And then when we talk about couples, we sometimes ask, “Are Mr B and Miss A still together?”

It’s as if we’re always not very supportive of their relationships, and sounds so mean but that’s how people usually ask questions and I don’t know why!

Maybe 20 to 30 years later, we’ll all ask “Is Mr B still alive?”

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Movie review!

Summer Wars

I’m already pretty confident that this movie will be in my personal mental list of top 10 movies of this year. The concept of the movie mainly revolves around this global virtual network (called OZ, something like our Google/Facebook, but way cooler and more interactive) that the world pretty much relies on for business, gaming and almost everything else. The problem comes when this supposedly super secure system gets hacked and chaos ensues.

What’s really awesome about this show is that, the director and screenplay writer have brilliantly married the two worlds that we live in (the young virtual world and the traditional real world), brought in a entire family of more than 20 interesting characters and still managed to tell an entertaining, original and meaningful story about love, family and technology…. and keep you engaged from the start to the end. The usual formula/approach for save-the-world stories like this is to have just one or two main characters to save the day, but here we have the Shinohara family, no wait, or even the community from all over the world, working together like a huge family to fight against a common enemy.

What a touching and epic movie this is. I’m SO going to get the DVD of this and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (same director and animation studio) this time!

This time!!

8.5 / 10

Or at the very least, look like I’m working very hard. Afterall, I’m very good at displaying the ‘looking intense and serious’ look.

It’s worked well for me during my Studio Project and Final Year Project in school, during my internship and during my short term job before my enlistment.

Sometimes even when I’m just casually surfing the net after working hours (around 8pm to 9pm-ish), I still have concerned colleagues (who have already changed into their pyjamas) walking past me in the office, greeting me with a “Wow you’re still working at this hour?”.

I reply with a.. “Yea. Too much work to do. What to do?”, shift a little on my seat and carry on hopping around tumblr sites.

I can’t stand being rooted to my seat for too long either. I frequently stand up to stretch myself, walk around the office to make small talk or look at myself in the mirror in the toilet to make sure I don’t unknowingly turn into a freak with drying eyes with dark circles.

Tuning in to Azure Ray on my laptop in this environment full of men helps fuel my imagination.

The elements of alt-country and folk Americana from their music transform all the men wearing green uniform around me into a big grassland with trees swaying to the rhythm, not without the imaginary gentle breeze blowing into my face, reminding me of the kind of the freedom and dreams I currently pursue.

With only about 66 days left before I leave this place, never look back and risk becoming unemployed like what happened to me two years ago after my graduation, I seem to have reached a zen status in my1 year 10 months short military career. It feels like I’m sitting on top of a hill, smiling and thinking about all the things I have done that have earned myself so much respect and trust from my commanders.

The juniors who have just joined my department seem to have a long long way to go, before reaching where I am today.

“Desmond, I need your help on something,” my superior asked as he gently tapped my shoulder.

And I’m gently thrown back to reality. -_-

Why? Because it was free!

The National Museum of Singapore was opened for free admission on that day, and the Quest For Immortality exhibition attracted the most crowds. And I have to admit, the large crowd was a bit of a turn-off, because you have to (sometimes) squeeze through people just to see things closely.

See, I noticed this crack on the coffin after looking closely. It’s like the corpse, woken up by the crowd maybe, couldn’t take it anymore so it came back to life and attempted to break it open and escape.

Rather than only showing mummies and coffins, the exhibition also showcases accessories, tablets, scrolls, etc, to help visitors understand ancient Egyptians’ concept of afterlife and immortality.

That looks like a lot ingredients for CNY reunion dinner. But in this case they are probably used as offerings. How many different food can you spot?

It seems like ancient Egyptians have already discovered advanced printing and graphic design techniques to tell people not to touch their sacred artefacts.

According to my friend, a little boy came and saw this ‘do not touch’ sign, and thought that only the sign itself could not be touched, so he used his fingers to touch the artefact instead. Haha so cute!

