Sicario
Denis Villeneuve
The story: Kate (Emily Blunt) is an FBI agent conducting raids on suspicious American properties near the Mexican border. She agrees to be part of a joint task force to track down a big-time drug lord, believing she can help to accomplish something meaningful by doing so. But she keeps getting stonewalled by her superior Matt (Josh Brolin) and she is uneasy about the presence of the taciturn Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) on the team. The word sicario means hitman in Mexico.

French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has a knack for making emotionally wrenching and riveting films.
Incendies (2010), in French and Arabic, was a mystery drama about a pair of siblings travelling to the Middle East and uncovering devastating family secrets.
Prisoners (2010), his English language debut, was an arresting thriller that kept viewers on the edge of their seats over the fate of two abducted little girls.
This time, it is the action that is explosive.
Sicario plunges right into the middle of a raid mission which ends up literally blowing up in the faces of the team.
Villeneuve then executes the extraction of a man close to the drug lord from Juarez, Mexico, back to American soil with terse precision. There are glimpses of dead bodies strung up on the underside of bridges, Mexican forces are seen in full riot-gear get-up and the staccato of gunfire can be heard. This is an urban war zone.
In contrast to the intensity of the action, Blunt’s Kate is a no-nonsense agent who keeps her emotions in check. She is also the moral compass of the scene and, as the film wades into a morass of complications, viewers look to her for direction.
Blunt’s (Edge Of Tomorrow, 2014) mix of naivete and desire to do the right thing is compelling and Brolin (No Country For Old Men, 2007) is suitably condescending as someone who knows far more than he is willing to let on.
Del Toro’s (Traffic, 2000) Alejandro is the intriguing wild card here.
Early on, he says ominously to Kate: “Nothing will make sense to your American ears. You will doubt what we do. But, in the end, it will make sense.”
Some pieces of the puzzle do come together eventually, but be warned, there is no light at the end of this particular tunnel of darkness.
(ST)

It sometimes feels as though Japanese pop culture is under siege. Be it music, TV dramas or movies, the Korean contingent of boybands, girl groups and perfectly groomed idols has edged ahead in the popularity sweepstakes.
Japanese fare is not about to roll over completely, though. When it comes to animation, the Land of the Rising Sun is still going strong.
I went through an anime phase in the early 2000s and then drifted away from it. After a recent return to its embrace, I am happy to report that the world of anime remains as wacky, moving and entertaining as before.
Titles that I watched back then included the inventive space western Cowboy Bebop (1998-1999) with its awesome jazz soundtrack, the battle for one man’s soul in the period actioner Rurouni Kenshin (1996-1998), the hilarious high-school comedy Azumanga Daioh (2002) and the sometimes head-scratching and
so-cool-it-didn’t-need-vowels sci-fi action series FLCL (2000-2001).
Studio Ghibli has international hits such as the fantasy adventure Spirited Away (2001) and the whimsically charming My Neighbour Totoro (1988), but there is much more to discover in anime films. The tip of the iceberg includes sci-fi techno-thriller Ghost In The Shell (1995) by Mamoru Oshii and the psychological thriller-horror flick Perfect Blue (1997) by Satoshi Kon, works which are far darker in tone than Ghibli’s family-friendly works.
My diet included the popular ninja series Naruto (2002-2007), although the supersized serving of 220 episodes proved to be too much to swallow. A single fight could stretch to more than 10 episodes and I gave up somewhere past the 100-episode mark.
For a long while after that, I lost touch with the medium.
But thanks to a long-haul flight on Japan Airlines, I rediscovered the myriad joys of anime.
I stumbled across a two-episode offering of Haikyu!!, Japanese for volleyball, and was soon hooked. Even without English subtitles, the show draws one in with its crisp animation, exciting ballplay and sharp characterisation.
Haikyu!! is a typical offering in the sports genre, but it is executed well. It has you rooting for the underdogs as pint-sized Hinata and his team aimed for glory on the courts. And when the ball finally lands with a thud in a crucial game that spans six episodes, I gasped out loud.
One reason for the high quality in anime is the large volume of titles produced. Just this spring alone, the gaming and anime blog Kotaku presented a guide to 50 new titles.
Mind you, that is merely for one season and not for the year. Animators have had tens of thousands of hours of content to hone their skills and it shows.
Very often, they draw on existing manga. Given there are at least 10,000 titles of manga compilations published in a year (as estimated by manga artist Dan Kanemitsu in a 2012 blog post), only the top titles get to be animated. The quality of the source material already gives anime a leg-up.
Live-action films based on manga continue to find big audiences. Post-apocalyptic title Attack On Titan (2015) has grossed more than $820,000 at the Singapore box office.
After the excitement of Haikyu!!, I decided to get into anime again, trawling the Web for recommendations on the best titles of last year. I settled on sports title Ping Pong The Animation, slice-of-life series Barakamon about a calligrapher, and set-in-hell comedy Hozuki’s Coolheadedness.
While Ping Pong and Haikyu!! both revolve around sports, they could not be more different. For starters, the animation in Ping Pong goes for a kind of ugly-realist style reminiscent of the rotoscoping done for the film Waking Life (2001). It also delves far more deeply into the psyches of the players. The ping pong games are depicted in an impressionistic manner as opposed to being the meat of the series.
Barakamon is in the slice-of-life genre and it offers gentle comedy and lessons in the tale of a calligrapher’s exile to a remote island – 23-year-old Handa’s friendship with the irrepressible six-year-old Naru is the heart and soul of this show.
Most unusual of the lot is Hozuki’s Coolheadedness, an episodic look at the challenges faced by the unflappable Hozuki, chief of staff to the head judge of hell. The landscapes of the netherworld are beautifully rendered and draw inspiration from ukiyo-e woodblock print illustrations. The gleeful theme song can also lay claim to the title of catchiest song ever written about hell. (Hell by the American band Squirrel Nut Zippers is a close second.)
There has always been more to anime than advertised-as- entertainment-kiddy fare such as Pokemon. There are shows of every genre, from the sublime to the ridiculous, to cater to every taste.
One title I will be steering clear of, though, is Naruto: Shippuden. It started in 2007 and has clocked 429 episodes. And it is not over yet.
(ST)

Jimmy Ye In Concert
Esplanade Concert Hall/
Last Saturday

Home-grown singer-songwriter Jimmy Ye was sweating bullets because of the General Election.
While the date of his gig had been fixed a year ago, he was left hanging for the longest time when there were rumours of Singapore heading to the polls with Sept 12 bandied about as the date.
“If today had been Polling Day...”, and he sprawled onto the stage to convey exactly how crushed he would have felt. He had, after all, waited 22 years for the chance to hold his own solo concert.
Ye made his debut as a Mandopop singer with Give Me Your Love in 1993 and released four more albums between then and 1998.
He chalked up hits such as Loving You Is Not For Others To See and My Heart Is Flustered and was a male idol singer to call Singapore’s own before the likes of JJ Lin and A-do came along.
Making his appearance as a bow-tied and bespectacled dapper gentleman in a grey three-piece suit, he said to the audience: “It’s been 17 years and you haven’t forgotten me and my music. I’m moved and grateful.”
The show opened with If We Fall In Love Again and Ye did a jazzy take on the ballad.
Despite the passage of years, he displayed a strong grasp of vocal techniques from vibrato to falsetto and he sounded as good as ever.
While there were some jitters, he smoothed things over with a dash of self-deprecating humour and some entertaining anecdotes.
Professing to be terrible in Mandarin and hence forgetful of lyrics, he announced that instead of sneaking peeks at the monitor, he would simply look at it openly.
While the election schedule had been a source of anxiety, the event also provided fodder for some interesting moments.
As it turned out, Ye has a song called Let You Decide which includes the line, “Let you decide/ Whether I’m free or enslaved”, and he dedicated it to the day of national reckoning.
The next number, I Keep Hearing You Say, was dedicated to the new government. He also joked about forming a new party with a less violent symbol – a music note as opposed to a bolt of lightning or a hammer.
While he had stopped releasing albums after 1998, arguably, he went on to scale greater heights as a composer.
A segment focusing on the hits he wrote for others included Jacky Cheung’s Wanna Go For A Walk With You, Jeff Chang’s Want To Love You Too Much, Jolin Tsai’s I Know You’re Very Sad and Leslie Cheung’s Left Right Hands, which Ye sang in its original Cantonese.
These are no less than the big guns of Chinese pop and his songs were their lead singles and no mere album fillers. Cheung once included that song in his setlist at the last minute when he realised its composer was at his concert.
Aside from his work in pop music, Ye also collaborated with xinyao pioneer Liang Wern Fook on the Mandarin musical December Rains.
The third run of it just ended recently, but the audience had a chance to revisit some of its songs when Liang and singer Hong Shaoxuan came on as guest stars.
The four-hour-long concert also saw Ye paying tribute to some of his favourite songwriters.
He took on John Legend’s All Of Me and Billy Joel’s And So It Goes as he tinkled the ivories, further showcasing his versatility as a musician.
He even wrote a new song, How Are You, including the Mandarin lyrics, specially for his fans.
From the standing ovation at the end, it was clear that Ye’s Music Party was a winner.
(ST)

10000 Hours
Cosmos People
What is 10,000 hours? Mathematically, it is just shy of 417 days – a little more than a year.
As the title of Taiwanese trio Cosmos People’s album, it suggests a contemplation on the passage of time, an intrinsic part of the cycle of life. On the title track, lead vocalist Hsiao Yu wonders: “How much time does it take for flat ground to form a mountain/How much time does it take for the coast to build a sandy beach.”
The idea of measurement is then extended to the emotional realm: “How does a love song measure the romance of when we first met.”
Elsewhere, the band wrestle with questions of identity and emotional apathy.
Against an upbeat, rousing tune, they sing of becoming numb on Rudderless: “I don’t feel anything towards wonderful things/When my heart is in pain, it’s hard to bear, the higher the expectations the greater the fall.”
The sentiments are sometimes dire, but the music remains engaging, from the whistling at the start of And You? to the brassy accents of Offline Friends; from the disco-tinged 15 Seconds Of Fame to the spare Minnan ballad Rainy Day.
Four albums on, Cosmos People are no longer playing dress-up as spacemen or detectives, even as they continue to play around with musical genres. This is the sound of a band growing up.
(ST)

