Alagwa (2012)

Minggu, 20 Oktober 2013

Alagwa (2012)

Alagwa (Ian Lorenos, 2013)

English Title: Breakaway

Inspired by an urban legend about kidnappers targeting children to be turned into beggars, Ian Lorenos’ Alagwa (Breakaway) tells the story of Robert (Jericho Rosales) and Brian (Bugoy Carino), his son. The film opens with Robert and Brian shopping inside a mall. Brian wanders off, attracted by the various toys being peddled. Seeing that his son is missing, Robert searches the mall, seeing Brian playing with the toys. He pulls away his son from the toys and scolds him, warning him of the syndicates that kidnap children to use them as beggars.

The relationship between Robert and Brian is one that is far from ideal. Robert works as a salesman, struggling to survive within the normally wealthy Filipino-Chinese community with only the meager commissions he earns. Brian reaps the effects of his father’s position in their community’s pecking order. Constantly bullied in his school because of his paltry lot in life, he performs very poorly and is often disciplined for fighting his schoolmates. There seems to be a quiet understanding between them. Although seldom expressed, gestures are shown, signalling affectations both of them hesitate to openly give to each other.

Lorenos does not hide the tragedy that will befall both father and son. In between moments that subtly express the preciousness of their relationship amidst the struggles, Lorenos fast-forwards, showing scenes where Robert is seen searching the streets of Hong Kong for his missing son. The inevitability of separation is absolutely heart-breaking. The film cleverly builds up the tension, juxtaposing sequences of desperation, frustration and loneliness with ones that are bursting with the wonderful chaos of togetherness.

Midway, the film suddenly transforms from a quaint and deliberate portrait of a relationship that is doomed to woe into an unhinged descent down Manila’s secret sinful underbellies, complete with an apartment building populated with drug addicts, lowlifes, and children waiting to be exported to Hong Kong. The kidnapping happens, turning Robert’s cynical father into an impromptu action hero who, within a few nights, crosses paths with abusive pedophiles, inutile cops, and penitent pimps. The unexpected deviation, more an exploration of a father’s desperation than an inability for Lorenos to contain his imagination, only foreshadows the impeccable emotional impact of the film’s ending.

The ending is in fact the film’s starkest contrivance. It is also its crowning glory. With a prolonged embrace, sobs, tears, and an indelible look on Robert’s face that reflects a flurry of heightened emotions ranging from relief to sadness, Alagwa ends without regard to subtlety, and rightfully so. There are moments that deserve silence. The film however deserves such an impassioned bow, one that would drown all the noise and doubts with unstoppable bursts of very well-earned tears.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

La última película (2013)

Sabtu, 12 Oktober 2013

La última película (2013)

La última película (Raya Martin & Mark Peranson, 2013)

The year 2012 was for most of humanity a waiting game. The Mayans predicted the world’s end. Riots sprouted. Floods happened. Scandals erupted. It seemed the Mayans spoke true, but there was still no assurance that the world was on the verge of its own demise. Amidst the chaos produced by the world’s hesitation to die, film was quietly performing its own disappearing trick. There were debates. Self-proclaimed vanguards of the cinematic arts were busy looking forward, confident of the continuation of the business despite the business’ abandonment of its first medium. The rest, those oblivious to the business of movie-making, were subsisting on throes of nostalgia, scrambling for the last remaining reels of film and creating very personal odes to celluloid, on celluloid.

The apocalypse happened. We were there to witness it. Film cameras were no longer being made. Analog projectors were no longer being used. Raya Martin, who stubbornly made films in celluloid when his comrades were shooting in digital, and Mark Peranson, editor of Cinema Scope, had the best view of cataclysm. In La última película, an impeccable collaboration between the two very outspoken cinephiles, they are seen viewing the apocalypse. Images of rampaging meteors and fiery explosions are superimposed on a peacefully starless night sky. Despite the spectacle, the two are quite withdrawn. It’s just another show.

La última película, for all its brash self-consciousness, is neither nostalgic nor dismissive of that foregone era. It masks its melancholy with sarcasm, bleeding incessantly from the antics and bickerings of a filmmaker (Alex Ross Perry) and his Mexican guide (Gabino Rodriguez), who are in Yucatan to scout locations for what is planned to be the last film ever made.

When melancholy manages to escape the clutches of Martin and Peranson’s intellectual comedy, the pay-off is quite tremendous. The film within the film shows a woman visiting a departed loved one in the cemetery. She is singing a mournful song. What follows is a montage of random everyday oddities, all shot in celluloid, all beautifully textured. The sombre montage gives way to an abrupt change. We now see Martin and Peranson’s film crew in high definition digital, shooting the film within the film. Peranson asks Gym Lumbera, his cinematographer, a question about shooting in celluloid. Lumbera then relates how he is certain that the film camera has stopped recording. He can hear it recording. Filmmaking has become too dolefully quiet.

It all seems chaotic. La última película switches from one medium to another, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The images from the various media, edited together exposing their individual merits and faults, can either incite further or end the debate that has been hounding the film community since digital started replacing celluloid. While the film is quiet towards its biases, it nevertheless feels like film’s rightful valediction.

La última película elucidates the flurry of emotions surrounding what was the cinematic apocalypse. It is best viewed as a relic from a recent past, a foregone era, an enigmatic museum piece. It is that bewildering but very enjoyable artifact of how all the talk on the state of cinema has become so absurdly serious and seriously absurd. With a wondrous marriage of self-importance and self-irreverence, La última película succeeds in being everything it sets out to be, an often frustrating but always joyous celebration of cinema.

In La última película’s final scene, shot in red-tinted celluloid tinted, Perry’s fervent filmmaker rows a boat down an anonymous river. Martin, who has experimented with the physical aspect of film and as a result produced works of astounding and profound ingenuity like Ars Colonia (where a conquistador’s exploration of a new land literally explodes with marker pen-colored fireworks), again does with film what otherwise cannot be done with pixels. The red hue slowly consumes the entire frame, leaving only indiscernible traces of the filmmaker in a sea of crimson. What eventually surfaces is something else, something reminiscent of what Martin and Peranson were looking at in the night sky. Meteorites are falling. This is the apocalypse. And the apocalypse is just beautiful.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Hello, World (2013)

Senin, 07 Oktober 2013

Hello, World (2013)

Hello, World (Joel Ferrer, 2013)

We all were once invincible. High with puberty, we were indestructible with our first time sexual encounters, super secret crushes, and truckloads of alcohol. We talked with flair, mouthing fad words that are strange to adult ears. We walked with a peculiar bounce, carrying an imaginary heft while displaying our newly minted moustaches and Adam’s Apples. Then adulthood happened. After several years of discovering our meager places in the largely frustrating adult world, we conjured something called nostalgia. Nostalgia momentarily brought us back to that time when we all were invincible. Only now, armed with the realities of the world, the past was something as silly as a standard sitcom.

Joel Ferrer’s Hello, World is bursting with nostalgia. It examines the typical and uneventful coming-of-age of two high school graduates from the perspective of an adult who has been there and has done all that. Unabashed in its portrayal of the normal teenager’s angst and arrogance as both awkward and funny, the film seems to have a feel of being told straight out of the very selective memory of someone whose journey to being an adult is as ordinary as anybody else’s. Weeded out are the dull moments where nothing absolutely happens. What remains are the hilarious anecdotes, the brash exaggerations, the brags, and the gentle lessons in life.

Jeff (Victor Medina) and Johann (Philip Quintos) have been best friends since they were kids. After high school, both are left with decisions that would mark their lives forever. Jeff is to migrate to the United States with his mother, leaving behind all his memories of the Philippines and more importantly, Annie (Maria Francesca Lim), his secret crush and twin sister of Johann. Johann, armed with one-and-a-half sexual encounters with his more mature girlfriend (Ginny Palma), wants to skip college and relax. A summer full of wild experiences with Jeff’s comically liberated aunt (Trixie Dauz) and Johann’s too-good-to-be-true rival (Reuben Uy) for his best friend and girlfriend’s attention seems to be the only cure to their nagging dilemma.

Candidness is the film’s strength. Hello, World is undaunted by any need to be anything more than it is. It sees in its wackiness an openness to define youth as but a playground. Adolescence is therefore the final five minutes in the playground, where all reason and good behavior are quickly thrown aside for those last precious moments of fun and irresponsibility. Ferrer indulges in the absurdity that a rapidly fleeting youth can only provide. His film is consistently funny with its sketches of teenagers desperately clinging to the freedoms of childhood while slowly creeping into the seriousness of adult life.

