Critic After Dark

More Vancouver Festival Films (Sebis; Face; Lebanon; ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction)

2009-11-08T02:44:00.022-05:00

Merly (Mercedes Cabral) and Alan (Coco Martin) and unruptured boil in Brillante Mendoza's Serbis

Did I mention that almost nobody I talked to in the festival liked Kore-eda's Air Doll, not even David Bordwell, who's an admirer of the director?

Ah well. Bordwell finds the execution "overcute" and "underdeveloped," but what's "overcute," anyway? The film plays into male notions of female fantasy figures, the same time it offers some kind of critique (the doll herself finds her owner's attentions distasteful, preferring the company of a gentler, geekier video store clerk), and there is something faintly prurient about the early scenes of Nozomi (Du-na Bae, in a courageously unselfconscious performance) standing in her (squeaky clean, rather breathtaking) altogether, totally vulnerable and defenseless, because the idea of putting on clothes doesn't even begin to occur to her.

But I submit that Kore-eda avoids excessive preciousness by focusing on the details--the latex squeal when her hands rub against objects, the occasional moments when she can't help but notice her translucency (either her shadow isn't dark enough or the gases flowing within her fingers are visible), the running gag about another woman's pantyhose lines, which she mistakes for latex mold lines. If one can imagine an American remake (and god knows, the idea of an inflatable sex doll come to life is asking for just such a catastrophe), one can imagine these details being simultaneously sanitized ("not so much nudity, please, and no shots of her cleaning out her removable vagina") and pumped up for slapstick content, with Jim Carrey mugging his face off to plenty of loud music cuing audience laughter.

Bordwell compares the ending to that of Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. Truth to tell, Oshima's ending left me cold (as I think Oshima intended); Kore-eda's comes off more as a tragic misunderstanding, the kind found in doomed romances or tragedies. Kore-eda's film attempts, as does Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence, to evoke the pathos of the unanimated--how, we imagine, they might be helpless to determine their own fate, and how, we imagine, they would suffer accordingly (beyond that, I think , is an attempt to evoke the pathos one feels when empathizing with inanimate objects--when, at one time or another in our lives, we ourselves feel helpless to determine our fates). Between Spielberg and Kore-eda, though, I think the lighter (and hence more effective) touch is Kore-eda's.

After Air Doll I decided to hell with it and attended a midnight screening, which can often be fun; the crowd is rowdy, the movie usually of the lowbrow, grindhouse persuasion--in this case Kevin Hamedani's ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction. Easy to say Hamedani is no George Romero, and that his zombie picture is too clunky to gracefully shoulder the weight of political metaphor and satire that it is meant to bear, and that anyway the zombie effects are second-rate (owing to a presumably low budget), but zombie flicks are judged more by their gut impact than their subtlety (until we come to the more recent fast-moving remakes, in which case I go all medieval on them). But the picture burns with the fire of a filmmaker out to prove a point, and easily the movie's most unsettling image isn't of the beheadings or flesh-eating or the swinging zombie guts, but of a half-crazed (all-crazed?) man threatening to hammer a young Iranian girl's foot to the floor if she doesn't confess to being involved in some evil Middle-Eastern plot to convert all Americans into zombies.

Hong Sang-soo's Like You Know It All is his second feature on HD, and am I imagining this or has Hong become more ostensibly funny? The film tells the story of a director named Koo Gyung-nam (Kim Tae-woo) invited to sit in as jury member at the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival. It adds something if you've ever been to a film festival before, or served as jury in one--the ubiquitous shoulder bags filled with goodies, the neverending round of polite greetings, the endless catalogs and promotional handouts and calling cards--Hong gets every detail right (Jecheon as depicted onscreen seems like a modest-sized festival, though it could have grown since, or maybe Hong didn't have the budget or inclination to use bigger sets). Add attractive, eccentric, possibly insane festival programmer Kong Yun-hee (Uhm Ji-won) into the mix, and Hong in effect puts poor Koo through the metaphorical and literal wringer, with women alternately enticing and rejecting him, men either inviting or threatening him, fans at times praising, at times humiliating him, and Koo himself wondering just what he had done the night before when he was drunk to deserve this kind of treatment.

Add to this the unmistakable hint of melancholy (Koo is always finding something to regret in either the recent or distant past in his relationships with women (with concurrent repercussions on his relationships with men)), and one might say Hong has executed a light but satisfying omelet of a film--deceptively simple, but flavorsome.

Programmer Shelley Kraicer made it clear (on the Vancouver catalog and when he spoke to me) that he regarded Tsai Ming Liang's Face, about a film crew attempting to stage a film version of Oscar Wilde's Salome, a masterpiece; everyone else, apparently, begs to differ. I wanted to like it, I really did, but where the pacing in Tsai's previous films was leisurely and uncompromising here it felt soporifically slow; where his storytelling was deadpan unpredictable here it felt obtuse and nonsensical. I wondered what made the difference and someone offered this explanation: "He's cut himself off. Where before he was full of angst towards his life and sexuality, now it's all about his love for French cinema. Moreau, Baye, Ardant, Leaud, references to Truffaut--it's all magic and new to him where we've been familiar with all this Francophilia for years, even decades. It's killing his films."

Possibly--all I know is that something's seriously missing in this picture whatever it is. To be fair the imagery is often heartstoppingly beautiful, and there is one sequence--Salome kissing the dead head of John the Baptist--that's incredible, even great (don't want to say too much about it except that instead of using dramatic music or even music of any kind, Tsai employs the ambient sounds found in a deserted abattoir to terrible, unforgettable effect).

Samuel Moaz's Lebanon might be described in the catalog as a "cross between Waltz with Bashir and Das Boot;" I would call it a transposition of Kevin Reynolds' The Beast to Lebanon, albeit with a greater intensity and claustrophobia--much of the film takes place inside a tank, and any contact we have of the outside world comes through the driver's tiny periscope, or through the upper hatch, a moon-shaped aperture through which authority (an Israeli troop commander who seems to have all the answers (at least for a while)) and terror (a Christian Phalangist full of unreliable information and even less certain loyalty) enter from the outside world. One might see the tank as a steel womb inside of which the men overstay their welcome (their gestation period?), wallowing in their own increasingly unbearable filth and refusing to leave the safety of their armored uterus.

Moaz captures the stench of waging war inside a tank--the ever-rising level of rancid water on the vehicle's floor, complete with a flotilla of cigarette butts and paper wrappers floating about its oily surface; the ever-thickening layer of grime and sweat covering the tank men's wide-eyed faces like so much makeup; the increasingly congealed gluey mess dripping from the interior walls (an explosion had sent foodstuff (Matzoh meal?) flying everywhere, and in the film's one hilarious running gag (and, come to think of it, politically weighted line of dialogue) the troop commander keeps demanding that the men "clean up this mess").

One festival viewer had hesitated to go see Lebanon; he said he didn't want to watch Israeli propaganda. I can see it being propaganda all right, but aimed at whom I'm not quite sure--the Israeli commanders order the use of illegal phosphorus shells and order the tank to fire on innocent civilians; the men inside the tank are frightened and barely know what's going on. We know only as much or less, because Moaz has made sure that everything we see and hear are what they see and hear; the experience is a harrowing one.

Managed to see Brillante Mendoza's Serbis, about a day in the life of a provincial movie theater, where they show uncut versions of softcore porn movies and the action in the darker corners of the auditorium are far more interesting than what's happening onscreen. In terms of hygiene the theater can give the tank in Lebanon a run for the money; it's almost as claustrophobic (a dark cavernous space surrounded by an intricate network of rooms and stairways), it has its share of rank sewer water, and people have terrifyingly red and swollen boils growing out of their behinds (come to think of it the relative darkness in the tank made the mess there a touch more tolerable). There's graphic sex aplenty and fellatio plunked front and center for those who appreciate that kind of action, and there's the slapstick interlude of a thief running up and down the theater's stairways seeking escape (if he got lost I don't blame him).

One less-then-enchanted viewer told me "I can tolerate the sex, the boil, the endless stair-climbing. What I can't stand is the goat--why is there a goat in the theater? I don't understand the goat."

I sympathize. But anyone who's actually attended a screening in one of these brokedown movie palaces knows that the occasional non-biped often wanders into its reassuringly shadowy interior--I've heard birds fluttering about in these places, even the occasional bat, and once in a while you hear a cat meowing for leftovers. Plenty of odd things can happen in a Filipino grindhouse, including a patron urinating into an empty soda cup beside you (apparently he couldn't be bothered--or didn't dare--to look for the men's room).

Should we understand the goat? I think these places are beyond understanding, just as I suppose Filipino life can be beyond understanding--like the theater it's full of lust and filth, and everyone's too demoralized to bother trying to keep it fully, continuously clean (the moment when the men's room is flooded is strangely the single most moving moment for me with its silent despair, its patient mop sweeper standing ankle-deep in dark water). The script by Armando Lao--who I used to call the Philippines' most underrated scriptwriter, now less underrated (and thankfully more active)--seems shapeless, lackadaisical, and Mendoza directs his script with a general lethargy, punctuated by the occasional surge of energy (a bursting boil, a bout of oral sex, a thief dangling from a balcony). But Lao and Mendoza (with the help of a wonderfully unglamorous cast that includes Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz and Gina Pareno) have carefully attained that lethargy, it's the kind of everyday rhythm fellow Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz strives for and achieves in his hours-long epics, set in the countryside.

Call this then, like Lebanon, an elaborate womb metaphor, with the people trapped inside too self-absorbed and terrified to seek escape, only too happy to wallow in their own waste and fester. If there's anything at all compensatory in these less-than-ideal conditions, it's that the theater snack food seem tastier than the cardboard pap found in most movie theaters, with hot meals over rice, pork rinds sprinkled with spicy vinegar, and boiled duck egg (complete with feathery, days-old fetus for a protein surprise) available at the lobby. Just don't use the men's room afterward.

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)

2009-11-01T01:18:00.004-04:00

King of pain

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker has been called the best film yet made about the war in Iraq, and one can see where they’re coming from--it’s crude yet coherent, understated yet intense, and it knows that first and foremost, before you even deal with the politics of war, you portray its head rush, the ‘drug’ mentioned in the film’s opening titles.

Bigelow’s eminently qualified. A woman successfully working in what’s basically a man’s world, she’s done one action film after another in various genres, and managed to give them an unapologetically distinct visual design--the chilly metallic look of Blue Steel, the dreamy twilight feel of Near Dark (arguably her best work), the headlong rush of Strange Days. Her editing is precise and swift, but she’s also a long-take fan, perfectly capable of going against the grain of today’s chop-suey editing and shaky handheld cameras.

If she has a weakness, it’s her scripts--Blue Steel had its moments, but Ron Silver’s psychopathic killer-lover was ultimately too silly to be truly disturbing; Strange Days started out strong but ended up underutilizing its fin-de-siecle scenario; even Near Dark had its narrative implausibilities (is vampirism that easy to cure?).

Hurt Locker seems different; its scenario doesn’t indulge in fantastic flights of fancy (narrativewise, I mean), and it doesn’t strive for glaringly unearned dramatic moments. The story is of a piece--basically, the life of an EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) squad, counting down days of active duty; in its way are seven scenarios, six involving bombs of escalating degrees of complexity, that it must survive to go home.

At the film’s center, breathing harshly like a Kubrickian spaceman in his bomb disposal suit (a heavy-duty affair of armor blast plating, Kevlar, fire retardant polymers and ballistic nylon) with matching helmet (visor made of hardened acrylic/polycarbonate laminate) stands Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a daredevil disposal expert who likes to keep souvenirs of the bombs he’s dismantled in a box (“this is shit from Radio Shack, man” a fellow soldier finally tells him). Funny, but there it is: a movie about a man who only lives when he’s in danger of dying.

James is the film’s wildly beating heart and biggest problem. As Renner (who bears an unsettling resemblance to thirty-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with “fuck you” attitude to match), plays him he’s a deadpan gambler willing and able to stake his life (and his fellow soldiers') on the possibility he’s right. He pulls up bomb wires with casual aplomb; he rips open car seats and carpeting with evident gusto. It’s as if dismantling bombs were a child’s game where he pretends that he reads his opponent’s playbook with complete clarity, even if he doesn’t (he doesn’t, not always, definitely not with the final device).

James’ bravado makes him cool and ultimately lends this movie much of its seductiveness. And seductive it is--the bombs are, as that soldier put it, “Radio Shack;” not the gleaming hi-tech bombs of movie villains past, but the product of ingenious minds with limited budget and resources. Their designs have an ingenious logic, a logic James follows with unbridled glee--if you wire a 155 mm round to detonate, would you use just one? If you want to hide a bomb, where's the ideal hiding place? If you want to fashion the ultimate undefuseable bomb--the last one that James, late in the film, deals with --just how would you do it? Bigelow stages and Renner plays each sequence with absolute conviction; you can’t think clearly, what with all the tension onscreen.

It’s when you’ve left the theater and the tension’s gone that you realize how big a con job this is, how much the character of James has been cribbed from louder, sillier antecedents like Lethal Weapon, only with Renner doing a far more persuasive job with far less than Mel Gibson ever did (Gibson at least had a wife long dead). Does the film say anything about the absurdity of the Iraq war? Only incidentally, in the background--in the way the Iraqis gaze at James with his bombs, as if this were an example of performance art with lives only incidentally at stake. That's an entire world into which he’s intruding, suit and bombs and all, and the onlookers may or may not have an interest in his safety. They deserve a more complex, less contrived view of the war and its causes and its effects.

No, the film doesn’t have anything profound to say about the war; it’s a skein of macho clichés linking together a series of bomb defusing sequences, admittedly superb. Thanks to those sequences, this may be the best film to date about the Iraq war; I just don’t think that means as much as we’d like.

First published in Businessworld, 10.23.09

Cinemanila 2009 (final weekend)

2009-10-23T00:24:00.005-04:00

Lav Diaz's Batang West Side

Cinemanila 2009 (final weekend)

The world on the big screen at Cinemanila

It’s that time of the year again, and again I’m not sure we appreciate the kind of bounty we get at Cinemanila. There are other festivals for foreign films (Cine Europa, Eiga Sai, the various embassy festivals); other festivals for independent films (Cinema One Originals, Cinemalaya), but seeing cutting-edge Filipino films screened side-by-side with the latest offerings from world cinema, that’s a different experience entirely. We see the best of what we have to offer alongside the best of what the world has to offer, and we can come to the conclusion that yes, there is much in the world that’s different and much we can learn from, the same time there’s much we can offer in return. The exchange of ideas, images, interests, cultures, stories and, above all, friendships--that’s the real value of a festival like this.

The world cinema programming in particular--it’s a relief to see programming that’s aware of what’s going on out there, instead of relying on distributors or popular hits or goodness knows what criterion to pick films for one’s festival. Here we have commercial hits (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the latest from any number of exciting filmmakers (Fruit Chan and Jian Cui’s Chengdu, I Love You; Steve McQueen’s Hunger; Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth; Francois Ozon’s Ricky). We have the latest from the finest Filipino filmmakers working at the moment (Raya Martin’s Independencia; Ralston Jover’s Bakal Boys; Pepe Diokno’s Engkwentro). We have screenings of two of Lav Diaz’s most important works, Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family), and Batang West Side (West Side Avenue).

