A kiss is just a kiss but if it is done by the scrumptious pair of Enchong Dee and Erich Gonzales, it ends up being an earth shuddering moment.
I've been watching movies at theaters for a long time, but the Cinema One Originals screening of Paano Ko Sasabihin? is one of a few times I've heard the audience loudly swooned in unison. Moviegoers strongly reacted to the initial kissing scene between Mike (Enchong Dee) and Erhyl (Erich Gonzales). I knew that both young stars are popular but I never expected that kind of intense reaction from fans.
Television writer Erhyl is a regular commuter of the Light Railway Transit. Just like Betsy Rallos of Now That I Have You, Erhyl is always on the lookout for her crush. She have been eyeing him long enough to know that he is deaf-mute. The ice was broken when she thanked him. How? It turns out that Erhyl knows a bit of sign language. Her brother is also deaf-mute.
The main problem of Erhyl becomes how to tell to her new friend, Mike, that she is not deaf-mute. The pretty lass feels dirty for deceiving him. The young man though has a secret of his own.
The fifth edition of the Cinema One Originals film festival is not as breathtaking as the torrid kiss of Mike and Erhyl. As expected, Wanted: Border romped off with most of the major prizes. It is a sign of the festival's relatively weak slate that no film got the first runner-up award or the so-called jury prize.
However, Paano Ko Sasabihin? nabbed a special mention from the film festival jurors led by film critic Rolando Tolentino. The average romance film was also selected as winner of the Audience Choice award. If you ignore the idiotic root of the film's main conflict, then this film will be a pleasant ride with a delectable screen presence of Gonzales. It is no wonder then that Dee gave his growling best in their memorable kissing scene.
Television station TV5 screens local independent films every Wednesday night at 9 pm. One of the best films shown in October 2009 is Khavn de la Cruz’s Paalam Aking Bulalakaw (Goodbye My Shooting Star).
So far, this is the only film of Khavn that I truly love. Yes, that's the proper term: love. This film deals with all permutations of that powerful four-letter word. This is also an ode to the people, food, icons, and landmarks of the University of the Philippines. And, it took an Atenean to show the charms of the national university.
Just what it is in the waters of Ateneo? Brilliant Atenean filmmakers Khavn and John Torres create unconventional films (Paalam Aking Bulalakaw and Todo Todo Teros) that make you fall in love, or if you’re already in love, will make you love more. They blend picturesque poems with poetic pictures. They conjure images of pretty, smart ladies in their stories. If John had Russian student Olga, then Khavn has Pinay actress Ana Maria.
Ana Maria (played by Meryll Soriano) is a frustrated violin player still hurting from her break-up with an American boyfriend. She meets up with friend K one afternoon because it was getting to be a bore at home. The duo starts their tour of the University of the Philippines at Sunken Garden.
A cool, loony optometrist teases K about his crush for Ana. He answers that having a crush is against his religion. It had been years but K wasn’t ready to reveal his feelings for Ana. Not yet, anyway.
The young man drops subtle hints by bringing up the subject of love frequently. He asks friends what they thought about love. Egay states that sex is a better trip than love. Elmo says love is an amalgam of hate, lust, and sex. Ana opines that love is sadness and happiness in one person.
But, for K, love is Ana. This unrequited love of K shows up in his heart-wrenching songs and poems. And, boy, are they potent! Songs dealt with shooting stars, lonely moon, wanting, and eternal devotion. On the other hand, poems tackled endless waiting, love letters, and goodbyes.
This extraordinary film shows the wildly romantic side of Khavn. A devastating blend of hardcore mushy songs and heart-core poems will also bring out the hopeless romantic in you. Sheesh! Just when you thought you were over that special someone, this film will make you pine for her/him.
So, still interested in this achingly beautiful film? Proceed with caution. You’ve been warned!
Riding through the streets of Metro Manila, an observant commuter will notice something amiss. Once in a while, manhole covers on the streets and steel railings from flyovers disappear. Blame it on the rising number of desperate bakal men and boys. Several of them filch and steal every possible metal scrap they can lay their hands on. These items will later be sold at dishonest junk shops.
