Critic After Dark

Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:27:34 +0000

Labyrinth

Talked about Curry Barker's Obsession and how his premise of the obsessed lover isn't anything new; Kane Parsons' Backrooms is if anything even less new dressed in world wide web clothing.

First to come to mind are the mindscapes described by Stanley Kubrick late in his career-- the vast redcarpeted mansion in Eyes Wide Shut; the urban ruins that stand at the end of Full Metal Jacket; above all the Overlook in The Shining with its infinite corridors dotted with secretive doors, looping on itself again and again like an intestine and lined with a carpet of repeated design dyed that maddeningly distinct burnt orange you see in interiors of the late '70s and '80s. Folks always maintained Jack Torrance was nuts from the beginning of the picture; I think that rug helped him along.

Might mention along the way Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," where postpartum depression prompts the husband to impose on his wife a rest cure guaranteed to make her depression worse not better. And yes we can trace it all to psychological causes but when you think about it isn't the real reason for the woman's eventual crackup that sickly sallow wallpaper?

Beyond that? Citizen Kane, whose digressions and interlocking flashbacks and cavernous rooms of Xanadu (the sprawling life in effect of Charles Foster Kane) Jorge Luis Borges once described as a 'labyrinth with no center,' paraphrasing a line he remembered from a GK Chesterton story ("What we all dread most is a maze with no center."). Beyond even that is strangest of children's writers Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), whose Alice books warned that we fall into rabbit holes and walk into looking-glasses at our peril.

And then there's the Minotaur, a monster out of Greek mythology, wandering its labyrinth as it feeds on young men and women-- and maybe the horror of his circumstance isn't all that carnivorous munching but the sheer dreary repetitiveness of the hallways, one corner after another for the rest of his unhappy life. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

I think it actually helps in this case to know a bit of history (or as much as I can piece together, with reasonable accuracy): "The Backrooms" started with the photograph of an empty yellow-walled room, posted in different message boards from 2011 to 2018, then on a paranormal-themed 4chan board; in 2019 an anonymous user posted a lengthy comment that started with "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms." The comment sprouted stories, the stories formed a fandom, the fandom created lore with differing levels and populated them with entities.

Inspired by the original image, Parson posted his first video in 2022 on YouTube; the Backrooms community resisted then adopted the videos, or at least enough members did that the video went viral, attracted enough attention to fund a film-- and here we are.

Helps to know because the history suggests the abruptness of the film's existence-- like it wasn't there and you turn and suddenly it is. No explanation, and the room's presence (and film's atmosphere) is both new and somehow familiar, an alien space that at the same time recalls any number of images (a hallway; a wallpaper; a cavernous room; a rabbit hole; a Minotaur) haunting the margins of your mind.

That's it, that's the film-- except where Parsons created his images from a 3D software program, production designer Danny Vermette had a budget big enough ($10 million) to actually build the rooms, 30,000 square feet worth, with walls the color of old urine; and sound designer Eugenio Battaglia managed to compose a few heard-round-the-corner noises that recall the subterranean work of Alan Splet.

That initial sense of mystery draws you in but can only do so much without some human drama-- in this case provided by Chiwetel Ejiofor's Clark, failed architect and failing furniture store owner who stumbles through a portal in his store basement. He's followed by his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) and in arguably the most disturbing scene in the film (WARNING: skip the rest of the article if you haven't seen the film!) they reenact a parody of a therapy session where Mary explores the source of Clark's-- frustrations? Failures? Unhappiness? All is as vaguely sketched out as the Backrooms' own backstory (for details you might want to check out Parson's 24 mini-episodes on YouTube), only Ejiofor and Reinsve pour passion and commitment into that scene to make it work: you feel Mary's horror as Clark cheerfully demonstrates the difference between our reality and his, us human beings and the figures he likes to call Still Lifes ("For starters, they don't feel anything...they simply exist. Like furniture").

Ejiofor sketches Clark's unhappy life for us. Unspoken: could these Backrooms be his chance to reset, become the success he never managed to be? Reinsve's Mary hides a childhood trauma that, in several ways, mimics this room she's in right now, tied to a chair; could she be working out issues of her own? If Parsons were a more seasoned writer we'd have some kind of compelling psychodrama playing out in these empty rooms and hallways; as is it's the vaguely sketched parody of a psychodrama, and much of the horror and humor derives from elements that we recognize in that parody (just like much of the horror and humor in Clark's predicament derives from elements we recognize from his everyday life).

At a certain point Reinsve's Mary assumes the role of our subjective consciousness and she's a welcome fit; she wins our sympathies. But you suspect she's overqualified, especially if you're familiar with her performances in Joachim Trier's films (The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value) where she's a multifaceted character juggling multiple traumas and motives and needs; running and screaming in a horror flick seems like relatively undemanding work in comparison.

The ending hardly feels like an ending, yet for some reason doesn't leave you unsatisfied. Why, I wonder? Perhaps because Parsons, having started with an enigma, senses he can't afford to end with anything but another enigma-- he has to pivot to an even bigger mystery because he has so much more to tell. Which may be a cop-out, may not; depends on how you feel about the film so far.

I like it; I feel I got my money's worth, but can't predict how another viewer might react. I do know I like that final image, which functions much like a Mandelbrot set: the further you pull out the more things remain the same, an ever-corrugating pattern looping into itself in endless iteration like (when you think about it) a labyrinth with no center.

First published in Businessworld 6.5.26

I Love Boosters (Boots Riley, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:32:16 +0000

Marximum overdrive

Boots Riley's I Love Boosters is a truckload of fun. Gang of shoplifters (The Velvet Gang-- Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige), Sade (Naomi Ackie)) prey on a chain of fashion stores (Metro Designers) owned by ultrarich Christie Smith (Demi Moore); they're joined by Chinese factory worker Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and her band of laborers: high-style hijinks ensue.

And when I say 'high style' I don't exactly mean 'high style.' Riley does show us the more traditional notion of the image as incarnated by Christie's stores: monochromatic (each branch a different primary color); tasteful (if sleekly elegantly provocative); expensive, with every detail including the employees (who are asked to purchase their own constantly updated uniforms) production-designed within an inch of their lives.

The Velvet Gang give us the alternative, wearing audacious clothes that reflect their personalities: Corvette is an ambitious if not unreflective designer; Sade seeks direction (hence her susceptibility to pyramid schemes) but is warmhearted; and Mariah is a rebel. Their respective outfits when out on prowl are loud to declare their presence, and cheap (day-glo colors and budget-friendly synthetics) to identify their economic status (struggling). Jianhu's clothes tell a more interesting story: having originated from a workplace with mandated identical wear-- the traditional factory jumpsuit-- suddenly being in the United States liberates her, but she still hasn't found her voice so she triesone bizarre ensemble after another, at one point wearing what looks like Kermit the Frog's mutated snake fur wrapped around her upper torso.

Have not been a fan of Demi Moore's humorlessly inexpressive 'look at me I'm gorgeous' style of acting for most of her career but loved her vulnerable turn as fading celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (even if I didn't love the movie itself) and love her turn here as fashion mogul Christie Smith, where 'humorlessly inexpressive' is the performance. Dressed in handsome understated business suits she radiates Serious As Shit vibes, to the point that her monomania affects the world-- Riley underscores this by locating her executive office in a skyscraper with a decided 17 degree tilt (inspired by San Francisco's Millenium Tower); Christie is hellbent on expansion, and everyone must to struggle to cope with that bias. Call her a female Elon Musk if Musk were actually good looking.

Riley reflects his heroines' haphazard largely hand-assembled aesthetic by resorting to haphazard largely handcrafted effects-- Christie's tilted office is yes actually tilted; a lot of the sudden appearances and disappearances and transformations (holding your breath to appear whiter comes to mind) are achieved through editing; and some of the more bizarre sequences-- a three-vehicle chase down the tilted streets of San Francisco involving skinless prominent media figures-- are created through classic stop-motion photography, in the grand tradition of Ray Harryhausen (an inspiration to Riley) and his sword-wielding skeletons. All this egged on by a music score from the band Tune-Yards, which has the bright toon quality of Danny Elfman on hiccups.

Throughout the film Riley champions the cause of Marx, not Groucho, and through Jianhu's stolen device the principles of dialectical materialism. Leftist coworker Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez) explains all this in the kind of headlong breathless delivery Ken Russell adopted for his actors when shooting Paddy Chayefsky's Altered States, the lines given the treatment and respect they deserve, tossed out for the audience to accept or reject as they like. I can see audiences flinching from this fastpaced maximalist (Marximalist?) approach but it's the rare film that struggles with a surfeit as opposed to a shortage of ideas, and I love that Riley leans into that, makes the flaw an integral part of his style.

Also note that Riley has a curious approach to wrongdoing: Boosters are felons especially when the item being boosted costs over $500 (depending on the local law); but the title pretty much states his position on the crime. Yes he's a leftie but also something of a utilitarian, a 'by any means necessary' sort of guy. Corvette, Mariah, Sade-- and likely Jianhu for her defiance-- are criminals but criminals by necessity, against a system built to keep them oppressed, and must resort to whatever they can for their survival (as opposed to Christie, who just keeps going because-- well what keeps all these billionaires going? "How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can't already afford?" as a certain naively bitter private investigator once asked), and again Riley's filmmaking reflects this attitude: he may break the laws of commercial or even coherent storytelling but you get something you never saw before, possibly may never see again (hopefully not; hopefully the musician turned filmmaker has a few more films left in him). You accept or reject him as you like it.

Obsession (Curry Barker, 2025)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:23:21 +0000

I'd do anything for love

(Warning: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail)

Curry Barker Obsession (2025) is basically W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," and "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" meet Fatal Attraction and Misery-- nothing startling new, only he's leaned into the sneaky comic spin of the premise, has a terrific cast to inhabit the roles, and the visual chops to tell the story with snap and zing.

Part of the fun of watching this in the theaters is how keyed up the audience gets, the film provoking either startled gasps or uncomfortable laughs, sometimes both at the same time. Barker as I've just learned is part of an internet sketch comedy duo 'that's a bad idea' on YouTube, and he joins filmmakers like Danny and Michael Philippou, who also graduated from YouTube to make 2023's Talk to Me; Dan Trachtenberg, who directed the mostly terrific 10 Cloverfield Lane; Bo Burnham, who did the funny Eight Grade-- young turks emerging from the tumult of the web to make longform genre content on the big screen.

Barker's also part of another trend, comedians turned horror filmmakers, and the first example of which to pop to mind being Jordan Peele with his assertion that comedy and horror both depend on timing-- to get the biggest response (of laughter or terror) out of the audience one must know how to keep the tension high, and at what point to release said tension. You also see Barker playing with conventions: the girl Nikki (Inde Navarrete) suddenly standing at her front door looking at her best friend Bear (Michael Johnston); matters have undergone turnaround at this point in the romcom as expected, the girl ready to confess her magically induced love for the boy-- but why does Nikki stand so still for so long, and why is her face veiled in shadow?.

Maybe what makes Barker's story so effective is how he makes you buy into the two characters: Nikki as Navarrete plays her is a beauty but not a standoffish one; she's warm, she's caring, she leans into you as if what you have to say really matters, and you absolutely believe Bear would fall for her, along with Ian (Cooper Tomlinson, the other half of Barker's YouTube duo) and everyone else. And Bear is sweetly clumsy, almost hopeless in his frustration at not having the courage to say what he needs to say; Johnston catches that awkwardness with all the pain of lived experience. Yes the movie works as a horror and a comedy but also as near-romance, the will-they-won't-they-can't-they-please-pretty-please? variety-- tension's essential to that genre too.

Mention must be made of Tomlinson's Ian, the grating best friend with all the wrong advice for Bear to win the girl; when you later learn that Ian in fact is having a casual relationship with Nikki you realize he's been keeping Bear off balance all this time, screwing with his friend's head and Nikki both. The murkier question is: why did Nikki sleep with Ian? One can speculate-- maybe just for physical relief; maybe Ian has a side that appeals to Nikki; maybe his persistence just wore her down; maybe maybe maybe-- it's the kind of unanswered question that either makes you ponder the mystery of human nature or fume at the laziness of the scriptwriter, depending on how you feel about the final result.

There's a setpiece, a boy's night out party involving an uninvited guest and drunken Jenga that hurtles along the razor edge of horrifyingly hilarious and hilariously horrifying and is about the perfect distillation or demonstration or what have you of Peele's assertion that horror and comedy are conjoined twin. The rest of the picture doesn't maintain that peak but does have its own satisfyingly relentless logic, and the picture ends with what looks like release but is really is the beginning of the rest of someone's very messed up life.

How does the picture compare? It's a sharper script than Fatal Attraction, slyer more darkly stylish than the O so literal Misery. It does fall short of what I feel to be the high water mark of female stalker flicks, Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H, for a number of reasons: 1) Adel, daughter of Victor Hugo, is more contradictory and perverse and makes no pretense she has reasons; 2) the story depends not on the supernatural or on horror effects but on the dark splendor of Nestor Almendros' cinematography; 3) Isabelle Adjani, whose translucent skin glows on the big screen, and whose sprung-open eyes promise total monomaniacal focus (at one point she asks a hypnotist if he could compel someone to fall in love, basically contemplating the same wish as Bear in this picture). I'd even call the film's conclusion grimmer (if more lyrical)-- Adele alone and self-sufficient, achieving perfection in her insanity. I like Obsession's Nikki just fine, but compared to Adele she's strictly minor league.

Lord of the Flies (1954) v Lord of the Flies (1963) v Alkitrang Dugo (Clotted Blood, 1975) v Lord of the Flies (1990) v Lord of the Flies (Netflix, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:10:30 +0000

Pig hunt

(Warning: plot and surprise twists in book and TV series discussed in explicit detail)

I remember reading William Golding's 1954 debut novel as a teen and having nightmares about running through the jungle with other boys in pursuit, waving sticks sharpened at both ends-- did not help the development of my socialization skills, lemme tell you.

The book comes off as a fable, the characters barely sketched-in symbols, the theme clear enough and neat enough for literature majors to milk for their theses: humans have this ingrown tendency to violence, and we flirt with or ignore it at our peril. Really that simple, the novel's chief virtue and key weakness, and folks who seek to adapt it flirt with this fact or ignore it at their peril.

Take Netflix's 2026 miniseries, where writer Jack Thorne (Adolescence) reconceived the book as four chapters devoted to the points of view of the four main characters: Piggy (David McKenna), Jack (Lox Pratt), Simon (Ike Talbut), Ralph (Winston Sawyers). Thorne gives each a backstory: Jack is ignored by his parents and fears being seen as weak; Simon shares a bond of loneliness with Jack during vacation time, is ignored by Jack the rest of the school year, in which case the former spends the rest of his time alone hearing voices; Ralph's mother was sickly and died not long ago.

Right off you see the problem. That innate savagery hiding in Jack, in all of us, is actually-- fear of abandonment? Simon, the mystic who hears otherworldly voices is really-- schizophrenic? Everything that happened might have been prevented by therapy, maybe a regimen of Thorazine? Odd that Piggy has no backstory, save for the constant tales of his aunt-- if you can believe he has an aunt, if his stories aren't made up on the fly (possibly Thorne felt Piggy was too valuable a plot function to fiddle with).

Understand the desire to cast Ralph as mixed-race and Sawyers is a charismatic talent no doubt... but I've always thought of Golding's fable as a warning directed at white Europeans (and their wealthier more powerful cousin white Americans); warning people who are already aware of said Europeans' barbarism (having often been at receiving end) feels redundant.

But my biggest problem with the film is Marc Munden's direction. I understand the temptation to digitally turn the island into a rainbow of colors, from brilliant lemongreen to deep fireblood red to bleak ashy grey... but Golding's novel is already an abstracted story with huge improbabilities (Pigs on an uninhabited island? Boys who learn to build a fire and kill large mammals in so many days? In 1965 six Tongan boys from 13 to 19 years old organized and cooperated and survived for over a year on an island (they ate wild chicken and, when desperate, bird's blood)-- can't thirty British boarding school students? ('Well,' sly voice whispers in my ear as I write this 'they're white... and they're British...')). Trying to sell the book's contrived premise is already an uphill task, do we need the bells and whistles of a digital paint job to make matters more difficult?

Throw in a few other minor details particular to this adaptation that irked: learning to shape flint spearheads and mount them on wooden shafts isn't an easy skill to master (in the novel they used sharpened sticks)-- and after all that trouble they swing the spears instead of stabbing? And succeed at killing their prey without getting anyone hurt? Wild boars incidentally don't succumb easy; they can outrun any human, no matter how young or healthy, and they will kill anyone who comes between them and their babies. But okay okay, a fable.

