The annotated budak

Pulau Hantu

Apparently, there's a new movie out with the same name but having little to do with the real thing. With a nubile master sergeant leading the unit and the promise of much spilling of bodily fluids, this looks like every recruit's sordid idea of a wet dream.

Brasil in black and white

This sounds good. In its Cinémathèque – World Cinema Series, the National Museum of Singapore is screening Macunaíma, a 1969 Brazilian picaresque with "over-the-top, farcical acting, frequent nudity and hang-loose, anarchic vibe". Joaquim Pedro de Andrade directs the tale of the titular hero who emerges from his mother fully grown and lives with two brothers, one white and the other black. Born black, Macunaíma later turns white and leaves his jungle hut for São Paolo for life as a fop. He hooks up with a sexy urban guerilla, encounters witches and giants. There's copious nudity as well as pervasive cannibalism to please viewers with raw appetites. It sounds like a good hour or more of raucous respite from the arbitrary order that rues each day. Too bad the craziness will likely not survive the night, for its magic is too brief and too meek in its preference for persuasion over power to overcome the mad drive for control and command that market forces seek over all matters of life and realms of unfettered imagination. Macunaíma screens on 13 January at 7.30 pm.

Faery tales for the faint of heart

The couple who left early missed out on the better half of Saturday’s double bill at Sinema Old School: [e’Tzaintes] + A Wicked Tale. Both directed by Tzang Merwyn Tong, the screening also charts the evolution of a filmmaker from a director of no-budget campus tragic-comedies to a polished producer of saturated atrocities that screw with stereotypes and taint visions of virtue in red and white.

Misfits rule and resign themselves to fate in the cringing opener set in a nondescript campus ruled by a blind caretaker and his little boyz in black. The less said of this the better, unless you like your acting stilted, editing scrappy, blood catsupy and script a molehill of whingeing punchlines and distilled epiphanies that outstay their welcome the moment they burst out with the ferocity of a half-bitten bullet.

A wicked world of a difference awaits in Tong’s retelling of a grim fairytale set to balletic distortions of Mozart and Tchaikovsky. A girl too innocent to be true dons a virginal frock and crimson cardigan on a mission to grandmamma through woods where wolves in name and nom lurk for prey of pleasure. In this fable of entangled fates, there is little to distinguish between the stalker, the woodsman and their respective quarry, for a mere taste of forbidden flavours can unleash appetites of unhinged minds. Wet cotton and dry blood mingle with living tissue to raise hell on earth in a massacre of modest proportions.

Mother knows most and tells least in this amorality tale that plunges deep into the Freudian barrel to scrape up lupine fantasies in a bonbon and nurse the darkest fears of devils in disguise. Pure bodies are clearly no strangers to sharp affairs and blind to the guiles of hapless hunters caught with their pants down in the act of unhurried seduction. Guns meet roses over Grandmama’s smoking body as Little Red Riding Hood plays hard ball with the facts of Faeryville and issues a cold warning to would-be puppet-masters still lost in an age of untrammeled innocence.

Still shorts

Shot with a Canon 20D and stolen from here. There's a cute kitteh at the end too...

Ghosts who walk

The month of the dead reveals much about the hearts of the living.

The most compelling individual in A Month of Hungry Ghosts, now screening at Sinema Old School's theatrette (with plush sofas ideal for full-length making out) on Mount Sophia, is a Cantonese lady with a lifetime’s skill at flipping a handful of incense paper into a perfect fan. We are not told what she does for a living, but at a middle age, she has lost more than a handful of close family members, including her in-laws and a young son.

The boy, remembered in a black and white photo of a bright-eyed toddler, crops up every now and then as she explains to the filmmakers (Genevieve Woo and Tony Kern, right) why and how she venerates those who have left her behind in the mortal world. She tenderly touches his portrait at a columbarium in Bedok and recalls how the boy would turn up as an apparition in an old refrigerator from which he received favourite treats.

