Bad Man

Li I-chun

2 Be Different

Cindy Yen

Back in the early 1990s, Taiwan’s Li I-chun was peddling ballads about being unlucky in love. It seems like her romantic fortunes have not improved.

The songstress wails on Adding Hail To Snow: “My love can no longer come true/Can’t wait for the ends of time/If I weren’t soft-hearted time and again/I wouldn’t have been left forlorn time and again.”

On the Minnan number Half Of Man Is Woman, she begins by lamenting: “Not willing to see your wanton soul/Destroy your precious youth.”

The arrangements are also determinedly retro. This only makes the attempt to drag the album into the present by including a rap on I Don’t Believe jarring. The album is best taken in small doses or when a session of wallowing is called for.

While Li has stuck to doing what she does best, newcomer Cindy Yen is still floundering about in search of an identity.

After the clean-cut girl-next-door image on her 2009 debut failed to take hold, the singer-songwriter has been made over with a sexier look and a more dance-oriented sound.

Her vocals have not improved much, though, and she still sounds too shrill at times. And horrors, she goes cutesy on the cringingly bad track, Innocent Ground.

Yen also needs to realise that scream- singing will not help a ballad such as Shatter The Sadness. Shattering eardrums will not win her any new fans.

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The Chinese pop star the world knows as Faye Wong was someone quite different when she started out in show business – literally.

Her first three records with Hong Kong’s Cinepoly Records in 1989 and 1990 saddled her with Cantonese covers of American and Japanese hits, and the moniker Shirley Wong Jing Man.

Even then, the pristine quality of her clear, unsullied pipes shone through.

It was with 1992’s Coming Home, released after a study stint in New York, that she officially became Faye Wong. Musically, the album was more adventurous than typical Cantopop fare but her big hit was still a cover. Fragile Woman was a remake of the Japanese song Rouge and was a winner both on radio charts and during awards season.

Even as Wong began to explore different genres over her next few albums, she also continued to record the no-brainer commercial numbers. There seemed to be a tussle between what she wanted and the dictates of the record company.

When she began releasing Mandarin albums with 1994’s Mystery, the split was along language lines. True, she delivered beautiful ballads such as I’m Willing and Chess, but it was the Cantonese releases which proved to be more satisfying.

Even the album titles indicated her musical restlessness, such as Random Thoughts (1994), Ingratiate Oneself (1994) and Di-Dar (1995). These were alternative pop records in the sense that the music differed from mainstream offerings and the lyrics were more enigmatic than the usual musings about love.

One criticism often raised by detractors is that Wong is a mere copycat. In particular, she not only modelled her vocal stylings after Irish singer Dolores O’Riordan, she also covered The Cranberries’ Dreams in both Cantonese and Mandarin.

It is not true that she was content to simply emulate, though. It was a way of absorbing new ideas and influences and it paid off in spades on her most audacious album, Restless (1996).

She went from covering the Cocteau Twins’ Bluebeard to collaborating with the Scottish alternative rock band as they contributed two original tracks to the album, Fracture and Spoilsport.

The rest of the atmospheric electropop album was composed and written by Wong and featured made-up sounds such as the “la cha bor” refrain on the title track, to her scatting her way through Imagine. It is her most daring and cohesive effort to date.

Her next few albums were less experimental. Instead, they managed to strike a balance between musical exploration and commercial concerns. Her voice sounds deceptively delicate but it was a powerfully expressive and versatile instrument. It could be disarmingly child-like on You’re Happy (So I’m Happy), poignantly tender on Red Bean and then showily operatic on Face.

On Fable (2000), that schism between her and a by-now-different music label once again emerged. She composed the music for a cycle of five songs dealing with Buddhist concepts, with frequent collaborator Hong Kong’s Lin Xi providing lyrics. But the rest of the album was jarringly radio friendly.

Her last two studio albums saw her working with some new partners such as Taiwanese rocker Wu Bai. In the case of the techno-rock of Two People’s Bible off 2001’s self-titled record, the end result feels more Wu than Wong. More heartening were the songs on disc two, her most substantive offering of original Cantonese material since 1997’s Toy.

To Love (2003) marked a return to the template of her late 1990s albums but did not quite reach the same heights. Her compositions here include the throbbing title track as well as the exquisitely written Leave Nothing: “I gave the cinema ticket to you, gave the seat to him/I gave the candlelight to you, gave the dinner to him”.

Since then, there has been the odd soundtrack contribution to whet fans’ appetites but no sign of a new album. Hope springs eternal that she will some day decide to embark on another musical adventure.

Mystery (1994)

Faye Wong had previously sung in Mandarin, most notably on the track No Regrets off the 1993 album of the same name. Mystery is her first all-Mandarin disc and is best known for the ethereal ballad I’m Willing. However, it contained too many remakes of her Cantonese hits, including a new cover of Tori Amos’ Silent All These Years. Regardless, it was a huge hit and sales went past the 800,000 mark in Taiwan alone.