This is the copper mirror they used in their time. Hmmmmm I think the surface it is lying on is much more reflective than it.

A mummy of a cat. It is said that millions of them have been found buried in cemeteries.

Bad thing about not paying to see an exhibition like this is that, you don’t feel the need to read and experience every single thing there. Even though there was some form of crowd control to regulate the number of visitors entering at a time, I still felt rather distracted by the huge amount of people wandering around.

It felt kinda like a huge CNY gathering happening in the dark (the whole exhibition was kind of dark).

All in all, I would highly recommend everyone to go there and spend S$15 for this experience! (Personally I wouldn’t mind going down again, because I didn’t manage to look through every single thing) Not all their artefacts have the ‘do not touch’ sign so feel free to touch (but be careful not to damage them)!

I touched his face.

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Lousy Movie Reviews!

14 Blades

I went to watch this movie purely because of Donnie Yen and Qi Yu Wu. And it certainly didn’t disappoint too much. The concept mainly revolves around dignity and bonds, with Zhao Wei’s constant reminder in the movie that ‘the world needs a hero to fight against injustice’. In this case, Donnie Yen is our hero in the movie. Frankly speaking, I didn’t really understand the storyline fully. The premise seems to be pretty complicated (or rather, maybe not very well explained) for a story that’s basically about good fighting evil. Luckily the fighting scenes and the occasional comic relief moments were pretty decent.

7 / 10

72 Tenants of Prosperity

Drawing audience into the cinemas using a large strong cast line-up is not new, and this is one of the movies during the CNY season this year that is heavily relying on this tactic. While the plot is paper thin and nonsensical humour not really funny (partly due to it being lost in translation from Cantonese to Mandarin, and partly because it’s really not funny when it tried too hard) sometimes, it was rather fun for me to spot various cameos of different Hong Kong actors and actresses. As the movie ends you might feel like you’ve watched a 2 hour CNY variety show.

5 / 10

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The main reason why I’m (and maybe everyone too) watching this movie is Heath Ledger (it’s his last movie). And Johnny Depp. And maybe, Jude Law. Haha. And nah, not really a fan of Colin Farrell. When the movie ended, I thought it gave me a pretty weird experience. Not bad, but not mind-blowing great either. It surprisingly has a lot of Ledger moments, and a heavy dose of magical fantasy elements thrown in. The story has managed to keep me engaged most of the time, even though it went a bit slow sometimes. The enjoyment of the movie largely came from watching Heath’s character slowly revealing its different sides and knowing more about himself.

7 / 10

While my mum chatted with her, my aunt said that after looking at my photos (in Facebook? maybe) she realised that I’m starting to look more and more like my dad back in his younger days.

To which my mum replied, “Yea, you think so too? I guess that’s good, if not we’ll have to worry who the boy’s real dad is. Haha!”

It was followed by a brief awkward silence. FHL lol.

I could almost see a semi transparent thought bubble over my mum’s head reading “Why the hell did I say that?!”.

Happy Lunar New Year everyone! =)

Sometimes you find things you thought you have lost, sometimes you locate physical evidences of your past self.

What I found during spring cleaning:

PETS Small Books!!! Who can forget these short stories? It was one of my proudest collections during my primary school days. I liked all the different illustration styles for various story books.

(My first encounter with illustrated upskirt viewing was in primary 1, I guess)

I’ve always liked the Arial Rounded lookalike font used in those books. It screams primary school-ish-ness!

I hate free keychain giveaways with a passion. Reasons being:

1. I don’t even have so many keys to chain them with.
2. They are usually ugly with blatant marketing/advertising.
3. Useless. I don’t like using it, nor evil enough to give it away as donations or gifts.
4. They are quite a waste of Earth’s resources and energy, really.

These reasons are also applicable to fridge magnet freebies.

MY SEC 4 UNIFORM! I miss those days (where I had fun with classmates, not when I wore the uniform).

Putting on that uniform made me realise that I haven’t physically grown a lot bigger nor taller since Secondary 4. That’s a bit sad. -.-

The important cards in my life! From primary school to national service, from beige to greeeeen.

