Resident Evil: Retribution (Paul WS Anderson, 2012)

 Poetry in motion

Surprised to see Dave Kehr interviewed on Movie Morlocks; was even more surprised to see that Kehr is a fan of Paul Anderson--W.S., not Thomas--and that he loved Resident Evil: Retribution. Did not know Kehr was an Anderson fan. 

Not a big fan, myself (thought Anderson's Death Race was a mere shadow of Paul Bartel's 1975 satiric original), but did like Soldier, Anderson's science-fiction remake of George Stevens' Shane which, taking its cue from Kurt Russell's expressionless title performance, had a sneaky understated sense of humor. If you gaze at the soldier's genetically impassive face for any length of time you start reading emotions into it, much like a Rorschach blot; I thought this both a clever parody of the action hero's traditional impassiveness and a surprisingly effective way to suggest soulfulness (?!) in a science fiction action flick (these soldiers may be genetically altered to minimize the impact of pain, guilt, shame but nevertheless they feel these emotions--and the fact that said emotions have been trained out of them and still manage to register suggest the power of these suppressed feelings). Later when you're more accustomed to their stylized (Bressonian?) acting you can read pages into their expressionless mugs: a mountain of sarcasm in a slightly raised brow, a floodplain of sorrow in a downturned mouth.

Several comments raised my brow in the Resident Evil interview--I suppose one can see Milla Jovovich's Alice being lead heroine as some kind of triumph for the feminist cause, but video games (and their big-screen adaptations)  use sexy female protagonists (Lara Croft, anyone?) so often it's practically a cliche. Same with the Umbrella Corporation--faceless corporate villains are a classic trope in the genre, nothing truly innovative about their use.

Also a pity he needed to use Anderson to bash Joss Whedon's work. Whedon possibly lost some street cred with the ubersuccess of his The Avengers (he's establishment now, for better or worse), but I've always thought his writing sparkled (Cabin in the Woods) and his directing capable of continuity and flow (perhaps not necessarily in this multimillion production--though I'd cite Black Widow's escape early in the picture--but in titles like Serenity and the "Once More With Feeling" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). He can even do musical numbers, always a plus in my book ("Once More with Feeling," Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog).

Those points set aside, I can see Anderson's film being a continuation of what the Hong Kong filmmakers were doing in the '80s and early '90s; not so much Tsui Hark as John Woo, with his penchant for fetishized gunplay and stylized homoeroticism. Not a lot of development with relationships in this, homoerotic or otherwise, but plenty of development of action sequences, from handgun to automatic rifle to rocket-propelled grenade, with side trips into weighted chains and curved blades along the way.  Plenty of actual as opposed to digitized stunts-- on occasion Alice will face a CGI creature, which she mostly disposes of with a brief strafing and a belt full of explosives; the real confrontations involve human adversaries doing non-digital kicks and spins, in knock-em-down-drag-em-out fights that recall (distantly but authentically) Drunken Master 2.

And they're dances; they're exuberant exhibitions of balletic motion, done with grace and skill; Anderson shoots them in such a way that the movements remain clear in your head, entire sequences glitter like elaborate jewelry in the mind (that glorious moment when, at the beginning of this Resident Evil, we get a slow-motion reverse-play recap of the ending of the previous Resident Evil). Astaire would approve, I think; Kelly too, though I suspect the one who would truly clap his hands in sardonic appreciation would probably be Bob Fosse. What can I say about Resident Evil: Retribution? Best dance movie I've seen in a while, easy. 

9.26.12

Armando 'Bing' Lao, 2026 National Artist for Film

Armando 'Bing' Lao is 2026's National Artist for Film

This September 2026 Armando 'Bing' Lao (1948 - 2024) was posthumously granted the title of National Artist of the Philippines, generally considered the highest honor the state can give one of its citizens.

Coyote vs Acme (Dave Green, 2026)

Coming toon

I saw Dave Green's Coyote vs Acme and-- surprise surprise-- liked it. 

Didn't sound promising. The premise itself is looney tunes-- that Wile E. Coyote would finally come to his senses and attempt that most American of undertakings, file a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation; that the case would blow up into a congressional hearing commanding nationwide attention; and that this whole silly drama would be material enough to fill a hundred minute feature. 

Not to mention the real-world decision of Warner Discovery to treat the picture as a 30 million dollar tax writeoff; the struggle to find an alternative distributor; the last-minute rescue by Ketchup Entertainment, which bought the movie for fifty million. 

The big online fuss surrounding its unlikely commercial release; the basically low boxoffice returns which, most unlikely of all, barely fazes the fans-- no one is blaming Ketchup, and a handful of articles have called the release a 'win' despite the modest numbers.

