Critic After Dark

Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012)

2012-11-11T23:12:00.000-05:00

Backwards Bond

(Needless to say, story and finale discussed in detail here)

Not really a big fan of Sam Mendes--thought American Beauty a plodding, watered-down version of Blue Velvet, thought Road to Perdition a pretentious if handsomely shot adaptation of the graphic novel. Mendes has talent, but it's difficult to get a read on him as a filmmaker--there isn't a very distinct personality, visually or emotionally speaking.

Which makes it a pleasure, I suppose, to say Mendes has finally found his metier, as an above-average director of Bond films.

Skyfall is back-to-basics Bond, and yes he--or at least the franchise--has tried this before, tried to breathe life into a tired franchise through radical change, either rebirth or death or resurrection. Here he pretty much does die, shot in the chest and dropped hundreds of feet into what looks like a foot of water (Chuck Jones would have milked a good gag out of that).

Nowhere else to go but up, then. The basic premise is that former MI6 agent Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) has emerged from the past and plans to revenge himself on Bond and, through him, on former boss M (Judi Dench)--seems that at one point she had handed Silva over to the enemy, and was tortured for some months; now he feels the need to pay her back the favor, with interest.

Dark and complex stuff, apparently, and Mendes seems to want to inject all this inkiness into his concept of Bond, but what it all really boils down to is that Bond is at war with himself, or a photographic negative of himself--Silva being Bond if Bond were less tough, or sane, or loyal. For the role Bardem dons yet another bad wig, blonde this time, to--what, tell us that his Silva is every bit as badass as Anton Chigurh, perhaps? As a way of parodying Daniel Craig's close-cropped pate? Bond as the epitome of British values while Silva is its perversion down to his Spanish accent, outlandish against the background of clipped British?

That's what the spectacular opening sequence racing through the streets and later rooftops of Istanbul must have been all about: Bond betrayed by M, yet unlike Silva running back to be at her side when Britain is in trouble. Both are M's favorite sons, who respond to her stern and at times ruthless ministrations according to their respective mirror-image natures; both love and hate her in roughly equal measure, with equal intensity.

It's not bad. The film's real stars are Roger Deakins, who manages to shoot much of the action in gorgeous amber lighting (Skyfall, Bond's ancestral ruins, looks beautifully barbaric when lit up from within by gasoline fires) and Bardem, who plays giggly brilliant psychopath with genuine relish (do I like this villain better than the one he played in No Country for Old Men? Oh yes--here you have an idea where he's coming from and what's driving him, and the moments when he is tender with M are every bit as ghastly as the moments when he relentlessly stalks her). If I have a complaint it's that they don't really do enough with Bardem's Silva--the man is deadly until he approaches his target, and then his aim goes bad, his luck turns sour, his brain softens to mush. I suppose it had to be; if he was consistently brilliant the movie would have ended at the halfway point, with an eighty minute running time.

Silva's overtures to Bond are fascinating; equally fascinating is Bond's coy response ("What makes you think this is my first time?"). His bluff called, Silva drops the pose, which is a disappointment--I'd have loved to have him persist trying to recruit/seduce Bond, to equate himself with Bond; more, I'd love to have seen Bond tempted however slightly to take the offer ("This is after all my soul brother, in espionage and in hair color"). Join me or joust with me; let's link arms, rise up, slay our spiritual mother--that might have been a more interesting conflict.

But no, Mendes' subversiveness is largely a tease; like Silva approaching M when he approaches radical revisionism of the Bond mythos his aim fails and he falls aside, leaving us with Business as Usual with Big Explosions. Bond may be abused but never feel betrayed; he may be enticed but never seduced; and he may have his heart tugged, but God forbid that it actually break.

A brief sidenote on the women--but then the women being treated as sidenotes already says something about the movie. Dench's M plays a significant role, it's true; it's also true that she's helpless for most of the picture (in chess, she's the king not queen), makes bumbling decisions, ultimately steps aside in favor of yet another male authority figure (was she tired of the role, or did she ask for too much money?). Naomie Harris' Eve is a more active, more entertaining foil to Bond, but hardly gets to bed him; Berenice Marlohe's Severin does bed him, but ends up as punchline to a sadistic joke. Good respectable girl ultimately sits docilely behind desk to play secretary, bad promiscuous girl gets screwed in both senses? Bond politics is as retrograde as ever, only the filmmakers can't use the times and a sense of wicked fun as an excuse anymore (the early Bond films took very little seriously; as a result (I suspect) audiences then and now don't need to take their misogyny seriously).

Is this the greatest Bond flick ever? Calm down; a little perspective is necessary. Skyfall is good, arguably the best recent Bond, but my list of better titles would include Never Say Never for introducing the idea of an aging, worn-out Bond; the original Casino Royale for its sheer anarchic perversity (Orson Welles as Le Chiffre, Woody Allen as one of several in a family of Bonds); On Her Majesty's Secret Service for the moment--carefully prepared for and presented--where Bond does break down, is more emotionally naked than any of his women, ever; and above all Goldfinger, for perfecting the Bond formula on third attempt, a Cock-a-leekie of beautiful girls, supervillain, fantastic gadgets (some of which sport license plates and roll on four wheels), inventive action and droll humor, all in precisely measured amounts and kept in the air, juggled in an intricate choreography.

In fact one might as well drop the other titles and stay with Goldfinger. Not for nothing did Anthony Burgess include the Fleming book in his 99 Novels, his list of the best 20th century fiction; not for nothing did Robert Bresson express admiration. Burgess liked the book, I suspect, partly because the prose was so evocative--a meal of stone crabs with iced pink champagne near the beginning has been known to provoke angry growls from the unwary belly, while the golf that follows manages to turn a monumentally dull game into a thrilling cat-and-mouse competition.

The novel is divided into three parts: "Coincidence;" "Happenstance;" "Enemy Action." Fleming thought of the story as a series of encounters between Bond and Goldfinger involving ever-increasing stakes, an ever-increasing intensity of loathing; and just as Bond comes closer and closer towards Goldfinger--first in a chance encounter (Coincidence), later as an assigned mission (Happenstance), much later as part of an all-or-nothing desperation ploy (Enemy Action)--Goldfinger himself expands and blooms, growing in size from card cheat to SMERSH agent to larger-than-life Bond supervillain. It's one of the most elegant plots I know, unfolding and unpacking like a magician's trick blossom, until what started as a sapling ends up as a mighty redwood, in the vague shape of a mushroom cloud.

There is an embarrassment of riches in the film, from Shirley Bassey wailing the title song over Saul Bass' gold-dipped beauties to Ken Adam's gigantic sets, their bunker-cavern feel connecting them to his work in Dr. Strangelove--another film from the same year that deals with the anxieties of living in a nuclear age. Paul Dehn may not be adapting literature (Burgess might beg to differ) but it's possible he knew of what he wrote--a year later, he would adopt one of John Le Carre's finest novels to the big screen. No, the director Guy Hamilton is not the filmmaker Sam Mendes is, but he needn't be--he's working from Fleming's perfectly structured book, and with the help of Ted Moore (who lensed all of the early Bond films) achieves a crystalline comic-book look that is part adventure, part parody, pretty much all entertainment.

All that said, there are moments when Hamilton transcends his workman's credentials--the aforementioned attacker-in-woman's eye which Bresson so admired, for example; the entire opening struggle, a series of lightning-fast lunges across the hotel room floor that ends with a literally electrifying checkmate (said finale foreshadowing the even grimmer struggle yet to come). Fleming's crude circular saw updated into a memorably cool hi-tech laser--with the even more memorable exchange:

"Do you expect me to talk?"

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"

There's Harold Sakata's chillingly genial Oddjob, who can work you over with his machine-shop hands like a hunk of taffy while he grinned his infuriating grin. There was the finale, set literally in a fabulous underworld of barred gold (Skyfall with all its lovely locations can't quite come up with a set as awe-inspiring as that vision of auric splendor) with an atomic weapon ticking away in one corner, Bond in another, and--blocking the way like a parked tank--the implacable Oddjob, waiting patiently.

Novel and film follow the classic storytelling structure of introduction-rising action-climax with such smooth and confident grace it takes one's breath away to note how humbly it starts--a game of canasta outside a Miami hotel--and how quickly it ascends to an absurd yet somehow frighteningly convincing scenario: Goldfinger threatening to detonate a nuclear device inside the Federal Bullion Depository of Fort Knox (convincing because Goldfinger--with the shadowy figure of Fleming behind him--had done his research, and apparently knows more about the depository than any other human on Earth).

All this in a running time of about a hundred and ten minutes (compare to Skyfall's one hundred and forty), and lean: no extraneous scenes, no moments of auteurist self-indulgence, no cinematic fat at all.

Goldfinger ends with the threat of an atomic explosion--what other conclusion is possible, in the age of Mutually Assured Destruction? To be fair Dr. No also threatened in a nuclear manner, only reactors don't inspire the kind of gut terror that bombs do, and looking at the bubbling pool in the movie one couldn't help think of (it was a low-budget effort) a tricked-out jacuzzi in the swinging '70s. Worse, after that most ultimate of dooms, it's difficult to imagine what kind of stakes a Bond supervillain might raise, or if there are any stakes left one can raise (Thunderball immediately following Goldfinger solved the problem--kind of--by employing two nuclear devices (which when you think about it is just the same damned thing, done twice)).

One could make the argument that after Goldfinger all succeeding Bond films were redundant, that they could never capture the same precise mix of humor, sex, and action, that Bond could never face so impossible odds and beat them with as much inventive and stylish flair ever again--and one in my book would be right. Goldfinger far as I'm concerned is the apex of the franchise; everything that followed--no matter how talented the people involved, no matter how many Oscar statuettes floated in their wake--is basically downhill.

11.15.12

Babaeng Putik (Woman of Mud, Rico Ilarde, 2000)

2012-10-31T10:28:00.003-04:00

For Halloween, a reprint of an old article on a minor horror classic

Little flick of horrors

Rico Ilarde’s Babaing Putik (Woman of Mud) is an unpretentious yet surprisingly supple example of the horror genre. It’s the story of Mark (Carlos Morales), a promising college graduate whose girlfriend plans to bring him to San Francisco…possibly to pursue a medical career and eventually, marriage and a family. But none of these interest Mark; he wants to be a writer--worse, he wants to be a writer of horror fiction. He had sent samples of a story he had been working on to UCLA, and the university had sent him an application for a writing scholarship. After graduation, he plans to take time out at his uncle’s safehouse in the remote town of San Joaquin, hopefully to finish the story he had started. He befriends a mysterious wanderer, who gives him a mysterious seed. He plants the seed under the light of the full moon (after being given explicit instructions not do exactly that), and a large plant appears. From this plant drops a large fruit; out of the fruit steps out a mute and beautifully naked woman Mark names Sally (Klaudia Koronel). They (of course) have an affair.

The tree and its fruit of beautiful women is an idea straight out of fairy tales, which, when you think about it, are potent horror stories all by themselves (if you don’t think so, read the Grimm Brothers’ original, unexpurgated version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” or “Cinderella”). The concept of having a horror writer at the center of the fairy tale is the kind of cute little conceit Stephen King might have thought up when in one of his more ‘serious’ and ‘literary’ moods (as a matter of fact, King does get mentioned somewhere in the film). Even the characters seem borrowed from King’s novels--Mark, the sensitive and somewhat passive writer-protagonist, ever concerned with his craft, with his (God help us) art, seems to have walked out of King’s The Shining, or The Dark Half, or even “The Body.” Sally, who becomes Mark’s artistic muse, is part ‘woman with dark powers’ a la Carrie or Firestarter, part plot device to get Mark’s creative juices flowing a la Shakespeare in Love.

King isn’t a very fruitful model for Ilarde to follow--his concept of a serious writer of horror fiction is an embarrassing collection of cliches--the need for solitude in ‘natural’ surroundings (Mario Puzo claimed he had to have the noise of wife and children about him to write), the need for sexual ‘inspiration’ to get past a ‘writer’s block’ (William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick used drugs). It would have been much more useful if Ilarde had gone ahead and tried to think through what a horror writer is really like. Making Mark a medical student is a step in the right direction--he could have included a scene where Mark actually asks someone, a professor or friend, various questions on flesh wounds and decomposition, little details Mark might have needed for his story. It would have been just as useful if he had tied in Mark’s enthusiasm with bow and arrows to his writing horror--the fact that archery is an ancient sport with a long history; that arrows can inflict long and lingering pain as effectively as it can kill. There are so many opportunities missed to make this film a minor horror gem--instead of the flawed but surprisingly well-made genre exercise that it is--that you feel a sense of waste, the same time you feel a sense of surprised discovery at just how good the film is anyway, despite the flaws.

Actually, a better model for Ilarde to follow (and he did, to a certain extent) is exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman--and in fact, the huge leafy vegetable out of which Sally steps out of could have come from Corman’s tiny horror classic Little Shop of Horrors, which featured a man-eating plant. Where King’s success has allowed him to suffer more and more from logorrhea (nowadays his books run over a thousand pages--or four kilos hardbound, depending on how you want to measure them), Corman is a master of quickie low-budget filmmaking. He has enjoyed some success but never a huge box-office hit, and this constant persistence on a low-margin level has taught him how to make films swiftly, with little fat or pretension.

Ilarde, fortunately, shows signs of having learned from Corman: he made Babaeng Putik for a mere three million pesos, in about twenty days. And while he doesn’t fully escape from the gassy sentimentality of King (the wanderer gives him the magic seed to “help him with his writing…by putting him to the test”), Ilarde does give King’s nonsense the amount of weight and emphasis it deserves--which is to say, not much.

And yet--sometimes, somehow--Ilarde is able to transform the material. Early in the picture, he gives Carlos Morales a sudden and rather arousing impromptu sex scene to play, and it’s well done--playful and inventive (you can tell Ilarde enjoys the lovemaking in his films). Then Ilarde pans to the wall behind Morales and his girlfriend, and focuses on an anatomical diagram of a man, with skin pulled open and muscles and organs exposed. It’s a startling and enigmatic touch, and strangely reassuring, at least to horror aficionados--it tells you that the director has a few surprises up his sleeve, a few unknown abilities he wants to show you. Later, Morales boards a bus to San Joaquin, and the bus emerges from a bank of thick smoke like a monster out of the jungle mists…the image is Ilarde’s way of telling you that Morales’ magic quest has begun, on the back of this ambulatory creature.

Ilarde’s casting of Carlos Morales is astute--he hardly looks like your ‘sensitive writer’ type, and you can believe he’s a mean son of a bitch with a long bow. He looks like he can take very good care of himself, so when all hell literally breaks loose and he of all people loses his composure, the sudden vulnerability is doubly shocking. Ilarde’s casting of Koronel as Sally, however (a kind of spiritual sister to Corman’s Audrey?) is very possibly a stroke of genius. Koronel has large eyes, a luscious mouth, and breasts the size of watermelons; she has the kind of body you literally cannot believe occurs in real life. She is a walking erotic joke, and as such it makes perfect logic for her to have stepped out of the fruit of an enchanted tree. It would also make perfect logic for her to function as Mark’s erotic fantasy, lending his narrative a psychologically doubtful air--a suggestion that he’s really cracking up from being alone so long and any moment now he’ll go sane and make her vanish into the thin air. Mark’s constantly anxious glances at her suggest the same unsettling thought keeps occurring to him as well.

Babaing Putik’s first half, with its atmospheric imagery and sense of haunted mystery is by far the superior half; when the monster finally makes its appearance, it’s yet another stuntman wearing a rubber suit--worse, wearing a rubber suit that looks suspiciously like the alien in Predator (there’s even a sequence on a bridge that seems like a take-off, or homage to the picture). The characters introduced don’t even do anything more interesting than provide food for the creature’s diet, which apparently consists of human blood and innards. The rules--so carefully outlined by the wanderer--are tossed aside and ultimately ignored (“don’t plant under a full moon,” “feed it only water and blood,” “a source of great pleasure and pain”).)

But even here Ilarde still manages to keep his visuals clean (cinematography by Johnny Araojo, who did the camerawork for Mario O’Hara’s Bagong Hari (A New King)), and his editing coherent. Ilarde even manages to stage a face-off between monster and a squadron of civilian vigilantes that’s like a take-off on the Rambo movies (though if the soldiers had displayed even the slightest knowledge of military tactics the battle would have been less one-sided, far more interesting). Ilarde doesn’t totally squander the good will he built up during the fascinating first half: he manages to whip up a mildly diverting climax, secure a small measure of sympathy for the monster, and suggest just the merest hint of a possible sequel. Not much altogether, and not very original, but not bad either. Considering the budget, the time constraints, the weakly developed script, it’s amazing the film is as good as it is--better, in fact, than some of the recent big-budgeted horror flicks that have come out of Hollywood in recent years. Along with Joyce Bernal for VIVA films, Ilarde is the best of the newest commercial filmmakers working today; can’t wait to see how his next project turns out.

First published in Menzone 2002

Reprinted in my book Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema

Seven Psychopaths, The Master, Frankenweenie

2012-10-29T21:19:00.001-04:00

A Few Good Men

Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths is cinematic Cherry Coke--sweet and tasty, but basically lacking emotional nourishment. It's not just as previous critics have noted that this is recycled Tarantino, it's Tarantino recycled at his least expressive, early enough in his career that Roger Avary still shared writing credit, and the pose Tarantino struck (itself secondhand) was so cool it started a fashion trend in filmmaking, hence the hideous term "Tarantinoesque."

