Best of 2010

Don't have a perfect system for choosing, don't pretend to have one; basically I try pick whatever had some kind of commercial release in the USA; that, or if they had a release in the Philippines, and I failed to include them the previous year (plenty of those). Or I feel I can actually include them in a 2010 list because they have yet to have (nor will they probably ever have) a commercial release, and I want to acknowledge them anyway. I try to err on the side of inclusiveness.

As for what constitutes "best" as opposed to "notable," purely gut feel, as in: I roll the title down my tongue, and if my gut tingles with similar or greater excitement at the mere sound of the words, it's in; otherwise, it's out. That's why Social Network, which I liked a lot when I first saw it, is relegated to the "notables." Others I like too much but are too otherwise flawed to include in "best."

Which is probably all bull, of course. Look up the titles, read my articles if you like, see if you agree or disagree. I find this more useful than having some half-assed committee sit down and tabulate a vote--as if two minds can actually agree on something valid and worthwhile. And as for all that statistical jazz--averaging out, grade curves, lopping off extreme values, I quote Mark Twain: "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics" and misquote Chairman Mao: "let a thousand best-of lists bloom!"

The best of the year:

The Fighter  - how does it shape up against other recent fight movies? It's different enough to be worth watching, with its video footage and edgy editing, and that's plenty enough in my book.

Forbidden Door - One of the better horror films in recent years...and not a silly swan in sight!

The Ghost Writer - I'd heard the complaints--the story isn't all that much, it's not Polanski's best, how could you endorse the work of a criminal, etc. I say: it's not the story but the style that reverberates, I think it's at least thematically and tonally linked with Polanski's best, a sort of Cinema of the Paranoid, and as for that last part--am praising the work, not the criminal. Have plenty of unpleasant to downright convictable people whose work I happen to like.

The Girl on the Train - Think John Hughes only sophisticated, and possessed of subtler storytelling instincts.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus - a relatively normal (?) Gilliam film, about the doctor and the Devil and a really nasty customer.

Mary and Max - Two friends an ocean and a continent away, talking to each other through the postal mail. One of the saddest and loveliest-looking animated films in recent years.

Ang Ninanais (Refrains Happen like Revolutions in a Song) - John Torres' attempt at mythmaking is erotic, funny, and like nothing you've ever seen before

Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio (The Trial of Andres Bonifacio) - Mario O'Hara's take on the other great Filipino hero is understated drama, anguished tragedy, a tremendous love story, and in my opinion the film of the year.

A Prophet - The Godfather in French, and in the claustrophobic confines of prison. The coming of age of a young crime lord, and what's so chilling about the story is that he's only too ready to take up the reins of power.

Restrepo - one of the best documentaries about the war in Afghanistan.

The Secret of Kells - the other great animated feature of recent years, an unflinching celebration of Celtic imagery.

A Single Man

 - Tom Ford's debut film is visually gorgeous and dramatically compelling, about a gay man who has just lost the love of his life.

Shutter Island - Leonardo DiCaprio's other (and in my book, far better) nightmare trip, a descent into schizophrenic states of paranoia as only Scorsese can conceive.

Thirst - In a year full of bloodsuckers, the one vampire film that really transgresses, and the first Park Chan Wook film I really like. 

Vengeance (Johnny To) - Basically Christopher Nolan's Memento, only done by a real filmmaker. The plot--a Parisian chef seeking revenge for the death of his daughter's family--is an excuse for extravagant gunfights and thriller sequences as only To--arguably the consistently finest filmmaker working now in Hong Kong--can do em.

Of course you have grand opera slow-motion; of course you have balletic gunslinging; of course you have casually funny sequences of male camaraderie--with Woo you might wonder at the homoeroticism, with To you get the genuine vibe of a bunch of boys hanging out and fooling around (what makes To so moving is that his heroes are often overgrown boys, living up to and enforcing an often fatal code of honor). An example: when it's time to move into action, Anthony Wong tosses a peanut at Suet Lam's face; Lam picks the nut off his cheek and without much forethought pops it in his mouth. Lovely.

The White Ribbon - along with Park Chan Wook the other enfant terrible of World Cinema at his most magisterially measured.

The flawed but interesting, or otherwise notables:

Bakal Boys - Ralston Jover's Los Olvidados, operating in an even more dangerous work climate.

Breathless - funniest, most jaw-dropping version of Beauty and the Beast I've seen in recent years. 

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs - Mostly harmless. But there aren't enough movies about food out there, much less animated movies about food.

Despicable Me - Plays well to your inner bad guy. Mostly funny, minimum sentiment.

