DEVILS YOU KNOW

Panahon Ng Halimaw
Directed and Written by Lav Diaz

My Twitter feed regularly explodes with governmental disgruntlement. Sometimes I weigh in, too. I don’t have many Twitter friends from the other side of the outrage and the ones I do have are rather sober, nuanced, rational even, quiet mostly. This gives me a rather inaccurate lay of the land in that I only see the outrage, in all its permutations, and the source of the outrage, without annotations. I realize that Twitter is a pocket universe and not the whole of the country. But from this lopsided, perhaps even insular, vantage point, I sense the lack of a cause-and-effect with traction, an echo chamber that preaches to the choir, a hole of indifference where a robust and determined opposition should be.  I sense, really, and ultimately, my own helplessness, and perhaps it’s our sense of helplessness as well.  I sense, too, the usual wag-the-dog theatrics all regimes dabble in and how we keep falling for it. Lav Diaz doesn’t have a Twitter account but his new film, Panahon Ng Halimaw (Season of the Devil), ostensibly addresses this lack of a conduit to channel our surges of indignation, to weaponize our clamor. The poet-hero is a recurring figure in his cinema but the poet-hero here, played by Piolo Pascual, and his works, are ineffectual in rousing a population mired in their own complacency. Halimaw seems to be questioning, too, if all our rages really amount to anything, whether as woke tweets, as soc med pulpits, as protest songs or as art-house cinema.

Perhaps because he was there, and perhaps, too, because it constantly threatens to re-animate itself in a potentially more sinister, more dangerous form, Marcos-era Martial Law is something of a recurring milieu with Diaz, first re-purposing it as a science-fictional totalitarian dystopia in Hesus Rebolusyonaryo (Jesus. Revolutionary) then many years later, as this pall of almost sentient darkness hovering over a small town that eventually eats itself in Mula Sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (From What Was Before).  Panahon Ng Halimaw may be set in 1979 Mindanao, during Martial Law, but it’s obvious that the bleak landscape, with its rash of extrajudicial killings albeit targeting straggler revolutionaries, insidious dog-wagging as a form of mind control, not to mention a charismatic leader who blathers indecipherably and literally wears two faces, is meant not just to parallel but to overlap with the present regime.

Panahon Ng Halimaw had a brief domestic theatrical run. Twelve years ago, when I first stumbled on and became an adherent of his cinema, coming in blind into what turned out to be the first half of the still uncompleted Heremias, the notion of a Lav Diaz film having a theatrical run would’ve been nothing short of absurd, certainly miraculous. But this is the fifth Lav Diaz film to have a theatrical run in as many years. At this point, one would like to think there would be a significant drop in the number of people you need to hand-hold and disclaim to when it came to Lav Diaz, when it came to so-called slow cinema, which one can argue his films don’t necessarily fall under, and when it came, really, to any film that isn’t the over-stimulated franchise pulp that has become the only normal in cinema nearly every movie-goer is willing to swallow. That isn’t the case, sadly. But then again, Panahon Ng Halimaw is a slightly more difficult Lav Diaz film to shill, let alone metabolize, even for Lav Diaz stalwarts like me. It is perhaps his less allegorical and certainly his most urgent, most forthright, arguably his most serious work. But it never lapses into pulpit nor anachronism. It may in fact be his most formally playful. Panahon Ng Halimaw is, after all, a rock opera, but not in the way an Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera is a rock opera, of course.

The argument over whether form should trump content in socially-aware cinema is low-key enough to make it seem as if we’re not even having the argument at all,  but Panahon Ng Halimaw is  all but demanding we do. Deconstructed musicals are not virgin territory for arthouse cinema, of course. But this is more than a mere deconstructed musical. Borne out of urgency but shot through with resignation, its entire libretto is sung a capella in the recitative style by a cast that’s vocally uneven on purpose.  There is no rouse in its call to arms, there is no hook in the songs to distract us from the tenor of its narrative weave, given over as they are to the transformative whim of  the characters singing them:  Bituin Escalante’s benevolent narrator and Shaina Magdayao’s crusading doctor, coming on like snatches of  emotive, melodic beauty,  while Hazel Orencio and Joel Saracho’s government henchmen, are ominous, somnolent, atonal. It takes some easing into, give it that, but perhaps easing into it isn’t the point, and coming in a form that you expect to ease into is. Conflating the Marcos regime with the present one is perhaps Diaz’s way of telling us that history will teach us nothing except that it repeats itself, and what he’s trying to tell us is something we ought to already know, but perhaps having it sung might make us lean in. “Mahirap gisingin ang nagtulug-tulugan” ("You can't wake up someone pretending to sleep") says a character in Lino Brocka’s Orapronobis, a film that was also about the cyclical nature of the political violence that besets us. We’re not quite there yet. But you can feel the stupor singing in our bones.


