I love JSB.

Rebuilding my iTunes library has been one exhausting project. (I wish that whoever stole my computer would suffer diarrhea for the rest of his low life.)  I’ve already transferred a lot of songs from my CDs, but there are still dozens left to play.  Listening to different genres of music could be tiring. Smashing Pumpkins, New Order, Duran Duran, Madonna, Janet, Elton, Kanye, Stevie, Ronstadt, Blackeyed, Gwen, even Hajji.  After too much percussion, improvisation and electronica, I always turn to JSB.

I have the vaguest grasp of musical structures.  They say JSB – Johann Sebastian Bach – was the most mathematical of classical composers.  I don’t comprehend all that.  What I know is that his music is comforting and hypnotic.  When all is not well, I turn to JSB.

Best use of Bach in a movie?  My all-time Bach fave, The Goldberg Variations, in Silence of the Lambs (1991).  Air on a G String Suite in the Se7en (1995) library scene is also memorable.

Grave of The Fireflies

September 21^st 1945: That was the night I died.

Get our your handkerchief with an opening like that.  Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is one of the greatest war films ever made.  And must be the saddest too in the drama genre, even sadder than Schindler's List.  Strangely enough, it’s all animation.

The first flashback after that fateful scene shows two kids witness American air raids over Kobe, Japan.  Mom dies from the bombings, while dad’s fate with the Japanese navy is never known.  An aunt takes them in as orphans but her cruel and resentful ways force them to flee and live in a bomb shelter.   Food is scarce, and they only have fireflies that hover the shelter to lift their spirits.  The lives of fireflies underscore their own – frail and fleeting.

It’s a pity that the film is little-known.  Thanks to Youtube, you can now watch the entire film.  It’s not like any cartoon you’ve seen before.  No one breaks into song.  It feels real. The emotions are so powerful that the film creators could’ve thought that it’d be even more shattering to see on live action.

If you’re watching this film, be sure to click on a silly Youtube clip right after.

Getting schmaltzy about The Azkals

The Philippine National Football Team, or The Azkals, are out of World Cup contention after losing to Kuwait on home soil.  They scored a goal against Kuwait’s 2.  The unanimous cry, though, at least from what I see online, is that the nation “still believes in them; they’ve shown 100% Pinoy heart”.

It’s not schmaltz at all.  Who would’ve thought they’d come this far?  Pinoys only started embracing the beautiful game last year when it’s been a global obsession for many, many World Cups now.  Pinoys are now hooked on football.  And we ought to be good at it.

We’re built for it. Agility does not come with a basketeer’s heft.  Anyone can play it – rich or poor.  Most African superstars and even Beckham picked up the sport while growing up in the poor side of town.  It requires grace.  We naturally get into the groove.  It’s group sport -- 11 exciting players make for a Pinoy brand of fiesta.  Do you get festive or have as much fun when Pacquiao gets bloodied up in Vegas?

The Azkals are a young team.  They barely had as much support, unlike a UAAP team which could not possibly compete against the Kobe Bryants.  There didn't have many football fields for practice. Yet, in spite of all the adversities, they’ve done us proud.  They kept us enthralled and awake even in the midnight hour.  They gave us reason to party.

Been trying to remember what film that had a main sporting character compete against all odds.  Rocky (1976) would have been an easy choice.  My friend James had an unlikely and hilarious suggestion: Ice Castles (1978).  An ice skater competes even after being almost totally blinded by an accident.  Now, that’s schmaltz.  

(Doesn't the music bring you back to boring wedding receptions at Aberdeen Court in Quezon Avenue?)

The most exciting actor of this generation.

No, it’s not Coco Martin.  He’s gotten so conscious since he crossed over from indie to mainstream.  Not Dakota Fanning – she’s Meryl Streep’s understudy.  It’s JGL: Joseph Gordon Levitt.

I’ve liked him since his 3^rd Rock from the Sun days on TV.  He held his own against those crazy aliens.  We don’t see him in a lot of movies.  His filmography may not be as extensive as Gyllenhaal's but JGL never fails to excite each time.  10 Things I Hate About You was his movie, not lead actor Heath Ledger’s.  Donning a 3-piece suit in Inception was enough to steal DiCaprio’s thunder. He’ll be seen next in Christopher Nolan’s new Batman.  I’m sure the skinny JGL’s turn as a beat cop would be meatier than Bane’s, Batman’s massively muscled nemesis.

JGL always strikes me as cool and thoughtful.  Hindi siya mukhang tanga.  And he can dance!  Watch this sequence from 500 Days of Summer – the best dance sequence in a non-musical in this millennium.  Also the best antidote to tonight's gloomy weather.

Amen.

