Haute Auteur Silent Video Competition 2012
Cj De Silva, Apol Sta. Maria, Kasey Albano, Benjie Marasigan, Carina Santos, Rob Cham, Shin Lopez, and Stephanie Manuel will be for sale during the week-long exhibition of entries at the Shangri-la Plaza Mall!
(via upcineastes)
Silent Running
by Don Jaucian
The Artist (2011)
D: Michel Hazanavicius
S: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell
It’s hard not to get swamped by the tidal wave that is The Artist. It is a charmer that constantly mugs (a word preferred by the film) for your approval, like its aww-shucks canine, Uggie, and The Artist is precisely this: a film bathed in the nostalgic effect of silent movies in this digitally enhanced era, banking on its stellar prowess (as hammered by the performances of its reliable leads Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo) and our slow degradation to a noise-polluted time where silence has become a luxury.
So let’s get this out of the way: The Artist is a mildly pleasurable cinematic experience, one that should get hardcore film sluts orgasmic with its numerous references to the films and stars of yore, including Orson Welles, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, John Gilbert (whose life story seems to be the inspiration for Dujardin’s George Valentin), and Gene Kelly. It has a heart, one that is sure to please anyone who is mesmerized by its trickster turns (a sudden emergence of phantom sounds hound George as the talkies eradicate the silent film era, the numerous reaction shots of Uggie, etc.). But the hype surrounding it is unabashedly criminal, overblown by the truckload of approval from guilds and plaudits from critics.
For a supposedly silent film, The Artist is annoyingly talkative. Mouths open incessantly, despite the film’s attempt to play on its heavy-handed obviousness. (“I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!” are the first lines that we see emanating from Valentin’s mouth in the opening’s film-within-the-film, something that perfectly captures the look and the vibe of the silent movies during that era). And it all falters from here on, with the film focusing on Valentin’s fall as the talkies gain more prominence and silent film actors are shunned as pariahs. It seems almost a cheat that his refusal to work in talking pictures is not because of his pride but because of his accent. But of course, he makes a comeback, in a silent film no less! And what happens after the big hit? Further obscurity and tabloids are probably some of the options.
The Artist has some memorable moments. We see desperation in George’s eyes as he is surrounded by flames that slowly eat his life’s works. The finale is, of course, a rousing playtime that magically erases all the melodrama of the past ninety-ish minutes. But when it all ends, it crumbles as a fleeting yield. There will be the momentary encouragement of the applause, soon to be followed by footsteps emptying the theater, out into the streets as moviegoers get on with their noise-filled lives. The Artist acts as a healthy cinematic diet, one that is direly needed in a pumped-up succession of 3D films and high-octane explosions. But other than that, its riches-to-rags-to-riches story will remain as memorable as the next American Idol winner.
The Distance to Our Graves and the Lives that We Have Lived
by Don Jaucian
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
D: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
C: Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee
The beguiling beauty of myths has always been the core that Apichatpong Weerasethakul has built his films upon. His films sway like the trees that surround his characters. They rattle in the gentle hum of anxiety, scattering in tales of mythical beasts and forms of reincarnation. But instead of imposing these elements as restrictions, Weerasethakul places them as portals to the Wild Blue Yonder, portkeys to a more complex schema about life, the universe, and everything.
Such grand scope places his Palme D’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives in a delicate position. It is a slingshot that treads the line between personal histories and fiction, creating characters that question the boundaries of our daily lives, religious beliefs, and their link with the afterlife.
Weerasethakul has always been fascinated with the afterlife and reincarnation. Uncle Boonmee is his treatise in transcending worldly desires, leaving a faint trace of the lives we have lived and, in this case, Weerasethakul depicts them in lingering presences of human spirits, monkey ghosts, catfish shamans, lonely princesses, and a water buffalo struggling to break free.
The ghosts in Uncle Boonmee serve as a visible link to our pasts. Boonmee’s wife, Huay, who suddenly materializes one night at the dining table, is both a preservation of her past misgivings and regrets and a glimpse to what awaits Boonmee when he dies of his illness. The scene then becomes a family reunion when they are joined by Boonmee’s son, Boonsong, who has turned into a monkey ghost, covered in hair, with red eyes flaring like signals from the dead. This increases Boonmee’s curiosity about the afterlife.