Candidness, however, is also the film’s weakness. There is too much of it for comedy’s sake, and too little for anything else. Inconsistent crafting is actually the least of its problems. In its efforts to be unreasonably zany, it forgets to plant a heart. The spoofs are undoubtedly plenty. Most of them are genuinely effective. When Ferrer however attempts to more than funny, when he finally decides to give his waylaid teenagers a taste of being riddled with grown up problems, the weight of all the foolishness he has so cleverly and wittily written seems to be too difficult to set aside. For all the joy and laughter Ferrer brings into his portrait of teenage life, he neglects the emotional heft of leaving it. Despite sincere attempts, Hello, World seems to be unable to graduate from being anything more than a caricature of memories.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Sana Dati (2013)

Selasa, 01 Oktober 2013

Sana Dati (2013)

Sana Dati (Jerrold Tarog, 2013)

English Title: If Only

Jerrold Tarog has been exposing the hard truths behind the Philippines’ greatest preoccupations, politics and family. Through characters whose jobs are related to cameras, Tarog destroys myths that have misled Filipinos into a distorted sense of comfort. In Confessional (2007), a documentary filmmaker accidentally stumbles upon a corrupt mayor. The mayor then confesses all his sins on video, lecturing the filmmaker of the fallacy of the Philippines so-called nationhood. In Mangatyanan (The Blood Trail, 2009), an awarded photographer struggles with the nagging influence of her father, who is also an esteemed photographer. In her attempt to take pictures of a rare ritual of a dying tribe, she learns to accept the sins her father has committed against her which effectively ripped their family apart.

Tarog caps his Camera Trilogy with Sana Dati (If Only). Love, probably the most potent diversion for Filipinos, is Tarog’s target. With an appetite for movies that extol the triumph of love and songs that glorify the sacrifices for true love, Filipinos have found the perfect escape for their everyday troubles. Amidst enduring concerns about the state of the nation and the needs of the family, love, corny as it sounds, will keep us alive. However, the love that is celebrated by Filipinos is one that has been defined by winners, by those who have found their happy endings, by those who have lived or died intoxicated by romance’s distinct pleasures. Love, in the form that most the nation appreciates it, is nothing more than a hallucinogenic drug.

The cameraman in Sana Dati is Dennis (Paulo Avelino), a novice wedding videographer serendipitously hired to cover the wedding of Andrea (Lovi Poe), the last love of his older brother Andrew (Benjamin Alves). Andrea wed Robert (TJ Trinidad), a failed politician-turned-businessman she met during an election campaign. Through Andrea, Dennis finally understands the reason behind his brother’s sudden decision to leave their family. Through Dennis, Andrea discovers another way to relive the perfect love that was abruptly terminated by fate’s cruelty.

Love has always been defined by winners. The greatest lovers are those who lived content with it or died inspired by it. Sana Dati is not a film about winners. It is not about the fictional poet, named after Spanish director Julio Medem, who wrote the most beautiful verses about the feeling of being in love prior to dying. It is not about Andrew, who like fictional Medem, died with a heart overflowing with love. The heart of Sana Dati lies with the losers, the ones we tend to forget when the most intense statements about love have already been declared. It is about Andrea, whose life goes on despite the tragedy of her one true love perishing. It is about Dennis, who is about to marry a girl who does not love him. It is about Andrew, who stirs trouble in somebody else’s romantic affairs.

Sana Dati, on its surface, is a very affecting romance. Tarog, who not only directed but also wrote, edited, and scored the film, is obviously in control. Although seemingly unburdened by any need to be relevant, Tarog nevertheless experiments with structure, not for the sake of needlessly complicating his story but to inject into the film a certain rhythm that effortlessly enunciates emotions.

Opening with an ingenious proposal by Andrew to Andrea, the film immediately cuts to the day of a wedding. Dennis is introduced, carrying into the hotel various camera equipment he barely knows how to use. He finally arrives in Andrea’s room, where he proceeds to interview her, throwing questions about her love for Robert. Andrea directly answers the questions, her eyes avoiding the camera. Dennis does the same for Robert. Robert answers the questions, with his eyes directly upon the camera. Tarog peppers Sana Dati with these details that invite interpretation.

The gestures of his characters are never empty. A cigarette butt absentmindedly thrown by Dennis from the hotel’s window lands on Robert’s collar. Andrea’s wedding vows is swept by the wind, creating a shadow for Robert to be signalled of her presence in the rooftop. Fate, the primary cause for lovers to have their happy endings in many unforgettable romances, is also an active participant here. The only difference is that in Sana Dati, fate intervenes for sobriety from what essentially is an unrealistic perspective on love.

Sana Dati ends in consolation. There are no grand tragedies, except perhaps the tragedy of having to spend a lifetime with someone you still have to learn to love. There are no dignified exclamations about the power of love, except perhaps the proclamation that moving on and settling for are also valid love stories. Tarog gently shatters the myth of love with subtle sentiment. With his completed trilogy, he sends us back to Earth, armed not with illusions and aphrodisiacs but with grounding realities, as can only be seen and recorded through the unbiased lens of a camera.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Puti (2013)

Minggu, 29 September 2013

Puti (2013)

Puti (Mike Alcazaren, 2013)

English Title: White

At the center of Mike Alcazaren’s Puti (White) is Amir (Ian Veneracion), a counterfeit painter who leads a reclusive life with his son, Jaime (Bryan Pagala). His wife died a couple of years back. Other family members are abroad. His social interactions are limited to Nika (Jasmine Curtis-Smith), a young arts student who assists him in his forgeries in exchange for some lessons, and the art dealer (Leo Rialp) who peddles his replicas to wealthy collectors. Brooding and perpetually in a state of unkempt, Amir is a man resigned to his wasted fate.

There is little joy in his life. The craft that destiny has chosen for him forces him to view the expensive works he copies upside down. He admits to Nika that the method makes it easier for him to create his immaculate replicas. It helps him to see the artwork as just a myriad of assorted brushstrokes and colors. Money is not scarce. As long as he keeps his art dealer content with the satisfactory forgeries he makes, there will always be more work for him. The morality of his job is a non-issue. Given a career that never took off and a son to properly raise, there is hardly any room for guilt, or so he thinks.

Amir figures in a car accident with his son. He wakes up, unable to see color. His doctor calls his ailment achromatopsia. It only means he has become very sensitive to light. There is no comfort in the diagnosis. He has deliverables he owes his art agent, who pulled certain strings so he can get discounts for the medical treatment of his son, who is in a coma.

Stranger things happen. The blind woman he got as art subject prior to his accident has been appearing everywhere. Her woeful tale of her eyes being gouged out by her mother lingering. At work, birds fly out of nowhere. Paintings display images that previously were not there. At the hospital, a mysterious nurse (Lauren Young) repetitively reads a storybook to his unconscious son.

What Alcazaren accomplishes in Puti is to conjure horror out of the very specific world of art. The very premise, of a painter suddenly losing the capability to discern color, is enough a nightmare to anyone who relies on visual arts to exist. Alcazaren translates those specific terrors within cinematic boundaries, creating an atmosphere of both dread and disorientation.

Alcazaren manages to sustain the deliciously quiet madness he has carefully set up through protracted visuals that are just a critical sliver off from comfortable reality. It is that very fact that Puti takes that brave step out of normal logic and overrated reality that makes it so intriguing. Absent any allegiance to reason and armed with limitless imagination, Alcazaren manages to break away from the conventions of the genre he initially proposes Puti to be part of.

Puti unfortunately decides to fall into the trap of narrative convention, of needing to explain all the chaos. Even more unfortunate is how all the style and atmosphere that Alcazaren invested are conveniently betrayed by the ruinous need to cleanly wrap Amir’s tale with a dully moralistic stance on his illicit job. The nightmare literally becomes just a nightmare, and in the process, loses its charms. Everybody becomes happy, and everything else witnessed before its overwrought conclusion become nothing more than vulgar exhibition.

There is very little difference between an expressionist masterpiece and a regrettable failure. In this case, that difference is good taste. In its final few minutes, Alcazaren abandons the film’s perversions for good taste, and as a result and despite its numerous pleasures, Puti regrettably fails.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Bingoleras (2013)

Minggu, 22 September 2013

Bingoleras (2013)

Bingoleras (Ron Bryant, 2013)

Ron Bryant’s Bingoleras is a comedy of scant pleasures and even scanter insights. Sure, the jokes are plenty. However, for a film that prefers to abandon reason and logic for an overflowing stream of supposedly funny skits and sketches, it lacks any real wit. Early Almodovar is an obvious inspiration as several of Bryant’s gags rely on sexual antics, as observed from Catholic eyes. He indulges in the sudden raunchy relationship of Mimi (Charee Pineda), dressed in a nun’s habit, and Dodong (Junjun Quintana), the helper of the parish church, milking the irreverent repercussions of their very unique affair for everything its worth. Also targeted for laughs is the broken marriage of Jean (Eula Valdez), a lesbian socialite and Wally (Art Acuna), gay lawyer, with their romps with their respective same-sex partners becoming the rare highlights of Bryant’s attempt at being both funny and sensual.

