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.
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.
(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.
Surface tension
Celine Song's Materialists on the surface is about the business of matchmaking-- an industry on the rise with the difficulty of online dating and of life in general (New York in particular); prices are not mentioned but looking at the clothes the characters wear and the milieu they inhabit you can probably figure it's in the five to six figure range for an annual service.
So the movie looks good and the cast looks handsome and the conversation in the trailer sufficiently sparkled (not Billy Wilder league much less Ernst Lubitsch divine but bubbles popped)-- is the actual experience worth it?
Came out of Megalopolis feeling a lot of things but what I did not feel was disappointed-- not a bad thing but not necessarily a good thing either.
I run hot and cold on Francis Ford Coppola. Thought his first two Godfather films were classically well-written if visually conventional, too-carefully curated portraits of a corrupt American family, thought Apocalypse Now was a vividly directed Vietnam war movie that had little to do with the actual war, thought The Conversation (easily his best early work) was a nicely done portrait of loneliness and introverted paranoia.
I actually prefer Coppola's wilder less disciplined later works: the lowkey monochromatic Rumble Fish, the emotionally extravagant One From the Heart (my favorite), the beautifully mounted Bram Stoker's Dracula (despite Keanu Reeves as an alleged British solicitor, and a haphazardly grafted love story), and now this, his wildest most undisciplined yet, basically a retelling of the Catilinarian conspiracy transposed to modern-day New York.
Lav Diaz's Phantosmia turns on the simple conceit that a man who has experienced trauma will carry a trace of that trauma for the rest of his life, sometimes in the form of a smell. Doesn't have to be a real smell-- people have searched his surroundings at his behest looking for a dead rat or snake, find nothing; the stink is in his mind, a manifestation of guilt for committed sins.
Mario O'Hara's Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? (Why is the Sky Blue? 1981) opens with panoramic views of Manila. We see Babette Gomez (Nora Aunor) and her family arrive at an apartment complex; movers unload furniture carry it into their new home. O'Hara's camera watches as the family settles in and we come to know each member-- imperious Sofia (Anita Linda) presiding over the operation; sullen Nardo (Mario Escudero) carrying out his wife's orders; beautiful Lorie who barks like her mother, but at a lesser volume; quiet Babette-- their other daughter-- skittering about doing as much of the heavy lifting as the movers.
We meet the neighbors: Marta (Melly Mallari), owner of the "sari-sari" (grocery) store at the complex entrance; Cora (Alicia Alonzo) and her unemployed husband Domeng (Rene Hawkins); Luring (Metring David) with a sideline selling clothes and her son Bobby (Dennis Roldan). Only courtly old Mang Jesus (Carpi Asturias) seems to notice Babette; they talk of the tiny cacti she's raising, and she notes (without any irony) that succulents flourish on very little care and water. Luring offers Sofia clothes and her life's story-- she's raising Bobby on her own and needs to watch him all the time because he can't care for or defend himself (he's a young adult with the mind of a child) so she can't go out to earn a living. Sofia makes a proposal: instead of paying for the clothes, maybe Babette can come feed Bobby while Luring is gone.
And so Babette finds herself with a plate of food at Luring's door looking in (you think of little girls in fairy tales peering into dark dens, wondering at the silence). She finds Bobby upstairs, chained, sets the food before him; he hunches over the plate, eating with his fingers. Later, Babette asks Bobby for his basketball-- to clean it, she explains; Bobby hands the ball over after some hesitation. For the first time O'Hara cuts to a closeup-- of Babette's face then of Bobby's (before this the picture has been all long and medium shots). They have somehow connected.
Eternity and a day
Coming off the commercial and critical success of Kastilyong Buhangin (Castle of Sand, 1980), Nora Aunor, Lito Lapid, and Mario O'Hara put their heads together once more to present Gaano Kita Kamahal (How Much I Love You, 1981), a more ambitious more lavish production.
Bonsai!
Heard it said of Paul Schrader's Master Gardener that it's his umpteenth retelling of the God's Lonely Man trope, starting from Taxi Driver (1976) to three of his last four films including First Reformed and The Card Counter, but I disagree; those films ended with redemption or rebirth or some form of baptism as climax, either through love, or punishment, or blood. This film I think takes up the narrative years later, a 'what happens after?' question hanging in the air.
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Lady of the lake
Call Lav Diaz's latest film Essential Truths of the Lake a prequel to his When the Waves are Gone (Kung Wala Nang Mga Alon 2022); call the film a deeper dive into Diaz's returning character Hermes Papauran, the oft-described 'greatest Filipino investigator ever.'
Lav Diaz's Historya ni Ha (History of Ha) may be his strangest work yet. If in Ang Hupa (The Halt, 2019) he proposes a Filipino dystopia complete with dictatorship and pandemic and volcano-induced darkness, and in Panahon ng Halimaw (Season of the Devil, 2018) he presents the Philippines' first-ever black-and-white, sung-through, no-instrument musical, this you might say is his Dead of Night--an astringently deadpan blackly comic film about a ventriloquist and his dummy.
In Wong Kar Wai's latest In the Mood for Love Tony Leung plays Mr. Chow, Maggie Cheung plays Mrs. Chan. He's a newspaper reporter; she's a secretary. They're both married and suspect their respective spouses are having affairs; it's when they learn that Mrs. Chow is having an affair with Mr. Chan that their eyes finally turn to each other, in mutual hurt and longing. A neat premise, neat enough to make you sit up and want to know what happens next.
Isabel Sandoval's achievement in Lingua Franca I submit isn't so much the breaking of boundaries or the allusion to current events (transgendered-directed film on transgendered relationships, and the perils of undocumented immigrants) but her plainspoken way of creating a mood, a feeling, the ambiance of an eerily depopulated subtly menacing New York just this much more hostile to the marginalized.
Antoinette Jadaone's Fan Girl is a sneaky little comedy that starts off with a storyline planted firmly within familiar Jadaone territory (the constantly permeable membrane between showbiz fantasy and everyday reality a la Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay; the sad-funny interchanges that motor romantic comedies a la This Thing Called Tadhana). Jane (Charlie Dizon), who describes herself as real-life celebrity Paulo Avelino's 'number one fan,' skips afternoon class to attend a mall event promoting the star's latest movie; she manages to climb into the back of Paulo's pickup truck just as he drives away.
I thought Violator-- Dodo Dayao's debut feature-- to be one of the most intriguing of recent horrors; think Kurosawa Kiyoshi doing a punk remake of Rio Bravo, with Hawks' sticks of dynamite swapped out for the apocalypse. Midnight in a Perfect World sees Dayao stepping up his game, this time proposing a semi-utopian society afflicted with both drug use and police fascism.
In his latest Lav Diaz has apparently toned down attacks on the Marcos and Duterte regimes, but if you think he's done so to deliver a kindler gentler more optimistic film to help us forget present troubles--think again.
Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Auraeus Solito, 2005) is a lovely little film, about a young gay boy named Maximo (Nathan Lopez) who forms an attachment with a handsome police officer named Victor (JR Valentin, a former ramp model).
