Ferris Bueller's Day Off

I love Ferris Bueller. Slick, witty and very, very cool. And live in the 80's. I've said it before, and I'm going to say it again. I love the 80's. The music, the films, the fashion sense. Ha. I know people give a lot of crap about the 80's fashion but I think it's super cool and needs to be brought back. Especially the Nike SB Dunk. Those are awesome knickers.

Ferris Bueller is the shiz. He's popular and gets away with everything. He knows the words to Danke Schön and Twist & Shout by heart, and sings them in front of thousands of cheering people. He drives a Ferrari like he just don't care. He skips school because he's already a genius.

When I grow up I want to be like Ferris Bueller. To him, the whole city is the Cheers' Bar, where everybody knows his name and is always glad he came.

By the way, what happened to Matthew Broderick's career? I remember him in Inspector Gadget but that's it. Oh and he's married to Sarah Jessica Horseface, that's all I know. He's such a good actor. It's a shame we don't really see him much these days.

Fork It Out If You Can Afford It, Cheapskate

I love a good bargain. Who doesn't? The feeling of buying something for a lot less than what's written on the price tag is just heavenly. I know a good deal when I see one, as much as I know when I'm being ripped off.

When travelling, I love to go to those street vendors hawking cheap, small memorabilia. Of course, it's good to be street smart when buying something off the street, especially since as a tourist you have this invisible brand on your forehead that says 'cash cow', very alluring to those key-chain sellers looking to milk you dead.

Over the years, I've learned to be more insistent when bargaining. When I went to Hong Kong, the racist Malay in me finally surfaced when I came across these Chinese vendors who tried to pass off obviously fake Emporio Armani belts for the real thing (stray threads don't lie) and sell them at exorbitant prices. I don't really fancy counterfeit stuff anyway, but I might have considered buying one if they had at least had the courtesy to admit that it was fake. I don't know the first thing about bargaining, so I tend to get ripped off pretty easily.

But while there are street vendors who try to make an easy penny out of unsavvy tourists like me, there are others who are just trying to make an honest living. When I went to Bali, there was this lady carrying a baby in one arm, and a handful of souvenir stuff on the other. She offered us 4 t-shirts for 5000 rupiahs (around 2 ringgit) which is sinfully cheap by any standard. I took 8 t-shirts, but one of my friends kept telling me I was getting ripped off since I could have gotten them for a lot less.

You know what? I don't care. This lady has been walking for hours with a baby in her arm, and all she asks for is 2 ringgit and she's not even begging. I don't crap money, but I know I can afford ten times that amount so why should I insist on an even lower price? That's just cruel. If you can afford to pay for an authentic Balinese whole body massage, you can surely fork out 2 ringgit to buy these t-shirts. Heck, you've paid 90 ringgit for one Hard Rock Café t-shirt and all of a sudden 2 ringgit for four shirts is too expensive?

Of course, I ended up buying those shirts and also some key chains, decorative chinese fans, pens and useless shiny shells (all these for less than 15 ringgit which my friend still considered exorbitant) but when the lady breathed out 'thank you' and looked at her baby with a smile that says 'we'll have something good for dinner tonight', I instantly knew that it was the best 15 ringgit I've ever spent.

Unlikely Discovery

The freakiest thing happened 10 minutes ago.

I was in the middle of watching The Color Purple (I just finished reading the book a couple of days ago) when all of a sudden I thought to myself, "This Celie girl reminds me of Tracy Chapman." I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm pretty sure it's not her looks. Maybe it's her somberness, or the way she always manages to see the small good things in life in spite of her suffering.

Of course, as a potential sufferer of adult ADD, I paused the movie, opened up iTunes and put on Fast Car, my favorite song of Chapman and probably one of the greatest songs ever written. Somehow when watching The Color Purple, I could almost hear Fast Car playing continuously in the background, since the lyric is all about pain, hope and dreams. While humming along to the song, I looked up Tracy Chapman on Info Concert to see if by any chance she had a concert coming up in France (which she didn't). I also looked her up on Wikipedia just to know what she's up to these days.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that sometime in the mid-90's, she used to date Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple!

Yes, I was watching a movie based on a book written by Walker, and somehow made a possibly far-fetched connection between the theme of the book and that of the music of Tracy Chapman, and found out that both of them actually used to date. Coincidence? Don't think so.

This either means my eyes are so perfectly in sync with my ear that I  can be a Hollywood music supervisor (the one choosing which song to be played during a scene of a film), or that I spend so much time looking up crap on the internet that I'm starting to get good at the 6-degrees of separation game thing.

post-scriptum : If you're into feminist literature or just curious about the lives of black people in the American South around the turn of the century, you should definitely get this book. Of course one can't help but be reminded of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird when reading it, but The Color Purple doesn't only talk about segregation and racism, it also deals with the patriarchal black community where women are expected to get abused and take the back seat in everything. A very interesting read for me (and pretty light too, as I finished it in a day).

