RIFLE RANGE BOY

A Complete Unknown (2024) Director: James Mangold Clip from Youtube One of my earliest memories from the late 1960s is of my uncle spending weekends at my house. He was a university student, a rare sight in Malaysia then. I was fascinated by the shaving cream he and his friend, who accompanied him, applied to their faces and skillfully shaved off. What intrigued me even more was the fragrant aftershave lotion they put on afterwards. I was captivated by the lovely containers it came in. I later discovered it was 'Old Spice'. Its logo, a pirate ship, left a lasting impression on me. They spoke a great deal in English, and I often wonder what they discussed—perhaps the societal changes about which Bob Dylan wrote in his songs? I could not comprehend the messages as they were mainly in English, the lingua franca of the educated lot in the country. As we know, the 1960s were tumultuous times. The Americans were the de facto leaders of the free world, whilst developing countries stru...

Onibaba (Japanese, 1964) Director: Kaneto Shindō Many stories tell us to be wary of the company we keep with. Like how Amma frequently reminds us, a calf, if it moves around with piglets, will eventually join the piglets and source its daily meals from the rubbish dump. An animal, placed high in Hindu society, will ultimately do unholy things depending on the company it keeps.  There is something special about black-and-white movies and the horror genre. It reminds me of my childhood, when my sisters and I would flock around our home 16" TV, squinting to watch RTM's Friday offering of  Cerita Pontianak . Even the poor makeup of Pontianak would scare the living daylights out of my sister. She would even be scared to enter the kitchen. To make it worse, I would hide around the corner and jump suddenly in front of her, making her scream! Onibaba is a classic Japanese movie set in the Samurai era. Times are bad. All the territories are at loggerheads; all men are out to fight, and...

Bridge of Spies (2015) Director: Steven Spielberg The Second World War had ended. The Sun had finally set on the mighty British Empire. The post of world supremo was up for grabs. Over at the blue corner, secluded far away from powerful neighbours, the capitalist USA was the poster boy to prove the case that 'greed is good'. Meanwhile, at the red corner, the Soviet Union spread the idea of equity and condemned the Western way of life as decadent.  Riddled with secrecy and the zest to supersede the other regarding military supremacy and space explorations, the Soviet-US animosity reached mammoth proportions in the post-WW2 era. Each was spying on the other and trying to outdo the other. After witnessing the devastation that the mushroom clouds did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Americans had the pressing need to keep nuclear bomb technology within American shores. On top of that, an even more devastating bomb in the form of hydrogen bombs was in the limelight. The Americans did ...

Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles (1965) Rev. David A. Noebel An Analysis of the Communist use of music - the Communist Master Plan. This book predates John Lennon's infamous press statement in 1966, in which he was quoted as saying that the Beatles were , at that time, 'more popular than Jesus'. To his defence, the baby boomers were, in fact, losing interest in what the church had to say.  In 1956, during a visit to Poland, Nikita Khrushchev was thought to have told the West that he would 'bury them'. Some say it was something that came out after being lost in translation. Again, during his state visit to the US, he may have said (again disputed) that he predicted the adoption of communism and the gradual creation of a 'socialist stare' in the US.  David Noebel is said to be a fiery Christian evangelist who argues his claims with dubious scientific evidence. In this booklet, he used many Pavlovian animal behavioural study models to convince his congregat...

Migrant stories of yore from Malaysia by Farouk Gulsara Ah Soh with Nand Lal, Saraswati’s son. (Photo taken circa the early 2000s). Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara https://borderlessjournal.com/2023/08/14/belacan/ “There she goes again,” thought Saraswati as she cut vegetables she had never seen in her native country. “Here goes Ah Soh cooking her stinky dish again.” Saraswati, Ah Soh and the rest of the pack are people commonly called fresh off the boat. They hail from various parts of China and India. The loud beating of a metal ladle against a frying pan, accompanied by the shrilling Chinese opera over the radio and her shrieking at her children, need no guessing whose kitchen ‘aroma’ is coming from. Everyone knows Ah Soh is frying belacan , a fermented Malay shrimp paste. https://borderlessjournal.com/2023/08/14/belacan/? This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .

In the Mood for Love (Cantonese; 2000) Director: Wong Kar-wai This film must surely be a fruit of a labour of love. It is such a joyful experience to watch as the viewers are cradled back to a Shanghainese community's claustrophobic surroundings in 1962 Hong Kong. It is a story of a close-knit group tenant, specifically of two couples, in an apartment building. Two spouses who are often left alone by their busy working partners end up developing feelings for each other. The busy partners in real fact are embroiled in an affair, between themselves. The scorned spouses discover a common interest, create a platonic relationship but soon realise it is romantic. They resist the temptations to be as low as their partners, despite the circumstances of time and the lure of their biological attractions. The theme of this story segues nicely into a discussion I had with my friends recently. What is this thing about marriage? Is it a mere a public declaration of a property much like when Vasc...

White Squall (1996) In my teen years, I remember helping an older teenager to organise a religious outing for a group of children. We were to arrange for a bus to get the kids to the other side of town for Sivarathri prayers. As it involved overnight event, somebody thought that verbal consent was not sufficient. Each participant was asked to get their parents to sign a release form. We got the replies promptly from all except one. It seemed his father, an Army man, refused to sign the consent form and wanted to see the organisers. That was the first time I was exposed to an unreasonable person who thought that the whole world out there was just out to kidnap his child. His coveted son did not make it to the prayers as we could not convince his father. Later in life, the calculating father must have miscalculated his drinking habits and succumbed to the effects of the bottle. The obedient son was also devastated much later, in an unrelated event, when he woke up one fine morning t...

Ford vs Ferrari (2019) The Ford Motor Company is said to be masters in taking up challenges. In its giant plant, Willow Plant with its one-mile-long assembling line, the company managed to produce B-24 Liberator bombers at the rate of one plane per hour. This was their contribution to the World War 2 efforts to liberate the American soil and their European cousins from tyranny. The company established a reputation  for themselves as "the arsenal of democracy" by transforming their production lines to make aeroplanes, tanks and trucks for the armies that defeated Adolf Hitler. They were a pioneer of sorts as women worked in the assembly line and were paid equal wages with men. It, wittingly or unwittingly, to also become "the arsenal of fascism." for its substantial business deals  in Nazi Germany. But that is another story for another time. By the end of WW2, Henry Ford's grandson, Henry Ford II had taken over Ford Motors. He adopted an aggressive busines...