The Home Song Stories (2007), written and directed by Tony Ayres, is a punishing mirror of my own childhood memories. This film, autobiographical of what Ayres experienced during his formative years and a portraiture of his enigmatic and volatile mother, is a devastating account of familial dysfunction. Its narrative is an interspersion of melancholia and heartwarming moments, a story of what Vladimir Nabokov would describe as “subliminal coordinates.” The Home Song Stories depicts desperation and despair, innocence and naivety, grace and redemption in the tormented soul of Ayres’ mother and her suicide attempts, in the rapid crossfires of Cantonese, Mandarin and broken English in the kitchen and bedroom as arguments break out, in the encyclopedia-reading young Ayres himself who believed that “I will then know everything.” So much of this film reminds me of my own past, a cinematic apparition of the pain, the chaos and the emptiness which have shaped me today — my mother’s affections for me, her emotional vulnerability and insecurity and subsequent neurosis, my own passion for reading and learning, my estrangement from men in general.

House of Sand and Fog (2003) is a heartbreaking drama directed by Vadim Perelman. It is a melancholic portrayal of loss and regret with an addict trying to desperately recover the house her father left to her when it was sold to a retired Iranian colonel who wanted to resell the house to earn some profits which would give his family a better life in America. The film exposes and highlights mortal vulnerability and fallibility in every turn, it is a cinematic unfurling of a tragedy waiting to happen. Just as there appears a glimmer of hope, a light of resolution at the end of the tunnel for both the evicted addict and the fallen Iranian, a cloud with silver lining — the fog comes, thick, heavy, inscrutable, opaque and inexorably. A touching, moving cinematic narrative.

Crash (2004) is a drama directed by Paul Haggis. This film is a meditation on racial tension in modern day Los Angeles through interweaving stories in which the prejudices and misunderstandings of the different characters crash to create an explosive, volatile cinematic narrative and commentary. Crash makes good use of sharp cutting dialogues and haunting ethnic music to summon the pain of human fallibility and vulnerability. This film has multiple climaxes which make each overlapping  subplots somewhat unique yet identifiable.

Shattered Glass (2003) is a docudrama written and directed by Billy Ray about The New Republic journalist Stephen Glass fabricating stories and fired subsequently when a Forbes Digital Tool writer could not verify the facts regarding an article about a Silicon Valley company’s security deal with a teenage hacker. This film is riveting and compelling with believable acting and gives an insider’s view of what transpires in a publication.

I ♥ Huckabees (2004)  directed by David O. Russell is a comedy which addresses various metaphysical and philosophical conundrums via a free associative form. It is unconventional and somewhat chaotic but entertaining.

Breaking and Entering (2006) is a drama written and directed by Anthony Minghella. The film is a meditation on emotional abandonment and adultery — the protagonist experiences rejection while his girlfriend feels isolated as they struggle to cope with an autistic daughter; he falls in love with a woman whose son is involved in stealing his computers; the woman tries to blackmail him with photographs of them in bed in exchange for his promise to not charge her son for theft; he refuses to give in and hurt his girlfriend in the process by revealing the betrayal. It is a fable on how love requires constant, consistent effort and discipline before it can flourish and be nourished.

Broken Flowers (2005) is a drama written and directed by Jim Jamusch. This film won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival and was critically acclaimed and received as a comedy. I am unable to relate to its humour, but Broken Flowers still has its outrageously mischievous moments which dot the vast canvas of an emotionally taxing storyline. The film resolves by resolving nothing; the melancholic tone of the film reaches its apex in its inconclusive conclusion as the protagonist struggles to come to terms with what transpired during his journey to find out if he does indeed have a son whom a lover almost twenty years ago gave birth to. Perhaps to avoid disappointment, one must learn to not have hopes or expectations.

Margot at the Wedding (2007) is a tragicomedy written and directed by Noah Baumbach. It is an intricate treatment of the family where two sisters have irreconcilable differences. The all-too-familiar tension and struggle to communicate and understand one another are realistically portrayed to devastasting effects as the film attempts to draw the viewer to identify with its characters and the mess they get themselves into.

The Family Stone (2005) is a dramedy written and directed by Thomas Bezucha. This film is a heartwarming ensemble comedy about a family Christmas gathering and the subplots of each member with the thematic thread of love and self-discovery binding the narratives. There is a tinge of melancholia amidst the warmth and joy of the festive season, undergirded the tragedy of the mother’s imminent death.

Burn After Reading (2008), written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, is an American black comedy which marries sex farce with political thriller. This film is witty and entertaining, not a moment too long or short. Outrageous yet believable, tragic yet endearing, Burn After Reading is a funny mess about obsession with physical fitness, cyber-dating, cosmetic surgery, blackmail, divorce and lots of spying facilitated via sharp lines and fine acting.

Adam’s Apples (2005) is a Danish film directed by Anders Thomas Jensen. It is a dark and disturbing allegory based on the Book of Job which examines how the religious finds meaning and purpose in a life of pain and suffering and how evil (construed as Satanic temptations, rather than as the outcome of Fall) can distort their beliefs about God and the devil. It is somewhat subversive for my taste, but I think I get what the film is addressing.

Taxi 3 (2003) is a French faux action thriller comedy directed by Gerard Krawczyk. This film has off-the-hook humor and zany but likeable characters. It is not thematically sophisticated, not cinematographically groundbreaking, not adrenalinally racing, but still a memorably cliched, entertaining and heartwarming story.

Closer (2004) is a drama written by Patrick Marber based on his 1997 play of the same name. This film, directed by Mike Nichols, portrays the fickle capricious nature of romance in the lives of four people whose fates collide with one another through revenge and betrayal, forgiveness and reconciliation. One primary motif running through the film is the desperate pursuit of truth whose absence, as one of the characters says, makes a man a beast.

