The Sound of 100 Bakyas Stomping

Dudes in Distress

2012-02-13T08:05:00.000-08:00

When women are imperiled in the movies, the dilemma is often presented in a straightforward way. Perhaps it's because of their perceived fragility, perhaps it's because of that pesky societal need to cast them as the weaker sex, perhaps it's because they're more attuned to their emotions, but when women are faced with life-threatening perils in the movies, they appreciate the width, breadth, and depth of the danger--whether it's a homicidal maniac in a ghost mask or little creepie-crawlies in the basement or even a perverse Swedish social worker--and can set about saving their asses without wading through a ton of issues.

Men, on the other hand, can't even begin to acknowledge that they're vulnerable, much less imperiled. How many husbands or boyfriends have you seen scoff while their wives and girlfriends tremulously insist that there's something malevolent circling 'round the child of the house? How many men insist that their brawn and rationality will save the day before the bodies start piling up? How many women have complained in movies and TV that their guys won't stop to ask for directions when they're so obviously lost?

A map is only one of the things the desperate men of The Grey need after a plane crash deposit them in the icy Alaskan wilderness and right inside the territory of a ravenous pack of wolves. Liam Neeson plays Ottway, a sharpshooter paid by oil companies to protect their rigs from marauding wildlife. Ottway assumes leadershipof the ragtag band of survivors, which of course includes a blowhard ex-convict (Frank Grillo) who insists that he isn't scared of the lupine threat. Until a wolf tries to chomp on him in the middle of a campfire throwdown with the gruff Irish wildlife expert.

Looking at the trailer, you'd think The Grey continues in the recent vein of Neeson's career, movies where he plays a brooding man of action who saves his daughter (Taken) or fights to reclaim his identity (Unknown). In fact, the final shot of the trailer above is a literal interpretation of the psychic space Neeson's most recent roles occupy: strapping some broken bottles to his fist and brnadishing a hunting knife in his other hand, his protagonists charge at the danger head-on.

But the truth is, The Grey is nothing like Neeson's most recent movies. Directed by The A-Team's Joe Carnahan, the film starts out occupying Ottway's head as he revisits memories of his wife and father in sun-dappled rooms and quoting plangent Irish poetry. From melancholy, we go to bleak, as Ottway's companions are picked off one by one--if not by the CGI-constructed wolves, then by various misfortunes like disease or flimsy, makeshift ropes. In fact, The Grey insists on "ennobling" its bloody spurts of violence with so much existential moping that you kinda miss the mindless forward momentum of uncomplicated actioners like Taken.

Fortunately, Safe House is as uncomplicated as they get...or as uncomplicated as an action thriller featuring a rogue CIA operative with questionable motives can be. Denzel Washington plays Tobin Frost, who has gone underground in Cape Town to purchase an incendiary file of intelligence wrongdoings, and is then forced to seek refuge in the US Embassy when his foes chase him. The suits at Langley deposit him in a safe house run by a rookie agent named Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), who has been vegetating at his post for a year. When the safe house goes under attack, Weston is forced to take on the dangerous assignment of transporting his "guest" to another safe house out in the boonies of South Africa. Betrayals and shadowy allegiances come to light.

The director Daniel Espinosa shoots his standard action set pieces in saturated color meant to evoke the grittiness of superior films like City of God, and he edits footage the way you would scramble an egg. But really, the central mystery of Safe House--who is behind the seemingly inside-job-ish attack on the safe house?--isn't much of a puzzle. Which leaves the relationship between our two embattled leads: one a bona fide protagonist (Reynolds), the other a sketchy anti-hero (Washington). Reynolds is going for the male equivalent of the trembling ingenue--the rookie who is schooled in the harsher realities of the job by life-threatening events--while Washington harks back to the ambiguity of his Oscar-winning performance in Training Day. But really, the two seem to be acting in two parallel universes: Reynolds is one-note, and Washington tries to inject a gravitas, a kind of epic tragedy, to an action thriller that just wants to blow stuff up. No more, no less.

Meanwhile, as its title implies, Man on a Ledge seems to be a pretty straightforward proposition: A wrongfully convicted New York policeman (Sam Worthington) perches himself outside a hotel highrise window to declare his innocence. But much like The Grey's trailer, Man on a Ledge isn't all it's cracked up to be. It turns out that the suicide spectacle is actually a diversion for a heist occurring in an adjacent building that's been hatched to expose the real evildoers in the case that sent our hero to jail in the first place.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am a Sam Worthington fan. He has that pleasing Everyman/Aussie bloke quality about him. You can tell that he has a bit of a gut (displayed to greatest advantage most recently during a Jay Leno guesting, where he decided to wear an ill-advised Hawaiian shirt that was two sizes too small for him), and even when he plays gruff and macho, there's a sincere vulnerability in his eyes that tells you he's not afraid to feel. (And judging by the Lethal Weapon-era Mel Gibson mullet he sports in Man on a Ledge, you can tell he's not afraid to look like a bit of a twat, either.)

But this character, given context by all the logic-bending diversions roiling around him, is in essence, another delusion guys take refuge behind when the shit hits the fan: I'm not a Dude in Distress; I'm actually a Man with a Plan. Put another way, it's the illusion of control--rather than the actual possession of control--that truly endangers.

It's the same dilemma faced by Arthur Kipps, the beleaguered lawyer Daniel Radcliffe plays in his first post-Harry Potter film The Woman in Black. The film is a pleasant enough return to horror movies that traffic in implied menace and atmosphere, as opposed to torture porn entries like the Saw movies or found footage movies like The Devil Inside that purport to be documenting real events by virtue of their jittery camera work. As a horror movie aficionado myself, it's nice to surrender oneself to the manipulations of a filmmaker like James Watkins, who makes use of every trick in the arsenal--music, lighting, the things he leaves out of the frame as much as the stuff he decides to show--even if the tools he's working with are pretty standard for a haunted-house story (gray, misty weather; creepy toys; inexplicably hostile townspeople). Personally, the element I like the best is the inky, opaque darkness at the end of the upstairs hall that Daniel Radcliffe constantly turns to with a lump in his throat. It's the darkness that refuses to give anything away that you know has a doozy to unleash.

Kipps has come to a remote town in the English countryside to sort out the real estate papers of a woman who owns a notorious house out in the marshes. Of course, he makes the groan-inducing decision of working overnight in the haunted abode, when perfectly comfortable lodgings are being offered in town by the requisite wealthy couple (The Debt's Ciaran Hinds and Albert Nobbs' Janet McTeer)--never mind if the wife often suffers photogenic fugue states where she etches prophetic scrawls on the villa's woodwork and masonry. It turns out that the titular spectre is the ultimate attention whore: It's only when someone sees her that the town's children die gruesome deaths, hence the townspeople's increasingly hostile entreaties for the clueless lawyer to return to London posthaste.

Herein lies the problem with ghost stories. In the end, it's all a bunch of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, and the dude in distress who fancies himself a man with a plan ends up fighting an opponent whose rules he doesn't quite understand. After skulking around the shadowy mansion holding candles aloft in one hand and an axe in the other, Kipps becomes convinced that he's found a way to set things to rights. Watkins himself can't resist throwing in a bit of funhouse gimmickry--by the film's climax, the woman in black starts charging the camera and squandering her spectral mystique. The director's labors--much like his protagonist's--ultimately end up going nowhere.

There is cluelessness afoot also in The Descendants, Alexander Payne's richly observant take on how men deal with grief and loss. It tells the story of a Hawaiian land baron named Matt King (the justly Oscar-nominated George Clooney) who, in the wake of a boating accident that leaves his wife in a coma, must now deal with the prospect of raising his daughters (the caustic and wonderful duo of Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller) alone. But when he discovers that his wife had been cheating on him, Matt's obsession to find her paramour becomes a ruefully hilarious odyssey, primarily because the audience never loses sight of what it actually is: an effort to keep sorrow from crushing him.

The Descendants is a deeply satisfying combination of the universal and the specific: the film is replete with observations both offhand (the ritual of removing sandals at the door) and wry (the politics of Hawaiian shirts) that ground the story in a distinct culture and milieu. And Clooney, while personifying Mr. Hollywood in real life, summons enough vulnerability and rumpled authenticity to embody what Payne believes to be the Endangered American Male--the species of men who now have to deal with the headache of changing gender roles and expectations. And while critics have been heaping huzzahs on Shailene Woodley's admittedly fierce and deeply felt performance, I'd like to give a shoutout to Nick Krause's wily doofus Sid, who insinuates himself into the family as a teenage boyfriend, and boasts that he cooks and has reasonable hygiene. In his dizzy surfer, Matt finds a comedic foil and a commiserating brother.

Some quarters have been grumbling that Clooney's star power eclipses any honesty his performance may aspire to. And my response is: Clooney's star power is your problem, not his. Sure, he indulges in extracurricular activities like playing the swain-about-town and working for humanitarian aid in the Sudan. He's worked his way up from thankless roles in sitcoms to enjoy his success, and more power to him. But if you're going to let his Tinseltown twinkle stop you from appreciating the abject terror he conveys as an embattled lawyer in Michael Clayton, or the wincing surprise he communicates as the disconnected corporate drone who unexpectedly finds he still has a soul in Up in the Air, then that's your loss.

There have even been criticisms leveled at the casting of Matthew Lillard as the paramour. How could Shaggy have cuckolded Mr. Hollywood? You may as well ask why Hugh Grant would be unfaithful with a Sunset Boulevard hooker when he had Elizabeth Hurley waiting for him at home. Women may be more in touch with their feelings, but in many respects they can be just as opaque--and delusional--as men.

Action Figures

2012-01-29T05:35:00.000-08:00

By the nature of the genre, action movies are designed like carnival rides: You settle in, you switch off your brain, and you let yourself be taken for a ride. That's why it's always a pleasure when an action movie--especially one released during the traditional dumping ground that is January--exerts a little bit of effort at displaying some wit. In Contraband, Mark Wahlberg trades on his up-from-the-mean-Boston-streets persona to play a retired smuggler named Chris Farrady. When his wife's (Kate Beckinsale) bumpkin of a brother (Caleb Landry Jones) gets involved in a caper gone awry, Chris is forced into an assignment to Panama City that, of course, goes wrong at practically every turn.

The wit isn't in the plotting, or even the blocking of action set pieces by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (remaking the 2008 thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam, which Kormákur produced). It's in a running joke that starts about halfway into the proceedings, when Chris and his skittish crew are forced to make a detour and help an old chum (played by Diego Luna with a convincing lived-in quality) stage a violent heist of a painting in transport. The audience sees only a corner of the paint-splattered canvas as the robbers cut it out of its frame, enough to communicate that the piece in question is a Jackson Pollock...and the guys then proceed to use the canvas as a back-of-the-van tarpaulin/rag that even the port authorities don't take a second look at! The visual gag seems to be the movie's statement that art is all about context.

Unfortunately, that artful aside doesn't have much context to work with. While Wahlberg is all pitbull energy, his co-stars Ben Foster (as a trusted colleague) and Giovanni Ribisi (as the thug who is after Wahlberg's brother-in-law and, by extension, Wahlberg's family) are largely interchangeable, playing a genus of anemic, greasy underworld denizen only separated by Ribisi's insistence on channeling Marlon Brando's accent in The Godfather. Meanwhile, as Wahlberg and his crew are stuck on a barge out at sea, Beckinsale is terrorized back on land, and the two plot threads come together in a series of wildly implausible coincidences that allow Wahlberg to turn the tables on his adversaries.

Speaking of terrorized females, Hollywood's idea of sexual equality seems to be girls kicking ass as violently as boys. That's the reductive idea that fuels Haywire, Steven Soderbergh's stylish riff on '70s exploitation heroines like Cleopatra Jones. Haywire revolves around an ex-Marine played by mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, with the exploitation-ready monicker Mallory Kane. Mallory is now working as a freelance operative for a private security firm headed by Ewan McGregor, and she has been tasked to "rescue" a missing Chinese journalist from his "captors" in Barcelona. If the quotes haven't clued you in yet, the operation isn't as cut-and-dried as it seems, and when the journalist ends up dead in a swank soirée in Dublin, Mallory is forced to go on the run, picking off the shadowy operatives who framed her.

The above trailer indicates that Soderbergh is playing with your preconceptions: What initially starts out looking like a romantic interlude between an admittedly attractive Carano and the always magnetic Michael Fassbender quickly devolves into a vicious, all-out, knock-down-drag-out fight in a Dublin hotel room. The movie is chock full of whiplash reversals like that. Whether it's a quiet diner conversation abruptly taking a left turn with hot coffee getting thrown at somebody's face, or a car chase through a snowy forest that ends with a deer smashing through a back window, or a contemplative walk on a Mexican beach that ends with a cartoonishly broken leg, Soderbergh revels in his manipulation of the audience.

Ultimately though, it is manipulation that serves no purpose other than to allow the filmmaker (famously going though a what-now phase that's supposed to lead to his retirement by January 2013) a chance to riff on the conventions of a genre just to see if he can get away with it. The script (credited to Lem Dobbs, who collaborated with Soderbergh in mid-career non-notables like Kafka and The Limey) doesn't bother to explain why a baddie named Studer (played by the French actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz) would want the Chinese journalist eliminated in the first place. There are no moral stakes or ethical dilemmas to give the proceedings some heft, and heft is the least you would expect from a movie featuring a top-heavy cast that also includes Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, and Channing Tatum.

The one bright spot is the sole rose among the thorns. Carano, in her dramatic-acting debut, displays an instinctive grasp of what it takes to shade in a character. She's sexy when she needs to be, she's bad-ass when she needs to be, and through it all she hints at subtext that she's withholding. Maybe next time she'll get to play a character that isn't all about cartoonish violence, a part that will allow her to dive under the surface...which is where Haywire, for all its sophisticated visuals and color-coded palettes, seems satisfied to stay.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is intent on diving into the deeper recesses...even when you may not want it to. Based on the 2005 best-selling serial killer novel by deceased Swedish author Stieg Larsson, the Hollywood incarnation directed by David Fincher revels in the kinky menace, the depraved sexuality, of the source material in a way the dutiful and ultimately by-the-numbers 2009 Swedish version did not.

The plot itself is a conventional whodunit, in which disgraced left-wing journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is hired to solve a locked-island mystery that has haunted a rich family for 40 years: Who killed 16-year-old Harriet Vanger, the apple of the eye of patriarch Henrik Vanger (played by Christopher Plummer in his twilight years, Julian Sands as a younger man)? Ultimately, Blomkvist is drawn into the investigation when the elder man dangles a carrot--the Vanger family has potentially damaging evidence that could put away the corrupt industrialist that disgraced him.

As Blomkvist starts to unravel family secrets while trying to keep his magazine and career afloat, the film follows a parallel thread: the travails of Lisbeth Salander, the withdrawn, 24-year-old hacker who is the novel's outlandishly Goth heroine. Where Noomi Rapace played Lisbeth as a pursed-lip punkette with a chip on her shoulder, the Oscar-nominated Rooney Mara goes all the way. The actress, who first made an impact as Mark Zuckerberg's dismissive girlfriend in the tour-de-force first scene of The Social Network, acts with a coiled, simmering rage that threatens to lash out from under her cold exterior. In her chopped bangs, bleached eyebrows, pasty-gray skin, piercings and tattoos, her combat boots held together by duct tape, Mara dares you to look while cautioning you to stay away...because it's quite conceivable that she will cut you if you lay a finger on her.

It's a piece of advice many men have ignored at their own peril. Lisbeth was institutionalized at age 12 for setting fire to her abusive gangster father, and now the social worker tasked with overseeing her finances, Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), has dared to ask for sexual favors in exchange for releasing her allowance. What starts out as coerced oral sex soon escalates into anal rape, and Fincher stages these scenes the way he would a quiet scene of pensive thought. Not just with clear-eyed, matter-of-fact directness, no. He places his camera uncomfortably close and at oblique angles to the characters' heads. He employed this same technique in Zodiac, and where in that film, the angle had the unnerving effect of blocking your view of what was happening within the rest of the frame, here it gives you the disturbing sensation of actually falling into the characters' heads, becoming privy to their depraved thoughts. It's just one of the many ways in which Fincher teases out the full perverted grandeur of Larsson's worldview. (Also watch out for a demented use of Enya's New Age anthem "Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)" during the film's climax.)

It's no wonder, then, that when Blomkvist comes knocking at Salander's door, and tells her (in a translation so clunky, it's bound to be the film's catchphrase) "I want you to help me catch a killer of women," the socially damaged genius is quickly on board. When Craig and Mara come together, the film's simmer finally starts to boil. The problem is, it doesn't happen until about an hour into the film.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo suffers from structural problems that aren't the fault of Fincher or his screenwriter Steven Zaillian. The novel itself tries to do too many things at once: It hangs a detective yarn onto a cat-and-mouse game with political overtones and a social statement about violence against women. (Some critics, this blogger included, believe that Larsson was only paying lip service to that politically correct sentiment). It spends an inordinate amount of time in exposition when it should be multi-tasking, and when the central whodunit has been solved, the denouement is a whole act unto itself, as Larsson (and the filmmakers) tie up loose ends and set up plot points for the next installment. (Zaillian wisely economizes by setting the final twist to the central investigation in an environment more organic to the plot, as opposed to the novel's John Grisham-esque flourish of sending Blomkvist on a quest across the world to the Australian outback.)

What redeems the film's clumsy plotting are the two lead actors. Daniel Craig is not only at the peak of his craggy sexiness, you can see that he is alert, ready to give as good as he gets opposite Mara's commanding performance. But make no mistake: This is Rooney Mara's movie. Once Lisbeth enters the search for Harriet Vanger's killer, the entire investigation is framed through her viewpoint, primarily because she sees the case as an extension of the abuse that she herself has endured at the hands of a sadistic, male-dominated society. While the two leads are solidly locked in for the next two films in the franchise, I ardently hope and pray that Fincher will come back and helm them both. Imagine what this master of skewed sensibilities can do with the next two novels, laser-focused as they are on Blomkvist and Salander and stripped of frou frou killer-of-women goose chases. Fincher is the director these stories deserve.

Contraband and Haywire are currently playing. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens February 1, Wednesday, and has been rated R-18 and approved without cuts--hooray!--byt the MTRCB.

Holiday Movies (Plus Oscar Nominee Predictions 2012!)

2012-01-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

To all five followers of this blog (ha-ha!), sorry for being away so long. Since my last entry nearly three months ago, I've been away on a month-long jaunt through the United States and Brazil, then been swamped by work and family crisis once I got back. But enough of lame excuses, let's get back to the reviews!

One of the best reasons to visit the States is the opportunity to see highly anticipated releases that would otherwise never see the light of a movie projector here in Manila...and on the actual date that the distributors actually intended them to be seen! On my swing through the States, I made sure to drag my hosts to at least one movie per city I visited. And so the bonus of these movies, for me at least, is that they have cherished memories attached to them, aside from the varying degrees of artistry that I had the privilege of witnessing before anyone else here in Manila:

The Ides of March. This I saw with my brother and nephew in Seattle. After leaving the cineplex (and a half-consumed tub of popcorn...boy, those Americans sure love to gorge themselves on movie snacks!), my brother called it his "kind of movie." By that I concluded that my brother likes films that riff on politics...or rather, politics as viewed through the prism of a public grown cynical from a steady diet of negative media portrayals of its partisan nature and backroom manipulations.

The Ides of March is George Clooney's fourth directorial effort after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Leatherheads, and it is easily his most pulse-pounding. While the star himself appears as Governor Mike Morris, a Democrat gunning for his party's nomination in an Ohio primary, the real protagonist of the story is Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling, in one of three sterling performances for 2011), the idealistic but also opportunistic press secretary running his campaign. Morris is gunning for the endorsement of a senator (Jeffrey Wright) whose rival delegates could seal the nomination for him. Amidst all the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, Stephen falls into an affair with a luscious intern (Evan Rachel Wood), who harbors a scandalous secret that could derail the Morris' campaign. When Stephen is unceremoniously booted out by the governor's campaign manager (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) for meeting with a counterpart(Paul Giamatti) working for Morris' most formidable opponent, Stephen contemplates using the secret first as vengeance, then as a means of leverage.

For all the speeches on a new kind of politics, it's hard to escape the notion that Morris' primary run is a cinematic representation of the idealistic Obama campaign, which might make The Ides of March , with all its cynicism, a de facto statement on the liberal Clooney's disenchantment with the current president's failed promises of reform and an end to Bush-era fierce partisanship. But now that the Republican primaries are in full swing, it's starting to dawn on me that The Ides of March is really an observation on how the process has eclipsed policy--I watch CNN's coverage of the three-way battle between Romney-Gingrich-Santorum not because of what they're saying, but for how they're elected.

And when the fuddy-duddy-looking Newt Gingrich lashes out at CNN anchor John King for beginning a presidential debate with the matter of his ex-wife alleging that the former Speaker asked her for an open marriage, it's hard not to draw parallels with George Clooney's masterful performance, where the actor trades on his sleek, Cary Grant-style charm and turns it on its head. That climactic kitchen scene is spectacular, where Clooney faces off against Gosling and the senior actor peels away his twinkling charisma to reveal a cold rage underneath. Clooney will probably get a lead nomination for his role in The Descendants, but I'll be damned if he doesn't deserve a double nod for his supporting role in the movie he himself directed.

J. Edgar. A late-night screening in San Francisco, which seems appropriate given the FBI director's long-rumored penchant for cross-dressing and tendencies toward alternate sexuality. Leonardo DiCaprio gives a stunning performance as J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau's most famous director and, in many ways, its inventor. Hoover inaugurated many of the crime-fighting techniques that we take for granted today--a database cataloguing individual fingerprints, crime scene protocols, the idea of hiring specialists well-versed in particular fields of expertise (during the investigation into the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, Hoover kept a man who knew all about different grains of wood on retainer).

The movie begins in 1919, when the 24-year-old Hoover first identifies bomb-planting Communists as the biggest threat to the American way of life. From there, the movie shifts time periods as Hoover's nemeses evolve from '20s leftists to '30s gangsters and, most significantly, to the leaders of the '60s social protest movement like Martin Luther King, Jr. Dustin Lance Black's (Milk) script is layered and fascinating in its wealth of detail, but all this shifting of time gets to be so belabored that the movie hardly finds its footing in the present.

The true constant is DiCaprio's bravura performance. I must say that, for the first time, the matinee idol loses himself in the character he's portraying. His cherubic looks often served to undercut the gravitas of his performances--whether portraying the obsessive-compulsive pathology of Howard Hughes in The Aviator or the world-weary heroism of the smuggler in Blood Diamond, he always seemed to be a boy putting on his father's grown-up clothes. Now, courtesy of John Edgar Hoover's pugnacious flattop and early 20th-century Brahmin accent, DiCaprio disappears into the character he's playing, which is all the better when it comes to delineating the relationship Hoover had with Clyde Tolson (played by The Social Network's Armie Hammer, who I believe should be rewarded with a supporting actor nomination but probably won't be), the strapping young agent whom Hoover recruits to be his right-hand man and, in their old age, constant dinner companion.

But just as the script encounters problems finding firm footing, DiCaprio's fine work runs up against Clint Eastwood's reticent directing. Lance Black's script forces the veteran actor-director to substitute his deliberate pacing for something plottier and wordier, but Hoover's evolution from crusader for the American way of life to corrupted man of power, eventually, isn't something the director manages to bring to blazing, vivid life. Eastwood's attack is too remote, too distant...too subtle. As the script struggles to find footing, Eastwood struggles to find heart.

The Skin I Live In. In New York, in a small cineplex near Lincoln Center that specializes in independent cinema. What better introduction to independent heaven than the latest from Pedro Almodovár, the Spanish auteur whose melodramatic plot twists may not make sense on paper but whose convictions carry you along once you consent to be borne away by the spells his movies cast. But the Almodovár of All About My Mother (in which a mother in mourning ends up becoming a surrogate parent to an HIV-positive nun, a feisty transsexual, and a lesbian actress) and Talk To Her (in which an unassuming caregiver impregnates a comatose dancer) is not the Almodovár of The Skin I Live In. That Almodovár was mature, contemplative, subtle. This Almodovár is more like the director of Bad Education--one who revels in Hitchcockian thrills and Jack-in-the-Box spingloaded gimmickry.

The story revolves around Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), an eminent plastic surgeon who has made it his life's work to develop a new kind of skin that is impervious to injury or assault. More ominously, he is keeping a beautiful woman imprisoned in one of the rooms of his home. As played by the amazingly blemish-free Elena Anaya (whom I remember most for her performance as one-half of a Sapphic duo in the interminable, girl-on-girl soft-porn-masquerading-as-treatise-on-doomed-love Room in Rome), the woman is an intriguing cypher: Is she the ghost of Ledgard's dead wife, brought back to life from the fiery car crash that destroyed her? Is she Ledgard's attempt at resurrecting the daughter he lost to a sexual assault a few years before? The answer, as it so often is in an Almodovár movie, is unimaginable and often unbelievably twisted.

At their heart, Almodovár's films are love letters to cinema: In crafting a story about what it takes to be comfortable in one's own skin (and the tragedy that awaits those who aren't), Spain's preeminent director pays homage to Vertigo, Rebecca, and, in the mask Anaya wears as the perfectly chilling Banderas goes about the early stages of his Frankenstein-like work, Georges Franju's 1960 horror movie Eyes Without a Face. Almodovár is a director who loves to watch movies--I dare you not to do the same when you download his latest.

Drive. On a rainy afternoon off Times Square. Even though it's set in LA and I saw it in a city where cramped streets often render driving impractical, I can't help but equate Nicolas Winding Refn's slickster movie with the coolness of the city I saw it in. Perhaps it's because everytime I take a walk down New York's streets, the influence and soundtracks of all those movies and TV shows I've seen paying tribute to the city that never sleeps adds a swagger to my step, as if I'm walking to my own internal score.

Personal delusions aside, Refn's ode to the inherent coolness of driving culture in the United States is steeped in all things hip: from its faux-'80s title design to its Europop soundtrack to Ryan Gosling's cool (as in temperature), minimalist performance, in service to a character so cool (as in attitude) he doesn't even have a name. He goes by the name of Driver, and by day he works as a mechanic for a garage owned by kindly, limping Shannon (Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston) and occasional stunt performer. By night, he offers his skills as a getaway driver for heists.

When Driver falls in love with Irene (Carey Mulligan), the single mother who lives next door, the guy who's so self-contained he can't even bear to give out his name suddenly starts to take uncharacteristic risks. He volunteers his services to Irene's ex-convict husband (Oscar Isaac), who's being coerced into robbing a pawnshop. Said robbery is actually a front for a deeper scam involving the East Coast-West Coast mafiosi, and two breeds of criminal mastermind: one loud and menacing (Ron Perlman), the other soft-spoken and menacing (Albert Brooks, whose doughy face and Scotch-Brite hair conceal a deadly talent for sticking forks into people's eyes). When Driver is sucked into this scam, all manner of photogenic violence ensues, which Refn often stages in loving, fetishistic slow motion.

Drive is a compelling piece of work, one whose makers have imbued with such dedication that the force of their conviction makes you paper over any gaping holes in its plot. But for the life of me, I can't understand why Driver would fall head over driving shoes for someone as reticent as Irene, whom British screenwriter Hossein Amini (adapting a novella by James Sallis) really gives nothing to do. Gosling can communicate whole worlds with his eyes, but when his stillness goes up against Mulligan's schoolgirl demureness, I can hear crickets trilling underneath Refn's carefully chosen hipster soundtrack.

Melancholia. Lincoln Square Cinemas, New York City, right after attending a taping of Anderson Cooper's daytime talk show. Any residual high I would have stored after seeing CNN's silver fox in person could have been threatened by watching Lars Von Trier's end-of-the-world drama, but oddly enough, the latest from the Danish filmmaker (whom my friend and fellow blogger Francis swore off because of his recent controversial comments about Nazism) left me feeling exhilarated. Perhaps because this time, he eschews Dogma's storytelling trickery and fully employs all the resources that film offers at his disposal, as evidenced by the eight-minute prologue I have embedded below, which distills Melancholia's plot and themes through stunning visuals and an over-the-top Wagnerian score:

Melancholia describes the crushing depression suffered by the film's heroine, a bride named Justine (Kirsten Dunst) watched over with indulgent love by her well-adjusted sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and bewildered groom (True Blood's Alexander Skarsgard). Melancholia is also the name of a rogue planet on a collision course with Earth, a literal, world-ending metaphor for the affliction that causes Justine to forsake her wedded bliss and her burgeoning career, and turn her world upside down on her very wedding day.

And yet, as the world goes on its inexorable cataclysmic end, Justine finds strength just as the ever-reliable Claire loses hers. Von Trier seems to be suggesting that, as our lives spin remorselessly forwards, going through cycles of life and death, our psyches--indeed our souls--evolve too. While I'm happy that Von Trier seems to have eschewed Dogma for the more conventional methods of straight-on filmmaking, I'm stunned that he could turn the end of the world into something close to orgasmic. But perhaps only someone who has endured the throes of depression (as the Danish director has famously done) could make the apocalypse so transporting.

Shame. First screening, first weekend, Chicago. Critics have been making comparisons between British director Steve McQueen's latest, in which he plumbs the throes of sexual addiction, with such seminal (no pun intended) entries in the sex-on-film canon Last Tango in Paris and Midnight Cowboy. But I'd like to draw a more radical comparison: Shame has something in common with Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar in that their immensely talented actors seem to be working at cross purposes--even struggling--against the rigid constructs of their directors.

Shame follows Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a New York advertising executive whose immaculately appointed Manhattan apartment masks a messy proclivity: an addiction to sex in all its forms--paid encounters with hookers, anonymous pickups, Internet porn, masturbation. Brandon's daily grind of wanton sexual encounters is upended by the sudden appearance of his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), whose neediness throws into stark relief Brandon's soul-crippling inability to forge a connection.

McQueen is a visual artist, and it is never evidenced more so than the exacting way he photographs the surfaces his camera touches, whether it's the sleek lines of Brandon's skyscraper apartment, or the gray grime of Manhattan's subways. The problem is, his film is more concerned with surfaces--you may very well marvel at how perfectly knotted Brandon's scarves are--than at plumbing the depths of Brandon's dangerous addiction. The film leaves many questions unanswered. Where did brother and sister come from? What is their shared history? Obviously, something cataclysmic must have occurred to have produced such a dysfunctional pair. Why is Brandon so closed off and Sissy so grasping? And why do Brandon and Sissy throw off such an icky incestuous tension when they're together? The film doesn't bother to say.

And yet--and yet--the actors fill this maddening, frustrating tabula rasa with performances so galvanizing the yawning loopholes hardly matter. Carey Mulligan attacks her role with a womanly appetite that makes me wonder where this actress was when Ryan Gosling needed a worthy object of desire in Drive. And Michael Fassbender--whoa! The Irish-German actor who first made me sit up and pay attention as the dashing British spy in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds throws himself uninhibitedly in his role as a man addicted to lust. The actor bares not only his body (yes, his admirable endowments are fully present from the second shot of the movie) but his soul, his haunted eyes displaying profound sadness at the moment when his body should be experiencing ecstasy, ineffable loneliness at the moment of deepest union. Shame may traffic in unhappy sex, but this critic left the theater happy as a clam.

And now, as a bonus, here are my prediction of this year's Oscar nominees:

BEST PICTURE: The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris. (Oscar's new rules stipulating that possible best picture contenders have to score at least 5% of the voting members' total list of number one votes to qualify means that these obvious choices will prevail over a crowded field that could have included War Horse and Bridesmaids. Which is a bummer...I think including Bridesmaids would have given middle-of-the-road viewers something to root for.)

BEST DIRECTOR: Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris; David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist; Alexander Payne, The Descendants; Martin Scorsese, Hugo. (There's always one director nominee that doesn't correspond to the picture contenders--this year, I'm thinking the relative unknown Tate Taylor of The Help will be left out in the cold.)

BEST ACTOR: George Clooney, The Descendants; Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar; Jean Dujardin, The Artist; Michael Fassbender, Shame; Brad Pitt, Moneyball. (Like Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling had a banner year. Unlike Michael Fassbender, Ryan's performances in The Ides of March and Drive are likely to cancel each other out.)

BEST ACTRESS: Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs; Viola Davis, The Help; Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady; Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin; Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn; Albert Brooks, Drive; Jonah Hill, Moneyball; Christopher Plummer, Beginners; Max Von Sydow, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Berénice Bejo, The Artist; Jessica Chastain, The Help; Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids; Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs; Octavia Spencer, The Help.

Let's see how well my predictions stack up against the actual nominees, which will be announced at around 9:30 pm local time Tuesday night, January 24. See you at the Oscars!

Random Reviews

2011-10-31T09:37:00.000-07:00

Since it's been a long weekend and I figure, in this age of economic constraints, most of you indulge in staycations, I thought I'd do you a service and give you my impressions of three Hollywood offerings currently making the rounds of the cineplexes this week:

Puss in Boots. My bet for the movie attracting the most eyeballs this long holiday weekend. (Well, aside from Praybeyt Benjamin, but that deserves another blog entry...once I've actually gotten past the hordes that descended upon it since it opened last Wednesday.) Antonio Banderas' Puss instantly stole the show when he was introduced in Shrek 2, and with good reason: the character had a built-in joke--how could something so diminutive and cuddly be such a swashbuckler? The question in my mind once word got out that DreamWorks was planning a spin-off all to the cat in boots was, Could that joke stretch out over an entire movie?

The answer, in a word, is yes. Adhering to the Shrek formula of pop-cultural asides, Puss in Boots actually deepens the character by giving him his own origin story. It turns out Puss was an orphaned kitty taken in at an orphanage in a town called San Ricardo, and he made fast friends with another outcast, a walking-and-talking egg named Humpty Alexander Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) who had bold dreams of becoming an inventor and finding some magic beans that would take him to a castle in the clouds that housed a goose that laid golden eggs. But once the two chums reach adolescence, a moment of heroism leads Puss down the road of the straight-and-narrow, and the already shunned Humpty falls deeper into a life of petty larceny. After a bank heist gone wrong, Puss is betrayed by Humpty and is forced on the road as a dashing vagabond.

The funny thing is, this origin story is itself a cliché, one that we've seen countless times before. The kick is seeing it enacted by fast-talking nursery rhyme characters, kinda like watching The Muppets act out Bugsy. To sweeten the deal, Puss is given his own love interest, a sultry vixen by the name of Kitty Softpwas (Salma Hayek) who is, appropriately enough, dressed like Catwoman. Throw in the ogre-ish outlaw pair Jack and Jill (voiced by Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris), a fast-growing beanstalk, a pissed-off giant goose, and some gorgeous 3-D animation (there are two sequences where the camera flies through the Tex-Mex desert landscape that's guaranteed to give your stomach a slight quease), and there's fun to be had for the family at the cineplex.

In Time. Andrew Niccol demonstrated he had a knack for allegorical sci-fi that asks Big Questions with 1997's Gattaca, which placed Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law in a dystopian world where people could be genetically programmed for physical perfection--devoid of disease or given an extra advantage like added fingers for concert pianists--and the kind of discrimination this kind of genetic programming engenders is hardly given a second thought.

The set-up for In Time is intriguing, to say the least: In this dystopian world where the middle class has collapsed and the wealth is controlled by the upper one-percent of the population, the aging gene has been switched off, and nobody ages past 25. In this world, time is literally money. For the poor in the ghettos, you either work backbreaking jobs to gain additional time (the additional minutes are stamped on your arm like a bright-green time code), get or give time in an arm-over-arm technique (a method most employed by caring mothers or marauding crooks called Minutemen), or are born into time the way people are today born into money (and therefore have decades or centuries added to your mandated 25 years).

The premise is fascinating, and you can't help but be absorbed in a world where a sports car can set you back five months instead of five million dollars. In this world we are introduced to Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), a drone working at a factory for gadgets that hold and dispense additional time credits. Will meets and saves a disillusioned rich kid named Henry Hamilton(White Collar's Matt Bomer) during a bar brawl with a gang of Minutemen (led by I Am Number Four's Alex Pettyfer), and in return, seeing as he's tired after having lived for 105 years, Henry gives Will his time.

I have to say, In Time has a lot in common with Gattaca, so much so that both visions of the future seemed to have been hatched in parallel universes. There's the same sleek, minimalist look (even the ghettos in which Will lives has that ordered sense of shabby chic); and there's the same sleek, good-looking cast. After Will witnesses the death of his mother (Olivia Wilde!) because of a constantly changing, random time-pricing scheme designed by the Establishment to cut down the poor, Will steps into Henry's privileged shoes and pays the time-toll across different time zones, eventually finagling his way into the rarefied inner circle of a time-banker (Mad Men's Vincent Kartheiser) with a beautiful daughter named Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried). When the authorities get wind that he is in possession of time that shouldn't be his, Will is pursued by a dead-eyed cop aka Timekeeper (Batman Begins' Cillian Murphy, looking scarier and scarier with every movie he appears in) and Will is forced to take Sylvia hostage as he seeks to buck the System.

I'll admit it was a bit disconcerting, having to swallow the idea of Olivia Wilde being a mother to Justin Timberlake. But that's the least of the hurdles In Time has to overcome. For one, Niccol as a filmmaker seems to have a cold streak in him--his characters seem to be as cool and sleek as the production design. Everyone acts with an undercurrent of minimalism even when they're expressing extreme emotion. This is most problematic in the central relationship between Will and Sylvia, who don't seem to have enough time or wherewithal to ignite a spark in their chemistry.

The second hurdle is the storytelling. After setting up such a fascinating world, the sedond half of In Time turns into a Bonnie and Clyde caper in which our two beautiful outlaws have to stay one step ahead of the authorities in their quest for temporal justice. It's a bit of a letdown, considering the invention and philosophical underpinnings that went into creating this dystopia. Oh well, at least Justin Timberlake has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's a natural actor--he has all the time in the world to find a vehicle worthy of his prodigious talents.

30 Minutes or Less. By rights, nothing in this pitch-black heist comedy should work. The warped premise, from a script penned by Michael Diliberti from a story by Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan, was inspired by a 2003 case in which a Pennsylvania pizza guy was forced to rob a bank because underworld elements had strapped a bomb to his chest. (Let's just say the real-life version didn't turn out to be quite as laughable.)

