbaric past and bring forward freedom, rights and justice.

In "Man In My Basement", summarily put, knowledge comes about only from the white man who locks himself voluntarily in the basement of the black man and confesses his heinous crimes against the world - the money he has stolen, the people he has killed, the children he has slaughtered etc. This is knowledge of another kind, one not gained, but only given - the knowledge of forgiveness. Only with that can we even begin to start on understanding a free world.

Yet... is anything so easy in such a hideously difficult world? Mosley's proposition is almost glib: Anniston Bennet appears one fine day on Charles Blakey's doorstep and pays the latter to lock him up in his basement so that he can absolve himself. To me, therefore, Sembene's work is the wiser but at the same time the less hopeful of the two: Collé Ardo's resistance worked because she invoked Moolaadé, a power of protection probably as ancient as female circumcision, signified by a string of colourful yarn which she ropes across her doorstep - no one may cross that rope, or she will be killed by moolaadé. The saladina draw back, afraid. The men, equally powerless, end up beating Collé Ardo to make her undo the moolaadé, to equally no avail. The only forms of life which/who paid no heed to the signification of the yarn were the livestock, and a small toddler who simply crawled underneath it when he found it too difficult to cross it. Freedom may be simpler than we think, though at the same time infinitely more difficult.

Le goût des autres (Agnès Jaoui, 2000)

2006-03-17T14:54:00.000Z

Agnès Jaoui has this trick of treating the bleakest themes with the lightest of touches and the most sensitive of hands, stirring it airily from its dredges of depression until it puffs up like a beautiful, fluffy soufflé - think Comme une image (neglected, unattractive teenage daughter determinedly pursuing her singing ambitions despite unsupportive father etc etc etc) - so much potential for a cesspool of melodrama yet the film never loses its winning, effortless breeziness. Same for Jaoui's husband (ex?) and collaborator (ditto?) Jean-Pierre Bacri, who can take the most boorish, most insensitive Grumpy Old Man role and play it to the finest edge whereby it is just, but only just, about almost impossible not to like his character. No wonder the two put together produce such magic.

Goût is a film about changing lives: how its characters change their lives that were, respectively, bored, colourless, desperate, envious, lonely or superficial. Some succeed, some do not, and some whose end results we are left to guess. In Comme I could smile at the easy-going formula of the film - it is possible, after all, to have a sense of humour alongside ambition. But I found it alot harder to smile at Goût - changing lives is not a light, easy matter - it has repercussions, implications, consequences. It affects whole families, turns one's world upside down. It asks for prices so dear one cannot even begin to imagine until it is too late. It is not as simple a matter as (per Castella, Bacri's character) walking away from a marriage after falling in love with one's part-time English teacher once he sees her acting as Berenice in the theatre. This is flippant and almost offensive.

Save for the last scene: Bruno, Castella's driver, who constantly and forlornly practises blowing (and not very well) a rhythmic single note on his flute, which I took to signify his disconsolation (unfulfilling job, dumped by his girlfriend, meaningless flings with Manie who was pining for someone else). In the last scene, we see Bruno again, playing his single note, but only when the camera tracked past him to show a whole band ensemble all watching and listening to him did it come to me (but of course!) what that single-note rhythm was: the opening bars of "Non je ne regrette rien". And at that point, the whole band took up their instruments and launched into a gusty, gutsy rendition which then led to the credits. Everybody else was playing melodies and harmonies, while Bruno was still blowing his single notes, but now no longer pathetic, but now the stolid, rhythmic bass that is holding together the music.

Luck, therefore, is regarded as a skill

2006-02-27T14:52:00.000Z

So this is the story about the salt.

On the topic of how cyclists are the most superstitious athletes in the world:

Not everyone is a believer, of course. During the 2002 Tour de France, Michael Sandstod of Team CSC (led today by the Italian rider Ivan Basso, on whom I'm putting money to win the Tour de France this year) decided to perform a demonstration at the team dinner. First, Sandstod knocked over the salt shaker. Everyone waited for him to perform the usual ritual passing of the shaker; the pitching of salt over the left shoulder. But to his teammates' horror and disbelief, Sandstod didn't pick up the salt -- no, he spilled it again on purpose, letting the grains sprinkle on the tablecloth, on the carpet. He poured out the salt in his hand and threw it around in the smiling, imperturbable manner of a missionary priest in a pagan temple.

"Don't you see?" Sandstod said. "It's just salt!"

The following afternoon brought the second half of Sandstod's demonstration, as he crashed on a steep downhill section, breaking his shoulder, fracturing eight ribs, and puncturing a lung. He nearly died, and spent that evening attached to a respirator in the intensive care unit while the story of his apostasy was repeated in hushed tones around team dinner tables.

