Init sa Magdamag (Midnight Passion, Laurice Guillen, 1983) forty years later

Init sa Magdamag, forty years later

(Restored version available on Vivamax.net. Details of plot discussed in explicit detail. )

The film starts wordlessly in a hotel suite, with Mr. Eleazar (Ding Salvador) humming "Bessame mucho" as he disrobes and Irene Trejon (Lorna Tolentino) sitting in her bubble bath. She hears a gasp and solid tonk! pulls the shower curtain aside, sees Mr. Eleazar on the floor, and the slow-pooling blood. 

Shock and dismay. Cut to a fully dressed Irene glancing back before leaving through a pair of sliding doors. The camera pauses to wander over the TV set, the furnishings, the bed with its immaculate dustcover (Why immaculate? Because they hadn't had the chance at sex), before returning to the gaping door, a lingering languorous shot that both opens and sums up the film: empty room, sordid scenario, camera following the departed woman into the dark-- into the depths, so to speak, of the woman's psyche.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003)

Return to sender

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King concludes what may be the single most massive production shoot in recent cinema, a $900-million, four-to-five-years-in-the-making, nine-hour-plus adaptation of the works of one shy Oxford don. With all those numbers, all the love and excitement generated by fans, all the hosannas heaped at its massive perfumed feet, one might feel churlish pointing out dents in the gleaming suit of armor. Still--

The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002)

The Too Tired

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers picks up where Fellowship leaves off-- with Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) mano-a-mano with the Balrog (huge, bat-winged creature with whip and sword and severe attitude problem)--and, if anything, ups the ante. Fellowship focused on a band of brothers, Towers divides into three threads: Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) off to see the wicked (Sauron's One Ring of Power) tossed into the Crack of Doom (insert ass joke here); Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), kidnapped by nasty Uruk-Hais (upgraded Orcs) and rescued by Ents (perambulating hardwoods); kingly Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and the rest of the Fellowship holed up at Helm's Deep, waiting for Saruman's ten-thousand-strong army to fall on them like rain.

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)

Middling earth

The film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is a massive undertaking-- 270 million on three pictures approximately three hours each, with thousands of extras, hundreds of locations, endless digital effects… you get the idea. And it’s by Peter Jackson, director of both the exuberantly gross Dead Alive and lyrical at times harrowing Heavenly Creatures, an event we’ve waited for all of last year, freshly arrived in its first installment. And how is it?

Best of 2021

Film year 2021 

was if anything more confused than 2020. The previous year we went into lockdown; last year we emerged  only to go back to lockdown due to Delta, partially re-emerge, partially go back in response to Omicron--a chaotic state. I think the best films didn't reflect that confusion so much as express themselves despite, raising their collective yet distinct voices above the turmoil. Hence:

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (Lino Brocka, 1974)

Our town

If you're going to film someone's story-- in this case Larry McMurtry's semi-autobiographical novel-- you can do worse than follow Orson Welles' suggestion to shoot in black and white. Faded photos have an allure no JPEG file will ever have; black and white celluloid will have this much over digital color no matter how high the definition-- they're already texture of memories, snipped out and pasted in someone's yellowing album. 

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021)

Sound and fury

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