Against The Hype

Here are my Twitter posts on some of the movies I caught in the past year:

District 9: Bracing as a quasi-documentary on alien immigrants, and as a horror film on unwanted transformations; opaque as an action flick.

Double Indemnity: I just don’t get classic actresses playing hysterics. c.f. Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, Hepburn in Long Day’s Journey into Night

Fighting: A formula film without the formula’s best parts: the sweat-soaked anticipation, the thrill of the win, or, y’know, the actual fighting.

Funny Girl: Nearly a revue meant to showcase Streisand’s talents at belting and rapid-fire line delivery; Streisand redefines stardom.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Potter fatigue has caught up to me; all of J.K. Rowling’s missed dramatic opportunities keep thwacking me in the face.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Sturdy pulp movie, with stars (Ford, Connery, Phoenix) that knew they were stars, and how to act as stars.

Katong Fugue: How is it that celluloid pianos so readily channel their player’s inner desires? (c.f. The Piano)

Moon: “Thoughtful scifi” for beginners: promising premise, predictable plotting.

Paper Heart: Shades of When Harry Met Sally, with clever, disciplined use of the handheld trope.

Paranormal Activity: Oscillates like Julie & Julia between its annoying and gratifying plots, but with demons (actual v boyfriend) not cooks

Public Enemies: Retreads Bonnie and Clyde, laced with the irony that even America’s Most Wanted doesn’t beat its citizens’ self-absorption.

Ratatouille: Anyone (who can reconstruct whole recipes from scratch with just a whiff) can cook.

Silkwood proves that horror movies are scarier when they feel like a part of life, especially one you haven’t the means to escape.

Taken: dooming teenagers worldwide to clampdowns on travel by their paranoid parents, who believe that kidnappers lie at every foreign turn.

There Will Be Blood score is such a keeper: each track is flavorful and distinctive! If it didn’t fit the images, that’s the movie’s fault.

Up: Apart from the vignettes of lifelong marriage… eurgh. Eurgh. Pixar at its most infantile.

The Wedding Banquet: Queer domesticity warms my soft heart.

West Side Story: (Romeo + Juliet’s plot) – (Shakespeare’s poetry) = Awful book scenes. Rita Moreno sets her scene ablaze; other songs nowhere as fiery.

You Can Count on Me: Exactly what the title says.

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!

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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