Bryant confuses. His material is clearly absurd, with characters ending up in situations with just a sliver of logical explanation. However, there is restraint in the presentation. There is an overabundance of good taste, from how the entire film is shot and lighted, the decisions in music, to the obvious inability to push the envelope in depicting sexual urges. A dull failed comedy is bearable. At most, it is just a waste of time. However, a failed comedy borne out of the lack of any sensitivity is unforgiveable. It purports to be progressive with its misguided stabs at norms and conventions. Sadly, absent a believable perspective or intent, the film overindulges in its rabid caricatures, making it seem that the entire point of its blunt slapstick is shallow hilarity.

Bryant populates Bingoleras with women of token motivations. Dang (Max Eigenmann), the mastermind of the sham bingo games, simply wants to be reunited with her daughter in the United States, forcing her to earn money through unscrupulous means. Mimi, her assistant whose past in the novitiate makes her a semi-effective fake nun, dreams of love and a more comfortable future. Jean is stuck in a loveless marriage, satisfied only by Rona (Liza Dino), a cop. Bonay (Hazel Orencio) and Pinang (Mercedes Cabral) are single mothers who have been toughened by their sorry lots in life. They also loathe each other.

Instead of granting the characters with some semblance of dignity or humanity, Bryant places them in unrealistic situations, turning them into mere butts of his haphazard jokes. There is simply no room for sensitivity, no space for characterization. In the end, the characters are only memorable because of the misfortunate stereotype they represent or because of the outrageous sketch they were part of. What little connection between the characters and the rest of humanity is brought by the actresses who play them with an excitement that is woefully missing from the rest of the picture.

It is really unfortunate. The very fact that Bingoleras tackles the sudden connections between diversely motivated women gives it an opportunity to be more scathing or informative in its exploration of various women’s issues. In the hands of Bryant, everything seems false, everything seems to be a convenient attempt to portray women as strong and independent, but still within the perspective of a dominant male. Thus, the film’s supposedly progressive commentaries are all elementary, lacking any refreshing argument in feminist discourse. At this point, what Bingoleras offers are just the six odd women to laugh at, and nothing else.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Otso (2013)

Kamis, 19 September 2013

Otso (2013)

Otso (Elwood Perez, 2013)

Various colorful images of Manila open Otso, Elwood Perez's first film since Lupe: A Seaman's Wife and Ssshhh... She Walks by Night ten years ago. Lex (Vince Tanada), a returning Filipino writer who is commissioned by a director to draft a script for an upcoming independent project, gives perspective to the seemingly unconnected displays of Manila's sights. Nothing has changed. The truths of the Manila that he grew up in are still the same truths that Manila grapples with. After a tour of the unchanging metropolis, Lex moves into his home for the next few months, a remarkable apartment building owned by Anita Linda, a local screen goddess. Otso suddenly switches to stark monochrome.

Otso is perhaps Perez's most impenetrable film. Perez, however, has always demonstrated a flair for experimentation, to break traditional narratives with illogical and unexpected turns. Waikiki (1980), a sordid melodrama about a mother attempting to reunite with her daughters who grew up in Hawaii, is laced with full sequences of actresses gyrating to hypnotic beats and suggestive chanting. In Silip (1985), regarded as Perez's most famous film after being distributed in foreign markets under the title Daughters of Eve precisely because of its outrageous content, he manages to induce titillation within the perspective of sex that exists under very Catholic clutches. Whether fuelled by Perez's actual creative impulses or just fits of adventurism, the films he makes have an energy that arouses curiosity, at the very least.

Otso seems to be beyond comprehension. It's a myriad of perplexing images and incongruent atmospheres. At the center of the chaos is one compelling artifact from several decades ago: Lex's apartment building. It simply could have belonged to another dimension, one that is unrestricted by real world reason and logic. Its narrow corridors are littered with stories and sleaze. Its cramped units are airtight boxes brimming with secrets. It has a solitary lift, a contraption from a forgotten era that is good enough to transport fragile Anita Linda into her private roost where she keeps an eye on each and every one of her tenants.

The building manager (Vangie Labalan), an old maid who busies herself campaigning for her political candidate, becomes impossibly infatuated with Lex. Lex, on the other hand, fancies Sabina (Monique Azerreda), the mysterious woman who is either the mistress of an incumbent congressman or the doting granddaughter of Alice Lake. Sabina may also be having an affair with Hans (Jordan Ladra), one of Lex's neighbors whose wife is severely ill, leaving their son (Gabby Bautista) to become Lex's constant companion. Elsewhere, a pimp and his hookers attempt to stage one of Jose Rizal's famous stories, and politically-motivated goons are on a rampage for votes.

Perez's motivations are defiantly unclear. There are traces of noir, of Lex's guileless writer stumbling towards a web of crime and politics. Then he steps out of the stereotypical gloom, and starts playing peeping tom, indulging in the imagined escapades of his neighbors. Madness ensues. The film escapes conventional reason, and just becomes a series of scenes tied together by a figment of an idea. It transforms with every twist it takes, never really cohering. At one point, it arrives at the climax of a mystery it so vividly paints, before abandoning all that to become an unhinged tribute to the great Anita Linda.

By its very end, Otso never really succeeds at being anything except a nagging riddle, one that begs to be solved despite the scarcity for any real answers. The film's belated revelations, coupled with what could be purposeful haphazard filmmaking and histrionic acting, point towards a message of caution from the maverick filmmaker about being drunk with too much freedom, too much truth, too much fantasy, and too much cinema. In a building where Anita Linda lords over desperate writers, amateur performers, prostitutes, and political lackeys, it is that sober grey area between cinematic fantasy and reality in which the ancient actress so comfortably lives in that is the unwonted cure to life's infectious confusion.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

On the Job (2013)

Jumat, 06 September 2013

On the Job (2013)

On the Job (Erik Matti, 2013)

In one scene in Erik Matti’s On the Job, Francis Coronel (Piolo Pascual), an investigator who is close to uncovering an assassination ring within the higher echelons of the Philippine government, confronts Pacheco (Leo Martinez), the retired general-turned-politician ringleader. Coronel, with a swagger reminiscent of those imperfect cops on the verge of a bloody redemption that populate the cinema of John Woo and Johnnie To, readies his handgun, oblivious to the fact that he is clearly outnumbered. There is only one of him, and Pacheco has several armed bodyguards. Pacheco, played by Martinez with the alluring charms of a villainous mastermind, lectures Coronel about learning the ropes of corruption and the timeliness of revenge, effectively talking him out of his fatalist plans, thwarting what could have been an impressive gunfight. Without a single bullet let loose, Pacheco walks away, alive and victorious. Coronel remains the jaded hero, wounded not by gunshots by his acknowledgment that he is absolutely powerless against a force of corruption so blatant that there is no more need for subtlety.

Matti’s far-reaching foray into the unchanging state of Philippine corruption is nestled not in the distant but expository tradition that drew for filmmakers like Brillante Mendoza and Jeffrey Jeturian a certain level of acclaim. Matti intelligently pulls away from Brocka’s social realism, leaving the style and purpose to the many Filipino filmmakers who mix their cinema with some level of journalistic purpose. Matti is clearly an entertainer. On the Job is thoroughly enjoyable, replete with scenes and sequences that are precisely conjured to thrill and excite. Underneath the numerous pleasures it generously serves however is an unflinching observation, aptly pessimistic and bleak, of a society that has become oblivious of the decay that has invaded the lowest of its lows and the highest of its highs.

On the Job tells the stories of several players in an elaborate scheme that enunciates the very rotten core of a government that seems to thrive in crime and intrigue. Coronel, an honest investigator who unknowingly marries into a political family with shady connections, ends up with a murder case file conveniently snatched Joaquin Acosta (Joey Marquez), a low-ranking cop who has been slaving on the case and other similar cases for years, with the help of his influential father-in-law. The perpetrators of the murder, Tatang (Joel Torre) and his overeager trainee Daniel (Gerald Anderson), are prisoners whisked away from their cells every time a target needs to be disposed of. Between Coronel and Tatang are various other personalities, loved ones and protectors, all of whom enlarge the risks and stakes.