- Daniel Coyle, Lance Amstrong: tour de force

2 thoughts:

The first is that this story brings to my mind that zany scene from Robert Zemeckis's Used Cars, where Rudy's (Kurt Russell) zealously superstitious friend, who had put money on a race which he needed to lose so that Rudy could win (they had betted on different horses - and Rudy needed to win because otherwise he would lose the used car junkyard), started going nuts: spilling every salt-shaker he could find in the diner (is that what they are called?), opening strangers' umbrellas and dancing under them, walking under laddars, and at the climax hurling a chair at a mirror (at which point his horse lost, and Rudy's won, so I'm sure there is a moral in there somewhere).

It's strange, isn't it: I used to have lucky pens for exams (did no good, though I managed to scrape through) and in my final year in law school I designated for myself a lucky dress (a dark blue rayon sleeveless sheath with small white flowers - it looks better than it sounds) which I would wear to my exams in my desperate bid to pass them so I might be able to get a vaguely decent degree class (I ended up topping my class that year - I'm sure there is a moral in there somewhere too).

How fate and destiny are bestowed on random objects.

My second thought is alot pithier: the European cycling season kicks off this Sunday with the Paris-Nice! Oh, joy!!! Cycling season is here, which means the road races are here, which means the Tour de France will soon be here, which means there will soon be a very, very nice summer. :-)

Passing time

2005-12-16T16:33:00.000Z

When I was 23 years old, I looked at the mirror and told myself: "You will never look more beautiful than you are now." And it is true. I wouldn't say everything has gone downhill since - it hadn't been that bad *knock on wood* - but, in a sense, without a doubt it has never been the same ever since that year.

I was walking down the Strand today, running a number of errands (one of which, might I add, involved carrying two hundred and fifty pounds worth of camera film in my bag). I was on the East end of the Strand, having walked up Arundel Street from Temple station, which I haven't been to for the longest time, not since I first arrived in London. It was one of those strange days - everything I set eyes on was heartbreakingly beautiful. The buildings, the Aldwych arch, the Lancaster Road turnoff where I used to cross Waterloo Bridge walking home to County Hall, the weird statues in the middle of the road, the imposing gates of Somerset House, glimpses of the manicured gardens within, past King's College where I once had a rather harrowing scholarship interview, the Strand Palace Hotel, the couple of West End theatres spilling out of Covent Garden, the Charing Cross Thistle Hotel. It was a sunny day, though it occasionally clouded over a little, resulting in flashes of light and darkness like a dramatic high school play. I have never seen London so beautiful - even more so than my previous post. Today, London was so beautiful my heart ached, yet soared at the same time. Something in me was just completely filled by its beauty. In Singapore, it is usually too hot and humid to walk, and even when one tries, it is always too crowded and... and frankly too ugly - its buildings, its sights despairingly humdrum and commercial.

I watched Tavernier's La mort en direct recently, and the force of the film struck me, like a physical blow. The confidence of Tavernier's camera, the elegance of his treatment of the subject matter, the allure of his lighting, so rich, so elegant... it is one of the most wonderful films I have watched recently. It's a complicated storyline, but basically Harvey Keitel plays Roddy, who has surgically transformed his eyes so that they are no longer human retinas, but camera lenses... to capture anything and everything he sees. Asked why he did it, he answers to the effect of, "because everything I see... they will then be there forever... on film."

I wanted today to be captured forever. Everything I laid eyes on today on my walk along the Strand, I want them to be remembered forever. For with the same prescience as at 23, I know life will never be more beautiful than it is today - my lack of bondage, of financial worry, of care, the total absence of any form of fatiguing social situation, the absolute conviction that I'm on the road to achieving my ambitions, and a life and career that would challenge and fulfil me, that I could sincerely care for, yet still possessing the complete liberty to do anything I want, wake up any time I want, chase any dream I want, go anywhere I want, the sheer feeling of opportunities for the future, the sheer fullness of possibility; most of all, the sheer awareness of the freedom of my soul, singing clearly to me. It will not last, and it will never, ever be the same again.

Being alone

2005-12-07T16:31:00.000Z

In Sideways, there is a genius of a scene, where Miles (Paul Giamatti) ends up drinking his precious, carefully saved wine by himself out of a paper cup at a greasy, grimy, non-descript fast-food joint. I won't go into any detailed analysis here - there is far too much out there on the web anyway - but I thought it was a miraculous touch: tragedy that is both determinedly neurotic and comic yet heart-stoppingly wretched; a point to which we instinctively feel as for a friend, because it is only after we have accompanied Miles throughout the film can we understand that scene. It is, I felt, simply such a magnificent image of being alone - not just that he was alone (cos, of course, he was) - but (at the end of a long story) drinking a hideously expensive 61 Cheval Blanc out of a paper cup, washing down a burger in a fast-food restaurant. What a scene, and all achieved with completely no dialogue and in just a shot lasting, what, 10 seconds.

