Cinematic Concerns

One year ago I was watching the Oscars exactly 380 metres away from where it was happening.

And then I came back home. Distance now: 14,144 km.

Anyway, much has been said about the Oscars and I don't have much to say except that the majority of people who thought the Oscars are irrelevant/boring/dull/too long/self-congratulatory/out-of-touch can just eat my shorts.

In the words of Variety:

Others can decide how Sunday's event looked on TV, but for the 3,000-plus attendees Sunday night, it was terrific. As Danny Boyle said in his acceptance speech, "I don't know what (this show) looks like on television, but in the room it's bloody wonderful."

It was a high-energy party fueled by frequent surprises, a socko host stint by Hugh Jackman and some memorable acceptance speeches. First-time Oscarcast producer Laurence Mark and exec producer Bill Condon sustained the sense of revelry with twists to the format, while Jackman kept the momentum going by entertaining the aud with jokes, songs and anecdotes during commercial breaks.

You got that? There were OTHER jokes that Hugh Jackman was telling that the other 800 mil of us didn't get to hear.

I want to be in that hall someday.

Also, my own acceptance speech, ten years in the making so far, is slowly consolidating now (though still far from completion).

Other things to say: Kate Winslet, still great with acceptance speeches. And I like that they no longer rush the Oscar recipients through their speeches. It's so terribly awkward to do that. I want MORE JOKES in the next Oscar ceremony! (Tina Fey and Steve Martin were the funniest. And instead of Ben Stiller and Natalie Portman, why not Christian Bale? If you get this joke, please leave a comment and we can talk.) Hugh Jackman is fine, but I still want to see Degeneres and Stewart return. And finally we no longer have to witness any more of this mourning Heath Ledger melodramatic shit. He got his Oscar, it's done.

Emma Thompson On Writing





Taraji Henson & Sally Hawkins





Directors On Ideas





Actresses Take On Directors





Actresses During Awards Season





Actors On Surprises





Danny Boyle & Gus Van Sant





Darren Aronofsky & Edward Zwick





Actresses Take On Roles





Writers On Writing The Movie





Ron Howard & Clint Eastwood





Boyle On Bollywood




Directors On Directing





On Mickey Rourke

How I think the Oscar nominations this year should have looked like. It deviates about 50% from the actual list. The Oscars will be held Monday morning our time.

(A special welcome to the numerous guys from Mamak Special. Note: MAJOR SARCASM ALERT. Those of you who didn't come from there, I urge you to go into the Mamak Special website, register, and see for yourself what a lot of Malaysian men think and get up to. It's not pretty.)

People, how many of you have actually seen the nude pictures of Elizabeth Wong?

Because, the thing I find most insidious about this incident, most disheartening, is NOT that certain politicians were calling Ms Wong immoral (Khir Toyo had the cheek to congratulate her in today's newspapers for "doing the right thing") and thus that she should resign, NOT the fact that Ms Wong actually resigned (which is very, very odd), NOT the fact that all this most definitely hints at conspiracy due to the timing, the person targeted (anyone say 'hillside development blanket ban lifted'?), etc.

It's the fact that the pictures of Ms Wong that are at the center of this incident are not actually nude.

Unless I'm missing something here.

I did not bother searching for the pictures. I didn't know how salacious the pictures were, but, seriously, how interesting would it be? And then, while blog-hopping to find out the sentiments at the public level, I came across the pictures.



Okay, for the more conservative members of the public, the second picture may be uncomfortable. But NOTICE THAT SHE IS DRESSED.

So where's the nudity? The shot down under? Possibly.

But, (a) we know these pictures were not taken out of consent; (b) you do not see anything. There is no intention, nor is there actual nudity.

Now, there is a term extrapolated from George Orwell's 1984 called 'doublespeak' - words uttered to impose an intended mental attitude on the masses and always with a political purpose.

In other words, you can say a black kettle is white, spread this information all over the country, and even when the pictures of the kettle are finally displayed and it is clearly black, the public will still either call it white, or hesitate on whether they truly know the difference between white and black.

And this is a major weapon of a Fascist state. In 1984, there were no need for wars but wars were still ongoing because the government in the story continually 'reminded' people of the need for war, and people listened to the government because (a) there is no other source of information; (b) to disobey is to lead to punishment and death. However, notice that, generally, in the novel - the public are no more miserable nor happier than we are in reality.

Coming back to this matter.