Schindler's List : Part II (The Movie)

Well I just reviewed the book, so now let's review the movie. (This is surely a first, as I'd never actually reviewed a book, but Schindler's List (or Schindler's Ark as it was originally known) is so good it deserves a lengthy review).

As per usual, I always find film adaptations somewhat disappointing. Spielberg's Schindler's List isn't any different. It's an astounding film by any standard, but doesn't hold a candle to the book. Sure, you'll say "Yeah, now you try cramping a 398-page long book on the Holocaust and see if you can do any better - or at least half as well."

I'm far from complaining about the film. It's just the way I feel about adapting something to the big screen while trying to be completely loyal to the storyline. You just... can't.

Why am I saying this? Well first, you can't transcend from words into moving images without losing the essence of literature: poetry. If Poldek Pfefferberg had wanted this book to just be another true account of things, he wouldn't have needed Keneally. He could have just gone to another run-of-the-mill writer and gotten it published all the same. Would the story have been told? Yes. Would the message have been delivered? Sure. But would it have had as much impact? Absolutely not.

For example, for people who didn't read the book, would the shower scene in Auschwitz be as moving? I doubt so. For in the book, the prisoners were said to have speculated about gas chambers in Auschwitz and grown fearful of them, although they were all still in Plaszow and such a killing method didn't exist there. So when they were mistakenly brought to Auschwitz instead of Oskar Schindler's factory in Zwittau, and asked to strip down before going into the shower room, the prisoners were having their worst nightmare realized as they were persuaded that, instead of water, the showers would emit deadly Zyklon-B gas and immediately kill them. To their pleasant surprise, water came out (albeit a bit icy). That was why they cried for joy.

And of course, the story of Josef Bau getting married in the concentration camp didn't make it into the movie, which is such a shame because people would have liked to hear love stories during the Holocaust, especially one involving a German guy and a Jewish girl.

Another problem I found in the movie was the casting of Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. They both looked so much alike that if I hadn't read the book, I would have thought that Oskar Schindler was a person suffering from a multiple personality disorder who would save a Jew one day and kill another Jew the next day. They both played their respective characters extremely well though, although I doubt that the real Schindler and Göth were half as good looking. And is it me, or was the book version of Amon Göth a thousand times more sadistic and murderous than the one in the film?

All in all, I still enjoyed the 3-and-a-half hour film thoroughly since it helped put images on the people and the places in the book. I wouldn't have known how enormous the ghetto was, or how the trains looked like if it weren't for the movie.

And the cute little kid in the picture above? It's Olek Rosner, one of the kids who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a pile of human shit. And most importantly, he looks like me when I was 6 years old.

Schindler's List : Part I (The Book)

I am obsessed with The Holocaust. Not in the Nazi "The Final Solution to the Jewish question" way, of course. It's more towards the amazement that the killings of these people were done coldly, swiftly, in quantities unprecedented, by means ranging from the most primitive (beating and hanging) to the most modern (electric fences, gas chambers, lethal injections); and most importantly, with the rest of the world kept in the dark about it.

I bought Schindler's List (the book) about 4 years ago, but never actually got around to finish it. 50 pages was my personal record, at which I would stop reading in favour of some other more fun activities, start becoming oblivious of the book's existence, and later forget everything I'd read. Lather and repeat.

Throughout the years, I've had the chance to visit one of the concentration and extermination camps in Dachau, read books and biographies of people involved directly or indirectly in the Holocaust, talk to grandchildren of the Holocaust survivors (a friend of mine actually has a grandmother who fled Hungary to escape the Nazi), and even talk to some Israelis I met during travels. Having been raised in a society where Jews and Judaism both mean scheming, money swindling, slick bastards whose only raison d'être is to corrupt Muslim people and conquer the world via fraudulent means, I've grown apprehensive of the Jews. In my country, a mere mention of the word Yahudi could cause endless debate on how the Jews are comparable to rats - dirty and resilient, with a cunning mind.

I watched Sophie's Choice a couple of years ago, and was appalled by the atrocity of it all. The idea of a Herrenrasse, the Hitler ideology, the punishments carried out on people who didn't have the chance to be born Aryan, the decadent lifestyle of blue-eyed German officials whose livers got to enjoy filtering the best Martelli cognac at the expense of unpaid Jewish labourers, most of whom would end up dying by virtue of their race.

So I picked Schindler's List (again) off my bookshelf, determined to finish it once and for all. I spent, in total, almost 25 hours on the train during the holidays without, at all, reaching for my iPod. The book was engrossing enough, even with Thomas Keneally deadpan penmanship. He didn't let emotion or judgment weigh in on his writing. Every torture, every killing, every act of suffering was presented as matter-of-factly as possible, with extra attention to details. He didn't make Oskar Schindler a saint, because at the end of the day, he was still one of the SS-officials who reaped profit from the system. He was a big drinker, gambler and womanizer, who might even have been involved in transactions of the flesh in order to get what he wanted.