It's hard being alone (and don't bring up Sondheim's "No One Is Alone" - it's sung by Cinderella - hell, what does she know). I don't care how cliche that comes out. I don't care how weak it sounds. My unabashed Bridget Jones moment hit me tonight, when the stupid shower ran out of hot water, which means the water in the geezer had to be topped up. So there I was, freezing half to death having just stood for 5 minutes in a shower with cold running water, shivering in a bathrobe, balancing uneasily on a S$12 IKEA assembled chair (the only other chair in the house has wheels under it - I'll rather trust the IKEA screws, thanks), laboriously climbing up and down said tremulously assembled chair five or six times as I refilled the water jug. Then it hit me: if I were to lose my balance now and break my neck......

I'm growing old - I'd never been afraid of being alone, ever. Now the next thing to do surely is to start keeping cats, followed by doily-crocheting.

La reine Margot (and memories of French history class)

2005-11-29T14:31:00.000Z

Just finished Patrice Chéreau's La reine Margot and enjoyed it immensely - well, certainly more than the confused Roger Ebert at least, who was, in his words, "at sea". My own relish, I suspect, was no doubt á grace my intensive study of the French Wars of Religion for both A and S-level History in junior college. I remember that topic with a great deal of fondness - it was a hilarious class - every character seemed to be called either Henry or Francis. Catherine de Medici herself had two of her own sons called Francis - now, I ask you, what kind of mother in her right mind would give two sons the same name (hey, but then we're talking about Catherine de Medici right). And then there was Henry of Anjou, another one of Catherine's sons, who later became Henry III and then, when he was deposed by the Duke of Guise (who was (guess!) called Henry too), rode off to join Henry of Navarre, who (I just found out) was Catherine's son-in-law, having married her daughter Margot (played in Chéreau's film by the utterly luminous, utterly ethereal, utterly captivating Isabelle Adjani - her beauty is simply out of this world - I digress...) - so at some point in the wars we actually had two Henrys plotting together to seize power back from Henry. It was a beautiful mess, and to be honest I only got it all straightened out days before my exam (at one point I swear I thought there were 4 Henrys in the whole saga - Henry III, Henry of Anjou, Henry of Navarre and Henry IV) but oh, how I loved it. I wrote constantly, I wrote passionately, about the French Wars of Religion - I seized every question I could find.

A couple of months ago, we passed through Pau while driving through the Pyrenees in the South of France. And what do you know, the château of Pau was originally the residence of the monarchs of Navarre and also where Henry of Navarre (aka Henry IV) was born. I walked in and around the château, feeling distinctly weird, feeling something had somehow come full circle. I've always unabashedly held that my education throughout my life had been a complete waste of time - a whole series of dull, monotonous, useless exams one after another, culminating in law school (to this conclusion save, of course, 16th century France. And 17th century Netherlands, another hilarious class, even if the Spanish were absolutely brutal to the Dutch. And every Literature class I ever took (other than Shakespeare, who remains overrated). And Criminal Jurisprudence and Civil Law. And, obviously, all my postgraduate education to date.)

Roger Ebert begins his review with this line: "When I saw "Queen Margot" for the first time in May 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival, it was like looking at the home movies of complete strangers - in this case, the French."

When I saw La reine Margot for the first time, it was like a reunion, meeting up, seeing old friends - in this case, the French. And remembering, as is what memories do, that there were a few parts of my life before 2001 which were actually worthwhile.

Gabbeh (dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)

2005-11-16T13:14:00.000Z

[First posted on the academic film blog, Dr Mabuse]

I have seldom been as blown away as I have by Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh. The lavishness of his film colour palette, the complexity of his metaphors, the elegance of his narrative structure, the richness for its interpretation and understanding. The film is so simple and so complex - a story woven (no pun intended) out of an old couple washing a rug (gabbeh) in the stream; a story of a girl, also named Gabbeh, who pines to be with her lover, a figure on horseback who calls for her in wolf howls, but whose union is thwarted again and again - by an uncle's marriage, by her mother's childbirth, by a sister's tragic death, by her sister-in-law's illness; a story that is a story and yet a memory, as we eventually realise the girl is really the old woman washing the rug, and yet a way of life, as the colours and patterns of the rugs are infused with icon and symbol, with tradition and custom, passed through generations.

Unexpectedly, much has been made of its dense narrative layers - for example, Adrian Martin, taking the idea from Jean-André Fieschi, discusses, fairly convincingly, I thought, the "imaginary space" occupied by the narratives of Gabbeh: an imaginary space which "is constructed from the way that the story, the physical geography and geometry of scenes, and finally the editing patterns create certain irrational, charged 'matches', connections between characters in vastly different places......"

Thematically, too, there have been comments on its political aspects, particularly the role of women in society. To me, though, this is also an incredibly sentimental love story... not of the young girl, Gabbeh, whom we last see riding off into the desert with her lover, but of the old couple: as the old woman finally takes on the voice-over of the young girl, we realise their stories are one and the same, up till and including the happy ending specifically narrated by the old woman (that the girl's father didn't kill the eloping lovers after all). And that they had remained together, right until the present, old and toothless, squabbling over who has sore feet and who should wash the rug. Ergo, life is not just colours encapsulated in an artifact of wool and thread, but the realness of each mundane day after day, loving, squabbling and washing rugs in streams.

