Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

The anatomical precision that recent torture-centered films like Eli Roth's Hostel (2005) or James Wan's Saw (2004) diligently indulges in has paved a way for a cinematic culture that equates realistic pain with commercial entertainment. Unlike the stylistic bodily inflictions that the crazed creative minds of renowned horror greats like Dario Argento, John Carpenter or David Cronenberg are known for, the present crop of torture porn flicks has none of the discipline, and none of the refreshing imaginative inflections that provide any semblance of dignity to the exercise in needless violence. With voyeurism and the subsequent delight of witnessing depravity inflicted on character-less human bodies as their primary concerns, the singularity of these films' reason for their existence gets redundant and obsolete.

Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, like Hostel and Saw, puts torture to the fore. The marked difference between Raimi's film and the indisputable junk that Hollywood has been and is still producing is that the recepient of the torture is a complete character with moral choices and suffers as repercussion of these choices, not the empty vessels of the recent torture flicks who only exist because of the available limbs that can be severed, blood that can be spilled, and eyeballs that can be gouched. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), the subject of a wronged gypsy's merciless curse, is a loan officer whose professional career hinges on two things: the pleasure of his boss (David Paymer), and the defeat of her her brash competitor (Reggie Lee). In an effort to please her boss and outdo her officemate, she harshly turns down the pleas of Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), an elderly gypsy who is asking for an extension to her loan to salvage her home from foreclosure. Her decision to override charity for her selfish ends has drastic results as she becomes the subject of the gypsy's curse that grants her three days of torment and anguish before being dragged into the fiery pits of hell.

Much of Raimi's film is concerned with the suffering Christine has to go through because of the gypsy's curse. Physical pain takes the backseat. The excrutiating pain of having one's limbs slowly mutilated is more imagined than real to most of us. Christine's suffering is much more recognizable: shame, embarrassment, discomfort, and being put in absurd situations where moral pillars are conveniently forgotten in the name of survival or gaining the upper hand. In a sense, Christine's fantastic scenario is hardly unrealistic at all. It partakes of a societal must in this capitalist world we find ourselves trapped in, where Darwin's theory is an inevitable law in a setting of inhumane rules and regulations overtaking the illogical considerations of human generosity and compassion. Yet, Raimi seems disinterested with these implications. Drag Me to Hell aims to only entertain, by pouring a bucketful of misfortunes on a beautiful but not entirely innocent woman of the world.

Drag Me to Hell succeeds because Raimi himself spares Christine not a single ounce of compassion. We root for her precisely because no one else does, and when she exposes a character defect, it doesn't make her less human and less rootable. She's alone and defenseless for the most part and while his ever-enamored boyfriend (Justin Long) provides a semblance of support in her battle against the fantastical and the unbelievable, his romance-fueled assistance proves to be inutile in the long run. Raimi cushions her torture with humor. Most of the violence here is cartoonic, with the physical abuses bearing more resemblance to the harmful escapades of Tom and Jerry rather than the one-sided exploitation of Roth or Wan's torture flicks. The psychological and mental anguish Christine carries for the most part is laced with outright silliness, as in the film's frivolous dinner scene where what Christine thought of as a perfect night turns into a nightmare with eyeballs appearing out of slices of cake and flies escaping out of coughing throats. In fact, Raimi seamlessly integrates humor with horror without sacrificing the efficacy of the well-staged shocks and scares.

Unburdened by the gargantuan task of committing the beloved Spider-man into celluloid, Raimi finally made a film that is reminiscent to the senseless yet hugely enjoyable romps (The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II (1987), and Army of Darkness (1992)) he is most famous for, at least to those who have followed his career even before his involvement with the superhero flicks. Drag Me to Hell is simply loads of fun. It is guiltless in its portrayal of the extreme lengths a woman has to go through for sheer survival. The deliberate extinction of Christine's dignity (she spills blood, gets a healthy dose of formalin on her pretty mug, receives an old gypsy's fist on her mouth, and a whole lot more), the moral tests she both fails (pleading to the demon that her boss is to blame) and passes (where she chooses from the various customers of a local diner who deserve to be dragged into hell more than her), the sight gags, the unsubtle yet largely effective internal drama (Christine's successful battle with her weight), and a whole lot more, make for one of the most engrossing abberations of the year.

