Have any of you guys seen a local movie called S.H.3.?
The title stands for Skateboard Hip-Hop Handphone. According to FilemKita.com, "The movie focuses on college student Khairul, who is a skateboarding freak who tries to gain the attention of Nelly. Khairul’s efforts to woo Sally is unfruitful and to top it all, he injures himself just before a major skateboarding tournament."
After trying to watch the movie, though, I can honestly say Skateboard Hip-Hop Handphone Is Terrible.
Some may say that my assesment of this movie is unfair due to the fact I haven't watched the movie as a whole. Don't worry, I will, and if it does turn out good after a second viewing I'll take my words back, but when the first ten minutes bore the shit out of you in ways no movie has ever achieved, then you know there's something wrong.
Sure, as per all local movies these days, the dubbing is horrendous (somebody shoot the sound engineer who's probably still splicing tape with a razor), the film transfer is attrocious, the title cards are like something out of the 70's (and not ina kitsch kind of way) and the movie's slower than a senior citizen trying to masturbate herself to orgasm with a Tesco's cucumber in the spring time.
The (lack of) speed in the movie is not a pacing issue. It's more than that. It's a syndrome I keep seeing time and time again in Malay movies: A scene that should only warrant about 1 minute of screen time (or less) is instead stretched to about 5 minutes. In a wide shot.
The scene I'm talking about is when the main girl arrives at college in her parents car. The camera is permanently on a wide shot as the car pulls up, she takes out all her luggage, one by one, and says goodbye to her parents. No time lapse. No cuts. Just a shot of an expensive car and some people taking out their luggage whilst the actress playing her friend has a tough time of trying to make her 'ooh's and 'aah's sound remotely interesting throughout this entire scene. It grates me. It pisses me off. It annoys unholy fuck out of me. It makes me want to vomit green bile onto the faces of innocent choir boys.
And they do this again. And again. And again. Time to hit the forward button.
My other gripe over this film is that it's supposedly a skate movie. And every skating shot looks like the director's never seen a skate video in his entire fucking existence.
One thing I will say is that I do admire the fact that the kids' skate abilities are presented as more realistic (although I have no idea whether this was intentional). Instead of being able to pull off every single trick in the book (courtesy of either Tony Hawk or Rodney Mullen doubling them) they hired kids with some level of skating abilities (much better than mine, I'll admit), but not of the supreme pro level. During the contest (where the good guy that nobody understands faces off to the skate bully... as if we didn't see that one coming) the hottest trick in the skaters' repertoir is a crooked grind. Not much, but that's usually what these skate comps are like.
But Jesus, they could have shot it a lot cooler.
Every skate shot during the comp is a wide shot with absolutely no feeling of action in it. No cool music, no funky editing, no moving shots, just static wide shots of the Kg. Batu skatepark empty as fuck with one kid doing a 50-50 about 50 meters away. Wow. Ain't skating cool.
And don't even get me started on the 'hip-hop' scenes. Please, if you're going to shoot a dance sequence, wouldn't you want the visuals to be in sync with the music?
Then there's your usual love story bullshit, your funny side character (watch him do funny facial gestures and fall off his board! Whoopee!) and your 'kepoh' girl. It's your typical over-stretched Malay love triangle jumping on the 'extreme' bandwagon but still lacking any redeeming audio-visual features whatsoever.
And it cost RM$1.5 million. The majority of it probably went to the editor for his 'cool' camera-click-click-cut-between-two-scenes-click-click-a-lot technique. Fuck off.
Maybe I should give it a chance. Maybe I should force myself to watch the movie in its entirety. I survived a half hour long session of dentists yanking out my wisdom tooth, I could survive this, right?
Or maybe I should shove it up a leper's ass, attach grenades on him and shoot him through a cannon into the fucking studio that made this insulting piece of shit.
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