Till death do them part
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Martha (1973) based loosely on Cornell Woolrich's short story "For the Rest of Her Life" is ostensibly a television movie, but the themes, visual look, and complexity of this supposedly minor work (in a supposedly inferior medium) puts most major motion pictures to shame (fact is, can't think of anything that came out of the multiplexes this year or the past few years that could even compare).
This inedible bulk
I'll say one thing for Marvel's latest remake of their latest action hero, Louis Leterrier's The Incredible Hulk (2008): it's made me actually appreciate the elliptical exercise in mythmaking that was Ang Lee's film (named simply (and--ironic, this--far less pretentiously) Hulk (2003)).
I'm not kidding; where Lee's Hulk was talky, slow, complex, this one's loud and full of special effects (digital effects at that); where the former evokes a hero's genesis from Freudian impulses (he's basically the product of his father's ambitions and sexual urges, combined with his own invention ('nanomeds'--tiny robots capable of repairing the human body)), the latter merely borrows the TV show's creation scene (basically a pair of X-ray machines gone haywire) and immediately gets it on with the bang-bang.
From the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 6.24.08:
Ferry sinks; 700 missing.
Don't know the facts; don't know anything yet, or if any of the seven hundred (many of them children, as the report says, screaming inside the hull as it rolled over) are still alive.
But we all know what these ships are like; I remember riding one--won't mention the ship's name, or the line--and looking at the diagram outlining the location of the various exits.
It was in Japanese. The boat I was riding on used to be a Japanese passenger ship. And when I checked the date, it was over ten years old. In effect Japanese passenger lines, having fully depreciated their ships and instead of selling them off as junk, sell them to Filipino passenger lines instead, who use them at their own considerable risk.
That was some years back; don't know if it still happens, or if that vessel still plies the Southern Mindanao waters. But--if the ferry capsized because of any number of failed safety policies similar to the ones I saw when riding one of these floating deathtraps, then it's more than outrageous, it's criminally obscene.
From July 1 to 12, Paris Cinema will screen forty Filipino films. I've been asked what to recommend; basically I recommend watching all the titles--Filipino cinema is too varied and rich a bounty to relegate to a mere tasting (and we Filipinos are voracious eaters). But if you must pick and choose or are on a diet, or regimen or budget (quel dommage!) here's my picks:Of Brilliante Mendoza, who's a festival favorite at the moment, I recommend The Teacher and John-John. Serbis (his latest) has had mixed reviews, but I haven't seen it, so I can't judge (and mixed reviews will if anything pique my interest). If you must pick one, I say The Teacher. I recommend all of Joey Gosiengfiao; he's not as outrageous as John Waters, but he has the same camp sensibility, more sophistication, and on a comparable (perhaps smaller) budget. Personally I prefer him to Pedro Almodovar (who I think is overrated, anyway). If you must pick one, I recommend Temptation Island. Of the Cinemalaya program, I haven't seen everything, but I hear good things about Endo and Donsol, I liked Big Time, really liked The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros. The latter is my top recommendation (it's available on DVD, though...) Of Panorama, again I recommend seeing all, but if you must pick and choose, I highly recommend Boatman, Himala, Midnight Passion, A Short Film on Indo Nacional, Todo Todo Teros, Will Your Heart Beat Faster?, Woman of Breakwater, You Were Weighed and Found Wanting. If I were to pare it down, I would recommend--uh, tough, but I'd pick Indio Nacional, Todo Todo Teros, Boatman, Himala, Midnight Passion, You Were Weighed and Found Wanting. If I had to pick one, argh--You Were Weighed and Found Wanting.But wait--You Were Weighed is also on DVD (so is Woman of Breakwater, which isn't O'Hara's very best, but is I think an excellent film). In which case, I recommend the harder-to-see Midnight Passion, Boatman, Himala. If I had to pick one, Midnight Passion (Big admirer of Tikoy Aguiluz's works, and Boatman is one of his best, but not his very best--that would be Bagong Bayani (Unsung Heroine, 1995)).Of the newer ones, the two best are easily Todo Todo Teros and Indio Nacional.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah--yearly ritual. Doesn't mean I have to like it. Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008) -- so is this Marvel's new style of moviemaking? Get a good actor, pair him off with a competent (more or less) director, throw in plenty of CGI action scenes, mix, shake, ignite? The cocktail comes off well enough here, where the actor involved is Robert Downey, Jr.--he makes Stark's assholiness appealing and sexy, and Favreau is smart enough to keep that damned golden helmet off of him much of the time (when he does climb in we have the luck to be able to peek inside). It was the same issue Raimi had with the Spider-man movies--he kept tearing the mask off Maguire's face (it's always been a problem with superheroes on the big screen--not so much for Superman, but Batman, as one critic put it, 'you're basically casting the chin').Maybe Downey's best moment comes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow (who's a nicely understated surprise as a supporting actress), when she does impromptu heart surgery on him. Downey's sharp as ever, and even when running rings around the slower-witted Paltrow he's so good he doesn't even forget to make her look good ('I couldn't do it without you,' or words to that effect). Which actually isn't saying much--Downey manages to spark laughs off a clueless robot arm with zero personality, so go figure. Perhaps my favorite action sequence comes