Bakal Boys starts with a pair of kids, Utoy and Bungal, running away from a security guard. They have just stolen some metal scraps from a ship. Just when the security guard comes close to apprehending the pair, the duo dives into the polluted waters of Manila Bay. Most of the time, though, Utoy and the other kids get their scraps the hard, legit way. The poor kids scour the dirty waters looking for metal pieces. They are expert divers because they live in the nearby Baseco compound in Tondo.
Director Ralston Jover utilized real-life children metal divers from the slum area of Baseco. The film takes a look at how they go about doing their work. The brazen way in which the kids take to the waters is simply unnerving.
Like a well-coordinated platoon of soldiers, they pursue their mission of retrieving an anchor with aplomb. Each one of them has a respective task to do. The divers plumb the murky depths. Some cook rice. A few youngsters fetch a banca for their ride back to the compound. The junk shop owner shortchanges the group. The kids can not complain because of the owner's threat of charging them with theft. After settling the transaction, the kids realize that one of them is missing in action. The loss of Bungal becomes a catalyst for the redemption of Utoy.
Bakal Boys does a neat job of essaying the lives of children metal divers. Jover's direction is generally good but some scenes with the kids are stagey. The junk shop scene shows the kids scratching their heads in unison. There are also scenes in which the kid actors anticipate their dialogue cues.
Nevertheless, Bakal Boys is a remarkable debut feature film. It may not be on par with the 'real-time' films of Brillante Mendoza and Jeffrey Jeturian but it is better than most mainstream films out there. Jover has the chops to make excellent films in the future. His earlier movie, Marlon, won the best documentary award at the 10th Cinemanila International Film Festival.
If you want a more insightful look at children metal divers, then check out the short film Batang Pier. The documentary film, directed by La Salle students Camille Adraincem, Paola Recuenco, and Michelle Saquido, examines in depth the problems and aspirations of the young metal divers of Manila's South Harbor.
This is one of the films championed by the late film critic Alexis Tioseco. In response to Tioseco’s wish for more people to see the movie, film critic Francis ‘Oggs’ Cruz chose this film as his Critic’s Pick selection during the Cinemanila International Film Festival 2009. The movie is a good choice because it is a pretty decent film and is rarely exhibited.
Sure, the picks of film critics Bien Lumbera and Roland Tolentino are better films (Serbis and Engkwentro) but those films have been well-exhibited. How I wished the two Urian members chose little-seen gems such as the Urian Best Picture nominee Hunghong Sa Yuta or Hospital Boat. The latter films, both of which I failed to see, had one-time only screenings at Cinemalaya festivals.
When Timawa Meets Delgado is still funny and wacky after all these years. My second viewing of the Gibraltar film highlights major assets and reveals a few defects as well. The rousing soundtrack, with songs by Mista Blaze, Tinug ni Nanay, and Color It Red, keeps things perky when segments fail such as the conversation between filmmaker Jun Delgado and his lover.
The segment I disliked most is the ambush interview with two young girls. Director Ray Gibraltar coaxes the girls to give answers that fit in with the film’s subjects, which are nursing and the lure of working abroad. The segment falls flat because of awkwardness. It contrasts differently from the well-edited interviews of nursing students.
The editing of the film is a mixed bag. The segment featuring the video projects of Delgado takes up a lot of time. It became dragging after a while. There seems to be funny things embedded in the video sampler but are just too deep or personal for ordinary moviegoers to decipher. I had more of a blast with the sampling of the works of award-winning gay poet Ruben Timawa. The gayspeak translation of Timawa’s poem ‘The Pig’ continues to bring out the guffaws. That alone is already worth the price of a ticket.
I love the humor, silliness, and inventiveness of the film. It is a unique and crazy hodgepodge of serious documentary footages, exhilarating music videos, penetrating interviews, and hilarious poem reading.
Special thanks to Oggs for using his clout to get this one-of-a-kind movie exhibited on a big screen.
October 24, 2009. Several malls observed United Nations' Day by holding events. Some of you may have celebrated their birthdays or anniversaries on that day. For a dozen or so moviegoers at Fully Booked's U-View, they spent half of that special day watching Lav Diaz's majestic story, Evolution of a Filipino Family.
It was a mini-celebration of United Nations' Day at U-View. An award-winning Filipino filmmaker, a Filipino-Chinese film critic, a Filipino-Japanese female scriptwriter, a middle-aged Caucasian male, and a smattering of local cinephiles patiently sat through the 11-hour epic film.
