Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2007)

I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)

Best of 2007 updated, and Filipino films on DVD updated

Little Black Book of Movies 3

Update: Filipino Films on DVD and Best of 2007 list

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Excerpt:

Death Proof (2007), Quentin Tarantino's contribution to the Grindhouse omnibus released together in the USA earlier this year, is having its solo premiere in Manila's commercial theaters. How does this slightly longer version play, so many months later?

Pretty much the same. Tarantino has added a few minutes of eye candy--Vanessa Ferlito manages to do her lap dance for Kurt Russell (who luckily isn't wearing his Escape from New York eyepatch) instead of having the entire scene written off as a 'missing reel' (the film for those that need the explanation replicates every aspect of the grindhouse theater experience including scratched prints, mismatched footage (the film's midpoint sequence is in black and white), and lost scenes). Russell later manages to caress Rosario Dawson's dangling toes while passing her car door ("He accidentally brushed against my feet. It was creepy"); I'm assuming the director is indulging his fetish for feet (many of the women wear flip-flops or walk about shoeless or prop said limbs up high at the slightest excuse, purely for our delectation) and perhaps Latina women (Russell closely studies Ferlito's lap dance, enjoys the feel of Dawson's soles).

Tukso (Temptation, Dennis Marasigan, 2007)

Excerpt:

Dennis Marasigan's Tukso (Temptation, 2007) from a script by himself, Mara Paulina Marasigan and Nikki Torres, is his sophomore effort at filmmaking following his marvelous adaptation of Tony Perez's Sa North Diversion Road (North Diversion Road, 2005), and it's evident he knows a thing or two about filmmaking, or at least film editing. The first few minutes--images of a fall, of talking heads, of silence and foreboding--are cut together with a strong sense of drama; Marasigan has had a long career in theater, and the showman's flair gained through long experience has helped, I think. He doesn't simply escalate the intensity of the imagery; he knows when to pause, to prolong, to punch home with the right words for maximum impact.

I'd go so far as to say that "Tukso" is proof positive that Marasigan wasn't just coasting on the excellence of Perez's classic theatrical piece but possesses a talent for filmmaking all his own. Perez's play posed special challenges--how do you present a theatrical conceit (two actors playing ten different characters) on the big screen? Onstage the constant shift of story and setting kept the viewers off-balance, guessing at what's happening and what's going to happen, and this held their interest for the play's relatively short performance time; onscreen you only had to change car, costume, highway exit and it's obvious where you are, who you're with, and why. Marasigan solves this by shifting emphasis away from said conceit and relying on purely cinematic devices--employing a restless cutting style that maintained the tension, shooting (on the near-nonexistent budget these digital films usually enjoy) from as many angles as he can manage, treating the car as a little theater venue (the windshield and side windows act as surrounding proscenium arches), using stylization (special lighting and costumes and even acting styles) when necessary, and essentially leaving center stage clear for his two lead actors (John Arcilla and Marasigan's wife Irma Adlawan) to shine (not as easy a feat as you might imagine--tempting for a first-time director to try show off, demonstrate how much he's learned from his cinematographer, film textbook, DVD collection).

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)

Excerpt:

Eastern Promises (2007) is the story of Anna (Naomi Watts) a midwife working at a London hospital who helps a 14-year-old Russian girl (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) deliver her child. The young mother dies, leaving behind the infant girl and a diary; Anna, who is part Russian, adopts diary and child and sets out to discover what had happened to the mother.

Her quest leads her to the Trans-Siberian, a restaurant owned by Semyon (Armin Meuller-Stahl); Semyon is all grandfatherly charm, offering to translate the diary; Anna is hesitant--her uncle Stepan (Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowsky) tells her to stay away from the vory v zakone (thieves in law), the Russian mafia, of which Semyon is the apparent local leader. Part and parcel of Semyon's organizational apparatus is his chauffer-slash-foot soldier Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), whose primary assignment is guarding Semyon's alcoholically unstable son, Kiril (Vincent Cassell). Will Anna translate the diary and protect the girl? Will she develop affection for, perhaps even a bond with, Nikolai, or will Kiril (who's just dripping with suppressed desires) get to him first? Will Semyon be brought to justice, the young girl avenged?

Sight and Sound (and my own) Best Films of 2007

Includes the list of at least two Filipino film critics--Alexis Tioseco and, heh, yours truly.

What I really think of Christmas

Excerpt:

To the people responsible for the picture;

This is a bad movie. No, I agree, you don't need people telling you it's bad; you need them telling you just how bad. Let me put it this way: if you churned this up and spread it in a field like any other fertilizer, nothing would grow. No self-respecting seed would sprout in manure this rank.

Raymond Red's Anino (Shadow, 2000): the little film that Cannes

Excerpt:

Raymond Red's Anino (Shadow, 2000) is a thirteen-minute short about a photographer from the provinces (Ronnie Lazaro) wandering about the streets of Manila. He meets a man in black (John Arcilla) just outside a church, and is nearly run over by an old man driving a car (Eddie Garcia); in between, he has a quiet interlude with a child (Ronnie Pulido). People meet, then meet again; harsh words are spoken, and violence inflicted. The film ends on what may be seen as either a hopeful or ironic note--it's up to you to decide which.

Tukso (Temptation, Dennis Marasigan, 2007)--temporary link good only until Thursday next week

Hitman (Xavier Gens, 2007)

Excerpt:

Dear Messrs. Askarieh, Besson, and Gens;

Congratulations on your new film Hitman (2007); it's very handsomely made, and it looks great--you can see every quart of arterial blood and every fleck of brain matter fly across the room and spatter on the faces of all concerned (that's how it is in real life, you know). I love how the bullets make holes in people's heads, like a pumpkin being smashed (compliments to the sound effects crew for the way they capture not only the sound of spraying blood, but the stickiness of it--the way the droplets splash across the skin, slowly expand, stick there (all suggested by sound!)). And I love how, in that scene with Belicoff's brother, you had my character spot the fact that every gun on that table is fake--I agree with you, if that was really me, I would have seen that right off. You've totally captured every element in my life, exactly the way I live it; except for a few details here and there, I might even call this a documentary, or at least a docudrama. Every shot, every explosion has the ring of undeniable truth.

An article on Lav Diaz's latest film Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Enkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007)

The film will have its Philippine premiere on 11/29/07 at the UP Film Center Videotheque, 10 am.

The Little Black Book (Movies)--1,000 Key Moments, Films, People in Cinema

Excerpt:

The Little Black Book (Movies)--critic Chris Fujiwara's yearlong project, involved 62 critics, historians, filmmakers, enthusiasts choosing to write short entries (250 to 300 words) on 1,000 of what they considered seminal moments in 100 years of cinema. This can be anything from a "key scene," a "key film," a "key event," even a "key person;" the films can range from all over--silent and sound; color and black and white; Hollywood and otherwise; mainstream and alternative. Contributors include Fujiwara himself, Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum; Australian critic Adrian Martin (Rosenbaum and Martin recently co-edited a book Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia); critic Dennis Lim (formerly of The Village Voice (back when working for the publication actually meant something (no disrespect meant for surviving critic Mr. Hoberman)), presently Editorial Director at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York); critic David Ehrenstein (Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928 - 2000)); critic Brad Stevens (Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision); L.A. Times web editor Tim Cavanaugh; Aruna Vasudev (founder/editor of Osian's Cinemaya: The Asian Film Quarterly; founder and director of Osian's Cinefan Film Festival), journalist, film critic and novelist Kim Newman (Anno Dracula); longtime film writer and lecturer Fred Camper; film critic and curator Paolo Cherchi Usai (The Death of Cinema); Filipino filmmaker and historian Nick Deocampo (Oliver (1983) and Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines) and, heh, yours truly.

