Lessons From the School of Inattention

Tanging Yaman (2000)

2012-01-16T23:05:00.002+08:00

Tanging Yaman (Laurice Guillen, 2000)

English Title: A Change of Heart

After several years away from the Philippines and her already illustrious career as a filmmaker, Laurice Guillen returned with Tanging Yaman (A Change of Heart), a tearjerker that unabashedly showcases Catholic faith not only as an underlying theme but as a narrative conceit. The film was both a commercial and critical success. Perhaps more than a decade worth of films that delighted in sex and naked bodies has given the Filipino audience a thirst for something more spiritual.

Guillen’s crafts her most religious film not from the point of view of one who is holier than thou, but from the eyes of an ordinary person who has most likely dabbled in various sins. Her characters are less than perfect. Loleng (Gloria Romero), the family matriarch, is a devout Catholic and spends her days hearing mass and communing with her fellow faithful. Danny (Johnny Delgado), her eldest son who stays in the family home to take care of her, seems satisfied of his modest position in life. Art (Edu Manzano), the middle child and clearly the most successful and financially capable of the siblings, is quietly jealous of his older brother who has always been the favored child despite his lack of any real successes in life. Grace (Dina Bonnevie), the only daughter who migrated to the United States, is too concerned of her family’s finances that she has neglected the real needs of her family.

When an opportunity to sell the farm, the family’s remaining asset, arose, repressed anger and other emotions start to surface, threatening the already fractured family to crumble further. This pushes Loleng, in a desperate attempt to rescue her family, to sacrifice herself, leading the characters in Guillen’s well-orchestrated melodrama to reconcile and live the rest of their lives like true Catholics.

As with all films that are inspired with overly good intentions, Tanging Yaman is enveloped by an atmosphere that predictably directs the narrative towards its amiable conclusion. From the light effects that drown the face of Romero during her moment of self-sacrifice that has been done and redone in various films for comedic effect to the use of mass songs to provide a sense of overt religiosity in the plot, the film is too littered with significant details that nearly push the film from being merely a portrait of a family nearly torn to pieces by greed and envy into a proselytizing sermon that seeks for its audience a result that is more likely achievable in a sharing session than inside the darkened halls of a movie theater.

Thankfully, the film is balanced enough to be enjoyed even from the perspective of a viewer who has no intention of being pulled into religious didactics. It is exquisitely put together. Guillen, who has always laced her films with a certain sensuality that can only be fleshed out by a feminine mind, only subtly suggests that kind of sensuality here. In one scene, Hilda Koronel’s character talks of her dreams of travelling to the United States to her humble husband, dancing with her husband to the romantic song from the radio. The scene by itself seems very ordinary, but as framed by Guillen, and as acted by both Koronel and Delgado with enough levels of playfulness and domestic mischief, it results in something subtly sweet and tender.

Films with religious motivations are often criticized for being too disconnected with the realities of human imperfections to be of real effect. They cater mostly to those who are already religious, reconfirming for them the faith they have sworn to uphold. Fortunately, Guillen is too much a humanist to overestimate the Catholic faith. Tanging Yaman has for characters men and women who dream, sin, fight, lie, love, hate, forgive, cry, and laugh for all the correct reasons and aren’t judged negatively precisely because of these very human acts. Without the miracles and the preaching that the film relies so much on, the film is just simply a well-crafted, brilliantly-acted, and elegantly directed family drama.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

2011: Philippine Cinema

2012-01-14T17:00:00.000+08:00

2011: Highlights in Film

2011 will probably be remembered as the year when analogue film formally gave way to digital. The last of the motion picture film cameras were made in 2011, following an announcement by top manufacturers of film cameras that they are no longer making analogue film cameras to make way for digital film cameras. In the Philippines, where the advent of digital film has sparked a creative revolution within the film community which has long been taken hostage by the capital of mainstream studios, 2011 saw several films which regarded the use of analogue film in filmmaking as an adjunct of reminiscence. Perhaps the most important of these films is Shireen Seno’s Big Boy, which created an aesthetic landscape composed of very loosely connected images weaved together by merely a semblance of a plot that was adapted from the converge of the memories of various members of Seno's family.

The movement towards digitalization of filmmaking has of course created a sort of debate among filmmakers and critics who perceive analogue and digital film as distinctly different mediums that should be utilized appropriately. While there are films such as Big Boy or Raya Martin’s Buenas Noches, España, an experimental film that explores the forgotten love affair between Spain and the Philippines through fragments that compose childhood memories, that separates analogue and digital in terms of utility and aesthetics, there are films like Loy Arcenas’ beautifully crafted Niño or Alvin Yapan’s seductively ambiguous Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (The Dance of Two Left Feet) or Mes de Guzman’s arrestingly lyrical Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (At the Corner of Heaven and Earth) or Jade Castro’s shockingly irreverent but undeniably hilarious Zombadings: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (Zombadings: Kill Remington with Fear) that are all very classic narratives and could have worked whether or not they were shot in analogue or digital.

Of course, the primary rationale towards the digitalization of filmmaking is economy, at least for the Philippines. Simply put, shooting in digital film is cheap, or to be more accurate, cheaper than shooting in analogue film. This has allowed for films that have themes that are not marketable to the masses to be created without any expectation of monetary compensation. Very personal films, tackling aspects that are too intimately connected to the filmmaker to be regarded as universal such as the death of a father in Khavn de la Cruz’s Pahinga (Breather) or the secret life of a man uncovered by his wife through letters he left behind after he passed away in Laurice Guillen’s Maskara (Mask).

Then there are the films from regions that have little to no expectation into becoming markets for film to force them to create their own films. These so-called regional films are more personal reflections for their crafters than products. Busong (Palawan Fate) is for its director Auraeus Solito a summation of his creative life, a long-awaited reunion with his roots as directed by the timeless stories relayed to him by his mother. Sakay sa Hangin (Windblown) may not be considered a regional film since its director, Regiben Romana, is neither a member of the Talaandig tribe or is a resident of the Bukidnon province in Mindanao. However, the film stretches itself from being a mere curious portrait of the ethnographic distinctions of the tribe into a parable that is too authentic and too heartfelt to be conveniently discarded from the category.

Eduardo Roy, Jr.’s Bahay Bata (Baby Factory), a heartfelt foray into the busiest maternity ward in the world, has for its parents the many real-time successes like the many films of Brillante Mendoza. Its obsession for truth seeps towards the method of its filmmaking, mixing documentary footage with a narrative framework to flesh out its underlying agenda of exposing the problems of reproductive health in the Philippines. On the other side of the spectrum is Antoinette Jadaone’s Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay, which bends what we conceive as reality, utilizing the form of documentary filmmaking to make it seem that its imagined plot involving a famous bit player who suddenly finds herself nominated for an acting award is grounded on reality, to reveal certain truths about the vices and virtues of the entertainment business.

Lawrence Fajardo’s Amok, Benito Bautista’s Boundary and Lav Diaz’s Elehiya ng Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan (Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution), on the other hand, are clear works of fiction, owing their existence to the many genre works that have come before them. Amok is clearly more concept than fiction. Set in the crowded and chaotic junction of two major Manila streets, the film merely gives glimpses of lives quickened, changed, or abruptly halted by a singular act of brazen violence. Boundary, set mostly within the confines of a taxi, portrays the streets of Manila with a certain level of mistrust, allowing for a storyline that unites top-level corruption with bottom-level criminality. Finally, Elehiya ng Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan is Diaz’s take on the noir, where typical fractured Diaz characters get embroiled in a story of crime and greed, while a visitor from the past (her reason for existence, for us, is an open-ended mystery) walks the same streets they live in with decades worth of melancholy.

2011 saw all the trends, quirks, and mannerisms that were developed throughout the years evolve to maturity. There are reportedly great films still left unseen, due to the fact that I have to juggle paid fealty to the law, my irreplaceable passion for the moving image, and whatever personal life I have left. Despite that, the fifteen films that have found themselves in this list more or less reflects the fallacy of the concept of Philippine cinema, that there is a direction the so-called national cinema needs to concentrate in, or that there is a single way of writing or shooting films, or that there is a formula for quality as there is a formula for commercial success. Moving towards directions already treaded or pioneering towards areas nobody else has explored, these films deserve to be seen, to be enjoyed, to be discussed.

Top 15 Feature Length Filipino Films of 2011:

1. Big Boy (Shireen Seno)
2. Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone)
3. Sakay sa Hangin (Windblown, Regiben Romana)
4. Niño (Loy Arcenas)
5. Pahinga (Breather, Khavn de la Cruz)
6. Elehiya ng Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan (Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution, Lav Diaz)
7. Bahay Bata (Baby Factory, Eduardo Roy, Jr.)
8. Buenas Noches, España (Raya Martin)
9. Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (At the Corner of Heaven and Earth, Mes de Guzman)
10. Amok (Lawrence Fajardo)
11. Zombadings: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (Zombadings: Kill Shokot with Fear, Jade Castro)
12. Busong (Palawan Fate, Auraeus Solito)
13. Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (The Dance of Two Left Feet, Alvin Yapan)
14. Boundary (Benito Bautista)
15. Maskara (Mask, Laurice Guillen)

Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring at ang Kuk-ok (1995)

2012-01-08T22:44:00.000+08:00

Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring at Kuk-ok (Auraeus Solito, 1995)

English Title: The Brief Lifespan of Fire, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring and Kuk-ok

With only the entire nine minute-running time of Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring at ang Kuk-ok (The Brief Lifespan of Fire, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring and Kuk-ok), filmmaker Auraeus Solito was able to convey the components of Palaw’an culture that ensured its survival amidst the allure of modern culture. Solito, whose mother was one of the few descendants of the shaman-kings of Palawan who were sent to Manila for education following the efforts of the government to reach out to indigenous tribes in the Philippines, was gifted with stories from his wealthy heritage. The short film, which is merely an excerpt from Solito’s own play, is but one of the thousands of tales transmitted aurally from generation to generation. With the power and reach of cinema, Solito has ascertained the preservation of his treasured culture, along with it, the virtues and values his own culture holds dear.

The short film tells the myth of Suring, who casts a spell of immense beauty but is still judged by humanity. She retreats to the forests where she is far from the prying eyes of humans, and there, she befriends the Kuk-ok, a creature who can transform into any form. Solito, acknowledging the essence of the stories conveyed by his mother to be the act of telling and listening, withholds from turning the film into merely a package of visual pleasures founded on the supernatural foundations of the story. The myth is actually told by Suring, relaying with precise emotions her very own tale to the film’s audience. In a way, the audience becomes the direct heirs of the Palaw’an oral tradition, inheriting the knowledge of such tale straight from the being.

The sacred act of storytelling is preserved in the film. Solito only adds visual inflections. Using very crude stop-motion animation which turns Suring’s environment into a troupe of swirling and spinning performers that enunciate the highs and lows of the plot, Solito evokes a definite stance of enchantment in his recreation of how the legend was imparted to him. Leaves conspire to form a magnificent headdress for Suring, turning her into a terrifying presence. Tattoos are magically painted on her face, beautiful blues and yellows to represent her relationship with nature, and black and red to express the corruption dealt by humanity’s cynicism. Seashells, flowers, twigs and branches are turned into delicate brushstrokes and punctuation marks, tools in imparting the subtle complexities of the seemingly simple creation story.

Because of the dazzling colors and movements in the film, one can only surmise Solito’s wonderment when his mother tells him the story when he was a child. In a very mundane city such as Manila, these stories, especially to a boy whose imagination is not limited by the browns and greys of the metropolis, are sure to be sudden bursts of colors and textures. The film is successful in turning Solito’s very personal and private joys as a child astounded by his mother’s beautiful stories into something universal, where anyone can find himself trapped in the pleasures of being transported in a different place and era with only the power of voice and practical cinematic effects, without need of the excesses provided by computer-generated fakery.

Solito has always been a filmmaker who mines his unique circumstance in the world to etch his life as an artist. Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005), although based on a lovely screenplay written by Michiko Yamamoto, is grounded on Solito’s own childhood experiences in his Manila neighborhood. Pisay (Philippine Science, 2007) on the other hand, situates his creativity within his own academic and political coming-of-age in a peculiar science high school. Boy (2009) is a peek into his sexual awakening. Basal Banar (Sacred Ritual of Truth, 2002), a documentary that dutifully details his rediscovery of his Palaw’an roots, lays the groundwork for his narrative films on the bevy of stories he has learned through the years. Busong (Palawan Fate, 2011), the first of the several narrative films he plans, finds Solito in that situation where he returns to Palaw’an, not as a child fascinated by that missing link, or a traveller searching for that missing link, but as an advocate, tasked to perpetuate, the same way his mother and his ascendants did, their heritage through the art of storytelling.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

2011: Philippine Shorts

2012-01-05T22:59:00.001+08:00

2011: Philippine Shorts

Criminally overlooked perhaps because their commercial value is limited, short films are like really effective pick-up lines. Within a matter of a few carefully selected words, emotions are captured, leading to what the pick-upper hopes would be a night of satisfying orgasms (or delectable conversations, depending on the moral barometer of the suave pick-upper). Limited to a running time of less than an hour, short filmmakers have the daunting task of creating worlds, forwarding ideas, convincing cynics, and expressing long-repressed feelings, while establishing an aesthetic and motivation that would set them apart from other audio-visual campaigns.

Raya Martin’s Ars Colonia, which was commissioned by the Hubert Bals Fund, was shot in hi-8 analogue video. Starting with the image of the silhouette of what seems to be a Spanish conquistador backdropped by an a mountainous isle surrounded by raging sees, the film suddenly explodes in what is either a blazing battleground or a fireworks celebration (the dazzling visual of colors bursting resulted from Martin drawing over the actual film with markers of various colors). Also shot in analogue film, Gym Lumbera and Timmy Harn’s Class Picture features various schoolchildren whose yearly class photographs are being taken in the beach. The film, beautifully faded like a memory stored for decades and suddenly rediscovered, evokes the fragile pleasures of reminiscence. Martin’s Ars Colonia, Lumbera and Harn’s Class Picture, and Shireen Seno’s Big Boy has turned analogue film into time machines, transporting viewers to places and events remembered from a respectable distance.

Jon Lazam’s Hindi sa Atin ang Buwan (The Moon is Not Ours) was filmed from a consumer-level video camera. A sequence of images of travel connected by ingenious editing (at one point, the moon bursts into fireworks before putting the audience within the alienated safety of the interior of a taxi with the unnamed protagonist in a moment of longing), the short converts the randomness of vacation shoots into a document of the heartbreak of distance, starting from rapid movements and ending in solemn quietude, as if to visualize what a sigh of romantic ache would sound in a silent film.

In Walang Katapusang Kwarto (The Endless Room), Emerson Reyes mercilessly focuses on the faces of his two outstanding actors (Sheenly Gener and Max Celada) who portray two lovers wasting idle time after what is presumed to be a bout of intense lovemaking. By invading the private spaces of his performers, Reyes concocts a document of voyeurism, where the audience takes intense pleasure in listening to the humorous banter of two persons engaged in an illicit relationship, the same way these two persons take intense pleasure in invading into the private lives of their neighbors, who we will only know through the way they shut their doors.

Filmmaker Jerrold Tarog was commissioned by an advocacy foundation to create a documentary on the Agusan Marshlands, an area in Mindanao that is famed for its various animal and plant life. Neither familiar nor armed with any emotional attachment with the place, he conceived the assignment as an adventure, seen from the eyes of his avatar, Gaby dela Merced. The result is Agusan Marsh Diaries, a delightful documentary that could have been just another tourism ad but ended up as an experience like no other. Unlike Tarog, Cierlito Tabay and Moreno Benigno do not have the task of reinventing the wheel. Undo is a documentary like any other. The only difference here is that Tabay and Benigno’s subject, an artist whose drug addiction is funded by his art and whose art is fuelled by his drug addiction, is more than enough to carry the film. Knowing this, Tabay and Benigno fills the minutes with only the subject, drowning it with his art, his life, even his music.

The stories and messages conveyed by the short films released in 2011 are all diverse. Their methods of conveyance are to say the least, intriguing. From Marianito Dio, Jr.’s Sarong Aldaw (One Day), which tells the all-too-familiar tale of young man leaving the provinces for Manila with immense lyricism, to John Torres’ Mapang-akit, which recounts from visual and aural textures of salvaged footage from another film the tale of a man who is seduced by an aswang, to Chuck Hipol’s Man of the House, which conveys the skewed image of the perfect Filipino through the ads that these families consume, to Nica Santiago’s Awit ni Maria (Song of Maria), a gorgeous tale of a man who falls for a prostitute and lives that admiration through the music he imagines for her, to Jason Paul Laxamana’s Timawa (Free Man), which weaves together fashion photography, filmmaking, impossibly beautiful people and the theme of marital infidelity to come up with a comedy with Lynchian awkwardness, these shorts are not limited by the stories they attempt to tell. Instead, they create stories from the way they tell stories, adding layers upon layers, creating a treasure trove of information within the very short span of mixing creativity, indulgences and everything else that make films more than just a succession of moving images.

Below are eleven notable shorts released and seen in 2011:

1. Ars Colonia (Raya Martin)
2. Hindi sa Atin ang Buwan (The Moon is not Ours, Jon Lazam)
3. Mapang-akit (John Torres)
4. Class Picture (Gym Lumbera & Timmy Harn)
5. Walang Katapusang Kwarto (Endless Room, Emerson Reyes)
6. Sarong Aldaw (One Day, Marianito Dio, Jr.)
7. Undo (Cierlito Tabay & Moreno Benigno)
8. Awit ni Maria (Song of Maria, Nica Santiago)
9. Man of the House (Chuck Hipol)
10. Agusan Marsh Diaries (Jerrold Tarog)
11. Timawa (Free Man, Jason Paul Laxamana)

Sanda Wong (1955)

2012-01-01T22:50:00.002+08:00

Sanda Wong (Gerardo de Leon, 1955)

Gerardo de Leon’s Sanda Wong was thought to be completely lost alongside its director’s other films. Fortunately, an extant copy surfaced in Hong Kong, allowing the film to gain new life and a new audience. The film, a co-production between Manuel Vistan, Jr. and Ho Chapman, is perhaps one of the earliest film partnerships that crossed national borders. While the only existing copy of the film features dialogue spoken in Hokkien with English subtitles, it is quite clear that the film was shot in Tagalog and just re-dubbed to gain access to the Hong Kong market.

The film opens in pageantry, with a parade of onlookers welcoming Lan Ying (Lola Young) into the house of her new husband, Liu Chien (Danilo Montes), a wealthy landowner who is about to discover the strange inheritance, including a magical ring that allows its bearer to control snakes. Bandit leader Sanda Wong (Jose Padilla, Jr.), who is also targeting the abundant wealth of Liu Chien, has sent his lady partner, Yuen Fei (Lilia Dizon), a trained dancer, to put up a diversion, as he attempts to rob the newlyweds of their riches. Koh Loo (Gil de Leon), the captain of the garrison, is also interested in Liu Chien’s wealth, and devises a plan to take both Liu Chien’s loot and lady for himself.

Within that same evening when Liu Chien becomes aware of what his father left him, Koh Loo confronts Sanda Wong, which leads to Liu Chien saving both Sanda Wong and Yuen Fei, who falls in love with her recently married saviour, from Koh Loo and his minions, by taking them inside his house. In gratitude, Sanda Wong makes Liu Chien his blood brother, a relationship which is tested when Liu Chien’s quest for vengeance and the love of a woman seem to force them apart.

The film, although brimming with action and adventure, is actually fuelled by romance. Liu Chien and Lan Ying’s love, doomed by lust and greed, is depicted with alluring extravagance, enunciating the emotions that would inhabit Liu Chien when he discovers his wife raped and desperate to die. Montes, who first appears as a naive young man, too enamored by feelings of the heart to be intertwined in the more base motivations of both Koh Loo and Sanda Wong, portrays Liu Chien exquisitely, transforming believably into a revenge-addicted widower and bandit.

Yuen Fei, as the third party to Liu Chien and Lan Ying’s romance, adds complexion to the affair, luring stoic and brash Sanda Wong, whose relationship with Yuen Fei seems to be grounded on attraction, into the fray of unrequited emotions. The result is a story of brotherhood and honor, betrayed by passion and jealousy, but ultimately redeemed. There are scenes in Sanda Wong, such as when the bandit leader leaves a pleading Liu Chien to die in a quicksand or when he forces Yuen Fei to sensually dance in front of Liu Chien which would eventually reveal romantic affiliations, that complicate characters, turning them from stereotypes into actual living, breathing, and relatable personalities.

De Leon’s direction, as always, is sublime. There are scenes that are simply astounding to look at, such as when Sanda Wong’s army of bandits was ambushed by Koh Loo’s men. Shot against the light, De Leon captures the brutality of the ambush through the shadows of men either fighting or falling in battle. Armed with exquisite production design by Jose de los Reyes, effective cinematography by Emmanuel Rojas, and the near-perfect performances of the entire ensemble, De Leon was able to concoct a fantasy that both enchants with its spectacular scenarios and disarms with its emotional weight.

More than half a century after its release, Sanda Wong remains to be an absolute delight, a sterling example of a commercially-motivated production that does not see itself as a mere peddler mere temporary and empty visual marvels. It is an actual film that has a story that is simple but fascinating, characters that are palpable and believable, and real talents both behind and in front of the camera who tie everything together with indisputably brilliant results.

Postscript:

Film historian Teddy Co, who had a major part in both the discovery and restoration of the film, states that the present copy is in Cantonese, not in Hokkien as previously stated in my article. The last two prints, one in Cantonese and one in Mandarin (which is still in Hong Kong), of the film were found by Co in Hong Kong twenty five years ago. The English subtitles were introduced by Teddy Co to the Cantonese version of the film with the help of a Cantonese speaking resident of Hong Kong. He also corrects that the production design was done by Vicente Bonus and not De Los Reyes. Co compares De Leon's distinctive style with that of Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles', particularly in the scene where the grieving Liu Chien buries his wife in the sea, with both Sanda Wong and Yuen Fei looking from a short distance.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Ang Panday 2 (2011)

2011-12-31T22:54:00.000+08:00

Ang Panday 2 (Mac Alejandre, 2011)

English Title: The Blacksmith 2

The malady caused by the proliferation of loud but predominantly empty Hollywood blockbusters in Philippine shores is most evident in Mac Alejandre’s Ang Panday 2 (The Blacksmith 2). The bombardment of special effects has never been this harmful to the eyes and to the mind. This sequel to the 2009 reincarnation of one of Fernando Poe, Jr.’s most beloved cinematic alter-egos is hardly a film. Its characters which are proudly advertised as based on Carlo J. Caparas’ creations actually reflect the weakness of Caparas’ imagination which seems to be fuelled only by stereotypes and derivations. In Alejandre’s hands, Flavio (played by Senator Ramon “Bong” Revilla, Jr.), who transforms into the heroic Panday with his elongating dagger that detects evil, is a hollow vessel, a tool for ambitious Revilla to transform his political ambitions into something as simple as a battle of good against evil.

Its story is nothing more than an excuse to chain together scenes that are supposed to inspire spectacle, the special effects of which are sometimes delightful to look at but are mostly just numbingly repetitive. After defeating Lizardo (Phillip Salvador), Flavio decided to settle with fiancée Maria (Iza Calzado) in a little town whose citizens are more than grateful to the hero for getting rid of their oppressor. However, Lizardo is hardly dead. Awakened by Baruha (Lorna Tolentino who braves to wear make-up that makes her look like a subpar version of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch), who opts to wreak her brand of evil from atop an ominous looking peak, Lizardo begins his quest for world domination, first, by kidnapping the town’s female folk including Maria, second, by murdering the men folk through his many minions, and third, by attempting to disarm Flavio by stealing his magical dagger.

Along the way, he discovers that his pet dragon is in fact a foxy lady (Marian Rivera) who is a member of an ironically peaceful race of people who can transform into powerful dragons. He also meets a couple of his friends from his first adventure. All this is of course a bunch of nonsensical filler. The film has lost all ambition to entertain beyond its brainless showcase of what it intends to be as international-caliber computer-generated extravagance. Every now and then, jokes are cracked, slapstick happens, or hints of a probable darkness beneath all the fakery are exposed. However, all those attempts are quickly shelved as soon as Revilla, who seems to have lost all humanity in his exertion to be an effective action hero despite his age and his unwieldy heft, sucks all the possible fun with his mug of contagious indifference.

Alejandre horribly mistakes pageantry with aesthetics. From the small town and its colorfully costumed townsfolk to Lizardo’s grimly dressed monstrosities, the film looks like a hodgepodge of miscommunicated pegs and influences. Like a zombie in search for a living human brain to feed on, the film gnaws on your sanity. It actually forces you to wish for random calamities that would salvage you from the misfortune of sitting through a confused and disastrously taxing film.

By the film’s end, when Baruha announces that this is just the start of the reign of evil, the aches stopped with the promise that this part of Flavio’s saga will finally close. But then, Revilla, donned in his heroic garb and flicking his symbol of being macho for all the world to see and mouthing cryptic words that may or may not be his battlecry for the next elections, appears in another one of Alejandre’s painfully pretty backdrops that are too reminiscent of every torturous episode of TeleTubbies to be taken seriously. Baruha indeed has played propher. This, ladies and gentlemen, is really just the start of the reign of evil.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (2011)

2011-12-31T15:25:00.002+08:00

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Jun Lana, 2011)

Its prologue, which briefly introduces its bouquet of characters and their curious relationships and situations, is divided into three parts, all of which are introduced by the three words of its generic title followed by sayings that would do better on greeting card than in a movie. Jun Lana’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is very convinced of its complexities that it utilizes these needless storytelling devices that are in reality are just ornaments to a narrative that is as elementary and straightforward as a daytime soap, only cramped within two hours. It is a film that does not say anything about anything, except perhaps to offer a glimpse of the sort of problems a Filipino upper class family, as imagined and fictionalized to cater to the masses, would be involved in.

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is essentially about the Montes family, owners of the country’s largest television network and a sort of hyperbolic representative of the famously wealthy and influential clans whose members’ lives we can only pretend to know. Tackling the sordid lives of the members of the Montes family and the people that are close to them, the film mines entertainment from tragedy, enjoyment from the manufactured tears of its embattled characters, and delight from the all the entanglements and estrangements brought about by the peculiarities of its very many narrative conceits.

Paraplegic Donald, the Montes patriarch, believes that he has a stable family. Agnes (Agot Isidro), his second wife who is decades younger than him, is secretly having an affair with Derek (Dennis Trillo), her personal trainer. Celine (Solenn Heussaff), Donald and Agnes’ daughter, is starting to get bored with Vince (Paulo Avelino), her clingy boyfriend. Mariel (Maricel Soriano), Donald’s eldest daughter from his first marriage and head of the family’s television network, has turned into a sad and mad woman after being separated from Gary (Gabby Concepcion), her ex-husband who is about to be wed to Charlotte (Carla Abellana). Jacob (Jericho Rosales), Donald’s son, is trying to balance the demands of being a family man and an executive for the family’s network. Lory (Lovi Poe), his bored wife, sneaks out of the house at night to sing with her band, leaving their baby with the household help.

After a disastrous earthquake, secrets are revealed, relationships are threatened, and emotions are questioned, further complicating these characters’ already complicated lives. Ex-wives are turned into mistresses. Mothers are turned into romantic rivals. Lana crafts a topsy-turvy world in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and attempts to pass it off as a glossier and noisier version of reality, dealing with feelings and circumstances that are beyond belief despite the strange circumstances that they are evoked from. This is unabashed melodrama, spending more effort in mercilessly pitting its characters against calamitous events to allow tearful montages and dramatic exchanges of dialogue than anything else. Lana’s characters seem to be there only for their eye sockets that spew off tears of depression and frustration and mouths that sound off phrases that sound devastating but actually mean nothing. Their motivations are questionable. Their existences are negligible.

