Review: SPL: 殺破狼 / Sha Po Lang (2005)

Hong Kong Detective Inspector Chan (Simon Yam) has had a bad run. After his witness against triad boss Wong Po (Sammo Hung) has been assassinated, he become the guardian for the witness' child and finds out that he has inoperable brain cancer. On the eve of Chan's retirement, his replacement, D.I. Ma (Donnie Yen), arrives to find that Chan and his team are framing Wong Po for a murder.

The plot for this modern crime thriller is a bit wobbly (the attempt to frame Wong Po is ludicrous) and cliched. However, two factors that make up for the clumsy plot. The first are the strong performances by the three leads: Donnie Yen as a very charismatic young inspector; Simon Yam as the grim vengeful officer; and Sammo Hung, who normally plays the comic roles with Jackie Chan, as the frightening triad boss. The second are the fight scenes, done by the actors without any wire work and minimal special effects. For martial arts fans, the encounter between Ma and triad assassin Jack (Jing Wu) in a back street is a highlight.

Cantonese with English subtitles.

3 out of 5 stars.

Review: The Prestige (2006)

In the beginning of the 20th century in London, two magicians vie to create the most spectacular illusions. Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) comes from an aristocratic family, and he feigns an American accent and background to avoid embarrassing his family with his stage ambitions. His rival is Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), who comes from more humble beginnings. After the death of Angier's wife, the two magicians become enemies because Angier suspects Borden's role in her death. Over the years, the two men create more and more spectacular illusions, culminating in 'The Transported Man'.

The story, based on a novel of the same title by Christopher Priest, is told in two parallel threads. In one thread, Borden is facing the gallows for murder of Angier, is told from the perspective of Borden and Angier's illusion engineer, Cutter (Michael Caine). The other stream traces the careers of the two magicians and their escalating rivalry.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan and writer Jonathan Nolan structure their film like a magic trick, where the audience is drawn into the trick (the promise), the expected happens (the turn) and a surprise is revealed at the end (the prestige). However, they have provided only sketchy information about the two protagonists, which makes it hard to understand the origin and depth of their animosity, and also reduces the impact of the climax. For science fiction fans, one unexpected delight is the appearance of electrical engineer Nikolai Tesla (David Bowie) who provides Angier with a device for the ultimate illusion.

3 out of 5 stars.

Review: Palabras encadenadas / Killing Words (2003)

Laura (Goya Toledo), a child psychiatrist, is abducted and imprisoned in an underground room by Ramón (Darío Grandinetti), a serial killer. In return for her life and freedom, he forces her to play word games. In a parallel narrative, police detectives, lead by Comisario Espinosa (Fernando Guillén) and Inspector Sánchez (Eric Bonicatto) question Ramón regarding Laura's disappearance.
As the title suggests (and unlike the lurid disk cover), this psychological thriller creates a lot of suspense using suggestion and judicious editing; there is very little violence or gore. The events in the two parallel narratives track each other and lead you to believe you have kept up with the story until the twist at very end.
Spanish with English sub-titles.
3 out of 5 stars.

Review: 头文字D / Tau man ji D / Initial D (2005)

After street racers hear that a nondescript young tofu delivery man, Takumi (Jay Chou), can drive his father's (Anthony Wong) old Toyota AE86 at incredible speeds down Mount Akina, they challenge him for the honour of the fastest time. Like any young man, Takumi has more pressing issues to resolve first: his girl friend Natsuki (Anne Suzuki) is going away for the school holidays and his father is a drunk.
Adapted from the Japanese manga and anime series of the same name, this Hong Kong - Japan co-production avoids the usual issues that bedevil manga adaptations (stilted acting and a lot of exposition) and presents a workable coming-of-age story for Takumi. It is leaven with some humour (mainly from Takumi's best friend, Itsuki (Chapman To)) and spiced with a lot of drift races. The racing scenes down the narrow mountain road, a combination of live action and CGI (what isn't, these days?), are varied and well-directed, and the climatic race is quite exciting.
Cantonese with English sub-titles.
3 out of 5 stars.

Review: À la folie... pas du tout / He loves me ... he loves me not (2002)

A young art student, Angélique (Audrey Tautou) becomes infatuated with the Loïc (Samuel Le Bihan), a respected cardiologist, who is married to Rachel (Isabelle Carré). When Loïc does not reciprocate (he is barely aware of her), Angélique plots increasingly desperate and violent ways to separate him from his wife.
From watching recent French films, you might think that erotomania, a delusional belief that another person is in love with you, is a common disease. Coincidentally, one of the stars of this film, Isabelle Carré, goes on to play the main role in a 2007 film, Anna M. about a woman who becomes infatuated with a doctor. Doctors can be so lucky!
What's interesting about this film is casting the wide-eyed Audrey Tautou as the delusional Angélique; she looks so innocent and trusting that you can imagine people believing her point of view. The other interesting aspect is to tell the story from both Angélique's and Loïc's points of view, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps, left deliberately by writers Laetitia Colombani and Caroline Thivelin, in each other's story. Other than that, the story follows a predictable arc.
French with English sub-titles.
3 out of 5 stars.

(Re)Learning Chinese and reading 米菲在雪中 / Miffy in the Snow

I didn't care about learning Chinese when I was a kid because it was tedious to copy Chinese characters from the blackboard or textbooks. Another difficulty for me, more familiar with English, was that I couldn't map sounds to characters. As a kid, I simply got bored and tuned out.

