Tikoy Aguiluz (1947 - 2024)

Pugilist

Tattooed gangster

As Tikoy put it he grew up in a penitentiary (the Davao Penal Colony, or Depacol, where his father was prison auditor) learning how to box from one of the veteran convicts. With his six other brothers, all of them wearing shorts instead of long pants and speaking in a funny Tagalog accent instead of everyday Visayan, they attracted the attention and ridicule of all the other kids, not necessarily starting fights but finishing them wherever they went. Tikoy's ambition in life was simple: to get a tattoo, and be a gangster; he ended up working briefly in Hollywood, then coming back to the Philippines to become one of the finest filmmakers in the industry. 

Best of 1998

1998: the good, the bad, and the ugly 

1998 is a good year for films, but the good weren’t the ones you’d expect, and  didn’t come from where you’d expect. 

Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, Lino Brocka, 1974)

Tinimbang judged today

Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) was a seminal work in contemporary Philippine cinema: one of the rare quality films of the '70s to enjoy commercial success, and Lino Brocka's declaration to the industry that a skilled commercial director has become a major Filipino artist. 

Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio (The Trial of Andres Bonifacio, Mario O'Hara, 2010)

(Belatedly, for the Philippines' Independence Day, an old post)

(For Bonifacio's 150th birth anniversary, a brilliant no-budget digital film on his trial and ignoble death)

The pasyon of Andres  

There are--and I could be perfectly wrong about this--about ten films made to date about Filipino national hero Jose Rizal, including Marilou Diaz Abaya's oversized, underpowered 150 million peso (US$3.0 million) historical epic. To date there have been--and again I can be wrong--only three films made on Filipino national hero Andres Bonifacio: Teodorico C. Santos' Andres Bonifacio (Ang Supremo) done in 1964, Raymond Red's beautiful, strangely haunting Bayani (1992), and this (edit: and at least two more, Richard Somes' 2012 Supremo, and Enzo Williams' 2014 Bonifacio, ang Unang Pangulo).

Mario O'Hara's Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio (The Trial of Andres Bonifacio, 2010) takes its cue from Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc in employing the actual trial records as a rough outline (a film treatment, if you like) and fashions out of them an analytical, self-reflexive examination not so much of the truth of what happened as of the meaning of what happened (O'Hara at first glance seems to accept the historical record--always written by victors, Emilio Aguinaldo's rival Magdalo faction in this case--as accurate).

Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, Lav Diaz)

Night of the living dead

Lav Diaz's Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan is arguably Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, into which is woven select threads of recent Filipino history (i.e. the Marcos dictatorship); his latest, Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery), is for all intents and purposes a conflation of Jose Rizal's El Filibusterismo with the 1896 Filipino Revolution. 

Rizal Weather (or: Undressing Josephine Bracken)--an interview with writer and historian Austin Coates

Belatedly for Independence Day, an old article (note: any factual errors are strictly my own responsibility)

Rizal Weather (or: Undressing Josephine Bracken)  

WE WERE IN THE CHAMPAGNE ROOM of the Manila Hotel, talking to Austin Coates, Rizal biographer, novelist, historian, and a former high-level official of Hongkong. "We" were film director Tikoy Aguiluz, Monica Feria, managing editor of Graphic Magazine, George Asiniero, and myself. The weather outside was a blustery grey, sheets of rain splattering against the hotel windows.

"Rizal Weather," Coates declares. He was a neat, elderly man with immaculate white hair. "We were in Heidelberg one morning when we looked out the window and saw that the sky was pouring. We had plans in the afternoon, now the trip was spoiled. And--God--quarter past two, just when we were prepared to go, the sun came out. It always happens. The rest of the day was a glorious afternoon, and I remember we loved the sunset. When we got back at 6:30 it was pouring again. It rained for another three weeks. There you are--Rizal Weather." 