Moreover, Lana does not have the eye to make Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow more visually appealing or distinctive. The cinematography, although apt in the sense that scenes are sufficiently framed and lighted, is characterless, contented to only the service the narrative without doing anything else. The result is pretty much a visually uninteresting picture, salvaged only by performances that are consistently competent although out. The film, which is essentially just an expensively mounted “move on” note, is all dull gloss and glitter. Despite the film’s many flaws, there’s satisfaction in the way Lana manages to juggle his sprawling account of a fictional family to its open-ended conclusion, the way he attempted to break away from the expectations of a neatly packaged ending with all loose ends tied together in a lovely knot. It is not all bad. It is just not all good, either.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 (2011)

2011-12-29T01:05:00.000+08:00

Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 (Richard Somes, Jerrold Tarog & Chris Martinez, 2011)

In Chris Martinez’s Rain, Rain, Go Away, the final episode of Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 which was touted by its producing studio as the last and the best of the horror franchise, water, more than the predictable ghosts that appear every now and then, is the main source of chills. Martinez, who is probably the cleverest writer and director actively working for the mainstream today, mines the collective paranoia of floods brought about by the horrific experiences during recent rain-related calamities the country barely survived from.

In the episode, reliable comedienne Eugene Domingo plays the wife of Jay Manalo’s businessman whose plastics business moved from its former flood-prone factory to a safer location. Brought about by experiences from the onslaught of typhoon Ondoy which caused her a miscarriage, among other traumas, the littlest instance of abnormal weather causes her to wilt in terror, forcing her to fear even the most unlikely and ordinary of objects.

Martinez’s episode is most likely to be the most relatable, considering that while it still deals with supernatural elements and relies heavily on the easy shocks of sudden apparitions of stock ghosts, it stems from a horror that is very close to home. Martinez has a knack for creating stories around very real experiences in the screenplays he writes like in Chito Roño’s Sukob (The Wedding Curse, 2006) where the sordid entanglements caused by marital infidelity is the actual curse. With Rain, Rain, Go Away, Martinez has crafted a predictable but effective ghost story that has greed and guilt in the midst of calamity as its heart.

Dealing also with greed, not by the upper-middle class businesspeople of Martinez’s morality tale but by people who are desperate for survival, is Richard Somes’ Tamawo. Somes’ episode, which opens the film with the type of otherworldly fantasy that usually dictates the franchise, is inspired from the Hiligaynon myth of elf-like creatures that inhabit strange places. Somes masterfully creates a rural landscape that serves the setting of both the coming of age of a young boy (a very expressive Bugoy Cariño) who struggles to win the affection of his stepfather (Zanjoe Marudo) while taking care of his blind mother (Maricar Reyes) and the horror tale of the titular creatures who would do anything to take back what the human occupants of their town have taken from them.

Irresistibly pretty at times, with sequences that are intelligently shot and directed, the episode shows a master craftsman at work. There are certain scenes, such as when the blind mother is being stalked in her house by the tamawo and Somes only reveals the monsters’ eerily white faces and menacing bodies partially, that emphasize the very raw horror of being absolutely vulnerable. And the episode is really about vulnerability, of the young boy who only wishes to belong to a family, of the mother whose lack of sight makes her more prone to danger, of the stepfather whose desire to provide for his family forces him to make questionable decisions, of the tamawo whose existence is being threatened by humanity’s interference.

Jerrold Tarog’s Parola (Lighthouse), the middle episode in this triptych, is also about vulnerability brought about by adolescence. Lucy (Kathryn Bernardo) and Shane (Louise de los Reyes) are best friends whose friendship is suddenly threatened when during their school trip to an abandoned lighthouse, two rival witches (Julia Clarete and Dimples Romana) decide to use their bodies to continue their feud. The plot, while admittedly convoluted, is thankfully just a frame for an otherwise atmospheric and moody exploration of teenage paranoia.

Tarog, through telling scenes that are remarkably observant of juvenile conflict, creates an atmosphere of subtle disturbance that is only enunciated by the premeditated acts of cruelty that the witches’ interference allowed the young girls to do. Tarog successfully turns what essentially is the normalcy of high school life into something seductively sinister, like a Freudian nightmare. Immature infatuations, corridor-set insults, chemistry experiments, menstruation, and friendship bracelets are fascinatingly turned into threatening objects and occurrences.

Sparingly paced and ominously quiet, Parola weaves the commercial intentions of the franchise’s shrewd producers with Tarog’s creative integrity and exquisite craftsmanship to create what possibly could be the entire franchise’s crowning achievement --- a truly harmonious mix of all the bad (the hackneyed storylines and stretches in logic) and all the good (the surprising invention some of the intrepid directors manage to sneak into their films) that Shake, Rattle and Roll is most known and loved for.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story (2011)

2011-12-27T22:50:00.000+08:00

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story (2011)

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story is a film that is as hotly contested as post-war Tondo. The first film of what was hoped to be a peaceful collaboration between Laguna governor E.R. Ejercito (who uses the name Jorge Estregan, Jr. when acting in films) and acclaimed director Tikoy Aguiluz, the film quickly gained momentum when a seductively pretty trailer went viral in various social networking sites, giving an impression to most of who have seen the trailer that the Filipino action film, long dead because of the proliferation of the more lucrative romantic comedy in the market, is soon to be revived.

A month prior to its release, relationships suddenly got sour with Aguiluz insisting that his name be dropped from the credits of the film that was going to be released commercially and that he be given the opportunity to create and release his director’s cut, claiming that Ejercito shot several new scenes and re-edited the film behind his back. Ejercito, on the other hand, claimed that Aguiluz’s cut was too slow and subpar. Demand letters were sent, cases were filed in court, temporary restraining orders were issued, and eventually, Aguiluz got one half of his two wishes, and had his name stricken out of the film that he deems was bastardized by its producers. The bastardized film, actually, is not as bad as it seems.

Undoubtedly, Ejercito, who is well beyond his 40’s, is miscast as Asiong Salonga, who ruled the streets of Tondo as a benevolent gangster before being gunned down at the age of 27. Brooding alongside actors like Baron Geisler, Ketchup Eusebio and Yul Servo who are decades his junior, he sticks out like a fogey in the middle of an amusement park. Notwithstanding the very obvious attempt by Ejercito to evoke some sort of inner youth in his performance, he more or less communicates Asiong’s authoritative swagger with expert ease. Pitted against John Regala, who plays Asiong’s nemesis Totoy Golem with equal parts cunning and savageness, he impresses because of his vulnerability, his ability to ache and bleed.

Unfortunately, Asiong aches and bleeds in a story that is haphazardly told, jumping from either one action set-piece or one narrative milestone to another with hardly any rhyme or reason. Edited like a music video presumably for the sake of fast pacing, the film suffers even more. It is a film that desperately needs to breathe. Its many vivid action sequences could have been rendered more poignant with a pinch of quietude and serenity. Its documentation of lives enveloped by corruption and violence could be more meaningful with some intelligent characterization from the film’s writers. As it is, the spare and unimaginative story seems more perfunctory to the visual spectacle and the shameless grandstanding. It is definitely quite a shame because its present form shows shades of glory, traces of the film Aguiluz had in mind --- stylish but somber, brutal but human, and entertaining but artful.

Jessie Lasaten’s musical score is most of the time obtrusive. Carlo Mendoza’s cinematography, however, is quite sublime in its masterful use of monochrome. With only light and shadows to play with, Mendoza concocts images that are admirably composed and expertly framed, which lend the film that has been fractured by its disconnected storyline and lousy cutting reliable crutches to walk with. The production design is also quite notable especially with the efforts to recreate post-war Tondo from Ejercito’s hometown of Pagsanjan.

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story is an undeniable mess of a film. Sometimes, it promises greatness. At other times, it sinks into an embarrassing slump reminiscent of the reason why action films have died in the first place. It seems to be ignorant of what it wants to be or what it wants to say about the testosterone-dominated world it vividly portrays. It is only during one vehemently illogical and anachronistic but miraculously effective sequence that the film, with all its chaotic storytelling and never-ending fistfights, knife matches, and gun battles, manages to say something coherent. Men fight men. Friends kill friends. And in the climactic, slow-motioned and revenge-fuelled orgy of sweat, blood, and bullets, it becomes apparent that the world we live in, as the glaring instrumentals of the pop song the film curiously borrows to set the scene’s action in music forces the audience to sing, is a mad world.

It’s definitely not an awful film. There are still hints of greatness in this haphazardly edited abomination to render it watchable, if not enjoyable. Now that Ejercito had shown the Philippines what he’s capable of, fairness only dictates that Aguiluz be given the opportunity to cut the film his way.

(Cross-published in Lagarista as 'The Strange Case of Asiong Salonga')

Segunda Mano (2011)

2011-12-27T10:49:00.001+08:00

Segunda Mano (Joyce Bernal, 2011)

Joyce Bernal is more famous for the charming romances and comedies she made that took full advantage of her actors and actresses’ celebrities. For instance, in Kailangan Ko’y Ikaw (I Need You, 2000), she concocted a movie that pits Robin Padilla’s undeniably manly swagger with Regine Velasquez’s streetwise sweetness. In Booba (2001), Ruffa Mae Quinto’s voluptuous mammaries and seemingly lacking mental resources are the running gag of the movie. In Kimmy Dora (2009), Eugene Domingo’s unlikely star looks and impeccable acting skills are utilized to depict twin sisters whose personalities are as different as night and day.

Quite interestingly, Segunda Mano, Bernal’s latest and notably her first foray into horror (D’Anothers, while featuring ghosts, is more comedy than horror), has her evidently struggling with Kris Aquino, an actress who has claimed for herself the crown for having the most sellable scared face in the Philippines. Aquino plays Mabel, a simple woman who runs an antiques shop. One fateful rainy night, she runs into Ivan (Dingdong Dantes), an architect who was recently left by his philandering wife and is now left alone with his young daughter, Angel (Sofia Millares). They eventually fall in love, leading to mysterious apparitions by a bloodied woman (Angelica Panganiban) who seems to be linked to both Mabel and Ivan.

Written by Joel Mercado, who has penned or co-penned the screenplays of other horror films like Rico Ilarde’s Villa Estrella (2009), Frasco Mortiz, Enrico Santos, Ato Bautista, Nick Olanka, and Cathy Garcia-Molina’s Cinco (2010), and Dondon Santos’ Dalaw (The Visitor, 2010), the film initially tells the story of a woman who seems to have contented herself with second hand objects and persons. Ivan has been used previously by his previous wife, Angel by her absentee mother, her mother (Helen Gamboa) by her sister who drowned in the beach while she was still young. The film then sadly settles into a prolonged mystery derived from the many psycho stories told since the birth of cinema that has a twist that has been prematurely telegraphed by bad acting, predictable cinematography, unreliable editing, and uncreative writing.

The biggest problem with Segunda Mano is that there’s incongruence in Bernal and her lead star’s intentions. Obviously, Bernal, who has always been an intelligent and witty filmmaker and could not have allowed herself to be relegated into an overused genre, doesn’t take the film’s terrorizing stance seriously, what with a silly haunted designer bag, a ditzy social climber (Bangs Garcia) for an annoying sidekick, a loon for a spirit medium, and even a cameo appearance by the iconic Lilia Cuntapay as an unfortunate bag lady who meets death via a murderous hand springing forth from red patent leather.

Unfortunately, Bernal can’t seem to control Aquino. While the film erupts into a parade of self-conscious nonsense, Aquino remains drowned in boring seriousness. She is too concerned perfecting her unsubtle looks of terror to get into the joke of the film, rendering Bernal’s attempts to graduate the film from being droll derivative horror into something irreverently fresh frustratingly unsuccessful. The sorry result is this miserably confused film that at times attempts to subvert the tired genre by injecting a bit of humor into its proceedings but most of the time just satisfies itself with being just a knock-off bag full of second hand scares.

(Cross-published in Lagarista as 'Second Hand Scares.')

Magnifico (2003)

2011-12-26T00:11:00.001+08:00

Magnifico (Maryo J. de los Reyes, 2003)

Curiously snubbed by the Metro Manila Film Festival during the same year the festival had films like Boy Vinarao’s Hula Mo... Huli Ko, Tony Reyes’ Lastikman and Enrico Quizon’s Home Along da Riber competing for the top plum, Maryo J. De los Reyes’ Magnifico was eventually released the following year to much critical recognition. Unfortunately, the film failed miserably in the box office. Nonetheless, the film, despite its very traditional filmmaking style, was way ahead of its time. In a way, it preceded the independent films of today in the sense that the story, more than the famous actors and actresses that lend their names and talent to the film, was the very vehicle that drove the film to acclaim. However, its unsuccessful local commercial run also preceded the mostly unsuccessful attempts of today’s independent films to break into mass consciousness.

Written by Michiko Yamamoto, the film is about the titular young boy (then newcomer Jiro Manio) who attempts to give his ailing grandmother (Gloria Romero) a decent funeral. Along with his best friend, he naively goes around town, talking to various personalities or finding ways to earn money, to piece together his grandmother’s funeral, from the coffin that he constructs from the extra plywood he gathered from the local crafts factory to the actual lot wherein his grandmother would be buried.

Yamamoto crafts an entire town populated with quirky individuals with realistic intentions and motivations. Gerry, Magnifico’s father (Albert Martinez) who works as a carpenter working for the local crafts factory, seems to be content with his family and their modest lifestyle. Edna (Lorna Tolentino), Magnifico’s mother who is mostly left in the house to take care of both her sick mother-in-law and her daughter (Isabella de Leon) who is suffering from cerebral palsy, takes her lot in life with a lot less of her husband’s optimism. Magnifico’s elder brother, Miong (Danilo Barrios) has just returned home from Manila after losing his scholarship and is now trying to court the daughter (Girlie Sevilla) of the factory owner (Tonton Gutierrez) in an attempt to escape his family’s fate.

Around town are a bevy of similarly complicated lives. Domeng (Mark Gil), the town’s bus driver, still morose and mourning months after his mother’s demise, is oblivious to the charms of Cristy (Cherry Pie Picache), the town’s primary source of gossip and as a result, the rival of Tessie (Amy Austria). Ka Doring (Celia Rodriguez), the owner of the town’s lone funeral parlor, has turned into the town’s laughing stock because of her seemingly incurable hoarse speaking voice.

De Los Reyes’ directs with precision, making sure that each character adds up to the emotional heft of the story. Although brimming with acting talents, he never allows any of the supporting cast to overshadow Magnifico or his younger sister, whose heart-warming interactions turn out to be the centrepiece of this finely tuned drama. Lutgardo Labad’s beautifully composed score is probably one of the very few in recent Philippine cinema that is truly memorable and hummable. It is quiet and subdued at times and swells whenever necessary, allowing the film to sink deep into the hearts of its audience. Magnifico is a masterfully orchestrated tearjerker. Each of its individual elements are weaved perfectly to create an emotionally rousing experience that never feels slight or ill-conceived.

Magnifico is that rare children’s film that tackles mortality, the inevitability of death. It buffers the seriousness of its subject matter with levity and humor, allowing the children to create for the film an atmosphere of endearing innocence amidst the drollness of the affairs of the adults.

By portraying life as a colorful tapestry of relationships affected by small acts that are fuelled by good intentions, it emphasizes its value while underlining its fragility. It is hardly an empty product that exploits Filipino sensitivity for shocks and tears, like the many melodramas that populate the Metro Manila Film Festival that unfairly neglected it because of its lack of commercial appeal. It is genuinely moving, as it makes you familiar with its characters, allowing you to understand instead of merely witness their virtues, flaws, and humble ambitions. Undoubtedly, Magnifico is a film that will be remembered far longer than any of the films that made it to that miserably misinformed film festival that year.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Bring the Macho Back, etc.

2011-12-22T01:41:00.000+08:00

Bring the Macho Back

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

We live in a country where men wear skinny jeans, sport hair done in salons, and parade skins glowing from oils and ointments one would normally find in a very kikay girl’s kikay kit. Our heroes are vulnerable matinee idols who survive through love battles with lines like “You had me at my best. She had me at my worst, but you chose to break my heart.” Instead of powerful shotguns or fists ready for a brawl, we have been thought to brandish glittering smiles and puppy dog eyes to get past conflicts.

Filipino men have grown soft, oblivious to anything but love. They are ripe for re-education and what better way to learn the olden ways of macho men, then from our burly, muscled, dignified action stars. Their words are wisdom. Arm yourself with them and face the world with confidence not even the suave ways of John Lloyd Cruz that grant.

(Continue reading in Supreme, Philippine Star, 17 December 2011.)

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The Eight Greatest Action Stars in Philippine Cinema
by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

There was a time when these men were kings. Sporting hairdos sculpted by cheap pomade, donning matching maong vest and pants, and parading their trademark macho poses, action stars were more famous than their romantic counterparts. The roles they portray overflow into real life, making them national heroes and defenders of the oppressed. That is why it is not surprising how these action stars, most of them with resumes filled only with movie roles rather than actual credentials, become elected public officials. Whether you like it or not, the best of them embodied the collective image of what national leaders should be — iconically tough, uncompromising, and sympathetic men of integrity who have human flaws, but are essentially virtuous.

(Continue reading in Supreme, Philippine Star, 17 December 2011.)

For Y'ur Height Only (1981)

2011-12-19T01:15:00.001+08:00

For Y'ur Height Only (Eddie Nicart, 1981)

According to Australian film critic Andrew Leavold, during the 1981 Manila International Film Festival, a film festival established by the Marcoses to position Manila as the Cannes of Asia, where all the most daring, deep and artful Filipino films were exhibited to foreign guests, critics, and distributors, Eddie Nicart’s For Y’ur Height Only, a spy actioner that seemed to be the exact opposite of what the new film festival supposed to represent and share to the entire world, was the only film to land an international distribution deal. The success of Nicart’s film only reinforced the Philippines’ position as a hotbed of weird cinema, of cinema that intentionally or unintentionally poked fun at Western pop culture, of bad films so ingeniously bad they’re good.

See, For Y’ur Height Only is a essentially a montage of novel and not-so-novel action sequences tied together by a very simple story of an American scientist who gets kidnapped by the minions of mysterious Mr. Giant, a devious and evil crime lord who sends his dastardly instructions to his assistants through a twinkling mirror. There is absolutely nothing in the film that would consider it a good film, even within the genre it places itself in. The acting is notoriously bad. The cinematography is at best, serviceable. The music scoring also do not inspire any excitement that is more than what the story offers. In the company of Peque Gallaga’s Oro, Plata, Mata (1982) and other well-regarded features, the film clearly pales in comparison.

It is a film that relies mostly on its lead’s starpower, a starpower that is based not on good looks or acting prowess but on his being extremely short. Weng Weng, the two-foot nine actor who has the facial features of a seven year old kid and the flirtatious antics and libido of a dirty old man is the glue that puts everything together, from the tongue-in-cheek humor to the height-specific action set pieces. Playing the film’s debonair spy called Agent OO, he gamely fights goons three times his height and cavorts with women whose breasts are larger than his head. The film, from being a mere run-of-the-mill spy thriller, mutates into a parade of visual gags, witty references, and unbelievable stunt acts.

Paced quickly to reinforce the fact that there really isn’t much substance in the sequential turnover of showcases of Weng Weng’s physical bravura despite his evident vertical limitation, the film rarely loses steam. Whenever the diminutive hero does not karate chop his opponents’ balls or share saliva with his bevy of female friends (a bevy that includes Beth Sandoval, Anna Marie Gutierrez and the Carmi Martin), he tries on his array of spy gadgets lent to him by his commander (played by Tony Ferrer, the much famed Tony Falcon a.k.a. Agent X44). His favorite, unsurprisingly, is the ill-fitting x-ray sunglasses that gave the little rascal an enjoyable glimpse of his commanders’ sexy secretaries’ secret sexy parts, making him beam his trademark smile prior to his mission of clearing the bakery of drug dealers who attempt to make a lot of dough from dough.

For Y’ur Height Only is vastly enjoyable despite its lack of any aspiration towards being anything more than a film that exploits Weng Weng’s uniqueness for commercial purposes. In fact, the film might even overtake the Bond film from which it creatively borrowed its title in terms of guiltless and mindless fun. It is a film packed with thrills, comedy, titillation, romance, and even a little bit of tragedy right in the end. In its expected modesty, it survives the test of time simply because it precisely knows its assets and limitations and therefore does not overreach. The film, like its star, is small and terrible in every way possible, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (2011)

2011-12-16T12:36:00.000+08:00

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (Mes de Guzman, 2011)

English Title: At the Corner of Heaven and Earth

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (At the Corner of Heaven and Earth), Mes de Guzman’s elegy to childhood innocence, is relaxed in its pace and elegant in its imagery. Set in De Guzman’s native Nueva Vizcaya where continuous fields meet proud mountain ranges, the film reinforces its powerful images of rural hardship with gorgeous passages of slopes being enveloped by clouds, creating a certain lyricism to its straightforwardness. Instead of portraying children as passive victims of an unfortunate circumstance, they are shown to be more in control of their fates, capable to exist within penury without much tragedy, but handicapped by their pride and other vices.

Four children, most of whom have chosen to run away from their families, have turned an abandoned hut in the middle of an idle lot outside the border of the town of Bayombong into their home. Days are spent looking for work, or fooling around, or fighting among themselves. Nights, on the other hand, are mostly committed to rest. The predictability of their daily routine has turned their simple lives into some sort of paradise. Their concerns are minuscule. Their main goal is survival, to eat at least a few times a day and to maintain a semblance of order in their motley crew. Except for the occasional sickness, these kids seem to do well in their chosen independence.

De Guzman depicts these kid’s lives’ comfortable predictability with levity and earnestness. He avoids crossing the line towards melodrama. Instead, he admits to the subtle joys of their little lives, of sharing a piece of candy or a bottle of soda, of the pranks played, of falling hopelessly in love with an uptown girl. These little slices of the kids’ humble lives, laced more with the comedy of childhood defiance than simpleminded pity whoring, prepare the film for its belated conflict, the inevitable collision of these kids’ precious innocence with real life’s corrupting harshness.

As De Guzman morphs his film from being a document of his protagonists’ youthful antics into something darker, the seemingly innocuous landscape of Nueve Vizcaya turns more ominous, more burdensome, and more painful. He is after all a master in establishing atmosphere without crossing the borders of tasteful subtlety.

In Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong (The Road to Kalimugtong, 2005), the simple story of two children hiking their way to their school is not spiced by dramatic confrontations or grandiose turns in the narrative. The conflicts are merely suggested by gunfights overheard in the forest, or petty thievery in the name of survival for a day. Instead of working up stories to compound the dilemmas of his youthful subjects, De Guzman turns his setting, whether it be the road towards an ill-equipped public school or the impoverished margins of a rural community, into the story, allowing the place to breathe drama into the lives displayed.

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa ends supposedly in tragedy, with the kids no longer existing in the fringes of a society that neglects them but somewhere else. De Guzman crosses over to poetry, with the children, in some sort of trance, escaping from their shelter into the field to be engulfed by a conquering fog. De Guzman merges the reality of the children’s situation and the lyricism of Nueva Vizcaya’s mysterious geography in a sequence wherein the film’s little heroes confront their being in limbo, their being in the middle of life and death, in the center of hope and despair, in the corner of heaven and earth.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Alkitrang Dugo (1976)

2011-12-12T05:00:00.000+08:00

Alkitrang Dugo (Lupita Aquina-Kashiwahara, 1976)

English Translation: Asphalt Blood

Alkitrang Dugo, the Nora Aunor-produced and Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara-directed adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, opens with a plane crash, with schoolchildren rushing out of the crash site. In the beach, Luis (Eddie Villamayor), one of the kids finds a conch shell and blows it to signal his location. This causes all the other survivors, all children, to form into the beach, where they initially start a community under the leadership of Luis.

As they figure out that coconuts and seawater cannot sustain them for long, the group venture into the jungle. They establish roles for themselves and create rules to dictate their lives. However, Luis’ self-appointment as leader does not sit well with Andy (Roderick Paulate), which leads to voting, legitimizing Luis’ leadership by a short margin. As the children become familiar with their new home, jealousies form, power struggles react, and the community disintegrates into abject chaos.

Aquino-Kashiwahara directs the film with very capable hands. Interestingly, the film depicts very male-centric relations, with struggles and conflicts resulting from the very primal need for supremacy. Yet Aquino-Kashiwahara deftly interprets these struggles and conflicts with the understanding of how a male mind works, how that primal need usually overlaps human logic.

It is a surprisingly vicious film. Its portrayal of the children trapped suddenly in that difficult demand to remain civilized under dire circumstances is never held hostage by the traditional depiction of children as innocent and naive creatures. In Alkitrang Dugo, children are forced to cheat, lie, and kill, not for survival, but more alarmingly, for power. Even more alarming is that this viciousness is not a solitary effort. Disguised as forms of community and society, it is scarily contagious.

Lutgardo Labad’s intelligent scoring rightfully deserves mention. From the Aunor-belted title song that sets the tone for the film’s slow but sure descent towards man’s innate capability for evil to the repetitive melodies that add atmosphere to the ominous forest that eclipses these children’s supposed naiveté, the film’s music becomes a character itself, growing in depth and viciousness. When the score erupts into the children’s repeated chant, calling for violence towards both nature and Luis, the film burrows straight into the dark heart of humanity, the same heart that enables us to be vile and violent.

The film follows Golding’s narrative faithfully enough to be considered a direct adaptation of the classic novel. Translated into a distinctly Filipino setting, where class differences are evident, romantic entanglements aggravate, and politics is vulnerable, the story takes a different form from what Golding intended it to be.

Golding’s clear-cut allegories become more specific. Alkitrang Dugo targets the heart of what is possibly wrong with how the Philippines is governed, how its so-called democracy is destructive because its stakeholders do not have the maturity to understand and utilize it, how the Marcos’ regime seemingly fascist society contributes to a Philippines of infantile citizenry. Aquino-Kashiwahara’s criminally underseen film is attention-calling and disturbing because despite its literary roots, it points fingers towards a gnawing reality that can no longer be ignored. It is as resonant now as it was when it was first released.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

The Road (2011)

2011-12-11T22:04:00.001+08:00

The Road (Yam Laranas, 2011)

The first of the three episodes of Yam Laranas’ The Road is the most reminiscent of the atmospheric thrills of Sigaw (The Echo, 2004). One night in 2008, three teenagers (Barbie Forteza, Lexi Fernandez and Derrick Monasterio) find an abandoned dirt road to practice driving. As they move further from the junction, a suspicious red car passes by them every so often. After noticing that the red car is without a driver, they hurriedly find their way back to the junction, but to no avail. They are trapped, and continuously haunted by the mysterious red car and a woman whose bloodied head is covered by a plastic bag.

The episode, set mostly at night in an abandoned road lighted only by the moon and headlights of occasional cars, relies on mood, on the presumed danger of being alone amidst omens and apparitions, to work and Laranas, a horror stylist here more than anything, creates an atmosphere of quiet but certain hostility.

The second and third episodes, set ten years prior to each other, forgo of the phantasmagoric for the more visceral. Physical and psychological torments, as opposed to the supernatural one of the first episode, are in the forefront. In 1998, two sisters (Rhiann Ramos and Louise de los Reyes) find themselves prisoners in the house of a disturbed man (Alden Richards). In 1988, a boy (Renz Valerio) is brought up by his domineering mother (Carmina Villaroel) and his religiously zealous father (Marvin Agustin).