In the movie version, the pizza guy is played by Jesse Eisenberg, who is having some issues with his former best friend (Parks and Recreation's Aziz Ansari) after he admits to having had sexual congress with his friend's sister. Into our beleaguered pizza guy's life enters Dwayne (Southbound and Down's Danny McBride), who gets the bright idea of paying a Latino hitman (Michael Pena) to off his ex-Marine father (Fred Ward) so he can inherit his old man's lotto winnings and put up a tanning salon-slash-prostitution ring. How to pay for the hitman's services? Get some poor schlub to rob a bank for him.

The reason why I say nothing in 30 Minutes or Less should work is because no one is particularly likeable. Neither the protagonist nor the villains make the effort to present a convincing case for empathy. Eisenberg's Nick is a slacker who isn't satisifed with his life, but rather than try to work his way out of his rut, he'd rather keep the people closest to him stuck in the same rut with him. Dwayne and his marginally more intelligent yet doofus cohort (Nick Swardson) are too dim-witted to appreciate the consequences of their actions.

And yet the rat-a-tat plotting by Diliberti and the outrageous words he puts in the mouths of Eisenberg (who actually says, "I don't check Facebook"...ha-ha!) and McBride (who revels in being an overweight jerk without a hint of redeeming value) bear you along. Add to that the off-kilter way Zombieland's Ruben Fleischer approaches scenes of violence and mayhem, and you have a stoner comedy without the mind-altering substances. All you're left with are characters acting out their basest impulses without the excuse of being stoned. 30 Minutes or Less is hilarious and wince-inducing in a Tarantino Lite-kind of way. It'll blow your mind.

Is Hollywood Ruining World Cinema?

2011-10-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

That's the question I had to ask myself as I attended Pelicula, the annual Spanish Film Festival at Greenbelt 3. You see, when you watch a movie from Spain, you'll notice a panoply of logos at the start: the national government, or the provincial government, or a cultural endowment arm, even the national cable provider Canal+--all signal the myriad financing and support that a Spanish film gets from its nation. But over the past few years, I've been noticing that logos from Warner Bros., Universal Studios, and even AXN have been getting prominent placement too.

A friend who works at one of the leading film distributors in the country confirmed to me that Hollywood studios have indeed been getting into co-productions with foreign filmmakers. He added that Star Cinema has led the charge locally, pitching a variety of scripts to Warner Bros. for a possible collaboration, but that so far, none of the proposed projects have been greenlit. While this may sound like an exciting way for our local filmmakers to break through internationally, perhaps we should venture down this road with extreme caution.

(Talking about extreme caution, I have to warn you that many of the trailers I've embedded in this post have nudity in them. If that doesn't get you to keep reading, I don't know what will.)

Among the directors who have been showcased in Pelicula, the one who seems to know how to tickle the fancy of Hollywood suits is Nacho Velilla, who has been represented by two romantic comedies, both co-productions with Hollywood studios: Que se mueran los feos (To Hell With the Ugly) last year, and Fuera de carta (Chef's Specials) in 2008.

There's really nothing to offend critics in both entries. Velilla treats the central elephants in his premises (ugly people trying to find love in the first title, homosexuality in the second) as a matter of fact, and in so doing, imbues his comedies with that European laissez-faire attitude towards topics that have the American psyche all twisted up in knots. He treats physical undesirability and queerness without a hint of bleeding-heart liberalism or condescension; Hollywood could take some cues from this shrewd comedian.

Way more disappointing for me was Primos (with the grammatically questionable international title Cousinhood), the latest from Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, a filmmaker whom I have been watching with much interest since I saw Azul oscuro casi negro (Dark Blue Almost Black) in the Spanish Film Festival back in 2007.

Primos follows the story of Diego (Quim Gutiérrez, now looking more mature with his defined bone structure and scruff since his debut in Azul oscuro) who, reeling from being abandoned at the altar on his wedding day, decides to go on a trip back to his childhood home with his two cousins (Raúl Arévalo and newcomer to the Sánchez Arévalo repertory Adrián Lastra). While there, he hopes to reconnect with a childhood sweetheart (Inma Cuesta), whom he may or may not have a son with.

Even though Primos is a crowd pleaser, I say it's a disappointment because it feels homogenized; you can recast Ryan Reynolds, Bradley Cooper and a tic-laden Jason Bateman in the three male leads, and have a raunchy Hollywood comedy in your hands. There is nothing specifically Spanish about the struggles of the triumvirate--Gutiérrez's Diego is a hangdog jiltee trying to regain his love mojo; Arévalo's Julián is a horndog whose play for a waitress (Nuria Gago) at the local brothel unintentionally reunites her with her drunkard father (Antonio de la Torre, another regular member of the repetory); and Lastra's José Miguel is an eye patch-wearing hypochondriac who is so emasculated that his overbearing nurse-girlfriend (Alicia Rubio) may have infected him with Munchausen Syndrome.

And let's not forget Primos' calling-card scene, which features (what else?) a performance of the Backstreet Boys hit "As Long As You Love Me". It's symbolic of how much Sánchez Arévalo, a filmmaker with a quirky voice, has had to water down his vision for what Hollywood deems makes for a crossover hit:

Contrast this with his debut film Azul oscuro casi negro and its characters' poignant struggle to find their destiny in the most over-the-top (hence, Spanish) ways: Jorge (Quim Gutiérrez), who tries to impregnate his jailbird brother's (Antonio de la Torre) incarcerated girlfriend (Marta Etura) while trying to reconcile himself with the janitorial job he inherited from his sick father; his slacker best friend Israel (Raul Arévalo), who inadvertently connects with his father (Manuel Morón) through the masseur (Roberto Enríquez) who gives him regular handjobs; and his childhood sweetheart Natalia (Eva Pallarés), whose desire to find a beau worthy of her leads her to recommend Jorge for a job at the multinational pharmaceutical she works for...in the parking garage security detail.

Sánchez Arévalo reached new heights of ambition and storytelling confidence with 2009's Gordos (Fat People), another multi-plotline dramedy following the lives of overweight people who have enrolled in a support group to investigate why they are so fat. There's Enrique (regular repertory member Antonio de la Torre), the self-hating gay endorser of a fat pill whose forays into obesity drive him into a relationship with his partner's wife; Abel (Roberto Enríquez), the support group moderator who likes to shuck his clothes at the beginning of a session and can't stand it when his wife (Verónica Sánchez) gets round because of a difficult pregnancy; Sofía (Leticia Herrero), whose Christian boyfriend (Raul Arévalo) is threatened by her newly svelte body and blossoming sexuality; Pilar (Pilar Castro), who desperately needs to lose weight before her expat boyfriend returns from a job assignment in the States; and crime scene investigator Andrés (Fernando Albizu), whose indifferent relationship with his rotund goth daughter (Marta Martín) raises questions about paternal bonds in the most unforeseen and dramatic ways.

Gordos is a breathtaking (and not because many of its characters get winded going up a flight of stairs) work of film. It is expansive (no pun intended), managing to be about a small group of people yet also about the entire world at the same time. It manages to be big-hearted yet cynical, unpredictable yet oddly familiar, slapsticky yet profound. It's the work of a filmmaker at the height of his powers...that is, until he decided to get in bed with Hollywood and dilute his mojo.

It's not just Sánchez Arévalo falling victim to Hollywood's insistence on a homogenized world culture in film. The most egregious example of Hollywood interference in 2011's Pelicula would have to be Di Di Hollywood, the utterly laughable and tone-deaf story of a Madrid bartender (Elsa Pataky, who recently appaeared as the uncorrupted cop in Fast & Furious 5 but is probably most famous as the wife of Chris Hemsworth aka Thor) who aspires to make it in Hollywood, then does nothing but whine when she gets her wish in the most contrived and unbelievable of ways.

The oversexed Di Di Hollywood is rife with the most unintentionally hilarious plot turns this side of Joey Gosiengfiao: She consents to be the plaything of a Vegas highroller who likes to wrap her in plastic; she becomes the beard of a secretly gay A-lister (Paul Sculfor, who was once linked to Jennifer Aniston), who is shown in a desultory hot tub sequence with an unappetizing paramour but reserves his most passionate emoting with our heroine (whom he is not supposed to be interested in); and she is represented by a soulless agent (Peter Coyote), who remarks at one point that he decided to take her on as a client because Hollywood is gaga over one-name actresses (!). Di Di has her conscience re-awakened when her best friend from Madrid is run over, reeling drunk from being kept waiting in a plush hotel room while Di Di has to face a battery of media people during the promotional blitz of her latest starrer...you know, the one that will finally prove she is an actress. (What part of A-list celebrity did you not understand, whiny muchacha?) Di Di only gets to show her boobs, but never her heart; she never fully engages with her fate, she only curses it. It would all be so sad if it weren't so effin' funny.

Recently, I came across the suspense thriller Los ojos de Julia (Julia's Eyes), co-produced by Guillermo del Toro with Universal and starring Belen Ruéda. They were two of the prime movers behind the chilling Mexican ghost story El orfanato (The Orphanage), a film I saw in the 2008 edition of Pelicula. Imagine my profound disappointment when I saw, not the trademarks of the Guillermo del Toro of Pan's Labyrinth, but the del Toro of the anemic Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

Los ojos is the story of Julia (Ruéda), who investigates the apparent suicide of her twin sister Sara, all while batlling the same degenerative eye disease her twin suffered from. She comes to suspect that her sister may have fallen in with an obsessive man...the only problem is, no one else seems to have seen this supposed stalker. What follows is a rote Hitchcock wannabe suspense thriller devoid of any Latin flavor or flair, culminating in a climax cribbed straight from the Audrey Hepburn thriller Wait Until Dark (which did it better, by the way).

So yes, Hollywood may help boost local filmmakers onto the international stage...but at what cost? While my friend seemed disappointed that Warner Bros. had not greenlit any of the scripts pitched to it by Star Cinema, I can't help but feel that maybe we should spend the turnaround time getting a hard-on for what makes us Filipinos before we get into bed with Hollywood.

Enviada

2011-10-10T00:05:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again when I take up residence at Greenbelt 3 for the week-and-a-half run of Peliculá, now on its tenth year in the Philippines. But in past years, when I only bemoaned my envy over the fact that the Spanish government seems to be fully invested in the growth of their film industry--subsidizing the financing or development of content without, it seems, censoring the content itself (whereas the local film industry has to pay astronomical taxes, be satisfied with the token incentive, and contend with legislated censorship), this year I have more reasons to be envious.

On the film festival's first Friday, I got to watch Iciar Bollain's 2010 film También la lluvia (Even the Rain), the story of a film crew trying to film a historical epic depicting Christopher Columbus' conquest of Bolivia as the 2000 Cochabamba water war rages around them.

It may sound like a snooze on paper, but Bollain, a Spanish triple threat who acts, writes, and directs, tells her story with a tight rein on pacing and suspense, mounting massively scaled sequences of upheaval with the confidence of an action director. This is amazing, considering that Bollain has so far directed mostly intimate domestic dramas, the most memorable of which is 2003's Te doy mis ojos (I'll Give You My Eyes), a drama about domestic abuse which accomplishes the remarkable feat of making the abusive husband an empathetic and understandable character.

But the real pleasure of Even the Rain isn't the overhanging question of whether the embattled film crew will actually finish filming. Guided by a script written by Paul Laverty, a frequent collaborator of the English director Ken Loach, the film revels in many different layers of subtext, as it draws parallels between the film crew and the marauding band of conquistadores, the Bolivians fighting for their right to water and the enslaved natives forced by the Spanish to panhandle for gold, and even the actors and the characters they play. The real pleasure of this deeply felt film is deconstructing those layers of subtext, identifying where the parallels converge and diverge. (It's a pleasure Academy members may experience for themselves, as the film has made it to the shortlist of this year's Oscar best foreign language race.)

This sinking feeling in my stomach at the chances of our local bet Ang Babae sa Septic Tank aside, (how many films about films being shot can find slots in Oscar's golden five, anyway?) I realized that one reason why our films never seem to make it onto the world stage is our inability as storytellers to fold nuance and subtext into our narratives. There never seem to be layers to peel away. Perhaps we'll try to insert the odd symbol here and there--how about that goat wandering into the theater in the middle of Brillante Mendoza's Serbis?--but our films never challenge the audience into actually engaging with it. Marlon Rivera's Ang Babae sa Septic Tank may be the first film to actually add a layer of subtext to its proceedings, slathering satire onto Mendoza's filmography of poverty porn. It just has the supreme misfortune of entering the Oscar race in a year when a far more ambitious film with a similar conceit is also in the running.

For sure, part of this lack can be attributed to the training one receives as a filmmaker in these shores. If you want to be a scriptwriter or director who actually makes a living doing these things, you will hear the constant chorus of producers who ask you to keep delivering the same story over and over. And if you dare to insert a little bit of novelty or creativity somewhere into your assignment, they'll hide behind this cardboard monster called "the masa", saying that a healthy return of investment goes hand in hand with dumbing down your work.

And so we either insert nuance and subtext on the sly, paying our producers the ultimate insult of assuming they won't spot them anyway. Or we look to independent cinema, with its much-vaunted freedom from the yoke of the studio system. But I look at last year's crop of Cinemalaya entries and still find nuance sorely lacking. Lawrence Fajardo's Amok may have visual bravado, but what about it isn't a scaled-down Amores Perros? Or perhaps the filmmakers try mightily to strive for profundity, so much so that their storytelling goes off the rails, as was the case with Ang Sayaw ng Daalwang Kaliwang Paa.

What does Cinemalaya mean for our future crop of filmmakers and their place on the international stage? Have they been so inured to the lowest-common-denominator school of narrative that they don't have the tools to add layers to their work? Or do they need to live their lives first, gain some experience to add substance to their sizzle? If you have any answers, I'll be at Greenbelt.

Leveling Up

2011-09-30T06:11:00.000-07:00

It's funny the things I remember sometimes. In the Adrian Lyne movie Indecent Proposal (this was way back in the '90s, when Demi Moore was the object of millionaire Robert Redford's pursuit, and long before she was the cougar doing the pursuing), there's a scene where Woody Harrelson--playing an architect who slums as a professor!--lectures to a class holding a brick while a slide show of the greatest architectural marvels unspools behind him. He then says in his hick Woody Harrelson way: "Even a brick aspires to be more than a brick."

Yes, it's a howler of a line. (I didn't know inanimate objects could aspire to be anything, but I guess this is possible, just as people who write words like "hardwork" and "bestfriend" also aspire to someday master English vocabulary.) But it's a sentiment that kept running through my head as I watched the two movies I'm about to discuss below.

What's Your Number? is a romantic comedy that seeks to take advantage of the path that Bridesmaids blazed, that emerging combination of rom-com and raunchy sex comedy that seeks to prove that romantic heroines can get as down-and-dirty as guys. The big advantage of this comedy is that it has Anna Faris in the lead, the pixie-faced actress who has long proven that she has the comic chops of Goldie Hawn at her peak--all she really needs is a vehicle other than the Scary Movies and House Bunny. You know, something that allows her to actually investigate a character and react to situations, instead of being put in one sight gag after another.

In this movie, she plays Ally Darling, a Bostonian who has hit a wall in her dating life and is sent into a tailspin when she comes across a (fictional) Marie Claire article that declares a woman who has had more than 20 sex partners will find it hard to find a long-term commitment. With the help of her next-door neighbor Colin (Chris Evans), a former cop-turned-musician with a talent for ferreting out persons of interest, Ally begins to revisit her ex-boyfriends to see if any of them have turned out to be marriage material.

Of course, we all know how this will turn out. It would be churlish to criticize a genre movie like this for being predictable. I'm sure there are reviewers out there who'll pooh-pooh the idea of basing your life decisions on a magazine article. (How ditzy can you get? Who does Marie Claire think it is--Oprah?) I'm sure there are nitpickers who will bemoan the fact that it takes a good hour-and-45 minutes for Ally to realize that the horndog next door is actually her one-and-only. (You have Chris Evans outside your door getting his newspaper in only a dishcloth--how can you not get all over that?) But you enter movies like this knowing what to expect. It would be like bitching because Captain America eventually blasted the Red Skull back to kingdom come.

To me, what's most interesting about What's Your Number? is the fact that Anna Faris is one of the executive producers. You can almost see the canny decision-making that went into every casual zinger that the snappy script (adapted by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden from a Karyn Bosnak novel called 20 Times a Lady--where do they find these properties?) throws out like so much popcorn. What's Your Number? doesn't stray too far from what audiences have come to expect from Anna Faris. The impeccable comic chops are still there. (Particularly hilarious is a sequence where Ally reunites with a British ex played by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Martin Freeman, and over the course of a date, her put-on British accent devolves into Cockney Eliza Doolittle all the way to full-on Borat.)

But the script also shrewdly gives Ally's family a dynamic (Ally is busy helping her younger sister Daisy, played by Ari Gaynor, with her wedding, and they are constantly besieged by Blythe Danner as their status-seeking mother), and in this way, Faris is allowed to stretch her acting muscles, as well. The scene where Ally breaks down in happy tears as her sister exchanges vows with her groom--"I promise not to blow my nose in the shower", "I promise not to be mad at you about everything when I'm really only mad at you about one thing"--was particularly touching.

It also helps that Chris Evans is Faris' romantic foil. Sure, he's often played a variation of his cocky-guy persona in the past (a cocky superhero in The Fantastic Four, a cocky rogue in The Losers), but I think Captain America: The First Avenger's unabashed lack of irony finally allowed me to see the melancholy cast of his features, and having seen it, I can't unsee it. At any rate, he's more convincing as a shiftless hunk who's really looking for that one woman to tame him than, say, Gerard Butler. Plus the chemistry he strikes up with Faris is unforced. A scene where he plays strip basketball with her comes off as both charming and surprisingly sexy. (And if the numerous scenes where Evans is often unclothed isn't enough for ya, there's even a helping of the bare ass of The Soup's Joel McHale.)

Another movie that I ended up enjoying immensely is Hanna, the action movie from Pride and Prejudice's Joe Wright which stars Saoirse Ronan, the Irish teener who followed in the footsteps of Jodie Foster, Tatum O'Neal, Linda Blair, and Anna Paquin by becoming one of the youngest actresses to get an Oscar supporting-actress nomination for 2007's Atonement, also directed by Joe Wright. (And among that list, only Paquin got the statuette, by the way.) Ronan plays the title character, a slight teenager with alabaster skin and ethereal blue eyes living with her father (Eric Bana) in the snowy Finnish hinterlands. But in case you've never seen the trailer, the opening sequence tells you Hanna isn't a run-of-the-mill character: She's hunting a reindeer, and after felling it with an arrow, she whispers to its dying carcass: "I just missed your heart." At which point, she whips out a gun and kills it without a shred of girly remorse.

Turns out that her father is an ex-CIA operative, and Hanna's impending re-entrance into the world is making her father's former boss Marissa Veigler, a ruthless bureaucrat with Agent Scully hair played with sinister relish by Cate Blanchett, a bit twitchy. Hanna is a loose end, you see--the kind that snaps the necks of thugs sent to pursue her. What kind of loose end is what you'll stick around to find out.

It would be tempting to say that Ronan is the one in need of a leveling-up here, after Peter Jackson's dreadful adaptation of The Lovely Bones threatened to derail her rising prospects. But I would argue that it is director Joe Wright who is seeking reinvention here. After a spate of stately period dramas and the prospect of becoming the second coming of James Ivory, Wright must have felt the need to prove that he can tackle contemporary themes--and what could be more extremely contemporary than a reworking of The Professional?

I'm happy to report that Hanna's action scenes are all staged with the right amount of pulse-pounding physicality. And Wright's subtlety gives Hanna a satisfying European flair, instead of the straightforward witlessness you'd expect from John Badham remaking La Femme Nikita. There are times, I have to admit, when the fairy-tale imagery and metaphors can become a bit overwrought. (Yes, we get it: Hanna is a special girl who ventured out of the magical, safe woods into the big, bad world.) But all in all, Hanna isn't a bad way to spend an hour and 50 minutes. Beats staying at home and sitting on your couch like a brick.

Hanna is showing exclusively at Ayala Malls cinemas. What's Your Number? opens October 5.

Unhappy Endings

2011-09-22T05:17:00.000-07:00

In writing, if there's one thing more difficult than beginning any creative endeavor, it's ending it. That might seem untrue, because it's easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency by the momentum of creation. After you get over the hurdle of actually sitting down and starting to write, in many ways the work is taken out of your hands, borne along by the power of its own engine; if an idea is strong enough, it often writes itself.

And then the ending looms, and once when you had to apply the gas, now you have to apply the brakes. You have to interfere in the momentum of plotting--if the characters are fascinating enough, there is always the temptation to stick around and prolong your visit--and now the challenge lies in guiding the engine to a smooth glide and not into a screeching halt or a whimpering sputter.

This problem of endings, I've noticed, is plaguing some notable movies of late. First up is The Beaver, a fascinating character study propelled by Mel Gibson's committed portrayal of a toy magnate whose crippling depression threatens to engulf both his professional and family life. You can use the new lows Ginson has sunk to in his real life to buy into The Beaver's dark portrait of a man sinking into the abyss of despair, or you can take the story at its own value. But you have to admit, there's a perverse fascination in seeing a man cling onto a clod of brown cloth and imbue it with a tough-love personality and a Michael Caine accent, and use it to claw his way out of his hopelessness.

Actually, I take it back: I don't think The Beaver's problem is its ending per se. I think it's the film's seesawing tone between its dark first-third, and then when Mel Gibson's emotionally besieged toy manufacturer Walter Black latches on to a beaver puppet he finds in a dumpster, the movie gradually becomes a cuddly story about a man who goes about repairing not just his business, but his fractured relationships with his concerned wife (played by Jodie Foster with the brisk, no-nonsense approach that we've come to expect from her) and his resentful son (the always intense Anton Yelchin). And then, when Kyle Killen's intriguing script investigates the idea that Walter can't keep using the cloth over his left hand as a crutch for the rest of his life, the movie swings to a hard left yet again in its third act, to a horrible act that only Hollywood, in its dogged insistence on pat resolutions, could deem as the start of redemption.

If The Beaver had only stuck to its darkness all throughout, perhaps the ending would have made more sense. Or if it had exposed its soft center since the very beginning, maybe Jodie could have sat down with screenwriter Killen and told him, "Hey, this ending is a bit discordant. Can we brainstorm on other options?" Or perhaps Foster, who has shown an affection for dysfunctional yet gooey family affairs like Little Man Tate and Home for the Holidays in her past directorial efforts, is simply the wrong director for this material. At any rate, I left The Beaver thinking how could anyone think that an ending like that could represent hope and wholeness.

Next up is Fright Night, a 3D remake of a vampire movie from 1985 which, from the preceding words alone, should be a damning statement of everything that's wrong with Hollywood. But Fright Night, the story of a high school senior named Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin again!) who gradually comes to suspect that the bachelor next door (Colin Farrell, as magnetic and dangerously sexy as I have ever seen him) may actually be a ruthless bloodsucker, is actually an enjoyable remake. It updates the original in clever ways--it comments on the housing downturn by setting the remake in a move-in/move-out Las Vegas exurb, which means that the vampire doesn't need an invitation to enter an abandoned homestead; the Peter Vincent vampire hunter, originated by Roddy MacDowall is no longer a Hammer Pictures refugee but a Vegas conjurer now played by David Tennant that is equal parts Russell Brand and Criss Angel. On top of that, it also stays true to what made the original so remarkable: a highwire act that offers up equal helpings of humor and horror, without ever mixing the two into an unseasonable stew of camp.

But Fright Night the remake does fall short in some areas. For one thing, its reincarnation as a 3D creature seems largely superfluous, with gratuitous blood spurts and in-your-face gimmickry that only distracts instead of adds to the enjoyment. For another, Charley's outcast best friend Evil Ed is now played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, whose breakthrough role as McLovin in Superbad has lent him a terminally cool geek factor where the original's Stephen Geoffreys rendered the character as a vulnerable lost soul.

And of course, there's the ending, which is really a quibble on my part considering how much I enjoyed everything that came before. It's too upbeat and hunky dory, as opposed to the original's subtle implication that the evil next door is just waiting for a chance to come back and bite you in the ass. It's those ambiguous endings that allow the good horror movies to burrow under your skin and stay with you when you get home.

(Of course, nothing could have been more frightening than the real-life ending of Fright Night the remake, which was one of the more resounding flops of the 2011 Hollywood summer season. It's too bad--I guess audiences prefer their vampires to glitter in the sun rather than be the "shark from Jaws", as Christopher Mintz-Plasse describes Colin Farrell. Now, vampires have become brooding romantic leads rather than the heartless predators they were originally conceived to be, and for that I say, "Boo to you, Twilight!")

Meanwhile, I say "Hail to Horrible Bosses!" for being a sturdily built comedy that, much like Fright Night's tightrope act of having something to please everyone, offers equal parts raunch, outrage, and positive reinforcement--that last being a remarkable feat considering that it's a laugh riot about wanting to kill your superiors. Horrible Bosses is about three friends: corporate drone Nick (Jason Bateman), who is terrorized by a sadistic control freak (Kevin Spacey, in an archetype we've seen him play before); happy-go-lucky horndog Bobby (SNL's Jason Sudeikis), who has to report to the son of his deceased former boss, a coked-up party animal (Colin Farrell, running hilariously with his prostehtic transformation) who doesn't care if his company pollutes the community; and dental assistant Dale (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day), who has to endure some outsized sexual harassment from the sexy dentist (Jennifer Aniston, relishing the chance to talk dirty) he works for.

What begins as a casual joke--hey, what if we kill each other's bosses, kinda like Strangers on a Train?--begins to coalesce into a concrete plan when the three run into a lowlife hood named Motherf---er Jones (Jamie Foxx), who agrees to become their "murder consultant." From there, the laughs just keep on coming, constructed with virtuoso skill by director Seth Gordon, who honed his talent by directing episodes for TV's current crop of golden comedies The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Modern Family.

Like I said, Horrible Bosses is a well-constructed comedy machine, with a plot that ingeniously manages to mesh the separate storylines of Nick and Bobby's horrible bosses. I just wish writers Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein had expended a little more effort into integrating Jennifer Aniston's raunchy dentist into the film's Rube Goldberg-ian payoff a little more. I don't think it will be a spoiler to say that Kevin Spacey's sadism and Colin Farrell's druggie lifestyle are turned against each other in clever, unforeseen ways. And so, since the writers went down that road, why not throw Jennifer Aniston's oversexed proclivities into the merry mix, instead of having it be the postscripted afterthought it is in the actual film? After all, an actress who fearlessly puts her face right up to a fat guy's crotch and says lines like "Do you watch Gossip Girl? I fingered myself so hard to that Penn Badgley guy so hard, I broke a nail" deserves to be in on the fun.

Speaking of postscripts, did you notice the six-degrees-of-separation symmetry among the three films reviewed in this blog post? The Beaver stars Anton Yelchin who stars in Fright Night with Colin Farrell who was barely recognizable in Horrible Bosses. I love it when an ending comes together.

Sequel-Itis

2011-08-24T04:07:00.000-07:00

Not sure if I've confessed this (and if I have in a previous blog post, then my apologies for repeating myself), but horror movies are my guilty pleasure. If the premise is creepy/clever enough and if they're done right, nothing gets under your skin quite like a good horror movie. And it won't matter if they're atmospheric or splatter-ific: A good horror movie is a good horror movie.

Being such a fan of the genre, I find myself going to practically every horror movie with an even vaguely interesting trailer, hoping for that one wormy horror movie that truly gets under my skin. Obviously, I've been disappointed countless times. One of the few times I wasn't disappointed was in 2000, when the first Final Destination movie was released. All the ingredients were there: clever premise, elaborate and painstakingly mounted set pieces, killer (literally) ending. Plus it helped that the creative minds were those of Glen Morgan and James Wong, the venerable consulting producers of The X-Files who were responsible for some of that landmark show's most indelible episodes.

Cut to 11 years and three sequels of rapidly deteriorating quality later, and you can understand my skepticism towards Final Destination 5, especially after the debacle that was The Final Destination, the exercise in flop sweat that squandered the possibilities of this old/newfangled technology called 3-D. But where The Final Destination (actually the fourth in the franchise and a fate-tempting title if there ever was one) was all stupidity, randomness, and accelerating body count for the sake of quantity, I am happy to report that the fifth installment actually feels fresh and reinvigorated. Probably because for the first time ever, the franchise has hired a new director to helm one of its movies: James Cameron protégé Steven Quale. (Directing duties for the first four movies were evenly split between James Wong and David R. Ellis.) Quale, aside from staging his set pieces efficiently, has that geek-level excitement that sweeps you along.

By now, anyone who's ever glimpsed film clips from these movies in YouTube should know the formula: Protagonist has a vision of a cataclysmic disaster (usually involving or tangentially related to transport, hence the title), he or she manages to save a few souls before the vision comes true, and then one by one, the survivors die gruesome deaths because Death doesn't like to be cheated. In Final Destination 5, the visionary is kind-faced Sam (Heroes' Nicholas D'Agosto), an aspiring chef slumming his way through an internship at a paper company (cleverly named Presage Paper) on his way to a corporate retreat. He sees a vision of the suspension bridge they're about to cross collapsing, and he saves a few of his friends and his co-workers, including his girlfriend Molly (The Walking Dead's Emma Bell) and best friend Peter (Gossip Girl's Miles Fisher). You may know the rest, but I will go on record to say that Final Destination 5 has some of the best-staged deaths in the franchise, including a squirm-inducing sequence set during a gymnastics meet that could change the way you look at the Olympics.

The one element of the series that I have never been a fan of is the mathematical sleuthing: To me, the question of intervening in someone's death making Death skip to the next victim and all that blather is too tedious to absorb, and often slows the storytelling down. But Final Destination 5 actually introduces a much simpler mathematical equation that even manages to bring up questions of morality: Kill someone else and have them take your place on Death's list. It's a much simpler, more elegant plot element that gooses the narrative along.

Final Destination 5 also boasts a satisfyingly clever ending which, if the Hollywood suits were smart enough (they often never are), should serve as their cue to make this installment the last of the series. Geek trivia/hint: Pay close attention to the name of the restaurant where Sam works.

The ending also got me reminiscing about the myriad deaths featured in the first four installments. And so I present my top 5 best and top 5 lamest deaths in the Final Destination series. (Out of respect for you, none of the deaths in the fifth installment are included in the list.)

The Top 5 Best Deaths:

The first "freak" death ever in the series featured a bathroom hanging, and set up the standard of staging a death scene in the elaborate style of a Rube Goldberg-ian device. It drew out the suspense excruciatingly--would he be electrocuted? Stab himself in the nose with scissors? Plus it was one of the few instances when Death was portrayed as an actual entity that took the trouble to cover its tracks.

To paraphrase Wendy the leading lady (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, next seen in the reboot of The Thing): "Couldn't you feel how vicious this was?"

Final Destination 3 had the protagonists deciphering clues to the victims' death from Polaroids taken on the fateful night of the opening disaster. This is one of the rare instances when that gambit paid off in a clever way.

To borrow a line from another franchise, Scream: "Slice and dice!"

I love how the filmmakers manage to skewer (metaphorically) Celine Dion and Britney Spears. Remember: Vanity kills!

The Top 5 Lamest Deaths:

Nothing destroys a movie like a lame ending. This one nearly killed Final Destination 2.

Uh, this isn't deja vu. This is a lazy rip-off of a death from the original Final Destination, which did it better.

Another hospital death scene (Final Destination 2 got there first). I would argue that this isn't really Death's elaborate scheme at work, but plain, old human neglect. Or scriptwriting stupidity.

You'll notice from this list I have a bias (more like a loathing) for the fourth movie. At different points in The Final Destination, the filmmakers have been lazy and unimaginative. This death, emplying 3-D technology, is just desperate.

X-rays? Really?

What about you, Faithful Follower? Have you seen any of the Final Destination movies? And if so, which deaths did you like? And which did you want to heap onto the Cutting Room in the Sky?

The Middle Ages

2011-08-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

You could say that losing your luster is a natural part of stardom--you know, you start to glow as you gain prominence, you shine with blinding brightness as you reach the top of your game, and if you're lucky, you find your own place in the sky and under the sun when your time to shine is through.

But I think there's an added layer to the twilit time of Tom Hanks' career: In these times of economic depression and uncertainty, Hanks' persona of unrelenting optimism may not only be losing relevance, not only be grating, but downright condescending. So you lost your job, your home, and your wife! That's no reason to have a long face! Chin up!

As it happens, that situation I italicized in the preceding paragraph is the situation in which Tom Hanks' title character finds himself in Hanks' second directorial effort, Larry Crowne. After being booted out of his worker-bee job at a Walmart-like superstore because he supposedly lacks a college education--this, despite the fact that he's won Employee of the Month nine times and served in the navy--the eponymous character decides to enroll in community college to beef up his résumé. There, he is adopted by a fashionable scooter gal (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, late of the short-lived JJ Abrams series Undercovers), who introduces him to the concept of keeping his shirts untucked; passes a class in economics taught by Star Trek's George Takei despite the professor's efforts at boom-voiced intimidation; and lands a job as a short-order cook in the local diner. Most important, Larry manages to charm the initially dour professor of his speech class, the unhappily married, teetering-on-the-winsome-side-of-alcoholism Mercedes (Julia Roberts).

There's a private game I play with Hollywood celebrities called "What's My Political Affiliation?" I'm willing to bet that Hanks is a Republican, if only because his choice of material when it comes to his directorial career has a black-and-white, bad-is-bad and good-is-great streak running through it that jives with the GOP's moralistic viewpoint. That simplistic view of the world may have worked fine for Hanks' directorial debut, the adorable but ulimately fluffy rise-of-a-50s-band movie That Thing You Do!, released more than a decade ago. But it doesn't do justice to the complicated mess that is the worldwide economic depression which Larry Crowne uses as backdrop. In this ambiguous moment of our history, the problem is extensive and overwhelming, everybody is in collusion, and there are no easy solutions.

Larry Crowne, both the character and the movie, make it look easy. Everyone who enters Larry's orbit is immediately uplifted by his sheer refusal to, I don't know, stay in bed and gorge on ice cream. Mercedes' husband (played by Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston) is a failed writer who looks at Internet porn all day and criticizes his wife for having a flat chest, so it's perfectly okay for Julia to hook up with Tom even though she just kicked him to the curb. And even the peppy credit officer at the bank who refuses to give Larry a life-saving loan (played, incidentally, by Hanks' likable wife Rita Wilson) is, well, likable. See? Only a Republican director's movie can a bank officer who essentially crushes a character's hopes at financial salvation be portrayed as someone you'd like to have a cappuccino with.

While watching Larry Crowne, I kept flashing back to Up in the Air, the 2009 Oscar-nominated film which also uses the bleak economic landscape as its milieu. George Clooney plays a frequent flier whose job is to fire people because their bosses are too cowardly to do it themselves, and only in heartbreak does he reconnect with the humanity that his job has forced him to abandon. As I watched Larry scribble some computations on a diner napkin and chirp to a classmate that her plan to open a thrift shop is a sound investment, I missed Up in the Air's courageous embrace of the precariousness of its characters' situations, its compassionate eye towards grief and anger, and the hard-won redemption of its main protagonist. George Clooney sparkles because he had to work for it; Tom Hanks sparkles because, well, he's Tom Hanks. You are free to conclude which actor I find more compelling in these times when nothing comes easy.

That hard-won charm is, essentially, what I love about Crazy, Stupid, Love, the romantic comedy with an all-star ensemble led by Steve Carell. As Michael Scott in the American adaptation of The Office and in every other movie he's made, Carell delivers his lines with clipped irony. But even as he hits the punchlines, Carell never loses sight of the humanity of his characters, whether he's playing a sexually frightened middle-aged virgin or a boss who's clueless about how clueless he really is.

In Crazy, Stupid, Love, Carell lets the humanity take center stage in his portrayal of Cal Weaver, a suburban dad partial to rumpled Dockers and worn sneakers who, in the opening scene, is told by his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) that she had a one-time indiscretion with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) and that she plans to divorce him. Sulking in the local bar, Cal drowns his sorrows in vodka cranberries and rambling monologues of self-pity that are loud enough to catch the attention of ladies' man Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling). Jacob takes the hapless suburbanite under his wing, schooling him on the art of small talk as sexual manipulation.

Like Larry, Cal undergoes a reinvention. But where Larry's reinvention is merely an external manifestation of the confident, affable, Big Man on Campus that he was preordained to be, Cal's transformation into a ladies' man produces nothing but more sexual confusion. And his mentor, the Henry Higgins of sexual politics, offers no guidance: Even when his student has mastered the art of pick-up lines, Jacob looks upon Cal with a smirking contempt that hints at a winking self-awareness. Gosling gives Jacob the swagger of a lothario, while ackowledging that he's swaggering.

But Crazy, Stupid, Love is nothing if not an ambitious, sweeping look at the ways we rush into foolish decisions when it comes to dilemmas of the heart. It's also about Jacob finally meeting Hannah (Emma Stone), the girl who runs her love life in the controlled and legalistic manner appropriate to her burgeoning career as a lawyer. It's also about Cal's 13-year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo), who is in the throes of an intense crush on his gangly babysitter (Analeigh Tipton), who is also harboring a secret yearning of her own. It's about Emily tentatively exploring the possibilities of a relationship with the oily accountant who ruined her marriage in the first place. It's about Cal's fling with the recovering alcoholic (Marisa Tomei) who keeps appearing in his life at the most unexpected moments. It's about the lingering feelings Cal and Emily still have for each other.

All of these divergent plotlines intersect in a very Hollywood-movie kind of way. But under the guidance of the directorial duo of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who made the delightfully subversive true-crime comedy I Love You, Phillip Morris, you don't really mind the diagrammatic nature of the script. There is a shrewd observational nature to Crazy, Stupid, Love, a pervasive sense of melancholia that makes the laughs not only satisfying, but also painful...because the film knows that love is painful.

