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.

Christ and the Anti-Christ

If I'd seen either of these movies as a child, I wouldn’t have lived long enough to blog.   In 1973, in my very Catholic town of San Fernando, word got around that you’d die in 5 years if you went to see the heretical Jesus Christ Superstar or The Exorcist, the work of William Friedkin and the devil.   I wondered then, if I'd see both, would my end come in 2.5 years? 

The few joys of adulthood include rebelling against what you were taught as a child, and doing them over and over again.  I only mustered enough courage to see both films in my 20s, away from all the priests and Kapampangans of my youth, and would then revisit them one after the other.   Christ and the Anti-Christ in one sitting. 

Both films remain groovy, long after people have stopped saying groovy.   I like how the contrasting styles of these films redefine the paradigms associated with their respective genres:  the Jesus material is not slow and somber, treated with sickly sweet deference and piety.   It’s meant to provoke the viewer, and make him understand what made Him the original superstar, and the price he had to pay for being one.

One of the most iconic images in film history

The Exorcist is more than just a terrific acting ensemble (with the great Ellen Burstyn, Max Von Sydow and Linda Blair).  It’s beautiful terror.   Like Kubrick’s The Shining, it takes awhile before the scarefest happens.  It starts out slow and eerie.   The atmosphere unsettles you before Regan the possessed girl frightens you with vomit, levitation, head-turning and that gravelly old woman’s voice.   It just stays with you. 

Would rather call it a night by singing along with the awesome Ted Neely.