Bekas
Karzan Kadir
The story: In Iraqi Kurdistan in 1990, orphan brothers Zana (Zamand Taha), six, and Dana (Sarwar Fazil), 10, dream of going to America to meet Superman. Their journey begins on the back of a donkey named Michael Jackson and their adventure is, by turns, sweet, funny and harrowing. Bekas means “parentless” in Kurdish.

Under Saddam Hussein’s despotic rule, the Iraqi Kurdish were targeted in a genocidal campaign and then cruelly repressed when they rose up against the regime after the Gulf War ended in 1991.
Writer-director Karzan Kader fled from Kurdistan that same year with his family to Sweden to start a new life. It must have been an intense experience for the six-year-old Kader, yet the film that emerges from such a grim history is one that is charming and endearing.
The story is simple as it focuses on a pair of brothers and their dream of going to America. They plan to look up Superman there and get him to right all manner of wrongs from dealing with Saddam to bringing their parents back from the dead.
Zana is at an impressionable young age where he believes in Superman’s powers and much of what his older brother tells him. Dana is older and knows enough about the world to want to protect his brother from it.
The performances from Zamand Taha and Sarwar Fazil are wonderfully unaffected and they are utterly believable as brothers, playing and laughing one minute and fighting and arguing the next.
Zamand, in particular, makes the spunky Zana come alive, whether he is excitedly yelling for his brother, sulking when he gets scolded or lighting up the screen with his smile. He manages to win you over even though Zana is stuck at one volume level – piercingly loud.
The story starts off almost fable-like. Yes, the boys are homeless and too poor to even afford clean water for washing.
Yet they live in a world where they get by on the kindness of other people and they seem to be cushioned from the harshest realities by an aura of innocence.
As they journey forth, however, the real world begins to intrude, although Kader handles that with a light touch.
The boys encounter border crossings manned by armed soldiers and have to figure out how to slip past them. Not quite as thrilling as Argo’s (2012) hostage-rescue perhaps, but the scenes are still tense and dramatic. Towards the end, the film gets a little repetitive, perhaps a consequence of lengthening a short film into a feature-length drama.
Bekas (2010) won a silver medal at the Student Academy Awards in 2011.
Still, there is much to like here for the glimpse it offers into a foreign land and culture and the appealing turns by the two non-professional child actors.
Hopefully, the film will not be orphaned in theatres here.
(ST)

Hollywood Zoo
Gary Chaw

Free Spirit
Lara Veronin

Actually Love
Nick Yeo

Show business is a zoo and entertainers are like caged animals.
The conceit is a cynical one on the second of Malaysian singer-songwriter Gary Chaw’s albums out last year: Released in December, Hollywood Zoo follows Gary Chaw Project Sensation 1 Jazz, his English-language interpretation of jazz classics with South American band Musa’s Trio, six months earlier.
The ballad Not Good? opens with the image of impossible escape: “If I could have wings, I want to fly to another life.”
He also sings on Zoo: “I am like a declining old tiger, locked up by you here, only loneliness remains.”
It is not all gloom and doom, though. The swinging retro pop of Hollywood oozes fun and glamour, while the cheery Malay folk song Rasa Sayang gets worked into the breezy Sunshine.
In contrast, Russian-Taiwanese- American singer-songwriter Lara Veronin is feeling like a free spirit.
The jangly title track sets the laidback mood for the follow-up to her debut album Hello (2010), as she croons: “Want to add some colour to your black and white life?/Free your soul.”
Apple is another charmer with an irresistibly upbeat melody paired with adorable lyrics by Gary Yang: “Heads shoulders knees and knees and toes/ Fermenting the smile of love, I’m about to be swallowed.”
Being free is also about being honest. She promises on Darling: “Darling, this time I’m going to love you more truthfully/Throw away the mask and face myself completely.”
Free Spirit is the sound of an artist coming into her own and it will win you over.
Meanwhile, local newcomer Nick Yeo makes a good first impression with his debut EP Actually Love.
The singer-songwriter has a soothing voice with a hint of raspiness. He is well-suited for ballads and his debut EP cleverly capitalises on that.
This is a batch of easy-on-the-ears tunes paired with the able work of local lyricist Kaiyang.
On the track Able, Yeo sings: “You are able to turn day and night upside down/You are able to wilfully ignore advice.”
Thank You sounds like a regular love song at first: “Your love is like oxygen/Lets me breathe/The strength to strive for my dreams.”
But it is actually a touching and tender note of affection and gratitude to his father.
Hopefully, Yeo will not get lost in the shuffle of male balladeers out there as he can sound like, among others, Jaycee Chan.
But if he continues to write strong material, that should not be a concern.
(ST)