From the grim greys of the abandoned road, Laranas expands his palette, creating a canvas of lush and inviting colors that only downplay the depravities that are depicted. Tying the three episodes together is the informally accepted mission of a recently promoted cop (TJ Trinidad) to investigate the case of the missing sisters from 1998.

Where in Sigaw, the violent deaths of a mother and child in the hands of an overly jealous cop has transformed their apartment building into a time-trapped capsule where the tortures and the assaults are repeated forever, in The Road, the abandoned road meets the same fate, time-trapped by victims of abject cruelty. Laranas’ ghosts are not troubled spirits thirsting for revenge. They are imprints of a violent past, perpetual footmarks in a place vandalized by vile intentions.

Laranas’ ambitious mapping of the place’s history of brutality inevitably leads to loopholes in the story’s logic and perhaps in the logic of the characters involved. Questions arise and most of them are left carelessly unanswered. However, there is more to the film than its flimsily crafted narrative web. In the scope of what Laranas attempts to achieve, he more or less delivers a story that notwithstanding the multitude of its lapses, coheres with a laudable vision of violence that by its very nature and the extent of its corruption, disrespects the laws of both place and time.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Won't Last a Day Without You (2011)

2011-12-10T17:05:00.003+08:00

Won't Last a Day Without You (Raz de la Torre, 2011)

A romantic comedy that seeks to reinforce the love team between singer-turned-actress Sarah Geronimo and Big Brother housemate-turned-matinee idol Gerald Anderson, Raz de la Torre’s Won’t Last a Day Without You does not stray far from the established story map and intention of a merchandized movie. It is feel-good, fun, funny, and extremely charming, like most of what Star Cinema has been mindlessly producing the past several years. The film is undoubtedly a product of formula, and quite surprisingly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

De la Torre is not exactly a newcomer. He wrote Cathy Garcia-Molina’s A Very Special Love (2008) and co-wrote with other writers Garcia-Molina’s You are the One (2006) and You Got Me (2007), two romances set in very distinct milieus that somehow added color and novelty to the film’s otherwise redundant storylines. In A Very Special Love, a hopelessly hopeful employee falls for her stern boss who is up to prove himself to his family by making his men’s magazine number one. In You are the One, the familiar romance is set within the world of bureaucratic red tape, an unfortunate circumstance that fortunately gives a glum American who is looking for his parents the opportunity to meet and fall for a government employee. You Got Me is essentially a love triangle between a lady cop, a nerdy officer, and a thief.

Won’t Last a Day Without You, like the rest of the films that De la Torre penned for Garcia-Molina, is set in a very specific niche of the Filipino experience. DJ Haidee (played radiantly by Geronimo) is the heartbreak guru for a late night radio show that gives love advice to romantically challenged insomniacs. At home, she sheds her screen name and becomes George Harrison Apostol, daughter to rock legend Pablo Apostol (Joey de Leon), sister to up and coming rockers, and victim to an ex-boyfriend who replaced her for her best friend. One night like all the other nights where she disparages playboys and heartbreakers on air, she advises Melissa (Megan Young), a listener who becomes fed up with the flirtatious ways of her boyfriend (Anderson), to terminate the relationship, not knowing that that night’s advice would lead her to rediscovering the pleasures of falling in love.

The world that De la Torre sets his romance in is addicted to love. This is a world of late-night workers, of students studying in the wee hours of the morning, of night-owls, all of whom spend their evenings either struggling through their current love problems or quenching their thirst for romance through the disembodied voices sharing their misery to the world. This is a world that has gone cynical because of the abundance of heartaches and heartbreaks. It is a world that is ripe and perfect for that sudden change of perspective, a miracle. The film, moving in the way like most romantic comedies of its like do which is predictably towards a happily-ever-after ending instead of a more realistic conclusion, feels apt in its both its manner and motivation. Its insistence on love’s perfection is an aberration in its milieu characterized by the advertisement of love’s pains and treacheries.

Won’t Last a Day Without You culminates in the revelation of DJ Haidee as someone as normal as the rest of the city who rely on her for certain logic in their romance. It climaxes in the revelation of love as not a private concern pertaining only to the lovers involved. It is has other stakeholders. It also involves the rest of the world who are either in love or in love with being in love, rendered into a community by the airwaves that have brought their needs and concerns in overwhelming union. Admittedly, like the Carpenters’ song from which it borrows its title, the film is more sap than substance. However, there is definitely nothing stopping anybody from being beholden to its adorable whims and charms.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (2011)

2011-12-08T15:25:00.001+08:00

Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone, 2011)

Most famous for the several short films which displayed a very casual understanding of the idiosyncrasies of Filipino life without relying heavily on cheap charms, Antoinette Jadaone has been regarded by the late Alexis Tioseco as the person that is most qualified to give Filipino mainstream filmmaking that much-needed burst of novel inspiration. Tioseco’s observations are very much valid, considering that Jadaone’s shorts are all tightly packaged confections that marry the popular appeal of mainstream escapist entertainment and the unique wit of more adventurous fare. The only concern remaining is whether or not Jadaone can replicate and sustain the irresistible charms of her short films in a feature length film. Fortunately, Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay is more than enough proof that she can.

Lilia Cuntapay, the film’s endearing subject, is the perennial extra, playing nameless characters in various films. Perhaps because of her distinctly memorable features, she has been type-casted to play hags or ghosts in horror films. Cuntapay is actually most famous for having a face that is easier to recall than her name. Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay springs from that unique fame of Cuntapay, opening with a montage of popular actors and directors who have all worked with Cuntapay who can’t seem to recall who Lilia Cuntapay is, until Peque Gallaga, who discovered Cuntapay while shooting one of the episodes of Shake Rattle & Roll 2 (Gallaga and Lore Reyes, 1990), breaks the name’s supposed unfamiliarity to describe Cuntapay’s strange appeal.

Set in a fictional scenario wherein Cuntapay gets a very surprising nomination as Best Supporting Actress, a filmmaker (played by Jadaone) ventures into Cuntapay’s neighborhood to document Cuntapay’s life a few days prior to the awards night. The film follows Cuntapay as she goes to work to play another nameless role for a television melodrama, or as she excitedly sets up a viewing event for her first-ever interview for a popular primetime news program, or as she tearfully recounts her memorable past few days to her stepdaughter who lives in Canada.

Despite the numerous humorous depictions of a woman who has always settled to be in the fringes of an industry whose main currency is popularity, the film remains a very human portrait of Cuntapay, who suddenly finds herself in the brink of her long-ambitioned recognition. Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay succeeds not only because it seamlessly merges fact and fiction or because it manages to tackle a personality who exists in the margins of Filipino pop culture within a context of absolute familiarity but because it is genuinely touching. As the film reveals Cuntapay’s other sides, as longing mother to an absentee stepdaughter, as dutiful mentor to her patient assistant (Geraldine Villamil), as a beloved and loving neighbor, it graduates from merely being just a witty and hilarious satire into something more worthwhile, more enduring.

Jadaone may have just made the quintessential Filipino underdog movie. Cuntapay is in fact the quintessential Filipino underdog. She struggles in a world of pretty faces, supple breasts, and pleasant gestures, despite the fact that she is the epitome of the complete opposite of what her world values the most. She is someone to be rooted for, not exactly to be given the fame and fortune luckier talents would normally aim for but only to be recognized, to be given a permanent place in that world she has devoted her life and uniqueness to but cannot give the same devotion to her. Jadaone’s film, rooted in that fantasy that someone who has persisted for so long like Lilia Cuntapay may actually cross-over to be pitted against established and talented actresses in a glittery awards ceremonies, is a heartfelt tribute to each and every person who dared to dream dreams as big (and probably far-fetched) as the ones dreamt by Lilia Cuntapay.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Memories of Overdevelopment (1980-2011)

2011-12-04T23:59:00.000+08:00

Memories of Overdevelopment (1981-2011)

At around 9 in the evening, in Vocas, a vegetarian restaurant/art space/wonderland that Nick de Ocampo aptly described as a nook straight out of Kidlat Tahimik’s mind (the place comes with a galleon and several other objects that are undoubtedly products of the artists’ sariling duwende), Kidlat Tahimik presented the latest version of his Memories of Overdevelopment, a thirty-minute version of the filmmaker’s dream project about the first man to ever circumnavigate the globe. Except for a few seconds of scenes that were inserted into the perpetually unfinished film and several minutes of footage that were restored from several generations of film decay, the film remains the same, an enduring fragment of what possibly could be the best film never made.

As it is, Memories of Overdevelopment is a lyrical ode to the ingenuity of both its subject, Enrique, a Filipino who gets sold to Ferdinand Magellan in what the film describes as history’s first buy one take one deal, and its maker, Kidlat Tahimik, who resigned to the fact that the film would require an enormous amount of money to mount started to put together scenes using whatever resources he had available and as a result, came up with the film. Utilizing relatives, friends, backpackers and expatriates who would frequent his Baguio home, Kidlat Tahimik assembled several lovely sequences that are strung together by his narration, which most of the time, resembles a storytelling session by a father to his children, and at other times, sounds like a pitch from an artist to a shrewd financier.

Enrique’s story is laced with wonderment and humor. Notwithstanding the inherent ambition of the project which would span miles of sea travel and between two diverse continents and cultures, the film never loses perspective. It remains an intimate portrait of a man of meager beginnings fated to accomplish big things by virtue of fortune, ingenuity, and a desire for home. The intended film, as can be gleaned from this most recent version, never strays from the playfulness that has defined Kidlat Tahimik’s filmography. Even during the sequences that venture towards some form of reverence or would normally require a semblance of sensitivity, Kidlat Tahimik injects an abundance of cheekiness, steering the film’s discourse from narrative seriousness or historical accuracy towards commentaries on the Filipino psyche.

Despite the nature of the film as a self-aware work-in-progress, the film actually feels oddly complete. Sure, Kidlat Tahimik himself admits that there are the sequences that the film lacks like the shipbuilding scenes in Spain, the grandiose sea voyages, the battle between Lapu-Lapu’s men and Magellan’s invaders. However, there is an endearing charm to Kidlat Tahimik’s straightforward modesty and honesty that makes the film’s inadequacies negligible. Instead of pleading for forgiveness because of the lack of those scenes, he pleads for creativity and imagination by supplying images of quaint sea travel in the Philippines and Indonesian shipbuilders to supplant the more ambitious imagery in his mind. There’s a certain sense of Kidlat Tahimik taking the place of his Enrique and the film’s audience taking the place of the curious young boy who suddenly invades his morning bath to be told stories of his adventures in the way Memories of Overdevelopment takes form.

The current version of Memories of Overdevelopment may or may not be the film’s final form. It all depends on Kidlat Tahimik and the cosmos. Part of me wants the film to get finished but part of me is also deeply satisfied with this admittedly flawed but infinitely intriguing version. It is after all that rare but persisting document of the Kidlat Tahimik, that odd but indisputably talented filmmaker whose films seem to be more beholden to unhinged imagination than monetary funding, who at one point of his illustrious career has seen himself as strangely a part of the traditional mechanics of movie-making, with its need for sizable investments, and because of that investment, certain compromises. The film shows Kidlat Tahimik to be a carefree hostage to unforgiving economics, a thankful victim of luck, and a constant dreamer.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Minsan Pa (2004)

2011-11-28T02:36:00.003+08:00

Minsan Pa (Jeffrey Jeturian, 2004)

English Title: One Moment More

The film Sana Pag-ibig Na (Enter Love, 1998), one of the several films made under Regal Films subsidiary Good Harvest, gave birth to the collaboration between Armando Lao and Jeffrey Jeturian. Before Sana Pag-ibig Na, Lao was then the very much underrated screenwriter of arguably William Pascual and Chito Rono’s best works, Takaw Tukso (1986) and Itanong mo sa Buwan (1988) respectively. Jeturian, on the other hand, served as production designer and art director for Leroy Salvador’s Dear Killer, one of the two episodes in Dear Diary (1989) that was written by Lao (the other being Dear Partyline, directed by Lupita Aquina-Kashiwahara and written by Jose Javier Reyes) and various other films and television shows. After Sana Pag-ibig Na, Lao and Jeturian would collaborate in Pila Balde (Fetch a Pail of Water, 1999) and Tuhog (Larger than Life, 2001), both of which are also critically acclaimed films.

Minsan Pa, Lao and Jeturian’s fourth film together, is more ambitious in scope. Their previous collaborations were clearly smaller. Sana Pag-ibig Na is a family drama set within a middle-class household. Pila Balde is a set in an impoverished community that envelopes a condominium complex and explores the complicated relationship between the haves and the have-nots. Tuhog is a more conceptual affair that pits real reality and movie reality, revealing a cycle of exploitation within a primarily escapist pastime. Minsan Pa is essentially a romance between a Cebu tour guide (Jomari Yllana) and a tourist (Ara Mina). However, more than just unravelling an ordinary love story, Lao and Jeturian set out to unravel not only the lives of the lovers but also the people around them.

The film often drifts away from the central romance, depicting tender episodes of other people’s lives, like the fisherman’s daughter who marries a Japanese tourist, leaving his childhood sweetheart heartbroken in the process, or the performers in a Japanese videographers’ anonymous shoot who become beholden to erstwhile passions and the need to survive. These side stories, told admirably without a sliver of judgment as to actions of these people and how these people lead their lives, contribute to an overall picture of lives existing amidst the lack of permanence.

People come and go, leaving unresolved relationships, obligations, promises and expectations. They strive for constancy, perhaps through by building a permanent home, by finding that one person for whom they can eternally be in love with, by seeking to reunite a family that has become broken by change. The characters Lao crafted and Jeturian fleshed out live lives adjusted to the fleetingness of the world. The only thing constant is heartbreak and disappointment, as when the promise of becoming settled both in life and in love are suddenly snatched not by a stereotypical antagonist but by the very nature of life.

Minsan Pa may be Lao’s masterwork, a piece so lovingly crafted, with characters that feel like they are living and experiencing life’s difficulties with us. There is very little sense of the writer interfering with how the narrative should flow and instead, the story slowly but surely manages to complete itself without succumbing to formula. Jeturian’s job becomes limited to creating the proper mood and atmosphere to finalize the picture. Backdropped by Cebu’s gorgeous sights and vistas, Jeturian expresses the irony of characters appearing and disappearing, completely engulfed by constantly changing emotions, in places that have been there for centuries or even more.

Minsan Pa is the film is fondly remembered as an underseen gem, the film where Ara Mina and Jomari Yllana gave the performances of their careers, the unlikely Filipino romance that did not need to rely on histrionics or cheap thrills to impress. Minsan Pa, however, has an actual place in the history of Philippine cinema. The film barely made enough to recoup the investment put into its production, prompting Lao to rethink the way Filipino films are written and made. Because of the film’s box office failure, Lao would come up with a system of writing films that are apt for Filipino film producers who may not have the capital to gamble into worthwhile but expensive projects that will never be consumed by the ordinary moviegoer.

Because of Minsan Pa, Kubrador (The Bet Collector, 2006), a film written in the manner Lao believes Filipino films should be written, happened. Kubrador won for Jeturian several international accolades and earned for the film’s producer, Joji Alonzo, enough money for her to continue making films despite the economic disaster that was Minsan Pa. Brillante Mendoza then made Masahista (The Masseur, 2005), then Tirador (Slingshot, 2007), then Serbis (Service, 2008) and Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009). Young filmmakers followed suit, creating a school of filmmaking that positively or negatively changed the landscape of how films are written and made in the country. Who would have thought that Minsan Pa, a glossy film starring famous actors and actresses about heartaches, would stir such a change, opening the Pandora’s box of stories that require absolutely no gloss, no big names, and tackling issues that are closer to the stomach than the heart.

(Cross-published in Lagarista)

Big Boy (2011)

2011-11-21T22:59:00.002+08:00

Big Boy (Shireen Seno, 2011)

We live in the present, for the future. The past only becomes part of the present through memories, which are but figments of the imagination, collections of reality as perceived, designed and fashioned by the creative mind. Memories are never conjured spontaneously. They are urged, perhaps, through people, objects, faces, or emotions. It is this very malleable aspect of memories that makes them infinitely fascinating. We trust them but never fully, knowing that they are hardly objective, rarely completely reliable. They are dreams dreamt while awake. They are preludes to a trance subsisting on pain, joy, and everything else that have become requisite ingredients of evoking nostalgia.

Shireen Seno’s Big Boy is a film that lives up to the feeling of being in a trance, of being transported in a place that could only exist within the boundaries of the mind. While familiar and unfamiliar episodes of somebody else’s childhood flicker on screen, its audience’s very memories are urged, eliciting emotions that are at once both daunting and comforting. Adapted from Seno’s own memories of her childhood in the province, the film’s plot details the experiences of a boy who is routinely stretched and served with fish oil by her parents so that he can be tall enough to be the poster boy for their business of selling fish oil.

True to the very element of memories that Seno attempts to replicate in the film, the plot is overtly disjointed, with points voluntarily left unseen, untold and unexplained like events consciously forgotten for whatever reason. Apparently, the film has bigger ambitions than merely telling a very personal story. In fact, the way the story was told with points consciously left out alludes to the limitations of memories, how some events, especially those done in repetition or coupled with violence or other things that would render them indelible, become ironclad memories and how some are simply forgotten.

The film attempts to replicate remembering, where sights and sounds are products of the imagination rather than of the senses. Cinema however is an art that is reliant on the senses, making it Seno’s task to create in her film sights and sounds that resemble the ones seen and heard by the mind during the act of remembering. Shot in Super8, the film persists as a lyrical artifact of a forgotten era. The soft daytime hues, the kerosene lamp-lit nights, and the timeless Mindoro town become relatable images of a collective past. Conversations are inaccurately dubbed, with conversations jumping from Tagalog to the local dialect seemingly unplanned.

Seno regards memories as imperfectly crafted episodes. She pinpoints to the idea of remembering as a very personal effort, modified in time by the vast differences, whether in morality, politics, beliefs, the language spoken and other things, of the person remembering during the time when the event happened and the time when the event is remembered. Memories, in a way, are akin to fiction. Although more grounded on actual events than ordinary imagined stories, memories are still just fragments of the reality that gave birth to them. Big Boy, in that sense, with its very intimate story of a town still enamored by its past as an American colony, weaves memories and fiction together into an intoxicating portrait of a people who are unable to forget.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Salamangkero (1986)

2011-11-20T23:59:00.000+08:00

Salamangkero (Tata Esteban, 1986)

English Title: Magic of the Universe

Tata Esteban is a director whose films mirrored his life. More reputed for being a careless womanizer who dabbled in drugs than a consistent and reliable filmmaker, Esteban has made films that are more famous for their blatant indulgences than anything else. However, a careful glance at his earlier pictures like Alapaap (Clouds, 1984) and Hubo sa Dilim (Naked in the Dark, 1985), both of which are clearly adult fare that feature abundant nudity and sex scenes, reveals a talent of potential that is too infrequently tapped. There is undeniable technique in the way he frames and designs his shots, creating an atmosphere that intriguingly mixes sleaze and style. Unfortunately, Esteban, probably because of his recklessness or a lack of luck or for whatever reason, never made that undisputed masterpiece that would catapult him to that level of respectability most filmmakers aspire for.

Esteban’s Salamangkero, released in 1986 during the Metro Manila Film Festival alongside Mario O’Hara’s more enduring Halimaw sa Banga (Monster in the Jar), could have been that masterpiece had it not turned into a mostly forgotten foray into American-style fantasy filmmaking. There’s very little sense to the film. In fact, the film is absolutely irrelevant and impertinent, especially during its time when Lino Brocka and other directors were either getting more and more political. Yet despite this glaring lack of substance, the film exposes Esteban as a master craftsman, still reckless and undisciplined, but capable of mounting a production that delights more because of how it was made rather than for what it was made.

Admittedly, Salamangkero, viewed now where computers have replaced prosthetics and other traditional special effects, is a gravely dated affair. Yet beyond Philippine shores, the film has gained considerable fame as Magic of the Universe, a re-released, re-dubbed shadow of its former self, because of its astute bizarreness than its craftsmanship. That bizarreness, the same bizarreness that has given Elwood Perez’s Silip (1985) (re-titled as Daughters of Eve) and Celso Ad Castillo’s Snake Sisters (1984) international success, has of course been translated into cult appeal and a fistful of straight-to-video dollars. Even in that mangled form, the film is still notably Esteban: logically flawed, narratively thin, but seductive because of its undaunted excesses.

The story is simple. Jamir (Michael de Mesa) is a magician who accidentally loses both his wife (Tanya Gomez) and daughter (Sunshine Dizon). After consulting a shaman (in a scene that forces De Mesa to eat monkey brains straight out of the head of a butchered monkey) and receiving advice from the ghost of his grandfather (also played by the very versatile De Mesa), he discovers that he has to rescue his wife and daughter, who are now prisoners of Mikula (Armida Siguion-Reyna), a vengeful witch who controls an army of pig-faced monsters and other eccentrics. Along with his assistant Bojok (Tom Tom), Jamir travels to Mikula’s dimension to recover a weapon that will defeat Mikula once and for all.

The simplicity of the story may be because of the fact that Salamengkero was intended to cater to the taste of children. It is a fantasy in the same vein as Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal (1982) or Labyrinth (1986), only less extravagant considering the budgetary constraints of the local production. Thankfully, the attempts at replicating Henson’s creature designs resulted into an unexpectedly absurd charm. From Gondo, that silly-looking creature that looks like the lovechild of Bugs Bunny and one of the Teletubbies, to tribe of midgets that become entranced by Jamir’s magic tricks, the film makes most of Filipino ingenuity, creating a fantasy world that may not be as complex and believable as its Western counterparts but is still madly entertaining. More than that, the film, beyond its very elementary struggle between good and evil, feels wildly grim and disturbed, as depicted in its shadowed hues and side characters with indistinguishable motivations and goals.

Esteban may never rise beyond being just a mere footnote in Philippine cinema. The films he left behind are more riddles on whether or not he had an opportunity to greatness than actual proofs of that greatness. It is because of that dividing uncertainty as to his place in Philippine cinema that makes him and his legacy of frustratingly imperfect films aberrations that deserve second looks.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Aliwan Paradise (1992)

2011-11-13T23:28:00.003+08:00

Aliwan Paradise (Mike de Leon, 1992)

Mike de Leon’s Aliwan Paradise, one of the four shorts featured in Southern Winds, rings truest in this present age where poverty, as explicitly depicted and as source of an unquenchable desire for escape, has turned into an embarrassing necessity in our entertainment.

De Leon’s view of the future is both hilariously fantastic and uncomfortably real. Although obviously inspired by the near-fascist regime of Ferdinand Marcos, the film’s setting can be read as a caricature of a Filipino society that is addicted to the pleasure of illusions, to the fleetingly amusing, to the ephemeral and the unreal. The Philippines is obviously in a state of grave penury. People are crowded outside the theater of the Impresario (brilliantly played by Johnny Delgado) to take their chance at impressing him and his inutile jury to land a job. The Impresario, under strict orders by her superior (a woman who appears only as a sketch that looks a lot like Imelda Marcos), is looking for a new type of entertainment, something that has not been seen before, and something that will and should sell.

Outside, Julio Madiaga (Julio Diaz) and Ligaya Paradiso (Melissa de Leon), characters from Lino Brocka’s Maynila: sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975), reunite under more heartbreaking circumstances. While Brocka uses the characters as symbols for the Filipino’s tragic search for happiness, De Leon infuses the characters with biting cynicism. Julio, although still madly in love with his former sweetheart, is more aware of the world and its inhumane devices. Ligaya, on the other hand, has totally abandoned romanticism for fatalist worldliness. Their reunion, in rebellion to Brocka’s grappling with a certain sense of hopefulness although futile, becomes more of a resolution to ideals that have become insignificant in a world where survival is the lone virtue that is worth fighting for.

And survival seems to be the only virtue worth fighting for. As a former human rights bureaucrat blows fire while lecturing on literature and eats shards of glass while teaching basic arithmetic and a nurse strips down to her underwear while taking care of an elderly man, the nobility of profession is quickly abandoned by the very basic need to earn a living. Dignity is forgotten. Ligaya’s performance, a song and dance number that fancifully narrates the downfall of the Filipino woman, sums up the distance of how far society has been corrupted by poverty. Her private dealing with the Impresario only reinforces the abject desperation.

De Leon however mixes his cynicism with timeless wit and humor. Doy del Mundo’s screenplay is essentially a satire, resting more on the ingenuity of the idea rather than the lives of its characters or the depth of the narrative. However, the film graduates from the limitations of its being merely a satire. Like its thesis as to how entertainment has lorded over the Philippines from prior to it being colonized up to the present, the film’s prophetic observations as to how entertainment has turned from being a source of respite to a parasite that lives on woe and suffering is evidenced by reality.

Willie Revillame, whose sudden rise to fame happened decades after Aliwan Paradise, has the same wile as the Impresario, acknowledging the wealth in both feeding from and feeding the poor. Star Cinema and other mainstream studios, who would never have raised funds to produce such an enlightening piece of entertainment as Aliwan Paradise, has the same muteness as the Impresario’s jury, ignorant of their being conspirators in creating an economy out of the Filipinos’ ignorance by coming up with products that are comparable to instant noodles, filling but deadly. Independent filmmakers, who subscribe to Mike de Leon’s ideals but are inevitably trapped into mining stories from the fringes of society not by the noble need to expose but by the personal need for acknowledgement, are the Julios and Ligayas of our time, aware of the gnawing injustice of it all but have become knowing parts of that awful but inescapable system.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Cartas de la Soledad: An Interview with Gutierrez Mangansakan II

2011-11-09T16:15:00.005+08:00

Cartas de la Soledad: An Interview with Gutierrez Mangansakan II

Gutierrez Mangansakan II is first and foremost a writer who promotes the conservation of his Maguindanaoan heritage through his essays and stories. He later ventured to filmmaking, creating experimental works, video installations, and documentaries that discuss both the problems that ail his region and the culture that forces him to do what he does with utmost passion. His first feature length narrative Limbunan (2010) is an understated masterpiece about a young woman who is forced to be wed by tradition to a man he does not love. It is a film that is characterized by quietude and contemplation, a seeming anomaly to the Mindanao as depicted and exploited by traditional media. For his second feature length narrative, Mangansakan again mines his heritage for inspiration.

Hi Teng, Cartas de la Soledad is your second film after the terribly underrated Limbunan, which I thought was the strongest film in that Cinemalaya batch. Why did you choose CinemaOne instead of Cinemalaya as the vehicle for your second film?

CinemaOne allows a filmmaker for greater experimentation. They do not bother whether or not your film has a star, or too slow, or has sequences consisting only of singular long takes. CinemaOne urges filmmakers to find their own voice, and because of that, it encourages the diversity of cinematic experience.

(Continue reading in Lagarista)

Boundary (2011)

2011-11-08T19:22:00.003+08:00

Boundary (Benito Bautista, 2011)

Confined mostly within the very small spaces provided for by the cabs, taxi drivers live lives that are well-suited for cinema. Although they are forced to interact with people of various personalities, needs and intentions, this human interaction is limited to services being offered and stories being shared in the interim. They are constantly embattled, by drowsiness when forced to drive nights, by paranoia when a particular passenger raises suspicions, by desperation when the shift’s earnings are not enough to cover the cab owner’s quota leaving them with hardly any income to live with. Within the rigid confines of their cabs and their means of livelihood, they witness, either through the endless tirades of newscasters in the radio programs they listen to or through actual experiences, the worst of what a corrupt society can deal to a person.