Well, this film is "Tarantinoesque," and that's a good and bad thing. Good in that on several counts McDonagh writes sharper, funnier dialogue, or at least sharper, funnier punchlines, and serves up twists every bit as witty and entertaining as said punchlines, not to mention the original source. Plus, unlike Tarantino, and as evidenced by the oft-promised shootout that ends the picture, McDonagh seems to know a thing or two about staging, shooting, and cutting action.

Otherwise, it's largely disposable (there's a subplot about a Vietnam psychopath that's so transparently a bid to transcend the label 'disposable')--except for Christopher Walken. Walken's psychopath seems to linger in memory because he seems to be the only character in the movie to actually care about something or someone, and we can't help but respond to that in this otherwise emotionally arid wasteland. What makes his performance even better is that he owns a pair of eyes more frightening than even Lucifer's. In Rosemary's Baby the Devil glared through several pounds of prosthetic fur and a satanic pair of contacts; Walken without wearing even an ounce of makeup much less contacts can gaze effortlessly bakc and you know who's gonna blink first. A pair of tired, loving, psychopathic eyes pouched in a cadaverously pale face--what's not to like?

The Matter

I came away from Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master thinking it's a collection of superb film moments--sequences, even--that don't really come together much. Anderson proudly and famously never attended a class for scriptwriting and I suspect this creates the tense energy in his films--he's basically a high-wire act, trying his best not to break his fool neck. But it also means a lot of floundering about, and sometimes you suspect it's the floundering audiences come to watch in an Anderson (Paul Thomas, not W.S.) and not the actual film--that, and the chance to maybe see him break his fool neck.

Oh, but what an act! Overhead shots of the ocean swirling behind a ship; a group of Filipino workers chasing a man across a vast dusty field; Joaquin Phoenix draped lazily past the boundary of a ship's railing, threatening to fall over and not caring; Phoenix later in the film, pressing his lips longingly to the windowpane (he appears to be trying to break through--to what? And why?). Anderson knows how to whip up a striking image, knows how present it--big, baleful, portentous--on the big screen (and I mean big--65 mm on traditional film stock, instead of the standard 35 mm digital video), knows to the microsecond how long to hold an image: long enough that you begin to wonder if you aren't perhaps missing some extra layer of meaning in what you're seeing, but not so long that you start to suspect maybe he's faking it with all the pregnant pauses.

It's not about Scientology--well, not directly about Scientology, which takes a few glancing blows to the rib; it's more about the dynamics that exist within a group not unlike the Scientologists, complete with fanaticists, doubters, and those that vacillate back and forth between the two extremes. And it's about the uneasy friendship that develops between Phoenix's Freddie Quell and the cult's founder Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a low-key yet authoritative performance). Most of all it's about what two men--one a wandering alcoholic, the other the multi-million dollar founder of a cult religion--have in common, and the answer is unsettlingly simple: both arrive at their respective positions in life (near ruin, great success) through hard struggle, and they will respond with rejection, anger, even violence, to anyone who threatens to topple that position. They recognize the same angry, fearful man inside each other, and they can't help but acknowledge that man, even lend him a kind of uneasy support.

Is it a great film? Hell no; least I don't think so. Anderson could go so much further if he actually knew what he was doing; then again, if he knew what he was doing, he wouldn't be the special flavor that is Anderson--Paul Thomas, not W.S.

A Boy and His

Talk about yet another unconscious, instinctive artist, Tim Burton's Frankenweenie is an expansion of the live-action short of the same name. Presumably Burton had his reasons for turning to stop-motion for the remake: more control over the overall look and the characters' gestures, a stylization that helps sell the sweet-natured premise (which is arguably too sweet, though Disney deemed the original short too frightening for kids) and, well, stop-motion don't need no reason--it's just awesome all its own.

The film starts with a short film that somehow manages not just to suggest its handmade nature (this in a $40 million Hollywood feature), but one with crude yet innovative special effects--pterodactyl swinging on a string, menacing cardboard buildings; toy artillery firing styrofoam muzzle flash; infantrymen made of cheap green plastic (what boy growing up back then didn't have an odd platoon or two forgotten in his toy chest somewhere?).

The story isn't much more than that: boy loves dog, boy loses dog, boy resurrects dog using recycled household appliances (our protagonist Victor improvises with a ironing board as operating table, an aquarium as battery, and a kite as lightning rod). It's Frankenstein recast as a iconic suburban creation myth, and it's arguably the film's money sequence, its reason for being--all throughout Burton's career there's been an uneasy tension between idyllic suburban home and doomed Gothic melancholy, and as shown in his short Vincent he's not averse to spoofing either sensibilities. With this film's first half, he's finally stitched both into a perfectly monstrous creation that lurches about the attic with gleeful abandon.

And then there's the rest of the film. After Victor creates the dog, Burton doesn't seem to know what to do next--he fills the picture with busy plotting and made-up conflicts that don't really threaten the status quo (a Gothic child growing up in an essentially benign suburban community), or at the last minute tosses in sketchy characters that shake things up without really clarifying why they do so, though even this has its moments--love the shout-out to Godzilla, and better yet, the classic animated short Bambi vs. Godzilla. The narrative really regains its footing only after the windmill sequence, after which all is right with the world.

Which doesn't really mean the ruination of the film. Burton was never a consistent or especially skillful storyteller; I suspect that he spent years and millions of dollars to do Planet of the Apes, for example, as an excuse to shoot the moment when man and ape kiss, sending a sexual charge straight up your spine. I suspect he did Frankenweenie to pour all of Disney's considerable resources into producing that creation myth--expressing his love for his long-ago animated short, for the James Whale original, for the neverending tension between Goth and suburb in his life. Everything else was pretty much an afterthought.

10.29.12

Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012)

2012-10-16T10:55:00.000-04:00

Ben Affleck's Argo isn't as emotionally profound or thematically complex as his previous works Gone Baby Gone and The Town, but it's plenty all its own--a meat-and-potatoes, no-nonsense thriller remarkable for its unlikely premise and outre details. The situation (six Americans hiding in the heart of Tehran during the height of the 1979 Iranian Revolution) is impossible enough; the solution (disguising all six as members of a Canadian film crew doing preproduction work on a science-fantasy movie) lifts the story to a whole other level, the kind that makes you want to exclaim "this would make a terrific film!"

And lo and behold--

Kudos to Affleck for playing it straight, for (as he puts it) presenting details as they (more or less) were, without too much comic exaggeration or overt mugging so that the humor emerges from the material, in fragile balance with the grimness of the situation--a grimness driven home by the scene where hero Tony Mendez (Affleck playing the lead), being driven through Tehran's city streets, catches a glimpse of a man hung from the end of a high crane. Kudos to Affleck for the effective inserting of unforgettable video footage (the students storming the US embassy) and archival photo images (the burning of an American flag, the aforementioned crane hanging) into the story. Kudos again to Affleck for trying to play fair with the Iranian people by beginning the film with a summary of recent history, outlining just why they're so unhappy with the United States--the intro helps add a texture of ambivalence to the proceedings, as we witness the heroic efforts expended to extricate people from a circumstance their own country's meddling helped bring about. The effort may not satisfy everyone, and when you think about it may not really be enough, but he did make the attempt.

Perhaps the film's best scenes take place not in Tehran but in Los Angeles; the satire on Hollywood wheeling and dealing is about as sharply observant and hilarious as one assumes an insider like Affleck can make it.

The latter half has Affleck's Mendez entering Iran and trying to shape his six terrified charges into something like a film crew; the finale is pure Hollywood hokum, but done so pulse-poundingly well you can't help but be caught up anyway. Affleck in an interview did defend the additional embroidery as being what Mendez and his fellow conspirators were probably thinking might happen while they attempt escape, not necessarily what actually happened.

Critics have noted a similarity between this and the thrillers of Alan J. Pakula, or Sidney Lumet. I don't know--this is somewhat more bizarre than almost anything they've done (Lumet did do Network--but that's more a Paddy Chayefsky film than anything). The film might have benefited from a more wayward, character-focused approach: the suggestion made in the Wired article that helped inspire the film, for instance, that the six really got into their roles, took elaborate measures to change their hairstyles and appearances, started to inhabit their assigned profiles the way Method actors do. Jonathan Demme, a master at eccentric Americana, might have taken to the challenge of suggesting this--think odd genre-bending efforts like Married to the Mob, Something Wild, Citizen's Band, or his masterpiece Melvin and Howard, where people assume roles distinct from their own personalities, the film itself starts to assume a whole other identity, and the plot as a result starts to deflect and detour, like a mis-hit cue ball, in unpredictable and often comic (but not always) directions. The effect would be so much more courageous, so much more strange, but still within the confines of a persuasive realism (think an American Jean Renoir). Affleck, alas, chooses the straightforward path a la Pakula and Lumet; well done, but it could have been so much more than what it is.

Perhaps my biggest reservation with regards to a more or less terrific film is the ommission of the true details about the faux film itself. Argo wasn't just any science fantasy, but a script based on one of science fiction's best-loved novels, Roger Zelazny's Hugo Award-winning Lord of Light. Science fiction enthusiast Barry Ira Geller had optioned Zelazny's novel and brought together some heavyweight talents--Ray Bradbury; Buckminster Fuller; Planet of the Apes makeup artists John Chambers and Maurice Stein; the inimitable Jack Kirby as conceptual artist--in a quixotic attempt to make what at that time was considered the most expensive science fiction epic ever made ($50 million, an unprecedented amount).

Sadly, the project fell apart (it didn't help that Geller had zero experience at film producing, or that one of the backers was a con artist). John Chambers--who knew Tony Mendez--eventually used the script and drawings as basis for the elaborate cover story for the Iran rescue mission.

As you might note from the artwork above, at one point Geller was actually proposing a $400 million theme park called Science Fiction Land. The park, based on Zelazny's ideas of free technology and built on the film's leftover sets, would feature guards flying about in jet packs; a thousand-lane bowling alley with robot attendants; a thirty-eight story high Ferris Wheel; Vegas-style "Pavilions of Joy;" and a holographic zoo.

Affleck suggested that the movie was a discarded studio script for a Star Wars-style science-fantasy movie, with blatant copies of Chewbacca and Artoo Detoo walking around the set. The truth is much stranger: a masterpiece from one of science fiction's most eloquent writers, realized in a series of gorgeous drawings by a giant in graphic art. If I were an Iranian Republican Guard, I too might be distracted by the beauty and vividness of these drawings.

Affleck must have thought the Science Fiction Land subplot too interesting and complex to include in his film and instead opted for a few cheap shots at Star Wars knockoffs, which is unfortunate; I liked the knockoffs better than the source material, especially Battle Beyond the Stars, which was a knockoff of both Star Wars and Akira Kurosawa's epic Seven Samurai (ironically Star Wars itself is a knockoff of another Kurosawa epic, The Hidden Fortress)). The real script and drawings might have given the film a surreal touch and help introduce a second theme, about resurrection and renewal and the power of the self-image (all key themes in Lord of Light)--but that's just me.

Come to think of it--did I say the story of Argo would make a terrific film? Maybe so; not just the Iran rescue end, but the whole story, science fiction novel, theme park, scam artists and all.

And lo and behold, it just might.

10.16.12

May Nagmamahal sa Iyo (Madonna and Child, 1996), in tribute to Marilou Diaz-Abaya (1955 - 2012)

2012-10-08T23:28:00.000-04:00

Another important Filipino filmmaker is gone, and in tribute to her, here's an article on one of my favorite of her films:

Mother Love

May Nagmamahal Sa Iyo

Starring: Lorna Tolentino, Stefano Mori, Jaclyn Jose, Ariel Rivera, Gina Pareno, Tom Taus

Written by: Ricky Lee and Shaira Mella Salvador

Directed by: Marilou Diaz-Abaya

I SAW this picture with a Japanese friend who didn't know Tagalog. We watched the first scene as Louella (Lorna Tolentino) gives up her child to a priest (Rolando Tinio, of all people!). A classic scene, done countless times, but you wouldn't know it watching Tolentino: her hair in a disarray, her eyes slightly wild, her hands clutch the infant helplessly, hopelessly, as she instructs the priest in a trembling voice on the proper care and feeding of her son. My friend didn't need a single word translated.

Seven years later Tolentino is a domestic helper in Hongkong. You have to give the producers credit for actually shooting in Hongkong; but you also give Marilou Diaz-Abaya credit for not allowing the Hongkong shots to look like a moment of Star Cinema spending. The sequence falls seamlessly into place and drives the story forward; it actually adds insight into Tolentino's character. She's taken her motherly love and poured it into her young charge--up to a point. When the time comes for her to go, the child is devastated; Tolentino leaves with hardly a backward look. You find yourself nodding yes, that's how I'd act in her place, and of how many local films can you truthfully say that?

Tolentino comes home to an embittered mother, Rosing (Gina Pareno), and a neglected boyfriend, Nestor (Ariel Rivera as--an honest policeman?). Her recent experience as babysitter has left her vaguely dissatisfied; she wants to find the child she gave away long ago. Her search leads her to Conrad (Stefano Mori), a dirty, disheveled urchin. Their eyes meet. Could this be her son?

I sat with bated breath, waiting for that fatal moment when the soap-opera plot slips on its frothy suds. It's a new form of suspense, uniquely Filipino, developed from years of watching promising local dramas that ultimately disappoint.

The moment never really happens. Like an unlikely swan the film flaps its wings once, twice, catches an oncoming wind, and soars; you're left in your seat with your face slowly turning blue.

An unlikely swan, indeed. You'd never guess it from Marilou Diaz-Abaya's previous film, Ipaglaban Mo, an exercise in feminist hysterics. Here she's cooler than she's ever been; her touch has never been more sure. You see it in her deft handling of the superb cast. She takes Ariel Rivera's wooden acting and brings it miraculously to life: an honest cop is unbelievable, but a cop as earnest and awkward as Rivera is funny and rather endearing. Who cares if he's fictional? You can hear the Rivera fans in the audience falling in love all over again with this subtly seductive illusion.

Claudine Barretto is unusually fine as Louella's young sister. It's a small role, but in a film like this there really are no small roles; each is given a life of his or her own. Gina Pareno as Tolentino's mother gives a gem of a performance. Like Louella, she's an abandoned mother, and she can't forgive her daughter for following in her footsteps. Pareno tortures Tolentino with tight-lipped, angry silences. When she has anything to say, the words come out swift and barbed; Pareno takes them and whips them across Tolentino's face.

Jacklyn Jose turns in a luminous performance as the housemaid who rescues a child (Tom Taus) from physical abuse. She manages to make her virtuous character not just believable, but moving, and for once her performance snaps into place as part of an ensemble, instead of sticking out in an acting vacuum. Taus plays the abused victim with horrific realism; when his bruised cheeks stretch into a tentative smile, you can't help but shudder.

Stefano Mori is everything you hope for in a child actor and almost never get. His Conrad is a rebel; dirty, spirited and profane. He'll punch a nun in the stomach, then charm her with a gap-toothed smile. What keeps his performance from being sickeningly cute is the fierce, hot core of anger you see in him. He's been abandoned by his mother and the world; now he wants--what? Revenge? A mother's love? The film's biggest flaw may be in not pushing this character to its limit; we might have ended up with the despairing cherubs of Shoeshine, or the angel-faced demons of Los Olvidados or Pixote. This reservation aside, Mori handles himself well--so well you want to see him in stronger roles.

Tolentino as Louella is passionate, confused, loving, torn. She never tries for easy dramatics; you cry long before she even sheds a tear (witness the scene when she gives up her son). Her intelligent, understated acting looks better and better with every movie she makes; this one could well be the performance of her life.

Kudos to the production crew: the quietly beautiful photography (by Ed Jacinto), the crisp, clean editing ( Jess Navarro and Manet Dayrit), the (for once) unobtrusive music (by Nonong Buencamino). As scriptwriter, Ricky Lee has never been stronger or more dramatic. Unusual for Lee, the script is also well-balanced and free of moral rhetoric--no one breaks into a speech in this picture, no one stands to deliver a sermon. The Hongkong scenes at the beginning and the ship full of children near the end, both big-budget production scenes, don't overwhelm the rest of the film, which remain focused on Louella and Conrad. You wonder how much of this, and of the remarkably believable dialogue, is the influence of Shaira Mella Salvador, who (as far as I know) is writing for the first time.

From the intensity of Brutal, through the realism of Moral, to the gothicism of Karnal, Diaz-Abaya has always been on the side of women, and it shows: the film has almost no significant male characters except for Nestor, who's thoughtful and passive. To this recurring theme she adds the subject of blood, the importance we give to it, to our actual relatives as opposed to friends and relatives we choose. Blood is a favorite Filipino obsession. At its extreme, this obsession leads to nepotism, racism, power dynasties--corruption in the name of blood. At its most extreme, it leads to feuds, battles, war: blood spilled in the name of blood. With this film, Diaz-Abaya suggests that the alternative--the son or mother you choose, the bond that two people form--can be as strong, if not stronger, than mere blood.

It's a measure of Lee, Salvador, and Diaz-Abaya's achievement that none of this heavy philosophizing weighs down the film. You don't really notice anything else: for minutes at a time, what's onscreen is life, real life, and you are under its spell. An enthralling film.

