Indiana Jones movies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Last Crusade)

Indiana Jones and the series of doom

(link good till next week, when I can correct, add links, and hopefully whip this article into better shape)

Excerpt:

I remember enjoying Raiders of the Lost Ark when it came out in 1981; I hadn’t seen the matinee serials that inspired producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg, but I did respond to the junky theme-park-ride feel (actually it wasn’t so much a theme park ride [that came later] than a traveling carnival, complete with walking freaks, lurid exhibits, the hint of sex, thrills galore). It shambled and lurched horribly (there wasn’t much of a plot to speak of) but that was part of the charm, and it moved with agreeable speed (the huge fiberglass boulder threatening to roll over Indiana Jones [Harrison Ford] pretty much set the pace and tone of the picture).

So many decades later, the appetite for movies derived from other movies has been satiated to the point of nausea (for me, at least); Raiders has spawned many clones, some of them amusing (I’m thinking of Romancing the Stone [1984], which was basically Raiders but from the point of view of the heroine, and ably directed by Spielberg protégé Robert Zemeckis), most of them not (the Richard Chamberlain remake of King Solomon’s Mines [1985] anyone?).

Santiago (Lino Brocka, 1970)

It's odd thinking of Lino Brocka directing a big-budget action epic, much less directing the late action-star-turned-presidential-candidate Fernando Poe, Jr. in a World War 2 epic--but there you are; even if you watched Santiago again and again, it still feels odd.

The film is difficult to like at first. Oh, it starts well enough, with Brocka taking a page from Jules Dassin's Du Rififi chez le hommes (Rififi, 1955): a nighttime attempt to sabotage a Japanese munitions store in the little town of Santiago, done without music or dialogue. But then comes the shock: Gonzalo (Fernando Poe, Jr.) discovers that the schoolhouse they are about to blow up is filled with women, old men, and schoolchildren (put there discourage exactly what they're trying to do); the school explodes, and Gonzalo is knocked unconscious.

Almost wished I was knocked unconscious too. At the moment of Gonzalo's realization Brocka cuts to the children, to the saboteur's panicked face, to the sparking fuse, each shot shorter and shorter in length as if to suggest the increasing sense of urgency building up inside the man. Problem is, it isn't very well edited--Brocka's films are almost never sharply edited (the one exception being in my opinion the French financed (and edited) Orapronobis (Fight For Us, 1989))--this sequence in particular is cut as if Fernando Poe's thought processes suffer from mental hiccups. Doesn't help that Brocka pours on the music, and it's a typical Lea Productions score, full of bathos and easy emotion; doesn't help either that Brocka shoots footage of the school burning in excruciatingly slow motion, as if he knew that this was a money shot, and he'd better have as much of it onscreen as he can.

Doesn't help that Gonzalo upon coming to his senses seems hysterical, or at least as hysterical as Poe is able to manage. FPJ (as Poe is affectionately called) is a gift of an action star, in that he's exactly as he seems to be: no facades, no Method acting, none of that nonsense. He's metal of the purest kind, and asking him to do something beyond the chemical properties of his particular element is like asking a fish to walk or a pig to fly; the fish just lies there, flopping, and the pig will patiently wait for you to feed him. You can ask FPJ to suggest a surprisingly large palette of emotions through his ever stolid face, but you cannot make him act them out for you, clearly and explicitly, as if in a soap opera or on a theater stage.

It does help that Brocka had for cinematographer the great Conrado Baltazar. You could tell it's Baltazar from the way he shoots domestic night scenes--he was a master at creating incandescent lighting, at making you believe a room was lit by two thirty-watt bulbs and little else. For the burning schoolhouse he manages to capture the rich orange glow, the lazy way the flames lick at the rooftop--like some fiery predator squatting atop the school, feeding on the people underneath.

The film's second half shifts the action to a small coastal town. Gonzalo has found amongst the wreckage of the schoolhouse a survivor, a seriously burnt girl (Hilda Koronel, in one of her earliest roles). Gonzalo asks a young man (Jay Ilagan) for help in carrying the girl to the young man's home; there for the next few months, Gonzalo with single-minded intensity nurses the girl back to health (shades of Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession (1954)). During the few months the girl spends under Gonzalo's care she falls in love with him--which is a problem, as the young man has in turn fallen in love with her. To complicate things, the young man's older sister (Boots Anson-Roa) has also fallen for Gonzalo, even if she's already engaged to another man (Dante Rivero).

Outside of the young man's home, Gonzalo walks among the villagers like an out-of-place titan; the locals look at him with awe, and not a little jealousy. Rumors fly, of course, and quite a few malicious stories are cooked up and spread around. It's interesting watching Brocka orchestrate the dynamics of rumor-mongering, and how the community's sentiment seems to waver, then draw itself together against Gonzalo. It helps that Gonzalo's character has been backed into a role Brocka identifies with intensely, the outsider who provokes local gossip (Brocka was born an illegitimate child, and for a time lived with--and was maltreated by--his mother's relatives). Brocka would deal with the subject on a broader yet more detailed canvas in his first genuine masterpiece, Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Judged But Found Wanting, 1974); here it's interesting to see Brocka direct a community's scorn not at a leper, or a mayor's illegitimate daughter (as in Tinimbang), but at a folk superman. Poe as Gonzalo handles the burden with becoming grace and humility, and it's in these later scenes that his performance, well within his comfort zone, really shines.

If in the film's early parts we glimpsed bits of Brocka's immaturity poking through all the glamorous production values (the fast (if erratic) cutting; the attempt at making FPJ 'act;' the frequent and at times unnecessary flashbacks*), several later scenes reveal early signs of Brocka the great Filipino dramatist. One sequence I particularly admire begins with Gonzalo's adopted family quietly waiting for him. It's a quiet scene, with not much action--dramatic or otherwise--going on; the younger brother, guitar on hand, starts to strum the lovely folk song Ikaw (You). Yet from the despondent expressions on the peoples' faces; from their body language and languid gestures; from the way they seem to listen--and yet not listen--to the song; most of all, from the way the seated figures are arranged (like ikebana cuttings) before the camera, you can tell that there's a tension in the air, a sense of electricity, of anticipation.

