Armando 'Bing' Lao is 2026's National Artist for Film
This September 2026 Armando 'Bing' Lao (1948 - 2024) was posthumously granted the title of National Artist of the Philippines, generally considered the highest honor the state can give one of its citizens.
For Adults Only
If Peeping Tom and Videodrome and Don't Torture a Duckling had a bastard child this might be the sleazy result.
The plot hinges around a series of snuff videotapes circulating Tokyo's underworld, and both a private investigator and the janitor in a porn video arcade are obsessed with discovering the source. But that's not the film's priority, which seems twofold, pretentious and prehensile both: to indulge the filmmaker's obsessions, which include celebrating his influences (Powell's vivd color palette, Cronenberg's body horror) and attempting to transcend them without a comparable budget; and adhering to the strict conditions of the genre's format-- a sexual encounter every ten minutes, a precisely titrated amount of gore, and (above all) no genital exposure.
That lack of a real budget is frustrating. The videos themselves when viewed aren't all that transgressive with POV footage recording fuzzy imagery and some clumsily executed onscreen mutilation (there's a bowl of spaghetti however that's bluntly effective, easily the most horrifying shock cut in the picture). The sex is more entertaining, and the fact that Sato has to come up with something kinky with the actors not exposing their crotch or even shedding their underwear becomes a real challenge-- just how much pleasure can you get out of sucking at an erection through cottonwear?
The cumulative blueball feel does get to you-- at a certain point you find yourself fastforwarding to the more interesting-looking stuff and rewinding to make sure you've squeezed out all the juices; you also, I suspect, find yourself more susceptible to Sato's more incidental effects. Perhaps his most satisfying moments aren't the scenes of extensive skin contact (or rather skin-through-silk contact), or the faintly risible sight of the killer swinging a spring-loaded knife mounted on a video camera mounted on a tripod like an ax (the weapon seems more threatening when the metal-tipped tripod legs are used as a spear) but the transitional images, the gliding shots through ultramodern cityscapes to end at a chainlink fence, behind which we see an abandoned fridge door gaping wide, inside of which lies a severed hand clutching a videotape (might as well throw in Bunuel as one of the director's sublimated heroes). Perhaps my favorite is a nothing image, a throwaway shot of buildings standing against brilliant sky, the harsh sunlight flagellated by tree branches in a stiff wind. Light me a cigarette, honey, I could use the postcoital smoke.
(Postscript: pause before the rabbit hole and enter at your own risk. Turns out Criterion Channel only showed one of Sato's more palatable films, and if you do a little googling to specific websites you can see his darker (if still genre-constricted-- no genitals!) work, some of them unabashedly queer. Secret Garden (1987) is a neat reworking of The Story of O with payback ending ingeniously appended, and Silencer Made of Glass is a lurid bit of sadomasochism with flash suppressor attached. Nothing wishy-washy here, only fetishes and fixations being thoroughly indulged)
Jaguar has a tony reputation: directed by Lino Brocka, loosely adapted by Jose 'Pete' Lacaba and Ricky Lee (from the true-life story "The Boy Who Wanted to Become Society," by Nick Joaquin), edited by Augusto Salvador, lensed by Conrado 'Carding' Baltazar, it's the first Filipino film to compete in the Main Competition of the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.
That said the film doesn't come up as often in cinephile discussion as Brocka's Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag or Insiang, which shouldn't be a surprise. Maynila and Insiang were released on DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming as part of the Criterion Collection; Jaguar is only available in crummier and crummier streaming copies, in the nether regions of the internet-- until recently, when the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP), the Philippine Film Archive (PFA), and Cite de Memoire all collaborated on a restoration. The film premiered in last year's Lumiere Festival in Lyon France, then opened the Sinag Manila Film Festival last night with a star-studded screening. After over forty years, Jaguar returns to Filipino audiences with a vengeance.
Three godmothers
Saw Mario O'Hara's Tatlong Ina, Isang Anak (Three Mothers, One Child, 1987) starring Nora Aunor years ago in a bootleg but the video was muddy and you could barely see what's going on. Cinema One put up a reasonably clear copy on YouTube-- in a few days ABS CBN will be unveiling a digitally enhanced version on theater screens-- and judging from what can be seen at the YouTube it's one of the loveliest, moodiest, most stylishly shot and lit Filipino comedies I'd ever seen.
Gatecrasher
Dan Villegas' Uninvited (2024) with a script by Dodo Dayao is unashamed to flaunt its pulp-fiction credentials, everything from Tarantino's Kill Bill to Ferrara's Ms. 45 to Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood (from which Tarantino stole much of Kill Bill) to Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black-- the Woman Seeking Revenge flick is a suitably disreputable genre that merits revisiting time and time again, if only to allow a director to get his rocks off exercising his filmmaking chops.
Kill baby kill
So the conventional line is that John Woo's remake of his 1989 classic is handsomely mounted but has nowhere near the intensity and bravura style of the original.
(Warning: details from the novel and film discussed in explicit detail)
Reading Dorothy B. Hughes' 1947 novel In a Lonely Place and watching Nicholas Ray's 1950 adaptation is like experiencing the difference between night and day: Hughes' novel takes place mostly at night it seems, in dense fog; you often confuse the misty Los Angeles evenings for Dix Steele's twilight view-- occasionally there's the glare of a passing streetlamp, but it quickly fades into the haze.
Ray's film feels as if it takes place mostly in sunlight; even its interiors radiate the glow of studio kliegs-- the film is described as a noir but if we adhere to strict definitions it breaks one rule of noir: not a lot of shadows onscreen. The look of Ray's films can diverge from the norm (see his debut work They Live By Night) but in this case he opts for the standard-issue brightness of a Hollywood production-- why?
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.
Experiment Perilous isn't the best-known Tourneur and critics of the time compare it unfavorably to Gaslight, with Hedy Lamarr's Allida Bederaux in the Ingrid Bergman role of tormented housewife, Paul Lukas as Nick her husband, and George Brent as therapist Dr. Huntington Bailey, who comes from the outside world seeking to help Allida.
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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.'
Robert Rodriguez doing Frank Miller sounds like a match in heaven: Rodriguez's comic-book style should provide the speed and motion and visual depth to enhance Miller's images while Miller should add the twists and wisecracks to spark Rodriguez's sometimes shaky storytelling (Rodriguez as seen in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, often doesn't know how to drive a plot forward; he needs a fairly good writer, which is why I think From Dusk Till Dawn with longtime buddy Quentin Tarantino (clever writer not much of an eye) may be the best work either have ever done (there's Jackie Brown-- but that's an Elmore Leonard film which I hear involves Tarantino)).
Miller's Sin City 'graphic novels' (I remember when they used to be 'comic books') are black-and-white pastiches, the distillation of classic noirs where hardboiled detectives and/or borderline psychotics uphold complicated codes of honor, authority figures are absolutely powerful and absolutely corrupt, women are either whores or innocents endowed with pneumatically enlarged breasts. Perhaps the most notable feature of the novels is Miller's determined manner of turning up the volume on the sex and violence, particularly the violence (the sex mostly happens offscreen and is often remarkably chaste, given the milieu (one character goes on a killing spree after just a single night with a hooker; another goes to jail for years successfully defending the purity of a young girl)). Miller packs as many variations on killing as he can into his pages, using everything from a .45 caliber cannon to razor wire to a samurai sword; he puts a spin on violence through black comedy-- a mordant comment or ironic remark as exclamation point on someone's often bloodspattered passing. The savagery and humor plays against an austerely monochromatic background-- like looking at a blood-drenched world through armor-plated shades.
My most vivid memory of Tikoy Aguiluz's erotic noir was of its censorship by the MTRCB-- the imposition of the feared Adults Only rating, effectively banning it from commercial movie theaters.
Tikoy Aguiluz, who illuminated the world of toreros in Boatman, painted a portrait of the GRO girl in Segurista (Dead Sure), explores Manila's gambling casinos and railway communities in Biyaheng Langit.
The film was given an X rating twice by the Movie Television and Classification Board (MTRCB) for its frank sex and explicit violence, both of which have been described as “gratuitous.” Wouldn't know what “gratuitous” sex and violence looks like myself, but I do feel that if Aguiluz is to portray the heaven and hell of modern Philippine society with any sense of realism, he has to be free to show what needs to be shown. Also don’t believe in giving an X rating to any film, especially when this prevents the film’s commercial screening; it suggests the rather insulting idea that there are some images or subjects the adult Filipino can’t handle.
Mario O'Hara's Bagong Hari (The New King) was released in early 1986, a singular moment in Philippine history. It was produced and released during the final days of the Marcos regime, when the dictator's hold on things was seriously weakened (though few realized just how much), and the level of ferment was at an unprecedented high-- was at a level not seen since Marcos declared Martial Law fourteen years before. It was also-- though few knew it then-- the final days of what we might call the '70s and '80s golden age of Philippine cinema, a period that I believe started with Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) and continued past the end of the decade with Kisapmata (Blink of an Eye, 1981) and Himala (Miracle, 1982).
Hollywood's on hold at the moment, trying to retool its production line to create gentler more sensitive films, with nary a mention of the words 'bomb,' 'terrorist' or 'World Trade Center.' The cineplexes have been forced to keep movies playing three, four weeks at a time, for want of anything new to show-- I've been seeing the ads for Bridget Jones' Diary and The Princess Diaries practically forever, though I haven't been able to (and possibly never will) see them.
Enter by sheer blind luck (I hardly call it design) Chito Rono's La Vida Rosa (The Life of Rosa), a noir crime thriller about con artist Rosa (Rosanna Roces) and her lockpicking boyfriend Dado (Diether Ocampo). Rosa and Dado keep half a dozen schemes juggling in the air, anything from carnapping to blackmail to stealing gifts from a wedding reception; their main source of income, however, are the smuggling and housebreaking operations led by Tsong, a crime boss, and his right-hand man Lupo (Pen Medina). Dado and Rosa have a love-hate relationship with Tsong: they depend on him for jobs and protection, yet at the same time feel an irresistible need to 'sideline'-- commit freelance crimes-- behind his back.
Dear diary
6:10 PM
Fear is a tool. When light hits the screen it's not just the movie's start, it's a warning. Only who's being warned-- the bad guys on the big screen or us sitting here? Maybe you, reading this? Confused now.
Sat down to watch Matt Reeves' The Batman. A hundred and seventy-six minutes to go.
Need I remind you? NARRATIVE AND PLOT TWISTS TO BE DISCUSSED IN EXPLICIT DETAIL.
Moving on.