The End of Oak Street (David Robert Mitchell, 2026)

Spielberg salad

David Robert Mitchell's The End of Oak Street is a bowl of Spielberg movie parts (ET, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park to name an obvious few) torn into bitesized pieces and tossed together, with a dash of Robert Zemeckis for plot dressing. Less obvious are bits of tone and detail from classic science fiction author Clifford D Simak, who liked to set one fantastic premise after another in a smalltown setting ("The Big Front Yard," Way Station).

Spielberg and Zemeckis are quick handy labels to slap on this concoction but I submit Simak is key-- not just to this picture but to much of what Spielberg (and Mitchell here) is doing. You get a patiently built-up portrait of suburban (in Simak's case rural) life, you're introduced to characters and their dynamic within the family, who in turn form relationships with the community at large. Then something happens and we're shown the characters' increasingly panicked reaction to events, the story's eventual resolution ideally a natural outgrowth of what the characters have learned along the way.

Asedillo (Celso Ad Castillo, 1971)

Gun and typewriter

By 1971 Celso Ad Castillo had written and directed a number of features when he was tapped by Fernando Poe Jr. to direct a biopic on one Teodoro Asedillo, a former schoolteacher and police chief turned revolutionary during the American Occupation. 

Apparently the two were feeling each other out. Ad Castillo may be a veteran filmmaker, having written eighteen scripts and nine features previously, but FPJ (as Poe is popularly known) had at this point directed eight, produced fifty, acted in approximately ninety. Ad Castillo must have acquitted himself well; FPJ called him 'my little genius' and asked him to direct three more pictures in quick succession (Ang Alamat, 1972; Sto Domingo, 1972; and Esteban, 1973)

FPJ was said to have impressed Ad Castillo in turn with the scene of Asedillo addressing the people of San Antonio (see pic above) who, thanks to American propaganda, have lost faith in him. The shoot happened in the latter part of the day, involved a high wide shot with plenty of extras, was eight pages long on paper including an intense monologue; on top of which they had already been delayed some three to four hours setting up. FPJ was exhausted; his brow furrowed while reading the script, and no one knew if he was happy or not with what Ad Castillo had written. 

Then the movie star launched into it: a long, involved speech at the end of which he was yelling himself hoarse, and you felt the frustration exhaustion and anger in his voice wasn't all acting.*

The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026)

Long day's journey into night

(Warning: story and plot twists of the movie-- and the three thousand year old epic poem the movie is based on-- discussed in explicit detail!)

First things first: Got no problem with Lupita Nyong'o's Helen/Clytemnestra or Elliot Page's Sinon (not Achilles as conservative pundits had complained about early on); Helen's fierce bitterness about being pawn and property to Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and Sinon's hauntingly solemn reproaches to Odysseus for using him as bait are rare bright spots in the movie. 

I do have problems with Matt Damon as Odysseus. 

Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004)

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

Wolfgang Peterson's Troy is an odd mix-- a summer blockbuster with the patina of a sincere attempt at adapting a literary classic painted all over its bright surface. David Benioff's script, loosely-- very loosely-- based on Homer's epic, tries to re-imagine the story as it might really have happened, that is, closer to what people might conceivably have thought and felt, filtered through what we might feel happened. For starters, Benioff (a newcomer, but not an entirely inept one--he wrote the novel 25th Hour and adapted it for Spike Lee to direct) does away with all the inconvenient gods and goddesses, without whom you get the impression Greeks and Trojans couldn't put one foot in front of the other much less wage a war. Then he incorporates a more cynical, more realpolitik motive for Agamemnon (Brian Cox) to go into battle: not to win back his brother Menelaus' (Brendan Gleeson) stolen wife Helen (Diane Kruger), but to use her kidnapping as a pretext to move on Troy, a bid to add the mighty kingdom to his already impressive collection of conquered territories (an act of arrogant aggression, in effect, by an established world power).

Leviticus (Adrian Chiarella, 2026)

Abomination

Year is only about halfway done and I'll say it: Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus is the best horror of the year.  I mean-- something better might come in October (Eggers' Werwulf comes out December), but can't imagine what that might be, or how it can be.

Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg, 2026)

I'm an alien, I'm an illegal alien

Easy enough to call Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day his reworking retelling reboot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film so elegantly worked out on the big screen you can recall most shots as being not just effortlessly lyrical but inevitable, locking in place to present a vast sound and light show, a once in a lifetime rock concert burnt into your brain the way the shape of Devil's Tower is burnt into Roy Neary's.

Disclosure is a different creature flavorwise. Spielberg's visual grammar (using his present favorite cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) has grown more sophisticated, his color palette more complex and mutedly realistic, his editing chops (with the relatively unfamiliar Sarah Boshar) if anything more daringly intricate. But that wide-eyed spirit is still there, for better or worse, that willingness to lift one's head up and look around to check if there's someone really out there. 