This heart-deep sadness is encapsulated in Steve Carell's performance, and the fine ensemble takes its cue from him. There is a scene where Cal and Emily reunite for a parent-teacher conference, and their conversation in the hallway as they wait for their turn vibrates with their shared history as a married couple. It's the weight of years that infuses Steve Carell's lovely speech at the end with lived-in, battle-weary affection...and damned if I didn't find myself sniffling despite the fact that I've seen this grand monologue in every romantic comedy out of Hollywood in the past 20 years.

More tellingly, Steve Carell's Cal says, "I don't know if it's going to work out, but I promise you I will never stop trying." It's that maturity, that experience, that hard-won right to at least keep trying--instead of Larry Crowne's entitlement to victory--that makes Crazy, Stupid, Love the perfect comedy for this particularly trying age.

Malayang-Malaya: Cinemalaya 7 Breaks Out

2011-08-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a breakout aura in this year's Cinemalaya Festival, its seventh edition.

Perhaps because more mainstream stars (ie: names from the broadcast networks, the acknowledged arbiter of showbiz careers in this dysfunctional industry we call local entertainment) have participated in this year's entries than ever before.

Perhaps because the movies seem to loom larger in the consciousness of the moviegoing public. Or that could merely be an illusion, given that Cinemalaya has made the unprecedented move of going beyond the confines of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the august halls of academe, and decided to unspool its offerings at Greenbelt 3, the nexus of middle-class moviegoing. The mostly sold-out houses and the generally huge attendance at Greenbelt should put lie to the assumptions that big movie producers have made about the local audience: that they have largely abandoned Filipino movies. Paging Star Cinema, GMA Films, Viva, and Regal: Until you stop producing movies that pander to the lowest common denominator, lobbing low-IQ concepts at this amorphous monster that you call the "masa", then, yes, you will find your efforts largely ignored. If you start building movies that stimulate the imaginations of the only segment of the public who can actually afford to buy movie tickets--that would be the salaried Makati desk jockey who wants nothing more than two hours of relaxation that also kills traffic--then, yes, they will come.

Cinemalaya 7 should also be a lesson to the independent filmmaking community. Yes, you've cornered the market on true cineastes, but it's time for some real marketing--and tying up with the Ayala Malls is a step in the right direction. The basic function of marketing is to help your product (your movie) find its consumer (your audience). Approaching the ancillary aspects of filmmaking other than the creative elements (ie: marketing) in reverse, and expecting your audience to come find your one-of-a-kind, visionary film is pie-in-the-sky thinking, a mentality borne of marketing urban legends. This blogger is a classic example: After going all the way to the CCP two years ago to view a Cinemalaya entry produced by a friend, I got caught by a seasonal downpour on my way home, and ended up spending eight hours in a cramped FX weaving its way through the city's submerged streets back to Commonwealth Avenue. After that harrowing experience, I had two words for Cinemalaya: Never again.

But I think the breakout feeling of this year's Cinemalaya is helped by the fact that, for the first time, the width and breadth of independent filmmaking is finally on display for more people to see. My big problem with local indie films is this pervasive thinking that they either have to glamourize poverty to gain an international audience (and in Brillante Mendoza's case, get international financing) or pander to homosexuals who find in the darkened moviehouse a natural allegory for their status in society. The four entries I was able to catch, at the very least, seem to be saying that there's a lot more f**ked up in our society than squatter communities and gay love lives.

At first glance, Lawrence Fajardo's Amok seems to be courting the poverty-porn lover from overseas. Shot with sterling production values and high definition that seems to radiate the heat you see onscreen and bake it onto the audience, Amok covers one day in the crowded, bustling roundabout in Pasay Rotonda, the narrative flitting among a cast of characters as they go toward something, run away from something, or are caught in stasis, baking in the humidity. For a while, you wonder where the film is going...until a stray bullet hits the head of a family matriarch (Lui Manansala) as she sits haranguing her brother-chauffeur (Archie Adamos) from the backseat of her van. And suddenly, the film jolts you with a sense of unpredictable urban danger.

A friend commented to me that the Pasay Rotonda portrayed in Amok, though crowded and sweltering, seemed suspiciously clean. That may be a matter for debate, but to me, it's in stark contrast to the filth surrounding the characters' lives, and the exhilarating untidiness of the plot strands. Even Alejandro Gonzalez Inñaritu couldn't resist a bit of diagrammatic resolution and forced interconnectedness in his sprawling, multi-plot films Amores Perros and Babel. Fajardo does something far riskier in Amok--characters come out of nowhere and seem to be headed nowhere. (Particular kudos goes to Mark Gil, the man who probably jumpstarted many an audience member's puberty growing up in the 70s with his mestizo beauty, reveling in an un-actorly lack of vanity playing a washed-up actor who gets a nasty surprise after a one-night stand.) Nothing is resolved, all the film captures is a moment when a man (Dido dela Paz) shoots haphazardly into a bustling intersection in retaliation for a vengeful knifing, and these characters' lives are frozen in a life-and-death snapshot that shows not the poverty of the metropolis, but the poverty of their spirit.

While audience word-of-mouth had been lukewarm to Director's Showcase winner Bisperas (Eve), I personally believe that this is largely due to the idea that this film of a home burglary on Christmas Eve exposing the deep fissures within a family feels like a letdown from the lofty ambitions of director Jeffrey Jeturian's past films. (Jeturian has shown an unerring deliberateness to his career choices, producing films that almost always hit the creative high mark.) Taken on its own merits, though, Bisperas feels like a self-contained gem, its grainy, home-movie quality highlighting its captured reality. The cast, made up of patriarch Tirso Cruz III, Julia Clarete, Jennifer Sevilla, Edgar Allan Guzman, and eventual best actress winner Raquel Villavicencio, inhabit their roles, acting out the battle-weary affection and coiled tension of people forced to live with secrets and petty resentments for years and years. The scary thing about this movie is what it says about the fragility of family, how outside forces can cause it to crack from within.

The least successful--and most baffling--entry I saw was Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa, Alvin Yapan's mediation on dance, poetry, and love. Ostensibly, it's about a student (Paulo Avelino) harboring a crush on his Filipino lit teacher (Jean Garcia), who also moonlights as a dance instructor. Sensing an opening, he hires a classmate (Rocco Nacino) to show him the ropes so that he doesn't look like a simpleton when he enrolls in his crush's dance class, and the two develop an ambiguous relationship that is less than lovers, but definitely more than a "bromance."

So intent are the filmmakers on melding the grace of movement with the flow of poetry that they neglect to lay the groundwork for the characters to first gain a semblance of solid footing. The words of poets like Joi Barrios, Benilda Santos, and Ophelia Dimalanta shimmer with longing and angst, and they serve as a wonderful aural framework for the shimmering melancholia in the planes of Jean Garcia's cheekbones (the actress has never looked more ravishing)...and yet, why is this teacher so sad? Meanwhile, Rocco Nacino seems to be an actor intent on learning his craft, yet he is completely stymied by the tense, closed-off quality of Paulo Avelino, who seems to be out of his depth tracing the arc of a guy who starts out harboring a normal college crush on his lit professor but ends up nursing a latent attraction to his less privileged classmate. None of these characters have an illuminated interior life, and so Sayaw ends up being apropos to its milieu, a remote treatise on poetry and dance so in love with its own contexts and subtexts that it feels like a well-made student thesis film.

The obvious crowd-pleaser is Marlon Rivera's Ang Babae sa Septic Tank, a movie-within-a-movie that starts out as a stark portrait of a woman forced to sell her child into prostitution, then takes a hard left and becomes an observant, hilarious satire on ambitious filmmakers seeking international recognition, actors' egos, the networks' crushing monopoly on creative energies, and--you guessed it--the glamorization of poverty. For a moment, I was afraid that perhaps the jokes were too insider-y, wondering if the punchlines would translate to an audience unfamiliar with the machinations of a back-biting industry that smiles with one side of its lips while whispering salacious gossip out the other.

But even the secret inside jokes are swept up in the gleeful joy with which Eugene Domingo plays not just the titular woman flailing in the allegorical septic tank that is her life, but herself as a diet-conscious diva who declares that she is an instrument for the filmmakers' vision yet tries to wrest control of the project with her own melodramatic, honed-by-soap-opera take.

In fact, one of Babae sa Septic Tank's conceits is that, as the filmmakers ponder each and every possible execution of the concept--as cinema vérité, as documentary, as musical, as melodrama--a production coordinator played by Cai Cortez imagines the finished film as each genre. Eugene Domingo obviously relishes the chance to display serious acting, outsized dramatics, singing chops, and self-winking parody all within the space of one film. But to me, Babae's supreme achievement is how the filmmakers harbor such affection for each of the genres they are parodying, an absolute prerequisite for satire. After the laughs die down, you may find yourself caught up in the commitment with which they approach each genre (although the musical segment could have used some more trimming), and discover to your delight that each holds a kernel of validity when it comes to portraying a certain kind of reality.

In the end, Babae becomes more than a satire of poverty porn, but a celebration of the no-wrong-answers ethos of creativity. And the fact that this film won the lion's share of New Breed awards in the Cinemalaya festival proves to me, thankfully, joyously, that the indie community is in on the joke.

The End and the Beginning

2011-07-21T04:34:00.000-07:00

I guess I couldn't let a blog entry pass without remarking on the passing of the Harry Potter franchise. Even though I've read all the books and watched all the movies (and even re-read the books before their corresponding movies come out), I don't really consider myself a die-hard Potter fan. Rather, I'm a fan of what the franchise has done to re-shape the culture. Yes, the books have gotten people to appreciate the written word again and to let their imaginations run free. But when it comes to the movies, Harry Potter has allowed people to participate in the communal experience of watching movies again, instead of just being slack-jawed zombies staring up at the screen as another ten-wheeler truck transforms into another robot.

I believe the real magic of the Harry Potter movies--and of any geek-generated, fanboy-fueled cult hit--lies in what their adoring audience brings into the cinema. Every dossier of every Death Eater, every distinction between an Erumpent and a Crumple-Horned Snorkack, every encyclopedic listing of spells from "Accio!" to "Petrificus totalus!"--this generous opening of hearts to the seven books' characters and unabashed investment in their fates is really what shapes the Harry Potter universe.

And what a beautifully realized universe it has been. Brick by brick, spell by spell, the seven Potter movies have given us a living, breathing alternate existence that we wish we could step into--I can think only of The Simpsons and the yellow-skinned inhabitants of Springfield, and The X-Files' rigorously rendered twilight world of conspiracies and monsters to rival the metaphorical three-dimensionality of Harry's wizarding world. (Although I personally believe that the franchise only started to soar once Alfonso Cuaron took over the reins from Chris Columbus in the third movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban--the Mexican director finally let go of Columbus' too-literal adapatation of the first two movies and gave the franchise some much-needed mystery and menace.)

And so the eighth and final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, dives unapologetically into its action, assuming that if you've sat your fanny down to watch it, then you have a) a more-than-passing knowledge of the scenery you're about to see, and b) as much riding on the resolution of this journey as much as the characters do. You should know what's at stake by now: While the evil Voldemort has gone and taken possession of the third and most powerful Deathly Hallow, the Elder Wand which the snake-nosed Dark Lord had taken from Dumbledore's tomb at the end of the seventh movie, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his courageous cohorts Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) have taken another tack, hunting down and destroying the seven Horcruxes (enchanted objects into which Voldemort has deposited a fragment of his soul as kind of an insurance policy for immortality), hoping that the destruction of each will spell his doom, or at least even out the fight. But in a final twist that is a testament to the crystalline perfection of JK Rowling's plotting, Harry's search for the Horcruxes will mean an ultimate sacrifice--the cost of which might be too high.

The real risk of a finale is that the revelations and set pieces may come barreling at you one after another. In The Deathly Hallows' case, you can't call it pacing so much as trafficking the revelations and set pieces. Fortunately, director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves have the science behind the magic down. From the giddy opening set piece of Harry and company barreling down a subterranean track on their way to break into Bellatrix Lestrange's (Helena Bonham Carter) vault at Gringotts, Yates and his band of filmmaking alchemists leaven the palpable sense of impending doom with surprising moments of intimacy (Ron and Hermione celebrate the destruction of another Horcrux with a very adult kiss--and then cap it off with childish giggles). These moments of human interaction then serve as a backdrop for the final siege of Hogwarts, which comes quite soon into the action. There is real death and real pain--the kind which can't be alleviated by a simple wave of a wand.

I revel in that communal experience of watching with an audience as they clap with glee at Maggie Smith's appearance as the feisty Minerva McGonagall, and gasp as they realize just how big a player Alan Rickman's Severus Snape is in the overall scheme to defeat Voldemort. I appreciate Alexander Desplat's plangent music, which manages to hark back to John Williams' iconic score but adds an epic melancholia befitting the end of the series. And I love that Yates and Kloves got the elbow room they needed to pay respect to the final battle between Harry and Voldemort by giving it its own space, distinct from all the other battles happening around it. Sure, it's an excuse for more action and more eye-popping special effects. But what's really at stake is never overwhelmed by the light show you see onscreen.

And finally, even as fans mourn the end of a distinct pop cultural moment, JK Rowlings' resolution provides its own comfort. That words are the greatest form of magic. That help will be given if you've reached the end of everything humanly possible. That the world is a magical, dangerous, wonderful, painful, comforting, mysterious place. And that the responsibility of saving it will ultimately lie in the hands of young people, while the responsibility of adults is to make sure that the young have every tool they need to do it. To paraphrase the sage Alan Rickman, we should not miss the franchise. Rather, we should hope that "it ends well." And that it does.

Meanwhile, let's take a moment to celebrate the beginning of what will hopefully be a long and bright career in movies for Kristen Wiig. On Saturday Night Live, Wiig specializes in playing high-strung motormouths with a competitive streak and varying degrees of egotism. On Bridesmaids, Wiig takes the comic mannerisms she's honed to perfection with SNL characters like Penelope and Target Lady but leaves out the outsize caricature, instead applying them to a fleshed-out, three-dimensional character named Annie, whose self-esteem has been left reeling after the recession claimed her bakery business and she's been forced to hawk engagement rings to couples she envies, and who has been carrying on a "friends with benefits" arrangement with an oily charmer (Jon Hamm) who feigns consideration while kicking her out of bed.

In other words, Annie has become a human doormat. But it isn't until her childhood pal Lillian (Maya Rudolph) announces that she's gotten engaged that Annie realizes how stuck in a rut she is. Recruited to be Lillian's maid of honor, Annie attends her best friend's engagement party, and promptly starts competing with the perfectly put-together Helen (Rose Byrne) in a hilariously escalating champagne toast whose affectionate tributes ride an undercurrent of bitter rivalry.

Bridesmaids has many comedic moments like these: gut-busting guffaws with a real edge of pain, because Wiig knows how to plug into the human impulse behind the comedy. Not since Jane Austen has a writer plumbed the connection between class and romance, and that a disadvantage in the former usually means difficulty in the latter. And this being a Judd Apatow production, you can expect a few verbal jabs at sex, but an early scene where Lillian counsels Annie on another unfulfilling booty call shows that Wiig has an ear for the frank, earthy way that longtime friends really talk to each other.

Bridesmaids touches on every trademark moment we've come to expect from every comedy in the age of Jim Carrey and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but again, there's a painful human impulse underpinning each of them that prevents them from sliding into gratuity. A particularly hilarious sequence involves the bridal party suffering a bout of food poisoning in an upscale bridal boutique, but what really drives the action is Annie's cold-sweat insistence that the diarrhea and vomiting did not stem from her taking the girls to a dodgy Brazilian churrascaria. It all culminates in a disastrous trip to Vegas, and a rejection that has Annie lashing out in a tirade that's both horrifying and cathartic to behold.

It is at this point that Bridesmaids leaves the concept of "chick flicks" miles in the dust. Make no mistake: Bridesmaids is a romantic comedy, as Annie has to figure out how to lower her passive-aggressive armour and allow a sweet Irish cop (Gulliver's Travels' Chris O'Dowd) into her life. But it is also an off-kilter love letter to the romance of female friendships, as Wiig and co-screenwriter Annie Mumolo craft nuanced yet scene-stealing parts for fine comic actresses like Mike and Molly's Melissa McCarthy, Reno 911's Wendi McLendon-Covey, and The Office's Ellie Kemper. The pair capture the underhanded ways in which women undercut each other, then come together in sisterhood (as life-affirmingly scored by Wilson Phillips). I'd always been a fan of Wiig's motormouth neurosis, but on a screen four stories-high, she's a neurotic that glows. Here's hoping this will be the first of many times that I'll be witnessing that glow.

Bridesmaids is showing exclusively at SM cinemas.

American Junked

2011-07-06T05:26:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I didn't know what to make of Amigo when I first saw it in December 2010, as part of the program of CineManila. For thousands of cineastes and Hollywood wannabes, John Sayles is more than an auteur--he's one of those mavericks whose career is the new template for indie cred: Use your earnings working within the studio system (Sayles was a script doctor for such genre films as Apollo 13 and Mimic) to finance deeply personal projects.

And what projects they've been! I loved the indelible connections forged between women in such films as Passion Fish (1992) and Casa de los Babys (2003) and marveled how the tall, imposing, and--dare I say it--hunky Sayles could write with such empathy for women. I loved the dream-like specificity of The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), in which Sayles must have dug deep into his Irish heritage to tell the story of a young girl dealing with the loss of her younger brother by explaining it through the folklore of "selkies"--seals with the ability to shed their skin and become human. I can even appreciate the whimsy of Brother From Another Planet (1984) and marvel at how a white man could have staked out the ticklish topic of race relations even before Spike Lee burst onto the scene.

Even though I enjoyed Eight Men Out (1988), Sayles' depiction of Major League Baseball's 1919 Black Sox Scandal, in which eight players from the Chicago White Sox were accused of colluding with gamblers to throw the World Series, I couldn't really plug into it, perhaps because in my head, I couldn't detect traces of the auteur's fingerprints on the material. I felt like Ron Howard or Ron Shelton could've directed this baseball movie and it wouldn't have made much of a difference. So this was a trepidation I carried with me as I left my first viewing of Amigo: The canvas was too broad, the material too impersonal. Was Sayles venturing into Back to Bataan territory?

I also admit now that it's unfair of me to squeeze John Sayles into the deeply-personal-project niche, because on second viewing at Amigo's premiere on the eve of its local theatrical release, the filmmaker's signature style of telling personal stories is right there for all to see. Amigo isn't so much a war movie (although a laregly forgotten conflict, the Philippine-American war, does frame it) as it is a race-relations movie. I believe it was an astute move on Sayles' part to situate the narrative in a war largely lost to the mists of time instead of plunking it down in Iraq or Afghanistan (too soon)--there's enough historical perspective and piqued interest for us to be open to the interpersonal connections that the film is interested in exploring.

(Quick history lesson: At the end of the 19th century, America was closely watching revolts against the Spanish in their next-door neighbor Cuba. When the American battleship Maine mysteriously sank in Havana harbor, McKinley, with much trepidation, declared war against Spain in 1898, resulting in a ten-week war that saw lopsided victories in favor of the Americans on both the Caribbean and Pacific fronts, where Spanish interests were located. Taking advantage of a weakened Spain, the Philippines also declared its independence in 1898, but unbeknownst to the Filipinos, Spain had ceded control of the islands to the USA as part of its terms of surrender. And so it happened that the Filipinos shirked free of one colonizer only to wake up under the yoke of another, resulting in another conflict that lasted much longer than the Spanish-American war.)

Amigo is a fictional account of one American platoon as it arrives to occupy one remote outpost, the barrio of San Isidro. Under the leadership of Lt. Compton (No Country for Old Men's Garret Dillahunt), the platoon discovers that the young, able-bodied men of San Isidro have largely fled to join the rebel cause, and that the remaining denizens have imprisoned the remaining Spanish element--most notably the parish priest Father Hidalgo (respected character actor Yul Vazquez, performing the awesome high-wire act of delivering lines in Spanish, English, and floried Tagalog, while conveying the clergyman's oily self-interest)--in the communal granary. They enlist the help of the barrio's authority figure, Rafael Dacanay (Joel Torre), whose son has joined his brother Simon (Ronnie Lazaro) in fighting the Americans. Rafael must balance the interests of the rebels with the welfare of the barrio that has been put under his care, and so he presents himself as a friend to the invading force, an "amigo."

Inevitably, this fence-straddling fools no one and blinds everyone at the same time. The rebels come to see Rafael as a collaborator, while the Americans see him as a potential threat. This last holds especially true when Compton's superior, the hard-nosed Col. Hardacre (Chris Cooper) discovers that the platoon has grown complacent under the torpor of rural life, and soon mandates that the Americans must stop dangling the carrot and start wielding the stick.

Amigo adds nothing new to the debate of American incursions in foreign lands. It makes the point that the real victims of war aren't the opposing sides who signed on with their eyes wide open, but the civilians caught in the middle, trying to live their lives while their world explodes around them. But there are many well-limned subplots, told with great attention to detail and meticulous research: the grudging communion between Compton and Dacanay, who realize that they share in common the ability to build even though circumstances force them to destroy; the Chinese coolies who dream of owning their own land while digging ditches for the American troops to defecate in while they march; the American troops who demonize Filipinos even though their charges unfailingly cooperate with them and sell them tuba.

There is also an abundance of humor mined from the language barrier (Dacanay and his wife Corazon, played by Rio Locsin, call the oblivious troops sent to guard them as they plant rice "monkeys"), and tenderness too (a naive Texan infantryman, played by Dane DeHaan, falls for a local lass, even though she can't understand a single word of courtship he's telling her). All this playing out with Jose "Pete" Lacaba's masterful translation of John Sayles' script, Lee Meily's alternate gold-and-sepia cinematography, and Rodell Cruz's to-the-period production design, and you'll see that while Amigo unfolds on a broad canvas, it's the little vignettes that Sayles paints in the nooks and crannies that will stay with you.

Meanwhile, the documentary Kano: An American and His Harem makes Amigo look like a multimillion-dollar production instead of the scrappy $1.2 million indie production that it really is. Kano (Tagalog slang for an American man) tells the story of Victor Pearson, a Vietnam War veteran who in 1969 relocated to a remote part of Negros Occidental and, with the pension he gets from his service in the military and the disability benefit he receives from his previous employment in a sawmill back home, manages to house and support numerous wives and paramours over a period of many years. The Big Love-style set-up only came crashing down in 2001 after Pearson raped a 15-year-old girl who had only come into his gravitational pull with the sole intent of finding employment as a cleaning woman in his compound.

The director Monster Jimenez fulfills the mandate of every documentarian, which is to step back and let her subjects tell the story. In the process of interviewing pertinent people from 2006 until 2008 (and witnessing the marriage of Pearson, who says he converted to Islam in the '80s, to wife no. 4 while in custody at the Negros Occidental Provincial Jail), Jimenez said in a Q&A session after the UP Film Center screening I attended, that they had amassed countless hours of conversations, thousands of feet of footage, and a one-way ticket to an editing process which she unequivocally called "hellish."

But the fledgling documentarian makes the wise decision to make Kano the story of a dysfunctional family, and in so doing, opens up the story to a wide variety of viewpoints. Pearson is at various points portrayed as a great charmer and wit, a teary patriarch who is sincerely concerned for the welfare of his numerous lovers, and a man buffeted by the twin demons of war and a fractured childhood. Meanwhile, the women--some long-suffering, others ambivalent about their feelings, and one speaking in serviceable English to set herself above her sisters in concubinage--are united in their stories of crushing poverty. And arching over them all is a society so completely transformed from the country of revolutionary zeal portrayed in John Sayles' Amigo, now looking upon white men as Messiahs, upon liaisons with them--no matter what the personal cost--as the last great hope for a secure future.

Jimenez can't resist a filmmaking flourish or two (she did, after all, co-write the indie hit Big Time). She often uses a wide lens to document the women going about their daily lives, making their everyday treks to the jail where their Kano is serving an 80-year sentence. At another point, she recounts the story of two girls who had initially filed charges of rape against him, then recanted, with one of them ending up Pearson's wife and the other his long-time mistress. Jimenez tells their story via the use of inventive subtitles, and shoots them on a rollercoaster, presumably as an allegory to the emotional peaks and dips of their relationship with Pearson.

Kano has already collected a passel of prizes, ranging from the first ever Gawad Urian Award for documentary feature to a citation from the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam. But if Jimenez is a talent to watch out for, it is because she has the eye to capture moments such as when Pearson declares, "They charged me with immorality...but I never claimed to be a moral person."

It's ethical quandaries like these that are the reason why you should duck into a cinema showing Amigo in the middle of lining up for Transformers 3 or the final Harry Potter movie, or why you should seek out Kano as it makes the circuit of university showings. Sometimes a little antidote to the never-ending diet of American junk is good for the soul.

Life, Oh Life!

2011-06-26T04:49:00.000-07:00

I feel a little guilty raving about a film like The Tree of Life, the new film by Terrence Malick that took three years to complete, because this implies that, like other film snobs, I view anyone who can't appreciate esteemed auteurs like Malick or Ingmar Bergman as someone not worthy of my time. I feel extra sheepish after seeing around five people walk out of the Saturday afternoon screening I attended in Rockwell, so it smacks of hoity-toity-ness to be awestruck by something these five people--who were, after all, paying good money to see The Tree of Life in a mall that's as hoity-toity as it gets--obviously thought confounding.

But here it is: I was awestruck, thrilled, and uplifted by The Tree of Life. Especially because it's so rare to find a film that isn't afraid to ask the Big Questions (Why are we here? Is there are a God? Why do bad things happen to good people?), and is even less afraid to be about Everything.

It's an understatement to say that The Tree of Life isn't for everyone. I don't mean that in any exclusive-club, secret-handshake sort of way, just that after a whole lifetime of watching movies that spoonfeed you what's happening and what's going to happen next, you come to define cinematic entertainment as anything that allows you to switch off your mind. The Tree of Life allows you no such luxury. The central story--about the travails of a Texas family named the O'Briens in the 1950s--is told out of sequence, with a Malick-ian emphasis on luminous, ephemeral details (the billowing of a curtain in the breeze, the way sunlight filters through the leaves of the tree in the front yard, being awakened with ice cubes down the back on a lazy morning). It's as if the filmmaker were trying to capture the specific, elusive nature of memories.

(Malick's camera, wielded by the formidable DP Emmanuel Lubezki, who helped Alfonso Cuaron present his dystopian view of the future in Children of Men, is also restless. So much so that the American friend I watched the film with had to leave his seat and spend the rest of the screening standing near the entrance. He also had similar issues with motion sickness during a viewing of Cloverfield and its hand-held camera work, so I'm pretty confident his visceral reaction towards Malick's latest isn't strictly one of nausea.)

But while The Tree of Life deals with the specific, it also deals with the abstract and the grand, plunking the story of the O'Briens in the story of the creation of the Universe, starting with the Big Bang, then the simmering of the primordial soup that gave rise to single-celled organisms, then pink axolotls, and on to dinosaurs. (It's a wonder Malick didn't deal with simians and prehistoric man, but I suspect he thought that had already been covered by Kubrick, a brother in perfectionism, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

By situating the O'Briens' story in the ongoing narrative of the Universe, Malick seems to be, on the one hand, making the statement that their travails seem to be insignificant. And yet elements of their story echo even in the prehistoric sequences. In voice-overs, Mother (the fragile and womanly Jessica Chastain) makes the distinction between Grace and Nature. Grace, she says, is nurturing and accepts everything, even insults and pain. Nature, on the other hand, insists on its own way and refuses to be happy, even, in the words of Malick's poetic screenplay, "when the world is shining around it and love is smiling through everything."

The push-and-pull between Grace and Nature is evident in the dynamics of the O'Brien family, where Mother is a devoted homemaker who plays with her three sons and cooks home-made meals from scratch, while Father (Brad Pitt, who radiates authority and vulnerability in everything from his crewcut to the pugnacious jut of his chin) is firm and set in his ways, telling his children to remain quiet unless they have something important to say and extolling Toscanini while barbecuing in the backyard. (Pitt's line, about the composer doing and re-doing a piece of music more than 60 times and then offering the composer's self-assessment that the piece "could have been better" seems to be a self-reflexive statement on the filmmaker's notoriously deliberate process.) By default, Father is the more fascinating figure: a man who tamped down his own dreams of being a classically trained musician so he could support his family during the flush of newfound American power in the years after World War II, just as likely to hug his three sons and kiss them as he is to lunge at them over the dinner table if they speak out of turn.

And yet, there are parallelisms between the conflict between Grace and Nature in the stretch depicting dinosaurs. A small lizard lies on the pebbles beside a stream, not necessarily wounded but seeming to be lost and exhausted. A few small dinosaurs wade in the background, then scamper away as something that resembles Spielberg's velociraptor from Jurassic Park lopes into view. It stamps down on the small dinosaur's head, and you fully expect it to rip the helpless lizard to shreds. But then it does the most amazing thing: It taps the smaller dinosaur's head, soemthing between a caress and a pat on the back, and then lopes away, sparing the weak dinosaur's life. Malick seems to be saying that even in the most brutal nature, grace can be found...and that we don't corner the market on impulses--mercy, compassion, nurturing--that we have come to define as humanity.

In telling anecdotes like this, Malick makes the story of the O'Briens both specific and universal, which, really, is the objective of all great works of art--something that speaks to something individual inside of all us through the yawning gulf of time and space.

Film has its own syntax and language--it's just our misfortune that most of the movies we've been exposed to have straightforward syntax: this happened, then this, then this. But The Tree of Life doesn't traffic in straightforward syntax. In presenting the story of the O'Briens as memory--ostensibly the memory of eldest son Jack, played in adulthood by Sean Penn, and in childhood by a variety of child actors but most notably by Hunter McCracken, commanding the screen with raw talent the way a yound Leonardo DiCaprio did in This Boy's Life--it presents events not just out of sequence, but often as a series of flashes of imagery.

Little by little, we see Jack being hardened by his father's disciplinarian ways, as he starts to smash windows on abandoned homesteads for fun, then strap frogs to home-made rockets, then does some petty thievery of a comely neighbor's lingerie, and culminating in an incident where he injures his younger brother by shooting his finger with an air gun. But so devoted is Malick to the non-sequitur nature of memory that when we witness a sequence where Jack's mother is quietly chastising him for an offense, we think at first that it's for murdering the helpless amphibian...until we realize it could have been for hurting his sibling.

Malick steadfastly refuses to spoonfeed us anything, doling out information in dribs and drabs. The movie opens with Mother getting a telegram. She opens the envelope, the camera lingers on her back for a moment, and then she sobs and mouths "My son". And then we cut to Father away on business on an airstrip, struggling to hear the voice of his wife on the telephone as the cacophony of whirring airplane propellers drowns out his "What? What?" on the mouthpiece. It's the miracle of Malick's virtuoso filmmaking that we deduce that the son died in combat in Vietnam (Penn tells us he was 19 when he died, which puts the time frame of these sequences at about this American conflict) without Malick giving away information in a direct way; everything is done obliquely, with Malick paying us the supreme compliment of assuming that we have brain cells that can deduce and put two and two together.

Oddly, the film flags when it switches over to Penn, who is a dour architect trying to deal with his conflicted Father issues and the death of his brother as the defining tragedy of his life. In the process of his reflection, Malick dots the narrative with shots of Penn gingerly stepping through a rocky, barren landscape, then being guided by a woman who resembles his Mother through a rickety door frame in the middle of nowhere, which deposits him onto a desolate beach populated by wandering travellers. He is transformed back to his child self, reunited with his dead brother, his parents and youngest sibling, all of them in the subtlest of ways portrayed as young and old, in different phases of their lives at the same time.

It is with this promise of the afterlife, the promise of grace and happy reunions after tumultuous struggles with Nature and many separations, that Malick leaves us, if we have had the patience to sit through this 138-minute cinematic poem. There is even a shot of sunflowers, with their obvious artistic symbolism and religious overtones. (Sunflowers, with their penchant for always facing the sun, have long been used by artists as a symbol for religious devotion.) I prefer to believe that we are all like sunflowers: on first glance, the same; yet subtly different; and essentially, all beautiful.

If you learn to let go of your expectations of what a film should be--a linear, three-act narrative with a beginning, middle, and end (preferably with an elaborate action set piece within the first five minutes)--and immerse yourself in The Tree of Life's stubborn mysteries, I think you'll be rewarded with what Malick wanted for you all along: You'll learn to live his film frame by frame, moment by moment, accepting each beautifully crafted shot with wonder and gratitude. And ultimately, isn't that how life should be lived?

Does It Have To Take "Forever"?

2011-06-18T19:18:00.000-07:00

So last night on my way home, the cab driver was listening to this radio station I'd never heard of, and this gay DJ (funny how there seems to be more of them on the airwaves...maybe there's hope for the Pinoy LGBT community yet) is reading a letter for his advice show. The letter writer was talking about an ex-spouse (sorry, spouse...we're still the only country in the world that hasn't legalized divorce) living with someone else in Cebu, and about a younger prospect circling said letter writer, and please, Mr. DJ, what should I do?

Mr. Gay DJ started out criticizing the letter writer for not specifying genders (funny how Tagalog doesn't allow for gender in words like "asawa" or "kalaguyo"--perhaps indicating that matrimony and infidelity are equal-opportunity mistakes), so he said he had no idea if the letter writer was a spurned wife or if the new, younger prospect was of the same sex, in which case there was a whole "forbidden-love" angle to think about. Having pointed that out, though, the DJ didn't let the dearth of information stop him from spouting love advice for a half-hour's worth of traffic time. After a while, he began to dispense nuggets like "Hindi ka dapat pumapatol sa mas bata sa 'yo. Siguro dapat magtinda ka para occupied ang time mo."

This whiff of people not knowing what they're talking about is the distinct bouquet I smelled wafting around Forever and a Day, the new Star Cinema offering that stars Sam Milby as a driven designer of athletic shoes and KC Concepcion as the lymphoma sufferer whose impromptu trip to the extreme recreational sites outside Cagayan de Oro is the catalyst which spurs their romantic liaison.

There's really not much to say about this A Walk to Remember rip-off except that, to give Star Cinema some credit, they decided to gamble on a movie that won't leave you smiling as you walk out of the theater, as they have been wont to do with their recent productions. There's nothing wrong with having a good cry in the cinema, because a good old-fashioned bawl is as cathartic as a belly laugh. The problem, I guess, lies in their choice of lead actors.

The truth is, no matter how mightily they try, Sam Milby and KC Concepcion just don't have the conviction and gravitas to carry all that weight. Maybe they don't have enough life experience yet, or maybe they need more workshops...who knows? But when Sam Milby tries to cry, he looks like he's about to have an aneurysm. And when KC acts scared about going on a zipline for the first time, it seems like she's channeling a Labrador puppy at the pet shop trying to reel in a prospective master. At one point during her chemotherapy sequences, the makeup people put so much chap on KC's lips they effectively steal her scenes away from her. You know a movie is in trouble when you can't focus on what a character is saying because you're too busy thinking about how gross the character's lips look.

Which leads me to the point about what the characters are saying. For one thing, they're just saying too much. Yap, yap, yapping so much about "learning to let go" and "shoes are the most unappreciated things in the world" that I started wishing KC's forlorn character would die already so there'd be less excuse for embarrassing dialogue.

For another, you get the sense that the writers don't really know what they're talking about, kinda like that DJ who extols entrepreneurship as the perfect antidote to infidelity. There's a scene where Dante Rivero, playing the father whose approval Sam desperately seeks, counsels Sam on loving KC the way she needs to be loved and not the way you want to love her, though letting go is hard you can do it blah blah blah, and every piece of dialogue, in every interaction between characters, is really just a variation of this speech. Come on! Even that mother of privileged boy-doomed girl movies, Love Story, confined itself to "Love means never having to say you're sorry." And what A Walk to Remember didn't deliver in meaningless platitudes, it compensated for with Mandy Moore performing "Only Hope."

If the writers have had any experience confronting death in such a capacity, they would have realized that most people don't possess such erudition in the face of losing a loved one to such a gradual, painful disease; that people can't always reach out during times of extreme sorrow; that they withdraw inward even more and act out in confounding, complicated ways. I would have loved to see a tragic-death movie where Sam has to grapple with his issues (and express his sorrow with more than just a run around the track) without being able to explicate them so eloquently. As the cliché goes, "Actions speak louder than words." And actions make for more compelling cinema.

In the end, Sam has a voice-over speaking about how his "biggest loss turned out to be [his] biggest gain": "It gave me a heart that's stronger, that's bigger." And then there's a memorial service where they release KC's picture up to the sky with a gazillion balloons, and I'm left marveling at the facility with which Forever and a Day has managed to romanticize and trivialize such a huge part of the human condition as death. Sitting through this movie is like enduring a session with a grief counselor who spouts only platitudes, saying stuff like "I know this is hard" or "Time heals all wounds." Or listening to a verbose DJ dispense love advice but doesn't have all the facts. In short, the movie felt like forever.

Super 8: of aliens and those pesky kids

2011-06-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to watch a re-imagining of ET - and that's what Super 8 looked like from the very first time I saw the trailer. You'd think the words ET would've hooked me but unlike everyone else, my recollection of the film was an hour and a half of total darkness, the kind you get from watching a camcorder copy of the film. On betamax.

As such, ET has no special place in my heart - I have seen a clear copy of it since, but the timing was not as magical as it would've been when it first came out.
In fact, I think I may have bunched it with a lot of those 80s movies that have what I call the "those pesky kids" syndrome - which is basically any movie with clueless kids getting past dangerous situations by sheer dumb luck.

My problem with these types of films was that the filmmakers were just too lazy to challenge themselves in coming up with scenarios that wouldn't make you go "Oh, come on, that's way too impossible!" If that thought pops in your head at any time while watching a film, then your experience will most likely be ruined.

And ET had a bit of that, with Elliot escaping the authorities with the help of his Extraterrestrial buddies.
Now, having said all that, I'm not saying ET was in any way an inferior film. Come on, Spielberg directed it! It's just that there was a certain naivete to it that, I'm kind of dismissive of, which compels me to classify it among those 80s kid adventure movies (forgive me, no titles come to mind).

I'm not being fair here, I know, after all, that dark betamax copy did ruin it for me (stop piracy!).
And having said all that, I hope I've explained why I wasn't excited about what I perceived to be another movie with pesky kids.

But once the opportunity to watch it presented itself, I, of course, took it. After all, JJ Abrams has never failed me on the big screen before ( on the small screen, it's a different story). And Spielberg did executive produce, so one can't help but think that this homage/reimagining/whatever you want to call it, was made with his blessing, as if he was passing on the torch to the next generation.
You know what? I was right and wrong.

I was wrong to not be excited about it because it turned out to be a good film, one I enjoyed quite a bit.
And I was right to compare it with ET: kids in a small town meet alien desperate to go home. But Super 8 turned out to be quite different from ET.

The film's alien, for one, is not cute, nor is it friendly and it ravages the town and some of its people in its desperate attempt to leave earth. This provides an element of danger that is far more immediate and perhaps, far more realistic than the situation presented in ET.

Super 8 is a more pragmatic film - alien contact as a dangerous, life threatening situation.
All this, of course, occurs at a point in the characters' lives when a devastating loss threatens to break family ties apart - and truth be told, this is one of the movie's strengths. The alien just hovers around the fringes for the better part of the film, which allowed Abrams to set an emotional core to the whole story.

But its not all heartbreak and lethal alien encounters, the movie has a delightful cast of kids who bring a lot of warmth, innocence and humor to the film.
One thing that stood out for me, really, was the way the kids were depicted here:
Unlike ET and it's contemporaries, these kids were far from doe-eyed and clueless - they were shooting a film. Abrams chose to make the kids filmmakers, a nod to his own childhood in Los Angeles.

I remember how innocent and clueless the kids seem in ET or any of those 80s movies for that matter - even the older brother character was kinda dumb. This wasn't the case with Super 8 - they were directing and acting in dramatic scenes, employing make-up and special effects, shooting their movie using Super 8 film.

Like I said, Abrams own childhood informs this direction. And while that lends the film credence, I can't help but think how this depiction reflects the change in the way children are now perceived, not just by filmmakers, but by everyone.

Would Spielberg have thought to depict the kids in such a manner back in he 80s? Who knows? All I know is ET's kids seem much more innocent and ignorant than Super 8's kids. Perhaps this approach makes you suspend your disbelief more willingly. Of course, there was that scene when the kids pieced the puzzle of the alien when they poured through a ton of documents, audio tapes and film reels - this reeked of convenience for me, but since it served to push the story forward, I just let it go.

Super 8 is a product of its time, much like ET was when it first came out. It's a well made film that doesn't insult the audiences' intelligence and at the same time delivers just enough drama and thrills. Watch out for the end credits, it's one of the best and most purposeful treatments ever. I was starting to feel something was missing from the film's ending until the cbb rolled up - it made the film so much more satisfying.

ET is one of the most beloved films worldwide. Ultimately, only time will tell if Super 8 becomes a classic like it's predecessor. One thing's for sure, this film was not some pointless remake or, as Hollywood would put it, reimagining. It stands on its own 6 legs while paying the utmost respect to its inspiration.

Go watch it now. In theaters, not on dvd or vcd or vhs or, God forbid, betamax.

Generation "X"

2011-06-01T20:50:00.000-07:00

Watching X-Men: First Class at a press screening last night, I happened to watch a trailer for an upcoming Selena Gomez movie that features the Bieber squeeze who, alongside Gossip Girl comrades Katie Cassidy and Leighton Meester as her girl friends, flies to Paris on a cut-rate holiday, but then gets mistaken for a spoiled socialite (they look alike--imagine that!) and is whisked away to a world of jetset locales and polo-playing hotties who appreciate Selena for who she is...even though she isn't who she's supposed to be.

Maybe it's a curmudgeonly impatience to the tastes of a younger generation (there were pubsecent girls who were gasping at every Hollywood hunk that appeared in the trailers, I was suprised they didn't faint from excessive oxygen intake), but I couldn't help but think, 'Haven't I seen this before? Except last time it was Hillary Duff in Rome getting mistaken for an international pop star?' How much of a generational gap exists between Hillary Duff and Selena Gomez that studio executives think that they can repackage a premise that's only a few years old and make it seem fresh for a new batch of gasping tweeners?

No wonder Hollywood keeps returning to the trough of superhero movies to keep their summer slate full. The basic premise is recycled over and over again--some supervillain is bent on the destruction of the world; some superhero must overcome his own personal demons to save it--and yet the depth of storytelling is limited only by the imaginations of the storytellers. X-Men: First Class is, by now, the fifth movie of the X-Men franchise to be unveiled since the first one in 2000, and yet, under the direction of Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn, it feels as fresh and new as it did 11 years ago.

Of course, a lot of the credit must go to the source material. Eversince Stan Lee and Jack Kirby unveiled back in 1963 a band of mutated superhuman beings whose very difference makes them the target of an increasingly wary world, talented writers and illustrators have introduced a plethora of various mutants into the X-Men multiverse, producing a mythology so dense and convoluted that it will probably take another five origin movies to unravel all the plot threads.

Since X-Men: First Class only has a maximum of 120 minutes to explain the origins of Professor Charles Xavier's X-Men (and, by extension, his nemesis Magneto's Brotherhood of Mutants), Vaughn and his batallion of writers (director Bryan Singer is given a story credit) have no choice but to simplify that mythology. But the mythos itself is so rich that even a simplification is rewarding enough.

The film opens in a concentration camp in Poland in 1944, when a young boy named Erik Lensherr captures the attention of a Nazi doctor named Klaus Schmidt (Kevin Bacon) when he bends a barbed-wire gate trying to get at his mother. The doctor murders Lensherr's mother after a failed experiment, and sets in motion a quest for vengeance that will consume the adult Lensherr (Inglourious Basterds' Michael Fassbender) his entire life.

Meanwhile, the privileged Charles Xavier comes upon the shape-shifting child Raven rooting around in the kitchen of his parents' country estate in Westchester, and takes the frightened orphan in. 22 years later, Xavier (Wanted's James McAvoy) grows up to become a geneticist pursuing his interest in mutated genes, where his expertise, in turn, attracts the attention of a CIA agent named Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne of Insidious), who believes that a group of mutants (the Hellfire Club) led by Schmidt, now a military power broker going by the name of Sebastian Shaw, is bent on turning the U.S. and Russia against each other, turning Cold War paranoia into an all-out nuclear armaggedon designed to decimate humankind but stengthen mutants, whose exceptional abilities seemd to have been a product of nuclear radiation to begin with.

The fundamental pleasure of an origin story like X-Men: First Class lies in discovering how well-known state of affairs came to be. Erik Lensherr--the future Magneto--is portrayed as a lost man whose soul has been consumed by an obsession for vengeance. Charles Xavier is a dandy whose isn't beyond using his telepathic powers to impress a right-fitting bird at a pub. After saving Lensherr from drowning himself trying to detain Schmidt/Shaw's escaping sub after a skirmish in Florida, Xavier forges a touching friendship with the tortured Lensherr, and it is Fassbender's engaging vulnerability and McAvoy's clear-eyed idealism that allows us to buy into this unlikely alliance...and mourn its inevitable break.

Xavier and the future Mystique (Winter's Bone's Jennifer Lawrence, on a roll with high-profile parts with this and the upcoming Hunger Games as Katniss Everdeen) had a deep brother-sister bond...how did the blue-skinned shapeshifter end up within Magneto's ranks? How did Charles Xavier end up in that wheelchair? All these questions are answered to satisfying effect.

The distinct pleasure of any X-Men movie is witnessing each mutant's power and matching it to their codenames. In the hopes of marshalling each mutant and offering them a sanctuary from society's persecution, Xavier and Lensherr recruit a slacker teen--or as much of a slacker a teen can be in 1962--who can emit sound waves to destroy glass, alter the forces of gravity, and produce underwater sonar (Banshee!); a juvenile delinquent who needs help controlling his destructive plasma waves (Havok!); a lab nerd who has hands for feet (the future Beast!); a cabbie with the ability of "reactive evolution", like sprouting gills when immersed underwater (Darwin!); and a stripper who can sprout firefly wings (Angel!). On the roster of the Hellfire Club, Schmidt/Shaw can absorb any type of energy and disperse it at will; his femme fatale accomplice Emma Frost (Mad Men's January Jones) is a telepath who can coat her body in a hard diamond carapace; henchmen Azazel can disapparate at will and skewer enemies with his devil's-arrow tail, while Riptide can produce twisters.

Matthew Vaughn displays none of the irreverence he brought to Kick-Ass--X-Men is too revered a franchise for that--but he exposes what made that earlier movie such a compelling experience to begin with: an understanding of humanity--normal or mutant--and all its contradictions. Add that thrilling '60s superspy vibe, and thrilling cameos from Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Romijn Stamos to make up for the lack of a Stan Lee appearance, and you've got a superhero movie that engages the heart and ups the adrenaline even as it pops the eyeballs.

So anyway, back to my original point about X-Men and Selena Gomez: Increasingly, Hollywood is running out of ideas to fill the demands of a relentless bottomline. And that's why superhero movies are literally a lifesaver. With their literate origin stories (Thor tweaks Norse mythology--how many Hollywood movies can claim that as a source of inspiration?) and dense mythologies (Green Lantern is borne of the idea of an intergalactic police squad whose members have to pledge allegiance to a powerful, er, lantern), superhero movies promise well-thought-out characters and plotlines that are fertile ground for sequels.

Though fanboys and purists may cry foul over the liberties Hollywood takes with their beloved myths, ordinary cineastes like myself will take a revisionist approach to the backstory of Emma Frost than sit through another mistaken-identity romp in Europe with a wizard from Waverly Place, thank you very much.

- Andrew

The Bard and Bifrost: a hearty toast of mead to THOR!

2011-04-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

When Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created the Marvel Comics incarnation of Thor, he was exactly like the mythological Norse god of Thunder, with maybe a few exceptions. His costume had some some Nordic elements such as the winged helmet and boots made of leather strips - hold on, the boots may not quite be Nordic, primitive, certainly - but otherwise, it was superheroic, red cape and 6 discs (6 discs in front of his tunic which made more sense in the film rendition). And he spoke in Shakesperean English, thee, thou and nay.
And aside from being called Goldilocks by his fellow Avengers, his manner of speaking became a trademark of his comic book incarnation. Which makes me suspect that this was the real reason they hired Kenneth Branagh.

Prior to being cast as the loony Hogwarts professor in the Harry Potter series, you would recall that he was the film world's go-to guy when it comes to Shakespearean film adaptations.
But after seeing the film "Thor", I realize that Thor's speech pattern was less Shakesperean than his story. Branagh was definitely in his element in bringing weight to this drama of fathers and sons. And set against the backdrop of Asgard, enchanted hammers and frost giants, this movie comes together and dishes the good stuff in spades.

(Actually, back in the 80s, a live-action Thor appeared in a Hulk TV movie - Marvel really could do worse than Branagh and, well, they actually did!)

One other great thing to this film is the casting. Chris Hemsworth, who you may or may not have seen previously for a few minutes at the beginning of JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot ( he was seen briefly as the doomed captain who fathered Captain Kirk), acquits himself marvelously as the God of Thunder. He brings a roguish playfulness to an otherwise cocky and hotheaded god of thunder. The man can act, thankfully! I'm just bothered by his hair and beard, something off right there, but otherwise, he IS Thor - albeit a Thor I've never seen before. In comic books, he was ever so serious and brooding. Hemsworth brings the right amount of humanity and likablity to the character.

And Natalie Portman. After Black Swan, I'm just so happy to see her in a role where she has some joie de vivre - I hope I spelled that right. It was a lot of fun watching her, the camera loves that woman - and so do I. She has some great chemistry with Hemsworth, despite the massive size difference between the two of them, heh. She IS Jane Foster, and she IS worth travelling the Rainbow Bridge Bifrost for, dammit!
I must say, I really love the way they take pains with casting nowadays.
For geeks, there's always the other Asgardians Heimdall, The Warriors Three, the hotness that is Ladywarrior Sif and Jeremy Renner in a cameo as Hawkeye, the Avengers Bowman!

I love that they cast a black dude, Idris Elba as Heimdall, the guardian of Bifrost. It was the actor, not his color. This was no stunt casting, it just made sense!

Tom Hiddleston, whom I've never heard of before, was an excellent Loki! Watch out for this guy.
And of course, who better to play Odin the Allfather than Sir Tony Hopkins himself! I loved him as Odin, most especially because he didn't seem to display any of his usual mannerisms. I daresay his acting was quite restrained here.
Which is where a lesser director could go wrong. Thinking gods, one could easily go the way of big, over the top emotions.
But Branagh was in control here, and all the actors played their parts with humanity and the film is infused with a healthy dose of humor. Even the extras had some pretty funny lines (watch out for the arrival of Sif and The Warrior's Three in town) And that's always a welcome tack for me.
The shades of grey, the characterizations that depict each individual as neither pure good or pure evil, this played a huge part in why I liked the movie. This film is very much Thor's origin as a hero as it is Loki's origin as a villain. Both are defined by the choices they make eventually, neither of them black or white.
This is one of the best origin stories of any superhero movie I've seen. It remains true to the spirit of the character while making it more accessible to the viewers. There's a right mix of humor, drama and action that's quite irresistible to watch.
I actually thought I'd miss the winged helmet, which appeared in the beginning and, in fairness, was a very cool rendition, but no, not really. The helmet doth not make the god.

And how cool was that scene where Sif skewers the Destroyer?

- ike

Mr. Independent

2011-04-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

It seems like guys still rule the Hollywood universe, if the movies I've been seeing the past week are any indication. And even though feminists and equal-employment advocates would sorely disagree with me (the actresses in the three movies I'm going to talk about are relegated to the role of The Girl), there's nothing wrong with that, because even though they may succeed in varying levels on the intellectual front, they all guarantee a great time at the movies.

First up is The Lincoln Lawyer, the adaptation of a legal thriller by Michael Connelly in which Matthew McConaughey plays a variation of the sweating Mississippi laywer in 1996's A Time to Kill. But there is none of the idealism in that earnest, young barister in The Lincoln Lawyer's Mick Haller: This slick, street-smart lawyer works out of the back of his chauffeured Lincoln Continental, and he mostly specializes in representing shady types who prefer to pay their attorney fees in envelopes stuffed with cash.

That is, until Mick is tapped to represent the son of a wealthy real-estate tycoon (Frances Fisher). His newest client is Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), whose cherubic good looks should serve as clear warning that not everything in his protestations of innocence is as they appear. He's been accused of beating up a prostitute, and as Haller digs deeper into his client's story, he bumps up against an old case involving a hapless immigrant (Michael Peña) that he sent away for a life sentence, thinking that negotiating it down from death row represented the best of his lawyering services.

Everything works like Swiss-made clockwork in this conventional legal thriller. You know that Mick's slick swagger is ample grounds for getting his character knocked down a peg, causing him to question his ability to distinguish innocence not just from guilt but, as Mick says in a moment of alcohol-fueled despair, "evil." The plot telegraphs its climax a mile away, but the real pleasure of The Lincoln Lawyer is not in finding out who did what, but in watching how Mick covers his tracks and then covers the tracks covering his tracks as he manipulates the justice system in the cynical way that he does, but this time in the service of protecting his family and his soul. Matthew McConaughey rewards your attention by being more alert--more there--in this film than he has been in the ill-conceived romantic comedies that he's been appearing in of late.

Being alert is the cornerstone of Bradley Cooper's performance in Limitless, the action-thriller adapted from Alan Glynn's more writerly but totally uninformatively titled novel The Dark Fields. Cooper plays Eddie Morra, a down-and-out writer who, probably on the lowest day of his life, bumps into his ne'er-do-well brother-in-law on the street. The drug-dealing brother-in-law gives him a taste of an experimental drug named NZT, which supposedly allows the taker the ability to access the fabled unused 80% of our brain's capabilities. The drug awakens Eddie's slumbering memories, allowing him to access random snippets of trivia he had encountered before and free-associate them in creative ways. Pretty soon, Eddie is charming his landlord's girlfriend, spiffing up his rundown apartment, and finishing long-overdue novel in a frenzy of productivity. And it doesn't take long after that for Eddie to believe that writing isn't his calling, but taking on the sharks at Wall Street.

Of course, NZT turns out to be too good to be true. Eddie soon starts to suffer splitting headaches and what can only be called "time jumps"--periods of time that he can't account for. And that's just the physical side effects. His brother-in-law is murdered, strange men are following him, a Russian loan shark wants his stash of the experimental drug, and Eddie is trapped in an increasingly contentious relationship with Carl Van Loon, a Wall Street king played by Robert De Niro with just the right amount of subtle menace.

For the longest time, Bradley Cooper had remained an enigma to me. Sure, The Hangover made him a Hollywood presence, but that presence was the question: He has the frat-boy entitlement of Matthew McConaughey but none of his drawling Southern charm. In The Hangover's merry band of hellraisers, his married shcoolteacher is the only one you can't quite like: He doesn't have the lost-boy haplessness of Zach Galifianakis, nor the terrified neurosis of Ed Helms. Besides, how does someone who looks like Bradley Cooper--with his leering smile and unctuous handsomeness--get trusted to be around high school-age girls?

Turns out, as it often does in Hollywood, all Bradley Cooper needed was a role that turns his liabilities into assets. In Eddie Morra, he finds a character that allows him to use his fast-talking Lothario persona as a tool to make us root for him. Limitless is a roller coaster ride that takes unpredictable turns and makes us get a shivery thrill from them, something you would expect anyway from Neil Burger, the director who gave us 2006's The Illusionist, the woefully underrated magician thriller that had the supreme misfortune of being released around the same time as Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. But more than making use of Cooper's playboy charisma, Burger shoots Cooper so that the actor's cobalt blue eyes seem to pop out of the screen; the laser-like focus of those startling peepers elevates Cooper's performance from clever to scarily intense.

But if you like mind-bending head-trips in the vein of Inception, then you can't go wrong with Source Code, the sci-fi thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as decorated helicopter pilot Capt. Colter Stevens, who has been recruited into a secret military program designed to head off--in these times of paranoia, what else?--terrorism attacks. The title refers to newly invented technology that allows a subject to tap into the brain's residual memories at the point of death (as Jeffrey Wright's top honcho describes it, like the phantom glow emanating from a light bulb after it's been switched off). And that is how Colet Stevens finds himself inhabiting the body of a schoolteacher named Sean Fentress, conversing with a beautiful friend named Christina (Michelle Monaghan) whom we gather he would like to be on a less platonic friendship with, trying to find the identity of a bomber threatening more destruction on Chicago, on a train eight minutes before it explodes.

The problem is, Colter is doomed to fail until he succeeds, and so he has to relive the explosion and those dire eight minutes until he finds out who planted the bomb on this commuter train and planning to detonate a dity bomb in the Windy City. Source Code makes big noises about the elasticity of time, the ephemeral nature of relationships and the enduring bonds of love, and Jake Gyllenhaal does an admirable job of building a solid emotional foundation for his character, taking you step by step as he gets to know his fellow passengers and develops feelings for the friend he is commuting with. But really all Source Code is is a sci-fi pretzel whose sole purpose is to have you untying its quantum-physics knots the moment you leave the theater. And that is reward enough: It's rare to find a movie that will leave you in spirited discussion after its end credits roll. Rarer still to find a film whose ending--though problematic and riddled with holes, as these time-travel plots are prone to be--trumps Inception for sheer complication and ambiguity.

These three movies, as I've said, guarantee a great time at the movies and are worth your 150-peso ticket. But another common factor unites these three amazing movies...and I'm not talking about their laughable posters. (Why do small-time local distributors feel the need to supplement their glossies with lurid pictures? For The Lincoln Lawyer, Matthew McConaughey is now sitting on the hood of his Lincoln Continental, gazing wistfully at a screaming woman with blood spurting out of her eyes. In Limitless, Bradley Cooper now has a cross-section of a brain plastered onto his slicked-back hair and a picture of Robert De Niro swiped from a Casino press kit pasted onto his neck. And Jake Gyllenhaal is now running through a full-blown apocalypse, instead of the falling pictures against an ashy landscape in the original poster.)

What is truly amazing about these films is that they were produced by the independents: Lionsgate (and its newly unveiled strategy of producing more films at a low budget) produced The Lincoln Lawyer; up-and-coming imprint Relativity (along with the incongruously named company Virgin Produced) financed Limitless; while The Mark Gordon Company and little-known Vendome Pictures are responsible for Source Code. More than that, these indie companies had the chutzpah to put untested directors in charge of these high-profile projects. Brad Furman is a virtual unknown whose film output comes to about one every four years, while Source Code director Duncan Jones was tapped on the strength of his one movie, the claustrophobic sci-fi thriller Moon.

There seemed to be no strategy in packaging these movies--no overthought, focus-group-driven marketing discussions on filmography and experience and touchstone audience requirements. The producers seemed only detemrined to pair the right material with the most exciting talent. And that's how the indies will beat the studios at their own game.

Oscar Predictions 2011

2011-02-24T05:22:00.000-08:00

Actually, the only reason why I'm writing an Oscar prediction entry this year is because I'm sufficiently pissed by the movie I think will win best picture that I need to add a "Who Should Win" section to the "Who Will Win" section just so I can vent. Anyway, here goes:

BEST ACTOR
Javier Bardem, Biutiful
Jeff Bridges, True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Colin Firth, The King's Speech
James Franco, 127 Hours

Who Will Win: Colin Firth. Scoring two lead acting nominations back to back means he's at the top of his game. Plus he's playing British royalty. With a handicap. If there's a textbook Oscar-bait role, it's his stuttering King George VI.

Who Should Win: Colin Firth. Yes, Oscar predictions tend to get a little cynical after a while when it comes to the concept of "Oscar baiting." But let that not detract from the depth with which Firth inhabits his role, portraying the man behind King George VI in all his sweet, vulnerable, foul-tempered glory.

BEST ACTRESS
Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine

Who Will Win: Natalie Portman. It's a showboat role that frees the usually repressed Portman--hallucinations! split personalities! lesbian dalliances!--and allows her to fly her freak flag.

Who Should Win: The real advantage Portman has going for her this year is that all of her rivals had roles that required them to do subtle work, diving inward instead of acting outward. Having said that, I'm partial to Nicole Kidman's finely calibrated work in Rabbit Hole--it takes a lot of talent to seethe and mourn quietly, and still be able to show the audience how all that quiet mourning and seething can eat up a person's soul.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Christian Bale, The Fighter
John Hawkes, Winter's Bone
Jeremy Renner, The Town
Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech

Who Will Win: Christian Bale. While he's split the pre-awards booty with Geoffrey Rush, there's no topping (or stopping) his magnetic portrayal of the dangerous, always threatening-to-tip-over-the-edge, but ultimately lovable Dicky Eklund.

Who Should Win: Christian Bale. I'm sorry, subtle has its place in the acting canon, but sometimes you just want a huge dose of crazy to wake you up on Oscar night.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams, The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech
Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom

Who Will Win: The money is on Melissa Leo, but given that shocking faux pas she committed with those tacky "For Your Consideration" ads (posing in fur beside an indoor pool, leaning down to show her cleavage as if her enhanced boobage were giving her back problems), I honestly think if an upset were to happen, it would be in this category.

Who Should Win: I couldn't tear my eyes away from Melissa Leo...but in a perfect world, her co-star Amy Adams would win. Not just because this is her third nomination in this category, but because her scrappy waitress is an Everywoman everybody can cheer for.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Mike Leigh, Another Year
Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, The Fighter
Christopher Nolan, Inception
Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, The Kids Are All Right
David Seidler, The King's Speech

WHO WILL WIN: David Seidler. The awards momentum of The King's Speech will probably sweep him along in its wake.

WHO SHOULD WIN: While Inception's nesting-doll script gave me brain cramps (but in a good way!), I appreciate how The Kids Are All Right was able to mine the well-trod territory of family dramas and produce something fresh and eye-opening.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy, 127 Hours
Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Michael Arndt, Toy Story 3
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, True Grit
Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini, Winter's Bone

WHO WILL WIN: Aaron Sorkin. Duh. This category is the closest The Social Network has to a lock.

WHO SHOULD WIN: Aaron Sorkin. Are you kidding? If every script had words and dialogue this intoxicating, then all scripts should be talky!

BEST DIRECTOR
Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
David O. Russell, The Fighter
Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
David Fincher, The Social Network
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, True Grit

WHO WILL WIN: David Fincher. Yes, yes, Tom Hooper won the Director's Guild. But the last time the DGA didn't line up with the Oscars was when Rob Marshall won the DGA for Chicago and Roman Polanski won the Oscar for The Pianist, and in Oscar years, that's pretty recent (2003). So I'm hoping the in-bred bias against young pups that Oscar has will translate into a defeat for Hooper in this category.

WHO SHOULD WIN: I love that Darren Aronofsky elevated the pulp that was Black Swan to dizzying heights of art-house artistry (and produced a fun film, to boot), but David Fincher's deft hand at visuals worked magnificently with Aaron Sorkin's electrifying words to make The Social Network a truly satisfying experience at the cineplex.

BEST PICTURE
127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone

WHAT WILL WIN: The King's Speech. If only by sheer dint of destiny afforded by its sweep of practically all of the most immediate pre-Oscar awards (Producers' Guild, Actors' Guild, Directors' Guild, Leather Tanner's Guild, etc.)

WHAT SHOULD WIN: The Social Network. Maybe Oscar is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from rewarding the deserving picture last year, so they're reverting to their old ways this year. Or maybe Hollwyood is just happy to see Harvey Weinstein back to being his old, blustery self, steamrolling through awards season.

Whatever the case, a vote for The King's Speech is a vote for a return to musty form, when the Academy ruled in favor of obvious feel-good pap instead of layered stories where everyone in the audience could leave the cineplex with their own interpretation of what they saw, and the film was expansive enough to allow all interpretations. The Social Network is dense enough and ambiguous enough to fulfill this criteria, and salacious enough to still be entertaining, to boot.

Meanwhile, The King's Speech finds its lofty aspirations constantly undercut by a first-time feature film director who insists on placing his actors in a lower quadrant of the frame and inserting himself in his shots: "Look at my off-kilter framing, Mama! See, I'm directing!" And that is why I will be pissed when Oscar rewards The King's Speech with its highest honor on Monday morning (local time). For an institution that traffics in movie magic, Oscar seems to have forgotten that real magic happens when you're not aware that it's happening...and it becomes even less magical when it's being shoved at your face.

"Kilig" Me Softly

2011-02-17T00:39:00.000-08:00

First off, a huge thank you and shout-out to my co-blogger Ike Veneracion for his lovely and totally random message. While I appreciate his praise, let me tell you that he completely underestimates his grasp of language, as our endless laughter at his witty punnery during college barkada get-togethers should attest.

So anyway, it's three days after Valentine's day, and I figured since people should have generally come down from their chocolates-and-roses, illicit-hotel-night highs, that it would be safe to write this without getting my head chopped off.

Who else thinks that the state of romance in the movies is at an all-time-high level of fakery?

Of course it would be easy to dismiss me as yet another bitter blogger without a love life to speak of (which I freely and happily admit to being), but then isn't that just a reflexive reaction to somebody who doesn't share the same rose-colored view of the rest of the population when it comes to romance in general, and romance in the movies in particular? It would be easy to call the bespectacled librarian who makes an offhand comment about men being assholes as a man-hater, while conveniently not acknowledging the fact that some men really can be assholes. In fact, there is still a school of thought that calls scientists who warn of climate change as perpetuators of a ginormous hoax, while turning a blind eye to the fact that parts of the Philippines, a swath of Australia and a large region of Brazil all suffered unprecedented floods in the same month.

But I digress from my point, which is that romance in the movies have reached an unprecedented level of artificiality. In fact, the only thing more synthetic in pop culture right now than cinematic love is Joan Rivers' face.

Last year, I saw My Amnesia Girl and left the multiplex distinctly unimpressed. By coincidence, in the same week, I saw a pirated DVD copy of The Kids Are All Right and asked myself, When did our local filmmakers start having the EQ of 12-year-olds?

Of course you could say that comparing My Amnesia Girl and The Kids Are All Right is like comparing apples to oranges. For starters, one is only in the business of making people forget the rising cost of mass transportation, while the other is a critically praised film that is in the running for best picture at the Oscars. But, you see, I refuse to accept that excuse. At their heart, romantic comedies are love stories. In Spanish, the word for "story" is "historia." And "love story" is translated as "historia de amor." The implication is clear: For a love story (and by extension, a romantic comedy) to be affecting, it has to present a history between the two protagonists. If we want to care about girl and boy, we have to go through that entire chronicle of boy meeting girl, boy getting girl, boy losing girl, boy getting girl back (or not). And if that history isn't presented right, then I'm afraid you won't have me at "hello."

There is a basic problem with My Amnesia Girl's premise: Both the protagonists are jerks. John Lloyd Cruz plays a guy who abandoned his girl at the altar because he has commitment issues which, if you happen to be the girl in question, should be an unforgivable slight. Meanwhile, Toni Gonzaga plays the aggrieved abandonee. Years later, they meet again at a supermarket, and instead of punching John Lloyd in the face or kicking him in the nuts, Toni pretends to have amnesia so she can string him along. See? Jerks, both of them.

At the very outset, these are people whose motives are unfathomable. Which is a problem because for a story to work, you don't have to agree with why the characters are doing what they're doing, but at the very least you have to understand why they're doing them. I don't agree with Tom Ripley when he bashes Dicky Greenleaf's head in with an oar in The Talented Mr. Ripley, but I understand that he's a sociopath, and sociopaths tend to do things like kill people for the sake of appearances. But for all intents and purposes, John Lloyd and Toni seem to be playing fully functioning people-next-door types...which is why their extreme choices are cuckoo and migraine-inducing. My Amnesia Girl seems to function in an alternate universe where no common sense is common sense--it's very scary to live in a world where the only person you can understand is Carlos Agassi, playing John Lloyd's cousin, who lifts his shirt and flashes girls his killer abs because, well, he has abs to flash.

My Amnesia Girl is guilty of putting the cart before the horse. Instead of troubleshooting the script's basic flaws, the filmmakers pile one grand gesture, one treacly stunt on top of another. In an effort to woo what he thinks is a clueless Toni back, John Lloyd organizes a night full of age-appropriate birthday parties, one for every year she supposedy doesn't remember. And then he papers her townhouse with Post-Its written with howlers like "Ikaw ang puto sa aking dinuguan." As predicted, it works, and now Toni is left with the dilemma of admitting to John Lloyd that her bout of obliviousness was all just a ruse. But by then, the filmmakers have dug themselves into a hole that not even a backhoe can dig them out of. If John Lloyd goes into a hissy fit (which he does), then he becomes an even bigger jerk. And if Toni accepts his anger as valid (which she does), then she's a brainless twit who deserves everything John Lloyd will dish out during what will conceivably be an unhappy marriage built on recriminations and one-upmanship.

I can just imagine the bigwigs at Star Cinema telling its phalanx of writers: "Taasan ninyo ang kilig value! 'Yan ang hinahanap ng mga tao!" And of course they're right, if My Amnesia Girl's stellar recepits are any indication. I can't judge them for that: as a scriptwriter myself, I'm often asked for romance-lite concepts, with lots of opportunites for kilig. The problem is that concepts have become the flimsy clotheslines upon which to hang grand kilig moments, instead of the cake where the kilig is the icing. At this point, any English professor reading this will be cringing at my horribly mixed metaphors, so to hell with it: When it comes to romantic comedies, producers are guilty of putting the kilig cart in front of the concept horse.

Worse, local cinema is in step with Hollywood in its view that the journey to the altar is infinitely more interesting than what happens aftet the vows are said. Which is why The Kids Are All Right is such an affecting comedy. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play Nic and Jules, a lesbian couple who got their kids--an overachiever played by Mia Wasikowksa and a vaguely cynical teen played by Josh Hutcherson--through the same anonymous sperm donor played by Mark Ruffalo. When the kids track down their sperm donor dad, emotional highjinks ensue.

Don't get me wrong, the highjinks are a pleasure to watch. (There's lots of nudity between Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo has joked that the only time he gets to be sexy is in a lesbian movie.) But the real joy of The Kids Are All Right lies in the performances of Annette Bening, who plays a doctor skating on the edge of alcoholism because of the stress of being the family breadwinner, and Julianne Moore, as the slightly untethered companion searching for meaning to her life who only realizes when she is on the verge of losing her family, that it is her family that gives her life meaning. When Julianne Moore stands in front of her damaged family as they watch TV and delivers a fractured apology, saying that "Marriage is a f--kin' marathon. After a while, you stop seeing the other person and just see these weird projections of your own neurosis," it is one of the most heartfelt--and most kilig--declarations of love I have heard on film in quite a while.

In a recent interview, Annette Being says that she and Julianne Moore used their longtime marriages (Annette to Hollywood legend Warren Beatty, Julianne to director Bart Freundlich) to anchor their performances and the dynamic between their characters. Her exact words were: "Oh, we get it, these people have a history." That's the insight that the current purveyors of celluloid romance seem to be missing: the people falling in love need to have a history, a convincing portrait of one neurosis brought on by living a life combining with another neurosis brought on by living another life to produce something that has a life of its own. When you've written characters that have lives of their own, you don't need to inject adrenaline into the story with Post-Its that say "You are the bagoong to my kare-kare."

Nowadays, it's all about the smug guy who only want sex with no strings attached (the title of an upcoming Natalie Portman romantic comedy, by the way) or the unfulfilled career girl who places bets on how fast she can lose a guy. In today's celluloid romances, it's as if the characters' lives only got activated once they made the wrong decision that jumpstarts the plot. Whatever happened to movies like The Way We Were? When it comes to combining neuroses, you can't get any better than Barbra Streisand's driven Jewish activist and Robert Redford's coasting-on-his-looks WASP. These two actors each bring a sense of background to their characters, a sense of amassed expectations and heritage piled onto their own emotional baggage. Because of the invisible baggage Katie Moroskey and Hubbell Gardiner are condemned to haul around with them, there is no logical reason why they should end up together...but you root for them anyway. When Katie tearily calls Hubbell and says that she wants to talk to her best friend so she can tell him about the guy who broke her heart, and then in a quavering voice says that they're one and the same person, it's your heart that breaks.

All the romantic comedies I cherish, from James L. Brooks' whip-smart Broadcast News, to unintentional comedies like Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (in which a breathtakingly fresh-faced Catherine Deneuve and an impossibly dashing Nino Castelnuovo sing all their dialogue and enact their tragic love story amidst the incongruously bright colors of northwestern France during the wintertime), have that sense of history built into their DNA. It's that feeling you get of accumulated days of a life steering the choices, and of choices steering the kilig moments. And that's why I can't wait for Lone Scherfig's adaptation of David Nicholls' beautiful novel One Day. In many ways the protagonists, Dex and Emma (to be played by Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway) are the British answer to Hubbell Gardiner and Katie Moroskey. The novel checks in on the state of their relationship on the same day, July 15, every year for 20 years. You can't get more history than that. And that's why I'll be waiting with my popcorn and my box of tissues.

Split personality

2011-01-21T10:06:00.000-08:00

Let's assume you do read this blog.
You may have noticed an inconsistency in the writing style (and if you read the entries all the way to the end, you may know why)
At times, the writing is elegant, eloquent and on-the-nose, while other times it's just sloppy, incoherent babbling.
If you read anything like the former, that would have been written by Andrew P., an esteemed colleague and old friend who's mastery of the word, both written and spoken knows no equal.
If you read anything like the latter, well, that would be me.
Still, whichever you get to read, I hope you'll at least be entertained if not enlightened.
We all share a great love for movies (films or cinema you may call it if you are in the least bit snotty) and I'm pretty sure that's enough to get us all by.
Pretty sure isn't a hundred percent sure, but still, as close as I can get it.
Mabuhay!

Ike

Metro Manila Film Fester

2010-12-29T05:02:00.000-08:00

Lately, there doesn't seem to be a non-controversial year for the Metro Manila Film Festival. Remember the year they awarded Best Picture to The Melanie Marquez Story, a movie that famously had Melanie (playing herself) have a doctor tell her after an excruciating wait that her son had weathered a potentially deadly medical crisis? The doctor called her son "a miracle boy"...at which point the action froze to make way for supers that read "The birth of Miracle Boy Films."

Or how about the year the jurors decided to award third best picture to the Nora Aunor-produced "Halimaw sa Banga/Komiks" horror double-feature...but decided not to award second- and first-place prizes? Which kinda begs the question: Nora's movie was third-best to what exactly? Thin air? (By the way, "Halimaw sa Banga" has become a classic, thanks largely due to Mario O' Hara crafting an effective horror-movie spectacle with the help of some seriously creepy life-size religious statues in the living room and a giant highlands urn that nobody seems able to steer clear of.)

Let's not even get started on 2006, the year the organizers decided to make box office a huge part of the criterion for determining what's best. This craven act, essentially a statement telling the audience that nothing matters but how much money a film makes, produced an awards rostrum that had an Enteng Kabisote movie being deemed more worthy than Joey Reyes' Kasal Kasali Kasalo. The biggest joke? Kasal staged a late-in-the-festival rally and ended up being the top-grosser. Eat that, you bean counters!

This year, the Metro Manila Development Authority (why a film festival is organized by a group of mayors will forever be beyond me) decided to let the judging be a bit more democratic: the jury for 2010 included ordinary citizens like a shcoolteacher, a student, a bus driver, and a homemaker. By the looks of things, the idea of including the audience in on deciding what's the best seems to have no downside...until you arrive at the conclusion that it's all downside. But we'll get to that in a minute.

As I write this, I've been able to watch three of the eight entries to the 2010 iteration of the MMFF, two of them best-picture placers: the period epic Rosario and the animation feature RPG Metanoia. Just to show you how mystifying the judging process is, aside from getting a third-best picture prize, Metanoia ended up getting a "Gender-Sensitivity" award. Why? Because nothing screams "gender-sensitive" quite like a movie that features a girl who can play kick-ass computer games.

Having said that, Metanoia is a surprisingly well-realized story about a boy who realizes that forsaking real-life interaction for virtual reality has its own dangers. The dialogue is fast, witty, and has the gamer lingo down pat. Walking out of the cinema, I overheard a mother tell her husband (in Tagalog, of course) that "this is the movie they should encourage kids to see." Maybe because the best service you can render to a computer-savvy generation that is fast losing touch with the tactile benefits of writing on pad paper, doing research in a library, and learing actual social graces is to encourage them to play patintero and get some exercise. The only thing I would slap director Luis Suarez' wrist for is not reining in his music mix--the soundtrack has an irritating habit of drowning out bits of dialogue at precisely those moments when your caveman/troglodyte brain needs to absorb some crucial bit of gaming information. That...and the animation team's woeful inability to animate hair.

Meanwhile, Rosario goes the traditional best picture route: period costumes, sweeping vistas, the Importance of Saying Something Significant. The film makes a point of crediting PLDT Chairman Manny Pangilinan for the story twice (both in the opening and end credits) while oddly billing him only as "M.V.P." in the cast roster for his cameo appearance as the person Dolphy narrates the plot to. Apparently, the Rosario in the title is MVP's grandmother, a rebel from New York whose passionate, libertine ways split his family into two.

Debuting film director Albert Martinez employs the admirable tactic of going all-out on the technical aspects and production values of the film (the photography and production design are particularly scrumptious) while exercising subtlety when it comes to the performances. The real problem with his debut is that, when you really get down to it, Rosario (Jennylyn Mercado) as a character isn't really compelling. At the beginning of her story, set in the 20s at the height of the American occupation, she is portrayed as a scandalous coquette teaching her cousin Carmen (Isabel Oli) how to smoke. She says to hell with her privileged family so she can knock boots with Manuel (Yul Servo), the college-educated but lower-class administator who runs her family's sprawling tobacco plantation. And yet, after she runs away from the nunnery where she is banished and reunites with her lover, she settles easily into domesticated life. Did scrubbing the monastery's floors and peeling their vegetables extingusih all her fire?

After her husband contracts tuberculosis, Rosario finds work as a secretary at an insurance firm in Binondo courtesy of Carmen, who has ironically become the empowered female Rosario once was. Here she meets Carmen's lusty beau Alfred (Dennis Trillo), who wastes no time rubbing her shoulder with a finger the first time they meet. The two engage in a steamy affair, are promptly found out, and exiled to Hong Kong for nearly four years for adultery. After they return to Manila, Alfred leaves Rosario and his son (who will grow up to be Dolphy) in his uncle's bed-spacing complex and in the care of Carding (Sid Lucero), a pup besotted by Rosario's hidden talent at playing the piano.

After Blue Moon, Rosario has to be the rare Filipino melodrama where the male characters propel the plot forward...which is strange because I'm sure Manny Pangilinan didn't intend for that to be the case. Yul Servo is steely and determined, Dennis Trillo is libidinous and menacing, Sid Lucero is sweet and heartbreaking. They all have great moments. They all exhibit an admirable economy in expression and gesture. And they all provide the film with its different narrative textures.

But they can't be substitutes for a central character that can't seem to make up her mind about what she wants to be. You don't absorb the tragedy of a woman beaten down by her circumstances because she seems to embrace those circumstances. On the surface, she purports to be the picture of scandalous female liberation, and yet she doesn't hesitate to barter her feminine wiles for rent. She tries on the guise of faithful wife and mother, but it doesn't take much convincing for her to cuckold her sick husband in the backseat of a car. And then, just when the film pumps some adrenaline into its storytelling with a savage beating...it inexplicably ends.

It's hard to sympathize with a character whose motives you can't fathom, who tries on one guise after another with neither rhyme nor reason. The same can be said of Jennylyn Mercado's performance. She doesn't inhabit the role so much as let the role wear her. Too often, Jennylyn seems lost underneath the crenellated curls and Clara Bow makeup of the flapper era. Too often, she gives one-dimensional line readings, neglecting to give her character shadings of psychological insight or nuances of contradictory impulse. And too often, we see that she doesn't know how to hold a cigarette.

If you don't want to be disappointed, check out Jerrold Tarog's "Punerarya" episode in Shake, Rattle and Roll 12. It's clever, it's claustrophobic, and my money is on it as being one of the best SRR episodes in the franchise's long and checkered history. Carla Abellana plays a teacher hired to tutor the children of a strange funeral home curator, and she soon discovers that the extended family that runs the home is doing more than embalming and makeup. Carla manages to summon adequate wellsprings of feistiness, despair and surrender, largely because she has the ever-dependable Sid Lucero as her foil. (This time he goes for quietly menacing.) There's even a twist in the plot that you may see coming from a mile away, but the way Tarog stages the sleight of hand will jolt and satisfy you.

The problem is, you'll have to slog through two other episodes to get to "Punerarya". The second episode, Topel Lee's "Isla," is harmless enough in its mediocrity, but it makes you miss the days when the director could stage a simple, straightforward screamer like his "Yaya" episode from 2006 without the bells-and-whistles of elaborate visual effects. Meanwhile, Zoren Legaspi's "Mamanyika" episode is downright laughable. Shaina Magdayao plays a disillusioned elder sister who, when she isn't talking to her mother's tombstone about how much she misses her or talking to her laptop about the need to google "evil doll," has to contend with her kid sister's murderous plastic playmate. (A Chuckie doll conceit in this day and age? Really?)

Let's not even get into the fact that Zoren and the writers don't even bother to explain how, in the time-honored horror-movie conceit of keeping things open-ended, the homicidal doll got from the family swimming pool to a homeless girl's arms in the sidewalk. Let's just dwell on Shaina Magdayao calling the previous owner on her cell phone, at which point the guy, with nary an introduction or even an idea of who the caller looks like, launches into a detailed history of his said family life. (Beginning with the words "Masaya kami noon," natch.) And then conveniently ends the call with a pissed "Leave my family alone!" tirade once the flashback ends. Perhaps this doll shouldn't be so much homicidal as manic-depressive.

If I were on the MMFF jury I would probably vote for Jerrold Tarog's "Punerarya" for best picture, since we're being democratic and all. And therein lies the rub. It may sound snobbish, but for too long now, the MMFF has been employing non-film experts to determine who gets prizes. Yes, the idea of a bus driver having a say on what the best film is sounds noble, the very epitome of democracy, but there is an implication here that popularity trumps cricitism. Taking nothing away from Ang Tanging Ina Mo (Last Na 'To)--which I'm sure is funny--there is a growing acceptance in pop culture that a bar set low is good enough. The lowest common denominator is already so prevalent in a culture that hails the Twilight saga as the new Gone With the Wind. Is it too much to ask that we not hail inadequate fluff as the successors of Kisapmata and Ina Ka ng Anak Mo?

While we're at it, why award first-, second- and third-best pictures anyway? The MMFF has probably got to be the only film festival that treats its entries like Olympic athletes. Why not do it the way other festivals do it, with citations for Grand Prize, Audience Award, Jury Prize etc.? We already have prizes for Gender Sensitivity and the Gatpuno Villegas Cultural Award...why not just have a Best Picture period? Or would that leave the taho vendor with too little to deliberate?

Seeing RED

2010-10-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

These here internets have all but ruined everything for us. There simply are no more surprises from all the spoilers floating around the blogs, news services and whatnot. its a good thing surprises, by their very nature, sneak up when you least expect them (not exactly words of wisdom, but at least I tried)

Last sunday evening, i went to trinoma with my wife to catch "the social network", the movie all the critics have been raving about. lo and behold, it was showing in NONE of their theaters. Apparently, "Petrang Kabayo" was all the rage, so I narrowed down our choices to "The Other Guys" and "Red". When I asked my wife which she'd like to see, she immediately said "RED!" without any hesitation.

Not that it was a hard choice, but for some reason, I really had no opinion of this movie. Truth be told, I had the slightest of trepidations in seeing it as it's based on a 3-issue comicbook by Warren Ellis, only one of my favorite writers. And so many things can go wrong with adaptations. But other than that, no opinion at all. I had seen just the one trailer and it showed these great actors doing crazy action scenes. I didn't even know who directed it. And Googling is what I usually do every when I'm online!

But I thank God I came into that theater not knowing what to expect because it made my viewing much, much more fun and exciting! It's probably the first film I've seen in years where most everything was fresh to my eyes. Save for John Malkovich running like a madman with a bomb on his chest and, of course, Helen Mirren firing a gatling gun, I really had no idea what was in the movie.

And there was plenty delightful stuff about the movie! First of all, the casting: Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Karl Urban, Morgan Freeman, Brian Cox, John Malcovich, Richard Dreyfuss! and Helen Mirren! And I'm not raving because most of them are big names. Well, this movie shows why they are big name actors in the first place

Bruce Willis might have gotten lost amidst all these greats but he's experienced enough to manage. Mary-Louise Parker showed what a great comedian she can be (still have to finish an entire season of Weeds, but I get a good glimpse what she can do right here). Helen Mirren, of course, slums it up as an ex-Spy with a penchant for big guns. But I really don't have the heart to call what they did slumming because they were all in top form! I don't doubt for one second that Dame Helen can actually fire large-caliber weaponry - with impunity! John Malkovich was quite a revelation for me here: the man has made a name for himself as a great character actor and I've found most of his characters creepy, but he steals the show here by being creepy AND hilarious at the same time! I especially loved seeing Ernest Borgnine again on the big screen! Imagine if they'd cast this movie with the actors from Starship Troopers! Disaster!

Now, I've seen one movie too many where great actors save an otherwise mediocre movie and turn it into Gold (Showtime and Training Day, come to mind). Gladly, that's not the case with RED. The barebones plot may have been something done before, but the script is snappy and the pacing is brisk - the movie just keeps coming at you.

And of course, the action is nothing to sneeze at. The beginning of the film showed this really cool scene of Bruce Willis stepping out of a car spinning 360 degrees in slow motion! And John Malkovich and his handgun go up against a woman in a business suit firing RPGs! Guess who won?

The main thing that struck me is how different the film turned out from the source material, yet still retains its very essence. The comicbook is about a lone wolf character forcibly brought out of retirement. The film is about a similar character but one who manages to find love and bring a group of his fellows out of retirement as well. The comics is grim and gritty, more cautionary tale , while the film is bright and hilarious, and more of a celebration, if you will, of age and experience, but essentially, they both comment on how easy and how wrong it is to be dismissive of the elderly.

And, perhaps, to push the point further, the film is totally devoid of botox! I was amazed at the crow's feet around Mary-Louise Parker's eyes!
And talent always trumps cosmetic surgery. Every. Single. Time.
I haven't had a pure and fresh cinema experience like this in quite a long while - who would've thought I'd get it from a movie about a bunch of old people.
(No, I haven't seen 'The Expendables')
Shalom!

French Fried (Or, How I Spent Independence Day 2010)

2010-06-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

If you want to escape reality, go to a blustery Hollywood movie like The A-Team. If you want to dream with your eyes open, go to a French movie. It must be the melodious language, but even when a French movie deals with gang violence, there's a certain gentility to it, a certain languidness that underpins the mayhem. And so, despite a hectic work week, I carved out four hours here and there to catch the 15th French Film Festival, which ran from June 4 to 13 at the Shanri-La Mall in Mandaluyong.

I'll cop to a guilty pleasure right now--I just love the sight of French people gorging themselves on good wine while basking in the Provencal sun. It's a subspecies of the same malady that afflicts people who go to those Merchant/Ivory films just so they can look at the antiques. I call it Continental porn.

But even I was distracted from my covetousness by the idea that, if the films I saw in this year's edition were any indication, the French sure are wacky! Take Le Premier Venu (Just Anybody), a drama about a listless young girl (Clémentine Beaugrand, beautiful in her androgyny) who resolves to heap all of her obsessive love not on the handsomest guy she sees, but on the first guy she meets. So naturally, she pursues a deadbeat criminal (Gérald Thomassin) all the way back to his hometown, tries to fix his life by financing a reunion with his estranged little girl, and ends up almost causing the death of a policeman (Guillaume Saurrel) who actually does like her.

The thing about any work of fiction is, if I can't care for or even understand what the characters are going through, then there's no sale. (Literally. The French Film Festival gives its tickets away gratis on a first-come, first-served basis, which makes me feel a teensy wit guilty when I bitch about the movies.) None of the characters in this movie--to busy being enamored of a concept to actually bother making sense--behave in recognizably human ways. First, there's no glimpse into the leading lady's inner life, no hint of an explanation as to why she would even fall for a guy whom she accuses of raping her during their first meeting.

The other characters take their cue from her, unfortunately. Desperate for money so that her amour (who frankly looks like he had the dashboard of his car for an aperitif) can send some money to the little daughter he abandoned years ago, this girl goes tricking with the town's wealthiest denizen, a real estate agent. Under false pretenses, she views an empty house with him, bats her eyelashes, then after accepting a 500 euro advance payment, bites his lip because she won't perform oral sex on him. So what does Mr. Real Estate Agent do, alone with the girl in an empty beachfront house? After stomping around a bit, he accepts her promise that she'll return the next day to do the dirty deed. No wonder a show like The Family Guy can get away with a joke that says homosexuality entered America when the French came to its shores in the 16th century.

It only gets worse from there, believe me. And to add to the incomprehensible mess that is Le Premier Venu, there's even a scene where the lovers talk about love. On a cold, windswept beach. If that isn't a hoary French-movie cliché, I don't know what is.

Another cliché: the French really love to talk. With their language, who can blame them? But really, at a certain point, even Rohmer knew when to cut the verbal gymnastics--or at least, use it effectively. In Le Genou de Claire (Claire's Knee), a randy middle-aged man named Jeremie visits a lakefront vacation home in Annecy to finalize the sale of the property, and promptly falls for two adolescent girls, the 16-year-old Laura and her slightly older half-sister Claire. Do we get to see the French way with romance portrayed in a scandalous menage a trois? No, because the protagonist is too busy verbally sparring with Laura, who prances around in a parody of self-aware femininity (she's like the bony French version of Glee's Rachel Barry), expounding on and on about what attracts her to Jeremie, her views on female sexuality, and why relationships ultimately don't work. By the time Jeremie makes his move on the infinitely more attractive Claire (who, thankfully, is too vapid to outdo her irritating half-sibling at talking), he's so emasculated that all he can do, during a climactic rainstorm, is stroke--you guessed it--her knee. (If you love sex talk without the sex, there's plenty of it in Les Bureaux de Dieu (God's Offices), which follows five family clinic counselors in Paris as they discuss sexuality, contraception, and abortions--which are performed over the border in Barcelona, who knew!--to a wide range of patients.)

Marginally better is the romantic comedy L'Amour c'est mieux a deux. Or perhaps it would be better to call this a farce, because the French are good at those. In this quintessential example, an architect named Michel (Clovis Cornillac) dreams of meeting his lady love in the perfect way, which is to say, by accident. His lothario of a best friend, a lawyer named Vincent (Manu Payet) orchestrates a whimsical meet-cute with a fitness trainer named Angele (Virginie Efira) that involves a Mexican costume and the picturesque banks of the Seine. And as these things go, they hit it off, then break up, hook up with other partners, and break off with them when they realize that they're made for each other.

Cornillac, who cut his comedic teeth playing Asterix, has a way with physical comedy and a befuddled Everyman charm that makes this rom-com entertaining. But the expected boy-loses-girl plot convention comes about because of a completely unbelievable twist that got audience members gasping: Michel breaks up with his lady love because their meeting was actually set up, and not accidental as he was led to believe. And if that doesn't strain credulity, Angele's friends are so convinced that she belongs with Michel that one of them volunteers, with Angele's knowledge no less, to sleep with the guy she hooks up with after Michel just to prove that her new man isn't suitable. And that's why L'Amour c'est mieux a deux is classified as a farce: Can you imagine anybody in real life acting this way? You'd ban them from the dating pool for life!

On Independence Day, I lucked out and got into a screening of Brillante Mendoza's Lola, which pits Anita Linda and Rustica Carpio against each other as grandmothers linked to each other by a violent stabbing. One grandmother (Linda) is seeking justice for her slain grandson, the other (Carpio) is determined to get her grandson exonerated. The advantage goes to Carpio, if only because her character gets to do more--display more desperation, suffer more indignities, test the elasticity of her moral boundaries--while Linda only gets to display righteous indignation. In the end, the two beaten-down matriarchs reach a detente over a wistful cataloguing of the ills that beset their fragile, twilight-age bodies.

Lola is more watchable than Kinatay, the divisive 2009 film that won for Mendoza his best director award at Cannes. But what really got me suspicious was something the screening's putative MC said during his opening remarks: "While Lola has yet to be screened commercially here, people are lining up in Paris to watch this film." What follows, of course, are gorgeously photographed images of poverty: the pungent underbellies of bridges, the squalid overcrowding of jails, depressed communities wallowing in months-long floods. Given that the executive producer of the film is a Frenchman, you have to wonder if the French aren't indulging in their poverty porn the way I'm indulging in my Continental porn.

Poverty is a legitimate subject matter for Philippine cinema; I only wish Mendoza had the discipline to portray it within a context instead of unfurling it as a series of stark photographs from a moving scrapbook. Like the rest of his "gritty" ouevre (Serbis, Kinatay), Mendoza offers no insight into why these women have to work their fingers to the bone to keep their families together instead of falling gently asleep in their twilight years, no hint of the overarching social forces these women are up against. Mendoza's films are mere anecdotes of the times they portray instead of comments on them. As it happens, the only hint of context Lola gets is provided by a cameo from self-styled eventologist Tim Yap, playing the host of a fictional game show broadcast over a TV set that none of the actors pays any attention to--an unnecessary cameo from one of the most unnecessary celebrities Philippine pop culture has ever produced.

But then, just as I start thinking that the French have gone certifiably cuckoo, along comes the one film in the festival line-up that restores my faith that France isn't certifiable just yet. Olivier Assayas' elegiac L'Heure d'été (The Summer Hours) opens with a beauty that is quintessentially French as the third generation of a family cavorts through an idyllic countryside estate, intent on a treasure hunt. It is matriarch Helene Marly's (Edith Scob) birthday, and during the festivities, she takes the eldest of her three children Frédéric (Charles Berling) aside for their own treasure hunt: cataloguing the various objets d'art stored within the country home, the product of her famed painter uncle's lifetime work and his associations with other leading lights of the art world. Frédéric is an economist working in Paris, the only one of her children still living in France, and it is up to him to determine what will happen to the house once she is gone.

After his mother's death, Frédéric wages a perfunctory campaign to keep the house within the family. But only sister Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is busy with her career designing houseware in New York and an impending marriage to an American, and youngest brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) is forced to take a long-term job in China out of financial necessity. With skyrocketing taxes and career realities bearing down on them, the siblings sell the house, systematically parceling out their family's legacy to museums (particularly the Musée d'Orsay, which makes a cameo in the film) and cannibalizing their memories. In the end, Frédéric's daughter, who has been briefly detained for a shoplifting charge, holds a raucous going-away party in the gutted house, a world away from the idyll of the opening. She is the last mourner left to shed a tear for what has been painfully, inexpressibly lost.

L'Heure d'été is an adept portrayal of one family's grief and a subtle commentary on France's place in the international community, as the pressures of the global economy bear down on its citizenry and its artistic patrimony. It might well be the French version of Howards End, in which a house isn't just a house but something immeasurably more, something as important and portentous as the world unseen beyond its ivy-covered boundaries. This is what I mean by private sorrow given universal context; Brillante Mendoza ought to take notes.

D'ead on Arrival

2010-05-01T06:13:00.000-07:00

When I looked at the poster for D'Survivors, the new comedy outing from esteemed indie director Adolf Alix, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. While there was a story credit (which went to the director and Agnes de Guzman), there was no corresponding credit for screenplay. I thought to myself: Oh no, are the sequences that the actors should bring to life, the words they should say, so execrable that nobody is willing to take credit for them?

Watching the horrible, aggressive exrecise in pointlessness that is D'Survivors, I began to formulate a new theory. Watching K Brosas and the gay stand-up comic Divine Tetay inflict their sing-along bar shtick on the mostly unresponsive male models (at one point, Brosas screams and shouts while professional mannequin/Pinoy Big Brother alum/Eula Valdes boy toy Rocky Salumbides looks off in the distance, seemingly oblivious to the woman having an aneurysm beside him), I began to ask myself: Is D'Survivors actually another exercise in the Filipino pasttime of imitating everything Western? Having witnessed the improvisational success stories that were The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, might Alix have seen it as his god-given right to imitate the extemporaneous filmmaking methods of these independent movies, providing a token stab at originality by applying it to a "comedy" instead of a horror movie?

Because, I have to tell you, nothing less than wondering if Alix and his crew were smoking weed could explain the mess that is his models-marooned-on-an-island movie. One website touting this movie has called it a "send-up of the hit reality show Survivor"...except none of the characters exhibit the conniving wheeling-and-dealing that is the hallmark of that program. I dare say that Ethan Zohn, winner of Survivor Africa and probably the most boring victor in the franchise's history ever, could eat any of the automatons inhabiting Alix's island for breakfast.

There are also shades of Temptation Island in the movie's premise. But D'Survivors has nothing of that beloved movie's razor-sharp sense of camp. Maybe Alix and his misbegotten crew would have benefited from a crash course in camp from the late Joey Gosiengfiao, "camp" being the sense that you're going over the top of some accepted norm (in style or performance), but knowing that the audience knows that you're going over the top. In short, "camp" is an exercise in inclusion: you're telling a joke, and you know that the audience is in on the joke.

But watching K Brosas and crew going through their uncomfortable paces, it's hard to escape the impression that Alix isn't so much letting the audience in on the joke as playing a joke on it...and only he is laughing at his gags. Much as I am loathe to say this about one of independent cinema's self-styled "bright lights", I doubt that he even knows what it is he is sending up. If D'Survivors was aiming to be a parody of current pop cultural staple Survivor (after all, the movie's logo is a direct lift of that program's logo), then Alix should have been able to know what it is that makes Survivor--that unrepentant sense of cunning--Survivor, loved it for what it is, before even attempting to poke fun at it.

Instead, Alix presents an incoherent plot that includes K Brosas feeing bitter because Rocky Salumbides won't acknowledge that they had a relationship many years prior. Meanwhile, Divine Tetay is searching for his long-lost sister (who naturally turns out to be K Brosas) and periodically lapses into a faux British accent (which isn't supposed to offend your willing suspension of disbelief because, well, he acts like a gay stand-up comedian anyway). There's also a matter of hidden island denizens who kidnap the crew of survivors one by one. In the middle of these inchoate goings-on, Alix drops a "parody" of Pilipinas Got Talent, in which poor Akihiro Sato is forced to sing a cracked version of "Bahay Kubo". Hey, Adolf, great comedy is supposed to have us laughing with the character. Making us laugh at him is just plain uncomfortable.

Here's another thing Alix seems to have forgotten about The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity: While allowing the actors to riff to their heart's content, there was always a plan. Each sequence had a starting point and a predetermined end point. No such plan seems to exist for D'Survivors. The movie begins as a screeching stand-up routine, and ends with the biggest cop-out in the history of screenwriting: It was all a dream, folks! And to add insult to injury, it was a dream that everybody involved in a fashion editorial shoot was supposed to have dreamt! If D'Survivors were a person, it would be a stand-up comedian performing to a deafeningly silent audience. (Which is a pretty apt metaphor, because the cinema I watched it in only had a grand total of ten viewers. Which means that as soon as Iron Man 2 waded into local cinemas, D'Survivors was dead in the water.)

Reading that spoiler that the whole movie was an elaborate dream, I am more and more inclined to believe that Alix and his cohorts were probably smoking something when they dreamed up this corker. If that's true, then the audience should spring the police on him for wasting 90 minutes of their precious lives. And maybe the producers should sic the authorities on him too, for laying to waste not just their money, but also the careers of several pretty young things. And the filmmakers even had the gall to attach a "To God be the glory" prayer at the end credits. Makes you want to be a vigilante priest and torch a moviehouse.

Of course, "visionary" auteurs have the luxury of declaring that critics just don't get their "vision". Maybe I can be accused of not having a sense of humor, that my ideas of what constitutes comedy is outdated. (After all, I can be indicted on the fact that my idea of comedy is whatever makes me laugh.) And wasn't Temptation Island also unheralded in its own time, unfurling its subversive wit and underhanded charms only after many generations of moviegoers learned to catch up with it? Who knows, maybe the same can be said of D'Survivors.

But I seriously doubt it.

Dumb and Dumberer

2010-04-27T04:46:00.000-07:00

I don't know why the Jose Javier Reyes film of Working Girls doesn't have a sequel number attached to it, considering that four characters from the 1984 original appear in it as supporting characters. If you really want to be technical about it, the film Joey Reyes wrote and directed is the real sequel to the one Ishmael Bernal directed in 1984 (from a script written by the late and lamented Amado Lacuesta), and the one titled Working Girls 2 which was released in 1987 isn't really a sequel, because its characters didn't appear in the original nor are their storylines affected by the events in the first film.

Why am I making a big deal out of this technicality? Because the fact that the real sequel doesn't have a "2" attached to it and the 1987 version does is just a symptom of the dumbness that has come to be mainstream Filipino cinema's trademark.

Even though it's been 26 years, I still remember that sense of revelation I got walking out into the daylight after spending two hours in the company of that first film. I still remember the characters as though they were old friends: Carla (Hilda Koronel), the take-no-bullshit career woman who pays with her lovelife for doing her job well; Anne (Chanda Romero), the wife and mother who finds that a home life and a career are not at all easy to balance; Amanda (Baby Delgado), the pretentious alta sociedad brat who uses her career to find a man she thinks is worthy of her status and ironically ends up settling for someone far lower than her pedigree but whom she richly deserves; Sabel (Rio Locsin), the put-upon secretary who takes the entire film before she learns to fight her battles with the sniggering machismo of her workplace; Rose (Maria Isabel Lopez), whose battle to stay financially afloat sinks her moral radar; Suzanne (Carmi Martin), the curvaceous secretary whose dizzy transfers from boss to boss finally lands her an envious catch; and Nimfa (Gina Pareño), whose relentless drive to keep up with the Amandas of the world is fueled by her desire to produce a son who studies at the Ateneo.

Meanwhile, I come out of the 2010 version of Working Girls and, honest to God, aside from Eugene Domingo's blowsy Internet entrepreneur Paula, I would be hard-pressed to identify any of the female protagonists by name. They seem less like characters and more like archetypes: the idealistic college grad (Bianca King), the ditzy beauty queen (Ruffa Gutierrez), the lonely single mother (Jennylyn Mercado), the nurse waiting for shipment overseas (Iza Calzado), the ambitious party girl (Cristine Reyes), and the neurotic cosmetic surgeon (Eula Valdez) who isn't even an archetype but a parody so thinly veiled you may as well call her Vicki.

The Bernal-Lacuesta 1984 original was truly that: an original. Even my newly adolescent brain could appreciate that first Working Girls for what it was--an adult film in the truest sense of the word: proud to be mature, unafraid to be smart, and unapologetically sexy.

More than that, it was about something. It was about trying to have it all...and failing. It was about trying to make a living...and being lucky to survive. It was about dreaming and aspiring...and settling for the next best thing. It seemed to encompass all social classes and all walks of life. It portrayed intimate realities yet still managed to comment on social realities (that scene where Carmi Martin walks past cubicles where Makati office drones are cutting up yellow pages for confetti still makes me snigger with its subversive courage). It managed to be high drama, romantic comedy, and social commentary. And it made you care for these women, whose well-rounded plotlines--even the ones that ostensibly end happy--made you wonder about their futures.

Meanwhile, I think about the new Working Girls and I have to wonder, Exactly what is it trying to say about the Philippines we live in today? That cosmetic surgeons have become celebrities? That men are pigs? That pageant winners are not to be underestimated? All in all, I look at the plotlines in the 2010 version and what I see are wasted opportunities. Eugene Domingo's relentless drive to produce sons who are Ateneo graduates, no doubt inherited from her mother-in-law Nimfa (played by Gina Pareño, of course), could have been a commentary on the emasculation of men, so prevalent in pop culture today (the latest of which could be seen in the song and video for "Telephone", the monumental kiss-off featuring Lady Gaga and Beyoncé Knowles). Bianca King's story as a newbie news producer who stumbles onto a meaty exposé on activist Rose's (Maria Isabel Lopez) sordid past could have been a statement on ratings over substance, the trumping of commercialism over idealism. And what about Sabel's (Rio Locsin) offspring Jennylyn, now also a single mother grappling with the fact that her ex has moved on? Isn't she supposed to be a call center agent? Exactly what goes on during those ungodly working hours anyway?

Instead, Joey Reyes seems content--whether by dint of scripting or editing realities--to function simply on the level of plot alone, somehow never exerting the effort to make his protagonists' situations be nothing more than statements pertaining only to themselves. But even there, some of the plotlines fall flat. Iza Calzado, playing a nurse who crosses paths with the boy (Jao Mapa) who broke her heart back in college when she is assigned to care for his dying wife (Ina Feleo), seems to be acting in a different movie altogether. With Ruffa's exaggerated entitlement, I find it hard to much care for her beauty queen as she wages war against her dead husband's grown daughter (Cherie Gil) over her newly inherited company.

But this newest version's biggest sin is sloppiness. For the life of me, I don't understand why the director insists on devoting close-ups to actresses as broad as Eugene Domingo (who uses her whole body for comedic effect) or as bland as Cristine Reyes (who couldn't add nuance to her expressions if her life depended on it). Shots that should have been longer (such as Eula Valdez's philandering husband, Matthew Mendoza, leaving a restaurant) are barely there, shots that could have used a little trimming (such as Eugene Domingo bidding goodbye to her erstwhile love Ricjy Davao in the middle of a downpour) go on for far too long. And as if the film's running time is a constant Damocles sword hanging over the editing suite, many subplots--Cristine's, Jennylyn's--seem to have been rushed and unsatisfactorily resolved.

But going back to my point in the second paragraph: our pop culture's precipitous drop in IQ points. I look back at the 1984 Working Girls and I marvel at how unafraid it is to be smart. By the third sequence, you have Gina Pareño practicing her English in front of a mirror as she applies her makeup: "As a matter of fact--sa katunayan. In fact--sa katotohanan. The fact is--sa totoo lang." A few scenes later, you have Hilda Koronel telling Tommy Abuel that a conglomerate whose account their bank has been wooing has a boss who's shady because he pays off gambling debts with company checks. A half-hour in, Baby Delgado is telling an amiga that her new beau Raul (Tommy Abuel) has no kids ("No tiene hijos")...which leads to a sequence where Sabel tells Raul that she is pregnant. In the space of 35 minutes, the script has managed to be witty, intelligent about its milieu, and subtle. Meanwhile, you can always rely on Joey Reyes for zingers--the biggest laugh his retooling got was for a line crackingly delivered by Eugene Domingo about her husband's (Antonio Aquitania) ugly paramour: "Bumalik ka sa babae mong may libag hanggang gilagid!" But by and large, it's pretty hard for this line to stand up next to Hilda Koronel's humdinger to her poet boyfriend Roy Alvarez: "Life is not a poem, Roy! It's a race...and I intend to win!"

Imagine if Ishmael Bernal and Madz Lacuesta were to pitch their 1984 script to the big bosses of GMA and Viva Films today as an original concept. It would probably be laughed out of the executive offices as being too highfalutin--in industry parlance, "masyadong mataas". Toiling as a scriptwriter myself for television, I often get accused of this, simply because I choose not to overexplicate some character's motivation or opt to keep a sequence secret. In other words, I am accused of being highfalutin because I assume that the audience can put two and two together, or demand that they use their brain cells for something other than pining for the amnesiac heroine and the magically ugly-handsome hero to wind up together.

How did we fall so far? I put the blame squarely on the rise of TV and its insistence on pandering to the lowest common denominator. And because the movie industry is now dominated by TV networks whose tentacles reach into film production, even the movies have been infected by their quantity-over-quality mindset, their assumption that moviegoers are dumb cattle that have to be spoonfed their cud.

Here's a revolutionary thought: TV is a passive medium, an entertainment that encourages you to sprawl on your sofa and tune out as you'e tuning in, so maybe lowest-common-denominator thinking is valid there. But movies have to be paid to see--is it such a strength to think that once you've challenged somebody to part with their money, you may as well challenge their brain cells too?

Maybe I'm overreaching here. So how about this: Do all these movie producers believe that all those hit Star Cinema romantic comedies are ringing the tills by virtue of C-D socio-economic patronage alone? Put another way, when did Regal Films forget all about the A-B audience? Given the dire economic realities and the prevalence of piracy, why do movie producers keep pinning their hopes for a profit on what they perceive as the "mass audience", that sector of the viewing public that is finding it harder and harder to set aside money for the movies? When are they going to start thinking of stories that won't insult the intelligence of Filipinos who graduated from college?

Not that I'm letting Star Cinema off the hook, mind you. Their first three releases for 2010 have all been pithy romantic comedies. Sure, the denizens of their creative department spend long hours talking about nuance and character hallmarks and foreshadowing. But take one look at Jennifer Lopez's in vitro romantic comedy The Back-Up Plan...and you have to wonder if the creative geniuses at Star Cinema would have the courage to pitch something as adult. Or if their creative pool would have the powers of observation to write a scene as hilarious as that movie's New Age birthing sequence. How many times can four to five credited writers for a Star Cinema movie be expected to write stories about John Lloyd Cruz crying because of his perpetually bad timing with Bea Alonzo? The ratio between effort and product is severly lopsided. Herculean effort producing mediocre results is the very definition of dumb, don't you think?

The Real Winners and Losers of the Metro Manila Film Festival

2010-01-09T02:17:00.000-08:00

Because I can't quit flogging a (creatively) dead horse, let me hand out my own awards for the recently (and thankfully) concluded 35th Metro Manila Film Festival-Philippines. But this time, I am following the example of the esteemed geniuses who instituted the rule that part of the award-giving criteria would be box-office figures. In that spirit...isang bagsak para sa The Sound of 100 Bakyas Stomping's own MMFF-P awards (THUMP!):

LOSERS: Bong Revilla and Vic Sotto. It's easy to put on a spin on things if you're self-delusional enough. GMA Network, the network umbrella that lords it over GMA Films, keeps reporting that its fantasy entry Ang Panday ni Carlo J. Caparas is the undisputed leader in the box-office rankings this year. That is true. But here's my own spin on things: As of January 6, according to the local box-office tracking site starmometer.com, Senator Bong's umpteenth retelling of the blacksmith who fights a lizard-like humanoid has grossed P97.6 million. In contrast, the festival top-grosser of the 34th edition of the festival, Ai Ai delas Alas' Ang Tanging Ina N'yong Lahat, ended up with an astounding cumulative gross of P171 million by the formal end of the festivities in January 2009. And since it performed so well, the comedy played for another two weeks, which means it isn't inconceivable that it ended up grossing a little upwards of P200 million. How do you like them apples, senator?

Meanwhile, Bossing Vic decided to take a tentative step outside of his Enteng Kabisote series (which had seen declining grosses anyway) in 2008 by inaugurating another franchise, Iskul Bukol. Though that initial outing grossed P107 million, it was apparently not good enough, considering that the Enteng Kabisote movies would routinely gross upwards of P120 million. And so he decided to take a chance on a completely original concept: Ang Darling Kong Aswang, hoping that the bankable combination of horror and comedy would spell box-office mojo. The result: P88.3 million by January 6, and a humiliating tumble down to third place in the box office rankings. Yes, it got an extended run at the theatres, so it may end up creeping to P100 million eventually. And yes, the low-key Bossing says it's enough to be ranked in the top 3. But still, that's gotta sting.

WINNER: Shake, Rattle and Roll 11. Outisde observers may well ask: How can there be a number 11 of anything in the movies? To which I answer: Only in the Philippines, buster. The fact is, this horror staple has been grossing steadily higher with every incarnation. This year, it has so far grossed P76.3 million, up from an estimated P68 million for its tenth installment and an estimated P65 million for the 2007 edition of the festival. Or maybe the sight of Ruffa Gutierrez getting terrorized by an ukay ukay wedding gown was just too irresistible for audiences to resist.

LOSER: Sharon Cuneta. Think about this: In 2008, Star Cinema released Caregiver, in which Ate Shawie played a beleaguered, yep, caregiver toiling away in London. She had no stars playing support, she had only her name and the English capital in her corner. That prestige production ended up grossing P139.5 million. In 2009, Regal Films released Mano Po 6: A Mother's Love, in which Ate Shawie played a beleaguered female taipan toiling to reclaim her estranged daughter's love. This time, she had stars like Christopher de Leon, Zsa Zsa Padilla, Dennis Trillo, and Heart Evangelista surrounding her, plus Beijing making an appearance at the end. This presige production ended up grossing a measly P41 million by January 6, 2010. If Ate Shawie wants to erase this black mark on her career grosses and maintain the legacy of her drawing power, she better make another movie with Star Cinema quick.

WINNER: Gabby Concepcion. Guess what? The first movie of Ate Shawie's real-life estranged husband since his comeback in April 2008, Star Cinema's I Love You, Goodbye, has climbed steadily up the box office rankings, and has surprisingly ensconced itself at the second-highest ranking, with a respectable P91 million behind Panday's P97.6 million. Not bad. Not bad at all. (Unless you're talking creatively...in which case, it can get bad. Very bad, indeed.)

LOSER: Mother Lily. I don't know what it is about Regal, but it seems incapable of doing anything right. The piddling grosses for the Marian Rivera horror movie Tarot last August probably gave Mother cold feet when it came time to bankroll her aborted third entry for this year's MMFF-P, Nieves, the engkanto slayer spin-off that proved to be the crowd pleaser of the 2008 Shake, Rattle and Roll installment. So she put the kibosh on Nieves, fielding Shake 11 and her prestige entry, Mano Po 6. But if you total the estimated cumulative grosses of her entries this year versus her entries last year--Shake 10: P68 million; Desperadas 2: P50 million--the result is that Regal ended up grossing less this year than last.

