KOREAN BUG

Zero Degrees of Separation: My 2011 At The Movies

2012-01-01T00:31:00.001-08:00

I am still, it turns out, terribly susceptible to the delirium of festival fever, and in 2011, the temperature cranked past even my own thresholds, with the demented overlap in the last quarter making matters even more grueling. At the end of that week and a half, I was down with a particularly vicious strain of influenza.

Cinemanila was still the sovereign colossus, as domestic festivals go, Cinema One Originals the squirrely daredevil, Cinemalaya the tasteful prude, although they seem to have grown an extra set of balls to let films like Amok slip through. All three had a robust year. And, despite the persistent and exasperating lament that local cinema is on a downward spiral, and despite bully tactics from the big studios, who got their ass handed back to them at one point, and by a delightful indie zombie film at that, things have settled into a groove of comfortable productivity. The year was copious with moments, still not enough perhaps, as it never always is. But at least now there's an envelope to push.

I flew to HKIFF just as the year begun and co-programmed the 4th .MOV a little after half of it had come to pass. And these were the twin piths of my festival year, the latter slightly moreso. I also curated an exhibit for it, designed posters, translated parts of the poetry anthology we launched, had a hand in marketing, got wrung through the logistical brouhaha, was as privvy, in as hands-on a manner as possible for someone a few jurisdictions away from the main team, to the exhaustion, and exhilaration, of running even a festival as small as ours, not to mention the spate of Club.MOV screenings leading up to it, abolished by default with the sudden, saddening foreclosure of Mogwai Cinematheque. After this, I vowed to never again grumble over another festival's snafus and glitches. But I'd do it all over again in a snap. And three years from now, if the world doesn't end as scheduled, I will be.

Movie-going, the communal experience of going out to a screening and watching a film with people, remained my advocacy. And I try, as much as I can, to disqualify torrents and DVDs from my list, charitably allotting one slot for it, with this year going to a film I almost saw in a theater. I did cheat a little with a couple of films I saw publicly, albeit in another country, but the rest of the list are films shown in Manila, never mind the nature of its run, never mind if it even had a run. As long as it wasn't at home on my TV, or worse, on my laptop. I did see a lot of films that way, and I imagine a few could've possibly made the cut. But with or without these rules, I suspect the list won't be too far off from this one.

I did miss Lav's Century of Birthing. I missed Adolf's Isda (Fable of the Fish), too. I missed Teng Mangansakan's Cartas De La Soledad. I missed Victor Villanueva's My Paranormal Romance. I missed Regiben Romana's Sakay Sa Hangin (Windblown). I missed Jewel Maranan's Tundong Magiliw. These are some of my sins of omission, if you will, prey to my usual deficiencies of stamina and time and resources and singled out because they're filmmakers I like. I did get to see nearly all the locally shown foreign product, arthouse staples and commercial tentpoles both, which ran the usual gamut of odious to tepid to fits of spunk here and there that tended to dissipate the further away you got from the works, with only Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, Wim Wenders' Pina, Justin Lin's Fast Five, Gore Verbinski's Rango and Tarsem's Immortals having sufficient traction and exuberance to deserve a shout-out, not to mention Todd Haynes' foray into longform TV, Mildred Pierce. I liked them all, sure. I liked a tremendous amount of films this year, mostly local. But for my 2011 list, anything less than love I had little room for.

1. 20 Cigarettes (James Benning, USA, HKIFF): James Benning asks 20 of his friends to smoke in their respective environments and films what happens to them in the time it takes to finish a stick. His first work that has to do with people rather than landscapes or architecture, has a strand of voyeurism that can't be helped but is also partially the point. As knotty to parse and even knottier to push, this, like all his films, behaves like an installation but it's the conditions of a theater that are conducive to what it ultimately asks of us: the acute observation of duration in stillness.

2. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, Cinemanila): As disingenuous, and as lazy, as it is to invoke the word "magical" for something shot through with secrets and lies and regrets and deaths and the banality of the everyday, regardless of how wryly funny it can sometimes get, no other word feels more apt, even if it's only to describe what random lightning turns the otherwise barren Turkish countryside into. The search for a dead body becomes, for a posse of crusty and haggard civil servants, a night, and eventually a day, of going round in circles, of straying off paths, of detours, the oddest and loveliest being a small village they repair to where the lights go out and an angel appears to serve them coffee.

3. Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy, HKIFF): Later on, when the nature of its metaphysics becomes apparent, you tend to marvel at the purity with which it was poeticized, not least with that single take everybody who's seen it is frothing in the mouth about, and rightly so, and with what is hands down the finest goat acting in the history of cinema. The four times of the title refers to the four lives that supposedly live within us and that we go through during rebirth: man, animal, vegetable, mineral. It is also, incidentally, the cast list.

4. Breather (Pahinga) (Khavn De La Cruz, Philippines, .MOV) : The cancer diary it started out as became something more after Khavn's father passed away during the editing, something closer to exorcism, to magical thinking, but not to eulogy, as it's loss is not so much given over to the part of nostalgia that aches but more to the part that exhilarates. A love letter, really, as much to the filmmaker confronting his own mortality as to the parent who left a hole when he succumbed to his, but also to that brief and immortal time they both spent in the shadow of their longest goodbye.

5. 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, Japan, Cinemanila): Having long parted ways with Seven Samurai as both my Kurosawa and jidaigeki touchstone, here, then, is my substitute, itself a remake but enthusiastically so. The density of the nihilism with which the enemy here is fleshed out demands such an outsize catharsis in his climactic taking down, that no less than half an hour of glorious comeuppance would seem to suffice. Miike knows this. And gives us 45 feral, bloody minutes of it.

6. Big Boy (Shireen Seno, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): A certain warm and often lovely and also familiar strangeness runs through here, as it's not only a film that's both about memory and like a memory, in the way it looks and feels and sounds and threatens to recede or disperse, but also about how every generation's experience of growing up has connective tissues that make them all kindred.

7. Mga Anino Sa Tanghaling Tapat (Ivy Universe Baldoza, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): Three girls grapple with the thorny changes their bodies undergo, as ghosts and portents pool in the luxuriant and poisonous forest around them. Ivy's polarizing but undervalued rumination on sex and death re-imagines the carnal processes of brutal youth as a creepily erotic , maddeningly obtuse horror movie.

8. Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, USA, Domestic Release): Pitched below the requisite volume of panic and spectacle, of course it's going to go over many heads spoiling for crackle, for racing against time and eleventh hour salvation. But its' grim, procedural sobriety has that low hum of unease and exposure. It starts with a cough in the dark, disembodied and nearby, as if saying here is your doom in small, the littlest of things you can't see, loosed now in a world that connects like a network of veins at the speed of god. If none of this makes you very nervous, you really ought to be.

9. Six Degrees of Separation From Lillia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone, Philippines, Cinema One Originals):
If nothing else, for not being the one trick pony I always felt it was prone to becoming, at least on paper, cynical as I was
a
t first about how deep the cachet of its subject ran and if it could sustain more than a couple of gags. Antoinette calls this a mockumentary but it veers closer to that freak overlap of documentary and fiction, and in exalting
Lillia Cuntapay, the iconic bit player, certainly a phenomenon unique to us, it
subtly lambasts how stuck-up the showbiz industry is and how intolerably embarrassing, and distressing, our thrall to it remains regardless. That, and it's also a hoot.

10. Niño (Loy Arcenas, Philippines, Cinemalaya):
Time's a goon, it's been said, and it is, and sometimes it wins.
Emptied-out desperate things palpitate against
obsolescence and all its useless beauties
, not least being the centrifugal matriarch whose opera star has faded but also the religious finery leeched of their divinities but for the wild hope she hangs on it.

Buenas Noches España (Raya Martin, Philippines-Spain, Spanish Film Festival): Raya's experimental opiate is a bit of a quandary for me, hence its position, as I do like the form, but I like the idea of the form even more, and absolutely love the idea of the form in the context of where his ouevre stands, on the cusp of either repeating himself into perpetuity or going so far out on a limb it's likely to wind a lot of people up, which it did, which it should. Painters and musicians get to color outside the lines the way he does here, sometimes to fanfare, sometimes to indifference, but filmmakers are routinely frowned upon, often by other filmmakers, for merely being curious as to what's on the peripheries of the three-act narrative convention we box the medium in, and are all but lynched when they act on that curiosity. This is also where our national cinema stands at the moment, trying to figure out what it is, and slowly fitting itself into safe absolutes in the attempt, when what it needs to do is to maybe wind a few people up. Cinema is the youngest art, and Philippine Cinema even younger. Too young, in fact, to get all wussy about going out on limbs.

Shake Rattle And Roll 13

2011-12-31T03:47:00.000-08:00

Shake Rattle & Roll 13
Directed by Richard Somes, Jerrold Tarog and Chris Martinez
Written by Richard Somes and Aloy Adlawan, Maribel Ilag and Jerrold Tarog and Roselle Monteverde-Teo, Jerry Gracio

Part of the fun, and the frustration, in watching a studio tent-pole taken over, in the loosest sense, by someone outside its rank and file of yes men hacks is second-guessing where the auteur ends and the studio head begins. That’s three times the fun, and the frustration, when it comes to what is being roundly exalted as the last of the Shake Rattle And Roll milking cows, 13.

But, restraint having never been a prominent facet of Chris Martinez’ aesthetic, and much less so the literal sturm and drang of his episode, Rain Rain Go Away, it gets tough to tease him from all this grim J-Horror slow burn, or slow damp if you will, tougher when his muse Eugene Domingo reins in all her funny, too. Tough, and not a little disorienting, at least at first. But this may be the most cohesive of all three, and the one with the least signs of interference. It uses for grist the collateral damage of Ondoy, a tragedy that’s possibly freighted with as dreadful a resonance for us as 911 has for Americans, and certainly weighs heavily on the characters. And there’s a meta eeriness to having it come out in the fresh aftermath of a similar catastrophe. You can see where it’s going almost from the get-go, but it’s not so much the reveal here as it is the languid gloom with which we get there.

Richard Somes is really the one with the most vivid auteurist imprint, if only because it’s more immediate and apparent by dint of being largely visual. His Tamawo is anorexic, falters in the telling, and takes its time to finish, but there’s an energy unique to him at work here, a feral, pulpy vigor. Returned to the familiar terrain of his aswang inversion Yanggaw, with some of its supple expressionistic sexiness, as well as that mixture of the brutish and the maudlin that leavens his sense of drama and takes getting used to, you can tell it’s the knotty dynamics of the fractured family that he’d rather tap into, but settles for a siege film in which Maricar Reyes is a young mother whose ramshackle house in the jungle is surrounded by monsters. She also happens to be blind. And it’s a trope that Richard gets to exploit brilliantly once, in a scene that amounts to your bang for the buck in hardcore creepout.

Creepier still, and possibly more terrifying than water ghosts and albino monsters, in real life as it is here, is the ferocious boil riled-up estrogen can come to. This is what Jerrold Tarog buttresses Parola with. It does bear some of the strain from all the shape-shifting the script was likely made to undergo, apparent not least from how the eponymous haunted lighthouse has become incidental to the point of extraneous, buckling here and there from its multiple tiers of subtext lacking enough running time to layer cohesively. But it gets palpably malevolent when it reverts to its high school setting, and Kathryn Bernardo and Louise De Los Reyes get to play out their protracted supernatural catfight, with all that heightened and pent-up spite and malice and venom that leak out when best friends turn archenemies. Voodoo plus hormones, yeah. That’s not only a log line for a tween horror movie, that’s also the quintessence of what it’s like to be a girl.

*Originally published in Lagarista as The Last Horror Show

Big Boy

2011-12-25T03:40:00.000-08:00

Big Boy
Directed and Written by Shireen Seno

Shireen Seno isn’t joking, or being flippant, when she says Big Boy is about the tonic wonders of cod liver oil, as it sort of is. And she herself can vouch for its efficacies, having been made to drink it every day while growing up. She is now the tallest of her brothers and sisters. She is also the youngest. Her father underwent a similar regime and a similar surge of growth and is, in fact, the eponymous character. And if it comes on all gauzy and fugitive, the way memories do, it’s out of how that’s what it ostensibly is. An entire hope chest of them, really, strung together as if like pearls, or family heirlooms if you will, in this case Shireen’s, and more particularly, her father’s.

Memories of his life as a boy living with his parents and siblings in the sticks of postwar Mindoro, where every sun-baked day seemed to vibrate with the potential for benign incursions of the magical to occur, and time and again did. Memories, too, of the blissed-out inertia that occurs between transitions. Of the anxieties in finding your place as your country recuperates from its own brush with chaos and navigates its own displacement. And, more than anything else, of growing comfortable inside your own body even as it grows faster than you thought it would, leaving the rest of you behind as it does. Her father had always found his way into her work before but only here is his presence this specific, this situated. Rather than wander into one of his daughter’s stories, she’s wandered this time into his.

And she’d been, in fact, foraging in there for years. These are a mere handful of the fragments she’d been curating of her family’s oral history. But in nearly every one of them, childhood being eerily consensual, is a flicker of recognition, deepening resonances, brokering empathies. Big Boy does have a wobbly rope of plot if you get queasy from the lack of a graspable shape but it’s from the irrational un-structure that all its cathartic voltage emits. It’s not so much about memories as it is about the way memories behave and the way they look and feel and also the way they sometimes blur into their own autonomous dream soup. And much as the period detail has a severity of precision that often belies its minimalism, it gains from it, ironically enough, not a sense of historical accuracy, but an atemporal disconnect, as if we were watching home movies from some parallel world past, undercutting the homespun intimacies of the Super8 footage, not with a surge of nostalgia, as you might expect from the way it evokes at first blush the lulling voyeurism of Jonas Mekas but rather with a low hum of otherness, at turns spooky and beatific, which evokes not so much Mekas anymore but, well, Shireen’s own similarly haunted short work, all furtive rhythms with the consistency of ghosts.

Originally published at Lagarista as Mysterious Objects At Noon.

Di Ingon Nato (Not Like Us)

2011-11-29T06:24:00.000-08:00

Di Ingon Nato (Not Like Us)
Directed and Written by Ivan Zaldarriaga and Brandon Relucio

Pretty much everything you can say through the mouthpiece of zombies, George Romero has: consumerist satire, dystopian nihilism, anti-science screed, first person shooter stress relief. You have oddments like Robin Campillo's terrific Les Revenants (They Came Back) that pass the trope through a sieve of melancholia, becoming instead a meditation on the dynamics of grief, but nearly everything else is a haggard riff of some law Romero's laid down, no matter how vibrant, how agog, how beloved.

Di Ingon Nato (Not Like Us) is a riff, too, but one that gets escape velocity from transposing its doomy sense of isolation to a rural milieu, and rural here means our far-flung Third World boondocks, where people get around on rickety diesel mopeds and beatup pickups, what passes for a hospital is an undermanned and under-equipped clinic, combat-readiness boils down to jungle knives and single-shot rifles, and no one is as steeped in the lore enough to know that head shots save bullets and buys time. And the zombies here are not the undead of legend, the sort these folks have names for and dispatch with magic, but rather the ones borne of unfathomable contagion and go viral at cheetah speeds. No social realist indie for miles has tapped into, as this has, the backward conditions and fatal ill-preparedness of half the country for any sort of calamity.

But its second half, set in a nameless town, where all this panic and vulnerability is meant to curdle into a delicious hysteria, is a badly-acted gruesomely-imagined crudely-staged shambling lack of anywhere to go. Granted, the version I saw was a work-in-progress, and you could snipe a volatile shape in all that meander and confusion, but many darlings need to be killed, and the editing prudent to the point of unmerciful, if any of this were to cohere, let alone survive its first half hour or so. Set in a nearby forest, where a farmer and his wife and their son eke out what meager life they can from the land, and an interloper darkness creeps in to upset their fragile balance, that half-hour is a gumbo of bucolic desolation shading inexorably into apocalyptic dread. It's an amazing, fearsome mixture. And a zombie riff with legs. Just too bad they had to go to town without it.

Niño

2011-11-25T22:42:00.000-08:00

Niño
Directed by Loy Arcenas
Written by Rody Vera

Shutting yourself off from the world swings both ways, and one man's idyll can be another's cabin fever. These are the defenses built, the lines drawn, when the future gets bleak and the present starts corroding the past, and the question that bears down on the Lopez-Aranda family is how much of their corroded past should they give up and what bleak future will they get for it? There's a lot at stake with the question because the past in question has to do with the massive, crumbling house they live in and whether they can keep doing so, and the past tends to get pushier if it's as verdant as theirs. The gravely ill paterfamilias, in his own advanced stages of molt, used to be a congressman. And his sister, often lost in a cloud of her own making, a rock star among opera singers.

She's the whirlpool around whom everything and everyone revolves and bounces off : her brother who owns the house she now runs as if she did, the reckless son in partial has-been rot even before he becomes an also-ran but who remains her favorite, the grandson in whom she sees the most fervent of hopes not least when he puts on a Sto. Niño cape and crown as if it were a superhero costume and refuses to take it off, the ignored daughter who only wants a little more of her mother's love than she's getting, the niece returned from abroad determined to move on and sell the house that hovers over everything like a ghostly weight. Fides Cuyugan-Asensio is indomitable as the lapsed diva and her temperament becomes the film’s: skittish, fractious, wistful, elegant, and just the tiniest bit cuckoo.

Cut from the same genteel cloth as Ang Lee at the height of his infatuation with no-round-limit cross-generational family wrestling matches, but reined in to frustrate the demands of melodrama, Niño hones in on something more delicate, averse to bluster and way naughtier and funnier, hardly vacating the premises, but never letting the air stultify or thicken into must, finding rather a phantom power in the way the forward motion of youth and the luxuriant torpor of old age stare each other down to the same uneasy truce that is the emotional stalemate of the film's tangle of estrangements, bequeathing an impasse that you can see coming, resolves nothing, but gets unexpectedly magical anyway.

Aswang

2011-11-17T23:19:00.001-08:00

Aswang

Directed by Jerrold Tarog

Written by Aloy Adlawan and Jerrold Tarog

If you go by the way he juiced up last year’s edition of the haggard Shake Rattle & Roll franchise with Punerarya, and also by the pop vibrancy of his independent non-genre work, Jerrold Tarog seems to have enough pedigree for remixing the beloved Peque Gallaga-Lore Reyes chestnut. And Aswang is ostensibly a monster movie, but it’s one that seems more interested in things other than its monsters: in the way revenge can transform you into the object of your violence, for one, in the imperatives of a species determined to arrest its extinction, in a small town living perpetually under threat, and above all, in the dissonances between the urban and the rural, the modern and the ancient, the natural and the supernatural, and the point when the lines between them blur.

It pivots on a teenage boy and his baby sister witnessing the cold-blooded massacre of their household. And having your parents murdered violently before your eyes turns out to be the shared tragedy of its principal characters, and also the tragedy that cracks everything open for a potentially bloodier, more mean-spirited sequel. But it’s a subtext that goes neither viral or nova, simmering rather under the skin of the piece, a trauma that never gets enough room to fester and seethe, nor gets to go anywhere really, as everyone is too busy running for their lives, if not from hired assassins, then inevitably from monsters, who shapeshift into crows, burrow under the ground like moles, sprout nasty fangs, eat live flesh. Aswang is also from Regal, after all. And it wants its monster movie to be interested in its monsters.

