Star Trek Into Darkness (JJ Abrams, 2013)

Everything old is new again

(Warning: plot twists and story developments to be discussed in detail here)

So what about the movie? Had a blast. Loved coming back to a largely familiar-looking crew (largely because they were chosen and dressed and made up to look familiar), the way the performances either played with our knowledge of the series (Spock arguing with McCoy, Scotty fussing over warp engines, Chekov flubbing his Russian accent (weirdly Anton Yelchin is Russian-born, in an in-joke might be a touch too elaborate)) or wrung surprising variations, this being a whole other timeline (Christopher Pike giving Kirk fatherly advice; Kirk and Scotty butting heads over photon torpedoes--torpedoes, for crying out loud!). 

Love the new incarnation of Carol Marcus (Alice Eve--see above and tell me you disagree) and the retooled Khan Noonien Singh. As played by the preternaturally intelligent Benedict Cumberbatch, Khan doesn't blink much, or shift weight, or even recognize the itch in his crotch (I'm assuming he has one--all men do--and that it must be maddening). He's sleeker and more intimidating, even if his evil master plan doesn't make a lick of sense.

Jolico Cuadra (1939 - 2013)

Never really thought I'd be writing this, but:

Jolico Cuadra, 1939 - 2013 

Best known for his poetry, particularly this poem--

"Wing hard, white-stallioned time:
The whirlwind sun upride
Where no sheerer
The crude bird dies.
Hanged in the mind’s eye, hold
Fast—shake out
The canines of God
The manbird locked in God’s bones
Him dogstar till the phoenix hour
The manbird locked
Till the phoenix hour. "

Dogstar

--but I'd known him for almost everything else.

I'd first met Jolico in the offices of the Manila Chronicle back in the '90s, when I practically lived in their editorial office, tapping away on one of their computers long after everyone else had gone home. He had an art column where he alternately terrorized and championed local artists, praising those he thought deserving, holding none sacred, raising a ruckus in his distinctly poetic prose.

We talked for hours. He told me of encountering artists and filmmakers (I remember a few of the names--Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Orson Welles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gerardo de Leon). He had wild stories (a friend once regaled him with a blow-to-blow sexual encounter with Pauline Kael ("they made love standing up")) and even wilder opinions (Pasolini was "filthy--a filthy man!" Gerardo de Leon was "an idiot!" which he later qualified: "you don't need to be an intelligent man to be a gifted artist"). 

Are any of the stories true? I don't know. But I had a grand time listening to them.

Even more interesting was what he loved. He thought Philip K. Dick was the greatest writer America ever produced--borrowed my copy of Dick's The Valis Trilogy and never returned it ("I'm rereading it for its ideas" he told me when I asked him about the book some years later). He loved Chiqui Gomez (also known as 'Auggusta de Almeida'), poet and stunningly beautiful woman: they met in '74 and started living together in '75, and she was at his side till the end. 

He didn't think much of our best Filipino filmmakers--Brocka, Bernal, Mike De Leon (for the record, I begged to disagree), but: "there is one I like--Mario O'Hara." 

This was in 1996, when the filmmaker's career was in a bit of a lull (two films made in a period of eight years), and his best known work Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, 1976) largely forgotten (both his and the film's reputation would be revived by a screening at the "Pelikula at Lipunan" festival around that time). Cuadra had never seen Tatlong Taong, but did see Insiang, and when he had the chance to talk to O'Hara criticized the film for being set in Tondo.

 O'Hara wasn't offended; he nodded in agreement. He had originally set the teleplay in Pasay (why Pasay is better than Tondo is explained in the article). 

On Bagong Hari (The New King) he had this to say: "(Dan Alvaro) was perfect. So quiet! Real killers are like that. The loud man walking down the street, threatening death, I don't notice. I'm afraid of the quiet man." 

When he finally saw Tatlong Taong--I'd arranged to have him attend a screening--he said it was "a great film." He pointed out that Peque Gallaga's Francis and Christopher De Leon's Masugi were probably lovers ("they don't look at each other's dicks when pissing") and loved how the women circling Nora's Rosario at the end of the film mirrored the children circling in the playground at the beginning of the film.

Cuadra, I had to admit, was more perceptive about and responsive to O'Hara's films than I was.

He was a wonderful man, an incredible asthete, a for the brief time we'd spent together good friend. I'd finally gotten hold of Auggusta only last year after a long time spent out of touch, and asked for news of him; she replied that he's been struggling with Parkinson's the past three years, and was wondering if I could send money.

I tried; I couldn't. I sent her a message apologizing, said I'll send something as soon as I can afford it. I planned to send something this end of May.

