Edmund Yeo

Two days ago, I found out about Japan Probe's Delicious cats! entry via BoingBoing , which has some rather, ah, disturbing photos of a cute Japanese girl pretending to eat her cat. We have since dubbed her 'the guilty, cat-eating wench' thanks to a comment at Japan Probe's entry. [1:10:01 AM] Swifty says: by the way, guilty cat-eating wench is an idoru [1:10:08 AM] Justin says: Who? [1:10:18 AM] Swifty says: that guilty, cat-eating wench

The following MSN conversation occurred last night while Justin and I were working on the previous Haruki Murakami Is Wrong! entry. As you can see, we aren't some mindlessly insecure, whiny bigots who take pleasure in blindly bashing a famed literary figure just to make ourselves feel better. An earnest and intelligent discourse WAS exchanged between Justin and I prior to posting the entry. Once again, it's profanity-laced, so don't read if you don't want to defile your virgin eyes.

Little Miss Sunshine was a film I watched just a few days after The Devil Wears Prada (my Anne Hathaway-centric review here). A charming gem of a film (... charming gem of a film? Man, I sound like those middle-aged critics now!) that was this summer's surprise hit, I was unable to write a review for it because, well, seriously, there's nothing much for me to say. I liked it very much, I enjoyed it greatly, both moving and funny, the film wasn't a life-altering experience, but there's really no flaws I can point out.

I picked up Ian McEwan's Saturday after I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go ( check out my review ) two weeks ago, eager for another quick read. As mentioned in my previous book review, I bought this in a '3 books for the price of 2' deal, along with Never Let Me Go and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love In The Time Of Cholera (*sigh* the mere mention of this book makes me want to swoon like a lovelorn virginal teen girl), so I had no prior expectations of it at all, and neither have I actually read anything by Ian McEwan. After the sense of hopelessness and resigned helplessness I felt from reading Never Let Me Go, I was desperate for some fastpaced action, some intensity, something to neutralize that lingering feeling. Knowing that the entire novel takes place in the span of a Saturday, I decided to read Saturday , praying for some explosions and humour that can appease the uncultured bloodmonger in me, well, not really, but that, along with Margaret

I've always been secretly in love with Anne Hathaway after watching The Princess Diaries . Those big doe-like eyes, so mesmerizing, so hypnotizing! That smile, so dazzling that the radiance of the afternoon sun would've paled in comparison, that beauty, so indescribably great that watching something like The Princess Diaries was like a life-altering experience, albeit a life-altering experience kept a secret until this very day. I was 17 then, but I would remain bewitched for nearly half a decade.

Sometime during 2002 (or was it 2003?), disillusioned with annoyingly underaged pop groups and still dealing with the heartbreaking disband of his much beloved SPEED , the Great Swifty, who suffered from Erotomania, lost faith in mainstream Japanese pop, and experimented with the non-mainstream, into what is generally referred to as Contemporary Japanese Groove Music (their jazz stuff).

Enough has been said and written about Jorge Luis Borges that you don't need to take it from me. Whatever I can possibly say about Borges's writing will automatically be swept under in the mass of history and commentary attached to him; in the same way that I'd hesitate to directly review Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, or Proust, (except perhaps to offer the heresy of a negative critique) so Borges presents something of a problem: writing this review almost feels superfluous; you probably already know and love his writing. Or maybe not; maybe I'm being falsely modest; maybe this review will be the one that convinces you to run out and buy his books as soon as possible .I hope so, since this is the only reason I'm writing it: to whore out Borges so he can give you the same intensely beautiful mindfuck he just gave me.

It had always been embarrassing back then, to admit to people that I've never seen a single Stanley Kubrick film before ( Artificial Intelligence: A.I doesn't count). Harbouring such a shameful secret, how can I even call myself a lifelong film buff, let alone a filmmaker?

