Pressure (Anthony Maras, 2026)

Sunny with a chance of rain 

Anthony Maras' Pressure (2026)-- based on a 2014 play by David Haig-- answers a question no one thought to ask before: can a riveting thriller be made out of weathermen? Not storm chasers (looking at you Twister); not disaster flicks involving climate change (You too Day After Tomorrow and Geostorm)-- I mean weathermen, folk who pore over isobaric maps and stare at thermometers and take windspeed readings. The science nerds.

Apparently the answer is yes if-- big if-- 1) We're talking Operation Overlord, 160,000 troops launched on 7,000 ships supported by 12,000 aircraft, arguably the largest seaborne invasion in history; and 2) Landing point's on the Normandy coast in France, at the center of one of the most unpredictable weather systems on the planet. 

Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025)

To mourn or not to mourn

Chloe Zhao's latest-- adapted by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell from O'Farrell's well-regarded 2020 novel-- is a tearjerker, most people will agree. The question one might ask: does it earn our tears, or are we overindulging?

Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Burning down the house

Been years since I saw Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985) and decades since I saw it projected (an unimpressive 16 mm print in an improvised theater). Watching the 2016 4K UHD restoration on the big screen forty years after its premiere is like watching a storm surge approach shore: you're confronted with an unstoppable wall stretching from end to end, and you're not sure whether to run (where to?) or fall on your knees in worship. 

And then you realize, after so many viewings, like a shock of saltwater to the face: damn, but this film is funny.

Isang Himala (A Miracle, Pepe Diokno, 2024)

It's a miracle

Let's get the million-peso question out of the way: from my limited perspective Isang Himala does not measure up to Ishmael Bernal's 1982 classic film, not quite, but does easily stand out as the best of the four films I saw at the 2024 Metro Manila Film Festival. 

"But how can this be?!" you ask. Well let me tell you.

Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar, 2023)

Lockup drama

Small confession: meant to trudge my way to the movie theater to watch the latest  Alien movie because-- why, exactly? Liked the atmosphere and production design and cast of the first movie; liked the offbeat humor and imagery of the fourth (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, from a script by Joss Whedon)-- otherwise, not a big fan.  

So I went and saw Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing instead.

Bug (William Friedkin, 2006)

The Itchy and Scratchy Show

Bug is a small, relatively unheralded release costing four million dollars-- gargantuan by Philippine standards (most medium-sized productions run about half a million or so), but practically peanuts by Hollywood's, where 'small' films run from twenty to forty million. It's also the single best thing William Friedkin's ever done.

The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)

Killing me softly

(Warning: plot details explicitly discussed)

Darren Aronofsky's The Whale (2022) adapted Samuel D Hunter's play to the big screen and we more or less know how the film has fared: made respectable money from a small ($3 million) budget, won Brendan Fraser an Academy Award for playing a morbidly obese man trying to re-connect with his estranged daughter, provoked either ecstatic or angry reactions from a broad range of critics. 

Aronofsky was smart enough to consult with the Obesity Action Coalition, and the statement on their website is interesting: they did not have any input on the decision to cast Fraser, nor did they have any input about the design and appearance of the suit meant to make the actor look like he weighed 600 pounds; they did find Fraser 'highly receptive' to their suggestions about how to approach his role, and felt he did 'a remarkable job.' They admitted to taking part in the production to 'help make sure' the character is portrayed in a 'realistic' way, but didn't explicitly say it was realistic; they hedged a little saying 'how individuals experience obesity varies,' but admit 'SOME people may have had (the same) experiences.' Tactfully worded, and about the best the production could hope for, considering this may have been a late innings consultation.  Stayed clear of a full-throated approval, but no violent objections. 

I do like what they have to say about the title: ''Whale' is often a derogatory term used for people with obesity. However, after reading the play and seeing the movie...it has a much deeper meaning.' These people take context into consideration, how cool is that?

O what did I think of it? Well let me tell you. 

Sa North Diversion Road (On North Diversion Road, Dennis Marasigan, 2005)

Road trip

Never seen Tony Perez's Sa North Diversion Road (North Diversion Road) onstage, but easy to see why this is a perennial theater favorite, constantly being restaged: it's the story of ten couples, of different social classes, occupations, and temperaments, driving at different times down the same road, dealing with the man's infidelity to the woman. The metaphor is obvious--life's a long road taken by different people undergoing differing experiences, with different destinations along the way. The pleasure is in the execution, a dramatic tour de force for two.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021)

Sound and fury

Joel Coen's latest is fascinating for what it's not--it's not a collaboration with his brother Ethan, not an original script or remake (or riff off a Greek classic a la O Brother Where Art Thou?), not in color but the rare straight adaptation, in stark black-and-white.