The Girl who Played with Fire - an improvement in my book over the first installment, The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, in that the aforementioned girl meets her snarling, relentless match.

Himpapawid - Raymond Red's first feature in years is the tragicomic story (partly true) of a man who wishes to fly. 

How to Train your Dragon - Yet another animated picture not Pixar that seems to offer something other than the standard Pixar uplift. Including Jay Baruchel with a voice performance that evokes a teen Woody Allen.

The Hurt Locker - won over ex-hubby's overproduced CGI epic, which is no big feat, but nevertheless a compelling psycho drama, possibly the best yet on the Iraq war.

Invictus - Eastwood's tribute to the Obama administration (at least that's how I read it), and a compelling rendition of an interesting footnote in world history.

Kick-Ass - comic book movie of the year, even if it is morally questionable.

The Killer Inside Me - Winterbottom's graphically faithful rendition is too literal, yet there are touches that make it worthwhile.

The King's Speech - The testosterone version of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, or Educating Rita leaves us with the image of two men in a room, struggling for domination, and reassurance, and human contact.

Last Supper No. 3 - The Philippines first legitimate legal comedy.

Let Me In - Not a bad remake. Not as good as the original, but it honors its source.

Machete - Avatar reeks like a potful of fermented Smurfs; Inception seizes up like a constipated large intestine; Machete is the action movie of the year. It has balls, it has breasts, it has sweat, it has blood, it has style, it has humor, it has a heart as big as all of Mexico.

Unlike Cameron, Rodriguez has a sense of irony about himself; unlike Cameron he feels the Big Message (illegal immigration and racism) in his bones. Unlike Nolan, Rodriguez can actually do an action sequence; this may be his best work yet. It's easily his most consistently sustained.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? - oddly subdued collaboration between Werner Herzog and David Lynch that, thanks to its precisely slanted view on life, oddly stays in the mind long after the credits roll. Indelible images include a vivid no-budget staging of The Eumenides, of a basketball caught in the branches of a sapling, and God coming out of a garage door and rolling down a driveway.

Salt - Old-school action filmmaking (circa '80s) at its best.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - Let me put it this way: Edgar Wright made me like my first video game movie. Small miracle.

The Social Network - Fincher's epic dramatization of an online phenomena fits into his gallery of lonely protagonists obsessed with the eternal.

Survival of  the Dead - George Romero as the ultimate termite artist, doing straight-to-video installments of his legendary Dead series.

The Tourist - Hitchcock redux, yes, but in this day and age of in-your-face action and even louder romantic comedies, secondhand Hitchcock is better than no Hitchcock at all.

The Town - not quite as precise as Heat, not as funny or intense as The Departed, what Affleck's film does have is an ineffable sense of place and time.

True Grit - Coen brothers' straightest shot yet hits the bull's eye.

Up in the Air - Imagine that, a comedy about unemployment. Best portions are the actual interviews of laid-off workers. 

Voyage of the Dawn Treader - Arrives at a point when the Narnia series starts to become really interesting. Special effects are second-rate, but Michael Apted's direction keeps the emotions and relationships clear, as they should be. 

Where the Wild Things Are - Not as good as Sendak's twenty-page original, but as its own creature it's not bad.

Tron Legacy, The King's Speech, True Grit, The Town

Jeff Bridges as a Zen master in Tron: Legacy

Tron: Legacy

What does it say about a movie that even the pans that put it down seem dull and uninspired? "Great visuals, lousy story, great visuals, lousy story." Say it aloud; rinse, repeat.

Tron: Legacy steals from a lot of films (Blade Runner; 2001) but arguably most unforgivable of all is how much the movie blatantly steals from itself, without improving much on the imagery (well, there's this 3-D gimmick...). Deadly frisbee halos; gleaming turbo-cycles that leave a deadly trail; those big hover-things that are meant to be menacing but come off looking more like oversized stapler bullets--we saw all this in the first Tron (which I didn't much like either); do we need to take away precious screen time to show 'em again, in case the audience doesn't realize this is a sequel?

We get some kind of story--son seeks out father, who turns out to be a Zen master, whose sagest advice is "do nothing." "The portal closed!" daddy tells his son over and over again, his official excuse for being a deadbeat. Nothing really comes out of this; son never really gets angry at his father's long absence, and father remains affectionate and unselfish despite the unapologetically lame excuse (I'd love to have seen the Jeff Bridges of American Heart deal with this young punk--twist him into a pretzel without batting an eyelash). 