Random Thoughts (1994)

At this point, her Cantonese releases were more daring and playful both musically and in terms of packaging. Unusual for a release by a major pop star, there was no sign of her face anywhere on the CD. Instead, there were fragments of phrases such as “No new image” and “No photo booklet”. While the anglicised name Faye had already appeared on 1992’s Coming Home album, this was the first time she used her actual Mandarin name Wang Fei.

Chungking Express (1994)

Critics say that Faye Wong can only act as herself. True, but given the right role and director, her natural charisma comes through on the big screen as well. Her turn as a quirky snack-bar worker in Wong Kar Wai’s stylish drama won her the Best Actress award at the Stockholm Film Festival. Wong’s Cantonese cover of The Cranberries’ Dreams is played over the end credits.

Decadent Sounds of Faye Wong (1995)

This is how a covers album should be done. Wong took the songs of her idol, Taiwanese songbird Teresa Teng, and made them her own. It helped that the two shared the same clear and sweet vocal qualities but the appeal also lay in the unexpectedness of the arrangements. They even breathed new life into the dated folksiness of a track like Sentiments Of A Native Village. On the poetic Wishing We Could Last Forever, though, little more than Wong’s pure voice was needed.

Restless (1996)

The title song clocked in at under three minutes and the lyrics consisted of just 22 words, and it was probably one of the more conventional tracks here. Given the experimental nature of the disc, it did not sell as well as previous albums. It was critically acclaimed though and after its release, Wong became the first Chinese singer to feature on the cover of Time magazine. The headline: The Divas Of Pop.

Scenic Tour (1998)

She has never looked as serenely beatific as she does on the album cover here. And the record also contains several classics including the tender Red Bean and the showstopping Face, which sees her explor ing different ways of singing on one track. The track Tong was written by Wong for her daughter with her first husband, China musician Dou Wei. Gurgles of that daughter (Wong has two), Dou Jing tong, can be heard on it. The album sold more than 2.5 million copies in Asia.

Eyes On Me (1999)

It was the first time a Japanese video game, Final Fantasy VIII, had a Chinese singer performing the theme song. The single sold over 400,000 copies in Japan and paved the way for her entry into that market. She later became the first Chinese singer to perform at the Nippon Budo kan venue. She even starred in a Japanese TV series Usokoi (Love From A Lie) and recorded the Japanese theme song, Separate Ways, for it.

Fable (2000)

Her regular collaborators, Hong Kong’s Lin Xi and China’s Zhang Yadong, both play prominent roles here. And while the cycle of five songs written by Wong marked another step in her growth as a composer, it was Cantonese track Love Letters To Myself which set tongues wagging. The ballad was supposedly about Hong Kong singer-actor Nicholas Tse, whom she was dating, and the fact that he never sent her love letters.

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (2002)

Faye Wong had a silly side to her as well and this was perfectly captured in the loony Chinese New Year comedy by director Jeffrey Lau. She was once again paired with her Chungking Express co-star Tony Leung Chiu Wai and their easy chemistry showed onscreen. Wong won the Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards for Best Actress for her role as a runaway cross-dressing princess.

To Love (2003)

Despite the widespread acclaim for her singing and music, it was not until 2004, on her fifth nomination, that Wong won the prestigious Golden Melody Award for Best Female Vocalist. She quipped in typical straightforward fashion: “I’ve known that I can sing, therefore I will also confirm this panel’s decision.” Not counting the six low-cost cover albums she released in China as a high school student, this is her 19th and, to date, final full-length studio album.

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In Time

Andrew Niccol

The story: In this brave new world, a person stops growing older physically at the age of 25 and a timer imprinted on his arm starts counting down to death. But time is a transferable currency: The powerful live forever while the poor eke it out from hour to hour. Ghetto boy Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) wants to shake up the system and finds an unlikely partner in rich girl Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried).

The premise of time as a currency is a promising one, but writer-director Andrew Niccol does not quite seem to know how to spend his time exploring it.

What the moviegoer gets, first and foremost, is an unending stream of weak puns and wordplay. The cops are called timekeepers, a bunch of ruffians are known as the Minutemen and characters are referred to as “coming from time”, in a play on the phrase “coming from money”. It makes the treatment of the material feel too literal.

The way in which characters transfer, or steal, time from one another also seems faintly ridiculous: grabbing one another’s bare arms. You would think that everyone would be going around sheathed in arm-guards but that seems to be a big fashion faux pas.

Still, some of the coolly dystopian vibe of Niccol’s well-received sci-fi flick Gattaca (1997) can be found here, such as in the forbidding concrete barriers that separate the well-off time zones, where nobody runs, from the ghettoes, where sleeping in is a luxury.

And there is something undeniably hypnotic about watching a life ticking through its final seconds, waiting, so to speak, for one’s number to be up.

Niccol builds tension with an early scene when Will and his mother (Olivia Wilde) run to meet each other as the seconds melt away. But the image becomes overused and its impact is diminished.

The film feels like a missed opportunity, especially given the cast assembled, from Cillian Murphy as self-righteous cop Leon to Vincent Kartheiser as heartless banking magnate Philippe Weis.

