Gayuma (2010)

Minggu, 24 Juli 2011

Gayuma (2010)

Gayuma (Alvin Yapan, 2010)

English Title: Pilgrim Lovers

Gayuma (Pilgrim Lovers) is a film borne out of love and sheer dedication. Armed with a budget that is minuscule even if pitted against other independent productions, director Alvin Yapan and producer Alemberg Ang ventured on to mount a film based on one of Yapan’s oldest stories, a concept developed and evolved from an exercise among literary comrades in college who dared each other to come up with a story that ends with the sentence “I love you.” The result is evidently imperfect. However, despite its obvious imperfections, the film perseveres with the strength of its story, making it a testament to Yapan’s boundless imagination.

In a parochial Bicol town, a statue of the Sto Niño suddenly started talking and dancing, prompting the town’s parish priest to visit to investigate and to exorcise from the statue whatever spirit that is haunting it. With him is Delfin (Kalil Almonte), his sacristan and assistant, who is advised by the verbose Sto Niño statue to concoct a love potion so that he can easily woo Carla (Mercedes Cabral), a rich girl who is already in love with another man, into leaving her man for him.

The film is divided into two parts. The first half focuses on Delfin who is enveloped by his longing for unreachable Carla and therefore takes the Sto Niño statue’s advice to easily win the affections of the girl. The second half focuses on Carla. Carla, under the spell of Delfin’s love potion, carries Delfin, who mysteriously fell in a coma, through fields, mountains and forests, to a pond that will cure Delfin of his affliction. The two parts are differentiated by mood and feel. With steady visuals, the first half establishes the traditionally masculine conviction and determination of Delfin in his pursuit for Carla’s undivided attention. The second half, characterized by markedly jerky camera movements, visualizes Carla’s stereotypically feminine confusion and uncertainty as she carries Delfin, inspired either by the sure effects of the love potion or true love.

Gayuma is ridden with details that pertain to certain agendas Yapan may or may not be that successful in fleshing out, like a certain extended scene with the gay beautician who fancies Delfin and an extraneous scene with certain rebels who rescue Carla from rapists in the forest (Yapan’s commentaries as to how homosexuals and communist rebels, respectively, are being used in Philippine cinema). It also suffers from lacking polish that could have added a little bit more of dread in the earlier part or dreaminess in the middle part or danger in the latter part.

However, despite the immense gap between what Yapan wanted to say and his budgetary limitations, the film still manages to communicate the harsh complexities of love and loving within a story that is simple yet brimming with color and flourish. There is poignancy in Delfin’s succumbing to ease of romance, and wickedness in Carla’s torturous trek towards the healing pond to rescue the man he may or may not actually love. There are no blacks or whites, just damning greys in Yapan’s peculiar love story. That “I love you” that was whispered in the film’s final second trumps all the “I love you’s” carelessly and emptily spoken, shouted, and written in other films I’ve seen before.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

Sabtu, 28 Mei 2011

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)

It is almost as if the paintings were waiting for the film to get made. The Chauvet Cave in Southern France suffered a cave-in several thousands of years ago, blocking its entrance and effectively preserving the paintings and everything else inside from deterioration caused by the elements and the natural course of time. For several decades since its discovery, the paintings have only been enjoyed through photographs and replicas, considering that entry to the cave have been limited to a few individuals. That is until Werner Herzog and his crew of three were granted unprecedented entry to film the interior of the cave. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that result of the unlikely marriage of fate and genius.

Instead of merely treating the paintings as isolated works of art, Herzog posits that the paintings are prehistoric prototypes of cinema, explaining that the position of the paintings, the way they were painted, where they were painted, the possible sources of light in the cave allude to an illusion of movement and to a possible fantasy. Herzog’s hypothesis immediately removes the cave paintings from a position of trite curiosity into something more immediate and relevant. The paintings have turned into products of our conspirators in dreaming. They are evidence of something intrinsically shared with the prehistoric men. Herzog turns these anonymous people from the distant past into relatable characters with hearts and souls that are kindred to ours.

Herzog does not completely settle inside the cave. Instead, he frequently flies away, curiously focusing on the people around the film: their dreams, their inadequacies, quirks and past lives. Although separated by differing priorities and millenniums, there’s a connection that’s established between the subject of the film and his erstwhile subjects, and hopefully, the audience. In one scene, Herzog forces this connection, staging an ominous silence inside the cave, keeping his guides, his crew, and himself in a prayerful stance listening to a supposed communal heartbeat. Ernst Reijseger’s powerful score not so much swells but creeps into the middle of that shared contemplation, turning Herzog’s orchestrated meditation with that filament of humanity he strives to define into some sort of graceful sequence which it is ostensibly not.

The most beautiful thing that Herzog committed to in Cave of Forgotten Dreams is to expand it into something quite larger than it should be. The use of 3D for example is not for mere spectacle. Instead, it is a necessary tool to create that illusion of being inside the cave, of witnessing the actual contours of the cave walls instead of seeing a flat representation of those contours, of experiencing the movement of the painted animals instead of only imagining motion. Considering that the cave paintings and the cinema they aspire to be are all tools that utilize illusions to function as tools to approximate reality, 3D serves as a companion piece to this illusion-building by requiring the approximation of space and depth as essential to not only experience the wonders of the cave but also to understand Herzog’s claims.

That Herzog does not rely solely on hard facts and historical accuracy is what makes Cave of Forgotten Dreams so immeasurably fascinating. After all, what we see in the cave paintings are only minute facets of the immense world that the prehistoric man could have lived in and exploited. We can only watch in awe, dream connections and relations. Yet, we can never be exactly sure. We can only speak and feel from the very little that we know and the very vast that we can imagine. The documentary, as most documentaries do, places us in a comfortable position of looking at and into the subject. Thus, when the film moves into its postscript, with Herzog suddenly placing the audience as the subject for possible interpretation and interpolation of albino alligators that came from the probable future, the tables are turned, and the effect is nothing short of sublime.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Kano: An American and His Harem (2010)

Minggu, 17 April 2011

Kano: An American and His Harem (2010)

Kano: An American and His Harem (Monster Jimenez, 2010)

The easiest thing to do is to inform. What Monster Jimenez does in Kano: An American and His Harem may be the hardest thing to accomplish. She first informs, of the life of Victor Pearson, an American war veteran who relocates to the Philippines and establishes a household that is composed of him and several wives and paramours, of the criminal suit for rape, of his eventual image as sexual deviant and monster. Jimenez then opens a window for Pearson, who has been adjudged by all who knew him solely as a character in the newspaper headlines as an indefatigable pervert, to prove his humanity, and opens a bigger window for Pearson to display his undeniable charms and wit.

Pearson looks like a thoroughly unkempt Harvey Keitel and talks like a reflective but drunken Edward G. Robinson. He is an inevitable screen personality. His backstory, with the possible barrage of psychological torture from a hinted torturous childhood and Vietnam War experiences, could have been a Kubrick thriller. His present story, as embattled villain in a legal battle against all odds, could have been a clever Lumet court drama.

His harem, on the other hand, is composed of an eclectic mix of looks and ages. Probably the only uniting factor for the women is poverty, which leads supposedly to their attachment and dependence on Pearson’s sizable veteran’s pension. However, to simply regard their intertwined relationships as primarily economic is to disregard the complexity of human nature. Jimenez explores not only the cycle of financial dependency but also the continuously evolving emotions, no matter how misplaced, mutated and immoral they seem to be. She treats the relationships between Pearson and his women and among the women with light-hearted sensitivity, with a careful but delicious mix of humor and seriousness.

Kano: An American and His Harem is ostensibly about the most curious of domestic arrangements, where one man plays benefactor, lover, victimizer, and a whole lot of other roles to the women who are voluntarily or involuntarily under his wing. Yet, the documentary also pushes perception despite the norms and moral boundaries that have set in place how we normally perceive what is human and what is not. Pearson, through Jimenez’s peerless and very involved investigation, has become the perfect example of the most misunderstood man, considering that his much-publicized and now legendary devious acts are too glaring to gloss over. And despite the initial disgust, the momentary fascination, and the lingering intrigue with Pearson, he becomes familiar, perhaps overly familiar to the point of discomfort.

