In the absence of other reasonable alternatives, I caught Saving Face last week. It starred Joan Chen, among others, and therefore by Singapore standards, it is under the restricted, artistic category.

The plot is not something you have not heard of. There have been too many movies made about culture shocks and cultural differences. This one is no different, depicting the trials of a lesbian couple in traditional chinese families in America.

It has the ingredients of most of Mediacorp family drama; the authoritative, conservative, paternalistic figure, the young, lovestruck highflyers who are socially deviant, the maternal figure torn between the love of the child and her own standards of acceptability.

It is, once against, love against all sods; against all the dinosaurs that survived the meteor and not knowing that the world now belongs to the mammals, the warm blooded and the young. One of the protagonists is a young, female, geeky, doctor who came from a strict, conservative chinese family; not the usual computer nerd kind of geeky, but the kind of pleasant, nubile, bright-eyed, innocent kind of geeky that you see in Dirty Dancing, the kind that is begging for someone to deflower her by the fifth minute into the show.

I think Wilde once said that "Innocence is the best aphrodisac."

The other is an uber attractive ballet dancer who later got a place in a prestigious school of ballet in France, whose father happens to be the director of surgery and the direct reporting head of the first protagonist.

Talk about cliches....

Talk about stereotypes....

They have more cliches and stereotypes than Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. In the most expected manner, the liberal artist (once again, a dancer) brought out the courage out of her and the lesbian tendencies out of the closet. They proceeded to have a really sweet and romantic relationship peppered with thoughtful gestures that only teenagers freshly in love will do.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

Of course, there is a scene where one stood the other up due to an important event, work related, important event.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

If there is still anyone reading this post, I thank you for your patience. In short, it is just a horribly boring movie that is simply beyond redemption; a movie that should not have been made.

And I paid for it.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

While watching the movie, lesbian acts seemed almost natural. It is only in retrospect that I realized the problem with it. Face it, which male would have a problem watching two lithe, young bodies having lesbian sex?

But imagine two bodies sporting stretch marks, excess pounds, cellulite and freckles doing the same and 50% you might lose your appetite. Now imagine (my mind came short of other examples) Lydia Sum and the old Oprah Winfrey (the version 1.1, the original, upsized one) going at it like the cast of Hamtaro in heat.

90% of you would have lost your appetite.

Now, imagine them with facial hair and hermaphro...

Nevermind, you get my point.

The point is that the media has messed up our ideas of what is beautiful and what is not. It is as if everything should be poster perfect and aesthetically pleasing people gives more meaning to a meaningful act.

I believe Wilde did say that "life imitates art".

And reality becomes somewhat of a disappointment.

I know, because I am still coming to terms that not all girls look like those in Baywatch. It is hard living life looking at 99.9% of the population only to see their flaws and not their strengths. But it is the picture that media paints, the scene of normality that excludes all the common people, one that has every strand of hair in place, one that the sun is always in her hair, one that he does not have garlic breath when he mutters, "I love you." in your ear, one that he never has erectile dysfunction or performance anxiety when you first have sex....

But shit happens.

We cannot live in Hegelian hegemony that does not allow for flawed beings. Perhaps it is time we go back to our existentialist roots and to better understand ourselves, accept our flaws and learn to love ourselves more.

What really bothers me is that chinese film makers continue propagate the stereotypes of chineses, packaging them with attractive images, using the old formula for the sake of profits. It is all about chinese film makers using chineses to make a film for the non-chinese market, just as in The House of Flying Daggers.

I actually prefer the Warriors of Zu and the other crappy Hong Kong swordfighting movie, both of which I caught with ^dante... both of which he actually made extensive complaints about. But at least they had a more genuine feel than with The House of Flying Daggers.

Somehow The House of the Flying Daggers was a big budget production that failed terribly to capture the essence of the chinese swordfighting genre. It wanted to add a dash of aesthetics, a touch of sophistication and yet retain the ambience. Sadly, it turned out to be extravagant and artificial. There are many aspects of art, there are many kinds of art, but it is a fine line between fusing and bastardizing them. The movie experience was one that was inauthentic, leaving the asian audience as empty as when they walked into the theatre, and one cannot help but feel betrayed.

And I paid to watch that one too.