Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Tarantino's talkathon

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a clever melange of violence, suspense, slapstick, wit, movie references both arthouse and grindhouse, talk, talk, more talk, even more talk; seems to me he is more in love than ever with the sound of his own words coming out of the mouths of about a dozen different men and women, in several accents and twice as many acting styles.

His initial setpiece, a variation on an early scene in Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) (Leone's outsized opera style seems to inspire Tarantino more and more, from Kill Bill Part 2 (2004) onwards) has Colonel Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) earning his nickname of “The Jew Hunter”--he sits with farmer Pierrer LaPadite (Denis Menochet) enjoying a glass of fresh-drawn milk, gently maneuvering the hapless peasant into admitting to harboring Jews.

It's a moderately suspenseful sequence (moderately--judging from Tarantino's past work he's not one to shy away from sacrificing an entire family for the sake of a dramatic opening). Landa first demonstrates here the technique of cheerful bonhomie overlaying steely cruelty that he wields to great effect, charming and disarming the object of his interrogation.

The technique is applied over and over again; Landa's death-dance around his victims while said victims sits helpless within an ever-tightening spiral, too frightened or fascinated to do anything, forms both heart and spine of the picture. Landa is the true protagonist of Basterds, and as Waltz plays him he has the bad-boy charisma of an old-fashioned Hollywood star (Brad Pitt as Basterds commander Lt. Aldo Raine, in comparison, comes off as a one-note buffoon). I'm thinking in particular of James Mason in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959)--Waltz has something of Mason's suave smoothness--and I think it significant that Hitchcock comes to mind: Waltz's Colonel Landa is firmly in the tradition of fiendishly clever Hitchcock villains like Mason's Philip Vandamm, Joseph Cotton's Uncle Charlie (Shadow of a Doubt, 1943), Walter Slezak's Willi (Lifeboat, 1944); like those scoundrels, Landa forms the core of the movie's appeal.

If I have any problem with Landa, or with Waltz's and Tarantino's conception of the man, it's in that they don't borrow from what what I would consider the very best Hitchcock villains--I enjoy Willi, Vandamm, Uncle Charlie, but their evil, while charming, isn't fully expressive; they function exclusively as figures of malevolence. Give me instead Claude Rains' Alexander Sebastian in “Notorious” (1946), or Raymond Burr's Lars Thorwald in Rear Window (1954), or Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in Psycho (1960); their characters displayed alternating streaks of villainy and vulnerability, ferocity and fear, capturing our sympathy and disgust in near-equal measure.

That said, give me Vertigo (1958), where the murderer literally steps off the picture about halfway through, leaving behind Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart, in what I consider the performance of his career) to function best he can as victim and villain both. Mere atrociousness can be effective, but ambivalence rules.

Then there's the talk. Landa purring at Farmer LaPadite over a freshly drawn glass of milk is fine; Landa flirting menacingly with massacre survivor Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) over a dish of warm apple strudel (with a dollop of freshly whipped cream) is fine too; Landa playing cat-and-mouse games with actress Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) is okay, if a tad wearying--yes, yes, we know he's smarter than anyone else in the picture, get on with the story already. Besides, they don't partake of anything in that scene, not even the champagne on tap in the lobby--though Tarantino does get to indulge in his trademark foot fetish, with Landa playing a predatory Prince Charming to Bridget's doomed Cinderella.

(I'm thinking Tarantino may have missed his true calling, that his greatest films may be ahead and not behind him if he would ever consider mounting a production about food. That strudel, the flaky-soft, buttery crust sitting high on a pile of thick-sliced apples, fresh cream dribbling down the sides, is easily the single most erotic, most sensuous image he's ever done).

I'm serious. I can't say there's a large library of great films on food, much less major filmmakers interested in the preparation and consumption of food on film--Yasujiro Ozu, Tsui Hark, Juzo Itami, Claude Chabrol, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini and Martin Scorsese come to mind, but even in their films the food or cooking is usually a minor preoccupation. It's a genre ripe for exploration (or exploitation), where Tarantino can easily excel.)

Tarantino having Landa talk to this beautiful woman or that peasant farmer is fine (as long as said farmer is able to serve fresh milk), but Tarantino forcing us to spend ten minutes in a basement bar with an inept British spy and without Landa is almost unforgivable. Morgan Meis in an article claims Tarantino “stretches the tension to a breaking point as masterfully as Hitchcock ever did”--Hitchcock stretched tension as far as it would go, but never did it with so much talk (unless it was with some comic figure making inane chatter). Just when the tension (or monotony, if you like) becomes unbearable, Tarantino tops it with an incoherently edited gun battle--all my patience, rewarded thus! For a filmmaker known for his violence, I find Tarantino's action sequences strictly second-rate--the camerawork's often clunky, the shots rarely if ever flow, the cutting, as in this case, done with a Cuisinart.

If he has any skill at all it's in scriptwriting (he's quite good at dialogue, if rather shallow and limited with his range of voices), film scoring (his eclectic soundtrack includes everything from Ennio Morricone to Elmer Bernstein to Lalo Schifrin to David Bowie's theme song for Cat People), and casting (his only genius ability, utilizing has-beens like John Travolta, Pam Grier, Lawrence Tierney, Robert Forster in brilliant new roles). Not to mention the occasional striking image, of which two come to mind: Shosanna's boyfriend Marcel (Jacky Ido) presiding over a gigantic pile of celluloid, summarizing in a single shot the volatile nature of cinema, and Shosanna herself appearing on the silver screen, announcing her revenge in a burst of orange flame.

