Garble

Noel Vera

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Babel" (2006) is excellently
directed, I think; what I'm not sure of, even when the end credits
have started rolling, is exactly what it's directed at.

Is Inarritu trying to make some kind of statement about
communication--the more connected we are, the more isolated we've
become? I thought Kurosawa Kyoshi in "Kairo" (Pulse, 2001), for one,
has delved into that issue on a far more metaphysically and
metaphorically imaginative level. Was he trying to show us the
impact the United States and its citizens have on other countries--
how an incident involving two American tourists can create a
firestorm of social and political turmoil on one hand, and how a
vast American construct (its fenced and guarded southern border with
Mexico) can dash the hopes and dreams of a humble illegal immigrant
on the other? If so, what's the Japanese storyline for? A tenuous
link is proposed, but it's a laughably farfetched one: you come away
with the somber if headscratching moral: "guns do not good presents
make."

Perhaps it's meant to do all of the above? Films nowadays,
especially films as ambitious as this, don't need to be particularly
focused to earn awards; they just need a broad canvas, some cursory
playing around with conventional narrative--in this case, four
separate stories linked together by a central event (an accidental
shooting), then chronologically shuffled--and a royal flush of
Hollywood stars (Brad Pitt, as vacuous as ever, throwing celebrity
tantrums right and left) to give the whole project respectability.
Inarritu did it once and did it best I think, in his breakout
film "Amores Perros" (Love's a bitch, 2000), where gritty dogfights
are intercut with mysteriously vanished pets (Inarritu's variation
on The Twilight Zone, I suppose), and a hit man / homeless vagrant
shuffles his way to redemption, all three stories linked together by
a central event (a car accident). Inarritu was at least familiar
with the milieu (the streets and alleys of Mexico), his 'vision'
felt reasonably fresh, and his budget was small enough that one
tended to forgive him his melodramatic excesses (the embarrassingly
romantic notion, for one, that a homeless man can double as a
professional killer). I was far less crazy about his 2004 film "21
Grams," where three separate stories (a mother who loses her family;
a professor with a weak heart; a recovering drug addict) are linked
together by a central event (a car accident--sounds familiar?). One
can't help but accuse Inarritu of being repetitive--of pulled the
same rabbit out of his hat time and time again, with diminishing
results. The world is full of evil and violence? We're all
connected? Truth is where you happen to be standing? Tell us
something we don't know--or, if you can't, tell us in a way that we
haven't already seen.

The film's at its best when trying to show life as lived in
differing parts of the world--a wedding in Mexico where a mother
dances with her long-unseen son; a popular hangout joint in Tokyo
where Japanese youths are jammed together in a somehow reassuring
crush; best of all, a boy and his younger brother, arms
outstretched, leaning into the wind rushing up the mountainside.
Inarritu is a champion of the poor and disaffected, and represents
them best when he's not pushing his agenda too hard; when he shows
them suffering all kinds of contrived situations (a freak gun shot;
an inexplicable sexual hunger; a chain of unfortunate events at a
border crossing) it uplifts one's eyebrow more often than it does
one's consciousness.

Far be it for me to teach Inarritu his business--all right, maybe
I'm trying to do just that, but how persuasive can a filmmaker be
when his view of his characters is so consistently dim? Can people
be as stupid as they are in his pictures? Crossing the border when
one is illegally in the country is not the smartest thing in the
world to do, but why cross back at night (when in all probability
you're the only one around, subject to the border guards' full
attention), with a drunk driver? Why leave one's charges behind in
the middle of the desert to seek help (If you're that dumb, how
could you have evaded the INS for sixteen years?)? Likewise, testing
a rifle by firing at moving vehicles isn't exactly brilliant, or
even sensible, but what earthly reason would cause you to run to the
mountains when the police come looking? And fire back at the
officers when they find you? It's clear that realistic texture--the
way people sit or stand or look around--is Inarritu's forte, but he
has trouble portraying the way they really think about or react to
or make decisions on the world around them. Given a choice, he opts
for the most pessimistic alternative, producing the most
melodramatic results.

The film is all the more disappointing because it's clear that he's
got a real filmmaking sensibility. I'm not the world's biggest fan
of handheld shots--after Von Triers and Tony Scott and more than
half the horror movies made in recent years, if I don't see another
lurching point-of-view camera for the rest of my life it'd be too
soon--but Inarritu is able to stitch the footage together to produce
a tempo that's both graceful and genuinely exciting; exciting not
because the beat is so fast, but because it's clear that the man
knows what he's doing (visually and rhythmically, anyway).  And
knowing that the man came from radio (he was a DJ for some years),
it's not surprising that, like Orson Welles, he can do breathtaking
things with sound--I remember in particular a scene where the camera
follows a Japanese deaf-mute girl into a dance club, and the
flashing lights and throbbing music rise to a crescendo, only to
suddenly fall away in silence. The lights still flash, but we're
hearing the world through the girl's nonfunctioning ears, and the
shock of silence, the sudden remove from all that is aurally
familiar, is deafening. The Japanese segment is the weakest and
least thematically relevant segment in the film, and the main
character as written (and played with misplaced sincerity by Oscar-
nominated Rinko Kikuchi) is more a storytelling conceit
(nymphomaniac teeny bopper seeks sex from the nearest available man)
than a real character, but for at least those few moments style wins
out over substance (or the lack of it), and we feel we understand
the girl's awful loneliness.

But that's for a few moments; for the rest of the film's length--all
142 minutes of it--we're subject to a treatise on how Life Can Be a
Bitch (Even in Wealthy Tokyo). One expects more from Inarritu;
hopefully one will, in future projects.

(First published in Businessworld, 1/26/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Apocalypto: this time it's the Mayans

Noel Vera

I hope there isn't anyone out there who still clings desperately to the belief that The Passion of the Christ  isn't a hate-filled, anti-Jewish snuff movie. Despite the evidence--Gibson basing his script not on the Bible (as he claims) but on the writings of Anne Catherine Emmerich (allegedly Emmerich's--there's a possibility that German poet Clemens Brentano forged them), who at one point confidently wrote that Jews fed on the blood of Christian babies; despite his portraying Jews as sinister, avaricious, bloodthirsty (True, Christ, his mother, and Simon are exceptions, but in Gibson's mind, they aren't Jews--they're really early Christians)--the few cries of protest were drowned out by the hysterical wave of love shown the picture in Manila.

And then the drunk-driving incident. Oh my, how inconvenient--in vino veritas, and all that. Fanatical viewers may refuse to remove the redwood log jammed in their eyes, but the photo of Gibson grinning drunkenly from his arrest photo seems to have taken most of the wind out of their enthusiasm.

That said, I wouldn't count out Apocalypto being a hit, or at least making some money; Filipinos are forgiving, they love handsome Hollywood stars, especially Oscar-winning Hollywood stars, and they love it that Gibson's a Catholic (ignoring the inconvenient fact that Gibson belongs to a hardcore sect (more a hate group, actually) that considers the Vatican popes--John Paul II, the present Pope Benedict--heretics, and refuses to recognize the reforms of Vatican II). The movie is subtitled, true (the actors speak Q'eqchi' Mayan, albeit with a heavily Yucatan diction), but has low comedy, non-stop action, and a generous helping of Neolithic violence, including jaguar face-ripping and mass open-heart surgery. What's not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. The action is basically second-rate George Miller (who directed the two films that made Gibson internationally famous, Mad Max and The Road Warrior) without Miller's sense of poetry or grandeur; much of the climactic chase sequence is cribbed from the 1966 The Naked Prey (though some elements--jumping off a waterfall, the various guerilla style traps--are borrowed from the more recent The Last of the Mohicans and First Blood)--hardly innovative fare. The sadistic pranks that open the movie would have been rejected by Tito, Vic and Joey for being too crude and obvious (and--cardinal sin--not half as funny); the family life our hero Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) enjoys is idyllic to the point of embarrassing (not to mention Youngblood and the actress who plays his young wife Seven, Dalia Hernandez, seem to have been chosen more for physical beauty than ethnic authenticity [Youngblood is a Native American from the Northwest]). When Zero Wolf (Raul Trujillo) raids the village for human sacrifices and slaves, Wolf and company have sinister faces that contrast sharply with Paw and family's softer, younger features (subtle, complex characterization is not a strong Gibson skill, apparently); the raiders, in effect, bear startling resemblance to the evil Jews that killed Christ in Gibson's previous picture. 

The pregnant Seven and her son manage to hide, albeit in the most dangerous location possible: a sunken cave that floods at the least excuse (Pregnant wife in pit in peril of drowning--anyone notice how corny Gibson can get?). Paw and company are dragged away to witness the horrors of Mayan civilization--which brings us to one of my biggest complaints about the movie: the first-ever major Hollywood feature on Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and what does Gibson show us? Grotesque slave-raiding, heart-ripping decadent imperialists who deserve to decline and be conquered. Never mind that the architecture and art is a mishmash of Mayan civilization from different periods and locations, with a few Aztec details thrown in; never mind that a sick girl appears to have smallpox, which had been brought to the continent by the Conquistadors (Gibson's vaunted obsession with authenticity is all hype; in The Passion of the Christ he has the Roman soldiers speak Latin, when 1) most of them weren't even Italian, and 2) they spoke Greek--the lingua franca of the time). The overall impression of the Mayans and their proudest accomplishments--their cities and civilization--is overwhelmingly negative.

And mostly wrong. No, Mayans who lived in the jungle would not have been astonished at the huge Mayan buildings--most lived not more than fifteen miles away, and were hardly isolated (they belonged to a political unit, and participated in active trade). No, Mayans would not have been startled at the sight of a solar eclipse--they were expert astronomers. No, the Mayans didn't just roam about kidnapping people for sacrifice; the sacrifices were often picked from the nobility, possibly proud to have been chosen. No, the Mayans did not perform massacres, resulting in Killing Fields-type mass open graves (the Aztecs did--massacres, I mean--but accusing the correct civilization of genocide is apparently not a priority for the man). No, the Mayans did not keep rotting corpses near fields of crop--they knew better, were master agriculturalists, and in some ways were more skilled than their European contemporaries (witness the sad history of corn imported into Europe). And what's with compressing the fall of the cities (which happened after 900 AD) with the coming of the Spaniards in 1500 AD? It's like Paw ran through three or four hundred years of Mayan history in a few nights. 

The last detail may seem like an innocent anachronism, but it's easily the most insidious. One might say Gibson was doing a Lord of the Flies-type metaphor, equating Paw's struggle against the Mayan cities with the Mayan's coming struggle against the Europeans; or, and this has the more disturbing implications, that the Mayans were so thoroughly rotten to the core they deserved conquest and conversion to Christianity by the Spaniards. That's just the kind of reasoning used by the Guatemalan Army to justify the horrific massacre of Mayan Indians in their 35-year genocidal civil war. Gibson has no real blood on his hands--yet. Did he really want to dip his hands into this particular bucket?

Easy to point to Paw and his tribe as evidence of a less chuckleheaded viewpoint (Mayans, they evil)--but they're romanticized primitives, innocents who are not part of and ultimately walk away from a doomed Mayan society (just as Christ and Mary in Passion walk away from doomed Jewish society). 

It's the hate, finally, that bothers me. Not so much the violence, though you can't help but notice how Gibson loves to insert that pause, that extra second--the better to see, say, a beating heart squirt blood, or a jaguar's teeth tear the skin off someone's face (Gibson loves variety in his bloodletting, but it's a callow kind of variety, not a means to some more profound end, unlike say the violence in Scorsese, Ferrara or Woo (filmmakers--artists, really--with a Catholic bent)). Why all this malice focused on a people, with such urgency that he gets basic details of his calumny wrong? Did Gibson think that by choosing a long dead civilization he would (unlike what happened with the Jewish community) escape criticism? If so, he's dead wrong; there are plenty of Mayan descendants living in Mexico and Central America, and they're already unhappy with the movie (perhaps he's not totally unaware; the movie's slated to show in Guatemala only this year, after he's collected box office receipts from the rest of the world).

A final point: Gibson seems to be establishing a pattern here: pick an ethnic group, preferably dark-skinned, do cursory and often slipshod research on them (he got the weapons, the cool tattoos and piercings right, I'll give him that), then create some kind of sadomasochistic scenario that demonizes said ethnicity so that the audience has no choice but to hate, hate, hate. What if he should turn his malignant eye in our direction, suddenly decide to make a major Hollywood movie about the Philippines--a race of savage dogeaters capering about, wielding weaponlike yo-yos and having wild orgies while the noble Spaniards come sailing in just in time to civilize us, Christianize us? I'd hate to see the day.

(For more on on the movie, Apocalypto: Caligula of the Yucatan has a comprehensive summary of Gibson's factual distortions, plus links to other helpful articles)

(First published in Businessworld, 2/2/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/02/todo-todo-teros-john-torres-2006.html

Excerpt:

John Torres' Todo, Todo, Teros is, simply put, a lovely film. Part video collage of found footage, glued together with bits of poetry (by Joel Toledo, who co-wrote the screenplay with Torres); part espionage drama; part documentary look on the Manila of today (the sights, sounds, feel of it, the excitement, energy, jacked-up paranoia); part meditation on relationships and the impact one has on others, the film is by turns funny, disturbing, tender, erotic.

On the surface it's the story of a terrorist-filmmaker (Earl Drilon, as the director's surrogate) walking through the Manila of today, a Manila just a shade darker, less tolerant of marginal figures and eccentrics and wayward types, thanks to 9/11--we have to remember that Al Qaeda operatives have been captured in Manila, and that members of the Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) trained in Afghanistan. When Torres surreptitiously trains his lenses at people sitting on park benches and talking, you can't help but think of a surveillance camera; when he throws Teletype reports onscreen of terrorists with Muslim names being captured here and there, you feel a shiver run up your spine. Torres doesn't overplay the terrorism angle (he doesn't have the budget to, anyway); he keeps it all at a background murmur, and it helps add to the verisimilitude, to the sense that this--this is Manila in the second millennium.

Curse of the golden filmmaker

Noel Vera

I'm not sure if we can call Zhang Yimou a great filmmaker, but in
the '80s and '90s he was certainly a force to be reckoned with. For
director Chen Kaige he shot "Huang tu di" (Yellow Earth, 1984), a
film that announced to the world the presence of the "Fifth
Generation" of mainland Chinese filmmakers; three years later,
with "Hong gao liang" (Red Sorghum), "Ju Dou" (1990), and "Da hong
deng long gao gao gua" (Raise the Red Lantern, 1991) Zhang helped
establish the house style of the Fifth Generation--at once old-
fashioned in its embrace of melodrama ("Ju Dou" owes a plot twist or
two to "The Postman Always Rings Twice") yet new in its utter lack
of cynicism (the unabashedly romantic flavor of "Hong gao liang's"
love scene); voluptuous in its use of colors, shapes, textures (the
dyed cloth in "Ju Dou" filling the screen with ribbons of fluttering
scarlet, purple, gold) yet somehow austere in intent and ultimate
impact (repeated shots of the compound's imposing rectangular floor
plan in "Da hong deng" emphasizing the heroine's imprisonment). The
1999 "Yi ge dou bu neng shao" (Not One Less) subordinated that
gorgeous visual style to the story of a young teacher struggling to
keep her class of poor student peasants together. The result, I
thought, was a film more persuasively moving (thanks to its
countryside grit and simplicity) than any of his earlier efforts.

He's struggled ever since, sometimes in interesting ways: "Wo de fu
qin mu qin " (The Road Home, 1999) is a romance told in flashbacks,
as the lovers' son arrives from the big city to bury his just-died
father (I liked it well enough, save that the mother seemed a tad
too self-indulgent); "Xingfu shiguang" (Happy Times, 2001) felt like
a reworking of Charlie Chaplin's "City Life" (blind girl given the
illusion of a better life by an equally poor benefactor) and suffers
in comparison (you also couldn't help but feel sexually predatory
overtones--all these middle-aged men, surrounding a helpless blind
girl--in what Zhang strenuously tries to present as an innocuous
situation).