It doesn’t take a genius anymore, these days, or much intel for that matter, to second-guess the processes that transpire when a studio makes a film, much more one meant to be a tentpole. And Aswang is beset by the sort of push-pull that occurs when you wring a filmmaker used to being left to his own devices, or a filmmaker who simply has his own devices period, through the knotty caprices of our studio matriarchies, as auteurist sensibility and studio directive constantly arm-wrestle for dominance. And it can be its own bit of fun trying to figure out which is which.

That dream slash love sequence does smack of pure Regal. And the stable newbies as well as the not-so-newbies are perhaps why the affectless, effortless performances that have enlivened every single one of Jerrold’s films before this is alarmingly nowhere to be found and nearly breaks the back of the piece in its absence. The bristling attack by the river does spasm with Jerrold’s skittish vigor. And much as I can’t figure out why they bother when they can fly anyway, the burrowing under the ground to catch prey is a splendid effect that accounts for at least one breathtaking money shot. But it’s not so much the jittery brio of Confessional that Aswang taps into, but rather the meditative languor of the underrated Mangatyanan. And there’s a gravity to Aswang that slows it down some, possibly slower than it should be, but thickens the mood, too, until it gains, particularly in the sequences at the abandoned ranch where the monsters hole up, this weird, pungent density.

*Originally Published in Lagarista as Tropical Maladies.

The Salvage Detectives

2011-10-29T06:35:00.000-07:00

Rumor has it that there’s a lost Martin Scorsese film out there, a crime film shot on the cheap from before Mean Streets, that exists in the form of a grimy bootleg VHS. Lost films are the yeti footprints of film geeks, our ghost stories, our fuzzy UFO photographs, our obscure objects of desire. And there certainly is a touch of the arcane to the notion of an under the radar film few have seen, tenuously held together by the duct tape of failing memory, its potentially vital cultural data hostage to the processes of decay. Exotica like this is the vitamin of geeks. But Scorsese hasn’t gone on record to confirm or deny the film nor has anyone bothered picking up its trail. It’s not as if the world is in desperate need for any more Scorsese films, anyway. We have too much as it is, if you ask me. And it’s not as if we’re talking about Citizen Kane either.

But what if we were? Or something of similar exaltation? The few people who’ve seen Gerry De Leon’s lost film Daigdig Ng Mga Api have unanimously proclaimed its magnificence. It had me with that title, sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it lives up to it and turns out be our Citizen Kane after all. Except we might never know. Just as we might never know, too, if Manuel Conde’s Juan Tamad films deserve the legend they’re freighted with. Or if Ishmael Bernal’s Scotch on the Rocks To Forget, Black Coffee To Remember is anywhere near as tantalizing as its title. No prints have survived. No copies exist. Not even on tape. The number of films we’ve apparently lost out of neglect and indifference is a gut punch that can make even the most stalwart of resolves buckle at the knees. And folded into the context of our film history, the stakes are raised and our lost films become more than mere esoterica, gaining instead a sheen of minor tragedy. And, if anyone from SOFIA could have their way, a throb of emergency, too.

Founded by the late Hammy Sotto and a handful of like-minded colleagues in 1993, SOFIA is the Society of Filipino Archivists for Film, a non-profit task force of volunteers whose station is to salvage whatever lost films of ours they can. It’s not yet too late but time is running out. Entire strains of history are literally and inexorably turning to vinegar. There are piles of films past the point of rescue, and there are piles more getting there even as you read this. SOFIA is not exactly bereft of trophies, counting among their triumphs the rediscovery and restoration of films like Giliw Ko, Noli Me Tangere, Tunay Na Ina, Sanda Wong, Kundiman Ng Lahi, and White Slavery. But this, their members will be the first to tell you, barely scratch the surface. And the work that needs to be done is regularly curtailed as SOFIA are continually beset by troubles that swing from the usual lack of funding to the crippling vacuum of a National Film Archive that should exist but doesn’t. Help does come from all sides. Foreign organizations have lent a hand in restoring some films. Even film producers and branches of government are weighing in. But it’s a precarious situation, all told. Still, never say never is their default mantra. Daigdig Ng Mga Api is SOFIA’s Holy Grail. But so were Gerry de Leon's The Moises Padilla Story and Lino Brocka’s Wanted Perfect Mother, both thought forever lost in any format. And if these films can resurface, as they have, suddenly anything is possible.

A few months back, after years of basking curiously in its outsize myth, I at last saw Mario O’Hara’s previously lost noir Bagong Hari for the first time, as part of SOFIA’s Overlooked Films Underrated Filmmakers series of screenings. Cobbled from grungy U-Matic elements, its condition was far from pristine but this was probably the best the film has looked in years. More to the point, though, it surged with energy, felt thrillingly alive - - -dense, ballsy, vigorous. Direk Mario was there and so were the film’s stars Dan Alvaro, Robert Arevalo, Perla Bautista. This was the first of the screenings I attended, and regret missing Jun Raquiza’s Krimen and Danny Zialcita’s Masquerade, regret missing nearly every screening, really. This was how it was each time, I’ve been told. An unsung film retrieved from the fringes, a relatively fervid audience, its director and stars rekindling glory days and meeting new generations of admirers. It’s terribly encouraging. And it makes sense that a generous amount of SOFIA’s energies are now being poured into them.

We are largely a culture who has routinely trivialized, neglected, ignored and vilified our own cinema, elevating our revulsion to a class schism even, while kissing the ground foreign cinema treads. This flippant, often disgruntled, apathy has been more or less crucial to the state our cinema is in now. But, in its own modest way, these screenings embody the almost violent tidal shift in attitude and enthusiasm. And it’s tough not to feel even the tiniest glimmer of hope. The mash-up archaeologist detective mercenaries of SOFIA will not shirk from their first mission , sure. The lost films need to be found and restored. But these screenings are, in and themselves, restorations, too, of the very things that bought SOFIA , and those of us who champion their efforts, here in the first place: the jubilant obsession, the keening passion, the relentless love.

Originally published at Lagarista.

Picture courtesy of SOFIA.

San Lazaro

2011-10-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

San Lazaro
Directed and Written by Wincy Aquino Ong

Wincy Ong’s first film feels like one all right, but not in the sense that it comes together crudely as if under the nervy thumb of some self-entitled film school amateur groping sloppily for a clue and passing it off as style. He’s put in the hours, Wincy, directing a tonnage of music videos and a television show before this. And all that toil shows in the restraint and temperament, in the shape and sheen, of the film.

No, it’s more in the way it seems to be organized around the twin notions of this being something he’d been waiting and wanting to do for so long and that the next one may not be as easy to come by, and the way he leaves nothing out, throwing in what feels like the entire filmography he's already shot and dubbed out in his head, as if they’ve been pent-up and gestating all these years and maybe they have, as if he might never get the chance and who knows if he will. But by cleverly parsing them out as flashbacks, flashbacks that frankly have far more vigor and crackle and weirdness than the one-note present-day through-line it all hangs on and feeds, he calms down the tendency of everything to violently shift tones. It does still buckle a little here and there, but mostly it fills out the characters and the piece, giving both density and cartilage.

San Lazaro is a no-brainer: a horror slash road movie slash buddy comedy. Pitched somewhere between Chito Rono and Edgar Wright, albeit with little of the former’s visual acumen but thankfully even less of the latter’s slavish and annoying geekiness. And prone as these things are to the self-referential hubris of such geeky impulses, it’s first grace note is in how all of that is reined in to zero, how it takes the time to build its own universe, contains everything there, and not nod to some pop-cultural in-joke for comfort every time things get iffy - - -even Ely Buendia’s too-brief cameo is sharply hewn, doesn’t feel extraneous nor like a wink, probably could fork off into a subplot with more legs than the plot on top.

It’s a spindly one, such as it is, that plot on top, with Wincy himself multitasking as a flighty slacker roped in to help old high school classmate Ramon Bautista drive his possibly demonically possessed brother to the eponymous small town of the title. Ramon and Wincy do play their odd coupling, the wacky lout and stoic foil respectively, with all the chemistry and dynamics, the thrust and parry if you will, of the stalwart comedy duos, from the Dolphy and Panchitos to the Maverick and Ariels, if not as given over to the funny as you’d want, the volume never cranking up above room tone, the repartee never getting as spry nor as gregarious. If nothing else, though, this measure of sobriety does make the twist it all boils down to more lancing, gives it brunt. But there's an even more piercing but far subtler twist in the epilogue that might shark under your radar if you so much as blink. San Lazaro is not much but not bad, a genre mashup with much pop torque and a load of fun, but that last line has a creepy poignancy that gets under my skin a bit more.

*Originally published in Philippine Free Press as The Devils You Know.

Zombadings 1:Patayin Sa Shokot Si Remington

2011-07-30T04:01:00.001-07:00

Zombadings 1: Patayin Sa Shokot Si Remington
Directed by Jade Castro
Written by Raymond Lee, Jade Castro and Michiko Yamamoto

Zombie screwball should cover it if you feel the need to wrap a code around Zombadings 1: Patayin Sa Shokot Si Remington, the way it runs on the same odd tracks as both the lowbrow tomfoolery of Chiquito movies and the affectionate B movie crudities of Sam Raimi and all the self-aware postmodernism such a mashup implies makes it so spot-on it's as if that was the actual log-line Jade organized his film around, except it only really turns zombie on us in its final third and is more a werewolf film up until then, in which our eponymous homophobe falls under a hex that gradually turns him gay even as a serial killer is picking off everyone in town who is.

Homosexuality as a curse can be misconstrued as demeaning and actually has, as the off-point and far-fetched outrage flung this way bears out. But the germ that feeds it is that old andold-fashioned Frank Capra trope

- - - the comeuppance and enlightenment that comes from walking in the shoes of what you abhor, and more than anything, it's really subverting the very stereotypes it only seems to condone, much as it's hard to tell sometimes from the breathless velocity of the gags and the caricatural swish and swagger of gay argot and affectation it relies on to make it fly. The character actor stalwarts, from Janice De Belen to John Regala with his game face on to the mighty but under-used Odette Khan, buttress the superstructure to prop up what they can of the third act sag that besets it. And for the shapeshifting by degrees at the heart of matters, Martin Escudero is like some one-man army of goofy, a bravura act of pitch. But it's Eugene Domingo who detonates every scene she's in with surreal delight. And Roderick Paulate is stunt-casting that's both preordained and genius. The queer act he's made his metier by rights should've gone stale after all this time but somehow it's even gained nuance and range. It's a shtick, sure, but it's a shtick that never ever gets old.

Amok

2011-07-22T23:07:00.000-07:00

Amok

Directed by Lawrence Fajardo

Written by John Bedia

"What,like a bullet, can undeceive?" (Herman Melville)

Amok is well-oiled tumult, a chaos mechanism of wrong place-wrong time dynamics fed through a portmanteau that has everybody looking to Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu as point of reference, if only for how both hew to similar tropes of threading a line through disconnected lives suddenly thrown in the glare of blood and harm. But where Inarritu gets overwrought in preaching a grand design, not to mention a troubling hard-on for closure, Amok is more haphazard, has little to say that hasn't been said before, but so much to say it with, neither overreaching nor belaboring. If nothing else, it's a technical feat, of logistics and guerilla tactics and cutting. It's rigorous, precise.

The bustling intersection where it all comes down is both milieu and metaphor, and the one thing shared by the motley ensemble of has-beens and also-rans it corrals: they all just happen to be in the area. The cocky cop on the walkway waiting to rendezvous with an asset (Efren Reyes Jr., funny), the faded stuntman living alone with his rancid nostalgia and a rent girl sleeping in his bed (Mark Gil, funnier), the put-upon brother driving his cranky sister around and stuck in traffic (Archi Adamos), the ex-cop with a baby on the way and a chip on his shoulder (Dido De La Paz, a walking tour de force). If it wobbles here and there, it's mostly from spasms of bad acting and the patois ringing false. But in never lingering on one character longer than it should, it blurs the chinks into forgiveness. Brief snatches are all we get to see of these brief lives, not so much arcs as they never get to complete any. It's the point of everything here: how our stories don't so much end but are cut short halfway through the telling and often in a random blast of doom. There's a weariness to its nihilism that's more wounding for being so resigned. The world is a clusterfuck. And God is a bullet.

Tisoy Vs. The Punks: On MTV, Philippine Cinema And You Can Dance If You Want To

2011-02-08T08:29:00.001-08:00

Google “music video” and you can trace its origins as a practice as far back as the late 1800s. Oh, it was performance footage for the most part, but isolated pockets were going out on limbs, laying in the ramparts. Jean Luc Godard had an indirect hand in matters, about as much as the direct hand Richard Lester had with his Help!. That entire syntax he came up with in A Bout De Souffle, the shakycam and the jump cutting and the whiplash rhythms, it was all prescient without knowing it, virtually the cloth from which music videos would be cut. You go to it and you go to films like Bob Rafelson’s Head and Nicholas Roeg’s Performance and to little oddments like Dylan’s iconic Subterranean Homesick Blues and the Who’s Happy Jack and the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever and to the lab experiments Todd Rundgren and Devo were conducting. You go to these not just for the DNA signatures, though. You go to these for having the bright idea that you can make little movies from songs without having to pick through Hollywood musicals for surplus or training a camera on some guy and having him sing to it.

They were all taking from other, myriad strains of cinema instead, or even other, myriad strains of culture in general, and in many ways, were pushing the form even before they had a name for it, and really, even before they were even aware there was a form to push. Pushing it closer to short film, to experimental narrative, to conceptual piece, closer to the music video as we know it today, notwithstanding all the excesses it accrued. Boiled down, all those primordial music videos name-checked back there, among others, were borne out of the need of independent filmmakers (D.A. Pennebaker, Peter Goldman) to do something and bored rock stars to feed blood back into their pulses, tiny little spurts of experimentation to while away the time waiting for the zeitgeist that would detonate all of what they were doing to calcify, blissfully unaware of the footprints they were making.

The task at hand here is to find, if any, similar overlaps between Philippine pop cinema and Philippine music videos, the bearing of one on the evolution of the other. But I’m not sure if I can say some parallel evolution took place. Ever since the local music industry appropriated the form, there has been a steady increase in production values and with the outbreak of the digital revolution, a proliferation of music video careerists, the music video becoming a refuge for Filipino film school graduates with nothing to film and, down the line, for anyone with a digital camera. Oh, there was already an active independent experimental cinema in the country lining the fringes back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when MTV first broke, our own Pennebakers and Goldmans if you will, in Raymond Red (Manila Skies) and Joey Agbayani (Lola) and later in Aureus Solito (The Blossoming of Maximo Olivero), but by the time they became the emergent bands’ go-to men, the music video had more or less become the global music marketing parlance it is, meaning the template was set, the laws laid down, leaving no room for a learning curve.

Not that any was needed, the short film being the métier of nearly every independent filmmaker recruited to make a music video—and something like Aureus’ longform video for the Eraserheads’ Ang Huling El Bimbo (aka The Last El Bimbo) almost instinctively went against the grain anyway. For the most part, there were catalogues of tropes to nick, styles to mimic, concepts to retro-fit, rules to break and unbreak. A learning curve would only amount to a lot of fuss you didn’t need, moreso when the form practically came with an instruction manual. All you had to do was crack it open and dig in. Other than the most rudimentary transfer of energies, there really was little significant overlap between cinema and music video. Go to Maryo J.De Los Reyes’ iconic but crummy Bagets (1984), though, and the argument turns a slightly different shade. Its gaudy colors, its editing rhythms and its incessant fondness for montage was a template in and of itself for the local youth comedies of the ’80s, that misbegotten horde, whose most beloved trope was the tendency to suddenly break into elaborate song and dance at the oddest moments and not in the culturally endemic manner of Bollywood, would count among its vile ranks such epics of trash as Hotshots and Campus Beatand the almighty The Punks among many, many, far more misbegotten others. Bagets and the rest of its sort seemed suspiciously and terribly influenced by MTV.

Not to dismiss leakages and osmosis, not to mention how slavish appropriation of whatever’s working for the West has always been domestic mainstream studio-made cinema’s particular brand of kung fu, but there’s a sudden breaking into elaborate song and dance too, in Ishmael Bernal’s (Himala) postmodern-before-there-even-was-such-a-thing-as-postmodern Tisoy!(1977). But it comes in at an even odder time, just after the title credits, so it’s not as if you’re ready and it’s not as if he throws a rope before plunging us into it but there you go—street sweepers in full-on Busby Berkeley mode! It’s nowhere near as well-oiled as the Busby Berkeley invocation would suggest, sure, there’s another proto-MTV sequence involving a traffic jam that’s more wittingly and precisely realized, but it’s a ballsy move even for someone who has built a career on ballsy moves. It throws you on enough of a loop so you start expecting that nothing here will settle into a groove you can see coming. And it doesn’t.

Nobody talks much about Tisoy!. Not when they talk about Bernal, not when they talk about the heights of ’70s comedy, not when they talk about ahead-of-its-time. Which is a bit of a shame. Rather, and rightly so, everybody talks about Mike De Leon’s Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba? (1980), which starred Christopher De Leon and Jay Ilagan too, and came three years later and has the same subversive energy and has one or two dance numbers as well but feels a lot less anarchic and a lot less funny and a lot less fun put up against this.My aunt remembers Tisoy from college, back in the late ’60s, in all its iterations: the Nonoy Marcelo comic strip, the play that came out of it, the eventual TV show, the Lauro Pacheco movie with Jimmy Morato and Pilar Pilapil, all that. Tisoy was their youth cult, their generational totem, their Scott Pilgrim. Their Bagets, if you will. But even she hadn’t heard of this. And even if she did, it’s possible she wouldn’t recognize it. Nonoy Marcelo wrote the script for this one, sure, and roped in his comedy titan cousin Bert Marcelo, who has been the constant through all the versions. But the Bernal Tisoy!was not so much a remake as a turning on its head. It’s a relic of its time—it’s near-topical in jokes, mostly pivoting on local cinema at that time, only working after some digging into, for one—but I saw it just a few weeks ago, some 33 years too late, and it’s temperament is weirdly fresh, weirdly now.

I bring it up and Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba?, too, because they both predate MTV but both too are uncannily possessed of a grasp for its rhythms and energies and language, as if they were as prescient without knowing it as Godard was. And who knows if maybe they are. That something as arch and irreverent and out-there as Tisoy! would have bearing on something as safe as milk and dull as bathwater as Bagets and the rest of its sort may be a little too much to suggest but the membranes that connect them make sense. It’s something far older than MTV here. And might have its roots in something embedded in our cultural psyche and in the psyche too of Philippine popular cinema of the ’50s and ’60s and even the ’70s, in the vaudeville aesthetic it sucked at the teat of, in the belief of entertainment as being everything to everyone, in that urge to put on a show… right now.There is something oddly, sweetly, wondrously intrusive every time someone dances in a movie that isn’t a musical and it’s done right or even if it isn’t but feels like it was or even if it plain isn’t. A breaking of the fourth wall almost, a spinning off into another planet, even the ones that enmesh themselves in the action through a sieve of logic, like the Madison bit from Godard’s Band of Outsiders or when John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino dance to Marvin Gaye in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam; but more so when it doesn’t, like the exhilarating coda to the Takeshi Kitano Zatoichi and that lovely bit near the end of Quark Henares’ Keka that feels kindred with the dancing in Tisoy! and Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba?. They’re all digs, sure. But you can parse a hum of affection coursing through it. Not obviously and, really, I’m mostly just guessing. And possibly projecting my own peculiar affection on it, itself most likely colored by an idiot love for crap and a tinge of nostalgia for it. Oh, it’s silly and naïve but it’s this naïve silliness, this utter disregard for everything, that counts for its untrammeled enthusiasm, for the purity of its unwitting anarchy, and for my screwy fondness for it.