Agaton & Mindy (2009)

Agaton & Mindy (Peque Gallaga, 2009)

Philippine mainstream cinema is a cinema of convenience. It exists primarily because it is comforting and safe, especially to the audiences it persists to please. Formula dictates predictability, and predictability dictates convenience. Convenience is the single most important element to convince an audience already inconvenienced by corruption and poverty. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the most profitable Filipino films of the last few years are formula-driven romances, escapist comedies and fantasies, and predictable thrillers. Given the day-to-day hardships that the Filipino audience has to go through, there exists an inherent thirst for easy and stress-less entertainment. They do not want the challenge of connecting the dots. They prefer the dots connected, with the image, complete and crystal clear before their eyes. Peque Gallaga's Agaton & Mindy seems to be conceived from this capitalist philosophy.

Agaton (Chase Vega) and Mindy (Louise de los Reyes) are dance partners for an upcoming recital. Their dance routine, entitled Young Lovers, requires intense sensuality from both dancers. However, Agaton and Mindy are worlds apart and the requisite madness their dance teacher (a joyously over-the-top Cherie Gil) instructs them to possess feels farfetched. While attraction exists, the reasons for their being apart seem to outweigh the probability of them falling in love. Agaton, left by his mother with his sister with only a Rolex watch as clue to his identity, is poor and works as a manservant for a wealthy woman. Wealthy Mindy, constantly bothered by her mother's sudden disappearance and her father's perceived infidelity, suffers from constant bouts of madness, where she switches from energetic mania to suicidal depression in a matter of minutes. Keeping true to the spirit of commercial cinema, the two dance partners find common ground, and eventually develop a volatile but well-meaning romance.

Gallaga reverently follows the formula. This proves to be an unwieldy exercise for the maverick director who made Scorpio Nights (1985), a film that explores perversity through a student who starts fantasizing about the security guard's wife from downstairs when he chances upon peeping holes in his apartment's floor, Baby Love (1995), a rebellious romance between two pre-pubescent lovers, and Pinoy/Blonde (2005), an undecipherable romp that misses the mark because of its scattered influences. Agaton & Mindy lacks the exhilarating energy, the humor, the fabricated fantasies that occupy a conventional Filipino romance, whether it is a big-budgeted Cathy Garcia-Molina production or a serialized soap opera. It is predominantly flatfooted, with only a few moments of undeniable beauty and seamless emotional manipulation. The story is as uncertain as Mindy's incessant mood swings, with the palpable passion fluctuating whenever the narrative decides to branch away momentarily. The principal cast, Vega and de los Reyes, do well with their inexperience, considering their roles are reliant dominantly on charm.

In summary, Agaton & Mindy is not as entertaining as it could have been. Thus, it is a good thing that Agaton & Mindy isn't actually a conventional romance, as it initially purports to be. While the film follows the narrative arcs of a conventional romance, it only does so to enunciate the illusion that escapist cinema perpetrates. The highest-earning romances of the past few years have a few things in common: an impossible romance; Cinderella-type side-plots, complications that threaten the impossible romance; and finally, a fantabulous climax that eradicates these complications to allow the happily-ever-after ending. For example, Garcia-Molina's A Very Special Love (2008), a romantic comedy that earned more than a hundred million pesos despite the steady influx of Hollywood blockbusters, has the impossible romance between the scion of an extremely wealthy family and a down-to-earth assistant editor being threatened by the scion's insecurity and many familial worries and the lowly assistant's dwindling patience for her beau's unpredictability. Their romance is eventually salvaged by the scion embarrassing himself in public, just to be rewarded with the assistant editor's much-awaited "I love you." Agaton & Mindy is exactly the same save for its final note.

Agaton professes his love with heroic passion. Conventional cinema has instructed us to believe it, and believe in the power of love. We can almost see the dots connecting, forming the picture of Mindy, free from the clutches of her psychological anguish swooning for Agaton's impassioned dance recital. We can almost see their happily-ever-after ending. However, Gallaga decides to stay on Earth, and abruptly ends the film. To the hopeful romantics, those bamboozled by the barrage of escapist entertainment, it only signals the two lovers' inevitable reunion. To the realists, it changes the entire picture. Agaton & Mindy, by Gallaga's sleight of hand, transforms immediately into a different creature, an indictment of the shallowness of what pleasures us as a nation. For almost the entirety of the film's running time, Gallaga made us believe that the world revolves around the puny romance of two troubled teenagers. He retreats from his prolonged exercise of creating cinematic illusions and starts to tell the truth: there is no magic. Sometimes, we just have to give up and continue to live.

Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim (2008)

Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim (Khavn dela Cruz, 2008)

English Title: Manila in the Fangs of Darkness

Bembol Roco, from his first starring role as an innocent provincial in a quest to rescue his sweetheart from an abusive Chinese man in Maynila: sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, Lino Brocka, 1975), has evolved as an actor. Physically, apart from his completely shaven head, age has hardened his once-immaculate mug and covered it with lines and curves that dispel any trace of his former youth and innocence. Professionally, Roco adapted to suit his evolving physical features and ventured into playing thugs and villains, a far cry from his portrayal of naive Julio Madiaga, which catapulted him to public consciousness. Despite the vast moral and emotional distance between the roles he plays, he still succeeds, granting the villains he portrays with an ominousness that feels natural, and with a mere flicker of his hard-edged eyes, he momentously evokes either a vengeful depth or a wanton-hungry craze, something that is usually missing from the underwritten foes that Filipino cinema can normally afford.

In Khavn dela Cruz's Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim (Manila in the Fangs of Darkness), Roco plays Kontra Madiaga, a character whose name is derived from two characters from Roco's vast filmography: Julio Madiaga, the wide-eyed protagonist of Maynila: sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag and Commander Kontra, the ruthless fundamentalist paramilitary commander from Orapronobis (Fight For Us, Lino Brocka, 1989). Much more than the name, Kontra Madiaga is a character borne out of the marriage of Julio Madiaga's stubborn messianic trait and Commander Kontra's intrinsic disregard for humanity in favor of a perceived good. Trapped in a twilight zone-like scenario where he aimlessly follows Ligaya (Ella Cortez), draped in an immaculate white dress, in the dirty streets of Manila, Kontra Madiaga is more of a conceptual creation rather than a character meant to live and breath in a traditional narrative. Speaking through voice-overs, he alludes to the past, depicted through snippets from Maynila, Orapronobis, and other Brocka films like Kislap sa Dilim (Sparkle in the Dark, 1991) and Hayop sa Hayop (Beast to Beast, 1978), and forces the audience to weave these Brocka characters into the confused yet powerful force that is Kontra Madiaga.

Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim is presumably dela Cruz's ode to Brocka's filmmaking. It is an interesting, if not totally surprising, concept, considering that dela Cruz, despite his obvious reverence to Brocka, is a filmmaker who consciously shies from working under the influence of Brocka's school of social realism. The closest dela Cruz has entered into Brocka territory is with Squatterpunk (2006), a silent documentary, usually accompanied by a musical live act, that exposes the paradox that exists within Manila's slums, where humanity survives despite severe poverty, and even there, dela Cruz inflicts the concept with authorial integrity, pushing the boundaries of the medium to evoke the youthful and experimental verve that his cinema possesses. Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim exposes the vast differences between dela Cruz and Brocka's styles.

Dela Cruz filters convenience from Brocka's filmmaking. Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim is a difficult film not because of the palpable violence and apathy, but because its concept is designed to alienate. Rather than being constricted by the requirements of melodrama and social realism, dela Cruz widens his canvass. He utilizes Roco as an actor who has evolved from stubborn innocence to nihilistic assuredness to create a phantom of a character that represents the deteriorating morality of the embattled metropolis. Roco's interpretation of dela Cruz's wild creation is pitch-perfect. He is confused, angry, lonely, and damned; much like the city that has become the subject of dela Cruz's explorations.

With chosen scenes from Brocka's films screening in sequence with those directed by dela Cruz, one can only appreciate Brocka's visual, narrative and emotional succinctness: the way he packs fear, insanity, and other emotions within a few minutes of studio-manufactured dialogue and directorial deftness. In comparison, dela Cruz's scenes seem cerebral and impenetrable. The strange combination of Brocka's populist filmmaking and dela Cruz's experimantations only heightens the nightmarish tone of the picture. The crisp digital footage of dela Cruz juxtaposed with the aging footage of Brocka's films evoke a twisted sense of reminiscence. The stylized voice-overs reinforces the existence of Kontra Madiaga as a creature of the imagination rather than a traditional cinematic figure. The purposely incohering soundbits and subtitles forwards dela Cruz's concept of recreating or refashioning Brocka's cinematic figures into a singular character that is the anointed spokesperson of Manila's intrinsic darkness.