Ah, back to spring cleaning!

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Site updates:

I have updated my portfolio website! Do look around that website and give me some comments (on the works, the interface, the demoreel). I’m going to try to change the selected uploaded works quite often so I need to find out what I can improve on.

I have also created a doodle blog. (As if I will have time to post entries there frequently when I already find it difficult to update this blog weekly)

Well, nowadays I draw more than I write; I speak more than I type. So the doodle blog will serve as an online platform for me to gather feedbacks on my ideas/drawings.

It’s my favourite shape to draw. Friends who have received greeting cards from me must have seen it as I like to contain my well wishes in these useful containers (I’m still referring to speech bubbles btw [who still spells out 'by the way' nowadays, btw?]).

Speech bubbles are like the extroverts. They are outspoken and sharp. Thought bubbles, on the other hand, are the introverts. They are disconnected and yet their presence can be felt and seen.

They are better than normal bathroom bubbles in so many ways. Firstly, the arrow of the speech bubble can be used to break a liquid bubble.

These speech bubbles have come a long way to evolve to what they look like today. In the past (around 13th century), before speech bubbles were used, people used to depict speech in bands, flags, scrolls or sheets of paper.

For those who aren’t aware of this practice, they may think that the guy (in picture below, on the right) is magically spitting out endless supply of toilet paper with text on it.

Hundreds of years later, in around 18th century, speech bubbles began appearing in several political cartoons from the American Revolution and printed broadsides. Their shapes started to resemble the modern day speech bubbles that we use now.

(I’m not going to give a detail history lesson about Chapter X: Speech Bubbles at this point but you can read a little more about it at wikipedia [how did the I survive 18 years without this?!] and find out some of the information and pictures here were stolen from that wiki article)

Speech bubbles are so cool because they are not even shapes that you need to explain or really give a name for. People just know what it means.

But of course there are informal guidelines (not really rules, you see) and principles to look out for when you use speech bubbles in your comic drawing. Like how you cannot draw a speech bubble and drink bubble tea at the same time because you will choke to death slowly.

Why is that so? What other rules are there? Read more about them here.

Have you read? I bet you must have searched up and down the web page I linked up to for that piece of bullshit information I typed above. I was just kidding. But the pointers highlighted in that page are rather useful though.

Will be doing some major revamp and additions to my website very soon. Watch out this space!

… that Dropbox is one of the best free apps (who still spells ‘applications’ nowadays?) ever. It has made sync-ing (and the word ’synchronising’ too) and sharing large amount of data across  computers so much easier and pleasurable. Why haven’t you started using dropbox too?

… that Gindaco @ Ion has the BEST TAKOYAKI IN TOWN. Seriously. It is so nice all over, a baby can probably learn to spell n-i-c-e after eating it. Like what ahdui from headphonehaven describes, it is “Crispy on the outside, moist in the inside with a rather decent cut of octopus meat, accompanied with the right amount of okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise and katsuobushi. *orgasmic*”

… that the food court at Cineleisure sells biáng biáng noodles! Haven’t tried it though. The Chinese word biáng is made up of 57 strokes, and is one of the most complex Chinese characters in contemporary usage.

… that I just watched two Asian movies (one from China, one from Taiwan) about dreams and passion.

Hear Me is good. It’s the kind of movie that makes you feel warm and happy inside. It reminds me of Cape No. 7. It explores themes such as sibling love and overcoming obstacles (in this case, being deaf) to achieve something in life. It’s a movie that requires a bit of patience and effort from the audience to read the subtitles as most of the dialogues are presented in sign language, but the sincere performance and much-welcomed comic timing of some supporting casts eventually makes you forget about the read and draws you intothe enjoyable light-hearted story. The female lead, Ivy Chen, is so cute! =D

8.5 / 10

The only obvious evidence of Stephen Chow’s involvement in the comedy Jump is during the opening credits, when it said ‘Stephen Chow presents’. However, I couldn’t help but feel the whole movie has his signature ‘Mo Lei Tau’ style stamped all over. It’s a straightforward story about a village girl who enters a modern city to learn how to dance. She encounters quite a fair bit of obstacles along the way but eventually manages to impress the right people with her gung-ho attitude towards dancing. It’s quite entertaining and well-shot, but you can’t help but feel empty when the credits start rolling and wondering why the movie didn’t have more dance sequences.

