Musings

There’re just three extended news issues running in the last week or so now. Firstly, the inquiries made to a certain Romanian DIplomat’s actions that resulted in a poor guy’s death; secondly, the extremely dry weather here that finally saw very welcome respite in the form of island wide downpours yesterday, and local director Jack Neo’s adventure-capades with women half his age. The forums, not unexpectedly so, have been abuzz with the usual gossip, speculation and finger-pointing – though unlike what the newspapers here seem to be suggesting, I don’t get the feeling that more than a very small handful of online persons are sympathetic to Neo at all. He’s pretty much the butt of jokes right now, with Mr. Brown getting into the act too and getting his usual mileage.

Funnily though, I’m feeling a little more sympathy for Jack Neo than other Singaporeans seemingly, and certainly more than Ris Low six months ago when a saga though of a very different sort reached the same kind of online fervor. Not sure why. His indiscretions are a lot more impactful and were obviously destructive to his family and at the same time made the more ironical when one considers the moralistic-styled themes of the series of films he’s directed.

I think my sympathy might be to do with the fact that I sense there’s some degree of opportunism from the persons who seemed to be lining up to expose him, with two so far announcing that they have come to the public because they wanted to shame him. But why was that even necessary to begin with? Surely they must have realized that by going full media public, the persons who were going to be hurt the most would had been Neo’s family and wife and not just him. At least the latter’s already used to media and publicity, his family no.

The second person was even reported as that “…[she] was spurred to go public after reading about Ms Chong’s story and wanted to prevent further such incidents” – but I think that was either just mind-numbingly bad judgment or pure vindictiveness. The same objective of preventing further incidents would had been equally reached if she had just gone to Neo’s wife directly to let her know, since news had already broke from the first woman. Moreover, the same second woman claims that at the age of 20, she was just “a little girl” who didn’t know how to handle the older man’s advances. I don’t buy that for a minute either. A 15 year old maybe, but a 20 year old who’s already a freelance i.e. independent model…? Who’s she trying to kid? Not in today’s world, even in the year 2004.

I don’t think Neo’s indiscretions can be reasoned away or excused, and to the director’s credit, he has offered no excuses for his behavior. There’s also a bunch of online comments complaining about Neo’s rudeness at the press this morning when he yelled at them to get away when they started photographing his wife after she collapsed from sorrow during the press conference.

My opinion differs: I saw a man who’s finally realized the net effect of his carelessness on his wife, but who is going all out to protect her now. Surely, that must count for something.

Matt was using a Nikon D90 with his 35mm f1.8, and myself the D300 with the Sigma 24-60mm f2.8. Different lenses not withstanding of course, the flash settings and DSLR modes we used were roughly similar but the results turned out rather differently.

Mine’s the first set below:

And Matt’s:

And just for fun: of Matt shooting Hannah.:)

Every other day there’ll be photographic events organized and posted up on Clubsnap, with the subjects of photography in one room at least typically young female models, and not always fully clothed but in lingerie and bikinis. I remembered these amateur model photoshoots were actually reported in The Straits Times a couple of months ago, and there was some bad publicity surrounding some of these photo shoots with some persons I think asking aloud if some of these amateur photographers participating in these events had sleazy intentions. While Matt was in Labrador Park last week, he encountered one such event with a young female model being followed by seven photographers around the park, and texted me asking what was going on haha.:)

Anyway, we decided to pull our own TFCD (LOL) ‘model’ shoot at The Rivervale stunt, just for fun. The model? None other than our very own Hannah! Here’re the third-person behind-the-scenes pictures taken by Ling on that little Panasonic LZ8 compact.:)

Hannah gamely took up the challenge of posing for Matt and myself, and didn’t seem in the least perturbed by the three flashes constantly going off. I’ll put up the pictures tomorrow in a different post.

In the mean time, the whole experience was just outright hilarious, and Hannah’s mood willing, we’ll do this again very soon.:)

We’ve been bringing Hannah for the occasional dip into the pool. The last time round we did this Hannah while could adjust to the use of her neck float, couldn’t quite float by keeping her body vertical. So, it was thrilling to see her able to do that this afternoon. Pictures.:)

Of the about 135 pictures taken over the 15 minutes using the Sigma 18-250mm, most of them turned out delightfully, though some color temperature adjustments were necessary with the SB600 flashlight alternating between TTL and TTL-BL modes throughout.

