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5 September 2012 #443

Between the summer blockbuster season and the Christmas holiday season, there's the period that we at the Fridae Movie Club prefer to call "film festival season" where you'd not just have film festivals running but also commercial cinemas releasing more experimental or niche films.

Our pick for this week is The Secrets, which airs this Friday at The Cathay for this year's Israeli Film Festival. A twist on the boarding-house-with-mild-sapphic-undertones flick, this film is set in a religious seminary for girls in an ultra-orthodox Jewish enclave where feminism and women's liberation is beginning to make an inroad.

The Woman in the Fifth is a crime thriller about a former professor and literary figure (played by Ethan Hawke) stuck in a dead-end job in the Parisian underworld. Will he clear his name, get back his job and his family? Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, the film is also a beautiful but disturbing psychological drama and mood piece.

The sheer insanity and comic genius of Seth MacFarlane (The Family Guy) is on display in Ted, a fantastic bromance about a man (Mark Wahlberg) who never grew up and his walking, talking teddy bear (voiced by MacFarlane), and Seth MacFarlane's penchant for making endless jokes informed by 70s and 80s pop culture.

In animation film Wolf Children, a young widow is forced to move to hardscrabble countryside with her pair of toddlers. Will she survive the coming winter? Will the children turn out all right? Will everyone find their way in life? And oh, this anime is called Wolf Children because... she married a wolf-man once!

With all the Korean cinematic conventions of a corrupt and inept police force, it's not surprising that a film like The Scent got made eventually. It's a classic noir and a parody of classic noirs where a gumshoe detective gets into a case too big for his shoes and has to solve the mystery before the real killer, the corrupt and inept police force, or the ravishingly beautiful femme fatale do him in.

Over at The Substation this weekend, the 5th Singapore Indie Doc Fest will conclude with a study in gender identity within the cultural mosaic of the world's largest Muslim community — Wariazone, a documentary which brings us to Indonesia to look at the lives of MTF transgenders and crossdressing performing artists across the archipelago.

Till next week,

Vernon Chan

PICK OF THE WEEK
 

The Secrets

Noemi, daughter of a renowned ultra-orthodox rabbi, takes leave to study at a seminary for girls. Her roommates in the seminary is one of whom smokes, cusses, and grew up in the liberal den of Paris. After learning neighbourliness, tolerance, and kindness, the friendship between our protagonist and the 'bad girl' grows into something far more emotional and intimate and now she must learn how to overcome prejudices of her own and others. As a boarding school drama, The Secrets plays like a pure melodrama and an almost Gothic film where the fragile purity of its denizens and the threats to it from outside and within form the concern of the cinematic narrative.

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OPENING THIS WEEK
RECENT MOVIES
The Woman in the Fifth
Ted
Wolf Children
The Scent
Paranorman
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RECENT MOVIES
Step Up Revolution
The Watch
The Silent War
The Cold Light of Day
Moonrise Kingdom
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FEATURED FILM EVENT
The 5th Singapore Indie Doc Fest, featuring Wariazone
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Facebook | Screenings
   
6 to 9 September 2012, The Substation Theatre, Singapore
READ Wariazone and Transgender/Third Gender Issues in Five Cultures an introduction by Bruce Nordstrom-Loeb
 

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