Andrew Leavold, enthusiast extraordinaire

Excerpt:

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

Excerpt:

Things change; fact of life. I've been fond of Coppola's gangster epic since I was but eight years old, catching snatches of the Cuba sequence in my grandfather's private viewing screen (long story), seeing part 1 several years later and revisiting both every year since. I grew up practically developing my sense of cinema on those pictures, learning about theme and character, the use of music, cinematography, location and design to create a sensibility, a distinct vision.

And things change; sensibilities change. The virtues of Coppola's first two films have become a touch too familiar (the third I'm learning to appreciate a bit more for the ugly yet not entirely charmless duckling that it is); the famed line "leave the gun; take the canoli" has become almost tiresome in its ubiquity--instead of being a sharp line of dialogue it's become the punchline to everything from Godfather jokes to parodies on TV (and in fact Anthony Bourdain staged one such parody in his travel show not too long ago). Things change, and while the films will hopefully remain enjoyable pop spectacles, full of iconic images (rough sex at weddings; horse heads in bedrooms; handguns wrapped in towels; epic massacre sequences) it's about time, I feel, that I found something new to admire.

Oh God! (Carl Reiner, 1977)

Excerpt:

In this age of high-concept comedies (sometimes yoked to an action-oriented plotline for more value per ticket-dollar spent) and semaphoring, elastic-faced comedians, going back to a modest, semi-forgotten little comedy like Carl Reiner's Oh God! can literally be, well, a godsend.

Made back in 1977 from a novel by Avery Corman (who also wrote Kramer vs. Kramer, the movie adaptation of which became a rallying point for middle-class single fathers) and adapted for the big screen by Larry Gelbart (Tootsie, the MASH TV series), the movie was an agreeable little entertainment that presented God (who was much more Jewish in the novel) as an agreeable little old man trying to get a message across--and maybe earning a laugh on the side.

Hitchcock and a few European films

Excerpt:

Consider, if you will, a modest alternative to the usual flavorless multiplex fare, where morphing robots are so bereft of imaginative programming that all they can think of turning into are sports cars and ten wheelers, and effeminate pirates are so enamored of boxoffice profits they can't even recognize when they've been drained dry of creative juices and just lay down and die. Shake things up a bit, plug into something a liddle different, and sample fare at these two modest film festivals: the Fright Fest at Ayala Cinema's Glorietta 4, and Cine Europa at its traditional venue for the past ten years, the Shangri-La Plaza.

The Fright Fest features (what else) fright flicks from Wes Craven (not a big fan) to John Carpenter (who isn't, in my opinion, represented here by his best work), and four from this funny fat Englishman named Alfred Hitchcock. Who's he, you may ask? Only one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, and, as all his own promotional material use to put it, a "Master of Suspense."

Day of the Dead (George Romero, 1985)

Excerpt:

The Dead movies aren't so much examples of sophisticated filmmaking as they are powerful metaphors given evocatively free rein by a cunning and imaginative filmmaker. Night of the Living Dead (1968) was about how a handful of people under siege (Middle-class America, faced with the horrors of the Vietnam War) are able to uphold their standards of decency (not too well, unfortunately); Dawn of the Dead (1978) was the same formula set against a large-scale parody of American consumerism (this just a few years before the onset of the materialistic '80s)--even the blandly overbright quality of the film's lights mimicked perfectly mall lighting.

Dawn is of course the critics' favorite, for its comic book flavor, relative lightheartedness, commentary on consumerism; when the critics went to see Day, they were expecting more of the same. But Romero had moved beyond the satire of Dawn; he was making metaphysical and philosophical statements on the human condition, rendered in extremis--soldiers vs. scientists, men vs. women (or woman), pacifists vs. idealists, all cooped up in a hellhole of a pressure-cooker set to 'apocalypse.' Unpleasant characters and nasty, tense dialogue? It's the end of the world; things are falling apart. They're not going to sit down to drink tea, they're going to fight each other tooth and nail for whatever little is left worth having.

My article on James Gray's We Own The Night (2007). Link good only until Thursday next week:

Better than The Godfather

A documentary film by Mirana Medina (Tikoy Aguiluz's favorite editor (Bagong Bayani (The Last Wish, 1995), Segurista (Dead Sure,1996), Biyaheng Langit (Paradise Express, 2000)), to be screened in Chicago:

The Islanders (Mirana Medina, 2005)

Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007)

Excerpt:

A.O. Scott of The New York Times calls Knocked Up (2007) an "instant classic;" Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly declares it "The very opposite of a storybook romance, and also the very model of a great comedy for our values-driven time;" Robert Wilonsky of The Village Voice praises it for its "relaxed, shaggy vibe."

David Ansen of Newsweek thinks director Judd Apatow makes the "freshest, most honest mainstream comedies in Hollywood;" Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer compares lead actress Katherine Heigl to "a double-dip of praline with caramel…so beautiful that initially you don't notice her comic chops;" Kamal Al-Solalee of The Globe and Mail calls lead actor Seth Rogen "the poster boy for the best American comedy of the summer and, what the heck, of the decade so far;" Kyle Smith of The New York Post muses "ridiculous comedies can be fine, but the ones that matter creep up close to the truth. This one lives in it." Impressive statements from respectable critics, all reason enough to rush to the theaters and see for myself what the fuss is all about.

I don't get it.

Deborah Kerr, 1921 - 2007

Excerpt:

She was a great beauty and a great actress both. Yes, I remember her doing a polka with Yul Brynner, and rolling in the surf-soaked Hawaiian sand with Burt Lancaster, but before her Hollywood extravaganzas, she was the muse of one Michael Powell, who immortalized her in two of his very best works: Black Narcissus (1947), and the great The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).

Stardust (Matthew Vaughn, 2007)

Excerpt:

The trailers of Stardust (2007) didn't look promising--"secondhand Narnia," I thought; "maybe third-hand Lord of the Rings," and forgot about it. When I heard enthusiastic praise from enough people though, my curiosity was aroused, so I went for a look.

I wasn't wrong in thinking it looked like a third-hand Lord of the Rings ripoff--Matthew Vaughn (he directed the gangster flick Layer Cake, which looked and felt like secondhand Guy Richie (and in fact Vaughn, a friend, produced two of Richie's pictures)) has included one too many horse chases edited to look spatially disjointed (see the similar chase between Frodo and the Ringwraiths in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), not to mention a heroine that makes the viewer want to bend his head low and cough "Gah-ladriel! Gah-ladriel!" And the sky pirates--did the filmmakers see Hayao Miyazaki's Tenku no shiro Rapyuta (Castle in the Sky, 1986) with its airbag ship filled with ostensibly vicious pirates that at one point sails through a lightning storm? One wonders.

Close-ups in Philippine cinema

Excerpt:

That said, my earliest memory of a close-up would have to be the ending of Lino Brocka's classic Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975), where Julio (Bembol Roco), having killed a man, is cornered in an alley by an angry mob; Brocka cuts to extreme close-ups of Julio's face as the men point at him, point out his icepick, and pick up various pipes and rocks and clubs.

Resident Evil: Extinction (Russell Mulcahy, 2007)

Gagamboy (Erik Matti, 2004)

Excerpt:

And here I was, thinking Pa-Siyam (Nine Days, 2004) was Erik Matti's best work--Matti, the director of such seminal works of Philippine Cinema as Ekis (Crossed, 1999), Dos Ekis (Double Cross, 2001), and Prosti (Prostitute, 2002)--one of I suppose you can say my favorite Filipino filmmakers, if only because he's given me endless opportunities for honing my critical blade.

Pa-Siyam showed what Matti was capable when he dropped his many affectations and concentrated on storytelling, reined in his self-indulgent style enough to serve the story more than itself; the result is pleasing, like De Palma doing a conventional action film (The Untouchables) or Cronenberg a neo-Western (A History of Violence) albeit on a lower, cruder level.