Virgin Territory (2007) is a romantic comedy directed by David Leland and based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of 100 novellas which are medieval allegories distinctively about erotic and tragic love stories. The film Virgin Territory is about the Black Death in 14th century Florence where Pampinea was tricked into marrying a noble when she was already bethrothed to a Russian count. Pampinea withdrew into a convent to preserve her chastity where she met Lorenzo who would eventually rescue her from the fraud marriage. This is a cliched Hollywood formula with slapstick and crass sexual jokes and a happily-ever-after ending.

Notting Hill (1999) is a British romantic comedy which marries love and humour very naturally and effortlessly. It depicts a realistic picture of life in Notting Hill, London which the audience can easily relate to, and therefore makes the film all the more universally accessible  and timeless.

A Beautiful Mind (2001) is an American biopic based on John Forbes Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics. It is a serious, respectful but incomplete portrayal of the mathematical genius from Yale who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.  What was not highlighted in the film were Nash’s homosexual encounters, his son who was the fruit of an extra marital affair with a nurse, and the misrepresentation that Nash gave a Nobel prize acceptance speech.

My Girl (2003), translated in English from the Thai original แฟนฉัน, pronounced as Fan Chan, is a Thai romantic comedy which nostalgically captures a period during the childhood days of a boy and a girl who are neighbours, schoolmates and play pals. The film is a meditation on memories and regret, how the innocent and carefree past can possess meaning and evoke emotions for the present, and one can never truly forget love and loss, and yet be optimistic and hopeful about the future.

Pretty Persuasion (2005) is a dark satire directed by Marcos Siega. This comedic film is a commentary on various contemporary American issues such as racism, homosexuality, immigration, sucide and parenting. It also studies the adolescent obsession with celebrity culture and material success. Pretty Persuasion is funny, smart and melancholic all at once. The audience will be delighted at the twists and turns of the plot in its non-linear delivery as an aspiring teenage actress seeks revenge by manipulating the school, her friends and the media through deceit… and acting.

Match Point (2005) is a dramatic thriller written and directed by Woody Allen. This compelling film examines love, lust, ambition, guilt and virtue; it also explores how one’s trajectory in life can simply be orchestrated by sheer luck, blind chance, randomness. The plot is of a man whose socioeconomic reality changes when he acquaints himself with the British upper class and then finds himself in a vortex of deceit after an affair with the ex-fiancee of his brother-in-law.

누가 그녀와 잤을까? , also known as Who Slept With Her?, (2006) is a Korean sex comedy. This farce relies on cliches and caricatures to set its tone, while deflated juvenile jokes fall flat and lie limp. And neither is this film any erotic.

집으로 or 家 or Jibeuro, also known as The Way Home, (2002) is a Korean film written and directed by Lee Jeong-Hyang. It is a low-budget, minimalist narrative about a single mother from Seoul who leaves her seven year old son with her aged mother in a rural village, and how the city boy adapts to bucolic life without the comfort and conveniences of urban luxury. But, above all, the film’s focus is on the relationship between the boy and his seventy-seven year old grandmother who is mute and suffers from severe osteoporosis and walks half bent, but expresses her unconditional love for her grandson and finds ways to please him despite his rejection and resistance through insults and cruel pranks. This heartwarming, heartwrenching tearjerker is a fable on conscience, familial love and humility.집으로 is a simple but beautiful cinematic story which, through its depiction of the slow and idyllic rural existence, traces the gradual but unmistakable change in the boy’s character and acceptance of his self-sacrificial grandmother. 

世界 (2004) is a Chinese film written and directed by賈樟柯.  It is sublime in its portraitures of solitude, separation and sexual longing in a Beijing World Park, a theme park with simulacra of famous landmarks from all over the world. This montage quietly weaves narratives of the family members and friends of the two protagonists — a dancer and her security guard boyfriend — with a thread of melancholia and disaffection running through the fabric of the story. The film examines the intrusion of a globalized economy into the lives of rural migrants, how alienation and adultery merely bring to surface the ennui and meaninglessness of an artificial, superficial world.

Mad About English! (2008), directed and produced by Lian Pek in collaboration with the Media Development Agency of Singapore, documents China’s fever with English in anticipation of the Olympic Games. This film offers an insightful glimpse into the lives of Chinese laypeople who devote time and energy to learning English. At once heartwarming and quirky, the highlight is surely Li Yang’s Crazy English where he employs pop psychology, militant and quasi religious means to teach 1.5 million Chinese English.

You are right. I did it because I felt I was wanted.

::

I am the snake in the garden.

Sideways (2004) is an American comedy drama written by Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne, and directed by Payne. It is about two forty something year old men on a week long wine-tasting road trip through Santa Ynez Valley, California. They have romantic encounters with two women but to unpalatable outcomes. This journey the protagonists take from winery to winery, signifies each stop they transit to mature psycho-emotionally, morally and sexually just like how good wine matures with each passing year til it reaches its peak. The fruit of love is intoxicating, and this film meditates on capitalistic definition and norm of what constitutes success, masculine desire for freedom, and drinking away the aftertaste of the past.

Before Sunset (2004) is sequel to 1995′s Before Sunrise, both directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. This American film is essentially a string of heartfelt conversations between an American author and a French environmental activist who reunite in Paris after their first meeting nine years ago. Like its predecessor, Before Sunset is a study on finding one’s bearings in the world, meditating on meaning, purpose and fulfilment in life. Hawke’s and Delpy’s characters share with each other their desires and insecurities, their dialogues realistically rich with false starts, interruptions, topic drifts and banter. It is delightfully evocative as it is transcendental; both struggle with secret longings, or as Delpy’s character says, “Memories are nice as long as we don’t have to deal with the past.” This film examines the tension which comes along with making decisions which may have lifelong implications — the viewer cannot help but empathize with the two characters as they get tangled up in romantic yearnings. Before Sunset does not sentimentalize love, but rather it acutely questions our beliefs and values, assumptions and desires which may well be easily hidden from ourselves.

