Category Archive for: arts and culture

kultura

on “Der Kaufmann” … and on an editing fail

NOTE: i’ve been contributing writer for GMA News Online for the past four years, and was always accorded enough respect to have edits pass through me. this is the first time in four years that my work has been so heavily — and badly — edited, with opinions not even mine, paragraphs that establish context removed. 

a version of this review was published in GMA News Online on October 6, without many sections that establish my assertions about Tanghalang Pilipino’s “Der Kaufmann.”  the discussion on the second and last sections, the reasons why Marco Viana’s and Ricardo Magno’s performances were great, the praise for sound and music, and Jonathan Tadioan, and lighting design, got lost in the edit.  (more…)

kultura

OTC: on the contrary (OTJ, Transit & the indie)

The truth is that while we celebrate local films, especially independently-produced ones, it seems important to point out that many other things come into play at this point as far as declaring any movie a critical success. That is, there is the social media bandwagon, where “public perception” is deemed powerful, and no one is allowed to think differently about a movie lest one is pounced on like some enemy.

(more…)

kultura

not a Santi Bose

Leon Gallery is holding what it calls a “Magnificent September Auction” tomorrow, September 28. as of today, its catalogue for tomorrow carries a work entitled “Heart Assemblage” that it has wrongfully attributed to Santiago Bose.

Leon Gallery has been contacted about this major faux pax (i am being kind) by the family of Bose. a letter received by the gallery on September 16 from Bose’s wife Peggy asked that Leon Gallery “kindly and immediately remove the name of Santiago Bose as the creator of ‘Heart Assemblage.”

11 days since, as of 1:09 PM today, Bose’s name is still appended to this work that isn’t his. the artist of this untitled and unsigned work has since claimed it: Rene Aquitania, also a Baguio artist. (more…)

kultura

on “Ang Kwento ni Mabuti”

That not much happens in “Ang Kwento ni Mabuti,” is precisely its power. And while its premise is poverty as crisis and its context is the distance and removal that the poorer among us live with, not once did the film seem like poverty porn. Neither was it full of itself.

It would of course be easy to hate this film for not doing more, not being more, when it could’ve been less restrained. Yet, there is the fact that it didn’t need to be more than what it was, because what this movie has to drive this story is what most other films don’t have.

That is of course Nora Aunor. (more…)

kultura

on “The Mind’s Eye”

It seems simple enough, a play that is limited to a set that is one room with three beds, all of them occupied by women from different contexts with the most diverse set of needs, cutting as they do across generations. This room is sparsely furnished, has a TV that doesn’t work, stark white sheets that speak as well of the cold cold winter outside.

It is in North Dakota as it is in the middle of nowhere. It could also be anywhere really, this narrative of two lives intertwined by the limits of a room, the sadness of an ending, the undoing that’s in the lack of a future.

For teenager Courtney (Jenny Jamora) and elderly lady Elva (Joy Virata), this room is all of the world that they have. This is all they need. (more…)