Can't write much, I'm in the midst of a Stanley Kubrick marathon (just watched A Clockwork Orange , currently watching Barry Lyndon while typing out this post) as the professor of my Advanced Screen Production unit said last week that referencing his films would be useful when directing my own Girl Disconnected . (Yes, surprisingly, I haven't seen a single Kubrick film before, except for three quarters of Eyes Wide Shut few weeks ago on television) Therefore, I'll be posting photos of Fremantle beach that I took on the 9th of October, when I was doing my location hunting. A nice-looking beach was crucial for my film, and I wrote my script with the Fremantle beach in mind after visiting it for the very first time few months ago (check out the video here, I went there with Justin and a bunch of cute Japanese girls... and guy, from Himeji, Japan). Why a beach? I didn't grow up living near a beach, and besides some vague memories of my childhood when I last vis

The appeal of ZONE isn't difficult to explain: girls with guitars. This simple, retardedly awesome premise lies behind much of the popularity of Shonen Knife , the 5 6 7 8's , and uh...in a different genre, Sleater-Kinney and L7 . But the one thing uniting those fairly disparate bands is that they're all - to a greater or lesser extent - PUNK.*

I ranted about how people were being too negative against Hollywood remakes last week in my The Lake House review , It's absurd to see how many people have long decided that The Departed would suck despite the fact that it has Martin Scorsese directing, and having big-name cast members like Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin in it. To the asian movie lovers, this is a sign of Hollywood 'running out of ideas', and in desperation, that had to 'remake' Asian films. Like duh, as if Asian films don't 'borrow' from Hollywood films at all. It's unfair to compare a film with its remake, just like how I usually don't review a film by comparing it to its source material. But alas this how a lot of people will review The Departed, and you'll hear things like:

I'm not a fan of Victorian fiction. I find the obsessive, minute focus on provincial social conventions to be both myopic and irrelevant, the prose ponderous, and the structures pat and formulaic. Some people like this sort of thing; they're often the same sort who think James Ivory was a significant director. I could argue that much modern interest in Victorian fiction is as much a genre-interest as something like Tolkien-derivative fantasy (and indeed, both genres in their prime rely on three-volume works, the Victorian three-decker novel and the modern-fantasy trilogy), but I'll try to stay on topic. So, I have to hand it to John Fowles - in this book, he makes the Victorian era seem interesting and exciting. True, there's the completely idle upper-class toffs, servants and 'upstairs-downstairs' drama, and depressing Anglocentrism that generally produce reader despair, but Fowles looks on all this with a cocked (if often nostalgic) eye. And, his writing is

Su-ki-da, directed by Hiroshi Ishikawa, is a slow-paced arthouse romance that I watched with Vivienne and Ayumi on the night of Justin's birthday party, we were reduced to groaning in agony as the film became too slow and, as said by Variety's review , selfishly inert. Despite being a filmmaker myself, and yes, facing numerous snide accusations of being 'artsy fartsy', I still think of myself to be rather uncultured, I didn't 'get' Godard's 'My Life To Live' (I loved Alphaville though), and I wasn't blown (sorry) away by Antonioni's 'Blow-Up' (... despite the nudity) and his latest short film in Eros (despite even more nudity). I also didn't 'get' many Malaysian indie works that are lauded by film fests around the world. Maybe I am... slow. (but not THAT slow, since I can still enjoy Wong Kar Wai films, haha) So, for me, sitting through Su-Ki-Da was quite tough (especially during a party!!). Especially with a

A film from Broken Lizard, the comedy group behind films like Super Troopers (saw it once quite a while ago on television, can't remember it much) and Club Dread ( didn't see it), the five members of Broken Lizard are Jay Chandrasekhar (usually the director), Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske. They write and star in their films. I'm lazy to explain the plot, so I'll just copy and paste it from the Beerfest Wikipedia entry : "The plot begins with two American brothers, Jan (Paul Soter) and Todd (Erik Stolhanske) Wolfhouse, who are mourning the death of their immigrant grandfather Johann Von Wolfhausen (an uncredited Donald Sutherland), founder of the Schitzengiggle German beer hall in the United States. They learn from their great-grandmother (Cloris Leachman) that they have an opportunity to travel to Germany to deliver their grandfather's ashes. Jan and Todd gladly take this opportunity when they learn that Oktoberfest will be