Bayaning Third World (Third World Hero, Mike De Leon, 2000)

This is not a Rizal film

Bayaning Third World (Third World Hero, 2000) is Mike De Leon's long-awaited film on Jose Rizal. It took over three years to complete, beginning way back in 1996 with the announcement by GMA Films of a massive, P70 million epic starring boy-toy Aga Muhlach as Rizal. Then Muhlach left, reportedly because De Leon was taking so long; eventually De Leon himself abandoned the production, to announce that he was making his own, independently produced film. No less than three other Rizal films were initiated and finished while De Leon's  picture maturated: Tikoy Aguiluz's Rizal sa Dapitan (Rizal in Dapitan, 1997); Marilou Diaz Abaya's Jose Rizal (1998--ironically, the same production GMA Films intended De Leon to direct, rumored to have an even bigger--P120 million--budget); and Mario O'Hara's Sisa. De Leon's picture was invited--sight unseen, mind you--to the Director's Fortnight at Cannes International Film Festival (which it failed to attend). There were long periods when no one knew what was happening--the project was shrouded in a secrecy as tight and mysterious, it seemed, as Kubrick's own latest (and last) work, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

The Many Faces of Jose Rizal

The Many Faces of Jose Rizal

The Philippines has long been obsessed with Jose Rizal-- writer, poet, artist, intellectual, doctor, educator, martyr. Two of the earliest silent feature films made in the Philippines dealt with Rizal-- La vida de Jose Rizal (The Life of Jose Rizal) and El fusiliamento de Dr. Jose Rizal (The Execution of Dr. Jose Rizal)-- and Ramon Estella made a three-hour version in 1956: Buhay at Pag-ibig ni Dr. Jose Rizal (Life and Loves of Dr. Jose Rizal). Rizal's two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo were adapted twice: the first time in 1915 and 1916 respectively by Edward Gross, the second time in 1961 and 1962 respectively by Gerardo De Leon, arguably Philippine cinema's greatest filmmaker. De Leon also directed Sisa (1951) a variation on Noli Me Tangere, which takes the story of one minor character in the novel and expands it to feature-film length (at the time it must have seemed like a dress rehearsal for De Leon's full-on adaptations; nowadays it seems to anticipate Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by seven years). Lino Brocka did his modern-day version of Noli with Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Judged and Found Wanting) in 1974.

Rizal seems to inspire both audiences (the two silents and Tinimbang were boxoffice hits), and filmmakers (El Fili has been described as De Leon's gothic masterpiece, while I consider Tinimbang to be one of Brocka's best-ever films). Now, with 1996 being the centennial of Rizal's death, and 1998 being the centennial of the country's independence from Spanish rule-- an independence to which Rizal contributed no small part-- the local film industry has made not one, not two, but three Rizal films, with one more in post-production at the time of this writing.

The first-- Tikoy Aguiluz's Rizal Sa Dapitan (Rizal in Dapitan)-- has already been discussed in this magazine. The second-- Marilou Diaz Abaya's Jose Rizal-- opened December last year, to widespread acclaim and huge commercial success. Why not? It's about Rizal, and at P120 million (US$3,000,000) the most expensive Filipino film ever made.

Jose Rizal is a vast exercise in logistics-- hundreds of extras, dozens of locations, Steadicam rental for over six months. Diaz-Abaya's most impressive achievement is in marshaling all the elements together into a comprehensive view of Rizal's life-- his university days; his exile in Europe; his writing the two novels; his arrest, trial, and ultimate execution by firing squad.

If there's a flaw in Rizal, it's not in the technicals-- photography, costume, and production design are as perfect as three million dollars can make them-- but the utter conventionality. There are speculations that events in Rizal's life inspired his novels (not exactly fresh insight), and one scene has a character from his novels urging him to support the revolt against the Spaniards-- Hollywood epic filmmaking at its most tasteful, in the grandly thudding tradition of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, or David Lean's Doctor Zhivago.

Doesn't help matters that Cesar Montano is miscast as Jose Rizal. Diaz-Abaya must have had Montano's action-star persona in mind when she chose him, as a way of emphasizing Rizal's vanity; but after a few witty and regrettably short scenes, nothing much is made of Rizal's egotism-- all we're left with is an action star trying to act the intellectual. Better is Jaime Fabregas as defense lawyer Luis Taviel; in his soft-spoken way Fabregas gives a subtler performance than Montano. His defense summation-- understated yet intense, spoken in fluent, effortless Spanish-- upstages Montano's own climactic trial speech.

Mario O'Hara's remake of Gerry De Leon's Sisa couldn't be more: where Diaz-Abaya took six months and three million dollars to shoot, O'Hara did his in ten days, for about sixty thousand dollars.

