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lucas with the lid off |
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Sunday, November 21, 2004 |
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call me a genius. i had Before Sunrise and Before Sunset lying around but i hadnt the time to watch them till now. So yesterday afternoon i watched both back2back in an amazing special feature presentation doublebill.
It's simply sublime, what Richard Linkater and Julie Deply and Ethan Hawke have created. Sunrise is that once-in-lifetime unexpected connection you make with a beautiful foreign stranger. It has all that mid-nineties postmodern slacker vibe all over it, and it took place before we had the internet and cellphones and all. And they've got the whole yakatiyak thing going on. Both of them talk while walking through the quaint city of Vienna. But hey, words can be sexy without talking dirty. They promise to meet six months later but never exchange numbers or anything. Sunset then propels you nine years ahead, and their chemistry is still intact despite not having seen each other. First you learn the reason for their not meeting up, then they proceed as they did nine years before to talk about life, love, universe, God, governments, sex and each other. And while the times and the years have caught on their yearning for each other has not, both haunted and almost obsessed with that one magical night they spent with each other two years back. The long tracking shots and naturalistic dialouge here serve to further heighten the realism and verisimilitude. And its ending is on par with that of Casablanca. Watching both back to back enables you to see clearly the similarities and differences that have arose in the intervening nine years. And it's all completely and utterly real and believable, staged as a gorgeous poem without all the flaky romance. Both Deply and Hawke are extremely watchable. This is a deep intelligent musing on love and people by very talented film-makers. You'd be stupid not to catch it. Posted by lucasho @ 11/21/2004 10:17:00 pm
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Monday, November 15, 2004 |
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i kinda suck at badminton.
Posted by lucasho @ 11/15/2004 09:26:00 pm
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Sunday, November 07, 2004 |
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right now, i don't have anything to say. It's not that i have nothing on my mind. Trust me, i've got a head full of crap i'm dying to unload. Maybe such moments of speechlessness strikes me often but i never realise it, given the little amount of time i spend actually communicating, reaching out, yearning for anything that can and will afford my cold heart comfort.
But words are all i have. The establishment has done it again : successfully injecting and profusing an atmosphere of fear and menace in the psyche of the public. Security guards at all schools? What, as if our kids don't have enough to contend with given the increasing stress of having to do well enough to skip their 'O's. This, in addition to a whole gamut of fear-inducing measures that the powers that be have installed such as bag checks and security guards at mrt stations, and those special operations command androids walking around orchard road in their striking navy blue uniforms armed to the teeth with P226 pistols and carbines, can only serve to distract us from their unscrupulous schemes. Like the fact that the ministers and top civil servants will already have had their 10% pay cut reinstated. And that the NWC is still looking at a furthur protracted wage freeze, while the tax brackets are adjusted to be more regressive. It's all in the papers, keep your eyes peeled. And what of the whole Huang Na thing? God bless her soul, but is it all just a ploy to furthur perpetuate the myth that the china study mamas are helpless victims of their own fate, and that our nation state needs to support them in any way we can? Do we support the war on Iraq? Do we allow minors to borrow uncensored videos from our state-run libraries, while rigorously enforcing what is probably the world's most dichotomized movie ratings system? How do we justify random bag checks in the name of keeping it safe? Right now, i don't have anything to say. But words are all i have. "Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum."- 1984 , George Orwell Posted by lucasho @ 11/07/2004 09:05:00 pm
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