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Just a day after my brush with Singaporean "entertainment", I caught the movie Ratatouille. It was extremely good, as I expected it to be, because Pixar hasn't failed anyone yet. My enjoyment of the show starkly contrasted with my boredom over the previous night's performance, and painfully highlighted to me the vast gulf between local and overseas standards of entertainment.

The most obvious difference, of course, was that Ratatouille was funny and our local artiste was not. How exactly does one make people laugh? It isn't an easy business, that is for sure, but I certainly know that rehashing years-old jokes about sex and bringing out the same old tired political cliches is not the way. Original material is very, very important - and Pixar is truly the master in that regard. The short film preceding the actual movie was a superb exercise in creativity. I won't spoil it; let us just say that it was a very fresh take on alien abduction.

Now, the pertinent question would then be: why can't local entertainment produce something half as good? Why does local entertainment showcase a comprehensive lack of originality? Why does every single Channel 8 drama serial involve a family estrangement of some sort, complicated by a seemingly insoluble love triangle, lots of shouting and crying and a final reconciliation over steaming rice bowls? (And Channel 8, sadly, is top of the local pile. Words have not yet been invented to describe how absolutely abysmal local English serials are.) Why is local comedy severely limited to the arena of sight gags and poor slapstick? Where is the creativity? Why do other countries have it, but we simply do not?

Perhaps it is the government's determination to utilise our media as a mouthpiece. Shackled by regulations and unwritten rules, all MediaCorp can produce are family dramas that stay within the public interest by promoting Our (wholly invented and fictitious) Shared Values. In that sense, the purpose of our local media is not entertainment but social engineering. Yet it is an unsatisfactory explanation - because Pixar films are also family-friendly. They all have happy endings and promote very wholesome values. At the same time they manage to be funny and wonderfully watchable; local drama and cinema does not even begin to approach that kind of quality. Why?

Can we then shift the blame on that old punching bag: the education system? The classic argument comes to the fore: that our education system has created a nation of the exam-smart, fully capable of doing well in any book-based test but dismally unable to offer solutions to unorthodox real-life problems. Certainly, I believe that this is a factor, but I would point out that book-based eduation systems are not uncommon. Britain, home of Blackadder, Monty Python and a good dozen other renowned comedy series, has a system that is similar and in some ways worse. The British don't seem to be hampered: why are we?

I am then very tempted to fling in an impetuous response: that Singaporeans simply would not know funny if it fell out of the sky and bashed them squarely on the head. This is evidenced by the fact that Phua Chu Kang managed to run for six years on, I quote from above, "sight gags and poor slapstick". If so many Singaporeans found that execrable sitcom funny, then it is no wonder local entertainment can't produce hilarity. But this could be over-simplifying things a tad. It does make sense to me as a knee-jerk response, though.

But that was just comedy I was speaking of. Coincidentally, Life! today came up with a feature on how local movies usually do not do well at the box office. I cannot say I was really quite surprised, to put it lightly. Local films are seldom if ever good. The last one I watched was "The Maid" and it felt like an Incredible Tales Episode stretched out to one-and-a-half hours with slightly snazzier special effects. The feature drove home the dilemma ever harder: what exactly is it that we lack, such that local productions are often so poor?

Hollywood, of course, comes in for plenty of criticism, but their movies are still of a far higher standard - and I have yet to meet anyone who does not agree with this. What could be the reasons?

Personally, I feel that Hollywood is cliched - but elements, sometimes subtle ones, still make the films produced there watchable. Little things like dialogue; dialogue in Singapore films and drama serials is often awful. It does not help that most of our local talent (term is used loosely here) cannot speak proper English. Instead of sending their actors for elocution classes, our local producers often try to play this up, in fact, to make it a central theme of the movie. Ok, we get it, heartlanders etc, now please do something different?

Yet to me the central dilemma remains. Why do local movies rehash the same themes over and over and over. If it isn't the education system, it is the government's/civil service's quirks. If not that, it is the army. Failing which, it is a cheap horror tale that tries its best to exploit Singapore's admittedly intriguing mix of tradition, mystery and modernity. Where are the fresh themes and ideas? Are we forever doomed to cheap slapstick, stilted dialogue and stale political wisecracks about GST and "the old man"?

If you have any views on this subject, I really want to hear from you.