College
Deb Hagan


The burning question here is: Why didn’t this go straight to video? Actually no, it should be, why did this even get made in the first place?
The mean-spirited film takes three high-school seniors and plonks them at a college’s orientation weekend. This turns into an excuse for an exercise in excess as they get sloshed, get hazed and get laid.
It is a mystery why bland Kevin (Drake Bell), nerdy Morris (Kevin Covais) and chubby Carter (Andrew Caldwell) are even friends since they barely have anything in common.
Carter is a bully who delights in being mean to Morris while Kevin is, well, bland.
The hangover you will have after partying on New Year’s Eve will be more fun than this.
(ST)

Bedtime Stories
Adam Shankman

The story: Hotel handyman Skeeter Bronson (Adam Sandler) has to come up with the winning theme for a proposed new project so that he, instead of the brown-nosing manager Kendall (Guy Pearce), can run the place.
At the same time, he has to babysit his sister Wendy’s (Courteney Cox) children with the help of her friend Jill (Keri Russell). He tells the kids fantastical bedtime stories which start to come true.

Bedtime Stories will not quite lull you to sleep but it will not keep you on the edge of your seat either.
Clearly, they had money to spend on this film. The audience is transported to a mediaeval castle town, outer space and even ancient Rome, the settings of the various fantasies. But you end up feeling like you are watching an attention-deficit child and the gimmickry only displays a lack of trust in the material.
Which is not all that inspiring in the first place. When Skeeter realises that his nephew and niece’s pronouncements are coming true, he is chiefly concerned with his own needs, including getting a Ferrari, kissing the girl and winning the contest.
In another plot device, the bedtime stories come true, but not necessarily in the way one would expect. While this creates a little interest, it also means sitting through two versions of the same tale.
As for the cast, the hardworking Sandler is back on the big screen for the second time this year after the hairstylist comedy You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, but maybe he should take a break. He dials in a low-key performance, coasting by on what he imagines to be his goofy charm.
Russell, playing the love interest, looks miffed and is probably wondering: “What am I doing in this movie?” At least she has a bigger role than Cox, who recycles her uptight- but-actually-decent persona from the sitcom Friends.
British comedian Russell Brand seems to be the oddball sidekick du jour and pops up here after the comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), while Australian actor Pearce is somewhat miscast as the toadying Kendall.
If you want a movie about fairy tales with actual charm and heart, do pick up a copy of romance classic Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987) instead.
(ST)

Ip Man
Wilson Yip


The story: In the thriving southern Chinese city of Foshan in the 1930s, martial arts expert Ip Man (Donnie Yen) tries to keep above the fray of martial arts schools competing fiercely for students. When war breaks out and the Japanese army swoops in, Ip can no longer keep a low profile.

Ip who, you ask?
You might not be familiar with the man, but perhaps you have heard of his most famous disciple – gongfu superstar Bruce Lee. The movie was probably greenlit on the strength of that fact.
However, if it is a detailed biography of the late Ip Man you are looking for, this is not the place to find it. And no, Bruce Lee does not appear either.
It would be more accurate to think of this as a gongfu flick with Ip’s life serving as a loose narrative structure.
When the audience first meets Ip, he is a man in the prime of his life who seems to have it all. He is the acknowledged gongfu champ in Foshan despite not having a single student. He lives in a big house and has a beautiful wife (Lynn Xiong) and a young son.
His biggest problem, which he despatches while barely breaking a sweat, is a gang of ruffians from the north who go around challenging, and defeating, all the other teachers.
Biopics sometimes drown you in details but in this case, you wish there was some explanation of how Ip got to where he was at the beginning of the film. Instead, you barely get a sense of the man beyond the fact that he is a saint.
When war breaks out, Ip is turned out of his house and forced to scrape an existence from menial work. Still, he keeps his cool until his friends are killed in matches with Japanese karate fighters, organised for the amusement of General Miura (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi).
The showdown between Ip and Miura is the action highlight of the film but while the fight sequences are entertaining enough, there is nothing about them that is truly surprising or inventive.
With his martial arts background, Yen does a credible job with the combat scenes and to his credit, he imbues the upright and moral Ip with the hint of a smile and prevents the character from becoming too stuffy.
There is little for Xiong, singer-actor Aaron Kwok’s purported real-life squeeze, to do here in the role of the supportive wife.
Since this is not a strictly factual biopic anyway, it might have been nice to see her break the ornamental huaping (flower vase) mould and bust out some gongfu moves of her own.
(ST)

Journey to the Centre of the Earth 3-D
Eric Brevig


Journey is a film tailor-made to showcase 3-D technology.
The plot is an excuse to get geologist Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser), his nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) and their guide Hannah (Anita Briem) to the otherworldly realm at the centre of the earth, one filled with exotic flora and fauna.
Naturally, the way there involves a jolting ride in an abandoned mine and lots of freefalling.
The 3-D effect took a little getting used to, especially when Fraser pops into larger-than-life view for the first time.
But the you-are-there impact was cool for the roller coaster ride, which could definitely have been longer. Another standout sequence was that of Sean crossing over a pathway of floating magnetic rocks.
Somewhat surprisingly, the real-life landscape of Iceland fared much better in 3-D than the computer-generated vistas, which seemed kind of flat in the distance.
On the whole, this is an enjoyable romp but you wonder if you should be watching this in an amusement park instead of in a cinema.
(ST)

Cicakman 2: Planet Hitam
Yusry Abdul Halim


This plays like an episode of the cheesy 1960s Japanese superhero TV show Ultraman, only with less subtle acting.
It is up to Cicakman (Saiful Apek), or Lizardman, to save the day when the evil Professor Klon (Aznil Nawawi) hatches a plot to turn the world’s water supply black.
Lurking in this Malaysian film is the interesting premise of a superhero struggling to earn his keep in the regular world. But this is something that director Yusry Abdul Halim is not interested in exploring.
Clearly the movie is not meant to be taken seriously when the arch-villain Klon first appears looking like an overgrown and unwashed hobbit.
But what little irreverent charm there is is simply overwhelmed by baddies who cackle incessantly, a noisy soundtrack and acting so exaggerated that this could be an invaluable how-not-to guide.
(ST)

Igor
Anthony Leondis

At the annual Evil Scientists’ Fair, the best in the land of Malaria (the awkward name being an example of the writer trying too hard to be funny) battle it out with their dastardly inventions. They are helped by Igors, those born with a hunched back and destined to be second-class citizens.
One such Igor (John Cusack) dares to dream above his station and successfully invents life in the form of the comically proportioned Eva (Saturday Night Live’s Molly Shannon). But her evil bone is not activated and she is instead brainwashed to become an actress who yearns for her big break.
This conceit is the funniest thing here, and Shannon gives a nicely restrained performance. Steve Buscemi as Scamper, the immortal rabbit with a death wish, and Sean Hayes as the none-too-bright Brain, also steal a couple of laughs as the oddball sidekicks.
But the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and like an invention missing the critical spark, the movie never feels fully alive.
(ST)

All Our Worldly Goods
Irene Nemirovsky


This could well be a Gallic take on a Jane Austen study on manners and courtship, sense and sensibility.
Pierre Hardelot and Agnes Florent are in love at a time when one’s class dictates one’s match. His grandfather is an iron-fisted industrialist while her family are brewers. When he defies social norms to marry Agnes, Pierre is cut off from the family business.
The outbreak of World War I soon dwarfs every other concern. In an economical 30 pages, Nemirovsky parses the psyche of a nation at war – despair, fear, numbness, hope, relief – with a few incisive episodes.
The couple get on with their lives after the war ends, only to face the outbreak of World War II decades later.
Nemirovsky marks the fragility of achingly casual happiness in the interim with a family outing to the woods.“They brushed aside the day, relegating it to the past, to obscurity, without a single regret. It had been one of the sweetest and most peaceful days of their lives. But they had no way of knowing that.”
The novel covers an extraordinary period in history when a generation lived through two world wars in the span of about 30 years. When World War II erupts, Pierre has to watch his son take up arms, knowing that even the illusion of the glory of war was gone as “they know that all our sacrifices were useless, that victory conquered no one”.
What is remarkable is the note of hope the novel ends on, all the more heartbreaking when you consider that Nemirovsky died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 39.

If you like this, read: All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. A searing indictment of the horrors of war as seen through the eyes of a young soldier from the trenches of World War I.
(ST)

Burma Chronicles
Guy Delisle


Is it Burma or Myanmar? Delisle addresses the different names for the country right off the bat and the choice of his title indicates he does not consider the ruling government to be a legitimate one.
Despite the overtly political start, Burma Chronicles is more a personal memoir of life in a repressed and isolated regime. When his wife Nadege, who works with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), receives her new assignment, Delisle and their toddler son Louis go along for the ride.
The cartoonist finds humour in learning about, and adapting to, a different country and culture. His black-and- white sketches offer charming, and sometimes instructive, anecdotes about such events as taking part in the water festival, surviving the rainy season or simply trying to find the right kind of ink.
While Louis is a universal ice-breaker with regard to meeting the locals, Delisle’s own profession opens some doors – he meets fellow illustrators and conducts private animation classes.
But inadvertently, politics intrude every aspect of life. For one thing, Nobel laureate and pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi is kept under house arrest near where they live.
Delisle also touches on the Orwellian regime’s control over the media, the exploitative gem trade, the easy availability of heroin in some places and the wildly different worlds of the privileged few vis-a-vis most ordinary Burmese.
His generally simple and direct style serves the stories well. And his depiction of sightseeing tours to Bagan and Lake Inlay displays wit and elegance. Instead of the usual six panels a page, he works in 15 wordless panels, conveying the harried, manic quality of such outings.
If you want a humane and humorous peek into the country, this is a good place to start.