Boonmee’s afterlife is a temple. The family of the deceased comfort the dead with their offerings and prayers while the spirit roams restlessly, hearing imprints of the living and the memories that they have made. Spirits are transformed into bestial creatures, carrying the weight of their past lives and the futures that they have been given. These ghosts converse with the living, talking about the minutiae of their daily routines, interacting as though death doesn’t exist at all.
Weerasethakul’s dream states are never as demented as David Lynch’s or David Cronenberg’s. They are unhurried, occuring at solemn paces that spread out like cards mapping out our most intimate desires. Junctures exist in folds, overlapping fabrics and parcels of different segments of our lives. Weerasethakul finds more beauty in the stillness, creating an alternate plane of existence where our imperfections are slowly carved out to the tune of a pop song while we wonder about what awaits us beyond the veil.
My Wand is Better Than Yours
by Aldrin Calimlim
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
D: David Yates
S: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman
There’s something not quite right in saying that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment in the popular film series based on J. K. Rowling’s ridiculously successful collection of seven children’s books about a mostly hapless boy wizard, is the worst among all eight entries in the Warner Bros.-powered franchise. To say so is to assert that the film is, actually, bad. It is not. A more accurate manner of describing the film relative to its cinematic siblings is to say that it’s the least good of the bunch. If anything, this belief, held both by most viewers and by most critics, betokens the singular richness of the film series’ source material as well as the skill with which the filmmakers, within the span of a decade, adapted it—all six and two halves of it.
Order of the Phoenix was the series directorial debut of the then virtually unknown David Yates. The film was a modest success (which is still saying something, considering that what is being spoken of is a goddamn Harry Potter film), fraught as it was from the start with the hazards of condensing the longest and arguably least good (not worst) Harry Potter book into two hours, more or less, of celluloid. The result was at best pleasant, a corrugated affair having many a montage sequence, more than what a typical inspirational sports movie holds. Nevertheless, it was indicative of Yates’s nascent flair for character- and plot-driven fantasy, away from his usual forays into social realism. Yates went on to direct the remaining installments, thereby displaying his developing authorial confidence: from his mind’s eye emerged the deliciously somber Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the affectingly wistful Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and, finally, the frantically fleet-footed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. But montage sequences are, three films and four years since the release of Order of the Phoenix, still among the things up Yates’s sleeve. To his credit, though, in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 their use is more compulsory than convenient.
Several montages in the final Harry Potter film are instances of fast cutting, signifying the increasingly tenuous mental link between Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe, troubled and stubbled) and his lifelong enemy, Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, bald and appalled). These occur every time a Horcrux is found and destroyed by Harry and his constant companions, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson). A Horcrux, in Rowling’s imagined parlance, is an object in which a fragment of a person’s soul is stored in his intention to achieve immortality. In accordance with plot logic, that person remains unbeatable until all his Horcruxes are vanquished. But the film, although it sneaks a short reintroduction of the Deathly Hallows themselves (a different set of articles of magic purported to make the person who possesses them a master of death) before a wizened character’s brief but ultimately important speech about wand lore, spends no precious time in briefing the uninitiated about Horcruxes. Nor should it. Plenty of expository dialogues have been devoted to them in Half-Blood Prince, and there are enough manifestations anyway of Voldemort’s affinity with the dark objects to aid the novice viewer.
Since the onset of Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Harry, Ron, and Hermione have been on the lookout for the Horcruxes Voldemort made before he met his downfall the night he tried to kill the then infant Harry, and at the close of Deathly Hallows: Part 1 three of the presumed six (plus Voldemort’s own body makes a total of seven, a magically potent number) have already been done away with. Deathly Hallows: Part 2 consequently sees the trio hunting for the other three. The remainder of their quest is made even more pressing by Voldemort’s not unexpected attack on the Hogwarts castle, their magical boarding school, where they abscond in hopes of being reunited with their friends and family as well as finding therein a Horcrux or two. The ensuing battle naturally compounds the urgency of the Horcrux hunt, and hence the film appears to derive satisfaction from its newfound briskness, even giving a few secondary characters their best and most fist-pumping scenes in the entire series amid its blistering pace. (Ron’s mother’s famous pre-duel line to Helena Bonham Carter’s vicious Bellatrix Lestrange, rendered in all caps in the book, is uttered otherwise: it is now a calmer yet resolute, “Not my daughter, you bitch!” which should please fans nonetheless.) In this respect, as far as tone and pace are concerned, Part 2 is almost diametrically opposite to the decidedly atmospheric Part 1.