What has happened is that Ms Wong was clearly not sleeping nude, but virtually all reports in the media says she is sleeping in the nude.

And if she isn't sleeping nude, how does having her privacy violated make her an immoral person, by ANY stretch of imagination? Malay commentators who condemn her 'immoral personality', and I don't care about your political preferences - can you seriously say that the existence of these photos makes her wrong in the eyes of Islamic laws?

Considering the photos, why did Ms Wong resign then? A better tactic would have been to DISPLAY the pictures during the press conference, if perhaps a controversial move. Make sure MORE people saw it. It would make the point this blog post is trying to make - there is NO real nudity, and this coupled with the fact that Ms Wong was clearly violated and is the victim and in no way the perpetrator means that the whole cause against her is nonexistent.

But resign she did. Why?

I hope it is not because there are other pictures that have not been posted (the threat remains), but even so, she is clearly DRESSED and not sleeping nude.

I hope it is because PKR and Pakatan Rakyat have a plan to exploit this matter for all our sakes. And not just because they feel compelled to distance themselves from a scandal. Because if that is their only motive - what chance do the rest of Pakatan politicians have in measuring their morality up against the apparently incorruptible, sincere and hardworking Ms Wong?

I do not see any integrity in her resigning. I guess other quarters do. It depends on your moral code, but I think politicians shouldn't resign because one person punches them in the face (because this is what it is). They should, however, resign if the majority of people thinking about you WANT to punch your face (Khir Toyo, take note).

Also ...

A film that was shot in over 25 countries.

Location scouting took 17 years.

Production itself, on and off, took 4 years.

With a lot of the cash, millions of dollars, coming from the pocket of visionary director Tarsem (whose last film was The Cell), perhaps the most imaginative and elegant directors of our age who uses saturated colours over surreal canvases. (Why use his own cash? So that there would be zero studio interference.)

With almost zero computer-generated visual effects. In other words, those hard-to-believe locations (including a labyrinth and a blue city) are real.

Look at the pictures.











Here's an interview with Tarsem:

Malaysians should watch this movie because it will remind them of the Perak coup.

Except, in the case of this film, the coup is done for a far more stronger moral reason that any reason either BN or Pakatan can come up with. However, it does call into question - who decides the moral reasons and justifies them as sufficient for a drastic action such as this? If you have a simple answer for it (for God, for Sultan, for 'justice' or the vomit-inducingly misused 'democracy'), then you are already wrong.

But that's about that.

On the other hand, Malaysians can't stand + don't care + don't know History, and this is a Historical film, with much less fictional content compared to the average Hollywood historical drama. Yes, it has thriller elements - but that comes with the knowledge that these guys here are trying to kill Hitler. And most of the population of Malaysia has never heard of Hitler, even if they studied Sejarah. (Maybe more than half of its viewing audience.)

This can be evidenced by the restless audience I saw it with. I wish someone had come to shoot them a la the Benjamin Button screening in Philadelphia.


Point is, it's a very complicated story, and because for the most part the filmmakers decided to keep the details (the whole first half is just setup, nothing else), and the myriad cast of characters, and even Tom Cruise went along with the fact that Colonel von Stauffenberg lost an eye, a hand and two fingers - it's not an easy sell.

There is a whole other story about this film that went on in the US - mostly gossips and rumours that explain how the film will flop terribly throughout 2008, i.e. a whole year before the film was released - that locals won't have heard about nor care. (They probably identify Valkyrie as 'neh, that Tom Cruise movie'.)

Also, glad to see Jamie Parker moving up the scales (last saw him in The History Boys). Another young actor to watch, especially in period dramas because of his very stiff formal English accent.

I'm writing less reviews nowadays, and I realise that the reason I write anything at all is because my motivations have changed.

I do want to say upfront, though - MALAYSIANS, PLEASE WATCH THIS FILM.

On another note, I resisted finding out too much about this film. Partly it was because I wasn't as interested in this as the other Oscar films - it's a Clint Eastwood film, after all, and his films always have this quality of being good, usually intensely dramatic and emotional, but without necessarily discerning themselves enough to be great. For example, it's rather difficult to find people who would revisit Mystic River nowadays. As for Gran Torino, which some of my friends are suggesting I watch, I have even less desire to do so, whole concept just sounds boring (so did the trailer).

I was always going to like this film more, for the following factors - Angelina Jolie, period setting (late 20s Los Angeles), interesting premise.

