15Malaysia: Meter

This might just be the most awaited short film from 15Malaysia. This is also the film that brought down 15Malaysia’s website, well technically its the database server, and its only for awhile. The 15Malaysia website is now up and back to normal.

Meter directed by Benji Lim and Bahir Yeusuff is currently my favorite of all the 15Malaysia films. It’s a comedy that’s not too overly slapstick. It stars the controversial head of UMNO Youth, Khairy Jamaluddin as a taxi driver being interviewed.

Khairy Jamaluddin is not the only star power here, there are cameos from famous familiar faces, Jason Lo, Amber Chia, Baki Zainal and Namawee. All of them take turns riding the taxi. Watch the embedded video.

First of all I’ve to say that Khairy Jamaluddin plays a convincing taxi driver. He is the stereotypical Mr. know-it-all taxi driver. He is also like most Malaysian, who only knows how to complain but don’t really do anything about it.

The film covers a few interesting topics. First is about the local football scene, funny how Khairy Jamaluddin condemn the Football Association Malaysia (FAM) saying that politician shouldn’t get involve and yet he is in the FAM executive committee. He then argued with Jason Lo, the first passenger, for being a Chelsea supporter and for not having any national pride, and yet on his own handphone you hear the ringtone plays, “Glory Glory Man United.”

The whole film is full with ironic moments like that. He was talking about the importance of english language, and yet makes a fuss about Malay not speaking Malay. Then he talks about politician jumping parties, and at that moment his passenger jumps to another taxi with Amber Chia behind the wheel.

I do love the part at the end with Khairy Jamaluddin and Namawee. As the notorious Namawee, a Chinese, pays and gets down from the cab, he points to a small souvenir keris hanging on the rearview mirror. A keris has become a well known symbol of Malay supremacy made popular by UMNO.

“That’s nice” said Namawee referring to the keris and Khairy the taxi driver give the keris to him. He even pull out some more keris souvenirs to give to other Namawee’s friends.

“There’s nothing to it,.. there is more” said Khairy while hanging yet another keris on his rearview mirror. However, this small souvenir keris is different from your normal keris, it has the word ‘Malaysia’ engraved on it.

Read into it as how you want it, all I know is, that the scene puts a smile on my face each time I saw it.

We don’t see many politician that can laugh at themselves. I think that the director did a good job at humanizing politician. Check out the making of Meter.

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