Cinematic Concerns

This is the seventy-first film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas. It is a preview screening - release date is on Christmas day, and it will be looking to compete at the Oscars next year. What's not completed - sound mix not quite done yet (dialogue often subtly buried so my ears couldn't poke through the thick Southern accents) and credits not quite finished.

Directed by Mike Nichols, who also did the much-lauded and very naughty Angels In America (I directed a very short scene from that script for school midterms) as well as the much-loved Closer. So you know his style. The film stars Oscar winners Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, as well as Oscar nominee Amy Adams and a slightly distracting, Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt (distracting due to her fairly good Southern accent ... I miss her Brit accent, honestly), as well as a myriad of other supporting players who are all good. Especially the justifiably arrogant weapons expert played by Christopher Denham - he'll go far, I think.

And script by Aaron Sorkin. You should know who that is. Oscar nomination - ding.

Style of the film is still naughty in that Mike Nichols way. The opening. The way Congressman Charlie Wilson is surrounded by girls - and the scene where he alternates between solving one crisis with his professionally-behaving but sexily-attired girls and the other with his no-nonsense, tough-talking guest from the CIA played by an excellent Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Oscar nomination - ding ... Well, they better. The Kodak theatre is only a mile away, I'll use blackmail if I have to.) The candidly funny exchange among the Russian pilots shooting and killing Afghans like an American kid plays his video games - just before they get shot. And they have the nerve to have the Russians spout out the sort of jokes that Americans would've made themselves.

Which is the point of the film. (Not the only one.) The point that much of its American audience won't get, I don't think, judging by the stupefyingly dumb response towards the well-crafted, entertaining Lions For Lambs ("it's boring", "it's one-sided").

Ah, yes. You guys don't know what's it about yet.

In the beginning of the film, plastered wide across the screen are the words: "The following are based on true events." And so it is. All of you would have heard of the conspiracy theory that the Americans funded al-Qaeda in the 80s in order to defeat the Soviets. (More accurately, they funded Afghans.) I say 'conspiracy theory' because that term does not, in fact, describe conspiracy theories in the sense that they are based on not completely founded beliefs, but it describes any prevailing theory that does not make sense based on 'common sense'. For instance, it does not make common sense for the American government to engineer an elaborate plot later to be known as 9/11 in order to start a war. By declaring it a conspiracy theory, it therefore must not be true. (Notice I didn't say whether I believe it to be true or not. I'm just saying, dumb people do not know the concept of probabilities, except for one type of probability - the binary type. 1s and 0s. Yes or no.) And, if I recall, back when 9/11 first happened and it was widely revealed that so-called terrorists now used to be friends of (the) America(n) (government) - many people were screaming blasphemy, "why would we do that?"

Which brings us to the story that Philip Seymour Hoffman's character tells towards the end of the film. Now, I find that, the smartest 'issue films' tend to paint a canvas around the issue, and then at some point, a character would tell a story, or captions would come up before the end credits, and that is when the movie is trying to make its most important but quite often obscure point. And dumb audiences always get blind-sided by the spectacle going around that message. For example, the same dumb audiences who were complaining about Orlando Bloom not being manly enough in Kingdom Of Heaven. Now, I happen to believe that the movie was made just to highlight one fact - spelled out at the captions just before the end credits began. Namely, "A thousand years later, peace in that region remains elusive." Or, in The Queen, it's the scene in the end when Queen Elizabeth II tells PM Tony Blair that public opinion can turn against him, swiftly and without him even suspecting it.

Here, it's the story told by a Zen master about a kid who gets a new horse, earning congrats from the villagers - at which point the Zen master says "we'll see". You know how the rest of the story goes.

The story is about Charlie Wilson, a congressman from the US who helped exploded the budget for covert operations from 5 million to (undisclosed number that you'll find out when you go watch the film) in order to help the Afghans beat back the Russians. The game at the time was the Cold War of course. Now, this isn't a war film, it's a political drama (I really wanted to use the word dramedy ... but, then, people won't take what I'm saying seriously). It's about what Charlie Wilson had to do to snake his way through the US political system to help those poor, poor women and children. (There is a scene in the film reminiscent of Blood Diamond.) To begin with, Charlie Wilson had to know what was going on - and, partly, he knew what was going on because the Pakistani president (ably played by Om Puri) snaked his way into Charlie Wilson's conscience with a brilliantly disguised request. And, the president did so not because of noble intentions - it's just that the pesky Afghans, fully 1 out of every 5 of them, are in his country fleeing the Soviets, and that isn't really good for Pakistan.

Point is, politics is complicated. Furthermore, so is morality.

One of the major, clearly-split differences between Americans and Europeans - and this is just a personal theory - is that Americans are more prone towards seeing a clearly-delineated good/evil line, whereas Europeans are able to deal with muddles. (At least, before they have to sink into totalitarianism.) And one thing I felt strongly, through watching this film, is precisely that among all the American characters. It does make some of the congress people easy targets to ask for money to help fund the war effort - just appeal to their religion.

And yet, the world is not so simple. Hence the telling of the story by Philip Seymour Hoffman's character. (If it still isn't clear, I'm saying that is the most important part of the film.) Good intentions could very likely lead to bad outcomes. Or, good intentions lead to good outcomes - that will cause REALLY, REALLY bad outcomes later on. Think economics - secondary effects. If the word 'economics' causes your eyeballs to roll backwards, then think chaos theory. The butterfly flaps it wings in ... you know the rest.

And it remains a lesson America does not learn. Not that it is an easy lesson to learn - there are no real solutions. I guess the reason the world is tired of America is that it does not even seem to acknowledge the lesson, let alone find solutions for it. And I won't be surprised that it is the reason for its own degradation - think the arrogance of the British empire back in the early 20th century.

To give you something more concrete ... well, park rangers thought they could manage Yellowstone Park. Instead, their managing caused extinctions and a complete imbalance in parts of the food chain (too many prey, too little predators, for example - those vegetarian idiots), only to realise that the best thing to do was to have left it alone ... that good park 'management' means something else. Same thing with supplying weapons to Afghans in the 80s. The prey now becomes the predator.

This film highlighted to me a lot of things that annoy me about America. Condescension. Presumptuous-ness. Hypocrisy. That sickening 'oh-we-must-do-something-to-make-the-world-a-better-place' attitude (excuse my cynicism for one moment).

But, at least a lot of that is borne out of one attitude - that they care.

Which is what the Malaysian government is lacking.

Let me dig into the conundrum that is morality further to prove a point. I believe the masses are stupid people. Stupid and malicious - it's okay to be stupid and kind-hearted ... I like innocence, I like those simple-minded souls who just want to be the world to their family. (Already, there isn't a standard, a logic to the structure of morality in my head.) But those ignorant little buggers who scream for war and send their sons over to war zones just coz someone on a podium was screaming out things they happen to agree with, gosh, how irritating. And they are dangerous - they are the cancer that will bring down society - American society. So they should be removed. How? Eugenics? Hmm, let us consider that for a moment. Perhaps it is a viable, moral solution - remove the stupid people from the society, and leave people who are CAPABLE of handling doublethink. Now, all of you reading this will probably be horrified by that suggestion now - eugenics? Are you barking mad? You say. And yet that is the conclusion that was arrived at by past presidents and past rich people like Rockefeller and Carnegie - that we must remove the dumbwits from the society, and do so via eugenics. Do I support eugenics? No. But do I want it for those people I don't like? Everything about me wants to (though I would not have the guts to actually push for it). It's not about disagreement - disagreeing with someone requires that we are able to debate on an equal ground, where any one side could potentially lose, as opposed to one side childishly resorting to stonewalling (like the producers in the battle between WGA vs AMPTP), which is what many of these people are. ... So, do you see any logic to morality? If morality is based on feeling disguising itself as a moral thought, then all of us are hypocrites. Better acknowledge it to avoid actually becoming a hypocrite. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Call oneself a hypocrite in order to not be a hypocrite.

Okay, time to boil what I said down to simpler statements.

I support hypocrisy.

This film is good.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 7.5/10
At What Point Did I First Looked At My Watch: 55 mins
Oscar Noms That It Deserves: Best Supporting Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Best Adapted Screenplay

This is the seventieth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas.