JJ Lin Timeline: Genesis World Tour
Singapore Indoor Stadium / Last Saturday
Family was the theme of singer- songwriter JJ Lin’s homecoming concert here.
The Taipei-based Mandopop star shared a sweet moment on stage with his mother during the encore as they sang Japanese Rose In My Palm. He did not neglect the other members of his family, who were surprised by an invitation to go on stage as well.
He sang Jonathan Lee’s poignant Hills with his father and performed with his elder brother Eugene, Fly Back In Time, a track recorded for the album Stories Untold (2013).
The Lin siblings had performed together at JJ’s last concert here in 2013 but this time round, even his parents were roped in.
“Don’t blame me for being partial on my Singapore stop,” he said to the sold-out crowd of 8,000 fans.
Another treat he had in store was inviting actor Chen Tianwen as his mystery guest star. And the song they sang? The cheesy viral hit Unbelievable, of course, complete with Chen holding a head of broccoli as he serenaded the audience.
There was an SG50 moment when Lin sang the Dick Lee-composed Our Singapore, the English theme song of this year’s National Day celebrations.
Being on home ground was an emotional experience for him. Thanking his fans for their support since his debut album Music Voyager (2003), he embraced them as family as well. Some female fans repeatedly yelled out “lao gong” (hubby) throughout the night. His mother quipped after her number: “Daughters-in-law, how’s that?”
Lin also broached the topic of marriage. He said: “When I see my friends getting married and having children, I wonder when it’ll be my turn.”
In one of the concert’s most touching moments, just before he performed the ballad Someday, about his grandparents, he said: “I believe grandma is here as well.” His grandmother had died from liver cancer in the midst of his concerts in Taipei last July.
She would have been proud of his show. This was the 37th stop of his current world tour and the concert was like a well-oiled machine.
The movable concentric circles of rigging provided effective lighting and were part of the dramatic staging. The T-shaped stage extended into the audience and the fans around it got to see their idol up close.
Lin was in fine form vocally and musically over the three-hour-long gig. He played the keyboard, guitar, drums and beatboxed and crooned his crowd-pleasing hits and rocked out to the faster-paced numbers.
Listening to Genesis, the title track of his latest album, it is clear that he still has ambitions as a songwriter and singer. He mixes R&B and dubstep with aplomb and throws in rap and soaring falsetto to winning effect.
Whichever direction he takes on his next album, there will be 8,000 fans cheering him on. After all, that is what family does.
(ST)

Thanks Giving
Yen-j
With its fresh jazz-pop sound, Taiwanese singer-songwriter Yen-j’s (right) 2010 debut Thank You For Your Greatness is still my favourite among his albums, which subsequently drifted towards the middle of the road – less jazz and more pop.
Thankfully, there are sparks of that original playful inventiveness once more on his fifth album Thanks Giving.
The piano-backed Nothing Is Impossible would not sound out of place on Greatness.
A child-like sense of joy and wonder suffuses the opening track Coin-Eating Tiger (co-written with a mysterious Assistant A), which deftly uses humorous imagery about a coin-eating tiger machine (a phrase which refers to a slot machine) and the repetition of the lines “So love is like fireworks” and “So dreams are like planes”.
Also making an impression is his buoyant duet Lightly with Taiwan- born, California-bred newcomer Peace, whose lightly husky vocals remind me of Kimberley Chen. She is definitely one to look out for.
I am less enamoured of his other love songs though. Tracks such as You Are My Everything suggest that he is a stronger writer than he is a singer, while Tacit Understanding flirts with being cutesy.
Still, it is nice to see him reaching for “something real” as he spells out on the track Something, even if it can sometimes be “Something empty/Something lost inside of me”.
And there is nothing middling about that at all.
(ST)

Fear The Walking Dead
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Poet T. S. Eliot called it back in 1925 in his poem The Hollow Men.
In the hit horror drama The Walking Dead (2010-present), the zombie apocalypse is in full swing from the get-go. The threat of the decomposing undead is everywhere and human survival is a touch-and-go business.
The companion series Fear The Walking Dead takes us back to when things are starting to fall apart. At this point in time, the term “walker” refers to a baby’s best friend as he is learning to walk and not to a dreaded monster.
There is barely a whisper of what is happening and the ones who have the earliest inkling of the truth are those on the fringe – a drug addict, a misfit at school.
But they are all on the cusp of a world that is about to change irrevocably. And we are right at the precipice with them.
The makers of Fear ratchet up the tension slowly and also play with the expectations of viewers, many of whom are likely to be well-versed with the rules of a zombie universe. Enough of them tuned in to make the show the No. 1 series premiere in American cable TV history with a viewership of 10.1 million.
In hindsight, things seem thuddingly obvious. But as they are unfolding, there is resistance, disbelief and reasonable doubt.
After all, which is the more likely: a world-ending infection or a particularly virulent strain of the flu?
Are cops shooting an unarmed person that unbelievable or would it be more unbelievable that they are mowing down creatures that will not stay dead?
Against this backdrop, the key characters are also dealing with complicated family stuff.
High school guidance counsellor Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) has a junkie son Nick (Frank Dillane) and a resentful daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey).
Madison’s boyfriend is fellow teacher Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis), who is trying to be a father to his son Christopher (Lorenzo James Henrie) with his ex-wife Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez).
In the second episode, we are introduced to the Salazar family. The father (Ruben Blades) is a refugee from El Salvador who owns a barbershop, the mother (Patricia Reyes Spindola) is deeply religious and they have a grown daughter Ofelia (Mercedes Mason).
Their paths cross with Travis, Christopher and Liza as the city begins to crumble.
Expect relationships to be tested as the apocalypse brews and the interplay of emotional and end-of- the-world-as-we-know-it action drama promises to make for exciting television.
Plus, there is always the suspense of wondering which key character is going to get killed first.
(ST)

Back To The Future
Da Mouth
Taiwanese group Da Mouth zoom in on an era of feel-good grooves on their fifth studio album, Back To The Future.
The retro dance of Funky That Girl features singer-host Pauline Lan and is already an ear-worm hit with its synth riffs.
Even the lyrics are retro with a reference to tapes no less: “Love is not less a cassette that can be rewound, wreck it and you can’t start over.”
Add a disco-ball and bellbottomed pants and the picture is complete. It is easily the most inspired thing here.
The rest of the album coasts along on a similar mix of dance beats, synth lines and rap, circling around one another the way men and women dance around each other – pleasant enough if somewhat forgettable.
But as Super Unclear makes clear: “It’s absolutely reasonable to pursue happiness, no need to ask if it’s permissible, don’t think too much, whether it’s appropriate or not.”
Shut up and dance is pretty much the message here.
(ST)

Woman In Gold
Simon Curtis
The story: Woman In Gold refers to a famous painting by Gustav Klimt that hung in the Belvedere Palace in Austria after World War II. To Maria Altmann
(Helen Mirren and Tatiana Maslany), it is a depiction of her beloved aunt Adele that was unlawfully seized by the Nazis from her family home in Vienna. Maria managed to escape to the United States and, decades later, with the help of an inexperienced but eager lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), she seeks to claim back what is rightfully hers from the Austrian government. Based on a true story.

It was recently reported that the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors can be passed on to their children. The ordeal was so devastating that it fundamentally altered them at some genetic level and the distress continued to echo in their offspring.
While Maria managed to escape the horrors of the concentration camps, she saw her family torn apart, her home looted and her neighbours and acquaintances turning on Jews.
Embarking on a mission to recover her family’s painting means that she has to relive the painful past, but she does it “for justice and so people remember”.
Mirren (The Queen, 2006), illustrious member of British acting royalty, slips easily into the role with a central European accent and a sometimes terse demeanour which masks an underlying vulnerability.
Reynolds, in a regular dramatic role as opposed to a glossy effects-filled flick such as Green Lantern (2011), starts out as an obedient Jewish boy doing his mother a favour by listening to Maria’s story.
Then, he gets persuaded to take on her case when he realises that the painting is potentially worth more than US$100 million (S$140 million).
Eventually, he finds a deeper and personal connection and he hangs on doggedly despite the odds stacked against him.
Mirren and Reynolds play off each other nicely.
Director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn, 2011) handles the underdogs versus the high-handed authorities legal battles effectively.
While the Klimt painting was described at one point as the Mona Lisa of Austria, its Jewish subject was also obscured by the title of Woman In Gold, reflecting the country’s uneasy relationship with its history even as a restitution programme was officially underway to redress past wrongs.
The Holocaust is no longer a fresh wound, but it throbs with an ache that reverberates in DNA, in ongoing battles for justice and in films such as these.
(ST)

Getting Ready
Eason Chan
The mood on Eason Chan’s latest Cantonese album after 2013’s more varied The Key, is sweet and optimistic.
The tone is set by lead single Unconditional, a ballad about loving someone through all the vagaries and challenges of life. It is a song which plays to Chan’s strength as an emotive singer. Come what may, he croons: “I only know to love you every day.”
Heart On Fire and To Like Someone are two more Eric Kwok-composed tracks tailor- made for Chan to make you gently swoon.
And the jangly opener Boss, I’m Leaving Early puts a lighthearted spin on escaping the pressures of work.
This being an Eason Chan album, some curveballs are thrown in.
The later half of the album includes the atmospheric The Halloween Nightmare and the gentle rumination of Monologue From One Soul. The moving lesson learnt: “Whether I was right or wrong in the past, it’s too trivial to bicker about now/But I want to say that love is never a burden.”
(ST)