Too late.

Death happens all the time; it happens to friends, to family, to people we care for and admire and (even if we're only fooling ourselves) we believe are going to outlast us, be around forever or at least long enough for us to meet again, to help in some small way. 

I know, I know; I should've known better. Doesn't mean I have to like it.      

May 17, 2013 

Iron Man 3 (Shane Black); The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann)--re-edited

(Warning: plot twists and story developments discussed in close detail)

Stark raving

And the celebration continues with Iron Man 3, where billionaire industrialist (only in comic books--and by extension the movies--can this be considered a respectable appellation) Tony Stark has his toys taken away from him and he's reduced, so to speak, to playing with the cardboard box.

It's an interesting situation--a way of upping the drama for this second sequel, without upping the scale of conflict from the previous Marvel movie's worldwide alien-invasion menace. Stark's forced to think literally on his feet, to cope with an enemy that's the opposite of what he is--functioning ubermen who are at the same time walking time bombs. No super machines, just super biology.

Director Shane Black (who cowrote the script with TV writing and producing veteran Drew Pearce) almost manages to get away with it, only the fight sequences don't quite emphasize the qualitative difference between Stark's exoskeleton armor and people who are themselves living weapons (you'd think said living weapons would be more agile, or graceful, or adaptable). 

I do like the quick-repair ability, that seems to make sense: as these people are basically speeded-up metabolisms, their healing is also speeded up. The exothermic reaction is silly tho--where does that come from? And why is Stark's armor unable to deal with it (Surely a heat sink or thermal pump of some kind would be basic to his suit's design?)? 

(Gratuitous aside: surely Stark would do better taking his cue from Neil Gaiman's latest take on Cybermen (warning: plot details discussed))

Arguably the best image from the film is the sight of Stark dragging his armor--stolen I suspect from Django. Feel ambivalent watching that: on one hand Black is channeling a far superior action film (suffers in comparison, of course); on the other I've been here before. At least Black's theft is more emotionally resonant than Tarantino's (where's Foxx's coffin/armor on a leash?). 

That's about it for me. Black's a sometimes funny writer-filmmaker--his Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I remember (barely) to be a darkly comic amusement, and possibly the highlight of his career to date--but the action sequences both there and in this picture are your standard-issue shaky-cam footage, cut ADHD style: hardly coherent, much less comprehensible. The script comes up with half a dozen interesting premises--Stark without his toys, the mecha vs. bio thing, and so on--but fails to develop them in an interesting way. The Mandarin's soldiers (for example) are barely fleshed out, which is a real shame: theirs is the most interesting situation (what would a man think and feel and say, knowing he's doomed to explode at any moment? And what would motivate him to pledge his loyalty to the one who put him in this predicament in the first place?).

Then there's this article, which tries to make the case that this third installment is really a feminist tract in disguise. Must be one helluva disguise, because I don't see it: the Maya character is mostly a smart egg seduced and exploited by the real villain; Pepper is a largely annoying hostage who manages at the last minute to kick some butt. 

Whedon in comparison is more overtly for women's causes, has produced at least two TV series with women protagonists, and has consistently put strong women characters front and center in his work (in one film she's the single strongest character). The Wired article mentions The Avengers as failing some silly test, which is frankly nuts: Whedon wrote Black Widow as a major character, with her own (fairly complex) inner conflicts and motives, her own character arc, and her own kickass scene--all the more impressive for being sans superpowers, or (for the most part) digital effects.

...actually would love to have seen Maya reveal herself to be the real villain: someone from Stark's crowded bedroom past, who he betrayed or rejected and who's out for his bal--blood. Simpler, more elegant solution to a needlessly overcomplicated problem, based on the oldest conflict of all...

Maybe the movie's biggest failing: Stark running out of worthy adversaries, not just physical but verbal; as played by Robert Downey Jr. he's the quickest wit around and for most of the picture his only sparring equal is himself, which quickly gets tired. Guy Pearce, who can be villainous, is strangely unthreatening here; would love to see Ben Kingsley take a crack, but of course Black quickly tosses that possibility out the picture window (I incidentally guessed the Mandarin's true nature twenty minutes in--Kingsley pops up again and again and not once speaks an unscripted line?--which doesn't speak much for the twistedness of Black's plot). In Whedon's The Avengers (which I wrote about at length) Stark has to deal with a Norse god, an earthbound titan (who doubles as the only brain able to keep up with him), a one-eyed badass--there's no end of inflated egos to bounce off against and that (not the largely digitized action) is what made the movie interesting.

