It’s Bloody Inspiring!by Issa Perez de Tagle 127 Hours (2010) D: Danny BoyleS: James Franco They say that one of the best things about being single and independent is that you become your own keeper. You don’t have to tell anyone where and why you’re going, or who you’re going with. And that’s probably true — unless you’re a canyoneer like Aron Ralston (James Franco). In which case, I suggest you leave at least a note. 127 Hours tells the amazing true story of a man who unluckily slips through a crevice in Blue John Canyon and gets his hand trapped by a rock for — that’s right — 127 hours. If you thought Cast Away was a great survival story… well, I’m sorry, but Ralston makes Tom Hanks’ Chuck Noland look like he was stuck in some island paradise. Boyle and Franco team up to challenge the so-called “unfilmable” and the minimal human attention span to unabashedly bring you Ralston’s story with all the gory detail and intensity that come with it. This is just a great example of an almost perfect collaboration between a director and an actor. Boyle successfully turns Blue John Canyon into Franco’s supporting character with the use of some masterful camerawork. At first, the shots are as zippy and adrenaline-pumped as the daredevil character that Ralston starts out be and the backdrop is shot so beautifully that you’ll want to explore it with him. But when he’s trapped between a rock and a hard place, it turns nervous and daunting. The cinematography becomes the perfect tool in highlighting Ralston’s claustrophobic struggle. It makes it seem larger-than-life, as I’m sure it must have been in his head. High praise should also be given to Boyle for demonstrating the proper use of the flashback technique. He shows just enough to give more background and depth to Ralston’s character but doesn’t rely too heavily on it either.  But the true highlight here is, of course, Franco who gives a tour-de-force performance that is arguably one of the best in his career. He combines oddball humor, cocky hubris, and vulnerable insightfulness so perfectly that it enables him to single-handedly carry you through 2 hours of film. Not an easy feat since he hardly moves for most of the movie but he draws you in and you stay locked in attention. His portrayal is so raw and relatable that at a certain point in the movie, it’s almost like the audience has become one with Ralston. That’s you or me trapped in that canyon, contemplating whether or not to hack our own arm off. It would have been so easy to go very minimalist with this kind of material but instead Boyle and Franco deliver something truly transcendental. They used everything in their arsenal to portray both the physical and psychological anguish in this story and despite its gruesome nature, they found just the right elements to temper it with to make it watchable, compelling, and honestly, quite inspirational. Boyle was quoted to have described this movie as an “action movie with a guy who can’t move” and he couldn’t have been more right. You’ll be sitting on the edge of your seat, probably cussing out loud, possibly cringing, shutting one eye but peeking with the other. And by God, by the end of this film, you will seriously want to jump up and shamelessly cheer for its protagonist. Because 127 Hours is just one of those movies where the hero is as ordinary as you and I, and the situation so disturbingly real that you can’t help but hope for his survival, because that’s what you’d hope for yourself if you were in his place. It’s just a brilliant film that reminds you how powerful human resilience really is and how much one person is willing to sacrifice for what he thinks is important. So if you’ve got a weak stomach: brace yourself because you don’t want to miss one of the best films of the year.

It’s Bloody Inspiring!
by Issa Perez de Tagle

127 Hours (2010) 
D: Danny Boyle
S: James Franco

They say that one of the best things about being single and independent is that you become your own keeper. You don’t have to tell anyone where and why you’re going, or who you’re going with. And that’s probably true — unless you’re a canyoneer like Aron Ralston (James Franco). In which case, I suggest you leave at least a note.

127 Hours tells the amazing true story of a man who unluckily slips through a crevice in Blue John Canyon and gets his hand trapped by a rock for — that’s right — 127 hours. If you thought Cast Away was a great survival story… well, I’m sorry, but Ralston makes Tom Hanks’ Chuck Noland look like he was stuck in some island paradise.

Boyle and Franco team up to challenge the so-called “unfilmable” and the minimal human attention span to unabashedly bring you Ralston’s story with all the gory detail and intensity that come with it. This is just a great example of an almost perfect collaboration between a director and an actor.

