A big shout-out to cast and crew of Milk!

Milk, a biopic about the first openly-gay man to be elected to public office in the US has won two coveted Oscars.

Sean Penn clinched Best Actor for his lead role as Harvey Milk, while gay screenwriter Dustin Lance Black won the statuette for Best Original Screenplay. Both made impassioned pleas for equal rights for gay women and men. Right on!

Which were predictably censored in Singapore’s delayed telecast of the Academy Awards on Ch5, frustrating! –ED.

We’re certainly not alone in saying how proud we are of the folks who made Milk, a film that will continue to inform, inspire and empower the LGBT community years from now.

As icing of the cake, the National Museum of Singapore is coincidentally presenting four films by gay British director Terence Davies this weekend. Stark and elegant, these haunting stories are often drawn from Terence’s own tragic past.

Meanwhile, there are treats galore at the cinemas this week. The most entertaining one is the horror movie My Bloody Valentine 3D which will leave you dumbstruck with its state-of-the-art 3D effects.

Watch as blood splatters on your face and sharp objects hurtle rapidly towards you. Starring the uber-hot Jensen Ackles from TV’s Supernatural, it’s the must-have experience this weekend.

Also opening are the charmingly subversive fratboy comedy Role Models, the heartwarming dog drama Marley & Me, and the Holocaust film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

Screen siren Shu Qi also has a new romantic comedy If You Are The One that delightfully pokes fun at the dating game in the new China.

Which to see? Which to skip? Scroll down!

My Bloody Valentine 3-D

You gotta watch this, if only for the full-on 3D effect. Whether you like horror or not, you will awestruck by the illusion of pickaxes flying straight at you and fiery explosions threatening to scorch your skin. My Bloody Valentine 3-D makes the gore particularly visceral and in-your-face, and it’s an experience you’ll be talking about long after the credits role.

Thing is, even without the benefit of its fancy technology, My Bloody Valentine 3-D is still a decent horror flick with a smart script and talented direction by Patrick Lussier (Dracula 2000, White Noise 2). It got an M18 rating for its gratuitous gore and nudity – but that would only serve to elevate its status among horror fans.

The story begins 10 years ago in a mining town called Harmony, where a young miner named Tom accidentally caused a tunnel collapse that kills several miners and puts one man in a coma. When the man finally wakes up from his coma, he goes crazy and hacks up 22 people before the police shoot him down.

Years pass, Tom leaves town, and his old girlfriend (the lovely Jaime King) marries his best friend (Kerr Smith). When an older Tom (played by Jensen Ackles from TV series Supernatural) returns to the town to settle some family business, the madman reappears and starts mauling people again. Can Tom stop him?

Director Patrick Lussier is clearly a man who enjoys gore and violence; he bathes in them and imbibes them by the gallons. There are numerous scenes of skulls smashed by pickaxes, chests cut open, innards spilling out, bodies sliced in half – you get the picture in 3D, no less. Jessen Ackles is an average actor with a very hot bod, as are his co-stars Jamie King and Kerr Smith, so much can be forgiven

Do yourself a favor and catch it this weekend.

Who is Shu Qi’s manager and has he gotten a raise yet? Shu Qi’s latest two films, Look For A Star and now If You Are The One, are rather good. Although both are romantic comedies, they transcend the genre to say something surprisingly profound about the state of relationships today.

Look For A Star deftly balances cutesy romance with earthbound realities, while her latest If You Are The One satirises the contemporary mating game. Directed by China’s leading satirist Feng Xiaogang (Big Shot’s Funeral, Assembly), the latter stars the ordinary-looking Ge You as a lonely man who tries to look for love on the Internet.

He has a string of dates with women who are completely wrong for him – the pregnant woman looking for a husband, the unhappily-married wife looking for revenge, and an assortment of other mismatches. And then he meets Shu Qi, an air stewardess who is in love with a married man. Realising that she is too beautiful to love him, he offers his friendship instead. But can he stop himself from loving her?

Director Feng Xiaogang has much to say about modern love. It seems that money is now the obsession of new capitalist China, and true love has taken a backseat. Marriage has become a barter trade between a man and a woman – a man provides money and stability, a woman satisfies him with her beauty.

Despite these sly observations, If You Are The One cops out at the end with a conventional happy ending that doesn’t do justice to what preceded it. Still, the film is a dose of freshness that’s rare among romantic comedies.