It was with immense grief that I visited the remains of my aunt, Sister Dorothy, yesterday. She was 86.  She was the last remaining sibling of my dad and Uncle Leony who came from a brood of 7.  It didn’t help that my dad broke down when he went close to coffin.  She was after all his fave Acheng Viding (from her original name Fredesvinda, before the Benedictine Order changed it to Dorothy).

Tita Madre was soft-spoken (rare for a Pampangan woman), cheery and kind.  She was not loud, haughty and overbearing, unlike some members of the religious who manage to disenchant more and more Catholics today.  When she left a rather privileged life with my Lola to join a monastic order, she vowed to devote her life to prayer, education and music.  And she continued to do so until Alzheimer’s wore her down.

When my belief in the shepherds of God and the goodness of man wavers, I’d just have to think of Sister Dorothy.  Life’s too short to recompense meanness with more meanness. Must not forget the kindnesses around us, like Dorothy’s.

[A clip from a small 1963 film entitled "Lilies of the Field", where Sidney Poitier won a Best Actor Oscar.  A most inspiring film about faith, perseverance, tolerance and the kindness of strangers.] 

Eiko is the best thing about Varekai.

You could say that if you’ve seen one Cirque du Soleil flying acrobat, you’ve seen them all.  But it’s not just about variations of the same theme of contorting and hurling in mid-air.  It’s about the total experience, clichéd as it may sound. 

Caught Varekai earlier in its last weekend run in Manila.  Felt proud to be Pinoy!  The  world-famous Québécois big top has finally been pitched in Manila, even if there were vendors of balut and kwek-kwek nearby.   The best things about Varekai was the finale, and the costumes by one of the greatest art directors in history, Eiko Ishioka. 

It’s an explosion of art and color in Lycra!  Nothing was compromised in the execution.  All the performers had whimsical things sticking out of tights, but they were all perfectly mobile.  I especially liked how Ishioka put padding all over the 3 young boys who were twirling ropes with metal cups.  They were tiny yet muscular.  

The work of this true visionary transcends boundaries and conventions.  The woman is wild!  She usually blends the Gothic and Victorian with Asian, usually Japanese.  Her work has invaded all sorts of medium –-

Graphic design:

Advertising:

Stage:

Spider-Man Musical

Album Covers:

Miles Davis' Tutu

MTV:

Film:

The Cell (2000)

In my opinion, the biggest achievement in film costume design belongs to Ishioka and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), for which she won an Oscar.

Yes, mga kapatid, Nora was an Atenista.

Times have really changed.  Last weekend, I wanted to see a Cinemalaya entry – Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa – in Greenbelt.  I was at the ticket booth an hour before the screening, but I couldn’t get a seat.  Pinoy movies are now a hot ticket.  In my youth, we didn’t dare tell our friends that we went to see one.  You’d be easily branded as bakya or low-class if you did.

But I did see a lot of them and they were mostly Nora Aunor movies, because I had no choice.  My yaya Carmen, then the biggest Noranian in the whole of Pampanga, would bring me to the theatre after school without my parents’ consent.  On days without yaya, my dad would take me to Charles Bronson movies.  I enjoyed the eclectic range.  But I enjoyed Nora more.  Bronson, the archetypal urban warrior, had only one brand of acting – staunch, and craggy-faced in good times and bad.

Those days, anyone could not imagine the Philippines without Nora Aunor (and the Marcoses, perhaps).  She changed the course of Philippine movies and the music scene. She outsold foreign artists.  Her best movies were pure art.  Her fans were ready to kill if anyone dared to malign her.  Had they known that students from Ateneo de Manila ostracized her when she enrolled in the university, the biggest class war since Bastille could’ve erupted in the hills of Barangka.  By the way, she didn’t finish a semester because of all the burgis ribbing.

It’s been reported that she’ll be back home soon after being away for many years.  I hope it’s true.  This Noranian would continue to root for her even if she’s garbed in her trademark acid-washed denim jacket and short skirt.  Even if the washed-up rapper John Robinson is in tow.  Even if she acts badly.  After the great director-mentors Brocka and Bernal died, she never had a performance that could equal her turns in Himala and Bona. She deserves my love to this day.  She saved me from Bronson.

Movie Moment: Tiny Dancer

The movie nerd that I was gave away CDs several Christmases ago labeled, 'Movie Moments'.  Each disc contained songs used in scenes from non-musicals (it would've been easy if they were musicals -- each gift could've just been a full Sound of Music download) that I found magical and pivotal.  One song was Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" which figured in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (2000).

In this scene, main character Russell (Billy Crudup) has just quit the band.  Tension fills their touring bus which includes band member Jason Lee, and groupies Kate Hudson and Anna Paquin. Elton John's song plays and everyone joins in a rousing sing-along.  Despite all the drama and conflict, it's song that still brings them together.  They are home.