Otherwise--zilch, nada. Tarantino's great surprise of an ending (a slowed-down, rather watery version of the brutal climax Robert Aldrich achieved (all shot in real time, unlike Tarantino) in The Dirty Dozen (1967)) may have critics all over the United States praising the immense power of cinema to create its own reality, but Steve Railsback summarized what Tarantino did almost thirty years ago, in Richard Rush's far funnier, far more imaginative The Stunt Man (1980): “Whaddaya know? A fucking rewrite!"

There are critics who call Inglourious Basterds science fiction, and with fairly good cause--the genre has been revising World War 2 history for practically ever, from Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream to Philip K. Dick's great The Man in the High Castle. It's instructive, I think, to look at Dick's masterpiece: Japan and Germany have won the war and split the United States in two, with everything from the East Coast to the Midwest going to Germany and the entire West Coast (on the balance generally recognized to be the more desirable piece of real estate (I disagree, but what do I know?)) going to Japan. Germany promptly establishes a totalitarian state where the genocidal extermination of Jews is well underway (as for black people, you don't want to know what they are up to in the continent of Africa); Japan creates a relatively pollution-free semi-utopia where electric cars and dirigibles ply road and sky, Americans are treated with subtle condescension (but otherwise enjoy most of their civil rights), and American pop curios are sold in specialty boutique stores. In this topsy-turvy world, supporters of Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich struggle to control the Reich; a Japanese bureaucrat named Mr. Tagomi attempts to foil an assassination plot, with the future of the Japanese Empire hanging in the balance; and shopkeeper Robert Childan pleads for the value of indigenous American art.

Doesn't sound like much but in the process of reading you may find yourself, as with all great science fiction, holding all sorts of unfamiliar positions--a profound pity for Childan and the kind of American pop culture (Micky Mouse watches and so on) one usually holds in contempt, here so fragile, so endangered; a sneaking sympathy for Japan's Greater East Asian Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere, which rules over the United States with a kind of benign despotism (imagine--electric cars!). At the heart of it all is novelist Hawthorne Abendsen, the eponymous man, who wrote The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a huge underground hit of an alternate-history novel where Germany lost the war.

Dick, in effect, plays with reality in ways Tarantino can't even begin to grasp--where Tarantino thinks in terms of victory or defeat, death or revenge, Dick thinks of broad political and economic forces, shaping a complexly realized society that in turn shapes us in complex ways; where Tarantino indulges in Three Stooges slapstick with a dash of sadism, Dick has a Japanese insulting an American with an offer to mass-produce his wares (it takes the American some minutes to even begin to realize he's been handed a putdown, not an opportunity)--the exquisite cruelty of the moment goes beyond anything in Basterds. Dick's High Castle is the game of make-believe played at grandmaster level; Basterds feels more like a session of tug-o-war with the other end of the rope tied to a fireplug--stupid and pointless, if occasionally amusing.

First published in Businessworld, 11.06.09

More Vancouver Festival Films (Serbis; Face; Lebanon; ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction)

Merly (Mercedes Cabral) and Alan (Coco Martin) and unruptured boil in Brillante Mendoza's Serbis

Did I mention that almost nobody I talked to in the festival liked Kore-eda's Air Doll, not even David Bordwell, who's an admirer of the director?

Ah well. Bordwell finds the execution "overcute" and "underdeveloped," but what's "overcute," anyway? The film plays into male notions of female fantasy figures, the same time it offers some kind of critique (the doll herself finds her owner's attentions distasteful, preferring the company of a gentler, geekier video store clerk), and there is something faintly prurient about the early scenes of Nozomi (Du-na Bae, in a courageously unselfconscious performance) standing in her (squeaky clean, rather breathtaking) altogether, totally vulnerable and defenseless, because the idea of putting on clothes doesn't even begin to occur to her.

But I submit that Kore-eda avoids excessive preciousness by focusing on the details--the latex squeal when her hands rub against objects, the occasional moments when she can't help but notice her translucency (either her shadow isn't dark enough or the gases flowing within her fingers are visible), the running gag about another woman's pantyhose lines, which she mistakes for latex mold lines. If one can imagine an American remake (and god knows, the idea of an inflatable sex doll come to life is asking for just such a catastrophe), one can imagine these details being simultaneously sanitized ("not so much nudity, please, and no shots of her cleaning out her removable vagina") and pumped up for slapstick content, with Jim Carrey mugging his face off to plenty of loud music cuing audience laughter.

Bordwell compares the ending to that of Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. Truth to tell, Oshima's ending left me cold (as I think Oshima intended); Kore-eda's comes off more as a tragic misunderstanding, the kind found in doomed romances or tragedies. Kore-eda's film attempts, as does Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence, to evoke the pathos of the unanimated--how, we imagine, they might be helpless to determine their own fate, and how, we imagine, they would suffer accordingly (beyond that, I think , is an attempt to evoke the pathos one feels when empathizing with inanimate objects--when, at one time or another in our lives, we ourselves feel helpless to determine our fates). Between Spielberg and Kore-eda, though, I think the lighter (and hence more effective) touch is Kore-eda's.

