Arts & Film

Creators of some of the best remixes ever themselves (check out their version of Eric B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full”), Coldcut allow big name remixers to revisit the songs of their classic 1997 album Let Us Play. The album kicks off nicely, with Cornelius redoing “Atomic Moog 2000” in his usual madcap space age style, and the Moog madness continues with Shut Up and Dance’s version of “Every Home a Prison”, replete with fun chopped-up speech samples. The Silent Poets’ take on “Border” that follows is exquisite. However, the rest of the album fails to inspire, even with the appearance of Grandmaster Flash on one track (“Last Night a Cliche Saved My Life”). It’s not that the remixes are bad. It’s just that they’re just not outstanding enough in comparison to the Let Us Play versions. The live versions of “Atomic Moog 2000” and “Panopticon” seem like souped-up versions of the originals, while DJ Lord Fader’s scratched-up version of “More Beats and Pieces” is just a reminder of how fresh the original’s big beat sound was. Still, a delectable moment near the end comes in the form of the English tones of guest Salina Saliva in “The Tale of Miss Virginia Epitome”, the hilarious story of a woman with a regenerating hymen over a groove more laidback than a chaise longue on pot.

(Ultra Records) The Ministry of Sound compilations in the dance music sections of record stores may use the name of London’s most well-known club, but they don’t always represent the best of house music. So House Nation America is a pleasant surprise. The big club tracks are still here (ATFC’s “Bad Habit”), but they’re balanced by personal choices (Latina Café’s “Aldela de Ogum”), and no song seems selected merely because of its “club hit” status. Instead, both DJs convey their own sound well. Little Louie Vega’s mix is more Sunday evening rather than Saturday night, with Isolee’s “Beau Mot Plage” an instant classic–Latin-style chanting and a bassline with more hooks than a fishing-supplies store, while Erick Morillo brings up the intensity with the pounding filter house of tunes like Afromedusa’s “Pasilda.” You may have heard most of the album if you’ve been clubbing regularly, but it doesn’t mean it’s any less fun. A-

Moving Cities, the American debut of English group Faze Action, opens with a magnificent string arrangement. All well and good, one thinks, but the publicity people said it was a dance album. And then the bassline appears, the drums join in, the title song really kicks in, and you find yourself snapping your fingers, tapping the table – bingo! You’re dancing. And now that damn string arrangement won’t go out of your head.

The Pet Shop Boys have always made erudite dance music. Few other groups, after all, would take a song title from an Anthony Trollope novel (1993’s “Can You Forgive Her?”). And in Nightlife, their first studio album since 1996’s Bilingual, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe stick to their forte.

(Warner Bros) ‘Working blue’ is what stand-up comedians call using jokes based on sex. Robert Schimmel, however, doesn’t just work blue, he lives blue. The diminutive Schimmel’s third comedy album, Unprotected, is a recording of his HBO special with some additional parts and continues the sex-based theme of his previous two albums. But even if you’ve seen the special or seen Schimmel do his routine on Conan (where he’s a frequent guest), the hysterical routine is in no way diminished by repetition.

(The Medicine Label / SSR) Noms de plume (Noms de turntable?) are in fashion for DJs these days: just as Norman Cook is Fatboy Slim, the Parisian Dominique Dalcan has released The Man in the Shadow under the name of Snooze. But where Fatboy Slim is Cook’s booze-fuelled alter ego, Snooze is Dalcan as black-and-white movie buff. The promotional material tries to place Snooze in the French disco house scene, but this DJ/musician’smusic resembles more closely the cinematic trip-hop of Portishead, albeit with drum-’n’-bass stylings. Steeped in an atmosphere of jazz-tinged noir and peppered with obscure film samples, this album evokes the smoky lounges of the pre-Technicolor life. The breakbeats (“Middle Class Lady”) and downbeat jazz (“Anais Nin’s Plot”) are hypnotic, as is the blending of piano and scratching on “Before Sunrise”, but guest singer Nancy Danino’s two torch drenched vocals are the album’s sweet high. Layered over the theme from The Saint and a rising string section in “Down for Mine”, her smouldering voice drips melancholy; on “Your Consciousness Goes Bip”, it exudes cool detachment. Like the alarm clock function, Snooze sneaks in under the radar of the consciousness, calling you into the world – but it’s his world, a world of cigarettes, dim lights, and men in shadows.