If you like this, read: Pyongyang: A Journey In North Korea by Guy Delisle (2007, US$10.17 (S$15.50), www.amazon.com). Here is a glimpse into another repressive regime from Delisle, who seems to have an affinity for them.
(ST)

Sex Drive
Sean Anders


Ian (Josh Zuckerman) is a high-school senior who wants to lose his virginity but he is secretly in love with Felicia (Amanda Crew), his platonic female friend.
His best pal Lance (Clark Duke) is a chick magnet and just wants to help him get laid.
Didn't they already make this film?
Just because it is a teenage sex comedy does not mean it has to be generic. I enjoyed it when it was called Superbad (2007), which had heart and likeable characters along with the ribald humour.
Sex Drive, though, is merely content to cross one dated genre (teenage sex comedy) with another (the road movie) as Ian goes on a nine-hour car trip to keep a date with an Internet hook-up.
There are a couple of funny moments with a giant doughnut costume and Seth Green as a deadpan Amish but otherwise, Zuckerman as the blandly sweet Ian and Crew fail to leave much of an impression.
Mostly, this ride just limps along.
(ST)

Four Christmases
The story: Brad (Vince Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) have been wriggling out of Christmas family gatherings and spending their holidays in exotic locales. When they are found out, they end up visiting both sets of divorced parents. Hence the four Christmases of the title.

’Tis the season for festive comedies.
Just as the lights go up like clockwork in Orchard Road, you can be sure of an offering or two from Hollywood, milking the yuletide tradition of family gatherings for yuks in films such as Home For The Holidays (1995) and Christmas With The Kranks (2004).
In the latest twist on the formula, the writers up the ante by plying the harried couple with four different home gatherings, promising more excruciating embarrassments and awkward situations.
Take Brad’s brothers, for example. They are tattooed paramilitary types who take pleasure in body combat. So Brad soon finds himself the object of flying tackles as his curmudgeonly father (Robert Duvall) looks on in approval.
As the day progresses, Brad and Kate discover things they have kept from each other, such as Brad’s real name and Kate’s fat camp detours as a child. As the skeletons come tumbling out, she begins to question their relationship and where it is headed.
Four Christmases turns out to be a drama about two people learning to commit to each other in the guise of a genre comedy.
Sure, the lessons about familial and romantic love are pat but there is a welcome bounce and edge to the writing.
It certainly helps to have the couple in crisis played by the likeable and winsome Witherspoon and Vaughn, even though his gut is starting to look like it needs its own wardrobe.
Balancing broad comedy with romance is not an easy task but director Seth Gordon pulls it off deftly, delivering a worthy treat for the holidays.
(ST)

Rihanna!
Singapore Indoor Stadium
Thursday

Who is Rihanna exactly, and where does this 20-year- old from Barbados with the slick chart hits fit in with other female pop stars?
Her latest album is titled Good Girl Gone Bad, but she has some way to go before she can snatch that particular crown from Britney Spears.
Perhaps she fancies herself a consummate entertainer such as Madonna, wanting to Take A Bow for her showmanship.
After all, it seems that she is deliberately inviting such comparisons. The warm-up song before her concert began was, oddly enough, Spears’ Womaniser. And Madonna’s Music was sampled in the introduction to Please Don’t Stop The Music.
And yet, her concert on Thursday night offered few answers.
Rihanna started with Disturbia. She was dressed in dominatrix chic – an all-black ensemble with a sleeveless top that showed off her toned arms and form-fitting pants.
The tough yet sexy effect was unfortunately marred by a mike malfunction which silenced her, not the best way to start a concert. It was left to her hardworking back-up singers to carry the show while she went offstage.
That was not the end of the audio problems. While mostly serviceable, her voice came across as ragged and harsh at times, possibly due to the patchy sound system.
The crowd of almost 8,000 were not put off, though. They came determined to party and nothing was going to get in their way. Fans were on their feet from the opening number and screamed and danced throughout.
Rihanna delivered hits from her three albums, including the infectious SOS, the energetic Pon De Replay and the paean to infidelity, Unfaithful. The crowd lapped them all up eagerly.
But mostly, she seemed to be going through the motions, putting her sharp cheekbones to good use as she preened and posed while singing. It was MTV-ready and it all remained on the surface.
It did not help that even though the show was promoted as a 90-minute affair, it clocked in at a miserly 60 minutes. The singer hardly had time to thank her musicians and crew and did not even change costumes until her encore.
Dressed in a black-and-white showgirl outfit, she ended the evening with her biggest hit, Umbrella, and soaked in the adulation from the crowd.
“I cannot wait to come back. Singapore, I love you,” she claimed.
Yea, yea, but we barely knew you.
(ST)

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Story: The paths of train robber Yoon Tae Goo (Song Kang Ho), bandit leader Park Chang Yi (Lee Byung Hun) and bounty hunter Park Do Won (Jung Woo Sung) cross over a much-coveted treasure map.
But they are not the only ones after it as the Japanese army and yet another gang of baddies have their sights set on the parchment as well in this actioner set in turbulent 1930s Manchuria.


This is a Korean take on the spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966), the Sergio Leone classic in which three men who do not trust each other have to work together in order to get to a buried treasure.
Director Kim Jee Woon, who helmed the bloody crime drama A Bittersweet Life (2005), re-imagines the story with three of South Korea’s top male stars.
Song Kang Ho, the award-winning actor in films such as the sci-fi horror flick The Host (2006), provides some comic relief as the blustery and blustering train robber Tae Goo, who unwittingly steals the treasure map in the first place.
Versatile hunk Lee Byung Hun, whose credits include the hit thriller Joint Security Area (2000), jarringly sports earrings and eye-liner in his wild-eyed portrayal of the ruthless Chang Yi, who is out to claim the map for himself.
Heartthrob Jung Woo Sung, star of the romance A Moment To Remember (2004), is the cool and collected Do Won, who has been offered a reward for hunting down Chang Yi.
Perhaps the combined star power accounts for the success of the film, touted by the distributor here as the highest-grossing blockbuster in Korea in 2008.
But that cannot hide the fact that the thin plot merely serves to move the action along from one set-piece to another. No doubt well choreographed, but the overlong gunfights feel like exercises in excessive violence after a while.
Late-in-the-game revelations about Tae Goo are simply not enough to make you care about the thinly-drawn but quick-on-the-draw characters.
By the time of the climactic three-way shootout between the protagonists, you are strangely liberated by the fact that you do not care who lives or dies.
In another misjudged display of excess, the film refuses to end even then, but drags out for another few improbable minutes.
At its best, violence in Korean films explore issues of morality, for example in Park Chan Wook’s vengeance trilogy.
Here however, Kim seems satisfied with violence as a guns a-blazing, bullets a-whizzing end in itself, but too much shoot ’em up action leaves one as stone cold as the corpses which litter the set after a while.
So much sound and fury, signifying oh so very little.
(ST)

Dragon Hunters

You know the school holidays are here when kiddie flicks begin popping up in cinemas.
On paper, what sets the computer-animated Dragon Hunters apart is that it hails from Europe and is based on the French TV animated series of the same name created by Arthur Qwak, who co-writes and co-directs the film.
It also boasts Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker as the voice of the hero Lian-Chu.
Not that this would matter one whit to the target audience.
The quest is straightforward. The big and strong Lian-Chu, Gwizdo, his childhood friend, and Hector, their pet dragon which acts like a little dog, have to go to the ends of the earth to destroy the terrifying monster, World Gobbler.
They are accompanied by Zoe, a talkative little girl who believes that she has found in Lian-Chu the heroic knight of her fantasies.
What lifts the film from its formulaic set-up are the lovely visuals as the story takes place in a world which is literally disintegrating.
While the vistas of floating, drifting land masses are reminiscent of computer games, the big-screen effect is both whimsical and gorgeous. So this one is not just for kids.
(ST)

American Widow
Alissa Torres/Art by Choi Sung Yoon

When the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed on Sept 11, 2001, as the result of a large-scale terrorist attack, almost 3,000 civilians perished.
Among them was Eddie Torres, who had just started his new job at brokerage house Cantor Fitzgerald the day before.
American Widow is the memoir of his wife Alissa Torres, who was 71/2 months pregnant at the time. It is about her coming to terms with the tragedy and how she navigated the tangled web of aid and compensation that followed.
After an initial outpouring of compassion and promises, red tape slowed down the handing out of monies and she found herself mired in frustration.
On top of all that, she had to battle post-natal depression and a backlash as family members of the 9/11 victims began to be seen by some as opportunists greedy for government handouts.
Her reaction was: 'It felt bad to be hated. It felt even worse to be envied.'
The text is complemented by Choi Sung Yoon's cleanly drawn black-and-white illustrations.
They are shaded in aquamarine, giving a slightly unreal edge to Torres' story, reflecting her own disbelief and struggle to come to terms with what had happened.
The advantage of the graphic novel medium is its flexibility, and good use is made of that here. For example, a one-panel page depicting the emptiness of Ground Zero speaks volumes.
American Widow also tells the story of Torres' husband, who came from Colombia and then snuck into the United States via Mexico, in search of a better future.
He bursts into life, suddenly and unexpectedly, in a two-page spread of photographs and identification cards. And an epic tragedy becomes at once intimate and personal.

