Would you burn out before the water fills your lungs?
Been inspired to try to update this blog more often (thus in keeping with the spirit of blogging) by my friend Weicong, who maintains a more regular blog of his own. "A blog of one's own" - very Virginia Woolf. Speaking of which, The Hours is scheduled to come to Singapore cinemas soon, and I really want to see if they adapted it well.
On Wednesday I watched both Catch Me If You Can and The Quiet American, both of which I really enjoyed. The combination made me think about the quality of lighting: there's something about the light in Catch that seems very 60s - it's slightly yellow saturated is my guess? Was the light really different back then, or is it that our memories yellow just like photos? Or do our memories yellow because photos yellow? And Quiet American has the familiar (to me) oversaturated colours of the tropics - it's easy to see how that oversaturated quality of the daytime sun wearies people, makes them retreat into indolence. Or is it just that I'm personally struck by ennui and inertia in a tropical locale that I associate the colours with inertia? Questions, questions. Chris Doyle did the cinematography for Quiet American and was brilliant, as always - there's a nice languid feel to the work, more like his work in In the Mood for Love or Liberty Heights (one of my favourite 'little' movies) than Chungking Express.
There was a really bad opinion column in the Life! section of the Straits Times (that's the local Singaporean paper) in which the writer opined that Chicago somehow represents a 'new' generation of amoral movie musicals, as compared to The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz, which seems to indicate more that she doesn't know anything about movie history. Ever heard of Guys and Dolls? There's nothing that infuriates me more than when people put forward this prelapsarian dream of a glorious, moral past - I believe people are no more (or less) immoral now than they've ever been...
Oh man I need TV when I got T. Rex...
On Wednesday I watched both Catch Me If You Can and The Quiet American, both of which I really enjoyed. The combination made me think about the quality of lighting: there's something about the light in Catch that seems very 60s - it's slightly yellow saturated is my guess? Was the light really different back then, or is it that our memories yellow just like photos? Or do our memories yellow because photos yellow? And Quiet American has the familiar (to me) oversaturated colours of the tropics - it's easy to see how that oversaturated quality of the daytime sun wearies people, makes them retreat into indolence. Or is it just that I'm personally struck by ennui and inertia in a tropical locale that I associate the colours with inertia? Questions, questions. Chris Doyle did the cinematography for Quiet American and was brilliant, as always - there's a nice languid feel to the work, more like his work in In the Mood for Love or Liberty Heights (one of my favourite 'little' movies) than Chungking Express.
There was a really bad opinion column in the Life! section of the Straits Times (that's the local Singaporean paper) in which the writer opined that Chicago somehow represents a 'new' generation of amoral movie musicals, as compared to The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz, which seems to indicate more that she doesn't know anything about movie history. Ever heard of Guys and Dolls? There's nothing that infuriates me more than when people put forward this prelapsarian dream of a glorious, moral past - I believe people are no more (or less) immoral now than they've ever been...
Oh man I need TV when I got T. Rex...
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