Batang West Side is as Diaz himself put it his “first film”--or, at least, the first where he truly realized his vision (I do like his earlier efforts, however flawed he may think they are, particularly the Dostoevskian Serafin Geronimo: Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (Criminal of Barrio Concepcion)). Batang West Side explores the different levels of an entire community, the Filipino-American community, from its oldest to youngest generation, from its upper class to middle class to underworld. In its five-hour accumulation of detail, with a density and scope and leisurely pace very much like a novel, it achieves greatness; it even has room for deadpan humor (a gang boss’ trippy speech (“Shabu (crystal meth) is the salvation of the Philippines”) and surreal imagery (a nightmarish dream sequence). Diaz balances severe aesthetic with a novelist’s comprehensive storytelling in this film and achieves, I believe, his masterpiece.

Ebolusyon at eleven hours is an even bigger canvas, and admittedly more impressive (Film critic/iconoclast Olaf Moller, writing for Senses of Cinema, picked it as the Best Film of 2005 and, writing for Cinematheque Ontario just this year, as "Film of the Decade"). I would argue that Diaz had trouble validating his mix of 16 mm and video footage, and that the historical perspective doesn’t really integrate with the personal storylines that crisscross the narrative. But huge canvases and overreaching ambitions are often accompanied by considerable flaws, and there are more than enough themes and surpassingly moving moments here to make it worth one’s while--a grandmother lying among her photographs, spending her final moments in mourning; a man’s pathetic, agonizing death stretched out almost to eternity as the camera follows his dying crawl. Diaz attempts nothing more and nothing less than an epic retelling of thirty years’ of Philippine history, and the results are confusing, fascinating, altogether exhilarating.

These are difficult and essential films to see; if you are Filipino, or a lover of all things Filipino, or a film lover, or a lover of Filipino films, or a combination of any of the aforementioned, you must, must, must see these two works.

(Belated note: the Batang West Side screening apparently didn't push through, but festival director Tikoy Aguiluz hopes to have it screened at a later dates)

As for the other films--Israel may not be the most morally upstanding country at the moment, but that doesn’t go for some of its filmmakers. Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary about an Israeli soldier (Folman himself) trying to recover his memories of what happened during the Lebanon War, in particular the Sabra and Shatila massacre--the animation acts as another level of stylization that helps the filmmaker deal with memories too painful to remember. Bui Thac Chuyen’s Adrift (Cinema 5, Saturday 12 to 1.50 pm) is a gorgeously photographed Vietnamese film much in the tradition of French erotic dramas, only the Vietnamese do the French one better by throwing a few virgins in the mix, to help recall what a surprise and terror and wonder human sexuality can be. Chris Chong’s Karaoke is one of the best films I’ve seen recently, an understated drama about the shattering of a youth’s illusions in life, with a great wordless sequence in the middle that reveals what it’s all about and why nothing the youth can say or do really matters.

First published in Businessworld, 10.23.09

More on Jang Kun-Jae's "Eighteen" and Ralston Jover's "Bakal Boys"

2009-10-18T02:48:00.017-04:00

Bakal Boys

Announcement of Dragons and Tigers winners

I'm the hairy dude that makes the dramatic announcement. For some strange reason the focus of my eyes had changed, hence my dramatic whipping off of glasses prior to reading out the director's name.

As for Bakal Boys (which, for the record, I liked very much)--perhaps the film's one major weakness, apparent on first viewing, is the director's seeming admiration--perhaps too much so--of the camerawork of frequent collaborator Brillante Mendoza (Jover had written the script for Mendoza's Foster Child, Tirador, and (easily my favorite of Mendoza's work to date) Manoro). The Dardennes brothers' style of handheld long takes has, for better or worse, become the signature style of the Filipino independent film production.

Jover does develop his own distinct light, a burnished sunset glow where Mendoza usually opts for a harsher, more realistic palette. Paradoxically, while Jover confines himself to warmer colors, his setting is noticeably bleaker than Mendoza's--a desolate concrete landscapes dominated by gigantic rusting machinery, with makeshift shacks that cover the concrete like an encrustation. The sea is the only other major presence, an endlessly roiling, rhythmic mystery, a source of both danger and possible delight for the people living nearby; in the distant horizon are cityscapes of northern Manila, an urban world familiar to us and other Filipino audiences.

As in his scripts for Manoro and Tirador, the last thing Jover seems to want to do is judge these children. In the Q & A that followed, he notes that attempts were made to try put these children in school, and that in a matter of months they were back to what they were doing, diving in Manila Bay for scrap metal--for many of the youths, scrap metal diving was a way of putting food on the table; if they didn't dive, they didn't eat. Diving was what they knew, was in many cases all they knew. As for parents, Jover cited a case where the father was crippled; I don't know about the other children (are all the fathers similarly helpless?), but you do notice in the picture the almost complete lack of adults--these kids, like the kids in Bunuel's Los Olvidados, are left to their own resources, to fend for themselves as best they can.

And yet, and yet, and yet, and this was the most startling thing about the picture, it wasn't completely grim; it wasn't all despair. You come away with an impression of the extraordinary strength and resilience of these children, of their ability to survive the horrifying harshness of their lives (Jover notes that one or two of these boys drown or simply disappear every week) and still be children, laughing, playing, teasing, having the time of their lives. You see a world that continually neglects if not actively oppresses these boys, and they and their kin and friends respond with courtesy, kindness, even love. Amazing film.

We knew Jang Kun-Jae's Hwioribaram (Eighteen) was something special (which was why we gave it the Dragons and Tigers Award) from the very first shot: a gas station late at night, pumps lined up to the right, a white-lined rectangle just below the camera frame, dark city night beyond. It's a shot full of promise, as if anyone could drive in and take over the picture, and someone does--a motorcycle rolls in, and a station attendant buzzes around it, topping off its tank. The rider kick-starts his bike and the camera pulls back, following him through the streets. The protagonist Tae Hoon has just arrived, in effect, and it's his story we follow as the film proper begins.

I'd been quoted as saying it's an old story--boy meets girl, boy and girl have a short affair, boy breaks up with girl. Familiar--too familiar, it's true, but one advantage of familiar old stories is that we don't waste too much time and attention on the narrative, we've seen it all before; instead we concentrate on the details, on how the story is told, visually as well as dramatically. For a plain meat-and-potatoes narrative, this one is told extremely well: understated melodrama, nicely modulated acting, some smartly staged set-pieces. The look is distinctive, in a quietly old-fashioned way (few quick cuts, and only a few instances of the all-too-common handheld camera)--no small achievement on digital video.

Perhaps the first time the story really hooks its audience is the scene in the living room when the parents of Tae-Hoon's girlfriend Park Mi-Jeong confront him and his family (the two had gone off on a seaside winter break without telling anyone), and Mi-Jeong's father loses it--he's pulled a knife from an ankle holster and is stabbing the coffee table. Handheld shots (one of the few instances in the picture and one of the few times it's perfectly justified, I think) convey the chaos; jump cuts keep us startled, off-balance--suddenly he's slapping his daughter; suddenly he's smashing glass with a golf club. Suddenly--the most effective shot in the sequence, I think--Jang cuts to a television set turned up full volume, and the roar of the set suggests the panic inspired by violence better than any onscreen act (and people's reaction to the act) possibly could. It's as if everyone's mind were tuned to the same station and someone accidentally sat on the remote, sending the tuner skittering across several channels.

Yet another example--Jang cuts to a sudden shot of the girl's younger sister, face puffy for some reason; the camera pulls back and we realize that she's being strangled, the hands tight around her neck belonging to Mi-Jeong. The two sisters fight, and their kicking and spitting and shrieking--with the mother desperately trying to pull them apart--seems more authentic than any family interaction I've seen on recent mainstream movies.

While we're at it, I might as well point out that the adults here, from Mi-Jeong's parents to Tae-Hoon's patient, put-upon boss, seem more authentically sketched-in and performed than most other adults in recent teen pictures (a rare virtue for the genre, where adults are usually abusive or ineffectual cartoons rarely given their due, much less a point of view).

Towards the end, we see how the incident (their impromptu seaside vacation) and their subsequent enforced separation has shaped both Tae-Hoon and Mi-Jeong's lives. Tae Hoon can't seem to accept the death of their relationship; he goofs around, tries to follow Mi-Jeong, tries to see her outside of school, or outside her home; Mi-Jeong for her part seems to have made her decision and moved on. But our final glimpses of their respective lives seem to suggest that matters are more complicated--Tae Hoon after struggling so long has (as suggested by the serenity with which he rides away) apparently come to terms with his loss. Mi Jeong puts on an equally brave face, but as she sits on her gym bench we hear the soft sigh of surf, and we see her hair ruffled, as if by an ocean breeze. Jang seems to suggest that Mi-Jeong was every bit as affected as Tae-Hoon was by the experience, only she's done a better job of repressing it; the memory, however, may haunt her for some time, perhaps all her life. Sad, lovely little film.

Finally, after googling around for articles and pictures and videos concerning the award, I found this. Recorded during the Jeonju International Film Festival, in 2006.

Jang Kun-Jae's "Eighteen" wins the Dragons and Tiger's Award

2009-10-10T15:09:00.012-04:00

Jang Kun-Jae's Eighteen wins the Dragons and Tigers Award

Ralston Jover's Bakal Boys (roughly translated: Scrap Metal Scavengers) won special mention.

Happy for these two films, but I really enjoyed all eight; each had its own look, its own point of view, its own urgent message to flash out to the world, and if I could I'd give 'em all an award and prize money. But this is the real world.

Of the other films--mind you, these are strictly my opinion, and not of my fellow jurors; they had their own favorites and reasons, and it's up to them to reveal it if they wish. But I've rarely been one to keep my thoughts to myself.

Bui Thac Chuyen's Adrift looked the most striking, with gorgeous shadowy cinematography edged by this lovely silver light. The story, about four men and women whose lives inextricably entangle, tended to remind me of a French erotic drama, only done better (maybe the problem with erotic French films nowadays is that everyone's done it all, seen it all; what you need is a few virgins thrown, male or female, the way this film does, to appreciate the tremendous force and fear sex can inspire).

I'm afraid Kim Ji-Hyun's Cats was the one I appreciated the least, at first; it took a second viewing to see the film's circular structure (a deejay whose voice is heard in the film's opening puts in a personal appearance in the end), and to realize that the film's occasionally awkward acting style is a small price to pay for the mostly naturalistic, mostly spontaneous look and feel of the film overall (I'm thinking of, among many others, Mario O'Hara's Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998)). I think Kim's less about the look of the picture and more about her characters--the lovemaking has a gentle erotic charge, nothing glossy and slick about it, the couples quarrel like real couples, and the editing among the three storylines (a gay couple; a dentist seeking a sperm donor; a young sculptor and the mother who wants to marry her off) is unfussy and unapologetic (the film cuts from one storyline to another with no-nonsense briskness, and it's up to you to keep apace).

Wu Haohao's Kun 1: Action mixes classical music, interviews, punk rock, personal diary and political rant to create a Godardian essay on the director's society and personal life. Perhaps the most sensational moment onscreen is an onscreen fellatio ("Is that you?" I asked; "yes," he replied without a trace of embarrassment), but the truly striking element in all this is the nostalgia Wu feels for the olden days of Mao, which he expresses in song, Johnny Rotten-style, as opposed to the materialistic spiritual corruption he sees eating away at the insides of his contemporaries. The film's not professionally done--some of the editing and sound mix is gnarly--but it's up close, and boy is it personal.

Extraordinary thing happened during the screening of Sasaki Omoi's Left Out: the director had a crisis of confidence and apologized for his film. I suppose all directors have moments they regret shooting in their films (some, Michael Bay comes to mind, have an entire career to repent), but I didn't see anything that needed urgent recanting, not right before the film's world premiere.

Like many initial outings this is a personal document--the characters are cartoonish, the yakuza figures manga versions of the real thing, but I see this as being basically Sasaki's story, the main character his fictional surrogate. All others are extensions of his persona (the yakuza are who he'd like to be; the girl is who he'd like to lay, and the boss is a freeze-frame portrait of who he will be, years from now), and he's in the process of working out just how much he'll take from the world at large before he snaps, what exactly will he do when that moment comes, and just how effective that moment will be in the general scheme of things. Bleakly honest and funny.

Mariko Tetsuya's Yellow Kid isn't so much a manga come to life as it is a lively manga about life--about unhappy people with complicatedly circular lives (Tamura takes up boxing to relieve his hostility; Hattori asks Tamura to model for his manga remake of the cartoon classic The Yellow Kid; Tamura accepts because the original model for the manga was WBA lightweight champion Mikuni Tokio, who inspired him to box; Tokio's girlfriend is Mana who once had a relationship with Hattori). Japanese passivity collides with Japanese aggression, and beautifully splashy unmanga-like art provides visual commentary. Fascinating film with fascinating ideas, and the meaning of the last shot (found after the credits) is fun to talk about afterward.

As mentioned at the ceremony and in the above article, Chris Chong's Karaoke was put aside during consideration, but it's really an impressive film. Almost nothing happens--a young man comes home, takes a modeling job, assures his mother he can take care of her and that everything will be fine, eventually contemplates leaving again, this time permanently. This "you can't go home again" microdrama is surrounded by the larger movement of a town transformed, said theme especially laid out in an extraordinary sequence where the main character Betik takes a walk. He wanders through a cathedral of tree trunks, basically towering palm trees that stand in silent attendance--an impressive shot, but as the sequence goes on and we see Betik's tiny figure walking slowly through the grove of giants, we realize that the trees aren't arranged randomly, but in a row. What we thought was a wild forest was actually a domesticated grove, and what looked like a ravishing example of proud, untouched nature was actually established by plantation owners. Cut to monumental piles of rotting palm fruit, haloed by flies, and the huge machines lifting the fruit on conveyor belts high up into the sky. This isn't nature but a parody of nature--agribusiness run amok, its plantations replacing local growth, its workers displacing local workers, its pesticide pollution contaminating local watershed, its very presence slowly corrupting the heart of this town.

Karaoke is basically about false fronts--Betik assuming a control over his life he doesn't really have, karaoke videos evoking emotions no one really feels, the silent palm giants representing a nature that doesn't really exist anymore. Wonderful film.

Vancouver International Film Festival

2009-10-06T14:32:00.006-04:00

So I'm at the Vancouver International Film Festival and seen a few films--can't quite say anything about the films we're judging yet--hopefully I can write something about them some time after the festival's ended. But I've seen films outside of the competition as well, and they're quite a memorable collection.

Hasn't been a pleasant trip; caught a bug on the flight over (I thought American airlines had the worst food--paid $7 for a cold, cardboard-y Quiznos roast beef sandwich at Air Canada which promptly dropped straight to the floor of my belly like a brick, and reacted I presume with the stomach acids there. The aforementioned organ started swelling--and swelling--and swelling--till I felt like John Hurt suffering indigestion in Alien (only it wasn't the chest my creature was threatening to burst out of). In-flight entertainment was Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, which as it turns out was a godsend: fifteen minutes of Michael Bay's muscular visual style and I passed out for the rest of the trip.

Ranks way up there as one of the worst flights I've ever had, while the meal is easily the worse I've ever had, period. Have been chained to my hotel room ever since--can't be more than twenty minutes away, or disaster will occur.

And the worst of it is that Vancouver's a lovely city, all tree-lined boulevards and a distinct mix of modern skyscrapers and lovely Art Deco buildings, at the moment experiencing unseasonally sunny weather--love walking the streets with a crisp breeze blowing and the sunlight turning everything bright and clear. The food--what I see of it, passing by windows--is an eclectic mix, but with the coast so near, emphasizing fresh seafood (I'd kill for sashimi right now, only I'm afraid it'll kill me first).