These are a few who have mistaken me as a girl (and may even have tender feelings for me in spite of themselves) over the past five years or so (in no chronological order):

1. friend from junior college. He was lonely (in Stanford) when we chat over the Net and he told me he wished I was a girl so that he could fuck me
2. friend from military college. He said he was aroused when I moaned (the context was non-sexual)
3. stranger. He was only 13 and sent me a sms by mistake. For the next couple of weeks or so, he kept texting me because he was interested in me
4. stranger. He was 23 and approached me on Facebook when I was doing my research and experimentation
5. and my brother’s keeper who just finds me confusing.

À la folie… pas du tout (2002) is a French film directed by Laetitia Colombani. It is a story narrated by the protagonist who cannot be trusted, as we see in the end. She is an art student, an erotomaniac whose obsession with a married cardiologist turns the latter’s life upside down. The truth is revealed when the story is told from the cardiologist’s perspective. Quirky and delightful, À la folie… pas du tout ends with a quote from a real-life erotomaniac who was confined for half a century, a meditation on the limits of psychiatry to heal and cure.

Just a Kiss (2002) is an urban sex comedy directed by Fisher Stevens. It is a fast paced film  with sharp wit and it mocks the cheap, liberated romantic love of modernity. The characters negotiate relationships and self-esteem through a convolution of fates which all began with just a kiss.

Il Mare (2000) is a South Korean romance fantasy drama directed by Lee Hyun-Seung. Il mare means the sea in Italian, while its Korean title is 시월애 (siworae which is the Korean pronounciation of Hanja 時越愛, which means time-transcending love.) Its cinematography is beautiful and its soundtrack haunting. The film is a meditation on love, as well as time travel and thereby the choices which we make that influence possibilites of the future. An architecture student and a voice actress meet in two different time frames — their existence is two years apart. Yet their fates collide through a written correspondence which a magical mailbox facilitates. At once tender, melancholic, heart wrenching and finally hopeful, Il Mare contemplates loss, yearning, memories, regret and bliss which come about through the choices we make in time, through time, over time.

L’Auberge espagnole (2002) is a French film about a French economics senior who spends a year on an exchange to Barcelona and finds himself falling out of love with his girlfriend in Paris while falling in love with Spain — the other European exchange students who share the apartment with him, the neglected wife of a French neurologist working in Barcelona, and puta madre Spanish. It is a comedy-drama about independence, friendship, intimacy, absence, loss, yearning and self-discovery. In the end, the protagonist gives up his prestigious job upon graduation, and decides to become who he has always wanted to be since he was a boy, a writer.

Lost in Translation (2003) is a comedy-drama directed by Sofia Coppola. The film is a meditation on culture shock, alienation and existential ennui. The chance encounter between an American celebrity and a Yale philosophy graduate leading to trips exploring the postmodern Japanese cityscape with its idiosyncrasies and contradictions is a metonymy of their pursuit for meaning, purpose and love.

Victims of violence may not see themselves as casualties because abuse speaks of their worth to the perpetrators. They may persevere in such a destructive relationship because they derive meaning and fulfilment through the pain inflicted upon them. The more pain, the more value they have to the abuser. They stay because they finally belong, albeit to a person who does not love and cherish them the way he ought to.

I do not understand why others misunderstand me so much. Actually, I do not understand myself very much either.

I do not have a good voice, but I like to sing. In the past, I would write poetry but these days I sing poetry instead. I sing poetry written by others but this is fine since I myself do not write very well and it does not bother me whether I write my own songs or not as long as the poetry resonate with the thoughts and feelings inside me.

I often sing when I am happy. I tend to listen to music when I am sad. And I am sad now.

The nights are not as cold as they were before. It is much more humid now, but the nocturnal heat does not keep the mosquitoes away. I leave my windows shut lest I invite more mosquitoes. Everything is so still, so quiet. And in less than six hours, I will have to be in class. The world does not stop, I wish it does. Every passing moment in time is memory immortalised, fossilised. I am trying to remember them all, cup them in my palms.

I am ever so eager to please, too eager to please. I understand the risk of giving. Once I give, I may lose it all. But the joy of giving makes up for the pain of losing. When that day comes, I must remind myself of this.

The sun has risen, I must go to bed.

May God preserve me from evil.

Pornography is for those who struggle with intimacy.

Pornography exposes our instinct to map our self unto another, and so find psychic equilibrium in sexual union. Often the carnal pleasure is secondary to the hidden need for spiritual and emotional intercourse. Love is integral to one’s personhood and its absence or deprivation tends to agitate one to seek surrogation or compensation in one form or another. Addiction to pornography, therefore, is not simply a symptom of loneliness and longing, but an individual’s wayward mechanism to satiate what is insatiable.

Solitude may be an universal human condition, but it is not what mankind was designed for.

I am miserable and wretched. I am desperate to emerge and be free, yet incalcitrant to make my desires reality. This night is an act of self sabotage. I forsake sleep and dignity to emasculate myself, so that I may conform to the image and personality I have manufactured for myself. I hunger and thirst but am not filled.

Above all, I have mistaken pity for love.

American Beauty (1999) is a drama directed by Sam Mendes. The film in all its complexity portrays the restlessness and futility of desire and regret. It is a fable about how all of us seek to emerge from a culture of conformity and to establish a sense of selfhood. But what we want may not be what we need, and often devastating when found out too late. At the end of the story the death of the protagonist unites the other key characters as they attempt to find closure for their life narratives, the voiceover while serving as an eulogy and epithet is also an exhortation to embrace the beauty found in life (while we still can).

