Thoughts on Forget Paris

This movie portrayed one heck of a turbulent romantic relationship. Intense Paris love, swift marriage proposal, and ever-occurring conflicts. Serving as a reminder for me to NOT rush into a relationship, but instead take my time in choosing and discovering my partner.

As this movie revolves mostly around love, I shall speak from the various theories about love. Firstly, it was interesting to note that both Mickey and Ellen were deprived of their same-sex parent when they were young. Mickey's father left him when he was still a boy, and Ellen's mother passed away early in her life. As such, it would not be surprising that these circumstances affected their development of their attachment styles. On one hand, Ellen's behavior seems to resemble those of a pre-occupied attachment style. She was willing to throw away everything for Mickey and make him her whole world. However, this means that her own identity is somewhat lost. For instance, when he was away for long periods of time, at times she would say that she doesn't know who she is without Mickey. On the other hand, Mickey tends to portray more fearful-avoidant attachment. He wants Ellen to be a central part of his life, physically and emotionally. Yet, he is unable to give up the job of his life, ironically. Even when he took a leave of absence for Ellen's sake, he was not able to comprise willingly and went back to his old job soon after. Hence, his expression of feelings can be unpredictable and wild sometimes.

Moving on, their love definitely started out with being high and intense in the passion component of Sternberg's triarchic theory. As they mentioned in passing, they had sex for many times in all the rooms of the house. Moreover, Mickey shared many stories of himself whilst in his attempts to court Ellen. Although the intimacy and self-disclosure from Mickey's side was strong, Ellen was not sharing nearly as much. This can be seen when Ellen revealed that she was actually married along and never drop a hint about it to Mickey, rendering him speechless at the news. The intimacy between them was fuzzy during the early stages. As Mickey proposed and she accepted, the intimacy and commitment grew greater. Ellen even left her life in France to come and live with Mickey. From I can tell, I assume that the intimacy component did increase between the two, mainly because they started discovering aspects of each other that they did not find appealing. In a way, the more they knew each other, their more they came to abhor each other, at least in the areas that they did not agree in.

A recoccuring aspects is the crisis that pops up, one after another. The way that Mickey and Ellen handled the crisis, and each other, was quite an eye-opener of how others would in real life. Gottman's Four Horsemen of Apocalypse contains the various ways of negative conflict management. First off, Mickey tends to be contemptuous when he is arguing. Normally, his humor and jokes are fun and enjoyable. But when it is said with ugly mockery and sarcasm, things can escalated quickly and wrongly. On the other hand, Ellen acts defensively many times. She defends and justifies her actions and sacrifices, and turns it around to blame it back on Mickey. It does not improve the situation when both of them are being indirect and "subtle" with their anger and frustration. As time passes, they reverted to stonewalling each other. They both withdrew from each other emotionally and ignored the situation, as well as each other. As one of their friends said, it was like they were pretending to be married.

Some said that the movie was overly dramatic, with its repetitive crisis. Personally, perhaps the reason why I did not perceive it as dramatic, was because these crisis were relevant and very real. As time goes by, different issues would arises in different stages of the relationships. Staying together, spending family time with each other, conceiving children and so on and so forth. These are matters that cross my mind before, matters that I did not have a good solution for. But as I realized, after the movie, that these matters cannot be handled by me alone. It has to be approached by both me and my partner, as we decide how to move forward in life as a couple.

Thoughts on Strictly Ballroom

My first thought after I finished the movie was, "That's not bad for a dance movie". As a whole, the plot, characters and screenplay were better than a number of other dance movies that I have watched previously. Granted, it ended with a more cliche and over-exaggeration than was needed. But how dance movies usually ends anyhow, fancy and extravagant. I also liked the fact that the story revolved mostly around the dance. Too often have I watched dance movies that steered towards the romantic relationship between the main characters, and that the dance becomes something to show off their love instead.

Looking at the entirety of the movie, I presumed that the pressure to conform is high and intense. Consider this, the Federation dance has been established for years and everyone, literally all the ballroom dancers, adhered to its principles. Scott's mother, Shirley, and teacher, Les, were strong believers of it and pushed Scott to follow it and win the Pan-Pacific Championship. Thus, the group size and cohesive is immensely large, and thus, exerting great social pressure. Even so, Scott explicitly expressed his distaste for it, and resorts to his own dance styles in the competition. This may be due to his strong desires for personal independence and control. This can be seen in the opening scenes itself, where Scott showed off his unique style. As it stands, Scott would be considered as a nonconformist. So, what does society do to nonconformist? They rejected them, ostracized them, and demanded that they changed their ways. In this case, Shirley, Les and Barry would repeatedly attempt to convince Scott to change his ways. The media would be all over these sensational news, like vultures to a carcass, and spread all sorts of rumors and stories. Some to discredit him, others to raise questions. Scott would also never win the various Federation competitions that he joined, although we later discovered that there was a personal agenda at hand.