Harsh Times (David Ayers, 2005)

Excerpt:

David Ayer's Harsh Times (2005) was reportedly based on his own experiences, and the language ("Whassup, dog?" "I wanna get fucked up") seems to reflect that (though Ayer's street profanity seems more mimetic than the kind of profane poetry that, say, David Mamet is capable of whipping up). He also manages to capture the boredom that exists between two men in a car (one of them simply weak, the other a developing psychopath), cruising around looking to get drunk, get laid, get high.

Beyond that--beyond the street realism, the surface texture and the sodium-arc street lighting (most of the picture, as with most noirs, takes place at night)--there's not much to be really said in favor of the movie. Ayer's self-admitted model was Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) but I'd say it's just as useful if not more so to look at Scorsese' earlier Mean Streets (1973)--you can see Ayer trying to capture the same kind of 'slice of life' quality, create the same meandering narrative, evoke the same anguished search for salvation (or damnation, you're not quite sure which).

William Wyler reloaded

Excerpt:

It's not as if Wyler intended it, I suppose, but for what seemed like the longest period--from the thirties (Wuthering Heights, Jezebel) through the war years (Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives) right up to the threshold of the socially turbulent sixties (Ben Hur) and late into it (Funny Girl) he was a force to be reckoned with. He was Hollywood, or at least that part of Hollywood that needed prestige pictures (preferably the kind that also made money); he wasn't half as prolific as Ford--around 70 films in 46 years, compared to Ford's 140 plus in 49 years--and his reputation today isn't as formidable, but to misquote yet another Hollywood icon "what's there is cherce."

Or, at the very least, entertaining. Melodramas like The Letter (with that great opening shot of Bette Davis stepping out of her bungalow, gun blazing) and Jezebel (which I much prefer to the more conventional Gone With the Wind) showcased Davis' inimitable brand of feminist perversity to wonderful effect; Wuthering Heights diminished the intense mysticism of Bronte's great novel (not to mention--this being an MGM production, where good taste is paramount--cleaning up much of the novel's blood and dirt and sadism) but did give us Laurence Olivier's huge hands, rising up to give the pretty (and rather vacant) Merle Oberon two full palms across the cheeks.

Gwoemul (The Host, Bong Joon-ho, 2006)

Excerpt:

Bong Joon-ho's Gwoemul (The Host, 2006) is terrific stuff, as much for being a family movie as for being a horror flick, but that's pretty much the secret appeal of almost any classic creature. James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) is really about parental responsibility and the neglect of the offspring; Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is about the abused child's development of an operating moral sense; Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong (1933) isn't so much a love story as it is a cautionary fable about a big brute's hopeless infatuation with (what else?) an airhead blonde (that's why the remake's so lame--it insists on being a love story); Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks' The Thing (1951) is about maintaining efficiency in the face of human weakness and overall chaos; Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) is about the impotence of human hubris (it's also about accepting a new and unlikely member into a rather ingrown family); Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) is about obsession and the comedy of male bonding. The creature (and the special effects used to create it) may be what draws the audience in, but it's always the human element--either suggested in the creature, or found among the victims or pursuers--that people savor and remember.

In Bong's case, it's about a dysfunctional family finding its priorities and learning how to operate as a unit. The slow-witted, blond-haired Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) runs a food stand alongside the Han River with his father Park Hee-bong (Byeon Hee-bong) and daughter Park Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-seong) when a monster rears out of the river and starts chomping down on innocent bystanders. Seems that many years ago an American military pathologist ordered his lab technician to empty a hundred bottles of formaldehyde into the drain, which apparently has a mutating effect on the riparian marine life (why that would be I'm not sure--formaldehyde's been dumped in water before, and I have yet to hear any recent news of giant mutant lizard-frogs walking the planet). Hee-bong and Gang-du escape, but Hyun-seo is snatched at the last minute by the monster's wonderfully prehensile tail to be snatched away, presumably eaten.

Um Filme Falado (A Talking Picture, Manoel de Oliveira, 2003)

Excerpt:

A confession: it's my first Oliveira (hang head in shame) and probably not an ideal introduction, but right off I can see that it's an unsettling work--at the very least brave, at the very most, radically great.

