TIONG BAHRU SOCIAL CLUB

NC16, 88 minutes, opens today

3/5 stars

Despite its title, this is not a movie about Singapore as it is. It is a movie about a Singapore of the imagination, a place with bits of its identity blown up to almost cartoonish proportions.

Those bits, such as the Government's fondness for social control, are highly lampoonable. Any article about Singapore in, say, The New York Times or The New Yorker, tends to abound in smug commentary about how things like universal mask-wearing or clean, affordable public transport systems can operate here only because of its citizens' abnormal propensity for toeing the line.

In an indirect fashion, the film also mocks mass gullibility, a trait that makes one seek soothing predestination over messy free will.

Thomas Pang is Ah Bee, a typical Singaporean worker bee (pun probably intended) who, fed up with his metrics-driven job, opts to join the club of the film's title, a community with utopian ideals that sound suspiciously like typical Singaporean goals.

In exchange for following rules religiously - and this includes dating a person selected for him - Ah Bee will be set for life.

A panopticon-equipped artificial intelligence continuously measures his emotional status and offers options it thinks he needs to maximise happiness.

The plot is a playful take on the idea of the World Happiness Report, a ranking of nations based on how happy its citizens say they are. Finland - which happens to be where the film's co-screenwriter, Antti Toivonen, comes from - came in at No. 1 this year, with Singapore in a dismal 31st position.

As Toivonen has said, the report baffles his compatriots, who every year get into a debate over whether they deserve the title of the world's happiest people.

Similarly, in the film, questions spring into Ah Bee's mind as he matures and comes to understand himself better. Mind you, this is not a science-fiction thriller - there is no conspiracy at the heart of the club, nor is there a villainous mastermind, whether silicon-based or human, to be defeated.

Rather, the story tries to state, through the gentle unfolding of events spiced with a hint of comic exaggeration, just how unruly and metrics-stumping the human heart can be. This is not earthshaking news, but the sentiment is palpably sincere.

Director and co-writer Tan Bee Thiam makes full use of the production's ambitiously theatrical design, so the film offers the best interior shots for a Singapore work in years - the colour-matched visuals are sumptuous and the staging of the ensemble cast in group scenes is deeply satisfying to watch.

Chinese theatre veteran Jalyn Han as the oddly cruel Ms Wee, an elderly person Ah Bee cares for as part of his duties, offers a vibrant breakout performance.

What the film lacks is drive. It is often funny and trenchant in how it sees the banal attractiveness of conformity, but the story gets bogged down when it finds itself not knowing what to do with Ah Bee other than have him act as a mute observer to mildly wacky goings-on.

MANK

NC16, 132 minutes, showing on Netflix

4/5 stars

There is more than a whiff of Oscar bait about this project, a portrait of a Hollywood wordsmith who quips like Oscar Wilde, drinks like a fish and lurches from one disaster to another. It is a role that calls for an actor to show Range with a capital R.

There is an added danger. Movies about writers, especially screenwriters, should carry a warning about excessive amounts of self-congratulation and hero worship.

Those caveats, however, can be safely put aside for this unflaggingly entertaining biopic of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, celebrated as the genius who penned the towering work of American cinema, Citizen Kane (1941), a movie based loosely on the life of media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

Mankiewicz, called Mank by friends, was hot property in the 1930s, a well-liked wit known for making dialogue sing and characters spring to life.

Director David Fincher, on the other hand, is known for edgy projects such as crime thrillers The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Seven (1995). The other biopic on his resume is the Oscar-nominated The Social Network (2010), which skewered Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by showing him to be a charmless nerd out for vengeance, a monster poles apart from the generous extrovert Mank.

The Zuckerberg film is written by the angry humanist Aaron Sorkin; Mank is written by Fincher's father, Jack Fincher, who died of cancer in 2003 before he could gain traction as a screenwriter. Mank was supposed to have been a 1990s father-son project, but delays caused it to be completed only recently.

Ignoring how this seems to be an in memoriam project or aimed at clinching Academy Awards, this is a fun watch, though somewhat tiring because of its length. But since it is on Netflix, watch it with pauses aplenty to give the mind a break from the deluge of repartee.

Fincher, for a film-maker who has not delivered anything as light as this, is right on the money in the camera work, editing and crisply edited dialogue.

British actress Amanda Seyfried shines as the smart, fragile Marion Davies, an actress whose relationship with Hearst was, as many believed, scandalously outlined in Citizen Kane.

Gary Oldman, also British, plays Mank as the charming but wildly unpredictable drinker who could be the life of a cocktail party or clear the room by dropping a bombshell about the host. Outside of the iconic comedies Withnail And I (1987) and Arthur (1981), it is hard to find a more bravura display of drunk acting.

JOSEE

PG, 117 minutes, opens today

Not reviewed

In this South Korean romance, Young-seok (Nam Joo-hyuk) is a university student who meets the wheelchair-using Josee (Han Ji-min) by accident. Despite being mostly shut in, Josee is surprisingly worldly, a trait that entrances Young-seok.