I stared at it, refusing to belief my eyes. But it just stood there, staring back at me innocently, pretending that there was nothing wrong and it has every reason to be there. That stupid C+ grade which spoiled my entire results for this semester.

Batam. A tropical Indonesian island located 20 km away from Singapore. Also the place where I lost my virginity. Alright that sounds wrong. I meant I just had my virgin trip (meaning first time) to a overseas country other than Singapore in my life. 

Yes, I have never traveled further than Singapore in my whole life before. Which means that for the past 22 years, the only countries that I have ever set foot on before are my home country Malaysia and Singapore. Kinda sad if you ask me but oh well, I'm not complaining. After all, there's still a lot opportunities in the future when I start working and getting rich. Muahahaha.

To be honest, I never knew Batam could be so much fun though. Maybe it's because we have a friend who is a local as our tour guide (as the rest of us can' speak Bahasa Indon and not many people understands English there). Or maybe it's the group of friends that we went with and the activities we did.

We played poker in which we can put in bets going up to hundred thousands because it is in rupiah.

And I won 71000 in total, which sounds totally awesome when you say it.

"Hey, how much you won yesterday?"

"Oh, no much, just 71K". Too bad it's not 71K SGD.

We visited the beach.


And le guys decided to go on a banana boat, because we all love bananas.


With the exception of me, sadly, because I have clear instructions from my parents not to touch water because of my inability to swim. And also because I preferred orange to bananas. Sorry inside joke.

The beach isn't exactly the best beach that I've seen before but it's acceptable. At least it's still better than the over-hyped Sentosa beaches (yes I have a deep resentment going on for Sentosa beaches). And we did not really go down to swim so there's not much to comment.

We also ate awesome seafood together on a wooden restaurant just next to the sea.

Possibly the most expensive meal I have ever eaten and most probably will ever eat in my life, numerically speaking, unless if I decide to visit Indonesia again or maybe some African countries.


One million two hundred sixty four thousand and five hundred bucks. The bill itself is already a millionaire.

And to top it all off, we had an awesome karaoke session during the final night too!

le star struck lovers on a duet

and le sexy topless beach guy on a guitar

The room even had its own built in bar!


But perhaps the most awesome thing is not the room itself but rather the fact that the karaoke room is not just any karaoke room, but rather a room located in our friend's house. Yes, the karaoke room is part of the house where le friend stays and its not a public commercial one like those you in places like K-Box. Awesome right? Reaffirms my stand that I should get rich one day.

All in all, it was a fun trip. There were loads of cheap food, cheap stuff and tons of fun stuff we did and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Would definitely want to go on a trip like this again.

Oh, I forgot that we also went for massage, but it was very painful for me which is why i did not include it in.

This...

...is my laptop's wallpaper.

This...

...is also my laptop's wallpaper.

And also this...

Not forgetting this too...

And last but not least...

All of them are my laptop's wallpaper.

And this...

...is me. If I were to be a female superhero, that is, fighting alongside the likes of Wonder Woman and Power Girl in an alternate universe called DC. Too bad I'm not. But then again, if you have superheroes and supervillains outside your house everyday, throwing boulders and cars everywhere and damaging public properties, life's gonna suck.

Besides, I'm just an average gamer guy who spends too much time in the room. Very likely to stay that way for many years to come too. Unless someone does a Lex Luthor and implants me with a superhero-abilities-giving robot into me. Until then, I guess I just have to stick with these sexy DC Universe girls wallpaper. Forever alone face.

Just kidding. My girlfriend would kill me if she sees this post. Shh...

An angel appeared to me and proclaimed an interesting piece news to me today. Nothing about me getting pregnant in the immediate future but rather something regarding this blog. Luckily for me, I had my webcam turned on when the angel appeared and was able to capture a few photos for illustration purposes. It went something like this:

That's right ladies and gentlemen, for the second year running, yours truly lukeyishandsome(dot)com is once again competing to be one of Singapore's top bloggers, with a twist this time. Instead of the Best WTH (What The Hell) category that I was a finalist for last year, I was chosen as one of the finalist for another category this year, which is the Best Y-Bloggist award.