7 / 10

You know you’ve stayed in your military camp for too long when you receive an sms from Maxis saying ‘Welcome to Malaysia’ and, for a few seconds, actually wonder if the rest of the outside world (or rather, only the rest of Singapore’s territory) has been invaded by and now belong to Malaysia and you are one of the last person on Earth to find out because you are stuck in camp for the past 10 days.

2009 was a challenging year. It is the only 365 days in my life that I was in National Service for the entire period.

Upon discovering my design skills, related tasks and artistic work from my unit came pouring into my hands like felines and canines would during a heavy rain. I have always felt like I have two jobs instead of one.

Last year an important friendship that I held so dear nearly died, but fortunately somehow got resuscitated in the end. Got to know a few new friends and had the most after-midnight stay-outs ever (well, since I am still young enough to do so, why not?).

I’ve grown a lot mentally, physically, emotionally…

…and a lot white hair too. -_-

The few to-dos I wrote down for my 2009 wasn’t exactly completed, of course. Lol. Sometimes new things happen, plans were delayed and I just had to go with the flow.

I guess I’m not the sort who can stick to a list so closely for a year. At the very least I did make some progress in some areas I intended to focus on, like learning guitar, Korean, maintaining physical fitness and my skin health. The resolutions I made last year did serve as a useful guideline afterall.

But what always happens is that I’ll get obsessed in one thing for a period, then I get a little bored of it and move on to another thing. After moving around different places somehow I’ll go always go back to the first one I started on, like a cycle.

So what about this year?

First and foremost, I intend to watch classic movies! If I have time, maybe all of them.

Some of my friends gasped to the point of oxygen deprivation when they found out I haven’t seen movies like Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Grease, Stephen Chow’s famous comedies in the 90’s, Infernal Affairs, etc..

Lol, reason being I’ve spent much of my childhood and teenagehood free time following Looney Tunes, Power Rangers, Doraemon, Ranma ½ and random movies that you may not have heard of. (One of them is the movie by John Travolta, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, which ranks 90 in IMDb’s bottom 100 movies of all time. I didn’t think it was that bad, but I don’t remember much about it either. I need to watch Grease…)

I didn’t really like Disney at that time because it was too fairy-tale-ish and superficially magical for me.

This year will also be the year I take a (major?) step towards achieving my dreams as I ORD in May. While my dream is roughly about promoting an idea and influencing people to, hopefully, change the world for the better, I haven’t thought about the kind of life I would be having while trying to achieve it or when I already make it. It’s not really about money making nor improving my skillsets just to become a better designer.

Finding out how to monetise this passion will be kind of awesome too.. haha. I guess along the way it will be important to keep learning, understanding and exploring.

Most people around me generally have a good feeling about this year, and for me, the possibilities of being free (in other words, unemployed/self-employed) after my NS are so overwhelmingly huge I sometimes get both frightened and excited just by thinking about it.

Maybe by the end of this year I’ll be an even more physically fit guitar-player who has nicer skin singing Korean songs? Heh.

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Movie Review!

Treasure Hunter

I thought Storm Warriors was the worst Chinese movie in 2009, but here we have a challenger. The story was like a lost sheep unsure where to go, characters seemed to have no motivations behind what they do sometimes, villains (one of them had unlimited toilet paper flying all over) constantly popped out of nowhere to fight losing battles with male lead Jay Chou, the dialogues sounded like something they came up with on the spot, and this movie has the most boring chase sequence I have ever seen. Even with all the sand storm effects and gun fights, the chase sequence was nothing more than a travel from point A to point B. This movie tried to be as epic as The Mummy, Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider combined, but the ambitious effort turned out to be an epic failure instead. The only redeeming factor is, perhaps, Lin Chi Ling.