Star Trek (2009)

Star Trek (J. J. Abrams, 2009)

Summer is the season of expensive eye-candy. Lifeless, and arguably worthless, trifles by legendary hacks like Michael Bay, Tony Scott, Stephen Sommers, and Brett Ratner are released to the hungry public who, having been rendered near-paralytic for months by pre-and-post-Oscar pseudo-importance, is more than ready to devour them in careless abandon. The opening of J. J. Abrams' Star Trek, where Federation ship U. S. S. Kelvin becomes hapless target to a Romulan ship' tireless bombardment before evolving into a showcase of human sacrifice in the face of desperation, is the initial snowflake of a winter wonderland of loud explosions, heavy computer graphics, lame punchlines, never-ending sequels, mesmerizing gloss and empty spectacle. Fortunately, Abrams' expensive opening is hardly the barren bonanza that summer films are made of and made for. It is instead, a worthy introduction to the hero lore that Abrams' Star Trek is attempting to recreate and reintroduce to this generation of robot-lovers and superhero-worshipers.

The Star Trek series, above anything else, utilizes our uncertainty about the limitless expanse of space to create the foundation of its existence. Its mythology is founded on the idea that what we currently know of space is a mere percentage of the actual possibilities that space may provide; that beyond our solar system are other civilizations, races, creatures, and problems; that beyond our primitive science are technologies like warp speed and time travel.

Thus, a fundamental element that any Star Trek story should possess is the overwhelming feeling of wonderment of possibilities: the possibility that there exists an alien race that purposely eliminates traces of emotionality from their system for logic; the possibility that one may correct a mistake in the past, or exact vengeance against a foe from the past because of technology only theoretically explored during our time; the possibility that world politics are eliminated in favor of the greater threat of intergalactic warfare or planetary genocide. My occasional encounters with the crew of the U. S. S. Enterprise were always infused with that exact sense of wonderment, although in varying degrees, of opened possibilities placed in the most simplistic, if not totally plebeian, manner. Shoddy prosthetics, inconsistent special effects, and melodramatic pseudo-sci fi plotlines consumed a portion of the idle time my childhood had to offer.

Abrams upgrades the visuals for his foray into the decades-old pop culture phenomenon. Perhaps the best features of Abrams' Star Trek is when his camera indulges in the larger-than-life visual concoctions that his team of graphics experts have created for the film, as when a gargantuan Romulan ship appears from a wormhole dwarfing a lone Federation ship; or when James Kirk (Chris Pine), presumably several years before his adventures as captain of the Enterprise in the original TV series, drives his motorbike to reveal a Federation shipyard in the middle of a desert. Abrams understands the value of awe in his attempt to refashion the sci-fi franchise. Without necessarily consuming all creative energies in successfully crafting a fictional universe that satisfies the boundlessness of space that Star Trek espouses, Abrams nevertheless captivates enough for the entire duration of the film, making his contribution to Star Trek lore an ample introduction to a collective adoration for the popular sci-fi series.

The story, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, explores the relationship of Kirk and Spock (played here by Zachary Quinto) which became the subtle emotional core of the original Star Trek series. Abrams removes all notion of subtlety and makes the relationship the driving force of the story, similar to formulaic romances where lovers from different places, backgrounds, and personal circumstances, are pushed together by the invisible hand of fate, only this time, the success of their being together is not fueled by an existing chemistry but by the investment made by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (who also plays Spock, marooned in the past by a crew of angry Romulans, in Abrams' film) through the years in creating a fictional relationship that has become an object of fascination or intrigue. Star Trek primarily succeeds because there is an existing mythology to be mined that will carry the implausible tale to its goal of either plain reminiscence or emotional resonance.

