RIFLE RANGE BOY

Rain Town (Cantonese, English; 2024) Director: Tunku Mona Riza   Our needs, dreams, ambitions, and desires to ensure the best for our children and peace in the family are universal. We all yearn for the same thing.  The most exciting thing about the movie is that it was produced and directed by two Malaysian Malays, but there was a single inkling of Malayness in its setting, spoken dialogue and props. It went on to premiere at the  Silk Road International Film Festival in Fuzhou, China.  Set in the wettest town in Malaysia, Taiping, hence the title Rain Town, it is a favourite pastime for the local retirees to bet on whether it would rain that day. It follows one of the betters, a proud Mr Choo, to his home. He is a disciplinarian, a domineering figure who runs his home like an army regiment.  He is a father of 3 adult kids, two men and a lady. His wife, a former Ms Taiping, an Anglo-Chinese, had fitted into the family as a docile, all-embracing mother who is th...

Conspiracy Theory (1997) Director: Richard Donner In the pre-internet era, Malaysian coffee shops were fertile grounds for conspiracy theories. At a time when all news was coming out in print and the airwaves were tightly controlled, information was a priced commodity. Everyone had their version of what was going on beyond the iron curtain of bureaucracy, of what was reported and what was not.  Surprisingly, at least in Malaysia, all the coffee shop banter that would initially be denied by the powers that be will turn out to be true. Investigational journalism is better done by the single cup of coffee purchaser sitting in the shop the whole day than by people trained and paid to do the reporting job.  In the infancy age of the internet, in the early 1990s, internet buffs scrambled to be on the mailing list of MGG Pillai's discussion forum, Sang Kancil. His brand of hard-hitting fire brand exposè journalism excited young minds who were quite fed up with paternalistic informati...

Manorathangal (Minescapes, Malayalam; 2024) An anthology based on stories by MT Vasudevan Nair After the release of the Hema committee report, the murmur, which started in 2019, is heard once again. More new victims of the Malayalam film industry are voicing their bad experiences out in the open. The report results from the Government's investigations into the alleged rise of sexual misconduct, exploitation and #MeToo complaints against big players of Mollywood. The report's contents paint badly for the safety and working environment for the fairer sex. The report paints a picture of Mollywood as run by a mafia of senior directors, producers, and male actors who call the shots and decide which actress gets chosen and who gets the boot. To make it to the cast, the new actresses would have to endure much humiliation, denigration, and assault. The report prompted many Malayalam Movie Association chief members to resign to clear their names. On one hand, civil societies assert that...

Sensuous Horizons - The stories and the plays Author: KS Maniam Thanks to MEV for introducing this book. This is an exciting collection of plays, prose and newspaper writings on plays written by KS Maniam. In the 1990s, all through into the Millenium, Kishen Jit was an influential theatre practitioner. His collaboration with various local and international playwrights, including KS Maniam, set the template for stage plays in the post-colonial multicultural Malaysia. He was one of the founder members of Five Arts Centre. Most of the book discusses KS Maniam’s play, ‘The Cord’. It is a social drama about the goings-on in an estate where the workers are predominantly immigrant Indians. Still living in the shadow of their cultural beliefs from their home country, it seems that most of them are missing their ticket on the bus to modernity and prosperity. In this story, the thundu, or ceremonial piece of cloth worn by Tamil men in cultural functions, acts like a MacGuffin. A thundu, in bett...

We Want Justice! A thing or two came up on my radar recently. Firstly, yet again, the unending saga of 1MDB took another court  postponement. The deposed Malaysian PM has not finished disposing of his cases. This time, he has excruciating knee pain that needs hospitalisation. When told to be wheeled into the courtroom, the defence lawyers quipped that since he would be on opioid painkillers, he would not be in the correct frame of mind to follow the proceeding. They said their client must be seen to be given a fair trial. So be it, said the judges.  Across the Straits of Malacca and Bay of Bengal, over in Kalkota, demonstrators are screaming that new legislation must be passed to expedite trials on rapists and impose the death penalty on them. The West Bengal Legislative Assembly even stipulated that investigations into sexual assault and rape must be concluded in 21 days. Are we overdoing it in the haste to right the wrong, punish the wrongdoers, and set an example to potenti...

Nocturnal Animals 2016 Director: Tom Ford On the one hand, people talk about masculine toxicity, while on the other, they want men to exert their muscular prowess to protect them. When the situation warrants, they want a man to 'act like a man'. When they want to be left alone, they say, 'Don't gaslight me!' This quite compelling movie has the same intensity as 'Cape Fear' (both Robert Mitchum and Robert DeNiro versions). It tells the story of a couple and their teenage daughter who are carjacked while travelling through the Texan countryside. The man is taken for a joyride while the wife and daughter are raped and killed. All through the movie, the man is mocked by the young punks hoodlums who carjacked the vehicle for not being manly enough to give them a good fight to protect his family. The film's story is mainly about a novel draft written by an ex-husband for the ex-wife to read. The movie rolls as she reads through the draft and reminisces about t...

  https://borderlessjournal.com/2024/09/16/finding-the-fulcrum/ I decided to care for my ailing octogenarian mother, not because she willed me a great fortune or because I have a great liking to care for the sick. Neither do I want to gaslight her for all the not-so-nice things she said about me and my family in better health all through her healthy life. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons 

Once a war starts, nobody can control its trajectory. The promise of a swift surgical strike with minimal casualties is anything but a fallacy. We have more than enough examples to tell us this wisdom in our present times, but we just refuse to listen. The Kuwait War and Iraq Wars were just propaganda wars attacking something non-existent. It also proved  that there is no such thing as precision bombing with zero casualties. It is no use telling us it is just collateral damage.  The Vietnam War showed how elections can be lost. When the body count piles up, and the disadvantaged fraction of society bears all the sorrows of seeing their sons returning in body bags while the elite dodges their way from drafting, the public knows they have been taken for a ride. It happens because, like a broken dam, war has a mind of its own that cannot be reined at will. An episode in the Mahabharata tells us a thing or two about wars. All the war ethics were closely followed until about day 12...