Can a non-native speaker assert ownership of English? Does linguistic ownership only extend to those in Kachru’s Inner Circle? Is the lack of confidence the dominant reason why Singaporeans are hesitant to claim English as theirs? Choice does not come easily (or naturally) for us because our government prescribes which language we are to take as our own — that is, Singapore’s language policies assign us our mother tongue (regardless what our L1, or home language, is) based on our ethnicity. (The Eurasians are a conundrum here.) But what the government prescribes for us defies definitions held by linguists — English is our L1 (very confusing!) while our mother tongue is labelled as L2. English has instrumental value, whereas the mother tongue has symbolic-cultural significance. While it may be easier for certain Singaporeans (whose L1 is not English) to embrace and thus claim ownership over their assigned mother tongue, there are even those who grow up speaking English at home being reluctant to claim ownership of English. Surely we have no qualms owning the colloquial variety (Singlish), and perhaps we may be more inclined to embrace a language which seems to be ineluctably associated with our ethnic identity (the concept of essentialism: Chinese, thus Mandarin etc.) But English, besides being a colonial artefact and a modern weapon of economic pragmatism in Singapore’s national crisis narrative, though widely used by most Singaporeans, does not really feel like it is ours. In a sense, it is within reason that we embrace Standard Singaporean English (SSE) but many would be awkward with claiming the native variety for ourselves. All of these serve to highlight that linguistic ownership of English should not be a birthright that only Inner Circle users enjoy — it ought to be a right that even non-native speakers possess. English is a world language and with the advent of English as Lingua Franca (ELF), no nativised varieties are intrinsically inferior to the native ones (linguistically speaking, that is.) We often forget (or are ignorant) of the fact that the standard is merely a product of its time. Even native English is open bare to mutability. No one dialect is, so to speak, correct and whatever makes it prestigious and powerful comes from politico-economic and sociocultural constructs. Therefore, Singaporeans should not fear claiming English or SSE for themselves — linguistic insecurity does not make ownership any less of a right and reality.

It is vital to English Language Teaching (ELT) that non-native speakers are made conscious of the fact that the standard variety is constantly changing (as attested by, say, the British corpus), and therefore educators ought to instil a sense of reflexivity in students in the acquisition of English. The contrastive method will help those from Kachru’s Expanding Circle since their first language (L1) will most likely be typologically distant from English (second language; L2). What is of more complexity in ELT is the fact that nativised and colloquial variants of English are prevalent in Outer Circle countries, and therefore educators tend to find higher incidences of interference in their students since their L1 are usually lexically and morphosyntactically similar to L2. Learners, therefore, have to be made aware of differences between the two dialects (in terms of register, function et. al.?) but this also implies the necessity (if not the inevitability) of L1 usage in the classroom. The shortcoming of ELT today is that it does not recognise exploiting the non-native’s L1 (the non-prestigious, non-standard variety) in the acquisition of L2 (English). And finally, it is an imperative for the educator to be metalinguistically trained in order to be reflexive about negotiating two languages, the very issue that the learner is grappling with.

I cannot go against desires which are only natural.

God made everything out of nothing. I make everything into nothing.

I am afraid of being unwanted. I am afraid of being misunderstood. I am afraid of being left alone. I am afraid of being unforgiven. I am afraid of being abandoned. I am afraid of not being good enough. I am afraid of being unloved.

Girl, Interrupted (1999) is a drama adapted from the original memoir of the same title by Susanna Kaysen, directed  by James Mangold and its screenplay written by James Mangold and Lisa Looner. The film chronicles a 18 year old’s stay in a psychiatric hospital in late 1960s where she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. What I can identify with this account is how the clinical establishment can only be of limited effect until one is ready to lay siege to the prison one has quarantined oneself to. And also that when one is depressed and isolated emotionally, socially and psychologically from others, one tends to engage in erotic encounters whereby sexual promiscuity manifests itself as a symptom of loneliness.

Jerry Maguire (1996) is a drama written and directed by Cameron Crowe. The film addresses how one draws purpose, meaning and fulfilment in one’s performance at the expense of personal relationships with others. The protagonist Jerry Maguire’s (played by Tom Cruise) existence is defined by his ambitions and success and it is until one day he loses his job and clientele that he finds that only love can fill the void within himself. It is also a study of the masculine aversion to emotional committment and intimacy, and how fame and materialism can sabotage romance and family life.

Pei Ren and I visited Bethany Independent Presbyterian Church this morning. The sermon preached was about having purpose and power by seeking God’s kingdom first above all else.

What if I think I have a sense of purpose but no power to carry it out? And is my lack of power because I have not been seeking God’s kingdom? But even if I seek God’s kingdom, I may not be given the power because what I conceive as my purpose may not be necessarily good or right for me. In other words, does it mean that only if it is God’s will that I hold onto a specific purpose, I will also then be granted the power appropriate to the work that I have to carry out? So perhaps we can say that when we are not given the power necessary for our sense of purpose, it may mean that we must find other work to carry out in God’s kingdom.

Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. (1 Corinthians 3: 22-23)

If I have everything, why does it still feel like I have nothing?

Why do I pour so much time and tears in you when I know there is no future for the both of us? Why are our memories ghosts and shadows? Why this hollowness inside me?

I want to be free, I want to be filled. God, please give what you ask of me!

I am constantly jealous and envious of others. I console myself by overcompensating my shortcomings. I resent and scorn those whom I fear.

I am seldom contented and grateful to God for what I have because I am always pitying myself for what I do not. I have forgotten I am bought at a price.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999) is a wacky, witty and (may I say) wholesome American romantic comedy directed by Gil Junger. Its screenplay is a loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. The film’s initial typecasted personalities eventually give way to, despite the cynicism that its cliched Hollywood happily-ever-after ending may breed, believable characters who manage to manoeuvre through the knots and ends of adolescent culture.

I do not know what it means to be a man. Nobody has taught me how. I am alone, all by myself now. I must have died a long time ago.

From what I gather after conversations with those I have met online, there appears to be almost as many who identify themselves as homosexuals as bisexuals. A homosexual is a person who seeks a sexual relationship with another member of the same sex whereas a bisexual does so with members of both sexes. Frankly, I am surprised. I have never expected that it is in vogue to be bisexual these days. I am writing this out of ignorance but I suspect these bisexuals are really bigendered — they are able to think, feel and behave appropriately to both sexes — and therefore their bi-sexual desires do not necessarily have much biological basis but may well be a product of  psycho-emotional lack in their formative years. Perhaps we can say that bisexuality is as much of a developmental disorder as homosexuality is. But I never knew of this sudden surge (sudden, at least to me) of bisexuality; plastic sexuality is probably popular out of pragmatic necessity since it is difficult to have a publicly satisfying sexual relationship with a member of the same sex, and therefore it serves well to have a heterosexual facade in contingencies. In other words, bisexuality is much more likely a calculated move than homosexuality is.

