Overindulged

With no comedy on a Sunday night, and no motorcycling until 2am tonight, we were at a bit of a loose end, so we got tickets to two films. Watching two films in one day always feels like a bit of an over-indulgence; it's not as strange as watching a film at lunchtime and then wandering out into sunshine, but it's close.

One flaw with this is that Singapore delights in its air conditioning. Not as heavily as Hong Kong, but still chilly enough that if you spend four hours sat in a darkened roomn you'll be frozen to the bone by the time you're done.

Speaking of bones, we watched Magic Mike first. This is a film about male strippers. It's also a film directed by Steven Soderbergh, so there are. Meaningful. Pauses. Few of these pauses are focussed on crotches, but there is one scene with an out of focus penis pump being used in the foreground, which isn't something you see very often at the cinema in Singapore.

The dancing is good: I'm confused whether Channing Tatum can do backflips or not, or if it's just good stuntwork. There's possibly a bit more crazy dancing than necessary to move the plot along (I'm not sure if Soderbergh actually wanted to make the next episode of Step Up: Dance Revolution, but it began to feel that way) and I wasn't sure if women like watching a man in very baggy trousers dancing, but there you are. It's a long way from my own experiences of taking my clothes off for money (except for the quick-release velcro trousers, but I suppose that's a universal component of male stripping).

After two hours of crotch-posturing we were shell-shocked, so we walked around the mall for an hour to warm up. That didn't work too well (even before we had ice cream) so we had to go outside to restore some heat to our bodies. It's strange, after sweating so much this morning that I had to wring out my beard when I got home, that I should be complaining about the cold.

Still, here we are in Singapore. Rather than having to stand up for the national anthem, there's just some dubious public advertising in the trailers. Apparently the roles of Singaporeans are (a) to fire guns in the air, if you're a man, or (b) to make healthy drinks for your husband, if you're a woman. So Singapore thinks men are meant to be 90s gangbangers from Compton, and women 1950s housewives. Which is all very well, but isn't it a bit strange to advertise it just before a modern action film like The Bourne Legacy? (Oh, and the advert for credit cards "designed specially for women" - I assume you can only buy shoes, handbags and groceries, while hubby is off putting a cap in somebody's ass.)

Luckily, everyone's brought their eight year old kids along to watch the film, so they can be properly indoctrinated by these trailers and not question them like I do.