Author: Wilfrid

Categories
Blu-ray / DVD Review

In Love With Korean Movies – My Sassy Girl and Windstruck

Where was I back in 2001 when My Sassy Girl was released? I cannot recall. I kept missing on the opportunity to watch this monster hit six years ago. Whenever I visit Hong Kong, I always try to look this title up with no luck. Just last month, when I placed my order for the album of a Japanese artist YUI at HMV.com.hk, I ordered the DVD version of My Sassy Girl (2001) as well as its, some may say, prequel Windstruck (2004) to save more on shipment charges (shipment cost per item goes down if I order more … buy more to save more does make sense?).

Six years of anticipation for My Sassy Girl was worth it as I enjoyed every moment of this 2 hours movie. Windstruck (another 2 hours long movie) has a higher production quality and if I am going to watch them again, I would watch Windstruck first followed by My Sassy Girl. Not too much because of the sequence but rather I enjoy My Sassy Girl a lot more.

I am actually quite a big fan of the actress Jun Ji-hyun. I did enjoy Daisy (2006) and plan to pick up Il Mare (2000). Il Mare was remade by Warner Brothers starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves as The Lake House (2006).

Categories
Documentary Movie Reviews

Fast Food Nation – A Humanistic View In A Relatively Inhumane Setting

When I was young, back in Hong Kong, I used to watch my mother making fish balls. My mother would first choose the fresh fish from the wet market, bring it home, painstakingly remove the bones, marinate the meat, put it into a blender, and to make it into fish balls, she would place a serving of the paste into her palm, squeeze out the paste, and scoop it up with a spoon. It took ages to make, tasted relatively fishy, and at times I could still feel the bone fragments. Though fish balls made this way is nutritious, I would be more than happy just to grab those ready made fish balls from the supermarket if I was to cook fish ball noodle these days (before I watched this movie that is).

In a way, we all embrace the fast food culture. We value convenience and the taste of our food more than its intrinsic nutrition value. We hardly have time to think about what goes into the processed food we eat daily. “Fast Food Nation” comprises of short stories that portray the different aspects of a particular food business of turning living cattle into the burgers on our tables – a process that not many of us care to know.

My movies buddy Tong Kiat and Cynthia both have a very different view of the movie from mine. I like this movie but it doesn’t work for them. “Fast Food Nation” is not a documentary movie like “Super Size Me” nor it is a fight against a specific industry with witty script like “Thank You For Smoking”. It is a humanistic view of the culture we have and is presented in short stories that have no satisfying resolution. Co-written and directed by Richard Linklater (“Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” … notice that both movies have no satisfying resolution either), the script does have its brilliant moments (“Right now, I can’t think of anything more patriotic than violating the Patriot Act“) and the transition between stories is smooth. I personally love Ethan Hawke’s performance that reminded me of his “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset”. He is such an engaging conversationalist. Bruce Willis’s star appearance was a surprise to me (and subsequently Avril Lavigne too though her acting was less impressive) and I just love his cool acting. As he bit into a juicy burger that he knew somewhere between the process of turning cattle into pate, a fair amount of manure found its way into the burger, Bruce Willis delivered such a cool speech on why we have to make sure that the pate is cooked and just don’t fight the system. The Mexican counterparts have acted their parts well too. To me, those heart warming stories played by the Mexicans are the glue of this movie.

Fast food restaurant executives brainstorming on their next big hit, a Vice President of the fast food restaurant sent to investigate why so much manure found its way into the burger’s pate, a group of Mexicans crossed the border illegally to find a better life working in US abide being exploited in many ways, a young cashier whose dream was beyond her counter, a food packing factory that was portrayed inhuman towards both cattle as well as its Mexican employees, and a group of high school activists that believed in freeing the cattle was a first step to raise awareness on the environment hazard posted by the cattle ranches – all of which are the ingredients of “Fast Fast Nation” presented in an intertwined fashion.

There may not be a lot of money and sex in this movie, but there are certainly lots of blood in it (money, sex, and blood – the key success of movies nowadays). Be prepared for the final scene. It is gruesome. After watching “Fast Food Nation”, I personally have made an effort to stay away from processed food. I guess I have set down what I like about this movie and I also would like to point out that there are others that don’t. This movie has a mixed review so do watch it with an opened mind if you so wish to.

Categories
Diary

My Windows XP Went Ka-Boom On Me

Every so often, my Windows registry gets corrupted and as a result, I can’t even boot up my computer. Microsoft programmers ought to get shot. If registry is so sacred, shouldn’t the programmers at least implement a robust approach to at least restore the last-known registry when it is evident that the registry is corrupted?

Spent more than one whole day re-installing Windows XP and all my favourite applications. You know what? It took me 46 steps to get back to where I was and it is no joke.

Categories
Diary

Day 5 of 2007

According to the January edition of Reader’s Digest, 40% of people have already given up their New Year Resolutions by the 2nd week. Also, it is motivation rather than discipline that keeps the momentum going. Interesting. Since the first two weeks of New Year is so crucial, I better buckle up and really do something about the ten things that I said I’ll do.

After a nice lunch with my buddy Mark, I returned home and the sky outside was blue, weather was warm, the swimming pools were … inviting. So I have decided to kick start my exercise initiatives and start to score some points. As I was fiddling with my computer, its health started to deteriorate and I was glued onto it minutes after minutes as the sky turned dark, thick cloud was forming, and a heaving rain was looming. I got out of my seat and made a dash into my bedroom looking for my swimming gears. Nothing was going to stop me …

… I took out my goggles (with degrees) and gasp, it was broken! I opened my second drawer and where was my swimming trunks? Finally I found it buried underneath some places that I wouldn’t even dig into in any given day. I changed, grabbed my towel, and made a dash to the swimming pools downstairs.

The water was so cold! But nothing was going to stop me. Not even the water that kept irritating my eyes. It must have been years since I swam. I did a round of breaststroke (my two swimming pools are sort of round in shape) and I was breathless. Remembering how one time I couldn’t even walk out of the swimming pool due to lack of practice, I have decided to take it easy. I regained my energy and made another round. And there was this man who kept surpassing me with freestyle. Men, how competitive we are, I am sure one day I will get back at him – but not today. I found myself another spot and did a backstroke instead (how wonderful that water was not getting into my eyes this way) and this guy did a butterfly! If only I am fitter …

Anyway, raindrops falling from the sky and time for me to head back to shore with my … freestyle. I swear my head was spinning due to such an intensive exercise. I looked at the clock when I returned to my apartment and how I hate the honestly of time. It certainly felt much longer than 15 minutes of swimming, I swear.

Categories
Experience Sharing Reflection

My Personal Scorecard for 2007

I have been toying with the idea of publishing a book on Personal Scorecard with my ex-colleagues when I was providing professional service to the military units and formations in crafting out the Balanced Scorecards. Personal Scorecard is not easy as we may or may not know our purpose in life. Without knowing our purpose in life, whatever we do today may or may not take us to where we want to be – that is if we want to be somewhere in first place. Personal aspiration is subjective and each of us have different character trails so much so that to standardise on an approach to develop a Personal Scorecard is indeed challenging. Besides, who do we, for lack of a better word, be accountable in life to besides ourselves? Of course, some may bring in religion, social constructs, and traditions as our “higher orders” whereby some may found it less acceptable to live their lives by others’ standards.

While I am still in search with the existence of such a Personal Scorecard, I think basing on New Year resolution is a good start. A New Year’s resolution is a commitment that one makes to a project or a habit, often a lifestyle change that is generally interpreted as advantageous. Though we may not know our purpose in life, I trust that we should be able to see what is good from bad and to recognise things that we can do to make our lives better. In a way, the concept of Balanced Scorecard still hold, the approach is entirely different.

First thing on my mind was my lack of enthusiasm to Cynthia’s desire to see the world. To me, a trip down to Botanical Garden or Sentosa or even a road trip to Malaysia is good enough. But Cynthia wants to see places that she has not seen before. There are many measurements that can address this as long as they satisfy the S.M.A.R.T. (simple, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely) rule. I can go with number of days overseas but then I will have to separate the long haul and short haul trips for the difference in impact. How about the places that we have not seen and the place that we have? In the end, I have chosen Traveling Budget Utilised as my measurement. It is a good proxy while giving us the flexibility to mix the different types of trips.

Shall I measure everything that I do? Of course not. So measurements like number of songs written, amount of content posted in my website, number of times I meet up with my friends per month, and etc. are important but are not things that I wish to track constantly. I know I will do reasonably well regardlessly. So I limit the number of measurements to what I most want to track. The magic number is ten.

I am not doing well in leading a healthy lifestyle so I think setting a target of 8 hours of exercise per month should be doable. That works out to be 2 hours a week. Half of the time having home cooked dinner should be achievable too. At present, Exercise Hours is zero and Percentage of Home Cooked Dinner is close to zero. So, any improvement is going to be good.

I have been lazing in managing my own money. I have seen how even with such a little effort Cynthia has put in, she has made some good return. So this New Year, I am going to start investing my money to beat the low interest rate.

On the other end of the money spectrum – a money making career – I need some sense of measurement as well. I have no idea what Career Fulfillment Survey is going to be. But the sooner I have this worked out, the clearer I know what I expect from my career.

After putting off the idea of turning my hobbies into something more serious for such a long time, I guess I should take this opportunity to see how far I can go with them. To the least, in the year 2007, I would have put in my best. So I am going to see how many live performance I can make and if I can publish a book or two on any topic.

I guess drinking in moderation at times is not that bad so long as I don’t have a hangover that affect my next day. I thought of having other measurements such as the unit of alcohol consumed but it is hard to quantify with the different type of alcohol.

My another habit to moderate is my time spent on gaming. My current benchmark is about 130 hours per month so having it down to 40 hours I think is a determined effort to make a change.

As I looked at these nine measurements, I pondered upon things that I should do to make my life more memorable. Things that I have no idea yet and hence, I classified them under Extraordinary Projects that have significant impact.

I don’t know how long I can sustain this process. Judging at this merely ten items, I think I have lots to do tomorrow. Wish me luck!

A recap of my measurements for Year 2007 by clicking here.

Categories
Reflection

New Year Resolution in a Scorecard Style

For years I have my New Year resolutions written at the beginning of the year only to look at them again at the end of the year when I need to do a self-reflection. So this year I wanted to do away with such a pointless exercise. On the way back from the countdown celebration at the church that did not appear to be such a good idea to me initially for there were thousand and one alternative places to do the countdown had Cynthia not wanting to start the year in a holy way, something struck my mind. New Year resolution does not work for me because while I put all my heart and passion into formulating what bad habits to get rid of and what cool things to do, I lack the discipline to see things through. Then the New Year Eve sermon suddenly rang a bell – don’t see things that happened as failures but as feedback instead. That is very much like what I have been preaching to the military units and formations over these 2 years before I left my job – continuous feedback is important learning points, strategy execution is as important, if not more so, then strategy formulation, and a balanced scorecard can be used as a tool to enhance performance.

So, day one of year 2007, based on my New Year resolution, instead of a list of abstract things to do or not to do, I have come out with ten measurements.  Detail explanation can be found in here.

Category Measurement Frequency Target Stretched Target
Life Traveling Budget Utilised Half-yearly S$3,000 S$5,000
Life No. of Extraordinary Projects Quarterly 1 2
Health Exercise Hours Monthly 8 10
Health Percentage of Home Cooked Dinner Monthly 50% 60%
Money Return of Total Savings Quarterly 5% p.a. 8% p.a.
Money Career Fulfillment Survey Half-yearly 60% 80%
Hobby No. of Public Performance Quarterly 1 2
Hobby No. of Books Published Yearly 1 2
Habit No. of Hangover Monthly 2 0
Habit No. of Gaming Hours Monthly 40 30
Categories
Memorable Events

Had Fun With Board Games

In the era of media domination when XBox360 and PC gaming are kings, movies are favourite past time, and people indulge themselves into YouTube and cable TVs, hardly do we remember that board games can be just as fun if not more. It is a great opportunity for friends to interact and for us to laugh at each other rather than to a television or a screen.

I have decided to, instead of our usual movie escapade, invite my buddy Tong Kiat over to my home to have dinner with Cynthia and myself and to play some board games. Dinner was delicious (roast chicken and chips), Ayu’s concert (DVD) was entertaining, but nothing beats our fun trying to outwit, outplay one another … in the name of Risk and Scrabble.

We did not take long to get ourselves familiarised with the rules of Risk. Round #1, Tong Kiat’s European yellow army took onto my African black army at Egypt and as a revenge, I took onto his Southern Europe. Meanwhile Cynthia’s Asian red territory of Middle East was at constant war with the yellow and the black armies. While our war focus was on Middle East, Egypt, and Southern Europe, Cynthia’s empire expanded into North America and without warning, she took over 24 territories and fulfilled her mission. Cynthia won the first round.

Round #2, my black army was determined to take over South America and Australia. Tong Kiat’s yellow army has decided to gave me hell and he has deployed all his troops at both South America and Australia. His mission was to eliminate my army. Without knowing Tong Kiat’s intend, I went frontal with his troops and right from the start, both the black and yellow armies were severely weakened. Cynthia’s red army took the environmental advantage, painted Asia and Africa red, and won the game.

Next, we moved onto Scrabble. Tong Kiat and I am both terrible in spelling and against all odds, Tong Kiat has won the game with a score of 176 (Cynthia – 152, Me – 140). Our final collective effort can be viewed by clicking here.

A very fun evening and we all agreed that we shall do it again.

Categories
Documentary Movie Reviews

Borat – You Either Love It Or Hate It

If indeed true that this is a documentary film made with real people in real situations, I really pity some of the people who were caught in this one big giant reality TV series in the expense of the audience’s laughter. Borat, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, left his home country Kazakhstan traveled into America hoping to learn the American culture that is going to benefit Kazakhstan. I can buy that plot. What the movie is tying to achieve is to bring out American’s racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and the mentality that they are number one in everything. That I can also accept. It is the execution that at times I found it hard to watch.

