Last week's episode of Looking ended with Patrick and Kevin tentatively exchanging I Love Yous with each other. The screen fades to black as the synthesizer sounds of Yazoo's Only You begins. It's the type of sweet 80s pop that usually resonates for me, hearkening back to my childhood. But for some reason, this song felt particularly special. What did this song remind me of? What memories did it trigger? It took a few days for me to work it out, but finally, it came back to me:
This was one of the most perfect moments I've ever witnessed on television. Sweet as the kiss is in isolation, the impact of the kiss increases because of the drawn out sexual tension of the previous two seasons, as well as because of the fact that it was the warmest moment of an otherwise (brilliantly) uncomfortable show. It just warms my heart.
I've been enjoying this season of Looking - it just gets better and better - but it's not there yet. Let's hope the final episodes bring everything to a climax.
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Tuesday, 10 March 2015
Paris is Burning
If ever there was a perfect snapshot in time and place in the world, Paris is Burning was it. This amazing documentary captures a point in time in queer history, showing the world the exuberance, the passion, the struggles, and most affectingly, the vulnerability of the drag community of the late 80s New York. It taught, and continues to teach, the rest of us about balls, vogueing, shade, reading, Houses, and above all else, what the defiant sense of community looks like.
And like the period and characters it documents, Paris is Burning too feels short on time. Its brisk 71 minute length leaves you salivating for more of this world and its characters. The stars shine brightly and the flames burn intensely, but all too quickly and before their time. Nothing encapsulates that feeling more than this shot of Venus Xtravanganza.
By itself, it's a beautiful image, a wondrous snapshot of a person at a time and place. That defiant face and pose. The fashion. The graffiti. That boombox, which not only captures the time period but also symbolizes Venus's (and the other characters') voice that announces to the world that it must be heard.
Throughout the film, Venus, and many of the other characters, have been framed either intimately in private or as part of a group shot at the ball. The private shots expose their personal histories, fears and vulnerabilities. The group shots showcase the fabulous rambunctiousness of the balls and the solidarity and community of the Houses. So when scenes are later filmed in public, these characters, on the one hand, are reintegrated into the outside world, announcing that they too are citizens of this world. But on the other hand, these shots are also a graphic reminder that while they can build walls and Houses around themselves for protection, they too must brave the real world.
So here is Venus, outside in the real world. This twilight shot, by itself, may suggest that, between the harsh light of day and the foreboding shadows of night, there is some beauty in Venus' world. That beautiful pink sunset behind her captures the love, beauty, and perhaps the vulnerability, that she embodies, qualities that befit the goddess after which she has named herself.
But alas, upon the narration of Venus' death, it's not just a sunset that we see in this shot - we are witnessing the twilight of Venus's story. Like the tip of her cigarette, her life shines briefly before her fate draws near, her life shining briefly. In the foreground she defiantly draws her final breath, as in the background, her world is burning and scorching the sky.
And like the period and characters it documents, Paris is Burning too feels short on time. Its brisk 71 minute length leaves you salivating for more of this world and its characters. The stars shine brightly and the flames burn intensely, but all too quickly and before their time. Nothing encapsulates that feeling more than this shot of Venus Xtravanganza.
By itself, it's a beautiful image, a wondrous snapshot of a person at a time and place. That defiant face and pose. The fashion. The graffiti. That boombox, which not only captures the time period but also symbolizes Venus's (and the other characters') voice that announces to the world that it must be heard.
Throughout the film, Venus, and many of the other characters, have been framed either intimately in private or as part of a group shot at the ball. The private shots expose their personal histories, fears and vulnerabilities. The group shots showcase the fabulous rambunctiousness of the balls and the solidarity and community of the Houses. So when scenes are later filmed in public, these characters, on the one hand, are reintegrated into the outside world, announcing that they too are citizens of this world. But on the other hand, these shots are also a graphic reminder that while they can build walls and Houses around themselves for protection, they too must brave the real world.