Originally published at Cinelogue.

*Image taken from Video 48.

Past Lives And The Beauties Summoned: My 2010 At The Movies

2011-01-12T19:44:00.000-08:00

"My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware the beauty is summoning him." - Andrei Tarkovsky

In a way, a catalogue of downfalls, having missed out on most of the Cinema One Originals and Cinemalaya and the "indie" section of the MMFF and some of Cinemanila and the stray Star Cinema fluke or two, and on the polar opposite, having seen nearly everything Hollywood saw fit to dump on us save for Skyline but I doubt if that counts as a sin of omission. Not that this caveat is anything new. As this is more of an indulgence than a civic duty and isn't really a job, it's perpetually been at the mercy of things like sloth and not having the time and the making of money and the getting of a life.

Mondomanila, it must be said, comes on like some Makavejevian depression musical only Khavn can hallucinate. I champion it heartily even as I hold back from placing it on my list out of my involvement in it and the implied nepotism that comes with picking something you were a part of. Also, I liked at least three other foreign films enough

- - -Unstoppable, The Ghostwriter and The Social Network - - - to honorably mention them. The rest of 2010's domestic and foreign cinephile fad gadgets remain unseen to me, until 2011 at least, when these things tend to remedy itself.

Geography has a bearing on my imperfect system, such as it is. 70% of the list must have been publicly screened in Manila during the year, regardless of screening venue or nature of run or if it even had a run, as long as it was in country and in public. The other 30% will be given over to 2010 films that weren’t screened nor released domestically regardless of format, with enough room for that stray 2009 film my radar picked up a little too late. The only criterion I uphold is love and that got me as far as 20 this year, making it a 14:6 ratio. This year, I also tried ranking. It’s a superfluous business, all told, but not without its moments. Still, I might consider going back to alphabetical next year. This is in descending order, but if you're the type who's prone to obsessing on rank, know that I urge you to watch all these with equal fervor, if only because you really owe it to yourself to bite into something more nutritious from time to time before you go back to making do with Jon Favreau tentpoles and Katherine Heigl rom-coms.

The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia, Russian Film Festival) : A bit of a cheat but we can cut Andrei some slack here, can't we? This was, after all, a film event, if not the film event of the year. Certainly was for me if only for how, after being inundated with 3D and HD and IMAX, none of it was still half as glorious as watching Tarkovsky - - - specifically this Tarkovsky - - - in 35mm.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand): All the serene arcana we've come to expect of Joe is here, of course, gorgeous and charged in the ways they usually are and also in ways that they usually aren't. An epistle but not so much to death but to the grace you find in dying right.

Ang Damgo Ni Eleuteria (Remton Suazola, Philippines,Cinema One Originals/Cinemanila): The single take technique counts as insanity, and as a plus given how insanity gets factored in less and less in films these days, but it doesn't show off so much as gives the piece buoyancy and in doing so attaches a sensation to the nonchalance with which we shrug off in real life the social malaise - - or any social malaise for that matter - - - at its heart. Plus, it's funny as all hell.

Agrarian Utopia (Sawan Banna) (Urupong Raksasad, Thailand): Of course, the title's meant to be ironic. These peasant families will toil the land until they're no longer able but will never attain the heavenly home in the fields the film's Thai title literally translates into. Like some Third World Days of Heaven and every bit as ravishingly envisioned.

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France, French Film Festival): In which the divvying up of a family inheritance turns into a consensual dissolution of mundane history and every single member an accesory to their own obsolescence. If anything, an epitaph to the impermanence of things and the eternal hold they have on us.

Ang Ninanais : Refrains Happen Like Revolutions In A Song (John Torres,Philippines, Tioseco-Bohinc Film Series, Netpac/Cinemanila): After twisting a tongue he neither speaks nor understands until it's nothing but pure sound , John Torres proceeds to feed his elusive, sometimes poignant, often lovely, terribly mysterious object through its badly broken codes.

Sketches of Kaitan City (Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, Japan, Cinemanila): Starved of levity as these bleak tales of ordinary sadness are, there's something in its wintry air that keeps everything gauzy and afloat, a metaphysical helium perhaps, that at points almost passes for hope. Almost.

Kano: An American and His Harem (Monster Jimenez, Philippines, Cinemanila): There is that implied metaphor on how we as a country have always been beholden to the smarmy wiles of America but this is almost an anatomy lesson in the machismo that is often flown like a flag of male virtue here. The fiendishly charismatic Victor Pearson may have struck a lot of people as virtually diabolical, and enraged a few enough to want to do the filmmakers bodily harm, but in some circles, he could well be some kind of hero.

Cameroon Love Letter (For Solo Piano) (Khavn de la Cruz, Philippines/Africa, Tioseco-Bohinc Film Series): Every word like a dagger drawing blood, every complaint freighted with loss, every memory leaking toxins, every line of worst fit, all tangled up in blue and threaded by that mournful, gorgeous piano fugue. Funny how you can't tell a breakup letter from a suicide note sometimes.

Vox Populi (Dennis Marasigan, Philippines, Cinemalaya): The naysayers weren't being merely pissy when they said this looked ugly and tacky, it is ugly and tacky, but then that's a function of the milieu and also the whole point. Ugly and tacky as our cities can get, they're even uglier and tackier during elections. But in nailing the Philippine condition on a surfeit of comic energy and without exoticizing anything, it pays the price by disappearing into an obscurity it doesn't deserve.

Summer Wars (Mamoru Hosoda, Japan): Turns out Jens Lekman got it wrong
- - -the end of the world is not bigger than love. Anime video game endorphin for sating my inner geek the way Scott Pilgrim can't quite do anymore.

Madeo (Mother) (Bong Joon-Ho, Korea, Cinemanila): Essentially a returning to the territories Bong covered in The Host
- - -the tensile strength of family members and the loosing of monsters on a placid community, only this time the family member and the monster is one and and the same.

Police Adjective! (Corneliu
Porumboiu, Romania): A police procedural that delights more in the tedium of procedure and where every conversation - - - be it about the lyrics of an inane pop song or the moral fallout from arresting a teenager for breaking a law that will most likely not be one soon - - - blows up into a discourse with equal degrees of gravity and consequence.

A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, France, Cinemanila): It's a bit like The Wire transposed to the French penal system, that is, if you go by how the overlapping ethnicities bear heavy on the power struggles of the underworld and also if you go by the ferocious dispersal of energy in charting the apotheosis of a crime lord from the ground up.

Detective Dee And The Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong): Just when you think all the chaos and opulence couldn't get any more berserk and contaminated, there's Andy Lau doing martial arts battle with magic deer. Oh boy. Sure is nice to have you back, Mr.Hark. Please don't go off and make things like Missing anymore. Or anything with Jean Claude Van Damme in it.

Love In A Puff (Pang Ho-Cheung, Hong Kong): Boy meets girl during their smoking breaks - - -
now there's a rom-com high concept with universal appeal that it seems only Asians can pull off , as it's the lack of hurry and the lack of the need to rub everything in and the insistence on actuality as a style that make this warm and lithe and
swoony. The
Rohmer vein a lot of people insist it taps isn't just for the way Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yue talk in circles but also, and more so, for the sensual causality of their brief encounters.

Senior Year (Jerrold Tarog, Philippines, MMFF): The effect is less of rekindling that rarefied and possibly false sense of magic we inflate our high school memories with but more like observing the social dynamics of a species seemingly removed from us yet somehow not. Were we ever this impetuous in our youth, this oblivious? Jerrold is actually saying we still are.

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, USA, Domestic Release): Either the lack of resources forced its hand or there really is an aesthetic at work here that warrants looking out for as Gareth Edwards may turn out to be that rare thing in Hollywood, an ex-FX man familiar and possibly even infatuated with the virtues of restraint. More than the dreamy and shapeless and awkward languor of his lo-fi sci-fic love story, it's really the world that
he builds from parts of ours and parts of something else, and of which he only shows us the parts made of rustle and shadow, that makes this such an immersive trip.

Piranha 3D (Alexander Aja , USA, Domestic Release): The dismembered penis scene towers above all but then again I haven't seen Jackass 3D yet. Alexander Aja pees in Hollywood's punch.
Lap it up, fanboys.
Anarchic, almost.

Art & Copy (Doug Pray, USA, Special Screening): The making of scam ads is like masturbating in front of a mirror pretending that noodle in your hand is bigger than it really is, only more deluded because you also pretend you're a genius when you're really just another sad wanker. No sad wankers here.

The Korean Bug Year That Was In Asian Cinema

2010-12-27T03:36:00.000-08:00

My official yearend list has 20 films in them. Since I measure all (feature-length) films with the same stick as God intended, these are merely the Asian ones, ranked in order, but prone to changing, and under one caveat: that 75% should have been shown in public in 2010, regardless of screening venue or nature of run as long as it was in Manila.

Annotations forthcoming. If it's the last thing I do.

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)

2. Ang Damgo Ni Eleuteria (Remton Zuasola,Philippines, Cinema One Originals/Cinemanila)

3. Agrarian Utopia (Urupong Raksasad, Thailand)

4. Sketches of Kaitan City (Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, Japan, Cinemanila)

5. Ang Ninanais:Refrains Happen Like Revolutions In A Song (John Torres, Philippines, Tioseco-Bohinc Film Series/Cinemalaya/Cinemanila)

6. Kano (Monster Jimenez, Philippines, Cinemanila)

7. Cameroon Love Letter (For Solo Piano) (Khavn de la Cruz, Philippines/Africa, Tioseco-Bohinc Film Series)

8. Vox Populi (Dennis Marasigan,Philippines, Cinemalaya)

9. Summer Wars (Mamoru Hosoda, Japan)

10. Mother (Bong Jun-Hoo,Korea, Cinemanila)

11. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong)

12. Love In A Puff (Pang Ho-Cheung, Hong Kong)

13. Senior Year (Jerrold Tarog, Philippines, Metro Manila Film Festival)

Halaw

2010-09-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

Halaw (Ways of the Sea)
Directed and Written by Sheron Dayoc

It's a sort of porn, too, the valorizing that domestic cinema makes OFWs undergo, much like the way they valorize the poor. Let's truss it up, then, and pelt it with ridicule like we do poverty porn, but then again let's not as that's petty and a bore. Not to say that there's nothing to exalt about OFWs but when a demographic becomes too profitable to upset, the patronizing tends to get laid on a little too thick even for melodramas. And as a trope, all those films - - - Caregiver and Anak and Dubai- - - say little about working away from your family in another country other than that it takes a tremendous sacrifice and that it can get terribly lonely and that it's heroic almost. Sheron Dayoc's Halaw taps a bleaker, richer vein. The grist that feeds his film may be the rampant people smuggling that sneaks out of Zamboanga and into the back door of Sabah, but it's really about the desperation and banality of the Faustian bargains that are as much at the heart of the OFW experience as the heroism and the melancholia. And how deep they run into the systemic malfunction of a country that fails time and again to sustain its workforce and into the seductive glamor of anywhere but here.

Following a ragtag group of stragglers that include a returning and bejeweled middle-aged whore (Maria Isabel Lopez, hilarious), a brother and sister (Arnalyn Ismael, a little pushy but a grace note regardless) hoping to reunite with their mother and John Arcilla, who threatens to center a piece that doesn't want for one but calms his trademark seethe down into a fitful languor before he does, Halaw only looks like an ensemble piece but doesn't behave like one. Working abroad under any conditions, but moreso under these conditions, is a last resort without coordinates. And it is this random and aimless meander to the way Halaw denies its characters any room to bond into a group dynamic nor milks them for anything more than a passing empathy and to the way it picks up strands of plot and subplot it doesn't pursue and parses everything in loose ends and half-measures, that nails the interior rhythm of what every OFW goes through, the numbing tedium of waiting under which anxiously simmers threat.

Less than a third of the way in, though, as night falls and the rickety outrigger sets out to sea, Halaw lapses into montage - - - anxious faces, blackened tides, maudlin ballad playing over it all. It's wistful,sure, but not a little at odds tonally and also not a little corny and not a little phony, too. It's a freak burst of weakness and a mere nit I wouldn't have picked if the suspiscion that the film has been cut against its will didn't get more and more persistent after this. If there's anything Halaw needs, it's at least another half-hour to breathe, not to have more room for more things to happen but rather to have more room for more things not to happen. Tedium and threat, right. And much as every scene seems determined to acquiesce to this necessary torpor, something curtails it before it gets to do so, cuts it short, hurries it up, hews it to a shape. Its unfortunate English title (Ways of The Sea) may come off like some drab tourism AVP but Halaw does benefit from not having the temperament of your average Cinemalaya film: that would be earnest and cushy and prudent and no coloring outside the lines. And I wouldn't necessarily mind truncation if it didn't have the worrying nag that much of it is done to fold the film into the weary comfort zones of the Cinemalaya house style it's been evading and doing a valiant job of it,too.

But it's the last shot nearly everyone piles on,though - - -the outrigger disappearing into a dark grove and the series of expository title cards telling us nothing, at least nothing the literal translation of the title (deportee) hadn't told us already. It's the loosest of loose ends, all unease and displacement and with the severity of a stump where a hand should be. I have no idea if the Halaw we have is a Faustian bargain struck with the forces that be, right down to the terrible subtitling, all I go by is how tough it is to shake the sense that the ending came out of some reverting back to carte blanche. Not only is it the film's most triumphant moment, aesthetically, but as a singular, damning epitome of the pointlessness in it all, it is also its truest. * * *

Possible Lovers

2010-08-15T00:21:00.000-07:00

Possible Lovers

Directed by Raya Martin
Sound Design by Teresa Barozzo

There's almost only one shot in the whole of Possible Lovers. That shot is a static single take of a young man staring longingly at another fast asleep on a couch. They are dressed semiotically, commoner and bourgeoise. You come to that from the found footage of 1919 Manila that came before it, as if grasping for echoes, or straws. It is not acting they do, these two on the couch, not really. It's performance art, almost. It's an endurance test, certainly. Possible Lovers is an experimental film. It's even more experimental than Raya's Next Attraction. But it's not bullish about its experimentalism, Raya's experimental films never really are. The label on the tape says, cheekily, Autohystoria 2. And like Autohystoria, there is an inertia and passivity about it. Unlike Autohystoria, it doesn't build up to anything but rather folds in on its own inertia and passivity. That can be terribly frustating for most people. It's the way an installation piece behaves and at first, it makes sense to come to it as if it were one, but not really. It fails as video art in that, notwithstanding a disregard for structuralist rigor, it's like a James Benning landscape film, and sound is where what little story it's telling is being told, making it co-dependent on the immersive properties of the cinema setting, demanding at some point that you close your eyes and prick up your ears. That may seem like a peculiar demand for a movie to make but it's not as if it hasn't been asked before. There are five ways you can react to Possible Lovers. You can be bored. You can be pissed. You can be at a loss. You can be heartbroken. You can be spellbound. You can go through all five, like I did. You have 95 minutes. There's enough time to run the gamut and back again. Every reaction is valid. Every reaction is correct. It is, in varying degrees, both conceptual hubris and avant mindfuck. It is also a love letter, not a valentine as the love is unrequited, and like all love letters, only one copy of it exists. That copy is on a haggard MiniDV. Every time it gets played, the image remains pristine as it can be but the sound goes to seed. This is the third time it's been played. And the rot is already a lot more profuse. The dropouts and glitches, they're almost like atmospheric conditions, ghosts. Break the title down and that's what this is about. The finitude of love and the cruel ecstasy of possibility and all the ghosts that flit in and out of that dreadful suspension between the two. I wonder how many more times the film will get played. And I think about how one day there will be almost no sound left at all. Almost no story, no love, no possibility. Only that pristine image of longing. And the empty, futile stasis that comes with it. * * *

The Trial of Mr. Serapio

2010-07-12T22:40:00.000-07:00

Filmless Films Presents This Is Not A Film by Khavn

The Trial of Mr. Serapio (Ang Palilitis Ni Mang Serapio)

with Teo Antonio, Mike Coroza, Vim Nadera and Jess Santiago as Serapio

Directed Written and Produced by Khavn De La Cruz

Based on the Play by Paul Dumol
Edited by Lawrence Ang
Director of Photography Albert Banzon
Music Jess Santiago
Production Designer Lena Cobangbang
Production Manager Kristine Kintana
Sound Design Arvie Bartolome
Stills Allan Balberona

A beggar is put to trial for taking an orphan girl under his wing. Paul Dumol's beloved classic one act play, considered by many as the first modernist play, may be more than 40 years old but in its inevitable transition to film in the hands one of its most ardent fans, filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz, its meditations on justice and equality remain disturbingly, eerily relevant.

July 15, Thursday 9PM CCP Little Theatre (Tanghalan Aurelio Tolentino).

A Shared Love And A Shared Art We Are Complicit In

2010-07-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

PHILIPPINE NEW WAVE: This Is Not A Film Movement

Edited by Khavn De La Cruz with Dodo Dayao & Mabie Alagbate
Introduction by Bienvenido Lumbera
Profiles by Chard Bolisay, Oggs Cruz, & Dodo Dayao
Published by Noel Ferrer, Instamatic Writings, & MovFest
Book Design & Layout by Gerard Lico

"I just need to say THANK YOU for making this! It's a major read for me as we share similar cinematic visions and, among others, political instability. Your book is gold." — Apichatpong Weerasethakul

"The most prominent internationally-acclaimed and wildly divergent digital filmmakers from the Philippines answer questions on filmmaking and beyond: from humble beginnings, to first adventures and unforgettable experiences, to influences and philosophy and process, to what the power of film is, to the true meaning of independence, to what the future holds for cinema, locally and worldwide.

Filmmaker and festival director Khavn De La Cruz throws the questions at them, and gamely answers them himself. The results are at turns informative and insightful, inspirational and illuminating, revealing how diverse the landscape of Philippine Cinema has become, and how much of it is a shared love and a shared art in which you are complicit in."

EDIT: Book launch will be on July 20 Tuesday, 4 pm at the CCP Little Theater. And yes, you will be there.

Ang Himpapawid (The Heavens)

2010-06-21T19:18:00.000-07:00

Ang Himpapawid (The Heavens)
Directed by Raymond Red
Written by Raymond Red and Ian Victorino

NOTE: The real Ang Himpapawid was to be Raymond Red's first feature. It is to this day unmade and exists in two forms. One as the short film A Study for the Skies. And the other as a glimmer in the filmmaker's eye. The following speculates on how the film might have been had it been made the way it was intended. The piece was originally published in the UNO April 2010 fiction issue.

