Paradise Inn (Celso Ad. Castillo)

The house on the hill

Call Celso Ad. Castillo's Paradise Inn his inversion (perversion if you like) of Lino Brocka's classic Insiang--mother and daughter locked in life-or-death rivalry, only instead of a Manila slum they live in the eponymously named establishment, a nightclub / dive bar / strip joint perched on top of a hill.

Where Insiang and her mother are lost among the teeming thousands jostling for space in urban Manila, Ester Paraiso (Lolita Rodriguez) and her daughter Daria (Vivan Velez) stand exposed on all sides; where Brocka plays up the claustrophobia in Tondo's teeming slums, Castillo (filming amongst the hills of Batangas) emphasizes the sense of helplessness, of agoraphobia. 

Never one to shy away from symbolism Castillo thoroughly milks the stripper metaphor. The two women are constant objects of voyeurism, are closely observed literally and figuratively: they are envied for their money (the modest but consistent income they earn from property and business), their influence (Ester's lover is Vice Mayor Anton (Robert Arevalo) who prefers sleeping at Ester's over his own home--the link between prostitution and politics made hilariously literal), Daria's youth and beauty. Some would like to pull them off their high hilltop; others offer money or favors in exchange for a kiss a dance a night's romance...

Maligno (Malignant, Celso Ad. Castillo, 1977)

Supped full with horrors

Celso Ad. Castillo's Maligno (1977), his horror genre follow-up to the hugely popular Patayin sa Sindak si Barbara (Let's Frighten Barbara to Death, 1974) uses many of the previous films' cast (Susan Roces, Dante Rivero, Mary Walter) but ups the ante considerably by openly inviting comparison with Roman Polanski's masterful Rosemary's Baby (1968)-- Satanist cult targets attractive young couple (Roces as Angela Cortez; Rivero as her husband Paolo) and their unborn child-- with mixed results. On one hand the film's tone isn't as understated, the music decidedly unsubtle; on the other Ad. Castillo (unlike Polanski) does manage to grant the cults leader his moment onstage, front and center, instead of forcing him to lurk about in the shadows. In the guise of Eddie Garcia's Lucas Santander, he's a grand, eloquent figure, given to slouching insouciantly in the darkest corner of his prison cell and pronouncing judgement on society's religious hypocrisy; unlike Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer, Garcia caters to our more traditional notions about evil cultists, but I guess if you must play a cliche, you should at least play it bigl Garcia plays it so the very bars of his cell seem to tremble. 

Return of the Dragon (Celso Ad. Castillo, 1974)

(Entire film available online, dubbed in English)
 
Rampage the dragon 

Officially the '70s Golden Age of Philippine Cinema started with Lino Brocka's bildungsroman Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) a commercial and critical success; unofficially it's not so simple. Ishmael Bernal's sophisticated showbiz expose Pagdating sa Dulo (At the Top) screened two years earlier; Celso Ad. Castillo  began directing in the mid-60s and as early as the Fernando Poe Jr. gunslinger drama Asedillo (1971) showed a flair for visual and narrative drama that would mark him an equal to Brocka, Bernal, de Leon and O'Hara, if not their superior.

Don't think I can make the case that Ad. Castillo's Return of the Dragon is in any way superior to Brocka's Tinimbang (its contemporary); the former is an unabashedly commercial mishmash of Bruce Lee martial arts flick (Filipino actor Ramon Zamora cast and coiffed to look like the legendary star) and spaghetti western, the latter a neorealist mural of small-town life. That said, there's an exuberance, a marshaling of forces visual and aural in Return that's exciting to behold--a bold pop style that's not necessarily superior to Brocka's realism but different, with its own more modest ambitions, its own brashly gonzo integrity.

On first look it is bizarre. A band of thugs wearing Mexican Bandit Chic and grimy karategis massacres a (faintly Ifugao-looking) tribal community; Paylon (Ramon Zamora) swears vengeance on behalf of his wife Amihan (Lotis Key) and her deceased family, then proceeds to wipe out said gang, one sneering mustachioed hoodlum after another.