"Ying xiong" (Hero, 2002) represents a third stage in Zhang's
career, the Chinese martial-arts extravaganza set in the country's
distant past, where Zhang's often provocative political subtext can
be tucked safely away inside an entertaining metaphor. Chris Doyle
was the cinematographer and I'm only guessing here, but he
apparently took inspiration from an idea Vittorio Storaro tried to
work into Warren Beatty's comic-book epic "Dick Tracy" (1990) but
failed; Doyle's primary colors aren't there just to make some visual
statement, but suggest the emotional tone and philosophical nature
of the various points of view making up the film's "Rashomon"-like
story. Zhang's follow-up film "Shi mian mai fu" (House of Flying
Daggers, 2004) was less impressive, partly because Doyle had been
replaced by Zhao Xiaoding (who also does the cinematography of this,
his latest), partly because melodrama swamps the already overripe
film.

"Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia" (Curse of the Golden Flower, 2006)
takes this trend of melodrama and extravagant production design and
pushes it to the nth power. With Zhao's help, Zhang fashions a--
well, it's hard to say just what: think "Blade Runner" set in the
Tang Dynasty, or the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffering its
meltdown inside a Chinese restaurant. The décor doesn't just have a
poisonously radioactive glow; there's also a delirious tackiness
that dares you to respond with something sarcastic (my favorite
speculates that set designer Huo Tingxiao must have been "channeling
Liberace"). The costumes reflect the outrageousness of the sets--
gold silk by the dozen square miles, push-up bras by the thousands,
more scimitar-length intricately carved and painted nail extensions
than might be found in Wolverine's manicure kit. Sets and costumes
are a mishmash of styles--the Forbidden City, a prominent setting
for much of the action, wasn't built until the Ming Dynasty, some
five hundred years later; some of the palace's defenses--a huge
tanklike wall made up of spears and shields--seem cribbed off of, I
don't know, either D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance," Anthony
Mann's "The Fall of the Roman Empire," even Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

Arguably odder than the production design is the chosen source for
the film's screenplay--"Thunderstorm" (1933), the single most famous
drama by legendary playwright Cao Yu (real name Wan Jiabao), done
when he was only twenty-three years old. Zhang had gotten in trouble
several times before, particularly for "Ju Dou" and " Da hong deng,"
which were seen as allegories on the authoritarian nature of the
Chinese government; in his recent work it's possible to see a
reluctance to engage in direct criticism. "Shi mian mai fu," for
example, may feature a secret band of knife-throwing rebels, but the
focus is more on their derring-do and love lives than on any
particularly despotic government activity. "Ying xiong" on the
surface reads as wholehearted endorsement of the government's
history of repression (the end--national unity--justifies the
means). "Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia," in channeling Cao Yu (who
had openly condemned the communists), is more overt: the corrupt
emperor (Chow Yun-fat) is secretly punishing his wife (Gong Li) for
sleeping with her stepson (Liu Ye)--perversely, by feeding her
poisoned medicine that he insists is crucial for her health; his
wife in turn plots revenge via a deadly coup attempt. An outré
detail, the sort of vicious slander Jonathan Swift liked to heap
upon particularly despised enemies: the emperor suffers from what
appears to be a spectacular case of hemorrhoids--his treatment
involves huddling in gargantuan throne that doubles as an
elaborately herbed and medicated steam bath.

It's difficult to know how to take the film--are we asked to swoon
to the passions on display, or laugh at the camp presentation? The
sets, costumes, plot twists, even acting style go so thoroughly over-
the-top that when one particularly grotesque revelation is made
between two lovers you're not so much shocked as shockingly amused
by their reactions-- eyes wide, jaws dropped, libido unmistakably
doused.

But Chow's emperor--I've heard him called miscast, but I'd rather
say he's a villain in the classic Hitchcock mode, gracious and
gallant and courteous to a fault. His ruthless response to his
beloved's fledgling coup attempt inspires Zhang to evoke images from
the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre; more, Zhang follows this up with
a brilliant bit of satire involving thousands of chrysanthemums
moving in clockwork precision, the sequence ending with a truly
shocking image: all the surviving combatants sitting down to a
celebratory family dinner. For a few breathtaking moments Zhang's
effrontery cuts through all the brocaded silk, heaving bosoms,
overilluminated screens; for a few moments the film is truly worth
seeing.

"Ying xiong" was a huge hit; "Shi mian mai fu" did respectable
business; this picture--despite the large budget, terrible notices,
and unspectacular boxoffice--will probably make its money back. From
controversial arthouse filmmaker Zhang has evolved into a
recognizable international figure with a celebrity status similar if
not equal to John Woo or Ang Lee--only Zhang seems committed to
making Chinese films, using mostly Chinese talent and production
facilities financed largely by Chinese money, and he seems to want
to say something beneath all that hoopla. I'm not exactly happy with
what Zhang's become (I thought his "Yi ge dou bu neng shao" was his
finest work to date), but considering his competition--I hear James
Cameron of "Titanic" fame is planning yet another 200 million dollar
bonfire of the vanities--frankly, I'd rather root for the Fifth
Generation veteran making hash of his culture, slipping subversive
subtexts past government censors, overall showing Hollywood that
there's an alternative to their flavorless factory product.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/9/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Love story

Noel Vera

John Fante was a relatively unsung poet of '30s Los Angeles, his
novel "Ask the Dust"--featuring Fante's alter-ego, the ambitious and
insufferable Arturo Bandini--a relatively unknown but intense
autobiographical rant against the City of Angel's racism and
implacability, and his own self-loathing self. The book possibly
influenced J.D. Salinger--his Holden Caulfield sounds like a
younger, better-fed version of Bandini. Charles Bukowski--who calls
Fante his "God"--describes his discovery of Fante thusly: "one day I
pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was…like a man who
had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table."
Michael Tolkin (who wrote "The Player") is an admirer; and writer-
director Robert Towne nursed a longtime dream of adapting the book
to film.

It wasn't easy. Towne had discovered Fante's work back in the
early '70s, when he was researching his script for "Chinatown;" at
one point, just after the first two "Godfather" films became a huge
hit, Francis Ford Coppola had planned to do Fante's "Brotherhood of
the Grape" using a script by Towne. Johnny Depp waited a year for
Towne to get the financing together; Towne never did. Even Leonardo
DiCaprio was at one point attached to the project.

Now, some thirty years since he read the book, Towne has finally
managed to make his film, with Colin Farrell as Bandini and Salma
Hayek as Bandini's inamorata, Camilla. This Bandini isn't exactly
Fante's--the self-loathing is largely absent, and much of the racist
invectives Bandini and Camilla hurl at each other have been toned
down. But Towne's recreation of the time and place is
preternaturally uncanny--not just the sunlight and heat haze (the
film was shot in South Africa, which does a superb job of evoking
the relatively unpolluted desert air of '30s Los Angeles), but the
look of an Angeleno street in the midday sun (the pedestrians still
outnumbering motor vehicles), and the genteel way a white woman
stands up to move away from Camilla (politely ignoring her glare)
inside a movie theater.

Fante's novel is also full of Bandini's fantasies, rants, personal
thoughts--difficult stuff to film (unless I suppose you ask Michel
Gondry to turn it into an "it's all in his head" picture [come to
think of it, Gondry might have been a good--or at least interesting--
choice to adopt Macolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" one more time,
maybe do a remake of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest"]). Towne goes the old-fashioned (John Huston?) route, and
focuses on the affair between Bandini and Camilla. He's a so-so
filmmaker (skilled, not riveting) and a superb director of actors;
he manages to make Farrell convincingly Italian (Towne in an
interview notes that Farrell is a Black Irish--an ethnicity that
shares with the Italian Americans a put-upon lower-class Catholicism
Farrell is able to channel), and he gives Hayek what I would
consider her most fully realized role as a beautiful woman (which
she is; something you don't quite realize in "Frida," what with that
distracting prosthetic brow). This may be at variance with what
Fante originally wrote, but it's also the frankest, bleakest, most
unsentimental portrait of lovers I can remember in recent films. The
eroticism is direct, if muted, as in the scene where Hayek lies on
Farrell's bed and admits she's not wearing underwear--better than
actual nudity is the sexual electricity between Farrell and Hayek,
an electricity all the more intense because it crackles in the midst
of the stormy, multifaceted antagonism roiling between them (you
can't believe on how many grounds the two battle each other: Italian
versus Mexican, citizen versus immigrant, literate versus
illiterate, man versus woman). The two in their struggles are like a
microcosm of Los Angeles' marginalized classes, one ethnic group
struggling to gain dominance over the other.  The tragedy is that
the two share more things in common than they do things different
(their dark skin, their impoverished lifestyle, the way they stand
outside white, middle -society), which ideally should draw them
together; instead, Bandini as often as not uses that common
experience to read Camilla's vulnerabilities better, tear into her
more effectively--Camilla as often as not responding in kind.

And because they are so alive as characters we buy the relatively
romanticized ending--or at least the ending here seems more
palatable than when something similar is presented in other romantic
movies (we believe in their romance because we believe in them as
people, we believe in them because we see that they can be as flawed
and hateful to each other as anyone we know--as we ourselves
sometimes are).

There's a subtext to all this that helps explain, and ultimately,
forgive Towne his less-than-faithful version of Fante's masterpiece:
that this is a seventy-year-old veteran filming the work of a thirty-
year-old angry young man. If Towne had managed to make the film as
he intended, twenty years ago, maybe the results would have been
closer to what Fante wrote; as is, there's something fascinating
about the way Towne softens Fante's hard edges. It's as if he had
lived with (come to know, learned to love) the characters for too
long not to be more forgiving of their foibles, suffered too much of
the same things they suffered not to accord them some measure of
compassion, even solace--a time they can spend with each other, for
example (the trip to the beach was much sketchier in the original,
and Camilla's illiteracy is a Towne invention). It's as if this
older man has taken the unforgiving vision of the younger, angrier
man, shaken his head fondly, and--well, rearranged the picture a
little, to better suit the view from where he's sitting. The result
isn't great art, but it's interesting, even moving, art--you can't
help but feel that while this may not be the apex of Towne's career,
it is some kind of valedictory statement, a summing up of his view
of the world.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/16/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Child's play

Noel Vera

There are a lot of things the matter with "Bridge to Terabithia,"
Gabor Csupo's adaptation of the Newberry Award-winning children's
book by Katherine Paterson, first and foremost being the trailer,
which leads you to expect a "Narnia" or "Lord of the Rings" type
adventure--nothing of that sort. "Bridge" is about the friendship
that develops between two lonely youths, both eleven years old--
Jesse, a boy trapped in a chaotic lower-middle-class household with
four other women and a seemingly uncaring father; and Leslie, the
only child of a pair of loving, well-to-do parents.

The fantasy, it's pretty much made clear here, is strictly in the
children's minds--no complex psychological or metaphysical questions
posed, no blurring of fiction and reality beyond what can easily be
explained by a parent to a child. This is no "Pan's Labyrinth,"
where the fantasy takes on unsettling parallels with grim reality,
even intruding upon it at several points; no "Heavenly Creatures,"
where the lure of fantasy for two girls is so strong their very
sanity is thrown into question. This movie's fantasy is mostly by-
the-numbers escapism, set against a reality where--though some of
the circumstances may be unpleasant, even tragic--the people
transcend said circumstances through persistent strength of
character and basic human decency.

The filmmaking in the fantasy sequences is strictly by-the-numbers
as well. Unlike what Guillermo del Toro accomplished in "Pan" the
digital creatures here have little heft or texture; they're shot
full-on, in broad daylight, and you can see how clearly artificial
they are (paradoxically it's when digital creations are in shadow
[as they often are in "Pan"] that they are most convincing).
In "Heavenly Creatures" there's enough exuberance and style that the
fantasy seems like an extension of the girls' burgeoning
imaginations--Jackson often shoots them running forward, the digital
effects sprouting and blooming before them, giving the impression
that they are literally making up the world as they go along (in
Csupo's picture the transition isn't as fluid, or exciting); more,
the leap into fantasy can happen anywhere, at any time (in Csupo's,
the worlds are more clearly delineated--you need to cross the creek
to get into Terabithia [a term, incidentally, that Paterson possibly
took it from C.S. Lewis, who in turn borrowed it from the Bible]).

True, "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Heavenly Creatures" are not meant for
children--or at least I wouldn't recommend showing them to children
without thorough guidance--but even, say, a child-friendly film like
Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" has its share of strangeness (the
train running over water, the mud spirit with a bicycle handle
sticking out of its side) and unsettling imagery (the parents turned
into pigs; the voraciously hungry No-Face). If the make-believe
in "Terabithia" seems ultimately innocuous in comparison, it might
help to remember that in the film's story the fantasy is a product
of two young minds, not a sophisticated adult evoking his younger
self--then the blandness becomes more understandable (Paterson is
staying true to what an eleven-year-old might dream up), even
perhaps forgivable.

The film's emotional center, of course, is the young boy Jesse. As
Josh Hutcherson plays him and Csupo directs him, he's hardly your
run-of-the-mill child protagonist--there's a hardness to him, a
sullen and unattractive angularity that sets him apart, makes him
believable as a loner and outcast (I much prefer him to Elijah Wood,
who with his relentlessly baby-blue eyes can only play suffering
victim in the "Lord of the Rings" movies). Sullen and angular he may
be, but in his loneliness he's also learned to be a listener; when
his parents talk of money matters, he can't help but overhear, and
the undercurrent of financial tension only adds to his sense of
unease.

Hutcherson also does fine work opposite Robert Patrick as Jack,
Jesse's father--Patrick, best remembered for playing the shape-
shifting Terminator, uses his naturally impassive face to suggest
all kinds of ambiguities: is Jack aloof, uncaring? Does he play
favorites among his kids? Is there some reason why he refuses to
give his only son a kind word, a sign of tenderness? Is all this
just the normal confusion that occurs between a boy and the father
that wants to raise him to be a man (only thanks to a pesky sense of
machismo the father can't be matte about it), or is there something
more--involving the money problems, perhaps?

It's amazing, considering how trailers were full of cheesy CGI
effects work, that the picture focuses on and succeeds in conveying
much of the subtext between a boy and his father--I'm tempted to
give all the credit to Paterson's original novel, but of course
Csupo had to direct the actors and try capture the novel's
understated emotional tone.  I'd also credit Paterson (with Csupo
translating) for the way middle-school life is so vividly evoked,
with its accepted cruelties (running feet tripped over, hapless
bystanders shoved aside) and casual injustices (bullies collecting a
fee for entry into the public restroom)--at one point a small revolt
is staged, heading towards the restroom, but it quickly peters out
(in Hollywood children's films nowadays, the revolt would have
succeeded).

When Leslie (AnnaSophia Robb, pretty enough with short blonde hair
and a level-headed gaze) enters Jesse's life and starts introducing
him to the wonders of an overactive imagination, you might actually
resent the intrusion of special effects--the spell of Paterson's
voice, her delicate way with familial relationships, her startlingly
honest depiction of American schoolyard society (she's had to defend
her books from more conservative Christian readers because of the
occasional frankness of her children's language) is such that you
want less of the former, more of the latter (Csupo's execution of
said digital effects doesn't help matters). You wonder: couldn't
Terabithia have been sketched in in a more minimalist manner--
extensive use of sound and floor effects, some artful camera moves,
a magical coincidence or two, perhaps?

