JUST PLAY ME TWO BARS OF STARDUST

Sir (Chabet) and I hardly talked about art. I was in his class for only a semester. But we've been hanging out since. We did talk a tremendous amount about cinema though, maybe because I was the only one among us who was sort of into it to the degree that I was. But I was a misguided Hollywood nerd and he took it upon himself to set me right. He was like my de facto cinema guru slash pimp. And he schooled me. Every time we saw each other, all these years, at drink-ups, at parties, at exhibits, he always had some filmmaker I had no idea about that he wanted me to seek out : Bernal, Zialcita , Godard, Buñuel, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Howard Hawks, Alain Resnais. And like any good student, I did. And subsequently got hooked. 

He pushed this Antonioni film on me years ago, raving about the ending. I have since fallen in love with it hard and seen it many times. And in its own odd way, that desolate and beautiful finale makes the most fitting of codas for the occasion. 

Thank you, sir. 

RIP.

THE ACT WE ACT

Updated Workshop Dates: Friday, Saturday & Sunday May 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26
1pm-6pm, 6 sessions, 30 hours

Workshop Venue: UFO Studio, San Juan

Workshop Fees: 9,000 Php

Discounts available for Early Bird Payments until April 15.

Special 15 on 15 promo for  a pair of enrollees. Each will be entitled to a 15% discount until April 15.. 

For Inquiries, call 0917.5201105

TROPFEST SEA

 Tropfest SEA is open to all citizens & residents of Southeast Asia.

 USD10,000 and a trip to LA await you if you're lucky.

You have until June 15, 2013 to make your films and send 'em. Submissions info and other details on the website.

POINTLESS NOSTALGIC: MY 2012 AT THE MOVIES

"There is something heroic in a movie director who grasps his vision of the world and takes it, scorning compromise, to its irrevocable limit" (Anthony Lane on Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse)

There was quite a number of people who came to the Batang West Side screening at 2012's leaner and arguably meaner Cinemanila. Some were watching it for the first time. It was my second. And it had been so long, and I've been used to Lav's immersive long films, I’d forgotten how steeped it was in the ostensible rigidity of film school fundaments. Lav did have tenure at Mowelfund and made his first films under the studio system. But even before the film got a fifth of the way into its terse five hours, you could already feel him pulling away, defiant of the form. Batang West Side was, in many ways, the primordial jolt of our independent cinema, and here it was, 11 years after its premiere in the same festival, unwittingly re-acquainting us with the qualities that made the phenomenon such an intoxicating crucible when it first emerged, primarily the D.I.Y. aesthetic that was a game-changing “fuck you” to the studio way of making films, with its ruthless disregard for protocol, its insatiable curiosity for new modes of narrative, its restless tendency to go out on limbs. Its odd that I should get nostalgic about something that isn't even into its 20th year but 2012 was the year independent cinema crossed over, or attempted to cross over, and made 2001 seem like ages ago. In consorting with the mainstream, these qualities were marginalized even further, if not outright discouraged. A national cinema is healthiest if it can metabolize all disciplines of film.  But any whiff of art in the context of independent cinema tended to be scoffed at, by the public, by the producers, by the filmmaking community itself sometimes. And by art, I mean anything that aspired beyond the slim, and myopic, purview that entertainment is the end-all be-all of films.  What seemed to be exalted more was the ability of filmmakers to manage compromise more than their ferocity of will to either ignore or even obliterate it. Filmmakers with lofty ambitions or unorthodox processes were routinely dismissed as pretentious and impractical and wankers. Oh, we do uphold Lav Diaz and Kidlat Tahimik for their stubborn and tireless pursuit of art in their work, but our tributes mostly reek of tokenism and misplaced respect because we never go see their films anyway.

Having said that, and with at least three corporations giving grants, 2012 was, for what it’s worth, a year of plenty, and as anybody will remember the Cinemalaya brouhaha, a year of controversy. And the volume of output alone was cause to rejoice, particularly for those of us disheartened on a yearly basis by the aesthetic inertia of Hollywood and Star Cinema. There were so many films that my yearly sins of omission, those films I simply lacked the time and the resources to catch, doubled in number. I only saw one MMFF entry as of this writing, two from Cinemanila's Digital Lokal, both here, and none of the FDCP Sineng Pambansa films. But there was also, at some point, a danger of misconstruing quantity with quality. As well-made as many of last year’s films were, there was also a sense of pulling its punches, of coloring inside the lines, of  thinking inside the box,  of revoking its license to confuse,  for most of them. Prudish, conservative, safe. This is borne perhaps from a premature settling into its fickle comfort zones and a misguided desire to expand their demographic, a demographic that remained staunch in its indifference, in its determination to not show up. At least five independently-produced films got a brief, suspense-filled theatrical run in 2012. Suspense-filled because of how there was a daily threat of being pulled out of theaters from lack of traffic hovering over nearly every film, particularly, and oddly, the ones that were aggressively user-friendly, the ones that sold out their festival runs, the ones that gained a fervid cult following, the ones aided and abetted by an over-enthusiastic task force of hype.  2012 was the year in which persisted the folly that the only way for independent cinema to thrive was not only to compete head-on with The Dark Knight Rises and No Other Woman, but also on their playing fields and by their rules, not to mention that other folly that the masses, whose collective wisdom about movies is that they don't want to think while watching them, was somehow within reach. And nary a rustle of developing a viable and sustainable alternative venue system for independent cinema, and nurturing its current audience, was heard in the mad scramble to get into the malls.

The encouraging news amidst the slow mainstreaming of indie, if you will,  was that films continued to be made under the same envelope-pushing, anti-traditional , non-conformist, sometimes defiantly no-budget aegis independent cinema used to operate under. Not too surprisingly, some of those creative spurts were shorts: Jon Lazam's Nang Gabing Sinlaki Ng Puso Ang Bato Ni Darna, Victor Villanueva's Saranghae My Tutor, Erik Matti's Vesuvius, Khavn's Solar Syokoy, Carl Papa’s Ang Prinsesa, Prinsipe At Malborita. As a concession to the productivity that distinguished 2012, and also as a concession to loosening up a little, my yearend list has been expanded to 13. I left no room for films seen through means other than a public screening, which means all of the films I picked were all shown publicly here,  regardless of nature of venue and how long it ran. Which also means that, delightful as they were, you won't find mention of Leos Carax's Holy Motors or Johnnie To's Life Without Principle beyond this sentence. I also didn't separate the domestic from the foreign because I've always found that a little pointless.  And, lastly, after discarding honorable mentions years back, I must also holler empathic shout-outs to the following, the other films I liked a lot but simply did not have enough room for:  Joss Whedon's Avengers, Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, Ridley Scott's Prometheus, Michael Haneke's Amour, Rico Ilarde's Pridyider, Erik Matti's Rigodon,  Emerson Reyes' MNL 143, Gym Lumbera's Anak Araw,  Richard Somes' Mariposa (Sa Hawla Ng Gabi),   Whammy Alcazaren's Colossal,  Benito Bautista's Harana and Brillante Mendoza's Thy Womb. All of these were flawed, some even terribly so, but then again, the most exciting cinema always is.





1. Florentina Hubaldo CTE (Lav Diaz, Philippines, Cinemanila):
If  Siglo Ng Pagluluwal (Century of Birthing), the first film Lav completed in the four years after Melancholia and the one that came before this, had a palpably transitory aura, a sense that he was severing ties with his old aesthetic, and that he was, at times,  fumbling for a new one, this feels like he'd at last stumbled on it and that it has come to a fiery bloom. At some point, you sense that the desperate men digging for desperate treasure and the eponymous young woman sold into prostitution by her own malefic father and spiraling into insanity are meant to embody the blunt force trauma suffered by a country that is inexorably cannibalizing itself.  It is, but the assumption comes more from a familiarity with the way Lav writes rather than any didacticism on his part. His politics remain fulsome and robust, sure, but his poetry has become intensely given over to a renewed faith in the eloquence of restraint and silences.