While Timberlake and Seyfried (both right) seem like a good combination on paper, they do not smoulder when they are thrown together, proving once again that movie chemistry is an elusive thing.

Pacing is also problematic. The movie feels flat for long stretches and potentially interesting plotlines – Will’s late father crossing paths with Leon, for instance – lead nowhere.

So, sadly, it takes too long before the film finally runs out of time.

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Never Said Goodbye

Eric Suen

The Things We Do For Love

Joanna Wang

Hong Kong’s Eric Suen burst onto the Mandopop scene as a fresh-faced 20-year-old back in 1993, with the monster hit Nice To Know You. Then, after a whirlwind five years, the singer-songwriter burnt out and left without bidding the public goodbye.

Having released last year’s wellreceived Cantonese album, Man In The Mirror, Suen is ready for his Mandopop comeback.

He does not address his absence directly, though he could well be addressing his fans on tracks such as You And I: “You and I, a new beginning of my life/You let me feel love’s excitement, never be parted from you my whole life.”

And on love song The Best Arrangement, he sings: “Goodbye yesterday’s boy, I must live in the now, the past is gone and will never come around again/If you’re afraid of failure, you won’t be able to live an exciting life.”

The album offers a preponderance of ballads such as the title track. Given that his voice is not that distinctive, I would have preferred more uptempo numbers such as the uplifting Count On Me.

Taiwan’s Joanna Wang, on the other hand, has a beautifully husky voice that leaves a stamp on whatever she sings.

And so we have another album of covers from her: The Things We Do For Love is a double-disc album of covers, after 2009’s two-disc Joanna & Wang Ruo-lin, which featured oldies on one CD and original material on another. Wang Ruo-lin, by the way, is her Mandarin name.

On disc one here, the inclusion of two versions of three songs – Carole King’s You’ve Got A Friend, Cat Stevens’ Wild World and Oingo Boingo’s Stay – feels like padding. Also, it would have been nice to hear her tackling more of the lesser-known material such as 10cc’s The Things We Do For Love.

The second disc of Mandarin material fares better. The late Anita Mui’s Intimate Lover is a beautifully languid showcase for Wang. And she does a tremulously tender take on Sarah Chen’s A Lifetime Of Waiting.

Hopefully, it will not be a lifetime of waiting before Wang releases her next album of original material.

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Life Without Principle

Johnnie To

The story: The paths of three cash-strapped characters cross: Bank officer Teresa (Denise Ho) feels the pressure at work as she tries to meet the sales target for a new, risky fund. Police inspector Cheung Jin Fong (Richie Jen) is under pressure from his wife to buy an apartment while thug Panther (Lau Ching Wan) needs a desperate gamble on the stock market to pay off.

Hong Kong director-producer Johnnie To’s latest film is a black comedy that reveals its true colours only towards the end. The first hour is, in fact, rather frustrating.

We are introduced to police inspector Cheung at a murder scene but the crime is largely a red herring. Then the movie cuts to Teresa’s story and there is a very long scene of her persuading a retiree to invest in a risky financial product.

Even though regulations have been tightened after high-profile fund failures, To pointedly notes that the less educated folk still get bamboozled by sweet-talking bank officers. While there is a touch of humour in the proceedings, there is simply too much unnecessary detail and repetition.

It is also a pity that Lau’s Panther turns up fairly late in the film. He lights up the screen in a vanity-free performance as the fiercely loyal triad hoodlum with a penchant for loud ugly shirts. The protagonists’ paths cross in unexpected ways and To uses flashbacks to reveal the hidden connections.

At the same time, there is a shift in the film’s tone as increasingly desperate and even ridiculous situations are handled in a deadpan matter.

The prolific To’s track record can be erratic but this – which was in the running for the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival – is a definite improvement over his other offering this year, the massively irritating romantic comedy that was Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.

And for once in a Hong Kong movie, the English title actually makes sense: It is also the name of an essay by American philosopher Henry David Thoreau on righteous living and the pernicious influence of money.

The film turns out to be a morality tale though it has no preachy black-and-white lessons to impart. And that is a good thing.

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The Help

Tate Taylor

The story: The help refers to the African-American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s in the midst of the civil rights movement. Against this backdrop, fresh graduate Skeeter (Emma Stone) persuades her friend’s maid Aibileen (Viola Davis) to tell stories about her life. It is a quiet act of rebellion as what they are doing is against the law. Based on American author Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 debut novel.

It was the little movie that could.

The sleeper hit at the American box office is a US$25 million (S$32 million) drama about women wearing uniforms – without one stitch of superhero spandex in sight. Thus far, it has made US$165 million at the American box office.

Its appeal is easy to see. It is an uplifting tale about a repressed people finding strength in words and stories. Indeed, it is about the power of the pen at a time when Martin Luther King Jr was leading the charge for change.

The irony is that it takes a white woman to spearhead change in Jackson. Stone’s Skeeter has returned home after graduation and is uncomfortable with the casual and pervasive racism she sees in her friends. In particular, queen bee Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard) is proposing a legal Bill to mandate that the black help have to use separate bathrooms.