11-hour film!?! Who would have thought of doing that?
Evolution of a Filipino Family is epic storytelling at its best. Only a genius like Lav Diaz can consistently create films that are more than 5 hours in length, and win acclaim and awards in the process. This film is Diaz’s response to Lino Brocka’s dictum of creating films for fellow Filipinos. It is a film in which local moviegoers will identify themselves with the aspirations and travails of the Filipino family.
The story initially focuses on a rural family. Three female siblings take on farm jobs because their father was incarcerated for theft. As the film progresses, we get to know of two more families. There is the family of treasure hunters in Benguet. A father and his adopted sons try their luck looking for gold. The third family is a fictional and dysfunctional one. The radio-based family is made up of a lecherous stepfather, his wife, and his stepdaughter. Just as the family of treasure hunters keeps track of a favorite radio program, the audience also anticipates the continuing drama and adventures of the three sisters and the gold prospectors. The storytelling is so intense and gripping, you will not notice the minutes quickly passing by.
Lav Diaz utilized various tricks to keep the audience wide awake. He inserted footages of voice talents doing work for a melodramatic radio program. The loud, booming voices and emotional faces keep the audience enthralled. There are also footages of grave political mistakes captured on video. Watching this film is probably your only chance to see unexpurgated video versions of the Ninoy Aquino assassination and the Mendiola massacre of farmers in 1987. These powerful footages were stunning.
But, ultimately, the harrowing tales of the families are the ones that will keep the viewers glued to the screen until the end. There is a killing here and a massacre there. There are incarcerations. And, then, there are those family reunions. There will be a happy ending for one family and a sad ending for another family.
As the end credits roll on, the cinephiles lingered. When the lights came back, a spontaneous, overwhelming applause erupted in the small room. The audience obviously loved the film. Almost half of the attendees that night came back the next day to watch another Lav Diaz film, Agonistes. That is the effect of a Lav Diaz film. Once you've seen an epic film by Diaz, you'll be begging for more.
Evolution of a Filipino Family is a highly recommended film. It may have a problem with synchronized dialogues but it is a film worth celebrating and worth allotting 12 hours or so of your precious time.
The Cinemanila group must be commended for exhibiting three Lav Diaz films during the festival in October 2009. Now, the question on local cinephiles’ minds is ‘when is the much-awaited screening of Batang West Side?’
Tasked to create a short film for an omnibus project of the Jeonju International Film Festival (JIFF), Lav Diaz came up with the 59-minute film, Butterflies Have No Memories. He is always pushing his films to the limit. A minute more and it would no longer have been considered a short film. However, the JIFF organizers trimmed it down to 40 minutes in order to make it fit in with two other short films. The longer version is available in the DVD box set released by JIFF.
In the extremely loaded film Butterflies Have No Memories, a bearded man named Ferdinand ‘Pedring’ Belleza is yearning for the return of mining in his town. He worked as chief security officer of a multinational mining company for decades. When it closed down, he lost a well-paying job, as well as his family.
The long-legged beauty Martha is a scion of the mining owners. The family closed the mining company after toxins heavily polluted the river. Their hasty departure turned the former prosperous place into a ghost town.
The return of fair-skinned Martha fuels irritations among local residents. She is likened to the so-called snow from Canada (mine tailings) that triggers skin rashes among the residents. Her former playmates, Carol and Willy, no longer have time to accommodate the young Canadian lady. They are so busy doing household chores or eking out a living. It is ironic that Martha, named after the Biblical character known for her hospitality, is treated badly during her visit.
There is a tinge of envy for the rich, single, and carefree visitor. Some people are more hostile. Pedring hatches a plan to kidnap Martha. His love for money reigns supreme over memories of good times with the family of Martha.
The short film alludes to the destructive effects of mining in Marinduque. Mine tailings caused the biological death of Boac River in 1996. The mining company left the place after decades of operations. Subsequent proposals to re-open the mining site are repelled by the Church and environmentalists.
The hellish effects of mining/treasure hunting were earlier tackled by Diaz in his majestic epic story Ebolusyon Ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino. A female character from the film admonishes her husband to give up mining. 'It is hell,' said the sight-impaired woman. Indeed, the mining area became a burial ground for gold prospectors and treasure hunters. Diaz will return once more to the issue of treasure hunting in a film project titled Agonistes.