Triple Jam – Jam Hsiao World Tour Live In Singapore 2015
Singapore Indoor Stadium / Last Saturday
This was billed as a concert for the ears, eyes and nose. A triple dose of Taiwanese singer Jam Hsiao, so to speak. During selected songs, a scent that he had a hand in creating would be released into the stadium.
It turned out to be somewhat underwhelming.
During the ballad Marry Me, a fragrance supposedly distilled from roses was pumped into the air. I spent a good minute or so inhaling, distracted from the song and wondering what it was I was supposed to smell. Eventually, it was the whiff of lavender that I caught.
The same floral scent was used during Kiss Me – it seemed at odds with the faster-paced number.
Visually, there was also a gimmicky moment when Jam’s Band, comprising eight muppet-like musicians, came on stage for his rendition of Calla Lily Love. It was just too random and had nothing to do with the rest of the concert.
Good thing, the Golden Melody Award-winning singer was in fine form when it came to the most important element – the vocals.
Cloaked and gloved in silver and black, he opened the show with Colours and The Prince’s New Clothes. Hsiao threw himself into the rock tracks with gusto and hit the high notes with ease. Even at the end, after close to three hours, his voice showed no hints of strain.
Often, the vocal drama was raised for maximum impact.
New Endless Love – the song he sang on the televised singing competition One Million Star in 2007, the platform which launched his star – started out with just his voice and keyboards and then built to a big and showy conclusion.
At times, he seemed to be channelling Michael Jackson with his howls and yelps and vocal tics. Other times, he seemed to be channelling Bruce Lee with his air kicks.
It made for an entertaining segment in which he let his falsetto run loose on the retro disco of Kiss Me and even showed off some dance moves.
His versatility as a singer is one of his biggest strengths, the crowd of 7,000 applauding his effortless gliding from pop to rock to ballads to a cover of Stevie Wonder’s For Once In My Life.
Instead of slick patter, he offered earnest anecdotes, which sometimes simply trailed off, and a sense of humour.
Hsiao wondered aloud why the song Anywhere, Somewhere, Nowhere was widely requested when it was actually used in a little- seen 2014 Taiwanese movie of the same name. He said: “I got a scientist to investigate and the reason is because the singer performs it too well.”
Later, he claimed that coming to Singapore felt like returning home, before admitting he had said the same thing in Hong Kong. At least he backed up the claim about Singapore by mentioning his love of bah kut teh.
What is definitely true is the key role played by Singaporean musicians in his career.
The opening track on his 2008 self-titled debut, Collection, was composed by veteran songwriter- producer Lee Wei Song. After he performed it, he asked Lee, who was seated among the audience: “Teacher, did I sing well?”
Thanks to Lee’s request, the fans got to hear another hit he composed for Hsiao, the lovely ballad Believers.
It might have been Hsiao’s night, but Lee certainly came up smelling of roses.
(ST)

Paris Holiday
James Yuen
The story: Kit (Louis Koo) moves to Paris for his new job in the wine business. He ends up sharing an apartment with the recently dumped artist Man (Amber Kuo).
Given her hatred of men, Kit has to pretend to be gay for Man to tolerate his presence. As he comforts her and offers her advice, they find themselves getting closer. And then Kit’s ex-girlfriend comes to Paris to look for him.

Holidays are meant to be sweetly pleasant occasions. But this Parisian confection leaves a sour taste in the mouth instead.
For starters, a romantic comedy soars or falls on the chemistry of the couple in question, and the vibe between Koo and Kuo is more familial than romantic.
He is the more experienced and sensible older brother to her petulant younger sister, patiently offering advice on how to get over a broken heart while cleaning up the apartment and making it fit for human habitation once more. Watching them kiss is an exercise in awkward intimacy.
Neither does Koo share much chemistry with his onscreen former girlfriend played by Chinese actress Candy Liu.
In other words, the audience has no couple to root for in a movie whose script is packed with cliches, contrivances and stereotypes.
The iconic attractions of the city of lights are dutifully showcased but, otherwise, it is a place of creaky lifts, douchebag cabbies and easy women.
There is something to cheer only when Alex Fong shows up, playing an Asian emigre with plenty of sex appeal in a Western society. That is as inventive as it gets story-wise.
Man is the worst cliche of a sensitive artist who feels too much and Kuo overacts alarmingly.
At least Koo turns in a more reined-in performance and offers his reliably affable presence.
To stretch things out, Man and Kit have to play along as a married couple as she had already signed up for a wedding photo shoot in anticipation of the big day with her ex.
The point of this is mainly to have the stars all dressed up taking pictures with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
Towards the end, it seems as though the movie is going to head in an unexpected direction, suggesting that you can find your soulmate and not end up together. That is merely a feint, though.
It would have been too much to expect that from a way too packaged Holiday.
(ST)

The Gift
Joel Edgerton
The story: Simon (Jason Bateman) and his wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall) return to the place where he had grown up and move into a new home. They bump into Gordo (Joel Edgerton), one of Simon’s former high school mates. He starts to leave gifts for the couple on their doorstep, but Simon is less than thrilled. Wondering what had happened between the two, Robyn starts to dig into the past.

Each time we watch a movie, inevitably, we bring with us certain assumptions. In this thriller, writer-director-actor Edgerton cleverly plays with those preconceptions in his feature directorial debut.
A young couple moving into a new home is a set-up seen in many other movies. Often, things go awry quickly, thanks to things that go bump in the night – witness movies such as Paranormal Activity (2007) and Poltergeist (2015).
Edgerton builds tension from the familiarity of the situation but otherwise does not follow the same script. The Gift is not a supernatural thriller even though it uses some of the same tropes deployed in horror flick after horror flick.
While music cues are too often overused as a scare tactic, they are used sparingly here for misdirection. Instead, suspense grows as silences are drawn out.
Even the casting is not as straightforward as it seems.
Bateman is known for playing the harried nice guy in comedies both on the small screen – Arrested Development (2003 to 2006, 2013 to present) – and big – Identity Thief (2013) and Horrible Bosses (2011).
As The Gift unfolds, the dark edge to Simon’s likeability is gradually revealed.
The story itself keeps you guessing as to where it is headed with question marks hanging over the key trio.
Is Gordo merely socially awkward or is there something sinister going on in his unannounced visits to the house?
Is Simon being evasive about the past or is he just a concerned husband? Is Robyn paranoid or does she have good reason to dig into the past?
The competent cast handle the material well. Hall is a consistently reliable actress (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 2008), while Edgerton is a versatile and prolific actor whose credits include Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and The Great Gatsby (2013). His malleability serves him well here.
Twist piles upon twist in the final revelations, although a greater degree of murkiness might have worked better.
This movie is one gift you will not want to return to the sender.
(ST)

Irish rockers U2 have done it. Veteran singer-songwriter Paul McCartney has done it. And now British act Blur have hopped on the bandwagon as well.
They have all had their concerts streamed live, reaching out to audiences beyond the solid walls of their performance venues.
U2 played to a crowd of close to 100,000 at the Rose Bowl stop of their 360° tour in California in October 2009. They reached almost 10 million more through the free webcast via YouTube. McCartney’s performance at Hollywood’s Capitol Studios was live streamed to iTunes and Apple TV in February 2012 to celebrate his 15th studio album, Kisses On The Bottom (2012).
On a more modest scale, Blur’s concert at Hong Kong’s Convention and Exhibition Centre last Wednesday was broadcast over the Taiwanese streaming service KKBOX. It was an exclusive event available to members in six territories – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Towards the end of the show, more than 4,500 fans were watching it live on the platform.
While there is much to be said for live streaming, it is not quite, to steal a phrase from U2, even better than the real thing.
But first, the pluses. The biggest one of them is easily this: Without the live streaming, I would not have been able to catch Blur in Hong Kong as it happened. And this was not just any concert by the feted band, but one featuring the complete line-up of singer Damon Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree.
Coxon had left the band in the early stages of the making of Think Tank (2003) and it was not until 2009 that Blur performed as a quartet again. Best of all, they were back on form with their new album, The Magic Whip (2015), which had its genesis in an unscheduled, extended stopover in Hong Kong in 2013.
I have been a fan since their heady Britpop days when they made excellent albums such as Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995). Their awesome concert in Philadelphia, where I was studying in 1997, as they toured on the back of their game-changing, self-titled album, Blur (1997), is one of my favourite gigs of all time.
So it was great to have the chance to see them again, performing new material alongside familiar favourites. And I did not have to take a flight or fork out money for a ticket. While the stream was only for KKBOX subscribers, one could easily sign up for a free one-day trial just to watch Blur in action.
What KKBOX gets out of the exercise is greater exposure for its service and it might even gain some new subscribers.
No doubt, there are the conveniences of having a concert right in your home.
It was supposed to start at 8pm, but of course, they never start on the dot. No biggie. I strolled over to the kitchen and snacked on some oranges, called a restaurant to make a reservation and checked in on my laptop screen once in a while.
Unfortunately, I was a little too laidback and should have reloaded the app more often. I ended up missing the start of the show. The thing about this live stream is that you cannot return to an earlier point. What unfolded on screen mirrored what was happening on stage and, if you blinked and missed a moment, that was that.
A live stream means the show has to be filmed and then transmitted. Often, this meant that you got to see a perspective that you normally would not get to enjoy as a member of the audience. One could see the band members up close, right down to Albarn’s glinting gold-capped front tooth. The trade-off is that you do not get to choose where your gaze lingers as the cameraman makes that decision.
Where you get to exercise control is in other areas. You can adjust the volume to whatever level floats your boat (some concerts can get uncomfortably loud), but hopefully, does not rock the boat with your neighbour.
You can sing along, or not, and bounce along like a pogo stick, or not. It is probably easier to belt it out than to bounce up and down like an Energiser bunny home alone but hey, no one is watching or judging you for blocking the view.
Also, toilet breaks are a cinch as you do not have to clamber over annoyed concertgoers in a darkened hall. So yes, score one, or three, for technology.
But since live streaming is a technology, it also means that things can go wrong. The feed for Blur’s Hong Kong gig was slightly laggy occasionally – probably due to my broadband connection speed – but at least there were no major hiccups.
Still, live streaming cannot be a complete substitute for being right in the thick of a concert, inconveniences and all. Sure, you could communicate with other viewers via a message box right next to the stream of the gig, but none of the messages were particularly memorable and nothing beats the electric feeling of communion with a band together with fellow fans in the same physical space.
In cases where it is too expensive or just plain out of reach, a live stream is a great alternative. But if time, distance and money were no obstacles, I would have been at Blur’s Hong Kong show in a heartbeat.
(ST)

The Crazy Ones
R.chord Hsieh
The Chinese title of the album is Don’t Have To Pretend To Be Good and that is something that Taiwanese singer-songwriter R.chord Hsieh has never done.
Indeed, his tabloid fodder exploits – from his drug-taking and feud with rapper Soft Lipa, to him accusing showbusiness veterans of cheating young women – have overshadowed his music at times.
It is a pity because there is no question that Hsieh is talented. His debut album, Nothing But A Chord (2009), was fresh and inventive and the follow-up, So After I’ve Grown Up (2011), included the touching duet with Lala Hsu, Under The Willow Tree.
After four years in the musical wilderness, he is back with a new record, The Crazy Ones, on a new label, Warner Music.
True to form, he does not shy away from his complicated history and bad-boy persona.
Girl Do You Know pours sexual desire into a poppy number: “I want to kiss you all over/From head to feet, I want to eat you up in big bites.”
The act of eating is less salacious in the bouncy duet Feel Good featuring Kimberley Chen as he professes: “I want to eat away your loneliness, your sorrows.”
Some of the posturing comes across as bravado. At other times, he seems to be unabashedly personal and painfully honest.
Album closer Embracing Failure is a naked mea culpa: “I can’t go back, can only go forward/All the regrets over my past mistakes are useless/I’ve already hurt the family and friends who love me.”
It ends poignantly in Minnan: “I want to make my dreams anew, realise from this point/Live again and learn to cherish.”
Self-knowledge is not a bad place to start.
(ST)

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
The story: In this fifth instalment, the Impossible Missions Force is faced with the bleak fate of getting shut down. That means Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has to bring down the powerful and shadowy Syndicate even as the Central Intelligence Agency’s Hunley (Alec Baldwin) is out to nail him. Good thing the rest of the IMF team – Brandt (Jeremy Renner), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) – have Ethan’s back while the beautiful and skilled Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) appears to be both friend and foe.