Maybe the movie's even bigger failing (this and every other recent comic-book franchise): its inability to create a distinct look for the film, a stylized, parallel world where superheroes can convincingly exist--or a stylized enough world to at least hold our attention, maybe even fire our imagination (Tim Burton managed with his Batman films, Guillermo del Toro with his Hellboy series and--further back--Robert Altman with Popeye and Mario Bava with Diabolik!). Maybe what's needed isn't a recalibrated script, or better cast of actors, or more on-camera special effects; maybe what's needed is a filmmaker with a vision, and the talent to properly realize it. 

So--what? Not a lot of kiss-kiss, mainly digitized bang-bangs, and an outsized admittedly talented star, standing alone on the big stage. Yes, he is Iron Man. The real question is: why on Earth should we care?

Grate Gatsby

First thing you hear from naysayers is: "I can't stand the hip-hop." Lovers of the picture ask that people be more open-minded, that they realize jazz was the hip-hop of its day, as shocking an affront to American ears with perhaps (since plenty of the great jazz singers and performers were black) the same undercurrent of racist indignation.

I get it; I can take the anachronism and move on, I see where rap is meant to dynamite one's complacency and allow the introduction of an unwelcome idea or two (though I'd reply that there are a few lesser-known, period-appropriate jazz and classical pieces that could serve just as well, and using "Rhapsody in Blue" to announce Gatsby is about the laziest choice for introductory song I can possibly imagine). 

What I can't take--what makes Lurhman's Gatsby the visual equivalent of a cheese grater applied to the knee--is how loud Luhrmann's movie is, in every sense of the word. How it shrieks out plot points in advance, heavily underlines them, highlights them several times over with a screaming bright-pink marker, and--for good measure--floats the relevant text in man-high letters across the big screen. 

...not an enemy of voiceover narration per se, far from it--Bresson and later Scorsese have shown us how it can be properly done--but Luhrmann in his self-declared respect for the novel uses Fitzgerald's prose extensively to the point where it functions as a crutch, telegraphing what should have been subtleties: the moment, say, when Daisy tells Gatsby that she loves him without directly saying so, right under her husband's nose; or the moment when Daisy decides to betray Gatsby (for the former Luhrmann uses Cliff Notes excerpts from the book; for the latter DiCaprio is asked to do an Al Pacino-style freakout, and then Luhrmann uses Cliff Notes excerpts). 

The famed blinking green light at the end of the pier--so neatly introduced in the book as an enigmatic signal from across the bay--comes across here more like a Close Encounter of the Third Kind, with the camera swooping close enough to make First Contact. When Myrtle is hit by a car she flies across the air, flashing her pantied crotch at the giant Dr. T.J. Eckleburg's baleful, bespectacled gaze ("Oh, you impudent tart!" you imagine him whispering with delighted outrage). 

The parties are overscaled carnivals with Gatsby as reclusive ringmaster (giving some bite to Tom Buchanan's quip that Gatsby drives a "circus wagon") but the real glory of Fitzgerald are the dinner and party conversations, the way the talk seems to pingpong in different directions yet somehow converge with eerie precision (like filings in a faint magnetic field) into a grand design, an insignia of the decadent '20s--on presenting this aspect the movie is an absolute failure, with barely the patience to sit still enough for one verbal exchange to register, much less a gaggle of em. 

Does Fitzgerald write about vulgar excess? Yes, but there's nothing vulgar or excessive about his prose: he suggests where others might explicitly state, omits where others might indulge (in this he shares something with fellow contemporary Ernest Hemingway: an unstated lust for simplicity, an equally covert fascination with the unwholesome). One wonders what antics occurred in the other rooms of Gatsby's mansion that Nick failed to visit, or what enterprise Gatsby is involved in that even common acquaintance Walter Chase (confessing to Tom) is "afraid to tell me about." Fitzgerald leaves details of Gatsby's wealth and criminal activities to dissolve into the dark and distance, allowing our imagination to take over; the result is bigger than the book itself, an outsized portrait of a self-made man--one of the most memorable in American literature.

Luhrmann's problem is he can't do elegant to save his life--he dives right in and luxuriates like a pig in a cesspool (apologies to all pigs; all cesspools too). This is American literature as reimagined by Michael Bay only, I suspect, worse--at least Bay doesn't aspire to art, is upfront about doing it for the money.  

Luhrmann presents the eponymous man as unabashed romantic hero, for the most part ignoring signs and indications in Fitzgerald's novel that Gatsby may also have been a naive fool. Or rather, the signs are present (Luhrmann is that faithful to the text) but the preponderance of evidence--from "Rhapsody in Blue" to DiCaprio's intense line readings to the heart-on-sleeve music--urges us to root for Gatsby because (gag) He Is Us.