As far as initial impressions go, I think it's difficult to better my eleven-year-old nephew's capsule review: "It's so boring. Nothing's happening. This is the worst and ugliest movie ever made." I'd disagree with one comment outright--what with Emmanuel Machuel's capture of the harsh and brilliant Mediterranean sunlight (the very first image, of tiny figures with white handkerchiefs in hand like so many fluttering flower buds is stunning), the many magnificent structures paraded before the camera--there is in fact plenty of beauty for the eye. Too subtle a pleasure, I suppose, for my poor nephew to appreciate (Walt Disney World being his idea of a top travel destination).

Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980)--a belated tribute

Excerpt:

Robert Altman's Popeye opens with the tinny monophonic sound of The Sailor's Hornpipe, segueing into Sammy Lerner's theme song (I'm Popeye the Sailor Man). We see the cartoon image of a ship's rear cabin, doors sliding open, the classic opening of many a Max Fleischer cartoon short; Popeye pops up, chuckles, exclaims (in stereo, and in the voice of Jack Mercer, who played the sailor from 1935 to 1978):

"Hey what's this, one of Bluto's tricks?"

"I'm in the wrong movie!"

Crash and boom. Cut to thunderclouds piled high and visibly boiling. Camera pans down to a tiny orange sunset, all but overwhelmed by the oncoming storm; more lightning reveals Popeye's little rowboat, bobbing in a restless sea. Cut to a closer view of the boat--thanks to Altman's telephoto lenses the boat is surrounded, overwhelmed, engulfed by row after row of waves, in an endless march towards the camera (Popeye lost in an ocean of waves, the way Altman puts it onscreen, is about as lost as one can get). Cut to a bell tower--think of the church in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972)--shrouded in shadow; the bell chimes, the tower emerges in sunlight (filters, I suspect), and we hear horns blow the fanfare introduction to the song "Sweethaven." The entire opening is Altman's way of saying "this is not the Popeye you're familiar with--not the Fleischer cartoons, not Famous Studios, not Segar's strip. And not like any musical you've seen before, either."

Disturbia (D.J. Caruso, 2007)

D.J. Caruso's Disturbia may seem like a teenage remake of Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) updated to allow for digital cameras and cellphones but other films figure as well: Tom Holland's Fright Night (1985), David Lynch's Blue Velvet released a year later, The Blair Witch Project (1999) among others. Nowadays you don't steal wholesale, you mix in borrowings from other pictures too--never mind that the result doesn't have the cheeky humor of Holland's stylish teen horror flick, the persuasiveness of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's pseudo-documentary, the surreal kick of Lynch's small-town noir, the elegance and control of Hitchcock's thriller, one of the greatest ever made.

It does start off as its own movie--a horrifying car accident; Kale, a troubled teen (Shia LaBeouf) under house arrest for punching a teacher; an electronic ankle bracelet enforcing Kale's confinement; Ashley, a beautiful next-door neighbor (Sarah Roemer), newly moved in; and Mr. Turner (David Morse), a quietly eccentric neighbor Kale suspects of being a serial killer.

The Invasion (Oiliver Hirschbiegel, 2007)

Excerpt:

Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2007 The Invasion, the umpteenth remake of Jack Finney's 1955 classic The Body Snatchers is easily the fastest-paced, most action-packed version yet--and that's not a recommendation. In 1956 Don Siegel directed the lean, classically proportioned Invasion of the Body Snatchers; in 1978 Philip Kaufman did a lushly photographed (by Michael Chapman) comic remake; in 1993 Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers transposes the action inside a military base.

All three versions start out by establishing a familiar, quotidian world--a small town, a big city, a family newly arrived at a new military assignment--against which odd details begin to appear, accumulate, create an atmosphere of paranoia and gathering menace. Setting the films side-by-side, you can see a progression of premises demonstrating how Finney's potent story of alien conformism versus human individuality can apply to different times, and differing circumstances: the 1956 classic explored the cracks in the smooth façade of small-town middle America; the 1978 version evoked the strangeness of a major city (San Francisco) and poked fun (the mordantly funny W.D. Richter wrote the script) at complacent Sixties liberals (in a way the film anticipates the rise of Ronald Reagan and a more conservative, less intellectually astringent America). Ferrara took the previous films' concept (that the nature of modern culture leaves it open to alien mimicry and infiltration) and pushed it even further: soldiers--trained to follow orders and not question, to wear uniforms and move in carefully choreographed motions, to consistently value the unit (the platoon, the division, the service) above one's self--seem like an inevitable choice for takeover.