The only difference between him and the other Nazis, was that he had a heart. This led to the compiling of the famed Schindler's List, a list of Jewish workers he wanted transferred from the Plaszow concentration camp to his enamelware-cum-artillery components factory, to be used as factory workers. People begged, fought, and bribed to be on the list, because they knew what the list actually symbolized: deliverance. They heard rumours on how the soup at Oskar's had more body, how his workers got to eat twice as much bread, how the doctors at Oskar's actually cured people instead of administering lethal injections, and how no one would die if they worked for Oskar Schindler. Next to Plaszow, Oskar's factory was not just a haven, it was a paradise.

I loved the book. And from now on, I will swear on Thomas Keneally's writing style. If there's anyone who can make true accounts of gruesome stories literary and poetic, it's Keneally. During the course of the book, we skipped from story to story, from a person's point of view to another. It took more than just bland recounting of a story to make it interesting, and Keneally knew it all too well. That was why he told the story of three-year-old Genia who witnessed the assassinations of the adults around her, the story of the German Josef Bau courting a Jewish girl he fell in love with and ended up marrying in one of the prisoners' barracks, the story of Schindler and his philandering ways, as well as the story of the villain Herr Kommandant Amon Göth, to whom murdering a person is as trivial as lighting up a cigarette.

At one point, he so vividly described the cold weather in which the prisoners were told to strip naked and run around, and I happened to be reading while waiting on an open-air platform of a train station (it was 3 degress outside) and shivering to my bones, that I felt as though I was one of the Jewish prisoners. Running for dear life.

I'd recommend the book to anyone if it weren't a bit hard to read, both grammatically and figuratively, as Thomas Keneally - as exceptional as he is as a writer - tends to emblazon his sentences with lengthy descriptions in between commas, so much so that oftentimes I got lost in descriptions and missed his point entirely.

It's still a great book (the Booker Prize it received can attest to this). I know my holidays have been enriched because of it, and now my perception of the Jews has radically changed for the better.

Hits and Misses

"A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it." - The Economist

Well said. I couldn't agree more. As a matter of fact, I've read two of Dan Brown's novels and found them well-researched, highly entertaining and very clever... since I was 16 at that time and didn't know better. In fact, I actually introduced The Da Vinci Code to everybody around me to the point that by the end, the pages in my copy were falling off the binding. I actually thought he was the best writer around.

Now that I've had the opportunity to travel the world, get more exposure on worldly literature and snap out of my immature conspiracy theorist phase (and I have to say phew.. good riddance!), I've come to realize that Dan Brown isn't all that. I'm not saying he's a bad writer, far from it. He's a terrific writer, he knows how to combine history, religion, conspiracy and entertainment in order to make a book irresistible not only to the highly educated (who eventually find his books to be shitty, by the way), but more importantly to the masses. It's just that his writing lacks poetry. It doesn't hurt to rhyme once in a while, or to throw euphemisms, or to actually tell a story beautifully instead of telling it by means of straightforward delivery.

When I went back to Malaysia a few years ago, I went to Kinokuniya just to browse around. I love doing that. And having friends who could never be punctual if their lives depended on it, I find my book-browsing hobby a blessing. In fact, I once waited at a shopping complex for 2 hours (or was it 3?) for a friend and I made no fuss because there was an MPH bookstore nearby and I spent the whole time finishing a book on Carl Sagan.

Anyway, I went to Kinokuniya and all I could see was these Stieg Larsson books piled up on the best-sellers shelf, next to the Twilight novels. Apparently people were buying them like hot bread, although I had never heard of them. I didn't even know who Stieg Larsson was.

So I took one copy, went to an isolated corner where's there's a small stool, and read away. After 20 pages, I could not go on. It was not bad, per se. It was just that my mind was urging me to stop, because I had already read this kind of stuff before. Over and over again. By hundreds of different authors with different styles, but all with similar ideas and execution. How and why Larsson's books have all been translated from Swedish into hundreds of languages, I'll never know.

This might come of as a snobbish entry. Maybe because it is, I don't know. My point is, people need to crawl out of their caves and look at books from a different angle. Just because a book has a glossy cover and is being hawked by the most reputable publisher, doesn't mean it's a good book. It only means this publisher's got dough and good PR people.

I have nothing against pop culture. I just get irked when it dumbs people down.

Yentl

We were strolling on the Champs Elysées, when suddenly Yasmin saw Fnac, a French media store selling electronic stuff, books and DVDs.

"Let's go in, I need to find a couple of things," she said, tugging me along. We went straight to the DVD section.

"Oh I love this movie," she said, pointing to About Schmidt. "I've never seen it," said I, a bit woefully. At that moment I really really wished I had seen it so that we could talk about the film. Or anything, as I was like a puppy, so eager to please and to impress.