West Side Story (Steven Spielberg, 2021)

Batang West Side

Not sure why people are surprised Spielberg has done a dance musical--arguably he's been making them throughout his career, from the deadly pas de deux between the colossal Peterbilt and little red Valiant in Duel to the lines of police cars snaking behind Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express to the Ferris Wheel strolling down a seaside dock in 1941 to the alien ships playing tag across the clear Wyoming skies in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg isn't just a master at shooting people dancing (see the USO dance hall sequence in 1941), he's a master at shooting anything dancing, from cars to saucers to Ferris wheels; the first time we manage to view the entire Great White in Jaws (after teasing us for about an hour) Spielberg cuts to a high overhead shot of the creature gliding smoothly past the fishing vessel (accompanied by John Williams' eerie harpstrings) and we see with an electric tingle shooting up our spine that it's about the size of the vessel. That's why the quip "You're gonna need a bigger boat" lingers so in memory--turns out Police Chief Brody was right. 

In the Heights (Jon M. Chu, 2021)

For your Heights only

Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights which he started working on in college and managed to stage on Broadway some nine years later has finally made it to the big screen. It's handsomely produced with a $55 million budget, shot on location in Washington Heights, and features a strikingly handsome cast of mostly young actors and a handful of recognizable veteran talents.

Insiang (Chris Millado, 2002, stage adaptation)

Insiang comes home

Insiang is arguably Lino Brocka's masterpiece, an intimate three-character chamber drama (Tonya (Mona Lisa); her lover Dado (Ruel Vernal); her daughter Insiang (Hilda Koronel)) that slips under the skin like a hunting knife, slicing away fatty illusion and crusted complacency. It's a vision of the Tondo community, of little plywood shanties jammed together and trembling under the shadow of a mountain of garbage.

The film was Brocka's first to be shown internationally, was the first Filipino film to go to the Cannes Film Festival, to be screened at the prestigious Director's Fortnight. Audiences and critics alike sat up and took notice when Brocka made Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang" (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974); they applauded Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon) in 1975. Insiang confirmed what Filipinos already knew--that Brocka was not just one of the best filmmakers in the country but in the world.

What few remember or even realize was that before Insiang was a film it was a script by Mario O'Hara, written for an episode of the drama series Hilda, in 1973. A few years later Brocka was pitching projects to neophyte producer Ruby Tiong Tan (one of his proposals: an adaptation of Agapito Joaquin's one-act play Bubungang Lata (Tin Roof), which O'Hara turned into a film in 1998); Ms. Tan agreed to Insiang. O'Hara wasn't available to adapt his teleplay (he was directing his second feature, the epic Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, 1976)), so Lamberto Antonio stepped up instead (according to O'Hara there are few changes). The film was shot on location in fourteen days, on a budget of P600,000 (roughly three million today).

It's now 2002, and Tanghalang Pilipino has chosen for its 16th season to adapt Insiang on the theater stage; the question on everyone's mind--certainly on mine--is "Why?" The film is arguably the definitive example of Filipino social-realism--why remake a near-perfect work? In terms of structure, of sustained dramatic tension, of economy of means achieving maximum effect, the film stands above almost any other Filipino films (only one other approaches its elegance and intensity I think--Mike de Leon's Kisapmata (Blink of an Eye, 1982)).

Marjorie Prime (Michael Almereyda, 2017)

Memory play

Michael Almereyda's Marjorie Prime (2017) adapts Jordan Harrison's Pulitzer-nominated play to the big screen in a small way and it's marvelous. Eighty-five year old Marjorie (Lois Smith, who played the role in two previous stage productions) suffers the initial symptoms of Alzheimer's; to help her deal with the memory loss her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) have installed a 'Prime'--a hologram-projected artificial intelligence--representing Marjorie's husband Walter (Jon Hamm) when he was a relatively young forty to talk to Marjorie, record her stories, remind her of any memories she might have forgotten, keep her company, give her all-around emotional support.

Faust (Fritz Bennewitz)

Beat the Devil 

First published in the Manila Chronicle 12/14/94

With the passing of Lino Brocka, Mario O'Hara is one of a shrinking handful of Philippine film directors whose films are worth getting excited about. Lino has already made his masterpieces; one disadvantage to being dead is that there are no more works forthcoming.

