Category Archive for: pelikula

kultura

notes on TEDx Diliman: ideas worth spreading? #2!

TEDx Talks are independently organized TED talks across the world, which is about “riveting talks by remarkable people.” TEDx Diliman was my first. This is a review of each of the TED talks that were part of it, done in 18 minutes or less, because that’s the time limit of a TED Talk. Read more about TED here, and check out this really good video on TEDx here.

Aureus Solito and his search for magic

what struck me about Aureus Solito’s TEDx talk was that he was the first to do it extemporaneously, as a TED talk should be.

which is not to say that there was much in Solito’s talk that made for an idea worth spreading as is the promise of a TEDx talk. what he did in fact, was tell the story of his life as it is tied to his Palawan roots, and he spends all of his 18 minutes just moving from childhood, to elementary school, to highschool, to college, and how the stories of Palawan would riddle his years, would make him weird in school, would give him the advantage of having stories magical and real.

this was interesting for sure, but not quite what should take most of those minutes spent in a TEDx talk.

ideally, you tell these stories as context for how you’ve used those experiences of your roots and your traditions, towards coming up with some bright idea that works, something that helps in saving these traditions that you find are important to you.

this Solito suddenly throws into the mix in his last two minutes onstage, where he talks about people and nature being one, where he mentions in one quick sentence that what he does through film is to try and achieve a certain kind of magic, a certain healing, which also means warding off the evils that are apathy and mediocrity.

this was Solito’s bright idea worth spreading. this was not what he talked about in the 18 minutes that he was onstage.

one realizes: all stories might be personal, and that is well and good. but TEDx talks demand ideas. ones that might be emulated, ones that could inspire, ones that have already taken steps in changing the world. in that sense, stories are but the premise of ideas worth sharing, and without the latter, the magic Solito grew up with becomes nothing but the words in a story that’s only his, not at all ours for the taking.

komentaryo

on The Manila Hostage Massacre, a documentary

On August 7, 2011, the History Channel premiered its 48-minute documentary on the bus hostage drama that happened in Manila a year ago on August 23, 2010.

For a full week after the premier, this same documentary would be replayed every day, sometimes three times a day, on cable TV. There was no noise about it, barely any media mileage other than what looked like press releases from the History Channel itself, where the documentary is sold along with the rest of the channel’s offerings for August.

For a nation that prides itself in having a powerful online and mainstream media, for a nation that can pick on a private citizen like Christopher Lao, and an artist like Mideo Cruz, we sure as hell know when to keep something under the radar. We sweep it under the proverbial rug, so to speak, just in case we might also be allowed to forget it. Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, means we cannot be seen as evil?

In the case of last year’s bus hostage tragedy, we might not be evil, but we sure are incompetent and unforgivable, unapologetic and downright wrong. And in light of this documentary, we are just all complicit.

Were we all just too busy? Or were we all not ready for this anniversary?

the rest of it is here.

kultura

Soxie Topacio FTW!

I’ve got faith in Soxy Topacio. Always have. Especially after that wonderful comedy that was Ded Na Si Lolo (2009) that could only rock the world of anyone who follows local movies – local comedies in particular. Topacio brilliantly captured the tragicomedy that is death and the family in a lower class setting without making it seem like a judgment, or an apologia for that matter.

Ah, but maybe that was a movie that was by most counts about being an indie, those were the days when Soxy as writer-director could freely demand that his story be told without the limits of network stars and box office success. Such is the tale of his recent comedy Adventures of Pureza, Queen of the Riles (Star Cinema) where Melai Cantiveros is obviously the point, and everything else in the movie is allowed to suffer. Which is to say that the story suffered. Where it could’ve been a swift narration of what’s expected, it became a series of events that wanted to tie together the character of Pureza. And yet there was nothing in Melai as an actress that made this wholeness relevant or crucial, nothing at all that made it seem like it was needed. In fact, given the acting she did here an audience would’ve been happy enough with no resolutions to her persona, and she could’ve moved from beginning to end playing mostly herself: loud and crazy, over-the-top silly, no stretch in characterization at all.

Given these limitations in a lead actress, the decision it seems was to work with everyone – and everything – else other than Melai. This might be why over and above veteran actress Gina Pareño whose tongue-in-cheek kontrabida character just worked as expected , there was some really good acting here, the kind that knew to be ironic, to be absurd, that was conscious of the story as comedy, that knew of the story’s limitations given its genre.

click here for the rest of it!

kultura

the brilliance of two left feet

had an infinitely emotional conversation with this non-fiction narrative of a review of Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa.

The teacher of literature, Karen (Jean Garcia), is enigmatic for a reason, but effective like every literature teacher should be. She reads poetry and it comes alive, she asks questions about it with certainty. She is unsurprised by any of her students’ assertions, even as these are necessarily about sexuality and desire, love and intimacy, the act of gazing. Even as she is the object of that gaze.

That Karen is unperturbed becomes part of her enigmatic persona; that this ties cleanly together with the fact of her silence(s) as teacher is the gift that Yapan’s characterization gives us, acknowledging without romanticizing the fact of teaching’s contingent and necessary loneliness, one that isn’t a sad thing at all. Karen’s quiet solitude shines with possibility and freedom, even as it becomes fodder for students’ presumptions about her, even when all it means is that she will never be known.

read all of it here!

Jean Garcia as Karen, the teacher who knew solitude and freedom.
Jean Garcia as Karen, the teacher who knew solitude and freedom.

 

kultura

Chris Martinez, FTW!

on Temptation Island 2.0

It might have been the more apt title, actually, for the benefit of those who are so strict about originals and remakes, and imagine faithfulness to be about keeping to the level of copy. But there’s no crossing the same river twice, and it’s a foregone conclusion that every remake is a retelling, every retelling a different story altogether.

And so the question for Chris Martinez’s remake of Joey Gosiengfiao’s 1981 Temptation Island (Regal Films and GMA Films) is: does it still work? Is campiness something we’d know to be an exaggeration? Would campiness work with this set of five girls, three guys, and a gay man?

Could Martinez make it work?

He apparently can, at least if we take the laughter in that almost filled theater as an indication of success. I myself was familiar with the lines from the original and still found myself laughing, sometimes too loudly or just earlier than the rest of the audience in that cinema. Because there’s a learning curve here, during which the audience seem to warm up to the idea of exaggeration and extremes, the kind that campy relies on.

So when the movie begins with Lovi Poe’s Serafina, with her overtly slow and husky voice, and a body in the eternal act of posing, it was easy to feel the audience’s discomfort: ah, this is this kind of movie? Never mind that it wasn’t clear what kind it was. By the time Marian Rivera was delivering Cristina’s lines while dancing with her crook of a boyfriend, the over-the-top delivery seemed to have sunk in, if not the obvious look and feel of an Austin Powers movie.

click here for the rest of it!