PILING PILING PELIKULA

ARMAGEDDON HOPEFULS: MY 2011 IN MUSIC

2012-01-24T19:41:00.000+08:00

"The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be." " (Nick Hornby)

In the end, it all came down to pleasure for me. Not that there's no melancholic surfeit here, there was the need to mope and to rant, mostly over the loose ends every year leaves you with, the ghosts I can't give up, the wolves at my door, all that. But the release you get from the songs you mope and rant to should count as pleasure,too. This list is unapologetically biographical as the connections I make with pop music cuts closer and closer every year, and I can only hope it's also bullish and solipsistic and contrarian, inadequate as cultural dowsing rod, charting rather the turmoils and ecstasies of my year and the reprieves inbetween. The far more burning urge was to dance, or rather, to reconnect with what made me fall in love with music in the first place and the small wonders that love can do for me: the hook-happy endorphin surge. I figure if the world really is coming to an end this year, then none of whatever troubles us now matters, except perhaps what little burst of pleasure we can muster in the face of it, partying, even if it's only in our heads, while hurtling to our doom on a headful of butterflies

Let's do this, then. Albums first, the records I listened to as wholes, then songs. As per usual.

1. Wild Beasts, SMOTHER
2. King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, DIAMOND MINE
3. The Indelicates, DAVID KORESH SUPERSTAR
4. Perc, WICKER AND STEEL
5. Rob Crow, HE THINKS HE'S PEOPLE
6. Mogwai, HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE BUT YOU WILL
7. Fleet Foxes, HELPLESSNESS BLUES

8. Korallreven, AN ALBUM BY KORALLREVEN

9. TV On the Radio, NINE TYPES OF LIGHT

10.Taken by Cars, DUALIST

40. Panda Bear, Last Night At The Jetty: Tomboy was not so much sonic upgrade as it was sonic upsize, less a taking in of new colors but more a robust re-iterating of old ones, but while it doesn't get as obtuse as Young Prayer, it doesn't get as touching either, only this doo-wop colossus, with Noah Lennox grasping at a failing memory in full-on harmonic grandeur, does stand out, by a transcendent Brian Wilson mile.

39. Woodkid, Iron: Turns out I listened to this more times than anything off the new Beirut, which is surprising given how much of a Zach Condon fanboy I am but is no way meant to imply it was his failure or that Yoann Lemoine, who is all of Woodkid, is a rip-off artiste, just that I was distracted, and that this shares that similarly archaic old world aura.

38. Childish Gambino, My Shine:

" . . . why nobody wanna admit they like me just a little bit?" I'm not sure if the ramshackle nature of Donald Glover's rap is an aesthetic so much as a diffidence that works in his favor, here in particular where he vents his frustration at not being taken seriously with the sort of heightened bravado you find in the heat of the moment but tends to dissipate after you've flustered yourself saying your piece, which in this case, is a spot of bother I'm intimate with myself. " . . . when these motherfuckers gonna understand I'm serious?. . ." I feel you, man. I so feel you.

37. Toro Y Moi, Still Sound: Death Cab for Chromeo, something like that, and apologies to Chaz if that comes off reductive as his funk-lite inversion is fancier than the mashup implies, tempering the opaque introspection of his words by turning up the warmth of his sound for sound's sake ethos that's obviously residue from a love for Stereolab, making it perfect for a song about the comforts that come from the shapes sound makes.

36. Frank Ocean, Swim Good: Love breaks down, as it tends to do, and either Frank's committing suicide or merely using it as a metaphor for how much he's had it and is moving on. The title's an exhortation, of course, to himself, to anyone in the same rut. It also describes the sensuous way the song moves.

35. Avril Lavigne, What The Hell: For the rinky dink organ and the hollaback propulsion and Avril going all punky naughty frisky sexy on us and dispensing truths while she's at it. ". . .love hurts whether it's right or wrong . . ." Damn right.

34. Owen, The Armoire: The center not holding, when the place you call home grows clammy with un-belonging, is a hurt that’s hard-up for solace, and in using junk furniture to articulate the displacement that comes from it, Mike Kinsella doesn’t really offer any, but he does one-up his own tiny gift for quotidian minutiae, one-ups even Dallas Green, whose new one as City and Colour lacked the catch it used to the first few listens in. Not that I've given up on it, or on Justin Vernon, but I'll have to get back to you on those two. Mike's got this covered anyway.

33. An Horse, Know This, We've Noticed: Their Sleater-Kinney auras disperse a little here, but not my much, and not that it needs to. I’m thinking it has a shot at being my Our Deal for this year even if it lopes rather than smolders, if only for how emotive the rah-rah in its chorus gets and for how it invokes Dusty as much, even if it's only in spirit.

32. Adele, Turning Tables: It really was the year the world threw its arms around Adele, wasn't it? Oh, she's earned it, been earning it since 19 , and ubiquity aside, the pissed-off exuberance of Rolling in the Deep can withstand the neutering a thousand talent show contestants can visit on a song and is something whose swampy voodoo curdles with age. But this was the one that got to me, and gets to me still, the song not even Glee could butcher, the song that could possibly top Chasing Pavements as her career-high. " . . .close enough to start a war, all that I have is on the floor . . . " All that minor key roil, all that simmering indignation.

31. Wild Flag, Romance : In which Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole and Janet Weiss form a supergroup and rekindle their collective punk-pop perk and feist by attaching hooks on them big enough to haul cargo on, which in the 90s, at the height of their powers, or at least of their hipster relevance, would come off like some fluke post-grunge crossover, but in 2011 felt no less than truly alternative.

30. Fucked Up with Madeline Follin, Queen of Hearts: Pried loose from the massive punk rock opera it’s embedded in, you do get a sense of autonomy that gathers its own brunt without sucking at the teat of the big picture, which is to say you could make a single out of it, which is precisely what they did. Riffs with traction catchily pile-drive to its own blaze of pop rapture, and being the part in the story where boy first meets girl, the shaft of light near the end when Madeline from Cults opens her mouth makes both narrative and aesthetic sense.

29. Chad VanGaalen, Peace On The Rise: Feelgood hit of the summer turned lo-fi lullaby for the rest of the year, as disheartening as it is comforting, as broken as it is pretty.

28. Lykke Li, I Follow Rivers: She may not have the same husk and wallop but this girl group mutation had as much, if not more, gumbo and raunch as Adele's stompers, and as I'm not really in any mood to pit one against another, I'll take both, thank you, but give this a few nudges up the list, as I prefer Adele when she torches it down, and because that tinpot drum figure that snakes throughout is as exciting a use of percussion as the digital castanets on Robyn's Dancing On My Own.

27. Shabazz Palaces, Are You . . .Can You . .Were You? (Felt): " . . .my mind hides behind the music . . .” And that music is the sort that begets coinage along the lines of avant-chiaroscuro and dub-noir and prog-hop, the beats stretching and spacing out as if into a stoned soul fugue. If this is indeed MC Palaceer Lazaro a.k.a. Digable Planets’ Ishmael Butler’s manifesto, the music’s just the thing for hiding behind : nocturnal, obscure, sexy.

26. Drake with Rihanna, Take Care: Fuller of sound, and somewhat more assured, over time, the new Drake record might reveal itself as the closest he's gotten to a masterpiece, but given the limits of my immersion, and also given the catchiness of its hook, it's the title track that I lived with for quite a bit, more than Marvin's Room, more than Crew Love , if only because the he said-she said volley between Drake and Rihanna gets so delicious, I hardly notice when Gil Scott Heron butts in on the conversation and by the time I do, they're at it again. " . . .if you let me, here's what I'll do, I'll take care of you . . .", sings Rihanna, words she filched from Bobby Bland, of course, but is an endearment as eternal as it is cliched that also happens to be my last word on certain matters myself.

25. Niva, Ghost In My Head: That tasty R & B chorus repeating " . . .I think about it all the time . . . " as if it were a mantra of something Niva both dreads and relishes, should feel incongruous but isn't, infusing the spry little synth(dream)pop bubble instead with a buoyant prettiness that sends me for no reason and is on here for even less.

24. M83, Midnight City: That riff, that ebullient synthesizer clarion call like OMD sans the intolerable sappiness,the riff of the year full stop, cracking the song open and grabbing you by the loins then bolting and letting you chase it across the verses, half leitmotif half fugitive, until you back it into a corner near the end, throbbing in the backdrop teasing you to come closer, just before it detonates and takes you, willfully, gleefully, in its ecstatic blast radius.

23. Metronomy, Everything Goes My Way: " . . .when I took you back, I thought you'd up and run away, but you're still here, you're still here . . ." Halfway through, Anna Prior comes down from her disbelief as if to countenance her giddiness with a dash of reality-checking doubt by telling us how bad a boyfriend her ex was, but it's really only to give him room to sing a few lines to corroborate her optimism, before she goes back up into its ether. As irony-free a reunion of exes as Peaches and Herb, but at least twice as bubbly with delight at the thought.

22. Summer Camp, Better Off Without You: " . . .I'm better off without you . . ." so Elizabeth Sankey sings, and you know she's trying to convince herself as much as us, but the euphoric swell with which she sings it wins you over so, you take her word for it and hope she does, too.

21. Arctic Monkeys, The Hell-Spangled Shalala: Could be the tunnel vision that comes from being a fan, which is sometimes the point and the fun of being one, but Humbug and Suck It And See were not as regressive as the world claims, more like spurts of forward motion, really, albeit one bigger than the other. The pining on Love Is A Laserquest does get epic and has dibs on poignancy but this bouncy, impressionistic love song manages to slake my throwback fix without drowning me in my nostalgia, reminding me what made me love them and why it's a good thing they didn't stay that way, not to mention that it has the line that is not only my second favorite lyric of the year but what my year essentially boiled down to: " . . .I took the batteries out of my mysticism and put them in my thinking cap . . ."

20. Meyer Hawthorne, A Long Time : Rigorously old school as his artifice comes off, the touchstone here is really Hall & Oates, and that fertile period when they were mashing every mutant subgenre within arms' reach into the Philly soul that was their base matter. This earnest paean to Detroit may not be as protean nor as arch, but it has a keyboard riff so sexy it would've been sufficient to clinch this one for me, in case Meyer didn't have either the chops nor the largesse to write a song to go with it, which of course he does.

19. Mastodon, Curl of the Burl: There's the sci-fic erotica of Stargasm, sure, wearing on its sleeve as much as it can the prog they seem to be eschewing for now. Or perhaps the devastating elegiac prettiness of The Sparrow. But for each new vein they tap on the new record, I kept coming back more and more to the meat and potatoes, which in this case, is the Skynyrd/Sabbath crunch of the single, which opens with what could well be the couplet of the year: " . . .I killed a man 'cause he killed my goat, I put my hands around his throat . . ."

18. Those Dancing Days, Help Me Close My Eyes: " . . .I breathe with a hand on my mouth, I refuse to get poisoned and I swallow my shout . . ." A song that's not only about trepidation but also sounds the way it feels, its verses nervily pulling back, as if gathering the courage to build to a chorus that's not quite as sure of itself as it wants to be but has enough rouse in it to feel as if it is.

17. Jennifer Hudson, No One Gonna Love You: " . . . don't dare send me straight to voice mail, babe,I'm just gonna text you, hope it ain't no issue . . . " And she's telling you she's not going, boy. But don't be so quick to walk away. " . . .I've been through some things, please don't hold that against me . . . " She has and you shouldn't. Insensitivity aside, though, that throb of meta does help nuance what gets by on how underdressed her approach to R & B has always been, not letting any production garnish cross the path of her voice, which, like her love, is all she's got and often all you need.

16. Slow Club, Horses Jumping: Rebecca and Charles have always traded in everyday despair but passed, at all times, through a sieve of hope only here it gets so jubilant as to be almost defiant. "Good love is hard to regret, when you know it was real . . ." goes a line here, before it comes to the emotional boil near the end that's nothing shy of inspiring: "I wanna live where each hand you're dealt is enough so you never feel like you want to bluff, and every road that you drive gives you the crashes that keep you alive . . ." Hands down my favorite lyric of the year. You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes, maybe you can.

15. The Streets with Claire Maguire, Lock The Locks: Mike Skinner's last bow. Wistful yet unrepentant, wry yet poignant, the last track on his last record is a last goodbye to the pop life, evoking the weariness he claims is his urge for leaving , buoyed by the certainty of his departure and the smoky way Claire makes that torchy chorus stick.

14. Destroyer, Chinatown: I suspect Dan Bejar's above mocking his own devices and that his tongue was as far away from his cheek as it can get when he sang this, veering as it does into a China Crisis by way of Walter Becker soft-rock haze right down to the cryptic lyrics and a sax solo that may be more Spyro Gyra than Bill Evans but goes on anyway to defy its predisposition for elbowing a song dangerously past anyone's thresholds of cheese, giving it updraft instead. Sibel Thrasher's harmonies are an unironic, unsurprising boon, too.

13. Radiohead, Separator: " . . .every woman blows her cover, in the eye of the beholder . . ." The last track on what turned out to be the second Radiohead album after Hail To The Thief that would inexplicably recede from both my attention span and eventually my memory mere weeks after first listen, but for this love song as hallucination, crooned oddly, mysteriously, gorgeously.

12. Memory Tapes, Wait In The Dark: " . . .this is how it ends we just stand each other up . . ." Dayve Hawk, like anyone with a pop gene as skittish as his, understands the protocols of pop heartbreak , how the lyrics confess pain and the music signifies relief, it's the most elegant of structures, the most empathic of co-dependencies. He also says insomniacs are like ghosts, two conditions I found myself in and find myself still, and this is a love song sung through the eyes of one or the other, about the separation anxieties of being so close and yet so far, set to his most effervescent singsong yet.

11. Fando and Lis, Nang Gabing Umiyak Ng Dagat: Full disclosure: I directed the video for this and my name does pop up on the album sleeve as "associate producer",which really only means I heard the tracks before anybody else did, but yeah, I'm biased, but then I also am with the 39 other songs here, and nepotism aside, this song and I do have a fair amount of history. I've always heard it stripped to the bone but adorned now with Khavn's piano curlicues and the way Ledh's voice aches and comforts and wounds, it becomes a song of unfathomable regrets for me to drown my own in.

10. Asobi Seksu, Perfectly Crystal: " . . .we've become what we've never wanted . . ." Almost a pastiche but not really, the way the latter-day Cocteau Twins swirl melds with the tasty My Bloody Valentine guitars that come in at the right moments and never overstays its welcome, and over which Yuki wails dreamily about the clarity that sometimes comes from disillusionment.

9. Flaming Lips and Neon Indian, You Don't Respond: Pardon the hipster obscurantism, as this was buried inside a one-off collab EP, one of many Wayne Coyne seems terribly fond of doing. I confess to never having been taken with their experimental nerve as I am by their pop fluency and a little pissed they could never quite manage the graft on these detours, as that would be wondrous, or at least sounds like it could be. This isn't quite that but it does come really, really close. Much as it's a cul-de-sac of a song, going around in circles, its glitchy anticlimax is weirdly catchy.

8. 2NE1, Lonely: It was only a matter of time before they slowed the party-hearty down, and not to say that this lithe, and rather grand, ballad doesn't have the goods, in and of itself, but it really is their unique alchemy that gives it a boost, and proves itself capable of turning anything Dara and Minzy and Bom and CL touch into gold.

7. Mates of State, Unless I'm Led: If you assume that every time husband and wife Kori and Jordan sing about a relationship, they're referring to the one they've been stalwart in maintaining all these years, then the minor key anxieties here are a glimpse of what they constantly find themselves up against and what they find the grace to overcome.

6. Low, Especially Me: Low has this utilitarian dependability that makes being a devotee less contingent on blind faith, and makes the occasional game change go down like magic. Having been a fan for so long, I never doubted their capacity for beauty and the way they draw forth balm from it. But this ghostly? This majestic? And this attuned to the truth? " . . . 'cause if we knew where we belong, there'd be no doubt where we're from, but as it stands, we don't have a clue, especially me and probably you . . .”

5. Rihanna, We Found Love :" . . .we found our love in a hopeless place . . ." Don't we all? The eight words that everybody will be singing and that rather ingeniously nails the way woe and desperation and euphoria push and pull at and sometimes bleed into each other inside not only nearly ever love song but nearly every relationship. Go by the words alone and it does seem doomed to futility, only Rihanna sings it with a strident sense of purpose to flip the script, which Calvin Harris' rapturous disco synths not only encourage but celebrate.

4. The Antlers, Putting The Dog To Sleep: ". . .my trust in you is a dog with a broken leg, tendons too torn to beg, for you to let me back in . . ." Peter Silbeman proves himself a few stations above the one-hit miserablist I always took him for, as every verse of longing, every cry for love teetering on meltdown, every plea for mercy met unheard on this tearjerky waltz, reveals a blade tucked in its folds, taking little nicks, drawing blood, hurting so bad, which is to say, so good.

3. Jay-Z and Kanye West with Frank Ocean, No Church In The Wild: Frank Ocean breaks the math down for you: " . . .human beings in a mob. What's a mob to a king? What's a king to a god? What's a god to a non-believer, who don't believe in anything? . . . " And Kanye and Jay-Z's spiritual crisis has to do with religious excess and existential voids and the obscene grandiosity of their own multimillionaire lifestyles, appropriately charged with apocalyptic urgency by that sinister Phil Manzanera blues riff.

2. Yuck, Get Away: Dinosaur Jr. for voltage plus Sebadoh for sustain plus Teenage Fanclub for immediacy, meaning its energies will dim over time but will re-up over time, too, and when it does, nothing can quite touch its catchy din for ecstasy, as is the case with it now.

1. Cold Cave, Confetti: Reining in the anthemic bombast that gave the new album crank, but hanging on to the Wayne Hussey affectations that serve him well, Wesley Eisold reverts back to the New Order he rode in on, milking a doomy sultriness from his overwrought melodrama, which, in all matters new wave and goth, is not a redundancy of excesses but a principle of faith.

ZERO DEGREES OF SEPARATION: MY 2011 AT THE MOVIES

2012-01-01T11:43:00.025+08:00

I am still, it turns out, terribly susceptible to the delirium of festival fever, and in 2011, the temperature cranked past even my own thresholds, with the demented overlap in the last quarter making matters even more grueling. At the end of that week and a half, I was down with a particularly vicious strain of influenza.

Cinemanila was still the sovereign colossus, as domestic festivals go, Cinema One Originals the squirrely daredevil, Cinemalaya the tasteful prude, although they seem to have grown an extra set of balls to let films like Amok slip through. All three had a robust year. And, despite the persistent and exasperating lament that local cinema is on a downward spiral, and despite bully tactics from the big studios, who got their ass handed back to them at one point, and by a delightful indie zombie film at that, things have settled into a groove of comfortable productivity. The year was copious with moments, still not enough perhaps, as it never always is. But at least now there's an envelope to push.

I flew to HKIFF just as the year begun and co-programmed the 4th .MOV a little after half of it had come to pass. And these were the twin piths of my festival year, the latter slightly moreso. I also curated an exhibit for it, designed posters, translated parts of the poetry anthology we launched, had a hand in marketing, got wrung through the logistical brouhaha, was as privvy, in as hands-on a manner as possible for someone a few jurisdictions away from the main team, to the exhaustion, and exhilaration, of running even a festival as small as ours, not to mention the spate of Club.MOV screenings leading up to it, abolished by default with the sudden, saddening foreclosure of Mogwai Cinematheque. After this, I vowed to never again grumble over another festival's snafus and glitches. But I'd do it all over again in a snap. And three years from now, if the world doesn't end as scheduled, I will be.

Movie-going, the communal experience of going out to a screening and watching a film with people, remained my advocacy. And I try, as much as I can, to disqualify torrents and DVDs from my list, charitably allotting one slot for it, with this year going to a film I almost saw in a theater. I did cheat a little with a couple of films I saw publicly, albeit in another country, but the rest of the list are films shown in Manila, never mind the nature of its run, never mind if it even had a run. As long as it wasn't at home on my TV, or worse, on my laptop. I did see a lot of films that way, and I imagine a few could've possibly made the cut. But with or without these rules, I suspect the list won't be too far off from this one.

I did miss Lav's Century of Birthing. I missed Adolf's Isda (Fable of the Fish), too. I missed Teng Mangansakan's Cartas De La Soledad. I missed Victor Villanueva's My Paranormal Romance. I missed Regiben Romana's Sakay Sa Hangin (Windblown). I missed Jewel Maranan's Tundong Magiliw. These are some of my sins of omission, if you will, prey to my usual deficiencies of stamina and time and resources and singled out because they're filmmakers I like. I did get to see nearly all the locally shown foreign product, arthouse staples and commercial tentpoles both, which ran the usual gamut of odious to tepid to fits of spunk here and there that tended to dissipate the further away you got from the works, with only Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, Wim Wenders' Pina, Justin Lin's Fast Five, Gore Verbinski's Rango and Tarsem's Immortals having sufficient traction and exuberance to deserve a shout-out, not to mention Todd Haynes' foray into longform TV, Mildred Pierce. I liked them all, sure. I liked a tremendous amount of films this year, mostly local. But for my 2011 list, anything less than love I had little room for.

1. 20 Cigarettes (James Benning, USA, HKIFF): James Benning asks 20 of his friends to smoke in their respective environments and films what happens to them in the time it takes to finish a stick. His first work that has to do with people rather than landscapes or architecture, has a strand of voyeurism that can't be helped but is also partially the point. As knotty to parse and even knottier to push, this, like all his films, behaves like an installation but it's the conditions of a theater that are conducive to what it ultimately asks of us: the acute observation of duration in stillness.

2. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, Cinemanila): As disingenuous, and as lazy, as it is to invoke the word "magical" for something shot through with secrets and lies and regrets and deaths and the banality of the everyday, regardless of how wryly funny it can sometimes get, no other word feels more apt, even if it's only to describe what random lightning turns the otherwise barren Turkish countryside into. The search for a dead body becomes, for a posse of crusty and haggard civil servants, a night, and eventually a day, of going round in circles, of straying off paths, of detours, the oddest and loveliest being a small village they repair to where the lights go out and an angel appears to serve them coffee.

3. Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy, HKIFF): Later on, when the nature of its metaphysics becomes apparent, you tend to marvel at the purity with which it was poeticized, not least with that single take everybody who's seen it is frothing in the mouth about, and rightly so, and with what is hands down the finest goat acting in the history of cinema. The four times of the title refers to the four lives that supposedly live within us and that we go through during rebirth: man, animal, vegetable, mineral. It is also, incidentally, the cast list.

4. Breather (Pahinga) (Khavn De La Cruz, Philippines, .MOV) : The cancer diary it started out as became something more after Khavn's father passed away during the editing, something closer to exorcism, to magical thinking, but not to eulogy, as it's loss is not so much given over to the part of nostalgia that aches but more to the part that exhilarates. A love letter, really, as much to the filmmaker confronting his own mortality as to the parent who left a hole when he succumbed to his, but also to that brief and immortal time they both spent in the shadow of their longest goodbye.

5. 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, Japan, Cinemanila): Having long parted ways with Seven Samurai as both my Kurosawa and jidaigeki touchstone, here, then, is my substitute, itself a remake but enthusiastically so. The density of the nihilism with which the enemy here is fleshed out demands such an outsize catharsis in his climactic taking down, that no less than half an hour of glorious comeuppance would seem to suffice. Miike knows this. And gives us 45 feral, bloody minutes of it.

6. Big Boy (Shireen Seno, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): A certain warm and often lovely and also familiar strangeness runs through here, as it's not only a film that's both about memory and like a memory, in the way it looks and feels and sounds and threatens to recede or disperse, but also about how every generation's experience of growing up has connective tissues that make them all kindred.

7. Mga Anino Sa Tanghaling Tapat (Ivy Universe Baldoza, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): Three girls grapple with the thorny changes their bodies undergo, as ghosts and portents pool in the luxuriant and poisonous forest around them. Ivy's polarizing but undervalued rumination on sex and death re-imagines the carnal processes of brutal youth as a creepily erotic , maddeningly obtuse horror movie.

8. Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, USA, Domestic Release): Pitched below the requisite volume of panic and spectacle, of course it's going to go over many heads spoiling for crackle, for racing against time and eleventh hour salvation. But its' grim, procedural sobriety has that low hum of unease and exposure. It starts with a cough in the dark, disembodied and nearby, as if saying here is your doom in small, the littlest of things you can't see, loosed now in a world that connects like a network of veins at the speed of god. If none of this makes you very nervous, you really ought to be.

9. Six Degrees of Separation From Lillia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone, Philippines, Cinema One Originals):
If nothing else, for not being the one trick pony I always felt it was prone to becoming, at least on paper, cynical as I was
a
t first about how deep the cachet of its subject ran and if it could sustain more than a couple of gags. Antoinette calls this a mockumentary but it veers closer to that freak overlap of documentary and fiction, and in exalting
Lillia Cuntapay, the iconic bit player, certainly a phenomenon unique to us, it
subtly lambasts how stuck-up the showbiz industry is and how intolerably embarrassing, and distressing, our thrall to it remains regardless. That, and it's also a hoot.

10. Niño (Loy Arcenas, Philippines, Cinemalaya):
Time's a goon, it's been said, and it is, and sometimes it wins.
Emptied-out desperate things palpitate against
obsolescence and all its useless beauties
, not least being the centrifugal matriarch whose opera star has faded but also the religious finery leeched of their divinities but for the wild hope she hangs on it.

Buenas Noches España (Raya Martin, Philippines-Spain, Spanish Film Festival): Raya's experimental opiate is a bit of a quandary for me, hence its position, as I do like the form, but I like the idea of the form even more, and absolutely love the idea of the form in the context of where his ouevre stands, on the cusp of either repeating himself into perpetuity or going so far out on a limb it's likely to wind a lot of people up, which it did, which it should. Painters and musicians get to color outside the lines the way he does here, sometimes to fanfare, sometimes to indifference, but filmmakers are routinely frowned upon, often by other filmmakers, for merely being curious as to what's on the peripheries of the three-act narrative convention we box the medium in, and are all but lynched when they act on that curiosity. This is also where our national cinema stands at the moment, trying to figure out what it is, and slowly fitting itself into safe absolutes in the attempt, when what it needs to do is to go out on limbs more often. Cinema is the youngest art, and Philippine Cinema even younger. Too young, in fact, to get all wussy about winding a few people up.

SHAKE RATTLE AND ROLL 13

2011-12-29T03:43:00.012+08:00

Shake Rattle & Roll 13
Directed by Richard Somes, Jerrold Tarog and Chris Martinez
Written by Richard Somes and Aloy Adlawan, Maribel Ilag and Jerrold Tarog and Roselle Monteverde-Teo, Jerry Gracio

Part of the fun, and the frustration, in watching a studio tent-pole taken over, in the loosest sense, by someone outside its rank and file of yes men hacks is second-guessing where the auteur ends and the studio head begins. That’s three times the fun, and the frustration, when it comes to what is being roundly exalted as the last of the Shake Rattle And Roll milking cows, 13.

But, restraint having never been a prominent facet of Chris Martinez’ aesthetic, and much less so the literal sturm and drang of his episode, Rain Rain Go Away, it gets tough to tease him from all this grim J-Horror slow burn, or slow damp if you will, tougher when his muse Eugene Domingo reins in all her funny, too. Tough, and not a little disorienting, at least at first. But this may be the most cohesive of all three, and the one with the least signs of interference. It uses for grist the collateral damage of Ondoy, a tragedy that’s possibly freighted with as dreadful a resonance for us as 911 has for Americans, and certainly weighs heavily on the characters. And there’s a meta eeriness to having it come out in the fresh aftermath of a similar catastrophe. You can see where it’s going almost from the get-go, but it’s not so much the reveal here as it is the languid gloom with which we get there.

Richard Somes is really the one with the most vivid auteurist imprint, if only because it’s more immediate and apparent by dint of being largely visual. His Tamawo is anorexic, falters in the telling, and takes its time to finish, but there’s an energy unique to him at work here, a feral, pulpy vigor. Returned to the familiar terrain of his aswang inversion Yanggaw, with some of its supple expressionistic sexiness, as well as that mixture of the brutish and the maudlin that leavens his sense of drama and takes getting used to, you can tell it’s the knotty dynamics of the fractured family that he’d rather tap into, but settles for a siege film in which Maricar Reyes is a young mother whose ramshackle house in the jungle is surrounded by monsters. She also happens to be blind. And it’s a trope that Richard gets to exploit brilliantly once, in a scene that amounts to your bang for the buck in hardcore creepout.

Creepier still, and possibly more terrifying than water ghosts and albino monsters, in real life as it is here, is the ferocious boil riled-up estrogen can come to. This is what Jerrold Tarog buttresses Parola with. It does bear some of the strain from all the shape-shifting the script was likely made to undergo, apparent not least from how the eponymous haunted lighthouse has become incidental to the point of extraneous, buckling here and there from its multiple tiers of subtext lacking enough running time to layer cohesively. But it gets palpably malevolent when it reverts to its high school setting, and Kathryn Bernardo and Louise De Los Reyes get to play out their protracted supernatural catfight, with all that heightened and pent-up spite and malice and venom that leak out when best friends turn archenemies. Voodoo plus hormones, yeah. That’s not only a log line for a tween horror movie, that’s also the quintessence of what it’s like to be a girl.

*Originally published in Lagarista as The Last Horror Show

BIG BOY

2011-12-12T22:34:00.001+08:00

Big Boy
Directed and Written by Shireen Seno

Shireen Seno isn’t joking, or being flippant, when she says Big Boy is about the tonic wonders of cod liver oil, as it sort of is. And she herself can vouch for its efficacies, having been made to drink it every day while growing up. She is now the tallest of her brothers and sisters. She is also the youngest. Her father underwent a similar regime and a similar surge of growth and is, in fact, the eponymous character. And if it comes on all gauzy and fugitive, the way memories do, it’s out of how that’s what it ostensibly is. An entire hope chest of them, really, strung together as if like pearls, or family heirlooms if you will, in this case Shireen’s, and more particularly, her father’s.

Memories of his life as a boy living with his parents and siblings in the sticks of postwar Mindoro, where every sun-baked day seemed to vibrate with the potential for benign incursions of the magical to occur, and time and again did. Memories, too, of the blissed-out inertia that occurs between transitions. Of the anxieties in finding your place as your country recuperates from its own brush with chaos and navigates its own displacement. And, more than anything else, of growing comfortable inside your own body even as it grows faster than you thought it would, leaving the rest of you behind as it does. Her father had always found his way into her work before but only here is his presence this specific, this situated. Rather than wander into one of his daughter’s stories, she’s wandered this time into his.

And she’d been, in fact, foraging in there for years. These are a mere handful of the fragments she’d been curating of her family’s oral history. But in nearly every one of them, childhood being eerily consensual, is a flicker of recognition, deepening resonances, brokering empathies. Big Boy does have a wobbly rope of plot if you get queasy from the lack of a graspable shape but it’s from the irrational un-structure that all its cathartic voltage emits. It’s not so much about memories as it is about the way memories behave and the way they look and feel and also the way they sometimes blur into their own autonomous dream soup. And much as the period detail has a severity of precision that often belies its minimalism, it gains from it, ironically enough, not a sense of historical accuracy, but an atemporal disconnect, as if we were watching home movies from some parallel world past, undercutting the homespun intimacies of the Super8 footage, not with a surge of nostalgia, as you might expect from the way it evokes at first blush the lulling voyeurism of Jonas Mekas but rather with a low hum of otherness, at turns spooky and beatific, which evokes not so much Mekas anymore but, well, Shireen’s own similarly haunted short work, all furtive rhythms with the consistency of ghosts.

Originally published at Lagarista as Mysterious Objects At Noon.

DI INGON NATO (NOT LIKE US)

2011-11-29T08:44:00.007+08:00

Di Ingon Nato (Not Like Us)
Directed and Written by Ivan Zaldarriaga and Brandon Relucio

Pretty much everything you can say through the mouthpiece of zombies, George Romero has: consumerist satire, dystopian nihilism, anti-science screed, first person shooter stress relief. You have oddments like Robin Campillo's terrific Les Revenants (They Came Back) that pass the trope through a sieve of melancholia, becoming instead a meditation on the dynamics of grief, but nearly everything else is a haggard riff of some law Romero's laid down, no matter how vibrant, how agog, how beloved.

Di Ingon Nato (Not Like Us) is a riff, too, but one that gets escape velocity from transposing its doomy sense of isolation to a rural milieu, and rural here means our far-flung Third World boondocks, where people get around on rickety diesel mopeds and beatup pickups, what passes for a hospital is an undermanned and under-equipped clinic, combat-readiness boils down to jungle knives and single-shot rifles, and no one is as steeped in the lore enough to know that head shots save bullets and buys time. And the zombies here are not the undead of legend, the sort these folks have names for and dispatch with magic, but rather the ones borne of unfathomable contagion and go viral at cheetah speeds. No social realist indie for miles has tapped into,as this has, the backward conditions and fatal ill-preparedness of half the country for any sort of calamity.

But its second half, set in a nameless town, where all this panic and vulnerability is meant to curdle into a delicious hysteria, is a badly-acted gruesomely-imagined crudely-staged shambling lack of anywhere to go. Granted, the version I saw was a work-in-progress, and you could snipe a volatile shape in all that meander and confusion, but many darlings need to be killed, and the editing prudent to the point of unmerciful, if any of this were to cohere, let alone survive its first half hour or so. Set in a nearby forest, where a farmer and his wife and their son eke out what meager life they can from the land as the darkness creeps in to upset their fragile balance, that half-hour is a gumbo of bucolic desolation shading inexorably into apocalyptic dread. It's an amazing, fearsome mixture. And a zombie riff with legs. Just too bad they had to go to town without it.

NIÑO

2011-11-25T23:42:00.009+08:00

Niño
Directed by Loy Arcenas
Written by Rody Vera

Shutting yourself off from the world swings both ways, and one man's idyll can be another's cabin fever. These are the defenses built, the lines drawn, when the future gets bleak and the present starts corroding the past, and the question that bears down on the Lopez-Aranda family is how much of their corroded past should they give up and what bleak future will they get for it? There's a lot at stake with the question because the past in question has to do with the massive, crumbling house they live in and whether they can keep doing so, and the past tends to get pushier if it's as verdant as theirs. The gravely ill paterfamilias, in his own advanced stages of molt, used to be a congressman. And his sister, often lost in a cloud of her own making, a rock star among opera singers.

She's the whirlpool around whom everything and everyone revolves and bounces off : her brother who owns the house she now runs as if she did, the reckless son in partial has-been rot even before he becomes an also-ran but who remains her favorite, the grandson in whom she sees the most fervent of hopes not least when he puts on a Sto. Niño cape and crown as if it were a superhero costume and refuses to take it off, the ignored daughter who only wants a little more of her mother's love than she's getting, the niece returned from abroad determined to move on and sell the house that hovers like a ghostly weight. Fides Cuyugan-Asensio is indomitable as the lapsed diva and her temperament becomes the film’s: skittish, fractious, wistful, elegant, and just the tiniest bit cuckoo.

Cut from the same genteel cloth as Ang Lee at the height of his infatuation with no-round-limit cross-generational family wrestling matches, but reined in to frustrate the demands of melodrama, Niño hones in on something more delicate, averse to bluster and way naughter and funnier, hardly vacating the premises, but never letting the air stultify or thicken into must, finding rather a phantom power in the way the forward motion of youth and the luxuriant torpor of old age stare each other down to the same uneasy truce that is the emotional stalemate of the film's tangle of estrangements, bequeathing an impasse that you can see coming, resolves nothing, but gets unexpectedly magical anyway.

ASWANG

2011-11-10T08:49:00.006+08:00

Aswang

Directed by Jerrold Tarog

Written by Aloy Adlawan and Jerrold Tarog

If you go by the way he juiced up last year’s edition of the haggard Shake Rattle & Roll franchise with Punerarya, and also by the pop vibrancy of his independent non-genre work, Jerrold Tarog seems to have enough pedigree for remixing the beloved Peque Gallaga-Lore Reyes chestnut. And Aswang is ostensibly a monster movie, but it’s one that seems more interested in things other than its monsters: in the way revenge can transform you into the object of your violence, for one, in the imperatives of a species determined to arrest its extinction, in a small town living perpetually under threat, and above all, in the dissonances between the urban and the rural, the modern and the ancient, the natural and the supernatural, and the point when the lines between them blur.

It pivots on a teenage boy and his baby sister witnessing the cold-blooded massacre of their household. And having your parents murdered violently before your eyes turns out to be the shared tragedy of its principal characters, and also the tragedy that cracks everything open for a potentially bloodier, more mean-spirited sequel. But it’s a subtext that goes neither viral or nova, simmering rather under the skin of the piece, a trauma that never gets enough room to fester and seethe, nor gets to go anywhere really, as everyone is too busy running for their lives, if not from hired assassins, then inevitably from monsters, who shapeshift into crows, burrow under the ground like moles, sprout nasty fangs, eat live flesh. Aswang is also from Regal, after all. And it wants its monster movie to be interested in its monsters.

It doesn’t take a genius anymore, these days, or much intel for that matter, to second-guess the processes that transpire when a studio makes a film, much more one meant to be a tentpole. And Aswang is beset by the sort of push-pull that occurs when you wring a filmmaker used to being left to his own devices, or a filmmaker who simply has his own devices period, through the knotty caprices of our studio matriarchies, as auteurist sensibility and studio directive constantly arm-wrestle for dominance. And it can be its own bit of fun trying to figure out which is which.

That dream slash love sequence does smack of pure Regal. And the stable newbies as well as the not-so-newbies are perhaps why the affectless, effortless performances that have enlivened every single one of Jerrold’s films before this is alarmingly nowhere to be found and nearly breaks the back of the piece in its absence. The bristling attack by the river does spasm with Jerrold’s skittish vigor. And much as I can’t figure out why they bother when they can fly anyway, the burrowing under the ground to catch prey is a splendid effect that accounts for at least one breathtaking money shot. But it’s not so much the jittery brio of Confessional that Aswang taps into, but rather the meditative languor of the underrated Mangatyanan. And there’s a gravity to Aswang that slows it down some, possibly slower than it should be, but thickens the mood, too, until it gains, particularly in the sequences at the abandoned ranch where the monsters hole up, this weird, pungent density.

*Originally Published in Lagarista as Tropical Maladies.

11 11 11

2011-11-02T13:06:00.004+08:00

Dario Argento. Nora Aunor. Pina. 13 Assasins. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I Saw The Devil. Century of Birthing. Nothing more needs to be said.

NOT QUITE DEAD

2011-10-16T15:38:00.004+08:00

The Spinanes’ Manos was not the first record I bought blind. This was a little over ten years ago, as the contrails of the 90s were fading into the next shiny millennium, back when you almost always bought music blind. Back when you almost always bought music, really, sometimes going on nothing more than a glut of praise gleaned from magazines serving as both field guide and failsafe. I bought a lot of records this way, on a wing and a prayer and a Five Star rating from Q. But Manos was the second record I bought blind because of the cover. The first was Nirvana’s Nevermind, and that’s since been rightly exalted into album cover canon. Manos hasn’t. I don’t think it will be but I think it should. Funnily, it’s a line from a Lush song that comes to mind every time I look at it: “ . . .shake baby shake you know I can fit you in my arms . . .” Rebecca Gates’ troubled eyes hiding under a shock of hair, her left hand holding on to his right, her right about to do the same with his left, half given in to their imminent calm, so grateful for them being there she can’t help but kiss the hand she’s holding even before she’s fully tumbled into his arms, arms she knows she would fit into, get lost in. It was love at first sight for me. And as much as I was betrayed by some of the records I bought blind, Manos was thankfully not one of those. Still, even if their songs blew, I’d at least have the cover tiding me over. I’ve since picked it as the album cover I love above all else.

And I have nearly all else. Most of them are stacks of DVD-Rs storing JPEGs of album covers, or sleeve art, as parlance would have it: everything from Peter Saville’s violently minimalist New Order covers to the sinister cartoons of Jim Flora and the benign hallucinations of Hipgnosis to the complete works of Blue Note’s Reid Miles and 4AD’s Vaughan Oliver and, of course, Sir Peter Blake’s monolithic Sgt.Pepper, a multitude of sensibilities, marvels of design all. I even have folders devoted entirely to the worst of the lot and have gleefully dumped that awful one for MGMT’s Congratulations in one of them. Yes, I’m a sleeve art buff. A sleeve art nerd, if you will. A sleeve art packrat, at the very least. But it really is closer to curatorship than collecting as it isn’t consumed merely with the act of collecting. At some point, you can even call it a co-dependency. And it comes more out of being a design fan than being a music fan, although it helps, but one need not dovetail into another, as I’ve fallen in love with the sleeve art for music I don’t necessarily care for as much, like any number of Roger Dean’s covers for Yes, whose gatefolds open into these exquisite alien vistas. But I also own a lot of the sleeve art I love. And this is where the pleasures become even more arcane, as it not only plays into a sensation that’s endemic to even the most cursory record collectors but upgrades it: the tactile high of the album as object.

It’s an even more rarefied thrill now that downloading has all but colonized the way we listen to music. And this whole new zeitgeist of having everything at your disposal tends to make having everything meaningless, taking away so much from what used to be fundamental to the experience of music: the pining for, the foraging, the sleuthing, the deprivation before the elation. There already is, right now, an entire generation of music geeks who have never torn the plastic off a new CD, yet own everybody’s discographies in their hard drives. Frankly, it’s a little unsettling. Sleeve art icons Saville and Blake have gone on record as saying that not only is their trade dying faster than we think because of this, but that the album as physical artifact is dying with it. Except that I see a lot of bands becoming more and more elaborate with their sleeve art. I see more and more bands issuing albums on vinyl even. It’s as if there’s this defiant thrust to restore the cachet of the album as physical artifact back into the mix. Not quite dead, then, sirs.

Oh, I do listen to hordes of albums without the benefit of owning any of them physically. But I still buy CDs as often as I can. If there really is some collective endeavor to rescue the physical album, and with it sleeve art, from obsolescence and eventually extinction, I’m putting a little skin in the game, so to speak. I know that makes me come on like some recalcitrant throwback, a shambling anachronism even, but if you’ve ever peeled the banana off Andy Warhol’s cover for Velvet Undergdound & Nico or used the spectral decoder that came with Bright Eyes’ Cassadaga to see its invisible cover or customized your own cover for Beck’s The Information with its special set of stickers or merely had the optical illusion on Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion play tricks on your eyes, you know precisely what my stake is. There’s a purist stance about sleeve art , moreso sleeve art with aspirations to flamboyance, that has to do with how its extraneous, distracting, bells and whistles. That’s true. But isn’t that also the point?

*Originally published in UNO.

THE SALVAGE DETECTIVES

2011-10-10T11:48:00.004+08:00

Rumor has it that there’s a lost Martin Scorsese film out there, a crime film shot on the cheap from before Mean Streets, that exists in the form of a grimy bootleg VHS. Lost films are the yeti footprints of film geeks, our ghost stories, our fuzzy UFO photographs, our obscure objects of desire. And there certainly is a touch of the arcane to the notion of an under the radar film few have seen, tenuously held together by the duct tape of failing memory, its potentially vital cultural data hostage to the processes of decay. Exotica like this is the vitamin of geeks. But Scorsese hasn’t gone on record to confirm or deny the film nor has anyone bothered picking up its trail. It’s not as if the world is in desperate need for any more Scorsese films, anyway. We have too much as it is, if you ask me. And it’s not as if we’re talking about Citizen Kane either.

But what if we were? Or something of similar exaltation? The few people who’ve seen Gerry De Leon’s lost film Daigdig Ng Mga Api have unanimously proclaimed its magnificence. It had me with that title, sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it lives up to it and turns out be our Citizen Kane after all. Except we might never know. Just as we might never know, too, if Manuel Conde’s Juan Tamad films deserve the legend they’re freighted with. Or if Ishmael Bernal’s Scotch on the Rocks To Forget, Black Coffee To Remember is anywhere near as tantalizing as its title. No prints have survived. No copies exist. Not even on tape. The number of films we’ve apparently lost out of neglect and indifference is a gut punch that can make even the most stalwart of resolves buckle at the knees. And folded into the context of our film history, the stakes are raised and our lost films become more than mere esoterica, gaining instead a sheen of minor tragedy. And, if anyone from SOFIA could have their way, a throb of emergency, too.

