Give Up Tomorrow (2011)

Senin, 10 September 2012

Give Up Tomorrow (2011)

Give Up Tomorrow (Michael Collins, 2011)

It should have ended when the Philippines’ Supreme Court denied the several Motions for Reconsideration filed by the men who have earlier been convicted for the rape and murder of the Chiong sisters and sentenced to death. It was supposed to have been a triumph of a justice system beleaguered by accusations of being beholden to the rich and influential. For a time, it was indeed seen as a triumph. For that very little time when the media, in the guise of being one with the overwhelming majority, was celebrating the illusory end to all the questions and issues, the country had a sense that there is indeed order.

The convicted men were predictably seen as spoiled scions of the few members of the wealthy elite. The most prominent accused, Francisco “Paco” Larrañaga, is at first glance, the very personification of the country’s social divide. With his fair skin, brown eyes, and foreign features, he does not look like most Filipinos. His mother is a distant relative of a former president. His father is a Spanish citizen. His gazes are intense, almost angry. He talks with a cadence that is too assured and easily mistakable as indifference and arrogance. His eventual fall from grace, starting from his celebrated arrest to that final conviction by the highest court of the land, is therefore the logical happy ending to the escapist entertainment that the case has evolved into.

Director Michael Collins and producer Marty Syjuco’s Give Up Tomorrow presents the fatedly intertwined stories of the Chiongs and the Larrañagas from a specific perspective, that of those closer and more intimate to the perceived victimizers than the victim. At first glance, the obvious tilt to sympathize with Paco seems problematic as it clouds the documentary, pushing it further away from being a portrait of a frustratingly neglected truth into something that resembles propaganda. As it turns out, the documentary, with its skillfully presented pieces of evidence that pertains to the alleged miscarriage of justice, serves both purposes seamlessly.

The documentary’s strongest sequences are those that featured real footage from the prolonged trial, edited together with various interviews with shelved witnesses and emotional relatives, unflinchingly revealing the folly that was instantaneously believed and consumed in the heat of the moment. The film’s most sobering moments are those depicting Paco, from when he was snatched from the good life up to several years after when he is still serving a sentence for a crime he allegedly did not commit, insisting on his innocence, mouthing the mantra from which the title of the documentary was borrowed. Its portrayal of the two mothers, one whose obsession with her being a victim has allowed her to mold the system to suit her cause and the other whose trust in the system had turned herself and her family into its unsuspecting victims, is at once astounding and melancholic.

As it methodically shatters the official truth as narrated and explained by the various decisions of the trial and appellate courts, it also shatters the precious comfort and security that the processes that came up with the official truths provide. As it navigates the glaring flaws of a distinct judicial system through the experiences of Paco, it exposes the immense cracks of any system or institution tasked to retain both order and justice that is created and run by corruptible and erring men. More than swaying sympathies towards the already maligned convicts, Give Up Tomorrow espouses vigilance, especially in this age where truth is easily adaptable to the needs of the powerful.

Give Up Tomorrow acknowledges the gravity and importance of its cause, skirting away from too much style and spectacle and focusing instead on the scope and breadth of its material. Despite its very straightforward presentation, it is an admittedly difficult film to sit through. It is immensely heartbreaking, balancing the indelible pain of seeing an entire system that for years has been entrusted to set things right shamelessly crumble and being asked to accept the very possible reality that an innocent man has wasted his best years in jail, all for the benefit of keeping a tumultuous mob sated.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Headshot (2011)

Senin, 03 September 2012

Headshot (2011)

Headshot (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, 2011)

Thai Title: Fon Tok Kuen Fah

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Headshot is a shape-shifter of a film. It opens like a traditional crime thriller. Draped in the ominous darkness of an obscure office kept awake by business best accomplished at night, a man prepares the files of an assassin’s next victim. A scar on the man’s weathered neck suggests a lifetime of violence. Tul, the assassin, distinguished by an assured posture made even more intimidating by his long hair deliberately worn unkempt, receives the target the next day. He brings the package to his home, a disorganized hovel with various sketches of faces posted on its walls, and prepares his next kill. He first reveals his dispassionate mug from the reflection of the mirror of his bathroom, where he ceremoniously cuts his hair.

The following sequence displays the assassin at work. Disguised as a monk making rounds for alms, Tul is welcomed to the mansion of his target. The target approaches him to give his food offering. He repays the generosity with several shots from his gun, ingeniously hidden in his food bowl and begins to escape. He ultimately gets shot in the head...

(Continue reading in Cinemas of Asia.)

Ang Panday 2 (2011)

Sabtu, 31 Desember 2011

Ang Panday 2 (2011)

Ang Panday 2 (Mac Alejandre, 2011)

English Title: The Blacksmith 2

The malady caused by the proliferation of loud but predominantly empty Hollywood blockbusters in Philippine shores is most evident in Mac Alejandre’s Ang Panday 2 (The Blacksmith 2). The bombardment of special effects has never been this harmful to the eyes and to the mind. This sequel to the 2009 reincarnation of one of Fernando Poe, Jr.’s most beloved cinematic alter-egos is hardly a film. Its characters which are proudly advertised as based on Carlo J. Caparas’ creations actually reflect the weakness of Caparas’ imagination which seems to be fuelled only by stereotypes and derivations. In Alejandre’s hands, Flavio (played by Senator Ramon “Bong” Revilla, Jr.), who transforms into the heroic Panday with his elongating dagger that detects evil, is a hollow vessel, a tool for ambitious Revilla to transform his political ambitions into something as simple as a battle of good against evil.

Its story is nothing more than an excuse to chain together scenes that are supposed to inspire spectacle, the special effects of which are sometimes delightful to look at but are mostly just numbingly repetitive. After defeating Lizardo (Phillip Salvador), Flavio decided to settle with fiancée Maria (Iza Calzado) in a little town whose citizens are more than grateful to the hero for getting rid of their oppressor. However, Lizardo is hardly dead. Awakened by Baruha (Lorna Tolentino who braves to wear make-up that makes her look like a subpar version of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch), who opts to wreak her brand of evil from atop an ominous looking peak, Lizardo begins his quest for world domination, first, by kidnapping the town’s female folk including Maria, second, by murdering the men folk through his many minions, and third, by attempting to disarm Flavio by stealing his magical dagger.

Along the way, he discovers that his pet dragon is in fact a foxy lady (Marian Rivera) who is a member of an ironically peaceful race of people who can transform into powerful dragons. He also meets a couple of his friends from his first adventure. All this is of course a bunch of nonsensical filler. The film has lost all ambition to entertain beyond its brainless showcase of what it intends to be as international-caliber computer-generated extravagance. Every now and then, jokes are cracked, slapstick happens, or hints of a probable darkness beneath all the fakery are exposed. However, all those attempts are quickly shelved as soon as Revilla, who seems to have lost all humanity in his exertion to be an effective action hero despite his age and his unwieldy heft, sucks all the possible fun with his mug of contagious indifference.

Alejandre horribly mistakes pageantry with aesthetics. From the small town and its colorfully costumed townsfolk to Lizardo’s grimly dressed monstrosities, the film looks like a hodgepodge of miscommunicated pegs and influences. Like a zombie in search for a living human brain to feed on, the film gnaws on your sanity. It actually forces you to wish for random calamities that would salvage you from the misfortune of sitting through a confused and disastrously taxing film.

