2 posts tagged “movies”

The Antonioni retrospective has sparked within me an interest in 50s and 60s cinema. This interest is by no means epicurist, but rather a childlike wonder at the alterity and enduring qualities of the times. This has been in tandem with another new interest in 18th and 19th Century England, what with my reading The Importance of Being Earnest and Sense and Sensibility. And now, I'm tuning into Turner Classic Movies like nobody's business! The channel is quite a treasure, if anyone should care to tune in every now and then. Beyond the value of screening classic movies, TCM screens them daily by themes. For instance, today they will broadcast movies by Stanley Kubrick, starting the day with a documentary on the director. Tomorrow their listings might include the filmography of Robert Wagner. The last few movies of the day will have both Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in their cast, then segue into a day of Natalie Wood movies. This day will end with West Side Story, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, and proceed into the following day of Richard Beymer works. Marvelous!

I am juggling my movie-watching with another very time-consuming endeavour: reading. I finished Sense and Sensibility in the last 2 weeks, and now I must get started on Penn Reading Project's pick-of-the-year, Your Inner Fish, a book that all freshmen have been assigned to read and that we will discuss in clusters during orientation.

Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics)

Jane Austen

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Neil Shubin

This week has probably been the most eventful and potentially cathartic one this year. I say cathartic because exposure to the arts supposedly purges one's soul of negative worldly emotions and bestows upon one an immediate ecstasy, even if only spiritually. I don't know if I've benefiited in that manner, but I certainly have been absorbed into an effortless trance when understanding the works of art.

On thursday morning I wandered round Cathay, a very puzzling building, though I quite liked the quirky, indie-style tenants in there. More importantly, I watched what is probably one of my favouritest movies EVER, The Black Book.

Zwartboek

On friday night I went to the Singapore Art Museum to catch a screening of esteemed Franco-Swiss director Jean Luc Godard, done by Alain Fleischer. The documentary certainly exalted Godard's enterprise to a very inaccessible art. When he talked about his thoughts, when his contemporaries discussed poltiics and cinema and history, when members of his round-table discussions broached questions, it basically seemed that no one could ever be on that same wavelength. So that documentary was quite demoralizing for a while, and it made me feel superbly shallow. But I was very much comforted when I discovered that one of Godard's films, Breathless, was the very movie that got me hooked on European films in the first place! Yes, I remember that evening after the last paper of my first Common Test in J1, I went to the NLB and picked the DVD because it just so happened to pique my interest. Anyway, though it wasn't my first French film (that was Wasabi, followed by The Spanish Apartment), it carried certain properties that were so different from the movies that I was accustomed to at that time. The free-spirited relationships, the emphasis on everyday conversation (with the camera following the characters down the street, a la Before Sunset), the realism that the people had in their lives as they made important decisions in a bedroom as the man dresses up and smokes and cigar and the woman in her underwear throws a pillor at him, but careless ones while negotiating with someone holding a gun - yeah my intro to Euro convention.

On Sunday morning I spent 2 hours in the Asian Civilizations Museum, skimming through the West Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia exhibits and spending a hour in the new Viet Nam exhibit, YOU know, the product of a collaboration with the National Museum of Vietnam to mark the 35th anniversary of strong ties between our two countries.

Viet Nam

After that I watched Comrade Don Camillo at the Arts House. I think Giovanni Guareschi is pure genius! Really, more genius that other people befitting of a "sheer genius" commendation. To create characters like that amidst the political landscape of that time, and to imbue them with such caricatured and stereotypical traits that manifest SO COMICALLY, and to think of such outlandish events but connect them in a very understandable storyline.. like seriously, I wish I was able to watch the other four Don Camillo movies.

Don Camillo

And then after that I went for Sotong Fest, a gathering for all incoming freshmen at UPenn, which lasted from 6.30pm to 11.30pm. Solid. I think, I'm gonna be fine there :)