To be fair Munden does offer effective moments-- the tenderness between Jack and Simon is moving (even if the idea of their having this hidden friendship feels wrong-- Simon the mystic needs to be isolated, to seem mysterious); of the cast I'd cite not just Sawyers and McKenna (the latter nominated for a Gotham Award) but Pratt as the volatile self-doubting faintly androgynous Jack-- though again while you're moved by his predicament, the fact that he harbors doubts tends to flatten the threat of his presence.

Piggy's lingering end as opposed to the sudden one in Golding's novel does result in more quality time between him and Ralph, and I appreciate all the Groucho Marx quotes, but watching Ralph drag a barely conscious Piggy past Jack's spearwaving soldiers, to successfully escape and hide-- at some point your willingness to believe seizes up and you've got to laugh at the visual idiocy. Couldn't Jack order his boys to stand back and let the two leave? Likewise couldn't Thorne and Munden just stick to the book?

For all the flaws I prefer this to the 1990 version which couldn't overcome the gimmick of turning the kids American (with British boarding school students you appreciate the shock value of watching kids with posh accents grow corrupt; with American students... well let's just say I've seen things that make William Golding's castaways seem as savage and chaotic as a chess club).

Even more bizarre is Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara's 1975 Alkitrang Dugo (Clotted Blood, 1975) which transposes the story to a Filipino island. Again my thesis: didn't Golding direct this fable towards white folks (Again, that sly voice: 'But don't upperclass Filipinos think they're honorary white folk--')? Aquino-Kashiwahara does well enough with a tiny budget and her jungle (basically the rain forests of Quezon Province) is more lush and claustrophobic than anything realized onscreen so far; in the film's final moments she pivots and turns the tale into an allegory about strongman rule, and I can actually buy her variation of Golding's basic message: hidden inside all of us is an embryonic fascist, ready to emerge.

Finally there's Peter Brook's 1963 black-and-white version, where the director confronts the problem of thirty inexperienced kids and how to make a screen adaptation from their collective presence: he simply shoots them over and over again, sixty hours' worth of footage, then trims that enormous pile of improvised material down to a viewable ninety-minute feature.

I think Brook's version works: the stark black-and-white, the unaffected performances, the young voices that shout and shriek the way real boys do, in a weekend adventure gone horribly wrong, on an island blessedly free of digital manipulation. Yes Golding has done better work (he's said his favorite among his books is The Inheritors, I say it's the surreally perverse Darkness Visible); arguably this was the perfect choice to adapt to the big screen, its crude schema lending to easy translation, Brook's severe approach in turn pruning the book's more self-absorbed self-indulgent passages.

Is it possible to adapt Golding's most famous novel to the big screen? I think so: a simplistic message but one too important not to deliver at least once, loud and clear, and Brook pulled it off a mere nine years after the book's publication. I submit we never needed another.

First published in Businessworld 5.15.26

Re-Wind (Hisayasu Sato, 1988)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:31:43 +0000

For Adults Only

If Peeping Tom and Videodrome and Don't Torture a Duckling had a bastard child this might be the sleazy result.

The plot hinges around a series of snuff videotapes circulating Tokyo's underworld, and both a private investigator and the janitor in a porn video arcade are obsessed with discovering the source. But that's not the film's priority, which seems twofold, pretentious and prehensile both: to indulge the filmmaker's obsessions, which include celebrating his influences (Powell's vivd color palette, Cronenberg's body horror) and attempting to transcend them without a comparable budget; and adhering to the strict conditions of the genre's format-- a sexual encounter every ten minutes, a precisely titrated amount of gore, and (above all) no genital exposure.

That lack of a real budget is frustrating. The videos themselves when viewed aren't all that transgressive with POV footage recording fuzzy imagery and some clumsily executed onscreen mutilation (there's a bowl of spaghetti however that's bluntly effective, easily the most horrifying shock cut in the picture). The sex is more entertaining, and the fact that Sato has to come up with something kinky with the actors not exposing their crotch or even shedding their underwear becomes a real challenge-- just how much pleasure can you get out of sucking at an erection through cottonwear?

The cumulative blueball feel does get to you-- at a certain point you find yourself fastforwarding to the more interesting-looking stuff and rewinding to make sure you've squeezed out all the juices; you also, I suspect, find yourself more susceptible to Sato's more incidental effects. Perhaps his most satisfying moments aren't the scenes of extensive skin contact (or rather skin-through-silk contact), or the faintly risible sight of the killer swinging a spring-loaded knife mounted on a video camera mounted on a tripod like an ax (the weapon seems more threatening when the metal-tipped tripod legs are used as a spear) but the transitional images, the gliding shots through ultramodern cityscapes to end at a chainlink fence, behind which we see an abandoned fridge door gaping wide, inside of which lies a severed hand clutching a videotape (might as well throw in Bunuel as one of the director's sublimated heroes). Perhaps my favorite is a nothing image, a throwaway shot of buildings standing against brilliant sky, the harsh sunlight flagellated by tree branches in a stiff wind. Light me a cigarette, honey, I could use the postcoital smoke.

(Postscript: pause before the rabbit hole and enter at your own risk. Turns out Criterion Channel only showed one of Sato's more palatable films, and if you do a little googling to specific websites you can see his darker (if still genre-constricted-- no genitals!) work, some of them unabashedly queer. Secret Garden (1987) is a neat reworking of The Story of O with payback ending ingeniously appended, and Silencer Made of Glass is a lurid bit of sadomasochism with flash suppressor attached. Nothing wishy-washy here, only fetishes and fixations being thoroughly indulged)

The Quiet Man: The Films of Mario O'Hara

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:43:00 +0000

In 2005 we put out a book: Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema

In 2026 we're doing it again.

The Quiet Man: The Films of Mario O'Hara was twenty-one years in the making, a collection of pieces new and old on the filmmaker plus a fistful of photographs, some of them never seen before, with a focus on arguably his greatest muse Nora Aunor, and we're launching the book on Sat April 25 (five days after O'Hara's 80th birthday) at 3 PM in Archivo 1984, 5F Building A, Karrivin Plaza, 2316 Chino Roces Avenue, Makati City, Philippines.

Be there if you dare.

Sirat (Oliver Laxe, 2025)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:28:00 +0000

Just deserts

Oliver Laxe's Sirat is a little hard to describe: Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona) look for his daughter Mar in a rave in southern Morocco. The pair wander aimlessly while the dancers surround them in an assortment of clothing haircuts hair dyes tattoos piercings, all swaying to the pulsing rhythm. They talk to people, hand out photos; no one has seen her, but there's another rave, closer to Mauritania, where they might find her.

(Warning: story and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail!)

So far so unpromising. It's a dusty milieu, the ravers don't seem interested in or can't afford high fashion, and the music is more loud than anything. More, Luis doesn't show much urgency to his search; he and Esteban walk about trying not to stare at all the writhing bodies, looking distinctly uncomfortable, so fish-out-of-water they're literally gasping for air. We-- or, rather, Laxe's camera-- stick close to the pair because they seem to be the only familiar, approachable, reasonably clean people in the crowd.

But is Luis being casual or cautious? It's been five months since they've seen her, and we have no idea long he's been looking, or what his search's been like-- could Luis' nonchalant manner be something he acquired along the way, a kind of emotional guard to keep from repelling others, a way of warding off hustlers or con men or predators? A way of guarding himself from what he possibly may find (Mar dead, or worse).

Soldiers arrive, announce the rave is over and they must evacuate; Luis and a group consisting of two vans break away from the military escort and drive deeper into the desert. Luis has to depend on these people-- he apparently knows nothing about the desert, knows next to nothing about driving through a desert or over mountains with rugged roads. The ravers don't look particularly friendly but they help, reluctantly, and he reciprocates in turn.

And that, I submit, is the fragile heart of the film: the kind of camaraderie that can form in extreme conditions, in this case the heat and bleakness of a Moroccan desert. The ravers are practical (or as practical as folks looking for the next party are practical), and frugal with their resources, but confronted with someone's distress they somehow some way step up to extend a hand. "These people are cool," Esteban breathes. He finds the ravers' tightknit bond refreshing, wants to spend as much time with them as he can. Stef, the group's unofficial den mother; Jade, of the flinty face but inexpressibly compassionate eyes; Tonin, who manages to improvise a puppet show out of his stump leg singing into its prosthetic peg for a microphone; large-bellied large-hearted Bigui; Josh the chatterbox. They're idealists in their way, leaving societal norms and value judgements behind to seek out the latest techno sensation and each other. You could call them marginalized but they're really knights in patchwork armor still tilting at windmills or, in this case, stereo speakers.

That's what the film's wayward first half is all about; a sudden left turn (actually more a downward curve to the right) and these characters you've followed-- reluctantly then eagerly, your attachment to them having at this point taken root and sprouted-- undergo the ultimate test of survival, and as writers from Jack London to Ernest Hemingway to F Scott Fitzgerald will tell you, the true nature of one's character is revealed under such circumstances.

A note on the music: not a fan nor an expert of techno or of music in general, but the score's relentless pounding beat, initially annoying, starts seeping into your skin as the film progresses, to the point that it becomes metaphorical-- standing, in effect for our ravers' nihilistic need for that unrefined vibration in their ears and on their faces, and for their respective heartbeats which, as it turns out, can be suddenly cut short at any time.

And that's it, that's the movie. Except that the aforementioned endurance test is more superbly timed and staged and drawn-out tense than anything I've seen in any other film this year (to be fair haven't really been looking that hard)-- Sinners? One Battle After Another? Snore. In terms of sheer teeth-grinding armrest-ripping beads-of-sweat-popping-on-upper-lip suspense this is superior, not just because of simple suspense mechanics but because over the course of its nearly two hour running time it's succeeded in letting you know each of its characters and making you care about their ultimate respective fates.

As for the title: 'sirat' apparently is an Islamic term, the bridge between heaven and hell, that the one without sin can cross quick without effort while others will plunge into the fires below, and one can take it as a random label slapped onto what happens onscreen or one can take it as the film's true viewpoint: that we're all tested similarly, as randomly, by life.

Maybe the other major criticism that can be leveled on this film is the question: what does this all ultimately mean or does it mean anything at all? The final images do suggest something-- that what Luis and Esteban and the rest of the ravers, citizens of an ostensibly more civilized society traveling to this far corner of the earth in search of a party a vibe maybe a daughter, what people from a more ostensibly civilized culture might consider a terrifying nightmare scenario-- for the people seated next to them it's Tuesday.

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:48:00 +0000

Bounce

Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme takes its cue from its central character: brassy, loud, unrelentingly annoying, chronicling the life of one Marty Mauser, a nascent shoe salesman and up-and-coming pingpong player. Marty to put it mildly likes to burn both ends of his candle: he hustles players at the local bar; hustles his rich friend Dion (Luke Manley) to finance production of orange pingpong balls with his name printed on them; hustles his married friend Rachel (Odessa A'zion) for sex at the shoe store's back room; hustles his Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) for $700 to help finance a trip to the British Open in London (to be fair Uncle Murray's hustling Marty too, trying to manipulate the young man into staying on as salesman while having an affair with Marty's mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher)).

Timothee Chalamet trades in his Kwisatch Haderach stillsuit for a long-sleeved blouse unbuttoned to reveal the sweatsoaked undershirt, glues a dead caterpillar to his upper lip the way I assume Guy Gardner likes to sport a bowl cut-- as a loud 'FUCK YOU' to anyone who objects to his grating personality. It's perfect; like him or not as an actor, have to admit this role fits Chalamet's less-than-charming persona to a t, down to the nipples standing defiantly erect 'neath the thin cotton.

It's a vibe, I suppose. Helps that Darius Khondji is cinematographer, with shadowed aesthetic developed from his time with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Alien Resurrection) through his time developing the dank grandeur of David Fincher's signature features (Se7en, Panic Room) to his time applying richly textured layers to James Gray's later features (The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z, Armageddon Time) to his time illuminating the Safdie brothers' shaky-cam aesthetic (Uncut Gems, this film), lending them more gravitas and solemn beauty than some of them actually deserve. For this production Khondji adds a sumptuous glow about Chalamet's tousle-haired head, suggesting he's more 'Fast' Eddie Felson than Ratso Rizzo (we're not totally fooled, but Khondji for moments at a time manages to leave us confused).

Also helps that legendary Jack Fisk is production designer-- he grew up in '50s Illinois, is adept in creating worlds set in the past (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, Killers of the Flower Moon), the relative present (The Straight Story, Carrie, Mulholland Drive), the nightmarish subconscious (Eraserhead). Fisk's work here is so immersive I can believe it helped settle and modulate Safdie's usually frenetic camerawork, the visual equivalent of slowing down from the near-incomprehensible near-hysterical gibberish Adam Sandler spouted in Uncut Gems to the comparatively sedate rat-tat-tat delivery of '30s screwball comedies.

Does the film work? To a point. It wants to be The Hustler, to beat that film at its own game of taking up a relatively lightweight game (billiards), here employing an even more seemingly trivial sport (table tennis) to pronounce on momentous matters (At what point does selling one's honor dignity soul for the umpteenth time become too much? Who in this dog eat dog world does one truly care about, dig in one's heels for-- and why?), but lacks Robert Rossen's lean elegant visual design, lacks George C. Scott's Mephistophelean presence as counterweight. Marty stands alone in a world of fools and suckers and that I suspect is how Chalamet (who's never suffered from a shy and retiring ego) likes it, and likely why this film fails to touch its intended level.

This Marty isn't even half as interesting as the real deal-- Marty Reisman, on whom Chalamet's character is loosely based, was a table tennis player from the age of nine, won his first city championship at the age of thirteen; he hustled for money and yes toured the world as opening comedy act for the Harlem Globetrotters, often visiting Hong Kong, and (a detail omitted from the film) smuggled gold and Rolex watches out of Asia into the United States. He won the 1997 US National Hardbat Championship at the age of 67, and in 2008 demonstrated on the Late Show with David Letterman that he could split a cigarette with a pingpong ball. On archival video footage Reisman looks improbable, with limbs longer and lankier than Chalamet's (you can believe he can cover a pingpong table with arms outstretched), his onscreen manner is far more charming and charismatic-- if he ever approached me for financing of thousands of orange pingpong balls with his name printed on them, I'd seriously consider his proposal.

This isn't Safdie's best work either-- that would be Uncut Gems, co-directed with brother Benny, in a milieu the brothers grew up in (the New York Diamond District), with real stakes (loansharks, a gambling addiction, a crumbling marriage, millions in rings and gems and unsecured loans), with Adam Sandler sweating the kind of desperation Chalamet can only fantasize about. Usually not a fan of the Safdies' trademark smash-n-grab frenetically-cut style but in this one case they may actually have a point, and so does the film-- an icepick of a point, driven into your skull between your eyes.

And this isn't even the ultimate table tennis saga-- that would be Masaaki Yuasa's Ping Pong: the Animation, with visuals that make the Safdies look like they are on quaaludes, and a narrative that goes into power dynamics, players' psychology, the significance of the sport to various countries' cultures (specifically Japan and China), the pitfalls and virtues of both victory and defeat. Would I call Marty supreme? Wouldn't call it bad, but would definitely rank it fourth at best.

First published in Businessworld 3.12.26

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:50:00 +0000

The stripping of Joan

Finally saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc on projected video (thanks to Alliance Francais), with music but without subtitles (no thanks Alliance, though to be fair they tried their level best to get one), so I watched without having understood a word. Nevertheless: an incredible film, one of the greatest-- silent French or otherwise-- ever.

Roger Ebert's series of articles on what he considers great films is a helpful introduction. His essay notes that the set was built as a complex of houses, prison cells and courtrooms, all within four concrete walls (solid enough and thick enough to support men and equipment) linked by towers; also mentions how doors and windows are slightly out of plumb with each other and full of strange geometric harmonies, possibly following trends in German Expressionist production design and French avant-garde art.

Ebert’s article is remarkable as much for its detail (bet he actually went to the Danish Film Museum in Copenhagen to look at the scale model of the set) as for his failure to ask the crucial question: why did Dreyer build the thing? Going through the effort implies Dreyer planned to make use of it; he probably envisioned a series of deep-focus shots, with the characters posed in different positions throughout the sets a la Alan Resnais, or complex tracking shots that snake through the rooms a la Max Ophuls or Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (and in fact you see one such shot at the film’s beginning-- the camera traveling through what if I remember right was the prison guards' barracks, with soldiers eating, talking, lounging about). You assume Dreyer would use one or the other style, anything except what he actually did-- huge closeups that cut from one face to another like shuffled Tarot cards, dealing out Jeanne’s destiny in a series of images.