By the film’s end, when Baruha announces that this is just the start of the reign of evil, the aches stopped with the promise that this part of Flavio’s saga will finally close. But then, Revilla, donned in his heroic garb and flicking his symbol of being macho for all the world to see and mouthing cryptic words that may or may not be his battlecry for the next elections, appears in another one of Alejandre’s painfully pretty backdrops that are too reminiscent of every torturous episode of TeleTubbies to be taken seriously. Baruha indeed has played propher. This, ladies and gentlemen, is really just the start of the reign of evil.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (2011)

Jumat, 30 Desember 2011

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (2011)

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Jun Lana, 2011)

Its prologue, which briefly introduces its bouquet of characters and their curious relationships and situations, is divided into three parts, all of which are introduced by the three words of its generic title followed by sayings that would do better on greeting card than in a movie. Jun Lana’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is very convinced of its complexities that it utilizes these needless storytelling devices that are in reality are just ornaments to a narrative that is as elementary and straightforward as a daytime soap, only cramped within two hours. It is a film that does not say anything about anything, except perhaps to offer a glimpse of the sort of problems a Filipino upper class family, as imagined and fictionalized to cater to the masses, would be involved in.

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is essentially about the Montes family, owners of the country’s largest television network and a sort of hyperbolic representative of the famously wealthy and influential clans whose members’ lives we can only pretend to know. Tackling the sordid lives of the members of the Montes family and the people that are close to them, the film mines entertainment from tragedy, enjoyment from the manufactured tears of its embattled characters, and delight from the all the entanglements and estrangements brought about by the peculiarities of its very many narrative conceits.

Paraplegic Donald, the Montes patriarch, believes that he has a stable family. Agnes (Agot Isidro), his second wife who is decades younger than him, is secretly having an affair with Derek (Dennis Trillo), her personal trainer. Celine (Solenn Heussaff), Donald and Agnes’ daughter, is starting to get bored with Vince (Paulo Avelino), her clingy boyfriend. Mariel (Maricel Soriano), Donald’s eldest daughter from his first marriage and head of the family’s television network, has turned into a sad and mad woman after being separated from Gary (Gabby Concepcion), her ex-husband who is about to be wed to Charlotte (Carla Abellana). Jacob (Jericho Rosales), Donald’s son, is trying to balance the demands of being a family man and an executive for the family’s network. Lory (Lovi Poe), his bored wife, sneaks out of the house at night to sing with her band, leaving their baby with the household help.

After a disastrous earthquake, secrets are revealed, relationships are threatened, and emotions are questioned, further complicating these characters’ already complicated lives. Ex-wives are turned into mistresses. Mothers are turned into romantic rivals. Lana crafts a topsy-turvy world in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and attempts to pass it off as a glossier and noisier version of reality, dealing with feelings and circumstances that are beyond belief despite the strange circumstances that they are evoked from. This is unabashed melodrama, spending more effort in mercilessly pitting its characters against calamitous events to allow tearful montages and dramatic exchanges of dialogue than anything else. Lana’s characters seem to be there only for their eye sockets that spew off tears of depression and frustration and mouths that sound off phrases that sound devastating but actually mean nothing. Their motivations are questionable. Their existences are negligible.

Moreover, Lana does not have the eye to make Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow more visually appealing or distinctive. The cinematography, although apt in the sense that scenes are sufficiently framed and lighted, is characterless, contented to only the service the narrative without doing anything else. The result is pretty much a visually uninteresting picture, salvaged only by performances that are consistently competent although out. The film, which is essentially just an expensively mounted “move on” note, is all dull gloss and glitter. Despite the film’s many flaws, there’s satisfaction in the way Lana manages to juggle his sprawling account of a fictional family to its open-ended conclusion, the way he attempted to break away from the expectations of a neatly packaged ending with all loose ends tied together in a lovely knot. It is not all bad. It is just not all good, either.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 (2011)

Rabu, 28 Desember 2011

Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 (2011)

Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 (Richard Somes, Jerrold Tarog & Chris Martinez, 2011)

In Chris Martinez’s Rain, Rain, Go Away, the final episode of Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 which was touted by its producing studio as the last and the best of the horror franchise, water, more than the predictable ghosts that appear every now and then, is the main source of chills. Martinez, who is probably the cleverest writer and director actively working for the mainstream today, mines the collective paranoia of floods brought about by the horrific experiences during recent rain-related calamities the country barely survived from.

In the episode, reliable comedienne Eugene Domingo plays the wife of Jay Manalo’s businessman whose plastics business moved from its former flood-prone factory to a safer location. Brought about by experiences from the onslaught of typhoon Ondoy which caused her a miscarriage, among other traumas, the littlest instance of abnormal weather causes her to wilt in terror, forcing her to fear even the most unlikely and ordinary of objects.

Martinez’s episode is most likely to be the most relatable, considering that while it still deals with supernatural elements and relies heavily on the easy shocks of sudden apparitions of stock ghosts, it stems from a horror that is very close to home. Martinez has a knack for creating stories around very real experiences in the screenplays he writes like in Chito Roño’s Sukob (The Wedding Curse, 2006) where the sordid entanglements caused by marital infidelity is the actual curse. With Rain, Rain, Go Away, Martinez has crafted a predictable but effective ghost story that has greed and guilt in the midst of calamity as its heart.

Dealing also with greed, not by the upper-middle class businesspeople of Martinez’s morality tale but by people who are desperate for survival, is Richard Somes’ Tamawo. Somes’ episode, which opens the film with the type of otherworldly fantasy that usually dictates the franchise, is inspired from the Hiligaynon myth of elf-like creatures that inhabit strange places. Somes masterfully creates a rural landscape that serves the setting of both the coming of age of a young boy (a very expressive Bugoy Cariño) who struggles to win the affection of his stepfather (Zanjoe Marudo) while taking care of his blind mother (Maricar Reyes) and the horror tale of the titular creatures who would do anything to take back what the human occupants of their town have taken from them.

Irresistibly pretty at times, with sequences that are intelligently shot and directed, the episode shows a master craftsman at work. There are certain scenes, such as when the blind mother is being stalked in her house by the tamawo and Somes only reveals the monsters’ eerily white faces and menacing bodies partially, that emphasize the very raw horror of being absolutely vulnerable. And the episode is really about vulnerability, of the young boy who only wishes to belong to a family, of the mother whose lack of sight makes her more prone to danger, of the stepfather whose desire to provide for his family forces him to make questionable decisions, of the tamawo whose existence is being threatened by humanity’s interference.

Jerrold Tarog’s Parola (Lighthouse), the middle episode in this triptych, is also about vulnerability brought about by adolescence. Lucy (Kathryn Bernardo) and Shane (Louise de los Reyes) are best friends whose friendship is suddenly threatened when during their school trip to an abandoned lighthouse, two rival witches (Julia Clarete and Dimples Romana) decide to use their bodies to continue their feud. The plot, while admittedly convoluted, is thankfully just a frame for an otherwise atmospheric and moody exploration of teenage paranoia.

Tarog, through telling scenes that are remarkably observant of juvenile conflict, creates an atmosphere of subtle disturbance that is only enunciated by the premeditated acts of cruelty that the witches’ interference allowed the young girls to do. Tarog successfully turns what essentially is the normalcy of high school life into something seductively sinister, like a Freudian nightmare. Immature infatuations, corridor-set insults, chemistry experiments, menstruation, and friendship bracelets are fascinatingly turned into threatening objects and occurrences.

Sparingly paced and ominously quiet, Parola weaves the commercial intentions of the franchise’s shrewd producers with Tarog’s creative integrity and exquisite craftsmanship to create what possibly could be the entire franchise’s crowning achievement --- a truly harmonious mix of all the bad (the hackneyed storylines and stretches in logic) and all the good (the surprising invention some of the intrepid directors manage to sneak into their films) that Shake, Rattle and Roll is most known and loved for.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story (2011)

Selasa, 27 Desember 2011

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story (2011)

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story (2011)

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story is a film that is as hotly contested as post-war Tondo. The first film of what was hoped to be a peaceful collaboration between Laguna governor E.R. Ejercito (who uses the name Jorge Estregan, Jr. when acting in films) and acclaimed director Tikoy Aguiluz, the film quickly gained momentum when a seductively pretty trailer went viral in various social networking sites, giving an impression to most of who have seen the trailer that the Filipino action film, long dead because of the proliferation of the more lucrative romantic comedy in the market, is soon to be revived.