2. Kalayaan (Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr., Philippines, Cinemalaya): If nothing else, this was the year we contemplated, however blithely or flippantly, the possibility, if not the imminence,  of our own wholesale extinction and there was no film quite as attuned to such apocalyptic tenor as Adolf's slow burning meditation on the existential isolation that besets us all, set ironically enough in the recent past, and in the Spratly Islands at that,  a politicized tract of land as barren of its impositions as it is haunted by its implications. And this ravishing fragment of paradise on earth comes at a price : the damning ennui of disconnectedness and the slow descent into hallucination that is the only way out of it.










3. This Is Not A Film (Jafar Panahi, Iran, Active Vista) : Here is Jafar's sly, often funny riposte against the regime that placed him under house arrest with a gag order from making films hanging over his head. Given the circumstances of its inception and its eventual distribution, though, shot  in the house he was prohibited to leave and smuggled to Cannes inside a USB drive hidden in a cake, here, too, is a stripping down to the cogs of the independent filmmaking process, the pushing against limits, the indomitable ferocity of spirit, the prevailing against adversities, the triumph of the will. 










4. Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, Cinemanila):  Is Reygadas an emperor wearing new clothes? Or a street magician engaged in some deliberately obtuse arthouse sleight of hand? And is the illusion compromised if he was one or the other?Part rebus, part hubris, family is the organizing principle in what is his most abstract work, maddening for the way it not only risks the befuddlement we are wired to resist, but somehow twists that very befuddlement into its source of catharsis. No matter what theories you derive out of  the images lashed together here, this semblance of clarity, this made-up order, will ultimately lack the visceral satisfaction of the exquisite confusion you're better off embracing instead.









5. In Another Country (Hong Sang Soo, Korea, Cinemanila): Each and every film in Hong's entire ouevre is a variation on themes, those themes being the ways in which relationships constantly shapeshift yet somehow remain the same, and also the ways in which the men in these relationships, Korean men in particular, can be such douches. Here he throws a Caucasian into the mix, several ones really but all played by Isabelle Huppert, and each one unversed in Korean,  and touches, with his usual lithe playfulness, with his sprightly grasp of the surreal, on the lopsided interplay that occurs between Asians and Westerners, the way they grope around the language barriers, their desperation to communicate, and the new language that emerges from the dissonance and misunderstanding.









6. Ang Paglalakbay Ng Bituin Sa Gabing Madilim (Arnel Mardoquio, Philippines, Cinema One Originals/ Cinemanila):  The revolutionary as zealot can be a reductive misnomer, and in attempting to untwine the intricacies of the Bangsamoro conflict, Arnel dismantles the image by training his contemplative, minimalist gaze instead on the relationship troubles of a rebel couple who also happen to be lesbians, and who also happen to be exhausted by the struggle, as they attempt to evade soldiers who are after the hot cache of ransom money they lug around. Their striking out for friendlier territory is languid and fractious and digressive, but also sometimes becalmed and hopeful, mirroring not only their own malfunctioning determination to stay together, but their own yearning to escape both the demands of their cause and the strictures of their faith.











7. Mamay Umeng (Dwein Tarhata Baltazar, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): A film about a man who can't wait to die,  about the slow action of a life unbothered by incident, about tedium, really, is bound to be, well, tedious, and  any chance it has at being emotionally involving, let alone being funny or poignant, neutered by its very nature. In theory. But there's a sense of space and  minutiae and quietude to this that is more bemusing than it is boring, and somehow defies all that, possessed as it is of a frail grace that is kept from dissipating into banality by the wry passivity of  the man outliving himself at the heart of it.











8. Jungle Love (Sherad Anthony Sanchez. Philippines, Cinemanila): Pleasure is the last thing you expect to take away from a work by Sherad, whose ethnographic reveries always seemed in the grip of some sober, enigmatic gravity. Not that this  piece of semiotic erotica abandons the veil of mystery entirely but it's more ornamental than forbidding, its uncharacteristic playfulness coming from how this is really a tone poem about seduction and disappearance but wearing the ghostly skin of a pop song about love and salvation and liking how it feels better.









9. Taglish (Gym Lumbera, Philippines, Cinemanila): Language, specifically Tagalog, the dialect of Gym’s native Batangas, and the duplicities and entropies visited on it that the title hints at, illuminates the duplicities and entropies of his film. The second half (Tagalog) is a dark, rueful love story and the first half (English) is what happened after the actual film got damaged in a flood. Mashed up, it's a narrative, in many ways, of wounded longing, for a love forever tainted by infidelity,  for a simpler life that's a stone's throw away yet out of reach. But it lingers more as a subtext on how much art is an Other that is never fully subservient to the control of its artist.










10, Pascalina (Pam Miras, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): Essentially the travails of a small girl in a big city but fed through the jittery muck you attain from shooting on a Digital Harinezumi,which comes off less as an outlaw impulse, and goes beyond mere mood-setting into the more aggressively contextual utility of peeling the skin off the titular fuckup's mundane history to reveal how everybody, from her sisters to her boyfriend to her dying aunt, the only person who has the temerity to tell her "I love you", has fangs sheathed inside them and the only way for her to make it through the eternal, grotty night that has become her so-called life is to dance with the devil she knows and spring the catch on her own secret monstrosity.

11. Argo (Ben Affleck, USA, Domestic Release): Funny how we fall back on aphorisms like 'old school' when we talk about this, and by ‘old school’ we mean the 70s when Hollywood had not quite mastered the fluency with which it now speaks the language of theme parks.  Not to say that the deliberate lack of flash and spectacle is its only achievement, of course, but the piston driving it is really its back-handed spoof on that whole period when Hollywood was metamorphosing into an event movie factory, cinema as rollercoaster.You do get dubious about its textural authenticity given how it has the tone and energy and the manipulative wiles of a pop thriller,  except that its preposterous, albeit true to life, conceit practically demands that specific immediacy and tautness to ground it.

12. Give Up Tomorrow (Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco, USA-Philippines, Domestic Release): The title swings both ways, as a tweak on that exhortation to procrastinate your surrender or a handing over of your future to someone else. For Paco Larrañaga, it's his mantra of resolve, languishing in jail these past 14 years for the infamous murder of the Chiong Sisters, a crime he vehemently claims he didn't commit, a claim that's bulletproof with corroboration but, to a corrupt justice system, has become as flimsy as a shield cut out of cardboard. It doesn't exactly let us forget that at the other end of its subject's wrongful incarceration, and the Kafkaesque conspiracy that swirls around it, are two dead girls and their devastated parents, and it may all be a function of our own instincts for narrative, but that we somehow do forget, even briefly, is also where the film derives its current of dangerous, harrowing ambivalence.

13. Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh, USA, Domestic Release): Soderbergh has been on such a streak of win, his last six films have all but  overturned my lingering reservations about him, to the point that this is the second year in a row wherein his work earned a slot in the compendium. Brazenly heterosexual and leeched of danger, there's obviously a rosy tint to his vision of the male stripper lifestyle that, while it docks no points for veracity, has that wildly abandoned flavor of zest that befits a swoony valentine to hedonism.