DiCaprio's mouth struggles to push the mush of an upper class New England accent past his lips (he gives the impression of having hired a diction coach only weeks before); he has the guarded eyes and studiedly relaxed pose of an infiltrating outsider, a deep-penetration agent high on overconfidence and desperate bluff, only a step ahead of exposure (is this really Fitzgerald's Gatsby? I don't know; I just know it's compulsively watchable). Carey Mulligan is anxious in a different way: she seems seems timid, out of her depth in dealing with her character--and rightly so, as Daisy is The Love of Gatsby's Life, and she's not up (as she herself exasperatedly informs him) to the demands of the role.

Luhrmann ends Gatsby's life with a shot stolen from the opening of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, then glosses over the father's visit--the little reveals from Gatsby's childhood and past that help clarify (or complicate) his character--to go straight for the tragic-heroic funeral (all that's missing really are a drifting Viking boat in flames and perhaps an erupting volcano, neither of which are in the book and neither of which, surprisingly, Luhrmann is able to cram into his Dagwood Sandwich movie). He does the ending in a straightforward manner, or as straightforward as anything he's ever done: Nick Carraway (a largely disheveled Toby Maguire, channeling Fitzgerald by way of William Faulkner) solemnly intones the closing lines ("So we beat on, boats against the current...") while the words flash like digital displays against dark water. Not for Luhrmann the simplicity of John Huston's masterful adaptation of James Joyce's great short story The Dead, where Joyce's words are spoken quietly against a snowblown darkness--Luhrmann, apparently, has no confidence in the magic of Fitzgerald's words, no confidence in his own ability to depict that magic on the big screen. He simply must have his digital. 

Who could have done a valid take on Gatsby? Robert Altman's overlapping dialogue I submit would have been perfect for the parties. Bob Fosse directed a lurid '20s crime melodrama on the theater stage (Chicago), dealt with the death throes of the period on the big screen (Cabaret). 

Max Ophuls has done Hollywood films, has done films depicting elaborate parties, has done period pictures portraying the upper classes, has tied them all together with gorgeously sinuous long-take tracking shots. Orson Welles entered films by way of radio--you hear it in the way his characters' dialogue overlap, how it's overheard before the start of one scene, spills like champagne into the next; you hear it in the music and sound effects that bridge his sequences, the aural transitions that whip his film into higher velocities. Gatsby might have been filmed in the manner of The Magnificent Ambersons only with a less gracious upper class, the conversation nevertheless glittering like a crystal chandelier.

Anyone alive? Woody Allen, if he could be persuaded to do someone else's material, might inject a welcome dose of comedy (Gatsby for all its gaiety lacks a sense of humor). Alan Rudolph has visited the period a few times (The Moderns; Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle); Michael Apted did a lovely little thriller once (Agatha).

David Fincher doesn't flinch from period work (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); neither does Brian De Palma (The Untouchables). Both have a gliding camera style that (like Ophuls') allows Fitzgerald's characters to talk to each other properly (their defining characteristic). And if you want some really offbeat young Turk to do the honors, I hear Mulligan has Nicolas Winding Refn's number on speed dial.

Meantime you have this, and this to put it mildly stinks. Jack Clayton's 1974 version (with Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy) may have choked on its own good taste; Luhrmann goes the other extreme, shoving his arm so far up his ass he could grab hold of his tongue and pull himself inside out. Don't know which is the greater horror, don't much care; I'm just waiting (possibly forever) for a proper adaptation of the novel.

5.11.13  

Crash of a Titan--a kind of tribute to Ray Harryhausen

Harryhausen's big guy, meeting his blind date for the first time

First, there's this sad news.

Then, there's this, one of my older articles comparing one of Harryhausen's lesser works with the more expensive digital remake. Just to remind us what we've lost, and how good he can be.

Let the bloodletting begin.

Crap of the Titans

You'd think they'd get one thing right; you'd think they could take a so-so movie, Ray Harryhausen's 1981 valedictory opus Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davies is the director on record, but let's not kid ourselves--this is Harryhausen's baby all the way) and make a halfway decent picture out of it. Walking out of Louis Leterrier's 2010 remake, though, all I could think was: “I miss Harryhausen.”

By no stretch of imagination was the original good, much less great--Harry Hamlin looked ridiculous in sandals and miniskirt, and the chemistry between him and starlet Judi Bowker was so underwhelming you kept looking sideways for the Marx Brothers to leap in and save the show. I remember Ursula Andress and Claire Bloom (beautiful actresses, both) being stiff as Greek statues; I remember thinking the mechanical owl was so blatant a rip-off of Artoo Deetoo that George Lucas ought to sue (and later--when Artoo took to the air in ridiculously tiny rockets--wondering if maybe it was the other party that ought to sue).