Fast forward to the 21st century and I'm having another go at learning Chinese. This time around, I've found out the stroke order, which enables me to count strokes correctly and find characters in a dictionary on paper or online (e.g. MDBG allows you to find a character by radical and stroke count or by drawing the character). Mandarin pronunciation has been standardised using pinyin romanisation, so I can (sort of) associate a sound with a character via pinyin.

(Knowing the representation of a sound in pinyin lets me type Chinese characters using Windows' East Asian Input Method Editor (IME). Here are instructions for enabling this feature in Microsoft Vista).

Equipped with a little more knowledge, I challenged myself to read '米菲在雪中 / Miffy in the Snow', which I borrowed from the local library. It's a 32-page bilingual picture book, where Miffy the girl rabbit plays in the snow and kindly makes a house for a bird. It took me a long time (three weeks!) to read it and in the process, I learnt or recalled some things about Chinese:

• Chinese uses classifiers or measure words for different types of objects in a sentence. For example, the phrase 'a little bird' is '一只小鸟' / 'yi1 zhi1 xiao3niao3' / 'a (classifier for bird) little bird'. It's akin to but not exactly like measure words in English (e.g. 'a mob of sheep').
• Some sequences of Chinese characters represent common phrases and only make sense when written together. For instance, 'carrot' is '胡萝卜' / 'hu2​luo2​bo5' but if you translated each character separately, you'd get a weird expression like 'reckless turnip prophesy'.
• Stroke order is critical for finding characters. I couldn't find '还' / hai2 / also, not realising that 辶 was written after 不.

I borrowed another Chinese picture book from the library; I hope I'll get through this one faster!

SF on Nine's Digital Go! channel

Channel Nine launched its second digital channel, Go! last Sunday (9 Aug 2009). It is pitched as an entertainment channel which I hope means that it will be possible to watch a series without it being rescheduled or interrupted by sport or other events.

Wednesday's schedule (named GO BEYOND) has three SF-themed series back-to-back: [the laboriously named] Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Fringe (Rea G. should be pleased!) and Eleventh Hour. Nine screened the first episode of each series yesterday, so I guess it is repeating each of the series.

Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

After the end of the first film, good Transformers led by Optimus Prime join forces with locals to fight off more bad Transformers, who are looking for a power source called 'The Cube' hidden somewhere on Earth.

It's a Michael Bay film, so there's lots of action and flashy camera work but forget plot and characters. The action scenes are really disappointing because they are so grossly over-edited and a lot of shots are prematurely cut before they are finished, and you never feel the impact of any action.

The leads from the first film reprise their roles: Shia Le Beouf does what he can with his limited role while Megan Fox appears in a lot of embarrassing shots draped over motorbikes while wearing lip gloss and hot pants. John Turturro seems to have a lot of fun as the paranoid ex-government agent.

A struggle, even for popcorn effects and action flick.

1 out of 5 stars

Holiday in Singapore and Malaysia

We took ourselves on a three week holiday in July '09 to visit my relatives in Singapore and Malaysia. Planning started in December '08 and initially I wanted to go over Easter but I couldn't get leave until the July school holidays. As it turned out, the company I worked for decided to close its engineering group in Melbourne by the end of June, so my leave in July was permanent.

Singapore city was pretty much as I remembered it from my last visit in '04, when I attended Yung's wedding. If anything, it's greener than it was before and crowds seem less hurried. We took it easy and took the kids to the Science Centre and Wild Wild Wet water park, and wandered around Orchard Road. As book lovers, we had to visit the local Kinokuniya. Yung and Li-Yah spent a day with us around town, and we also visited them and my in-laws in their very nice condo.

Then we took a bus to visit my parents in Kuala Kangsar, a town in the state of Perak. The town now has a very nice Olympic-length swimming pool but the rest of the town is still pretty quiet, much as I remember it. We lazed in my parents' home for a week while mum busied herself keeping us fed.

We wanted to take Dad with us to Alor Setar in Kedah, where Lung lives, but found out that there weren't any direct buses (they stop in Butterworth and we'd have to change buses for the next leg) and taxies weren't big enough. In the end, Mum hired a minivan and driver, and Lung kindly paid the cost of the journey.

Lung and his family showed us around town. Kedah is rice growing state, and we visited the quite interesting Paddy Museum with its detailed full sized diorama near Gunung Keriang (I think).

While based in Alor Setar, we spent a couple of nights in Langkawi island. We took the ferry from Kuala Kedah to Kuah, and rented a basic room next to Cenang Beach. The kids really liked the idea of walking out from the room onto the beach and spent hours in the sand and waves. The water was mild and smooth, and the beach didn't have many visitors since it was the middle of the week, so it was very pleasant.

Our stay in Langkawi was short but we managed to visit Underwater World, Durian Perangin waterfall and the Wildlife Park.

We returned to Alor Setar and took a bus from there to Kuala Lumpur to visit my cousins. Kooi Sim organized an unexpectedly large dinner with her family and the kids got to sample even more Chinese and Malaysian food.

We left Malaysia from KLIA, transited Singapore, and took the overnight flight back to Melbourne. The kids stayed up all night with the onboard computer games and fell asleep in the taxi ride home.

Many thanks to everyone for hosting us in Singapore and Malaysia! It has been a great experience and holiday, and I definitely plan to make a return visit with the family.

Caffé Corso

While our car was out of action, we walked to Clayton and found that Caffé Corso was one café that was open on a windy Sunday afternoon.

Details: Caffé Corso, 298 Clayton Road, Clayton. +613 9544 7750