And then you realize it's not that they're waiting for someone that's coming, it's that they're waiting for someone that's missing. And just when that realization blooms in one's mind, Brocka (with--this time, anyway--a supreme sense of timing) cuts to a shot of Gonzalo sitting outside, the camera angled just so that to the upper left of the screen you see the window of the very living room where the people who care about him sit, waiting. A beautiful sequence, and not the least among its achievements is the fact that if the scene works no one should notice anything--and yet everyone watching is undeniably, if unknowingly, moved.

The film's latter half devolves--harsh word, I suppose, but after a scene like that--into a series of standard-issue (if well produced) action sequences, including some low-key if impressive stuntwork, and a lengthy tracking shot of villagers crossing a flooded underground tunnel to safety. FPJ mows down his share of Japanese villains--you know the drill: a vigorous sweep of the semiautomatic and everyone with slanted eyes drops to the ground. Interestingly, when Celso Ad. Castillo directed FPJ in Asedillo (1971) the star refrained from any superhuman acts of killing; he was just a schoolteacher turned rebel hero, and if anything seemed outsized and near-mythical about him it was probably due to Ad. Castillo's expressive direction (the film's theme, after all, was the making of an ordinary man into a legend) and Sergio Lobo's larger-than-life cinematography. Interesting too, that when Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero directed FPJ in Intramuros: The Walls of Hell (1964) the film had realistically staged (if inventive, even tense) action sequences. FPJ there was like a Latin James Dean, all tilted head and youthful arrogance and the camera (and audience) can't help but love him, but no, no wholesale slaughter of the Japanese at the pull of a trigger.

To be fair, De Leon, Romero and even Ad. Castillo when they worked with FPJ were already veterans; Brocka on the other hand was a neophyte director making his sophomore effort. He was lucky to land an assignment with FPJ, and if the star of the production wanted to kill scores of soldiers in a single sweep, who was Brocka to say otherwise?

Still, Santiago has its place in Brocka's oeuvre: an early draft for Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang; a rare moment in the man's career when he stepped outside of his melodramatic domain; an honest attempt at epic period filmmaking a la Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, Mario O'Hara, 1976). And one can see how Brocka, even with the burden of a large-scale production full of extravagant special effects (unlike Tatlong Taong or Intramuros, this film boasts of large, intricately detailed models of churches and bridges being blown up with genuine explosives, not New Year's Eve firecrackers--always an expensive undertaking), even with star producers dictating terms, even with the limitations of the war drama genre, still manages to make the film somehow personal, somehow his own.

* On those flashbacks--I'd say they were mostly unnecessary save one, a black-and-white, wordless interlude where Mario O'Hara and Caridad Sanchez play a married couple whose happiness is torn asunder by the Japanese. What is it with Brocka's intensely told side-stories (especially when O'Hara is acting in them (see also: Tinimbang)), that they often steal attention from the rest of the film, and are often more interesting than the main narrative line?

Perfect Creature (Glenn Standring, 2006)

Perfect stinker

Perfect Creature (2006), which Glenn Standring singelhandedly wrote and directed, apparently did not get a decent commercial release in the United States; none of the major papers reviewed it (New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, so on and so forth), none of the major critics (Roger Ebert for one (not that I consider him authoritative in any way on matters of cinema--only that he has a popular TV show and some pull at the boxoffice)) gave it any attention (or even a brief mention). "Straight to video" is the term I'm looking for, I think, which does not bode well for the movie's quality.

Or does it? Sometimes one finds a gem in the discounted DVD bin. King of the Ants (2003) suffered a similar fate: Stuart Gordon's compelling little exploitation flick showed us the kind of terror that can be conjured from a malevolent George Wendt (unrecognizable without his overstuffed business suit, or the calls of "Norm!" trailing in his sizable wake) and a simple golf club. The film took Gordon's gift for Lovecraftian grotesquerie in films like Re-animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), Dagon (2001) and inserted them into decidedly more realistic (read: suburban) settings; it gave us a charmingly sympathetic hero (Chris McKenna) doing decidedly unsympathetic things (stalking women, murder), provoking all kinds of complex feelings from us along the way (Is McKenna a creep? A horrifically helpless victim? Some inextricable combination of both?).

Perfect Creatures doesn't inspire that kind of fascination, but does show considerable ambition--it's not our future the film depicts, but some kind of steampunk variation of it. High-tech dirigibles glide across the sky; policemen wield what look like Luger pistols; people drive '40s-style cars down streets overshadowed by towering Gothic constructions. Vampires are not just real, they're an accepted and vital part of society. They have formed an elite class called The Brotherhood and established a comfortable symbiotic relationship with their mortal brethren: humans (in a parody of the Catholic Eucharist) offer up their blood willingly for consumption, while The Brothers offer theirs as a means of curing human diseases and prolonging life.

It's a conceit worthy of Joss Whedon, that master integrator of wildly different genres (vampirism and the teen angst flick (Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)); Westerns and pirate flicks with science fiction (Firefly, 2002, and the feature film made from it three years later)) in such a way that they comment on each other, mutually reinforce each other, give each other fresh nuances that each alone otherwise wouldn't have. Would that Standring have imbibed some of Whedon's wit, or consistent hand with a story. Standring posits a world with vampires and humans in harmonious balance; that balance is thrown off by Edgar (Leo Gregory), a vampire gone berserk: he goes around openly attacking people and drinking their blood (the victims obligingly spray their blood around in arterial spurts--startling at first but you'd be surprised how quickly that gets old).