But, strange to say, the years have been kind to this Titans. Laurence Olivier's Zeus--who was so salty you could fry him in a pan, add coffee, and come up with red-eye gravy--goosed the picture to life whenever he was onscreen. Olivier has his 'thespic' moments--even in a production where he's obviously there for the paycheck he never simply phones in the performance--he's constantly on and ebullient and chewing with much gusto on the badly designed scenery.

Then there are the creatures. Bubo has, finally, become charming (while Artoo through the years has become mean-spirited and annoying); the monstrous Calibo (Neil McCarthy) achieves a sort of tragic stature; Medusa slithers with gravid grace, and has a suitably evil glare; the Kraken, unmistakably modeled after the alien Ymir in Harryhausen's 1957 20 Million Miles to Earth, possesses a grandeur that gets grander every time I see him again (he looks as if he had swallowed an umbrella that had snapped open).

And that, for all the stillborn drama and cheesiness of the overall production, is what I remember about the movie--its considerable flaws now forgivable, its virtues considerable. I suppose what John Huston as Noah Cross once said still applies: “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” Harryhausen's Titans is an old building whose time has apparently come.

Keith Phipps of the Onion A.V. Club wrote of the Leterrier remake: “If Clash were a meal, it would come in a paper bag and have some grease stains near the bottom.” I disagree; I don't think Mr. Phipps appreciates the virtues of a greasy burger, the fulsome flavor of properly charred meat on toasted buns, the juices (red from a medium-rare patty) oozing thickly out the sides and staining one corner of the bag. Harryhausen's Titans is a bar burger, a diner's special, a one-of-a-kind creation that's too fatty to be good for you, but makes for a satisfying snack; what Mr. Phipps must be thinking of is a McDonald's Happy Meal, which to my recollection has never stained the corner of anything--it's too dense and flavorless and dried out, as Morgan Spurlock once put it, for any self-respecting bacteria to touch.

Yes, Leterrier uses the latest in CGI techniques, and yes both Medusa and Kraken move smoother than before--the Medusa skittering over rocks like a frightened gecko, the Kraken lifting his head (and for a while there you think he's nothing but head) out of the ocean, then baring an impressive set of ginzu knives. But Harryhausen's creatures for all their clunkiness had personality--the Medusa dragged her serpentine body painfully across the rocks, and her face held this look of aggrieved fury partly because, you think, she'd been thusly accursed (she almost didn't need that green glow of power emanating from her eyes, the expression was arresting enough). Leterrier's Medusa is a babe with snake hair, and the way she would slither here and there you wonder--why does she kill? If I had that much mobility I'd take a month off and backpack through the Amazon jungle, maybe visit Machu Picchu.

Then there's the Kraken (which, by the way, is Scandinavian, not Greek at all--I can understand the creature vacationing at the Greek Isles to get a tan, but why this sideline involving virgins?). The Leterrier Kraken is an animal (a rather tasty-looking one at that; give me a lemon wedge and tartar sauce and I'm all over that creature), and presumably looks at Andromeda (Alexa Davalos, who to her credit actually manages to look more interested in her eventual fate than Bowker) strictly as food. Harryhausen's Kraken has the whiskers of an old man, the leer of a lecher, and tentacles to match; when he climbs out of the sea, you don't know exactly what will happen--dinner, or the most hideously outsized date rape in recorded history?

And that's pretty much it except I might add that Liam Neeson, who plays Zeus, says the line “Release the Kraken!” as if he was hoping the command would slip by without anyone bothering to obey; fact of the matter is, he looks like he'd rather let the entire movie slip by without anyone bothering to notice he was there...on the whole, he'd rather be somewhere else altogether. 

Now why bother showing up to collect a paycheck if you can't get some kind of satisfaction out of said paycheck? Olivier knew better: if the picture was going to stink (his was like day-old fish; the remake was more like week-old fish (okay, I'm being unfair to week-old fish)) then he was going to, if not save it, at least derive some kind of pleasure from it. He was going to have fun, Zeus damn it, and he'll give his equivalent line of dialogue a snap and roll and punch that Neeson would have been wise to emulate (“LET LOOSE THE KRAKKEN!!”). Not exactly great acting, but definitely great hamming.