As revenge flicks go this one promises to push limits. A crucifixion-style torture session is performed in parallel with a gang rape; Paylon pinions a thug wheelbarrow-style, then pounds his crotch into steak tartare. Sometimes the violence is outre enough to constitute sadistic poetry, as when Paylon plunges a sword into a man's fundament offscreen, and we see the handle tremble to the rhythm of the man's fading heartbeat. As with the films of Chang Cheh, pain and body mutilation are the price of honor, same time you sense a faint homoeroticism fetishizing the bodies being mutilated (Homoeroticism? But of course! Men bathing at a river are beaten to death, their pubic patches flashing the screen like a bouquet of scattered blossoms; Paylon himself spends much screen time half-naked, his increasingly scarred flesh a scoreboard of progress towards his goal).

First indication that this might be more than just your run-of-the-mill revenge flick: Paylon's face as he plunges a dagger into someone's belly. His face is a portrait not of satisfaction but of agony, as if the knife were twisting in his own gut, and each succeeding death serves not to relieve that sense of suffering but intensify it.



The mystery is explained in flashback: Paylon was a pacifist turned lawman, with a long and bloody career of killing criminals; he had since grown sick of bloodshed and sought a life of peace (hence Amihan and her tribe). Amihan's death changes the situation: he forces himself to resume the violence, each murder in a sense an act of self-destruction as he murders yet another corner of his anguished soul.

It's an interesting dilemma that at the same time helps resolve an issue familiar to pulp revenge flicks: since you know the hero is faster and stronger than anyone, and you know it's just a matter of time till he achieves his goal, where's the suspense? Ad. Castillo substitutes a 'man-vs.-man' type conflict with 'man-vs.-himself:' a pacifist driven to kill despite his beliefs.

The key scene here is his encounter with Joaquin (Joaquin Fajardo). Disarmed and helpless, Joaquin pleads for his life, his wife (who Joaquin only minutes before had been verbally abusing) pleading beside him. Paylon refuses; he walks away with Joaquin's wife hurling curses at him, with a ferocity she never once directed at her husband when alive. Ad. Castillo's retreating camera follows Paylon as he strides away, a tender love song playing in the background. Love for a dear departed is what drives the man--but what of Joaquin and his wife? He yelled at her, humiliated her, but when pinned down she begged desperately on his behalf just the same. Was his love (or hers) any less powerful, or deserving? 



Zamora made his career playing comic roles, but he was perfectly capable of drama: on one level conflicting emotions of remorse and revenge battle it out on his sweat-strained face; then you look closer and realize the conflict has long since been resolved. Joaquin's wife can't move Paylon because whatever she's going through he's already been there; more, there's nothing she can threaten him with--divine retribution or ultimate damnation--that he hasn't already inflicted, again and again, on himself. 

Return rounds out its theme with a plot twist involving the mysterious Rita (Leila Hermosa) and the formidable Leon (Tsing Tong Tsai). By the picture's bloody finale we learn this much about the nature of vengeance: it's not circular, not a spiral; it's a tangle that catches us in a hopeless snarl--everyone victimized, everyone indicted, no one coming away clean. Ad. Castillo and his scriptwriter (Mike Relon Makiling, who in his own directorial efforts never showed this level of narrative sophistication) have basically constructed a revenge picture with its own built-in criticism of revenge pictures: not perhaps the first to have done so but a well-made example nonetheless, and ultimately an affecting one. 