I think Ebert himself might have suggested the answer to his own unasked question when he mentions how Dreyer took one look at the script written for the film and threw it away, instead relying on actual trial transcripts. Was it possible Dreyer took one look at the extravagant set and turned his back on it as well? Was it possible that Dreyer threw caution (and all the planning involved) to the winds and relied instead on inspiration and instinct?

Ebert’s article is full of facts but discussing the film itself can only pay the usual lip service-- at one point quoting Pauline Kael (“It may be the finest performance ever recorded on film”) to describe Falconetti as Jeanne. He doesn’t even begin to do justice to the film’s intense tactility, the unblinking camera bearing down on the actors' faces, revealing every pore, wrinkle, nose hair, mole; every twitch of cheek, every faint smile, every tear squeezed out the corner of an eye. Jeanne’s smooth (if somewhat speckled) complexion makes marked contrast with the coarse vellum of the inquisitors’; Dreyer complements their faces with voluminous robes for the inquisitors, severely plain shirts for Jeanne. Even the torture-chamber scene gives one a prickly crawly sensation-- the thousands of sharpened spikes spinning over the skin, nibbling it away. Dreyer makes everything seem up close and personal, almost three-dimensional, as if the film were meant to be felt as much as seen. Then there’s the ambiguity: the film is a drama about a saint in the process of being martyred, same time it’s an investigation conducted by weary bureaucrats trying to make sense of a dangerous schizophrenic. You might argue the way Dreyer casts his characters gives the game away (inquisitors + big noses and bad complexion = evil; Jeanne + lovely liquid eyes = good); I say: not necessarily. The inquisitors’ twisted faces reveal vulnerability and confusion as much as cruelty; Jeanne’s face suggests spiritual ecstasy and complete insanity both. Dreyer is too much of an artist not to plant doubt about the integrity of both judged and judges, lend both sides a measure of sympathy (not having seen a subtitled version, I wouldn’t know if the dialogue is equally ambivalent).

Then there’s the sexuality-- why else call it “The Passion of Joan?” Watching the film alone in the darkened Alliance projection room was an unsettlingly familiar experience, as if I'd done this before: in a ‘70s-style porn theater, on a diet of triple-X features. Possibly porn filmmakers of the ‘70s took their cue from Dreyer-- they share his taste for simple sets and costumes, his preference for exciting imagery over boring dialogue. They even share something of his style, in the repeated giant closeups of human anatomy put up on the big screen, held there long enough for the raincoat crowd to achieve orgasm.

Dreyer for his part seems aware of the connection between spirituality and sexuality. The faces he presents-- the inquisitors’ leers, Jeanne’s rapture (as if she was experiencing multiple climaxes)-- could be choice excerpts from some triple-X compilation featuring Marilyn Chambers and a pack of hooded John Holmes wearing outsized genitals on their faces. It’s the focus, the total immersion on a single subject, the willingness to discard all else (a completed script, an expensive set), to zero in on what matters most that links these two kinds of filmmakers; the difference is, the pornographer zeroes in on the heroine’s genitals, Dreyer on her face.

Falconetti has an oversized nose with an eggplant-shaped head (Dreyer found her in a little boulevard theater, performing light comedy). She’s hardly a beauty in the league of, say, Milla Jovovich, star of Luc Besson’s ruinously extravagant Hollywood version The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc. Jovovich, a fashion model and Besson’s ex-wife, feels no scruples about taking her clothes off in front of the camera but when we actually glimpse her nakedness it has no impact; it’s yet one more supermodel sans clothes. Doesn’t help that Jovovich’s voice is so thin-- hardly one to inspire the French Army-- and that she looks constantly terrified, as if she knew she was trapped in the center of a multimillion-dollar piece of ordure with no quick way out.

Falconetti plays a more disturbing game with her audience. She removes not fabric but objective distance, makes us identify with her luminously transparent, infinitely more accessible Jeanne. Dreyer reportedly forced the actress to kneel on stone (again the similarity to porn, which is all about painful positions), ordered her to wipe all expression from her face, shot her over and over again in endless takes, then used what little footage he liked. Either Dreyer got what he was after from the considerable amount of film shot or Falconetti found herself totally identifying with the sorely tried martyr; the net effect was a complete shedding of all inhibition and self-awareness in the actress. Quite an achievement: when Falconetti’s Jeanne expresses an emotion you feel the surge from her face straight into you, as if her nerves were hardwired into yours. It’s like we live inside Jeanne’s skin-- actual sex would have been redundant.

The same time the film allows us to be intimate with her it also allows us to become complicit partners in her intellectual and emotional ravaging. Dreyer’s imagery couldn’t be more explicit: a dozen or so wizened old priests surrounding a girl of nineteen. They go at it for what seems like hours, taking turns or attacking all at once. Jeanne responds as any victim of assault would, with pain terror shock (and, perversely, not a little pleasure). Somehow she survives; with the cruelly enduring strength of the simple faithful, she survives to defy them all and be burned at the stake.

The word ‘mindfuck’ comes to mind for what they do to her, implying as it does something both nonphysical and degrading. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc is arguably one of the earliest examples of a mindfuck ever, and I think part of the film’s power is that it’s also an arousing sight-- that something in me responds to Jeanne’s vulnerability, to the inquisitors’ unholy power, the most spiritual and most profoundly erotic film I've ever seen.

Published in Menzone 11.2.01, republished in Cambridge Book Review, Winter 2000-2001

The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:10:00 +0000

The Fashion of Joan of Arc

Carl Dreyer’s 1928 French silent La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of the greatest films-- French, silent, otherwise-- ever; Luc Besson’s 1999 The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc is possibly one of the silliest-- French, epic, otherwise-- and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Such is progress.

Dreyer’s film is an astonishingly spare work, essentially a hundred and ten minutes of gigantic close-ups strung together and little else. No fat nothing extraneous-- each shot adds to the film’s sense of inevitability, each cut (1,500 of them) accelerates momentum. Besson’s at two hours and twenty minutes has little meat-- as if Besson had tossed in everything learned in grade school about Joan but stopped short before freshman year. Dreyer’s has the courage of a consummate artist with an idea of what he wants to present to the world; Besson’s has the courage of a consummate hack, piling special effect upon special effect in the hope that heat and pressure would build inside his digitally enhanced big-budgeted compost heap and ignite to yield a vision.

And it is a vision, sort of. Jeanne at a young age, swinging her walking stick at daisies (she must have been a terror at flower shows); an older Jeanne, hacking off her hair and screaming orders at her Neanderthal soldiers; finally, Jeanne in prison, talking over defense strategy with an imaginary legal counsel (a woefully miscast Dustin Hoffman). It’s a Jeanne’s Greatest Hits, safe-as-houses epic filmmaking, except that Besson tries his damnedest to make the picture his own by cramming the first half with signature action sequences. As for Jeanne’s visions: Dreyer only suggests what she sees, Besson actually shows them-- marauding wolves, a bleeding Christ (he yells occasionally, but is otherwise a nice guy), time-lapse photography of flowers crawling all over Jeanne’s breasts (Jeanne presumably having seen Peter Gabriel’s "Sledgehammer” video).

Dreyer’s film is in love with textural contrasts-- the oval smoothness of the girl's egglike face against the corduroy harshness of the judges’ own; the Spartan simplicity of Jeanne’s military uniform against the judges’ elaborate robes. Besson isn’t so much concerned with textures as he is with textiles-- his King Charles of France (a startling John Malkovich) leans against stone like a practiced lounge lizard wearing the latest in Medieval chic while his mother (a terrifyingly bald Faye Dunaway) wears huge gowns and headgear so elaborate she must be able to receive signals from the HBO channel. Everyone wears his clothes no matter how dilapidated with a sense of style; everyone is allowed at least two to three costume changes over the course of the film. Even Jeanne has her wardrobe, from Extreme Peasant to Rusty Armor to Rough Prisonwear-- each worn with awardwinning aplomb.

To play Jeanne Besson cast his wife (now ex) Milla Jovovich, and the logic is impeccable-- who else to star in a bigscreen supershow but a fashion supermodel? Dreyer found his Jeanne, Maria Falconetti, on the theater stage, doing light comedy; he bullied her, tormented her, demanded endless takes involving excruciatingly exact instructions, and the result is one of the great performances in the history of cinema, a vivid Jeanne whose large eyes express either terror or ecstasy. Falconetti found the experience so memorable she never acted in another film for the rest of her life.

We can’t pretend Jovovich even begins to seem adequate for the role-- she’s a great camera subject, but her voice suggests a panicked mouse. So what? Realism isn’t the point, neither is artistry-- style is all and in the end what The Messenger's all about. Besson isn’t out to glorify Jeanne but to cremate her and scatter the ashes; if anything my main complaint isn’t that he goes too far, but doesn’t go far enough. Would have liked campier dialogue (script is about as taut as overcooked spaetzle), maybe a prize Gallic insult or two (“I fart in your general direction!”). Would also have liked a musical number in the spirit of History of the World, Part I tossed in (Hoffman tapping Jovovich’s knees with a pair of wooden mallets comes to mind).

Film critic once called Besson’s La Femme Nikita 'the Death of French cinema as we know it.' In a sense Besson’s movies from The Last Battle through The Big Blue to his latest is one long descending spiral-- the inevitable Hollywoodization of the French industry, its reduction to 'kiss-kiss, bang-bang' product. Besson does 'kiss-kiss, bang-bang;' he does them unashamedly (except perhaps here-- the stretch marks show where he tries too hard). Punchline is, Besson does it better-- with more grace and elan-- than practically any other Hollywood (or French) hack alive.

French critics or critics in general might not like that; they’re likely squirming in their seats. They’d rather die than give Besson even that much credit. The Death of French cinema As We Know It? You bet, and you’re all invited to the memorial dinner afterwards. Don’t forget ze whine.

First published in Businessworld 3.10.2000

Nightjohn (Charles Burnett, 1996)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:40:00 +0000

The fruit of the tree of knowledge

Charles Burnett's Nightjohn (1996)-- about the perils of slaves learning to read in the early 19th century South-- succeeds in transforming the for-the-whole-family TV-movie (Hallmark Channel produced, Disney distributed) into something more unsettling (screened this for my students back when I was teaching at-risk youths, and one of the most common responses was: "This was on the Disney Channel?").

Nightjohn apparently commanded a sizeable budget for a Hallmark production; the cinematography is more lush, the production values more elaborate than usual. Carl Lumbly plays the film's eponymous character with laser intensity, fierce eyes framed by dark brow; you can imagine the actor playing either Christ or Judas, perhaps both (would have had more respect for Mel Gibson if he had cast Lumbly as Christ or Judas in his boxoffice smash of a snuff flick).

Instructive comparing Burnett's film to Gary Paulsen's short novel. Paulsen, a popular writer of youth fiction, created a slim account of the cruelties in store for rebellious slaves in the South. That's what you remembered from the book: the sadism and graphic brutality. Slave owner Clel Waller was a "white maggot"-- his characterization didn't go much deeper than that; Sarny was a mere narrator, Nightjohn a cipher, the book efficient but inexpressive (oddly enough Paulsen in 1997 wrote a sequel titled Sarny, which seems to benefit somewhat from Paulsen having (strictly my suspicion no hard evidence to back it up) seen Burnett's adaptation).

Burnett with help from writer Bill Cain fleshes out Paulsen's flimsy characters: Sarny is now a quiet yet spirited girl ("she's 'still waters,'" her guardian Dealey (Lorraine Toussaint) observes); John (as he's called onscreen) a man who lost his family, finds another along the way.

The biggest difference comes with Burnett and Cain's treatment of Waller. As Beau Bridges plays him Clel has an affable roguish charm; he's not a bad man or (key difference) doesn't think of himself as a bad man-- he doesn't flog his slaves because he enjoys the act or needs to vent his frustrations (at one point he tells his son "I've never whipped a slave in anger"); he does so because it's expected of him, part of the business of owning slaves-- good practice, is all.

Or so Waller thinks; in another significant change from the novel Burnett and Cain actually trace the flow of plantation money and labor onscreen, from the bank loans that buy the seeds to the long days watching and watering to the frantically heroic efforts to harvest to the machinations brought to bear behind Waller's back that force him to borrow from the bank again. Looking at his sagging face as he gradually realizes he has not made a fortune-- the opposite, if anything-- and you almost feel sorry for this slaveowner. Almost.

When John is found out Waller extracts an appalling penalty. John in the book keeps quiet and carries on the revolution behind Waller's back, setting up 'pit schools' (pits dug in the ground and covered so that the lamplight doesn't leak). John in the film is openly defiant; he tells Sarny "When an arm is cut off the other grows stronger. You're my other arm now." Sarny proves John right; she not only reads better than he does and at an earlier age she takes on Waller too-- only she's smarter, able to think on her feet.

At one point walking a dangerous tightrope Sarny points out to Waller that he's actually a very rich man. His slaves are his greatest wealth, his problem being he can't seem to monetize them effectively. An extraordinary moment, not just for Sarny but for Burnett and Cain-- it's like they've gotten so far deep into the mindset of this man that they can see him in his entirety, assets and liabilities and all, even clearer than he does himself. Yes his greatest wealth are his slaves, maltreated and abused as they are; if he can look beyond those blinkered terms-- see them as equals and partners to nourish and collaborate with-- he might even start making some serious money.

In Paulsen's book John and Sarny take their punishments without complaint, then secretly carry on the teaching, a quieter safer way to respond to oppression. John and Sarny are retooled to be more active in Burnett's film and while their solutions may seem farfetched, said solutions are often rooted in the power of literacy to be applied, not just to immediate objectives (deciphering maps, reading road signs, forging day passes), but also long-range goals (knowing slave laws-- knowing one's way around slave laws-- and someday maybe repealing them). A lesson that resonates especially today, in this information age, and a lesson I couldn't resist pointing out to my students, to keep in mind when picking up a book.

Burnett gives us the antebellum South in all its moods, from everyday grit to evening glamor. Waller holds a lavish dinner for his older brother and guests, all sweeping candlelit shots and extravagantly plush furniture; when the topic of slavery pops up in conversation the camera stops to gaze as Sarny is slapped for dropping a tray of food. John teaches Sarny in the glow of firelight, the student warming her mind under the blaze of her teacher's attention; when Waller uncovers evidence of slaves reading (a stolen bible) he conducts his investigation under the noon sun, to better highlight the horrors to come.

Interesting to note that some of my students already saw the film; that teachers have gotten wind and are showing this to kids, usually for Black History Month. Ironic to think perennially cashstrapped Burnett was thusly bankrolled, and granted the biggest exposure of his career thanks to Disney.

I pointed out how Allison Jones' wide-open eyes give Sarny's face freshness and urgency; also pointed out that narrating Nightjohn through her voice and words adds a fairy-tale feel to the story, the camera-- taking its cue from that voice-- wrapping the drama in a ravishing glow (I remember Old Man's fierce face (Bill Cobb) as he recites his alphabet, just before revealing the heavy price he paid for learning). Burnett tells an important episode in African-American history in his distinctly humane gracefully understated manner-- all on a TV movie budget, under the banner of the world's largest entertainment corporation. That in my book counts as a miracle.

1.18.16, edited 2.2.18, then 2.26.26

"Wuthering Heights" (Emerald Fennell, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:07:00 +0000

Doddering Heights

(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail!)

Wouldn't condemn Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" for taking liberties with Emily Bronte, but would condemn the film for making such weak tea out of her novel.

Agreed the Byronic protagonist should be darkskinned-- though every Heathcliff in most every adaptation has been white (Olivier, Fiennes); agreed taking out Hindley is a grievous wound (combining the man who adopts Heathcliff with the man who most hates Heathcliff makes for a veddy confusing character); agreed cutting out the novel's second half truncates much of the story's power (though most every version including the classic 1939 William Wyler adaptation does just that)-- Fennel coulda woulda shoulda but didn't and if we hew to the principle that adaptations must have leeway for the art to breathe life in another medium then she didn't haveta.