(First published in The Manila Chronicle, 2/3/96; reprinted in my book Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema)

Looper (Rian Johnson); Dr. Who: The Angels Take Manhattan (Nick Hurran)

2012-10-04T12:12:00.000-04:00

Coming around again

Rian Johnson's Looper--about a hit man assigned to kill targets sent to him by the future who ends up face to face with an older version of himself--is pretty good fun, a clever mash-up of The Terminator and The Fury or to be more accurate, of "Jon's World" and Dr. Bloodmoney (Johnson is a self-admitted Philip K. Dick fan).

He doesn't get it all perfect (warning: major plot details discussed in detail); a subplot about TK (telekinesis, or the ability to manipulate small amounts of pocket change) seems to stick out like a sore thumb--you just know it's going to figure in a more crucial manner later on. All those people hanging about in mid-air with their legs hanging loose seem so, well, Chronicle (I thought De Palma did this effect best, in near-dark, where the sense of disorientation would be greatest). The guns--anachronistically called 'blunderbusses'--seem more tailored to the demands of the script than practical with an effective range of at most fifteen feet, we're told time and again (that extreme short range plays into a number of admittedly exciting and well-staged action sequences, not to mention the finale). Our hero (played alternately by Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Willis prostheses) manages to wipe out an entire building of gangsters with some assault rifles and a beltful of hand grenades (isn't anyone else but him at all halfway competent?), not to mention everyone's aim when wielding a firearm while normally excellent starts to suffer precisely when the script calls for it to suffer (otherwise the movie would end right there).

And oh, the Rainmaker; little is known about the Rainmaker except what's whispered furtively, sparingly, just enough to let you know he's basically a plot function meant to raise the dramatic stakes more than a little.

The climactic killing (I did say I was going to discuss crucial plot details, didn't I?) has the protagonist vanish; nothing spectacular, just a digitized wipe. That says something to me when the same results could have been achieved with two or three cuts and some strong mis-en-scene--that the filmmaker isn't quite as confident about his abilities as he should be, a flaw I think he shares with one Christopher Nolan.

The crucial difference, I think, is that Johnson with only his third feature reveals himself to be a more inventive, more sensual, more humorous and (thank goodness) more coherent genre filmmaker than Nolan has proven to be so far. Gordon-Levitt and Willis play both ends of the same character brilliantly; someone pointed out that facing each other they remind you of the mirror sequence in Leo McCarey's Duck Soup. The twists as with Nolan are surprising; unlike Nolan Johnson is careful to populate the complex plot with humanlike characters who crack wise and have goofy moments and actually exhibit something of a libido.

And Johnson has his oddball moments--I mean really oddball, like the close-up of the cream swirling in a cup of coffee. What does a reference, several in fact, to 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle have to do with the movie? Who knows? I just happen to love it, is all.

Unlike with Dick, Johnson gives the film a bittersweet but ultimately hopeful ending, which I suppose marks the difference between the two: Johnson has to work with a budget however modest, and has to come up with an ending that would earn the necessary boxoffice to repay his backers. Dick worked alone; he may have tried to write for a pop audience, but couldn't help straying from the commercial path to follow his own dark, dangerous visions.

"It's called marriage"

There's complicated (as in Looper), faux-complex (as in Memento and Inception) and then there's timey-wimey. Nick Hurran's realization of Steve Moffat's script "The Angels Take Manhattan" (Doctor Who Season 7, Episode 5) is about as dark and eerie a recent Doctor Who episode as I can think of. Not, perhaps, as frightening as the Angels' first outing--can't think of a more frightening episode than "Blink," at least on television--but at least Moffat and Hurran have managed to bring back some of the chills.

It helps to be so unabashedly noir, from the handsomely lit ambiance of New York in the late '30s to the lush shadows that wrap the hallways and stairwells of the hotel Winter Quay (ominous name, that--like a frozen harbor or something as bleak).

I liked the Angels' two-part second outing well enough--stuff like "The image of an Angel is an Angel" helped expand their deadly capabilities--but I've always preferred this, their original modus operandi. Something about flinging a man backwards through time, away from friends and loved ones, always struck me as a horrible way to go, especially when you've just met the love of your life (thinking of you, Detective Inspector Billy Shipton).

Thirties' New York should have been our cue: this is a return to classicism, of sorts. The Angels return to their former eeriness, the Ponds (you know I've got to talk about them at some point) to their former roles, with Amy as the strong heart and decision-maker of the relationship and Rory as the hapless yet faithful fall guy who not only accepts but exploits his repeat-dying routine as a way to defeat his adversaries--the ultimate punchline, with the joke being on the Angels ("Rory, stop it. You'll die." "Yeah, twice, in the same building on the same night. Who else could do that?"). I liked that.

I like it that Moffat draws on all of Amy's episodes (which means practically all of the fifth, sixth and seventh seasons) for motifs, in-jokes, gratuitous references; I like it that River Song is present for their final adventure, and that Amy calls her "Melody"-- belatedly and briefly but no less authoritatively she's River's mother, giving her daughter the benefit of an instinctive but quick-witted wisdom.

I love it that Smith's Doctor is casually, unthinkingly cruel ("No, you get your wrist out; you get your wrist out without breaking it"), and that River despite her brief if interestingly sequenced lifespan is the more mature of the two in marriage ("Never let him see the damage"); I love it that that though Rory makes the crucial decision that saves everyone's life Amy makes the crucial decision that determines the rest of her (and Rory's) life.

I love the lines: "You've changed the future!" "It's called marriage, honey." Moffat it seems to me has taken all the wit and feeling he developed writing scripts for the sex comedy series Coupling and poured it into those two lines, lines that sum up the episode and pretty much sum up the Ponds. Which could be thought two ways: that he's shallow for being able to summarize everything he stands for in two sentences, or that he's genius for being able to summarize everything he stands for in two sentences. River's glib reply is a feint, a deception, of course; when Amy repeats it later on she does so with infinitely greater emotional force and resonance. This time it works--no hiding, no deception, only change.

As for the Ponds' ultimate fate--I don't buy into the complaint that Rory doesn't get to do anything or say goodbye; the very sting and poignancy of an Angel death is that it's a total shock, that you don't get to do anything or say goodbye. If Moffat has the Angels back to doing what they always did, kill with kindness, then Rory must go back to doing what he always does: die, this time taking fifty years to do so.

Amy writes to the Doctor, assuring him they lived happy lives. I don't know about that: the Angels are known for killing with kindness, and we only really have Pond's secondhand word for it that they're happy (not that I really want to know; sometimes it's better not to).

But even if they were happy, it's the kind of happy that comes at a cost: no more rides with a madman in a box, no more careening through all of space and time. The slow path, someone once said to the Doctor; having traveled with him, how can anyone stand it? Moffat may have dressed matters up the best he could, put on a brave face and told us (through a disembodied voiceover) that they had had a happy life, but when all is said and done, this is a tragedy: the Ponds are dead, the Doctor is once more left alone.

Know what I think of all this? Moffat might be a Weeping Angel himself--take your eyes off him for a second, and he'll kill you with kindness.

10.4.12

The only real crime is the cybercrime law

2012-10-02T11:52:00.001-04:00

No libel

No slander

No derogatory remarks

No sexually suggestive innuendos

No unkind words

No negative comments

No exposes

No wit

No sarcasm

No irony

No truth

No freedom

No way

Some links:

Full text of RA 10175

Human Rights Watch: New 'Cybercrime' Law Will Harm Free Speech

10 scary things about the cybercrime prevention act 2012

Netizens rally against cybercrime law

Forbes: The Philippines passes a Cybercrime Law

The heroic opposition

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

2012-09-30T11:33:00.002-04:00

My debut article for Cinemas of Asia (a journal of the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC)):

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

It was a blast to watch, and write about.

9.30.12

Herbert Lom, 1917 - 2012

2012-09-27T10:01:00.000-04:00

Herbert Lom

He was brilliant as Chief Inspector Dreyfus in Blake Edwards' Pink Panther series (watch him read a tribute to Inspector Clouseau, where people take his desperately smothered titters for barely repressed tears), and an imposing Captain Nemo in Cy Endfield's low budget but still impressive Mysterious Island, but I'll really remember him best as the soft-spoken yet frightening Kristos in Jules Dassin's masterpiece noir Night and the City. How frightening? He terrified the shit out of Richard Widmark.

Resident Evil: Retribution; Beast of the Southern Wild; Body Heat

2012-09-26T09:41:00.001-04:00

Poetry of the senses

Was looking over Lawrence Kasdan's memorable '81 feature debut and it looks nice enough, all shadows and subdued colors and slinking camera, and he does evoke the moist heat well enough--I caught myself wiping my brow from time to time and wishing for some ass tea. He does best with the male cast: Ted Danson was an amusing best friend, Mickey Rourke a memorably soft-spoken demolitions expert. William Hurt had this lazy, brazen arrogance, leaning back and admitting he was doing his client; Danson's brows rose about the same time as mine.

What screws up the movie (literally and metaphorically) is the girl. As Matty Walker, Kathleen Turner was a gorgeous creature, all creamy skin, flowing blonde mane and husky cigarette voice. But she has reams of dialogue, much of it with her clothes on, and she can't seem to make all those lines work, much less come alive, much less wrap us and bewitch us (the way she's supposed to be bewitching Hurt's Ned Racine) with the sensuality of her passion. At one point Kasdan has her standing opposite Hurt and talking fast and the scene was just dead, it lay between them like roadkill, and no amount of fast talk was going to bring it back to life. Kept waiting for Kasdan to do something, glide the camera sideways, blind us with a little style, but no: he seemed too in love with the words he wrote for Matty, with his words, to do anything other than insist that we sit and listen (Hurt to his credit looked as if he was listening; he even looked persuaded). Turner wouldn't display the kind of heedless eroticism that would be her trademark until two years later, when she would lampoon her sensuality in Carl Reiner's underrated The Man With Two Brains (apparently she's sexier when she's funnier). For real heat I prefer Richard Rush's demented, much underrated Color of the Night instead--Jane March could raise a felled flagpole without even trying, both hands tied behind her back (especially with hands tied behind her back).

Poor lucky Kasdan--muffs his first attempt which becomes a small boxoffice hit anyway, and goes on to have a so-so filmmaking career. His mistake, of course, was to ignore classic noir's prime directive: Cherchez la femme, pardieu! Cherchez la femme.

Poetry of devastation

There's a lot to dislike about Benh Zeitlin's debut feature (all about debuts today): details don't make sense (it's impossible to slap a chicken the size of a small turkey on a grill and expect it to cook immediately, and demolishing a levee without showing the consequences--more deaths--seems like questionable filmmaking at best), bits seem underwritten (Why leave the shelter? Granted there were stories of assaults and such during Katrina's rampage, but we don't see the reason here) and the lyricism is sometimes troweled on with such lack of restraint you feel like a Fortunato confronted by an overcaffeinated bricklayer ("for the love of God Montresor!").

But Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) is such a strong presence and Zeitlin's film so dense with textural and aural details one can't help but be enchanted, nevertheless. The fictional Bathtub--a bayou located in some unspecified corner of Louisiana (actually the town of Montegut) is like a dank corner of the country's subconscious, where homeless, forgotten wanderers drift in and forage for plywood and chicken mesh to build their dilapidated shacks. Zeitlin achieves the Katrina-like storm effects with almost no budget (a reported $2 million), and his giant creature effects are amazing (mostly forced perspective, some prosthetic tusks, and perhaps a digital touchup here or there)--and of course it makes sense that the aurochs (an ancestor of domesticated cattle) would look like giant feral pigs--they're the only hooved animals Hushpuppy would know about.

Wallis delivers a memorable performance that is the heart of the film, but most of my admiration is reserved for Dwight Henry's tremendous performance as Wink, Hushpuppy's father. Henry is not afraid to play Wink as an unapologetic monster--he cuffs his daughter when angry, and he's not afraid to yell and toss things around; but he does have love for her, a love that burns as fiercely as any of his other drives (one other would be an independent spirit that refuses to knuckle under to the powers that be).

It's poetry; sometimes overdone, rarely under complete control, but legitimate poetry, fashioned from crowding forest and muddy waters. At one point Hushpuppy climbs aboard a makeshift raft, basically the back of a Ford truck mounted on oil drums and tied together with rope, and one thinks Huckleberry Finn himself wouldn't turn down this adventure.

Some compare this picture to Terence Malick's Tree of Life. I can see similarities in tone and imagery--the voiceover narration, the glorification of nature, the profundity slipping occasionally into pretentiousness--only Beasts was done for a fraction of Malick's budget with no name stars, a boatload of heedless courage, and a collective heart as big as all of Louisiana. Not bad at all, but I expect to see more from Zeitlin, hopefully better.

Poetry in motion

Was surprised to see Dave Kehr interviewed on Movie Morlocks; was even more surprised to see that Kehr was a fan of Paul Anderson--W.S., not Thomas--and that he loved Resident Evil: Retribution. Did not know Kehr was an Anderson fan.

Not a big fan, myself (thought Anderson's Death Race was a mere shadow of Paul Bartel's 1975 satiric original), but I did like Soldier, Anderson's sneaky remake of George Stevens' Shane which, taking its cue from Kurt Russell's expressionless title performance, had an even sneakier--furtive, almost--sense of humor. If you gaze at the soldier's genetically impassive face for any length of time you start reading emotions into it, much like with a Rorschach blot; I thought this both a clever parody of the action hero's traditional impassiveness and a surprisingly effective way to suggest soulfulness (?!) in a science fiction action flick (these soldiers may be genetically altered to minimize the impact of pain, guilt, shame but nevertheless they feel these emotions). Later when you're more accustomed to their stylized (Bressonian?) acting you can read pages into their expressionless mugs: a mountain of sarcasm in a slightly tilted brow, a floodplain of sorrow in a mouth's downturned edge.

Several comments raised my brow in the Resident Evil interview--I suppose one can see Milla Jovovich's Alice being lead heroine as some kind of triumph for the feminist cause, but video games (and their big-screen adaptations) often use sexy female protagonists (Lara Croft, anyone?); it's practically a cliche. Same with the Umbrella Corporation--faceless corporate villains are a classic trope in the genre, nothing truly innovative about their use.

Also a pity he needed to use Anderson to bash Joss Whedon's work. Whedon possibly lost some street cred with the ubersuccess of his The Avengers (he's establishment now, for better or worse), but his writing has always sparkled (Cabin in the Woods) and his directing has its own continuity and flow (perhaps not necessarily in this multimillion production--though I'd cite Black Widow's escape scene early in the picture--but in films like Serenity and the "Once More With Feeling" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). He can even do musical numbers, always a plus in my book ("Once More with Feeling," Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog).

Those points set aside, I can see Anderson's film being a continuation of what the Hong Kong filmmakers were doing in the '80s and early '90s; not so much Tsui Hark as John Woo, with his penchant for fetishized gunplay, stylized homoeroticism. Not much development in this flick into genuine relationships, homoerotic or otherwise, but plenty of development of action sequences, handgun escalating to automatic rifle, with side forays into weighted chains and curved blades. Plenty of actual as opposed to digitized stunts--on occasion Alice will face a CGI creature, which she mostly disposes of with a brief strafing and a belt full of grenades; the real confrontations involve human adversaries, doing non-digital kicks and spins, in knock-em-down-drag-em-out fights that recall (distantly) Drunken Master 2.

And they're dances; they're exuberant exhibitions of balletic motion, done with grace and great skill; Anderson shoots them in such a way that the movements remain clear in your head, that entire sequences remain clear in the head (that glorious moment when, at the beginning of this, Resident Evil 5, we get a slow-motion reverse-play recap of the ending of the previous Resident Evil). Astaire would approve, I think; Kelly too, though really the one who would clap his hands in sardonic appreciation would probably be Bob Fosse. What can I say about Resident Evil: Retribution? Best dance movie I've seen in a while, easy--since Robert Rodriguez's Machete, anyway.

9.26.12

Jose F. Lacaba receives lifetime achievement award

2012-09-22T10:36:00.000-04:00

For the 40th anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law, a belated reposting of a piece I wrote on one of the dictatorship's more hardcore adversaries:

Jose "Pete" Lacaba receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the 10th Osian's Cinefan Film Festival

Sincerely hope he had the chance to visit the Taj Mahal in nearby Agra. Shah Jahan's monumental tribute to matrimonial love (actually it's less romantic when you learn that Mumtaz Mahal (hence the name) was his favorite wife, and that when his son Aurangzeb deposed him for overspending and imprisoned him in nearby Agra fort to spend the rest of his life gazing at his great love's tomb marker, he had his harem to console him in his loneliness--but still).

