Awards season is right up the corner – here are my predictions for the Golden Globes 2023:
WW: Will Win
DH: Dark Horse
Prediction Results: 7/14 (10/14 if including dark horses)
Continue reading →Awards season is right up the corner – here are my predictions for the Golden Globes 2023:
WW: Will Win
DH: Dark Horse
Prediction Results: 7/14 (10/14 if including dark horses)
Continue reading →‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
It was an honour to have been invited to partake in Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade poll this year. Filmmakers and critics around the world were asked to pick any 10 of the greatest films of all time. All the selections will then be consolidated. The first 100 films to receive the most votes will form a ranked list of 100 of the greatest films of all time.
Here is the announced 2022 list: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time
Though there is a slight improvement in diversity since 2012, it is still rather West European and American-skewing, a Western bias still visible in matters of film history, exposure and taste.
Sharing my selections (in alphabetical order) and why I picked them:
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
As per tradition after the Oscars, I will give out imaginary awards to the films that I love most or hold in high regard from the preceding year.
Golden Snoopy – Radu Jude for BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN
A schoolteacher and her circulating sex tape headline Jude’s provocative new experiment – a piercing sociopolitical satire that proves illuminating because it dares to be offensive and blunt about everything wrong with the world, and is arguably the most stimulating screen experience of 2021.
Silver Snoopy – Asghar Farhadi for A HERO
The finest film Farhadi has put out in years—here he skilfully draws out a complex, delicate drama with weighty themes of morality, truth and honour from a simple premise: a debt-ridden prisoner and a bag of gold coins. Farhadi doesn’t for one moment judge who’s right or wrong, leaving us to think and empathise in the same vein. Society’s far too complicated to produce an easy answer, but under the director’s hands, he makes these complications easy to understand.
Bronze Snoopy – Ryusuke Hamaguchi for DRIVE MY CAR
Three hours fly by in Hamaguchi’s gentle Cannes Best Screenplay winner—a highly-layered and nuanced take on the unresolved regrets and guilt that stay deep within us, and the affordances of performance art and unlikely acquaintance as catharsis. This is arguably the year’s most rewarding film.
Bronze Snoopy (Special Mention) – Maria Speth for MR. BACHMANN AND HIS CLASS
This is pedagogy as cinema—an unobtrusive and highly-rewarding documentary centering on a veteran teacher and his ethnically-diverse students in a small town in Germany, earning every compelling bit of its nearly four-hour runtime. Mr. Bachmann’s incredible patience and compassion are what drive Speth’s work, captivating us as we nostalgise our own experiences in the classroom.
Top 10 Films of 2021:
Special Mention (in alphabetical order):
As per tradition, here are my predictions for the Oscars 2022!
WW: Will Win
DH: Dark Horse
Prediction Results (updating): 19/23 (22/23 including dark horses)
Continue reading →The 9th edition of my annual Oscar prediction contest is back!
I will share my predictions on the weekend of 26-27 Mar. The Oscars will happen on Mon 28 Mar, 8.00am (SGT).
Instructions:
How to win:
If you win, choose one of the following prizes:
Here are the 23 categories in contention:
Have fun and good luck!
The Oscar-nominated documentary, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (2015), is on Netflix. Harrowing but essential viewing. It shows how Ukrainian youths who were mostly born during the period of post-Soviet independence galvanised their people from all walks of life to protest against the oppressive regime, headed by a pro-Russian president, at the time (circa 2013).
The extraordinary courage and fearlessness of Ukrainian civilians shown in the face of police brutality and certain death in pursuit of freedom tell us a thing or two about their strong unity and fervent resistance against the Russian invasion today.
The war may be far away (for someone in Singapore), but Putin is terrorising the world by laying down the preliminary conditions for WW3 to spark and forcing humanity back to the Cold War paranoia of existential nuclear threats which may very well turn unimaginably real. (Go remind yourself on ultra-close shaves: Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 & the Stanislav Petrov incident in 1983.)
I’m already feeling the fears, both rational and irrational, creeping in. The world has changed and we could be bracing for a pivotal few months or years that future historians would collectively reference to explain the state of the 21st century.
Covid was just the start, this is even more frightening, and then there is the prospect of irreversible climate change within our lifetime. In the short term, I’m just praying for everything to de-escalate as soon as possible.
Awards season is right up the corner – here are my predictions for the Golden Globes 2022:
WW: Will Win
DH: Dark Horse
Prediction Results: 8/14 (12/14 if including dark horses)
Continue reading →