No Country for Old Men

"Like death itself, Anton operates without discrimination, without the guidance of reason and with the force of inevitability. The equation is hauntingly simple. In order to illustrate the point with clarity, Anton offers one of his potential victims mercy with the flip of a coin; In Anton’s universe, one which we inevitably share, life boils down to chance, to making life and death choices regardless of whether we’re ready to stare death in the face or not." - Read Tom Hall's review.

If there is a personification of Death in recent cinema, then it must be Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old men. It is a strange movie (as it doesn't fit with what we're used to especially the ending) but it is intimate in its treatment of life, death, fate and human nature.

Get this print "art of Levitation"!

There are many things in this world and they mostly involve one kind of addiction or another. It is the way of our modern society. We use our addictions to deny our own insecurities (it can be anything from loneliness to boredom to unfulfilled desires), and everything "negative" becomes a catastrophe. We don't want to face them so we keep running away, always needing to keep pace with everything else, to earn more money, to get the latest gadgets, just to cover up our own little stories - that we need that something else - just to be happy. Truth is, our life will never be how we would like it to be. If we're not happy now, we can never be happy later.

There are two great disappointments in life.
Not getting what you want and getting it.
~Sir George Bernard Shaw

Llewelyn Moss and the Pandora's Box

Anton and the satchel of money are inextricably linked. It is a Pandora's box, the apple in the Garden of Eden, it is blood money from a drug deal gone bad. If you find a bag that contains two million dollars in unmarked bills, what would you do? It promises to make your dreams come true (much like the lottery but with less dramatic side effects), but Death never makes any promises. He comes as and when he wishes, and no matter how far Llewelyn Moss ran with the money, or how much he believe he could make it, his life was stretching thinner and thinner. Haha Death and his satchel of money. Throw the bait and they will bite...

There are many things in this world; there is beauty and happiness and there is the present. The only time to be happy is in the present. That is the age of happiness, the time when children are children, fully in the present (Haha sometimes you wonder if children are growing up a little too fast these days). And of course, we are all addicted to speed nowadays. Things just get faster and faster and we never really have any time to stay still. If we stop for a moment, we can feel the constant pull of our thoughts and reactions that takes us towards what we fear and what we crave. Both are just different faces on the same coin. Both are dissatisfactions with little or no bearing on the present...

;)

Recycled Memories

The quality of memory changes, like movies, being edited, filtered, made simpler. We watched them as and when they hit us triggered by the most innocent of things. A corridor. A face. A touch of the hand. The smell of rain. A ride in the taxi. Sometimes, it hits us like a train and then some, touch us lightly, leave us stranded; synapses connect and make us see, hear, feel as if for the first time. Sometimes they fade, and no matter how hard we try, we can't make them out, like subliminal images secretly implanted that refuse to go away. And then we shrug them all aside. The movie ends, and we walk out only to walk back in again and again. If we accumulate enough movies, we may end up walking in circles haha. It's hard to break the cycle, as those movies will always bring you back.


Sorrow is addictive. If you're not careful, like the protagonist, you may end up walking back into the past in order to relive it again. Addictive because most people who travel back in time to reminisce do not come back. We should live in the present as that is all that matters. It's the kind of wisdom that makes sense but may be harder than we imagined. Many people try to move on with their lives but leave a part of themselves back in time, secretly hoping that they could capture what they once felt.

The present should be enough.

It should be enough to make us happy...

Re-visit - Princess Mononoke

I saw Princess Mononoke (1997) by Master animator Hayao Miyazaki many years back, and I remembered loving the anime but felt that the ending was somewhat not fulfilling. I was hoping for a resolution - revenge - for the destroyer of the forest to meet her just deserts; for the spirits of the forest to win, and for the greedy to be punished for their folly. But this story is much more than that, and refuses at every turn to be simplistic.

I watched it again (it's been 10 years) and I can't help but admire the sensibilities of the creator. It is truly one of the best anime I've watched. It begins as a black and white case, an evil demonic boar invading the innocence of a small village with its murderous rage. An innocent young prince, Ashitake fights to save the village but sustains a supernatural injury on his arm. Then, it is no longer black and white. All shades of gray begin to appear.

The demon is a god, spirit of a once mighty boar who dies while fighting to save the forest. The cause of its death is an iron bullet (the advent of technology). The cause of its demonic manifestation is rage and hatred. The owner of the iron bullet is Lady Eboshi, who is as determined to strip the forest bare for ore to smelt and profit, as it is for the divine wolves, tree-planting apes and vengeance-seeking boars to protect the forest. Yet, Lady Eboshi desires to build a better place for her people (including ex-courtesans and lepers).

It was quite heart-wrenching to see the tree-planting apes cry out in despair as they try to replant trees on the barren ground that Lady Eboshi has destroyed, admist cannon blasts from Eboshi's guards to keep them away. And then there is the "Kodama", strange childlike tree-deities that embody the life spirit of the trees, as they click in unison to the great equalizing force - the Spirit of the Forest - the creator and taker of lives.

The way Miyazaki conceptualizes and gives form to this force - a spirit deer with a benevolent face (which transforms into the nightwalker) is truly awe-inspiring, and to have Lady Eboshi assassinating it for its severed head, as a trade for the rifleman, and the prize for the emperor (for everlasting life), reflects the reality of today's capitalist system and it's incessant ravage of our environment - it is brutal and unrelenting.

