The Meet Cute

"The Meet Cute"

I learnt this new phrase while watching that amazingly awful romantic comedy The Holiday en route to London three weeks ago. The Holiday reaches new depths of mediocrity with the scenes between Cameron Diaz and Jude Law (gorgeous people but ARGH, noxious plot!) but at least had a few charming bits during the Kate Winslet scenes. (But of course I also think Kate Winslet can do no wrong. hee.)

Anyhow, Kate Winslet plays poor melancholy Iris, a magazine writer nursing her pummelled heart. Her ex-boyfriend is that kind of cad that still wants to remain friends but keeps things so fuzzy that you are always wondering hopefully if he still likes you and wants to get back together. So Iris flies all the way to California to escape her crummy life.

Anyhow in the Hollywood neighbourhood, Iris befriends Old Screenwriter because he has lost his way home and she decides to kindly offer him a ride. That's when he tells her about "The Meet Cute"

According to good old Wikipedia:
"In the film The Holiday (2006), Eli Wallach's character Arthur Abbott (a Hollywood screenwriter) described a meet-cute by saying "Say a man and a woman both need something to sleep in and both go to the same men's pajama department. The man says to the salesman, I just need bottoms, and the woman says, I just need a top. They look at each other and that's the meet-cute." "

In other words, it's one of the conventions of romantic comedy films where you have the contrived encounter of two potential romantic partners in unusual or comic circumstances. During a "meet-cute", scriptwriters often create a humorous sense of awkwardness between the two potential partners by depicting an initial clash of personalities or beliefs, an embarrassing situation, or by introducing a comical misunderstanding or mistaken identity situation.

So if screen mimicks reality to some extent, I wonder how many of the couples I know began with a Meet Cute in real life?

Love Actually?

Last night, we were wondering about what was the last romantic movie we enjoyed. There was some bantering about Love Actually, Pride and Prejudice, When Harry Met Sally.

Curiously, I never realized how few of those romance movies I actually love. I liked some of them not because I found them particularly romantic. In fact, my favourite scenes were those with that hard-edge of realism. Maybe it’s my inner cynic – heh.

My favourite story in Love Actually was the morose one about near-adultery - where Alan Rickman reduces Kristen Scott-Thompson to wrenching sobs over a Joni Mitchell CD. I loved Before Sunrise and Before Sunset not because I thought the relationship in there was cool – but because I liked Julie Delpy’s awkward burst of anger as she confronts Ethan Hawke about how he had left her behind when he got married. I liked 2046 for the way it painted the ugliness of secret longings and selfish love – it was fitting to see the Tony Leung character alone and morose at the end of the whole show.

Okay the exceptions - I liked High Fidelity because it was …charming. Or rather John Cusack is charming, haha. I also liked Roman Holiday because it was just sweet, old-fashioned and cute. Who can say no to Audrey on a Vespa and Gregory Peck in a suit? Gregory Peck. 1950s Man in 1950s suit, Sigh.

The one fairly recent serious romantic movie I like is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I thought the ending was quite genuinely romantic. It was a screen relationship that I actually thought was worth rooting for. The whole movie cleverly used the metaphor of a memory-erasing technology to show how a beautiful, realistic love story has to be built upon remembering the good and the bad about each other. It was quite sweet to see the two leads tentatively agree to fall in love with each other again after reliving all the best and worst memories of their relationship.

I guess I am generally picky about films- especially when I have to shell out $8 for them. J Films that have managed to grab me successfully over the past few years all had to be pure fun (X-men, Batman Begins), clever or at least brutally realistic (Hotel Rwanda. The Constant Gardener).

On a tangent – I realize all my favourite “clever” films used a fantastical device to make a strangely grounded, frank observation about the things that we do to each other and to ourselves: American Beauty, Unbreakable, Eternal Sunshine, Memento, 2046, The Matrix (only the first) and now The Prestige. It is quite funny how appropriate analogies and metaphors are in talking about the human condition!

Currently reading: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Thinking of reading: John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener, Persepolis 2

the prestige: vengeance and the death of self

I watched The Prestige last week for director Chris Nolan and writer Jon Nolan. The Nolan brothers’ Memento is one of my fave movies of all time. Christopher and Jon Nolan must be an interesting pair of brothers: their work shows a Gothic fixation with Man’s inherent unreliability and propensity for the darkest kind of self-deception, obsession and egoistic self-deception.

Although I kind of saw the twist in the Prestige coming, I still was taken aback by the clever playing out of the Nolan brothers’ favourite Gothic theme. It’s one of the most genuinely disturbing endings I have seen in a while. I don’t think you can watch The Prestige for its ‘twist’ alone because the twist is fairly obvious after a while and can be unsatisfying if you don’t appreciate the odd mix of old-fashioned story-telling and sudden introduction of science-fiction that traditionally requires suspension of reality.

Memento was a tribute to the fickleness of memory: how it colours the way we perceive our grievances, moulds our selves and defines the lives we end up living. Memento succeeded at two levels: it was an old-fashioned Gothic story about the dark horror of Man’s capability for self-deception and murderous; it was also an intelligent noir detective thriller. Likewise, The Prestige is both a Gothic study of Man’s dark heart as well as a sci-fi/thriller/drama.

Once you get past the sci-fi device, The Prestige is a film that really gets you thinking about the horror of vengeance and how far we are willing to kill our Selves to get there. Although the ending would have us believe Angiers (Jackman) to be worse, I don’t think Fallon/Borden (Bale) is supposed to be any better.