To put it in a peanut shell, that means that instead of  trying to make you all go "WTH?!" this year, I am the "Yo Wazzup Wazzup" cool kind of blogger this year. For your info, the Best Y-Bloggist category aims to honour bloggers below 25 years of age who are not only creative but media savvy as well. Which means that not only I am young, I am also creative and media savvy too! And not forgetting handsome too.

To be honest, I never expected to be shortlisted for this category because I was nominated for the Best WTH category last year and was hoping to have a second shot at the award again this year. Besides, I don't think I'm very media savvy nor creative but I think that those comic strips of mine must have helped a lot. And looks like spamming your applications thick-facedly over the different categories was quite useful too.

Now of course, like every online competitions out there, voting is part of the scoring criteria, which means I will be needing your votes for my blog. Due to the big nature of this competition, the voting mechanism is slightly more complicated and before I write a post about why you should vote for me (obviously because I'm handsome, ahem, but lets not overuse that reason), I need to teach you how to vote first! The steps are as follows:

1. Go to http://sgblogawards.omy.sg/2012/category/?cat=ybloggist (that's the web page for the Best Y-Bloggist finalists category)

2. Scroll down until you see the picture of my handsome face among the tons of other pretty girls in that category (refer to pic below)

3. Click the yellow "VOTE FOR ME" button on the bottom right of my thumbnail. A grey box asking you to login will pop up after you click it (refer to pic below)

4. You need to be an OMY.sg member in order to be able to vote for the competition. If you're not yet a member, simply click register now to be taken to the registration page. There's quite a number of personal details to be filled up but you don't have to worry as OMY.sg is part of Singapore Press Holdings so your details would not be simply leaked anywhere.

5. After successful registration, a confirmation email would be sent to your email address that you've registered with. Simply click the verification link and you're done. Very standard procedures.

6. Once you've registered, you can login daily to cast your votes for lukeyishandsome(dot)com and for other blogs in other categories too. Remember, you can vote once per day! Meaning you could make it into a daily habit, for example voting everyday before dinner or before you log in to Facebook. The whole voting process just takes up less than 5 minutes of your time per day. 5 minutes out of 24 hours, it's quite a good deal.

Coming up next in lukeyishandsome(dot)com's Singapore Blog Awards 2012 (SBA2012) blog series, "10 Reasons Why You Should Vote for Lukey!". Stay tuned! And of course, you can start voting now too! All your help is greatly appreciated!

Tags: Singapore Blog Awards 2012, How to vote, Panasonic's Best Y-Bloggist

I've been killing a lot of people recently. No, not the literal type of killing but rather the ones that you do in your head on victims living a few hundred years ago back during the Renaissance period in Rome. Not that I have any choice though, because it's my line of work and murder is the only closest thing to justice that you can find during those times.

And yes, if you're wondering, I'm actually playing one of the Assassin's Creed game and more specifically the Brotherhood series. I would love to play more recent games to be honest, but the slow internet speed of Malaysia and the lack of installation files have left me with very little options.

Aside from the unique gameplay that is not easy to find in other games franchise, I also love the storyline of Assassins Creed (AC) a lot. The eternal feud between two factions that lives in the dark, one bent on world domination while the other on the preservation of freewill is very appealing, if you ask me. After all, we do love conspiracy theories and gossips and AC manages to capitalize on that beautifully.

From the creation of the world to the rise of religion to the advent of capitalism and even to the feud between Tesla and Edison, you gotta admit that the writers have put a lot of thought in the story, although it has some uncanny similarities with Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code here and there about how religion is sometimes is used to mask the truth, which I expect may offend some Christians here and there.

The people behind AC are somehow smarter though, choosing to highlight that it was an evil group that hide behind religion and later capitalism in order to pursue their own evil ambitions instead of the people who are behind the religion themselves. In my opinion, AC has one of the most intricate and best thought of story ever and for someone who has a knack for history like me, it's gamingasm.

The only complaint I have is the super long duration that you need to have in order to thoroughly explore the game. 

This...

...is a photo of the interior of my nose, courtesy of my one day stint at the hospital today.

After years of persuading and nagging (mostly nagging), my mum has finally gotten me into hospital to undergo a check on a lump on my throat, which has been sitting there for quite some time now since being detected three years ago during the compulsory university health check. 

