Against The Hype

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!

I haven’t posted in a month, and a lot of things have happened to me since then: among others, I’ve joined a film writing team, started learning Japanese, and programmed cherished movies for my friends. I’ll get to some of these as the days roll by, but none, none of them can top…

… not understanding why Sally said the story of her life hadn’t started yet…

… because mine feels like it’s already begun.

Thirty-three years later, here I come!

“God save Illinois.”

Unlike most critics, I don’t get to watch a whole slew of movies as they are released. I have the luxury, though, of knowing critics whose tastes dovetail with mine enough that I tend to watch good movies (or at least interesting ones) whenever I rent them. So while most critics are now gearing up to write their personal Top 100 lists for this decade’s movies, I’ll be taking up the opposite challenge of watching all the movies listed by the critics I trust most, and writing one-liner comments on each. Beginning with Tim Robey of the Telegraph, and adding other critics as they post their lists, I’ll slowly make my way through their recommendations and rank them by my own tastes. To start:

Movies I’ve seen so far from these lists (ranked in descending order):

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (‘04): A patchwork quilt of relationship truths and clever scifi, culminating in the wisest romantic insight since Annie Hall
2. The Incredibles (‘04): Deft, rocket-paced flexing of superheroes into crises of identity and family (full review)
3. Erin Brockovich (‘00): Finally, a star vehicle that fully capitalises on Julia Roberts’ prickly edges
4. Julia (‘08): You won’t find a more sober and disciplined director-actor pair playing so drunk, desperate and out-of-control
5. Birth (‘04): Nicole Kidman thrives in close-ups and in being profoundly disturbed; this movie indulges her
6. The Bourne Supremacy (‘04): Whip-smart, breakneck spy thriller that sustains Jason Bourne’s clear-headed urgency while suffused with the pain of his loss
7. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (‘01): Epic worldcrafting, with actors and designers attuned to the demands of old-school myth
8. In the Mood for Love (‘00): Aestheticised within an inch of its life, which fits brilliantly its tale of yearning and suffocation in ’60s Hong Kong
9. Before Sunset (‘04): Sadness and self-absorption jostle in this narrow Parisian sequel to the gloriously expansive and romantic predecessor
10. Synecdoche, New York (‘08): A heartfelt meditation on self-centredness and ageing; relies on your capacity for deadpan humor, sadsack-watching and between-the-lines editing
11. Kill Bill Vol 1 (‘03): Candy-coloured pop fantasia of actresses and Japanese action movies, with a drop in mid-film momentum from Uma’s ineptness with bimbo humour
12. The Hurt Locker (‘09): More realistic, tense sequences of warfare than you’ll find elsewhere, though the soldiers teeter a bit towards broad enigma
13. There Will Be Blood (‘07): Fiery tempests wrought from the earth’s depths, Jonny Greenwood’s alien strings, and Daniel Day-Lewis’ oil baron. But things can get un-illuminatingly loud
14. Memento (‘00): Gimmicky collage of noirish scenes, blank-slate grieving and emotional manipulations held fast by a punchy existential twist
15. Sideways (‘04): Depends on your mileage for sadsacks, especially when they’re insulated by narrative perks, e.g. sex with the luminous Virginia Madsen
16. Adaptation (‘02): Depends on your mileage for sadsacks, especially when they’re insulated by narrative perks, e.g. being fictional
17. No Country for Old Men (‘07): Cleaves too easily into standalone scenes of well-edited tension and recycled caricature-humour to truly earn its mopey “bleak” ending
18. King Kong (‘05): Fanboy-wank remake bloated with CGI, wrapped around a cross-species romantic core that should have ventured beyond mere gestures at empathy
19. Mysterious Skin (‘04): Alternates between its boring and its exploitative plots, though Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hustler gets a few emotionally raw/tender encounters
20. Hunger (‘08): I’m tired of arthouse exploitation as an excuse for male nudity, or vice versa; hurling shit-stained walls and clichéd police brutality at me doesn’t help

(The movies I have yet to see, or don’t remember enough to write about, can be found after the jump.)

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Despite the title, (500) Days of Summer is not about a sunny romance, as the narrator is quick to warn you. “This is not a love story,” he intones, and he’s probably referring to the routine heartbreak in movies that accompanies any belief in love. But he’s also right about the relationship at this movie’s core not being about love. See, there are two kinds of romantic comedies in this world: the ones that divide people into Men and Women, and the ones that don’t. (500) Days of Summer hastily identifies itself as one of the former, in a kitschy montage that narrates how Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the Man) believes in love, and how Zooey Deschanel (the Woman) turns heads wherever she goes. How are you supposed to react to a montage like that? He’s the guy of this movie, and she’s the girl: they’re going to fall in love.

Except they don’t. From Day (1) that Deschanel’s character waltzes into mopey office-cubicle hipster Tom’s life, his eyes follow her in slow-mo as it dawns upon him that she’s the girl of his dreams. Days later, when she identifies The Smiths through his headphones and gushes about the band, that’s confirms it. So when she keeps not asking him out, and later tells him that she isn’t looking for anything serious, it floats right past Tom’s rose-tinted sensors even as we’re yelling in exasperation at the movie screen, and things go predictably downhill from there. (500) Days of Summer has been dubbed an anti-rom-com, but it deserves that label not because the two leads don’t end up together, but because it’s an unromantic study of infatuation at its most blinkered.

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The things movies make you do: I watched the college romance Words of Devotion (Ai no Kotodama) recently and it was the first Japanese movie I brazenly loved, despite its glaring formal flaws; now I’m brute-learning the characters of hiragana, one of the many “alphabets” in the Japanese language. What we do for love!

I’ll have more to say in the future about Words of Devotion, its lovely coupling of the leads prior to the start of its narrative as well as its cringeworthy elements. But the movie also stoked my interest in a broader discussion: What is the appeal of queer couples in movies, over and above the appeal of watching people in love, period?

For me, the basic appeal of queer couples lies in that their social and sexual roles are not pre-defined by their bodies, at least in relation to each other. While the feminist movement has done much for equality between the sexes, a heterosexual couple is still far more beholden to heteronormativity than a queer one is, since the overt physical difference that marks a man and a woman dictates their unspoken gender roles, whether or not they choose to subvert it.

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