Ang Babae sa Septic Tank

When my friend Madonna learned that I had just seen Ang Babae sa Septic Tank, she asked how the audience responded to the film she line-produced.  I texted that they loved it.  Now, thinking about it,  my text-message should've been  based on what the great French director, François Truffaut, once said: "The most beautiful thing I have seen in a movie theater is to go down to the front, and turn around, and look at all the uplifted faces, the light from the screen reflected upon them."  Of course, I Googled that.

First-time director and ad exec Marlon Rivera’s entry to this year’s Cinemalaya comes from a long line of movies about movies like, Fellini’s 8½ , Ed Wood, Boogie Nights and a Cinemalaya winner, Jay, from a few years back.  But Septic Tank reminded me most of a film made in 1973, Truffaut’s Day for Night. 

Day for Night, which starred one of the most beautiful actresses from the 70s, Jacqueline Bisset, is Truffaut’s homage to the whole movie-making process.  It’s chaotic, zany, circus-like but nonetheless meaningful for people who just love to be on the set.  All the artifice you see on screen (shooting night scenes during the day, included) is a by-product of real-life dramas in the making of a film.

Rivera’s take on the movie-within-a-movie formula is actually more hilarious.  Two idealistic young filmmakers (played by the wonderful Kean Cipriano and JM de Guzman who has the most soulful eyes) are bent on making the first Pinoy film – Walang Wala –  that would win an Oscar.   They’d like to have big movie star Eugene Domingo play the dirt-poor Mila who’s forced to sell one of her seven children to a pedophile.   The movie (Septic Tank, not Walang Wala) starts with a sweep of the squalor in Manila’s urban poor.  It cuts to a quiet, blank-faced and emotionless Mila preparing one packet of instant noodles which she divides among the seven kids.  Then unceremoniously, she bathes one of her daughters, dresses her in an ill-fitting Sunday dress and finally drops her off in the pedophile’s condo unit.   Those opening scenes were a precious ten minutes or so.  It feels real.  There’s grit.  It’s so indie.

Then the directorial treatment of those same Mila sequences ricochets from sensitive to showy to farcical.  What if Cherry Pie Picache played Mila?  What if it slum people broke into song?  And everything else just gets crazier and crazier on the road to Kodak Theatre.  It's craziest when the two young men visit Eugene the actress who is even more flamboyant than her overly designed home.  Eugene’s acting there along with her lines is pure genius.

Got some beef though which could be inconsequential for some.  The musical numbers in the squatters are too many and extended.  The photography should have been as spirited as the writing, as nifty and pliant as the change in directorial flavor.  The daydreaming device, while cute because the imagined scenes were all happening inside the head of the production assistant who had no speaking lines, was too familiar and easy.

But by and large, Madonna, I was one of those uplifted faces in the theatre.  The light on the screen reflected the joy I had from watching your movie.   And I felt for the two idealists.  We are all from advertising, you see.  We all hope for a nice and fulfilling ride each time we work on a piece of film.  But shit always happens. 

Grand Finale

It all ended well. The final movie in the Harry Potter series was generally satisfying.

There were plenty of things to like – the actors were all great, especially Daniel Radcliffe, Alan Rickman, the boy who played Neville and Helena Bonham-Carter.  Only Helena could get away with playing Hermione Granger pretending to be Helena’s Bellatrix Lestrange. She had it down to Hermione’s girlish charm and facial expressions.  Rickman as Professor Snape deserves an Oscar.

It had adventure!  Its adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s book was faithful but not slavish to the point that it gets too explanatory (ergo, boring).  It cut out the unnecessary, leaving us with quite moving and emotional tales of sadness, fear, betrayal, unrequited love and the love of friends.

There’s just one underwhelming thing about it: the final fight scene between Potter and Voldemort.  Voldemort was not a great villain.  Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw in X-Men: First Class was more menacing and could beat Voldemort to a pulp.  Wands do not make for breathtaking fight scenes.  You poke it, it spits enough sparks to make the opponent tumble, and that’s it. I’m a big fan of action scenes, and I want lots of choreography.

I grew up on young Jet Li and drunken master Jacky Chan. Ganoon ang kick-ass! Of the more recent action movies, some of my faves include the following:

1. Bride vs. Crazy 88 in Kill Bill: Vol. 1
2. Jason Bourne’s use of the martial art Kali: he could kill with a book, a pen or a towel.
3. Ripley battles the Queen in Aliens
4.  Spiderman’s fight scene with Dr. Otto Octavius on the runaway train in Spider-Man 2
5. And this Ang Lee fight scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Iconic

Still on the subject of billboards.   A friend has a radical (and impossible) suggestion for the MMDA.  Remove all the  billboards along EDSA.  He finds most billboards offensive, to his aesthetic sense.  I guess he’s right about the ugliness factor.  Some could kill the hapless passerby during a raging storm.  But most already kill the few vestiges of good art sense.

