情牵南苑 (Age of Glory) - Updating Myself

Filmmakers rarely watch their own work. I think this must be true to some extent, since we production people would be preoccupied with projects all the time. By the way, we'd probably knew how the final product would turn out to be. Of course, there's also this thing called pre-view. Nope, I was too busy myself even if I have access to the nice fellas at post production (;p).

And so, yesterday (or so I remembered) I took some time out of sleeplessness to watch an episode of AOG at NTV7's webbie. It was the 13th episode (I last watched was epi 4). Everything that I wrote in the previous post about AOG turns out as I've expected. Now Rose (Yu Lan) is a prominent performer at Nan Yuan and she has Chen Mei as her maid, plus now they met the oh-so-lovely-that-I-must-mention-with-oh-so-quote-unquote future songbird Shu Juan. Interesting too was the fact that the rest of the leading males has all appeared here; Ah Sheng (the trishaw fella), Mr. Fang (the boss at Jetty), his henchman (played by Justin Choo), Wang Cai (the aunty killer), and Bao Sheng (the guy that got robbed in the rain). The protagonists are up to something too. So now the stage is more or less settled. From now onwards, its going to be cheesy till infinity and beyond!

Speaking of cheesy, I wasn't expecting that AOG could be THAT cheesy. Heck, given its length, it could be cheesier than West Side Story (that's a famous musical/film, you kids). SPOILER - One main character died the same way too - END OF SPOILER. I suddenly realized AOG was a bloody good tearjerker. But to arrive at that, you viewers (and me too lah) should learn this thing called suspension of belief (SOB). In short, SOB is like you watch Jackie Chan doing all the hoo haak jumping falling stuff; you know its entertaining but there's only a 0.01% that its gonna happen in the real world. You know there's some things that doesn't make sense, like some 700dpi color posters here and there, rain that looks like the end of the world, a street devoid of vehicles, fat and skinny guys that you'd probably seen before, boobs, unnatural lights, familiar decorations, more boobs, a toilet bowl (?), and more boobs, and things of such. Well, I think we are all too immersed into the wrong direction and missed the point of a drama: character drama.

Character drama is what it is: the story of and between the characters. That's how a drama is intended to be. Now I'm not gonna talk about directors and their wacky vision yet. That's the topic for a future post. But what I suggest everyone to do is to apply some SOB in the spirit of Jacky Chan. You went in the cinema to watch an amazingly un-historic 10'000 BC and you'd thought its interesting and a lesson in human history, then why not do the same with AOG? After all, its just drama; they just did it in a different way. There's a perfect blend of characters in AOG, be it one dimensionals or two. I doubt the actors are not fit for the job. Forget the language. Even you and I can't claim total proficiency in one language. This is the problem being Malaysian and Singaporean: we are trying to be what we ain't. We are not Chinese nor Taiwanese, we are Malaysian (and Singaporean). Its time we admit our own unique culture: we are rojak, and rojak tastes damn good!

I think Age of Glory has its ups and downs, just like the decade its trying to portray. There are things we kids would never exactly know about the 60s. Heck, even the grownups don't always agree with each other. So at best, we try to come out with the most ideal vision. TV is a make belief media. It shapes reality so people like me and Jacky Chan can make money. So be a SOB sometimes, and enjoy the show.

no-fark!

情牵南苑 - Age of Glory

I love pilot episodes; they either decide the success of a series, or its doom. They tell audiences what to expect, and generate further expectations, and at the end, make you anxiously waiting for that next episode to be aired next Monday. That's what happened to me with favorites such as Stargate SG-1, Seaquest, Lost, Prison Break, most of the Hongkie stuff and all of the J-Doramas.

In case you didn't know, "Age of Glory", a Malaysian made drama which I am deeply (almost affectionately) involved with, premiered earlier tonight on NTV7. Don't worry if you missed that. There's still 39 episodes to go, every Monday to Thursdays at 9.45pm. Edit: Past episodes are also available on www.ntv7.com.my, without the ads (yeay!). After watching the pilot of AOG, there are some points that perplexes me.

I'm not saying that perplexing is a bad sign for a drama premiere. I happened to like dramas that does things out of my comfort zone (the great TVB drama War and Beauty has IMHO an aptly apocalyptic ending which The Girlfriend loathes), although they did it at different stages, rarely at the pilot. So seeing the first episode of AOG departing from its comfort zone makes me don that Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson look. Nolah, at least they don't have shaky handphone-esque camerawork and stuff that needs me to turn my TV screen 90 degrees. So what's the quirk?

It has centralized dispersion. That means contradiction lar, even the two words are opposites mah. It tells the story from a flashback from Rose, excuse me, Yuk Lan's point (kudos James Lee for those beautiful opening shots). But, the (flashbacked) story is skewed towards what's happening to Rose's elder sister (played by Yip Lai Yee). We see a bit of what's coming for Rose - her being smart (conversations with sister), her being defensive (saving Janet Khoo from Uncle Hamsap), and most importantly her dreams (being taught makeup and dancing). Those are small bits of information to what lies ahead of young Yuk Lan. Yuk Lan is definitely the focus here, but so far its her sister's issue that is of concern, and the episode ends in that way too.

