Expanded from a 20-minute short, the Singapore director Royston Tan follows five l5-year old youths who are generally alienated from the society in which they live. For want of a better word, they are hooligans and are apparently playing themselves. While there is little for an adult Western viewer to empathize with, one must admire the bravura filmic style which mixes brilliant colour, animation, freeze frames and striking graphics. The final credits confirm that we are being presented with dead-end lives but they are shown to us as a minor work of art.
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Archives from AOL 2005-2008 - rantings of a film fanatic.
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2005
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October
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- Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)
- Fraulein Else (1928)
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- The London Film Festival
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1 comment:
'While there is little for an adult Western viewer to empathize with'
unless you lived in east London for a while......
Finally caugh up with this one. Bravura film style like you say - embracing eveything that's relevant in modern life - the computer game sequence (which you can't help thinking they're emulating in real life, but then that's probably the point), and the gangsta rap sequences which are so 'other'. Did have to hide my eyes in my arm at a couple of points though - the slashing of the arm, pain, and swallowing the mass of drugs, gag.
It's all very relevant these days you think, with the mass of recent gun crime, but then, that's only probably becuase the media is on a mission, and it's no different now than its ever been. They might be heroes now, this one year of their life, but that's all they're ever going to have. That's how I like to remember a lot of guys from way back..... and a gangster's life only ends one way - the death of a hero, either the gun or of your own design (which we see 2 here), but there's one thing to be sure, it's going to be a short life, which City of God showed too.
In the end you conclude there's only one glory - survival
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