Founded by the late Hammy Sotto and a handful of like-minded colleagues in 1993, SOFIA is the Society of Filipino Archivists for Film, a non-profit task force of volunteers whose station is to salvage whatever lost films of ours they can. It’s not yet too late but time is running out. Entire strains of history are literally and inexorably turning to vinegar. There are piles of films past the point of rescue, and there are piles more getting there even as you read this. SOFIA is not exactly bereft of trophies, counting among their triumphs the rediscovery and restoration of films like Giliw Ko, Noli Me Tangere, Tunay Na Ina, Sanda Wong, Kundiman Ng Lahi, and White Slavery. But this, their members will be the first to tell you, barely scratch the surface. And the work that needs to be done is regularly curtailed as SOFIA are continually beset by troubles that swing from the usual lack of funding to the crippling vacuum of a National Film Archive that should exist but doesn’t. Help does come from all sides. Foreign organizations have lent a hand in restoring some films. Even film producers and branches of government are weighing in. But it’s a precarious situation, all told. Still, never say never is their default mantra. Daigdig Ng Mga Api is SOFIA’s Holy Grail. But so were Gerry de Leon's The Moises Padilla Story and Lino Brocka’s Wanted Perfect Mother, both thought forever lost in any format. And if these films can resurface, as they have, suddenly anything is possible.

A few months back, after years of basking curiously in its outsize myth, I at last saw Mario O’Hara’s previously lost noir Bagong Hari for the first time, as part of SOFIA’s Overlooked Films Underrated Filmmakers series of screenings. Cobbled from grungy U-Matic elements, its condition was far from pristine but this was probably the best the film has looked in years. More to the point, though, it surged with energy, felt thrillingly alive - - -dense, ballsy, vigorous. Direk Mario was there and so were the film’s stars Dan Alvaro, Robert Arevalo, Perla Bautista. This was the first of the screenings I attended, and regret missing Jun Raquiza’s Krimen and Danny Zialcita’s Masquerade, regret missing nearly every screening, really. This was how it was each time, I’ve been told. An unsung film retrieved from the fringes, a relatively fervid audience, its director and stars rekindling glory days and meeting new generations of admirers. It’s terribly encouraging. And it makes sense that a generous amount of SOFIA’s energies are now being poured into them.

We are largely a culture who has routinely trivialized, neglected, ignored and vilified our own cinema, elevating our revulsion to a class schism even, while kissing the ground foreign cinema treads. This flippant, often disgruntled, apathy has been more or less crucial to the state our cinema is in now. But, in its own modest way, these screenings embody the almost violent tidal shift in attitude and enthusiasm. And it’s tough not to feel even the tiniest glimmer of hope. The mash-up archaeologist detective mercenaries of SOFIA will not shirk from their first mission , sure. The lost films need to be found and restored. But these screenings are, in and themselves, restorations, too, of the very things that bought SOFIA , and those of us who champion their efforts, here in the first place: the jubilant obsession, the keening passion, the relentless love.

Originally published at Lagarista.

Picture courtesy of SOFIA.

SAN LAZARO

2011-07-29T16:39:00.010+08:00

San Lazaro
Directed and Written by Wincy Aquino Ong

Wincy Ong’s first film feels like one all right, but not in the sense that it comes together crudely as if under the nervy thumb of some self-entitled film school amateur groping sloppily for a clue and passing it off as style. He’s put in the hours, Wincy, directing a tonnage of music videos and a television show before this. And all that toil shows in the restraint and temperament, in the shape and sheen, of the film.

No, it’s more in the way it seems to be organized around the twin notions of this being something he’d been waiting and wanting to do for so long and that the next one may not be as easy to come by, and the way he leaves nothing out, throwing in what feels like the entire filmography he's already shot and dubbed out in his head, as if they’ve been pent-up and gestating all these years and maybe they have, as if he might never get the chance and who knows if he will. But by cleverly parsing them out as flashbacks, flashbacks that frankly have far more vigor and crackle and weirdness than the one-note present-day through-line it all hangs on and feeds, he calms down the tendency of everything to violently shift tones. It does still buckle a little here and there, but mostly it fills out the characters and the piece, giving both density and cartilage.

San Lazaro is a no-brainer: a horror slash road movie slash buddy comedy. Pitched somewhere between Chito Rono and Edgar Wright, albeit with little of the former’s visual acumen but thankfully even less of the latter’s slavish and annoying geekiness. And prone as these things are to the self-referential hubris of such geeky impulses, it’s first grace note is in how all of that is reined in to zero, how it takes the time to build its own universe, contains everything there, and not nod to some pop-cultural in-joke for comfort every time things get iffy - - -even Ely Buendia’s too-brief cameo is sharply hewn, doesn’t feel extraneous nor like a wink, probably could fork off into a subplot with more legs than the plot on top.

It’s a spindly one, such as it is, that plot on top, with Wincy himself multitasking as a flighty slacker roped in to help old high school classmate Ramon Bautista drive his possibly demonically possessed brother to the eponymous small town of the title. Ramon and Wincy do play their odd coupling, the wacky lout and stoic foil respectively, with all the chemistry and dynamics, the thrust and parry if you will, of the stalwart comedy duos, from the Dolphy and Panchitos to the Maverick and Ariels, if not as given over to the funny as you’d want, the volume never cranking up above room tone, the repartee never getting as spry nor as gregarious. If nothing else, though, this measure of sobriety does make the twist it all boils down to more lancing, gives it brunt. But there's an even more piercing but far subtler twist in the epilogue that might shark under your radar if you so much as blink. San Lazaro is not much but not bad, a genre mashup with much pop torque and a load of fun, but that last line has a creepy poignancy that gets under my skin a bit more.

*Originally published in Philippine Free Press as The Devils You Know.

ZOMBADINGS 1: PATAYIN SA SHOKOT SI REMINGTON

2011-07-24T04:32:00.043+08:00

Zombadings 1: Patayin Sa Shokot Si Remington
Directed by Jade Castro
Written by Raymond Lee, Jade Castro and Michiko Yamamoto

Zombie screwball should cover it if you feel the need to wrap a code around Zombadings 1: Patayin Sa Shokot Si Remington, the way it runs on the same odd tracks as both the lowbrow tomfoolery of Chiquito movies and the affectionate B movie crudities of Sam Raimi and all the self-aware postmodernism such a mashup implies makes it so spot-on it's as if that was the actual log-line Jade organized his film around, except it only really turns zombie on us in its final third and is more a werewolf film up until then, in which our eponymous homophobe falls under a hex that gradually turns him gay even as a serial killer is picking off everyone in town who is.

Homosexuality as a curse can be misconstrued as demeaning and actually has, as the off-point and far-fetched outrage flung this way bears out. But the germ that feeds it is that old and old-fashioned Frank Capra trope - - - the comeuppance and enlightenment that comes from walking in the shoes of what you abhor, and more than anything, it's really subverting the very stereotypes it only seems to condone, much as it's hard to tell sometimes from the breathless velocity of the gags and the caricatural swish and swagger of gay argot and affectation it relies on to make it fly. The character actor stalwarts, from Janice De Belen to John Regala with his game face on to the mighty but under-used Odette Khan, buttress the superstructure to prop up what they can of the third act sag that besets it. And for the shapeshifting by degrees at the heart of matters, Martin Escudero is like some one-man army of goofy, a bravura act of pitch. But it's Eugene Domingo who detonates every scene she's in with surreal delight. And Roderick Paulate is stunt-casting that's both preordained and genius. The queer act he's made his metier should've by rights gone stale after all this time but somehow it's even gained nuance and range. It's a shtick, sure, but it's a shtick that never ever gets old.

AMOK

2011-07-19T04:18:00.016+08:00

Amok

Directed by Lawrence Fajardo

Written by John Bedia

"What,like a bullet, can undeceive?" (Herman Melville)

Amok is well-oiled tumult, a chaos mechanism of wrong place-wrong time dynamics fed through a portmanteau that has everybody looking to Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu as point of reference, if only for how both hew to similar tropes of threading a line through disconnected lives suddenly thrown in the glare of blood and harm. But where Inarritu gets overwrought in preaching a grand design, not to mention a troubling hard-on for closure, Amok is more haphazard, has little to say that hasn't been said before, but so much to say it with, neither overreaching nor belaboring. If nothing else, it's a technical feat, of logistics and guerilla tactics and cutting. It's rigorous, precise.

The bustling intersection where it all comes down is both milieu and metaphor, and the one thing shared by the motley ensemble of has-beens and also-rans it corrals: they all just happen to be in the area. The cocky cop on the walkway waiting to rendezvous with an asset (Efren Reyes Jr., funny), the faded stuntman living alone with his rancid nostalgia and a rent girl sleeping in his bed (Mark Gil, funnier), the put-upon brother driving his cranky sister around and stuck in traffic (Archi Adamos), the ex-cop with a baby on the way and a chip on his shoulder (Dido De La Paz, a walking tour de force). If it wobbles here and there, it's mostly from spasms of bad acting and the patois ringing false. But in never lingering on one character longer than it should, it blurs the chinks into forgiveness. Brief snatches are all we get to see of these brief lives, not so much arcs as they never get to complete any. It's the point of everything here: how our stories don't so much end but are cut short halfway through the telling and often in a random blast of doom. There's a weariness to its nihilism that's more wounding for being so resigned. The world is a clusterfuck. And God is a bullet.

THROW ME THE STATUE: OSCARS 2011

2011-02-21T11:02:00.043+08:00

It's close to a religious thrall, the way I used to be, and the way many of us still are, beholden to the Oscars. To this day, a nomination still tends to bear the weight of benediction, doing wonders for, say, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone in that it's lured people who wouldn't normally bother with bleak, doomy backwoods indies about poor people who hunt squirrels and cook meth with no movie stars in them to at least think of giving it a whirl the way they would the trendy new Pixar. That wears off after awards night, of course. Unless it wins, which it won't, and not because it isn't any good.

My own private ardor had sunk to what I rather charitably coined as "nonchalant curiosity" by the time I covered the awards in a piece back in 2009. It's since deteriorated to indifference. I wish I could say I willfully evaded last year's ceremonies like I had some cause to flag-wave, but I just plumb forgot about it. I came around to watching and liking and in some cases loving The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds and Up and A Serious Man, sure, but that's more from my love for their resident auteurs. And to this day, I still haven't seen Avatar. Or Up In The Air. Or The Blind Side. Or Precious Based On The Novel "Push" by Sapphire - - - and how about that title, eh? I don't sense any gap in my cinema IQ from not having seen them. And I don't feel any serious hurry to do so. I suspect I will, at some point - - -well maybe not The Blind Side. But that's if my procrastination doesn't wilt my resolve. Or if other films don't distract me.

Despite remaining immune to the wholesale clairvoyance and frothing in the mouth and wetting of panties this time of year tends to fan to a flame, I did get around to seeing nearly all of the 2011 nominees and not for research. It helps that people I actually like - - -Aronofsky, Fincher, the Coens - - -figured in the running with work I would've come to regardless if they were up for trophies or not, probably more so if they weren't. Except for The Social Network and, to a lesser degree, the derivative and overrated but rather wily and fun Inception, which are missing because I've spoken about them at length here and here, respectively, and have run out of anything worthwhile to add about either of them, the other nominees that are not here are merely ones I could not seek out in time, but if I muster the stamina, will do so and will probably, probably, dash off a second piece.

Black Swan
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin

Aronofsky does take a lascivious glee in the spectacular disintegration of a beautiful woman here, but it's not so much Repulsion in a tutu as it is a Dario Argento giallo in the way a conspiratorial malice slithers in its deep-focus shadows and the way the soap is blown up past operatic thresholds to the brink of hysteria and often spilling over into the ridiculous, as if going haywire on a meth of its own making. Natalie Portman is splendidly over-the-top as a one-woman vortex of paranoid niggle and whiny damage, her coming undone aided and abetted by her flippant rival ballerina (Mila Kunis) and her fucked-up self-immolating idol (Winona Ryder) and her demented stage mother (Barbara Hershey) and her demonically horny director (Vincent Cassell). She's also besieged by hallucinations, that, if anything, point to the phantasmagoric cocktease in Aronofsky. When the otherness intrudes, and it intrudes often but only once as exquisitely as I'd like, they don't so much pierce as merely sheath things in a gauze of displacement that lack the seeping disquiet of consequence, like overripe dream sequences, which is how the whole thing tends to sort of feel the further in you get, toeing the line of perversity that Polanski, or indeed Argento, would have gleefully, dangerously criss-crossed several times over, and making Aronofsky that sort of a cocktease,too - - -except perhaps for the sequence where Natalie pleasures herself which does end up getting rudely interrupted but also ends up creepier and funnier than if he'd merely let her finish. Which is not to say that the punches he pulls betray his aesthetic, he's always been a bit of a cocktease, Darren, and his cinema of obsession was always hornier for the milieus all that obsessive turmoil heightens and infects, and if it finds a kindred garishness in Ken Russell, Black Swan is still very much of a piece with everything else he's done. All that corrosive, corroded opulence? You could say it's positively Aronofskyesque. * * *

The King's Speech
Directed by Tom Hooper
Written by David Seidler

The reluctant king-in-waiting with a profound stammer may not be a cliche in and of itself, but the misfit speech therapist who not only helps him overcome his handicap but discover himself in the process is, and their tag-teaming turns our conflicted royalty into just another noble soul with a social impediment and the bonding that transpires between them into a lockstep of guru-grasshopper cliche and rehash. Little here goes against the grain and everything is wrung through a historical confection in which everyone is smoothened into such impossibly likable shapes that even Hitler comes off as just some cranky old nut. But it's so dogged in its enthusiasm to please it's practically altruistic, making it a task to dismiss, or at least dismiss with too much snark. The moderately snide Karate Kid comparisons someone somewhere made are as far as I'll go myself, even if they're a bit inaccurate given how Karate Kid is the slightly better film, if only out of how we never saw Miyagi's reveal coming the way we could sort of see Lionel Logue's, not that he has much of a reveal up his sleeve anyway. What does somewhat relieve its lack of capacity to surprise and will to misbehave is Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter and Guy Pearce and the way the vibrant gusto of their faith in the material enlivens if not emboldens it. Amiable and harmless,then, and by that measure, poised to win the main trophy of the night by a landslide. * *

True Grit
Directed and Written by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Based on the Novel by Charles Portis

Not that Henry Hathaway had anything as subversive in mind as a genre inversion but in zeroing in as he did on John Wayne setting his icon on fire as the cantankerous Rooster Cogburn, his True Grit unwittingly tapped into a minor vein of meta, tweaking its quaint hokiness into the mildly compulsive sensation of watching John Wayne play John Wayne not playing John Wayne, something like that. If True Grit were John Wayne's last film, it would have been as if he was sending off his myth, and in many ways that's what it was, the first increment of a drawn-out last bow. Bereft as it is of Coen mannerisms, nothing quite as cannily self-reflexive prevails in their remake, which installs Jeff Bridges into Rooster Cogburn's britches and draws as much from the psychological charge of Anthony Mann as it does the otherworldly minimalism of Monte Hellman. But the way they stick close to the contours of the Charles Portis novel is deceptively reverential, given how its universe centers around the Halie Stainfield character, possessed of a tenacity beyond her teenage years borne neither from a sense of duty nor a squandered bravado nor even from paternal love and righteous indignation and the desire to see a murdered parent avenged but rather from an almost matriarchal and ostensibly female determinism, making it an inversion off the bat. The cowboy picture, after all, is the perpetual chick flick antithesis, it's a man's man's man's man's world, and the male presences here, be it Bridges' imploded crank or Matt Damon's robust professional, are quite galvanic. But for all its sinew and crag and gravity and macho bluster and ominous bursts of carnage, and for all the imposing and rigorous maleness of its title, True Grit is mostly languor and grace, shot through as it is with the spiritual fervor and melancholic temperament of its lone female. She does catch up with her father's killer, we know that. And frontier justice, in the doling out, is all anticlimax and muffled catharsis, because from a young girl's POV, there is no code to live up to here, no machismo to reinforce, just a woman's work done. But at a steeper price, it turns out, than anyone bargained for. Where the first True Grit was a cock-eyed ballad to heroism and redemption, this one is, ultimately, an autumnal hymn to regret, one whose poisons sharpen when we get to the eerie, sombre epilogue. No country for old men, all that. Over that heartbreaking final image, stoic and resolute and embodying the title as to almost be its eponym, she intones the even more heartbreaking final line: "Time just gets away from us." That it does. More than it ever did and moreso for some than for others.* * * *

TISOY VS. THE PUNKS: ON MTV, PHILIPPINE CINEMA AND YOU CAN DANCE IF YOU WANT TO

2011-02-08T23:00:00.009+08:00

Google “music video” and you can trace its origins as a practice as far back as the late 1800s. Oh, it was performance footage for the most part, but isolated pockets were going out on limbs, laying in the ramparts. Jean Luc Godard had an indirect hand in matters, about as much as the direct hand Richard Lester had with his Help!. That entire syntax he came up with in A Bout De Souffle, the shakycam and the jump cutting and the whiplash rhythms, it was all prescient without knowing it, virtually the cloth from which music videos would be cut. You go to it and you go to films like Bob Rafelson’s Head and Nicholas Roeg’s Performance and to little oddments like Dylan’s iconic Subterranean Homesick Blues and the Who’s Happy Jack and the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever and to the lab experiments Todd Rundgren and Devo were conducting. You go to these not just for the DNA signatures, though. You go to these for having the bright idea that you can make little movies from songs without having to pick through Hollywood musicals for surplus or training a camera on some guy and having him sing to it.

They were all taking from other, myriad strains of cinema instead, or even other, myriad strains of culture in general, and in many ways, were pushing the form even before they had a name for it, and really, even before they were even aware there was a form to push. Pushing it closer to short film, to experimental narrative, to conceptual piece, closer to the music video as we know it today, notwithstanding all the excesses it accrued. Boiled down, all those primordial music videos name-checked back there, among others, were borne out of the need of independent filmmakers (D.A. Pennebaker, Peter Goldman) to do something and bored rock stars to feed blood back into their pulses, tiny little spurts of experimentation to while away the time waiting for the zeitgeist that would detonate all of what they were doing to calcify, blissfully unaware of the footprints they were making.

The task at hand here is to find, if any, similar overlaps between Philippine pop cinema and Philippine music videos, the bearing of one on the evolution of the other. But I’m not sure if I can say some parallel evolution took place. Ever since the local music industry appropriated the form, there has been a steady increase in production values and with the outbreak of the digital revolution, a proliferation of music video careerists, the music video becoming a refuge for Filipino film school graduates with nothing to film and, down the line, for anyone with a digital camera. Oh, there was already an active independent experimental cinema in the country lining the fringes back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when MTV first broke, our own Pennebakers and Goldmans if you will, in Raymond Red (Manila Skies) and Joey Agbayani (Lola) and later in Aureus Solito (The Blossoming of Maximo Olivero), but by the time they became the emergent bands’ go-to men, the music video had more or less become the global music marketing parlance it is, meaning the template was set, the laws laid down, leaving no room for a learning curve.

Not that any was needed, the short film being the métier of nearly every independent filmmaker recruited to make a music video—and something like Aureus’ longform video for the Eraserheads’ Ang Huling El Bimbo (aka The Last El Bimbo) almost instinctively went against the grain anyway. For the most part, there were catalogues of tropes to nick, styles to mimic, concepts to retro-fit, rules to break and unbreak. A learning curve would only amount to a lot of fuss you didn’t need, moreso when the form practically came with an instruction manual. All you had to do was crack it open and dig in. Other than the most rudimentary transfer of energies, there really was little significant overlap between cinema and music video. Go to Maryo J.De Los Reyes’ iconic but crummy Bagets (1984), though, and the argument turns a slightly different shade. Its gaudy colors, its editing rhythms and its incessant fondness for montage was a template in and of itself for the local youth comedies of the ’80s, that misbegotten horde, whose most beloved trope was the tendency to suddenly break into elaborate song and dance at the oddest moments and not in the culturally endemic manner of Bollywood, would count among its vile ranks such epics of trash as Hotshots and Campus Beatand the almighty The Punks among many, many, far more misbegotten others. Bagets and the rest of its sort seemed suspiciously and terribly influenced by MTV.

Not to dismiss leakages and osmosis, not to mention how slavish appropriation of whatever’s working for the West has always been domestic mainstream studio-made cinema’s particular brand of kung fu, but there’s a sudden breaking into elaborate song and dance too, in Ishmael Bernal’s (Himala) postmodern-before-there-even-was-such-a-thing-as-postmodern Tisoy!(1977). But it comes in at an even odder time, just after the title credits, so it’s not as if you’re ready and it’s not as if he throws a rope before plunging us into it but there you go—street sweepers in full-on Busby Berkeley mode! It’s nowhere near as well-oiled as the Busby Berkeley invocation would suggest, sure, there’s another proto-MTV sequence involving a traffic jam that’s more wittingly and precisely realized, but it’s a ballsy move even for someone who has built a career on ballsy moves. It throws you on enough of a loop so you start expecting that nothing here will settle into a groove you can see coming. And it doesn’t.

Nobody talks much about Tisoy!. Not when they talk about Bernal, not when they talk about the heights of ’70s comedy, not when they talk about ahead-of-its-time. Which is a bit of a shame. Rather, and rightly so, everybody talks about Mike De Leon’s Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba? (1980), which starred Christopher De Leon and Jay Ilagan too, and came three years later and has the same subversive energy and has one or two dance numbers as well but feels a lot less anarchic and a lot less funny and a lot less fun put up against this.My aunt remembers Tisoy from college, back in the late ’60s, in all its iterations: the Nonoy Marcelo comic strip, the play that came out of it, the eventual TV show, the Lauro Pacheco movie with Jimmy Morato and Pilar Pilapil, all that. Tisoy was their youth cult, their generational totem, their Scott Pilgrim. Their Bagets, if you will. But even she hadn’t heard of this. And even if she did, it’s possible she wouldn’t recognize it. Nonoy Marcelo wrote the script for this one, sure, and roped in his comedy titan cousin Bert Marcelo, who has been the constant through all the versions. But the Bernal Tisoy!was not so much a remake as a turning on its head. It’s a relic of its time—it’s near-topical in jokes, mostly pivoting on local cinema at that time, only working after some digging into, for one—but I saw it just a few weeks ago, some 33 years too late, and it’s temperament is weirdly fresh, weirdly now.