She offers few reasons but much earnest devotion as the crew follows her annual rites of passage to a dwindling shophouse in Chinatown, where she selects attire and accessories for kin according to their taste and time of death (“This one cannot – too modern!”). Her son gets a smart paper suit while her late mother expects a full complement of cosmetics and enough cash (preferably Hellish versions of the greenback) to pay her way through Hades.

The crude figures of Haw Par Villa offer a backdrop to the narratives of priests and paranormal investigators who offer their personal theories and thoughts on the metaphysics of this month of magic and mayhem. Motion sensors go awry at a festival auction. New wires fail to prevent outages at a makeshift shrine. And a midnight pilgrimage through a forest to conquer private fears conjures an invisible aura of spiritual defences.

From the gates guarded by Messrs Horsehead and Bullface, the souls of the unreborn are unleashed for a moon to their old haunts. They are greeted by topsy-turvy thrones and a Demon King who is a gentle Bodhisattva in disguise. In this city of paradoxes, the unseen are both good friends and feared foes who must be appeased by sumptuous offerings and respectful front-row seats. Old fashioned spirits are happy with heavy-robed operas but newer generations of ghosts frequent the stages of lighter clad ladies who race from show to show. And through the eyes of anointed heads, these brothers in alms signal their pleasure or offence, which devotees ignore to their peril. For malicious sprites might be tempted into mischief or worse, machinations with ends as harmless as flickering lights or as horrendous as world wars and acts of mass destruction.

But for all their fright, men of flesh still seek out those of fire in hope of favours and blessings. Bare-backed mediums become receptacles for disembodied beings who in exchanged for a solid abode offer otherworldly wisdom and a chance at better odds. Taukays engage the services of bearded priests (is this tax-deductible?) to soothe the powers that might risk their profits. The promise of brighter fates awaits participants in the fiery rites of Ullambara as they line up in bare feet to offer intangible fragrances that feed the hunger of the mouthless. Up to $200,000 worth of scented paper go up in smoke and ashes in a single night of reverence.

Not a few times, the priestly men warn that perpetuators of spiritual intercourse must have their hearts (and hands) in the right place. For the season, so it is said, is wrecked by more than its fair share of mishaps that plague those who wrong their wraiths with heinous deeds such as forgetting to cough before urinating in the open. And mothers must know that placing their babies on offering tables is tantamount to a sacrifice of the darkest magnitude.

The Cantonese dame who embarks on her tour of ancestral duty with little fuss and much diligence offers few pointers. “Stop playing the guzheng after eight,” she says, noting that a little night music is wont to result in melodies from free-floating fingers. She stands far from the neon altars of gaudy shrines or self-serving piety of mechanistic rituals (the most documentary's most disturbing moment showed the mass [and it is said monthly] releasing of a truckload of munias by a forest), preferring to serve the souls of those who lived around and in her home of many decades with modest packages and unaffected pleas. True believers such as her would also probably have no truck with the pedantry of those who deem it inappropriate to christen with colour a festival that is finding new friends and fans amongst the young who remember not the past for they know too little to forget.

Born to cycle

Lynn and James are two Singaporean filmmakers you probably have never heard of and whose works you will likely never see locally outside a film festival. Instead of crowd-pleasing musicals and formulaic comedies that make money like dead leaves raining down from a tree, they have made it their mission to explore the stories of individuals and communities who have little to offer but the sweat of their passion and the stain of their blood.

Aki Ra's Boys is the tale of a former guerilla turned minesweeper who now fosters children maimed in limb but unflinchingly merry in spirit. Redemption and reconciliation is less likely in Passabe, a village on the volatile borders of Timor where militamen find refuge and pass their days in an uneasy peace. In Homeless FC, the dejected and downtrodden of Hong Kong's grim underbelly emerge as ballsy winners against despair.

Their latest project rolls through the hills of Kenya in pursuit of a short shoe-shine man with high hopes who is on the ride of his life. Real people achieving unreal dreams live and love in Lianain Films, who toil with no illusions of fame or fortune from visionaries who know enough only to fete winning numbers but recognise and reward no true callings.