I would prefer to simply dismiss it as an Adam's apple that grew in a strange location but I know that you an't simply joke when it comes to health matters and I wouldn't want my mum to pester me for another three years to come so I reluctantly agreed to the hospital stay. So in I went and like all hospital stays, I was given the complimentary blood test, urine test, X-ray scan, CAT scan (which I never experienced before) and also a nasal something-scopy, which included a very long fiber optic cable going up my nose (which I have never experienced too and hope that I will never get to experience again).

 Through this experience, I realized that trying to diagnose the cause behind a patient's discomfort is really much like a scientific experiment that we used to do in high school. The doctor is the experimenter and the patient's illness is the problem. You form a hypothesis about the cause of the illness and employ various methods to test it out. Methods like blood test, CAT scan or urine test. Through these tests, you eliminate the possibilities one by one until you reach a conclusion. Much like the null hypothesis theory.

Which means that each new patient is like a new experiment to the doctor, where he/she has to test out his or her hypothesis of illness's source. Because each and every patient is different with varying sources or symptoms, the doctor can never be too sure of his/her initial deductions until results from the tests come in. Which in turn means that we are some sort of guinea pigs when we're visiting the doctor.

Of course, through numerous experiences, it would allow the doctor to make more accurate guesses but when it comes to ambiguous cases like the lump on my neck, they can never be sure of their hypothesis until they have the test results. So you can never be too sure when it comes to disease/illness.

This experience did not only taught me that though. It also taught me how a CAT scan felt like.

One thing about CAT/CT scans like this is that reading about it is totally different from undergoing it yourself. Now I finally understood why my textbook mentioned that there were people who refused to undergo scans like this. It's far from comfortable, that I can assure you.

First, they strap you to a bed. Then, they poke your arm with a needle so they can inject a sort of chemical in to let them see your brain more clearly. Finally, they put you in the machine and you spend like the eternity there feeling heat all over your body because of the medication they pump into your body, wishing for everything to end soon. I didn't like any of it. Pain isn't really my strong suit.

But survive it I did and after numerous tests, the doctor gave me a clean bill of health. Now what's left is the surgery o extract that lump out and give it a chemical test to see what it really is. A less than 30 minute surgery in which I'll be sedated the whole body for the first time. To be honest, I'm kinda scared of the whole sedation plus surgery thing. Questions like, "What if I'm too handsome to be sedated and I would have to undergo the surgery awake" keeps playing in my paranoid mind (must have been inherited thanks to my mum).

Still, I have read few accounts of surgeries like this and they all tell the story of having a wonderful sleep to wake up finding everything has gone well so I am going to repeat those assurances when I get whisked in to the operation room a few days later. And it would also finally give the case of "Lukey's Lump" a close after three years of nagging.

Besides, the doctor also told me a good news. According to him, there were too many psychiatrists in Ipoh but no psychologist. Maybe I could consider pursuing Masters and perhaps come back to Ipoh and open a clinic as a retirement plan when I'm bored of the exciting life outside. Maybe. 

The garden of Eden. A place that is very well known among Christians, Catholics, Jews and Muslims alike. It's the place where God first created humans and it's also the place where humans first sinned which ultimately led to the sorry state we're in now, the state where if we do not choose to repent for the sins that our ancestors did, we will be forever doomed to an eternity of suffering. The place where it all started, at least from the Judaistic religion's point of view.

Having attended church for more than 20 years already, the story of Eden garden is no stranger to me. It tells the story of how Adam and Eve disobeyed God's command to not eat the tree of knowledge and as a consequence, came to realize that they were not clothed and ultimately had to be banished from the garden and away from God, away from the happy life that they once used to know.

I never gave a lot of thought to the story before, even though I must have heard it for a few thousand times already. To me, the moral of the story is like every other story you can find in the Bible, or at least in the Old Testament: Never disobey the instructions from God or else you would not like the punishment that would follow. Simple as that. That was before I went to university.

I heard the story again today during my church's sermon. Having gone through numerous social sciences writings by the likes of Karl Marx during my years in university, the story seemed to have taken a completely different meaning this time.