If you like this, read: The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (1996, US$23.10 or S$33.88, Amazon.com). This depiction of the Holocaust, with the Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, has been hailed widely as a modern-day classic.
(ST)

The Little Book
Selden Edwards
Think of this as the literary offspring of the central ideas in the time-travel crowd-pleaser Back To The Future (1985) and Forrest Gump (1994), in which the titular character is inserted into pivotal moments in history.
Rock star and one-time baseball wonder pitcher Wheeler Burden is transported from 1988 back to 1897 Vienna, Austria, where he meets his father, World War II hero Dilly, who is himself transported to the same time and place from 1944.
The mechanics of this, wisely perhaps, are never explained. Instead, the author offers an emotional rationalisation for these feats.
It so happens that fin de siecle Vienna is something that Burden is deeply familiar with, having learnt all about it from his beloved preparatory school mentor Arnauld Esterhazy, who also taught Dilly.
Just as Back To The Future's Marty McFly had to fend off the amorous attentions of his teenage mother, there are complicated liaisons between supposed relatives in this book.
Freud would have a field day with this and he appears in the book, attempting to psychoanalyse Burden, whom he believes to be severely deluded.
First-time author Edwards, who started writing the book in 1974, also serves up cameos from rock legend Buddy Holly and composer Gustav Mahler to American writer Mark Twain and a young Adolf Hitler.
He recreates a detailed sense of time and place, and also has fun with the circular nature of cause and effect inherent in time-travel stories.
The characters, though, come off as too black or white - they are either noble or despicable.
The writing also has a somewhat stilted quality to it and can be a little repetitive at times.
But as befits a former headmaster, there is a well-designed lesson plan here that draws you in, holds your attention and makes you think.

If you like this, read: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2004, $23.44 with GST, Books Kinokuniya). This devastating tale of the impact of time-travelling on a relationship is at its heart a deeply moving romance.
(ST)

Camera Obscura
Esplanade Concert Hall/Wednesday

Scottish band Camera Obscura seem at once dated and timeless.
They came on stage in dresses and ensembles of collared shirts and pants, with nary a T-shirt or a pair of jeans in sight.
Lead vocalist Tracyanne Campbell was in a cream outfit with white stockings and the entire group could have been out for a quiet night on the town - circa the 1950s.
But like fellow Glaswegian band Belle & Sebastian, also formed in 1996, they mine a rich vein of timeless melodic pop paired with arch observations.
Sample lyric: You're not a teenager/So don't act like one/Sure she is a heart-breaker/Does she have one?
For most of the 80-minute set though, the near-capacity crowd of 1,500 were content to stay in their seats.
The line-up was heavy on tracks from their last two albums Let's Get Out Of This Country (2006) and Underachievers Please Try Harder (2003), and fans were also treated to three songs from their forthcoming album.
Campbell's voice, however, was decidedly less ethereal and dainty compared to the recordings. The iffy lower range and flattening of the higher notes pointed to her vocal limitations in a live setting.
The fact that the band were static on stage, barely budging from their positions throughout the show, did not help.
It took a while for the crowd to warm up and during an early lull between songs, someone yelled 'It's oh so quiet' to scattered laughter.
Still, the band injected some welcome surprises into the set, segueing into Paul Simon's You Can Call Me Al from Let's Get Out Of This Country and leaving their stamp on a cover of Abba's Super Trouper.
By this time, the fans were won over by Campbell's unassuming, low-key charm. Before launching into Super Trouper, she noted: 'Just for the record, we actually didn't write this song.'
Responding to shouted-out requests for obscure numbers such as San Francisco Song, she demurred: 'It's always amusing when people ask us for songs we've forgotten how to play.'
The track that finally roused the house was If Looks Could Kill, with its thumping bass-line and joyous hand-claps. It prompted Campbell to quip: 'We need to write a few more songs that can get us that reaction.'
On the closing number Razzle Dazzle Rose, Camera Obscura proved that, unlike their namesake - an optical device - they were no dated curiosity, pulling off an exquisitely drawn-out finale that drew enthusiastic claps and cheers.
(ST)

Salawati
Marc X Grigoroff


This shot-in-Singapore film starts out as a study in how people cope with grief.
After the death of 15-year-old Shahim, his father questions his faith while his sister, 12-year-old Salawati (a sombre-faced Siti Aisyah Masgot, below), withdraws into a world of her own.
She also begins trailing two men, Raj (Ravi Kumar) and Chan (Chaar Chun Kong), who were somehow involved in her brother’s drowning.
The fact that Wati is Malay, Raj is Indian and Chan is Chinese suggests some kind of comment on race relations.
Salawati owes more than a passing debt to the Oscar-winning Crash (2004), which used intersecting stories to touch on the prickly issue of race in Los Angeles. But like Crash, the set-up here is too deliberate and over-engineered to seem provocative.
Whatever American and Singapore permanent resident writer/director Marc X Grigoroff might have to say about this sensitive topic is undercut by the thinly drawn characters which themselves play into racial stereotypes.
(ST)

The Guardpost
Gong Su Chang


A remote guardpost in the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea is the perfect setting for this creepy tale.
The film begins with a group of soldiers nervously patrolling the maze-like post and finding several dead bodies as well as a bare-bodied soldier covered in blood and menacingly holding an axe.
Military investigator Sergeant Major Noh (Chun Ho Jin) is given until the morning to unravel the truth of what happened, as the head of the post was the son of the army chief of staff and the cover-up will soon begin.
The opening had promise but the film is littered with red herrings, swimming in a graphic sea of blood and body parts, including brain matter and a blown-off limb.
After a while, you begin to admire writer/director Gong Su Chang’s gumption in upending the audience’s assumptions of the horror thriller genre.
But the movie starts to drag in the middle and, most annoyingly, a videotaped clip which explains what went down just happens to have a crucial portion missing when it ends up in Noh’s hands.
If he had seen this key footage, which is revealed to the audience at the very end, a good 30 minutes could have been shaved off the two-hour running time.
(ST)

Her costumes glittered but it was A*mei herself who shone the brightest at the Singapore Indoor Stadium on Saturday night.
This was the encore performance of the Taiwanese singer's Star tour, which came to Singapore in November last year, and it could just as well have been titled High High High.
The live wire delivered her dance hits with crackling energy and belted out her ballads with aplomb, moving from one to the other with effortless ease. She also rapped, covered Alicia Keys' If I Ain't Got You and surprised the audience with a new Japanese song.
She commanded the four-sided stage and had the capacity crowd of 10,000 enthralled throughout the three-hour show.
In turn, she was visibly moved by the enthusiastic fans who screamed, danced and sang along with gusto.
'I think the rest of the shows should all be held in Singapore,' said an appreciative A*mei. She praised the fans several times but there was no mistaking who the star of the show was.
(ST)

Stir-fried And Not Shaken
By Terry Tan

Monsoon Books/ Paperback/256 pages and eight pages of photos/$23.50 before GST/Major bookstores
This is a fun and funny look at life in Singapore from the 1940s to the 1970s. There is no narrative arc as such. Instead, it is a collection of episodic anecdotes, each affectionately recounted in an easily digestible couple of pages.
Food writer and television chef Terry Tan, who was born in Singapore in 1942 and later moved to London in 1983, makes clear early on that this is not a chronicle of 'the horrors of war or its aftermath' but an idiosyncratic and deeply personal jaunt down memory lane.
'I prefer to perpetuate happier memories instead.'
Even his accounts of the Japanese soldiers are not about their cruelty but include an almost comic look at their propensity for bathing in public in loincloths.
Not surprisingly, a lot of his memories have to do with food, from his grandmother's flying fox curries to vanishing hawker fare such as keropok ubi (tapioca crisps) and tang hu lu (rock sugar bottle gourd).
Tan peppers his memoirs with a large assortment of mischievous cousins, colourful aunts and one very feisty grandmother. In his vignettes, they get into trouble, go on dates, gamble and battle with thieving neighbours, all to amusing effect.
There are also nuggets of trivia scattered throughout the book. I had always thought that lau pok car meant crappy old car, but found out from this book that Piak and Pok were actually the corrupted forms of Fiat and Ford.
Tan also offers glimpses into his own Peranakan heritage, Malay culture, the hard lives of samsui women and what it meant to live in a British colony.
Reading the memoir, you get a sense of the massive transformations that have taken place in Singapore in the past few decades, leaving you both heartened and with an inexplicable sense of loss.


If you like this, read: Sweet Mandarin by Helen Tse (2008, $21.03 without GST, major bookstores). Tse recounts her family history from life in a poor Chinese village to bustling Hong Kong to Britain, and how it is deeply intertwined with food.
(ST)

Big Stan
Rob Schneider


Imagine The Shawshank Redemption filtered through a raunchy, comic sensibility and you have Big Stan - a feel-good prison comedy.
Stan Minton (Saturday Night Live alumnus Rob Schneider) is a two-bit conman who wins a six-month reprieve from jail by hiring a shyster lawyer. He spends this period training under The Master (a chain-smoking, deadpanning David Carradine) in order to protect himself in prison.
By the time he enters jail, the skilled Stan uses his power for good, outlawing rape, sexist rap music and other violent entertainment. But he lets himself be talked into a deal with the prison warden, which threatens to undermine everything he has accomplished.
While the mix of physical comedy and vulgar jokes do not always hit the mark, there are a couple of laughs here for those who are not too thin-skinned.
But then Schneider, star of films such as The Animal (2001) and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999), has already shown more restraint as a rookie director than one might expect.
(ST)

The Black Swindler
Yasuharu Ishii

Pop and drama idol Tomohisa Yamashita reprises the role he played in the TV-series adaptation of the best-selling manga Kurosagi, which looks at the world of swindlers.
White swindlers (shirosagi) scam victims for their money while red swindlers (akasagi) steal your heart. Kurosaki (Yamashita) is a black swindler, or kurosagi, who preys on other swindlers.
He does this because his family was wiped out by cheats in a plot masterminded by Katsuragi (Tsutomu Yamazaki), whom he now depends upon for information about other swindlers.
Needless to say, theirs is a complicated relationship.
Yamashita's blank-faced pretty-boy looks are put to good use since he has to adopt various identities as a con artist, but the set-up for the final scam takes way too long and lacks the wow factor, after films such as Hollywood's Ocean's Eleven series.
The cast of characters is also not drawn well and some of the relationships between the characters are not clearly delineated.
Also, repeatedly pinning the blame for Japan's long-lingering economic malaise on bankruptcy fraud perpetrated by swindlers is just too far-fetched and jarring.
You begin to wonder what scam the film-makers are pulling.
(ST)

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa
Nicholas Drayson


On first introduction, Mr Malik is a gentlemanly retiree who spends his time bird-watching. Pleasant enough, but perhaps not the most exciting prospect for Rose Mbikwa, the widowed guide of the weekly bird walks in Nairobi, Kenya.
When a flamboyant schoolmate, Harry Khan, turns up from Mr Malik’s past, the stage is set for a contest between the two. Whoever identifies the greatest number of bird species in a week will earn the privilege of asking Rose to the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball.
This book’s unassuming charm grows on the reader, rather like Mr Malik. Decency and goodness are not the most flashy qualities, but as the contest progresses, Drayson has you rooting firmly for the “short, round and balding” underdog.
The story appears somewhat slight at first, but there is more to bird-watching than meets the eye. It is a hobby, but it can also be a lesson about the virtues of paying attention to one’s surroundings and discovering the richness around us.
A bird’s-eye view can be instructive as the avian world can be read as an allegory for the shenanigans taking place in Kenyan politics.
Drayson does not shy away from the darker side of life in Nairobi. Besides talking about corruption, he also touches on crime, the devastation caused by Aids and the abduction of young men to be sold as soldiers in nearby countries.
A seemingly trifling premise opens up into a far more bountiful world.