The penchant for death-defying stunts, the disregard for personal safety and the need to one-up himself with each new film. The signs are there: Cruise is becoming the Jackie Chan of Hollywood.
For Mission: Impossible 5, he is actually strapped to the outside of an airborne plane. His feet are dangling away as he is flung back by the sheer force of the wind and he is clinging on fiercely with his hands for dear life. He does it, not once, not twice, but eight times.
The making-of stunt featurette is probably the best trailer for the film and has already been viewed more than seven million times on YouTube.
It says something about director Christopher McQuarrie’s confidence that this stunt opens the movie instead of being kept for the finale.
There are plenty of other action sequences – or wanton acts of mayhem, as the CIA puts it – to get into. There is a high-speed metal- crunching vehicular chase through the narrow streets of Morocco, a tense assassination attempt at an opera and, for the piece de resistance, a power station with so many layers of security that it involves a heroic act of breath-holding in order to access an underwater chamber.
I am still not sure why a power station would need this level of protection but, then again, the movie needs these ludicrously convoluted set-ups to justify the IMF.
Remember the Adidas slogan Impossible Is Nothing? It could work equally well as a motto for this franchise series. The word
“impossible” is like catnip to super agent Ethan Hunt.
McQuarrie, best known for writing the script for the acclaimed thriller The Usual Suspects (1995), keeps the story moving along, though there is a whiff of familiarity about the proceedings. In the previous instalment Ghost Protocol (2011), Hunt had to go rogue as well and operate without official approval.
Adding a welcome touch of humour as always is Pegg (Man Up, 2015), who reprises his role as the loyal techie Benji.
The film is also on top of the latest cinematic trend.
Swedish actresses are officially the hottest thing in film at the moment, with Alicia Vikander lighting up the screen in Ex Machina (2015) and, now, Ferguson as the mysterious Ilsa Faust.
For all the thrilling action and gee-whiz spycraft on display, the takeaway message is a surprisingly prosaic one: Always back-up your files.
(ST)

Jolin Tsai 2015 Play World Tour – Singapore
Singapore Indoor Stadium/
Last Saturday

Jolin Tsai is ready to have some fun.
Taking its cue from the title of her 2014 album, the Taiwanese singer’s world tour is titled Play.
And it has inspired an enjoyable concert staged with flair and imagination, playing to her strength as a sexy dancing diva.
The pint-sized dynamo made quite a statement with her entrance, performing the song Medusa with a headpiece of silvery, slithery snakes – yes, they moved. Like the Gorgon of myth, she challenged you to tear your eyes away from her.
Point made, off came the headpiece and on came the slinky moves as she worked the four-sided stage tirelessly.
She commanded: “Move your a**”, and soon had the crowd of around 7,500 up on their feet.
And we had yet to even hit the first costume change.
One of the highlights was seeing Tsai in a 1920s flapper get-up, incorporating dance moves from the era into her choreography.
It certainly helped that her posse of sexy and statuesque dancers looked like they just came from an audition for the musical Chicago. The sly subversion of gender roles added a playful edge as some of the men danced in high heels.
While the 34-year-old has made her reputation on high-octane, energetic numbers, the singer can hold her own as a vocalist as well, at more moderate tempos.
When she performed hit ballads Rewind and The Smell Of Lemongrass on a slowly revolving dais, the stage was cleverly transformed into a cosy jazz club as the dancers sat at tables in groups of twos and threes and listened.
To keep things fresh, some of the songs were given a new twist.
The triumphant dance track The Great Artist, the 2013 Golden Melody Award winner for best song of the year, had its tempo slowed down and then revved back up again.
And the ballad Sky was presented as a mash-up with Singapore singer Stefanie Sun’s Encounter.
The controversial We’re All Different, Yet The Same, banned from Singapore’s radio and television for its homosexual content, was presented as a broader anthem of inclusion and acceptance as it was preceded by a video clip about a wheelchair-bound young woman.
It was clear that attention to detail had been paid to every aspect of the show, from the music to the engaging staging, which drew on everything from high art to mass-market pop culture.
One prop resembled a giant version of British artist Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull sculpture, while in another segment, Tsai was a Barbie doll who came to life and broke out of her box.
In another beautiful set-up, the stage morphed into an underwater palace and she reigned from a raised platform which looked as though it was surrounded by glass seaweed.
For the most part, she kept her patter to a minimum, perhaps to conserve energy for the demanding dance routines.
She opened up towards the end of the three-hour show though, sharing that local musicians, brothers Paul and Peter Lee, were her earliest producers.
Turning back the clock to 1999, she performed her first single, Living With The World.
Since that debut track, the artist has grown in maturity and confidence and it came through over the course of the show and in her assured interaction with her devoted fans.
Be it taking selfies with the crowd or pumping up the energy level, Tsai was always in control and she made it look as easy as child’s play.
(ST)

Herstory With Mayday
Various artists
Popular Taiwanese band Mayday are right there in the title but you will not hear them sing on this concept album.
Instead, 10 diverse female music acts take on 10 of the all-male quintet’s songs.
As the rockers have always worn their hearts on their sleeves in their music, that emotional directness is something that a singer can readily tap into, regardless of gender.
Indeed, the band members have written for many women singers as well, including balladeer Fish Leong, girl group S.H.E and power vocalist Jia Jia. Incidentally, all three appear here.
The results here are sometimes surprising, often moving, and offer some pithy lessons on how to record a cover.
One way to go is to venture as far from the original as possible. That is exactly what diva Sandy Lam, indie darling Waa Wei and veteran Kay Huang have done.
Eternal Summer is now a shimmering slice of indie electropop as Lam insists: “I won’t turn, I won’t turn, I won’t turn, I won’t turn.” Mayday’s portrait of headstrong and restless youth is now a declaration of womanly strength.
Blistering rocker Viva Love is completely unrecognisable as it is skittery and mysterious, with Wei’s hushed vocals draped over it. Huang’s The Yet Unbroken Part Of My Heart swings lightly and jazzily.
Alternatively, one could pare the arrangements to a minimum and let the beauty of the song shine through. In this case, it helps if one has the vocal chops to do the heavy lifting.
Prime exhibits include Qu Wanting’s moving and heartfelt take on Life Has A Kind Of Certainty, Lala Hsu’s quietly compelling reading of Suddenly Miss You So Much and Eve Ai’s beguiling Like Smoke.
In the successful covers – G.E.M.’s power pop ballad rendition of You’re Not Truly Happy and Jia Jia’s gently heartbreaking I Don’t Want You To Be Alone – the essence of Mayday remains even as the song becomes undeniably the singer’s.
Regrettably, S.H.E’s Jump comes across as perfunctory and Leong’s Tenderness, ironically, feels blanched of emotion. Neither cover seems necessary.
(ST)

Own Categories
A-fu
From the title of her third solo album, it is clear that Taiwanese singer-songwriter A-fu does not want to be pigeonholed. Instead of offering sappy sweetness, she is happy to mix in plenty of kook with her cute.
On Teng Da-fu Is A Cat, she imagines herself as a tom cat, gender change included (A-fu’s surname is Teng).
Against a lightly jazzy accompaniment, she sings: “Da-fu’s greatest love/Is to narrow his eyes and accompany girls.”
In the electro-pop number Black Sheep, she turns the title on its head by urging in English: “You can fly, you can fight, you can be the light of the dark side/There’s no one can hurt you anymore.”
There are some radio-friendly numbers here, such as Stop At The Crossing Ahead, the above-average R&B duet with Hsiao Yu that has already climbed to the top of the UFO Mandarin Pop Chart in Taiwan.
But, sometimes, the quirkiness veers off-course. On the light-hearted Super Pig Head, she gets tangled in a love-hate relationship.
While the lyric booklet coyly prints it as “x.o”, it clearly sounds like “a**hole”. And it just sounds wrong when she chirps: “You are my super a**hole.”
Well, at least no one can accuse A-fu of being predictable.
(ST)

Tanglin
Channel 5
Tanglin is Channel 5’s first long- running drama series. More than $1 million was spent on big custom- built sets and the episodes are nicely lit and shot.
It features a sprawling cast and the return of Wee Soon Hui from the nostalgia drama Growing Up (1996-2002). She plays widowed matriarch, Li Yan, of the Tong family, a nurturing mother to her five children and the friendly boss of Tanglin Coffee House.
With 199 episodes commissioned, there are plenty of characters to introduce in order for enough storylines to play out.
Li Yan’s brood include nice-guy Ben (Darryl Yong), twins Diana (Jae Liew) and Christopher (James Seah), and the youngest, Eddie (Charlie Goh). The eldest, laidback Adam (Adam Chen), is married to career-minded Xue Ling (Constance Song) from the Lim family. Her father (Richard Low) heads the stodgy KS Foods.
Adding to the racial diversity are the Rahman and Bhaskar families. Bubbly Salmah (Masturah Ahmad) is Li Yan’s friend and her two daughters are complete opposites in temperament. Bhaskar Ram (Mathialagan) is the neighbourhood doctor with a bachelor son Arjun (James Kumar) and a daughter Shruti (Eswari Gunasagar) in junior college.
Many of the initial episodes were spent on establishing who’s who and their relationships with one another.
After five episodes, though, it feels like Tanglin is can-see TV rather than a must-see. It plays too much like a low-key, genteel series. And that is not enough to keep viewers hooked in the long run.
While possible arenas of conflict and likely romance arcs have already been sketched out, at the moment, there seems to be little danger of getting sucked into the stories.
A clash is brewing at KS Foods between stick-with-tradition chief executive officer Lim Kwong San and his time-for-a-change daughter. But it is the overly familiar plotline that needs an overhaul.
Meanwhile, Shruti’s attempts to ingratiate herself with the in-crowd at school is a tired retread of the Mean Girls (2004) playbook. And why does a tame prank of giving wrong directions to the principal’s office warrant parents getting summoned to school? It feels like a clumsy way of getting a few characters into the same room.
More promising are the relationships in the process of getting tangled and secret histories which are slowly being revealed.
Li Yan’s tomboyish daughter Diana is constantly bickering with the new chef Jay (Nat Ho) at the coffee house. At the same time, Arjun finds himself drawn to the feisty Diana even as his mother tries to make a match for him.
Complicating things is the long- buried relationship between Li Yan and Bhaskar Ram. But I am not convinced that a woman who had five children with her husband would carry around a keychain with another man’s initials on it.
Intriguingly, the age gap between Li Yan and her eldest son Adam is a shocking 14 years, according to the official media kit. Either he was adopted or the show is venturing into teenage pregnancy territory. Regardless, there seems to be an interesting backstory there.
Still, a single episode of the recently concluded mega Taiwanese soap Night Market Life mustered more thrills and spills than Tanglin has managed to rustle up so far. Of course, not everything has to be a melodramatic roller- coaster ride, but this home-grown series needs to turn the dial up on the drama.
(ST)

