Yasunari Kawabata is a writer I admire immensely. Although perhaps slightly limited in his range of themes and stories, he has a truly world-class sense of technical perfection and stylistic beauty, and the best of his novels and stories (Snow Country and Beauty and Sadness are my favorites, with the excellent Palm of the Hand Stories perhaps being his masterwork) are so satisfying and haunting as to make him unquestionably deserving of his Nobel Prize. Someone (can't remember the source) compared reading a Kurt Vonnegut book to eating an ice cream cone, and if that's true, then a Kawabata book is more like a high-quality Italian gelato - cold, perhaps, but exquisite, and best when served in small portions. At one point I pretty much blindly accepted him as a god; and while after much consideration I've decided Mishima at least equals him, he's still up there for me as one of the masters.
I had no high hopes for Eragon. All I've hoped for was some campy, silly fun where the filmmakers would choose not to be too faithful to its source material, after all, the source material, the first book of a fantasy trilogy published when author Christopher Paolini was 19 (back in 2003), isn't Lord of the Rings nor Narnia, just a work of a fantasy fan that happened to appeal to many other fantasy fans due to the popular, conventional fantasy elements he had used in his book. In my opinion, it's much better for a filmmaker to not view a source material with so much reverence that he would end up not being able to take the necessary creative liberties that could optimize the quality of the film, we know what might have worked on paper wouldn't have worked onscreen.
Video of Swifty at KL's Writer's Circle, Meeting Author Lim May Zhee and Sharon Bakar
I attended the KL's Writer's Circle today that was held at the MPH bookshop in 1-Utama shopping mall. I learnt about this event from the blog of Lim May Zhee, a 15-year-old girl who self-published her novel, Vanity Bee this year and made some news. However, as I was still in Perth back then, I was entirely unaware of her until I recently detected a link to this blog from this entry of hers after I came back, where I was credited for inspiring her to make this wacky little webcomic. So, that was how I found out about her, who apparently, is becoming a rising star in both the literary scene and the blogosphere since dear old Kenny Sia himself had mentioned her in one of his magazine columns, calling her, I paraphrase 'Malaysia's answer to (Singapore blog queen) Xiaxue (it's all right, Dawn, you're still my queen), but without broccoli for brains'.
I'm going to be doing a 2-part video of my stay in Ipoh last weekend. (from the 9th to the 11th of December, I posted my entry about the badminton craze in my country during this period)
Ipoh is a city in Malaysia that's the capital of the state of Perak, just a 2-3 hours away from Kuala Lumpur (it really depends on how fast you drive :D). It's the hometown of my mom, and also international movie star Michelle Yeoh (of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Memoirs of a Geisha fame). YES, to the uninitiated, Michelle Yeoh is MALAYSIAN, she's not from Hong Kong, nor China, nor Taiwan.
The Italian Film Festival 2006 was held during my last two weeks in Perth at the Luna theaters (a chain of theaters in Perth that specializes in arthouse fare, or local Aussie films). I've long made my decision to catch some of the movies they were showing since attending the same festival the year before. After all, it's not really that easy to see an Italian film anywhere.
Last year, I had the pleasure of watching Manuale D'Amore (Manual Of Love), a wondrous romantic comedy I loved so much that I rated it alongside Fellini's 8 1/2 as one of the greatest Italian films I've ever seen! Unfortunately, during the same festival, I also saw the indescribably agonizing Cantando Dietroi i Paraventi (Singing Behind Screens)... a film that scarred me until this very day, you can check out my really brief and not entirely comprehensible reviews of both films here.
Anyway, like last year, I saw two films in this year's Festival.
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.