In films such as Condemned and Bulaklak sa City Jail Mr. O'Hara has proven that he can elicit memorable performances and excellent ensemble acting from Dan Alvaro, Nora Aunor, Maya Valdez, Zenaida Amador; even genial German Moreno gave a chilling turn as prison warden in Bulaklak. I will stick my neck out and say that he is Brocka's superior in visual style, as witness the dark gloriously film-noir look of Bagong Hari or the claustrophobic squalor in City Jail. As late as last year with Johnny Tinoso and the Proud Beauty he was still doing fascinating work: while the first half of the film is a mess of underfunded special effects and poorly imagined art direction, the second half is one of the more enchanting fantasies made that year, local or foreign. It was more hip and sophisticated than Disney's Beauty and the Beast and fully realized the complexities of the Nick Joaquin short story it was based on.

One more thing about O'Hara's career: it is difficult it is agony to choose between his acting and his directing. He is a brilliant director but is a just as brilliant if not more so actor. Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang is one of Brocka's more ambitious films (his best some say). O'Hara has the supporting role of a leper who lives in the outskirts of the village near a cemetery; his companion is a woman driven insane by a forced abortion, played by Lolita Rodriguez. Their roles are hoary old cliches that stink to high heaven of sickly sweet sentiment--or should: O'Hara and Ms. Rodriguez perform with sublime simplicity, treading the thin line between bathos and comedy. The result is a tender portrait of small-town outcasts; the film is a starring vehicle for Christopher De Leon (who fares well) but it's O'Hara and Rodriguez who stay with you.

 O'Hara has made a few appearances since (he was memorable in Brocka's Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa as a malevolent gardener out to seduce a repressed widow, again played by Lolita Rodriguez--what is it about the two that the chemistry between them is so potent?). He has gone into directing, resulting in the films already mentioned (for which I am grateful), and has done work on stage.

Which brings us to O'Hara's Mephistopheles in the PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association) production of Faust. In England Shakespeare wrote among many plays Henry ll to Vll, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear; Germany has Goethe who wrote Faust. It took him sixty years and almost as long for modern audiences to sit through; PETA is doing only the first part but still--ambitious.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek / Ordet

 
Two miracles

Warning: plot of both The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Ordet discussed in close detail)

Maybe the funniest joke in Preston Sturges' classic comedy--about Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton wearing one of the most salacious monikers in all of cinema) who after a night of drunken partying with a band of soldiers finds herself pregnant--was that it got made in the first place, in 1944, under the supposedly watchful eyes of the Hays Office (and in fact they were watching: when the picture was being developed the Office approved of only ten of the script's pages). 

Film critic James Agee managed to upstage (or top) the joke, though, with his appreciative quip: "the Hays Office has either been hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep." 

I dearly love the film but do feel that both film and Agee's topper were topped in turn by the Office itself when it cautioned the filmmakers (sometime during script development) to depict the men as "normal, thoroughly fit American soldiers who have had an evening of clean fun."

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson)

 

Anomalous

Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's Anomalisa (2015) was based on his 'sound play'--actors seated on an empty stage, reciting lines, with accompanying sound effects--and judging from what we hear the script is painfully clever, painfully funny. This adaptation into a stop-motion animated feature using 3D printed puppets, however, raises the story to a whole other level. 

Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes, 2011)

Belatedly for Shakespeare's death day, an old post

Inflexible Man

Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus is a lively and intense adaptation of an obscure Shakespeare play--especially obscure, considering this is the first-ever attempt to deliver it to the big screen.

There's probably a reason for the neglect--Caius Martius (dubbed 'Coriolanus' after his conquest of the Volscian city of Corioles)--is an unregenerate bastard, a highborn military career officer seeking election to high office who looks down upon ordinary men, claiming their breaths “reek o'th'rotten fens, whose loves I prize / As the dead carcasses of unburied men / That do corrupt my air.” Asked to display his battle scars to the public--a Roman tradition when campaigning--he puts down the wounds as mere “Scratches with briers / Scars to move laughter only,” and declares “I would not buy / Their mercy at the price of one fair word.”

Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure, Roman Polanski, 2013)

Crack that whip

A critic if he's smart looks at a new Roman Polanski film the way an airport security officer looks at a suspiciously hefty, heavily taped carton box full of loose rattling metal: with sharp anticipation, plus a healthy dose of nervousness, perhaps fear. 