*Originally published in Esquire.

UNDERRATED ASIAN HORRORS

What Asian horror cinema seemed to understand a lot better than Hollywood horror ever will is that fear is irrational and the more irrational things get, the more terrifying things are. The pull Asian horror always had with me, aside from obligatory defiance to the hegemonic narratives, are the specific varieties of irrational unease that have become rough ordinance with most Asian horror cinema but which Hollywood has nothing but disdain for, perhaps residue from how Eastern cultures have a more pervasive, more insidious spiritual firmament than America: the spatial displacement, the overhang of dread, the dreamlike languor and casual surrealism, the often brutal lack of closure and this gnawing sense that the supernatural was a matter of fact. Asian horror isn’t above solving its own mysteries, sure, but Hollywood horror seems in the grip of a compulsion to constantly whip the mask off the monster to reveal a backstory. Indian burial grounds, Scooby Doo endings, whistling past graveyards, all that. Western critics gregariously upheld the heady, volcanic surge of Asian horror films in the 90s as a “new wave” poised to rehabilitate and reinvigorate the genre, which it was and which it did, even if the exaltation smacked of hegemony and hubris, if only for the implication that Asian horror had somehow “caught up” and that Hollywood was somehow “in charge” of the genre to waylay it, circumventing the fact that Asian horror has been trumping Hollywood horror for decades, and still does. I’d go so far as argue that the two 90s horror films that game-changed the genre didn’t come out of Hollywood, Myrick and Sanchez’s Blair Witch Project and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, and that most post-90s horror films run on the modified engines of either of these two films, and sometimes, oftentimes a confluence of both. Japan, Thailand and Korea has been undergoing fluctuations in quality since. The combined output of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia is still occasional at best. The Philippines, meanwhile, remains stupidly, stubbornly determined to bash out the same old wine without even bothering to put it in new bottles, mainly vengeful spirits terrorizing young actors that no amount of workshopping can make worthy of being called one.

Despite this, Asian horror cinema is still an embarrassment of riches, if you know where to look and what to look for. The list below is meant to be a spanner in the works, throwing props long overdue and much deserved, but also as an index of possible new pleasures. Obviously, they barely scratch the surface, but if you’ve had it with the same old and your curiosity is piqued by the list, here’s a few more to look up, of varying quality and flavors and temperaments: Mystics In Bali (H. Tjut Djalil), Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi), Pasiyam (Erik Matti), Exte: Hair Extensions (Sion Sono), How To Disappear Completely (Raya Martin), The Red Shoes (Kim Yong Gyun), The Forbidden Door (Joko Anwar), Pridyider (Rico Ilarde), Salvage (Sherad Sanchez), Matangtubig (Jet Leyco), Dream Home (Pang Ho Cheung) and Noroi (Koji Shiraishi).

 Akumu Tantei (Nightmare Detective) (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2005, Japan) Pivots on the pulpiest of setups: an emotionally crippled and borderline suicidal young man who has the ability to walk into people’s dreams and somehow fix them is recruited by the police to thwart a creepy serial killer who has the ability to walk into people’s dreams and coerce them into suicide. The surprise here is not that Shinya Tsukamoto would take on such relatively straightforward material. Nor is it in the way he finds much to mine within the parameters of his outlandish premise, not least being its discomfiting overlaps between waking life and dream state. But rather, it’s the fearful symmetry he strikes between his usual transgressive surrealism and his newfound pop efficiency. Tsumakoto, of course, also made the Tetsuo movies, which is to say that the few times he does, he makes the sort of superhero movies we deserve: deranged, chaotic, resonant, thrilling as fuck.