Boundary starts ominously. Coke Polipata’s violin wails in the background as a dishevelled and obviously paranoia-stricken cab driver (Ronnie Lazaro) opts for a snack in what seems to be an ironically idyllic riverside park. Within the first few minutes of the film, director Benito Bautista orchestrates a view of Manila that is intriguingly unhinged. He carefully sows the seeds of suspicion, which will eventually color the atmosphere of the film. The film retreats from the temporary comforts of day as it follows the cab driver as he plies the crowded streets of Manila well into the night. At this juncture, Bautista allows a glimpse of the city from a distance and away the jaded eyes of his overworked protagonist, evoking a certain calm amidst the chaos of the city before plunging his viewers into a more intimate yet intense look of how that seemingly disconnected bigger picture finds its way into the most contained of spaces.

From then on, Bautista follows the cab driver as he picks up a well-dressed man (Raymond Bagatsing) who asks to be driven to nearby Antipolo. Beneath exteriors defined by random acts of decency and conversations marked by normalcy, both the driver and his passenger are in fact brewing plans of their own.

The action is mostly set inside the cab, with the storytelling done mostly through the conversations the cab driver has with his passenger and the characterization limited to the stories relayed, the mannerisms, gestures, and other occasional quirks. The paranoia Bautista invested in early on manages to color the prolonged sequences within the cramped interior of the cab with tremendous foreboding, carrying the film despite being constricted with its location with a sizeable portion of uneasiness and tension. From within the cab, safety from the viciousness of the street is in fact an illusion as desperation creeps into the picture, forcing the cab driver to survive amidst all odds.

Boundary falters only in narrative logic. Bautista succeeds in establishing the dangers of uncertainty in the familiar. However, the screenplay, which Bautista co-wrote with John Bedia, is peppered with holes, raising more questions of logistics and practicality rather than answering them. This, of course, is a minor and forgivable problem considering that everything else seems so masterfully orchestrated, from Bolipata and Paolo Peralta’s unsettling score to McCoy Ternate’s aptly economic cinematography to Chuck Gutierrez’s intelligent editing. In the end, Bautista has crafted a firm and suspenseful thriller whose clever twist in the end puts both perspective and pertinence to its constricting but intriguingly exciting process.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Waikiki (1980)

2011-11-06T22:19:00.005+08:00

Waikiki (Elwood Perez, 1980)

It is undeniable that Filipinos are addicted to migration stories. In a way, despite the far-flung locations of these tales, there is always a strand in the tale that would be instantly relatable, either because immigration has been a common ambition of the ordinary Filipino or immigration has been vicariously experienced through a loved one. From Gil Portes’ masterfully lyrical ‘Merika (1984) to Lav Diaz’s slow-burning Batang West Side (2001), the Filipino diaspora is always depicted with a discontent and ennui, of a gnawing longing for the homeland, of a certain pride for being rooted in a culture despite being detached from its source for so long.

Elwood Perez’s Waikiki is different from these migration stories because its main character, Edad (Alicia Alonzo), a mother who was separated from her husband and two daughters who migrated to Hawaii, is the outside, the seeming trespasser, to the stories of the migrants that her loved ones have become. Left behind because of tuberculosis, she waits for the day when she’ll be able to be reunited with her family. When she gets to Hawaii however, she discovers her daughters (played by Rio Locsin and Lorna Tolentino) adversely changed, with morals looser than what she would’ve expected, with husbands and boyfriends whose attachment to family is less grounded than hers. She finds her husband (Raul Aragon) with a different family, putting that final nail in the coffin of her own American dream, forcing her to go back to the Philippines, with her dignity more or less intact.

Instead of dwelling into the sordid problems of migration, Perez peeks into the specific life of someone who was left behind, expectant of joyous reunions with the loved ones she knows through happy memories when they were still together but instead was greeted with indifference and alienation from loved ones obviously changed through the passage of time and the sudden shift in culture. Alonzo portrays the mother’s coming to terms to the fact that her precious family has been shattered by the American dream with believable intensity. She fights until she no longer can fight, and her eventual surrender to the realities that have literally hit her in the face is quite heartbreaking.

The mother’s story however is just one half of the film. The other half features Mikaela (Alma Moreno), Edad’s eldest daughter who decides to stay behind with her ailing mother, falling from her mother’s graces when she decides to work in a nightclub as a dancer. With the help of her doting neighbor (Bella Flores), she discovers the practical functions of her sexuality, parading in grass skirts and dancing a bastardized and overly-eroticized version of Hawaiian dances with scantily clad Ricky Belmonte to the beat of drums and suggestive chanting of the word “Wai-ki-ki,” subliminally evoking images of what is kept hidden by those strategically placed shards of dried grass.

Despite the obvious erotic undertones of the dances, Perez withholds from designing the scenes to be plainly lewd, plainly objectifying Moreno’s womanly curves in compromising rhythms. Instead, Perez injects the scenes with some sort of feminine empowerment, where men are beholden to the hypnotizing grooves of the show’s main attraction. Waikiki, despite being advertised as a sexy film in obvious reaction to Moreno’s sudden rise to fame as a sex symbol especially after her stints in Joey Gosiengfiao’s Bomba Star (1980) and Nympha (1980), is actually a film that features strong women amidst a world of men made frail by very real circumstances.

Waikiki is deceptive in a sense that it allures with exoticization of female sexuality, of a very foreign land, of the migration experience, before exposing very familiar truths of how families are pulled apart by the Filipino diaspora, how there is an immense divide between traditional mores and the virtues of progress and modernity. Perez, by adeptly juggling the commercial requirements of studio filmmaking and his own artistic impulses, has created a film that is strange because it almost always works in all its attempts to be whatever it needs to be. As a sexy film, it does not fail to arouse. As a melodrama, it does not fail to force out tears. As a portrait of the Philippines then and now, it does not fail to impress with both its astuteness and simplicity in expressing its points.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

No Other Woman (2011)

2011-10-31T11:05:00.003+08:00

No Other Woman (Ruel Bayani, 2011)

Ruel Bayani’s No Other Woman has supposedly earned for itself the distinction of being the highest grossing Filipino movie of all time, for now. It’s essentially about marital infidelity, tackling the sordid turns in a married couple’s life when another girl enters frame. The premise alone makes it an unlikely crowd-drawer. However, the movie is designed for commercial success, featuring pretty faces and sexy bodies living and breathing in places that are seemingly removed from the reality that its targeted audience should be familiar with. It’s essentially escapist fare, piling gloss upon gloss to arrive at a final product that resembles the tacky front cover of a random lousy romance novel.

Ram (Derek Ramsey) has been selected to supply furniture to a luxury resort, where he meets Kara (Anne Curtis), the daughter of the resort owner. The two start an affair. Charmaine, Ram’s wife, starts to become suspicious and eventually discovers the affair, forcing her to compete for her husband’s attention. The story’s quite thin, riddled only by extraneous complications involving the characters’ familial histories, supposedly adding depth to the characters’ convictions and motivations. Unfortunately, the characters, despite all the needless details, are nothing more than caricatures that are meant to be objectified.

Although the movie parades with the sheen of seriousness and importance it borrows from its subject matter, it sometimes resolves to treat the subject matter with disarming humor. The movie shines when it is upfront with this irreverence, such as when the movie’s internal rules of fate and circumstance connive to have the wife and the paramour meet each other in the mall while wearing outfits of the same hue, with both of them bursting in the seams with knowledge of each other’s secrets, throwing each other one-liners with irresistible double-meanings. Joey Gosiengfiao is an obvious reference. However, Bayani seems unable to completely surrender to the pleasures and sophistications of camp, making his movie an unwieldy and inconsistent romp that leads essentially to something that is best described as dull, ordinary, and ultimately offensive to the intellect.

The movie is mired by an utter lack of integrity. It is unable to decide what it wants to be, a persisting problem of movies produced by mainstream studios whose addiction with formula and morally and socially acceptable but completely illogical endings has ruined nearly most of their films. Kara, a promising character who represents the Filipino woman that is uncharacteristically not beholden to marital vows and declares herself immune to love and guilt, unfortunately drowns in remorse, betraying whatever complexity the character has. The marriage of Ram and Charmaine, in what seems like a product of the director and his writers’ chronic lack of imagination, is as good as new. Even more bizarre is the resolution wherein the married couple actually becomes civil with the woman who nearly threatened their relationship, completely forgetting all the shouting sprees and the violent catfights.

It is as if nothing happened, and the entire ordeal is simply an avenue to learn lessons in life and gain new friends. I don’t even see why Bayani bothered to tell that story of infidelity at all, if infidelity turns out to be that inconsequential, that negligible. But then again, there’s big money to be made serving junk in pretty platters.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Mapang-akit (2011)

2011-10-23T14:59:00.002+08:00

Mapang-akit (John Torres, 2011)

In 2009, directors John Torres and Frosti Runolfsson, participants in DOX:LAB which endeavors to partner Scandinavian filmmakers with Middle-Eastern, Asian or African filmmakers for a film project, ventured into rural Antique to document the hudas-hudas, a practice done in a small town in the province every Black Saturday where an effigy of Judas is hanged and burned in the town center. Mapang-akit, assembled from footage that was unused for the documentary, may be accused as a mere product of afterthought. Fortunately, it is as gorgeous as it is anomalous, an alluring and exhilarating mix of communal and personal mythology, of documentary filmmaking and fictional storytelling, and finally, of the overtly banal and the subtly sublime.

Mapang-akit owes much to Torres’ creative process in Ang Ninanais (Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song, 2010), where he made use of footage gathered while shooting in Panay Island. Everything, from people, stories, history, and language become separate components that are assembled to complete a whole that while reminiscent of its individual parts is clearly and convincingly different. Interestingly missing in the film however are Torres’ voice-over and poetry, marking a movement for Torres towards a storytelling style where he does not feature as a main element. What essentially remains is an idea that is just as personal as all the other ideas that populated all of his shorts and features, germinated from local myths and realized through astute artistry into a dazzling portrait of a woman adored and envied for her beauty and scorned for her being.

It is a lovely-looking film, relatable considering that what Torres primarily captures are random images of provincial life, but enveloped by some sort of supernatural gleam. People talk. Their discussions are kept secret, even to Torres, by the foreignness of their spoken dialect. With only the rhythms and melodies of what is heard from the villagers, Torres tells a very loose story of an alluring woman who has enchanted local men who mysteriously die through subtitles that do not correspond with what is actually being said.

Mapang-akit benefits much from the randomness of how things unfold, which seems rooted to the film’s formerly documentary intentions. The camera is curiously observant, reacting to the most delicate of details like the sudden gush of wind, the musical invites of a passing ice cream vendor, a random carabao that becomes curiously attracted to the act of being recorded on film. There is always that sense of being within the film as opposed to being mere unaffected onlookers, making the film unusually compelling despite the seeming mundaneness of everything.

While it is unavoidable that ethical questions are raised since the subjects are not actors who are portraying fictional characters, Torres never claims to tell the truth as most of the world normally sees it. Truth, after all, is sometimes overrated, especially when heartlessly removed from what should be a truly personal experience. Instead, he paints very personal dreams and visions on a canvas made from the visual and aural landscapes of hid footage, making the province’s dormancy irresistibly seductive and its unravelling mysteries oddly romantic.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Buenas Noches, España (2011)

2011-10-20T20:57:00.002+08:00

Buenas Noches, España (Raya Martin, 2011)

What separates Earth from space? If we are to base it from what could arguably be the most famous sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), it is a speedy ride along a futuristic highway. The sequence, around five minutes in length, oddly switching from black and white to color, and uses a Tokyo highway to pass for the futuristic highway, approximates the experience of travel, more specifically, space travel. Stripped of the usual pleasures of escapist science fiction where space travel is always depicted to be exciting or intriguing, Tarkovsky’s concept of space travel is more grounded, evoking a sense of displacement, awkwardness, even boredom. In a way, Tarkovsky has injected cinematic space travel with much-needed honesty, much-needed humanity.

What then separates now from then? Time travel is nothing new in cinema. Yet the actual experience of time travel has always been curiously neglected. At most, we have gotten ourselves satisfied by seeing speeding cars disappearing in the sky, or sparks and bolts of electricity appearing as kitschy contraptions are turned on. However, what actually happens to the human being that is transported back in time is left to the fringes of the imagination, unfairly blanketed by extraneous depictions of characters and things disappearing supposedly back in time. So if we are to base it from Raya Martin’s Buenas Noches, España, what separates now from then are not sparkles or random disappearances, it is reality-altering drugs and a lot of it.

The seemingly random events of Buenas Noches, España is grounded on one exposition, that on 1593, a Filipino soldier stationed in Manila suddenly vanishes and wakes up in Mexico City. Martin establishes several things through the anecdote. One, that non-traditional travel exists. Two, that there is an inherent connection between and among Spain and all of its former colonies. From those starting points, Martin places two lovers (Pilar Lopez de Ayala and Andres Gertrudix) in a trip across Spain, across time, and elsewhere. The footage of the couple are heavily processed, played and replayed in various tints of red, blue and yellow, accompanied by a perpetual droning and strategically placed sound effects from slapstick cartoons of the past.

Martin replicates the experience of being under the influence of drugs. He also replicates the feeling of being lost in time, seeing scenes played a few moments ago played again and again with various details changed, and listening to sounds that evoke reminiscence of carefree childhood. Being in the influence of drugs and time travel, although at first glance are two very different experiences, are actually interchangeable, giving Martin’s proposition logical sense, and very personal sense, too, since drug influence and time travel are both panacea to heartache, allowing a person an option to forget and to make what has been made permanent by the movement of time more or less malleable. Thus, the lovers seem to be in incomparable bliss being in that state of temporal randomness, oblivious of where they are and where they are going.

Curiously absent from the couple’s ecstatic trip is the Philippines, past or present. A visit to the museum would reveal artifacts from Spain’s past as colonial master: various paintings by Juan Luna, a Filipino artist who won various prizes for his paintings while sojourning in Europe with various other Filipino intellectuals. The sight of the paintings is sobering to both the lovers and Martin. From the vapid goofing around the museum’s various chambers, the lovers are mysteriously awestruck and emotional, as if reminded of a closeted fact in history. Martin slows down too, relaxing the editing, substituting the heavy drone with ominous silence, and settles with black and white visuals. The sudden break is strange but fitting, alluding to a shared history between countries, finally establishing that long lost thread that will finally connect present and past, and Spain and its former colony.

Buenas Noches, España is more frustrating than it is pleasurable. It is more experiential than intellectual. Just as Tarkovsky has created the most precise cinematic equivalent of space travel, Martin has created the most precise cinematic equivalent of being stuck in time, immobilized by some obsession with the past, with history, never moving forward, never moving backward.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

San Lazaro (2011)

2011-10-11T23:48:00.001+08:00

San Lazaro (Wincy Ong, 2011)

If Wincy Ong’s San Lazaro were a student in a classroom full of recent films from the Philippines, which necessarily includes important works from Lav Diaz, Raya Martin and Brillante Mendoza, it would probably be sitting in the back, an unnoticeable weirdo among the overachievers and underachievers that fill the room. It is a film that does not seem to belong to the room, given that it is inherently oblivious to anything and everything that is supposed to be pertinent to the so-called new wave in Philippine cinema, except to the irreverence and humor that persists in the cinema even amidst its usual heft and seriousness.

It is not that the film lacks ambition or rejects relevance or that ambition and relevance are essential elements of films. San Lazaro disguises itself as horror yet it is most apparent that its primary purpose is not to shock or scare. It is intriguingly unhinged, with characters that are grounded more on humorous illogic than common sense. In a way, Ong has crafted a film that is reminiscent of David Lynch’s works, except that it is fuelled by artificial uppers instead of the usual dreams, nightmares and other insanity-induced things. There’s probably a tad more self-conscious wit and weirdness than needed, but it never crosses-over to being something that is more annoying or frustrating than entertaining.

The story’s simple enough. Sigfried (Ong), a random loser who has contented himself by learning useless skills from YouTube, is suddenly plucked from his uneventful existence by Limuel (Ramon Bautista), his previous classmate whom he has not communicated with since their school days, to bring Limuel’s brother (Nicco Manalo), who seems to be possessed by some sort of evil spirit, to his uncle (Allan Forte), a singing exorcist, in the faraway town of San Lazaro. It’s basically a road movie, peppered with details that make it delightfully off-tangent and curiously engaging.

Ong and Bautista’s odd coupling undoubtedly highlights the experience. It’s a grand balancing act they admirably commit to. Wearing sheens of fantabulous seriousness, the two prance around in the obviously made-up world where everything is not exactly topsy-turvy but deliciously creeping its way there. There is always that sense that everything is an inside joke, yet Ong and Bautista are formidable in their ploy, resulting in cautious giggles. The other characters that populate that world are mostly oddballs and other contrivances, teasing the audience of many more stories that have not been told, and seemingly conspirators with Ong and Bautista in what could either be a well-orchestrated prank or a product of tilted genius.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me (2011)

2011-10-02T07:37:00.002+08:00

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me (Erick Salud, 2011)

English Title: Star-Crossed Love

Philippine cinema has never been one that is deeply related with literature. Except for adaptations of Jose Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, Francisco Baltazar’s Florante at Laura, and other revered texts of national importance, adaptations are mostly limited to popular comics and romance novels. Perhaps the reason why there is that gaping separation between cinema and literature in the country is because literature, except for the texts that are used for school and the comics and romance novels that are used for escapism, is unprofitable. Consequently, cinema based on literature is also unprofitable, catering only to the sophisticated and the learned elite and not to the general movie-going populace.

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me (Star-Crossed Love), based on Eros Atalia’s bestselling short novel of the same title, attempts to close the gap between literature and cinema. Atalia’s novel is by no means the type of literature that would incite deep thinking or debates. It is populist in both style and intention making it the perfect text for a film adaptation that would have a semblance of commercial appeal without being just purely escapist.

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me was obviously written to appeal to the younger generation, with Intoy (played charmingly in the film by Edgar Allan Guzman), an ordinary student who enters into a secret sexual relationship with Jenny (played in the film by Mercedes Cabral), a transferee from a private school who instantly becomes the school’s resident bombshell, representing the typical Filipino youth who is has become more open to loose sexual attitudes without losing appreciation for the necessities of a fulfilling romance.

Jerry Gracio’s screenplay is very faithful to Atalia’s novel, appropriating even the mental monologues of the main character in the novel as voice-overs. Director Erick Salud is very faithful to Gracio’s screenplay, keeping the voice-overs and the other playful excesses while managing to ably tell the story in the simplest way possible. In a sense, both Gracio and Salud become victims of undue reverence to a source material that would probably work film-wise with modifications in both storytelling and style.

It is all cute at first. Sex has never been a serious proposition for Filipinos. Sex has been quite the favorite punchline for skits and jokes. There is therefore a very wicked sense of accuracy as to how Intoy’s sexual awakening is depicted with cartoonish humor and irreverence. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t know how to grow up. It never graduates from being just an effective sitcom. In fact, aside from the flourishes that infrequently adorn certain scenes, the film is mostly visually drab and almost always aurally annoying, like a hurried locally-produced television show.

When Intoy and Jenny’s relationship evolve from being simply limited within the confines of their afternoon’s motel room into something that is supposedly painfully complicated, humor gets in the way of communicating the turmoil. Their romance, the intricacies of their relationship, and the eventual ache of their inevitable separation and the hopeful reunion are drowned amidst all the needless noise and clutter, betraying the film’s attempts to convince its audience that there is something more to the seductive sex talk, to the lousily staged sex scenes, to the humorous stabs at the suddenly lopsided roles of young Filipino men and women when it comes to sex, to the never-ending supply of colloquial wit, to the endless and tedious monologues. There’s really enough to love in Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me. Unfortunately, there’s also enough to dislike.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Rakenrol (2011)

2011-09-28T18:14:00.002+08:00

Rakenrol (Quark Henares, 2011)

Rakenrol is a lot of firsts for its director, Quark Henares. It is his first feature film to be produced and directed independent of any major studio backing. It is his feature first film to be completely free from any genre limitations. It is also his first feature film after the untimely death of his most loyal supporter and most honest critic, Alexis Tioseco, to which he dedicates the film as a partial fulfilment to one of Tioseco’s famous wishes for Philippine Cinema.

Gamitan (2002), produced by Viva, was clearly bankrolled to maximize the very popular sex appeal of Maui Taylor, who pumped fresh blood and class to the waning genre of titillating films that dominated Philippine cinema in the last few years of the last century and the first few years of the new millennium. Keka (2003), also produced by Viva in an effort to launch the career of Katya Santos, another one of its up and coming sexy actresses, is a revenge film, in the same vein as Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood (1973) and Lino Brocka’s Angela Markado (Angela the Marked One, 1980). Wag Kang Lilingon (Don't Look Back, 2006), a horror film which Henares co-directed with Jerry Lopez Sineneng, is co-produced by Viva with Star Cinema. Super Noypi (2006), produced by Regal Films for the Metro Manila Film Festival, is a mash-up of sci-fi and superhero elements to unwieldy results.

Rakenrol evidently has all the heart a filmmaker can ever give his film, with storylines that are partly or wholly based on actual events and cameos of Henares’ friends and heroes. Henares has clearly taken independence seriously, showering his film with the little things that made his previous films work beyond their respective genres. It overflows with so much heart, its humor and unsubtle odes to whoever and whatever may tend to be alienating. Absent of any real genre, of an actual framework to work with, of self-control, the film doesn’t really have a story to stand on, just a flimsy tale of idealistic youngsters wanting to form a rock band called Hapipaks and in the process of doing so, form life-long friendships and romantic links with each other

It could have worked better if the flimsy tale were driven by real characters instead of just stereotypes and mockeries. It also does not help that the entire film rests upon the shoulders of Jason Abalos, who is unable to turn the character of Odie, the soft-spoken lead guitarist of Hapipaks, into anything more than the typical boy-next-door who happens to have a guitar on his hands. That Glaiza de Castro, who manages to inject Irene, the swoony Hapipaks lead singer with palpable sincerity amidst the film’s unabashed caricature of everything.

Ketchup Eusebio and Alwyn Uytingco, who play the other Hapipaks bandmembers, valiantly make most of their underdeveloped and over-typecasted characters. Ramon Bautista, who plays the self-absorbed director of the Hapipaks music video, Jun Sabayton, who plays misunderstood avant-garde artist, and Diether Ocampo, who plays Odie’s cocky rival to Irene’s heart, are more comedic acts than actual characters you care to love or hate. The film is unfortunately filled to the brim with characters, including the famous Ely Buendia who is reduced to play an inspirational deus ex machina, who serve no real purpose other than as arguably unsuccessful attempts at irreverence or just clutter.

Logic and the advertised promises of working with full independence dictate that outside the fences forced by his collaborations with commercial film studios, Henares would be able to create a masterpiece, or at the very least, a very good very personal film. Unfortunately, Rakenrol is hardly a masterpiece. Although it is indeed a very personal work, it feels more than a little bit scattered, with the story never evolving to be either the quintessential movie about the Philippine rock scene or to be one truly charming romance. With the way it seems to slide out of more interesting conflicts with humor and satire, the film seems to delight in its manufactured weightlessness, never really achieving anything except perhaps for personal nostalgia, and needless tons of it.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Elehiya sa Dumalaw Mula sa Himagsikan (2011)

2011-09-11T23:59:00.002+08:00

Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan (Lav Diaz, 2011)

English Title: Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution

Originally planned as a one minute short for Nikalexis.MOV, a program of short films dedicated to the memory of slain critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc that featured short works by directors like Raymond Red, Rico Maria Ilarde and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz’s Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan (Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution) grew both in length and concept, turning into a film that is ponderous and perplexing but is still grounded on very familiar emotions of melancholy and despair. It is undoubtedly a film that sprung from spontaneity, with Diaz literally writing the film as he was shooting it with a cast of actors and friends who are willing and ready to take in complex roles in a very short period of time.

Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-paro (Butterflies have no Memories, 2009), Diaz’s one-hour meditation on the moral and environmental changes in an abandoned mining town in the island of Marinduque, is evident in its struggle to communicate the spare and pained aesthetics that Diaz is most famous for within an hour. As a result, the film feels unduly hurried, rushing to arrive at its beautiful conclusion. On the other hand, Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan, despite clocking at only one hour and twenty minutes, is deliberately structured and less beholden to its narrative. The film is told in three parts, with each part pertaining to each of the three visits of the time-travelling visitor from when the country was fighting for independence from Spain.

The three parts are themselves divided into seemingly incongruent storylines. A prostitute (Sigrid Bernardo) patiently waits for a customer. A musician (Diaz) plays various melodies for nobody. Three petty criminals (Dante Perez, Evelyn Vargas, and Joel Ferrer) are preparing for a heist. A woman (Hazel Orencio) from the country’s past suddenly appears in a busy marketplace, venturing then to fountains, rivers and other watery places. The storylines eventually converge, revealing characters whose lives are consumed by desperation, forcing them to venture into territories that compromise relationships and whatever remains of their fractured humanity.

Clearly, the prostitute and the petty criminals, with their botched attempt to drift out of their sorry lots, are only victims of a country that has sadly devolved from what it was originally intended to be by the revolutionaries who risked lives for freedom. Diaz does not create characters that are evil by nature. Like the trio of kidnappers of Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-paro, the ox-cart driver of Heremias (2006), or the displaced farmer and miner of Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004), his characters are drawn to extreme actions naturally by an evil society, corrupted by systems that have remained unchanged or adopted through several years of abject complacency or lack of identity.

In one of the rare close-ups in Diaz’s entire filmography, the visitor from the past directly looks at the audience, her face aching with heavy emotions of regret and sadness, the same regret and sadness that pervades the musician’s solitary strumming. It is a hauntingly beautiful dream sequence, unsettling in the way it directly confronts with images bursting with the most wistful of emotions. Dreams are said to be products of unprocessed memories. The dream in Diaz’s film seems to be the product of a nation’s unprocessed memories, burdened with a decades’ worth of tireless but unmerited struggles.

Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan is clearly Diaz’s lament to what the country and its citizens have become. More importantly, it is also his ode to those who continue with the revolution, notwithstanding their songs being unheard, their images being unseen, and their impassioned calls being unfelt. It is everything Diaz stands for. It is everything Tioseco stood and wished for.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

When Silver is Better than Gold: Silvershorts

2011-09-01T23:37:00.005+08:00

When Silver is Better than Gold: Silvershorts

Once every few years, silver is worth more than gold. From the hundreds of short films, ranging from powerful advocacies to mystifying experimentals, ten films were chosen to represent the best of digital short filmmaking this side of the world.

Alvin Yapan’s Panibugho (Jealousy) is a parable that is inspired by a quotation on jealousy and envy from Jose Rizal’s famous first novel. Shot and designed like a moving painting with otherworldly colors melting into rural landscapes, the short film weaves the unreality of local folklore and the reality of the human condition into one of the most astounding cinematic adaptation of a Rizal text. Gym Lumbera’s Dahil Sa’yo (Because of You), on the other hand, situates its melancholic romance between an old man and a banana tree set in the director’s native Batangas. Lyrically shot, sparingly paced, and thematically succinct, the short film makes use of very relatable human emotions as expressed through the popular ballad sung by the old man to his beloved tree to depict the despair in humanity’s relationship with his environment.