But we can only judge the movie we have before us It's not
negligible, fortunately, thanks to Paterson, Hutcherson, Patrick,
and (to some extent) Csupo; at times it's even surprisingly moving.
And it has a distinctive view of the world--cruel sometimes,
desolate sometimes, even tragic--but never irredeemably so.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/23/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Bowl movement

Noel Vera

David Bowers and Sam Fell's "Flushed Away" (2006) is surprisingly
charming, an unholy marriage between Aardman Animations (responsible
for Nick Park's "Wallace and Gromit" movies) and Dreamworks that
actually manages to stay afloat, despite the tidal pull of American
digital animation and all its dreary clichés.

It's hard to say why--there's plenty the matter with the picture.
You miss the handmade quality of Park's films (yes, he's started
using CGI, but only to supplement the stop-motion animation), the
vast tabletop models (the aerial shots of the estate with the
carnival rides spinning about in "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" were so
intricately detailed you wanted to stop and stare), the (most of
all) expressive plasticine forehead of Gromit (he's to silent dog
comedy what Chaplin was to silent film comedy--a sweet yet somehow
melancholy champion). You don't miss the tired storylines, the
action sequences that ape amusement park rides or the latest extreme
sports that seem standard-issue in most animated American films
nowadays--all that swinging from vines (in this case, electric cords
and pipes running liquid nitrogen (but what are liquid nitrogen
pipes doing in a sewer?)), the motorboats chased by hand mixers, the
parachuting and hang-gliding and water-skiing and whatnot (when
Parks did chases, they weren't mere coaster rides, but structural
frames on which to hang all kinds of sight gags). Strangely, the
baggage that does comes with the digital animation is not as
annoying as usual--maybe it helps that longtime Parks collaborator
Peter Lord both produced and cooked up the script, with the help of
Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais (both veterans who have written for
Tracy Ullman and Lenny Henry), with additional material by Tim
Sullivan (who has adopted both E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh to the
big screen).

Fairly overqualified talent to bring together and focus on what is
essentially a mouse-out-of-water story: Roddy St. James (Hugh
Jackman) is the lonely spoiled dandy of a pet rat (from Kensington,
yet!) who gets flushed down the toilet by a rude intruder rat named
Sid (Shane Richie); underground, he encounters a subterranean
version of London, complete with a carton-box Big Ben and a broad
sewer canal representing the river Thames (again, those wondrous
tabletop models--a shade less wondrous, being digital constructs).
He meets Kate Winslet (granted she's been afflicted with the less-
than-attractive car-grille smile Aardman glues on all its
characters, and denied the bountiful upholstery she carries around
with her in real life, but still…) playing Rita, a spunky (but what
else could she be?) female rat out to smuggle the Queen's ruby to
her impoverished, physically handicapped father (David Suchet).
Standing in their way is the villainous Toad (Ian McKellen, more fun
here than when wrapped in leather as Magneto, much more entertaining
than he was or could ever be in Ron Howard's soggy "The Da Vinci
Code"), his pair of slightly out-of-it henchmen Spike (Andrew
Serkis, apparently still suffering withdrawal pains from losing The
One Ring) and Whitey (the wonderful Bill Nighy, playing the rodent
equivalent of a twenty-five watt bulb screwed into a fifty-watt
lamp), and as the smooth and suave Le Frog, the (who else?) smooth,
suave Jean Reno.

It's not just your usual multiplex kiddie fare, stuffed full of pop
cultural references (although there's plenty of those here
(allusions to "Finding Nemo," James Bond, Superman, Spiderman, and
previous Aardman films abound)), non-sequiturs, fart jokes, enough
sentimentality to send your blood sugar index soaring; this is a
seriously silly movie, where the actors mostly have a light touch
with jokes and you can catch glimpses of wit--or at the very least
evidence of an odd sense of humor. You'd be hard put to find a
movie, for example, where someone will inform you point-blank that
the stomach ache you're both suffering is "the curry you had last
night," adding confidentially: "I've got a bum like a Japanese
flag." When Rita takes Roddy home it's to a disarmingly ramshackle
house, precariously balanced (a reference to Chaplin's "The Gold
Rush"?) and inhabited by about a hundred brothers and sisters, a
cockroach boarder reading a French translation of Kafka's "The
Metamorphosis" (think about it), and a grandmother convinced that
Roddy's really Tom Jones, here for a visit. It's difficult to
maintain an air of snooty condescension towards a picture where
people are so eager to laugh at their own Britishness: discussing
both the imminent World Cup halftime and upcoming end of their
underground London (inextricably linked, thanks to an evil plan by
the Toad), Rita (on their chances of saving the day) declares: "It's
impossible!" Roddy responds: "England's winning--anything's
possible."

Then there's the slugs. Whole choruses of them, shrieking in the
dark, sliding down slippery tunnels, peering into this or that
shadowy corner, singing everything from Bobby McFerrin's "Don't
Worry, Be Happy, to Bobby Vinton's "Mr. Lonely"--excellent voices,
at that--and flitting around in a cocktail drink umbrella. It's
almost enough to make you want to adopt them as pets--almost.

As is, "Flushed Away" is inventive enough and eccentric enough to
distinguish itself against the rest of competition--against, say,
Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick's "Over the Hedge" with their
vision of row after row of gleaming suburban garbage cans, just
begging to be raided; or John Lasseter's "Cars" with its parallel
universe inhabited by automobiles, and its trademark blend of syrupy
sentiment and storytelling savvy. It doesn't have the grandeur and
ambition of George Miller's "Happy Feet"--penguins, yes, but with a
serious messiah complex--and it's so far below the level on which
Studio Ghibli is operating ("Howl's Moving Castle," the yet
unreleased Earthsea film) the joke's not very funny. But it's
passable, a recognizably Aardman product; here's to hoping they'll
get back to Parks, and to using plasticine.

(First published in Businessworld, 03/02/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

A pair of queens

Noel Vera

In the wake of Helen Mirren's sweep of Hollywood's annual horse
derbies for playing Her Royal Highness (a victory that was for the
most part deserved, having cracked open that unattractive granite
façade to reveal the hint--and it's the sense that you're getting a
mere hint that's so compelling--of something warm and vital pulsing
inside), two equally impressive performances seem to have been
forgotten: Judi Dench's and Cate Blanchett's, for this picture.

Richard Eyre's adaptation of Zoe Heller's novel "What Was She
Thinking: Notes on a Scandal" doesn't do much in the way of using
the medium to tell its story, beyond the occasional cliché of using
handheld shots to suggest the chaos of reporters surrounding a
notorious public figure, or the benign chaos that reigns when a
family goes about its business of contented living, but the theater
veteran does inspire wonderful work from these two royalties. As
with his previous picture "Iris," a biopic about author Iris
Murdoch, he pairs Ms. Dench with a younger woman--there, Kate
Winslet, as the younger Murdoch; here Blanchett, as Sheba (short for
Bathsheba) Hart, the object of not-so-obscure desire by the rather
obviously named Barbara Covett (Dench).

Covett, a longstanding history teacher who has become both fixture
and institution, grimly describes herself as a "battle-axe." She's
quietly formidable when submitting an insultingly succinct report to
the school principal; she's equally formidable facing down two
battling teenagers, one of which has just called Ms. Hart "a
tart." "You will apologize at once," she informs the offending
youth, who is cowed enough to comply.

Sheba is grateful; she develops a close friendship with the battle-
axe. It's part of the novel and film's scheme, of course, to keep
her unaware of just what she's getting into; we already know from
the start. Using the age-old device of the voiceover narrating
excerpts from a private memoir, we're privy to Barbara's thoughts,
and they're just a firm step short of being apocalyptic: "In the old
days we confiscated cigarettes and wank mags," she muses, watching
the stream of students pass; "now it's knives and crack cocaine. And
they call it progress." At the school departmental meeting her
report consisted of a single page noting that the department's
results were "below the national average but above the level of
catastrophe. Recommendation: no change necessary."

Voiceover may be an old device but used carefully it can be
effective. It's amusing, for example, to take note of Barbara's
words and see Eyre's camera either confirm their acerbic
observations or give away their delusional nature. When Barbara
first spots Sheba, she can't make up her mind whether the young
woman was "a sphinx or stupid;" when they later become friends she
declares that Sheba "is the one I've been waiting for." She's
surprised to see that Sheba's husband, Richard (Bill Nighy, always
excellent) is an older man--is, in fact, a former professor who has
left his wife to marry one of his students, and that the son they
had together suffers from Down's syndrome. When the family gambols
or dances together, Barbara puts this all down as the self-indulgent
frolicking of the "privileged;" all we see is a reasonably loving
family, happy with itself.

What makes Barbara such a compelling character, however, isn't so
much that spiky armor she wears for protection but the howling
loneliness hidden away inside the armor. You catch glimpses of it in
the eager way she prepares herself when Sheba invites Barbara to
dinner, a singular event, as she puts it, in the "arctic wasteland"
of her social calendar; you see it in the hungry way she looks at
Sheba despite her verbal disapproval--the way her gaze lingers on
Sheba's slim hands, graceful cleavage, wide, rouged lips.

Blanchett and Dench--with Nighy's skillful support--all play
together so beautifully that you may not notice how carefully Eyre
(or Heller, possibly) cleverly stacks the deck. We're asked to
believe that Sheba despite her loving family would be naïve enough
to fall under the spell of a fifteen year old boy with all the
finesse and subtlety of a teenage Neanderthal--when you read about
cases where a teacher has had an affair with her underaged pupil,
you almost always find that there's a pattern, a consistency in the
psychological makeup (they've done this before, or had this done to
themselves (yes, Richard fell in love with her as a student, but as
Richard points out, she was twenty at the time)). Blanchett plays
Sheba as a dewy young doe, more innocent--though physically older--
than her boyfriend; we're asked to believe that she's less sexual
predator than sexual victim, or at least chronically unable to make
up her mind as to the right thing to do. Likewise Barbara: after
having so skillfully and patiently manipulated Sheba, we're asked to
believe that she would jeopardize it all for a dead housecat; worse,
we're asked to believe she would give up her blackmail scheme so
easily, when the classic blackmailer knows well that it's the threat
of exposure that gives one power--once one actually reveals the
secret, one's power is lost.

But never mind psychological plausibility--Eyre and Heller seem
determined to provide the maximum number of revelations and dramatic
confrontations, plus endless footage of cameramen and reporters
running after one fleeing fugitive or another, seemingly confident
that whatever improbables might arise their wonderful pair of actors
will wave it all regally away. And to a large extent, they're right--
Blanchett and Dench go a long way towards helping us buy this rather
clunky thriller with the Sapphic subtext and requisite Philip Glass
music score (Glass is apparently the go-to guy for composing music
for obsessive characters in movies; his droning, repetitive tones
naturally, almost comically, evoke single-minded resolve in a
protagonist), confident in the idea that if they can't give us some
kind of truth about their subject matter, they can at least amuse us
for ninety minutes. I can't take this seriously as some kind of
great meditation on woman-on-woman relationships, or even as some
kind of profound comment on loneliness or fixation, but I can enjoy
it for what it is: a fairly well-made entertainment, showcasing two
members of the English-language cinema's acting royalty, on their
very best game.

(First published in Businessworld, 3/9/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Joey Gosengfiao: 1941-2007

Excerpt:

Joey Gosiengfiao wasn't a friend--I wouldn't presume to have enjoyed the privilege. I wasn't close enough to him--didn't spend enough time with him to become close--but it wasn't for want of wanting. Of the many people I've met and come to know deeply or casually in the Filipino film industry he was one of the most good-natured, the most endearing. Never saw him angry; in a crisis he was often upset, but he never allowed himself to cross over to anger--never occurred to him, I suspect; even when he was reprimanding someone he sounded like a favorite grand-aunt telling you something unpleasant for your own good (you hung your head in shame--how could you upset your dear aunt…). Talking to people in the industry--not the celebrity actors or actresses, who demanded the best treatment, but ordinary folk who pushed the wheels of moviemaking slowly and painfully forward--I learned that he was the most beloved director in Regal Films. I don't know anyone who disliked him. Well, some might have been mad at him at one time or another, but for specific reasons, during the course of doing business; I don't know of anyone who resented the man's character, or stayed mad with him for a very long time.

Best of all was the aura the man radiated--when you stepped up close, no matter what problem or stormy emotion clouded your brow, the sight of those chinky eyes, that wide smile, the hair that looked like fresh-mown grass set your soul (spirit, mind, whatever) instantly at ease. You could sit down with Joey, talk to him, and feel like he was your friend, no matter how short the acquaintance.

Ugly duckling

Noel Vera

After more than two decades in development hell the Broadway
musical "Dreamgirls" has finally come to the big screen, and while
it's not a great musical or even the best recent one (I'd say that
would be the "Once More, With Feeling" episode of "Buffy, the
Vampire Slayer"), it's better by far than anything we've seen in
years ("Evita," "Chicago," "Moulin Rouge," anyone?). It's a
melodrama with musical numbers; a soapy retelling of a famous
singing group's dirtiest laundry (The Supremes, and its breakout
star Diana Ross); a modest, fairly crafted revival of a moribund
genre, all rolled up in one unashamedly glitzy package. It's the
story of an ugly duckling--Effie White (Jennifer Hudson) a wannabe
pop diva with a weight problem who, instead of becoming a swan by
story's end is instead surpassed by Deena Jones (Beyonce), a real
(or at least more conventional) beauty, the classic morality tale of
surface winning out over substance, which had illusions of matters
being otherwise.

Maybe the biggest problem the show has is that it's essentially a
retelling; the songs are pastiches (that at times approach parody)
of the Motown songs they're supposed to emulate. Actually, they're
less than parodies--a parody would at least try and sound like the
source material it's making fun of; these are overblown, Hollywood
motion-picture soundtrack notions of what Motown's supposed to sound
like. Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen can try hard as they can (and they
try very hard), but the works of geniuses like Marvin Gaye are sui
generis, and therefore inimitable. The film very rarely comes to
life in its musical numbers; maybe only twice, and mostly thanks to
the actors--"What About Me?" comes to mind, and of course, the
showstopping "And I'm Telling You." Most of the time director Bill
Condon is content to cut away and go into a montage sequence that
furthers the story, instead of wasting time on the number--and for
once I'm not complaining.

Maybe the movie's second biggest problem is the ostensible lead
role, Deena Jones; granted she's supposed to be a mediocre singer
with real stage presence, couldn't they get an actress who could
sing instead of a singer who can't act? Beyonce, revealingly, looks
best in a series of photo shoots, suggesting the crystallized,
rather inflexible vision of her created by her husband/manager
Curtis Taylor (Jamie Foxx, channeling Berry Gordy, Jr.): she looks
nice, and her beauty can stand a variety of transformations, some of
them bizarre, but ask her to act and she gives you her impression of
a photo cut-out moving its mouth and making sounds, otherwise devoid
of life. First half of the show, she's rather wan and bland, easily
malleable in a sweet, unoffensive way; when she starts to think for
herself--fielding film offers behind her husband's back, singing the
song "Listen" (written exclusively for the film) towards the
uncomprehending Curtis, she shows a furtive vitality which, thanks
to her underwritten character, seems to come from nowhere.

The rest of the cast does much better: Jamie Foxx is at his
smoothest, seductive best as Curtis (he reminds me of the David
Selznick-type producer Kirk Douglas played in "The Bad and the
Beautiful," only here there's no last-minute justification of the
man's Machiavellian machinations); when later the castle Curtis has
built up (Motown Records in real life) starts crumbling, the shiny
veneer of his charm starts looking forlorn, even heroic. Foxx's
Curtis might be the picture's true tragic center--he made everyone
believe he was building a family when really he was building an
empire, his empire; the tragedy lies in the possibility that his
vision could have lasted longer if he had been more forthcoming.
Eddie Murphy is hilarious and in the end even moving as the
increasingly anachronistic James "Thunder" Early--in the first half
he's a heavily pomaded sleazeball celebrity; by the picture's second
half he's obsolescent, obscure, and chafing under the weight of all
the flavorless pop songs Curtis is forcing on him (when at one point
Early breaks out in an unabashed funk number, you can see the
exuberance in Murphy's face). His James Brown-like dance moves might
remind you uncomfortably of times when he would ape the great
performer during his stand-up act; but when he's asked to just stand
there reacting to his dimming fame, the camera homing in on his
careworn face, you feel the character's pathos.