Hollywood Adventures
Timothy Kendall
The story: After getting dumped over the telephone, the straight-laced Xiaoming (Huang Xiaoming) sets off for Los Angeles to win back his ex-girlfriend. He ends up on a Hollywood Adventures honeymoon package, together with the insistently chatty Dawei (Tong Dawei) on a tour led by the resourceful Wei Wei (Vicki Zhao Wei). Something is not quite right, though, and Xiaoming is soon in the thick of his own adventures involving weaselly criminal Manny (Sung Kang), Hollywood star Gary Buesheimer (Rhys Coiro) and the trafficking of rhino horn powder.

Self-awareness in a movie can be sharp and witty, like in the Scream horror-comedy series (1996-2011). It could also land with a thud, like in Last Action Hero (1993).
Happily, director Timothy Kendall makes it work in his energetic debut feature, which winks at cliched Chinese perceptions of Los Angeles and American pop culture while gleefully playing into the idea that anything can happen in Hollywood.
In the process, he also pokes fun at La-La land with its petty egos, oversized mansions and inflated sense of self-importance.
His able top-drawer cast of Chinese cinema stars is owed thanks.
Tong, in particular, demonstrates a natural flair for comedy as the earnestly droll Dawei, a walking encyclopaedia of all things movie- related who comments on the action and on his own role as a sidekick.
When the craziness starts piling up – he witnesses costumed mascots in a gunfight, shares a drive into the desert with a pig, stumbles into a redneck bar – he accepts it all with equanimity.
After all, anything can happen in Hollywood.
Even as the proceedings get increasingly outlandish, the film is anchored in the relationships among the characters, portrayed by the leads who have an easy camaraderie most likely as a result of their shared history.
Huang and Tong were in the drama American Dreams In China (2013). Tong and Zhao played a couple in the television series Tiger Mom (2015) and Zhao and Huang were classmates at the Beijing Film Academy.
Adding to the revelry are cameos and supporting turns from recognisable actors such as Sung who plays street racer Han in The Fast And The Furious franchise, and a deadpan Robert Patrick gamely takes a dig at his T-1000 villain in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).
Throw in car stunts, a superhero segue and a fabulous pink party, and you wind up with a madcap adventure that is quite a ride.
(ST)

My Way To Love
Eric Chou
He just turned 20 last month, but you would never guess it from Taiwanese singer-songwriter Eric Chou’s accomplished debut disc. The opening title track is a lush ballad which showcases his beautiful voice – soothing, warm and altogether like a pool of comforting sunshine.
While the lyrics suggest youthfulness, they also point to a mature attitude towards love: “Cause you are my love/I’ll slowly learn to be brave/Learn to be honest, learn gentleness, learn reliance.”
His falsetto is gentle and delicate and used to moving effect on tracks such as The Distance Of Love, a ballad from the idol drama The Way We Were. It was written after he was turned down by a high school classmate. He is not the first teenager to be jilted, but precious few turn that experience into a hit track.
Much of the record comprises ballads and mid-tempo tracks, a wise choice as they give Chou’s voice the space to shine.
However, he also flirts with other tempos, pulling off the dance track Shutter In Love and rap on Romance Movie.
The talented newcomer had a hand in crafting all the songs and is equally at home in Mandarin as he is in English. The piano-backed Come Out Your Way is performed in two versions and both languages work.
Chou’s musical flair reminds me of another Taiwanese singer- songwriter’s excellent debut, Yen-j’s Thank You For Your Greatness (2010). The two share similarities in their background. Both were born and raised in Taiwan, spent their formative teen years in the United States and returned home to carve a career in music.
While Yen-j started off with a sound that was heavily influenced by jazz, he has moved towards the mainstream with subsequent releases.
Chou’s opening salvo is decidedly commercial and it will be interesting to see how his style evolves. No less an authority than famed producer Jonathan Lee has predicted that Chou would be the next star on the music scene. With his boyish looks, gorgeous pipes and assured songwriting, that seems as sure a bet as anything.
(ST)

Ted 2
1Seth MacFarlane
The story: In this sequel to the 2012 hit comedy, magically alive teddy bear Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) ties the knot with his girlfriend Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth). When they try to adopt a child, they plunge straight into a bureaucratic nightmare: Ted is not legally recognised as a person. His best buddy John (Mark Wahlberg) offers outrage and emotional support, while newbie lawyer Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) fights for his rights in court.

Both Ted (2012) and Kick-Ass (2010) shared a similar premise that was a stroke of genius: Put a potty mouth that would make a grown man blush on a pint-sized cutie and let the laughs rip.
A follow-up is a trickier beast, given that audiences are already familiar with the concept and the shock value is much diminished.
The first Ted balanced the crude laughs with a sweet friendship between a man-child and his teddy bear. And that insane fight between full-grown man and furry stuffed animal was flat-out hilarious.
Ted 2 tries to top that by taking things in a more serious direction, with pointed comments about Ted being denied his rights because he is a minority and parallels drawn to slavery and gay rights.
But it does not quite work. The movie has grossed a disappointing US$32.9 million (S$44.3 million) in its opening weekend in the United States, compared with US$54.4 million for the first movie in 2012.
Not only do the somewhat tedious court proceedings take up too much time, the more mature themes also sit oddly with the juvenile humour.
There are jokes involving pornography, bodily fluids and sex acts, including a hare-brained scheme to artificially inseminate Tami-Lynn with a “contribution” from star footballer Tom Brady collected while he is asleep.
The stream of celebrity cameos – including Brady’s and those from action star Liam Neeson and former talk-show host Jay Leno – cannot make up for a script that is less sharp than its predecessor’s.
At least, director and co-writer Seth MacFarlane (creator of animated series Family Guy) spares viewers the image of human-toy copulation, courtesy of the fact that Ted is a regular, anatomically inaccurate stuffed animal. The song segments here feel more perfunctory as well – nothing comes close to the Thunder Buddies song, an awesome track that was robbed of an Oscar nomination.
What the movie does achieve is this: Thanks to a game and committed cast and MacFarlane’s voice acting, there is no doubt that Ted is a living and breathing being. Maybe he should get a better agent.
(ST)

Juno ¡uno!
Juno Lin

Jacky Chew Eponymous EP
Jacky Chew

Juno Lin and Jacky Chew are two new home-grown male singer- songwriters who have released polished debuts, adding some excitement to the Singapore Mandopop scene.
Even better, their vocals remind one of other Singapore artists who have made a mark regionally.
Lin’s lightly raspy pipes sound like Huang Yida’s, particularly on the ballads Anyway, It’s Love and Survival Of The Fittest.
He conjures up a sci-fi scenario on Survival Of The Fittest, a number about holding on to your dreams: “Dreamt of a time machine, no manual can explain/Need to rely yourself to travel through time.”
He also dabbles in electronica and rap, flirting with falsetto on Poison and gets pumped up with patriotism on War referencing Count On Me, Singapore with the English lines: “There was a time when people said it/That we were never gonna make it.”
The lyrics were written by Lin while the music was composed by label-mate Chew, who takes a somewhat different route on his own record, even though War is on it as well.
There are radio-friendly ballads on Chew’s eponymous EP that would not be out of place on a JJ Lin album.
He croons convincingly on It’s My Bad: “I won’t, don’t want to, put an end to this/Can’t pretend, can’t fool, still need/Your goodness.”
R&B rules on tracks such as Live Your Dream, a different take on going after one’s dreams.
Defiance is palatably cloaked under a steady swinging beat: “Can you give me one more second/Can there be silence with no interruptions/Can you listen to me sing this song/Can you support the heartbeat of my dream.”
Those are the key questions that Chew and Lin are throwing out there.
(ST)

Dark Places
Gilles Paquet-Brenner
The story: Libby’s (Charlize Theron) mother (Christina Hendricks) and sisters were killed one horrific night when she was eight. As a result of her testimony, her brother Ben (Corey Stoll) is jailed for their murders. Twenty-five years later, Libby reluctantly meets a group of amateur investigators who call themselves The Kill Club. Lyle (Nicholas Hoult), one of its members, wants her to help prove that Ben is innocent. Based on Gillian Flynn’s 2009 novel of the same name.

Would Dark Places have been made without the success of the previous Gillian Flynn adaptation Gone Girl (2014)? Probably. But it would not be attracting the same level of attention.
David Fincher’s assured handling of a genre-crossing dark tale turned Gone Girl into a critical and commercial hit, along with lead actress Rosamund Pike winning accolades and several Best Actress awards.
Dark Places has managed to attract a top-drawer cast as well, including Oscar-winner Theron, Hendricks from television’s Mad Men (2007 - 2015) and hot, young stars Hoult and Chloe Grace Moretz, who plays teenaged Ben’s wild girlfriend.
Instead of Flynn adapting her novel for the big screen, like she did for Gone Girl, French film-maker Gilles Paquet-Brenner (Sarah’s Key, 2010) pulls double duty as screenwriter and director. This is why Dark Places stumbles a little.
The story throws up some intriguing questions: Did Libby lie or was she just a scared little girl? If Ben was innocent, why has he remained silent all these years? Who is he protecting? And perhaps the biggest mystery of them all: If not Ben, then who committed the murders?
But the dots are connected a little too easily and conveniently here, even though Paquet-Brenner tries to build tension by cutting back and forth between the past and present.
As the adult Libby, Theron gives a sense of her pain and vulnerability. She dresses like someone who wants to disappear into the crowd – with a cap pulled low, a nondescript jacket and ratty jeans. She wants to leave behind a dark past which insists on haunting her.
Moretz grabs your attention as an out-of-control daddy’s girl, while Hoult has little to work with as a geekish-looking advocate for Ben’s innocence.
There is some satisfaction in seeing how the truth comes to light. And learning that, sometimes, the darkest places are of our own imagining.
(ST)

Change The World
Bevlyn Khoo
Local singer-songwriter Bevlyn Khoo’s new EP comprises songs for television drama Jump Class, which aired recently on StarHub TV. Based on the comic of the same name by Johnny Lau of
Mr Kiasu fame, the show is about a primary school pupil who discovers he can travel to a less stressful parallel universe.
In keeping with the show’s youthful vibe, the songs here are mostly cheery and chirpy. Over a jaunty guitar and harmonica accompaniment on Haha Song, she sings charmingly: “Come along and sing along with me, don’t let your thoughts run wild/All together now, hahahahahahahaha.”
The title track is a paean to positivity and a call to action: “Change the world, change your space, step across that stubborn and invisible boundary.”
Think of it as a pick-me-up anthem for Monday mornings.
(ST)

American Heist
Sarik Andreasyan
The story: After committing a crime with his older brother Frankie, who takes the rap for it, James (Hayden Christensen) tries to stay on the straight and narrow by working in a car repair shop. When Frankie (Adrien Brody) gets released from prison, though, he gets pulled into a bank heist job. James is reluctant, but the fates of his girlfriend Emily (Jordana Brewster) and Frankie are on the line.