Having said the above, few homosexuals I speak to are gay. Gay is a political identity where one affirms homosexuality to be a legitimate sexual variant to co-exist with heterosexuality. My heart goes out especially to ego-dystonic homosexuals, that is homosexuals who want to change, but do not know how to. There can only be help and hope for these struggling with homosexuality in Jesus Christ.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) is an American documentary presented by former president Al Gore and directed by Davis Guggenheim. The film urges us to revolutionise our lifestyle in order to avoid what may be the devastation brought about by global warming. Al Gore warns us that economic progress, popular misconceptions and complacency (wrought by the media), and the lack of political will must not hinder us in addressing this question of survival, not just presently for ourselves but even so for the generations to come.

Most of the time, I am afraid to admit that I am proud. I think pride is a form of self defence. I dread being wrong because it is embarrassing. I lose face. And it makes me feel helpless.

I think in the eyes of many I am a respectable person. I go to church every Sunday, set up websites for those struggling with homosexuality, am on a government scholarship, and most friends say that I am meek and gentle. But I live in fear, all the time.

For it is shameful even to speak of the things they do in secret. (Ephesians 5: 12)

I desire to be freed from my fears. I want God’s light to shine into my dark heart, casting the shadows away. I hope that though my

sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. (Isaiah 1: 18)

But my fear of confession, which grows out of the seed of the pride of self-sufficiency, is like a fern strangling me.

What shall I do?

The Squid and the Whale (2005) is a drama written and directed by Noah Baumbach. This film is a meditation on how divorce and separation, like the squid and whale diorama in the American Museum of Natural History, is a war over power. But whichever parent wins, it is always the children who lose. And that this war is as much political as it is emotional, and for children to take sides in a war that they do not understand, is at once desperately disorientating as it can be painfully liberating. Without a trial, there will be no questions… but with no questions, there are also no answers it seems.

The Road to Guantanamo (2006) is a documentary drama directed by Michael Winterbottom and Matt Whitecross about four young Muslim men from England who visited Pakistan for a holiday and to attend a wedding were mistaken as Islamic terrorists and finally detained, interrogated, tortured and humiliated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This film chronicles how this party of four eventually lost a member (whose whereabouts, til this day, is not known) in Afghanistan, and the remaining three, also known as Tripton Three, were psychologically manipulated by the American and British military to confess that they were recruited by Al-Qaeda and under Osama bin Laden’s leadership. This film not only captures faithfully the anger and agony of the Tripton Three, but perhaps more importantly, highlights the hypocrisy of the American rhetoric of freedom. The Road to Guantanamo is a treatise on the deception devised by the military against apparent perpetrators of crime and how ideology and technology can greatly influence what is reality and what the truth is.

Being John Malkovich (1999) is a film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze about how there is a hidden portal in the Lestercorp office on the 7 1/2 floor which transports a person into the mind of a renowned theatrical performer John Malkovich (a fictionalized version played by John Malkovich himself). This drama has a complex plot which involves a puppeteer’s unbridled ambition (by usurping Malkovich’s mind and body); his wife’s desire to be a man (after entering the Malkovich portal) and then falling love with a seductive mercenary woman (who married the puppeteer-occupied Malkovich); and a circle of aged friends whose journey of immortality encompasses migration from one host’s body to another through the very same portal which enters John Malkovich. Forget about the gender ambiguities, the unscrupulosity that the love of money breeds, and aesthetics of puppetry — this film  is, above all, a study of the questions of consciousness, mind-body dichotomy and the soul.

Fast Food Nation (2006) is an American drama directed by Richard Linklater. It studies the duplicity of junk food culture and the companies’ complicity in exploiting cheap, illegal labour through a string of stories  interwoven together to form a rich, realistic portrait of the cruelty behind fast food. The film brings to light the hypocrisy of profit driven fast food companies by drawing our attention to how often what arrives on our plates are actually chemically manufactured in some laboratory in the desert, and not necessarily the picture-perfect cow we see grazing the pastures in the advertisements. The running metaphor through this film is the abattoir where the meat industry is characterised by not just physical slaughter, but sexual, emotional, monetary, spiritual.

Super Size Me (2004) is a documentary written, directed, produced by and starring Morgan Spurlock who went on an one month diet of McDonalds and almost suffered from liver failure. This film examines how economic conspiracies behind the fast food phenomenon have grave repercussions on the health of the American population, and that the reach of processed food is not limited to fast food restaurants but even in public schools where meals consist of sugar and fats in the form of glossy, packaged “nutritious choices.” This film helps to expose the insidious subtexts of utopian-themed advertising and commercials which are particularly targeted to the children where memories are manipulated to associate euphoria with fast food. Spurlock consults government officials, university professors, lawyers, medical experts, patrons of McDonalds, and even his vegan chef girlfriend (“even during sex, he gets tired easily… and I have to be on top!”) to have a fill of what the most lucrative golden arches in the world can come up to.

I am a proud person. When I say proud, I mean arrogant, conceited. I secretly despise others. Sometimes I hate certain people because I see myself in them. Perhaps resenting the flaws and shortcomings of others is in a sense self-loathing since I identify with their flaws and shortcomings. However, there are also moments when I believe myself to be inferior to others. But this is not a contradiction, right? Proud people tend to have low self esteem, though they may not readily admit it to be so. So being high and mighty gives these people a sense of security because deep inside they are actually vulnerable. Without this fortress of superiority that we set up for ourselves, I suspect we may just shatter into a million pieces. I think I am somebody great but actually I am not. Or maybe I have confused thinking I am great with wishing I am great. But it is humbling to know that there are many others who are greater than me. It helps me to see reality more clearly and learn not to be presumptuous. Then why do I still want to be great? I have this desire to be important or special. I seek to please. I suppose this may be due to the fact that I was seldom praised or encouraged when I was young. I usually got criticised instead, which is not particularly very helpful for my own confidence. So I end up growing into a person who is never contented with himself but is always finding ways to be better than others. This is probably because I am not sure who I am. After all, all the praise and encouragement during childhood tells a child who he or she is.