Yet, Jimenez does not flinch. In fact, she confronts Pearson with only some apprehension, maybe some suspicion too, but never with disdain or an already made-up objective as to how the documentary will move. Instead, the documentary takes a life of its own, rollercoasting on emotions ranging from anger to amusement, and frustration to delight. It moves seemingly without direction because the director itself is moved by her subject, gravitating only to the business of exhibiting Pearson’s life and dilemma. As willing companions of Jimenez in her creatively crafted and deliciously enjoyable attempt to simplify the complexities of Pearson and his women’s unique situation, it is best to enter Kano: An American and His Harem with an open mind, totally unresisting of the probable charms of Pearson and his bountiful love.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Day is Done (2010)

Minggu, 13 Februari 2011

Day is Done (2010)

A View from a Room

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

A plane passes through a passive sky that serves as background to an industrial chimney bellowing smoke that simmers in with clouds. The scene repeats four to five times, before an undrastic change in tempo, a hint of music, and then, an abrupt cut. The montage, impertinent in the way that it breaks traditional conventions in cinema by adamantly refusing to move forward, emphasises the film’s overt minimalism.

Thomas Imbach’s Day is Done, shot mostly from his Zurich apartment, forcibly transports its audience within a place of restricted span and scope, limiting its visuals to the sometimes banal but mostly hypnotic images that are ironically conjured from the filmmaker’s singular point of view. It is convenient to describe the film as simply a collage of everyday sights from the sleepy part of the filmmaker’s hometown. However, it seems that the film persists as a subtle, arguably to the point of frustrating, account of time and change.

The film partakes of a similar approach to Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), without of course the celebrity of the famous New York City landmark, by inviting the viewer to gaze more than to watch in order to comprehend the minute details that signal the passage of time and the movement of change.

The film’s soundtrack, composed mainly of recorded messages from Imbach’s answering machine collected through time and various songs that accompany the images by either wit or circumstance, provides an inward view of the apartment as opposed to the outward view provided by the imagery. Almost like an autobiography, the soundtrack facilitates the images by detailing the stories that happen in Imbach’s life – like the birth of his son, him growing up, the blossoming of his career, the deterioration of his relationship with his son’s mother. Not unlike his Zurich neighbourhood, Imbach’s life takes the form of a document of time and change while in a seeming standstill.

Day is Done is hardly the type of film that rewards its viewers instantly. Like the planes that breeze through that distinct Zurich sky, the film is an object of mysterious charm whose pleasures are derived from the deliberate discovery of the profound from what is ostensibly a visual and aural barrage of the mundane.

(First published here. Read more in the Berlinale Talent Press website)

Senior Year (2010)

Sabtu, 29 Januari 2011

Senior Year (2010)

Senior Year (Jerrold Tarog, 2010)

While Confessional (2007) and Mangatyanan (The Blood Trail, 2009) are all very well made films, introducing director Jerrold Tarog as a very able and promising filmmaker, Carpool (2006), a short film that is mostly set inside a car where friends are rambling about a recent break-up, indicated Tarog’s ability to capture youth’s virtues and vices, from its loose sense of camaraderie to its abject frivolities. Senior Year, although it is the supposed sequel to Faculty (2010), a short film that featured a debate regarding social activism in schools, shares more of its moods and devices with Carpool than any of Tarog’s previous works. The film, drowning its melancholic overview of adulthood with charm and gratifying levity, is simply irresistibly delightful.

The film is very modest in scope. Mostly limiting itself with the few months in the final year in high school of several students of a private school, the film feels like it is circling on dangerously familiar grounds, risking redundancy for the sake of convenient storytelling. However, the film, without burdening itself with pretenses of pertinence or relevance, communicates the universal truth of what really happens decades after the highs of high school, when the lows of the real world has consumed the optimism that youth can only fuel for so long.

The film starts with a man, bespectacled and in an obvious state of nervousness, sitting inside his car which is parked outside a high school where a homecoming of its alumni is about to happen. Self-deprecating quips, defensive remarks, and rationalizing witticisms prevent him from stepping out of his car, registering his name, and enjoying the homecoming. The man, several years ago, is the expected valedictorian, beaming with promise, which has not gone unnoticed by his teachers, one of whom instructs him to prepare a valedictory speech that would both inspire and incite social concern among his peers.

While it is happiness, depicted through moments of lighthearted banter and expressions of youthful love, that makes reminiscence pleasurable, it is disappointment and pleasurable that marks the past with utility to endure the banality of what lies ahead. Tarog thankfully details the high school experience with equal amounts of joy and pain. All of the film’s characters are carved from stereotype. Tarog seems to acknowledge this, but instead of relying on the narrative crutches that working with a bevy of stereotypes provides, he concocts stories that are hardly complicated but fluently communicates the simple pleasures and hardships of that stage in life.

Senior Year is most enjoyable when the stories of the characters intertwine and erupt into a chorus of emotions that seem so distant now that we’ve preoccupied ourselves with more pertinent matters. Tarog, much more than delighting by reveling in the affairs of the youth, processes such delights to elicit a more spirited sense of nostalgia, one that is not only concerned with the past but as to how the past relates to the present. While the film is brimming with poignant moments, it is the unseen but certainly felt sense of regret that the alumni express, through casual jokes and remarks, while reminiscing that carries the film from being just another high school flick into a heartfelt portrait of our inevitable ordinariness in the midst of a world that is far bigger than any high school campus.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Shake Rattle and Roll 12 (2010)

Kamis, 20 Januari 2011

Shake Rattle and Roll 12 (2010)

Shake Rattle and Roll 12 (Zoren Legaspi, Topel Lee & Jerrold Tarog, 2010)

Something has to be said about how Regal Films treats its films. Shot digitally, the films are haphazardly transferred to film to be projected in theaters. As seen in theaters, the films look absolutely abominable, with its already muted colors bleeding into each other and digital artifacts scattered throughout the unsatisfactory images. In other words, far from the usual gloss that has been part and parcel of mainstream filmmaking, all the recent films of the historic film studio, in its attempt to churn out movies within a budget by utilizing digital filmmaking, are horrid manifestations of the ills of technology in the service of filmmaking for convenience and profit rather than artistry and integrity.

Shake Rattle and Roll 12 exemplifies this blatant bastardization of film that seemed to have ripened into practice for Regal. The fact that it is the twelfth in the series of three-part horror/horror-comedy anthologies that started in 1984 is enough proof that these films exist as cash-cows and that any artistic merit that can be derived from them are mere byproducts of their commercial goals. The series has never been a bastion of originality. However, either by sheer luck or actual inspiration, several episodes like Ishmael Bernal’s Fridyider (1984), Richard Somes’ Ang Lihim ng San Joaquin (2005), and Topel Lee’s Yaya (2006) have surpassed their borrowed beginnings and can be regarded as contemporary classics in Filipino horror filmmaking. That said, the fact that included in the series’ twelfth installment is an episode that justifies the series’ continuing existence despite the strong evidence that the series is nearing creative depletion makes the aforementioned lack of respect by Regal for its filmmakers and their films more painful.

Shake Rattle and Roll 12’s first two episodes, Mamanyika (Mama Doll), directed by Zoren Legaspi, about a murderous doll that purports to be the mother of a little kid who lost her mother, and Topel Lee’s Isla Engkanto (Enchanted Island), directed by Topel Lee, about a group of friends who become victims of engkantos in an island, are slightly entertaining but hardly memorable additions to the franchise. Jerrold Tarog’s Punerarya (Funeral Parlor), however, is something else. It is that rare deliberately graceful horror short that is made even more special by the fact that it seems to be a piece of treasure in a sea of junk.

Punerarya starts inside a funeral parlor where a young teacher (Carla Abellana, who magnificently avoids all clichés in horror film acting to deliver a refreshingly relaxed but intense performance) is introduced by the funeral parlor’s owner (Sid Lucero) to her children, her new students --- a morose girl and her friendly brother who are curiously sensitive to light. What follows is a slow yet delicious unraveling of mysteries closeted within the confines of a morbid but otherwise normal business operation.

Tarog has mastery over the time and thematic limitations of his medium. He withholds telling too much plot to the disservice of creating an atmosphere that accommodates the episode’s mix of the real and the bizarre. The episode seamlessly shifts tones and modes, incorporating Tarog’s own musical score that delights in what is overtly fanciful and subtly sinister, making most of the carefully mapped visuals.