Foxx's Curtis may be "Dreamgirl's" central consciousness and
Murphy's Early its nostalgic soul (something at one point Murphy
claims to have--and believe it or not, you find yourself actually
agreeing with him), but Jennifer Hudson's Effie White (a
considerably cleaned-up, nonalcoholic version of the great Florence
Ballard) is its outsized heart. Hudson's Cinderella story is famous,
of course--she was dismissed from "American Idol," and went on to
win this role (ironically, a January 2007 Vanity Fair magazine cover
of the film--echoing the musical's storyline--featured not her but
her slimmer, better-known co-stars Beyonce, Foxx, Murphy), and
eventually, one of Hollywood's gold doorstops. This wasn't the first
time the role or its players had to struggle for recognition: when
Jennifer Holliday originated the role onstage she walked out several
times during development--the first time because her character died
after the first act, the second when the Deena Jones' character's
role had been expanded in the second act. Later, Whitney Huston was
attached to play the role of Deena, but the deal stalled when she
insisted on singing some of Effie's songs, particularly "And I'm
Telling You."

I remember watching a TV show where Holliday had been allowed to
sing the song: never mind the grainy video image, or the mono sound,
or the so-so music and lyrics, it was the massive outpouring of pain-
-modulated, precisely controlled--on display that held me
enthralled. Hudson on the big screen with stereo sound can't wipe
out my memory of Holliday, but she doesn't do it dishonor--no small
thing, in my book. We go through the story with her, we come to know
her Effie--an outsized ego, much like Early (I thought they would
have been perfect for each other. Perhaps too perfect)--wrapped
around a kernel of vulnerability. When she explodes onscreen
with "And I'm Telling You" it's the tremendous passion (a passion
you've come to know during the course of the movie) that lifts it
above the overfamiliar caterwauling you hear from so many song
contests and Mariah Carey ballads.

Condon, a longtime fan of the show, helps give the unpromising
material more visual snap and conviction than it deserves. He uses
relatively simple camerawork and editing--not enough to osterize the
choreography, but enough to give it snap and sparkle. He uses
devices--the camera looking on an actor in rehearsal, cutting to a
reverse shot that turns to reveal the actor before a live audience,
in full performance--that are old, old, old, but even so your blood
throbs to the excitement generated.

Sometimes he comes up with inspired imagery: the mirrors reflecting
and multiplying the many voices speaking out against Effie during
the crucial fight scene that later become (when Deena and Curtis and
everyone else abandons her) multiple copies of Effie onstage as she
sings her big number--deprived of an audience to love her, she wills
up her own. Condon (like Hudson) pours everything into this song--
spotlights flash and blaze above Hudson as she sings, and it's a
visual metaphor for her emotions; at one point she's poised in front
of a particularly brilliant light, her shadow trailing her like
tattered sleeves, echoing Liza Minnelli singing her heart out in the
finale to "Cabaret."

If there's a flaw to Condon's approach, it's in trying to insert a
sense of historicity--paralleling the girls' rise with Martin Luther
King and the Civil Rights movement and the emergence of a black
culture--into the mix; the attempt's admirable, and I love the fluid
editing as he moves from staged to archive footage and back, but
either he didn't work on it enough or the book's too limited to
allow him to make more connections.

Condon is fond of biopics--his last film was an urgently needed
retelling (in the face of today's sexual conservatism) of the life
of taboo-breaking, frank-talking Alfred Kinsey; he'd done a biopic
on a director of a great musical--James Whale, who did "Showboat" in
1936--but one would never suspect he had a "Dreamgirls" inside him.
One wishes he'd go at it again, this time with better material.

(First published in Businessworld, 3/16/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

A better film than "Babel"

Noel Vera

I haven't liked an Anthony Minghella film in goodness knows how
long. I agreed when critics dubbed "Truly, Madly, Deeply" (1991) as
a far more intelligent alternative to "Ghost" (faint praise,
considering, but there it is); I thought his "The English Patient"
some five years later was one of the more passionate and less
undeserving films to have won a Best Picture Oscar recently (let me
put it this way--it actually seemed too good to win one of those
golden doorstops). "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999) was stylish and
amusing, only Matt Damon made for an unengaging Ripley, easily
upstaged by the charming Jude Law; his "Cold Mountain" (2003)
scraped bottom for me--Jude Law, so enjoyable in "Ripley," was
lifeless in this, a Civil War drama set in a North Carolina that
somehow manages not to look anything like the actual Carolinas (much
of it was shot in Romania).

There's plenty to dislike in "Breaking and Entering," starting with
the title--it's both literal (a gang of young thieves break into an
architectural office) and metaphorical (people breaking into other
people's lives, stealing a measure of comfort or pleasure, taking
some kind of advantage from them). It's just the kind of
sophisticated arthouse thesis viewers like to discuss over lattes
afterwards (come to think of it, Minghella's always been the kind of
refined filmmaker arthouse viewers love to patronize). The film is
too civilized--it raises troubling questions, treats them with kid
gloves, and at the ninety-minute mark wraps them all up in a neat
and tidy package--well, not too neat and tidy; Minghella even adds
frayed edges Martha-Stewart style to give the whole thing a
comforting rustic feel.

But but but but…Minghella's strength as a filmmaker has always been
less his impeccable good taste (and we know what Godard always said
about good taste) and liberal values and more his love for
characters and the actors playing them; for the first time in a long
while, without the distracting background of genre conventions (the
noirish plot of "Ripley") or epic historical settings (the Civil War
in "Cold Mountain"), that love has come out loud and clear. More,
Minghella's assembled a cast--Law again (a favorite of his,
apparently), Binoche (another Minghella veteran), Robin Wright Penn,
Vera Farmiga and Ray Winstone--to flesh out characters who respond
to his affection with a warmth and glow of their own. This isn't a
great film at all; but it is, I submit, a quite enjoyable one,
modest in its ambitions, charming in its refusal to hide overt
sentiment, unabashed humanism.

It's a far better film, I submit further, than Alejandro Gonzalez
Inarritu's much ballyhooed "Babel"--here we learn that, yes, we're
all interconnected, but the connections are more quotidian, less
forced (Binoche's teenage son breaks into Law's office; Law finds
out, follows boy, meets Binoche; Law is divided between loyalty to
his wife (Penn) and growing attraction for Binoche; Winstone as the
police officer investigating the break-in and Farmiga as an
intruding prostitute watch from the sidelines with weary yet caring
eyes). The characters (as in "Babel") don't make smart decisions,
but Minghella (unlike Inarritu) lingers over these people, dwells on
their moments of decision, shows us, often with strong
identification devices and careful preparatory details, how
reasonably intelligent and compassionate men and women can do less
than intelligent and uncompassionate actions. Inarritu seems more
concerned with maintaining some kind of edgy texture, maintaining
his circus balancing-act of a plot. If there's a flaw in Minghella's
approach, it's that it's a touch too cavalier with the plot (I
mentioned a tidy resolution; maybe the better word is "optimistic"),
but even that I understand--the plot's just bone structure on which
Minghella hangs his beloved characters, working out their complex
interrelationships.

Law is key to the picture, of course: he manages enough comic banter
with Farmiga as the tough-talking prostitute that you buy the notion
that a man would have such a beautiful woman in her car and just
talk to her. With Penn as his wife he has a more subdued
relationship--Penn's daughter (Poppy Rogers) is autistic, concern
over her care has taken over their marriage, and you spot a kind of
puzzled grimace flit over his face from time to time as he gingerly
feels with a metaphorical tongue the gap where their love for each
other used to be. Perhaps his most exciting--and dicey--relationship
is with Binoche: as mother of the felon he's supposed to turn in,
his courting her has the feel of exploitation, no matter how noble
the intentions; you see him shutting down his cognitive abilities
before he walks in her door, just because the ethical implications
of what he's trying to do are too complicated to work out. Law has
always seemed smart in a callow way, with a boyish need to please
everyone, including his audience (which may be why he was all wrong
for the remake of "Alfie"--Michael Caine's original interpretation
always had this element of reptilian hedonism in it that made one's
fine hairs stand on edge). He wants to please Farmiga, so he lets
her into his car; he wants Binoche happy, so he tries to sleep with
her; he desperately wants to love Penn, and has done so for so long
he's gone numb with the effort, allowed her to drift away.

Minghella has the three women respond to Law in their own ways,
according to their character. Farmiga is a knockout combination of
creamy, pink-nippled body and quick-witted intelligence; with a
glance she sizes up Law's character and knows just how far she can
go, what she can get away with. Binoche's worried mother is a lonely
wanderer who reaches out hungrily for Law's pity; the only
complication to that situation is the fierce core of love she has
for her wayward son. Penn's is the most understated, and most
difficult to appreciate--she displays a wonderful physical warmth
towards her mentally handicapped daughter, and she's brave enough to
show a constantly lined, careworn face to Law (and us)--a face that,
at unexpected moments, just when you've about given up on the two
(on them), can suddenly express affection for her husband, or
remorse for the moribund nature of their marriage.

The film's had a lukewarm response from American critics. I suspect
it's part of the times, when a reasonably intelligent and well-made
picture isn't enough--movies have to be wilder, more intense, more
novel, more relevant somehow; a somewhat feel-good film about middle-
to-upper class adults and their complicated lives just seems
inadequate. Can't argue with that sentiment--these are not happy
times--but then I can't quite bring myself to disapprove of this
ostensible failure.

(First published in Businessworld, 3/23/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

He coulda been a contender

Noel Vera

I was never a big fan of the "Rocky" movies. Built on the dreams of actor-writer
Sylvester Stallone, wearing its big heart unabashedly on its sleeve, the first
"Rocky" charmed audiences with the image of this big, gentle, slow-witted
bruiser with the courtly manners and modest outlook in life who--as the
boxing-movie cliché goes--"getsa shot adda tiddle." Stallone captured the way
ordinary folk talked and acted in Philadelphia, and he had in particular a feel
for how big palookas think--how they're constantly aware that the world looks at
them as freakish and grotesque and not a little stupid, how Rocky basically
doesn't mind, so long as he has this small space for himself--an apartment, a
turtle, not much else. Stallone's able to convince us that this might actually
be a reasonable way of living after all, no small achievement.

Then it turns into a huge fairy-tale, and suddenly we're in rah-rah mode: Rocky
pummels a beef carcass (must be how Philly cheesesteaks got so tender), runs up
the Art Museum's stairs, does a little victory jig to the tune of Bill Conti's
"Gonna Fly Now" number (with tremulous violin strings suggesting the thrill of
the moment), and we believe this nobody can beat the heavyweight champion of the
world. To be fair, Stallone didn't pluck the idea for his screenplay out of thin
air; he'd been inspired by the career of Chuck Wepner, a relative unknown who in
1975 had been given a chance to fight Muhammad Ali for the title. Wepner
surprised everyone by lasting far longer than the expected three or four rounds,
even knocking Ali down on the ninth (the only fighter to have knocked Ali down
while he was the heavyweight champion); he lost to Ali on the fifteenth by a
TKO. You can see the basis for the story here, though Stallone couldn't resist
polishing and even whitewashing the facts a little--Wepner had been a longtime
professional and had fought noted boxers such as George Foreman and Sonny Liston
before being given his title shot, and he was no innocent (in 1986 he was
arrested for cocaine possession).

The second half is what most people remember, but it's the first half--that
street world of pale, pasty faces wrapped tight against the Philly chill--that I
liked best. If the basic rule of creative writing classes is to "write what you
know," Stallone wrote about what he knew, and clearly loved; you could almost
imagine him walking the neighborhoods, scribbling down funny lines from his
friends and acquaintances for his hoped-for movie.

Then came the sequels and frankly I lost interest; they were set up as underdog
fights against increasingly unbelievable comic-book villains (in "Rocky IV" the
hero faced the Soviet Union itself, incarnated (petrified?) in the granite form
of Dolph Lundgren), but the hero had long since lost his underdog status. If I
followed the series at all, it was for the way the stories paralleled Stallone's
own life, from relative unknown to Oscar nominee to celebrity fathead, jerk, and
moviemaking joke in just a few years (his two Oscar nominations have since been
buried under the far larger pile of Razzie nominations--twenty-nine in all,
winning an impressive ten). Doesn't take a genius to realize that Rocky was a
stand-in for Stallone, and that the boxer's rise and fall in fortune was
Stallone's way of working out his own rise and fall in status, only on his own
terms, terms that existed solely in Stallone's head--everyone else has since
grown tired of said terms, of the movies, of Stallone himself.

Cut to sixteen years after "Rocky V"--more or less agreed upon by people as
being the worst in the series--and five years since Stallone had been given a
lead role (his last was "Driven" (2001), a car-racing picture that made back
only half of what it had cost). When news leaked out of a sixth "Rocky,"
reactions were more raised eyebrows and age jokes ("Who's he gonna
fight--Wilford Brimley?") than any kind of serious expectations.

But things are different now; Stallone is no longer the celebrity he once was
(if he's still a jerk or fathead, I wouldn't know--even tabloids don't bother
covering him anymore), and in this latest installment he's finally found a
suitably realistic foe--his own decaying body. Suddenly Stallone's slow delivery
and weary, wary eyes have acquired a gravitas he lacked when young; he's gone
back to his roots, in a way he failed to do in "Rocky V"--rediscovered the way
Philly folk talk and walk, rediscovered the thought processes of someone aware
of being seen as freakish, grotesque, not a little stupid. It's the spell of the
first film's first half evoked all over again, with the added pathos of
nostalgia, of obsolescence--this Rocky is a dinner-party bore, reduced to
repeating tedious boxing stories to a table of respectful listeners, helplessly
aware that his son is slipping away from him, unable to resist taking his first
date in years (Marie, played by Geraldine Hughes) to the same places he took his
dead wife.

There's pathos and there's pathos, and then there's pathos. For the most part,
I'm an emotional diabetic--syrupy bathos has an emetic effect on me. But beyond
a certain point sentiment stops being cloying and starts being entertaining
again--it's the sheer shamelessness that's the source of fascination. Will
Stallone have Rocky caring for yet another pet turtle (the same one for all I
know--turtles have a long lifespan)? Sure. Will he show yet another shot of
Rocky visiting his wife's grave? Of course. Will he earn yet another "shot at
the title?" Whaddaya think dis is--neorealism?

It's when the movie goes for that last cliché, complete with yet another
training montage and set of beef ribs to be pummeled (More tenderized
cheesesteaks! More cheesy music!) that it once again loses me. Stallone has the
common touch; he knows--or knew, once upon a time--how to win over ordinary
folk, how to move them, leave them cheering instead of jeering, and against all
odds, he's recovered enough of that skill to make this movie, this "last shot at
the title." One wishes that along with that touch he'd developed enough of an
artistic sensibility that he'd for once want to crack open his hero's psyche,
take a look at what it means to be a champ who has lived past his sell-by date,
in a section of the city that's been largely passed by; one wishes, in effect,
that he'd picked this fairy tale apart, made new magic out of an aging carcass
(instead of pummeling it anew), shown Rocky dealing (or failing to deal) with
his wayward offspring instead of trying to beat sense into yet another black
punk who don't know any better (Antonio Tarver, who onscreen seems to experience
far more complex emotions than his underwritten role requires).