March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, 2005)

2005-11-12T14:47:00.000Z

"Lolita," I said, "this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after."

"People should mate forever, like pigeons... or like Catholics......"

The first quote is my favourite passage from one of my favourite books, Nabokov's Lolita. Despite the nature of the story, to me, a hopeless sentimentalist, this is still one of the saddest love declarations I'd ever read - in one moment, monstrosity turns to sacrifice, outrage to heartbreaking tenderness, iniquity to a deep and self-destructive love.

The second quote is from Woody Allen's Manhattan, and it kept running through my mind as I (finally!) watched "That Penguin Movie", which opened in the UK two days ago (which, like everything else in this country, is just abominable: I mean, for chrissakes, it was being shown on Singapore Airlines when I went home in September (though I resisted then as I wanted to catch it on the big screen) - now if your theatre release can't beat the scheduling of an airline's inflight entertainment, that is very, very sad.)

Anyway. The film was charming, though I thought its storytelling could have been a lot tighter, considering it was a rather straightforward narrative. (Aside: Now, for a *superb* animal-documentary narrative, take my word for it, right here right now, that nothing can beat "Meerkat Manor" (shown in thirteen episodes on Animal Planet) - I would love to talk more about it, but for now... believe me, it is completely without peer.) What I felt was most interesting, though, about Penguins is the amount of anthropomorphism that one (sub)consciously processes in order to make this film work: the romance of mate-finding, the sacrifices for the eggs, the parental love of the chicks, the rearing, nursing, caring, nurturing, cherishing, tending etc etc. All very touching, and everybody duly coos and ahs. Yet, really - come on. The penguins are doing no more than obeying a deep natural instinct - of breeding and propagation and ensuring the continuation of the species. It is not a moral choice - of heroics or self-sacrifice - they never had one.

But doesn't "over-attribution" apply to alot of things in life? I cannot count the number of times I have stood at the bottom of the train station, telling myself, "from here to the platform there are twenty, twenty-five steps. Climb those steps now......" At the end of the day, the story is no more than simply the recognition that it is not an issue for election, that inherent in love is duty, that the sins and infirmities of one generation really do flow in the blood of the next. And that it is not a moral choice - that in life perhaps one really has very, very little of it, or none at all.

The fickle finger of fate

2005-11-11T18:24:00.000Z

Since we're talking about luck. It's a good question. How do the good things happen, and how do the bad? In Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda, the character of Melinda plays out a tragic or comic story, depending on whether it is Larry Pine or Wallace Shawn spinning her tale. Melinda and her life are, of course, not real - but how much of life is or feels real, anyway? And how many times do we feel - when we look at the coincidences in life, the choices we made, the paths we followed - that we really are playing out some great, pre-written text?

Haven't we all, at some point, considered alternative fates? If we hadn't met a particular person? If we hadn't attended a certain party? If our story was being narrated by Pine or Shawn (Melinda and Melinda)? If we had caught the train (Sliding Doors)? If we hadn't gotten ourselves engaged to someone we didn't love who then gave us the book "Love in the Time of Cholera" (Serendipity; one of the worst movies ever with John Cusack in it)? If we weren't trying to rather self-consciously demonstrate postmodern narrative artifice (Run Lola Run)? Etc, etc.

Me, ok. Me, I believe in good ol' simple karma. The process of what goes around comes around, the exact mechanics of which I'm a little hazy, but are no doubt handled skilfully by what I've always called Larger Forces. I have no scientific proof for this, of course - for all I know, life and fate might really be as casual as Larry Pine and Wallace Shawn coolly spinning out people's lives and stories over dinner. After all, some of the best things in my life have come about by the chanciest, dicey-est, unlikeliest encounters......

Baths and showers

2005-10-27T14:56:00.000+01:00

Due to "reconstruction works", the shower has now been reduced to a heap of rubble, the direct result of which being there is no chance at all of it being used for the rest of the week, which majorly sucks, as I hate baths. I had originally intended to take my daily ablutions at the showers in the gym (an idea which, trust me, I wasn't that wild about either) but for one reason or another it got too late and I didn't fancy walking/cycling to the gym in the dark. So I ended up climbing into the bath, which I do in only 3 circumstances: (i) in romantic circumstances with somebody else (and then that wouldn't be for the point of the bath); (ii) in France; and (iii) in times when the shower has been reduced to a heap of rubble.

It wasn't too bad in the end - poured in alot of bath bubbles to amuse myself and I do like my sandalwood bath cream; heck, I've got sandalwood in everything, from linen spray to candles. I would have liked a rubber duck to play with, but since I've already got tons of stuffed toys I decided a long time ago to draw the line at rubber ducks... one has to grow up some time. While running the water, I tried to think of movies with baths in them - which wouldn't be hard, you would think; after all, every self-respecting horror movie would have a bath scene. But as I was alone at that time and it was pitch dark outside... trust me, I did NOT want to think about horror movies.