I bring it up and Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba?, too, because they both predate MTV but both too are uncannily possessed of a grasp for its rhythms and energies and language, as if they were as prescient without knowing it as Godard was. And who knows if maybe they are. That something as arch and irreverent and out-there as Tisoy! would have bearing on something as safe as milk and dull as bathwater as Bagets and the rest of its sort may be a little too much to suggest but the membranes that connect them make sense. It’s something far older than MTV here. And might have its roots in something embedded in our cultural psyche and in the psyche too of Philippine popular cinema of the ’50s and ’60s and even the ’70s, in the vaudeville aesthetic it sucked at the teat of, in the belief of entertainment as being everything to everyone, in that urge to put on a show… right now.There is something oddly, sweetly, wondrously intrusive every time someone dances in a movie that isn’t a musical and it’s done right or even if it isn’t but feels like it was or even if it plain isn’t. A breaking of the fourth wall almost, a spinning off into another planet, even the ones that enmesh themselves in the action through a sieve of logic, like the Madison bit from Godard’s Band of Outsiders or when John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino dance to Marvin Gaye in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam; but more so when it doesn’t, like the exhilarating coda to the Takeshi Kitano Zatoichi and that lovely bit near the end of Quark Henares’ Keka that feels kindred with the dancing in Tisoy! and Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba?. They’re all digs, sure. But you can parse a hum of affection coursing through it. Not obviously and, really, I’m mostly just guessing. And possibly projecting my own peculiar affection on it, itself most likely colored by an idiot love for crap and a tinge of nostalgia for it. Oh, it’s silly and naïve but it’s this naïve silliness, this utter disregard for everything, that counts for its untrammeled enthusiasm, for the purity of its unwitting anarchy, and for my screwy fondness for it.

Originally published at Cinelogue.

*Image taken from Video 48.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FORGETTING: MY 2010 IN MUSIC

2011-02-06T21:40:00.009+08:00

" . . .(with) downloads . . . you can listen infinitely without knowing often what you're listening to." (Brian Eno, from an interview in Pitchfork)

At it again.

More music is being made and put out there now than there's been at any other point in history and unlike any other point in history,too, you can have them all, if you have the stamina and the appetite and the will and the life to burn. That,and a broadband server. I have a little bit of each and I listened to a ridiculous amount of music in 2010 mostly because it was out there and I could. But Brian Eno was right. I've forgotten what half of it sounds like. This, then, technically, is the half I remember, give or take. Or at least what made it through the filters in one piece and stuck.

There are two lists here. The first is for albums and comes with no annotation as I'm lazy like that. I apologize for the lack of domestic product. This year, I plan to get out more often and remedy that. I didn't have the heart to separate the two Sufjan Stevens records, as they weren't meant to be anyway. And I'm counting all three of Robyn's Body Talk EPs as more of a whole than the comp album she released from bits and pieces of them. Barring the obvious pick , for me and for yearend lists (Kanye West,Cee-lo Green), the rest of my listening turned out to be wildly catholic, even more than 1999, taking in, as it does, the gleeful return of stalwart old favorites Superchunk and Gil Scott Heron and a thoroughly forlorn Tracey Thorn, my new fetish for three strains of pop (dream, K and J), as well as the robust jazz-funk of The Budos Band, the DIY psych of Coma Cinema , the orchestral manoeuvres of Owen Pallett, the jubilant pop of 2NE1 and the weirdly comforting goth balladry of Zola Jesus.

The second list is for songs, not really singles, as I'm terribly misinformed about these things, having lost the old vigor to swim the media bath for coordinates. I used to hoard copies of SPIN and Q and Mojo to use as maps for the hunting and gathering of pop that consumed half my life and money. These days, with zero danger and less at stake, I forage blind. And I don't really care. Turns out, though, that most of these were singles, which is odd and neat.

One of the rules I set for myself is that nobody from one list can cross over into the other. It's a rule I was tempted to break several times - - -with Robyn and 2NE1 and Kanye and Cee-Lo from the albums list and LCD and Teenage Fanclub and The-Dream from the songs list. The other rule is that no one gets two slots on either list.

I wrote a decade-ender list of albums and songs that both peaked at 40 and ran the risk of leaving out a lot, which happened. I wanted to keep this at the same number but I got as far as 20 for the albums and up to 46 for the songs and ran the same risk, with Allo Darlin' and Nicki Minaj as casualties. I ranked both lists, too, as ranking is my new toy. And like most toys, it's both a bit of fun and possibly immaterial. Love was my only gauge and love's impervious to hierarchy. I also didn't go as far as including albums and songs released before 2010 that I heard for the first time and played a lot last year as that was not the point- - -sorry,then, City And Colour and Skeleton and the Girl-Faced Boys and Clazziquai Project and Empire of the Sun and Jesus Walk With Me.

Besides,if I had, we'd be here all night. And this is late enough as it is.

1. Zola Jesus, STRIDULUM II
2. Cee-Lo Green, THE LADYKILLER
3. Rangers, SUBURBAN TOURS
4. Kanye West, MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY
5. Robyn, BODY TALK I-III
6. Superchunk, MAJESTY SHREDDING
7. 2NE1, TO ANYONE
8. Crystal Castles, CRYSTAL CASTLES 2010
9. Chew Lips, UNICORN
10. Evenings, NORTH DORM
11. LoneLady, NERVE UP
12. Sufjan Stevens, ALL DELIGHTED PEOPLE / THE AGE OF ADZ
13. High Places, HIGH PLACES VS. MANKIND

14. Budos Band, THE BUDOS BAND III

15. Owen Pallett, HEARTLAND

16. Rose Elinor Dougall, WITHOUT WHY
17. Coma Cinema, STONED ALONE
18. Young Heretics, WE ARE THE LOST LOVED ONES
19. Gil Scott Heron, I'M NEW HERE
20. Tracey Thorn, LOVE AND ITS OPPOSITE

47. David Sylvian, Playground Martyrs
It was always Sylvian's vocals, from Brilliant Trees on, that made me his bitch, more than his sober artpop, really, but it didn't take long for me to get around to loving that,too. He's the closest thing I have to a Sinatra, to a devotion hinged almost entirely on mechanism. This is a torch song disrobed until there's close to nothing left, attaining a spectral quality, in both the consistency of the songform it co-opts, and in the threads of melody flitting through it that his voice divines then exposes.

46. Christina Aguilera with Ladytron, Little Dreamer
Bionic worked despite not being as all that as I'd hoped, but on paper, the pairing up of Christina with Ladytron for two bonus tracks smacked of a car crash slightly less grotesque than the car crash the pairing up of Christina with Cher turned out to be but a car crash still, and yet the parts match both times without a seam out of place, more so on this sci-fic lullaby whose prosaic sappiness, sung as if to a child but could well be to a lover estranged by either geography or maybe death, gains a warm, eerie glow.

45. The Pipettes, Stop the Music
The new Pipettes did somewhat jump the shark, their kitsch-disco tropes getting the better of them, but for this fabulous scorcher, which gets by on little more than that slinky Latin beat and the spring it restores to their step.

44. R.Kelly, Number One Hit
It sounds like it could be one but it will never be, of course, which is both its pathos and its power.

43. Techy Romantics, Photos Fade

" . . .stepping off the platform of you and I/ I'm leaving it all behind . . . " When that stacatto guitar riff comes in on the second verse it makes the romantic suicide invoked by that first line seem like the sweetest of freedoms even as Camyl herself isn't quite so sure but goes along with it anyway.

42. Efterklang, Harmonics
They traded off , on Magic Chairs, that sense of playfulness and sprawl they're expert at for a coherence and immediacy they don't have the sea legs for yet, but a delightful teeter-totter is struck here, nibbling away, as it does, on its own self-imposed boundaries.

41. Kylie Minogue, Get Outta My Way
The disco inside you is your friend. Take its hand. Give in.

40.The Silver Seas, What's The Drawback?
" . . .she's stopping traffic and moving through time/she's like a 45 record in the back of my mind . . . " If there's an argument more persuasive than this for the strip-mining of ELO as a sonic influence with as much mileage as Gang of Four, I haven't heard it yet. Except, perhaps, if you count the new Manic Street Preachers, which I do.

39.Free Energy, Hope Child
That torch they carry for Thin Lizzy would be corny if it didn't actually give their songs balls and those balls crunch. Crunchy balls,yeah.

38. Foxes In Fiction and Galleries, Borders
Bedroom recordings became something of a substitute habit for me last year, taken in as much by process and principle as I was by product. Warren Hildebrand was a constant go-to man for most of it and this collaboration stuck with me the most, a song about distances that induces the yearning that comes from it more than anything did, except for the actual distance itself.

37. Lucky Soul, White Russian Doll
That cartilage of Motown by way of Johnny Marr that bolsters its indiepop stomp is what makes being subsumed by a lover, as if you were a matryoshka doll, feel almost triumphant.

36. The School, I Want You Back

As fired-up as that other song with the same name is in feeding its romantic anxieties through a primary-colored ebullience - - -with a dash of mariachi horns for gravy. Insanely catchy, terribly uncomplicated, nothing you haven't heard a hundred times before but wouldn't mind hearing again, which is sort of the point of pop music but very seldom is these days.

35. Katy Perry, Teenage Dream
" . . . I've finally found you, my missing puzzle piece, I'm complete . . ." Oh Katy, I bet you say that to all the boys.

34. Twin Sister, Phenomenons
New wave revivalism that feeds off aura more than nostalgia and artifice. There was a lot of those last year and there was a lot of those I liked - - -Wild Nothing, Radio Dept., Twin Shadow - - -but this tasty pastry and the equally tasty EP it came from one-ups nearly all of them.

33. Gobble Gobble, Lawn Knives
" . . . crackle crackle flake/ let no one know . . . " Wild, inspired nothingness that exudes, in equal measure, a nutso bob and weave and a frantic joy the sort of which was nowhere else to be found last year. My radar is thusly trained.

32.Standard Fare, Love Doesn't Just Stop
No it doesn't.

31. Warpaint, Undertow
Possessed of a similarly hazy smolder as Hope Sandoval and Miki Berenyi, these lovelies earn my enthusiasm to disappear into it with this lovelorn ballad that feels like its title, perking up near the end as if breaking surface, but mostly ebbs and flows in a sensuous whirlpool of faintly sinister bliss.

30. Women, Eyesore

Of a piece with the album in that it still sounds uncomfortable in its own skin which is part of what makes it tick, but this time all that coarsened, fitful grayness is in service of a brighter shaft of melody that is, if not optimistic, then hopeful. Also, that guitar riff at the start drips all kinds of juice.

29. The-Dream, Florida University
Not that we'll ever be given the satisfaction of consensus, but in the real world, girls can be assholes, too, and here's The-Dream spewing on one of those, his ex. " . . .I was the realest thing you've ever known/ I can't wait to say I told you so . . . "Scorned boy venom that's more cocky than furious, but near the end, after the chorus that explains the title (" . . . this is short for Florida University . . .F U . . .F U . . .FU. . . FU . . . "), it throws in a mocking fake Bieber sample that makes the song not only cut like glass but draw a little blood, too.

28. Uffie, F1rst Love

I was going to write something here about how all pop music boils down to a matter of context and use as example the way this attaches a kitschy 80s sample - - -F.R.David, no less - - -onto a not-much ditty and makes a tiny gem out of the graft . . . but if I'm going to be very honest, I'm stone in love with this for no particular reason. Uffie is the captain of my heart, at least for the 4 minutes 57 seconds it's playing.

27. The National, Sorrow
Lays it on a little thick, sure. " . . .sorrow found me when I was young/ sorrow waited, sorrow won. . ." Like a clenched fist, this is all pent-up seethe building up to a detonation that never comes because that would mean some form of release and I'm not sure that's what Matt wants. " . . .'cause I don't want to get over you . . . " I feel you,man.

26. Los Campesinos!, Straight In At 101
Not getting enough sex - - -a universal lament, almost - - - makes Gareth antsy and skittish and he throws a fit and takes the song with him which is good for us if not necessarily for him.

25. Teenage Fanclub, Sometimes I Don't Need To Believe In Anything
The last sentence of what I wrote about #36 applies here. Somebody should tell Norman Blake and Gerard Love that doing the same thing twice has long been outlawed by the tastemakers of pop because they keep doing exactly that and do it wondrously both times. I like how the bit that goes ". . .taking a ride on a subway train/ to feel more alive when you get back out again . . . " makes me feel like the lyric says and that's even before we get to the guitar din in the chorus that I might've seen coming but when it does is the wind beneath my wings.

24. Utada Hikaru, Goodbye Happiness
A happy pill of potentially perpetual efficacy. And yes, the irony of that isn't lost on me.

23. Sleigh Bells, Treats:
I do have all of 2011 to burrow into the album as I got around to it a little late and didn't pay it much mind at first, save for this monolith of guitar bombast that's every bit as 80s as Jean Claude Van Damme, every bit as buff and full of itself,too. A blow-up doll for my infatuation with powerchords. Even better than the real thing.

22. Memoryhouse, Lately (Deuxieme)
The feeling I get of being submerged and the line about breathing through machines and also the one about asking to be shut off makes it seem this is about the benign forcing into corners and making peace that happens in the nearness of death, and maybe it is, but I've learned not to take things as they seem, as this could be about other,less fatal forms of dying. It's so beautiful regardless, it makes succumbing to one or the other almost something to look forward to.

21. Jenny And Johnny, Big Wave
The recession confuses Jenny Lewis and you can tell from the anxious albeit effervescent tremble that the confusion frightens her a little, too.

20. SAWA, Swimming Dancing

Wakarimasen*but when teengirl fantasy Kawauchi Sawa throws herself into this vortex of trance and swims(dances) against the current, the sensation was/is a euphoric few could touch.

*"I don't understand"

19. Arcade Fire, Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
Merely catchy where they used to be opulent and weird along with the catchy, I never quite got The Suburbs,or it never got to me the way Funeral did and still does, or I didn't give it enough time and probably should. But the unsentimental nostalgia of this magnificent chamber disco oddment, in which Regina Chassagne sings herself to rapture, took hold. Time will reveal that it really is their masterpiece. Or you could take my word for it now.

18. Girls Generation, Run Devil Run
The partial ruin of Oh! was that it was tasteful here and there when it should've been tasty from end to end, but what ultimately rescues it are the skyscraper beats the girls strap on here and all the alpha-female sass they pump it up with as they stride across the land like a nine-headed pop monster crushing nearly everybody under their heels. Also, a massive attack of cute.

17. Vigo, Where Are You My River?

Not so much a kundiman deconstruction as that implies a taking apart and a putting back into place to get to the bottom of things and this is a band that's too familiar with the form and its tales of love gone missing to need to do that. More a kundiman reconstruction, then, a summoning of the necessary auras and demons to make you feel as at home with all that treachery and bleeding.

16. No Age, Glitter
Pummels you still, if you're worried about a softening of blows, but it is the swooniest they've gotten and you can make out what Dean Spunt is singing but not so much that you don't have to still lean in, as leaning in against the chaos of its surfaces to pick up signals is what makes their punk special.

15. LCD Soundsystem, All I Want
This Is Happening was not a record wanting for peaks but it's to the exhausted glitter of this krautpop love song with its payload of feedback at the end that I come back to again and again and again. " . . .all I want is your pity/ all I want are your bitter tears . . . " Not so much a Berlin-era Bowie rip as it is a gene-splicing.

14. Krakow Loves Adana, Cold and Closed
" . . . floating speech/ except the words we need/ and with some time there might return the fire/ but love was always a fragile kind of truth/ life was always a fragile time for you. . . " More than its intolerable wounded loveliness, this is up here out of the number of times I played it and play it still. Like with hangovers, sometimes the medicine for melancholy is more melancholy.

13. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti , Round and Round
Taking soap and water to the scuzz that Ariel Pink used to lather his records with is an aesthetic cop-out only to those who saw lo-fi as a moral stance rather than a trope you can discard as soon as the shtick wears itself out, which it will if the bells and whistles of your pop are the songs anyway. Multi-sensation studio-centric popcraft up there with Todd Rundgren if his prog gene had been even more squirrely, and every bit as epic as that suggests.

12. Deerhunter, Helicopter
Even before reading the Dennis Cooper short short story it was based on, there already was a niggling sense that, for all its weepy beauty, Bradford Cox is singing about the sort of loss you don't come back from. And when he gets to the line " . . . now they're through with me . . ." the blood temperature tends to drop.

11. Paul Weller, Aim High
In a way, a returning to the whole modern retro duality that gave his rather fertile and unjustly reviled Style Council period vitamins, reinvigorating Weller even more than he already is. This is a glimpse of what could have been if he'd seen it through to its endgame. Biases aside, and going by the keening soulful swirl here, it would've been grand.

10. Janelle Monae, Cold War
" . . . I was made to believe there's something wrong with me . . . " Janelle's a tornado, death-defying and beholden to a thousand fancies, most of which she indulges in the record she was roundly exalted for, making this exhortation to self-belief a will to power on a winning streak. With digable Kelindo guitar solo as extra jackpot.

9. Best Coast, Our Deal
Bethany wants to break the deal and be more than friends but she can't so a stray cuddle after sex is the most she can hope for. That sleeve of guitar fuzz Girlfriend wore its subservient heart on had a charge running through it, sure, but it merely nips at the heels of this gigantic ballad and the way it wrings from Ms. Cosentino's disappointment the sort of sweet, sweeping melodramatic ache that would make even Dusty Springfield weep

8. Drake with Alicia Keys, Fireworks
" . . .you never see it coming you just get to see it go . . . "That's Drake in the corner, that's Drake in the spotlight, losing his religion. Not much of a rapper, not much of a singer either,and his 2Pac metaphor's a little weak but somehow that makes the melancholies of affluence and celebrity that beset him more poignant than it probably should be.

7. Crystal Castles with Robert Smith, Not In Love
The futuristically-named Ethan Kath and Alice Glass do crop up on that other list, sure, but this shouldn't really count as breaking a rule, or at least can be cut some slack on a technicality, being, after all, a re-imagining so thorough it comes into its own. And roping in Robert Smith really was last year's pentium chip of stunt-casting.

6. Alicia Keys, Unthinkable (I'm Ready)
“ . . .you give me a feeling that I never felt before/  and I deserve it, I know I deserve it / it's becoming something that's impossible to ignore/ it’s what we make it . . .” Alicia looking down a drop we've all been on the edge of before, so you understand why she's feeling a little vertigo and a little open to harm and a little peril in her bones and also why the song throbs with such suspense. Plush, caution.

5. Peryodiko, Agawan Base
The way it pulls its anthemic punch at the last minute in that soaring chorus that makes you feel as if everything's forgiven, is like a catch in the throat that reminds you it isn't.

4. Beach Fossils, Face It
That utopian lope, not quite summery, not quite the feeling of sand between your toes, but like a gust of wind in your face telling you that you'll get there at some point. And just when you thought the pretty guitars couldn't get any prettier, they do and do they.

3. Rihanna with Drake, What's My Name?
More than Beyonce's “. . .to the left . . . “ , it was the way Rihanna turned her eye-rolling smirk of a ". . .puh,leeze . . . " into an assassination on the majestic Take A Bow that was the cocky height of pop kiss-offs. She's no stranger to empowerment, and she’s grown into it so that she doesn’t even need to flex as hard. " . . oh na na /what's my name? . . . " Oh, she wants the boy bad but he's only having her on her own terms. Don't misconstrue ". . . you're so amazing you took the time to figure me out/
thats why you take me, way past the point of turning me on/ you 'bout to break me, I swear you got me losing my mind . . . " as a giving in. It isn't a surrender, it's a taunt.

2. Minus the Bear, Excuses
" . . . running out of excuses/ when we know what the truth is/ I’m into you/ when you hear this song/ you’ll say you knew all along/ you’re into me too . . . " I still can't make up my mind if this was/is my mantra of denial or my fight song. But half a year after I first heard it, I'm still taken with the way it simmers sexily so.

1. Local Natives, Wide Eyes

". . .they told me how they fear it/now they're putting it on their tongues . . ." The Body of Christ theories hold , if only for this line, but it's not dropping acid they're really singing about but the confounding spectacle of the Buddha Boy , at least on the bit that goes ". . .no food and water for the better part of ten months/ quietly he sat between the folds of a free trunk . . ." As much about the disarming tenacity of the faithful as it is about the bewilderment it arouses in those of us who can't muster up the courage. That's wondrous in and of itself but the supple, kinetic sonics catch up fine.

PAST LIVES AND THE BEAUTIES SUMMONED : MY 2010 AT THE MOVIES

2011-01-11T00:16:00.030+08:00

"My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware the beauty is summoning him." - Andrei Tarkovsky

In a way, a catalogue of downfalls, having missed out on most of the Cinema One Originals and Cinemalaya and the "indie" section of the MMFF and some of Cinemanila and the stray Star Cinema fluke or two, and on the polar opposite, having seen nearly everything Hollywood saw fit to dump on us save for Skyline but I doubt if that counts as a sin of omission. Not that this caveat is anything new. As this is more of an indulgence than a civic duty and isn't really a job, it's perpetually been at the mercy of things like sloth and not having the time and the making of money and the getting of a life.

Mondomanila, it must be said, comes on like some Makavejevian depression musical only Khavn can hallucinate. I champion it heartily even as I hold back from placing it on my list out of my involvement in it and the implied nepotism that comes with picking something you were a part of. Also, I liked at least three other foreign films enough- - -Unstoppable, The Ghostwriter and The Social Network - - - to honorably mention them. The rest of 2010's domestic and foreign cinephile fad gadgets remain unseen to me, until 2011 at least, when these things tend to remedy itself.

Geography has a bearing on my imperfect system, such as it is. 70% of the list must have been publicly screened in Manila during the year, regardless of screening venue or nature of run or if it even had a run, as long as it was in country and in public. The other 30% will be given over to 2010 films that weren’t screened nor released domestically regardless of format, with enough room for that stray 2009 film my radar picked up a little too late. The only criterion I uphold is love and that got me as far as 20 this year, making it a 14:6 ratio. This year, I also tried ranking. It’s a superfluous business, all told, but not without its moments. Still, I might consider going back to alphabetical next year. This is in descending order, but if you're the type who's prone to obsessing on rank, know that I urge you to watch all these with equal fervor, if only because you really owe it to yourself to bite into something more nutritious from time to time before you go back to making do with Jon Favreau tentpoles and Katherine Heigl rom-coms.

