Lessons From the School of Inattention: USA

Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Jersey Boys (2014)

Clint Eastwood's Jersey Boys: From Broadway Blockbuster to Boilerplate Biopic

The road from stage to screen is almost always paved with good, although still commercial, intentions. Cinema, with its countless manners of reaching to an audience, will always be the best medium to reach the masses. Good intentions notwithstanding, films based on stage plays, more specifically musicales, are often riddled with issues on adaptation.

Directors tasked to adapt musicales to movies are often faced with the dilemma of translating elements specific to the stage to cinematic language, without sacrificing the charms that made the original material successful and popular enough to be optioned. Certain decisions often lead to disastrous results.

Chris Columbus’ take on Jonathan Larson’s Rent (2005) had the Harry Potter-director’s trademark Hollywood gloss and naiveté bastardize the rare bleakness of the material. Joel Schumacher’s version of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera (2004) concentrated more on the original play’s kitsch and aplomb rather than its world-famous musicality.

Clint Eastwood, in adapting Tony Award-winning Jersey Boys, had the good sense of understanding that the material he is faced with has all the makings of the traditional Hollywood biopic. Its being a musicale is nothing more than a stunt for better Broadway showmanship. Eastwood, whose films are often peppered with stirring heft, is clearly more interested in the story of Frankie Valli and his crew, which has themes and motivations that are right along his alley.

The narrative arc is all too familiar. Frankie, played by John Lloyd Young who is reprising the role from the musicale’s debut in Broadway, is a barber’s assistant with a uniquely beautiful shrill singing voice. With pals Tommy de Vito and Nick Massi, played by Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda respectively, Frankie spends most of his free time either breaking the law or breaking ladies’ hearts with his distinctive crooning.

It is only when composer Bob Gaudio, played by Erich Bergen, came into the group that things start to pick up for the group. The Four Seasons is then formed. They get the recording contract they aspired for, with a collection of hits under their belt. However, as with most American rags-to-riches, obscurity-to-fame tales, everything is undone by clashing egos and inevitable vices.

The theater elements of the source material that remain, like the characters breaking the fourth wall to narrate their internal struggles or the upbeat curtain call where close-ups of the actors replace individual bows, serve the purpose of reminding the audience of the film’s roots. They also reveal that very rare opportunity where Eastwood, rigid and straightforward to a fault, attempts at humor and experimentation.

Eastwood, who is famous first as an actor before delving into directing with Play Misty With Me (1971), is in fact also a very capable musician. He composed the scores for most of his recent films, like Mystic River (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Flags of Our Fathers (2006). In all of his films, music, although scarce and subtle, is always impeccably placed to draw out the emotions he requires from his viewers.

It is no different with Jersey Boys. Although Eastwood mostly does away with the musicale’s need to be constantly in a singsong state, he still manages to incorporate to make essential the various songs of the Four Seasons and Franki Valli in either moving the narrative or adding emotional weight to the scenes. A lot of the film’s dull intervals are salvaged with music.

Forget Broadway for a couple of hours. Let Eastwood do what he’s best at doing, which is to lace familiar stories with a certain kind of elegance that Hollywood has forgotten nowadays. Eastwood’s decision to filter out most of the theater elements from the material, all for the sake of being conventionally cinematic, sort of pays off.

Jersey Boys is a safe endeavor. It fulfils its intent of telling the musicale’s story to a much wider audience, although obviously with less pageantry and gaiety. That said, Jersey Boys suffers from too much earnestness, too much gravity, and too little irreverence, the same ailments that drive most biopics about musicians to eventual obscurity. Eastwood, without the benefit of the bells and whistles most musicales provide, seems to be powerless to the allure of churning out just another boilerplate drama.

(First published in Rappler.)

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Maleficent (2014)

Robert Stromberg's Maleficent: Taming the Witch, Disney-Style

Walt Disney, the spectacle-maker who made an entertainment empire out of cartoons based on fables and fairy tales in the public domain, needed a name for the magic-wielding woman that would terrorize Sleeping Beauty and her family that would represent her inexplicable malice.

Hence, maleficent, an adjective that literally means “doing evil or harm” was chosen to become the name of the villain. The character, donning a black slithering gown, a headpiece formed to look like devil horns, and the most disarmingly mischievous smile, has then represented unadulterated wickedness to kids who grew up watching Disney’s cartoons.

Disney died, to be replaced by his corporate heirs who inherited his shrewd business acumen. The commercial value of nostalgia was discovered. Hollywood was quick to grab the opportunity to earn a few more bucks off it. Now, we live in an age where myths and fairy tales enjoyed and re-enjoyed are now being retold and refashioned to suit contemporary ideologies and avaricious pockets.

Robert Stromberg’s Maleficent, which reimagines Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) from the perspective of the evil witch, is thus hardly unique. It simply follows the commercialist and creative intent of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man movies, and Zack Snyder’s Superman movies in attempting to redo familiar stories, by way of Winnie Holzman’s Wicked, the novel that told L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories from the perspective of the fictional universe’s misunderstood antagonist.

Modern perspectives are predictably introduced. Instead of concentrating on the prince-saves-the-princess angle that dominates the fairy tale, the film diverts into more feminist territory, where heterosexual romances are sidestepped for female solidarity. It is admittedly a fresh approach, one that produces for the film a lot of its more poignant moments where the clichéd phrase “true love” was removed from its more traditional connotation to mean something more worthwhile.

However, despite its progressive politics, Maleficent could still not escape the clutches of Disney’s happily-ever-after philosophy. The film was written to faithfully follow the story of Sleeping Beauty at least until it is still happy and harmless. It deviates only when Maleficent, played with admirable integrity by Angelina Jolie, withdraws from her temporary corruption and becomes the fairy tale’s protagonist.

Do not get me wrong. This is all good. It would have been better if Maleficent’s sudden change of heart, amidst the crime of cursing an innocent baby with eternal slumber, had more weight and had repercussions. Instead, the film simply tied things together neatly, with everybody happy in their CGI-rendered paradise. Had it not been for Jolie’s affecting performance, the witch’s deus ex machina metanoia would be utterly unbelievable and unconvincing.

It simply stinks of fakery, which sadly seems to be Disney’s current raison d’etre with all the movies it has recently produced that promote questionable optimism cloaked in token expressions of modern advocacy. Maleficent’s effect is at most, skin-deep. It does not, and could not penetrate the soul because it conveniently avoids engaging its characters with real morality and redemption.

Maleficent alludes to the concept that it is human frailty that creates villains. The film’s narrative points out that the witch’s transformation from glorious forest fairy to vengeful hag is the result of treachery that is fed by greed and ambition. Again, this is nothing novel. Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997), which has a human settlement disrupt nature spirits with its quest for resources, tackles the theme with more maturity and heft. Stromberg is content with surface-level rhetoric.

Maleficent imagines itself to be hip and modern. It is not. It still subscribes to Walt Disney’s archaic formula of the supremacy of happy endings, above everything else. Even a witch precisely named because she personifies all things vile and malicious deserves her happy ending. Ho hum. Wake me up when things get a little bit dirtier.

(First published in Rappler.)

Sunday, April 27, 2014

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel: In Praise of the Old World

Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel opens with a girl paying homage to the novelist of the book she is carrying by visiting his bust in the center of a park in his hometown. By the look of all the trinkets pasted on the unkempt marker, the park, along with the prized author’s bust, has become quite a tourist’s attraction for what seems to be a country that has seen more pleasant years.

The girl proceeds to read her book, with Anderson quickly taking his audience away from the park and into the office of the novelist (played by Tom Wilkinson), explaining the intricacies of his job. While in the middle of his lecture, a little boy interrupts him by threatening to shoot him with a toy gun. He momentarily stops his lecture to threaten the boy, and continues his story.

The novelist, now thirty years younger (now played by Jude Law), is a resident of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the once luxurious home of baronesses and countesses. The hotel is just a shadow of its former glory, with its empty halls being adorned by lackluster guests and snooping employees.

The novelist has taken a fancy on the hotel’s reclusive owner, Zero Moustaffa (played by M. Murray Abraham). The reclusive owner has also taken a fancy on the wandering novelist. Over dinner, the wealthy owner recounts how the hotel came to be part of his dearest possessions.

The hotel owner’s story first takes place inside the palatial room of Madame D. (played by an indistinguishable Tilda Swinton), a very wealthy aristocrat who is about to leave the confines of the hotel. The hotel’s concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes, who aptly wears an exterior of propriety while bellowing in bits of naughtiness), along with an army of the hotel’s finest employees, is with her, comforting her before her trip.