Punerarya is a near-perfect use of the thirty-or-so minutes of its running time. Like Bernal before him who in Fridyider created a wildly horrific view of Philippine suburbia with his newly relocated family who gets terrorized by a murderous refrigerator, Tarog eschews the built-in thrills of his already strange subject matter, a family of aswangs who hide behind their business for survival, to create something more intelligent, something more horrifying. Sadly, the episode exists as a washed-out and perhaps shortened version of what it should have been, thanks solely to the indomitable power of the purse who regard what could be a future masterpiece as just another Christmastime commodity.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Son of God (2010)

Jumat, 31 Desember 2010

Son of God (2010)

The Gospel According to a Weng Weng-Wannabe

A Confession as to How Son of God Restored My Faith on Faith

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

An aerial view of Manila, dull and dreary with its sea of tin roofs and tangled electric lines, opens Khavn dela Cruz and Michael Noer’s Son of God. This is not Mondomanila, a garbage-filled metropolis populated with overjoyed nobodies living in the most depressed of situations as can only be composed by Khavn. This is Manila, the same city where the stories of fatedly sorrowful migrants of Lino Brocka’s films are set, the same city where the stories of the corrupted and corruptible men of Brillante Mendoza’s cinema verite are situated.

However, Khavn and Noer, a Danish filmmaker, instead of similarly dwelling in the hopelessness of the severely impoverished, focuses on their crazed hopefulness. From the high heavens, they bring down their vision to an annual event, the Feast of the Black Nazarene, where the most faithful, who are also arguably the poorest, in Manila converge in the grounds of the Quiapo Church to relay their innermost desires and needs to a supposedly ancient replica of Jesus Christ, darkened by time and circumstance.

To call this disorganized gathering of the cluelessly good, the predatory bad, and the inexplicably ugly carnivalesque is an understatement. Son of God, carried in an ornate throne, is paraded into the Feast grounds by two bulky men wearing ceremonial masks. The image is too ridiculous to be believed, but in a buffet table of Jesus-wannabes presented to desperate men and women whose hunger for miracles can only be matched by their hunger for actual food, he fits right in, gaining for himself a bevy of followers.

He has also gained a critic, a documentary filmmaker (superbly played by Noer) whose disbelief prompts him to follow the self-proclaimed miracle worker to ultimately reveal the fraud he thinks is happening. He asks Son of God questions; all leading to the answer he is looking for, that Son of God is doing his act for money. Yet Son of God answers them with creepy reverence, dodging any implication of ill motive. He documents the miracles that occur too. A mother presents her unconscious sick baby. The moment Son of God touches the baby, the baby bursts in motion. The lines are blurred. Faith on faithlessness is tested. Is Son of God the son of God?

That question is of course only a dilemma to the faithless filmmaker. Khavn and Noer’s viewers are saved from deliberating on the merits of Son of God. He is fake, an actor plucked from somewhere in the city to be part of one of the biggest pranks in Philippine Cinema. Khavn and Noer emphasizes the word “mock” in mock-umentary, and colors the film, from start to finish, with an impish attitude, a discernible notion that the entire film is fueled not by a desire to be seriously sacrilegious but by a desire to have fun in poking holes at both the faithful and the faithless.

The film is actually favored by the overt bad taste that functions as its cornerstones. The film’s most hilarious moments occur when all pretenses of approximating truth and reality are thrown out the window, such as when an actual heart a glass jar inside is brought to Son of God’s attention to have him question his own faith, leading him on a quest, where he dons robes that could have been a costume in George Lucas’ Star Wars, to climb a mountain to regain both his faith and his healing powers. Shot in the same style as Brillante Mendoza’s real-time dramas, the images gain further comedic prominence, the same way Terry Gilliam’s Life of Brian was utterly funny not just because of the jokes played but also because it was shot and executed like an extravagant Zifferelli Christ-pageant.

Son of God, more than just functioning as a humorous yet shallow satire on the ludicrousness of being overly faithful, proposes the mechanics why poor Filipinos and faith are not strange bedfellows. Faith exists here because there is a need for it in the absence of everything else. Faith equates to hope and hope equates to happiness despite having nothing. In the eyes of a foreigner filmmaker who has everything, this immense faith is strange especially when there is no showing for its presence. What else is faith for then when the world provides in abundance? The miracle of the film is that in their exercise of mockery of the faith, Khavn and Noer, whether intentionally or not, has preached truth.

(Cross-published in Twitch. First published in Philippine Free Press.)

RPG Metanoia (2010)

Selasa, 28 Desember 2010

RPG Metanoia (2010)

RPG Metanoia (Luis Suarez, 2010)

Luis Suarez’s RPG Metanoia is the first Filipino-made 3D and CG-animated feature length film. Sadly, it seems that the distinction has overshadowed the film, which, even without the label that points out its historic significance, is quite a solid endeavor and must be seen, instead of read about, to be really enjoyed.

The film opens with a lengthy action sequence where Zero, a heroic kid who is quite adept with the yoyo as a weapon, makes his way through a horde of robots and defeats a three-headed monstrosity who looks like a cross between a hydra and a jack-in-the-box, revealing a prize, a mysterious mask that is supposed to give its wearer god-like powers. The computer hangs. The mother scolds. Zero is Nico (voiced by Zaijan Jaranilla), a frail kid who spends his days and nights leveling up his character in Metanoia, an online role-playing game where he can be everything he can’t be in real life.

The story’s less of a stretch than what can be expected from animated features. When it is not concerned with the plotline of an in-game character wreaking havoc on the real world via a virus that transmits images through the computer that effectively turns humans into gaming zombies, the film spends time exploring the domestic life of Nico, his intimate dinner conversations with his mother (voiced by Eugene Domingo), his webcam communications with his father (voiced by Aga Muhlach), who is working overseas, his blossoming crush with a girl next door, his role in his gaming troop, and his inefficiencies in sports and other physical activities. A bulk of what makes RPG Metanoia so charming is how it translates these relatable elements of living into gorgeous animation.

Thus, RPG Metanoia’s greatest asset is that it satisfies itself with telling its story with refreshing simplicity. The animation, unremarkable if compared to bigger-budgeted extravaganzas produced elsewhere, is lovely in a way that its imperfections and limitedness in terms of frames per second give the film the feel of a stop-motion animated feature, which is more organic, more human than anything done by the animation factories of Hollywood. Instead of belaboring the world of Metanoia with needless spectacles and ornaments, it focuses on creating an emotionally palpable feel for the film’s “real world.” It isn’t simply the comparably polished animation that contributes to the film’s modest powers. The script, written by Suarez with Jade Castro and Tey Clamor, is both far-reaching in its attempts at science fiction and beautifully intimate in its depictions of the joys and conflicts of growing up. The voice acting, most especially by Eugene Domingo as Nico’s mother and Aga Muhlach as Nico’s father, is consistently delightful. The musical score, by Ria Osorio and Gerard Salonga, complements the visuals with fanciful melodies and exciting rhythms.

Suarez and his team peppers the world of Metanoia with details. For example, the portal where the characters of players from the Philippines is replete with fantastic creations inspired from a wellspring of Filipino traditions and artifacts, from the robotic kalesas or horse-driven carriages that roam the cobblestone streets to the Vigan-inspired exteriors of the buildings. Moreover, in keeping true with the massiveness of the multiplayer online gaming experience that Metanoia is envisioned to be, the film introduces elements and characters that establish the fictional computer game’s reach and influence beyond Philippine shores, adding a multicultural flavor to the viewing experience.

There is of course a danger in putting such a game, whose popularity is limited to a specified niche, as the point of interest in the film. The mechanics of the MMORPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game which could be material to the appreciation of the niceties of the film may seem foreign to the demographic it seeks to market itself to. Thankfully, the film does not drown itself with the complexities of the gaming phenomenon and limits itself to its essence, which is basically the threat of living vicariously through the near-perfect lives of computer-created amplified personalities thriving in a world where rules can be bent. Instead of functioning merely as a reflection of what could be a passing fad in video-gaming as with almost all films adapted from video games, it explores the dynamics between gamer and game, and why such relationship, hardened by some symbiosis where both benefit from each other, thrives. In that sense, RPG Metanoia has the capacity to be timeless notwithstanding the possible and probable obsolescence of its thematic source.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Rosario (2010)

Senin, 27 Desember 2010

Rosario (2010)

Rosario (Albert Martinez, 2010)

Albert Martinez’s Rosario, stripped of all its gloss, is essentially about the titular woman, played illustriously by luscious Jennlyn Mercado, whose fate seems to be dictated by her passions unleashed that during that time were severely discouraged, especially for women. Nonetheless, Rosario, presumably out of an upbringing influenced by the liberalities preached by America, the Philippines’ new colonial master, succumbs to every call of her flesh, first with her father’s trusted assistant (Yul Servo), whom she marries to the chagrin of her parents, second with her best friend’s boyfriend (Dennis Trillo), which caused her separation with her husband and her children, and third, with her landlord’s enamored nephew (Sid Lucero). As such, it holds immense promise beyond the trite melodramatics that usually accompany such material.

