19
19
Do not be misled by the CD cover.
The act 19 is not some young female newcomer but a duo comprising the very seasoned singer-songwriter Sandee Chan and George Chen, noted composer of tunes for theatre, film and advertisement jingles. The album is filled with a sense of adventure and fun that is positively youthful, turning Chen’s score music and commercial work into bona fide pop songs.
Sound-wise, this feels like a natural continuation of Chan’s previous light- hearted foray into electronica on I Love You, John (2011). The soothing romantic ballad Don’t Forget My Kisses was first included on the soundtrack of the hit film Monga (2010) and it is one of many highlights here.
On the ethereal Journey For Two, they muse about wanderlust: “You’d say every time/Sigh, want to go to Bali island/ You’d say every time/Sigh, want to go to Spain and run.”
The restlessness is also seen in the wide-ranging influences on the songs – from the Japanese youth romance film Bataashi Kingyo (1990) inspiring Stupid Goldfish to the ubiquitous leisure activity of karaoke giving rise to KTV Legend.
Meanwhile, the dreamily sultry Boy Boy Girl Girl features two same-sex couples in the blush of nascent love in the music video.
A winning musical experiment from the Taiwanese duo.

Feeling Of Loss
TKB
This is local band TKB’s second EP after last year’s First Step, First Episode.
The emo-rock tracks by the quartet, such as Feeling Of Loss, Mess and Number 17, are the less interesting numbers here, though the inclusion of a violin’s plaintive wails adds some interest to 17.
Head instead for the light-hearted The Last Address, which at least offers a pick-me-up instead of being another downer. Lead vocalist Nicole Teo sings in English for the refrain: “I must be sleeping on a star, let’s not wake up.”
Still, a soporific record is the last thing a band wants.
(ST)

My Ghost Partner
Huang Yiliang
After messing with the wrong guy, conmen Zhang Shi (Huang Yiliang, sporting a trying-too-hard mohawk) and Yi Fei (Brandon Wong in an Ah Beng role that has Mark Lee’s name all over it) get thrown into the sea. Fei survives but Shi does not and he returns as a constantly ravenous ghost. He also acquires powers which are conveyed on screen via cheesy visual effects.
Too bad that Huang, who also served as director and co-scriptwriter, just does not fit the mould of a lovable spook along the lines of Hong Kong’s Raymond Wong in the Happy Ghost films of the 1980s.
Fatal flaws aside, My Ghost Partner could have been a mildly amusing comedy if it had focused on Shi and Fei’s partnership. But with multiple plotlines and a whole bunch of familiar small-screen faces including Dawn Yeoh, Nick Shen, Yang Libing, Carole Lin and even Taiwan’s Sam Tseng, it feels too scattered.
And in its last 30 minutes, the movie completely veers off course.

A high-stakes gambling game is hastily arranged but it is one devoid of any suspense. Bizarrely, the ones with the greatest emotional stakes in the game are not even the protagonists of Shi and Fei but some minor characters. Go figure.

(ST)

Imperfect
Steve Cheng
The story: Teenagers Jianhao (Edwin Goh) and Zach (Ian Fang) are best buds who join a gang headed by Zhihua (Li Nanxing). The two friends are pulled in different directions – Zach is seduced by the easy money that comes from peddling drugs while Jianhao aims to complete his O levels with help from the studious Shanshan (Kimberly Chia). Tragedy strikes when the hot-headed pair get into a fight with the rich brat Alex (Xavier Ong) and they find themselves in bigger trouble than they ever could imagine.