There's much to dislike about Sisa: the sets are basically of the plywood-and-Styrofoam school of production design; the acting-- sex star Gardo Verzosa plays Rizal, sex starlet Aya Medel the title role-- is crude, if not a bit embarrassing. The story is difficult to follow, shifting from past to present to fantasy to supernatural reality, with little preamble and no apologies whatsoever.

Yet there's something about Sisa. As all Filipinos know, she's is the madwoman who haunts the margins of Rizal's Noli; dressed in filthy rags, calling out the names of her two lost children, she's easily the single most memorable character in the novel. O'Hara believes that memorable characters aren't created so much as they are based on people the writer knew in real life (Rizal once spoke of a "Miss L., who has the most enchanting eyes"). It's O'Hara conceit (and the crucial difference between his film and Gerry De Leon's) that this "Miss L." was the basis for Rizal's Sisa, and that she was the great love of his life.

In a sense O'Hara has been telling Sisa's story all his life. He not only wrote the screenplay for Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (Brocka's version of Noli) he also played Berto the Leper, lover of the Sisa figure in the film. O'Hara may have revealed more of his feelings than he intended in Tinimbang, both in the screenplay and in his acting; his Berto (like his screenplay) is compassionate, infinitely loving, infinitely tender towards the helpless Kuala. From writing a great screenplay for Brocka (and giving, incidentally, a great performance) to writing a great screenplay for his own film must have been an inevitable, all-too-tempting step.

I've never really liked Rizal as a dramatic character; he's always been too passive, too intellectual a hero for me to believe in. Except for his execution he lived a meandering, uneventful life-- hardly ideal stuff for film biographies. I've never really understood what drove him to write his novels, or believe what he believed. His family was maltreated, yes, and he saw Spanish injustice firsthand...but that was years ago, when he was a child. Could there have been someone closer to him-- some woman, perhaps-- whose tragedy drove him to what he did?

This is Sisa's greatest audacity-- to explain Rizal in such a way that he comes to vivid life before us; everything O'Hara does complements and reinforces this ambition. He knew he couldn't create the world of 1896 on a two-and-a-half million budget so he deliberately creates an unrealistic one out of painted plywood. He knew he couldn't get topnotch actors to play his Rizal and Sisa, so he reconceived them as a pair of crudely intense, emotionally passionate lovers (Verzosa and Medel for all their 'crudity' are ultimately affecting). O'Hara has reimagined Rizal's life the way Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard reimagined Shakespeare's in John Madden's Shakespeare in Love-- as a grand, once-in-a-lifetime love affair. If you don't buy it, you find yourself hooting helplessly in laughter; if you do buy it, you find yourself believing in Rizal for the first time, as a fully human being.

Rizal sa Dapitan was the first, Jose Rizal the biggest; coming soon is Mike De Leon's Bayaning Third World (Third World Hero), invited to this year's Cannes. Sisa will probably fall between the cracks opened up by these three works; it's too ambitious for its own good, a project that fails (though fails magnificently) to live up to the promise of its wildly innovative screenplay. It may end up forgotten in the flood of Rizal films, relegated to the more obscure dustbins of film history...except by those who can respond to its magic, or thrill to its unfettered imagination.

Cinemaya magazine, Issue #44, Summer 1999

El Filibusterismo (Gerardo de Leon, 1962)

Thanks to Video 48 for the image

A dark masterpiece

El Filibusterismo (The Subversive) is one of two of Jose Rizal's major novels, Rizal being (to the Philippines anyway) a combination of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln--a founding intellectual of the country as well as its single most beloved historical figure (which has its good and bad points...but that’s a whole other article right there). El Filibusterismo is to Philippine history what Les Miserables or Huckleberry Finn would be to…well, not completely true: Les Miserables and Huckleberry Finn are masterpieces of world literature, and not many would claim as much for El Fili (our fond nickname for the novel).

El Fili and its companion piece, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), did, however, inspire a nationalist movement, and the death of their author did inspire a nationwide revolt--one which ultimately led to what is generally considered the first-ever democratic republic in Asia. I doubt if Les Miz or Huck Finn could boast of as much direct influence in their respective countries’ histories, classic literary status notwithstanding.