Upon her departure, Gustave notices the young Zero Moustaffa (a delightful Tony Revolori who counters Fiennes’ onscreen confidence with impish awkwardness) wearing the hat of lobby boy. Gustave starts to mentor the wide-eyed penniless immigrant, tagging him along in everything he does, including all the misadventures that have yet to happen as a result of Madame D.’s untimely flight from the Grand Budapest Hotel.

Anderson has always occupied his films with a sense of reminiscence, of harking back to days better than the present. His very distinct visual style, with its pleasing mixture of a near-absence of depth and curiously symmetrical framing, enunciates the fantasy out of the many realities he is accomplishing to tell. In a way, Anderson plays a modern and ingenious fabulist, prescribing harsh truths within cleverly told stories that are all too pleasing to immediately disarm.

The Grand Budapest Hotel has all the ingredients of an escapist fairy tale. It is set in a fictitious country dressed in alpine mountains and courteous upper folk. Its main story has an orphan arriving at an immense amount and finding his one true love while dodging psychotic villains. It is one heck of a caper, featuring a delirious prison break, a hilarious ski chase, and a mystery to keep things stirring in the middle.

However, underneath all the wily artifices of the film, it echoes a very palpable sadness. Its structure of being a story within a story within many more stories articulates how far back in history this tale of stark camaraderie and veritable honor takes place. Its allusion to the Great War that shook Europe partakes of a passing of an era of noble dispositions only to be replaced by noise and barbarity.

Anderson, by abandoning the ease of the 1.37 aspect ratio that better suits his aesthetic idiosyncrasies for the 4.3 aspect ratio that would obviously limit him but would seem to be more appropriate for Zero’s lengthy flashbacks, also gives due respect to the form of storytelling, attributing within his own cinema a desire to be transported back to those supposedly good old days.

History has changed us, Anderson seems to be imparting. We have turned into a people who look upon the past to be reminded of how it is to be human. We travel great lengths to visit monuments to be imparted the virtues of honored heroes. We read novels from decades past to recall ages we were deprived of witnessing. We tell stories and listen to stories being told to perpetuate glorious pasts. Once that has passed, we struggle to live again, ignoring the noise, avoiding the violence, surviving.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is such an ode to the old world, and to those who have immortalized it in words and pictures. Sure, Anderson’s ideal of pre-war Europe is one laced in anachronistic liberties. However, absolute creation is not the intention here. It is his mere act of storytelling, adorned lovingly it with as much of his wild artistry, that punctuates that immense yearning for a world that we can only experience through stories told and retold.

(First published in Rappler.)

Saturday, March 15, 2014

300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

Noam Murro's 300: Rise of an Empire: Starved for Identity

If there is one myth that needs to be debunked this early on, it is the myth that Zack Snyder’s 300 is a good movie. A series of vulgarly stylized tableaus that celebrate violence in the guise of bravery and heroism, the film, lifted from George Miller’s famous graphic novel of the same title, would end up with its unfair share of exclaimed praises.

The females of 300 are relegated to the background to serve as adornments to the Spartans’ bulging muscles and insatiable bloodlust. Its enemies, on the other hand, are either misshapen or devilishly monstrous, probably to enunciate the visualized virtues of the film’s outnumbered heroes. Underneath all its pretty posturing, the film is nothing but a confused celebration of ignoble machismo and reprehensible intolerance.

300: Rise of an Empire, directed by commercial director Noam Murro, has the feel of an afterthought. Snyder’s film is bare and flimsy and needed the backbone of a proper narrative. Rise of an Empire, with its story that spans events prior, during, and after those of 300, puts everything in perspective.

Xerxes, played by Rodrigo Santoro, is given a lengthy backstory, which would serve as an explanation to his grossly towering figure and stoic inhumanity. Persia is no longer just the land from which the invading monstrosities come from. It is now an adequately motivated world power, reeling from the murder of a respected ruler who was just out to prove the folly of Greek democracy.

The Greece which Leonidas of Snyder’s movie so brashly referred to as “philosophers and boy-lovers” is represented in Rise of an Empire by Themistokles, played by Sullivan Stapleton. The soldier, who rose to legendary status by killing Xerxes’ father, proves to be a more complicated hero than Leonidas. Absent the authority that is inherent on a king of a warrior city-state, Themistokles bears the difficult burden of proving his mettle in both battle and wit.

Unfortunately, whatever depth Themistokles’ character has is forgotten as soon as the movie unravels itself as just another snuff picture draped in elegant slow motion and digitized hues. Like Snyder before him, Murro makes spectacles out of bodies being impaled, limbs being severed, and blood being sprayed with wild abandon.

Rise of an Empire’s one chance at redemption is Artemisia, played with such delightful excess by Eva Green. The Greek slave turned general of Persia’s fleet of ships singlehandedly cures 300’s blatant chauvinism. By establishing her as the sly mastermind to Xerxes’ demigod status, she exemplifies the oft-repeated adage that behind every successful man is a woman. When Themistokles rejects Artemisia’s offer of sex and power in exchange for his betrayal, Artemisia then exemplifies another oft-repeated adage about women, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” by unleashing the entire power of Persia’s navy to teach her man a lesson.

Sadly, Rise of an Empire’s understanding of the women it belatedly brings into the picture is as rote and ancient as the over-quoted sayings about women Artemisia exemplified in the film. Artemisia is still nothing more than the stereotypical villain that needs to be vanquished for good to prevail.

The recently widowed Gorgo, portrayed by Lena Headey, gives the entire picture a female perspective by narrating most of the story with such solemnity that is reserved for tales much grander than this. The women of Rise of an Empire are still beholden to patriarchal values to be worthy of attention and glory. Other than the surface-level acknowledgments of women, Rise of an Empire does not really redeem 300 from the numerous mistakes it committed.

Rise of an Empire is pretty much everything one can expect from being a by-product of 300’s success. From the countless sickening speeches that trivialize virtues to the too-many soulless battles, Murro’s film is one that starves for identity. While it attempts to cure the thematic sins of its predecessor, it ultimately fails to rise above the necessity for gimmickry.

(First published in Rappler.)

Monday, March 10, 2014

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr. Banks: Mary Poppins and the Mouse

P.L. Travers, the author of the beloved novels about a magical nanny named Mary Poppins, is in a conundrum. Strapped for cash and without a new work in sight, she is about to lose her house. Her only way out of the dire situation is to accede to the offer of Walt Disney to purchase the movie rights of her famous books. With a nudge from her hardworking agent, she flies to Los Angeles to agree to Disney’s proposal with the condition that she be given a creative say to the production.

Saving Mr. Banks, had it been about a fictional author working with a fictional Hollywood producer, could have been a harmless , much like The Blindside (2009), The Rookie (2002), or any of director John Lee Hancock’s previous cookie cutter works. There is always a certain feel-good allure in any story about cantankerous middle-aged women who lose their icy exterior to kindness and good reason.

Hancock, moreover, has crafted the story into a handsomely-produced spectacle with mid-century Hollywood dazzling with its blatant opulence and curious cheer. It’s nearly impossible not to swoon over such a film’s good-natured sheen.

However, Saving Mr. Banks does not tackle fictional people and their fictional relations. Travers and Disney are real people and their collaboration would in fact be remembered as one of Hollywood’s most difficult, with Travers recommending the removal of the dancing animated penguins from the final cut of Mary Poppins and Disney snugly replying “Pamela, the ship has sailed.” While the rest of the world is celebrating Disney’s Mary Poppins, Travers was regretting it. As a result, despite Disney’s requests, no sequel was ever made.

That is as much as Travers’ later account would confirm, at least. According to John Lee Hancock’s Saving Mr. Banks however, everything seems dandy. Travers protests were nothing more than an opportunity for flashbacks into her hard early life. Her daily exercises with Disney and his crew of confectioners are but therapy for the misunderstanding author to dig inside herself to accept things she has no control over. The movie Mary Poppins is a celebration of that hard-earned acceptance, as may be observed with the image of Travers bawling with the memory of her father’s sacrifices while the cast of the movie sang Let’s Go Fly a Kite with such majestic gusto during the premiere of Mary Poppins.