The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia, Russian Film Festival) : A bit of a cheat but we can cut Andrei some slack here, can't we? This was, after all, a film event, if not the film event of the year. Certainly was for me if only for how, after being inundated with 3D and HD and IMAX, none of it was still half as glorious as watching Tarkovsky - - - specifically this Tarkovsky - - - in 35mm.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand): All the serene arcana we've come to expect of Joe is here, of course, verdant and charged in the ways they usually are and also in ways that they usually aren't. An epistle but not so much to death but to the grace you find in dying right.

Ang Damgo Ni Eleuteria (Remton Suazola, Philippines,Cinema One Originals/Cinemanila): The single take technique counts as insanity, and as a plus given how insanity gets factored in less and less in films these days, but it doesn't show off so much as gives the piece buoyancy and in doing so attaches a sensation to the nonchalance with which we shrug off in real life the social malaise - - or any social malaise for that matter - - - at its heart. Plus, it's funny as all hell.

Agrarian Utopia (Sawan Banna) (Urupong Raksasad, Thailand): Of course, the title's meant to be ironic. These peasant families will toil the land until they're no longer able but will never attain the heavenly home in the fields the film's Thai title literally translates into. Like some Third World Days of Heaven and every bit as ravishingly envisioned.

Ang Ninanais : Refrains Happen Like Revolutions In A Song (John Torres,Philippines, Tioseco-Bohinc Film Series, Netpac/Cinemanila): After twisting a tongue he neither speaks nor understands until it's nothing but pure sound , John Torres proceeds to feed his elusive, sometimes poignant, often lovely, terribly mysterious object through its badly broken codes.

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France, French Film Festival): In which the divvying up of a family inheritance turns into a consensual dissolution of mundane history and every single member an accesory to their own obsolescence. If anything, an epitaph to the impermanence of things and the eternal hold they have on us.

Sketches of Kaitan City (Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, Japan, Cinemanila): Starved of levity as these bleak tales of ordinary sadness are, there's something in its wintry air that keeps everything gauzy and afloat, a metaphysical helium perhaps, that at points almost passes for hope. Almost.

Kano: An American and His Harem (Monster Jimenez, Philippines, Cinemanila): There is that implied metaphor on how we as a country have always been beholden to the smarmy wiles of America but this is almost an anatomy lesson in the machismo that is often flown like a flag of male virtue here. The fiendishly charismatic Victor Pearson may have struck a lot of people as virtually diabolical, and enraged a few enough to want to do the filmmakers bodily harm, but in some circles, he could well be some kind of hero.

Cameroon Love Letter (For Solo Piano) (Khavn de la Cruz, Philippines/Africa, Tioseco-Bohinc Film Series): Every word like a dagger drawing blood, every complaint freighted with loss, every memory leaking toxins, every line of worst fit, all tangled up in blue and threaded by that mournful, gorgeous piano fugue. Funny how you can't tell a breakup letter from a suicide note sometimes.

Vox Populi (Dennis Marasigan, Philippines, Cinemalaya): The naysayers weren't being merely pissy when they said this looked ugly and tacky, it is ugly and tacky, but then that's a function of the milieu and also the whole point. Ugly and tacky as our cities can get, they're even uglier and tackier during elections. But in nailing the Philippine condition on little more than its surfeit of comic energy it pays the price for not exoticizing anything by disappearing into an obscurity it doesn't deserve.

Summer Wars (Mamoru Hosoda, Japan): Turns out Jens Lekman got it wrong
- - -the end of the world is not bigger than love. Anime video game endorphin for sating my inner geek the way Scott Pilgrim can't quite do anymore.

Madeo (Mother) (Bong Joon-Ho, Korea, Cinemanila): This is, essentially, Bong returned to the territories he covered in The Host
- - -the tensile strength of family members looking out for their own and the loosing of monsters on a placid community - - - only this time the family member and the monster is one and the same.

Police Adjective! (Corneliu
Porumboiu, Romania): A police procedural that delights more in the tedium of procedure and where every conversation - - - be it about the lyrics of an inane pop song or the moral fallout from arresting a teenager for breaking a law that will most likely not be one soon - - - blows up into a discourse with equal degrees of gravity and consequence.

A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, France, Cinemanila): It's a bit like The Wire transposed to the French penal system, that is, if you go by how the overlapping ethnicities bear heavy on the power struggles of the underworld and also if you go by the ferocious dispersal of energy in charting the apotheosis of a crime lord from the ground up.

Detective Dee And The Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong): Just when you think all the chaos and opulence couldn't get any more berserk and contaminated, there's Andy Lau doing martial arts battle with magic deer. Oh boy. Sure is nice to have you back, Mr.Hark. Please don't go off and make things like Missing anymore. Or anything with Jean Claude Van Damme in it.

Love In A Puff (Pang Ho-Cheung, Hong Kong): Boy meets girl during their smoking breaks - - -
now there's a rom-com high concept with universal catch-all that it seems only Asians can pull off, as it's the lack of hurry and the lack of the need to rub everything in and the insistence on actuality as a style that make this warm and lithe and
swoony. The
Rohmer vein a lot of people claim it taps isn't just for the way Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yue talk in circles but also, and more so, for the sensual causality of their brief encounters.

Senior Year (Jerrold Tarog, Philippines, MMFF): The effect is less of rekindling that rarefied and possibly false sense of magic we inflate our high school memories with but more like observing the social dynamics of a species seemingly removed from us yet somehow not. Were we ever this impetuous in our youth, this oblivious? Jerrold is actually saying we still are.

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, USA, Domestic Release): Either the lack of resources forced its hand or there really is an aesthetic at work here that warrants looking out for as Gareth Edwards may turn out to be that rare thing in Hollywood, an ex-FX man familiar and possibly even infatuated with the virtues of restraint. More than the dreamy and shapeless and awkward languor of his lo-fi sci-fic love story, it's really the world that
he builds from parts of ours and parts of something else, and of which he only shows us the parts made of rustle and shadow, that makes this such an immersive trip.

Piranha 3D (Alexander Aja, USA, Domestic Release): The dismembered penis scene towers above all but then again I haven't seen Jackass 3D yet. Alexander Aja pees in Hollywood's punch.
Lap it up, fanboys.
Anarchic, almost.

Art & Copy (Doug Pray, USA, Special Screening): The making of scam ads is like masturbating in front of a mirror pretending that noodle in your hand is bigger than it really is, only more deluded because you also pretend you're a genius when you're really just another sad wanker. No sad wankers here.

VJ

2010-12-24T16:38:00.000+08:00

Beating a path to my own forthcoming surge of yearend listmaking, despite fluctuating server malfunction, and taking a page from Richard Bolisay but picking only five plus one picked despite the potential nepotism, as I haven't been scrounging about and I find the whole MTV aesthetic a little annoying to begin with. I do regret having little in the way of Asian work but here be my favorite music videos from the year that was, mercifully free of those loathsome music video mannerisms, and ranked ,as ranking has become my new fetish but prone, as always, to changing, possibly even as soon as I've hit "publish" on this post.The songs kill,too, if you must know. Click on the titles to watch.

1. Lovely Bloodflow, Baths (directed by Alex Takacs and Joe Nankin)

2. Cold War, Janelle Monae (directed by Wendy Morgan)

3. Stick To My Side, Pantha Du Prince (directed by Amaury Agier-Aurel)

4.Window Seat, Erykah Badu (directed by Coodie)

5. Marching Song, Ebsen and the Witch (directed by Peter King and David Procter)

and

6. Where Are You My River? , Vigo (directed by Dante Perez)

FIRECRACKER

2010-11-25T12:29:00.002+08:00

"Try to win and suit your needs, speak out sometimes but try to win" (REM, Perfect Circle)

"Sometimes a good exit is all you can ask for" (William "Dead"Kennedy, Firecracker)

Sean Stewart's Firecracker has a weariness in its bones from all the past that bears down on it - - -an overlap of memories, of ghosts actual and metaphoric. It's a weariness brokedown with a cathartic sadness, though, shot through with languid quietude and, in spasms , tenderized with something that's so close to grace that it hardly matters if it isn't. William (a.ka. "Dead") Kennedy is a man in both deep hurt and deep surrender, not so much lived-in as lived out - - - "these bullets of loneliness used to get me all the time . . .you just learn to let the feeling roll by you . . .wait until you can breathe again." He also sees dead things , talks with them, incurs their wrath. But the vortex of his cul-de-sac life is the one dead thing he hopes to, but cannot, resurrect - - - his failed marriage to a woman he still loves : "You love someone,they're in you like a fishhook. Can't just pull them out. "

The supernatural here is ambient,imminent,dangerous - - - Stewart's grasp of scary is cunning. But the beautiful noise picks up more in the tender exchanges between fathers and daughters, ex-husbands and ex-wives, mothers and sons, and in their hopeful but dangerously fragile resolutions to conflict. Not merely about the strangeness that converges around a lost man worn down by his pathos but more about the pathos wearing him down , genre stalwart Stewart is pulsing an emotive throb that might seem beyond the ken of the ghetto- - - a ghost story about the virtues of family, true love's slippery grasp and the futility of second chances at making first impressions. Haunted, haunting, heartbreaking.

MONDOMANILA FILMFEST MOTHERFUCKERS

2010-11-24T11:09:00.004+08:00

"Glee on shabu" -Abe Kano

We built this city. And it is here for you to use.

Khavn's long-gestating Mondomanila, based on the Norman Wilwayco novel is here, at fucking last, and it's crashing into UP Cine Adarna, from December 1 to 4, wiith Timothy Mabalot, Marife Necesito, Whitney Tyson and Palito in his last role. Keys to the city are 50 pesos per head.

Contact 09175015269 for tickets. You know you want to.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

2010-11-03T01:25:00.009+08:00

The Social Network
Directed by David Fincher
Written by Aaron Sorkin

“Dating you is like dating a Stairmaster!” the girl, who is named Erica, in a pique, tells the boy she’s about to dump, at the start of things. Acidic in its exasperation and all the funnier for it, the retort makes me laugh a little but it makes me cheer her under my breath more, as if she just threw a mean left hook in a prize fight which in some ways she did, and makes me secretly hope, too, that the force of what she said would break a little skin, as the boy, given the brief time I’ve heard him talk, is not only obnoxious and exhausting but also seems peevishly oblivious to his own profound lack of charm.

"You're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd,” Erica says, “And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." It does hit him like a clout of trauma, much like any rejection, only the scar it leaves runs a little deeper. The boy, you see, is also supposed to be Mark Zuckerberg, prodigious inventor of Facebook, not so much a nerd as a hyper-nerd, hopped-up on his own adrenaline of precociousness. And the breakup, with its toxic fallout of scorn and vendetta and maybe a couple of beers too much and one spiteful blog entry, is also supposed to be the loam from which his ubiquitous billion dollar brainchild would rise. Erica may have all but disappeared after she walks out on Mark, but she soaks into the fabric of the piece, becomes ambient almost. David Fincher has flippantly referred to The Social Network as “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies” and If we’re to indulge him, then Erica is Rosebud.

Facebook, then: bane or boon? Hoary debates revolving around its ramifications on social conduct and modes of communication have long emerged and trended, as they always do each time something new tucks itself into the folds of the zeitgeist so deeply as to become equal measures infrastructure and default setting. It’s a little tiresome, to be honest, and a little impertinent, too. The Social Network is not about Facebook per se. It’s speculative fiction, but pickled in the conspirational anxieties that shadow the platform, only it’s less about the conspiracy as it is about the conspiracy theory. The Kane referencing is fun but what the sub-machinegun velocity of Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue and the sinister melancholia that underpins it and gives the piece its torque and throb, hews closer to is Preston Sturges, albeit a Preston Sturges so feverish with paranoia and malice it deters the comedy of manners a little for something closer to noir. The Rashomon parallels make even more sense, mostly out of how the three-way legal tumult-- between Zuckerberg, his best friend and CFO Eduardo Saverin, and the Winklevoss twins who claim they thought of it first-- is mapped out, a fractured whole pieced together from opponent sides of the story, stingy about its truths, like a mystery that closes in on itself. Obviously, getting to the bottom of matters is not the main thrust. And neither, it seems, is getting to the bottom of the man who centers everything.

Jesse Eisenberg, sidling at last out of the shadow Michael Cera casts over him unfairly because it really should have been the other way around, allows his Mark Zuckerberg to break his armor some, with little tics of remorse that soften him and also surges of awe when he comes into the presence of the devil himself, who is supposed to be Napster overlord Sean Parker and is played with a fiendish glee by Justin Timberlake. But for the most part, he is the quintessence of the nerd-- abnormally brainy, profoundly isolated and possessed of both supernatural tunnel vision and a debilitating social deficit. A little after the beta version of his social network detonates on campus and makes him a rockstar-in-small, Mark sees Erica in a restaurant. He walks over and rather than apologize for his online spew of vitriol, among others, he tries to impress her with his new website. This is the currency of his world, the main prop of his cockiness. This is also the crucial truth nerds never learn when it comes to women who are not nerds: never try to impress a girl as if you were trying to impress yourself because nerd things mean little to people who are not nerds. Except that, at last, this nerd thing of his means something to people who aren’t nerds. And it hasn’t changed a thing. It’s heartbreaking. And if you can trace from his feigned contempt for Harvard’s exclusive Finals Clubs that won’t let him join, how he secretly wants to be part of one, and how his cocky self-regard is ultimately beholden to the hierarchies, then you know that heartbreak must come with extra crush. After this, when the Beatles’ Baby You’re A Rich Man starts playing at the end of it all, the line that goes “ . . .how does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? Now that you know who you are . . . ” can’t help but gain a measure of snark.

“Good luck with your video game” is Erica’s caustic rebuke in the restaurant, her killer blow, and the last we see of her until we sort of circle back one last time in the end. Rosebud, remember? “You’re not an asshole. You’re just trying so hard to be one.” The benign, almost angelic paralegal and slightly corny expository mouthpiece, and one of the few bum notes here, tells Zuckerberg after the deposition and before leaving him alone in the empty conference room. It’s a line freighted with redemptive balm. But Zuckerberg is still too lost in his own orbit for it to have any brunt. That penultimate image of him sitting alone at his laptop, though, sending a friend request to the one that got away, is the very condition of our online selves: everywhere at once and nowhere at all. And The Social Network is a dark fable about this condition, the fundamental disconnect of a hyper-connected generation and the loneliness that comes from it. The last shot of Zuckerberg hitting the refresh button every few seconds, awaiting the confirmation that will most likely never come, is an epistle to that loneliness: the creator in the coils of his creation, fulfilling his cosmic destiny as a nowhere man. * * * *

*Originally published at Philippine Online Chronicles

EKRAN TRANSLATED

2010-09-17T13:12:00.008+08:00

I remember the first time I heard of Ekran was also the first time I heard of Slovenia and the first time I heard of Nika Bohinc and was introduced to her. The year was 2008 and I was co-editing the .MOV programme and helping moderate some of the workshops, not the one Nika was giving, no, but she was there for the others as well, in the audience with Alexis Tioseco. Nika was editor-in-chief of Ekran, the youngest to land the gig it turns out, and it was in prepping her profile that the name caught my eye. It’s Russian for “screen”. And I remember thinking how it was almost too obvious a word to name a film magazine with. But it also had that evocative roll off the tongue that Russian words tend to have, this arcane hum, if only phonetically. I nurse a mild fetish for Russian words and names so that added exotic weight is semi-automatic and a signal no one else is likely to receive. It nailed the same arcane hum that other cinema had, though, that other cinema the magazine pursued, that other cinema I pursued - - - the non-Hollywood, non-commercial, non-conformist, non-mainstream sort. Call it the inflated and enthusiastic wont to (over)romanticize that is my quirk as a so-called film buff and maybe as a person, too, but in my head, there was a clicking into place, parts matching.

Ekran was/is the sovereign film magazine of Slovenia, born in 1962, reborn in 1997. It was the Slovenian Cahiers Du Cinema, no less. That there was a country called Slovenia was not what threw me the most. That they had their own robust version of Cahiers Du Cinema, and with it their own robust history of film writing and film theory, was what did. Here was a country of roughly 3 million with a cinema proportionate to that population (that is, tiny) as opposed to our 92 million with a proprietorship to a film culture and industry that was, at one point, among the largest on the planet, and we don’t even have a recurring column in a newspaper, let alone a film magazine that has made it whole through an entire year. It was like a calling out. I remember this brief prickle of embarrassment tinged with not a little melancholy run through me. Oh, Ekran did temporarily close shop. The aftermath of some editorial crisis apparently, as it always is. But it didn’t stay in limbo for long. The Slovenian Cinematheque took it under its wing eventually. Yes, Slovenia cared enough to have its own Cinematheque,too.

More than the aesthetic rethink that did transpire, though, the thrust of Nika’s mission as editor, picking up where Simon Popek and contributing editor Jurij Meden, her predecessors, left off, was really to throw its arms around the world. There was cinema outside of Slovenia, cinema outside of Hollywood, cinema thriving in the festival circuit, cinema made for no money, cinema no one’s heard of. Nika was curious about all of it and Ekran fed that curiosity with vigor. Up until then, Ekran had been written in Slovene except for that one issue that had a piece on Lav Diaz in English. But Nika started to rope in film critics and film writers and film programmers and even filmmakers from all over, John Gianvito and Neel Chaudhuri and Ben Slater and Benjamin McKay and Olaf Möller and Albert Serra, among others, as if they were field agents, phoning in dispatches from the frontlines, to fill the magazine’s regular columns Cinema Postcards and Mirror in their native tongues.

This is where I came to Ekran, as everyone outside of Slovenia most likely did. Its international online iteration, Eklan Untranslated, curated those multiracial, multilingual column pieces, among others, in one place. Those of us who fancy ourselves film buffs habitually look under the skirts of the rigid canons for cause to blaspheme and it comes with a benign greed for more. Ekran Untranslated was one more rabbit hole that led to places where we could find more of that more. As a resource to that other cinema I was talking about back there, it was invaluable. And is its own embarrassment of riches if we go by film writing alone.

Film writing is something I tend to approach with a measure of caution. I find most of it arid, didactic, scholarly. I find most of it hard to qualify as writing,too. Alexis was the one who said that the first impulse of a film critic is love and his approach to film writing was to come to it the way one would a love letter. It was an approach after my own heart. And there was something to the writing dynamic on Ekran Untranslated - - -be it discourse or theory or diary - - - that dovetailed into that, given over as it was to language and tone, shot through with subjectivity and possessed of a peculiar intimacy and warmth but never at the expense of the dialectic urge and of genuine insight. It felt wet and alive. And above all that, belying its polyglot diversity, it exuded this sense of community. And that may be its most crucial attribute and its most lasting gift. In wanting to bring a vast new other world of cinema to light, Ekran, under Nika, showed us how small that world really is. And how everything and everyone in it is more connected than it seems.

*first published in UNO September 2010

HALAW

2010-09-06T20:49:00.005+08:00

Halaw (Ways of the Sea)
Directed and Written by Sheron Dayoc

It's a sort of porn, too, the valorizing that domestic cinema makes OFWs undergo, much like the way they valorize the poor. Let's truss it up, then, and pelt it with ridicule like we do poverty porn, but then again let's not as that's petty and a bore. Not to say that there's nothing to exalt about OFWs but when a demographic becomes too profitable to upset, the patronizing tends to get laid on a little too thick even for melodramas. And as a trope, all those films - - - Caregiver and Anak and Dubai- - - say little about working away from your family in another country other than that it takes a tremendous sacrifice and that it can get terribly lonely and that it's heroic almost. Sheron Dayoc's Halaw taps a bleaker, richer vein. The grist that feeds his film may be the rampant people smuggling that sneaks out of Zamboanga and into the back door of Sabah, but it's really about the desperation and banality of the Faustian bargains that are as much at the heart of the OFW experience as the heroism and the melancholia. And how deep they run into the systemic malfunction of a country that fails time and again to sustain its workforce and into the seductive glamor of anywhere but here.

Following a ragtag group of stragglers that include a returning and bejeweled middle-aged whore (Maria Isabel Lopez, hilarious), a brother and sister (Arnalyn Ismael, a little pushy but a grace note regardless) hoping to reunite with their mother and John Arcilla, who threatens to center a piece that doesn't want for one but calms his trademark seethe down into a fitful languor before he does, Halaw only looks like an ensemble piece but doesn't behave like one. Working abroad under any conditions, but moreso under these conditions, is a last resort without coordinates. And it is this random and aimless meander to the way Halaw denies its characters any room to bond into a group dynamic nor milks them for anything more than a passing empathy and to the way it picks up strands of plot and subplot it doesn't pursue and parses everything in loose ends and half-measures, that nails the interior rhythm of what every OFW goes through, the numbing tedium of waiting under which anxiously simmers threat.

Less than a third of the way in, though, as night falls and the rickety outrigger sets out to sea, Halaw lapses into montage - - - anxious faces, blackened tides, maudlin ballad playing over it all. It's wistful,sure, but not a little at odds tonally and also not a little corny and not a little phony, too. It's a freak burst of weakness and a mere nit I wouldn't have picked if the suspiscion that the film has been cut against its will didn't get more and more persistent after this. If there's anything Halaw needs, it's at least another half-hour to breathe, not to have more room for more things to happen but rather to have more room for more things not to happen. Tedium and threat, right. And much as every scene seems determined to acquiesce to this necessary torpor, something curtails it before it gets to do so, cuts it short, hurries it up, hews it to a shape. Its unfortunate English title (Ways of The Sea) may come off like some drab tourism AVP but Halaw does benefit from not having the temperament of your average Cinemalaya film: that would be earnest and cushy and prudent and no coloring outside the lines. And I wouldn't necessarily mind truncation if it didn't have the worrying nag that much of it is done to fold the film into the weary comfort zones of the Cinemalaya house style it's been evading and doing a valiant job of it,too.

But it's the last shot nearly everyone piles on,though - - -the outrigger disappearing into a dark grove and the series of expository title cards telling us nothing, at least nothing the literal translation of the title (deportee) hadn't told us already. It's the loosest of loose ends, all unease and displacement and with the severity of a stump where a hand should be. I have no idea if the Halaw we have is a Faustian bargain struck with the forces that be, right down to the terrible subtitling, all I go by is how tough it is to shake the sense that the ending came out of some reverting back to carte blanche. Not only is it the film's most triumphant moment, aesthetically, but as a singular, damning epitome of the pointlessness in it all, it is also its truest.