I don't know if you noticed or not, but from my perspective the whole story of the Garden of Eden is centered around one tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Except for that tree, Adam and Eve are allowed to eat any fruits from any trees in the garden. I don't know what other trees they have in the garden, maybe they have fancy names too like the Tree of Love or the Tree of Patience, but no matter what tree it is, Adam and Eve are allowed to eat its fruit. Only one tree is forbidden, and that tree is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

As the name suggests, the fruit of the tree grants whoever who eats it the ability to distinguish between good and evil, what can and cannot and as we all know very well, after eating the fruit of the tree, Adam and Eve immediately realized that they were not wearing any clothes, their eyes were opened and in a way, you could say that they came to 'know'. Which is to say that prior to eating the fruit, Adam and Eve were at best ignorant. They didn't know what was good and what was bad and because they didn't know, they did not question. Like the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. The less you know, the better.

While some of us might have no problem with that, I can't help but feel that there's something wrong with the message. Is the bible telling us indirectly through the story of Eden that knowledge is harmful? And if we want to live a happy life, we should not challenge what we are told? I don't know about you but after thinking about it, the words of Karl Marx of how religion is used as a tool of oppression came to my mind. 

After all, we all know that the key to keeping an entire population under your rule is to keep them stupid. That is how countries like North Korea and even Malaysia does it. By keeping the population ignorant, by not encouraging the population to think and by not giving them knowledge, the population would not question the authorities. They would not know of the concepts such as democracy nor human rights and would most likely in most cases to still support their government.

I can't help but feel troubled after giving that sermon a thought. Is this what God want? To keep us ignorant so we would not know about the dangers of the world? And what if some radical church leaders decide to use this story to manipulate the church. To justify his wrongdoings and discouraging people from questioning him by reminding them how Adam and Eve suffered from their actions because they disobeyed? Isn't it too convenient to put that story there to let people with ill intention manipulate it?

If I were an atheist, I would have stopped here already and draw my conclusions saying that your God is one cruel God because he discourages his children from gaining knowledge, believing that knowledge is harmful and that with knowledge, which is good in the first place, they would learn of the truth and rebel against him. History would prove that right time and time again. How the Protestants rise up against the the Church with their new found knowledge, thanks to the printing machines and how with knowledge, we were able to usher in a new era of scientific discovery that disproves of the old teachings of the church, for example the case of Darwin and evolution and Galileo and how the earth orbited around the sun.

I would go on to attack the story of the Garden of Eden, saying that it is nothing but a story disguised to keep people from challenging he legitimacy of the church and how it is evil in helping those with evil intentions to oppress the people, to keep them dumb.

But I'm not an atheist. Nor I want to be one. So I decided to go one step further.

Reading on, I discovered that another reason why God chose to banish Adam and Eve from Eden was because he was afraid that after the Tree of Knowledge, they would then proceed to eat the fruits of the Tree of Life, which would grant them immortality and godlike wisdom. Because they knew what was right and what was wrong already, because they have the knowledge already, the next logical or reasonable choice was to go one step higher and to challenge God himself by eating the fruit of Life.

Now you could ask what could go wrong with eating the fruit of Life. After all, if eating the fruit of Knowledge would grant you knowledge, what bad things could happen from eating the fruit of Life?

While that question do have some merit, the closest analogy that I can think of is the relationship between a parent and a child. Growing up, we all had our fair share of parents asking us not to do this, not to do that and a whole loads of other rules. When we're young, we thought that those rules are only there to control us and that we know better than our parents, so we chose to flaunt each and every rule set by our parents, only to find out that a few years later, what our parents said were actually right and we were wrong all along. 

The best example I could think of is boy-girl-relationship. Growing up, my parents always told me that I should focus on my studies first instead of focusing on finding a girlfriend and relationships from high school don't usually last. I never believed them, thinking that if I want it, the relationship will definitely last and that my parents were underestimating my relationship powers. Now that I've gone through that stage, I wished that I have listened to them years ago and focused instead on my studies (none of my high school flings lasted) and noticeably I have begun giving the same advice to my younger brother. Turns out my parents were right all along.

The same could be said for the Eden story I guess. Because God is on an entirely different level than us, because he's more like a parent rather than a peer, he knows what is good and what is bad for us. He knows the consequence should we decide to disobey him, a consequence that we could not comprehend because we're still like a child, and instead of trying to explain to us, he's asking us not to do it because even if he did, we would not understand, just like how a child would not understand the logic of his parents. The language, rationale and logic is on a totally different level.