While we are shown that Skeeter has a close relationship with the maid who raised her, it is not quite clear why her outlook is more enlightened given that her mother (Allison Janney) behaves like everyone else. After all, one of the poignant themes here is that the white children lovingly raised by the black maids eventually model their parents when they grow up. Still, Stone is an appealing actress and she keeps Skeeter likeable even when her motives for talking to the maids in the first place are muddled by her own desire to be published.

There are also strong performances from Davis, who brings dignity and a flash of anger to the role of Aibileen, and Octavia Spencer, as the sassy Minny who cooks up a stomach-turning revenge on her employer Hilly.

Look out also for Jessica Chastain, who goes from saintly mother in Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life (2011) to a lonely social outcast here.

In lesser hands, the characters could easily have come across as cliched types. While scriptwriter-director Tate Taylor has commendably avoided that, he makes it all a little too neat and a tad predictable. The award-winning musical Caroline, Or Change (on Broadway in 2004) similarly explored the social changes in the early 1960s more realistically and with deeper characterisation.

The Help could well trigger some reflection on how the help here – whether they are domestic workers raising children and looking after the elderly folks or foreign workers building towers and digging tunnels – are treated.

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One Day

Lone Scherfig

The story: After their graduation from the University of Edinburgh in 1988, shy Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) spends a day and night with charming Dexter Mayhew

(Jim Sturgess). The film then returns to that one day, July 15, every year to trace the arc of their relationship over more than two decades. Adapted by David Nicholls from his best-selling 2009 novel of the same name.

How refreshing for a movie romance to be so free of artifice. You never get the sense that Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess (both below) are acting sexy or cute, or that they are calculatingly mugging for the camera.

Instead, this is a story about two people who make a connection and then have to figure out for themselves what that means.

When they first attempt to hook up after their graduation, it looks like a fling without much of a future. After all, they seem like such different people.

Emma comes across as serious, a little acerbic and gauche, while Dexter is more extroverted, the kind of guy that people are drawn to.

Yet, a friendship grows between them, one that is sustained by letters and telephone calls even if they are not always in the same city.

The idea to focus on one day a year over a period of 23 years can easily turn out to be a cheap gimmick, as the local film The Leap Years (2008) has shown.

But here, it works beautifully. The development of their relationship is sensitively handled and reveals how Emma and Dexter grow and change.

The going is hard for Emma at first. She wants to be a writer but finds herself stuck in waitressing. “Welcome to the graveyard of ambition,” is how she introduces a newcomer to the job.

Meanwhile, Dexter finds fame on television as a host but success goes to his head and booze and drugs get the better of him.

It is a heartbreaking moment when Emma realises that you can love someone but not like him anymore.

The two leads slip into their roles so thoroughly that you are completely drawn into their relationship and the turns that it takes as it wends through the years.

Hathaway came to audiences’ attention as the sweet young thing in The Princess Diaries films (2001, 2004) and then as the put-upon ingenue in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). In recent years, she has begun to win notice for her acting, most notably for the family drama Rachel Getting Married (2008).

One Day is another reminder that she is not just another pretty face.

Late in the film, Emma blossoms as a writer living in Paris and Hathaway finally gets to be gorgeous in an Audrey Hepburn kind of way though her character charmingly calls the look “butch”.

Sturgess is even better. The singer- actor broke out in the musical romance Across The Universe (2007) and is equally convincing as a shallow young man and as an older, wiser Dexter. He taps into the darker aspects of the character while conveying a touching sense of vulnerability.

The audience’s sense that it is watching flesh and blood characters is further bolstered by how the film was made.

Reflecting her Dogme 95 film background, Danish director Lone Scherfig’s follow-up to her lauded An Education (2009) looks like it was shot with natural light. It feels organic as opposed to some slick and glossy Hollywood product.

One Day will have you falling in love with movie romances once more.

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Kit Chan The Music Room Concert 2011

Grand Theater at Marina Bay Sands/Thursday

Is it too soon for another gig by home-grown songbird Kit Chan after her sell-out shows at the Esplanade’s Huayi – Chinese Festival Of Arts in February? The answer is a resounding no.

Once again, she proves to be a big draw live. Another show was added for tonight after the first two nights on Thursday and Friday at the 2,155-seater venue were sold out.

While she had to share the stage with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra at the Huayi gig, this time, it was all about Chan. Even the pre-show announcement about no flash photography and silencing beeping devices was made by her.

She appeared on stage with slicked-back hair and a shimmery gown which revealed a flash of leg. At one point, she said she was nervous and added: “You know the best cure for nervousness? Loud applause!” The audience responded on cue.

She was totally comfortable in her own skin and clearly relished the experience of holding another solo show after a seven-year hiatus from the scene.

Picking which songs to perform was a challenge as she has released more than 10 albums between 1993 and 2004, and she shared her winnowing process.

First, she would have to sing those songs without which she “might not leave the venue alive”. Second, were selections from her comeback covers album Re-interpreting Kit Chan (2011). Third, pick songs which would let out the drama queen in her.

So she performed her hits such as Heartache, Worried, Liking You and, of course, Home. The last was a version that started out hovering on the edge of space and then segued into Michael Buble’s Home. As hands waved in the air, she urged: “Let’s do this NDP rehearsal together.”

She bantered playfully in English, Mandarin and Cantonese and also sang Waiting and Forget Him from two Hong Kong musicals she had acted in – Snow.Wolf.Lake and The Legend.

Mixed in with familiar tracks were other Kit Chan numbers that had not been heard in years, including the first song she recorded, Do Not Destroy The Harmony, and the uptempo Look At The Moon.

Some of the classics she sang were not included on her recent covers album, including Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U and Stephen Sondheim’s Send In The Clowns. In particular, Clowns is not a song for any young, wet-behind-the-ears singer and it is a measure of Chan’s vocal and emotional maturity that she did justice to this song about missed chances and fate’s twisted sense of humour.

On Pink Martini’s Sympathique, she got in touch with her inner diva, slinking across the stage and vogueing languorously as she crooned silkily: “Je ne veux pas travailler (I don’t want to work)”.

The decision to do away with over-the-top costumes, back-up dancers and elaborate production worked as it kept the focus squarely on Chan and her band of able musicians.

Even the encore was thoroughly satisfying as she presented a new song – a beautiful Cantonese ballad called Left And Right Hands written by local songwriter and guest pianist Jimmy Ye and lyricist Lin Xi for the late Leslie Cheung.

When it was time to finally say goodbye, she did a reprise of Liking You, accompanied by just music director Goh Kheng Long on the piano. She sang: “I like following you like this, up to you to bring me to wherever.”

It took the words right out of the audience’s mouths.

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Pure

Aska Yang

Another She

Claire Kuo

Pure is as much a Jonathan Lee album as an Aska Yang one.

Mandopop veteran Lee produces it and contributes several tracks. His style is so strong on Greed and Because I’m Single that one almost expects to hear his raspy half-sung-half-spoken vocals. Instead, one gets One Million Star alumnus Yang’s clear and emotive voice plumbing love and loss.

A lesser singer would have been overwhelmed but Yang holds his own and also has a hand in writing the tracks, including Light In The Shadow.

The compelling ballad has him fantasising: “Eyes squinting, ears listening, I’m thinking, I can/Against the light, following the illusion, slowly, walk towards you.”

There is a jazzy, loungey vibe to this record as the arrangements frequently feature keyboard and brass instruments, making this a good late-night record to wallow in.

The album, a follow-up to Yang’s 2008 debut, Dove, flounders a little towards the end.

The tacked- on extra track, the unabashedly mainstream ballad, That Man, does not quite gel with the rest of the album.

Taiwanese singer Claire Kuo (left) is nothing if not unabashedly commercial. Yet, apart from album title tracks such as 2008’s The Next Dawn or 2009’s Singing In The Trees, few other songs of hers stick.

It is not a good sign that Another She is less memorable than previous lead singles.

The Next Miracle, a duet with feted newcomer Weibird Wei, sparks some interest, though their voices do not mesh well and the arrangement sounds dated.

It is not all lacklustre. Wei’s other contribution here fares better: Soft, which he composed, gives Kuo the chance to demonstrate some bouncy liveliness. And on the Lala Hsu-penned ballad, Originally, the singer shows a glimpse of real emotion.

This is by no means an offensively bad record but it is an album that is hard to get excited about.

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Snowflower and the Secret Fan

Wayne Wang

The story: As little girls in early 19th-century China, two sworn sisters have their feet crushed and bound so that they would walk daintily and marry well. Over the years, Snowflower (Gianna Jun) and Lily (Li Bingbing) secretly communicate by writing on silk fans. Their relationship is echoed in the friendship between their descendants Sophia (Jun) and Nina (Li) in modern-day Shanghai. Adapted from American novelist Lisa See’s 2005 novel of the same name.

The lot of women in Chinese history has not been a happy one. In a strongly patriarchal society, they were expected to be subservient and to know their place.

As a matchmaker observes, marriages are arranged according to men’s reasons but laotong, or sworn-sister, relationships are for women’s needs for emotional comfort and support.

The idea of adding a modern-day parallel relationship to the film is a potentially intriguing one given how gender roles and social mores have evolved.

But Chinese-American director Wayne Wang, probably best known for his 1993 adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, disappoints.

He is not helped by screenwriters Angela Workman, Ronald Bass and Michael K. Ray, who produce a leaden and unconvincing script. The dialogue is painfully stilted and filled with portentous sounding lines: “We are all women, we were born to leave our families” and “Disobedience is a woman’s greatest sin.” Not surprisingly, hardly anyone comes across as a flesh-and-blood character.

It is hard to believe that these characters are who they say they are to each other. Snowflower and Lily are meant to have a deep-hearted love for each other, as are Sophia and Nina, but Gianna Jun and Li Bingbing cannot summon that depth of feeling.

In particular, South Korean actress Jun, from the hit comedy My Sassy Girl (2001), seems rather vacant at times – you wonder if she was fully aware of what was going on.