Dir. Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan Josie and the Pussycats combines the fast, furious feel of a garage-band single with the frenetic kinesis of a music video. The film updates the comic of the same name, tracking grrl-band Josie and the Pussycats as they get caught up in success. The movie’s main target of attack is mass consumerism (boo Abercrombie!), but it also gets in smart jibes on boybands (the show’s spoof boyband, Du Jour, has a hit single named “Backdoor Lover”), “Behind the Music” and other aspects of ’00s pop culture. It’s great campy fun (Alan Cumming and Parker Posey obviously relish their villain roles) with a catchy soundtrack, underpinned by an admirable powerful-grrl ethic. Rachael Leigh Cook’s eyes sparkle with charisma as bandleader Josie, Tara Reid makes an agreeably ditsy Melody, and Reid’s boyfriend Carson Daly parodies the hand that feeds him. Is Josie a signal of the end of mindless pop music and culture? Probably not, but as supposedly disposable movie fluff it’s savvier than it has any right to be.

(The Ecco Press) In an era of talk-show hosts and the self-loving blather of the chattering classes, is the confessional mode of speech a vice? “The need to unburden… was a selfish need” goes a line in the English author Nicola Barker’s new novel, Wide Open, and ultimately the novel addresses the question of the line between the need for revelation and the desire for indulgence. Even as characters are drawn out of their shells, nothing is ever fully ‘wide open’.

By Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf) (Note: right now I’m putting out a lot of material that was previously published in the Harvard Crimson, so apologies if the reviews are sounding dated. “Proper” reviews will follow shortly.)

I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography “Cash” by Johnny Cash. Rob in High Fidelity As many know, I collect cover versions obsessively, and right now it’s 1.23am, perfect for the haunting sounds of Johnny Cash. So various songs from his American Recordings albums are inching their way into my playlist. It’s an astounding body of work, those albums: frequently, they hold the power to surprise with their interpretations. For one, Cash’s version of U2’s “One” (from American III: Solitary Man) is classic. It’s a completely different take on the song. It’s the smoky voice of a man worn out by the world, and trying his best to find optimism against his basic instinct of resignation.

LAUNCH OF DELTA SIERRA ARTS - THE REVIEW SITE I thought it would be better to have a space to keep blogging about film and music and arts, instead of only posting reviews related to the films in the Singapore International Film Festival. So Delta Sierra Arts now contains a collation of all my film reviews, including the ones that were posted here, as well as reviews of music and other arts. Enjoy!

Dir. Sue Brooks (Warning: this review gives away spoilers on a turning point in the film. I’ll put an appropriate warning just before the spoilers.) Sometimes, someone flies in like a comet in your life, and the beauty of it is in the evanescence of the interaction. In Japanese Story, director Sue Brooks gives us a geologist named Sandy (Toni Collette), and a protagonist named Hiro (Gotaro Tsunashima). Their names may be obvious, but little else is about their characters: Tachibana Hiromitsu (to use his full name) is the straight-laced, buttoned-down product of Japanese cultural norms and stifling family business, while Sandy is the hard-as-nails geologist. No hearts on sleeves here. There’s obviously more to the two main characters, of course. Collette does a wonderful job of depicting Sandy visibly softening as she gets into contact with Hiro. Collette’s face, looking upon Hiro emerging from the water, is a wonder of multiple emotions: curiosity, aesthetic appreciation of his body, archness. And Hiro clearly has reserves - an offhand reference to a Mayan temple, for one - that are untapped (geology metaphor deliberate).

Dir. Bruno Dumont The last road movie I watched at a film festival was Y Tu Mama Tambien, a joyous celebration of life, vigour, and sexual vitality amidst the spectre of death. This could be the anti-Mama, with the lead couple, David and Katia driving through Joshua Tree National Park, a landscape where life has been baked out. David and Katia are embarking on a trip ostensibly to look for scouting locations, but ultimately they’re cruising down a lost highway, plunging further downward into the loss of language and ultimately the loss of sanity1.