After Air Doll I decided to hell with it and attended a midnight screening, which can often be fun; the crowd is rowdy, the movie usually of the lowbrow, grindhouse persuasion--in this case Kevin Hamedani's ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction. Easy to say Hamedani is no George Romero, and that his zombie picture is too clunky to gracefully shoulder the weight of political metaphor and satire that it is meant to bear, and that anyway the zombie effects are second-rate (owing to a presumably low budget), but zombie flicks are judged more by their gut impact than their subtlety (until we come to the more recent fast-moving remakes, in which case I go all medieval on them). But the picture burns with the fire of a filmmaker out to prove a point, and easily the movie's most unsettling image isn't of the beheadings or flesh-eating or the swinging zombie guts, but of a half-crazed (all-crazed?) man threatening to hammer a young Iranian girl's foot to the floor if she doesn't confess to being involved in some evil Middle-Eastern plot to convert all Americans into zombies.

Hong Sang-soo's Like You Know It All is his second feature on HD, and am I imagining this or has Hong become more ostensibly funny? The film tells the story of a director named Koo Gyung-nam (Kim Tae-woo) invited to sit in as jury member at the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival. It adds something if you've ever been to a film festival before, or served as jury in one--the ubiquitous shoulder bags filled with goodies, the neverending round of polite greetings, the endless catalogs and promotional handouts and calling cards--Hong gets every detail right (Jecheon as depicted onscreen seems like a modest-sized festival, though it could have grown since, or maybe Hong didn't have the budget or inclination to use bigger sets). Add attractive, eccentric, possibly insane festival programmer Kong Yun-hee (Uhm Ji-won) into the mix, and Hong in effect puts poor Koo through the metaphorical and literal wringer, with women alternately enticing and rejecting him, men either inviting or threatening him, fans at times praising, at times humiliating him, and Koo himself wondering just what he had done the night before when he was drunk to deserve this kind of treatment.

Add to this the unmistakable hint of melancholy (Koo is always finding something to regret in either the recent or distant past in his relationships with women (with concurrent repercussions on his relationships with men)), and one might say Hong has executed a light but satisfying omelet of a film--deceptively simple, but flavorsome.

Programmer Shelley Kraicer made it clear (on the Vancouver catalog and when he spoke to me) that he regarded Tsai Ming Liang's Face, about a film crew attempting to stage a film version of Oscar Wilde's Salome, a masterpiece; everyone else, apparently, begs to differ. I wanted to like it, I really did, but where the pacing in Tsai's previous films was leisurely and uncompromising here it felt soporifically slow; where his storytelling was deadpan unpredictable here it felt obtuse and nonsensical. I wondered what made the difference and someone offered this explanation: "He's cut himself off. Where before he was full of angst towards his life and sexuality, now it's all about his love for French cinema. Moreau, Baye, Ardant, Leaud, references to Truffaut--it's all magic and new to him where we've been familiar with all this Francophilia for years, even decades. It's killing his films."

Possibly--all I know is that something's seriously missing in this picture whatever it is. To be fair the imagery is often heartstoppingly beautiful, and there is one sequence--Salome kissing the dead head of John the Baptist--that's incredible, even great (don't want to say too much about it except that instead of using dramatic music or even music of any kind, Tsai employs the ambient sounds found in a deserted abattoir to terrible, unforgettable effect).

Samuel Moaz's Lebanon might be described in the catalog as a "cross between Waltz with Bashir and Das Boot;" I would call it a transposition of Kevin Reynolds' The Beast to Lebanon, albeit with a greater intensity and claustrophobia--much of the film takes place inside a tank, and any contact we have of the outside world comes through the driver's tiny periscope, or through the upper hatch, a moon-shaped aperture through which authority (an Israeli troop commander who seems to have all the answers (at least for a while)) and terror (a Christian Phalangist full of unreliable information and even less certain loyalty) enter from the outside world. One might see the tank as a steel womb inside of which the men overstay their welcome (their gestation period?), wallowing in their own increasingly unbearable filth and refusing to leave the safety of their armored uterus.

Moaz captures the stench of waging war inside a tank--the ever-rising level of rancid water on the vehicle's floor, complete with a flotilla of cigarette butts and paper wrappers floating about its oily surface; the ever-thickening layer of grime and sweat covering the tank men's wide-eyed faces like so much makeup; the increasingly congealed gluey mess dripping from the interior walls (an explosion had sent foodstuff (Matzoh meal?) flying everywhere, and in the film's one hilarious running gag (and, come to think of it, politically weighted line of dialogue) the troop commander keeps demanding that the men "clean up this mess").

One festival viewer had hesitated to go see Lebanon; he said he didn't want to watch Israeli propaganda. I can see it being propaganda all right, but aimed at whom I'm not quite sure--the Israeli commanders order the use of illegal phosphorus shells and order the tank to fire on innocent civilians; the men inside the tank are frightened and barely know what's going on. We know only as much or less, because Moaz has made sure that everything we see and hear are what they see and hear; the experience is a harrowing one.

