We made plans to head for Urbanscapes 2008 on Saturday…
... but that plan DIDN’T HAPPEN!!! Wails~
Instead, we ended up heading home early after some long fruitless hours at the Zara sales and picking up some dinner. I figured it was probably a little late by the time we left KLCC.
So we got 5 movies to enjoy for the rest of the night…
Kung Fu Panda ... started off light with some funny animation. Eastern Promises ... some serious shit. Not for the faint of heart. If you like to catch some bloody brutal violent Russian mafia shits with a lil bit of free-willie, you’d like this one. Starring Viggo Mortensen who played as Aragorn in LOTR. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ... dark and twisty. Despite sad misfortunes backfiring some ill intentions, I enjoyed the wicked sense of humor. The Spiderwick Chronicles ... light yet adventurous. I had this lil kink for faeries and orges, but this movie was rated “PG” so there was no naked faeries. Bummer! The Ruins ... if you like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes crossed with Apocalypto, you might like this movie. Lots of blood and explicit scenes, but killer vines don’t seem to scare me a bit.
I know… that’s some weird combo. To be honest, I have no idea how we ended up with this combo of titles to such extremes, but overall it was a good mix of comedy and tragedy for one night.
Although… I did end up wishing I had some whiskey at 2am.
Following blinkymummy’s post on the movie Cashback, I finally got myself a copy over the weekends and watched it.
I had initially associated the time-freezing plot subject with the book Fermenta by Nicholson Baker, but the stories turned out different. Fermenta is an erotic novel where the protagonist stopped time to take the clothes off women and masturbated to the nakedness. In Cashback the protagonist is an aspiring artist who stopped time to enjoy the beauty of the naked female body and draw them on his sketch book. The plot looks similar but the ploys are different.
Can the admiration of a naked body be non-erotic?
Let’s not start a Freudian arguement with that. Nudity in this movie is shown with such casualness though the subject of sex was closely discussed, there was no explicit sexual scene. The mood was more romantic than erotic.
I particularly noticed the beauty in Emilia Fox. You’d probably noticed her as Jane Seymour in the TV mini-series Henry VIII... or as the younger pregnant Rosie Jones and her large bloody body-filled trunk in Keeping Mum.
Blinkymummy discussed the compartmentalization of time, which can only be done when one’s life is routinized. That will be the last thing I want in my life… getting myself ritualized to a set of predictable patterns. That’s probably why I’m switching my passions around over different seasons. I’m always seeking of new chapters in life. I would be a hardcore watch aficionado at a time, I can be a health freak in another. Because of that, the compartmentalization of one’s time can keep changing.
Overall, the MV-like cinematography of this movie makes it a nice pick for the melancholic. I love the lightworks and photographic effects. I would recommend it for a lazy Saturday afternoon entertainment.
When we picked this up, I was anticipating similar cinematic effects as The Day After Tomorrow… I was very wrong.
First half of the movie was really slow. Too much talking. Tacky acting skills. A golden crucifix afixed on the wall inside a Maya temple alleged to be over 3000 years old??!? That’s just so chronologically incorrect. (Note that crucifix refers to a cross with a representation of Jesus’ body.)
At each change of scene towards the middle of the movie, we noticed the constant questioning of faith by a certain agnosticistic spur followed by an reassurance of “salvation through Christ and eventual redemption in an afterlife”... Huh?
I picked up the sleeve of the DVD box and pondered if I got the wrong movie. Then I read above the movie title…
“A Modern Christian Epic in the Tradition of The Omega Code and Left Behind”
Hokay! Now I understand why the dialogues remind me so much of members from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Please note that I have nothing against the religion. It’s just the clich
It wasn’t a movie I’d pick to watch on my few evenings spent back home in Singapore, but it was still the reason why I watched it as well. We just got back from a long stay in Malaysia and a short visit to the factory in Indonesia. I wanted to spend some time with Annie so we made dinner plans and she suggested going for a movie. She chose this local movie ‘The Leap Years’. Since it also starred Ananda Everingham, who acted in (the Pang Brothers’) Shutter, Sunsun’s keen to watch it as well.
