[film] Alice In Wonderland (2010)

Still waiting for the movie to come out. It’s been a year of waiting already…!

IMAGES from the OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Click to visit the Official Website

Mia Wasikowska as Alice

Matt Lucas as Tweedledum + Tweedledee

Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter

Helena Bonham Carter as The Red Queen

Anne Hathaway as The White Queen

For more portraits, visit the official website + look under 'Gallery'

PANORAMIC PICTURES at USAToday

STILLS(?)

POSTER via Filmofilia

There are a number of film posters out there, but I liked this one quite a fair bit because there’s so much details in it. Just look at his fingers!

Some EXHIBITION photos from the fb page

The official TRAILER

‘Tis the voice of the lobster

Alice recites this to the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle:

‘Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
“You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark;
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.

I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon;
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by — *

[*Alice's recitation is suddenly interrupted by the Mock Turtle, who finds the poem "the most confusing thing I ever heard"]

Lewis Carroll’s light verses are the best sort of nonsensical fun. I particularly admire his skill in parody and absurd turn of phrase (“You have baked me too brown,  I must sugar my hair.“) You can almost see the vain little lobster twisting and turning in front of his mirror, twirling his feelers into place.. it makes you smile.

The verse above is a take on Isaac Watt’s (1674 – 1748) highly conscientious poem, ” The Sluggard”:

‘Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain,
“You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.”
As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,
Turns his sides and his shoulders and his heavy head.

“A little more sleep, and a little more slumber;”
Thus he wastes half his days, and his hours without number,
And when he gets up, he sits folding his hands,
Or walks about sauntering, or trifling he stands.

I pass’d by his garden, and saw the wild brier,
The thorn and the thistle grow broader and higher;
The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags;
And his money still wastes till he starves or he begs.

I made him a visit, still hoping to find
That he took better care for improving his mind:
He told me his dreams, talked of eating and drinking;
But scarce reads his Bible, and never loves thinking.

Said I then to my heart, “Here’s a lesson for me,”
This man’s but a picture of what I might be:
But thanks to my friends for their care in my breeding,
Who taught me betimes to love working and reading.

cause it’s cheap-cheap, cheap-cheap

Despite being a marketing graduate and knowing how these things work, I still give into the YAY! of sales.

Starbucks Pastries High School

One day, Nabs and I were at a Starbucks.

While we were trying to make the quick, firm decision of what to munch on (which means we took forever), we realised that the pastries were like cliques in cafeteria in high school.

I can’t remember exactly what we said, but here’s the gist:

The Atypical ABC

Mean girls trio huddled (right), whispering,

“Hey, did you see that weird kid. He’s like so strange.”
“And he smells funny *giggle* “
“I don’t want to sit so near him; he might make my hair (almonds?) stink too! Like eeeewww…”

The Lascivious Lovers
Left bun: ” Oh my darling, oh my hunny bun.. *snuggles*
Right bun: ” Mmmmm.mmmmmmmmmmmmm…”

The Cuckoo Club

“Ooops, no space for you.. ! Bye now! “

Waking up

You’re talking in my face,
Tear-spittle on the back of our hands,

the noise,
the noise,
the noise,
from the black hole
that’s supposed to be your mouth.

And suddenly,
I’m not sure I know your name.

[videos] KYTV: P.O.P :: Singapore

photos here & here

The troops rallied on 6th June, and it was a good, fine day at the esplanade doing KYTV:P.O.P nonsense. Our singing more or less sucked, our dancing – some, at least – drew inspiration from the Great Singapore Workout (so you can imagine how that went), but the making of it was INCREDIBLY fun.

It was a ball of a time prancing around in weird-ass costumes and lip-syncing to the recording. I laughed so hard during the whole process I think I developed abs.

How it worked:

1. Choose your POPstar name
2. Pick the original song for your solo/duet/group: Angry Song, Love Duet, Obscure Song, Happy Song…
3. Learn your song via the separate tellies & headphones set up for each song (we never really made it..heh)
4. Record your song in the studio.
5. Head over to the makeup/dress up station to muck around with the nice people
6. Wait for your turn to shoot your MTV against a green screen
7. Say “thank you”!
8. Sober up over the next few days and cringe over your video when it appears

So thanks to shal, nab, erfen, jonny, chris g, juliane, su & jie for coming down.. not to mention the bishy-bashy and bowling session that happened later. Oh yes, and the NOBODY by wonder girls impromptu cover we did.

(L-R) erfen, me, shal, jonny, nab, juliane

And here are the videos:

J. the Wicked-Witch-from-the East-who-had-to -settle-for-purple-sequins-because-it’s-the-recession-and-black-cloth-was-expensive & the Great Singapore Workout back-up dancers

Angsty boys : Ch(Tr)is G. & E.Dilly Daddy

Still angsty: schoolmates indra, terrix & helen

schoolmates: raphael & mike

Weird rooster-disco girl S. & SuperPinkBather N.

Happy Spankers, Lime-light Grabbers

keeping track…

It appears I attended a lot more exhibitions/plays/concerts than I realized in the past 3 months. Ah, money-money, so that’s where you went.

ARTS FEST
Yuri Bashmet & the Moscow Chamber Choir
Jeremy Monterio, T’ang Quartet & friends
Visible Cities (S’pore/Italy co-production)
Etiquette (Rotozaza)
Red (Stalker Theatre Co.)

