At 9pm on June 26 2022, the Cathay Cineplex at 2 Handy Road screened its last movie—Top Gun: Maverick—before shuttering its doors forever.1 Operator mm2 Asia, which has been running the network of Cathay Cineplex theatres since 2017, identified the closure as a “business decision”, explaining it as “part of the cost rationalization process for its cinema operations”
Imagine entering a time portal. You can rewind time to encounter your partner before you were together or seek out a future version of them when they are older. Would you still develop a close relationship with them? How about facing someone completely different from the one you’re used to and being too traumatised to confront the present?
We should celebrate going to therapy. For the longest time and for some sub-cultures today, to declare that we go for therapy sessions might be synonymous with a declaration of weaknesses. Even though counselling services populate schools, government agencies, and even workspaces, the fear of being seen to reach out to these services might deter us from attending these counselling sessions to better our mental wellness. How wonderful it is, then, that we see an encouraging turn to openly discuss mental illness and our own experiences with therapy.
I can trace the beginning of my love of cinema to when I was three or four years old. My father decided it was time for me to start watching ‘proper’ films, not just kids’ stuff. As an early adopter of the Betamax Video Recorder he could record films from British TV – especially those broadcast after I’d gone to bed – and play them back for me in the day. I wasn’t used to getting attention from my Dad, because – as a senior doctor at the local hospital – he worked long hours. Even at home he wasn’t one for playing with his kids. So, when he told me we were going to watch a film together, I was surprised and excited. We didn’t go to the cinema often; a few times a year to see things like The Water Babies or the Superman films, and my mother always took us. Dad had no interest in new releases, preferring to carefully curate from cinema’s past.
I used to walk around Dakota Crescent in its final days, a quiet antique place filled with secrets no one would know now. Walking back recently, the facade of the neighbourhood barely looks recognisable. The ‘crane’ might be the national ‘bird’ of Singapore, filling our skies with a symbol of progress, of constant rejuvenation and innovation, of creation itself. Every few months, something new is built in Singapore, as though we are indeed a creative nation.
Toy-like beeps punctuate the air as the Ikarie XB-1 spaceship zips across the cosmos. A rickety robot called Patrick clumsily rolls across the floor, answering commands from its owner in a deadpan voice. Accustomed to advanced computer-generated graphics and visual effects, modern-day audience members may find this black-and-white footage from the 1963 sci-fi film Ikarie XB-1 quaint and unsophisticated.
In 1961, a time when the world was scrambling to shiny new heights with towering skyscrapers and novel machinery, the young explorers of the Piedmont Speleological Group ventured into the rural Italian South, searching for undiscovered primeval depths. The abyss they eventually descended deep into turned out to be the third deepest cave in the world at the time.
2008. Bridgeport, Connecticut. A teenage girl is found dead in her room. Going between spaces geographical, mental and historical, the film is an innovative exploration of concepts of identity, searching for a ‘maison’ (house) to shelter a complex identity.
Time is life’s ultimate currency. What we do with it – often trading it for a manmade currency like money – usually requires rational thought on a constant basis. Life’s currency is not fair from person to person, for some have more than others, and even the ones with seemingly more time may have depreciative qualities, for example when sickness and accidents rear their unwelcome head, at any time during our lives.
We take it for granted that time is an objective, linear, and constant presence in our lives. After all, it seems difficult to imagine a life that exists outside of time. Yet, as proven by Matthew McConaughey’s reaction in Interstellar upon his character’s return to the spacecraft, he discovers that decades have passed on Earth in the hour he was on another planet: Time, by itself, might extend beyond our conventional understanding of time as a linear 24 hours, 7 days a week.
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