And then Hugh Jackman turns up as Sophia’s love interest and attempts to serenade her in unintelligible Mandarin.

What is obviously missing in the film is an exploration of the sapphic element in female friendships. There are some hints of this and while one could argue that this was something not plausible in 19th-century China, it does not make sense for there not to be at least some mention of it in the modern-day storyline.

Moreover, instead of trusting the audience to grasp the past-present parallels, Wang cuts back and forth in a heavy-handed manner to underline his point.

Not only is the big picture askew, the smaller details are off as well. For reasons unknown to the audience, Li Bingbing, as Nina, switches distractingly between Mandarin and English even when she is conversing with other Chinese people in Shanghai.

The denouement that finally rolls around hinges on some convenient discovery, but by that point, one is barely invested enough in the story to be incensed.

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Loud Festival

Singapore Indoor Stadium

Last Friday

It was only when King of Mandopop Jay Chou came on stage that the concert really lived up to its name.

He was the final act after indie Taiwanese band sodagreen, sultry popster Landy Wen, newcomer singer-songwriter Cindy Yen and home-grown band Ang Moh Pais had performed.

Fans who had remained glued to their seats the entire night before Chou appeared shot to their feet the moment his 30-minute set started. No one needed to ask which star the sold-out crowd of 8,000 was there for.

While there was understandably no elaborate set on stage like there would be for Chou’s solo concerts, there was still an attempt to jazz up the production with props such as coffins for the opening number Herbalist’s Manual.

Chou, in a red jacket over T-shirt and jeans, was relaxed and had the crowd eating out of his hand with his every gesture. He played the piano, strummed the guitar, showed off his human beatboxing and worked in mentions of Singapore and his fans into the songs.

The consummate entertainer also presented a reworked version of Nunchucks, danced to Free Tutorial Video and sang The Last Battle, which he seldom performs live.

By the time he launched into the original rap version of Nunchucks for his last number, he had the stadium dancing and chorusing along.

In the fight for second place at the Chinese music festival, so to speak, opening act sodagreen had their share of supporters as well.

Lead singer Wu Ching-feng was in fine form be it hitting the high notes on early favourite Little Love Song or teasing his bandmates during the introductions. Best of all, the band performed two tracks from their upcoming album, What Is Troubling You. The Limits Of Happiness and Like Loneliness both bear sodagreen’s hallmark traits of sensitive lyrics and beautiful melodies, and certainly whetted one’s appetite for the new offering.

Popster Landy Wen performed a set as long as Chou’s without coming close to his success. Her voice sounded rougher and more strained than on recordings. As if to overcompensate, the volume on the sound system went way up.

Surprisingly for Wen, who is arguably more famous for being eye candy, her ballads Wish Me Happy Birthday and Fool received the most positive reaction, over the slinky dance moves she used to seduce the audience.

Newcomers Cindy Yen and Ang Moh Pais filled out the roster with three numbers each. The band rocked out on the crowd-pleasing getai remake One Million while Yen left an impression with her hot pants rather than her vocal prowess.

The lone encore featured Chou and Wen dueting on Rooftops in mismatched outfits. Unfortunately, it was the only collaboration among the acts.

Surely the hot ticket would have been a jam between Chou and sodagreen. Maybe next time?

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Who Is Hanjin Tan

Hanjin Tan

If you want to know about Hanjin Tan, listen to this album.

The Hong Kong-based Singaporean musician lays out his life in the opening track Both Hands To The Sky: playing the guitar in bars after national service, leaving his economics degree in the cabinet and taking a gamble on pursuing music full-time and then writing songs for Jacky Cheung and producing for Eason Chan.

The road has been tough but Tan is not spinning some sob story: “It’s been hard going against the flow, but it’s harder to bear grudges, too lazy, can’t remember.”

From his beaming face on the CD cover to song titles such as No Time For Regrets and Happiness Is Free, it is not hard to work out his philosophy of life. And there is no denying that it is a compelling one, especially when the sentiment is dressed up with groovy beats and joyous scatting on Why Be Sad.

Admittedly, on first listen, I missed the edge that MC Jin brought to the table in their revelatory collaboration, Buy 1 Get 1 Free (2010). But this is such a personal album that it could not be anything else but a solo project.

Indeed, Tan composed the music, wrote the lyrics, did the production, arrangements, recording and mixing and also played the instruments.

There is no playing it safe here. Just listen to Not Reliable Making Money From Music, in which the sampled sounds of someone coughing and gagging cleverly make up the rhythm. Tan memorably makes the point that turning one’s passion into a means of making a living can be a terrible thing.

And in an album of mostly Mandarin tracks, the easy breezy jazzy pleasures of Simple Things make the sole English number a personal favourite.

It is absolutely worth your while to get to know Hanjin.

Mysterious Hero

Jonathan Leong

Making a somewhat unexpected Mandopop debut is Singapore Idol alumnus Jonathan Leong.