The film was highly anticipated due to the very, very compelling trailer, incorporating inspirational and assertive music (which turned out to be lifted from the film's score) and that precocious kid which has been appearing everywhere this year and last year by the name of Freddie Highmore. (The young fellow even managed to slip into a voiced character in The Golden Compass without me realising it.)

The film itself, however, was a little disappointing. The story is kinda childishly presented - it is in essence a fable, but I think it went too far in that direction. Maybe it's just suitable for tweens and kids and I'm no longer those. Point is, it is so full of contrivances and coincidences that it is glaringly obvious that the plot is driving the story and not the other way round (as it almost always is with films). That, and the subplot that was meant to mirror Oliver Twist instead became pretty much a direct relocation of the story from 19th century England to 21st century Manhattan with almost no changes plotwise. That in itself created a major contrivance when the plot needed the kid to return to the Bono-like Robin Williams character based on Fagin - there was absolutely no motivation for the kid to walk out of the orchestra rehearsal, he had every reason to stay on without fear.


Without all those weaknesses, the film could have EXPLODED in its intense desire to tell a compelling love story and an adventure story of a lost son searching for/coming back to his parents, such is the passion with which director Kirsten Sheridan created the film. The music and sound design, in particular, deserves mention in that regard - the kid doing fingerstyle guitar*, and the cacophony of noises representing the background section of the Manhattan city-noise orchestra greeting the kid as he first steps out 'into the world'.

August's Rhapsody is quite a fascinating listen - apparently Hans Zimmer had a hand in it.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 5.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 6.5/10
Oscar Noms That It Deserves: Best Sound

* Fingerstyle guitar is something I only knew after a friend who saw and loved the film told me about it. It very easily captures my fancy due to the percussive nature of it. As I understand, it's not the easiest type of guitar playing to master - one guy did, and here's a Youtube video of a very nice sounding melody he played.

I'm really not a TV person. I despise it in a snobbish sort of manner - film's harder to make in so many ways, plus it tells its story properly in a couple of hours. TV usually feels amateurish - the special effects doesn't have to be as good, the dialogue can be a bit corny, the acting can be a bit corny, the music is never as interesting or as involving as in film, directors have less power, and it seems far more dictated by the non-existent but hypothetical average audience ... you guess it, I could go on.

Consequently, when a TV show grabs me, like, really really tight, like, squeezing my heart out and destroying my life, my plans, my schedules ... I am surprised.

And for whatever reason, I have a tendency to discover these TV shows after the fact. None more so than this - it is already halfway through Season Three. (Wait, scratch that ... I did only begin to watch 24 when Season Three ended ... in fact I saw all three seasons in a week. That was hardcore. End digression.)

It's 1 am and I'm extremely awake, and extremely affected. The last time I was this affected by a TV show was when I was furious, absolutely furious that there was not going to be any more Arrested Development after only three seasons. Fuck Fox on that one, that show deserves several more seasons. (And before that, the TV show that affected me most was the SciFi Channel miniseries Taken. That was the singular most possessive experience in my life. But this isn't about that.)

And yet, this TV show isn't getting as much attention as I would have imagined. While Ugly Betty has already garnered a Best Comedy Series at the Golden Globes - a TV show that I did like, by the way (even though the Hispanics here thought that the South American versions were better) ... just not as much as this one - How I Met Your Mother hasn't even been nominated. (It won an Emmy for ... art direction. Okay.)

As most reviews have mentioned, the show benefited from a great cast, one where the chemistry between all the characters fitted like a perfect mitt would fit a hand. And it achieves this by - if one would believe the creators of the show - good casting, as opposed to casting mainly to attract an audience. Josh Radnor, who's kind of always been at the back of my mind due to his subtle performance in Not Another Teen Movie (who has already generated a huge star in the form of Chris Evans ... I'm just waiting to see if Chyler Leigh gets her turn) is perfect as the ...

... you know what, I'm just going to describe why each of the five characters are good and there's just no point and it's not going to do it enough justice. Suffice to say that Josh Radnor, Alyson Hannigan, Jason Segel, Neil Patrick Harris and Cobie Smulders were perfectly casted.

But what got me, was the feeling of the show. In the behind-the-scenes segment of the DVD, the phrase that the creators and cast used was 'heart' - as in, 'there's so much heart in the show', or 'it's funny but it also has heart' and so on. For me it's the way the characters (and hence, the point of view of the show) often looks at life as if it has a 'right' way for things to work and an ambitious, crazy, emotional, 'oh-gosh-let's-just-plunge-into-it' feeling ... and how the triumphant moment is when characters realise that the latter is the way to go. And they go for it. And they get burned. And sometimes it works. And when it works, it's joy, coz it's like they have defeated fate.


In the DVD, those who were interviewed were asked to name their favourite episode or part of an episode from Season One, and for the most part it wasn't surprising which ones were their favourites. (Neil Patrick Harris's one was damn predictable - it was the part where he had to play his character at his most out of character.) For me it was the climax of the season finale. Sure, it was built that way - structurally the season finale had to be the strongest, most compelling part of the entire season.

What struck me and left me still reeling now is the way it gained momentum over the course of the episode, where our hero tries, then fails, then tries harder, then fails again, and looking back at his string of failures, tries even harder, and against all odds, succeeds in the most impropable manner.

And life isn't like that.

But you see, what makes the show brilliant, is the fact that I kept thinking, why the fuck does life not allow us this chance to go against odds and win, that we have to lose all the time - instead of thinking, oh come on, that will never happen. There is a difference in those two modes of thought. One is a ball of intense emotional energy fired by pessimistic optimism until it's becoming almost a tangible object. The other is cynicism.

And I realised how much of my life is lived under cynicism. And indifference (which is mutually inclusive).

And I kept thinking to myself, I have got to get myself on this show. Somehow. As a PA, a boom operator, janitor, I don't know, I don't care.

This show is killing me by how good it is.

Luckily, I've only done Season One and now I can continue diving deeper into the obsession with Season Two. (Wait a sec. That might be 'unluckily' instead.)

WGA = Writers Guild of America

It's been going on for a couple of weeks now. I was rather surprised that friends back home (and my mom, of all people) heard about the strike, never mind that they don't understand the details of it. But yes, it's a huge thing here in Hollywood, there hasn't been a writers' strike since '88.

Anyway, while at work yesterday I received news from the career development department of my school that a strike march scheduled for 1 pm will be happening from Hollywood/Ivar, which is a block north of my school (and right on my daily path to school). I was eager to get home after lunch hour (I only worked half day yesterday) but was slightly delayed. Still, I managed to get to the Kodak (Hollywood/Highland, or a mile west of Hollywood/Ivar) before 2 pm, and along my way home I got to see lots of people carrying strike boards and wearing red WGA strike shirts. Which is pretty cool. I wished they had informed us earlier so that I'd have grabbed my camera.

Anyways, to better understand what the strike is about and why it is affecting your not being able to watch Heroes (which I don't care about), watch this.

This is the sixty-ninth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas.

Truth be told, the trailer to this one was rather off-putting. Grimy colours, facial expressions suck, didn't seem like it'll be different from the lousy animation presented in The Polar Express, which, by the way, was an example of Robert Zemeckis taking another step away from compelling stories which made him choosing Beowulf to do a 3D animated film at once unpersuasive and potentially disappointing. Now that the film is out, the reviews from critics are so-so. Still, I wanted to watch it for the 3D - I was intrigued by how this worked initially ... are they really going to provide 3D glasses to all --

Yes, they are. Not all the screens, but one-fifth of the 3000 or so screens that will be showing the film. Will they do the same for international territories? Somebody tell me. (Hollywood jargon: 'international' is different from 'world', in that 'international' excludes North American territories - USA and Canada ... not Mexico - whereas 'world' is everywhere on the planet. By the way, when Hollywood refers to the box office of a foreign language film playing in North American territories, it refers to it as its 'domestic box office' gross.)