Whereas each of the previous films depicted events that mostly happened throughout a period of months, if not a full year, the closing film of the franchise, bar its saccharine epilogue, has a unique time frame of only around 24 hours, picking up right where Deathly Hallows: Part 1 left off (Voldemort stealing the notorious Elder Wand, one of the three Deathly Hallows, from the tomb of Dumbledore, its former owner and Harry’s mentor) and ending with the inevitable final face-off between Harry and Voldemort. In the interim a significant sort-of montage sequence is presented. Immediately following a standout display of talent from actor Alan Rickman and itself containing more demonstrations of the same, it’s a jumble of strands of memories from the mind of Severus Snape (Rickman), Harry’s least favorite (perhaps worst) teacher and Dumbledore’s murderer. Dubbed “The Prince’s Tale,” it is to Part 2 as the handsomely animated “Tale of the Three Brothers,” which tells the origin story of the Deathly Hallows, is to Part 1. It reveals through a succession of beautifully framed flashbacks a couple of plot twists confirming what most viewers, including non-readers, have suspected long ago (in the case of the readers, before the release of the final book). One revelation concerns a Horcrux and an act of self-sacrifice, while the other concerns a Horcrux and an act of self-sacrifice.
Death, given the film’s intimations of a main character’s vain attempts of evading it contrary to another’s and his allies’ heroic acts towards confronting it, looms large throughout Deathly Hallows: Part 2. But, of course, underneath all the surface tension lies the all too imminent triumph of love, doubtless the overarching theme of the series and, as Rowling and company have made crystal clear, the greatest magic there is. This much is evident especially during the aforementioned montage of memories and in the scene marking the film’s halfway point, which shows the trio, not unaided by friends, bravely crossing the school courtyard war-torn and inundated with Voldemort’s army.
It’s a tad easy to extol—or, indeed, dismiss—Deathly Hallows: Part 2 as a contemporary war movie, albeit rendered bloodless and PG-13 by its diegetic contrivance of people pointing glorified pieces of wood at one another hardly resulting in laceration and hemorrhage. It unfetteredly makes a case for the persistence of good against evil, laudable but played to a fault in the way the good guy appears to do things that are beyond what he’s actually capable of, what with his somewhat unimpressive, luck-laden seven-year history with teenage wizardry, and in the way the bad guy struggles, by dint of poor, blindsided planning and the deus ex machina-esque importance of the allegiance of said glorified pieces of wood. But no matter: Harry and Voldemort’s prolonged match, as well as the other events in the legendary Battle of Hogwarts, is as exhilarating as any climactic exchange of salvos in a bona fide war movie, its aftermath no less bittersweet for its having been fought in a world where healing and repair are seemingly achieved with just a wave of a wand.
Deathly Hallows: Part 2 can also be seen as the culmination of a series of films about a war more personal, one that is fought with angst and acne, with hormones and rebellion. Harry Potter, it must be acknowledged, is an extended allegory of the perks and pains of growing up and approaching the threshold between adolescence and maturity. One of the memorable scenes in Order of the Phoenix—memorable not because it’s well-staged but because it sticks out like a zit ripe for the pricking—is an awkward kissing scene between Harry and his first girlfriend under—what else?—a sprig of mistletoe, although one that’s filled with Nargles, probably. In Deathly Hallows: Part 2, too, osculatory interludes take place, reminders and celebratory acts of affection and connection amid the attendant disorder of earthly existence, common, as it happens, to wizards and Muggles both.