But it’s not just the historical importance--emotionally and culturally the two novels are still very much alive to some 75 million or so Filipinos. It and Noli are required reading in high school; more, every other high school in the country is named after the author (not to mention every other street, drive or avenue--if not after Rizal, then after characters in his novels: Maria Clara Drive; Simoun Street; Dona Victorina Avenue…).

It’s unfortunate that Rizal was too spread out, too involved in concerns personal, political, commercial, and scientific to pour his considerable energies into making the novels more artful. Mind you, they are genuine novels, in the classic sense of the term--the characters develop over the course of the narrative, the prose (in the English or Filipino translations, anyway--have not read them in the original 19^th-century Spanish) is florid but occasionally eloquent, and full of sharp, satirical observations. But they can't be considered groundbreaking or even outstanding examples of Victorian fiction--El Fili, for one, is obviously indebted to Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo without, unfortunately, inheriting that book's drive and genius for colorful detail (of course Rizal had other things in mind besides writing 'entertainment'). And Simoun may be a fascinatingly shadowy figure but pales in comparison to Dumas' Count, whose thirst for vengeance burned him deep into our collective consciousness.

This, I think, is where the film versions come in.

Officially there is no existing print left of El Fili. Rumor has it that one exists in some lab in Germany--but no further news has been heard since. I managed to catch the film on Viva Channel years ago, in what appears to be a poor video recording of a faded print, with almost none of the dialogue discernible (the cable channel no longer exists, and I have no idea what has happened to their copy). In a way, it was like watching a silent film adaptation of a literary classic.

And it works; the plot is complex, but all you need to know can be learned from the images onscreen. Proud white mestizos hover high and haughty over dark-complexioned indios; heroes Basilio, Isagani, Kabesang Tales--indios with rare courage and intelligence--defy civil and church authority. And behind all loom the shadowy figure of Simoun: jeweler, master manipulator, representative of all that is black and bitter within Rizal himself.

There are the interludes between Basilio and his beloved Juli, who meet by a tree on a high seaside cliff, a striking location composed of tree and cliff, sea and sky. But a pair of twisted crucifixes stand silent nearby, the graves of Juli's mother and sister, and add a note of foreboding to their courtship.

There is the subplot of a priest and a town official conspiring to rob Kabesang Tales, the farmer. When Tales finally picks up a rifle to pursue the two villains, De Leon shoots all three in extreme long shot, running like ants through a vast landscape--an image not unworthy of Erich Von Stroheim's Death Valley sequence in Greed.

Many of these sequences are not in the novel--Rizal mentions Basilio and Juli’s lovemaking only in passing, while the death of priest and politician is suggested by a pair of dead bodies found the morning after. By actually filming the events De Leon pushes Rizal’s political and social agenda into the background (where I for one would say it belongs), and brings to fore the characters' everyday struggles, their essential humanity.

Actually, Rizal had many intentions for his two novels--they were to serve as a panoramic assessment of Philippine society; a clarion call for reform; a scathing critique of the Filipino character as a whole. Ibarra/Simoun was meant to represent the fresh idealist turned soured revolutionary; Basilio was his younger, lower-class self; Padre Salvi, Dona Victorina, Cabesang Tales, Don Custodio and Ben Zayb represent various strata of Philippine society as it was then (and, in many ways, still is now). Cramming in all these characters with the full weight of their significance would have sunk the picture; De Leon, however, employs a  technique filmmaker John Huston often used in adapting literary classics--when faced with characters rich in symbolism and subtext he focused on incident, dialogue and detail, trusting the story as it unfolds to reveal the characters’ full meaning.

It’s a risky gamble--Huston’s flat adaptation of Under the Volcano, or overambitious staging of Moby Dick (sunk by the miscasting of harmless Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab) shows how this style of storytelling can go wrong. But De Leon is working with (admittedly) simpler material, and in the case of El Fili the technique works remarkably well. De Leon’s classical yet dynamic sense of composition--a sense that owes something to John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa--and clean storytelling style pares away much of the novel's dense underbrush, turning it into the intense drama of vengeance it always wanted to be.

