It’s been an emotionally trying time for cinema-lovers this month. Titan of the Asian scene Run Run Shaw decided that, after a grand old 106 years*, it was finally time to roll the end credits and bow out. Then a crowd of more than 100 foreign workers staged a sit-in protest at the Rex, after the theater was forced to cancel the premiere of Tamil movie Veeram, for which some of them had queued up for more than six hours. (But hey, if you can no longer sit around getting blasted in Little India all weekend, what else are you going to do with your time?) And then there were calls for local movie-goers to boycott the new Scorsese-DiCaprio love-in, The Wolf of Wall Street, after the MDA cut four minutes from the film prior to its release here, including some colorful language and what it described as an “orgiastic-like scene in an airplane”. (Thankfully, else who knows what the bored travelers aboard flight SQ317 might have gotten up to during their unanticipated layover in Azerbaijan earlier this month.)
All of this topical tomfoolery sets things up nicely for film awards silly season, with the Golden Globes just behind us and Oscars on the way soon for whichever films the Academy think will best show off their caring, daring, no-opportunity-to-self-promote-sparing side. Having won at Cannes and just about everywhere else, local gem Ilo Ilo has probably come to the end of its golden run. (Though it’d be a lock for Best Film Which People Here Only Watched Because They Heard It Won Some Awards in a Far-Away Land.) The good news? There are 30 or more new local films on the way this year, so there’s hope yet for our cinematic future. The even better news? Only 23 of them are further instalments of Ah Boys to Men.
*It would have been 110, but the MDA cut four years to get back at him for defecting to Hong Kong in 1957.