Don’t get me wrong. I did laugh very hard almost throughout the show. But when the storyline switched from a series of interviews to cover various topics such as American’s humour and feminism into Borat wanting to travel all the way from New York to California in order to meet and marry Pamela Andersen after watching her acting in Bay-watch at his hotel room, that I found it senseless and hard to believe. In keeping up with the tempo, the practical jokes have gotten cruder and cruder. You will see Borat entered into an antique shop that sold items related to American heritage and he accidentally tripped himself destroying a room full of antiques. You will see Borat carrying a plastic bag of feces out from the restroom asking the hostess of a high society what to do with it (I was surprised to see that in the end credit, it was mentioned who that belongs to). You will see Borat’s face buried underneath a big hairy fat naked man’s ass – Borat’s co-actor – and both of them run out of the hotel room naked crashed into a company function continued the fight on stage till both of them were taken down by the security guards (What are they trying to say except that they have balls to go naked in public and make a fool out of themselves?). And you will see many more worse than this.

I can’t help but ask myself what some of these scenes really trying to say. Shall I be, for instance, laughing to Borat’s success in humiliating hundreds of real people to bring out certain points, if any, or shall I feel pity for those innocent people that are portrait unfairly on a big screen? I don’t know. What I know is that this movie has really gotten high ratings across many sources and the general response is that you either love this or hate this movie. Borat could be one of the funnest shows (and pretty original too) I have seen but I feel awkward watching it.

Categories
Diary

Give Me Back My Internet Connection!

The last time I got frustrated with Internet connection was when StarHub was my ISP. The customer service representative pointed me to InternetTrafficReport.com and told me, “Look at those numbers. The whole Singapore is affected by [a damaged underwater cable].” Little did he know that back then, it only affected StarHub. Now I am with SingNet and this time round, due to the earthquake in Taiwan (more recent news), both ISPs are affected. Connection is down to crawling or non-responding speed. I have to hold off publishing a few of my blogs because they require content streaming. Hopefully, everything will be back to normal soon (StarHub took weeks last time).

My buddy Mark asked if I am glad that my website is now hosted in Singapore instead of US. Oh yar … definitely.

Categories
Foreign Movie Reviews

Eye Wide Opened for Curse of the Golden Flower

Days ago, I asked one of my friends to recommend a movie to watch over Live Messenger and her immediate response was Curse of the Golden Flower and have myself a “boobs treat”. Well, I have forgotten the exact phrase but it was something to that extend. Last weekend, I suggested this movie to my buddy TK and after I made the booking, he suggested to meet half an hour earlier than usual. I asked why and his reply was: we don’t want to miss Gong Li’s boobs, do we? Gasp! I was actually intrigued by the storyline as it seems to contain the trademarks of Chinese movies. When I told that to Cynthia while she was wearing a cosmetic mask, she tried very hard not to laugh (and she did burst out laughing). I know, you readers are probably laughing in disbelief too but I wanted to watch this movies because of the storyline and not the … erm … boobs.

I immediately understood people’s reaction to the movie at the opening scene. Imagine yourself in one of the biggest Cathay theaters with a huge screen and all you see is a sea of palace maids bearing almost half of their boobs. Have I seen that many boobs in my life before? Probably not.

Boobs aside, this movie has it highs and lows. The setting is extravagant and the entire movie is so colourful, especially the colour gold. Be it as hundreds of actors on the screen or just a few of them serving tea or following the royal family, all the actions were sychronised. Not a sense of disorder. You can easily sit back, enjoy this majestic movie, and walk out of the theater feeling satisfied by this 45 million dollars production – most expensive Chinese film to date.

But I can’t. The plot is too simplistic and at times, flawed. I wish I have read the synopsis carefully and some of the Chinese write-ups from the Internet before watching this movie. That way, at least I wouldn’t feel that confused. Perhaps it is because I relied on the subtitles to understand the movie and the white subtitles set against a background that was mostly gold in colour just didn’t work out for me.

Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat’s acting was great. They played out their characters well. It was Jay Chow’s acting that is in question. A few scene, Jay Chow has to act side by side with Gong Li and it was most obvious that he just didn’t cut it at all. I sense that the cameraman tried very hard to minimise his exposure and in the theater, the audience laughed whenever Jay Chow acted those emotional dramatic scenes. His battle scene was watchable but that is not exactly acting, is it?

The historical inaccuracies may not go well with some of you though I can easily look pass that. Perhaps my imagination tends to go wild. At one point, when I watched Prince Jai (Jay Chow) in full silver armor practicing sword with the Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) in golden armor, I swear I felt like watching a sci-fi movie.