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.
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.
