Lav Diaz's Historya ni Ha (History of Ha) may be his strangest work yet. If in Ang Hupa (The Halt, 2019) he proposes a Filipino dystopia complete with dictatorship and pandemic and volcano-induced darkness, and in Panahon ng Halimaw (Season of the Devil, 2018) he presents the Philippines' first-ever black-and-white, sung-through, no-instrument musical, this you might say is his Dead of Night--an astringently deadpan blackly comic film about a ventriloquist and his dummy.
Saw The Eternals and lemme put it this way: best MCU in recent years, worst Chloe Zhao to date.
What made her such a memorable actress? Her smile, which was unique; it had a queer twist to one side as if wanting to turn into a sneer, something worthy of Barbara Stanwyck in a noir thriller. It didn’t, not quite; it accompanied eyes that opened wide in surprise and wonder, or narrowed into an intense laser stare. The problem with those eyes--or the glory of them whichever way you saw it--was the twinkle you saw, a twinkle that said she was only kidding, that the near-sneer was a put-on, that the tough-girl image was merely a façade defending her from a tough world.
Forgotten silver
I watched Mario O'Hara's Uhaw sa Pag ibig (Thirst for Love, 1983) expecting a mediocre production--no awards, no admiring words from anyone--and for the first thirty minutes or so the film confirmed my suspicions: your run-of-the-mill fallen-woman story where Lala (Claudia Zobel) fights with her mother (Perla Bautista), gets pregnant by her boyfriend (Patrick de La Rosa), plans to elope with said boyfriend (who is stabbed while waiting in an alley), eventually runs away from home.
(Warning: plot points of both the 2018 Halloween and 2021 Halloween Kills discussed in explicit and gory detail)
"I come to bury Caesar not praise him," Marc Antony once said standing over Caesar's corpse, making brutal appreciation of his former friend; I know how he feels. Lay David Gordon Green's Halloween Kills across the autopsy table and you're forced to agree with most critics: this is not a pretty sight. I mean--long character expositions sutured to grotesque murders of said characters; loud thumping music stretched to cover entire missing sections of narrative and huge gaps in logic; conventions from different genres stuffed like so many makeshift organs into the film's carcass in the hope that the mess will come to life, rough thread punched in and out of festering leather in a parody of stitching. If this unholy assembly ever manages to lurch off the table and stumble across the bloodslicked floor the audience will shriek--more at the sheer gracelessness of the filmmaking, I imagine, than any violence actually depicted.
(Plot twists and story discussed in explicit detail)
Latest of a longrunning franchise, last to feature latest Bond Daniel Craig. Best of the lot tho I'm not a fan of of the series from Roger Moore onwards. Craig I'll admit is one of the better actors in the role, second to Connery (who didn't do his best work in this series). I trust I make myself clear as mud.
Legendary komiks writer-artist Francisco Coching's best-known work first saw light of day in Liwayway Magazine; its first of many incarnations on the big screen was this, Gerardo 'Gerry' de Leon's homespun folksy Pedro Penduko done the same year (if web sources can be trusted).
De Leon is one of the few great filmmakers who dabbled in comics (others include--off the top of my head--Robert Altman, Mario Bava, Lino Brocka, Celso Ad. Castillo (who did a remake starring Ramon Zamora in 1973), Ishmael Bernal, Lamberto Avellana). The previous year de Leon had also adapted Mars Ravelo's Dyesebel, and while I generally agree with Martin Scorsese's jab at the Marvel Cinematic Universe I do think some comic-book adaptations are cinema--you just have to decide which.
