Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 8: "Got a light?"

Ignition

(WARNING story discussed in explicit detail--though how comprehensible details may be is a matter of debate, with both discussion and debate an exercise in futility)

The episode's putative title-- "Got a light?" sounds odd on first reading (online you see it under the episode's thumbnail pic) gains significance later on. 

Starts off plottily enough: Evil Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan) and less evil Ray (George Griffith) have blackmailed their way out of prison, shaken away any electronic tracers*, turned off into a small side road (how can Lynch fill interminable shots of cars nosing down dirt roads with such dread?). They confront each other, demanding money demanding information, with C pointing the 'friend' he pulled from the glove compartment (a special request planted there by the prison warden) at Ray.

Only C's gun somehow fails to fire. Only Ray in a clever twist produces his own gun shooting C twice in the gut. Only when C drops the lights start flickering and shadowy figures emerge from the woods, dancing around C's body, pulling apart his belly, smearing his own gore on his face, squeezing out an egg sac larva with BOB visibly floating inside (Ray: "I saw something in Cooper. It might be the key to what this is all about.").

High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

Heaven and hell

Akira Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) may not be on the level of Seven Samurai but it is a great crime thriller, perhaps one of the greatest.

The Kingdom (Michael Tuviera, 2024)

Freedomland

Michael Tuviera's The Kingdom is that rarity in Filipino films, a high-concept production that in this case answers the question: what if the Spaniards never landed? What if the Philippines-- here renamed Kalayaan (Freedom)-- remained Malay in culture and tradition?

Green Bones (Zig Dulay, 2024)

Presumed innocent

Zig Dulay's Green Bones from a script by Ricky Lee and Angeli Guidaya-Atienza (story by Joseph Conrad Rubio, Kristian Julao, Angeli Guidaya-Atienza, and Ricky Lee) turns on the premise that a convict judged and sentenced isn't always guilty, and truth is always more complicated.  

Having more than passing familiarity with correctional facilities I'd say the answer is: it depends. When you talk to a convict they're always innocent, but when you read their files or talk to someone familiar with their case they're always guilty.

Uninvited (Dan Villegas, 2024)

Gatecrasher

Dan Villegas' Uninvited (2024) with a script by Dodo Dayao is unashamed to flaunt its pulp-fiction credentials, everything from Tarantino's Kill Bill to Ferrara's Ms. 45 to Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood (from which Tarantino stole much of Kill Bill) to Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black-- the Woman Seeking Revenge flick is a suitably disreputable genre that merits revisiting time and time again, if only to allow a director to get his rocks off exercising his filmmaking chops. 

Isang Himala (A Miracle, Pepe Diokno, 2024)

It's a miracle

Let's get the million-peso question out of the way: from my limited perspective Isang Himala does not measure up to Ishmael Bernal's 1982 classic film, not quite, but does easily stand out as the best of the four films I saw at the 2024 Metro Manila Film Festival. 

"But how can this be?!" you ask. Well let me tell you.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Anos de Soledad, Alex Garcia Lopez, Laura Mora, 2024)

One hundred years of telenovela

I remember the first time I opened Gabriel Garcia Marquez's celebrated novel and read the sentence "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." It was an intriguing opening line and I was hooked, but for some reason never made it past the second page. I put the book aside, and didn't bothered touching it again for two years.

Then sitting in a beach-- in the shade, away from that ridiculous scorching sun,  while friends were in the water enjoying themselves-- I had no other choice but to pick up the book again, and this time (I think it was when Jose Arcadio, Colonel Aureliano's father, after many intricate calculations, announced to his wife that the world was round like an orange) I was well and truly hooked. I read till the sun gave up its plan to burn me and sank back into the sea to bide its time; read deep while the moon rose and kept me company; read till the moon gave up and bade farewell and sank back down and the cocks started to crow; read till there was nothing left to read, and when I put the volume aside saw my old nemesis peeking out from over the ocean's edge with a spark in its eye, fresh and ready for another round.