T2 (2009)

T2 (Chito Roño, 2009)

The story of T2, written by its director Chito Roño with Aloy Adlawan (whose writing credits include Topel Lee's gratingly noisy Ouija (2007) and Khavn dela Cruz's counter-horror genre 3 Days of Darkness (2007)), is coined from the many different experiences by various individuals from around the Philippines with engkantos (nature spirits that take human form) gathered by the film's researchers during the film's pre-production. To the casual cynic, these stories about encounters with engkantos may seem outrageous, if not downright ridiculous. Tales about normal men and women who are lured into the lavish dwellings of these monarchial beings or punished with severe ailments or disfigurations for rejecting these offers are out of place in this modern world of scientific and medical accuracy. However, the consistency of these stories despite geographical and social boundaries, and the cultural and social repercussions of the abundance of these experiences from all over the country despite the expanding grasp of modernity outweigh the farfetchedness of the storytellers' implausible representations.

The fact that T2 is a tapestry of various tall tales, framed into a straightforward story about Claire (Maricel Soriano), a frustrated childless wife, who escapes from the pressures of her failed marriage by volunteering to escort orphans to their adoptive homes, is telling of what to expect from a film about wraithly nature spirits. The film behooves standard logic, even more so than Roño's recent absurd horror films, Feng Shui (2004) and Sukob (The Wedding Curse, 2006)) . T2 is most effective when it piles enigma after enigma; where the chills are not derived so much from Roño's proficiency for staging visual and aural treats that shock, agitate, and momentarily perturb, but from the lingering discomfort of unexplained occurrences that despite their impossibility maintain a stranglehold over our common cultural imagination. The film's cryptic opening, where a young man who is in search for his lost goat encounters a strange apparition of an airplane descending down an airport in a metropolis that suddenly appears out of the starless night, sets the tone, although unsustained, for Roño's more inconsistent and intriguing horror film to date.

T2 is curiously concerned with travel: the airplane that zooms past the young man in the introduction; Claire working in a travel agency; her philanthropy concerning transporting orphans from one place to another; and the initial half of the film being told in various forms of travel. Roño portrays the act of traveling with such repose that allows him to infuse it with an ominous unease, inflicted by intertwining emotions like fatigue, despair, depression and hope that consume Claire after evading from her severe domestic predicament. Humanity, ungifted with any natural weapons, opts for the logic of flight when faced with crisis. Adopted in our modern world scenario, vacations remedy work-a-day stress and inter-country migration is believed to be the cure-all to the inadequacies of an incompetent government. It is this fundamentally human trait of escapism that birthed the cultural phenomenon of engkantos in the Philippines as the common denominator of these stories is the possibility of escape, being offered by these spirits, from the hardships of the real world.

Roño clearly acknowledges this by creating travel and escape a constant thematic concern, with Claire using her mission of accompanying orphans to their new homes as a distraction from her pressing marital problems; or the fantastic offerings of leisure and comfort being utilized by the engkantos to lure Angeli (Mika dela Cruz), Claire's ward, into their realm; or the little gestures that Claire does to momentarily forget or evade her troubles like turning off her cellular phone or drowning her sorrows with bottles of beer. By emphasizing the ugliness of the real world (the dilapidated and overpopulated tenement that becomes the stage to the film's climax) and the interminable troubles that hound his characters, Roño facilitates the allure of abdicating worldly affairs for the promise of painless existence with the consequence of losing the ability to feel human emotions. However, T2 never fully explores this dichotomy since the film clearly prefers simplicity over analyzing the national malaise through the horror medium, by establishing clear lines that divide good (humanity) and evil (the scary engkantos that offer empty comforts). Roño shies from portraying the gravity of the human condition, preferring to limit earthly concerns to emotional turmoil and familial inconveniences, which are not enough reasons to facilitate the blurring of moral lines and make permanent escape a feasible, if not entirely logical choice.

This is what differentiates T2 from Guillermo del Toro's far superior Pan's Labyrinth (2007), which clearly influenced Roño. Del Toro paints Fascist-era Spain with viciousness, violence, and depravity, that makes escapism the only means for the film's desperate heroine to survive. In comparison, T2 feels insignificant and petty. This brings me to Roño's biggest miscalculation, which is to filter from the stories the social element that binds these tales no matter who tells them and no matter where the storyteller comes from. By constricting the film within the melodramatic trappings of a distressed wife and a parentless little girl who is hounded by engkantos, Roño waives making a film that transcends pure commercialism. Instead of crafting a horror film that explores a grave national ache inflicted by decades of poverty, corruption and oppression to the point of causing a nationwide malady of escapism through fables, fantasies and tall tales, Roño comes up with a competent and effective horror picture, filling but will ultimately leave you wishing it were saying something more.