“Poetry is nearer to vital truths than history.” – Plato

History’s always been more toy and maybe riddle to Raymond Red, something to play with and crack, to ransack and suspect, to bother and tweak. The doyens of the mainstream always come to history as if it were plutonium or dogma, that is, with wariness and reverence, and the fallout is blah, wimpy, cushy, safe - - - Jose Rizal, right. Raymond’s three historical fictions run less on set design and textbook exactness but more on dialectical fumes, not buying into the perceived truths of the subjects it hones in on, cross-examining the scuttlebutt, inventing wild theories. And each one feels, in varying degrees, like some aesthetic cage match between the budding classicist and the berserker experimentalist in him. Granted, Sakay (1992) was a stalemate. And the avant-garde tingles in Bayani (Hero) (1991) will crank up empathically, Raymond tells us, in the new cut he’s readying. It’s his obscure first feature, Ang Himpapawid (The Heavens) (1990) - - - the one that almost never got made, the one that Roman Coppola came this close to producing, the one that started life as an aborted fairy tale installation piece made up of slides - - - that fully realizes this delightful frisson. Conceived in embryo as a Super8 feature and at first given over to the organic tangents that specific pairing of form and format anticipated, Raymond shot it finally on 16mm, perhaps to save himself a few headaches, but without sedating its fevered exoticism.

In thumbnail a historical fantasy, but envisioned with a finicky verisimilitude, Ang Himpapawid, set in the twilight of the Philippine-American war and sheathed in dreamy expressionist tangles, is centered by two childhood friends turned freedom fighters - - - Julian (Rene Aquitania) with his head in the clouds and Pedro (Jeffrey Tigora) with his hand on the rifle trigger. Both have a vivid dream of freedom and an even more vivid dream of taking flight to attain it. And in lulls between the spurts of gorgeously-realized conflict, both conspire to jerry-build - - - with little more than a gusto verging on the naïve and spilling over into the nutty and whatever spoils and detritus they can amass - - - an aeroplane that can fly them away to the freedom of their dreams. As one flying contraption after another fails, their obsession turns fevered and combative , embroiling themselves unwittingly in a secret war of their own making against the enemy. Less a historical pastiche as it is an allusive parable on the mechanisms of beautiful failure, Ang Himpapawid could well be Raymond’s sneaky allegorization of his filmmaking process and the turbulent backstory of his film .

No work from the birth pangs of indie seemed to cry for a second look more. Or a third. And a third of many, at that. The noise the critics made was enthusiastic, but sparse for something as freighted with expectancy, with pedigree. But I missed this one in its first run out of having neither the age nor the will nor the curiosity. All that would come later but by then it had flown under the radar, and into a cultural fog, and I would finish up infatuated, for years, with a ghost.

The good news, of course, is that the centerpiece of the new Raymond Red retrospective, which swings from his first battery of shorts to his sinewy new Himpapawid (Manila Skies) is the belated return of Ang Himpapawid ,out of mothballs and back into the light at last. A film this loaded with vulnerabilities, it might help to leverage expectations a little before going to see it, undo the ribbons of fabulous rumor that has since mummified the piece, but not really by much, and I know this because that’s as far as I get. I was still dosed up coming in, prone to letdown. And I kept waiting for it to drop. And it wouldn’t. Not with the pulpy arcana of its parade of aeronautic malfunctions. Not with the stumblebum band of guerillas. Not with the way you can’t tell the corporal from the corporeal. Not with that coup de grace sleepwalking sequence that it turns out wasn’t in the script. It feels like one long mysterious and beautiful and maddening surge of cognitive dissonance. It also feels like his masterpiece.

Ang Himpapawid folds itself into a wrinkle in time with as much speculative fervor as Ang Magpakailanman (Eternity) (1983). And more than Raymond’s later, more sober historical fictions, it is this meta-textual and meta-textural faux-antique, predating Guy Maddin and equal parts Brakhage and Murnau and apparition, and more historical science-fiction than anything, that Ang Himpapawid feels of a piece with, trembling, as it does with the same metaphysical solemnity, the same aesthetic nerve, the same puckish mischief. In its sublime final shot, where everything is explained and nothing is, the film opens up a brand new universe of possibility and in the gap between two worlds - - - classical and experimental, mainstream and independent, fact and fiction, captivity and emancipation - - - crosses over from the wounded lie of history into the vital truth of poetry. * * * * *

*First published in UNO April 2010

Independencia

2010-06-12T19:20:00.000-07:00

Independencia
Directed by Raya Martin
Written by Raya Martin and Ramon Sarmiento

The enchanted forest that predominates Independencia, set during the first days of the American occupation, is a spooky and exquisite fake and closer to delirium than setwork - - - pattern recognition with counterfeit rain and skies made from paint.

Into its verdant recesses repair a mother and her son bedeviled by invaders and forced to flee their home- - - Tetchie Agbayani in full-on voodoo seethe and stumblebum Sid Lucero - - - and later a young girl - - - slightly anonymous Alessandra De Rossi - - - raped by soldiers with Roosevelt handlebars, who begets a half-breed boy. The story it’s telling has the aura of vapor. A ghost story, really, like nearly everything Raya does. A story of an exile so utter, a freedom if you will, that everyone who undergoes it all but disappear completely, consumed, become like ghosts. And much as it may pulsate and tremor and eventually breach, from inside this tenuous adoptive Eden, history- - - erratic, rogue, malleable history , the conspirational lie we’re all complicit in - - - is all rumor and smoke.

What Raya is in the middle of here is his vividly referential historical trilogy with its deceptively simple and rather elegant conceit - - - run three specific periods of our history that have been colored by struggle through past pre-eminent, almost anachronistic cinematic vocabularies. Then mine the dissonance. Ignore, then, any dismissals - - and there are quite a few floating around, you’d be surprised - - - that it looks artificial, that in parts it looks half-finished, that it’s the pitfalls of not having enough money to shoot in an actual forest. That’s a little like whining that porn has too much nudity. That’s a little like missing the point. That’s a little, like, dumb.

Form has always been crucial to his aesthetic more than you think , making it always crucial to look at form squarely in the eye. And Raya is often at his most vivid and his most alive,and really his most joyous, when he indulges his fetish for manipulating form, which tends to shift shapes from one film to the next and with a perverse and devilish changeling glee, too, that juices up his manipulations. Not so much assimilating these archaic tropes as re-purposing them into vectors of postmodern strangeness. Like the silent film textures that blanket Maicling Pelicula Nang Ysang Indio Nacional, set during the last days of the Spanish occupation, once so quaint, now possessed of this eerie unsettling beauty, putting Raya on the map but loosing, too, a tumult of lazy if not entirely avoidable Guy Maddin parallels. And Independencia has its fairy tale soundstage of a forest, effervescent throwback to Masaki Kobayashi ,to FW Murnau, to Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies.

As taken as I am with the camcorder crudities of Now Showing and the way it evoked the fickleness and banality and warmth of nostalgia , not to mention the grimy and petrified snuff film sheen that bears out the claustrophobic nihilism of Autohystoria, the fever dream forest here has enough hallucinatory torque to thrust you whole into that immersive otherness, into that alternate reality, where tree gods bask in the rivers and you hunt for food dressed as bamboo birds and sometimes you lose your way and need to turn your shirt inside out to get back home.

Both allusion and illusion and throbbing with metatextual vigor, it could well be Raya’s most ravishing manipulation yet, and also his most disquieting, if only for how it’s both milieu and metaphor, and for its determined insistence that everything here - - - the very notion of independence alluded to in the title included - - - is nothing but a seductive, bewitching lie.
* * * *

*Originally published in UNO.

Head Above Water: Live From Planet Rox

2010-06-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

It had all the come-on of a museum installation, that random labyrinth in Roxlee’s backyard, made from the junk Typhoon Ondoy made of things. Stacks of laserdiscs, vinyl records, cassettes, DVDs, CDs, all bereft of sleeve, strewn all over. The machineries that would have brought them to life lined an entire wall, meshing into a single sculptural mass of wire and cord and parts, water-damaged beyond usable. Resting against a far corner is an unlabeled can of 35mm film - - - with the film still inside. All this actually makes me cringe a little more than the sight of SUV roofs protruding from black water.

Rox and his wife and kids and his brother Romeo live in this five storey tower block. And Ondoy had laid waste to the whole of the ground floor. At the height of the storm, with power outages and communication breakdown amplifying the anxieties of everyone who knew people in the submerged areas, worried texts from friends asking how they were and had they made contact flew in frantic ricochet from one mobile to the next. But the place is a stronghold. Higher ground was always just one flight of stairs away or two. Virtually everybody who knew the brothers has been here at some point. And hung out on the roof deck that overlooked everything. If the place was under water that would mean the entire city was. So of course it wasn’t. In the thick of the deluge, it even doubled as a refugee ark for their waterlogged neighbors. Rox was, at some point, if you remember, a kind of indie cinema Moses, bearing not 10 but 13 commandments for every aspiring D.I.Y. filmmaker. Picturing him as a kind of monsoon Noah fits.

Rox is giving me a sort of guided tour of the detritus. Here are the tools of his trade - - -a 16mm projector, an 8mm camera, two Handycams - - - all wearing the patina of fatal gunk, beautiful in death. “Wala na ‘yan.” ( “They’re gone.” ) he says. He seems unfazed. Could be he’s had time to get over it. The Mini DV camera he’s been shooting his new films with was spared, after all, along with the Bolex and that warhorse 35mm camera. But then, Rox always wore this aura of unfazed. I’m the one who feels tiny pangs of regret, which spike a bit when he shows me an actual 16mm print of an untitled 11 minute collaboration with his brother Mon, fused into an unplayable wither. I wonder aloud how the film would look if we projected it in this condition. Rox just laughs the laugh of a man who has done that sort of thing before. And, it turns out, he has.

It was this other film, years ago, the title of which escapes him as he tells me the story. He was delivering a 16mm print to UP for a screening and was running a little late when the can of film fell from his bag. The lid came loose un-spooling the print onto the street where it lay, vulnerable as a tongue. Before he could retrieve it, several cars had already ran over it. Ever heard the one about imagining yourself sliding down a banister that suddenly turns into a razor blade midway through? This is the equivalent of that cringe-making joke for filmmakers - - -heavy traffic grinding your film into the asphalt minutes before people see it. But Rox, he just calmly spooled it back into the can, headed for the venue and screened the damaged film. “Mas gumanda pa nga e.” (“It actually looked better.”) he laughs. It’s like something out of Cesar Asar, the sly and absurdist and surreal and immortal comic strip he did with his other brother Mon.

For all its unhinged cheek, Cesar Asar, was a cross-generational touchstone that both boosted his mainstream stock, nestled as it was in the pages of the conservative Manila Bulletin, but also further insulated his cult. Nobody thought to qualify its subversive peculiarities as ahead of its time out of how much of its time it was - - -some rather strange fans at some point even pored regularly over the strips for codes, secreted allegedly in the art, from which to decrypt jai-alai numbers to bet on, numbers which, funnily enough,won. “Hindi man lang ako nakatanggap ng balato” (“I never even got a cut”) Rox laughs.

But here we are in the thick of an indie comic boomlet and that handsome volume curating the Planet of the Noses arc is often blithely passed over for the transliterated superheroes and supernatural mysteries and secondary world tripe (yawn) that excite domestic comic geekdom. “I sell more books in Japan.” Rox says, as he should - - - it’s not much of a reach to imagine Planet of the Noses tickling wild fancies there. Suddenly, though, ahead of it’s time doesn’t ring like the mother of all clichés. “Nobody who could push for it pushed Cesar Asar for syndication back then.” Rox laments the possibility stunted. “I think it had a strong chance of being picked up. It’s universal because it’s very visual.” I agree. Dialogue would be the downfall of the film Rox made of it. He tinkers with it from time to time, hoping to find a way to make it work a little better. But it’s the rest of the Cesar Asar oeuvre I’m interested in. I mention anthologizing it but Rox fears most of the strips have been waylaid in the chaos of moving house. Shame. Hands down the mightiest local comic strip ever, then and now, Cesar Asar deserves a full-hog anthology, if only to trap a moment in his career that Rox looks back to with a giddy fondness.

An exhaustive - - - albeit incomplete unless he agrees to play that soggy print - - - film retrospective is more promising, as future prospects go. Two years ago, Rox was one of the objects of tribute at the .MOV film festival. And a handful of his films were screened - - - including the out-there Lizard: Or How To Perform In Front of a Reptile, which I saw for the first time then and was a brand on my brain since. But his corpus is vast. Animation has always been Rox’s métier and his irreverent, evocative, hand-drawn shorts are mostly glorious. But I’m more partial to his films - - -the experimental brio, the wry looseness, the vigorous glee. And the way some of them got under my skin. Like Lizard. And like Juan Gapang (Johnny Crawl), which was my first blast of Roxlee’s non-animated cinema. Pre-indie, pre-digital, pre-everything, it was made under his own steam with a little help from his friends. D.I.Y. filmmaking was , even back then, fortified by such communal ramparts. For a time, the only filmmaker who owned a 16mm camera was Kidlat Tahimik, and everyone borrowed it to make films they would later watch in some basement, projected on a sheet - - - a literal underground cinema. What I would’ve given to see Juan Gapang for the first time under those conditions. But no, I saw it in college. But it was still full-on synaptic broil.

What Juan Gapang meant to me at first was being fed through the disorienting crackle of some alien voltage, a sensation I would eventually associate with every experience of stumbling into a hitherto unseen mode of cinema. Experimental cinema of any make and model was zero footprint to me back then. Lynch and Brakhage and Warhol would come into my life much,much later. And to someone with a headful of nothing but the crassest Hollywood pop, Juan Gapang was like a hit from some truly arcane opiate stash. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it at first. Nor how to feel after. Creeped-out, amused, a little seasick. It is, to this day, my favorite work of Rox’s.

What Juan Gapang meant to me later, along with Kidlat Tahimik’s Sino’ng Lumikha Ng Yoyo? Sino’ng Lumikha Ng Moon Buggy? (Who Invented The Yoyo? Who Invented The Moon Buggy?) and Raymond Red’s Ang Magpakailanman (The Eternal) - - - both of which I remember seeing for the first time within that same year - - - was my first glimmer of an Other in Philippine cinema, the height of which for me, at that time, was a handful of comedies and maybe one or two pop Brockas. It was a seminal moment.

There’s always been a schism between mainstream and independent. But is blurring the divide the point? Or are we better off sharpening it, instead , into relief? The mainstream will always have its insurgents, the independents its fence-jumpers. But overlap is a utopia in need of a reality check. And the presence of an Other in art is almost necessary. Kicking against the pricks, spanner in the works, ghost in the machine, all that. Not that I get confirmation but I’m sure Rox would agree. His Sinekalye seemed to pivot from this stance, ripening an exclusive environment for filmmakers to cook their work and make it sing without intrusion and qualifiers. Much as they’re welcome to crash the party, I’m not sure his 13 commandments were aimed at anyone looking to be careerist teleserye directors and would unlikely sway them anyway.

Rox beams a little when he talks about younger filmmaker friends who have struck out on their own,as if they were charges, or sons - - -Brillante Mendoza,who was his PD for a few of his early films, Lav Diaz, whom he’s known as far back as their days at Jingle when Lav hadn’t even shot a single second of footage, Khavn de la Cruz, who was an acolyte and whose aesthetic hews closest to Rox’s.

Rox himself continues to work, imbibe his ethos. He tells me he’s finished a new and better cut of Romeo Must Rock, his valentine to brother Romeo. And he plans on tinkering with 35mm Man next. His experimental documentary on Juan Baybayin, Green Rocking Chair , fresh off a stint at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival a few months back, may be a kinder, gentler universe removed from,say, Juan Gapang or Lizard , but it is a warm and funny and in parts even touching piece. More than that, he made it in 2008.

The day I swung by to visit, it’s been almost a month since Ondoy and the house has been wiped clean of all its traces - - - no more mud on the walls, no more refugee neighbors. Rox is reclining on one of the many hammocks hung all over the place. Fatherhood and domesticity may have warmed Rox, but I’m not sure the old saw of how these twin poisons bring aesthetic ruin to artists applies to him. Go by the way he howls as Akira Brocka in the noisepop un-band the Brockas and the wild man peg is easy to come by. But brother Romeo is the wild thing in the family and even then, not by as much as you might think. Passive nonchalance has always been Rox’s default setting. On one hand, it’s the purest iteration of cool I’ve seen. But it’s also the nexus of his aesthetic - - - Rox is a man who doesn’t try too hard. And it colors his work to a refreshing degree.

He’s shooting his next film in Lubang and he’s shooting it in January and according to him, “Maganda doon pag ganung buwan.” (“It’s lovely there that time of year.”) He’s not sure where he’ll get the funding but no ripple of worry mars his visible eagerness at the prospect. It’s the way Rox is. And this is what filmmakers do. And more than his 13 commandments, it is this unwritten 14th commandment that matters above all: thou shalt shut up and make films.

*originally published in Phil. Free Press

Fire of Conscience

2010-05-08T19:33:00.000-07:00

The throb of old school Heroic Bloodshed mayhem is making my heart go pitter patter.

Also, Leon Lai. Sweet.

Let's Get Lost

2010-05-05T23:19:00.000-07:00

You asked me if I planned all this, I could sense a hum of worry in your voice, as if regretting the question even before you finished asking it. This was when I could still sense things like that. I meant it when I said no. And maybe you felt that I meant it. I hope you did. You kissed me before you went to sleep. Pink neon as a kind of mint with murmurs of nicotine was how it tasted. Also, relief. It was a kiss that would have taken us to such great heights if the timing had been different, timing being everything. But that night in Chungking, that night I lay awake until morning listening to you breathe, that would be the whole of our brief encounter, that would be the first and last time I went there, that would be the last time I saw you. I always thought I’d see you again. And no, I didn’t mean it to be that way either.

Sinatra was wrong. HK, not NY, is the city that doesn’t sleep - - -and doesn’t let you get much either. I sleep light when I’m there, so light that it doesn’t really count as sleep anymore. I’m not sure why that is and how much of it is merely my biology reacting to the telemetry of a foreign city nor why it happens every time I’m there nor why it only happens there. Everywhere else, I drift into baby sleep. Here, I sometimes don't sleep at all. All the foreign cities I’ve been to tend to activate some measure of displacement in me and that comes, of course, with some measure of giddiness. But this is special. Could be it’s the constant blare of neon like some rogue filament of caffeine in my blood. Could be it’s the tumult of endorphin all of us get from going to places we haven’t been before only I’ve been here too many times and every time it’s the same. Could be radiations of a collective pre-millennial anxiety except little seemed to change during my post-millennial trips. Could be I’m over-romanticizing matters. Could be it’s all in my head. Whatever it is, this groggy and vibrant out-of-body wake state has become my default setting for HK. But I am, I suspect, alone in this. My HK is not likely everybody else’s HK. But it is, in many ways, the same HK as Wong Kar Wai’s. This groggy and vibrant out-of-body wake state is the climate and tenor of his lovelorn cinema.

The bleed between the two HKs was eventual and the reasons for that are more banal than anything else. I came to both at roughly the same time and under roughly the same emotional weather. I stayed, more by accident than design, at Chungking Mansions my first time there and a few weeks later, I saw my first Wong, Chungking Express, which was set in Chungking Mansions. The equivalences, if not cosmic, are quintessential Wong. I was heartbroken my first trip to HK and through some divine arrangement, or divine cruelty if you will, I would be in a heightened emotional state, not necessarily heartbreak but some permutation of it, every time I came back. The converging of opponent sensations until they taste the same - - rapture and agony, ecstasy and despair - - - has always been the sumptuous tang of Wong’s cinema and the sumptuous tang of every trip I take to HK. The overlap could be mere coincidence. But things are never as simple as mere coincidence in Wong’s HK.