If I am never good enough, then how do I know what is ever good enough?

Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 family road trip drama directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. This film is not quite funny as a comedy to me as it has been critically received, but I like it because it explores how life can be performance oriented, or as one of the characters say, “one fucking beauty pageant after another.” Olive Hoover is a 7 year old girl who is competing in a Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant and her entire family joins her by driving 800 miles from New Mexico to California in a yellow Volkswagen T2 Microbus. Along the way, Olive’s uncle meets and gets slighted by his ex-boyfriend in a petrol station, her grandfather dies from drug overdose in a motel, and her brother finds out he is colourblind and his pilot dream is shattered. Despite its dark themes, it is still a feel-good film in which you cannot help but cheer for the characters as they find love and fulfilment in the family.

Le Fabuleux d’Amelie Poulain (2001) is a French arthouse film directed by Jean Pierre Jeunet. It is a whimsical, postcard-picturesque film about the charms of imagination, goodness and love in contemporary Paris. This asexual romantic comedy is at once dreamlike and childlike.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) is the sequel to 2004′s Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. This stoner farce, as its predecessor, puts an Asian face to Hollywood cinema but goes beyond exposing ethnic stereotypes and prejudices to become a political critique of the national paranoia over terrorism in America. The comedy film attempts to address how a crisis of fear is engendered by a corrupted class of elites who abuse power to preserve their privileges at the expense of the truth. Besides its crude humour (such as smoking marijuana with George W. Bush in his Texan ranch), one can look forward to a  montage shot in Amsterdam where there are sequences of romance between the characters of John Cho and Kal Penn and their girlfriends. One memorable moment in the film is Kumar reciting a lame love poem he refused to show his girlfriend years ago in college (transcribed in the following:)

I fear I will always be
A lonely number like root 3
Why must my 3 keep out of sight?
Beneath the vicious square root sign?

I wish instead I were a 9
For 9 could thwart this evil trick
With just some quick arithmetric

I know I’ll never see the sun
As 1.7321
Such is my reality
A sad rationality

When hark, is this what I see?
Another square root of a 3
Is quietly come waltzing by

Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
And with a wave of a magic wand
Our square root sign becomes unglued
And love for me has been renewed

Before Sunrise (1995) is a drama film directed by Richard Linklater. It is an earnest meditation on what knowing oneself and knowing the other are, and how the two may not necessarily be extraneous. An American man (Ethan Hawkes) who is a romantic plagued by cynicism, and a French woman (Julie Delpy) who is philosophical and idealistic meet on a train to Vienna. They fall in love with each other (the beauty of chance encounters!) and their conversations within one night in a foreign city reveal the struggles of young people to find their bearings in a world often beyond their understanding, as well as making sense of the void deep inside as they grope their way to find the Other.

Good Will Hunting (1997) is a compelling drama film directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Matt Dillon and Ben Affleck who also star in the film. Dillon plays a prodigy who is also an autodidactic polymath with an eidetic memory but suffers from childhood trauma which sabotages his professional prospects as well as emotional relationships with significant figures in his life. Robin Williams is his therapist who unlocks the cage that Dillon imprisons himself in. Throughout the film, we see Dillon’s self fortification through intellect, wit, humour and violence. What elevates him is precisely his downfall — this protege’s charm is also his curse. But as Williams himself confides about love, regrets, ambitions, choices, fear and forgiveness, Dillon comes to recognize that what gives meaning, purpose and joy in life is not his breathtaking virtuosity and knowledge, but sentiential experiences of the simple things in life, things books can never provide or offer. Good Will Hunting is not just a film about a tortured genius; rather it seeks to suggest what it is to be human.

I am in bliss.

I just got my examination results for the semester. I did fine. Praise the Lord! I am really grateful to God for giving me better grades than those of the previous terms. I thank my Heavenly Father for providing my needs and wants and I appreciate His mercy and grace and I do not take His goodness for granted. I look out of my window and I see white clouds drifting by like a fleet of ships in an ocean of acrylic blue sky. The trees are blooming, cheering God’s beauty with gay flowers. It is a picturesque December afternoon.

I am listening to Songs of a Pious Heart (A Tribute to the Confessions of St. Augustine) by Blake Hicks. I want to lie in bed and sink forever in this moment

of bliss.

Shall read my ESV Study Bible later, perhaps this evening.

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) written and directed by Judd Apatow and co-written by the film’s lead actor Steve Carell was critically acclaimed but I find it disappointing instead. It seems to me more of a tired and flat approach to the American pressure of possessing male sexual prowess in an age of sexual liberation and experience. However, to its credit, the comedy does get funnier in its later development despite its overall stereotypical Hollywood formulations. The film’s accolades, if any, lie in its efforts to portray reality faithfully and unpretentiously.

Black Snake Moan (2007), written and directed by Craig Brewer, derives its title from a 1927 song of the same name by a Texan blues singer-guitarist. The film is set in the Deep South where the fates of a senior black man (Samuel L. Jackson), whose wife leaves him for his brother, and a young white woman (Christina Ricci) addicted to sex due to childhood trauma, collide. Jackson is a religious man and after nursing Ricci back to health from an act of violence by a young white man who wanted to have intercourse with her, Jackson sees it as his spiritual duty to make Ricci repent of her sins (which involves chaining her up in the house, calling in the church pastor, and getting her a summer dress). This unlikely friendship is a transcendental story of resilience and redemption in the Mississippis. The film ends with a voiceover narration of the New Testament — “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways… So now, faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love.”