As perhaps is to be expected of someone who made his mark in the singing competition with English pop-rock hits such as Matchbox Twenty’s If You’re Gone and Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars, his Mandarin diction still needs work. It is not so deplorable as to render the songs unlistenable but it is noticeable.

The good news is that the album has a distinctive tuneful emo-rock sound. Better yet, it is a vibe which seems to be in keeping with Leong’s own sensibility rather than one foisted upon him – he composed seven of the nine tracks here.

It even works when he ventures into the synth-laced dance-rock of the Depeche Mode-influenced Addiction. Not to mention that it makes for a refreshing change from the endless emulations of Korean dance-pop out there.

A promising start.

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Documentaries are often associated with authority figures and experts doling out facts, with the spotlight firmly fixed on the subject in question.

Think Sir David Attenborough in his natural history programmes or Errol Morris’ The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S McNamara (2003), which looks at the life of the former United States Secretary of Defense.

More recently, another kind of documentary has emerged, one in which the film-maker is front and centre.

Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock are the two names that spearhead this sub-genre of documentary films.

In his first feature-length work, Roger & Me (1989), Moore took General Motors to task for relocating its factories from Flint, Michigan, to Mexico, causing many Americans to be jobless.

His approach was unconventional and one that was very personal, since he had grown up in Flint.

There was a lot of anger over GM’s actions, both from former employees and from Moore himself.

It set the template for his subsequent films in which he thrust himself into the middle of the action, whether he is trying to get politicians to answer awkward questions in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) or getting a free gun for opening a bank account in Bowling For Columbine (2002).

Spurlock upped the stakes in Super Size Me (2004), in which he subjected himself to an experiment of eating only McDonald’s meals for 30 days.

This approach has reaped rewards at the box office.

Fahrenheit 9/11, about former president George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, is the highestgrossing documentary of all time with over US$222 million in worldwide grosses.

It also won the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or.

Super Size Me earned over US$20 million worldwide and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary.

The me-me-me movies resonate with audiences, and some critics, as they give viewers someone to identify with in grappling with abstract issues of gun-control, war or even unhealthy diets.

But brickbats have been hurled at Spurlock and Moore along with the bouquets.

Moore, in particular, has been criticised for his showy, biased approach and for distorting the truth to suit his agenda.

Film-maker Michael Wilson even made an entire movie about the objections called Michael Moore Hates America (2004).

For example, he charges that Moore misrepresented the truth in the free-gunwith-bank-account incident by arranging for a gun to be delivered to the bank ahead of time.

That Moore dresses up the truth to dramatise it is troubling and distracting. It is not shocking enough that a bank was giving away guns?

The accusation, however, that a documentary is necessarily tainted the more the film-maker inserts himself into it does not hold water.

When the label of documentary is applied to a film, there is an expectation of absolute objectiveness that is simply unrealistic.

Every documentary, no matter how fairly approached, has a point of view.

Hiding the film-maker behind voiceovers and keeping him out of sight can, in fact, be a sneaky way of presenting what is seen on screen as the authoritative and undisputed truth.

Ironically, it is probably more transparent to have the film-maker expose his own biases.

The topics they delve into also persuades me of the worth of what Moore and Spurlock are doing.

They are often up against Goliaths, be they multinational corporations, powerful industries or even entire governments.

These self-styled gadflies prick and sting with their persistent and pesky questioning, and if that gives the behemoths any kind of pause in their actions, and everyone else food for thought on how his world is shaped by bigger forces, then I say: Bring those documentaries on.

Roger & Me (1989)

What: General Motors’ decision to close its plants in Flint, Michigan, devastated the city economically and socially. Michael Moore tries to pin down GM’s then chairman Roger B. Smith for an interview and finally confronts the man as he is giving his annual Christmas message to the company.

Bowling For Columbine (2002)

What: In the wake of the Columbine High School shooting tragedy, Moore examines the culture of guns and violence in the US in this Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature. He includes footage of actor Charlton Heston holding a musket and declaring at a National Rifle Association meeting: “I have only five words for you: From my cold dead hands.”

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

What: This highest-grossing documentary of all time by Moore took issue with the media coverage of the War on Terror as well as the mishandling and misrepresentation of the Iraq War by former president George W. Bush’s administration.

Super Size Me (2004)

What: In his 30-day McDonald’s-only experiment, Morgan Spurlock ate the equivalent of what most nutritionists say is an ordinary person’s average intake of fast food in eight years.

Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? (2008)

What: Spurlock conducts interviews in the Middle East on the subjects of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Islamic fundamentalism.

He even goes around asking people in the street where Osama is at a time when the US had yet to take him out.

The birth of Spurlock’s son Laken is depicted here and the film is dedicated to him.

This is Spurlock’s exploration of the fight against terrorism, juxtaposed against his own fears of the kind of world his son is being born into.

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The Change-Up

David Dobkin

In the opening scene, projectile poop from a baby’s butt scores a bullseye on Jason Bateman’s face. Crap on the big screen – that just about sums up this film.

Bateman plays Dave Lockwood, a married- with-children lawyer who is overdue for a mid-life crisis, and Ryan Reynolds is his pal Mitch Planko, a sometime actor who is still living it up as a swinging bachelor.