So here is Venus, outside in the real world. This twilight shot, by itself, may suggest that, between the harsh light of day and the foreboding shadows of night, there is some beauty in Venus' world. That beautiful pink sunset behind her captures the love, beauty, and perhaps the vulnerability, that she embodies, qualities that befit the goddess after which she has named herself.
But alas, upon the narration of Venus' death, it's not just a sunset that we see in this shot - we are witnessing the twilight of Venus's story. Like the tip of her cigarette, her life shines briefly before her fate draws near, her life shining briefly. In the foreground she defiantly draws her final breath, as in the background, her world is burning and scorching the sky.
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
The Sound of Music
How do you solve a problem like choosing the best shot from a movie? How do you find one image that best represents a movie? In only the rarest of movies will one shot be designed to be, or over time grows into being, THE definitive image. Movies by their nature celebrate the beauty of multiple shots in successive motion. Sequences scroll by, images build upon images, dialogue layers over songs and music. The beauty and power of that one crescendo moment is really the cumulative result of numerous previous moments.
I find that there are always so many beautiful shots that define any movie, including The Sound of Music. So many shots and sequences have become iconic and ingrained into the collective consciousness. The amazing helicopter shot zooming in on Maria as she sings the opening lines of the movie. The children on Maria's bed during My Favourite Things. All of the images from Do Re Mi.
The beauty of this excellent HMWYBS series is that it allows us to revisit movies, to rediscover what drew us in in the first place and to allow us to find new hidden gems to be thankful for. What is the best shot may be the best shot always, or it may only be the best shot right now, changing in the future.
Growing up, I only watched this film on television. Punctuated by advertising, I could only stay up until around the wedding scenes. My memories are mostly of the joyful first half, full of song and dance. And while the more serious, Nazi filled second half gives the film a lot of weight, it will always be the infectious exuberance of the von Trapp family, led by Maria, that fills my heart.
So it was perfect that, upon this viewing, I discovered this glorious reaction shot:
Within the film, this shot captures Liesl's glee upon experiencing her first kiss with the seventeen-going-on-eighteen messenger boy. But that same unbridled glee could also belong to Maria in her celebration of life and music, or the children upon learning to sing and being able to play again, or the Captain upon watching his children during the Lonely Goatherd performance.
For many of us, it's also the same unbridled joy that we get from doing over favourite things, listening to our favourite songs and watching our favourite films. This shot may not be the most beautiful or well known from the movie, but it's the one that best encapsulates the run-into-the-rain-and-jump-for-joy-in-your-wet-clothes kind of glee that I feel when I watch it.
I find that there are always so many beautiful shots that define any movie, including The Sound of Music. So many shots and sequences have become iconic and ingrained into the collective consciousness. The amazing helicopter shot zooming in on Maria as she sings the opening lines of the movie. The children on Maria's bed during My Favourite Things. All of the images from Do Re Mi.
The beauty of this excellent HMWYBS series is that it allows us to revisit movies, to rediscover what drew us in in the first place and to allow us to find new hidden gems to be thankful for. What is the best shot may be the best shot always, or it may only be the best shot right now, changing in the future.
Growing up, I only watched this film on television. Punctuated by advertising, I could only stay up until around the wedding scenes. My memories are mostly of the joyful first half, full of song and dance. And while the more serious, Nazi filled second half gives the film a lot of weight, it will always be the infectious exuberance of the von Trapp family, led by Maria, that fills my heart.
So it was perfect that, upon this viewing, I discovered this glorious reaction shot:
Within the film, this shot captures Liesl's glee upon experiencing her first kiss with the seventeen-going-on-eighteen messenger boy. But that same unbridled glee could also belong to Maria in her celebration of life and music, or the children upon learning to sing and being able to play again, or the Captain upon watching his children during the Lonely Goatherd performance.
For many of us, it's also the same unbridled joy that we get from doing over favourite things, listening to our favourite songs and watching our favourite films. This shot may not be the most beautiful or well known from the movie, but it's the one that best encapsulates the run-into-the-rain-and-jump-for-joy-in-your-wet-clothes kind of glee that I feel when I watch it.