Of the films I'd managed to see--Eugenio Polgovsky's The Inheritors (2008), about child laborers in Mexico, reminds me of Ditsy Carolino's Children Only Once, and it's interesting to see where one is stronger than the other. Polgovsky has a pitch-perfect tone--nonjudgmental, no commentary and very little music. We develop our own attitudes towards the children, and we see not just their suffering but their ways of coping and of being despite all the work and harsh conditions, well, children.

Not that Polgovsky whitewashes conditions. We see children struggle to put together bundles of sticks tied together by crude cords made of plant fiber; we see kids with gloves whack away at sugar cane with heavy machetes (you half expect him to miss and knock his legs off their feet). What we don't get is the kind of information Carolino gives us when she talks about children carrying cement bags breathing in the dust, which forms a kind of hardening mud in their lungs (they chug gin afterwards, in an effort to clear their air tubes), or the nightmarish fairy-tale ambiance Carolino achieves by shooting in black-and-white video. The Inheritors is an impressive film, nevertheless, worth watching for the immersive verite poetry.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll finds him in fantasy mode--basically an inflatable sex toy come to life. The ending goes on interminably and there are touches of sodden sentiment, but I do love how Kore-eda works out the details that remind us that the heroine is basically made out of air and latex (the mold lines, the translucent shadows) and how he relies on largely on-camera effects as opposed to the more popular digital. Also love Du-na Bae's performance, which is key to our believing the whole airy, delicate film. Ron Howard did something similar with Splash way back when, but I prefer Kore-eda's subtler, far lighter touch.

Bong Joon-Ho's Mother is terrific fare, possibly his best work. Where his Gwoemul worked in stops and starts, careened all over the place in terms of emotional tone and genre, in Mother Bong seems completely in control. Hard to see the comedy here, but it is dark comedy, nevertheless--Bong pokes not-too-gentle fun at the stereotype of the smothering Korean mother as he spins out for us the tale of one mother's love for her mentally challenged child, the determination and ferocity involved when said child is accused of the murder of a young woman.

Barking Dogs Never Bite; Oldboy; Beyond the Years

2009-10-04T15:35:00.006-04:00

Korean buffet

MOVIE REVIEW
• Flandersui gae (Barking Dogs Never Bite)
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
• Old Boy
Directed by Park Chan-wook
• Cheonnyeonhak (Beyond the Years)
Directed by Im Kwon Taek

AMONG THE FILMS being screened at the ongoing Korean Film Festival at the Shangri-La Plaza Mall is Bong Joon-ho’s rarely seen first feature, Flandersui gae (Barking Dogs Never Bite, a.k.a. A Higher Animal, a.k.a. Dog of Flanders, 2000). Bong would go on to greater fame and fortune as the director of Gwoemul (The Host, 2006), but you can see his fondness for dark comedy this early in the game, in his take on the realities of contemporary Korea--the huge apartment complexes, the pressure to succeed in academia, the henpecked husbands and listless office girls, the Korean fondness for dog meat (comparable to our own appetite for the same [for the record it’s better stewed than barbecued, the better to hide the gaminess], especially in the northern provinces).

Bong gives the story a slow pace for a comedy, but the deadpan demeanor only adds a rather unique, oddball feel (think Jim Jarmusch, only with a more gruesome touch). He has a gift for depicting claustrophobic spaces (the apartment basement, for example, where pets stew in little pots), when ironically the city is surrounded by some of the most beautiful natural landscapes in the world, if anyone would bother to look up and around.

Bong will acquire a more popular touch in Gwoemul, an anything-for-a-buck sensibility that mixes high family melodrama with low slapstick with social commentary with political satire with straightforward kill-the-monster action, plus a dollop of rather startling digitally composed imagery (a monster stretching gradually down from underneath a bridge like a humongous blob of quicksilver; the same monster some minutes later, galloping alongside panicked human crowds with the loping, looping gait of a mountain lion crossed with a sea serpent). In the meantime we have this, his poignantly awkward first significant step.

Park Chan-wook’s Old Boy (2003) is a radically different, altogether fiercer creature, a revenge flick to make Quentin Tarantino’s pair of Kill Bill movies look like a Girl Scout campfire meet complete with mint cookies. Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is kidnapped, confined to an apartment with only cable TV for company, and fed nothing but fried dumplings for 15 years; when he’s released, he’s left with little more than questions--who did this to him? And more to the point, why?

Park is hailed as a major new figure in world cinema, a provocateur in what one might call the 'Cinema of the Overdose'--one of Oh’s first gestures coming out of imprisonment is to demand "something alive," whereupon he’s served live octopus, whole and wriggling on a plate, which he picks up and stuffs, still wriggling, in his mouth.

It’s the kind of Grand Guignol hi-jinks that made Park a figure of international notoriety, though personally I found the moment rather crude--Koreans traditionally slice the octopod up for easier handling and better appreciation of the sweet flesh, something I’d do myself, if I had the money to actually splurge on live seafood (I suppose the crudity was Park’s point--the man’s appetites, given his situation, is understandably inhuman).

Not a big fan of the film. Thought the plot more gimmicky than surprising, thought the storytelling a little shoddy (would someone who took the trouble of imprisoning a man for years take the risk of keeping him in such an unsafe apartment--one where he can cut or bludgeon himself to death in any number of ways?), thought the "shocking" twist and conclusion more pretentious than profound.

Much prefer Park’s comic timing, the wit of his deadpan visual style. The much-celebrated claw-hammer scene, where Oh fights his way through a crowd of armed thugs with only a hammer in one hand, is a breathtaking bravura sequence, simple in concept and fiendishly difficult in execution (Park took three days to shoot it, and even then he had to digitally correct some punches and stabbings). Think of a diorama sequence brought to ferocious life, or the idea of widescreen action taken to its logical and ultimately absurd (yet somehow thrilling) conclusion.

I’ve finally warmed to Park’s darkly romantic brand of comedy (sort of like Bong’s, only on gamma-irradiated steroids) with his latest film Bakjwi (Thirst, 2009)--here the conventions of the vampire film give vitality to the conventions of the erotic thriller, the perils of vampirism have become a more evocative metaphor for the perils of romantic relationships, and the exhaustion felt near film’s end recalls the exhaustion of a life lived in despair for far too long. Old Boy works fine as low comedy delivered with an interesting aesthetic, but I didn’t feel it fully earned the poignancy it strove for; with Bakjwi Park finally scores--beside his work, movies like Catherine Hardwicke’s Mormonic vampire flick Twlight (2008) is revealed as anemic pap.

Then we are come to the grandmaster of Korean cinema, Im Kwon Taek, who has over the course of 50 years directed over a hundred films--I’d first seen his Chunhyang (2000) in Cinemanila, an epic retelling of a classic love story, done old-school style in the manner of Akira Kurosawa or David Lean. His latest, Cheonnyeonhak (Beyond the Years, 2007), an informal sequel to his 1993 hit Sopyonje, did not make money, but is nevertheless memorable.

The film tells the story of a father, son, daughter troupe that travels bars and inns, singing for their living. The son (a pansori drummer) falls in love with his beautiful singing sister (adopted, or so they say); the father plots to keep his daughter with him always. By turns moving, compelling, immeasurably sad, it meditates on the price an artist pays for the purity of her art, and where love and family and everyday happiness fits in (unspoken answer: trailing several steps behind the artist as he or she wanders about in nomadic rootlessness, seeking work).

Im may be an old-fashioned filmmaker with strong interests in traditional Korean culture but he does experiment with structure (we see the brother, a middle aged man, talking to an old acquaintance, the brother’s story fitting slowly into the present narrative piece by intriguing piece). It’s a measured experimentation--we trust Im to not go wildly experimental on us, nor lose himself or his story in the possibilities of a shot. One image (arguably my favorite) is particularly expressive--brother and sister sitting in grass, the sister singing; the camera gliding around them with the couple constantly kept on the lower right corner of the screen. It’s as if they were on some giant diorama, the landscape turning, while the couple acts as pivot to the great wheel--as if the world may change and move around them, but their love for each other is a fixed constant.

First published in Businessworld, 9.25.09

Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker, 9

2009-09-26T04:44:00.016-04:00

Tarantino's latest, Inglourious Basterds is an entertaining enough and harmless enough movie; what I don't get are all the hosannas proclaiming it (and Tarantino) as the Second Coming.

Tarantino may be comfortable in exploring "everything troubling and uncomfortable about the fact that a love of movies has no inherent virtue," but I don't see why that gives him power over us (who mostly knew it all along, if our heads were screwed on right).

"To claim that Tarantino's films are empty and self-referential is to ignore the obvious truth. Tarantino has already achieved relevance simply by being good at making something we like. Movies." But Meis attributes something to Tarantino I just don't see. He is, as I've said before, a middling director, a deft scriptwriter, a brilliant assembler of soundtracks, and arguably the greatest casting agent alive, in that order. I'll go see his pictures but I'm not expecting anything extraordinary--that way I'm neither blown away nor let down by what I see onscreen.

The opening was amusing, but nowhere near as "taut and sharp" as Meis claims (Spielberg's Schindler's List, much as I dislike the film, was better at generating suspense, or at least a sense of tension (I'm thinking of Amon Goth granting forgiveness to one camp inmate)). Meis praises a barroom scene and the way it "stretches the tension to a breaking point as masterfully as Hitchcock ever did." I don't know; Hitchcock I submit knew the difference between stretching "tension to a breaking point" and stretching one's sense of patience to the breaking point, plus he never had people talk as much as Tarantino does (when Hitchcock did allow for chatter it was usually for comic effect). Tarantino demonstrates a lousy sense of pace here, and rewards our patience with an incoherently edited gunfight; later you can't help but notice that his scenes peter out with either a cut or cute joke--it's as if he'd lost the knack of ending a scene, or at least of writing a proper ending for one (He still had that knack when he made Reservoir Dogs, if I remember rightly).

The movie has its moments--Melanie Laurent framed against a window, for example, while electric guitars roar a la Ennio Morricone in spaghetti western mode (Tarantino channels a lot of filmmakers but his favorite nowadays seems to be Sergio Leone). And Christoph Waltz as the Nazi officer smarter than anyone else is a funny recap of something Hitchcock did decades ago--only those weren't my favorite Hitchcock; my idea of a great Hitchcock villain combines evil and vulnerability in a complex, knotty little package (Claude Rains in Notorious, Raymond Burr in Rear Window, Anthony Perkins in Psycho).

The ending evokes Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen with a significant difference--Aldrich's film (shot matter-of-factly, in real time) emphasizes the dirty, difficult, dangerous business of murder; Tarantino's film slows the killings down for a more grandiose effect, inflating the rhetoric the same time he deflates any hope of adding meaning to his climactic massacre (I know, I know, movies have "no inherent virtue." Doesn't mean one can't try).

Critics seem to want to call the movie's ending a powerful act of re-imagination. It's not often done in movies (HBO's Fatherland), but the genre's common enough in science fiction (Norman Spinal's The Iron Dream is an excellent example, though my favorite is Philip K. Dick's great The Man in the High Castle). Tarantino cutting short World War 2 doesn't seem half as interesting as Dick's dark vision of a world dominated by a Japanese and Nazi empire--but that's probably just me.

I don't know, I think Meis needs to see a few more WW 2 and Holocaust movies and documentaries. If he's saying Inglourious is a better film than Night and Fog I think he needs to produce a helluva longer article, just to explain himself.

It's hard to take Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker any more seriously than Tarantino's pulpy war fantasy, but Bigelow at least demonstrates more than enough ability to be "good at making something we like." I don't mean the characters, who are basically cartoons (albeit deftly and economically sketched), or the central character's psychological predicament (an update on a premise as old as Hawks' His Girl Friday, given some heft and urgency (if not verisimilitude) in Richard Dinner's Lethal Weapon). What makes this movie sing, or at least warble a few vivid notes, are the bomb defusing sequences, which are pretty damned good. The movie's basically Richard Lester's Juggernaut (1974) set on dry land, and without Lester's misanthropic wit--not as bracing, perhaps, but it'll do until something better comes along.

Shane Acker's 9 is a disappointment--the trailer led us to expect a miniature epic complete with rag-doll courage, improvised weaponry, and huge, shambling Rube Goldberg machinery. We get all that and in spades, but what I should have asked for is a storyline that resonates more with its audience instead of depending on the inherent pathos of discarded trash, the spell of which lasts for all of twenty minutes--then it's a long and dull slog through the world of the future as a historical junkyard.

Some of the action is imaginatively done. A snakelike creature swallowing our heroes whole has some of the skin-crawling horror of recent onscreen anacondas (though the creature being made of cloth reminds one that this textile-as-skin conceit has been done before, and much better, in Henry Selick's Coraline), and any action sequence that puts string, rusted metal and other knickknacks to good use can't be all bad. Overall, however, this is thin fare.

The Grudge 3 (Toby Wilkins, 2009)

2009-09-19T06:00:00.002-04:00

A dish best served cold

Not a big fan of Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on (The Grudge, 2002), basically a series of setpieces loosely held together by the notion of vengeance after death. The plot is intricate, and frankly illogical; the characters are notable mostly by the manner in which they expire; the dialogue is, at best, functional.

The real star of the movie is Shimizu's claustrophobic style, and the battery of inventive effects he employs in realizing that style. The slow creep, either of hair or camera, into one corner of a house or another; the implacable creaking noise as the violently murdered Kayako (Takako Fuji) tries to moan through her twisted throat, or do her memorably crablike crawl. Ju-on may not make much sense, but in the hands of Shimizu it has all the sense it needs to send shivers down one's spine.

The American remake (The Grudge, 2004) did one thing right: it imported Shimizu all the way from Japan to direct. Aside from a touch more explicitness and an American actress (Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame) in the lead, the remake was a shot-by-shot copy of the original; the sequel (The Grudge 2, 2006) featured a brief cameo by Gellar and a series of stories that expanded on Shimizu's revenge philosophy (actually the only elements that really expanded were the variety of settings, the confusing plot lines, and the ways in which characters died).

Enter The Grudge 3 a straight-to-video production, with Shimizu bowing out (he "prefers to produce," as he puts it) and even Ms. Fuji failing to reprise her long-running role as Kayako (Ms. Aiko Horiuchi steps in as substitute). Toby Wilkins as director doesn't seem to have a very substantial filmography, but his visual effects resume is as long as your arm--one suspects that the special effects, which aren't too bad, have been well-served in this installment. Brad Keene, who did the screenplay, has written a handful of other features, most if not all horror.

One must hand it to Keene, there's some attempt at characterization here--the family, now a band of two sisters and a brother, the youngest sister often wheezing and in dire need for an oxygen tank, the middle one on the verge of becoming a famous fashion designer, the eldest brother managing an antiquated apartment building in exchange for free rent. Sister loves sister loves brother; a neighbor named Gretchen (Marina Sirtis, doing the best she can after Star Trek: The Next Generation) occasionally babysits for them. Fact is, there's so much love and affectionate neighborliness--even the building owner seems like a decent enough person--that you wonder who could be holding anything against anyone.