After finishing Michael Moorcock's The Dancers At The End Of Time (which was a rather sprawling read), I sifted for the number of books which I've bought but haven't read. I needed an easier read, something smaller in scope and scale, can be finished in a shorter time as I was in the midst of preparing for my film shoot. And voila, I picked Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go , which I actually bought in '3 for 2' deal earlier this year, along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love In The Time of Cholera (OMFG! GREAT BOOK!! MOST ROMANTIC BOOK I'VE EVER READ!) and Ian McEwan's Saturday (currently reading, second chapter, seems promising). The last Ishiguro book I read was When We Were Orphans , six years ago. Fresh out of high school, I was untrained for something as subtle as that, and even though I remembered being slightly moved by its ending, and raving about it to my indifferent cousin, I cannot remember a single thing about it now. Er, it has t

My skin is currently peeling after the major sunburns I suffered during last Friday's grueling shoot . Thankfully, the subsequent shoots for the production were much easier as we were in a more controlled environment. One in the university's TV studio, and one in the Bassendean Railway Museum . The scene with Justin and Grace (the rabbit) was shot during Mooncake Festival two days ago, while the train scene was shot early yesterday. So here you are, some more production photos from my upcoming short film.

When I was in my late teens, casting around for new music to listen to (this was the golden age of Napster, when you could find anything, and people's tastes were expanding), I started getting into 70's progressive rock. Now, prog has a bad reputation - it's considered uncool and unlistenable by the mainstream media, appreciable only ironically. But my average mix tape contains Norwegian black metal, Japanese girl-pop, Chinese rap, and underground U.S. noise bands, so I could give a fuck less what the mainstream media thinks. The prog bands looked serious, like they cared enough to give their music unconventional themes, arrangements, time signatures, and song titles. They wrote multi-part suites, invented the concept album (as a distinct entity, not a vague muddle like Sgt. Pepper), brought in orchestras (ELO), dabbled in jazz, maxed out the solos. They had outside influences, like film and literature and fantasy and technology. In short, they were trying to keep it n

Dog Bite Dog (狗咬狗) starring Edison Chen (his first role since last year's Initial D) and Sam Lee (a once-promising actor demoted to appearing in numerous B-grade crap films in recent years) is hardcore. Heck, I can't even think of another word to describe it.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is funny like hell. It pokes fun at NASCAR racing, and your generic 'rise and fall and rise of hero' in sports film, most plot cliches were included here: the hero's disastrous accident that traumatized him mentally and emotionally, the hero's loved ones talking to him while he lies comatose in the hospital, the hero's best friend who turned against him, the hero who turned from cocky to humble throughout the course of the film, the supportive love interest, the smart mentor with all kinds of unorthodox training methods. Yeap, all these were there, and hilarious. Gotta love those overacting and crazy melodrama. And as funny as Will Ferrell was as Ricky Bobby, he seemed more like a straight guy compared to the supporting cast like John C. Reilly's Cal Naughton Jr, Gary Cole as Ricky Bobby's estranged dad. But the entire film is definitely stolen by Sasha Baron Cohen (whose Ali G film I've never seen, unf

A film that reunited Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock since 1995's awesome SPEED (a film that made me spend most of my childhood and high school years sporting a crew cut just because I wanted to be like Keanu, and then decided to allow my hair to grow longer after the Matrix came out, so I can STILL look like Keanu), and a remake of an okay Korean flick, Il Mare.

Chau, the original actor playing Wiler has to drop out of the project as he has to leave for UK on the 2nd of October.

I have a confession to make. I'm in love.