No such luck. And now the modest success of this latest sequel has apparently
encouraged Stallone: there's news of a "John Rambo"--the umpteenth installment
of Stallone's fascistic fantasy figure from the Vietnam War--coming in 2008. Yet
another shot at the title, or his foot? Another comeback, or comeuppance? Stay
tuned, if you happen to still be interested.

(First appeared in Businessworld 3/30/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

The reeking

Noel Vera

Stephen Hopkins' brand new horror flick has a simple enough premise:
the ten plagues visited upon Egypt are being inflicted on the small
town of Haven, Louisiana, possibly because of the influence of a
devilish young girl named Loren (AnnaSophia Robb); former missionary
turned miracle debunker Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank, doing some
serious slumming) arrives skeptical in the little town, ready to
find a scientific explanation for all this.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike this movie, but perhaps the
strongest is the cheap way the picture tries to cash in on the
recent trend in faith-based filmmaking--"Oh, look at how much
boxoffice apocalyptic pictures and most of all "The Passion of the
Christ" are making! And look how much more we can make if we have an
Oscar-winning actress in the lead, and a pretty young girl as the
source of evil ("Rosemary's Baby," "The Omen," "Village of the
Damned," "The Bad Seed," etc.). Throw in the ten plagues digitally
re-enacted (See frogs drop out of the sky! See rivers turned into
blood!), and we're talking big money!"

Right. Along the way we learn that Katherine lost her faith (we're
treading into William Peter Blatty territory, here) because of the
death of her husband and child in Sudan--a drought had started
around the time they had arrived, their very presence there had been
blamed, and her husband and child were sacrificed to appease the
gods.

Right--not only are we asked to believe that God has taken a more
overt role in changing weather (hail, darkness, flames) and
ecosystems (plagues of frogs, lice, and locusts), we're also asked
to blame those damned ignorant Sudanese for the loss of this poor
woman's faith (And where on earth did those barbarians get the idea
of killing her child? Sudan is predominantly Muslim and that
religion isn't exactly known for its child sacrifices (despite what
Christian nutcases might tell you)). No mention of the recent
violence in Sudan, all of which is directed at fellow countrymen--
movie audiences don't care about the thousands of black children
killed, only the one white one offered to pagan gods.

Swank wades hip-deep into the muck laughingly called a story; she's
as game as always, whether in a masochistic transgendered role
("Boys Don't Cry," 1999) or a masochistic boxing martyr role
("Million Dollar Baby," 2004), but try as she might, she can't sell
this cheesefest very well--probably no one can (she was fun in "The
Black Dahlia" (2006)l--a film I liked very much--but you couldn't
quite buy her as a femme fatale, either). Actor-filmmaker David
Morrissey as Doug, Katherine's local contact, fares better: with his
quiet line delivery and the slight knot of concern fixed on his brow
you can imagine either he's worried but very good at hiding it, or
very good at faking worry. There's a charm to him, a becoming
reserve or modesty that's appealing, the same there's a quality
behind that reserve that's irreducibly creepy (either that or I'm
really scraping bottom to find something--anything--free of
hysterics in this picture). Idris Elba pretty much functions as the
film's Magic Negro--caring, reliable, absolutely disposable black
friend with unshakeable faith and absolutely no sex life (Swank
makes free with Morrissey in what turns out to be a dream sequence
(or is it?), but her relationship with Elba is purely platonic);
AnnaSophia Robb is suitably impassive as Loren (not much of a
performance, but she's really just a movie prop with legs); Stephen
Rea chews scenery entertainingly as Father Costigan, the movie's
increasingly hysterical Catholic priest who does all the worrying
from a distance, racking up cell phone minutes like there was no
tomorrow (he basically channels Rod Steiger from "The Amityville
Horror," giving Steiger's schtick a classier sheen).

Director Stephen Hopkins (he was the man responsible for "The Ghost
and the Darkness" (1996), and the film adaptation of "Lost in Space"
(1998)--yes, you may wonder: why wasn't he lynched then?)) seems to
believe that the louder the music and sound effects the more
terrifying the picture, and that people are truly frightened by
shaky handheld camera footage (are we supposed to worry that the
actors might get knocked over?) chopped up into incomprehensible
fragments, MTV-style. He steals shamelessly from all kinds of movies-
-"Psycho," of course; "Rosemary's Baby," of course; "The Evil Dead"
movies; the original "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (a standard
resource for fright flicks set in the South); even Michael
Bay's "Armageddon" ("Gee, momma--looka all the fake-lookin
meteorites!") isn't immune to ravaging. The only real scare in the
picture for me, though, was the plague of maggots--all that
beautiful grilled seafood ruined, just like that.

O, for a Professor Quatermass to take over matters midway, and a
Nigel Kneale to guide him! Kneale had his fictional scientist
battling monsters and devil figures, but setting all the poltergeist
noises and flying dishes aside, his explanations were rational and
ultimately more persuasive--government conspiracies, say, or man's
genetic disposition towards violence. Sure he threw alien races into
the mix, substituting science fiction for religious fantasy, but
there's an inventiveness to his speculations that I liked, a way of
putting things together that actually seemed coherent, possessed of
an inner logic, fitting neatly into the plot without lazily
resorting to God or The Devil suspending the laws of nature
(In "Quatermass and the Pit" Kneale explains the Devil, Original
Sin, and racial cleansing (a phrase that has sadly become more, not
less, relevant in recent years) in a single brilliant premise).
Kneale would often start with gothic horror trappings--he knew how
to get more thrills out of a miniscule budget than Hopkins with his
battery of tired digital effects could imagine possible--but his
horrors are ultimately explicable through intelligence, not
hysteria, and are fought with quick thinking, not blind, unreasoning
faith.

This movie is harder to explain--call it the unholy union of
insatiable greed with invincible contempt, guided by a consummate
lack of talent and imagination. God visited the Egyptians with ten
terrible plagues; the filmmakers sent us this movie--overall, I'd
say the Egyptians got the better deal.

(First appeared in Businessworld, 4/13/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Some notes I managed to write about the Jeonju festival, including films I saw:

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/04/jeonju-and-trio-of-korean-films.html

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/04/jeonju-days-2-3-jiri-menzel-and-tony.html

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/04/jeonju-day-4-go-master-whos-that.html

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/04/jeonju-5-2-films-and-world-cinema.html

Little girl lost

Noel Vera

The fairy tale that opens the picture--about a princess from an
underground kingdom who wanders to the surface, can't find her way
back, grows old, and dies--pretty much says it all: this is the
story of a girl who was lost, and has since been trying to find
herself. Or rather who felt lost, then fumbled her way to some form
of self-assessment--what kind of person she is, what she will or
will not do.

It's Spain, 1944; Franco's fascist regime has been in power for some
years now. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is being driven along with her
mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) through miles of woodland to her new
stepfather, Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez); Vidal welcomes his new wife-
-hugely pregnant with his precious new son--and stepdaughter,
installs them in the old mill where he's staying, and continues on
his sadistic business of hunting down and torturing the few diehard
Republicans hiding in the surrounding mountains. Ofelia, mostly left
to herself, explores the grounds of the mill, and an old labyrinth
nearby; she encounters a giant faun (Doug Jones--he had previously
acted out marine superhero Abe Sapiens in del Toro's "Hellboy") who
explains to her that she's really the long-lost princess, and to
regain access to her underground kingdom she must perform three
tasks before the coming of the full moon.

It's easy to say Guillermo del Toro's "El laberinto del fauno"
(Pan's Labyrinth, 2006) is a fantasy--or perhaps not; I've heard
reactions from hardcore fantasy freaks that the fantasy is really
rather minimal, the special effects less than spectacular. Fine by
me--I'm not one to look for spectacle, or the "Wow! Wasn't that
kewl?" factor; if anything, this is one of the rare CGI films where
the digital effects seem more convincing than conventionally flashy,
more carefully executed and integrated into the live-action footage
so that the fantastic creatures actually seem to stand before you,
with real texture and heft to them (If you reached out towards the
screen, you almost find yourself thinking, you just might brush
amphibian slime, or parchmentlike monster skin, or worse).

  As for the minimal fantasy--del Toro has been quoted as saying he
sees fantasy as "not a way to escape reality but to articulate
reality…a way to talk about big truths." The film isn't really about
a girl who escapes into a fantasy world because the real world is
too unpleasant for her, but about a girl who creates a fantasy world
to help mediate what's happening in the world around her. Fantasy as
therapy, a means of coping.

You see it in the film's style--the boundary between reality and
fantasy is deliberately blurred. Ofelia climbs out of a car, peers
at an old stone sculpture with a dark hole of a mouth. The hole
suddenly burps forth an oddly winged and articulated insect--not
common-looking, but not entirely fantastic (you may have seen
something similar on a nature channel documentary--the unsettling
resemblance to several types of walking sticks is probably
intentional); the girl, convinced that what she's seeing is a fairy,
talks to it. She's called back to the car, which drives off; the
insect flits to a position behind a tree, and, with preternatural
intelligence, peers around the tree at the departing vehicle. The
entire sequence is grounded in reality (slightly stretched reality--
the insect is a well crafted CGI creation), with only the insect's
last gesture hinting at something a little more, hinting that
perhaps the girl is right.

Later you see more correlations between real and make-believe. The
adventure with the toad beneath the tree (the first of the girl's
three tasks) is some kind of parable--the toad representing the
Fascists growing fat off the roots of the starved fig tree (Spain,
or at least the people living around the Capitan's mill); the
adventure with The Pale Man (Doug Jones, again--del Toro calls the
two creatures "incarnations of the same character"). The second
adventure can be seen as a retelling of her and her housekeeper
Mercedes' (Maribel Verdu) predicament--Ofelia sneaking out on
nocturnal secret missions for a faun, Mercedes doing likewise for
the Republicans she secretly supports, in defiance of Capitan Vidal.
Both missions, it should be noted, involve a key; both carry out
their missions literally under the noses of creatures (The Pale Man;
Capitan Vidal) who are dangerous when awakened. The third task is
the most perilous of all, of course, the one where Mercedes' world
of Fascists and Republicans in mortal conflict and Ofelia's world of
underground kingdoms and perils beyond her understanding ultimately
collide.

Del Toro doesn't follow any strict rules with his fantasies, drawing
inspiration everywhere, from Dunsany to Dodgson to C.S. Lewis to
Borges, and that's all right--one can imagine the book-savvy Ofelia,
picking and choosing from what she's read, and reconstructing them
to fit her present circumstances (Lewis and Borges's influence may
be anachronistic--but never mind). He strives to give the forest
where the Republicans hide a fairy-tale look (you feel as if you
might spot Hansel and Gretel wandering among the trees), while the
Capitan's mill house resembles an ogre's den; at the same time,
Ofelia's fantasy world finds many echoes and correlations in the
real world (along with the aforementioned correspondences to real
life, del Toro notes that the Pale Man's dining room is laid out
almost exactly like the Capitan's).

Sergi Lopez's Capitan is such a strong presence some critics have
wondered could the film have been better--or more complex--if he had
been recast as a more sympathetic figure, adding a note of ambiguity
(as for those who would question its authenticity--whether or not
such violence was practiced--I would them to records of
interrogation methods used at the time, methods used and still used
in the Philippines, actually). I'd argue that creating a sympathetic
Capitan would either extend the film's running length or take screen
time away from Ofelia--and Ofelia, not the Capitan, is the films'
true focus (or what del Toro chose to be the true focus). The film
is not so much about choice, or at least not directly, as it is
about learning to use imagination, the power of conceptualization.
Imagination has helped her survive, keep her sanity, process
information otherwise unbearable to her--the fact, for example that
her baby brother may be endangering her mother's life (a reason for
her to hate the unborn child); she could blame it on the Capitan
instead, for taking away the mandrake root she had hidden under her
mother's bed (when you think about it, it IS the Capitan's fault--he
insisted on having the woman driven over, despite her fragile
health). Imagination has served her well throughout the film;
towards the end, its machinations hone her attention, make her
realize what's really at stake, what she must do in the midst of
chaos, and who she must defy to do it. She learns an even more
important lesson, the limits imagination must inevitably have: at
what point she should stop listening to the voices in her head--the
voices she created and yearns to yield to and obey--and start
listening to an even fainter voice, that of her still developing
moral sense. The film has for its center a labyrinth, the labyrinth
for its center a little girl, the girl for her center a complex knot
of feelings (jealousy of her unborn brother; fear of her stepfather
and of the giant faun; unrequited love for her distracted mother and
developing love for the secretly heroic housekeeper, Mercedes), the
knot for its center a bewildered consciousness, trying to untangle
it all and escape.

Not perhaps a great--I can't help but compare it to Victor
Erice's "El espiritu de la colmena" (Spirit of the beehive, 1973), a
clear influence and far more beautiful, delicate, mysterious film--
but at least the best fantasy film I've seen in recent years.

(First published in Businessworld, 4/27/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

My Senses of Cinema article is finally out:

Journal d'un cure de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, Robert Bresson, 1951)

Excerpt:

It's strange how Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (Dairy of a Country Priest, 1951), a film considered by many to be so spiritual, is so thoroughly immersed in the physical. But Catholicism--and the film is steeped in it--is full of paradoxes: loving one's enemies; believing in one God with three incarnations; needing to die to gain eternal life. Bresson at an early point of his career--using the Georges Bernanos novel--seems to be telling us that to present matters indefinite (the spirit, or soul), you need for material matters definite (the body, the world it lives in); more, to break free of the world of the physical you must first take a firmer hold on said world--for traction, if you like.

The film's first image is of the eponymous diary. You see the texture of the journal's thick paper cover; behind that, a blotter splotched with ink; behind that, a page full of scribbling. The act of writing--scratching ink on rough paper, carefully blotting it, just as carefully closing the cover to keep the contents safe--will become a repeated motif, emphasizing the act of physically capturing and putting down on sheets of flattened pulp one's thoughts and ideas and emotions. Capturing and rendering on paper, so to speak, such elements of the soul as one can record.

Jeonju Day 8: Colossal Youth; Oshii's latest; various shorts

Jeonju Day 9: Artavazd Peleshian; Johnnie To's Exiled

Lucky me

Noel Vera

You have to give credit to director Curtis Hanson; he tries his
level best not to repeat himself. After making his bones with
suspense ("The Bedroom Window;" "The Hand That Rocks The
Cradle;" "The River Wild") he does a noir epic ("L.A.
Confidential,") that wins him a few Oscar nominations, then follows
that up with a comedy on writers ("Wonder Boys"), a gritty urban
fairy-tale about a rap artist ("8 Mile"), and now this. I find the
post "L.A." films to be the most interesting ("8 Mile" being my
favorite so far)--Hanson attempting the unenviable task of throwing
away the crutches of genre filmmaking (suspense, noir), to focus on
character and human relationships.

It doesn't help matters that poker is hardly the most visually
lively of games. Critics have compared this picture to Robert
Rossen's classic "The Hustler," often unfavorably, and no wonder:
with all the overhead lamps hanging over pool tables the players
look almost Bergmanish in their shadowy, black-and-white intensity
(poker on the other hand occurs in a bright space lit solely for the
benefit of TV cameras). And you can do trick shots with pool, shots
that Rossen photographs simply, the better to capture their
impossibility (my favorite has the cue ball put such english on a
ball that it shot forward, curved around backwards in a small
parabola, and sent a third ball into its pocket).

Poker isn't like that; if anything, the drama is in the immobility
of the players, the cards held up or face down, the mystery of one's
hand, whether you hold nothing or a royal flush--or are able to
convince your opponent that you're holding a royal flush.