 Di Ingon Nato (Brandon Relucio and Ivan Zaldarriaga, 2011, Philippines) Rough around the edges, sure, but you can argue that it’s more appropriately primitive because of it, given how everything hinges on its transposition of First World zombie tropes into far-flung Third World boondocks, where people get around on cheap mopeds, an under-manned and under-equipped clinic passes for a hospital, combat-readiness boils down to jungle knives and single-shot rifles and no one knows zombie lore enough to go for a head shot, not to mention that the zombies here are not the undead of legend, the sort these superstitious folk have names for and dispatch with magic, but rather the ones borne of contagion, the sort these medically naïve folk can’t quite fathom. The first half, set in a remote forest, is all bucolic desolation. The second, almost meta-recursive apocalyptic desperation. For all their social-realist pontifications, I can’t think of a single poverty porn indie that has tapped as potently into how fatally ill-prepared we are for calamity quite like this under-seen zombie riff has. 

Marebito (Takashi Shimizu, 2004, Japan) . No pun intended but I slot this in here grudgingly if only because the nonchalant misogyny bugs me still but also because it is a terribly flawed and terribly shallow work and one I hesitate to recommend heartily. Approach with caution, then. But after thrashing this the first time I saw it, calling Takashi Shimzu the Gore Verbinski of J-Horror of all things, though I’m not sure if that’s unfair to Shimizu or to Verbinski, I’ve reconsidered my position and now go as far as claiming that I might actually prefer its Lovecraftian dissonance to the routine spookiness of his beloved, and certainly more polished, Ju-on/ Grudge films. The anxiety and displacement evoked by the subterranean world the perverted cameraman hero stumbles on remains every bit as distressing as the last time I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

Pascalina (Pam Miras, 2012, Philippines) Pascalina, the eponymous social klutz, is a fuck-up of the poignant sort, well-meaning and down on her luck. Her aunt is the only one who loves her enough to say it, but is not only dying but may or may not be a monster, which means she may or may not be a monster, too. Pam Miras tends to rub her fluency with the genre against her bigger fish to fry, harnessing horror tropes to slant the realities she wants to confront at an angle, for a view that’s oddly purer and truer the more heightened it gets. Shooting with a toy camera comes off as outlaw impulse at first blush, but the jittery muck it attains becomes both verisimilitude and metaphor, elucidating the dance her stumblebum heroine does with the devil she knows, as she comes into her own by springing the catch on her own secret monstrosity. The film won a Best Picture prize then all but vanished without a trace. That’s one way to boost your underrated stock. Another is to be as good a debut feature as it is.

 The Unseeable (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2006, Thailand) Atypical Wisit Sasanatieng but only if you go by the velocity with which his candyland visuals ran riot in his last two films before this. But look at Tears of the Black Tiger and Citizen Dog again and you realize what he really has a knack for is the way he twists over-familiar environments into weird off-key shapes, like balloon animals. If this rather traditional ghost story is a lot more sedated, the mood dripping rather than shouting, that’s mostly out of how ghost stories are supposed to get by on the sedated drip of mood alone. The gorgeous crumble of that haunted countryside manse, and its sprawling garden, may be a calmer palette than we’re used to from Wisit but is every bit as florid and intoxicating an artifice as any he's ever manipulated. Oldfangled but thick with feed.

Uzumaki (Higuchinsky, 2000, Japan) Lazy as it sometimes is to brand Junji Ito as the Japanese Lovecraft, it’s also rather apt, right down to how much of a bitch it is to adapt his work to film. Those ubiquitous Tomie films, about a dead schoolgirl who regenerates over the centuries to wreak all manner of revenge, often feel homogenized, and as gorgeous as Kakashi was, it was a little too complacent, even for a film about haunted scarecrows. Uzumaki is by far the only film taken from his work that perfectly nails all his potencies: the bleak nihilism, the demented strangeness, the psychedelic rot. This is the one about the seaside town driven mad by an invasion of spirals, and there really is no way to approach any work that boils down to that synopsis except to take it literally.

*Originally published by CNN.