So in the end, I don't think the story of the Garden of Eden is an entirely bad one. Like all stories in the bible, it is open to all sorts of interpretation. And to truly understand it, we need to understand the context of the story. Besides, if someone choose to use the story of Eden to discourage people from questioning his actions, we could easily refute it because he/she is a human whereas in the story, the one setting the rule is God, who is on a different level than us, not any pastor/priest who is also a human just like us.

Going by this logic, I think you could say that the score now is Bible-1 : Atheist-0. At least for me, internally. To be honest, I always engage in self-debates. Somehow I find it fun. Besides, if I'm not mistaken, Paul said something before going in a style like, "the unquestioned faith is not worth living", so I guess it's okay for me to do stuff like this once in a while. And it seems like I still have a long way before I fully become an atheist, which is a good news, I think.

It's a common knowledge among Malaysians that life in Ipoh is quite slow paced as compared to bigger cities like Kuala Lumpur and Penang. I blame the internet speed.

It's been more than a week since I last came back to my hometown and to be honest, life here has been far from productive. You don't really have a choice though, because when your email inbox takes more than one minute to load, it kinda kills your motivation to do stuff. I can't apply for internships, look for jobs and even blog without spewing vulgarities every five seconds, which totally horrified my mum and that's part of the reason I gave up on trying.

In a world where speed is everything, having a WiFi connection that stops working when there's more than two computers accessing it is not very advantageous to you. But I can't complain though, because that's the way things are in Ipoh, where everything moves slowly, even the internet speed. I just hope my life isn't turned upside down when I go back to Singapore. I feel so handicapped right now.

Growing up, I had always wanted a lot of friends. Somehow, I came to equate the number number of friendships that one has with one's self-worth, thinking that if a person has little friends, something must be at fault with the person's personality. I yearned to be popular, to be well known, and I'm pretty sure many of us do too. Some strive to be as friendly as possible to as many people as possible, thinking that the more friend they have, the better. The assumption goes that if you have loads of friend, you would not be lonely and would always have company.

I used to envy those who are popular. People who are well known by others, who can chat with whoever they meet and who have a bulging friend list in Facebook. I often think that they have a better life than me, because they often have loads of friends to depend on and their schedule is often filled with outings with friends.

But is this always the case?

While having a supper with my old school mates today, coupled with some discussion I had during my Penang trip, I realized that perhaps it's not the number of friends you have that matters but rather it's the depth of your friendships that are important. You see, all of us have a limited  24 hours per day. No one has more, no one has less. If we choose to invest our time in getting to know as many people as possible, we wouldn't have time to get to know our friends deep enough to make that friendship count. The more friends you have, the less time you have for each of them. And when it comes to quality of a friendship, it always fall back on the amount of time you spent with a particular person. No matter how likeable you are, when you always only say Hi and Bye to your friend, that friendship will definitely be a superficial one.

The strength of your bond often depends on the amount of commitment you put in and often, when you have to many friendships to maintain, you have trouble committing to one.

Which is what I came to realize this vacation. I found out that even when you are popular and very well known, most of your friendships would be superficial. And often when it comes to group outings, sharing of secrets and holidays, only close friends are invited. What matters is the depth of friendships you have. Though you may not have many friends, you could always depend on the few friends you have to do anything, even burying a body.

Take my form 6 friends for example. Even after so many years apart, we could still sit together like the old days and chat as if we're still together in school. Nothing's changed.

So I guess I have to stop trying hard to get to know everyone and just be happy for the few friends I have. Because for me, it's the quality of friendship that matters, not the quantity.

Just like us waiting for the bus with Charlie Brown and co., I know some of you guys have been waiting for my next blog post for days already. There was even a line of pretty girls protesting outside my house today with banners that read "We want Lukey!" and "The word handsome is nothing without Lukey's blog". Not wanting to prolong the problem, here I am updating my blog again.

I have been eating a lot recently. Maybe because after months of deprivation without good food in Singapore, I am finally back in Ipoh, the land of cheap and good food. Also I've been tagging along with my university friends whom a lot of them are visiting Ipoh and Penang for the first time to hunt out food and enjoy the holidays.


It's great though, hanging out with friends, having heart-to-heart talk, enjoying ourselves without the slightest worry for tomorrow. We drank, ate, sang and even shot each other (in laser tag). An awesome break from the six months of studying and stress.

I can't wait til the next round of trip.

