Category Archive for: pelikula

kultura

The Truth and Raya Martin

Though admittedly not the best of speakers, it was difficult not to be enamored by young independent filmmaker Raya Martin on a Saturday afternoon at the Lopez Museum. Even when he sometimes lost his train of thought, and dared speak of filmmaking as an ultimately personal thing – almost a refusal to consider us as audience.

What Martin had going for him wasn’t just his youth and its contingent rebellious streak, but a consciousness about his craft that was surprising. Here, Martin proved he wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill indie filmmaker who’s wont to churn out the now familiar movie on slums and sex, violence and volatility. For this lecture, which had a mix of film practitioners and students as audience, Martin revealed why he was more than just a kid with a digital camera.

Because he spoke of history and the personal. Cinema as image. Sound as a distinct element. There is the interest in film versus the digital. There is the project of the anti-narrative. There is the reinvention of genre – from documentaries to the autobiography. There is the dream of making a commercial film.

It is clear that Martin has more than just all those international grants going for him and his films. There is a thought process to Martin’s creativity that he admits comes from his upbringing, but also is borne of wanting to go against this upbringing and everything that this requires.

No rebel without a cause

And yet this is no stereotypical rebellion. In the case of Martin, this is about a critical mind’s resistance to the conventional ways of seeing and speaking. He hated the way in which history was taught in school, where his grades were dependent on how many names and dates he could memorize. The product of this has been a conscious effort at creating films about and of history, with a very personal perspective. (more…)

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tears for harry

it was the last full show, the one that began at 11:40 PM on a friday, when i watched harry potter and the half-blood prince. by 12:30, half of the people on my side of the theater were fast asleep, only waking up when the sounds became too muchto ignore, as with scenes of quidditch and spells being cast, and the run-of-the-mill wizard violence of harry’s world.

i wasn’t surprised really. the only way this would still be interesting to any audience is if they have read the books, or have a clear memory of all the movies before this. for half-blood prince in particular, the novel had too many silences about both protagonists and antagonists, about each and every character, that the movie couldn’t help but render as well. (more…)

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Agaton and Mindy: love in the time of indie

Where does one begin with a good movie – the kind that resonates a day after watching it, the kind that you gush about? Maybe with this: for the first time in my life, I had the daring to watch a movie alone. Even when this theater in particular, my gay friend had warned, was a pick-up place; even when as I entered the theater, there were only two other guys, in separate ends of the theater, and I had no choice but to be nervous. Goodness, the things I do for Pinoy indie films.

But soon enough, three different couples walk in, and so does Jackie Lou Blanco with her kids – hooray! for intelligent viewers who chose Peque Gallaga over Angels and Demons! Having seen the first two of the Sine Direk project’s movies – Fuschia and Ded Na Si Lolo! – and missing Litsonero by Lore Reyes (because they pulled it out after two fluggin’ days!), I crossed my fingers for Agaton and Mindy. Oh, please please make my heart flutter, jaded as I am about love?

Thankfully, Gallaga outdoes himself here. I had imagined Baby Love (from the 90s) on the one hand, and Pinoy Blonde (from recent years) on the other. Agaton and Mindy is neither. Because it is informed by the contemporary and the current, which is to say that it also highlights an urgency that isn’t just for the young. It in fact goes beyond the notions of puppy love, and becomes more of a love story than any of those commercial romances. (more…)

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Livin’ Rakenrol!

a version of this was published in the 2Byou section of The Philippine Daily Inquirer on May 22 2009.

You don’t know rock ‘n’ roll – or in Pinoy slang rakenrol – until you’ve lived it. No, I’m not talking about turning back time and living in the 60’s and 70’s. What I’m talking about is going through a day of only surprises, being made to imbibe the enterprise of letting go and letting be: rakenrol! as Pepe Smith has told us countless times.

At the Red Horse Beer Muziklaban Media Challenge, this was the one thing that rang true. Kicking off the 11th Muziklaban amateur rock band competition, the media challenge was an introduction to the new and improved project of RHB. Happening too early in the morning for media people (a 7AM calltime at the Ortigas San Miguel Building), the day began with the realization that we were all participants in an amazing race that would bring us all the way to SMC’s Management Training Center in Tagaytay. I couldn’t help but imagine eating some creature I would rather step on and kill in a heartbeat. (more…)

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Ded Na Si Lolo Lives!

There was something fulfilling about Ded na si Lolo, the second installment of the Sine Direk project of the Director’s Guild of the Philippines, Inc. (DGPI).  Written and directed by Soxie Topacio, it began by establishing the kind of noise and screaming – and melodrama – that is true for the majority of communities in this country, the kind that we rarely see truthfully represented on TV and the movies, for fear that it will give us a sense of our REAL conditions as a nation. (more…)