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25 April 2012 #424

This week, the Fridae Movie Club wishes all the best to outgoing Singapore chief censor Amy Chua, who in spite of her cautious, conservative slant, presided over a striking liberalisation of our censorship system in the past five years — and this week's selection proves our point.

Our pick of the week is House of Pleasures, a frank and explicit, yet artistic look at what went on behind brothels in Paris at the end of the 19th century. Featuring more nudity, female solidarity, and kinky sex amidst suffering and squalor than even a modern women-in-prison flick, the film is a spiritual companion to Hou Hsiao Hsien's Flowers of Shanghai.

Twisted, gory, verbose, and over the top. The Raven captures the charm of American Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe and his writings. The writer, played by a very campy John Cusack impersonating Nicolas Cage, is embroiled in a series of Se7en-style murders, all inspired by his infamous short stories.

Japanese horror POV is a found footage horror film about the haunting of two teen idols — who happen to be real-life teen idols playing themselves. Written and directed by a Japanese master of horror, the flick sneakily blends real life and fiction on the level of say, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Given that these teen idols' fanbase consist of pre-teen girls, we applaud the censorship board for scaring the living daylights out of them.

Till next week,

Vernon Chan

PICK OF THE WEEK
 

House of Pleasures

House of Pleasures is an elegy to an age and way of life long gone. It's also a film that would be hard to appreciate in its totality without first seeing Hou Hsiao Hsien's Flowers of Shanghai. Made in 1998, Hou's classic depicted life in the flower houses of Shanghai at the turn of the 20th century. In House of Pleasures, the action is set within a similarly respectable Parisian establishment in 1899 and 1900. Besieged by increasing rents, the spread of venereal disease, the advent of the Metro, and modern science (and its approach to humanity and human relations), the girls of the Apollonide ask the same question of their clients while knowing full well the impossibility of being bought out of their debts and contracts.

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