My laptop is reaching three years old this year. In the world of computer, my laptop can be considered an old geezer already, which has lived through two world wars and have 10 kids and 55 grandchildren. In other words, it's old. So old that when I play games under a sunny weather with a surrounding temperature of more than 30 degrees Celsius, it overheats and shut down.

Kinda sad though, considering that I'm such an avid gamer and my laptop chooses to shut down at the most important of time, for example when I'm about to get rampage in DotA. Okay, that can never happen, but still, having your computer shut down on you when your adrenaline is running on its peak is a major turnoff.

I would buy myself a new computer, but sadly my bank account wouldn't permit. Oh well, I guess I have no choice but to live with what I have now and improvise along the way, for example spamming my school files and laptop cooler and finding cool air whenever I can.

Not that it's bad though, because it's finally holiday! And like any traditional holiday spent away from home, holiday is the period for non-stop gaming!

I'm predicting that by the time the holiday ends, my long sightedness power would go beyond the thousand. And judging by the glasses I would wear that time, you could call me "Lukey the round eyed fella" next time.

I read with amusement today about a photo that was shared widely among my friends in Facebook. It's claimed to be from the Star newspaper, one of Malaysia's mainstream newspaper, depicting what is supposedly to be the Sultan Azlan Shah Airport's new female toilets in Ipoh and their improved standards and cleanliness. 

However, there seem to be one problem with the photo, instead of the ladies, you have a bunch of seemingly male students depicted in the photo. See for yourself:

Anyone who studied in St Michael's Institution, Ipoh, before would have easily recognized the photo at first glance. After all, the toilet in the photo is none other that our very own "world class toilet", as how one principal used to put it and our school's signature green tie is also partly visible in the toilet. Clearly we have a case of mistaken toilet identity here.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the reporter's seemingly careless mistake of not double checking his/her work though, because it is very obvious that the mistake could have only be committed by someone who absentmindedly grabbed a photo from the folder "Clean Toilets" and included it in the article without double checking. I mean, how can such a big thing escape your eye? One or two typos could be forgiven, but for such a big photo to escape not only the journalist's but also the editor's attention only points at the professionalism and the standards of our mainstream newspaper today. After all, if you see guys standing in a female toilet, wouldn't you feel strange and would at least cross check the origin of the photo?

A part of me weeps for the state our country is getting into today, looking at the people they hire for the mainstream media, not only at the Star, but also newspapers like Berita Harian and the Strait Times and also Astro. The recent censorship of BBC's coverage and heavily biased account of Bersih 3.0 only points to how low our Malaysian media standards have dropped. It's not journalism, it's more like a government propaganda outlet. And now we have reporters who can't even be bothered to check their work, along with editors who perhaps sleep on their job.

I could also lament about how talented people, people who can do much better than the above reporter, are exiting the country in droves because the current government does not want them but I think I'm gonna stop. It's just sad, you know, to see how we are slowly turning into some laughing stock of the world.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, perhaps it's just an honest mistake by the people at the Star. But what I know is people are currently laughing and ridiculing the newspaper all over Facebook and it just serves to reinforce the idea our newspapers have only one use which it is good for, and that is as a nasi lemak wrapper. Perhaps it's time to "Bersihkan" our media also.

I had an awesome Labor Day today, thanks to Golden Village Cinemas and also omy.sg. Not that I'm a laborer, of course, though I must comment that students nowadays could fall under that category given the amount of work that we're expected to do.

The reason why I had a fun day today was because I had the chance to visit the newly refurbished GV cinemas at Jurong Point to watch one of the highest anticipated movie of all time with the longest running buildup, The Avengers. That's two good things happening in one day. Watching an awesome movie and watching it in a newly renovated cinema.

GV Jurong Point, after 3 months of renovation!

The post-renovation + Labor Day effect: The amount of movie goers is too damn high!

Equipped with the all the latest features like the wall-to-wall Spectro screens, the 7.1 Dolby premium grade EAW sound system, wider legroom and stadium style seating, GV Juroing Point aims to provide you with the best possible movie experience ever. The whole renovation caused more than $4.5 million after all, mind you.

And the newly renovated cinema is that awesome until Untie Lucy, Singapore's famous local celebrity, decided to pay it a visit herself (or himself?).