Pressure (Anthony Maras, 2026)

Sunny with a chance of rain 

Anthony Maras' Pressure (2026)-- based on a 2014 play by David Haig-- answers a question no one thought to ask before: can a riveting thriller be made out of weathermen? Not storm chasers (looking at you Twister); not disaster flicks involving climate change (You too Day After Tomorrow and Geostorm)-- I mean weathermen, folk who pore over isobaric maps and stare at thermometers and take windspeed readings. The science nerds.

Apparently the answer is yes if-- big if-- 1) We're talking Operation Overlord, 160,000 troops launched on 7,000 ships supported by 12,000 aircraft, arguably the largest seaborne invasion in history; and 2) Landing point's on the Normandy coast in France, at the center of one of the most unpredictable weather systems on the planet. 

Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026)

Labyrinth

Talked about Curry Barker's Obsession and how his premise of the obsessed lover isn't anything new; Kane Parsons' Backrooms is if anything even less new dressed in world wide web clothing.

First to come to mind are the mindscapes described by Stanley Kubrick late in his career-- the vast redcarpeted mansion in Eyes Wide Shut; the urban ruins that stand at the end of Full Metal Jacket; above all the Overlook in The Shining with its infinite corridors dotted with secretive doors, looping on itself again and again like an intestine and lined with a carpet of repeated design dyed that maddeningly distinct burnt orange you see in interiors of the late '70s and '80s. Folks always maintained Jack Torrance was nuts from the beginning of the picture; I think that rug helped him along. 

I Love Boosters (Boots Riley, 2026)

Marximum overdrive

Boots Riley's I Love Boosters is a truckload of fun. Gang of shoplifters (The Velvet Gang-- Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige), Sade (Naomi Ackie)) prey on a chain of fashion stores (Metro Designers) owned by ultrarich Christie Smith (Demi Moore); they're joined by Chinese factory worker Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and her band of laborers: high-style hijinks ensue. 

Obsession (Curry Barker, 2025)

I'd do anything for love

(Warning: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail)

Curry Barker Obsession (2025) is basically W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," and "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" meet Fatal Attraction and Misery-- nothing startling new, only he's leaned into the sneaky comic spin of the premise, has a terrific cast to inhabit the roles, and the visual chops to tell the story with snap and zing.

Lord of the Flies (1954) v Lord of the Flies (1963) v Alkitrang Dugo (Clotted Blood, 1975) v Lord of the Flies (1990) v Lord of the Flies (Netflix, 2026)

Pig hunt

(Warning: plot and surprise twists in book and TV series discussed in explicit detail)

I remember reading William Golding's 1954 debut novel as a teen and having nightmares about running through the jungle with other boys in pursuit, waving sticks sharpened at both ends-- did not help the development of my socialization skills, lemme tell you. 

The book comes off as a fable, the characters barely sketched-in symbols, the theme clear enough and neat enough for literature majors to milk for their theses: humans have this ingrown tendency to violence, and we flirt with or ignore it at our peril. Really that simple, the novel's chief virtue and key weakness, and folks who seek to adapt it flirt with this fact or ignore it at their peril. 

Re-Wind (Hisayasu Sato, 1988)

For Adults Only

If Peeping Tom and Videodrome and Don't Torture a Duckling had a bastard child this might be the sleazy result. 

The plot hinges around a series of snuff videotapes circulating Tokyo's underworld, and both a private investigator and the janitor in a porn video arcade are obsessed with discovering the source. But that's not the film's priority, which seems twofold, pretentious and prehensile both: to indulge the filmmaker's obsessions, which include celebrating his influences (Powell's vivd color palette, Cronenberg's body horror) and attempting to transcend them without a comparable budget; and adhering to the strict conditions of the genre's format-- a sexual encounter every ten minutes, a precisely titrated amount of gore, and (above all) no genital exposure.

That lack of a real budget is frustrating. The videos themselves when viewed aren't all that transgressive with POV footage recording fuzzy imagery and some clumsily executed onscreen mutilation (there's a bowl of spaghetti however that's bluntly effective, easily the most horrifying shock cut in the picture). The sex is more entertaining, and the fact that Sato has to come up with something kinky with the actors not exposing their crotch or even shedding their underwear becomes a real challenge-- just how much pleasure can you get out of sucking at an erection through cottonwear?