The screenplay is written by Matti with Michiko Yamamoto, who penned Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Magnifico (2003) and Aureaus Solito’s Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005), all of which are films whose underlying observations on society’s ills are masked in their endearing depictions of humanity’s goodness. On the Job is similarly situated, carrying characters whose moral troubles are only reflective of their insistence on being humans despite a society that dehumanizes them. Tatang is only led to become an assassin due to that glimmer of hope he sees in his wife (Angel Aquino) and daughter (Empress), a hardworking law student. Daniel has an abruptly terminated romance to revive through the earnings and erstwhile freedom provided by his clandestine profession. Coronel, stuck in the middle of a war between good and evil, is guided by the virtues of a father who died a hero. Acosta diverts his attentions from his failed family to his unrewarded work as a police officer. Matti and Yamamoto’s characters are amply motivated. They never resemble soulless symbols, and are instead living and breathing characters driven by believable principles and aspirations.

Matti’s recent films feel like reactions towards trends in Philippine cinema. When the mainstream has caught up with Japanese-style horror, Matti release Pa-siyam (2004), a stylized ghost story that takes the best of the horror trend and properly situates it within a distinctly Philippine setting without being too obscure. When inane fantasies became popular after the successes of Peter Jackson in filming J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous trilogy, Matti teamed up with a local theme park to mount Exodus: Tales from the Enchanted Kingdom (2005), a flawed but ambitious display of Matti’s ability to create spectacle. The increase of films being made outside Manila resulted in The Arrival (2009), his personal ode to hometowns. Rigodon (2012) is Matti’s more sober and more morally complex reply to the slew of films that unduly glamorized marital infidelity.

On the Job seems to be Matti’s defiant contribution to the on-going debate between the Philippines’ commercial and artistic cinemas. With the film, he marries the merits of the two seemingly opposing camps, infusing his sharp social commentaries within a style and aesthetic that suit more mainstream intentions. Evidently, Matti’s risks have paid off. His tireless crusade in developing a filmmaking culture that equally values content and craftsmanship has finally culminated in a piece of work that douses all the doubts and suspicions hounding both sides of the tired debate. On the Job is not satisfied in what pundits consider a safe and viable middle-ground. It opts to simply just move forward, always consistent to an aesthetic that is both true to the filmmaker and not manufactured simply to please a market.

Quick Change (2013)

Selasa, 13 Agustus 2013

Quick Change (2013)

Quick Change (Eduardo Roy, Jr., 2013)

Dorina (Mimi Juareza) is a retired entertainer who now plies the streets offering her cheap, quick cosmetic fixes to other transgendered men. Lacking any medical experience, she is nonetheless "doc" to her grateful patients, whose faces are sculpted to look like the glittering faces of popular local celebrities. Her patients then don extravagant and colorful costumes, sashaying on makeshift stages, pretending to be beauty queens with their plastered smiles and generic retorts. At night, Dorina satisfies her boyfriend (Junjun Quintana), a performer in a pageant show that caters to foreign tourists. She then starts to satisfy herself discretely lest she incur the wrath of a boyfriend who prefers not to be reminded of her persisting masculinity.

Eduardo Roy, Jr.'s Quick Change is all about facades. It obsessively dissects the culture of transsexual women, their infatuation with youth and beauty. Seemingly aimless in its meanderings in between the redundant struggles of its fading protagonist, the film attempts to sensitively shed light on the ills of a specific repressed subculture, those that have been masked excessively with thick make-up and fake collagen.

Roy's challenge is obviously enormous. He has chosen to tackle subjects that have often been marginalized or exoticized. Roy attempts to dodge the traps, freeing himself from focusing on the usual themes of discrimination which gives him the opportunity to observe his subjects' conflicts in identity, how they struggle in between being male and female, being religious and morally compromised.

Although Roy would sometimes indulges in the humor that has been stereotyped as part and parcel of what makes transsexuals so irresistible to Philippine popular media, he would nevertheless depict them not as oppressed individuals, but as individuals who have found a certain niche that they have become comfortable to live in. Roy mostly succeeds in his endeavors, betrayed only by the need to frame his grand intentions within a narrative that only attempts a certain degree of subtlety to its obvious didactics.

Roy missteps when, midway, he shifts his focus from his transsexual muses to the actual crime of conducting clandestine cosmetic operations. Quick Change deflates into something quasi-noir, propelled mostly by Roy's compelling depictions of the horrors of makeshift cosmetic surgery than by its advocacy or its narrative force. Thankfully, the film is consistently visually fascinating, with Roy and cinematographer Dan Villegas creating morbid and ominous images out of the plain and banal.

Much of the film's perceptive style is reminiscent of Bahay Bata (Baby Factory, 2011), Roy's impressive debut about several mothers overcoming the inhumanity of giving birth in a crowded government-run maternity hospital. As in Bahay Bata, Roy, for the most part, fashions himself as a passive observer of Dorina, following her as she flies from one cheap hotel room to another to conduct her dubious cosmetic operations. He then exposes Dorina's cornered morality, constantly being splintered by both an economic necessity and her community's insistence on being defined in terms of outward appearances more than anything else. 

Avoiding labeling Dorina in terms of good or bad, black or white, Roy conceives a society for Dorina where morality has been rendered obsolete by its impracticality. After all, in a world where consumerism is god and those who are incapable of paying make do with what they have, morality can never pay for food or more prominent cheekbones.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Transit (2013)

Rabu, 07 Agustus 2013

Transit (2013)

Transit (Hannah Espia, 2013)

Hannah Espia’s Transit deals with the struggles of an extended Filipino family living and working in Tel Aviv after the Israeli government passed a law forcing children of overseas workers who are below five years old to be deported back to their homelands.

Joshua (Marc Justine Alvarez), who has lived all his life in Israel, is a few months shy of his fifth birthday. Moises (Ping Medina), Joshua’s father, aware of the risk of his son being deported if caught, keeps Joshua indoors. Janet (Irma Adlawan), Moises’ sister, takes care of Joshua while Moises is out to work as a caretaker for a wealthy retiree. She also has to manage Yael (Jasmine Curtis-Smith), her teenage daughter from an Israeli former flame who now has to grapple with neither being Filipino nor Israeli. Tina (Mercedes Cabral), freshly plucked from the Philippines and assisted by Janet to her new life as an overseas worker, witnesses a family that is in fear of being suddenly uprooted from a foreign land that they have decided to call their home.

Transit is a marvel of restraint and control. Embellished sparingly with visuals that are never too extravagant, too opulent to distract, the film is painted with delicate colors, which complements the fragile situations the characters move in.

Opening with an image of Joshua in an airport, his small frame backdropped against giants of airplanes landing from and departing to all corners of the globe, the film seems to mediate expectations, revealing the modesty of its story against a world of bigger problems. In truth, the story that Espia explores is one that seems too removed, too remote to be of moment. However, what Espia manages to do is tremendous. By dissecting the issues arising from a very specific troubled group, she navigates the blurring of cultural and national identities of individuals who are caught trapped between two countries.

The word diaspora was first used in the Bible to refer to the exile of Jews from their homeland by invading conquerors. Espia’s choice to tackle the Filipino diaspora in the land that first experienced renders some poetic effect, enunciating not the irony of the situation but the repetitions that seem to be the fate of all merging cultures. Transit is told from the various perspectives of its many characters, often repeating certain scenes to reveal facets that can only be depicted if seen through the eyes of the various participants. More than just a display of creative storytelling, the technique that Espia utilizes enunciates the necessity of understanding the contrasting motivations and interests, amplifying the emotional investment that pays off in the film’s subtle but moving conclusion.

The differences between the Filipinos and the country they adopt as their own but barely tolerates them are tremendous. Espia covers the extent of the difference, by chronicling a Philippines that seems to dissipate even more every year. Her scope is immense but she laudably concentrates on very palpable and very specific frustrations, heartaches, and triumphs, emotions that are shared by all of humanity.

Tina carries her homeland inside a worn luggage. She offers trinkets from home, packets of sour soup to remind her hosts of the Philippines they have not visited in decades. Janet and Moises speak both Filipino and Hebrew. They insist on their being Filipinos, forcing that dated idea of nationality to their children. Their children however reject the idea with reason. They do not speak Filipino, and have never been to the Philippines. Their only linkage to their parents’ homeland consists of bedtime stories repeatedly told to soothe their curiosity.