I mean--look at the lines in his latest, Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure, 2013): Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) is reading Thomas' (Mathieu Amalric) play, an adaptation of the classic novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Along the way Vanda suggests the play is about child abuse. Thomas freaks: "what the fuck does the maltreatment of children have to do with this story?" He's absolutely right, of course--we have this unlovely habit of shoehorning politically correct ideas into texts that were composed long before the notion of correctness was ever conceived, we expect long-dead minds to conform to our notions of good and bad, right and wrong. You catch yourself nodding in agreement, then realize--this is a character in a Roman Polanski film talking. You wonder if Polanski's slipped in a bit of special pleading on his behalf, and feel repelled by the manipulation (for what it's worth, the lines are in the play). Then you wonder if that's what he intended all along, choosing to adapt this particular play for the big screen. 

"Stereotypes!" Thomas continues to rant. "What are you going to throw at me next? Racism, sexism, class struggle?" to which Vanda replies not with a counter-argument, but a line from Thomas' play "well you're certainly unique, Herr Kushemski," mollifying the man by stroking his vanity (a classic tactic).  

That's the whole play, basically: Vanda the wannabe actress mesmerizing Thomas the playwright and first-time director, in a theatrical retelling by David Ives of a classic erotic tale, in turn taken from an actual episode in the author's life (his name incidentally--or not, as little is incidental in a Polanski film--is basis for the term 'masochism'). To muddy matters between fiction and fact further, Polanski uses an actor coiffed and costumed to resemble himself (if he were fifty or even forty years younger he might have played the role himself), opposite his real-life wife as Vanda; the themes--the power struggle between man and woman, actress and director, dominatrix and dominated--echo moments in Polanski's own life, themes dealt with in his previous films.

The trouble with Polanski isn't that he's a convicted sex offender; or that he can be a maddening tyrant (to the point that actress Faye Dunaway would fling a cup of urine into his face); or that he is manipulative, charming, ingenious and ruthless by turns (sometimes all four at once and then some). No, I'd say the real trouble with Polanski is that he's immensely talented, and I find myself time and time again not apologizing for the man--he's living comfortably in France (whether he deserves to or not), in permanent exile--but for his films, which are seductive, unsettling, gorgeous, almost always worth watching (even his unhappier efforts (I'm thinking a good portion of The Ninth Gate) have moments that startle you out of your seat (the wheelchair crashing through doors for one, revealing the conflagration beyond)). 

Take his trademark camera move, the tracking shot: gliding smoothly down one hallway or another, usually opening a film, likely inspired by similar shots from Alfred Hitchcock. Only Hitchcock directs your attention to this or that detail, points out the relationship between two entirely disparate objects, distends time and magnifies tension to an unbearable degree; his camerawork, more manipulative than anything, is born out of a need for precision and relentless visual storytelling logic. Polanski is capable of this when needed (I'm thinking of the camera following from a point slightly above Rosemary Wodehouse's shoulder as she enters her neighbors' apartment, in the climactic scene of Rosemary's Baby) but the overall impression is of a silky seductive style, meant to relax you and allow you to luxuriate in the velvet gorgeousness of it all--until he delivers the horrors, in which case you do anything except relax.

Said tracking shot sends us down a rainy tree-lined boulevard, turns gracefully right, pushes past theater doors like so many parting curtains to the stage--the venue of battle. The combatants are Vanda, a seemingly crude, inept actress late for auditions, and Thomas, whose new play is the reason she's braving the rain (everyone else is gone, leaving Thomas on his cellphone, complaining about the unsuitability of applicants).


Somehow Vanda manages to turn Thomas' mind (a few teardrops help; so does a deftly exposed thigh, and flattery ("You should play him...you'd be terrific," and we remember that Polanski often acted in his films). Vanda pulls out of her voluminous carpetbag some cheap knitting (the play's opening requires Venus standing in furs, and Vanda could only afford a shawl) and a costume; later she pulls out a dressing gown for Thomas--made in Vienna, 1869 (he looks at her in disbelief).  From out of her head she produces a passable accent, a bright and agile mind, an increasingly impressive series of opinions and insights on the play Thomas has written, a copy of which she has somehow obtained (you wonder what else Vanda might have in that bag--Aristotle's book on comedy? Sophocles hundred other plays? The last forty minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons? Gerardo de Leon's Daigdig ng Mga Api?). You wonder if she isn't Venus herself, come down to earth to serve judgment on this presumptuous male.