HORRORS IN THE SLIPSTREAM

What’s a slipstream? A category, but one that constantly resists being one, reaching to go beyond making one necessary. The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling coined it to codify the interstices, mongrel works that hover between speculative and realist fiction, that mash up genre tropes with mainstream temperaments.

There’s a surge of interstitial activity in horror cinema of late, its own neither-here-nor-there slipstream hovering between genre and arthouse, and someone less clever and less adept with words went and gave it names, too: Post Horror, Elevated Horror, all that. Like any genre, horror is bordered by its own perimeter fence, rigid with protocols, The Rules, as they’re called. But Post/Elevated Horror isn’t some new strain, all it means is horror that doesn’t play by The Rules, and it’s been going on for decades: Lang, Roeg, Teshigahara, Bergman, Lynch. The new films are fine: It Comes At Night, A Ghost Story, Personal Shopper, Beyond The Hills, Neon Demon. OK, maybe not Neon Demon. The tinge of condescension does bug me, the implication that horror needs “elevating”, but then again, when asked why I make horror films, my answer was how porous and fluid and pliant it was, how I could bend it to any shape I saw fit, how it lends itself to be , ummm. . .elevated. Yeah. I should talk.

But it’s a different sort of interstitial horror film I want to talk about here, the sort Clive Barker and Peter Atkins were talking about when they sought to expand the genre, finding trace elements of horror in films that were ostensibly not, settling on the intent to horrify and make us complicit in the perversity of that intent as the crucial pre-condition. They name-checked Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Fassbinder’s Fox And His Friends and Bergman’s Shame as tangential horror films. I agree. You don’t gauge your responses to these films the way you would, say, The Exorcist. But anyone familiar with the genre is bound to taste similar flavours in the soup. Here are five more.


 A Field In England (Ben Wheatley, 2013): A war film, a period film, a drug film, a fever dream, a hallucination. By virtue of Wheatley being a “horror” filmmaker, some circles make no bones over slapping the label on this. Suffice to say, it isn’t The Conjuring. That’s a sales pitch, incidentally, not a disclaimer. Also, I like how the title is also its location brief.

Kynodontas (Dogtooth) (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009): You can see this through the cracked prisms of its metaphors, sure, and it has many, from the claustrophobia of families to the subtle totalitarianism of home schooling, but better to come in without blinders and let the weirdness snowball in all its excruciating languor until it smothers you. The last shot still gets under my skin in ways few horror films can.

Leviathan (Lucien Castiang-Taylor, Veronica Pevel, 2012): A documentary that fulfills the terms of the form, immersing itself thoroughly in the environment it’s observing, but by doing so to the degree that it does, planting cameras in the oddest crannies of a fishing trawler, discarding the annotative comforts of talking heads and an editorial that holds your hand as it walks you through, it leaves us open to harm, making a routine night of fishing in the open sea feel like a descent into Hell.

Medusae (Pam Miras, 2017): A young documentarist and her cranky albino son go to an island to make a film about a mysterious cult that summons firstborns as offerings to the ocean. Two thirds of the way in is the point where you recognize Pam Miras, when the strangeness seeps into the mundane with disarming stealth, and disarming poetry, and inexorably takes over the piece. The horror was a lot more overt in her Pascalina, though, perhaps out of how this has a lot more on its mind, and perhaps, too, out of how it taps into a horror that’s too real for her: the horrors of motherhood. Misunderstood and uncategorizable. In other words, totally slipstream.

Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (Lav Diaz, 2014): Lav Diaz has incurred debts to the genre throughout his career in spurts but here, as if to buffer us from the palpable horror that was Martial Law, his allusive, lo-fi parable, perhaps the most daring, and certainly the most poignant, of his post-Norte renaissance, comes suffused with strange goings-on: a constant hum of existential dread, mysterious cattle mutilations, rumors of an aswang on the prowl and a town that eats itself. . .sort of. The quietly spine-tingling ending to his short Nang Matapos Ang Ulan evoked a quality of unease horror filmmakers would kill to evoke. The sequence here with the mentally-challenged girl writhing while the windows move by themselves one-ups that.


 *Originally published by Esquire

BLADE OF GRASS

The last film of a dear old friend who is sorely missed is screening tonight (April 10), 7 PM at the Green Papaya for free. Please come if you are.

