Spooked and thinking...

KH was in Shanghai last week so with some time on my hands, I brought the kids to the movies.

While the kids watched Horton, I took on the horror flick Rule #1.

Rule#1, directed by Singaporean Kelvin Tong, has had some good reviews which piqued my curiosity about the film. The story revolved around two cops who worked in the Miscellaneous Affairs Dept of the HK police force. As world-weary detective Ekin Cheng explains, everyday the police force gets about 185 phone calls. Inevitably, the majority will involve some crime or other. But there will be a handful of calls which start with "There's something strange going on in my house..." And those are the cases taken up and investigated by the Miscellaneous Affairs Dept.

I won't spoil it for you but will say that the plot was good and there is a twist at the end. I was expecting something along the lines of The Others, but this was something different and totally unexpected and I quite liked the surprise. The movie has its share of tense and 'shocky' moments, complete with eerie soundtrack, that left me covering my ears in tension (which is why KH always laughs at me when I say I want to watch a horror movie - I 'watch' with fingers over my eyes and/or fingers stuffed into my ears at the key tense moments!). The hunky and intense Shawn Yue (whom I liked for his roles in Infernal Affairs and Protegy) lent a brooding, angsty air to the movie. Uh, I have to say that I did not like Fiona Xie in the movie. I thought she was very posey, too pouty and one-dimensional and at some points, the saccharine was really an overdose! Luckily she didn't appear too often in the movie.

So I learned rule #1: There are no ghosts. Or at least you won't hear the police dept telling you there are! But keep an open mind, as the detective later says - ghosts and spirits are really everywhere, some are just trapped into a sad cycle on earth, unable to leave the place in peace. They don't want to harm you, they just want to keep repeating their tragedies in an unending loop, stuck in time. I think this is sad and not entirely impossible to disbelieve. And if this is so, perhaps ghosts are more to be pitied than to be feared.

Overall, a nicely satisfyingly creepy suspenseful movie that left me a tad creeped out as I went home - even as I was surrounded by five boisterous little kids. With all that noise and activity, you would think that even the most intrepid of ghosts would be scared off! But my imagination still went into overdrive that night - particularly on the crowded bus number 105.

The minute we got on the bus, my eye was caught by a couple sitting at the back - both were dressed black and styled along the lines of a cowboy's or line-dancing couple's rodeo get-up. But it wasn't their dressing that caught my attention. It was their skin colour. They had a skin tone with the same familiar pallor of death that all the ghosts in Rule#1 seemed to have. Chalk it down to bad SBS lighting. Or particularly good movie make-up. But that couple's whitish, chalky skin and dark undereye shadows really spooked me. I've never seen anyone that pale - they looked like they were very recent blood donors to some thirsty vampire! I kept looking from them to other people in the bus, trying to figure out if it was my imagination or just the light. But everyone else looked brown, healthy and normal! Didn't help that the lady, cadaverically thin, stood up and volunteered her seat to my kids. In that split second, I didn't want to take it. I know I know, stupid me right? I should just say yes, and thank you gratefully and snap out of the horror-movie nonsense, but I couldn't. Finally, I could not bear to embarrass the ghost's - I mean lady's - kindness and so plonked Cait on the seat while I scuttled off to another, all the time keeping an eye on Cait next to the pale-faced man.

We made it home in one piece, all blood intact, with the kids chattering away about Horton. Which brings me to the movie. I had watched Horton separately with Owain and Trin (who behaved very well during the movie!). I enjoyed it immensely. Dr Seuss's characters, always so flamboyantly rendered, took on a 3-D magnificence on the big screen when they came to life in full technicolour glory. Hues of purple, teal, orange, violet, mauve, fuchsia, egg-yolk yellow, and so on burst to life on screen - very beautiful!

The story itself was interesting. Horton the elephant has discovered life on a tiny speck which he caught on a dandelion. But no one would believe him. They think the elephant's gone loony talking to himself. Mrs Kangaroo, anal and controlling, could not believe that there was really life but feared the anarchy which would ensue in the jungle if Horton could convince the other animals that there was really life on that tiny speck. What she could not see or hear could not possibly be real. So she incited Vlad the vulture to get rid of the speck and later stirred up a lynching mob in the other animals when Vlad failed. Meanwhile, life on the speck is really a microscopic world called Whosville. The mayor of Whosville was the only one who could hear Horton. No one else in Whosville believed him that there was life beyond their world, that a voice was coming through the clouds and speaking to him. This being a kids' cartoon though, there was a happy ending of course.

But it struck me how similar it was to life, to the way we think, and the way we behave etc. We all run the risk of being so closeminded to just the known and the familiar, the tried and the proven, that we ignore possibilities out there - possibilities that we might be wrong, that there are other options and scenarios and realities. We sometimes act just like Mrs Kangaroo and the mad mob, refusing to consider alternative points of view. Just because these may not be immediately obvious or proven.

I thought of the medical profession today, and how resistant it is to change, to possibilities like home births, drug-free, intervention-free births, water births etc. The reality for them is not a birth, but a delivery - one fraught with risk, danger, that needed help and intervention, that should take place in a hospital in the presence of doctors and nurses. They no longer see birth as what it has always been: just a normal life process, like breathing, seeing, eating, thinking. And because they don't see it like this, they miss out on seeing the awesome power and beauty of life being born into the world. The pity of it is, the mothers and fathers and families also miss out. And those who try to point this out, end up like Horton - derisively labelled quacks, charlatans and witchdoctors.

I also thought about religion, and how we can be so blinkered that we refuse to acknowledge that there might be other realities that may be just as real to other people. If only more people would live and let live. Then it being Holy Week and I being a Catholic (albeit not a very good one), I thought about how the Pharisees acted like Mrs Kangaroo and her lynch mob, hellbent on destroying a dissident. A dissident who said things they did not believe in. A dissident in danger of fracturing all they have ever known or believed in. We do a lot of harm when we act in fear and ignorance.

Luckily that story too, had a happy ending.