Critics have complained that the sexual politics are dated--and much of it is, especially what comes from Sacher-Masoch, who ventures into the extremes of masochism only to collapse into a submissive conservatism; Ives flips the story around to wreak feminist vengeance on the author's misogyny (funny, I don't recall anyone calling Ives on the datedness of his play when it was on Broadway). 

To respond one must paraphrase Ives: what the fuck does any of that have to do with the film's true appeal? The play, the actor/director, the beautiful wife/actress, the rant against child abuse, the dressing gown, even the moment Thomas applies lipstick and pulls on women's clothing--all are distractions, all are (as Thomas puts it) trivia. 

The wit, sharpened by Polanski's slowly gliding camera (like a knife blade across a whetstone); eccentric bits like imaginary coffee gurgling into a nonexistent cup, or actors miming a tap or slap or kiss (which only emphasizes the play's tactility); the fact that the film's single most sensual moment doesn't involve Seigner but Amalric, giving himself completely over to a moment of erotic self-confession--it's all maddening, mesmerizing trivia--but still trivia.  

The film's real subject after all isn't men vs. women, or director vs. actress, but world vs. Polanski. Like Rosemary Wodehose, Wladyslaw Szpilman, Jake Gittes, or even Dean Corso, Polanski's a survivor who knows his true role in the universe: a leaf, a plaything, the punchline to the sorry overextended joke we call evolution, backgrounded by the even more elaborate joke we call the universe. Why does Polanski put so much art and cunning into seducing us in his films? Perhaps because he knows what he has to say doesn't hold much appeal--but needs to be said, anyway. 

First published in Businessworld 6.9.14

The World's End (Edgar Wright); Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)

Apocalypse haw

(WARNING: storylines and plot twists of both films and A Streetcar Named Desire discussed in close detail)

After the smoking stinking wreckage that is This is the End, Edgar Wright's The World's End shows us how an apocalyptic comedy is supposed to be done: with economic swiftness (rare), skill (even more rare), cinematic panache (almost totally unheard of). The opening sequence (the narrative gliding from one scene to the next as if the world was a series of tableaus arranged in a row, the camera on an endless pair of rails running parallel), the fights (an unholy cross between the ferocity of movie barroom brawls and the balletic grace of Jackie Chan), the funny-terrifying shots of hapless humans running from hostile townfolk, their eyes and mouths blazing--all this confirms that, of filmmakers working now, Wright is one of a select few who make comedies one can actually look at (beyond him there's Sam Raimi, Tim Burton, Ben Stiller, Stephen Chow...not many more).

Love the group dynamics: the over-the-hill middle-aged men roused into one last epic round of drinks by one of their less successful own, one Gary King (Simon Pegg at his scuzziest best). There's a love interest played by the scrumptious Rosamund Pike, but after a brief bop with 'The King' in a 'disabled only' toilet stall early in the movie she's quickly relegated to supporting status; the picture's real central relationship is between Gary and estranged best friend Andy (played by longtime true-life bromantic partner Nick Frost--here (amusingly enough) the straight-laced conformist). Gary and Andy (not only do their names rhyme somewhat, the first seems to phonetically meld with the next like a brand of designer ice cream) are really trying to find the friendship they lost twenty-five years ago, and not feeling it; as they continue to flee they shed not just physical (a rolling wreck of a car nicknamed 'The Beast') but various emotional and psychological baggage (the anger of a wronged comrade; the fiction of a successful life) to finally confront each other at the eponymous bar metaphorically naked, confessing that for all their hurry they haven't gone anywhere at all with respect to each other, without each other.

The relationship is not as memorably, centrally, complexly depicted as in Wright's Shaun of the Dead (arguably his masterpiece) though it's a far better showcase than the visually flat Paul. Coupled with a breathlessly paced chase (which begins with a leisurely walk that turns into a drunken determined stagger, accelerates into a flat-out sprint), some sharp observations about the modern pub experience (lookalike bartenders; bland beer and decor; even blander semi-sophisticated bistro food) and a comment on the true value of British--and beyond that human--individuality (in effect nothing special; Gary pleads against alien assimilation (the townsfolk's ultimate aim) strictly it seems for the sheer cussed principle of it--is later seen drinking with the very creatures he ran from), this after all is said and done is really superb stuff. Aside from the underrated, underpopular Pacific Rim, the most entertaining movie of the summer.

A streetcar named disconnect

What to make of Woody Allen? Common complaint is that he's out-of-touch--a sensibility straight from the '60s coupled with a visual style frozen in the '70s--while defenders say he's a consistent artist who has managed to wring variations on a strictly defined set of themes and locations and actors (all three changing oh-so-slowly through the decades).