If the movie had concentrated on its escape plot the way the original did, it would be some kind of weightless, affectless masterpiece (take the effects from the original, make 'em darker, more shaded, more substantial-looking); as is, the attempts at emotional profundity seem half-hearted, and not a little silly. Tron himself--yes, the character is back, though you would never really notice unless you pay close attention--seems like a lot of effort to very little result (think of how much drama and pathos Stanley Kubrick wrung out of just a camera lens singing a song in 2001: A Space Odyssey--"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true"). 

"Forget it, it's just a movie," defenders might say. I have to agree, it's only too easy to forget this picture; you just have to clear your mind of all expectations, slacken your jaw, let the saliva accumulate on your lap. Wanna see the true legacy of this movie? Watch all the people coming out of the theaters with two hours of their lives snipped out, not a single new thought or idea having formed in their heads during that time period. Yes, watching this movie you experience no worries; you experience no growth, either. Keep on droning, fans.

The King's Speech

Tom Hooper's The King's Speech might seem like yet another comfortably likeable comedy about those crazy British royals; it bends too far backwards in its attempt to ignore all the important figures and dramatic occurrences that surrounded King George VI's reign, the better to emphasize his triumph (King Edward VIII's abdication in favor of a divorced woman, for instance; and Winston Churchill's far better-known (and far more crucial) role in bolstering British morale ("We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets"). It offers an ultimately benign view of the Royal Family (arguably Britain's--and the world's--longest running reality series) and, as such, presents few valid reasons for existing at all, other than as entertainment one might label "Mostly Harmless."

But there's more, thankfully; the film's heart can be found in the sessions between King George VI (Colin Firth) and his Australian therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Hooper stages these as largely chamber pieces, a duet between two actors on chairs in a room, and little else (the pattern is repeated in Westminister Abbey--actors, chairs, and little else--to an even more dramatically stark effect).

It's in these moments that the picture's best reason for being emerges: not because George VI was crucial to victory against the Nazis, but because he wasn't. The story isn't so much a nationwide triumph for the British as it is a personal one for Bertie (affectionate nickname for George VI), the poor, left-handed, knock-kneed child of George V (the intimidating Michael Gambon, whose very presence and booming voice makes the son's stammer understandable, if not inevitable). If someone so physically and spiritually timid can overcome his limitations, the movie seems to say, then so can we--the real reason, I suspect, the movie has resonated with so many viewers.  

True Grit

The Coen Brothers' True Grit is yet another crowd-pleaser in the No Country for Old Men mode; unlike that movie, I think this is a better fit--no ostensibly profound message meant, no pall of doom hovering over the characters, or at least no pall heavier than what you find in Westerns nowadays.

I like the Coens when they do period; they tend to come off as being warmer, more stylized, and it gives their chilly sense of humor a considerably more human aspect, as if they feel more indulgent viewing the follies of humans past than they do the follies of humans present (the two notable exceptions to this being Fargo (which had Mrs. Joel Coen in a lead role--make of that what you will), and the aforementioned No Country (a Western by default, not to mention a Cormac McCarthy novel)).

But the Coens do this one straight, with perhaps the most consistent Coen twist being that practically every character suffers from an apparently irresistible need to talk to each other to death. This isn't an unpleasant thing no; it's actually a pleasure to hear, oh, Jeff Bridges and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld try outlast each other verbally, their cadences working up and down the scale as if the words were being read from the King James Bible (which as a matter of fact a good chunk of them are).

I love it that the film is cut to an older rhythm, that of Ford and Hawks (or at least Eastwood); that the promise of a Wide, Wild West shot by Roger Deakins is left largely frustrated--the story takes place in woody, hilly Arkansas--except for a few glorious shots of Cogburn riding across the horizon (their snow scenes, however, are softly, hauntingly rendered). I love it that the final ride has the fairy-tale qualities of Charles Laughton's great Night of the Hunter--as in that film, half-asleep children race against death across a dreamlike landscape that is both tender and menacing. 

The Town

Ben Affleck's The Town is a heist film, or at least a Boston crime film. It's not a great crime film--it doesn't have the magisterial clarity of Michael Mann's Heat, it doesn't have the mercurial intensity and humor of Scorsese's The Departed, it doesn't have (if we're talking great here) the geometric precision and ruthlessness of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. 

What it does have, however, is a deeply rooted sense of place, and community, of a people Affleck has known and lived with all his life.

He gives himself the lead role here, and in that he may have been a touch too self-indulgent--Affleck heroic is Affleck at his most conventional; when he directs his brother (as he did in Gone Baby Gone) he's free to give the protagonist all the ambivalent shadings the character can bear; here he is in full-on heroic mode, and the lines of morality, of right and wrong, are a touch too clearly drawn to achieve true ambiguity. The film, in effect, is a requiem, when it should really be an anatomy--a breaking apart and laying out and cold-hearted analysis of a tragedy. Too bad, nice try, looking forward to seeing his next work.