"Really? I'll buy it for you," she said. Then she grabbed a Sidney Lumet DVD (I can't remember which film it was, in fact I'm not even absolutely sure if it was really Sidney Lumet) and said laughingly, "This guy is so brilliant, he could film my hand and make it look like a million dollars." She also picked up a couple of other DVDs, one of them Barbra Streisand's Yentl. She told me it was impossible to find it in Malaysia and that Yentl had the best musical score of all time.


And now I'm watching Yentl for the first time. I can't help thinking of Yasmin. She truly was one of the greatest filmmakers Malaysia ever had.

What's Your Addiction?

Lux Æterna from Requiem For A Dream. This piece of music is every bit as incredibly disturbing and gut-wrenching as the film itself. It is so beautifully crafted I can't stop listening to it. Alfred Hitchcock managed to associate violin with gore, and Darren Aronofsky - or more precisely Clint Mansell and The Kronos Quartet - took that to another level in that they produced hauntingly beautiful music that stays with you and not just annoying high-pitched violin noises that make you grit your teeth.

I love Requiem For A Dream. I read that Aronofsky wanted Giovanni Ribisi in the role of Harry, which would have been awesome as I'm a big fan of Giovanni and can totally see him killing it as a heroin junkie. Jared Leto was fine though, although in the beginning I had quite a hard time believing he was an addict due to his clean-cut image. Jennifer Connelly is superb. I first saw her in In The Bedroom (a shitty movie, but Jennifer was great in it) and then in A Beautiful Mind (she did Requiem first but I saw A Beautiful Mind first so yeah.. and who cares about chronology anyway) and I thought her mind-blowing. There's something about her that says disconnection, as in she seems distant in her roles, but at the same time she's very relatable and real. Am I making any sense? Okay let's put it this way. Zooey Deschanel is also distant and disconnected (and hot!) in 500 Days Of Summer, but in a more flaky and stoic way, while Jennifer is more emotive and expressive but still somewhat spacey and out of reach.

But the show stopper in the movie must be Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb. Her portrayal as a lonely woman addicted to prescription pills is just pure genius. She brings this frightening bipolar quality to the character the way Meryl Streep did in Sophie's Choice. And Streep went on to win an Oscar for that (just sayin'). Sara Goldfarb's monologue about being old and ignored makes me cringe. It's so true on so many levels that I wouldn't want anyone past 40 years old to see this movie lest they'll end up being junkies.

All in all, I've watched Requiem many times and each time, I got goosebumps. Hats off to Darren Aronosfky, and I can't wait to watch Black Swan (also by him, plus there's Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis totally doing it).

M

I've seen one of Fritz Lang films, Metropolis, and I didn't like it but nevertheless was extremely impressed by it. After all, it was 83 years ago. It's touching to think how far we've come since then.

I don't think I even managed to sit through the entire film since the subject matter of dystopic capitalism was quite hard to stomach given the picture quality, the frantic nature of characters in silent movies and not to mention, the missing scenes that they later had to replace with title cards depicting what was happening at the moment (I still remember one of the cards saying, "The princess fell down", or something to that effect and it was pretty damn funny).

So last night I tried to watch M, also a film by Lang only this time it's a talkie. It's one of the oldest courtroom dramas, and God only knows how much I love courtroom dramas (Kramer vs. Kramer, Philadelphia, To Kill A Mockingbird (both the book and the film), In Cold Blood (only the book as I've never seen the film) and Legally Blonde (one of the best chick flicks ever haha). M is considered Lang's magnum opus, so it should be good.

The verdict?

I kinda like it, but it's not something I'd watch twice. I mean it's pretty awesome for a German Expressionist film, but somehow I failed to derive pleasure from watching the movie. I think I'm gonna have to be 15 years older (and a lot more mature) to be able to actually love this film.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

I'm rewatching One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. One of my favourite films of all time. In my opinion, while Jack Nicholson evidently steals the show in this one (as in every other film he's in), this film has one of the strongest cast ensembles, from the nurses to each one of the mental patients.

Playing a mentally ill person must be one of the hardest challenges for an actor. I remember Leonardo DiCaprio killing it in Gilbert Grape (I hate him now, but let's not forget that he used to be good), Vivien Leigh in Streetcar, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Rani Mukherjee in Black, Mr. Os in Adik, and of course, the mighty Sean Penn in I Am Sam.

I refuse to put in films like American Psycho and As Good As It Gets in the list, as I don't really find the main characters crazy. In American Psycho, Christian Bale is a very well-groomed and well-mannered psychopath, and psychopathy is not really a cuckoo-kind of mental illness, IMHO. And Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets is just obsessive compulsive, and that's not really a mental illness as much as a personality tic. Although, I'm no shrink so everything I say is from a layman's POV.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is one of the films I would want to keep in my future movie room (of course I will have a movie room in my future 3-acre mansion) and watch every other Saturday night with my kids so they will grow up better than other kids whose cinematically-challenged parents make them watch cartoons all day long.

By the way, isn't this the most awesome way to store your cigarette pack? To hell with rectangular bulges on your pants, T-shirt sleeves FTW! (Although I do have doubts concerning one's ability to pull this off if one is not Jack Nicholson.)

