Happy Valentine’s Day!

Now as you’d expect, the theaters are filled with romantic comedy titles.

There’s the Andy Lau-Shu Qi vehicle Look For A Star; there’s New In Town starring the increasingly annoying Renee Zellweger; and there’s The Other End of the Line starring Desperate Housewives’ hotbod Jesse Metcalfe. These come on the heels of The Wedding Game and Bride Wars.

My favourite among all these titles would be Look For A Star. Directed by Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs), it delivers all the requisite laughter and warm fuzzy feelings you need for a date movie. So make a beeline for it this Saturday!

Now if you’re a more discerning moviegoer, you might want to catch Oscar nominee Slumdog Millionaire instead.

Danny Boyle’s film about a street urchin who turns into a quiz show whiz is daring, dazzling and utterly exhilarating. It’s quite unlike anything you may have seen in recent memory, and it will be enjoyed and talked about long after the Oscar season is over.

Here's rooting for the Oscar nod for Best Picture – even though its biggest contender, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is an uncommonly good picture too.

Till next week, enjoy!

Slumdog Millionaire

Can you love someone so strongly, it drives you to answer all the questions correctly on a tough quiz show like “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”? Apparently, love can make you do anything.

Although the idea may seem far-fetched, director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) make their case beautifully with Slumdog Millionare – a film so stunning and satisfying, it goes to the very core of human experience. The film is already touted to win Best Picture at the upcoming Oscars. And one can see why.

When the film opens, teenage boy Dev Patel is being accused by the police of cheating on a quiz show. After all, he is an uneducated orphan. How could he have answered all the tough questions on the show unless someone was feeding him the answers, right? Wrong.

Life, it seems, has a funny of teaching the young man everything he needed to know on the show. As Slumdog Millionaire flashes back into his past, it tracks his extraordinary journey from a juvenile deliquent to a quiz show whiz.

As in the case of those of us who weren’t born with much, life for Dev began as a series of endless disappointments and heartbreaks. Yet each time, he bounced back and moved on, taking away a precious lesson that would one day come in handy. The most important lessons of all he learnt when he fell in love with the beautiful Frieda Pinto…

Gorgeous, exhilarating and inspirational, Slumdog Millionaire is a miraculous work and a testament to the emotional power of cinema. Director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle imbue it with the spirit and energy reminiscent of Fernando Mireille's City of God and, yes, Danny’s first smash-hit, Trainspotting. There are so many unforgettable scenes here, and even the closing credits are worth staying back for.

If you’re going to watch to just one Oscar nominee this year, let it be Slumdog Millionaire. (If two, then catch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button too.)

Fridae has always championed gay director Bryan Singer. From his early indie hit The Usual Suspects (1994) to his mainstream successes like X-Men (2000) and Superman Returns (2006), he’s well-regarded by many queers for being able to navigate the shark-infested waters of Hollywood and negotiate the tricky math of box-office success – while being openly-gay.

His latest film, Valkyrie, is a handsomely-crafted historical thriller starring Tom Cruise. From its opening reels to its final credits, Bryan has spared no detail in perfecting the film. Unfortunately, it’s also turned out to be one of his weakest. And the problem may lie less in the execution than in the historical facts itself.

Valkyrie is based on the true story of a righteous Nazi officer named Col Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) who wants to kill Adolf Hitler. Dismayed by Hitler’s evil deeds and atrocities, he befriends a group of civilians and soldiers who want to get rid of their leader too. As we all know, the plan failed and Hitler continued his reign of terror long after that.

Now as viewers watching Col von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) plan an assassination which we know will fail, we cannot help but feel a sense of impending disappointment. It’s hard to enjoy a film whose ending will be something of an anti-climax. Burdened by this expectation, Valkyrie’s numerous scenes depicting the men’s meticulous planning of the assassination just feel redundant.

Watch this film for its historical relevance, but don’t expect to enjoy it in its entirety.

Now if you’re looking for a Valentine’s Day movie for this weekend, we highly recommend Look For A Star. It’s as light as a breeze and as fluffy as cotton candy, and just perfect for date night.

Directed by the very competent Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs, Initial D), it stars Andy Lau as a wealthy casino owner who’s been divorced three times but still looking for love. He meets the comely Shu Qi, a sexy cabaret dancer and part-time poker dealer who dares to talk back to him. They’re drawn to each other, and romance soon follows.

As Andy is a public figure, the spotlight eventually turns on the couple. And that’s when their problems begin. She starts to soak in the attention; he starts to think she’s after his money. He wants to sign a pre-nup; she thinks he doesn’t love her.

Inspired by the life and loves of Macau’s ‘King of Gambling’ Stanley Ho, Look For A Star feels both fresh and familiar at the same time. Much of its strength lies in the script’s multiple storyline that has Andy and Shu Qi’s glamorous affair foiled by the more down-to-earth romances of his chauffeur and his secretary.

Indeed, Look For A Star is one of those rare films that has its head in the clouds and its feet firmly rooted on the ground. It’s pure 100% romantic entertainment that you won’t regret catching, especially on Valentine’s Day.

Exclusive to Cathay

Talk about redundant, The Other End of the Line is one movie that’s 5 years too late. Had this film been released when there was a big hoo-haa over American call centers being moved to faraway India for its much cheaper English-speaking workforce, it might have interested audiences.

But today, the story of a romance that starts with phonecalls between an American man in New York and an Indian woman in Mumbai just feels stale.

Jesse Metcalfe (of Desperate Housewives fame) plays a hip advertising guy who has problems with his credit card. When he calls his bank, a lovely Indian woman (Shriya Saran) in Mumbai picks up the phone to help. She calls herself “Jennifer David from San Francisco”, and Jesse can’t help but find her charming and eloquent.

Attraction burgeons over several phone calls, but Shriya eventually has to come clean and tell him who she really is…

To be fair, the lead actors are really quite charming. Jesse is gorgeous, as we all know, while Shriya is a delightful actress with a mega-watt smile. But not much else in this romantic comedy feels new or engaging. Tracey Jackson’s script is too obvious, while James Dodson’s direction is ham-handed.

Here’s another romantic comedy that’s wrong for its times. It deals with – of all things – job losses and retrenchment. Yeah, that’ll surely pull in the crowds….

Renee Zellweger plays a high-powered executive from Miami who has to go to a little town in Minnesota to downsize a food-packaging plant. Her plant's employees, instead of being worried about losing their jobs, pull pranks on her. She, instead of getting annoyed, starts to like them.

Soon she grows to love the town and its people, from the weather to their accent to the scruffy union representative (Harry Connick Jr, who really should go back to singing). Not surprisingly, she ends up trying to save their jobs instead…

If you’ve watched more than 10 romantic comedies, you don’t need to watch New In Town (but Old In Everything Else). Especially since Renee Zellweger is getting to be damn annoying with those pinched expressions and look-at-me-aren’t-I-cute? pouts.

^ back to top

19th Melbourne Queer Film Festival

My Queer Valentine

Kumar: Stripped bare and Standing

more>>

7th Q! Film Festival Indonesia

^ back to top

22nd Singapore International Flim Festival

^ back to top