Hanson does well enough with the game sequences. He has Huck Cheever
(Eric Bana) introduce the intricacies of Texas hold 'em to Billie
Offer (Drew Barrymore); Huck points out that much of the game
depends on one's reading of the body language and 'tells' of the
opponent and maintains that poker is a game of skill, not chance
(Huck's downfall is in not recognizing that it's really a mix of
both). Hanson's camera closes in on the players' faces, a mix of
recognizable Hollywood character actors (Bana, Jean Smart, Robert
Duvall as LC, Huck's father) and real celebrity players (Sam Farha,
Doyle Brunson), and the sheer brinksmanship on display makes for
compelling drama. That, and the details--the knuckles rapped on felt
in a call-and-reply; the insider slang ("blind;" "double-
blind;" "check;" "river"); the sense that one is in a separate but
equal world few of us even suspect exist, but would probably like to
visit if we ever did. That Hanson can do this to poker-- to the
sight of men at a table, holding cards--is an achievement in itself;
more, he brings what he knows about cutting and shooting thrillers
into play here--the games are intricately staged and exciting, not
despite the intricacy but because of it. The terminology and
gestures add a unique flavor to the action.

As for the plot--well, that's actually the weakest part of the film.
Bana and Barrymore are easy on the eyes, and Bana has a laser focus
of a stare he's used through "Hulk," "Munich" and even that deadly
bore "Troy" (he looked as if his Hector could whip Brad Pitt's
Achilles with his big toe), and Barrymore has what can only be
described as one of the most empathic faces on the Hollywood screen--
every emotion on her face comes across as unfiltered and direct,
unmeditated by thought or pretension or acting philosophy.
Unfortunately, the two can't quite bring their romance to life--he's
afraid of commitment, she becomes his moral compass; the arc of
their relationship is about as unpredictable and cliché-free as
sunrise. Hanson does have a lovely way of not letting his actors
build up melodramatic steam; instead he has them grapple a bit, go
off in oblique, unhappy directions, come back later for more
wrestling. The figureheads, however, remain figureheads (he wayward;
she morally superior); maybe what was needed was a more mercurial
actor, someone who can charm us same time he scares us with his
temper (Bana's an interesting casting choice, in that he's anything
but temperamental).

The lack becomes sharper when Robert Duvall comes into play. Easily
one of the most authoritatively easygoing presences around, Duvall
can simply take over a scene by leaning back and giving you a wink;
you believe Bana would feel inferior to the man--what's more
difficult to believe is that Bana can at any point hold his own.
Actually, Huck's relationship with L.C. is another problematic
cliché--the upstart youngster living in the shadow of a living
legend of a father (Didn't Duvall deal with this already in "The
Great Santini?" Didn't Stallone deal with this, and--gasp--
relatively more effective poignancy?). Duvall not only wipes Bana
off the screen, he does so while easing himself effortlessly into
the milieu--when the camera pans across the table, from player to
player to Duvall, you don't feel any disconnect; he belongs to the
poker table as naturally and inevitably as chips. Bana tends to
stand out as a Greek God type come to Earth to play; Duvall looks as
if he's one of the boys--the meanest, orneriest, baddest ass of the
lot, too.

"Lucky You" is so good it's disappointing it isn't better; one would
think that Hanson, eschewing the obvious and avoiding most clichés,
would go all the way and strike out in his own direction. It's not
as if he doesn't have models he can follow, or at least take
inspiration from--I'm thinking of something as recent as Tian
Zhuangzhuang's "Wu Qingyuan" (The Go Master, 2006), where
Zhuangzhuang has to deal with an even less visually appealing game,
Go (In terms of intricacy it's to chess what advanced calculus is to
basic arithmetic--the number of possible games in Go reportedly
exceeds the number of known atoms in the universe). Zhuangzhuang
adopts an interesting approach--he foregoes depicting the games
altogether and attempts to evoke the mindset of a man playing Go--
the fanatical, almost insane focus on the board, to the exclusion of
all else (even, at one instance, the atom bomb).

Then there's Robert Altman's "California Split," for my money the
finest film ever made on the subject. Altman not only does away with
clichés, he does away with the cliché of a narrative altogether--the
film is a series of vignettes about two gamblers (George Segal,
Elliot Gould) who meet, become friends, go to Reno and have a Big
Game. What happens at the game, however, isn't quite what one
expects--the look on Segal's face as he holds his winnings is
haunting, unforgettable (What was he thinking? Why does he do what
he does?). There are women in the film, but romantic attachment is a
none-starter; everyone's too absorbed in their own schtick to feel
romantic about anything, though there's a scene where Gould consoles
Gwen Welles by telling her about the size of a blue whale's tongue
that's beautifully, tenderly oddball. Altman had the guts to pull
this gossamer creation together almost out of thin air, and in a
mainstream Hollywood film; Hanson has yet to do anything as
amazing. "Lucky You" is a brave try--bravish--and should be
appreciated as such; one wishes one can appreciate it more.

(First published in Businessworld 5/11/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Jeonju Day 9:

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/05/jeonju-9-artavazd-peleshian-johnny-tos.html

Jeonju Indie Visions, a documentary on Gypsy music, and what Johnny Depp is REALLY like:

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/05/jeonjus-indie-visions-doc-on-gypsy.html

Jeonju Indie Visions 2:

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/05/jeonju-indie-visions.html

Jeonju Indie Visions 3:

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/05/jeonju-indie-visions-3.html

Pictures I took during the 8th Jeonju International Film Festival:

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/05/jeonju-film-festival-photos.html

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/05/jeonju-photos-too.html

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/05/jeonju-film-festival-photos-three.html

Silencing the lamb

Noel Vera

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:

I submit to you that Gregory Hoblit's latest film isn't a crime
thriller or even legal thriller at all; one just has to see Anthony
Hopkins' Ted Crawford make his furtive way round a swimming pool,
observing his wife Jennifer (Embeth Davidtz) and her police lover
Rob Nunally (Billy Burke) in a watery clinch, to see what the
picture is really up to: a chance for Sir Hopkins to strut once more
in Hannibal Lecter mode.

Consider: Hopkins is much too old for the physical demands of
playing a serial killer (the last time he did, five years ago, Brett
Ratner had to cut around the fact that he was using a stunt double
much of the time). He is also too familiar to audiences now, is
probably aware that they may be tired--is himself probably tired--of
the role. If Sir Hopkins were to don yon hockey mask one more time,
he would be laughed off the screen; he needed a new shtick, a new
way to entertain the audience.

Hence, this cleverly modified part. Instead of playing a serial
killer of superior intelligence, he plays a murder suspect of
superior intelligence (keeping the man incarcerated is key, as both
Jonathan Demme (who directed him in "Silence") and Hoblit must have
realized--behind bars Hopkins is a magnetic presence, able to
represent tremendous forces in check, or great evil barely held at
bay); instead of a dewy young FBI agent for a foil, he has dewy
young prosecutor Willy Beachum (played by aptly named Ryan Gosling);
instead of committing a series of horrifying killings he commits
just one, his wife's; instead of a devilishly planned escape, a
devilishly planned trial defense--with Beachum's career prospects
also put at stake as a kind of collateral.

But if that were the only aim of the picture, ladies and gentlemen,
I would plead mere plagiarism. As is, Hoblit and writers Daniel Pyne
and Glenn Gers fashion an amusingly intricate tale of misdirection,
where Ted Crawford lulls Beachum into thinking he has an open-and-
shut case (Crawford is arrested holding a gun and has confessed
verbally and in writing) before zinging the unsuspecting fool (it's
amazing how aeronautics engineers (Crawford seems to specialize in
finding design flaws, or structural damage) are easily able to
outmaneuver trial lawyers with a 97% conviction rate). Hoblit has
gone this way before, of course; back in 1996 he directed "Primal
Fear" where an overconfident defense lawyer played by Richard Gere
walked into an interrogation cell containing a scared, neurotic
prisoner played by Edward Norton. Parallels too with the O.J.
Simpson case, where the blame is ultimately put on some unnamed,
unknowable and probably nonexistent other man.

Hoblit you must remember is a veteran TV director--"NYPD Blues," "LA
Law," "Hill Street Blues" (almost a who's who of '80s television)--
turned filmmaker. He knows how to stage an efficient, effective
scene, he knows how to keep the narrative moving (in "Psycho" Alfred
Hitchcock depended on a TV crew to help move the heavily expository
scenes along swiftly), and he largely avoids the greatest sin a
competent craftsman (as opposed to a great artist) can possibly
commit--be pretentious. With the help of cinematographer Kramer
Morgenthau he is able to bathe the courtroom in amber lighting, lend
the corporate law offices a seductive modern glow (This is what the
law offices in Taylor Hackford's "The Devil's Advocate" should have
looked like--less comic-book obvious, more diabolically chic), and
even give us sweeping helicopter views of what little downtown Los
Angeles has managed to accumulate that actually seem fresh, and not
stock footage.

In Gosling I submit that Hoblit has found his second Norton. Gosling
is not as startling a discovery--he's been noticed as far back
as "Remember the Titans" (2000)--and his role isn't as showy as
Norton's, but he's asked to slowly wake up from his smug
complacency, reach down deep into himself, and pull out a response
strong enough to be pitted against Hopkins' sly hamminess without
evaporating in embarrassment. Gosling's solution is to let Hopkins
walk all over him, again and again and again; the tension from
waiting for the tide to turn--for Gosling to deliver Biblical
comeuppance on Hopkins--becomes well nigh unbearable.

As for Hopkins--pure hokum. But, ladies and gentlemen, I submit that
the hokum is presented without hypocrisy; this is not an important
film, nor was it meant to be, and the frankness is frankly
refreshing. Hoblit plays up Hopkins' Lecter tics, shining a light
into Hopkins' eyes to give them a reptilian glitter; posing his
figure, erect and immobile, against various dark backgrounds (one
thinks of some tightly bound golem about to burst into malevolent
life); lingering over the creases and crows' feet around the eyes to
give the impression of weathered toughness and ancient cunning--of
someone whose style is to burrow underground, undermining all who
oppose him.

I submit that the ending is overly simple, and is either telegraphed
or confused by the matter of Officer Nunally's offering a bit of
manufactured evidence of his own to help the case (by way of
mitigating circumstances, I do think it a relief that for once a
thriller is resolved not with a shootout or car chase, but with
brain and wit desperately probing for an opponent's
weakness). "Fractured," ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is no
great film, but it's a surprisingly good one, able to entertain and
make full use of its cast (and the associations they bring with
them) without insulting one's intelligence or sense of reality. I
ask you to do the right thing, and find the defendant not guilty of
the crime of boring the audience. Thank you.

(First published in Businessworld, 5/18/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Compulsion

Noel Vera

Perhaps the single most surprising fact about "Zodiac" is that David
Fincher directed it--one might think that Alan J. Pakula had been
raised from his grave and given a far larger budget than when he
did "All the President's Men" (1976), or that Sidney Lumet had been
asked to remake his "Prince of the City" (1981) with a hunt for a
psychopath at its center, or that Curtis Hanson--an excellent
thriller filmmaker who raised the stakes mid-career when he made his
epic "L.A. Confidential" (1997)--had suddenly developed a taste for
serial killers. Fincher, a music video director turned feature
filmmaker, showed such taste early on; he first became famous for
the grotesque "Se7en" (1995--about a man who staged his killings
around the Seven Deadly Sins), but had already made an earlier film
about a killer that happened to be nonhuman ("Alien3," 1992) and
later, a film about a serial prankster turned terrorist ("Fight
Club," 1999). Whatever the story, Fincher's camera seems to
constantly seek out and focus on the character living or even
temporarily thrown outside the norm (of society, of humanity)
looking in, his actions dictated by his needs or obsessions.

A quick comparison of the two filmmakers should be instructive. I've
always admired Hanson's attention to detail, storytelling skill, and
gift for characterization, something that's kept him in good stead
in films from "L.A. Confidential" to "8 Mile" (2002) to his latest
this year, "Lucky You;" overall, he makes clearer, more coherent
films than Fincher. But with Fincher I've always had expectations,
often disappointed by his not exactly disciplined approach--"Alien3"
was a shaky-camera mess, "Se7en's" plot was preposterous (genius
killer who slays to make a philosophical point?), and "Fight Club"
was brilliant satire that degenerated into comic-book ludicrousness
(a worldwide conspiracy of bomb-planting waiters?). That said,
there's a look to each of his films that often varied in tone and
palette (from the ambers of "Alien3" to the murky grays of "Se7en"
to the sumptuous sheen of "Fight Club"), but was almost always
ringed by an encroaching, ever-present gloom. Few recent Hollywood
filmmakers made shadows as menacing as Fincher and you suspect that
if you ever opened up his cranium and peered inside, you'd find the
world being viewed through similarly darkened lenses.

Then came "Zodiac," where Fincher successfully trains those lenses
on a script (by James Vanderbilt, based on the books by Robert
Graysmith (played here by Jake Gyllenhaal)) that either Pakula or
Lumet or Hanson might have been happy to direct. The film covers the
nearly ten years starting 1968 during which the Zodiac Killer
terrorized San Francisco, and during which the police force tried to
hunt him down; it goes on to trace Graysmith's investigations of the
killer, past the publication of his book on the subject in 1986, and
some time after that. It deals with roughly twenty characters
(portrayed by a cast of excellent actors, from Gyllenhaal to Robert
Downey Jr. to Mark Ruffalo to Brian Cox to Chloe Sevigny, John Getz,
Candy Clark, Elias Koteas, Charles Fleischer, Philip Baker Hall), at
least half a dozen of them major, and ranges all over San Francisco
(and some cities nearby), from the murder sites to the police
precincts to the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle to even the
apartments and houses of various people involved.

It's a huge, sprawling project, and a viewer might be forgiven for
not getting all the particulars straight (this film, if any recent
mainstream film ever did, demands additional viewings); more,
there's so much story to tell, so much detail to wade through, that
Fincher barely has time to illuminate the motives of anyone involved
(the killer himself exists mostly as a glimpsed-at shadowy figure, a
few brief scenes, and a quick climactic confrontation). Critics have
cited this as a major flaw, but I see it as a change in Fincher's
point of view, a change of heart, almost. Ever a man to glory in the
surface, even texture, of his pictures, Fincher here is using
surface--what a man does in killing, and what people do in trying to
capture him--to suggest the mystery of what goes on underneath (the
surface of things, of one's cranium), in this particular case the
extremes to which a man will go to obey his need to kill,
accomplish, explore, question, believe; beyond that, the film's
surface suggests that truism with which any ambitious artist must
eventually come to grips, the ultimate unknowability of things, the
sense that final solutions or answers are rare, or false, or often
impossible.

Actually, Fincher seems to have been straining to evoke this
throughout his career. In "Se7en," for example, we hear the killer's
rationale, but we barely understand it, much less accept it at face
value (as a detective so callowly put it: "You're a movie of the
week. You're a fucking t-shirt, at best"); in "The Game" (1997) the
nightmarish circumstances in which a man suddenly finds himself
turns out to have (after two hours of chase and anguish) an all-
encompassing explanation (and even when the credits roll, you wonder
if that IS the final explanation); in "Fight Club" we never get a
clear reason for the protagonist's split personality. In each of
these near-fantasy settings, however (Fincher's films almost always
seem to be set a few years in the future, or in some alternate
reality), the mystery seems more like a conceit to get an unlikely
premise rolling; they're easy to accept because they seem so
shallowly conceived--gimmicks to help a gimmicky director.

"Zodiac" is different: thoroughly grounded in the San Francisco of
the '60s and '70s, it creates a familiar, even banal everyday world,
one we've seen and come to take for granted after years of films and
TV shows, here presented to us--thanks to Harry Savides' use of the
Thomson Viper FilmStream Digital Camera--in all its larger-than-life
glory (the inspiration was American photographer Stephen
Shore's '70s pictures). Occasionally Fincher would cut loose--an
overhead shot of Paul Stine's taxicab, from killer's pickup to
driver's death; a hilariously creepy visit to film projectionist Bob
Vaughn's cavernous basement--but these moments seem more like
baroque curlicues, to frame the essential realism of the film, a
realism with slightly deeper shadows than one might normally expect.