Two more pictures below: at the start of the swim (you can see that Hannah’s hair is still dry), and towards the end in Hannah’s Jedi-esque swim-robe but looking pretty tired:

As soon as we got back home and changed her back to her normal clothes, Hannah zonked right out into sleep! :)

Ling wasn’t kidding when she wrote here last month that Hannah bursts into tears whenever our baby sees Ling coming to pick her up from infant care! Semester break started for me a week ago, so I’ve been taking a day of leave here and there – and this afternoon I saw exactly just that.

Hannah was on the far side of the room at the infant care center playing with toys, while Ling had to crouch and hide behind an ankle-height obstacle just so that Hannah wouldn’t spot her LOL! Too funny for words. As soon as Hannah spotted me on the other side of the room (about 5 metres away), she broke into a huge grin and started scrambling on all fours to me. I’d brought along the Sigma 18-250mm so managed a few pictures of Hannah on the move crawling towards me, though the uneven lighting in the room messed up exposure metering.

When Hannah was on my side of the room, she spotted Ling – and immediately started crying haha.:)  

It’s extremely rare for Ling to show any interest in the lenses I use when it comes to taking pictures. So it came as surprise to me when she took a look at some pictures I took of Hannah yesterday evening, expressed surprise at how amazing the shots looked and asked what lens was used:

The lens belongs to Matt, and is the Nikon 35mm f1.8G DX and for cropped sensors a fairly recent release from Nikon actually. Prior to coming to Singapore and earlier this year, Matt actually asked if I’d to buy a copy of the lens too for him to bring here too but I declined then. While I don’t have a lens capable of shooting at 35mm @ f1.8, I thought the Sigma 24-60mm f2.8 I normally use for indoor and Hannah’s pictures would cover any intended use of the 35mm.

Well, I got to eat my words now: the lens is simply superb! Even Ling was bowled over at its color reproduction and how much detail the lens could resolve (“Wah… can see the detail in the cushion cover!!”). And when I told her it was a lens the lens costs about USD200, she said “buy buy buy!!”, and even suggested buying it from Matt haha!

Matt isn’t a stranger to seafood here in Singapore: there’s an entry he wrote for our blog here more than three years ago tucking into Jumbo Seafood, with photographic evidence to boot. This time round, Matt was taken to seafood dinner by Tchung and Jasmine on Sunday – and that restaurant that’s named after a certain English footballer, “Owen Seafood”.

This restaurant’s a pretty popular spot among Singapore foodies (the Foo clan at Lentor is no exception). One of the really special things about this restaurant, or the place it’s located at rather, is that the seafood comes live and off a multilevel bazaar comprising huge water tanks. Basically, you pick which critters you want for dinner, and half an hour later, voilà – they’ll be on your table, all cooked and ready for you to tuck in. Some of those critters are freakin’ big, as in mutant-size huge. I wonder are they really open for sale and consumption, or are those really just intended as museum artifacts LOL.

No complaints about the food too: it’s as good as ever. We had chili and black pepper crabs, coffee pork ribs that were so good we ordered a second plate of, minced beef toufu and other veggies.

One thing though: the place, or heck the entire Turf City, looks a little rundown and in dire need of a major renovation effort. The pictures turned out pretty alright though on Matt’s D90 DSLR, coupled with the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8. Great lens, tack sharp wide-open.:)

Surrogates (2009) – on rental. There was critical acclaim heaped on Surrogates when the film was screening in theatres here last year: but I gave it a miss back then for a really dumb reason. Don’t laugh now – but I skipped it only because the film was a disappointing 89 minutes long, and I concluded it wasn’t worth $10 and decided to catch it on rental instead. I like long films – make me feel it’s worth the price of admission.:)

Seriously though; Surrogates is a sci-fiction thriller and includes elements and elements already seen in several other movies of this type,including The Matrix, I, Robot and The Island, all from about the last decade, and even the recent Avatar. This film is set in the near future – the year 2017 where robot surrogates are used in place of human beings to do just about everything: at work and even at war. The robot avatars are ‘driven’ through mind-links with humans who remain in their safe confinements of home. Not everyone’s thrilled with this technological evolution though: humans who resist the use of robotic surrogates have formed city enclaves, and tensions between them and the rest of the world are high. The leader of the enclave is known as The Prophet, played by Ving ‘M.I.’ Rhames in hilariously funny dreadlocks.