EGOTRIPPING AT THE GATES OF HECK

2010-09-02T02:43:00.005+08:00

Indulge me this bit of narcissism if you will. Below is a cross-publishing of a brief interview Michael Gullen of The Evening Class and Twitch conducted with me via email for a Brocka retrospective held in San Francisco early this year, posted out of how it nails the way I see not only Brocka but Philippine cinema as a whole then but most specially now, and of film writing as well. It's shorter than Michael expected but that only means it's less of a slog, too.

What do you want San Francisco audiences to understand about Filipino cinema?

That it's not all social realism and exoticized poverty. That it is multi-colored and many-flavored and more often than not--especially these days--goes on adventures. And that there's more where all this came from.

What do you want San Francisco audiences to understand about Lino Brocka?

That Brocka made around 65 movies and only around 10 of them have been elevated to the canon. And that the films that didn't make it to the canon--the melodramas, the comedies, the pop films--demand as much investigation, possibly even more, than those that did. Canons are moldy and rigid and play it safe and are no fun at parties anyway. I always thought cinema should be the opposite of all these (especially the part about being fun at parties).

How do you situate yourself within Filipino cinema and Filipino film criticism?

I'm a fan first, a writer second and a critic a distant third. I abandon myself to tone and voice and color, to energy of language and blood in the pulse and the beating to a pulp of all anonymity and objectivity. Cinema is all about wading knee-deep in the mud and getting your feet dirty and sometimes your heart broken. And I always thought film writing--or any kind of writing for that matter--should be as vivid and fervent and as misbehaved and as given over to the moment, not dry like a dissertation. Also, would-be film reviewers should at least know basic grammar. But there should be more film writers, if only to amp the volume of discourse. There are very few of us and the ones that are doing good work--and there are a good number of these already, mind--are either people I know or have met. I want to someday be swept off my feet with awe and envy by a complete stranger's piece. All this, of course, most likely situates me in the margins--which is really where I prefer to be.

If there is one Filipino film that you don't think gets enough attention, what would it be?

A trick question, as there can never be just one. But for now, let me just say that Joey Gosiengfiao's masterpiece is not Temptation Island (1980) as the world seems to think; it's Bomba Star (1980).

POSSIBLE LOVERS

2010-08-05T11:22:00.040+08:00

Possible Lovers

Directed by Raya Martin
Sound Design by Teresa Barozzo

There's almost only one shot in the whole of Possible Lovers. That shot is a static single take of a young man staring longingly at another fast asleep on a couch. They are dressed semiotically, commoner and bourgeoise. You come to that from the found footage of 1919 Manila that came before it, as if grasping for echoes, or straws. It is not acting they do, these two on the couch, not really. It's performance art, almost. It's an endurance test, certainly. Possible Lovers is an experimental film. It's even more experimental than Raya's Next Attraction. But it's not bullish about its experimentalism, Raya's experimental films never really are. The label on the tape says, cheekily, Autohystoria 2. And like Autohystoria, there is an inertia and passivity about it. Unlike Autohystoria, it doesn't build up to anything but rather folds in on its own inertia and passivity. That can be terribly frustating for most people. It's the way an installation piece behaves and at first, it makes sense to come to it as if it were one, but not really. It fails as video art in that, notwithstanding a disregard for structuralist rigor, it's like a James Benning landscape film, and sound is where what little story it's telling is being told, making it co-dependent on the immersive properties of the cinema setting, demanding at some point that you close your eyes and prick up your ears. That may seem like a peculiar demand for a movie to make but it's not as if it hasn't been asked before. There are five ways you can react to Possible Lovers. You can be bored. You can be pissed. You can be at a loss. You can be heartbroken. You can be spellbound. You can go through all five, like I did. You have 95 minutes. There's enough time to run the gamut and back again. Every reaction is valid. Every reaction is correct. It is, in varying degrees, both conceptual hubris and avant mindfuck. It is also a love letter, not a valentine as the love is unrequited, and like all love letters, only one copy of it exists. That copy is on a haggard MiniDV. Every time it gets played, the image remains pristine as it can be but the sound goes to seed. This is the third time it's been played. And the rot is already a lot more profuse. The dropouts and glitches, they're almost like atmospheric conditions, ghosts. Break the title down and that's what this is about. The finitude of love and the cruel ecstasy of possibility and all the ghosts that flit in and out of that dreadful suspension between the two. I wonder how many more times the film will get played. And I think about how one day there will be almost no sound left at all. Almost no story, no love, no possibility. Only that pristine image of longing. And the empty, futile stasis that comes with it.

INCEPTION

2010-07-17T00:07:00.089+08:00

Inception

Directed and Written by Christopher Nolan

Memento had a glint, a loony glee, a grasp of the long con. A movie played backwards is bound to test anybody's threshold for gimmicky,sure, if not wear it down, but Christopher Nolan used to love playing us like this and I used to love him for it. That was before those lumbering, humorless, overpraised, frankly awful superhero farragoes swallowed him and his sense of mischief whole. His oneiric and spry new piece of high pulp, Inception, is his attempt to rescue his aesthetic ethos, his DNA signature as a filmmaker, from the shadow of the Bat, from the Ninth Circle of A-list anonymity. He revisits his old tropes - - - the persistence of memory,the illusory fabric of reality - - - and reheats others that aren't his - - - idea-as-virus memetics is nothing new to anyone who's ever answered an internet meme or read Grant Morrison - - -then reverse-engineers nearly everything that's taken on similar modes of dreamwalk and mindfuck, from Philip K. Dick to Jorge Luis Borges to Alain Resnais to Charlie Kaufman to, more tellingly, Shinya Tsukamoto's Nightmare Detective and Satoshi Kon's Paprika not to mention the exploding sequence in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and the encrypted character-naming the Wachowskis were so fond of (Mal, Eames, Robert Fischer and a girl named Ariadne who draws mazes (get it?)), then metastasizes his influences and makes it wear an oldish suit but sharpened and buffed to a newish sheen. Inception is where Nolan gets to show the world what he can do when more or less left to his own devices with a trustfund to dip into. It is also where he possibly regains a little bit of his soul.

Leonardo DiCaprio is like a high-end corporate spook slash cat burglar here but it's people's dreams he breaks into and it's their vital secrets he steals. His murky backstory - - - he's the only one with a backstory,murky or otherwise - - - involves a bounty on his head, estranged children whose faces he can't remember and a dead wife who keeps dropping in while he's at work and whose ghost he really needs to give up because it's starting to become hell on the career. And he's assembling a team - - -and recruiting a new member so he can have someone to bounce exposition off and possibly mediate his secret turmoil - - - to take on that old saw The One Last Job which,of course,comes with a catch: this time, he has to break into someone's dream and put something in. That something would be to stop world domination by market share - - -the mark is the heir of an energy empire. Inception is essentially, and quintessentially,a caper film with all the givens and a lot on its mind, a REM-sleep Rififi but on a cocktail of placebo smart drugs: more clever than intelligent, more mechanism than fugue, more prudish than diabolical.

And like all caper films, it's all about the team dynamics and the precision planning. The first half is almost pure crackle. And this is where Inception comes most to life, in the recruitment and the debriefing, in the architecture and the walk-through, in the build-up and the prep, and with an almost fetishistic ardor for geometry and clockwork and a visual energy you're not used to from Nolan at that - - - that hallucinogenic city folding into itself and that Escher by way of Tati office building are trumped only by that maddeningly disorienting zero gravity set piece that comes much later. Also, there's a tiny scene tucked into a shadowy corner of the plot inside an opium den for dreamers that's not only a tantalizing germ of an idea in and of itself but the pivot point to a possible alternate ending. Oh, you knew there would at least be one of these. Like Memento, Inception is a puzzle nerd's sex toy, playing into the seeing of things that aren't there and the poring for clues on its surface, and Nolan has custom-built his contraption to provoke that specific misdirection, layering in red-herring teases in the already hectic matrix of its surface, except that what all these will augur if pursued is merely that at some point the real world ends and the dream world begins and it's not where you think it does. All this is juicy enough over a few rounds of beer but isn't particularly complicated nor profound nor even necessary. Who's incepting who? Good question. But don't ask. Nolan's not telling anyway.

The ability to dream within a dream within a dream within a dream is a wondrous conceit and the editing is so fiendish and crisp in the multi-leveled second half it enables that it would do Nolan and his editor Lee Smith, not to mention your own brain, a disservice to be confused. It's RPG gameplay, no more ,no less. And with none of the team nor its mark nor the world in any real danger and with its de facto enemy being a figment of the imagination, it has the fundamental empathic and emotional disconnect of an RPG,too. See, nobody dies in a dream. You die in one you just wake up. Go deeper,though, and dying means you get trapped in your dream and lapse into a semi-vegetative state in the real world for what could be years, meaning your body may be in a coma but in your head you could be having the time of your life, and that's closer to bliss than doom. Perception is reality, after all. Choose your own adventure. Right there is everything Nolan wants to say here. And in the push-pull between art film and event movie, he gets to choose his own adventure,too. By blowing things up. But he gets feverish with the propulsion and viscera of fulfilling his vision on the scale with which he gets to do it that his enthusiasm bleeds all over the propulsion and viscera of the spectacle he straps it on. And much as it isn't as terribly mysterious nor as terribly cerebral as head trips go, as no-brainer theme park mission movie, Inception rides. Like a dream.

I CAN SEE SO CLEARLY WHEN YOUR SMOKE GETS IN MY EYES

2010-07-16T08:37:00.000+08:00

“Punk - or pop, or life - isn't always about keeping the promises you make, but daring to make them in the first place. Despite knowing what's at stake. Maybe even making them because you know what's at stake.” (People Who Died, Jonathan Lethem)

This is a love letter you hold in your hands, a meta valentine. A love letter about love letters disguised as one disguised as something else. Not a fan letter, no. I was never that hardcore into Shonen Knife anyway, so it couldn’t be. This is about them, sure, and about that one muggy night they came here to play, like some artifact emerged from a time capsule, head-banging to cartoon punk rock in matching Mondrian dresses and bearing day-glo shimmers of an aging and maudlin music nerd’s misplaced nostalgia. This is about a hole in my heart. And the revolutions we think we’re staging in our impetuous youths tanked up on the belief we were going to live forever and the debris we sift through when they crumble after realizing we won’t. But mostly this is about how I’ve always wanted to meet the Most Beautiful Girl In The World while reaching for the same CD in a record store. And how I’d all but given up I ever will.

The connections we make with music and the connections music will make between us.

Beatlemania was that hole in my heart. Beatlemania, not really the Beatles. I had the Beatles, even if it wasn’t the way I wanted to have them, which was as current event, as a drop in the zeitgeist. But I was born too late and grew up odd, in the spin cycle of a swiftly tilting planet made from other older people’s pop, swirling around me in manic overlap, the wonky chronology thwarting me from pinpointing when the exact moment was that I fell in love with pop music for life and from pinpointing, too, with what. I stumbled on the Beatles this way. I stumbled on a lot of the music that changed my life this way. As heirloom, as hand-me-down, as stray bullet, as osmosis. It was a task to miss the Beatles, anyway. I liked them. I was partial to the tearjerkers. Eleanor Rigby cut me open even before I had gone through enough life to understand why.

And I wanted to cup them in my hands, tuck them under my pillow, hang them on my bedroom wall. But they were too gigantic and too everywhere and too removed. They were on the car radio. They were embedded in the wallpaper. They were in the atmosphere like vitamins. And they were someone else’s. And my heart longed for a Beatlemania to call my own. Beatlemania may have been some other generation’s frenzy but it was the voluptuous template for a frenzy that could be mine to claim. I owe my Dad and my hippie uncles for encoding me with music,sure. But I was through with the blind dates. I wanted music for a girlfriend but I wanted to fall in love all on my own. I wanted a banner to fall under and colors to fly. I wanted to froth in anticipation over album release dates. I wanted to hoard B sides and I wanted to know all of them by heart. I wanted to be taken over by a fervid piety that could almost pass for church. All these, of course, are the shallower iterations of what it’s like to be a music nerd. But it was also our puberty, the hormonal propellant that would vault my adolescent postures of worship and emulation someplace more promising.

“Pop music will never be , for me, the way it is to most people- - -aromatherapy, furniture, entertainment. It's all that, sure, but it's also a lot more.

Food, meth, fetish, toy, code, love.

Pop , simply put, conjugates my emotional language. The death metal powerchords of my temper flares, the weepy country ballads when love breaks down, the ebullient powerpop of when it sweeps me off my feet, the grim and grotty swamp blues when my hissy fits blacken. That’s how it works, like biology almost.” (excerpt from Wow And Flutter)

I smashed into the years I went avid as a music nerd with a curious lack of omen, with a cassette of Nevermind, really, bought blind before Nirvana detonated, bought because the cover made me laugh and because the title reminded me of the Replacements but not because a radar in me flared up that I was about to take home pop’s next big thing. It was covert to the point of nonchalant. The irony, of course, is that I kept grunge at a distance after that. Nirvana I swore by. And I always liked the thud that came out of Soundgarden. But I thought the rest of the Seattle brouhaha a little misbegotten, overly glum and in need of a party gene. But that cassette of Nevermind was like a bomb had gone off in me. Hell, the 90s was like a bomb had gone off everywhere musically. There were all these other noises to cling to all over and cling I did. Sugar and My Bloody Valentine were heroic, transcendent, all that. Primal Scream, too, at the cusp of the decade when they taught me not to fear the disco inside me and near the end when they cranked things up into a din of glory. Manic Street Preachers before and even after Richey James vanished into the ether of rock and roll myth. There were the first two Suede albums and that one mighty Posies album Don Fleming produced and the Lemonheads album with Rudderless in it and the self-titled Magnapop album I thought no one else in the republic owned or even knew about. Mazzy Star. The Stone Roses. Matthew Sweet. The Magnetic Fields. Beautiful South. Garbage. Beastie Boys. Sleater-Kinney. Beck. Pavement. Teenage Fanclub. Juliana Hatfield. That exquisite Costello-Bacharach hook-up. Everything and anything signed to Sarah Records. And later, moseying down the pike, this tiny uprising called Britpop. Pulp. Radiohead. Elastica. Gene. Paul Weller. And those two. Oasis. Blur. It was a heady time. Where were you while we were getting high?

I remember standing outside an HMV in Hong Kong one morning, waiting for it to open on the day a new Supergrass album was coming out. That morning was to be the height of my Britpop fervor. And I overromanticize it not just out of how I overromanticize everything but also out of how it was the height of my Beatlemania, too. I had come full circle. I had done what I came here for. I had engaged with music with fire and venom and gristle and blood and hurt and lust and love and I had engaged in it as it was happening. The chronology was bang-on. Music is my girlfriend and I had fallen in love with her on my own. That morning was as good as it would ever get. It’s a small thing to make something out of, sure. And few will get it. You’d have to be severely retarded to want for that these days. But, back then, it meant so much to me, much more than merely having a finger on the pulse. Haters tend to piss on Britpop these days for being little more than reductive nostalgia. I’d probably agree in principle. But, if there was anything the 90s, and more particularly the Britpop years, drilled in me, it was a grasp for living in the moment. And even if it didn’t leave me with that, it would be a bitch, and not a little bit dishonest, to be cynical about a time when I was, musically at least, irrevocably happy.

“This is the first day of the future and all I want is you . . .” (Love me Like The World Is Ending, Ben Lee)

I listen to Ben Lee as I walk to the Shonen Knife gig. Weirdly, it’s not 90s Ben Lee I’m listening to. It’s Ben Lee in the new millennium, a little older and a lot less precocious. It’s Ben Lee closer to who I am, really. Love Me Like The World Is Ending is the sort of mildly optimistic bit of mush I’d write if I knew how. Ben Lee,of course, like Shonen Knife, was a marginal presence in the 90s but I don’t think there’s any serendipity here. The song just happens to be how I feel at the moment.

Shonen Knife came into my life by way of the tribute album, Every Band Has A Shonen Knife That Loves It. I sort of dug their songs and I sort of dug around. I came to Let’s Knife soon enough and, really, stopped with that. Oh, I liked them. But Shonen Knife are a cartoon band. Not in a Josie and the Pussycats way, more like in an escapist J-pop way. They played punk rock without the sneer, without the vitriol, without the ideology, without the danger, without the rebel yell. Punk as pure form and filtered through primary-colored rockabilly and girl group pop. And they sang about sushi bars and banana chips and parallel women and flying jellies that attack people. I liked them back then for being like the Ramones, only perkier and poppier and prettier. But I liked them more, I guess, for how they were like taking little zero gravity holidays from meaning anything.

But I’m not sure if I was there that night because I wanted to hear Twist Barbie and Burning Farm live so bad. I’m not sure if I was there just to prove they were actually there and close enough to touch. Maybe I was there for some other reason altogether, one that had nothing to do with Shonen Knife but also one that had,in a way, everything to do with them.

The 90s were a time keening with possibility and fulfillment, not just popwise. I remember walking tightropes day in day out, clinging to schemes with the guts of a commando and the conviction of a penitent and the brio of a revolutionary. And there was no rebuke too damaging, no heartbreak too crippling, that I couldn’t just dust myself off every time I hit a snag. The 90s are gone, of course. And with it, maybe a little of the guts and conviction and brio to go for the things with your name on it. And maybe a little of the belief in my own immortality. Cobain’s dead. Oasis is a bore. The Most Beautiful Girl In The World I was supposed to meet and go off on adventures with is more than likely married with children. The world has moved on to other things. And so have I. I’m also a little older and a little more defeated and a little out of revolutions.

“ . . .maybe you’re the same as me, we see things they’ll never see, you and I are gonna live forever. . .” (Live Forever, Oasis)

But that night, as I stood close enough to Shonen Knife I could touch them if I wanted,I felt a familiar surge. And it’s not at all peculiar nor discouraging that it’s not Liam Gallagher or Damon Albarn singing when this happens. That would have amounted to little more than a pang of nostalgia. But Shonen Knife were never really a part of my past in the same way and their singing songs I never liked enough to call love and hitting a nerve and bringing me back smacked of something palpably now. Time melts and somehow it makes sense that Ben Lee sang to me coming here.

I remembered standing outside that HMV in HK and nursing this feeble hope that maybe, as I reach for a copy of that Supergrass album, the Most Beautiful Girl In The World would reach for the exact same copy, too. She didn’t. And I gave up on what seemed back then a trite, infantile folly. But maybe that morning and all the wild hope it held was this night, too. And the gig was like the last record store at the end of the world. The last stone left unturned in my catalogue of beautiful failures. And it wasn’t trite and infantile to wish for these. Not when I had enough courage and conviction and brio. And maybe I shouldn’t have given up on many things. And maybe it’s not too late.

The connections we make with music and the connections music will make between us, right.

I tell myself this is not 1995 anymore and that maybe I’m too old for this shit. But I’m not very convincing. Not when the stalwart Naoko and statuesque Ritsuko and smoldering Etsuko are singing song after song after song until they melt into each other and into a single joyous racket of possibility and fulfillment. It was like taking a little zero gravity holiday but this time from meaninglessness. By the time they sing " . . .I'm on the top of the world . . .", it’s as if I was. Over the moon and under the influence. What did I tell you back there? It was magic. Man, it was love.

*pictures by Meg Cabanes
*first published in Philippine Free Press

A SHARED LOVE AND A SHARED ART YOU ARE COMPLICIT IN

2010-07-04T10:57:00.005+08:00

PHILIPPINE NEW WAVE: This Is Not A Film Movement

Edited by Khavn De La Cruz with Dodo Dayao & Mabie Alagbate
Introduction by Bienvenido Lumbera
Profiles by Chard Bolisay, Oggs Cruz, & Dodo Dayao
Published by Noel Ferrer, Instamatic Writings, & MovFest
Book Design & Layout by Gerard Lico

"I just need to say THANK YOU for making this! It's a major read for me as we share similar cinematic visions and, among others, political instability. Your book is gold." — Apichatpong Weerasethakul

"The most prominent internationally-acclaimed and wildly divergent digital filmmakers from the Philippines answer questions on filmmaking and beyond: from humble beginnings, to first adventures and unforgettable experiences, to influences and philosophy and process, to what the power of film is, to the true meaning of independence, to what the future holds for cinema, locally and worldwide.

Filmmaker and festival director Khavn De La Cruz throws the questions at them, and gamely answers them himself. The results are at turns informative and insightful, inspirational and illuminating, revealing how diverse the landscape of Philippine Cinema has become, and how much of it is a shared love and a shared art in which you are complicit in."

EDIT: Book launch will be on July 20, Tuesday, 4 pm at the CCP Little Theater. And yes, you will be there.

COLOSSAL YOUTH

2010-06-03T08:45:00.003+08:00

Duckie didn’t get Andie at the end of Pretty In Pink . . .and it felt at first like high treason. John Hughes' teenage movies were like fight songs for the high school underclass, tapping as they did into those overfamiliar dichotomies - - - popular versus unpopular, jock versus nerd, all that - - -and always coming out in favor of the ones who never got to sit at the cool table, the freaks and geeks and dorks and misfits, that entire strata of outcasts. He had our backs.

I don’t remember there being such dichotomies in my high school, though, nor jocks or nerds but rather a curious mixture of both, nor was there a cool table. There was the usual obsession with girls and the usual trouble with them and I’m not sure what strand of empathy I was picking up from Duckie - - -the social retard or the hopeless romantic or maybe both - - -but I rooted for him nonetheless. And the original ending of Pretty In Pink - - - scripted, filmed, not used - - -would have been the ultimate revenge of the nerd. But the one the world saw felt like a test screening cop-out, given over to wishful thinking . . .except maybe it wasn’t too wishful.

John Hughes' teenage movies had the temperament of fairy tales but all that groggy optimism was always undercut by this gnawing anxiety, this creeping melancholia. Duckie and Andie felt like a mortal lock,sure. His fidelity to her was hardcore - - -he was that into her. And when he did that sublime Otis Redding lipsynch, well. . . wasn’t it almost heroic? Try a little tenderness, Andie - - -what's not to love? Looking back, though, Duckie ending up with Andie was wishful thinking and Andie ending up with Blaine was probably the purest hit of reality in the entire Hughes ouevre. . .unless Duckie ended up with Blaine, which is another story and another Brat Pack filmmaker. Giving Duckie a hot girl as consolation prize was sort of the cop-out. What was a boy in love going to do with a bombshell? Well . . plenty, really, but you know what I mean,fellow boys in love. Still. The petty,percevied betrayal turned out to be just that - - petty and perceived.