That's the story; it's hardly the film's essence. You don't go to Ad. Castillo for mere story, just as you don't go to Brocka for mere realism, Bernal for mere cynicism, de Leon for mere intellect or O'Hara for mere despair; you go for the poetry, and Return of the Dragon has more than its share elevating it beyond its pulp--the marriage ceremony with its ridiculous rock-thumping ritual, where through near-magical editing the clacking of stones suddenly stands for the beating of newlywed hearts (corny, but with the lovely Ms. Key's soulful eyes boy is it effective); the showdown location, a basin of sand with a pool of water reflecting one of the most dramatic skies I'd ever seen (a mountain range of clouds, a baleful glare of sun); and finally Zamora's deliriously kinetic leaps, simply Zamora crouched and shrieking against a pure azure sky, sometimes framed by a perfectly circular lens flare--you think perhaps Zamora's Paylon needed those uncanny high jumps to touch the sky, to reinvigorate strength and spirit. Brief moments and mere images perhaps, but without them Return of the Dragon would merely be a grave, unusually well-written lecture on the futility of revenge; with them the film is a soaring song on vengeance, its seductive power, its ultimately fatal spell. A great little film, absolutely.

First published in Businessworld, 11.27.14

End of the world news

Can't do it. 

Don't have it in me to put up a Best of 2012. Haven't the heart to make up an arbitrary list of what's good out there, much less judge what I think are the best of the year. 

Partly it's the times--not just the recent violence but any number of deaths, some underreported, some that hit close to home, some that are just personal. Is this year worse than any other? I don't know--don't feel like doing a count, only know it's up there. 

If I focus on one thing and not another, if I focus on specific tragedies and not others, it's not that I'm focusing on what I think are worse or more significant losses (not an authority on current events); it's that I'm writing about what I know best. That's all I can do at the moment--write on what I know, what hit me personally, a report on a direct blow to the breastbone if you like. 

Mildly put, it hasn't been a good year for films. Oh, good work has been done--even wrote about some of them. But the losses to Philippine and world cinema (I only nod at a distinction people seem to insist on making; I try not to actually make one) I feel were greater: Ike Jarlego; Marilou Diaz-Abaya; Dolphy; Chris Marker; Celso Ad Castillo; and Mario O'Hara, among others. It's as if God or Death or whoever presides out there took a quick survey of the giants towering over the landscape and decided to lop off the tallest heads one by one--for a while there you wondered if the pruning would stop, or at least pause for breath.

If it's any consolation, new filmmakers have come forward (wrote about some of them, too), and O'Hara for one has left us a last surprise, a made-for-TV film previously forgotten or presumed lost. A (more or less) new O'Hara, and a gem of a film at that--surely that counts towards the ledger's positive column.

But still. 

Here's hoping next year will be better. 

12.31.12 

Celso Ad Castillo, 1943 - 2012

One of the greatest has passed.

Celso Ad Castillo was born on the 12^th of September, 1943 in Sinaloan, Laguna, son of lawyer and writer Dominador Ad Castillo, and Martha Adolfo. He graduated with a BA in English Literature, married and had children, at least one of which-- Christopher Ad Castillo-- followed in his footsteps as filmmaker. 

 
Ad Castillo didn't start out to be a director himself; he really began writing for komiks, publishing-- with his father's help-- a magazine where he wrote every story under different aliases. He was commissioned to do the script to a James Bond knockoff (James Ban-dong, 1964) so successful it spawned a sequel (Dr. Yes, 1965). He eventually directed his first film-- Misyong Mapanganib (Mission Dangerous, 1965)-- at the relatively young age of twenty-one. 
  
Asedillo (1971), possibly Ad Castillo's finest early film, set the template for Filipino movie legend Fernando Poe, Jr.'s persona, as deadly gunslinger and champion of the poor. His best work was yet to come, but even this early on you see his grasp of film language. Poe's action movies are almost always well-produced, but this is the rare picture of his that shows touches of genuine poetry-- deep orange sunsets; village elders expressively lit and photographed; iconic shots of Poe on his horse climbing an impossibly steep slope (the camera tilted so to make the climb even more impossible), his body bent forward as if to keep from falling off.