The cumulative blueball feel does get to you-- at a certain point you find yourself fastforwarding to the more interesting-looking stuff and rewinding to make sure you've squeezed out all the juices; you also, I suspect, find yourself more susceptible to Sato's more incidental effects. Perhaps his most satisfying moments aren't the scenes of extensive skin contact (or rather skin-through-silk contact), or the faintly risible sight of the killer swinging a spring-loaded knife mounted on a video camera mounted on a tripod like an ax (the weapon seems more threatening when the metal-tipped tripod legs are used as a spear) but the transitional images, the gliding shots through ultramodern cityscapes to end at a chainlink fence, behind which we see an abandoned fridge door gaping wide, inside of which lies a severed hand clutching a videotape (might as well throw in Bunuel as one of the director's sublimated heroes). Perhaps my favorite is a nothing image, a throwaway shot of buildings standing against brilliant sky, the harsh sunlight flagellated by tree branches in a stiff wind. Light me a cigarette, honey, I could use the postcoital smoke. 

(Postscript: pause before the rabbit hole and enter at your own risk. Turns out Criterion Channel only showed one of Sato's more palatable films, and if you do a little googling to specific websites you can see his darker (if still genre-constricted-- no genitals!) work, some of them unabashedly queer. Secret Garden (1987) is a neat reworking of The Story of O with payback ending ingeniously appended, and Silencer Made of Glass is a lurid bit of sadomasochism with flash suppressor attached. Nothing wishy-washy here, only fetishes and fixations being thoroughly indulged)

The Quiet Man: The Films of Mario O'Hara

In 2005 we put out a book: Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema

In 2026 we're doing it again.

The Quiet Man: The Films of Mario O'Hara was twenty-one years in the making, a collection of pieces new and old on the filmmaker plus a fistful of photographs, some of them never seen before, with a focus on arguably his greatest muse Nora Aunor, and we're launching the book on Sat April 25 (five days after O'Hara's 80th birthday) at 3 PM in Archivo 1984, 5F Building A, Karrivin Plaza, 2316 Chino Roces Avenue, Makati City, Philippines.

Be there if you dare.

Sirat (Oliver Laxe, 2025)

Just deserts

Oliver Laxe's Sirat is a little hard to describe: Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona) look for his daughter Mar in a rave in southern Morocco. The pair wander aimlessly while the dancers surround them in an assortment of clothing haircuts hair dyes tattoos piercings, all swaying to the pulsing rhythm. They talk to people, hand out photos; no one has seen her, but there's another rave, closer to Mauritania, where they might find her. 

(Warning: story and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail!)

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)

Bounce

Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme takes its cue from its central character: brassy, loud, unrelentingly annoying, chronicling the life of one Marty Mauser, a nascent shoe salesman and up-and-coming pingpong player. Marty to put it mildly likes to burn both ends of his candle: he hustles players at the local bar; hustles his rich friend Dion (Luke Manley) to finance production of orange pingpong balls with his name printed on them; hustles his married friend Rachel (Odessa A'zion) for sex at the shoe store's back room; hustles his Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) for $700 to help finance a trip to the British Open in London (to be fair Uncle Murray's hustling Marty too, trying to manipulate the young man into staying on as salesman while having an affair with Marty's mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher)).

Timothee Chalamet trades in his Kwisatch Haderach stillsuit for a long-sleeved blouse unbuttoned to reveal the sweatsoaked undershirt, glues a dead caterpillar to his upper lip the way I assume Guy Gardner likes to sport a bowl cut-- as a loud 'FUCK YOU' to anyone who objects to his grating personality. It's perfect; like him or not as an actor, have to admit this role fits Chalamet's less-than-charming persona to a t, down to the nipples standing defiantly erect 'neath the thin cotton.

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

The stripping of Joan

Finally saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc on projected video (thanks to Alliance Francais), with music but without subtitles (no thanks Alliance, though to be fair they tried their level best to get one), so I watched without having understood a word. Nevertheless: an incredible film, one of the greatest-- silent French or otherwise-- ever.

The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc

The Fashion of Joan of Arc

Carl Dreyer’s 1928 French silent La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of the greatest films-- French, silent, otherwise-- ever;  Luc Besson’s 1999 The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc is possibly one of the silliest-- French, epic, otherwise-- and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Such is progress.

Dreyer’s film is an astonishingly spare work, essentially a hundred and ten minutes of gigantic close-ups strung together and little else. No fat nothing extraneous-- each shot adds to the film’s sense of inevitability, each cut (1,500 of them) accelerates momentum. Besson’s at two hours and twenty minutes has little meat-- as if Besson had tossed in everything learned in grade school about Joan but stopped short before freshman year. Dreyer’s has the courage of a consummate artist with an idea of what he wants to present to the world;  Besson’s has the courage of a consummate hack, piling special effect upon special effect in the hope that heat and pressure would build inside his digitally enhanced big-budgeted compost heap and ignite to yield a vision.