The article goes on to mention Lino Brocka, for whom Lacaba penned many of Brocka's best-known works--Jaguar (1979), a superbly structured drama based on Nick Joaquin's news article "The Boy Who Wanted to Become Society," and featuring great noirish cinematography by Conrado Baltazar; Bayan Ko (My Country, 1985), which took genuine courage to write during the last few years of the Marcos dictatorship; and Orapronobis (Fight for Us, 1989), which took courage of a different kind, saying that the then hugely popular Corazon Aquino (not a dictator, but she had so little control over what was happening it was practically chaos) was "worse than Marcos"--an accusation currently being leveled against present president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Written during this period as well was his one screenplay for the Philippines' one genuine genius filmmaker ('genius' with all the virtues and limitations the label implies), Mike de Leon: Sister Stella L. (1984)

What to say about the films? Lacaba has a strong voice in his scripts, I submit, so strong that otherwise powerful personalities like Lino Brocka and Mike de Leon (and if you think the reclusive de Leon doesn't have a powerful personality, ask the men and women (especially the women) who act or work for him) are subsumed under his intense, no-nonsense sensibility. Melodramatic Brocka becomes coherent and even understated (?!); De Leon loses the baroque edge of cruelty of his more personal works (Kisapmata, 1981; Batch '81, 1982). I don't believe the films show either director at their very best (they become, I submit, Lacaba's translators to the big screen), but they are strong, well-shaped pictures--superb examples of agitprop--with an electric political awareness and unselfconscious modesty I wish I could see more often in other Filipino films.

Lacaba does when given the opportunity to do so (which doesn't happen very often--his filmography is relatively spare, compared to more prolific Filipino writers) uplift the work of almost any other filmmaker. Chito Rono, for example, was inspired to create what I would consider his masterpiece from Lacaba's script for Eskapo (Escape, 1995)--the early scenes of paranoia and fear, when Marcos' freshly declared Martial Law hung silently over every Filipino head, are unmatched in any of Rono's other pictures (or almost any other picture in Philippine cinema, for that matter).

With filmmaker Tikoy Aguiluz, I submit they brought out the best in each other. For Rizal sa Dapitan (Rizal in Dapitan, 1997) Lacaba wrote what I thought was an honest, beautifully spare historical drama, perfect for Aguiluz's no-budget guerilla-style filmmaking (full disclosure: I wrote a draft of this film (a rather improbable affair full of conspiracy intrigues and arnis combat and scenes of Rizal exorcising the demon out of a possessed woman, of which only a little of the dialogue and even less of the plot was used)). For erotic noir thrillers like Tatsulok (Triangle, 1998) or Segurista (Dead Sure, 1996), Lacaba brought tautness to a well-structured plot that Aguiluz (and Aguiluz's longtime collaborator, writer-editor Mirana Medina-Bhunjun) exploited for maximum tension and (thanks to Aguiluz) memorably unglamorous eroticism.

Bagong Bayani (Unsung Heroine, 1995), about the trial and execution of Singaporean domestic worker Flor Contemplacion, is part dramatized footage, part documentary, almost all masterpiece--an innovatively structured film (Aguiluz claims the inspiration was Ian McNaugton's And Now For Something Completely Different (1971)) sprinkled with Lacaba's no-nonsense dialogue (Lacaba once said he strove to write the way people talk), dealing with an urgent Filipino issue (the plight of our overseas contract workers--source of much-needed foreign currency, backbone of our fragile economy, target of an endless number of employer abuses).

One remembers the film for the power of the dramatized scenes (Contemplacion's farewell to her family) the power of the documentary footage (the interviews of various overseas workers and Singaporean citizens), and for the image of Flor pressing hand against window, trying to feel the touch of her children's hands through the glass. A great film, easily the best of the collaborations between Lacaba and Aguiluz (arguably, Lacaba and anyone).

Congratulations, Pete; you deserve the honor many times over (not to mention the financial rewards--Hollywood rarely pays its writers well, much less the Philippine film industry). God willing we'll get to see more of your work, and of the same rare calibre, for years to come.

Moonrise Kingdom, Irene Dunne, Ingrid Bergman, and a little Rudy Vallee

2012-09-04T05:19:00.001-04:00

Moonrise Kingdom

Maybe liking Wes Anderson is a matter of perspective; maybe one needs to see his films from a chair lowered some six or so inches--maybe this miniscule adjustment's all that's really needed to love his work with little or no qualms.

I mean--all the archness that seems so gratingly off in adults seem perfectly natural, even dignified, in a child. The bizarre yet somehow benevolent adventures--there's violence and even death but not a lot of cruelty, much less flinching--seem more heroic, even infused with a miniature grandeur when children (or stop-motion animals) go through their paces. And a love scene involving a kiss or stripping down to underwear can seem annoyingly coy in adults, but daring and even creepy in kids.

Even the adults here seem transformed--their shenanigans and eccentricities (an adulterous affair, a nosy professional, a dedicated scout leader) all-too-familiar in other Anderson films feel fresher somehow, more mysterious, when seen through a younger (and shorter) pair of eyes.

Moonrise Kingdom then, along with The Fantastic Mr. Fox, is Anderson's most satisfying work in years, and all due to this slight physical adjustment in the audience's subjective height. Maybe they were right after all--size does matter.

Ingrid Bergman day at TCM

The list is full of familiar (maybe too familiar) classics--Casablanca and Gaslight, anyone? But the gems of the lineup are the pair she made with Roberto Rossellini, the relatively less well-known (though highly regarded by those in the know) Stromboli and Europa '51.

Stromboli, about a newly wedded woman who experiences culture shock (to put it mildly) when brought to the island of Stromboli, is really about learning that there's more to life than mere survival, than the creature comforts of urban life--she may not like the epiphany, she may never accept it, but it's there, as raw and wide-open as a belly wound, a fact she has no choice but to deal with. Rossellini's attack is beautifully ambiguous--Bergman's Karin is the ostensible protagonist and we feel for her fish-out-of-water status, but as we get to know her we realize she's also selfish and limited, and we're reminded that she largely created the whole situation for herself; the natives at first come off as provincial and ignorant, but as we come to know them we realize they're reacting to the meanness of their environment, a blasted landscape largely formed by the volcano of the same name.

It all comes together in the film's finale, some ten minutes of largely wordless mountain hiking that ends as tumultuously as any disaster film, only the tumult is mostly internal (the volcano itself rumbles threateningly, majestically). What exactly happened here, one wonders: total disillusionment or spirit-searing epiphany? I'd like to think (skip the rest of this paragraph if you wish to see the film, and I wish you would) that she moves on and escapes the island, but life hereafter would be a joyless affair, with Karin painfully aware of the huge hole in the middle of her self where her soul should be.

Europa '51 starts with the death of a child, ends with the immolation--of sorts--of a saint. Rossellini charts Irene's (Bergman) descent--or ascent if you will, again he's masterfully ambivalent about it all--into social awareness and near-madness with near-pathological intensity, from inconsolable grief to blind groping for a purpose in life to a dawning realization of the nature of her obligation to her fellowmen. Parallel to this is her family and husband's dawning realization that she is drifting away from them physically and spiritually, and their panic at what this may mean for their reputation as a respectable upper-class family.

Interesting to contrast Rossellini with his near-contemporary Robert Bresson, arguably the only other director seriously concerned with depicting the human spirit onscreen at this time. Bresson's techniques quickly become more uncompromising, more perversely pointed in unusual directions (hands and feet for one), lasting for unusual lengths of time (sometimes a minute past the point where a conventional director might cut away). Rossellini's style is precise as well, but his innovations stay carefully within the confines of commercial cinema.

Even within those limits, Rossellini comes up with startling effects--Irene's arrival at a mental institution is an impressionistic tour de force, the camera acting as her eyes picking up details here and there--the lost faces of the patients, the staff carefully locking doors and shutting windows--and we share in her growing panic at the prospect of staying at this terrible place. And yet there is no inappropriate hysteria, no excessive drama--when asked why she does what she does, Irene perceptively replies "hate." Hate of herself, and her inadequate response to the suffering of the world, a hopeless cause capable of driving anyone insane. The ending shows some kind of transcendence, but one can easily read it as Irene finally embracing her madness, as harrowing (or exultant if you like) an end as anything I've seen.

Irene Dunne day at TCM

In A Guy Named Joe (1943) the real source of comedy is between Van Johnson and Tracy, particularly Tracy's trademark brand of the slow burn--being dead to him is like being father of the bride, you're impotent and omniscient, and the combination is frustrating. Dunne is the film's heart--she's lost Tracy, and she's too hurt and frightened to accept the ardent Johnson's offer of a new life. Victor Fleming mixes miniatures and actual footage of planes and battle sequences to great effect; even filmmakers nowadays can learn a thing or two about making an action sequence vivid, memorable, even somewhat frightening. It does get a bit wordy with all the endless speeches delivered to no one in particular--but you've invested enough in the characters that you keep watching anyway.

My Favorite Wife (1940) is a wonderful comedy, and I can't help noting that the hoary device of the third party going off to war while the object of desire marries someone else has been used again and again, as far back as Odysseus, as far away as Raj Kapoor's Sangam, and as recently as Michael 'friggin' Bay's ludicrous Pearl Harbor.

I do think the script succeeds at stepping up the momentum, adding an Adam (Grant's longtime 'roommate' Randolph Scott, which throws this whole Cary Grant-Irene Dunne conflict into an altogether more interesting life), and a judge that seems to have stepped in from a Frank Capra courtroom comedy. The ending is a less successful reprise of the finale of The Awful Truth, but 'less successful' is relative--it's a terrific scene, full of charm, and the film overall is wonderful fun. That said--

The Awful Truth is near perfection; it features the first appearance of screwball Grant, a slapstick master with glowering brows and a whole menagerie of glares, slow burns and elaborate double takes hidden under his leopardskin bathrobe. Here you see the germ of ideas Hawks would later steal--and, some would say (including me)--perfect in His Girl Friday (1940): Grant playing off Ralph Bellamy's granite-swift uptake; Grant scheming to one-up his wife; Grant playing off an inanimate prop--in His Girl Friday a writing desk, in The Awful Truth an ill-fitting hat--to create the perfect piece of slapstick, largely wordless, exquisitely timed. The finale, with Grant fooling around in an increasingly desperate attempt to sneak into Irene Dunne's bed, reaches comic apotheosis with the sight of Dunne helplessly staring at him, lips half-parted with frustrated ardor. No one has managed to be so peerlessly hilarious and jaw-droppingly desirable at the same time.

The Palm Beach Story

The comedy of remarriage, given a perverse twist by Preston Sturges (he'd push perversity a step further with Miracle at Morgan's Creek). Claudette Colbert, delectable as usual (is it getting hotter in here or is her unbuttoning scene with Joel McCrea that sexy?) decides she needs to go out and use her looks to raise money for her struggling inventor husband; said husband naturally wants to stop her (if he didn't it'd be a more European kind of film, I suppose), and that's the motor that drives this film forward. Rudy Vallee is wonderfully unflappable as John D. Hackensack III, one of the richest men in the world; he lives according to his principles to the fullest ("Why do you travel around in a lower berth?" "Staterooms are un-American") and he's every bit as adorable as the rest of the screwball characters.

Maybe the only flaws to this film are Mary Astor, strangely unappealing in maneater mode (thought she was miscast in The Maltese Falcon, and doubly miscast here) and the way the hapless black porter is portrayed. The finale should be a flaw--talk about contrived endings--but somehow Sturges prepares for it with the equally nonsensical opening ("They live happily ever after" followed by "or did they?") failing to explain anything with anything except that this whole other subplot is somehow involved with the main plot (it ties everything up in a single neatly Gordian package--amazing what Sturges gets away with in terms of what needs to be explained and what doesn't). The second time "happily ever after" appears one is doubly satisfied--now the two lovers should be happy with their lot in life--and then Sturges tops the topper with a second "or did they?" Here we go again.

Ike Jarlego, Jr. (May 3, 1944 - August 24, 2012)

2012-08-24T05:08:00.001-04:00

Mario O'Hara once called Ike Jarlego, Jr. one of Philippine cinema's best editors, easily making him in my book one of the world's finest. He began his career cutting the most famous work of the most notable filmmaker of the '70s and '80s Golden Age of Philippine cinema: Lino Brocka's Maynila sa Mga Kuko Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975). He went on from there: O'Hara's Mortal (1975) and Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, 1976); Mike de Leon's Itim (Rites of May, 1975) and Kakabakaba Ka Ba? (Are You Worried?, 1980); Ishmael Bernal's Aliw (Pleasure, 1979), Himala (Miracle, 1982), Working Girls (1984) and Working Girls 2 (1987); Butch Perez's Haplos (Caress, 1982), and Balweg (1986); Maryo J. Delos Reyes' Bagets (1984).

Jarlego was born into a moviemaking family--his father Enrique Jarlego, Sr. was an editor who worked for Vincente Salumbides (Ibong Adarna (Adarna Bird, 1941) and Lamberto Avellana (Huk sa Bagong Pamumuhay (Communists in a New Life, 1953); five of his brothers (he had thirteen siblings) also became editors, most notably his brother Efren (Mario O'Hara's other best Filipino editor, who also worked on Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos and then went on to do Kastilyong Buhangin (Castle of Sand, 1980), Condemned (1984), Bagong Hari (The New King, 1986); Laurice Guillen's Salome (1981) and Init sa Magdamag (Midnight Passion, 1983); Lino Brocka (Hot Property, 1983)).

It was while Jarlego Sr. was working for Avellana that Jarlego Jr. got his big break--Ike was a little boy playing on the LVN Studios compound when Avellana asked him to appear in Pag-asa (Hope, 1951), running towards a gate and yelling "shoeshine!" He had a small subsequent career as child actor before turning editor later in life.

At his very best Jarlego managed to translate the editing styles of some of the greatest Filipino filmmakers to the big screen: the precise cutting of Itim, the stream-of-consciousness flow of Mortal, the witty brevity of Kakakbakaba Ka Ba?--none of these would have been possible without Jarlego's skill on the Moviola and Steenbeck machine.

He debuted as a director in 1992 with Andres Manambit; his direction of Lualhati Bautista's script for Nena (1995) was lean, intense, noirish--a no-nonsense, totally unpretentious means of realizing Bautista's allegory on female empowerment. The film along with Mario O'Hara's Bulaklak sa City Jail (Flowers of the City Jail, 1985) was easily one of the most effective interpretations of Bautista on the big screen--both succeeding, notably, without resorting to direct adaptation of some of her more famous literary works.

(Some information in this post taken from the CCP Encyclopedia)

My Sight and Sound List of Ten Greatest Films Ever Made

2012-08-16T12:42:00.003-04:00

My Sight and Sound list of Ten Greatest Films Ever Made

I did say I think the individual lists are more fascinating and more valuable overall as opposed to the aggregate (which I think is about as interesting as watching paint dry).

Some observations:

The Philippines is fairly well represented.

Love it that Ms. Wurm listed Tatlo Dalawa Isa (Three Two One); that's not an obvious Brocka choice (but a good one, nevertheless). Also love Mr. Bhaumik's inclusion of Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare)--that and Kidlat Tahimik are even less well known than Brocka.

Love it that Ms. Ingawanij lists not one but two Filipino films. She may not be Filipino, but she certainly loves our films...

Impressed that Lav Diaz's Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family) earned three critics' nod. One can say that's partly because it traveled the film festival route not too long ago, but I don't think so; I do think it deserves the admiration.

Pity we don't see more of the Philippines' earlier masters--Gerardo de Leon, Manuel Conde, Manuel Silos, Lamberto Avellana. If I had to do it all over again, I might include more; maybe fill all ten slots with Filipino films. We certainly have the back catalog (with newer works meriting serious consideration)...

Finally--my list, as originally written (with links to available articles):

I look at how well the filmmaker translates his passion, at the intensity of said passion, and listen to the feeling in my gut that tells me “this is one.”

In alphabetical order:

Banshun (Late Spring, Yasujiro Ozu, 1949) - a minimalist masterwork, one of the most moving films ever made.

Campanadas a medianoche (Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles, 1965) - arguably the finest adaptation of Shakespeare and greatest battle sequence ever filmed (yes, I'm enough of an incurable adolescent that I still judge the quality of an action sequence, and no Apocalypse Now's helicopter assault did not make my list).

Faust (FW Murnau, 1926) - a truly great special-effects film, Murnau's adaptation of Goethe's (and perhaps Germany's) greatest play is both fevered nightmare and harrowing drama.

Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, Robert Bresson, 1951) - a priest's interior journey towards transcendence, one of the most comprehensive and unrelenting depictions of human spirituality ever.

Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers, Guru Dutt, 1959) - Guru Dutt's film maudit, a titanic box-office flop, and one of the best films ever about a filmmaker's passion for his work.

Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Hayao Miyazaki, 1984) - one of the few science fiction film to deal with and understand ecological systems and the environment, arguably the greatest animated film ever made.

M (Fritz Lang, 1931) - the prototype noir film that towers over the genre.

Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star, Ritwik Ghatak, 1960) - a neorealist tour de force, one of the most heartrending depictions ever of female oppression.

Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924) - one of the most imaginative uses of special effects, and perhaps the most beautiful comedy ever made.

Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, Mario O'Hara, 1976) - the rare film from a victimized nation that strives to understand, perhaps even forgive, the invader.

8.16.12

Tribute to Mario O'Hara (1946 - 2012)

2012-08-15T15:47:00.000-04:00

The Quiet Man passes

Mario Herrero O'Hara was known, if he was known at all, as legendary filmmaker Lino Brocka's collaborator; more malicious wags called him Brocka's lover (for the record--no, and there's a reason why). He acted in several of Brocka's early films, playing a vivid villain in Tubog sa Ginto (Dipped in Gold, 1971), and a neglected son in Stardoom (1971) opposite actress Lolita Rodriguez; three years later he played Rodriguez's leprous lover in Brocka's seminal film Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed But Found Wanting), having also written the film's screenplay.