.

Centurion (Neil Marshall)

The Lone Centurion--I know, wrong historical drama, but much more entertaining

Sword and slaughter

A world power marches into the mountainous territory of a half-civilized people and quickly finds itself immersed in a quagmire of fierce fighting, guerrilla tactics, terror attacks (at one point a convoy is stopped, and flaming roadside devices are deployed).

The world power is not the United States but the Rome Empire; the territory is not Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan but Scotland. It is the time of Hadrian, and he is struggling to deal with the threat of the Picts, Celtish warriors who paint their faces a bright blue and who like to wield the throwing axe--an impressive weapon that can severe a limb or split open a skull, or with an additional swing fling itself as far as twenty feet to bury its bladed head in someone's chest.

Unorthodox tactics to the Roman legionnaire, whose preferred weapon was the short sword (perfect for quick, precise work, not so suited to berserker fighting). There are ample examples of both styles of combat in Neil Marshall's Centurion, his historical action thriller just released last month on DVD, and it would be wonderful to report that he makes full use of the contrast, but no--there are some intricately choreographed fight sequences, rendered halfway (but only halfway) intelligible by the somewhat frenetic editing (Marshall is no Paul Greengrass, thankfully, but neither is he a Philip Noyce, alas).

The film is basically a long chase--a group of decimated Romans tries to rejoin the rest of the Roman army while a band of bloodthirsty Picts hunt them down. Too often the hunted back themselves into absurd situations (they adopt the strategy of not taking the obvious Southward route, only to find that the Picts are perfectly capable of tracking them down anyway; when trapped they resort to the Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid style of last-minute escape: leaping off a high cliff into a roaring river (doesn't it ever occur to anyone that the water might be shallow?)). There's some inconsistency too: the Picts hunt hard and fast, and sometimes they feel as if they're supernaturally prescient in tracking down their Roman prey, sometimes they seem to slack off and disappear for long periods of time (it depends, you feel, on the needs of the script or the whim of the director, when it shouldn't--you should be too busy worrying about their chances for survival).

The finale is satisfyingly intricate--an abandoned Roman fort acts as setting for three different duels, happening at two different levels. The whole is too dependent, however, on precise editing to keep the fight sequences distinct and comprehensible (Marshall doesn't deliver, alas). Not bad, but not quite first class, either.

The movie does dwell on more realpolitik than is usual for action movies. The survivors are led by a centurion named Dias (Michael Fassbender) and he's not your usual gung-ho, do-or-die military officer--though he does decide to run for miles and miles and risk the lives of four or five surviving soldiers to save a Roman general. Dias has his thoughtful side, as when he says "It's easy to turn to the gods for salvation...but it's soldiers who do the fighting, and soldiers who do the dying, and the gods never get their feet wet." He confronts Etain (Olga Kurylenko), a mighty Pictish warrior-woman who wields a spear that might have come out of Liu Chia-liang's Legendary Weapons of China--Etain is a fearsome opponent and a relentless, bloodthirsty killer, but she has reasons: her family was massacred when she was a child and she herself raped, her tongue cut out to ensure her silence.

The good guys have their doubts, the bad guys their motivation; the grounds for opposition shift ever so slightly this way and that. When Dias meets Arianne (Imogen Poot, a much more gorgeous-looking actress than the name might suggest)--exile, healer, reputed sorceress--he finds plenty of reason to at least settle down, if not change allegiance; when he finally accomplishes his mission--when he in effect reaches safe haven--his very presence as survivor of a Pictish massacre is a potential embarrassment to the Roman military. Marshall does a swell job of muddying up simplistic action-movie waters (he did an equally fine job of injecting feminist subtext into his underseen horror thriller The Descent), it's a pity he didn't do more with this, substantiate the characters rather than the choreography, concentrate on the machinations rather than the manslaughter (you saw this unexploited potential in The Descent as well).

The movie is on the verge of being so good it's painful to see how close it managed to get before missing the mark altogether; you want to handcuff Marshall down in front of a desktop and threaten to withhold the key till he comes up with a really good, really thought-through script--concept pushed as far as it can go--this time around. One waits, with some interest, for his next work. 