That being said, Saving Mr. Banks has all the makings of a well-orchestrated ploy. From the casting of beloved Tom Hanks as the equally beloved Walt Disney to Hancock’s treacly treatment of the material to Travers’ portrayal as an uptight prude, everything is perfectly tailored to suit the interests of Disney’s corporation and its pertinent intellectual property.

Ploy or not, Saving Mr. Banks will still predictably melt hearts and earn its army of admirers. As mentioned, its dishonesty is disguised in pleasantry and its pandering to Hollywood’s power is draped in seamless craftsmanship.

Thankfully, Emma Thompson’s portrayal of Travers is nuanced enough to be of moment. Hanks, on the other hand, gives Disney enough likeability to overshadow the dubiousness of the character’s endeavors.

In one particularly devious scene, Disney visits Travers in her home to seduce the children’s book author to sign away the rights of her books in the guise of guiding her to closure of certain childhood pains. Purporting a bevy of compassion being given by the the benevolent producer to the emotionally wrecked poor author, the scene exemplifies the point that the film wants us all to believe: that the world is a better place if Mickey Mouse had his way.

As human beings thirsting for escape, we enjoy watching little mermaids marrying their princes instead of turning into sea sponges, Native American princesses ending up with their European suitors instead of being left in the wilderness for other Europeans to whisk them away, and other distortions of truth as long as they have the requisite happy ending. Saving Mr. Banks is no different. It is nothing more than a necessary exercise by Hollywood to use very personal histories of semi-famous people and perverting them into dainty and harmless pictures for its own motives.

(First published in Rappler.)

Friday, July 12, 2013

Before Midnight (2013)

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 2013)

“Still there, still there, still there,” Celine announces while waiting for the sun to disappear behind the mountains. Jesse, her boyfriend for several years after their serendipitous reunion in Paris, is intimately sitting beside her, also waiting for the sun to disappear. Celine speaks the phrases like a prayer. It is as if the phrases were not observations of the sun’s setting, but a fervent wish that something else is still there and has not been lost to the cynicism that familiarity breeds.

In 1995, Richard Linklater conjured a romantic fantasy by having American backpacker Jesse take a stab at spontaneous love by inviting French tourist Celine to an impromptu excursion in Vienna that has to end before sunrise. The night was magical. There were no ridiculous plot devices or grandiose musical themes, just those once-in-a-lifetime conversations about random facets of life as observed through different eyes that glued them together, at least for those few special hours. They ended their love affair with a promise.

In 2004, Linklater visited the couple separated by geography and broken promises. Jesse has just released his book based on the events that took place that fateful night in 1995, and is now in Paris to sign copies. Celine’s in town as well. Their reunion doesn’t have the exhilarating spontaneity of their initial encounter in the train, but the reminiscence of what has happened and what could have happened is too alluring to ignore. They end up in Celine’s humble hovel, listening to music, surrendering to the fairy tale that was a decade in the making.

Less than a decade after, Jesse, as unkempt as he is ancient, finds himself in a Greek airport, saying his farewell to another what-could-have-been. After hopelessly waiting for perhaps a reassuring hand gesture or eye contact from his son, he leaves the building. Romantic music deceptively plays in the background. Celine, also visibly older, is waiting outside the car. Inside, twins, we presume to be the fruits of the decision they made several years back, are sleeping. Linklater is back at his game. The ride from the airport back to their Grecian home is a treasure trove of banter and insight, of clues as to what has happened within the nine years we left the couple to plot their love story.

However, things are different now. In 1995 and 2004, Jesse and Celine are strangers, excitedly learning about each other. They scrape their lives for whatever secret story or piece of trivia they have left. Bubbling underneath an exterior of flirtatious jokes and other pleasantries are regrets and other things a life already half spent unceremoniously offers. For the first time, Linklater invites us to witness the couple interacting with others --- young lovers discovering the exhilaration of romance in a quickly virtualizing world, a working-class couple who has learned to love the idea of settling for each other’s pleasures and displeasures, and two elderly intellectuals whose varying perceptions on relationships provide both comfort and pain. In the midst of their conversations, Jesse and Celine’s romance loses their uniqueness. It is as if Linklater is preparing the film-viewing world he has molded into believing a fantasy of happily-ever-afters that exists in a cynical world to swallow the pains of seeing the perfect love be rendered imperfect.

The sun disappears. Jesse and Celine end up trapped in a boutique hotel room that forces them to confront each other, without the safety of their twins, their hosts, and the time and distance that used to separate them. The fissures of their discontent were all subtly depicted within that single day. Celine throws a knowing look at Jesse over lunch when certain sensitive topics are touched. Jesse retreats to his accented amorous and humorous declarations of sexual longing when cornered by Celine’s relentless questions. Their expected fight, which is as impassioned as the sweeping promises they used to tell each other, is the heart-breaking evidence that the beloved love story has opened itself to the biting cynicism of our current world.

Linklater has grown up. Jesse and Celine too. The way they see the world has been molded by age and regret. In a country made famous by its ruined edifices that constantly remind the greatness of its past as opposed to the uncertainty of its future, Jesse and Celine are in the brink of seeing their great love be reduced into a piece of history. Great wars of nations have been waged for principles and religion. Jesse and Celine’s war, however, is one that is waged by differences of personalities, of sex, of culture, of everything that was the subject of their laugh-filled debate over a sumptuous Grecian feast. The inevitable truth that is too bitter to swallow is that the heartbreak of seeing the romance fall apart reverberates greater than the sweet promises and expectations that got us drawn to them in the first place.

Jesse makes a last-ditch effort to save everything. In that same seaside café where Celine repeatedly said “still there, still there, still there,” she finds the heart to find truth in the mantra despite the fact that the sun is nowhere to be found. Jesse’s attempt to revive the romance, despite the adorable but passing creativity, is obviously patchwork. There are issues unresolved. From those issues, more fights, probably more vicious than the last one, will be fought. They are now engulfed by reality, just as we all are, with our mercurial moods and relationships. By being brought down to Earth, their love story has taken one big step towards immortality.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Man of Steel (2013)

Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013)

The planet Krypton is about to implode because of its inhabitants’ unscrupulous abuse of its core’s energy. Pillars of flame erupt from the alien world’s surface, obliterating whatever weirdly-shaped structures. It is such delirious wanton, but in the hands of Zack Snyder, who made violence so randomly elegant and extravagant in 300 and impending doom so impatient in the remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the destruction of the world is enthusiastically operatic. It is just so spectacular that a Kryptonian woman, the widow of a recently deceased scientist and mother of a soon-to-be superhero, turns her back on the audience, presumably taking her place as one, absorbing the visual wonder that is her world’s destruction before she is engulfed by a sea of flame.

In Man of Steel, Snyder exploits carnage for spectacle. In the many sequences wherein towns and cities are destroyed, Snyder stages the destruction in a way that humanity, normally driven to safety by its survivalist tendencies, stay behind to indulge in the terror. Buildings fall apart, and workers hypnotically gaze from their offices. A tornado wreaks havoc in an entangled highway forcing vehicles to spiral up in the air, and the survivors stare in dazed horror. This philosophy is so conveniently attuned to the needs of Hollywood, especially with its maniacal obsession during summer to entertain through its many depictions of various scales of destruction, that Snyder’s stylized obliteration of almost everything seems commonplace, even redundant.

However, there is something uncanny about Snyder’s visual savagery. From the perspective of a Superman story that is so rooted in the heartland of America, the near-endless string of edifices and structures bowing down to invasion bears an immense sense of dread. That everything that happens between the film’s fiery bookends is so devoid of joy that every attempt to crack a joke dissipates and is ultimately forgotten is just the kind of adroit seriousness a superhero movie needs to give its many scenes of purposeful havoc some semblance of weight.

The quieter moments of Man of Steel, the ones shown in the film’s many lengthy flashbacks, proposes a heart that is unlike any of its ilk. Where recent incarnations of superheroes insist on backstories that rely on drama, like a violent death in the family or an aberration, Man of Steel has a young Clark Kent living a very palpable American existence, aside of course the frequent displays of superhuman strength. Raised by Kansas farmers, presumably Christian in the same way most rural Americans are, he is molded to possess a simpleminded morality that will serve as foundations of his decisions as an adult superhero.