New York Times critic Janet Maslin noted, “Absent are the little anthropomorphic touches that enliven most animation involving animals; this film’s prevailing attitude toward its creatures is one of respect and wonder.” In its depiction of the nature of animals, Princess Mononoke inherits the legacy of the great works of Japanese art." - Pacific Asia Museum

The final scene sees the humans returning the head to the Spirit of the Forest when they realize that they are in fact killing themselves. Perhaps that is the equalizing force, with the awareness of our environment predicament becoming more and more prevalent in our consciousness. Not sure if this is enough to stop the tide of destruction but at least now, we can feel its counterforce...


"Mononoke also became the highest grossing movie in Japan until Titanic took over the spot several months later. Overall, Mononoke is the third most popular anime movie in Japan, next to 2001's Spirited Away and 2004's Howl's Moving Castle, both also by Miyazaki." Wikipedia

Fight Club

Just watched Fight Club again and I’m feeling more energized already! Can’t help but see the similarities between Fight Club and The Matrix. Both are about becoming disfranchised and ceding personal power to programmed aspirations. Like photocopies of our actual self, we grow further and further away from who we really are. For your own protection, Catmasutra introduces Angel for some comic relief while the Matrix provides the red pill; Fight Club inevitably presents Tyler Durden:

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

We can all identify with this somewhat… and sometimes it’s nice even just to wake up for a while, shake ourselves up (in fight club, they fight), at my workplace, we play foosball. And at one time or another, we feel like letting go of everything and just run with it – wherever that takes us. The more we have to lose, the less freedom we have.

“But first you have to give up. First, you have to know, with no fear, know that someday you are going to die. Until you know that, you are useless. It's only after we lost everything that we are free to do anything.”

Painting by Nara Yoshitomo

Of course, we have our very own blue pill, made in Singapore. The blue pill will leave us as we are, commuting to work everyday, caught in the rush-hour, reading the Straits times, and believing in the things we believe we know as a matter of habit. Boomtown $ingapore! As revealed by lifestyle in the Sunday Times, “It’s boomtime, boomtown Singapore as the island shed its stuffy image and revels in the sound policy decisions that were made.”

Boomtown Singapore Menu
(Work hard and you can be one of us!)

Risotto for $580
Face serums for $1200
New breasts and a flat stomach for $20000
Country club memnership for $170000
Lamborghini Gallardo for $928000
Horizon yacht $22.8m

Wahahah That was one of the most "empty" article I’ve ever read. Imagine what all those years of reading the national papers will do to you!!??

The red pill is that something
we should be searching for if not for the blue pill.

We are told that it can help us to find the truth. We don't know what that truth is, or even if it is necessary. It symbolizes risk, doubt and questioning. "Ignorance is bliss" and if you believe that you already know the truth as prescribed by the blue pill, what is there to question? “By accepting what we are told, life can be easier. There is the social pressure to 'fit in', which is immensely strong in most cultures. Questioning the status quo carries the danger of ostracism, possibly persecution. This aspect has a strong link with politics. People doing well under the current system are not inclined to look favorably on those who question the system. Also, the act of simply questioning does not infer a lack of validity on the questioned. Why not assume that your experience is innocent until proven guilty? Just accept everything?” – Matrix Philosophy

“After fight club, everything else in

your life gets the volume turned
down. You can deal with anything
The people who had power over you
have less and less."

Perhaps the truth lies in the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide...

Me and you and everyone we know

The shoe salesman says "Did you want to try these on?"
The woman who drives the cab says, "No, I'm just driving him."
- So those are comfortable?
-- I guess so. I mean, they kind of rub my ankles, but all shoes do that. I have low ankles.
- You think you deserve that pain, but you don't.
--I don't think I deserve it.
- Well, not consciously maybe.
-- My ankles are just low.
- People think foot pain is a fact of life... but life is actually better than that.

Sipping coffee in Cambodia, looking at the evening sky...

There is one sky. I love the sky especially during the evening time. If you have a place that you can look out of, or for that matter, just a window, remember to catch a piece of the sky and hold it for a while. It's like the world is one big house, and there is really just one sky, and the only difference is that you're looking at it from a different window. Zoom in, and here I am, on a small island, in a small place, with 2 cats, looking out at the same sky as you are. It's such a nice big picture that you can't help but feel this is no longer such a small place, that somehow there's more room in the world now (places and things get smaller and smaller when you keep doing and seeing the same things over and over again), and there is more magic out here than we care to let ourselves believe.

says the shoe salesman who set his hand on fire trying to save his own collapsible life : "I don't want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it (from the movie, Me and you and everyone we know)." Can we handle it? It's harder and scarier than we think...

;)

Cinema Paradiso

"Living here day by day, you think it's the center of the world. You believe nothing will ever change. Then you leave: a year, two years. When you come back, everything's changed. The thread's broken. What you came to find isn't there. What was yours is gone. You have to go away for a long time... many years... before you can come back and find your people. The land where you were born (from the movie Cinema Paradiso, 1988)." You have to succeed overseas before Singapore will recognize that you have succeeded... We have heard this phrase so many times that it's almost a cliché. Unfortunately, this is still true...

"The Screen Kiss is important to Cinema Paradiso. Early in the film, the local priest previews each movie before it is available for public consumption, using the power of his office to demand that all scenes of kissing be edited out. By the time the new Paradiso opens, however, things have changed. The priest no longer goes to the movies and kisses aren't censored. Much later, following the funeral near the end of Cinema Paradiso, Salvatore receives his bequest from Alfredo: a film reel containing all of the kisses removed from the movies shown at the Paradiso over the years (Reelviews)."Haha - Remember the time when old men queued up in long lines just to watch some uncensored scenes? Even today, art with nudity is deemed as too sensitive in public places... Maybe the Internet is a good thing - it forces a re-think from "control" to "letting go"...