At one point Poe reads a crucial letter from his arch-nemesis, offering parley: Ad Castillo cuts to the people outside waiting for the results of the fateful letter, and as they chat Castillo drops all sound except the wind blowing-- an effect full of portent.

Ad Castillo's Tag-Ulan sa Tag-Araw (Monsoon Rain in Summer, 1975) is about a young man (Christopher de Leon) who dorms with his uncle and aunt and falls in love with his cousin (a waiflike Vilma Santos). Ad Castillo tackles the sensational subject of incest by framing the two lovers' relationship as a kind of innocent affair, set in a countryside Eden.

It's the kind of hackneyed concept that really shouldn't work, less like D.H. Lawrence and more like Emmanuelle. But Ad Castillo happens to have one of the most prodigiously talented eyes in all of Philippine cinema, and the heedlessly melodious manner in which he shot Tag-Ulan transforms softcore porn into something like art. Every rainfall, every shaft of light, every leafy shadow caught by his handheld camera makes you catch your breath; there's lovemaking without nudity, yet Ad Castillo shoots with such throbbing intensity you can't help but be aroused.

Ad Castillo was also versatile, working in everything from action to psychodrama to of course horror. His Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara (Let's Frighten Barbara to Death, 1974), about a dead woman's determination to wreak unholy vengeance on her poor sister, is not a perfect film or even a particularly good one, certainly not the finest of Ad Castillo's work, but after a first half of playing with devil dolls and cheesy sound effects the film lays aside its childish toys and tries silence, shadows, the stretching of a moment of tension to sadistic length, revealing in its second half arguably the most viscerally frightening film in all of Philippine cinema. At one point Ad Castillo evokes the scene where Arbogast (Martin Balsam) climbs the stairs in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)-- only unlike many a Hitchcock imitator, he manages to pull it off.

Ad Castillo's Ang Pinakamagandang Hayop sa Balat ng Lupa (The Most Beautiful Creature on the Face of the Earth, 1974) is an unabashed remake of David Lean's epic boxoffice failure Ryan's Daughter (1970); it nevertheless has a coastal sensuality that need not apologize to the underrated original.  Return of the Dragon (same year) took a comedian famous for parodying Bruce Lee (the physical resemblance is uncanny) and forged a remarkably straightforward exercise in Filipino chop-socky, complete with fight scenes staged as if under an azure crystal bowl. Lihim ni Madonna (Secrets of Madonna, 1997) has one of the most beautiful actresses in Philippine cinema (his taste in women was exemplary) running about in an abandoned mansion in a state of perpetual distress, wearing a semitransparent nightie-- a laughable premise, only he uses the gothic scare tactics of Patayin sa Sindak si Barbara to keep the audience off-balance, and ends the film with a magic-realist finale worthy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

With Ang Alamat ni Julian Makabayan (The Legend of Julian Makabayan, 1979) Ad Castillo and his cinematographer Romy Vitug were accused of imitating the honeyed sunlight Nestor Almendros created for Terence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978). If the films share a superficial similarity (both involve extensive outdoor shooting) the resemblance ends there-- I doubt if Malick possesses the showmanship to tell his story as a series of interviews, faux-documentary style, or the effrontery to pull a corpse out from inside the split-open corpse of an actual water buffalo. With Pagputi ng Uwak, Pagitim ng Tagak (When the Crow Turns White, the Heron Black, 1978) Ad Castillo proves he can combine the aesthetic of period epics with the energy of political firebranding-- a volatile mix-- the unstable whole held together by beautiful folk music.

As for his masterpiece Burlesk Queen (1977)-- here's an excerpt of what I wrote on a moment in the film (Chato's deflowering) for Chris Fujiwara's The Little Black Book of Movies: 
 
“Celso uses Jessie's smooth back as both veil and metaphor for Chato's nudity, the clothes dropping from overhead hangers as metaphor for her failing inhibitions; what makes the scene erotic and nakedly emotional is Chato's face, glimpsed over Jessie's left shoulder as terror (the widened eyes), greed (the remote expression, as if she were a starving man wolfing down a steak), pain (the startled look of one who has been kicked in the crotch), guilt (the tears) and finally pleasure (the bit lower lip) flit across and mingle in her eyes.”