If you like this, read: Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
This genteel tale of crime-solving is set in Gaborone, Botswana.
(ST)

Boys Over Flowers The Movie
Yasuharu Ishii

The story: Tsukasa Domyoji, the rich young head of a business conglomerate, announces that he will be marrying Tsukushi Makino in the spring. But the engagement gift of a bejewelled tiara, a Domyoji heirloom, is stolen. In order not to jeopardise the wedding, the two decide to recover it on their own.
Boys Over Flowers is the best-selling shojo (young girl) manga of all time in Japan. It has been the source material for various adaptations, including the Taiwanese version Meteor Garden, which launched the career of the F4 pop idols.
A little background here as the movie picks up where the second season of the Japanese live-action TV series left off, with the cast reprising their roles on the big screen.
Tsukushi Makino (TV actress Mao Inoue) attends a high school for the privileged and finds herself a fish out of water given her lower-class background.
Worse, she crosses the path of F4, the ruling clique of four guys who can make life hell for anyone they choose. But she eventually falls for Tsukasa Domyoji (Jun Matsumoto, member of popular boyband Arashi), the leader of F4, and at the end of Season 2, says yes when he proposes.
There was talk at first of a third season but the producers chose to wrap up the series with a movie instead.
The problem, as with such jumps from the small screen to the big, is how to tell a story that would engage new fans as well as satisfy old ones. Unfortunately, there is little here for the former and only slightly more for the latter.
The contrived story has Makino and Domyoji searching for a stolen tiara so that they can learn about the true meaning of love. The plot is simply an excuse to move them to exotic locations such as Las Vegas, Hong Kong and an island supposedly in the South Seas, to fill up the two-hour-plus running time.
Matsumoto as the arrogant and hot-headed Domyoji and Inoue as the plucky yet vulnerable Makino share some chemistry, but the bickering grows tedious and the lessons learnt are too pat. The issue of class differences is raised and then dismissed in throwaway lines.
To be sure, one is not expecting a serious dissection of social issues here, but perhaps this would have worked better as a two-part TV series finale instead.
Released in Japan in June, distributor Toho expects the film to gross over 10 billion yen (S$130 million), which would make it one of the top-grossing domestic movies of the year.
I guess Boys still rule in Japan.
(ST)

Cyborg She

Directed by Korean Kwak Jae Young who helmed the hit romantic comedy My Sassy Girl (2001), this Japanese film plays like My Sassy Cyborg.
The set-up is a familiar one to fans of manga and anime - a young geeky guy suddenly gets the girl of his dreams.
But there is a catch. In Chobits, the lovely lass is an android; in Oh My Goddess!, she is a deity; and here, she is a robot, or cyborg, as she prefers to be called.
Jiro (Keisuke Koide) is celebrating his birthday alone again at a restaurant when a girl (Haruka Ayase) plonks herself down at his table.
After a memorable night out together, she vanishes from his life only to reappear a year later. That is when Jiro learns that she has been sent from the future by himself.
Ayase is all rough mannerisms and brute strength as the cyborg while Koide is sweetly nerdy.
The love story is a predictable one, although the final 30 minutes unexpectedly offers a visually spectacular disaster.
Kwak, who also wrote the script, drags out the ending but does provide one final poignant twist in this time- travel romance.
(ST)

To Kill A Mockingbird
Jubilee Hall
Last Thursday


Stories are rooted in a particular time and place, and it is that very specificity that makes them universal. The more detailed a setting is, the more authentic the work feels and the greater the connection with the audience.
Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is set in the American South in the 1930s. It was a time when defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman was either the act of a courageous man or a fool.
Lawyer Atticus Finch was no fool but a man of uncommon decency and we see events unfold through the eyes of his daughter, six-year-old Scout.
This two-hour-15-minute production takes the gamble of unmooring the story from its social context with its minimalist staging and costume choices.
There were ramps on both sides of the stage and in the centre, a flight of stairs leading to a platform, all in black.
The costumes were not meant to evoke 1930s American South, but functioned as shorthand characterisation – Scout was a tomboy as she was in overalls and Atticus was a gentleman as he wore a blazer.
The multitude of accents sported by the cast also contributed to the amorphous setting.
This meant that those not familiar with the story would have to work much harder to come to grips with it.
It also meant that a lot was riding on the performances of the actors.
Mockingbird is essentially about Scout’s journey and loss of innocence. In this crucial role, Malaysian Lum Kay Li, 23, performing in Singapore for the first time, did a fine job with a natural and convincing portrayal of a spunky girl.
Less successful was Kun Wai Kit as Jem, Scout’s 10-year-old brother. He mistook exaggerated twitching and petulance for youth, making it seem as though Jem was Scout’s little brother.
Veteran actor Gerald Chew’s Atticus was appropriately paternal if a little distant. He also lacked the moral gravitas of Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning turn in the 1962 film, although Peck admittedly set a very high bar.
The use of an older Scout (Yeo Yann Yann) reflecting on the past was a device that helped to compress the novel into a more streamlined structure.
The result, however, was a play that seemed to be preachier than the book, concerned with Lessons To Learn about empathy and doing the right thing. Important lessons, no doubt, but ones that would have made a stronger impression with a defter touch.
Ultimately, this Bird managed to take flight, but did not soar.
(ST)

Death Cab for Cutie

Esplanade Concert Hall

Tuesday

All hail Death Cab.

From the first notes of majestic opener Bixby Canyon Bridge off the band’s latest album Narrow Stairs (2008), the packed hall of more than 1,500 fans were on their feet.

These lucky devotees, who had snapped up tickets to the show within a day of sales opening, stayed on their feet and rewarded the band with noisy affection.

On the song, lead singer Ben Gibbard’s plaintive, aching tenor searched in vain for some deeper truth.For the audience though, the 100- minute set was a revelation.

After the mid-tempo build-up, the foursome tore through the next few numbers with a fierce intensity.

It was as bassist Nick Harmer had told Life! in an earlier interview: “Our live shows are more high-energy than our albums would suggest.”

The band, which also includes guitarist Chris Walla and drummer Jason McGerr, infused the show with a sense of urgency and purpose, and simply let the songs speak for themselves.

They dug deep into their catalogue, performing Your Bruise from their first album Something About Airplanes (1998), and the summery Photobooth from the Forbidden Love EP (2000).

Cheers and whoops greeted the beginning of almost every song, with tracks from Narrow Stairs and the critically beloved Transatlanticism (2003) making up half the set.

The lengthy eight-minute-plus I Will Possess Your Heart raised eyebrows when it was released as the first single off Stairs but has since proven to be the right decision as it helped to propel the album to No. 1 in the United States.

When Gibbard sang “You gotta spend some time with me/And I know that you’ll find love/I will possess your heart”, it was a declaration of intent. It was also a statement of fact.

The laconic vocalist tossed out a few thank-you-very-much and how-are-you-doing in-between songs, but the little else he did say hinted at a wryly humorous personality.

“Sorry it took us so long to get here, we got lost along the way,” he deadpanned.

During the encore, he also thanked their non-existent opening band, Dead Air.

The final elegiac number Transatlanticism began with Gibbard singing over a keyboard accompaniment. Then the guitars joined in and as he crooned “I need you so much closer”, white lights flared, the music soared and McGerr flailed away on the drums.

It was over all too soon. Fans left bereft can only hang on to Gibbard’s parting words: “We’ll see you again very soon. We promise.”

(ST)

Fate

Kim Hae Gon

The poster of the two bare-bodied Korean hunks, Song Seung Hun and Kwon Sang Woo, spells out the selling point of the movie.
This is also heart-throb Song's highly anticipated acting comeback after his compulsory military service stint which took him away from showbusiness for two years.
Too bad he has to look pained and heroic for most of the movie, while Kwon gets more of a chance to shine as he brings heart and humour to the role of a bad- tempered ruffian.
All this is in service to a Korean melodrama about betrayal and loyalty among a group of gangsters. This is full of overwrought scenes but little genuine emotion.
While Kwon might have the acting edge, Song has the sharper cheekbones. Let's call it a draw for these two leading men.

(ST)

The Midnight Meat Train

Ryuhei Kitamura

Destination: cult favourite status.