However, the film, like the many well-dressed and well-made up characters that populate it, is far too concerned in decorating itself to be anything more than an expensive ornament. Given that the film is mostly set in the early-1900’s where the Philippines was recently given to imperialist America by Spain, the film expectedly features costumes, sets, and details that match the period. Thankfully, the film’s artisans and craftsmen sufficiently cater to the demands of its period aspirations, making sure that even the minutest detail takes part in the momentary illusion that everything happened in a past that is best remembered through encyclopedias and history books. Yet after several minutes of being drowned by a barrage of period details, the film little by little gives off an inorganic feel that distracts from rather than complements what the film attempts to convey.

Rosario’s main problem is the abundance of good taste. Martinez makes most of the material, orchestrating what essentially is a grand production of sights and emotions. There is an attempt at some sensuality here, all glimmering and oiled up, bursting in the shadows. Artsy is the word, if we are going to be sincerely blunt about it. Prude, too. It is as if any display of overt sexuality in a film about a woman whose downfall has more to do with sexuality than anything else is taboo. The film, with all its grandiose depictions of the era where the story is supposedly situated, shies away from the grime and the dirt and polishes everything with undue gloss. The result is something definitely pleasing to the eyes but evidently soulless like an expensive commercial for an obsolete luxury cologne.

The film’s good taste seeps into its decision to pronounce its relevance. Rosario’s story is framed as a flashback by aging Hesus, played by Dolphy endearingly, who tells his mother’s story to his wealthy nephew in an attempt to prove his identity. It’s a needless framing device. First and foremost, it places the story within the grasp of being adjudged by a character in the film. When Hesus concludes the film with a theory that his revelation to his nephew has washed away the sins of his mother to the family, it reeks of moralization, belittling the story as simply a tale of caution of the ill effects of sexual expression, a panacea to the generations-old hurt that a single family has experienced because of a matriarch who has been endowed with the new liberalities of the twentieth century.

Rosario, in the end, will be seen only as well-made, arguably smartly directed, and elegantly crafted and if only for that, will be placed in a pedestal by a country that has hungered for films that could approximate those done by Hollywood. If film appreciation only stops there, then Rosario may indeed be a success. However, it does not. A film has to be stripped of its clothes and ornaments. It has to be felt, to be appreciated, to be penetrated, once, twice, thrice, and as many times as one wants, until its soul is bared to be seen by all. If it fails in that tenor, then it is nothing more than an expensive spectacle, delightful while you’re watching it and a distant blur as soon as the theater lights are up.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

My Amnesia Girl (2010)

Minggu, 19 Desember 2010

My Amnesia Girl (2010)

The Art of Exquisite Fluff

A Review of Cathy Garcia-Molina's My Amnesia Girl

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

Cathy Garcia-Molina’s My Amnesia Girl has all the trappings of detestable formula. Like all of the romantic comedies that preceded it, the ones that have given Star Cinema the ill-repute of dumbing down its followers with rehashes of the same story, the film seems to be relying solely on kitsch, on star power, on everything artificial. There is no denying the film’s use of kitsch. In fact, the film is quite unabashed with it, with characters strangely enveloped by a culture of love reigning supreme over everything else. It is adamantly unpretentious, relishing on the obvious fact that it has in its service of fun an abundance of cute and hip. It does not aspire anything more than to recharge its audience’s thirst for spritely romance, the one that is less attached to reality, the one that mines on the mysteries of fate to add magic to it. In other words, My Amnesia Girl is Grade-A fluff. It fulfills everything that a mainstream romantic comedy should do. Much more, it skirts away from genre revision or experimentation, to delight of the studio that bankrolled its existence.

Miraculously though, the film, with its refreshing lack of pretenses of achieving more than momentary delights that is expected of a romantic comedy of mainstream sensibilities, does actually more than fulfilling the basic goals of the films of its genre. Somewhere along the way, amid the near redundant exchanges of witty pick-up lines, against its need to only delight, against its fate as a tool for escape that is to be solely for enjoyment, the film develops a beautiful heart that thankfully aches, although quite subtly, more than it delights.

Apollo (John Lloyd Cruz), pick-up artist extraordinaire, met Irene (Toni Gonzaga), a photographer, in a speed-dating event. While Irene attended the event only to document it, she ended up enamored by Apollo’s undeniable charms and wit. The seemingly perfect relationship suddenly and unexpectedly ended when on their wedding day, Apollo did not show up, leaving Irene irreparably heartbroken. When the two serendipitously meet in a grocery, Irene concocts a lie and pretends to be suffering from amnesia, therefore, removing all memories of Apollo and his failure to marry her. Apollo, believing Irene’s lie, takes the supposed clean slate to undo everything he has done to her and make her fall for him like the first time. The two become inseparable again, but are now faced with the impending repercussions of their second chance at love be revealed as by-products of Irene’s vengeful grand lie.

The story, written by Jade Castro whose masterful Endo (2007) situated a poignant love story in the middle of temporary contractual employment, hinges on a ludicrous proposal that men can be so drowned in love and guilt that amnesia, which only happens in unimaginative telenovelas and is highly unlikely in reality, has become instantly believable. Garcia-Molina, however, manages to distract from the implausibility of the premise by creating a film that is as self-aware of its contrivances as the characters are self-aware of their love-addicted attitude in life. The performances by Cruz and Gonzaga are expectedly charming, especially during the film’s lighter moments. However, during the moments where the film bleeds with emotions, Cruz and Gonzaga communicate those emotions with convincing conviction that is impossible not to get swayed into their dilemma and be affected with much more than just the cheap thrills that is usually associated with Star Cinema’s star-studded romances.

The film’s last scene, made funny by the trademark exchanges of witty one-liners that extend up to the end of the end credits, is actually quite bittersweet. Sure, the lovers end up together, as expected in any romantic comedy produced by Star Cinema. However, there is no assurance, no previous revelation, that fate’s cruel retort to Irene’s crueler lie, a lie that has produced so many beautiful things that it seems more alluring than the truth, has been resolved. We only see the lovers in satisfied bliss of being together, not knowing exactly whether the memories, good and bad, are there with them in their modest celebration. Whether Garcia-Molina knows it or not, with My Amnesia Girl, she has made a film that transcended the limiting bounds of formula filmmaking without breaking them. I’m crossing my fingers, but there might be hope yet for the mainstream.

(Cross-published in Twitch. First published in Philippine Free Press.)

Chassis (2010)

Selasa, 14 Desember 2010

Chassis (2010)

Chassis (Adolfo Alix, Jr., 2010)

Adolfo Alix, Jr.’s Chassis opens with Nora (Jodi Sta. Maria) ironing the school uniform of her daughter inside a modest house. The house, perhaps a few square meters wide, consists of very few belongings, some furniture, the ironing horse, cheap ornaments hanging on the wall, one of which Alix’s camera becomes fixated on because it showcases the ideal house. Nora finishes her chore and thanks the owner for her kindness. No, this is not Nora’s house. She lives elsewhere.

Alix’s camera follows Nora as she crosses a wide cement gap that separates her neighbor’s house with the parking lot of huge container trucks. Underneath the chassis of one of the parked trucks hangs a hammock where Nora’s daughter is sleeping. Nora’s husband sleeps on the cold cement. This is Nora’s home, or at least until the truck drives off to one of its many destinations. She wakes her daughter, bathes her, helps her into her uniform, and finally sends her to school. It seems that the events of that morning have ripened into routine. Shockingly, normalcy has inevitably crept into what is obviously a situation that can only be described as both unjust and absurd.

With its opening of expertly mounted visual cues, Chassis immediately forces notice of the gravity of its oppressive milieu. Alix separates from the tattered houses of the slums, clichéd by the dozens of films that are situated there, and slides further and deeper into penury, focusing primarily on individuals who have made homes and attempt to raise families out of parked trucks. Alix overemphasizes the bleakness of his chosen setting, visualizing his setting in monochrome, effectively removing any semblance of color from the sorry lots of his characters and the place they live in.

The images Alix creates, with the help of cinematographer Gabriel Bagnas, are astoundingly austere, more stylized and carefully framed portraits of extreme poverty in the midst of what supposedly represents a bustling trade economy than anything else. Chassis, if experienced only as a series of moving pictures, feels like an album of black and white postcards of Manila in its most deplorable, most depressed and most desperate.