Ad Castillo was not a genius, he was more interesting than that. His films were often incoherent and inconsistent because he didn't have the money or didn't have the discipline, or just plain didn't care-- apparently narrative was secondary to him, a mere excuse to flex his prodigious filmmaking muscles. 
 
Of his greatest works-- which include but are not limited to Ang Alamat ni Julian Makabayan; Pagputi ng Uwak, Pagitim ng Tagak; and Burlesk Queen-- his imagery burned like an incandescent bulb on the big screen, and his filmmaking technique was second to none. 
 
If Mike De Leon is Philippine Cinema's mad intellectual, Lino Brocka its fiery social realist, Ishmael Bernal its skeptic-satirist, Mario O'Hara its nightmare scenarist, Celso was its poet laureate-- his images were Filipino lyricism incarnate. His passing is an unimaginable loss.

First published in Businessworld, 12.3.12

Still more Vancouver Festival Films (Oliviera, Hui) --and one Filipino (Ad. Castillo), just because

Yang Ik Joon's Ddongpari (Breathless, 2009) does, at times, induce that eponymous state, especially when debt collector Sang Hoon (the director doing triple duty by also writing the film's script and playing lead actor) goes into action. I don't know what Yang is like in person but onscreen he's a singular presence, small eyes taking a steady bead on you (his moving target), jaw settling into a particularly grim line, hands working themselves into fists, prior to letting them fly. He talks insolently, contemptuously, his language a string of firecracker profanity; he collects debts by beating the money (and will to resist) out of his clients. He's dedicated enough (or unstable enough) to work overtime, pummeling his next-door neighbor or even a passerby gratis, without even expecting a fee.

This portrait of a near-sociopath bully would be compelling on its own but Yang goes a step further by introducing Yeon-hue (Kotbi-kim), a teen-aged schoolgirl who, as it turns out, is his match in foul language and possibly his superior in perverse fearlessness (he has his fists to back him up; she has nothing but sheer attitude). She defies him, wins his respect, and later his trust; the film plays out like Beauty and the Beast with the lovers suffering a severe case of potty-mouth; the effect is startling and unsettlingly funny at the same time.

Yang tries to go a step further--tries to explain Sang and Yeon's personalities by showing either their past or home life. These scenes seem trite and sentimental; seem like the kind of melodrama Sang and Yeon would rather laugh at than accept as their respective back stories. It's a measure of their appeal that we would prefer to take Sang and Yeon as they are--straight, no chaser, no sympathy or psychotherapy or any such syrupy nonsense.

Yuri Nomura's eatrip (2009) is a lovely documentary but no less substantial for being beautifully shot and lit--witness the sequence at the Tsukiji fish market where a seller talks about the lightness of tuna in spring, and how much richer the flesh is in winter when the fish eats fattier foods, then in a sudden change of tone notes how the supply of fish is dwindling all the time. It's a sobering moment, balanced by the woman who grows her own produce theorizing that it's best to eat root vegetables during the new moon, when all energy is drawn downwards, and best to eat leaf and fruit during the full moon, when all energy is drawn upwards.

The central section depicts a tea ceremony, where the tea master explains that "water and mountain are the essence of the Earth and of Buddha...what is Buddhism? It's all living things. Therefore all living things are a part of Buddha!" He's far more persuasive when explaining that a light blue sweet on a plate represents the Earth, with the translucent blue outer dough representing water, and the bright green bean center representing solid ground. "Eat the sweet first," he explains. Eating the sweet first, apparently, prepares tongue and throat for the tea, allows one to taste the tea's best flavors, instead of only its bitterness.