A month prior to its release, relationships suddenly got sour with Aguiluz insisting that his name be dropped from the credits of the film that was going to be released commercially and that he be given the opportunity to create and release his director’s cut, claiming that Ejercito shot several new scenes and re-edited the film behind his back. Ejercito, on the other hand, claimed that Aguiluz’s cut was too slow and subpar. Demand letters were sent, cases were filed in court, temporary restraining orders were issued, and eventually, Aguiluz got one half of his two wishes, and had his name stricken out of the film that he deems was bastardized by its producers. The bastardized film, actually, is not as bad as it seems.

Undoubtedly, Ejercito, who is well beyond his 40’s, is miscast as Asiong Salonga, who ruled the streets of Tondo as a benevolent gangster before being gunned down at the age of 27. Brooding alongside actors like Baron Geisler, Ketchup Eusebio and Yul Servo who are decades his junior, he sticks out like a fogey in the middle of an amusement park. Notwithstanding the very obvious attempt by Ejercito to evoke some sort of inner youth in his performance, he more or less communicates Asiong’s authoritative swagger with expert ease. Pitted against John Regala, who plays Asiong’s nemesis Totoy Golem with equal parts cunning and savageness, he impresses because of his vulnerability, his ability to ache and bleed.

Unfortunately, Asiong aches and bleeds in a story that is haphazardly told, jumping from either one action set-piece or one narrative milestone to another with hardly any rhyme or reason. Edited like a music video presumably for the sake of fast pacing, the film suffers even more. It is a film that desperately needs to breathe. Its many vivid action sequences could have been rendered more poignant with a pinch of quietude and serenity. Its documentation of lives enveloped by corruption and violence could be more meaningful with some intelligent characterization from the film’s writers. As it is, the spare and unimaginative story seems more perfunctory to the visual spectacle and the shameless grandstanding. It is definitely quite a shame because its present form shows shades of glory, traces of the film Aguiluz had in mind --- stylish but somber, brutal but human, and entertaining but artful.

Jessie Lasaten’s musical score is most of the time obtrusive. Carlo Mendoza’s cinematography, however, is quite sublime in its masterful use of monochrome. With only light and shadows to play with, Mendoza concocts images that are admirably composed and expertly framed, which lend the film that has been fractured by its disconnected storyline and lousy cutting reliable crutches to walk with. The production design is also quite notable especially with the efforts to recreate post-war Tondo from Ejercito’s hometown of Pagsanjan.

Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story is an undeniable mess of a film. Sometimes, it promises greatness. At other times, it sinks into an embarrassing slump reminiscent of the reason why action films have died in the first place. It seems to be ignorant of what it wants to be or what it wants to say about the testosterone-dominated world it vividly portrays. It is only during one vehemently illogical and anachronistic but miraculously effective sequence that the film, with all its chaotic storytelling and never-ending fistfights, knife matches, and gun battles, manages to say something coherent. Men fight men. Friends kill friends. And in the climactic, slow-motioned and revenge-fuelled orgy of sweat, blood, and bullets, it becomes apparent that the world we live in, as the glaring instrumentals of the pop song the film curiously borrows to set the scene’s action in music forces the audience to sing, is a mad world.

It’s definitely not an awful film. There are still hints of greatness in this haphazardly edited abomination to render it watchable, if not enjoyable. Now that Ejercito had shown the Philippines what he’s capable of, fairness only dictates that Aguiluz be given the opportunity to cut the film his way.

(Cross-published in Lagarista as 'The Strange Case of Asiong Salonga')

Segunda Mano (2011)

Senin, 26 Desember 2011

Segunda Mano (2011)

Segunda Mano (Joyce Bernal, 2011)

Joyce Bernal is more famous for the charming romances and comedies she made that took full advantage of her actors and actresses’ celebrities. For instance, in Kailangan Ko’y Ikaw (I Need You, 2000), she concocted a movie that pits Robin Padilla’s undeniably manly swagger with Regine Velasquez’s streetwise sweetness. In Booba (2001), Ruffa Mae Quinto’s voluptuous mammaries and seemingly lacking mental resources are the running gag of the movie. In Kimmy Dora (2009), Eugene Domingo’s unlikely star looks and impeccable acting skills are utilized to depict twin sisters whose personalities are as different as night and day.

Quite interestingly, Segunda Mano, Bernal’s latest and notably her first foray into horror (D’Anothers, while featuring ghosts, is more comedy than horror), has her evidently struggling with Kris Aquino, an actress who has claimed for herself the crown for having the most sellable scared face in the Philippines. Aquino plays Mabel, a simple woman who runs an antiques shop. One fateful rainy night, she runs into Ivan (Dingdong Dantes), an architect who was recently left by his philandering wife and is now left alone with his young daughter, Angel (Sofia Millares). They eventually fall in love, leading to mysterious apparitions by a bloodied woman (Angelica Panganiban) who seems to be linked to both Mabel and Ivan.

Written by Joel Mercado, who has penned or co-penned the screenplays of other horror films like Rico Ilarde’s Villa Estrella (2009), Frasco Mortiz, Enrico Santos, Ato Bautista, Nick Olanka, and Cathy Garcia-Molina’s Cinco (2010), and Dondon Santos’ Dalaw (The Visitor, 2010), the film initially tells the story of a woman who seems to have contented herself with second hand objects and persons. Ivan has been used previously by his previous wife, Angel by her absentee mother, her mother (Helen Gamboa) by her sister who drowned in the beach while she was still young. The film then sadly settles into a prolonged mystery derived from the many psycho stories told since the birth of cinema that has a twist that has been prematurely telegraphed by bad acting, predictable cinematography, unreliable editing, and uncreative writing.

The biggest problem with Segunda Mano is that there’s incongruence in Bernal and her lead star’s intentions. Obviously, Bernal, who has always been an intelligent and witty filmmaker and could not have allowed herself to be relegated into an overused genre, doesn’t take the film’s terrorizing stance seriously, what with a silly haunted designer bag, a ditzy social climber (Bangs Garcia) for an annoying sidekick, a loon for a spirit medium, and even a cameo appearance by the iconic Lilia Cuntapay as an unfortunate bag lady who meets death via a murderous hand springing forth from red patent leather.

Unfortunately, Bernal can’t seem to control Aquino. While the film erupts into a parade of self-conscious nonsense, Aquino remains drowned in boring seriousness. She is too concerned perfecting her unsubtle looks of terror to get into the joke of the film, rendering Bernal’s attempts to graduate the film from being droll derivative horror into something irreverently fresh frustratingly unsuccessful. The sorry result is this miserably confused film that at times attempts to subvert the tired genre by injecting a bit of humor into its proceedings but most of the time just satisfies itself with being just a knock-off bag full of second hand scares.

(Cross-published in Lagarista as 'Second Hand Scares.')

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (2011)

Kamis, 15 Desember 2011

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (2011)

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (Mes de Guzman, 2011)

English Title: At the Corner of Heaven and Earth

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (At the Corner of Heaven and Earth), Mes de Guzman’s elegy to childhood innocence, is relaxed in its pace and elegant in its imagery. Set in De Guzman’s native Nueva Vizcaya where continuous fields meet proud mountain ranges, the film reinforces its powerful images of rural hardship with gorgeous passages of slopes being enveloped by clouds, creating a certain lyricism to its straightforwardness. Instead of portraying children as passive victims of an unfortunate circumstance, they are shown to be more in control of their fates, capable to exist within penury without much tragedy, but handicapped by their pride and other vices.