Alix often shows Nora’s face, suspiciously serene despite her troubling circumstance, in close-up. It is as if he commands from Nora’s the same irony as he does from his milieu. After all, both subjects, Nora and Manila as represented here by its port area, are beautiful yet tarnishing. In the frequent close-ups, Alix prompts his viewers to observe Nora, to become intimate with her, and to understand the lack of any intense emotion from her face as she goes about her daily routine that is rife with oppression, from the men who pay her a paltry sum for a quickie, from her husband who can’t provide for her and her daughter decent shelter, and from the society that fosters her dire situation. She has been calloused to the point of being deprived of truly feeling. She only expresses genuine emotions, of joy, sadness and later on anger, with events concerning her daughter.

Alix exploits both milieu and subject, creating a film that instantly grabs you by strength of both its premise and Sta. Maria’s presence. However, the film attempts to go beyond observation of the severe human condition, participating further by enveloping such observations within a story that attempts to push gender discourse. Alix basically paints a grim community where dominating males are unable to provide, forcing the stronger women to prostitute herself for mere survival. The film’s debatable conclusion portrays Nora’s revolt towards her severely iniquitous predicament, bringing the film closer to being unduly didactic if not totally academic, betraying ultimately any emotions already invested on the fate of the film’s female protagonist. Thus, Chassis persisted as a powerful piece of cinema verite until it mistakenly took that final-minute drastic turn for inexplicable shock to forward a negligible and passé statement on the state of patriarchy in the Philippines’ poorest sectors.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (2010)

Jumat, 10 Desember 2010

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (2010)

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (Remton Siega Zuasola, 2010)

English Title: The Dream of Eleuteria

In To Siomai Love (2009), director Remton Zuasola tells the story of two strangers who meet in a street-side eatery and eventually fall in love. Making use of only one shot that deliberately follows the strangers in their minutest of romantic gestures and most exciting of mundane discussions, the film brings its audience into the picture as quiet observers of love being birthed from the strangest of circumstances. Perhaps the film’s biggest fault is that it succumbed to revel in its technique when it concluded with the entire film rewinding to reveal a twist that ultimately betrays the seductive honesty Zuasola masterfully sustained for several minutes.

In Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (The Dream of Eleuteria), his debut feature length film, Zuasola also makes use of a single shot to document the Terya leaving the island where she has lived her entire life. It is very easy to either praise or criticize the film for its audacious storytelling method. The single shot especially limits the scope of the narrative, keeping it within a certain time frame and the geography that is allowed by the logistics of that single shot. Zuasola thus limits the film to the hour and a half prior to Terya’s departure, patiently capturing everything that happens from when Terya is discovered submerged in the ocean to when she embarks the pumpboat that will bring her to the airport that will ultimately bring her to faraway Germany.

So Terya, following the wishes of her mother to escape from the impoverished life her father can only provide for them, is to leave for Germany to marry an older man. Within that hour or so when the camera follows Terya and her family as they walk to the port, Zuasola deliberately unravels the pains and frustrations that are deeply hidden within the spoken ambitions of the people around Terya. Terya, on the other hand, quietly enduring the outspoken rationalizations of her mother and the submissive affirmations of her father during the first half of the film, only bursts into the picture midway, revealing what could possibly be is an irreversibly hurt heart, especially when it is her dream that was bartered for the dream of a better life for her family.

This precursor to Terya’s lifelong journey fleshes out the mismatched rationales that ultimately push Terya to commit herself to a loveless union. The masterful camerawork, the very apt music that drowns the visuals and becomes the supporting backdrop when it needs to, the courageously convincing acting of the entire cast that blurs all moral condescension, and the narrative that naturally flows without need of a single cut all, communicate the emotions that pulsate as Terya nears the demise of her very own dream. In the end, despite the mostly mundane goings-on that comprise most of Zuasola’s film, it still holds for its purposes the poignant reality that poverty has skewed the very purpose of ambitioning, pushing people to break familial ties, to dessert pained lovers, to abandon the country for the dream of a better life.

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria, much more than exposing the physical state of the country because of the abject poverty that pervades it, exposes the dissipating values that are only natural repercussions of that poverty that has become cliché in the so-called national cinema. That the gorgeous vistas shown in the film hardly represent the social and economic decay that is actually thriving therein makes the film’s careful attempt to expound on the more intimate state of the nation more resonant, more resonant in fact than the films whose supposedly pertinent advocacies or themes are worn on their sleeves. Zuasola, despite the near-perfect use of the one shot which clearly establishes him as one of more talented young filmmakers nowadays, thankfully disappears and does not commit the brilliant although self-serving conclusion in To Siomai Love, allowing Terya and her indisputable pain that we’ve become familiar with to occupy the spotlight.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Layang Bilanggo (2010)

Minggu, 28 November 2010

Layang Bilanggo (2010)

Layang Bilanggo (Michael Angelo Dagñalan, 2010)

English Title: Life Sentence

An illusion is brilliantly hatched. Playing alongside each other are two storylines, seemingly separated by time and an immense change in the character of Pol (Pen Medina), a jailed convict who doubles as an assassin for the jail warden (Archi Adamos). The illusion is cleverly maintained, at least up until the cleverness wears off and the need for exposition becomes imminent. The film opens with Pol’s unflinching assassination of a man, briskly revealing in a sequence so judiciously executed Pol as a man of hollow virtues. Yet, Pol, noticeably aged, is also seen communing with a group of other retirees, revealing a character that is opposite the ruthless man of the opening sequence. The gargantuan distinctions between the two Pols of the supposed two storylines of Michael Angelo Dagñalan’s Layang Bilanggo (Life Sentence) are so gargantuan, that it is impossible not to be intrigued by what could have converted Pol the obedient killer into Pol the gentle geriatric.

Given that the two storylines differ in mood and style, since the storyline involving Pol the killer is unabashed in its use of violence and portrayal of reform institutions as ridden with corruption and exploitation while the storyline involving Pol the elderly seems to be a quiet portraiture of people living out the twilight of their lives, the film naturally shifts pacing, requiring a bit of diligence and skill from the director. Thankfully, Dagñalan mostly juggles the two storylines with understated efficiency. Yet when Dagñalan lets go of the conceit, revealing that Pol’s peaceful and reformed presence in the home for the elderly is but a sham for his next mission as an assassin, the film loses a vital piece of what makes it momentarily poignant, the endearing sincerity and simplicity of a life redeemed from what seems to be an inescapable hell.

Layang Bilanggo suffers ultimately because it is told with that conceit in mind. It cheapens the emotions sought to be fleshed out, putting focus more on the ingenuity of the storytelling than the story itself. The story itself though is not as notable as it thinks it is. It’s primarily a tale of redemption of a father who left his wife and daughter decades ago and now attempts to reconnect with her without revealing himself while waiting to eliminate his next target, a journalist who is researching about corruption within the prison system. There are certainly moments where the emotional heft that is being carried by Pol is exposed for some onscreen poignancy. With the help of the consistently believable portrayals of Medina and Miriam Quiambao as the criminal father and his daughter, respectively, Dagñalan manages to sustain a breath of the familiar in a story that wraps itself in blatant contrivances.

The attempts at familiarity, however, are nowhere near noble or novel, because they are based incidentally on melodramatic turns and character motivations that are often used to the point of garnering cliché status. The perfunctory anecdotes in the home for the aged make up for all the film’s many faults, puncturing the convoluted main storyline with much-needed humanity. Jaime Fabregas, who plays a retired Metrocom officer who ironically becomes Pol’s best friend in the home for the aged and later in the film, dons a grandmother’s garb while wielding a high-powered armament, adds much-needed levity to the mostly serious and moribund affair. Thus, despite the plentiful excesses in Dagñalan’s scripting and directing, one cannot simply take away the fact that Layang Bilanggo works, even if only as a random curiosity.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Astro Mayabang (2010)

Jumat, 19 November 2010

Astro Mayabang (2010)

Astro Mayabang (Jason Paul Laxamana, 2010)

Jason Paul Laxamana’s satire Astro Mayabang is about titular Astro (Arron Villaflor, who very ably inhabits the role with equal parts arrogance and vulnerability), an Angeles City local who literally wears his nationalism with shirts, jackets, caps, and rubber shoes bearing Philippine emblems, who it seems is the film’s singular joke. His oft-mouthed mantra is a not-so-accurate list of Filipinos or men and women with Filipino blood, no matter how little, who have made an impact, no matter how little, on the world. He berates a Caucasian tourist for not giving alms to one of the many mendicants in the city when the United States has colonized the Philippines for several decades leading to its very visible poverty, only to be told off by the tourist that he is not American, but British. He is supposedly supportive of locally produced music but buys his music from pirates. Simply put, he is a package of inconsistencies.