Managed to see Brillante Mendoza's Serbis, about a day in the life of a provincial movie theater, where they show uncut versions of softcore porn movies and the action in the darker corners of the auditorium are far more interesting than what's happening onscreen. In terms of hygiene the theater can give the tank in Lebanon a run for the money; it's almost as claustrophobic (a dark cavernous space surrounded by an intricate network of rooms and stairways), it has its share of rank sewer water, and people have terrifyingly red and swollen boils growing out of their behinds (come to think of it the relative darkness in the tank made the mess there a touch more tolerable). There's graphic sex aplenty and fellatio plunked front and center for those who appreciate that kind of action, and there's the slapstick interlude of a thief running up and down the theater's stairways seeking escape (if he got lost I don't blame him).

One less-then-enchanted viewer told me "I can tolerate the sex, the boil, the endless stair-climbing. What I can't stand is the goat--why is there a goat in the theater? I don't understand the goat."

I sympathize. But anyone who's actually attended a screening in one of these brokedown movie palaces knows that the occasional non-biped often wanders into its reassuringly shadowy interior--I've heard birds fluttering about in these places, even the occasional bat, and once in a while you hear a cat meowing for leftovers. Plenty of odd things can happen in a Filipino grindhouse, including a patron urinating into an empty soda cup beside you (apparently he couldn't be bothered--or didn't dare--to look for the men's room).

Should we understand the goat? I think these places are beyond understanding, just as I suppose Filipino life can be beyond understanding--like the theater it's full of lust and filth, and everyone's too demoralized to bother trying to keep it fully, continuously clean (the moment when the men's room is flooded is strangely the single most moving moment for me with its silent despair, its patient mop sweeper standing ankle-deep in dark water). The script by Armando Lao--who I used to call the Philippines' most underrated scriptwriter, now less underrated (and thankfully more active)--seems shapeless, lackadaisical, and Mendoza directs his script with a general lethargy, punctuated by the occasional surge of energy (a bursting boil, a bout of oral sex, a thief dangling from a balcony). But Lao and Mendoza (with the help of a wonderfully unglamorous cast that includes Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz and Gina Pareno) have carefully attained that lethargy, it's the kind of everyday rhythm fellow Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz strives for and achieves in his hours-long epics, set in the countryside.

Call this then, like Lebanon, an elaborate womb metaphor, with the people trapped inside too self-absorbed and terrified to seek escape, only too happy to wallow in their own waste and fester. If there's anything at all compensatory in these less-than-ideal conditions, it's that the theater snack food seem tastier than the cardboard pap found in most movie theaters, with hot meals over rice, pork rinds sprinkled with spicy vinegar, and boiled duck egg (complete with feathery, days-old fetus for a protein surprise) available at the lobby. Just don't use the men's room afterward.

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)

King of pain

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker has been called the best film yet made about the war in Iraq, and one can see where they’re coming from--it’s crude yet coherent, understated yet intense, and it knows that first and foremost, before you even deal with the politics of war, you portray its head rush, the ‘drug’ mentioned in the film’s opening titles.

Bigelow’s eminently qualified. A woman successfully working in what’s basically a man’s world, she’s done one action film after another in various genres, and managed to give them an unapologetically distinct visual design--the chilly metallic look of Blue Steel, the dreamy twilight feel of Near Dark (arguably her best work), the headlong rush of Strange Days. Her editing is precise and swift, but she’s also a long-take fan, perfectly capable of going against the grain of today’s chop-suey editing and shaky handheld cameras.

If she has a weakness, it’s her scripts--Blue Steel had its moments, but Ron Silver’s psychopathic killer-lover was ultimately too silly to be truly disturbing; Strange Days started out strong but ended up underutilizing its fin-de-siecle scenario; even Near Dark had its narrative implausibilities (is vampirism that easy to cure?).

Hurt Locker seems different; its scenario doesn’t indulge in fantastic flights of fancy (narrativewise, I mean), and it doesn’t strive for glaringly unearned dramatic moments. The story is of a piece--basically, the life of an EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) squad, counting down days of active duty; in its way are seven scenarios, six involving bombs of escalating degrees of complexity, that it must survive to go home.

At the film’s center, breathing harshly like a Kubrickian spaceman in his bomb disposal suit (a heavy-duty affair of armor blast plating, Kevlar, fire retardant polymers and ballistic nylon) with matching helmet (visor made of hardened acrylic/polycarbonate laminate) stands Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a daredevil disposal expert who likes to keep souvenirs of the bombs he’s dismantled in a box (“this is shit from Radio Shack, man” a fellow soldier finally tells him). Funny, but there it is: a movie about a man who only lives when he’s in danger of dying.

James is the film’s wildly beating heart and biggest problem. As Renner (who bears an unsettling resemblance to thirty-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with “fuck you” attitude to match), plays him he’s a deadpan gambler willing and able to stake his life (and his fellow soldiers') on the possibility he’s right. He pulls up bomb wires with casual aplomb; he rips open car seats and carpeting with evident gusto. It’s as if dismantling bombs were a child’s game where he pretends that he reads his opponent’s playbook with complete clarity, even if he doesn’t (he doesn’t, not always, definitely not with the final device).