WORLD WITHOUT END: MY 2012 IN MUSIC

"I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music." Lester Bangs

I don't remember pop ruling my world to the degree with which it ruled my 2012, an odd thing, as I've always been a staunch believer. But then again, pop ruled 2012 to a similar degree that it could all be osmosis.  And by pop, I mean not just catchy but catchy with ubiquity. And by ubiquity, I mean stuff that you hear everywhere and that everybody knows, that somehow blur the hierarchies you impose between your obscurantist hipster self-entitlement and the obliviousness and nonchalance with which ordinary folk approach their music.  But Rebecca Black's Friday can go fuck itself. I'm talking more of songs like  Gotye and Kimbra's Someone That I Used To Know, PSY's Oppa Gangnam Style, Carly Rae Jespen's Call Me Maybe. Ubiquity of this sweep, of course, tends to breed contempt, except the production and the songwriting on these three numbers was almost irrevocably impeccable, enough at least to buttress and sustain its viral longevity.  I do realize I'm speaking for myself, as all three have its detractors crusading against them with all the zeal and vitriol better reserved for more nefarious moral transgressions. It's a little sad, and not a little pathetic, when people put so much outrage and energy into railing against pop music, although I make an exception when the target of ire is 6Cyclemind or Rocksteddy. In the light of my own issues with all this misdirected and self-righteous indignation, I took to pop for the spirit of lightening up that is its ore. Which is not to say I've dumbed myself down, musically. But I think there's a way to succumb to the pleasures of frivolity without succumbing to its inconsequence. Not to mention the immense benefits, musically and otherwise.  Not all of this is pop in the strictest sense, of course. And looking at it now, R & B (Up Dharma Down, AlunaGeorge, Jessie Ware, Solange, Usher) and New Wave (Wild Nothing, Frankie Rose, Grimes, Churches, even that Springsteen song)  seem to be  the more pervasive musical strands threading through most of them. There's also a lot of belated returns to guitar crash and tumble (Japandroids, Divine Fits, Gaslight Anthem, Walkmen). And a healthy smattering of my usual relevant fogies (Mould, Weller, Mariah, Dylan, Womack, Blur, Rebecca Gates, Saint Etienne). A mixed bag, sure, but it  almost always is, essentially. My caveats this year, the only time I've found it necessary to invoke one since I began this, is the lack of an album list and , more significantly, of annotations for the songs.  I haven't immersed myself  in the new records by Pinback, Frank Ocean, Paul Buchanan, Jens Lekman, Ne-Yo and Gravenhurst thoroughly enough to make a proper assessment but I mention them out of the potential I glean from my first cursory listens. The vacuum of writing on the individual songs is simply a casualty of lack of time, which is a foul thing sometimes but is all too real and often difficult to address. As the world didn't end as scheduled, which we of course knew it wouldn't, life went on, just that there was, and there still is, too much of it going on. I can only ask for your forgiveness in this matter and offer a conciliatory promise to make sure this doesn't happen next year. At least I don't have sloth as an excuse anymore. Disclaimers aside, the usual rules apply. Most of these are album tracks rather than singles, but some of them are singles,too, because such is life. There are a lot of other songs I liked, sure, but in the name of stringency, these are the 50 that mattered most, and matter still. In descending order.

1. Up Dharma Down, Thinker
2. Carly Rae Jespen, Call Me Maybe
3. Wild Nothing, Shadow
4. Bagetsafonik, Airports
5. Ang Bandang Shirley, Iyong
5. Dan Deacon, True Thrush
6. Alabama Shakes, Hold On
7. Paul Weller, That Dangerous Age
8. Sky Ferreira, Everything Is Embarrassing
9. AlunaGeorge, Your Drums Your Love
10. Mariah Carey with Meek Mill and Rick Ross, Triumphant
11. School of Seven Bells, The Night
12. The Gaslight Anthem, 45
13. Kindness, House
14. Tennis, Origins
15. Chairlift, I Belong In Your Arms (Japanese Version)
16. Bruce Springsteen, We Take Care of Our Own
17. Spazzkid, Touch
18. Father John Misty, Nancy From Now On 
19. The Walkmen, The Witch
20. Johnny Marr, The Messenger
21. Japandroids, Continuous Thunder
22. Divine Fits, Would That Not Be Nice
23. Eleanor Friedberger, My Mistakes
24. Frankie Rose, Know Me
25. Rufus Wainwright, Out of the Game
26. Bobby Womack and Lana Del Rey, Dayglo Reflection
27. Cody ChestnuTT, Til I Met Thee
28. Nite Jewel, She's Always Watching You
29. Allo Darlin', Wonderland
30. Jessie Ware, Running
31. iLikeTrains, Mnemosyne
32. A Dark Horse, These Butterflies Are Free
33. Solange, Losing You
34. Let's Buy Happiness, It Works Better On Paper
35. Dirty Projectors, About To Die
36. Rebecca Gates and the Consortium, & & &
37. Churches, Lies
38. Best Coast, The Only Place
39. The Hundredth Anniversary, Slip
40. Memory Tapes, Sheila
41. Usher, Climax
42. Blur, Under the Westway
43. Bob Mould, The Descent
44. Sleigh Bells, The Comeback Kid
45. Saint Etienne, Tonight
46. Bob Dylan, Duquesne Whistle
47. Mount Eerie, I Walked Home Beholding
48. The Soft Moon, Zeros
49. Grimes, Vowels=Space and Time
50. David Guetta with Sia, Titanium

NUMBER 14

Cinemanila. Dec 5 to 11. Market Market Cinemas. 

Michael Haneke. Ari Kaurismaki. Carlos Reygadas. Hong Sang Soo. Namapol Thamrongrattanarit. Nonsee Nimibutr. Sherad Sanchez. Raya Martin. Richard Somes. Teng Mangansakan. Arnel Mardoquio. Gym Lumbera. Whammy Alcazaren. Lav Diaz. Mario O'Hara. Marilou Diaz Abaya. Celso Ad Castillo. Manuel Conde.  2012 Jeonju Digital Project. Sergio Leone. 

 Film geek euphoria. No mistresses, hipsters or videogames.

CINEMA ONE: THE LOWDOWN PART III

Mamay Umeng (Dwein Baltazar): Mamay Umeng is in his 80s and has nothing left to live for except dying, only he's in the pink of health and death has been everything but cooperative. The risk you run with a film about tedium, a film that's ultimately about the lack of anything happening, the slow action of life going on and on and on, needs no elaboration, but in drawing out the minutiae of the old man's waiting, often with dollops of funny, and not to mention a couple of tiny and poignant semiotic gestures, it proves sound the premise behind slow cinema that stillness is conducive for stumbling on epiphanies. 

Ang Paglalakbay Ng Bituin Sa Gabing Madilim (Arnel Mardoquio): It boils the intricacies of the Bangsamoro conflict down into the plight of a lesbian rebel couple and the suddenly orphaned nephew of one of them, still reeling from the murder of his parents and whose backpack is bursting with ransom money, as they make a break for friendlier territory and evade the soldiers bearing down on them.  Not so much minimalist as it is almost graceful in its restraint, it slows the chase film down into a road movie and achieves, in the subtle shifting of tones  from urgency to languor, a dreamlike reverie that poeticizes their own futile yearnings to free themselves from the strictures of both their revolution and their religion.

Palitan (Ato Bautista): Sure, it gets its softcore jollies down pat, but just like its spiritual forebear, Scorpio Nights, this is really about the simmering desperation that comes from sustained ennui and claustrophobia, re-imagining the cramped milieu as an ever tighter space with even flimsier walls, both literal and metaphoric, through which slithers the devil at the heart of matters, embodied gamely and diabolically by Mon Confiado, with all the threat and malice of a coiled snake.

