Clips, Blips & Flicks

[helvetius]

Have been and still am feeling feverish for the past few days. (I suspect it's the result of late nights and all the popcorn I have been munching.) Which probably led to me talking gibberish to people online and off. So if you have been somehow scarred for life... er, yah.



While my cousin is off to a Goth gig (having borrowed accessories and a waist sash from me and dressing up to the nine to boot) and others are having a ball of a time with chocolate fountains, I went off to watch Moving Gods, which was based on the legend of the German Girl of Pulau Ubin. Somehow, the Toddycats managed to get the rights to screen the movie and the "specials" found only on the DVD. The film was alright though not entirely based on facts and the specials were downright creepy. You never learn exactly why the protagonist keeps having the same dream but you learn that the crew got so spooked by certain events during the production, many are fearful of going back to Ubin. The movie also had details that were ambiguous, but then we got to discuss some issues with the director at the FAQ session.

Yes, what really made the event special was they got the director, Choon Hiong, to come down as well.

Always been interested in the interaction of an artist's original intent and the audience's interpretation of hir work(s). (By 'artist', I mean someone who creates something, be it written, visual or aural. Fanfic writers are artists in their own right, so are wallpaper/winamp/icon makers and so forth. But I am digressing here.) I mean, was Shakespeare a genius as we make him to be today, hiding layers upon layers? Or have the critics simply read too much? We see what we want to see after all. Heck, I can tell you that there's one critic out there who analysed Lear using Carl Jung and Seneca. That one broke the my BS scale. Seriously, after a while, you have to wonder.

And so, all this leads to the movie, 天边一朵云, The Wayward Cloud.

There has been much hooha over the movie, what with the sex, sex, sex and more sex with a comatose porn actress if you're kind or a just plain necrophilic sex if you're realistic. All this while the two main leads break out into song and dance regularly in the strangest outfits. There's the sequinned fish outfit, the giant phallus outfit, the dominatrix outfits made of toilet accessories, the cross-dressing and then the scary numbers of watermelons umbrellas. There seems to be 4 possible ways to view this movie.

#1: Be like the boys who sat behind me and bitch, moan, whine and wonder WTF you paid good money or spent time to watch this shit.

#2: Understand that sometimes, you don't need a point to a story and enjoy the ride as it is to the very end. A piece of work is like a window to the mind of the creative force behind it. You don't have to understand and most times, you can't understand why someone thinks the way s/he does.

#3: Analyse it to bits. You might just end up frothing at the mouth though. XD OTOH, I think the Chinese papers mentioned how the movie is the reconciliation between the Mind and the Body. If the Japanese porn star and the whole pornography bits are the Body and Shiang-chyi is the Mind (she seems to be a tour guide at the National Palace Museum and comes up with the most ingenious ways to steal water), then the ending where *SPOILER* Hsiao-Kang comes in her mouth during a pornography filming session can be seen as the fusion of the two. It's a possibility, not a conclusion.

#4: It's a love story. I think it is. How it ends is unclear though.



GIP: Renji, Heart and He Who Stole His Wife's Hair-Curlers. Because it amuses me. Music icon has been replaced by Ishida this time round, which is rather strange because I don't think I have ever seen Ishida with headphones. Fluffy ear muffs, yes, the wussy. XD

 Dunproofin' - Dance To The Velvet Underground

Just the right amount of swanky sixties-sounding guitars and scratchiness. It makes me want to dance like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.