Similarly, his motivations are fashioned by the same prejudices and fears that consume the heartland. Its mostly white, mostly Christian demographic, induces its residents to be less tolerant of strangers, of anybody who might disrupt the comforts of tradition. His father's guiding words, the ones that urged him to live in anonymity for fear of being persecuted, acknowledge the very nature of middle America, one that is fearful of its capacity for intolerance. Of course, the film’s more apparent and conventional storyline, of General Zod and his dreams of populating Earth with Kryptonians and committing genocide while at it, reflects in a louder and more confrontational manner those themes on morality and tolerance.

In a way, Snyder’s Superman seems to represent the America none of these recent superhero movies even dare to represent. He personifies the traits and weaknesses of the common American, the ones oblivious to the wealth only a certain percentile of the population possesses, the ones whose ambitions are limited to the corners of their birth town. Even this Superman’s quiet charm, his inability to verbalize his actions, his reliance on memory, even that extended discomfort with his love interest, mirrors the modesty associated with America’s heartland. In the midst of all the responsibility that is suddenly placed upon his shoulder and the succeeding threat to the world, there is just an undeniable charisma in his popular struggle.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Give Up Tomorrow (2011)

Give Up Tomorrow (Michael Collins, 2011)

It should have ended when the Philippines’ Supreme Court denied the several Motions for Reconsideration filed by the men who have earlier been convicted for the rape and murder of the Chiong sisters and sentenced to death. It was supposed to have been a triumph of a justice system beleaguered by accusations of being beholden to the rich and influential. For a time, it was indeed seen as a triumph. For that very little time when the media, in the guise of being one with the overwhelming majority, was celebrating the illusory end to all the questions and issues, the country had a sense that there is indeed order.

The convicted men were predictably seen as spoiled scions of the few members of the wealthy elite. The most prominent accused, Francisco “Paco” Larrañaga, is at first glance, the very personification of the country’s social divide. With his fair skin, brown eyes, and foreign features, he does not look like most Filipinos. His mother is a distant relative of a former president. His father is a Spanish citizen. His gazes are intense, almost angry. He talks with a cadence that is too assured and easily mistakable as indifference and arrogance. His eventual fall from grace, starting from his celebrated arrest to that final conviction by the highest court of the land, is therefore the logical happy ending to the escapist entertainment that the case has evolved into.

Director Michael Collins and producer Marty Syjuco’s Give Up Tomorrow presents the fatedly intertwined stories of the Chiongs and the Larrañagas from a specific perspective, that of those closer and more intimate to the perceived victimizers than the victim. At first glance, the obvious tilt to sympathize with Paco seems problematic as it clouds the documentary, pushing it further away from being a portrait of a frustratingly neglected truth into something that resembles propaganda. As it turns out, the documentary, with its skillfully presented pieces of evidence that pertains to the alleged miscarriage of justice, serves both purposes seamlessly.

The documentary’s strongest sequences are those that featured real footage from the prolonged trial, edited together with various interviews with shelved witnesses and emotional relatives, unflinchingly revealing the folly that was instantaneously believed and consumed in the heat of the moment. The film’s most sobering moments are those depicting Paco, from when he was snatched from the good life up to several years after when he is still serving a sentence for a crime he allegedly did not commit, insisting on his innocence, mouthing the mantra from which the title of the documentary was borrowed. Its portrayal of the two mothers, one whose obsession with her being a victim has allowed her to mold the system to suit her cause and the other whose trust in the system had turned herself and her family into its unsuspecting victims, is at once astounding and melancholic.

As it methodically shatters the official truth as narrated and explained by the various decisions of the trial and appellate courts, it also shatters the precious comfort and security that the processes that came up with the official truths provide. As it navigates the glaring flaws of a distinct judicial system through the experiences of Paco, it exposes the immense cracks of any system or institution tasked to retain both order and justice that is created and run by corruptible and erring men. More than swaying sympathies towards the already maligned convicts, Give Up Tomorrow espouses vigilance, especially in this age where truth is easily adaptable to the needs of the powerful.

Give Up Tomorrow acknowledges the gravity and importance of its cause, skirting away from too much style and spectacle and focusing instead on the scope and breadth of its material. Despite its very straightforward presentation, it is an admittedly difficult film to sit through. It is immensely heartbreaking, balancing the indelible pain of seeing an entire system that for years has been entrusted to set things right shamelessly crumble and being asked to accept the very possible reality that an innocent man has wasted his best years in jail, all for the benefit of keeping a tumultuous mob sated.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Monday, February 13, 2012

Tinikling or 'The Madonna and the Dragon' (1989)

Tinikling or 'The Madonna and the Dragon' (Samuel Fuller, 1989)

French Title: Tinikling ou 'La Madonne et le Dragon'

“A film is like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotions,” answered Samuel Fuller when asked by Jean-Paul Belmondo what cinema is in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965). The statement is in fact the guiding principle in most of Fuller’s films, which are fundamentally inspired by all of the things that Fuller has mentioned pervade a war. His masterpieces like Pickup on South Street (1953), Shock Corridor (1963), The Big Red One (1980), and White Dog (1982) are films that are charged with the rawest of those emotions, unhindered by any pretense of subtlety. Even in the twilight of his colorful career, a period which critics have disregarded as his weakest, Fuller still made films that move and stagger like emotional soldiers in the heat of victory or defeat.

Tinikling or ‘The Madonna and the Dragon’, made for French television and shot entirely in the Philippines, is the last film Fuller directed. The film starts with the display of several photographs of domestic strife from various parts of the world like Beirut and Nicaragua. After which, photographs of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination, leading to the declaration of the elections between overstaying president Ferdinand Marcos and Aquino’s widow, Corazon. The film, set a few days prior to the elections, has foreign journalist photographers chasing around Manila for that perfect picture that will catapult Manila’s chaotic situation to international standards. It pits the distance from their subjects these journalists have to acquire to succeed with the very human situations that they are forced to witness and only document.

The action begins in the middle of a trash dump. Fuller opens with an extreme close-up of the withered face of an old man who is frantically praying. The camera pans to reveal the barrel of an automatic rifle, sticking against the back of the old man. The rifle’s owner, an intoxicated soldier, orders another person to shoot him at the count of three. The other person, a female photographer named Patty (Jennifer Beals), is cursing the soldier for his inhumanity while readying her camera to shoot the soldier at the exact moment of the old man’s execution. The soldier counts to three, kills the old man, and angrily asks Patty if he shot his proud moment. Patty curses the soldier and says that she couldn’t, forcing the soldier to angrily point his rifle at her, readying to shoot. Before the soldier could pull the trigger, he is shot by another photographer from behind. Simon (Luc Merenda), Patty’s savior at that time is also her ex-husband.

The opening sequence is one that fulfils Fuller’s description of what cinema is. In a matter of a few minutes, Fuller was able to completely characterize Patty as a woman too concerned over the welfare of her subjects to be truly successful. Simon, on the other hand, is more of a mercenary, adept not only in photography but also in other skills that would land him the perfect sensational photo. The photograph he takes later on, a photograph featuring a soldier shooting an old lady who refuses to reveal the lair of the rebel vigilante group of Mindanao (Ben Cervantes), becomes the object of the film’s story.

Wanted by Marcos’ men and Mindanao’s men for political reasons because its raw power which can steer the election towards Corazon Aquino and by the foreign press because it encapsulates the situation of the Philippines under the regime of Marcos, the photograph is suddenly stolen, leading Simon and Patty to deal and connive with Manila’s underworld which features Mama (Christa Lang), the shrewd owner of a casino cum brothel, Pavel (Patrick Bauchau), a suspect goon who has ties with both Mama and Mindanao, and a prostitute (Pilar Pilapil) under the care of Mama whose romantic dealings with Mindanao seems to be the picture’s only avenue to a real dramatic heart.

Tinikling or ‘The Madonna and the Dragon’ is commendable for dealing with a very specific event in Philippine history. Inaccuracies are inevitable. For example, the film makes it seem that Corazon Aquino officially won the elections, leaving out the People Power Revolution which eventually led to Marcos’ ouster. I suppose the several days of the peaceful revolution would throw the film’s quick pace off. I also suppose that Fuller did not have full control over the final product, which is why the film is not as tightly edited as it could be. However, the film has enough Fuller in it to be assessed alongside the director’s best films.

Aside from the astounding opening, the film also features a gun fight set inside a movie theater. As Mindanao’s men are firing against Marcos’ soldiers, Fuller cuts to the gunfight that is happening in the film being screened. Fuller seems to be channelling his Pierrot le fou quote by juxtaposing the violence of cinema and the violence of the realities of Marcos’ regime in that brilliantly conceived action sequence.

