Close Encounters of the Wet Kind

So I finally managed to see Abandoned. It quite literally appeared before my eyes as I was crossing the street - the movie poster, that is. And at my shitty neighborhood movie theatre (I hesitate to even use the term) too. Twenty minutes to showtime. No hesitation.

Unfortunately it was rather blah. It never quite moves into out-and-out child abuse territory, except for one scene that hints at the paedophilic leanings of a teacher. So yeah, blah. No need for further elaboration. Good final scene though.

What happened afterwards is a lot more interesting.

Dinner was at the hawker centre at Bedok Interchange, where we shared a table with a couple of old ladies. Who were, incidentally, drinking large bottles of beer and chain-smoking, which is pretty cool for old ladies.

During the meal, this old lady who looked about seventy was right next to me, and she had the foulest mouth I'd ever witnessed on an elderly person. She bellowed this in an unbelievably loud voice (boy, was she ever using her diaphragm):

"Oi! Lim peh kio li lah! Cheebye."

Translated from Hokkien: "Hey! Your father (i.e., her) is calling you! Cunt."

This is a side of Singapore that's never shown in the travel brochures - the chain-smoking, beer-chugging old lady who swears like a sailor. She was just being her normal everyday self, and it felt so real. Like something tangible. I don't know how else to put it, other than to say that at that moment, I was happy to be sitting there and having that really bizarre experience.

She also spat on the ground every few minutes. This consisted of two steps. The first was the expellation of a proper globule of spit, which would typically shoot out like a bullet and splatter on the ground. The second step was the clearing of residue spit in the mouth, which consisted of pursing the lips together and forcing out any remaining liquid in a fine spray. Unfortunately, this spray was executed with a lot less precision than in the first step, and this almost always ensured that some of it ended up on my right elbow. Initially I surreptitiously wiped my arm off on my pants when it happened, but after a couple of times I simply kept my arm close to my body instead.

I was not as happy about the spraying.

But yeah, it was pretty intense.

I also saw The Aviator yesterday, which was excellent all round. I especially enjoyed the way Scorsese moved you in and out of Hughes' madness via lighting and audio cues - dim the lights, cue the flashbulb-crushing auditory motif. The dinner sequence at the Hepburns' is some of the best editing I've seen in a while. And hey, Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't suck in this one! (Gangs of New York, anyone? Catch Me If You Can? - I know, this last one isn't bad, it's just kinda blah too.)

And I was reminded of how your first film set can feel on Friday, when I helped out at a friend's shoot. Everything just takes forever, and you're all concerned about all these pressing issues that really aren't issues at all. You haven't yet learned the fact that there are some things that audiences are looking out for, some things they just don't give a rat's ass about, and some things that they're never going to notice in a million years. You're just all "I'm making a movie! Happy happy joy joy." I just felt really weird and left after being a boom op for a couple hours. Also a lighting guy, and a lightmeter verifier, and one more mouth to feed.

Yes. Multiple skills I have.