Auntie Lucy taking photo with a young fan

Auntie Lucy being Auntie Lucy in the cinema

Alright, enough bout the cinema now. On to the movie review (some spoilers included, so you might want to stop reading if you hate spoilers. But then again, what's there to spoil anyway? We all know from the trailers that Loki comes, intends to enslave Earth and after numerous battles, the Avengers defeats him. Simple right?).




For a movie that receives an incredible amount of hype and publicity prior to its release, I would say that the Avengers movie did indeed live up to expectations. It could be better, but for an epic movie like this, it's already quite good.

One of the things that I liked most about this movie is its character development. Like many fans out there, I had gone to the movie expecting heroes like Hulk and Thor getting all the screen time, due to their powers while people like Hawkeye or Black Widow would basically have nothing much to do. After all, when you're facing an army of otherworldly invaders, how could archery or two pistols help you? Besides, when you have Robert Downey Jr on screen, his charisma would easily overpower most of the actors. So I sort of expected unequal screen time among the characters to be a major flaw in this movie. Turns out I was wrong.

I think the production crew made it a very good point not to let one or two heroes dominate throughout the entire movie before they started shooting and they did a beautiful job with it. From the start to the end of the movie, each character was given an equal amount of emphasis and development. Their personalities, struggles  and background were highlighted evenly in the movie and as you watch it you can feel for each of them.

Even in the final battle scene, where you would expect Hawkeye, Black Widow and Captain America to be pretty useless against the big ass monsters, turns out that they're not. Each character has their unique role to play during the conflict and there was no incident of like Hulk smashing through everything during the entire sequence while you wonder where Hawkeye had went.

Yep, even Hawkeye looked cool during the fight

Which is what I liked about the movie a lot because I feel that the crew really had put in a lot of effort to make all members of the Avengers shine without sacrificing any of their personality or back story and by the end of the movie, you find yourself being attached to not just one or two characters but to the team as a whole. For that, I admire the production crew. And also the actors. For managing to bring out the best of their characters without any compromises. Simply marvelous.

The battle scenes were orgasmic too. If you ever wondered how would real life look if superheroes decide to battle it out, this is the movie for you. The action, the explosions, the excitement would just make you go wow. The scenes of Hulk fighting Thor, where Thor teams up with Captain America and other similar scenes is just simply superb. Even if the whole movie sucked (which it did not), the action scenes alone are worth dying for.

Spoiler: That shield can withstand Thor's frigging hammer!

 Storyline wise, the movie also manages to tie every loose end up. Why must the aliens invade America when there's so many other places in the world they can go to? Answered (Hint: Stark). What are the roles played by nations across the world? Answered too. What are the motives of Loki wanting to specifically target Earth when there's other worlds to invade? Also answered. The story's pretty conclusive too, if you decide to took at it. Not only that, the movie manages to deliver sufficient comic relief at the right moment rather than giving you a full 2 hour plus of pure action and fighting. There were jokes, struggles, action, suspense and even WTF moment that keeps you wanting more. It's a great movie alright.

My only complain about the movie is the lack of realism. If you have watched the movie and paid close attention to the details, you would notice that during the final scene in New York when the aliens invaded and start shooting lasers and blowing of everything in their sight, you would expect to see at least some civilian casualties, for example a poor guy getting shot or maybe one of two dead persons lying on the road.

But for the whole final fight scene, there was literally no civilian death count. ZERO. There's a lot of people running from the monsters, standing in the buildings when they shot at it, standing amidst the explosions and lasers but none got killed. It seems like as if everyone escaped and the mayor proudly announces tomorrow that despite the huge amount of material loses, no one got killed! How awesome is that.

You would have expect that when aliens come invading, they would at least bother to target the people they're supposed to conquer, instead of inanimate objects like cars, windows and lamp posts. It feels as if they director was going for a Disney like movie if you ask me, where no one is supposed to die (okay to be honest there were deaths in the movie, just not the part where there is supposedly a war going on).

Devastation like this and no civilian deaths

But all in all, it's a great movie that did not disappoint. The action scenes were heart stopping, the comedic reliefs were funny, the personal struggles and conflict were real and don't seem fake and by the time the movie ends, you'll be thinking "So fast?". And like every other Avengers movie, there's a post credit scene, which most likely will hint at a second movie with a new villain. And then it's orgasmic action heart-pounding hilarious superhero movie again.

A 8/10, if you ask me.