What I do find unacceptable is the softening of the main characters. Emily's Catherine to put it bluntly is a bitch, Emily's Heathcliff a sonfabitch, and their relationship has a strong whiff of incest about it (implied but never stated that Heathcliff is likely Mr. Earnshaw's bastard child-- and Catherine likely his half-sister). I'd even object to Fennell's turning Nelly (Hong Chau) into an underhanded villain, tho there are hints here and there-- the crucial scene in the novel when Heathcliff eavesdrops (why didn't Nelly warn Catherine?) comes to mind. I've heard criticism that the whole course of the novel depended on such a little thing-- a man listening and leaving at just the right moment-- but truth of the matter is anything could have split the two up: a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, a trivial spat. Catherine and Heathcliff are what you'd call 'compelling'-- characters you'd love to read about in a gothic novel but hell to actually live with day to day. They're so stubborn they'd find the slightest excuse to fight; they're their own worst enemies. Shifting the blame on Nelly as Fennell does absolves them of what they've done to each other, lessens the tragedy of their relationship.

As for the sex-- two ways to think about it: either they've been fucking every chance they get, under a bed, in a barn, round a corner behind a door, or they haven't. Funny effect of a 19th century gothic, in particular Emily's type of gothic: you never see sex mentioned but it seeps between every line like blood through a linen shirt, and if you have a particularly overactive imagination (like to think I give mine the occasional workout) you'll conjure all kinds of scenarios. To be fair Fennell comes up with two satisfying ones-- where Catherine and Heathcliff hide up in the barn attic, where Nelly visits Heathcliff and Isabella and he has her in a leash (Alison Oliver, physically unappealing till she marries, then a startling delight).

If they haven't-- why that's even hotter. Two lovers aching for each other who haven't even made out, much less done heavy petting? Can you imagine the epic edging involved, the blueness of Heathcliff's balls? Emily I submit was actually trying to describe a more than merely physical connection: Heathcliff and Catherine spent hours with each other as youths, presumably the way Emily and sisters Charlotte and Anne spent hours with brother Branwell, creating kingdoms-- worlds-- of their own. A melding of kindred souls is what I think they call it.

So when Fennell offers all those vigorously staged and shot onscreen sex scenes as her substitution for a lifetime's worth of wild windswept fantasies-- well let's just say all that muscular exertion falls a little flat.

Won't even talk about the dropped second half that outlines both Heathcliff's generation-spanning vengeance and the next generation's ability not just to suffer but endure and, improbably, thrive under that suffering. Yes Heath and Cath are avatars of willful fire but that second half helps complicate our view of man-- suddenly he's a crumbling landlord watching the world grow past his control, and there's something pathetic-- sad even-- about his decline.

That's my problem with the Fennell adaptation. Are there better? I can cite three-- four if you include the Olivier (who makes for an unruly Heathcliff, tho I remember disliking Merle Oberon's Cathy, and the William Wyler style of tastefully rendered squalor).

Luis Bunuel's Abismos de Pasion (1954) shifts the setting from Yorkshire to Mexico and takes a chainsaw to the novel, lopping off the lovers' childhood (the film starts when Heathcliff comes back a rich man), ending shortly after Catherine's passing (the same tactic Fennell and Wyler adopt). Working on a shoestring budget he tells the story with heroic simplicity, as only a true pervert can (think David Lynch with The Straight Story or Pier Paolo Pasolini with The Gospel According to Matthew): the emotions simmer under a parchment of respectability, the wind howls past twisted leafless trees in the high chaparral. No we don't get much background (why did Alejandro (Heathcliff) leave? Why does he hate Eduardo (Edgar) and Ricardo (Hindley) so much?) but Bunuel is all about smolder and atmosphere and Alejandro (Jorge Mistral) has a killer glare that burns holes on the screen. With a climax played to the strains of Wagner's "Liebestod" so down and dirty and abrupt and glorious it leaves you a little breathless.

If you want the book the whole book and nothing but try Yoshishige Yoshida's Arashi Ga Oka (1988) set on the windswept slopes of a volcano, telling the entire four-hundred-page story across three generation in a relatively compact 140 minutes. Yoshida's version is inspired by Noh acting-- the characters strut or slink on a minimalist stage-- and is contemplative in tone, taking its time (despite the massive amount of story involved) to accumulate detail till Yoshida's version of Emily's elaborate narrative unrolls in all its ungainly glory.

I talked about less being more when it comes to sex; I lied. Yoshida stages a scene where Kinu (the Catherine figure, played by Yuko Tanaka) coils around Onimaru (the Heathcliff figure, played by Yusaku Matsuda) like a serpent and you're thinking Ms. Fennell should have sat down and taken notes. And for all its faithfulness the film is hardly stuffy-- Onimaru is a brute, his quest to possess Kinu involving everything from bloodspurting violence to gravedigging to suggestions of necrophilia (and worse). No ghosts-- Yoshida doesn't go for anything so cheap-- but the film definitely gives you the feeling that the murdered do haunt their murderers. Can't really take credit for finding this one; Mr. Bilge Ebiri put it on top of his Vulture list of best adaptations of the book.

Helps that my personal favorite also happens to be a great comedy, Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story. Okay hear me out: Gerry (Claudette Colbert) flees her penniless husband/lover Tom (Joel McCrea) to marry multimillionaire John D Hackensacker lll (Rudy Vallee) and obtain the $99,000 needed to build a prototype of Tom's invention (an airport suspend like a tennis racket over a city). When Tom shows up at Hackensacker's mansion to stop the wedding Gerry passes him off as her brother Captain McGlue; meantime McGlue catches the eye of Hackensacker's sister Princess Centimillia a.k.a. Maud (Mary Astor), who plots to make him her fourth husband.

A pair of siblings, the suggestion of incest (in 1942 Hollywood!), the scheming, the naked greed, the sheer amorality-- the film is basically Wuthering Heights with palm trees and jokes. Joel McCrea makes a fine tall Heathcliff with his hulking shoulders, stiff bearing, and glowering tendency to sock any man who looks at his wife; Claudette Colbert is the perfect chaos demon with her wide "who me?" eyes and adulterously pursed lips. The film ends abruptly with an unlikely twist and too-convenient reveal, too convenient, that is, unless you factor in the zany chase that opens the picture with characters conveniently forgotten till the plot suddenly drags them in, and a final shot that suggests a never-ending circular chase that has only paused to allow for end credits-- and suddenly you're reminded that Emily Bronte's brooding vision is full of souls seeking and repelling each other, their forebears and siblings and descendants caught in their wake, in a never-ending circular chase of desire and destruction, the second circle of Hell. Am I nuts? Maybe but so's the book and so, in my book, is this film

2.19.26

Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:34:00 +0000

To mourn or not to mourn

Chloe Zhao's latest-- adapted by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell from O'Farrell's well-regarded 2020 novel-- is a tearjerker, most people will agree. The question one might ask: does it earn our tears, or are we overindulging?

Haven't read O'Farrell's book so can't approach the material that way-- can only go on what's visible on the big screen.

The film starts impressively enough-- Zhao's camera looking up into the sky or down a hole, both sky and soil crowded by giant beech, their roots furry with moss. We see a hawk swoop down onto the glove of one Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), catching along its glide path the eye of a young man (Paul Mescal).

Attraction, connection, commitment: Agnes is courted, marries the man, is disowned by her family, is forced to move in with newfound husband. Gives birth to daughter, Susana (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). At about this point more or less one notices an oddity: we hear the man referred to as 'tutor,' 'husband,' 'son,' 'father' but not by name, the reason being simple: this isn't the man's story.

Zhao's film-- and O'Farrell's novel presumably-- is a member of that subgenre of metafiction where a well-known tale is retold not through the eyes of the protagonist but of a supporting character's, in this case Agnes. Tom Stoppard did this as early as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, (about the eponymous pair and their misadventures with a certain Danish prince) back in 1966; Gerardo de Leon pulled it off (with the help of Teodorico Santos) fifteen years earlier with Sisa (the story of Noli Me Tangere through the eyes of its most memorable minor character). Sidenote: Stoppard thirty-two years later told of the staging of Romeo and Juliet, where the real-life playwright immortalizes his true love in a play; Mario O'Hara that same year remade Sisa with its equally real-life writer-hero immortalizing his true love in a novel. Might strictly be me but Stoppard seems to write brilliant fanfic in eerie parallel step with Filipino filmmakers, was at one point anticipated by a decade and a half.

Being silly of course. Stoppard retells the story of a well-known play through the eyes of one of its minor characters; O'Farrell retells the story of a well-known life through the eyes of the man's wife. Stoppard is working with an established play, arguably the most famous in all of English literature, O'Farrell filling in the gaps in a biography with guesswork and imagination.

Another noted difference: Stoppard's play (saw the 1990 adaptation directed by the author) is often funny, full of absurdist Beckettian humor (as befits two characters with little else to do); Hamnet offers few laughs, if any, and the dearth can be overwhelming. This is heavy drama, gets heavier as it unfolds.

Paul Mescal has been dinged for being too pretty and I see the critics' point: if O'Farrell's purpose is to tell the story of Agnes and not of Agnes' husband, or at least only enough of Agnes' husband to establish that he's emotionally distant or becomes emotionally distant when tragedy strikes, doesn't help to have an actor with melting Spaniel eyes, with a gaze so soulful he keeps you worshipping even when he's a self-centered jerk. The smarter money would have been to cast someone less distractingly pretty-- this generation's equivalent of Gary Oldman or Tim Roth (I don't know that many young uns), able to repel us then, eventually, win our affections the hard way. A Humphrey Bogart, if you like, of contemporary indie cinema.

Critics also ding Jessie Buckley for being one-note and to that I say: phooey. The actor knows a good thing when she sees it and goes all the way, from spell incantations to hard births to desperate resuscitation attempts to primal screams loud enough to raise the dead. And it isn't all acting with a capital 'A:' Towards film's end, when she finally attends a performance of her husband's long-awaited handiwork, her expressions and mutterings-- consistent with her tendency to mutter during moments of stress or when she needs to focus-- help us to a better understanding (as she in turn better understands) of what her husband hath wrought onstage.

Mind you, I said 'understand,' I didn't say 'reconcile.' That's certainly suggested in the way Agnes and her husband look at each other at performance's end, and in the way Zhao arranges images for the film's finale, the hoariest kind of biopic cliche-- but I like to think there's enough ambiguity that we're left with the possibility the ending led to a momentary connection not holistic healing, that the marriage ahead will still have rough bumps and deep potholes, maybe a historically unrecorded separation or at least estrangement along the way.

As for the accusation that a playwright transmuting life experiences into a masterpiece is yet another cliche-- O c'mon. C'mon. The late Filipino filmmaker Mario O'Hara admitted to taking ideas from what happened around him; he walked everywhere, every day, sometimes from Avenida to Luneta, a forty minute trek. He at least partially based his script for Insiang on what happened to his backyard neighbors back in Pasay (partly on a radio drama written by Mely Tagasa). If drawing from experience to create art is merely another old trope, I submit there's a reason why it became an old trope in the first place.

O'Farrell notes that she based much of her novel's emotions on her own when her child was sick-- in this case of meningitis, a terrifying disease-- and on her experiences as a child suffering from encephalitis. If she presumably invests so much feeling in her novel can Zhao-- whose films are notable for their often low dramatic temperature-- do no less? Should Zhao do what she usually does and hold back, understate, make the scenes of sickness and suffering tasteful, even artful? More phooey; any parent-- me included-- knows exactly what Agnes and through her O'Farrell are going through, and any husband or father will be just as dumbfounded when they realize that whatever terror or sadness or despair they've experienced is nothing, a mere foothill, to the volcanic upheavals a wife and mother undergo.

Don't know I don't know; already admitted to having failed to read O'Farrell's book (currently committed to a really long read, likely take years to finish), and will admit to being a sorry nonexpert on Elizabethan drama (seen film adaptations-- does that count?). If more knowledgeable heads can hang the label 'grief porn' on this film then so be it-- but it's well-made porn, I submit, nevertheless, and I'll admit to having giving in to its spell a few times.

First published in Businessworld 2.6.26

Saving Private Ryan vs The Thin Red Line

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:12:00 +0000

Battle of the Best Pictures: The Thin Red Line vs. Saving Private Ryan

Spielberg is master of a narrow emotional range, that of a child in suburban America. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET the Extraterrestrial, even parts of Jaws, Poltergeist, the underrated 1941 all reflect this. More, he has the child's pleasure in toys, and in motion for the sheer pleasure of motion. His films move, and that is no small thing; they are “movies” in the fullest sense.

When Spielberg tries to go beyond that, to "grow up" in effect, he can't seem to do it. The Color Purple is an embarrassing depiction of the black experience. Empire of the Sun is a Boy's Adventure adaptation of JG Ballard, one of the most perverse writers ever. Schindler's List has wonderful texture—gritty and grim—but is basically a simplistic view: the Jews are saints ready to float up to heaven (to the accompaniment of composer John Williams’ choral music), and the Nazis are bastards ready to plunge straight to hell (except for Ralph Fiennes, who’s a sympathetic bastard).

The most shocking thing about Saving Private Ryan—and this because it plays to Spielberg's strengths—is that he treats war as a game. Spielberg turns the Omaha landing into a vast game of patintero, where the beach—a place traditionally reserved for fun and leisure—is desecrated by blood and violent death. Soldiers sidestep and dart forward; when caught their guts splatter all over the sand. The huge landing barriers resemble jumping jacks left by some titan child. The film’s final battle, with tanks rumbling forth like armorplated Jurassic creatures, is a gigantic game of hide-and-seek—the tanks seeking out and killing desperately hidden soldiers.

But the drama in the middle of the film lacks bite. Spielberg doesn't have the conviction of Martin Scorsese or Francis Coppola, and the Nazi and American who start out cowardly and later become murderous seems more like a belated attempt to complicate matters.

Doesn’t help to cast Tom Hanks in the role of the tight-lipped Captain Miller. Hanks’ wholesomeness simplifies his character’s silence; you know impure thoughts have never dwelled behind those baby blues. Hanks looks like the Hollywood personification of Spielberg’s sensibility—no matter how many heads are blown off, no matter how much intestine spill on bloody sand, human decency and compassion will always win out in the end.

The Thin Red Line shows what an adult is capable of when dealing with the Second World War. Less gore in all of Thin Red than in the first twenty minutes of Ryan, but what blood there is startles with its brightness and viscosity, especially splattered against deep green grass. A quick shot of a mutilated soldier speaks far more eloquently of the cruelty of Japanese soldiers than all the bullets fired by the German military. And Malick knows how to use silence: when soldiers approach a Japanese bunker you sense hearts beating triple-time. When the camera captures a man’s face in giant close-up, his huge eyes—deep within his cowled shadowed face—communicates a fear as wordless and primal as the nightmare you had last night.

The Thin Red Line is unlike most other Hollywood movies made recently—maybe because the filmmaker hasn’t made any Hollywood movies recently. Malick’s last feature was Days of Heaven, twenty years ago, and before that Badlands; Thin Red brings the total number in his filmography to date to three. Nick Nolte, who plays a major role, probably said it best: Malick is an artist because he hasn’t made a film in twenty years, never made a living making films, does so for reasons that have little to do with money.

Or with pleasing an audience. Half the film is Hans Zimmer’s haunting New Age music; the other half is half-whispered voiceovers by men in combat about life, about death, about Nature, love, good and evil. Half the time you can’t tell which soldier is having what interior monologue; half the time, you can’t even tell characters apart. Only the superior officers are familiar with John Travolta as a general, Nick Nolte a colonel, George Clooney and John Cusack captains, Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson sergeants—all the other soldiers from corporal downward are complete unknowns. This may be the only concession Malick makes to the boxoffice, and even then he’s perfectly perverse about it: Clooney is onscreen for maybe a minute, while Harrelson is recognizable only when he’s about to die. All the other familiar stars have equally brief screen times, despite which Nolte and Penn manage to stand out. Malick concentrates on the more anonymous corporals and privates, and the result is a blurring of characters, a melding of faces into one composite military face, staring wide-eyed at the screen, at you.

Actually, the film's real star is Malick. It’s his vision up there on screen, you wouldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s if you tried. He lights the jungle canopy as if it were the inside of an emerald, and for contrast has these hunched twisted men—darkened by dirt and gunpowder—crawling underneath. A backlit leaf has all the aura of St. Bernadette in a religious epic; bodies swim crystalline waters with dreamy slow-motion grace, with all the time in the world before coming up for air. Malick has been criticized for making what is essentially a war picture in Discovery Channel mode—but I’ve never seen a Discovery feature that devoted this much exaltation over grass and leaf, snake and beetle.