The film suspiciously ends rationally. Patty finally gets the picture that betrays her earnest characterization, shooting a boy (Reginald Singh), whom Patty rescues from the trash dump from bloodthirsty scavengers early on, who kills a man who turns out to be a Marcos supporter. Simon shoots Patty shooting the picture. Corazon Aquino has replace Marcos as president of the Philippines. Against the man-made peace provided for by a luxurious hotel pool, Patty and Simon are reunited. The boy, whose peculiar grasp of the English language was learned from growing up being fed by gangster movies, is reunited with his passion for rock and roll and everything else American.

Tinikling or ‘The Madonna and the Dragon’ concludes in a way that everything that happened before, from the extreme poverty that turns children into ingenious murderers to the treachery of freedom fighters, seems to be nothing more than plot points in a continuing history of a nation. From the perspective of foreign eyes, it seems that the very real atrocities of the country are but mere subjects of pulp fiction. Fuller, like the foreign photographers he chose to concentrate on instead of the fractured Filipinos whose stories may prove to be more endearing, chose to tackle his subject from a safe distance, turning the film into an enjoyable, sometimes intellectually stirring but ultimately emotionally shallow trip back to the final days of the Philippines under Marcos’ rule.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Chronicle (2012)

The Man with a Camera

A Review of Josh Trank's Chronicle

Perhaps the only thing that made true sense in all of Michael Bay’s ridiculously noisy Transformers films is a scene in the first film. The homeless robots from outer space have just landed in America, transforming into various vehicles, creating much mayhem, destruction, and fanfare. Instead of running for their lives like the adorably naïve city-dwellers of those cheap monster movies from the 50’s and 60’s, the city-dwellers of Bay’s explosion extravaganza, armed with only video-capable cellular phones or other kinds of portable cameras, go near the metal-bound extraterrestrials and commit the strange occurrences to this world’s technology-aided memory, as captured in bits of data and shared to the world through the help of the internet. That scene in Transformers, perhaps done not for depth but for shallow social satire, sets the film within contemporary terms. It is what differentiates Bay’s films from the outdated but hugely enjoyable and undoubtedly memorable cartoon series from which the films were based.

Josh Trank’s Chronicle is ostensibly a superhero movie. Three friends discover a hole in the ground with some mysterious contraption that gives them telekinetic abilities. From simple tricks they display amongst themselves, they start expanding their powers, and as their powers evolve, the limits of what their morals can take are tested. They are after all quite suddenly gods among normal men.

Chronicle’s storyline is by itself satisfying enough to merit the film some attention. The connivance of the troubled coming-of-age of bullied high schoolers and superpowers creates an experience that delightfully betrays comic book expectations. Although many of the film’s plot points are more corny than compelling, the film admirably commits to its nonsensical musings, weaving together characters that are as obnoxious or as likeable as any other person off your Facebook friends list with a plot straight out of Marvel fan-made fiction.

What ultimately separates Chronicle from other superhero films with the same normal-person-turned-superhero core is the gimmick that pervades the film. The film starts off as a home video. Andrew (Dane DeHaan) has just purchased a cheap camera and has decided to shoot everything that happens in his life. From that logic, the film is allowed to maintain the amateur videographer aesthetic, creating an atmosphere that forces you to understand the motivations behind Andrew’s drastic decisions in the future.

Interestingly, as the characters gain their telekinetic abilities, and as the cheap camera is replaced with a new and more expensive one, the film also transforms into something sleeker, with deliberate pans and zooms and interesting angles, that not only adds aesthetic variance to this so-called “found footage” film but also adds personality to the character who is supposedly controlling the camera that is capturing the action. In a way, the character is not only described through the actions we immediately see but also through the motivations we impute behind his always wanting to be filmed or chronicled.

Andrew, from the loner whose only communication with the world is through the videoclips that people someday might see, is transformed into a power-hungry megalomaniac whose zest for self-iconography can only be matched by history’s worst dictators. In one scene that is similar to the Transformers scene earlier mentioned, tourists in the viewing deck of Seattle’s Space Needle start chronicling the midair battle between Andrew and his cousin (Alex Russell) instead of running for safety, Andrew telekinetically grabs the cellular phones and cameras from the onlookers and creates a wall of cameras circling him, capturing his every movement in numerous angles.

Many critics find the film’s reliance on the so-called found footage as more damning than helpful. I disagree. Perhaps the only liability that Chronicle’s peculiar style deals is that it raises questions as to the consistency of the gimmickry. It just seems unlikely that a camera would be available just anywhere to coherently form a story in motion picture form.

However, as can only be gleaned from the near limitless videos available online, from the freak accidents in an obscure part of the world that have suddenly gone viral in social networking sites or the proliferation of very personal and intimate video blogs, there is always a possibility, one that could not have existed years before the citizens of the world did not have the ability to randomly pull out a camera to capture robots landing from outer space, of an outrageous story being told by anybody who has unlimited access to view and edit something out of all the videos produced and being produced by the billions of people who have access to cameras. Chronicle is only a Hollywood-ized expression of that fantastical possibility.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Sunday, June 26, 2011

The Tree of Life (2011)

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Life is such a peculiar thing. It is regarded as the most precious of things by humanity. However, it is also the one thing that humanity shares with other creatures, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest whale. That exact same life that humans and the rest of nature partake in equal portions however becomes vastly differentiated with the sudden absence of it. For the rest of the universe, death is just an act of nature. For humanity, death is something else, something that dwells, something sacred, something spiritual, something religious.

“Was he bad? Where were you, to let a boy die, to let anything happen? Why should I be good, if you aren’t,” a boy asks God after witnessing another boy drown in a public swimming pool. The death of a fellow human elicits such a response from another human. It is as if a great injustice has been done by God. Death is treated as punishment instead and should only be merited when one has been evil.

Naturally, the initial emotion that The Tree of Life communicates is one brought about by death, grief. A mother opens her home to the news of her teenage son’s death. Moments of piercing silence, probably out of doubt or disbelief, ensue. Then she lets out a defeated wail, short-lived though as Malick immediately cuts to the next scene of the father who learns of the death of his son through a phone call. Sequences of grief follow: neighbours and friends attempting to placate the mother, the father wanting to grieve in privacy.

Fast-forward to several decades after, a man, seemingly aloof from his wife and the world, remembers the death of his brother. He lights a candle, apologizes to his father about something about his dead brother, and goes about his work-a-day life with evident distance. As these visualizations of grief, both fresh and carried over through the years, flicker onscreen, whispered prayers are heard. The mother looks up to the sky. “That’s where God lives,” she once told her son. The scene cuts to a cloud of light over darkness, the same image that begins and ends the film and recurs every so often. “Lord, why? Where were you? Did you know? Who are we to you? Answer me,” she pleads.

At that juncture, Malick tells the story of the universe, from when it was just nebulous formations of light and darkness up to the appearance of life. Awe is an overwhelming emotion derived from a position of subordination. The images that Malick conjures in non-stop fashion are ones that can only elicit awe. From something as epic as galaxies being formed to something as minuscule as the moment a sperm enters an egg, the images are always sublime and powerful. In the midst of such breadth and brilliance, everything else, even death and grief, seems insignificant.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth,” quoted by Malick from the book of Job, could be God’s response to the mother’s chain of questions. Religion has trained humanity to regard itself as the center of the universe, but the history of the universe, it seems, points out to the exact opposite: that humanity is but a dot in the journey from beginning to end.

Malick goes back from mapping the formation of the universe to mapping the evolution of a man, from the time when the father and mother fell in love, to his birth, to the early stages of his maturity. Told in fragments instead of a linear narrative, the film takes the shape of a montage of memories kept that inevitably molds adulthood. It is also a medley of emotions that ground the experience back to familiarity. A boy looks jealously of his baby brother. The father plays a few notes of his piano to accompany his son who is strumming his guitar as the older son enviously looks from afar. A boy throws a piece of lingerie to the river because of the guilt of an emerging sexuality. A son wishes for the death of his father. The same son imagines his mother flying in the air, an angel.

Malick explores the supposed opposing concepts of nature and grace. Ostensibly, the father, strict and dictatorial in the rearing of his children and the management of his household, represents the path of nature. On the other hand, the mother, kind, gentle, and immaculate, represents the path of grace. Childhood becomes the setting of these clashing forces. The boy struggles from innocence to worldliness, treading the path to nature. “I’m as bad as you are. I’m more like you than her,” the son tells his father.