Stupid Films That I Absolutely Love

Everyone has a stupid ill-fitting t-shirt or pair of jeans or even underpants that they love to wear on weekends or even anytime when nobody's around. It might look horrid, but damn it's comfortable. In fact, I have these Aeropostale pants that I would rather not be caught dead in, ever, but which I put on every night. I'm absolutely confident that they are a must for a good night sleep, without which I would be the crabbiest, most groggiest sonofabitch during the day.

Speaking of tattered comfortable clothing, I also have a list of guilty pleasure films that I love to watch whenever I'm bored and have absolutely nothing to do. They are nowhere near the best films list, not even in the 100 miles radius. But they're so good it's the only thing I want to do when it's raining outside and the temperature's dipping into the sub-zeros. I call them my 'Aeropostale movies'.

1. Demolition Man

This is my number one Aeropostale movie. I've watched in since I was maybe 6. And I never look back. I've got all quotes and unfunny jokes committed to memory, down to the subtlest indefinite articles. It's a movie set in the year 2032, where society is ruled by a single man by the name of Cocteau and food is in the form of 3 flimsy lines of sauce. People wipe their asses with 3 seashells instead of toilet papers, and sexual intercourse involving fluid transfer is not just frowned upon, it's against the law. Police officers use tasers powered by liquid nitrogen (?) and they are not acquainted with martial arts skills since they are not trained to deal with 20th century criminals (because in 2032 apparently everyone is an abiding citizen ahah how about that). The most ridiculous thing must be the profanity-detector machine which every room in every building is equipped with, and it's sole purpose is to issue a fine every time a foul word is uttered.

This movie is the reason why Sandra Bullock is my most favoritest actress on Earth because she just has a way of making stupid lines believable. And Stallone has never been more stoic, but he kicks ass in this movie (surviving a burning building full of explosives? Classic.)

And Wesley Snipes is just the most bad-ass of all bad-ass criminals. He makes Cyrus The Virus look like Forrest Gump. I mean, if he were aboard the Con Air, he woulda flown that goddamn plane.

I fucking love this movie and am not afraid to say it. Haha. This is my answer to Ebert's Shawshank Redemption.

Okay I would love to continue writing down my list but suddenly I feel so hungry so I'm gonna have to cut this into several postings. Later.

Ladri di Biciclette

I watched The Bicycle Thieves years ago and had a hard time deciding if it was as great as people said. In the end, I didn't even think it was good. I guess I was a bit confused by the film. Of course I had high hopes before watching it, what with it being on every top ten list ever made, winning an Oscar and getting rave reviews from every film critic from every generation.

And I was disappointed. I remember watching the word 'FINE' appear on screen and me saying, "That's fucking it?" in disbelief. I thought it was a bit too simple for my liking. And I refused to write a review on it, because I didn't really have anything nice to say about the film, and I was afraid people (read : the 2 people that read this blog) would call me shallow and stupid.

In short, I thought The Bicycle Thieves was extremely overrated and people who praised it were mere sheep who would agree on everything if it would make them look smart and artsy-fartsy. For me, it took only one reputable film critic to give a standing ovation and the whole world would follow suit, because those who don't would be seen as fools. It's the Emperor's New Clothes all over again. Only in this case there was no child to point out that The Bicycle Thief was a naked emperor and so the fable went on.

Boy was I misguided then.

A lot of things have changed since then.

I went to Italy for a month. Alone. And I fell in love with the people, the food, the language, the scenery, the everything.

I took up Italian for a whole year.

I watched other neo-realist and new wave movies and loved a lot of them.

I learned that Hollywood was far from being the barycenter of arts and films. And the Oscars were just rich Hollywood people giving awards to each other, completely overlooking the stuff that really counted.

I started reading philosophy.

All in all, I grew up.

So the other day, I revisited The Bicycle Thieves with a blank slate in mind. Now that I was in a different place mentally and spiritually, I would love to watch it from a different point of view and give it another chance at blowing me away.

And I was pleasantly surprised. No, I was baffled. I was completely blown away by it. The irony is (I love irony), the thing that I hated about the film is now the thing that makes me find it so special : the simplicity!

I still don't think it's the best film of all time. But it definitely ranks high on my list.

ps : The boy in the movie was so expressive, more so than his dad. I'd love to pinch those chubby cheeks. Haha. I do have a question though : Did his dad really make him drink wine? He was 7 for God's sake!

Nosferatu

I think I'm over Hollywood. Okay not really, since I just saw The Social Network the other day and loved it. But in my defense, I loved movies based on true stories and this one happened to be a Hollywood production, so I didn't watch it because it was an American production but because I was interested in the storyline.

You'll never believe me so what's the point. Besides I'm not making a strong case for myself, am I?