Now, these robotic surrogates are supposed to have fail-safes that protect their operator from harm in the event that the surrogates are injured or destroyed. However, the opening scenes of the film establishes that this is no longer the case: two surrogates are destroyed, killing their operators as well in apparently brutal fashion (the violence fortunately is all off-screen). Bruce Willis and Rahda Mitchell play FBI agents Greer and Peters, and who’re assigned to the case. And soon enough, both discover a plot and conspiracy that’s bigger than just two seemingly unexplained incidents, and which involves even millions of lives.

Visually, the film doesn’t spell out loud that This is the Future, aside from those eerie-looking robots which look like anatomically and facially perfect representations of their human operators. Case in point: Rosamund Pike plays Greer’s wife, but as stunningly beautiful is this British actress in person, her avatar ironically looks like an awfully creepy version of the real person. From the looks of it, CG was used to airbrush (or something) each actor’s facial features. Sort of how Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were digitally de-aged in the opening scene of X-Men: The Last Stand but somehow in disturbingly hair-raising way.

The film’s 2017 world also looks pretty much like today’s 2010, and there aren’t space ships or jet propulsion cars flying about. But the moralistic issues and themes of technological use are right center and forefront in the narrative: when does the use of technology come to a point where we lose our humanity. There’s a terrific subplot of Greer’s marital relationship with his wife whom he has not seen in person for years, but only her avatar – his wife has not stepped out of his room through all these years, and for him, her perfect avatar is no substitute.

The 89 minute run length of the film though I think works against the film. I would have like the film to run a lot longer with a more thorough fleshing out of several story points, including of a very interesting law enforcement operative who has the power to remotely disconnect – with the appropriate warrants – robot surrogates from their operators. In a couple of other cases, key story points needed to have been explained but were glossed over: like how that unique weapon actually results in the violent killing of operators.

Still, the film was a terrific ride. I’ll recommend this for any one who like their sci-fiction thrillers with thoughtful themes.

500 Days of Summer (2009) – on rental. Romantic comedies are a dime a dozen these days, and while the quality of the spoken dialog and chemistry between leads do continue to vary from film to film, more often than not many films of this genre don’t see much range in terms of their stories, the general plot arc of meeting to conflict to reconciliation, nor the atypical outcome at film’s end.

I guess that’s why I really enjoy romantic comedies that are either offbeat or even just a little out of the norm. There’s the pair of real time-esque comedies Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and now this: 500 Days of Summer. The film starts off with a startling voice over – that this is not a love story, though that in itself is a misrepresentation: 500 Days is a love story, just not a conventional one.

The compact 95 minute film tells of a relationship between Tom, a card writer who dreams of being an architect and who begins the film believing in the power of love and fate; and his co-worker, Summer, who doesn’t believe in either. By the film’s end, both persons’ perspectives would have changed, though their individual journeys to this vary in efficacy: it works for Tom, didn’t work for me in Summer’s case.

The film is presented in nonlinear narrative fashion. In any other circumstance, the narrative might have caused audiences getting madly disoriented as the film jumps between points in the timeline. To the film’s credit, these timeline points are presented through a numerical measure of how many days Tom and Summer are in in their relationship. Some of the funniest bits are the juxtapositions between past and present. For instance, in one scene you see the relationship at a high point, and a second later, you see an identical scene but only 100 days later where the relationship is at its low point.

Character pair engagement, chemistry and general likability in romantic leads are of great importance in films of this type. Tom and Summer are played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, not exactly unknowns but so over-exposed in films of this genre either like Jennifer Aniston is these days. You’ll empathize with Levitt’s Hansen – he’s the average guy in a job that keeps him occupied and puts food on the table but he has secret dreams.

But it’s Deschanel’s Summer that left me with an impression: she’s unconventional, refreshing despite her pessimistic attitudes towards love, but constantly still surprises with her actions despite that. It’s telling that Zooey Deschanel is an attractive actress in person, but her costumes and weird 1960s hairdo hides that and lets her facial features takes over the visual aspects of her representation.

It’s also refreshing to see a comedy that doesn’t rely on adult gimmicks to relate a story point, like in the recent but really disappointing The Ugly Truth. In this sense, 500 Days doesn’t feel false but exactly what relationships are like.

We watched the film the other evening with Matt, and it gets Ling’s approval.

And on the following evening after getting home from an Owen Seafood dinner event with Matt and family, she was chewing on the edges of her pillows.:)

Sunday evening

I must get pictures of her chewing on my fingers soon – just for the record of course.:)