There was no going back after that for me,though. The spell had been broken, the gauze lifted ,the cycle ground to a halt. There was no going back after that for John Hughes either - - -his lapse into the immensely lucrative blandness of safe as milk adult comedies and preteen slapstick came almost immediately after, followed by semiretirement, and sadly, his untimely, albeit serene, passing. That the six high school movies he left behind - - - -of which Ferris Bueller is what the world upholds as the height of his powers but I'm more partial to the hormonal anarchy of Weird Science - - - have become touchstones of several generations comes as no surprise: youth movies tend to have that totemic charge. 400 Blows, Napoleon Dynamite, Dazed and Confused, Battle Royale, Linda Linda Linda. All these pivot thematically on the knotty interior politics of a specific time in your life, but they also had this exuberant cockiness, this finite surge of invincibility that's almost empowering even if it often mixes with a resentful sense of loss and even if it lasts only a little while and mostly in your head.

Not so odd ,then, that I'm remembering John Hughes' death just now, a little belatedly. The birthday is around the pike and I get a little more maudlin than usual this time of year. And there's also been a lot of disquiet and vertigo lately, the repercussions of too much happening too fast still- - too many conversations cut short, too many status quos shifting, too many disappearing acts,too many irreversible goodbyes. A part of it has to do with receding into the warm corners of nostalgia, looking for places to hide for a little bit. But mostly I'm harnessing that exuberant cockiness. God knows how much time I've got left on my side but I'm thinking this empowering surge will prop me up long enough to ask that pretty girl in pink for a last dance. And maybe the movie ends differently. Maybe. Just this once.

ANG HIMPAPAWID (THE HEAVENS)

2010-05-12T14:47:00.019+08:00

Ang Himpapawid (The Heavens)
Directed by Raymond Red
Written by Raymond Red and Ian Victorino

NOTE: The real Ang Himpapawid was to be Raymond Red's first feature. It is to this day unmade and exists in two forms. One as the short film A Study for the Skies. And the other as a glimmer in the filmmaker's eye. The following speculates on how the film might have been had it been made the way it was intended. The piece was originally published in the UNO April 2010 fiction issue.

“Poetry is nearer to vital truths than history.” – Plato

History’s always been more toy and maybe riddle to Raymond Red, something to play with and crack, to ransack and suspect, to bother and tweak. The doyens of the mainstream always come to history as if it were plutonium or dogma, that is, with wariness and reverence, and the fallout is blah, wimpy, cushy, safe - - - Jose Rizal, right. Raymond’s three historical fictions run less on set design and textbook exactness but more on dialectical fumes, not buying into the perceived truths of the subjects it hones in on, cross-examining the scuttlebutt, inventing wild theories. And each one feels, in varying degrees, like some aesthetic cage match between the budding classicist and the berserker experimentalist in him. Granted, Sakay (1992) was a stalemate. And the avant-garde tingles in Bayani (Hero) (1991) will crank up empathically, Raymond tells us, in the new cut he’s readying. It’s his obscure first feature, Ang Himpapawid (The Heavens) (1990) - - - the one that almost never got made, the one that Roman Coppola came this close to producing, the one that started life as an aborted fairy tale installation piece made up of slides - - - that fully realizes this delightful frisson. Conceived in embryo as a Super8 feature and at first given over to the organic tangents that specific pairing of form and format anticipated, Raymond shot it finally on 16mm, perhaps to save himself a few headaches, but without sedating its fevered exoticism.

In thumbnail a historical fantasy, but envisioned with a finicky verisimilitude, Ang Himpapawid, set in the twilight of the Philippine-American war and sheathed in dreamy expressionist tangles, is centered by two childhood friends turned freedom fighters - - - Julian (Rene Aquitania) with his head in the clouds and Pedro (Jeffrey Tigora) with his hand on the rifle trigger. Both have a vivid dream of freedom and an even more vivid dream of taking flight to attain it. And in lulls between the spurts of gorgeously-realized conflict, both conspire to jerry-build - - - with little more than a gusto verging on the naïve and spilling over into the nutty and whatever spoils and detritus they can amass - - - an aeroplane that can fly them away to the freedom of their dreams. As one flying contraption after another fails, their obsession turns fevered and combative , embroiling themselves unwittingly in a secret war of their own making against the enemy. Less a historical pastiche as it is an allusive parable on the mechanisms of beautiful failure, Ang Himpapawid could well be Raymond’s sneaky allegorization of his filmmaking process and the turbulent backstory of his film .

No work from the birth pangs of indie seemed to cry for a second look more. Or a third. And a third of many, at that. The noise the critics made was enthusiastic, but sparse for something as freighted with expectancy, with pedigree. But I missed this one in its first run out of having neither the age nor the will nor the curiosity. All that would come later but by then it had flown under the radar, and into a cultural fog, and I would finish up infatuated, for years, with a ghost.

The good news, of course, is that the centerpiece of the new Raymond Red retrospective, which swings from his first battery of shorts to his sinewy new Himpapawid (Manila Skies) is the belated return of Ang Himpapawid ,out of mothballs and back into the light at last. A film this loaded with vulnerabilities, it might help to leverage expectations a little before going to see it, undo the ribbons of fabulous rumor that has since mummified the piece, but not really by much, and I know this because that’s as far as I get. I was still dosed up coming in, prone to letdown. And I kept waiting for it to drop. And it wouldn’t. Not with the pulpy arcana of its parade of aeronautic malfunctions. Not with the stumblebum band of guerillas. Not with the way you can’t tell the corporal from the corporeal. Not with that coup de grace sleepwalking sequence that it turns out wasn’t in the script. It feels like one long mysterious and beautiful and maddening surge of cognitive dissonance. It also feels like his masterpiece.

Ang Himpapawid folds itself into a wrinkle in time with as much speculative fervor as Ang Magpakailanman (Eternity) (1983). And more than Raymond’s later, more sober historical fictions, it is this meta-textual and meta-textural faux-antique, predating Guy Maddin and equal parts Brakhage and Murnau and apparition, and more historical science-fiction than anything, that Ang Himpapawid feels of a piece with, trembling, as it does with the same metaphysical solemnity, the same aesthetic nerve, the same puckish mischief. In its sublime final shot, where everything is explained and nothing is, the film opens up a brand new universe of possibility and in the gap between two worlds - - - classical and experimental, mainstream and independent, fact and fiction, captivity and emancipation - - - crosses over from the wounded lie of history into the vital truth of poetry.

*First published in UNO April 2010

LET'S GET LOST

2010-04-28T17:51:00.007+08:00

You asked me if I planned all this, I could sense a hum of worry in your voice, as if regretting the question even before you finished asking it. This was when I could still sense things like that. I meant it when I said no. And maybe you felt that I meant it. I hope you did. You kissed me before you went to sleep. Pink neon as a kind of mint with murmurs of nicotine was how it tasted. Also, relief. It was a kiss that would have taken us to such great heights if the timing had been different, timing being everything. But that night in Chungking, that night I lay awake until morning listening to you breathe, that would be the whole of our brief encounter, that would be the first and last time I went there, that would be the last time I saw you. I always thought I’d see you again. And no, I didn’t mean it to be that way either.

Sinatra was wrong. HK, not NY, is the city that doesn’t sleep - - -and doesn’t let you get much either. I sleep light when I’m there, so light that it doesn’t really count as sleep anymore. I’m not sure why that is and how much of it is merely my biology reacting to the telemetry of a foreign city nor why it happens every time I’m there nor why it only happens there. Everywhere else, I drift into baby sleep. Here, I sometimes don't sleep at all. All the foreign cities I’ve been to tend to activate some measure of displacement in me and that comes, of course, with some measure of giddiness. But this is special. Could be it’s the constant blare of neon like some rogue filament of caffeine in my blood. Could be it’s the tumult of endorphin all of us get from going to places we haven’t been before only I’ve been here too many times and every time it’s the same. Could be radiations of a collective pre-millennial anxiety except little seemed to change during my post-millennial trips. Could be I’m over-romanticizing matters. Could be it’s all in my head. Whatever it is, this groggy and vibrant out-of-body wake state has become my default setting for HK. But I am, I suspect, alone in this. My HK is not likely everybody else’s HK. But it is, in many ways, the same HK as Wong Kar Wai’s. This groggy and vibrant out-of-body wake state is the climate and tenor of his lovelorn cinema.

The bleed between the two HKs was eventual and the reasons for that are more banal than anything else. I came to both at roughly the same time and under roughly the same emotional weather. I stayed, more by accident than design, at Chungking Mansions my first time there and a few weeks later, I saw my first Wong, Chungking Express, which was set in Chungking Mansions. The equivalences, if not cosmic, are quintessential Wong. I was heartbroken my first trip to HK and through some divine arrangement, or divine cruelty if you will, I would be in a heightened emotional state, not necessarily heartbreak but some permutation of it, every time I came back. The converging of opponent sensations until they taste the same - - rapture and agony, ecstasy and despair - - - has always been the sumptuous tang of Wong’s cinema and the sumptuous tang of every trip I take to HK. The overlap could be mere coincidence. But things are never as simple as mere coincidence in Wong’s HK.

Wong’s HK isn’t the HK of Johnnie To and Fruit Chan, no. I love their HKs, too. As much, sometimes more. But Wong’s HK is a skittish organism all its own, a city that seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown, amok with dilapidated lovelifes, persistent with memory, translucent with melancholia, hopelessly devoted to the frantic pursuit of fugitive and maddening and slippery love and where the random collision of strangers is not as random as you think and sometimes it can be a bitch to tell where happenstance ends and fate begins or if there’s any difference between the two.

HK is perpetually alive with a siege of ghosts , coloring the aura, configuring the atmosphere.

Foreign cities emit sensations of getaway and bewilderment. I get that from HK,too. But pickled with a rarefied quality by the sensations I associate with these ghosts : a kind of heightened catharsis that invigorates even the most melancholic of situations. I've come here twice, deep in romantic harm ,and HK always had a way to make it hurt so good.

HK is ,simply put, my hot zone for all the colours of romance : metaphoric and abstract, specific and displaced, wistful and heartbroken.(excerpt from Episode of China Blonde)

“Do you believe in love?”

Not as simple to answer as you think as it falls prey too easily to cynicism. It’s a cop-out but it’s not as if you can blame anyone who succumbs. Love isn’t exactly making it easy for anyone to believe in it, and it doesn’t seem to give much of a shit either, which might be the whole point. I do, of course. And that’s about as defiant of fashion these days as the allegiance I pledge to Wong Kar Wai’s cinema. Wong seems to believe in it, too. Every regret is just a stopover, muses the forlorn hitman in Fallen Angels, and everybody needs a partner. That this sentiment prevails as the sovereign locus of Wong’s work outs me more than it does him,though. There’s an exquisite sadness to his endings, sure - - -the serenely devastating Angkor Wat sequence from In The Mood for Love milks me dry every time. But the malfunctioning desire he traps has always, for the most part, evoked inexorability more than futility for me. Everybody’s lost in space in his movies, fumbling to master that inarticulate speech of the heart, waiting for some emotional rescue or the other, and when it comes, if it comes, you get this sense that it’s fated even if it gets hurtful and confusing and messy. After all, Bacharach did say that " . . . true love never runs smooth". And the loveliest things in life are the ones that are a bit of a mess. And his bad-hair-day lovefools, his wistful bittersweethearts, his romantic depressive misfits - - - if they weren’t so beautiful, I could be one of them.

Somewhere between the Sarah Records compilation There and Back Again Lane and the Magnetic Fields’ The Wayward Bus-Distant Plastic Trees twofer, the speed takes hold and dim sum breakfast thoughts slide into oblivion, my vertigo decompresses.

I should’ve known better. I should've seen it coming. Hong Kong was my favorite piece of geography on the planet, second only to my mother's hometown in Lipa. I made love to three women in Hong Kong. Three women who would break my heart. Three women equal in my desire for, fealty to, fear of. Three women whose gunk had seeped into the cracks. And the last of them was still radioactive. Stepping out of the Causeway Bay subway terminal, I was hit with that gush of bodies, a gush she had felt weirdly comforting. I was feeling the exact opposite right now, a pang swelling doughlike in my gut, but not hunger, no. I knew. Stranded during a weekend lunchtime in Tsimtshatsui last time we were here, it had taken nearly three hours for us to find a place to eat and not the Chinese she wanted. She was simmering to a boil that wouldn't rise throughout the meal. Coming home hours later,exhausted from walking and from settling for so-so Japanese, we spot this little noodleshop next door to the guest house in Fu Kuong, and laugh ourselves silly. We never got the chance to try it, though. Waking up this morning with a craving for sharksfin dumplings and beef wanton noodles and almond jelly, I remembered the place. I was voguing on what to eat on the train ride from Mongkok. And I was starving even before my stop. This pang was on top of that. A more bullheaded, a more ruthless, a more indomitable pang to quell. Clairvoyance would help, time travel, amnesia. This pang, this distress signal, this spider sense warning me about the nearness of things going dogshit, of the ghosts about to whack me with flashback of that weekend, the happiest weekend of my life. the foregone conclusion of for keeps. Then, despite all the warnings, it hits me, without warning, like a prizefighter’s mean hook. Mentally, my teeth rattle.

I took out an old film canister from my jacket pocket. Inside were four capsules of prescription speed. I swallow one dry and take refuge in the nearest HMV I could spot. (excerpt from the unpublished short story A Song For Whoever)

For a time, the ceiling of my movie love would be everything Wong Kar Wai did. The groovy ellipses, the jittery swoon. There was something narcotic in the manner of the way it sucked me in but little to do with the way Chris Doyle could light a scene so it attains this benign psychedelic sexiness, which would make my drug allusions a little trite. No, it had more to do with the mechanisms of addiction, the way I would voraciously consume and re-consume the works, as if trying to crack an uncrackable code. His is a cinema devoted to the mesh and magnetism of stories, to the pattern recognitions of love and heartbreak, to the poetry of people. His is a cinema after my own heart and after my own heartbreak. And I’ve seen and loved nearly everything Wong has made - - - I uphold even his erratic 2046 and his much-reviled My Blueberry Nights but not so much his BMW ad- - - and in a mildly blasphemous inversion, it was his work that brokered my love for Jean Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais, rather than the other way around. But it’s Chungking Expressthat I’ve seen more than 12 times. At least. Not only is it my favorite Wong Kar Wai movie, it’s my favorite movie full stop and who knows for sure why that is. Others supersede it time and again with as much fervor and as much love - - -Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Tsai Ming Liang’s What Time is It There? , Godard’s Band of Outsiders, Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Antonioni’s L’Ecclise- - - and all of these seem to converge on the same playful surrealism, the same wistful melancholia and for at least three of them, a guarded but won-over optimism about the nearness of happiness. But that’s as close as I can get to parsing my love for it and it’s not as if you can actually parse the mad, unstable love you feel for anything. I keep coming back to Chungking out of loving it just a little bit more than the others, though. Equal parts Godard and guerilla, it hangs brightly in some pre-millennial HK of the heart, it’s the most kinetic movie about stasis and the most romantic movie about breaking up, a love letter to the tiny spaces that connect and disconnect people. It orbits around two cops navigating the tailend of a jilt. Cop 223 finds fleeting solace in a henchwoman wearing a blonde wig out of John Cassavetes’ Gloria. And Cop 663, in the girl he buys his ex’s dinner from, embodied luminously by Faye Wong.

I fell in love with Faye at first sight just as she did when she first sees Tony Leung’s cop, which is the first time we see him, too, through her smitten eyes. Faye may have something to do with my Chungking devotion. Not Faye herself but the way her arc articulates the romantic confusion that is the story of my life. Chungking is almost a romantic comedy but one untethered to the protocols of dating and the rules of attraction and all that social drudgery that makes chick flicks and modern day big city romance such a drag. It's surrendered instead to the machinations of a grander design. More poetic, more cosmic. After Cop 663 comes to his senses that she’s in love with him, he asks her out on the date she can't wait for him to ask her out on. Faye promptly stands him up and goes off to see the world, leaving behind a boarding pass drawn on a table napkin. When she returns a year later , the napkin is soggy and the pass unreadable that she has to write him a new ticket. “Where do you want to go?” she asks him. “Wherever you want to take me.” Wow and flutter.

I haven’t been back there in a long while. Someday, someway, I will. And maybe I’ll see you there, whoever you are, whoever you will be. And maybe this time you’ll leave with me. We can go deep into the city, with its din of color, where the ghosts and the stories are. We go there without a map. And without a plan. And maybe this time, we get so lost, we’ll never have to say goodbye.

*First published in Philippine Free Press

YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET

2010-04-28T17:47:00.010+08:00

Anna Karina, all she had to do was run through the Louvre to take my breath away, steal my heart. She didn't have to dance , but when she did, it was too much and my heart sort of broke a little. She broke Jean Luc Godard's heart,too. That's what exes do. And sometimes muses.

Anna K's a fantasy of mine. Not that sort, but that'll do, too - - -the woman is digable , I'm not blind. I do prefer Yoko, in principle, for standing by her man, never leaving. I'd rather have a Yoko ,all told. I heart the long haul. Jean-Luc, he may have had Jean Seberg in A Bout De Souffle , Brigitte Bardot in Le Mepris, Chantal Goya in Masculin Feminin but Anna K had this perilous radiance none of them had and, with or without knowing the backstory, you get this sense of a lot more at stake, which is how it should be with muses. And Anna K was the proper, righteous, consummate muse. Jean-Luc never stood a chance.

True story taken from Garrison Keillor by way of Jonathan Carroll - -"Robert Louis Stevenson was passing by the window of a house one night in France when he looked inside and fell instantly in love with a woman he saw eating dinner with a group of her friends. Stevenson stared at her for what seemed like hours, and then opened the window and leapt inside. The guests were shocked, but Stevenson just bowed and introduced himself. The woman was an American named Fanny Osborne. They fell in love and got married a few years later."

I saw Vivre Sa Vie some time back and it will become the Godard closest to my heart. The resident awe for Anna K's face, parts of it, if not most of it, like some porno of that visage. Everything begins with a face you can't escape. Even before the first word is spoken. Even before the first transfer of energies. Even before the parts match. The longing to connect. The urge to pursue. The thundering desire for love. The face reduces you to tongue-tied, sniveling, social deficiency. The face makes you palpitate like a caffeine drip. I have a wobbly theory that none of us are ever sucked in by a fat chance, none of us crush for longshots. There's no empirical evidence - - - how can there be? But it hasn't failed me yet so maybe I'm on to something. Love at first sight is not some wayward phenomenon, it's the standard. I don't know you. But I want you. All the more for that. Right.

She was the kind of young that would make me look like a perv, radiant and out of reach but catching no one else's nonchalant gaze but mine.

She was the best kept secret borne from fleeting encounters, remarkable for how the imprint got stickier and stickier with each run-in.

Is that you, my Anna K? Will you run through the Louvre with me? Could you be loved?

Bravado is an also-ran as I think about Anna Karina,about my own first sighting burning holes in my eyes, as I listen to Roky Erickson's You Don't Love Me Yet and Death Cab for Cutie's I Will Possess Your Heart one after the other, which is sort of trite and so is trying to imbibe the courage of its convictions - - - the cock of its bull as it were - - - but I don't care and do so anyway.

Jean-Luc said once that all a movie needs to sell tickets is a girl and a gun - - -a theory that somehow applies to everything.

A girl and a gun, yeah. Shooting at the walls of heartache. Bang bang.

*Previously published in Philippine Free Press and Swank

HEAD ABOVE WATER: LIVE FOM PLANET ROX

2010-01-03T20:39:00.006+08:00

It had all the come-on of a museum installation, that random labyrinth in Roxlee’s backyard, made from the junk Typhoon Ondoy made of things. Stacks of laserdiscs, vinyl records, cassettes, DVDs, CDs, all bereft of sleeve, strewn all over. The machineries that would have brought them to life lined an entire wall, meshing into a single sculptural mass of wire and cord and parts, water-damaged beyond usable. Resting against a far corner is an unlabeled can of 35mm film - - - with the film still inside. All this actually makes me cringe a little more than the sight of SUV roofs protruding from black water.

Rox and his wife and kids and his brother Romeo live in this five storey tower block. And Ondoy had laid waste to the whole of the ground floor. At the height of the storm, with power outages and communication breakdown amplifying the anxieties of everyone who knew people in the submerged areas, worried texts from friends asking how they were and had they made contact flew in frantic ricochet from one mobile to the next. But the place is a stronghold. Higher ground was always just one flight of stairs away or two. Virtually everybody who knew the brothers has been here at some point. And hung out on the roof deck that overlooked everything. If the place was under water that would mean the entire city was. So of course it wasn’t. In the thick of the deluge, it even doubled as a refugee ark for their waterlogged neighbors. Rox was, at some point, if you remember, a kind of indie cinema Moses, bearing not 10 but 13 commandments for every aspiring D.I.Y. filmmaker. Picturing him as a kind of monsoon Noah fits.

Rox is giving me a sort of guided tour of the detritus. Here are the tools of his trade - - -a 16mm projector, an 8mm camera, two Handycams - - - all wearing the patina of fatal gunk, beautiful in death. “Wala na ‘yan.” ( “They’re gone.” ) he says. He seems unfazed. Could be he’s had time to get over it. The Mini DV camera he’s been shooting his new films with was spared, after all, along with the Bolex and that warhorse 35mm camera. But then, Rox always wore this aura of unfazed. I’m the one who feels tiny pangs of regret, which spike a bit when he shows me an actual 16mm print of an untitled 11 minute collaboration with his brother Mon, fused into an unplayable wither. I wonder aloud how the film would look if we projected it in this condition. Rox just laughs the laugh of a man who has done that sort of thing before. And, it turns out, he has.