When the scares start happening, of course, people stop making sense and start shrieking, which is probably one of the biggest problems I have with Shimizu's horror franchise--people don't seem to deserve their horrible fates; all they need to do is step into the apartment, or house, or whatever, and poor Kayako starts snapping her limbs in their direction. Once cursed, they do little more then peel their lips back and shriek--Kayako's going to get you no matter what you do or how well you hide (not that any of them bother too much). There's no emotional buildup, no sense of drama, no narrative momentum; people walk in, nose around, then bones start snapping. The Grudge movies are little more than the Final Destination gimmick translated into J-horror, with Shimizu's talent for creeping atmosphere and unsettling effects the only (if not inconsiderable) distinction. In Hideo Nakata's Ringu the plot had a real motor, a genuine source of suspense--the heroine's attempt to investigate the source and cause of the curse, mainly because she herself was cursed (Nakata ratcheted the suspense quotient considerably by counting down the days till she died, and at one point caused an unsettling sense of confusion--playing cunning games with one's expectations--when the countdown continued even after matters were supposedly resolved).

The filmmakers have boasted that their Grudge movie is bloodier, more explicitly violent--a pity, actually, as part of Shimizu's appeal was that he inspired terror (or at least profound unease) out of so very little: some special effects, some sound effects, a little inventive staging, not much else, not even a real plot. With Shimizu gone, or at least out of the director's chair, there isn't much to the picture--more blood, I suppose, give or take a few gallons, and a near-sex scene that comes to not much when the lovers are quickly interrupted. If I really needed to say something nice, there's a brief scene of unseen forces playing patty-cake with red paint that is fitfully memorable--one might wish, however, that the sequence didn't end with the standard-issue Grudge scare, a corpse with the lower mandible ripped off.

And that's about all, folks. Revenge might be a dish best served cold, but this one's been served again and again and again, with no sign of relenting. You wonder if the dish is still edible, considering the number of times it's been taken out of the fridge--there's a distinct aroma pervading the air, as if of a corpse kept on display way past its time of burial. Enough, already.

First published in Businessworld, 9.11.09

National Artist Awards can't be undone, says Solicitor General

2009-09-19T04:56:00.003-04:00

From the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

National Artist Awards can't be undone--SolGen

The issues raised in the petition are clearly moot and academic

The issue of cultural standards, of the honor of a formerly revered award is moot and academic? I suppose.

No amount of melodramatic protests shall overturn this fact

Does melodrama instantly negate the virtues of one's case? If artists express themselves melodramatically, as is often their nature, does this mean their cause has no serious merit?

Implicit in this kind of thinking is that any issue involving culture and the arts is moot and academic, that serious consideration of such issues is beneath one's dignity.

This coming from a member of the legal profession of unimpeachable reputation, of course.

The present petition is one for prohibition which is a preventive remedy. The act sought to be enjoined having taken place already, there is nothing more to restrain.

A technical flaw, and it's a chronic flaw of Filipinos that they are prone to technical flaws. But another flaw of Filipinos and one more significant I think is in investing close attention to such minutiae and ignoring the larger issues involved. In this case--does Carlos J. Caparas deserve the National Artist Award?

(To) sustain petitioners’ argument that the President cannot grant the award to someone nor recommended by the NCCA-CCP Boards would be a patent disregard of the President powers

And this, of course would be a very bad thing.

Public Enemies (Michael Mann, 2009)

2009-09-12T01:17:00.004-04:00

Robber soul

Michael Mann's Public Enemies (2009), his epic production on the life of legendary bank-robber John Herbert Dillinger, is a cold fish of a movie. You get little of Dillinger's early career--we see his escape with friends from the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, actually two separate episodes (his friends broke out, then facilitated his own getaway) combined, presumably to help condense the story. You get little sense of who Dillinger was as a person, a gang leader, a lover. Dramawise the movie's inert, a series of excitingly made setpieces strung together and shot (by longtime collaborator Dante Spinotti) on high-definition digital video--a lot of flash, no discernable heartbeat.

But looking for heart in recent Mann films is beside the point, I think; Mann has different if not bigger fish to fry. Critics have complained that Mann's latest has no foreground, no compelling character dominating the landscape whose motives define the film's conflict; I would argue that, as with filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, the characters' attempt--and subsequent failure--to dominate that landscape IS the film's conflict (more on this later). Mann gives this much concession to conventional expectations and to the moneybags financing this film, that he casts a bona fide Hollywood star (Johnny Depp), but Depp often pursues his own agenda (look at how he hijacked Pirates of the Caribbean and, perversely, turned it into a bigger hit than even the producers anticipated) and is a habitual risk-taker. A Mann film, especially one with its priorities so bewilderingly upside-down, would be the kind of project he would find hard to resist.

Public Enemies is nothing if not a film of landscapes, not so much about countryside as about an entire country. The film's setting is '30s America in the grip of an economic downturn, and early on we see Dillinger stopped by a woman clutching his arm. "Take me with you," the woman pleads softly. Dillinger just as softly turns her down, turns away; the camera lingers on the faded woman, her skinny child, the dilapidated house looming behind her. It's visual poetry of the highest order, and its brief onscreen appearance haunts our viewing experience of the rest of the picture--the rest of the evening, in my case and several evenings after. "This," the film seems to whisper, "is the Great Depression, nor are we out of it."

Mann fills in other details in his complex extended metaphor: the creation of counterterrorist techniques by an embryonic Federal Bureau of Investigation headed by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, who wittily plays Hoover as an anal-retentive publicity-hungry politician). Phone wiretaps, brutal interrogations--Mann's conceit is that the hunt for Dillinger inspired the use of these measures, much as the hunt for terrorists has resurrected their use today. Mind you, the FBI was not the first American organization to use the technique--waterboarding was used on Filipino insurgents (freedom fighters to us) at the beginning of the 20th century, when the country was a freshly acquired American colony--but it was possibly the FBI that brought these techniques home, for use on American (as opposed to foreign) prisoners.

Deeper in the background is the development of an information network of sorts. Dillinger walks in on a startling scene--hundreds of operators taking bets on the phone, wires snaking up from their hands to an unseen web overhead. Frank Nitti (Bill Camp) owns this operation, and his lieutenant informs Dillinger that this is the future, this data exchange--where the bank robber once considered a vault filled with over seventy thousand dollars a good haul, Nitti's bookmakers can make that amount in a single day. Crime has stopped being a boutique endeavor--a small group of professionals victimizing mostly the rich--and established itself as a corporate enterprise, complete with departments and accountants and political lobbyists. Dillinger doesn't admit it (even if you see the recognition in his eyes), but he is obsolete.

Meantime he's alive and robbing, and Mann in his own deadpan way celebrates Dillinger's due diligence, the elegance with which he goes about his business. The real Dillinger may not be so efficient, but Depp's Dillinger joins a long line of hardworking Mann men, from Sonny Crockett to Vincent to Neil McCauley (one might title his entire filmography Men at Work; Men at Work 2; Men at Work 3; and so on), his heroes more comfortable talking to co-worker than family, more at ease mounting quasi-military operations either for or against the law than sitting on a living-room sofa, watching television while the wife prepares dinner. Mann films are extremely physical, full of forward motion; a pause for breath or, worse, commonplace exposition would not just kill the momentum, it would lessen the drama, the mystery of relentless physical movement.

Mann's choice of Depp is, I think a daring one; I would have thought Christian Bale (who plays Melvin Purvis) the more obvious choice for tommy-gun sociopath, with the more thoughtful-looking Depp as federal agent. Casting the two against type creates interesting dynamics, though--suddenly Purvis is the relentless hunter, near psychopathic in the intensity of his desire to capture Dillinger; suddenly Dillinger is a more thoughtful, more melancholic quarry, with weary eyes looking about all sides for the danger he knows is coming. I've never considered Depp to be particularly dangerous-looking but in the occasional feral grin spotted here, there, in the Pirates movies; in his chilling turn as a CIA agent in Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003); in his recent turn as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; in this film, he's built up an impressive resume of cold-blooded killers.

Dillinger acts out dark, socially unacceptable wishes, striking banks where they would hurt most (their vaults, of course). Mann acknowledges this facet of the Dillinger myth with his robberies, the banks architecturally imposing cathedrals with soaring ceilings, vast marble floors, dark railings that divide bank staff from common customers--Dillinger vaults the railings with gazelle-like grace (he was nicknamed "The Jackrabbit" for his ability to jump), violating the institutionally imposed divide between rich and poor. Banks were the villains in Depression America, remain the villains in America today; Mann's Dillinger in the way he jumps about exults in exacting revenge on these villains, these malevolent financial angels holding fiery swords over heavily mortgaged houses.

Salon Magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek dismisses any notions of parallelism to our present-day situation with the thought that there is no direct modern equivalent to Dillinger, no outlaw rebel bringing the high and mighty to their knees (however superficially and temporarily, if publicly). I submit that there are parallels, only Mann's Dillinger has to take on the double role of acting out the fantasies of both '30s audiences and our own. No, we don't have a Dillinger; all the more reason to appreciate Mann's attempt to bring him into hurtling, leaping life for us.

First published in Businessworld, 7.24.09

Bruno (Larry Charles, 2009)

2009-09-12T00:03:00.006-04:00

Bruha

One had expectations. Larry Charles' 2006 mockumentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was made for a slim $18 million and generated some $260 million worldwide, earning both director and writer-producer Sacha Baron Cohen the reputation of pop provocateurs as they interview hapless Americans under misleading pretences, exposing latent racism and Anti-Semitism.

(Why Kazakhstan, by the way? Cohen uses the name; the language, written and read, is made-up gibberish. Couldn't he have given Borat's country something made-up, instead of the moniker of an actual country too small and powerless to fight back?)

The filmmakers attempt to repeat the stunt with Bruno (2009). Bruno comes with an estimated price tag of $42 million, an altogether more expensive affair though the picture itself doesn't necessarily look more expensive (the amount breaks down into a reputed production budget of $20 to $25 million, plus perceived added value to Universal of $20 million). Distributors pay a higher price for a known quantity, even if returns are slimmer (Bruno earned a relatively smaller $136 million worldwide to date); that smaller amount is almost as good as cash in the bank.

One wonders if perhaps the filmmakers should have heeded an old warning: repetition kills, or a gag isn't as funny the second time around. Borat was a freak accident; it proposed the terrifying idea that people would find two ugly, hairy men mashing their buttocks in each others' faces funny (20th Century Fox timidly released it in a scant 800 theaters). Part of its appeal--well, a huge part of its appeal--is the surprising fact that audiences did find two grown men grinding their nose into each others' behinds not just funny but hilarious (Fox quickly put the picture in 2,500 theaters when it earned $29 million on its first weekend).

Repetition kills surprise; that's the downfall of most if not all remakes, sequels, sophomore efforts from a filmmaking team. With Bruno we pretty much know what we're getting, and so does the rest of the world--the number and size of celebrity 'gotchas' is considerably smaller, less varied. Some of the 'unstaged encounters' either look less than spontaneous, or the victims seem to have quickly suspected what they're in for and are understandably cautious.

Bruno has more problems than mere freshness--Cohen has misconceived the character in a number of ways. Borat for all his cluelessness and lack of impulse control was an innocent abroad who traveled America with Azamat (Ken Davitian), his intermittently faithful if considerably more hirsute Sancho Panza; he was an impoverished Don Quixote tilting at the windmills of (even if he didn't see it that way) anti-Semitism and racism and xenophobia. Bruno's idealism is half assumed pose, not so much a humanitarian quest as a calculated publicity bid. Borat's is the classic American story, the immigrant underdog who comes to America seeking knowledge and understanding and, of course, a beautiful woman (he wants to impregnate Pamela Sue Anderson and give her many children). Bruno is a media-spawned creature desperate to be noticed and his victims are decidedly less prosperous (the Alabaman hunters, the Arkansan cage-fight audience), more deserving of sympathy than scorn from an audience. Perhaps the crucial difference is that Borat conducts his odyssey on a shoestring (he drives an ice cream truck to Los Angeles to seek out his precious Pamela Sue). Bruno, like his picture, enjoys a decidedly bigger budget--hiring a consultant to help with his celebrity image; flying hither and thither to foster world peace; swapping out an Ipod for an African child a la Madonna. Bruno may want to establish himself as a champion for gay acceptance but he does so with deep pockets, and the effect is rather alienating.

Bruno isn't without some laughs. His all-Velcro suit is a howling success, and any occasion where a Milanese fashion show's security is compelled to chuck you out for the sake of public peace of mind has to be an occasion to celebrate. An episode with a minister who specializes in treating homosexuals is funny for its sheer wrongheadedness (though one can't help but feel a touch of admiration for the heroically patient minister, especially when Bruno informs him that he has "amazing blow-job lips." "These lips were made to praise Jesus," the minister primly informs him). His Panza here, Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) is a suitably sad and sweet assistant's assistant, an adoring disciple who takes much abuse from homophobes and from Bruno himself, for the sake of his beloved idol. The few occasions where Bruno takes shots at someone with deeper pocketbooks than himself one feels comfortable enough to savor the humiliation (I'm thinking of Paula Abdul invited to sit on an illegal immigrant bent over on all fours, and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul enduring an unsubtle sexual pass, then being mistaken for RuPaul).

All hail Cohen's intent--he had hoped to do for homophobes what he managed to do for racists, anti-Semitists, and xenophobes, but the scattershot approach injures the implied victors (Man-hungry gays with a bizarre fashion sense? So not stereotypical!) almost as much as the intended victims. Send this one back to Austria, ASAP.

First published in Businessworld 9.4.09

Piecing together a shattered mirror

2009-09-07T03:28:00.009-04:00

I don't know why I'm doing this, only that I am.

Been googling links, images, articles on Alexis. Trying, I suppose, to piece him together in place of faded six-year-old memories.

Is that as crazy as it sounds? I suppose. But photos and testimonies and the miraculous medium of the internet have a way of throwing up the strangest artifacts on the shoreline of your search engine.

Take this little item found in Nostalghia.com, an Andrei Tarkovsky website (thank you, Trond, for the head's up!). Tarkovsky had visited Las Vegas in 1983, and in the May 1, 2008 website news notes two mentions from two separate accounts of a Filipino filmmaker who accompanied Tarkovsky on his tour.

Nothing more about that until a quarter of a century later, when Alexis emails the website with a letter providing this link, a still from Kidlat Tahimik's Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari (Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow, 1994); apparently the mysterious Filipino was Kidlat, and he had captured Tarkovsky's image and incorporated it into his film.

Another example of the mysterious currents that surge throughout the web: I'd only heard of Nika, never met her, I thought. Turns out I was wrong--I have met her and even written about her, almost a year before Alexis had; she had been one of a group of Slovenians I had talked to in my 2006 visit to Rotterdam (see the fourth to the last paragraph). I dug up my email to Ekran contributing editor Jurij Meden asking about her and found his response: "i imagine that a pretty blonde girl named "nika" was in attendance(she's the new editor-in-chief of ekran)."

Gabe Klinger in his wonderfully detailed tribute characterizes Nika as "hunched over the table, smoking furiously, and talking passionately -- as she always did -- about the state of things" I remember feeling the warmth of some of that passion (it was after the screening of Pangarap ng Puso, and she and some friends had cornered me in a little cafe table outside the screening room) as she needled me with her doubts about the Filipino film she had just seen.

We never met again, of course, but her questions must have bothered me more than I expected. In my Criticine article I write a more detailed and reasoned-out (if sadly belated) response to her. In a post some months later, I referred to that conversation again, adding a bit more to my response.

Did Alexis know who I was talking about? He never told me; possibly never made the connection, either. Did she read my additions? Maybe, maybe not; would be nice to think she did, but considering she still had Alexis to meet and a whole new country to deal with, probably not.