CINEMA ONE: THE LOWDOWN PART II

Aberya (Christian Linaban): Difficult as it is to dismiss how jacked up with promise this is and how its reach has balls, only one of the four separate lives that inevitably intertwine here has juice: a drug dealer experimenting with ways to travel through time using narcotic cocktails. The rest, which include a boxer and a whore and a wannabe socialite, lose me a little and most of this loses to my issues with the post-postmodern aesthetic Linaban favors, dangerously verging on either MTV sensory overload or hipster self-awareness but both of which, to his immense credit, he rejects falling back on.  

Mariposa Sa Hawla Ng Gabi (Richard V. Somes): It's saying a lot to pin this down as hitting some  ceiling with regards to how visually sumptuous it is, as every Richard Somes film looks good enough almost to eat.  His alternate universe re-imagining of Manila as a gaudy noir carnival of color and grime, through which a feisty young country woman tries to get to the bottom of her sister's brutal murder not to mention her mysterious body modifications, smacks of equal parts Fellini and Sion Sono, and does gain the relentless, fucked-up weirdness that implies.

Mater Dolorosa (Adolf Borinaga Alix Jr.):  Granted, it trawls over little that's new, but then again, every big-boned post-Godfather gangster saga, from Election to We Own The Night, doesn't necessarily trawl over anything new either, all being essentially iterations of the politics of family, Shakespearean being the go-to qualifier, meaning they're knotty and messy and operatic. Only here, everything is subdued to the point of nonchalance, even its colors are muted to the brink of gray you assume is the moral tenor of its characters, achieving a sense of the equilibrium you also assume is how you give yourself over to this sort of life.

CINEMA ONE 2012: THE LOWDOWN PART I

Anak Araw (Gym Lumbera): Despite its undertow of melancholia, and its fragmented structure, it's not difficult to parse the ethnographic schisms at play here, the yearning for the bucolic and the pull of the urban, schisms that obviously preoccupy Gym. Like Taglish, language is a metaphorical stand-in and its duplicities, not to mention the entropies visited on it, illuminate his own duplicities and entropies.  But where Taglish is the darker, more sombre film, Anak Araw is almost intolerably light-hearted and shot through with whimsy and tenderness. The way the song that plays near the end gives the piece its necessary emotional uplift and at the same time elucidates the conceptual point of everything is quite the feat.

EDSA XXX (Khavn de la Cruz): It's a film freighted with many things, not least of which is Alexis Tioseco's portentous wish to see it come to fruition, and the irony that the perpetually independent and self-sufficient Khavn's dream project turns out to be his first under a corporate aegis, his first that he doesn't own rights to, acquires a special underlayer of subtext. Khavn's reaction to the emptiness the revolutions we celebrate have come to represent is to laugh at its absurdities and lay in a delightful array of music under it, veering from girl group doo-wop to quasi-flamenco to smoldering swamp-blues. A work-in-progress sustained in its current form by the propulsion from the joyous racket it makes and shaping up to be his most hopeful work yet.

Pascalina (Pam Miras): Here are the things you don't notice when seen through the bland prism of the everyday: how your self-absorbed sisters are grotesque harpies,  how distant and arrogant your boyfriend is,  how the only person who has the courage to say she loves you is dying and probably a monster. But the opaque sheen that comes from shooting on a Digital Harinezumi not only gives everything  a timbre of often intoxicating ambivalence but lathers the hellish melodrama in which the eponymous stumblebum is embroiled in, until the soup gets so oppressive, it makes her eventual descent into the secret monstrosity languishing under her well-meaning social deficiency feel more like a transcendence, into a shadow life that's perversely more promising.

BLOOD AND BUTTERFLY

Richard Somes' Mariposa Sa Hawla Ng Gabi.

December 3 7:30 PM. Shang Cineplex.

December 5 9:15 PM. December 8 2:30 PM. Robinsons Galleria Moveworld.

ABSURD REPUBLIC

Khavn's EDSA XXX. Work-In-Progress, Out-Of-Competition.

Special Screenings: December 1 7:30 PM.  Edsa Shangri-La 

December 2 12 PM. December 4 3 PM. December 5, 7 PM.  Robinsons Galleria Movieworld.

THIS MORTAL COIL

Dwein Baltazar's Mamay Umeng. Gala: November 30 7:30 PM. Shang Cineplex.

December 2 12:30 PM. Shang Cineplex.

December 1 12:30 PM. December 3 4:30 PM. December 9 2:30 PM. Robinsons Galleria Movieworld.

GIRL AFRAID

Pam Miras' Pascalina. Gala: December 1 7 PM. Robinsons Galleria Movieworld.

December 4 9:30 PM. December 7 5 PM. Robinsons Galleria Movieworld.

December 3 3 PM. Shangri-la Cineplex.

CHALKBOY

Gym Lumbera's Anak Araw.  Gala: December 2 9 PM.  Shang Cineplex.

December 3 12:30 PM. Dec. 4 7:30 PM Dec.6 5:00 PM. Robinsons Galleria Movieworld.

DISAPPEAR WITHIN DISTANCE

This isn't goodbye. Just that the monumental tussle with words I've been building up to as far back as the middle of the year has at last begun. I'm writing, you see. Not just one specific thing but many. Which is my rather disingenuous excuse for not writing. Not writing here, at least. Not that I've been writing much here of late, I know. Do I owe anyone an apology for that? Sorry, then. And know that I mean that.  But in my defense, where life used to be what arrested the steady updating of this blog, this time it's been waylaid by more writing. I'm talking partially about pieces of mine that have shown up the past few months in places like Vault and Esquire and the Philippine Star and the Singapore Cinematheque Quarterly, among others, that I've chosen, for some reason or the other and entirely mine, not to cross-publish here. But I'm mostly talking about work that will not be showing up here either and will not be showing up for quite some time but will inevitably show up, in the forms the cosmos has meant for them to take and with the requisite measure of chest-beating and town-crying that befits someone like me who tends to physically wince at the prospect of self-promotion. I'd leave it at that as I'm also terribly averse to making pronouncements before the time is right, and it won't be, not for a bit. Everything in its right place.

All this, of course, is meant to disclaim and perhaps reassure that the silences you have been, and will continue to be, subjected to are not by-products of sloth. New writing will crop up here from time to time, I suspect. And I remain committed to my traditional yearend evaluations. This piece of internet turf is more junkie habit than thankless duty for me, I can't stay away from it too long. Also, more films continue to get made.

Not to get too melodramatic nor too precious nor too self-absorbed even, but the year has been a particularly challenging one for me, with regards to work, and by work I don't mean livelihood, and I don't recall any stock-taking that ensued in the wake of any pitfall to be this severe and decisive, nor this pro-active and crucial either, and I suppose that deserves some gratitude on my part. Much as it can dangerously be a persuasive deterrent, frustration has always been a reliable and enthusiastic impetus.  I'd like to fashionably proclaim this a hiatus but that would imply that I'm taking some form of holiday from writing, which I've reiterated enough times in the course of these three overlong paragraphs I'm not. Quite the opposite in fact. So call it what it is. I know most of you are used to the vacuum at this point. All I'm saying is not to get too used to it. And thank you for getting this far into my self-indulgent leave-taking. And to please be around for the eventual return.  I promise it will be all manner of winful and epic.

THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE

Oslo 31 August
Directed  by Joachim Trier
Written by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogl

From the novel by Pierre Dreu La Rochelle

"Happy people are morons."You can make a shirt out of those four words, market it like a stance as it's quite the combustible soundbite. And yet the first time you hear them in Joachim Trier's Oslo 31 August, they're almost tossed-off, arbitrary. It's something Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), a professor of literature, apparently once said, maybe in the flame and flippancy of his youth, before lucking into his own surfeit of domestic bliss, the mundane comforts of settling into your own skeins, if you will. Talking later to his friend Anders (Anders Danielson Lie), a heroin junkie out of rehab who might or might not be hastening his oblivion before day's end, he breaks all that down to little more than an index of banalities and complaints on how it has quelled his hunger to write and dowsed their enthusiasm to go out and how they spend their nights mostly playing Battlefield instead, a PS3 first-person shooter that shows up later in the house of Anders' dealer. Everybody around Anders except for him seems to have settled into themselves but also casually shrug it off as if it were nothing.  And either Thomas is diffusing his own situation to assuage Anders or actually manifesting symptoms of a deeper malaise: a need to trivialize contentment as if it were a weakness, or as if in fear of loosing its potential treacheries, or worse, its potential boredom. Anders does outwardly shun the promise of happiness delivering the release that eludes him, but his daylong and later nightlong meander through the town he grew up in is really a trawl for its glimmers, for its salve.

The first time we see him, he's filling his pockets with stones and jumping into a lake, hoping to drown himself but failing. That it doesn't feel like a first attempt is a relief. And there's nothing tactile and immediate forcing his hand. But something James Ellroy said about geography being destiny nags at me, and how the rejection Anders is coming to terms with is more than the sabotage his past inflicts on any chance he has at a career and more than his sister worrying about him but from a distance and more than the ex-girlfriend he probably loves more than anything now halfway around the world and not returning his calls.

Cleaving less to the nouvelle vogue playfulness of his Reprise and more to a weightless Bressonian austerity, whatever attendant spiritual felicities that come with the appropriation is in the way Trier and cinematographer Jakob Ihre drape the eponymous city in a magic kingdom burnish, making everything seem to glow from within with a fairy tale consistency: that beguiling bike ride through the night near the end like an incantation almost. But, alas, the limits of enchantment. Anders seems blind to its rhapsodies, and instead wallows in his memories of the place and eavesdrops on the conversations of strangers, finding an evanescent comfort and joy in the disembodied, the erased, the disappeared.  "I have nothing." he says at some point, and he's not merely being melodramatic. It's a rejection of place that he grapples with, the strangeness come over familiar terrain. That whole last resort cure-all mystique of the suicidal impulse frankly never had much traction with me as a fuck-you to the world that doesn't give a shit anyway. And we never really know what happens, with that ambivalent last shot, do we?  But it makes a faint, chilling sense. Each time those tics of confusion play across Anders' face, each time that smile has trouble forming and even more trouble staying in place, there is that intolerable unease of recognition, that here is a man with no footing left to lose and whose only hope may be the tender mercy of at last letting himself drop.

WE ARE BEAUTIFUL WE ARE DOOMED

The Animals
Directed by Gino Santos
Written by Gino Santos and Jeff Stelton

Ang Nawawala (What Isn't There)
Directed by Marie Jamora 
Written by Marie Jamora and Ramon De Veyra


 

At home he's a tourist. Gibson (Dominic Roco), that is. After seeing his twin brother Jamie fall to his death, he has spoken to no one, except, that is, for Jamie (Felix Roco), who's all grown up and smokes as much pot as he does but is probably a ghost and most likely a hallucination, and is what the title of Ang Nawawala may be referring to. What isn't there, right. He's the void in Gibson's life. He's the void, too, in the lives of his left-behind parents. His father (Buboy Garovillo, underused) has taken to sleeping in his room. And his mother (Dawn Zulueta, radiant) regards everything with an icy remove, particularly Gibson, who is the wrong son who died the way Timothy Hutton was in Ordinary People, only he mitigates his pathos not by slashing his wrists, but immersing himself, much like everyone his age tends to do as a default, in the comfort zones of his bohemia.

The film takes after him, swaddling itself in often intoxicating  artifice:  from the gregarious color schemes and hyper-stylized dress codes to the endless parade of scenester gigs and haunts to the first world problems we wish most of us would have and the reliance on such fashionable youth film tropes as MPDGs. All this reinforces its candied, faintly self-reflexive milieu, its characters defined by their totems, their longings charted in their denials. This is how we shield ourselves from having to deal with the real world sometimes. And  it's as if the film were itself daunted, like Gibson, to confront the anxieties at its core without protective covering. But no matter how festive and bright and exuberant its young noise gets, the sense that it will eventually lose to the ennui it's trying to stave off, to the emptiness it's trying to fill, tinges everything with a gauzy melancholia.  This push-pull between how empowering those totems we exalt in our youth are and how transient that power can be is, of course, the shared tension of all youth films and the most crucial thing Ang Nawawala shares with The Animals.

The class divide is as rampant in this country as the poverty our cinema is fond of making porn from. But it rarely gets tackled full-bore that it counts as one-up for these two films that they do, and with such an assured verve at that. The farthest Ang Nawawala goes in approaching the schism, though, is a montage of people on the streets celebrating New Year's Eve seen from the back seat of a car on its way to a posh party. It's gaze is detached, curious at best.  The Animals is more brazen about it, more arrogant, more without remorse. And it comes to a troubling boil when it hangs the most corrosive burst of aggression on an economically-challenged outsider, which might be better read as a cop-out than a measure of its worldview, even if it makes contextual sense if the latter is what it is.

The Animals is not about wistful hipsters, after all, but rather their diametric opposite, a strain of upper-crust youth with no pop cultural co-dependencies for shaping their selves.What music they have is faceless to the point of anonymous, their fashion extravagant but off the rack. The future bores them, the present is just time that needs killing, debauchery and violence are just things to do. Their cocksure hedonism feeds off their privilege and knowing how high it makes their place in the pecking order and how this is some license to get away with almost anything.

It references Skins about as much as Ang Nawawala references Wes Anderson, sure, and when it soft-pedals in the end, it does blunt its nihilistic thrust.  But there's an authenticity to its depravity, to its bleakness, to how brutal it is for leaving the character with the most to lose from its gruesome turn of events hanging in bliss at the end, that sticks and lingers, despite its lapses. Which is not to say that the bleary optimism of Ang Nawawala is false. It believes wholeheartedly in its own hopefulness. But is also aware of how it can only go so far. You can tell from how the conversations Gibson has with Jamie are the moments that ring truest. Some wounds run deep and take forever to heal. And sometimes the only voices you can trust are the ones in your head.

DOLPHY: QUEEN OF COMEDY

“You should stop making personal films and make the ultimate Dolphy movie instead.” This was a professor of mine talking to some young filmmakers, with a measure of both snark and con I’d imagine but also meaning it, much as this was back when the idea of the ultimate Dolphy movie tended to ring partially like a joke. It did stick to my craw, give it that, and long enough for the notion to gain enough weight and sink in. The ultimate Dolphy movie, then. What would it be like? And has it been made? My pondering of these two matters may have been casual but oddly continual.