The film’s most oddly beautiful moment involves Astro and Dawn (Megan Young), a Filipino-American lady who wants to discover more of her Filipino lineage, alone in the latter’s house. Angry at Dawn for not wearing the nationalistic clothes he bought for her in the dinner with her friends that she invited him to, Astro scolds Dawn for being ashamed of her roots. Dawn, initially taken aback by Astro’s accusations, starts seducing him, pointing to him how each flag-adorned article of clothing which she is removing from his body, means nothing to what she feels for him. Just before Dawn gets her way with him, Astro rejects her advances, pleading for her to wait for him as he rushes to the city to scour for the cure for his embarrassing impotence.

From then on, the film, in a way that shows a director whose confidence in his material is unassailable, ties all the seemingly incoherent parts of the film together to reveal a portrait of a country far too engrossed in outside appearances to cure its embarrassingly decaying core. That night before the Pacquiao fight that almost surely rejuvenates nationalistic pride to all Filipinos, the proudest one of them resigns to the pointlessness especially amid the malady that pervades the culture, as exemplified by the people surrounding Astro, from his hedonistic employer to his good-for-nothing parents. In the end, he abandons his obsession with everything and anything Filipino in exchange for faith in the Church. The film’s end however notes not salvation but repetition, arguing that impotence within can only exude impotence outside.

In sum, Astro, at least during the initial parts of the film, when his nationalistic angst is in full irresponsible display, is a walking hysterical satire, representing the absurd ironies of the kind of nationalism that is pervading the country: loud, proud and unabashedly branded nationalism. Like a fake Louis Vuitton bag to a shameless social climber, Astro’s clothes, slogans, and unmitigated anger against anything and everything foreign supposedly expresses the abundance of his national pride. As the satire and humor wear off, the film plods into seriousness, reveling in its statement on the values the misdirected youth of this country has skewed, mostly because such values have been intertwined with commercialism and fanaticism, all of which are by-products of the nation’s past as colony to various world powers.

Yet, the character of Astro, the biggest asset of both the entertainment and substantial value of Astro Mayabang, seems to be also the film’s most telling liability. As soon as his novelty wears off and he is unclothed of the momentary charms of his humorous psychosis, Astro is revealed to be rather unlikeable to the point of utter annoyance. That is probably Laxamana’s intent to begin with, to slowly but surely dissipate the artifices of the character until what’s left is nothing but the emptiness of what the artifices represent. It is supposed to chafe, to repel, to frustrate. It is supposed to rock you to your core, push you to evaluate whatever nationalism, whether it is as little or as ridiculously grand as Astro’s, and determine if it stems from the right place or if it is only there to cover up embarrassing shame. If only for that, Astro Mayabang, though it could be more abrasive than funny, is a more than worthwhile comedy.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Tsardyer (2010)

Selasa, 16 November 2010

Tsardyer (2010)

Tsardyer (Sigfried Barros-Sanchez, 2010)

English Title: Charger

Supposedly inspired by the news of the kidnapping of a famous journalist by the Abu Sayyaf, Sigfried Barros-Sanchez’s Tsardyer (Charger) tells the story of Shihab (Martin delos Santos), a young boy who is recruited into the group to run back and forth from the kidnappers’ den to the nearest house to charge the cellular phones used by the kidnappers to communicate their demands for the release of their captives. Barros-Sanchez, unsatisfied with the already promising premise of the boy who gets caught right in the middle of the war, needlessly expands his reach, tackling without benefit of any clear direction everything from corruption within the military and the role of media in the troubles in Mindanao. The film, already hurt by an ambition that is supported mainly by convoluted storylines that only reveal empty aspirations of social relevance, is rendered further unwatchable by stale and tasteless filmmaking.

The film’s cast, composed of mostly reliable thespians like Neil Ryan Sese, who plays Shihab’s pacifist father, Dimples Romana, who plays the reporter who was kidnapped, and Shamaine Buencamino, who plays the media executive tasked to negotiate with the kidnappers, sift through a screenplay that is a patchwork of atrociously stilted dialogue and confused approximations of what is happening in Mindanao. Perhaps the biggest perpetrator of the dangerously one-dimensional acting that contributes to the film’s abominable one-sided appreciation of the conflicts in Mindanao among the actors involved in the film is Pipo Alfad, who plays the kidnapping band’s high-strung leader with unadulterated and detestable villainy, reciting his hammed up lines with mismatched conviction, and filling the screen with probably well-intentioned but inevitably vulgar gesticulations.

The musical score, if one can consider the unimaginative and annoying repetitions of trite melodies music, lazily cues the mood, the setting, the intended emotion. Even more unjustified is the film’s ridiculous utilization of various songs, all made more abominable by how they are tacked on to specific scenes to manipulate emotions. Visually, the film is frustratingly flat, with cinematography that seems to function only to record what is happening within the frame, nothing more. It’s not just the acting, the music, or the visuals. Barros-Sanchez seems oblivious to subtlety. The production is crippled by bluntness. Tsardyer attempts far too hard to be socially relevant, yet it fails more than miserably. What Barros-Sanchez achieves is exactly the opposite of his intentions, inadvertently revealing the pitfalls of using social relevance and advocacy to justify bad filmmaking, or any filmmaking at all, which seems to be a fad for Filipino filmmakers nowadays because of its allure to organizers of film festivals from all over.

The evident bad filmmaking, however, is not the only problem of Tsardyer. The film obnoxiously packages the important and sensitive issues it intends to shed light on within a story that swims in clichés and stereotypes. Moreover, Barros-Sanchez pussyfoots, trapping himself with his righteous advocacy for peace while telling a story wherein the Muslim rebels are deranged antagonists and the media are the poor victims. While he reserves a musical montage displaying the undiscovered beauty of battle-torn Sulu and its people, he nevertheless pushes the limits of taste as he presents a portrayal of the problems of the region that seems to irresponsibly turn the pressing issues into a massive caricature that is thankfully not funny at all. To make matters worse, Barros-Sanchez seems clueless to his very own incoherence and inconsistency as he champions peace with a sensationalized dramatization of the war.

Tsardyer is one of the most insulting films I have had to suffer through. The insults stem more from the film’s irresponsible oversimplification of the grave complexities of the Mindanao problem than the indubitable fact that it is terribly made. For me, it would have been better if the film was forgettable since forgetting it seems to be the only cure to the agony this carelessly mounted film has caused me, yet it is not. Thus, my only hope is that the film, charmless asit is yet persisting like some memory of a traumatic experience, will prove me wrong and be really instrumental in its goal, though questionably communicated, of peace. That's what we all want, anyway.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Dagim (2010)

Senin, 15 November 2010

Dagim (2010)

Dagim (Joaquin Valdes, 2010)

English Title: Raincloud

There is no denying that Joaquin Valdes’ Dagim (Raincloud) is a visually exceptional film. Despite the film’s preoccupation with grime and gore, the film manages to sustain an aesthetic style that is hardly obnoxious but is more often than not quite alluring. The film’s visualizations of desolation that we can only surmise from what Valdes hints at as a product of the heavy military presence in the area attempt to complement the angst-ridden mood of the story of two brothers (Martin del Rosario and Samuel Quintana) who discover a suspicious band of individuals whose anarchist ideology is more than telling of their peculiar lifestyle. Stylized almost to the point of confusion, the film can be best described as a collage of striking images stitched together to service a story that could have worked better with more restraint, more meaningful simplicity.

Dagim feels superficial. It’s unfortunate, really. What the film is trying to say or at least from what could be gathered from the several snippets of beautified ugliness is intriguing. Its revisionist interpretation of the aswang, relating monstrosity to a philosophy of abandoning the false trappings of civilization and order to reveal humans as true monsters, has potential for something more enduring and more troubling than the posturing that the film has heavily invested on. Other than its curiously sympathetic leader (Marc Abaya) and maybe the band’s mysteriously captivating belle (Rita Iringan), the band is composed of members who are nothing more than loud and attention-grabbing eccentrics and punks. They are hardly individuals whose belief in a skewed philosophy has forced them to abandon the comforts of normal existence for a monstrous lifestyle. Their anachronistic fashion sense and tacked-on attitude add more to the superficiality of the entire exercise than to the merits of the film’s attempts at horror.