O'Hara wrote the teleplay that was the basis for what is arguably Brocka's best work, Insiang (1976); it went on to be the first-ever Filipino film to be screened in the Director's Fortnight, in Cannes. The film--about a slum girl raped by her mother's lover--is often called a masterpiece of realism, and no wonder; O'Hara claimed in an interview that the story happened to his backyard neighbors, in the city of Pasay.

(It's also claimed--and here you see the state of Filipino film history, that many details are open to contention, or can rarely be definitively documented--that the teleplay was based on a radio script written by actress and scriptwriter Mely Tagasa. Quite possibly both stories are true; that is to say, O'Hara took the premise from Ms. Tagasa's radio script but based details of the characters on his neighbors...)

It was ever so in O'Hara's films and screenplays, his insistence that everything and anything in his works be true, no matter how fantastic. An outre character (a faded movie actress living in a cemetery crypt), an outrageous occurrence (a historical figure falling in love with his literary creation) can be allowed in his films only if they were, by some convoluted definition, true.

O'Hara was notorious for not using a motorized vehicle--or rather he owned a vehicle, a van really, but drove it only on weekends and film shoots (he had a chauffeur who drove him around that he would also parsimoniously use in bit parts--I once spotted the old man playing Jose Rizal's father). Weekdays he took public utility jeeps and buses, and walked for hours from his house in Bangkal, Makati to Divisoria in Manila (a distance of some five miles), these marathon walks often being the source of his stories, characters, bits of dialogue, incidents (a particularly torrid film scene involving lovers coupling in a tricycle was inspired, he once, claimed, by something he actually saw happen on Taft Avenue). The joke was that you had to watch yourself when talking to the man--he was liable to put you in a movie someday, sometimes without your permission.

O'Hara would make his directorial debut with Mortal (1975), his fabulist re-telling of a real-life murder committed by a paranoid schizophrenic; the film was to be one of the first produced by the just-established Cine Manila, under which Brocka had hoped to produce films. The murder victim's family sued and won, unfortunately, and Cine Manila quickly folded.

O'Hara's second film was to be his first with popular singer-actress Nora Aunor. Aunor had been looking for a prestige project to produce and star in and asked for Brocka; Brocka didn't want to have “anything to do with that Superstar!” and passed the project to O'Hara. O'Hara dug up an old script and on a budget of about a million pesos--modest for a World War 2 drama of that scale and ambition--created Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, 1976), about the three years of Japanese Occupation when, as the title suggests, God turned his face away from the Filipino people. The film is possibly the actress-producer's best performance, arguably the director's finest feature, and--possibly, arguably, strictly in my opinion--the finest Filipino film ever made.

First Act

Mario O'Hara was born in Zamboanga City on April 20, 1946, the son of a half Irish-American, half Filipino lawyer named Jaime O'Hara from Antipolo, Rizal and Basilisa Herrero from Ozamis Oriental. Jaime O'Hara's father was a Thomasite teacher, one of the earliest sent to the Philippines, and this fact alone allowed the O'Haras including Mario the chance to immigrate to the United States (Mario turned the offer down).

It was a large family--eight brothers and three sisters--and according to O'Hara a happy one, with a childhood fueled by the imaginative power of night-time radio. His neighborhood--some time after his birth the family had moved to Pasay City--had an unusual layout, rich mansions on either side and a slum directly behind; O'Hara said many of his TV scripts came out of that backyard slum. One of his brother's friends owned a movie theater and they watched films for free--the titles included Michael Curtiz's The Adventures of Robin Hood, and the Flash Gordon serials.

O'Hara planned a practical career--a chemical engineering degree, to be earned at Adamson University--but the call of that childhood night-voice proved too strong. On his sophomore year he auditioned for a part in a Proctor and Gamble radio show at the Manila Broadcasting Corporation; by third year college he dropped out because he couldn't handle the load of both studying and performing on radio.

In 1968 O'Hara met Lino Brocka; Brocka in turn used him as an actor on the big screen and on the theater stage, doing productions for PETA (Philippine Experimental Theater Association). O'Hara came to helm his first feature by criticizing Brocka's style of film direction. “If you know so much, why don't you direct?” Brocka finally asked him. Brocka wanted to do an adaptation of Edgardo Reyes' serialized novel Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (In the Claws of Light), to be produced by Mike de Leon, so he passed on to O'Hara the film Mortal, which he had been slated to direct.

After the career high of Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos followed the career low of Mga Bilanggong Birhen (The Captive Virgins, 1977), yet another period epic. O'Hara was fired after accomplishing ninety-five percent of principal photography (“I couldn't see eye-to-eye with the producer,” he said); the picture was finished by another director.

We would see this tendency time and time again--a film where the producer started interfering, and O'Hara either abandoning the project or allowing himself to be fired. On set he's described as a diligent, determined worker, but the moment you interfere with control of the picture he was likely to drop matters and simply walk away.

One might try explain this tendency through O'Hara's attitude towards filmmaking, once articulated thusly: "first an actor, second a writer, and lastly a director." The self-confessed lack of commitment to cinema (think of Orson Welles spending four years of his life to finish Othello) can on one hand be considered a fatal flaw, in that O'Hara was often more opportunist than self-starter, his finished features far fewer than they could have been. On the other hand this gave his work an independent quality, a fearlessness towards fellow filmmakers' (and movie audiences') possibly angry responses to his more eccentric films (in Mortal for example the film proceeds in a fragmentary, hallucinatory manner, only later becoming more coherent--the way the protagonist's schizophrenic mind becomes clearer as his mind grows gradually saner)

Mga Bilanggong Birhen helped established a pattern: when O'Hara couldn't direct a film, he directed for television; when he couldn't direct at all, he acted; when he wasn't acting, he wrote. He performed for theater, radio, television, and film; he wrote scripts for Brocka and, at one point, for filmmaker Laurice Guillen's debut feature (Kasal? 1980); he also directed the television soap Flordeluna for a period of one year.

O'Hara wrote Ang Palayso ni Valentin (The Palace of Valentin), a zarzuela (a form of Filipino musical theater) about a decaying theater's decaying pianist, and his undying love for the theater's beautiful singing star. The play was O'Hara's valentine to the theatrical arts, and won the 1998 Centennial Literary Competition grand prize for drama. In 2002 he reworked his best-known collaboration with Brocka (Insiang) into a stage play, with the action relocated back in Pasay City where he had originally set it (Brocka's film was set in Tondo), adding a hip and funny narrator (much like The Common Man in Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons) to comment on and provide context to the drama.

Second Act

In the '80s, O'Hara would hit his stride on the big screen. His Kastilyong Buhangin (Castle of Sand, 1980) was a vehicle for both Aunor's singing talents and stuntman-turned-actor Lito Lapid physical prowess, like a bizarre yet spirited union between George Cukor's A Star is Born and Ringo Lam's Prison on Fire. His Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? (Why is the Sky Blue? 1981), about a shy young woman (Aunor again) who falls in love with a mentally challenged young man, is O'Hara directly challenging mentor and friend Brocka in his own social-realist territory. And then there was what might arguably be called O'Hara's Manila noir trilogy: Condemned (1984), about a brother and sister (Aunor, again) on the run in the streets of Malate from a dollar-smuggling gang; Bulaklak sa City Jail (Flowers of the City Jail, 1984), about a pregnant woman (Aunor yet again) incarcerated in the city's hellish prison system; and Bagong Hari (The New King, 1986), about a man hired to unwittingly assassinate his own father. The three films present a grim portrait of the city of Manila (the last film earning an “X” rating from the censors, for extreme violence), and might arguably be called the zenith of Filipino noir.

Pygmalion

If a good proportion of O'Hara's films seemed to feature Aunor there was a reason for this. O'Hara was one of the first filmmakers to recognize her worth as an actress back when she was considered a 'mere' multimedia pop star; both were shy, private people who only when required to do so (in public speaking, or before a camera) would switch on the thousand-watt bulb of their charisma. This seeming timidity concealing considerable talent is possibly the basis for the rapport between them, a spiritual resonance rarely found in other actress-director collaborations in Philippine cinema; you might even call Aunor the filmmaker's doppelganger, his onscreen expression of inner strength and hidden vulnerability, to be sorely tried and tested by the tortuous narratives of his films. For whatever reason, the titles (Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? among many others) speak for themselves: O'Hara's work with Aunor represent some of the best that either artist, or Philippine cinema itself, has to offer.

Pito-pito Films

In 1998 head of Regal Films “Mother” Lily Monteverde with the help of filmmaker/producer Joey Gosiengfiao established Good Harvest, a subdivision of Regal designed to churn out pito-pito pictures, the term (which translates literally into “seven-seven”) referring to the speed with which the films are to be made (seven days of shooting, seven of post-production). The basic premise goes something like this: Mother Lily gives the filmmakers a tiny amount of seed money (two and a half million pesos, or roughly $62,500) and an insanely tight schedule (fourteen days from start of shoot to finished film) with the only stipulation being that the films should have commercial appeal (some violence, some choice eroticism); otherwise, the filmmakers have carte blanche approval to do whatever they want.

The pito-pito system helped newcomers produce their debut features, helped veterans realize old projects; O'Hara shot not one but two pictures in fourteen days. Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998) was O'Hara's adaptation of Agapito Joaquin's two-character one-act chamber drama, expanded to become a eulogy to the Filipino film industry; Sisa was O'Hara's tribute to Filipino historical figure and hero Jose Rizal, with the conceit that Rizal did not fashion his most famous literary creation out of whole cloth but actually knew her, as a living, breathing, red-blooded woman (remember O'Hara's oft-repeated assertion, that the most vivid characters come from real life); and that this woman was the love of his life (like Shakespeare in Love, only with a fraction of the production budget and a far more bizarre (read: insanely imaginative) approach).

Final Act

In 2000 O'Hara directed his last pito-pito film: Pangarap ng Puso (Demons), basically a genre-bending retelling of recent Filipino history as horror film, war drama, love story, and celebration of Filipino poetry. In 2003 he did Babae sa Breakwater (Woman of the Breakwater) about the homeless folk who live along Manila's breakwater--again O'Hara straying into Brocka territory (most notably Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag) only with a strong strain of magic realism running throughout, and troubadour Yoyoy Villiame commenting on the onscreen action through song (again, Robert Bolt's The Common Man, this time set to music). His Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio (The Trial of Andres Bonifacio, 2010) uses the actual minutes of the trial of Supremo Andres Bonifacio (much as Carl Theodor Dreyer did in The Passion of Joan of Arc) as basis and occasion to give this neglected contemporary of Jose Rizal the long-delayed, low-budget, magic-realist due he deserves.

O'Hara's reunion with his oft-muse Nora Aunor would prove to be his last major work. Sa Ngalan ng Ina (In the Name of the Mother, 2011), a mini-series retelling recent Filipino politics in teleserye format, turns on the brilliant conceit that much of the melodramatic excesses of contemporary Filipino soap opera (the drama, the betrayals, the sex and violence) reflect the melodramatic excesses of contemporary Filipino politics (the drama, the betrayals, the sex and violence). By this time O'Hara's health may not have been what it used to be; he codirected this tremendous effort (twenty-five hour-long episodes in one month) with Jon Red, who also did all the series' action sequences.

All that passion, all those sleepless nights, the massive strain on O'Hara's health (at one point shooting Babae sa Bubungang Lata and Sisa back-to-back) must have come at a cost. On June 19, 2012 the report came out over online social media that O'Hara had been rushed to the emergency room due to symptoms of acute leukemia; the family, respectful of his retiring nature, withheld the hospital's name (it was later revealed to be San Juan de Dios). Brother Jerry O'Hara reported that he responded well to chemotherapy. The optimism was premature: on the morning of June 26 word went out that O'Hara had succumbed to cardiac arrest, the quiet man silenced at last.

Curtain Call

O'Hara's significance to Philippine cinema is a challenge to assess. Unlike his more outspoken contemporaries Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal, O'Hara disliked discussing the ideas behind his films; he much preferred to stay in the background, playing cup-bearer to the industry's gaudier princes.

There's an additional difficulty: if the works of the older generation of Filipino filmmakers are generally not readily available (Brocka's Tubog sa Ginto, for example, exists only as bootleg video), and O'Hara's are even more troublesome to obtain than most, then attempting to view his work can be compared in terms of difficulty and expense to a hunt for the Holy Grail (that may not be too much of an exaggeration, with some titles). I'd say at least four or five of the twenty-five film features he directed have no existing print, and that only five are readily available on DVD--not the clearest of copies, and without subtitles (unless otherwise indicated). His masterpiece Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos is on youtube with subtitles, though I refuse to link to that travesty; the experience is like viewing Velasquez's Las Meninas from the bottom of a septic tank (not a big fan of the translation, either). In trying to talk about his films you can't help but think of the seven blind men trying to describe an elephant; it's impossible to do justice to the wondrous creature.

Nevertheless--

O'Hara was a crucial collaborator of Brocka's, and it's possible to argue that he introduced a note of moral ambiguity not found in Brocka's other pictures--at the end of Insiang, for example, one couldn't really tell who was the victim, who the victimizer; in Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang the character O'Hara plays (Berto the Leper) is first seen as a possible rapist. He took up Brocka's social-realist mode of storytelling (Bakit Bughaw ang Langit?) and introduced baroque, even fabulist variations (Mortal, The Fatima Buen Story (1994)); later in his career he managed to fashion a mode of cinema inimitably his--imaginative in both form and content, yet filled with political, sociological and historical concerns (Pangarap ng Puso, Sisa).

Arguably O'Hara was more fluent than Brocka in at least one or two dialects of the language of filmmaking. The prison riot that climaxes Kastilyong Buhangin, the varied and at times elaborate fight sequences in Bagong Hari confirm his status as one of Philippine cinema's finest action filmmakers; his use of pointedly angled shots and distinctly staged mis-en-scene reveal him to be the visual descendant of Gerardo de Leon (and behind de Leon the classicists: Ford, Eisenstein, Griffith).

O'Hara's early training in radio possibly distinguished him from other Filipino filmmakers of the '70s, who mostly came from Filipino theater: I submit that this training helped free him (the way it freed another filmmaker active in radio, stage and film) from the tyranny of the proscenium arch, giving one the sense of watching a film film instead of a film recording of a stage performance. Musical cuing (Brocka's weakness, according to O'Hara), sound transitions, overlapping dialogue linked his images, subtly amplified their cumulative emotional power. More, there was a fluidity to his editing (see Pangarap ng Puso, where the montage of photo stills act like the flicker-images of memory), a constant bounding from reality to fantasy and back (the protagonist's schizophrenia in Mortal, the children's view of supernatural creatures in the context of provincial life in Pangarap ng Puso) that suggests not so much a spatial orientation as an aural one, or at least one less limited by the unities of a specific location--a heedless leaping across time and space and emotion, taught to him by the equally fearless transitions (from present to past, reality to fantasy, comedy to drama) found in the radio shows of his childhood.

Not that he turned his back completely on theatricality. In Bubungang Lata he would present large swathes of Joaquin's play as a play, as two characters moving about in a tiny set with the camera just sitting there, drinking in their performances; the plainness of the approach underlined the plainness of their lives, their aspirations (this in contrast to the film's more fabulist characters, who are shot in a variety of angles and lighting). In Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio, O'Hara's first ever digital feature, O'Hara refrains from taking advantage of digital video's most obvious virtues (the mobility of the equipment, the ease in creating handheld, constantly moving shots) and instead locks down the camera, viewing the actors with an unblinking, dispassionate eye (if anything he takes advantage of digital's other virtue, its ability to record long takes). The stable framing and vivid color palette emphasizes a stylization not inappropriate to a moro-moro (yet another specifically Filipino form of theater) production, one of which is quoted extensively in the film, and serves as unspoken commentary on the politics behind the trial (in the moro-moro, the outcome is settled long before the play begins).

The heart of the matter

O'Hara's cinematic virtuosity would mean little without a moral and philosophical stance--this being possibly the most difficult aspect of all to pin down. His personal reticence, his reluctance to clarify and explicate his thoughts and intentions in real life extends to his films; in his very best work it's near impossible (Who is the victim? Who the victimizer?). O'Hara's films, like those of his friend and mentor Brocka, depict extremes of love, lust, hate, contempt, sadism, tenderness; unlike Brocka, you sense a distance between O'Hara and his subjects. The immediacy, the urgency, the white-hot anger that pulses through Brocka's films is missing in O'Hara's, the same time there are emotional hues found in O'Hara that are missing in Brocka (cynicism (the finale of Condemned); a sardonic sense of humor (the severed head in Bagong Hari)). The title of Brocka's breakthrough film summarizes his attitude towards his characters: he judges them, constantly and thoroughly, and can be an unforgiving justice with near-impossible standards.

O'Hara doesn't; there's a vast, yawning cavern of silence where his attitude towards characters should be. He doesn't seem to hate his villains (the Japanese rapist in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos), doesn't seem to particularly love his heroes (the hapless stuntman in Babae sa Bubungang Lata). His camera has that unblinking quality found in more contemplative Filipino filmmakers (Mike de Leon and Ishmael Bernal, to name contemporaries; Lav Diaz to name a more recent example). On occasion you find him cutting to a shot from high up looking down--the point of view of a deity, or superior being, or observing scientist, gazing down on its worshipers, inferiors, test subjects.