Wish we could have continued that conversation--not necessarily to change her mind, just find out what she thought of what I had come up with since (and then maybe try change her mind). Just another of the thousands of conversations I've had or will have in my lifetime that I wish I might have finished.

I think I'm glad that they met; judging from Gabe's tribute and other sources, theirs was a joyful, loving, fulfilling and yet terrifying relationship. I imagine they were happy the same time they had a thousand and one obstacles to grapple with (the clash of cultures, the differing languages, the finances, the dirt and grime and noise and oh god heat of Metro Manila). I imagine they were as busy and frazzled and happy as any pair of young lovers trying to build a home, trying to build the rest of their lives.

Anyway--in the interest of putting together a few more pieces:

The Letter I Would Love to Read to You in Person--Alexis profession of love to both Nika and Philippine cinema, easily the finest piece he's ever written, and a lovely, lovely bit of confessional meditation.

(edit 9/7) Paul Dumol's eulogy. Heartfelt, at times critical, ultimately honest. A eulogy, I think, Alexis might have appreciated.

Raya Martin's eulogy, this one from a close friend's POV instead of a mentor's.

Adrian Martin's, via girish shambu's blog.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's at his blog

Glenn Kenny's, at The Auteurs.

Jason Sander's at Filmmaker

Raymond Pathanavirangoon's at TIFF

Kim Voynar at Movie City News

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's beautiful minute-long tribute

Oggs Cruz's at his blog.

Celinejulie's, all bright pink

Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa's

Sonthaya Subiyen and Richard MacDonald's. I especially like MacDonald's mention of Alexis' 'steeliness.'

Kanchat Rangseekansong's (in Thai)

(edit 9/10) Matthew Flanagan's blog, with a haunting photo tribute made out of stills from a Gustav Deutch short.

(edit 9/17) John Gianvito made this eight-minute tribute.

It's amazing, the reponse, all the thoughtful words and feelings poured out into the internet to date. We'll never have Alexis and Nika back, but we do at least have some measure of the breadth and width and depth of the imprint they have left on us.

photo from Alexis' livejournal blog

District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)

2009-09-05T00:22:00.004-04:00

Prawn salad

The mix of genres that is Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (2009) is, I would argue, more monstrous than anything you see in the movie itself--imagine a military action thriller that mixes in huge flying saucers, hideous genetic experiments, various alien body parts, racism, crushing poverty, political satire; the resulting lurching, stitched-together, patchworked Frankenstein of a creation would be close to what I'm talking about, only probably not as haphazard.

The premise pretty much comes from Graham Barker's Alien Nation (1988). A race of extraterrestrials arrives and instead of invading or enslaving us, they live with us as refugees, to the point that we have granted them their own racist nickname ("prawns," thanks to their exoskeletons, a repulsive cross between lobster and cockroach), their own trash-choked ghettos (the eponymous district), their own unique vices and crimes (cat-food addiction; alien johns serviced by human prostitutes; the odd alien killed for its meat). Blomkamp develops this elaborate metaphor for apartheid and social-class struggle with inventive flair, filming everything in a documentary style reminiscent of Matt Reeves' Cloverfield (2008).

The picture is a hundred and twelve minute expansion of Blomkamp's six-minute short Alive in Joburg (2005). That short video was a perfect distillation of news commentary and interviews painting a world where alien (as opposed to black, or Latino, or poor) lower classes simmer resentfully against an oppressively fascist apartheid government. This longer version doesn't have that seamlessness, unfortunately; bits of faux news are mixed in with scenes where aliens congregate and conspire (and a news camera can't possibly have access). The ostensible hero Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) conducts an informal reality-show tour of the district's more lurid sights until he is infected by some mysterious black liquid, and the camera for some unexplained reason starts following his return home (where, again, a news camera can't possibly have access).

Unmotivated shifts in point-of-view often bother me; Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's Blair Witch Project (1999) famously pretended to be a series of film reels and videotapes that reveal the fate of a film crew vanished into a Maryland forest years ago, in search of the Blair Witch--but who cut film and video footage together? Who laid on the barely ominous hum in the soundtrack? Same problem with Cloverfield, though there is an attempt to preserve the unity of time and space, at the expense of plausibility (would a cameraman be so determined to point his camera at the right direction at the right time, all the time, even at the possible cost of his life?). At least George Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007) squares everything neatly away with a scene where the filmmaker actually sits down and edits his material--brilliant!

No such luck here. Blomkamp mixes documentary and straightforward narrative with reckless abandon, and at times you're not sure which mode the movie's on. Consistency and clarity aren't one of the picture's strengths--we aren't sure, for example, if the prawns are strong enough to tear a man in two, or weak enough that a single man can drag it out of a shack; we aren't sure just what kind of organization is in charge (seems to be a mish-mash of Afrikaner law enforcement and United Nations peacekeeping). We're not sure why the aliens landed, why they're trapped here on Earth, and what the heck that mysterious 'fluid' is--if it's spaceship fuel, why does it have the gene-splicing abilities of Seth Brundle's teleporter? Why did the command ship lose all its fuel? Why did the prawns take so long--years--to gather enough of the fuel for the ship to get moving again? And why does Christopher (arguably the smartest prawn on the planet) suddenly change his mind and take three years to do something important for Wikus that should take only three minutes (I presume)?

It's a salad, a poorly mixed one, at that, but there are ideas and some power to this movie. The scenes of prawns kneeling on the ground, automatic rifles to their heads, is an unsettling image; the piles of garbage and fly-covered meat carcasses make you want to scrub yourself with steel wool and lye before leaving the theater. The anti-apartheid message, filtered through the conventions of the alien-occupation genre, gains freshness and bite.

Easily the best thing about the movie is its nebbishy protagonist, Wikus. Wikus as Copley plays him is a charmless, spineless hero, appointed through nepotism to head the operation to move all prawns to nearby District 10 (apparently based on similar operations to move blacks from Johannesburg to Soweto in the '50s). He's hilariously clueless, knocking on ramshackle doors as if he were visiting royalty (or some reality show host); politely enquiring if a prawn is willing to sign away hearth and home; relentlessly putting a cheerful face on anything and everything on-camera, from beatings and scenes of harassment to cold-blooded murder. This is Larry Charles' Borat (2006) meets Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom (1987) meets Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (1997), and it's brilliant black comedy; one wishes Blomkamp had kept up this level of satire, allowed Wikus to keep his smarmy, ingratiating chatterbox personality till the end.

Alas, about the time Wikus is infected with the deadly space fuel the picture deflates into a weepy, self-important shoot-em-up that depicts Christopher as the noble oppressed alien and Wikus as the noble Earthman oppressor turned liberator. Borat is gone, to be replaced by serious (and rather dull) acting, and some equally serious (and also rather dull) alien ordnance. Did Blomkamp feel solemnity would be necessary to be taken seriously? Or did Blomkamp (who showed creative genre flexibility so far) feel he could only operate on one emotional tone at a time? Why couldn't Wikus be every bit as smarmy shooting up Afrikaner soldiers as he was knocking on prawn doors? Why can't he be Borat and Rambo at the same time?

Far as integrated alien pictures go, District 9 is more entertaining than, say, Alien Nation (it's not a large genre), though not as witty and imaginative as W.D. Richter's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984); far as alien-earthling buddy pictures go, it's more respectable than Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine (1985), though the featured alien-human friendship is certainly not as deeply felt as that of Spock and Kirk in the Star Trek series, or of The Doctor and his companions in the classic and recent Dr. Who episodes. Not bad, could be a lot better.

First published in Businessworld, 8.28.09

Alexis A. Tioseco, 1981-2009

2009-09-01T19:05:00.015-04:00

Alexis A. Tioseco, 1981-2009

The film community is a strange creature, particularly this side of the millennium. We're scattered all over the world, and our connections are as tenuous as the aether writers spoke of in the 19th century. We don't see each other for years, we mail each other only occasionally, we lead busy lives, too busy to look to each other or sometimes even look out for each other.

But when we meet it can be as if we were friends long lost. We grip shoulders, we shake with firm hands, sometimes a tight hug or two. But it isn't so much the gestures of hail-fellow-well-met that we put out towards each other that is remarkable as is the expression, the glow on our faces when we see each other. We're happy to see absent faces, we're eager for the latest talk and gossip. Most of all, though few of us are loathe to admit it, we're hungry for kindred souls.

That's something I'm never going to get from Alexis--not anymore. Have not seen him for upwards of six years, and I can barely remember the last time we met--I believe it was with Joey Fernandez, of Brash Young Cinema, when I showed them my bootleg copy of Pangarap ng Puso (Demons, Mario O'Hara, 2000). I remember throwing down the gauntlet "Well? Do you think it's the best Filipino film since 1986?" Joey was skeptical; Alexis liked it very much, but couldn't agree.

And that's all right; we disagreed, and it's great we disagreed, that we had differing opinions, differing minds, tastes, thoughts. We argued about it, teased each other about it, then left the debate hanging, to be taken up again next time we met.

When I moved away I kept contact with him occasionally; I submitted a number of articles, some of them my best work, to his online magazine Criticine, still the finest web magazine on Southeast Asian cinema, even if it hasn't been updated for years. I like to think I think so not because I'd been published there, or had a kind review of my book there, but because it is a wonderful treasure trove of articles on Southeast Asian films and filmmakers such as Raya Martin, John Torres, Lav Diaz, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Amir Muhammad, and Pen-ek Ratanaruang among others, written by writers and critics such as Rolando Tolentino, Gertjan Zuilhof, Ben Slater, and Alexis himself.

It wasn't just the venue and unflagging encouragement to do my best; when in 2005 I was close to publishing my book, I was stuck for a title. My publisher Philip Cheah and I weren't happy with the suggestions I was coming up with, and I had a long list--too long, and too pathetic to bother publishing here. In desperation I emailed Alexis and asked for his input. Don't remember his exact words, but he said something like "I don't know about the rest, but this one I like--"

And that decided it for me.

It wasn't all work (though how we can call this work is beyond me--we were doing what we loved, and I don't like putting this out a lot because someone might take me seriously, but we would pay for the privilege of writing on Philippine cinema). I've ribbed him once or twice about being the only film critic in the world who was also a male model; caught him walking the ramp in a Ayala Center fashion show. He insists it was the one and only time, but--hey, girls loved him; he got all kinds of fan mail (fan comments?) on his blog. I'm no expert on male beauty, but who am I to disagree?

Irony of ironies, I'd been thinking about him lately. I was feeling with all the recent deaths of people known and unknown a sense of my own mortality, and the thought occurred to me "maybe I should give the password to this blog to someone. Just in case."

Our last email exchange I'd been enthusing to him about David Gordon Green's early film All the Real Girls; he'd been a longtime Green fan and had insisted that I catch this and George Washington (I haven't regretted the tip; they are both wonderfully moving films). I'd submitted to him an article for a special Love Letters issue--a love letter to be written to a filmmaker or film personality you profess a passion for. At least that's how I understood it, and how I wrote it, as a confession.

May never be published, alas.

So long, Alexis, I owe you a lot, I wish I'd done more for you, and I wish all your dream projects had come true--or will come true, God willing (not ready to throw in the towel completely just yet).

Love you, man.

photo from cinema du reel.org

Up (Peter Doctor, Bob Peterson, 2009)

2009-08-28T23:25:00.004-04:00

Down

I. To dream the impossible

Far as I can see Pixar’s Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009) is very in with critics (Liza Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly says it’s a “lovely, thoughtful and, yes, uplifting adventure;” Richard Corliss of Time Magazine calls it Pixar’s “most deeply emotional and affecting work;” heavyweight film critic Roger Ebert declares it “another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation”), and most audiences too ($288 million in US boxoffice receipts as of this writing, with another hundred million in foreign receipts--cream off the top, in effect). There’s no reason to believe Filipinos, who can barely resist lovely, thoughtful, deeply emotional and affecting masterworks of uplift (that at the same time lead animated charges), will not respond to the picture.

And it does begin well--one thing I can say for Pixar’s movies nowadays, or at least their last two movies, they do have a neat, unfrenetic way of introducing themselves. Wall-E opened with a silent pantomime of a lonely robot abandoned on a garbage dump-planet lasting some thirty minutes; Up opens with a mere four minutes of wordless animation, but does ratchet up the pathos quotient a notch higher--basically a young boy and girl meet, fall in love, promise each other an impossible dream, then before they realize it find themselves too old to achieve said dream.

To dream the impossible--you might say this is the unspoken mantra of American animation, the spoonful of moral to help convince parents to allow the sugary to drop down unsuspecting children’s throats. Carl (Ed Asner) happens to dream a little more impossibly than most: he wants to lift his entire house up with a couple of thousand balloons (Someone actually went ahead and did the math, estimating that yes, it’s possible to lift a house with the hundred thousand plus balloons on display--but one wonders what, with that much helium hidden away under the house, kept the house from taking off earlier? What kind of string do those balloons use? How could Carl have afforded all this on a pension?) and whisk it away to Paradise Falls, South America (no such place, of course, but the layout--slim falls, vertiginously high plateau, impossible rock spike to the right--looks suspiciously like a similar spot in Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925). Let’s call it an homage, and move on).

Pixar would like you to think they’re doing original work; they’d like you to think “Oh! A flying house, how original!” when Hayao Miyazaki has already had a castle walk (Hauru no ugoku shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004)) and, some eighteen years earlier, fly (Tenku no shiro Rapyuta (Castle in the Sky, 1986), based on an idea by Jonathan Swift, almost three hundred years ago). Some flying sequences here, particularly the aerial battles, look as if they had been inspired by Castle; a crucial subplot--of an explorer discredited and vowing to return for further proof--seems to have been borrowed from the aforementioned Lost World silent, only here Professor Challenger is seen as a villain and not hero. They’d like you to think just because they use a robot, or a rat, or an old man for a main character they’re doing something different when they’re really just telling the same old story (dream the impossible) the same old way, with superficial dressing on top.

II. There’s no place like home

For all the ostensible wanderlust on display by heroes in American animation, the movies betray a not inconsiderable amount of nostalgic conservatism. After all is said and done it’s not your dream that counts, it’s the life you’ve actually lived; it’s not what you take home from some exotic land, it’s how you treat the people around you--the first is actually realized in the main character’s dramatic arc, the second in that subplot stolen--sorry, inspired by--The Lost World. Perfectly good moral lessons, of course, but the point and my main objection is that they’re almost always treated as lessons, as teachable moments and not subversive messages smuggled into the subconscious while you’re engaged in the ostensible story.

Note the difference in Miyazaki’s films, which Pixar head John Lasseter professes to admire: the moral of the story isn’t so much hammered home as it is mentioned in passing--the man makes his themes palatable by introducing them lightly, little to no hammering involved at all.

For example: Miyazaki’s latest work Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo, 2008) is all about a search for “balance.” Miyazaki is a little vague about what’s supposed to be balanced, but never mind--we actually see the theme in action, in the form of pollution and debris fouling the otherwise clear waters surrounding a small fishing town: humans are abusing their relationship with nature, and the result is garbage choking the town’s waterways. But Miyazaki doesn’t allow said theme to stagnate for long; he has Fujimoto (a Captain Nemo-like figure) drive his submarine forward, pushing the heavily metaphorical flotsam aside to make way for story. Heroes in Miyazaki films are too busy, have too little time for what really matters to them to let such issues as “clarifying the morality of the situation” drag the audience down. They make their point, they move on; the audience, intrigued, follows; they are either proven right or learn better, and then move further on. That’s the mark of a storyteller.