The two switch bodies when they pee into a fountain. Predictably, the uptight guy learns to cut loose while the slacker guy learns about grown-up responsibilities.

However, the way they go about doing so is utterly unbelievable. For example, even though Mitch-in- Dave knows nothing about the law, he is able to play a pivotal part in a major, and majorly complicated, deal.

Indeed, the script, courtesy of The Hangover’s Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, has a very strong and distasteful world view: Women are witless sex objects and movie audiences are blithering idiots.

Stay clear.

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The Sorcerer And The White Snake

Ching Siu Tung

The story: The White Snake spirit (Eva Huang) takes on human form to be with the man she loves, the herbalist Xu Xian (Raymond Lam). Meanwhile, her soul sister, Green Snake (Charlene Choi), strikes up a friendship with the monk Neng Ren (Wen Zhang). White Snake’s true identity is found out by Neng Ren’s sorcerer teacher Fa Hai (Jet Li), whose mission is to subdue all demons.

While cautionary tales of entanglements between humans and spirits are not uncommon, what is unusual about the White Snake legend is that she is genuinely in love with Xu Xian rather than just out to sink her teeth into him.

Indeed, it is Fa Hai who comes off badly as he is unyielding in his simplistic dogmatic belief that humans and demons can never be together.

Director Ching Siu Tung had explored some of these elements in A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) to great success and it makes sense for him to take on this project. Unfortunately, his idea of updating this story is to bombard the audience with computer-generated imagery.

Worse, the CGI landscape looks decidedly fake. Instead of conjuring up believable other-worldly vistas as in Storm Warriors (2009), Ching creates what looks like epic battles of a video game. Sure, some bits may look cool but the overall effect is alienating.

Then there are the other questionable uses of CGI. In their reptilian form, White Snake and Green Snake are given breasts. The anatomically incorrect sight is ludicrous – and wouldn’t bosoms just get in the way of snakes slithering about?

Even more ridiculous is the decision to include cutesy CGI critters such as a talking mouse, tortoise and rabbit. Every time the creatures appear, this jarringly turns into a film that seems to be targeted at kids.

It would have taken some tremendous acting from the cast to rise above this and this was not the case.

Lam is blandly insipid as Xu Xian, turning what should be a passionate and moving love with Huang’s White Snake into a tepid affair.

Li is mostly stoic as the single-minded Fa Hai and his usually reliable action scenes are swallowed up in a sea of CGI.

The supporting characters gamely shore up the film. In particular, Wen left an impression as the tragicomic Neng Ren and his bittersweet relationship with Choi’s Green Snake was affecting.

Too bad the movie as a whole has no bite.

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My Love

Hebe Tien

Looking For

Jeanie Zhang

Bad Girl

Amber Ann

Taiwanese singer – and one-third of girl group S.H.E – Hebe Tien (far right) delivers the goods again on My Love, her

follow-up to last year’s well-received solo debut To Hebe. Left to her own devices, she comes across as a chic hippie chick, all grown up and with a mind of her own.

Collaborators such as indie singer- songwriters Sandee Chan, Cheer Chen and sodagreen’s Wu Ching-feng burnish Tien’s music cred on the tracks Utopia, Shadow’s Shadow and You.

On the song Flower, Tien explores

unusual line readings that make the breezy track more memorable, as she

sings: “Flowers, learning coloratura/

Flowers, borrowing fragrance/Flowers, flowers are so beautiful/Does the heart want to feel the same.”

Hearteningly, her vocals seem to have improved from her previous effort and the sound is more nuanced and full-

bodied here, hopefully not the result of electronic fiddling. With her hard- earned music credibility of late, one foresees that her membership in the popular S.H.E – put

together by the dictates of a record company and struggling to shake their reputation as disposable popsters – could become a liability to her down the line.

Faring a little less well on her second release is China’s singer-composer Jeanie Zhang. There is no doubt she has a clear voice, but the material this time does not leave as strong an impression as the songs from her 2009 debut, Keep Going.

She writes in the liner notes about “strangely” losing her voice last year and the frustrations and fears she faced. But there is no trace of this struggle to be found here.

Instead, too many songs are in the mid-tempo range and deal with the well-worn topic of love in a not particularly fresh manner. Or, maybe, it is the fact that familiarity breeds higher expectations.

This is not a problem faced by Taiwan’s sexiest woman Amber Ann, who was voted No. 1 in FHM magazine Taiwan’s 2011 poll of top 100 sexiest women. The model and TV host is merely releasing a pictorial book of her in sexy underwear with various degrees of translucency. Wait a second, there is actually a debut CD of songs tacked on here.

If you can get past the baby-doll voice, you are rewarded with cutesy numbers. Hola, for instance, seems to be an attempt to pun the Spanish greeting with the Minnan phrase for okay.

On the final track Where Did She Go, she sings: “I know I’m not noble, but I’m definitely not lowly.” That spunky attitude and note of defiance would probably be more convincing without the lingerie catalogue.

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