Four children, most of whom have chosen to run away from their families, have turned an abandoned hut in the middle of an idle lot outside the border of the town of Bayombong into their home. Days are spent looking for work, or fooling around, or fighting among themselves. Nights, on the other hand, are mostly committed to rest. The predictability of their daily routine has turned their simple lives into some sort of paradise. Their concerns are minuscule. Their main goal is survival, to eat at least a few times a day and to maintain a semblance of order in their motley crew. Except for the occasional sickness, these kids seem to do well in their chosen independence.

De Guzman depicts these kid’s lives’ comfortable predictability with levity and earnestness. He avoids crossing the line towards melodrama. Instead, he admits to the subtle joys of their little lives, of sharing a piece of candy or a bottle of soda, of the pranks played, of falling hopelessly in love with an uptown girl. These little slices of the kids’ humble lives, laced more with the comedy of childhood defiance than simpleminded pity whoring, prepare the film for its belated conflict, the inevitable collision of these kids’ precious innocence with real life’s corrupting harshness.

As De Guzman morphs his film from being a document of his protagonists’ youthful antics into something darker, the seemingly innocuous landscape of Nueve Vizcaya turns more ominous, more burdensome, and more painful. He is after all a master in establishing atmosphere without crossing the borders of tasteful subtlety.

In Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong (The Road to Kalimugtong, 2005), the simple story of two children hiking their way to their school is not spiced by dramatic confrontations or grandiose turns in the narrative. The conflicts are merely suggested by gunfights overheard in the forest, or petty thievery in the name of survival for a day. Instead of working up stories to compound the dilemmas of his youthful subjects, De Guzman turns his setting, whether it be the road towards an ill-equipped public school or the impoverished margins of a rural community, into the story, allowing the place to breathe drama into the lives displayed.

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa ends supposedly in tragedy, with the kids no longer existing in the fringes of a society that neglects them but somewhere else. De Guzman crosses over to poetry, with the children, in some sort of trance, escaping from their shelter into the field to be engulfed by a conquering fog. De Guzman merges the reality of the children’s situation and the lyricism of Nueva Vizcaya’s mysterious geography in a sequence wherein the film’s little heroes confront their being in limbo, their being in the middle of life and death, in the center of hope and despair, in the corner of heaven and earth.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

The Road (2011)

Minggu, 11 Desember 2011

The Road (2011)

The Road (Yam Laranas, 2011)

The first of the three episodes of Yam Laranas’ The Road is the most reminiscent of the atmospheric thrills of Sigaw (The Echo, 2004). One night in 2008, three teenagers (Barbie Forteza, Lexi Fernandez and Derrick Monasterio) find an abandoned dirt road to practice driving. As they move further from the junction, a suspicious red car passes by them every so often. After noticing that the red car is without a driver, they hurriedly find their way back to the junction, but to no avail. They are trapped, and continuously haunted by the mysterious red car and a woman whose bloodied head is covered by a plastic bag.

The episode, set mostly at night in an abandoned road lighted only by the moon and headlights of occasional cars, relies on mood, on the presumed danger of being alone amidst omens and apparitions, to work and Laranas, a horror stylist here more than anything, creates an atmosphere of quiet but certain hostility.

The second and third episodes, set ten years prior to each other, forgo of the phantasmagoric for the more visceral. Physical and psychological torments, as opposed to the supernatural one of the first episode, are in the forefront. In 1998, two sisters (Rhiann Ramos and Louise de los Reyes) find themselves prisoners in the house of a disturbed man (Alden Richards). In 1988, a boy (Renz Valerio) is brought up by his domineering mother (Carmina Villaroel) and his religiously zealous father (Marvin Agustin).

From the grim greys of the abandoned road, Laranas expands his palette, creating a canvas of lush and inviting colors that only downplay the depravities that are depicted. Tying the three episodes together is the informally accepted mission of a recently promoted cop (TJ Trinidad) to investigate the case of the missing sisters from 1998.

Where in Sigaw, the violent deaths of a mother and child in the hands of an overly jealous cop has transformed their apartment building into a time-trapped capsule where the tortures and the assaults are repeated forever, in The Road, the abandoned road meets the same fate, time-trapped by victims of abject cruelty. Laranas’ ghosts are not troubled spirits thirsting for revenge. They are imprints of a violent past, perpetual footmarks in a place vandalized by vile intentions.

Laranas’ ambitious mapping of the place’s history of brutality inevitably leads to loopholes in the story’s logic and perhaps in the logic of the characters involved. Questions arise and most of them are left carelessly unanswered. However, there is more to the film than its flimsily crafted narrative web. In the scope of what Laranas attempts to achieve, he more or less delivers a story that notwithstanding the multitude of its lapses, coheres with a laudable vision of violence that by its very nature and the extent of its corruption, disrespects the laws of both place and time.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Won't Last a Day Without You (2011)

Sabtu, 10 Desember 2011

Won't Last a Day Without You (2011)

Won't Last a Day Without You (Raz de la Torre, 2011)

A romantic comedy that seeks to reinforce the love team between singer-turned-actress Sarah Geronimo and Big Brother housemate-turned-matinee idol Gerald Anderson, Raz de la Torre’s Won’t Last a Day Without You does not stray far from the established story map and intention of a merchandized movie. It is feel-good, fun, funny, and extremely charming, like most of what Star Cinema has been mindlessly producing the past several years. The film is undoubtedly a product of formula, and quite surprisingly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

De la Torre is not exactly a newcomer. He wrote Cathy Garcia-Molina’s A Very Special Love (2008) and co-wrote with other writers Garcia-Molina’s You are the One (2006) and You Got Me (2007), two romances set in very distinct milieus that somehow added color and novelty to the film’s otherwise redundant storylines. In A Very Special Love, a hopelessly hopeful employee falls for her stern boss who is up to prove himself to his family by making his men’s magazine number one. In You are the One, the familiar romance is set within the world of bureaucratic red tape, an unfortunate circumstance that fortunately gives a glum American who is looking for his parents the opportunity to meet and fall for a government employee. You Got Me is essentially a love triangle between a lady cop, a nerdy officer, and a thief.

Won’t Last a Day Without You, like the rest of the films that De la Torre penned for Garcia-Molina, is set in a very specific niche of the Filipino experience. DJ Haidee (played radiantly by Geronimo) is the heartbreak guru for a late night radio show that gives love advice to romantically challenged insomniacs. At home, she sheds her screen name and becomes George Harrison Apostol, daughter to rock legend Pablo Apostol (Joey de Leon), sister to up and coming rockers, and victim to an ex-boyfriend who replaced her for her best friend. One night like all the other nights where she disparages playboys and heartbreakers on air, she advises Melissa (Megan Young), a listener who becomes fed up with the flirtatious ways of her boyfriend (Anderson), to terminate the relationship, not knowing that that night’s advice would lead her to rediscovering the pleasures of falling in love.

The world that De la Torre sets his romance in is addicted to love. This is a world of late-night workers, of students studying in the wee hours of the morning, of night-owls, all of whom spend their evenings either struggling through their current love problems or quenching their thirst for romance through the disembodied voices sharing their misery to the world. This is a world that has gone cynical because of the abundance of heartaches and heartbreaks. It is a world that is ripe and perfect for that sudden change of perspective, a miracle. The film, moving in the way like most romantic comedies of its like do which is predictably towards a happily-ever-after ending instead of a more realistic conclusion, feels apt in its both its manner and motivation. Its insistence on love’s perfection is an aberration in its milieu characterized by the advertisement of love’s pains and treacheries.

