Best of 2001

A film odyssey

The search for cinema in 2001 started out with one of the less admirable, Yam Llaranas’ Balahibong Pusa (Pussy Hairs), an unwholesome mix of MTV, San Miguel Beer commercials, and Mike de Leon’s Kisapmata. It was screened side-by-side with Gil Portes’ Gatas sa Dibdib ng Kaaway (In the Bosom of the Enemy), a passably crafted (meaning it didn’t look like a San Miguel Beer commercial) love triangle between a woman, a guerilla, and a Japanese officer in World War 2.

Hollywood looked thinner than usual--not just ribs exposed but backbone, with movies like John Landis’ Susan’s Plan, Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hank’s decent not extraordinary Castaway, and Mr. Madonna Ciccione (sorry, Guy Richie’s) totally familiar Snatch (basically Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels with the volume cranked up). Slightly more interesting were Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot, Lasse Halstrom’s Chocolat -- personal, not quite visionary. Then there’s Kevin Smith, whose Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back proves as eloquently as ever that Smith should do radio.

Possibly the best of the mainstream movies would be those found at water’s edge--Steven Soderbergh's epic (if patchy) Traffic; Philip Kaufman's sanitized though entertaining Quills; and Robert Altman’s strange and strangely playful Dr. T and the Women.

Blunders in the big-budgets--Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, managing to make the extraordinary seem syrupy and stupid; Ridley Scott’s Hannibal manages to make his slipshod Gladiator look classy; and Michael Bay’s atom bomb of a project Pearl Harbor, which asserts the novel theory that the Japanese started the Pacific War so that Josh Hartnett could impregnate Kate Beckinsale. And then there's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, of which the less is said the better.

It wasn’t all multimilliondollar duds. Ringo Lam’s latest Van Damme vehicle Replicant features Lam’s characteristic low-key storytelling, always a pleasure; John Carpenter’s Ghost of Mars is his umpteenth remake of Rio Bravo, still fun and this time with Martian zombies. Jeepers Creepers is Victor Salva’s partially successful attempt at horror, with one of the tensest first ten minutes I’ve sat through recently. And Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes was a keen pleasure with Helena Bonham Carter giving the hottest performance of the year, as an ape with a thing for humans.

This year’s European festival offerings seemed about as exciting as mud, with the marked exception of Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland--kitchen-sink realism done by a talented filmmaker--and Michael Hannake’s Code Inconnu (Code Unknown), about the communication that occurs between people, or failure of.

Children’s fare didn’t fare too well--Disney’s Atlantis  was a stunning bore, Pixar’s Monsters Inc lighthearted fluff. The most memorable is easily Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson's Shrek with its parody of Disneyland and former Disney executive Michael Eisner--as Shrek notes gazing at the town's impressive collection of towers: "he must be compensating for something."

As for Filipino films, it has not been a good year. Llaranas came out with the incoherent Radyo (Radio), while Assunta de Rossi starred in three stinkers--Maryo delos Reyes’ Red Diaries; Joey Romero’s Sisid  (or Dive, with a storyline that sounds suspiciously like Lou Ye’s Suzhou River) and Joel Lamangan’s Hubog (Wretched Lives). And Erik Matti decided (or so he claimed on premiere night at UP Film Center) that he was trying to make his own Manila By Night with Dos Ekis (Double Cross)--a movie twice as bad as the original Ekis (Cross), one of the worst films of 1999.

Then there's Joyce Bernal’s romantic comedies. Her Pangako…Ikaw Lang (Promise…There’s Only You) and Pagdating ng Panahon (When the Moment Comes) are unpretentiously commercial fare; they’re also well-paced and well-told (Bernal started out as an editor). Chito Rono teamed with Amado Lao to make Rono’s best work in years, La Vida Rosa (Life of Rosa), a noir thriller with style and  heart. Tikoy Aguiluz and Ricky Lee adapted Nick Joaquin’s play Tatarin (Summer Solstice) and produced Aguiluz's most lighthearted work yet, a stylish erotic comedy about the War between the Sexes.

The year ended in a flourish of fine films, thanks to Cinemanila--Im Kwon Taek’s elemental Chunyang, Nonzee Nimibutr’s sensual Jan Dara, Jan Svankmajer’s darkly funny Otesanek, Harry Sinclair’s poetic The Price of Milk, Danis Tanovic’s blackly comic No Man’s Land, Jung Ji-Woo’s ironically titled Happy End, and Arturo Ripstein’s blasphemously beautiful Divine.

The best films of the year? I can think of two--Kim Ki Duk’s The Isle, a film about a quiet lake resort and its wordless woman caretaker that is by turns sexual, sadistic, and surreal (sometimes all three at the same time), and Lav Diaz’s Batang West Side (West Side Avenue), a five-hour meditation on the Filipino-American community in particular and the Filipino people in general. Quite an odyssey, with Batang West Side being the particularly important find.

First published in Businessworld 1.3.02