First published in Businessworld 4.8.10

Beware: Bed Sins (Mario O'Hara, 1985) now online - a continuation of the weeklong O'Hara retrospective

Sinned

O'Hara's entry into the '80s softcore porn sweepstakes isn't quite the bare-bones classic that, say, Peque Gallaga's Scorpio Nights is; possibly one might make the case that less story and not more improves an erotic film's chances at actually working, the heaving breasts and pumping behinds speak speaking louder and more eloquently than any mere screenplay (written in O'Hara's case by the usually excellent Frank Rivera). Gallaga far as I can see had at most a scenario (housewife and student have an affair, behind the bodyguard husband's back) with the barest whiff of dialogue, and the minimalism turned his work into a sexual allegory about defiance in the face of of fascism (in this case, the Marcos administration).

Possibly there are other reasons: the producers at Seiko Films interfered with the production, to the extent of inserting explicit genital shots into the lovemaking--a practice O'Hara vehemently condemned; the budget was so small (especially for zombie makeup), O'Hara's actors look more afflicted with a debilitating case of eczema than any mere voodoo curse.

That said, the film does have the sensuality, the dark sensibility of true noir. Carla (Sarsi Emmanuelle, arguably loveliest of the era's 'softdrink beauties,' and one of the most talented), a high-class prostitute, has many clients--some mere jerks, some out-and-out psychopaths; one is out to kill her. Simple enough premise (though not as simple as some, as we've noted), O'Hara complicates matters with a series of flashbacks, flash forwards, fantasy sequences and outright hallucinations that cause the narrative to be every bit as unreliable as the handful of suspects stalking Carla (Is it really happening? Has it already happened? Will it happen soon?). Sergio Lobo continues the noir camerawork he did for O'Hara previously (in Uhaw sa Pag-ibig) and gives us angled shadows, deep colors, a variety of skin tones; Jaime Fabregas manages, within limits of the synthesizer so often used for Filipino soundtrack music at this time, to give us a moody score with (thanks to a button that switches to 'pipe organ' mode) distinct Gothic flavors.

Sarsi almost isn't acting here--she hardly ever does. Her huge, lustrous eyes are as naked in their emotions as her body often is, and unclothed she has a frankness and unselfconsciousness about her that's breathtaking. She's ably matched by her co-stars--Joel Torre as a hotheaded lover, Rafael Roces as her detective protector, Liza Lorena as her fanatically religious friend, and even Fabregas himself as one of Carla's more eccentric clients. 

Not one of O'Hara's best, but give the film a chance and it's a fascinating head (and groin) trip. 

4.22.13

Mario O'Hara tribute screening of Pangarap ng Puso (Demons) at the 2013 Udine Far East Film Festival

The 2013 Udine Far East Film Festival will feature a tiny tribute to Mario O'Hara, a rare screening (Monday, April 22, 2.15 pm) of his pito-pito film Pangarap ng Puso (Demons, 2000). 

O'Hara, who died June 26 last year, was actor, writer, director for Filipino radio, television, stage, screen. He was best known for writing and directing the wartime drama Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, 1976), for acting in and writing the screenplay of close friend Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) and for co-directing the recent political miniseries Sa Ngalan ng Ina (In the Name of the Mother, 2011).

Pangarap ng Puso was made at an odd juncture in O'Hara's career. He had just enjoyed a small success with his previous pito-pito melodrama Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998), a multi-storied, multi-charactered behind-the-scenes look at Filipino filmmaking, described by one of its actors as "a eulogy for the Filipino film industry." Bubungang Lata functioned as both expose of abuses and exercise in nostalgia, freely mingling the grinding realism of the filmmakers' hardscrabble lives with the supernatural presence of their predecessors (younger incarnations of aged actresses, dead husbands come back to life). 

Pangarap was a different creature altogether--a brief, deftly sketched precis of Philippine history from just before the assassination of Ninoy Aquino Jr., through the toppling of dictator Ferdinand Marcos and rise of Aquino's widow to the office of President, and beyond. Along the way it depicts both military atrocities and the at times even more extreme violence inspired by those atrocities.

The film (set in Negros Oriental) touches on Negrense mythology, particularly the kapre: a huge, hairy manlike creature with sharp stink, who liked to play pranks on people.

It tells the shared story of Nena, daughter of a wealthy haciendero, and Jose, son of one of the haciendero's employees.

It's also a celebration of Filipino poetry.

If the film doesn't end up as an incoherent mess--and I'm not saying it doesn't, not entirely--that's because O'Hara manages to tie almost everything together into a bewildering, genre-defying Gordian knot, where Negrense mythology and Philippine political history are just differing aspects of the same sociopolitical-cultural landscape, and a young girl's love can assume the features of both angel and demon simultaneously. 