First published in Businessworld, 12.09.10 

Black Swan, The Fighter, The Tourist, Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Natalie Portman, basically trying to do to herself what Aronofsky was doing with this movie

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Michael Apted's adaptation of the latest Narnia movies has plenty the matter with it, of course, and it all starts from how the whole series was conceived and designed--a bit of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings (the sweeping, digitally constructed  battle sequences, the rousing martial music, the odd sea serpent or dragon), a bit of Harry Potter (the magic flashes out from hands and objects like so many digitally added laser beams). Whoever the production designer and special effects supervisor were--either Apted signed on without insisting on approving the design or effects beforehand or he's never been one to obsess over a film's overall look or this may not have been a personally significant project for him--they prioritized boxoffice appeal over putting out a distinct product. Ironically, boxoffice receipts in America look to suffer--the first weekend is weak, and only gotten weaker--though the picture is doing better in markets outside the United States (I'm generalizing here, but the picture seems to do better in countries that accept or practice strong Christian tradition).

But that's the boxoffice; how's the film itself? Despite the weaknesses (the effects, the design, the timid air of being a feeble Lord of the Rings knockoff), I do like the film. It may not be a true Narnian film, but it's Narnian enough that you get some of the flavors of C.S. Lewis' classic. 

And Lewis' fantasy series is a classic, I say. Lewis may not be the flavor of the moment the way Tolkien is, and I know the strong Christian subtext puts many readers off, but I prefer his books over Tolkien's for a number of reasons: 

1) He's well-versed in science fiction (he knows enough, say, of Olaf Stapledon to be able to criticize him), and he uses a few of the genre's concepts (the idea, for example, of relative time (Narnia's time flows faster than our world's), of doors that open to other dimensions (see The Magician's Nephew, and The Last Battle), and of Very Large Objects, complete environments within complete environments (some suggestion of this, plus sophisticated examples of dimension-twisting in The Last Battle)). 

2) He ranges freely over his world, from its very beginning (The Magician's Nephew) to its furthermost reaches (Voyage of the Dawn Treader) to its subterranean habitats (The Silver Chair) to its final destiny (The Last Battle) the way Tolkien never does with his Middle Earth (there is The Silmarrillion--but how many outside of Tolkien completists read that dull tome?). 

3) He is not above adding the inventively imagined creature or situation, or even resorting to the occasionally surreal. Lewis' Narnia has its share of elves, dwarves and dragons, but--a faun with an umbrella, walking past a lamppost in the middle of a woods? A race of invisible creatures (who look even stranger when made visible?)? A sea of lilies, beyond which stands a permanently roaring wave of water marking  the end of the world--which happens to be flat? 

Tolkien has mastered the galumphing blood-and-thunder, sword-and-sorcery style of storytelling, but after reading the whole series through more than once, I've finally found the Ring books endlessly tiresome, endlessly conventional...whereas, I suspect, we've barely scratched the surface of Lewis' Narnia.

Lewis' series is more than just adventure and magic and Christian symbolism, though. At the end of the day it's really all about the Pevensies and their longing for Narnia and Aslan--arguably the greatest imaginary playmate ever created. About Prince Caspian (now king) who has grown older, sadder, hopefully wiser since taking charge of Narnia; about the splendid Ripicheep, possibly the most gallant and great-hearted mouse in all of creation (and I include that insufferably wholesome rat what rules an allegedly magic kingdom down in Florida); and about Eustace Scrubb, an odious little boy who, thanks to the influence of Narnia, becomes considerably less odious.

Apted, who in films like The Coal Miner's Daughter and even Gorillas in the Mist has proven to be skillful (to say the list) in depicting onscreen relationships, does a fine job here; his Ripicheep (voiced by Simon Pegg) is small only in stature while his Eustace Scrubb (Will Poulter, brilliant) is hilariously self-involved; they meet onscreen like flame and gunpowder, and you enjoy the resulting sparks. The ending, where the Dawn Treader reaches the End of the World and lives are irrevocably changed, is a fine mix of muted tragedy and bittersweet triumph, a fitting capstone to this latest (and, judging from the money that isn't coming in, possibly last) installment. 

The Tourist

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's latest is another one I feel I've got to speak up for, which is a bit of a surprise--I'd seen von Donnersmarck's far better received The Lives of Others and wasn't all that impressed; thought the protagonist in that picture made a few dumb moves, though the film as a whole captures the era's feeling of exhausted despair. 

Critics have called The Tourist "slow" and "muddled," the two leads "lacking chemistry." What I found was an old-fashioned caper film, elegantly paced, with stunts that look realistic enough to be actually dangerous (the rooftop sequence reminds me of Roman Polanski, a master at depicting hazardous heights, though von Donnersmarck makes an honorable enough attempt) and a cleverly structured plot--refreshing change from all the hysterical, frenetically paced thrillers released recently, all noise and heavy artillery and very little style. 