Boyle successfully turns Blue John Canyon into Franco’s supporting character with the use of some masterful camerawork. At first, the shots are as zippy and adrenaline-pumped as the daredevil character that Ralston starts out be and the backdrop is shot so beautifully that you’ll want to explore it with him. But when he’s trapped between a rock and a hard place, it turns nervous and daunting. The cinematography becomes the perfect tool in highlighting Ralston’s claustrophobic struggle. It makes it seem larger-than-life, as I’m sure it must have been in his head.

High praise should also be given to Boyle for demonstrating the proper use of the flashback technique. He shows just enough to give more background and depth to Ralston’s character but doesn’t rely too heavily on it either. 

But the true highlight here is, of course, Franco who gives a tour-de-force performance that is arguably one of the best in his career. He combines oddball humor, cocky hubris, and vulnerable insightfulness so perfectly that it enables him to single-handedly carry you through 2 hours of film. Not an easy feat since he hardly moves for most of the movie but he draws you in and you stay locked in attention. His portrayal is so raw and relatable that at a certain point in the movie, it’s almost like the audience has become one with Ralston. That’s you or me trapped in that canyon, contemplating whether or not to hack our own arm off.

It would have been so easy to go very minimalist with this kind of material but instead Boyle and Franco deliver something truly transcendental. They used everything in their arsenal to portray both the physical and psychological anguish in this story and despite its gruesome nature, they found just the right elements to temper it with to make it watchable, compelling, and honestly, quite inspirational.

Boyle was quoted to have described this movie as an “action movie with a guy who can’t move” and he couldn’t have been more right. You’ll be sitting on the edge of your seat, probably cussing out loud, possibly cringing, shutting one eye but peeking with the other. And by God, by the end of this film, you will seriously want to jump up and shamelessly cheer for its protagonist. Because 127 Hours is just one of those movies where the hero is as ordinary as you and I, and the situation so disturbingly real that you can’t help but hope for his survival, because that’s what you’d hope for yourself if you were in his place.

It’s just a brilliant film that reminds you how powerful human resilience really is and how much one person is willing to sacrifice for what he thinks is important. So if you’ve got a weak stomach: brace yourself because you don’t want to miss one of the best films of the year.

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Dreams from the Ditches by Don Jaucian Slumdog Millionaire (2008) D: Danny Boyle S: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto Slumdog Millionaire has ‘Oscar Winner’ written all over it. It’s the typical fare that Oscar voters usually like: small fish versus the big world, only now it’s set in a third world country. It’s like Maalaala Mo Kaya on steroids and directed by a well known director. It’s a fast-paced tour of the streets of Mumbai, crowded and boisterous (sounds familiar?). If you’re the typical Filipino kid who grew up watching soap operas, Slumdog’s trappings won’t be anything new but this time, you can actually care about the characters. With Boyle’s strong visual dynamics, Slumdog depicts a kinetic portrait of modern-day Mumbai, just another city populated with dreams and wishes pinned in one man’s struggle to escape the fallout and get out of the barriers and shackles he was born with.

Dreams from the Ditches
by Don Jaucian

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
D: Danny Boyle
S: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto

Slumdog Millionaire has ‘Oscar Winner’ written all over it. It’s the typical fare that Oscar voters usually like: small fish versus the big world, only now it’s set in a third world country. It’s like Maalaala Mo Kaya on steroids and directed by a well known director. It’s a fast-paced tour of the streets of Mumbai, crowded and boisterous (sounds familiar?). If you’re the typical Filipino kid who grew up watching soap operas, Slumdog’s trappings won’t be anything new but this time, you can actually care about the characters.

With Boyle’s strong visual dynamics, Slumdog depicts a kinetic portrait of modern-day Mumbai, just another city populated with dreams and wishes pinned in one man’s struggle to escape the fallout and get out of the barriers and shackles he was born with.

