Arts & Film

(Epic / Independiente) American music writers may instinctively dash off Radiohead comparisons with any British rock band with intelligent lyrics, but Scottish indie rock band Travis are far too important, both commercially (2 million UK copies sold, which to put in perspective is almost one-and-a-half times what Britney Spears sold over there) and artistically (Brit Award winners) to be analyzed merely by comparison. Perhaps the best rock album of 1999, The Man Who’s sold the world over, and it finally receives a belated American release just in time to support the band’s current tour with Oasis.

Dir. Joe Roth Intended as an elegant skewering of celebrity culture, America’s Sweethearts ends up too sweethearted for its own good. Which is a pity, given the wealth of talent on display: John Cusack, the thinking woman’s sex symbol, stars as Eddie Thomas, a major movie star whose on-screen partnership with Gwen Harrison (Catherine Zeta-Jones) stands in marked contrast to their pathologically dysfunctional off-screen relationship. Enter Lee Phillips (Billy Crystal), whose job is to seduce the reporters on the junket for the latest Eddie and Gwen movie into thinking the two are back together, and make those reporters forget that the director has refused to release the print of the movie. Lee ropes in Kiki (Julia Roberts), the recently-slimmed-down sister/minder to Gwen, to assist his cause, and of course Kiki and Eddie fall for each other. (That’s hardly giving anything away: if you expected something other than a Cusack-Roberts romantic pairing, you’d better brush up on your own Hollywood savvy.)

In a fit of consolidation, I’ve created an Arts section for this blog. So now there’s Delta Sierra Arts for film and music reviews (since I don’t only watch films at the Singapore Film Festival), Singapore Sox Fan for baseball writing, and good ol’ dsng.net for random thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. I’m starting by dragging up all the reviews I’ve written to enter into this site. Enjoy!

OVERALL IMPRESSION OF SIFF 2004 Last year I parked myself at Shaw Tower and gorged on lovely films. This year, unfortunately, I actually had to work and couldn’t spend my days in a cycle of films and The Sopranos. Still, I’ve decided to post my thoughts on the few films I caught at this year’s Film Festival here on this blog.

Twentynine Palms 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.

Young Adam Dir. David Mackenzie Was feeling bored on Saturday, so I went to catch Young Adam at the Singapore Film Festival. I 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 Mackenize) 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.

Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion Dir. Tom Peosay The Singapore Film Festival is on again. Unfortunately, while last year I could blog about the Festival to my heart’s content, this year I have to work. So far, I’ve only caught Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, an extremely moving documentary on the plight of the Tibetan people. Makes one really sad. I liked that they showed the supporters of Tibet to be a wide, varied group, including many Asians, not just the stereotype of New Age hippies. Indeed, the most embarrassing moment would be the scenes of the mosh pit in the Free Tibet concert; but somehow, I’ve never heard a more affecting singing of “Losing My Religion”, if only because in the context of the film the lyrics take on both the original, metaphorical, end-of-one’s-rope sense and the literal. To see the grief in the monks and nuns, to hear their descriptions of the tortures endured, and to see their determination to remain non-violent despite it all… all very moving. Makes me wonder whether those Tibetans who ran the now-defunct Rising Moon restaurant in Harvard Square had stories to tell.

Just finished watching Standing in the Shadows of Motown, about the Funk Brothers, the musicians of Motown. A nice parallel to Only the Strong Survive, which I saw in April last year. I feel it’s so sad that the Funk Brothers never really got the acclaim they deserved… man, if I could say I played on any one of those great great Motown hits - What’s Going On?, What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? etc. etc. etc. - let alone a thousand of them, I’d be a happy man.

By Malcolm Gladwell I’ve read the parts of The Tipping Point that were in the New Yorkerbefore, but I’m still really impressed by the ideas on social epidemics. The idea’s that really sticking in my head right now is that of Hartshorne and May’s 1920s studies on cheating, where they concluded that honesty as a trait isn’t “fundamental” in the way we tend to believe, but is often dependent on context: if someone is willing to cheat on a word completion test, it doesn’t mean she’s going to cheat on a different kind of test. Fascinating.

Just watched Secretary. Maggie Gyllenhaal is great stuff (incidentally, she really does look like her brother) and the movie’s hot. But the whole last 15 minutes really loses the snap of the rest of the movie - the pace slackens so much that it becomes just gratuitous. Then over the weekend I watched sex, lies and videotape - interesting to compare the James Spader performance with that in Secretary, since Spader is still master of that vacant, tabula rasa look of the voyeur. Would make a good double-bill, methinks.

Just watched X2. Brilliant stuff, and I love the bigger improved role for Rogue, my favourite of the X-Men. (X-Women, I suppose.) But the question remains: couldn’t Iceman just use his powers at the ending? Also, it’s interesting that the women all seem to have it together (Jean Grey and Storm fly the plane, Mystique’s a computer whiz), while the men may have powers but they’re all neurotic as hell - the tortured Wolverine, the repressed Cyclops, the uncertain Nightcrawler. Speaking of Nightcrawler, it was interesting to see Alan Cumming in a less campy role for a change. And I liked the way Bryan Singer managed to give moments to a whole panoply of X-Men, not just the big roles but also Siryn, Jubilee, Gambit, Kitty Pryde… apparently there was a Beast sequence too but I missed it. And Ian McKellen as Magneto escaping from the prison - brilliant action sequence, beautifully realised.

THOUGHTS ON THE SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2003 Kudos is due to the organisers for the very solid programming of this year’s festival. Scheduling and budget mean it is not possible for me to catch every single film, or even a significant portion, but I’ll do my best to report on the ones I’ve seen.

24 Hour Party People Dir. Michael Winterbottom There’s no way to review this one fully objectively. For one, I’ve actually already seen it before, so this was a second impression. Next, I’m a club kid at heart, and I really do love the history of club culture, of which the Hacienda is a big part. And so, when I was writing about Britain for Let’s Go, I actually requested to cover Manchester so that I could go to the site of the Hacienda (which had shut down the year before) to pay homage. I suppose it means something that a few of my friends from America e-mailed me just to say “I saw 24 Hour Party People and it reminded me of you”. And lastly, after two films in a row about different forms of evil, I really needed a break, and this was just perfect.

Blind Spot - Hitler’s Secretary (Im Toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin) Dirs. André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer Was sollen wir sich bei einer, der Sünde nicht sehen können, fühlen? Okay, it’s been a while since I learnt German, but the question remains: what should we feel about one who could not see sin - especially a sin as grievous as Nazism? The camera in the documentary Blind Spot spends almost all 90+ minutes on Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, and it’s a testament to how compelling her story is that Heller and Schmiderer never need to show anything else to keep you watching. There’s so much to hear in her story: the idea of the banality of Hitler’s evil; Junge’s guilt over naïete; and her blow-by-blow recollection of the final days. That recollection accelerates the film’s pace in the final half hour, and since I’ve never heard much about Hitler’s bunker before I found it utterly fascinating. (Incidentally, given that 30 Apr was the actual day of Hitler’s suicide, perhaps this should have been shown the day before?) The part where Junge describes Hitler calmly testing cyanide pills on his dog Blondie, a dog he loved, because he was suspicious of Himmler (who had given him the pills) at that point really captures the mix of banal evil and hysterical paranoia in the Führer.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini There were moans in the theatre during the torture scenes; there were gasps during the raised-fist scene; there was a stunned silence at the end. All the sounds seemed entirely appropriate: how else to respond to Pasolini’s dramatisation of the Nazi-Fascist regime that ruled in Saò in 1944-45? The film reminded me of Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And if you didn’t flinch at the last scenes, I worry for your sanity…

Russian Ark (Russkij kovcheg) Dir. Aleksandr Sokurov Ah, these Russians and their long, occasionally ponderous, often visually stunning films! (See: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.) A visual and technical tour de force, with all 96 minutes shot in one take (the third take of the day’s shoot, I’ve read), Russian Ark was oddly spellbinding. It’s not like there’s much of a plot, but the visuals are sumptuous - especially the Great Royal Ball of 1913, which has great music too - and it certainly held me in my seat. Was there a meaning to it all? I guess if you must find one it’s that the Hermitage in itself contains not only great art, but the whole of Russian history, from the time of the Tsars to the present day. But since feeling is first we forget the lack of narrative and focus on the pure aesthetic beauty of some of the shots. On the way back, I had the happy coincidence of reading a Richard Schickel interview where he said while critics tend to think verbally, some of the greatest films are imagistic and don’t lend themselves nicely to verbalisation. He was talking about Kubrick movies, but I think it applies to Russian Ark too.

City of God (Cidade de Deus) Dirs. Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles Definitely one of the two best things I’ve seen so far at this film fest (The Man Without a Past being the other), and the first show so far to get a round of applause. City of God, as the Cannes-following masses know, is a cinematic examination on 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.

The Tramp and the Dictator Dirs. Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft About the courage necessary to make a political film: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. The film was one of Chaplin’s best pieces (not as good as Modern Times, but still great), but the documentary had the Turner Classic Movies sheen on it. The efforts to show the corollaries (and differences) between Chaplin and Hitler struck me as laboured - being born within the same week shouldn’t mean anything beyond being a coincidence. I found myself agreeing with its premise, that sometimes you have to deal with horror through humour, but not necessarily with its claims about the power of film. (“Here was this huge artist standing up against this gargantuan monster” says a critic - I think Stanley Kauffman - at one point.) Which is the point where I randomly quote one of the great funny movie lines, “Don’t be stupid be a smarty come and join the Nazi Party!” from The Producers. Back to the movie - there’s a lot of questions raised about appeasement versus the necessity of making waves sometimes, and we’re reminded of the old saw that Hollywood as a business is really very conservative, in the sense of trying not to upset anyone. The clips from The Great Dictator itself are great, but then why wouldn’t they be?

Strange Fruit Dir. Joel Katz The first half of an interesting documentary double-bill, both exploring the background behind an art work, in this case, the song “Strange Fruit”. I remember the first time I heard “Strange Fruit”. It was the Billie Holiday version - her voice on the tip of heartbreak; the stark, specific images; that beautiful, spare piano. I’ve since heard many of the other versions cited by this documentary, but it’s the Holiday version that’s seered into my mind. It wouldn’t be my song of the millennium (as Time magazine called it) but it’s close. Lynching - how could anyone be so inhumane? I remember seeing the photos from the “Without Sanctuary” exhibition - they just break your heart.

Six Ways to Sunday No reviews till Sunday - taking a film breather, letting my butt get some exercise, that sort of thing. (By the way, thanks to the people who realised that us poor folk need to take public transport home, and scheduled the late films so that they would end in time for viewers to catch the last train.) Anyway, a thought struck me: wouldn’t it be great if the cinema organisations in Singapore donated 10min. or so before each movie to show Singaporean short films? That way at least films here get some audience.