early, when the first armor comes into play--I like the idea of building something crude and improvised in your garage (or in this case cave), walking out , and whipping all the bad guys with the weapons at hand(basically enhanced strength and a dependable flamethrower); I like it that the baddies are using Stark's own weapons against him. Afterwards, when the armor is upgraded into digital, I pretty much lost interest (though Jeff Bridges has his sly moments as Stark's mentor turned nemesis Obediah Stane). Overall not too bad, though I have to note that Favreau has little feel for staging a coherent action sequence, and the digital effects hold little to no sense of wonder for me (nor does Favreau have the talent to overcome that tremendous handicap).One moment that does leave a bitter taste, the waterboarding scene. Bad enough the moviemakers trying to inject a superficial reference to the Iraq war in a summer flick, but to attribute it to the wrong side--? What the hell? My heart doesn't bleed for the Al Qaeda or terrorists in general, but if we must accuse them of something, we should accuse them of the right things. Getting the facts wrong is Bush's job, not ours.Mark Osborne and John Stevenson's Kung Fu Panda (2008) is surprisingly better than I expected. Kung fu and pandas? High concept crap. That said, the focus on food as a training motivator's an excellent idea (I know I snack heavily myself when doing overnight work), though what's all this blarney about wanting to be a kung fu master when one is in line to own a noodle shop, and learn the secret of a noodle master? As anyone who's lusted and loved the food in Juzo Itami's Tampopo (1985) and many a noodle shop can tell you, knowing how to make good noodle soup is enough. The panda doesn't make sense at all. Directors Osborne (Spongebob Squarepants) and Stevenson (Shrek 2, The Muppet Show), writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger (both King of the Hill veterans) bring enough comic talent to the table; the jokes come fast and furious--some are actually funny, and the plot develops with chop-socky speed. One can list the influences, if one cared to--the filmmakers cite Stephen Chow, particularly his Kung Fu Hustle; there is of course Liu Chia Liang's classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978); Chang Cheh's The Five Deadly Venoms; and in one sequence, if I'm not far off, the snow-leopard villain while escaping is emulating Pazu in Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky. The final battle is Chow, with a liberal dose of Jackie Chan thrown in. And all for what? Basically your good ole American animation storyline, about a youth pining to be something he's not, and the parent not understanding (Mulan, Little Mermaid, about half the Disney inventory of the past twenty years, anyone?). Kung Fu Panda's not a bad way to while away ninety minutes of your time, and I suspect it's at least as much if not more fun than the upcoming Pixar flick, but it didn't exactly rock my world (And anyway why not noodles?!). Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (2007), on the other hand, I'd watch just for the skateboarding sequences alone. Graceful dance on four wheels, in effect, the impossibly beautiful youths (Van Sant can't seem to help eroticizing them) leaping and spinning up and down the concrete ramps, in langurous slow motion. But there's more: an exchange of glances between youth and police officer evokes some if not all the terror found in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment; the sudden support of a friend throws the whole into a more ambiguous light--is the protagonist redeemed or damned, or is the question rendered irrelevant in this modern age? Wonderful film, one of the best of last year.
(Note: The film was shown in the 38th Rotterdam International Film Festival, the 38th Berlinale's International Forum on New Cinema, and the 21st Singapore International Film Festival.
It received a glowing notice from Robert Koehler in Variety Magazine, and from our very own oggsmoggs when he saw an earlier version of the film, titled Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition (2007))
My own article as follows:The telltale heart
John Torres' Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008) starts out with the key event described in the film's title: the revelation that his father had another family, sired three children that neither Torres nor his mother knew anything about.
It's a traumatic enough an event for any family to endure; for Torres it was reason enough to leave home and try make sense of his life not through discussion, or diary-writing, or any kind of easy, tension-relieving dramaturgy (yelling at his father, or at the stars or something), but through some kind of cinematic digestion--taking bits and pieces of his life into himself, meditating over them for a time, then regurgitating them, transformed, on the big screen.
The result is, well, interesting, to say the least. He makes short vignettes, but pulls them together to form a feature; uses documentary techniques and found footage (albeit less than what I remember him using in his previous work, Todo todo teros (2006)) to weave a personal--possibly fictional--narrative; lets voiceover narrative and detailed titles introduce and link sequences together (but at the same time uses the same voice and text cinematically (the voice (mostly Torres) a soothing drone that sets the film's contemplative mood; the titles flashed on and off at precise moments, like exclamation points, the way Jean-Luc Godard would flash text in his film series Histoire(s) du cinema (1997-1998))); gives us a series of failed film projects that in the act of enumeration reveals a completed film. Several times Torres uses long monologues that either describe an episode or present a philosophical stance and you're asked to see through the monologue, past the screen of words the speaker is weaving to hide the vulnerability inside. At one point Torres admits "I'm not a simple person;" you can't help but agree.