Dir. David Mackenzie On a whim, I went to catch Young Adam at the Singapore Film Festival. I only briefly scanned the synopsis before getting the ticket, and was completely unprepared for Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, and Emily Mortimer1 appearing onscreen. The tone of Scottish desolation, with a blanket of fog-grey that seemed to rest upon the movie, seemed an appropriate reflection of 1950s Glasgow, and of my mood - after all, I was watching a movie alone on a Saturday night. There was a strong suggestion of an utter lack of options in that life, what with the claustrophobia of the boat and the desperation and despair in the sex scenes between Joe and Ella (McGregor and Swinton)2. The movie meanders near the end though - the tortured Joe-Ella affair and its parallel with the Joe-Cathy relationship is spoilt, one thinks, by the sexual omnivorousness of Joe, who can’t seem to bump into a married woman without taking his pants off. But then I suppose one could argue that the cold sexual interactions just illustrate Joe’s general callousness. There’s an unfeeling, unforgiving, hard quality to the landscape, and it seems to be breathed into the fibre of Joe’s being. It seems as though the director (David Mackenzie) wants us to feel that this alienation is part of the human condition. At the end of the movie, I’m still not completely convinced that this is true, instead of the alienation just being part of Joe’s character, but the film’s stark, spare style did leave an imprint.

Dir. Menno Meyjes Aka the Hitler-as-starving-artist movie. I was afraid that Max would postulate a simplistic spurned-artist-turns-evil point of view, but it turned out to be more complex than that. Hitler (Noah Taylor) is shown as always possessing the evil ideas that he later channeled into murder - his idea of blood purity is chilling with or without the dramatic irony of knowing what happened next. This film was tied up in controversy because of the fact that it dares to show human aspects of Hitler, but I think that’s what makes Hitler’s evil even scarier.

[This interview was conducted in 2001 in conjunction with the release of Blow. It was first published in the Harvard Crimson, hence the use of “THC” to signify the questions I and the rest of the interviewers asked. Sadly, Ted Demme passed away on 13 January 2002 from an accidental cocaine-induced heart attack.]

Dir. Ted Demme Stars Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Ray Liotta, Rachel Griffiths. It’s a big risk calling a movie Blow. Headline writers, pressed for time and happy for puns, are prone to turn even a mildly negative review into groan-inducing one-line summaries: “This Blows,” “Blow Sucks”. Low blows, indeed.

Dir. Aki Kaurismäki The Man Without a Past manages to be simultaneously laconic and warm. Quick plot summary: “M” (as he is referred to in the credits; played by Markku Peltola) gets beaten up and loses his identity; he then finds a community among the poor of Helsinki. Amnesia is a favourite device of storytellers (see Memento, for instance), of course, so much of the philosophical grounds trodden here have been explored. But whereas in most works amnesia is a cause for agita, this film seems to be a cinematic “oh well”. You can almost feel M shrug and proceed on with life. Today is the beginning of the rest of your life? For M, it really is.

Dirs. Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles At the 2003 Singapore International Film Festival, this was the first show I saw that got a round of applause. It was without a doubt one of the two best things I saw at the film fest, The Man Without a Past being the other. City of God, as the Cannes-following masses know, is a cinematic examination of life in the favelas of Rio - that was basically all I knew about it, since I was trying to avoid reading about the movie before watching it, and I was surprised and impressed that the movie comes across as vital rather than nihilistic. It’s easier, in a way, to give up on an utterly hopeless world (Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate); this film alternates between tender moments that reel you in and then casual violence, which I think is what rends your heart.

Dir. Carlos Reygadas First things first: why is it that Mexican films seem to have the unique ability, alone among non-English-language films, to have their titles referred to in the original (Spanish) language? I cite Japón, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Amores Perros as examples. Even films from Spain don’t get that treatment (cf Almodovar’s Talk to Her). Not that knowing what “Japón” means would make any difference to your understanding of the film anyway - I presume naming a film after Japan when it has absolutely nothing to do with Japan is a reference to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil…