Scratch: Not Really Worth Scratch

Call me a music snob, but I suspect the reviewers who were falling all over themselves to pour platitudes on Scratch are somewhat unfamiliar with hip-hop beyond the flatulence of Puff Daddy and Will Smith.

I wasn’t impressed by its “look ma, I can speed the film up and cut quickly from scene to scene” cinematography (if you could call it that) – MTV does it a lot better, and it’s so tired and overdone by now anyway.

I wasn’t impressed by its organization or editing, in that I think it could have conveyed much the same experience in half the time it took if it had left the more inane interviews on the cutting room floor. For instance, I really wasn’t interested in Mix Master Mike and Qbert talking about how the universe and various imagined alien cultures inspire them. Instead I’d have really liked to hear from Krush, who features in a clip but isn’t interviewed, or anyone else in Japanese hip-hop, which is mentioned more fleetingly than it deserves. In the section on “battling”, we’re informed that when you compete in the DMCs, you’re no longer competing against one other person, you’re competing against everyone else in the competition. This is hardly profound. You could say the same thing about a yodelling competition.

I thought the clips it did show of scratching were often boring and samey, and hardly explored the sheer ingenuity with which some artists use it. Kid Koala doing Drunken Trumpet, anybody? It showed Beck’s DJ demonstrating the record he made composed entirely of guitar sounds, but didn’t go on to show how that becomes Smoke On The Water in concert. It showed a clip of beatboxers completely out of the blue, but provided no commentary or follow-up. I don’t even see why beatboxing would be that relevant to the subject matter of the documentary in the first place, but if they were going to put a clip in, they might as well have put some more in, because it was bloody amazing. I could go on, but won’t.

Surely I liked something? Well, yes. I always like good beats. Qbert had a gorgeous face (pity about the height). I liked the uniting theme of how everyone seemed to have been influenced by DXT scratching on the Grammy performance of Herbie Hancock’s Rockit. I liked the jam session at Qbert’s house with Shadow and others. The clip of Jurassic 5 was well-placed and did a good job of explaining the ideal, arguably, of a DJ working symbiotically with the MCs. And I liked laughing at Cut Chemist, who is either naturally inarticulate or was just really out of it. On balance it was probably just about worth the trek to Hammersmith (Riverside Studios), but only just.

[Bizarrely, at the IMDB entry for this movie (linked above), “if you like this title we also recommend…Mother Teresa.”]

The Eye

The Eye was billed as a horror film, and did indeed strike horror into the heart of Ken before it had even started when he found out it was in Chinese. Apart from that it wasn’t particularly scary, unlike Ring, which probably had most of Asia looking fearfully at wells, TVs and long-haired girls who walked funny for months. But I was pleasantly surprised at the appearance of Edmund Chen, whose rosy cheeks and chiseled jaw filled many a happy childhood Chinese soap opera afternoon. I remember sometimes looking at him so appreciatively I forgot to read the subtitles.

[Side note: I just found out that Channel 8 is re-running some of those old soap operas in celebration of some channel anniversary, and I so have to watch The One About Volleyball! (Not, of course, its actual name in Chinese, but anyone who watched Channel 8 in the late ’80s should remember it instantly)]

Minority Report

The rest of the day was given over to wandering from eatery to eatery, which tends to form the substantive bulk of my social activity over here, simply because most eateries are air-conditioned enough for conversation to be about something other than how hot we all are. From gourmet sandwiches at Olio Dome to char kuay teow at Kopitiam to cakes at Cafe Cartel to bubble tea and salty chicken at Quickly to meatball soup at the Marina Square food court in various group compositions (Me, Felice, Ken, for a spell, Jonathan, eventually just me and Ken). Conversational highlights of the afternoon included Ken calling me a slut (highly amusing if you know Ken) and the Who Would I Shag In This Shopping Centre? game. Also brief forays into schools of legal and political thought, but that doesn’t sell papers, dah-ling.

Minority Report thankfully managed to exorcise me of my A.I. demons, in that it was a sci-fi movie with a lot more brain and subtlety, and a lot less saccharine cringeworthiness, although I still had to roll my eyes at the ending sequences.