WINNER: Star Cinema. By contrast, the film arm of ABS-CBN could do no wrong. True, they didn't rise to stratospheric heights of box-office earnings this year, but P91 million and a second-place finish for I Love You, Goodbye cements their reputation as the film company that is able to market just about anything. Aside from having the sterling performance of the 2007 Judy Ann Santos-Ryan Agoncillo dramedy Sakal, Sakali, Saklolo their corner (it bested the final Enteng Kabisote installment in box-office gross), Star Cinema shrewdly bet that dramas had longer legs. True, there was an initial rush to feed the kiddies their fantasy junk food at the height of the Christmas season, but once the rush had died down and adults had time enough for themselves, then more mature fare would get their own share of business. And they were right...at the expense of Mother Lily.

LOSER: The Metro Manila Development Authority. So that rule about box-office gross comprising 50% of the best picture awards...how's that working out for you, mayors of Metro Manila? Because here you go adjudging Aswang as the second best picture of the festival, while the audience has plainly spoken that I Love You, Goodbye deserved that "honor". On top of that, this year's festival only grossed P428.2 million, down from P449.3 million in 2008 or, if I did my math correctly, a whopping 95% drop in earnings. This is what happens when you let bean counters administer exercises in taste. Eventually, they consistently bet on "safe" horses that even the odds-makers get bored with them.

WINNER: Avatar. Even--make that especially--during the two-week reign of the MMFF-P over the cineplexes, James Cameron's visionary sci-fi adventure was doing brisk business at the two IMAX theatres in Metro Manila, consistently playing to sold-out seats. If the taste-making middle classes were willing to pay P400 a ticket just to escape the amateurish fantasy wannabes of the MMFF-P, how much more business can Avatar conceivably do now that it's been allowed back into 2D cinemas? The mind boggles...and the Filipino film industry weeps.

Metro Manila's F**k-ed Up Festival

2009-12-30T19:59:00.000-08:00

I blame it all on Avatar.

On a deeper level, I tend to look at films for their "value-for-money" factor. It's nice to be entertained at the movies, but it would be better if the movie you just saw didn't evaporate from your mind the moment you left the cineplex. Does it say something about the human experience? Does it advance the cause of film artistry in even some infinitesimal way, perhaps in viewpoint or approach? Does it speak to something in your life?

While I have reservations about Avatar's story--I still don't find it as indelible as Cameron's Aliens or Terminator 2: Judgment Day or Titanic--there is no doubt that this groundbreaking fantasy is a mind-blowing volley in the discussion of technology as a tool in filmmaking. It proves that there really is nothing impossible in what stories we can tell. Clichés are clichés because they are true: As in life, so in movies--the only limitations are the ones we impose on ourselves.

So one day during this holiday season, I was at SM North EDSA and I was faced with a question that any local cinephile has never had to confront during Christmas before: Take my chances with any of the entries in the Metro Manila Film Festival or watch Avatar in 3D IMAX for the second time? Even though the difference was a huge matter of around 220 pesos, there was no question. It was back to Pandora.

Honestly, would you rather lose yourself in the bold originality of James Cameron's imagination, bask in the thrill of the King of the World finally becoming a God of His Own World, or watch a pallid imitator like Ang Panday ni Carlo J. Caparas, which has gone through countless retellings already? One way or another, this year's Metro Manila Film Festival-Philippines, aside from being guilty of having a stupid name, was also guilty of not even trying anymore. Whether it was as obvious as appending the numbers 11 and 6 to your movie title, or coming up with tired concepts (So you married a monster? Whoop-dee-doo!), the 35th edition of the MMFF-P filled the cineplexes with movies that phoned in their stories, and proved without a doubt that the job of producing movies in the Philippines is the biggest exercise in cynicism.

The only possible exception? Wapakman, where we saw Pambansang Kamao Manny Pacquiao breaking a sweat in a way he never has in the ring, contorting himself into a superhero pretzel trying to prove that he is, indeed, a movie star. Which, of course, he isn't, as that laughable 750,000 opening-day gross attests. (At the very least, Wapakman had those annoying TV ads working against it: Aside from the maddening video-game score, you have a voice-over from Polo Ravales saying we don't need to put on a costume or have superhuman powers to be a hero...at which point, we cut to shots of Manny Pacquiao in a costume displaying superhuman powers.)

I only resolved to watch the two dramatic entries in this year's festival, Mano Po 6: A Mother's Love and I Love You, Goodbye, hoping beyond hope that minus the forced spectacle of fantasy or the belabored exertions of unfunny comedy, filmmakers such as Joel Lamangan and Laurice Guillen could get down to the serious business of artistry.

Wrong. The "6" in Mano Po 6 is coincidental: The whole movie is an incoherent mess that strives to be six movies in one. As Sharon Cuneta narrates in voice-over the difficulties of her own mother Jin Feng (Boots Anson Roa) as a victim of pirates in the South China seas, its first incranation is as a historical epic. Then as she traces the Romeo-and-Juliet story of her parents' union, it becomes a multi-generational love story. Then as we see the injustices visited upon her by her husband's heartless family, it becomes an '80s Viva melodrama. As we see her estranged daughter Heart Evangelista resist Sharon's attempts to reconcile, it becomes a mother-daughter drama. And then as Dennis Trillo, playing Heart's fiance, reveals his underworld ties and Heart's life is put in danger, it becomes a crime-action epic. (Actually, I'm not certain when Mano Po 6 became an action movie, exactly: It could have been when Sharon, in a scene that was meant to be cathartic but ended up being unintentionally hilarious, planted one on Zsa Zsa Padilla's kisser with one of her massive hamhocks.) And finally, as Sharon takes her newly reunited children to Beijing to inaugurate an orphanage in the name of her late mother, the movie becomes a travelogue for the Chinese Tourism Board.

The movie is so busy avoiding a tone that's even halfway intelligible that it discards its stars and moments without a second's regret. Christopher de Leon and Boots Anson Roa? Great actors that are summoned and dismissed without a moment's thought. Sharon is disgnosed with cancer and survives a gunshot wound without the movie's narrative engine even slowing a bit to digest what these tumultuous events could possibly mean or what their effect is on the larger picture. All we see is Sharon getting wheeled into an MRI machine, then a few sequences later, she's sitting in an oncologist's office being told that her cancer has gone into remission and her "best friend" Kris Aquino acting like a retardate in a paroxysm of what passes for relief. One moment, Sharon takes a bullet for her gritty journalist daughter Heart Evangelista (now there are words I never thought I'd write in the same sentence: "gritty journalist" and "Heart Evangelista"), the next we see a doctor approaching Heart and Kris Aquino--there she is again!--in a hospital hallway, telling them matter-of-factly that Sharon is out of danger. You could almost see director Joel Lamangan clapping his hands behind the camera, marshalling his troops: "Chop, chop, people! We only have two weeks until the playdate! Who cares about building suspense or amking sense?"

(The only bright spot in Mano Po 6 is Dennis Trillo. He escapes the fate of Christopher de Leon, who walks across the screen without even registering, by unapologetically embracing his character's two-faced villainy. In the process, he comes across as sexy and dangerous. When he harangues Zsa Zsa's character over the phone from prison and punctuates his speech with a crisp "Pyaw-si!"--subtitled "Bullshit!"--the audience can't help but cheer. Someone administer career resuscitation for this guy stat!)

I Love You, Goodbye faces a different problem. The performances are uniformly heartfelt and understated. The script suffers from no serious lapses in logic. (But it doesn't escape two instances of bad grammar: 1. An opening credit reads "A Star Cinema Productions presents"; and, 2. Angel Aquino congratulates ex-husband Gabby Concepcion on his new love Angelica Panganiban by saying "Things have changed. Your career is now in a full swing." So...Gabby's work as a heart surgeon is now jostling for space in an overcrowded playground ride?) There's really nothing wrong with I Love You, Goodbye. It's just...boring.

Here is the reason why I believe our producers should ante up and offer our directors a piece of the back-end profits. If Joel Lamangan and Laurice Guillen could rely on money coming in from the royalties of DVD sales or TV-movie sales from the movies they'd done in the past, then maybe they wouldn't feel the need to keep themselves afloat even during those times when they feel too tired to direct. Because that's what I see when I watch I Love You, Goodbye: a director who's too tired to summon any dynamism or vitality, and inject it in her movie. The problem becomes even more apparent when a late-movie twist comes along, involving a botched rendezvous between Angelica Panganiban and former flame Derek Ramsey. In a twist, you want to stage scenes that give audiences a fighting chance to predict the twist themselves. Not allowing them that chance cheats them, and the twist feels like a cheap shot. That's what happens here: The scenes haven't been conscientiously plotted, the action improperly staged. Accusing Guillen of sloppiness would be an insult to her filmography--I just feel, sadly, that staging a twist demands more from Guillen's stores of energy and sensibility than she has at this late stage of her career.

As the object of desire between Gabby Concepcion and Derek Ramsey, Angelica Panganiban is treated to many caressing shots in love scenes and shower sequences. There are obviously shades of Guillen's unapologetic embrace of female sexuality as a feminist statement in Init sa Magdamag. But in this day and age, when Cosmopolitan Magazine celebrates the "Big O" and it's okay for girls to stalk boys, it's a tone-deaf statement. (Plus Angelica's cherubic face just makes these ogling shots plain wrong. It's like lusting after your 14-year-old niece. Wrong. Just wrong.) And yet! When Guillen needs to summon her "I am woman, hear me roar!" impulses, they fail her, condemning I Love You, Goodbye to one of the most horrendous movie endings in recent memory. Obviously caving in to the producers' demands for a happy ending, Guillen haphazardly ties all loose ends of betrayal and familial animosity formerly established in the plot, all in the service of...a badly painted restaurant sign. Miss Guillen, do you remember that heart-whopping ending from Mahawi Man ang Ulap? The one where Hilda Koronel left Christopher de Leon on a private dock, motoring away on a speedboat with their lovechild as he receded smaller and smaller in the distance behind her? She rejected the guy because she needed to love herself more. I Love You, Goodbye could have used a kick-ass ending like that.

Recently, Bong Revilla came out with a quote saying that, if it were up to him, he would only allow one Hollywood movie a month to be shown. I ask the respected senator...to what end? We've already given 35 years of unfair monopoly to the MMFF over the most lucrative playdate of the year. What has the movie industry shown for its unfair advantage? What leaps and bounds in creativity and sensibility can it boast? What contributions has it made to the discussion of film in this country? Every year, film industry stalwarts crow over the MMFF's sterling box office receipts, saying that there is hope for the film industry yet. But then the next year comes, the government (a government you are a part of, respected senator!)refuses to support the industry in a truly substantive way (at least not in the way France and Spain supports their film industries), the producers keep producing the same safe, cynical dreck...and then it's 365 more days until Shake, Rattle and Roll 12 and Ang Sweetheart Kong Kapre.

So I hope you'll pardon me when I go watch Avatar a third time. James Cameron may be an asshole, but he obviously cared enough to give me a rip-roaring time at the movies and enough eye candy to make my brain pop for the next month. Joel Lamangan and Laurice Guillen are good people...I'm just not sure plain "good" cuts it anymore.

A whiter shade of pale

2009-09-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

Finally, got a clever title in! And it really does reflect what I felt about this film "Whiteout", which had promise but ultimately turned out to be a little bit 'meh'.
But I have to admit, at this point, that I'd slept through some parts in the beginning, thanks to the Crispy Tadyang ng Baka and Pinakbet we had for lunch at Mangan. Mmmmmmm.
But unlike most films I slept through, I got to watch a huge chunk of this film - I don't think I missed all that much.
And I did read the graphic novel by Greg Rucka on which this film was based on.
But I'd also read "Angels & Demons" before seeing the film and I thought the film version turned out to be a pretty exciting thriller.
And that's my case against watching a film based on material you've read before: Angels & Demons.
I knew whodunnit, but by God I was along for the ride up to the very end.
I did not get that satisfaction with 'Whiteout'.
All the elements were there: the terrifying snowstorm, the paranoia of being left in that isolated Arctic base with 3 people, one of which may be the villain - but this film just wasn't thrilling enough for me.
The paranoia, the uncertainty could have been heightened but it all feels like everything was done by the numbers.
I should have known, after seeing Kate Beckinsale strip down to her undies that that would be the most exciting part of the film. It was also gratuitous, which filled me with a sense of foreboding.
And then I saw the end credits and I was illuminated.
"Directed by Dominic Sena"
This, explained a lot to me.
I normally watch a film based on who directed it, but this time, due to my love and affection for Kate, I didn't bother finding out.
If you didn't know, Dominic Sena is a TV commercial director who's had some films under his belt, but he's no David Fincher, one of his compatriots during the late 80s early 90s.
Next Kate Beckinsale movie, please!

Comic Stylings

2009-09-06T05:04:00.000-07:00

The multiplexes were happy places this past weekend as--for the same reasons Mars aligns with Jupiter, and a woman waking up five minutes later than usual leads to a ballerina getting run over and crippled--comedies like Bruno, Year One, Land of the Lost, and Kimmy Dora all got the same release dates. Since all of the Hollywood releases mentioned above were shown at least more than a month ago in the States, I suspect a case of back-end dumping going on here. (Wait...back-end dumping...that didn't come out quite right.) Or maybe the distributors were betting on the fact that people's moods were quite elevated due to the second consecutive three-day weekend we were enjoying. (While death is always a sad thing, Ka Erdy can at least take consolation from the fact that we all pay tribute by being lazy an extra day.)

Whatever the case, we can all use a hilarious pick-me-up during these dreary rainy days and gloomy economic times. I was most excited about Bruno; I had adored Borat, and the prospect of Sacha Baron Cohen's fearless, trenchant satire directed at homophobia was just too delicious an idea to pass up. Now, I don't know if my expectations were too high, or whether the MTRCB undercut all the fun by "recommending" nips and tucks (despite the fact that they had already rated the film an R-18, yet still insist on treating adults like drooling, impressionistic babies), but somehow, this mockumentary felt a bit limp.

It could be that Borat's success practically mandated a formula for his gay brother to follow. This time, Baron Cohen plays the titular fame-hungry Austrian fashionista who, after demolishing a fashion show with his Velcro jumpsuit, gets fired from the talk show he hosts (Funkyzeit), and decides to conquer the world by way of Los Angeles. With his besotted assistant's assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammersten) in tow, he tries to pitch a show to the networks (and gets a crisp "F--k off!" from Harrison Ford); espouses a cause by flying to the "Middle Earth" and attempting to broker an instant peace between the Israelis and Palestinians; stops off in Africa to adopt a black baby like his gurus Angelina Jolie and Madonna; and finally, tries to be the first successful straight convert ever.

Borat's "plotting" felt more organic; the Kazakh journalist was, after all, trying to glean learnings from the American heartland to make benefit the glorious nation of Kazakhstan. As such, all the hilarity and hypocrisy he uncovered seemed more serendipitous. Of course, part of the fun of Borat was trying to identify which parts were staged and which were authentic. (Borat trying to abduct Pamela Anderson with a sack was staged. It couldn't have been real...could it?) But with Bruno, a lot more feels staged, somehow. Bruno's nominal plot feels like a force-fitted imposition of "structure" on what's meant to be a picaresque journey, and the creators' hands (Baron Cohen reunited with director Larry Charles) look more apparent. That's why the "We Are the World"-like anthem stgaed at the end feels a bit flat; it's as if you were watching celebrities hamming it up at a party yet self-consciously congratulating themselves for being donw-to-earth cut-ups.

Also, I guess I was just expecting more. There are stretches of out-and-out hilarity (such as Baron Cohen miming oral sex with the deceased half of Milli Vanilli in a sequence so breathtakingly coarse you just have to see it to believe it), and Baron Cohen is still so committed to his character that he seems willing to risk life and limb for the sake of a joke (such as the comedian getting chased down a street in Israel by a Hassidic scholar for his offensive style of dress). But when Bruno hits on the idea of ditching his homosexuality, the satire falls by the wayside. The comedian can still coax unintentional laughs from an evangelist who claims to be able to convert gays to straights ("There's nothing quite like building your muscles around other men...who aren't gay"), but the set-up presupposes a dynamite punchline. I was expecting a hidden-camera infiltration into one of those notorious gay-to-straight camps. Instead, the film decides to hit easy marks by bringing Bruno to a macho camping trip (where he asks his three backwoods companions which of the Sex and the City girls they are) and military boot camp (where he schools his superiors on Dolce & Gabbana). Anyone can put a homosexual in camo--I expect more from the prankster who fed cheese made from human milk to politicos!

I also expected more from Harold Ramis, the comic genius who wrote Animal House and Ghostbusters, and directed the seminal existentialism-as-a-form-of-comedy film Groundhog Day. But sitting through Year One, in which Jack Black and Michael Cera play Neanderthals who are ejected from their tribe and land in the Biblical landscape of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and Sodom and Gomorrah, I was particularly saddened to witness how tone-deaf the Old Master had become.

I think it's a case of Ramis' classic comic instincts bumping up against the very of-the-moment persona of Jack Black, who wears his clueless horndog persona like a badge of honor. (Michael Cera tries his darndest to match Black's manic energy by ratcheting up his nerdy sarcasm, but Black's onscreen presence just won't be denied.) When Black discovers the concept of the wheel and acts as though riding a cart were like doing free-hands on a rollercoaster, you get a sense of unpredictability and unapologetic anything-goes humor. But instead, Ramis must exert the hand of the plot, in which Zed (Black) and Oh (Cera) must rescue their respective lady loves from slavery. The resulting comedy is painfully awkward...a bit like stone-age men adopting the new-millennial stances of slacker and self-reflexive geek.

My most enjoyable trip to the cineplex this past week came from my visit with Eugene Domingo, as she played the dual roles of rich virago Kimmy Go Dong Hae and her half-wit twin sister Dora Go Dong Hae in Kimmy Dora (Kambal sa Kiyeme). Of course, the plot is predictable--sibling rivalry that results in a botched kidnapping that results in enlightenment and a happy ending. But Kimmy Dora is proof positive that predictability is not a detriment to hilarity, as long as it is done smartly. And you really cannot get a much smarter comedienne than Eugene Domingo, who appreciates the fact that it takes a fair amount of brain matter to do dumb the right way.

Eugene is an intelligent enough performer to let you know that she's in on the joke; what makes her so deserving of the stardom that is coming her way is that she lets you know that she knows you're in on the joke too. It takes a special brand of courage to give your audience credit for having a brain, which means that the unfunny trailer for the misbegotten Vic Sotto-Tony Reyes "comedy" Love on Line is the celluloid equivalent of a stand-up comedian dropping flop sweat while delivering flat jokes. The biggest joke of all? I hear from reliable sources that Love on Line has grossed a measly P10 million so far, while Kimmy Dora's rapturous word-of-mouth among the AB crowd will most likely propel it into the status of a surprise hit. Proving that justice may be blind...but its scales can be tipped with a well-executed tickle.

Sci-High

2009-08-27T06:25:00.000-07:00

In Karen Joy Fowler's delightful cream puff of a book The Jane Austen Book Club, one of the obstacles preventing the hookup of two characters (who you just know are right for each other...because that's what great romantic literature should reduce you to: a page-turning matchmaker) is the issue of the guy's love of science fiction books. The control-freak woman looks upon science fiction with disdain, implying that her laid-back, potential beau has some growing up to do. It is a sign of Fowler's depth of perception that she identifies this snobbery among mainstream lit freaks of science fiction as the domain of arrested adolescents; it is a credit to her generosity of spirit that she acknowledges science fiction as a genre has much in common with Jane Austen. Both are denigrated for being too specific in realm, too eclectic in milieu to command the attention or respect of serious lit lovers. And yet scratch beneath the surface of jargon and custom, and you discover that science fiction and Jane Austen are really speaking to huge, universal themes of human behavior.

I myself consider Ray Bradbury one of the greatest American writers. I remember reading one of his short stories, "To the Future"--about a man seeking refuge from a war-torn future in the present and the time-traveling police force pursuing him--in a high-school lit textbook, and being instantly hooked. The man writes economically, yet somehow conveys the width and breadth of wonder that only someone who looks through the telescope of extreme possibility can possess. And then comes the heartbreaking ending...and the truth hits home that life is all about ambiguity; that the world offers no convenient platitudes, no black and white. I got turned on to the power of fiction and lost my innocence all at the same time.

No such disturbing loss happens in Robert Schwentke's The Time Traveler's Wife, in which Hnery (Eric Bana) and Clare (Rachel MacAdams) are lovers who are eternally enamored of each other...except the guy has a "genetic anomaly" that causes him to unpredictably pop out of their present existence and appear in another time frame--either the past or the future--without clothing and with very little time to get his bearings. Sometimes the time-skipping Henry will see himself in the past and realize he is powerless to change what is in store for him; sometimes he will see Clare at a time when he doesn't know who she is yet but she is starry-eyed in her knowledge of him. Because as it turns out, Henry first met Clare as a little girl in the field behind her wealthy parents' estate, and she's been waiting for him to appear sporadically in her life eversince. (Then again, what sane member of the female species wouldn't be waiting with bated breath for a naked Eric Bana to pop into their life now and again?)

Confused yet? So was I. But time-travel plotlines tend to do that to me, obsessed as I am with poking holes in their logic. But the film is constructed as a game whose rules you're bound to learn as the story goes along...or maybe you just learn to overlook the obvious lapses (aside from a few streaks of gray in one pivotal scene, Eric Bana never seems to age) and just go with the feeling. And the feeling you get is that this matter of the man disappearing for days and weeks at a time because he can't help it is treated as a weepy inconvenience, a bit like Barbra Streisand being a feisty Jew from the lower classes and Robert Redford being an entitled WASP in The Way We Were. The plot is never milked for its obvious science-fiction richness, and the script by Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost) never strays from its wistful, diaphanous, gentle mood, even when it deals with the prospect of a violent death foretold.

But if indications are correct, Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 best-seller did not flinch from the creepy overtones of its premise. There is something inherently pervy about a naked guy who compels a little girl to fall in love with him, and there's even a scene in the book where Henry's father mistakenly thought his son was gay because he caught an older version of Henry teaching himself to masturbate. In the end, what's missing from the movie adaptation is that most intriguing of questions: What would you tell yourself if you had the chance to visit yourself when you were younger? The movie, illuminated by Rachel MacAdams' radiance and Eric Bana's charm, only tells us the heart-fluttering platitude we romantic saps long to hear: Given the choice, I wouldn't change a thing.

Maybe this fondness for beating its themes into the heads of its readers with large, honking Allegories is my one beef with most science-fiction literature. Thankfully, that brow-beating is largely absent from the trippy, inventive, running-on-its-own-adrenaline District 9. The political overtones are obvious: a rundown spacecraft stalls over the city of Johannesburg, forcing its crustacean alien life forms--derogatorily called the Prawns--to inhabit a fenced-in settlement, and the country as a whole to confront its history of separation and race-induced violence all over again. But once the action gets going...well, all the glaring politics just fly out the spaceship window!

A hapless bureaucrat named Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley, in a take-no-prisoners feature debut) is promoted by his weapons conglomerate employer MNU (the Multi-National Unit) to evict the aliens from their squatters' area in the center of Jo'burg and relocate them to another settlement outside city limits. Poking around the shanty of a Prawn who turns out to be a scientist devising a way to get his race back into the mothership and off to their home, he is sprayed by a fluid in a cylinder and suddenly becomes an unwitting pawn (or is that a semi-Prawn...yuk! yuk!) in an arms race between his evil corporation and a criminal warlord who has set up shop within the settlement.

Produced by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, District 9 is co-written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, a director who cut his teeth on shorts and commercials. And what a heady brew of symbolism, narrative, and humor he comes up with! Blomkamp shoots everything in documentary style, imbuing even scenes with high-technology graphics and gadgetry with a gritty, lived-in look that situates them in the immediate present. And just like those creepy, lumbering Prawns, just when you think the story is about to grind to a halt, it picks itself up and careens in another breathtaking direction. I'd call District 9 a cheeky mash-up of Independence Day, The Fly, and Cloverfield...but that wouldn't be doing this giddy, wildly original science-fiction film justice.

I think one reason why I was so enthralled by District 9 is that I always appreciate fiction that is wholly situated in their own complete universe. All of the recent pop-cultural entries that I vociferously follow--from The Simpsons to The X-Files to Mad Men--all live in a world of their own making that is vital, detailed, and beholden to their singular rules. And if there is one filmmaker who is a stickler for following his own rules, it is James Cameron. His obsession with creating his own universe and marching to his own beat is in full flower in his latest sci-fi epic Avatar.

I was fortunate enough to be invited recently to a 20-minute sneak peek at the Titanic director's first new feature film in 12 years, and let me tell you, it is mind-blowing. The story of disabled former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, easily the best thing about Terminator Salvation) who, through the wonders of consciousness-transferring technology, is able to inhabit the body of a blue, 10-foot-tall humanoid called a Na'vi and fight a Vietnam-style war in the distant planet Pandora, Avatar makes full use of IMAX and 3-D to immerse you in its breathtakingly alien world. But that's only half the picture: it's the obsession and obsessiveness of its creator (who, true to form, refused to commit a single frame of this long-gestating idea to film until the technology had caught up with his vision) that will really take you for a ride.

True, the lead humanoid kinda looks like Robert Pattinson and not Sam Worthington (as a recent website was obsessive enough to point out). And I have a sneaking suspicion that Avatar has fewer layers of subtext than the smart, subversive District 9. But unlike Geroge Lucas, Cameron can actually write and direct, so I'll let highfalutin considerations like that slide. Suffice to say that like a wide-eyed girl in a meadow anticipating the appearance of her naked beau, I will be waiting with bated breath for December 18, when Avatar pops up in our collective Christmas movie stocking.

Off the Beaten Track...or Just Off-Track?

2009-08-17T04:06:00.000-07:00

Technically speaking, "independent movies" were first called that because the origin of their financing originated outside the studio system. But of course, if you ask any film scholar, they will proudly hark back to the '60s and refer to the films of John Cassavettes as the first examples of true independent cinema, then trace a throughline that skewers everyone from Francois Truffaut and the French New Wave, to John Sayles and Steven Soderbergh. Which means that the words "independent cinema" have now taken on a romantic connotation--now they mean anything outside the well-trodden mainstream and its ills, anything maverick, anything brave and revolutionary, anything with a "vision".

There's a reverse snobbery to the very concept of independent cinema, something that smacks of the pride a starving artist feels when he thumbs his nose at those who produce landscape paintings for living room walls, while he himself starves because he refuses to sink to the level of painting poker-playing dogs. And so a movie like Porky's will be deemed too pedestrian to be included in the canon of independent cinema, even though it was produced on the cheap by a small Canadian production company. And Miramax will be criticized for "selling out" by allowing itself to be folded into the corporate behemoth that is Disney, when it was responsible for such groundbreaking titles as Sex, Lies...and Videotape and Pulp Fiction. In many ways, the proponents of independent cinema are like brothers in a fraternity: strict about who gets to be called one of them, slightly contemptuous of those who aren't.

Here in the Philippines, independent filmmakers criticize the studios for their paucity of vision, their aversion to risk. I have to admit, when I see the trailer for the Vic Sotto-Paula Taylor comedy Love On Line--with its wealth of unfunny gags--I can't help but agree with them. The problem with many of these filmmakers, really, is that they haven't paid their dues. A filmmaker like Brillante Mendoza, no matter how polarizing his subject matter may be, can at least lay claim to the fact that he's served his time in the trenches, slaving away as production designer for years before taking his shot at directing love-'em-or-hate-'em films like Masahista, Serbis, and Kinatay. I'm more bound to give his films the time of day because he's seen the view from the inside, he knows the realities of making movies locally, and he allowed his talent to ripen with the technique and conviction that only years of experience will give you.

Nowadays, it seems that anyone with a laptop, a cellphone, and a "vision" can make a movie, which makes for an interesting phenomenon: Never before has a stringent fraternity been so open to admission. Bang out a story you feel strongly about, scrounge up some money from a favorite aunt, and--voila!--you're a director. And while I don't subscribe to the notion of "us versus them" when it comes to filmmaking, maybe for the sake of independent cinema in the Philippines, we should. Cases in point: Monty Parungao's Bayaw and Seymour Barros Sanchez's Handumanan.

Bayaw was a participant in the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) category of this year's Cinemalaya, a satellite competition that involves independent film producers. Sorry if I sound ill-informed; even the producer I asked NETPAC about had these words for me: "I really don't know." Given that the producer I talked to put up the money for Bayaw, his mind must have still been reeling at what hath been wrought in the small CCP theatre we had just walked out of. The film is about a disgraced police officer (Paolo Rivero) who kills his wife in a fit of temper, goes on the lam with his hapless brother-in-law (Janvier Daily), proceeds to molest him when he feels the urge, hooks up with a petty thief (Andrew Miguel)...I can't even find the energy to continue with the synopsis, given how incoherent the whole thing is. All I can tell you is that, for reasons I can't completely explain (and I was watching!), the brother-in-law voluntarily incarcerates himself with the homicidal police officer because there seems to be some sort of poignant poetry to it.

Parungao, a veteran of softcore beefcake Viva home videos, has a vision (there's that word again!) of Manila that's a bit like John Carpenter's vision of Gotham in Escape from New York: claustrophobic, characterized by a lot of lighting by fire, wearing its grunginess like an ingenious badge of honor. But that's really all that I can commend of the movie. The pickpocket played by Miguel steals from the two fugitives but is strangely admitted into their confidence...with oral rape by way of a pointed gun as hazing ritual, of course. All the homosexuals in the movie are either raped or ridiculed, for no other reason than that they're supposed to serve some larger theme or be convenient gewgaws in the film's mise en scene. There's supposed to be a late-movie twist about the wife really being a bitch (either an implication that she deserved her fate or a clumsy machination to allow for said poingnant ending), but given that it comes completely out of the blue after so many mystifying plot points, you wouldn't be blamed for being beyond caring.

On the other end of the stylistic spectrum is Seymour Barros-Sanchez's Handumanan (Remembrance), which was financed in part via a grant from the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (!) for the NETPAC competition (!!). The film follows the story of three damaged souls: a lonely pocketbook romance writer named Sol Miranda (Chin Chin Gutierrez) who is being edged out of her rose-colored view of the world by an employer who feels that erotica is the wave of the future; a disillusioned government employee named Lean (Jason Abalos) who has some nebulous issues with his Chinese mother and who really wants to be a novelist; and a Brazilian model named Carlos (Brapanese model Akihiro Sato) who is trying to find his Filipino mother.

Barros-Sanchez wears his literary aspirations on his sleeve--setting the movie in the academic atmosphere of Silliman University, the Southern haven for writers and various literary types; sprinkling his dialogue with literati inside jokes; peppering his script with wordsmithed nuggets on life, love, and loss. But just because you're literary, doesn't mean you can write a script. The problem begins when he has the lives of his three characters intersect. Sol takes in Lean after she finds him shivering with fever in a tent on the beach outside her villa; then Carlos comes upon his face on the cover of a pocketbook Sol wrote, whereupon he strikes up a cyberchat friendship with her. Sol forges a connection with these two men on the flimsiest of motivations--what's supposed to be an affecting portrait of loneliness just comes across as spinsterly desperation.

Handumanan is the kind of incompetently staged movie where Sol's obligatory gay pal acts all sentimental and weepy that his friend is leaving, then cuts to an exterior shot of the NAIA, and then we discover that Sol has actually gone all the way to...Dumaguete. It is so laughably amateur that in all the scenes that show Chin Chin or Akihiro typing on their laptops, the preprogrammed words appearing on the screen appear out of sync with the actors' slower typing fingers. And the acting is a case of Goldilocks faced with three choices of porridge: Chin Chin (too overheated), Akihiro (too underdone), and Jason (just right...although in a movie like this, that's not saying much). To Akihiro's credit, you can tell his heart is in the right place...as well as most of his other body parts. (The hunk appears barechested in his first three scenes.)

I was planning to catch the new Jay Altarejos film Big Boy, Little Boy...I was ready to give independent cinema another try, I really was! The last film I saw of Jay Altarejos' was the borderline-passable Ang Lihim ni Antonio, which at least portrayed some of the recognizable awkwardness of growing up gay (even if it insisted on faux-profound voice-overs in which the pubescent protagonist contemplated his name and how it defined his place in the world...because all gay teenagers are burgeoning philosophers). But one look at the poster and its credit line "A Film by Altarejos"--just as Talk to Her is "A Film by Almodovar"--and I was suddenly stricken by a migraine.

Remember what I said in the beginning about paying your dues? If these filmmakes had actually done that, maybe they would have subjected their characters to recognizable motivations, strapped their plots on the crucible of considered structure...maybe they would have realized that if they followed the discipline of narrative logic, then their movies wouldn't be such an excruciating viewing exercise. But really, this kind of insight and conscientiousness you can only gain from years of experience. Based on my experience of writing for film and TV, the lack of narrative discipline in the mainstream is usually a matter of laziness or a scarcity of faith in the mass audience. For local independent cinema--which often touts itself as the great hope of Filipino film--there is no excuse.

Bro Cinema

2009-08-09T01:53:00.000-07:00

Apparently, sometime between the Lethal Weapon movies bowing on screens in the '80s and Paul Rudd looking for a best man in the recent comedy I Love You, Man, the Golden Age of Bro Cinema happened. As GQ Magazine so helpfully points out, the term "bro" "originally evolved from the Middle English ("I knowe ynogh, on even and a-browe"--G. CHAUCER); evolved during the '60s as "brother," used by African-Americans to indicate a shared history of struggle. Now used a lot by white guys to indicate a shared history of that time you puked at White Castle."

This week, two specimens of testosterone-driven cinema debut on local screens. One shows manly men piloting sleek aircraft and blowing things up. The other involves three best men looking for a lost friend in the wilds of Las Vegas a day before said friend's wedding. Two likely entries in the emerging subgenre of Bro Cinema. But really, only one of them is a Bro Movie.

Let's start with the one that isn't: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Remember that distant time when the toys existed as merchandising for the movie? Now, thanks to Hasbro (a perfectly named corporation for the Golden Age of the Bro, if there ever was one), it's the other way around. If the other Hasbro movie of the season is any indication, then G.I. Joe is everything you'd expect it to be: just as loud, just as emptily bombastic, just as devoid of "acting" as Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.

What makes G.I. Joe marginally better than that other movie about robots that can hide themselves as monster trucks is what it is by default: an exposition movie. In laying out its plot about an evil corporate magnate named McCullen(Christopher Eccleston, emoting enough for a whole village of loud, abrasive Scotsmen) who intends to enslave the world via nanotechnology--that branch of theoretical physics which postulates that subatomic particles can be manipulated into doing anything from killing cancer cells to devouring toxic waste--the filmmakers clumsily toggle from the present to the past in order to explain their characters' motivations. Which is how you come to know that the Joes' newest recruit Duke (Channing Tatum), has a past with the requisite slinky villainess, the Baroness (the generically beautiful Sienna Miller who, in brunette coloring, looks like a straight-haired Evangeline Lilly); or that the silent operative Snake Eyes (masked and wordless throughout, so I didn't even bother looking him up in the credits) has a shared childhood with the requisite martial-arts villain Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee, who is inexplicably always dressed in white despite his crepuscular name).

So anyway, through his terribly deformed scientific genius The Doctor (whose actor I won't reveal as it will spoil an already spoiled movie), McCullen has created the first successful nanotech weapon and sold it to the US military. But the truth is, he only needed the sale to fund his research and development, and so he's commissioned The Baroness, Storm Shadow, and their ilk to steal the weapon back from the military. And it is up to G.I. Joe, the elite branch of the armed forces with super-advanced fighting skills and weaponry of their own, to stop this evil plan from coming to fruition.

If you can overlook the glaring holes in the plot, (According to theoretical physics, nanotechnology is self-replicating, so why would McMullen need to steal back something that is theoretically limitless? For an elite fighting force, G.I. Joe's headquarters are ridiculously easy to infiltrate. And maybe you can explain this away via political correctness, but it's a little jarring to have an outfit named G.I. Joe be populated by British and French-Moroccan operatives.) then sit back and enjoy the mind-numbing ride. But make no mistake: this is no bro movie. Yes, there are neat explosions, women in tight catsuits, and that high-five brand of machismo, but G.I. Joe is too sleek and too corporate an entertainment to be called a Bro Movie. At its heart, the Bro Movement is defined by that love a guy feels for another guy who will always have his back--the less succinct, sappier definition of "Bros before 'hos." At its heart...well, I'm not sure G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra even has a heart. Calling G.I. Joe a Bro Movie would be like calling Top Gun a Bro Movie, only that would be an insult to Top Gun.

Now, The Hangover...ah, where to begin? Do I begin with that scene where Justin Bartha, playing Doug, the groom about to embark on his last night of debauchery in Las Vegas before getting hitched, gets hugged by his nutzoid-bordering-on-insane brother-in-law Alan (Zach Galifianakis), who is wearing only a tee shirt and a jockstrap? Or how about that scene where The Office's Ed Helms, playing Stu, a desperately buttoned-down dentist who is in desperate need of rescue from his slave-driving lady (Rachel Harris), is fetched by his good-looking friend Phil (Bradley Cooper) with a hale and hearty "Paging Doctor Faggot!" Or how about the nifty character twist that has Phil, the most eager to be debauched and the most open to highjinks, be not just a high school teacher...but also the only one among this crew of four friends to be happily married?

The Hangover is directed by Todd Phillips, the director and sometime-screenwriter who also helmed Road Trip and Old School, which makes him the putative Martin Scorsese of Bro Cinema. Both the director and his characters look upon this trip--in fact, the very concept of Las Vegas--as the Promised Land of Debauchery. At their essences, a road trip to Las Vegas and a pilgrimage to Lourdes are the same: You've heard of their reputations, you go expecting something to happen, and then upon arriving at the fabled land, you realize that everything has been so organized and touristy that the promise of debauchery or miracles--something raw and authentic--has been bleached out of the place.