Bradley Cooper (Kitchen Confidential, 2005-2006) plays a photographer who accidentally captures on film evidence that a creepy butcher (Vinnie Jones from 1998's Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels) is linked to a young model's disappearance.
He begins to tail the meat-carver and discovers a more disturbing and sinister conspiracy taking place on the late-night trains.
Based on a short story by Clive Barker (whose The Hellbound Heart was filmed as the 1987 horror classic Hellraiser), this is a blood- drenched, tension-soaked ride which takes a detour into unexpected territory.
The climactic confrontation in a train carriage filled with trussed-up human bodies is a sight you will not forget in a hurry.
Known for his fighting scenes and action sequences in films such as Azumi (2003) and Sky High (2003), it would appear that Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura's sensibility remains happily intact in the crossover to Hollywood.
(ST)

The Love Guru
Marco Schnabel

The whiff of controversy surrounding this film cannot quite mask the fact that it is a stinker.
Hindu groups in India and the United States had protested against the comedy, contending that it lampooned Hinduism. It was passed with a rating of NC16 by the Board of Film Censors here for its raunchy humour and not for religious sensitivities.
The Love Guru’s greatest sin is that it is not funny.
Mike Myers (voice of Shrek and star of the Austin Powers spy spoofs) is Guru Pitka, the world’s No. 2 self-help guru, stuck behind Deepak Chopra, real-life guru to the stars.
Pitka is hired by an ice hockey team owner (Jessica Alba) to reconcile the team’s star player (Romany Malco) with his estranged wife (Meagan Good). Success would mean getting a spot on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show (which is plugged ad nauseam) and a chance at unseating Chopra.
The film’s idea of sophisticated humour is the use of actress Mariska Hargitay’s name as a spiritual greeting, and then have Hargitay actually cameo.
Most of the time though, Guru aims lower. Much lower.
No joke is too lame to repeat and one is forced to endure recurring gags about a male chastity belt, corny self-help book titles and the increasingly desperate sight of Myers mugging away for the camera.
Note to director Marco Schnabel: Just because a character laughs at something on screen does not make it funny.
Guru also contains the least sexy seduction scene ever. An elaborately dolled-up Myers, complete with jewellery in his hair, makes a play for Alba with phallic-looking dishes and more dead-on-arrival jokes.
In a violation of all the possible laws of attraction, Alba’s character actually falls for him.
The film attracted protests from religious groups but the people who should be crying foul are duped audiences.
(ST)

Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Eric Brevig


Which came first? The movie or the theme park attraction?
Back in the old days, the ride followed the flick. Then the worldwide blockbuster Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl, based on an existing attraction, came along in 2003 and changed the rules.
Nowadays, it is probably an integrated marketing decision from the get-go. Watch the movie, preview the ride.
And while not exactly a top-of-the-line heart-stopping spin, this solidly B-grade sci-fi adventure offered some decent thrills and spills.
Brendan Fraser, in his second summer movie outing after The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor, is geologist Prof Trevor Anderson.
His brother Max vanished while tracking unusual volcanic activity, leaving behind a wife and son, Sean (Josh Hutcherson).
Ten years later, aided by Icelandic mountain guide Hannah (Anita Briem), Trevor and Sean undertake a journey to the centre of the earth, with Max’s note-filled copy of Jules Verne’s novel of the same name serving as a guide.
They find a world filled with beautiful and terrifying flora and fauna and also discover what happened to Max.
The film took a while to kick into gear as the various pieces were put into place - a sullen pre-teen in need of a father figure, the mystery of a missing brother/father and the question of whether Verne’s novel was fact or fiction.
The set-pieces included two bone-jolting rides, one through an abandoned mine (Big Thunder Mountain anyone?) and the other in a dinosaur skull (coming soon to a theme park near you).
The special effects were serviceable though the forest of giant mushrooms looked decidedly plasticky. Perhaps you needed to smoke them for the scene to look more realistic.
The ending pointed to a sequel set in the mythical land of Atlantis. Whether that project gets greenlighted could well depend on the takings from the amusement rides, oops, movie.
(ST)

A Case Of Exploding Mangoes
Mohammed Hanif


The point of departure for this debut novel is historical fact.
On Aug 17, 1988, a military plane carrying Pakistan's ruling dictator General Zia ul-Haq crashed under mysterious circumstances. He was killed along with several of his top generals and the American ambassador.
In the author's imagination, General Zia's death becomes an overdetermined event. He is paranoid for a good reason - everyone is out to get him.
There is General Akhtar, chafing under the label of the country's second most powerful man and plotting to seize the reins of control.
Blind Zainab, unjustly sentenced to death after being raped, unleashes a curse that finds its way to a winged harbinger of doom, a crow.
And officer cadet Ali Shigri plans an act of vengeance over the death of his colonel father.
The Pakistan-born Mohammed has fun skewering the buffoonish dictator and uses dark humour to convey the ludicrousness of life under a religious zealot.
He also works in unexpected sexual tension and romantic tenderness in the story of Ali, the character the novel focuses on.
Even as the various strands of story converge and the novel marches towards a pre-ordained conclusion, the writer manages to ratchet up the suspense and sustain one's interest.
But the ending falls short of being the explosive finale implicit in the build-up and promised in the title.


If you like this, read: Animal Farm by George Orwell
This political allegory is a classic study of how power corrupts.
(ST)

Eason's Moving On Stage 11
Singapore Indoor Stadium
Last Saturday

King Of Karaoke Songs was one of Eason Chan's biggest hits, and he showed why he fully deserves that title with a highlight-packed concert.
For more than 2 1/2 hours, the Hong Kong singer entertained the near-capacity crowd of over 7,000 with his repertoire of Cantonese, Mandarin and English numbers, aided by memorable costumes and energetic dancing.
The showman emerged as a veiled, ruffled and twinkling mysterious presence with Red Rose and then revealed with a flourish his smart get-up of a black suit paired with sneakers.
The affable and playful Chan, sporting hair reminiscent of Krusty the Clown’s, had an easy rapport with the crowd, chatting with them in Cantonese, Mandarin and English.
He was equally versatile with his material.
He sang the jazz standard What A Wonderful World and his first English language single, Aren't You Glad, from his latest album, Don't Want To Let Go.
On the slinky and funky Love Is Suspicion, the British-educated singer even pulled off a verse or two of rap.
It was in the ballads though, that he truly shone.
In lesser hands, tracks such as Brother And Sister and An Urge To Cry would merely be above average hits, but in his rapt renditions, one could hear the sound of heartbreak.
He impressed with the majestic Under Mount Fuji though the quietly devastating Let's Not Meet worked better with the hushed, defeated delivery on the record.
Chan also showed off his moves, including on King Of Karaoke Songs, given a fresh spin with a ballroom dance remix. He tackled the waltz, the tango and the cha-cha-cha, which had his fans laughing in merriment.
On the electro-rock track Flash, he writhed around gamely with both male and female dancers. And for the finale, he burst on stage like a hip-hop pimp in a maroon tracksuit and twiddling a walking cane.
The singer, who turned 34 yesterday, was in a great mood, bolstered by the entire stadium singing him Happy Birthday.
His exuberance was endearing and during the encore, he took requests from the floor. The audience included his wife Hilary Tsui and daughter Constance; and Hong Kong celebrities such as actress Josie Ho, actor-singer Jaycee Chan and singer Edmond Leung.
One particular image of Chan stands out.
He is wearing a black cloak and a panel above his forehead, which is printed with a pair of eyes. When he stretches his arms to the side, the underside is revealed as a ruffled explosion of colour.
Chan is that rara avis in Chinese entertainment, a rare and precious songbird who delivers genuinely moving music - in the guise of karaoke hits.
(ST)

Strange Wilderness
Fred Wolf

Turkey.
The low point, or highlight, depending on your predilection, is when wildlife show host Peter Gaulke (Steve Zahn wearing out his slacker persona’s thin charm) gets his private parts stuck in a turkey’s throat.
The situation is ludicrous enough to raise a smile, but it is played out for too long.
Another contender for low point/highlight is when Gus Hayden (The X-Files’ Robert Patrick), a trekker who can supposedly lead Gaulke’s gang of misfits to Bigfoot, drops his trousers to reveal some bizarre-looking genitalia after a story about getting his testicles ravaged.
By this point, it should be clear whether this movie is for you or not.
(ST)

Gary Chaw Welcome To My World
Asia Live Tour 2008
Singapore Indoor Stadium
Last Saturday

The king cut a dashing figure in black as he crooned from his prop throne.
It was an apt seat for Gary Chaw, the newly crowned Best Male Singer at Taiwan's Golden Melody Awards. And he delivered a 21/2-hour show that kept things interesting for the most part.
The 29-year-old Malaysian shone during the ballads and he started the concert with a fan favourite, the R&B hit Superwoman.
The near-capacity crowd of 7,500 roared its approval when he fell to his knees and his voice soared on the karaoke favourite, Betrayal.
His sonorous pipes were shown to their best effect when he was accompanied by just a piano on various slow songs. He was by turns tender, aching and dramatic.
Melancholic ballads aside, Chaw was cheekily endearing. When he fumbled on the pitch, he said: 'Oops, the king of pop has gone off-key again. Everyone just pretend he didn't hear that.'
That facet of his personality worked well on the livelier numbers such as 3-7-20-1 and the retro-sounding The Wake Up Song.
Some thought had clearly gone into the staging of the songs as well.
The brooding Singular was performed against a stunning backdrop of a V-shaped sculpture entwined with fairy lights while Chaw playfully channelled gongfu superstar Bruce Lee and fought off a motley crew of baddies during Superman.
There was also an English song segment but Chaw could not quite swing the jazz standards Moon River and Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.
He got points for trying, although his rendition of My Way, which saw him switching back and forth between his lower register and his falsetto, probably had original crooner Frank Sinatra turning in his grave.
But the concert seemed to run out of steam towards the end. Perhaps it was due to the fact that Chaw has only three albums worth of material.
Four, if you count the first album that he released in Malaysia in 2001, though, he confessed frankly during the concert, 'it died a horrible death'.
Fellow Malaysian singer- songwriter Jet Yi and a shrill Genie Chuo showed up as guest stars but it was white-hot singer Aska Yang who caused the greatest stir when the crowd realised that he was in the audience.
Though Yang's version of Betrayal had previously eclipsed Chaw's in the popularity stakes, there was no question who wore the crown last Saturday night.
(ST)