Pa Siyam (Erik Matti, 2004)

Excerpt:

Erik Matti is a talented and commercially successful filmmaker, but coherent storytelling isn't exactly his strong suit. He likes style, lots of it, slathered heavily over flimsy characters and nonsensical plots, filling up the space usually reserved for a film's themes and ideas. He likes to borrow, magpie-like, images, moods and colors from a wide range of filmmakers--Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Wong Kar Wai, San Miguel Beer commercials--tossing them in without rhyme or reason, to ferment in his celluloid chamber-pots. It would be nice to think he's aware of how hilariously his films play onscreen, but no; he's been heard to declare with the utmost solemnity about this or that oeuvre that he's consciously tried to emulate the works of a master like Ishmael Bernal, only to say "fuck it, I'm going to do things my way." Which he does, with inimitable results.

When he's working from someone else's screenplay, however, he's a different creature entirely. Dwight Gaston's screenplay for Pa Siyam (rough translation "Nine Days"--this refers to the traditional period of mourning after the deceased has been buried) is refreshingly low key: a family gathers together at their ancestral mansion to mourn the death of their mother, and a series of eerie events occur around them. This time there are no dead bodies in trunks, no suitcases full of cash, no nursing uniforms stained with rancid spaghetti sauce (don't ask): Matti is forced to put away his CGI toys, his whirligig camera and strobe-like editing tricks to tell the relatively straightforward story of a family frightened to within an inch of their lives.

The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007)

Excerpt:

Paul Greengrass rounds off Robert Ludlum's Bourne trilogy with The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), a movie that (as implied by the term) is designed to really move.

The story's a considerable departure from the source novels--Robert Ludlum's spy thriller of the same name, published in 1990, featured an elaborate plot that has Bourne and real-life terrorist Carlos the Jackal in a showdown; the movie jettisons the novel's narrative for a more streamlined premise: having lost his identity, his love (Franka Potente, in The Bourne Supremacy (2004)) and his peace of mind, he's come gunning for the man who created him and started this whole mess.

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Excerpt:

Quentin Tarantino's something of a strange case--he's an enthusiast without much discrimination, a director who cares more about framing his dialogue than his images, an auteur wannabe more interested in cramming allusions and homages into his works than actually fusing them into a unique voice. He's got so many references in his movies the frame operate more like hypertext (click on this hat and it's the same type hat used in so-and-so kung fu flick; click on that pack of cigarettes and it's the same brand used in one of the director's previous works)--that much he's up-to-date. To be fair, he does have a fondness for the classic and antiquated that may, after all is said and done, be his finest trait (though his uncritical passion for junk takes a bit of the gloss off that love).

In effect, he's not the greatest thing since apple pie, but he's not cow flop, either. In 1992 he took the plot of Ringo Lam's great Lung fu fong wan (City on Fire, 1987), shuffled the time scheme for variety, dumbed down the understated desperation, and presented it as Reservoir Dogs; two years later he took Godard's declaration that "every film has a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order," made Pulp Fiction, and won a Palme d'Ir in Cannes (funny Godard never got credit for the idea, nor brought home his own Palme d'Or). The 1996 From Dusk Till Dawn might be my favorite Tarantino, if only because the man wrote a clever, genre-bending script for his more visually talented friend, Robert Rodriguez (Rodriguez's problem is in constructing a narrative that moves in reasonably smooth motion, and comes to a satisfying resolution; the two should do more projects together, preferably with Tarantino at the keyboard, Rodriguez behind the camera).

100 Best Filipino Films

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.