While not exactly a bang of an ushering of the age of 3D films, it certainly makes its case very well. The 3D quality here is clearer than what I remember, no more blurs, and the only discomfort is the fact that I wear glasses too and it's kinda hard to prop the 3D glasses up as it falls lower ahead of my nose bridge. James Cameron's Avatar should be interesting when it gets released in less than two years' time (though you don't have to wait as long as that for such films; there's a couple coming out next year too). One thing this film does well to help sell the idea is that it is a serious film, with much violence and nudity. (And on that note, what idiots presiding over the MPAA thought that the film should be given a sodding PG-13 rating and not an appropriate R? I mean, come on, if you want to be autocratic, at least be consistent. )

The advantage of 3D over 2D, of course, is that it provides an extra dimension for filmmakers to play with. That is huge - and let me remind you, the level of increase of possibilities is exponential from one dimension to the next ... just try to imagine tangibly the increase from 3D to 4D. (Note: You can't. That's the point.) A few years back when I was still crazy over the idea of making a 9/11 film myself, I've always imagined it will be a 3D film, due to the increased dramatic and emotional effect such a medium would bring.

Let me digress a little into the history of screen entertainment in the 20th century. Back in the first few decades, when all people had were cinemas (or nickelodeons) and radio, up to 90 million Americans would go visit the cinema per week. That's around half the population. (Today, the weekly figure is more like less than, say, 15%, even during the summer. In other words, more people tune into the Oprah Winfrey Show than visit a cinema at least once every week in the US.) Then along came television. The problem with television was that it was free. Sorta. In order to combat piracy ... I mean, television, studios refused to let their films be syndicated. So television went on to make its own programmes. So in order to combat free television - cinemas started making big movies.

Yes, that is where your epics flourished. (Not that there weren't epics before.) Colour suddenly bloomed and swiftly took over black and white movies - coz television could only play black and white, at least for a while. Technicolor's the word. Also, aspect ratios began to change - it became wider, inching wider and wider until it hit the Todd-AO standard of 2.40:1 (examples of such films include AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS and THE SOUND OF MUSIC). To compare, television then was really very square (with vignettes, those of you old enough to remember); today, standard def TV is around 1.33:1 = 4:3, HD TV and your widescreen DVD plays at 16:9 = 1.78:1, whereas widescreen movies can often go up to 2.35:1 at the widest. Point is, cinema is doing everything it can to beat television in what used to be its own monopolistic territory.

It lost. TV won. People would rather watch TV at home, and play DVDs of films at home, than to go to a cinema. A few of my friends lament, why? The cinema is so much better a place to watch films than --

Hey, free movies! Downloadable, or costing nearly as much as a movie ticket (or much less if jumping across political borders) but infinitely replayable. So what if the sound quality is bad and people shadows graze past the screen for 0.5% of the running time of the film?

You guessed it, studios are worried. And so, now, seven years into the 21st century, they pull out their trump card.

Because, kids, you can't get 3D at home. Not on your television. (Try not to think about Spy Kids 3-D. Hush hush.) End of digression.


Point is, you should never watch this film without having a chance to see it on 3D. I have never read the Celtic story of Beowulf and Grendel, which is good as much of the story came as a surprise to me. The film is surprisingly harsh with the violence and the ear-splitting sound effects, and there are many tense long takes where the characters await the monster's attack which might come at any moment. It is also very daring, as Beowulf strips off everything to declare his fight with the monster a fair and equal one. So often it does that Austin Powers hide-and-seek-little-pinky thing that I really wished they didn't have to do that and go full out - they dared enough to let him strip, didn't they? Unfortunately, the reality is that much of the audience will be distracted (dumb asses); the girls in particular, and many guys as well for various different reasons. (I suspect, though, that when the DVD is released some nerd would scrutinise the shots frame by frame, whereby he might catch a glimpse of Beowulf's pubes.) And yes, as the trailer suggests, there is a fully nude Angelina Jolie-voiced character. The nudity serves a particular purpose, and the filmmakers used it well.

A surprisingly complex and obviously dark story, with its maturity level kept intact. The songs are suitably Celtic and thus, automatically haunting. The landscapes are bleak, and the people rowdy and rough, as one would expect of the Dark Ages. And the filmmakers dared to let some of the dialogue be unintelligible - because they were spoken in Danish. (If it were in a Celtic language I think I would have recognised it.)

I definitely recommend it. But only at a cinema with a tray of red and green glasses.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 8.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 7.5/10
At What Point Did I First Looked At My Watch: 15 mins
Oscar Noms That It Deserved: Best Sound Editing, Best Animated Feature

This is the sixty-eighth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas.

Before I saw this film, I was heavily anticipating this film, but basing it on pretty much nothing. I knew that this is a book by some bloke named Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose name I came across in Warwick Booksack (uni bookshop). In fact, I saw the title there and thought it weird enough to pick up the book, but wasn't interested enough to read it. Very soon after that, rarely a month goes by where the name Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn't get mentioned somewhere prominent enough to catch my attention. Then I go to film school and we talked about magic realism, which turns out to be the most nostalgic and poignant genre possible in the entire body of cinema, which makes it my favourite genre (there are obscure or even lousy films I saw when I was young that I remember till this day simply because they were magic realism, and many of the short stories and one of the screenplays I wrote were magic realism too).


Magic realism, for those not on the know, refers to a type of story where one element of the world of the story is physically impossible and fantastical but everything else remains realistic. For example, the mini-series Taken, the new TV series Pushing Daisies, or the films Hearts And Souls, Chances Are, Heaven Can Wait, Ghost, Birth. (As you can see, it often involves the romance of a couple separated by life and death.)

Also, during Oscar weekend, we had the opportunity to meet a representative of Stone Village Pictures (the production company behind the film) and she was proudly talking about the film, which led to a guy from Colombia getting really excited, talking about Cartagena, and talking about Gabriel Garcia Marquez as if he were a literary figure as well known as Salman Rushdie or JK Rowling. (If you thought the last sentence didn't make sense, then you are a bookworm through and through.)

And then there was the trailer - which was really terrible, by the way. Fire the people who made the trailer and never hire them again. But there was Javier Bardem, whose acting chops is renowned. And then they kept blarring out the name of Giovanna Mezzogiorno. And strangely enough there was Benjamin Bratt too. And hidden in the credits is a surprising Liev Schreiber.

And through all this, I still have no idea what the story is about.

And after 2 and a half hours at the cinema ...


Disappointing. The story is a weird one, and it didn't seem like the sort of story that could be translated onto film. I didn't feel anything from the characters, even though the actors were good, particularly Mezzogiorno. Both she and Bardem have to age from their early 20s to their 70s, something Mezzogiorno achieved very well (but still not impressive enough considering I was very conscious of her aging via her acting) but much harder for a 48 year old man like Bardem to achieve. In fact, for Bardem's character the first quarter of the film is played by a young, talented actor named Unax Ugalde. Ugalde should have been playing it for half the screen time - Bardem playing the character as a 25 year old honestly doesn't cut it. There is something perverse about the way Bardem looks - the perversity of which allows him to be so brilliant in No Country For Old Men, so I hear. (I will never watch that film, by the way. Call me stubborn. I still haven't seen Fargo or The Big Lebowski. I loved Intolerable Cruelty.)

In fact, I would say, as good an actor Bardem is, he is simply miscast.

The story itself is ... weird. No sense of direction. It doesn't seem to be about anything - I couldn't really detect any themes except the broad category of ... love. The whole thing didn't make sense to me - and by making sense I don't mean in terms or logic but in terms of emotion. Nothing feels.

Obviously I was giving the film a lot of chances to begin with. Then my interest began to wane and I thought it a mistake to come for the film. I began to enjoy the last 20 mins of it, when the characters finally got what they wanted. The journey in between is meant to be unpleasant - film is all about characters not getting what they want and fighting for it - but it should also be entertaining, which strangely enough it wasn't.

Shakira's an oddly appropriate choice for the vocals. One particular song (that never quite finishes) has captured my mind.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7/10
How Much I Liked It: 6/10
At What Point Did I First Looked At My Watch: 10 mins
Oscar Noms That It Deserves: Best Make-Up, Best Original Song

This is the sixty-seventh film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas.

Catch-22. The only reason I even contemplated watching this was because my German friend Julian said it was surprisingly good. Plus I've heard of reviews saying how surprised they are of Ben Affleck's direction - it seems the fellow has suddenly turned serious and turned in a nomination-worthy performance last year and a solid directing effort this year. What's catch-22 about it is that I would've liked the film more if I didn't come in with these higher-than-average expectations, but I wouldn't have gone at all without these expectations.