The Channel 8 juvenile delinquency television drama On The Fringe (2011) turned its young leads Edwin Goh, Ian Fang, Kimberly Chia, Elizabeth Lee and Phua Yida into overnight stars.
At a fan meet held last September, 2,000 fans turned up to show their love and support for them despite a drizzle. The next logical step was to parlay their small-screen success into a movie.
Imperfect features the five young actors as well as veteran Li Nanxing from the TV show. But while it covers similar ground of good-at-heart bad kids, the characters here are different.
Goh is watchable as a young man trying to do the right thing, managing to pull off the different sides to his character Jianhao in his interactions with his family and friends.
Sullen and curt with his mother (Taiwanese TV actress Chiang Tsu-ping), he is fiercely loyal when it comes to his buddies, and then with Shanshan, he reveals an impish likability.
Compared to the fully fleshed-out Jianhao, the others are mostly one-note: Fang’s hot-headed Zach is seduced by easy money, Lee is his shallow girlfriend, Chia is the serious and studious girl and Phua, the bumbling friend.
Still, the young actors bring their On The Fringe chemistry to this movie and make their interactions believable.
Clearly, movie and TV producers are eager to bottle their camaraderie for profit – Goh, Fang, Chia and Phua are currently in the Channel 8 school drama Don’t Stop Believin’.
Unfortunately, the film has a tendency to sink into melodrama, perhaps because Hong Kong director Steve Cheng had cut his teeth on TVB dramas.
The late revelations about Jianhao’s parentage are unconvincingly shoehorned into the script, while Jianhao’s unexpectedly tender relationship with his younger sister, touching at first, soon becomes an overused device.
Adding to these woes is the uneven tone of Imperfect – Jianhao’s mother’s limp-wristed suitor (Taiwan’s Li Pei-hsu) strikes an off-note and Hong Kong veteran Liu Kai Chi as the psycho triad boss father of Alex seems to be in a different gangland flick.
At least the producers were honest when coming up with a title for the movie.
(ST)

Ghetto Superstar
MC HotDog
A rapper must surely drive a flashy car and be surrounded by hot model babes. Right?
Well, Taiwan’s MC HotDog self-deprecatingly takes apart that stereotype in the title track which is dense with wordplay and puns. As he claims: “The crappy songs I write are not at all fan te xi/Still living with my mum, she cooks fan tai xi (rice that is too watery)”. “Fan te xi” is likely a reference to Jay Chou’s hit 2001 album Fantasy.
The flashes of humour and cheekiness liven up this collection of singles that he released between 2009 and this year, often with other collaborators. Rocker Chang Chen-yue lends a hand on three tracks including the party dance-pop number High High Life.
No Breakfast For Hip-Hoppers with fellow rapper Soft Lipa is a sly riposte to Crowd Lu’s Rock ’n’ Roll Style in which Lu proclaimed that eating breakfast every morning was a rock ’n’ roll thing to do. MC HotDog fires off: “What does eating breakfast have to do with rock ’n’ roll/I’ve cracked my head and can’t come up with a thing/So, so I’ve decided to declare one thing, which is, not eating breakfast is a very hip-hop thing.”
Breakfast or no, this 17-track offering, inclusive of short audio skits, should fill you right up.

Sexy, Free & Single
Super Junior
You never know what you are going to get with each Super Junior album, in terms of their line-up, that is.
With Kangin having completed his military service, the K-pop supergroup is now 10-strong on its sixth album.
Sound-wise, SuJu bank on their usual mix of dance numbers and ballads, except the material is decidedly less strong here.
The title track is merely serviceable, no match for the insanely catchy Mr. Simple off their 2011 album of the same name.
It appears that the reason for the existence of a track with a name like Sexy, Free & Single is merely to have an excuse to have the lads lounging about topless on the cover of the album.
Then again, since when have K-pop groups needed a reason to play the sexy card?
(ST)

Yan Zi
Stefanie Sun
It was a classic case of overnight success.
With her self-titled debut album, Stefanie Sun was catapulted into the top ranks of Mandopop singers, achieving both popular and critical acclaim.
The disc sold more than 400,000 copies in three months in Taiwan, and was Singapore’s best-selling Mandarin album in 2000. She even beat today’s Mandopop king Jay Chou to nab the Best New Artist accolade at the prestigious Golden Melody Awards in 2001.
While Sun was very much in the girl-next-door mould, she stood out with her short crop and casual get-ups of unfussy tops and pants, rarely skirts. And in further contrast to docile doe-eyed lasses crooning about love, there was a spunky edge to her distinctive lower-pitched voice, particularly on faster-paced numbers.
She looked as though a moderately strong wind could carry her off, but proved to be no frail damsel when she opened her mouth to sing.
Turbo kickstarted the album. The track was designed to differentiate her from the crowd, with its snappy tempo and lyrics pumped full of attitude: “The feeling is right, I’m starting out/Using my own steps.”
The undoubted highlight of the disc, though, was Cloudy Day. The ballad with its poignant refrain of “tee or or, bey lor hor” (“The sky is dark, it is going to rain soon”), taken from a Hokkien folk song, grew to be a monster hit.
The canny sampling of a well-known ditty meant that everyone and their grandmother could easily relate to the song. For deftly updating an oldie and turning it into an instant classic, local songwriter and Sun’s mentor Lee Shih Shiong won the Golden Melody Award for Best Composer in 2001.
The ballad Love Document was also a thoughtfully crafted number. Lyrics such as “distance is a test”, “we are still learning for love” and “this love will have its certificate” were a perfect fit for the then 22-year-old who graduated from Nanyang Technological University that year with a bachelor of business degree.
Sun also showed that she could write music with her composition for Fine. She would go on to hone her skills as a songwriter, particularly on the statement-making Stefanie (2004) for which she composed two tracks and wrote the lyrics for one.
Interestingly, Yan Zi closes with Leave Me Alone, foreshadowing the ambivalent relationship Sun would have with fame. She loves to sing, but is clearly less enamoured with the pressures that come with being a professional entertainer.
When she released her ninth original studio album It’s Time (2011), she told Life!: “I just want to sing and enjoy it. I don’t need any record-breaking sales or awards or more titles, I just want to enjoy it while it lasts.”
Perhaps that ambivalence is in part due to the awareness that it is never just about the singing. While there is no question of Sun’s raw talent, a clever marketing campaign was also key to her early success.
Even before her album was released in Taiwan, Sun was already a recognisable face, thanks to an advertising campaign for sanitary napkins. And a generous NT$40 million (S$1.67 million) was spent on the promotion of the record.
More controversially, a man with an air gun tried to take her hostage during an autograph session in Taipei, an incident dismissed by some as a publicity stunt.
Still, none of this should detract from the fact that Sun was a unique voice in Mandopop from day one and Yan Zi was the album that first showcased her uniqueness. She has since proven to be that rarest of stars – an overnight smash who has endured.
(ST)

Music-Man II World Tour 2012
Singapore Indoor Stadium
Last Saturday
American-born, Taiwan- based Wang Lee Hom certainly knows how to make an entrance.
After an introductory video clip of him as Music Man taking on hordes of nameless opponents, a tank decked out in coloured lights rolled onto the stage to wild screams.
The singer-songwriter was perched atop the vehicle and dressed in an eye-catching all-red outfit with his hair teased into a gravity-defying pompadour. Appropriately, the opening montage included the electro-rock number Fire Power To The Max.
Dramatic fire power is all well and good, but too much of it can end up feeling like mere bombardment.
And, in fact, the concert became more enjoyable towards the end when the still-boyish-looking 36-year-old loosened up noticeably.
As it was, the early ballads such as The Only One and All The Things You Never Knew were pounded into submission and his face scrunched up with the effort.
It did not help that the sound level was too loud and whatever delicacy of feeling that existed in the songs was pretty much obliterated.
His self-described “chinked-out” style of music was also packed into the first half with tracks such as Descendants Of The Dragon 2012, The 18 Martial Arts and Heroes Of Earth in the line-up.
I have never been particularly swayed, however, by his fusion of pop and hip-hop with elements of folk and traditional Chinese music on albums such as Shangri-La (2004) and Heroes Of Earth (2005).
The starting point of ethnic pride is a laudable one but the results are often bombastic and border on the cringe-worthy. The melding can be successful though when it is done more subtly in songs such as Mistake Made In The Flower Field.
It was with Love Love Love, a third of the way into the 21/2- hour-long concert, that Wang seemed to relax and enjoy himself more.
Talking about the song, he asked who needs love and whether Zhang Ziyi needs love as the camera zoomed in on the Chinese actress who was in the audience. He later added that he had been spending the past few weeks in Singapore making a film with her.
For the most part, his banter stuck to a script as it served to segue into announcing the title of the next song. Not that it mattered to the full-house crowd of 10,000 who greeted his every mention of Singapore and “I love you” with loud cheers.
The talented musician also thrilled his fans by playing on, not one, but four instruments – the piano, the violin, the guitar and the erhu.
Even better was the a cappella segment in which he crooned a string of his best-known hits such as The One I Love Is You and Impossible To Miss You – accompanied by six other Lee Homs in a pre-recorded video. The timing was flawless as he “interacted” with and even quarrelled with his other selves.
By the time he took on Forever Love, the ballad sounded decidedly less strained than the earlier offerings.
During his encore, he recorded a video clip of the enthusiastic audience chorusing “I love you” to post on his Weibo microblog.
He also thanked his Singapore fans for their unwavering support from his first album, Love Rival Beethoven, back in 1995 before ending the evening with Kiss Goodbye.
Happily, it was a kiss that had just the right amount of fire power.
(ST)