James’ bravado makes him cool and ultimately lends this movie much of its seductiveness. And seductive it is--the bombs are, as that soldier put it, “Radio Shack;” not the gleaming hi-tech bombs of movie villains past, but the product of ingenious minds with limited budget and resources. Their designs have an ingenious logic, a logic James follows with unbridled glee--if you wire a 155 mm round to detonate, would you use just one? If you want to hide a bomb, where's the ideal hiding place? If you want to fashion the ultimate undefuseable bomb--the last one that James, late in the film, deals with --just how would you do it? Bigelow stages and Renner plays each sequence with absolute conviction; you can’t think clearly, what with all the tension onscreen.

It’s when you’ve left the theater and the tension’s gone that you realize how big a con job this is, how much the character of James has been cribbed from louder, sillier antecedents like Lethal Weapon, only with Renner doing a far more persuasive job with far less than Mel Gibson ever did (Gibson at least had a wife long dead). Does the film say anything about the absurdity of the Iraq war? Only incidentally, in the background--in the way the Iraqis gaze at James with his bombs, as if this were an example of performance art with lives only incidentally at stake. That's an entire world into which he’s intruding, suit and bombs and all, and the onlookers may or may not have an interest in his safety. They deserve a more complex, less contrived view of the war and its causes and its effects.

No, the film doesn’t have anything profound to say about the war; it’s a skein of macho clichés linking together a series of bomb defusing sequences, admittedly superb. Thanks to those sequences, this may be the best film to date about the Iraq war; I just don’t think that means as much as we’d like.

First published in Businessworld, 10.23.09

Cinemanila 2009 (final weekend)

Lav Diaz's Batang West Side

Cinemanila 2009 (final weekend)

The world on the big screen at Cinemanila

It’s that time of the year again, and again I’m not sure we appreciate the kind of bounty we get at Cinemanila. There are other festivals for foreign films (Cine Europa, Eiga Sai, the various embassy festivals); other festivals for independent films (Cinema One Originals, Cinemalaya), but seeing cutting-edge Filipino films screened side-by-side with the latest offerings from world cinema, that’s a different experience entirely. We see the best of what we have to offer alongside the best of what the world has to offer, and we can come to the conclusion that yes, there is much in the world that’s different and much we can learn from, the same time there’s much we can offer in return. The exchange of ideas, images, interests, cultures, stories and, above all, friendships--that’s the real value of a festival like this.

The world cinema programming in particular--it’s a relief to see programming that’s aware of what’s going on out there, instead of relying on distributors or popular hits or goodness knows what criterion to pick films for one’s festival. Here we have commercial hits (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the latest from any number of exciting filmmakers (Fruit Chan and Jian Cui’s Chengdu, I Love You; Steve McQueen’s Hunger; Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth; Francois Ozon’s Ricky). We have the latest from the finest Filipino filmmakers working at the moment (Raya Martin’s Independencia; Ralston Jover’s Bakal Boys; Pepe Diokno’s Engkwentro). We have screenings of two of Lav Diaz’s most important works, Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family), and Batang West Side (West Side Avenue).

Batang West Side is as Diaz himself put it his “first film”--or, at least, the first where he truly realized his vision (I do like his earlier efforts, however flawed he may think they are, particularly the Dostoevskian Serafin Geronimo: Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (Criminal of Barrio Concepcion)). Batang West Side explores the different levels of an entire community, the Filipino-American community, from its oldest to youngest generation, from its upper class to middle class to underworld. In its five-hour accumulation of detail, with a density and scope and leisurely pace very much like a novel, it achieves greatness; it even has room for deadpan humor (a gang boss’ trippy speech (“Shabu (crystal meth) is the salvation of the Philippines”) and surreal imagery (a nightmarish dream sequence). Diaz balances severe aesthetic with a novelist’s comprehensive storytelling in this film and achieves, I believe, his masterpiece.

Ebolusyon at eleven hours is an even bigger canvas, and admittedly more impressive (Film critic/iconoclast Olaf Moller, writing for Senses of Cinema, picked it as the Best Film of 2005 and, writing for Cinematheque Ontario just this year, as "Film of the Decade"). I would argue that Diaz had trouble validating his mix of 16 mm and video footage, and that the historical perspective doesn’t really integrate with the personal storylines that crisscross the narrative. But huge canvases and overreaching ambitions are often accompanied by considerable flaws, and there are more than enough themes and surpassingly moving moments here to make it worth one’s while--a grandmother lying among her photographs, spending her final moments in mourning; a man’s pathetic, agonizing death stretched out almost to eternity as the camera follows his dying crawl. Diaz attempts nothing more and nothing less than an epic retelling of thirty years’ of Philippine history, and the results are confusing, fascinating, altogether exhilarating.

These are difficult and essential films to see; if you are Filipino, or a lover of all things Filipino, or a film lover, or a lover of Filipino films, or a combination of any of the aforementioned, you must, must, must see these two works.