Won’t Last a Day Without You culminates in the revelation of DJ Haidee as someone as normal as the rest of the city who rely on her for certain logic in their romance. It climaxes in the revelation of love as not a private concern pertaining only to the lovers involved. It is has other stakeholders. It also involves the rest of the world who are either in love or in love with being in love, rendered into a community by the airwaves that have brought their needs and concerns in overwhelming union. Admittedly, like the Carpenters’ song from which it borrows its title, the film is more sap than substance. However, there is definitely nothing stopping anybody from being beholden to its adorable whims and charms.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (2011)

Rabu, 07 Desember 2011

Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (2011)

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

Most famous for the several short films which displayed a very casual understanding of the idiosyncrasies of Filipino life without relying heavily on cheap charms, Antoinette Jadaone has been regarded by the late Alexis Tioseco as the person that is most qualified to give Filipino mainstream filmmaking that much-needed burst of novel inspiration. Tioseco’s observations are very much valid, considering that Jadaone’s shorts are all tightly packaged confections that marry the popular appeal of mainstream escapist entertainment and the unique wit of more adventurous fare. The only concern remaining is whether or not Jadaone can replicate and sustain the irresistible charms of her short films in a feature length film. Fortunately, Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay is more than enough proof that she can.

Lilia Cuntapay, the film’s endearing subject, is the perennial extra, playing nameless characters in various films. Perhaps because of her distinctly memorable features, she has been type-casted to play hags or ghosts in horror films. Cuntapay is actually most famous for having a face that is easier to recall than her name. Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay springs from that unique fame of Cuntapay, opening with a montage of popular actors and directors who have all worked with Cuntapay who can’t seem to recall who Lilia Cuntapay is, until Peque Gallaga, who discovered Cuntapay while shooting one of the episodes of Shake Rattle & Roll 2 (Gallaga and Lore Reyes, 1990), breaks the name’s supposed unfamiliarity to describe Cuntapay’s strange appeal.

Set in a fictional scenario wherein Cuntapay gets a very surprising nomination as Best Supporting Actress, a filmmaker (played by Jadaone) ventures into Cuntapay’s neighborhood to document Cuntapay’s life a few days prior to the awards night. The film follows Cuntapay as she goes to work to play another nameless role for a television melodrama, or as she excitedly sets up a viewing event for her first-ever interview for a popular primetime news program, or as she tearfully recounts her memorable past few days to her stepdaughter who lives in Canada.

Despite the numerous humorous depictions of a woman who has always settled to be in the fringes of an industry whose main currency is popularity, the film remains a very human portrait of Cuntapay, who suddenly finds herself in the brink of her long-ambitioned recognition. Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay succeeds not only because it seamlessly merges fact and fiction or because it manages to tackle a personality who exists in the margins of Filipino pop culture within a context of absolute familiarity but because it is genuinely touching. As the film reveals Cuntapay’s other sides, as longing mother to an absentee stepdaughter, as dutiful mentor to her patient assistant (Geraldine Villamil), as a beloved and loving neighbor, it graduates from merely being just a witty and hilarious satire into something more worthwhile, more enduring.

Jadaone may have just made the quintessential Filipino underdog movie. Cuntapay is in fact the quintessential Filipino underdog. She struggles in a world of pretty faces, supple breasts, and pleasant gestures, despite the fact that she is the epitome of the complete opposite of what her world values the most. She is someone to be rooted for, not exactly to be given the fame and fortune luckier talents would normally aim for but only to be recognized, to be given a permanent place in that world she has devoted her life and uniqueness to but cannot give the same devotion to her. Jadaone’s film, rooted in that fantasy that someone who has persisted for so long like Lilia Cuntapay may actually cross-over to be pitted against established and talented actresses in a glittery awards ceremonies, is a heartfelt tribute to each and every person who dared to dream dreams as big (and probably far-fetched) as the ones dreamt by Lilia Cuntapay.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Big Boy (2011)

Senin, 21 November 2011

Big Boy (2011)

Big Boy (Shireen Seno, 2011)

We live in the present, for the future. The past only becomes part of the present through memories, which are but figments of the imagination, collections of reality as perceived, designed and fashioned by the creative mind. Memories are never conjured spontaneously. They are urged, perhaps, through people, objects, faces, or emotions. It is this very malleable aspect of memories that makes them infinitely fascinating. We trust them but never fully, knowing that they are hardly objective, rarely completely reliable. They are dreams dreamt while awake. They are preludes to a trance subsisting on pain, joy, and everything else that have become requisite ingredients of evoking nostalgia.

Shireen Seno’s Big Boy is a film that lives up to the feeling of being in a trance, of being transported in a place that could only exist within the boundaries of the mind. While familiar and unfamiliar episodes of somebody else’s childhood flicker on screen, its audience’s very memories are urged, eliciting emotions that are at once both daunting and comforting. Adapted from Seno’s own memories of her childhood in the province, the film’s plot details the experiences of a boy who is routinely stretched and served with fish oil by her parents so that he can be tall enough to be the poster boy for their business of selling fish oil.

True to the very element of memories that Seno attempts to replicate in the film, the plot is overtly disjointed, with points voluntarily left unseen, untold and unexplained like events consciously forgotten for whatever reason. Apparently, the film has bigger ambitions than merely telling a very personal story. In fact, the way the story was told with points consciously left out alludes to the limitations of memories, how some events, especially those done in repetition or coupled with violence or other things that would render them indelible, become ironclad memories and how some are simply forgotten.

The film attempts to replicate remembering, where sights and sounds are products of the imagination rather than of the senses. Cinema however is an art that is reliant on the senses, making it Seno’s task to create in her film sights and sounds that resemble the ones seen and heard by the mind during the act of remembering. Shot in Super8, the film persists as a lyrical artifact of a forgotten era. The soft daytime hues, the kerosene lamp-lit nights, and the timeless Mindoro town become relatable images of a collective past. Conversations are inaccurately dubbed, with conversations jumping from Tagalog to the local dialect seemingly unplanned.

Seno regards memories as imperfectly crafted episodes. She pinpoints to the idea of remembering as a very personal effort, modified in time by the vast differences, whether in morality, politics, beliefs, the language spoken and other things, of the person remembering during the time when the event happened and the time when the event is remembered. Memories, in a way, are akin to fiction. Although more grounded on actual events than ordinary imagined stories, memories are still just fragments of the reality that gave birth to them. Big Boy, in that sense, with its very intimate story of a town still enamored by its past as an American colony, weaves memories and fiction together into an intoxicating portrait of a people who are unable to forget.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Boundary (2011)

Selasa, 08 November 2011

Boundary (2011)

Boundary (Benito Bautista, 2011)

Confined mostly within the very small spaces provided for by the cabs, taxi drivers live lives that are well-suited for cinema. Although they are forced to interact with people of various personalities, needs and intentions, this human interaction is limited to services being offered and stories being shared in the interim. They are constantly embattled, by drowsiness when forced to drive nights, by paranoia when a particular passenger raises suspicions, by desperation when the shift’s earnings are not enough to cover the cab owner’s quota leaving them with hardly any income to live with. Within the rigid confines of their cabs and their means of livelihood, they witness, either through the endless tirades of newscasters in the radio programs they listen to or through actual experiences, the worst of what a corrupt society can deal to a person.