Sure enough, the story does something interesting from the halfway point onwards. Up till then it was exactly the sort of the film I expected to see based on the trailer, which is just a drama about a missing kid and the investigations going on. The halfway point, curiously enough, is where most such movies would've ended ... but instead, the film goes on, and of course, at this point I have no idea where the movie is taking me anymore. I am intrigued enough to follow the ride, due to the performances of the leads - a compelling Casey Affleck and a very appropriate Michelle Monaghan. And just when you think the movie ends, something else comes up. Then something else. And they're not really twists, just that the movie you thought you're watching in the beginning is no longer that by the end, and a willingness of the film to dig deeper and deeper into the moral quandary of the situation until the morality and ethics of it becomes really muddled that, really, I don't think any of the (smarter) audiences would be sure what they would do if they were in the characters' shoes.

But you see, I didn't enjoy Mystic River. And this one shares a lot of the themes and feel of that one. And while I admire the fact that there was nothing showy about the way the film was directed, just plain craft in storytelling (for example, there were a couple of really suspenseful sequences with Casey Affleck's character hunting down suspects with a gun on his hand, expecting to be shot at any moment), I can't say it's a film I would remember in a few months' time.

Also, it's kinda hard to understand the Bostonian accent sometimes. And, this combined with The Departed really makes that part of Massachusetts an unattractive place to go to - even though a former producer of mine, Evelyn, who hails from there insists that Boston isn't really like that.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 8/10
How Much I Liked It: 6.5/10
At What Point Did I First Looked At My Watch: 20 mins

This is the sixty-sixth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas.

By this time there's been a lot said about the film. Namely that it is talky and hence, automatically boring. That it won't do well in the box office - and for the moment it is languishing at No. 4 on the weekend box office. And it will be known in the future as the first project to be released under the label of the new and improved United Artists, managed by Cruise/Wagner.

In fact, this one hit harder than I thought it would. Yes, it is talky. Yes, it is about politics.

No, it doesn't take sides.

Americans who think so are just dumb. Which, unfortunately, is most of the country - most of the country thinks the film is simply anti-war, or anti-Republican, or something ... in other words, they think the film is preaching one side of the argument.

What the film is trying to discuss, I think, is not the for or against of war, but the fact that we're in this situation today - what are YOU gonna do about it? It argues that sitting there not making a decision, or choosing to avoid looking at it, is not an option. It is possible to choose to not look, yes - but we are dragging civilisation down with it by doing so, when we could have done something. By we, I mean each individual himself or herself. Now this is a lesson that Malaysians should hear, as the Malaysians who are able to do something about their own country and the most apathetic as well. As Robert Redford's character says in the film, "they bank on your apathy". (By 'Malaysians who are able to do something about their country, I exclude those people who are too angry and too impatient to want to change their country, those ppl who sit back and just bitch while they continue their hypocritical activities, and the fundamentalists.)

First of all, the film is by writer Matthew Michael Carnahan (good name, by the way), which is a political drama, not a thriller, not suspense, not action. Not a legal thriller a la Michael Clayton. It consists of three strands of plot, three sides of a broad and complicated debate about the war in general (and in specific, something that can't really be articulated). There's the senator vs the journalist, the professor vs the student, and the soldiers vs the enemy. Together, they say something which I don't quite understand yet. So for all those audiences to write it off as anti-war propaganda (read: unpatriotic Hollywood asshole celebrities) implying that they understood the film is just plain delusional. The way I see it, the ending scene which paints an unflattering image of the people who find reality shows and news reports about TV stars exciting mirrors the very same audience members who would find the film boring and pointless (completely ignoring the nuances), while the lamentations of Meryl Streep's journalist character about the absence of responsibility of journalists in this very corporate modern journalistic environment mirrors the shallowness in which those smug film critics responded to the film.

I can't fully explain why I love it, except that I realise that the filmmakers are smarter than I am. I do think that I'm capable of writing such dialogue piece films if I set my mind to it. But it would take a lot of effort. And this one looks like Carnahan has mastered the art of doing that. Robert Redford is a pretty solid director. And all the actors - Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Andrew Garfield, Michael Peña, Derek Luke - turn in superb performances. And of course, the former three acting heavyweights are always interesting to watch for different reasons.

All I'll say is watch it. And I hope more people I know are the sort who would find the film interesting than those who would find the film boring.

Other than the fact that big stars are involved, this one must have been an easy and cheap one to shoot.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 8.5/10
At What Point Did I First Looked At My Watch: Never
Oscar Noms That It Deserves: Best Original Screenplay

The following are links to my reviews of the 18 films I saw at the 2007 AFI FEST held at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas.

1. Operation Filmmaker (USA)

2. In Search Of A Midnight Kiss (USA)

3. The Princess Of Nebraska + A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers (USA, in Mandarin)

4. On The Road With Judas (USA)

5. Sügisball/Autumn Ball (Estonia)

6. Orange Revolution (USA, Ukrainian with subtitles)

7. Expired (USA)

8. Lucky Miles (Australia, in English, Arabic, Khmer and Bahasa Indonesia)

9. Solos (Singapore)

10. 腑抜けども、悲しみの愛を見せろ/Funuke, Show Some Love You Losers! (Japan)

11. Hollywood Chinese (USA)

12. The Quest For The Missing Piece (Israel)

13. Le Voyage Du Ballon Rouge/The Flight Of The Red Balloon (France)

14. Steep (USA)

15. 喜瑪拉雅王子/Prince Of The Himalayas (Tibet)

16. Smiley Face (USA)

17. Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon/The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (France)

This is the sixty-fifth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the eighteenth and final film from the AFI FEST programme.

Finally getting to see it after having known for so long that it won the Best Director prize at Cannes and having passed on the chance to watch it back in Telluride, I got to watch it this time after queueing for over an hour at the rush line. As the movie begins, it occurred to me I didn't really know what the film is about, even though I've glanced through the synopses numerous times and saw a couple of the stills.

The beginning shot, though, very quickly reveals what the story is about. Then more and more details arrive and I get the sense of, 'ohhh, so that's what it is'. And then at some point it dawned upon me that this is a true story.

It is a story about Jean-Dominique Bauby, an editor for ELLE magazine, who woke up from a coma one day to find that he suffers from a rare condition that keeps him paralysed, leaving only his mind and left eye functioning. He is taken care of by a physiologist and a speech therapist, the latter played by one of my favourite French actresses Marie-Josée Croze. The speech therapist devises a way to allow Bauby to communicate - yes, you guessed it, by spelling it one alphabet at a time.

Anyway, as a result, perhaps 70% of the film is spent in first-person subjective mode - i.e. we see what he sees. Including blinks and the inside of one's eyes. This is one more example of an oncoming trend of experiential films - films that force us to experience what the main character experiences. This one is done well enough that ... well, it won Best Directing at Cannes. Though I did find myself thinking often, when will this end?


It surprised me to find out that director Julian Schnabel isn't French as I've always assumed. His previous film turns out to be Before Night Falls, the film that brought Javier Bardem his Oscar nomination. As it happens, tonight, Love In The Time Of Cholera closes the AFI FEST - it's a film that stars Javier Bardem, along with that other film that so many people seem crazy about watching - the Coens' No Country For Old Men. As for the actor who plays Bauby, Mathieu Amalric, I kept thinking he looks familiar but couldn't place him. Turns out he plays one of the characters in Munich, and that film also stars Marie-Josée Croze.

Anyway, a well-made film, though I'm not sure I'd put my friends through it if they weren't in the mood for it.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 8/10
How Much I Liked It: 6.5/10

This is the sixty-fourth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the seventeenth from the AFI FEST programme. Film fatigue is definitely setting in, as the selections here are (understandably and reasonably) weaker than what I saw at Telluride. As I type this, I am queuing up in the rush line for one of the films I missed at Telluride - Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillion/The Diving Bell And The Butterfly - a whole hour and a half earlier than the screening time.

I didn't quite realise that this film is directed by Gregg Araki until I was seated in the theatre. The name immediately rang a bell - that rather difficult film Mysterious Skin ... but I wasn't sure until I came out of the cinema to check it. Which is slightly weird as this is a completely different film.

Imagine an arthouse, slightly intelligent version of any number of those stoner films like Dude, Where's My Car?.