Edgar turns out to be a pawn in a greater conspiracy staged by The Brotherhood--but the details don't really matter, because when all is finally revealed it doesn't carry a lot of dramatic weight. Partly that's because the actors (Dougray Scott as Edgar's dour older brother Silus; Saffron Burrows as Silus' equally dour love interest and police-officer-slash-crimefighting-partner Lilly) have been ordered to pitch the emotional tone in their performance at a level slightly above icewater (only Edgar is told otherwise, with his emotional dial nailed at "massive landscape mastication"). Partly it's because the details are so fuzzy: The Brotherhood, we're told, is corrupt, evil, repressive, but aside from the odd revelation here and there, we don't really see what they do (it doesn't help that other than Silus and Edgar, no other member of The Brotherhood really stand out--it's like fighting shadows, only shadows in the right director's hands (Stuart Gordon comes to mind) might present a more palpable threat). And the battles are predictably one-sided: Silus sets up one trap after another, some of them well-planned; Edgar pops up and promptly whips Silus' butt; Silus barely escapes by the skin of his teeth. Pause; repeat cycle again, and again, and again. One wonders: are the two really brothers, or has Silus been less than straight with us? Is Silus congenitally incapable of at all handling his younger brother, or has the virus brought everyone's IQ level except Edgar's down to single digits?

There are compensatory scenes, I think--Edgar's escape, for one (he's held prisoner in one of the picture's genuinely brilliant designs, a personal restraint system built on the principle of the falcon's claw: struggle, and sharp projections dig deeper into one's throat); Edgar and Silus facing each other down (Gregory's and Scott's glowering brows are a memorable match) and taunting the other to make the first move. Sometimes a moment feels right, like when Silus contemplates Lilly's sleeping arm--he gazes at a gently pulsing vein, then gives the wrist a cautious sniff.

For the most part, though, Standring pads out the picture's running time with gimmicky camera moves borrowed from Sam Riami's Evil Dead movies (you know what I mean--point-of-view shots that skitter from one ventilation shaft to the next, sometimes nosing past a squeaking rat, sometimes zooming close on a man cocking his gun) to indicate superhuman senses, and fills the many dead spots with aforementioned pointless fight sequences where Edgar keeps winning. Perfect Creatures comes close to being a good movie; it comes so close one could almost smell with one's nose how close it is, missing a few centimeters at a time, all the time.

First appeared in Businessworld, the Weekender section, on 5/15/08

Kakabakaba Ka Ba? (Does Your Heart Beat Faster? Mike de Leon, 1980)

This post part of Ferdy on Films' Invitation to the Dance Blogathon, May 4 to 10th, 2008

Christopher de Leon, Charo Santos, Sandy Andolong and Jay Ilagan in Mike de Leon's Kakabakaba Ka Ba? (Does Your Heart Beat Faster? Mike de Leon, 1980)

Filipinos love to dance; even convicted Filipinos love to dance, and dance well--you only have to see the occasional video clip CNN plays, of orange-clad convicts from the Cebu Detention and Rehabilitation Center dancing to pop tunes (the choreographer is an accused mass murderer) but strangely enough there aren't a lot of noted Filipino films that feature dance, or at least notable filmmakers making musicals that include dance.

There are early musicals, like Carlos Vander Tolosa's Giliw Ko (1939); problem is the surviving print is in wretched condition (even after restoration by The Philippine Information Agency and the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra), and what little song and dance I do see in it is, well, of interest, but not quite inspiring. Comedy team Tito, Vic and Joey have done dance numbers; so has comedian Dolphy, among many others. Lino Brocka did Stardoom (1971), a showbiz melodrama full of singing (only the melodrama--a Jacobean struggle between two brothers (Mario O'Hara and Dante Rivero) is more interesting than the music); O'Hara's own Kastilyong Buhangin (Sand Castle, 1980) features singing (you can sense that O'Hara actually gets into his song numbers--gives them genuine emotional heft), and fight sequence so gracefully done I'd argue they are dance numbers (and for a while was tempted to write about them as such).

But an honest to goodness dance number, in an honest to goodness musical, one that I actually like? None, off the top of my head, except, of all people, from the forbidding dark genius of Philippine cinema, Mike de Leon. The filmmaker responsible for such grim masterpieces as Itim (Rites of May, 1975), Batch '81 (1982) and Kisapmata (Blink of an Eye, 1981) did Kakabakaba Ka Ba? (1981), a demented caper comedy involving Yakuza gangsters smuggling an audiocassette tape full of opium into the city of Manila and eventually to the northern city of Baguio, for processing and eventual distribution throughout the Philippines.

The title itself--often translated as Does Your Heart Beat Faster?--is literally untranslateable, a play on the present progressive form (at least I think it is) of the Filipino word kaba, meaning 'worried' (literally: 'worrying'), with the final ka ba? being a pronoun and a verb (the term as a whole literally translates as 'Are you worrying?'). For a Filipino, just reading the title brings a smile to the lips; by the time he's explained it to a non-Filipino, of course, all the fun's been drained out of it.

I remember talking to one of the writers, Racquel Villavicencio (Init sa Magdamag (Midnight Passion, 1983)); she told me that de Leon had provided her and Clodualdo del Mundo (Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975)) with the basic story, which they in turn built up into a complete screenplay, often with de Leon's guidance. She notes that the original concept was much darker, with more satire of the Catholic Church, more emphasis on the drug subplot. Of the three de Leon films she collaborated with del Mundo and de Leon on (the others are Batch '81, Kisapmata), this is her favorite, partly because she contributed so much of the humor (she was also reportedly crucial to providing the woman's point of view in the writing of Kisapmata).