Malick is more than just a photographer of gorgeous images he's a mindscaper. Like the Kubrick of films like 2001 and The Shining, Malick likes to create totally imagined environments—the cinematic equivalent of a world that reflects his sensibilities. With The Thin Red Line, Malick has turned Guadalcanal into a vast tabletop miniature of his own mind—mysterious and silent (except for the occasional burst of choral music), with the light from the outside world filtered through a million leaves. It’s not (I suspect) the James Jones novel that you read, but I don’t think Malick’s changes diminish the work. If anything, he expands it, makes it bigger in our head the more we think about it; Ryan, a conventional film told conventionally, can only shrink in comparison.

I don't think Thin Red Line is perfect; there are flaws, and the philosophizing is part of it. Thought Malick should have let the film be a largely wordless experience, and allow us to supply it our own pretentiousness. Zimmer’s music and John Toll’s glorious cinematography prime you up for some really profound thinking, and all you get are Zen statements like “maybe all men got one big soul that everybody's a part of.” The far more potent visual poetry outstrips the verbal, ultimately saves the picture—making it the only 1999 Oscar nominee I can actually respect.

Excerpt from an article first published in Menzone Magazine 3.22.99

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia Dacosta, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:56:00 +0000

The numbing of the beast

Saw The Bone Temple and thought it far better than the first movie. No, I'll go further: in my book the best by far 28...Later movie to date. No, I'll go even further; best film of the entire franchise, and yes I haven't seen the as yet nonexistent third installment-- calling it here and now, a year or so early.

No-- backtrack. I'll go even further than that: Bone Temple is the first movie in the entire franchise that I actually like.

(WARNING: bits of plot discussed in explicit and bloody detail)

Dafuq? You heard me. Not a fan of the patented Boyle style, the frenetic editing, the often unsteady cam; not a fan of the blowhard in-your-face smash-n-grab filmmaking that steps right up yanks you by your lapels up close and insists on its importance-- loudly, in your reddening left ear.

O wasn't always like that. Shallow Grave with a veddy veddy young Ewan McGregor and slowly unhinging Christopher Eccleston (MVP being Kerry Fox as a very fatale femme) was pulpy stylish fun-- presumably the director was fresh and underfunded and didn't have the time or experience or money to develop the Boyelisms he would be known for later in his career.

Trainspotting was fairly impressive not just for the coolly nihilist attitude (mainly taken from the Irvine Welsh novel) but for the on-location low-tech look and the nightmarishly surreal sequences that approximated drug-induced hallucinations (fitting as the film dealt with heroin addiction).

A Life Less Ordinary was... unsatisfying. The angels felt like an arbitrary insertion and the ending-- if you've seen Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday you'll have an idea of my problems with it.

The Beach... well it had a nice location, though there are hidden gem beaches in the Philippines that could give its sandy stretch a run for its money.

With Sunshine started to sour on Boyle: the science in this fiction (by Garland) was dumb (rekindling the sun by bombing it?), the effects (particularly the distortion lens used on the creature) laughable. Might forgive this in a Roger Corman production but the film had a budget of $40 million-- and the ending! If you disliked A Life Less Ordinary's you might like this conclusion even less.

You see the trend: Slumdog Millionaire (which won a Golden Buttplug for Best Picture) might be the kind of urban fantasy Raj Kapoor or Guru Dutt could pull off with proper conviction (Dutt would likely give the story a darker more bitter spin); 28 Days Later introduced zombies so insecure they have to sprint for their dinner; 127 Hours was ninety minutes of camera acrobatics when one wanted to see a man pinned to a rockface hour after hour for days on end. Maybe the one recent Boyle I liked was T2, his sequel to Trainspotting-- mainly because the drug-fueled characters of the 90s had dried out enough in the late 2010s to gain some depth, or at least self-awareness.

So when Boyle presented 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple you can imagine my sigh of relief. Why? Because he didn't direct. Instead we have Nia DaCosta, who showed such promise in Candyman, giving the film a sense of lyricism and sidelong-glanced horror that Boyle at his goriest never could touch. The death match between Spike (Alfie Williams) and Jimmy Shite (Connor Newall) comes to mind: the combination of exhaustion and desperation shown not just in Spike's expression but his gradually slowing movements; the sense that poor Spike is outmatched but must still somehow outthink his taller stronger more skillful opponent. Later in the barn with the captive family... DaCosta starts us with an explicit amuse bouche earlier in the film (a man's head and spine pulled out of his torso); with the audience prepped, she only has to suggest what is going to happen-- a bit of blade, a few drops of blood-- for audiences to seriously flinch, imagining what is to come. DaCosta's point however-- the true horror she wants to convey-- isn't the 'charity' the Jimmys inflict on the helpless family, but the fact that a member (pregnant Cathy) is watching helplessly, unable to make a sound.

A sidenote: Jack O'Connell's Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal is a keen disappointment; having been so vividly set up in the earlier film's bloody opening, and being re-introduced in that same film's silly Power Rangers finale, when we see his character arc fully laid out before us it feels sadly underwhelming-- yet another tinpot religious leader, following his inner voices to senseless mayhem. I would have hoped for better, or more interesting, or at least more ambitious from Garland and Boyle.

The main setpiece of course is The Bone Temple, where we learn that Ralph Fiennes' Dr. Ian Kelson isn't just another mad scientist but a canny survivor with sharp deductive mind; opposite him is Chi Lewis-Parry's Samson, perhaps the biggest Alpha in the United Kingdom, and Kelson doesn't just handle Samson's repeated attacks, he deduces that the creature is actually after something, and the result of this line of reasoning I assume will form a crucial link that develops Garland's overall concept.

Fiennes and Lewis-Parry make a fine mismatched pair, clever prey to oversized predator, but if I'm not as enthusiastic about their storyline that's not the actors' fault, or DaCosta's (she guides them deftly through sequence after fine sequence, like a song number from Duran Duran of all things, and a quiet moment where Samson nibbles on berries): it's just that I've seen this done before and in my book better, in George Romero's still underrated Day of the Dead, where Richard Liberty played mad scientist with more unsettling ambiguity (at one point crossing a line between genius and sanity that Fiennes' Kelson refuses to approach) and Sherman Howard shows us the delicate dumbshow humor-- and surprising poignancy-- in his undead Bub.

Otherwise yes did like. Hope to see more from DaCosta-- hopefully an original project, and not part of some undead franchise.

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:24:00 +0000

We have ways of making you talk

Give Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi this much credit: he shoots what he sees. Intrigued by the look on a young girl's face, he made The Mirror (1997), about a child acting in a film production and the sudden plot twists she introduces in both the film and her life. Seeing how women are treated in Iran, he made The Circle (2000), a series of interlinked stories about different women, and Offside (2006), about a group of young women determined to see the World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain-- even if women are banned from attending.

The Circle, Offside, and the crime drama Crimson Gold (2003) helped earn Panahi a 6-year prison sentence and 20-year filmmaking ban; he responded with This Is Not A Film (2011), and the surreptitiously shot Taxi (2015). He was arrested and imprisoned again in 2022 for following up on the arrest of a fellow filmmaker, and his response is this film-- about former prisoners and how they react when meeting their former prison interrogator.

The above hugely incomplete sketch suggests Panahi's life would make an excellent political thriller; truth is likely less dramatic. His six-year prison sentence was commuted to house arrest a year and seven months later, and the house arrest commuted to a travel ban preventing him from leaving Iran; the second prison term lasted some seven months till he went on a hunger strike and the publicity from that strike forced authorities to release him 48 hours later. Each time he did something provocative and the regime responded he-- or his friends abroad-- managed to put enough pressure on the government to have him release or his sentence reduced; that said, he continues to provoke, and continues to fall into trouble (with this latest picture the government has sentenced him to a year in prison and a travel ban in absentia).

There's an accusation that ever since the government has stepped up their persecution Panahi's filmmaking has become "self-indulgent." I'm not sure; This is Not a Film is in part a documentary showing the severe limits imposed on Panahi's life at that moment, but also-- taking cue from the Magrittelike title-- suggests a self-mocking investigation into what does or does not constitute filmmaking; Taxi is basically a single locked-down camera conducting on-the-spot interviews of various people traveling by taxi in and about Tehran, but the dashboard cam also suggests the kind of video surveillance used to record subversives and gather incriminating evidence. There's a bit of play to Panahi's politically outspoken work, maybe even I daresay art; if it's actually any good is for the viewer to decide (I like em, for the record).

Major tactic Panahi uses for It Was Just an Accident is to tell the story as a comedy; one can imagine Costa-Gavras telling something similar as heavy drama. Here we have garage mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) who after many years hears an unforgettable sound: the squeaky prosthetic leg of one 'Peg Leg' Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), his one-time torturer, walking into his garage. Acting on impulse Vahid knocks Eghbal out (the one implausible moment in the film-- surely someone on the street would see a man drive a van up to a pedestrian to tap his skull with a shovel?) and ends up crisscrossing the city, asking various acquaintances to 1) help confirm he really is Eghbal and 2) deal with him once they confirm his identity.

Panahi isn't explicit, at least for the most part; you have to listen close to catch the throwaway details that suggest harrowing experiences. Shiva (Mariam Afshari) confirms Eghbal from his smell (which makes you ask: what went on between the two that she could recall a man years later from his smell?). Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr) has to feel up and down Eghbal's legs because he was blindfolded all the time. Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) admits she was tortured and it's never explicitly stated but you're almost sure (from the flood of words and tremor in her voice) that she was sexually assaulted-- and she has to admit this in front of her fiancee Ali (Majid Panahi). Each of them shudder and yell and have the kind of emotional outburst one sees in people who have undergone extreme trauma-- and the violence of the outbursts suggest we're not talking just sleep deprivation, or 24-hour heavy metal blasting through cell walls.

Comes the point when the rest of the party abandon the quest, leaving only Vahid and Shiva with their captive; what follows is arguably the most intense twenty minutes captured onscreen in recent years, where the two-- with time running out and no one left but them to finish the job-- resort to the very same techniques Eghbal presumably used on them. Poetic justice, yes, but also a kind of validation of Eghbal's approach; you might say at this point Vahid and Shiva have lost and Eghbal, poor weeping Eghbal possibly sitting in a puddle of his own urine and begging for his life, has won. Panahi refuses to judge; he just lets what happens happen. And-- in a chilling coda involving Vahid and a certain memorable squeak-- further suggests that some things can never be resolved, or healed, or forgotten.

Final note: interviewer Jean-Michel Frodon asked Panahi what if he can't return to Iran (he's appealing his current arrest order), and he said "...I can't do that. I don't have the courage! I'm unfit to live outside Iran." I can only wish I lack courage like that.

Best Films of 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:10:00 +0000

Best of 2025

Not having really focused on seeing everything out there because-- reasons-- but did manage a few titles. This list can and will change while I'm still playing catch-up.

22. Eddington (Ari Aster)

Starts off terrific as a New Mexico version of Bernard Tavernier's Coup de Torchon with Joaquin Phoenix in the Philippe Noiret role, then devolves into yet another vast conspiracy theory a la The Parallax View only with a lot more firepower (yawn) and a lot less atmospheric menace.

21. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

The first forty minutes, where different folks come together as a team and raise up a juke joint, are some of the most glorious storytelling of 2025; the rest-- not so much.

20. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

Basically Uncut Gems with ping pong paddles. This Safdie brother's first solo outing confirms several things: that setting their stories in the past helps settle their frenetic helter-skelter filmmaking; that Adam Sandler is a far better actor than Timothee Chalamet; and that Masaaki Yuasa's Ping Pong: The Animation is a more detailed more honest more inventive treatment of the sport.

19. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)

Another of the director's valentines to filmmaking, this time French. If I don't actively dislike it that's because I'm constantly amused by the casting (the actor playing Godard has the man's attitude roughly right, but the actor playing Jean-Paul Belmondo can't even approximate his gunpowder charisma). If I don't actively like it that's because 1) I could just watch the movies themselves and read about the gossip in the many accounts and biographies available, and 2) I mention a better celebration of the joy (and agony, and history) of Filipino filmmaking later in this list.

18. Chainsaw Man The Movie: Reze Arc (Tatsuya Yoshihara)

Unlike say something like Zootopia 2, which promotes something positive (the virtues of expressing one's feelings), Chainsaw Man is little more than a love story told straight, and is all the better for it. Would call it best animated of the year if I actually made the effort to see animated films last year. It's better than Zootopia 2-- I can say that much.

17. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

Understand the temptation to use voiceover narration-- helps incorporate as much of Denis Johnson's original text as possible-- but its use in this particular picture is a drag on said picture; only later when the film gains enough confidence to walk on its own and explore the wide world does it feel like something unfolding on the big screen instead of a scrolling text with widescreen illustrations. With Joel Edgerton, who looks as if he was born to play a mountain man, and William Macy, who makes a brief but lively cameo.

16. Superman (James Gunn)

Not Gunn at his best but at his most straightforward, as if trying to kick a bad drug habit. Still his take on the Big Blue Boy Scout is refreshingly sweet-natured, an antidote to the dark n edgy superpowered bores that have lumbered forth and lulled me to sleep. Plus Nathan Fillion needs his own Guy Gardner movie and Krypto is such a good dog!

15. Quezon (Jerrold Tarog)

Not fair and balanced and cuts a few (okay a lot of) corners and bends a handful (okay an armful) of truths; my biggest complaint about the film is that it doesn't give in to its tendencies and transform into the full-fledged dance musical it keeps threatening to become. But Tarrog's biopic is livelier than most and more flattering than anyone is willing to admit-- a portrait of our beloved president as badass gadfly tweaking the noses of all-powerful stuffed-shirt Westerners. Heroic? Not really, and thank goodness for that; heroes make me snore.

14. The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)

If I can't rate this higher it's because Anderson comes up with plenty of them, in a variety of colors and emotional tones, and they're all of a consistent quality. This one has a Trumplike figure actually redeem himself, somewhat, in a way I'm guessing Trump is incapable of (actually I'm guessing Trump is incapable of redemption, period).

13. Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro)

Arguably del Toro softpedals (not to mention sexes up) the more horrific aspects of the creature's nature, but even so this is a handsome beautifully mounted production of Mary Shelley's great gothic novel. A struggle to accept, definitely not del Toro's best (tho it should have been), but I did end up liking it.

12. Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)

Think Mr. and Mrs. Smith as written by John Le Carre, smart and sexy and subversive as hell. Doesn't quite touch the kind of honest despair Le Carre at his best is capable of, but finely crafted and finely acted (of course being a Soderbergh) and overall a fine time at the movies.

11. Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho)

Biggest slam against this film is that it isn't Parasite; best thing about this film is that it isn't Parasite. Bong rarely if ever repeats himself, thank goodness, and here he turns out a large-budgeted production with wonderfully oddball virtues-- not the least of which is what may be the most endearing character Robert Pattinson's ever played (and yes I've sat through Twilight-- over two hours of my life I'll never get back).

10. Weapons (Zach Cregger)

Loved the ingeniously constructed script, the eerie imagery (kids silent in the night like cruise missiles with wings spread and engines cut off, gliding towards selected targets), the spiky interplay between Julia Garner as beleaguered teacher and Josh Brolin as beleaguering parent, above all Cary Christopher's uncannily honest portrayal of a child in way over his head, in a situation he can barely understand let alone handle.

9. Cinemartyrs (Sari Dalena)

Hands down a more visually gorgeous, more moving, more insanely inventive celebration of cinema than Richard Linklater's overrated museum piece.

8. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

I'd call Trier an excellent writer of characters and delicately conceived, vaguely defined relationships that the characters themselves barely understand-- he shares that much in common with fellow Nordic filmmaker Ingmar Bergman when working in modernist as opposed to period-gothic mode (Trier does tend to cut dialogue scenes more frequently than Bergman, not sure why-- as concession to his restlessness or to our shorter attention spans?). With his latest he raises emotional stakes between filmmaker Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard) and estranged daughter Nora (Triers regular Renate Reinsve), the former wanting Nora to act in his latest film, the latter wanting to have nothing to do with her father. Kind of reminds you of yet another patriarch belatedly wanting in on their children's lives, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums only Triers isn't interested in emulating Anderson's high style (pity) nor is he interested in reproducing Anderson's fey tone (not quite a pity).