Huayi 2013: in::music – Deserts Xuan: Songs Of Tea And Wine
Esplanade Recital Studio/Monday
One person, one world, one kind of music. That is what good music should be to Taiwanese singer-songwriter Deserts Xuan, also known as Chang Xuan.
And the world she presents through her music is one that shimmers with mystery and beauty. Her voice goes from a beguilingly throaty low to a delicate high register as she sings about love and life accompanied by drums and guitars.
On Monday evening, the first of three sold- out shows, she sang tunes from her four albums. She opened with the title track of her 2006 major label debut, My Life Will, and also took on material from Dear... I Still Don’t Know (2007), City (2009) and Games We Play (2012).
Exuding casual cool in a black-and-white print top, skinny jeans and mid-calf black boots, she looked the part of the indie rocker on more uptempo tracks such as Selling and the encore number Crazy Sunshine.
It was on the quieter numbers, though, that her magnetic voice got to breathe, such as a cover of the Velvet Underground track I Found A Reason. And on her own Blue Sky White Clouds, she was achingly tender when she repeated the line: “I used to have only you in my eyes.”
Instead of easy answers or cliched sentiments on her songs, there is the sense of someone engaging with life on her own terms and trying to find her way forward.
The audience got a peek into her thought process when she spoke between songs. She was endearingly shy and tentative, and sometimes, her words flowed as though reflecting the stream of consciousness in her head.
She was clearly pleased to be performing here, bowing deeply to the audience several times and happily slipping in references to local singers Stefanie Sun and Tanya Chua. She joked: “Tomorrow night, I’m autographing for Stefanie Sun” and added later, “Tanya is doing very well in Taiwan, don’t worry.”
Regrettably, she signed on for just an hour- long gig. She would have preferred a longer show as she could then do “unimportant songs” such as the six-minute-long Days and “so that you know what I get up to in Taiwan”.
There is no question that fans here would love to find out.
(ST)

Safe Haven
Lasse Hallstrom
Is novelist Nicholas Sparks running out of ideas? This adaptation of his 2010 work strongly suggests that the answer is yes.
Katie (Julianne Hough) is on the run and decides to settle down in a small seaport town. She meets Alex (Josh Duhamel, both right), a widower with two kids, and gradually falls for him. Meanwhile, a strangely obsessive cop (David Lyons) flagrantly flouts the rules to track her down.
The blandly pretty and pretty bland Hough (Footloose, 2011) cannot anchor the film and her slowly burgeoning romance with Duhamel is a snoozefest.
How it all goes down during a Fourth of July parade is supposed to be dramatic and exciting but is instead exasperating and forced. Worse still is the schmaltzy ending with a lame, gimmicky twist.
Worst of all, for film buffs, is to realise that Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom was once responsible for lauded fare such as My Life As A Dog (1985) and The Cider House Rules (1999). His previous adaptation of a Sparks novel, Dear John (2010), had its problems but it was more watchable compared to this.
(ST)

The Last Stand
Kim Ji Woon
The story: Drug lord Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) makes a daring escape from custody and speeds towards Mexico in a Chevrolet. The only thing standing between him and freedom is Sheriff Ray Owens (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his motley crew comprising cops (Jaimie Alexander, Luis Guzman), a former Marine (Rodrigo Santoro) and a vintage arms collector (Johnny Knoxville).