Timmy Harn’s Panty is at first glance, just a joke, admittedly a very funny one. At second glance, when the joke’s effect has worn off, the film readily reveals itself as an astute observation of gender roles within a marriage in an age of empowered women and lazy men. Jet Leyco’s Patlang (Blank) starts seemingly as a run-of-the-mill melodrama, covering what possibly is a young girl’s heartbreak. From there, it jumps into a wormhole, transporting the narrative to different places. The short film’s both an exercise of style and rhythm and a mystifying document of the personal and the political converging in the most intriguing of ways.

Jon Lazam’s Hindi Sa Atin Ang Buwan (The Moon is Not Ours) is even more mystifying than Patlang. Shot with a consumer-level video camera over a holiday in Bohol, the film is completely without sound and in black and white. It is mostly footage of travel, chaotic and rapid at first before settling into a more relaxed pace, relaying the feelings of distance, resignation and sadness through sheer imagery. Sharing its adoration for elusiveness with Lazam’s silent short, JP Carpio’s Coverage seems to be more experiment than anything. A multi-cam set-up, a couple preparing and eating breakfast, and an indecipherable rationale, the short film is a puzzle that is more alluring to behold than to solve.

Richmond Garcia’s Numbalikdiwa, a thesis film from the University of the Philippines, attempts to paint the pains of a writer in the process of creating his story. As his imagination literally forms into characters that move, communicate, and hurt him, he learns of the sacrifices of his craft. Also a thesis film, Chuck Hipol’s Man of the House opens with a portrait of a perfect family, the type that only exists in television advertisements. Slowly but surely, it unfolds to reveal a reality that seems to be more normal than strange in a society that fantasizes about perfect families.

The two short documentaries in the program both tackle artists. Mark Mirabuenos Gupit (Cut) centers on a barber gifted with a golden voice. It is a film that charms because the subject is charming, all too willing to belt out a pop classic while parading his skills with the scissors and telling his all-too-familiar story of his very modest life. Cierlito Tabay and Moreno Benigno’s Undo tackles a very unique individual, a very talented painter whose very fuel for his art are the drugs that would inevitably lead to his death. If Mirabuenos’ barber sings to enchant his customers, Tabay and Benigno’s painter sings to express the burdens of his overextended life.

Ten brave short films, all different in their methods, but all similar in their goal to maximize the medium of digital filmmaking in relaying truths, expressing emotions, and forwarding the form of cinema.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Zombadings: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (2011)

2011-08-31T17:22:00.003+08:00

Zombadings: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (Jade Castro, 2011)

English Title: Zombadings: Kill Remington with Fear

If there’s one thing a filmmaker needs to know about profitable filmmaking in the Philippines, it is to acknowledge that the only kind of filmmaking that actually earns money is genre filmmaking. If the film is not horror, comedy, romance, or laden with homosexual themes and titillation, it would probably not arouse enough interest to earn enough box-office rewards to at least break even. It seems that filmmakers are then left with the choice of either making a commercial but compromised film or a noble-intentioned film that nobody in the country would have seen or even hear of unless it makes waves in international film festivals.

At first glance, Zombadings: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (Zombadings: Kill Remington with Fear) seems to fit perfectly in the category of creative compromises. Producer and screenwriter Raymond Lee, screenwriter Michiko Yamamoto, and director and screenwriter Jade Castro ingeniously shower the film with elements from the horror, comedy, romance, and queer genres, assuring it, at least in essence, a chance at making monetary profit. However, Zombadings is more inspired than it sounds and looks. There is definitely more to the film than homosexual undead and slapstick. It is deliciously subversive, delivering a message that sadly and unfairly may not be universally accepted in the most universal of ways.

Set in a provincial town just like any other in the Philippines, Zombadings follows the story of Remington (Martin Escudero), the stereotypical macho boy next door who engages in manual labor during the day and downs shots of rum at night. Cursed to turn gay when he was a little boy by a gay man (Roderick Paulate) he angered because of his incessant insensitive teasing, Remington slowly but very surely turns gay, first with his gestures, then his language, then his sexual preference, leaving him in the middle of a love triangle involving his best friend Jigs (Kerbie Zamora) and literal girl-next-door Hannah (Lauren Young). While Remington is transforming, his mother (Janice De Belen), a police officer, is solving the case of uncovering who is responsible for the murders of the gay men in town.

Despite the having a story where crazy-looking gaydars, rollerblading widows, vengeful drag queens, homophobic serial killers and the titular gay zombies miraculously cohere, Zombadings is actually very intelligently and carefully conceived and crafted. Castro directs the film like a maverick conductor, leading an orchestra composed of traditionally jarring instruments but eventually coming up with a symphony that is not so hard to enjoy and adore.

The casting decisions are brilliant. Escudero, a teen heartthrob who has been relegated to playing supporting roles in haphazardly crafted horror films, is a revelation, hilariously portraying a straight man involuntarily turning gay, making use of all the clichés of gay-acting without looking forced or overdone. Paulate, who is instrumental in creating the sub-genre of drag queen slapsticks with films like Petrang Kabayo at ang Pilyang Kuting (Petra the Horse and the Naughty Kitten, Luciano Carlos, 1988), Bala at Lipistik (Bullet and Lipstick, Maryo J. De Los Reyes, 1994), and Ded na si Lolo (Grandpa si Dead, Soxie Topacio, 2009), generously and willingly lends his iconic stature to give Zombadings credibility within that genre, effectively making its use of homosexual stereotypes palatable within the perspective of being part of a cinematic tradition that began as far back as 1954 with Mar Torres’ Jack en Jill starring legendary Dolphy as the funny crossdresser.

On the other hand, John Regala, who starred in many action flicks of the late eighties and early nineties, Daniel Fernando, who most famously played the peeping tom in Peque Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights (1985), and Leandro Baldemor, who bared his skin while cavorting with starlets in many of the titillating films of the nineties, lend their iconic cinematic manliness to represent the other darker side of the fence of homophobia as machismo. Their much-valued machismo however looks useless once pitted against the leadership and industry of the characters played by De Belen, Odette Khan, and Mailes Kanapi who do more for the town than throw baseless and hateful tirades against gays (that are rightfully drowned and obliterated by a marching band in one of the film’s more clever scenes).

Zombadings is undoubtedly tons of fun, and it is perfectly alright to take it as it is, a very well-made piece of populist entertainment. However, the film becomes even more rewarding if enjoyed within the context of what it was made for, as a document of empowerment, a testament to the right of choice, and a blow against intolerance. It is packaged in a way that its freedoms and excesses should not be taken literally or too seriously, yet its jabs at still-existing constipated perceptions and opinions against homosexuality are too potent to be left unnoticed. Ladies and gentlemen, gay or straight, dead or alive, this film’s a winner.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Cuchera (2011)

2011-08-28T23:21:00.001+08:00

Cuchera (Joseph Israel Laban, 2011)

Joseph Israel Laban’s Cuchera, a rightfully shocking exposé of the lives of low-rent drug mules, one of the drug mules, opens with the obligatory and totally unnecessary factoid on how there are so many Filipino drug mules who are still rotting in jail in various countries. From the seemingly lofty implications of his advocacy-heavy introduction, Laban jumps into the middle of one of Manila’s slums. His camera is attentive to the most damning of details, like a torn and discolored Philippine flag, the grime, the mud, the heaps and heaps of garbage and the shanties that dot the dump’s perimeter. From the film’s first few images, it becomes clear that Laban is not interested in subtlety, and probably rightly so. The intentions of the film seem better communicated through shock and noise than lyricism and nuance.

Laban continues by following Rosa (Isadora), a matronly woman we later find out is in charge of making the falsified passports for the drug mules, and Isabel (Maria Isabel Lopez), a retired prostitute who now masterminds the recruitment of drug mules, as they spend the day preparing for the night’s operation. He fortifies the story’s progression with various details like Rosa and Isabel’s detour to a shady faith healer, or the comedic infidelity of Isabel’s husband (Simon Ibarra), or the crazed sexual appetite of Isabel’s nephew (CJ Ramos). From there, Laban introduces the drug mules one by one, giving enough background to rationalize their decision to become literal victims of the very real horrors of international drug trade.

Cuchera is best seen as a horror film without the entertainment goals of the popular genre. While Laban sympathizes with the drug mules who find themselves transformed into receptacles for bags of cocaine, he does not shy away from depicting the violence, depravity, and atrocities of the carefully mapped out process. Through the succeeding sequences of rape, drug use, and of the drugs being hastily and carelessly inserted into the victims, Laban fervently manufactures offense, disgust, and revulsion from the images and sounds he creates, emphasizing very well the indisputable perversity of the market for drug mules and the pervading poverty that forces men and women to become drug mules.

Near the end of the film, one of the drug mules, while aboard a pick-up van en route to the airport, suddenly tells the story of a white lady that is rumored to haunt a hospital. One by one, the drug mules recite their known version of the ghost story. The drug mules’ versions of the story are alarming, all involving rape and abortion as reasons for the lady’s death and her horrid afterlife. However, the dazed storytellers recount the stories without emotions, strangely without even a tinge of fear the stories normally deserve. It is as if their collective recent experiences have desensitized them to fictional horror, rendering them unfettered and unfeeling. It is as if humanity was but a distant memory. To Laban’s credit, watching his powerful debut film produced the same results within me, even if just momentarily.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Observations from a Semi-Starry, Starry Night

2011-08-22T22:58:00.002+08:00

Observations from a Semi-Starry, Starry Night

It was a blind item coursed through an acceptance speech. Arnel Mardoquio, director of Sheika (2010), received the Urian Best Actress trophy for Fe Gingging Hyde, who was in Dubai and was unable to receive her award. The Mindanaoan director revealed that his film was then an entry for a local independent film festival and was removed precisely because Hyde was not famous enough to rake in publicists and moviegoers to be interested in the film. For Mardoquio, the Urian prize, like the NETPAC prize he won for the same film during the local independent film festival he was referring to, is sweet retribution. For some of us, Mardoquio’s speech reveals just one of the many concerns of the supposed “indie film” scene. For the rest, which probably consists of majority of movie-going Filipinos, the speech is nothing more than an ignorable anecdote that will do nothing for their hunger only for escapist cinema, whether locally produced or imported.

Ever since the international film community started noticing so-called indie films and bestowing upon them slots in prestigious film festivals and awards, the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino quickly took charge in promoting their successes by offering nominations and wins in their annual Urian Awards. It is ostensibly a worthy effort. The films needed to be seen in the Philippines. However, the sad truth is that these films’ existences are kept secret not by some grandiose conspiracy but by simple ignorance. The Manunuri and their much-coveted awards have saved up enough integrity and goodwill over the years to make their decisions a matter of public interest...

(Continue reading in Lagarista.)

Isda (2011)

2011-08-21T11:59:00.002+08:00

Isda (Adolfo Alix, Jr., 2011)

English Title: Fable of the Fish

Adolfo Alix, Jr.’s Isda (Fable of the Fish) appears to be just another movie set in the overexploited slums of Manila. Lina (Cherry Pie Picache) and Miguel (Bembol Roco), a childless couple despite several years of being married who have just relocated from the province to the city to change their fate, arrive at the slums just in time to witness an unsurprising altercation between a slum dweller and the police, which is expectedly spiced by rowdy and overly involved onlookers. Unstirred by the unexpected but commonplace boisterous welcome of their new home, the couple settle in. Miguel finds a job in the nearby ice plant. Lina stays at home, taking care of the children of her neighbors if she’s not helping her husband in trying to earn money from the dumpsite. Despite the harrowing conditions of the place where they decided to live, Lina and Miguel’s new life is strangely perfect, except that they have not been blessed with a child of their own.

Then Lina gets pregnant, and gives birth, amazingly, to a fish.

Alix does not completely abandon reality in his foray into the supernatural. Picache and Roco admirably wear their roles with unquestionable conviction, blurring further the line that separates the gnawing reality of the depicted poverty and the fantasy of the couple’s situation.

Isda is also visually intriguing, with the scenes framed purposefully, either to direct humor or to forward the narrative. Cinematographer Albert Banzon ensures that the film is not too grimly lit or too bluntly framed. The music, melodies randomly conjured from a single violin, lends uneasiness to the affair.

Absurd is a word that Isda draws its power from. From the absurdity of families etching out decent lives from the indecent conditions of the slums and the dumpsite to the absurdity of Lina giving birth to a fish and attempting to be normal in an obviously abnormal family situation, Alix maintains an unwavering consistency in his depiction. The film is refreshingly mischievous, wearing a mask of seriousness amidst the hilarity of everything that is going on. The film appears to be just one big joke, the same big joke that screenwriter Jerry Gracio played on Lina and Miguel when he wrote Lina’s birthing to a fish into his screenplay. However, the film is indisputably bigger than the sum of all the chuckles the obliviousness of its characters of the blatant absurdity that they’re living could ever produce.

Beyond the absurdity and the tabloid-worthy uniqueness of the story that would most probably be the center of all discussions about the film is a very simple but very earnest portrait of a family. Alix maps the family’s story with astute tenderness, establishing relationships between each member, grounding them with logic and emotions. More importantly, Alix does not place his story within a lifeless vacuum. He concocts a community for the family to exist in and relate to. He has created a world, exaggerated it seems with people living and raising families side by side with garbage, that is ready to admit another glaring anomaly. The truths of Isda, I believe, are as weighty if not weightier than its delicious and deliriously memorable flights of fantasy.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Chris Martinez: The Man Behind the Golden Septic Tank

2011-08-11T15:33:00.003+08:00

The Man Behind the Golden Septic Tank

If it’s from Seiko, it must be good. The tagline of the movie studio that has made for itself a reputation for churning out half-baked soft pornography with mouth-watering titles like Talong, Kangkong, and Itlog has turned into a joke. Then Bridal Shower (2004) came along. The film, written by newcomer Chris Martinez with mentor Armando Lao and directed by Jeffrey Jeturian, follows the exploits of three ad executives as they search for love in the big city. The film is ridiculously funny, but the humor, thankfully, is not grounded on slapstick or gimmick. Bridal Shower is funny because it exaggerates the realities of love and life in a metropolis that is getting more and more materialistic.

Martinez’s second film is Bikini Open (2005), also directed by Jeffrey Jeturian and also from Seiko Films. A mock-umentary that goes right in the heart of the then-popular bikini contests, the film mocks not only the men and women who parade their bodies, their life stories, and their motherhood statements for the entertainment of the sex-starved but also mass media who is quick to point fingers to the obvious wrongs of society without acknowledging its own viciousness...

(Read more on Chris Martinez's film career in the super-fantastic site on anything and everything that is Philippine cinema called Lagarista.)

I-Libings (2011)

2011-08-08T23:59:00.001+08:00

I-Libings (Rommel Sales, 2011)

English Title: I-Funerals

Isabel (Glaiza de Castro), a promising mass communications student, has just landed an internship that none of her classmates, who are interning in television stations and film production outfits, would envy. I-Libings, a company that specializes in covering wakes and funerals for its grieving clients, does not seem to be the proper place for Isabel’s skills and talents. With only a lowly consumer-level video camera to work with, a crew of untrained technicians and a boss (Earl Ignacio) who is initially unimpressed with her capabilities to deal with, she treats her internship with the company as some cruel joke that fate has randomly dished her.

Rommel Sales’ I-Libings (I-Funerals) starts off seemingly with very little ambition. It initially concentrates on Isabel’s experiences in her internship, mining the unique nature of her work for nuggets of humor and sizable doses of irony. While somewhat entertaining, the exploits of Isabela and her workmates in and out of the funeral parlor, with camera on hand as they manage to get the most effective angles of the wakes and interments or edit the footage in the most efficient way, get tired and redundant. Thankfully, Sales does not limit the film within the confines of Isabel’s life as an intern in a funeral video coverage company.

Apart from being the talent that rots away in a company that she has deemed unworthy of her, Isabel is also a bastard daughter of a family man (Rez Cortez). Her weekends are spent with her mother (Louella de Cordova), wondering whether her father will spend the night with them and getting used to the fact that her father probably won’t. Sales depicts this area of Isabel’s life with fascinating sensitivity, expressing the insecurities, angst and anger felt by a daughter born and living under less than ideal circumstances with ample clarity and believability. Those consuming emotions are all subtly communicated, just waiting to explode, waiting to burst at that precise moment.

And burst they did at that most precise of moments when all the film’s incongruent elements converged to ground the film’s single emotional highlight. Isabel, enveloped by both grief and frustrations, stands before her tormentors, revealing with the apparent disgust the most damning truth that death has conveniently shrouded. Isabel invests in that imperfect gesture, going against tradition, manners, and etiquette. She commits to the perpetuity provided by video recording the irreverence she was constrained to do, declaring to the world the pains of her life. She’s only human, and I-Libings is better for it.

Confused whether it is a comedy, a drama, or a mixture of both, the film contains elements that do not always cohere. It is very frustrating, especially since the film has really momentous moments that are wasted by attempts at being funny that never quite work. The film’s biggest sin is that it chose to end with another lousy bid at humor, betraying the abundance of emotions of the immediately preceding scene for an ineffective punchline. I-Libings is a sorely uneven film, but for that unexpected detour from the mundane concerns of intern life to tackle humanity’s fragility within the frame provided by death and mourning, everything can forgiven.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Bahay Bata (2011)

2011-08-06T23:59:00.002+08:00

Bahay Bata (Eduardo Roy, Jr., 2011)

English Title: Baby Factory

A pregnant woman, notably without a husband to keep her company and more notably with hardly an emotion on her face, walks to the maternity hospital. She arrives at the hospital, revealing a queue of other pregnant women, waiting for their turn to be examined by the physician who determines whether or not the mother’s are about to deliver and should be admitted into the hospital. In the delivery room of the hospital, several women are giving birth together, side by side, seemingly oblivious of privacy and other things that make that most important moment in motherhood immeasurable unique and special.

With its unflinching depiction of the brutal conditions of an overworked and overcrowded public maternity hospital, the opening sequence of Eduardo Roy, Jr.’s Bahay Bata (Baby Factory) enunciates how poverty has pervaded and probably tainted what should be sacred. It’s a literal baby factory, where mothers are herded in assembly lines, and doctors go through one mother after another, delivering babies with astounding but unfeeling efficiency that is not unlike that of a trained and skilled factory worker.

The images that Roy was able to capture within the maternity hospital are evidence of the gnawing overpopulation that strangles the country’s economy and therefore making the cycle of poverty ever more apparent and inescapable. In a country that is in the middle of a seemingly never-ending debate on overpopulation and governmental regulations to put a stop to it, what Roy has strung together is politically and socially relevant, an intelligently rendered disclosure of the failures of the status quo, and a signal of a need to graduate from a stagnant culture of useless charity and temporary solutions to something more progressive.

Fortunately, Roy does not succumb to the temptation of being overtly political. From the shocking images that Roy sets the tone and feel of his film with, he moves on, focusing on the very human stories that miraculously still exist despite the hospital’s pathetic conditions. Because of that, Bahay Bata succeeds in painting a very tender, very delicate, and beautifully non-judgmental picture of mothers at their humblest and most vulnerable.

From the nurse (Diana Zubiri, in a surprisingly heartfelt performance that is memorable not because there are big acting moments but because she was able to communicate the minute changes that happen from the first time we see her until the last) who is suddenly faced with the decision of continuing a pregnancy that is borne from an illicit relationship to the mother who is unable to lactate and breastfeed her thirteenth child, the stories that Roy and screenwriter Jerome Zamora found in their research which they wrote into the film are mostly fascinating. Masterfully weaved together by Charliebebs Gohetia’s precise editing work, those stories merge to become a penetrating film that echoes the glistening imperfections that makes motherhood such a beautiful thing, how amidst the blood, sweat and tears of childbirth, there is the truest of pleasure, however momentary, in giving life, how it incites the most pronounced of emotions, whether it be happiness, anger, love, and depression.

Bahay Bata is wonderfully subtle, a description that is rarely used for films that have poverty as a constant and continuous backdrop. While it starts seemingly exploitative of the appalling scenario that the dozens of mothers have to face, it evolves into something extremely close to sublime, a film that can be both agitating and touching, numbing and heartfelt.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Amok (2011)

2011-08-05T05:22:00.003+08:00

Amok (Lawrence Fajardo, 2011)

Opening with a montage of faces, scenes, and sounds of Manila scored by street children rapping about street life, Lawrence Fajardo’s Amok immediately captures opposing yet strangely coexisting facets of city life, disconnect and the scarceness of distance.

The film is set in one very specific location in Manila. The EDSA-Pasay Rotonda, situated in the middle of two of EDSA and Taft, two of the busiest streets in Manila, has the unique feature of being several levels of urban madness. The intersecting streets could barely accommodate the volume of traffic, worsened by passenger jeepneys and buses that cruise the street barely an inch from the next vehicle without crashing. The sidewalk is equally busy with pedestrians dodging other pedestrians, sidewalk vendors, their patrons, and other obstructions to walking traffic. Then there are the walkways above ground, connecting the areas in EDSA-Pasay Rotonda that are separated by two rivers of overheating automobiles and their overheating drivers. Above the walkways is the light rail track, the only fixture of predictability in that hotspot. The buildings surrounding the streets are structures providing privacy to the most private of acts.

The characters Fajardo and screenwriter John Bedia conjure probably have elaborate live stories. However, the film does not dwell too much in their stories, showing only fragments of lives limited by time and space. A father (Noni Buencamino) and his son discuss the latter’s basketball dreams while waiting for the bus. A sidewalk vendor (Patricia Ysmael) tends to both the food she’s selling to passers-by and her precocious daughter. A forgotten stuntman (Mark Gil) hangs on to the little that remains of his former action star physique and masculinity and fucks a prostitute who turns out to be both less and more than what he expected.

Stuck in horrendous traffic, a driver (Archi Adamos) tries to air his thoughts on the family affairs of his impatient employer (Lui Manansala), who is also his sister. An irate taxi driver reaches his boiling point when a gay talent scout and his ward ride his taxi. A former police official (Efren Reyes, Jr.) meets with an elderly woman (Ermie Concepcion) to plan the burning of a squatter colony nearby. In one of the sidestreets, a game of poorman’s pool (where instead of balls, bottle caps are used) played by a trio of street folks (Dido dela Paz and Gary Lim), heated by jeers, cheers, and bruised egos, is arriving at an unexpected finish, a finish that would obliterate the disconnect and any remaining distance among the thousands of people in the EDSA-Pasay Rotonda that hot afternoon.

The film is directed with meticulousness and discipline, moving from one character to another with commendable restraint in not telling too much and not showing too much, effectively teasing the audience of the predictable but still surprising havoc that is quietly being orchestrated by the elements at play in that time-bomb of a place. Fajardo peppers the film with delectable details, a bit of visual wit here and there, a nuanced shot, and those gems of subtle humor in the dialogue. Louie Quirino’s precise cinematography communicates the sweltering heat that seems to demonize humanity in the anarchic setting. The film uses the city’s noise as soundtrack, creating an uneasy atmosphere of spontaneity that complements the film’s story and theme.

Fajardo, after patiently mapping the lives of strangers with admirable clarity and technical proficiency, concludes the film, measuring the extensive scope of a random act of violence. More than the obvious tragedy, the ending encompasses various other things like comedy, anger, fear, forgiveness, and a sudden second chance at fame. Amok is without a doubt, chaos in astoundingly consummate order.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Bisperas (2011)

2011-07-31T23:54:00.001+08:00

Bisperas (Jeffrey Jeturian, 2011)

English Title: Eve

Set on Christmas Day’s eve in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood, Jeffrey Jeturian’s Bisperas (Eve) details a family’s return from the traditional panunuluyan, a re-enactment of Joseph and Mary’s search for a place to stay involving the members of the parish, only to discover that their house has been robbed. As they account for what has been stolen from their belongings, long-kept secrets are uncovered, revealing the ironic dysfunctions of what seems to be a model middle-class Filipino family.

The film is deceptively simple. It faithfully follows the dysfunctional family trope, with no sharp turns in the narrative, just incidents piling upon incidents until everything explodes predictably at the dinner table. It is shot with hardly any pretense for cinematic prettiness or flair, just the drab interiors of a typical subdivision house, illuminated only by sparse room and Christmas lights. It is expertly edited, with scenes stitched together in near seamless fashion, importantly establishing continuity in the story that exists within a very short period of time.

Bisperas is a superbly acted film. Tirso Cruz III plays the beleaguered patriarch with controlled ferocity. Raquel Villavicencio, on the other hand, playing the family’s very tolerant matriarch, blends into the subtle drama with admirable ease, putting in a mannered performance until the exact moment when hysterics become necessary. As the couple’s grown children, Julia Clarete, Jennifer Sevilla, and Edgar Allan Guzman give the brood of discordant adults ample chemistry, making the strict distinction between emotional attachment and distance among them so deliciously apparent.

It is as if the film was willfully made to look ordinary and feel familiar, owing to Jeturian’s agenda of having the film mirror the pretentiousness of the Philippines’ bourgeoisie, a class as beholden as any other to the Catholic Church but displays such attachment to religion with near-absurd pomp. By bookending the film with public displays of faith and religiosity, where it appears that the Church has been successful in tending its flock to follow the ways of Christianity, Jeturian enunciates the ungodly difference between what is displayed in public and what is kept from public.

Jeturian sprinkles the film with a little too much of symbolisms and visual cues that make it a tad more pedantic than what is required to effectively communicate its message. Uneven only because of certain portions when the film is carried away by an understandable eagerness to reveal the failures of an overbearing Church and its shallow flock, Bisperas is a film that triumphs when it is low key, when its affronts to Catholic hypocrisy are gestured instead of zealously announced.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ang Babae sa Septic Tank (2011)

2011-07-29T15:23:00.003+08:00

Ang Babae sa Septic Tank (Marlon Rivera, 2011)

English Title: The Woman in the Septic Tank

Ang Babae sa Septic Tank (The Woman in the Septic Tank), directed by Marlon Rivera from a screenplay written by Chris Martinez, earns most of its laughs from the misadventures of director Rainer (Kean Cipriano), producer Bingbong (JM de Guzman), and production assistant Jocelyn (Cai Cortez), an overly ambitious troop of filmmakers who are out to make their dream film entitled "Walang Wala" by exploiting the picturesque poverty of Manila. As they brainstorm on the casting, the look, the story, the poster design, and down to the English translation of the title of their precious project, the film takes shape inside the mind of perennially quiet Jocelyn (perhaps Rivera and Martinez’s homage to the production crew rendered voiceless by noisy auteurs and capitalists), showcasing what’s depressingly wrong in the current state of Philippine filmmaking in the most hilarious of ways.

Ang Babae sa Septic Tank delights in caricaturizing filmmakers, films, and the business of making films. There are practically no real characters to speak of, and no real story for the characters to navigate in. The filmmakers are just comical representations of deplorable traits of filmmakers tend to have. The plot is essentially what happens in a typical day in the pre-production of the film, where meetings, pitches, and location checks are crammed within the few working hours of the day in true independent film fashion.

Rivera and Martinez thickens what essentially is a thinly plotted experience with wit and exaggeration, creating both a chilling and charming indictment of Philippine cinema for creating monsters that feed on fame and fortune at the expense of the truly marginalized. Unfortunately, Ang Babae sa Septic Tank trips on its own trap. In its quest for some sort of comeuppance for its erring characters, it draws up a twist that makes use of the most common stereotype of poverty, which is abject criminality.

Ang Babae sa Septic Tank’s biggest commodity is reliable Eugene Domingo, who plays the various versions of "Walang Wala"’s Mila, the hapless mother of too many children who is forced to sell one of her kids to a pedophile to survive. She also plays an overly distorted version of herself. Domingo hilariously hams up the role of the overly-pampered product of mainstream projects and television shows.