I ended up thinking of the bath scene in Birth (one of the boringest movies I've ever seen with Lauren Bacall in it) viz, basically Nicole Kidman gets into the bath with 10-year-old Cameron Bright, who is at that point believed to be the reincarnation of her dead husband. It had sparked quite a flurry of discussion - though I was personally more outraged at the gender implications; this is like discussing Germaine Greer's "The Beautiful Boy" all over again.

Nevertheless, during my bath last night, I couldn't help but think of the particular shot of Nicole Kidman, frozen with eyes turned sideways, fixated for a long time on the door, behind which stood Joseph, her fiance, even while Cameron Bright sits stolidly in front of her. Surely that must be the epitome of what what having an affair is like: always staring sideways with averted eyes, watchful of doors that could suddenly open, never seeing the lover in front of her, even though he is naked and immersed in the same water, and that close to being entwined with her forever.

The deliverance from responsibility

2005-09-28T15:00:00.000+01:00

Responsibility goes both ways. Sometimes it can be a real bitch - you feel the whole world weighing down on you; you feel trapped, stifled, walls closing in etc; you feel the resistance of every fibre in your soul, against which you are inexorably driven only by the sheer call of conscience, and everything is torn or near collapse from the pressure.

But sometimes it can be a source of strength - that which will *cough* make one a better person. That which calls becomes a rallying cry, from which one derives courage, tenacity and the determination to see things through because it is a responsibility.

The former is, of course, a source of irritation, and most times a great deal of distress. Occasionally, it can be tragic. In an early chapter in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, Ned has just escaped from his captor, Harry Power, to whom he had been unwittingly apprenticed by his mother. He rode home not in fear or even to flee, but primarily because he felt responsible for his family and for the land on which they had staked. After a near epic journey, he finally arrives home, hoping for (but perhaps not anticipating, or even daring to anticipate) a joyous homecoming. His younger siblings were ecstatic to see him, but his mother (his father is dead) was distraught at his appearance, and later hysterically demands money from him. When Ned Kelly says he has no money, his mother goes berserk:

You can't come home I paid the b----r 15 quid to take you on. You are his apprentice now.

The mother and the son stood separate in the middle of the home paddock the chooks all droopy and muddy the pigs with their ribcages showing through their suits the waters of the Eleven Mile already receding leaving the spent and withered oats lying in the yellow mud. The son felt himself a mighty fool he'd been bought and sold like carrion.

Ok - now for the movie. I found myself making comparisons to the attitude of the eponymous hero Donnie Darko, who, tasked with the duty of saving the world, effectively winds up killing himself (rather ingeniously) so that the world may not come to an end. It is a responsibility which he takes on with surprising equanimity (but then the dude has been so troubled and distressed throughout the whole film you figure it would take nothing short of relieving his duty to save the world to calm him down). Donnie's voice-over is, at long last, full of hope and, almost, faith:

I hope that when the world comes to an end I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to.

While I thought the film in general tended to be a little overloaded with mood and drama, it was nonetheless an extraordinary ending. As the camera pans past the various characters and Tears for Fears sings "And I find it kind of funny/ I find it kind of sad/ The dreams in which I'm dying/ are the best I've ever had", it is almost cathartic: light from darkness, life from death, hope from fear, deliverance from responsibility.

Sea of Love

2005-09-21T14:22:00.000+01:00

Records and love. There wasn't much music in the house when I was a child (ok, there weren't many films either, but that's another story) so I never had much experience with vinyl. By the time I finally got around to listening to music half-way decently, CDs were already out, and there were more than enough at Tower Records, Borders etc to supply for my vague music education. So records have always been strange to me - artifacts from another time like from another planet.

Records are synonymous with nostalgia, sentiment, memory and a bypassed era (in the same way, though this is hardly an original thought, celluloid will probably one day be). This passage I read from Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun, where the narrator describes one of his key childhood experiences - listening to records with his childhood friend, Shimamoto, with whom he later shares a powerful love story that is the rest of the novel - is probably symptomatic:

Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She'd take one from its jacket, place it carefully on the turntable without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to brush the cartridge free of any dust with a tiny brush, lower the needle ever so gently onto the record. When the record was finished, she'd spray it and wipe it with a felt cloth. Finally she'd return the record to its jacket and its proper place on the shelf. ... Only when the record was safely back on the shelf did she turn to me and give a little smile. And every time, this thought hit me: It wasn't a record she was handling. It was a fragile soul inside a glass bottle.

More than a historical detail, the record is also a powerful invocation of memory and, with memory, love. Twenty-five years later, the narrator meets up with Shimamoto and they attend a concert together. He admits he couldn't enjoy the concert because "The record we used to listen to, at the end of the second movement there was this tiny scratch you could hear. Putchi! Putchi! Somehow, without that scratch, I can't get into the music!" When he finally confesses his love for her, it was to Nat King Cole's "Pretend" spinning on the turntable, a song they used to listen together as children. South is therefore a love story bound by memory, where memory in turn is held together by music on old records.