Help Me Eros

This could conceivably be subtitled The Joys Of Drugs And Sex.
Ah Jie (Taiwanese actor-director Lee Kang-sheng) has lost everything in the stock market crash and dulls his pain with home-grown marijuana.
He becomes obsessed with hotline counsellor Chyi (Jane Liao) and also tumbles into a relationship with betel nut beauty Shin (Ivy Yi, right).
But Ah Jie is not the only one crying out for help as Chyi and Shin are also mired in their own predicaments.
Lee has mixed in song-and-dance sequences, acrobatic sex and sensual images of food and animals, but the film ends up being too scattered for its own good.
(ST)

Snuff
Chuck Palahniuk


Cassie Wright, an adult movie actress, is planning to go down in history by having sex with 600 men on film.
The story unfolds from the points of view of Mr 72, Mr 137, Mr 600 and Sheila, the set manager as well as the person responsible for putting the project together.
It eventually emerges that she is doing the film for the sake of her child, accidentally fathered by a fellow professional on a shoot and later given up for adoption.
There is a possibility she could die making it, hence the title of the book. That would, however, result in phenomenal sales and life insurance policy payouts, thus securing her child’s future.
Best known for the nihilistic Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk here takes the dysfunctional family drama and gives it a twist by setting it within another American institution – the porn industry.
Palahniuk also trots out the rationalisation of porn as female empowerment but it is clear from the book that the women, from Annabel Chong to Cassie Wright, are very much victims as well.
Chong is the real-life Singaporean porn star who set a record in 1995 by reportedly having sex with 251 men. Her exploit is both referenced and analysed in Snuff.
A brooding fatalism underscores much of the novel and the ever-present link between sex and death is made explicit here.
The climax, when it finally arrives, strikes a deliciously demented note. Too bad he couldn't keep it up throughout.

If you like this, read: Damage by Josephine Hart (1996, US$13.50 or S$18.41, amazon.com) Another dark aspect of sex is explored in this tale of an obsessive love between a man and his son’s fiancee.
(ST)

The Strangers
Bryan Bertino

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a couple stranded in a house in the middle of nowhere. For reasons never made clear, they become the targets of three masked assailants.
Despite the generic set-up, this was a taut and effective creepy little thriller executed with some visual flair and unusual pacing.
Pity about the bland title.
(ST)

Li Mao-shan and Lin Shu-jung
Singapore Expo's Max Pavilion/Last Saturday

Time travel does exist.
And last Saturday night, 6,500 people were transported back to the 1980s.
Taiwanese crooners Li Mao-shan, 48, and Lin Shu-jung, 47, turned back the clock with songs from yesteryear complete with vintage musical arrangements, bubble machines and dancers twirling giant feathered fans and prop umbrellas.
The best part: There was not a hint of irony in sight.
The 21/2-hour concert was not about updating past successes. Instead, it was an unabashed and unreserved recreating of a bygone era.
Li took to the stage first in an all-white suit and delivered ballads such as My Eyes Are Raining and I Have A Love.
While he has a pleasant baritone, the eyes-closed, brows-furrowed, fist-clenched style of over-emotive singing of angsty lyrics grew old after a while.
But clearly, it held some appeal for the crowd, mainly in their 40s and older.
It helped that Li had a somewhat cheeky stage persona and he spoke in both Mandarin and Hokkien, cracking self-deprecating jokes.
After an hour, he yielded the stage to Lin, who emerged in a sequinned gold number. Having been away from showbiz for over 10 years, she admitted that she was nervous and excited and had not been sleeping well.
This explained the slightly hoarse voice and the fact that she seemed out of breath when chatting between songs. Still, she was in fine form otherwise.
She performed several upbeat tracks such as Anna and Qiao Qiao Men (Knock Knock), which were a welcome change of pace. She also took on the late Anita Mui's melancholic Woman Flower.
The evening ended with both Li and Lin on stage, bantering lightly and flirting coyly to the amusement of their fans.
Announced by Li as 'the greatest song of the 20th century', the pair proceeded to deliver Wu Yan De Jie Ju (Silent Ending), the monster hit duet that remains a karaoke favourite to this day.
For their encore, the duo performed the classics The Moon Represents My Heart, Applause Swells Up and the Hokkien anthem To Win You Must Fight, and got their fans to wave their hands in the air and sing along spiritedly.
And then it was time to head back - to the future.
(ST)

Angela's Live @ Singapore 2008
Singapore Expo Hall 5/Sunday


Only connect. This was British writer E. M. Forster's exhortation in the novel Howards End, and this is what the best singers do on stage.
They forge a rapport with the audience and deliver an intimate experience, even with a crowd of thousands. Sadly, there was no such connection at Taiwanese singer-actress Angela Chang's two-hour show.
Yes, the pint-sized, big-voiced lass could sing, but for the most part, the performance by the 26-year-old to a house 85 per cent full seemed rather perfunctory.
A pity really, since this was her first concert after being reportedly diagnosed with a heart condition called mitral valve prolapse.
Chang was forced to postpone the Singapore leg of her regional tour from March 29 to June 1 and spent over two months away from the entertainment scene.
She choked up as she revealed: 'The past few months have been the worst time of my life.' She thanked her family, friends and fans for their care and concern, but did not divulge more about her illness.
Perhaps for this reason though, the show was shorter than usual since most Chinese pop concerts tend to hit the three-hour mark.
And for much of the night, most of the audience members remained seated and fairly sedate, even as her die-hard fans cheered every song.
The singer had a little help from label-mates Fan Wei-chi and Claire Kuo Jing, who turned up as guest stars.
Otherwise, there was little sign of her affliction and Chang even pulled off a dance routine for Protective Colour.
'I remember my first concert when I couldn't finish the dance number. But I managed to complete it today and I'm very happy,' she said.
Still, she seemed more at ease with power ballads such as Don't Want To Understand. But she had the annoying habit of simply letting the crowd of more than 4,000 take over for large chunks of the song.
Ultimately, on stage, Chang had neither the polished showmanship of an assured performer such as Jacky Cheung nor the earnest charms of a singer-songwriter such as Cheer Chen.
It was telling that she got the audience up on their feet only during the final song Aurora.
By then, it was a case of too little, too late.
(ST)

Wolf Totem
Jiang Rong

Nature, red in tooth and claw.
Rarely has poet Alfred Tennyson's oft-quoted line of verse been depicted with such visceral vividness.
The reader is quickly plunged into the thick of the action with gripping descriptions of calculated attacks by packs of ravenous wolves on hapless gazelles and horses as well as the battle of wits between wolf and man.
This is, on the most accessible level, an old-fashioned adventure story, pulsing with the rhythm of life on the beautiful but harsh Mongolian grassland.
Wolf Totem was a publishing phenomenon when it was released in China in 2004, with over 50,000 copies sold in two weeks. It has also garnered various accolades, including the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize (2007). It is based on the experiences of Lu Jiamin, who was sent to rural Inner Mongolia in 1967 at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China. Jiang Rong is his pseudonym.
In the book, young man Chen Zhen, who leaves Beijing to work as a shepherd on the Olonbulag grassland, is Lu's alter ego. He develops a fascination with the customs of the nomads and, in particular, with their sacred wolf totem.
Wolves hunt sheep and horses but they are not a scourge to be wiped out as they are part of the intrinsic balance which ensures the grassland's survival. Lu even makes a compelling case for the lupine art of war which, in turn, honed the Mongols into awe-inspiring warriors who carved out the largest contiguous empire in world history.
But the fearsome and intelligent wolves are no match for greed and rifles.
When the Han Chinese sweep in with their sedentary farming lifestyle and weapons, the equation is upset and the price of so-called progress is the destruction of the grassland and of nomadic culture.
Man once again proves himself to be the most dangerous animal.

If you like this, read: My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
For animal lovers seeking a totally different reading experience, curl up with this uproariously funny and warm-hearted account of the author's life on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s.
(ST)

A Partisan's Daughter
Louis de Bernieres

In One Thousand And One Nights, Scheherazade was the wise queen who told stories to her king to keep from being executed.
In de Bernieres’ latest work, it is the titular Roza who spins tales to make sense of her own life as she goes from growing up in Yugoslavia to working as a hostess in a pussycat costume to being mistaken by Chris for a prostitute on the streets of 1970s London.
Chris is no king but a middle-aged, unhappily married man in the winter of his discontent. He is enraptured both by the stories and the teller and, as time passes, a genuine affection grows between the two.
The novel alternates between the points of view of Roza and Chris, though you never quite feel that you get a good grip on either of them.
This is partly deliberate as there are hints peppered throughout that Roza is an unreliable narrator who is embellishing her tales in order to shock Chris and keep him hooked.
What happens though when the stories run out? Scheherazade wins over the king and keeps her life, but there is no happy ending in sight for Roza.
Chris has a conveniently timed meltdown and, even more annoyingly, Roza’s voice is unceremoniously silenced.
One is left with an ending that feels rushed and forced.
Fans of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, de Bernieres’ deeply humane and funny novel about love in the time of war, would do well to approach this one with caution.