To absorb these characters are mere symbols of some cosmic tug-of-war between nature and grace is to belittle the complexities of their humanity, which Malick laid down with such meticulousness that it can only come from somewhere intimate and personal. The father, the mother, the three children, all fall from grace, rebound, and just exist notwithstanding the greater forces that lord over the universe. It is that innate ability to exist and the knowledge of existence that separates humanity from the universe. In a way, that ability and knowledge allows humanity to distance itself from the evolution of the universe and create for itself a history of its own choosing, a beginning of its own choosing, and an end of its own choosing.

To exist is to choose. Rather than representations of a philosophical notion, the characters exist, deciding to jump from domination, such as when death results in a collapse of faith, to acceptance, such as when the father’s financial collapse brings all of them together to leave their perfect suburban home, and so on.

“I give him to you,” the mother whispers as she is caressed by angelic beings. Images of the dead son leaving their suburban house towards the horizon, of the adult eldest son seeing his father, mother, brothers, all in ageless form, converge in a beach teeming with people from memories both close and distant, of birth, of death, and of life mingle onscreen.

Grace, as Malick seems to elucidate, is neither the opposite of nature, nor an elementary appropriation of the mother’s maternal qualities, nor an adjunct of religion’s concept of morality. It is simply acceptance of the movement of the universe, that people die to form part of the story of the world, that humanity, despite its capacity to choose, can choose to be again part of the universe it has always attempted to sever itself from in its quest for dominance over creation. Grace is a moment of peace, that secluded smile the adult son lets off because of and despite the world.

The Tree of Life is a priceless work that is astoundingly majestic, sublimely spectacular, but never alienating. In its search for deeper truths, it positions itself not from the vantage point of a pompous philosopher, looking in from the outside, but as an everyman, looking out from the inside. In that sense, the film is far more generous than it looks. In its beautiful abstractions are fissures that allow for the entry of varying interpretations that are inevitable given the infinite number of disciplines, faith, and experiences that are around.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)

It is almost as if the paintings were waiting for the film to get made. The Chauvet Cave in Southern France suffered a cave-in several thousands of years ago, blocking its entrance and effectively preserving the paintings and everything else inside from deterioration caused by the elements and the natural course of time. For several decades since its discovery, the paintings have only been enjoyed through photographs and replicas, considering that entry to the cave have been limited to a few individuals. That is until Werner Herzog and his crew of three were granted unprecedented entry to film the interior of the cave. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that result of the unlikely marriage of fate and genius.

Instead of merely treating the paintings as isolated works of art, Herzog posits that the paintings are prehistoric prototypes of cinema, explaining that the position of the paintings, the way they were painted, where they were painted, the possible sources of light in the cave allude to an illusion of movement and to a possible fantasy. Herzog’s hypothesis immediately removes the cave paintings from a position of trite curiosity into something more immediate and relevant. The paintings have turned into products of our conspirators in dreaming. They are evidence of something intrinsically shared with the prehistoric men. Herzog turns these anonymous people from the distant past into relatable characters with hearts and souls that are kindred to ours.

Herzog does not completely settle inside the cave. Instead, he frequently flies away, curiously focusing on the people around the film: their dreams, their inadequacies, quirks and past lives. Although separated by differing priorities and millenniums, there’s a connection that’s established between the subject of the film and his erstwhile subjects, and hopefully, the audience. In one scene, Herzog forces this connection, staging an ominous silence inside the cave, keeping his guides, his crew, and himself in a prayerful stance listening to a supposed communal heartbeat. Ernst Reijseger’s powerful score not so much swells but creeps into the middle of that shared contemplation, turning Herzog’s orchestrated meditation with that filament of humanity he strives to define into some sort of graceful sequence which it is ostensibly not.

The most beautiful thing that Herzog committed to in Cave of Forgotten Dreams is to expand it into something quite larger than it should be. The use of 3D for example is not for mere spectacle. Instead, it is a necessary tool to create that illusion of being inside the cave, of witnessing the actual contours of the cave walls instead of seeing a flat representation of those contours, of experiencing the movement of the painted animals instead of only imagining motion. Considering that the cave paintings and the cinema they aspire to be are all tools that utilize illusions to function as tools to approximate reality, 3D serves as a companion piece to this illusion-building by requiring the approximation of space and depth as essential to not only experience the wonders of the cave but also to understand Herzog’s claims.

That Herzog does not rely solely on hard facts and historical accuracy is what makes Cave of Forgotten Dreams so immeasurably fascinating. After all, what we see in the cave paintings are only minute facets of the immense world that the prehistoric man could have lived in and exploited. We can only watch in awe, dream connections and relations. Yet, we can never be exactly sure. We can only speak and feel from the very little that we know and the very vast that we can imagine. The documentary, as most documentaries do, places us in a comfortable position of looking at and into the subject. Thus, when the film moves into its postscript, with Herzog suddenly placing the audience as the subject for possible interpretation and interpolation of albino alligators that came from the probable future, the tables are turned, and the effect is nothing short of sublime.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Friday, March 18, 2011

Bombay Beach (2011)

Bombay Beach (Alma Har'el, 2011)

Salton Sea, a salt-water lake in the middle of the deserts of California, used to be the place to be several decades ago. Nowadays, it stands as a testament as to how time diffuses luster. The once pristine beaches that catered to the wealthiest of Americans are now graves to thousands of fish that perish because of the increasing salinity and toxicity of the lake. As it is, the area surrounding Salton Sea is that post-apocalyptic paradise existing in this pre-apocalyptic world. It remains to be this place of very elusive beauty, where glistening during sunsets are masked by abject sights of poverty.

Alma Har'el's Bombay Beach, without glossing over the pertinent issues that surround the subject surroundings, focuses on the lives of several individuals who seem to approximate the veiled charms of the place they call home. The film is loosely structured in a way that it does not follow any narrative arc but instead rides on an atmosphere of feel-good but never doubtful sentimentality. As a collage of portraits of various lives struggling in a presumably inhospitable landscape, Bombay Beach is joyously uplifting, which is somewhat pleasantly strange in this current cinematic landscape of popular doom and despair.

Music is an important element of Bombay Beach. The dances, mostly choreographed but performed by Har’el’s subjects with hardly any expectations of perfection, however, are essential. Volumes are communicated when a hard-boiled old-timer delivers a graceful gesture of unlikely romance in his awkward waltz, or when budding lovers interpret their newly formed affair with an evocative number. Benny, youngest son of the Parrish couple, whose story of being imprisoned for blowing up bombs in the desert as a pastime is an extraordinary subject for another documentary, takes part in this lovely group dance with other kids which summarize the endearing awkwardness of his fateful existence in the community. In a wondrously edited, lovingly executed and carefully directed sequence, the film transported its audience, although temporarily, to a place where innocence in the midst of immense adversity is not some lunatic’s fantasy.

That Har-el was able to draw inspiration from individuals who would commonly be regarded as the dregs of society, as pinnacles of human hopelessness, and jokes of cruel destiny, and was able to visually manifest beauty from a place where it has long faded is evidence of her ability to mix heart with directorial mettle. It is that unrestrained but sincere optimistic depiction of the human spirit that makes Har’el’s modestly produced but magnanimously crafted documentary such an indelible experience.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Friday, October 22, 2010

The Social Network (2010)

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

David Fincher’s The Social Network opens inside a bar where Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenburg), future billionaire and inventor of Facebook, and Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), Zuckerberg’s very-near-future ex-girlfriend and inspiration for a chauvinistic blog post and website Facemash, are in the middle of a rather lopsided conversation with Zuckerberg leading in amount of words and ideas blabbered in a minute and Albright obviously trailing behind. The setting, although not very long ago, harkens to an era when face-to-face relations have not been threatened with obsolescence. The bar is packed. Talk is lively. That is pre-Facebook, pre-the era of living both real and cyber lives with equal importance, pre-breakups via change in the relationship status in profile pages.

If the internet has made the world smaller, Facebook has turned the inhabitants of that shrunk world into codes and scripts that are all interconnected and worse, predictable. Facebook is not addictive because it was made to be addictive. It is addictive because it simulates the social aspect of modern human living. What Facebook members do in the website resembles, with hardly any artificial intervention, how we act and speak in real life. The fact that the inspirations for Facebook are ignited from the social systems of a university campus reflects the probable lapse in the so-called human free will that the success of the social networking website feeds from.