It was this other film, years ago, the title of which escapes him as he tells me the story. He was delivering a 16mm print to UP for a screening and was running a little late when the can of film fell from his bag. The lid came loose un-spooling the print onto the street where it lay, vulnerable as a tongue. Before he could retrieve it, several cars had already ran over it. Ever heard the one about imagining yourself sliding down a banister that suddenly turns into a razor blade midway through? This is the equivalent of that cringe-making joke for filmmakers - - -heavy traffic grinding your film into the asphalt minutes before people see it. But Rox, he just calmly spooled it back into the can, headed for the venue and screened the damaged film. “Mas gumanda pa nga e.” (“It actually looked better.”) he laughs. It’s like something out of Cesar Asar, the sly and absurdist and surreal and immortal comic strip he did with his other brother Mon.

For all its unhinged cheek, Cesar Asar, was a cross-generational touchstone that both boosted his mainstream stock, nestled as it was in the pages of the conservative Manila Bulletin, but also further insulated his cult. Nobody thought to qualify its subversive peculiarities as ahead of its time out of how much of its time it was - - -some rather strange fans at some point even pored regularly over the strips for codes, secreted allegedly in the art, from which to decrypt jai-alai numbers to bet on, numbers which, funnily enough,won. “Hindi man lang ako nakatanggap ng balato” (“I never even got a cut”) Rox laughs.

But here we are in the thick of an indie comic boomlet and that handsome volume curating the Planet of the Noses arc is often blithely passed over for the transliterated superheroes and supernatural mysteries and secondary world tripe (yawn) that excite domestic comic geekdom. “I sell more books in Japan.” Rox says, as he should - - - it’s not much of a reach to imagine Planet of the Noses tickling wild fancies there. Suddenly, though, ahead of it’s time doesn’t ring like the mother of all clichés. “Nobody who could push for it pushed Cesar Asar for syndication back then.” Rox laments the possibility stunted. “I think it had a strong chance of being picked up. It’s universal because it’s very visual.” I agree. Dialogue would be the downfall of the film Rox made of it. He tinkers with it from time to time, hoping to find a way to make it work a little better. But it’s the rest of the Cesar Asar oeuvre I’m interested in. I mention anthologizing it but Rox fears most of the strips have been waylaid in the chaos of moving house. Shame. Hands down the mightiest local comic strip ever, then and now, Cesar Asar deserves a full-hog anthology, if only to trap a moment in his career that Rox looks back to with a giddy fondness.

An exhaustive - - - albeit incomplete unless he agrees to play that soggy print - - - film retrospective is more promising, as future prospects go. Two years ago, Rox was one of the objects of tribute at the .MOV film festival. And a handful of his films were screened - - - including the out-there Lizard: Or How To Perform In Front of a Reptile, which I saw for the first time then and was a brand on my brain since. But his corpus is vast. Animation has always been Rox’s métier and his irreverent, evocative, hand-drawn shorts are mostly glorious. But I’m more partial to his films - - -the experimental brio, the wry looseness, the vigorous glee. And the way some of them got under my skin. Like Lizard. And like Juan Gapang (Johnny Crawl), which was my first blast of Roxlee’s non-animated cinema. Pre-indie, pre-digital, pre-everything, it was made under his own steam with a little help from his friends. D.I.Y. filmmaking was , even back then, fortified by such communal ramparts. For a time, the only filmmaker who owned a 16mm camera was Kidlat Tahimik, and everyone borrowed it to make films they would later watch in some basement, projected on a sheet - - - a literal underground cinema. What I would’ve given to see Juan Gapang for the first time under those conditions. But no, I saw it in college. But it was still full-on synaptic broil.

What Juan Gapang meant to me at first was being fed through the disorienting crackle of some alien voltage, a sensation I would eventually associate with every experience of stumbling into a hitherto unseen mode of cinema. Experimental cinema of any make and model was zero footprint to me back then. Lynch and Brakhage and Warhol would come into my life much,much later. And to someone with a headful of nothing but the crassest Hollywood pop, Juan Gapang was like a hit from some truly arcane opiate stash. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it at first. Nor how to feel after. Creeped-out, amused, a little seasick. It is, to this day, my favorite work of Rox’s.

What Juan Gapang meant to me later, along with Kidlat Tahimik’s Sino’ng Lumikha Ng Yoyo? Sino’ng Lumikha Ng Moon Buggy? (Who Invented The Yoyo? Who Invented The Moon Buggy?) and Raymond Red’s Ang Magpakailanman (The Eternal) - - - both of which I remember seeing for the first time within that same year - - - was my first glimmer of an Other in Philippine cinema, the height of which for me, at that time, was a handful of comedies and maybe one or two pop Brockas. It was a seminal moment.

There’s always been a schism between mainstream and independent. But is blurring the divide the point? Or are we better off sharpening it, instead , into relief? The mainstream will always have its insurgents, the independents its fence-jumpers. But overlap is a utopia in need of a reality check. And the presence of an Other in art is almost necessary. Kicking against the pricks, spanner in the works, ghost in the machine, all that. Not that I get confirmation but I’m sure Rox would agree. His Sinekalye seemed to pivot from this stance, ripening an exclusive environment for filmmakers to cook their work and make it sing without intrusion and qualifiers. Much as they’re welcome to crash the party, I’m not sure his 13 commandments were aimed at anyone looking to be careerist teleserye directors and would unlikely sway them anyway.

Rox beams a little when he talks about younger filmmaker friends who have struck out on their own,as if they were charges, or sons - - -Brillante Mendoza,who was his PD for a few of his early films, Lav Diaz, whom he’s known as far back as their days at Jingle when Lav hadn’t even shot a single second of footage, Khavn de la Cruz, who was an acolyte and whose aesthetic hews closest to Rox’s.

Rox himself continues to work, imbibe his ethos. He tells me he’s finished a new and better cut of Romeo Must Rock, his valentine to brother Romeo. And he plans on tinkering with 35mm Man next. His experimental documentary on Juan Baybayin, Green Rocking Chair , fresh off a stint at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival a few months back, may be a kinder, gentler universe removed from,say, Juan Gapang or Lizard , but it is a warm and funny and in parts even touching piece. More than that, he made it in 2008.

The day I swung by to visit, it’s been almost a month since Ondoy and the house has been wiped clean of all its traces - - - no more mud on the walls, no more refugee neighbors. Rox is reclining on one of the many hammocks hung all over the place. Fatherhood and domesticity may have warmed Rox, but I’m not sure the old saw of how these twin poisons bring aesthetic ruin to artists applies to him. Go by the way he howls as Akira Brocka in the noisepop un-band the Brockas and the wild man peg is easy to come by. But brother Romeo is the wild thing in the family and even then, not by as much as you might think. Passive nonchalance has always been Rox’s default setting. On one hand, it’s the purest iteration of cool I’ve seen. But it’s also the nexus of his aesthetic - - - Rox is a man who doesn’t try too hard. And it colors his work to a refreshing degree.

He’s shooting his next film in Lubang and he’s shooting it in January and according to him, “Maganda doon pag ganung buwan.” (“It’s lovely there that time of year.”) He’s not sure where he’ll get the funding but no ripple of worry mars his visible eagerness at the prospect. It’s the way Rox is. And this is what filmmakers do. And more than his 13 commandments, it is this unwritten 14th commandment that matters above all: thou shalt shut up and make films.

*originally published in Phil. Free Press

INDEPENDENCIA

2009-12-15T21:34:00.023+08:00

Independencia
Directed by Raya Martin
Written by Raya Martin and Ramon Sarmiento

The enchanted forest that predominates Independencia, set during the first days of the American occupation, is a spooky and exquisite fake, closer to delirium than setwork - - - pattern recognition with counterfeit rain and skies made from paint.

Into its verdant recesses repair a mother and her son bedeviled by invaders and forced to flee their home- - - Tetchie Agbayani in full-on voodoo seethe and stumblebum Sid Lucero - - - and later a young girl - - - slightly anonymous Alessandra De Rossi - - - raped by soldiers with Roosevelt handlebars, who begets a half-breed boy. The story it’s telling has the aura of vapor. A ghost story, really, like nearly everything Raya does. A story of an exile so utter, a freedom if you will, that everyone who undergoes it all but disappear completely, consumed, become like ghosts. And much as it may pulsate and tremor and eventually breach, from inside this tenuous adoptive Eden, history- - - erratic, rogue, malleable history , the conspirational lie we’re all complicit in - - - is all but rumor and smoke.

What Raya is in the middle of here is his vividly referential historical trilogy with its deceptively simple and rather elegant conceit - - - run three specific periods of our history that have been colored by struggle through past pre-eminent, almost anachronistic cinematic vocabularies. Then mine the dissonance. Ignore, then, any dismissals - - and there are quite a few floating around, you’d be surprised - - - that it looks artificial, that in parts it looks half-finished, that it’s the pitfalls of not having enough money to shoot in an actual forest. That’s a little like whining that porn has too much nudity. That’s a little like missing the point. That’s a little, like, dumb.

Form has always been crucial to his aesthetic more than you think , making it always crucial to look at form squarely in the eye. And Raya is often at his most vivid and his most alive,and really his most joyous, when he indulges his fetish for manipulating form, which tends to shift shapes from one film to the next, and with a perverse and devilish changeling glee at that, juicing up his manipulations. Not so much assimilating these archaic tropes as re-purposing them into vectors of postmodern strangeness. Like the silent film textures that blanket Maicling Pelicula Nang Ysang Indio Nacional, set during the last days of the Spanish occupation, once so quaint, now possessed of this eerie unsettling beauty, putting Raya on the map but loosing, too, a tumult of lazy if not entirely avoidable Guy Maddin parallels. And Independencia has its fairy tale soundstage of a forest, effervescent throwback to Masaki Kobayashi ,to FW Murnau, to Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies.

As taken as I am with the camcorder crudities of Now Showing and the way it evoked the fickleness and banality and warmth of nostalgia , not to mention the grimy and petrified snuff film sheen that bears out the claustrophobic nihilism of Autohystoria, the fever dream forest here has enough hallucinatory torque to thrust you whole into that immersive otherness, into that alternate reality, where tree gods bask in the rivers and you hunt for food dressed as bamboo birds and sometimes you lose your way and need to turn your shirt inside out to get back home.

Both allusion and illusion and throbbing with metatextual vigor, it could well be Raya’s most ravishing manipulation yet, and also his most disquieting, if only for how it’s both milieu and metaphor, and for its determined insistence that everything here - - - the very notion of independence alluded to in the title included - - - is nothing but a seductive, bewitching lie.

*Originally published in UNO.

KINATAY

2009-11-01T23:30:00.059+08:00

Kinatay (The Execution of P)
Directed by Brillante Ma. Mendoza
Written by Armando Lao

The heart of darkness Kinatay plumbs is a black hole we know, but couch in the cozy swaddle of urban legend, of things that happen to other people. Because confronting them without that measure of remove, without that deniability at arms' length, puts us too far out in harm’s way for comfort,makes us fair game.

But nearly everybody has a third person rogue cop story, or knows somebody who knows somebody who does, of men with guns and abductions in the night, of death squads and body parts in sackcloth, of devilish deeds done dirt cheap. I tend to cold sweat on impulse at the sight of checkpoints myself. I'm overreacting,sure, but none of that anxiety is mere caprice. Kinatay has night-thoughts to rummage through,alright. Enough verite to tap. Buttons to push.

But not agendas. Kinatay spews from firsthand moral outrage - - -Mendoza's, Lao's - - -but doesn't politicize nor exoticize nor even outrightly address it. It's apolitical. And amoral. And in a way that does little but thicken its soup of dread 'til we're choking on it, gasping for air. It's a closed-in half-lit morally blank world Coco Martin's rookie cop - - -and us along with him - - -is marooned in without coordinates,a world of permanent midnight and spatial displacement where malevolence is the hunch of a lieutenant's back and Hell, a nondescript spare room turned makeshift abbatoir.

And it's tone is of a chilling passivity that neither gets as nosy nor as horny as tortureporn ,which it sort of is, albeit wth the volume turned way way down, a real time abstraction if you will, a horror movie bereft not only of gory sensation - - -the controversial raping and torturing and beating and slaying and dismembering is a dimly-lit battery of master shots verging on unseeable- - - but also of ways out - - -an almost unbearable sequence during a detour to buy balut on a beer run and an even more unbearable one near the end when a cab gets a flat and the bravura van ride that knots coils in my gut still and that last shot and the harrowing pointlessness of it all. It's deadened and deadening.

The word "salvage" may have re-entered the vernacular freighted with an alarming new meaning but it's also freighted with an alarming currency that wears off the scald over time. Salvage victims are mostly nobodies anyway,other people. And who cares what perversities are visited on a haggard old whore ,moreso one who's dim enough to think she can dupe rogue cops of their drug loot? Repulsed. Desensitized. These are the emotional polarities of salvage. And these,too,are the emotional polarities of Kinatay. It can either burrow under your skin and breed cultures of unease. Or it can numb you into feeling nothing. Both, of course, is the desired effect.

NOW SHOWING

2009-10-30T09:08:00.009+08:00

Now Showing
Directed and Written by Raya Martin

"(Nostalgia) is delicate but potent. . . in Greek, it literally means the pain from an old wound.It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone." - Don Draper, Mad Men

Lovely Rita, the girl who leaps through time here, had a movie star for a grandmother who wore a dress spun from gold, that now hangs from a nail on the door, a yellowing ghost leeched of its exuberance much like Rita herself, making the rent as a teenager from the hawking of bootleg DVDs

Coming of age stories, the sugar pill of arthouse, tend to heighten the mythic in the banal. Raya Martin’s Now Showing, ostensibly a coming of age story, taps into these banalities, rather, for the despair and beauty of impermanence. The past is a forever fragmenting thing, forever slippery, forever changing shape, making every memory implicitly flawed and implicitly precious. Retro is what nostalgia is often mistaken for. But retro's passive - - -the weak shit of the time-locked. Nostalgia has a lot more at stake - --a rescue mission but always with casualties.

Of a throb with avant-garde diary films like Khavn’s Memory of Forgetting and Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost in the way it parses for mesh in disjuncture, teasing membranes of story from random found life vignettes, it's not as if Raya is splicing together his own found life - - -he's merely co-opting the syntax. Now Showing is a triptych bookended by the two halves of Rita - - -the prepubescent trembling with wonderment and the post-teen lost in space. But it is the middle third, a re-purposing of the weathered but resplendent remains of Octavio Silos’ lost film Tunay Na Ina into what seems at first mere connective tissue, that somehow bears the ore of the whole piece - - -that is, the corrosive vagaries of time. And like his Indio Nacional and Autohystoria, this is an historical autopsy, too, notwithstanding the shift in temperature, and as bothered by the futilities of retrieving the past without having to make up the parts mislaid to the blind spots of memory.

Chris Marker, in Sans Soleil, said “Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting but rather its inner lining.We don’t so much remember as we rewrite memory.” I'm with Chris and so's Raya.Now Showing is all remembering and re-enactment, if these are his memories or if these are even memories at all , but conceived with a naturalism so immersive, the seams melt. A fake passing itself off as real passing itself off as fake until you can't tell which is which anymore. With thickly familiar pangs of mood evoking a sense of deja vu that can't be right but never leaves you anyway.

Each of the three parts it divides itself into is queasy with a specific veneer of decay - - -imperfect failing memory and the imperfect failing platforms that foolishly try to capture and preserve them - - -but the first third, a love letter to childhood that's flush and agog with tiny incident and shot as if on a lo-res camcorder, is queasiest, opaque to the point of creamy, with that vague sense of torpor that someone else's home movies have in the way the interstitial shots linger- - -on a birthday party, on kids playing patintero at night, on a young girl singing mutely to the roar of the crowd in her head, on nothing much - - -past ambient and into tedium. But not without that murmur of peril, as if some fugitive magic will be forever lost if the pause button is pressed too soon. That's the lethal poignancy of nostalgia. And it leaks like blood into what these interstices connect, throwing shadows on everything. And a swatch of hope. There is nothing mythic to heighten in the lives we lived. There is only the warmth and burnish of remembering , the flames that gnaw at the edges and the things we save from the fire.

ALEXIS TIOSECO 1981-2009

2009-09-02T18:39:00.019+08:00

I didn’t know Alexis enough to say we were close but knew him enough to feel kindred with him. And maybe that was all it took - - -the too few run-ins, the too few conversations, the too few emails, the too few fond anecdotes. Why else would there be this much shock and fear and regret and grief? Why else would all the cinema in the world suddenly feel so outmoded and impotent in the face of what happened? But let’s not put cinema down, as it was, after all, the magnet that drew us to each other - - -this mad fervid love for it that many thought almost freaky. Having declared my unwavering fealty to it even before I was in high school and knew better, I always thought my love bottomless and indomitable but the depth Alexis’ feelings ran - - -and the things it made him do - - -makes mine look like a petty crush . It put me to shame. But also had me keyed up. If there was one thing Alexis left with me, it’s knowing that there was still, and will always be, much more cinema to fall in love with.

Much as I'd like to say I was writing this as a friend, and much as I know Alexis wouldn’t mind if I did that or called him one, I feel it’s not entirely my place to do so. I’m writing this instead as a fellow lover of cinema and a fellow writer, a fellow film critic if you will. This blog was my secluded little pocket of the internet to write about something I loved. I never factored in that there would be traffic- - -the spotlight and me never really did see eye to eye, always had a touch of the hermetic, camera shyness. But the very first thing Alexis said to me when I was introduced to him was ”Hi. I like your blog”. It was immensely flattering. And it would later fuel me to not just write, but write faster, write truer, write more - - -my sloth may be my downfall but I’m getting there. But it was also immensely daunting knowing there was someone reading, let alone someone like Alexis. It was the second most frightening thing he ever said to me,really.

The most frightening thing was when he asked much later on if I really was shooting my first film. I told him sheepishly that I had shot one scene. Who knows what he would have thought of it had he lived to see it finished? Not that it would’ve mattered, I figured, long as I make it with generosity and conviction and love. That's how Alexis did his work. And that's how everyone in this ragtag so-called scene of ours sets out to do theirs, too. That's how he would've prefered it, I think - - -I don't know, I won't know. But it's all about love,in the end. The last few days I've been swimming in this warm and fraternal and almost familial inundation of community, this coming together in consensual sorrow,bonded by this shared and senseless loss and by this shared love for both cinema and for two people who gave so much for it. Too much.

Love is,as Alexis once said, the first impulse of critics. It is also the first impulse of friends.

Peace for the last time, Alexis and Nika. I hardly knew you but I'm glad I did.

20-SEIKI SHONEN CHAPTER 1 ( 20TH CENTURY BOYS CHAPTER 1)

2009-05-18T22:57:00.018+08:00

20-Seiki Shônen Chapter 1 (20th Century Boys Chapter 1)
Directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi
Written by Yasushi Fukuda and Takashi Nagasaki and
Naoki Urasawa and Yûsuke Watanabe
From the manga by Naoki Urasawa

I've destroyed the world many times before - - - and so have you. With crayon drawings on torn notebook paper. This is what us boys would do to give vent to the berserker rages of all our boyish imaginations. Gleefully, dementedly laying waste to civilizations, perhaps in secret hope of remaking the world from the rubble but this time to our prepubescent whims. Or maybe it was merely out of how diabolically fun blowing up imaginary cities can be. Not to mention drawing all the flamboyant, impossible monsters that blew them up.

Back in the 20th century, flying a 747 into a skyscraper as a terrorist plot rang with similarly feverish delirium- - - crayon drawings on torn notebook paper. That was just nine years ago. Not that you need to be told but this is the world we woke up to after the millennium changed hands- - - boyhood annihilation fantasies as real world genocide scenarios with wackos for architects, bent on remaking the world to their whims. Fucked up doesn't quite cover it. And taken one way, Naoki Urusawa's immense manga 20th Century Boys , filtrated as it is through this grand pop sieve of weird viruses and giant robots and shadowy cults, is all about what life is like in this new world we live in, which is what life was like in the old world we lived in except it's more fitful and more rickety and more prone to toxic absurdities.

Taken another way, it's about the vagaries of obsolesence , the way those of us whose destinies have passed us by flail for some kind of bearing in a world that doesn't give a shit like it used to, if it did at all. And the possible devastations getting stuck in the past can wreak on the future. That T. Rex song - - - "I'm your toy, your 20th century boy" - - - has a riff so mighty you can believe how the kids here fell under it like a banner to signal changes. Fed by Marc Bolan's futuresexy androgyny, it was a song on the cusp of a world to come. The irony, of course, and the subtext Naoki is aiming for, is that today nothing sums someone up more as a relic of his time than calling him a 20th century boy.

Taken the same way and minus the millennial divide, this is what Stephen King's It was about, too - - - waking up in a present you didn't expect to wake up in agitated by a past that's come to collect. It's not as if it would take a genius to run them - - - the parallels between the two do glare and vibrate. There's the relentless toggling between two timelines. There's the childhood friends - - -boy dominant with a token girl - - - sputtering invisibly through a bland middle age. There's the banding together to thwart an enemy they may have unwittingly loosed. There's the epic sprawl - - -it starts in the '70s and ends in 2015. There's the turned-up volume to everything. Except it's not supernatural bunk Naoki cranks up.

He hews closer to the sort of boy detective sci-fic pop the younger Ray Bradbury and the younger Steven Spielberg proliferated but without lapsing into the dewy cloy they both tended to stoop to back then. And he's as fiendish as King is with story. It , of course, was massive, but also unwieldy and turgid and not the novel you uphold to champion King - - - omnipotent turtles and gangbangs, WTF? 20th Century Boys is even more vast but manga always gives itself the room to stretch and breathe and not hurry that Americans seem chronically allergic to, and over its 24 volumes, it moves at a clip but paces its convolutions so it never really disintegrates into the gooey mess we're left with at the end of It.

Given how Tsutsumi's spacing out all 24 volumes across three features - - - and this is merely the first - - - it's a little disingenuous to raise him up for the structural liberties he takes that makes this spry or put him down not only for how the nuances he forsakes activates a little supercompression vertigo but also for how he exaggerates the cataclysm near the cliffhanging end. He does soothe my doubts about the next two to come by tempering all the heightened arcana that comes with being a kid with all the simmering melancholia that comes with being an adult. 20th Century Boys is all about how hope and ruin intersect, potential and failure, wonderment and exhaustion. And how, to paraphrase another glam rock icon, we can all be heroes in the overlap. Trite, sure - - - but lay in a mighty guitar riff on top of it and it's a banner to fall under.