I admit that for the longest time, I thought Hollywood was the only place decent movies could come from. I mean, back when I was young, my cinematic experiences were restricted to Disney cartoons, Jalan Ampas movies and Hollywood blockbusters. So how would I have known that somewhere, people who didn't speak English were also making excellent films only with inferior budget and even smaller exposure?

Fortunately in my town, there's this one cinema called Le Melville which mainly (but not exclusively) shows films from around the world in their original language (I hate voice-overs). I've been there a couple of times, most recently to watch Uncle Boonmee, the Thai movie that won top honor at Cannes 2010.

(I also watched the infamous Deep Throat there for their Pornography History week and I have to admit, watching the first pornographic movie in the world on the big screen with other people clapping and nervously laughing was awesome and awkward at the same time. Everybody was trying to look like they were just healthily curious and they weren't the least bit turned on, but to me it felt bizarre that suddenly the human perversion was a cause for celebration. It was like a collective effort to prove that we're all the same anyway. Except for that weird looking dude who chose an isolated seat at the back and noisily fapped to Linda Lovelace. Then again, the ushers did distribute condoms and tissues to everybody for good measure. And Linda Lovelace was being rammed by some random dude(s), so I guess fapping was in order. As a friend once said, appropriateness is just a state of mind.)

Anyway....

I have this list of films I have to watch before I die. And the list keeps getting longer and longer each day while the number of films being crossed out has not incremented since I don't know when. The thing is, while a lot of them are Hollywood films, the majority were renowned foreign movies. Of course, if you separate them by countries and languages, Hollywood still comes out on top. So I decided to put Hollywood on the opponent's court and all the other films on my court, resulting in Hollywood getting its ass kicked big time! Granted, my players wouldn't know how to talk to each other because there's no subtitles at sports' arena (it would be hard to provide subtitles for ALL of them anyway) but you get the idea.

So now I'm picking up where I left off, so the next film I'm going to watch from the list is Nosferatu. I downloaded it last week but only get to actually watch it this week. People told me that once I've watched German expressionist movies, it'll change my views on cinema altogether. While that might be an exaggeration, I kinda had the same 'awakening' with art when I discovered Edvard Munch's The Scream. So I'm actually kinda pumped up to watch Nosferatu.

Hancock

I've never been excited to see superhero movies in my life. Ever. Ironically, the first video cassette that my dad bought me was Batman. When I was 5 and living in the Borneo, he went to Singapore and bought us many, many great stuff. We each got a pair of roller blades, a video cassette (my sister got The Little Mermaid, me Batman, my big brother got We're Back and my little brother got The Land Before Time). We also got a video game console which I think was a Nintendo although I'm not quite sure.

My dad also bought himself an electric razor, which was the end of our 3-hour haircut-session era.

Now, I'm so very excited to see Hancock, the latest superhero movie starring Will Smith. It's Will Smith, so it has to be good. His last movie was I Am Legend, and to me it was pretty nifty. Although the best film I've seen in the cinema this year is Bienvenue Chez Les Ch'tis (which is the bestselling French film of ALL TIME, easily beating out Amélie), but I Am Legend comes in a close second.

Can't wait to see Hancock. It'll be out on 9th of July. Although at that time I'll be in Italy with some Irish girl (oops did I just blurt out my secret summer travel plan?), I'll still be scouring around Milan, or Florence, or whichever Italian city I'm at, to watch the film. I must. I must.

Knocked Up

I never really liked The 40 Year Old Virgin. So I wasn't really looking forward to watching Knocked Up since it involves a lot of the same people (Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogan etc), which would mean it uses the same formula, ergo it would disinterest me.

But as George F. Will once said, the nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. Knocked Up pleasantly surprised me, and I can safely say millions of others (I rotten-tomatoed it).

It's simply about a girl who had a one night stand with the most unattractive man (lest you believe in the inside beauty crap) only to find out 8 weeks later that she was pregnant. She was pretty, smart, and a host at E! channel while he was barbaric (as were his friends), broke and a co-founder of fleshofthestars.com, a website focusing on celebrity on-screen nudity which had been under construction forever. It goes without saying that they were two very different people. How the hell did she get herself knocked up by the most philistine of men, you might wonder, but I'm not judging.

You might hate Ben (the ugly knocker) at first for not putting on a condom thus impregnating Allison (the knocked up) thus making him the bad guy. But as the movie unfolds (and the Stockholm Syndrome sinks in), you'll start to pity the guy because obviously he was a loser in all terms, and picking up girls at bars was not his forte. Let alone the hot ones. Getting a famous girl pregnant was the last thing he needed in his fucked up life.

At the hands of other directors, this movie would have focused only on the main character (think Steven Spielberg and War of The Worlds) or it would have been a bland movie peppered with lame one-liners but embellished by awesome CGI (think Michael Bay), due to its very simple premise. Luckily we have Judd Apatow to make sure that it's as funny as it is sweet and touching. And the one-liners are sure to make you laugh so hard you fall off your seat (or in my case, the bed).

One of my favourites are :

Ben : You're pregnant... with emotion?