The end result is--well, it's not the funniest Filipino film ever made (there are Dolphy films that are much funnier), but I think it's the subtlest, wittiest, and arguably most demented. The tape is smuggled through an unexpectedly (and unbelievably, for anyone who's actually had to deal with them) Philippine Customs by a hapless innocent bystander (Christopher de Leon) and his friends (Jay Ilagan, Charo Santos, Sandy Andolong); along the way, they tangle with the Chinese mafia (led by the imperious Armida Siguion-Reyna), a mysterious priest with a painfully loud crick in his neck (Leo Martinez), a legion of sweetened soybean vendors, an intimidatingly porcine woman wrestler, and more.

But what makes the film--for me, anyway--is the scene where a flock of nuns waddle, penguinlike, into a common room. They hum a worshipful hymn; they crowd around one nun (the rotund Nanette Inventor), who looks up, heavenward, while an organ plays sonorously. Suddenly, a crash of chords; the camera plunges down on the ring of nuns, who shake their hands at the lenses; Inventor lifts her habit, revealing a fishnet-stockinged, voluptuously curved leg; the nuns promptly launch into a no-holds barred rendition of Bigyan Mo Kami ng Tinapay (Give Us Our Daily Bread).

The choreography isn't anything special--standard Broadway fare, with a few moves borrowed from some Vegas chorus line--but it's such a superbly timed joke (and de Leon's films are all about superb timing) that even when you know it's coming (and the joke anyway is obvious and labored) it still sends tingles up one's spine. It's one of the strongest expressions of de Leon's cynicism (which surfaces more often than one might think--in brief moments in Batch '81; in short form in Aliwan Paradise, his sequel to and satire of Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (this being the film that cemented his reputation as a visual artist (he was Maynila's cinematographer), he was effectively biting the hand that made him (then again (and de Leon is all about jokes within jokes), he's biting his own hand, since he was Maynila's producer as well); in Bayaning Third World (Third World Hero, 1999)). It goes hand-in-glove with de Leon's suspicions that the Catholic Church is the biggest show around, full of glitz and lights and music and not much else (the song's repeated request for immediate sustenance is implicitly answered by the arrival of the smuggled opium (as in: for the masses)). It fits in with the overarching theme found amongst de Leon's films, that the quotidian surface of Filipino life conceals a teeming, often decadent, often perverse underworld, ready to be revealed at the rise of a skirt. The number may lack production values, but more than makes up for them with a keyboard-banging melody, and the exuberance with which the ecclesiastical performers belt it out.

The film continues on to have a rousing finale involving the Chinese Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, the dancing nuns, de Leon (Christopher, not Mike) and his intrepid friends, eyepopping sets (by Ms. Villavicencio) reminiscent of James Bond movies and the Academy Award ceremony, a samurai sword duel, the arrival of the ever-slow but always sure Philippine Constabulary, and, of course, a happy ending with two simultaneous weddings, backed by a full symphony orchestra. The ending is a happy mix of melody and lunacy, but it's that one number (Bigyan Mo Po Kami) that I'll remember--that sense of serene sanctity, punctured by an overstuffed pair of fishnet stockings. I can see in my mind the priests in the theater audience gasping in shock and outrage, their eyes glittering in the enfolding darkness.

(Kakabakaba Ka Ba? is available on dvd, along with other Mike de Leon films. Am not sure if they have subtitles--which is more than enough reason to strike an acquaintance with a Filipino, lure him into one's home (an offer of dinner--and real dinner, please, involving meat and plentiful carbohydrates, not some Caucasian notion of cocktail finger fare--might help), and ask him to perform benshi duties. That, or learn Tagalog. Anyway, Mike's such a visual director, his films are worth buying without subtitles...)

Deception (Marcel Langenegger, 2008)

De suction

Noel Vera

Marcel Langenegger and Mark Bombeck's Deception (2008) is some kind of minor camp classic. It posits Ewan McGregor as Jonathan McQuarry, an accountant too shy to get laid--which, considering the man's filmography (there was a point before he started playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas' excruciating prequels when he seemed contractually obligated to bare his bottom in every project), is reason to start sniggering right there.

So: Jonathan has trouble meeting girls (pffftkhkhkhkh…'scuse me); enter Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman, refreshingly villainous after doing all those heroic X-Men sequels and gloomy romantic leading roles). Wyatt introduces Jonathan to The List, an exclusive club whose members (all good-looking and smashingly successful) call each other, arrange a meeting, and have hot yet discreet sex in expensive hotel rooms (sort of like a cross between eharmony.com and American Express).

Jonathan meets a slew of beautiful women, played by everyone from Paz de la Huerta to Rachael Taylor, though easily the most remarkable of the lot (their cover-girl glamour tends to get monotonous fast) is Charlotte Rampling, she of the unsettling cool grey eyes and mysterious smile, still a stunner at the age of sixty-plus (they have to put her on a Forbes magazine cover as a "Wall Street Belle," of course, to explain the fact that she looks far too intelligent to have ever walked a fashion ramp).

Now, if Jonathan had stuck to the Belle we might have had something, but instead he meets "S" (Michelle Williams, looking as trashy as ever), a woman who he had caught a glimpse of in the subway a month back, and has since been obsessing over. This should have lead to some extra-steamy sex, but Jonathan is so lovestruck he can't even pork his inamorata; he has to sit up in bed looking at her while she (and a good portion of the audience I saw the movie with) sleeps peacefully.

So far, so lame. Turns out this isn't some profound exploration of human sexuality and obsession; turns out it's actually a financial thriller, with a blackmail plot involving Jonathan's accounting job so elaborate and unwieldy one imagines it would have been easier to be appointed into the present Bush administration and steal money straight from taxpayers (Jackman is certainly handsome enough, and it isn't as if Republican candidates have never been drafted from Hollywood before). Jonathan's head spins so fast he can't even follow-up on the water pipe leek in his overexpensive apartment bedroom (a detail so blatantly and repeatedly noted it's bound to figure in the plot--and Langenegger's such a hamfisted moviemaker you can hear him dragging said detail into position a mile away). The moviemakers are so worried about keeping their elephantine extortion scheme moving forward they forget along the way to make our hero care about the death of an innocent bystander (which is okay, I suppose; we forget to care about our hero, too).

