July 8, 2006 Archives
Singapore. Ah.
The action was happening in a house like this, oh so traditional Singapore/Southeast peninsula colonial arch. On the morning I had to catch my flight, I left my things in the lobby of the youth hostel on Joo Chiat and took a walk around Katong. Would not be surprised if the movie was actually shot in that neighborhood. I haven't been to other quarters of the city, but it would seem that many of the new areas are instead populated with square concrete residential towers that are made to house a lot of people (also shown in the movie).
I read an interview with Alessandra De Rossi, but can't figure out where. I need to find out in my newspaper archives. Maybe in the Straits Times. Vaguely, I recall reading something about maids, or someone talking about maids coming from abroad to provide much-needed help to families. It's a part of the culture over there (whether it's exclusively a Chinese practice, I don't know) to employ domestic helpers from the Philippines, Indonesia, most predominantly. You give away part of your salary to an extra hand, and spend more time at the office, etc. There is a Filipina lady who does the cleaning at our home with us, and who came to Canada with the family who employed her in Hong Kong. She worked for them for a while, and then moved on (got married, I think, but I never exactly asked) to do other things.
The Maid is an extremely recommendable (for the Singapore sightseeing too), and it plays again tomorrow (Sunday, July 9th) at 5:20PM in JA De Seve.
HK Magazine has a website. I've known about it for just a few months, but still... quite my favourite read, with the SCMP Sunday Magazine.
Half my family is leaving for HK tomorrow morning.
Fantasia came a long way on the road of respectability. Its programme for the first few years were so plenty of English/French mistakes in translation that some free weeklies were mischievous enough to publish a Top 10 lists in within their pages. XD
Once, I went to see the Cowboy Bebop feature, and the movie just stopped for a few minutes at the exact moment when the monorail derails and the bad guy confronts and shoots Spike Spiegel, who falls in the water. Tonight, they did not have a 35mm version of the film, so instead used the DVD, but mislabelled the DVDs, causing us to watch up to fifteen minutes of another Japanese feature, God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand, a movie that I was hesitating to see at the benefit of seeing Funky Forest (so between creepy horror flick and bizarre comedy, I went for the latter). Noone actually reacted, until a few seconds upon seeing the other movie's title appear. I thought it might've been a long trailer, but it made sense up to then, if one didn't know Tokyo Zombie, the manga, with the salaryman during the first minute or looking quite like a faux-zombie.
After a few minutes (with the fifteen minutes of the film shown - enough time to rush to the nearest videostore to rent the movies' DVD, hah!), the film was shown, and the audience given its warm milk: an hour and a half of sliced heads and martial arts and blood and gore (so, not different from Seven Swords yesterday XD).
On Thursday night, after the movie finished (a 150 minutes marathon), I jogged to Guy-Concordia metro, and near the gates, upon hearing the arriving metro, sprinted down the escalator, and entered the metro wagon head-first (the doors closed three to five seconds later). All this jogging does indeed pay off. XD I then catched the 211 by one minute, and my father graciously picked me up at the stop of the second bus (which was done for the day, as it was 1AM when I got to Beaconsfield).
There were only a handful of late movies I saw at Fantasia, non-car situation and suburban place of residency obliges. A notable film that finished well into midnight was The Eye, the 2002 hit that was premiered in Montreal at Fantasia '03, and, if I remember correctly, had only one showing during the whole festival.
It was pretty full, but far from being a full house. I remember having to squeeze between full rows of people in the middle top section. I sort of expect commercial HK movies to be fuller than usual, b/c, not only do they draw usual Fantasia fans, but they also draw people like me five years ago, who would go to Fantasia only for the occasional commercial Asian film. Similarly, I believe that My Sassy Girl @ Fantasia '03 was quite a hit too for non-genre Fantasia viewers (now, I'm having a doubt: did I dl it, or did I actually go to the theatre room, or both?).
My first Fantasia movie was in 1999, and an old Stephen Chow film. The HK flicks remain my favourite, and annual must-see. If I had been around last year, I would've certainly seen One Nite In Mongkok and Breaking News. So basically, Seven Swords did not escape that rule.