The Very Hot Aamir Khan, who makes 'em swoon

I watched my very first Hindi movie at Jade 2 the other day — Taare Zameen Par. It's about a boy's struggle with reading and writing and how he struggles to overcome it.

Hindi movies are such fun. So much music and dancing. We were five minutes early and already there was dancing music filling the hall. The movie had so many gorgeous looking people in it. There was the very hot Aamir Khan, who makes 'em swoon, and other beautiful people whose names I don't know. Ishaan, the boy protagonist, had a smile that lights up the screen.

And... the movie had an intermission! So that movie go-ers can run to the loo. Heh.

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Tekkonkinkreet

Tekkonkinkreet was the opening film of Animation Nation 2007. I watched it last night at the National Museum and was bowled over by how good it was. The animation was seamless as silk, smooth as butter. The characters were endearing and convincing. The artwork was amazing (check out the link for examples). And the most important thing, it was a damn good story.

There are two main characters in this story: Black and White, both orphans who live in the street. Black is strong and smart; White is naive and imaginative. The film opens to White with mucous running from his nose. He pulls on a roll of toilet paper attached to his waist, and the audience is sold, immediately. And we're not even five minutes into the film.

But the admirable thing about this film that it doesn't build only on the natural sympathy audiences have for young orphans, it also manages to make the audience feel empathy for every character in the film. Seriously, I felt for all of them: Gramps the hobo, Fujimura the detective, Sawada the frigid young policeman, Suzuki the Yakuza, Kimura the father-to-be... All of them seemed real and believable to me.

This film is about the demise of a city. It is a swan song, sung by delinquents, hobos, gangsters and policemen. At the heart is the yin-yang philosophy, that black needs white, and white needs black. This film is replete with religious symbols. The fundamental philosophy is the Taoist yin-yang, yet it includes the Hindu god Ganesh, the symbolism of the wounds in the hands, to the statement by Black that he does not believe in anything, to even a quote of faith being the "evidence of things unseen".

I teared up watching this film. I'm not sure what it was that got to me. Perhaps it was the emptiness of the city. Perhaps it was when White lay on the floor in a pool of blood. Or perhaps it was when White said, "God made us broken. With missing screws....... I've got all the screws that Black needs. Every single one."

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Movie overload

Midnight. I'm chomping down on cold samosas and writing in this blog. There is a big 1.25l bottle of cold water beside me, and I take a glug every three bites or so. This school business is throwing my meal-times way out of whack.

Watched The Home Song Stories tonight. This has nothing at all to do with the quality of the film—it is a good show— but I feel like if I have to suspend my disbelief one more time, I will, well, keel over and die. Too. many. movies.

In other news, Joan Chen is gorgeous in the movie. It's for people like her that cheongsams were made for, if you know what I mean. Uncle Joe is good-looking too.

Okay, I'm going to put the rest of the cold samosas back in the fridge now...

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Dying at a Hospital, 1993

A film by Ichikawa Jun about what it is like to die in a hospital. It is a very slow and long-drawn film, but that creates the effect of time slowing down at the end... As one of the characters say in the film, "TV shows aren't realistic 'cos the patients in the hospitals get well too fast."

The blurb on Singapore Film Society's website:

This film comprises the stories of various families dealing with death inside a hospital – a young father dying slowly, an elderly couple in separate hospitals who want to be together and a woman who fights to stay alive. Ichikawa deliberately shoots his actors' fine performances from a distance – middle and long shots, no close-ups – painting a realistic picture of people dealing with death. Interspersed with these stories are lyrical montages of life outside the hospital. The end result is a hopeful yet sensitive treatment of life and living. By Ichikawa's own admission, this is “perhaps the closest [he's] come to an Ozu movie”.

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Faraway Sunset (1992)

I must be in a weepy mood. Yesterday, The Ballad of Narayama made me tear. Today I couldn't even keep the taps off at Faraway Sunset. Dang it, it is supposed to be a happy success story! I'm in such a strange mood.

Faraway Sunset is the biography of Noguchi Hideyo, a famous bacteriologist known for discovering the bacteria that caused syphilis. It is also the story of a mother and her son — her extraordinary, yet in some ways, perfectly ordinary, love for her son.

Considering my weepy mood, I really wonder if I should continue with my plan to watch Dying at a Hospital this Tuesday.

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The Ballad of Narayama (1983)

A heart-breaking film by Shohei Imamura.

Why is it that the other Japanese show I watched was also set in a really poor village, where they lived such bitter, hard lives?

Driven by poverty, the villages live out John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism. They make laws so that the village as a community will survive: thieves are buried alive, those who are 70 years old are carried up the mountain to die. It's sad. Heart-wrenchingly so. Is this what we become when you take away our food, lodging, warmth, lodging? Are all our ethics and principles just sentimental fluff, suitable only for the well-fed?

The show intersperses cuts of animals mating with each other or devouring each other, almost like a periodic reminder that only the fittest survive — that life is nasty, brutish, short.

Watching grandma made me tear. She is too stoic, too selfless, too much like my own grandma.

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The Profound Desire of the Gods

I have so much to do but I have to write this down, before I lose this fleeting feeling. I can still hear the haunting song sung by the crippled old man in the wheeled wooden chair set low to the ground...