Reason I went in, was coz it was one of the rare comedies on offer, and it stars Anna Faris who's usually good at what she does, and the supporting cast boasts such names as John Krasinski, Adam Brody, and John Cho.

There's not much to say as it's pretty simple, really. We begin in the end, as these films usually do, with Jane talking to the narrator at the top of the ferris wheel next to a beach wondering how she got there. The narrator is revealed to be Roscoe Lee Browne, which generated a huge laugh from the audience though I have no idea who he is. (Wikipedia: an American Emmy Award-winning actor and director, known for his rich voice and dignified bearing.) Then we go to the beginning where, of course, Jane gets herself stoned. Then accidentally gets herself stoned even more. She has a number of chores to complete that day, and obviously she screws them up one by one and digs deeper and deeper holes.

As you can read, there are lots of 'obviouslys'. In other words, structurally the film doesn't do anything new. Yet half the audience were enjoying it immensely and laughing out loud, whereas I was just chuckling at some and stone-faced at others. It's not that the film isn't funny - I think what the film achieved pretty well was to take scenarios we've seen before or have kinda been expecting and presented it in the funniest ways possible with sound effects and editing (Araki loves dissolves and fade into whites, certainly reminded me of Mysterious Skin).

As mentioned, the scenarios have an intellectual bent to them. Like how Jane ends up in a sausage truck with the first edition of der Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei in her hands. Which inspires her to hatch a scheme to sell the book on eBay where, presumably, it would fetch 780,000 dollars. And so on.

Anna Faris is being her usual self - there is no other actress who is capable of pulling off a stoned young girl as well as she could, probably. Adam Brody walks into the scene half-dressed like Captain Jack Sparrow, playing the cocky side (as opposed to the insecure side he plays half the time). John Krasinski plays a nerdy character in a performance I didn't expect from him - very surprising. (However, with this film, I'm now convinced the whole masturbating in the shower joke - in order to embarass the characters or show how degraded they've become - is getting tired.) John Cho has a really small role, but watching him in a stoner film suddenly made me want to watch Harold & Kumar again.

A film for other people, though I can't say I didn't enjoy some parts of it.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7/10
How Much I Liked It: 6.5/10

I said a few days ago, after watching the documentary Orange Revolution that I didn't think Malaysians could match what the Ukrainians did for the love of their country.

So I read with interest what's going on in KL and thought, hmm, perhaps I was wrong.

Perhaps Malaysians ARE capable of protesting peacefully. Yes, the police are not above using water cannons and beating people (to death?) - which are unlike the police force in Ukraine, who eventually looked at their conscience and left their posts, while the Ukrainian people kept to their promise and didn't storm the government buildings. That is, it was a non-violent protest through and through, with no one on either sides getting hurt. Well, that's not a possibility in Malaysia - it seems that, based on recent history, the police is not above using force, and the individual policemen wouldn't have changed their minds on anything. They're not taught to think.

In fact, many Malaysians are not taught to think. That is the problem.

The thing that I find wasteful (segue-way coming up ...) is that Malaysians - especially those who went overseas to study, whether they come back or not - are very, very strategically poised to succeed in the world, and to do so quietly under the radar.

And doing so quietly under the radar is important, I feel. So that fame doesn't hit us - fame that the government craves so much through its prestige projects and the pointless Malaysia Book Of Records.

What I mean to say is, those of us who've been overseas, many of us speak both English and Mandarin/Malay/an Indian dialect well, and can think in the Malaysian mentality, the Malay/Chinese/Indian mentality AND the Western mentalities. Now, this is a very distinct advantage above all the other nationalities - Africans who come over to the UK to study, for example, are still often stuck in their African mindset (more likely than not an urban African mindset), or else they've stayed in the UK since they were young and have no idea how to think in an African mindset and are completely British in their mentalities. Or a Brit doing a NOVA teaching job in Japan - they're still Brits and will never think like the Japanese. Or an American studying in Australia. And so on.

No, only Malaysians (and Singaporeans too) are able to hold different ways of thought in our heads, and this is a consequence of our multi-racial society.

Folks, this is a good thing.

And with globalisation, borders no longer matter. Malaysians who left the country ... many of them remain quite Malaysian, even if they never go back, or even if they go back every year. This is generalising of course - every individual is different, as always. But this is my argument. We are powerful, resourceful, perfectly poised to take over the world bit by bit.

And many of us don't even know it.

I guess I just want all of us Malaysians to do well. Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, do it well. Whether you're Law Tzuo Hann, cycling your way back home. Or one of my friends studying medicine in Liverpool. Or Nicol David winning the world squash championship. Or my friend Swifty who just returned home from Perth digging his claws into film producing in our very nascent film industry.

And know that you're better than most Westerners I've come across.

And know that if the government ever becomes too oppressive or corrupt that it benefits most of us to leave the country (and yes this is a warning to the government, push us hard enough and we will all leave, whether Malay, Chinese or Indian or others), we will still be Malaysian at heart - and by that time, Malaysian will no longer be a nationality but a diaspora.

This is the sixty-fourth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the sixteenth I saw from the AFI FEST programme.

I was about to go in for this one with some anticipation when my friend Swifty told me that he only saw a few minutes of it and gave up on it coz it was 'stupid and campy'.

Yes it was. Though I did manage to stay for the whole thing.

Okay, first of all, this is yet another adaptation of Hamlet - but obviously the Tibetan setting gives it that much more reason to exist. Only thing is, it comes pretty close after the heels of Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet, which is unfortunate. And between the two, I'd rather watch The Banquet again, no matter how slow that film was, coz at least that film ... is a film.

This one is quite a mess. It's like Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but ten times messier. It commits a similar mistake of plastering the whole film with fairly bombastic music. What's worse is the editing - editor probably never went to film school, or perhaps that's the editing style they adopt in more primitive parts of China. (Which is perhaps unfair - the director, Sherwood Hu, speaks English averagely and clearly has studied in the US before.)

Now, about the editing. I haven't seen such atrocious editing since, I guess, Seven Swords. And that one's not that bad compared to this - Prince Of The Himalayas consists of a loosely strung together series of perhaps five dozen scenes. The transitions are nonexistent, it just jumps from one scene to the next, and leaves no leeway for the music to help make it flow so the music just ends prematurely before the next scene. (Remember Stephen Gaghan's quip that transitions are most important in a film.)

The music is actually rather good, very interesting, just very poorly planned out - even though it is surprisingly well mixed at parts, with the percussions lingering into the scenes. But only ever the percussions. There were a couple of Tibetan songs that were really haunting - you guessed it, a female voice over New Age music.

In fact, it's not just the editing between scenes that suffers - editing within scenes are terrible as well. Absolutely no thought is given to continuity; there seems to be numerous unnerving instances of what is known as 'crossing the line' (which is fine if it didn't unintentionally unnerve but this one did); and they actually found ways to make jump cuts not work, which is pretty hard these days.

Now, it honestly wouldn't have been hard to make this film fascinating - it is set in the Himalayan mountain ranges, after all. New Age-y music and awe-inspiring landscape - those two things combined together will grab me like no other elements of film can. And yet, the way the film was shot somehow made the locations ... mundane. The camera seems to love crane shots (occasionally elaborate) and quick pans. That's not how you shoot such vast landscapes! I would imagine one would've used slow-moving pans, especially when accompanied with those droning music sounds of Tibetan music and songs - I actually thought of some shots in Oliver Stone's Alexander that did that, for example. Personally, I would've emphasised the landscape in the shots. Here, the landscape seems to have no bearing on the feel of the story. I almost feel like the director was given all these toys to make it shooting in such difficult landscapes as close to the ease of shooting under normal conditions as possible - and so all he does is shoot and shoot and shoot, without much proper planning. Not to say that is the case, just that it felt that way.

The performances were okay. Two in particular, were good - Dobrgyal, who plays the ostensibly evil uncle (we've previously seen him in Kekexili: Mountain Patrol as the very moral and authoritative leader of the patrol), and Zomskyid, who plays the queen. Dobrgyal plays his character with much uncontrived ambiguity, while Zomskyid plays hers with complete dignity, and there actually is a chemistry between those two characters. The main actor, Purba Rgyal, looks like Wang Lee Hom.