All of which makes for an interesting comparison with Al Pacino's memorable spew in Sea of Love. (Aside: now that is a GOOD cop duo movie, as compared to, oh, say Hollywood Homicide, which was utterly unwatchable. But then with a cast of Pacino and John Goodman - how could you go wrong?? (As opposed to the astonishingly talentless Josh Hartnett and a Harrison Ford who clearly only needed the money and couldn't even bother to put half a heart into it) But that in turn begs the question: does the cast make the movie, or the other way around?)

(Aside #2: apropos to nothing, this movie also has one of the oddest foreplay scenes I've ever watched - viz, in the Korean grocery shop amidst peppers, cans of soup etc. Very strange.)

Anyway, so in Sea of Love, Pacino, an old cop, is hunting down a killer who keeps finishing off naked men in bed, the scene always shown to the song Sea of Love played on an old record. Pacino is convinced the killer is some deranged femme fatale who picks up men and then kills them off and explains his reasoning in the conversation below with his officer:

Lieutenant: Yeah, but how do you know the trim is strange? Maybe it's a steady.

Frank: Strange. You know how I know? Records. 45s. Nobody whips out their old 45s, except on a first or second date, when you're doing "the wonder of me" thing. Getting to know you. So what do you do? You take out your old records, show the broad you kept them after all these years, meaning you're a wonderful, sentimental individual. Who does that with somebody they know already? I mean...once you know them, y'know, who gives a shit?

It's a great speech (I really like "doing the wonder of me thing"!), and, of course, turns Murakami completely on its head - a record, so full of itself and all that it stands for, therefore is also a wonderful cover, a conjuration of false sincerity, an appeal for memories which promise lies.

There's nothing like the hiss of a needle meeting a vinyl record? Of course. It's a profound sound which encompasses love both enshrined and forsaken. And you know I like dichotomies. :-)

War of the worlds (aka White Palace, aka Lost in Translation)

2005-08-25T14:20:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking alot about worlds recently - worlds I have known before, worlds I have known and don't want to go back to, worlds I have known and am toying about revisiting, worlds I have known and will be revisiting and wondering what it would be like, worlds I know now that I like, don't like and can't decide whether I like, worlds I want to know ... (yeah, think that pretty much covers everything).

So last night I watched Lost in Translation, where two different worlds (Bob and Charlotte - old and young; glamourous and vicariously glamourous; resigned and to-be-resigned) briefly collided for a week (?) in yet another different world (Tokyo - lit by a trillion neon lights, crazy, incomprehensible, inscrutable, impenetrable; ergo, the classic East Asian Other). Yet it was a beautiful meeting - brief, ephemeral, almost fatefully transitory, but (or maybe therefore) innocent and hopeful - which became a totally weird outcome in a crazy situation where two worlds which in most other circumstances wouldn't understand each other came almost sublimely together and found a common empathy.

**Aside: I can't describe how much I hated Coppola's The Virgin Suicides - her first effort - which I felt was pretentious to the point of making me want to walk out (and I very, very, very seldom...I almost never do that to any film). And, really, even the most angelic would have to hide one's cynicism at evaluating any of Coppola's efforts once one sees American Zoetrope in the credits. But LIT took me completely by surprise. It not only had all the right touches, but in the right places and with the right pressures. This is, purely and simply, a labour of love - only someone who had gone through it all and earned the credentials could write like that about life, love, marriage, family, loneliness and friendship. My cynicism vanished - more power to her.**

So all that, in turn, made me think of another film about the meeting of worlds: the excellent-until-the-last-thirty-seconds-whereby-the-film-decided-to-commit-harakiri White Palace by Luis Mandoki. (Very) briefly summed up, it is a story about working-class waitress Nora (Susan Sarandon) and upper middle-class "great catch" ad man Max (James Spader) and their romance and relationship. Again, another meeting of different worlds - class, social circumstances (she lives in Dogtown, he pays $1200 in rent for his apartment), religion (he's Jewish, she's a "lapsed Catholic"), age (he's way younger than her). The implicit premise of the film's ending is that all those factors above can be transcended simply by common experience (they have both suffered tragic bereavement) and, well, sharing good sex (yes, we do see shades of Annie "Bull Durham" Savoy in Nora). Now, really, I ask you: is life that simple?

How do we meet different worlds? I watched the part where Nora attends Thanksgiving with Max at a gathering thrown by the latter's rich, Jewish friends. Ok, I'm not a waitress and I've never had to go to a Jewish household under those circumstances, but still I've done my fair share of having to move into other people's worlds and it's creepy how universal these experiences can get. Conclusion: when worlds meet, it's traumatic, disturbing and requires tremendous emotional strength, drawn primarily from alcohol. It's not always sweet and loving and simple like in LIT. If only.

Birth of a Nation (1915, dir. D.W. Griffith)

2005-08-05T12:10:00.000+01:00

I have to say this film ends on a surprising high, all its controversies notwithstanding. Having said that, I guess next up should be Mississippi Burning or Malcolm X, just for some counterbalance.