That’s not to say Miyazaki’s films are loud and relentlessly fast-paced; he allows for quieter moments, like Sosuke poking around at the beach, or observing the prize swimming in his water bucket. These moments, though, are so expertly paced and superbly realized (no one does quotidian moments in animation better than Miyazaki, far as I know, except maybe for his colleague, Isao Takahata) one can’t think of them as extraneous, or indulgent. For all the apparent leisureliness of his storytelling, Miyazaki’s films have very little fat.

I might add that while Pixar has done its latest in state-of-the-art digital 3-D animation, which pretty much looks alike in all its movies (oh, a few new effects here and there--peacock feathers, for one), Miyazaki continues to prove that there’s still room for innovation in 2-D hand-drawn animation. In Ponyo he’s opted for an unfinished look, with brushstrokes visible and backgrounds at times sketched out. The effect looks spontaneous, even lively--one thinks this is how Van Gogh might do an animated film, if he were handed an enormous box of colored pencils.

III. Leading the charge in modern animation

That’s Miyazaki; a far more dramatically contrasting case on an ostensibly more similar storyline can be made with Mamoru Oshii’s contemporaneous Sukai kurora (The Sky Crawlers, 2008). Oshii’s film deals with aeronauts, with fighter pilots instead of balloonists; there are flight sequences, even dogfights aplenty, but there all similarity ends. The pilots don’t know what they’re fighting for (themes about impossible dreams fly out the window right there), how they got there, and for whom, exactly, they fight. All they know is that their rival pilots are from rival corporations, corporate warfare at its most spectacular and nonsensical (and unhypocritical).

Incidentally, where Miyazaki uses traditional animation digitally enhanced and Pixar uses exclusively digital animation, Oshii mixes both--the human characters and detailed foreground objects are visibly hand-drawn, while the fighter planes straining and roaring in mid-flight are composed on a computer; Oshii manages to combine the non-organic realism of digital with the expressiveness and subtlety of hand-drawn to great effect.

Miyazaki’s been called “The Walt Disney of Japan;” that in my book is an accusation, not a compliment. In the case of Oshii his sensibilities are so alien to Disney it’s hilarious--I can see the older animator shaking the younger’s hand, sensing the thoughts wriggling like electric eels beneath the skin, and flinching . Much closer to Oshii’s thinking (not to mention imagination and sense of disaffection) would be J.G. Ballard; I’d go so far as to say the film is basically Ballard’s autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun done right, without the Spielbergian frippery or sentiment. Compared to Oshii’s (and Miyazaki’s, for that matter), Pixar’s latest is a sad, sad afterbirth of an afterthought, seeking to catch up with the frontrunners.

First published in Businessworld, 8.21.09

Nonoy Marcelo for National Artist!

2009-08-13T21:32:00.005-04:00

If Carlos J. Caparas can be National Artist just like that, why not Nonoy Marcelo?

Undercover history

Filipino cartoonist Nonoy Marcelo's Tadhana (Destiny) is possibly the first-ever full-length animated feature made in the Philippines. Based on a series of volumes on Philippine history officially written by Ferdinand Marcos (unofficially written by a whole team of historians), and produced by his eldest daughter, Imee, the film was broadcast on September 21, 1978--the sixth anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law. It was supposed to be replayed and even have a commercial theater release, but for reasons never made clear that broadcast was it; it was never seen again. Today, no known print or negative is left, only a video copy recorded off that broadcast by Mr. Teddy Co, who lent his copy to Mowelfund for their French-Filipino Animation Festival.

Some sixty artists worked for three months on the project--not many and not long compared to what goes into a standard Disney feature animation (hundreds of artists working for years), but almost unheard of in the Philippines, where animation is a cottage industry--literally a one-man, part-time job. The animation is crude, though compared to what's been done previously and even recently--Geirry Garrcia's Adarna comes to mind--the film stands up surprisingly well. Garrcia's film may have smoother motion (just barely) but Tadhana has a distinct, even unique, sensibility (Adarna's is of the simpering Disney kind).

Marcelo conceived of the film as a series of vignettes, often experimental, sometimes surreal. It has to be--a consistently realist style would have been too expensive. Marcelo turns this idiosyncrasy into an advantage: this is probably the funniest, least stuffy lesson on Philippine history ever given. When Magellan's galleons sail across the Pacific they sway right and left like fat-bellied matrons (to the tune of the Star Wars theme); when Lapu-Lapu lops off Magellan's head it drops to the sands and sings (in Yoyoy Villame's voice): "Mother, mother I am sick; call da doctor very quick." Marcelo's film is less an account of history than it is a gleefully, unashamedly jaundiced interpretation of it--sixty minutes of editorial cartoons, improvising brilliantly.

Imee insists that while it's not a literally faithful adaptation of her father's books, it's faithful to their themes. I've dipped into the books enough to remember that Marcos recognizes (or rather, his historians recognize) the centuries of repression inflicted by the Catholic Church and Spain. But if Tadhana takes its cue from the books in targeting church and state, its humor is uniquely Marcelo's. His near-Swiftian wit turns microcosmos into macrocosmos (as in his comic strip Ikabod, where a mouse and friends represent Philippine society), and compels him to bite the hand that feeds him (Marcos, as skewered in Ikabod, Tisoy, and others).

One highlight is the Blood Pact, traditionally depicted by Filipino artists as a solemn, historically momentous ment. In Tadhana the pact is signed during the opening cocktails of the Sandugo (One Blood) Art Exhibit; boiling blood is served as punch while a manananggal (a woman's severed upper half, flapping about on a pair of batwings) and a tikbalang (a half-man, half-horse--drawn, I think, by cartoonist Edd Aragon) get down to some funky disco music. Rajah Soliman, riding a water buffalo that roars like a Harley Davidson, crashes the party and demands to know why he wasn't invited; when he peers at the exhibited paintings--examples of Western abstract and postmodern art--his brain reels and undergoes a hallucinogenic head trip.

Probably the best part of the film--my favorite, anyway--is the relationship sketched between parish priest and native, animated to the tune of Freddie Aguilar's mournful Anak (Child). The choice is hilariously ironic; Aguilar sings of an ungrateful child and his sacrificing parents while onscreen it's the priest--the native child's spiritual and biological father--who is boorish, abusive, greedy, ungrateful. The child confronts his mother, a veiled babaylan (sorceress) and the priest's mistress; she has wept so much from grief that she has to wring her veil dry. Cut to a close-up of the child's face--now that of a young man--as tears stream down his own cheeks. Aguilar's melody wails on, but suddenly satire is transmuted into something potent and unsaid, something not so very different from genuine tragedy...

The final twenty minutes chronicles an epic war between native and conquistador, an overambitious, overextended sequence stuffed to brimming with all kinds of animation techniques, to the tune of Procol Harum's violent Conquistador. Panoramic drawings of native warriors and Spanish soldiers poised to attack; godlike overhead shots of armies surging like tides; images scratched into the film print itself, depicting elemental chaos...

Marcelo tempers his anti-Western stance with a remarkably clear-eyed view of the pre-Hispanic Filipino; he knows not all blame can be laid at the feet of foreign devils. The datu (chieftain) is an incoherent drunk who considers everything useless and shares his counsel with a jar of rice liquor; his manservant is a craven backbiter constantly aware of the fact that if the datu dies, he will be buried with him. Both are hardly the heroic warriors of Filipino history books; rather, they're the same funny characters that spill out the margins of Marcelo's newspaper strips: as flawed, vainglorious, deluded--as recognizably human, in short--as you or me.

As mentioned before, Tadhana was broadcast once, then apparently never shown again. Why? Did the Church, on seeing the anti-clerical bias, move to have all prints and video copies destroyed? Did Marcos, watching as the natives cried Makialam!" (roughly, "Join us!") against their oppressors, feel uncomfortable enough to want to suppress it? We may never know...

Another intriguing question: if the series had continued, how would Marcelo have handled recent history--particularly the Marcos years, up to his declaration of martial law? Would he have tried smuggling anti-Marcos criticism under the censors' noses, as in his later cartoons? Again we may never know, and perhaps Marcelo himself intended it that way, stopping far enough in the past while it's still safe.

Anyway--what we have, here and now, is a video copy of the remote past, brought to glorious, comic life by one of our greatest satirist. Is the film still relevant? More then ever, I think, what with parish priests still molesting parishioners, wealthy patriarchs still abusing laborers, and the all-mighty West still oppressing us all ("War on Terrorism" anyone?). The film ends with the glowing circular logo of Marcos' Bagong Lipunan (New Society)--symbol of Marcelo's patron without whom the film would never have been made, the same time it's a symbol of the twenty-year dictatorship he would end up fighting through his comics. The irony, I hope, isn't lost on us.

(Excerpt taken from Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema. Click here to order online.)

Joyce Bernal for National Artist!

2009-08-13T21:14:00.007-04:00

Continuinng from the news that Carlos J. Caparas is National Artist, yet more artists that 1) better deserve the title, 2) are I think genuinely talented, and 3) deserve to be much better known--in this case, Ms. Joyce Bernal:

Excerpt from: Two love stories

Viva Film's Kailangan Ko'y Ikaw (You Are All I Need, 2000) is a romantic comedy starring Robin Padilla and Regine Velasquez and--surprise, surprise--it's actually very good.

It's nothing really new--actually, it's the nth variation of William
Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953), where Audrey Hepburn plays a lonely princess longing to escape her duties and go on a holiday and Gregory Peck plays the journalist who accompanies her on her holiday and ultimately falls in love with her. Here Velasquez is a pop-music princess with a full schedule; one of the quickie activities she happens to be involved in is a "Your Dream Date" contest which Padilla happens to win, hence their first meeting.

Not quite--Velasquez does show up, but she's in such a hurry to get to her other engagements that Padilla is left forgotten and bewildered and not a little disappointed. So he stalks her, kidnaps her, then continues the date from where they left off.

And they fall in love. And they have the usual lovers' quarrels (here involving her being a rich and famous singer and him being some poor nobody). And, despite everything, it all ends happily. That's not the point; the point is Joyce Bernal (who directs) and Mel Mendoza (who wrote the screenplay) have taken a tired genre (the romantic comedy) and a tired plot (poor boy meets rich girl), and spun off fresh (okay, fairly fresh) and funny moments from the less-than-promising material. And that (as anyone familiar with recent romantic comedies can tell you) is a minor miracle.

Part of it is the way the film plays against the two stars' public persona…which has been done before, but rarely with such intelligence and wit (I can barely remember the last Filipino or even Hollywood romance that had wit, much less intelligence). It's established early on, for example, that Padilla is popular in his impoverished little baranggay (village)--one of the film's conceits is that he's so popular everyone in the community submitted his name to the "Dream Date" contest in the hopes of seeing him with their favorite singing star (Velasquez), which explains why he won (cute; a stretch credibilitywise, but cute). He enjoys a standing among his people, and Velasquez's unintended snub was more than his honor can bear--hence his improvised kidnapping.

Which is pretty much a recap, in romantic-comedy form, of Padilla's public life to date. We know he has the ability to command the loyalty and affection of ordinary folk; we know he's popular with girls and gays (though with gays it's strictly "look, no touch"); we know he's given to impulsive acts of questionable legality (for which he's already spent time in prison); we know he's a die-hard romantic of a lover, who falls for all his leading ladies. We know all this and still we forgive his flaws, still we cheer him on--because he's not just the movie's leading man, he's our leading man; he has that indefinably quality that kept stars like Fernando Poe Jr., Joseph Estrada, James Stewart, John Wayne popular through the years.

It helps, I think that Bernal is directing; an accomplished editor, she knows how to pace the film, to keep it moving along. More, having an intelligent woman filmmaker take the famous Padilla machismo and--well, not exactly deconstruct it, but contribute her take on it--gives the movie an interesting tension. Bernal doesn't do much to soften his character--we still see his temper flareups, his tendency to talk with his fists rather than his brain--but she does see him as a kind of anachronism, one to be put up with and understood rather than put down and censured.

Which, incidentally, is where I think recent James Bond movies fail--instead of seeing Bond as the dinosaur that he is and honoring him for what he once represented (male European sexism), they updated him, made him politically correct--in short, emasculated him. Bond, and to a lesser extent Padilla, belong to an earlier age when men were men and women loved them as such; that's the basis of their appeal. Defanging them doesn't make them more interesting as characters, or help us understand them.

It also helps that in Velasquez, Bernal has a champion willing to fight for her sex, on both the ideological and comical front. She concedes little to Padilla's pride and reverse snobbishness (in this the film is spot-on accurate--the rich are proud, the poor prouder); she even engineers the film's fairly ingenious conclusion, bringing the whole story to a full circle. Better, she brings her own public persona and charisma and sense of humor to the role--at one point she's game enough to even make fun of her surgically improved nose (very distracting to look at). And she has a strong singing voice (the film manages to work in a few numbers--some of them, surprisingly, the picture's comic high points. Unsurprisingly, Viva Recording is promoting Velasquez's album based on the song score).

Kailangan Ko'y Ikaw is a hit--the theater I saw it in had people sitting in the aisles. It's heartening to think that at a time when the local film industry seems to be in a depression people still love to go see a movie; it's even more heartening to think this particular movie is not unworthy of their love--that it earns that love through heart and skill and carefully crafted humor. The film isn't the best local film I've seen this year--it lacks the harrowing realism of Tikoy Aguiluz's Biyaheng Langit (Paradise Express, 2000), or the poetic ferocity of Mario O'Hara's Pangarap ng Puso (Demons, 2000)--but it pretty much stands head and shoulders above everything else.

(Excerpt taken from Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema. Click here to order online.)

Ronnie Ricketts for National Artist!

2009-08-08T00:12:00.006-04:00

If Carlos J. Caparas can be National Artist just like that, why not Ronnie Ricketts?

I'm serious. I've seen Caparas' films, I've seen Ricketts' films, and I'm telling you, the latter is a real filmmaker, with talent and passion and (unlike Caparas) a becoming modesty.

Here's an article I'd written on Ricketts, in the Manila Chronicle, 7/26/97

Solid-Fueled Rickett

HARD TO BELIEVE, BUT THERE YOU ARE: of all the recent actors who've tried their hand at directing, the most promising seems to be Ronnie Ricketts. Ricketts onscreen comes off as a quiet, unassuming action star with day-old stubble and excellent kickboxing form. Not exactly material for Aspiring Director, which usually calls for an actor who's won a number of dubious acting awards (nowadays all local acting awards are dubious) and an ego to match.

But Ricketts is the real thing. His budget for Hawak Ko, Buhay Mo (Your Life in My Hands, 1997) can't come up to more than a fraction of Mission Impossible's budget, and he still manages to make lively action sequences that rival Impossible in energy and inventiveness. Without the money for a Steadicam, he simply keeps the camera handheld: the resulting jumpy, restless images charge up the audience, keeping them on the edge of their seats; the secret of his cinema seems to be in the wrist, which is kept fast and loose and funny.

He has three weaknesses that I can see: his editing can be tight when the situation is tight and someone wants to manhandle someone else, usually with both bare hands; and he knows counterpoint--a few fast cuts, then a sudden image in slow motion. But in between the action set pieces, the film is oddly slack. Ordinary scenes which shouldn't trouble more conventional directors are long and drawn-out; dialogue in particular is a real pain. Once in a while the editing can get too tight, and you don't know where you are in the fight scene--a cardinal sin for an action director. Can't emphasize this too much, but the greatest action directors on film are great precisely for their clarity--Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Howard Hawks. Even Sam Peckinpah with his furiously edited violence never allowed you to get lost (His slow motion is cited as a trademark style, but it's more than that--it's one way he lets you know what's going on).