Friday, 26 December 2014
Endings and beginnings
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!
No, I am not announcing the end of my blog despite no posts for months. It's been a long and busy year, moving to Bangkok, enjoying the trailing spouse lifestyle, dabbing in some NGO work, then progressing to the most busy and stressful job so far in my career; being asked to be a best man at the last minute; travelling around the world for work and play; forging new ground in the second year of being with the love of my life; and somewhere in there finally starting a blog about two of the passions of my life: film and television.
I will continue blogging next year but I have mostly been kept dormant for the last few months because of some intense work periods. But I had to post about one thing before 2014 came to a close - the ending of the partnership between seminal Australian film reviewers Margaret and David.
Their on-screen partnership has lasted for 28 years, as long as I've been alive and longer and more fruitful than most marriages. It's ironic that although their subject matter is film, it is television that has cultivated their fame and sustained their cult for so long. This is another example of television being the unique medium that allows people, like Margaret and David, to enter our homes over weeks, months and even years, projecting as much passion, humour, anger and vulnerability as we might share in person with our very own friends.
Growing up, Magaret and David were my windows to the film world, my window to both the objectivity and subjectivity of film criticism, my window to the souls and visions of filmmakers. They were the aunt and uncle who could passionately, constructively and respectfully disagree, and it didn't mean the end of their relationship. In fact, it only strengthened it. I didn't have those kinds of role models growing up.
In my youthful days as a wannabe film director, I didn't just envision film festival and awards acceptance speeches, I also envisioned intense debates between David and Margaret about my future films. I wanted them to debate my films, to disagree on my films (I knew David would not like my shakey-cam shots, so Margaret would always give me the higher ratings). I'm quite saddened that there won't be a generation of filmmakers that will have that as part of their dream, and there won't be a whole generation of filmgoers who compare their film opinions to the David and Margaret scale.
Although my film future was not to be (if only talent was not necessary to succeed), their presence remained throughout the years. One of my most cherished memories is their review of Khoa Do's The Finished People. Sometimes they are criticised (rightly or wrongly) for their soft ratings for Australian films, but this film demonstrated exactly why that soft touch was needed. It's a lovely film full of heart and poignancy, but would not have received a fair audience without David and Margaret as advocates. In Australia, very rarely do we hear sympathetic stories of these characters from the Vietnamese enclaves of Cabramatta, who are trapped within vicious visibility circles of voiceless children within a migrant world, hidden behind a multicultural story of drugs and cuisines, safely hidden from the view of middle class Australia.
Based on this review, I took my mum to a faraway arthouse cinema to see the film - it was ironic that although this was a film about the people living in the area that this film captured had to go so far away to watch it. Luckily in this case, the 50 minute train ride home was fertile ground for discussions about the film. My mum's comments afterwards was the most I have heard her say for any film. Living in the area, she could see the locations, the familiar settings, and the stories behind the faces of the homeless children she saw.
In this review, and countless others, Margaret's and David's love and enthusiasm for Australian film, and film in general, never wavered. And without their reviews, I don't think I would have had that train ride with my mother. Film clubs around Australia might not have flourished like they do. And this blog might never have existed. It's been a great 28 years, and I wish them the best of luck in the future.
No, I am not announcing the end of my blog despite no posts for months. It's been a long and busy year, moving to Bangkok, enjoying the trailing spouse lifestyle, dabbing in some NGO work, then progressing to the most busy and stressful job so far in my career; being asked to be a best man at the last minute; travelling around the world for work and play; forging new ground in the second year of being with the love of my life; and somewhere in there finally starting a blog about two of the passions of my life: film and television.
I will continue blogging next year but I have mostly been kept dormant for the last few months because of some intense work periods. But I had to post about one thing before 2014 came to a close - the ending of the partnership between seminal Australian film reviewers Margaret and David.