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Shrinking Universe
Muse

28 Weeks Later (2007)
D: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
S: Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner

Purveyors of stadium sci-fi rock, Muse, have been skronking out heavy blasters riddled with space operas, black holes and uprisings. In the trailer to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, his follow up to executive producer Danny Boyle’s zombie rock, 28 Days Later, we witness the slow trickling of human population after the scouring brought about by the Raging Monkey Virus (a.k.a. the Rage Virus). Burbling under these proceedings is their eventual demise. Ripping the trailer apart, as the military sounds the alarm, is Matthew Bellamy’s recognizable screech, sending shots of adrenalin to our veins.

Shrinking Universe is an ode to Despair, the kind of song that you’d like to sing amidst thousands of audiences while the song erupts into fiery prog-rock dimensions. It carries the anxiety of the characters struggling to escape the resurgence of the virus. Shrinking Universe catapults into the scale of Asimovian and Clarke-sian thinking: searching for our place in the vast fabric of the universe. Don Jaucian

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Tripping On by Nan San The Beach (2000) D: Danny Boyle S: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton For a minute, let’s forget about story. Think setting. Think Boyle’s cloyingly delicious visuals in Trainspotting—that drugged swim into a septic tank transformed into a suppository drug-induced diving sanctuary, that high (or rather low) sinking into a filthy heroine dealer’s carpet—and you’ll be well-satisfied, extra-thrilled in fact, to see Jack Dawson, er, Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) navigating through this lost paradise like a PlayStation character and backpacking in this exotic oriental city laden with contrivances and an urban legend incarnate. But that’s as far as you can see. Many haven’t been that pleased with the turn of events in this film adaptation of Alex Garland’s cult novel. With Boyle risking some plot changes for cinematic (and perhaps marketing) purposes, he disappointed fans of the fiction piece and of his earlier work. Fortunately, that doesn’t include me. This was the first Boyle I saw, so I have no point of comparison. And I’m an advocate of extended adaptation efforts. What took central space in my memory of this little film, aside from The Divine Tilda Swinton, is the idea of escape. Looking back, what it really was is this fantastically-veiled sci-fi movie turned “bad” with a twist a la M. Night Shyamalan. It’s not the Nintendo acrobatics or the ammo-ridden herb bandits. It’s this pack of bored, white men (and women), perhaps not incidentally from Europe, building their utopia in the navel of an Asian island. Remember Lord of the Flies? It’s that, plus a parallel microtopia free of the global restrictions on consciousness expansion. And when those collide, you get this trip that brings you back to the world far larger and complicated than the imagined. Makes for a worthwhile excursion, I think.

Tripping On
by Nan San

The Beach (2000)
D: Danny Boyle
S: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton

For a minute, let’s forget about story. Think setting. Think Boyle’s cloyingly delicious visuals in Trainspotting—that drugged swim into a septic tank transformed into a suppository drug-induced diving sanctuary, that high (or rather low) sinking into a filthy heroine dealer’s carpet—and you’ll be well-satisfied, extra-thrilled in fact, to see Jack Dawson, er, Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) navigating through this lost paradise like a PlayStation character and backpacking in this exotic oriental city laden with contrivances and an urban legend incarnate. But that’s as far as you can see.

Many haven’t been that pleased with the turn of events in this film adaptation of Alex Garland’s cult novel. With Boyle risking some plot changes for cinematic (and perhaps marketing) purposes, he disappointed fans of the fiction piece and of his earlier work. Fortunately, that doesn’t include me. This was the first Boyle I saw, so I have no point of comparison. And I’m an advocate of extended adaptation efforts. What took central space in my memory of this little film, aside from The Divine Tilda Swinton, is the idea of escape.

Looking back, what it really was is this fantastically-veiled sci-fi movie turned “bad” with a twist a la M. Night Shyamalan. It’s not the Nintendo acrobatics or the ammo-ridden herb bandits. It’s this pack of bored, white men (and women), perhaps not incidentally from Europe, building their utopia in the navel of an Asian island. Remember Lord of the Flies? It’s that, plus a parallel microtopia free of the global restrictions on consciousness expansion. And when those collide, you get this trip that brings you back to the world far larger and complicated than the imagined. Makes for a worthwhile excursion, I think.

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