But if you look and listen closely--again, that aural element--if you pay close attention to his framing, to the timing of his cuts, to the choices made in staging and line readings and even actual words used in dialogue, there is the whisper, hint, suggestion of an attitude. The blind man carrying his palsied brother past the religious procession in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos; Babette saying goodbye in Bakit Bughaw ang Langit?--the first sequence is entirely wordless (one is struck by the size of the gigantic float swaying past the two brothers); the second nothing but words (it's less the words--mostly bits of practical advice--than Aunor's delicately shaded delivery of them that reveals Babette's true state of mind). O'Hara keeps the lamp-flame indicating his scenes' emotional temperature burning low, low, low...until you realize what the scene is really about, and the full meaning explodes in your face. Where Brocka was a full-on revolutionary raising a fist in the air and demanding change, O'Hara was a subversive, smuggling hidden contraband right under your nose, to detonate deep in your head where no defense is possible.

O'Hara's distance is no assumed pose; he's far too clear-eyed about the perversity of human nature to think we're just misunderstanding each other, or instinctively inflicting our own inner pain on each other. He understands that there is a keen pleasure to be found in imposing pain (again, the Japanese rapist in Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos), and that there are those among us who crave that pleasure in regular doses (the police officer in Babae sa Breakwater, Rex in Bagong Hari). At the same time you hear a whisper from the cavern's yawning silence; when O'Hara's films are working full-on you feel the hairs rising on your arms and back of your neck as you sense--the way a sensitive senses a presence supernatural--that O'Hara does care about his characters, cares for them deeply, but is too much of an artist to let this concern speak out too loudly. Understanding of this contradictory pull of forces between the impassive and empathic in O'Hara, this double-vision if you will, is possibly key to understanding his cinema.

What to say, finally, of O'Hara the filmmaker? Frankly I could write for years and it wouldn't be enough. But a few words might help: he is, I believe, Philippine cinema's wayward spirit, its silent wanderer-observer (especially around the Makati-Malate-Quiapo-Divisoria area), its whispered yet insistent conscience. He is its reluctant poet, its low-key fabulist, its (to borrow a phrase from Manny Farber) termite artist, toiling away in the mud and filth to build something that isn't intended to be anything beautiful, perhaps doesn't even presume to become anything near beautiful, but which somehow, in some way, almost by accident if you will (though this random quality may be a hallmark of its authenticity) achieves a wayward, reluctant beauty.

He is (again, strictly in my opinion) the Philippine's finest filmmaker, and his death does our cinema an irretrievable, irrecoverable harm--not just for the life's worth of recognition owed to him, but for the works he might have given us, if he lived but a year longer (I once spent an evening listening to him talk of the scripts he has squirreled away, one more fabulous than the next). The world is a quieter place with this man gone, not necessarily a better one. We do well to mourn our loss.

Encore

Whatever this article managed to cobble together about O'Hara the filmmaker is likely but a fraction of what the man has done, a fraction (a tiny one) of the regard and affection the man has inspired.

A lovely tribute from a collaborator (she was involved with the production of Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio) and confidante of the family.

Fellow filmmaker Joey Reyes' impassioned piece on the man (Reyes will hopefully forgive me for saying that this is possibly the best single thing he's ever written, but that's how I feel about it).

Friend and fellow actor/filmmaker Dennis Marasigan's memories of Mario O'Hara.

Versatile writer/editor Gibbs Cadiz gives a more thorough (though again, hardly comprehensive) overview of O'Hara's theater career.

As said, much has been written about the films, but the subject is hardly exhausted--here is a discussion of the sociopolitical meaning of three O'Hara films.

Premiere Filipino film critic Oggs Cruz's writeup (his last few lines are a great favorite).

A brief citation by Jessica Zafra.

An account of the wake.

Friends give their reaction.

Mell T. Navarro's pictures from the wake.

Jude Bautista's photos of the Cinema One tribute. One of the rare times O'Hara was recognized (kudos to the festival for doing so).

Vladimir Bunoan's Essential O'Hara: 10 films you should watch.

A mini-retrospective of his work at this year's Cinemalaya.

TV5's obituary.

First published in Businessworld, 6.28.12

Total Recall, Safety Not Guaranteed, Deep Blue Sea

2012-08-11T06:11:00.000-04:00

Minor 'Recall'

No, I didn't think Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990) was particularly good--too cartoony, too ready to give away the joke that it's all really a dream--but it had two interesting scenes: the one where Dr. Edgemar (Roy Brocksmith) persuasively argues that Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is really experiencing implanted memories and that taking a pill will wake him up. It's the film's most Dickian moment, where the two possibilities--this is a dream / this is real life--are most perfectly knife-edge balanced. It helps that Roy Brocksmith personifies the facelessness of bureaucracy--his very blandness argues for the truth of his words.

The second Dickian moment comes towards the end, where Quaid asks Melina (Rachel Ticotin): "What if all this is a dream?" Melina's reply is by turns practical and human and wonderfully droll: "Well, then kiss me quick before you wake up." Everything in between is over-the-top in that exuberant yet decadent fashion Verhoeven perfected in his '90s Hollywood pictures, trash cinema with artistic aspirations (some would say pretensions): not especially memorable, but amusing.

Len Wiseman's remake can't even manage to be that (Verhoeven's "is he or isn't he?" moment is resolve when Quaid spots a drop of sweat trickling down Edgemar's temple (Why would he be nervous if he was telling the truth?); Wiseman's Quaid spots a cheesier teardrop on Melina's face (She loves him so it must be real)). At close to two hours' running time, it's one close call after another, with plenty of high-powered mayhem along the way, a sort of Crank on steroids with electrodes attached; five minutes of this and I was pretty much numbed out--how many scenes of Colin Farrell karate-chopping Kate Bosworth and vice-versa can you watch? Five? Ten? Fifteen? Then there's the other hundred and three minutes to sit through.

Doesn't help that like another major Hollywood director whose name I won't mention, Wiseman's humor-impaired--a few Schwarzeneggerisms wouldn't have hurt ("Consider that a divorce"); Farell is a far more talented actor than Schwarzenegger but Wiseman seems to have sat on Farell's head for most of the picture (only half the actor's charisma is on display). Beckinsale as Quaid's wife performs competent martial arts, but is barely as sexy (or funny) as the original, played by Sharon Stone.

Satisfaction guaranteed

Colin Trevorrow's Safety Not Guaranteed was inspired by an actual Backwoods Home Magazine ad, about a request for a time-traveling companion willing to bring his or her own weaponry (Trevorrow claims to still have a copy of the issue)--clever conceit, and I suppose if you aren't familiar with Doctor Who it would seem extraordinarily imaginative. What Trevorrow does bring to the table is an American indie feel, which includes no-budget production design and refreshingly unpolished line readings; that, and a 'is he or isn't he?' tension straight out of Miracle at 34th Street (for all the series' virtues you aren't really given a chance to question the Doctor's authenticity--once he starts pointing his sonic screwdriver about all doubts fly out the left ear).

Indie star Aubrey Plaza with her kewpie-doll looks and deadpan delivery is the main attraction as Darius, the Seattle magazine work intern assigned to investigate the ad. She's the shy nerd's idea of an unapproachable hot date, and there's something to her combination of spiky snark and hidden vulnerability that's hard to resist--but more interesting still is Jake M. Johnson's Kenneth, the star reporter whose ulterior motive for doing the story is to seek out and hopefully hook up with an old girlfriend of his who lives in that same small town. Johnson's a comedian, unafraid to make himself look like an egotistical jerk; at the same time he holds out for the same dreams about love and companionship that Darius and her time traveler do, only his side story has a more believable and ultimately more poignant trajectory.

Aquarium of pain

Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea, his adaptation of a 1952 Terence Rattigan play might be considered so mannered and hermetically closed it's claustrophobic (it's shot mostly in sets and interiors all choked up with smoke--you can't help but gasp for fresh air). It's the story of Hester (Rachel Weisz), who has left her husband Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale) for handsome RAF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). A familiar storyline: woman feeling constricted by unsatisfying marriage runs out to have a passionate fling--only in the traumatically damaged, essentially selfish Freddie, she finds an even more extreme, less extricable sort of enslavement (the apartment she and Freddie shares feels like a cell for solitary confinement).

You wonder how Davies, often glancing in his storytelling, can tell this tale of emotional devastation without betraying his sensibilities. Some details give a clue: the essentially two-set film (the apartment, the crowded pub where Hester and Freddie go for a drink); the contemplative pacing and camerawork (the camera gazing at the actors as if trying to suss out their innermost thoughts); even the song Davies plays at one point ("You Belong To Me"--denoting possession and possessiveness) all conspire to construct, detail after detail, a kind of confined crucible in which the heat and pressure of Rattigan's play can build.

The camera homes in on Weisz and Hiddleston as they suffer, the same time Davies manages to aestheticize the camera's stare (there's an eerie underwater feel to that stare, as if we were peering into an aquarium tank, or formaldehyde jar). Not that Davies is distanced--you sense his sympathy for the characters--but that he seems to look at them unflinchingly through the amber-tinted lenses.

The result is a breathtaking piece of work, one of the most beautiful and impassioned (yet hushed, oblique) recent films I've ever seen. Beale, the ostensible villain, wins you over with his helpless decency. Hiddleston manages to make a thoroughly self-centered man--an overgrown emotional brat, in effect--fascinating and empathic; you like him despite (or perhaps because of) his flaws. Weisz owns the picture; her Hester runs the gamut from boredom to ecstasy to absolute abjection without the fetters once snapping open, and you can't help but respond to the sheer pathos of her circumstance. A great film.

8.11.12

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

2012-08-08T07:01:00.000-04:00

(I know, I know, but Nolan's last word on this comic book character and possibly one of the year's biggest movie events is too irresistible a target. Watch out: story discussed in close detail)

Art of darkness

I'd already said pretty much everything I needed to say about Nolan's take on Batman. Does he redeem himself with this version? Some, not enough.

Nolan's better at shooting action--no more shaky-cam (much), and he has learned to keep the camera trained on the fight sequences till they're over. That said, he still hasn't learned to keep his camera trained on the money shot--in The Prestige he cut away when a crucial trick was performed (invalidating the magic of the trick); here someone leaps across space to an impossibly far ledge, and he has to insert a reaction shot from everyone below. He's improved, but still lacks confidence as a filmmaker.

He's doing better as a writer--somewhat. Borrowing entire pages of detail from Frank Miller's seminal The Dark Knight Returns (with Wayne's retirement shortened to an eight-year absence, and the villain Bane (Tom Hardy) standing in for the mutant leader) he knows how to weave complex plots, how to twist and turn the strands, startling the audience at the right moment, how to build and maintain intensity. Probably his biggest problem is that he wants it to be all intensity, which at two hours and forty plus minutes gets wearying (not to mention repetitive), this imminent sense that something terrible is about to happen, about to happen, about to happen. Nolan like Peter Jackson wears his geekiness proudly on his sleeve when what was probably needed was an artist's skepticism, an ability to stand back and ruthlessly assess the material--what should go, what should stay, what should radically change.

(And for all his geeky knowingness, his immersion in matters both Bat and scientific, Nolan doesn't seem to understand the forces that act on a suspension bridge, making it stand--that if you sever the two main cables the entire center span will fall or, arguably, the whole thing collapse (I was staring at the bridges in the background, with their span cut. What was holding it up--wishful thinking?)).

He can toll the bells of rhetoric well enough (too well; you get the sense that he loves the sound of his own voice coming out of other peoples' mouths--witness the endless speeches Commissioner Gordon delivers at the conclusion to the last two movies). He loves to pontificate on profound themes, banging the gong when there's a moment to spare (perhaps this is his idea of 'giving an audience a rest') and even when there isn't a moment to spare (when the true nature of one crucial character is fully revealed, said character just has to stop the entire picture and explain the full significance and consequences of said revelation while Batman lay bleeding. "Slow knife" someone at one point says. Slow knife my ass--I thought they were trying to talk him to death).

Nolan tries for relevance and unfortunately achieves it--every moment someone pulls out an assault rifle, every detonation of a planted explosive whether he intended it or not leaves a sour taste in the mouth. More, Bane's plan, of upending the 1% and leaving the 99% in charge sounds like a parody of the Occupy Wall Street movement--so Bane is the illusory leader of liberal idealism and Batman the conservative reality? Not sure I like the sound of that.

And for all Nolan's eloquence, he still hasn't learned to be funny. Hathaway as Selina Kyle has a few sparkling lines, but you don't get the laugh-out-loud demented dialogue of a Daniel Waters ("Just the pussy I've been looking for!"). And while we're on the subject of Selina, no, sorry, Hathaway doesn't come within striking distance of Michelle Pfeiffer's glorious incarnation. Hathaway is far too healthy and wholesome; Pfeiffer was a knife's edge away from psychologically shattering. Hathaway looks smooth and svelte in her catsuit, Pfeiffer looked stitched-together and fragile, barely able to cohere. Hathaway provides a dose of lighthearted I-don't-give-a-fuck (her gradual changeover to commitment and care actually seems like a betrayal of the character); Pfeiffer was the film's emotional core--loses it early on, is barely able to keep it together, and still manages to be laugh-out-loud funny ("Life's a bitch; now so am I"). Hathaway gives her career a nice little boost; Pfeiffer gave the performance of her life.

I'd add this much more, on the difference between Nolan and someone like Tim Burton. Nolan writes fairly straightforward Syd Field-style scripts, where even the twists and turns of time travel (Memento) or dreams (Inception) are intricately laid out yet meticulously kept coherent, the genres efficiently exploited for whatever narrative hooks they can provide; Burton is a filmmaker who uses the script as an excuse to leap into the thin air, depending on the beauty and texture of his imagery (and the fascinating whiff of melancholy they give off) to keep him afloat. Nolan gives the impression of being a clever, careful writer who to retain control of his material has turned director; Burton is a trapeze artist, a high-wire act.

Give me something better; at least give me something else. Give me Escape From New York (1981), yet another science-fiction adventure set in the near future where yet another maverick hero infiltrates an isolated Manhattan to save the city and perhaps the world--at least Carpenter's nightmare vision has wit and genuine edge to it, not to mention images that earned it a definite 'R' rating (as compared to Dark Knight Rises' wimpy 'PG-13'). Come to think of it Dark Knight Rises does seem to borrow elements from Carpenter's classic--just not enough to make a real difference.

Give me the ostensibly lighter-hearted but emotionally more complex The Avengers. I wouldn't call Joss Whedon as talented an imagemaker as Burton, but (comparing Nolan's latest to more recent efforts) his latest picture is for me the more impressive achievement, the dialogue far more entertaining (more audible too--half the cast in The Dark Knight Rises seem to mumble, and when you try listen more closely Nolan punishes your attentiveness with a very loud drum in your ear, banging for about a hundred and sixty minutes). Whedon, smartly, focuses less on complicated narrative and more on character interaction (which was what the original Marvel Comics stories were about, anyway), and leavens the occasional drama with bouts of humor, even silliness (the shawarma scene that caps the credits).

(Humor is an underrated virtue, especially nowadays in this age of superserious superhero pictures (witness the trailer for Man of Steel, where the late Christopher Reeve's charmingly low-key Kryptonian has been reduced reduced to roaring across the sky like supersonic aircraft). Humor can serve as contrast to sharpen the horror in films, can serve as distracting patter while real drama is sneaking up behind, can be (and both Burton and Whedon know this) combined with horror and drama to create an emotionally potent mix. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons in a storyteller's emotional arsenal, of which he is advised to use every item; Nolan seems to be using at most half of his available inventory--or possibly that's all he's got, which would be an even sadder scenario).

If Dark Knight Rises feels more intense than The Avengers that, arguably, comes from focusing on a single character's plight instead of seven. Whedon is no slouch at telling stories about single protagonists, either--his Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog delivers more drama and pathos and poignancy in forty minutes and for about $200,000 (set to music, at that) than Nolan ever does with his hundred and sixty-four minute, $250 million epic white elephant. Want a movie full of darkness and doom (not to mention imagination, wit, hummable tunes)? Don't waste your time with Dark Knight, or for that matter The Avengers--download Dr. Horrible instead. Be careful; break your heart, that will.

Revised 8.8.12

As a suggestion for further reading, friend was kind enough to provide me with a link to an in-depth discussion of the movie, found here. Enjoy!

And David Bordwell has as usual a thorough and thoroughly considered appreciation of Nolan's career as a filmmaker (a lot more balanced and sober than mine--but y'know me). Towards the end of the article is an interesting link to Jim Emerson's rather ruthless takedown of Nolan's superhero flick--check it out.

8.26.12

Sight and Sound's Ten Greatest Films of All Time

2012-08-01T20:40:00.000-04:00

Sight and Sound's Ten Greatest Films of All Time

Y'know, I'll just say it out loud: these lists do matter, and this one is about as authoritative as it gets. Sometimes you don't want to be all inclusive and diplomatic and diverse in your tastes; sometimes you want to be ruthless, and rate one work superior to the other. It's human nature; more, it's fun, like scratching an itchy old scab--you can't help it, and you sneak a quick rub even when you don't mean to.

It's also a way of charting trends and fashion, and one trend the list does chart was the enduring reputation of Welles' debut film, which lorded it over this list (and almost every other list) for some fifty years. One might also note the relative domination of American films (four on this list), the relative lack of presence of Asian films except Japan (which is allotted a measly single slot), and short shrift given to comedy (Renoir's Rules of the Game being the only if formidable finalist).