(Belated note: the Batang West Side screening apparently didn't push through, but festival director Tikoy Aguiluz hopes to have it screened at a later dates)

As for the other films--Israel may not be the most morally upstanding country at the moment, but that doesn’t go for some of its filmmakers. Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary about an Israeli soldier (Folman himself) trying to recover his memories of what happened during the Lebanon War, in particular the Sabra and Shatila massacre--the animation acts as another level of stylization that helps the filmmaker deal with memories too painful to remember. Bui Thac Chuyen’s Adrift (Cinema 5, Saturday 12 to 1.50 pm) is a gorgeously photographed Vietnamese film much in the tradition of French erotic dramas, only the Vietnamese do the French one better by throwing a few virgins in the mix, to help recall what a surprise and terror and wonder human sexuality can be. Chris Chong’s Karaoke is one of the best films I’ve seen recently, an understated drama about the shattering of a youth’s illusions in life, with a great wordless sequence in the middle that reveals what it’s all about and why nothing the youth can say or do really matters.

First published in Businessworld, 10.23.09

More on Jang Kun-Jae's "Eighteen" and Ralston Jover's "Bakal Boys"

Bakal Boys

Announcement of Dragons and Tigers winners

I'm the hairy dude that makes the dramatic announcement. For some strange reason the focus of my eyes had changed, hence my dramatic whipping off of glasses prior to reading out the director's name.

As for Bakal Boys (which, for the record, I liked very much)--perhaps the film's one major weakness, apparent on first viewing, is the director's seeming admiration--perhaps too much so--of the camerawork of frequent collaborator Brillante Mendoza (Jover had written the script for Mendoza's Foster Child, Tirador, and (easily my favorite of Mendoza's work to date) Manoro). The Dardennes brothers' style of handheld long takes has, for better or worse, become the signature style of the Filipino independent film production.

Jover does develop his own distinct light, a burnished sunset glow where Mendoza usually opts for a harsher, more realistic palette. Paradoxically, while Jover confines himself to warmer colors, his setting is noticeably bleaker than Mendoza's--a desolate concrete landscapes dominated by gigantic rusting machinery, with makeshift shacks that cover the concrete like an encrustation. The sea is the only other major presence, an endlessly roiling, rhythmic mystery, a source of both danger and possible delight for the people living nearby; in the distant horizon are cityscapes of northern Manila, an urban world familiar to us and other Filipino audiences.

As in his scripts for Manoro and Tirador, the last thing Jover seems to want to do is judge these children. In the Q & A that followed, he notes that attempts were made to try put these children in school, and that in a matter of months they were back to what they were doing, diving in Manila Bay for scrap metal--for many of the youths, scrap metal diving was a way of putting food on the table; if they didn't dive, they didn't eat. Diving was what they knew, was in many cases all they knew. As for parents, Jover cited a case where the father was crippled; I don't know about the other children (are all the fathers similarly helpless?), but you do notice in the picture the almost complete lack of adults--these kids, like the kids in Bunuel's Los Olvidados, are left to their own resources, to fend for themselves as best they can.

And yet, and yet, and yet, and this was the most startling thing about the picture, it wasn't completely grim; it wasn't all despair. You come away with an impression of the extraordinary strength and resilience of these children, of their ability to survive the horrifying harshness of their lives (Jover notes that one or two of these boys drown or simply disappear every week) and still be children, laughing, playing, teasing, having the time of their lives. You see a world that continually neglects if not actively oppresses these boys, and they and their kin and friends respond with courtesy, kindness, even love. Amazing film.

We knew Jang Kun-Jae's Hwioribaram (Eighteen) was something special (which was why we gave it the Dragons and Tigers Award) from the very first shot: a gas station late at night, pumps lined up to the right, a white-lined rectangle just below the camera frame, dark city night beyond. It's a shot full of promise, as if anyone could drive in and take over the picture, and someone does--a motorcycle rolls in, and a station attendant buzzes around it, topping off its tank. The rider kick-starts his bike and the camera pulls back, following him through the streets. The protagonist Tae Hoon has just arrived, in effect, and it's his story we follow as the film proper begins.

I'd been quoted as saying it's an old story--boy meets girl, boy and girl have a short affair, boy breaks up with girl. Familiar--too familiar, it's true, but one advantage of familiar old stories is that we don't waste too much time and attention on the narrative, we've seen it all before; instead we concentrate on the details, on how the story is told, visually as well as dramatically. For a plain meat-and-potatoes narrative, this one is told extremely well: understated melodrama, nicely modulated acting, some smartly staged set-pieces. The look is distinctive, in a quietly old-fashioned way (few quick cuts, and only a few instances of the all-too-common handheld camera)--no small achievement on digital video.

Perhaps the first time the story really hooks its audience is the scene in the living room when the parents of Tae-Hoon's girlfriend Park Mi-Jeong confront him and his family (the two had gone off on a seaside winter break without telling anyone), and Mi-Jeong's father loses it--he's pulled a knife from an ankle holster and is stabbing the coffee table. Handheld shots (one of the few instances in the picture and one of the few times it's perfectly justified, I think) convey the chaos; jump cuts keep us startled, off-balance--suddenly he's slapping his daughter; suddenly he's smashing glass with a golf club. Suddenly--the most effective shot in the sequence, I think--Jang cuts to a television set turned up full volume, and the roar of the set suggests the panic inspired by violence better than any onscreen act (and people's reaction to the act) possibly could. It's as if everyone's mind were tuned to the same station and someone accidentally sat on the remote, sending the tuner skittering across several channels.