Perhaps just one thing I could add to the reams already written on Birth: This must surely be one of the oddest ways to get a kiss from a girl - namely, giving Lillian Gish a bird to to cuddle and then to try and catch her lips while she repeatedly smacks them on the bird's beak (?!).

But then I've never understood why people would kiss dogs either, so maybe there's something about kissing birds which similarly fails me.

Finally, I thought I would reproduce this quote, apparently from James Agee on D.W. Griffith:

To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.

It is wonderful, isn't it?

Broken Blossoms (dir. D.W. Griffith, 1919)

2005-08-03T12:02:00.000+01:00

1. There must be few things grimmer than watching an enraged man unprovokedly and inexplicably beat a helpless woman, even (or especially?) circa 1919. I can't entirely explain if my reaction is not one that does not run along racial or gendered lines (ah, the double negatives). For sure, there is an issue of fairness: it is never fun watching the strong beat up the weak. Yet, along the gendered line, I can't admit to not watching women kill off men with a certain sense of satisfaction: Anne Parillaud in Nikita, Famke Janssen in Goldeneye, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill... Along the racial line, on the other hand...well, I didn't feel a thing watching Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah slug it out in Kill Bill, but while my companion guffawed and chuckled as Queen Latifah and Kimberly J. Brown brawled in the ladies room in Bringing Down the House, I couldn't quite do the same. There's something about a black woman engaging with a white woman in this manner - it's comic, sure, but there's also something darker underneath which I couldn't quite place (and anyway the whole film's depiction of race relations is interesting to the extreme, it being a movie with Steve Martin notwithstanding). I am reminded of the line from (and I know I've described her thus before) the almost sickeningly talented Zadie Smith's fabulous first book, White Teeth - on the hows and whys of the unfortunate end of the torrid affair between Samad Iqbal and Miss Poppy Burt-Jones (viz, the Indian man and the English woman - yes, another inter-racial relationship, while we are at it!), it eventually boiled down to this: "too much bloody history."

2. I would never have guessed that Broken Blossoms would be an astonishing forerunner to so many other classic cinematic motifs, most notably:

(i) the hack-through-the-bathroom-door (Lillian Gish even has more than a passing similarity to Shelley Duvall!);

(ii) the inter-racial romance (I am consistently reminded of a quote I once read as spoken by a fellow countryman, about how he theoretically has "no problems" with inter-racial marrying but nonetheless will never allow his children to marry inter-racially because there is "a reason" why "bloodlines" should be kept "pure" - I kid you not. He would probably have an apoplectic fit, then, watching this film, and this is from 1919!!!, which kind of shows how far THTC has progressed);

(iii) the use of boxing as a visual epithet for violence and an ironic statement on manhood (cf countless subsequent boxing films like Rocky, Raging Bull, Rocco and his Brothers...);

(iv) the alternating between two sequences of action, viz Battling beating Lucy to death and the Yellow Man rushing along the Limehouse docks to save her, which is actually alot more thrilling than it sounds (anything to save the piteous Lillian Gish!);

3. And then, finally, there is the shockingly innocent racism - at one point, the intertitles asks, as Lillian Gish gazes gratefully at the Yellow Man: "Why are you so nice to me, Chinky?" to which for one second I simply could not react. If Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven "desires an anachronistic spectator", Broken Blossoms makes one too consciously aware how anachronism - ergo racial inequality, relatively speaking - can also be a very bad thing.

The Phantom of Liberty

2005-07-18T21:37:00.000+01:00

So another Egyptian liveaboard sank last week (Willow - take note! What did I tell you about Egyptian boats??). Accidents and misfortunes seem to be abound in this world.

Post 7/7. I've been thinking about paranoia. We have been avoiding the Tube. I have been avoiding Canary Wharf during peak hours (morning, lunch time and evening). I've been rethinking about taking up rock climbing because I am increasingly consumed by the unattractive idea of falling and breaking your neck (but then conversely diving is safe as long as you don't drown; and climbing is therefore safe as long as you don't fall). I've been rethinking about sky diving for the same reasons. And the other day I was thinking maybe I should watch Open Water, even though I'd been forbidden to do so by my diving buddy because he promises me I would never dive again. But I thought I'd better watch it so that whatever happened so that those divers were left behind I'll rather know about it so I can make sure it doesn't happen to me. I have suddenly been thinking of nothing but danger, risks and exposure.

Dreams have suddenly taken on incalculable hazards, every decision now simply another stitch in a vast fabric which any moment might, because of that stitch, fall apart. Ambition has become a nightmare of jeopardy, whereas before it was a window to riches and opportunity. It's funny how one's vision of the world can change so quickly. Hence the truth of opposing values in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty.

Kungfu hustle

2005-06-14T16:52:00.000+01:00

Why is it that Stephen Chow (or, rather, his SFX guys) can create such stunning special effects in the fighting scenes but can't make a decent CGI butterfly?

