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)
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
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)
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)
Monday, October 06, 2008
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)
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)
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)
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
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)
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)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)