I'm a weeper. Crying at the movies comes so naturally to me, I do not my trust my tears. I have been moved to tears at good movies as much as I have cried at calculated, mediocre movies. My tear glands are that gullible, yes. But the rest of me knows the difference. Good movies do not just make me weep, they also leave me shaken, as if a couple of my organs have changed positions. Some stay on my mind for a long time, others make me want to watch them a second time. Here's my list of the year's best:
1. A History Of Violence
2. Sympathy For Lady Vengeance
3. The Hidden Blade
4. 3-Iron
5. The Wayward Cloud
5 1/3. King Kong
5 2/3. The Hand
6. Ydessa, The Bears And Etc
1. I don't know what it says about me that the top three are either violent, about vengeance or both. But David Cronenberg's A History Of Violence - a taut turn-on of a movie in which a gentle, married guy (Viggo Mortensen) may or may not have had a homicidal past - was so powerful, I didn't know how to tell other people about its power. The most I could manage was, "It's very good. Viggo's very good..." It's very, very good. Mr Mortensen's very, very good.
2. When revenge is your name and your game, you are a person who insists on living in the past. So it makes perfectly poetic sense that in Park Chan Wook's Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, a would-be avenging angel calls a meeting in a classroom with the parents of children who were murdered by her enemy, they get a class debate going on how to kill the murderer and after the deed is done, they sheepishly pose for a class photograph.
3. Yamada Yoji's The Hidden Blade has, for my money, the most quietly astounding assassination scene of the year.
4. The next two belong on my dream double bill of silent love stories. In Kim Ki Duk's 3-Iron, a wordless, homeless man roams Seoul with a woman he has rescued from her abusive spouse, occupying the homes of people who are away on trips, never speaking - ghostlike. From broken appliances to prized golf clubs, objects are as much a part of the movie as people. But by focusing on the physical, Mr Kim somehow finds the metaphysical.
5. In Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud, a porn actor and his love traipse through Taipei silently, joyously. They don't speak but they do lip-sync and dance in musical montages.
5 1/3. Peter Jackson's King Kong, in which an ape falls wordlessly for a human actress, might have made it a triple bill. But two-thirds of the movie are too noisy, too Jurassic Park...
5 2/3. Clothes are sex, they truly are. In Wong Kar Wai's exquisite, erotic short, The Hand, tailor meets girl, tailor doesn't get girl but tailor gets to dress girl up.
6. Agnes Varda's new short, Ydessa, The Bears And Etc, is a provocative, playful piece about a bizarre art exhibition which consists of thousands of photographs of people with teddy bears. Girls with bears. Boys with bears. Naked women with bears. Nazi men with bears. Boys pointing toy guns at bears. Et cetera. Armed with a camera and a curious mind, Ms Varda, 77, is having some serious fun as she explores the deceptively innocent display of photographs. She's my heroine.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Foreign talent
They are all around us. They could be the taxi man from Hong Kong, who quotes the Tao Te Ching to you as he drives. They could be the boy from Indonesia, who answers your queries in Hokkien as he peddles freshly-trafficked passion fruit on a piece of canvas in a corner of a market. Or they could be the man from South Korea, who sells you $20 LV wallets at the same market.
I met him on my way home last night, the cabbie from Hong Kong. I had been in some sort of taxi-stand rage outside the Heeren, because it had bloody annoyed me, how those at the head of the queue wouldn't walk an extra step to board a cab as soon as they saw one. They wouldn't speed things up for everybody else in the queue. They would rather stand still, wait for the taxi to stop right at their feet and make everybody else wait with them. Grrr.
By the time I did get a cab, I was still so angry that the first thing I said after my address was, "What's wrong with them? Why can't they take an extra step? Why can't they spare a thought for everybody else? They'll be the death of me."
"They don't mean to do it. It's habit," replied the taxi man in Mandonese (Hong Kong Mandarin).
His accent alone was hilarious; I forgot my anger; and as he recounted to me the gahmen's many policy reversals, he turned out to be both concerned citizen and aspiring comedian.
The taxi man: "It's like when you fry a small fish. One side isn't cooked yet, you flip the fish. The other side isn't cooked yet, you flip the fish again. You flip, flip, flip, the fish falls apart before it is cooked."
Me: "Yes, doesn't the Tao Te Ching say so, too?"
The taxi man: "You read it, too? Yes, as it says, 'Rule a big country as you would fry small fish.'"
(He knew the book by heart!)
"They don't read the Tao Te Ching. If you don't read old Chinese books, you should at least read fairy tales. They should at least read Aesop's Fables."