But because I can never resist the urge to nitpick: they set up the loss of Anderton’s son as the driving force behind his belief in pre-crime (the why, so crucial in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I’m enjoying immensely these days). Multiple statements are made about how pre-crime could have saved his son if it had only been set up 6 months earlier. But it can only detect murders, not rapes, not assaults, presumably not abductions, and his interrogation of Leo Crow later reveals that he doesn’t actually know if his son is still alive or dead. So pre-crime would have been useless if his son had merely been abducted and, say, ritually tortured. Also, the law student in me wonders how the system draws what can often be an exceedingly hazy line between murder and manslaughter, given that they seem to have dispensed with all relevance of actus reus (the act) and mens rea (the state of mind) as elements of a crime.

But I admit these are easy and not particularly penetrating criticisms to make, and they don’t detract from the fact that it’s a stunningly-made film with fairly good adherence to continuity (this is important to me. Other disgruntled X-Philes will understand) which didn’t bore me for a second – overall, well worth my seven fifty, which I don’t find myself able to say about most films I see.

Especially since I am about to leave the house to watch The Eye with Ken, a movie we are inexplicably determined to see despite everyone else giving us dire warnings to the contrary. We only settled for Minority Report yesterday because The Eye wasn’t showing where we were, and only after a long tussle between the pros and cons of travelling to Tampines to watch The Eye (pro: we’d watch The Eye; con: we’d watch The Eye).

Attack Of The Clones

Attack Of The Clones on Sunday was everything you expect from a Star Wars movie – cool effects, terrible dialogue, corny jokes, shameless use of devices (retain Jar Jar so he can (a) be given away with Happy Meals and (b) propose emergency powers for the Chancellor in the absence of Queen Amidala; get Amidala’s back slashed by animal in gladiatoral arena so that later her top may magically but legitimately become ripped and midriff-baring).

Low points:

  • Hayden Christenson AKA Darth Sipid.
  • The sound of the devil laughing gleefully over Natalie Portman’s soul.

High points:

  • Yoda, who was my imaginary friend for most of my childhood. I somehow formed an attachment to him in Return Of The Jedi (the second film I ever saw in a cinema. I think the first was ET.) and probably embarrassed my family by crying my eyes out when he died. He’d already been swordfighting his way through most of my imaginary worlds for years before Attack Of The Clones, but it was still nice to see it happen on the screen, even if I do think my imagination was better at realistic computer animation than Industrial Light And Magic seem to have been with him in this movie.
  • C3PO: I’m programmed for etiquette, not destruction!

Audition

Right, so there’s my Japanese dismemberment movie out of the way for this lifetime. It’s a blessing we weren’t able to get tickets for this on Saturday night after stuffing ourselves at the Breeks buffet dinner, but watched it on Sunday afternoon instead with lunch well out of the way.

Email Moments

Recent email moments that made me smile:

I wrote:
“you know, panic is so much more than how they define it in the dictionaries…”

Edlyn replies, and is so right:
“absolutely. The dictionary never mentions the pseudo-nirvana we attain, you know, that stage where you’re past panic, past caring, and with the impenetrable impassive calm of a Buddha, enter the exam hall.”

* * *

Fay sends quotes from Samuel L Jackson movies:
“Yessir Miss Daisy, I be honking.” – Mitch, The Long Kiss Goodnight

Charly: I’m leaving the country, Mitch. I need a fake passport and I need money, lots of it.
Mitch: Well why didn’t you say so? Hold on a minute while I pull that outta my ass.
– The Long Kiss Goodnight

Ordell: Look, I hate to be the kinda nigga does a nigga a favor, then, BAM!, hits a nigga up for a favor in return. But I’m afraid I gotta be that kinda nigga.
Beaumont: What?
Ordell: I need a favor.
– Jackie Brown

* * *

John analyses Flash Gordon:
“Flash Gordon: fantastic campy kitsch post-Star Wars 30s serial update starring two complete planks of wood supported by knowing performances from everyone else. How they get away with the kinky ideas in a childrens film is beyond me. Two examples:

1. The heroine (Dale) is held in some sort of orgasmic trance by Evil Emperor Ming’s power ring. She seems rather (ahem) excited by it.