Or perhaps not that odd. Rifling through Dolphy’s vast and varied filmography, for me, is like sifting through layers of nostalgia, condensing hundreds of childhood afternoons into a body of work.. They were, invariably, agents of my private cinephilic ferment. Sure, most of the films were saddled with one-trick directors and by-the-numbers scripts. But all of these Dolphy would rise above and invigorate and sometimes transform into something else. The monotone of stereotype is something all comic leads from Jerry Lewis to Adam Sandler lapse into and I remember being told that plans were once afoot for a think tank tasked to develop projects for Dolphy that would pry him loose from this. Age eventually brings a sense that his earlier material bristled with genuine anarchy and subversion and that the later ones conformed to convention and formula. But no matter how pedestrian the material got, Dolphy’s ungraspable comic wiles would set most of it on fire. This is what the possibly mythical think tank may have wanted to harness and re-direct.

The queer act Dolphy minted with Jack and Jill is one of his two most enduring archetypes. And it almost forfeits its undeniable comic charge for the way it allegedly misrepresented the homosexual community, which it actually didn’t. It bowed to the mores of its time, unfortunately the mores of our time still, every time it finished up reforming a character into heterosexuality, sure. But, arguable lack of subtlety aside, which is an issue of tone and attack rather than condescencion, Dolphy’s gay characters feel hewn from the street and crosses no lines. Vice Ganda tends to come off more like caricature, like exploitation. Still, this is what his work in Gil Portes’ Markova: Comfort Gay, which Dolphy himself produced, and Lino Brocka’s Ang Tatay Kong Nanay, sought to nuance and broaden and perhaps even overthrow.

The problems with Markova have more to do with the overly earnest script but centering it is the fragile humanism of Dolphy’s performance, invaluably reinforced by Joel Lamangan as his best friend, who may essentially be playing himself, but somehow one-ups the creepy soldier he played in Lav Diaz’s Hesus Rebolusyonaryo. A spar and volley with someone of equal measure, be it Panchito, be it Nida Blanca, has always been the diesel of Dolphy’s comedy. And every scene he and Lamangan are in here feeds blood into the pulse of the film. Even better is the drag queen forced into fatherhood that he plays in the Brocka film, where Dolphy merges his flamboyant queer with his other iconic comic persona, the proud to a fault Everyman, and turns it into a tour de force. He remains gay at the end of both films, too.

Much as these two remain colossal, tenable go-tos for Dolphy’s reserves as a character actor, framing them as paradigms for the ultimate Dolphy movie, or at least the ultimate Dolphy queer movie, is to make the idea seem like a rehabilitation, when it shouldn’t be. Markova and Ang Tatay Kong Nanay are departures. And the ultimate Dolphy movie needs to be situated within his métier. And of all his queer films, Luciano Carlos’ Facifica Falayfay, in which his eponymous character is forced to become a pretend-girl by his mother’s desire to have a daughter, is crucial if only because it was the point where he leveled his comedy of pratfall and retort up into something beyond mere Chaplinesque riffing, gaining also a sense of a young master at last governing his wild gifts. The ultimate Dolphy queer movie? Why not? His going straight near the end does make contextual sense, but let’s just pretend he and leading lady Pilar Pilapil ended up as BFFs instead of lovers. Then we’re good to go.

  *Originally published in Phil.Star Supreme.

FAST CHEAP OUT OF CONTROL

Primo Salvo In Vibracolor
Dina Gadia
Silverlens

William Burroughs will be name-checked at some point, figured might as well front-load it, and in the manner of laying down the law at that. There are other referents, of course, but Burroughs is the source of the Nile, so to speak. His influence over many things has been so over-emphasized as to reek almost of cliché and certainly of laziness to invoke, but it’s impossible to avoid. What’s relevant here is his central process, the cut-up technique, which involved the inserting of other people’s text into his own and a shape-shifting of form as an aftermath, a literary method that smacked of ritual, of casting the runes. No wonder he nursed this adamant belief that it was a conduit to sorcery and who’s to say it isn’t. More pragmatically, it was the primordial voltage for mash-up culture, and you can sense its trace elements in everything from plunder-phonics to fan fiction to hip-hop. But his name comes up, too, out of how he had this obvious kinship with pulp, with science-fiction and horror primarily, with superheroes and erotica, with its flamboyance and hysteria.

The relevance of Burroughs goes beyond how the title of Dina Gadia’s new show, Primo Salvo In Vibracolor, has all the shock and tang of a Burroughs title, which of course it isn’t. Pulp is also the base matter of her collages and paintings and installations, and her fundamental process the mash-up, willfully mismatched juxtapositions of art and copy. The art here being dated, banal images from old encyclopedias and lifestyle magazines and vintage advertising, which are in and of themselves, signifiers of conflicting modes: utopia and repression, obsolescence and nostalgia, death and memory. The copy being garish and bombastic pulp titles, some taken verbatim and some themselves mashed up, serving as commentary, as counterpoint, as annotation, as re-contextualization, as punch line.

And that last qualifier is far from a dis, given how the sense of humor in the work is prevalent to the point of being insidious, another thing it shares with Burroughs, moreso when it leans towards a queasy strangeness, which it does most of the time: the panther growling over the dinner table spoils in Fangs Into You , the caveman lugging hollow blocks in Everything In Modernation, the spiritualists trying to exorcise the blancmange in The Spoiler and those creepy hairy things in the two works called The Hair! The Hairrrr! In some cases, though, the humor achieves the give-and-take immediacy of a stand-up routine. There’s the matinee idol lothario peeking out of the garish pink bed as the Tagalog word for “hell” floats ominously in Let the Love Flow. And the dolled-up socialite, dressed in minty cobras with the word “karanasan” (“experience”) emblazoned underneath in Display of Hard-Earned Callousness. Or the three manicured men having a laugh in nothing but their undies, immaculately bereft of wrinkles, under the insinuating logo of the defunct Manhunter comic. And in A Cultural Weekend Exploitation Away, the word “holiday” hovers gleefully over a cartoon model peddling a cannibal rite like a game show girl. There are nuances to mine here, sure. The “ho hum” sign in We All End with Lines of Ending Cliché I is a riposte to the ubiquity and dominance of the Hollywood sign, which it emulates in size. And the two young girls in We All End with Lines of Ending Cliché II are shackled by the anchor they hug for comfort and safety. Ultimately, its collective dialectical urge has to do with bashing the stereotype, taking it apart and putting it together again. But like any good routine, elaborating further would neuter the buzz, like having to explain the joke.

Fast and cheap and out of control: there’s a catch-all that nails the quintessential ethos of pulp. You could nail the quintessence of Gadia’s work here with it, too. The thing it slightly misses, on both occasions, is the vibrancy. There is a tawdriness on the surface, sure, but that tawdriness is as much an aesthetic directive as it is a function of osmosis, and it is a tawdriness that is not without its charms. Just as Burroughs recognized a visceral potency in the pulp he revered and appropriated, so does Gadia, and she seems fueled here by her desire to revel in the relative rawness and ugliness of her chosen subjects, aiming as she is for that boiling point in pulp where process becomes product and where “bad” bubbles over into “good”. In many ways, she’s trying to replicate her own pleasures with it and in many ways, she has. Prima Salvo In Vibracolor deserves the Burroughsian allusion. And as mutated and recombinant as its pulp is, it has all its prime qualities: fast, cheap and out of control, right. As deep-seated as its resonances run, its delights are immediate and it’s funny as all hell.

*Primo Salvo In Vibracolor ran from May 24- June 23, 2012 at Silverlens.

AIN'T NO LOVE IN THE HEART OF THE CITY

MNL 143
Directed by Emerson Reyes 
written by Emerson Reyes and Ade Perilla

*Note: an FX, for those who aren't aware, is one of the staples of  public transportation in Manila and is, essentially. a mash up of a cab and a very small midibus.