Boundary starts ominously. Coke Polipata’s violin wails in the background as a dishevelled and obviously paranoia-stricken cab driver (Ronnie Lazaro) opts for a snack in what seems to be an ironically idyllic riverside park. Within the first few minutes of the film, director Benito Bautista orchestrates a view of Manila that is intriguingly unhinged. He carefully sows the seeds of suspicion, which will eventually color the atmosphere of the film. The film retreats from the temporary comforts of day as it follows the cab driver as he plies the crowded streets of Manila well into the night. At this juncture, Bautista allows a glimpse of the city from a distance and away the jaded eyes of his overworked protagonist, evoking a certain calm amidst the chaos of the city before plunging his viewers into a more intimate yet intense look of how that seemingly disconnected bigger picture finds its way into the most contained of spaces.

From then on, Bautista follows the cab driver as he picks up a well-dressed man (Raymond Bagatsing) who asks to be driven to nearby Antipolo. Beneath exteriors defined by random acts of decency and conversations marked by normalcy, both the driver and his passenger are in fact brewing plans of their own.

The action is mostly set inside the cab, with the storytelling done mostly through the conversations the cab driver has with his passenger and the characterization limited to the stories relayed, the mannerisms, gestures, and other occasional quirks. The paranoia Bautista invested in early on manages to color the prolonged sequences within the cramped interior of the cab with tremendous foreboding, carrying the film despite being constricted with its location with a sizeable portion of uneasiness and tension. From within the cab, safety from the viciousness of the street is in fact an illusion as desperation creeps into the picture, forcing the cab driver to survive amidst all odds.

Boundary falters only in narrative logic. Bautista succeeds in establishing the dangers of uncertainty in the familiar. However, the screenplay, which Bautista co-wrote with John Bedia, is peppered with holes, raising more questions of logistics and practicality rather than answering them. This, of course, is a minor and forgivable problem considering that everything else seems so masterfully orchestrated, from Bolipata and Paolo Peralta’s unsettling score to McCoy Ternate’s aptly economic cinematography to Chuck Gutierrez’s intelligent editing. In the end, Bautista has crafted a firm and suspenseful thriller whose clever twist in the end puts both perspective and pertinence to its constricting but intriguingly exciting process.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

No Other Woman (2011)

Minggu, 30 Oktober 2011

No Other Woman (2011)

No Other Woman (Ruel Bayani, 2011)

Ruel Bayani’s No Other Woman has supposedly earned for itself the distinction of being the highest grossing Filipino movie of all time, for now. It’s essentially about marital infidelity, tackling the sordid turns in a married couple’s life when another girl enters frame. The premise alone makes it an unlikely crowd-drawer. However, the movie is designed for commercial success, featuring pretty faces and sexy bodies living and breathing in places that are seemingly removed from the reality that its targeted audience should be familiar with. It’s essentially escapist fare, piling gloss upon gloss to arrive at a final product that resembles the tacky front cover of a random lousy romance novel.

Ram (Derek Ramsey) has been selected to supply furniture to a luxury resort, where he meets Kara (Anne Curtis), the daughter of the resort owner. The two start an affair. Charmaine, Ram’s wife, starts to become suspicious and eventually discovers the affair, forcing her to compete for her husband’s attention. The story’s quite thin, riddled only by extraneous complications involving the characters’ familial histories, supposedly adding depth to the characters’ convictions and motivations. Unfortunately, the characters, despite all the needless details, are nothing more than caricatures that are meant to be objectified.

Although the movie parades with the sheen of seriousness and importance it borrows from its subject matter, it sometimes resolves to treat the subject matter with disarming humor. The movie shines when it is upfront with this irreverence, such as when the movie’s internal rules of fate and circumstance connive to have the wife and the paramour meet each other in the mall while wearing outfits of the same hue, with both of them bursting in the seams with knowledge of each other’s secrets, throwing each other one-liners with irresistible double-meanings. Joey Gosiengfiao is an obvious reference. However, Bayani seems unable to completely surrender to the pleasures and sophistications of camp, making his movie an unwieldy and inconsistent romp that leads essentially to something that is best described as dull, ordinary, and ultimately offensive to the intellect.

The movie is mired by an utter lack of integrity. It is unable to decide what it wants to be, a persisting problem of movies produced by mainstream studios whose addiction with formula and morally and socially acceptable but completely illogical endings has ruined nearly most of their films. Kara, a promising character who represents the Filipino woman that is uncharacteristically not beholden to marital vows and declares herself immune to love and guilt, unfortunately drowns in remorse, betraying whatever complexity the character has. The marriage of Ram and Charmaine, in what seems like a product of the director and his writers’ chronic lack of imagination, is as good as new. Even more bizarre is the resolution wherein the married couple actually becomes civil with the woman who nearly threatened their relationship, completely forgetting all the shouting sprees and the violent catfights.

It is as if nothing happened, and the entire ordeal is simply an avenue to learn lessons in life and gain new friends. I don’t even see why Bayani bothered to tell that story of infidelity at all, if infidelity turns out to be that inconsequential, that negligible. But then again, there’s big money to be made serving junk in pretty platters.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Mapang-akit (2011)

Sabtu, 22 Oktober 2011

Mapang-akit (2011)

Mapang-akit (John Torres, 2011)

In 2009, directors John Torres and Frosti Runolfsson, participants in DOX:LAB which endeavors to partner Scandinavian filmmakers with Middle-Eastern, Asian or African filmmakers for a film project, ventured into rural Antique to document the hudas-hudas, a practice done in a small town in the province every Black Saturday where an effigy of Judas is hanged and burned in the town center. Mapang-akit, assembled from footage that was unused for the documentary, may be accused as a mere product of afterthought. Fortunately, it is as gorgeous as it is anomalous, an alluring and exhilarating mix of communal and personal mythology, of documentary filmmaking and fictional storytelling, and finally, of the overtly banal and the subtly sublime.

Mapang-akit owes much to Torres’ creative process in Ang Ninanais (Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song, 2010), where he made use of footage gathered while shooting in Panay Island. Everything, from people, stories, history, and language become separate components that are assembled to complete a whole that while reminiscent of its individual parts is clearly and convincingly different. Interestingly missing in the film however are Torres’ voice-over and poetry, marking a movement for Torres towards a storytelling style where he does not feature as a main element. What essentially remains is an idea that is just as personal as all the other ideas that populated all of his shorts and features, germinated from local myths and realized through astute artistry into a dazzling portrait of a woman adored and envied for her beauty and scorned for her being.

It is a lovely-looking film, relatable considering that what Torres primarily captures are random images of provincial life, but enveloped by some sort of supernatural gleam. People talk. Their discussions are kept secret, even to Torres, by the foreignness of their spoken dialect. With only the rhythms and melodies of what is heard from the villagers, Torres tells a very loose story of an alluring woman who has enchanted local men who mysteriously die through subtitles that do not correspond with what is actually being said.

Mapang-akit benefits much from the randomness of how things unfold, which seems rooted to the film’s formerly documentary intentions. The camera is curiously observant, reacting to the most delicate of details like the sudden gush of wind, the musical invites of a passing ice cream vendor, a random carabao that becomes curiously attracted to the act of being recorded on film. There is always that sense of being within the film as opposed to being mere unaffected onlookers, making the film unusually compelling despite the seeming mundaneness of everything.

While it is unavoidable that ethical questions are raised since the subjects are not actors who are portraying fictional characters, Torres never claims to tell the truth as most of the world normally sees it. Truth, after all, is sometimes overrated, especially when heartlessly removed from what should be a truly personal experience. Instead, he paints very personal dreams and visions on a canvas made from the visual and aural landscapes of hid footage, making the province’s dormancy irresistibly seductive and its unravelling mysteries oddly romantic.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Buenas Noches, España (2011)

Kamis, 20 Oktober 2011

Buenas Noches, España (2011)

Buenas Noches, España (Raya Martin, 2011)

What separates Earth from space? If we are to base it from what could arguably be the most famous sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), it is a speedy ride along a futuristic highway. The sequence, around five minutes in length, oddly switching from black and white to color, and uses a Tokyo highway to pass for the futuristic highway, approximates the experience of travel, more specifically, space travel. Stripped of the usual pleasures of escapist science fiction where space travel is always depicted to be exciting or intriguing, Tarkovsky’s concept of space travel is more grounded, evoking a sense of displacement, awkwardness, even boredom. In a way, Tarkovsky has injected cinematic space travel with much-needed honesty, much-needed humanity.