The effect is unsettling, to say the least--like "Blue Velvet,"
David Lynch's vision of small-town life ("Zodiac" would be Fincher's
vision of big-city life), we're given a glittering shell, and can't
help but be aware of the void beneath; more, the portrait of
obsession (the film isn't so much about the killer as it is the
effects the killer has had on those hunting him) uncannily mirrors
Fincher's own obsessive qualities in making this film (aside from
the painstaking work of recreating '70s San Francisco, Fincher and
his collaborators spent an additional eighteen months conducting
their own investigation into the Zodiac case). The two hour-plus
film (the running time is roughly a hundred and fifty-eight minutes,
and word is the DVD release will have an even longer director's cut)
is arguably Fincher's Dorian Gray painting--a source of dark power,
and Fincher's best chance yet for artistic immortality.

(First published in Businessworld, 6/1/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

The twit family Robinson

Noel Vera

And now, the latest piece of ordure from The Rat Factory--sorry,
Walt Disney Pictures…

Stephen J. Anderson's "Meet the Robinsons, 2006), based on the book
by William Joyce, feels like ninety minutes spent in a disco for the
half-blind and hard-of-hearing. I've read of Japanese interrogation
techniques that were less sadistic; should be classified as "Cruel
and Unusual Punishment," or "In Violation of the Geneva Code."

It's an excruciating movie. Lewis (voiced by Daniel Hansen and
Jordan Fry), an orphan inventor out to prove himself at the school
science fair, is the kind of standard-issue Disney hero they seem to
crank out by the metric ton lots nowadays. Throw in a "Back to the
Future" plotline where Bowler Hat Guy (voiced by Anderson himself)
steals a time machine to go back into his past and sabotage Lewis'
science project; a family of drearily "lovable" eccentrics called
the Robinsons (at least the filmmakers must have hoped we'd think
they're eccentric (we might if we've never seen a single Warner
Brothers animated short); a chorus line of song-and-dance frogs (how
dare they insult the memory of Chuck Jones' immortal "One Froggy
Evening?") and you have the formula for the kind of "fun, fun, fun
for everyone!" Disney's been selling for the past, oh, forever. At
one point a character explains her invention "I have the caffeine
patch…each patch is the equivalent of 12 cups of coffee, you can
stay up for days with no side effects," whereupon she lets loose a
shriek. You know exactly how her listener feels.

It's not as if the story made sense--if Bowler Hat Guy upsets the
past, shouldn't the effect on the future be instantaneous? Granted,
some time-travel movies ("Back to the Future," "A Sound of Thunder")
posit a delay (actually time-travel movies as a whole are full of
plotholes and paradoxes), shouldn't someone establish the length of
the delay, or at least raise the issue? If Bowler Hat Guy is such a
hopeless klutz, shouldn't the flying bowler (don't ask) look for a
smarter partner in crime? If the Robinsons are so rich, shouldn't
they have a security system commensurate with their wealth (what
with people and even dinosaurs popping in and out of their estate,
seemingly at will)? If Lewis visits the future in a flying car,
shouldn't he be sitting quietly in the passenger seat instead of
trying to wrestle the controls from Wilbur Robinson (Wesley
Singerman)? If Bowler Hat Guy steals Lewis' invention and tries to
pass it off as his own, shouldn't he be trying to do that in in
Lewis' time instead of in his own--where, presumably, such devices
would already be old hat (and if stealing the devices instantly
alters that timeline--well, see above)? And if the family finds out
that Lewis is from the past (and he is who he is), shouldn't they
immediately grab him, tie him down till the time machine is fixed,
make sure he goes back to where he belongs--maybe erase his memory
in the process? Isn't doing that a far, far more urgent priority
than, well, showing disapproval towards one family member's apparent
foolishness?

But it's useless trying to apply logic to the product of a studio
that's never been famous for storytelling logic--when gags fail or
the pace slows it's time to turn on the waterworks, and "Robinsons"
is simply full of it. Lewis is such a needy whiner it's no wonder he
responds to the Robinsons' in-your-face cheerfulness; Bowler Hat Guy
is a Snidely Whiplash cliché too annoying to laugh at; the ending is
such a shameless affirmation of the Robinsons' essential Goodness
and Cheer you feel as trapped as James Stewart, surrounded by
rugrats and loving neighbors at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life"
(Yes, I'm aware that most people consider Capra's film to end
happily, but I don't see it--for me Stewart suffers the equivalent
of Hell On Earth, is in effect a drooling zombie that smiles on cue
at each and every bell ring).

Setting aside the story (which is lame) and the characters (who are
repulsive), the very look of the movie isn't all that impressive.
Obviously the picture was influenced by the Tomorrowland section of
Disney's park (the cheesiest land in a kingdom of cheddar, in my
opinion--even Space Mountain lacked a decent loop or corkscrew);
they were also trying for a '30s Futurism look, or something like
Frank Paul's covers for Amazing Stories in the '20s, with the kind
of stylized, spotless feel--not a grease stain or fingerprint
anywhere--that just begs to be lampooned. But asking for satire
(real satire, with teeth) from a Disney flick is like asking Uncle
Walt himself for a pay raise (look up his record with unions, if you
like); you'll find yourself staring into a gaping, howling abyss
where the heart (or brain) should be.

Oh, not all of it is reprehensible. For about five minutes, when
Bowler Hat Guy's vision for the future is realized the movie's color
palette darkens from banal pastels into something really
interesting, full of shadows and textures lit by a warm orange glow
(presumably hellfire, or at least the Disney version of it); workers
move with synchronized precision, recalling Lang's "Metropolis" but
with Magritte bowlers in hand--a nice absurdist touch in this all-
too-brief dystopia (the "Spongebob Squarepants" movie featured
something similar, only with bucket helmets that managed to be
funnier and creepier, both). Then balance is restored, the dreary
pastels returned, the smiles relentless as ever.

At picture's end we learn that the Robinson's motto--"Keep moving
forward" is actually Uncle Walt's own. Move forward indeed--to quote
an even greater thinker than Disney (whose true genius was in
squeezing middle-class families even today of most of their child-
raising dollars): "he who forgets the past is condemned to repeat
it." Disney was a master of kitsch, of supposedly wholesome (read:
sterile) family entertainment, of a moneymaking synergy the richest
men in the world gaze upon with envy (from movie to merchandise to
themed vacation resorts, he had it all)--if he wanted you to keep
moving forward and not spare a backward glance, that's probably
because he didn't want you finding out about the lesser known, far
more talented artists (U.B. Iwerks, Tex Avery, the Fleischer
brothers, to name but a few) out there in the great unknown, waiting
to be discovered.

(First published in Businessworld, 6/8/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Frenched

Noel Vera

The French Film Festival is underway! And I'd recommend every film
at the festival save the two I've already seen--not only because
they're quite old and have been screened in Manila before, but
because I'm not too crazy about them.

Luc Besson's "Arthur et les Minimoys" (Arthur and the Invisibles,
2006) is a part CGI, part live-action adaptation of two children's
books he had written back in '02 and '03. Given that he had been the
source and directed the adaptation, and was working in a medium
where literally anything was possible at the touch of a button,
you'd think all that would free up his imagination to try something
really wild.

No dice. The picture is a mix of any number of clichés, from the
villainous banker scheming to repossess the family farm to the youth
who begins his adventure by pulling a sword out of a stone (sounds
familiar?). Besson, not exactly France's greatest filmmaker ("The
Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc" anyone?) seems inventive enough
when tuning live action into big-screen cartoons ("La Femme
Nikita;" "Leon;" "The Fifth Element"). Asked to do it the other way
around, the most he does is lift the mayhem and motion and gags out
of every recent CGI extravaganza, from "Chicken Little"
to "Madagascar." His notion of elfin character design leaves you
with the sneaking suspicion that he watches Saturday morning
cartoons for inspiration--and not the better ones, at that.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect--perhaps the ONLY interesting
aspect--in all this is the pedophilic frisson one feels when hearing
Madonna (her voice every bit as wooden as her digitally parodied
face) as the thousand-year-old Princess Selenia express love for the
eponymous Arthur (played by the fourteen-year-old Freddie Highmore).
Naughty, naughty, but it all ultimately comes to naught--Highmore's
boy hero ends his adventures with his virginity intact, not even
seriously challenged (the pop singer is better matched opposite the
more sexually ambivalent David Bowie, doing a droll impression of a
Sith Lord). I'd love to see Besson carry matters further; I'd love
to see him carry SOMETHING further, beyond the boundaries of good
taste even--anything to keep me awake while watching this picture.

Luc Jacquet's "Marche de l'iempereur" ("March of the Penguins,"
2005), is, if anything, an even duller proposition--eighty-five
minutes of watching a flock of flightless waterfowls mate and take
care of their young. What distinguishes this documentary from most
shows seen on the Discovery Channel is the wildly beautiful
cinematography by Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison, and the
impeccably authoritative voiceover narration of Morgan Freeman.
Freeman's played god (or his moral equivalent, or at the very least
our moral superior) often enough that it's difficult to question
him, or the movie--you feel as if you're committing blasphemy (to be
fair, Freeman is possibly a far better choice than what they used in
the original French version, where actors dubbed penguin dialogue).

The material is powerful enough--yes, penguins do travel up to a
hundred miles in search of food for their families; yes male
penguins do carry their eggs cradled and warmed on their feet for
months in the intense Antarctic cold--that you can't help but resent
the many occasions the documentary attempts to manipulate your
feelings (comic trombone for penguin pratfalls; Freeman's tragic
indignation over the odd frozen egg). Nature documentaries come in
many forms, and my favorite often involved a human being's complex
responses to nature--Timothy Treadwell's self-destructive hatred of
humans in favor of grizzlies, for example, in Werner Herzog's
compelling "Grizzly Man;" or Mark Bittner's intense identification
with birds (to the point of naming them and carrying out extended
conversations with them) in Judy Irving's "The Wild Parrots of
Telegraph Hill." Failing that, I'd rather have my nature documentary
straight up, no chaser--Claude Nuridsany and Marie
Perennou's "Microcosmos: Le peuple de l'herbe" (Microcosmos, 1996)
say, or Jacques Perrin and Jacquez Clouzad "Le Peuple migrateur"
(Winged Migration, 2001), where we're immersed in the world of the
creatures without being force-fed a dreary narrative, or harassed by
syrupy anthropomorphizing music.

This film made millions, true; it's easily the most successful
documentary in history, and part of this is due to the power of the
imagery (the penguins huddled in the endless dark; an egg slowly
cracking from sheer cold; a ferocious leopard seal diving after its
fleeing prey), part of it what seems to be a knee-jerk response to
the creatures' short, portly figures and comic waddle ("Awww--ain't
they cute?"). Call me a spoilsport, killjoy, or just plain odd, but
I'd rather have the digitally enhanced adventurings of George
Miller's "Happy Feet," the first animated feature (but unfortunately
not the last) to feed off this penguin craze; at least with Miller's
film there's plenty of mind-expanding filmmaking (epic landscapes,
immense ice storms) and an almost surreal sense of otherness (the
scenes at the zoo exhibit, for example). In short, there's a
tremendous imagination involved, reined in and in the service of a
story--something that I find difficult to say about Jacquet's
picture.

(First published in Businessworld, 6/15/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Haikus on the big screen

Noel Vera

Akihiko Shiota's "Gaichu" (Harmful Insect, 2001) had previously been
shown in Cinemanila some years ago, but it's nice to see it back--
it's received so little attention since, but what little there is
has been quite strong (Mark Schilling of The Japan Times has written
enthusiastically about it; Max Tessier of Cinemaya Magazine and
Positif considers Shiota a "very underestimated filmmaker" (both
Schilling and Tessier are western critics who specialize in Japanese
cinema)).

The film follows Sachiko Kita (Aoi Miyazaki, the heroine of Shinji
Aoyama's "Yureka" (Eureka, 2000)) through her rather grim life--her
father leaves her and her mother behind before the film begins, her
mother (at film's opening) attempts suicide after suffering
rejection from her new boyfriend and (in a series of flashbacks) a
youthful math teacher in love with Sachiko (who may or may not have
sexually molested her) quits the school for a job in Northern Japan.

Sachiko becomes the center of attention at school; she's not
physically harmed (this isn't Shunji Iwai's "Lily Chou Chou no
Subete" (All About Lily Chou Chou, 2001), or Toshiaki Toyoda's "Aoi
haru" (Blue Spring, 2001)), but the whispers and gossip become so
intense anyway she starts dropping out. She falls in with a drifter
named Takao (Tetsu Sawaki) who lives with a mentally retarded man
named Tama (Koji Ichikawa); they run a scam where motor vehicles hit
Tama, and the unlucky driver pays hush money to Takao, the only
witness to the "accident." Sachiko is happy until she accidentally
meets former best friend Natsuko (Yu Aoi) again, and decides to go
back to school. She adjusts to school life easily enough, but when
both she and Natsuko fall in love with the same boy, all hell breaks
loose.

A seemingly melodramatic story in outline, but Shiota is a fairly
recent master of what might loosely be called the "Cinema of
Contemplation." He pitches the film's emotional tone at such a
quiet, almost subliminal level (no pop songs, no music-video
editing, no digital special effects) that the most outrageous
episodes are persuasively presented, with understated power (I'd
further add that the melodrama would turn the picture into
unintentional comedy using any other approach, that without Shiota's
delicate touch no one would take this film seriously). Shiota is
fond of placing Sachiko at the center or near-center of his
compositions, such that even when surrounded by schoolmates she's
irrevocably alone (the way the schoolmates are arranged and posed
isolate her, emphasize her outcast status); Sachiko may wear the
class uniform, be of the same age, but she'll never part of the
school community.

As Sachiko, Miyazaki's performance is note-perfect--just the right
amount of restraint that you might call her low-key, the same time
she's simple and direct and clear. Miyazaki's acting is crucial, of
course, along with Shiota's quiet style of directing; the latter
helps soft-sell the story, the former keeps you caring for her (and
the picture) no matter how fast and furiously the disasters pile up.

Shiota's film stands in stark contrast with Toyoda's
aforementioned "Aoi haru." Based on a manga by Taiyou Matsumoto,
this's an ultraviolent high school flick more in keeping with trendy
Japanese youth pictures than with contemplative cinema. As Toyoda
himself puts it, the picture is not a documentary; "I wanted to
inject a bit of magic," he says--kitchen sink, anyone? Toyoda's
movie has it all--teacher-student anomie, bullying, gross and gory
action, insanely stupid acts of rebellion, defiance, sheer nihilism.
Toyoda, unlike Shiota, doesn't mince words, or keep the drama at a
low flame: with a rocking J-pop score and the promised atrocity
every ten minutes, he manages to keep your attention on the big
screen the same way a, say, Guantanamo interrogator would hold an
Iraqi detainee's attention for hours on end ("Look away and my
German Shepherd'll tear your crotch out").

But it's like using a flamethrower to roast a peanut: Toyoda posits
a high school where the instructors are so apathetic they barely
bother to tour the school corridors; instead, they show up at class
(as if by force), and intone dull, endless lectures (the Japanese
equivalent of "Beuller; Beuller…"). Yes, there're cases of bullying
in Japanese schools, yes, there're cases of frightening amorality
and violence, but you never saw or heard of an entire educational
institution go to pot (unlike, say, in most American urban centers,
cases of extreme violence happen in the relative vacuum of an
essentially conformist society). This teen manga turned teen flick
is such a cartoonish depiction of the Japanese high school you're
never in danger of saying to yourself "This is what's really
happening, I know people like these" (by way of contrast Shiota
takes the extreme melodrama in "Gaichu" and by dint of his
uncompromisingly understated filmmaking, persuades you of the
honesty of his worldview).