I mean--look at that credit sequence! He's been using that same font and practically the same jazz music since, I don't know, Take the Money and Run, over forty years ago.

So what to make of Blue Jasmine his reworking of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire? Well...

There's only one city in the world for Allen, and that's New York. From the opening montage depicting Manhattan in the film of the same name (accompanied by the strains of Gershwin's magnificent Rhapsody in Blue) to Coney Island's The Cyclone shaking up Allen's childhood breakfast in Annie Hall, the city lives and breathes and sings like a character actor constantly and loyally used (is perhaps the single most consistent actor in his pictures). London in Match Point, Paris in Midnight in Paris, Rome in To Rome with Love seem like outtakes from a Lonely Planet video--pretty, but strictly for tourists. San Francisco in this film seems especially inexpressive: we see a few harbors and maybe one shot of a tilted street, and if anyone in the city is gay they're still keeping it strictly in the closet.

It's difficult to take off from a classic piece of theater like Streetcar and avoid comparisons (often unfavorable), not just to the play but Elia Kazan's famed film, and if you're as familiar with the text as I am (taught the play for some years) there's something jarring about Williams' almost perfectly structured plot (eleven scenes of ever-briefer length, accelerating remorselessly to its inevitable climax) being twisted about. When Allen, for example, comes to his equivalent of Scene Three: "The Poker Night," Chili the Stanley figure (Bobby Cannavale) tosses not a radio but a phone not out the window but across the room. Not really that big a problem, I can see how a phone torn from its wall mountings can be seen as shocking--but when he's ordered out by Ginger the Stella figure (Sally Hawkins) you remember with a start that he doesn't even live there. Where Williams confined the action of his film to a period of a few months and a single cramped New Orleans apartment, here the conflict is dissipated over time (the picture flashes backwards and forwards over a period of years) and space (from San Francisco to New York, from Ginger's rather roomy lower-middle-class apartment to Hal the Allan Grey figure (Alec Baldwin) and his expansive Long Island mansion. And ordering Chili/Stanley out--what's that all about? You'll eventually need to bring him back in again, for the climax (which is considerably muted).

More conventional sexuality (Williams had at least one gay character--Allan--and at least suggested nymphomania); markedly less cruelty (plenty of shouting, no real physical or sexual abuse), a more experimental story structure hiding an ultimately more ordinary drama. Allen has grown as a filmmaker--somewhat; it's his good taste and restraint that seems to keep him frozen in time.

That said, Allen does improve on the Kazan film on at least one point--where Kazan lets one sister escape, Allen leaves both physically free yet psychologically trapped, their prisons defined solely by the dimensions of their own craniums.

Maybe there's another more fruitful way of seeing Allen: as a kind of Rip Van Winkle, skimming his way across this new millennium in cryogenic sleep, waking briefly to raise his head and take a quick look around before going back under--those brief moments of exploration and expression, those are his films. Out of touch? Possibly--and still he brings something to the party: the perspective of an older age, a pair of eyes that see this world as the ultimate alien landscape, the ultimate source of pain and drama and comedy. I don't know, I guess I'm still waiting for the film where Allen finally admits to this point of view, uses it fully, freely, artfully--maybe in the next one, which should come out next year.

8.26.13

The Butler (Lee Daniels); Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler); Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon)

The butler didn't do it

Lee Daniel's The Butler (director's name included reportedly for copyright reasons) really should read: Lee Daniel's Forrest Gump. We get a similarly hapless, helpless hero bouncing his passive way through recent American history, though Daniels does refrain from digitally inserting his protagonist in every famous archival footage in recent memory--at least we're spared that travesty. 

I'm guessing though what Daniel's really striving for with this story of Cecil Gaines (Forrest Whitaker), the White House butler who served seven presidents (based loosely--very loosely--on the story of Eugene Allen), would be popular audience response to Gump's feel-good version of history (we experience in swift succeeding order institutional oppression; physical, mental suffering; decades of bad prosthetic age makeup; and ultimately and eventually vindication, triumph) combined with the kind of respectful accolade granted to filmmaker James Ivory and novelist Kazuo Ishiguro for their film Remains of the Day, about yet another butler (Anthony Hopkins) serving in the cusp of history. Not an easy task, though--Ivory directs with an aesthetic severity that sucks all the pathos out of the material; you actually find yourself gasping for air in the film's hermetically sealed screen space (my favorite of Ivory's works, possibly) while Hopkin's unceasingly smiling butler stand invisible and invincible in one corner. 