The film ends with a visually ravishing meal--light brown chicken poached in a green broth; what look like sauteed gizzards mixed with grain which are then steamed above the poaching chicken, picking up the flavor of both chicken and broth; a plate full of sliced radishes is lightly seasoned, is topped with gorgeous slices of raw whitefish; is in turn topped with a bowl of bright red strawberries--easily one of the most beautiful dishes I've ever seen. Does the film have some kind of overarching plan, a coherent point to make? I don't know; I suspect not. It rambles here and there, picking up other people's voices and opinions, at times pausing to show us how something is made. Much like the best dinner conversations, come to think of it.

Ann Hui's Tin shui wai dik ye yu mo (Night and Fog, 2009) was the rare festival film that I didn't like. Hui this time takes on wife-beaters, and like her Filipino contemporary Marilou Diaz-Abaya she goes about dealing with the subject in an impassioned, rather heavy-handed manner. These films are more about script and acting than about visual style, which is unremarkably competent--the script scrupulously goes about building the case against the husband (Simon Yam), closing along the way all avenues of escape for the girl (Zhang Jingchu). It's a case of city boy resents country girl, constantly putting her down, constantly undercutting her sense of security, and of self.

Mind you, it's not an especially bad film; it goes about its business with brisk efficiency and in its best and most moving moments gives us a glimpse of the kind of happiness the pair had (a quiet scene, for one, where Yam washes Zhang's hair) before everything goes horribly wrong. When they do go wrong though Hui pulls out all the stops, and you can feel the film slipping swiftly out of her control: Yam's angry husband becomes a teeth baring-monster, and Zhang can only gasp in humiliation and pain. We wince as well--partly in sympathy for Zhang (and what her director puts her through), partly in embarrassment for Hui. Subtlety like this belongs more in a Rob Zombie flick.

Manoel de Oliveira's Singularidades de uma Rapariga de Loura (Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl 2009) shows the filmmaker celebrating his 100th birthday still in full control of his faculties. A little over an hour long, the film is a masterpiece of economical and graceful storytelling--not a single wasted image or gesture. The very first shot shows us a conductor punching tickets; the camera following left to right, right to left, as if asking us to guess who this story will be about, with the conductor presenting each candidate for our inspection. We finally settle on Macario (Riccado Trepa), who tells his sad story to a fellow passenger (Leonor Silveira). He is an accountant working for his uncle, and looking out the balcony of his office one day he sees in the balcony of the opposing building a blond girl (Catarina Wallenstein) playing with her fan.

That's all it takes: two balconies, a girl, her fan. Macario falls madly in love with her, of course, and for most of the film's running time Oliveira toys with the image framed by the two doorways and the space between the two balconies, the way fate toys with Macario's life. The opposite balcony is always tantalizingly close--you feel as if you can reach over and grasp the railing--yet Oliveira keeps us constantly aware of the gulf between them, as of the obstacles that must always be put in the way of two lovers in all romantic comedies (this one more dryly comic than most). At one point we listen to the girl reading Macario's love letter as across the way a different accountant occupies Macario's former office--Oliveira mocks her with the image of someone other than Macario sitting in his accustomed place; she keeps faith by facing pointedly away, reading the words of his letter aloud to herself.

The ending, of course, is purest irony (the script was based on a story by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, a nineteenth century writer oft called the Flaubert of Portugal), with the film's final image possibly being Oliveira's best jest: The train pulling away from the camera, a joke on the joke Hitchcock pulled in the final image of North by Northwest (1959). Instead of cinema's longest penetration shot we have cinema's longest withdrawal shot, receding rapidly towards the horizon. Talk about onscreen lovers that feel blue, Macario possibly has the bluest pair of anyone I can remember.

