Category: Non-Academic Writing

Anatomy of a Fall (2023): How Far Can We Know?

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“With no witnesses or confessions, one must interpret”, towards the final third portion of the film, one returns to the courtroom and gets reminded that one has been speculating, hypothesising and interpreting an immensely private matter. Anatomy of a Fall (now seems more like Anatomy of a Marriage) juxtaposes the private and the public, the personal and the institutional, the moral and the legal. What matters is no longer who killed Samuel, but how a state apparatus violently disseminates an imperfect private union, and how one’s personal poignancy gets publicised and exploited.

Eternals (2021): What Went Wrong

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Eternals is a paradox, perhaps from the very beginning. For Marvel, it is meant to be a reset, or a glorious beginning, after the Avengers trilogy. Chloé Zhao was recruited to direct the film shortly after her Oscar win for Nomadland. Eternals also unmistakably features an ensemble cast more diverse, more cosmopolitan than any other Marvel production. It is an ambitious, soul-searching production about the fate of humanity, free will and femininity. Its scope covers major events in human history while making scattered references to other Marvel films (. In short, Eternals feels like a mission impossible.

Dark (2017-19): God is Time?

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The intricate yet meticulously plotted story spans over two centuries, four generations, three family names (about twenty major characters) and three parallel worlds - all cramped into twenty-five hours. I had to constantly look for the complete family tree online when it became impossible to recollect character relationships. Rooted in modern German thoughts, the philosophical drama quotes, sometimes excessively, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein and Martin Heidegger, the Germans who have shaped the modern understanding of reality, that reality is not necessarily deterministic, and how human will constitutes the phenomenal world apart from the inscrutable nominal reality.

Miss Americana and Her Folklore

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Throughout Folklore, once again, Swift showcases her metaphors, insecurity in love and acute self-consciousness. However, instead of putting herself at the central stage of the album, Swift learns to dissolve her personality, her selfhood into a broad range of fictional characters, married or divorced, teenage or middle-aged, men or women. The newest persona of Swift is no persona. Instead of focusing what she has been going through, whether she breaks up again, Swift wants her audiences to contemplate with her phrasing and hum along her soft breath. It is about shutting down the noise, the distractions and the planned agenda of life so that one can take things slow and appreciate what’s important.

Life-Sized Mikey Mouse, Sigmund Freud and Quantum Physics: How Reality May Not Be Reality

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Recently, I have been quite addicted to Emily Levine, the American philosopher-comedian, or comedian-philosopher, whatever. Emily passed away in February 2019 due to stage-IV lung cancer, but she most likely prefers to say that she has gone back to Emily’s universe. In her last appearance as a speaker on TED, she talks about death, American politics, quantum physics and nasty feminist jokes. She does not ask for pity but shares her experience of making peace with reality.

Phantom Thread (2018): Love is Toxic, Literally

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We all need some magic mushrooms sometimes. I do not mean the ones you can buy on the streets of Amsterdam. I mean the ones that effectively poison our husbands/wives (but don't kill them) so that they become sick, vulnerable and needy. The extent of neediness is essential. And hallucinations about dead parents are a bonus. These magic mushrooms remind our loved ones of the importance of our companionship and the limit of their outsized ego. They play a key role in a lasting, healthy, self-correcting relationship. After all, love is toxic, literally.

The Anxiety of Nature and The Difficulty of Grace

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"A man's heart has heard two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You'll have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. It likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, and love is smiling through all things. " - The Tree of Life (2011)

Consumable Feminism

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Feminism has never been more voguish on TV. Many recent shows, including The Handmaid's Tale, The Good Fight, Big Little Lies and Killing Eve, to just name a few, have acquired commercial and critical success. HBO blockbusters like Game of Thrones and Westworld have both featured powerful female protagonists with varying degrees of awkwardness. I have watched all these shows, and they are peculiarly similar. They are all inherently commercial productions to begin with, and they all depict women who fit into the public imagination of feminism: the sort of women who are rebellious, manipulative and capable of shooting a gun unlike those James Bond girls in the good old days. There is something unsettling about this, and I am afraid that we are moving in the wrong direction despite unprecedented media attention given to women.

Between My World and Me

Wan Bo

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a post seeking the most neutral, most inoffensive description of what’s happening in Hong Kong. I am by no means qualified to do that. I have never been to Hong Kong, nor have I or my family directly benefitted from its special political and economic status. As you might have noticed, I do not like to offend others, especially on such a divided issue with both sides feeling so strongly. But to me, this is not a matter of seeking the most apolitical description; the most apolitical description is itself a political statement. This is an issue of personal matter and sentiment. This is an issue between my world and me.

What is Lana Del Ray Hopeful of?

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The closing song on Lana Del Ray's most recent album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, is titled Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have. At first glance, it seems too long a title, but in fact, not a single word can be taken out from it. In the minimalist production, Del Ray sings about being a modern American woman with (what she calls) a weak Constitution, reading a suicidal female poet, crying in a church basement and how her audience are perceiving her. It surveys a wide range of emotions and sensations beyond just melancholy and solitude that are featured in most of her old songs. At the end of her most recent and mature album, she concludes with a surprisingly weighty remark with much confession to make and much imagination to inspire.