Daniels doesn't suffer any severity, except perhaps the ADHD kind: his movie makes Robert Zemeckis' picaresque romp through the decades look positively Japanese with subtlety and restraint. There isn't a dramatic confrontation or emotional breakdown or historic occasion he can't shove in your face and up your nose with his ten-ton touch; this is coercive emotional porn of the worst sort, shameless propaganda shrieked out from the rooftops on the remote chance that perhaps you didn't get the message. I found myself hiding behind the seat before me, trying to avoid the sheer obviousness of it all (case in point: the picture's final death is telegraphed at least minutes before it actually occurs, causing me to exclaim: "Can't believe he's going to do it--oh, he did it!").

A shame, because there are some honestly powerful moments to be found here. Daniels builds some surprisingly potent comic-horrific contrapuntal rhythms from the sequence where Gaines' rebellious son (David Oyelowo) insists on keeping his chair at a whites-only lunch counter while Gaines seats honored guests at the White House dining room; later Daniels intercuts between Gaines listening to Nixon talking about undermining the Black Panthers and Gaines' son listening to the Panthers speak similarly brutal language. In moments like these Daniels makes a cogent point: that estranged father and son aren't so far apart in their struggles and aspirations as they would like to think they are.

Whitaker does plenty with an indrawn breath or a slightly lifted brow--but he isn't working with a screenplay from an Ishiguro novel, nor does he enjoy the deft guidance of a James Ivory (at one point Gaines actually quotes a line, not from the Ivory film but from an interview about the film, where Hopkins summarized his character with the observation that ideally a room should feel emptier when the butler is present; Hopkins actually makes you feel that vacuum while Whitaker with no small help from Daniels fails--possible because the feat requires subtlety). Whitaker's role (heroic restraint in the face of dramatic circumstances) also bears striking resemblance to Cherry Pie Picache's emotionally wounded-up surrogate mother in Brillante Mendoza's Foster Child--only Mendoza doesn't provide dramatic catharsis and spiritual uplift at the end of his film. 

What Daniels has done (or failed to do) can't help but make me better appreciate Eddie Romero's achievement in his Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon (The Way We Were Then, The Way We Are Now, 1976)--yet another hapless Gump figure traipsing his way through history, only with tongue pressed firmly in cheek. Comedy solves a lot of problems in historical chronicles--you are forgiven the unlikeliest coincidences, you're excused from maintaining a wearying fidelity to realism, the same time comedy is constantly analytical; it tends to take an issue apart and hold it up for close examination, and properly used it can still develop an emotional wallop. The Butler could have used a bit more analysis, a lot less  catharsis; at the very least Daniels could have used more comedy to cut through all the cheese he poured over his huge steaming pile of nachos. 

Coming home

The impact of Ryan Coogler's intensely felt Fruitvale Station is belied by the relative innocuousness of the title: unless you know about or heard of what happened you'd be thinking the film is some kind of documentary on San Francisco's mass transit system.

It's some kind of document all right: the final twenty-four hours of Oscar Grant III, a young black man arrested and shot to death (accidentally, not-so-accidentally) by transit police on New Years' Day, 2009.

I've no large issues with the film's ending--far as I can see it's a powerful piece of filmmaking, apparently well researched and for the most part accurate. I like it that the more overtly brutish and possibly racist of the transit officers (Kevin Durand) isn't the one who fires the fatal shot; that it isn't quite made clear--or at least Coogler manages to recreate the confusion at the time--whether or not Grant's hands were handcuffed at the time, or if (as the officers claimed) he was really reaching for his waistband in an apparent attempt to draw a gun (he was unarmed). I think Coogler with the less-than-coherent imagery and editing is trying to make a larger, more powerful point: that a black man's existence is in such a state of ferment and turmoil his life can be cut short at any time, just like that.

Coogler makes a similar point earlier, in a subtler manner: Grant and his friends board the fateful train which pulls away; the camera stays put and as the train blurs into motion the passengers inside become shimmery and ghostlike, almost as if they threaten to flicker completely out of existence. Lovely, memorable effect.

More troubling I suppose is his recreation of the earlier part of Grant's day. Coogler doesn't hide the fact that Grant is a repeat criminal offender, that he has used drugs in the past and is still using, and that he's less than faithful to his girlfriend. On the other hand he plants little hints here and there that tend to mitigate these character flaws--to cite three: he loves dogs, he's seriously thinking of quitting drugs, and if he flirts with a pretty girl it's mainly to help her out at work.