Lately, Philippine cinema has been represented internationally by the films of Brillante Mendoza which are predominantly focused on lives persisting in extreme cases of poverty. With the success of Mendoza and the demand of film festival programmers for exoticized visions of third-world penury, other filmmakers followed suit, filming various stories back-grounded by mountains of trash, acres of slums, and never-ending violence.

The Philippines, sadly, is proud of a cinema that most of its citizens have not seen. It is proud of a cinema that is taken hostage by the international film festivals that dictate upon it its inevitable direction. It is proud of a cinema that is only part of a vicious cycle of international demands and artists too willing to fill in these demands. Of course, that is only one spectrum of the debate. The other spectrum belongs to what’s right in Philippine cinema, which is obviously not the focus of Martinez and Rivera and would have made the film a less effective parody.

With its brave and seamless sense of humor, Ang Babae sa Septic Tank is a sure crowd-pleaser. However, let not its comedic machinations be mistakenly considered as the summation of the bigger, more complex and more beautiful thing that is Philippine cinema.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Gayuma (2010)

2011-07-24T15:20:00.001+08:00

Gayuma (Alvin Yapan, 2010)

English Title: Pilgrim Lovers

Gayuma (Pilgrim Lovers) is a film borne out of love and sheer dedication. Armed with a budget that is minuscule even if pitted against other independent productions, director Alvin Yapan and producer Alemberg Ang ventured on to mount a film based on one of Yapan’s oldest stories, a concept developed and evolved from an exercise among literary comrades in college who dared each other to come up with a story that ends with the sentence “I love you.” The result is evidently imperfect. However, despite its obvious imperfections, the film perseveres with the strength of its story, making it a testament to Yapan’s boundless imagination.

In a parochial Bicol town, a statue of the Sto Niño suddenly started talking and dancing, prompting the town’s parish priest to visit to investigate and to exorcise from the statue whatever spirit that is haunting it. With him is Delfin (Kalil Almonte), his sacristan and assistant, who is advised by the verbose Sto Niño statue to concoct a love potion so that he can easily woo Carla (Mercedes Cabral), a rich girl who is already in love with another man, into leaving her man for him.

The film is divided into two parts. The first half focuses on Delfin who is enveloped by his longing for unreachable Carla and therefore takes the Sto Niño statue’s advice to easily win the affections of the girl. The second half focuses on Carla. Carla, under the spell of Delfin’s love potion, carries Delfin, who mysteriously fell in a coma, through fields, mountains and forests, to a pond that will cure Delfin of his affliction. The two parts are differentiated by mood and feel. With steady visuals, the first half establishes the traditionally masculine conviction and determination of Delfin in his pursuit for Carla’s undivided attention. The second half, characterized by markedly jerky camera movements, visualizes Carla’s stereotypically feminine confusion and uncertainty as she carries Delfin, inspired either by the sure effects of the love potion or true love.

Gayuma is ridden with details that pertain to certain agendas Yapan may or may not be that successful in fleshing out, like a certain extended scene with the gay beautician who fancies Delfin and an extraneous scene with certain rebels who rescue Carla from rapists in the forest (Yapan’s commentaries as to how homosexuals and communist rebels, respectively, are being used in Philippine cinema). It also suffers from lacking polish that could have added a little bit more of dread in the earlier part or dreaminess in the middle part or danger in the latter part.

However, despite the immense gap between what Yapan wanted to say and his budgetary limitations, the film still manages to communicate the harsh complexities of love and loving within a story that is simple yet brimming with color and flourish. There is poignancy in Delfin’s succumbing to ease of romance, and wickedness in Carla’s torturous trek towards the healing pond to rescue the man he may or may not actually love. There are no blacks or whites, just damning greys in Yapan’s peculiar love story. That “I love you” that was whispered in the film’s final second trumps all the “I love you’s” carelessly and emptily spoken, shouted, and written in other films I’ve seen before.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Patikul (2011)

2011-07-21T16:57:00.005+08:00

Patikul (Joel Lamangan, 2011)

There is no denying the sincerity of veteran director Joel Lamangan in making Patikul. Education is after all an issue that can never be overemphasized. It needs to be talked about because there is an alarming lack of it especially in the riskier and more remote areas in the Philippines. Patikul was born out of that very noble intention of educating the public on the deficiencies of the policy on education in the Philippines. Unfortunately, the film is as effective as a lousy kindergarten teacher teaching calculus to a room full of monkeys.

Patikul tells the story of Kan-Ague Elementary School in Patikul, Sulu. Two of Kan-Ague’s best students are chosen to compete in the region’s quiz bee. Determined to grab the top prize, the students prepare for the quiz bee with the help of the school’s supportive principal (Marvin Agustin) and teachers. However, the students get caught in the middle of the hostilities between the government and the terrorists.

Since Patikul borrows the name of an actual place for its title, one would logically expect Lamangan to shoot the film in that place. Instead, the film was shot in locations in Rizal and Cavite that could pass for the town of Patikul, or what Lamangan envisions Patikul in Sulu would be. The danger of the convenience-fueled resourcefulness is that it makes the film based on a certain interpretation of a place, an interpretation that is not unlike a ghastly stereotype. Thus, the film is erroneously emboldened by its pretty but empty visuals of rolling hills, dark forests, bustling town centers, and busy coffee farms. However, these locations are just stages, the characters are just performers, and the film is just an explicit exercise of fakery.

Sincerity and conviction are too different things. Patikul is a sincere film that lacks conviction. The confusion shows. The performances are obviously thinly inspired, grounded more on the need to get things done sure and fast than any genuine understanding of what their characters are going through. Agustin’s performance is predictably flat. The performances of Martin delos Santos and Angeli Nicole Sanoy, who gave life to the determined students who were chosen to compete for the quiz bee, are lacking in depth. The other supporting cast-members, with the probable exception of Glaiza de Castro who gives a modestly heartfelt depiction of one of the schoolteachers, are needless pretty faces and familiar names whose only contribution to the film is publicity.

The actors, however, are only acting out what the screenplay tells them to act out. Sadly, Kristoffer Brugada’s screenplay, which surprisingly won a Palanca award, is a horrendous mess. It is ridiculously talky, indulging in dialogue that makes more obvious the already obvious. Its desire to be “full of heart” (for a lack of a better phrase) is too put on, too manufactured.

Lamangan treats the screenplay with reverence it does not deserve. Thus, the result is this confused work whose only merit is that it seems to signal that the type of uninvolved filmmaking that Lamangan has gotten too used to from working as a hired gun for film studios and television stations can no longer work when the film that needs to be made involves the director’s sincerest advocacy that he longs to communicate. That said, Patikul is independent only by association, nothing more.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Niño (2011)

2011-07-20T20:45:00.002+08:00

Niño (Loy Arcenas, 2011)

The Lopez-Aranda family has fallen far from grace. Gaspar (Tony Mabesa) was a promising statesman during his younger years but his political ambitions were thwarted by Ferdinand Marcos’ sudden rise to power. Celia (Fides Cuyugan), his sister, was an opera star whose sudden marriage to an inutile man stalled her career.

The second generation didn’t fare any better. Celia’s daughter, Merced (Shamaine Buencamino), is unmarried and takes care of the affairs of the household. Her son, Mombic (Art Acuña), haunted by a failed marriage and business, is seeking employment abroad. Gaspar’s only daughter, Raquel (Raquel Villavicencio), displaced from the Philippines for decades, has had three marriages. The third generation, represented by Reinhardt (Joaquin Valdez), Raquel’s teenage son, and Antony (Jhiz Deocareza), Mombic’s five year old son, bear the cudgels of their family’s inevitable decay.

There is a reason why people are fascinated with ruins, despite the evident disrepair and decay. Ruins are permanent reminders of a distant glorious past. In Loy Arcenas’ Niño, the Lopez-Aranda clan is portrayed with the same fascination, as if the family were ruins on display: the bits of opera that Celia sings to bedridden Gaspar with her aging soprano are the broken columns, the stories told by Gaspar of his blossoming political position are the damaged statues, and the rustic house, its remaining furniture and ornaments and the anecdotes of the loyal household help of the house’s former prominence are the collapsed edifices, the wilted gardens, the burnt arcs, all of which are faint indications of the family’s expired extravagance.

Do not be mistaken to think that Niño treats its characters plainly as mere objects of art, remnants of a faded legacy. The characters are very human. Their relations and entanglements with each other are grounded on uncomplicated emotions. Arcenas comprehends the allure of disgrace, the way it measures the extent of the family’s sure decline. Arcenas punctuates desperation with class, moderates depravity with sensitivity, and adds levity to the very certain histrionics and melodramatics of the formerly privileged.

For a film by a first-time film director, Niño is a feat to behold. All the elements, from Lee Briones and Jay Abello’s elegant cinematography, to the ensemble acting, to Jerrold Tarog’s intelligently spare scoring, to Danny Añonuevo’s very precise editing, are meshed together by Arcenas with expert precision. The film is marked with disciplined craftsmanship, a rare commodity in a filmmaking culture that has become too forgiving of lazy, careless and depthless technical work. The amazingly tight screenplay, concocted by playwright Rody Vera, is humorous without going overboard.

The film’s accomplished climax, a final audacious attempt to grab onto whatever glory or dignity left, is the film’s poignant crest. The very sight of the country’s best opera singers together in their old age, belting out in voices that are fractions of what they used to be, is both absurd and wondrous. Yet after everything, when the music of the past has faded, when the momentary elation and heightened hope have been replaced by the very real notion that there are things that are meant to wither and that what remains are only echoes and shadows from an era and a family’s sunken splendor.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Teoriya (2011)

2011-07-18T16:28:00.006+08:00

Teoriya (Zurich Chan, 2011)

English Title: Theory

An airplane flies past an anonymous Zamboanga cemetery. Outside the city’s airport, reporters are waiting. Passengers from the most recent arrival scramble out of the airport. A man, donned in running gear, is approached by the reports. He won a prestigious marathon in Manila and returns to his native Zamboanga to start running across the island of Mindanao. While the reporters are gathering clues from the runner as to why he wants to run, another man (Alfred Vargas), dressed in typical Manila clothes, appears. The runner, who is still being followed by the reporters, and the man leave the airport in separate directions.

Zurich Chan, instead of following the possibly more colourful tale of the champion runner, follows the other man, as he takes a cab through the streets of Zamboanga he may or may not remember from the childhood he chose to forget and abandon. He arrives in the office of his godfather (Lilit Reyes), the starting point of his journey to find his dead father’s grave. His father bequeathed him with almost nothing, except for a piece of land, a rundown car, and a diary of his father’s exploits as a medical representative. The man rides from one town to another, retracing his father’s footsteps, discovering secrets about him, and inching closer to truly living.

Simplicity has become so underrated, especially today wherein complex plots, social relevance, and shallow intellectualism have become overrated. More often than not, simplicity has been mistaken for lack of originality, thinness of plot, and worse, absence of imagination and ambition. Teoriya could have been about the runner, traversing the dangerous but picturesque roads of Mindanao. It could have dug deeper into the psyche of the runner. It could have been immensely inspirational, a film that puts forth triumph against the stereotypical adversities that plague the island.

Fortunately, Teoriya is not about all of that. It is first and foremost a story, the simplest of all stories, and like most stories, a theory as to what the story’s creator would do had he been in the shoes of the character he is writing himself in. That said, the film, with its unfairly criticized simplicity, is a heartfelt achievement, rife with anecdotes that add not only quirk and humor into the exercise but also rare visual lyricism.

Without forcing issues for the goal of achieving some sort of social relevance, the film manages to acknowledge that personal stories are unavoidably intertwined with the bigger picture, that more often than not, in any journey, there will always be predictable encounters with poverty (the hijacking farmer), with violence (the father’s experience of losing his parents to massacre), with love (the woman among men). These encounters are not caused by some clever circumstance or narrative conceit. It is just how life naturally unfolds. With Teoriya, Chan celebrates the frustrating and enjoyable mysteries of life and living life while basking under the peculiarly warm sunlight of death.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Maskara (2011)

2011-07-16T10:41:00.006+08:00

Maskara (Laurice Guillen, 2011)

English Title: Mask

There’s one scene in Laurice Guillen’s Maskara (Mask) where Ina Feleo, playing Anna, the illegitimate daughter of accomplished actor Bobby (Tirso Cruz III) who recently passed away, suddenly weeps. Guillen does not opt for an extreme close-up of her daughter’s face. Instead, Feleo is seen from a comfortable distance, allowing her to overwhelm the frame with just There’s something strangely haunting about Feleo’s performance. It is more than good within the scope of the film’s narrative. It is actually very moving on its own, encompassing emotions as varied as sorrow and anger, regret and acceptance.

Feleo’s father and Guillen’s husband, the great actor Johnny Delgado, died in 2009. While Feleo and fictional Anna were born under different circumstances, they share common emotions, of longing and of overflowing love for a missed father. In short, Feleo’s memorable performance has truth as its foundation. That the truth is conveyed through the art of acting makes it immeasurably more beautiful.

Maskara, written also by Feleo, is based on the truth. Huge portions of the film are covered by unscripted anecdotes told by Delgado’s friends and comrades. The interview of Bobby by Anna is adapted from an actual interview done by Delgado. The film, although fictional, becomes a loving tribute to Delgado, not only by Guillen and Feleo, but by the actors, from someone as established in the industry as Ricky Davao, who dedicates a very raw but convincing rendition of O Sole Mio, to someone as young as Miles Ocampo, whose tearful reminiscence of Delgado is poignant, who shared their stories to both humanize the actor and to move the film’s story.

Truth, as it is, is a powerful thing. Truth, moderated and enunciated through arts and craftsmanship, becomes infinitely more powerful. There are fragments of very personal truths to Guillen’s family in Maskara’s story of a wife (Shamaine Buencamino) who discovers of her husband’s illegitimate daughter through letters that the daughter wrote to her father that he kept. These personal truths, masked by the fiction of Guillen’s cinema, is modulated, turning what could possibly be personal only to Delgado’s family and to those who personally knew him into something that is personal to everyone who ever loved and even questioned love.

The story ends with a question left unanswered. Why did Bobby hide Anna from her family? The concealment could taint love. It can also mystify it, deepen it, and instruct that it has more facets than what we may know in a single lifetime.

Acting is an art where the concealment of the truth is required. Film too, since it is based on the illusion of movement. The paradox here is that the quality of these art forms is often gauged as to how much truth is revealed from the concealment. The more real the acting, the closer to truth the film is, the better. Maskara conceals as much as it reveals. The film, more than an impassioned tribute to a loving and beloved husband for Guillen, father for Ina and executive producer Ana Feleo, and esteemed artist and friend for the other actors who appeared in the film, is a document on the power of art, to communicate and to heal.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (2011)

2011-07-11T00:50:00.003+08:00

Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (Alvin Yapan, 2011)

English Title: The Dance of Two Left Feet

Ambiguity is such a beautiful thing. It is what makes art free from its artist, allowing the observer of the art part of the art-making. It is what breaks the boundaries of the literal, allowing art to traverse the infinite expanses of the subjective. It is what makes art from being only personal to the artist, to also being personal to the observer. A tear, for example, is ordinarily an object of sorrow. A tear from the eye of a man embracing another man has transformed it from being an object of sorrow into an object of love, suddenly realized. A tear from the eye of a man embracing another man in the end of a grandiose dance production of a famous epic has transformed it from being an object of love into an object of awe.

Alvin Yapan’s Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (The Dance of Two Left Feet) tells the story of Marlon (Paulo Avelino) who is enamored by Karen (Jean Garcia), his literature professor. He follows her after class and discovers that she moonlights as a dance teacher and choreographer. To impress her, he asks Dennis (Rocco Nacino), his classmate and Karen’s assistant in the dance studio, to teach him the dances that Karen teaches in her classes before actually enrolling. A unique love triangle, one wherein the point is to share love and not to exclusively own love, ensues.

Yapan, an awarded fictionist and literature professor, enriches the story with poetry, borrowing the poems of Merlinda Bobis, Ruth Elynia Mabanglo, Joi Barros, Rebecca Anonuevo, Ophelia Dimalanta and Benilda Santos, all of whom are famous feminist poets. From there, the film takes a different shape. The story, without being abandoned totally, becomes the frame for Yapan’s goal, which is to utilize cinema as an extension of his classroom and an invitation to indulge in the limitless scope of literature, dance, and music.

It works. The film dodges any threat of being pointlessly academic by making most of the elements that are exclusive to cinema, particularly cinematography and editing. Its first ten minutes is a masterful sequence that marries dance, dialogue, music and verse. Edited seemingly without regard to narrative succession, it takes the form of a poem film, not unlike very personal works of John Torres that are crafted from found footage loosely strung together with words and melodies. It’s a prelude for what’s to come: lucid discussions on feminist poetry, the poems themselves that are recited in dialogue and in song and beautifully choreographed dances, all flaunted intelligently and at once, written into the film and edited together near seamlessly.

Yapan’s use of feminist poetry is quite subversive since Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa hardly has a feminist agenda. While the film hints of homosexual longing, it seems to conceive romance as absolved from the politics of gender and preference. Instead, love and longing is free. Marlon longs for Karen, notwithstanding the difference in age and position. Dennis longs for Marlon, notwithstanding the difference in sexual preference. It seems that Yapan is freeing the poems of their feminist roots, expanding their interpretations to encompass emotions stemming from males. In fact, Karen, the only female in the film, is the only character who is emotionally separated from the young lovers, consumed primarily by her own lonely and rapidly aging existence.

With Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa, Yapan has choreographed a delicious orgy where various art forms mingle with astounding ease. Its final image will doubtlessly result in complaints, most probably prejudiced by expectations fostered by the slew of romantic and gay-themed films whose love stories are so much more pronounced and so much more obviously plotted than this. However, that final image’s ambiguity is all that the film needs to graduate from being just another gay love story with literary ambitions into a poem that is as potent as the ones it used. After all, a tear is more than just an object of sorrow, of love, and of awe. It is also an object that equalizes all of humanity as it communicates each and every person’s innate capacity to feel and express emotions, whether one be male, female, straight, gay, rich, or poor.

(Cross-published in Twitch)

Busong (2011)

2011-07-02T23:16:00.003+08:00

Busong (Auraeus Solito, 2011)

English Title: Palawan Fate

Busong (Palawan Fate) is the summation of Auraeus Solito’s artistic life, so far. Its devotion to folklore and its insistence on it being told through the usage of practical effects as opposed to sleeker and more popular digital effects is owed to the dazzling stop animation that was the source of absolute wonder in Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2 Scene 2, Suring at ang Kuk-ok (The Brief Lifespan of Fire, Act 2 Scene 2, Suring and the Kuk-ok, 1995). Its reliance on romanticizing the struggle of the marginalized and the underrepresented is owed to the famous love story of the young gay boy and a police officer in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) and the struggles of various genius high school students in Pisay (Philippine Science, 2007). Its homoerotic gaze is owed to his sincere re-telling of his own homosexual coming-of-age in Boy (2009).

The film’s most direct precedent however is Basal Banar (Sacred Ritual of Truth, 2002), a documentary that compiled very real stories of land-grabbing and other oppression in by the outsiders towards the native people of Palawan. Much like Basal Banar, Busong is a collection of stories that focus on the issues concerning Palawan. While it is the sense of community, of a common struggle, that connects the stories of Basal Banar together, in Busong, fate is the thread that ties the tales. Busong retells the stories of Solito’s childhood and the stories he documented while making Basal Banar as one narrative, made endlessly elaborate and poignantly poetic.

Busong tells the story Punay (Alessandra de Rossi) who is suffering from a mysterious illness that rendered her helpless and perpetually wounded. Angkarang (Rodrigo Santikan), Punay’s brother, carries her on an ornate hammock, searching the land for a cure to his sister’s suffering. Their search would lead them to meet several strangers --- the widow (Bonivie Budao), of a logger, a fisherman (Dax Alejandro), and the descendant (Clifford Banagale) of Palawan’s healers.

Spells are spoken to pacify wildlife. Butterflies fly from healed wounds. At the same place and time these magical events happen, foreign capitalists bully the island’s impoverished natives. Traditions are slowly being forgotten, salvaged primarily by sung stories recorded on tape and played in the radio. The film is not grounded on logic. It is more than anachronistic. The film exists in some abstract plane, where past, present, and future converge, tradition and technology are not at odds with each other, and myth and reality intertwine.

From the dreamy episodes set in the beaches and forests of the island to the erstwhile but gorgeous underwater sequences, Busong is undoubtedly visually sumptuous. However, like postcards sold in the gift shop of a luxurious tourist’s resort, the images that cinematographer Louie Quirino conjures are framed and lighted predictably to enunciate the natural allure of the island. Shot and projected in high definition video, Busong runs the risk of being too beautiful, too defined, and too welcoming. A film that grieves for a dying tradition and cautions of the masked repercussions of forced modernization is deserving of a tinge of grit, a hint of ugliness, and a possible serving of anger.

There is no denying that the film is a product of Solito’s love for his cinematically-neglected homeland, which he visualizes to near-perfection. During those moments and sequences where the film becomes incomprehensible story-wise, it is that love which is communicated with absolute ease. Each frame bursts with that unabashed adulation for his cultural heritage. Busong is essentially Solito’s ode to himself, his past and the many pasts of his people that contributed to who he is as an artist.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

The Tree of Life (2011)

2011-06-26T15:32:00.002+08:00

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Life is such a peculiar thing. It is regarded as the most precious of things by humanity. However, it is also the one thing that humanity shares with other creatures, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest whale. That exact same life that humans and the rest of nature partake in equal portions however becomes vastly differentiated with the sudden absence of it. For the rest of the universe, death is just an act of nature. For humanity, death is something else, something that dwells, something sacred, something spiritual, something religious.

“Was he bad? Where were you, to let a boy die, to let anything happen? Why should I be good, if you aren’t,” a boy asks God after witnessing another boy drown in a public swimming pool. The death of a fellow human elicits such a response from another human. It is as if a great injustice has been done by God. Death is treated as punishment instead and should only be merited when one has been evil.

Naturally, the initial emotion that The Tree of Life communicates is one brought about by death, grief. A mother opens her home to the news of her teenage son’s death. Moments of piercing silence, probably out of doubt or disbelief, ensue. Then she lets out a defeated wail, short-lived though as Malick immediately cuts to the next scene of the father who learns of the death of his son through a phone call. Sequences of grief follow: neighbours and friends attempting to placate the mother, the father wanting to grieve in privacy.

Fast-forward to several decades after, a man, seemingly aloof from his wife and the world, remembers the death of his brother. He lights a candle, apologizes to his father about something about his dead brother, and goes about his work-a-day life with evident distance. As these visualizations of grief, both fresh and carried over through the years, flicker onscreen, whispered prayers are heard. The mother looks up to the sky. “That’s where God lives,” she once told her son. The scene cuts to a cloud of light over darkness, the same image that begins and ends the film and recurs every so often. “Lord, why? Where were you? Did you know? Who are we to you? Answer me,” she pleads.

At that juncture, Malick tells the story of the universe, from when it was just nebulous formations of light and darkness up to the appearance of life. Awe is an overwhelming emotion derived from a position of subordination. The images that Malick conjures in non-stop fashion are ones that can only elicit awe. From something as epic as galaxies being formed to something as minuscule as the moment a sperm enters an egg, the images are always sublime and powerful. In the midst of such breadth and brilliance, everything else, even death and grief, seems insignificant.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth,” quoted by Malick from the book of Job, could be God’s response to the mother’s chain of questions. Religion has trained humanity to regard itself as the center of the universe, but the history of the universe, it seems, points out to the exact opposite: that humanity is but a dot in the journey from beginning to end.

Malick goes back from mapping the formation of the universe to mapping the evolution of a man, from the time when the father and mother fell in love, to his birth, to the early stages of his maturity. Told in fragments instead of a linear narrative, the film takes the shape of a montage of memories kept that inevitably molds adulthood. It is also a medley of emotions that ground the experience back to familiarity. A boy looks jealously of his baby brother. The father plays a few notes of his piano to accompany his son who is strumming his guitar as the older son enviously looks from afar. A boy throws a piece of lingerie to the river because of the guilt of an emerging sexuality. A son wishes for the death of his father. The same son imagines his mother flying in the air, an angel.

Malick explores the supposed opposing concepts of nature and grace. Ostensibly, the father, strict and dictatorial in the rearing of his children and the management of his household, represents the path of nature. On the other hand, the mother, kind, gentle, and immaculate, represents the path of grace. Childhood becomes the setting of these clashing forces. The boy struggles from innocence to worldliness, treading the path to nature. “I’m as bad as you are. I’m more like you than her,” the son tells his father.

To absorb these characters are mere symbols of some cosmic tug-of-war between nature and grace is to belittle the complexities of their humanity, which Malick laid down with such meticulousness that it can only come from somewhere intimate and personal. The father, the mother, the three children, all fall from grace, rebound, and just exist notwithstanding the greater forces that lord over the universe. It is that innate ability to exist and the knowledge of existence that separates humanity from the universe. In a way, that ability and knowledge allows humanity to distance itself from the evolution of the universe and create for itself a history of its own choosing, a beginning of its own choosing, and an end of its own choosing.

To exist is to choose. Rather than representations of a philosophical notion, the characters exist, deciding to jump from domination, such as when death results in a collapse of faith, to acceptance, such as when the father’s financial collapse brings all of them together to leave their perfect suburban home, and so on.

“I give him to you,” the mother whispers as she is caressed by angelic beings. Images of the dead son leaving their suburban house towards the horizon, of the adult eldest son seeing his father, mother, brothers, all in ageless form, converge in a beach teeming with people from memories both close and distant, of birth, of death, and of life mingle onscreen.

Grace, as Malick seems to elucidate, is neither the opposite of nature, nor an elementary appropriation of the mother’s maternal qualities, nor an adjunct of religion’s concept of morality. It is simply acceptance of the movement of the universe, that people die to form part of the story of the world, that humanity, despite its capacity to choose, can choose to be again part of the universe it has always attempted to sever itself from in its quest for dominance over creation. Grace is a moment of peace, that secluded smile the adult son lets off because of and despite the world.

The Tree of Life is a priceless work that is astoundingly majestic, sublimely spectacular, but never alienating. In its search for deeper truths, it positions itself not from the vantage point of a pompous philosopher, looking in from the outside, but as an everyman, looking out from the inside. In that sense, the film is far more generous than it looks. In its beautiful abstractions are fissures that allow for the entry of varying interpretations that are inevitable given the infinite number of disciplines, faith, and experiences that are around.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Forever and a Day (2011)

2011-06-24T14:54:00.002+08:00

Forever and a Day (Cathy Garcia-Molina, 2011)

Their love’s on a rush. Eugene (Sam Milby), a shoe designer who insists on always being on top of his game, is always on the go. Raffy (KC Concepcion), on the other hand, is making what remains of her life count. They meet in an adventure camp. They fall in love, forcing Eugene to finally admit defeat and allowing Raffy to touch one more life before her predictable demise.

Cathy Garcia-Molina’s Forever and a Day suffers from a bad case of extreme tastefulness. It is unfortunate that Garcia-Molina, who almost always supplants the mainstream imprints of her films with subtle inventiveness and distinctive charm, seems powerless to the dullness of the film’s unfortunate script. It is a dullness that is only worsened by dialogue that seems to belittle the complexities of the human condition. Everything, from something as banal as white water rafting to something as sensitive as cancer and death, is utilized to neatly wrap a narrative that trivializes life for commercial purposes.

