I picked up Lucky Wander Boy(Swifty: Official website of the book here) on a recent trip, mainly on the strength of its premise but without any real expectations, since the book is about, among other things, video games. A 'gaming novel' is not a prospect that would seem especially earmarked for greatness, and so D.B. Weiss's debut came as a welcome surprise: while perhaps not great in any real sense, this is certainly a very good book*, with more-than-capable prose and much trenchant humor.
Goodbye Perth, Hello Malaysia - Video of Swifty's last day in Perth
I've mentioned before that I was stuck with limited Internet access back in Perth. Basically, I was using the Internet system in my university as I was staying in the student village, and I had to pay for my internet fees based on the bandwidth I was using, for example, 10MB will cost around 50 cents, thus making it impossible for me to actually upload or download any videos and music, hell I even had to disable the images in my browser just so that I don't have to spend that much a day for my surfing. Yeah, It was THAT bad.
Anyway, I've whipped together another video to share with you all today (I'll be doing that pretty regularly from now on since, well, I am the very first Malaysian listed at the Vlog Community, I'm definitely going to make up for the lack of videoblogging I've done in the past few months I was in Perth.
But anyway, this video of mine is shot during my very last day in Perth (5th of December, 2006), just a short and simple video of my dad and I driving to the Perth International Airport, and this video is my farewell to Perth, my home for the past two and a half years. Less of the flashy stuff I usually had on my videos, more focus on the introspective mood and the atmosphere I had back then.
The program I used to edit this is the Adobe Premiere Pro 2 (I also use it to edit my last two short films), unfortunately, without the facilities I had in university, the quality of the video capture's pretty bad (it's fuzzier and lower definition compared to what I would get if I were using those editing studios in uni).
Music I use for this is 'Away' by Adrianna Krikl, whose other work I had used for the opening of my last short film, Girl Disconnected.
Badminton is one of the most popular sports in Malaysia, its popularity mostly contributed by the fact that the wife of Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir's a hardcore badminton fan. I, like most Malaysians, would root for the the national badminton players during major sporting events, like the Olympics, the World Championships, the various tournaments, or Thomas Cup (the Badminton equivalent of the World Cup?). As a child, I used to watch in excitement as our own players advance deep into the tournaments, rooting for their victory.
One of the biggest annoyances in Perth is the fact that shops are closed before 6pm, while many restaurants would close by 9:30pm, the only thing that seemed to open for 24 hours is McDonald's. Basically, the city of Perth itself feels entirely lifeless once the sun has already set. Can be pretty annoying when one needs to do some emergency shopping, takes a bus to the city, only to realize that most shops are closed.
UPDATED (April 27, 2014): It's been 8 years since this blog post was written by Justin. Since then, Sifow had announced her indefinite hiatus in 2008. I'm not sure whether she still sings, but as of April 2014, after her hiatus, she moved to this new(er) blog, where she still updates quite often.
All right, I said in my previous entry I'm going to write something heavy, but I'm still not ready for that, so I'll just churn out another film review for a film I saw last night (first movie I saw in Malaysia since my return two nights ago!).
My next entry will be rather heavy, so I'm just going to warm up by writing about two movies I've seen recently, The Illusionist and The Prestige, that happen to 'look' fairly similar, both are about 19th century magicians. To me, these two films brought back memories of those years when there were competing volcano films (the crappy Dante's Peak vs that Volcano film starring Tommy Lee Jones, which was kinda bad, but in my opinion, not as bad as the former), and asteroid films (Armageddon vs Deep Impact), or 3D cartoons about insects (Antz vs A Bug's Life, both really good flicks). But obviously, both are really different films.
I find it rather apt that what I have suffered during my last few days in Perth would be pretty much what I have suffered throughout my whole stay here in the past two and a half years.
I'm currently chillin' in my friend, Amir's house after moving out from the Murdoch University Student Village, Flat 90, a place I've called home for the past 2 and a half years. And in less than two weeks, I will be leaving Perth for good.
The bitter and cynical part of me wanted to say 'GOOD RIDDANCE, I DON'T HAVE TO DEAL WITH AN OPPRESSIVE ENVIRONMENT WITH LIMITED INTERNET CONNECTION AND RUN INTO ANNOYING DUMBASSES WHO HAPPEN TO LIVE IN THE VILLAGE TOO!'. However, that's the only thing I won't miss about the place.
Everything else about it is almost great. Here's a quick list of everything I loved about staying in the Student Village.
Based on the test viewings thus far (test viewings amongst my teachers, fellow film students etc.) The 'Corridor Scene' from my latest short film, Girl Disconnected, is one of the most well-received scenes of the film. Some called it the turning point of the film, where it just elevated to another level of filmmaking (compared to the first half of the film). Another friend of mine just shook his head and smiled, saying that it was certainly 'trippy'.
Legendary film director Robert Altman is not someone most casual Malaysian film fans would have heard of, his films, many lauded as classics, are unseen by most. Therefore, his death two days ago wasn't much of a news for most. On the other hand, many film blogs that I read everyday are writing their own eloquent tribute to him, they are the people whose lives were touched by Altman's films.
I can't be bothered to review this in any real depth, so I'll just excerpt parts of it and laugh at them. Much like the previous review, you're pretty much aboard the train at this point or you're not. Despite overseas acclaim (it was even made into an English movie starring Kris Kristofferson...what the fuck?), this novel, about a doomed romance between a sailor and a widow offset by evil kids, probably isn't one of Mishima's major works. It feels almost like a novella or really long short story, something that could have gone in one of the collections Acts of Worship or Death in Midsummer (discussed here)
Two of the short films I wrote and directed this year, Vertical Distance and Girl Disconnected, have been nominated for a few categories in the end year Murdoch Film Festival held on the 3rd of December.
Watching Drawing Restraint 9, an art film by American artist Matthew Barney, is possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, mainly because Barney's films are only available in festival circuits, there will never be any DVDs, and it will not even get a limited theater distribution.
The film (along with Matthew Barney's previous works, the Cremaster Cycle) was screened in Perth because of the 10-day Artrage Festival held few weeks ago. Desperate to witness the film ourselves, Justin and I went for the screening at the RMax theater. Initially hoping to be blown away by watching this film on a huuuuuuge Imax (the RMax theater is an Imax theater... whatever that means), we were disappointed that the film was only projected upon a portion of the screen. Bah.
Anyway, Justin and my thoughts of the film are illustrated in the following MSN conversation. The film stars Bjork and Matthew Barney himself.
Silk Shoes (비단구두), a 2006 Korean film directed by Yeo Kyun-Dong (a Korean who shares my surname? Incredible!) is about an elaborate hoax staged by a film director on a gangster's aging father to make the latter believe that he was returning to his home in North Korea.
Prior to watching a film based on historical events, I would actually read up about the event, not because I'm the type who desperately seeks factual accuracies in such films, just that making comparisons between facts and fiction can be kind of fun. In the case of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, I went to read about the raising of the flag in Iwo Jima (and the personal history of the six flag-raisers, especially the surviving three) on Wikipedia, which is what this film mainly revolves about. You know, that iconic photo taken by Joe Rosenthal prior to the battle at Iwo Jima.
Prince of Tennis is a faithful adaptation of the popular manga and anime series. When I said faithful, I meant to say that characters perform superhero feats in tennis games, levitating thirty feet into the sky to return a serve, causing stormy clouds to gather above the stadium (darkening the skies, covering the sun) when one decides to concentrate, performing mid-air acrobatics, unleashing devastating serves that could engulf a tennis ball with flames, or creating some kind of vortex or force field which causes the ball to fly towards his direction no matter where the opponent was aiming.