Espia paints a scenario where the characters are all confused, all tired from futilely maintaining illusions from a faraway motherland or struggling between two clashing alliances. Transit is a document of fractured identities, an essay that declares the very familiar concepts of citizenship and nationality as shallow facades that are maintained by laws and enforced by borders.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Babagwa (2013)

Jumat, 02 Agustus 2013

Babagwa (2013)

Babagwa (Jason Paul Laxamana, 2013)

English Title: The Spider's Lair

Jason Paul Laxamana's Babagwa (The Spider's Lair), an exploration of the proliferation of deceit in a rapidly virtualizing world, centers on Greg (Alex Medina), who fronts himself online as Bam Bonifacio (Kiko Matos), an affluent and handsome model whose sexual orientation depends on the gender of the target victim. The ruse is the brainchild of Marney (Joey Paras), who gets a sizable portion of the money earned from the swindle. Like all of his previous victims, Daisy (Alma Concepcion), a wealthy and philanthropic middle-aged woman, easily falls for Greg's dashing alter-ego. However, caught in a web of domestic drama, a shallow and stunted romance with his girlfriend (Chanel Latorre), and a slew of unsatisfying paychecks from his illicit gigs, he suddenly finds himself falling for Daisy.

Babagwa is ingenious. Laxamana creates a believable world where fantasy and reality are immediately interchangeable. Set in Laxamana's native Pampanga, the film enunciates the nagging pains of living indolent lives. His characters are scoundrels, products of their own doing and a society that forces them to scrape the very bottom of barrels to experience a semblance of a decent life. Marney needs to uproot his parents from a house that is being threatened to be demolished by the local government. On the other hand, Greg, Marney's former talent who has allowed himself to fade alongside his dreams of fame and glory, has only his afternoon trysts with his girlfriend to remind him of what he has lost. To his annoyance, his girlfriend seems to be more interested in a vacation he cannot provide than stroking his fragile ego. Presumably, their victims certainly live similarly pathetic lives.

Laxamana conceives the world with Darwinian precepts, a bazaar where love is peddled to the loveless, and thieves and cheaters are abound. Facebook has made the marketplace smaller and has made it even more difficult to detect fact from fiction. It has allowed for the commodification of virtual lives, those products of wants and necessities multiplied exponentially by a specific moment's mood. In one's playful mind, depending on one's gullibility and specific need, a swindler sitting alone in a dark and unkempt room is a sensitive prince lying in an expensive condo unit and in need of part-time passion. Trust is a too expensive luxury if the need is desperate.

Laxamana clearly understands the foolishness of it all. Babagwa is after all still a comedy of errors, one whose humor is reliant on the very foolishness of humanity to fall for the obviously illogic all in the name of love, or lust. He doesn't take his observant musings too seriously, and instead concentrates on balancing the tension with moments of delightful levity. His actors share the same responsibility, peppering their convincing performances with playfulness. Babagwa is refreshingly balanced, its heavy themes never outweighing the need to still entertain.

It is therefore unfortunate that Laxamana chooses to give up the balancing act in favor of a neat resolution. The film's parting shot suggests Greg's comeuppance. The politics itself of such comeuppance seems questionable and misshapen. Moreover, it is a misstep that forces Babagwa to be a mere cautionary tale on the dangers of mixing virtual lives and real longing. For sure, the ending perfectly wraps Laxamana's brilliantly conceived concept, but it only does so for the purpose of completing a narrative, to satisfy the demands of tradition. In the end, Laxamana's sophomore feature feels more like an exquisitely filmed urban legend, an urban legend that has been whispered around by those unfortunate enough to be enthralled by the internet's promises of quick love only to be fooled in the end.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Rekorder (2013)

Rabu, 31 Juli 2013

Rekorder (2013)

Rekorder (Mikhail Red, 2013)

Mikhail Red's Rekorder is the story of Maven (Ronnie Quizon), a tragic drifter who with his old camcorder records movies currently showing in theaters to sell the footage to pirates. The parting image shows Ronnie in the movie theater without his camcorder in hand. For the first time, he isn't asleep while the movie is playing. He is just there, sitting alone and motionless, completely engrossed by the movie he is watching. As it turns out, the movie is not the commercial features he has been recording throughout the years for the enterprising pirates, but security camera footage of a robbery that culminates in violence.

The footage plays a key role in the narrative, explaining how Maven turned into the unsettled character that he is now. Yet, viewed against Red's stubborn indulgence in depicting the overextended role of sensational acts caught on video, the image of Maven sitting in a theater, completely enthralled by a video of real and actual violence instills an observation of a society that has become so indifferent to evil that it appreciates as entertainment the recorded sight of it.

Rekorder seems to be a reiteration of themes already explored by Red's father, Raymond, whose films like Kamera Obskura (2012), Himpapawid (Manila Skies, 2009), and Anino (Shadows, 2000) feature a singular character who awakens to the ills of society. The younger Red does not hide his influences, displaying prominently the senior Red's Manila Skies as the movie Maven attempts to record in the theater. Fortunately, the younger Red, unburdened by memories of a glorious era where film was king, is less hesitant to experiment with the digital medium, exploring the varying textures and impulses of high definition video and other formats.

Maven is in fact a fallen filmmaker who has resorted to illicitly recording these movies to earn a living. He talks languidly, walks passively, and relates to other people with more than just a hint of disconnect. It almost seems that he does not belong in the same time and space as the rest of the world. He finds sanctuary only at night when he is at home, being comforted by grainy videos of his wife and daughter; relics of a foregone happier life. When he becomes an unwilling witness to a crime by following a compulsion to capture a violent rumble with his camcorder, his drab routine is disturbed, forcing him to finally participate in the same society that has betrayed him, the same society that grows noisier whenever a recorded video goes viral for the simple reason of brazen sensationalism.

The proliferation of media into the routine lives of a consistently bored and hungry populace, jolted into a mad rush by rapid advancements of technology the past few years, has quickly changed moral perceptions. What would have caused reactions of shock and disgust decades ago is now commonplace and welcomed with undivided attention. With the public's conscience being consistently pounded by random acts of depravity and violence that are captured and spread by anonymous recorders for various reasons, society has been rendered utterly callous to wrongdoings of whatever extent. Guilt has been rendered obsolete. It has been replaced by pleasure and escapism, by-products of those depraved acts whose sensationalism has turned them into convenient pieces of entertainment.

Maven, in all his exaggerated expressions of self-inflicted alienation, represents the extent of such modern apathy. It is only when the noise has become too close and near for peace and comfort that he acts, breaking down into a frenzy of self-preservation. Rekorder, even with all its fundamental excesses and obvious faults, succeeds in painting an alarming portrait of a man hesitantly living in a world that is much like ours, a world that gladly suffocates on its own filthy crap, perpetuated by our little recording gadgets for all eternity.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Debosyon (2013)

Selasa, 30 Juli 2013

Debosyon (2013)

Debosyon (Alvin Yapan, 2013)

English Title: Devotion

Alvin Yapan’s films have always been influenced by his being both a literature professor and a writer of short stories. They are never empty vessels of creatively plotted stories that are heavily embellished by cinematic techniques and visuals. His films’ charm relies heavily on the fact that the stories are never just stories. They are intelligent observations on gender politics, as in Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (Dance of Two Left Feet, 2011), where a gay love story houses feminist intentions, or in Gayuma (Pilgrim Lovers, 2010), a romance whose two halves articulate love and longing from the perspectives of both genders, and on economic history and Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (The Rapture of Fe, 2009), a supernatural tale where the various inadequacies of the Philippines’ economic growth are represented by various inadequate male characters.

Debosyon (Devotion) is Yapan’s visually sumptuous observation on cultural and religious phenomena. In the film, he frames his explorations within the strangest of romance, one between a young man and a creature of mythology. Mando (Paulo Avelino) is a fervent devotee of the Lady of Penafrancia, a wooden Marian statue that is famed for the miracles it grants to its devotees. While searching the forest for orchids, he chances upon a solitary flower on top of a tree. He falls while attempting to get the flower. He wakes up to Salome (Mara Lopez), a mysterious woman who lives alone inside a hut in the middle of the forest, who nurses him back to health. They fall in love, only to be hindered by Salome’s revelation, one that shakes Mando’s religious devotion to its core.

Yapan tells the story with admirable patience, allowing his story to really take root in the landscape that features very heavily in his elegant visuals. The forest where Mando meets Salome is a character itself. Its trees bleed when axed. Deep in its heart is a pond pristine enough to wash the gravest of doubts. From its hills, one can see the perfect but solitary Mayon volcano, an image of absolute beauty and loneliness amidst plains and farmlands. Yapan understands the topography of Bicol. His narrative makes use of it in a way that it is intertwined with the romance and the mysticism. The beauty of the film is not intended to simply be pleasurable to tired eyes. It is meant to enamour, to give a semblance of the irresistible allure of the land. It is meant to make one fall desperately in love.