Finally--not because it was in the festival but only because I just saw it again--Celso Ad Castillo's Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara (1974), about a dead woman's determination to wreak unholy vengeance on her poor sister, is not a perfect film, not even a particularly good film, certainly not the finest of Ad Castillo's work (which at worst can politely be described as 'inconsistent,' at best goes beyond the reach of any other filmmaker in the Philippines, perhaps the world). Rosanna Ortiz's Ruth is the very definition of overwrought; Ad Castillo dwells over her jealous hysteria the way a sadistic police officer might over a criminal's interrogation, pressing foot to miscreant's neck and grinding his face into the dirt (we feel as if our face were being ground into Ms. Ortiz's). Some of the horror effects seem ludicrous today--the doll with glowing Eveready eyes, the rather monotonous 'twanging' sound indicating evil is afoot (if it's on foot, why would it twang?).

Difficult to say what happens next, but Ad Castillo, after playing with dolls and cheesy sound effects in the film's first half lays aside the childish toys and tries a different tack--silence, shadows, the stretching of a moment of tension to sadistic length. At one point he evokes the scene where Arbogast (Martin Balsam) climbs the stairs in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)--only unlike many a Hitchcock imitator, he manages to pull it off.

After all the bloodletting and screaming and buried corpses, one remembers Barbara declaring to Ruth (rough translation): “yes I love Fritz, but never at the cost of your happiness! Our love was a quiet love, a tender love, giving, self-sacrificing, concerned for the other's welfare. It was not based on anger, or hate, or jealousy! It was not based on vengeance!” The film's true horror lies in Ruth's all-consuming jealousy towards her sister, how she must possess everything Barbara has on her own terms even if it cost her everything, even if it costs her her life.

(poster from Video48)

Atonement; Juno; Paprika; Sanib; Back Door to Hell

Some films seen on DVD and the big screen these past few weeks:

Atonement (2007) is remarkably awful. Based on Ian McEwan's novel, it's not a bad story per se--about a young girl's misunderstanding of events she witnessed, and the disastrous consequences that result, but it's eighty percent a sharp observation of social class and mores in '40s England and twenty percent a desperate love story--desperate in the sense that it will do anything to move us to tears, even resort to destroying its characters in all sorts of unlikely ways. Director Joe Wright might have done something about that, but he can barely even set a proper mood and tone for his scenes; sequences that are meant to be taken literally have an unreal, stylized feel to them, and quickly give the plot away (it's all in her head). Kiera Knightly is pretty enough, but the film really belongs to Saoirse Roman and Romola Garai, the two girls who play the misunderstanding girl at 13 and 18 respectively.
The ending is an embarrassment; Wright plunks the camera inches away from Vanessa Redgrave's head, and we're to listen attentively as she pours out a bucketload of crap (on our laps, almost), asking us to weep over her fate. The Academy displayed its usual appetite for expensive costume dramas, nominating this sentimental mess for Best Picture. Would've voted it Best Unintentional Comedy, myself.

Jason Reitman's Juno isn't much of anything. It isn't innovative cinema (the movie is mostly made up of steadicam shots following the lead actress around her little home town), and it isn't even edgy social comedy (once pregnant, the young teenager quickly finds some rich bitch to adopt her baby, pay her medical bills, and even offer a 'little something extra' on top of everything (hell, if I could find someone that generous, I'd be willing to get pregnant)). What it is is a fairly well-written comedy (by Diablo Cody) with enough funny lines to keep one awake, even amused, and a lead actress (Ellen Page) charming enough to make you want to give a damn. With scenes of creepily uneasy subtext between Page and the wannabe father of her child, played by Jason Bateman--if they'd gone to bed together credibility might have flown right out the window, but at least the movie'd have real teeth. 

Paprika (2006) seems to be Satoshi Kon's way of adapting Roger Zelazny's He Who Shapes on the big screen, only Kon doesn't seem as interested in developing the idea of virtual reality as a therapy tool as he is in fully exploiting the potential for surreal imagery found in animation, a goal he's been pursuing from Perfect Blue (2001), and Millennium Actress (2001), to Paranoia Agent (2004) and this picture.

