Wokay!

Yes, I know that I’ve been back in India for two weeks already. In my defense, I’ve been trying to write other posts, but writer’s block and all that means I’ve decided to just get the Singapore posts over and done with, and hopefully I’ll be able to kickstart myself on the others.

So, anyway, what does a guy who’s got an iPod for his birthday, and is quite fond of his current cellphone buy in Singapore? Well, he buys food (more on that in another post), and newspapers (more on that in yet another post), but when it comes to big ticket items, he begins with the coffeemaker his parents asked him to get. And since he’s feeling extravagant, he buys a grinder as well.

A note on coffee makers. I bought the cheapest one available- the grinder and maker together were a hundred and eighty five dollars- but the higher-end models were astounding. I gazed upon them with a lovelorn expression on my face, the one my dad has when he sees six door refrigerators and my mum has when she sees the Mercedes SLR.

These coffee makers, see, didn’t stop at dripping, or percolating. They did it all.

They had inbuilt grinders, settings for cappucino and espresso and macchiato, little compartments for milk and sugar, and a drain for foam. They were covered with dials and buttons, and the chrome finish gleamed.

Sadly, I didn’t have three thousand dollars on me, and the coffeematics were left for another, richer day. So what did I spend the rest of my money on?

Movies. Asian movies.

You don’t get them in India, and the DVDs are ten dollars cheaper than Hollywood movie DVDs. And ten dollars is a lot. It’s two laksas (more on that later).

The movies I bought were a judicious mix of pretentious, arty-farty, award winning cinema, and movies that are so bad they have to be good. Here’s the list:

1. The Perhaps Love soundtrack. There is no way I’m ever going to get videos of this movie- which I saw in theatre out there- in time to frame a question for the Unmaad Open, so I’ll put full fundaes about it in another blogpost soon. The soundtrack itself is Broadway musical-ish, but with Chinese lyrics. What joy.
2. Steamboy– the cheaper, non-Director’s cut DVD. It is the first movie made by Katushiro Otomo, the man who directed Akira, since Oldman Z. To my great annoyance, it is also available with Beatzo. Twenty six dollars gone. I could have bought Be With Me instead!
   Anyway. I liked Steamboy, but it’s terribly derivative. The backstory is nothing you can’t read in any random steampunk sf novel, and the interaction between the characters- well, it reminded me of The Empire Strikes Back. Good son, evil father, good father figure. The bitchy Scarlett O’ Hara character was funny though, and the art was gorgeous, especially the closing scene, which has a huge ice flower trashing Central London¹. I’ll say this for Otomo, he destroys cities with style.
3. Install. The only other movie of the entire list I’ve seen so far. The rest remain unopened. It’s about a ten-year old kid who’s standing in for a sex chatroom hostess, who further outsources his job to a depressed and aimless seventeen year old dropout, played by Aya Ueto. Somebody please tell Beatzo she can’t act- not that I think he’ll care. It also has what must be the Best Subtitle Ever: “If you’re going to jump, can I touch your breasts first?”.
4. All About Love. It’s a Hong Kong movie about a doctor whose wife dies, so he transplants her heart into another woman- whose husband, coincidentally looks just like the doctor. I read the blurb on the DVD box, and gaped, and knew I just had to buy this. It reminded me irresistably of a Kannada movie described on Sundar Srinivasan’s Timepass Pages -which to my shock and horror, seem to have disappeared off the internet.
5. Everlasting Regret: This is very much in the arty-farty movies category. I have no clue who the director is, who the stars are, or what the story is. But I shall watch it anyway, and act pretentious and cultured the next time I meet Samanth or Jabberwock.
6. Initial D: It’s a Chinese live action movie adaptation of a Japanese comic. It would have been even more pretentious to buy the actual manga, which was freely available, but I had a budgetary constraint, dammit. Each of the manga titles was nine dollars each, while the VCD was fourteen dollars. Besides, the movie was highly recommended by the alumni over there. It’s supposed to be like The Fast and the Furious, but with yellow people instead of white and black ones.
7. 20 30 40: Not only is it the only Chinese entry to the Berlin film festival, but it’s also a chick flick. Oy vey. Well, let’s hope it’ll be good. If not, it’ll at least allow me to be twice as pretentious.
8. Farewell My Concubine: Something which everyone has heard of but surprisingly few people have seen. Should be decent.
9. The Myth: Nothing pretentious about this one. In fact, pretentious should not even be mentioned in the vicinity of “Jackie Chan” or “Mallika Sherawat”. No, this is a movie to be watched with gleeful anticipation of who joyously mindless it’ll be.
10. Hinokio: Intergalactic Love: It’s a Japanese movie, about a kid who’s confined to a wheelchair. His father is a robotics engineer, and connects him haptically to a robot which can speak, listen, and feel for him. Again, should be decent, if only for the plot premise.²
11. Innocent Steps: This one is the only Korean movie. I read the blurb, and realised it would be a sentimax mushy movie. I mean, what else can you expect from a movie that is about a girl who can’t dance pretending to be her sister- the regional dancing champion- and meeting a dance instructor. And the tagline is “First step, first dance, first heartbeat… Will you dance with me?”. Why then did I buy this movie?
    Because when I read the blurb, I also realised that the subtitles would provide a rich vein of unintentional hilarity. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have confident expectations that the subtitles will be at least as comical as All Your Base Are Belong To Us

That’s the shopping done. Coming up: posts on food, media, and blogger meets.

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¹Two minutes away from where Wimpy lived
²Coincidentally, one of the people I met in Singapore had a very similar fourth year computer science engineering project. However, he was more concerned with other applications of the technology than helping disabled children. In his own words, his project was to facilitate the world’s first transatlantic blowjob³.
³This is mentioned not just for the sake of completeness, but also in a pathetically cheap attempt to boost my pagerank.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2005 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Books Movies and Music, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.