I had started watching CinemalayaX with Carlitos Siguion Reyna’s Hari Ng Tondo, Joseph Alterejos’s Kasal, and Roderick Cabrido’s Children’s Show. It was two good movies out of three, and I thought it was portents of things to come for the rest of the week’s movie viewing frenzy.
After watching all 15 full length films, I realize I had it good that first day. It was downhill from there.
Click here to read the rest of it over at Vera Files.
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.
because 2011 ended with some sadness, and the new year had me on a roll, which is to say it forced me to hit the ground running. one must be thankful.
the yearender for arts and theater and the one on popular culture were up before the end of 2011. though with the Metro Manila Filmfest happening at the end of the year, too, these could only be overshadowed by the notion of ending-with-a-bang and a foreboding of the year to come. the sadder thing might be that this has fueled discussions on Pinoy film from people who admit they haven’t watched it in a while. well what else is new with regards elitism in this country.
which is to segue too into the fact that i did see some of the MMFF films: the Asiong Salonga review and the My Househusband review are up, and i have two more to go. suffice it to say that as far as Asiong is concerned, what we might demand for at this point is a viewing of the director’s cut, if only so we can judge its creative team who were ignored / disrespected / dissed by the movie’s producers as they added removed scenes, changed music and/or sound, and messed with the editing of the film. that’s the work of director Tikoy Aguiluz, editor Miranda Medina, and musical score by Nonong Buencamino that we have yet to judge Asiong Salonga by. show us the director’s cut na!
in the meantime, the wish for 2012, has to be clarity and truthfulness and just our cards on the table. because it seems that between those faked-up magazine covers and press releases about objective journalism, between power-to-the-people rhetoric and the govt strategy of running a government campaign by not doing it themselves, 2012’s begun on very very rough ground.
<…> “good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great,” Slavoj Zizek says, and yes he was talking about the violence of communism and stalinism, but in third world philippines, he could just be talking to you and me and our lack of a sense of the realities that define us. it could just be you and me refusing to get to the heart of any and all of this nation’s problems: a failure in the system that allows for the poor to get poorer and grow larger, and a minority to get richer. and i daresay, the middle class thinking they can save the world by working — admittedly or not — within the system the State has set up.
“The basic insight I see <with regards the Occupy Movement> is that clearly for the first time, the underlying perception is that there is a flaw in the system as such. It’s not just the question of making the system better.” — yes Zizek, not anymore.
we should all be reminded of this the rest of 2012.
quotes from Zizek via this Harper’s Magazine interview by J. Nicole Jones, November 2011.
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.
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.