Plotwise, there were many cringe-worthy moments. Like when we know what's going to happen (or even, already shown what's going to happen) and still the film takes its time describing it to us (yet it has no respect for cuts between scenes). So many 'scenes' seem to have no purpose whatsoever - just a character lamenting, or another character lamenting.

Ultimately, a lost opportunity.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 3.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 3/10

PS - American audiences seem to love the film though. As I said, it's not too hard to impress them, it seems. By the way, the AFI staff who introduced the film alleged that this is the first time the film has been screened outside of China. Nonsense - it has already been screened at the Adelaide Film Festival this February, it seems.

This is the sixty-third film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the fifteenth I saw from the AFI FEST programme.

I actually fell asleep in the beginning. I seem to fall asleep around then nowadays - oddly, it's exactly dinner time for normal people. I'm not normal of course - a year of film school has screwed up my alimentary schedule.

Anyway, this film is about skiing. In very, very high places. Not just high, exceedingly steep as well. As in, places that neither you nor me would ever think we're capable of traversing. Not unless you're one of the talking heads in the film who actually dig that kind of stuff, names that you've never heard of - Doug Coombs, Shane McConkey, Ingrid Backstrom, Andrew McLean and so on.

The film focusses exclusively on skiing and doesn't deal with snowboarding, which has its own history according to director Mark Obenhaus. It spends a good half of it on the early history of very steep ski mountaineering - ah, maybe that's why I fell asleep! - which is, slightly surprisingly, only three or four decades ago when that began. Then it slowly makes its way to the people of today who do such things, their reasoning about why they do it - which seems to surprise so many of the audience who chuckle at such musings from the talking heads who nonchalantly look upon their challenges ... I mean, seriously, aren't we all used to it already? Just because we don't commit ourselves to such dangerous pleasures doesn't mean we don't know it exists, right? And yet the audience chuckles, as if it was the first time they heard something as crazy as skiing down a 55 degree slope with many long drops, done with a certain amount of somersault, possibly even out-running an avalanche.

Anyway, the reason I came to this is to watch the amazing shots of ski athletes - often in graceful slow motion, I might add - somersaulting and speeding their way down the mountains, and in this the film doesn't disappoint, and such images fill up much of the second half of the documentary.

The music, strangely, seems to be composed for something NASA would've produced as an educational programme about the history of space exploration.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7/10
How Much I Liked It: 6.5/10

This is the sixty-second film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the fourteenth film I saw from the AFI FEST programme.

When one of the programmers, Rose Kuo, tasked to introduce the film, explains to the audience that Hou Hsiao Hsien is considered one of the best filmmakers of the current generation according to many critics, I was thinking about the one film of his that I saw, called 最好的時光/Three Times. Well, saw is perhaps the wrong word, as I fast-forwarded through two-thirds of the film. Hou Hsiao Hsien shoots with a fairly static camera - except when his characters are moving, at which point the camera pans and tilts along with the subject. And he composes the film with mainly long takes, with its own language in terms of when to cut to a different setup. And nothing much happens - it's just the characters doing stuff, going through their own lives.

And therein, lies the seeds of the Malaysian independent arthouse cinema, I thought. I might be off by a mile, but I vaguely recall that some of the indie filmmakers back home mention him as one of their favourites (along with other names like Ozu and Kiarostami and Ray, which none of my filmmaking classmates have ever heard of or are likely to). And certainly the style that was employed in many Malaysian indie arthouse films - what I often describe as static but well-composed long takes of people going through their occasionally surreal but quite often mundane/boring lives.


So here we have Hou Hsiao Hsien doing a French film. The only reason I went for this, really, is Juliette Binoche. I first saw her in Chocolat, though I remember seeing her winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The English Patient before that. She is absolutely mesmerising and charismatic, her performances always sincere and charming - very, very charming. I later saw The English Patient and realised that's very basically how she plays all her characters - her characters are all very recognisably Juliette Binoche, with some differences between films of course. Since then, I've always looked forward to watching any films when she's in it, though I can't say I liked all of them. Sure enough, she doesn't disappoint here.

The other performances were good as well. The other two main characters are Song, a film student from Beijing who becomes the nanny to Suzanne's (played by Binoche) son, Simon. Song is always caring and patient as she should be, while Simon is ... a kid, so he does what a kid does.

There is no real conflict in the film, and no plot to speak of. It is a series of episodes. In fact, there are two seemingly parallel and unconnected 'stories' - one involves the eponymous red balloon that floats around with a mind of its own, which we see 10% of the time; the rest of the film portrays the lives of those aforementioned characters. The only connection to speak of is that Song is making a film about a flying red balloon with the help of Simon - perhaps that is what we're watching when we're looking at scenes of the flying balloon, her film. However, there is no transition between the two sides.


The flying red balloon bookends the film - as a result, those were the two areas I fell asleep in. The entire middle section, which shows Suzanne trying to deal with the non-paying renter downstairs, Song and Simon's time together after school, Suzanne's job as a puppeteer, etc gets more interesting as we go deeper into the film. But as expected it never really goes anywhere.

Which brings to mind the question, what is the film for? If film is all about transporting us to another time and place, then yes, this film succeeded, rather clumsily. If it is to entertain - well, this film didn't, really.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 6.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 7/10

This is the sixty-first film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas, and the thirteenth from the AFI FEST programme.

At 52 mins, this is a pretty short documentary that explores the origins and persistent custom of circumcision (called brith by the Hebrews, 'bersunat' by the Malays, and I don't know what else by other groups). It isn't really - the documentary assumes we know where it comes from - ordered by God, that is. Instead, it's the filmmaker complaining about why he was circumcised and trying to trace the reasons behind it, ignoring the fact that it is just what is done and no one in his society questions it. That he questions it might be a noble pursuit - if it had yielded some interesting insights. Keyword here is if.

In short, much ado about nothing.

There is one interesting figure though - approx. 20% of the global male population is circumcised: Jews, Muslims (but not Christians, don't confuse!), many Americans, and interestingly, many South Koreans.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 5/10
How Much I Liked It: 4.5/10

This is the sixtieth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the twelfth from the AFI FEST programme.

The title is pretty self-explanatory - this is a documentary about the Chinese actors and filmmakers who preside in the Hollywood film industry, both past and present; their experiences, their opinions about how life has been for them and how they are perceived. In particular, half of the documentary focuses on that rather irritating tendency for older Hollywood films to portray Chinese characters with Caucasian actors. Obviously we Chinese cringe at that, but on the other hand there is no other way around it, looking at the social and political climate of pre-1960s Hollywood.

In attendance:
Arthur Dong (director of the documentary)
James Hong (so many films and TV shows; an actor you know by face and not by name)
Nancy Kwan (The World Of Suzie Wong, Flower Drum Song)
Tsai Chin (Fu Manchu series, The Joy Luck Club, Red Corner)
Lisa Lu (The joy Luck Club)
Amy Tan (writer of Joy Luck Club)
... as well as a few others who are connected to the story of the Hollywood Chinese

Also in the audience is Janet Yang, whom my producer insists is the most powerful female Chinese figure in Hollywood - plus, she's her godmother. She barely gets a mention in the film, but she has collaborated with Oliver Stone in many occasions, won an Emmy, worked with Steven Spielberg in Empire Of The Sun as a Chinese liaison, and produced, among others, The Joy Luck Club.

Other figures interviewed include Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift), B.D. Wong (Jurassic Park, The Salton Sea, Father Of The Bride), Joan Chen (The Last Emperor, and Lust, Caution) and Ang Lee of course. Strange they didn't manage to track down Jackie Chan, John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat, etc.

It is a well made documentary, and that's really all I can say about it. It was a lot more interesting to hear the Q&A with the panel of Chinese actors and filmmakers in attendance after the film. Plus the cheesy title in the beginning and end was slightly irksome - you guessed it, Chinese takeaway fonts.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7/10
How Much I Liked It: 7/10

This is the fifty-ninth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas, and the eleventh I saw from the AFI FEST programme. It is also perhaps the first Japanese film I saw at the big screen.

Such a weird title. And the synopsis promises that it would be black comedy. And that is confirmed within the first 2 mins of the film, when a black cat causes an accident that is gruesome and hilarious at the same time - we cut to an aerial shot with the smoking truck and two large trails of blood behind it, incidating that its victims have been squashed to pieces. Only the Japs would think of portaying it that way!

Essentially it is a story about a dysfunctional family. Far worse than any you've come across. The weird thing about this one is that the characters aren't set up in a directly opposing manner - things aren't 180 degrees opposite of each other, or even perpendicular or parallel. There are four characters, and each one seems to belong in a different universe, but neither opposes or complements the other properly, though they do interact. That actually makes their interaction a lot more unpredictable - I was frequently left wondering, oh kay, what's gonna happen next?

First off, my favourite character is Machiko, the one character who doesn't actually belong in the family. She is the sister-in-law, newly married to the eldest sibling - the step-brother. She seems to have arrived from a cartoon, with her constant nodding and smiling expressions and cutesy giggle. And, just when I announced that I haven't met a character as forgiving and patient and oblivious to others' bad intentions as Claire from Expired, here comes one to rival that.

And similarly, just like Jay from Expired, there is a humongously narcissistic and self-centred character here, and actually evil too - the second sister, Sumika. She punishes her youngest sister Kiyomi for something she did years ago - in the form of homework, consisting of poems Kiyomi has to write praising Sumika's beauty and greatness. She also plays pranks like bringing a camera into the bathroom while Kiyomi is in the bath and turning on the hot water to force her out of the bath.

Kiyomi herself is a rather enigmatic character - a quietly enigmatic one. She is constantly scared of Sumika for obvious reasons - so scared that she almost never speaks throughout the film. She has a penchant for drawing manga though, and that becomes a major element in the film. We can see that beneath her fear, though, there is something else going on, and sure enough, there is.

And then there's the eldest step-brother, Shinji. Quite a hard one to crack, this character. He is protective of Kiyomi, scared of Sumika, yet abusive towards his absolutely wonderful and hardworking and easily-content wife Machiko. He is constantly depressed or worried about something through the film.


There isn't much more to say really, except that it's a fun one - and there haven't been too many of those in this film festival. As you can surmise, the characters are pretty much all the film has.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 7.5/10

This is the fifty-eighth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas.

I've heard of differing views about the film, with a rather mixed result overall. Still, I wanted to watch it coz it's a legal thriller - and more importantly, one written and directed by Tony Gilroy who also wrote the Bourne trilogy.

I spent much of the movie thinking, this is an unconventional film. And really, the only reason the film got made through the Hollywood system is possibly due to the names backing it - it names as exec producers Steven Soderbergh, Anthony Minghella and George Clooney. Coz it is talky, and it jumps around between subplots which didn't seem like subplots, and it was nearly the end of the film before I figure out the point of the film.

The point of the film, I guess, is very basically about a guy who is good at his job but he is discovering that he doesn't like it much.

It's a strange one. Being a legal thriller, it spends a lot of time on Michael Clayton's family - his relationship with his son, his elder brother, his younger brother. You see, the trailer made it out to be a story about Michael Clayton having to fix one single problem - that one of their top lawyers has stripped himself very publicly and thus threatens to destroy the case they've been working on for years. That story doesn't even come in until a quarter of the way into the film.

That first quarter is in fact a flash forward - in which we end with Michael Clayton behaving in a way we don't quite understand. Either I'm missing something, but we get to the end and see that scene again, and I still don't understand why he did that.

I found it really hard to get into the film, and while the dialogue was superbly written I never quite enjoyed it the way I thought I would. Again, it was cool that the film doesn't make things easy for the audience - it is full of the kind of language we imagine lawyers would use, often trying to one-up the other. It was also kinda hilarious to see a bunch of lawyers busily talking or running about in the offices - the density of lawyers were such that they reminded me of lemmings.


Then we came to the climax, and it's explosive. Just simply explosive. Very power-charged. Alas, it lasts all of five minutes.

I found the end credits interesting.

And Tilda Swinton is great, as always. As is Tom Wilkinson - so utterly compelling I forgot that he was supposed to be crazy in the film.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7/10
How Much I Liked It: 7/10

For the longest time I didn't have the mood to watch the film. I remember first hearing about it when I was holidaying in Australia. It came out around the same time as King Kong - and I remember the two ladies in the Aussie talk show criticising the film, in particular about how Diane Kruger plays a soprano but her lip synching didn't work.

And so there it lay. It was later nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and I wondered why.

Well, I saw it just now and it's better than ANY of the AFI FEST films I've seen to date.

There are so many reasons to like this film.

It opens with shots of first a French, then a British, then a German boy reciting the poems of the times, which consists of insults and degradation of the 'enemy'.

The opening credits are played over beautiful, soaring helicopter shots showing the beautiful landscapes of the three countries - the same, yet different.


The film is populated by some of the most enigmatic young actors of Europe; Daniel Brühl and Diane Krüger and Benno Fürmann from Germany, as well as Guillaume Canet from France. Then there's Gary Lewis from Scotland.

And consequently this is a rare film that has no dominant language. That in fact becomes the theme of the film.

You see, for those of you who didn't know what the film is about, it portrays an example of what is called fraternisation during the First World War - a spontaneous decision by opposing armies in many parts of the frontline to call a truce and mingle among each other during Christmas Eve 1914, when the war has lasted only five months and the immensity of the war itself and the following one remained an unconsidered impossibility. This story isn't based out of one single event, but is a collection of various anecdotes that were reported from the time period, and pieced together by writer-director Christian Carion into one beautiful story.


And so, in the film, it came to pass that opera music brought the Scots and the Germans together, and soon the French joined in, and they decided to enjoy their Christmas, sharing stories, sharing pictures of wives, sharing champagne, sharing and sharing, and it was beautiful, and there was no sarcasm about it, no irony. Just the pure bliss of people finding out that the people they once fought are no different from them. Some of them are even able to speak each other's language - a German speaking French, the French speaking English, the English ... are quite useless really when it comes to language.

The film sustains that moment, and then slowly by slowly, 'reality' begins to creep in and we realise how fragile that co-existence between soldiers are, and willing it not to end, we witness it for a bit longer, and then it ended. In the film, it ended with the sermon of a bishop who came in to chastise the men who fraternised, demonising the Germans in the worst words possible and declaring it God's will to kill as many of the other side as possible 'so that we never have to do it again'. And through it all, there is an underlying sense of conflict, of dilemma - now that they've shared chocolates and champagne, do they go back to killing each other again? What's going to happen? To disobey, or to disobey one's newfound conscience?


Haven't really been so touched (and surprised by it) by a film in such a long time. Since, maybe, The Girl In The Cafe.

This is the fifty-seventh film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the tenth from the AFI FEST programme.

I had wanted to see this, because it was a film from Singapore and it would be nice to meet someone who shares a similar accent. This is in fact the first Singaporean film to play at the AFI FEST. On the other hand, the synopsis and the posters look boring - like it would be yet another example of the Malaysian/Singaporean indie arthouse trademark style of routine and mundanity portrayed through an unmoving frame. And sure enough, it is.

The producer came out to intro the film in the beginning and announced, to my disappointment, that the director (co-director, rather, but also writer and actor) Loo Zihan has flown home this very morning for an exam. He also kept calling it a daring film, for a Singaporean film, due to its frank portrayal of homosexual sex and nudity. That and Loo managing somehow to snag Lim Yu Beng to play the other gay role. I remember Lim Yu Beng in Anna And The King (very small role there), but I also remember seeing him doing an anthology of plays last year, a collaboration between Malaysian and Singaporean stage actors - the name of that play event escapes me, but I remember having seen it in Bangsar Actors Studio.

Anyway, it's a really short film that felt 50% longer due to the constant one-takes. It involves three characters, Boy, Teacher and Mother. They do things which are normal to their characters, most we understand, a few we don't quite. Generally, I had no idea what the film is trying to say. However, it has an assured sense of style - much of the sequences use muted sepia tones, a few surreal scenes are in full blown saturated colours. A couple of times the scenes involve the technique of reversing the video, such as when Boy dances in the woods with red satin cloth.


It is strangely compelling at times - I guess I have by now gotten used to the indie arthouse style that I used to loathe so much. Still don't get the point of the title though.

I really liked the minimalistic music by Darren Ng though. Shall keep him in mind for future projects.

A trivia. This is in fact the first Singaporean film I saw at the big screen.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7/10
How Much I Liked It: 7/10

PS - The theme song to Dae Jang Geum can be heard in the background, which made me chuckle silently in the cinema - only I knew what that meant, you see. Plus, it reminded me of home.