Despite being overindulgent in parts with certain sequences feeling longer than they should be, the film is fortunately well-made. The film waddles through with beautifully shot passages, convincingly acted exchanges, and adeptly directed scenes. Milby makes up for his stilted line delivery with consistency. Concepcion, on the other hand, gives an adequately affecting performance, as she conveys a vulnerability that is quite pleasantly surprising, especially since it comes from her. Sadly, the film overflows with needless support, effectively turning the film into a messy ensemble instead of something more intimate, something more sincere.

Ultimately, there’s not enough humor to add levity to the drama. There’s not enough honesty to temper the bad taste having the pain of death be reduced into a gimmick of an ending. Love, sprinkled with a bit of class struggle, of growing-up angst, of amnesia, used to be the lone resource for these manufactured escapist trifles. Now, death, with its appurtenant emotions filtered from it, is utilized and as a result, cheapened to cater to market demands. The resulting drama is so neatly concluded, so courteous and gregarious to its audiences that it defeats the entire purpose of expanding the grasp of the mainstream to tackle the most real and most certain of the many realities and certainties of life.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Basal Banar (2002)

2011-06-20T23:59:00.002+08:00

Basal Banar (Auraeus Solito, 2002)

English Title: Sacred Ritual of Truth

The most unique of sunsets opens Auraeus Solito’s Basal Banar (Sacred Ritual of Truth). The distant coast and the clouds are but shadows to the mysterious red, blue, and white of the darkening sky. There can never be a more appropriate introduction. In a single visual, Solito introduces Palawan as this land that is mysterious, grandiose, and sadly, much burdened by problems any paradise may expect but should never deserve. From that otherworldly view of Palawan from the sea and through rivers and thick jungles, the film elegantly takes its viewers into the heart of the land, its people.

Solito has the advantage of capturing Palawan not from the vantage point of an absolute stranger but of a returning son. Instead of depicting Palawan’s people with the coldness and distance of an uninvolved documentarian, he positions himself as equally affected, giving the documentary a sense of reverence when depicting the more intimate details of the island’s culture and urgency when forwarding an advocacy.

Solito, schooled in Manila, prides himself of his Palaw’an heritage, a heritage that would guide him through several of his narrative features, all of which would give ample light to the unknown and marginalized, from the gay youths of Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) and Boy (2009) to the rare geniuses of Pisay (Philippine Science, 2007). It is only with Busong (Palawan Fate, 2011) that Solito was able to give his beloved Palawan undivided attention. In the film, he drapes his adulation with high definition images of a timeless paradise that curiously mingles with the very real and the infinitely current, creating something of a beautiful anachronism that is a more than apt summary of the situation in Palawan.

Basal Banar is an essential precursor and companion piece to Busong. Where Busong is dreamlike and artistic in its imagery, Basal Banar is organic and unrehearsed. Its aesthetics is borrowed directly from nature and the people that partake of nature.

Even the music and the sound design are essential facets of what is seen. The songs sung by the natives are little stories by themselves, tackling everything from sacred rituals to mundane domestic dilemmas. There are also songs heard from the radio, transmitted straight from Malaysia, the closest neighbor to the island. The songs heard in the film are essential to the story it tells, efficiently painting the island’s demographic as not comprised solely of the natives who have resided first in the island but also the newcomers. Solito, by encompassing the entire wealth of humanity that resides in Palawan, enlarges the scope of the struggle, deepens the pains caused by modernization and the inequity of the concept of property, a concept that is incongruous to the concept of community that has kept peace in the island, a concept that has displaced an entire people from a land they and their ancestors have considered home for centuries.

The documentary climaxes with a journey by Solito and other men and women to plot the ancestral domain that is supposedly protected by law. Hundreds of kilometers and several hours of arduous travel are reduced to several key minutes through time lapse. The effect is tremendous. It is in equal portions a campaign that would supposedly end the injustices caused by government-sponsored land-grabbing and a celebration of unity among people of various ethnic groups, educational attainments, professions, and personal histories. Basal Banar, in turn, becomes that rare documentary that forgoes dwelling in the evils humanity can be capable of by concluding in a note of triumphant hope.

Manananggal in Manila (1997)

2011-06-05T22:44:00.006+08:00

Manananggal in Manila (Mario O'Hara, 1997)

English Title: Monster in Manila

Mario O’Hara’s Manananggal in Manila (Monster in Manila) takes its cue from Roman Polanski who has mined domestic paranoia for dread in films like Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976). Terry (Angelika dela Cruz), who is living in a condominium building with her sister (Aiza Seguerra), is pregnant. Unfortunately, the father of her baby has abandoned her. Beatriz (Alma Concepcion), a model, has moved in next door and starts to befriend her. Right after Beatriz's move, mysterious deaths are reported, with the bodies of the victims disemboweled, giving rise to conclusions that a manananggal (a monster that looks like an ordinary woman except that the upper part of her body separates from the lower part when it hunts for its prey) is responsible for the several murders.

Manananggal in Manila is essentially two separate movies melded into one out of convenience and commercial viability. The first one’s the attempt to update Peque Gallaga’s Manananggal episode in the first Shake, Rattle and Roll (1984). This is where O’Hara stumbles. Given the meager budget and the time constraints O’Hara has to work with, the film ultimately suffers, bearing all the evidence of its lack of ample financing. The wings of the manananggal are obviously assembled from plastic. The animated sequences (where the winged monster flies into the sky against the full moon and the parting scene where an ominous full moon slowly appears in the night) are pathetically executed. Sometimes, O’Hara does away with special effects by communicating terror through editing, nuanced and resourceful cinematography, or inventive sound effects.

The other film is far more interesting. O’Hara, more than just depicting evil through a monster sourced from myths and ghost stories, explores the nuances of that evil. Concepcion, sans the prosthetics she dons in the film’s climactic scenes, inhabits the role with astounding ease. There’s urgency in her attempts to seduce Terry to befriend her, to ease her out of the comfort of living the life of a single mother who consciously fantasizes about a boyfriend who cares about her instead of simply accepting the fact the he has left her, and finally, to slowly be liberated from the clutches of morality and be angry and vengeful, making her the proper vessel for herself. The film is most successful when it aspires for this kind of internal dread, more introspective and conceptual rather than the cheap scares and unintended humor of low-rent visual effects.

O’Hara’s Manila fronts a facade of normalcy. However, underneath the concrete of its many high-rise residential towers and the cautious demeanours of its denizens lies an unspoken fear, a shared understanding that the supernatural exists alongside ordinary problems. It is a city that bears the same haunted quality of Dario Argento’s Freiburg, New York City and Rome in Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), and The Mother of Tears (2007), respectively. The city becomes an apt dwelling place for the evil monster, who other than its look and its craving for human innards and babies has been transformed from a random mythological monster into an embodiment of evil, which is not necessarily defined by violent and destructive acts but by characteristics that are more human in nature, such as greed, lust and guiltless vindictiveness.

Manananggal in Manila is low-budget, high-concept horror. At first glance and especially with its crude and laughable special effects, the film seems to be nothing more than a hodgepodge of incongruent elements struggling to make logical sense. It is easily dismissible as nothing more than an attempt by its producers to rake in the most profit out of the littlest of capital. However, there is certainly something more to the film than its numerous glaringly bad parts. Unfortunately, the patience and persistence to see through the mess are traits that are rarely found in moviegoers fed with the seamless but empty spectacles Hollywood provides.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

2011-05-29T14:29:00.001+08:00

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)

It is almost as if the paintings were waiting for the film to get made. The Chauvet Cave in Southern France suffered a cave-in several thousands of years ago, blocking its entrance and effectively preserving the paintings and everything else inside from deterioration caused by the elements and the natural course of time. For several decades since its discovery, the paintings have only been enjoyed through photographs and replicas, considering that entry to the cave have been limited to a few individuals. That is until Werner Herzog and his crew of three were granted unprecedented entry to film the interior of the cave. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that result of the unlikely marriage of fate and genius.

Instead of merely treating the paintings as isolated works of art, Herzog posits that the paintings are prehistoric prototypes of cinema, explaining that the position of the paintings, the way they were painted, where they were painted, the possible sources of light in the cave allude to an illusion of movement and to a possible fantasy. Herzog’s hypothesis immediately removes the cave paintings from a position of trite curiosity into something more immediate and relevant. The paintings have turned into products of our conspirators in dreaming. They are evidence of something intrinsically shared with the prehistoric men. Herzog turns these anonymous people from the distant past into relatable characters with hearts and souls that are kindred to ours.

Herzog does not completely settle inside the cave. Instead, he frequently flies away, curiously focusing on the people around the film: their dreams, their inadequacies, quirks and past lives. Although separated by differing priorities and millenniums, there’s a connection that’s established between the subject of the film and his erstwhile subjects, and hopefully, the audience. In one scene, Herzog forces this connection, staging an ominous silence inside the cave, keeping his guides, his crew, and himself in a prayerful stance listening to a supposed communal heartbeat. Ernst Reijseger’s powerful score not so much swells but creeps into the middle of that shared contemplation, turning Herzog’s orchestrated meditation with that filament of humanity he strives to define into some sort of graceful sequence which it is ostensibly not.

The most beautiful thing that Herzog committed to in Cave of Forgotten Dreams is to expand it into something quite larger than it should be. The use of 3D for example is not for mere spectacle. Instead, it is a necessary tool to create that illusion of being inside the cave, of witnessing the actual contours of the cave walls instead of seeing a flat representation of those contours, of experiencing the movement of the painted animals instead of only imagining motion. Considering that the cave paintings and the cinema they aspire to be are all tools that utilize illusions to function as tools to approximate reality, 3D serves as a companion piece to this illusion-building by requiring the approximation of space and depth as essential to not only experience the wonders of the cave but also to understand Herzog’s claims.

That Herzog does not rely solely on hard facts and historical accuracy is what makes Cave of Forgotten Dreams so immeasurably fascinating. After all, what we see in the cave paintings are only minute facets of the immense world that the prehistoric man could have lived in and exploited. We can only watch in awe, dream connections and relations. Yet, we can never be exactly sure. We can only speak and feel from the very little that we know and the very vast that we can imagine. The documentary, as most documentaries do, places us in a comfortable position of looking at and into the subject. Thus, when the film moves into its postscript, with Herzog suddenly placing the audience as the subject for possible interpretation and interpolation of albino alligators that came from the probable future, the tables are turned, and the effect is nothing short of sublime.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

The Short Films of Kidlat Tahimik

2011-05-23T21:47:00.003+08:00

Orbit 50: Letter to My Three Sons (1992)

The Short Films of Kidlat Tahimik

For the 12th edition of the Jeonju International Film Festival, the focus was on Kidlat Tahimik, a rare talent in filmmaking whose works are beacons of uncompromisable vision. While most famous for his long works like Mababangong Bangungot (1977) and Turumba (1981), he has made several short films which attest to the singularity of his creative process and the integrity of his perspective and creativity, traits which have become essential in the Philippine's burgeoning new cinema.

Ang Balikbayan (Memories of Overdevelopment, 1980-2011)

Perhaps one of the greatest films that will probably never get made is Kidlat Tahimik’s account of the first circumnavigation of the globe by Enrique, Magellan’s Filipino slave. Ang Balikbayan (Memories of Overdevelopment), a thirty minute collection of scenes from what could have been the film, is, for the moment, the closest the world will ever get to the non-existent film. Kidlat Tahimik narrates the events of Enrique’s voyage in a surprisingly straightforward fashion, more descriptive of how the final film would be than anything else, lacking the usual fanciful and humorous wit that defines most of his films. The film is a work that is too long in progress. Enrique’s circumnavigation of the globe is hardly a product of skill. It is however a mixture of many things, of skill, of ingenuity, of friendship, and of luck. The film that is in progress, as seen from this narrated version, showcases everything of those traits, except, sadly, luck.

Orbit 50: Letter to My Three Sons (1990-1992)

Made for his fiftieth birthday, Orbit 50: Letter to My Three Sons reveals the source of Kidlat Tahimik’s filmmaking powers. He is a father first, and a filmmaker second. Structured like almost all of his films where found footage are playfully edited together and provided sense and substance by his honest and often humorous narration, the short film appears to be a dedication to his three sons, Kidlat, whom he acknowledges to be his creative father considering that his filmmaking name is borrowed from his son’s birth name, Kawayan, whose artistic impulses rival his father’s, and Kabunyan, whose youthful playfulness reveals his father’s own joyous unpredictability. Seen today, the film performs as an enduring ode to the beautiful simplicity of family life in the midst of the more alluring world of arts. That he chose to honour his children instead of his career in his fiftieth orbit around the sun reflects the very unique attraction of his life’s creative work.

Celebrating the Year 2021, Today (1995)

In the year 2021, it will be the 500^th anniversary of the circumnavigation of the world of Magellan’s slave, a Filipino. Starting from the Philippines where he was captured, he was brought to Portugal via the Indian Ocean, sailing off the coasts of India and Africa. When Magellan went to the Philippines from Portugal, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to South America and crossing the Pacific Ocean to the island of Mactan where he was killed by the island’s chieftain, he brought with him his Filipino slave, who at that moment, is the first person to have circumnavigated the globe. The story was supposed to have been a film by Kidlat Tahimik. However, budgetary limitations have halted the project. A few clips from the terminated project make their appearance in this short, a testament to Kidlat Tahimik’s creative resourcefulness. Undaunted by the hindrances to making his film project, he instead has planted trees in various places around the world. By 2021, the trees would have all grown, and would be steadfast testaments to Filipino ingenuity as well as markers for the historical footnote of Kidlat’s filmmaking fantasy.

Bahag Ko, Mahal Ko (Japanese Summers of a Filipino Fundoshi, 1996)

The tragic tale of the bahag, then a garment of respect and now a mere costume that is treated with ridicule and shame, is one that has colonization and its effects of extreme Western influence as antagonists. With Bahag Ko, Mahal Ko (Japanese Summers of a Filipino Fundoshi), Kidlat Tahimik takes the garment as a symbol of everything we have forgotten as a result of being the subjects of imperialist powers for more than three hundred years. The film starts as a conversation between Kidlat and his son, Kabunyan, where idle chatter about Marilyn Monroe’s immense sex appeal transforms into a discourse on the malleability of concepts of beauty. The film then transports the discourse to Japan, where the tragic tale of the bahag, or fundoshi, is shared. At that point, Kidlat Tahimik, makes the adverse effects of modernization and its requirements of cultural homogeneity, an international concern.

Our Film-grimage to Guimaras (2005)

In August of 2006, an oil tanker sank off the coast of Guimaras, an island famed for its pristine beaches and nearly untouched natural beauty. Almost immediately after, the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative of the Philippines spearheaded a project where several of its filmmakers, which include Khavn dela Cruz, Raya Martin, and Roxlee, are to make a film in reaction to the oil spill. Kidlat Tahimik’s contribution, aptly titled and brimming with the director’s trademark levity amidst the heaviness of his themes and topics, humorously starts off with his promise to his cat to bring home fish from Guimaras. The “film-grimage” is documented with hardly any frills, and fuelled primarily by Kidlat Tahimik’s unrehearsed and therefore veritable wit. The resulting film has all the marks of an impromptu project. Notwithstanding its obvious simplicity and probably all the more because of the unlikely humour that surrounds the humble production, the film resonates with a mature understanding of the gross repercussions of the oil spill.

Some More Rice (2005)

The Philippines and Japan are linked in so many ways. However, Kidlat Tahimik, ever the idiosyncratic artist, explores the connection via rice, staple food for both nations. However, what Kidlat Tahimik explores in this short documentary is hardly relegated to rice as food, but rice as a way of living. Narrated by Kidlat Tahimik from letters he wrote to a Japanese rice farmer and Akira Kurosawa, whose Seven Samurai (1954) serves as starting point of the film’s discourse and also as the source for its curious title, the film details the several similarities and differences between the two cultures. As the film goes on, as its discourse moves from the facile to the intimate, it reveals a sympathetic heart for farmers, and more importantly, a fluent understanding of the human condition. Notwithstanding physical, cultural and economic distance between the two nations, Kidlat Tahimik convinces that the connections are more real than hypothesized.

Bubong (Roofs of the World! Unite!, 2006)

Kidlat Tahimik’s always curious creativity is now focused on shelter. Starting with a hike up the Himalayas where he notices his guides carrying heavy roofs to the villages up the mountains, the film moves around the world, depicting various roofs, from the ornate bronze domes of Buddhist temples to the humble bamboo structures of Kidlat Tahimik’s Baguio home. Much more than a document on anthropological details on roof-building, the short film only makes use of the detail to forward the resilience that is shared by humanity, no matter how different in terms of culture. Although carried heavily by the utilization of the roof as a metaphor to the virtues that connect cultures, the film, like most of Kidlat Tahimik’s works, is fuelled not by a need to prove a logical flow or predictable sense. Thus, the film follows no structure and instead persists like a collage made from footage collected through the years. Despite its lack of form, the film is a masterfully conceived and joyously executed essay on the fundamentals of human living, as seen through eyes that have travelled and witnessed the world.

(The reviews in this article were commissioned for the programme of the 12th Jeonju International Film Festival)

In the Name of Love (2011)

2011-05-21T10:47:00.003+08:00

In the Name of Love (Olivia Lamasan, 2011)

The first fifteen minutes of Olivia Lamasan’s In the Name of Love is that sort of uncharacteristic greatness that comes from an otherwise unspectacular director. Hinting of a narrative that is darker than what is expected from a mainstream studio, Lamasan confidently lays the pieces of her masterpiece-in-the-making. After spending seven years in a Japanese jail for being caught transporting yakuza money in the airport while on his way home to visit his son, Emman (Aga Muhlach) has become old and modest in his ambitions. However, an unlikely meet-up with Mercedes (Angel Locsin), the prostitute-turned-girlfriend of a politician’s son (Jake Cuenca), pushes him in the middle of a dangerous love triangle involving a murderous political family and a province struggling under its control.

Lamasan introduces Emman as the irreversibly old and wasted man who is fated for doom. Mercedes is the irresistible femme fatale, sexy beyond compare but seductively mysterious. The little town they live their sad lives in is clouded with discontent, with the prospect of the coming elections only exposing the town’s unmistakably rotting core. The first fifteen minutes set up a film noir that never was. After building up expectations of gloom, Lamasan succumbs to the allure of drowning the set-up with paltry romance, completely wasting whatever’s built up to confused schmaltziness.

Lamasan stages the most heartbreaking of dramatic moments in her films (such as the painful dinner scene in In My Life (2009) where the recently broken mother suddenly realizes how she destroyed the lives of her children, or the melancholic scene in Milan (2004) where an abandoned husband finally finds his wife in a worse condition than his, or the very angry scene in Sana Maulit Muli (Hopefully, Once More, 1995) where an illegal immigrant furiously bursts upon seeing the maltreatment a Filipino employer treats his employees) hinting of some sort of depth in her work within the usually shallow mainstream. In this film, she pits then matinee idol Muhlach with his inevitable old age, in one heartbreaking scene where his character, after being imprisoned for several years, stands in front of the mirror, realizing how he has wasted his youth, his life.

However, Lamasan struggles with mood, shifting from light-hearted moments to gloomy episodes and vice versa with the flimsiest of motivations. That has always been Lamasan’s biggest fault. While Muhlach’s vulnerability is commendable, he remains unconvincing as a dramatic actor, most especially when delivering lines that require some sort of sombreness, which sadly, the actor seems incapable of. His perpetually youthful looks provide some sort of visual irony, making his expected corruption and demise all the more heartbreaking. Unfortunately, expectations remain that. In the Name of Love is not as dark as it should be to be effective in depicting the crookedness of its setting. Though it aspires to be a great love story (even making use of the theme song of Arthur Hiller’s Love Story (1970) to communicate the gravity and grandness of the film’s romantic aspirations), it simply fails to engage, remaining limp and overly simplistic in its portrayals.

Finally, in the name of escapism and sure returns, Star Cinema, the film’s producer which is arguably the Philippines’ most commercially successful movie studio, maintains the silliest and stupidest of traditions. Their movies (with the exception of their horror films which end with cliffhangers) are riddled with unnecessarily happy conclusions, making it seem that life, despite its gargantuan problems and unexpected tragic turns, are but fairy tales with predictable endings. While there is nothing generally wrong with escapist cinema, there is something glaringly evil about how films are haphazardly tacked with these happy endings, no matter how disgustingly illogical they are in the context of the film.

In the Name of Love is an ambitious but very flawed film. It could have been passable entertainment. However, with its completely irrelevant ending, the film devolves into some sort of insulting drivel, a confused marriage between untrusting capitalists and earnest artists, with the latter in the losing end. Like a poor man’s porridge with a piece of pubic hair proudly floating, the otherwise palatable film is rendered virtually inedible with that single unforgivable compromise.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Sino'ng Lumikha ng Yoyo? Sino'ng Lumikha ng Moon Buggy? (1979)

2011-05-08T21:30:00.004+08:00

Sino'ng Lumikha ng Yoyo? Sino'ng Lumikha ng Moon Buggy? (Kidlat Tahimik, 1979)

English Title: Who Invented the Yoyo? Who Invented the Moon Buggy?

It’ is very tempting to acknowledge Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare, 1977) as an autobiographical account of an ambitious Filipino with a compellingly descriptive name who wakes up from his dreamy infatuation with the West.

A student leader in the University of the Philippines, a Wharton graduate and the son of his home town’s first mayor after the Philippines’ liberation from America, Eric de Guia, the real Kidlat Tahimik, although similar in curiosity and probably in destiny with the character he created, is hardly the poor and uneducated jeepney driver of his first film. Sino’ng Lumikha ng Yoyo? Sino’ng Lumikha ng Moon Buggy? (Who Invented the Yoyo? Who Invented the Moon Buggy?) although set in fictional Yodel Ville, with Kidlat Tahimik, no longer the same jeepney driver of Mababangong Bangungot but a character that is closer to the real man, spending time with children in his mission to launch a chicken to space via a makeshift vessel.

Detouring from those humorous flights of fantasy, Kidlat Tahimik opens up, detailing his personal history and circumstance, blurring further the lines between him and the characters he has created for himself. In that sense, Sino’ng Lumikha ng Yoyo? Sino’ng Lumikha ng Moon Buggy?, more than Mababangong Bangungot or Turumba (1981), his more popular works, represents the closest precursor to the distinct autobiographical wonderments that would define his latter video works. It seems that the film, because of its lengthy title, is a promotion of the inventive qualities of Filipinos which benefitted the entire world.

Without taking away from the unique delights of seeing a grown man treating toddlers as equals in discussions that should not make sense but actually do, the film, while utilizing the often inane resourcefulness of Kidlat Tahimik’s character as a wellspring for comedy, proposes that it is that trait, arguably endemic to Filipinos, that is the secret ingredient to genius.

(This article was commissioned for the programme of the 12th Jeonju International Film Festival)

Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? (1994)

2011-05-08T13:13:00.003+08:00

Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? (Kidlat Tahimik, 1994)

English Title: Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?

Perhaps because of its length, which is an hour more than the typical Hollywood fare that Filipinos have gotten chronically used to seeing, Kidlat Tahimik’s Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? (Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow?, 1994) is criminally under-seen, and is therefore severely underrated. The film, which is effectively Kidlat Tahimik’s account of his personal life from 1981 to 1993, is perhaps the most personal work of the director whose films are intimately intertwined with him, his history, and his beliefs.

Because the film is essentially a collection of footage from various points of Kidlat Tahimik’s life during the timeline, the audience becomes openly familiar with the director’s private life: learning of the intricacies of his family, joining him in his creative and social endeavours, and reflecting with him on the political events that have been unfolding alongside his personal growth. It is perhaps the multitude of facets of an artist, all portrayed with the distinct generosity and modesty that Kidlat Tahimik is most famous for, that makes Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? such an invaluable and special film.

With the film, Kidlat Tahimik discusses alongside the difficulties of fatherhood, the birth pangs of the newly founded artists’ community he helped form in Baguio City, and the initial highs and impending disappointments of post-Ferdinand Marcos democracy. Considering the ostensible epic scope and ambition of the film, Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? never feels burdened with self-importance.

The film moves and feels like a diary that he selflessly opens to his viewers, and in that sense, it never overreaches but instead comfortably sits in the midst of what Kidlat Tahimik is most knowledgeable of. Moreover, the film is laced with tangible authenticity. Shot and presumably made sans any script or creative intervention, the film evokes a sense personal, cultural and national histories unfold through the eyes of an active participant. In a sense, the film shows history as it is being made, raw but never confrontational, tender but never cowardly.

(This article was commissioned for the programme of the 12th Jeonju International Film Festival)

Turumba (1981)

2011-05-08T00:51:00.003+08:00

Turumba (Kidlat Tahimik, 1981)

Turumba is arguably Kidlat Tahimik’s finest work. When compared to his other films, the film is handsomely produced, tightly edited, and sleekly told. Also absent in the film is Kidlat Tahimik’s physical presence. Instead, the film is told through the eyes of young Kadu, son of a craftsman who specializes in papier-mâché products.

Kadu, similar to Kidlat Tahimik’s character in Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare, 1977), is a curious creature, well-entrenched in his community but not without questions about his town’s customs and traditions. On the day of turumba, a festival celebrating the feast day of the town’s beloved Marian image, a German capitalist chances upon the papier-mâché products he is selling, leading to ever-increasing orders, and forcing Kadu’s father to turn what used to be a livelihood that is intimately connected with the town’s customs and traditions into a lucrative business, a source of immense profit.

Turumba seems to be Mababangong Bangungot’s spiritual sequel, although it can be argued that Kidlat Tahimik has spent his entire creative career tempering the allure of modernization. In the film, foreign capital is treated with suspicion. The German capitalist, a moneyed woman whose stately appearance is betrayed by her lack of grace and finesse, seems to be portrayed for laughs, not unlike the American in Mababangong Bangungot. The country folk, from Kadu’s keen grandmother to the resourceful blacksmith, are all depicted with reverence.

In that sense, Turumba does not dwell in complications. It is told with refreshing simplicity. Thus, instead of politicizing and complicating the discourses regarding Westernization, modernization, and economics, Kidlat Tahimik focuses on what is most intelligible in the arguments, and that is what is most tangible and visible, like the death of traditions, the sudden soullessness of craftsmanship, and the dissipation of cultural integrity. Turumba, without having Kidlat Tahimik, the vastly enjoyable performer performing onscreen, has the tracks of Kidlat Tahimik’s sariling dwende from start to finish.

(This article was commissioned for the programme of the 12th Jeonju International Film Festival)

Bagong Hari (1986)

2011-04-29T20:03:00.003+08:00

Bagong Hari (Mario O'Hara, 1986)

English Title: New King

With the possible exception of Fernando Poe, Jr., no other actor who made a career as an action star can evoke that very rare mix of gravitas and ruthlessness in his characters as Dan Alvaro. Alvaro has a very pleasant and handsome mug, more befitting a matinee idol than a wronged crusader. Perhaps it is because of the incongruence of his angelic face, his stuntman’s body, and the diverse roles that the then unpredictable Filipino film industry has given him that turns Alvaro into such a wildly intriguing and probably underexplored screen personality.

In Mario O’Hara’s Bagong Hari (The New King), Alvaro plays Addon, the quintessential Filipino anti-hero, the bastard son of a corrupt police officer who purposely meddles in the very dirty political war between the governor (Elvira Manahan) and a town mayor (Celso Ad Castillo) in an unnamed province. Made for the 1985 Metro Manila Film Festival but only released the following year, the film left its producers, who were more used to producing comedies that are sure hits especially in a time when escapist entertainment was prime commodity, unable to recoup the capital put into the film.

