Word: tans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that's when the magic happens." His goal: to use his fame to build a cultural bridge between East and West, playing Chinese music to Western audiences and vice versa. "The West is hungry now for Chinese culture - like the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with its music by Tan Dun," he says. "And in China, young people are devouring Shakespeare. Music moves people so deeply, it can really make them feel differently about each other." Official Website: www.langlang.com
...allowed to see 15, because the Lion City's middle classes would learn more from this film than they did studying for their O-level exams in secondary school. 15 is meant to give its native audience a glimpse of a subculture usually airbrushed out of the official reality. Tan took his stories and his cast from the struggling teenagers he met as a part-time high-school drama teacher, and their gritty tale rings true. The picture follows a group of five teenage delinquent boys as they embark on their daily odyssey of cutting class, chain-smoking, self-piercing...
...also not Larry Clark's Kids, a film 15 echoes. Though Tan's teenagers live in a world that seems void of adult authority?or even adult presence?they are hardly the empty-eyed nihilists of Kids. If anything, Tan's punks feel too much, clinging to each other and their noble concepts of friendship and camaraderie, agonizing over parental rejection. They just want to be loved. For every brutality?slicing an obnoxious bully's face, stomping a passerby on the street?15 offers moments of cloying mawkishness. One character lets his friend stay over after he's been kicked...
...Like American director Spike Jonze, Tan cut his teeth on music videos, and that pedigree shows in the hip-hop numbers that punctuate the film. He mixes documentary realism with dream sequences, rapid montages, video-game graphics, even a darkly comedic animated scene called "Suicide Manual," in which a typical-looking Singaporean kid offs himself in ever more creative?and bloody?ways. Despite his experimental forays, Tan knows when to let the camera linger on the faces of his young actors and wait for the pain to surface. With its white skies and overexposed tropical light, his Singapore...
...Tan says that despite the film's many critical plaudits, since shooting 15 he's become more distant from the government. In a city where the state is deeply involved in the film industry (the Singaporean Film Commission was one of 15's producers), Tan knows that could mean serious trouble for his career. "I feel like an outcast." That's an emotion his characters, rebels on the edge of a manufactured paradise, know all too well...