(He pulled out then a book from a plastic bag, on lessons to be learnt from the fables.)
"Fables are about human nature. How do you govern without knowing human nature?"
On and on he went about SMRT Taxis, the economy and ERP, and as we neared my neighbourhood, he explained what it means now that an HDB home-buyer has to go to a bank, not the gahmen, for a housing loan.
"When people couldn't pay the HDB back, they could get their MP to talk to the government. But when you can't pay the bank back, even if your surname is Wee, even if your grandpa is Wee Cho Yaw, it will be no use, you will be sleeping on the street."
He has been here for 40 years, the taxi man. He might have been taken out of Hong Kong but the Hong Kong wise guy has not been taken out of him.
I met him on my way home last night, the cabbie from Hong Kong. I had been in some sort of taxi-stand rage outside the Heeren, because it had bloody annoyed me, how those at the head of the queue wouldn't walk an extra step to board a cab as soon as they saw one. They wouldn't speed things up for everybody else in the queue. They would rather stand still, wait for the taxi to stop right at their feet and make everybody else wait with them. Grrr.
By the time I did get a cab, I was still so angry that the first thing I said after my address was, "What's wrong with them? Why can't they take an extra step? Why can't they spare a thought for everybody else? They'll be the death of me."
"They don't mean to do it. It's habit," replied the taxi man in Mandonese (Hong Kong Mandarin).
His accent alone was hilarious; I forgot my anger; and as he recounted to me the gahmen's many policy reversals, he turned out to be both concerned citizen and aspiring comedian.
The taxi man: "It's like when you fry a small fish. One side isn't cooked yet, you flip the fish. The other side isn't cooked yet, you flip the fish again. You flip, flip, flip, the fish falls apart before it is cooked."
Me: "Yes, doesn't the Tao Te Ching say so, too?"
The taxi man: "You read it, too? Yes, as it says, 'Rule a big country as you would fry small fish.'"
(He knew the book by heart!)
"They don't read the Tao Te Ching. If you don't read old Chinese books, you should at least read fairy tales. They should at least read Aesop's Fables."
(He pulled out then a book from a plastic bag, on lessons to be learnt from the fables.)
"Fables are about human nature. How do you govern without knowing human nature?"
On and on he went about SMRT Taxis, the economy and ERP, and as we neared my neighbourhood, he explained what it means now that an HDB home-buyer has to go to a bank, not the gahmen, for a housing loan.
"When people couldn't pay the HDB back, they could get their MP to talk to the government. But when you can't pay the bank back, even if your surname is Wee, even if your grandpa is Wee Cho Yaw, it will be no use, you will be sleeping on the street."
He has been here for 40 years, the taxi man. He might have been taken out of Hong Kong but the Hong Kong wise guy has not been taken out of him.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
A-wu
Since I'm still here to tell you this, it means only one thing. I haven't been kidnapped by Takeshi Kaneshiro - haven't even come close - and soon he will have come and gone from Singapore. And the world will have read about what a bastard he was, apparently, at an interview with two journalists here.
A few days ago, for a few happy hours, the interview was a dream assignment that had come to me. (I was so drunk on my daydreams, you have no idea.) Then the assignment went to somebody else, who came back from it saying it was a nightmare. What went wrong?
Now, Takeshi is here for his movie, Perhaps Love, which is about a jilted lover. On one hand, you do understand why a journalist, fishing for a good read in a 12-minute interview, would go hook, line and sinker for it and ask him as a first question, "So how many times have you been jilted?" And on the other hand, you don't have to be Einstein to understand why anybody would clam up at this question, do you?
But it is just as well that I wasn't there. I don't know the real Takeshi and I don't need to, as much as I did dream of being kidnapped by him. I know the make-believe movie Takeshi - the beautiful boy with the soul of a fat boy - who needs reality?
A few days ago, for a few happy hours, the interview was a dream assignment that had come to me. (I was so drunk on my daydreams, you have no idea.) Then the assignment went to somebody else, who came back from it saying it was a nightmare. What went wrong?
Now, Takeshi is here for his movie, Perhaps Love, which is about a jilted lover. On one hand, you do understand why a journalist, fishing for a good read in a 12-minute interview, would go hook, line and sinker for it and ask him as a first question, "So how many times have you been jilted?" And on the other hand, you don't have to be Einstein to understand why anybody would clam up at this question, do you?
But it is just as well that I wasn't there. I don't know the real Takeshi and I don't need to, as much as I did dream of being kidnapped by him. I know the make-believe movie Takeshi - the beautiful boy with the soul of a fat boy - who needs reality?
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