[Cinema One Originals 2019] O

The first 10 or so minutes of O is filled with a frenetic energy that's rare in contemporary cinema, reminiscent of the first five or so minutes of Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive. But that energy quickly dissipates over its run, thanks to the fact that the film isn't actually finished. I actually managed to watch the film before it was taken off cinemas and it was not pretty to hear. Entire minutes went by without dialogue, music or any sound at all. The plot started making less and less sense as time went on, and when it ended, the film was a shadow of what it had promised in its first few minutes.

I had not planned to review this movie at all, but then the filmmakers "fixed" O and re-released it in cinemas a few days later. To be fair, this version does adequately address all the audio problems (at least for the most part) and considering that, in the words of the director himself, half of the film was not shot, the resulting product is remarkable, at the very least coherent.

That said, while enjoyable, O still feels largely unfinished. The story introduces and abandons many of its storylines with little to no fanfare, and the non-linear storytelling does not help in this regard. It's regrettable, but that's what happens with tight filmmaking schedules. One wonders what would've happened to the film had it been greenlit outside the festival system, but that in itself is a whole other monster: it's doubtful given the mainstream studio system we have in place right now that a film like O would have been greenlit in the first place.

[Cinema One Originals 2019] Metamorphosis, Lucid, Yours Truly, Shirley

Films or works of art that discuss or portray intersex individuals are rare. Perhaps the first of its kind in the country, J.E. Tiglao's Metamorphosis is a tender coming of age film about one such person's journey to discovering their identity.

The film does its best to be informative, though the proceedings sometimes follow a conventional melodrama (this is felt even more by the end scenes.) As a side note, perhaps partly because it was originally intended for Cinemalaya, the film feels like a Cinemalaya film stuck in another film festival.

Regardless, it's surprisingly tender and sensitive towards its subject matter. Even though it shows the long road we all have to take as a society in accepting our intersex brothers and sisters, the film shows that in your heart and mine, in the hearts of parents and siblings who love unconditionally, in the hearts of friends who find common ground (or just empathy), there is room for acceptance and love. 

NOTE: Some spoilers for Lucid are present.

Alessandra de Rossi plays Annika, an accountant who uses lucid dreaming to live an idealized version of reality. In Annika's dreams, she can snag the guy of her dreams and she can eat in fancy restaurants that she has no realistic chance of affording on her lower-middle class salary. It's all good until she meets Xavi (JM de Guzman), a mysterious man who intrudes on her dreams.

One would assume that this becomes a romantic movie where Xavi and Annika hook up. But Lucid isn't a romantic love story. I'd also argue that it isn't exactly about dreaming, either. Perhaps one would argue that the film's point is how some people use dreams as escape, or how reality is better, even though it's not  our personal ideal. That's only partially true. As Annika gains stability in her life during the second act of the film, if that notion held true, then she would be happy. 

She is not.

When Annika gains what she desires - a home, a family, companionship - she finds her dreams and reality merging, and it does nothing for her. If dreams achieved in reality become true, what then is the source of her discontent? Lucid is a film that tries to document a growing sense of loneliness that is not focused towards any one person or thing, but towards something bigger, something harder to define. It is numbness, grief and discontent towards a world whose reality has been overtaken by what society imposes on it. And that thing that society imposes, that "reality" where we suffer day by day to systems we cannot control, driven by our need to acquire capital and survive - why is that our ideal? Annika only begins to achieve a sort of peace with herself when she uses her dreams not as an instrument of escape, but as an instrument of introspection.

In terms of what it tries to say, Lucid is unlike anything I've ever seen before, and while the film is far from perfect, it is perhaps one of my favorite movies of the year.

Like last year's Pang-MMK, Yours Truly, Shirley doesn't quite feel like a film that belongs in the lineup of this festival. By itself, it's a mainstream flavored, lighthearted film about a woman who thinks her deceased husband has been reborn in the body of a popular idol.

It's occasionally cute, and Regine Velasquez-Alcasid does the best she can do with her character, considering how she was written, but it really doesn't elevate itself to more than just fluff. The film doesn't convince us why Shirley is so hung up on her husband, or why she is so determined to revive him in another's form.

There's something potentially interesting here, in that the film could show us how and why we attach ourselves to pop culture figures and icons, or perhaps an exploration of fandom. The ideas are there, but the film doesn't quite take that extra step.

[Cinema One Originals 2019] Utopia, Tia Madre, Tayo Muna Habang Hindi Pa Tayo

In the world of Dustin Celestino's Utopia, the Philippines is much like what we are right now: corruption, toxicity and bad behavior is systemic, their malignant roots invading everything. It's far removed from the modern definition of a Utopia, or even the utopia described in Thomas More's book. Utopia the film tells several stories, each connected in one way to all the others, a crime-riddled clusterfuck waiting to happen.