That brings us to the second point, that AOG follows a sequential character revelation ark. Most series opens with all main characters (mainly protagonists) and most side casts showing up. The characters' lives often cross paths between each other or they are shown with their own lives in the first episode until they converged at a later stage (usually less than two episodes later). AOG opened with only Yuk Lan and her immediate family. This indicates that the other two main casts would be sequentially revealed along Yuk Lan's life. This too means that audiences would need to stick to seeing only her for some more episodes. I don't suppose that is the case though. A person's life is usually boring. The characters of Shu Juan and Chen Mei would probably pop up sooner.

Finally, hooray for the comeback of Cantonese dialect. Although Janet's Malay-slanged Cantonese amuses me, but I hail the producers' bold decision to stick to it. At first I thought the editor gods made a mistake, but nope, its all true that I'm listening to locals speaking Chinese dialects on free TV again (there are maybe some others that I had no knowing of). Its odd, but my friend theorizes that maybe Janet's character came from KL, that's why she speaks Canton. I had a nice time watching HVD and The Company's Cantonese dramas during the good ol 90s, but quitted since the gaberment's initiative at pushing Mandarin as de-facto dialect for public TV. Those sucked in part because the actors had not acclimatized to speaking in full Mandarin. The small doses of Cantonese in AOG hopefully is a start for more localization of Malaysian dramas.

Maybe I was most edgy about AOG because I worked on it. I knew how they made those shots and they deliver more memories than objective emotional impact on screen. I hope those who view it purely for what they are - drama, would enjoy it as much as we enjoyed (har har) making it.

no-fark!

Age of Glory; DONE!

Nyahahaha, that's it, a simple uneventful end to a turbulent but fun project. Age of Glory's principal shooting is officially over. I hear there were tears when it was announced. A lot of us waited for so long for this day. So now all that is left is between the editors and the directors to sort out the final product. From what I understand, its going on air in another two weeks. Stay tuned.

Out of boredom, both Feng and Shan decided to celebrate this very occasion with a bit of powder bashing, all 9 packs of flour in fact. We would've used confetti and snow sprays but those were a bit expensive for casual fun. Luckily we didn't settled on whip cream either. And so the three of us stockpiled the vehicle with ponchos and enough flours to make hell for the DBKL morning sweepers. We stirred up some riot of our own.


Dai Lou's gonna have some washing to do.


We arrived in time to cause some serious damage!


"Dai sei" fatty!


The guy that started it, gets it!




They finally had their revenge on the Iron Lady.


The day's big winner.


One sore loser...


The official poster.

Darn, we still had to pick up tonnes of stuff from Broga tomorrow (today, as of time of writing). So, technically I still haven't "sau kong"!

no-fark!

Every Era Must Pass

Legend has it, that Age of Glory is wrapping up principal shooting in 3 more days. That also means that I too have another month left as an intern. I'd say that its nice to be a part of this project.

I was very lucky (really!) to have entered this project at its busiest phase while they were filming primarily on studio sets. As a set design guy, its damn tiring at times, but after you got the set done, most of the time you could drift off. Movie sets are simply magnificent; you take a whole lot of wood and bunch them into something, decorate them with whatever, and there you have a wall, a room, and even a fully functioning dance hall! At the end of the day, you strike it down into pieces ready for the next set, or the next truck going for the dump. That's movie magic.

So what do I think of it? AOG should be fine when its out. For most part of it, it has something. Some of the plot might be a bit boring, but I'm saying this because I didn't look at the big picture yet. I think there's a reason too why these people are so demanding on things that could be seen on-screen (props). This is a very long drama (40 ep), its tiring to see character actions all the time, so they are using settings and props to spice up things (something like mis en scene, and film directors like James Lee likes to do that). That's just my theory. Anyhow, all we did was to turn the mundane and mediocre to some good looking object appearing on your TV screen.

Well, the age of glory is coming to an end, or at least it is for me. My most memorable part was watching James and co. doing the final 'shutdown' scene at the makeup room set. I might have sobbed had I not gone out earlier for a pair of shoes (duh, also partly because I can't stand the AD). I hope it would be equally touching when its aired.

I'm feeling the void already. The new project simply lacks the motivational omph by my standards (there's nothing interesting watching a bunch of middle age men doing fresh idol stuff). AOG is bigger than anything coming, and I doubt they wanna try that again anytime soon. I'm gonna miss working with the crew and the AOG casts, and the blardy ADs too. Hopefully these people are still around next year as I 'proudly' enter this industry as a paid who-knows-what.

Rest in pieces dear AOG sets and props.

no-fark!