If you think the blackmail is ridiculous, wait till you see Jonathan's designs for revenge and reversal (Hint: he manages to obtain a fake passport, an airline ticket, and a way of blocking Bose's electronic fund transfer to a bank in Madrid. All this born full-blown, seems to me, within the few seconds that Jonathan stares at a photograph--and still he has to depend on "S" not just changing her unreliable mind, but showing up at the right place and right time with a handy pistol in her purse)).

I didn't care; I really didn't. I'd given up about an hour before, and just sat back to enjoy the many moments worthy of catcalls and flung popcorn bags (this amidst the several patrons with their heads bent back, snoring unashamedly). I'm ready to go so far as to call this a cult classic, only poor Langenegger (whose feature debut this is) doesn't have the talent to make the picture as delirious visually as it is narratively (Langenegger can't generate much thrills out of the suspense sequences, while the sex is shot and edited to resemble perfume ads).

It's not as if erotic thrillers have to be logical to work--Alfred Hitchcock's great Vertigo (1958) featured an absurdly cumbersome murder, and a film as recent as Richard Rush's much underrated Color of Night (1994--which, come to think of it, owes much to Vertigo, or at least Hitchcock's earlier Spellbound (1945)) manages to juggle half a dozen suspects and still make the real killer's unmasking a surprise.

Then there's Brian De Palma, who not only uses ridiculously intricate storylines but makes a fetish of them. Take something like Femme Fatale (2003)--the real suspense isn't whether or not Rebecca Romijn-Stamos will come out okay in the end; it's if De Palma can (after the bizarre whirls and twirls of his hypernoirish postmodern narrative) still land right-side-up on his own two feet.

These films transcend their hoot-worthy storylines through a prodigious use of style--through throbbing reds and oily golds and luminous greens splattered across the big screen, through unforgettable uses of light and shadow (a nun's startling silhouette; an image-multiplying prism; a gemstone's brilliant sparkle) while intricate, largely wordless sequences unfold in their own hypnotically sweet time, revealing filmmakers every bit as obsessed as their protagonists with their one great, true love (cinema, of course).

Looked at on those terms, at the tremendous platters of moist flesh on display (and if you think there aren't any in Vertigo, look again--at Hitchcock's lovingly giant close-ups of Kim Novak, dunked (in seawater) and undunked, rouged (thickly) and unrouged), Deception is more like a weenie on a toothpick--but a tasty weenie, nevertheless, full of spice and odd, at times off-putting, flavors. Not bad for a quick, unnourishing nosh.

First published in Businessworld, 5.9.08

VCDs of two major Mario O'Hara films (Bakit Bughaw and Kastilyong Buhangin); plus other DVD releases

Tremendous news--kind of. But still.

Two of Mario O'Hara most highly regarded films--largely unseen for over twenty years--are finally, finally available on VCD format (that's the 'tremendous' part), but unsubtitled (that's the 'kind of' part): Kastilyong Buhangin (Sand Castle, 1980) and Bakit Bughaw ang Langit (Why Is the Sky Blue? 1981).

Basically, Kastilyong Buhangin was a pop vehicle for drama queen/music diva Nora Aunor and rising stuntman turned actor Lito Lapid, so the film is a mix of melodrama and action setpieces--a cross, in effect, between George Cukor's A Star is Born and Ringo Lam's Prison on Fire. Stuntmen choreographing their own stunts, Nora Aunor singing a George Canseco classic (if you've ever been to a karaoke bar in Manila--or any Filipino home with a karaoke set--you've probably spotted the title song in their catalogue). What's not to like?

Bakit Bughaw is even better, a Lino Brocka melodrama played with an understatement and laser-beam focus I submit Brocka never achieved in his own films. Some say this is O'Hara's masterpiece; I may not agree, but I understand their regard.

I've written on both films--on Kastilyong Buhangin here and on Bakit Bughaw ang Langit here, and I cannot, can not recommend them highly enough. VCDs work on my Philips DVD player, so there's a chance they'll work on yours; the video quality will be bad, but this may be the only way the films are ever going to be seen (the prints and negatives are gone, as far as I know, and believe me I've looked). If you're not fluent in Tagalog chances are you'll have trouble understanding the story, so now's your chance to either learn the language or befriend a Filipino, take him or her to your home, and have them watch two of the finest films in Philippine cinema, translating the dialogue benshi-style for your benefit.

Abel Gance's J'Accuse (1919) is great, and moving in ways Napoleon (a more visually spectacular and complex film) is not. The storyline is pure melodrama, but the way it's carried out is hard to resist--Gance's hokiness is so much more sophisticated than Griffith's, or even Murnau's, at least in Sunrise (1927) (which can be off-putting, if you're not ready for it).

Again and again Jean Diaz (Victor Francen) proves himself self-sacrificing, totally unselfish and sensitive to the needs of the people and of Edith, the woman he loves (Line Noro), who happens to be married to another man. Your eyebrows rise but you can't quite bring yourself to laugh--Gance has Francen underplay his acting so well, largely subordinates his not inconsiderable visual style to the story so completely that Diaz's deeds come across as simple expediency, dictated by circumstances, with only a trailing whiff of nobility in the air. I for one was completely seduced by this plaster saint posing so effectively as a human being.

The truly three-dimensional figure in the film is Edith's husband Francois (Marcel Delaitre), who makes for a magnificent peasant brute; with his howitzer of a shotgun and battleship prow of a nose, when he glares at the camera (often at Diaz or at his own erring wife), you expect the theater screen to singe a little. All the more moving, then, when he is confronted with his own implacable sense of honor, and his granite facade cracks a little.