Knocked Up also offers insight into married life. After watching this, all I can say about marriage is don't do it just because life catches you off-guard, do it when you're fully ready and can take responsibilities.

Given the fact that it was much, much better than I thought, I give Knocked Up 9/10.

Love And Honor (Bushi No Ichibun)

I've seen Takuya Kimura in 2046 before, and he wasn't that impressive.

In Bushi No Ichibun, it's the same thing. It's not that he's a bad actor, it's just that I expected more. Throughout the film, he seemed unreal and a little stiff. Maybe it's just me, but he failed to shine in the movie. He did win an award for his performance, but winning awards doesn't say a lot these days. After Erra Fazira was named Best Actress for FFM a few years back, I just stopped believing in film festivals altogether.

The good thing is, Takuya Kimura's acting is the only problem I have with Bushi No Ichibun.

Set in the Edo period, it's a story about a young samurai who worked as a poison taster for the king. After consuming a red tsubugai (a type of shellfish) caught off-season, he had a high fever and went blind.

Not being able to be of service to anyone and having to live on welfare for the rest of his life, he turned into a man of few words, cold and reserved. Things got even worse when he started hearing rumours about his wife's affair with a higher ranked samurai.

The most impressive thing about the movie is that you can freeze-frame any scene from the movie, and it will be picture perfect. The setting, the costume, the mood and the lighting are flawless. The camera work is especially outstanding.

I don't know if this is the best movie I've seen this year, but it sure does rank high on the list.

FYI, I watched it twice.

p/s : That Kayo is indeed a very beautiful creature. Flawless beauty, ain't she?

Rat - A - Too - Ee

Again, I went to Midvalley. This time with one of my girlfriends. I'm getting super-duper ass bored with Midvalley but people just won't stop going there. I wonder why.

Since it was a Wednesday where a movie ticket was priced at RM6, all the cheap boyfriends were queuing up. Thus, the line was THIS long. It was so long that the people were queuing up right into the elevator and they kept going up and down but they didn't realise it.

We were appalled. I really, really wanted to watch Ratatouille for the second time, this time with a girlfriend. So what did I do?

I went to the Telephone Booking Counter which was surprisingly empty. There was this Indian lady smiling Julia Roberts-ly. I said, "Ma'am. I would like to collect my tickets."

"Reservation number please."

"438917."

"Sorry sir. There's no reservation under that number."

"But I have reserved two tickets for Ratatouille 4.20 pm! How can there NOT be a reservation under this number!" I said this with a mildly annoyed look and a radiating confidence. I even tapped my finger on the counter for extra impact.

"Oh I'm sorry sir. Usually you have to collect the tickets at least 45 minutes before the show (it was 4.15pm). If you don't show up, we'll release it for sale at the box-office counter. Now the 4.20 pm show is already sold out. Maybe that's why the reservation has been cancelled. But you can still catch the 4.55pm show. So how?"

I tried to look as irritated as I could. My girlfriend remained silent because she knew if she said anything, I would burst out laughing and this Oscar-worthy performance would be ruined.

"Okay-lah, okay-lah. I will take two tickets for the 4.55pm show," I said to the lady before turning to my girlfriend and babbled about how I had reserved the tickets 3 days ago, how cinema employees were more efficient in other countries and how sorry I was that we had to wait for half an hour before the show started.

"Okay sir. RM 12, please. Thank you and enjoy the show!"

Yes. Mission accomplished. I turned around with the most annoying grin on my face, facing those cheap boyfriends who were still queuing up. "Losers!"

Ratataouille is awesome. It's one of the best from Pixar. Not that I've watched all Pixar animated movies, but I know that this one is just one of the best, if not the best.

That's why I watched it twice.

I wanted to review it but, well, what's the point? You know it's good, everybody says it's good, it got 100% on RottenTomatoes, which obviously means no one can hate it.My girlfriend (who was keen on seeing Impak Maksima only to discover that it would only be premiered today thank God) said she was happy I made her watch Ratatouille.

One thing though. Why did the dead chef speak with the silly French accent but Linguini didn't?

(Soundtrack : Makes Me Wonder)

29 February

I hung out with some friends yesterday. They said I've changed a lot, and that I looked more and more like a Frenchman. Boo-fucking-hoo. Guess who said that in which movie?

The thing is, all of them were busy looking for super skinny jeans. It's a stupid fad actually, not because I can never wear skinny jeans, but because they're ugly. I know Mika looks super fine when wearing it, but it takes a lot more than just a pair of Topman jeans to make it work. First, you need the height (which, apparently, we Asians lack). When you're as tall as the Topman mannequins, then maybe we can talk. Then you need the right shoes and hair (and looks).

As one of my friends said, if you wear skinny jeans with the ugly regular Converse low-cut white shoes, you'll look no more than a samseng kampung.