ORIENT PEARLS

Hong Kong was the first kiss in my eventual, and undying, romance with all cinemas Asian. I call it a romance because that’s precisely what it is, a love affair. And because, well, there are women involved. I’m talking about movie star women, of course, opulent peacocks, dream girls on parade. My first movie star crush was Nora Miao, whom I’ve only seen in the Bruce Lee film Return of the Dragon and nowhere else. I should’ve known that was the start of something. Much later, there was Joey Wong and Shu Qui and Zhao Wei and Karen Mok and Gigi Leung and Miriam Yeung and Jo Kuk and Kelly Chen. There was Sammi Cheng bustling through the Johnnie To/Wai Kai Fai office rom-com Needing You. And Cecilia Cheung grieving her way back to love in Derek Yee’s tearjerky Lost In Time. Some of them were ghosts, as all women you love eventually become. Some of them could take me in a fight. Some of them melt you with a gaze. And some of them flew.

Brigitte Lin did a lot of transgender flying, and fighting, in Tsui Hark’s hectic and wondrous 1986 wu xia inversion Peking Opera Blues. When Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon emerged in 2000, it all but brokered the mainstreaming of wu xia cinema outside of Asia and the cinephile fringes, but you only thought hoary old paradigms of the Asian leading lady shifted in its wake. That was really nothing more than the flex and fallout of American hegemony. Brigitte, and really, Michelle Yeoh, among many others, had, at this point, been doing it for years. Ang Lee himself was merely riffing off King Hu’s 1966 masterpiece Come Drink With Me, going as far as casting its feisty leading lady Chang Pei-Pei as Jade Fox. China, and HK, and really Japan and South Korea and the Philippines, have long-standing traditions when it came to the prominence of their leading ladies, a lot of their films tend to be centered by women as a result. Peking Opera Blues had no less than three.

Before she retired, in a canny bit of stunt casting, Brigitte Lin gleefully subverted her own image as HK showbiz royalty, by putting on a trashy blonde wig and an even trashier raincoat straight out of John Cassavetes’ Gloria for Wong Kar Wai. It was an iconic last bow. But Chungking Express, if you press me to a corner, was all about Faye Wong, whose character, also named Faye and arguably the prototype for Sinitta Boonyasak’s Noy  and Apinya Sakujaroensuk’s Ploy in Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life In The Universe and Ploy, respectively, as well as Jun Ji Hyun’s nameless girl in Jae-young Kwak’s My Sassy Girl, was every bit the Manic Pixie Dream Girl before Hollywood coined the term and claimed it for their own. Only none of them had the self-aware affectation that makes it such a grating trope. Faye, hair shorn to that of a boy and making pink gloves sexy as she sneaks into heartbroken cop Tony Leung’s apartment and stealthily insinuates herself in the minutiae of his life before turning it on its head, was, aside from being almost intolerably cute, effortless and unfussy and fresh.

 You could tease a meta throb from the casting of Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong as two halves of a diptych, a sense of a torch being passed perhaps, with Brigitte being the last of her generation of leading ladies and Faye being the first of hers. When Joseph Campbell said the condition of a movie star is also the condition of a deity, he was mostly talking about Hollywood movie stars and how they can exist in several places at once, that is, on the screen and in real life. But he was also talking about this heightened, almost otherworldly, glamour you associate with them, how they were larger than life abstracts. Asian movie stars were, by refreshing contrast, life-sized. I’m not just talking about Faye here, of course, or for that matter, Hong Kong, but also of Japan’s Chiyaki Kuriyama and Taiwan’s Chieng Shiang Chyi and Korea’s Lee Young Ae and Yunjin Kim and our own Angeli Bayani and Alessandra De Rossi. These are women with presence, stars with wattage, but with a girl next door vulnerability and naturalism.