Then there's De Leon’s conception of Simoun the jeweler, “The Brown Cardinal”--tall and silent, wearing dark cloaks and even darker spectacles. Simoun is the Gothic figure Francis Coppola probably wanted from Gary Oldman in Dracula but failed to get (perhaps because Coppola surrounded Oldman with so much extraneous silliness). De Leon keeps it simple, and his Simoun is truly menacing--rarely speaking or smiling, always standing in one corner of a shot, always peering at unfolding events like an artist examining his handiwork, or a spider its prey. In one wonderful scene Simoun leans back on a rocking chair and addresses a row of three bandits--with his body in a pose of total languor, his eyes masked by mysterious spectacles, he nevertheless dominates the three before him.

Which is metaphorically apt; Simoun, after all, is the figure behind all the machinations that drive El Fili--its heart of darkness, so to speak. Where in Noli Rizal, hoping for reform, wrote to expose the cancer eating away at Philippine colonial society, his message in El Fili is different: that the failure of reform may lead to violent revolution. He needed a hero diametrically opposed to the naïve Crisostomo Ibarra (played by the earnest Eddie del Mar) in Noli, and practicing both the principle of economic means and the principle of narrative symmetry, turned Ibarra into Simoun.

Pancho Magallona who plays Simoun gives what I consider to be one of the greatest performances in Philippine cinema. No Gregory Peck he, every moment he’s onscreen he radiates a sense of malevolent forces kept in careful check. Yet good as he is with his glasses on, with his glasses off (the rare moment recalling some awful memory, or undergoing some pang of conscience) he's even better, the eyes warm, sad, full of pain. Suddenly the monster that dominates much of the film acquires a human face and heart; suddenly, De Leon complicates the texture of Rizal’s story of revenge with the possibility of redemption--the forlorn hope that Simoun, despite his hatred, despite all the evil he has done, could somehow be turned around and saved.

One complaint I might lodge against El Fili--you don't really see De Leon cut loose here, not the way he does in the earlier Noli, when Elias runs across a phantasmagoric landscape while members of his dead family berate him for his failures. You don't see the De Leon of Sanda Wong with its hauntingly beautiful drowning scene, or endless rain of pythons summoned by a magic ring. You don’t see the De Leon of The Moises Padilla Story with its painfully extended torture sequence that visually parallels the crucifixion and death of Christ.

What you do see is an amazingly sustained piece of cinematic storytelling from one of the best filmmakers in Philippine cinema, translating to the big screen one of the most important novels in Philippine history--and, a rarity in literary adaptations, doing it well.

Though I hear Daigdig ng mga Api (The World of the Oppressed) is De Leon’s true masterpiece (the film’s prints and negatives are, tragically, lost), this one reportedly comes close. Easily the best De Leon I’ve seen to date and one of the greatest Filipino films ever made.

First published in Menzone Magazine, a Businessworld publication, May 2001

Sisa (Gerardo de Leon, 1951)

Mother dearest

Gerardo de Leon's Sisa (1951) is amazing, not the least because the director takes a memorable if minor character from Filipino activist and intellectual Jose Rizal's seminal political novel Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) and makes her the protagonist of his film. Tom Stoppard tried something similar on the theater stage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead some fifteen years later; a film version followed forty years after that, and achieved only a fraction of de Leon's visual panache.

Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, Gerardo de Leon, 1961)

Can't touch this

Even with a perfect print, I can't imagine anyone saying De Leon's Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not, 1961) is a perfect film. While the casting of the men is impeccable (Eddie Del Mar as Crisostomo Ibarra, Oscar Keesee, Jr. as Padre Damaso, the great Leopoldo Salcedo as Elias), the women (Edita Vital as Ibarra's beloved Maria Clara, Lina Carino as the hapless Sisa) seem to have been hired more for their pretty faces than their acting abilities.

Actually the film's true star is De Leon' style, virtually an encyclopedia of low-angled shots, striking deep focus compositions, dramatic lighting, on-camera effects, and precision cutting--the variety in turn complementing the collection of anecdotes, plot twists, and melodramatic confrontations that made up much of Rizal's novel. If the results are not perfectly satisfying, perhaps that's in part due to the fact that De Leon is a master of Gothic drama, and Noli a dark but essentially comic satire of Philippine society; only later, when the forces of oppression rise up triumphant does the film truly come into its own. Perfect marriage of material and filmmaking sensibility had to wait until El Filibusterismo (The Filibuster, 1962), when the ambivalently evil Simoun (Pancho Magallona, in what may be the greatest performance in Philippine cinema) plotted revenge against the all-powerful Spaniards.

