Against The Hype

I just bought tickets to eight of the 11 shows that I’m planning to watch at this year’s Singapore International Film Festival! A heads-up to other buyers:

Potentially unavailable tickets
For some reason, Jang Hun’s Secret Reunion, François Ozon’s Potiche and Heiward Mak’s beside(s,) happiness are not available for booking through SISTIC at the moment. I’m not sure what’s going on here, and what other showings might also be unavailable, but this unpredictability makes ticket-buying rather inconvenient.

Misleading “bundle discount” [REDACTED: See comment below]
On the SIFF Ticketing page, it mentions a bundle discount in which you can “purchase 10 tickets in a single receipt to enjoy a 10% discount”. But according to the SISTIC ticketing agent from whom I bought my tickets, this only applies if you’re buying 10 tickets to the same screening. This would make the wording on that discount far too misleading, unless I’ve been misinformed. (It made no difference to me, since I’m still a student, but it would certainly be an annoyance to others.)

Now that I’ve given you an overview of what I’m watching at this year’s Singapore International Film Festival, here’s a list of movies I wish I didn’t have to miss out on, even though I’d still be here in Singapore.

Treat this as an alternate set of recommended movies if the ones I’m watching don’t take your fancy! I’d go to these myself, except I can’t possibly be in two places at once.

WHAT I’M MISSING (BEFORE FLYING OFF):

A Night with Boo Junfeng
Lido 7 – 16 September, 9.30pm
Why I want to watch this: Boo Junfeng is one of Singapore’s most promising young filmmakers, with a knack for the familial drama of unsaid things (and pensive semi-autobiographical leading men). I’ve only seen three of his films (Katong Fugue, Keluar Baris, and his only feature film Sandcastle), so I’d have loved to have seen his handpicked selection of five of his own short films.
Why I’m missing this: It overlaps with Yu Li’s Buddha Mountain, which was nominated for Best Film, Best Director and Best Performance at the Silver Screen Awards—a tripartite I can hardly bear to miss out on, especially since Junfeng’s rising status promises a DVD anthology or festival tribute of his short films sooner or later.

Everyone’s Gotta Start Somewhere: The Singapore Edition (90 min)
Sinema – 17 September, 3.30pm
Includes: A Family Portrait (dir. Boo Junfeng, 2004), Dick Marlow (dir. Wesley Leon Aroozoo, 1995), Paradise (dir. Liao Jiekai, 2005), Nadim (dir. Loo Zihan, 2005), Tak Giu (dir. Jacen Tan, 2004), The Nightmare and the Wedding (dir. Wee Li Lin).
Why I want to watch this: Argh. The debut short films of all these now-established directors among the Singapore filmmaking community: what a thing to miss!
Why I’m missing this: I might not mind dropping Werner Herzog’s 3D cave-painting documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams for this, but I wouldn’t miss Wim Wenders’ far more acclaimed 3D modern-dance documentary Pina for the world. Sadly, I can’t possibly teleport right from the end of this short film screening to the Lido theatre where Pina will immediately begin, so I’d just have to forego this one.

Floating Lives (dir. Nguyen Phan Quang Binh, 2010, Vietnam, NC16, 113 min)
The Arts House – 18 September, 1.30pm
Why I want to watch this: It’s been nominated for Best Director and Best Cinematography at the Silver Screen Awards.
Why I’m missing this: I’d have to rush down to the Arts House from the Lido theatre after a screening of Jang Hun’s Secret Reunion, only to somehow teleport back to the Lido afterwards for Jeon Kyu-Hwan’s Animal Town. On a day when I already have three screenings scheduled? Forget it.

Nosferatu (dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922, Germany, PG, 94 min)
LASALLE – 21 September, 7.30pm
Why I want to watch this: Murnau is one of the genius directors of the silent movie era, and Nosferatu is perhaps his most acclaimed work after his glorious and humane Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the last great silent masterpiece. Plus, vampires! People like those, right?
Why I’m missing this: Another issue caused less by direct scheduling clashes than the inexplicable distances between the festival’s various screening venues. I wouldn’t relish racing down from LASALLE to the Lido for my next screening, Park Jung-bum’s The Journals of Musan. I’d expect, thankfully, that Nosferatu will still be screened in rep theatres for many years to come, and readily available on DVD.