ESPLANADE’S FLIPSIDE
Ole: The Latin Music Comedy Explosion
KYTV: P.O.P

THEATRE
CATS
The Importance of Being Earnest (Wild Rice)
Much Ado About Nothing (SRT)

EXHIBITIONS: museums
Christian Lacroix the Costumier (NMS)
Verner Panton (NMS)
The Kangxi Emperor: Treasures from the Forbidden City (ACM)

EXHIBITIONS: photography:: Month of Photography
The Unguarded Moment by Steve McCurry (ACM)
Don’t Move by Francoise Huguier
Life before death: Journeys by Deanna Ng
InsideOut II

EXHIBITIONS: misc
URBAN Playground: SSQ Artist-in-Residence 2009 (sculpture square)
There are No New Messages Today (Popok Tri Wahyudi)

It’s time to Kill Your Televison & P.O.P the sock

Zul  – our audio instructor – passed us the flyer for KYTV P.O.P’s Station Tour: Singapore 2009 the other day and said all of us had to attend one of the days. Heh. Now that’s why I like school. You get to do all these fun and embarrasing things in the name of  “homework”. Good excuse, yes? So besides my classmates, I’m going to drag as many friends I can with me.

They’ll dress you up, record your voice, play it over the system for you to lip-sync to while you dance like a mad chicken against a fantasy backdrop (honestly, isn’t it a mass desire to dance like a mad chicken?), and then upload your video of fame/lame to YouTube. Your very own MTV parody.

KYTV (Kill Your Television) has been around a number of cities for this tour: London, Thailand, Berlin, Jakarta, Yogyakarta… which makes up the range of videos on their YouTube channel.

I’ll definitely freeze for a bit on the day itself because as my good friends know, I’m shhhyyyy….. (sorry, inside joke. but I really am.), but I still think we’ll have a good time poking fun at this ironic take on the entertainment industry and, as the poster puts it “(the) process of ‘manufacturing’ celebrities, by ‘packaging’ and individual or a group into a product for mass consumption”. Plus dressing up with wigs & friends always means a ++++++++ rocking good time.

Hmm… maybe it’s time to tell Jonny & Nab to put their Nobody,Nobody but you/chu moves to good use. I know for sure that Jonny has been practising.

DETAILS

05 – 07 June 2009 (Fri – Sun)
2 – 6pm
7 – 10pm

Jendela (Visual Arts Space)
Level 2, Esplanade Mall

we make a very good pink dot

PINK DOT.SG
16th May 2009, Saturday
4.30 pm
Hong Lim Park

Met Squid and her friends there after the Verner Panton exhibition @ NSM. I’m glad I went.  It’s encouraging to see how many Singaporeans – gay or straight – are willing to come down to support this cause : the freedom to love whatever your gender, race, religion, etc. You know, the funny part is that I think more straight people were there to support their friends than anything.

What I thought would be a huge cam-whoring session/picnic for everybody turned out to be more than that. Good job, organisers. They sure kept the crowd entertained . There were dikir barat(with an entertaining tukang karut/main singer), dance, bhangra and lion dance performances.. when there was a technical delay, Neo Swee Lin even ad-libbed and danced a bit to stall for time. Oh, her husband and her baked cookies to give out. How sweet was that.

Ah. And that was the day when I first heard Nobody by Wonder Girls (one of the dance groups did it) and ever since then, the song has SERIOUSLY been stuck in my head. It just won’t bloody go away. The earworm oscillates between being great fun and driving me mad.

The other group…. well. I always thought nothing gay/transexual/homosexual/whateversexual would surprise me anymore. That I wasn’t as fuddy-duddy as my parents’ generation< , but when Voguelicious came out, I have to admit, my eyebrows shot up.

Now these Voguelicious members, oh boy.. can they dance. And man, are they hot.

There was one member who I would love to use for my studio shot assignment (we all have to do one for our digital photography course). He had a most interesting face. Feminine, but very strong features. Lots of angles and rather sexy. Wonder if he’ll agree to let me photograph him if I ever find out who he is.

What I liked best about Voguelicious wasn’t the fact that they’re all superb dancers – individually or in a group , or that they’re different, but that they looked so confident. I’m sure they get stares when they go out, but they look like the sort that would be nonchalant about it.

Anyway, pinkdot was quite an experience. It has unforgivingly hot and humid, but the crowd was obviously there to have a good time, and we did. Forming the dot did only result in a photograph for solidarity, it also made all of us feel that solidarity. So check out pinkdot.sg for more info/photos/videos, because they’re obviously headed in the right direction, and going about it in the right way for Singapore.

more photos at flickr

Tally-ho, Bizarro!

Click to read more at BizarroBlog

Bizarro was always one of those comics I cut out of the papers and stuck in my journal, on the rare occasion I actually read the papers. I missed it, so did a little googling one day and found the official site, the usual wikipedia entry and even better, Dan Piraro’s BizarroBlog .

His daily entry gives background to one of his cartoons, and it’s entertaining to see what inspired or provoked the creation of the cartoon. Especially since the way he writes is exactly the same style of succint, offbeat humour you get in the strip. It’s also great that he credits his idea-givers freely. Now that’s a cartoonist who’s confident about his sense of humour and interpretation.

When I was younger, I used to mix up The Far Side and Bizarro. Not so much for the content – because there are differences in the humour – but because of the one-panel format and text placement. So it clears things up a little to find out that Bizarro came into syndication in 1985 to replace Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” when it shifted to another syndicate.

I’m glad for a daily Bizarro. It sure makes the daily stress-grinding better. Here’s another one of my recent favourites.