The Movie Emperor (PG13)
127 minutes
4 stars
In this satirical comedy, Hong Kong star Lau Wai-chi (Andy Lau) is going through a crisis of confidence.
Losing the Best Actor prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards to a rival has shaken him so much that he resorts to a sure-fire awards-bait strategy. He will star in a Chinese art-house movie, the sort that Western film festival juries love. The glamorous actor will take on the role of a noble but penniless pig farmer.
Chinese director Ning Hao, who also plays the movie director given the job of making the urbane Wai-chi look like a proper farmer, never steps on a joke nor oversells punchlines.
His wide frames give plenty of space for the sense of absurdity to grow.
Lau’s character, the spoilt actor slumming it in rural China to soak up authentic peasant vibes, lands himself in one cringe-making moment after another. In Lau’s expert hands, Wai-chi’s discomfort is sweatily palpable.
The Movie Emperor is a funny, good-natured takedown of celebrity culture and other ills of modern China, and does its job without calling attention to itself about how clever it is.
The Worst Person In The World (R21)
128 minutes, ArtScience Cinema
4 stars
This 2021 black comedy about love and its misconceptions follows Julie (Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve, in a performance that earned her the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival) as she dips in and out of careers and relationships.
On the surface, she appears to be the classic romantic heroine because she is hungry for passion and giddy with joy when she finds it. Directed by Joachim Trier, working with an Oscar-nominated screenplay, it emerges that Julie does not need love as much as she needs therapy.
The Worst Person In The World is being screened as part of ArtScience Cinema’s Notes On Tenderness Film Programme, created for February’s Valentine’s season.
Where: ArtScience Cinema, Level 4, ArtScience Museum, 6 Bayfront Avenue
MRT: Bayfront
When: Feb 17, 24 and 25, various timings
Admission: $13 for standard ticket price
Info: str.sg/acxa
Orion And The Dark (PG)
101 minutes, available on Netflix
4 stars
Charlie Kaufman, the visionary surrealist who entered the portal of movie star John Malkovich’s mind in Being John Malkovich (1999) and conceived Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004), has reinterpreted British author Emma Yarlett’s 2014 picture book as a witty and imaginative bedtime story a-swirl in existential dread.
He turns what might have been a simple life lesson into metafiction and cross-generational time travel, complete with narration by German cinema maverick Werner Herzog.
Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) is an 11-year-old American schoolboy terrified of the dark, who appears one night in the form of a gentle black-cloaked giant (Paul Walter Hauser) and whisks him away on a nocturnal adventure around the world to show him there is nothing to fear but fear itself.
Feature debut director Sean Charmatz blends the hand-drawn abstract concepts with computer graphics. There is much of Pixar’s Monsters Inc (2001) and Inside Out (2015) in Dark and his Night Entities co-workers Insomnia (Nat Faxon), Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel), Quiet (Aparna Nancherla), Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett) and Sleep (Natasia Demetriou).
The half-dozen goofy personae befriend Orion, and they help him overcome his insecurities and confront life’s uncertainties.