"Long time ago, a brother god and a sister goddess...."

This film makes me ache, and I cannot quite explain why. Perhaps it is true what Slavoj Zizek said, that cinema makes alive desires we never knew we had.

The Profound Desire of the Gods, also known as Kuragejima - Legends from a Southern Island, was shot in 1968 by Shohei Imamura. An engineer from Tokyo goes to a remote island populated by a primitive, superstitious, tribal people, and in going to this tightly knit community, upsets it irrevocably. The film pits the primitive against civilization, modernity against superstition, incest against social norm.

Toriko, a mentally retarded girl, epitomizes base human desire in all its rawness. The film opens to her dancing and laughing without a care in the world in the middle of a raucous crowd of men. She sings of herself as a lover who comes to tempt in the night, and bares her desire without shame. The engineer, the modern man, is enraptured; but he abandons her in the end, and the villagers tell stories of how she turned into stone while waiting on the beach.

Yet we see her again at the last scene, always one step ahead of the steam train, showing that in spite of all of our advances in culture and technology, we cannot stamp out base human desire: this is the reason why we feel "all in pieces" in modern cities. Although we have driven out the primitive, the primitive is always with us: in our hearts, always condemning, never dying.

You see, I am a modern person. There is no reason why I should mourn for the loss of the primitive. Yet, I do...

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The Bourne Ultimatium (2007)

Plot-wise, there is very little elaboration on the 1988 version of The Bourne Identity. (Technology-wise, we've improved by leaps and bounds since 1988!)

But an entertaining movie nevertheless. Watching people do surveillance is always fun.

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Ratatouille

Watched it opening night. What can I say? It was awesome! :)

That little fella with his little pink nose is just too darn cute.

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The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

You should have seen the face of the sweet young thing at the ticketing office when she asked me what I wanted to watch, and I said "The pervert's guide". Only later did I notice that the billboards had unobtrusively referred to the film as "Cinema". Well.

Anyway, The Pervert's Guide is an intriguing look at cinema and what it tells us about ourselves. Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, basically gives a two and a half hours lecture on cinema, with clips from some of the most highly-regarded films in history. He says, "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire — it tells you how to desire."

I don't have the brain right now (as the scarecrow says in "The Wizard of Oz") to put my random thoughts into paragraphs, so here they are in point form.

- Zizek talks about our need for fantasy so that we can negotiate reality. In Blue, the female protagonist escapes reality into fantasy when she couldn't cope with her dead husband having had a mistress, but later escaped fantasy back into reality, and it was with this sense of the fantasy that she could cope in the real world. In Eyes Wide Shut, the male protangonist finds himself struggling and failing to catch up with his girlfriend's fantasy about her having an affair, and so he creates his own, but he finds himself at an impasse in the fantastical world as well.

- The use of a window, glass, a crack in the door as a double metaphor of the character looking into his fantasy world (cp Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock), and viewers watching a film.

- Fantasy is a bit like religion, I think. Everyone needs a meta-narrative of some sorts to be sane. But those are just my thoughts, not Zizek's.

- I don't think I will ever want to watch any of David Lynch's films... Zizek mentions that the extermination of the paternal figure is a key element in Lynch's films. I think to a certain extent that is true, in the sense that everybody wants autonomy, but in "normal families". this is expressed as a shift in the balance of power, rather than the desire to kill our fathers.

- Zizek also talked about the birds being "raw incestuous power" in The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. Erm. Okaay.

- Watching a movie is like watching a toilet bowl. You flush your excrement into the "netherworld" and never see it again, but watching a movie is the opposite of that — you stare into yourself, wondering what will come up.

- Sex requires fantasy. It isn't just about bodies; it is about your idea of who you want, what you want. Males and females have different fantasies. The male is always baffled by the mystery of the subjective woman and wants her to fit neatly into his fantasy. Women's eroticism is in the re-telling of the act — the narrative.

- The power of music. In The Dictator (Charlie Chaplin), the same music is used after the speech by the dictator, and the peace-loving speech of the barber. The response from the people is the same: wild cheering. So, does the content matter?

- The belief in illusion. In some films, the director actually appears at the beginning to say that it is fictional (for example Frankenstein), but viewers are still affected despite knowing that it is not real.

- I wonder what that says about our current obsession over reality tv?

For a more coherent idea of what The Pervert's Guide is about, read this page.

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The Island

Quite a fun movie. Caught the 5:30pm show. We probably chose to watch `The Island' because neither of us knew the first thing about the movie. Sometimes not knowing anything about a movie adds to its appeal. The other choices were `Bewitched', `Wedding Crashers', `Mysterious Skin', and `Land of the Dead'. So, armed with a colleague's recommendation and the ticket seller's summary (`cloning lah'), we bought our tickets. No regrets. :)

Update: One of the themes of The Island is that humans would do anything to survive, similar perhaps to the concept of "Grun-tu-molani" in Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow. "Grun-tu-molani" is roughly translated as "Man wants to live." But The Island is not completely damning in its protrayal of the survival instinct of human beings (afterall it is a hollywood flick). The heros in the movie make the selfless decision to save the rest of their friends from certain death. I think that is why the idea of a selfless hero, or Christ for that matter, is so appealing to humanity. It goes against our human nature, therefore we are drawn to the heroism, the way opposites attract.

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