A Korean director taking on a genre as quintessentially American as the western, with an Austrian-born actor in the lead role, is a big multi-cultural gamble.
But if anyone can do it, it would be Kim Ji Woon. After taking a shot at the genre in 2008 with the Korean-language The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), he ups the stakes in his American directorial debut – and he succeeds in delivering an entertaining action film with a healthy dose of humour.
The script by newcomer Andrew Knauer smartly plays off Arnold Schwarzenegger’s celluloid tough-guy persona and the fact that he is getting on in age. The one-time champion bodybuilder is now 65 and his last lead role was sci-fi action flick Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines (2003).
When his character, the sheriff of sleepy border town Sommerton, examines a corpse, he has to put on a pair of glasses. And asked how he is at one point, he responds: “Old.”
There is also a delicious line that foreshadows what is to come as he says ominously: “I saw enough blood and death... I know what’s coming.”
Schwarzenegger has, of course, seen plenty of blood and death in his career as an action hero from Conan The Barbarian (1982) to Collateral Damage (2002).
Apart from mucho macho action, what makes an Arnie flick an Arnie flick are also quotable quotes such as “I’ll be back” from The Terminator (1984). Contenders here include “You make us immigrants look bad” and “You f***** up my day off”.
In addition to making good use of his ageing star, Kim is also adept at pacing. He contrasts a tense and quiet scene with a burst of action, effectively building up tension and then releasing it.
The supporting characters are easily recognisable types, from Johnny Knoxville (Jackass: The Movie, 2002) as a goofy arms collector and Luis Guzman (Boogie Nights, 1997) as a seemingly cowardly deputy to Peter Stormare (Fargo, 1996) as a ruthless henchman.
They are well-sketched enough that even the early death of a minor character means something.
The final showdown between Ray and Gabriel starts with a beautifully lensed car chase through golden corn fields and ends with man-to-man fisticuffs.
Off-screen, Schwarzenegger’s image took a beating after his infidelity scandal but on-screen, he can still be persuasive as a man of honour holding down the fort.
(ST)

Huayi 2013: in::music – BearBabes
Esplanade Recital Studio, Sunday
Life may be chaotic but it can be a beautiful mess in the music of Taiwanese quintet BearBabes, who performed songs mostly from their third album, Beautiful Chaos (2012), at their first gig in Singapore.
Light Of Darkness was a spirited number awash in a buzz of guitars and animated drumming, as lead singer Chang Chia-heng, also known as Bing Gan, cajoled: “Come on, let’s dancing (sic), babe.”
Even on the more contemplative English track 17, a streak of positivity was apparent as she sang about believing in oneself.
There was a sense of texture and layering to their material as, apart from guitars and drums, a keyboard or cello would sometimes be added to the mix. When the music got raucous, though, Bing Gan’s vocals could sometimes be a little overwhelmed.
It was only when her pipes were front and centre on tracks such as Crossing Borders – with just Wei Chun’s acoustic guitar for accompaniment – that one could fully appreciate her gentle and alluring voice.
Sprinkled across the hour-long set was older material including Crossing Borders from Years (2010) and Simple from debut album 03:53 (2006). The ballad One Man’s Sky Light from their 2011 EP of the same name offered something different as it was the sole Minnan track.
The seated Esplanade Recital Studio, which was about two-thirds full on Sunday night, was something different as well for the indie band as they are used to standing-room livehouse venues in Taiwan.
And Bing Gan hoped that when they next met their Singapore fans, everyone would stand to enjoy the music as they would feel closer to the band.
For their encore, BearBabes took the audience on a Tour Around The Island. As Bing Gan sang, cellist Luo Fei-tsuei and guitarist Da Wei gamely acted out a comical skit of a couple on a road trip.
At drummer Cheng Han’s urging, fans started streaming onto the floor and gathered right in front of the band. Tour Around The Island morphed into a fast-paced rocker and they began dancing along. Just like that, Bing Gan’s wish came true, even before the band’s next gig here.
(ST)