Grave of the Fireflies

2005-06-08T16:54:00.000+01:00

In his review, Roger Ebert expressed surprise that animated films, barring a recent few (he cites Lion King (?! which is still cutesy by any benchmark - I mean, hell, it's Disney), Princess Mononoke and The Iron Giant, all of which I still have my doubts) could be anything but cutesy, fluffy, mindless candy floss. On which he, as is usually the case with Ebert vis-á-vis the Oriental stuff (one day I will start on his idiotic review of Hero, as well as his "robotic fighting machines" of Matrix Revolutions, completely missing the anime inspirations of the Matrix trilogy), is so wrong. Japanese anime, for example, have never spared any punches - everything goes, from pornography to apocalyptic science fiction to hard-edged drama. Just cos you have been used to other people who insisted on being cute doesn't mean everybody was so.

But, as is also the case with Ebert, picky issues of cultural (un)familiarity aside he is also generally correct in making his point, and he is certainly right for this one: Grave of the Fireflies stands in a class of his own. War movies always leave me cold, except for one: Empire of the Rising Sun, which totally terrified me (but then I was seven at that time). Today, Empire on my list has gotten company in Grave (which is supremely ironical but does in its own way have an interesting touch which I appreciate (to my Movie God: nice work!) - namely, one about the Japanese Empire at its height, with Westerner POWs; the other about it at its defeat, with the Japanese bombed into surrender by American fire storms). Unlike Ebert, I have always respected the power and dramatic potential of anime - just cos it is 2-D doesn't denote it can't pack a mean story. And is GotF mean. When the flashbacks/ghostly scenes of the little sister started to the music of "Home Sweet Home" just after she died, I sobbed openly. And then I laughed when, as part of that sequence, I saw her bending over the river and realized she was playing "scissors paper stone" with her reflection. I had tears streaming down my face, and then I was chuckling, all simultaneously. It is difficult enough to make something genuinely sad (without melodrama or tragedy), or to make something genuinely funny (without cheap devices or snarky humour). To make something both genuinely funny and sad - that crosses the line from good craftsmanship to something else much closer to the human soul.

Spellbound

2005-06-02T16:55:00.000+01:00

This Oscar-nominated (a deserved nomination, for once) documentary by Jeffrey Blitz is about the stories of eight contestants in the National Spelling Bee competition. This documentary is about how eight little stories can tell one big story. About how one big story can tell an amazing story. About how an amazing story can teach so many valuable lessons. About how so many valuable lessons can be about so much hope. About how so much hope can be about so much life. And how so much life is about so much beauty, and so many wonderful things.

How does one start on such a film?

With its stars, I suppose. The children. I have never ever, not even vaguely, wanted children, ever. But very, very occasionally (twice in my entire life, to be exact - and watching this film being one of them) I also understand how children can be wonderful: they are givers of hope and surprising depositories of wisdom. Now if I can have a child like any of those in the film rather than some screaming manipulative brat you see all the time in restaurants and aeroplanes, I would definitely think twice about it. A good kid like Ashley, whom I warmed to immediately (my favourite child, even though I honestly like all of them - to describe them all would simply take up too much space) - her wide, honest smile, her Afro hair, her round glasses, her shining like a jewel in the environment she is in. Her opening words in her section: "My life is like a movie." "How so?" "Because there are different trials and tribulations, and then I finally overcome them." How adorable is that?? And her giggle at the end of her reply that just goes straight into your heart, because by her laugh you know she is still a child, though by her words you know she hasn't had an easy life.

Most of all, the children make one realize how fragile and brittle adults are. The children who got eliminated in the Nationals - not one of them expressed bitterness, regret, anger, sullenness or anything negative. And they are too genuine on screen to make one suspect artifice (the parents, on the other hand......). Adults speak of competitive loss and rejection as personal blows - just read the autobiography of any writer, sportsman, musician. I myself have taken rejections (of which I have received many) as if it was the end of the world, which, of course, it isn't. But I felt literally apocalyptic, which is just pathetic. These children are a whole lot wiser, smarter, better people than alot of adults I know. I watch them and I know they are going to go on to great things and bright futures because they do something that comes so naturally to them: they aspire, they dream, they strive for something. Which is alot more than I can say about alot of adults I know (my good, struggling self included): atrophying, regretting, watching time waste, growing old and losing aspirations. It's pretty sad when one has to take children a role model. Yet, it is also perfectly natural.

Ashley ends her section with these words:

"As I go higher, my goals go higher also. It's like I've got to keep on reaching, keep on reaching.....So this year, I rose above all of my problems, and this year I went straight through the local, straight through the regional, I was determined I was going to the Citywide Spelling Bee.....I told the photographer, he was like, 'so, what're you going to do when you get to Citywide?' I said 'I'm going to win.' And sure I did! I won Citywide Spelling Bee. Now I'm going to the Nationals."

This girl's 13. She got eliminated in the 3rd round of the Nationals, but she's more of a winner than I'll ever be.