Had enough of Oscar-nominated films? Ready for some stupid, raunchy fun? Then get your ticket to this shamelessly dumb movie that’s surprisingly funny and charming. We guarantee you’ll be laughing out loud at some of the gags – even if they are designed for an audience of tipsy tertiary students.

Seann William Scott and Paul Rudd play two salesmen who, in a fit of pure misanthropy, crash their company vehicle and land in court. To escape a jail sentence, they have to perform community service at a counseling center for troubled teens.

Seann is assigned to a 10-year-old boy, who immediately accuses the man of touching his balls. Paul gets to counsel teenager Christopher Mintz-Plasse (from Superbad) who is so obsessed with playing medieval role-playing games, he sews his own crests.

Director David Wain throws in lots of subversive jokes, while making the point that although we all have to grow up and become responsible someday, we shouldn’t forget how to have fun. If you enjoyed The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, you’ll looove this.

From the director of The Devil Wears Prada comes this family drama about a couple (Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson) who adopt a puppy named Marley and learn several lessons about life.

Now here’s the catch. Although the trailers seem to suggest this is a cute and happy film, it actually isn’t always. Instead, it gets fairly serious somewhere past the first act when Jennifer and Owen have to deal with marriage issues, career issues, housing issues, parenting issues, stay-home-mom vs career-mom issues, adjusting-to-the-new-neighborhood issues, and so on.

Meanwhile, the dog is the only one in the family that stays happy – chewing the furniture, playing with the kids, chasing pigeons on the beach, and all the other things that dogs are supposed to do.

lthough Marley may be cute enough to get audiences going oooh and aaahh over every little thing he does, the human characters aren’t always that charming. As they try desperately to juggle the demands of modern living, their problems are too real and familiar to be laughed off. Based on the non-fiction bestseller by John Grogan, Marley & Me delivers some laughs, some tears and some painfully sobering perspectives

We’re not sure how to react to this film. On the one hand, it is a handsome, well-crafted production. On the other hand, it is morally abject.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas tells a Holocaust story from the point of view of an 8-year-old German boy named Bruno (Asa Butterfield). His father (David Thewlis) is a Nazi officer who has been newly assigned to take charge of a concentration camp. His mother (Vera Farmiga) knows that the camps are exterminating Jews but feigns ignorance. His sister (Amber Beattie) is so in love with the Nazi ideology, she puts up Hitler posters in the house.

Bruno is a lonely boy who doesn’t know the truth. Forced to play by himself in the fields, he meets a boy in “striped pajamas” behind an electrified fence. (Hence, the title.) They strike a happy friendship, even though Bruno’s questions like "What do you burn in those chimneys?” hardly gets him any closer to the truth.

Directed by Mark Herman (Little Voice), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas asks you to see the Holocaust from the point-of-view of the family of a concentration camp commandant. But why? Why should we care about them? Why should we give them any more sympathy than the terrorists of 9/11 and the Bali bombing, or George W. Bush who started a false war that killed thousands of innocent Iraqis and Americans?

^ back to top

Tickets at $8 are available at the Stamford Visitor Services Counter.

Or book online at www.nationalmuseum.sg.

Call 6332-3659 or 6332-5642 for inquiries.

Terence Davies is a filmmaker whose stark, poetic and finely-crafted films are well-regarded in British cinema. Openly but unhappily gay, many of his films drew upon his troubled childhood when he was frequently beaten by his father. Terence is also a Roman Catholic who believes his homosexuality is “a curse” and often uses the medium to explore his feelings of guilt and shame.

The first film, The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983), comprise three black-and-white short films that depict different periods of a man’s life – from his childhood to his middle age. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) draws from Terence’s brutal and impoverished growing-up years, while The Long Day Closes (1992) is about a teenage boy who finds escape from painful reality through the cinema.

His latest film, Of Time and the City (2008) is a visual ode to his hometown of Liverpool. The film is largely made up of archival footage that covers the years from the end of the Second World War through to the 1970s. It poetically evokes the many changes the city has gone through over the decades.

Austere and unrelenting, Terence’s films are certainly not for everyone. Mainstream audiences often complain that his films are too subtle, cryptic and slow, while art-house film lovers savor these delicate enigmas.

His films are screening at the National Museum of Singapore for this weekend only.

• Friday (27 Feb), 7:30pm: The Terence Davies Trilogy
• Saturday (28 Feb), 4pm: Distant Voices, Still Lives
• Saturday (28 Feb), 7:30pm: The Long Day Closes
• Sunday (29 Feb), 2pm: Of Time and the City

^ back to top