Of course, Dagim’s horror is of course more conceptual than functional. Although there are overt attempts at utilizing gore and atmospheric mood-setting to scare or at least unsettle, Valdes relies mostly on his concept to ground his horror, depending on the idea that the terrorizing monsters of myth and folklore are as real and palpable as any ordinary person who has completely lost hope on social institutions. Sadly, the film’s fictional setting, a nowhereland whose geography and history is sorely unexplained, filters any inkling of connection between viewer and film. Thus, the film, unlike Richard Somes’ Yanggaw (Affliction, 2008), another revisionist tale of the aswang mythos whose use of the Ilonggo language and whose careful depictions of local culture enhance the horror by grounding it on some semblance of reality, locates itself in an under-realized approximation of any existing Filipino setting.

Valdes peppers his film with little details, that of the little brother and his habit of lighting his flashlight in the middle of the night, or the eccentricities of the mysterious girl during the siblings’ initial encounter with her, or the madwoman wildly mourning outside the siblings’ humble hut one morning. These details are supposed to logically create the apt atmosphere for the intended horror, just enough of the quirk and the strangeness to skew the seemingly normal to produce unease. These details unfortunately fail to cohere with everything else.

Despite all these reservations, the promise of the talent involved in the film cannot be ignored. Perhaps it is that promise that preempted the film’s incoherence. Dagim certainly feels like a work of a director that is trying too hard, trying too much. While Valdes cannot seem to unify style with substance, creating a product that is grossly uneven, he persists as a very efficient orchestrator of the capabilities and proficiencies of the several talented craftsmen and artists under his control. Maybe, given time, given experience, given focus, Valdes can make the film where his lofty technical ambitions add to instead of deviate from his loftier intentions.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Till My Heartaches End (2010)

Rabu, 03 November 2010

Till My Heartaches End (2010)

Till My Heartaches End (Jose Javier Reyes, 2010)

The young lovers in Jose Javier Reyes’ Till My Heartaches End have the easiest of romances. Unfettered by meddling family members, poverty, or other problems that stall the relationships of their counterparts in other movies, Powie (Gerald Anderson), a young man who ambitions to make his own name and wealth, and Agnes (Kim Chiu), a nursing graduate from the province who relocates to Manila to review for the board exams, get into a relationship without any issue.

After an encounter in a coffee shop where Powie was working and a fateful meeting in the heart of Manila that led to a lunch of cheap soft-boiled eggs covered in orange batter in the middle of a busy street, the two become inseparable. When Powie starts to earn more money as a real estate agent, the relationship starts to crack and reveal its weaknesses, starting with the impression that maybe Powie, whose ambition seems to precede everything else, and Agnes, whose naiveté in the affairs of the heart has rendered her vulnerable to the inevitable heartaches of being in a relationship, are not exactly compatible.

Reyes’ aim is to filter fantasy from the romantic film. In that sense, Till My Heartaches End plays like an account of an ordinary relationship, starting with the joys of falling in love for the first time and ending with the gnawing aches of expecting the inevitable conclusion to what used to be a perfect love affair. The only difference is that this account banks heavily on the individual charms of Anderson and Chiu and the chemistry that was manufactured specifically for their duo. Unfortunately, the moroseness of the material overwhelms the possible charms of Anderson and Chiu’s tandem.

The film, despite Reyes’ earnest attempts in recreating a love affair that started perfect but was not really meant to be and despite the momentary pleasures of Reyes’ consistently pleasant writing, is just very dull. Reyes’ film fails primarily for the very simple reason that the romance that is at its center so torturously tedious and its participants so obnoxiously obsessed with whatever they’re obsessed with that caring for the couple and their relationship, as the movie moves along, gradually evolves to be a chore. Beyond the requisite gloss of the typical mainstream production, Till My Heartaches End pushes the boundaries of monotonous commercial filmmaking. Having Powie and Agnes’ love story unfold through the curiosity-triggered conversations of people around the couple seems to be an expendable storytelling conceit. With or without it, the film still struggles to make magic out of the mundane facets of what it believes to be the realities of falling in and out of love.

Its attempts in demystifying cinematic romance, derivative of the anti-romantic charmers from Hollywood like Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer (2009), is hurt by its own indecisiveness in whether or not it wants to map the life and death of a romantic relationship or it wants to betray that completely by hinting of the possibility of still a romantic happily-ever-after for the beleaguered and tortured lovers, as exemplified by the anti-climactic buss in the forehead that precedes not one but two telling instances where the girl looks back at her ex before singer Carol Banawa belts out a song about loving so stubbornly, it hurts.

Believe me, this hurts.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Laruang Lalake (2010)

Senin, 01 November 2010

Laruang Lalake (2010)

Laruang Lalake (Joselito Altarejos, 2010)

English Title: Boy Toys

In an age in Philippine cinema where filmmakers and their films are thirsting for a local market at the risk of solely relying on the international film festival circuit for an audience, a genre of films persisted, with a captive market that was loyal to it no matter how technically inept and creatively insipid the films were. Queer cinema took over the space the titillating films of the nineties outgrew. Initiated by Cris Pablo’s ultra-low budget meditations on the gay lifestyle that were shot on digital video, these queer films were mostly independently produced, a quality that separated it from the sex-oriented films of the nineties which were heavily supported by the country’s profit-hungry mainstream film studios. As a result of the genre’s indisputable profitability, which in turn opened it to exploitation by more enterprising producers who opt to concentrate on what drew viewers to pay and watch, which is the nudity and the sex, instead of artistic integrity, it earned ill repute among film circles who saw the genre’s domination in both numbers and earnings of the entire independent film industry, if ever such a thing exists, as an affront to what independence in filmmaking really meant.

Yet queer cinema in the Philippines per se is not exactly an evil thing. Sex, the element that is easiest to target as indulgent and needless, is essential to genre. After all, it is sex and the differences in sexual preferences between homosexuals and heterosexuals that birthed the genre in the first place, and any pretense of purity in the genre is misaligned. Perhaps the only fault of the country’s queer cinema is that its target audience is so loyal, so willing to part ways with their hard-earned money to vicariously live their sexual fantasies through the fictionalized lives of the gay men appearing in these films that there’s a tendency to be unforgivably lax in the actual process of filmmaking, with filmmakers churning out films at a pace that renders the products questionable.

Joselito Altarejos, whose career as filmmaker is a product of the recent boom in queer cinema, has made seven features in the span of only three years. His staggering output as a director is a testament to the undying demand for the films that follow the formula that breathe economic viability to that particular genre. With Laruang Lalake (Boy Toys), Altarejos offers an insider’s look as to how these films are made, starting from when an aspiring actor (Arjay Carreon) from the province is pushed to audition for an upcoming gay feature by his ambitions of stardom and dire financial needs to when the film gets made but its life hinges on the hands of the members of the censors board.

It’s clearly and understandably a non-judgmental portrayal of what happens behind the scenes. The characters, from Carreon’s timid neophyte and his motherly manager to the admirably honorable director (Richard Quan), lack that certain darkness in their personalities that could have caused the requisite conflict in this film about filmmaking. Instead, the film focuses on the mechanics of making a gay film, concentrating on moments that are by themselves banal, but as a whole, is a statement on how gay films, despite their assured profitability, are still subject to all the rules of independent filmmaking in the Philippines, which include making most of shoestring budgets, putting up with unprofessional upstarts and being at the mercy of established ones, personal loans for the sake of the craft, and censorship.

Altarejos dutifully mounts scene after scene, attempting to approximate the tedium that goes with the filmmaking, coloring the tedium with bits of comedy and drama. Despite the effort however, Altarejos fails to engage primarily because the film is not consistent in its aim, struggling to initiate its audience with the familiar story of an upstart getting into a profession that will predictably eat his soul before completely changing course to focus on the fate of the film. The problem stems from the fact that neither the upstart nor the fictional film is interesting enough to carry a film about them. Carreon plays his character with hardly any charm to pull away the fact that the character is severely thinly written. Fortunately, Quan and Mon Confiado, who plays a strip club owner who is venturing to produce gay films, are believable in their respective parts. The fictional film, showed in bits and pieces as being filmed and as shot, seems to be the typical gay film, defended righteously by the director as an exploration of gay sexuality, but as portrayed in the partial pieces that Altarejos shows, is more of a montage of naked male bodies in various simulated sexual acts.