Big Time (2005)

Big Time (Mario Cornejo, 2005)

Danny (Winston Elizalde) and Jonas (Nor Domingo) are petty crooks whose idea of going big-time is kidnapping the only daughter of a middle-class couple for a ransom price of 50,000 pesos, which is roughly a thousand American dollars. Before even fully realizing that their kidnapping plan is not very different from the dozen little felonies they have committed through the years (the most memorable of which is their dog-napping escapade, foiled by the mutt's incessant barking), they are involuntarily pushed into shady affairs far larger than what they have imagined. Melody (Joanne Miller), the duo's target whose recurring daydreams involve her ambitions of being a famous celebrity, turns out to be the girlfriend of Wilson (Jamie Wilson), the underachieving son of mob boss Don Manolo (Michael De Mesa). Wilson sees the awkward situation as an opportunity to double-cross his father by staging his own kidnapping, using Danny, Jonas, and his starry eyed girlfriend as props in his attempt to raise enough capital to fund his proposed illegal drugs business.

Mario Cornejo's Big Time, written by Cornejo with Monster Jimenez, is easy to enjoy, blanketing its genre affiliations with its extraordinary grasp of pop culture. The film's vocabulary, composed of references to mass culture, both past and present, is used to communicate its effective brand of humor, dark yet wildly efficient, and the aptly limited scope of emotions that it utilizes (Danny thinks that Melody looks like popular actress Kristine Hermosa; and in one scene, subtly declares affection to Melody by choosing Hermosa over another celebrity in an impromptu preferences game). In truth, Big Time is deliriously morbid in its processes and notwithstanding its reliance on fantabulous narrative twists and turns, penultimately realist in its philosophies. Its narrative, despite the distractions provided for by the screenplay's reliable internal wit, actually zeroes in on a pressing social issue that is supposed to be meant to be taken seriously, but the filmmakers decide to enunciate using genre conventions and black humor.

Cornejo and Jimenez, in pitting two small-time crooks with the complications of big time criminality, reflects on the absurd situation of Philippine society, where the gap between rich and poor is undeniable in its extent, where it is not only social status or financial capability that separate them but also their needs, wants, and cultures. In Big Time, Danny and Jonas' sudden involvement in Wilson's scheme awakens them into a realization of their insignificance in the larger world, that their felonies are trivial if compared to the convolutions of organized crime, and that because of their pitiful place in the criminal world, they become nothing more than voiceless subordinates in Wilson's strategies. Even Melody's ambition of achieving stardom, an ambition that both humorously and poignantly consumes her very existence, is negligible in the midst of Wilson's immediate plans of siphoning money from his father through the sham kidnap-for-ransom ploy he concocted. The idle time conversations are written (and the pop references are selected; Wilson prefers to refer to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy, while Danny limits his references to local entertainment) and staged to flesh out the cultural ignorance and lack of sophistication or finesse inflicted by Danny and Jonas' small time status.

Big Time, with all its overt silliness and glaring implausibility, is tons of fun. It takes cognizance of the overwhelmingly real injustice that attaches to Filipino society without employing shock tactics or drowning its artistry with revolts or laments. Instead, it dwells on the absurdity of the societal situation of big dreams, quick fixes and unfathomable repercussions. The film reaches its bloody climax outside the abandoned Film Center of the Philippines (an artifact of a building that was created to serve as nucleus of the country's film industry, but has then been converted into a haven for amorous lovers, drug addicts, and ghost searchers; the setting of the final showdown in the Film Center can be read either as a criticism against the expensive government rendered useless both by Marcos-era lavishness and negligence, or simply put, or a slogan against a dying, if not totally dead, Philippine cinema as represented by the building, only to be given life by the sudden influx of new work by young filmmakers), where double-crossings, broken promises, and revelations erupt into a survivor-less bloodbath.