All this is of course touched upon by Fincher tangentially. What The Social Network is more concerned with is Zuckerberg’s story, how a seemingly unlikable Harvard student turned billionaire in a span of a few years and changed the world. It is a story that plays very much like a corporate thriller, except that the characters, instead of being motivated primarily by the greed that consumes adults, are all twenty-something dreamers whose wealth and greatness are mere byproducts of wrestling with their own immaturities and lack of world-readiness. Thus, sprinkled in between plot-forwarding scenes and dialogue are the portraits that are not always patronizing of Zuckerberg’s character but enunciates his humanity, such as when his new-found fame got him a first stab at sex, or what results right after, when he sees his ex-girlfriend and attempts to utilize his fame to undo the insults resulting from his foolish brashness and insensitivity in the film’s opening scene.

At the same time though, The Social Network does not attempt accuracy. In fact, the characters that Fincher and Sorkin created for the film are only stereotypes of who these personalities could be in real life. It is as if these characters are seen not through a biographer’s precise inquisitiveness or a journalist’s adherence to codes of ethics, but through their very own Facebook profiles, where tagged photos, albums, hobbies, interests, likes and relationship statuses are enough to create an idea of who the person behind the profile could be. In a way, the film relishes in the idea of seeing the characters, which are essentially film-friendly sketches of more complex personalities the audience might never have the privilege of knowing, interact as such, extended sketches of what these people were in Harvard: competitive jocks, unsociable nerds, negligible sidekicks, and objects of desire. Fantastically too, this is primarily how Facebook works, by encapsulating people in a few web pages consisting of pictures, basic information and relations, and allowing the casual onlooker a pre-conceived notion of the person via his profile, and thus, giving him the opportunity to judge via his response to the random Add Friend request.

Despite its liberal interpretation of the Facebook founding story, turning what in my mind is a monotonous and maybe sometimes exciting amalgamation of boring lawsuits, endless nights in computer gibberish and mental masturbation, and utter lack of sexy sex, Fincher and Sorkin succeeds in romanticizing the unromantic, cinematizing the un-cinematic, and humanizing the potentially dehumanizing website that has turned Zuckerberg into an icon of this generation of millionaires and billionaires who’ve reached their economic peaks at the same time they’re discovering their own maturities. It’s a generation, as exemplified in one of the scenes where Zuckerberg is asked a question by an elderly lawyer but his mind is elsewhere and when scolded by the elderly lawyer delivers a witty retort that is impossible to deflect without sounding foolish, that cannot by manhandled by dinosaurs of a disappearing era. The speed of change is indisputable in the film which details the pre-Facebook and post-Facebook eras with satisfying details, although blanketed with the familiar dramas of Zuckerberg and company.

The ending, where Zuckerberg ends up alone after a full day of depositions and argumentations in the conference room, toying with his Facebook page, adding Erica Albright as one of his friends in the networking site, and refreshing his internet browser every few seconds to see if his ex-girlfriend responds to his request, is a very potent portrait of creator succumbing to his creation. It details the very mechanism of human interaction that Facebook or any other high technology simulator of human behavior can never replicate, and that is the ability to feel and the free will to act on that feeling. A billionaire in his early twenties, the founder of the most popular website in the planet, a ruthless and conniving businessman, Zuckerberg, at that moment, is without what he wants and needs the most. It is the fact that it is the mechanical and a little bit humorous redundancy that his creation inevitably lured him into mindlessly committing that exposes his biggest failure amidst his famous successes that makes the scene, and the entire film, a worthwhile, if not enlightening journey into what kind of social creatures our human race is transforming into.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010)

An archived photograph of the Filipino-American war as shown

in John Gianvito's Vapor Trail (Clark)

Aftermath

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

I once fancied myself a history buff, memorized all the events, the dates, the personalities, and other specifics. I was necessarily fascinated by the fact that these events, although involving unheard of elements like war, bloodshed and political intrigue, were real and that they happened in the same world that I exist in. That these events happened in the past gave me a god-like stance of observing them, studying them, memorizing them within a safety that is comforting. The immediate rewards of this fascination with history included top grades in social sciences and an infamy for being a reliable source of trivia.

Trivia. That was all history was for me and presumably most of the world’s work-a-day citizens. As soon as we participate in the seemingly grand but realistically humdrum race called life, we conveniently forget the lessons of the trivial past and replace them with a mentality of “what’s in it for me in the future.” The several EDSA Revolutions all seem like blurs, all parades of empty symbols of the color yellow, the Laban sign, and the humongous Mama Mary standing guard atop a Catholic shrine. For majority of us who are in it for the future consider these symbols as emblems of the promises that they once were and are rejuvenated as continuing promises, not necessarily as a linkage of the persistence of history as a reason for the woes of the present.

Alexis and Nika were murdered on September 1, 2009 in Alexis’ house in West Triangle. Alexis was a film critic, nay, a film activist who spread himself and whatever resources he has amassed during his lifetime for the goal of film education, whether it be to salvage whatever remains of whatever film legacy the Philippines has or to simply broaden the tastes of Filipinos to try films more complicated than the traditional offerings of Hollywood and its local counterparts. Again, all of these are just trivia, bits and pieces of information that newspapers would publish for a semblance of currency in their news-telling. Again, that’s that, a piece of history for the now-enamored-then-oblivious history buffs in high school. The truth of the matter is that their deaths have left an immense void in the advocacy that they concentrated their efforts on.

One of Alexis’ foremost projects was to set-up informal screenings right at the heart of the hangouts of the middle-class and upper-class Filipinos, presumably to bring intelligent films into the consciousness of those with the most capabilities to move and change the pitiful status quo. Thus, the Fully Booked Film Series was born. Imagine. The static shots of Lav Diaz, the beautiful experimentations of Raya Martin, the ultra-personal visual poems of John Torres, and the sensible madness of Khavn just a few meters away from Batman, Spider-man, Archie, Calvin and Hobbes. The irony of it all is just the cherry on top. The meat of the project is that these films, criticized for only being devoured by film enthusiasts outside the country, are being screened in the Philippines, for free, and with the directors and film experts present to answer or at least acknowledge hopefully sensible questions.

A few months after the deaths of Alexis and Nika, the Fully Booked Film Series re-introduced itself as the Tioseco-Bohinc Film Series in appreciation of the two film lovers’ contribution to its existence. In consonance with the recent happenings in the Philippine cinema scene, a very apt screening of John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) was held a few months ago after much prodding from Lav, one of the film’s staunchest supporters. The first part of two documentaries that tackle former United States military bases in the Philippines, the film parades itself as a document of the harrowing effects of the ghosts of these bases, from the contaminations to the water supply to the general forgetfulness of the residents of the subtle woes that the Americans have left behind in the country. The documentary perceptively masks its berating message to the Filipino populace who seem to have contented themselves in treating history as a reason to install crumbling statues in unkempt city plazas while sniffing rugby for pleasure. We are a country of people addicted to momentary flights to landscapes of illusory comforts while everything else in the world is decaying.

In Gianvito’s very personal introduction to the film, where he acknowledged the contribution of Alexis to the film but was only read to the viewers because Gianvito was in Boston and could not go to the screening, he proposes that the Philippines “was robbed of its own independence” by the Americans “at the very moment it had finally achieved liberation from the brutal yoke of Spain is yet one more example of the willful distortion of history by those who benefit from the suppression of inconvenient truths.” The crux of Vapor Trail (Clark) is not only the indictment of the Americans of its overt and subvert crimes against the Philippines but also the indictment of the Filipinos for the act of forgetting and hence, undervaluing and neglecting the gift of liberty that was delivered by our patriots and freedom fighters. The very purpose why this country exists has been overshadowed by tenuous promises of alleviation. The truth is that we are still at war with our colonizers yet there are only very few revolutionaries left fighting, very few nationalistic songs sung, very few real Filipinos left to protect. The rest are slaves to a written history that is too much about trivia and too little about us.

These ramblings are of course products of my own frustration, not anymore about how this country’s history has been morphed into a topic of quiz nights instead of discourse but by the well-founded opinion that to even entertain such an idea is so unpopular, so boring, and so unsophisticated for anyone to spend a few hours of a lazy Sunday for. Vapor Trail (Clark), powerful as it is in its content, in the fact that it is imparted by an American, in the fact that it is too scathingly true to be simply a matter of entertainment or even curiosity, ended with only four people in the audience remaining. Alas, such is the sorry fate of these films that only seek to enlighten and to change mindsets and such is the blessed fate of Christopher Nolan’s Inception that is praised to death by both critics and viewers for its ability to turn fantasy into reality, vice versa ad infinitum. Such is also the fate of those who attempted to inherit Alexis’ woes, finding solutions against all odds to instill a permanent curiosity which will hopefully evolve into a thirst for films of these sort, films whose whispers are louder than the most grandiose explosions in a Michael Bay flick. If only these things can be treated as trivialities. Unfortunately, they can’t so we simply stagger on.