Thank You for Smoking is a 2006 film directed by Jason Reitman. It is smart, glib, and it caricatures corporate politics and image culture. This cool satire encounters and exploits the pursuit of integrity in parenting amongst other concerns as a ballast to the lack of scruples generally depicted in multinational company wars. Aaron Eckhart who plays the protagonist, a charismatic spin-doctor for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, has an emerald-eyed son (Cameron Bright) who serves as a voice of conscience, a moral compass for the father who has to convince that smoking is good for health. Never has wit and humour been so potently sexy.

4:30 is a 2005 Singaporean film by Royston Tan, a meteor of homegrown talent. It is an intricate meditation of love, loss and longing conducted in an existentialist mood. A boy neglected by his mother, yearns to fill the void within in the absence of his father through a South Korean tenant who is nursing a heartbreak himself. Sublimely homoerotic, perhaps by virtue of Royston Tan’s identity as a homosexual, this study of male adolescent affection and affectation traces the contours of deviancy.

Notes on a Scandal (2004), directed by Richard Eyre, is adapted from a novel by Zoe Heller of the same title. This film is an intoxicating concoction and not for the fainthearted. Both Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett deliver stunning performances in this psychological drama. Its controversy lies in how sexual predation (a schoolteacher having sex with a minor) intersects with emotional predation (the older woman possessive and manipulative of the younger). What is most splendid about this film is that what it addresses is actually not far detached from reality, but quite believable — and therefore, unsettling.

The Calcium Kid (2004) is a very British comedy which mocks the fighter genre. This film is made in the form of a mockumentary, and funny only if one has a sense of British humour. Above all, it also serves as a celebrity vehicle for Orlando Bloom who plays the protagonist, a naivete-milkman-turned-world-champion-boxer. I am ambivalent about The Calcium Kid  for while it can be pretty cute, at other times its frivolity can drive you up the wall. All in all, a popcorn show with a likeable character.

2 Days in Paris (2007), quirky and endearing, is written, directed and acted by Julie Delpy. As if a protest to how life imitates art, this film intelligently represents reality as it is — cultural clashes and sexual politics between an American Jewish man (Adam Goldberg) and a French American emigre (Delpy), at once so idiosyncratic but all at the same time so easily sympathetic for whoever have to struggle with mutual trust and intimacy in love. The micro-sensitivity to aspects of day-to-day life in Paris, such as meeting ex-boyfriends, language barriers when ordering in a fast food restaurant, meeting racist taxi drivers, getting embarrassed by parents etc., gives fertile ground for sowing opportunities for us to appreciate the peculiar personality traits of both characters and then finally reaping a complex picture of how love between two is seldom, if possible, a private or personal affair but very much tied to psychosomatic, familial, communal, cultural, societal, ideological contingencies that we often overlook or take for granted. It is a beautiful film with snatches here and glimpses there to insights which reminds us it is nothing like any conventional romantic comedy.

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is a 2004 stoner comedy, directed by Danny Leiner, that primarily addresses racial stereotypes. Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) are a Korean investment banker and a potential Indian medical student whose cravings for White Castle burgers lead them to a series of misadventures in one night. The film’s brilliance lies in its meditations on various aspects of American life — corporate slackers, skateboarder punks bullying, cops abusing their power, hypocrisy of the religious pious etc. — which centripetally find them in ethnic prejudice. Its farcical humor subverts the assumptions of the American white middle class, and encourages the viewer to question notions and expectations that he may have as regards to children of immigrants.

Malingering, masturbation and male camaraderie in Jarhead, a 2005 tragi-comedy directed by Sam Mendes, closely reflect intimate details of a life of the soldier in outpost. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a private who straddles between solitude and solidarity in the Gulf War, a war he and his comrades do not understand but are proud of their parts therein. It is a charming portrayal of how the individual finds his bearing amidst unfaithful lovers back home, spiritual isolation, and fraternal bonding. The inner world of the comrades is as vast and empty as the outer world of the Iraqi desert. The film tells us that war is not simply fighting against national enemies but also the enemies of boredom and isolation. One’s existence, as one is taught, to be constructed from one’s performance — the rifle, a symbol of virility, gives ontological security, meaning and purpose in one’s life during battle. The horny snipers shoot both bullets and semen, both out of desperation. The fear, rage, and euphoria experienced by the jarheads, or so the Marines are sometimes known as, give this military film a strangely un-military touch.

Members of a plural society, such as Singapore, may hold onto different framing rules and feeling rules from one another despite being socialized by the government with certain dominant ideologies, and therefore it gives space for competing ideologies to thrive underneath a collective imagination. This ought to point towards consciousness of politic behavior, which is culturally and communally relativistic, rather than stipulating specific approaches at redressing potential face threatening acts via negative and positive politeness. While we can agree quite readily with the universal human claims of rationality and face, we must be sensitive to how behavorial manifestations of internalized societal controls can still differ to extents we do not expect from an authoritarian governmentality because a concatenation of factors come into play — ethnic identity, mass media, consumption culture, religion etc. — and they often escape the state’s ironclad grip on our linguistic and emotional practices.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is anything but forgettable. This 2008 romantic farce, directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by Jason Segel who also played the protagonist in the film, pleasantly presents the emotional concavity of a heartbreak through coarse juvenile humor. Forgetting Sarah Marshall employs many boy-falls-in-love-with-girl cliches and mocks New Age syncretism/ecumenism (Russell Brand) and Christian sexual purity (Jack McBrayer), and finally finds itself parodying, and therefore signifying on a greater whole in the reunion of Segel and Mila Kunis, the theme or genre of love-conquers-all in the Dracula musical Segel’s character composed. One can expect to empathize with the bittersweet moments in this film with its pulses of pain, sorrow, anger, escapism and closure in love which ought to resonate with us with their familiarity.