If you like this, read: If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino. For a bravura rumination on the nature of reading and story-telling, lose yourself in Calvino’s exquisitely constructed literary labyrinth.
(ST)

Dance of the Dragon
This movie is great. For a drinking game.
Every time Korean heart-throb Jang Hyuk looks bewildered or MediaCorp actress Fann Wong looks pained, take a swig and you’ll be happily oblivious in no time.
The plot, for want of a better word, has Jang playing a poor Korean factory worker, Tae, who has always dreamed of dancing. One day, out of the blue, he receives a letter for a last-chance audition at a Singapore dance school.
Come again? This is such a random development that no one even attempts to give an explanation for it.
His transition from rural Korea to ostensibly modern-day Singapore is also made as jarring as possible as the language of the movie suddenly lurches from Korean to English.
The school that accepts international students is a rinky-dink set-up which is located, along with much of the action, in a time-warp section of Chinatown. Any moment now a rickshaw could trundle by and you would not be surprised.
The audition is a joke. Jang looks bewildered and Fann, as dance teacher Emi,looks pained. Glug glug.
To add to the fun, Emi has a psycho creep of a boyfriend, which partly accounts for her constant state of anguish.
Boyfriend Cheng (Jason Scott Lee) challenges Tae to a duel as he does not like the fact that Tae is dancing with his girl.
Tae points out, not unreasonably, that he’s a dancer, not a fighter. But he gamely picks up some form of Shaolin martial arts from a DVD, and then proceeds to what can only be described as a pose-off with Cheng.
And then there’s the finale, a dance competition which Tae and Emi take part in, even though they don’t ever seem to practise together.
Where would Tae find the time given that he’s busy washing cars to make ends meet and otherwise preoccupied with the letdown of a showdown?
If this film, co-directed by Australians John Radel and Max Mannix, were a turkey served at Christmas, the leftovers would last till Easter.
All right, maybe that’s quite a stretch, but hey, you’re already drunk.
(ST)

Mayday [Down To Earth] Singapore Concert 2008
Singapore Indoor Stadium



Being brought back down to earth has never been more uplifting.
Less than a year after their last concert here, Taiwanese rock band Mayday once again proved why they are one of the top live acts around.
They thrilled the full-house crowd of almost 10,000 with unflagging energy and enthusiasm over a three-hour plus show which surged from highlight to highlight.
The drama began with a music video that came alive as stuntmen rappelled into the crowd and then the lads appeared, all dressed in white, in a literal deus ex machina as they were slowly lowered onto the stage.
And then they were off, guitars blazing, with Going Crazy, Perfume, Call Me No. 1 and Born To Love, pumping up the crowd with a series of rock-out numbers.
Such was the momentum that lead vocalist Ashin greeted the crowd only eight songs into the concert. He then took the spotlight as he sang There Is An Absolute In Life backed by keyboards, his earnest delivery at once expansive and intimate.
The much-touted 360-degree stage design was a great idea because it placed the band right in the middle of their adoring fans. The sky bridge, when lowered from the ceiling, along with the extended catwalks off the two ends of the main stage, formed the outline of a rectangle.
Cheers rang out as Ashin, guitarists Stone and Monster, bassist Masa and drummer Guan You ran along the catwalks to the sky bridge stage, brushing palms with besotted audience members along the way.
Fans also got the chance to sing Happy Birthday to Masa, who turned 31 on Friday. The band members clowned about, asking Guan You to lie down and raise the candle, drawing howls of laughter from the crowd.
Stone later provided a tender interlude as he sang Ya Ya, a song about a father’s love for his son.
Singapore was the first stop in the band’s regional tour and they worked the crowd effortlessly, getting the entire hall to bop up and down and sing along fervently.
On One Thousand Centuries, Ashin belted out: “I want to journey with you for one thousand centuries.” Backed by a 10,000 strong chorus, hyperbole turned into a simple declaration of fact.
(ST)

Fancy a helping of Steamed Buns with Onion? It’s not the latest in haute fusion cuisine but the titles of two Chinese pop songs currently simmering on the charts.
Steamed Buns is by Hong Kong indie singer-songwriter Chet Lam and is taken off his Three Kinds Of Happiness EP (2008). The retro-sounding piano ballad is paired with a music video filmed in black-and-white in an homage to silent slapstick movies.
Onion is sung by Aska Yang, the white-hot Taiwanese singer, from his album Dove (2008). In the music video, Yang is shown wrapped up in layers of white cloth like a mummy.
The title of the song, Yang Cong, is also a pun on his Chinese name Yang Zongwei and also because he’s been said to make listeners cry with his emotive singing.
Food and song though are no strangers to each other. Back in 1957, Zhang Zhongwen was singing about Char Siew Buns, from the film Sisters Three.
More recently, Lam has crooned about instant noodles, Faye Wong has rhapsodised about red beans and David Tao has waxed lyrical over kungpao chicken.
Rich pickings indeed for a thesis on food imagery in Chinese pop culture. Just hold the MSG.

Lyrical Food For Thought
Choice picks: Yang Cong (Onion)
“The onions at the bottom of the plate are like me
Forever a seasoning”
“If you are willing, layer by layer by layer, to peel apart my heart
Your nose will crinkle, you will tear”

Taste test: Songwriter Ashin from Mayday uses the metaphor of an onion to express feelings of inadequacy and inferiority as the humble vegetable is often ignored or taken for granted - always the garnish, never the main dish.
He takes it one step further by conflating the physical reaction one gets from peeling an onion to the tearful emotional response of getting to the core of the truth when the layers of defence have been peeled away.


Choice picks: Man Tou (Steamed Buns)
“I am your steamed bun, often by your side
The most considerate romanticism, the most earnest gentleness”
“The purest steamed buns have always agreed with you
They have tasted the sour, sweet, bitter and spicy times with you
And won’t let you grow thin”

Taste test: The plain steamed bun represents simple, fulfilling happiness to Chet Lam. It may not be the most exotic or exciting dish, but it is reliable comfort food.
The steamed bun can also be read as a metaphor for Lam himself. He may be a modest looker but his earnest, endearing charms as a singer-songwriter will outlast the flash and sizzle of here-today gone-tomorrow boybands.
(ST)

David Tao 2008
Singapore Indoor Stadium

It was a fitting concert to cap a 14-year detour, which was how Taiwan-based David Tao described his foray into music.
The singer, and aspiring director, entertained the 7,000-strong crowd over three hours with a well-thought-out show packed with little surprises throughout.
The boyish-looking 38-year-old emerged on stage in a burst of burgundy. He was decked out in a spiffy ensemble of vest and slacks paired with a polka-dotted shirt and tie.
An early highlight was Close To You (Tian Tian) as Tao strummed the acoustic guitar and caressed the lyrics with a lightly slurred delivery.
He also made good on his promise to feature new arrangements for most of his songs.
This was a gamble since the crowd could not always rely on familiar aural cues to get pumped up but the assured showman had a few tricks up his sleeve.
A thumping bassline anchored the slinky and sexy Let's Fall In Love (Tao Yan Hong Lou Meng) while a laser show complemented the aggro-rock of Ghost.
The crowd was even entertained by a Chinese pipa solo which segued into Susan Said, while Indian tabla drums and a belly dancer served as the introduction for Marry Me Today.
While his reinterpretations of old favourites can be a hit-or-miss affair, his sassy, show-stopping version of Moon Over My Heart saw him scatting and swooping all over the keyboard accompaniment.
But Tao also knew when to leave well enough alone. Regular Friends was backed by a pair of acoustic guitars and the crowd gave a roar of approval when the first few notes were plucked.
The entertainer bantered in a teasing manner with his fans in English and Mandarin and struck up an easy rapport with them.
He cheekily noted that Singapore was a fine city, but since 'they can't fine you all', he had the hall cheerfully yelling out Wang Ba Dan (Bastard) for his track of the same name.
The crooner had previously said that the applause he received here was the shortest of all the cities he performed in, but 'I feel something is different in the air tonight'.
And he later added, in all earnestness: 'I'm seriously considering moving to Singapore.'
Now that's a detour that fans here definitely approve of.
(ST)

My Life As A Traitor
By Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman
Bloomsbury/Paperback/250 pages/$33.95 without GST/Major bookstores

The title is provocative but it is not a gimmick. As far as the ruling Islamic clerics in Iran were concerned, Zarah Ghahramani was a traitor.
The Tehran University student made a speech on reform in school, attended political meetings and took part in protests.
As a result, in 2001, she was grabbed on the street and taken to Evin prison, which is notorious for its political prisoners’ wing.
Ghahramani, who was 20 when that happened, gives an unflinching account of the interrogations and beatings which followed and concludes that pain will break everyone.
This is not a tale of unwavering strength and resistance to torture. Yet it is a tale of courage. The courage it takes to lay bare one’s fears and frailties in the face of physical and mental punishment.
Interspersed with these harrowing episodes are her memories of growing up in a privileged household against the changing political backdrop, her passion for the Farsi language and falling in love.
“Young women in vestments that reach from the crown of their heads to their toes fall in love in the same way, by the same process, roused by the same emotions, as young women all over the world,” she writes.
If the Iran on television and in newspaper reports seems foreign and unknowable, books such as Persepolis, Reading Lolita In Tehran and My Life As A Traitor illuminate the country and her people, one story at a time.

If you like this, read: Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler (2006, $25.51 with GST, Books Kinokuniya).
This novel offers a glimpse of another repressive regime as it is set in 1938 in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist purges.
(ST)

Wu Bai & China Blue Asia Tour 2008
Suntec City Convention Hall 6

Rocker Wu Bai showed little sign of giving up his crown as King of Live Music during his three-hour concert.
The 40-year-old Taiwanese singer now sports well-coiffed hair and is fuller in the face but he could still pull out the stops on his hard-luck tales of life and love such as Wanderer’s Love Song and The End Of Love from a repertoire that spans more than 10 albums.
Having last performed here in September 2006 when he shared billing with Taiwanese singer Chang Chen-yueh, this time he thrilled the crowd of over 4,000 with his rapturous guitar-playing and intense delivery.
Emerging on stage with a black jacket thrown over a white graphic T-shirt and black pants – his dramatic eye make-up obviously inspired by glam rockers Kiss – he got right down to business with Innocent Years from his last studio album.
He then reclaimed Yellow Moon, which he wrote for popster Tarcy Su, for himself.
It wasn’t till a couple more numbers into his show that he greeted the audience. Clearly, he preferred to let his songs do the talking.
Still, beneath the cool, taciturn exterior was someone who could be playful as well and fans got to see this side of him in the dance segment.
Backed by four female dancers in cropped tops and hot pants, he showed off his moves on four tracks, including Flower.
During the second encore, he had everyone in the hall on their feet as they took part in a mass dance led by him and his game band China Blue.
Fans also got to see their idol’s artistic side as his photographic works, comprising poetic and almost abstract images, were flashed on stage to the accompaniment of keyboards and violin.
But the familiar Wu Bai was the one they loved best and Hokkien tracks such as Lonely Tree, Lonely Bird, No. 1 In The World and One Half proved to be crowd-pleasers.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Wu Bai & China Blue and their long experience in performing together showed in the tight-knit playing.
The set ended on a high note as Wu and the gang gave a spirited rendition of the aptly titled Again, Meet Again in an impressive shower of confetti.
Carried along by the energy, Wu asked for the lights to come on, and stay on, so that he could see the crowd.
After the Flower mass dance, he quipped: “It’s ended, why are you still here? I’ve sung for such a long time, go home, go home.”
Then, for good measure, he sent his fans reeling into the night with the propulsive You’re Drunk, My Dear, high from the invigorating blast of rock ’n’ roll.
(ST)