I hope advertisers would take their cue from great movie poster-making.  Thanks to direk Paolo Dy for the heads-up on the new Batman poster which is worth blogging about.  The movie posters I love are exercises in beautiful and arresting iconography.  The don’t give everything away, unlike some billboards which are simply magnified brochures.  The graphic is usually singular and simple, yet fresh and intriguing.  It excites, and makes you yearn for more.

The Batman posters through the years are also noteworthy for their consistency.   The style is all Batman’s, and it’s instantly recognizable.  No wonder Batman remains as one of the most successful franchises in movie history.

I hope Bench would replace the Volcanoes billboards with something as iconic as Batman’s.  6-packs could actually be tiresome.

Rugby players in briefs and the slaughter of innocence

Last week in Manila, the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) removed billboards along EDSA showing burly rugby players clad only in Bench underwear.  Top star Angel Locsin’s Century Tuna billboard was also taken down for the same reason:  the content was found “offensive” and "indecent”.

I could understand the uproar of years back over the double entendre in a whiskey billboard:  Nakatikim ka na ban ng quinze anos?  (Have you tasted a fifteen year old?).  That was bad taste and pedophiliac.  But men in briefs and women in sexy attire?  I’m sure most motorists loved what they saw.  Some could’ve been upset.  But the displeasure was colored with envy.

I stand against censorship of any kind.  Government and religion have no business telling me what I should read, see or listen to.  They must not erode my basic right to think or behave as an individual, most often in the name of moral values or protecting the innocent.  

Censorship of any kind necessarily stifles freedom of thought and expression.  It wants us to constantly feel guilty and threatened, rendering us weakened and neutralized -- until we don’t have the moral strength to challenge current norms, and discover, explore.

If Government really wants to protect the innocent, shouldn’t they fix the traffic on EDSA first?  Precious time is waited sitting in traffic.  Kids in cars and public transport age unnecessarily.  Their innocence, wasted.

  

I miss Amy.

Now, there’s Google +.  This 40something can’t even get his Twitter account running and he’s now pressured to sign up for a new way to interact online.

Just the other day, a friend got all excited about launching his new album sans the familiar album jacket.  The songs will all be offered in a stick.  I didn’t get excited at all.  There goes the liner notes, I thought.  I’m a sucker for dispensable literature.

I like appreciating my music, and the graphic design within which it’s packaged.  I like filing them neatly, alphabetically.  Just how do you file those thumb drives?  In a lipstick tray?

In a insignificant fit of rebellion against technology and all its intangibleness, I revisited my CD collection tonight and transferred some songs I’ve loved through the years into my iTunes.   It’s such a joy to rediscover gems from the movies.

There’s Bridget Jones:  Edge of Reason.  The movie’s forgettable.  The only thing I remember was Renee Zellweger’s tired Method ways of getting (fat) into character.    But the soundtrack has Amy Winehouse crooning Carole King’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.  It’s better than Bryan Ferry’s cover.  And worth playing over and over than Carole’s.

I miss Amy.  Please come back.  Please get out of rehab and record your next song.  Your Back to Black album was the only one I enjoyed listening to in its entirety in the last few years.  These days, savoring every song in an album is as rare as not having a stick.

WHY?

I went to see the remake of the 1981 movie, Temptation Island, with an open mind and left the theatre confused.  Why would Regal films and director Chris Martinez want to reconstruct the campiest film in Pinoy movie history, without reinterpreting its utterly (unintentional?) ridiculousness?  Camp made twice over is tedium. 

Writer-director Martinez, who’s given us some of the most enjoyable comedies in the last decade (Here Comes the Bride, Bikini Open, Bridal Shower), perhaps wanted to introduce the most quotable Pinoy film to a new generation who didn’t grow up on low-budget films that would screen almost every week in the 70s and early 80s.  Wish he had re-channeled that giddiness to a whole new brand of camp.  The ‘new generation’ who were with me last night in the almost empty Makati theatre hardly laughed throughout the screening.  Sayang ang giddiness.

Would it have been better if the actors were all gay, like in the successful stage run years ago?  It could’ve have worked while still strictly adhering to the film shot-by-shot, line-by-line.  Or, updating it in a much major way?  The changes in the remake are cursory: beauty pageant is now a model search; walang signal was added to walang mainom, walang pagkain; the use of Purita.  I think in the years since 1981, there have been abundant references for frivolity, nouveau riche excesses to create fresh camp for millennials. 

Most importantly, there were four key reasons why the original has remained a classic:   

1. Azenith Briones
2.  Jennifer Crotes
3. Bambi Arambulo
4. Dina Bonnevie

The new one didn’t have those, and Aljur, John Lapus  and the others messed it up even more.