This was when O'Hara was introduced to digital nonlinear video editing, which seems to have liberated him--his editing here at times resembled the shuttering of a single-lens reflex camera, at times the streaming consciousness of a young girl's febrile mind, free-associating ideas and emotions into a single narrative. 

Occasionally O'Hara throws an image of the text being read onscreen, and one is reminded of Robert Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), where we hear the priest mouthing the words, we see the words being written in his diary. The idea seems to be less about reinforcing some point or concept through synesthetic means, more about reveling in the physicality of poetry--the scratchy texture of wood-pulp paper, the visual pop! of seeing ink applied to paper, the feel of words read from the paper rolling off one's tongue. Then the shock of realizing that the words one is enjoying holds significance for the drama onscreen, their meanings detonating in your head like timed explosive devices--

At roughly one hundred minutes' running time and made for three million pesos (roughly US$75,000), the film seems outsized in its ambition, startling in its imagination. Despite barely having the money to evoke a hacienda lifestyle, much less produce the effects needed for a war or horror movie, the film encapsulates the pain and passion and perversity of one small corner of the Philippines, towards the end of the previous millennium. 

Coming this April 20th: a weeklong retrospective (here's a trailer/preview) of O'Hara's work as an actor, screenwriter, and director, with thanks to Jojo de Vera of the Sari-Saring Sineng Pinoy Blog. Will post links to the films soon (possibly no English subtitles except when noted; some of the films digitally enhanced and cleaned for improved visual clarity (again, when noted)); links to article whenever applicable.

Tentative titles to be shown:

As actor: Tubog sa Ginto

As writer: Rubia Servios and Kasal? 

As director: Bulaklak sa City Jail, Uhaw Sa Pag-Ibig, Prinsesang Gusgusin, Bed Sins.  

4.18.13

Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine), Evil Dead (Fede Alvarez)

Sprang brake!

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is some kind of masterpiece--compared to all the Girls Gone Wild videos, and lord knows I've seen more of them than I want to admit, his movie is the Citizen Kane of teenage vacation pics. 

Easily the best moments come at the beginning, when the picture for maybe ten minutes doesn't really feel the need to explain anything--just splice together footage of girls and boys flashing nipples and ass cracks, gyrating and spraying beer everywhere like surf breaking on rockface, sprinkling cocaine on nubile skin like confectioner's sugar on a finely turned bun. For some ten minutes Korine achieves a verite ambiance, a brief vision that captures the langorous ennui of the American adolescent--the sense that life is mean and short and doesn't have much of a point, so one must grab what pleasure is available now, as much as one can. You almost believe he would pull out of all this a bloodily profound truth, something about these spring breakers from within their culture, on their own rap-booming, beer-spraying, bouncing-booty terms.

Yeah, yeah. Right off we're asked to believe that three girls wearing face masks and tiny shorts (they don't even bother pulling on decent denim) would rush into a diner, badger cook and waitstaff badly enough to receive money (and what was the cook with his pots of hot fat and kitchen knife doing all this time, hm?), and use the proceeds of that heist to fund a booze-and-drug fueled crawl through St. Petersburg, Florida (from the cash register of a fried chicken diner? Who eats there, Bill Gates?). We're asked to believe in a meth and arms dealer named Alien (James Franco) dumbass enough to scatter dollar bills all over his king-sized bed and loaded weaponry all over his room like M & Ms, yet smart enough to earn the money to buy a grand piano beside a drop-dead gorgeous swimming pool. Only in Florida, I suppose.

I'm not demanding realism, mind you; I know a demented fantasy when I see one, and the four coeds are an important part of Korine's fantasy.  Gomez plays the good girl--not only does she attend regular church, she hangs out in a bikini without flashing a nipple, sucks on an oversized bong once that I actually noticed, and bails early before she gets into real trouble. Rachel Korine is second-best girl, having only functioned as getaway driver for the diner heist, and using a bullet wound on the arm as pretext  for her exit scene. Only Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson go all the way, incarnating the director's concept of spring break's darker side, in day-glo bikinis. The girls' behavior is so precisely calibrated to their respective statuses (Gomez the Disney princess, Korine the director's wife, Hudgens and Benson as the bad bad girls), their rewards and punishments so schematically meted out that you can't help but think the story, with a bit of judicious sanitizing, could make for a nice discussion topic in next week's Sunday school. 

Korine joins his one-time Dogme 95 co-conspirator Lars Von Trier in staging handsome-looking pictures that are occasionally provocative (a scene with a gun barrel inserted in the mouth is sure to provoke some kind of reaction) but when you really think about them have little real application to the actual world--and are hence weightless. What's left, really, are Korine's stylings, illuminating the surrounding darkness like a day-glo g-string in the dank Miami night.