My first reaction during first 15 minutes of the movie… unrealistic. The plots are largely wrong and lots of things don’t make too much sense. Then I decided I should stop trying to make any sense of the movie. It’s a romantic story and romance isn’t supposed to make any sense. That helped.
I actually enjoyed it. It wasn’t a regular romance where the hero saved the day or the heroine finally declared to the man she loves. It’s a ‘feel-good’ movie… a simple love story that makes girls cry throughout the plots then smile at the end. Sounds cliche but overall still rather good with some twists toward the second half. Happy ending, nevertheless…
It wasn’t until the end of the movie when I found out… that it’s based on a Catherine Lim story “Leap of Love”. No wonder.
Just when I was replying a comment a minute ago, I thought and remembered about the power of music to spark what usually is left of an inspiration I feed on…
So I turned on my iTune, which I had not yet used since I last updated the software last week.
(Plays the “Bullet” album by Trafik)
So I really do not have passion in my job. I really do not feel during my day-to-day of work feeding any sense of satisfaction to my soul. I was merely working for the good money it brings. I am falling into my own version of a corporate life hell…
I have been convinced that I had been lying to myself.
________
So why am I still here in my job?
It’s partially my innermost fear, a fear of not achieving what I had initially dreamt of. I just could not bring myself to even think of sacrificing what I have established for my career, on top of the investment my family had put in for my studies.
Oh~ Nvermind that. I’m just thinking aloud
The world is big, and my dream of becoming a graphic designer is just a profession too popular. There is hardly room for more designers, and it takes a whole lot to make one visible out of the world of blinding colorful graphics. And it requires lots of PR skills too, to get exposure and your work known to the world. I would need lots of help.
There I go again…
So what else left for me from what I have? I have some business background. I understand what a FMCG company needs and wants. Bottomline is just to get the common public to buy more of whatever you are already selling them. That’s the art of marketing. Great strategy?
Nothing that innovative actually, if you ask me. You may make the world a market place for overstocking, but other than the real products you are selling it is actually the dreams you sell with the products that consumer wants.
Simple yet a great idea? It’s nothing new actually.
That is exactly what the true masters of marketing already know. They create the dreams and sell these dreams with their products. Whether or not these products are up to the value, the true overstated value comes from the dreams.
Now for a little media design appreciation…
Check out this Golf GTi ad adapted from the original movie scene? What does it try to say? Is it trying to create a feel of classic (being a classic VW model) Gene Kelly dancing to a modernized (“updated” as literally mentioned in the ad) version of Singin’ In The Rain?
The funky Kelly may not make any sense to the new design of the car, but it hides in the subconscious a dream we all wish we could keep but will never been able to… that is, to re-live the beautiful memory with the advancement we have today. Logically that is not possible, but it just does the job of tinkling our senses.Find out what influential media designers think about their creativity and the power to influence the world in this short film “Polinate”.
Most of what we buy today is ‘inspired’ by the media. Renewed packages aren’t enough.
Today, Sunsun and I went for the Quidam show. It is circus show presented by an international circus troupe (minus the elephants, tigers and lions) known as Cirque du Soleil.
Seated right in front on the side, we had pretty closed up view for the performances and some were so overwhelming I had to shush Sunsun from speaking too loud during the show.
“Which do you think is your favorite act?” she asked when the intermission break ended and the show continued. I was too busy trying to get myself engrossed in the show that I couldn’t be bothered to remember which was my favorite at that moment. ALL of them were great. None was my favorite.
True enough, the show that my mind labelled as my favorite only came later. It was the act called Statue.
“Never losing contact, two strong, flexible performers move almost imperceptibly, assuming positions impossible without an impeccable sense of balance. The couple summon all their sensitivity and powers of concentration in their quest for perfect harmony. Their act is testimony to the natural beauty of the human body.”
I just love the way two figures can summon such balance supporting each others body weights and at the same time create such beautiful works of art forms with their bodies.
Quidam: a nameless passer-by, a solitary figure lingering on a street corner, a person rushing past. It could be anyone, anybody. Someone coming, going, living in our anonymous society. A member of the crowd, one of the silent majority. The one who cries out, sings and dreams within us all. This is the “quidam” that Cirque du Soleil is celebrating.