Ricketts is competent with actors, but only competent. He still doesn't let his actors or himself break out of that stop-start style of declamation that's standard with local action flicks--you know, the scene where the hero faces the villain and they declaim their respective philosophical positions on the meaning of life in endlessly convoluted speeches before trying to whack each other's heads off. It's a formula, true, something the local audience tends to expect, but he could at least subvert the convention, give it a satiric spin the way Anjo Yllana does in one of his action-comedy capers--can't for the moment remember which one.

Michelle Aldana does well in what's largely an ornamental role. Her affair with Ricketts is nicely low-key, with minimum dramatics. Ricketts himself isn't really acting; this is the persona his fans are familiar with, a mix of melancholic vulnerability and driven determination, badly in need of a shave. Ricketts seems to model himself after Clint Eastwood, an approach which has its advantages and drawbacks--the drawback is that Sergio Leone once referred to Eastwood as a block of marble you have to shape yourself; the advantage is that, well, he is after all marble, which easily gleams once the polishing is done.

Complementing Rickett's block is Michael De Mesa's fine-grained performance as villain (asked about Robert De Niro, Leone considered him not a block but a finished work of art). De Mesa isn't given equal billing or even equal screen time but his slyly perverse grin and laser-sighting eyes have a way of burrowing under the skin, to the point that in the final faceoff with Ricketts, he achieves a larger-than-life stature. It's been years since I felt any kind of shudder in a Filipino action film (the last time might be in Mario O'Hara's noir masterpiece, Bagong Hari (The New King, 1986)). Standing on that catwalk in leather cladding, his hands hanging loosely at each side like a pair of power tools, De Mesa made me shudder (Can I suggest De Mesa as an anti-hero in a Ricketts-directed flick? Just hoping).

Rickett's most serious weakness is in scripting. We get a serial killer (De Mesa) who likes to break people's spines; we get a sex slavery ring thrown in for good measure. The two storylines could make a movie by themselves; together, they tend to detract and weaken each other. De Mesa is very good, but his serial killer isn't that much out of the ordinary--after the tableau killer in Se7en and mimic-killer in Copycat, you expect a little more. The sex slave ring also cries out for a twist or three--the revelation, for example, that Rickett's boss is actually heading the ring.

But what we do get is pretty interesting. The showdown between De Mesa and Ricketts features a deft mirror-maze sequence that recalls something of Enter The Dragon and even Orson Welles' Lady From Shanghai. Ricketts is fast on his feet, and has a filmmaker's eye; with more consistent editing, a more inspired script and somewhat bigger production budget, he might make a movie worth sending to film festivals abroad. He is one propulsive vehicle that shows every sign of taking off.

(Excerpt taken from Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema. Click here to order online.)

Cory Aquino--sinner or saint?

2009-08-04T22:45:00.008-04:00

Corazon Aquino, 1933-2009

Filipinos loved her; now that she's gone, Filipinos mourn her. And I understand that.

Her finest moment, I believe, was during the 1986 Snap Elections, declared by then president (and dictator) Ferdinand E. Marcos. When accused of lacking experience, she replied: "It is true. I have no experience in lying, cheating, stealing and killing. I offer you honesty and sincerity in leadership."

We loved her for that. She said it in a monotone; she had little to no gift for public speaking, but the fact that she sounded like such an inexperienced political speaker was in itself refreshing. We'd had it with Marcos' legendary eloquence (muted perhaps by advanced age and acute lupus) and as far as we were concerned, she was a startling sea breeze, blown in from a window long padlocked.

The revolt itself happened almost despite Aquino's popularity, a military coup prematurely discovered; but people decided enough was enough, used said coup as an excuse, and poured out in the streets to demand Marcos' resignation.

Aquino rode on the crest of that wave to Malacanang, but it's instructive to remember what factions made up that wave--the Philippine military; the Catholic Church; people from upper to middle to lower class, not just in Manila but the provincial cities as well (Manila hogged the lion's share of media coverage, of course). It wasn't just her, though she was possibly its most prominent figurehead, in bright yellow.

The government she formed right after the revolt might be what we call the Dream Team of Philippine politics--Claudio Teehankee as Chief Justice, Juan Ponce Enrile as Secretary of Defense, Fidel Ramos as Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Jaime Ongpin as Finance Secretary, Joker Arroyo as Executive Secretary. It was like a rainbow spectrum, from right to left and all shades in between--for a brief, shining moment, an example of the lion lying with the lamb (who was lion and who lamb I wouldn't dare guess).

But she couldn't hold it together--who could, actually? Juan Ponce Enrile and his military supporters tested her, thought her weak, tried to overthrow her the way he tried to overthrow Marcos (what's that again about an untrustworthy servant?). She survived--mainly because Fidel Ramos remained loyal to Aquino. She stayed in power despite six coup attempts in all, a feat in itself, but at a cost: she was forced to purge her government of leftist elements (Arroyo among others, left her cabinet).

She refused to repudiate any of the huge debts Marcos amassed during his reign, forcing her to prioritize debt repayment over poverty alleviation and economic development. She slow-pedaled attempts to achieve a peace settlement with the New People's Army and the Moro National Liberation Front (we're still trying to negotiate/wipe them out some twenty years later). She outlawed paramilitary groups, then turned around and allowed them to continue, under a cosmetic name change. She initially championed land reform, though when the law finally passed, how effective has that really been?

On a relatively smaller issue, Ms. Aquino was not exactly a friend of Philippine cinema--or rather, the industry during her administration was not known for enduring art. Number of factors for this, including inheriting an ailing economy from the Marcoses, and the fact that the Marcoses themselves were convenient targets for some of our finest filmmakers' finest films (the fact that for years the Marcos administration actively practiced censorship meant that said films had to be subtle, not blatant). Developing Philippine cinema may not have been her priority and understandably so, but she could at least have lifted the enormous entertainment tax (almost 30%, or a third of the gross receipts) that was such a heavy drag on the industry for decades.

And Ms. Aquino was a good and faithful Catholic, meaning censorship under her watch didn't relax much, overall (remember that her administration banned one of Lino Brocka's most outspoken films Orapronobis (Fight for Us, 1989)). Despite her daughter's long showbiz career, Ms. Aquino remained pretty much clueless when it came to films and filmmaking (to be fair, why not? She had more pressing problems to pursue?).

That all said, she will and should be remembered for three not inconsiderable achievements: she led an opposition movement to popular victory; she opened a Philippines in stasis for decades to change and reform; and she arranged for the orderly transfer of power to her protégé, Fidel Ramos.

My point being: she's no saint, she's only a human being. A wonderful human being, I'm sure--I've talked to people who have known her, and I once had the privilege of shaking her hand; I believe the goodness of heart is genuine. But goodness of heart can only do so much, and Aquino with her brief career showed its limits as well as capabilities.

Carlos J. Caparas, National Artist.

2009-08-01T23:13:00.009-04:00

In honor of Carlos J. Caparas, who was recently made National Artist, an early article on one of his cinematic masterpieces:

Fidel’s Favorite Film

Tirad Pass, or: The Last Stand of Gregorio del Pilar

Starring Romnick Sarmenta, Joel Torre, Tommy Abuel, Mikee Villanueva
Written and directed by Carlos J. Caparas
Highly recommended by the MTRCB

Carlos J. Caparas’ version of the fall of Tirad Pass is an artistic, dramatic and historical disaster--a triple threat by all accounts. We’re talking bomb, as in atomic, maybe even thermonuclear.

To add insult to injury, no less then the president of our country recommends this film. “One of the best films I have ever seen” he is quoted as saying (which begs the question: are the cigars you’re so fond of smoking full of just tobacco, Mr. President?). With his endorsement, the MTRCB’s, the secretary of the Department of Education’s; with a reportedly 40 million-peso budget, and the current interest in history, this being the country’s centennial year, how can the film not make money?

And it is making money: hand over fist, the way a child molester steals candy--or worse--from a baby.

Wonderful news, you might say: other historical projects are in development, and this can only encourage them. Wonderful news, that is, till you see the movie itself.

It begins with a dedication to the Chief Executive, which may explain his enthusiasm for the film. It goes on to sketch a simplistic version of Katipunan history, underlining (highlighting, italicizing, printing in bold, bright colors) the nobility of the republic’s first president, Emilio Aguinaldo (and--by association--the republic’s latest president, Fidel V. Ramos). The flagrant bottom kissing of these scenes would turn any leader’s head (Again, I hope so*).

*I sincerely hope President Ramos endorsed this film for cynical or manipulative reasons. If he was sincere--if he endorsed the film because he liked it--then I‘d really be worried about the state of Philippine government today.

That’s not the worst of it: to preserve Aguinaldo’s cartoon heroism, the film has Bonifacio killed by the villainous Spaniards. This, if anyone knows his history, is like having Ninoy Aquino shot by Communists to make Marcos look better.

It’s not just the wholesale rewriting of history; the details are equally irritating. Joel Torre as Aguinaldo spends most of the film scowling and looking generally irritated—who wouldn’t, with hair like that? But at least the attempt to give Torre the semblance of a crewcut is fairly accurate; Del Pilar and the rest of his youthly crew sport modern ‘dos that could have come out of the nearest Fanny Serrano beauty salon (Are we to assume that people of the 1890’s gel, tease and blowdry their hair?).

Then there are the writing implements. After all the effort of using feather quills dipped in blood, Sarmenta drops the melodramatic nonsense and scribbles into his pocket dairy with a ballpoint pen or sign pen--can’t decide which, though the head looks suspiciously Kilometric.

Or how about the moment where a girl shot through the chest sings in a beautifully operatic voice? The image is so startling you shake your head and wonder if perhaps Caparas is an artist after all: Werner Herzog had a modern-day boat hang from a tree while conquistadors sailed underneath in Aguirre, The Wrath Of God; Alex Cox had Ed Harris rescued from Nicaragua by US Marines in Walker. Is Caparas’ shamelessness actually a kind of surreal style?

Then something broke the spell (the audience laughed its head off) and I came to my senses. I shuddered at the manhole I had nearly stepped into--insidious, the influence of a Caparas film! To paraphrase a famous saying: bad filmmaking corrupts; absolutely bad filmmaking corrupts absolutely.

I can’t even begin to count the ineptly staged scenes, the unintentionally hilarious dialogue, the unbelievably embarrassing performances that pepper the film like 12-gauge buckshot. Caparas achieves the near-impossible task taking 40 million pesos in production budget and turning it into yet another cheap massacre movie. You want to ask: where did all the money go? To the overbright costumes with plastic buttons? The lame New Year’s fireworks that passes for military artillery? The sharpened bamboo stakes? I like to think a good chunk went into catering: one scene had a mouthwatering array of watermelons and pineapples that put the rest of the film to shame (don’t you think a film has problems when the ongoing drama is upstaged by fruit?).

The siege of Tirad Pass is memorable for the endless number of Filipino stuntmen that suddenly stand up, clutch their chests as if heartbroken, and fall over, impaling themselves on conveniently placed bamboo stakes. It’s also memorable for the way the American extras just keep going up against that hill, only to be stopped by a few paper-mache rocks thrown at their heads. The way this scene is shot, the Americans look as if they’re having more fun than the Filipinos (Actually, they look as if they’re having more fun than the audience).

Sarmenta, like Aga Muhlach, is an improbably pretty actor with a lot of untapped talent. Unlike Muhlach, he doesn’t try to coast on his cute looks; he actually gives a performance. He tries gamely here--you have to give him that. But he has no character to play and no one to play against. Poor Sarmenta, left stranded in the middle of a psuedo-epic, is posing for tourist postcards.

He has two scenes that stick out--in the first he murders a Filipino in cold blood (the man just lies there, helpless), his reason being that this Filipino was working for the Spanish (Sarmenta has a point, though this comes off as being less than compassionate). In the second one of Del Pilar’s sharpshooters loses his cool and wants to run; Sarmenta points a gun at the man’s head and threatens to blow his brains out if he doesn’t back down (the man promptly does, is just as promptly shot dead). The scenes play in such a hysterical tone you wonder if Caparas thinks Del Pilar was a psychotic megalomaniac (the pot calling the kettle off-white).

Then there's Tommy Abuel (excellent actor, one of the best). He gives a performance as a religious revolutionary that would have been classic if this had been a comedy. In one scene he steadies a gun against a cross as he fires (Harvey Keitel does something similar in From Dusk Tll Dawn). Abuel is caught and put before a firing squad of Spaniards. They shoot; Abuel laughs out loud. He can only be killed by bullets fired from Filipino-held guns. So the commandant--for the first time in the history of Caparas flicks--does something intelligent: he switches the firing squad from Spanish to Filipino sharpshooters, which wipes the smirk off of Abuel’s face double-quick. Still wondering how I should feel about this scene.

There’s a lot more wrong with the film, but I’m writing an article, not a multivolume novel. It should be obvious though, that this isn’t one of local cinema’s prouder moments--fact is, I can’t think of a moment for which I could be less proud--unless someone has the bright idea of sending this turkey to film festivals abroad. Then, I believe, I would actually campaign to raise money for airline tickets so I can follow the film wherever it goes, stand outside the theater, and warn people not to watch. Call it my sense of patriotic duty--seems to me it’s the least I could do for my country.

(Excerpt taken from Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema. Click here to order online.)

Some links:

Petition declaring Carlos J. Caparas is not qualified to be National Artist

Eulogy on the death of a meaningful National Artist Award

Statement from National Artist Ben Cabrera

Concerned Artists of the Philippines statement

Xiao chen zhi chun (Spring in a small town, Fei Mu, 1948)

2009-07-25T03:36:00.013-04:00

Xiao chen zhi chun (Spring in a small town, Fei Mu, 1948) is, for the record, considered the best Chinese film ever made by both the Hong Kong Film Awards Association and by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society.

That's a fearful burden for any film to bear (even Welles' Citizen Kane), and the highest praise I can think of is that one understands its present high reputation (it used to be criticized by the Chinese government for not being sufficiently political, though one suspects the real problem is that, as Wade Major's essay accompanying the DVD puts it, the film emphasizes personal problems and interiorized drama over explicit issues and nationalist sentiments). Fei's classic is a haunted film, full of moons framed by drifting clouds, strange slow dissolves within the scene (what, you wonder, do the dissolves mean and why at that particular moment?) and sad, silent rooms drenched in wordless mystery.

Fei employs immediate setting as a reflection and extension of character. The broken house symbolizes not only the husband Liyan's poor health but the country's--it's set immediately after the Second World War, when China had yet to rebuild from the sufferings and devastation inflicted on it by Japan. The wife Yuwen finds herself often walking alongside a partly wrecked wall, and as the film progresses one can't help but suspect that she projects her view of her self on that wall, that she feels her life to be every bit as desolate, as useless, as that wall. When the doctor Zhichen arrives to pay Liyan a visit we first see him walking down an open road, a symbol of approaching change. When Yuwen comes out to greet the new visitor (who, as it turns out, was a former lover of hers), and is framed with broken wall to the left, green shrubbery to the right. It's as if she were already caught--or trapped--between the two worlds represented by husband and ex-lover.

The camera often moves in on characters to break up the often flat-looking black-and-white imagery. It attempts to bring the imagery to life, so to speak, by giving depth to empty space, solidity and thickness to objects and people.