From the geography comes the native songs, the lyrics of which speak of loving desperation or pained longing. Mando sings one of the love songs Salome learns from a previous love as an act of courtship. Struggling to learn the song with only a guitar at hand and Salome’s memory for guidance, the song may very well be an expression of devotion, a pleasant tribute from a mortal to a woman whose beauty is venerated. At another point, Mando is warned by roving rebels of the forest witch that eats the souls of the men who are beholden by her charms. He desperately races to find Salome, presumably to see if the rebels’ warnings are true. In the background, another song is heard, lamenting of the hurts one bears for love. Yapan intelligently places the various songs in the vital points of courtship, directing the viewer to understand and digest the familiar lyrics along and melody within very specific contexts ranging from absolute adoration to enduring doubt.

More than just a love story, Debosyon seems to be an ode to Yapan’s native Bicol. It dissects a psyche that has been cultivated by a distinct landscape and the history that has taken place in it. Its mythologies, its songs, its undying devotion to the image of the Penafrancia idol, are to Yapan’s mind, products of a love affair between its people and the mystical land they live in. Religion hardly matters in the film. It is simply not its point, but just a starting to point to uncover a cultural feature. Yapan seems to be more interested in the psyche that resulted in the religiosity that is as intense and involving as romantic passion. Debosyon is profound allegory, a story that puts in a clear perspective a culture of devotion that is more rooted in a people’s pre-colonial conscience than the actual charms of Catholicism.

Yapan ends Debosyon with a summation of both the love story and the allegory. The lovers make passionate love, Mando heavily caressing the serpentine figure of his unlikely partner. People express their love to the Marian image, their little candlelit boats floating along the banks of a serpentine river. Despite the differences, the two images sit comfortably alongside each other. The country’s unique Catholic practices are but reiterations of a cultural devotion that has been shaped by the forests, the mountains, the rivers. “I saw your eyes in the eyes of the Virgin of Penafrancia,” whispers Mando when asked by Salome about his desire that seems defiant of reason and logic. In a few words, Yapan commits the impossible and marries religious fervor with the most primal of human urges.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Jazz in Love (2013)

Minggu, 28 Juli 2013

Jazz in Love (2013)

Jazz in Love (Baby Ruth Villarama, 2013)

A telephone conversation between Ernesto “Jazz” Tigaldao and his German boyfriend Theo Rutkowski opens Baby Ruth Villarama’s Jazz in Love. As excited words are exchanged, Villarama’s camera lingers heavily on Jazz’s face, examining its longing lines and careful contours, forcing familiarity within the few minutes that are spent to introduce us to a same-sex and Facebook-initiated long distance love affair. By the time the two lovers give each other their respective parting kisses over the phone, Jazz has already become a fully-formed character, a hopelessly enamoured romantic who is on his way to Germany to wed his foreign prince and live his happily-ever-after.

It is not as if adorably optimistic Jazz does not deserve his fairy tale ending. He has studied and learned enough German to pass the required language examinations that would hopefully lead to a fiancé visa. He has survived the whispered curiosities and suspicions of his community, one that endures radio talk shows that disparage homosexual unions in the name of religion and morality. He has suffered through his father’s alcohol-induced coldness and frustrations. Despite the countless challenges, Jazz remains perpetually smiling, seemingly oblivious of the gravity of his love’s challenges.

Jazz in Love has all the makings of a perfect love story. Villarama has carefully placed and presented the foundations of her found fairy tale. She has an overly charming lead with a story marked with conflicts and issues that are relevant in a world of constantly shifting norms and migrations. Early on, Jazz’s route to happiness seems already predestined. He simply needs to pass his German examination, wait for Theo’s arrival, and be brought to Germany to live their expected perfect lives. However, as bits and pieces of Jazz’s life are revealed through impressions and anecdotes from his friends and relatives, it becomes apparent that there is something else quietly simmering beneath the infectious smiles and flirtatious retorts.

Theo does arrive. However, Jazz seems to be more in love than his partner, a rather pragmatic fifty-plus year old military staff who admits to surrendering to a life of being single. Their conversations, creatively framed by Villarama and co-cinematographer Dexter dela Pena to maximize available lighting to sentimental effect, are made lively mostly by Jazz’s undeniable attraction to Theo. The sparks though are momentary, replaced almost immediately by doubts and suspicions. In the midst of all their plans to legitimize their union, Jazz’s father is still cold and frustrated, drowning himself with liquor if and when the opportunity passes. His relatives, who are quick to blame their Filipino upbringing for their traditional morality, are more tolerant of the upcoming wedding than actually happy. Moreover, Theo seems to be more pragmatic than in love in entering into the marriage.

Of course, all these are just inferences and conclusions based on the subtle gestures and dialogues as captured and pieced together by Villarama. An entire relationship, despite its cyber beginnings and the haziness of its end, cannot truly be summarized within the scope of a documentary that also takes into consideration the filmmaker’s leanings and biases. Villarama has probably started Jazz in Love as something sweeter, something that will showcase love beyond borders, languages, and outdated prejudices. The limitations of documenting simply what unreliable fate chooses to do with Jazz’s life within a very short span has given her footage that showcases exactly the opposite, that despite the numerous pleasures that love can give, it forces us to be both blind and numb to its faults and deficiencies. Villarama, sensitive but unflinching in her presentation of the realities she has uncovered, gives impassioned Jazz both the respect and adoration to grant him that sheen of fantasy to his objectively imperfect romance.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Tuhog (2013)

Kamis, 18 Juli 2013

Tuhog (2013)

Tuhog (Veronica Velasco, 2013)

English Translation: Skewered

Veronica Velasco has always found humor in the cruelty of fate. Her films have always been grounded on premises where an act of fate results in absurd and sometimes torturous scenarios that test the limits of humanity.

In I Do (2010), the dream wedding of two teens is constantly delayed by occurrences beyond their control, pitting their youthful love against youthful impatience. In Last Supper No. 3 (2009), a props-man turns into the butt of an overextended joke when he misplaces a wall décor he borrowed from an opportunistic family for an ad campaign, forcing him to experience the frustrating inanities of the Philippine judicial system. In Maling Akala (2007), which Velasco co-directed with Pablo Biglangawa, a chance meeting between two strangers results in a set-up that would hint of a budding romance that turns out to be nothing but an erroneous assumption. Velsaco and Biglangawa’s first feature, Inang Yaya (Mother Nanny, 2006), an emergency forces a nanny to choose between being a mother to her estranged daughter and a nanny to her ward.

Tuhog is spawned from that same obsession with fate’s cruelty. This time, the cruelty approaches the macabre, with three random strangers getting impaled by a steel pole when their passenger bus figures in a freak accident. The absurd situation the three find themselves in is that they are now faced with an even crueller responsibility of choosing who among them would have to perish to save the lives of the other two. The rationale for the need to choose is borne out of writer’s conceit: there are only two operating rooms in the hospital, leaving the unlucky unattended victim to simply bleed and suffer to death.

Velasco and co-writer Laurel quickly abandon the morbid image of skewered strangers in an ill-equipped emergency room to explore the three lives that through a twist of fate have become the subjects of a debate of life’s worth. Tonio (Leo Martinez) is a recent retiree who now finds himself either arguing endlessly with his adult children or reminiscing youth with his best friends over games of cards. His only hope from what seems to be a deadened existence is his sudden dream to put up a bakery. Fiesta (Eugene Domingo) is the toughened conductor of a passenger bus. Her hardened front, a result of having live with her alcoholic and suicidal father, is softened when Nato (Jake Cuenca), her replacement driver who has just recovered from a recent break-up, expresses his love for her. Caloy (Enchong Dee), a student who is far too concerned with his hormones to take his studies seriously, is in a long distance relationship his girlfriend. Having contented himself with the passing pleasures of daydreaming and online flirting in an effort to preserve his virginity for their upcoming anniversary, he now has to face the possibility that his girlfriend has already been sleeping around behind his back.

Beyond the mostly clever writing that rarely feels false or forced, there is also something humorously brutal in the way Velasco and Laurel fashion the three stories with linings of hope and forgiveness only to have them be abruptly suspended with the impalement. There is always that threat that death or some sort of sudden conclusion is just looming around, waiting to foil a life plan, to block a resolution, or to douse a passion.

Unfortunately and perhaps because there are limitations as to what is tolerable in commercial filmmaking, Tuhog never really embraces the darkness that could have complemented its gruesome center-piece. There is very little interaction among the suddenly conjoined victims, considering that their dilemma is one that would naturally excite the demons of self-preservation. Instead, it settles for obvious life lessons, as bluntly mouthed in the film's hurried end by its unnecessary mascot, a destitute drummer boy who every now and then appears in the film to vengefully predict death.