A young girl fumes; she has already seen everything there is to see, and her world has lost all meaning. Her anger shatters her little world, and she finds herself in the universe of Quidam. She is joined by a joyful companion as well as another character, more mysterious, who will attempt to seduce her with the marvelous, the unsettling, and the terrifying.
What makes the heart recognize the uniqueness of a person? Was it memories with that person? Or was it what you predict of that person based on these memories? Conveniently both are. Our weakness of the heart that can kill us slowly inside is the one thing that we don’t realize could also be our strength to forgive and start over… if only we know when and how to stop, and look again.
“Pieces of April”, starring Katie Holmes (remember Dawson’s Creek?), is such a memory which most would have just chosen to remember the past and forget the future. A family is a blood-related tie (or sometimes if the water is thicker than blood) where individuals are bounded and bonded by their roles through each’s life-long journey. In the world today, where life is defined by the standard of living and the clustering of singular individuals each striving for their individualistic goals, the meaning of family has subtly become simply a form of support for mortality of the next generation. What you do now will be what you get. Any variance would be some generosity of the heart.
So when April spent a whole day preparing a thanksgiving meal for her suburban family, who in turn struggled through memories of her rebellious ways and fear of yet another sad memory of her, these modern family values are questioned. The efforts and the anguish April hung heavily, while running through the day panicking through neighbors for help to get a decent thanksgiving meal, showed clearly that despite her deranging personality she still has her family in heart. Some people are just not the kind to conform, and certainly not the type to allow superficiality of social amenities, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care. The conformed family values brought down by our forefathers will cast off these deviants, for the sole purpose of preventing the disturbance of the same conformity. So who is to define what deranges and disturbs the social order?
It was a good thing that while most of April’s family members backed out after being freaked by her urban neighborhood, her cancer-stricken mom, who was also the center of the family anxiety, became the first to realize that family is not defined by what memories we have of each other but what future we hold for each other. Doubts created by the past can be persisting and hard to erase, but given a little more courage we can give it a chance to create good memories. April’s mom, with her love of a mother, overcome her fear and her own despair, finally gave April a chance to make a final good memory of her as a daughter she loves.
Sniff sniff… this movie made me teared. Makes me think of mom.**
How many times have we actually watch the night sky long enough to notice how one can recognize one’s homeland by the color of the sky? I wouldn’t have noticed this until I witnessed how Alex, in the movie Good Bye Lenin!, tried to paint the night sky outside his bedridden mother’s window the same socialist color she was accustomed to, but failed to realized that no matter how ill or weak, she could still notice the difference.
After the movie, I stepped out to the balcony and stared hard at the night sky. Only then did I realized that I actually miss the sky at the other end of the world. Boston night sky was clearer and was always accompanied by inviting cool gusts. What I see tonight at Bukit Timah hill is covered by the dark red clouds, with some light breezes of warm tropical air. After a little comparison, I decided that I’m still used to this sky at home. The same night sky I first noticed when I started dating and shared with my first date. The same night sky that I watched while hugging my rifle and my buddy snored next to me on the wet forest ground. The same night sky that I shared my glass of wine with some great friends while the ballet performances went on. No matter how humid the air is, as it is tonight as any other nights, or how star-less it turns out for most nights, it is still the night sky of home. This can never be replaced by any clearer sky, not even the one in Boston nor in Melbourne.
This might not be the same color as the sky that Alex saw when he watched the fireworks. It might not remind me of the same devotion that he held to keep the dream alive for his mom. It is, however, the kind of sky I can look up to when encountering unanswered doubts and remind myself that there is no greater worry than not being able to see this sky again… when I eventually have to shut my eyes. This is my sky…
“Pieces of April”, starring Katie Holmes (remember Dawson’s Creek?), is such a memory which most would have just chosen to remember the past and forget the future. A family is a blood-related tie (or sometimes if the water is thicker than blood) where individuals are bounded and bonded by their roles through each’s life-long journey. In the world today, where life is defined by the standard of living and the clustering of singular individuals each striving for their individualistic goals, the meaning of family has subtly become simply a form of support for mortality of the next generation. What you do now will be what you get. Any variance would be some generosity of the heart.