Wong’s HK isn’t the HK of Johnnie To and Fruit Chan, no. I love their HKs, too. As much, sometimes more. But Wong’s HK is a skittish organism all its own, a city that seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown, amok with dilapidated lovelifes, persistent with memory, translucent with melancholia, hopelessly devoted to the frantic pursuit of fugitive and maddening and slippery love and where the random collision of strangers is not as random as you think and sometimes it can be a bitch to tell where happenstance ends and fate begins or if there’s any difference between the two.

HK is perpetually alive with a siege of ghosts , coloring the aura, configuring the atmosphere.

Foreign cities emit sensations of getaway and bewilderment. I get that from HK,too. But pickled with a rarefied quality by the sensations I associate with these ghosts : a kind of heightened catharsis that invigorates even the most melancholic of situations. I've come here twice, deep in romantic harm ,and HK always had a way to make it hurt so good.

HK is ,simply put, my hot zone for all the colours of romance : metaphoric and abstract, specific and displaced, wistful and heartbroken. (excerpt from Episode of China Blonde)

“Do you believe in love?”

Not as simple to answer as you think as it falls prey too easily to cynicism. It’s a cop-out but it’s not as if you can blame anyone who succumbs. Love isn’t exactly making it easy for anyone to believe in it, and it doesn’t seem to give much of a shit either, which might be the whole point. I do, of course. And that’s about as defiant of fashion these days as the allegiance I pledge to Wong Kar Wai’s cinema. Wong seems to believe in it, too. Every regret is just a stopover, muses the forlorn hitman in Fallen Angels, and everybody needs a partner. That this sentiment prevails as the sovereign locus of Wong’s work outs me more than it does him,though. There’s an exquisite sadness to his endings, sure - - -the serenely devastating Angkor Wat sequence from In The Mood for Love milks me dry every time. But the malfunctioning desire he traps has always, for the most part, evoked inexorability more than futility for me. Everybody’s lost in space in his movies, fumbling to master that inarticulate speech of the heart, waiting for some emotional rescue or the other, and when it comes, if it comes, you get this sense that it’s fated even if it gets hurtful and confusing and messy. After all, Bacharach did say that " . . . true love never runs smooth". And the loveliest things in life are the ones that are a bit of a mess. And his bad-hair-day lovefools, his wistful bittersweethearts, his romantic depressive misfits - - - if they weren’t so beautiful, I could be one of them.

Somewhere between the Sarah Records compilation There and Back Again Lane and the Magnetic Fields’ The Wayward Bus-Distant Plastic Trees twofer, the speed takes hold and dim sum breakfast thoughts slide into oblivion, vertigo decompresses.

I should’ve known better, seen it coming. Hong Kong was my favorite piece of geography on the planet. I made love to three women there. Three women who broke my heart. Three women equal in my desire for, fealty to, fear of. Three women whose gunk had seeped into the cracks. And the last of them was still radioactive. Stepping out of the Causeway Bay subway terminal, I was hit with that gush of bodies, a gush she had felt weirdly comforting. I was feeling something else right now. More like a pang swelling like dough in my gut. Not hunger, no. I knew. Stranded during a weekend lunchtime in Tsimshatsui last time we were here, it had taken nearly three hours for us to find a place to eat and not the Chinese she wanted. She was seething throughout the meal. Coming home hours later, exhausted from walking and from settling for so-so Japanese, we spot this little noodleshop next door to the guest house in Fu Kuong, and laugh ourselves silly. Never got the chance to try it, though. Waking up with a craving for sharksfin dumplings and beef wanton noodles and almond jelly, I remembered the place. I was starving the entire train ride from Mongkok. This pang was on top of that. A more bullheaded, a more ruthless, a more indomitable pang to quell. Clairvoyance would help, time travel, amnesia. This pang, this distress signal, this spider sense warning me about the nearness of things going dogshit, of the ghosts about to whack me with flashback of that weekend, the happiest weekend of my life, the foregone conclusion of for keeps. Then, despite all the warnings, it hits me, without warning, like a prizefighter’s mean hook. Mentally, my teeth rattle.

I took out an old film canister from my jacket pocket. Inside were four capsules of prescription speed. I swallow one dry and take refuge in the nearest HMV I could spot. (excerpt from the unpublished short story A Song For Whoever)

For a time, the ceiling of my movie love would be everything Wong Kar Wai did. The groovy ellipses, the jittery swoon. There was something narcotic in the manner of the way it sucked me in but little to do with the way Chris Doyle could light a scene so it attains this benign psychedelic sexiness, which would make my drug allusions a little trite. No, it had more to do with the mechanisms of addiction, the way I would voraciously consume and re-consume the works, as if trying to crack an uncrackable code. His is a cinema devoted to the mesh and magnetism of stories, to the pattern recognitions of love and heartbreak, to the poetry of people. His is a cinema after my own heart and after my own heartbreak. And I’ve seen and loved nearly everything Wong has made - - - I uphold even his erratic 2046 and his much-reviled My Blueberry Nights but not so much his BMW ad- - - and in a mildly blasphemous inversion, it was his work that brokered my love for Jean Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais, rather than the other way around. But it’s Chungking Express that I’ve seen more than 12 times. At least. Not only is it my favorite Wong Kar Wai movie, it’s my favorite movie full stop and who knows for sure why that is. Others supersede it time and again with as much fervor and as much love - - -Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Tsai Ming Liang’s What Time is It There?, Godard’s Band of Outsiders, Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Antonioni’s L’Ecclise - - - and all of these seem to converge on the same playful surrealism, the same wistful melancholia and for at least three of them, a guarded but won-over optimism about the nearness of happiness. But that’s as close as I can get to parsing my love for it and it’s not as if you can actually parse the mad, unstable love you feel for anything. I keep coming back to Chungking out of loving it just a little bit more than the others, though. Equal parts Godard and guerilla, it hangs brightly in some pre-millennial HK of the heart, it’s the most kinetic movie about stasis and the most romantic movie about breaking up, a love letter to the tiny spaces that connect and disconnect people. It orbits around two cops navigating the tailend of a jilt. Cop 223 finds fleeting solace in a henchwoman wearing a blonde wig out of John Cassavetes’ Gloria. And Cop 663, in the girl he buys his ex’s dinner from, embodied luminously by Faye Wong.

I fell in love with Faye at first sight just as she did when she first sees Tony Leung’s cop, which is the first time we see him, too, through her smitten eyes. Faye may have something to do with my Chungking devotion. Not Faye herself but the way her arc articulates the romantic confusion that is the story of my life. Chungking is almost a romantic comedy but one untethered to the protocols of dating and the rules of attraction and all that social drudgery that makes chick flicks and modern day big city romance such a drag. It's surrendered instead to the machinations of a grander design. More poetic, more cosmic. After Cop 663 comes to his senses that she’s in love with him, he asks her out on the date she can't wait for him to ask her out on. Faye promptly stands him up and goes off to see the world, leaving behind a boarding pass drawn on a table napkin. When she returns a year later , the napkin is soggy and the pass unreadable that she has to write him a new ticket. “Where do you want to go?” she asks him. “Wherever you want to take me.” Wow and flutter.

I haven’t been back there in a long while. Someday, someway, I will. And maybe I’ll see you there, whoever you are, whoever you will be. And maybe this time you’ll leave with me. We can go deep into the city, with its din of color, where the ghosts and the stories are. We go there without a map. And without a plan. And maybe this time, we get so lost, we’ll never have to say goodbye.

*First published in Philippine Free Press

Future X Cops

2010-01-12T19:13:00.000-08:00

Sometimes all it takes for the world to right itself is a new Wong Jing movie. With Andy Lau. And killer robots.

Kinatay

2009-11-17T08:18:00.000-08:00

Kinatay (The Execution of P)
Directed by Brillante Ma. Mendoza
Written by Armando Lao

The heart of darkness Kinatay plumbs is a black hole we know, but couch in the cozy swaddle of urban legend, of things that happen to other people. Because confronting them without that measure of remove, without that deniability at arms' length, puts us too far out in harm’s way for comfort,makes us fair game.

But nearly everybody has a third person rogue cop story, or knows somebody who knows somebody who does, of men with guns and abductions in the night, of death squads and body parts in sackcloth, of devilish deeds done dirt cheap. I tend to cold sweat on impulse at the sight of checkpoints myself. I'm overreacting,sure, but none of that anxiety is mere caprice. Kinatay has night-thoughts to rummage through,alright. Enough verite to tap. Buttons to push.

But not agendas. Kinatay spews from firsthand moral outrage - - -Mendoza's, Lao's - - -but doesn't politicize nor exoticize nor even outrightly address it. It's apolitical. And amoral. And in a way that does little but thicken its soup of dread 'til we're choking on it, gasping for air. It's a closed-in half-lit morally blank world Coco Martin's rookie cop - - -and us along with him - - -is marooned in without coordinates, a world of permanent midnight and spatial displacement where malevolence is the hunch of a lieutenant's back and Hell, a nondescript spare room turned makeshift abbatoir.

And it's tone is of a chilling passivity that neither gets as nosy nor as horny as tortureporn ,which it sort of is, albeit wth the volume turned way way down, a real time abstraction if you will, a horror movie bereft not only of gory sensation - - -the controversial raping and torturing and beating and slaying and dismembering is a dimly-lit battery of master shots verging on unseeable- - - but also of ways out - - -an almost unbearable sequence during a detour to buy balut on a beer run and an even more unbearable one near the end when a cab gets a flat and the bravura van ride that knots coils in my gut still and that last shot and the harrowing pointlessness of it all. It's deadened and deadening.

The word "salvage" may have re-entered the vernacular freighted with an alarming new meaning but it's also freighted with an alarming currency that wears off the scald over time. Salvage victims are mostly nobodies anyway,other people. And who cares what perversities are visited on a haggard old whore ,moreso one who's dim enough to think she can dupe rogue cops of their drug loot? Repulsed. Desensitized. These are the emotional polarities of salvage. And these,too,are the emotional polarities of Kinatay. It can either burrow under your skin and breed cultures of unease. Or it can numb you into feeling nothing. Both, of course, is the desired effect. * * * *

Now Showing

2009-10-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

Now Showing
Directed and Written by Raya Martin

"(Nostalgia) is delicate but potent. . . in Greek, it literally means the pain from an old wound.It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone." - Don Draper, Mad Men

Lovely Rita, the girl who leaps through time here, had a movie star for a grandmother who wore a dress spun from gold, that now hangs from a nail on the door, a yellowing ghost leeched of its exuberance much like Rita herself, making the rent as a teenager from the hawking of bootleg DVDs

Coming of age stories, the sugar pill of arthouse, tend to heighten the mythic in the banal. Raya Martin’s Now Showing, ostensibly a coming of age story, taps into these banalities, rather, for the despair and beauty of impermanence. The past is a forever fragmenting thing, forever slippery, forever changing shape, making every memory implicitly flawed and implicitly precious. Retro is what nostalgia is often mistaken for. But retro's passive - - -the weak shit of the time-locked. Nostalgia has a lot more at stake - --a rescue mission but always with casualties.

Of a throb with avant-garde diary films like Khavn’s Memory of Forgetting and Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost in the way it parses for mesh in disjuncture, teasing membranes of story from random found life vignettes, it's not as if Raya is splicing together his own found life - - -he's merely co-opting the syntax. Now Showing is a triptych bookended by the two halves of Rita - - -the prepubescent trembling with wonderment and the post-teen lost in space. But it is the middle third, a re-purposing of the weathered but resplendent remains of Octavio Silos’ lost film Tunay Na Ina into what seems at first mere connective tissue, that somehow bears the ore of the whole piece - - -that is, the corrosive vagaries of time. And like his Indio Nacional and Autohystoria, this is an historical autopsy, too, notwithstanding the shift in temperature, and as bothered by the futilities of retrieving the past without having to make up the parts mislaid to the blind spots of memory.

Chris Marker, in Sans Soleil, said “Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting but rather its inner lining.We don’t so much remember as we rewrite memory.” I'm with Chris and so's Raya.Now Showing is all remembering and re-enactment, if these are his memories or if these are even memories at all , but conceived with a naturalism so immersive, the seams melt. A fake passing itself off as real passing itself off as fake until you can't tell which is which anymore. With thickly familiar pangs of mood evoking a sense of deja vu that can't be right but never leaves you anyway.

Each of the three parts it divides itself into is queasy with a specific veneer of decay - - -imperfect failing memory and the imperfect failing platforms that foolishly try to capture and preserve them - - -but the first third, a love letter to childhood that's flush and agog with tiny incident and shot as if on a lo-res camcorder, is queasiest, opaque to the point of creamy, with that vague sense of torpor that someone else's home movies have in the way the interstitial shots linger- - -on a birthday party, on kids playing patintero at night, on a young girl singing mutely to the roar of the crowd in her head, on nothing much - - -past ambient and into tedium. But not without that murmur of peril, as if some fugitive magic will be forever lost if the pause button is pressed too soon. That's the lethal poignancy of nostalgia. And it leaks like blood into what these interstices connect, throwing shadows on everything. And a swatch of hope. There is nothing mythic to heighten in the lives we live. There is only the warmth and burnish of remembering , the flames that gnaw at the edges and the things we save from the fire. * * * * *

Nymph

2009-10-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

Pen-Ek. Nymph. Trailer.

Nothing more needs to be said - - -but I just did.

The Long Goodbye (For Alexis & Nika)

2009-09-02T20:09:00.000-07:00

I didn’t know Alexis enough to say we were close but knew him enough to feel kindred with him. And maybe that was all it took - - -the too few run-ins, the too few conversations, the too few emails, the too few fond anecdotes. Why else would there be this much shock and fear and regret and grief? Why else would all the cinema in the world suddenly feel so outmoded and impotent in the face of what happened? But let’s not put cinema down, as it was, after all, the magnet that drew us to each other - - -this mad fervid love for it that many thought almost freaky. Having declared my unwavering fealty to it even before I was in high school and knew better, I always thought my love bottomless and indomitable but the depth Alexis’ feelings ran - - -and the things it made him do - - -makes mine look like a petty crush . It put me to shame. But also had me keyed up. If there was one thing Alexis left with me, it’s knowing that there was still, and will always be, much more cinema to fall in love with.

Much as I'd like to say I was writing this as a friend, and much as I know Alexis wouldn’t mind if I did that or called him one, I feel it’s not entirely my place to do so. I’m writing this instead as a fellow lover of cinema and a fellow writer, a fellow film critic if you will. This blog was my secluded little pocket of the internet to write about something I loved. I never factored in that there would be traffic- - -the spotlight and me never really did see eye to eye, always had a touch of the hermetic, camera shyness. But the very first thing Alexis said to me when I was introduced to him was ”Hi. I like your blog”. It was immensely flattering. And it would later fuel me to not just write, but write faster, write truer, write more - - -my sloth may be my downfall but I’m getting there. But it was also immensely daunting knowing there was someone reading, let alone someone like Alexis. It was the second most frightening thing he ever said to me,really.

The most frightening thing was when he asked much later on if I really was shooting my first film. I told him sheepishly that I had shot one scene. Who knows what he would have thought of it had he lived to see it finished? Not that it would’ve mattered, I figured, long as I make it with generosity and conviction and love. That's how Alexis did his work. And that's how everyone in this ragtag so-called scene of ours sets out to do theirs, too. That's how he would've prefered it, I think - - -I don't know, I won't know. But it's all about love,in the end. The last few days I've been swimming in this warm and fraternal and almost familial inundation of community, this coming together in consensual sorrow,bonded by this shared and senseless loss and by this shared love for both cinema and for two people who gave so much for it. Too much.

Love is,as Alexis once said, the first impulse of critics. It is also the first impulse of friends.

Peace for the last time, Alexis and Nika. I hardly knew you but I'm glad I did.

Disco Mon Amour

2009-05-22T23:07:00.001-07:00

Sifting through the Criterion website, nursing half-baked plans to bucke down and at last get one of these.

Two things caught my eye that made me wet myself.

August will be orgasmic.

20-Seiki Shônen Chapter 1 (20th Century Boys Chapter 1)

2009-05-18T18:18:00.000-07:00

20-Seiki Shônen Chapter 1 (20th Century Boys Chapter 1)
Directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi (Crying Out Love in the Center of the World)
Starring Toshiaki Karasawa (Casshern),Etsusi Toyokawa (Hula Girls)

I've destroyed the world many times before - - - and so have you. With crayon drawings on torn notebook paper. This is what us boys would do to give vent to the berserker rages of all our boyish imaginations. Gleefully, dementedly laying waste to civilizations, perhaps in secret hope of remaking the world from the rubble but this time to our prepubescent whims. Or maybe it was merely out of how diabolically fun blowing up imaginary cities can be. Not to mention drawing all the flamboyant, impossible monsters that blew them up.

Back in the 20th century, flying a 747 into a skyscraper as a terrorist plot rang with similarly feverish delirium- - - crayon drawings on torn notebook paper. That was just nine years ago. Not that you need to be told but this is the world we woke up to after the millennium changed hands- - - boyhood annihilation fantasies as real world genocide scenarios with wackos for architects bent on remaking the world to their whims. Fucked up doesn't quite cover it. And taken one way, Naoki Urusawa's immense manga 20th Century Boys , filtrated as it is through this grand pop sieve of weird viruses and giant robots and shadowy cults, is all about what life is like in this new world we live in, which is what life was like in the old world we lived in except it's more fitful and more rickety and more prone to toxic absurdities.

Taken another way, it's about the vagaries of obsolesence , the way those of us whose destinies have passed us by flail for some kind of bearing in a world that doesn't give a shit like it used to, if it did at all. And the possible devastations getting stuck in the past can wreak on the future. That T. Rex song - - - "I'm your toy, your 20th century boy" - - - has a riff so mighty you can believe how the kids here fell under it like a banner to signal changes. Fed by Marc Bolan's futuresexy androgyny, it was a song on the cusp of a world to come. The irony, of course, and the subtext Naoki is aiming for, is that today nothing sums someone up more as a relic of his time than calling him a 20th century boy.

Taken the same way and minus the millennial divide, this is what Stephen King's It was about, too - - - waking up in a present you didn't expect to wake up in that's agitated by a past that has come to collect. It's not as if it would take a genius to run them - - - the parallels between the two do glare and vibrate. There's the relentless toggling between two timelines. There's the childhood friends - - -boy dominant with a token girl - - - sputtering invisibly through a bland middle age. There's the banding together to thwart an enemy they may have unwittingly loosed. There's the epic sprawl - - -it starts in the '70s and ends in 2015. There's the turned-up volume to everything. Except it's not supernatural bunk Naoki cranks up.

He hews closer to the sort of boy detective sci-fic pop the younger Ray Bradbury and the younger Steven Spielberg proliferated but without lapsing into the dewy cloy they both tended to stoop to back then. And he's as fiendish as King is with story. It , of course, was massive, but also unwieldy and turgid and not the work you uphold to champion King - - - ominipotent turtles and gangbangs, WTF? 20th Century Boys is even more vast but manga always gives itself the room to stretch and breathe and not hurry that Americans seem chronically allergic to, and over its 24 volumes, it moves at a clip but paces its convolutions so it never really disintegrates into the gooey mess we're left with at the end of It.