On Tour (dir. Mathieu Amalric, 2010, France, TBC, 111 min)
The Arts House – 22 September, 9pm
Why I want to watch this: GlenH kindly recommended this movie as “pretty genial (although ultimately melancholic), loosely structured and surprisingly well-directed film with Amalric front and centre (upgrade to a must see if you’re at all a fan of the guy).” I’m not familiar with Amalric beyond his unmemorable villain in Quantum of Solace, but Glen’s recommendation (and the movie’s Cannes 2010 Best Director prize) really seals the deal…
Why I’m missing this: … except that I can’t get from Sinema, where I’m seeing an anthology of Singapore short films, to the Arts House in just ten minutes. Local short films are notoriously hard to watch apart from festival screenings such as these, so I’ll take my chances coming across the Cannes award-winner at some other time and place.

It’s easy to keep mum on a blog called Against the Hype. When you only hunt down movies that critics you trust have been raving about, it’s hard to go off consensus. When you otherwise discover movies you have no strong frame of reference to discuss, as I have been doing for the past year in arthouses around Chicago, it’s presumptuous to mouth off without first wondering what kinds of viewing practices you’re failing to adopt to charitably appreciate them.

But I’m breaking my long silence, because this is the first year I’m looking forward to the Singapore International Film Festival after having been broken-in to the arthouse realm, and the line-up is mouthwatering. Kudos to the festival programmers!

Below the jump, you’ll find the current list of movies to which I intend to buy tickets, once the box office has opened on Sept 2. I’ve basically picked each movie for at least one of three reasons:

1. It’s been nominated for Best Director at the festival’s Silver Screen Awards competition, an endorsement I trust handily more than Best Film;
2. It hails from South Korea, whose country’s auteurial output I’ve been unjustifiably enamoured with ever since watching Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry and (more importantly) Bong Joon-ho’s Mother last year; or
3. It’s been directed or acted in by filmmakers that I’m intrigued to know more about, namely Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders in their 3D documentary showdown, as well as French acting goddess Catherine Deneuve.

So please:

1. Check out the SIFF schedule yourself and think about which movies you’d like to watch. I’m already getting a 10% discount for buying tickets to this many movies, so if you’d like to hop on, let me know before this Friday.
2. Let me know if there are any movies I’m not seeing that you think I should! Sadly, there are some juicy choices that I’ll have to miss, either because I can’t be in two places at once, or because I’ll be flying back to Chicago for my sophomore year in the wee hours of Sept 23.
3. Stay tuned. I’ll have more to say about the SIFF, now that I’ve essentially defibrillated this blog…

(more…)

I’ve moved! My old site name, TinyEpiphanies.com, was a holdover from my younger days when I needed a general label to hold forth on anything I wanted. I’ve since learnt that my favourite writing for this site involves railing against the excessive hype plastered on nearly every awards contender nowadays, and leveling a more nuanced critique of its glories and missteps.

Hence: Against The Hype.

Please update your links and bookmarks to AgainstTheHype.com! For feed readers, please update your feed to http://www.againstthehype.com/feed/. Here’s to a great new year!

I have joined the writing team at SINdie, short for Singapore Independent Films Only, which I think amply covers the scope of the blog. “Independent”, though, is pretty redundant at this point, since we’re long past the short-lived post-war era where Singapore had a thriving studio film industry. For my debut reviews, I attended a night screening of 26 short films from aspiring local filmmakers at the Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media, though I had to bow out after sixteen films to catch a public bus home (not to mention that a consecutive run of about five films before I left made a good case for leaving).

Here’s a snippet from my favourite piece of the lot, a joint review of four of the shorts:

While SINdie’s regular policy is to give each film its own post, I’ve packaged together these four films, which span three languages (English, Mandarin, Tamil), because they suggest a regrettable tendency for local filmmakers to receive their storytelling and scoring influences from charity show montages or social awareness ads.

Sure, After Skool, Shifting Feet, Father and Ananthi differ in the precision of their cinematography, editing and makeup, which are especially strong and steady in those last two films. But they’re all prone to breaking out the “touching” melodies at key moments, and in all their stories, one character commits an unfeeling transgression against another, only to have a later turnaround scene that casts this character in a less stonyhearted light:

After Skool: A bunch of bullies beats a girl bloody (seriously, she’s like marinara) for having an old auntie’s photo in her pendant, only to have one of them soften after she picks up the fallen pendant, realising its significance as she sits by the unconscious girl’s bedside… (Full review)

It’s great at SINdie: not only am I already getting a much better feel of local film in just my first two assigned screenings, we’re also the only Singaporean blog to focus explicitly on homegrown films, which means that the filmmakers themselves often look to our reviews for encouragement and critique (though, given my hard-assed expectations of formal incisiveness, they might often find more of the latter from me).

I’m here to serve!