Huayi 2013: in::music – The Freshman: Sophomore's Dream
Esplanade Recital Studio, Last Friday
Over the course of an 85-minute-long set, home-grown duo The Freshman took the audience along on their seven-year journey together.
Chen Diya and Carrie Yeo became firm friends through singing contest Project Superstar 2 (2007) and made their debut with the album Life Experiment 101 in 2010. Last year, they released a follow-up EP, The Dazy Eyes, and also toured Taiwan.
Musically, they have grown from the power-pop offerings of the first record to a more confident acoustic sound on the EP. Their friendship, though, was put to the test after a period of non-stop work.
Appropriately enough, the set began with the ballad Strong Front. Yeo’s rawer vocals joined with Chen’s brighter smoother tones as they sang about putting on a brave face when confronted with difficulties.
It took a little while for Yeo’s voice to warm up and she sounded more secure only after a few songs. Chen was nervous at the start as well, knocking over the microphone at one point. Perhaps because this was the “grandest intimate” venue that they have performed in.
They loosened up after a few up-tempo numbers such as the playful Rotten People Club and Chen proved to be pretty good at bantering with the crowd between numbers.
She shared that they had started out with the dream of making music and discovered along the way that things were not always so simple.
It was clear though that they still enjoy making music as a duo and that is what has kept them together.
Backed by six musicians, including two violinists, The Freshman presented tweaked versions of their material. The ballad 1924 sounded sparer and more haunting live, while Spectacle Friend underwent a change of tempo midway and turned into a rollicking rocker.
Yeo later revealed that the song was actually about their big fight. The good thing, though, is that they are able to laugh and joke about it now.
The strongest sign that they have moved forward is the fact that they premiered a new song, Sophomore’s Dream. It was a lively track about self-acceptance and the duo cleverly worked in lyrics asking the crowd to get on their feet.
The catchy pop of Life Experiment 101 brought the evening to a close. Its joyousness was infectious and sounded a note of cheery optimism for whatever comes next for the duo.
(ST)

Beautiful Creatures
Richard LaGravenese
The story: Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert) is a “caster” with growing supernatural powers and when she turns 16, her fate – whether she is claimed for light or dark – will be decided. Complicating matters is a blossoming romance with a regular high school boy, Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), against the wishes of her uncle, Macon Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons). Based on the 2009 young adult novel of the same name by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl.

Nature abhors a vacuum and so does show business. With the conclusion of the hugely successful Twilight film franchise after Breaking Dawn – Part 2 last November, the hunt is on for the next breakout hit combining supernatural creatures and young love.
Instead of vampires and werewolves, there are witches, magic spells and a powerful curse.
And attempting to replace Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in the popularity stakes are relative newcomers Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert, daughter of film-makers Jane Campion and Colin Englert.
Ehrenreich has the easier task here as Ethan is, for the most part, a sunny smiley boy who wins over Lena with his love of banned books and earnest determination. Englert has the tougher job as the pale and mysterious new girl in town who is hiding some very big secrets.
Together, they manage to convey some of the intensity and tempestuousness of young love, a situation that is heightened by the high stakes facing Lena.
When a female member of Lena’s family turns sweet 16, she gets all this power kicking in like an avalanche of hormones and she can either use it for good or evil – but it is not quite in her control how it all turns out.
In the case of her cousin, Ridley (Emmy Rossum from The Phantom Of The Opera, 2004), it was a none-too-subtle transformation from virginal good girl to va-va-voom man-baiting temptress.
This part of the story is problematic as it essentially seems to be driven by a misogynistic fear of female sexuality.
Thank goodness it veers away from that premise to a more palatable message of self-determination as Lena searches for a way to lift the curse on her. The price is, of course, a high one and there is a twist to how it plays out.
Director and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (writer of The Fisher King, 1991) just about manages to pull the film together, despite some familiar elements and the occasional use of cliches (the gate to Lena’s home is a forbidding design of spreading tree branches which practically screams: “Creepy creatures live here!”).
He also works in some welcome humour in what can easily be an overwrought genre, even slipping in a dig at former American First Lady Nancy Reagan for being scarily formidable.
The supporting cast is credible, with Jeremy Irons as the gruff but protective uncle, Emma Thompson as the rabidly Christian mother of Ethan’s friend who is not all she appears to be, and Viola Davis as Amma, Ethan’s surrogate mother and yet another keeper of secrets.
The film possesses a keen sense of the place it is set in – a small town in the American south – with flashbacks and a re-enactment of a civil war battle being pivotal scenes here.
Englert’s wavering accent can be a little distracting, though.
Still, by the end, you care enough about Lena and Ethan’s story to be curious about the twists and turns ahead in the next three instalments of the Caster Chronicles book series: Beautiful Darkness, Beautiful Chaos and Beautiful Redemption.
Hollywood is betting that this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
(ST)