7. Hamnet (Chloe Zhao)

Call me a sucker for a period weepie. Zhao's adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's attempt to link The Bard's only son to The Bard's most famous play isn't notable for its historical veracity (the theory remains unproven if intriguing) or sense of humor (comic highlight is when the playwright berates an actor for lacking conviction and even that scene lacks conviction) as for the delicate way Zhao frames Jessie Buckley's face while she addresses the camera. Arguably Zhao's best work, never mind she was a hired gun-- she feels this story as if it were her own.

6. No Other Choice (Park Chan Wook)

By turns harrowing and hilarious, Park's dark corporate downsizing comedy is arguably his stylish best, morphing almost seamlessly from Squid Games satire to Hitchcock homage (one shot-- a high overhead, of two cars parked on the shoulder of a coastal road-- lingers without comment, as quietly malevolent as a shower head or a jungle gym full of birds). Pairs nicely I think with Train Dreams (which acts as its prequel fifty years previous), Parasite (its prequel seven years before), and even Cloud (its sequel six months later). Not Park's best (that honor in my book goes to Decision to Leave) but definitely up there.

5. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Arguably Anderson's masterpiece and the best adaptation of Thomas Pynchon to date (not that there are many), a hurtling juggernaut of a shaggy-dog odyssey of an epic chase across hundreds of miles of California landscape with dozens upon dozens of ICE agents in hot pursuit. On drugs. Leonardo Di Caprio gives the performance of his life and Sean Penn the most hilarious in the film (never knew walking about with a ramrod up your rear could be so funny) and Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti play the most inspiring rebels and Benicio del Toro is just well cool af.

4. Sirat (Oliver Laxe, 2025)

It's Wages of Fear without the contrived premise, Hamnet without the comfort of historical distance, The Road Warrior at a more contemplative pace. It's one of the best films of the year.

3. Cloud (Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2024)

Talk about genre bender, Kurosawa Kiyoshi's film starts out as character study of an amoral techno creep, turns into a stalker/home invasion thriller involving the many online victims of said creep, turns into an efficient little shoot-em-up between victims and creep and his new friend, ultimately turns into... something else. 2025 may be a fairly good year for horror, even films that barely qualify as horror, but this is hands down my favorite.

2. Magellan (Lav Diaz)

Just when you think Diaz has sold out-- a color film, and under less than three hours!-- you look at Diaz and Artur Tort's dusky candlelit imagery, the field after field of corpses the famous explorer leaves behind in his wake, and you say: "I would like this projected in 35 mm, please." If Paul Thomas Anderson's epic adaptation of Thomas Pynchon explored fascism's latest manifestation in the form of thugs in uniform smashing down doors, Diaz reaches back centuries to depict the father of all fascists, an adventurer and monumental mass murderer who killed tirelessly for his royal patron's benefit. "We work for his greed." "That's a good one, we work for his greed!" and they toast to the king's greed.

1. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

A man named Vahid recognizes Eghbal, the prison interrogator who may or may not have tortured him a long time ago. What would you do if you were him? How would you do it? Who would you contact, how would you convince them to help and, conversely, what can they do to make you stop? The proceedings are compelling the emotions intense but also, surprisingly, funny. One of Panahi's best and one of the best to win the Palme d'Or in recent years.

First published in Businessworld 1.9.26

Tom Cruise is perfect in 'Eyes Wide Shut'

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:54:00 +0000

Tom Cruise is perfect

(WARNING: details of the film explicitly discussed!)

I remember hearing that for the role of main protagonist (eventually named Dr. William Harford) in Stanley Kubrick's last project (eventually named Eyes Wide Shut) the director considered Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, Albert Brooks.

I shook my head. "No. They aren't right."

"Why not? It's a comedy, well an erotic comedy, and they're comic actors."

I shook my head. "No."

Kubrick also considered Alan Alda, Tom Hanks, Warren Beatty.

"No."

"But they're not bad looking."

I shook my head. "They're wrong for the part. Cruise brings something to the role that none of the other actors can."

Kubrick also looked at married couples-- Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, or Bruce Willis and Demi Moore."

I thought about that harder. "Baldwin comes closest, but Cruise is perfect."

"What are you talking about? Why is he perfect? What quality makes him perfect for the role?"

"His enormous sense of entitlement."

Eyes Wide Shut in my book is a comedy, on the surface an erotic comedy but just barely-- the sex scenes lack any real heat or sensuality; the action looks performative if not downright acrobatic. There's nothing relaxed or spontaneous about them, just as (I submit) there's nothing relaxed or spontaneous in any Kubrick film since, O I don't know, Barry Lyndon. To be fair I think this is a deliberate choice on the part of the director, and actually not a bad thing (but that's possibly the subject of a whole other essay).

If you recall the story, Bill Harford (Cruise) is talking to his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman, at the time Cruise's real-life wife) while smoking weed and smugly declaring she can never be unfaithful, because women are just naturally loyal. Alice laughs and tells the story of how she fantasized about a naval officer she saw while they were on vacation, even considering leaving her husband and daughter for the man.

The rest of the picture (and the novella the film is based on, Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle) has Bill crisscrossing New York City (Vienna in the novella) trying to take revenge on Alice, to have an adulterously erotic adventure and failing every time; the failure becomes a running gag, to the point where one can suffer a serious case of blue balls trying to watch the poor man score.

Which also I submit explains the nonerotic quality of the orgy-- all that copulation is seen through Bill's eyes, and the fact that it all looks both exotic yet unenticing says something about Bill: that he wants to and doesn't want to; that he knows what he's supposed to do, that this is his own uninformed ideal of what he's supposed to do, yet he feels puritanical panic at the prospect of actually wading in and doing it. Here it all is, willing flesh in all its variety and as much as he could possibly want several times over, and poor Bill is practically wilting in embarrassment.

And this is where Cruise comes in. If this were Woody Allen or Dustin Hoffman, you'd expect something like that; you'd expect them to pratfall and you'd feel sorry for their misfortune, and all would be that much right in the world. If on the other hand it were Tom Hanks or Warren Beatty you'd feel even sorrier because the latter two are actually decent-looking if not attractive (depending on your aesthetics), and you'd feel some measure of sympathy at their failure to perform.

But with Cruise you're laughing your head off.

Because Cruise has an eminently punchable face. From Top Gun to the Mission Impossible movies the man has this ineradicable smirk you dearly want to smear off with a well-swung elbow. His persona, pretty-boy-turned-Hollywood-star, hasn't aged much over the years but especially in 1999, in this perfectly photographed Kubrick production, he comes off as especially arrogant, the kind of upper-class white privilege that badly needs its comeuppance.

And Kubrick gives it to him over and over and over again, like a baseball bat between the legs, for something like two hours.

I further submit that that ending is actually not a happy ending but Bill Harford running home with that poor excuse of a tail tucked between his legs, and that the film's final word-- Nicole Kidman's Alice looking Tom Cruise's Bill in the eye and suggesting they should 'fuck'-- isn't a promise of pleasures to come but the clanging permanently shut of Bill's cell cage door, possibly loading him down with a second child and barring him from even the possibility of a naughty escapade any time in the future.

Forever. And ever. And ever.

If you'd like to turn this traditional Christmas viewing ('traditional,' at least, in my household) into a double feature, may I suggest It's a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey spends the majority of his adult life trying to escape the little town of Bedford Falls and constantly failing. When he finally cracks and has a meltdown, angels are called in to subject him to a session of hypnotic conditioning a la The Manchurian Candidate. He comes out of the ordeal with eyes bright and glitteringly shiny, suggestive of mirrored balls that hold nothing inside, his mind laundered completely clean of soul. As Tiny Tim might say at the dinner table to newly reformed Scrooge and Tim's own pinkly glowing family-- prior to casting aside both crutches and launching into a spectacular backflip for the television cameras-- "God bless us, every one!"

1.8.26

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:31:00 +0000

Slouching tiger, limping dragon

Early in the film Chow Yun Fat's swordsman Bai Li Mu hands his weapon named The Green Destiny to fellow warrior Lien Yu Shu (Michelle Yeoh), asking her to give it to a common friend to hide-- he's retiring from a life of bloodshed, he tells her. Cut to the friend's house: Yeoh has the sword wrapped in a cloth when she bumps into another guest, the Governor's daughter Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a woman she has never met before, and what does she do next? Pulls out the sword and starts showing it off.

Granted Lien must be proud of her colleague's legendary blade-- but Bai had entrusted her with the sword! For safekeeping! And here she is, explaining the sword's history as if hoping Jen would buy it on the spot. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is being marketed as a character-driven martial-arts epic, but this early in the film character credibility takes a blow right in its narrative testicles and never quite recovers. Not to mention the scene is a dead giveaway as to what happens next: will the sword be stolen, and by the very person Lien has just paraded it to? Take a wild guess.

Lien and Jen (and later Bai) take to the air in a display of state-of-the-art wirework-- the wires digitally removed to add realism-- and they're slow as molasses. After years of kung-fu warriors leaping from the ground, caroming off walls, rooftops, bamboo trees, trying to achieve a kind of realism (or at least nominal plausibility) through speed, careful camerawork, and deft editing, here is a film with the budget to do it right-- with more realism than was ever before possible-- and we promptly get a display of antigravity.

Which may be a reactionary response, but film historian and expert David Bordwell (Planet Hong Kong) describes kung-fu as having a physics of its own, where the laws of motion and gravity may be stretched or bent, but never broken. Jet Li in Once Upon a Time in China may corkscrew into the air for his 'no-shadow kick, but he does so strictly under his own leg-power. Donnie Yen in Once Upon a Time in China 2 can use a wet bedsheet to shatter concrete, but he's simply following the principle that cloth soaked and twisted tight has greater tensile strength. Only supernatural beings-- ghosts, gods, demons, Linda Blair-- actually float; a sign of otherworldly power, not martial-arts prowess.

And what's with all the pseudo-poetry? Bai at one point describes to Lien how "time and space stopped" as if just having read Stephen Hawking; Jen lies next to her lover Lo (Chang Chen), who muses about how "thousands of stars fell from the sky... I rode out to the edge of the desert, to look for them." Fine talk for a Hollywood romance, but I can't remember the last time I heard someone in a wuxia film speak like that. Martial-arts warriors are never verbally eloquent; they expressed themselves with their limbs, not their tongues. Even when in love their dialogue is very practical, very down-to-earth; love is rarely declared, or at most is alluded to in exchanges.

In The Bride With White Hair-- a genuinely romantic wuxia epic-- Brigitte Lin asks Leslie Cheung "will you still want me when my hair is all white?" Cheung replies that he'll get her a flower that, when eaten, will grant her immortality, so that her hair will never whiten. All fine and poetic, except that later in the film, Lin's hair does turn white at Cheung's betrayal, and she leaves him; Cheung, in reparation, sits for decades by the flower that grants immortality, waiting for her to come back. Part of the beauty of Bride is that what for us may seem like romantic hyperbole is for them immediate and real. Problem with white hair? Flower of immortality should solve it. Lost your loved one? Wait a few decades, she'll be along. In Crouching Tiger, the plot isn't half as flowery as the dialogue, and that grates on the ear.

Mere details, maybe (I haven't even mentioned the poorly synchronized dubbing), irritating only to wuxia afficionados and about which ordinary audiences couldn't care less... but it's the sheer wrongheadedness of approach taken by the film's director that bothers me most.

Lee probably felt he had something fresh-- gallant warriors with complex motives, in a kung fu flick!-- except a few details (the inn; the bamboo grove; the noble veterans played by Chow and Yeoh; even Jade Fox, heroine of Come Drink With Me and played by the same actress, Cheng Peipei) give the game away: what he's really doing is remaking King Hu films, but with Hollywood-sized budget and special effects. A pointless exercise, I think-- Hu accomplished with his films (A Touch of Zen, The Valiant Ones) all that Lee hopes to accomplish with this one: complexity of narrative, nobility of character, high tragedy, bold innovation; all done with little strain or pretension, and all made with less money. More, Hu's films move like lightning, helped along by his experimental editing style; Lee's film plods--handsomely, it must be said-- towards its rather toothless conclusion.

Having said all that, I don't think Crouching Tiger is a terrible film, really just not a very interesting one. It's worth seeing for the gorgeous Chinese landscapes, for Michelle Yeoh's heroic serenity, and for Yuen Woo Ping's wonderful fight choreography (though not his best work--see the Once Upon a Time in China films, or Iron Monkey). After all the hype we've heard the past few months, however (Richard Corliss of Time Magazine considered it one of the best things he saw at this year's Cannes Film Festival), you can't help but feel that it's an an insult to the genuine article.

11/19/00

A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 17:02:00 +0000

Sword and cinema sorcery

King Hu's A Touch of Zen differs from his earlier Dragon Gate Inn and later The Valiant Ones in that the film begins not with a heroic character, but humble one: Ku Shen Chai (Shi Chun), a scholar who wastes his education writing letters and painting portraits on commission. Ku is visited by Ouyang Nin (Ting Peng) who asks for a portrait; Ku, sketching, is struck by the intensity of Ouyang's eyes. When Ouyang abruptly leaves him to follow herbalist Dr. Lu (Sit Hon), Ku is intrigued by his manner, and follows. Hu stages, shoots and edits this surveillance-within-a-surveillance so skillfully that not only are we caught up with it we also get a quick lesson in the town's local geography: we know where Ku's portrait shop is in relation to Dr. Lu's herb stand; we know exactly at what point Dr. Lu disappears (to the consternation of Ouyang Nin); when Dr. Lu reappears behind watchful Ku, we are as startled as he is.

The marvelous sequence, utilizing not a line of dialogue, does several things at once: it strikes the right note of intrigue and mystery, introduces three important characters (Ouyang Nin, Ku, Dr. Lu), sketches their relationship to each other (follower, second follower, followed), emphasizes the fascination Ouyang Nin has for Ku. It also shows Hu the director effortlessly tossing off a masterful piece of cinema for no other reason than that it serves the story.

Ku's home is a hovel in the abandoned Ching Lu Fort, where his mother berates him for being too lazy to take the civil service exam; she informs him that blind man Shih (Pai Ying) predicts his lucky star will work hard this year (ironic statement, considering), and suggests that he marry Miss Yang, the new girl next door. Ku's scenes with his mother give the film some welcome comic moments; they humanize Ku and the film for us. Ku is the stick by which we measure the martial and moral stature of Ouyang, Dr. Lu, fortuneteller Shih, Miss Yang, and all the other extraordinary people to come; he is also our representative, the lens through which we view both heroes and villains of the film, the man we identify with. We all know someone like Ku; we may at one point or another have been like Ku, a man too smart and lazy for his own good, willing to drift along the course of his life until thrown into a sharp curve-- at which point he pays dearly for his passivity.

Ku eventually learns that Miss Yang is the daughter of an eminent officer, killed for exposing the corrupt practices of Eunuch Wei (eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty were famous for their power, and abuse of it). She escaped with two of her father's trusted officers, General Shih (the blind man's real identity) and General Lu, and with the help of Abbot Hui Yuan (an impressively impassive Roy Chiao), hides first in a Buddhist monastery, then in Ku's town (the basic plot bears some resemblance to Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, though its direct inspiration is the short story "The Magnanimous Girl"-- the film's title in Chinese-- by Pu Sung Ling). Ku, whose marriage proposal to Miss Yang was politely turned down, now proposes to help the girl against her enemies; Yang admits she has no choice but to accept.

In the meantime, Ouyang Nin has left; Ku reasons that he is trying to send a message out, and must be stopped. Ku, Miss Yang, and Generals Shih and Lu follow Ouyang Nin into a bamboo forest, where he's seen talking to two of the personal guards of his superior, Commander Mun Ta. The ensuing battle is a takeoff on a scene in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai where men are sent to intercept spies in a forest: Hu takes Kurosawa's taut little sequence and develops it into a remarkable piece of cinema, perhaps the most famous from the film (Ang Lee borrowed an image or six, plus much of the film's emotional tone, for his anemically inferior Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Looking at it some thirty-plus years later, the fight may not be as elaborate as in Tsui Hark's Swordsman or as expensively staged as in Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time, but these directors (and practically all subsequent wuxia pian filmmakers) use Zen's bamboo grove battle as the standard against which to measure their own, and by necessity, exceed; it's possibly the most beautifully shot superbly edited fight sequence in all of Chinese cinema.

Hu enlists nature to his aid-- the very bamboos quake in fear, while mist gives the proceedings an eerie, detached air. Like all great onscreen battles, there is a pleasing structure discernible in the seeming chaos: Shih tells Yang that the two guards are too powerful together, and should be attacked one by one. Shih and Yang advance; their silence, their tense expressions show awareness of the danger. Hu draws the moment out to almost unbearable length; when one guard emerges from the fog, then the other, their worst fears are confirmed.