What then separates now from then? Time travel is nothing new in cinema. Yet the actual experience of time travel has always been curiously neglected. At most, we have gotten ourselves satisfied by seeing speeding cars disappearing in the sky, or sparks and bolts of electricity appearing as kitschy contraptions are turned on. However, what actually happens to the human being that is transported back in time is left to the fringes of the imagination, unfairly blanketed by extraneous depictions of characters and things disappearing supposedly back in time. So if we are to base it from Raya Martin’s Buenas Noches, España, what separates now from then are not sparkles or random disappearances, it is reality-altering drugs and a lot of it.

The seemingly random events of Buenas Noches, España is grounded on one exposition, that on 1593, a Filipino soldier stationed in Manila suddenly vanishes and wakes up in Mexico City. Martin establishes several things through the anecdote. One, that non-traditional travel exists. Two, that there is an inherent connection between and among Spain and all of its former colonies. From those starting points, Martin places two lovers (Pilar Lopez de Ayala and Andres Gertrudix) in a trip across Spain, across time, and elsewhere. The footage of the couple are heavily processed, played and replayed in various tints of red, blue and yellow, accompanied by a perpetual droning and strategically placed sound effects from slapstick cartoons of the past.

Martin replicates the experience of being under the influence of drugs. He also replicates the feeling of being lost in time, seeing scenes played a few moments ago played again and again with various details changed, and listening to sounds that evoke reminiscence of carefree childhood. Being in the influence of drugs and time travel, although at first glance are two very different experiences, are actually interchangeable, giving Martin’s proposition logical sense, and very personal sense, too, since drug influence and time travel are both panacea to heartache, allowing a person an option to forget and to make what has been made permanent by the movement of time more or less malleable. Thus, the lovers seem to be in incomparable bliss being in that state of temporal randomness, oblivious of where they are and where they are going.

Curiously absent from the couple’s ecstatic trip is the Philippines, past or present. A visit to the museum would reveal artifacts from Spain’s past as colonial master: various paintings by Juan Luna, a Filipino artist who won various prizes for his paintings while sojourning in Europe with various other Filipino intellectuals. The sight of the paintings is sobering to both the lovers and Martin. From the vapid goofing around the museum’s various chambers, the lovers are mysteriously awestruck and emotional, as if reminded of a closeted fact in history. Martin slows down too, relaxing the editing, substituting the heavy drone with ominous silence, and settles with black and white visuals. The sudden break is strange but fitting, alluding to a shared history between countries, finally establishing that long lost thread that will finally connect present and past, and Spain and its former colony.

Buenas Noches, España is more frustrating than it is pleasurable. It is more experiential than intellectual. Just as Tarkovsky has created the most precise cinematic equivalent of space travel, Martin has created the most precise cinematic equivalent of being stuck in time, immobilized by some obsession with the past, with history, never moving forward, never moving backward.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

San Lazaro (2011)

Selasa, 11 Oktober 2011

San Lazaro (2011)

San Lazaro (Wincy Ong, 2011)

If Wincy Ong’s San Lazaro were a student in a classroom full of recent films from the Philippines, which necessarily includes important works from Lav Diaz, Raya Martin and Brillante Mendoza, it would probably be sitting in the back, an unnoticeable weirdo among the overachievers and underachievers that fill the room. It is a film that does not seem to belong to the room, given that it is inherently oblivious to anything and everything that is supposed to be pertinent to the so-called new wave in Philippine cinema, except to the irreverence and humor that persists in the cinema even amidst its usual heft and seriousness.

It is not that the film lacks ambition or rejects relevance or that ambition and relevance are essential elements of films. San Lazaro disguises itself as horror yet it is most apparent that its primary purpose is not to shock or scare. It is intriguingly unhinged, with characters that are grounded more on humorous illogic than common sense. In a way, Ong has crafted a film that is reminiscent of David Lynch’s works, except that it is fuelled by artificial uppers instead of the usual dreams, nightmares and other insanity-induced things. There’s probably a tad more self-conscious wit and weirdness than needed, but it never crosses-over to being something that is more annoying or frustrating than entertaining.

The story’s simple enough. Sigfried (Ong), a random loser who has contented himself by learning useless skills from YouTube, is suddenly plucked from his uneventful existence by Limuel (Ramon Bautista), his previous classmate whom he has not communicated with since their school days, to bring Limuel’s brother (Nicco Manalo), who seems to be possessed by some sort of evil spirit, to his uncle (Allan Forte), a singing exorcist, in the faraway town of San Lazaro. It’s basically a road movie, peppered with details that make it delightfully off-tangent and curiously engaging.

Ong and Bautista’s odd coupling undoubtedly highlights the experience. It’s a grand balancing act they admirably commit to. Wearing sheens of fantabulous seriousness, the two prance around in the obviously made-up world where everything is not exactly topsy-turvy but deliciously creeping its way there. There is always that sense that everything is an inside joke, yet Ong and Bautista are formidable in their ploy, resulting in cautious giggles. The other characters that populate that world are mostly oddballs and other contrivances, teasing the audience of many more stories that have not been told, and seemingly conspirators with Ong and Bautista in what could either be a well-orchestrated prank or a product of tilted genius.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me (2011)

Sabtu, 01 Oktober 2011

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me (2011)

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me (Erick Salud, 2011)

English Title: Star-Crossed Love

Philippine cinema has never been one that is deeply related with literature. Except for adaptations of Jose Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, Francisco Baltazar’s Florante at Laura, and other revered texts of national importance, adaptations are mostly limited to popular comics and romance novels. Perhaps the reason why there is that gaping separation between cinema and literature in the country is because literature, except for the texts that are used for school and the comics and romance novels that are used for escapism, is unprofitable. Consequently, cinema based on literature is also unprofitable, catering only to the sophisticated and the learned elite and not to the general movie-going populace.

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me (Star-Crossed Love), based on Eros Atalia’s bestselling short novel of the same title, attempts to close the gap between literature and cinema. Atalia’s novel is by no means the type of literature that would incite deep thinking or debates. It is populist in both style and intention making it the perfect text for a film adaptation that would have a semblance of commercial appeal without being just purely escapist.

Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me was obviously written to appeal to the younger generation, with Intoy (played charmingly in the film by Edgar Allan Guzman), an ordinary student who enters into a secret sexual relationship with Jenny (played in the film by Mercedes Cabral), a transferee from a private school who instantly becomes the school’s resident bombshell, representing the typical Filipino youth who is has become more open to loose sexual attitudes without losing appreciation for the necessities of a fulfilling romance.

Jerry Gracio’s screenplay is very faithful to Atalia’s novel, appropriating even the mental monologues of the main character in the novel as voice-overs. Director Erick Salud is very faithful to Gracio’s screenplay, keeping the voice-overs and the other playful excesses while managing to ably tell the story in the simplest way possible. In a sense, both Gracio and Salud become victims of undue reverence to a source material that would probably work film-wise with modifications in both storytelling and style.

It is all cute at first. Sex has never been a serious proposition for Filipinos. Sex has been quite the favorite punchline for skits and jokes. There is therefore a very wicked sense of accuracy as to how Intoy’s sexual awakening is depicted with cartoonish humor and irreverence. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t know how to grow up. It never graduates from being just an effective sitcom. In fact, aside from the flourishes that infrequently adorn certain scenes, the film is mostly visually drab and almost always aurally annoying, like a hurried locally-produced television show.