The first hint is the most problematic; the entire incident did happen--but to Coogler's brother, not Grant; Coogler admits to trying to establish a metaphor, that Grant is like that pit bull, a basically goodhearted creature with an unhappy reputation. The second (giving up drugs) was apparently discussed by Grant with his mother and girlfriend--though no one actually saw him go so far as to throw away an expensive bag of grass.

Can't help but liking the third little detail--for a while there you're not sure if Grant is being helpful or trying to pick up the girl, and the actor Michael B. Jordan plays up this ambiguity beautifully; also, this is one of the few details that seems to have some basis in fact, as the grandmother did say he called her asking for her fish recipe.

Think Coogler weakens his film when he tries to mitigate his protagonist's many flaws, when he tries to both present the flaws and defend his protagonist however indirectly from the uglier implications of those flaws. Coogler misses the more difficult but possibly more rewarding argument: that no matter what faults Grant may have (and even if every accusation leveled at him were true he'd hardly be the worst person aboard that train) he didn't deserve to be shot in the back, lying on his belly on the floor of that station.

Still it's a harrowing experience, and call Coogler irresponsible for picking the aftermath of the Treyvon Martin case to release his picture, I'm willing to admit the film articulates something, a frustration we feel on the issue of race in America: we may have come a long way, but have an even longer way to go. 
 

Much to-do

Joss Whedon's adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is pretty much what you'd expect--sexy fun--but I didn't expect it to be so much of a piece with the rest of Whedon's work. Smart and attractive people dealing out wit in intricately woven, kilometric lines? That's so--Buffy. Or Firefly.

Not saying Whedon's managed to pull Shakespeare down to the level of television (well-made television); time and time again he's borrowed characters, situations, ideas from The Bard--he's just taken a major source of inspiration and brought it to the big screen. Plus he goes on to demonstrate how unintimidating Shakespearean English can be, if you've got a cast of actors confident enough and deft enough to wrap their lips around all that archaic (yet still playable after all these centuries, still of-the-moment pertinent) dialogue such that the meaning is not only clear, but the actors clearly had fun speaking them.

Helps that much of the film is casually--even carelessly--shot and cut together, giving the very opposite impression of a formal Shakespeare drama; Whedon has things hopping and we're put on alert trying to keep up with his lively sense of pace. 

If Much Ado feels so Whedonesque, the grounds on which the play is performed--Whedon's own house--feel so, well, Italian, or at least Santa Monica California doing its level best to be Italian (the play is officially set in Messina, Sicily). This along with (as Whedon himself notes) the film's extensive use of window panes, glass, reflections, candlelight, sunlight and shadow play on classically Shakespearean themes like deception and truth, of something or someone or someplace pretending to be what she, he or it is not, from that pretense forging a new truth--or at least a more persuasive lie.

There's a bright side (Benedick (Alexis Denisof) and Beatrice's (Amy Akers) belligerence hiding a budding affection for each other) and dark side (Claudio's (Fran Kranz) festering distrust of Hero (Jillian Morgese, in her debut role), fanned by the machinations of Don John (Sean Maher)). Matters come out right in the end (this is a comedy after all), but Whedon doesn't stint on the more pessimistic implications of the play, as mistrust and misogyny wrap their tentacles around Hero's helpless form to the point that even her own father Leonato (Clark Gregg, in arguably the finest, most understated performance here) accepts the calumny directed against his daughter with heartchilling speed, and the only ally she can reach out to is her friend and confidante (and fellow woman) Beatrice. People in distress act instinctively, and Hero's instincts have her choose along gender lines--that's how it is, the play seems to say, though it also makes you wonder: why should this be so? Why do women more easily trust women, why do men put much more faith in men, and should Hero continue loving a man who has demonstrated so little of both?

Hero and Claudio's relationship produces much of the play's drama; Benedick and Beatrice's churns up much of the comedy--but also much of the warmth, as theirs is the older story with more than a bit of history, and not just in the play. Whedon fans recognize the actors playing Benedick and Beatrice as the famously star-crossed lovers in his series Angel and call it cheap fan service, but watching them consummate that tragically brief romance in this modestly scaled, sloppily shaped Shakespearean comedy is like having a little ribboned gift presented for our delight. Ackers and Denisof aren't just a pair of pretty faces: you can tell they're totally comfortable with each other, and the developing fondness on their faces isn't just skilled emoting, it's genuinely felt. Wonderful fun.

8.19.13