The film has been lost for several decades, with the wild rumor of the remaining print of the film being thrown into the Pasig River by its frustrated producers surfacing every now and then, until a VHS copy was discovered by New York-based Filipino film preservationist Jojo de Vera, and through the efforts of the Society of Filipino Archivists for Film (SOFIA), was recently screened after a couple of decades worth of absence.

Bagong Hari benefits the most from Alvaro’s distinctly curious presence. Addon, previous to being forced into being deeply involved in the corrupting political state, exists within some sort of modest and humble paradise, where his conflicts are mostly personal and his pleasures are absolutely simple. O’Hara fluently paints that quaint existence, making use of the most sensual of visual and aural stylizations to enunciate sexual fantasies and other modest delights of Addon’s erstwhile peace. The marked difference between that seemingly idyllic life and the violent and bleak existence that he suddenly finds himself in punctuates the harshness of O’Hara’s not-so-fictional version of the Philippines. That the bearer of that entire world’s physical and emotional turmoil is a man of boyish features makes the bleakness of O’Hara’s vision even more poignant, more heartbreaking.

Deaths are so commonplace and only made momentarily significant by the strange sentimentality that the characters who seem to be enamoured with the pretence that there is something more to their lives than the hell that they have been living have reserved for them. Violence, on the other hand, becomes more than a requirement for survival. It is the way of life. The capacity to both resist and inflict violence becomes the barometer for one’s value. The country itself is moved by violence. The quiet decision-makers engage in gambles that involve brutal fights to the death. The struggle to the top political post is ridden with not only dirty dealings but also mindless massacres.

Bagong Hari, timely resurrected from a demise caused by both fate and neglect, proves to be a still potent portrait of a country wallowing in despair and hopelessness.

Kano: An American and His Harem (2010)

2011-04-17T23:26:00.001+08:00

Kano: An American and His Harem (Monster Jimenez, 2010)

The easiest thing to do is to inform. What Monster Jimenez does in Kano: An American and His Harem may be the hardest thing to accomplish. She first informs, of the life of Victor Pearson, an American war veteran who relocates to the Philippines and establishes a household that is composed of him and several wives and paramours, of the criminal suit for rape, of his eventual image as sexual deviant and monster. Jimenez then opens a window for Pearson, who has been adjudged by all who knew him solely as a character in the newspaper headlines as an indefatigable pervert, to prove his humanity, and opens a bigger window for Pearson to display his undeniable charms and wit.

Pearson looks like a thoroughly unkempt Harvey Keitel and talks like a reflective but drunken Edward G. Robinson. He is an inevitable screen personality. His backstory, with the possible barrage of psychological torture from a hinted torturous childhood and Vietnam War experiences, could have been a Kubrick thriller. His present story, as embattled villain in a legal battle against all odds, could have been a clever Lumet court drama.

His harem, on the other hand, is composed of an eclectic mix of looks and ages. Probably the only uniting factor for the women is poverty, which leads supposedly to their attachment and dependence on Pearson’s sizable veteran’s pension. However, to simply regard their intertwined relationships as primarily economic is to disregard the complexity of human nature. Jimenez explores not only the cycle of financial dependency but also the continuously evolving emotions, no matter how misplaced, mutated and immoral they seem to be. She treats the relationships between Pearson and his women and among the women with light-hearted sensitivity, with a careful but delicious mix of humor and seriousness.

Kano: An American and His Harem is ostensibly about the most curious of domestic arrangements, where one man plays benefactor, lover, victimizer, and a whole lot of other roles to the women who are voluntarily or involuntarily under his wing. Yet, the documentary also pushes perception despite the norms and moral boundaries that have set in place how we normally perceive what is human and what is not. Pearson, through Jimenez’s peerless and very involved investigation, has become the perfect example of the most misunderstood man, considering that his much-publicized and now legendary devious acts are too glaring to gloss over. And despite the initial disgust, the momentary fascination, and the lingering intrigue with Pearson, he becomes familiar, perhaps overly familiar to the point of discomfort.

Yet, Jimenez does not flinch. In fact, she confronts Pearson with only some apprehension, maybe some suspicion too, but never with disdain or an already made-up objective as to how the documentary will move. Instead, the documentary takes a life of its own, rollercoasting on emotions ranging from anger to amusement, and frustration to delight. It moves seemingly without direction because the director itself is moved by her subject, gravitating only to the business of exhibiting Pearson’s life and dilemma. As willing companions of Jimenez in her creatively crafted and deliciously enjoyable attempt to simplify the complexities of Pearson and his women’s unique situation, it is best to enter Kano: An American and His Harem with an open mind, totally unresisting of the probable charms of Pearson and his bountiful love.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Deadline (The Reign of Impunity) (2011)

2011-04-10T13:39:00.002+08:00

Deadline (The Reign of Impunity) (Joel Lamangan, 2011)

In the morning of November 23, 2009, a local politician who was on his way to town to file his certificate of candidacy for the upcoming elections, his family, his supporters, lawyers, and several journalists were ambushed and cruelly murdered. The massacre, more popularly referred to as the Ampatuan Massacre not only because it happened in the town of Ampatuan but because the suspected perpetrators bear the same name, became the much-needed signal that would alert the public of the systematic murder of journalists, a practice that has long gone unnoticed. Joel Lamangan’s Deadline (The Reign of Impunity) clearly takes its cue from these recent events that shocked the Philippines.

Ross Rivera (TJ Trinidad), a writer whose cynicism has converted him into a government apologist, is suddenly forced to reassess his role as journalist when he finds himself right in the middle of unearthing a conspiracy linking Muntazir Ghazi (Tirso Cruz III), a local warlord, with election fraud and the sporadic killing of journalists in various parts of the country. While Ross wrestles with his conscience and attempts to convince Greta Manarang (Lovi Poe), television newscaster and grieving girlfriend of a recently murdered journalist, of his newfound integrity in Manila, Azad (Allen Dizon) and Claire (Ina Feleo), local journalists who are deep into the tracks of Ghazi, are hunted down by Ghazi’s henchmen. Their stories eventually intertwine, revealing a more frustrated than concerned outlook of the state of free speech in a country that supposedly fosters democracy.

The film is obviously fuelled by anger and alarm, necessary emotions when the government itself, through its inaction and inattention, perpetuates these heinous activities. Lamangan’s activism however seems more reactionary. The film, instead of gnawing deeper into the cultural defect only dramatizes, probably for the sake of infecting viewers with the same disgust over the current corrupted state of the country, the social malaise.

There are attempts at exploration, as when Ross converses with a peasant walking along the dirt road where his vehicle stopped and gets told of the promises of the government of bountiful land in Mindanao that are broken for the sole reason of the fact that the lands promised weren’t the government’s to be given away. Unfortunately, the narrative cannot afford any time for idle talk that is only tangentially related to Lamangan’s agenda. The film moves on, interrupting possibilities of depth with the furtherance of its heavy-handed agitprop.

Lamangan, when impassioned by political themes, tends to substitute subtlety with forceful slogans and unsavoury didactics. Fortunately, in Deadline (The Reign of Impunity), the bluntness seems called for. Lamangan paces the film evenly, imbuing the briskly-told story with the same sense of immediacy that the still unresolved issues of media-related murders deserve. The film, armed with a rousing musical score and other commendable technical values, communicates its advocacy without necessarily surrendering the requirements of entertaining and intelligible cinema. Deadline (The Reign of Impunity), with its unrelenting thirst to display only the most dramatic of scenarios, has the same appeal as primetime sensationalized news.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Kommander Kulas (2011)

2011-04-07T16:39:00.010+08:00

Kommander Kulas: Ang Kaisa-isang Konsiyerto ng Kagila-gilalas na Kombo ni Kommander Kulas at ng Kanyang Kawawang Kalabaw sa Walang Katapusang Kalsada ng Kamyas (Khavn de la Cruz, 2011)

English Title: Kommander Kulas: The One and Only Concert of the Amazing Combo of Kommander Kulas and His Poor Carabao in the Long and Unwinding Road of Kamyas

Khavn de la Cruz's Kommander Kulas: Ang Kaisa-isang Konsiyerto ng Kagila-gilalas na Kombo ni Kommander Kulas at ng Kanyang Kawawang Kalabaw sa Walang Katapusang Kalsada ng Kamyas (The One and Only Concert of the Amazing Combo of Kommander Kulas and his Poor Carabao in the Long and Unwinding Road of Kamyas), or Kommander Kulas for much-needed brevity, relies strongly on pattern. After a prologue which details the existential account of the titular character's death in storybook fashion, Khavn spends little time to force his audience into a near-torturous cycle of depraved art, from spoken poetry of varying degrees of menace and perversion serving as soundtrack to several images (the most shocking of which has a heavyset woman sitting on a plate as if defecating), to long takes of Kommander Kulas riding his carabao in lush landscapes, to public domain Tagalog love songs serenading images of a makeshift grand piano stationed in different decrepit locations in the city.

Khavn has done the same patterned film before. In Paalam Aking Bulalakaw (Goodbye My Shooting Star, 2006), he documents a date with a girl (Meryll Soriano) while cycling through love poems and love songs. Where the pattern in Paalam Aking Bulalakaw complemented the Khavn's unabashed meanderings on romantic love, in Kommander Kulas, the pattern only adds to the burden of the film, weighing the already weighty subject matter with the malady of predictability.

However, Khavn is not concerned with providing surprises or shocking twists. Right from the start, he duly warns his audience of Kommander Kulas' demise leading from his unresolved search for his heart which led to his meet-ups with various loves and their human representations. It seems that Khavn's goal is to wear his audience off, to make them feel the exhausting repercussions of a hopeless search for a hopeless heart. In that sense, perspective and agenda, he more than succeeds.

Khavn is much more than a prolific filmmaker who makes three to four feature length films and even more short films per year. He is also very unpredictable. His films, most of which bear the signature of being sensible and sometimes logical despite the palpable chaos of their creation, attempt to dignify the common vices of the inevitable ease of digital filmmaking and are most of the time, very successful at it. Mostly unplanned with only an idea that is probably germinated from random discussions over rounds of San Miguel beer in one of Manila's artists' nooks and probably a day or two to shoot and materialize the idea, Khavn's films, despite the obviousness of the probable ease and welcomed carelessness in their production, range from absolutely fun to curiously profound. Interestingly, with Kommander Kulas, it seems the hardworking director has unwittingly chosen profundity over fun.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Bombay Beach (2011)

2011-03-18T17:40:00.001+08:00

Bombay Beach (Alma Har'el, 2011)

Salton Sea, a salt-water lake in the middle of the deserts of California, used to be the place to be several decades ago. Nowadays, it stands as a testament as to how time diffuses luster. The once pristine beaches that catered to the wealthiest of Americans are now graves to thousands of fish that perish because of the increasing salinity and toxicity of the lake. As it is, the area surrounding Salton Sea is that post-apocalyptic paradise existing in this pre-apocalyptic world. It remains to be this place of very elusive beauty, where glistening during sunsets are masked by abject sights of poverty.

Alma Har'el's Bombay Beach, without glossing over the pertinent issues that surround the subject surroundings, focuses on the lives of several individuals who seem to approximate the veiled charms of the place they call home. The film is loosely structured in a way that it does not follow any narrative arc but instead rides on an atmosphere of feel-good but never doubtful sentimentality. As a collage of portraits of various lives struggling in a presumably inhospitable landscape, Bombay Beach is joyously uplifting, which is somewhat pleasantly strange in this current cinematic landscape of popular doom and despair.

Music is an important element of Bombay Beach. The dances, mostly choreographed but performed by Har’el’s subjects with hardly any expectations of perfection, however, are essential. Volumes are communicated when a hard-boiled old-timer delivers a graceful gesture of unlikely romance in his awkward waltz, or when budding lovers interpret their newly formed affair with an evocative number. Benny, youngest son of the Parrish couple, whose story of being imprisoned for blowing up bombs in the desert as a pastime is an extraordinary subject for another documentary, takes part in this lovely group dance with other kids which summarize the endearing awkwardness of his fateful existence in the community. In a wondrously edited, lovingly executed and carefully directed sequence, the film transported its audience, although temporarily, to a place where innocence in the midst of immense adversity is not some lunatic’s fantasy.

That Har-el was able to draw inspiration from individuals who would commonly be regarded as the dregs of society, as pinnacles of human hopelessness, and jokes of cruel destiny, and was able to visually manifest beauty from a place where it has long faded is evidence of her ability to mix heart with directorial mettle. It is that unrestrained but sincere optimistic depiction of the human spirit that makes Har’el’s modestly produced but magnanimously crafted documentary such an indelible experience.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

It Rains on Our Love (1946)

2011-02-17T18:31:00.002+08:00

You and Me Against the World

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

They meet by chance in a train station. Maggi (Barbro Kollberg) is a woman who wishes to go home upon learning that she is pregnant with the child of a man she does not know. David (Birger Malmsten), without a penny to his name, has just been released from prison. After spending a night together in a hotel room, they fall in love and vow to build their future together. The two end up breaking into a cottage, leading to a series of events that will test their love.

Slandered, suspected of theft and swindled, the couple insist on starting their new life together in a rural community that obviously does not want them and their scandalous relationship in its midst. Thus, the couple’s attempt to legitimise their love through the formality of marriage is hindered by moral and bureaucratic mechanisms that are at play. Their dreams of getting their own home are spoiled by their greedy landlord’s dastardly manoeuvrings.

Only Ingmar Bergman’s second film, It Rains on Our Love (1946), screening as part of the Berlinale Retrospective of the famed Swedish master, showcases a director who has the gift for both storytelling and characterisation. Humour plays a vital part in the film, providing much-needed levity in a story that mines the misfortunes of a couple trying to exist in a village that thrives in narrow-mindedness. The film plays very much like an amiable Hollywood melodrama, something that might surprise Bergman enthusiasts who have gotten used to the harsh ascetic of films like Cries and Whispers (1972) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973).

It Rains on Our Love may not have the complexity and gravity that is usually associated with Bergman. What it does have is an optimism that, at first, might seem strange and out-of-place. But in reality, it is very much a part of the human condition that Bergman has tirelessly worked to portray in his cinema.

In a filmography that includes great films like Fanny and Alexander (1982), Persona (1966) and The Seventh Seal (1957), minor works like It Rains on Our Love are easily forgotten. Thankfully, retrospectives that not only concentrate on widely-accepted masterpieces but also on lesser-known gems, give us a chance to rediscover these films, and for them to reach audiences that may welcome them with new eyes.

(First published here. Read more in the Berlinale Talent Press website)

The Actors and the Alchemist

2011-02-16T03:07:00.004+08:00

The Actors and the Alchemist

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

Beatrice Kruger, casting director for Tom Tykwer’s The International (2009) and Anton Corbijn’s The American (2010), sat among actors from countries like Belgium, Iran and Nigeria. She looked at everybody’s faces with very curious eyes. “When you are a casting director, you are fixed on a face.”

“Casting is a lot like alchemy. You not only find the right actor for the right role, but you also have to find the right actor for the right director,” she aptly defined her profession. Asked how it is working with both directors and actors, she mentioned that “most directors, I would say, have not been to an acting school. If they haven’t, they don’t know what actors are like. If they don’t know that, they don’t know how to stimulate the actor to get into the role.”

Regarding working with directors who require non-actors, she cautioned that “while it is very exciting, what people tend to forget is that there is natural talent, but it is one in a thousand. If one wants to work with non-actors, one has to be prepared to spend time, and therefore money, to find them. Someone from the street who is great fun and perfect there, can freeze the minute he or she is in front of the camera.”

She then intimated that she was very much involved with discovering young talent. “I always was. And of course, there is a big satisfaction when you discover somebody. It’s no big deal to recommend to a director or producer a famous actor. You can always do that. You don’t need a casting director.”

Whether or not her sympathies are with the actors since she was previously an actress, she answered, “Well, I feel with them. But I am on the other side of the table. My analysis is with the director, is for the picture, is for the product. I sympathise with the actors, of course, since I was also an actress before. But also with their laziness, their wrong egos.”

Asked if there is any difference between working as an actress and a casting director, she recounted her experience working in Krzyzstof Zanussi’s Black Sun (2007), where she was forced to play a minor role when the actress chosen suddenly backed out. She then imparted that “if I would’ve fucked up that part, my ego would have been broken for five minutes … but not seriously, since I had a profession as a casting director which I am very happy about. But for an actor who does nothing else, he can die. His career depends on it.”

Kruger, to most viewers, remains just a name in the credits. But to directors and hundreds of aspiring actors and actresses, she is an indispensible alchemist.

(First published here. Read more in the Berlinale Talent Press website)

A Woman in This World of Men

2011-02-16T02:55:00.004+08:00

A Woman in this World of Men

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

In his scathing review of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Roger Ebert laments that Isabella Rossellini is “degraded, slapped around, humiliated, and undressed in front of the camera.” Ebert, of course, had the image of Rossellini, her arms outstretched to reveal a naked body dirtied by stains of blood and tears, in mind.

Interestingly, in the documentary My Wild Life (2010), which preceded the discussion between critic and historian Peter Cowie and Rossellini, the esteemed model, actress and director pointed out her great affection towards Blue Velvet and how she collaborated with Lynch in making the now iconic scene one of the most evocative images of a woman in absolute resignation.

Rossellini, donning an elegant black dress and an enthusiastic smile, finally appeared after the film in front of an audience composed of fans, admirers and attendees of the Berlinale Talent Campus. Cowie began with a series of questions concentrating on Rossellini’s career in film, from acting to directing. Rossellini, in astute statements that were laced with subtle but effective humour, sensibly answered every question, revealing bits and pieces of her perceptions on acting, working with Lynch, Guy Maddin, and other filmmakers who influenced her. Replying to Cowie’s query regarding an observation that almost all of her characters are enigmatic, she said that “I am attracted to original minds,” revealing her to be a woman of very eclectic taste.

Modest in a way that is surprising given her experience and stature within the international film community, Rossellini recommended that one of the regrets she has in her life is that she only decided to accept jury positions in film festivals very recently. She explained that being in juries had been exceptionally educational for her, considering that she is required to watch several films, all with varying styles and narratives, each day. Previously prevented from accepting jury duties because she was preoccupied with raising her children, she suggested that “women have integrated into a man’s world but it is the man’s world that has to integrate into the traditional woman’s world. That is the next step.” The audience, nearly half of which were women, cheered her on.

Rossellini is hardly the degraded, slapped around, humiliated and undressed woman of Ebert’s review. In fact, she, notwithstanding all the trials in her life and the arguably questionable women she portrayed in various films, proves herself to be a bastion of female integrity in a world where man, or at the very least that male-centric perspective that has persisted through the ages, is king.

(First published here. Read more in the Berlinale Talent Press website)

Tales of the Night (2011)

2011-02-14T04:20:00.005+08:00

Colored Shadows

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

Nightly collaborations by a boy, a girl, and a master technician give rise to tales that burst with magic in Michel Ocelot’s Tales of the Night. It is impossible even for the sternest of critics not to enjoy the film and be reminded of times when things were simpler and did not involve elaborate plotlines and super-sophisticated designs. Ocelot pits shadow puppets, whose details are reliant on the lines and curves dictated by costumes, against lush backgrounds, creating an otherworldy atmosphere in settings that are based in history. The six tales, all equally charming, explore these settings, whether it be modern Africa or medievel Europe.

As opposed to James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and the dozens of other Hollywood productions that utilise 3D to create an illusion of depth in an otherwise flat space, Tales of the Night makes use of 3D only to further a crucial element of shadow puppetry, which is the separation of subject and background. Ocelot replicates the wonderment of the ancient craft onscreen, telling the six stories with refreshing clarity and a distinct look.

Compared to Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which remains the pinnacle of this underepresented style, Tales of the Night lacks the unrestrained sensuality that Reiniger, even without the conveniences provided by modern film equipment and 3D technology, has so masterfully injected in her film. Perhaps, had Ocelot resisted romanticising love in a way that is similar to nearly all of the Disney studio’s many retellings of classic fairy tales, the film could have been less saccharine and more alluring about love and romance.

Despite that, Tales of the Night remains a fine piece of work. In a festival that puts a premium on the more serious aspects of life, Ocelot has conjured up tales that value fantasy and the allure of happy endings. This way he has created a film that is remarkably universal despite the myriad of cultures from which it liberally borrows. The film celebrates the power of stories and how, in both their creation and their consumption, they unite humanity.

(First published here. Read more in the Berlinale Talent Press website)

Day is Done (2010)

2011-02-13T17:56:00.002+08:00

A View from a Room

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

A plane passes through a passive sky that serves as background to an industrial chimney bellowing smoke that simmers in with clouds. The scene repeats four to five times, before an undrastic change in tempo, a hint of music, and then, an abrupt cut. The montage, impertinent in the way that it breaks traditional conventions in cinema by adamantly refusing to move forward, emphasises the film’s overt minimalism.

Thomas Imbach’s Day is Done, shot mostly from his Zurich apartment, forcibly transports its audience within a place of restricted span and scope, limiting its visuals to the sometimes banal but mostly hypnotic images that are ironically conjured from the filmmaker’s singular point of view. It is convenient to describe the film as simply a collage of everyday sights from the sleepy part of the filmmaker’s hometown. However, it seems that the film persists as a subtle, arguably to the point of frustrating, account of time and change.

The film partakes of a similar approach to Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), without of course the celebrity of the famous New York City landmark, by inviting the viewer to gaze more than to watch in order to comprehend the minute details that signal the passage of time and the movement of change.

The film’s soundtrack, composed mainly of recorded messages from Imbach’s answering machine collected through time and various songs that accompany the images by either wit or circumstance, provides an inward view of the apartment as opposed to the outward view provided by the imagery. Almost like an autobiography, the soundtrack facilitates the images by detailing the stories that happen in Imbach’s life – like the birth of his son, him growing up, the blossoming of his career, the deterioration of his relationship with his son’s mother. Not unlike his Zurich neighbourhood, Imbach’s life takes the form of a document of time and change while in a seeming standstill.

Day is Done is hardly the type of film that rewards its viewers instantly. Like the planes that breeze through that distinct Zurich sky, the film is an object of mysterious charm whose pleasures are derived from the deliberate discovery of the profound from what is ostensibly a visual and aural barrage of the mundane.

(First published here. Read more in the Berlinale Talent Press website)

Evolution of a Filipino Film Lover

2011-02-05T19:11:00.003+08:00

Lav Diaz's Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family)

Evolution of a Filipino Film Lover

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

I’m sure it did not happen deliberately, like a well-hatched plan from an expertly crafted heist film. And unlike dear Alexis Tioseco’s important pronouncements about film criticism, that it be fueled not by anything else but love, my almost accidental foray into film writing was borne out of frustration and a tinge of subtle rebellion.

Bullied by my traditional parents who thought anything relating to film can hardly be a career, I jumped from my graduation with an almost useless degree in psychology to law, where I spent most of my time reading about other people’s woes dehumanised into pieces of statutory provisions and their repercussions, and the rest of my time watching movies, and recording my reactions to them in a blog, mostly for my fragile memory’s sake than anything else. What I considered as mechanical routine turned into the most delicate of loves when I experienced suffering for film. See, in the Philippines, film has always been synonymous with enjoyment and escapism. Shying from the most pressing of real national concerns, commercial films delight in tackling the fleeting-like teenage romances or kitschy fantasies.

However, Lav Diaz’s Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004), seen in my university’s film theater with the director running to and from his post-production house to deliver the DVDs and effectively turning the 10 hour-and-so running time of the film into a half-day event, woke me up. The physical pain of resisting sleep, hunger, and thirst, compounded by the emotional and spiritual pain of what Diaz had so eloquently communicated in his film affected me like no other film. It opened me to a family of Filipino filmmakers who are working outside the capitalist instructions of the businessmen governing the mainstream. It allowed me to transcend the selfish beginnings of simply writing about films for my requirements, and to start doing it for those who are open to see films beyond their more popular reasons of existence.

I opt to persist, notwithstanding the understandably love-hate relationship I have with the filmmakers whose products I love and adore so dearly that I cannot simply treat them with forgiving dishonesty, notwithstanding that writing is never lucrative and never materially rewarding, notwithstanding that most of my countrymen are more interested in the private affairs of actors and actresses than the merits of their work, notwithstanding the fact that the government has remained paranoid with its outdated censorship laws and film support programs, notwithstanding the fact that masterpieces have disappeared because of neglect and lack of information. I opt to persist - not notwithstanding, but because of what I enumerated above.

My participation in the Berlinale Talent Press is for me a validation that there is a lot more that needs to be done, to be written about, with regards the thing I love the most. I am simply humbled to have this experience as part of my continuing evolution as a Filipino film lover whose utmost goal is to propagate this seemingly insignificant love for a seemingly insignificant art form to as many countrymen as I possibly can.

(First published here. Read more in the Berlinale Talent Press website)

Senior Year (2010)

2011-01-30T03:53:00.003+08:00

Senior Year (Jerrold Tarog, 2010)

While Confessional (2007) and Mangatyanan (The Blood Trail, 2009) are all very well made films, introducing director Jerrold Tarog as a very able and promising filmmaker, Carpool (2006), a short film that is mostly set inside a car where friends are rambling about a recent break-up, indicated Tarog’s ability to capture youth’s virtues and vices, from its loose sense of camaraderie to its abject frivolities. Senior Year, although it is the supposed sequel to Faculty (2010), a short film that featured a debate regarding social activism in schools, shares more of its moods and devices with Carpool than any of Tarog’s previous works. The film, drowning its melancholic overview of adulthood with charm and gratifying levity, is simply irresistibly delightful.

The film is very modest in scope. Mostly limiting itself with the few months in the final year in high school of several students of a private school, the film feels like it is circling on dangerously familiar grounds, risking redundancy for the sake of convenient storytelling. However, the film, without burdening itself with pretenses of pertinence or relevance, communicates the universal truth of what really happens decades after the highs of high school, when the lows of the real world has consumed the optimism that youth can only fuel for so long.

The film starts with a man, bespectacled and in an obvious state of nervousness, sitting inside his car which is parked outside a high school where a homecoming of its alumni is about to happen. Self-deprecating quips, defensive remarks, and rationalizing witticisms prevent him from stepping out of his car, registering his name, and enjoying the homecoming. The man, several years ago, is the expected valedictorian, beaming with promise, which has not gone unnoticed by his teachers, one of whom instructs him to prepare a valedictory speech that would both inspire and incite social concern among his peers.

While it is happiness, depicted through moments of lighthearted banter and expressions of youthful love, that makes reminiscence pleasurable, it is disappointment and pleasurable that marks the past with utility to endure the banality of what lies ahead. Tarog thankfully details the high school experience with equal amounts of joy and pain. All of the film’s characters are carved from stereotype. Tarog seems to acknowledge this, but instead of relying on the narrative crutches that working with a bevy of stereotypes provides, he concocts stories that are hardly complicated but fluently communicates the simple pleasures and hardships of that stage in life.

Senior Year is most enjoyable when the stories of the characters intertwine and erupt into a chorus of emotions that seem so distant now that we’ve preoccupied ourselves with more pertinent matters. Tarog, much more than delighting by reveling in the affairs of the youth, processes such delights to elicit a more spirited sense of nostalgia, one that is not only concerned with the past but as to how the past relates to the present. While the film is brimming with poignant moments, it is the unseen but certainly felt sense of regret that the alumni express, through casual jokes and remarks, while reminiscing that carries the film from being just another high school flick into a heartfelt portrait of our inevitable ordinariness in the midst of a world that is far bigger than any high school campus.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)