Toyoda's picture may be a grotesque caricature, but it stands head
and shoulders above what passes for American shock cinema nowadays.
America post 9/11 seems to be trying to express the ugliness of its
guilt and anger through "Saw," and "Hostel," and the "Grindhouse"
movies, but other than sense of noxious pus being explosively
squeezed out there's precious little in terms of wit, imagination,
or art in any of this. Toyoda is perhaps a distant relative, opting
for sensationalism at the price of any relevance to reality, but
unlike, say, Roth or Tarantino, harboring a minimalist wit within
his shock and gore. His strategy is a bit like Takeshi Kitano's: two
figures (usually men) facing each other; a quick insert of some
image indirectly involved with the scene; a return to the earlier
shot, only with someone slumped on the floor, blood pouring out of
the mouth. Unlike Kitano, though, Toyoda's flick: 1) lacks a richly
melodic score from Joe Hisaishi, and 2) lacks a world-weary fatalism
that if squinted at hard might could almost be mistaken for wisdom,
even grace).

Toyoda's picture is interesting, if ultimately disposable; the real
find, I submit, is Shiota's far more moving work. See it, not just
for the wonderfully understated storytelling, but also for the
strong possibility that this may be your one and only chance, on the
big screen--the film is not available on DVD in the United States,
and there's little sign it will be anytime soon. The film IS out in
Japan but far as I can tell only in PAL system, which is
incompatible with most Filipino NTSC-system TV sets (you need both a
multisystem TV and a multisystem DVD player).

First published in Businessworld, 6.22.07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/07/playtime-jacques-tati-1967.html

Excerpt:

Jacques Tati's Playtime is the comic twin brother of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, released a year later. Both are unique visions, arrived at after years of work and elaborate sets (Tati constructed an entire urban center nicknamed 'Tativille' which consisted of glass buildings (one of which contained a fully working escalator), roadways, a power plant, and a traffic signalling system to control it all), and both have as theme the at times antagonistic relationship between man and technology (machines for Kubrick, mostly architecture and design for Tati), and eventual human trancendence.

In 2001 we have brute man discovering technology (promptly taking said technology and bashing a fellow brute's head in), developing it for centuries (the passing of said centuries expressed in a single spectacular cut), ultimately having said technology literally swallow him up, turning him into a machinelike parody of himself. In Playtime Tati echoes that same development, with humans dressed largely in grey or beige, walking in predictable straight lines. In 2001 Kubrick inserts vestiges of lost humanity--banal jokes about chicken sandwiches, an unruly, insistent daughter; in Playtime Tati has a Hulot lookalike drop his umbrella (the clatter rolls across the hall of the indeterminate building (it's only when we see a plane's tailfin do we realize we're in an airport) like a sacrilegious cough).

Just die already

Noel Vera

Never been a big fan of the "Die Hard" movies--well, Alan Rickman in
the first made for a memorably witty villain, the outrageous escapes
and climactic explosions in the second outstripped the first (at the
expense of the first's token attempts at realism, of course), New
York City was put to good use in the third (which also had this
wonderful idea--fairly well realized--about bombs with riddle-
activated detonators)--but no, not a big fan. They're loud, they're
obvious, and once in a while they allow the action to grind to a
halt while the main character--one John McClane, ostensibly of the
NYPD but with training that seems more Delta Force than police
academy--grouses about how lousy life and the police department has
treated him.

This fourth installment is pretty much more of the same. Willis
seems to want to prove that at fifty-two he can still cut it as an
action hero when this could have been a wonderful opportunity to
show a fifty-two-year-old man cutting it as an action hero--that's
what made Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky Balboa" partway affecting, as
half of an effective drama on advancing age (the second half being
an old (and not in a good way) retread of the Rocky clichés). So: no
blood pressure pill jokes, no constipation jokes, no Viagra jokes;
maybe one or two lukewarm jabs at McClane's taste in music, but not
even a hint or suggestion that maybe the knees aren't bending as
readily as before, the ticker beating as steadily as before, or that
nervy trigger finger squeezing perhaps a touch slower than before--
no siree. The filmmakers have always been proud to present a human-
sized protagonist, able to feel pain and not a little suffering, but
this guy shrugs off shrapnel and gunshot wounds like water off a
duck's back (as Clark Kent might put it when shot with a .38
revolver: "Huh?").

This time McClane is faced-to-face not with mortality but with
obsolescence; he is, as the villain Thomas Gabriel (a miscast
Timothy Olyphant) puts it "a Timex watch in a digital age." The
terror this time isn't exploding buildings or crashing planes or
bombs set to go off if a riddle is improperly answered, but computer-
hacked control systems, able to wreak havoc with rogue traffic
lights and massive blackouts up and down the Eastern seaboard of the
United States.

It's a fairly chilling scenario mainly based on a ten-year-old Wired
article "A Farewell to Arms," by John Carlin, about the possibility
of an Information War, or an assault on the communication networks
of the United States: massive gridlocked traffic, grounded airlines,
panic in Wall Street, uncoordinated emergency service and military
units, chaos and confusion everywhere. The future belongs to the
digitally aware, and when someone starts messing with that
awareness, civilization itself is threatened.

Enter John McClane, who has trouble maintaining his 401k retirement
fund, much less keeping up with all this computer crap; he's asked
to deliver a young computer hacker named Matt Farell (Justin Long,
who acts in Apple Computer ads) from Farell's apartment in New
Jersey to Washington DC, where he's wanted for questioning on a
computer breach. The simple transport assignment quickly escalates
when silent killers are sent to eliminate Farell; McClane, whose
middle name seems to be 'morose' when he's in-between adventures,
lumbers yet again into action.

Even this lesser idea of analog vs. digital might have made for a
fairly interesting action flick, but the script cheats by almost
immediately providing McClane with an expert advisor on hand to tell
him all about those nasty computerized hazards; in effect McClane is
left doing what he was originally assigned to do: transport said
whiz kid from one place to another so he can tap away at yet another
keyboard and set things right (I'd love to see at least an actual
monkey wrench dropped into actual set of gears at one point in the
movie, but the filmmakers wouldn't even oblige that much). The Final
Confrontation is mostly your standard-issue face-off at gunpoint; it
lacks the gee-whiz punchline quality of the second movie (possibly
my favorite, if you pressed a gun to my head and demanded I choose),
where a cigarette lighter and a crisp "Yipee kay-yay, mother--"
whatever turned the terrorists' soon-to-be realized dreams into
ashes. The Unlikely Escape is if anything TOO elaborate, involving a
spiraling freeway, a ten-wheeler, a hovering F-35 Lightning, and so
many unlikely breaks you wonder if McClane (or at least the director
and scriptwriters) had to go through several boxfuls of rewrites
before they came up with a solution even halfway plausible--as is,
it seems several screenplay drafts short (again, the second movie's
explosive ejection-seat getaway is--for me, anyway--the best (or at
least the most amusing) in the series).

Director John McTiernan, a serviceable Hollywood craftsman, chose
not to do this fourth installment; Renny Harlin, who did the fairly
kinetic first sequel wasn't tapped either (Harlin's done so many bad
films since ("Cuthroat Island" and that "Exorcist" prequel, anyone?)
that "Die Hard 2" is starting to look like his masterpiece).
Directing chores instead fell upon Len Wiseman, whose previous
credits include the much-maligned (and not without
cause) "Underworld" movies. Like Harlin, this may be Wiseman's
finest moment--the action is reasonably coherent, the butt-kicking
fairly witty (one man is knocked off his helicopter perch by an
uncorked fire hydrant, another has his hands frozen is dropped into
a pair of whirling fan blades). Ironically, this "analog hero for a
digital age" boasts of plenty of digital effects, most of them meant
to make what looks like a series of fairly elaborate stunts look
more dangerous than they really are.

It's plenty of huffing and puffing, all to little avail. I'm not
sure why Willis is even doing this; he's proven time and time again
that unlike Stallone or Schwarzenegger he's often been a lively and
interesting character actor; he doesn't need to climb out of his
wheelchair to do yet another action flick (and as I've said before,
it would've been a more interesting film if he'd stayed in his
chair). He's got nothing to prove, so why do this at all--to make
even more money on top of the millions he's already earned? "Live
Free and Die Hard" is the fourth in what for me has always been a
pointless action series; high time to drive a stake through its
heart, cut off its head, give it a proper burial.

(First published in Businessworld, 7/6/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Dr. Who Season 2: The Girl in the Fireplace

Just saw the Dr. Who: Season 2 discs (belatedly available on Netflix), and the standout episode has to be this one, a tale of growing affection between an 18th century French mistress and a whatever century Time Lord, three thousand years and two and a half galaxies apart, linked together by (that cliche symbol of burning passion!) a burning fireplace.

It's also television writer Steven Moffat's contribution to the Andy Tennant season, after his oh-so-memorable pair of scripts for Christopher Eccleston (The Empty Child, and The Doctor Dances, 2005, both of which won that year's Hugo Award for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form), and it's one step in a carefully prepared story arc that ends with a once-in-for-all determination of the fate of Rose Tyler, the Doctor's companion for two (2005-2006) seasons.

Nuclear waste

Noel Vera

Robert Rodriguez's latest feature "Planet Terror" (2007) is his
attempt to re-create the feel of his (and Tarantino's) much-beloved
grindhouse days, when moldering movie theaters with ripped seat
cushions and unsavory smells might show a double feature of, oh,
say, Gerry de Leon's "Women in Cages" (1971) with Jesus
Franco's "Vampyros Lesbos" (same year) (I'm not sure they ever
actually did such a pairing, but it makes a nice progression). In
American theaters, Rodriguez's movie was paired with Quentin
Tarantino's own homage to exploitation films ("Death Proof")),
stitched together with a slew of fake trailers (Edgar
Wright's "Don't," Eli Roth's "Thanksgiving," and--funniest of all,
at least on paper--Rob Zombie's "Werewolf Women of the SS") and
released as a three-hour extravaganza, the closest you'll ever get
to the sights, sounds, feel and smells of a second-run theater in
the glory days of the '70s and '80s.

The movie didn't do well in the United States; apparently audiences
liked not smelling urine in the aisles, liked knowing that the
stickiness in the seats is caramel and not something altogether less
savory; I also suspect that the audiences preferred their movies to
clock in at a shorter running time (the latest "Pirates of the
Caribbean" and the recent "Transformers" were pushing it, but didn't
push too hard). Many didn't get the joke--people were leaving after
the end of "Planet Terror" until theater managers had staff posted
at the exits reminding people that a second feature was still to
come. Splitting the film into two discrete features for Asian--and
Filipino--audiences is probably a smart move; we're not familiar
with the double-feature concept, and I doubt if we'd sit still for
anything longer than two and a half hours.

Ergo--"Planet Terror," with maybe one or the other of the trailers
included, and without Tarantino's contribution to the project. It's
not a bad picture per se, or at least not unintentionally so--a
silly concoction Rodriguez has whipped up, about the military
allowing noxious gases to escape and create zombies, and various
citizens banding together to survive, much of its details borrowed
from George Romero and Lucio Fulci, among others. Easily the best
idea in the movie is having Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling ("Sounds
like a stripper name" "no, it sounds like a go-go dancer name;
there's a difference") lose one leg to one of the undead, to be
eventually replaced by her former boyfriend El Wray (a fairly
intense Freddy Rodriguez) with an M-16 assault rifle / M203 grenade
launcher (one wonders at the use of a gun barrel--which anyone with
any sense will tell you to keep raised and away from dirt, to
prevent clogging--for a leg (though beyond that one wonders about
the wisdom of wondering about such questions in a flick full of
bubbling zombies)).

I like the idea of a beautiful woman (for a thick, unsubtle layer of
added irony, a dancer with dreams of being a stand-up comedian)
hobbling around with a kickass weapon for a limb; don't think much
of McGowan as an actress, so any appendage taken away or added can
only improve her performance (not that she's asked to perform here,
not in the thespic sense, anyway). I like the hot-pizza quality of
the zombies, particularly the body parts melting away like gummi
bears under a blow-dryer--one of Rodriguez's finest moments is
talking (or he could have volunteered, for all I know) fellow
director and good friend Tarantino into appearing onscreen as a
rapist soldier whose ability to rape literally drips away in gooey
strings.

Much like Tarantino's enthusiasm, the picture's pacing ultimately
droops, then sags, then keels over for want of anything more
interesting to show us ("Zombies; chick with assault-rifle leg;
dripping testicles; and then?"). Rodriguez sets up an expectation
for more and more outrageousness that he just can't quite keep up.
It's a problem with which Rodriguez has struggled for most of his
career--his faux-epic "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," is all
consistently engaging set-up, stylish climax, and precious little
story development in between two fairly impressive bookends. Here it
takes a tedious amount of time (despite an intentionally
induced 'missing reel') before El Wray finally jams the rifle onto
Cherry's stump, and while that does remain a memorable moment,
Rodriguez fails to follow it up with anything equally satisfying--
mostly survivors beating a Howard Hawks-style retreat to an escape
helicopter, soldier zombies in hot pursuit.

Rodriguez--and Tarantino, acting and co-producing beside him--are
out for a lark; unlike Romero's recent "Land of the Dead" (2005), or
Joe Dante in his brilliant short "Homecoming" (released the same
year), Rodriguez is not using the zombies for anything more than as
convenient plot device. Well, there are brief references to WMD-type
chemical agents, military cover-ups, and Guantanamo-style
intimidation of prisoners, but the tone of the scenes--the attempt
to play up the luridness--suggests more opportunistic headline-
grabbing than any earnest attempt to actually explore contemporary
issues.
Rodriguez is I think a more skilled filmmaker than Tarantino (who's
essentially a clever scriptwriter with a voluminous catalogue of
movies from which to draw on for visual technique) with serious
storytelling problems (alongside with an inability to develop his
stories, he has a serious problem ending them).

Maybe my biggest problem with this whole exercise is the sheer
superfluity of it all, at least to Filipino audiences. We have our
own grindhouses in Manila, where insanely overcrowded theaters are
the norm, cats meow from the darker corners, steamed buns filled
with unidentifiable meat (why do you think there are cats in the
theaters?) and balut (boiled duck eggs with a recognizably developed
fetus) are sometimes served at the refreshment counter, and I'd once
seen a toddler urinate straight into a plastic vending cup he'd been
drinking Pepsi out of (I couldn't approve of his hygiene training,
but I did admire his marksmanship). As for the movies themselves--
overripe women emerging from giant eggplants (with gallons of tomato
sauce dripping from both); green muscled men with giant pythons
sprouting out of their shoulder blades; mermaids, Wonder Woman look-
alikes, obese giant men, James Bond-like midgets, bald vampires in
punk shades. Filipino pulp films and the nightmarish Manila theaters
that screen them are perfectly capable of providing their own
inimitable experiences, thank you very much (I haven't even
mentioned provincial theaters); Rodriguez's movie can only be a
redundancy inspired by an irrelevancy.

(First published in Businessworld, 7/20/07)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)

This will be my last post--kind of.

Membership of this egroups is dropping, partly, I suspect, because subsribed email is not the medium of choice nowadays; blogs are. I've decided to post all subsequent writings on my blog Critic After Dark instead (link above); you're welcome to unsubscribe from this egroup if you like and read that instead, cut out the middleman.

Oh, the egroups will still be here; too many of my articles are archived here, and it's too much trouble transfering all 600 plus of them to my blog (not to mention redundant). And I'll still post here, actually, but it'll usually be links to the blog.

And that's all she said, folks.