Despite all its faults, Laruang Lalake contains a sequence that makes it worth anybody’s time. The director faces the censors board for a second time, pleading for his film to be given a go-signal to be screened commercially. As the censors rip his film apart and tackles each objectionable scene and explaining why it can’t be screened to the public, the film morphs into something else. Sure, ostensibly, the scene laments a film culture that bows down to individuals whose senses and tastes have become obsolete (as deliciously displayed when the censors themselves are unable to turn a cellular phone in silent mode). However, much more than a statement as to the dangerous inutility of the censors board, the scene, in the way the director defends first the scenes and later on, the homosexual acts depicted in the scenes, begs for acceptance of the genre that exists primarily because there exists sexual differences. To disparage the genre itself is akin to intolerance, and in a way, just like all the members of the board that condescend on the elements that are essential to both gay cinema and being gay, we’re all suspects.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

The Social Network (2010)

Jumat, 22 Oktober 2010

The Social Network (2010)

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

David Fincher’s The Social Network opens inside a bar where Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenburg), future billionaire and inventor of Facebook, and Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), Zuckerberg’s very-near-future ex-girlfriend and inspiration for a chauvinistic blog post and website Facemash, are in the middle of a rather lopsided conversation with Zuckerberg leading in amount of words and ideas blabbered in a minute and Albright obviously trailing behind. The setting, although not very long ago, harkens to an era when face-to-face relations have not been threatened with obsolescence. The bar is packed. Talk is lively. That is pre-Facebook, pre-the era of living both real and cyber lives with equal importance, pre-breakups via change in the relationship status in profile pages.

If the internet has made the world smaller, Facebook has turned the inhabitants of that shrunk world into codes and scripts that are all interconnected and worse, predictable. Facebook is not addictive because it was made to be addictive. It is addictive because it simulates the social aspect of modern human living. What Facebook members do in the website resembles, with hardly any artificial intervention, how we act and speak in real life. The fact that the inspirations for Facebook are ignited from the social systems of a university campus reflects the probable lapse in the so-called human free will that the success of the social networking website feeds from.

All this is of course touched upon by Fincher tangentially. What The Social Network is more concerned with is Zuckerberg’s story, how a seemingly unlikable Harvard student turned billionaire in a span of a few years and changed the world. It is a story that plays very much like a corporate thriller, except that the characters, instead of being motivated primarily by the greed that consumes adults, are all twenty-something dreamers whose wealth and greatness are mere byproducts of wrestling with their own immaturities and lack of world-readiness. Thus, sprinkled in between plot-forwarding scenes and dialogue are the portraits that are not always patronizing of Zuckerberg’s character but enunciates his humanity, such as when his new-found fame got him a first stab at sex, or what results right after, when he sees his ex-girlfriend and attempts to utilize his fame to undo the insults resulting from his foolish brashness and insensitivity in the film’s opening scene.

At the same time though, The Social Network does not attempt accuracy. In fact, the characters that Fincher and Sorkin created for the film are only stereotypes of who these personalities could be in real life. It is as if these characters are seen not through a biographer’s precise inquisitiveness or a journalist’s adherence to codes of ethics, but through their very own Facebook profiles, where tagged photos, albums, hobbies, interests, likes and relationship statuses are enough to create an idea of who the person behind the profile could be. In a way, the film relishes in the idea of seeing the characters, which are essentially film-friendly sketches of more complex personalities the audience might never have the privilege of knowing, interact as such, extended sketches of what these people were in Harvard: competitive jocks, unsociable nerds, negligible sidekicks, and objects of desire. Fantastically too, this is primarily how Facebook works, by encapsulating people in a few web pages consisting of pictures, basic information and relations, and allowing the casual onlooker a pre-conceived notion of the person via his profile, and thus, giving him the opportunity to judge via his response to the random Add Friend request.

Despite its liberal interpretation of the Facebook founding story, turning what in my mind is a monotonous and maybe sometimes exciting amalgamation of boring lawsuits, endless nights in computer gibberish and mental masturbation, and utter lack of sexy sex, Fincher and Sorkin succeeds in romanticizing the unromantic, cinematizing the un-cinematic, and humanizing the potentially dehumanizing website that has turned Zuckerberg into an icon of this generation of millionaires and billionaires who’ve reached their economic peaks at the same time they’re discovering their own maturities. It’s a generation, as exemplified in one of the scenes where Zuckerberg is asked a question by an elderly lawyer but his mind is elsewhere and when scolded by the elderly lawyer delivers a witty retort that is impossible to deflect without sounding foolish, that cannot by manhandled by dinosaurs of a disappearing era. The speed of change is indisputable in the film which details the pre-Facebook and post-Facebook eras with satisfying details, although blanketed with the familiar dramas of Zuckerberg and company.

The ending, where Zuckerberg ends up alone after a full day of depositions and argumentations in the conference room, toying with his Facebook page, adding Erica Albright as one of his friends in the networking site, and refreshing his internet browser every few seconds to see if his ex-girlfriend responds to his request, is a very potent portrait of creator succumbing to his creation. It details the very mechanism of human interaction that Facebook or any other high technology simulator of human behavior can never replicate, and that is the ability to feel and the free will to act on that feeling. A billionaire in his early twenties, the founder of the most popular website in the planet, a ruthless and conniving businessman, Zuckerberg, at that moment, is without what he wants and needs the most. It is the fact that it is the mechanical and a little bit humorous redundancy that his creation inevitably lured him into mindlessly committing that exposes his biggest failure amidst his famous successes that makes the scene, and the entire film, a worthwhile, if not enlightening journey into what kind of social creatures our human race is transforming into.

I Do (2010)

Selasa, 05 Oktober 2010

I Do (2010)

I Do (Veronica Velasco, 2010)

Sometimes a kiss is just not enough. After the redundancy and tedium of romancing, fighting, and forgiving that has been the standard storyline of most if not all recent romantic comedies, the pay-off of seeing the onscreen lovers lock lips in slow motion has been quite unrewarding. Tradition demands that the only acceptable conclusion to any romance is a wedding. Veronica Velasco’s I Do endeavors to innovate on traditions by telling the tale, which according to her and co-writer Jinky Laurel is based on a true story, of a couple whose attempts at being wed are often foiled.

Yumi (Erich Gonzalez) is a hopeless romantic whose mission in life is to find the one to tie the knot with in the dream wedding that she has been obsessing over since her younger years. Lance (Enchong Dee), her Chinese boyfriend, is suddenly faced with the decision of marrying her to the chagrin of her strictly traditional Chinese family, when she discovers that their seemingly innocent romance has produced for them an offspring. Amidst cultural differences, financial un-readiness, overbearing families, and the incoherent advices of close friends, they struggle, stumble, and carelessly rush to the finish line, the dream wedding Yumi has been longing for.

Gonzalez and Dee do make a charming couple. It helps that their performances here are grounded on romantic naiveté and youthful cluelessness, making their fated scenario and their sometimes incredulous reactions to that scenario more believable. The supports, on the other hand, are a mixed bag. The performances of veteran comedians Dennis Padilla and Pokwang infuse Yumi’s humble but earnest parents an amiable sheen. The tacked-on friends, with the exception of Janus del Prado’s pathetically enamored best friend who spurts pessimistic love quotes to hide his feelings for Yumi, are more annoying than alluring, adding more to the unnecessary clunk of the film.

Velasco acknowledges the comedy in the obsession with weddings. As the apt conclusion to any love story, the ceremony represents a collective desire of any lover to cap the uncertainties of pre-marital romantic relationships with something that resembles a fairy tale ending. I Do both flourishes and wallows in its overt comedic intent. Although very careful not to tread past the boundaries of what formula dictates, the writing is mostly witty. However, there seems to be an overabundance of wit and a redundancy of some of the comedic efforts, to the point that the dramatic parts, the portions that feel like the soul of the film, are pushed to the margins. It’s not that the film is not funny. With Dennis Padilla and Pokwang lending their comedic mettle to the already absurd situations conjured by Velasco and Laurel, it’s impossible not to be swayed to at least chuckle at some of the gags. Yet the comedy or perhaps the brand of humor utilized that hinders the film from being anything more than a joyous although momentary diversion.

I Do ends not with a kiss, not with a wedding, but in a heartfelt portrait of familial acceptance. It’s the romantic comedy graduating from the romance and the comedy, bursting the bubble that the lovers created for themselves and realizing that the world is not all about them and the exploits they have encountered in the name of their infallible romance. It is also about other people: the parents that can only long to see their daughter happy, the parents that believe they solely know what’s best for their child, the friends, and the dejected lover. Romances should never end with a kiss, or a wedding, or the promise of love for the rest of their now united lives. I Do, for all its faults and indulgences, invested in an ending that feels like a truly happily ever after.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)