Given how Tsutsumi's spacing out all 24 volumes across three features - - - and this is merely the first - - - it's a little disingenuous to raise him up for the structural liberties he takes that makes this spry or put him down not only for how the nuances he forsakes activates a little supercompression vertigo but also for how he exaggerates the cataclysm near the cliffhanging end. He does soothe my doubts about the next two to come when he tempers all the heightened arcana that comes with being a kid with all the simmering melancholia that comes with being an adult. 20th Century Boys is all about how hope and ruin, potential and failure, wonderment and exhaustion intersect. And how, to paraphrase another glam rock icon, we can all be heroes in the overlap. Trite, sure - - - but lay in a mighty guitar riff on top of it and it's a banner to fall under.* * *

Independencia

2009-05-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

Ang Lee Takes Woodstock

2009-05-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

Cameron Crowe, sure. Richard Linklater, possibly. But Ang Lee? The family dynamic fits him,give him that - - - but why gripe when it's the imperfect fit of this that has me piqued anyway.

Nymph

2009-05-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

Pen Ek. Nymph. Poster.

Nothing else needs to be said - - - but I just did.

SHORTS: Mobile Men by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2009-05-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

Aaaaaaaah!!!!

Joe Weerasethakul's Mobile Men is a part of the 22-segment Stories on Human Rights.

Visit Wise Kwai's site for the breakdown.

Independencia At Cannes

2009-04-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

Raya Martin's Independencia picked for Cannes' Un Certain Regard together with Pen-Ek's Nymph, Bong Joon- Hoo's Mother and a new one by Cristian Mungiu.

And it has a trailer.

Beautiful stuff. And that song is a chill up the spine.

Vengeance At Cannes

2009-04-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

Johnnie To's Cannes-bound with his new Vengeance. In competition, at that.

And there's a second trailer.

Wet your shorts.

Departures おくりびと

2009-04-17T04:35:00.001-07:00

おくりびと
Okuribito (Departures)
Directed by Yojiro Takita
Starring Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ryoko Hirosue

We talk to our dead during a wake. We converse with them as if the dearly departed could reply back. Oftentimes, we answer for them.

Oftentimes, we like to pretend that the dead are only asleep and it's crucial that they look that way.

The Japanese encoffinment ritual that is the heart of Departures is the most affectionate gesture I have ever seen on screen. It is graceful yet precise; concealing the difficult task of cleaning and disrobing the dead with a hypnotic, almost celebratory dance, knees firmly tucked under, arms rising and falling and fingers fluttering. Fussing like a mother; rigid like a father. Playful like a child. The bereaved family watches closely and become part of the corpse's transformation, from a cold, empty shell to a familiar face that they've woken up to or watched fall asleep in the years that have passed.

As a child, I used to watch my mother suit up for work and I've only remembered recently how I have memorized her morning routine: the perfume behind the ears before anything else, the skirt that she carefully smooths out, the watch, her only jewelry, that she gingerly clicks into place. Watching the encoffinment ceremony feels like watching someone go through his daily ritual one last time.

In refined, thoughtful strokes, Departures paints different scenarios of last goodbyes with such unpredictability in the details that it feels painfully real. The ceremonies do tend to end in tears (quiet, howling) but it's the subtle change in atmosphere---the slightest tics of recognition and submission to fate on the faces of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters and lovers, and the wistful look of committing to memory the contours and the imperfection that once loved them back---that director Yojiro Takita carefully captures with polite elegance.

Much like us unfamiliar with the Japanese cermony, Daigo is the outsider, the watchful eye that is slowly drawn into a career of encoffinment. Played brilliantly by Masahari Motoki, who first thought of filming Departures ten years ago after reading the memoir of an enconffinment master, Daigo is an awkward mess of insecurity and unfulfilled dreams. Recognizing his own limitation in playing the cello, he and his wife Mika (the luminous Ryoko Hirosue) move back to Yamagata to look for a new job. He stumbles upon an ad on "Assisting Departures" and thinking that it was a travel agency opening, applies for it.

His introduction to corpses is a gag but as he is drawn deeper into the refined precision of the ritual, almost similar to the fret play on the cello, Daigo unravels into his own person and confronts memories he has been running away from all his life.

I'm forgiving the movie for its singular, obviously-staged montage (Who plays cello in a rice field? Even the kurosagi seem to be bothered by it.) because as a joyfully heartbreaking whole, Departures is one of those rare movies that transforms into a shared experience. The movie poses through images difficult questions about life and death, contemplates the answers, and leaves it to us mull over. It's loose structure gives the string of encounters breathing space, making room for Daigo's own personal battles, his struggle to remember his estranged father's face, the quiet brevity it requires. And what I love most, for all its thematic weight, is the movie's light footed humor, most of the time rolling with the funny down its melancholic twists. Unpretentious, the humble film that could, Departures wistfully offers us the gift of how to say goodbye.

(And yes, it is better than any of the 5 nominees for Best Picture in this year's Oscar race.)

5/5

20th Century Boys Chapter 3

2009-04-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read the manga, this will mean nothing to you. If you've read it up until the part where the first movie ended, the second to the last shot will either be a massive spoiler or will make you wet your panties. I almost did when I was reading the manga. And I almost did when I saw this.

Yes, sometimes I get embarassingly excitable.

Just go clicky clicky, alright?

Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition

2009-04-13T23:42:00.001-07:00

Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition
Directed and Written by John Torres (Todo Todo Teros, Years When I Was A Child Outside)

Voices is a failure. A love letter to, in the shape of. A film about making a film that never gets made, about the plan coming undone, the dream revoked. John Torres digs the annihilating of form but digs the annihilated form even more. The pseudo-espionage of his Todo Todo Teros had the layered mien of collage, effervescing as it did on the sampler's gambit of making cohere the often opponent fragments he curates- - - scraps of poetry, found footage and that haunting recurring shot of a wife watching the filmed proof of her husband's infidelity- - - with the connective tissue of a new form. It's spypunk, a miasmic voodoo of surveillance paranoia and emotional terrorism - - - love in the time of Al Qaeda.

Neither as dense nor as frantic, most of Voices are talking heads, all exiles for being adrift someplace they never expected to be at this point in their lives and almost confessing to the camera with a candor both icky and poignant- - - the homesick revolutionary lamenting his receding hair and singing guerilla songs , the son disgruntled at finding out he has a half-brother, the OFW remembering the voice tapes she used to send her boyfriends back home, the girl playacting a pretend love story who breaks down between takes to go emo about her own romantic troubles. Strung together one after the other and marooned from an overriding design, each vignette making a go at that unmakable movie but eventually folding in on itself and giving up, you're meant to parse the fragmentary quality this time. Voices is teasing frissons from the disconnect. In flux is it's mien.

Everything begins at a house pelted by rainfall, much smaller than what the people living in it thought they would move into, in a bedroom piled high with the junk they can't throw away,where a kid plays videogames between the oaken limbs of his sleeping grandparents, lost,as they are, in a vacuum of calm. You know this house - - - you've been to one, you know someone who lives in one, you probably live in one. And you know the feeling. Failure is a universal language. And everyone's a disappointment artist, adrift. The lullabylike rain fades as soon as we leave the house but its sombre, aching, serene and tender soothe pitterpatters on in my head, like some phantom serenade to that exile in all of us. * * * * *

Altar

2009-04-13T23:20:00.000-07:00

Altar
Directed by Rico Maria Ilarde (Sa Ilalim Ng Cogon, Aquarium)
Starring Zanjoe Marudo (You Got Me!), Dimples Romana (Huling Pasada)

What the creatures that gnash and tumble through Rico Ilarde's features do is take irony into the woods and slits its throat. They’re tactile presences, these mud women and genetic fuckups and fish demons. They're context. They’re not meant to multitask as semiotic bullshit and be anything other than what they are upfront. In a more snide universe, calling them pulpy schlock amounts to a dis but in a universe that knows better they are pulpy schlock but they’re also what gives the work its frisson, its dissonance. B movies, say the scornful lazy. Fair enough. Unlike the kind Uwe Boll or Brett Ratner or Michael Bay shit through their noses, though, and more like what Monte Hellman or Francis Coppolla used to make for Roger Corman, this is genre, hundred proof, but with a bit more on its mind, more room to maneuver without wandering off into the kind of disdainful postmodern appropriation that is so chickenshit and dull. The interstitial complexities of his work are possessed by nothing short of true love for the genre, for its tropes. And the beauty of Sa Ilalim Ng Cogon, despite having me more - - -and having more, really - - - in the poignant taboo of its love story than the black science gone fuckup it converged with - - -and once converged became something else- - -was that, ultimately,it was a tricked-up Dr.Moreau riff and wore it proudly.

Altar is Rico's first haunted house, and a far grimmer, far grimier affair than the lush, pungent gumbo of Cogon, but still within his esthetic. There's repeating yourself and there's making the same movie over and over, like an exorcism rite, a honing and a purging both. The difference is the difference between formula and theme, between hack and auteur. Push Rico for the latter- - - because he is. And the movie he keeps making over and over is about the Everyman who flees the world that owes him by crossing over the weird precipice of another. Here, it's a prizefighter with no fight left in him, fallen from grace, sick with remorse, shrunk to drudge, soul in tatters. Too bad having read the virtually unchanged treatment a year back has dampened all the creepy goings-on for me. It's the boxer's pathos I chew on for resonance - - -the soul of Rico's movies has always been in the things he lets simmer under the genre tropes. And it's a chill up my spine when he tells the girl he loves his fate's not so much out of trespasses he's atoning for, more the butt of a mean joke the universe played. Flies to wanton gods. In a universe painted this black,any ghost that attic holds almost counts as relief. * * *

Autohystoria

2009-04-13T23:01:00.000-07:00

Autohystoria
Directed and Written by Raya Martin (Now Showing, Next Attraction)

Projector issues
- - -that's likely. But there is the way the image in that opening long walk home seems to corrode before your eyes, the way the noise picks out shapes of things that aren't even there, the way it feels less like postwork - - -that is, premeditated but artificial- - -and more the risk you put yourself through shooting on analog then blowing it up to see what happens- - -that is, premeditated but organic. And the way what does happen counts as foreshadowing. For how it similarly obsesses on the active degrading of our collective memory, on history as something mutable and suspect, but not with the same elegaic prettiness as Indio Nacional tapping into silent cinema's textures of otherness to find eerie new con/subtexts - - - 1896's hard-won independence as a kind of cultural neutering, for one- - - in our beloved revolutionary saga.

That one opens, too, with a man walking, not home but down a cave. A returning to the womb, perhaps, also a descent into mystery. The mystery of our birth as a nation reflexively full-circling to our dying as a cultural entity and retold as ghost stories at bedtime so it gets feverish and hysteric with swaths of unease and swaths of whimsy and swaths of surreal imagery - - -the blessed virgin dogging a katipunero down a field , the sun rising from between a man's legs then giving him a wink, a plaster saint flirting with two women in church - - - where Autohystoria gets feverish and hysteric but only with unease and in more than mere swaths, it's nervy with it.

The death it gets under the skin of, after all, isn’t as abstract, as metaphoric, as philosophical. And is,in fact, bloody and viscous. Is, in fact, a murder- - -Andres and brother Procopio Bonifacio’s execution at the hands of Emilio Aguinaldo’s cohorts and the conspiracy to whitewash it, retold with microscopic agony and brutal immediacy as presentday salvage in real-time. Noble aims superseded by gleeful artifice means the pleasures of Indio are purer as mere cinephilic fetishism, nothing wrong with that. More nihilistic, more wounded, Autohystoria triumphs as surface, too, only with more seepage and tackle. Its subtext - - - that political homicide is in our blood - - - runs hardwired with marrow chill and black voltage, but its visceral jolt is the volatile that stays with you.
* * * * *

Paalam Aking Bulalakaw (Goodbye My Shooting

2009-04-13T22:45:00.000-07:00

Paalam Aking Bulalakaw (Goodbye My Shooting Star)
Directed and Written by Khavn De La Cruz (Squatterpunk, Hindi Kita Kilala)
Starring Meryll Soriano (Numbalikdiwa)

Who knows what came to pass between K and Ana before today? K is, of course, director Khavn himself sort of, the man with the movie camera whom we never see, and Ana is Meryll Soriano, his obscure object of desire whom we can't take our eyes off. They talk and it's not as if it gets so obtuse as to resist parsing. Just weightless and hesitant and stumblebum . There are no codes in the conversation to decipher. What we talk about when we talk about love are the things that go unsaid anyway. The inarticulate speech of the heart. So maybe we should just take Khavn's word for it that K loves Ana and that's as far as it got. Which then makes this. . . what? Chance? Or design? Date? Or destiny? Unrequited? Reunited?

The Linklater parallels you invoke only to cut a long story short and to peg what can be a bitch to peg, what is better off seeing for yourself- - - Before Sunrise at 30 f.p.s. on a shoestring. The parallelism does take, somewhat- - - the walking around, the talking around, the going everywhere, the going nowhere. But there's no arc in this first person love story, no fate playing matchmaker, no intrusions from the universe. Only the brutal symmetry - - - the solipsistic economy and delicate equilibrium and minimalist stasis- - - of its POV.

It's the longest goodbye in the universe when your shooting star burns out, shooting star here's used loosely, figuratively. It rings more poetically in the vernacular - - -bulalakaw. You call them that because they burn so bright, because you wistfully look to the sky for their trajectories to cross your radar again even after their orbits have passed most likely forever, because you wish on them. But you knew that and maybe you knew that out of having had this extraterrestrial hurt too, out of having the unforgettable face of that lapsed darling afterimaging in your head long after her radio silence, her invisibility, her supernova before your eyes. And all of this is in K's head. Like the lovesongs falling on deaf ears, like the poetry in the details, like the words that fail, like the wishfully-thinking extraterrestrial hurt it hooks me with.* * * *

Vengeance

2009-04-11T21:06:00.000-07:00

New Johnnie To. Written by Wai Kai Fai. Starring Johnny Hallyday.

If you need any more words to pique your curiosity, let me extend my condolences for living all this time on a planet of no joy.

This had me at "New Johnnie To".

Clicky clicky. Preview is available.

The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela

2009-04-11T01:06:00.000-07:00

Limited run of Olaf Johannesson's The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela starts April 11 at Robinson's Galleria. Click to embiggen. Then go see.

Meat Grinder

2009-04-07T19:18:00.002-07:00

Meat Grinder
Directed by Tiwa Moeithaisong Starring Mai Charoenpura (Suriyothai), Rattanaballang Tohsawat (Bangkok Love Story)

A movie about slicing and dicing is sliced and diced by the Thai censors, how's that for parallelism?

Whether Tiwa Moeithaisong intended it to be or not, Meat Grinder has become a crash test dummy for the new Thailand motion picture ratings and can't be helped but seen as an allegory to the viewing experience: As the landlord and his thugs slurp down Bus' noodles and devour the bits and pieces of human meatballs, I am also served a severely and clumsily hacked movie, which refrained me from digesting the narrative as a coherent whole. (I was also out of my comfort zone, watching a movie for the first time in Bangkok in the plush Siam Paragon multiplex on a chair that stubbornly pulled back at what should be a relaxing angle but only made me feel like I was about to fall backwards every time my cringe reflexes were, err, cringing away.)

Meat Grinder is about a lot of things---violence begets violence, the tumultous Thai communist uprisings which I hoped the movie pursued more to add more dimension to the period's climate, violence as escape (and lucrative business) for the women in this movie---but these all feel incidental to the main attraction, the deliciously graphic hunting and gathering of human meat and the calculated food preparation.

Mai Charoenpura as Bus goes about her killing spree with stoic determination that it becomes more chilling. And cool. She even out-classes Uma Thurman's The Bride (Kill Bill) when Bus kitchen kung-fus her three abusers with knives and cleavers or whatever she could grab in her dank kitchen, whacking heads like they were yielding watermelons, driving hooks through screaming mouths, slicing arms casually as if she were about to serve Christmas ham. Admittedly, even for someone like me who has a taste for gore fests, I had to look away when she drove a nail down in all ten fingertips of one of her victims. Shot up close, the rusty nail pierced and cracked the quivering fingernail painfully slow, which is reminiscent of Choi Min-Sik's dentistry work with a hammer in Park Chan Wook's Old Boy and the gradual torture in Takashi Miike's Ôdishon.

Unfortunately, Meat Grinder's narrative is as choppy as its violence. The Thai censors is partially to blame but Moeithaisong is also at fault, resorting occasionally to execution over substance. There are just too many styles employed---from scratchy old-film wash-out colors to black and white to quick cut-to-cuts---resulting to a disjointed storytelling and a tone that is impossible to define, which is my biggest issue with the movie.

Outside the political context of censorship, Meat Grinder, as a movie, is without depth. There are signs that the director struggled to inject it with meaning but the cycle of violence as an emotional center or theme is a beaten-up, predictable purpose. Soylent Green existed in an apocalyptic what-if context; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Titus made cannibalism the ultimate penance. In Meat Grinder, we never feel the weight of commiting the act. Was Bus supposed to be excused because she was mad? Was Bus' lover not even mortified or even the slightest bit morally shaken after seeing the slaughterhouse?

In this respect, Meat Grinder is torture porn. Frustratingly so because it could have been so much more. There's not much to chew on really.

3/5

Further Reading:

Wise Kwai's Meat Grinder review.
Wise Kwai on he Thailand ratings system.

Sundo

2009-04-07T19:18:00.001-07:00

Sundo
Directed by Topel Lee
Starring Robin Padilla, Rhian Ramos, Sunshine Dizon

You can feel the cold creeping in and squeezing your windpipes. You are Louella (Sunshine Dizon) getting soaked in the rain, shoes sticky with mud, as you watch your father's skeleton stumble out of its coffin clumsily dropped by cemetery caretakers. You are Baguio, sprawling, eternally cold and gray like a blanket hiding a corpse.

Director Topel Lee and cinematographer J. A. Tadena transform the usually cheery Baguio into a brooding, opaque hell where houses seem to shiver in the cold. Bathed in muted palettes of browns and steel, the fluorescent light seems alien, a fragile glow that the dark is hungry to devour, while the ghosts, ang mga sundo, lurk in the mist-like shadows.

The noun "sundo" has no direct English translation: it is a person---a close relative, a sweetheart---who picks you up from school or work with the specific purpose of making sure you get home safely, ie. My sundo (boyfriend or parent) has arrived. As a verb, sundo means to pick someone up (from school or work). In the movie, Romano (Robin Padilla) sees dead people, but these are ghosts with a mission, to be the sundo, the guide of the dying from this life to the after life. In effect, every appearance of a ghost is an omen of death.

Romano and childhood friend Louella drive down to the city with his sister, the blind Isabel (Rhian Ramos), to find a cure for her ailment, along with a few companions. Romano dreams about an accident that kills them all but wakes up in time to prevent it from happening. He suddenly hears a baby crying and as he steps out of the vehicle, he realizes that they are surrounded by ghosts. They were meant to die and now their sundo have arrived.

Sundo is a movie severely split in two. The first half is moody, atmospheric, and genuinely dead cold; its claustrophobic static can be felt at the back of the neck. The second half, which begins right after the should-have-been accident, is commercial Hollywood that is too reminscent of Final Destination.

What a damn shame.

There could be higher forces at work here and Lee does his best to keep the brooding tone, but the gimicky accidents (being blinded by flying embers from your favorite isaw stand) are laughably scripted and clumsily executed with not enough B-movie gusto that they turn out flat. And boring.

There's a twist in the movie's last few minutes that almost saves the movie from predictability but it is carried out in exactly the same way that Ouija (Topel's previous horror genre effort) ended, with someone being pulled into the darkness.

Is it just me or was that last echoing scream a cry of frustration?

3/5

Best in Time (Kwaam Jam San..Dtae Rak Chan Yaao)

2009-04-07T19:17:00.001-07:00

Best in Time (Kwaam Jam San..Dtae Rak Chan Yaao)
Directed by Youngyooth Thongkonthun (Iron Ladies)
Starring Arak Amornsupasiri (Body sob 19), Yarinda Bunnag

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. ~Michel de Montaigne

Memory is a whimsical beast. It surfaces without warning, submerges without a sound as if it never made ripples. Memories being unique to a person, we can assume that we own them, that we can subject them to bend to our will, chronologically sorted and easily pulled out as needed.

Keng (Arak Amornsupasiri) is a snobbish, awkward veterinarian who never got over his first love, Fai (Yarinda Bunnag), who married and later got divorced to his best friend. Keng pretends that he doesn't remember her when she stumbles into his clinic carrying an injured dog.

Kind and eternally compassionate Fai can't forget her ex-husband and secretly wishes that they would get back together soon. But she also remembers Keng, the once shy, admonishing high school kid who had recorded a love mix for her, and is now showing her the kind of affection and attention that her ex-husband couldn't give.

Sompit and Jamrat met at a computer club for the elderly. Eventhough her family doesn't agree with her blossoming relationship with Jamrat, Sampit flees to Chumporn to be with the man she loves; she insists on staying with Jamrat even if her family is relocating to the U.S. But Jamrat, due to an illness, is slowly losing his memory. He will soon forget every memory he holds dear. Pretty soon, he wouldn't even recognize Sampit.

Best in Time is a thoughtful, lighthearted examination of memory and its ironies. Director Amornsupasiri is in no rush to tell a story and there is a languid, relaxed flow to the mistakes and realizations that the characters make along the way. Beyond a logical progression from point A to point B, Best in Time is fattened with moments that make each character more endearing----Fai rushing off to a bookstore to buy her ex-husband's missing DragonBallZ vol. 18 manga but ends up getting the entire set because the books weren't sold individually; Keng pretending to be asleep and secretly smiling when droplets of water from Fai's newly washed hair trickle down his cheeks---moments not exactly integral to moving the story forward but in themselves are memories waiting to be kept.

The movie also keeps it real as much as possible and veers from romantic-comedy predictability right from the outset. Fai and Keng make an odd couple; they never really become comfortable with each other's company with Fai still attempting, maybe even faking, to move on from her divorce. And I like it that the movie leaves it at that, with one still unable to forget and the other quite willing to never forget and continue waiting.

If there is a weakness to the movie, it is the contrived metaphors (the tree, the goldfish) that weigh down Sampit and Jamrat's story, the almost too obvious emotional anchors that cue the melodrama (of which I am not immune to because I admittedly had to pretend to clean my glasses when I was really quickly wiping off tears).

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

I liked Best in Time more than I should. Memory is triggered randomly and the DragonBallZ manga bit hit too close to home. Out of nowhere, with one hand freezing from holding a soda and the other half-buried in a popcorn bucket, there it was, this thing I thought I had forgotten.

If there's one thing that the movie is successful at it is making us remember that the past is as fluid as the future and that all we can do when it does rear its head---nostlagic, regretful, or whimsical---is sit back and enjoy the view.

4/5

Official website: www.kwamjumsan.com
Trailer:

The Unseeable เปนชู้กับผี

2009-04-07T19:16:00.000-07:00

เปนชู้กับผี
Pen Choo Kub Pee (The Unseeable)
Directed by Wisit Sasanatieng
Starring Suporntip Chuangrangsri, Tassawan Seneewongse, Siraphan Wattanajinda

"All seeable things are alike; each unseeable thing is unseeable in its own way." - Leo Tolstoy

Old-fashioned fear is organic in the hands of flashy Thai director Wisit Sasanatieng. Organic like reflex memory, the groaning shadows and fleeting shapes of things that go bump in the dark that make your heart skip a beat. Organic like cautionary tales, cob-webbed ghouls and pale, clawed hands that pull you into the darkness when you've been disobedient. Organic like love, the heart of darkness that pushes us to do foolish things that later come back. Oh, and do they come back.

The Unseeable is thick with ghosts, so thick it's impossible not to beathe in the dusty, musty smells of locked closets and abandoned rooms heavy with beauty. And of course, secrets. The attention to detail poured over to recreate the romantic 1930s is obssesive compulsive accurate. The looming high roofs, the ornate doors and tapestry, the grandly spacious rooms that echo the glory of Hollywood, a nostalgic lushness that at first seduces a young pregnant woman, Nualjin (Siraphun Wattanajinda), who is in search of temporary lodging while she looks for her missing husband. Madame Somchit, played with Gothic glee by Tassawan Seneewongse, is the grim caretaker who sternly forbids any trips to the main house where the mysterious widow, Runjuan (Supornthip Choungrangsee) lives.

The labyrinthine gardens and hallways beckon Nualjin out of her room and into the maddeningly crowded night. With only a low-burning oil lamp throwing, stretching, and distorting shadows, the unseeable surfaces.

There is macabre magic at work in Wisit Sasanatieng's frames. The ghosts are barely visible; glimpses above Nualjin's shoulder, a pale hand reaching out for moldy offerings from the mouth of a jar or a thorny shrub, a half naked man sitting on the roof, crawling down the walls---blink and you miss it. But if you do see it---them---the shivers go down the spine like mad.

Scripted by Kongkiat Khomsiri who also wrote Art of the Devil II, The Unseeable reveals itself like a mystery-thriller with bits and pieces of flashback that get less and less scary as it reaches the end, a twist that is not much of a surprise but still deftly, err, executed. What the script lacks in sophistication Sasanatieng makes up for with dazzlingly claustrophobic camera pans and a precise eye for capturing the slightest ghostly gesture, which has made the unseeable desperation and montrosity of a past that haunts deliriously cinematic.

Old-fashioned fear is organic, the haunted houses of our youth that we occassionaly visit in our nightmares. Organic like the quickening of the pulse when the street lights go out and we are walking alone in the dark. Organic like a lamp burning out. Organic like not turning off the lights after watching The Unseeable.

4/5

Stumbled upon Leo Tolstoy quote here, SEED Magazine article on Dark matter.
More photos and a review here, Coffee Coffee and More Coffee.

20世紀少年 (20th Century Boys)

2009-03-19T01:24:00.000-07:00

20世紀少年 (20th Century Boys)
Directed by YukihikoTsutsumi
Starring Toshiaki Karasawa, Etsushi Toyokawa, Takako Tokiwa

20th Century Boys, created by Naoki Urasawa, is a science fiction mystery manga that cleverly combines the careless innocence of youth with the harsher reality of growing up in a world scarred by failure and terrorism.

Fresh from the reeling disappointment of Watchmen (I've seen it twice, am now tempted to lower my initial rating but will let it stay there for the meantime), I was a bit cautious to watch another ambitious adaptation. Still, I thought, not Hollywood.

To put it succinctly, the first installment of the 20th Century Boys trilogy is tha bomb. *Scrambles off for actual words*

Folksies, this is how a comic book adaptation should be made. As a visual medium, the panels should not be the shoot list. A faithful tribute is just an excuse for being lazy. Details, no matter how meticulously brought to life, do not make a movie. Besides, where's the fun in that, eh? Director Yukihiko Tsutsumi is clever enough to filter and borrow only the iconic images of the manga and frames the rest with his own point of view.

Covering the first five volumes of the sprawling, kaleidoscopic epic, the movie moves at a brisk pace, which is very necessary since this is first and foremost a mystery story that goes back and forth the past and the present. 20th Century Boys hits the ground running with an ominous conversation between two prisoners locked up in separate cells hinting at a darkness that blankets the country before transitioning to 1973 (the actual opening of the manga), where a boy named Kenji plays along to the opening riffs of T. Rex's "20th Century Boy" on a broom as the crunchy guitars ROAR its way through sleepy classrooms. Later on we see Kenji (Karasawa) in 1987, drained and tired and forced to smile as he tries to balance running a grocery store with taking care of a baby his sister has mysteriously left behind.

When one of his regular patrons disappears, Kenji decides to take chance at visiting the client's home to check if the family left behind any form of payment and discovers instead a symbol on a wall that is connected to his childhood.

In another area in the city, the police find a body that is drained of blood, possibly connected to a virus that has been killing hundreds in Africa. Has it reached Japan?

And some place else, a cult is born, worshiping a messianic masked man simply called "Friend," the symbol that Kenji saw printed across the cult leader's mask.

It is the same symbol that one of Kenji's childhood friends writes a letter to him about before dying a few days later.

The key to solving the mystery is in Kenji's childhood and in his circle of friends. And this is where the 20th Century Boys truly shines. The flashbacks are infused with such relaxed nostalgia where the kicked-up dirt mixes with sweat and snot, and bullies are rampaging giants who can break your bone at a whim. The warmly-hued scenes of playing in the fields also serve as a grating and ultimately heartbreaking contrast to the complex lives the grown-ups are leading. Evil is no longer getting your ass whupped or imagined villains straight from the pages of comic books. Evil is failure, the postponed dreams that grow more distant as the years pass, but also as palpable as murder, terrorist bombings, and betrayal.

The screenplay wisely omits a few scenes from the manga, with a couple of rewrites (the back story of Donkey comes to mind) for the sake of pacing, but I don't mind at all because the soul of the movie is intact and not drowned out by the nifty special effects or a stoic reverence to the source material.

Much like Stephen King's novel "It," 20th Century Boys follows the lives of childhood friends who have grown apart but are reunited by a pact they made decades ago. And Tsutsumi never loses sight of the movie's center: That it is possible to confront the monsters and giants we have always feared because true friends will always have your back.

In the movie's climactic showdown on the eve of the new millennium, even if I knew what was about to happen, I continued to cheer on for Kenji and his friends, secretly hoping for a different ending. Tsutsumi has made me care for these characters all over again, and differently from when I was reading the manga. It's a different experience altogether.

Now, that's how you do it Mr. Snyder.

4/5

See prang (4BIA)

2009-03-19T01:18:00.000-07:00

สี่แพร่ง or See prang (4bia)
Written and directed by
Youngyouth Thongkunthon (The Iron Ladies) / Banjong Pisanthanakun (Shutter) /
Parkpoom Wongpoom (Shutter) /
Paween Purikitpanya (Body #19)

Filipinos love ghost stories. We love it so much that sharing a ghost story has become a staple in any type of gathering: birthdays, weddings, funerals, all it takes is for someone to mention a little strange episode---a flickering light bulb in a bathroom, a distant melodic humming, a passing shadow---and the stories start pouring in and almost everyone has something to share. There is a personal connection to the story and it runs deeper than urban legends.

Most of the time, it's in the blood.

Just the other night I heard something. My neighbor's son saw this. My sister's husband's nephew had a run in with. Sometimes it seems as if we live with ghosts. When one is moving to a new house or a new office, we often ask, "May multo ba dito?" (Is this place haunted?) while negotiating for lower rent. It is the natural aspect of the supernatural in our lives that make watching Asian horror movies more of an experiential trip down a dark memory lane.

Hollywood rarely frightens us. A university professor who had seen "The Exorcist," touted then as the scariest movie of all time, overheard an audience in the movie house casually say, "Nangyari yan sa pinsan ko eh, hindi naman to nakakatakot." (My cousin went through the same thing. This is not scary at all.) Serial killers, demonic haunting, that's not quite horror for us.

Ghosts, yes. Ghosts of friends and ex-lovers, jealous wives and cheating husbands, vengeful children and ignored admirers, yes, yes!

It's karma. It's that dark secret you've buried. It's your aunt's cousin's crazy son left in the mental institution that's tapping on your window 23 floors high.

And 4bia, uneven as it may be, is all this.

Happiness (Youngyooth Thongkonthun): 4bia doesn't get any scarier than its first installment. Feeding on our longing to make a connection, it tells the story of a young woman who is stuck in her room because of a broken leg and not surprisingly, she turns to her cellphone for a little company, having regular exchanges with a friend through text messages until she receives a mysterious SMS from a stranger, a lonely young man. They become "text mates" of course. When she sends him a picture of herself and he replies with the image that she has just sent, the fright that has slowly been creeping in abruptly grabs us by the throat and doesn't let go until a window shatters. The end is too neatly tied up but at this point, my racing heart didn't care. Maneerat Kamuan is nominated for Best Actress in Bangkok Critics Assembly Award . Wise Kwai has the details. 5/5

Tit for Tat (Paween Purikitpanya): Voodoo, using the term loosely, is a familiar form of revenge and Purikitpanya's frenetic and flashy direction tries its best to give it a sharper, bloodier edge but only succeeds in keeping my interest on the first half of the movie. A young, darker-skinned boy is relentlessly bullied and beaten up by a cool, fashionably hip group of friends. He conjures and cast curses through a book of witchcraft to inflict painful deaths without realizing the fatal ricochet of black magic. Glossy at best, the "Final Destination" body count frenzy doesn't allow for fear to settle in and results in a mechanical display of violence. One down, four to go. Yawn. The CGI ghouls/ghosts in the end only added to the too calculated orchestration of horror. 1/5

In The Middle (Banjong Pisanthanakun): Four buddies on a camping trip share ghost stories until one becomes too scared to sleep near the tent's entrance. The guy on the other end of the tent replies that if he were to die and become a ghost, he would haunt whoever is sleeping in the middle for a change. Of course, fate was listening too closely. "In the Middle" is refreshingly funny and geeky; the self-aware nods to other movies of the same genre (Shutter, The Others) lends it a tongue-in-cheek tone making one jump when the scares do shake the tent. Not exactly original but it is undeniably likable, like those stories you hear over beer. 3/5

The Last Flight (Parkpoom Wongpoon): The only a passenger, a corpse. That image alone, menacingly quiet in the dark rows of empty seats, is the movie itself. Everything else that surrounds it is familiar: the lurking jump-out-of-the-shadow scare, the lurking jump-out-of-the-shadow sound effects. As a study of atmosphere thick with anxiety, "The Last Flight" works quite well. Wongpoon composes images that linger, haunt even, but that's all they are, images too evocative to terrify. 2/5

The connection between the four segments is subtle and one that I admittedly had to look up. The chronology of the events (edited for spoilers) are:

Story 3 ("In the Middle"). One of the teenagers' name is Ter. Story 4 ("Last Flight"). Ter is mentioned as the brother of Pim's colleague and fellow stewardess, Tui (not seen in movie) who could not accompany the flight because something has happened to her brother. Story 1 ("Happiness"). The girl with the broken leg is seen reading the online news about a character's death. Story 2 ("Tit for Tat"). The image we see of the curse is the image of the girl with the broken leg.

4BIA Film Posters here.

Trailer to new Park Chan-Wook movie, THIRST

2009-03-16T02:55:00.001-07:00

Syndromes and a Century (Sang Sattawat)

2009-03-14T03:04:00.000-07:00

Meshes of the afternoon

Syndromes and a Century(Sang Sattawat)

Conceived by Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul
Starring Akanae Cherkam, Jaruchai Iarmaram, Sakda Kaewbuadee

*Syndromes and a Century is one of seven films commissioned for the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.

Amadeus is in the details here* so it isn't a diptych but variations on a theme, two views of a memory- - -they're movements. But whether across time or geography is what Joe Weerasethakul isn't making apparent - - - that's always been part of his elliptical charm and past/present and rural/urban overlap as dichotomies anyway so it's not as if knowing which is which is crucial to getting anything. And neither is getting anything per se. Knowing a bit about its Mozart connections sort of is, though, because as used as we may be to the way his work splits in half, the one thing we do get is how melodic the whole piece feels. How benign with happiness, too. Joe's remembering something he has no memory of- - -how his doctor parents met - - - so it's hazy, so it's fond, so idyll drapes it. From the first half's country hospital - - -where a young doctor is torn between her forthright suitor and the elusive orchid farmer she's starting to fall for and a dentist who wants to be a pop star strikes an odd friendship with a monk who wants to be a DJ- - -to the secret wing of the city hospital in the second half - - - where mysterious diseases with no names are treated and brandy is stashed in the hollows of prosthetic limbs for the staff to sneak a nip in. And all over, between bisected halves, murmurs and ricochets and rhymes and refrains and shapeshifts : an outdoor concert becomes an outdoor aerobics session, a pop CD given to the monk becomes a remote-controlled UFO two other monks play with, a solar eclipse becomes an ominous air duct, and one deceptively passive woman with one leg shorter than the other crosses over both segments unchanged by the transition the way other reappearing characters are. All exuding, even at its most obtuse, this persuasive calm that makes you fear decoding them will upset its delicate, contained loveliness. So you don't. There's bliss enough in just humming along to those magic changes, those melodies - - - prettified with mystery, soaked in bearable lightness, invincible to regret. * * * * *

Wonderful Town (2008)

2009-02-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

Let's do, err, laundry.

Wonderful Town
Written and directed by Aditya Assarat
Starring Supphasit Kansen, Anchalee Saisoontorn, Dul Yaambunying

The world was still heady with holiday hangovers when the news of a great disaster of mythological proportion filled our screens and stunned us immobile by its enveloping devastation.

"Wonderful Town" takes us back to the beaches of Phuket, Thailand where a tsunami claimed hundreds of thousands of lives four years ago. The rushing and crashing of waves fill the screen, a hypnotic lullaby that sings of loss, strangely graceful and sinister at the same time. We get flooded in by foreboding before we get a first glimpse of a town framed by ragged mountains with patches of jungle, idyllic and murmuring with impressionist pastoral warmth. Wonderful, from a distance.

And it is this calm glamour that Ton (Supphasit Kansen), an architect from Bangkok, falls under. He checks in an old hotel and later, while on a site visit to oversee the rebuilding of a hotel along the coast of Phuket, reveals to his foreman that he volunteered for this assignment, preferring the solitude and quiet over the busy city, preferring to stay in an almost empty hotel in a town muted by predictability.

At the hotel, Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn) peacefully goes about performing her chores, changing sheets, folding towels, carefully but vacantly. But when she enters Ton's room, for the first time we see a hint of a sparkle in her eyes, a little tension in the arches of her shoulders. Later that evening, after searingly casual introductions, Na presses her ear against Ton's door, listening to him sing under the shower. The darkness rolls away from the shore as the second half of the movie delicately follows the relaxed conversations and uninhibited sweetness of falling in love that is reminiscent of Il Gon-Song's 2004 movie, Git or Feathers in the Wind. Na spends her afternoons sleeping in Ton's unmade bed, carefully following the creases with her fingers. Ton steals glances and kisses as the wind stirs up a line of drying towels.

Aditya Assarat's eye allows us to soak in the details until every curve of a landscape, every thoughtful brushing of skin against shadow against skin, every hissing summer blade, becomes imprinted in memory and are dialogues in themselves. This hypnotic spell, this immersion of gestures, motives and scenery in a single breath is much like Apichatpong Weerasethakul's atmosphere of strange calm where the mundane is amplified by steady camera pans until it reaches delirious surrealism. But where most of Weerasethakul's movies take a detour to the fantastic, Assarat's abruptly changes in tone as we hear the sea once again while the lovers make love in the darkness, the thief that steals, the waves that are hungry.

Na's brother, Wit (Dul Yaambunying), disapproves of his sister's illicit affair, which has stirred the town to life with gossip, and decides, along with his gang of thugs, to do something about it.