Building on that point, a number of people tried to get Scott to comply to their request. Shirley, Les and Barry kept giving various reasons regarding their request. As reasons are one of the factors that influences compliance, Scott seems to assume that these reasons are legititmate, and somewhat complies to them. Barry, in particular, used a technique that may be compared to the door-in-the-face strategy. He initially asked Scott to adhere to the conventional styles, with the reason of winning the championship. After which Scott responded of his disinterest, Barry follows up with the reasoning of winning it for his father. Doing it for his father was a smaller but more personal reason. Although the details of the strategy do not match directly to the door-in-the-face, such as the time interval between the request, the strategy did managed to elicit Scott's guilt and he gave in to Barry's request.

On a different topic, it was nice to see the relationship between Scott and Fran blossomed and grew. As the laws of attraction goes, we like those who reward us. On one hand, Fran was rewarded with being able to pair up with a champion-level dancer. As she later revealed, it was hard for Fran to muster the courage to ask Scott to be her dance partner, and even more so when trying to persuade him to give her a chance, being a beginner and all. From Scott's side, his reward came in the form of a partner who accepted both his unique dance steps and mentality. As it were, nobody else, neither his mother, his teacher, nor the Federation, approved of his nonconforming dance steps, although later we found out that there was one who did, of whom I shall not spoil the identity of. That being said, the similarities of their perspectives on unconventional dancing was perhaps a key attraction between the two. Fran also incorporated pasodoble steps into her dance. Here, we have the flamboyant and elegance of ballroom dancing, mixed with the rhythmic and energetic movements of pasodoble. A slight case of opposite attracts, of complementary contributions, but both still heading towards the same goal. With a few weeks of intense personal contact with each other, it was undoubtedly that the familiarity between increased and intensified as well .

As a dancer and musician, I consider myself as an artist. As such, I understood Scott's nonconformity  very well. I myself strive to be original and creative in my artistic expression, incorporating that mentality into all areas of my life. Indeed, it is most difficult, especially when many, even those close to you, do not support you. But we have no wish to be among the masses of white sheep heading the popular direction. Instead, we are prepared to be the black sheep that walks the path that no one else dared.

Thoughts on Eat Drink Man Woman

Good thing that I didn't know that it was directed by Ang Lee. Otherwise, I would have anticipated the unique style of his movies. I like the fact that it starts off by showing the food, with the ingredients being used and the culinary skills displayed. That way, I was given the impression of a cooking/food movie, due to the primacy effect. While technically it wasn't wrong, but in hindsight, I felt that it was meant to mislead and distract us from the punchline that came at the end of the movie.

This movie portrays a family of one father and three daughters, with a family dynamic that is diverse and varying. These interactions can be seen similarly across real families too.

The father, Mr. Chu, has a strong traditional form of love and caring towards his three daughters. He is a man of few words, and even if he does speaks, he talks in a gruff manner. His words can seem harsh and unforgiving at times. Nevertheless, his love language is more clearly seen in the form of actions, especially in preparing food. This can be seen throughout the movie, whereby the father would prepare extravagant meals. His attitude can be explained as instrumentality behaviour, with him being assertive and independent. On the other hand, his oldest daughter, Jia Jen, perhaps showed the most expressive behaviour. To the point where I might say that she portrays the mother in Jung's archetypes. The second sister, Jia Chien, did mentioned that she adopt the mother role after their real mother passed away.

The coping mechanisms of the family are most enlightening. Here, I could use several of Freud's defence mechanisms to explain the conflicts between their id and ego. The most glaring one is the father. It is highly likely that the father is suppressing, as well as sublimating, the desires of his id. I won't spoil the twist, but at the end, we could see that he has been consciously holding back his deepest desire from everyone, excluding the party involved. The sublimation part could be said to come after this, whereby he pour his energy into a socially accepted behaviour. In his case, cooking. Being a famous Chinese chef, he has extensive skills and knowledge of cutlery. Nevertheless, he has lost his taste buds, so he can no longer test his food before serving. In such a condition, it is not ideal to continue cooking, as his food could be poisonous without him knowing. His close friend, Uncle Wen, fell ill once after tasting his food after all. Even so, he kept cooking elaborate meals still, perhaps suggesting that his strong id had to be expressed in one way or another.

The twist showed an intriguing attraction between the parties involved.  The law of attraction states that we like those who rewards us. In this scenario, we could say that opposites attract, but in terms of assets. One party could offer fertility, passion and a companionship, while the other had stability and reputation to boast about. As the research goes, we like people who are similar to us. For the two parties involved, it is difficult to ascertain whether they are similar, in terms of personality and values. But seeing as they were attract to each other, despite their obvious GENERATION differences (if you know what I mean), it may suggest that they saw something alike in each other.

Although this movie has elements that seems generic and traditional, the way the story and screenplay goes is just quirky and subtly unconventional. It is an Ang Lee movie after all. For me, the aspect of things-are-not-all-that-they-seems-to-be resonated in me. The sudden turn of events for many of the characters showed how unexpected life can be. Things may not necessarily go our way, or sometimes it goes all the way before we even realised it. We can always prepared for the worst and unexpected. But sometimes, life still manages to catch us off guard and hender us speechless.