Even Gong Li and Maggie Cheung had this earthy quality. These two, were, for a time, the Western embodiment of the Asian leading lady. Gong Li’s work with Zhang Ymou and Chen Kaige were world cinema game-changers. And Maggie Cheung had her own formidable arthouse cachet with Stanley Kwan’s Actress, Peter Chan’s Comrades: Almost A Love Story and, more prominently, Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. Despite the profile and the overtures, Maggie never succumbed to the Hollywood cross-over that all but dismantles the careers of Asian filmmakers and actors, with the possible exception of Ang Lee. She did make one Hollywood art film with Gong, Wayne Wang’s middling Chinese Box, but that was as far as she got. Gong Li, too, had said no to Michael Mann the first time. She said no, in fact, to Heat, because she didn’t want to be a prop, which may come off a little harsh, except she totally would’ve been one. She did eventually say yes, to Mann’s reboot of his own Miami Vice, and to a part that was more fulsome, had more consequence. The film was thoroughly excellent if sadly misunderstood, but her dalliance with the refurbished Crockett and Tubbs was unnecessary. The only thing it proved, apart from the impeccable taste Mann has in actresses, was that she didn’t need Hollywood. None of them ever did.

1. Faye Wong : I’m biased. And tremendously so. Chungking Express happens to be my favorite film. Of all time.  Oh, but Faye is so puckish and adorable here as to be almost indelible. She was last seen in 2046 and has since focused more on her music than on films, realizing perhaps that she can never outshine this with any other film role. Even one that’s directed by Wong Kar Wai.

2. Sammi Cheng :  Sammi’s acumen for screwball makes her a shoo-in for rom-coms. That’s her winning streak, all those Johnnie To comedies, of which Love On A Diet, where she acted through a fat suit, was the funniest, and Romancing In Thin Air, from just a couple of years ago, the most sublime.

3. Angeli Bayani  and  4. Alessandra De Rossi :  The only time they were together was in Ka Oryang playing embattled activists.  But they’ve cut their own respective swaths through domestic independent cinema on their own, not to mention laid claim to serious Cannes pedigrees: Alessandra, significantly, in Raya Martin’s Independencia and Auraeus Solito’s Busong, and Angeli, as a semi-regular member of Lav Diaz’s rotating ensemble last seen at the center of his exuberantly-praised Cannes film Norte.

5. Cecilia Cheung : For my money, HK cinema’s prettiest face.  That she has the acting chops, too, seals it. Her work in the Korean drama Failan was her calling card to the world. But I’m a huger fan of her heartbroken single mother in Lost in Time.

6. Chen Shiang Chyi : Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl flies to Paris. Boy starts changing all the clocks in Taiwan to Paris time. What Time Is It There? is another lifelong favorite. Which is to say I’m tremendously biased here, too. But she’s only been in nearly every film by Tsai Ming Liang, and one with Edward Yang.  Tough to argue with credentials like that.

 7. Jun Jy Hyun:  Last time we see her was part of the massive all-star ensemble of  The Thieves but sometimes all it takes is one iconic role to seal your fate. She had two: My Sassy Girl and Il Mare, classics of modern Korean cinema made more essential by the dreadful American remakes.

8. Chiyaki Kuriyama  : As Go Go Yibari, she was Kill Bill's entire surfeit of cool. But you’re really better off going to Sion Sono’s Exte Hair Extensions, Takashi Miike's The Great Yokai War and Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale.

9 .Maggie Cheung and 10. Gong Li : Before she wore all those opulent cheongsams in In The Mood For Love, I succumbed to Maggie Cheung when she walked on the rooftops of Paris dressed as the cat burglar Irma Vep. And much as Zhang Ymou had a hand in it, Gong Li converted me to Chinese period drama as the longsuffering wife in To Live.  A little predictable to name-check them, perhaps, but ultimately foolish to omit.


*Originally published in Vault

ALL TOMORROW'S SIRENS

Daniel Faraday called it a constant. Daniel Faraday being the jittery physicist from Lost. And the reason he was so jittery may well be Desmond, who’s about to go back in time, and run the risk of getting lost in it. Unless, of course, he has a constant, a recurring event perhaps, or better yet a recurring person to whom he had an emotional attachment of such ferocity it acts as hook, as coordinate, as way back. In Terry Gillam’s grandiose remake, Twelve Monkeys, her name was Kathryn Reilly, but in Chris Marker’s original La Jetee (The Pier) from 1962, she had no name, but the woman Helene Chatelain played was quite possibly the first constant. And consequently, my top pick for science-fiction cinema siren.