Still, Tuhog is something to behold within the context of a mainstream cinema that shuns experimentation and adventurism. Through convictions and compromises, Velasco and Laurel have come up with a film that successfully bridges the gap between smart and sentimental, eccentric and emotional, quirky and conventional.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Four Sisters and a Wedding (2013)

Rabu, 17 Juli 2013

Four Sisters and a Wedding (2013)

Four Sisters and a Wedding (Cathy Garcia-Molina, 2013)

Predictably, Four Sisters and a Wedding is plagued with all the deficiencies and excesses of a movie that caters to the masses. It suffers from an identity crisis, but that identity crisis is its biggest selling point especially in a country where being all-in-one is a virtue and a movie that offers tears, laughs, and lessons is a prized commodity. Four Sisters and a Wedding is adamantly a comedy, one that uses in unbridled exaggerations and popular wit to earn chuckles. Along the way, it suddenly transforms itself into a drama, with each of the movie’s multiple characters getting their fair share of profusely teary expositions. At the end of the movie, everything is wrapped up almost too neatly and easily with just mouthfuls of motherhood statements that render all issues and conflicts resolved.

Also predictably, it is that trait of Four Sisters and a Wedding that would be targeted by detractors. The movie’s insistence to remain within the borders of a cinema that is stubbornly safe for the purpose of commercialism is considered its downfall. Because it aspires to appeal to the majority, its story clunks with unnecessary heft and it confuses with its inconsistent mood and temperament. However, to simply dismiss the movie for its intention to comfortably exist in a market that knows fully well what it wants is short-sighted.

The Salazar sisters (Toni Gonzaga, Bea Alonzo, Angel Locsin and Shaina Magdayao) have been living their lives, connected only by occasional phone calls, until the sudden upcoming wedding of their youngest brother (Enchong Dee) forces them to reunite and join forces for what they think is the good of their family. As it turns out, the Bayags, the family which the youngest Salazar is marrying into, are as tactless as they are wealthy, convincing the sisters to plan together to dissuade their beloved brother from continuing the wedding. From a story by Jose Javier Reyes, whose works are almost always inspired by his sharp commentaries on Filipino middle class faults and aspirations, the screenplay written by Vanessa Valdez manages to simplify and meld various Filipino experiences into a package that is amiable enough.

For what it’s worth, within what may be considered a genre of Philippine escapist cinema that is mostly produced by mainstream studios, Four Sisters and a Wedding is actually quite remarkable. Its indulgent comedy parts are mostly hilarious, its extensively dramatic climax, moving. Director Cathy Garcia-Molina fulfills the requirements of commercial movie-making, balancing the vulgarity and tactlessness that draws laughter and tears with some semblance of predictability with some elegance and restraint, as may become necessary.

It is the movie’s disarming earnestness that is truly admirable. At one point, the sisters suddenly tearfully expose their failures and insecurities, probably in defense of their mostly despicable demeanor throughout the movie. Garcia-Molina forgets all notion of subtlety, allowing her actresses, all of whom are brilliant, to emotionally verbalize regrets and apprehensions that most of us would never dare expose. There are simply no pretensions of depth or insight as it specifically targets the heart, coursing its way to it through its familiar tale whose threads and strands seem to be plucked straight from the sometimes joyful and sometimes painful eccentricities of being Filipino.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Before Midnight (2013)

Jumat, 12 Juli 2013

Before Midnight (2013)

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 2013)

“Still there, still there, still there,” Celine announces while waiting for the sun to disappear behind the mountains. Jesse, her boyfriend for several years after their serendipitous reunion in Paris, is intimately sitting beside her, also waiting for the sun to disappear. Celine speaks the phrases like a prayer. It is as if the phrases were not observations of the sun’s setting, but a fervent wish that something else is still there and has not been lost to the cynicism that familiarity breeds.

In 1995, Richard Linklater conjured a romantic fantasy by having American backpacker Jesse take a stab at spontaneous love by inviting French tourist Celine to an impromptu excursion in Vienna that has to end before sunrise. The night was magical. There were no ridiculous plot devices or grandiose musical themes, just those once-in-a-lifetime conversations about random facets of life as observed through different eyes that glued them together, at least for those few special hours. They ended their love affair with a promise.

In 2004, Linklater visited the couple separated by geography and broken promises. Jesse has just released his book based on the events that took place that fateful night in 1995, and is now in Paris to sign copies. Celine’s in town as well. Their reunion doesn’t have the exhilarating spontaneity of their initial encounter in the train, but the reminiscence of what has happened and what could have happened is too alluring to ignore. They end up in Celine’s humble hovel, listening to music, surrendering to the fairy tale that was a decade in the making.

Less than a decade after, Jesse, as unkempt as he is ancient, finds himself in a Greek airport, saying his farewell to another what-could-have-been. After hopelessly waiting for perhaps a reassuring hand gesture or eye contact from his son, he leaves the building. Romantic music deceptively plays in the background. Celine, also visibly older, is waiting outside the car. Inside, twins, we presume to be the fruits of the decision they made several years back, are sleeping. Linklater is back at his game. The ride from the airport back to their Grecian home is a treasure trove of banter and insight, of clues as to what has happened within the nine years we left the couple to plot their love story.

However, things are different now. In 1995 and 2004, Jesse and Celine are strangers, excitedly learning about each other. They scrape their lives for whatever secret story or piece of trivia they have left. Bubbling underneath an exterior of flirtatious jokes and other pleasantries are regrets and other things a life already half spent unceremoniously offers. For the first time, Linklater invites us to witness the couple interacting with others --- young lovers discovering the exhilaration of romance in a quickly virtualizing world, a working-class couple who has learned to love the idea of settling for each other’s pleasures and displeasures, and two elderly intellectuals whose varying perceptions on relationships provide both comfort and pain. In the midst of their conversations, Jesse and Celine’s romance loses their uniqueness. It is as if Linklater is preparing the film-viewing world he has molded into believing a fantasy of happily-ever-afters that exists in a cynical world to swallow the pains of seeing the perfect love be rendered imperfect.

The sun disappears. Jesse and Celine end up trapped in a boutique hotel room that forces them to confront each other, without the safety of their twins, their hosts, and the time and distance that used to separate them. The fissures of their discontent were all subtly depicted within that single day. Celine throws a knowing look at Jesse over lunch when certain sensitive topics are touched. Jesse retreats to his accented amorous and humorous declarations of sexual longing when cornered by Celine’s relentless questions. Their expected fight, which is as impassioned as the sweeping promises they used to tell each other, is the heart-breaking evidence that the beloved love story has opened itself to the biting cynicism of our current world.

Linklater has grown up. Jesse and Celine too. The way they see the world has been molded by age and regret. In a country made famous by its ruined edifices that constantly remind the greatness of its past as opposed to the uncertainty of its future, Jesse and Celine are in the brink of seeing their great love be reduced into a piece of history. Great wars of nations have been waged for principles and religion. Jesse and Celine’s war, however, is one that is waged by differences of personalities, of sex, of culture, of everything that was the subject of their laugh-filled debate over a sumptuous Grecian feast. The inevitable truth that is too bitter to swallow is that the heartbreak of seeing the romance fall apart reverberates greater than the sweet promises and expectations that got us drawn to them in the first place.

Jesse makes a last-ditch effort to save everything. In that same seaside café where Celine repeatedly said “still there, still there, still there,” she finds the heart to find truth in the mantra despite the fact that the sun is nowhere to be found. Jesse’s attempt to revive the romance, despite the adorable but passing creativity, is obviously patchwork. There are issues unresolved. From those issues, more fights, probably more vicious than the last one, will be fought. They are now engulfed by reality, just as we all are, with our mercurial moods and relationships. By being brought down to Earth, their love story has taken one big step towards immortality.

Dance of the Steelbars (2013)

Jumat, 28 Juni 2013

Dance of the Steelbars (2013)

Dance of the Steelbars (Cesar Apolinario & Marnie Manicad, 2013)

After a rap-fuelled montage of various shots of Cebu City’s bustling streetscapes, the gravelly voice of Patrick Bergin introduces the provincial jail of Cebu as some sort of hell on Earth. The images that accompany Bergin’s lengthy opener seem to support his assessment. Prostitution is rampant. Gambling is commonplace. Bergin rambles on about the rampant corruption inside the prison, and how the warden, a brute of a man who lords over his kingdom of thieves and murderers, has kept the place in a persistent state of desperation. However, death is also a commodity, and power is a prize worth paying for. A riot takes place. The warden is found dead. The perps, the assistant warden and his lackey, have begun preparations for their own take-over. Bergin’s testimonial seems to be accurate.