Great scenes combining actual combat with reenacted footage, and I don't know if it's an accident or conscious decision on Gance's part, but the soldiers captured on film are faceless figures, foreshadowing the harrowing sequence where the dead rise up to judge the living (Romero's entire work, and even Dante's Homecoming (2005), anyone?). That final scene, with the dead in long shot, even in bright sunlight, is unsettling--they're solid, not phantoms, but you still get this hair-raising sense that they're not completely of this world.

Again, again, that's why I think Romero's slow-shuffling undead (or Kurosawa Kiyoshi's in Kairo, for that matter) are so disturbing. They're don't quite move to our beat--don't swim in the same currents of time. The more recent, faster-moving ghouls (28 Days Later; the Dawn of the Dead remake) are just wild animals on the loose; Romero's (and Kiyoshi's) cry out from beyond.

Finally: Desu noto (Death Note, 2006). Tetsuo Araki's adaptation of the manga by they psuedonymous Tsugumi Ohba. John Powers reviewed the series in NPR, quoting someone as saying this is the best thing to come out of Japan in reecent years.

It's fascinating for the intricate plotting, mainly, and the jawdropping twists introduced along the way. And of course for L, the bug-eyed pale-skinned, honey-voiced (Alessandro Juliani who, if they ever remade 2001: A Space Odyssey, would be a shoo-in to play HAL 9000) genius behind the the manhunt for Kira, the unknown killer who strikes down criminals the world over just by looking at their faces, and writing down their names in an ordinary notebook.

It's not particularly profound, and it doesn't make any grand statements on the human condition; it's just a fantasy of two youths possessed of extraordinary abilities (as Powers notes, the two main characters represent two distinct types: Kira (a.k.a. Light Yagami) is the handsome honor student, ladies' man, and athlete, while L (real name unknown) represents the weird otaku, or geek). L and Kira are alike, they're deadly enemies, they're also, strangely enough, tentatively good friends, mainly because they are the only two people in the world, apparently, intelligent enough to truly appreciate each other (in a late episode, perhaps the creepiest moment in a series full of creepy moments, L washes Kira's feet).

I don't agree about that 'best thing to come from Japan recently' bit--Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Takeshi Kitano are still working (haven't seen their latest, though), and Oshii wowed me with his last picture--but it's defintely interesting, addictive stuff.

Diving Bell and Butterfly, Comrade X, Force of Evil, Sunrise

Le Schaphrande et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007) has got to be one of the best films last year. I vividly remember Schnabel's Before Night Falls (2000) (aside from being what I felt was the finest performance Javier Bardem's ever given (still feel the same way), it was an unforgettably lyrical film); with this Schnabel if anything proves that he is one of the most graceful filmmakers alive (his free-floating, off-the-cuff camerawork recalls early Polanski, particularly Noz w wodzie (Knife in the Water, 1962)). The point-of-view shots are amazing, as much for what they obscure (out-of-focus filaments suggest wayward eyelashes; watery distortion indicate tears) as for what they reveal (when a pretty woman comes up close, his gaze invariably falls upon her cleavage); even the way he segueways from first person to memory to third person to fantasy is brilliant.

Love the in-jokes--a bit from Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and a snatch of Lolita (1962). What's not to like?

Some critics have complained of the claustrophobic quality of the storytelling, but who wants yet another standard-issue disease-of-the-week flick? Schnabel fits form to Jean-Do Bauby's (Matthieu Amalric) straitened circumstances, his restless intelligence (represented by a constantly agitated eye) unable to escape the cyclopean point of view except through memory or fantasy (the point is driven horrifically home when the doctor declares his other eye 'problematic' and recommends that it be 'occluded'--and we watch, every bit as helpless as the desperately pleading Jean-Do, when the recommendation is carried out).

Is there a place in the world for such personal cinema, such specialized, interiorized stories? But Jean-Do's story isn't as extraordinary as we might like to think: consider the depth of the gap between one person and another, the way we constantly struggle to hear, or make ourselves heard, and our constant failure at perfect communication (which we continue to strive to do, nevertheless). Jean-Do's story resonates because it's our dilemma, mutiplied a hundredfold; in his case he has the stubborness and energy and yes, selfishness to overcome his hurdles, to call out to us one more time in the form of an extraordinary book. Which Schnabel has transformed into an equally extraordinary film.

Comrade X (1940) is maybe not better than Ninotchka (1939) but can it, well, actually hold its own? Vidor is not Lubitsch--i'd hate to even begin to compare the two--but if Vidor doesn't have The Touch, his comedy (very possibly made to cash in on the success of the earlier flick) has more teeth; fact is, the prison and execution-squad sequence comes across as a black-comedy version of something Graham Greene might have written, set in South America. Plus I doubt if Lubitsch has done much in the way of action sequences: here, Vidor throws in a vigorous chase involving a battalion of dancing tanks (how did they do that--remote-control models?) that's a real delight (think Spielberg in 1941 mode, only really set in 1941).

And then there's Lamarr, who's definitely no Garbo; if anything, I think she's even more desireable. Garbo's a beauty, of that there's no doubt, but it's a Teutonic kind of beauty, heavy-spirited and unattainable. Lamarr has a sweet sensuality you can to walk up to and touch, with just enough hint of European mystery to make that walk forward feel daring, dangerous even.

So there're rumors she and Gable didn't get along--so what? I'm not noticing the lack of chemistry; all I can see is Lamarr heedlessly planting kisses on Gable's chiseled mug every five minutes, and thinking I'd love to shove that guy aside and take his place, I really would.

Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948) is, in every sense of the word, awesome. It's set in a great city of steel and stone (Manhattan, of course), only there's a weirdly comic mismatch because crawling all over this tremendous construct are flawed, tiny creatures, eking out a living. Joe Morse's (John Garfield) relationship with his brother Leo (Thomas Gomez) is a case in point--they're constantly bickering, but Garfield can't help keeping an eye out for the man, nevertheless. Is Joe the evil brazenly declared in the title? Maybe, but what about his concern for his brother? Is Leo evil? He has principles, but he's basically running an illegal business. How about Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts)? He comes closest to personifying pure evil, but even he has his Achilles' heel, in the form of Edna (Marie Windsor), who has eyes for Joe.

Polonsky takes an eloquent script (by Ira Wolfert based on his novel (with additions by Polonsky)) and fashions a terrific noir from it: grey, drab on-location exteriors match equally drab interiors; when danger lurks, it's high-angle shots and expressive shadows; when danger steps out in the open it's all quick cuts and abrupt, point-of-view shots. Polonsky (this is his debut as a director) orchestrates all with a confidence and elegance Martin Scorsese can't help but admire.

Then there's the finale, which can only be described as something out of Dante, a descent into a hell if not exactly frozen over, just a few degrees short of it. Joe climbs down past massive structures and vertiginously steep staircases to end at a desolate beach, where he faces the basic fact of his life thus far, and realizes what he must do in response. A great film, absolutely.

And finally (with thanks to Dave Kehr for pointing it out), this brilliant review of Murnau's Sunrise. It's critics like these (okay, maybe not a critic--but what's he doing putting forth on this subject, anyway?) that make me so optimistic about the future of cinema.

Some thoughts: maverick opinions are not of themselves valueless--actually, I think all opinions are equally of value (or are equally valueless); what adds substance and authority to an opinion is the thinking that brought the writer to that opinion, and O'Neill's way of thinking is, to put it politely, not exactly reasoned, logical, or even well informed. If instead of just noting the film's high reputation he showed some understanding of why the film's so highly regarded, then proceeded to show why such regard was flawed, why, he may have something.

It's not as if it's a perfect film, after all. Many sequences are justly famed (the tracking shot that reveals The Woman From the City; the tram sequence (Murnau, shooting through the tram windows which somehow refract the images of the surrounding forest just so, manages to give the trip a floating, dreamlike feel); the gigantic sets of the city). The story is simple, even for silent films, even for Murnau--Man, Woman, other Woman, basically--but Murnau takes advantage of Hollywood's considerable resources to create a mostly reality-based (if hugely exaggerated and stylized) vision.

Maybe my biggest problem with the picture are the subtitles. They're obvious and hokey, even for the time, even compared to Griffith's (and Griffith could be unbelievably sentimental); worse, Murnau went on to animate his titles. The effect is not unsimilar to underlining what's already obvious, highlighting it with three different color markers, then sprinkling all with glitter; if anything, I suspect the sense of over-the-top melodrama one has of the film comes largely from the titles.

Don 't get me wrong, I love the film; it's just not my favorite Murnau (that would be Faust (1924), with its opening image of a magnificent bat-winged Emil Jannings, looming over a volcano (that image has influenced films as diverse as Disney's Fantasia (1940), Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Ridley Scott's Legend (1985)), its passages of Faust flying over blasted landscapes (inspiration for some of the finest passages of John Boorman's Exorcist 2: The Heretic (1977), and its final heartbreaking sequence of the beautiful Camilla Horn, struggling to survive a winter storm with her bastard child).

Still. Not a big fan of the Oscars or of its organizers, but even they and their running media dogs should know better than to nip at the long-dead hand that, if it isn't exactly feeding them now, did much to create the reputation of quality they enjoy (and have almost entirely failed to uphold) today. Shame on them--on Cameron Diaz too, incidentally, for involving herself in such cheap shots (she should grovel on used razor blades for a chance to star in a film anywhere near as great as Sunrise).

No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)

Beep, beep

The Coen brothers' latest film No Country for Old Men (2007) is excellently made, in some ways terser and more economical than even the Cormac McCarthy novel it was based on. Plenty agree this much with me, apparently--it rolled up most of the major golden doorstops in the latest Academy Awards nights (the one supposed to be crippled by the recent writer's strike) including Best Picture doorstop.

I've really got only one problem with it--I couldn't buy it for even a minute.

Mind you, that doesn't mean I didn't like it. The Coens have developed into expert entertainers, able to take classic genres like noir (Blood Simple, 1984), the gangster film (Miller's Crossing, 1990), comedy (Raising Arizona (1987); The Big Lebowski (1998)), even a relatively obscure subgenre like '40s Capraesque (The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)) and give it their unique spin. Their cool, flip attitude in the face of some of the horrors they depict (a man reaching out a window has his hand pinned by an icepick, the windowpane cracking almost as if in sympathetic response to his pain; a woman bound and hooded runs desperately for her life and promptly falls flat on her face) seemed refreshing during the '80s and '90s, when the biggest hits were E.T., The Extraterrestrial (lonely boy makes friends with a lost alien) and Forrest Gump (lonely retard makes friends with a lost America) respectively.

If I consider the Coens more interesting than great that's probably because underneath all the formal brilliance I can't help but feel they're more in love with their own cleverness than with anything they want to express through their films (and yes, I admire them this much--that I'd call their work "films" instead of just "movies"). Until they did O Brother, Where Art Thou? at the turn of the millennium with its warm color palette, unapologetically folk music, and overall cheerful ending I wasn't sure they had anything more than a jaundiced, one-sided view of humanity (I'm tempted to point out the crime drama Fargo (1996) as earlier proof, thanks mainly to Frances McDormand's beautifully eccentric performance as police officer Marge Gunderson--only McDormand happens to be brother Joel's wife, and it may be callow of me to suspect this of having some kind of effect, but there it is).

