Tuesday, February 26, 2008

About leap years

There's been an upmeow (i.e. small uproar) about the film The Leap Years, based on a book written by local author Catherine Lim. Simply because of the song that you hear when you watch the trailer.



This is a clip of low-quality, but you still can hear the music.

Well it may sound familiar to you like how it sounded familiar to me the many times I saw this trailer on TVMobile.

Did a search (the Internet is power) and found that the soundtrack is actually 'Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence' composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto.



The music was actually used for a 1983 movie of the same name.



Based on a novel of the same name by Sir Laurens van der Post.

I searched the NLB and LINC catalogue but I couldn't find that book. Only the movie. I feel like reading the book, 'cos it is better than to watch the movie and stomach the seppuku scenes. *shivers*

Anyway. The point is, apparently the movie did not credit the soundtrack to Sakamoto, that explains the upmeow.

So that's somehow stealing other's intellectual property. It's more of an uproar to me actually. But many still seem to be oblivious to this. This is Raintree Pictures we're talking about! The music was credited to this Ricky Ho. Who's now a target of criticisms. I wonder who's at fault, really.

I'm still tempted to either read the book or catch the show though, some people are boycotting the movie.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The original story is called "A Leap of Love: A Novella" :)

Crystal Abidin said...

dearest erina, your blog skin is so pretty, haha. i like eggs. but i like paddlepop better. merry christmas mr. lawrence and the leap years trailer theme are only exactly the same and the ending piano octave trill and chord progression! technically, changing a single note in any song at all makes it an entirely different song altogether. status of plagarism from there on has to be debated over in court. seriously, some american ferederation rule. sucks, but oh well, welcome to life.

love,
pingu.