Of course, the twist in The Hangover is that something does, indeed, happen: After settling in at their beyond-their-means suite in Caesar's Palace, the band of four toast each other at the roof...and then they wake up the next morning with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the cabinet, Stu missing his right incisor, and Doug the groom just...missing. The whole movie is structured in revelatory Oh my God, I did that?! detective fashion, and while I can't spoil what is a truly hilarious, laugh-a-minute movie, all I will say is that the unearthed memories involve a stripper (Heather Graham), an Asian gangster (Ken Jeong, who played a grumpy doctor in the Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up), and a debate over why the date-rape drug Roofies are called Roofies and not Floories (because that's where you end up after taking them).

The Hangover is a Bro Movie not just because the lowest of the low in masculine behavior--that part of a guy who refuses to go gently into the good night of adulthood--serves to undermine everything that is so organized and touristy about the Vegas experience, but because the central mystery--Where is Doug?--is treated with a touching urgency. Not since Saving Private Ryan has the story of a missing comrade been laid out more engrossingly.

I have to admit, the plot necessity of bringing together disparate "types" is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I understand that opposing character types make for more interesting interactions--characters who are too similar to each other are redundant, and when they talk, they have "conversations" not "dialogue". On the other, you wonder how the Dweeb (Stu), the Nut (Alan), and the Jock (Phil) could have become friends in real life. Among this band of Bros, it is Ed Helms who rises above the rest, reacting to every improbable twist the plot throws at him with an accessible mix of horror and giddy liberation. But really, even the clunky parts work in The Hangover, which, at its heart, is an unapologetic, chest-bumping, warm-Budweiser-guzzling ode to the "Bros before 'hos" philosophy.

Up, Up and Away

2009-08-03T03:33:00.000-07:00

Is it possible that living, breathing actors could become obsolete? If you spent the last week watching Public Enemies and Up like I did, you would see why this is becoming a distinct possibility.

Not that Johnny Depp and Christian Bale act with all the vitality of cardboard, mind you. In fact, they make for a truly intriguing pair: Depp, one of the most unpredictable, iconoclastic actors of this generation; Bale, one of its most intense and volatile. I'm just not sure if this Michael Mann biopic--about the exploits of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger and the FBI agent who pursued and eventually shot him outside a moviehouse in Chicago--was the best vehicle to showcase their strengths.

Public Enemies opens with trademark Mann machismo. Shooting in HD with frequent collaborator Dante Spinotti, Mann shows Dillinger orchestrate a clever jail breakout so he can repopulate his bank-robbing gang. The colors are cool and bleached, the panorama is expansive (suggesting both freedom and the lack of places to hide), and the action is staged with macho melodrama...and in a way, the film approaches its subject matter in much the same way: Full of bluster and coolness, but never really getting into the skin of its notorious subject.

Soon, Dillinger is romancing Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, laboring in newly learned English for very little acting payoff), the half-Native American, half-French coat-check girl who suspiciously tells Dillinger: "I don't know anything about you." Dillinger responds that his father beat him up, that he likes movies, cool clothes, fast cars, whisky, and her. And that's as much character exposition we're going to get about Dillinger. Oh, and that he has a Prince Albert piercing in his you-know-where. I never thought it was possible to have too little character illumination also be too much information, but there you have it.

On the other side of the law, J. Edgar Hoover (played with beady-eyed brilliance by Billy Crudup) is busy jockeying for more power for his bureau of detectives, and he thinks his golden boy Melvin Purvis, fresh off his sensational arrest/killing of Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), is just the guy to do it. He assigns Purvis to the Chicago field office and tasks him with taking down Public Enemy # 1 Dillinger. But Purvis has a problem: His unwavering sense of ethics is often at odds with his boss' sense of politics and showmanship.

In the end, Depp and Bale aren't playing living, breathing characters so much as Symbols: According to the screenplay by Mann, Ronan Bennett, and Ann Biderman, Dillinger was the last of the honorable rogues--the kind who cared about public opinion enough to return the money of the customers whose banks he robbed, and looked upon such rackets as kidnap-for-ransom with disdain; and Purvis was the last of the honorable G-Men--the kind who cared not an iota about public opinion, budgets, or manpower allocations, only about getting the job done right. They're the remnants of a bygone, glamorous era--an era where big-time scores didn't involve conning retirees out of their pensions in pyramid schemes and crusading lawmen didn't try to impeach Presidents over their adulterous dalliances for media exposure. In their own ways, Dillinger and Purvis were Good Men, if not three-dimensional men.

3-D as moviemaking technology is not necessary in any Pixar movie, because the 3-D unfailing exists in its screenplays. That Up makes use of 3-D technology is just a fitting, metaphorical bonus--Pixar's 10th film is a touching, inventive, uplifting story about a crotchety old man, an enthusiastic boy scout, and a house that sails away on balloons. And it made me tear up in the first ten minutes...a new record for my encounters with Pixar's movies!

Up follows the life of Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner with an authority he displayed as Lou Grant), whose block of a head and square glasses already communicate to us that he isn't an adventurer in the conventional sense of the word. The adventurer is his wife Ellie, whom he first meets as a boy walking past a dilapidated house that she has sequestered as her own adventurers' headquarters. The film then lays out their love story--their happiness, their heartbreak, their shared dream of someday traveling to a fabled waterfall in South America--with such deftness and economy of narration, it could be the subject of much dissection by filmmaking classes for years to come...if it weren't also such an emotional, engrossing ode to all that makes us wonderfully, beautifully human. (Just remembering that montage now is choking me up.)

But Up is just beginning. In the twilight of his years, Carl finds himself hemmed in by the soulless developments rising up around his quaint, little home and badgered by the energetic boy scout Russell (expressive newcomer Jordan Nagai), who is only missing a badge for assisting the elderly to become a full-fledged Wilderness Scout. And then something terrible happens: An unintentional assault threatens to uproot Carl from his life. And so he does what any sane balloon salesman does: He attaches his house--a nod to how the elderly cannot travel anywhere without a memento from home--to a thousand brightly colored balloons, and finally makes true on his lifelong promise to seek out that fabled waterfall.

With Russell as an accidental stowaway, Carl touches down in South America, and this is where the screenplay goes into full inventive, unpredictable mode. Through the alcehmy of Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) and Bob Peterson's script, Up manages to weave an exotic bird, a gang of talking dogs (with the good-hearted nerd of the pack, Dug, voiced by co-screenwriter and co-director Peterson), and an obsessed explorer (Christopher Plummer) into a story brimming with laugh-out-loud comedy, breathtaking scenery, and a sincere, unselfconscious joy that tells us, Hey, the biggest adventures happen in your own life...with the people you love! And through it all, the creators never lose sight of their biggest strength: their unerring ability to paint characters with understandable motives, contradictory impulses, recognizable emotion.

In a press conference after Up's screening as the opening film at Cannes this past May, Pixar creative bigwig John Lasseter characterized 3-D as a "fun toy," but that he had no use for it as a marketing gimmick: "3-D should supply depth that furthers the emotion of the scene." It's so simple a moviemaking tenet, so applicable to everything that raises movies to beloved classics, you wonder why Hollywood doesn't always get things right. I say John Lasseter and co. have accomplished their mission with Up. Can't wait for Toy Story 3.

Everything Old is New Again

2009-07-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

Film snobs and cinema eggheads say "formula" as though it were a dirty word. For the record, it's not. As Julia Roberts squirmily explained to Cameron Diaz, our mouths may water for créme brulée, but there are times when Jell-O really hits the spot. To bludgeon all the wit out of the metaphor by taking it to its extreme, there is nothing quite so disappointing as créme brulée that is badly done (which, in my opinion, is the problem with most local "indie" films...but more on that in a future entry.) Having said that, the question then becomes: What flavor would you like your Jell-O to be?

Perhaps you'd like it to be vanilla with a subtle hint of something-something. Like The Proposal, which casts Sandra Bullock as Margaret, a high-powered Manhattan book editor who will get deported back to Canada on an expired visa unless she pulls off a green-card wedding to put-upon assistant Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), who tolerates Margaret's abuse as standard industry fraternity-hazing but finagles a possible promotion out of the set-up. But first, they must survive a weekend visit back to Andrew's home state of Alaska for his grandmother's (Betty White) 80th birthday. Amusing complications, as to be expected, ensue.

The romantic comedy conceit of "man and woman who hate each other before they realize they love each other" goes back beyond Jane Austen, all the way back to Shakespeare, and it is used with square pride in The Proposal. Proving that Hollywood relegates its middle-aged actresses at its own peril, Sandra Bullock shows that she's polished and burnished her comic chops to a sharp, pearly sleekness, so that even when you know her character is headed for the inevitable softening/humbling that you know is due, her intelligence never makes it seem like a diminishment of her character. The real pleasures here are Ryan Reynolds, whose dry sense of timing is given more screen time here than it did in Wolverine (Was I the only one who was sorely disappointed that they didn't give Deadpool a mouth so Ryan could spout some more smart-aleck putdowns?), and Betty White as the hot grandma, who steals every scene she's in by masking her shrewd worldliness with her trademark Rose Nyland naiveté.

Only one problem: the lopsided nature of Peter Chiarelli's script. Maybe it's because Sandra Bullock is the producer, but I got the sense that her character's journey is more mapped out than Ryan Reynolds'. Sure, sure, we get a subplot about Andrew butting heads with his entrepreneur father (Craig T. Nelson) because the son has no interest in inheriting the family business...but see, that really has nothing to do with why he should suddenly realize that he's in love with his termagant of a boss. Meanwhile, on Sandra's part, we get a retread of her "I never had a family growing up so I never learned how to love" shtick from While You Were Sleeping (although lovelorn Lucy from that movie was certainly more pleasant than multitasking Margaret), and a realization that wielding your power over people like a blunt axe isn't really all that fun.

And so what should have been a shiveringly pleasurable reunion is rendered a bit unconvincing. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being a truly satisfying Sandra Bullock rom-com romp, The Proposal ranks somewhere much higher than Forces of Nature (the 1999 torture device in which Sandra does edgy with liberal doses of eyeliner as she escorts Ben Affleck through natural calamites and a misguided striptease so he can marry Maura Tierney anyway) and two notches below Two Weeks' Notice (the 2000 soufflé that had Sandra Bullock sparring with Hugh Grant on equal footing when it came to smarts, sexiness, and ability to do a chuckle-worthy pratfall). In other words, I'm still waiting for the romantic comedy that will make full use of Sandra's middle-aged intelligence and womanliness. (Judging by its trailer, I'm not sure her next outing with Bradley Cooper, All About Steve, is it.)

Or perhaps you'd like your Jell-O to be darkest blueberry with the piquat zing of chili. That's the flavor you'll get from Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan, which somehow takes the tried-and-tested horror trope of the "evil child" and squeezes something new out of it. Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and Peter Sarsgaard (The Skeleton Key, Kinsey) play a comfortable, middle-class couple who adopt a preternaturally gifted and "mature for her age" orphan named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) so they can get over the tragedy of a recent miscarriage. It's not long before Esther is smashing a pigeon's head in with a rock and pushing a bratty classmate out of a treehouse...and she's only getting started.

Collet-Serra, whose most memorable directing job in Hollywood has been fulfilling audiences' death fantasies for Paris Hilton in the 2005 reboot of House of Wax, has a directorial style that can be called purple: If you're looking for Damien Thorn-subtlety, it's safe to say that Orphan is no The Omen. Esther dresses like an antique doll, and speaks in a heavy Russian accent that should send jitters up even the most clueless parent's spine. But the way Collet-Serra repeatedly plays on our jaded perception of standard horror movie devices--the medicine cabinet mirror trick, the subjective camera as it approaches a character from behind, the welling music--and then subverts it, leavens the proceedings with much needed doses of humor. In this respect, he is more subtle than Sam Raimi--hey, at least Collet-Serra didn't send anvils crashing down on his villain's head!

But the real ingredient to a sumptuous piece of cinematic Jell-O? Character, character, character. The main conflict in Orphan is obviously between the mother-warrior and the cunning interloper. Vera Farmiga lends an empathetic neurosis to her grieving, borderline-alcoholic mother, just to make Isabelle Fuhrman's evil Esther appear all that much bigger and make the showdown more evenly matched. And Isabelle Fuhrman...lordy! Where on earth did they find this 12-year-old actress--a back issue of Mini-Psychotics Weekly? (I sound catty, but I say this as a compliment.) My hats off to the casting directors who found this chilling, wise-beyond-her-years actress (who I hope will not be typecast into playing creepy misfits for the rest of her career).

And when the tagline says "You'll never guess Esther's secret," I am happy to report that you really won't...even if the cynical cinephile in you will insist that you saw the twist coming from a mile away. That dirty-trick-of-a-twist is simply whipped cream on top of a sick, satisfying slab of cinematic jelly.

Adventures in Moviewatching

2009-07-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

There's always a sequence in every movie that encapsulates what it's about or lays out its agenda. Some are iconic (there's Tom Cruise dancing in his long-sleeved shirt and tighty whities in Risky Business, forever freezing in our minds the image of repressed adolescence just yearning to bust out of suburbia); some are quiet (there's Wall*E discovering a growing shrub in the midst of the junk heaps a future Earth has been reduced to); and others are neither iconic nor quiet (that meteor crashing to Earth and becoming a cougar crossed with a trash compactor in Transformers 2).

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, that sequence occurs early on, when in the middle of a gloomy, foreboding London subway, our titular hero (Daniel Radcliffe) takes a break from reading all about the marauding Death Eaters and the daily disappearances of witches and wizards in The Daily Prophet to flirt with a comely diner waitress, a beauty of African extraction. In that one deftly written interaction, (the by-now) indispensable screenwriter Steve Kloves and director David Yates manage to bring the fantasy franchise into the new realities of an increasingly racially integrated world; set out the production's path of balancing dark and light, tragedy and humor; and announce to the die-hard fans that--wait a minute, this sequence isn't in the book!--they will not be slaves to adapting the book faithfully.

A quick recap for those of you who don't read the books before watching the movies: In this installment, Harry is recruited by the venerable headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), to persuade the social-climbing Potions teacher Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent, so touching in his superciliousness that it's a pity his character won't be appearing in the last two installments) into returning to the wizarding school so that they can infiltrate his memories of interacting with the student named Tom Riddle, the boy who would be Lord Voldemort. Specifically, they need to find out what he told Tom Riddle about Horcruxes, those bewitched objects into which Voldemort deposited different parts of his soul so that he could live on should his physical body be lethally attacked (which, of course, occurred when he tried to murder the infant Harry and had his deadly spell backfire on him).

So confident and sure-footed are Kloves and Yates in their adapting duties that they have decided to switch up the ratio of the book, devoting less time to Voldemort's backstory and giving more screen time to the minefield that is adolsecent relationships: Will Hermione (the radiant Emma Watson) and Ron (the painfully geeky Rupert Grint) finally acknowledge their feelings toward each other? (That is, if Ron can surface for air from the incessant "snogging" being administered to him by the obsessed Lavender Brown, played with such comedy and creepiness by Jessie Cave, you'd think she was channeling a British Glenn Close.) Will Harry and Ginny (Bonnie Wright) finally connect? (That is, if Harry can escape the chocolates laced with love potion sent to him by Romilda Vane.) And then there is Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), whose bully nature unexpectedly gains gravitas when he is given a Herculean task that is too much for his teenage soul to grasp.

The beauty of this current adaptation is that, while director of photography Bruno Delbonnel and those CGI wizards behind the scenes serve up the magic and majesty we have come to expect from the Potter movies (the images of a London walkway buckling under the onslaught of Death Eater smoke, and the gray sea roiling in front of Voldemort's cliffside Horcrux hideaway are particularly breathtaking, especially on IMAX), Kloves and Yates make the foibles of adolescence an adventure unto themselves. As Dumbledore himself so astutely observes during an awkward infirmary scene involving Lavender, Hermione, and an incapacitated Ron Weasley: "Ah...to be young and to feel the sting of love!"

Make no mistake, however: Half-Blood Prince is nothing but an interlude, the hush before the much-anticipated explosion that is the final showdown (Deathly Hallows' two parts are scheduled for showing in November 2010 and July 2011). Adventureland, the heartfelt coming-of-age story written and directed by Greg Mottola, is afforded no such luxury--the characters inhabit a prosaic world that is the prelude only to the heartbreaking realities of adulthood. It is 1987, and geeky Comparative Lit college graduate James (Jesse Eisenberg) is looking forward to a summer in Europe before hightailing it to grad school in New York. Trouble is, his father has been demoted and can't afford his graduation gift, so he is forced to take a job as a carny in the Pittsburg amusement park Adventureland so he can save some spending money for his post-graduate aspirations.

Mottola expands on the losers-rule-the-world ethos that he started in Superbad by giving his nerdy protagonist concerns other than raging hormones to contend with. For starters, James has to confront the reality of diminished employment opportunities (his college degree can't even get him a job waiting tables at the local restaurant) and possibly compromised dreams (his parents keep trying to persuade him to move to a less exalted university other than Columbia for post-graduate studies). For another thing, he falls hopelessly in love with one of the most appealingly mixed-up girls the cinema has ever had the privilege to produce, a disillusioned fellow carny named Emily (Kristen Stewart) who is wrestling with a stepmother she hates and an affair with a washed-up musician/janitor (Ryan Reynolds), one of those Adults Who Should Know Better.

Both Half-Blood Prince and Adventureland deal with, at varying degrees, the glory and anguish of adolescence. They both delicately balance humor and tragedy to get their points across. But what makes Adventureland a particular pleasure to watch is its specificity: You may find yourself nodding along to the evocative power of the soundtrack (Falco's "Amadeus" is used to great comic effect), or chuckling at the scene-stealing highjinks of Saturday Night Live players Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as the clueless husband-and-wife team who run the amusement park, or cringing at the morning-after rejection that must come after a night when a drunk hot chick makes out with the geeky carny who majored in Russian Lit...but you nod and chuckle and cringe because all the details are true. In fact, you may be forgiven for assuming that Mottola must have cribbed from his own life to write and direct this heartfelt film, which comes across as less of a comedy than a documentary re-enactment.

The love James feels for his tortured object of desire does indeed transform him, so much so that he even attracts the attention of the resident vamp Lisa P (Margarita Levieva), who has a habit of gyrating to any song she likes over the amusement park public speakers. But just as love lifts him up, it will inevitably send James crashing down. If I have one quibble with Adventureland, it is with the ending--it feels too much like a concession to the feel-good demands of Hollywood's current brand of comedy. I won't spoil the ending, except to say that, while I appreciate a happy, tied-up bow on top of a gift as much as anyone, I would have loved it if Mottola had set his sights higher, aimed for that poignant ache which would have raised his film memoir to the truly indelible and unforgettable, above the level of popcorn which the grand and majestic Harry Potter movies proudly occupy. As it is, Adventureland is cotton candy: light, pleasant, and all too likely to disappear after dissolving into sugar on your tongue.

'Fallen' Down

2009-06-29T03:15:00.000-07:00

There's a trademark moment in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen that, to me, encapsulates what this quintessentially popcorn movie--and I don't mean that as a compliment--is all about. Floating in space, an evil Decepticon shoots a ball of fire to Earth, where it lands in the ocean. The ball of fire then emerges from the water as a metallic cougar, which then bounds off towards a highly fortified military base. It wrestles a shaft cover off its moorings, where it then vomits ball bearings into a chamber, and these ball bearings then reassemble themselves into an air-thin Rube Goldberg device that's supposed to cut through a receptacle housing a shard whose energy will reawaken the dormant Decepticons hidden throughout the world.

The sequence serves no purpose other than to elicit "oohs" from the fanboys in the audience; as a mechanism for propeling the plot forward in any form that makes sense, it accomplishes nothing. In fact, its ball of fire-transforming-into-metallic cougar-transforming-into-ball bearings-transforming-into-impossibly thin jackknife device can serve as a tidy metaphor for the movie: It's candy for the eye, but pure indigestion for the brain that demands, oh, coherence.

Where to begin, where to begin. How about the script? Co-written by the scribes behind the Star Trek reboot, Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (Ehren Kruger, responsible for The Ring movies, is the third point in this unholy writing trinity), it is a depressing testament to the fact that scripts are only as good as the directors handling them. Apparently, Charlie Kaufman does not work in Hollywood during the summer: Get a JJ Abrams to tackle your script, and you get fully rounded characters as a bonus with your pyrotechnics. Get a Michael Bay to handle it...and you get a whirligig camera that gives you motion sickness even when all it's showing are Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox trading goodbye kisses before he goes off to college.

In fact, Michael Bay's attention-deficit-disorder restlessness permeates the entire movie. The plot, which careens from Shia's character Sam Witwicky getting infected with symbols-in-the-brain from a leftover shard stuck in his jacket from the first movie, to another shard housed in a high-security military installation that will awaken hibernating Decepticons, to an energy source housed in the pyramids of Giza that's supposed to give the evil robots paramount power at the expense of our sun, seems to be winging it with no apparent rhyme or reason. It cheats moviegoers by making up new rules--even halfway through the movie!--and defies basic narrative tenets that exist for coherent storytelling. Now, all of a sudden, we have Decepticons that can transform not just into trucks or blenders but into convincingly babealicious college freshmen. Where the hell did this ability come from? Who knows? Who cares?

And then there are the expected set pieces, in which Bay can't decide which city or beloved landmark to trash first. Shanghai? Paris? Petra? The pyramids? Heck, let's pulverize 'em all! (This whole demolition-of-landmarks motif is employed in another summer movie, GI Joe, which does such a strikingly similar number on the Eiffel Tower that you wonder if it and Transformers 2 are actually the same movie.) Michael Bay is so eager to get to the pyrotechnics that he can't even be bothered to show his characters getting into cars before they drive off in them--you know, basic "words" to ensure that the syntax of your shots still make sense.

Instead, he decides to linger on his trademark images: slow-motion shots of his heroes--in this case, the batallion headed by Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson--walking in firing-squad formation even when all they're doing is walking out of a hangar. Which, come to think of it, can serve as another metaphor for the movie: It's during those stretches of the story where the military gets strategizing in their command centers with the giant radar screens that the movie slows down to a deadly crawl. Which might partly explain why this spindle-fold-and-mutilate moviegoing experience lasts an excruciating two-and-a-half hours...except you take a look at the story and realize that this isn't the kind of story that needs 150 minutes to be told.

Here's another disturbing observation: Now that the US has elected a leader that the world generally approves of, it seems Bay has taken this as a license to revive his whole America-is-superior ethos. The American military lays waste to a major Chinese city and a world-famous landmark, and does so under the imprimatur of "saving the world" without so much as a reference to international censure. None of this adventurism was present in the first Transformers movie (shown during the Bush 2 era), which is probably why it didn't piss me off this much.

Bay, the weapons-and-destruction fetishist masquerading as director, shoots the climactic desert battle sequences so convincingly that you have to keep reminding yourself that what you're watching is a summer movie, not a gritty war movie set in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan. It's a little disheartening to think that, at least in America, moviegoers find images of war palatable only if they're done in the service of eliminating giant robots that can turn into helicopters. It's an aesthetic that not only makes war palatable, but trivial. Just as it makes violence palatable and trivial as long as it's done to Optimus Prime or to Decepticons. I'd be disturbed...if I cared.

What A Drag!

2009-06-07T05:52:00.000-07:00

Full disclosure: I am not a big fan of hip hop. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to explain the difference between "hip hop" and "rap". And when I received the invitation to watch an advanced screening of Notorious, the first thing that popped into my head was the hit of the reconstituted '80s band Duran Duran, not the biopic of Biggie Smalls aka the Notorious B.I.G. aka Christopher Wallace, who was gunned down at a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles in 1997, when he was only 24.

Now, I may not know much about hip hop as a genre. But once you transpose that genre onto film, I figure it's fair game. Amd I have to say, Notorious may feel feverish and frenetic, but as biopics go, it also feels a bit thin. The director George Tillman, Jr. (Soul Food) works hard to capture the meanness of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn where Christopher Wallace grew up, abandoned by his father and raised by a Jamaican single mother (Angela Bassett, in steel-jawed, strong earth mother mode); the bacchanalia of the music scene, where Christopher Wallace transforms into Biggie Smalls (newcomer Jamal Woolard), reaching for stardom as a means of freedom from his inner-city beginnings under the sponsorship of emerging record producer/performer Sean "Puffy" Combs aka Puff Daddy aka P Diddy (Derek Luke); the unfettered sexual appetite that leads him to impregnate his high-school sweetheart (Julia Pace Wallace), then take up with the feisty Brooklyn bombshell who would eventually metamorphose into the novelty act Lil Kim (Naturi Naughton), and eventually marry the blonde-tressed singer Faith Evans (Antonique Smith).

After films like Ray and Walk the Line (and even the Judd Apatow satire Walk Hard), these have become basic elements for any biopic worth the celluloid it's filmed on. I guess the problem with Notorious is that there's really not much "there" there. Biggie Smalls' background has been exploited and brandished like a badge of honor by everyone from Eminem to 50 Cent, and when you consider that Biggie was killed when he was on the verge of releasing his second album, well, there's not much accomplishment to contemplate and feel tragic over. Even the episodes involving the ladies come across as a tad undercooked--these women merely function as fainting objects overcome by Biggie's outsize, larger-than-life sexual charisma. They are not as strongly written as the women of Ray, who come across as living, breathing, flawed humans worthy to spar with the blind R&B genius.

What is remarkable about the biopic is that it attempts to plumb the deadly East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry that would eventually claim the life not just of Biggie, but of the other preeminent name of '90s hip hop, Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie). But even here, in the plotline that should have raised Notorious above other entries in the genre, the sequences are underwritten. Biggie and Tupac started out as buddies. But after an attack in a Brooklyn studio that almost killed him, Tupac turns against Biggie in a fit of paranoia...but why did Tupac think Biggie had put out a hit on him in the first place? The movie doesn't say, offering only a public view of the Biggie-Tupac relationship, but never an intimate, bet-you-didn't-know portrait of it.

Or perhaps, ocnsidering the movie was executive-produced by Sean Combs, the movie had no choice but to be an apologist for Biggie Smalls. The budding record-label magnate is protrayed as an underdog--kicked out by his first mentor Dr. Dré, persecuted by rival record producer Suge Knight--and so even Biggie is sanitized, blameless, guilty only of the excesses contemporary and future hip hop stars are also guilty of. And this trivializes Biggie's tragic death into the product of a horrible misunderstanding, instead of the escalating competition between two subcultures battling over who was the bigger alpha dawg. (There are even sequences, on the day of Biggie's death, where the rapper is shown calling and making peace with the three women he'd wronged--I simply had to roll my eyes.)

Much more fun is Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, where the director of the increasingly earnest Spider-Man movies returns to his B-horror movie roots. While Sam Raimi has kept in touch with the horror movie genre via his Ghost House pictures, the imprint responsible for such fare as The Grudge movies, Bogeyman, and The Messengers, he's only produced, not directed. And in the delirious, fun-house, scream-while-you-laugh ride that is Drag Me to Hell, Raimi proves he's still a maestro at manipulating audience reaction years and years after The Evil Dead movies first made us squirm and shriek with their whooshing-camera, over-the-top thrills.

The story revolves around a loan officer named Christine (Alison Lohman) who, gunning for an assistant-manager position at the bank she works for, refuses to grant an extension on the home mortgage of a one-eyed, rotten-toothed gypsy woman (Lorna Raver). Big mistake: the gypsy unleashes a curse on the loan officer, and for the rest of the movie, Christine fights off a phantom called the "lamia", a demon that will torment her for three days before, you guessed it, dragging her off to hell.

The lamia isn't the only grotesque phantasm Christine must deal with: the gypsy woman also makes multiple appearances in increasingly baroque set pieces that, under Raimi's deft hand, play like elaborate sick jokes even as they scare the bejesus out of us. The first set piece is a knock-down fight between the two women in an underground parking garage that is--if you can imagine it--a cross between a slasher confrontation and a UFC matchup. And it only gets better--more gross-out, more horrifying, more screamingly funny--from there. Just bear in mind this mini-spoiler everytime the music starts to get ominous: You will never think of the phrase "in your face" in quite the same way again.

But that's what a master orchestrator like Sam Raimi can do to you: skew your perception, slither into your subconscious, splatter all your deepest fears onto the screen like so much monstrous effluvium. And, with his amazing ability to never let the chills get in the way of laughs (or is that vice versa?), create the first truly affecting horror movie I've seen in years and years.

Maybe Skynet generated all the negative reviews . . .

2009-05-30T19:43:00.000-07:00

I got the chance to see 'Terminator Salvation' right after all the blogs and online critics have told me that the movie sucks. And, guess what? I liked the movie; it didn't suck at all.
Of course my expectations were lowered and a part of me winced at the idea of McG directing it (Charlie's Terminators?), but, as a fan of the series, I thought this last installment was quite good. Perhaps it doesn't hold a candle to the first two films (a review of both is in order, methinks, before I pass ultimate judgement, at this point, and I can certainly say that in terms of storytelling, Salvation is quite flawed), but I thought it held its own in furthering the story of John Connor and the hellish world he inhabits. The film has flaws, but I found myself drawn to it from start to finish, and long after I left the theater, the movie stayed in my mind.
The actors were all quite good, most notably Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright) and Anton Yelchin (Star Trek reboot's Chekov), who plays the young Kyle Reese.
I did feel some discomfort with Worthington at the beginning and felt his acting wasn't up to par during a huge part of the film's first part, but he does warm up midway and I found myself sympathizing with his character.
Yelchin is a joy to watch and he does a great job playing a version of Kyle Reese on the verge of becoming a man.
Chrisitan Bale, of course, is John Connor and I almost got goosebumps when he says "If you're listening to this, you ARE the resistance." Almost. His famous verbal attack on the cinematographer, notwithstanding, he plays the role with intensity. He does scream most of the time, and some critics say the film was a collection of explosions and screams, but I didn't mind.
Bryce Dallas Howard as Mrs. John Connor, doesn't have much to play with in this film, but I somehow feel she does fit her role well.
And of course, there's Moon Bloodgood, which some of you may remember from the late, lamented series "Journeyman" or the Paul Walker movie "Snow Dogs." She's not bad, not bad at all. And she's so freaking hot, Lawdamercy!
The effects are topnotch, as expected and there are some really cool Terminator concepts they put in like the ginormous Harvester terminator and its Ducati monsterbots. How cool was it when these killer robot bikes slid down the harvesters legs?
So why was this film panned, in general?
While it didn't turn out candy-colored like Charlie's Angels, I found McG's direction of some scenes to be awkward. Some of the actors' delivered some lines, well, awfully.
The scenes where John Connor listened to his mother's tape recordings seemed forced; there was something awkward about the scenes were staged - and it didn't help that Sarah Connor's voice didn't act so well. I'm not sure if that was Linda Hamilton's voice - if it was, she didn't bring her A game.
There are instances where the storytelling was quite dodgy. There were two instances when a character disappears (without any reason) only to turn appear later in a big dramatic entrance; oh, ok, that was the reason for the disappearance- to ensure a grand dramatic appearance later.
Several storytelling shortcuts made me go 'Whuh, did I miss something?'
In general, I'd have to say the action sequences were better staged than the more dramatic ones - I can almost see McG saying "Ok, enough of this drama, let's get to the explosions!".
But despite its flaws, I liked where this movie took me. The story, as I said, is a satisfying continuation of the Terminator saga. Its flaws didn't ruin my entire experience of the movie and that's quite enough for me.
And before I forget, there's a not-so-surprising (thank you, internet!), sort-of cameo of a certain governor of California towards the end of the film. This reminded me of the first time a few years back when CGI tech was on the verge of creating really convincing 'actors' - people were starting to wonder if CG animation can actually replace real actors. Well, after watching 'Salvation', I can tell you for certain that CG animation CAN actually replace SOME so-called actors. I swear, CG Arnie had a more menacing expression than real Arnie.
Go watch this film - it's not the horrible train wreck the naysayers of the world wide web makes it out to be.
Oh, and did I mention how HOT Moon Bloodgood is?

The Second Time Around

2009-05-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

Remember that scene in Scream 2 where Sarah Michelle Gellar, Timothy Olyphant, Jamie Kennedy, and a host of other overheated film students debate on the validity of sequels as a genre? Despite the fact that the film geek Kennedy played whips out The Godfather Part 2 as proof that sequels can indeed surpass the originals in quality, the self-reflexive sequel that is Scream 2 ended the sequence with the consensus that superior sequels are the exceptions that prove the rule.

I'm happy to report that two hot-ticket summer movies prove that the exceptions could be fast becoming the rule...but my excitement is tempered by the fact that their originals weren't much to write home about in the first place. First piece of good news: Angels & Demons. Yes, Dan Brown's premise is still overheated. Yes, Ron Howard still takes his cues from the source material and matches it with equally bombastic, church-choir-on-the-soundtrack filmmaking. Yes, Tom Hanks still runs all over the place doing the equivalent of an academic scavenger hunt. But at least Angels & Demons has something The Da Vinci Code sorely lacked: a pulse.

Credit it to an old, reliable plot device: the ticking time bomb. While The Da Vinci Code really had nothing more than a dead, naked museum curator to propel its plot, this sequel has two cylinders gunning its narrative engine. First, a canister of explosive anti-matter is stolen from the Hadron Collider facility in Switzerland, and symbologist Robert Langdon is recruited to help find it when an assassin (the charismatic Nikolaj Lie Kaas, filling in for the creepy Paul Bettany role from the first movie)--supposedly a member of the Illuminati, an age-old foe of the Church--hints that he's planted it somewhere in the Vatican. Second, the explosion is timed during a crucial conclave to replace a beloved, progressive-minded Pope, and an internal power struggle is erupting between the stone-faced Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor), the right-hand man of the dead Pope who must assume administrative duties in lieu of a sitting Pontiff.

There's lots of high-minded lecturing on Art as Robert Langdon tears all around Rome, trying to decipher clues about actual landmarks hidden in ancient texts, interpreting squiggles and cryptic messages that could lead him to save the lives of four cardinals favored to assume the seat of Vicar of Christ (also known as the Preferiti). And during the first 45 minutes of the film, the plot tends to screech to a grinding halt every so often while Tom Hanks explains academic concepts to his comely co-hunter, a scientist portrayed by Munich's Ayelet Zurer, that she doubtless already knows about but which the audience has to be made aware of. But at least the concepts don't overrun the plot the way they did in The Da Vinci Code.

True, you can see the twist coming from a mile away. But as Tom Hanks expounds on old Church lore while he runs from one breathtakingly shot landmark after another (I got an extra added thrill from seeing an all-important rescue staged at the Piazza Navona, one of my all-time favorite spots in a city bursting with favorite spots), at least you get the sense that, this time, it is the plot running away with the audience.

The second item of good news: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonina. I stayed away from the original while it was in the cinemas three years ago, and a subsequent viewing on DVD only confirmed my worst suspicions: that this special-effects-laden, ripped-from-kiddie-imagination piece of fluff was too generic, too vanilla to merit much discussion. I felt little optimism for the follow-up. So imagine my surprise when the filmmakers, realizing that there really wasn't much needed by way of exposition, decided to make full use of the opportunity to jump right in with witty zingers and piquant visuals.

Make no mistake, the Night at the Museum sequel is as silly as its predecessor...but somehow its silliness feels zippier, more subversively intelligent, and more true to the wonder kids must feel when visiting a museum full of stuffed mastodon and astronaut monkeys. This time, former night guard Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) has become a successful entrepreneur (of flashlights), and his neglect of his old, inanimate-by-day, animated-by-night friends has led to a lot of the old displays being shuttered and shipped off to the archives of the massive Smithsonian. There, they meet a fictional pharoah (Hank Azaria) who is trying to wrest away the mystical Egyptian tablet that brings them to life come nightfall so he can open a gate to the underworld that will allow him to rule the world.

While Stiller specializes in playing the same role--the put-upon Everyman--over and over again in all his films, there is more reason for him to do his well-practiced double takes this time. That's because Night at the Museum 2 has evolved into a kid's fantasy of the history of the world, imagining what it must be like when such formidable figures as Ivan the Terrible, Al Capone, and Napoleon Bonaparte share the same real estate as bobblehead Albert Einsteins who recite the numerical value of pi, cherubs that sing "My Heart Will Go On" in hip hop cadence, and a sculpture of The Thinker that does nothing other than think of ways to impress the next-pedestal Roman goddess.

There's also the consistently hilarious Hank Azaria, who invests his power-hungry Kahmunrah with a lisp worthy of Boris Karloff; the scene-stealing Bill Hader, whose addled General Custer delivers the line--"Sac-in-the-box! Mission accomplished!"--that got the most laughs in the trailer; and the daffily sexy Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart, who expands on the screwball charm she displayed in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by delivering such lines as "You haven't been able to take your cheaters off my chassis since we met!" with enough precision to cut glass. If Amy Adams were to appear in every sequel ever made from now, maybe that classroom debate in Scream 2 would be rendered moot and academic.

A Worthy Enterprise

2009-05-17T04:50:00.000-07:00

An entry ago I was talking about reboots (or reimaginings, or whatever the hell Hollywood calls resurrected old ideas these days). I distinctly recall predicting that I would enjoy the revived Star Trek immensely. I was right.

Too often, origin stories--especially of much beloved pop cultural chestnuts--have a workmanship about them that's devoid of all the joy the original ideas brought us. Because we already know the mechanisms by which the original story ticks along, the backstory tends to be a tedious exercise in fill-in-the-blanks. (So how did Wolverine lose his memory? How did Jason decide to use a hockey mask as his headgear of choice?) But J.J. Abrams, the relentless Hollywood wunderkind/proud geek who brought us Lost and Cloverfield, miraculously avoids the trap of roteness by tapping into what makes Star Trek such an enduring classic: that sense of discovery as seen through the conflicting viewpoints of bravado and relentless logic.

According to Gene Rodenberry's vision--a sci-fi extrapolation of what The Age of Free Love in the '60s must have promised--earthlings and extraterrestrials have forged a harmonious relationship, barring a pesky Klingon or two, to create the Federation, an intergalactic police force tasked to patrol and explore the uncharted expanses of space. That vision serves merely as a framework in Abrams' version, where intergalactic harmony is good on paper but unpredictable human emotion is still the norm. In Abrams' alternate reality, future captain of the Enterprise James Tiberius Kirk is imagined as a hot-rodding delinquent whose dead-father issues cause him to instigate run-ins with the law while growing up in rural Iowa. Meanwhile, Spock is a half-human, half-Vulcan overachiever who is constantly derided for his earthling heritage (wait, there's bullying in the logical world of Vulcan?). Kirk grows up to be a cocky bad boy (Chris Pine) who enlists in Starfleet on a dare; Spock (Heroes' Jeremy Quinto) rebels against the course set for him by the Vulcan elders and rises to prominence within the intergalactic cadet academy.