The bigger fish fried, with regards to Emerson Reyes' MNL 143,  a loose-jointed portmanteau pivoting around an FX* driver's fruitless search for his longlost love,  has to do with how its brief but tremulous history has brought to harsh light what has become the quintessential discourse of Philippine cinema in the noughties: when is an independent film truly independent? Cinemalaya has long basked in a glory that has re-purposed what was really a confluence of media muscle and high-impact branding, that name being a particular stroke of genius for coinage and connotation,  into its highly arguable equity as the layman end-all be-all of independent cinema. At least up until it disqualified Emerson and his film over, of all things, casting issues. At least, for a brief time, back then.

At the gregarious height of the very public furor, even before a single frame was shot, MNL 143 had become provisionally known as the film that outed Cinemalaya for misrepresenting itself as a grant-giving body, and the sovereign one at that, when its dynamic and philosophy was closer to  a boutique studio, beholden as it was to the show business caprices of its selection committee and the purse strings of its benefactor.  Predictably enough, now that the festival is fast approaching,  status quos have been restored and not a rustle heard about the scandal.  MNL 143 will always be a cautionary both of what happened and what may be happening still, but on its shoulders now unfairly rests a tremendous amount of polemic that it shouldn't bear, at least not anymore, as it unwittingly hangs its failure or success on the wrong things. And the irony is that, for something so freighted, it's an almost diametrically modest work: plotless, lackadaisical, blithe.

MNL 143 sidelines its diffident Romeo, and his ordeal,  for the parade of strangers who flit in and out of his cab, casting the same laconic, slightly curious but mostly transient eye on them, as those of us who've ridden cabs like these day after day have. The effect is like watching someone else channel-surf. And if nothing sticks perhaps that's out of how nothing is really meant to. This temporal, claustrophobic, often uneventful, and familiar pocket universe of our lives as commuters is the universe of the film, and one suffused with the random, from the banal to the amusing to the touching but never the truly consequential. Even when things actually start to happen, and despite the satisfying surge of endorphin near the end,  they happen with a peculiar lack of fanfare, as if to say that the love of your life is just another fare who gets on your cab and gets out at her stop, another unfinished story, another interrupted arc, another brief life with no closure. It's also Emerson's canny way of throwing us off the film's scent.

But there is a scene halfway through, where the lovelorn cabbie (Allan Paule), who is the film’s center of gravity or rather its disarming lack of it, turns on the radio and breaks down to a lovesick ballad. Granted, it’s a reined-in breakdown, overwhelmed yet understated, but even as it smacks, at first, of something plucked out of a glossed-up studio rom-com, it slowly and inexorably becomes discomfiting as it lingers longer than it should and even longer than that, until the ickiness spills over from mushy verging on mawkish to something approaching poignancy. It is the first and only time in the film he confronts how much of a cross his longing has become, how much it bristles with deep-seated regret, but it's enough to reveal its hand. The unmistakable emotional timbre of MNL 143 really draws from the kitschy jukebox pop you hear when it opens, thusly distilled as country music by way of 50s balladry by way of unguarded sentimentality by way of shameless corn, which is how we also dismiss our feelings when we wear our hearts on our sleeve, perhaps for fear of giving ourselves over to the harm that comes from doing so.

We are a people who not only succumb to mawk when no one's looking but whose reflex action after we've cried our hearts out is to shrug. And the nonchalance that makes MNL 143 so breezy, so amiable, is really this casual, perhaps even endemic, optimism we conduct our lives with, the passive belief that everything will turn out OK and even if it doesn’t, well, that’s OK, too.  It’s a sentiment that dovetails neatly into the real-life backstory of  the film, which almost never got made but eventually was, under duress and with less than a quarter of the original budget, and becoming, too, in the process, a de facto figurehead against the artistic repression we had foolishly thought we were rid of. The making of MNL 143 may be a lofty achievement but the film itself is a triumph of under-reach.

CTHULHU RISING

Prometheus
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Jon Spaiths and Damon Lindelof

The bone to pick with this one seems to be how much it has to do with the iconic franchise Ridley Scott midwifed with Dan O'Bannon and H.R.Giger, and whether it warrants the disappointment that comes from something as momentous as his belated return to science fiction being dedicated to merely reheating old glories best left alone, amidst rumors that shinier Joe Haldeman and Aldous Huxley adaptations curdle in his brimful development vat.

It's prudent to remember that the pedigree inflating expectations here, outside all that heightened enthusiasm from internet nerds,  rests entirely on two films, one of which, Blade Runner, was a tremendous flop first before it burst into flame, and the other, Alien, is a B movie,  more The Thing From Another World than Solyaris. What both films had was a distinct sensibility that could be boiled down to having an acute sense of its own incoherence and a willingness to give the chaos free rein if it would take the piece to other places. And Scott really was an imagist nonpareil. It wasn't so much story that interested him, rather the stuff that swirled around it, the tangential moods, the structural detail, the peripheral esoterica, the outlandish architecture, the industrial design. He also had,with these two films at least, a healthy disregard for the three-act structure. Cranks will dismiss these as plot holes and sketchy characterization and sloppy filmmaking, and they would have some point. Both films are arguably messy. But they were messy in the grandest of ways. And they were also wet and alive. Hollywood has since bent Ridley Scott to fit its conservative strictures and every single thing he's done after, give or take one or two, has been bland and safe and joyless.  The anticipation, then, is understandable. The anxiety moreso.

Prometheus, then. Remake? Reboot? Prequel? Sequel?  You know what? It's immaterial.  This is, in temperament and in thrust, Alien Remixed.  There is a corporation bankrolling a scientific expedition with a ragtag bunch of space travelers. There is a feisty Ripley surrogate in Noomi Rapace, who gets her own action sequence dressed in nothing but her undies. There is an Ash surrogate in Michael Fassbender's creepily sterile android, who gets his own decapitation sequence. There is an ornate and lived-in spaceship.  There is a chamber of cylindrical vessels with dire things inside them lined up in a familiar configuration. There are peculiar creatures with a slimy, biological fullness. There is some nail-biting tentacle (sort of) porn.  There are also the usual horror movie stupids. Not to mention characters that seem cut out of cardboard.  And some horribly intrusive music. But there is a quest at the heart of matters that's a little more esoteric than mining: a multi-trilionaire with ulterior motives humors a starry-eyed archaeologist who believes the origin of all human life can be found on a barren planet.  Secret histories, then, fountains of youth, faces of god. Its' frankly hokey theological superstructure rubs Erich Von Daniken up against the New Testament, and everything has to happen in the five days between Christmas and New Year, too, belaboring what doesn't necessarily need to be belabored. Big questions are asked and only the tiniest answers are given, if at all. But then again, this is the bait and switch of all belief systems. And the biggest question it poses, the one about whether we are all made of stars, isn't that big in any context and isn't something we'd really want answered literally, in a film, or in life.

Stephen King was the first to point out how Alien was really a Lovecraftian parable in disguise:  men coming to the gods and being eaten by them. Prometheus is like a sleeker, pulpier spec-up, At the Mountains of Madness, if you will, with Cthulhu thrown in to up the ante. And it really is more about the dissonance of faith,  how big they are and how small we are, how creation must eventually destroy creator or get destroyed themselves. Scott, his visual acumen restored at last and firing on all cylinders after decades in the mainstream trenches have homogenized it, devotes one visually staggering set piece after the other to the discrepancies of scale between colossal gods and puny humans, his breathtaking master shots optimizing the form Prometheus works best as: chaotic, oversized pulp.