Then there's the body language--Yuwen first introduces herself to Zhichen as a formal hostess, with both hands linked together under her breast (the hands look as if they were under great tension, ready at some signal to pull her apart). Liyan is often caught reclining on an ornate chair or canopied bed or against the rubble of a broken wall--resting, in effect, on evidence of his former wealth or evidence of its present ruin. Zhiyang is often photographed in relaxed, confident poses (save for one scene where he presses himself flat against a wall to hide from annoying, innocent Mei, Liyan's younger sister).

Perhaps the single most overwhelming impression one has coming away from a viewing is of a hypnotically leisurely pace. Fei almost always dissolves to the next scene (and as mentioned, will sometimes dissolve in the middle of the scene, for no apparent reason), he will hold a shot for as long as the character within the shot needs to finish his or her errand or bit of business. This languorous rhythm has the effect of heightening the realism (one thinks of the celebrated kitchen scene in Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, made six years earlier--strange, but that film seems so much more immediate and modern (despite its turn of the century setting) than this, Fei's masterpiece) and intensifying the eroticism (the often silent, often wordless meetings between Yuwen and Zhiyang have the breathless impact of outright sex in today's more explicit (unfortunately, in my opinion) age). When Zhiyang suddenly seizes a wounded hand and presses it to his lips, the act has the effect of curling one's startled toes.

Fei's film is often called subtly understated, with the exception of the voiceover by Wei Wei, the actress playing Yuwen; I tend to think of the device (describing a scene in words while presenting said scene onscreen) as something Robert Bresson will develop and perfect later, in his own films. Also think everyone from Wong Kar Wai to Edward Yang to the great Hou Hsiao Hsien must have been influenced by this little chamber drama (not to mention Tian Zhuangzhuang with his acclaimed remake).

One shot occurring early on in particularly stays with me: Old Man Huang looks for his Liyang, pokes his head through a hole in a wall, then walks around said wall to talk to the young master; the camera doesn't follow the faithful servant around but instead moves forward to peer through the hole in the wall.

Why does the camera follow Huang, which would be the more natural choice? Is Fei celebrating some value through the move--elegance, perhaps, or economy of effort? I don't know; all I do know is that the shot is an inexpressibly beautiful one, that it haunts me to this day. My favorite explanation is that Fei does it because he simply can, that the move is Fei's way of expressing the freedom of the camera: to follow or not follow, peer or not peer, surprise or not surprise. Freedom to make personal choices, on the part of the filmmaker or characters--one of the film's central themes, and one of the reasons the picture got into trouble with the authorities. Seems to me Fei knew what he's doing, after all.

Maybe not my favorite (I'd have to set aside Hou Hsiao Hsien, Edward Yang, Tian Zhuangzhuang and King Hu among others), but definitely a great film.

Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa, 2004)

2009-07-18T23:11:00.004-04:00

My article on one of the films screening in Japan Foundation's 2009 Eiga Sai Film Festival, from July to August, at venues in Baguio, Cebu, and the UP Film Center:

Mr. Lonely

Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani (2004) is a deceptively slight, spare film--at an hour and fifteen minutes, with a cast of two actors portraying four characters, with most of the film consisting of the camera moving sideways, or of either of the characters standing in various moody poses, it's about as minimal a film as one can have and still be called a motion picture.

Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, the picture begins with a brief biographical sketch of Tony's father, Shozaburo Takitani (Issei Ogata, who also plays Tony). The rest of the picture follows Tony on his doomed trajectory in life, a trajectory pretty much determined by the oddly outlandish name given him by his jazz musician father (the man had acted on the suggestion of an American major). With such a name one can either be a dashing hero type, or an outcast so rejected by fellow Japanese children (who would be hostile to unusual names, especially those evoking the presence of their American conquerors) that one is condemned to a life of loneliness.

Then real tragedy strikes: Tony meets Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), and suddenly Tony isn't lonely anymore--feels in fact the vague yet unsettling fear that all who fall in love feel, that this sudden surge of emotion and affection might somehow end. It's not a bad marriage--Murakami won't let Tony (or us) off the hook that easily; Eiko turns out to be a wonderful housekeeper, and loving wife. But she had this one flaw--she loves to buy clothes, lots and lots of clothes. At one point (about the time when an entire room in their house is turned into an oversized walk-in closet) Tony suggests that perhaps she should stop.

And that's it; that's all there is to the story, and the film made around the story. But Ichikawa with tiny brushstrokes (as if painting an illustration inside a tiny snuff bottle) has in miniature created a closed-off world of mute, inexpressible suffering. Doesn't seem that way at first, but when you arrive at the film's equally quiet conclusion (not once does anyone raise his voice above a whisper--well, only once, and the actual event occurs offscreen) you find yourself startled, looking backwards at the inevitable series of steps that led you here.

I'd mentioned tiny bottle paintings and you can't help but think of such brushstrokes, watching this film; Ichikawa is fond of gliding his camera from left to right, when he doesn't have it locked down. Noel Murray in The A.V. Club calls it an "illustrated Murakami text"--a sharp observation that doesn't fully account for the leisurely yet perfect pacing (as if the movie were a daydream, or shot underwater); nor does it fully account for the director's Bressonian knack of looking at people and objects at oblique angles, through hands and shoes and hair (as if observing through sidelong glances), or through medium shots (as if gazing from a discreet distance). Manohla Dargis in The New York Times speculates that the left-to-right camera motion might have historical significance: Japanese used to be written from right to left, in vertical columns. "It's no wonder Tony often seems headed in the wrong direction," Dargis muses; several critics have compared the movement to the turning of the pages of a book. I'm more inclined to think of the movement as riparian, the flow of life made cinematic flesh, a series of irretrievable moments pushing past each other in an unstoppable current.

Mention the roomful of expensive clothes and hundred-plus shoes Eiko buys to any Filipino, and his thoughts must turn to our own world-class shopper, former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos. True, the scale of her shopping outclasses anything Ichikawa has the budget or inclination to depict (Mrs. Marcos abandoned around a thousand pairs of shoes when she fled the country), but tone is all and on those terms the stories of both ladies couldn't be more different: Ichikawa's is a whispered intimacy, while Mrs. Marcos' is a comic opera, full of grotesque details.

Ichikawa's style also causes critics to recall the minimalist storytelling of an earlier Japanese master, Yasujiro Ozu. Good call: Ozu confined himself to domestic situations, and his quiet voice can range anywhere from light slapstick to monumentally understated tragedy. But Ozu's style is wildly conventional, while Ichikawa embraces more commonplace notions of the experimental and avant-garde (am I making sense here?); Tony and Eiko's psychology verges on the abnormal, whereas Ozu's characters are relentlessly, fascinatingly ordinary (a far more difficult feat to pull off, I think).

I like to think Murakami and Ichikawa were just as if not more inspired by an earlier, equally short text, Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Like Tony, Bartleby has the suggestion of a sad past; like Tony, Bartleby is invincibly surrounded by walls of alienation and loneliness. Unlike Bartleby, Tony has tasted something of love--but that makes his eventual fate all the more harrowing, a sudden fall after the depths and heights of feeling he has experienced.

Ichikawa adds a coda to Murakami's perfect little story, involving a phone and an annoying neighbor; one can call the addition lily-gilding, or seamless amplification of the man's sorrow (I think it's more of the latter, myself). Whatever; Tony Takitani is Ichikawa's testament to the power of minimalist cinema, how the slightest of narratives told in the most unassuming of manners can posses startlingly poignant power.

First published in Businessworld, 7.3.09

Last Supper No. 3 (Veronica Velasco, 2009)

2009-07-18T22:59:00.007-04:00

Maricel Soriano (in a hilarious cameo) with Joey Paras

My article on one of this year's Cinemalaya entries

Law and ordure

Veronica Velasco's Last Supper No. 3 (2009) starts out as a droll account of a semi-chaotic advertising shoot, causing my heart to slowly sink--no, I thought to myself; not yet another movie about the advertising industry. Doesn't matter how witty or well-observed they may be, I have a longstanding prejudice against advertising pictures…seen enough over the years to fill a Metro Manila phonebook. Seriously.

There's no challenge to making these movies; most people in the Filipino film industry work in advertising, which is their bread and butter when they're not involved in a feature film production. It's a not completely unfounded suspicion of mine that most characters in Philippine movies are in advertising because it's the business the filmmakers know best. It's worse than lazy filmmaking, it's knee-jerk storytelling.

Thankfully, Velasco's picture quickly becomes something considerably more interesting, a comic nightmare of an odyssey through the Philippine legal system. The story is based on Winston Acuyong's actual experiences involving a piece of lost property (in the movie, the iconic Last Supper tapestry that seems to hang over about 90% of Filipino dining tables) and complicated by a related case of Serious Physical Injury (the plaintiff attacked the defendant with a belt; the co-defendant fought back, injuring the plaintiff's nose; the plaintiff came back at both defendants with what looks like a knockoff sword). The picture feels like a portable Filipino version of Charles Dicken's Bleak House, with its own version of the novel's endless "Jarndyce and Jarndyce," a last will and testament case involving years of litigation and seventy thousands pounds sterling (the equivalent of fifteen million dollars in today's currency).

Castwise the film is full of fresh faces making a fresh impression on the big screen; much of the story turns on Joey Paras as Acuyong's fictional proxy Wilson Nanawa, the hapless production assistant who loses the ill-fated rug. Paras is unapologetically gay (except when he has to use his man-voice to stop a speeding jeep), and unapologetically the hero of the story (would have been nice to have given him a boyfriend to come home to, but films must shatter one gay stereotype at a time, I suppose). Paras has a wheedling, put-upon voice he uses to great comic effect as a defense mechanism when, well, being put-upon (which is most of the time); you feel the voice become less and less a defensive pose and more and more a sincere expression of unbearable weariness as the months pile on (the case lasted an exhausting two and a half years) and thousands of pesos are poured into his legal black hole.

Along the way we have able support from a host of comic actors--Beverly Salviejo, Mhalouh Crisologo among others. On occasion a major screen star will have a small cameo--Ricky Davao as a rough-hewn cop, Maricel Soriano as a dyed-in-yellow office worker (her side business of ordering a packed lunch is about peerless, with a wonderful little ironic punchline at the end), and best of all Liza Lorena as a dead-eyed whacko grotesque, probably driven mad by years of litigation. A Dickensian brew of rich side characters, indeed.

Velasco seems to know the two basic rules of comedy filmmaking: lucid camerawork (Charlie Chaplin kept his setups ridiculously simple, to the point that people doubted he was a great filmmaker--now that's great filmmaking), and pacing, pacing, pacing, pacing. I may have a quarrel with one or two pieces of music on her soundtrack (sometimes the tune tries too hard to remind us that this is a comedy, and what you're seeing is supposed to be funny), but the several songs that accompany Wilson through the corridors of legal bureaucracy wonderfully emphasize the Sisyphean nature of his trek, down to the glum rhythm of his endless slog.

As for the courthouse in which much of the action (or complete lack of) takes place, Velasco achieves something a little more special, a distinct character with a charisma all its own. The courthouse is a massive camera presence, with thick concrete walls and a sickly-looking paint job that hilariously evokes both the yellow-ribbon fad of the Aquino Administration (one of the worse in Philippine history when it came to legal ineptitude and needless complication) and the kind of ultramodern building renovation that is supposed to attract more tourists (Bright colors! Spanish architecture!). As the camera winds its way up staircases lined with wide Narra-wood steps right out of the Second World War, we ourselves become aware of the winding nature of Wilson's journey, how it never seems to move in the obvious, predictable manner, how at any moment one may drop to one's knees from dizziness and sheer distance (one might also look at Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976), where an overhead camera invokes the drama of a great mystery hidden under a mountain of paperwork).

This may be the first and most successful film ever to deal with the Filipino legal system (to be fair, there aren't a lot of Filipino films on the system to start with, and--a comedy? No surprise there). The film's courthouse may be the first and most successful attempt to re-create Dicken's Chancery in Southeast Asia--the very incarnation of hell on earth, duly notarized, signed by witnesses, typed out in triplicate.

First published in Businessworld, 7/24/09

Bruno (Larry Charles, 2009), Catch Me if You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002)

2009-07-18T17:32:00.005-04:00

Saw Bruno (2009) and maybe the diciest portion of the picture comes at its earliest stages, in Sacha Baron Cohen's portrait of a gay lifestyle. I can see his strategy--confirm a homophobe's worst fears of decadent homosexuals, parody said portrait, then show the humanity later on (it's the same approach used on Kazakhs in Borat), but where do you cross the line between spoofing and confirming homophobia, and does said line matter anyway?

This kind of comedy thrives on blurring such distinctions, but there are points where he doesn't so much blur as overstep completely into outright slander, and that is possibly why critical reaction is so hostile (boxoffice isn't doing so hot, either). Bluntly put, the gay community has considerably more media clout than the Kazakh community it appears (and I can't say either community is wrong to speak out, either), and their disapproval is hurting the movie's appeal.

Parts are still funny, particularly the broadsides at conservative folk (Cohen's real targets), but we've seen all this before in Borat, down to the martial-arts training session where Cohen's character learns how to deflect an attack from a Jew (a homosexual, here). Some effects take your breath away--the car that nearly runs over a motorbike, the flung folding chair that lands inches away from a pair of grappling wrestlers--but there isn't that sense of transgression and shock you had from the earlier film. This is basically a retread; amusing, but not particularly instructive.

I remember listening to a brief program about Andy Kaufman, and Cohen does take a page from his take-no-prisoners brand of comedy, but Cohen doesn't quite have Kaufman's purity--as noted in the program, when Kaufman played "Andy Kaufman," the neurotic comic celebrity suffering a nervous breakdown, even Kaufman's close friends were wondering if he was really cracking up. Cohen's too smart and sane to go that far, more's the pity, and that I think is what's missing from this picture.

Onwards with my survey of movies Spielberg--Catch Me if You Can (2002) is easily the director's finest, most fleet-footed recent work, and further evidence that Leonardo DiCaprio (who plays Frank Abagnale, Jr., the picture's true-life protagonist) was growing out of the burden of supercelebrityhood imposed on him by the movie Titanic (not to mention its music score is easily John Williams' least characteristic, hence my favorite).

Part of it is the material, of course: a nineteen-year-old acting out the darker aspect of the American Dream by constantly reinventing himself--what's not to like? Spielberg's usually assertive camera plays an uncharacteristically subdued role here, and to my mind hasn't been better in years...especially love the shot of Frank on his first day of school standing by the blackboard as fellow students pass by, heaping wisecracks on his head. Spielberg holds the shot, recording Frank's intensifying resentment, watching his face and body language closely as he squares his shoulders, takes the various insults flung at him and on the spot creates the persona of a substitute French teacher. It's our first glimpse of Frank's capabilities, as simple and precise a summation of the man's brilliance as anything in the picture.

But more than the '70s milieu or the return of the old-fashioned Spielberg, what gave me the sharpest pang of nostalgia were Frank's counterfeiting activities. Worked in a bank some years back, and one of our activities involved applying for an externally-funded loan on evidence that was, well, manufactured (For the record the bank in question stopped the practice, and the loans involved have all been paid off by now). Smudging signatures, gluing-and-pasting, simulating printed text with hand and ink and magnifying glass (all that was missing in Catch was the copier machine, which has since added all kind of tricks to the counterfeiter's diverse bag), watching Frank at work brings back my semi-criminal past. Ah, life.