I just didn't realise how much more there is to the film from what the trailer showed. The trailer hinted at a movie that is entirely about Christine Collins losing her son and then being handed back her boy, who turns out not to be her son, and her fight against the corrupt LA police. In fact, there are two major plots to the story that seem to bear little relation until they converge halfway through. The second story, which I won't reveal what it's about, is shocking and horrifying to the point that it really belongs to another genre. It's an odd structuring of the plot, and I frequently felt like I didn't know where the story is going to go next, but at the same time I'm still very much engaged in the story.


Now, this is so because the film allegedly sticks very closely to the facts of the true story. In fact, Eastwood and company opted for the "A True Story' signage rather than "Based On A True Story'. (Yes, there is a difference.) Based on the behind the scenes information on Wikipedia, one surmises that the story is about 90% identical to what really happened back then, right down to certain dialogue lines - and this, I should want you to know, is an exceedingly rare practice in Hollywood. It is due to the bizarre nature of the true story that the filmmakers felt they didn't need to invent anything to make it more interesting. (It was alleged that they lost the Cannes Palme D'Or to Entre Les Murs by two votes because the jury didn't believe some of the things that happened in the film really happened. But it did.)

Now, the film itself is top quality across the board, and I mean this being someone that demands very high standards out of everything. You know by now that Angelina Jolie is nominated for Best Actress for this particular role - in fact, the entire cast (including, remarkably, the child actors, all of whom have to play characters in very complicated, almost adult complexities) were brilliant and entirely believable. Amy Ryan almost deserves to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress even though she's in it for less than ten minutes for being able to sell the character, while Michael Kelly is very good as the cop whose conscience reveals itself later in the story and thus galvanises him to investigate the case with gung-ho scrupulousness, and Jason Butler Harner is chillingly creepy without being over-the-top. The story is gutwrenching, but not in an overt manner. It's because the film refuses to be in-your-face, but remains understated, with its minimalistic non-manipulative music (but that's an Eastwood trademark), and attention to detail in the period settings, that is why it is all the more shocking, all the more real.


I was surprised that it is also nominated for Cinematography, but it is well shot. Mostly, however, I was impressed with the special effects - the Los Angeles of 1928 it created was so utterly believable, with people on the streets and cars and street blocks that must be computer generated due to its scope. The feel of it, the colours, the sounds of the people and the street.

What's amazing is how so much of the film reminds me of current issues in Malaysia. The central issue of the film is entirely unrelated to us and there are no parallels - what is related are the endless and hopeless corruption in the police force, the arrogance of those in power towards those whom they should serve, scenes of protest the like of which we wish we could see here, scenes of torture and interrogation which reminds one of ISA.

Also, this is the prime example of films we should be making - it is art, it is entertaining, it is serious, it is worth our time. This film shames almost all the effort the Malaysia film industry, all of it, is putting into in the name of either creating art or making profits. I am asking, why can't we strive to make films like these? Far from saying that it is easy; however, the formula is there: you have to, have to, have to insist on a proper, good script first, then the rest is just about getting the right people who can work with each other.

One of the Top 10 films of 2008.

Unlike previous years where it wasn't so difficult to pick 10 movies and order them according to my preferences, it was quite a bit harder to achieve that for 2008, so I think I'll just name my Top 10 without ranking them. The most important criteria, which I use to decide when I find it hard to decide, is: yeah, it's good and I enjoyed it then, but would I watch it again?

It's interesting how, of all the late 2008 Oscar movies which I was depending upon to make it into this list, only three managed to squeeze in.

MovieWeb - Movie Photos, Videos & More

CHANGELING

At a previous Oscar Roundtable organised by Newsweek, again, there are many nuggets of craft sprinkled in between copious amounts of anecdotes (mostly by the ever talkative George Clooney), but I found the following clip particularly useful, in terms of its discussion of how actors sink into their roles, and more particularly, Angelina Jolie's intimation that characters and actors share a certain core and going into character is about taking off all the normal self and changing into the character's self.

This is an interview conducted by Newsweek with actors Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Robert Downey, Jr. (Iron Man and Tropic Thunder), Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), Brad Pitt (The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and Burn After Reading) and Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) before the announcement of the Oscar nominations.

It is, of course, fascinating to see how these actors, who are at the peak at their careers and having obtained superstar status, talk about the acting craft, Hollywood style. For Malaysian actors (and let's be frank, we have none that remotely approaches the level of performances these six produce), listen, and learn. Because I really think we can do it.