My picks are highly subjective, of course. Some you can see coming, because how can you not slot Jane Fonda’s Barbarella in for quintessence,  not to mention Sigourney Weaver’s entire run as Ripley in the Alien quadrilogy  for will to power,  and the eponymous troika of superwomen from The Heroic Trio played by Michelle Yeoh and Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung, for sheer resplendence? All draw from my own tastes in women and from how high I regard the work said women appear in, guided by how a siren is defined by her specific effect on men. And Chatelain only seems like an outlier choice until we start going by how one dictionary definition boils that effect down to “beguiling”. La Jetee  may well be the greatest science fiction film full stop and Chatelain’s crucial function may have been to keep the time-travelling soldier from going insane. But that’s only if you don’t count the burning love that drove him to return to the past and save the future again and again and again as a sort of insanity, too.  It’s the same effect Kate Winslet’s Clementine has on Jim Carrey in Michel Gondry’s (and Charlie Kaufman’s) mesmerizing grafting of Philip K. Dick with Alain Resnais, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that is, the desire to repeatedly go through any strait no matter how dire with someone. Both feature, too, a man whose destiny is ultimately shaped by a woman. No other definition of beguilement holds a candle.

And this is really the prevailing dynamic for most of the more obvious choices, even Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein, undisputedly the first siren of science-fiction cinema, who did sooth the savage beast.  Despite the dominance of the male hormone in science-fiction and despite that dominance verging on obsolescence, the presence of a woman in a piece of science-fiction cinema can still be wonderfully disruptive. Grace Park’s feisty engineer Boomer in Ronald Moore’s gritty re-jig of Battlestar Galactica had several men wriggling under her thumb. Megumi Hayashibara’s Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, Diana Rigg’s Mrs. Peel from The Avengers and Karen Gillen’s Amelia Pond from the last two seasons of Doctor Who all had a habit of constantly upstaging the men they were supposed to be mere foils to, and those men would include a bounty hunter, a crack secret agent and a Time Lord, respectively. And no amount of new age gibberish would’ve sold Neo into entering The Matrix had Trinity been any less alluring.

Trinity, of course, is a mash-up built from parts of Ghost in the Shell’s Major Kusanagi and Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux and Molly from William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Selina Kyle from the Batman comics and Irma Vep from Louis Feuillade’s epic proto-noir serial Les Vampires. But she's also the embodiment of that other genre’s archetype. The femme fatale of noir is “a mysterious alluring woman who leads men into dangerous situations”. And when Trinity goes acrobat all over those cops and agents and buildings at the start of The Matrix, like a two-gun fetish-wear wu xia angel of doom, your first impulse may be a hormonal swoon, but the next and more fatal one, is to follow her wherever she leads.

1. Helene Chatelain as The Woman from La Jetee (Chris Marker): She had no name, she said nothing, but not only was she a time traveler’s object of desire but eventually the shaper of his destiny, which is essentially what all women are.

2. Megumi Hayashibara as Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop (Shinichiro Watanabe): She’s a cartoon, deal with it. And futuristic bounty hunters don’t come any spunkier or sexier.

3. Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel from The Avengers (Brian Clemens): The proto-Scully no less. First and fairer. Sorry Gillian, but we are talking about the only woman James Bond saw fit to marry.

4. Karen Gillen as Amelia Pond from Doctor Who (Series 5-6) (Steven Moffatt): No companion of the Doctor made me swoon so bad it broke my heart the way Amy did.

5. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley from Alien (Ridley Scott): Not just for the fact that she fought the eponymous nasty in nothing but her underwear but I’d be lying if I said that had no bearing.

6. Kate Winslet as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry): The damaged girlfriend we all know and we all would probably go through recurring cycles of relationship hell. even in a future where romantic bliss was within reach. 

7. Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung as the Heroic Trio from The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To) :  The first ladies of HK cinema together in one film as wu xia superheroes saving a pulpy HK of the future. It had me at “the first ladies of HK cinema in one film”.

8. Jane Fonda as Barbarella from Barbarella (Roger Vadim): Nobody outside of the Europeans could touch Jane Fonda in the 60s. Strap her into a skimpy superhero costume and it’s game over.