When Intoy and Jenny’s relationship evolve from being simply limited within the confines of their afternoon’s motel room into something that is supposedly painfully complicated, humor gets in the way of communicating the turmoil. Their romance, the intricacies of their relationship, and the eventual ache of their inevitable separation and the hopeful reunion are drowned amidst all the needless noise and clutter, betraying the film’s attempts to convince its audience that there is something more to the seductive sex talk, to the lousily staged sex scenes, to the humorous stabs at the suddenly lopsided roles of young Filipino men and women when it comes to sex, to the never-ending supply of colloquial wit, to the endless and tedious monologues. There’s really enough to love in Ligo na Ü, Lapit na Me. Unfortunately, there’s also enough to dislike.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Rakenrol (2011)

Rabu, 28 September 2011

Rakenrol (2011)

Rakenrol (Quark Henares, 2011)

Rakenrol is a lot of firsts for its director, Quark Henares. It is his first feature film to be produced and directed independent of any major studio backing. It is his feature first film to be completely free from any genre limitations. It is also his first feature film after the untimely death of his most loyal supporter and most honest critic, Alexis Tioseco, to which he dedicates the film as a partial fulfilment to one of Tioseco’s famous wishes for Philippine Cinema.

Gamitan (2002), produced by Viva, was clearly bankrolled to maximize the very popular sex appeal of Maui Taylor, who pumped fresh blood and class to the waning genre of titillating films that dominated Philippine cinema in the last few years of the last century and the first few years of the new millennium. Keka (2003), also produced by Viva in an effort to launch the career of Katya Santos, another one of its up and coming sexy actresses, is a revenge film, in the same vein as Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood (1973) and Lino Brocka’s Angela Markado (Angela the Marked One, 1980). Wag Kang Lilingon (Don't Look Back, 2006), a horror film which Henares co-directed with Jerry Lopez Sineneng, is co-produced by Viva with Star Cinema. Super Noypi (2006), produced by Regal Films for the Metro Manila Film Festival, is a mash-up of sci-fi and superhero elements to unwieldy results.

Rakenrol evidently has all the heart a filmmaker can ever give his film, with storylines that are partly or wholly based on actual events and cameos of Henares’ friends and heroes. Henares has clearly taken independence seriously, showering his film with the little things that made his previous films work beyond their respective genres. It overflows with so much heart, its humor and unsubtle odes to whoever and whatever may tend to be alienating. Absent of any real genre, of an actual framework to work with, of self-control, the film doesn’t really have a story to stand on, just a flimsy tale of idealistic youngsters wanting to form a rock band called Hapipaks and in the process of doing so, form life-long friendships and romantic links with each other

It could have worked better if the flimsy tale were driven by real characters instead of just stereotypes and mockeries. It also does not help that the entire film rests upon the shoulders of Jason Abalos, who is unable to turn the character of Odie, the soft-spoken lead guitarist of Hapipaks, into anything more than the typical boy-next-door who happens to have a guitar on his hands. That Glaiza de Castro, who manages to inject Irene, the swoony Hapipaks lead singer with palpable sincerity amidst the film’s unabashed caricature of everything.

Ketchup Eusebio and Alwyn Uytingco, who play the other Hapipaks bandmembers, valiantly make most of their underdeveloped and over-typecasted characters. Ramon Bautista, who plays the self-absorbed director of the Hapipaks music video, Jun Sabayton, who plays misunderstood avant-garde artist, and Diether Ocampo, who plays Odie’s cocky rival to Irene’s heart, are more comedic acts than actual characters you care to love or hate. The film is unfortunately filled to the brim with characters, including the famous Ely Buendia who is reduced to play an inspirational deus ex machina, who serve no real purpose other than as arguably unsuccessful attempts at irreverence or just clutter.

Logic and the advertised promises of working with full independence dictate that outside the fences forced by his collaborations with commercial film studios, Henares would be able to create a masterpiece, or at the very least, a very good very personal film. Unfortunately, Rakenrol is hardly a masterpiece. Although it is indeed a very personal work, it feels more than a little bit scattered, with the story never evolving to be either the quintessential movie about the Philippine rock scene or to be one truly charming romance. With the way it seems to slide out of more interesting conflicts with humor and satire, the film seems to delight in its manufactured weightlessness, never really achieving anything except perhaps for personal nostalgia, and needless tons of it.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Elehiya sa Dumalaw Mula sa Himagsikan (2011)

Minggu, 11 September 2011

Elehiya sa Dumalaw Mula sa Himagsikan (2011)

Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan (Lav Diaz, 2011)

English Title: Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution

Originally planned as a one minute short for Nikalexis.MOV, a program of short films dedicated to the memory of slain critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc that featured short works by directors like Raymond Red, Rico Maria Ilarde and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz’s Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan (Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution) grew both in length and concept, turning into a film that is ponderous and perplexing but is still grounded on very familiar emotions of melancholy and despair. It is undoubtedly a film that sprung from spontaneity, with Diaz literally writing the film as he was shooting it with a cast of actors and friends who are willing and ready to take in complex roles in a very short period of time.

Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-paro (Butterflies have no Memories, 2009), Diaz’s one-hour meditation on the moral and environmental changes in an abandoned mining town in the island of Marinduque, is evident in its struggle to communicate the spare and pained aesthetics that Diaz is most famous for within an hour. As a result, the film feels unduly hurried, rushing to arrive at its beautiful conclusion. On the other hand, Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan, despite clocking at only one hour and twenty minutes, is deliberately structured and less beholden to its narrative. The film is told in three parts, with each part pertaining to each of the three visits of the time-travelling visitor from when the country was fighting for independence from Spain.

The three parts are themselves divided into seemingly incongruent storylines. A prostitute (Sigrid Bernardo) patiently waits for a customer. A musician (Diaz) plays various melodies for nobody. Three petty criminals (Dante Perez, Evelyn Vargas, and Joel Ferrer) are preparing for a heist. A woman (Hazel Orencio) from the country’s past suddenly appears in a busy marketplace, venturing then to fountains, rivers and other watery places. The storylines eventually converge, revealing characters whose lives are consumed by desperation, forcing them to venture into territories that compromise relationships and whatever remains of their fractured humanity.

Clearly, the prostitute and the petty criminals, with their botched attempt to drift out of their sorry lots, are only victims of a country that has sadly devolved from what it was originally intended to be by the revolutionaries who risked lives for freedom. Diaz does not create characters that are evil by nature. Like the trio of kidnappers of Walang Alaala ang mga Paru-paro, the ox-cart driver of Heremias (2006), or the displaced farmer and miner of Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004), his characters are drawn to extreme actions naturally by an evil society, corrupted by systems that have remained unchanged or adopted through several years of abject complacency or lack of identity.

In one of the rare close-ups in Diaz’s entire filmography, the visitor from the past directly looks at the audience, her face aching with heavy emotions of regret and sadness, the same regret and sadness that pervades the musician’s solitary strumming. It is a hauntingly beautiful dream sequence, unsettling in the way it directly confronts with images bursting with the most wistful of emotions. Dreams are said to be products of unprocessed memories. The dream in Diaz’s film seems to be the product of a nation’s unprocessed memories, burdened with a decades’ worth of tireless but unmerited struggles.

Elehiya sa Dumalaw mula sa Himagsikan is clearly Diaz’s lament to what the country and its citizens have become. More importantly, it is also his ode to those who continue with the revolution, notwithstanding their songs being unheard, their images being unseen, and their impassioned calls being unfelt. It is everything Diaz stands for. It is everything Tioseco stood and wished for.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)