Hu lets us take the situation in with a long shot, Shih and Yang facing the formidable pair; another pause, and the four launch into furious motion. Hu shoots the action in brief flashes, almost too fast for the eye to follow; when he assembles the shots the action overall is miraculously coherent but somehow indistinct, as if caught fleetingly from the corner of the eye. The impression is of incredible speed and force, which Hu reinforces with the clang and swish of blades; when Miss Yang leaps high up the bamboos to dive down on her enemy, her clothes make a terrible fluttering noise, like a hawk plunging on its prey. A comical shot of Ku and Lu staring, wide-eyed, ends the confrontation with an exclamation point.

Ku learns that two hundred men and Mun Ta himself is coming. Ku lures them into town, then into Ching Lu Fort where, under cover of night, the men are frightened by straw dummies and tinkling bells, attacked by hidden arrows and catapults. The action sequences seem magnificent-- this may be one of the few battles in wuxia cinema where the fighting actually makes tactical sense. Hu trumps the battle, however, with the morning after: Ku wanders about, laughing-- perhaps at his ingenuity, perhaps at the silliness of grown men frightened by bundled straw and superstition. It all seems like a child's game, a silly game; then Ku sees the bodies of the men he has killed, and the realization crashes down on him of what he has perpetuated. Buddhist monks arrive, led by Abbot Hui Yuan; the Abbot's silence in response to Ku's questions is appalling, not so much because Ku is irritating (he is) but because the question feels irrelevant in the face of large-scale tragedy; without a single tear shed, Chiao manages to suggest that the Abbot's grief is immeasurable. Ku eventually learns-- from his mother, of all people-- that Yang has left, and has asked that he not follow her.

A note on Yang's character: Ku is the lens through which we see King Hu's world; we feel what he feels, hurt when he's hurt (or abandoned). The first time Ku bumps into Yang, all he sees is a pretty face; he's just been hunting ghosts, and in a comically odd moment, raises a wooden sword printed with spells as if to exorcise her (you wonder if, looking back, it ever occurred to him that he should have gone ahead and stabbed her-- that she really was a malignant soul after all). He learns more about her through the course of several months; when he (and we) finally learn the whole truth, his (and our) reaction feels somewhat more complex.

It's a remarkable character portrait, skillfully sketched through the eyes of another. Yang does not behave like a normal woman; if anything, she has at various points lied, whored, murdered her way across the land. But there are reasons behind her actions, stemming from great necessity, or great pain; part of her fascination for Ku may stem from his gradual understanding of her hidden motives. Her sudden retreat into seclusion, an act Ku may or may not have understood, is possibly a response to the killings, a way to ask forgiveness from all the dead for her crimes.

The first half-- or first three-fourths-- of the film feels like a superbly made wuxia pian, with death and violence served up in generous portions; the rest feels like a repudiation of all that savagery. Suddenly the Zen-like elements-- breathtaking landscapes, fluttering birds, webspinning spiders-- come to fore. Ku finally locates Yang, but the resolution of their relationship is, at best, bittersweet; then Ku is threatened, Yang comes to his defense, and a final battle ensues between Yang, Shih, and General Hsu, Eunuch Wei's commander-in-chief (Han Yin Chieh, also the film's fight choreographer), with a last-minute intervention from Abbot Hui Yuan. Again Hu dazzles with a flurry of techniques: quick cuts between bouncing monks and quivering grass give the impression that the Abbot is levitating; a sudden jump-cut when Commander Hsu attacks suggests super-speed; golden blood gushes out when a dagger is uprooted; a skull with fluttering tail plummets from the sky.

You might call the ending more than a little strange, a climax that sheds all trappings of the wuxia pian genre and, like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (only on a far smaller budget), makes a wild stab at transcendence. I think it succeeds more than fails, myself; you end up walking out of the theater in a contemplative, Zenlike mood--not quite fully understanding what you saw, yet understanding that even this may not matter, after all.

(First published in Menzone Magazine, February, 2004)

Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:57:00 +0000

Paalam, Lee Tamahori (1950-2025)

Brief thoughts on his first and arguably best film:

Once Were Warriors. Beth Heke--perhaps too neatly--stands for what was proud in her people. A Maori princess, she turned her back on her heritage to marry Jake Heke and have children by him. Jake, who represents the degraded Maori, responds to his wife's royal pride by ignoring their children and beating her. Predictable and schematic, but first time director Lee Tamahori knows enough to give his film an intensity that rides over the obviousness. He bathes the film in orange light-- a brilliant lava glow that falls on the blasted urban landscape, turning junkyards and cheap housing developments into barbaric temples in twilight. Against this backdrop stand the Maoris, huge muscled people with tattooed faces living violent, chaotic lives.

In the film's strongest sequence, Jake throws an all-night party, a nightmare of half-full beer bottles drunken guests greasy dishes that climaxes with Jake battering Beth. No open-handed slaps or rabbit punches--Jake takes roundhouse swings at her with his entire weight behind them, pounding, bone-breaking blows. He grips her by the back of the neck and rams her head into a picture frame. He throws her across the room, and half the furniture at her, then ends the evening by raping her.

It helps the film to have Temuera Morrison, who's both threatening and compelling as Jake; even at his most brutal, he invests Jake with a primitive innocence. As Beth, Rena Owen is earthy, sexy, loving and courageous. You flinch for her when she stands up to Jake-- the bruises on her face are horrendous-- but stand up to him she does. You can see all the pride of the Maoris in her erect posture and magnificently chiseled face.

Batman Returns Returns (Tim Burton, 1992)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:59:14 +0000

Masquerade

(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in close and explicit detail)

Saw Tim Burton's Batman Returns on the big screen again after three decades and far as I'm concerned: not just the best onscreen incarnation of the character ever but one of three best examples of its genre, period. Channels a distinct look-- German Expressionism-- with extensive use of miniatures and forced perspective and gigantic sets and minimal digital effects; puts Danny Elfman's creepy-swoony-funny holiday season score to lively use; features a trio (actually a quartet) of stylized performances savoring the sparkling dialogue they've been served (by Daniel Waters)-- as if seated at an extravagant champagne feast of which they've never seen the likes before, and likely never will again.

And the film's so kinky. And subversive. And stuffed to the ears with eat-the-rich sentiment. A lot of frankly explicit jokes, including a scene of Selina (Michelle Peiffer) getting hold of Bruce's (Michael Keaton's) codpiece (prolly helped that Keaton-- clever lad--specifically requested to be able to relieve himself while wearing the costume). You could tell writer and director couldn't care less about the plot, much less the eponymous character (or at least his official job title), much less the source material, and it's a liberating feeling, a pretentious goth art film masquerading as a multimilliondollar superhero movie. Parents were right to be outraged and Warner Brothers was right to be alarmed, and I still wouldn't recommend this to anyone who thinks Pixar and Disney movies are worth watching. This is strictly a one-of-a-kind gloriously bonkers misfire that deserves to be treasured as such.

Burton and Waters reportedly weren't interested in the character of Oswald Cobblepot (Danny DeVito) but there's significant pathos to his character arc-- thrown Moseslike into a river by his parents, accepted then abandoned by the city, accepted then abandoned by his own Red Triangle Gang, he's like a Charles Dickens orphan whose rejection has inspired so much bile the stuff dribbles down his cheek. Burton's concept of Cobblepot feels less like an animal and more like a corpse that has been submerged in sewage and gone bloated; inside he's even more repulsive, from misfit to misogynist to misanthrope, his character arc caught in an inescapable downward spiral.

But you recognize Oswald's reasons; you know-- maybe even feel-- his pain ("I am not a human being, I am an animal!"). Selina's cursory rejection seems like a poor reason for Oswald to attempt to hang her from the highest bough, but considering his frame of mind, the fact that he was on an all-time high at that time-- prospective electoral candidate watching his city burn-- and knowing of recent real-life leaders who've unwittingly stepped into the role, can you say his entitled manbaby tantrum is entirely unbelievable?

And-- wouldn't say this completely redeems Oswald-- but he did have folks who cared for him no matter what, the Emperor penguins who receive him as a babe in a woven basket from out of icy waters, the same giant silent faintly comical figures who returned him as a corpse back into those same waters, a grace note of symmetry that offers at least the chance that maybe you'll feel some sympathy for him after all.

Likewise the figure of Max Schreck-- created by Waters as linchpin to connect the plot strands, and for all I know named after the legendary actor in Murnau's Nosferatu just for the entertainment value. Christopher Walken plays comic-creepy with effortless ease, mainly because there's always been something unsettling about the way his popped-open eyes seem to stare past you at an unseen presence standing right behind. A simple if memorable caricature but when you think about it what are the rich today if not outsized cartoons? If the satire here isn't subtle it's remarkably appropriate for this day and age, because the targets have grown bigger and so much coarser.

Then there's Peiffer. Who got this role secondhand. Who nevertheless trained to crack her own whip (that's no stunt double snapping the heads off department store mannequins). Who swallowed a live bird (a finch?) for a shot-- no puppet effects for her! Who had to be vacuum-sealed into her impossibly tight black latex costume (with thick silicon applied with sponge brushes, for a fluid shine) every morning before the cameras start rolling.

Peiffer took the role and made it her own, ferocity and female sexuality incarnate, but lemme cite a scene that stands out for me: first time she walks into her apartment chirping 'Honey I'm home!' she turns on a side desk lamp, painfully takes off her dress jacket (it's been a long day and her joints ache), pours a bowl of milk for the cat (O her throbbing back), checks her voice mail (Selina it's your mother calling to say hello"). You recognize it's a routine complete with self-invented banter, a choreographed dance of loneliness composed mainly because she has nothing better to do, and no one to do it with. Second time she does this, after being dropped from a high window (Burton seems to excel at depicting freefall terror a la Vertigo), she again walks into her apartment saying 'Honey I'm home!' only to knock the switched-on lamp off its table; peels off her jacket like freshly flayed skin; pours milk into bowl and floor; lifts the carton to drink herself, the white thick fluid dribbling down neck and shirt in a parody of what porn professionals call a 'facial.' All the while her eyes gaze at some far object, aching joints and exhaustion all forgotten, a startling demonstration of no-look no-effort physical dexterity that must have taken hours to rehearse and just as long to perform right on-camera (tho I'm betting it actually took all of one take). We're talking a woman whose psyche is so shattered she can't quite take in reality at the moment-- as if she was forced into a waking walking dream while struggling to process what happened (I nearly died-- or I did die and came back to life).

Selina literally rebuilds herself from patches of latex and leather and black raincoat, stitched together with string and wire; the completed costume suggests Frankenstein's creature's bride if the bride were heavily into bondage (part of why the parents must have objected was because their children were getting too much insight into Burton's fetishes). Selina herself is part cat in heat part panther on prowl, a masked vigilante seeking satisfaction and revenge both ("A half pint? I'm talking gallons"), and a large measure of her arc is the way men are constantly promising and failing to deliver, ending up killing her one way or another (Schreck drops her from a hundred feet through several awnings onto a bed of snow; Bruce drops her some sixty feet into a truckload of sand ("Saved by kitty litter!"); Oswald catches her via umbrella handle to the neck, hoists her to what may be the greatest height of all, then drops her through a greenhouse roof into a bier of roses (the picture serves up an unnerving number of funeral imagery)).

Selina quickly uses up her cat-induced nine lives, by end of the film leaving only one; you can only imagine what the inside of her head was like at that point but her response to Bruce's proposal of giving up and living together is indicative: "I would love to live with you in your castle forever, just like in a fairy tale" she says, prior to slashing his face with her claws. "I just couldn't live with myself." If I've learned anything from working with wounded youths and children it's that they often wound others in return; not the proper or accepted response especially to a hand held out to help, but one too often seen to ignore. Burton's film with its stitched-up cats and monstrously hobbled penguins seems to be saying this about the hurt the maimed the permanently crippled, in limb or mind: that they are in pain, that sometimes they can't be helped, that sometimes they don't want help. The best you can do is hold out a hand* and hope this time they don't clamp their teeth on it, for your sake as well as theirs.

*(Which is basically what Bruce does throughout the film-- fans complain there's not enough of the eponymous character to which I say good: we dealt with him in the more handsomely produced if less heartfelt first Burton adaptation and we're thoroughly familiar (overfamiliar) with his history and trauma; this sequel shows how he deals with the trauma of others and as it turns out-- continuing Burton's theme of subverting comic book conventions-- he doesn't do so well, being too busy to stop Oswald's plunge then, yes, the aforementioned scene with the proffered hand)

At the same time you can't help but hear yourself crying out a little 'yes!' when Selina does what she does. She speaks out for the rest of us walking wounded: fuck you, fuck the patriarchy, fuck the whole goddamn world; if she wants to go down burning that's her choice, not anyone else's, least of all not some man who failed her at least once before. Which I suppose is strong ill-advised inappropriate stuff for a supposed children's film, much less a comic book adaptation, and it shows-- after this Warner Brothers eased Burton into the 'producer' slot and recruited Joel Schumacher to make something brighter and considerably more toothless, and when the winds of fashion changed, hired Christopher Nolan, Zack Snyder, and Matt Reeves to do something grittier and grimmer, but also more straightforward and drearily literal (not to mention faithful-- yawn-- to the comics).

Which leaves us with only one film to mix the comic the gothic the grotesque (and hilariously pervy), enough to scare the shit out of the big corporate conglomerate that spawned it-- so much so said corporation never tried anything like this ever again. As Oswald once put it: 'just the pussy I've been looking for!' Accept no substitutes.

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:53:00 +0000

Hail, Mary

(Warning: plot twists and story discussed in full and explicit detail!)

If you don't know anything about Guillermo del Toro's

Frankenstein (2025) know this: he spent eighteen years sketching, researching, talking, all-around wheeling and dealing with talents and studios to make this, his Great White Whale film adaptation of what he calls his 'favorite novel in the world.' So if he changed anything in Mary Shelley's book while making this picture-- know that he did so out of love.

Is the film worth a look? Well let me tell you.

A lot to admire here. The production design includes a sarcophagus straight out of David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future and a laboratory that combines the 1931 stone castle tower where the good doctor did his work with the high gothic mansion in del Toro's own Crimson Peak. The creature itself is a radical reinterpretation of Mary Shelley's-- part Berni Wrightson, part Elric of Melnibone, part Jacob Elordi, all del Toro.

There are script changes, many of which I actually liked: Charles Dance plays Victor's father as a monster disciplinarian (in the book he's largely sidelined). Mia Goth is both Victor's much-loved mother and prospective sister-in-law (his fiancee in the novel) Elizabeth, retooled to be fiercer sexier and if anything even weirder than the doctor himself.

Not sure I approve of having Elizabeth demoted to sister-in-law though; muddies Victor's motive to hunt down his creation (changing the reason for Elizabeth's demise-- from malevolent tactic to careless shooting accident-- doesn't help either).

Del Toro was always a fabulist and here he pushes fabulism to its limits: sumptuous sunset lighting, extravagantly detailed sets, inventive special effects: he doesn't even skimp on the costumes, many of which are long-sleeved and high-necked, with more textures than a draper's fabric sampler. His best effects are rooted in the old-school horror filmmaker in him, in half-dissected corpses-- a man and his arm bristling with electrodes, a body with spinal cord splayed, to better expose the muscle being stimulated.

Not as big a fan of the CGI effects, which seem to encroach and ruin any enjoyment of what physical effects are there: weather, impossible landscapes, enhancement to physical structures (the mast and sails of an otherwise solid ship for example)-- it all tends to look overlit and frankly flat, the better to accommodate digital stuff (and, I suspect, less discriminating eyes viewing this on Netflix)

I can partly sympathize with del Toro's idea of inserting the character of Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), war profiteer and harvester of human bodies, to allow Frankenstein's creature to be both funded and formed from the fleshy output of the Crimean War-- a direct consequence of the military-industrial complex, with Harlander representing both patron and plunderer of Frankenstein's efforts.

What I can't abide is del Toro's whitewashing the creature-- and I don't mean skin complexion. Del Toro and Shelley begin from the same place, with the creature as pure innocence; but Shelley seems to have the warier more adult eye of the two, even if she was only eighteen when she conceived the story (nineteen when she finished writing). She knows the creature may be born sinless but the world can and will corrupt him; she knows her creature to be capable of all emotions, not just love and passion and kindness but resentment, bitterness, cruelty, hate. When Shelley's creature begins a campaign of tormenting his creator he does so by picking off family members one by one including, unforgivably, a young woman and a seven-year-old child (in the film the 'child' is in his late twenties). The creature has learned sadness, loss, suffering, now he wants to pay his pater tormenter in kind, with considerable interest.