Yet another example--Jang cuts to a sudden shot of the girl's younger sister, face puffy for some reason; the camera pulls back and we realize that she's being strangled, the hands tight around her neck belonging to Mi-Jeong. The two sisters fight, and their kicking and spitting and shrieking--with the mother desperately trying to pull them apart--seems more authentic than any family interaction I've seen on recent mainstream movies.

While we're at it, I might as well point out that the adults here, from Mi-Jeong's parents to Tae-Hoon's patient, put-upon boss, seem more authentically sketched-in and performed than most other adults in recent teen pictures (a rare virtue for the genre, where adults are usually abusive or ineffectual cartoons rarely given their due, much less a point of view).

Towards the end, we see how the incident (their impromptu seaside vacation) and their subsequent enforced separation has shaped both Tae-Hoon and Mi-Jeong's lives. Tae Hoon can't seem to accept the death of their relationship; he goofs around, tries to follow Mi-Jeong, tries to see her outside of school, or outside her home; Mi-Jeong for her part seems to have made her decision and moved on. But our final glimpses of their respective lives seem to suggest that matters are more complicated--Tae Hoon after struggling so long has (as suggested by the serenity with which he rides away) apparently come to terms with his loss. Mi Jeong puts on an equally brave face, but as she sits on her gym bench we hear the soft sigh of surf, and we see her hair ruffled, as if by an ocean breeze. Jang seems to suggest that Mi-Jeong was every bit as affected as Tae-Hoon was by the experience, only she's done a better job of repressing it; the memory, however, may haunt her for some time, perhaps all her life. Sad, lovely little film.

Finally, after googling around for articles and pictures and videos concerning the award, I found this. Recorded during the Jeonju International Film Festival, in 2006.

Jang Kun-Jae's "Eighteen" wins the Dragons and Tiger's Award

Jang Kun-Jae's Eighteen wins the Dragons and Tigers Award

Ralston Jover's Bakal Boys (roughly translated: Scrap Metal Scavengers) won special mention.

Happy for these two films, but I really enjoyed all eight; each had its own look, its own point of view, its own urgent message to flash out to the world, and if I could I'd give 'em all an award and prize money. But this is the real world.

Of the other films--mind you, these are strictly my opinion, and not of my fellow jurors; they had their own favorites and reasons, and it's up to them to reveal it if they wish. But I've rarely been one to keep my thoughts to myself.

Bui Thac Chuyen's Adrift looked the most striking, with gorgeous shadowy cinematography edged by this lovely silver light. The story, about four men and women whose lives inextricably entangle, tended to remind me of a French erotic drama, only done better (maybe the problem with erotic French films nowadays is that everyone's done it all, seen it all; what you need is a few virgins thrown, male or female, the way this film does, to appreciate the tremendous force and fear sex can inspire).

I'm afraid Kim Ji-Hyun's Cats was the one I appreciated the least, at first; it took a second viewing to see the film's circular structure (a deejay whose voice is heard in the film's opening puts in a personal appearance in the end), and to realize that the film's occasionally awkward acting style is a small price to pay for the mostly naturalistic, mostly spontaneous look and feel of the film overall (I'm thinking of, among many others, Mario O'Hara's Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998)). I think Kim's less about the look of the picture and more about her characters--the lovemaking has a gentle erotic charge, nothing glossy and slick about it, the couples quarrel like real couples, and the editing among the three storylines (a gay couple; a dentist seeking a sperm donor; a young sculptor and the mother who wants to marry her off) is unfussy and unapologetic (the film cuts from one storyline to another with no-nonsense briskness, and it's up to you to keep apace).

Wu Haohao's Kun 1: Action mixes classical music, interviews, punk rock, personal diary and political rant to create a Godardian essay on the director's society and personal life. Perhaps the most sensational moment onscreen is an onscreen fellatio ("Is that you?" I asked; "yes," he replied without a trace of embarrassment), but the truly striking element in all this is the nostalgia Wu feels for the olden days of Mao, which he expresses in song, Johnny Rotten-style, as opposed to the materialistic spiritual corruption he sees eating away at the insides of his contemporaries. The film's not professionally done--some of the editing and sound mix is gnarly--but it's up close, and boy is it personal.

Extraordinary thing happened during the screening of Sasaki Omoi's Left Out: the director had a crisis of confidence and apologized for his film. I suppose all directors have moments they regret shooting in their films (some, Michael Bay comes to mind, have an entire career to repent), but I didn't see anything that needed urgent recanting, not right before the film's world premiere.

Like many initial outings this is a personal document--the characters are cartoonish, the yakuza figures manga versions of the real thing, but I see this as being basically Sasaki's story, the main character his fictional surrogate. All others are extensions of his persona (the yakuza are who he'd like to be; the girl is who he'd like to lay, and the boss is a freeze-frame portrait of who he will be, years from now), and he's in the process of working out just how much he'll take from the world at large before he snaps, what exactly will he do when that moment comes, and just how effective that moment will be in the general scheme of things. Bleakly honest and funny.

