Just went to see the Afdlin Shauki movie Sumo Lah. Since I saw him live at KLPac last year I thought I'd give in a chance. I was dreading it being Astro tacky, but it's not except for the last 30s of smiling together faces, and outrageous product placement for Celcom. Michihiro Kubota wrote the script and it seems he set out to make an intelligent film with important moral messages.
I would really recommend it especially to take foreign visitors to, cos it's much better than Hollywood films, it shows lots of places in KL and Malaysian culture. It has places like his house in Kampung Baru that I walked past yesterday, KLPAC, Puchong, the park in Putrajaya, The Japanese club and things like roadside food-stalls.
It seeks to give a moral message without being preachy. Malays taking the mickey out of themselves for being lazy and giving up too easy - Shows him learning humility and discipline by working with Japanese.
So it's dialog is 60% Malay, 30% English and 10% Japanese. The way this is done with each character switching between languages while the subtitles switch between English and Malay works well; you never feel left out as if you were watching a foreign movie.
Outrageous product placement and I mean outrageous, one time they actually watch a Celcom commercial, features a Celcom shop, people using Celcom 3G video phones and almost 10% of the time a Celcom banner is visible. Ogawa also sponsors and twice they go into Ogawa shop to use the chairs for free. The fitness studio also get a lot of publicity.
Other Malaysian cultural things we see are motorbike repossession, and the hardworking mother paying for everything for her boy while he seems selfish and ungrateful, Japanese winding Malays up by being too direct and aggressive (what ?), him calling out at girls going past .. even Muslims. Strangely we see he touches women who are not his girlfriend e.g. Massaging their hands without asking then he squeams with embarrassment when he sees the sumo wrestlers in loincloths or sees naked men at the hot-springs. Surely every man has seen other men naked before what's the big deal, maybe to women it's interesting, but not to men.
It could have done with another few weeks for character development. The stereotypical baddie repenting and becoming honorable could have been done better. And it could have shown better how they used their skills acquired in Japan to win in the sumo bouts. The womens roles were all about being pretty, whereas the men's were about being leaders, winners or baddies. It would have been nice to have had some better role models for women other that a pretty Celcom promoter or dedicated put upon mother.
Nakossa- try hard, no matter the opponent
