Movies - Cinema of Singapore

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Cinema of Singapore

	Movies - Cinema of Singapore

After independence, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Singapore had no film industry, being more concerned with the bread-and-butter issues of economic nation-building. The first truly Singaporean film came in 1991's Medium Rare, based on a true-life local cult killer who was hanged in 1988 for murder. Although costing over S$2 million in production, it performed dismally at the box office, taking in merely S$130,000 locally but broke the ice for the next movie, Bugis Street, which was released in 1995, a gaudy film about the famous sleazy district where transvestites and transsexuals can be found. 1995 also saw the release of Mee Pok Man
, made by Eric Khoo on a tight budget of S$100,000 and being the first local film to break even for profits. Concerning a lonely noodle seller who falls for a prostitute, Mee Pok Man
earned much critical accolade worldwide and encouraged more experimental, independent filmmaking within the nation.

Army Daze
, initially starred Kai Wong as Malcolm Png, who dropped out of the project and moved to the United States. This films takes a humorous look into Singapore national service, was made in 1996 and continued the trend of turning high profits at the box office. The most recent theatrical adaptation of Army Daze (2006) stars Hossan Leong.

Next came another Eric Khoo film, 12 Storeys (1997), a highly acclaimed local production which was the first Singaporean film to be shown at Cannes. Interweaving 3 stories about life in the HDB high-rise flats, it is seen as a breakthrough for local films, combining a coherent plot with Singaporean production crew and actors, such as Jack Neo and Koh Boon Pin. Glenn Goe's Forever Fever (1998) was also picked up by Miramax for S$4.5 million and re-released in the U.S. as That’s the Way I Like It. These two years saw the releases of a number of films, such as A Road Less Travelled (1997), God or Dog (1997), Tiger's Whip (1998) and Teenage Textbook (1998), to varying degrees of success.

But it was the phenomenal success of Money No Enough (1998) which eventually catapulted the nation's drive toward movie-making. Using a local crew of actors drawn from television comedies, this heartland comedy written by Jack Neo uses a smattering of Singlish and Hokkien to make a realistic, easily identifiable drama about everybody's quest to earn more quick bucks. Made for less than S$1 million, it raked in S$5,800,000, making it the most commercially successful local film to date. It also demonstrated the potential of the Singapore film industry, and the next year would be a boom year for local films. Eight Singaporean films were made in that year alone, the most notable being Liang Po Po: The Movie
(starring Jack Neo in a reprisal of his television cross-gender role), That One No Enough, the first directorial effect of Jack Neo, and Eating Air, made by film critic Kelvin Tong and film editor Jasmine Ng on a budget of S$800,000. Eating Air did not break even; That One No Enough barely did and only Liang Po Po: The Movie continued the vein of commercial success of Money No Enough, collecting S$3.03 million.

However, the year also marked a watershed for Singapore films. Raintree Pictures, the filmmaking subsidiary of MediaCorp Productions, was started, investing in two regional co-productions, Liang Po Po and The Truth About Jane and Sam
, which merged Singaporean television lead actress Fann Wong with Taiwanese singer Peter Ho and Hong Kong director Derek Yee. Raintree Pictures would finance a number of local and Hong Kong productions in years to come, most notably the films of Jack Neo. Subsequent productions, such as 2000 AD (2000) and The Tree (2001) also draws on Hong Kong star power; the company invested in critically acclaimed regional films such as The Eye (2002) and Infernal Affairs II (2003). It produced two more English-language local productions, Chicken Rice War
(2000) and One Leg Kicking (2001).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Cinema of Singapore ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Cinema of Singapore; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay