Watching movies in Makati has become so unaffordable I want to fight back by boycotting the cinemas altogether. I choose to dust off my trusty player at home instead, and rent, rent, rent videos upon videos at P15 per. I can watch all the movies I have missed anytime I want, who needs cutting-edge resolution and sensurround?
Join me in the boycott. Here's the whole deal: You must be "low on dough" and you must NOT have a sex life.
In the Bedroom was easily my favorite among the bunch I was able to lay my hands on. (Is it getting obvious I like real-life dramas? Now kill me.) A domestic drama that reveals, slow by slow, the ugly, repressed and most-secret conflicts within the family, with the entry of a character outside the family as the catastrophic catalyst. I guess In the Bedroom is all about - hold your thesauri - inner sanctums being violated. Sissy Spacek and Marisa Tomei lead the rest of the cast in being unbelievably believable in their respective roles.
Room with a View I found a bit boring and annoying because I generally dislike symbolic scenes that are, in reality, implausible, if not impossible. Movies about real life should be downright real and this is the reason I got frustrated over Rebel without a Cause, as compared to, say, Saturday Night Fever. I believe works like E. M. Forster's masterpiece about expression and repression are better left read or staged than filmed. A Streetcar Named Desire is chockful of symbolisms, yes, but I don't remember any implausible scene. I will always have a problem with a scene like that of three naked men chasing each other in Room with a View. Why would two or three men who just met for the first time go giddy in split seconds and take a bath together like kids on excursion, and in the buff yet, when they weren't shown to have had a sex EB (eyeball after a round of sex chat)? Even if they were British, that still is crazy. Daniel Day Lewis, though, is so brilliant here just like I expected.
Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal runs at a sloth's pace, just like sex, lies and videotape, and it feels more artsy indeed than pretentious. This movie is not a movie. I guess that's how I should put it without ruining the suspense to this day-in-the-life slice-of-crazy-life in Hollywood. Brad Pitt stars as himself here and David Duchovny doesn't get to act at all, save for one vital appendage. You review this kind of movie by not reviewing it.
Don't get shocked by my choices here for I included in the lineup Peter Weir's Gallipoli, an Australian staple in the art-house circuit. It's largely an antiwar propaganda movie which traces the beginnings of the "ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) tradition" and almost feels like a documentary of the defeat of the Australian contingent at the Egyptian border during World War I. The event is said to be Australia's version of what Alamo is to America. Starring Mel Gibson and Mark Lee when they still looked virginal, this movie is said to be anti-Hollywood in all respects, and I can only agree - a war film with some amount of brain. It's also a story of male friendship at a time when brotherhood bondings were not yet suspected of anything. It's also about the supposed stupidity of war, starting from the draftees' silly reasons for enlisting, to the tragic waste of the beauty and promise of youth.
I also saw Big Fish, a surreal movie about fathers and the tall tales they tell about themselves esp. as told to their sons. Save for the distracting mix of Scottish, British and American accents, this is a thoroughly enjoyable, surprise-filled, modern-day Wizard of Oz, which, however, takes a little more minutes longer in the end than is necessary. I couldn't complain much more than that, though, and I tend to complain a lot. Wait, I didn't get why it's Big Fish.
Meirelles' Cidade de Deus (City of God) is one slam-bang film that takes too much liberty with the presentation of a story but never, never, irritates. It only annoys like a gadfly in so far as cold facts and harsh realities annoy, if not depress. It's like reading James Hamilton-Patterson's Ghosts of Manila and watching a Lino Brocka social commentary. City of God, however, takes Lino Brocka's Third Word "neorealism" a step further. At the end of the film, when one's energy is just about exhausted from all that violence (isn't a life of violence tiring?), one finally agrees with this movie's vision -- this is about gangster life as seen from a news photographer's zoom lens. Life's extreme ugliness told beautifully, stylishly.
Now hold on to your galoshes, coz this one is jaw-dropping: I capped my personal filmfest lineup by making an hommage to the local film industry. I watched Milan.
Now if I haven't yet reached this level of pomposity in my life as a so-called cineaste, maybe I would've said Milan is excellent. Unfortunately for this local effort, I have watched far too many foreign art films. I was disappointed with the way the director succumbed to commercial temptations in handling the sex scene (awkward, awful) and dramatic moments (a tad too melodramatic). But I can forgive Milan for these twin mortal trespasses because it tells something new -- the depravities migrant workers go through behind the backdrop of tourist-trappy Italy's grandeur and the main characters' unseemly gorgeousness - and it tells this facet of Filipino life in the context of an atypical, passably conceivable love story, interspersed with documentary-like shots that made sense.
I've watched three more movies but these don't deserve mention.
Posts