The film provides no real resolution for its pitiful small-time protagonists and no satisfying comeuppance for its shady big-time villains. Except for Jonas, whose reward is survival and whose punishment is insignificance in a sea populated by small-time persons like him and dominated by only a few. In the end, he works as a janitor and like the rest of the country, struggles to survive as one of the nameless and faceless in the streets of Manila. There is bittersweet comfort for a man to know his place and be satisfied, lest he plunges himself once again in a world that is too complicated and too big for his severely wounded ambitions.

Amar Akbar Anthony (1977)

Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977)

There is enough story in the forty minute opening of Manmohan Desai's Amar Akbar Anthony to fill up an entire month's worth of melodrama. Kishanlal (Pran) ex-convict is released from prison only to find out that Robert (Jeevan), his boss who promised to take care of his family if he takes full responsibility over a hit-and-run accident he did not commit, has broken his pledge and left his wife (Nirupa Roy) afflicted with tuberculosis and his children starving. He goes to Robert's mansion, and pleads for the support that Robert owes him, but instead of getting what he deserves, is humiliated and forced out of the mansion. He fights back by shooting Robert with a gun, but fails to kill him, and thereafter, escapes from the mansion using one of Robert's cars that contains a crate full of gold bars. He goes home and finds out through a letter that his wife has left to kill herself. He takes his three children, leaves them to safety inside a park while he is being chased by Robert's men. The three children are then separated: the youngest is adopted by a Muslim pacifist; the middle child is taken cared of by a Catholic priest; and the eldest is raised by a Hindu police officer. The mother fails to kill herself, and instead, is blinded by a freak accident. Kishanlal falls from a cliff, and is presumed dead by the police, although he actually has escaped from the accident with a crate full of gold.

In a matter of forty minutes, director Desai manages to separate the three boys from each other and their parents through narrative twists and turns that appear out of nowhere, and thereafter reunites them with their mother in a sequence that serves as the film's belated opening credits: the three children, now grown up, are all inside a hospital room, donating blood to their blind mother and all of them not knowing that they are related. Its an outrageous concept, and cinematographer Peter Pereira's camerawork matches the outrageousness of the concept, focusing on the viscuous blood flowing from the siblings' arms and into their mother, focusing and de-focusing, shifting angles to enunciate the very unique circumstance of their reunion. Amar (Vinod Khanna), the eldest brother, is now a police inspector. Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan), the middle child, manages a liquor bar, while responsibly donating half of his profits to the Catholic Church. Akbar (Rishi Kapoor), the youngest, is a performer. Desai stretches the film for another two hours or so, infusing the narrative with upbeat action sequences, syrupy romance, and catchy melodies, before arriving at its predictably happy ending.

However, despite the film's obvious leaning towards plebeian considerations, it remains to be unbelievably entertaining. Desai commits to the impossibility and implausibility of the film's convoluted affairs; when the film purports sentimentality, it not only opts for shallow tears, it requires wails, screches, and enlarged gestures; when the film flirts with kitsch, it is unsatisfied with choreographed song numbers but decides that Bachchan pop out of an Easter Egg, singing a hilarious ditty ("My Name is Anthony Gonsalvez") that starts off with a long-winded yet incomprehensible speech that sounds scholarly but doesn't really mean anything; when it describes villainy, its unsubtle manifestations of human evil, from physical characteristics (bared teeth and gorilla-like muscularity) to heartless processes (Robert, in a showcase of his malevolence, orders Kishenlal to clean his shoes using his shirt's sleeve), are more than instructive of the characters' moral predisposition, they are also downright hilarious; when it involves romance, it triplicates the cheese and the corniness, giving each of the brothers a beautiful partner to court and ultimately win over. The humor, whether intended or unintended, adds to the allure of this undeniably charming flick.

It is Desai's particular preference for simple-minded pleasures fuels the film from start to finish. Desai manages to delegate the film's more-than-obvious political commentary (the three boys being separated on India's independence day, under the statue of Gandhi, and raised by India's three largest religious factions), fresh in its hopefulness on the nation's religious dynamics, in the background, not totally indispensible in the overall enjoyment of the film, but adds a possible discourse about the cinema that Amar Akbar Anthony represents. Amar Akbar Anthony is populist in its sensibilities yet not totally lacking of a say on the world-view that is current during its time. While the film is definitely unpolished, it possesses an energy, a certain rhythm, an inarguable sincerity to simply amuse without leaving any baggage or concern, that makes one forget of its blatant inadequacies and excesses.