The Joshua Tapes

In the spirit of supporting indie films when I can, I decided to BUY a ticket to The Joshua Tapes. A movie so indie it's not on IMDb (seriously). It's also so indie that there was probably only 20 people (tops) watching in the whole screening room.

Starring Baki Zainal, Phoon Chi Ho, Matthew Ho Tien Li, Grace Ng, and Alfred Loh; the only people you see for most of the movie are the first three dudes while the rest are via flashback video footage.

So you have the three main dudes that are, coincidentally enough, a 1Malaysian sorta cast: one Chinese, one Malay and one Indian (for the purposes of this movie anyway) going on a East Coast road trip by the back roads instead of the taxpayer-funded highways. You know, a proper roadtrip.

As you watch Ryan (Chi Ho), Reza (Baki) and Ajeet (Matthew) drive towards the East Coast (of Malaysia, natch), it's interstitched with shaky videocam footage of a going-away party for Joshua (Alfred Loh, the title character) hosted by Sam (Grace Ng), who's going to the States for school, who proposed the said roadtrip the guys are now on. The next question you might ask yourself (if you haven't already): where is Joshua on this roadtrip, and what happened to him?

As anyone who has ever been on a roadtrip with friends or reality show fans would know, things happen when you are in each other's company 24/7: Issues emerge, tempers flare, some fighting... These guys are not without their personal demons, which you will see in the movie.

The only lighthearted scene (bit?) was when they had to spend the night at a creepy motel in a small town, and Reza answered the proprietor's question in Mandarin ("three people, one night") and not the Chinese or the Chindian dude, haha. And I totally forgot that Baki Zainal's a polyglot.

In the end, some of the questions were answered and certain things started to make more sense than it did in the beginning. But like a lot of indie movies, there are also a lot of unanswered questions and holes in the movie that we don't get to watch.

If you're into roadtrip movies, you should catch this one. If you're Malaysian, you should watch this. If you saw the director's previous film S'kali (which I didn't), you might want to watch this for the cameos that you might recognise that I didn't.

PS. For some reason the official URL is not working, so I'm just gonna link the Facebook page instead.