I find that the two stars are totally at ease with each other, are not afraid to play their parts--Johnny Depp here is not Johnny Depp the international star, but a nebbish on the run (he's always been fond of losing himself in his roles). Jolie plays Jolie; that's what the script calls for, that's what she plays. 

The movie is not North by Northwest (to which it owes a huge debt); but then, few movies are.

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is, to put it mildly, a hoot and a half. A rising young ballerina feels insecure about her role as lead dancer in a prestigious ballet company's production of Swan Lake (she herself had inherited the position from the company's former lead dancer, who has since gone nuts). Throw in a Mephistophelean ballet director (Victor Cassell), a Stage Mother From Hell (Barbara Hershey), a duplicitous slut of a dance colleague (Mila Kunis), and you realize--with the camp rising in your gorge--that what you're watching is a demented showbiz melodrama on speed: Showgirls in tutu.

But no, Aronofsky isn't satisfied with this. He has to throw in actualized psychodrama--bones cracking, skin transforming, feathers sprouting in the oddest places. Admirers call it a confluence of David Cronenberg with Michael Powell and Brian De Plama; I say Aronofsky is trying to ape the named filmmakers, only he doesn't have Cronenberg's seductive pacing, or Powell's unassuming craftsmanship, or De Palma's comic sense of cruelty.

Winona Ryder goes all Sissy Spacek on us while Natalie Portman looks desperately thin; about a quarter of the movie is Aronofsky zooming into gigantic closeups of Portman's pinched face, revealing half a pound of makeup on her wasted cheeks. Vincent Cassell spends his screen time pounding Mila Kunis, kneading Portman's steamed pork buns, or walking away with the picture tucked firmly in his pocket.

Scariest moment is Barbara Hershey as the Stage Mother from Hell, clipping Portman's fingernails almost to the bone (Hell Hath No Fury like a pissed-off mother wielding a pair of nail scissors). Only time I cringed.

The Fighter

Word is that Aronofsky was supposed to do The Fighter; thank heavens it was given to David Russell instead. Where Aronofsky is all over the place with his Monster Goose psychodrama, Russell tells his story simply, quietly, with as much honesty as he can (he does more with plain sunlight than Aronofsky does with spotlights, shadows, and splashy CGI effects). Bale is fantastic as Dicky, Whalberg quietly effective as Mickey, and Melissa Leo amazing as their hard driving mother (like Hershey she's a Stage Mother From Hell too, only you spend as much time feeling for her as you do laughing at her). 

The performances are all terrific, but it's Russell who does the star turn. His editing rhythms are eccentric, restless; he likes to show, say, a man getting out of a car, then either cutting out a shot of the man crossing the street, or cutting out a shot of the man knocking and entering, or cutting out the shot of the man getting out of the car--depends on how he feels at the moment, and how he wants you to feel. Unlike Aronofsky--who is all huge closeups revealing the human visage as a cratered, mountain-ringed horror--Russell likes to shoot at medium to long shot, basically keeping the drama at arm's length, keeping you conscious and alert of the material at hand.

Only with the fight sequences does he close in, but here he deploys the video cameras used in so many HBO boxing matches, deploys the actual music you would hear from such matches (not for him the Bill Conti symphonic uplift used like a ten-ton truck in the Rocky movies). There's a cheesiness to the music, and the film in general, but it's a self-conscious cheesiness, wielded with a knowing wink.

Like Aronofsky's picture, this is a hoary old storyline, a combination of Former Fighter Finds Redemption and Two Brothers with Differing Destinies; unlike Aronofsky, this is done with an acute, intelligent eye, and great sensitivity. One of the best of the year.

Coup de torchon (Clean Slate, Bernard Tavernier, 1981)

Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert in Coup de torchon

Deus Irae

I liked Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, but didn't feel entirely satisfied with it--was even less satisfied because I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. I thought it had something, despite the critical acid bath it suffered, and thought it at least in one aspect improved on the original, in the casting of baby-faced Jessica Alba as a prostitute with a taste for sadomasochism. That said, it seemed to me that Winterbottom's deadly earnest tribute to Thompson missed the taint if not the tenor of the original.

Took my re-viewing of Bernard Tavernier's Coup de torchon (Clean Slate, 1981) to clarify matters. Tavernier struggled with trying to adapt Thompson into French--he wondered how to transplant the racism against blacks, wondered how to capture the wide-open spaces of Texas, and so on. He hit upon the idea of relocating the action to the sandy plains of French West Africa (now Senegal), where, as Michael Dare in his Criterion article points out, African slaves were first shipped out for the New World. 

What if Robert Towne had written "The Empire Strikes Back?"

Skywalker crawls away from Vader who follows, looming over his prone form. "Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father."

