This month I am kind of busy doing RP duties while most of the battalion are involved in IMF at the airport. The remaining ones are stationed in our base camp doing guard duties which I am part of it. Alternate day and night shifts of 12 hours guard duty and 24 hour rest is rather tiring. Especially sometimes when doing night shifts till the wee hours in the morning when there is the tendency to fall asleep but is not allowed. If caught sleeping by anybody especially the duty officer , it means signing 7 extras. To hell with what security is everybody's responsibility. My favourite is when I am doing duty clerk which means I can slack in the ops room watching tv , surfing net and sleep peacefully without anybody waking me up to change shifts. Luckily my team consists of my closer army mates so is not that bad. After getting a taste of what RP is like , honestly I don't know if I am glad to exchange the lack of sleep and lesser freedom of doing my own stuffs for an augment of $100 on top of my pathetic monthly allowance. Thankfully , all these is going to end since IMF is over and normal unit life resumes.

Though the 24 hours off is seemingly not enough , I still managed to catch some movies this month together with my fellow guard duty mates. We watched Little Man , The Banquet and Miami Vice. Here are my personal reviews :

Little Man - The show is funny enough. At least it managed to get me cracking up , though is based on cheap risque jokes. Folks with a no-nonsense persona should skip this. Rating : 6/10

The Banquet - I like this movie. Based loosely on Shakespeare's Hamlet , it is set on the chaotic scene of an ancient kingdom where all hell broke loose on a supposedly banquet held at night. I always have a proclivity to the intriguing history of China and the beauty of chinese word characters. Hence , the dialogues between the actors and actresses and beautiful natural sceneries are rather palatable to me. Even though the ending is not the usual denouement (nowadays chinese movies consist of such epitome anyway) , still I think it should be lauded for its magnificent showcase of the ancient grandeur of the feudal era. Rating : 7/10

Miami Vice - Quite a lengthy movie and I am afraid that I would have to give an excoriating review on it. It's so boring that not only me but my friends all zonked out throughout the movie. We didn't understand what the story is talking about and it seems that more priority is given to the bedroom scenes where we can see Colin Farrell and Gong Li groping and fondling each other. Anyway these scenes doesn't help to enthrall us. Maybe because we just finished a day's guard duty shift and we watched this movie at 3:05a.m. in the morning but this reason is subsidiary. The show itself is incommodious. I should have known better to go home and sleep rather than sleep in the cinema and waste $9.50. Rating : 3/ 10