The abandoned haunted house, the crazy local boy, and the gurgling sea---like a forgotten memory from the beginning of the film---rear their ugly prophecies and suddenly fall into place. In an ending that is evocative of Weerasethakul's "Blissfully Yours," drowned ghosts not different from a town left hollow by tragedy, remain ghosts that pull others down to its murky, secretive depths.

"Wonderful Town" is adjective and irony, a heavy current with invisible waves. Assarat's first full-length feature is deceptively haunting, but its message does not lie in an aimlessly drifting bottle in the ocean. It's the in-between, the love (even) among the ruined, that can sweep us away like nothing else can.

5/5

Links:

Wonderful Town Wins 5 Subanahongsa Awards (Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal)
Aditya Assarat's Wikipedia Page

Shi gan (Time)

2009-02-11T20:14:00.000-08:00

Days of open hands.

It's a strange feeling, getting old. I feel the same, sleep the same, I even sound the same. But the mirror in the bathroom disagrees. I have gotten heavier around the middle. My eyes a little darker; my hair a little lighter with gray. My teeth stained from the hundreds of cigarettes and a thousand cups of coffee that I have and will consume.

Time has made me wiser. But also older. And let's face it: More and more less of what I was.

I see this sometimes reflected on my partner's eyes. And it's a painful thing to see.

Kim Ki-Duk takes this pain and creates an admonishing parable in his 13th movie, "Time."

Shi gan (Time)
Written and Directed by Kim Ki-Duk
Starring: Sung Hyun-Ah (Woman is the Future of Man), Ha Jung-Woo(The Unforgiven)

Familiarity breeds monotony, and in the two-year relationship of Seh-hee and Ji-Woo (Ha Jung-Woo) it has resulted in obligatory sex and predictable dates in a cafe. In trademark Kim Ki-Duk fashion, Seh-Hee asks Ji-Woo to think of someone else while they fuck. The sex is hotter. Seh-hee is destroyed. The following day, Seh-Hee disappears and without telling Ji-Woo, undergoes cosmetic surgery to change her face beyond recognition. Six months later, Ji-Woo meets See-hee (Sung Hyun-Ah) in the cafe he frequents and dangerous sparks fly out of the blue and into the black. See-hee is Seh-hee and demands the clueless Ji-Woo to choose between them.

This is definitely Kim Ki-Duk's most obvious work as he (angrily) slaps on the movie his disdain for Korea's, and everyone else's, obsession with physical beauty. After Ji-Woo realizes that See-hee and Seh-hee are the same woman, he also gets his face altered leaving Seh-hee desperately looking for him; the feel of his hands in hers her only anchor. If the hands fit, so to speak. And this is a Kim Ki-Duk movie where the laws of reality are ignored and the fantastic and the surreal exist as truths. In the end, "Time" admonishes too much to be really provoking. The vicious cycle ending comes across as preachy, and not the ambigous catharsis that we've come to expect from the director.

It is withot doubt though that "Time" is visually magnificent. The statue park of Baegumi on the island of Mo which breathtakingly displays the sculptures of Lee Il-ho becomes the only constant in the passage of time and tide. The iron hands that sometimes rise from the depths and oftentimes cradle the lovers is the heart that remains a child. Tarnished, yes, but unchanging.
3/5

Sud sanaeha (Blissfully Yours)

2009-02-09T17:49:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the jungle.

Sud Sanaeha (Blissfully Yours)
Written and Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Starring Kanokporn Tongaram, Min Oo, Jenjira Jansuda

Ever had that indecipherable feeling of dreamy watchfulness? You become a vigilant critic, every crease, every scent is memorized as if it were your last day on earth. You become a watchful romantic, haunted by disbelief at the clarity of someone's skin. You become heady with desire; the alliance of hormones and heart rush to the head, an assault of contentment.

Bliss.

In Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Blissfully Yours," bliss begins with escape. The movie starts all too suddenly, in the middle of a scene. A man (Min Oo) afflicted by a mysterious skin decease is being treated by a doctor. He is accompanied by Roong (Tongaram) and an elderly woman, Orn, played by Jansuda with a consistent undercurrent of slyness. We discover the relationships much later in the film. The man, Min, turns out to be an illegal immigrant that Roong, a young factory worker, pines for. Orn helps the lovers navigate through life in Thailand in exchange of cash, and in the afternoon of their visit to the clinic, she helps Roong out of work so Roong can spend time with Min. Orn lends them her car and the two drive out into the dusty open road.

45 minutes into the movie, as the road trip begins and the scenery changes from dry to lush, the movie credits roll out. Roong turns on the radio and a Thai version of Summer Samba (So Nice) plays. Roong puts lotion on her and Min's hands. Fingers become flirty and playful. Colors deepen, yellow to golden, green to deeper green. They step out of the car and walk into a forest.

Bliss begins. Bliss takes over.

The next hour of the film is a celebration of naked intimacy, of moments of abandon at once introspective and instant. Weerasethakul's steady shots frame Min and Roong's childlike euphoria with journalistic clarity yet even the simplest gestures---picking wild berries, Roong resting on Min's lap---are soaked in a languid dream-like state. A waking dream impossibly captured and almost impossible to fully grasp.

In the meantime, Orn is also in the forest frolicking with her lover when her husband's motorcycle gets stolen. Tom, a factory worker, chases after the thief, and Orn wanders into the forest. Where Weerasethakul's "Tropical Malady" took a surreal turn in its second act (a parable that admonishes desire?), "Blissfully Yours" flourishes with calm bewilderment.

Orn stumbles into Min and Roong by a stream; Orn says that somehow the trail disappeared and her wandering led her to them. The stream, clear and reflective, becomes release and salvation for the three characters. Again, Weerasethakul elevates the ordinary to wonder lust. I was specifically transfixed when Orn began to intensely watch her hands under the running stream, palms up then down, weaving, worm-like shadows running across them. And then a kind of miracle. A delicate distortion, the healing cold.

"Blissfully Yours" is a state of being on film that's nearing abstract. But once you pull away, once you let the scenery sing and watch the lovers fall asleep, the bafflement becomes an expanding sun in your stomach. Lightheaded, you desire, too, to lie on the bank and listen to the stream whisper:

Follow your bliss.

5/5

The Thank You Girls

2009-02-03T23:22:00.000-08:00

The Thank Your Girls (Kung giunsa pagbuhat og binisayang law-oy: Original script title)
Directed by Charliebebs Gohetia
Cast: Gie Salonga, Pidot Villocino, July Jimenez, E.J. Pantujan, Kit Poliquit

No queen of the desert, no Julie Newmar fetishists can carry a sparkly candle against "The Thank You Girls," a colorful troupe of hard-traveling drag queens in search of a title and a little tenderness. This low budget independent movie is rich in characterization and brims with lust for life; a rollicking fuck-you to poverty, stubbornly poised to laugh at misfortunes and loneliness. Which is quite a feat, really, as both social commentary vehicle---purely coincidental as these girls are set against a backdrop of debt and prejudice---and a gay movie that truly rejoices in what truly defines the homosexuals in this country: quick wit and glittery make-up. And love, of course. Love of and for companionship. Minus the burden of gratuitous nudity and sex, "The Thank You Girls" is able to focus on a staccato of stories, which bounces back and forth from the actual pageant to the next one, until all the girls' mishaps and raison d'etre are told, before finally embarking on the last pageant. But somehow, it's different this time around. After all the hilarious question and answer exercises (If you are stranded in an island, how did you get there?) and casual confessions, it feels like I actually know these girls and I did wish them well as I sat quietly in my seat. As the movie reaches the final stage, spotlights on, stomach in and chest out, a dream sequence all of a sudden rolls out. Glamour shots, flowing white gowns, expensive make-up. A quiet peek inside their fantasies, our fantasies at one point in our lives: To be blindingly beautiful. And if this is what it feels like to be onstage, even if it's just a fleeting moment of grace, then it's all worth it. 4/5

Minyeo-neun goerowo (200 Pounds Beauty)

2009-02-02T19:29:00.000-08:00

She ain't heavy...now.

Minyeo-neun goerowo (200 Pounds Beauty)
Directed by Kim Yong-hwa
Cast: Ju Jin-mo (Happy End), Kim Ah-jung (When Romance Meets Destiny)

Andy Lau still gets the award for best acting in a fat latex suit in the hilarious and heartbreaking "Love on a Diet" but Kim Ah-Jung does come a close second for playing Hannah, the overweight "backstage singer" of a catty pop star who literally brings the house down with her dancing. A little too much, like most of the fat jokes that roll out mercilessly during the first hour of the movie, but Kim Ah-jung's self-deprecating tics and troubling earnestness keep the material grounded, until she loses the latex and the movie finally moves from sitcom drudgery to genuinely funny. Even as the gorgeous Jenny, a persona Hannah invents, she still acts ugly-awkward. "200 Pounds Beauty" lightly deconstructs beauty: What one can get away with and how one can never run away from an ugly past. It delivers its share of commentary on plastic surgery, not too deeply, but enough to ask weighty questions. Underneath the layers of comedy and Korean culture exposition, underneath the skin and fat, is a desperate search for acceptance and love no matter what the cost. Hannah is too overweight to be wanted; Jenny is too perfect to be touched. After yet another rejection, Hannah/Jenny laments: I endured the pain when they were cutting through my skin and bones. But this hurts more. I'm quoting badly of course. But it did get me to thinking, is love worth the pain of a transformation? If you had the means, would you get rid of the fat around your stomach, the weight that drags your feet, that look on people's faces? Yeah, me too. Funny, huh? 3/5

Rak haeng Siam (The Love of Siam)

2009-01-28T20:17:00.000-08:00

The Love of Sherbet

Rak haeng Siam (The Love of Siam)
Written and Directed by Chukiat Sakveerakul (13 Beloved)
Cast: Witwisit Hiranyawongkul (4 Romances), Mario Maurer (Friendship), Cheryarn Boonyasak (4bia), Sinjai Plengpanich (The Legend of Suriyothai)

Somewhere in the second half of the movie, the characters converge in Siam Square. The camera follows the craning necks and the long last looks, the oblivious, the forgotten and the ignored, under blinking lights down clogged streets. It’s a short sequence but it has left its mark. “The Love of Siam” feels accidental. The placid storytelling takes its time and lets life run its true, natural course. And the effect is almost incomprehensible. The story is quite straightforward: Two boys Mew, the withdrawn wimp, and Tong, the rugged menace, become friends in a quiet neighborhood until Tong’s family is struck by tragedy and had to move house. Years later, Mew (Witwisit Hiranyawongkul) and Tong (Mario Maurer) meet again, rekindle their friendship, but both now weighed down by growing pains, the former’s “frightening loneliness” and Tong’s crumbling family life. And here, the movie goes where no mainstream teen romance (as the film was marketed in Thailand to gain a wider audience) dared to venture.Chukiat Sakveerakul's script is delicate and never becomes precious with sentimentality. The graceful camera movements panning across bedrooms, streets and classrooms, the steady shots of a family unraveling or a fragile kiss, keep the pace slow but thoroughly involving. With the Director’s Cut running 178 minutes, one would expect a drop somewhere—even the much acclaimed “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” had a saggy middle—but not a second is wasted.Sakveerakul cleverly slips in enough quirky tics that widen Mew and Tong’s universes. The feisty neighbor who has resorted to chick-lit voodoo to win Mew’s heart, the band manager that finds herself entangled in Tong’s family, and the treasure hunt games. The treasures? A toy. Then a goodbye. “The Love of Siam” is a deceptively simple, no-frills family drama. But like Mew adding the missing nose of a wooden puppet as tears of rejection and gratitude run down his uncomplaining face, I am left grasping for reasons and motives. For whys and what-ifs.“The Love of Siam” feels accidental, much like the love it defines: We simply can’t choose where our love lands. 5/5

20th Century Boys

2008-04-23T23:59:00.000-07:00

No longform manga since Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira rocked my planet harder than Naoki Urusawa's 20th Century Boys - - - except maybe his Monster, which I haven't read yet. Moviebound for years now, a teaser's out at fucking last. And a teaser it is. Superlative use of that T Rex riff notwithstanding, it isn't much . . .but if you've read the manga or if you're not in kindergarten anymore, this will make you drool more than that potentially sucky kid's movie with Robert Downey in red armor coming to brand us stupid in a few weeks.

4bia

2008-04-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

Stupid,punny title. See Prang rings better. The four-piece Thai horror anthology tackles various makes and models of fears - - phobias, get it? In rough order - - - a mysterious text message, a cursed diploma, a camping trip gone fuckup and a dead princess on a plane. My soft spot for horror anthologies notwithstanding,what hooks me is the involvement of Yongyoot Thongkongtoon of Iron Ladies and the tag team of Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom who may have soiled us with the abysmal Alone but also gave us the brilliant Shutter. Quality, then,of a sort. Plus, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom go solo on an episode each so maybe now we'll know who fucked Alone up. Or not. The plane episode (Wongpoom's) has burrowed under my skin on those snippets alone - - - but everything else looks promising. Wise Kwai has a more in-depth breakdown.

Linger

2008-01-11T07:14:00.000-08:00

Mad Detective is on DVD. The Sparrow premieres in Berlin this year. And Linger opens January 10 in Hong Kong. When one of your favorite filmmakers on the planet is as indefatigably prolific as and as impervious to making a dud as Johnnie To is, heaven is a place on earth.

Invisible Waves

2007-11-29T02:35:00.000-08:00

Love hurts.

Invisible Waves
Director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang
Stars Tadanobu Asano (Café Lumiere) / Kang Hye-Jeong (Welcome to Dongmagkol)
Ken Mitsuishi(The Vanished)

Grow up among nuns and you get real cozy with both the notion and throb of guilt, wear it like a scar that recedes but never really fades. It’s like a bitch monkey on your back, up there with regret, and often the same thing, for the vehemence of its nag and its bite - - - and man, can it bite. So you get how the blood on Tadanobu Asano's chef's hands is actually making him physically sick. You also get how his milieu's suddenly irradiated with bulletins of his sin - - -a decrepit hotel room in Phuket with graffiti that reads redrum, for instance. You get it mostly because he's your quintessential noir fall guy - - - works for a gangster, bangs the boss's wife, feeds her a spoonful of poison under orders, goes on the lam, gets shot to death, comes back to life, takes revenge - - - and we've seen remorse manifest itself as anxiety, paranoia and stomach disorder many times in many noirs. But this is only half the quintessential noir you think it is, perhaps even less, and those echoes of the noir piece it most closely hews to - - - John Boorman's great Point Blank - - - bouncing off the walls are only just echoes, and what Pen-Ek really siphons off to make weird green soup with is its ambiguous shadow instead- - - that Lee Marvin's resurrected hitman could be a ghost. Title alone's fat with metaphor- - -rebirth, purification, cleansing - - -and this isn't so much Pen-Ek headtripping on the vagaries of guilt but more on the currencies of atonement. Because guilt with no out is nihilistic and pointless. Grow up among nuns and you get real cozy with that, too. You can see the shape its arc wants to be - - - a sort of karmic coming to grace. And Christopher Doyle's palette isn't so much bleak as it is an opaque remove - - - everybody here's from someplace else, adrift and seeking anchor points, talking in a stunted English that evokes their unmooring. That entire first half on the cruise ship he escapes on with its malfunctioning cabins, bloodstained fishtank full of baby sharks, childhood friends he doesn't remember and repentant barkeep who's a ringer for his Dad going sensei on repentance has such a rich, purgatorial charge, you wish it never disembarked for the lukewarm second half that brings everything full circle back to Hong Kong, a cleavage it doesn't make it out of whole. Guilt is not a cul-de-sac and there's ecstasy in the promise of transcendence alone. But the impertinent, overlong confrontation with the double-crossing boss sucks the fatalistic conclusion of whatever measure of epiphany it might have shivered with, leaving nothing but metaphysical void. Withdrawal like that can sap you into a stupor. * * *

Total Bangkok

2007-11-18T21:48:00.001-08:00

Pen-Ek does shoe ads.

Home Pro

2007-11-18T21:38:00.000-08:00

Pen-Ek does bathroom fixture ads.

Mad Detective

2007-10-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

Around here, Johnnie To directing Lau Ching Wan again has all the bang to wet panties as Martin Scorsese directing Robert DeNiro again, John Woo directing Chow Yun Fat again, Seijun Suzuki directing Joe Shishido again.

Mad Detective , then. Directed by Johnnie To. Starring Lau Ching Wan.

Coming soon to soil geek underwear planetwide.

Eye In The Sky

2007-08-30T08:53:00.001-07:00

Simon Yam and Tony Leung in versus mode. If it looks like this is built on classic Milkyway chassis, that's because Johnnie To has his producing mitts all over it. His longtime scripter Yau Nai Hoi pops his directing cherry, threatens to be the next Derek Yee. Let's hope so.

Kantoku Banzai

2007-08-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

Loopier than Takeshis from the looks of it. Funner, too. Big on the serene brutality of his noirs- - -Sonatine, Hana-Bi , Brother - - - as I am, I could live with Takeshi taking this phase of his a few more movies down the line. Has its own weird voltage,give it that. Funny, too. And the world needs a new Kitano movie as often as he can make 'em. Does wonders for the environment.

End hero worship. Cue trailer.

Sakebi (Retribution)

2007-07-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

Hideo Nakata’s got game but not even he can touch Kiyoshi Kurosawa as J-horror overlord. Visual intelligence alone gives Kiyoshi dibs. And the way his movies - - - Kairo, Cure, Charisma- - -get under your skin and stay there until it grows cultures of unease. I give. I've been stealing from him wholesale, and shoplifting bits from Nakata as well, over the last month doing this scriptwriting gig. He's been out of the horror loop for a bit. Sakebi is his comeback. Goody.

Epitaph

2007-07-01T19:50:00.000-07:00

As ghost milieus go, haunted hospitals have mileage. Spiffy come-on for something possibly classic . . .or possibly a pile of dog poo. Director's a newbie who's done time with Park Chan Wook so we can worry less. Let's just hope those hair strands near the end are just design elements.

2007-06-16T04:45:00.001-07:00

Tonari No Totoro

Yummy fur.

Tonari No Totoro
Directed by : Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away)

The whimsy's there if that's your thing and there are days this is like a down blanket for me, something to keep warm in - - -that bus stop vignette and my wanting to play it over and over again as if looping would somehow enable me to cross over, there's no way you can break that down to a science, no way to peg why it works in the way it does, no way to do it again, not even Miyazaki himself tried. Could be the wet, shimmery palette's what makes it - - -and the whole piece ,really - - - so immersive, a kind of hush. Also the absence of anything going on in the usual sense of anything going on - - -two sisters billeted in a country house, their mother in a hospital and oh, next door lives a family of snuggly tree spirits that help them plant a tree, take them on a bus ride and later flying through the night. It's ambient, almost. The magic circle aura holds until you get the sense that the supernatural never overwhelms the natural, that there's a certainty to the creeping uncertainty in its peripheries- - -and you get it. Miyazaki would go on to do more ornate work - - - wiser, prettier,better. But what he nailed here that he won't nail again to such a degree is what Erice nailed in El Espiritu De La Colmena : that blinding headrush of what it's like to be a kid - - - and the sense of wonder and threat that come with it. And he nails it not because the magic he taps into makes those wisps of foreboding go away, like they do in neo-Disney mollycoddle. But precisely because it doesn't. * * * * *

Post Written for the Ghiblogathon.