Opinion (2022)

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 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.

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.

Click. A snap on the camera captures a moment in time, whether it is a fresh graduate collecting his degree scroll or a couple raising their glasses to a toast at their wedding. Before the age of smartphones, we printed photographs and arranged them neatly into albums that tell stories of our past. Most of us still keep troves of them tucked away in old drawers, documenting scenes where our memories fail us.

Being both an NTU student and resident of Singapore’s east means I am no stranger to a protracted, time-sucking commute. I usually try to squeeze all the productive work possible out of my close to 2-hour journey back home—since entering university, I have become the seasoned practitioner of a precarious one-woman, posture-wrecking, laptop-on-knee balancing act.

A documentary film which charts the final days of the eponymous Bangkok theatre, Scala delves into the personal histories of the in-house workers and director Ananta Thitanat herself, who spent her childhood on the grounds as the daughter of a nearby theatre worker. The film’s languorous, persistent shots and steady angles demonstrate a preoccupation with encapsulating interactions between people and space as they unfold organically, observed through the lens of a distant camera.