Films of 2023

List of 2023

Not everything I've seen for the year but everything I think deserves to be noted, for good or bad. More mainstream than I'd like but life happens. I do try note films I've seen but not newly released in 2023, and why I thought them worth talking about. 

Amo (Brillante Mendoza, 2018)

Who's the boss?

When Netflix announced that it was airing pro-Duterte filmmaker Brillante Mendoza mini-series (produced by TV5 Network), the intention was made clear from the get-go: to present "the other side of the coin" (as Mendoza states in an interview) of the drug war: "Yes, it (the drug war) is necessary for the Philippines--not only for the Philippines but also other countries afflicted with the drug problem." 

When interviewed by The Telegraph Mendoza's response (after the outraged response to his statement) was more measured: "This series will show the two sides of the coin," he says (italics mine). "The message is that we should all understand that there is a (drugs) situation in the Philippines…and now the government has really got very tough about it." He adds "I’m not saying that it should be addressed in the way that this government is dealing with it. But people tend to criticise and to give their opinions without even going deeper into the issue."

At least one human rights group has already voiced its opinion: The International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) on hearing Netflix's declaration that the series is a "bold and suspenseful show that has the potential of capturing thrill-seeking audiences worldwide" has replied in an open letter: "This is a humanitarian crisis, not entertainment fodder."

The series itself? Well let me tell you.

Ma' Rosa (Brilliante Mendoza, 2016)

Swap heads

Brillante Mendoza's latest feature executes the immersive handheld camera style of filmmaking as well as could be done despite the small production budget of a little over fifteen million pesos (roughly $300,000).

A New Golden Age: Contemporary Philippine Cinema

A third golden age?

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from June 1 to the 25th will hold an exhibit titled "A New Golden Age: Contemporary Philippine Cinema"--basically a sampling of seventeen Filipino films from a broad range of directors: Erik Matti, Ato Bautista, Brillante Mendoza, Raya Martin, Lav Diaz to name a few. 

Wonderful tribute to what I agree is a wonderful development in our turbulent country: a (relatively) young generation of filmmakers funded by new forms of financing taking up the digital lens and recording not just what's happening around them but what's happening in their heads their memories their imagination. 

Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza, 2009) (revised 5.15.11)

Bloody hell

(Revised 5.15.11)

Finally got to see Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009). Apologize for the two-year delay; I can only say said delay was partly due to life getting in the way, partly due to technical difficulties...

Finally got to see the film, finally can directly respond to Roger Ebert's plaintive declaration that this is "the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival" by saying: Mr. Ebert--grow up.

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.

Brillante Mendoza in New York

New York Times' Manohla Dargis reviews Brillante Mendoza's Serbis (Service, 2008)

And for good measure, Dennis Lim writes about Mendoza and his films.

Have unjustly neglected Mendoza, I think; while I've seen some of his films, for one reason or another I've put off writing about him in-depth--a disservice, since he is the internationally best-known Filipino filmmaker since Lino Brocka.

His Kaleldo (Summer Heat, 2006), which incidentally won the NETPAC Award at the 2006 Jeonju International Film Festival is a lovely slice-of-life melodrama, the three interweaving stories of three daughters, as captured in bits and pieces over seven summers in the daughters' lives. Of the daughters it's Cherry Pie Picache's story that leaves the strongest impression--Cherry Pie, a character actor of considerable skill who has played supporting roles in films often unworthy of her talent, shines as the quietly suffering tomboy, unwanted and largely ignored by the family patriarch. Mendoza's handheld camera, much in the fashion of the Dardennes brothers and cinema verite, gives the stories a distinct caught-in-the-moment feel.

His Manoro the same year makes the initial misstep of inserting a slightly condescending tone towards tribal people in the opening titles of the film, then goes on to be to my mind Mendoza's finest work. The film--again with his trademark handheld camera, shooting in lengthy takes--makes little comment, and barely even has a plot (basically it's about a young woman named Jonalyn, and her attempts to educate her Aeta family and neighbors on how to read and write mainstream Filipino, at least enough to cast their ballots in the elections to be held the next day--that, and her search for her grandfather, who has disappeared into the forests to hunt wild boar).

Jonalyn is not a little inventive (to help her pupils remember the alphabet she resorts to describing their geometrical shapes and swoops and lines) and a bit of a bully, wheedling, nagging, pushing people towards political participation. Mendoza stubbornly refuses to comment on the relevance of the election process to a people barely out of the Paleolithic Age, technologically speaking. Aside from the opening titles, he refuses to pick sides on the issue of integrating with modern society, and I think the film gains greatly from this--we're left as silent witnesses to the Aetnas' lives, drawing our own conclusions as to their seemingly sad isolation from the rest of society, their seemingly quiet dignity, clinging to the tatters of their cultural identity.

Foster Child (2007) is Mendoza's take on the system of foster child care and adoption set up in the Philippines, so well-oiled and organized it's practically down to a science, thanks to adoptive parents like Thelma (again Cherry Pie, again terrific). Thelma may live in the heart of Manila's slums, but she runs her crowded household with a quiet if quietly chaotic efficiency, and she takes proper care of John-John (Kier Segundo), her adopted son, raising him as if her own.