Angiers kills himself literally and figuratively in his desperate search to be the best magician, to earn the adoring of the crowd. He sacrifices his human identity, his love for his wife and the possibility of love with a new woman. Worse, he knows what he is doing: he chooses blind stage hands backstage so that they cannot see the horror of his sin. Borden/Fallon kill themselves figuratively – they never experience true love for they sacrificed honesty in their relationships with family, friend and lover. They too have blended two lives so well that they lose their identity and no longer know who they actually are anymore.

The recurring questions in the show centre around “Are you willing to dirty your hands?”, “Do you know what sacrifice means?”. After all the clever pyrotechnics of this film have faded away, these questions I think remain far more outstanding. At the bottom of all their self-justification and pain, both Angiers and Borden/Fallon are essentially the same - impulsive, self-destructive, self-mutilating and willing to cheat on their nearest and dearest to get exactly what they want. Even the ‘happy’ ending where Borden/Fallon gets his daughter back is tainted. His daughter – like his wife/mistress - never had him and apparently never will truly have him as long as the wall of deception never drops.

7 Up

Have been wondering, if the 7 UP documentary people made a story about my life, what would it sound like?

7 Up
was a: shy, colour-pencil toting, paper doll loving Primary One kid
dreamt of being: a kickass magic-using superspy
fell in love with: Bob the Pianist on Sesame Street
coveted: Barbie dolls from Toys R'Us Katong

14 Up
was a: awkward, nerdy Secondary Two girl with perfunctory ugly 80s specs and bad haircut
dreamt of being: Singapore's youngest comic book creator
fell in love with: Han Solo and Indiana Jones
coveted: more Xmen comics

21 Up
was a: wannabe fresh graduate from architecture swinging between idealism and angsty cynicism
dreamt of being: anything but an architect
fell in love with: the boy next door and the not-so boy next door
coveted: a cool job, an uber babe body and a dreamy boyfriend

28 UP
was a: gal with a pretty cool job
dreamt of being: a better person
fell in love with: God again and again
coveted: a kinder mouth and a more honest heart ( a classy funky wardrobe and a swinging singleton appartment of my own. lol. )

I wonder what's gonna happen in
35 UP, 42 UP and 49 UP? :)

Isn't it scary to imagine how your life would look like on film? I hope mine makes for a good indie movie at least - haha. I want it to have a cool-indiesque score like High Fidelity. Plus injections of classical music for the more tear-jerking moments.haha.

perhaps 70 UP will be
was a : mischievious, classy old woman with cute rabbits
dreamt of being: nothing but her own strange self
fell in love with: God again and again (and the old man next door)
coveted: a good, peaceful death (and a fabulous jacket)

Documentaries I wanna watch!

1) Deliver Us From Evil
a pedophile ex-priest talks about the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholoc Church


2)Fast Food Nation
an insight into the modern fast food industry

3)So Goes the Nation
a look at how America's electoral process can be manipulated. Case Study: Kerry vs Bush elections


4)49 Up
The seventh film in a series of landmark documentaries that began 42 years ago when UK-based Granada’s WORLD IN ACTION team, inspired by the Jesuit maxim “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” interviewed a diverse group of seven-year-old children from all over England, asking them about their lives and their dreams for the future.

5)Jesus Camp
A look at the increasingly militant Evangelical Christian movement in America.

sin city - postscript on heroes and antiheroes

postscript to thoughts on heroes and antiheroes:

just got back from watching Robert "From Dusk Till Dawn" Roduiguez's take on Sin City. I remembered first coming across Frank Miller's graphic novels when I was in secondary school.

I remembered skimming through the cannibal sequence at 15 and finding it gruesome enough for me to try and blank it out from my head. I like his eye for black-and-white ink art but well...let's say watching the movie reminded me again of why I blanked out so much of his plots in the first place.

Much as I admired his linework, I could never bring myself to buy a copy of Sin CIty to keep. I just never pictured myself re-reading his stuff again and again. I do own Miller's Batman classic The Dark Knight Returns - that was great story-telling. If you loved Batman Begins, much of it was inspired by that and Miller's other Batman classic, Year One.

Back to Sin CIty and why I don't own a copy: It's not so much the over-the-top sex and violence thing but more because I found the whole macho-man-rescuing-tough-oversexed-dames thing a little trite after a while. His villains were the stuff of stereotypes at heart - the crooked politician, the sanctimonious hypocritical religious figures. His antiheroes and antiheroines were always these bizarre cariacatures, living a caricature of a life. It was like he deliberately pushed the mark of film noir to its extremes, just to see how ridiculous he could get. His anti heroes and antiheroines are a smudge away from absolute villainy.

Miller was my first encounter with graphic novellists that "push the boundaries" through flagrant depictions of sexuality and over-the-top violence. Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and to a certain extent early Neil Gaiman did it too. In the comics world, these writers and artists are regarded as a heroes for doing so. Their works are hailed as "brave" and "cutting edge".

I would rather heap those accolades on graphic novellists like Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman or Craig Thompson frankly. Sacco's graphic novels drawn directly from the battlegrounds of Palestine, Bosnia and Afghanistan are brave in every sense. Not only do they boldly speak what no politician dares to speak about, they are documented straight from the mouths of the victims - all information collected at great mortal risk by Sacco himself.

Thompson and Spiegelman's bravery is of a different sort. Thompson's Blankets and Spiegelman's Maus are autobiographies - attempts to courageously capture their most fragile and painful memories in pen and ink for others to connect with.

Sin City is a movie that deserves to be watched solely for being the most successful translation of graphic art to screen to date. The use of lines, angles,shadow and light was truly watershed-stuff in the 80s. But as for the rest of the movie, it's hardly cutting edge or brave stuff. There are one or two inspired moments of dark humour but overall, I think even Miller would admit hat he himself has written far better stories.