For the record, I do like the choices on the list, especially the new number one; have long maintained that Citizen Kane while a great film is hardly Welles' best work; think that Sunrise is a great film too, but that Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven is far more affecting (and consider Murnau's Faust to be his masterpiece anyway); bemoan the lack of Bresson or any film from Indian cinema (easily the most prolific in the world) on the top ten; love Tokyo Story but would rather put Leo McCarey's Make Way For Tomorrow in its place (and anyway have a different pick for favorite Ozu), and scratch my head at the near-absence of any woman filmmaker (to be fair, I couldn't bring myself to include one either, an oversight that needs to be corrected this millennium).

Far more interesting for me--and again, I'm hardly saying anything new for me--are the individual lists, that show the tastes of hundreds of filmmakers and critics. Those I'll be poring over, once made available (the website seems to be down as of this writing, and I'll take that as a hopeful sign of interest), and noting down unusual choices, and unknown titles. That's the exercise's real resource--an excuse to watch more films, hopefully find new gems, new masterpieces.

And finally the value of this list is to show the limitation of all aggregate lists--that they're the result of compromise and groupthink, rather than an objective reference. So once you've read it, definitely disagree and draw up one of your own. As Mao once said (minus the sinister ulterior motive): "Let a hundred flowers bloom."

8.1.12

China 9 Liberty 37, Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, Magic Mike

2012-07-30T16:45:00.000-04:00

Monte Hellman's China 9 Liberty 37 starts out with a spaghetti-ish (not to mention noirish) premise. Legendary gunslinger Clayton Drumm (Fabio Testi) is offered a deal: be hanged or go shoot the railroad company's former killer-for-hire Matthew Sebanek (Warren Oates) whose farm stands in the way of said railroad's expansion. When Clayton arrives at Sebanek's farm, he chances upon Catherine (the luscious Jenny Agutter) bathing naked in a stream.

The stranger who comes upon an isolated house and an ambivalent marriage; we pretty much know how this plays out, only with Hellman we don't exactly know how things plays out, and character as much as conflict has a role in determining the narrative's wayward progress. Hellman's trademark pacing (something a bit more leisurely than a horse's lope) sometimes erupts in sudden, vicious, superbly staged and shot violence (a showdown between Clayton and one of Matthew's brothers comes to mind); said pacing also hides the tensions simmering beneath. Matt knows Clayton was sent to kill him; Matt and Clayton like each other (both are hardened professionals tired of their profession); Catherine and Clayton like each other too. If the actors look as if they're a little lost that's not a flaw in the performances but a natural reaction to being in a Hellman film: so many undercurrents and subtleties crossing each other you have to be careful not to say the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Arguably the most confident performer here is Oates; having given Hellman the definitive portrait of American machismo at its most unconfident in Two Lane Blacktop he knows enough to armor Matthew with the most obtuse of surfaces, the better to hide his true intentions--which we learn about anyway, of course. Hellman puts up people with varying skills at deception and self-deception (even Testi's open-faced Clayton plays the game), that in the course of his films are gradually stripped of their defenses, leaving a raw, aching awareness. A great western, of course, not the least because it feels so much more than one.

Tarsem Singh can't really tell a story properly, but he's such a heedlessly fertile imagemaker one doesn't quite care. Mirror Mirror is his modernized take on the Snow White legend, and frankly it's a mess; it's also fun, with Lily Collins as the impish heroine and Julia Roberts in full-on comic mode as the malevolently vain stepmother queen. Scriptwriter Marc Klein and playwright Jason Keller manage to come up with sparkling rom-com dialogue between Collins and her Prince Charming, the heroically game Armie Hammer (he gets considerable comic mileage out of a less-than-dignifying spell that compels him to act like a dog), but the true star of the film is Singh's distinct visual style--exuberant and restless (but not to the point of ADHD), with a gift for imagery (Snow White's minaret palace rising high over a crystal lake from an impossibly curved crag) and dramatic sets (the hushed winter forest; the dwarfs' underground lodge; the ballroom with its breathtakingly cavernous entrance).

A good chunk of the film's visual appeal are the costumes, by Singh's collaborator Eiko Ishioka with their soaring collars, sweeping capes, and ridiculous swan and sailing-ship hats (sadly, this was to be Ishioka's final work--she died before the film was finished). Call me smitten, but I think it all works--the actors are content to be smart and sassy and shallow, leaving all the real magic to be worked by the filmmakers, toiling away in the background. Easily Singh's most enjoyable picture to date.

And if that isn't convincing, check out Snow White and the Huntsman, Rupert Sander's LOTR-ized version of the legend. Serious themes, dark magics, and Charlize Theron in full Monster mode--for all her talent and beauty, Theron has never struck me as an actress with much of a sense of humor. She's so driven to make us see the acting behind the beauty that we're put off by the pushiness: "you want to be taken seriously, we get that; now back off!"

If Theron is too in-your-face, Stewart is too, well, comatose. She sleepwalks through the film with the same vaguely distressed expression she used during all four (five? I forget) Twilight movies, and frankly the ploy has become a bit wearying, if not soporific. Between the two actresses, one pathetically passive, the other psychotically aggressive, there's no point of dramatic contact whatsoever; it's as if they were acting in two completely different movies, neither of which I particularly liked.

Sanders directs big, but it's an empty, unevocative kind of big; big sets, big action setpieces, no sense of drama, inspiration, artistry, no acknowledgement of the essential absurdity of the story (A beautiful virgin living with seven dwarfs, unmolested? Really?). There's a suggestion of feminist sympathy for the evil queen, but poor Theron lost me some time back, when she wouldn't even crack wise on the idea of eating a young girl's heart--c'mon, Charlize, not even an Andrew Zimmern reference?

Possibly the picture's low point is when Snow White comes to the heart of the forest, and a mysterious stag with monstrous antlers rises up to greet her (sounds familiar?). Rule number one when making bad movies: don't ever remind the audience of a better film; they might not come back in heart and mind to finish this one.

Steven Soderbergh is the hardest-working serious filmmaker in the business, arguably; his Magic Mike is his low-budget take on favorite star Channing Tatum's life story. The star has a charming, low-key presence, but cedes center stage to Matthew McConaughey's slimy strip club owner, a combination of six-pack abs, long unwashed hair, and fine wrinkles.

Film is nicely understated, the dance sequences nicely shot and choreographed (I can see Soderbergh being capable of doing a musical, though I don't see him wanting to--he's such an odd combination of the canny and straitlaced); several points of contention in a largely competent production: I'm not sure club customers look that consistently good, and the level of homoerotic denial ("Got all these hot women, so I ain't gay") in the air is so intense you can't help but sniff suspiciously for smoke.

Perhaps my biggest beef with the picture is that it ain't Lino Brocka; the club is too clean, the acts too wholesome, the melodrama too tidy. As I wrote in Cineaste, Brocka's Macho Dancer is unashamed exploitation (where Mike--again, too strenuously--keeps its head largely above the muck), and that's part of the film's political point. When it comes to male strip melodramas, make mine Macho.

7/30/12

Chris Marker, 7/29/21 - 7/30/12

2012-07-30T06:54:00.000-04:00

Chris Marker, 1921 - 2012

His La Jetee in its brief forty minutes encompasses the span of a man's life, in its static images the mystery of the man's soul and in its oblique and tersely told story the tragedy of the man's destiny. If this isn't one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made (it is, but say it isn't) it's definitely one of the most daring, most lyrical, most eloquent.

Your work was loved, sir, and we will miss you.

French film critic Max Tessier's tribute to Mario O'Hara

2012-07-23T01:12:00.000-04:00

French film critic Max Tessier's tribute to Mario O'Hara

Tessier's been a longtime follower and ardent champion of Philippine cinema, not to mention being a frequent visitor to the Philippines. He managed to visit O'Hara's wake, something I wasn't able to do (and met O'Hara a few times). His support is much appreciated.

Ted; Spider-man; Brave; Savages; To Rome with Love; and an announcement of sorts

2012-07-16T05:00:00.001-04:00

Don't see why Seth McFarlane should bother bringing his unfunny Family Guy series to the big screen when he's already done the live-action version.

I mean--Mark Whalberg as the Peter Griffin character; Mila Kunis as the hot love interest; McFarlane himself, stuffed in fur stained the exact shade of bilirubin, as a combination Stewie Griffin/Brian. So tell me what's the difference?

Oh yeah--about a hundred million dollars. I suppose for that much money you can find someone willing to defecate in public too.

It's not that I object to tasteless comedy; it's that I object to tasteless comedy that's so lazy. McFarlane has basically recycled an episode of Family Guy--where Peter keeps screwing around and having to scramble to make up for it with Lois (and oh, doesn't that basic plotline sound a tad familiar?)--puffed it up to feature-film length, added name actors and a digitally animated stuffed animal for the "wow!" factor.

Can he direct? Like Paris Hilton can sing. He likes to swing his camera around in an establishing shot as if to say "Look guys! I've got a style!" but when the characters (usually in a two-shot) start talking, all pretensions to being a film are forgotten and the screen snaps shut like a discarded pop-up book. You're left staring at nothing but crude sketches.

As for tasteless--don't talk to me about tasteless. When McFarlane goes for a gross-out joke the best he can muster is a turd on the carpet (we don't even get to see how it got there); when the Farrellys go for one the shower wall is spectacularly spray-painted the exact shade of Ted's fur. Give me the Farrellys anytime.

It's more than just boobs-and-poop jokes. The Farrellys are outrageous comedians but (like Ben Stiller, another comic talent I appreciate) they're satirists; they shock and disturb because they're trying to make a point. I don't know what kind of point McFarlane is trying to make--that the '80s was a great decade? I grew up in the '80s; I would rather undergo a colonoscopy. And if someone asks "Then how do you account for--?" and quotes Ted's boxoffice receipts to me, I'll simply respond with P.T. Barnum's one-time remark about suckers. Serves him right, too.

Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-man is a little less than. Andrew Garfield plays the angrier, edgier Peter Parker--and that's part of the problem. There's no real surprise here of a loser nerd type (like Tobey Maguire) suddenly standing up and spurting sticky substances from his wrists, only a James Dean troubled teen already spoiling for a fight. Garfield is a good actor being typecast where Maguire was a funny running gag good for three movies (almost).

Webb (cute last name, but he's better off doing rom-com) puts the focus on Parker's melodrama, and shoots most of his action at night, the better to hide the digital fudging. Smart move; Raimi was ballsy enough to stage his digital webslinging in daylight (I love the largely orange-tinted view of New York) but then Raimi didn't give a damn (as can be seen in the Evil Dead films and Drag Me to Hell, he wore his cheesy effects proudly on his sleeve). After a while you realize that Webb prefers melodrama; his fight sequences are an incoherent mess of the non-shaky-cam type (What were those cars doing there hanging from the bridge? If Spidey saved them why didn't we see him saving them?). Arguably Webb is heir to the Rob Reiner and Mel Brooks School of Directing, comic filmmakers who can tell a story (and sometimes even coax a good performance from an actor) but haven't a clue how to construct a proper action sequence. When I said it's time to get someone else to direct the fourth Spidey picture I meant a filmmaker.

Talk about needing to get a filmmaker: Brave is reportedly Pixar's first animated feature with a strong female lead. Redheaded princess who kicks serious butt--now where have we seen that before?

Unfortunately Pixar may talk the talk but hasn't learned lesson one about what makes Studio Ghibli films so great. The subtlety of detail; the gorgeous handpainted background art; the use of silence and understatement to add depth and poignancy. The adult level of the storytelling--not adult as in rated R violence (though Ghibli has been there before) but adult as in indirect and unhurried and sophisticated, designed for audiences unafflicted by ADHD (a joke a minute, a chase every other).

The triplet brothers are wonderful--they deserve an animated short all their own.

Might as well add that amongst Pixar's recent efforts, Brave isn't half as fun as half of Cars 2, the Michael Caine half (maybe not even half); that it tries for too much heart, which, as I mention in the above piece, isn't Pixar's strong suite in my view; that this latest movie is far more ambitious, but there's something to be said about doing something unpretentious; that a middling entertainment like the aforementioned sequel, with nothing more in mind than to amuse and make more money, is more Pixar's speed.

Oliver Stone's Savages is possibly his best work in years--not exactly high praise, but it's really not bad. Violent, funny, sexy, with a careful balancing act that keeps it just this side of being racist (a trio of Californian weed dealers struggling to stay ahead of a Baja drug cartel--what keeps it from stepping over is that everyone is sympathetic and everyone dirty; if they're not, they soon will be).

It has the density and nuance one only gets from a novel--Stone needs that to anchor his coked-up storytelling drive. What with the fashionable style nowadays being to shoot shaky-cam and cut the footage ADHD fast, Stone slows down his editing to just nervously jagged and hurls the camera along with the confidence and grace of a real veteran. And he's not too flashy; he's not trying to overload our circuitry the way he did in Natural Born Killers. He gives the plot its due, enhancing instead of engulfing the narrative. He gives the finale an odd twist, a variation of the novel, but strangely enough his addition sounds like the more reasonable, more true-to-life one. Man has grown.

Call me perverse, but I enjoyed Woody Allen's To Rome with Love far more than I did his previous endeavor set in Paris. Seems to me with Midnight in Paris he felt that all he had to do was namedrop Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Bunuel and the like, and he has the interest of his audience; here he's using all-fictional characters and he actually has to work a little to entertain us.

The effort works; perhaps his best idea is Roberto Benigni (Benigni, of all people!) suddenly becoming famous for the sake of being famous. The conceit speaks volumes about our celebrity-obsessed culture (Kim Kardashian and Snooki anyone?), and puts Benigni's sad-sack face to full and even sympathetic use. Allen himself appears onscreen after a long hiatus as an avant-garde opera director, and acquits himself well (the stammer is still funny); Jesse Eisenberg makes for an amusing young Woody surrogate (his stammer impersonation is funny).

And finally, a kind of announcement. Am going to stop writing for Businessworld and stop writing here in this blog at least for a while, to focus on finishing that damn book I promised to finish for the past seven years.

Doesn't mean I won't put up something once in a while--but it won't be as in-depth, and it won't be regular. Priority is the book right now, and if what I hear from some people is correct, it's about time.

Hopefully I do get to finish it--owe him that much.

So long for now.

7/16/12

Rodolfo Quizon (Dolphy) 1928 - 2012

2012-07-10T11:46:00.001-04:00

Rodolfo Quizon (Dolphy) July 25, 1928 - July 10, 2012

Biographical note on the man (an improvement over the wikipedia entry I linked to earlier).

A brief article about one of his many films:

Lino Brocka's Ang Tatay Kong Nanay (My Father, My Mother, roughly, 1978) is the master filmmaker's one collaboration with the near-universally acknowledged King of Philippine Comedy, Dolphy (Rodolfo Vera Quizon). Screen legends working with famed filmmakers rarely if ever create sure bets; it's something of a surprise, then that the resulting picture from these two is so straightforwardly poignant, laced with just enough humor to wriggle past one's defenses.

It's a simple premise: Dioscoro Derecho, a.k.a. Coring (Dolphy) has nurtured a crush for his handsome young friend Dennis (Philip Salvador, Brocka's then newfound protégé). When Dennis appears at Coring's door with a baby and a need to disappear for a while, Coring has no choice but to take in the child, and raise him as best he can.

If there's any comedy in the picture, unlike with most of Dolphy's movies, the humor arises from character rather than situation, and Dolphy here reveals himself as a superb character actor. Witness his discomfort at dealing with Dennis (the physical attraction he feels so intense he almost feels faint); witness too the growing sense of maternal love he feels for Nonoy, Dennis' child (played by Nino Mulach--if, as W.C. Fields warns us, we should never act opposite dogs and children, Dolphy had his hands full trying not to be upstaged by this indescribably cute, frighteningly precocious young actor).

More, there's a handling of homosexuality that is startlingly deft, considering when this was made. Coring doesn't believe in gay empowerment--when Nonoy catches him in drag, he makes excuses; when the boy puts on lipstick (in an attempt to play an American Indian), Coring, misunderstanding, reprimands the boy. Brocka shows us a gay man who fails to transcend his times (Coring believes homosexuality is a flaw--or worse, a sin), who nevertheless does his level best to be a parent to the child; watching Coring bumble along in desperate befuddlement, often against the dictates of his own instincts, creates a complex knot of feelings in the viewer. You feel your heart quietly breaking in sympathy for the man, the same time you find yourself (despite the film's overall serious tone) chuckling in amusement.

Easily one of Brocka's most delicate creations, and one of Dolphy's finest performances (arguably his finest, period, would be his monumental role as quintessential Filipino family man John Puruntong, in the long-running family comedy series John en Marsha (1973 to 1990)). A definite must-see.

Links to other Dolphy films:

James Batman (Artemio Marquez, 1966)

Facifica Falayfay (Luciano Carlos, 1969), scroll down to bottom of the page.

Jack en Jill (Mar Torres, 1954), scroll down to middle of the page; apologies for the misspelling.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

2012-06-30T11:42:00.002-04:00

Mommie dearest

Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011), her first feature in nine years and an adaptation of the novel by Lionel Shriver is, to put it simply, spectacularly messed up.