This crime thriller is based on the 1959 film The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery. But it also seems to be influenced by the more recent The Town (2010).
In that hold-up flick which Ben Affleck co-wrote, directed and starred in, lifelong friendships in the Charlestown neighbourhood of Boston are tested when pressure mounts on a gang of robbers.
As a testosterone-heavy tale of greed gone awry, it is superior to the New Orleans-set American Heist, where the testy love-hate relationship between brothers James and Frankie is central.
Heist does not make much use of its setting, a pity considering New Orleans’ rich and distinctive culture.
The characters are flawed, but not in a way that makes them compelling. James is just too gullible. Asked to meet an “investor” together with his brother’s shady pals in the middle of the night and all he can muster up is: “I got a bad feeling about this.”
His romantic interest Emily (Brewster) just happens to work as a dispatch officer for the cops, which means she conveniently gets to hear first-hand what unfolds at the stick-up via police radio transmissions.
At least, Brody (Dragon Blade, 2015) turns Frankie into the scumbag you love to hate – a none-too-competent weasel whose main skill seems to be using emotional blackmail on his younger brother.
The heist itself is not very exciting, which is rather a let-down considering the grand-sounding title. It also gets increasingly tedious and ludicrous as the bank job gets stretched into an extended finale.
Armenian film-maker Sarik Andreasyan (That Was The Men’s World, 2013) squeezes in some fancy point-of-view sequences, but they feel showy and seem unnecessary.
Despite the effort, American Heist is simply not that arresting.
(ST)

White
Pakho Chau
Hong Kong singer-songwriter Pakho Chau held his first gig in Singapore only last month. But he has been chalking up Cantopop hits at home since his debut in 2007.
His new EP continues that streak as the ballad Little White scaled the territory’s charts.
There is something interesting going on thematically on the record as the tracks touch on impermanence and fragility as well as holding on to innocence. White is a symbol for both emptiness and purity.
“The kite descends quietly/Paradise is flattened quietly,” he sings in Prologue.
And on Little White, he reminds listeners: “No matter how fickle and fragile life is, it still has a unique meaning/You are the child who has come to tell me everything.”
With his sonorous and soothing pipes, the former model and national basketball player nabbed the Best Male Singer Gold accolade for the first time at the Ultimate Song Chart Awards 2014, beating veterans Andy Hui and Eason Chan.
His credible sole Mandarin effort here, Make The Same Mistake, suggests he is ready for his crossover into the big time.
(ST)

Wonder Mama
Clifton Ko
The story: Lovely (Petrina Fung Bo Bo) is a mousy librarian trying to keep the peace at home between her warring parents (Kenneth Tsang and Susan Shaw). Meanwhile, her grown son (Babyjohn Choi) is unemployed and stays cooped up in his room. Things come to a head when her father gets the maid pregnant after moving to Guangzhou in the wake of getting a divorce.

Veteran Hong Kong star Fung Bo Bo is the best reason to watch this movie.
Her last role was a cameo as a lesbian in Ann Hui’s All About Love (2010) and she has come out of semi-retirement for writer-director Clifton Ko’s Wonder Mama.
Over the course of the movie, she gets to blossom from a timid mouse who needs to check with her father when her boss offers a promotion, to a woman who begins to live for herself and not just for others.
Lovely has been so wrapped up in the lives of her parents and her son that she does not even have any friends of her own. Whenever she needs to talk through her frustrations, she would go to a doctor (Tse Kwan Ho) just before closing time to make sure she gets all the attention she needs.
Fung adds a touch of playfulness to a character who has been hard done by fate, beginning with a husband who disappeared without a trace years ago. When she learns about the maid’s pregnancy, she can only laugh in the face of the tragicomedy that is her life.
As a whole though, Wonder Mama is somewhat uneven. The peculiarly Hong Kong mix of blithe comedy and melodrama feels a little jarring here. The scream fests between Kenneth Tsang and Susan Shaw are bruising and brutal take-no-prisoners affairs. But the intensity is undercut by the comic appearance of the luckless panda-eyed neighbours who can never get any peace.
Neither are the Stephen Chow references for Wen Chao, who used to imitate the Hong Kong comedian as a newcomer, particularly funny. Wen plays Lovely’s mainland cousin here.
(ST)

Minions
Pierre Coffin, Kyle Balda
The story: Without a villain to serve, the Minions (Pierre Coffin) are purposeless and listless. So adventurous Kevin, rocker Stuart and little Bob head off into the world to search for a despicable master. They find Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock) at Villain-Con in Orlando in 1968. With the help of gadgets from her inventor husband Herb (Jon Hamm), the trio attempt to steal the Queen’s crown in London. A spin-off and prequel to the Despicable Me movies.

The Minions were the breakout stars of the Despicable Me animated flicks. Cheerfully yellow and irrepressibly riotous, they had a knack for causing mayhem and an endearing ability to laugh at themselves. They were like eager-to-please children running amok, babbling away cutely in baby-talk gobbledygook.
There is no doubt that they are entertaining as sidekicks and in short little segments. Their nonsensical banana song, done barbershop quartet style, has been viewed more than 57 million times on YouTube. And that is just for one version of the clip.
Can they shoulder an entire movie on their own though? Especially since they have no shoulders.
The answer is – sort of.
Instead of attempting to subtitle the Minions, actor Geoffrey Rush provides the droll narration of how the creatures have sought out the biggest and baddest through the ages. There are amusing vignettes of the Minions in prehistoric times, in ancient Egypt and with Dracula. But inadvertently, they end up killing those they serve.
For fans, there is also the fun of finding out how they ended up with their trademark overalls look.
A movie needs to be more than a series of little skits strung together, however, so a new superbaddie is introduced. Unfortunately, Scarlet Overkill is not very interesting despite being hyped as the first female super villain. So she has some kind of mechanical contraption for a skirt which holds weapons, big deal. The kooky contraptions her husband comes up with are more imaginative.
Sandra Bullock (Gravity, 2013) also seems miscast as her voice lacks the oomph and character needed for an animated evildoer. Other big names lending their voices include Jon Hamm (Mad Men, 2007-2015) as Scarlet’s hubby as well as Allison Janney (The West Wing, 1999-2006) and Michael Keaton (Birdman, 2014) as a bank-robbing couple.
The best voice work, though, was by co-director Pierre Coffin, who breathes life into Kevin, Stuart, Bob and a whole bunch of other Minions. Now, that is wicked.
(ST)

Kit Chan Spellbound Concert 2015
The Star Theatre / Last Friday
It was towards the end of the concert that home-grown singer Kit Chan dropped a bombshell. She told a hushed hall: “Less than a year ago, I wasn’t sure if I could sing.”
Due to complications caused by acid reflux, she underwent surgery on her vocal cords in the first half of last year. She had “no voice” after the procedure and it was a traumatic time for her.
It has been a deeply personal and spiritual journey of recovery culminating in this concert, a mostly sold-out two-night affair which kicked off her maiden regional tour.
And so, she was moved to share this publicly for the first time. If she had kept mum, no one would have been the wiser.
Over the course of a 2½-hour-long concert, her pipes were in fine form.
She is an emotive and sensitive singer with a clear and bright upper register and a rich and warm lower range and one could hear it all, thanks to the crisp sound.
The only quibble was that the volume of the music was sometimes a tad too loud.
The focus was clearly on the singing and the music, so the staging was kept simple with some choice costumes providing the visual flourish.
Chan first appeared in a Vegas-ready feathered and sequinned white pantsuit and cape outfit and later changed into a beaded gown which exuded old-world glamour.
Between numbers, the seasoned performer shared stories, joked, teased and easily commanded the stage.
She also taught the audience a thing or two, including the definition of a “ba la” song. And no, in the context of music, the Mandarin term does not refer to guava but, instead, a ballad which is “very emo” and often performed with a pained expression.
Nowadays, she seldom belts out this genre of songs, even when they might have stood her in good stead in the recent season of the China reality television show I Am A Singer.
But she acknowledges the fact that her fans would want to hear them at her solo concert and so she duly trotted out hits such as Dazzle.
Unlike most Mandopop concerts, however, the lyrics were not shown for fans to sing along to, save for the track Heartache, one of her biggest hits. She would be the one doing the singing, thank you very much.
In addition to the de rigeur signature tunes such as Home and Liking You, she also showcased her versatility with the Cantonese numbers Waiting and the late Leslie Cheung’s Chase, as well as covers of Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares To You and Lana Del Ray’s Young And Beautiful.
There was also an unplugged segment during which she delivered some of her lesser known, but not necessarily lesser, tracks.
Chan was clearly enjoying herself. She said at one point: “It’s fun to sing songs, but telling stories through song is shiok.”
On Marilyn Monroe’s saucy and slinky My Heart Belongs To Daddy, she told a captivating tale as she let her closet cabaret girl out for a whirl.
It came with an amusing anecdote. She had performed it as a 16-year-old, complete with somewhat inappropriate actions, for a charity event that was attended by an audience full of older men.
“But I’ll sing it because I’m of age now,” she purred.
Like fine wine, she has gotten better with age. By the time she ended the show with the new slow-burn ballad Spellbound, the audience was probably feeling pleasantly tipsy.
(ST)

On The Way To The Stars
Kenji Wu
Taiwan’s Kenji Wu has the pretty-boy looks and he has talent. Apart from writing and producing for himself, he has also penned hits for others, including Landy Wen’s Fool.
For some reason, he has never really broken out here in Singapore, other than the occasional hit such as Poems For You.
It certainly sounds like he wants to change things on the title number: “I’m waiting for someday to come back, I dream about someday to come back/Want to shine for you, prove that I exist, as proudly as a star exists.”
He makes no bones about the fact that he wants to be a star.
Besides statements of intent and love ballads, Wu shows off his versatility on the bonus disc with the aggressive Minnan techno track Flip Over The Table. One can just imagine that performed at getai, complete with flashing coloured lights.
The duet You Are So Cute, though, comes across as trying too hard and South Korean actress Song Ji Hyo’s heavily accented Mandarin does not help. Still, the melodic Britpop stylings here and a thoughtful space theme – You Are My Jupiter is another highlight – could well propel him to greater heights of popularity.
(ST)

Man Up
Ben Palmer
The story: Thanks to a case of mistaken identity, awkward Nancy (Lake Bell) ends up on a blind date with an older, divorced man Jack (Simon Pegg). They get along swimmingly and, somehow, there is never a right moment for her to confess the error. When he eventually finds out, is there still a chance for them? Or will she fall into the clutches of a former classmate, Sean (Rory Kinnear), who has an unhealthy obsession with her?

