Manhattan

What’s the most dispensable part of a movie other than the cheesy original theme song? The opening titles. Woody Allen in Stig Bjorkman’s book Woody Allen on Woody Allen (a must-read for fans of the media-shy filmmaker) decries the hundreds of thousands of dollars Hollywood spends on optical effects for a movie’s opening. Yeah, he’s right. The money could have been better spent on screenplays, like in the case of David Fincher’s The Panic Room – great credits (glassy 3-D effect over the Manhattan skyline), dreadful thriller.

Mr. Allen’s opening credits are brisk and consistently use the same typeface.  The actors' names all appear in one frame.  Googled it and it’s Windsor Elongated. It’s simple and elegant. You could also tell that what it prefaces would be substantial and brief. His films usually take only 80 minutes of narrative. Anything more than that would be superfluous, he says.

What I’m usually more interested is how a film opens, with or without credits. Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) tops my list. It signals the start of a gorgeously orchestrated symphony of love, hate, immaturity and neuroses in New York City. 

I knew from the opening strains of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue that I was in for the most significant movie experience of my life.

Fave Forgotten Film: Misteryo sa Tuwa

Even if he wanted to, my friend was not brave enough to shout “Magnanakaw! Magnanakaw!” when Imelda Marcos walked into the CCP a few weeks ago for a chichi event.  It would’ve been inappropriate.  

It’s also inappropriate for people to be fawning over Imelda like she wasn’t part of the conjugal dictatorship.   Perhaps some are too young to remember the Marcos years as the darkest era in our nation’s history, post-war.   Others may have been won over by the Marcos’ PR machine which have been consistently rehabilitating their image.   We’re still paying for their sins, and yet we emblazon the dictator’s wife face on shift dresses and t-shirts.    The past administration even paid her a glowing tribute as a true patroness of the arts.

We can’t dispute her contribution to the arts.   She built the CCP.  She sent scores of artists like Macuja and Arrieta abroad to study.   Soon after, they became well-acclaimed international performers.  She funded the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, which her daughter Imee headed.   Because of ECP, we could still enjoy cinematic masterpieces like Himala and Oro, Plata, Mata.

But, at what price?   It was just art that was enjoyed by a few, while many became too poor and inappropriate to wander through the halls of the CCP.

It’s ironic that one of the products of the CCP, Misteryo sa Tuwa (1984), was about corruption.   A plane crashes into the boondocks, and a group of simple folk scavenges stuff from the crash site.    There found lots of Spam, and a suitcase of half a million pesos in cash.   The town mayor gets wind of the group’s little secret. A series of unfortunate events ensues.  He conspires, then kills for the loot.

Let’s all learn from this almost-forgotten piece of film.  Let’s always remember.

Small parts, big actors

The line, "There are no small parts, only small actors” is believed to have been first said by Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavsky. The Academy could have taken that line to heart, because they had, on several occasions, acknowledged actors with smaller egos and paychecks, and shorter screentime.

Beatrice Straight in Network
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcXIktL55Gw&feature=related

Beatrice Straight won an Oscar for her supporting role in Network (1977). She was onscreen for less than five minutes. I remember loving the book about bad television by Paddy Chayefksy (who also wrote the screenplay) back in high school, then rushing to a moviehouse during its provincial run.  I was blown away by its theatrics, including Straight’s turn as a wife wronged by husband William Holden. I thought posthumous Oscar winner Peter Finch’s line, I’m mad as hell as hell and I can’t take it anymore, was the cleverest ever.

30 years after, I saw Network again. What was I thinking? The film didn’t age well. Everything about it was shrill. Peter Finch was Jerry Springer ten times over, before reality TV became a genre.  Faye Dunaway also overplayed it, yet won an Oscar. And Straight seemed like she knew she only had 5 minutes to impress the Academy.

Dame Judi Dench took all of 8 minutes to bag an Oscar. I like watching Dench but she remains the dame as Queen Elizabeth, Daniel Craig’s boss, the woman in Italy who had tea with Mussolini, Mrs. Henderson or whoever. If you’d give her one of the cheerleaders’ roles in Glee, she’d sing a cheesy song in staccato, with an evil squint and an imperious stare.

In my book, the greatest-actor-in-a-small-part award goes to Viola Davis in Doubt (2008). She appeared in just one scene, for less than 10 minutes. She did the impossible – she made Meryl Streep the smaller actor.

Pinoy confrontation

You could tell how much the quality of Pinoy entertainment today has regressed by just watching confrontation scenes.  The verbal sparring is predictable and borrowed.  The delineation between hero and villain is familiar and obvious.  And they usually end in catfights that couldn’t even compare with what Hollywood had already done ages ago in camp classics like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) and Valley of the Dolls (1967).

The late National Artist Ishmael Bernal had already set the standard in the 70s.  But the road to inspired cinematic exchanges ended with Cherie Gil’s “You’re nothing but a second-rate, trying hard copycat” in Bituing Walang Ningning (done in 1985; but at least, the line remains quotable).   Everything else that followed is just lame.