Nevertheless--two boys, Crispin and Basilio, shiver like mice high up in a bell tower, where De Leon uses the claustrophobic space and enveloping darkness to suggest the shape and nature of the children's fears; when the tyrannical sacristan finally appears, De Leon momentarily wipes away the eyes' pupils, giving him the blank stare of a doll, a shark, a child's terror. When Basilio finally comes home, he learns that his long-missing, much feared father had come home before him, eaten his dinner, left; Basilio ignores his mother's news and immediately checks her for bruises (a lovely gesture that endears Basilio to us--not only is he caring, he's smart, too).

De Leon's realization of the famous scene where Sisa is arrested (famous partly because it's based on what happened to Rizal's own mother) is equally vivid. Sisa runs up the street to the camera in panic; cut to Basilio in the house, backing away; soldiers are approaching. He drops out a window, sprains his ankle, but manages to crawl away. His mother isn't as lucky; as the soldiers approach the camera, De Leon cuts to her stepping in from the side to stand in their way. She's force-marched across beautiful landscapes, past the church that was source of much of her troubles (she asks not to be humiliated before the townspeople; the soldiers order her to march two steps ahead--no more). At the station of the guardia civil she's marched past prostitutes and a hanging saddle (De Leon's not one to shy away from a sexually suggestive visual metaphor); the capitan angrily dismisses her. Sisa, running home, cries out for her two boys, both of which are now missing. She finds a torn shard of Basilio's shirt, and in one of the most beautiful shots in the film De Leon's camera gazes at her from below as she raises the fluttering piece of cloth up to the sun.

There's Ibarra and Maria Clara's party at the fisheries, where a crocodile is discovered inside the netting; a man dives in and Tarzan-fashion, wrestles with the creature. De Leon's cutting is fast and furious; there's so much splash and struggle you find yourself panicking along with the witnesses. Ibarra jumps in to help, and the sequence ends spectacularly, with men heaving on a rope and pulling out a live, roaring creature (the shot sells the sequence; seeing the monster in all its glory, you can't help but believe the two men were in mortal danger).

There's the attempt on Ibarra's life: Elias' profile as he catches wind of the plot; Ibarra's frightened glance at the cornerstone hanging fatefully above him; De Leon's thrilling yet coherent cutting of the chaos that ensues. There's Sisa--driven mad at last--urged to dance then whipped by the capitan's sexually deprived and sadistic wife, the whip like a tongue flicking about Sisa's body.

There's a shot midway through the film--Ibarra and Maria Clara walking down the street when they encounter a leper; Sisa standing beside the leper and pointing to the church tower above them; soldiers of the Guardia Civil riding up to drive the leper away--that's clearly a throwaway moment, one the viewer can easily miss, but the shot is colonial society crystallized in a single image, arguably the greatest in all of Philippine cinema. Standing at ground level, the bourgeoisie; low near the ground are derelict and outcast; towering above all--aloof and unperturbed--is the almighty Catholic Church's bell tower.

Finally there's the great phantasmagorial sequence of heroic Elias, confronted with one revelation too many, running across the novel's many landscapes with figures from his dead past (a woman prostate on the ground; a man's decayed and bloodied head in a cage; a girl floating on surf, knife buried in her bosom) bitterly accusing him of cowardice. Flawed in print and execution De Leon's Noli may be, still it stands as the definitive, most visually striking realization of Rizal's celebrated novel ever made.

(Portions of this post taken from my entry on the film found in Chris Fujiwara's Little Book of Movies)

2.19.08

Sisa (Mario O'Hara, 1998)

For the ambitious failure blogathon (and the perfect companion piece to oggsmoggs' article on Jose Rizal (Marilou Diaz Abaya, 1998):

If I had to define 'ambitious failure,' it would have to be Sisa (Mario O'Hara, 1998). A tiny film (roughly seventy thousand dollars) shot in ten days, it didn't have much expense to recoup, yet it bombed at the tills, closing on its opening day. I saw copies of the VCD for a while, and (I still have nightmares about this moment) actually held the print in my hands (oh why oh why didn't I run with it-- it was even in good condition), before I returned it to Regal Films, where it disappeared into their warehouse (where hundreds of other prints sat in the Manila heat, slowly turning into vinegar) forever.

Anyway-- here's my contribution, an early assessment of the film: