Dial History

My third movie for the Singapore Film Festival was Dial History. This is an irreverent documentary about airplane hijacks all over the world.

The movie is a compilation of all the news clips about various hijacking incidents, interspersed with little cartoons of houses crashing into planes, planes crashing into the ground and exploding, cartoon characters making phone calls etc, well you get the idea of what kind of movie this is. The jokes aside, it does feature various hijacking scenes - the Japanese Red Army hijack of Israeli / Japanese planes, Palestinian terrorism (ok, now I know who Leila Khalid is), the South Korean airplane hijack by North Koreans, hijackings that occured in Singapore and Malaysia, and many others. You do get to see some real sickos out there, like the Japanese Red Army hijacker who talks about how everyone who dies will become stars in the sky, and how he wants everyone to become stars. The final conclusion of a hijacking is often bloody - either the hijackers, the commandos or the passengers get killed.

Nevertheless, the documentary does not try to be too serious. Firstly, it is littered through out with somewhat corny-sounding comments from the director. There's also a clip where the hijackers take the place of the stewardess' role ... and start serving food to the passengers? A boy who talks about how cool the hijackers really are, even though his fellow passengers might not feel the same?

While I can certainly conclude that I know more about hijacking than ever before, I still cannot convince myself that the SGD 8.80 I had spent on the movie was a wise choice.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew

My second movie for the Singapore Film Festival was The Gospel According to St. Matthew, directed by the famous Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini is a well-known Marxist homosexual who had an illustrious, but highly controversial career in film-making. For that, he suffered a mysterious and violent death at the age of 53. My interest in the movie stemmed from two sources - my background as a Christian, and a certain curiousity about how the film would turn out, considering Pasolini's controversial background.

The movie takes excerpts from the Book of Matthew. As a whole, however, it follows the Book of Matthew very closely. There were certain interesting features to note. The devil who tempts Jesus appears in the movie not as someone with horns (as I had imagined), but as one in a human form who wore crimson robes. It also gave me a view of another side of Jesus, one that is not commonly portrayed in the churches or during sermons. Initially, I was under the impression that Jesus was a nice-guy type of person, so I was quite surprised to see a stern-looking Jesus who goes around rebuking the the Israelites who live in sin, and the Pharisees. There is a difference between reading about how Jesus rebukes the Pharisees in the bible and actually watching it on screen.

The film takes many close-up shots of people's faces at somewhat uncomfortable angles, and if it were not for the fact that this was 1960s movie-making, one would have been able to see the facial pores of the characters depicted in the film. This is not necessarily a weakness, however, Such a focus on the characters does have the effect of permitting one to see every character's expression when placed in various situations.

Although it is clear that the movie was shot on a low-budget, it left a deeper impression in me than many of the other gospel movies that I had watched previously. The black-and-white nature of the film and the use of ordinary actors gave the movie a certain sense of authenticity, as it conveyed the image of an era from a long time ago. Many of these actors were very ordinary people, and you could often empathize with how they felt. Overall, I enjoyed the movie and would certainly recommend it to other people.

Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in our Times

This is my first movie for the Singapore Film Fest (I gave Chihwaseon a miss after discovering that tickets cost SGD 21.80!). Power and Terror is not so much a movie, but a documentary about Noam Chomsky and his views. For those of you who are not already in the know, Noam Chomsky is a linguist professor from MIT. He is also a political activist who is famous for his criticism of US foreign policy. The documentary consists of interviews with Noam Chomsky and excerpts from the lectures he gave at the University of California, Berkeley.

Before, I start, I'd like to emphasize that I am neither pro- nor anti-American. Foreign policy problems rarely ever have simple solutions, although more often than not, there is a strong tendency for the layman to oversimplify issues in searching for an answer. I am more interested however, in gaining an understanding of the American political mind on an intellectual level, and to study its potential consequences on the world, whether political, economical, or cultural.

Despite his reputation (some have called him anti-American), he does not outrightly condemn the US. He merely states that imperialist powers tend to behave in a similar fashion, since the British Empire (he had a few sharp words for W. Churchill). Most countries in the world will oppress any other country or its peoples, if it is within its capability to do so. Thus it comes as no surprise that the US, currently the most powerful country in the world, is also in the business of causing misery to other nations.

Although he describes the Sept 11th attacks as a great tragedy, it is a historic event not because of the scale of the attacks, but "only because of who the victims are". Terrorism, he explains, is any form of atrocity committed against a civilian population, and not just the civilian population of a superpower. It is for this reason that he ridicules the phrase, "War on Terrorism", as he ponders the number of corpses the US has left in South East Asia, Africa, Latin America and other parts of the world. "The only way to stop terror, is to stop participating in it", says Chomsky. It is interesting to note however, that the "War on Terrorism" has become a catchy phrase that legitimizes major offensives by the US in various parts of the world. Many other world governments have similar used the Sept 11th attacks as a cover to pursue their own agendas.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, he does not recommend solutions except to say that the US should sincerely inquire the grievances that many other peoples have against it. Nevertheless, I recommend this documentary to everyone. You may not agree with everything he says, but it certainly helps one obtain a different perspective of the forces that shape our world.

Some of you have complained that my articles were too long, so I have decided to write shorter articles from now on. Also, this Blogger appears to give some trouble when I'm writing long articles, so there is definitely a strong incentive to cut down on the size of my articles. :)

The Hours (Part 3)

This may all sound rather surreal, but the story it tells is very real. I recall walking along HDB 1-room apartment blocks, where the old folks live, and see many old folks sitting around, doing absolutely nothing, whiling their time away. Where are their children? It appeared as though life no longer held any surprises for them. They were simply waiting to die. What meaning does live hold for these people? Will we perhaps, suffer a similar fate one day?

Of course, The Hours is more than just a movie about a woman suffering from the pangs of old age. Ultimately, it is a movie about three women trying to find a meaning to their existence. One suffers from chronic depression, one suffers from the dreariness of living with a husband she does not love, and one tries to help others to give her life some meaning. Unable to come to terms with what they were going through, they adopt drastic measures to escape from their dreary lives. I have no doubt that those who have read Mrs Dalloway might be able to truly appreciate the movie, but nevertheless I consider it a good two Hours spent.

PS. I learned later via the Internet that Virginia Woolf herself had suffered from various tragic experiences during the course of her early life. Her half-brother Gerard sexually abused her, her mother died when she was in her early teens, and her half sister who took her mother's place, died two years later. Her father suffered a slow death from cancer, and her brother Toby died when she was 24. After her brother's death, she suffered a mental breakdown. After going through what she had gone through, one can hardly blame her for being somewhat neurotic.

The Hours (Part 2)

The second part however, reveals a little bit more about the story of Mrs Dalloway, and gradually I began to understand the movie. What struck me most was what Meryl Streep said to her daughter. "When I was young, I imagined a world full of possibilities. I thought that it was the beginning of happiness. Now, I know - that was happiness." I began to wonder if I would be asking similar questions when I grew old. It's true that I too, like her, see a life full of possibilities now. However, my thoughts, needs and desires have changed a lot in the last decade, and I believe they would continue to change in the decades to come. Is this the way life is supposed to end?

This also reminds me of a movie, Requiem for a Dream, where one of the characters Sara, a lady in her senior years. She loves and wants to be proud of her son, but he is a drug addict who is hardly around and pays very little attention to her. She is lonely and watching television becomes more than just a pasttime for her - it becomes an obsession. One day, she learns of an opportunity to appear on TV. All of a sudden, she finds a purpose in life. She is determined to look her best when that happens and she starts taking drugs to lose weight. Losing weight too, becomes an obsession, and she starts taking large quantities of the drug, thinking that she could lose weight faster. The drugs cause her to hallucinate and her mental state degenerates from then on. The story ends with her in a mental institution.

(continued in third part)

The Hours (Part 1)

So here I am now, with my own blog. As I write, the American/British invasion of Iraq rages on, and American troops have entered the Baghdad palace. While I do have a lot to say about this, I think I will leave it for another day.

Perhaps I will talk a bit about The Hours, a movie that I watched last Saturday (5th Apr). In truth, I had wanted to watch The Pianist, but due to the inconvenient screening times, my friend and I had caught this movie instead. Thus, I went into the cinema, not knowing what to expect.

The movie starts off with a morbid tone - a woman commits suicide by drowning herself in a river. That piqued my interest, and I thought I was about to be in for a good movie. However, I could not really connect with what followed, at least for the first half of the movie. Having not read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, I have to admit that I was pretty clueless during the first half of the movie. During this time, all I saw were three perpetually depressed women, depressed for the sake of being depressed. I had _absolutely_ no idea why they were so depressed. After an hour, I found myself snickering at the scene where Julianne Moore leaves her son with a friend and walks towards her car, crying. At that point in time, I began to wonder if it was a movie that only a woman could understand. I was ready to conclude that it was that time of the month .... for all of them.

(continued in second part)