3 / 10

All the work in my company, outings, gatherings and celebrations have left me highly exhausted and hence the lack of proper entries for the past 2 weeks. *gasp*

Unlike frequent bloggers like kkyz or kevin @ erpz who put in efforts to blog every single day, (they probably even apologise when they miss a day, which puts my ‘promise to blog weekly’ to shame because I can’t even handle 1 post/week) I find it really difficult to keep up with blogging on a regular basis.

Not that I have nothing to write about. I actually have many incomplete drafts lol.

Like, whenever I managed to squeeze out time to update my blog, there were always some obstacles ahead that stop me from doing so.

I either…

fell asleep before I managed to finish typing the first line..

OR..

K.O.-ed before I reached my computer..

OR..

zzZZ outside my room.

On a side note, I want to announce something shocking to all Singaporean Apple fanboys (and girls, if any) out there.

It’s something about the Epicentre at 313 @ Somerset.

It’s something about their informative touchscreen wall, which provides an interactive experience mimicking the one on their popular iPhones.

It’s something about looking closer at its top right corner..

..to discover a Windows icon. OMG.

So they are using an Internet Explorer 6.0 on a Windows XP platform to showcase their superior iMacs, iPods and iPhones??!

Why Windows? If Windows, why Windows XP? If Windows XP, why bloody use Internet Explorer 6.0?????

I can already hear several Apple fanboys’ hearts die a bit.

My heart goes out to all of you.

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Movie Reviews!

Sherlock Holmes

Some movies are story-driven while some are character-driven. This movie clearly belongs to the latter. For someone, like me, who has never watched or read a lot of mystery/crime fiction works, Sherlock Holmes manages to provide decent amount of entertainment and story substance to hold my attention for the 2 hours it ran.

The plot may not be as exciting as Kindaichi Case Files or villain not as memorable as Joker in The Dark Knight, what this show has delivered are the lovely chemistry shared between Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr and the funny moments. Recommended!

8 / 10

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Bodyguards and Assassins

This is the BEST CHINESE MOVIE OF THE YEAR, truly a masterpiece. What makes this movie so good is its ability to stir emotions inside the audience (in this case, me). The passion shown by the characters and their fighting spirit has made me tear several times throughout the show.

This is the sort of movie that makes you want to stand up and applaud for the right things while curse and kick the theatre seat for the wrong things. Not forgetting to mention, it has one of the best chase sequence I have seen in my life. The character development in the movie is very well-done, and that’s not an easy feat, considering its large ensemble of strong and well-known cast.

It seems like every year end there is a movie (last year’s was Ip Man) that reminds me that Asian cinema is faaaarrrr from dead, and this is THE movie.

9.5 / 10

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Avatar

I caught this movie so much later than everyone else that I nearly thought I was the last person in Singapore to do so. This show has created so much hype and received so many good reviews it was hard not to enter the cinema without great expectations.

Seriously how good can a movie be? Good story, check. Good visuals, check. Good music, check. Good acting, check (seriously, the best motion capture performances I have seen).

At some points I was pissed by the antagonists’ actions, and sometimes quite sad when some of the trees got taken down. It’s the standard good vs evil thing.

Even with all items on this mental checklist (for the best movie) checked, I somehow felt that the most important thing (ie, the emotional connection) wasn’t really there. It wasn’t like ‘WHOA MINDBLOWING AWESOME’.. but more like ‘hmm that’s good!’. While the plot is good, it isn’t entirely original or refreshing. What’s really revolutionary are the storytelling technique, the new world it’s presented and the entire movie viewing experience.

But yea, I had a great time throwing myself into the world of Pandora and watching the adventures and battles unfold.

It seems like everyone (who has watched the movie) on Earth would give anything just to live in Pandora with the Na’vi. For me, I would not mind paying to relive the enjoyable viewing experience. (update: and I did)

9 / 10