What is the one sure sign that you are watching a British romantic comedy instead of an American one? Look at the teeth.
In Stateside flicks, the chompers are unnervingly, blindingly white. In English movies, the state of dental aesthetics is less oppressively perfect. Just look at Pegg’s regular, stained teeth here.
It points to a fundamental difference in the two branches of the genre. American rom-coms tend to be glossy fairy tales while British ones are more relatable and, often, more genuinely sweet.
Pegg is a funny and easily likable actor and what he lacks in swoonsome looks, he makes up for with charm, wit and a deep-seated sense of decency. He is the everyman you root for, be it in apocalyptic comedies such as Shaun Of The Dead (2004) and The World’s End (2013) or in a romance here.
Bell (Boston Legal, 2004-06) is actually American, but don’t hold that against her. Besides, she is not quite in the mould of pretty-women leads such as Reese Witherspoon and Rachel McAdams. She is gawky, cynical and vulnerable in an endearing way, without quite getting into the cartoonish territory of Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001).
Pegg and Bell have a nice energy between them as they bond over crime thriller The Silence Of The Lambs (1991) and dance with choreographed aplomb to Duran Duran’s The Reflex.
Director Ben Palmer, who has a knack for comedy as evidenced by his work on the hilarious British sitcom The Inbetweeners (2009-10), paces Man Up nicely. Writer Tess Morris, who has worked largely on TV, lands a few sharp observations on modern romance. The unkindest cut of a break-up turns out to be deauthorising an ex from a shared iTunes account.
Bland title aside, Man Up is a rom-com that gets both the romance and the comedy right.
(ST)

We demand answers from intelligent personal assistants such as Siri and rely ever more on smart devices for work, play and communication. And yet, our relationship with technological progress is a fraught one.
As artificial intelligence gets more sophisticated and complex, the possibility of a sentient system looms larger as well. And the idea both fascinates and repels.
Perhaps reflecting our conflicting attitudes is a recent crop of films. Automata (2014) and Ex Machina (2015) are dystopian dramas which explore the theme. At first, the birthing of autonomous intelligence is held up as a crowning achievement – only to be followed by tragic consequences and a stark message: It is hubris to think that man can simply play god.
On the other hand, Chappie (2015) and Marvel’s Avengers: Age Of Ultron (2015) tackle the topic with a lighter hand and feature entities which might even be the saviours of man.
Set in 2044, Automata stars Antonio Banderas as insurance investigator Jacq in a ravaged world where humanoid robots are used for manual labour. Automata is the plural of automaton, a self-operating machine.
The robots are subject to two unalterable protocols: They cannot harm a human and they cannot alter another robot or itself. But Jacq suspects someone may be illegally modifying the machines and tries to garner evidence to that end.
Science fiction crosses paths with noirish murder mystery here and we also get the indelible image of Banderas tentatively dancing with a robot. Brave new world indeed.
The film draws on a wide variety of influences from past works such as the dystopian sci-fi noir Blade Runner (1982) and Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which a computer, HAL 9000, kills to prevent its own demise.
In the case of Automata, the first protocol prevents Jacq from coming to harm at the hands of the androids, but still leaves him vulnerable to human treachery.
Trickery and treachery lie at the core of Ex Machina, the quietly compelling directorial debut of novelist Alex Garland (The Beach, 1996). The title comes from the phrase deus ex machina, which literally means god from a machine.
The set-up is simple. A programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is chosen by his boss Nathan (Oscar Isaac) to test whether Ava (Alicia Vikander) is able to pass for human by interacting with her.
Soon enough, the questions begin to stack up. Why was Caleb picked? Does Ava need to be female? Can Nathan be trusted? Is deception a uniquely human trait? Is seduction a uniquely human trait?
Part of the draw here is in the depiction of Ava, a humanoid robot with a life-like visage. Apart from the human face and hands, she is metallic frame and pulsing lights and the effect is at once both eerie and pretty cool. It is a rendering made possible and easier with technological advancement.
In A Space Odyssey, HAL was an unblinking red light. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), the robots were given human form and played by actors Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law.
Ava’s clearly non-human appearance makes the audience complicit in Caleb’s undertaking as you try to finesse that fine line between a very smart program and a robot with a mind of its own.
There is no question that Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie is a robot with a mind of its own as it is able to feel and learn.
Which is not to say that everything is open and shut here. Mixed in among the thrilling action sequences are posers on consciousness, mortality and whether the body can be separated from the soul.
Artificial intelligence is neither inherently good or bad, but a function of what Chappie is taught. Pointedly, it behaves like a child and then, like a petulant teenager.
Even a crowd-pleasing blockbuster such as Age Of Ultron is ambivalent when it comes to A.I. True, the android Vision saves the day, but it is Ultron, yet another sentient entity, who brings earth to the brink of obliteration in the first place.
Hero and villain both share perhaps what is the overriding imperative of life, and that is the principle of self-preservation. Is the ability to weigh the cost and morality of doing so what differentiates us from them then?
More works engaging with artificial intelligence will come our way, including a television series titled Humans on AMC channel. The drama imagines a world in which synthetic humans are available for purchase to do chores.
Its title is telling. Be it computer, robot or even superhero, at its heart, the exploration of artificial intelligence is to grapple and wrestle with the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
(ST)

Air World Tour 10
sodagreen
To mark their milestone 10th anniversary, feted Taiwanese band sodagreen embarked on a regional tour for much of last year.
Named after their first single Air (2004), the concerts were about taking stock and bearing witness to how far the band have come in a decade. They were also an opportunity to celebrate their much-loved works from Little Love Song to Once In A Lifetime to What Is Troubling You over the course of nine studio albums.
The meat of this package – a record of their gig at the Taipei Arena last July – is really in the DVD, which offers over 100 minutes of footage from the concert, capturing lead vocalist Wu Ching-feng’s peerless live singing as well as the top-of-the-line visual effects. From the video imagery to the rotating raised platforms, it was clear that a lot of thought had gone into the presentation of the songs.
The CD almost feels like an afterthought with only 10 tracks on it. Also, an audio-only version of a track with fans singing chunks of the chorus is not the most exciting thing to listen to.
On DVD, though, the extent of fan fervour comes across compellingly. Even then, it does not quite capture the full flavour of a sodagreen live performance, which often runs to three hours and longer.
If you can, get the version with the bonus DVD featuring the top 10 song requests made on the tour. This is a fan favourite segment as they get to shout out the song that they want to hear.
Not only does it showcase the musicality of the band as they take on sometimes obscure material on the fly, but it is also a chance for Wu to wear his variety show host hat and entertain with his quick wit and cutting remarks.
Now that the anniversary festivities are over, they will be working on the final album in their ambitious four-season project. Winter is coming and that is the best news for sodagreen fans.
(ST)

Red Amnesia
Wang Xiaoshuai
The story: Old Deng (Lv Zhong) lives alone after the death of her husband. Her elder son Jun (Feng Yuanzheng) has a family of his own while her younger son Bing (Qin Hao) has a male lover, a fact she does not approve of. She begins to get harassed by phone calls from someone who never says a word. Meanwhile, there is an intruder breaking into homes in her neighbourhood.
Is there any connection between the two things? And why does she keep seeing a teenage boy around?

This is an intriguing shape-shifter of a movie. It seems at first to be a portrayal of contemporary China society, warts and all.
Age-old values of filial piety and respect for the elderly are put to the test in today’s bustling cities. Nursing homes are packed to the brim, even drawing long lines as beds need to be reserved in advance. Deng’s mother is in a home and she herself does not wish to be a burden to her children.
Prickly and hard to get along with, she cannot see eye-to-eye with her daughter-in-law (Qin Hailu) and disapproves of the fact that her younger son is gay.
Stage and screen actress Lv Chong is excellent, conveying Deng’s pride, resilience and vulnerability in equal measure, in the process making the character sympathetic.
Writer-director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle, 2001) has more up his sleeve, though. The Chinese title Chuangruzhe, which means intruder, points to the mystery-thriller part of the film.
Questions start piling up: Who is the teenage boy lounging about in different apartments? Who is making nuisance phone calls to Deng? Why does she feel guilty?
Then the film takes another turn, seemingly towards a ghost story of sorts. Or is Deng losing her grip on reality?
The different threads start coming together when she returns to Guizhou where she and her family were stationed during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, a sensitive period Wang had previously dealt with in the dramas Shanghai Dreams (2005) and 11 Flowers (2011).
As the sins of her past are revealed, she gets cast in a new light and one’s sympathy for her is put to the test. Red Amnesia’s unusual structure can be frustrating at times, but it might well mean that you will not be forgetting this movie in a hurry.
(ST)

Good Kill
Andrew Niccol
The story: Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) used to be a combat pilot. Now, he executes drone strikes and returns home each day to his wife (January Jones) and children in a Las Vegas suburb. His superior, Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), believes in following orders, while newcomer to the team, Vera Suarez (Zoe Kravitz), believes in speaking her mind. When the orders to kill start coming in from a disembodied voice over the telephone from the Central Intelligence Agency instead of the military, some start to question the morality of their actions.