D’Ohriginal Gangstah
by Jansen Musico
Manila Kingpin: The Untold Story of Asiong Salonga (2011)
S: Jeorge Estregan Jr., Carla Abellana, John Regala, Baron Geisler
Like a slaughtered calf, Asiong is hung from the ceiling. His hands are tied and his face is bruised and bleeding. He has become a human punching bag to a guy threatening him to leave town for good. Like Jesus on the cross, Asiong is weak and dying, his head dropping lifelessly on his chest as a glob of blood drips from his lips. This opening scene is stark. It’s a moving chiaroscuro that sets the tone for what pledges to be the reawakening of Philippine action cinema. But much like its title antihero, that promise dies rather abruptly.
Much has been said about Manila Kingpin: The Untold Story of Asiong Salonga. Praises and insults had been thrown even before its opening day. Its original director, Tikoy Aguiluz, did not want anything to do with the project because of disputes with the film’s producers. After seeing the reedited work, I could see why. Manila Kingpin is nothing but a gratuitous remake.
In 1961’s Asiong Salonga, pre-president Joseph Estrada gave birth to the role, which then would be taken over by Rudy Fernandez in 1977’s Salonga. In 1990, Jeorge Estregan Jr., better known as E.R. Ejercito or Joseph Estrada’s nephew, revived the movie and filled the title role. With three versions of the same film already in existence, what’s the need for another? What else could possibly be squeezed out from Asiong’s regurgitated story?
This year’s Metro Manila Film Festival big winner is puzzling, to say the least. The film is beautifully shot and framed. The black and white rendering also helps give the film its crisp dated look reminiscent of 1950s Hollywood noir. The use of it is justified, considering that the events taking place are within that decade. The costumes are also on point. The ladies in their glamorous frocks and powdered faces and the gentlemen in their starched, pressed shirts look like they waltzed out of vintage post-WWII fashion catalogs.
Although most of the film’s action sequences are stylistically on par with those of recent Hollywood flicks, they may as well be deemed as copycats. Hints of Quentin Tarantino, Danny Boyle, Wong Kar Wai, and, more blatantly, John Woo might jolt the nerves of discerning moviegoers. Fleeting smoke silhouettes, slow motion gunfire, and sliding on the floor on one’s knees may look spectacular in moderation, but too much of these make scenes cartoony. And though action flicks bend the concept of reality, Manila Kingpin is not The Matrix. The kalesa chase sequence is a stretch considering that no horses were fictiously harmed in the rain of gunfire. It’s a good example of how aesthetics can make a potentially exciting scene downright laughable.
The plot could have also been solid had the writers knitted all the minor story arcs more closely. Asiong’s lovelife, family life, political involvements, and vendettas against different gang bosses all feel disjointed even if they are placed together in a long string of cause-and-effect events. The dialogue isn’t also that well-written. Though appropriate for its story’s setting, it lacks a certain kind of zing that made early action films memorable. What it has, though, is an abundance of good enough actors to pull off their lines.
Manila Kingpin reminds me of The Expendables. It was able to assemble some of the Philippines’ most notable action heroes and villians and cram them all together in one film. The casting of the five gang bosses was inspired, John Regala as Totoy Golem in particular. Also of note is Joko Diaz, whose father, Pacquito Diaz, starred in the original Asiong film. Each of the bosses are notable, and their fight scenes with Asiong are equally fun to watch.
On the flipside, not much can be said about Asiong’s gang. Despite the very talented ensemble, none of them, except for the incredible Baron Geisler as the group’s Judas, Erning, are given the chance to stand out. Ketchup Eusebio has his moments, but they’re few and far between. And although Dennis Padilla is there to deliver the movie’s “iconic” punchline, it feels as if he was only cast for consistency, to keep the Padillas in almost all Asiong films.
The ladies of the cast hold their own, proving that women can do more than be stay-at-home moms. As usual, Carla Abellana is the epitome of perfection in front of the camera. Her acting matches her classic beauty as it graces the screen. Jaycee Parker is also stunning, if only she wasn’t given any lines. Perhaps the biggest casting oddity is Asiong himself. Although E.R. Ejercito took on the role two decades ago, his age alone makes him a weird choice. There must be something about him that I missed, much like the whole point of this flashy remake.