(First published in Uno Magazine, September, 2010, issue)

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Robin Hood (2010)

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

What is it with history that implores us to treat it with reckless reverence? It seems that humanity has devolved into needy orphans, unable to cope up with the problems of the present and always looking at the past for answers and reasons, or a semblance of a former glory that the messy world we currently live in can never provide. Filmmakers, those modern storytellers who more often than not are no longer motivated by the actual pleasure of the arts but by the promise of earning a shiny buck for themselves and for the corporations they make films for, have presented themselves to bridge the already bridged gap, telling new and old stories with perceived historical accuracy. What for? Surely, it is no longer for sheer spectacle or plain pageantry. When the likes of D. W. Griffith, whose The Birth of the Nation (1915) remains to be one of the most historically offensive yet grandiosely spectacular films of all time, or Cecile B. DeMille, who has made a career turning the silver screen into a time capsule that showcases the opulence of the past, are a rare if not extinct species in today's crop of filmmakers, historical accuracy has turned into a cosmetic cliché that begs and pleads for relevance and importance, rather than a spark for discourse.

Take Ridley Scott's appallingly unimaginative Robin Hood as an example. The character of Robin Hood persists in common knowledge as close to mythical, a conveniently moral bandit who is donned in the stereotypical archer’s outfit and goes about the business of stealing from the rich so that he can redistribute the wealth to the poor and is reinforced by the many cinematic reincarnations from Errol Flynn’s dashing and charming hero in Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); to the witty fox garbed in green in Walt Disney Studios’ animated re-telling Robin Hood (1973); to Kevin Costner’s overly serious champion in Kevin Reynolds’ Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). In an attempt to inject relevance to the overly familiar tale in the most unlikely way, Mel Brooks came up with a deliciously vicious satire, Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), explicating how the hero, with his and his friends’ dated fashion sense and claim to fame, is actually a wellspring of gags and jokes.

In Scott’s Robin Hood, Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) is an archer in the army of King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston), whose return to England to reclaim the throne is impeded by his death in battle. Disguised as Sir Robert Loxley who died in an ambush, Robin and his men return to England to relay the news of the king’s untimely death, which leads to the coronation of John (Oscar Isaac) as the new king of England, and start to lead the lives of their assumed identities, as son of the Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) of Nottingham and wife of Marion (Cate Blanchett). Burdened by contributions to Richard’s crusades and John’s abominable taxes which are being collected by Godfrey (Mark Strong), one of John’s trusted men, who turns out to be a double agent for the invading French, the people have gone poorer and poorer, making them more restless and resistant to the king’s abusive demands.

Placing the character in an exact place in history seems to be a good idea since it opens the character to further interpolation, placing his legendary motive of wealth distribution within a context of actual events instead of fictional scenarios. Although claimed to be based on researches and investigations on the very identity of the character, Scott’s Robin Hood feels more hokey than convincing. In fact, this undue insistence on historical accuracy, boxing him within the possibilities and probabilities of the time period, has turned the character into a fatal bore. As far as this film goes, the allure of Robin Hood --- the cunning and mischief mixed with chivalry, the adventurousness, the mystery --- is completely obliterated, turning the famous thief, at least in the eyes of the film’s viewers, into just another artifact of the past, excretable and forgettable. Not even the several astoundingly meticulously recreated set pieces can save a Robin Hood film whose Robin Hood is as ordinary as the next summer blockbuster action hero from obscurity.

As far as historical accuracy is concerned, Scott makes his audience believe that he has solved the riddle to the identity of the much-beloved Robin Hood. More than that, Scott has oversimplified Robin Hood, turning him into a palatable modern hero and a defender of democracy with the several back-stories on the trauma of the crusades, his father’s goal of uniting England with a declaration of rights, and his fate of mustering all the warriors of England to thwart the French invasion, instead of the moral conundrum that he really is, the prime example of the debate on whether or not the ends can justify the means. I personally prefer the latter; Robin Hood is simply bigger than the history or the culture that gave birth to him. By reinventing him by portraying him from a definite historical perspective in the mistaken belief that with history, comes newfound relevance, it can only lessen the character’s mystique. Of course, other than what I think is a bastardization of the enigma that is Robin Hood, the film, is, to put it plainly, just lousy, and probably the lousiest film ever done by Scott.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Iron Man 2 (2010)

Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010)

Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), a billionaire businessman involved in weapons research and manufacturing, his secretary-slash-CEO Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), and her foxy assistant Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson) arrive at an upscale Montecarlo bar. In between the hustle and bustle of waiters doing their job, of wealthy types socializing, of journalists rumormongering, Tony and Pepper go about a continuous banter on some things and nothings while Natalie disappears into the vibrant crowd. The couple walks towards the bar where Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), Tony's business rival, is animatedly conversing with a journalist, who upon being introduced to Tony by the forcedly courteous Justin, shifts her attention to the newcomer much to Justin's well-hidden chagrin. The rather talkative sequence stretches up to the moment Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a Russian scientist whose personal vendetta with Tony has something to do with stolen patents and intellectual property, appears, apparently to wreak havoc.

Before thinking that the described sequence belongs to one of the Robert Altman-inspired commentaries on the dehumanizing repercussions of big business and the celebrity that results out of it, it must be clarified that the scene belongs to the sequel to the 2008 screen adaptation of one of Marvel Comics' most unwieldy superheroes. Iron Man 2, unlike its predecessor which delivered precisely the pure and unadulterated entertainment it promised, is a conundrum. While it is evidently still a superhero movie, it often indulges in these perfunctory scenes of endless chatter between its characters. These scenes are not indispensable either to plot or spectacle. In fact, apart from the fact that they insubstantially detail the extent of the characters' quirks and personalities (Tony, as an egotistical jerk; Pepper, as a hypertensive worrywart; etc.), these scenes predominantly stall the picture, resulting in what feels like an alienatingly imbalanced and possibly incoherent blockbuster. It is safe to say that the sequel will not be as well-loved as its very successful predecessor.

Jon Favreau, who identifies Altman as one of his creative influences, may have been patterned Iron Man 2 after Popeye (1980), one of Altman's most underrated works, released by Paramount and Disney as a children's film but unassumingly possesses a bit of an irreverent angle, with themes and observations that seem unlikely in Max Fleischer's comic masterpiece. Iron Man 2 is similarly awkward, sold as the much-awaited continuation of the Iron Man saga but is actually more mumblecore, with its characters more often seen blabbering than fighting, than special effects extravaganza. The mumble, unfortunately, is empty, more like an attempt at banal humor or a soundtrack to the noises and explosions than a wellspring of wisdom. While Downey and Paltrow showcase the type of chemistry that would have worked in a screwball comedy, and Rockwell inhabits his character's corporate exploitativeness with remarkable ease, their verbose banters only produce kneejerk pleasures that can easily get tiring.

The action scenes, which are very few and far apart, are mostly flat and unsatisfying, just a cornucopia of expensive eye-candy mixed with middling stunts. Moreover, that most of the action only involves men inside metal armors fighting robots enunciate the inconsequence of the battles, given that sweat, blood, or pain are practically eliminated.

Back to Popeye. At least Altman's film looks and feels like a pariah in its genre, which is probably why it was not received well when it was released or it has been taking decades for it to be taken seriously. Iron Man 2, on the other hand, has the indisputable sheen of a Hollywood merchandise and the lousy aftertaste, especially with all the irrelevant teasers to the future superhero movies in the Marvel Films assembly line, of an overdone genre. It has themes of seeming relevance in the current world scenario, like that of war, the greed that it invites, and a host of other things, is more of an echo of a trend among comic book films to have pertinent messages to escape the stigma of these films being only for kids than anything else.

That said and in all honestly, half of me admires the audacity of Favreau to indulge in atypical talkativeness in a special effects-laden picture that will always sell whether or not it has anything intelligent or logical to say. The other half wishes that Favreau had done more than just blankly emulate Altman.

(Cross-published on Twitch.)

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