Their on-screen partnership has lasted for 28 years, as long as I've been alive and longer and more fruitful than most marriages. It's ironic that although their subject matter is film, it is television that has cultivated their fame and sustained their cult for so long. This is another example of television being the unique medium that allows people, like Margaret and David, to enter our homes over weeks, months and even years, projecting as much passion, humour, anger and vulnerability as we might share in person with our very own friends.
Growing up, Magaret and David were my windows to the film world, my window to both the objectivity and subjectivity of film criticism, my window to the souls and visions of filmmakers. They were the aunt and uncle who could passionately, constructively and respectfully disagree, and it didn't mean the end of their relationship. In fact, it only strengthened it. I didn't have those kinds of role models growing up.
In my youthful days as a wannabe film director, I didn't just envision film festival and awards acceptance speeches, I also envisioned intense debates between David and Margaret about my future films. I wanted them to debate my films, to disagree on my films (I knew David would not like my shakey-cam shots, so Margaret would always give me the higher ratings). I'm quite saddened that there won't be a generation of filmmakers that will have that as part of their dream, and there won't be a whole generation of filmgoers who compare their film opinions to the David and Margaret scale.
Although my film future was not to be (if only talent was not necessary to succeed), their presence remained throughout the years. One of my most cherished memories is their review of Khoa Do's The Finished People. Sometimes they are criticised (rightly or wrongly) for their soft ratings for Australian films, but this film demonstrated exactly why that soft touch was needed. It's a lovely film full of heart and poignancy, but would not have received a fair audience without David and Margaret as advocates. In Australia, very rarely do we hear sympathetic stories of these characters from the Vietnamese enclaves of Cabramatta, who are trapped within vicious visibility circles of voiceless children within a migrant world, hidden behind a multicultural story of drugs and cuisines, safely hidden from the view of middle class Australia.
Based on this review, I took my mum to a faraway arthouse cinema to see the film - it was ironic that although this was a film about the people living in the area that this film captured had to go so far away to watch it. Luckily in this case, the 50 minute train ride home was fertile ground for discussions about the film. My mum's comments afterwards was the most I have heard her say for any film. Living in the area, she could see the locations, the familiar settings, and the stories behind the faces of the homeless children she saw.
In this review, and countless others, Margaret's and David's love and enthusiasm for Australian film, and film in general, never wavered. And without their reviews, I don't think I would have had that train ride with my mother. Film clubs around Australia might not have flourished like they do. And this blog might never have existed. It's been a great 28 years, and I wish them the best of luck in the future.
Tuesday, 2 September 2014
The Matrix
This post is the final post from The Film Experience's excellent Hit Me With Your Best Shot series.
In 1999 I was a newly formed teenager, venturing out from the PG action movies and comedies that my family watched and into the world of watching movies without my parents. I don't remember much about how I got to to my movie seat, dragging my sister to the cinema. I can't remember what the marketing was, or whether it was talked about but that I remember having the urge to see this movie called The Matrix (what was the matrix anyway?). And it blew my mind. Whoa indeed.
One of the main things that blew my mind was the cinematography which expertly captured the choreography. Right from the opening fight between Trinity and the police until the final fight scenes involving air stunts and bullet-time effects, I knew this was something I had never seen before. I had seen aerial stunt work in the Asian martial arts films before, but never so polished and never so graceful (I would be even more spoiled the following years with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon etc). My impression of the choreography was so fluid and so immersive that I subconsciously incorporated it into my dreams. I recall having vivid "anxiety" dreams where I was chased (by witches I think, probably all played by Angelica Huston), first jumping through the air onto roofs, then running through apartments and houses like Neo in the final act, before escaping through the backyard and into the forest behind, gliding through branches and treetops like I was Zhang Yiyi finding my own Mount Wudang (I was not manly enough to be Chow Yun-Fat).