One wonders at his filming methods--how much is actual revelation, and how much invented for purposes of the story? In an early scene he has a mother and father talking about how they were so busy with their jobs they would lock their daughters up in their rooms with educational tools. Father warns mother not to say that, adding "that's child abuse!" Mother counters by saying "but it's the truth!" Torres records the conversation, interested not so much in what they actually say, as in the thought processes involved in arriving at what they decide to say. If this is documentary footage then there's the disturbing element of exploitation in seeing them reveal themselves so frankly onscreen; if it's a script, then it's startling how Torres is able to make these non-actors deliver their written-down lines so naturally.
Likewise with the personal revelations: Torres has done this before, and the detail he's able and willing to dig out for audiences seems limitless. If he's simply pulling it out of himself, he's one kind of artist; if he's making some of it up, he's another; of course, he could also be playing one perception against the other, hiding his true self in the confusion. Or not.
Then there's the mixing of found and staged footage--one sensed a distinction, a kind of visual break between what was made for the film and what was archived fare in Todos; here I think the distinction has been blurred (or at least blurred to a greater degree)--it all seems to come out of the work of one cinematographer. Actually it IS just one cinematographer, Torres (he had Albert Banzon for his previous feature, and did additional photography himself)--it's just that the lighting and medium of filming (except for some moments in low-definition video) seems more consistent, less flashy, overall more beautiful.
As for Torres' use of colors--I love the look of contemporary independent Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz's films (Heremias, Book One (2006); Kagadaan sa Banwaan ning mga Enkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007), his austere black-and-white video sensibility, but sometimes there's something to be said of color, and the way it points up the beauty and variety of the Filipino foliage. At one point Torres films a tribal dance at long shot: the dancers in their gear (the ribbons of red and orange, the bright squares of yellow or white), stepping in that curious rhythmic gait at once awkward and graceful, surrounded by the tremulous, luxuriant green fur of forest around them, the sun waxing and waning at precise intervals (a brute arclight in the hands of an artist). the trilling, thrilling, bamboo music--it's a hypnotically lovely moment.
Then there's the endless tracking shot of two friends falling in love (perhaps). In black and white, with a little melody playing over the dialogue and a sampling of Torres' more heroic musings heard in voiceover, the scene plays off as poignant, romantic; the same sequence repeated in color, with discordant music in the background and the actual dialogue turned up, is revealed as a free-wheeling comic riff between two longtime friends on the subject of old memories and scoring drugs.
There's the nanny, saying farewell to her employers to work in the Middle East; there's the overseas worker, talking about the tape-recorded love letters she sent to her four boyfriends. There's even footage of Communist Party of the Philippines patriarch Jose Ma. Sison, singing (?!) some of his poetry (The Guerilla is like a Poet). As Sison himself is ready to admit, singing is not his forte. Finally, there's Torres' long dreamt-of film about Christ.
What unites these fragments, these discordant notes in a life's symphony of sorts, is the idea that each was something Torres hoped to present--whole, complete--to his father. No matter what the subject or who is speaking, it all comes back to this mysterious, often absent, figure, what he might like, what he might not like. We may not come to know him (Torres might not know all that much about him, either) but we do learn things about him: the aforementioned affair, children; the fact that he once ran an empire built out of children's educational aids, now gone--and in fact we see the unsold children's aids piled high into crooked towers along cramped corridors, like abandoned apartment building. You think of a smaller-scale, third-world Kane, with his improvised storehouse full of past successes; you wonder if Torres wonders: while his father achieved and lost just as much, what does he (the son) look like, with all his failed films? As with Kane, what would all the educational aids assembled and put together spell out? What would Torres' own incomplete narratives spell out? The film is full of questions, hilarity, tenderness, confession, pain; it's a storehouse of memories and emotions that defy categorization, constantly inviting one to come, dive in, and lose oneself in its many wonders.
(First published in Businessworld, 6.17.08)
John Torres' latest film Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008) will screen at Mogwai, Cubao X, on June 17, 8 p.m.The film was screened in 38th Rotterdam International Film Festival, the 38th Berlinale's International Forum on New Cinema, and the 21st Singapore International Film Festival. It also received a glowing notice from Robert Koehler in Variety Magazine. Our very own oggsmoggs wrote a nice review of an earlier version of the film, titled Voices, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness: Filipinos in High Definition (2007).I've got an article on the film in Businessworld, coming out on the same day as the screening. A brief excerpt from the article:The telltale heart
John Torres' "Taon noong ako'y anak sa labas" (Years When I Was a Child Outside, 2008) starts out with the key event described in the film's title: the revelation that his father had another family, sired three children that neither Torres nor his mother knew anything about.
It's traumatic enough an event for any family to endure; for Torres it was reason enough to leave home and try make sense of his life not through discussion, or diary-writing, or any kind of easy, tension-relieving dramaturgy (yelling at his father, or at the stars or something), but through some kind of cinematic digestion--taking bits and pieces of his life into himself, meditating over them for a time, then regurgitating them, transformed, on the big screen.