The Catcher In The Rye
Bai An

Unforgettable
Jia Jia

Archer
Magic Power

Record label B’in Music fielded five of its acts for a massive concert in the Taipei Arena earlier this month.
The Taiwanese line-up comprised newcomers Bai An and Jia Jia, as well as more established acts: singer-songwriter Yen-j, kooky trio Cosmos People and pop group Magic Power.
It was a smart way to create buzz, although singer-songwriter Bai An has already been generating plenty of that on her own. Her voice has a distinctive timbre that reminds one of Singapore’s own Stefanie Sun and British songstress Dido. Yet, Bai An’s unusual enunciation – in which she pronounces “zhai” instead of “zai” (Mandarin for ‘existing’), for instance – sets her apart.
Cloaked in electronica, her debut album has a decidedly youthful vibe about it. Not in the sense of having a childish theme or sounding kiddie, but in the way she engages with the world.
For example, on the title track, she sings: “Cos I know you won’t be here/Cos I know you won’t be there/I don’t even wanna talk/But I’ll catch your smile/I’m the catcher in the rye”.
From the reference to J.D. Salinger’s classic American novel of adolescent angst in the title, to songs with names such as I Only Wish To Care About The Things I Care About, this album smells like teen(-ish) spirit all right.
Both Bai An and Jia Jia made it to No. 3 on the G-Music album charts with their records.
While this is Jia Jia’s solo debut, she is actually a Golden Melody Award-winning artist for her collaboration with Hao En on the bluesy Blue In Love (2006).
She is the real deal, a power vocalist who knows when to rein it in and when to belt it out.
And the material on Unforgettable showcases her pipes beautifully.
Soul Turned Into Stone is a moving ballad with an aching refrain: “If one day my emptiness meets his love, love/If one day his emptiness meets my love, love”.
The album is not just chock-a-block with ballads though. She is sweetness and light on the flirty Fireworks Festival, and then swings with the rhythm on the retro-pop of Common Sense Of Breaking Up.
Good as she sounds on record, she sounds even better live.
Live is also the best way to experience the hip-hop party pop of Magic Power’s third album.
The title track Archer comes with some simple dance moves and is guaranteed to put a smile on the face of anyone doing it. And kudos to them for unexpectedly rhyming “lock and load” with “rock ’n’ roll” – and pulling it off.
The beat-heavy synth-pop continues with Feeling Guilty: “When the feeling comes, just love/As long as the feeling’s right, just love”.
When the feeling is right, just move. And Archer is right on target for music that gets you grooving.
(ST)

Upside Down
Juan Solanas
The story: Adam (Jim Sturgess) and Eden (Kirsten Dunst) live on a planet with dual gravity. She lives in rich and prosperous Up and he lives in the hardscrabble world of Down. They meet and gradually fall in love when they are young but are forcibly separated. Ten years later, Adam searches for a way to reach Eve in her world.

Think you are facing some tough obstacles in your relationship?
Thank your lucky stars, or planet, that you are not Adam. Because in his case, it is something as elemental as gravity that is keeping him from the love of his life.
The sci-fi twist to this romance is a promising one and the film starts off by listing the rules of the planet’s gravity.
Essentially, they point the way to how he will eventually cross over into her world.
Writer-director Juan Solanas (Northeast, 2005) has a keen eye when it comes to establishing the aesthetics of the film.
So we get gorgeous scenes of Up suspended above Down, like a not-quite
reflection in the sky. There is also a mega corporation, TransWorld, which has a massive building which links the two worlds.
And right in the middle where Up and Down meet is a spectacular office level with no ceilings but two floors occupied by cubicles and workers, one hanging right over the other.
Unfortunately, gee-whiz visuals alone are not enough to sustain the story.
An early scene in which Adam and Eden meet as a result of hearing each other just seems silly. Okay, I can buy a planet with two gravities, but that does not mean that sound can just willy-nilly break the laws of physics in the way it travels.
The bigger problem is that not enough happens, and not at a fast enough pace, to keep the film interesting.
It is a pity given that Jim Sturgess (Across The Universe, 2007, and One Day, 2011) is so likable when he plays the earnest romantic Adam that you want to root for him.
Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia, 2011), meanwhile, is wasted in her role as there is little for Eden to do.
And there is not quite enough chemistry in this pairing to have the audience fully invested in what happens.
Upside Down actually contains the sketch of a more intriguing film.
There is something of the dystopic sci-fi flick here in the fraught, exploitative relationship between Up and Down.
In it, there is an echo of the uneasy real-world relationship between the Northern hemisphere and the South.
Also, the film’s resolution, even if not fully persuasive, justifies the biblical naming of the characters.
Solanas has some interesting ideas, but they do not come to fruition here, certainly not enough to turn your world upside down.
(ST)