9. Carrie Anne Moss as Trinity from The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers):  The sci-fic/noir mashup that is cyberpunk doesn’t have a deep bench in terms of cinema but Trinity is hands down its sovereign femme fatale.

10. Grace Park as Boomer from Battlestar Galactica (Ronald Moore): Excuse the gushing but she did tend to light up the darkest, nastiest longform sci-fic series so far. That has got to count. 


11. Elsa Lanchester as The Bride from The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale):  The first science-fiction cinema siren, no less. Stupid to omit lest you want her “husband” on your case.



*originally published in Vault

DANCE ME TO THE END OF LOVE*

DANTE PEREZ
1956-2013




"Lithium we know as a medication but one can misread it as a mediation and still nail it. The way it stabilizes frenzies that violently push and pull from both sides of the pole is a form of mediation, a truce of chaoses." (Notes on Lithium, Dodo Dayao)


He built a little village from the ground up, on a bluff in Zambales, then later burned it down, with gasoline and a makeshift torch. This was my first glimpse of Dante Perez’s prowess as a production designer. A potent image, for sure, but I’m resisting the urge to milk it for poetic effect as I don’t want to cloud this with anything less than forthright. Nor lay anything on too thick. One thing you probably won’t hear much mention of, in the flurry of well-wishing and reminisces, is how funny Dante Perez (Ka Dante to us) can be. And if this gets a little too maudlin, he’d probably crack a joke or two just to lighten the mood.

What this is exactly I’m not sure, though. A eulogy to a dead star. A valentine to a friend. A celebration of an artist. All of these, perhaps. But more than that, a way to make sense of someone leaving too soon. I realize it’s arrogant to assume one is privy to the caprices of the cosmos when it comes to comings and goings. I realize, too, that everybody ultimately gets a lifetime. And Ka Dante had one that was packed to the gills.

The tiny inferno in Zambales was also my first glimpse of the synergy he shared with Lav Diaz. Ka Dante was Lav’s collaborator and production designer and eventually actor, from Heremias up to Florentina Hubaldo CTE. It is, without argument, one of the most vital and robust collaborations in domestic independent cinema, of world cinema even. And yet it remained a largely unsung one. Which is how Ka Dante would have wanted it, I suppose. He was never a man drawn to the blare of the spotlight. He was always about the work. And he worked incessantly. He got restless when he wasn’t working. He drew comics, including an unfinished, wordless one about a Japanese straggler that he was going to show to me. He acted for other filmmakers, including Khavn De La Cruz in Mondomanila and Rico Ilarde in Pridyider. He made his own films, and his unflinching and often poignant feature-length documentary on Soliman Cruz, The Actor, has a raw, almost uncomfortable, honesty that makes its obscurity almost criminal. Before all this, of course, he painted. And had anyone known he wasn’t going to have another one-man show, the melancholia that permeated through his last, Lithium, would have seemed less residual and more prescient. The way Ka Dante explained it to me was that the new work was his means of grasping at transcendence. And much as the stark monochrome felt at first leeched of his usual color, his usual vibrancy, you do feel, in its place, a soothing sense of grace.

A couple of weeks before the opening of Lithium, Ka Dante and I were having a few beers at a Cubao X that seemed to be leeched of its vibrancy and color as well. It was a vibrancy and color we were familiar with and we missed. Six years ago, give or take, this was where our every night led us, talking about art and love and hope, all of us who were part of that ragtag community of like-minded friends who made films and wrote about films and worked on films and dreamed of films, and the future of the cinema we loved and the future of our lives as well was still fulsome, incandescent. That night, we talked instead about other things, about cycles running its course, about the parsimony of fate, about the infinite relief of art. But we talked about it in an oddly hopeful way, knowing full well we could easily rebuild that little village from the ashes anyway. And before he left us, Ka Dante, in many ways, did. “Sparkle”, apparently, was the last word he uttered. He was referring to the soft drink. But I prefer to think of it instead as an exhortation to all of us he left behind. Thank you and shine on yourself, Ka Dante. Shine on and live forever.



 *Lyric by Leonard Cohen
**This article originally appeared in the June 2, 2013 edition of PhilStar Sunday Lifestyle

GOD IS A BULLET

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.

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

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.