Jeff Chang & Symphony Orchestra 2008
Singapore Expo’s Max Pavilion/Last Saturday


It began like any other classical music concert. The members of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Orchestra tuned their instruments and then the conductor strode onto the stage.
But this was Taiwanese crooner Jeff Chang’s show and he soon emerged in a black suit over a black ruffled shirt with bling added for effect.
He also sported an anachronistic asymmetrical haircut that harked back to Boy George in the early 1980s – wavy strands which cascaded down one side of his face.
Then there was the stage itself – awash in dark red drapes, with chandeliers hanging in the centre, and three screens made to look like framed pictures in a museum.
What followed was not your typical Chinese pop concert.
As Chang delivered his love ballads, masterpieces from canonical Western art were shown, from Botticelli’s The Birth Of Venus down to Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Still, all of the staging and production would have been for nought if Chang had not delivered as a singer.
And deliver he did as the prince of love ballads dug into his big bag of hits and pulled out one familiar favourite after another, including Don’t Worry About My Sadness and Love Tide.
Apart from a moment or two of strain, he showed excellent control over his pristine tenor pipes over the 21/2-hour show.
His heyday might have been in the 1990s but he still has his fans. The 7,000 capacity crowd comprised those in their 20s and 30s.
He walked up and down the length of the stage and waved to the audience from time to time, but otherwise, he was not much of a mover and shaker.
But he had a cheeky side which occasionally emerged in his banter.
When some fans shouted: “Ah Zhe, you’re so handsome,” he responded immediately: “What took you guys so long? I’ve been waiting all this time for a compliment.”
When the crowd finally got fired up during the call for an encore, a bemused Chang quipped: “Why is everyone so high after the concert has ended?”
He might not have the most electrifying stage presence and he might not have the slick dance moves, but he nevertheless fashioned an entertaining show from the unlikely combination of Chinese pop and high art.
There was even a snatch of Chinese opera incorporated into his new song Peony Care.
You could also read the presentation as Chang making a case for his songs as art. Before each number, the title was displayed and the composer and lyricist duly credited.
You might not agree, but there’s no denying that the crooner has accumulated an impressive body of well-loved classics over two decades. And that’s no small achievement.
(ST)

The Bird and the Bee
Esplanade Theatre Studio
Wednesday

The pairing of the bird and the bee suggests a flight of fancy and whimsy, and at their best, Southern Californian popsters Inara George and Greg Kurstin put together playful music with an appealing pop sensibility lightly dusted with the sophistication of jazz.
The cosy theatre studio was the intimate setting for their highly anticipated show, the first Mosaic event to sell out when ticket sales were launched.
It attracted a full house standing crowd of about 300, comprising hipsters and young working professionals.
George’s slightly husky pipes were shown off to good effect on the opening track Spark. And live, her breathy vocals on the higher registers sounded more substantial.
While her light-as-air stylings worked on tracks like Again & Again and Polite Dance Song, it can seem like mere pretty posturing on something like I’m A Broken Heart.
Also, most of the numbers were rather straightforward renditions of the versions committed to disc.
F***ing Boyfriend, the first single from The Bird And The Bee album, was one of the tracks which had a chance to breathe a little more on stage.
It would have been nice to see them have some fun with their songs. After all, that would be perfectly in keeping with the spirit of much of their material.
The duo were backed by two singers, a drummer and a guitarist. The women wore headbands, white gloves and candy-coloured shift dresses, giving off a 1960s Hairspray-era vibe which fitted in comfortably with the music.
There was not too much patter between songs though George showed off some Singlish phrases she had picked up, “Wah lau eh” and “Why you so like that”, to the appreciative crowd.
Still, the connection with the audience was only intermittent and she was content to stand in the centre of the stage for most of the show.
An unexpected highlight turned out to be the cover of the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love late in the performance. George and Kurstin managed to imbue it with a fragile beauty that was 100 per cent cheese-free.
With one full-length album and two EPs under their rather slim belt, the set ended in a little over an hour.
You could say it was a pleasant enough evening with The Bird And The Bee, but it was nothing to crow about really.
(ST)

The Believers
What one believes in is strongly tied to one’s sense of identity.
In her latest novel, Zoe Heller explores the aftermath when these core beliefs are undermined.
After her husband, a radical New York lawyer, suffers a stroke, Audrey finds out about his other life. It makes her question her own worth after having supported his work and causes over their 40-year marriage.
Her daughter Rosa, a disillusioned socialist, finds unexpected solace in Orthodox Judaism but has difficulty accepting some of the religion’s rules and rituals.
It would appear to be a Heller speciality to create flawed, even unpleasant, characters who nevertheless engage you.
Audrey is angry, potty-mouthed and prickly, while Rosa is uncompromising and combative.
But in the rigid certainty of their convictions, they have been blinkered to the larger truths in their lives and that makes them all too human.
In her previous novel, the Man Booker prize-nominated Notes On A Scandal, Heller dealt with the more incendiary topic of sexual obsession.
The subject matter might be tamer here but the heat remains – in the writing and in the fiery characters who wrestle with the big questions thrown up about religion, identity and love.

If you like this, read: Three Junes by Julia Glass
A portrait of family dynamics pieced together from events that take place over the course of three summers.
(ST)

Jay Chou World Tour 2008
Singapore Indoor Stadium
Last Friday


So this is star power.
Excitement for and expectations of Taiwanese pop sensation Jay Chou’s concert had reached a fever pitch. Tickets for the two sold-out shows, his first here since 2004, were going for several times their value on the Internet.
The audience was keyed up and ready. Just the sight of the red-hot entertainer on the huge screens was enough to launch waves of cheering.
Chou delivered by owning the stage that night. He was in his element and he knew it, drawing Mexican-wave-like roars from the full-house crowd of almost10,000 as he strode from one end of the stage to the other.
He brimmed with the confidence that comes with knowing that the audience would know the lyrics to his songs, even without the help of karaoke-style prompting on the screens. And they did.
It did not hurt that this was a production with a capital P. Thought had gone into every element of the show, from the costume changes to the back-up dancing.
Chou emerged for the opening number, Golden Armour, sporting a fat ponytail and dressed in a dramatic mauve, warrior-like trench coat complete with long feathers at the back.
Over the nearly three-hour-long show, he had a costume change every two to three songs. These potentially momentum-breaking pauses were smoothly handled,with arresting dance interludes or smart musical transitions.
The singer fed off the crowd’s enthusiasm and kept the energy level high throughout.
He also served up hits from his eight albums with little visual and aural twists, giving familiar favourites a fresh spin.
Thousand Miles Away, a duet with evergreen crooner Fei Yu-ching, was performed solo to the accompaniment of a coterie of male dancers in white, wielding large feathered fans.
The multi-talented showman kept the surprises coming and showed off his chops in playing the piano, the drums, the Chinese zither and even displayed his acrobatic skills.
An early highlight was the infectious song-and-dance rendition of the fast-paced The Cowboy Is Busy from his latest album, On The Run.
At the end of the number, Chou quipped: “Why get so knackered on my birthday?” His fans responded with delighted laughter.
The singer, who turned 29 on Friday, kept the banter light and humorous, asking at one point: “Today’s my birthday, will you give me a song? Not Landy Wen’s lonely version I hope.”
The entire hall answered with a bracing delivery of the traditional Happy Birthday song in Mandarin, then English, and he soaked it all up on stage.
Chou might have had to work on his birthday, but he had a ball of a time, and so did the audience.
(ST)

In Defence Of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating
Michael Pollan
How did something as fundamental as the food we eat turn into such a hopelessly muddled issue? And what we can do about it?
Professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Pollan cuts through the jargon and balderdash in this lucid and sensible tract on eating healthily.
The book is divided into three parts.
The first deals with how reductionist science has pervaded and perverted our thinking about food. We look at foods as the sum of their nutritional components and ignore the long-standing cultural relationships we have had with food.
Pollan points out that before we listened to the scientists, we used to listen to Mum, who, according to him, is the repository of our cultural knowledge of what to eat and how to eat.
In the second section, he tackles the Western diet of “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables and whole grains”.
The relevance here is that societies who have adopted the Western diet display “higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and obesity” compared to those who have kept to traditional diets.
He also points his finger at the industrialisation of food. While this has brought about easy access to greater amounts of food, the trade-off was a fall in the quality of what we consume.
For example, refined flour is “nutritionally worthless, or nearly so” as the germ of the grain, which contains oils rich in nutrients, is removed to produce a “gorgeous white powder” that is both durable and portable.
In the third part, Pollan dispenses advice on how to eat healthily. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
He goes on to unpack these three statements and offers rules such as “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food” in order for one to avoid health-claim inflated, processed pseudo-foods.
While the message of the book is empowering and might persuade you to change the way you eat, perhaps the equally important lessons to be digested here are the fact that science is very much fallible and that a healthy dose of scepticism towards the prevailing orthodoxy, culinary or otherwise, never hurts.


If you like this, read: My Year Of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
A novel that digs up the dirty secrets of the American meat industry. More evidence, if needed, on why we should go green and eat more veggies.
(ST)