Luna Sea The End Of The Dream
Asia Tour 2013
The Star Theatre, The Star Performing Arts Centre
Last Friday

It has been a long wait for fans here.
Japanese rock band Luna Sea released their self-titled debut album back in 1991 and hit the height of their popularity in the late 1990s with chart-topping albums Style (1996) and Shine (1998). They later disbanded in 2000 and then got back together in 2010.
And it was not till last Friday night that they finally performed in Singapore for the first time.
All that pent-up anticipation was palpable as close to 3,000 fans, a good number of them wearing black Luna Sea concert t-shirts, surged to their feet from the moment the lights dimmed.
The band did not disappoint, delivering one high-powered hit after another over a two-hour show. Dressed mostly in black, Luna Sea kicked off the night with mid-tempo rock tune Loveless and let the music do the talking for them.
Lead singer Ryuichi Kawamura’s sonorous vocals were in fine form and on the gothic rock of Moon, he went from scaling high notes one moment to howling the next.
Many of the songs were propelled by a propulsive rhythm and energetic drummer Shinya Yamada was more than up to the job.
The three axemen – lead guitarist Yasuhiro “Sugizo” Sugihara, bassist Jun “J” Onose and rhythm guitarist Kiyonobu “Inoran” Inoue – were charismatic performers as well. At one point, Onose even flung the mike stand into the air. How very rock ’n’ roll. Several times, the lights were trained on Sugihara as he unleashed mighty riffs and showed off nimble fingerwork. He also displayed his versatility with the dramatic violin solo opening to the ballad Providence.
Instead of fancy video projections, there was effectively choreographed lighting, ranging from strobe-like flashes to effects which were perfectly synced with the music.
They saved one of their biggest hits, I For You, for the encore. If you know only one song by the band, this is likely to be it. The ballad was the theme song of a popular Japanese drama series which dealt with Aids, titled God, Please Give Me More Time (1998). After their final number Wish, the band members happily threw out guitar picks and drum sticks into the crowd. And Sugihara said in English: “I promise we will come back soon, I love you so much, bye-bye.”
Kawamura also spoke, in Japanese, to the fans several times and noted that Singapore was the final stop of their The End Of The Dream tour.
But with an album slated for release this year, this is merely a new beginning for the veterans of the J-rock scene.
(ST)

Being Lonely Is The Thing I Do
Jeff Chang
His pristine high-pitched vocals are so familiar by now, it is easy to take them for granted.
But with an above-average batch of songs on his new record – his 31st, counting some permutations released by record companies of his albums – Taiwanese singer Jeff Chang sounds more moving than he has in a while.
The follow-up to Genesis (2010) opens with the title track. It sounds like a classic emotive Jeff Chang ballad, except that it takes on urban alienation instead of a broken heart: “The time that’s freed up is just right for loneliness/Don’t think of deciding for me what I want/Too lazy to communicate with everyone, they won’t understand anyway.”
Even if Chang is now 45, the confessional Thirty Something sounds heartfelt: “Thirty something, hard not to sigh at this age/I’m used to myself, used to the breathing of the long night.”
And just in time for Chinese New Year, Switch, the up-tempo duet with Ricky Hsiao, wants to help you springclean your relationships: “Women fear the dark, men fear tiredness/If you want different situations/Why not switch rooms.”
Chang also takes a stab at doing the boogie on Mr. No but, really, it was not necessary. Dance numbers are not the thing that he does.
(ST)

Journey To The West
Stephen Chow, Derek Kwok
The story: Xuanzang (Wen Zhang) is a demon hunter whose weapon of choice is singing from the book of 300 Nursery Rhymes. Fellow demon hunter Duan (Shu Qi), who works with spiffy magical flying rings, ridicules Xuanzang at first but soon falls for him. The demons who threaten them include the powerful Monkey King Sun Wukong (Huang Bo) and the rapacious KL Hogg (Chen Bing Qiang).