Del Toro's creature isn't like that; he's an innocent and stays innocent, killing only in self-defense, being relentlessly sweet, a Romance hero of the Byronic kind-- actually less than Byronic, as the word describes a dark dangerous figure. Del Toro seems to want to rehabilitate Shelley's creature, purge it of its sins; any flaw in its creation is to be directly blamed on Harlander's last-minute interference with one of Victor's steampunk lightning rods.

The ending is an orgy of last-minute father-son bonding and forgiveness, a moment more gruesome than all the mutilated corpses preceding. As for the creature's fate-- arguably del Toro's most audacious conceit is to marry Frankenstein's story with vampire lore, drawing from elements used in Blade 2 and The Strain-- now the creature isn't just inhumanly fast and unnervingly strong he's impossible to kill, immortal without the need to feed on human blood. He's cursed as many del Toro heroes are cursed-- a Pinocchio or a Blade or Hellboy or an Amphibian Man-- doomed to wander the Earth hunted and misunderstood, doing good because his heart says he must.

Not quite what I hoped. Shelley's novel draws from deep within herself, from a mother who lost a child before birthing an immortal tale, her book is full of high feelings and dark thoughts, and the sense of things gone beyond any one man's ability to repair them. Del Toro gives you the sense that nothing can't be fixed by a good sit-down talk and a big hug in the end.

Elordi is a gorgeous creature no doubt but I so much prefer Shelley's, with its mix of the noble and grotesque: "His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips." Del Toro as with most modern designers like a consistent design; Shelley knew the value of setting a disparate detail beside the other, one mocking the other.

Might point out that del Toro may have consciously or unconsciously so admired Shelley's book he felt he couldn't reach her level and decided he had to sabotage his own efforts, set alternate goals-- like showing the perils of techbro patronage, the waste wrought by sexism, the possibility of redeeming irredeemably broken relationships. Del Toro might have so loved the creature-- his career is all about the monster as hero-- that he wanted to redeem the creature, have him forgive as well as be forgiven. One wants to salute del Toro's humility; one also wonders if perhaps he'd blown his one best chance at shooting his ultimate wad.

Too long didn't read: basically I admired del Toro's picture when it was at its ugliest, felt remorse when it was at its most cosmetically beautiful.

But this is my first viewing; the film, arguably del Toro's most personal, is a repulsively stitched-together assembly of wildly incompatible parts-- much come to think of it, like Shelley's creature. Over time the stitching might heal, with textured skin grown over the glossy patches; over time I might better appreciate this clearly beloved effort, and see it for what it is: an ugly duckling dreaming of becoming a swan. Maybe, who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Quezon (Jerrold Tarog, 2025)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 17:19:00 +0000

Quezon!

Start right off with a caveat: not a historian, merely a student of film. I can talk of storytelling and visual style, but of historical facts about the period and details of the man himself? At most I can repeat what I've found through online research, perhaps hazard a few inexpert opinions based on what I've read.

Jerrold Tarrog's Quezon (2025) begins in quietly spectacular fashion, taking its cue from the film that inspired many an aspiring director, Welles' Citizen Kane: a silent short depicting the younger Quezon (Benjamin Alves) during the Philippine-American War; for the rest of the running time fictional journalist Joven Hernando (Cris Villanueva) dogs Quezon's heels, digging into and commenting on the man's life the way Jerry Thompson dug into and commented on Charles Foster Kane. Tarog with cinematographer Pong Ignacio (who lensed the previous two installments of the director's period epic) employs the kind of sweeping camera movements Welles used in his second feature The Magnificent Ambersons, or Bertolucci in 1900 or-- to name a model closer to home-- Peque Gallaga in his wartime drama Oro Plata Mata (mind you, I'm not ranking Mr. Tarog as equal to Welles or even Bertolucci, just citing influences).

More inspired in my book is Tarog's editing and music score: Quezon prances to the rhythm of the tango, a sensual dance that, when played at a brisk pace, suggests a strong sardonic streak. The film isn't so much biopic as it is musical, with passages that entirely take their cue-- emotional tone, satiric edge-- from a song; isn't just any old musical but a dance musical, with Quezon himself (Jericho Rosales) and partner-in-crime Sergio Osmena (Romnick Sarmenta) high-stepping their way into Leonard Wood's (Iain Glen) office for a quick game of high-stakes brinksmanship.

Glen underplays wonderfully against Rosales and Sarmenta, coming across as the experienced civil servant trying to curb the enthusiasm of two overcaffeinated politicos-- or, to push a different metaphor, like a schoolmaster trying to educate a pair of juveniles. Rosales for all his yelling can't match Glen's gravitas and this is deliberate, I think, a case of brownskinned David needling palefaced Goliath. Glen plays it two ways: in an intimate scene he confides to Quezon (and us) that he'd like nothing more than to retire and go home but has a job to do; the same time he comes across as someone who thinks he knows what's best for us-- a whiff of condescension taints his most solemn pronouncements. When Quezon does pull one over Wood (as in the case of Woods' appointee attempting to shut down the city gambling dens) you can't help but cheer the Filipinos for their effrontery.

The film isn't perfect, far from it. Its mediating consciousness, reporter Joven Hernando, is a rather bland persona, and necessarily so; Tarog isn't about to spend millions of pesos telling his story (likewise Jerry Thompson in Kane was an equally anonymous creature). More interesting is the character of Emilio Aguinaldo (Mon Confiado)-- a Machiavellian figure in Heneral Luna (General Luna), an equally shadowy figure in Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral (Goyo: The Boy General). One senses that he's Tarog's real focus, the director's hidden agenda while selling the project to his producers: an epic on the Philippine-American War focused on three heroes-- Luna, Del Pilar, Quezon-- that really tells (in three chapters) the arc of Aguinaldo's career, from revolutionary leader to first Philippine president to shadowy ghost from the political past, rising up one more time to fight Quezon for the office.

Except we don't really get a proper narrative on the former chief executive; the focus remains on the three aforementioned heroes. Tarog needs to tell each of their stories properly-- he's spending millions of other peoples' money after all-- and ends up short-changing Aguinaldo, tho the man is granted a high point: when Quezon is challenged, he responds by taking away privileges and digging up skeletons in the old man's past; that lined face grows grimmer and grimmer and grimmer, and at a certain point you start to feel a bit sorry for him. A bit.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is that Tarog doesn't listen to the whispered voices in his head and turn the film into a dance musical, complete with sung-through lyrics and an original tango score (Quezon!). I can see the project exercising the director's full talents as composer and editor, the results stylized enough to quell any outcry; after all, it's hard to ask critical questions when your feet are tapping to the melody.

That's my thoughts on the film as a film-- if we're talking of Quezon as darkly comic entertainment Tarog largely pulls it off; the feature carries you along further and faster along the tides of history than his previous efforts Heneral Luna and Goyo. If we're talking whether or not Tarog should have adopted that specific cynical tone, well...

The biopic is generally my least favorite genre; most productions have to tread carefully, especially when the subject is still alive or his descendants still around, ready and willing to threaten a lawsuit or restraining order (Citizen Kane anyone?). I don't think disrespect is fatal to a biopic I think it's essential, if the film is to be at all interesting. Hate, love, ambivalence, any and every emotion in the dictionary should inform the feelings of the filmmaker except indifference, or (god help us) unthinking reverence.

I also question the charge that Tarog has stained Quezon's reputation; if anything he's taken the cold marble statue of the man and breathed a little life into him-- instead of a halo, a pair of brass balls; instead of a stentorian megaphone, an almost shrill voice. Someone questioned Rosales' vocal performance: surely it's inappropriate for a national hero? But if you listen to sound recordings of the real Quezon especially when older it was fairly tinny; a bit like Lincoln, whose voice has been described as a "falsetto, almost as high-pitched as a boatswain's whistle." Lincoln realized his voice was a handicap, and developed his diction and rhetorical style to compensate; I assume Quezon did something similar, and Rosales decided to stay true (or as true as ability allows) to historical record.

That assertion-- that a national hero must have a heroic voice-- feels naive. Surely we have come to know better; if not, it's up to filmmakers like Tarog to show us, if not something better at least something different, not necessarily for the sake of being different but for that startling detail dug up from historical record that jolts us into realization: why, this is an actual person, one who walked on everyday pavement-- in a pair of shoes, like the rest of us.

There's the question of a pro-American slant and yes Tarog does paint a flattering portrait of Wood (ignoring, for one, the Governor-General's record of massacring women and children in Bud Dajo-- I didn't like that exclusion) the same time an old aphorism pops into my head: if you want to know a man, talk to his enemies. If you want to build up a man, build up his enemies, to make his eventual triumph all the more impressive. Not historical but dramatic imperatives because this, after all, is a movie.

There are cries to be 'fair and balanced' and 'why didn't they consult the family?'-- but a fair and balanced account is important to a history; to a film it's... a stylistic choice at best, and one to be carefully applied lest you fairly balance all the life out of your picture. Consulting the family might turn the film into an Official Account, the equivalent of the Marcoses' Iginuhit ng Tadhana (Written in Destiny, 1965), a mythmaking biopic that glorified that former president's fictional wartime record. Could Tarog have done this instead? Maybe. I don't know all the answers, I can at best wonder.

Finally: I did see that video, of Quezon descendant Ricky Avancena confronting actor and director after a screening, and have this to say: I applaud Mr. Avancena for the magnanimity of his gesture, urging everyone to see the picture anyway, even if he did hate it (and he has every right to, that's his grandfather after all); I applaud the generosity of his sentiment that a work should not be suppressed but discussed and, if one ends up feeling a certain way, condemned. Also liked his style-- the fiery Quezon blood does shine through. So following his lead, I recommend: go watch, if it's still in theaters, or go watch, if it eventually comes to streaming, and go make up your own minds.

First published in Businessworld 11.7.25

Le Grand Illusion (Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, 1937)

noreply@blogger.com (Noel Vera) — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:24:00 +0000

Goodness gracious

(WARNING: story discussed in explicit detail)

Some find La Grand Illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937) formless, which I suspect only proves Renoir's artistry. The film does have a design, buried in so much minutiae, told in such an unprepossessing manner, that you can't really be blamed for missing it (as if Renoir ever intended you to see it in the first place). The film is structured like a three-act play, with trimmings: a short prologue gives us the setup and introduces two of four major characters-- Boldieu (Pierre Fresnay) calls out Mareschal (Jean Gabin) to join him on a reconnaissance mission; a quick wipe and Boldieu and Mareschal are POWs meeting the third major character, the officer who shot them down, Rauffenstein (Erich Von Stroheim).

Love Von Stroheim-- a great director in his own right-- here; love his monocle, his casually arrogant posture, his leather jacket so tight a manservant must yank from behind while he shrugs out of it. He looks like a matador after his first morning bullfight, or a surgeon after his first vasectomy of the day--coolly confident, yet flushed with the excitement of a recent conquest. Already, Renoir establishes their dynamic, with Rauffenstein effortlessly warm towards upper-class Boldieu, tolerantly polite towards the middle-class Mareschal.

The first act proper begins with the first prison camp, where Boldieu and Mareschal meet the last of the four major characters, Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio). A lot of comic business follows-- the digging of the escape tunnel; Rosenthal's luxurious food packages; the prisoners’ merciless ribbing of poor Arthur, the kindly dim much put-upon German guard. A sad note sounded when Mareschal is thrown into an isolation cell, for celebrating a French victory; ironically, it's 'poor Arthur' who tends to the airman in his cell, clucking over his charge like a worried hen. Arthur with Mareschal, and Rauffenstein with Boldieu demonstrate Renoir's thesis, that friendships can happen between men of different countries, though Renoir is enough of a realist to admit not usually between people from different social classes.

Pause to note that when Mareschal shoves Arthur out of the way in a desperate escape attempt (his first), and Renoir’s camera stays with Arthur in the cell instead of following-- there’s a terrible inevitability about Arthur’s (and the camera’s) quiet patience; they know they only have to wait the few minutes necessary for Mareschal to be captured and beaten before he's returned unconscious to his cell.

First act ends when the tunnel the prisoners are digging is abandoned because the prisoners are being transferred; the punchline to the whole first third of the film-- all that dirt and effort went for nothing. Plus the cell where the tunnel entrance is hidden is being handed over to some American soldiers who don’t know a word of French, and can’t understand what the French soldiers are so desperately trying to tell them.

Second and central act begins months later, at a high stone fortress (my viewing companion noted, not without cause: "looks like the Castle of Dracula"). Rauffenstein is back, this time in a metal neckbrace, living in the stronghold's chapel (is Renoir suggesting a monk suffering in his asceticism?). Rauffenstein gives the officers a tour, more for the benefit of Boldieu than for the others; we the audience come along to acquaint ourselves with a crucial setting, and to emphasize the impossibility of escape from this stone monster).

Of the climactic prison escape I have little to add, save I love that Mareschal insists on shaking Boldeiu's hand for the first and last time and Boldieu insists on keeping his gloves on, firmly if politely distancing himself from Mareschal’s sincere gesture. Also love the little pirouette Rosenthal does, twirling the escape rope from his waist while Mareschal feeds it down the window.

Once Mareschal and Rosenthal are gone, Boldieu and Rauffenstein are finally free to express their feelings for each other. True to form, they do so with exquisite restraint-- Rauffenstein complaining bitterly of his poor marksmanship trying to hit his leg while Boldieu consoles him, citing distance and poor visibility. Boldieu’s death prompts Rauffenstein to commit the grandest gesture in the film, killing the single most beautiful object in the prison to pay tribute to the most meaningful relationship in his now-friendless life. (Just realized that the way I described the ending one can easily read queer overtones; certainly Boldieu’s and Rauffenstein’s feelings were intense enough, but I think such a suggestion ultimately unfair--surely anyone can appreciate an intense bond between two men that transcends physical sex. I submit tho I'll admit I can just as easily be wrong that a purely sexual reading would reduce the moment, not enhance it.)

Third act is the oddest; Mareschal and Rosenthal spend a pastoral holiday in a German farmhouse with a widow. It's as if Renoir felt they needed a furlough, and threw together one of the loveliest pastoral interludes this side of the Garden of Eden (instead of a serpent a cow; instead of a temptress a farmer’s wife; instead of an apple a Christ child carved out of a potato-- not as sweet but funnier, and just as tasty).

The film ends with a short epilogue, of the two men crossing the border into Switzerland. Note that Mareschal enters Germany on wings with one Frenchman (Boldieu, an aristocrat), leaves Germany on foot with another (Rosenthal, a Jew). Fade to black.

Does La Grand Illusion still speak to us today? Nowadays, Platoon and Apocalypse Now represent state-of-the-art antiwar films--with the added irony that these warnings of the horror of violence come up with ever more glamorous and spectacular ways of depicting said violence. I think we've reach some kind of saturation point and that Renoir seems to stand alone on the opposite side, arguing not that war is such a terrible thing (it is), but that what we have in common is too precious to wreck by indulging in something as wastefully destructive as war.

Some of the funniest and most touching moments in this film come out of Renoir’s sense of common humanity-- out of the way he depicts human goodness. Goodness and compassion in La Grand Illusion isn’t treated as the sentimental embarrassment it is in our more cynical times; tt breaks out from the most startling places-- between a French prisoner and his German guard; between two fellow officers; between a German patrol with rifles cocked and their fleeing French targets. Goodness in La Grand Illusion might even be considered an insidious, corrupting influence-- it sneaks up on you and makes you do surprising things. Goodness, as Graham Greene once noted (in I think Brighton Rock or The End of the Affair), acts a lot like sin sometimes-- subversive and not a little perverse. Certainly a source of Boldieu’s amusement is his feeling so silly for doing something so noble; he never expected it of himself, and he’s embarrassed (may also be part of why he never gives in to Marechal’s friendly overtures). He's already obsolete, now he’s playing the hero? How crass! And how touching and ultimately tragic that he feels it so crass.

And even if none of this seems relevant-- if war has moved beyond Renoir’s humanitarianism-- you might at least be able to appreciate the sense Renoir gives you of a vanished age, of a class and lifestyle rendered irrelevant. You might be able to appreciate the need of people in this film to reach out; appreciate the quiet poetry of Renoir’s film, the simplicity of his storytelling-- something else that seems to have passed, in this world of sensual overload.

First published in Menzone Magazine, 11.2.01