I'll swallow your sequel

Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead plays surprisingly better than it appeared, at least from the loud and splashy trailers: the requisite five pretty youths headed for an isolated cabin, the mandatory evil presence (redneck cannibal, or generic Abomination). Only Alvarez probably realized that this was his best chance for going big-time--despite being (or especially because it's) only a sequel--and he wasn't about to waste the opportunity. 

Alvarez's intent is announced with the very first shot, a breathtaking view of a vast wooded landscape (presumably Auckland, New Zealand) on the upper half of the screen--the shot is upside-down. Right off he's telling us to expect the usual, only it won't entirely be the usual. 

The script presents a more thought-out than is standard scenario: instead of five horny adolescents intent on an orgiastic bacchanal in the woods, it's three friends and a brother trying to force a troubled young girl to quit her heroin habit. The storyline involves us for maybe twenty minutes, then is completely dropped when more supernatural antics take place, but for those twenty--and especially the last ten of those twenty--the premise works well (skip the rest of this paragraph if you wish to see the picture): her friends and brother aren't sure if it's the addiction speaking, and they do all the wrong things for the right reasons. For those brief minutes the movie makes explicit the idea The Exorcist refuses to confront: that demonic possession is a metaphor for addiction (drugs, sex, whatever), a supernatural excuse for us to be the very worse assholes we can be, to satisfy our appetites. 

Love it that Alvarez doesn't use shaky-cam--at least not to the point of incoherence; love it that he doesn't slice the footage into a slurried mess (though he presents plenty onscreen, sometimes flung at the camera lens); love it that he largely avoids CGI--most of the special effects are either deft misdirection or classic magic tricks or plain, old-fashioned filmmaking. 

There's a scene I'd like to point out, of Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) perched at the top of the cellar stairs while Mia (Jane Levy) crouches below, tears streaming down her cheeks. We know Mia will turn evil and we dread the moment; Alvarez's camera is pressed close to Mia's all-too-human and teary face, and we're  aware that it looms over us while Natalie is poised upstairs, fidgeting with uncertainty--will she or won't she come closer, give Mia some comfort? Suspense and dread, and not a pixel in sight.

It's pretty good for what it is, an exercise in genre filmmaking; maybe its biggest problem is just that: it's a mere exercise in genre filmmaking. I've maintained that Drew Goddard's Cabin in the Woods, working from Joss Whedon's script, pretty much killed the genre--rendered all other permutations, no matter how well made, redundant by showing how silly it all is (Five kids isolated in a cabin in the woods--wouldn't they at least have cellphones? Paramedics on helicopters?). Watching this I can admire the filmmaking, the same time say the picture hasn't changed my mind any.

That is, till I saw Raimi's own Evil Dead 2 again on cable. Raimi had a big success with his first Evil Dead, and an offer was immediately put to him to remake the picture on a bigger budget. Raimi turned this down; he was hoping his upcoming Crimewave would be a hit, that he would win some financial independence. It wasn't, so he was doing the Evil Dead remake--only it wasn't just a remake; Raimi, presented with basically the same material, decided to change his interpretation and along the way throw in everything he knew about filmmaking which, as it turns out, is a lot.

 Watching this, all memories of Cabin (and by extension this remake) were blown away like so much brain matter. This is the cabin-in-the-woods flick to end all cabin-in-the-woods flicks, by turns horrifying, hilarious, and droll. There are images here that recall Ray Harryhausen (the Necronomicon gnashing its teeth), and images (the laughing furniture scene) that recall--well, I'm not sure what: Buster Keaton crossed with Jan Svankmajer maybe? There are moments disgusting beyond belief (the popping eyeball scene) and moments disgusting beyond that, if you know where to look (the discharge pouring from grandma's ear is actually brother Ted Raimi's sweat, pouring out of his rubber old lady suit). There's a phantasmagoric beauty to some of the frames (the undead Andrea twirling on her toes; Ash's Oldsmobile turning in the air; the massive trees groaning, pulling their rootlike knees up from the ground in arthritic pain), a requisite for truly memorable horror. This is the genre's epically surreal, no-budget masterpiece; the Platonic ideal all other lesser pictures aspire to, at the same time shattering the mold of that ideal with modern power tools, forever. 

Towards the end of this entertaining if ultimately disposable movie the iconic chainsaw finally makes its long-awaited appearance, and the audience members heave a sigh of recognition: "Yeah--" Dispiriting, till one realizes: who put that expectation in their heads? Accepteth no substitutes. 


4.6.13