Techniquewise it's stunning: the gorgeous color palette, the totally convincing reality Kon renders onscreen (the better to tear apart in a fluid series of fantastical transformations). I'd love to declare Kon the perfect choice for adapting Zelazny's novella, only he seems to have exhausted all further possibilities with this picture; anything more would simply mean repeating oneself (unlike Mamoru Oshii, who with Tachiguishi retsuden (The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters, 2006) pretty much proves he's nowhere near in danger of repetition, at least not in this millennium).

That said, mention of Oshii makes me think of the reason why I can't surrender to Kon's not inconsiderable charms, not completely: I just don't think he's got anything interesting to say. He's an expert--perhaps great--entertainer; none of his works fail to please me, or whichever youth I manage to show his films to, and there in part lies the problem. I think he's too entertaining, too much of a crowd pleaser. He knows how to hook an audience from the start, keep them interested for the length of his exquisitely paced films, let them go with a quick flourish, an emotional bonbon (in this case we learn who Dr. Chiba actually cares for (though how or why is skimped on)), an easy moral lesson. Unlike Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, with Kon you rarely get the sense that all that stunning animation technique is in service of anything more serious than a good time. Maybe the one notable exception would be his TV animated series Paranoia Agent--that one actually seems to be about something...

Celso Ad Castillo's Sanib (2003) is his version of William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) and whaddaya know, I prefer the remake, for several reasons. First--full disclosure here--I've never been a big fan of Friedkin's horror flick. Second, Celso in one crucial scene manages to explore the story's most horrifying moment, when an uncomprehending innocent asks why is she being treated thusly, an animal tied down for sacrifice (Linda Blair in the original depended on heavy prosthetic makeup and clever lip-miming to achieve a lesser pathos). Third, Ad Castillo working on a budget tiny enough to be the latter's laundry bill is still able to wreak miracles--brief but eerie encounters with supernatural forces that depend on sheer filmmaking skill and not CGI effects to pull off. Yes, the pic has third-act problems--the introduction of a second malignant spirit that needlessly complicates the plot--but some of the taut cutting here actually reminds me of the editing in Ad Castillo's horror classic, Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara (Scare Barbara to Death, 1974). This is an intriguing little feature, one that reveals that The Celso Kid--a great Filipino filmmaker, and easily the most visually lyrical of them all--still has the power to surprise and enthrall.

Monty Hellman's Back Door to Hell (1964), about a group of soldiers making a secret landing on Bicolano soil to prepare for MacArthur's coming gives one a chance to compare the filmmaker's camerawork against Filipino masters like Gerardo de Leon when using the same or at least similar landscape; the differences are--well, I don't know. I'm not aware of exact numbers--Hellman's budget couldn't possibly be much larger than that of a standard Hollywood feature's-- but the crispness of sound, smoothness of camera movement and clarity of footage go way beyond even the most expensive all-Filipino production; one wonders if perhaps Hellman simply brought better equipment with him.

Both have their distinctive styles, with Hellman favoring low-angled cameras and carefully interlocking shots that show the soldiers' stealthy progress against the Japanese; de Leon often works with grand gestures, with tiny figures running up some tilted landscape, often as if they were working their way up a Sisyphean incline.

When the action breaks out, both use crisp, precise editing, and standard-issue music to ratchet up (however imperfectly) the tension. Hellman's characters talk in a hardboiled language, however, while de Leon betrays a less updated sensibility by having his characters speak florid dialogue in a stagy, often theatrical manner (though he does have a tendency to position his people the way a Japanese director might in a drama scene--both facing the camera, one standing in a far corner, the other up close and looming). A fascinating gem, an efficient genre piece--one that deals, however briefly, with the issue of death and killing and a man's evolving response to them--and easily the best of the titles mentioned here.