"He told me enough!" Luke yelled. "He told me you killed him!"

"No. I am your father."

Skywalker without thinking about it whips his lightsabre handle across Vader's mask. CLANG!

In a shaky voice: "I am your brother."

CLANG!  

"Your father."

CLANG!

"Your brother."

CLANG!

"Your father, your brother..."

CLANG!

"Your father and your brother!"

Luke's arm freezes. Vader with faceplate dented looks at him, trembling. "Your sister Leia and I...understand? Or is it too tough for you?" 

With apologies to Mr. Towne.

Cinemanila 2010

Movie, movie

From December 1 to 5 at Robinsons Movieworld, Robinsons Galeria in Quezon City it's the 12^th Cinemanila International Film Festival--still, for my money, the best and most varied offering of World and Philippine cinema available locally.

So what to watch? Everything. But if you have limited time and budget, I have more specific recommendations:

December 3 (Friday):

Cinema B, 8 pm: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Edgar Wright, 2010). The first ever video game movie I've ever liked (actually, a manga-style graphic novel by Bryan Lee O'Malley) samples from all kinds of bright-colored, bright-sounding games, committing to no single title (and managing to be all the better for it). Perhaps key to its success is the premise, a teenage variation of one of the funnier gags in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, where the geeky hero discovers that his lady love has more than one skeleton in her closet (seven, in fact; "Seven Evil Exes," as she calls them), and that geeky hero must vanquish each and every one before he wins her.

Throw in Edgar Wright's inventive sense of visual humor (when Scott urinates in the men's room a "pee bar" empties above him) and pacing and use of cheesy digital effects and the result is like a souffle--it'll deflate once you leave the theater, but while you're enjoying it it's an inimitable experience.

December 4 (Saturday)

In Cinema A at 10 pm: Thirst (Park Chan Wook, 2009). Forget Twilight and even Tomas Alfredson's otherwise excellent Let the Right One In feels thin and timid in comparison. The bad boy of Korean cinema takes a stab--hell, tears a few hunks of steak--off the necrotic carcass of onscreen vampirism. He basically junks most of the paraphernalia (no garlic, no crosses, no changing of form or inviting people in or any of that silliness) and has his Catholic priest hero (Song Kang-ho) infected through an experimental vaccine. The priest sucks and is miserable about it--bad enough, until he meets a beautiful woman (Kim Ok-vin) trapped in an unhappy marriage whereupon the whole thing transforms into The Postman Always Rings Twice with fangs.

Song's fatalism contrasts vividly with Kim's feral will to live, and the results are hilarious, creepy, erotic, and bloody beyond belief even for a bloodsucker flick, thanks to Park. It's also surprisingly poignant, taking on as its subtext the unhappiness of two people trapped in a troubled relationship. If you like vampires, if you like gore, if you like horror, if you like comic horror, if you like stormy love affairs that leave both lovers either unhappy or dead or worse and if you like all this stirred into a delirious mixture (Park has rarely showed much restraint when it comes to sex and violence and judging from the evidence on hand he's not about to start any time soon) delivered hot and steaming in a tall glass, this one's for you.

December 5 (Sunday)

In Cinema B at twelve noon: Bontoc Eulogy (1995) is Marlon Fuentes' haunting mock documentary about Markod, one of the thousand plus Igorots carted off to the St. Louis World's Fair to be exhibited as fascinating 'primitives'--live exhibits for naïve Midwesterners to point and gawk at, marveling at the assumed superiority of American civilization over theirs.

Fuentes uses archival images and film footage to tell Markod's story, the wrenching changes he had to undergo to adapt to the weather and culture. He digs deeper, his narrator (who remains nameless) ruminating over his own fate as an immigrant, a fellow savage traveling from tropical rainforest to temperate grasslands, from Third World poverty to First World decadence with barely a moment's pause to adjust. Fuentes in effect tells three stories at once: Markod's leaving his pregnant wife; the narrator, leaving his native soil; and Fuentes himself, leaving home and family never (reportedly) to return. He captures them at a pivotal moment, when they are in the process of assimilation, of dissolution, of fading into the ever-rising hum of America's multicultural society, a kind of simultaneous death, fusion and transcendence that carries its own sense of tragedy, loneliness, and loss. A great film, undeservedly neglected--it would make a fascinating companion piece to Floy Quintos' play St. Louis Loves Dem Filipinos (now a musical, with music by Antonio Africa). Where Quintos tells the story of Bulan, a Bontoc prince reduced to being lonely and poor as high tragedy, Fuentes turns the story into an intimate portrait, makes it part of his own story (or his own part of the larger story). 