Cesar Apolinario and Marnie Manicad’s Dance of the Steelbars opens with some sort of promise. The directors, without wasting any time, drape their film with a semblance of grit and anger, the stuff that usually fuel the most ordinary of prison stories to greatness. Unfortunately, that initial promise seems to be the only near-great thing in the film, and the greater the promise, the more resounding the fall. The film falters Right after Bergin’s stirring description of his Cebu prison. The corrupt warden is replaced by a kind one, who initiates various reforms, the most pertinent of which is a morning dance exercise. The initial grit dissipates. The anger is mostly censored. What remains are just seeds of awful melodrama, seeds that Apolinario and Manicad fervently cultivate into what essentially is a hit-or-miss affair that confuses advocacy for advertisement.

So Bergin plays Frank Parish, an American who gets erroneously imprisoned for the death of someone he was just trying to help. Frank’s prison pals include Allona (Joey Paras), a gay man who pins his hope on his British penpal who thinks he’s a girl, and Mando (Dingdong Dantes), a dance instructor who is imprisoned for killing a gay man who attempted to seduce him. Apolinario and Manicad spend most of the film woefully exploring their various dilemmas, from Frank’s vapid apprehension to help other people to Mando’s shallow father issues.

As in all lazily-written sagas, a deus ex machina appears to save the day. Here, the deus ex machina is a politician, who unceremoniously grabs the limelight from the real heroes of the film. This is perhaps the film’s biggest sin. In the guise of advocacy, it maneuvers its focus from the inspirational inmates to needy attention-whores, making it seem like their success is more a product of bureaucratic intervention than the prisoners’ own will to reform. Instead of depicting actual efforts of the inmates to change and break common conventions, Apolinario and Manicad decide to manufacture melodramas that are nowhere near as inspirational as a pixelated video of a thousand hopeful orange-suited felons grooving to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Thankfully, Apolinario and Manicad decide to end the film with a choreographed number by the Cebu prisoners. Although inconsistently shot, the finale at least reminded the film’s viewers as to why it exists, not because of the manicured faces of moneyed politicos and the big-named celebrities, or the American man who strangely becomes the viewers’ eyes and ears to what essentially is a Filipino experience, but because of the prisoners who took that one step away from the world’s expectations and as a result did wonders. Sadly, even in that final number, the dance would still give way to awkward close-ups of faces the film never needed, enunciating either Apolinario and Manicad’s fatal confusion or their compromised ambition.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Man of Steel (2013)

Kamis, 13 Juni 2013

Man of Steel (2013)

Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013)

The planet Krypton is about to implode because of its inhabitants’ unscrupulous abuse of its core’s energy. Pillars of flame erupt from the alien world’s surface, obliterating whatever weirdly-shaped structures. It is such delirious wanton, but in the hands of Zack Snyder, who made violence so randomly elegant and extravagant in 300 and impending doom so impatient in the remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the destruction of the world is enthusiastically operatic. It is just so spectacular that a Kryptonian woman, the widow of a recently deceased scientist and mother of a soon-to-be superhero, turns her back on the audience, presumably taking her place as one, absorbing the visual wonder that is her world’s destruction before she is engulfed by a sea of flame.

In Man of Steel, Snyder exploits carnage for spectacle. In the many sequences wherein towns and cities are destroyed, Snyder stages the destruction in a way that humanity, normally driven to safety by its survivalist tendencies, stay behind to indulge in the terror. Buildings fall apart, and workers hypnotically gaze from their offices. A tornado wreaks havoc in an entangled highway forcing vehicles to spiral up in the air, and the survivors stare in dazed horror. This philosophy is so conveniently attuned to the needs of Hollywood, especially with its maniacal obsession during summer to entertain through its many depictions of various scales of destruction, that Snyder’s stylized obliteration of almost everything seems commonplace, even redundant.

However, there is something uncanny about Snyder’s visual savagery. From the perspective of a Superman story that is so rooted in the heartland of America, the near-endless string of edifices and structures bowing down to invasion bears an immense sense of dread. That everything that happens between the film’s fiery bookends is so devoid of joy that every attempt to crack a joke dissipates and is ultimately forgotten is just the kind of adroit seriousness a superhero movie needs to give its many scenes of purposeful havoc some semblance of weight.

The quieter moments of Man of Steel, the ones shown in the film’s many lengthy flashbacks, proposes a heart that is unlike any of its ilk. Where recent incarnations of superheroes insist on backstories that rely on drama, like a violent death in the family or an aberration, Man of Steel has a young Clark Kent living a very palpable American existence, aside of course the frequent displays of superhuman strength. Raised by Kansas farmers, presumably Christian in the same way most rural Americans are, he is molded to possess a simpleminded morality that will serve as foundations of his decisions as an adult superhero.

Similarly, his motivations are fashioned by the same prejudices and fears that consume the heartland. Its mostly white, mostly Christian demographic, induces its residents to be less tolerant of strangers, of anybody who might disrupt the comforts of tradition. His father's guiding words, the ones that urged him to live in anonymity for fear of being persecuted, acknowledge the very nature of middle America, one that is fearful of its capacity for intolerance. Of course, the film’s more apparent and conventional storyline, of General Zod and his dreams of populating Earth with Kryptonians and committing genocide while at it, reflects in a louder and more confrontational manner those themes on morality and tolerance.

In a way, Snyder’s Superman seems to represent the America none of these recent superhero movies even dare to represent. He personifies the traits and weaknesses of the common American, the ones oblivious to the wealth only a certain percentile of the population possesses, the ones whose ambitions are limited to the corners of their birth town. Even this Superman’s quiet charm, his inability to verbalize his actions, his reliance on memory, even that extended discomfort with his love interest, mirrors the modesty associated with America’s heartland. In the midst of all the responsibility that is suddenly placed upon his shoulder and the succeeding threat to the world, there is just an undeniable charisma in his popular struggle.

Juana C. the Movie (2013)

Kamis, 06 Juni 2013

Juana C. the Movie (2013)

Juana C. the Movie (Jade Castro, 2013)

An actress mainly for theater for several years, Mae Paner landed her greatest role when she, along with a ragtag team of advocate artists including esteemed playwright Rody Vera and other theater performers, uploaded a video on YouTube in 2008. The video features Juana Change, a full-bodied woman played with such infectious rabidity by Paner, playfully lampooning issues hounding Philippine society then.

Paner has the look of the great Filipino comediennes of old, the Zoraida Sanchezes and the Nanette Inventors, who proudly parade their unusual beauty and trademark heft, to turn themselves into actual jokes instead of just deliverers of jokes. Paner understands the value of attention she gets. She mesmerizes with the curves she utilizes mostly for laughs, but earns much respect with such timely wit that makes her inevitable didactics palatable. After several years and several more online videos that garnered for Juana Change several more thousand hits, Paner, like one of those superheroes whose real names have become irrelevant because of their larger-than-life alter-egos, would be more known by the public as the fictional crusader she has created.

Juana C. the Movie does not stray far from its roots, which is good. There are no deep stories here, no exquisitely crafted characters, no grandiose ambitions to be anything other than a straightforward satire. The film’s storyline is reminiscent of the thinly-plotted titillating films from the 90’s where the formulaic plot of barrio innocents being spirited away to the city to become overworked prostitutes served as mere frames for gargantuan breasts to be exposed for the pleasure of the repressed audience and the profit of enterprising producers.

This time, Juana is the provincial lass who finds herself beholden to the allure of the city only to be left in debt. She is then forced her to sell her body. As a prostitute that caters to very specific needs, she is later on exposed to judges, senators, governors, generals and other personalities that hold sensitive positions or roles in government. Unlike its more exploitative and commercial ilk, the storyline is mostly milked for jokes, which range from the corny and crass to inventive and inspired.

Directed by Jade Castro, who directed Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington (Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings, 2011) with a similar stance regarding the utility of what seems to be lowbrow humor to subvert and convert, Juana C. the Movie works best as a caricature of Philippine society. By enunciating and exaggerating immense national issues to the point of ridicule, the film brings the discourse to a level that is readily understandable to the common man. In the real world, mining generates employment in exchange for the pollution. In the film’s world, mining grants wealth to the already wealthy and turns a river into an acid trap. There are no grey areas here, no draining intellectualizations, no lengthy rationalizations, just crystal clear delineations between what is right and what is wrong.

In the end, the film properly addresses sticky national issues within the perspective of a universally-accepted concept of morality, which is immensely good for starters. The film does conclude with a caveat that its happy ending is short-lived. There is more to be done once the caricature’s over and reality overtakes the chuckles.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)