The film is an admirable exercise in slice-of-life filmmaking; all the minutiae of slum life is captured but rarely to the point of tedium, showing us how the slum dwellers feed, bathe, pass the time; it goes on to show us the various duties of foster mothers, how they are paid, how their umbrella organization is organized (Thelma is like a subcontractor who earns commission for every child she successfully brings in for adoption). The film errs in perhaps only one or two details--a schoolteacher snapping at John-John (who suffers from stage fright during a school theater production)sounds loudly out of place (most Filipino parents would snap back at the teacher's unheard-of rudeness)--but overall the tone is authentic (Thelma puzzling out the mysteries of modern hotel plumbing is surprising and funny and--well, it feels true).

In the end the film becomes some kind of domestic thriller: can Thelma keep her composure, even when about to lose the child she raised for three years? Will she lose her composure--was all that care and loving poured into John-John mere professional childrearing, or does she beneath her serenely maternal demeanor truly care for the boy after all? Mendoza holds his cards close to his chest; you wait with baited breath, wondering when if ever will he (or Thelma) show his (or her) hand.

Tirador (Slingshot, 2007) is arguably Mendoza's attempt at urban noir; more, at that subset of urban noir great Filipino filmmakers can't seem to resist--that is, noir films set in Manila. Lino Brocka did his (Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975)); so did Ishmael Bernal (City After Dark, 1980) and Celso Ad. Castillo (Burlesk Queen (Burlesque Queen, 1978)). Mario O'Hara did what might be considered a trilogy (Condemned. 1984; Bulaklak sa City Jail (Flowers of the City Jail, 1984); Bagong Hari (The New King, 1986)).

Mendoza also evokes echoes of another subgenre, that of urban youth dramas, and again the roll call is intimidating--Fernando Mereilles and Katie Lund's Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002); Hector Babenco's Pixote (1981); Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados (1950); even Vittorio de Sica's Sciuscia (Shoeshine, 1946).

Kudos and due respect to Mendoza for trying to throw his own hat in such a prestigious ring. The results of his attempts are memorable, if somewhat mixed--the Manila slums are introduced early on in an unstoppable police raid, with the city's finest breaking into an endless number of shanties and plywood bedrooms, exposing any number of crimes and sexual acts in progress. Not too crazy about some of the filmmaking--the jump-cuts, the swinging handheld footage (so serene in his earlier films, so violent here), the in-your-face staging.

Mendoza seems to be experimenting in the language of noir, and some of the experiments work (a nicely elliptical interrogation scene involving a police officer and his student suspect), some I feel don't (the aforementioned jump-cuts). He is developing as a filmmaker, however, and one can't begrudge him the freedom to attempt new styles, new subject matter. Easily an important new voice in a remarkably vigorous and varied independent Filipino digital cinema.

Raya Martin in Director's Fortnight, Brilliante Mendoza in Cannes

The director of the brilliant Indio Nacional (2005) has made it not to the official Cannes festival, but to a parallel festival, the Quinzaine des realisateurs, or Director's Fortnight, which has its own more eclectic reputation, that of being the discoverer new, quirkier talent, where the Cannes festival is more likely to screen the works of established filmmakers. This meant the French debut of directors like Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jim Jarmusch, Nagisa Oshima, Michael Haneke, the Dardennes brothers, and many others, and has screened the films of Robert Bresson and Manoel de Oliveira, Stephen Frears. I think Martin makes for an excellent addition to their ranks.

The links lead to two of three (apparently the third isn't available as of this time) video interviews of the filmmaker, who talks about his filming and logistical methods, his scriptwriting style (for his first two features, he didn't have any), and how Indio Nacional, Autohystoria and Now Showing form not a trilogy, but the beginnings of three separate trilogies. Ah, youth! And more power to him, for his ambitions...

Raya Martin talks about his new film Now Showing (2008) Part 1

Raya Martin talks about his new film Now Showing (2008) Part 2

Briliante Mendoza, on the other hand, is an entirely different creature, a teller of conventional yet intense narratives about Philippine life (Kaleldo (2006) was about the lives of three daughters in a provincial town; Manoro (same year) is about a young girl who teaches her illiterate townsfolk how to read, to enable them to cast votes in a coming election; Foster Child (2007) is the quite moving story of a woman who makes it a business to raise parentless children for adoption; Tirador (same year) about slumdwellers in Quiapo). His stories are told in the kind of handheld, cinema verite of the Dardannes brothers, making full use of his uniquely Filipino settings. His latest film Serbis (Service, 2008) was chosen for the Official Competition in Cannes.

In the following video clips, Mendoza talks about the source material for the film (the porn theaters that inspired his premise), and the sound problems noted by some critics, which he maintains is actually an immersive statement, and how surprised he was to have shocked the Cannes audience:

Brillante Mendoza talks about his new film Serbis (Service, 2008) Part 1

Brilliante Mendoza talks about his new film Serbis (Service, 2008) Part 2

Brilliante Mendoza talks about his new film Serbis (Service, 2008) Part 3

Brillante Mendoza's 'Kaleldo' (Summer Heat) wins at Joenju

Do not have the time (I'm packing for Seoul) but just wanted to scoop everyone and say Brillante Mendoza's Kaleldo (Summer Heat) won the NETPAC Award here in Jeonju. Congrats!