Dear Orange
Orange Tan Hui Tien

Uncontrolled
Namie Amuro

Johor’s Orange Tan was the women’s champion in the Malaysian version of Project Superstar back in 2007. While it has taken her a few years to produce, her first EP is the perfect showcase for her agreeably husky pipes.
The songs here have an easy-breezy feel. In them, she muses on familiar themes of life, love and friendship, while avoiding the trap of sounding hackneyed.
In the sweetly optimistic Dear Us, she sings: “Dear us, we live for love/Even if we go our separate ways today/The baggage is heavy, we have to lift it somehow/An unwrapped possibility is waiting in the future.”
Interspersed between the five songs are short interludes, including a cute recording of her niece asking if she has eaten and when she is coming home over the telephone. It is all very slice-of-life and charming.
A totally different proposition is Japanese pop queen Namie Amuro’s ninth studio album, Uncontrolled.
Slick and urbane, with polished music videos to go with 11 of the 13 tracks, it feels calculated down to the last beat.
Still, tracks such as In The Spotlight (Tokyo) and Let’s Go – with lyrics such as “It’s the idea, the idea, idea of you/It gets me going, going, it gets me going” – do the job and ought to get one moving on the dance floor.
It is on the slower-paced numbers that one seems to get a hint of Amuro, the person. Get Myself Back has her crooning: “I’ve always been acting strong/Even lying to myself/On the open white map/There isn’t a place I can go to.”
A little more Amuro, and a little less control, would have made for a more fascinating album.
(ST)

Greedy Ghost
Boris Boo
This tedious morality tale about people who are irritants has few scares and fewer laughs.
Lim (Taiwan’s Kang Kang) stumbles across a manuscript with seemingly empty pages. After being harangued by the spirit within it (Mark Lee), Lim decides to bet on the numbers given to him, not realising that he has to pay a high price for his lottery winnings.
Meanwhile, his two layabout friends whose only discernible job is to occasionally dig up old graves end up stealing from one.
Malaysia’s Brendan Yuen overacts as the greedy and all-round nasty piece of work that is Huat. Henry Thia is at least mildly amusing as the devout Buddhist who obsessively arranges his remaining few strands of hair.
Pity Jesseca Liu who is stuck in the thankless role of Huat’s doormat girlfriend. Her character even gets molested by the female ghost incongruously named Madam Butterfly.
Add to the mess a script in which the repartee descends to the level of “you eat s***”, “no, you eat s***”, and the horror is complete.
(ST)

The Silent War
Alan Mak, Felix Chong
The story: Blind piano tuner assistant He Bing (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) has an excellent sense of hearing. He is recruited by Zhang Xuening (Zhou Xun), an agent of 701 Headquarters of the newly established China Republic government in the 1950s, to detect the frequencies on which the enemy, a vague threat, is broadcasting sensitive information.

It has been said that feted Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai acts with his eyes. In acclaimed dramas such as In The Mood For Love (2000) and Lust, Caution (2007), he could convey the emotions roiling beneath a placid surface with just a searing glance.
So how does he fare when the character he is playing is blind?
Pretty well, thank you very much, and this role lets Leung demonstrate that he does not act with just his eyes. His charisma remains intact even while wearing lenses or dark glasses that cover his piercing peepers. It helps that the character is not some angsty tortured person but a likeable rascally fellow who has to get by on his wits.
The sound design also does a good job of putting the audience in He’s shoes by heightening the noises that filter through to him in a scene where he is being tailed by Zhang and her men.
As Zhang and He later work together, she begins to feel protective of him and he starts to have feelings for her. Their relationship is played out with restraint but perhaps a little too tentatively as other characters enter the picture.
One is actually more intrigued by the enigmatic relationship between Zhang and her boss Old Devil (Wang Xuebing). And He later ends up with the cryptologist Shen Jing (Mavis Fan) in a development that feels rather pat.
The film reunites Leung with Hong Kong film-makers Alan Mak and Felix Chong, who had collaborated as writers for the excellent cop thriller Infernal Affairs (2002). Here, Mak and Chong both direct, from a script adapted from China novelist Mai Jia’s An Suan (Plot Against, 2006).
And it seems possible to detect the seeds of The Silent War in that earlier film.
There is a tensely pivotal scene in Infernal Affairs which involved Morse code being tapped out on a window. Here, the transmission of Morse code messages consumes the protagonists.
The stakes, though, are generally vague here and one never gets the sense of the enemy beyond a few references to Chiang Kai-shek.
And when the stakes are made clearer towards the end in a hunt for the master enemy agent Chungking, what unfolds rests too much on the trite coincidence of similar-sounding Morse codes with very different meanings.
The poignancy of the tragedy that strikes He is also diminished as the rationale for his actions is less than fully convincing.
But at least Leung keeps one watching.
(ST)