CANDY-COATED STEAMPUNK

Hugo
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by John Logan
Based on the Book by Brian Selznick

George Melies was a master showman, equal parts magician and fabulist, man-child and sentimental git, the cushy candyman as opposed to the young punks the Lumieres were, much like a close friend of Scorsese's. And if you're going to embody any rose-tinted love for cinema, it's hard to go awry with the proto-Spielberg, Melies being as fanatic a believer in cinema as a dream portal. Which is merely one of its many iterations, verging on the corny and susceptible to narcissism, but with sufficient mass-market traction. It only gets troublesome if you temper it with the object of Melies' pathos.

The first world war visited the real Melies with bankruptcy.  All it visits on this fictionalized and over-romanticized Melies is a cutting short of his winning streak at the box office. But that's enough of a tipping point for him to shutter up his studio, burn all his props and retreat into the oblivion of a train station toyshop to mope forever. Pardon the snark but  . . .what an epic diva!  And what a chore to rally behind as an embodiment of why we make films or why we love them. If Hugo is a love letter to filmmaking, it's to a specific mode of filmmaking perhaps, one whose impetus and bedrock is profit and entitlement. More than the proto-Spielberg, Melies here is like the proto-A Lister, his doldrums relieved in the end by the returning blare of the spotlight and the swaddle of public adoration, not to mention serious ROI. And if you buy into the hubris that this candy-coated steampunk behemoth magically clicked into place all because Scorsese's daughter wanted him to make a film for her, then it doubles as its own meta shadow, an ostentatious monolith to how overprivileged Hollywood directors have become.

JJ Abrams' Super 8,  in which precocious children gambol and grouse making amateur films and fight extraterrestrials while they're at it, is a love letter to filmmaking, too, and if its glittery promise is squandered by the glee with which it gives in to Hollywood's pathological need to reduce everything to spectacle, there is at least an eloquence to its first ten minutes that underpins all this preteen magic realism with emotional turmoil,  achieving a purer catharsis also because it envisions filmmaking as more liminal joy than lucrative career, more a means to process the world than a retreat from it. The eponymous orphan of Hugo is not without his own existential mulch to sift through, his own bewilderment of loss, and when Scorsese traces his arc, with its missing fathers and surrogate sons, its machine dreams and weird science,  its secret mean streets made of clockwork, the vague antipathies between auteur and source dissipate. Not that it reaches the wondrous heights you'd hoped, it lacks the full-bore quirk and sense of abandon for that, lacks the earnestness really, but it does gain sustainable emotional gristle, and becomes something else, something that hews it closer to the film Super 8 was essentially remaking, Joe Dante's modest and goofy Bradbury riff Explorers. That is, a love letter still, or half a love letter at least, but this time to the mad, impetuous spirit of invention.

A MURDEROUS DESIRE FOR LOVE

In the dream, I was watching the Smiths sing a song I hadn't heard before and will never hear again but was beautiful nonetheless, and crying the sort of tears you cry at revival meetings, that suspension between ruinous and lifted that I merely imagine it to be given that I've never been to a revival meeting, nor  to a Smiths gig. It was an odd dream out of how, one, I dreamt it in the 90s after the Smiths had parted ways to become a constantly metamorphosing back catalogue, and two, I've never had much of a hard-on for gigs, an indifference I pin on the 90s as well, as the thought of the bands that mattered to me coming to Manila back then was beyond the ken of logic as to be impossible, forcing the pragmatic in me to take measures by throttling down any residual enthusiasm I might have originally nursed. The Smiths were my Beatles almost. They certainly were my Byrds, at least. And, hackneyed as it seems given the subject of the piece, they were the only band I literally dreamed of watching.

We all trace it back to Morrissey and Marr, of course, and whatever it was they had between them, that rarefied push and pull that transpires between frontman and guitarist, only with them it was more exacting, with no room for graying the area, for overlap. Morrissey took care of the morose wit and the erudite melodrama and Marr the ebullient melodicism and that way he had with his Rickenbacker that few could touch. It was the most fundamental division of labor between a frontman and guitarist, mirroring the stringent classicism of their repertoire: here was a band that never had a dance phase, a hip hop phase, an electronic phase, any kind of phase. A curious dynamic, sure, but one with a particular elegance. Once their alliance was severed, though, iffiness set in.  Marr tended to disappear inside every band he was eventual member of, becoming more rampart than color, never as exuberant nor as vivid.  But Morrissey was going out on sonic limbs, stumbling at first from the lack of a melodic crutch to prop him up, but eventually finding his sea legs. That's why I only have Electronic albums but have everything Morrissey put out since leaving the Smiths. And why May 13 was a date I would physically punish myself for missing.

But my tenacity was almost thwarted by the usual galore of deterrents: there was the excruciating lack of funds, the false rumors of tickets selling out, the eleventh hour scheduling of a shoot on the day of the gig and lastly, the lack of company to go with.  I had friends in the crowd, sure, but I didn't want to move from my place to go looking for them.  I would, later on, move around that is, looking for vantage points for each number. But before that, I just diligently nursed my overpriced vodka, waiting for the endorphin of anticipation to spike. It did but it didn't last. The sirens blared. And the band stepped out.

No measure of sobriety could dampen the euphoric surge of the opening song. How Soon Is Now? was both almost a given and out of left field at the same time. The effect of hearing its' colossal, ominous tremble pushed to 11 like that was physiological. Louder than bombs, right. My body couldn't make up its mind if it would pee in my pants or bawl in ecstasy. I did neither, thank god, but my knees were shaking as I screamed myself hoarse:"I am human and I need to be loved."  Alma Matters was the next song, quite possibly my second or third favorite Morrissey song, and the only one on that short list he sang that night, and was like my own bullish tantrum slash tenet:  " . . it's my life to ruin my way. . ."  Our angsts diverged many ways and it's not like his music put up a mirror to my own index of failures, my own ineptitude at happiness, but the songs always felt like fistbumps of solidarity, and almost comforting in how overblown and funny they most of the time got."This is not pop music. This  is opera!" he would proclaim later.

There's no way to parse a gig on paper that will make it meaningful to anyone else outside of enthusiastic reportage, it's bound to be different for everybody, and there was an immeidate spate of disappointments among people I knew, conspiracy theories even, of sets cut short, and of over-privileged brat hecklers in the front row. Admittedly, I came in there hopeful for a revue: The Best of Morrissey and the Smiths. I didn't get that, of course. But I was singing along to every song anyway, and he was working the table so fiercely, hearing First of the Gang To Die amplified by power chords or  Shoplifters of the World Unite raised to its anthemic rafters or Meat Is Murder with inappropriately, and therefore appropriately,  distressing images of animal torture, made me not mind the absence of The More You Ignore Me or Interesting Drug or I Want The One I Can't Have or Frankly Mr.Shankly. But I was still waiting for the last button to be pushed that would tip this over into the eternal. I started tearing up halfway through the first verse of the penultimate song: "Oh mother, I feel the soil falling over my head . . . " I Know It's Over was magnificent but tears were not enough, it turns out.

But  then Morrissey reclaimed There Is A Light That Never Goes Out  from Zooey Deschanel, and honed his encore, and the gig with it, to near-perfection. There are days I envy his resolute belief in the hopelessness of matters, and long for the force of will to surrender myself to the lassitude it brings.  But I am cursed with an innate optimism and an immense capacity for waiting. And mine has always been a blind, dumb hope in that light that never goes out never going out. In being reminded how desperately, how literally, I take that title, how I clasp its implications to my chest, and how I probably will until the day I die, I felt the night tip over into the eternal at last. I felt a  prickle of rapture appropriately tinged with sorrow.  I felt, in fact, both ruinous and lifted.