This has got to be the worst collection of short films, ever. Seriously.

The Tragic Story Of Nling
Pointless. And vulgar. Pointlessly vulgar and completely unentertaining.

Untitled #2
What, just because you stuck together machinima scenes from Second Life doesn't make it worth any value whatsoever. Who programmed this, seriously?

White Man In A Black Box
And just what point are you trying to make? Or do you think just having African children in it will just make the audience coo 'aww'? They're not cute at all.

Life And Times Of Robert F. Kennedy Starring Gary Cooper
Ooh, let's just juxtapose images of RFK and scenes from movies involving Gary Cooper and call it art, call it a short film. Shameless. Music's good though.

Emergency Needs
Same thing. Trying too hard to make a point interesting = completely redundant.

South Central Farm: Oasis In A Concrete Desert
You and your subject may think the subject matter is compelling. It isn't. Political correctness can go to hell - but it just isn't interesting.

Aftermath On Meadowlark Lane
Great. Another case of using film as a medium to complain about the filmmakers' personal problems. Boo hoo.

Saliva
Only thing interesting about this was trying to guess which country it was from. Sounded part French and part Spanish. Should have guessed - Portuguese. Brazil in fact. Overly laborious in style, to the point of irrelevancy to the theme.

This is the fifty-sixth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the ninth I saw from the AFI FEST programme.

The thing that attracted my attention to the film was that it involves the desert. Never mind that it is Australia.

What's interesting was how international the characters were. We begin on an Indonesian boat - which means I'm the only person in the entire cinema, probably who understood what the characters are saying without having to refer to the subtitles ... well, most of the time anyway, Indon is a bit harder than Malay and my Malay has deteriorated as it is. Wait - not all the characters are Indon - three of them are the fisherman, who are transporting a bunch of illegal refugees into Austrlia, a group of Cambodians and a group of Iraqis (which an Australian character later mistook as Persians). The time period is early 1990s.

Basically, it came to pass that one member from each nationality ended up bumping into each other as they try to make their way out of the harsh desert in the middle of nowhere in Australia. The Khmer insists that his dad is an Australian living in Perth; the Iraqi is looking forward to a happier, freer life in Australia; the Indon arrived there by accident. All three speak good but accented English. On the side, a trio of Australian reserve army soldiers are being radio-ed around to locate the missing refugees. What's interesting about them is that they are not malicious in any way, and treat their interesting but easily boring job with good nature and much light-hearted banter.

It feels a tad long, but it has an assured sense of style. There are moments of comedy, and moments of stylistic boredom (meaning, played with a trancey way of editing and a certain kind of music ... I like the music, by the way).


Later during the Q&A, I mentioned to the director Michael James Rowland that I understood Malay; after that I went up to him and talked to him a little. This is his first film, ten years after film school. The project took seven years from writing to release. His next project involves a story of escape too, but more morbid - I shall keep it mum for the moment. He admits that his Indon consultant told him that the Indonesian in the film was a little formal - I didn't really realise that until he pointed it out. But honestly, it was pretty accurate, and I found the actual Indonesian dialogue funnier than the translation. There's just something to the Indon/Malay race and the way they talk that makes it funny (often in the form of sarcasm).

The way the film is bookended was real unconventional - the framing scene in the beginning didn't make sense to me structurally, until we get to the end framing scene.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 7.5/10

This is the fifty-fifth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the eighth from the AFI FEST programme.

My, Jason Patric looks so different. More plump, and pulling off a role that completely washes away anything Speed 2: Cruise Control suggests about the type of roles he's after. (Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoyed that film. Yes I did.)

Anyway, when people refer this film to you, they might say it's a film about parking enforcement officers - the most hated people in LA. I once worked with a producer earlier this year who, at the sight of one of those people, spent the next ten minutes complaining about them, questioning why they would ever accept such a job - my reasoning that they needed the money was brushed aside with an 'even so ...'.

Claire (Samantha Morton) became a parking enforcement officer because she needed money. (Hah, see!)

The story, though, is really about Claire and her relationship with Jay (Jason Patric). You see, Claire is the most gracious, patient, and ridiculously forgiving person to ever grace the screens in any cinema. I mean, seriously, I have never seen such a character before. Ever. Jay, on the other hand, is the most narcissistic man to ever exist, in real form or in fiction. (It means, Swifty my friend, even you don't compare.) The whole world revolves around him, so clearly he sees that that it must be true - though his life barely registers on anyone's radar ... except when they bump into him as he forcefully writes up a ticket for them, 45 times a day on average. Boy is he good in his job. Plus his self-admittance to his greatness - "I am a great guy" said matter-of-factly, or "I'm the nicest person you've ever known", or any number of variations of those lines. Jason Patric must be having a field day with this role - certainly his most unique to date, as far as I know.

The other actor worth commenting is Teri Garr. So different from her days in Tootsie, she now plays neurotic characters - I last saw her as a constantly screaming paranoid woman in a car in Kabluey. Here she plays Claire's mute mum with such cutesy lovability.

Anyway, as I said, the story is about the relationship between these two completely opposite characters. The movie itself plays out as a series of (endless) episodes about how Jay is constantly abusing Claire while Claire takes it all in without a pip of complaint. The constant attempts to kiss become just another action, a behaviour, primal, not something that means anything anymore.

And boy, does director Cecilia Miniucchi like gliding steadicam long takes.

And then it ends.

As I said, there hasn't been a film that I've seen so far from the AFI FEST that ends conclusively.

Worth watching for the performances.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 6.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 7/10

This is the fifty-fourth film I saw at the Hollywood Arclight Cinemas and the seventh from the AFI FEST Programme.

Orange Revolution is a documentary about that so-named event that happened in Ukraine during the winter of 2004. The Ukrainian government is corrupt in the eyes of a lot of people. Blatantly so - bribery has infected many aspects of society. (Malaysians: sound familiar?) In 2000, a journalist was actually murdered for being daring enough to question Leonid Kuchma's government - and there are apparently enough evidence to make a convincing case that this is not a rumour.

Somewhere along the way, a man called Viktor Yushchenko came along and impressed the country with his sincerity. Made people believe that corruption didn't have the be the way of life. And people began to buy the idea that the opposition party could win the election in 2004. The recumbent party didn't even sweat at the idea - they're just moving on with their plans of winning the election, then having a new politician, Yanukovych replace Kuchma.

This documentary is a story about the election, during the course of which Yushchenko was poisoned with Ricin, Yanukovych survived an assault attempt (consisting of eggs), and for the prolonged climax, half a million people congregated in the streets and squares of Kiev to protest the blatant falsification of the election results.

The protest was done in very, very careful determination to not have a single drop of blood shed for its cause on either side.

They succeeded. Kind of. The events in the years following the Orange Revolution have put a bit of a damper to the excitement and passion stirred up among the Ukrainians for their country.

But, never mind that - for the Orange Revolution itself is an event of pure patriotism. The people rose up - it wasn't about power or the economy. It was about what the majority wanted - and it is surprising how fragile that is. But the people persisted, in the middle of the winter. You could intercut the images here with the images of the immediate post-9/11 days when thousands congregated near Ground Zero to feed the workers. There were rock concerts, and highly emotionally-charged speeches that actually moved me, a foreigner with no allegiance to Ukraine. I could see how it could happen in my country - but it won't.*

It was the most affecting documentary I've seen since The Corporation. I mentioned so to director Steve York - and he took it rightly as a compliment. It has also spawned an interesting idea for a new script in my head. I made sure I took Mr. York's business card to prepare for that eventuality.

How Good I Think The Film Is: 7.5/10
How Much I Liked It: 8/10

* On 10 Nov, 2007, upwards of 40,000 Malaysians marched to the national palace in Kuala Lumpur to ask for fairer elections. Perhaps that's one step towards proving me wrong.

PS - You might wonder why it is called the Orange Revolution. It's not just that orange was the symbol used to represent Yushchenko's party and supporters. Historically, various Eastern European and Central Asian states have used colours or prominent objects (with seemingly no related symbolic meaning) to name their revolutions, such as the Singing Revolution of Estonia, the Tulip Revolution of Kyrgyzstan or the Rose Revolution of Georgia.