Star Trek really kicks into high gear when Kirk and Spock--the forebears of Mulder and Scully--meet up in Starfleet and take an immediate dislike for each other. Kirk figures out a way to beat an unbeatable test simulation which Spock devised, and so Spock brings Kirk up on chrages of cheating. But before the academy can rule on the charges, the Federation receives a distress call from Vulcan, which is under attack by a Romulan mine worker named Nero (Eric Bana, completely unrecognizable) who is exacting revenge for the death of his planet by blasting Federation planets and turning them into black holes.

I watched Star Trek with an 18-year-old who doesn't remember the original series at all. At the points in the movie where Kirk and Spock meet up in Starfleet, and all the key crew members are introduced--Sulu (John Cho), Chekhov (Anton Yelchin), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Scotty (Simon Pegg), and Bones (Karl Urban)--each in their own indelible, scene-stealing way, I couldn't help but feel a thrill that, yes, this is the way that great crew would have come together: with equal measures of gravity and humor. Looking over at my movie companion and realizing that I was the only one in on the inside jokes, I realized there is a reason why it pays to be a scholar of anything: only in knowing the history of something beloved can you really love what it's become.

I guess my only beef with this rebooted Star Trek is that writers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who also gave us the wildly popular movie version of Transformers) decided to hang their plot on the crucial detail of--SPOILER ALERT!--time travel. As far as I'm concerned, time travel plots are just excuses to chuck all logic out the window and give your little evil writer's heart free rein. (I remember sitting through the two sequels of Back to the Future with barely an idea of what all the frenetic action onscreen was about.)

In this case, it's a handy excuse to shoehorn the aristocratically craggy Leonard Nimoy into the proceedings. But even the presence of the elderly Spock in the same reality as his younger self opens gaping holes in the plot: Why is it not okay for the elderly Spock to come aboard the new Enterprise and explain why they need to change course and pursue Nero's ship to his younger acting-captain self...and yet it's okay for him to meet himself at the end of the movie? (Remember in Back to the Future, where Christopher Lloyd's mad-scientist Doc keeps cautioning Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly about meeting himself in the past, saying that it would result in a "universe-ending paradox"? Ironically, it's a phrase Leonard Nimoy says to Zachary Quinto...basically, to himself.)

A time travel plot is never airtight, and in Star Trek's case, it just adds a hint of sloppiness to what is all in all a zippy, smart, and sexy reimagining of what the Star Trek backstory must have been. After surviving all his pratfalls (getting injected multiple times without warning to counteract the side effects of a bogus inoculation, suffering swollen hands and a numb tongue, getting chased by a monster through an icy planet), Kirk has earned the right to be a cocky daredevil. And after making peace with his human heritage, Spock is all the better equipped to wield his logic like an expert weapon. By the end of the movie, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto feel like the younger versions of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. I can't wait to go where no one has gone before.

Wolf Whistling

2009-04-29T00:47:00.000-07:00

Summer seems to be coming earlier and earlier in Hollywood with every passing year. So eager are the studio brass to cash in on idle vacation money that they have decreed all of May now part of blockbuster/movie-pyrotechnics season. (This year, the early onset of summer in the studio calendar might have to do with the abnormal economy--movies are one of the few industries to actually make a killing during dour recessions. Meanwhile, for the rest of the world, abnormal weather patterns seem to be to blame. Summer in the States coincides with the wet season over our shores, and I for one am relieved that the punishing heat seems to have been cut short by unseasonal rains.)

And so comes the first big-bang movie to come out of Hollywood in Summer 09--X-Men Origins: Wolverine. If you remember the first X-Men movie, you will no doubt recall that James Logan aka Wolverine first entered Dr. Xavier's school for mutants as a belligerent loner with no memories of who or were he came from. As the title subtly suggests, this movie will supply our hero (and us) with those memories. And not a moment too soon: While the X-Men movies are one of the few franchises to boast increasing grosses with every outing--$157 million for X-Men, $215 million for X-Men: United, and $234 million for X-Men: The Last Stand--fans had been complaining that the most favorite mutant of the bunch had been going soft.

Now the alpha-male mutant has been plunked down in the middle of his own origin story, and we learn that as a child in mid-19th century Canada, Logan had committed a murder which sent him and his equally mutant half-brother Victor Creed aka Sabretooth (Liev Schrieber) spinning out into the world as vagabonds; that they had both survived every war from the American Civil War to Vietnam; and how he was recruited into a secret government program by Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston) out of revenge, receving the injection of adamantium that turns him into a virtually indestructible slice-and-dice killing machine.

During his stay in Stryker's band of mutant mercenaries (dubbed Team X) and then his time on the run from it, Wolverine meets a rogues gallery of people with special abilities, among them Remy LeBeau aka Gambit (Friday Night Lights' Taylor Kitsch), a Louisiana hustler whose control over kinetic energy can turn even ordinary playing cards into lethal weapons; Bradley (Lost's Dominic Monaghan), a former Team X member who can conduct and generate electricity, and who goes underground as a circus performer; and Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), who not only displays extraordinary proficiency with a sword but can also heal himself. While appreciating the fact that it is Wolverine's name in the title, I can't help but feel a little disappointed that none of these charismatic actors got to strut their stuff in more than one or two set pieces each. While I hear that fan favorite Gambit is set to appear in two more sequels, the wisecracking Reynolds (whose charm has always lain in his fast-talking persona) is criminally underutilized--as you will see when you witness his ultimate fate.

I was prepared to enjoy Wolverine when I entered the theater, and I did. There's no reason why you shouldn't too. Simply check any expectations you may have that this movie will equal The Dark Knight's moral complexity at the door, and you're all set. I have, however, noticed that X-Men Origins: Wolverine seems to be part of a larger trend in Hollywood: the reboot.

The reboot, taken from the techie term in which the slow functioning of a program is remedied simply by shutting down then restarting the computer, has enjoyed a huge amount of success lately. After the rubber-nipple, circus-madhouse nightmare that was Batman and Robin, Warner laid the Dark Knight to rest for a few years, then breathed new life into him by hiring Christopher Nolan to return the franchise to its roots with Batman Begins. After the outlandish, kitschy heights of Die Another Day, the Broccolis brought James Bond back to earth with a gritty and sexy retelling of Casino Royale.

Not all reboots have been welcome, despite their (qualified) success. In 2006, there was the well-intentioned Superman Returns, in which Bryan Singer tried to duplicate the misty innocence of Richard Donner's 1979 classic in a post-9/11 world. Michael Bay brought homicidal maniac Jason Voorhees back for a retelling of Friday the 13th; the heavy breathing you hear isn't the killer breathing through his hockey mask, but the filmmakers popping an aneurysm trying to transplant the washed-out desert atmosphere that worked for the new millennium Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Camp Crystal Lake. (For the Nightmare on Elm Street revival that will star Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger, I wonder if the producers will insist that he wear a chainsaw instead of finger knives?)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is lucky that it is reviving a franchise that really needs no reviving, considering that from the very beginning, it functioned in morally ambiguous times (armies that profess to protect the populace while bending ethics in pursuit of their objectives; heroes who blur the line between heroism and villainy). It is for this reason that I have slight reservations about the Star Trek reboot, helmed by J.J. Abrams and due later this "summer". Based on the previews, in which we see the redoubtable James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) as a problem child, I wonder if Abrams isn't popping his own aneurysm trying to retrofit Gene Rodenberry's vision of a future utopia into a future that's actually scared and jaded.

Or maybe he won't. In the pursuit of mass-marketing and audiences that don't necessarily "get" Star Trek, maybe J.J. Abrams will just do as he sees fit to cross over the $100-million mark. And that's sad. Because in trying to please as many ticket buyers as possible, he may be losing what makes these pop-cultural chestnuts so special and distinct and beloved.

But who am I kidding? I'll probably enjoy Star Trek too.

Dream On

2009-04-20T04:19:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I go to the movies because they're good for me. Since I don't patronize museums, and I don't go to the thee-yay-tuh that often, I watch movies--excuse me, films--like The Bicycle Thief and The Seventh Seal and Children of Heaven because they allow me to be the film scholar I only wish I was.

But deep down, I really don't care as much about the searing, soaring visions of directors, or whether documentaries capture the reality of inner-city gangsta life better than Boyz n the Hood. I don't even know what Krzysztof Kieslowski has been up to lately. (Wait...you say he's been dead more than ten years? See how much I really know? I'm just psyched I spelled his name right!) Mostly, I go to the movies because they allow me to dream while I'm awake. And if my dreams have the patina of "serious movie" around them, or if they possess that special Oscar glow, then I figure the real me and the pretentious me can both leave the cineplex happy.

Now I know it's a bit late in the day to post anything about Slumdog Millionaire, seeing as people have been raving about this movie for at least five months. What can I say? I prefer to watch my movies the old-fashioned way: in a dark, air-conditioned cave with a tub of sour cream popcorn and two giant iced teas, than squinting at a pirated DVD in my sweltering bedroom because we can't afford the air-conditioning surplus in the electric bill. But I can understand the basic attraction of this much-beloved-by-Oscar, Bollywood-by-way-of-Ireland, rags-to-riches story. Watching the movie, the entire thing seems plausible, and it is only on paper that we see how extreme the premise really is.

The film painstakingly documents the abject squalor of Mumbai and Agra (among other Indian cities), but portrays them in such an upbeat, music-video style that it nearly fetishizes the poverty it is showing us. So anyway, imagine you are a chaiwalla living in this crushing poverty: You are in constant danger of being recruited by syndicates who will blind you so that you can make for a more heart-tugging beggar. You have to hang upside down outside the windows of moving trains just to swipe a tortilla. You even dive into a cesspool of shit so you can escape a locked commode and get the autograph of your favorite Bollywood actor. Now imagine going from such beginnings ("humble" doesn't even begin to describe the origins of Slumdog's hero Jamal, played as an adult by British actor Dev Patel) to winning 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and being the toast of your countrymen, to boot. How can this movie not be the hit with audiences and critics that it was?

It would take the most persnickety of cynics not to be swept along by the enthusiasm of director Danny Boyle's storytelling. Maybe the energy and vitality of his vision was what the book by obscure author and Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup needed to sweep it up into greatness, because by all accounts nobody paid the novel Slumdog Millionaire was based on much attention. (Retitling the adaptation was also a shrewd move--after all, Q&A is too generic, and doesn't have the evocative powers, the rags-to-riches extreme produced when you pair "slumdog" and "millionaire" together.) But more than the attraction of any underdog-does-good story, there are many potent dreams Slumdog Millionaire reinforces: the idea that love does conquer all, even treacherous brothers and relentless syndicate heads; that if you're willing to risk it all for the most noble of motives, you can win it all; and that every shitty thing that happens in your life can, in its own unforeseen ways, prepare you for the triumphs that will--that should--come your way.

But to me, what's most poignant about Slumdog Millionaire is the idea that this is a story Filipinos could have told. Everything about it is relatable: the redolent poverty, the romanticism, the pinning of hopes on game shows, the production number at the end (paging Mother Lily and Chaning Carlos!). By the time Jamal, now a lackey serving tea at a soul-crushing call center, sits down at a cubicle to desperately track down his brother and, possibly, his lost love Latika, I was envisioning a Filipino remake starring Jericho Rosales and shooting at a Convergys office somewhere in Makati, and I was cursing our cinematic movers and shakers for not thinking of this story first.

On the other side of the world and in another era entirely (Britain at the onset of World War II), we have Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Frances McDormand, sporting a British accent, plays governess Guinevere Pettigrew, whose straitlaced demeanor and strict moral codes have gotten her fired from her fourth job. When the lady boss at her temp agency implies that she can no longer find another assignment for her, Guinevere swipes the calling card of a woman named Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams) from her desk, unaware that the woman on the card is a dizzy American actress-singer who is actually looking for a social secretary, not a governess. Over the course of a day, Guinevere realizes that she has her work cut out for her: Delysia (whose real name is Sarah Grubb) is juggling three men--the nightclub impresario (Mark Strong, Body of Lies) whose penthouse apartment she is staying in; the post-adolescent rich brat (Tom Payne) who can make her dreams of West End stardom a reality; and the penniless but devoted pianist (Lee Pace of Pushing Daisies) who went to prison for her in a fit of drunken passion. In the process, Guinevere snares the heart of a noble underwear designer (Ciaran Hinds) away from a social-climbing fashion maven (Shirley Henderson).

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a throwback to the screwball comedies of 1930s Hollywood, and was co-adapted from the novel by Winifred Watson by Slumdog Millionaire screenwriter Simon Beaufoy. While director Bharat Nalluri may not have a sure hand in evoking the frothy fun of movies like It Happened One Night or Bringing Up Baby, the real pleasure here is watching the interaction between the two lead actresses. Amy Adams can light up the screen with her bright eyes and down-home gaiety even if she were hidden under a nun's habit (and did so in her Oscar-nominated turn in Doubt), and her vivacity just coaxes Frances McDormand out of her dour, down-and-out gloom at the beginning of the movie to demure radiance at its end. It's also a wonder to see Frances McDormand stretch her comedic muscles again--this performance's comic understatement lies somewhere between the stoic Madge Gunderson of Fargo and the manic Linda Litzke of Burn After Reading.

As a romantic comedy, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day may not have the attractive casting of a Pretty Woman or a She's Just Not That Into You, but it traffics in the same seductive dreams: that penniless means nothing in the face of true love; that love lost can be found again; that sticking to your beliefs has the power to transform the world around you. The third idea is particulary attractive to me, because Lord knows how doggedly I want to believe that there is a place for ideals in this cynical, mediocre world, no matter how often they get me into trouble.

I don't remember who said (and in any case, I'm too lazy to look it up) that there are two kinds of movies: those that reinforce, and those that disturb. Slumdog Millionaire and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day definitely fall into the first category, and I say: Long may movies like these live. I guess the only thing that disturbs me about these movies is how easily I buy into them.

The Best Something VS. Other So Far . . .

2009-03-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

The movie franchise 'Underworld' was supposed to bring a titanic clash of two of the most enduring movie monsters: Werewolves vs. Vampires.
Instead, what we get is a convoluted story and lame vampires who use guns, not claws or fangs.
Of course, we got Kate Beckinsale in skin-tight leather, but the joke is on us because director Len Wiseman ended up getting married to her - in a nutshell, he used the film to get into her pants. He may lack storytelling skills, but he got game. Damn him.
And then we have our two favorite alien races, the Sigourney Weaver 'Aliens and the Arnold Schwarzenegger 'Predator'. Two movies have come out based on their conflict and I've only seen the first one, but I'll tell you this: these movies greatly suffered from the lack of A-list talent wanting to work on them.
Two epic confrontations resulting in meh.
But these did not stop me from getting all giddy when I found out about 'MONSTERS Vs. ALIENS!"
Having been disappointed before my thinking was: "Bring it on! Show me what you've got!"
The trailer looked really promising - they all do, unfortunately.
So I saw the film with high expectations, thinking that Dreamworks is finally doing thing right as evidenced by Kung Fu Panda and, to my surprise, I wasn't disappointed!
The main thing I loved about this movie were the characters and their interactions.
I found myself rooting for Susan/Ginormica (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), whose wedding day was spoiled by her sudden growth to gigantic proportions.
The Missing Link, voiced by Will Arnett, and Doctor Cockroach played by Doctor Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) were ok, but the real winner is B.O.B., the sentient blob thingie, whose lack of intelligence was mined for all it's comedic worth - and they got a lot of mileage out of him - "I may have no brains, but I have an idea!"
Rainn Wilson, the creepy guy from the US Office, gives an excellent performance as Gallaxxar, mad Alien conqueror. There was exceptional relish in his lunatic rants.
I guess I really love the idea of teams, whether superheroes or monster strike forces,- again, it's the way they interact with each other that form the film's good moments.
I still think it's a far cry from what I'd call the wholeness of Kung Fu Panda or any Pixar offering, for that matter, but it serves, as the Bard would say.
There were a couple of scenes that really, really irked me.
One was the President playing 'The Beverly Hills Cop theme' on the synthesizer - it was corny as hell and just stopped the story entirely. Come to think of it, the President, played by Stephen Colbert, didn't do much for me. They tried too hard with this one.
The other scene was Dr. Cockroach, played by Dr. House (Hugh Laurie), unlocking some alien ship password by dancing on the DanceDance Revolution-like keypad interface of the alien ship's self-destruct mechanism. Corny as hell.
Also, the character designs of the humans was kind of disturbing - but that could be intentional - humans can be scarier than any monster? Hurrrmmm. . .
For that matter, there was an awkardness in the way the humans were animated - I guess the animators spent most of their time on the monsters and didn't bother much with the humans.
Still, these are slights I forgave as the whole package delivered the fun in spades.
Great characters in end of the world scenarios, with huge helpings of comedy and action - almost always a winner for me!

Twisted

2009-03-29T00:09:00.000-07:00

See, this is the difference between real life and the movies: In real life, things just happen; in the movies, everything has to be tied up with a nice bow. (In Hollywood, the nice bows usually come with millions of dollars' worth of visual effects.) In life, we are usually left to ponder and find some meaning in or make sense of the random accidents that shape our lives, while in the movies, there are...surprise twists.

Ever since Bruce Willis turned out to be a dead man walking at the end of The Sixth Sense, screenwriters have been falling all over themselves trying to hoodwink the audience with surprise endings that demonstrate just how preciously clever they are. Now, before you continue reading, I must warn you that I will be spewing out spoiler after spoiler. So in case you haven't seen any of the movies I'm about to mention, stop reading now. Though I will say that since you've taken the time to log onto this blog, that wouldn't make much sense, since you've just wasted both your time and mine. But go ahead and stop reading if you like, you know what's best, because I may just get overexcited and tell you that at the end of The Crying Game, Jaye Davidson is revealed to be A KLINGON COMMANDER BENT ON DESTROYING THE NEW STARFLEET CREATED BY J.J. ABRAMS!

So you were still reading. God bless you. Anyway, After The Sixth Sense, there was Fight Club, in which it turned out that Edward Norton and Brad Pitt were actually the same person. Still breathtaking, as far as shock twists go. And then there was the first installment of Saw, in which it turned out that the orchestrator of the Rube Goldbergian torture devices seen throughout the movie was actually posing as a corpse inside the grimy, tiled prison the two main characters were incarcerated in. Hmmm, okay, I guess...but as a jaded student of plotting, I could see the filmmakers straining to reach that perfect, unforeseen twist that would leave 1) no room for hecklers waiting to poke holes, and 2) audiences with their jaws dropped along with the inexplicable substance that make cinema floors sticky.

What followed was a boom in "surprise" twists, an unfortunate chapter in modern pop culture that I will call the M. Night Shyamalan School of Film Crap. He is given this honor because he is the director whose twists just keep getting more and more preposterous with every new movie he makes: In Unbreakable, it turns out that Samuel Jackson is the exact opposite of Bruce Willis, a man whose body is so indestructible that his exact opposite--a man whose bones are so brittle--has made it his mission to bring him down (kinda like the black Lex Luthor to Bruce's balding Superman). In Signs, it turns out that the invading aliens can be killed by water (so what business do they have trying to colonize a planet that is two-thirds of the stuff???). In The Village, it turns out that the monster stalking the woods surrounding the titular village is actually the most respected elder dressed in a costume, trying to frighten the inhabitants from venturing out of his nightmarish version of an Amish settlement. And don't get me started on The Happening, in which the trees engage in a conspiracy to release some kind of gas or hormone or pheromone that makes people engage in murderous behavior. (I have a slight suspicion that the plot of this movie was also released as a gas from the director's nether regions.)

A few nights ago, I happened to catch a horror movie called Dead Silence over at HBO. The only saving grace of this movie is the lead, Ryan Kwanten, who is currently doing superb work as the maladjusted, promiscuous sibling of Anna Paquin in, coincidentally, an HBO series called True Blood. (Okay, he's also hot...but that's irrelevant!) Otherwise, this movie from the makers of Saw decided that the best way to scare audiences is to use the revolutionary, totally original...ventriloquist dummy. Wait, it only gets better. It turns out that the character played by Amber Valletta, the comely stepmother who married Ryan Kwanten's father (and is presumably one of the thorny issues in a contentious father-son relationship) is actually JAYE DAVIDSON, AND SHE'S COME TO ADVANCE THE CAUSE OF THE I.R.A. IN CREEPY, SMALL-TOWN AMERICA! Well, no, not really. Amber is actually a manifestation of the movie's evil spirit, and she's turned Ryan Kwanten's father into a giant dummy and has been manipulating everything he's been telling his son throughout the course of the movie. I would have actually preferred my twist ending, because it's certainly more audacious than Dead Silence's actual climax, which made me feel kind of a dummy myself.

Over the weekend, I decided to watch Knowing (it is, after all, the #1 MOVIE IN AMERICA!) to decide whether this movie would fall in the column of Nicolas Cage the Artist or Nicolas Cage the Crapmeister. I'm sorry to say that this movie only scales the balances irredeemably in favor of the latter category: There is only so much pap an actor's career can stand--only so many Wicker Men, only so many Ghost Riders--before they overwhelm the Leaving Las Vegases and Adaptations.

In the movie, Nicolas Cage plays an astrophyisicist who--oh, will ironies never cease!--is teaching his MIT class about the debate between determinism (the school of thought that says all events in the natural world are the effects of a rational set of causes) and randomness (the school of thought that says, well, shit just happens). Meanwhile, his angelic-looking son (Chandler Canterbury) is studying in a school that is celebrating its half-century foundation day by unearthing a time capsule filled with former students' visions of the future. Nicolas' son gets a piece of paper filled with numbers, and Nicolas deciphers the numbers into the dates, coordinates, and fatalities of every major disaster in the world since 1959...with indications that the last set of numbers point to an end-of-the-world cataclysm that Nicolas must race to decipher.

In the meantime, creepy men in black start shadowing Nicolas' house and terrorizing his son, who supposedly hears their whispers first in his hearing aid and then in his own head. Now, don't get me wrong--I am a diehard fan of the horror genre. It takes a director of consummate skill to orchestrate lighting, editing, production design, music, acting, all the elements that go into filmmaking into that one perfect scare. Unfortunately, Alex Proyas (who gave us one of the most dour and depressing comic-book heroes in The Crow) does not seem to be one of those directors. He is no Wes Craven, no William Friedkin, no Dario Argento. Instead, he takes refuge in computer-generated imagery and cheap gimmickry, hoping that we will confuse a momentary startle or trademark Hollywood spectacle for genuine chills.

Actually, it's not the end-of-the-world scenario that's the twist (it's been foreshadowed by weather reports claiming a longer than usual Indian summer and people complaining of heat in the middle of October in New England), it's what these "whisper people" really are. And it turns out that the whisper people are actually EXTRATERRESTRIALS COME TO SAVE THE PEOPLE WHO CAN HEAR THEIR WARNINGS SO THEY CAN BE BROUGHT TO ANOTHER PLANET AND START THE HUMAN RACE ANEW! Wait...you thought I was kidding? I only wish I was.

This is my problem with surprise twists: Lately, they seem to be more a case of the tail wagging the dog. More and more, screenwriters seem to be diagramming their plots backwards and coming up with a "mind-blowing"/sleight-of-hand ending first, instead of coming up with an intriguing "What if?" premise first then letting the plot proceed from there. While I have detested his later work with a passion, I look upon The Sixth Sense with much regret and nostalgia now: for its organic "surprise" ending, for how airtight the plotting is, for how satisfied I left the theatre after I watched it (which is planets away from how cheated I feel after sitting through these surprise-twist movies). How's this for a twist? Promising, Oscar-nominated director of The Sixth Sense finds himself mired in a career full of incoherent movies and self-indulgent crap. Unfortunately, after watching his movies since then, it's a twist everybody saw coming.

Taken for a ride

2009-03-23T04:01:00.000-07:00

A couple of friends said that seeing this film made them want a father like Liam Neeson's character.
I thought: "If you wanted an absentee father growing up, sure, why not? So long as he's there to save you WHEN YOU GET KIDNAPPED AND BE SOLD AS A PROSTITUTE TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER!"
Which is basically what the film is all about: Neeson plays Brian Mills, a retired CIA spook who's doing everything he can to make up for lost time he was unable to spend with his only child.
It's the film's gigantic irony: that which kept him from being a father to his kid is the only thing that ensures he'll get the chance to make things up to her.
The filmmakers did a fantastic job of setting up the film that's why when Mills goes after the bad guys, you're with him every step of the way.
Especially harrowing is the phone conversation between Mills and his daughter, as she was about to be kidnapped. He talks her through her whole ordeal, caring and supportive, only to say later: "Listen to me: You will be taken."
Mills is a professional through and through, and he remains so, until his daughter gets taken.
And when he tells the kidnapper over the phone: "I will find you, and I will kill you", you believe him.
You know what happens next - in fact, you've probably known even before entering the theater.
There are no surprises here - but Brian Mills' resolve to get his daughter back drags you along and you're powerless to stop him.
You feel his controlled rage with every bullet he fires, every bad guy he knocks dead.
The action is fast, brutal and surprising in its efficiency - no posing or posturing action heroes here.
Neeson's age is showing, looking scruffy around the edges, but he's fit enough to pull off playing the overly concerned father who happens to be very good at killing people - the man ran up an off-ramp for God's sake, framed in a frontal medium shot, which wouldn't be worth doing a digital head replacement on.
Props go to Maggie Grace, Shannon of TV's Lost, for playing the daughter - somehow, she made me believe that she was, indeed, 17 years old.
I suppose this is the kind of film that gets you cheering in the end, that gets you stoked enough to say "Yes!" for every bad guy killed - but I couldn't help but feel that Mills killed waaay too many people in searching for his daughter.
But that's the point, isn't it?
It's Mills motivation for doing what he did in the end that resonates, not the fact that he was an absentee father to begin with, nor the fact that he went on a killing spree - the hero gets the chance to redeem himself, in spite of the bodycount.
Some parts felt odd and should have been given more thought - the scene where Mills gets caught then escapes could have used a little more imagination.
Still, I thought this was a pretty solid ride.
I'm particularly glad this movie did well, despite the lack of publicity - word of mouth is still a powerful thing - because it isn't made by Hollywood.
It's actually a French film shot in English, (Luc Besson co-wrote and produced it) which maybe explains why the beginning invested heavily on establishing the lead character's angst.
I'm no expert on French cinema, but I suspect the film's firm beginning owes much to non-Hollywood sensibilities.
Lesson for Hollywood: If your hero has to kill a ton of people, you better make sure he has a damn good reason to do so.

Musty Docks, Dark Trucks, and Wagging Shlongs...Oh My!

2009-03-22T02:36:00.000-07:00

For this post, maybe the blog shouldn't be hailing the sound of a hundred bakyas stomping, but the clicking of a hundred stilettos.

No, maybe that's a misnomer, an easy cliché to fall back on. Because there are no transvestites or drag queens among the interview subjects of Jospeh Lovett's Gay Sex in the '70s, the 2005 documentary that uses amazing archival footage and pictures (How did the photographers take those provocative photos?) to relive the heyday of gay sexual liberation in New York City after the Stonewall riots of 1969, a heady time of drugs and hedonism that would end just 12 short years later with the onslaught of AIDS. Nope, not a feather boa-loving friend of Dorothy in the bunch. In fact, everytime Lovett cuts to a picture of his interview subject from the decade of free love, I couldn't help but think, Wow! He was hot!

Lovett begins the documentary with one interview saying in voice-over that the decade bracketed by Stonewall and AIDS was "the most libertine period the Western world has known since the Roman Empire." And then he goes on to document story upon story of sexual excess: of prowling men falling through the floors of decrepit dock warehouses; of couplings in the back of dark meat trucks; of friends inadvertently having sex in bathhouses. The milieu has been mythologized by both the gay subculture and the mainstream--Studio 54, Fire Island, the Village--but the narrators tell their tales with such immediacy, they can't help but thumb their noses at the ignorant gay men of later generations who now associate the '70s with polyester.

As documentaries go, Gay Sex in the '70s isn't as encompassing or comprehensive or sprawling a history as, say, the book tracing the AIDS pandemic, Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On. But maybe it doesn't have to be. By focusing on a small slice of Americana, it still manages to capture an amazing facet of the fight for gay rights, and how closely the modern history of homosexuality resembles our own personal experience of adolescence. After decades of being forced to live their lives undercover, gay men finally found the catalyst to strike back when the NYPD staged one raid too many on the Stonewall bar in 1969, and they took to the streets and incited riots demanding the right to live their lives openly. After their naked display of power in numbers, gay men started getting nekkid in the more obvious sense...at every place and every opportunity they could find. As one subject wistfully recalls: "Anything in pornography, you could have in abundance. It was like life was one big pornographic film."

And then of course, the documentary turns, as it inevitably must, to the aspect of sexually transmitted diseases: gonorrhea, syphilis ("Getting the clap was nothing. But getting syphilis...the authorities wanted names!"), and AIDS. There will inevitably be two camps of thought about this documentary: the one where conservatives believe that AIDS was the price of all that sexual hedonism, and the other where sexual liberation is a natural step in the process of a whole community's maturity. (The ravages of AIDS first struck the gay community, and prompted the establishment of the Gay Men's Health Crisis--one of the first serious responses within the United States towards fund-raising and research to battle the emerging epidemic.) Being shamed into keeping your sexual proclivities private, then saying "What the hell! I'll let my freak flag fly!", then backtracking as you grow older and saying, "Okay, I'm done with all that hellraising, time to get serious"--an entire, embattled minority had to go through those stages, but really, who among us hasn't?

To me, it's just edifying to understand the history. Because in knowing where you've been can you appreciate where you're going...or rather, not going. Three decades later, a film like Milk still strikes a chord within Academy voters because they live right at the epicenter of Proposition 8, an amendment to California state law that would once again revoke the right of marriage to homosexual couples. Why even go across the Pacific? Right here in the Philippines, in a society that never got to experience free love, I hear stories of Atenean girls with botched rhinoplasties meeting foreigners at raves, getting their kicks with E, and having unprotected sex. Why would I put such credence on hearsay? Because I hear it straight from the guys themselves!

I think this is why documentaries like Gay Sex in the 70s have intrinsic value--well, aside from the value of showing that running shorts cut way up to here can look hot on the right body. When the subjects speak about gay activism, they speak with the authority of soldiers who have been to the trenches. They know what they're talking about. One of the last few stories told in Gay Sex in the 70s is told by the filmmaker himself, Joseph Lovett. And it is a chilling one. He recounts going to a party with his lover, and getting the distinct impression that the gathering was about to evolve into an impromptu orgy. His incensed partner demanded that they leave, and Lovett relented, but not without huge resentment on his part. In retrospect, he says, "All the men in that party--except for me and my ex-boyfriend--all those men died of AIDS."

I don't know if it's because I'm turning 40 in a few weeks, but suddenly I have a new appreciation for the stories of those who have gone on the path before. Somehow, those who preach about the glories of empowerment--female, gay, or otherwise--have words that ring hollow now. They keep carping and carping about "How to get your best O!" and sex tricks that will have him panting for more and how to teach your partner to reach your G-spot...but they speak without any context. Or maybe, their context is the frame of reference that MTV's My Sweet Sixteen and Paris Hilton has provided them. They promise important information but lack the most valuable knowledge: how much such empowerment and how much getting that "best O" really costs.

The Devil is in the Details

2009-03-14T05:57:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting there watching You Changed My Life. In case watching Filipino movies is beneath you, this is the sequel to last year's A Very Special Love, the second-highest-grossing Filipino movie of 2008. (Its P179 million + box office haul put it in the runner-up position behind Ang Tanging Ina N'yong Lahat, the Ai Ai delas Alas December comedy that's likely to gross above P200 million when all is said and done.) The film continues the romantic adventures of Laida Magtalas, an up-from-the-slums-of-Marikina dreamer played by Sarah Geronimo, who goes to work as an editorial assistant for a morose scion of a rich family with a chip on his shoulder played by John Lloyd Cruz, and--surprise! surprise!--snags her Prince Charming with her endless optimism and peppy devotion.

There's one reason why Hollywood doesn't produce sequels to romantic comedies, not even insanely successful ones starring Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan (the closest they've ever come is reuniting these ladies with their leading men--Richard Gere and Tom Hanks, respectively). And the reason is this: Hollywood knows that when it comes to romance, it's the chase that titillates, not the conquest. So you'll never see titles like Down from Notting Hill, or Awake in Spokane, or even He's Still Not That Into You. But Hollywood wisdom be damned: local audiences came back for a second helping of Laida Magtalas-Miggy Montenegro's romantic highjinks, with box office forecasts predicting that You Changed My Life is set to outgross its predecessor by at least 30 percent.

Which is okay, I guess. Sure, the engine of the sequel's plot doesn't seem to get chugging until John Lloyd's character is put in charge of his rich family's laundering facility in Laguna (What? Somehow I can't imagine the Gokongweis or the Ayalas taking out a Lavandera Ko franchise!), and his new post's time demands put a strain on the fledgling romance. Bless Ricky Lee and his merry band of toiling screenwriters for not insulting us with some hokey third-party drama (although there is a little rivalry, courtesy of Sarah's high-school chum played by Rayver Cruz), instead focusing on real issues that beset every relationship: time, priorities, society's demands. Who cares if the first half-hour is kinda limp? At least Sarah and John Lloyd don't conveniently crash land on a desert island in Palawan. (Yes, Richard Gutierrez and KC Concepcion, I'm talking to you!)

I could've gotten into the story...except I keep getting distracted by Sarah's wig.

I notice this is a syndrome that is starting to beset Star Cinema's romantic comedies. Or at least, Cathy Garcia-Molina's romantic comedies. They made Toni Gonzaga, otherwise a charming, spunky comedienne, wear this brown helmet for her comedy with Vhong Navarro, My Only U, and now it seems a tinted octopus is back for another go-round on top of Sarah's head in You Changed My Life. Sarah's strenuous efforts at being cutesy somehow exacerbate the situation, because the more she mugs, the more she seems to be overcompensating for the dead thing plopped above her eyebrows. Oh, how truly entertaining this romantic comedy would have been if only they had named it You Changed My Hairstyle.

And herein lies the problem with local entertainment: We never get the details right.

Allow me to diverge a bit. I have Secret Nerd Behavior, and it goes something like this: Whenever I watch those X-Files reruns on AXN Beyond, I take out the viewers' guides I bought from places as diverse as Humor Post and Seattle (I have the guides for seasons 1 through 7) and I read the episode synopses and the behind-the-scenes "backstories" that talk about how each specific episode got made. For the premier episode of season 5, where Fox Mulder had to go rummaging through a secret Department of Defense warehouse for a cure to Dana Scully's cancer, I was told that the art department had to construct ten thousand drawer pulls for ten thousand steel cabinets, only about a tenth of which would be seen onscreen. Wow! Talk about obsessive-compulsiveness to a degree that would take your breath away!

This is the kind of attention to detail and love for your job that is sorely lacking in our media practitioners. And please don't give me any of that "but-Hollywood-has-more-time-and-money" crap, because the degree of difficulty of constructing ten thousand drawer pulls over deciding to let Sarah Geronimo go with her natural hair is not even worth discussing.

This syndrome goes by another name: the Puwede-na-'yan habit. And it besets even our best-intentioned film productions. Take for instance our bet this year for Oscar glory: the Judy Ann Santos pet project Ploning. The passion that Juday and her bosom buddy, director Dante Nico Garcia, have for this concept is palpable. It is a wholehearted telling of a touching story, photographed in dulcet pastoral tones. It seems every detail has been lovingly paid attention to, so why shouldn't it be our country's representative to the film equivalent of a Pacquiao-Dela Hoya fight?

Well, it seems the filmmakers overlooked one important detail: Oscar has seen this movie before. In Il Postino. In Malena. In Cinema Paradiso.

Judy Ann is truly one of the nicest biggest stars I have ever met. That's why it breaks my heart a little to see her auctioning off movie memorabilia, knocking on sponsors' doors to get handouts, otherwise moving heaven and earth just to finance a swank Hollywood public-relations firm's "efforts" to get the film noticed by the Academy's voting members--an effort that seems doomed and naive, to tell you the truth. Why would voting members take a second glance at our beautiful little retread when they have tons of screeners to plow through? It should also bear noting that by the time Il Postino came rolling around, the media backlash against this kind of "prestige film" had already reached its peak, with criticism centered on Harvey Weinstein for ramming this heart-tugging pap down Oscar's throat.

It seems to me that if we want Oscar to take notice of our films, we have to start telling stories that only we Filipinos can tell. Look at last year's winner for foreign language film, The Lives of Others from Germany. It talks about a Stassi operative who develops an unlike sympathy for the dissident he has been charged to spy on. This is a story that only Germany, with their years of being split in half, with one half being bullied by a feared secret police, could tell. This year, I placed my bet on Waltz With Bashir, an animated feature from Israel recounting the narrator's years serving in the army during an ill-conceived foray into Lebanon--again, a story that only Israel could tell. Man, if we could find a story that could only happen in the Philippines, we wouldn't need a friggin' public relations firm to sell our movies, because the product would speak for itself!

I look at our current crop of independent movies, the supposed breeding ground for original voices and visions, and all I see are exploitative gay movies, more movies set in the city's seedy underbelly (because Lino Brocka proved that you cannot be taken seriously as a filmmaker unless you have a hooker lit by a garish neon sign in your movie), and "personal" visions from a generation weaned on the rock sensibilites of MTV. Because of our mongrel history, are we a race doomed to be unable to think originally. forever trapped in a loop where our identity is defined by all the other races that have subjugated us?

Questions like that put Sarah Geronimo and her dastardly wig in perspective. After all, the detail of what to put on your head is easily answered. What stories define us as a people...well, that's harder to figure out.