This was my overriding visual memory of the film, and it was such a blur of a kinetic experience, I found it difficult to find a singular favourite shot. It seemed a betrayal of these sequences to single out one shot, so I "settled" on one from a more static sequence:
Kansas has indeed going bye-bye, but instead of entering the technicolour world of Oz, we've visual regressed to a whole new world of black and green. Everything here is coded in dehumanising green digits, pulsing with electrical energy. The shot builds on the recurring motif of green digits, first seen in a line on Neo's computer, then as part of phone numbers that dial into the Matrix, and then as a jumble of digits on Tank's computer. Finally, here, Neo experiences the wonder of seeing the world anew, seeing the Matrix for the digitally programmed world that it truly is. It's a moment of triumph and revelation, the resurrected messiah empowered with knowledge and understanding.
This shot speaks to me because I recall a similar experience from high school. No, not the messiah part, but more the geeky understanding of the world part. Upon first learning about the existence of waves - sound waves, light waves, colour spectrums, electrical waves etc - I wandered out of the classroom, inspecting the world anew. I saw waves coming out from all directions, from trees, from tables, from humans. This was an exciting world, much more interesting and dynamic that what I could see with just my eyes.
To this day I sometimes imagine the waves radiating around me, data sent wirelessly from routers and mobile devices, and waves of music and movies travelling through optic fibres and air molecules to my laptop. For me, this shot encapsulates what the Matrix is all about. It reminds me of the world around us, pulsing with hidden concepts and energies, invisible to the naked eye, but easily awakened by our own knowledge, understanding and imagination.
In 1999 I was a newly formed teenager, venturing out from the PG action movies and comedies that my family watched and into the world of watching movies without my parents. I don't remember much about how I got to to my movie seat, dragging my sister to the cinema. I can't remember what the marketing was, or whether it was talked about but that I remember having the urge to see this movie called The Matrix (what was the matrix anyway?). And it blew my mind. Whoa indeed.
One of the main things that blew my mind was the cinematography which expertly captured the choreography. Right from the opening fight between Trinity and the police until the final fight scenes involving air stunts and bullet-time effects, I knew this was something I had never seen before. I had seen aerial stunt work in the Asian martial arts films before, but never so polished and never so graceful (I would be even more spoiled the following years with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon etc). My impression of the choreography was so fluid and so immersive that I subconsciously incorporated it into my dreams. I recall having vivid "anxiety" dreams where I was chased (by witches I think, probably all played by Angelica Huston), first jumping through the air onto roofs, then running through apartments and houses like Neo in the final act, before escaping through the backyard and into the forest behind, gliding through branches and treetops like I was Zhang Yiyi finding my own Mount Wudang (I was not manly enough to be Chow Yun-Fat).
This was my overriding visual memory of the film, and it was such a blur of a kinetic experience, I found it difficult to find a singular favourite shot. It seemed a betrayal of these sequences to single out one shot, so I "settled" on one from a more static sequence:
Kansas has indeed going bye-bye, but instead of entering the technicolour world of Oz, we've visual regressed to a whole new world of black and green. Everything here is coded in dehumanising green digits, pulsing with electrical energy. The shot builds on the recurring motif of green digits, first seen in a line on Neo's computer, then as part of phone numbers that dial into the Matrix, and then as a jumble of digits on Tank's computer. Finally, here, Neo experiences the wonder of seeing the world anew, seeing the Matrix for the digitally programmed world that it truly is. It's a moment of triumph and revelation, the resurrected messiah empowered with knowledge and understanding.
This shot speaks to me because I recall a similar experience from high school. No, not the messiah part, but more the geeky understanding of the world part. Upon first learning about the existence of waves - sound waves, light waves, colour spectrums, electrical waves etc - I wandered out of the classroom, inspecting the world anew. I saw waves coming out from all directions, from trees, from tables, from humans. This was an exciting world, much more interesting and dynamic that what I could see with just my eyes.
To this day I sometimes imagine the waves radiating around me, data sent wirelessly from routers and mobile devices, and waves of music and movies travelling through optic fibres and air molecules to my laptop. For me, this shot encapsulates what the Matrix is all about. It reminds me of the world around us, pulsing with hidden concepts and energies, invisible to the naked eye, but easily awakened by our own knowledge, understanding and imagination.
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