The 2001 film Vanilla Sky directed by Cameron Crowe attempts to address the narcissistic desire of humanity for immortality. David Aames (Tom Cruise) purportedly goes through dream-induced lucid dreams, sequences of subconscious interference which conflat reality with fantasy. Vanilla Sky, as a reference to Monet’s paintings, signifies the placid bliss of transcendence in the face of human longing for paradise. The film is a psychological thriller, erotic love story and a moral fable on the dubious promises of psychoanalysis and cryonics to secure one’s future. The point here appears that the fantasy of parallel reality is only precisely what it is, unreal, and therefore chaotic unlike the order of conscious rationality. And the theme of the technologization of existence suggests virtualization of what is corporeal is really like a painting of vanilla skies.

It is one of those Tower of Babel affairs where man’s efforts at dethroning God is always, at best, self-sabotaging.

Once upon a time, a hungry fox came upon a cluster of ripe black grapes hanging from a trellised vine. The grapes were still moist from the morning dew, and the fox could see herself in the glistening skin of the grapes as the warm sunbeams landed on the cluster. She said to herself, I must have a taste of these grapes, imagine how their saccharine juices would trickle down my lips… and so the fox jumped and leapt with all her might but her snout could never reach those grapes. In the end, the panting fox sank to the ground in defeat, and as she choked on her tears and sweat she told herself, no these grapes are sour, they are probably not even ripe!

The fox looked longingly at the grapes as they glowed teasingly at her, I want my grapes, I want my grapes… even if they are sour… for sour tastes nicer than this bitterness in my heart. 

The fox’s consolation for the pain of not tasting the grapes is the pleasure in admiring them.

Governmentality — self governance or self discipline involving internalization of societal controls and thereby constructing one’s selfhood or personhood – through framing and feeling rules rationalize individuals to love in such a way which is ideologically constructed to be appropriate and desirable. All individuals are managers of their emotions; their self-regulating capacities — agency, autonomy and creativity — may or may not direct them to resist or comply to dominant ideologies. But one always carry out emotional work, managing one’s emotions, and emotional labour, managing others’ emotions by managing one’s emotions. The service sector with its designer retailers, boutique hotels and style bars commodifies the worker’s corporeality where certain embodied attributes, cultural capital and dispositions, or habitus, are valued above knowledge, technical expertise or skills. Workers in the service industry are no longer the working class or proletariat, but an aesthetic aristocracy. Therefore, postmodern consumption is no longer limited to goods but the rendering of service itself is also a product.

The contemporary lover is a postmodern consumer. In the age of post-Fordist economy, product differentiation and material affluence offer persons choices and the power to make choices through mass production, and therefore mass consumption. The commodification of romance and the romanticization of commodities explain how love becomes a liminal ritual for members in the age of globalization — credit card bills, exotic holidays, fine dining etc — fantasy in reality.

The socio-historical genesis of rationalization of emotions can be traced along the trajectory of economic evolution – from pre-industrialism, industrialism, early capitalism, to late capitalism — where the disintegration of familial kinship and societal and communal ties occur slowly, but surely and then suddenly. One’s biography is dictated by the economy. As men leave the household for the factory, they became rationalized, indeed individualized, due to wage work. The alienated assembly line production defines the worker’s identity as one of isolated, disposable, replaceable, faceless unit of commodified labour. But with inflation, women also become wage earners and, like the men, they are rationalized and individualized too.

Singapore’s nationalistic ideology of economic pragmatism and meritocratic competitiveness fulfils its own prophecy — individuals produce to consume, and because they consume, they must produce. This circularity reveals ambivalence of the postmodern lover in his desire to be an individual which contradicts and conflicts with his desire to be intimate. Therefore, the utilitarian etho of the labour market — profit maximization and cost minimization — and its logical consequence of gendered division of labour construct the transactional value of love by legitimizing the existence of plastic sexuality where the ultimate purpose and meaning in romance is subjective gratification.

Self pity is a curious creature. A person who wallows in mud has much pride but little esteem. He looks down on others but thinks little of himself, a diva and the downtrodden at the same time. Such ambivalence can be found in the homosexual who suffers from spiritual haemorrhage day and night.

Mythmaking can be ideological in nature but a common heritage can encourage solidarity in a people. This imagery, or imagination, gives unity in diversity, through a collective lens or vision. In other words, so the past, and so the future.

Take George Washington as an example. American schoolchildren are told that their first president chopped down a cherry tree when he was a boy and because of his honesty and integrity to owning up, he grew up to lead the land of the free. In actuality, this was a fictitous account invented by Washington’s biographer.

Therefore, I am not against our schoolchildren mangling, as it were, our history. Young Singaporeans thought that the Merlion was a mythical creature of lion-fish hybridity which Sri Nilang Utama saw when he landed ashore Temasek a few centuries ago. But the Merlion was actually a trademark symbol of the tourism board created in the 1960s.

I think that Singapore deserves a national narrative of its own which is for once not borne out of a survivial crisis mentality or economic pragmatism, but something we can call our own, something magical almost, and not see ourselves as a victim of circumstances.

How can a person you love, be a shadow?

In today’s context of late capitalism and post-Fordist economy, a discerning language user is a postmodern consumer. Language has become commodified and appropriated by individuals to realise and authenticate their identity, as well as to construct and project their image. For Singapore, English serves as a desirable good because it promises socioeconomic mobility and there is a consciousness and emphasis on class, rather than ethnic or cultural, identity amongst Singaporeans. Most are eager to be proficient in English since it provides a competitive advantage in securing their future, very much in line with the government’s nationalistic ideology of economic pragmatism.

Metalinguistic reflexivity reveals and calls for the postmodern language user to exercise his agency, autonomy and creativity in how he appropriates language. This very much stems from the individual’s intersubjectivity and self-regulating capacity in constructing his personhood, but we must understand that choices and the power to make choices tend to go hand in hand with material affluence.

Let the mosquitoes, mockery, and morning come.

A need to be needed, a want to be wanted, the love of being loved.