(Not that I'm down with every filmmaker down on people--Stanley Kubrick comes to mind. But Kubrick brings such magisterial skill to his depiction of humanity's flaws, and often executes his projects on so vast a canvas there's room for contrasting hues, for a more comprehensively complex view of the world, despite his profound pessimism (of such contrasting (contrary?) moments I'm thinking among others of the girl singing before the soldiers at the end of Paths of Glory (1957), the death of Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the final duel in Barry Lyndon (1975)))

So what happens when the Coens encounter McCarthy? In the novel Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who pursues Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) for the two million dollars Moss picked up from a failed drug bust, actually meet; in the film they don't, and most of the picture is devoted to the strange sight of three men (the third being Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones)) chasing each other up and down Texas without once having a face-to-face meeting. The Coens compose some nifty effects from this sustained non-event, one of the niftiest being Bell on a sofa, uncomfortably aware that he's sitting on the exact spot Chigurh sat on just moments before, seeing exactly what he's seeing (his own reflection on a dead TV set). McCarthy in turn seems to bring out something more measured and thoughtful than is usual from the Coens, who largely eschew their comic pratfalls and grotesque caricatures.

The Coens pare away most of Sheriff Bell's musings from the novel (they occur in alternate chapters to the main action) and in one sense pare away much of the novel's sense of mortality (the very title implies the world's basic hostility towards grizzled old veterans like him), adding at most sketches and indications of Bell's brooding mindset in carefully situated monologues throughout the film (his final monologue--where he relates a dream about his father--suggests that any measure of comfort will only be found at the end of the journey (of his life, in other words)). Other changes are mostly minimal save two, the first being an extended sequence involving Moss and a young hitchhiker, which in the novel shows us a more scruffily compassionate side to Moss (the side that took that jug of water to the dying Mexican in the desert--a silly act, in my opinion, but who am I to judge? Without it there would be no novel, or film), and sharpens our dismay at his ultimate fate. The second change makes up for the first deletion, by preserving the dignity of Moss' wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald)--in the film she alone stands up to Chigurh, in her small, rabbitty sort of way.

Bell is the book and film's true protagonist (which may be why the Coens felt they could cut down Moss' hitchhiker to a brief flirtation), the filtering consciousness through which we gain a sense of McCarthy's fatalistic worldview, and Tommy Lee Jones plays him with a simplicity and directness that helps undercut what can easily have been the film's most pretentious moments. More problematic is Bardem's Chigurh, the "badass killer" that haunts the film's margins ("Just how dangerous is he?" "Compared to what? The bubonic plague?"--McCarthy and the Coens feel that mere superlatives aren't enough, they need near-biblical calamities to help place him in context). Not that he's not fascinating--like Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Bardem's brief appearances are cortisone injections that bring the film to spasmodic life, and probably explain the picture's boxoffice appeal. As a figure of inevitable death, however, I find him with his captive-bolt pistol (basically a tank full of pressurized air driving a sliding bolt) and silenced shotgun too cool to take seriously. He's like the James Bond--no, more like the Road Runner--of assassins, slipping in and out of firefights, surprising fellow killers by outflanking them, surviving car crashes that might pulverize lesser men.

I like watching competent men on the big screen; I like to watch them make their quiet way around, no wasted motion as they go about doing their job. A superman has a different fascination--you revel in his powers, in the fun and fantasy of the impossible made possible right before your eyes. A superman asked to convince us of a concept difficult for most of us to accept--that we all at one point or another will face death--is a tool asked to do the wrong job. You want more realism in your scenario, not less--otherwise the audience opts out of the predicament by saying "it'd never happen like that!"

As Pat Graham of The Chicago Reader points out, Michael Haneke's Funny Games (2008), his English-language remake of his own 1997 film, does pretty much the same thing: shows us likeable people trapped in a no-win situation. Haneke expends less effort than the Coens in doing it--he confines the action to a single house, gives his antagonists no extraordinary weapons (just a golf club, a kitchen knife, a shotgun sans silencer). His killers are not exotic assassins with faintly foreign accents, but a pair of clean-cut youths, recognizably of the same class as their victims--they could have just stepped out of some neighbor's vacation home to start their predatory work (and in fact, did). His visual style (unlike the Coens') disdains gliding shots and clever angles, but instead settles for static camera setups that hold us, viselike, in their grip while Haneke's scenario plays out, step by agonizing step.

It's every bit as artificial a situation as in McCarthy's story, but Haneke takes the extra step of anticipating our disbelief by openly acknowledging it, commenting on it, making fun of it with sly jokes and direct asides to the camera. Ostensibly the Coens and McCarthy take the loftier road, attempt to say something about mortality and our (not very central) place in the world ; Haneke with his baby-faced thug looking straight at us sticks pins at that pretension: it's all about the violence, not the mortality, not the metaphysics (which could change, anyway, with just the touch of a rewind button). We're sitting in the theater seats (or watching the DVD) because we want the violence visited on the film's characters. One may ask if the punishment Haneke metes out is appropriate to our crime (of wanting to see this picture), and Haneke even has an answer to that (did the family ask to have their home invaded?).

Of course Haneke says all this artfully, artfully (the vicelike camera, the carefully neutral lighting, the total lack of a music soundtrack other than at the film's start, and whatever incidental tunes can be heard from the television set). Is he so to speak shooting himself in the foot? Or is this his way of including himself in the equation, exposing himself as yet another exploiter of onscreen violence, only more cunning and self-conscious than others?

Eventually you hit a wall or (as with No Country) fail to take off, because the premise(thanks to Anton Chigurh) failed to find sufficiently solid ground against which to purchase traction. Funny Games is perfection of sorts, a sealed-off box from which there's no escape, other than walking out of the theater (or pressing the STOP button on the DVD player), but it's a sterile perfection, a squared-away dead end; I for one am happy to see Haneke move on from this to other themes, in films like Code Inconnu (Code Unknown, 2000), or Le Temps de loup (Time of the Wolf, 2003). Will the Coens do the same? They've been trying; thanks to Mr. McCarthy they do take a few steps forward. Not quite far enough, I think.

First published in Businessworld, 4/11/08