My Room
Maggie Chiang
In the six years since her last album Crybaby (2006), Taiwan’s Maggie Chiang has been quietly remodelling herself as a singer-songwriter.
The initial impression of My Room is that it does not present a very much different Chiang. After all, she already used to sing sensitively wrought love ballads, penned by others, such as Why Is My Beloved Not By My Side and The Gentleness Of Both Hands.
That is not to say that the album is without its rewards – the better tracks include the easy breezy romance of You Do Love Me and The Weight Of Love, the latter first appearing in an EP of the same name in 2010.
In particular, the gently lilting Under The Moon Light, composed by Chiang with lyrics by her and Peggy Hsu, strikes a tender note: “Hey, you in the moonlight, are you thinking about the past on this lonely night.”
So what if there isn’t a radical departure from the past? The more important thing is that Chiang has decided to take a bigger stake in her music and that can only be a good thing.
As the title track with lyrics by David Ke goes: “Open the window, it’s the same sunlight, and yet the feeling is not the same.”
The same could be said of Chiang.
(ST)

Listening
VC Tan
As a songwriter, Malaysia’s VC Tan has composed memorable hits such as I Love Him for Della Ding Dang and Longing For for Rainie Yang.
Perhaps he should have kept some of it for his new album, the follow-up to 2010’s Goodbye, Single.
He has a pleasant if not overtly distinctive voice and the material here could have done with a bit more oomph.
Ballads such as the title track and Yes Man seem a little too tailored for the mass market. He plays the part of the lovelorn guy on Yes Man: “I’m the lousy good person who loves you/Having loved you, yet I can only hide myself/No matter, don’t worry about how heartbroken I am.”
More interesting are the uptempo jazziness of Nobody, the dance-pop of You Hold My Happiness and the breeziness of Love In This Moment. The Lord’s Prayer is an oddity. It features the Lord’s prayer from the Biblical book of Matthew in Mandarin set to synth-pop. Actually, it works fine if you do not, ironically, listen too closely to the lyrics.
(ST)

Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson
The story: Scout-in-training and orphan Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) elopes with misunderstood Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) on the island of New Penzance in 1965. Scout master Ward (Edward Norton) and police captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) track down the young lovers while Suzy’s parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) fret.

How much you enjoy this film will depend on your appetite for – or tolerance of – what is kooky, off-kilter, precious or twee.
The typical Wes Anderson film traverses the entire spectrum of quirky. The writer-director creates self-contained brightly coloured worlds in which stories of family, whether by blood or by circumstance, unfold drolly.
In The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004), Bill Murray and his submarine crew go after a shark which ate his friend. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) was all about the successes and failures of three privileged siblings.
At his best, Anderson draws you into his richly imagined scenarios with a gentle sense of humour and intriguing oddball characters.
With a relentlessly deadpan relationship at its core, Moonrise Kingdom happens to be among the more indulgent of his works.
It is a little frustrating given the promising set-up as the entire island is turned upside-down when the young lovers run away together.
Jared Gilman brings a likeable mix of bravado and vulnerability to the plucky and resourceful Sam, though Kara Hayward (both above) is largely one-note as the far too passive Suzy.
Maybe because the protagonists are so young, they do not bring that sense of pathos to their roles as, say, Murray and Jason Schwartzman did with their roles in more engaging Anderson films such as Rushmore (1998).
Good thing then that he has surrounded the young ones with a group of experienced and big-name actors who are great to watch as they do their thing in supporting roles.
The usually oh-so-serious Edward Norton is the almost goofily earnest scout master and Bruce Willis, so often the macho action star, is the somewhat pathetic and yet good-hearted Captain Sharp.
Caped and imperious, Tilda Swinton turns up as a character referred to only as Social Services.
You sometimes wonder, though, if the actors had more fun making the film than most viewers will have watching it.
Anderson’s particular brand of aesthetic had actually worked very well in animation for Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), perhaps because whimsicality feels less like an affectation in that genre.
But even in a lesser entry, Anderson’s voice is distinctively present. You could never mistake his movies for anyone else’s.
(ST)