Mariko Tetsuya's Yellow Kid isn't so much a manga come to life as it is a lively manga about life--about unhappy people with complicatedly circular lives (Tamura takes up boxing to relieve his hostility; Hattori asks Tamura to model for his manga remake of the cartoon classic The Yellow Kid; Tamura accepts because the original model for the manga was WBA lightweight champion Mikuni Tokio, who inspired him to box; Tokio's girlfriend is Mana who once had a relationship with Hattori). Japanese passivity collides with Japanese aggression, and beautifully splashy unmanga-like art provides visual commentary. Fascinating film with fascinating ideas, and the meaning of the last shot (found after the credits) is fun to talk about afterward.

As mentioned at the ceremony and in the above article, Chris Chong's Karaoke was put aside during consideration, but it's really an impressive film. Almost nothing happens--a young man comes home, takes a modeling job, assures his mother he can take care of her and that everything will be fine, eventually contemplates leaving again, this time permanently. This "you can't go home again" microdrama is surrounded by the larger movement of a town transformed, said theme especially laid out in an extraordinary sequence where the main character Betik takes a walk. He wanders through a cathedral of tree trunks, basically towering palm trees that stand in silent attendance--an impressive shot, but as the sequence goes on and we see Betik's tiny figure walking slowly through the grove of giants, we realize that the trees aren't arranged randomly, but in a row. What we thought was a wild forest was actually a domesticated grove, and what looked like a ravishing example of proud, untouched nature was actually established by plantation owners. Cut to monumental piles of rotting palm fruit, haloed by flies, and the huge machines lifting the fruit on conveyor belts high up into the sky. This isn't nature but a parody of nature--agribusiness run amok, its plantations replacing local growth, its workers displacing local workers, its pesticide pollution contaminating local watershed, its very presence slowly corrupting the heart of this town.

Karaoke is basically about false fronts--Betik assuming a control over his life he doesn't really have, karaoke videos evoking emotions no one really feels, the silent palm giants representing a nature that doesn't really exist anymore. Wonderful film.

Vancouver International Film Festival

So I'm at the Vancouver International Film Festival and seen a few films--can't quite say anything about the films we're judging yet--hopefully I can write something about them some time after the festival's ended. But I've seen films outside of the competition as well, and they're quite a memorable collection.

Hasn't been a pleasant trip; caught a bug on the flight over (I thought American airlines had the worst food--paid $7 for a cold, cardboard-y Quiznos roast beef sandwich at Air Canada which promptly dropped straight to the floor of my belly like a brick, and reacted I presume with the stomach acids there. The aforementioned organ started swelling--and swelling--and swelling--till I felt like John Hurt suffering indigestion in Alien (only it wasn't the chest my creature was threatening to burst out of). In-flight entertainment was Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, which as it turns out was a godsend: fifteen minutes of Michael Bay's muscular visual style and I passed out for the rest of the trip.

Ranks way up there as one of the worst flights I've ever had, while the meal is easily the worse I've ever had, period. Have been chained to my hotel room ever since--can't be more than twenty minutes away, or disaster will occur.

And the worst of it is that Vancouver's a lovely city, all tree-lined boulevards and a distinct mix of modern skyscrapers and lovely Art Deco buildings, at the moment experiencing unseasonally sunny weather--love walking the streets with a crisp breeze blowing and the sunlight turning everything bright and clear. The food--what I see of it, passing by windows--is an eclectic mix, but with the coast so near, emphasizing fresh seafood (I'd kill for sashimi right now, only I'm afraid it'll kill me first).

Of the films I'd managed to see--Eugenio Polgovsky's The Inheritors (2008), about child laborers in Mexico, reminds me of Ditsy Carolino's Children Only Once, and it's interesting to see where one is stronger than the other. Polgovsky has a pitch-perfect tone--nonjudgmental, no commentary and very little music. We develop our own attitudes towards the children, and we see not just their suffering but their ways of coping and of being despite all the work and harsh conditions, well, children.

Not that Polgovsky whitewashes conditions. We see children struggle to put together bundles of sticks tied together by crude cords made of plant fiber; we see kids with gloves whack away at sugar cane with heavy machetes (you half expect him to miss and knock his legs off their feet). What we don't get is the kind of information Carolino gives us when she talks about children carrying cement bags breathing in the dust, which forms a kind of hardening mud in their lungs (they chug gin afterwards, in an effort to clear their air tubes), or the nightmarish fairy-tale ambiance Carolino achieves by shooting in black-and-white video. The Inheritors is an impressive film, nevertheless, worth watching for the immersive verite poetry.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll finds him in fantasy mode--basically an inflatable sex toy come to life. The ending goes on interminably and there are touches of sodden sentiment, but I do love how Kore-eda works out the details that remind us that the heroine is basically made out of air and latex (the mold lines, the translucent shadows) and how he relies on largely on-camera effects as opposed to the more popular digital. Also love Du-na Bae's performance, which is key to our believing the whole airy, delicate film. Ron Howard did something similar with Splash way back when, but I prefer Kore-eda's subtler, far lighter touch.

Bong Joon-Ho's Mother is terrific fare, possibly his best work. Where his Gwoemul worked in stops and starts, careened all over the place in terms of emotional tone and genre, in Mother Bong seems completely in control. Hard to see the comedy here, but it is dark comedy, nevertheless--Bong pokes not-too-gentle fun at the stereotype of the smothering Korean mother as he spins out for us the tale of one mother's love for her mentally challenged child, the determination and ferocity involved when said child is accused of the murder of a young woman.