Ethan Hawke is haunted and haunting in Good Kill.
Teaming up again with writer-director Andrew Niccol, with whom he had worked on the stylish and absorbing sci-fi drama Gattaca (1997), the actor known for films such as Boyhood (2014) and Before Midnight (2013) slips thoroughly under the skin of Egan to create a compellingly flawed character.
Not only is he a combat pilot who gets his wings clipped, to add insult to injury, he also has to continue to wear a flight suit even though his work station is now a bunker in the Nevada desert.
He does not want to burden his wife with the murky details of work, preferring to keep it all bottled up and releasing stress by drinking.
The not-very-helpful advice from his boss is to keep compartmentalising.
Each time he completes a successful drone strike, he utters: “Good kill.”
It is a phrase that grows increasingly ironic and fraught as Niccol examines what it means to kill from a distance. While the crew are removed from the actual location, what they see through the drone’s camera is shockingly intimate, as they can even make out faces and expressions.
The television drama Homeland explored similar terrain over the course of Season Four, albeit without much discussion of the ethics of a drone strike which triggers a dramatic chain of events.
Good Kill takes a quieter approach by forgoing an emotive music score for much of the film and is also more thoughtful, raising all kinds of questions.
Much of the outright querying is by junior airman Suarez. The pointed posers include why are they carrying out missions in Yemen, a country not at war with the United States, and whether striking a target twice to fully eliminate a threat puts them on a par with terrorists who wait for rescuers to arrive and then attack again.
She even asks sarcastically at one point: “Was that a war crime?”
The movie also addresses the changing nature of war to one in which the combatants are now playing a shooting game, a comparison that was presciently drawn in the 1985 classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game.
Towards the end, the film stumbles with a few false steps. Egan’s actions stretch plausibility, yet they make sense in the context of one man’s attempt to redeem his humanity.
(ST)

Spy
Paul Feig
The story: Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy) feeds suave spy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) intelligence from behind her desk at the headquarters. When he falls off the grid, she steps up and goes undercover to get close to arms dealer Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne). The bumbling efforts of compromised agent Rick Ford (Jason Statham) get in her way.

A-list leading man Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes, 2009) is in this movie and so is Jason Statham, the go-to guy for mid-budget action flicks such as the Transporter trilogy (2002-2008).
But there is no mistaking the fact that Melissa McCarthy is the star here. Even better, her character is no loser spy, but an effective one who can run, shoot and get out of tight spots like the best of them. Score one for the women.
It is good to see McCarthy finally land a vehicle that does her justice.
She has always been likeable and fans remember her fondly as the excitable chef Sookie St James on the drama Gilmore Girls (2000-2007). After she broke out on the big screen with a memorable turn in the raunchy Bridesmaids (2011), she seemed to be stuck in movies which ran the gamut from crappy to lacklustre: Identity Thief (2013), The Heat (2013) and Tammy (2014).
Teaming up again with writer-director Paul Feig after Bridesmaids and The Heat, she strikes gold this time.
Feig juggles spy-thriller parody, physical comedy and creatively salty insults in a movie that comes together nicely. From the opening credit sequence and theme song, which clearly reference James Bond, it is clear he has great affection for the globetrotting action-thriller genre even as he sends it up.
Neither is McCarthy merely the brunt of jokes – she blossoms from a mousy deskbound operative nursing a crush on super spy Fine to an effective agent who proves to be quick on her feet, despite being saddled with lame disguises (“I look like someone’s homophobic aunt,” she decries in one instance).
In a sizzling kitchen showdown with knives, pots and pans within easy reach, she also gets to unleash her lethal side.
The supporting players pull their weight as well.
Statham pokes fun at his oh-so intense on-screen persona through a character who talks big, but is something of a dimwit.
Peter Serafinowicz (Shaun Of The Dead, 2004) raises chuckles as an incorrigibly lecherous Italian agent who keeps hitting on Cooper.
Laughs, action and, buried beneath the pottymouthed dialogue, an inspirational message of believing in yourself – Spy has it all.
(ST)

Half. Wan Fang's Little Theatre
Wan Fang

Anyway, I Believe
Shin

Those in Singapore probably know Taiwan’s Wan Fang as a singer. But she is also an accomplished actress. This release explores her dual identity. Happy Reading is the theme song of a play she has acted in, Happy Receipt Of The Letter. While it references specific characters, it is also self-contained enough to stand on its own as a short epistolary love story.
There is a poetic sensibility to the EP’s five songs, which works well with the spare arrangements and Wan’s thoughtful readings. The Same Existence from the play Merry Christmas juxtaposes opposites: “In the night, flying in search of the sun/In the day, waiting for night to fall.”
Who is a haunting ballad with the late singer- songwriter Koumis, who died tragically young in 2013 from illness. Life, love, death – it is all here in the space of an EP titled Half. As she asks intriguingly in the liner notes: How would you know that half is not the whole?
Such contemplation is not rocker Shin’s thing. On his sixth studio album, Anyway, I Believe, he cranks up the volume and tosses odd lyrics in the title track that make it sound like the theme song for a trashy B-grade flick: “When you take off your underwear, you are my everything.”
He also amps up the drama in a reworking of Su Rei’s pop-rock classic The Same Moonlight, but it does not quite feel like an improvement. The material works best when he takes it down a notch, as on the moody-broody ballad, It Would Be Great If You Were Still Here.
He growls, he screams, but I would rather just hear him sing.
(ST)

Pitch Perfect 2
Elizabeth Banks
The story: After an embarrassingly disastrous performance, the Bellas are banned from recruiting new members on campus. The only chance for them to redeem themselves is if they win the World Championships of A Cappella in Copenhagen. The band of sisters include ambitious Beca (Anna Kendrick), out-there Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) and high-strung Chloe (Brittany Snow). Freshman Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) manages to join the group as her mother used to be a Bella.

The first Pitch Perfect (2012) was a sleeper hit, grossing more than US$113 million (S$150 million) on a budget of US$17 million.
The music video for the song Cups sung by Anna Kendrick has racked up close to 200 million views on YouTube and the album was the best-selling soundtrack of 2013.
In other words, a sequel was inevitable.
But how to take the story forward?
In the earlier film, the Bellas won the national a cappella competition. So this time, they head for the world championships, but it feels like a perfunctory progression.
Pitch Perfect opened with a performance marred by projectile vomiting. So the sequel opens with Fat Amy accidentally flashing the audience during a stunt gone wrong – an incident quickly tagged, among other labels, as Southern Exposure.
The jokes strain for laughs and border on the offensive, whenever a ridiculously sexist commentator (John Michael Higgins) shoots off his mouth. The idea, which does not work, is that he is so off- the-charts outrageous that he is funny.
The Bellas themselves are a collection of paper-thin types. The exception is Kendrick, who gets a little more plot to work with as Beca finds herself thinking about life beyond college and interns at a record label.
Her crush on the Amazonian leader (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) of the German group Das Sound Machine is also mildly amusing. Every time she tries to come up with an insult or retort, Beca ends up complimenting her instead.
Still, for a Kendrick who sings with genuine emotion, catch her in The Last Five Years instead.
Mostly, the middling Pitch Perfect 2 muddles along from incident to incident. The more interesting competition is not the world championship, but a strange little sing-off between a cappella groups that takes place mid-way through the movie.
Actress Elizabeth Banks from The Hunger Games franchise makes her feature directorial debut here. She probably found that getting the Pitch right, much less perfect, is harder than it looks.
(ST)

Tamalakao
Jane Huang
Going back to their aboriginal roots has proven to be a musical boon for the likes of A-mei and Chang Chen-yue. Chang’s album, Ayal Komod, was one of Mandopop’s highlights in 2013 and A-mei’s excursions under her Puyuma moniker, Amit, have been sterling outings.
Following suit is rocker Jane Huang, One Million Star singing competition alumna and formerly of the duo Y2J. The title Tamalakao is the tribal area where she was born and home is a recurring theme on the disc.
The album begins with a tribal chant and the first song is Where I Belong, written by Chang. She yearns to be away from the stifling metropolis as she sings: “Standing in the middle of the road, can’t smell the fragrance of grass/ Wandering, drifting, the city has no place for dreams.”
The sense of alienation lingers on the rocker Sleepless In Supermarket, in which the supermarket is both an imagery and a metaphor, and she warns: “Don’t let them buy away your unique, authenticated smiling face.”
A highlight here is Silent Protest, a beautiful ballad written by Penny Tai. Huang sensitively charts out the rocky terrain of a relationship: “You stammer through your ‘Sorry’/I object, but what good is that.”
This is no mopey record, though, and an insouciant spirit comes through on the positive spin of A Speck Of Dust, the breezily light-hearted Understood and the uptempo Crazy World.
Huang finds strength in her home and identity and the results speak for themselves on Tamalakao.
(ST)

Big Game
Jalmari Helander
The story: As a rite of passage, 13-year-old Oskari (Onni Tommila) has to venture into a Finnish forest and hunt down an animal on his own. What he chances upon is the president of the United States (Samuel L. Jackson), ejected to safety after Air Force One is shot down. With the villains on the hunt for their big game, it is up to Oskari to thwart their devious scheme and save the day.

There are actually two movies here.
One is a cinematic update of an almost quaint genre – boys’ adventure, as exemplified in magazines such as Boy’s Own Paper (1879-1967) that were geared towards entertainment and character-building.
In order to prove that he is no longer a child and make his father proud, Oskari has to track down a deer and claim it as a trophy – even if he is not quite ready.
The other movie is a more conventional Hollywood-type action thriller with stock villains out to hunt down a target – the American president.
When the two movies collide, the result is a passably entertaining flick, helmed by Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander (Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, 2010).
It helps that the two worlds are so different. If Oskari had been an American kid, the movie would have been far less intriguing. Tommila, who had also acted in Helander’s Rare Exports, is likeably plucky without a shred of self-aware cutesiness.
Jackson (Pulp Fiction, 1994) is cast against type as a lame duck president, not just politically, but also physically – he has to depend on Oskari for survival. Still, Helander could not resist giving Jackson a badass moment late in the film.
Big Game begins like an arthouse film with characters speaking in Finnish, with ideas of masculinity a constant theme.
The intrusion of the Hollywood action flick is when the film gets dumbed down.
Oskari’s conflicted attitude towards masculinity is met with pat advice such as: “You don’t have to be tough, you just have to look tough.”
At the same time, the boy’s fantasy adventure aspect of the story takes off, complete with aerial stunts and underwater exploits and much hand-wringing from hapless Pentagon officials.
Without the unusual Finnish elements, this would have been a far more mundane Game.
(ST)