The story follows the life of one Eva Katchadourian (Tilda Swinton) as she gives birth to her son Kevin (played at various ages by Rocky Duer, Jasper Newell, and Ezra Miller as the child, youth, and teenaged Kevin respectively), struggles to raise him to doubtful young adulthood and, much later, live a life made lonely by ostracization from the entire community--though not necessarily in that order. Ramsey shuffles the time order, her way of echoing the novel's structure (a series of letters written by Eva to her husband that look back on her life), leaving clues along the way of something terrible that happens--will happen--later in the film, possibly the reason for her isolated status.

Ramsay's not an untalented filmmaker; she directs the film with a creepy deadpan tone, something of a cross between the hilariously serious (I'm thinking of Richard Donner's deadly earnest The Omen (1976)) and the seriously hilarious (Barry Sonnenfeld's Addams Family Values (1993), with a waywardly witty script by Paul Rudnick). Ramsay surrounds mother and son with a supporting cast full of grotesques (Alex Manette as a creepily predatory office co-worker, John C. Reilly as the eternally sweaty-looking husband), some (with the help of cinematographer Seamus McGarvey) striking imagery predominantly highlighted by a vivid shade of red (Swinton posed against a Warholian background of soup cans), and a soundtrack sprinkled with choices obvious (Buddy Holly's “Everyday”), and not-so-obvious (George Michael's “Last Christmas,” a selection from the score of Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine).

There's an argument to be made that Swinton is miscast here, being reportedly a less-than-empathic actress of the Isabelle Huppert school of onscreen disdain. I don't see it (actually I don't see it in Huppert who, when used judiciously, can be devastatingly effective); here Swinton's the put-upon sad-sack mother, her most consistently funny expression being the caught-in-the-headlights look on her face as she realizes time and again just what she's dealing with. As for her beloved son Ramsey manages to inspire every one of the Kevins, from toddler to teen, to flash the trademark Kubrickian evil psycho grin (see Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980), or Vincent D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket (1987)), to which Swinton's Eva can only respond with exhausted dismay. Yes, Swinton's default mode is cold fish, but I actually found this more fascinating--a woman unapologetically accustomed to flying all over the world and writing about her travels suddenly confined to a single house in a tiny town with the Devil's spawn. She doesn't give in to her neighbors, she doesn't give in to us her audience; when she does give in, almost despite herself, it's a startling moment, and startlingly moving...

Perhaps my biggest problem with the film is the lack of psychological insight; we're outside looking in, and Ramsey doesn't even seem all that interested in doing more than suggest what drives both mother and son (and, equally interesting, what makes mother just as culpable as son). The film is really a series of darkly comic gags, artfully shuffled together and strikingly photographed--not unentertaining, but not something you would take seriously on the issue.

Perhaps it helps to look at another film for comparison. Lino Brocka is not the most sophisticated filmmaker in the world; his pictures work best as blood melodramas, with a sense of you-are-there immediacy. He's a straightforward, no-nonsense artist whose subtlest ability is a gift for modulating actors, coaxing them to underplay so that the melodrama starts looking larger and more profound--touching at times the level of dramatic art...

His Insiang (1976) covers roughly the same territory, albeit in a more straightforward manner: girl raised by less-than-loving mother, learns through abuse and neglect to give back as good as she gets, or better. Perhaps the difference here is that you identify with different points of view--mother, being abandoned by her husband; daughter being abandoned (emotionally if not literally) by her mother. Brocka makes both sides real for you, you can't help but sympathize with both points of view...and are horrified when both clash dramatically, then violently.

Brocka doesn't use a fancy back-and-forth time scheme, doesn't use a beautifully modulated color palette. His camerawork (by the great Conrado Baltazar) makes strict use of sunlight and available incandescents (or appears to do so, at least, better even than slum dramas are able to do today); his script (by longtime collaborator and filmmaker Mario O'Hara) is ripped out of the here-and-now (O'Hara claims the story happened to his backyard neighbors in the district of Pasay). We Need to Talk About Kevin isn't a bad film, really--it's brilliantly shot and acted and morbidly entertaining--but it doesn't have the white-hot intensity of unvarnished truth, or of a Brocka film.

First published in Businessworld, 6/21/12

Mario O'Hara 1946 - 2012

2012-06-26T05:13:00.002-04:00

Mario O'Hara died today of complications due to leukemia.

Here is an old interview (reproduced from my book Critic After Dark) I did, the very first time I met him:

Three Men Drunk In A Dimsum Shop

WE MET OUTSIDE of Shakey's, which was Mario O'Hara's suggestion. "Then I thought 'Wait a minute,'" he told me, "'Shakey's, on a Friday night--a basketball night. We won't get a table.'" Indeed we didn't: there was a line of customers waiting to be seated. We ended up in a dim sum shop outside of Glorietta's Streetlife, ordering pitchers of beer from a nearby bar.

I was with my friend--call him Mang Philip--and we had collared the elusive Mario O'Hara backstage of the last performance of his latest play, Wilfredo Ma. Guerrero's Ulilang Tahanan (Orphan Home). Mang Philip took one arm, I took the other, and we twisted until O'Hara agreed to meet us: which is, it turns out, the only way you can convince him to give an interview.

Backtrack one year: when I had first met Mang Philip, we had spent the whole night talking about, well, everything you can imagine; one of the things we talked about was films. "Everyone is a thief and a fake," he informed me. "Celso (Ad. Castillo), Mike (de Leon), Ishmael (Bernal), Lino (Brocka), Gerry (de Leon)--all thieves and fakes."

"I don't know," I told him, "They're not that bad."

Mang Philip shook his head. "The only one who's any good is Mario O'Hara. I can't remember the title of the movie I saw of his--what's the matter?"

The matter was, I had just seen Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, (Three Years Without God) and I was more or less thinking the same thing--not that O'Hara's the only one who's any good, but that he's the best filmmaker we have.

The realization came gradually. As early as '86 I had seen Bagong Hari (The New King) and I was blown away: the film's action sequences were far more thrilling, far more exciting than anything I had ever seen in a Filipino film, almost--well, almost Japanese in intensity. I'd decided that if Brocka is our best film director, at least visually, O'Hara is his superior.

When I saw Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Judged and Found Wanting, 1974), I was dumbstruck. Not in his agitprop films Bayan Ko (My Country) and Orapronobis (Fight for Us), not in his acknowledged masterpiece Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon) did Brocka realize the epic sweep, the intimate detail that he did in this pitiless, passionate portrait of a small provincial town. He even had a pair of lovers--Lolita Rodriguez as a crazed woman, Mario O'Hara as a leper--in a dramatic duet so powerful they took over the film. It was after seeing the film (I was late for the opening credits) that I had my mind blown away yet again: the film had been written by O'Hara.

Name me the best Filipino directors, at least of the 70's, and the list is short: Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Mike De Leon, Celso Ad. Castillo. O'Hara's name is rarely mentioned, yet he is always there, lurking in the credits like Frankenstein's monster. Of Brocka's three greatest films (Maynila, Tinimbang, Insiang), O'Hara wrote two: Tinimbang and Insiang, and he gave the best single performance in Tinimbang. The man can act, can write, can direct--a triple threat. What else was he capable of?

Then I saw Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, and I was blown away for the third time.

When the pitcher of beer arrived, I filled our mugs, then asked him about the film, and how it was received back in 1976.

"Not very well," he admitted. "Mainly because everyone was asking: who's he? I'm from Adamson University, and all the filmmakers and Manunuri critics were from UP.

"The best-praised film that year was Lupita's (Kashiwahara) Minsa'y Isang Gamu-Gamo (Once There Was a Moth). Socially relevant films were very in then, and Tatlong Taong wasn't very socially conscious."

No it wasn't, I told him. I added that the film was also unique for another reason: it portrayed Japanese soldiers as human beings. As far as I can tell, we're the only country in the world that has suffered under the Japanese Occupation and made a film like this.

"Christopher De Leon's Japanese officer," I concluded, "is like no other character I've ever encountered in Filipino films. How did you create him?"

O'Hara smiled, "I knew him."

"You knew him?"

"Or someone like him. I knew a Filipino who had raped a woman, then felt guilty, cared for the woman, and became a good father to their baby. Every character I write is from someone I know."

"How about Insiang?"

O'Hara started to laugh. "Insiang happened at the back of our house in Pasay."

Mang Philip interrupted: "Mario, I loved Insiang, except for one thing: I cannot believe it can happen in Tondo."

"It didn't," O'Hara said. "It was set in Pasay. Brocka changed it to Tondo."

"You should have insisted on Pasay," he said, refilling our empty mugs.

I was lost, and I admitted as much to them. O'Hara explained it to me. "A woman as good-looking as Hilda Koronel's Insiang wouldn't remain poor in Tondo. She would stand out; she would be noticed, wooed, showered with gifts. In Pasay, there are so many prostitutes another one, no matter how beautiful, wouldn't make a difference. She would stay poor."

"Oh." I asked him: "and Nora Aunor's character in Tatlong Taong? The one De Leon raped? Did you know her?"

O'Hara laughed. "There are a lot of women like her in Pasay."

Mang Philip refilled our mugs. I ordered another pitcher.

"I liked you in your very first role," Mang Philip was telling O'Hara, "opposite Eddie Garcia in Tubog sa Ginto (Dipped in Gold). Eddie was with you at the swimming pool. You stripped and dove in. A beautiful scene."

"There's a story about that scene!" O'Hara said. "I was concerned about taking my clothes off. I told Lino: I wanted just Eddie, him, and the cameraman. No one else. When I arrived, the owner of the pool was there; so was his wife, his children, his maids, his neighbors. I talked to Lino again, and he said 'Don't worry, I'll take care of everything.' I was too nervous--it was my first role. So I obeyed him. I took my bathrobe off. One of the young dalagitas--I'm sure she was a virgin--pointed and screamed: 'Diyos ko, ano 'yan?!' (Dear God, what's that?!)"

"A beautiful scene," Mang Philip murmured, caressing the mug with his thumb.

I was trying to establish his writing, directing and acting filmography. "What was your next role?"

"Stardoom, 1972."

I frowned. "And Tubog was--1970, right? Why the gap?"

O'Hara laughed. "Because I was angry! After that swimming pool scene, I said to myself: 'P_k_ mo Lino, just try and put me in one of your films again! Just try!"

Mang Philip roared "P_k_ niya talaga!"

I looked at Mang Philip. "Is that how people from Pasay express themselves?"

"P_k_ nilang lahat!"

"Lino liked to shock people," O'Hara said.

"Lino was an idiot!"

"I thought Halimaw (Monster, 1986) was an interesting film," I said, looking hard at Mang Philip. He was pouring himself another mug of beer. "At least, your half of the film."

"That was during the Metro Manila Filmfest, when Tingting Cojuangco announced that all the films were copies of foreign movies." Mario said. "I said to myself, 'P_t_, I better not win, because if I do, I'm going to say something!' So I walked out."

"But you won anyway, for" I looked at my notes, "best actor, best director, best picture." Actually third best picture; the judges refused to give first best.

First or third, I told him, Halimaw had at least two brilliant sequences. The first had Liza Lorena talking to O'Hara, and ends with Lorena slapping O'Hara's face, again and again. The scene was finely written, flawlessly acted; you had to remind yourself that it was a horror story. The second sequence was even better: a long monologue where Lorena explains to Lotlot De Leon her feelings of jealousy and hate, all the while walking towards Lotlot with chilling deliberation.

"The film was based on Ifugao burial practices. They put their dead in jars, and store them in caves." O'Hara told me. "Tingting must have thought the film was copied from an Amazing Stories episode, where monsters came out of a box."

"Tingting is a--" Mang Philip went into a long, involved speech about exactly what Tingting was.

"And the other half?" I managed to ask. "The Christopher De Leon segment?"

"That was inspired by Ah-ha!s' video, the one where the hero turns into a cartoon character."

"Ah-ha."

Mang Philip was for ordering another pitcher.

"You won the previous year for Bulaklak Sa City Jail (Flowers of the City Jail, 1984)," I noted, filling mugs.

"I thought I might win a third time. But "Bagong Hari was given an X-rating, which disqualified the film."

"You directed Bagong Hari?" Mang Philip asked. "My God!" He pointed at O'Hara "You sir, understand violence. You do! I know everything about the balisong, and I didn't see a single fake moment in the film. Did you pick Dan Alvaro for the role?"

"No, he was picked by the studio. I had to use him."

"He was perfect," Mang Philip declared. "So quiet! Real killers are like that. The loud man walking down the street, I don't notice. I'm afraid of the quiet man." He talked about quiet men and balisongs, balisongs and quiet men, for some time after that.

"It took me three days," Mario finally continued, "to shoot the fight scene at the National Mental Hospital sunken theater in Mandaluyong. The producer asked why it had taken three days. I showed him the fight scene and he didn't like it."

I couldn't believe that, and I told him so. After, of course, Mang Philip had me order another pitcher of beer.

"Actually, the most difficult action scene was the one in the ice plant. I'd forgotten that Dan had his shirt off and was soaking wet. His bare feet kept sticking to the metal floor."

"I have to urinate," Mang Philip said, and walked out.

"Johnny Tinoso and The Proud Beauty," I said quickly (I knew I didn't have a lot of time), "is half of a wonderful film. Half was poor special effects, the other half was, for me, even more magical than Disney's Beauty and the Beast."

"I didn't want to go too far from the concept of Beauty and the Beast at first," Mario said. "That's why Jestoni Alarcon's makeup was the traditional Beast makeup. When Gretchen Baretto was transformed, I wanted to show her inner nature coming out."

"It was beautiful," I said, "and horrifying. The hand clutching her forehead. The tiny face on her chin, screaming. That I remember: that and the ending. It's the first time I ever saw a dramatic climax where the two stars had their backs to the camera. Why did you do it?"

"She was supposed to transform back to her beautiful self, and I was tired of seeing the magic done in front of you, onscreen. So I had her turn her back instead. You heard the change through her voice, through the words she used. You never saw the magic, but you knew it's happening."

"Which was magical." I said. Mang Philip came through the door, looking suspicious. "Did I miss anything?" We shook our heads.

"Another pitcher of beer," Mang Philip said. O'Hara gently told him he'd had enough. But Mang Philip was stubborn.

"The beer won't be wasted. If you can't finish the pitcher, I will!"

We compromised: one more, but it's the last. Mang Philip agreed. O'Hara went to the bathroom. I told Mang Philip: "We came here to interview O'Hara, but it's turning into an interview of you."

He shook his head. "You saw how shy he is. I'm trying to help you draw him out."

"The shop closes at two. I have just a few hours left to 'draw him out.'"

"You can do it, you'll see."

O'Hara came back smiling. "I went to the men's room in Hard Rock Cafe, and I saw all these people seated. They looked so bored! They were so bored they all stared when I walked by them."

Mang Philip probably felt O'Hara needed a little more "drawing out;" he talked about his travels to France, about meeting Orson Welles, about some university professor named Anton who flashed him in Dunkin' Donuts, thinking he was a boy prostitute (they instantly recognized each other, and were deeply embarrassed).

Eventually, I did see: I saw O'Hara listening to Mang Philip. I saw the line of his body, the tilt of his head, the turn of his knees. I saw the subtly branching fingers on his hands, like tree roots probing deep for water. His whole being was focused on this old man pouring his memories out over a mugful of beer.

"My son," Mang Philip said, "is a son of a b_tch. He's in Japan, he speaks Japanese, he works there."

"You must be proud of him," O'Hara said.

"I hate him," Mang Philip said. "He never sends any money."

O'Hara laughed. "You don't miss his money, you miss his letters! You miss him, don't you? Don't you?" he teased, gently nudging Mang Philip.

"I have to urinate again," Mang Philip walks out.

O'Hara laughs. "While he was talking, I could see his character forming in my head!"

"You mean, you might use him in a script? A film?" O'Hara laughed again. For some reason, I felt more than a little envious. I remember a question I had asked him earlier:

"Was the leper and the crazy woman in Tinimbang inspired by Sisa and her husband in (the Jose Rizal novel) Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not)?"

"But Sisa's husband wasn't a leper!" Mario said, "Not in the book. I created the two lovers, I didn't copy them."

"Did you write the part of the leper for yourself?"

"No. Lino couldn't get anyone, so he asked me."

"Really?"

O'Hara suddenly looked serious. He leaned forward, looked at me, and said: "One thing I am, one thing that's me is, I'm devoted. I'll give a person what he needs. If he needs a friend, if he needs a companion, if he needs to talk, if he needs to cry, I'm there."

The shop was closing. For the umpteenth time, I told Mang Philip that the last pitcher was the last pitcher. "You shouldn't be so literal," he moaned.

O'Hara started to move away. Suddenly, Mang Philip had his arms around his neck.

"Don't go!" he said.

"I won't," O'Hara soothed.

O'Hara being a prodigious beer drinker, knew all the moves when handling a drunk--but so did Mang Philip. He clung to O'Hara's neck. O'Hara relented. The two of us walked Mang Philip unsteadily out of the building.

"I love this man," Mang Philip said. "This man is a genius!"

I asked O'Hara if he'd be all right going home. "I think so," he said. Suddenly, we realize that Mang Philip wasn't with us; he was leaning against a wall, urinating.

"Now's your chance," I told O'Hara, nudging him. He looked puzzled; then he understood. "Thanks," he said, stretching a hand out to me. And he was gone.

Manila Chronicle, 3/25/96