Butterflies Have No Memories contains elements one would expect from a Lav Diaz film. Shot in bleak monochrome, the abbreviated film includes a couple of long takes. The lush ambient sound is also here along with scenes featuring animals/insects. I always look forward to the last two elements, ambient sound and inclusion of animals. They play a big part in making Diaz’s films so natural and realistic.
What I didn’t expect is the peculiar, dream-like ending. It features three adult men donning Moriones masks. Their epiphanic encounter with a swarm of butterflies triggers a change of heart for one of them. The sublime last shot is that of a prostrated young man in the middle of the forest while a pair of Roman soldiers looks on.
Lav Diaz is truly a great filmmaker and storyteller, equally adept with short features and epic stories. Butterflies Have No Memories is his best short film so far and one of his most symbol-laden films. It is a wonderful amalgam of mundane and insane images.
There is a little-known Serbian comic film titled Who’s Singing Over There? (Slobodan Sijan, 1980) that has a similar premise: a passenger bus, a long journey, a cast of disharmonious travelers who must keep their sufferance. There, too, is the star-crossed destination. The similarities are striking, but they remain on paper. Armando Lao’s Biyaheng Lupa outstrips its antecedent: it's not a simple account of claustrophobic travel, but a poetic, disembodied journey of voices.
Biyaheng Lupa is not so much a road movie, a journey to appointed places, as it is a trip into inner landscapes. Mouths barely open. Like telepaths, we hear the passengers think and feel inwardly, all their psychic activity audible on the soundtrack – making us privy to dramatic irony. Regrets, suspicions, disdains, fears, hopes, paranoias, desires, prejudices, the whote gamut: all feelings and senses oscillate in a steady stream-of-consciousness on this eventful bus ride. Travel has never been a more introspective activity. We don't get the impression of noise: the disembodied voices are devoid of ambient noise.
Lao’s characters strike close to Filipino homes and yet sound not too rehashed. Lao’s light satire sees them as caricatures caught in their funny and comical foibles. There is the man with the body odor who is unaware of it. This is complemented by a shadiness – pragmatic or opportunistic? – as he secretly wolfs down a wrapped espasol he finds under his seat. There is the multi-level marketer who dreams grand dreams of profits but is discomfited at every turn and finds no takers among a busload of streetwise passengers. His anti-cancer merchandise even gets him into trouble with the military.
There is the discreet, daydreaming cougar who is on her way to a tryst with her younger lover. Her thoughts of romance are broken as the town gossip has just come on board the bus. Her wariness turns to slight panic when she realizes that a picture of her lover and herself is missing. The gossip is an odd creature: a beautiful lady who is indeed profiled as a curiosity seeker. Yet her caviling instincts are balanced by her romantic thoughts for the ticket man on the bus.
They also come in parallels and polarities. The young text-mates, one of them a conflicted and secretive mute, who provide the aspect of puppy love. A homosexual and a good-looking teenager are cats and dogs. And this apparently involves thwarted sexual advances in the comfort room. A look into the hearts of a pair of old characters reveal checkered pasts, tinged with regrets and slight despair.
There are checkpoints, there are stopovers, there are drop-offs, along the way. But there are moments when the static nature of the mise-en-scene – mostly static framing of characters with just the dynamism of aural information – stagnates the flow of the film. Lao shifts gears with a song number, a chorus of the passengers with their teary-eyed plea for love or tenderness. Or understanding. I forget. Touching enough.
Biyaheng Lupa may not break new ground in film art, but there are few films that precede it in its use of the stream-of-consciousness as a narrative device. Fewer have even succeeded. Off-hand there are Resnais’s seminal Last Year at Marienbad and Gaspar Noe’sI Stand Alone, but Lao’s film can be said to be more ambitious. In his directorial debut, he attempts a subconscious portrait of an ensemble cast of characters. It takes some flair and some balls to even attempt it. And Lao has some success.
Biyaheng Lupa, in the end, however, is watered-down sociology, the sanitized fabric of the Filipino subconscious. The resulting portrait is not as raw, illogical and impressionistic as the Filipino psyche would have been. Still, this is one auspicious debut with moments of sheer cinematic beauty. Look for the butterfly floating through the bus, a lyrical moment that signals the uncertainty of this bus ride we call life.
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