Lastly, you need the charisma to carry the look. Like Pete Doherty. He's on crack 24/7, he has ugly teeth (see also Chris Martin, Hugh Grant or simply, all Brits), he dates Kate "I live on cocaine" Moss, and he's an asshole. But he has the charisma of James Bond (he's a rocker) and the face of an angel. That's why he can wear super skinny jeans that show exactly how his wiener is positioned when flaccid.

And of course, you need to be skinny. If you have meat clinging to your bones, then no skinny jeans for you.

Anyways, my friends left early because they needed to go somewhere else. I then rushed to GSC and bought a ticket for February 29 on a whim (as per usual). I thought it was the latest Thai horror flick, and ever since Shutter (2005), I've fallen in love with Thai movies. However, I discovered February 29 was actually Korean.

All my life, I've watched a lot of Korean horror movies. I never understood any of them. They're confusing, the plots are raunchy, the actors scream like hyenas (see also Jaclyn Victor, Regine Velasquez).

The same can be said of February 29. Although I was fashionably late, I know exactly that Jiyeon was the killer. Sorry for spoiling the ending but I don't think you'll want to watch it after reading my review anyway.

The only thing original about the movie is that it's about late-night tollgate workers. The killer is choosy when it comes to the victims. Only tollgate workers are eligible because that way, the camera can focus on the bloody toll tickets. Plus, toll booths are located on dark, deserted highways. Bingo!

There aren't many shocking scenes. It's a slow movie. And there are only 5 characters (so the producers can save a lot).

All in all, I hated the movie. It was a Saturday, so again I couldn't use my student card, so the RM 11 I spent was a total waste.

If only I had chosen Perfect Stranger.

Transformers : A Movie Without a Soul

Finally I got the chance to watch Transformers. I was actually lazying around at Midvalley, shopping and chick-spotting when I decided to watch a movie. And I had four choices : Kayangan, Haru-Biru, See How They Run and Transformers. So it was a no-brainer. The thing was, the show was at exactly 6:00 pm so I was no longer entitled to use my well-beloved student card.

I didn't realize that the movie was two and a half hours long.

Now I know why the reviews have been a mixed bag. You can either love it or hate it. I decide to love the CG (it's definitely ground-breaking and the human-machine interaction was seamless) but I hate the plot and the script. Oh and Shia LaBoeuf was again, great as hell.

I hate the plot. It's kinda illogical. Like when Shia was selling stuff during History class, to me that was a pathetic attempt at humour. And the movie was full of crappy one-liners that were supposed to light up the mood. Some did, some were just lame. Well, a lot were just lame.

And the movie only kicked in after an hour or so. I thought the tragic moment where Bumblebee was captured by the FBI was the climax, but I couldn't be more wrong as it was actually the beginning of the human-autobots-decepticons war. And it all went downhill from there. The dialogues started to get really crappy, the subtitles were confusing (yes, I read the subtitles because it's there), and the transformations from vehicles to robots were unreal. How can a car this big transform into a robot THIS big?

And since when do robots speak like niggas? They said they learned to speak American from the world wide web. Yeah right. Because every alien, robot, talking animal, jungle people, ghost, and ape can pick up American accent just like that.

After an hour and a half, I started to get restless. It was just too long and, although the CG was awesome, after a while it just became old news. Just like Megan Fox. She's hot all right, but her acting was unconvincing. She has this weird look that screams "i'm so hot look at me" plastered on her face. And she looks too old to play a high school girl.

Dialogues like "Optimus Prime, we meet again" or "It's you or me, Megatron" or "At the end of this day, one should stand and one should fall" were sooooo fucking lame. And at the very end, after they destroyed the cube, Optimus Prime said something like "We've lost a comrade but we've gained friends" before looking at all the humans around him. It was so cheesy that I threw up in my mouth a little. Who even uses that line, ever?

Plus, if the cube could actually be destroyed, why didn't they just destroy it from the very beginning? Wouldn't it be a lot easier? And I didn't really understand the story behind the glasses either. I know I wasn't paying attention, but hey, I was holding my bladder in there for 2 1/2 hours and my phone didn't stop ringing.

All in all, I'm happy because now I know for sure that Transformers is just like all those superhero movies : not my cup of tea. Oh yeah, and Harry Potter too.

Muallaf

Yasmin Ahmad held a special private screening of Muallaf for me on Monday night at her office.

Muallaf might be her best effort to date. Her producer didn't intend to release it in Malaysia for fear of getting slagged off by the society as per usual. Plus, this latest film deals with religions, sociology (understanding humanity) and everything that's never been discussed overtly by the Malaysian cinema.

Fortunately, they decided to release it at last. But beware! It's 95% in English, so as to encourage all Malaysians to improve their command of the language. As Yasmin said, 40 000 fresh graduates won't be able to secure any jobs due to their poor command of English.

I'm not going to give any reviews. I'm just going to say that it's better than Mukhsin, it has more drama than Gubra, and it's as witty as Sepet.

Thank you Miss Yasmin for the screening. She even made Nasi Beriyani for everybody who came. It was delicious.