Despite bearing the same English title as the beloved classical Chinese novel about Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to obtain sutras, this movie is actually a prequel to the story.
Xuanzang is not yet a monk but a good-hearted demon hunter with a mop of unruly hair. Sun Wukong, Sha Wujing and Piggy, inscrutably named KL Hogg here, are not yet his disciples – they are demons to be conquered. The film is quite episodic as Xuanzang confronts one challenge after another, each more potent than the last – a water demon, a pig demon and, finally, the monkey demon.
While the pacing could have been tighter, particularly for the first battle, directors Stephen Chow (CJ7, 2008) and Derek Kwok (Gallants, 2010) manage to keep one entertained throughout.
The water demon plagues a picturesque fishing village, which turns into an inventive backdrop for the battle. Wooden walkways turn into ramps and seesaws as Xuanzang tries to save the villagers from the demon’s jaws.
The humour runs the gamut from low-brow (it takes a plus-sized girl to toss the demon onto land by jumping on the upraised end of a seesaw) to the sublimely ridiculous (Xuanzang sings a nursery rhyme to subdue the monster).
Adding to the fun are kooky characters, from a demon hunter with one giant foot to the crafty, almost Gollum-like Sun Wukong. Wen Zhang, who touched hearts playing an autistic character in Ocean Heaven (2010), is a hoot here as he has no qualms making a fool of himself. In a hilarious scene, Xuanzang is made to dance seductively in front of two other men and Wen totally gets into it.
At the same time, he conveys the essential innocence of the character and the struggle Xuanzang faces in coming to terms with his feelings for Duan.
Shu Qi, for once in her career, gets to be gauche and uncouth as Duan, whose warped idea of courtship is to trick Xuanzang into having sex with her. It is fun watching the actress who usually plays sexy urbanite roles needing lessons on how to seduce a man. That her relationship with Xuanzang means something more than a gag is credit to the film-makers.
Chow had previously starred in the two-part modern classic A Chinese Odyssey (2004), a loose adaptation of Journey To The West. In it, he utters a key piece of dialogue about loving someone for 10,000 years. There is actually an entry in the Baidu online encyclopaedia on this.
He uses it again here, with a moving twist to it. When Xuanzang finally attains enlightenment, the price he pays is a devastating one.
Chow may give the impression that he is a crude and rough director given his association with nonsensical comedies but he is actually a very thoughtful one. Little details – from the book of nursery rhymes to Duan’s ring – serve different purposes at different points in the movie and yet, at the end, it all makes sense. This was a journey worth taking.
(ST)

Opus 12
Jay Chou

Keep Loving
Claire Kuo

Beautiful Chaos
BearBabes

The early signs were not encouraging for Mandopop king Jay Chou’s 12th album. That blond hair. That buffed-up bod. The K-pop styling makeover gave me an ominous sense of foreboding about the music direction. It is hence a relief to find that Opus 12 is not an album of bopping dance tracks filled with inane lyrics. It also feels less kiddy compared to the deliberately cartoonish Exclamation Point (2011).
There is an ebullience here that is infectious, beginning with the chugging Train Of The Four Seasons and continuing with the giddily entertaining Dizzy Eunuch.
Chou and his long-time lyricist Vincent Fang definitely had a ball writing these songs and it shows.
The singer also roped in other vocalists on two tracks. Skip the sappy Giggle with Cindy Yen and groove along to the jazzy A Larger Cello featuring Lara Veronin and Gary Yang.
This is an album on which the faster tempo tracks outshine the ballads. From love ballad Obviously to the so-called China-style Red Dust Inn, Chou has been down these roads before to greater effect.
For that matter, so has Taiwanese sweetie-pie Claire Kuo. I sound like a broken record when it comes to her albums – nothing offensively bad but nothing to get too excited about.
Her sweet voice leaves more of an impression on breezy tunes such as The Way I Am rather than on standard ballads such as the title track Keep Loving.
She also appears in miniature amid knick-knacks in the lyric booklet. Is that supposed to be making literal a little- woman persona who yearns for love even on the number Shining Single Life?
Offering a very different sound and vibe are Taiwanese indie band BearBabes. The quintet serve up rock with distorted feedback and a skittering of electronica, defiantly finding beauty in chaos. There is celebration and positivity here.
Light Of Darkness extends an invitation of “Come on let’s dancing babe” while female lead vocalist Chang Chia-heng declares, “This is what I want”, on the track of the same name.
There is also pain and uncertainty. The lyrics for the ballad 17 go, “Life is nothing but the struggle within myself”, while Chang sings in Fisherman: “Following the wind, proudly sailing forward towards an unknown wildness, no matter how dispiriting reality is”.
Life is messy but it can be a beautiful mess, especially with music like this.
(ST)