At 8:45: Jacques Audiard's A Prophet (2009) is a crash course in prison life who are the gangs, which one to join, what is of value and available for buying, selling, smuggling in and out of the prison walls. Audiard and his writers (Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri, Nicolas Peufaillit) take a page from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather--Michael Corleone's transformation from fresh-faced college graduate to stone-cold gang lord--and transposes it here, with fresh-faced Malik coming under the wing, protection and eventually tutelage of gang leader Cesar. What breathes unruly life into the film are the bits and pieces you haven't quite seen before, not even in Coppola's epic (which in my opinion is overfamiliar, perhaps even overrated)--the hostile faces--Arab, Corsican--staring at each other from across the courtyard; the DVD players and radios delivered by cart to one's cell; the everyday delivery of fresh baguettes, as if hot bread were a right every bit as guaranteed as your weekly phone call.

If Malik is the central consciousness in the film, Malik's knotty interaction with Cesar is the film's central relationship. Certainly there's a father-son affection there, as Cesar lets his mask of brutality slip to reveal a lonely, insecure old man (mind you, this doesn't dilute Cesar's more monstrous qualities, merely makes him grotesquely fascinating). Malik seems to count on Cesar's patronage, but when Cesar at one terrifying point turns on him, pressing a spoon into his eye, the affection seems to shatter. That said, one is never surprised that Malik for all his softness grows into his criminal shoes: the boy is a physical and intellectual sponge, starved for knowledge (in school he learns reading, writing, basic Economics, Arabic; he learns--this on the fly--the problems of negotiating with people, dealing with disparate, distrustful groups) and activity. He catches some unbelievable breaks--ever so often he manages to turn a swift ambush into a golden opportunity to network or make connections--but not once does he doubt his good fortune, or question the general velocity of his life; with the swiftness of the very young (and utterly ruthless) he makes his bloody progress up the pyramid. Also showing on December 6 (Monday) at Cinema B, 9:15 pm.

And then--as it turns out--on December 6 (Monday) Cinemanila is extended! At Cinema A twelve noon is Brillante Mendoza's Kaleldo (2006), a lovely slice-of-life melodrama, where the three interweaving stories of three daughters is captured in bits and pieces over seven summers in the daughters' lives. Of the daughters it's Cherry Pie Picache's story that leaves the strongest impression--Cherry Pie, a character actor of considerable skill who has played supporting roles in films often unworthy of her talent, shines as the quietly suffering tomboy, unwanted and largely ignored by the family patriarch. Mendoza's handheld camera, much in the fashion of the Dardennes brothers and cinema verite, gives the stories a distinct caught-in-the-moment feel.

At 4:15, Yang Ik-Joon's Breathless (2010) at times induces that eponymous state, especially when debt collector Sang Hoon (the director doing triple duty by writing the script and playing lead actor) goes into action. I don't know what Yang is like in person but onscreen he's a singular presence, small eyes taking a steady bead on you (a moving target), jaw settling into a particularly grim line, hands working themselves into fists, prior to letting them fly. He talks insolently, contemptuously, his language a string of firecracker profanity; he collects debts by beating the money (and will to resist) out of his clients. He's dedicated enough (or unstable enough) to work overtime, pummeling his next-door neighbor or even a passerby gratis, without even expecting a fee.

This portrait of a near-sociopath bully would be compelling on its own but Yang goes a step further by introducing Yeon-hue (Kotbi-kim), a teen-aged schoolgirl who, as it turns out, is his match in foul language and possibly his superior in perverse fearlessness (he has his fists to back him up; she has nothing but sheer attitude). She defies him, wins his respect, and later his trust; the film plays out like Beauty and the Beast with the lovers suffering a severe case of potty-mouth; the effect is startling and unsettlingly funny at the same time. 

 

At 9:30 Bong Joon-ho's Mother (2009) is terrific fare, possibly his best work. Where his The Host worked in stops and starts, careened all over the place in terms of emotional tone and genre, in Mother Bong seems completely in control. Hard to see the comedy here, but it is dark comedy, nevertheless--Bong pokes not-too-gentle fun at the stereotype of the smothering Korean matriarch as he spins out for us the tale of one mother's love for her mentally challenged child, the determination and ferocity involved when said child is accused of the murder of a young woman.

On December 7 (Tuesday) at Cinema A is a twelve noon showing of Jeffery Jeturian's Pila Balde (1999) a multi-character, multi-storyline film of modest virtues and modest pleasures, possessed of keen intelligence and a recognizable soul.

So--what are you waiting for? Go forth, and see much more.

First published in Businessworld 12.3.10