Klytus (Ming’s loyal No. 2) to Ming: ‘Never have I seen such a response…She even rivals your daughter’.

What ?!

2. Ming’s (incestously) foxy daughter Aura brings hero Flash back from the dead and proceeds to secrete him on the planet of her lover Prince Barin (played by Bond-to-be Timothy Dalton). Barin ain’t too happy about it either. Seeing Flash with Aura he spits:

“I knew you were up to something though I confess I hadn’t thought of necrophilia”

Beats The Phantom Menace everytime.”

Sex And Drugs

On Saturday I watched Traffic (Odeon, Tottenham Court Road. Gotta love the 5 pound student concession), and later, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story on Channel Four. Two films with much fodder for moralizing/philosophizing/taking the piss, and I have to say that I engaged in all of the above.

As films go, both were absorbing, but for very different reasons. I thoroughly enjoyed Traffic, It took the hugely complex mess that is the war on drugs, and chose key elements within it on which to focus. It had a number of messages, but didn’t club you over the head with them. It had unlikely heroes, and unlikely villains, who eventually came across as believable and multi-dimensional, the way real people are. It had moments of genuine hilarity, and genuine pathos. It was easy enough to follow, but not predictable. It was gripping, thought-provoking, and genuinely entertaining, if you take the word in its broad sense. I came out of the cinema and was amazed that two and a half hours had passed so quickly. I think the most important thing about “issue” movies for me is that I don’t want to be condescended to or clubbed over the head, and I don’t want emotional rhetoric to obscure the hard facts. A guilty movie that comes to mind is Philadelphia. Traffic, however, didn’t strike me as falling prey to such weaknesses. Well worth my 5 pounds.

Sex: The Annabel Chong Story is a movie of particular interest to Singaporeans, given that we’re a country used to being famous for having the best port and airport in the world, or being one of the freest economies, but aren’t really used to having the world’s best gangbanger.

The movie tells you particular things about a)pornography, b)Singapore and c)Annabel Chong.

a) I hadn’t seen that much porn before watching this movie, but my primary reaction to what I saw wasn’t moral outrage or disgust but incomprehension as to why men find it arousing. Gisele Bundchen nekkid and seductive: understandably arousing. Annabel Chong nekkid and trying to be seductive: repulsive. The woman is hideously ugly. I don’t even understand how any of the 251 men could get it up to fuck her. The same goes for men. To me, Ralph Fiennes: sex on legs. Ron Jeremy: an advertisement for chastity on legs, and disgusting fat legs at that.

b) It’s annoying how I have to keep telling people this. I don’t feel oppressed in Singapore. I’m not brainwashed. I’ve lived in the “liberal democracy” of the UK for a year, and I love it. I’ll go home to Singapore in two years, and live happily there as well. Annabel Chong feels oppressed by Singapore society. I’d suggest that anyone who has willingly fucked 251 men in 10 hours is likely to feel oppressed in most societies.

c) I felt some pity, some disgust and not much respect for her. Pity because of the obvious unhappiness she goes through in the course of the film. Disgust at her pseudo-intellectualization of everything she does. If she’d said she’d done 251 men in 10 hours because she liked sex (or pain), or wanted the money, or wanted to set a world record, I’d say fair enough. Saying she did it as a feminist statement, and that it was a noble and empowering act for womankind, is ridiculous, and I’m pretty sure most of womankind would rather she empower us by putting her obviously capable intellect to work instead of her equally obviously capable cunt.

I don’t usually use the words I’ve used above, but the politer alternatives seemed inappropriate. Porn is about fucking, not sex; cunts and pussies, not vaginas. Sure, it has its place in a secular capitalist society, but I don’t think it should be made out to be anything more than what it is. It isn’t intellectual. It isn’t noble. It’s just something certain consumers are willing to pay for, and certain people are willing to produce. And the Invisible Fist does the rest.