Here are two great examples of Bernal confrontations.  The first one, Ikaw ay Akin (1978), has no dialogue at all.   It featured the two biggest actresses of their generation in their first major movie together.    Their fans were expecting fireworks so the great debate on who was the better actress would finally be settled.  Bernal denied them that.  Instead, he showed how silence could best show character (cerebral vs. corporeal).  And the unease that came with sharing one man (Christopher de Leon).

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJNYtCfLh90

A year later, Bernal did Salawahan which I read somewhere is the best-loved film on cable channel Cinema One, along with Temptation Island.  The movie revolves around five characters (Jay Ilagan, Matt Ranillo III, Sandy Andolong, Rio Locsin and Rita Gomez).  They’re frivolous, egocentric and all have varying perspectives on love, sex, lifestyle, dominance and just about anything decadent.  They’re smart.  And with sassiness comes colorful dialogue.

Marianne: Hi. Good morning.

Sylvia:  Same to you.

Marianne:  Aren’t you going to wish me well?

Sylvia:  I’m going to wish you what you’re going to wish me.

Marianne:  Foreign twang. Girlfriend ako ni Gerry.

Sylvia:  Same to me.

Marianne: Ano’ng gagawin natin ngayon?

Sylvia:  Wala.

Marianne:  Hindi ba tayo magco-confrontation?

Sylvia:  Huwag na.  Nakakatamad e.

Marianne:  Ok, I’ll see you.

Sylvia:  See you.

Oh, the 70s.  Fun times, indeed.

Fave forgotten film: You Can Count On Me

Another stimulus from the past weekend – bonding with my siblings whom I had not seen for quite awhile.  Can you name one excellent film that explored brother-sister relationships?  Only the mature ones, so count the Von Trapps out.  I can only think of You Can Count On Me (2000), the Sundance Best Picture winner that starred the underrated Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, who could’ve been the next Sean Penn.   

Some parallel themes there.  Laura and Mark also reunite after not having seen each other for quite some time.   They both share a trauma, a death in the family, which will forever define them and only make the bond deeper.  There’s pain, conflict.  But everything’s so beautifully nuanced.  Much like in our real lives.  None of the screamfest you see in the usual family drama fare.

Charivari

Learned a new word last week from an anonymous letter-writer:  charivari.  He said that the lynch mob mentality we had seen in blog forums or social networking sites was modern-day charivari.  He wrote in support of our company that recently figured in the most talked-about national issue since Hayden Kho’s sex video scandal.

From an online encyclopedia – “Charivari was a ritual used by medieval and early modern Europeans to chastise community members who failed to conform to social expectations, especially sexual ones. Examples included a widow who remarried, a wife who beat her husband, or a couple who failed to have children. In France, where this term originated, teenage boys and young unmarried men usually led such rituals. The youths would parade through the streets, making rough music by banging pots and pans, shouting mocking insults, and sometimes threatening violence.”

It’s a sad reality we in the new millennium witness everyday, and cannot change.  The smart mobs who desire genuine change through social (digital) action are outnumbered by the bad or flash mobs.  These ones are just silly, lost and unimportant, and yearn for meaning and acceptance by simply joining in the ‘fun’.  Some are blind disciples, holding on to the influencers they follow, whose ‘power’ has actually corrupted themselves.  The flash mobs sound angry but they’re not, for education is a condition for genuine rage.

The Internet, they say, is the largest mob ever assembled in history.  You can’t fight that.  So, ignore.  Do something else.  Enrich yourself with good vibes.  Like, watch Wall-E, a wonderful drama and comedy on nonconformism.

But if you enjoy seeing how contempt could kill, check out Doubt, Mississippi Burning and The Crucible.

Weekend stimuli

Shanghai.  The decadence of 1930 Shanghai has been fabulously recreated by the Peninsula Manila in Salon de Ning.  The Salon launched last Friday, and it must have been the launch party of the year.  The Pen had me with blue velvet-gloved waiters hidden behind the curtain, welcoming  guests with glasses and glasses of Moët.  What now, Shangri-la Manila?

Hmmm, the Shanghai movie I liked best?  Nothing figures in my all-time list.  Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987)?  Over-evocative.  I like the theme, Suo Gan, though, and Christian Bales’ debut (before the muscles he grew in American Psycho kept him from having an extensive range in facial expressions).  Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007)?  It’s pretty to look at.  But did I really care about that woman who slept with and spied on her lover?  Naah.

I haven’t seen Madonna and Sean Penn’s Shanghai Surprise (1986).  I doubt if it had any or Ang Lee’s artisty or Spielberg’s sweeping photography and aggressive editing.  But it could be more fun.

Next cue: Weddings (Congratulations to my niece, Sigrid, and Allan.  That was one beautiful wedding in Tagaytay).  Rachel Getting Married  (2008) is the last important movie in recent memory that's wedding-themed.  Loved Anne Hathaway there.  The film is raw, real, un-sentimental and has loads of charm.  But dizzyingly hand-held.  It’s like watching a long wedding video done by an amateur photographer.  I want my movies shot on tripods or some sort of stable mechanism.  That’s why I prefer My Best Friend’s Wedding.  No great shakes, really.  Weekends ought to be relaxing.