And as the plot threads begin to intersect and people start dying, things get pretty engaging. It's the kind of crime thriller that serves a certain audience, and understandably the sheer volume of narrative threads can be read as excessive by some. Not for this reviewer. The tone is loud, edgy, confrontational, but that's kind of the point.

A capable crime drama such as this could've been adequate by itself, but the ending of Utopia poses this question: with how things went in this movie, what if this crapsack world really was a Utopia, or at least, an idealized version of what we normally expect? What if, in the real world, things were far more cynical? The film then poses a challenge to us to help bring forth such a "Utopia," an ideal that may be far more pragmatic and closer to home, but an ideal that we can all attain by challenging the system in our own small ways.

The coming of age film is built upon a certain translation of reality through innocent eyes, filtered and reinterpreted by a child's imagination. Often in such films we see heavy, darker things made light or inconsequential because the witness, almost always a child who doesn't know better, cannot process these ideas properly. But what if that filter creates monsters?

In Tia Madre, Camille (Jana Agoncillo) is tormented by her unhinged mother (Cherie Gil.) Camille believes her mother has been replaced by an otherworldly creature, but it's unclear if her thoughts are real or if she's just making it up; the film keeps it a mystery and gives us the choice whether to believe Camille or not.

It's abstract at times, flavored with fantastical imagery bordering on horror, a freakish version of Nervous Translation. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jana Agoncillo was the lead on that film as well. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. But ultimately as the film reaches its symbolic conclusion, there's a feeling of release, even though the film continues to hold out from giving any answers to the bitter end.

The protagonists of Denise O'Hara's Tayo Muna Habang Hindi Pa Tayo treat their relationship as a sort of Schrodinger's Cat, in that if they don't observe it (i.e. acknowledge its existence), they can live in blissful ambiguity all they want. This tentativeness of a non-relationship feels safe, even though it's tempting to just go and take the step forward.

That's pretty much the premise of the movie, with both characters trying (and mostly failing) to reconcile the nature of their relationship with each other for the next hour and a half. They're both deeply flawed, and may come across as unlikeable to some, but their neuroses stem from major trauma from the past or from a stubborn attitude to love that doesn't exactly help the proceedings. 

The film is staged nicely at parts, but it doesn't quite reach the romantic mumblecore heights of its sister film That Thing Called Tadhana. It's a capable romantic film, even though it could have benefited from establishing the odds and ends of the (non) relationship a little bit more.

[Cinema One Originals 2019] Sila Sila, Shorts Program

A broken door serves as a motif in Giancarlo Abrahan's Sila Sila, in that it signifies an inability to move on, or a refusal to confront and acknowledge closure. Its main characters leave and return like planets in orbit, passing close to each other every so often, but never truly leaving. It's perhaps one of Abrahan's most personal films, and also one of his lightest.

As a slice of life, the film is lush and feels lived in. One feels like these characters are our friends, and we're in on their conversations, privy to some of their most personal thoughts. It's a testament to the film's writing and direction - Abrahan really nails the kind of film he wants to have.

As a character study, the film is solid, even though it feels a bit light compared to his previous two films. It examines how we find comfort in familiarity, how our bonds with someone else tether us to them, and how not moving on - an old fridge left where it is, a door kept broken - is still the best answer.

we want short shorts Cinema One Originals short shorts reviews 2019 edition

Last 2, 3, 4 is perhaps the first Filipino film I've ever seen, short or long, about intercollegiate cheerdance. It portrays the cheerdancer as a student athlete, both struggling with academics, their passion, and their everyday lives. However the conflict isn't as deeply felt as I feel it should be, and it rushes towards a standard conclusion.

Sa Among Agwat is a festival darling, and seeing it for the umpteenth time doesn't take away its emotional power.

Ang Lumunod Sa Atin tries to tie together guilt and trauma with something otherworldly, but it stumbles along the way by overstating its point, missing its cathartic moment thanks to tedium.

There's a clever metafictional technique employed by The Slums that will work on foreign audiences reliant on subtities: it, in addition to the whole film, is commentary on how "poverty porn" is constructed by filmmakers for their own needs, while neglecting to humanize the struggles of the poor they claim to serve.

Sa Gitna ng Lungsod begins with a conversation that wouldn't feel out of place on a contemporary facebook thread or political discussion, placing doubt on experiences felt by others for the sake of a political agenda. But further events, while on the nose, put a hamper on those notions, giving the terror and trauma of the Martial Law era a sense of palpability.

And finally we have Ang Gasgas na Plaka ni Lolo Bert, a sweet tale about an old man who finds companionship (and even love?) in an unlikely place. It's a cute, well-acted, sentimental piece, with just the right amounts of comedy and fuzziness.

[Cinema One Originals 2019] The Lighthouse (opening film)

note: spoilers present. 

Nothing else matches the phantasmagoria of Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse. Set in a remote lighthouse somewhere off the coast of New England, two men (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) are tasked with taking care of the place. However, as the storm comes and with any chance of relief becoming more remote, madness begins to set in.

The film can be interpreted in different ways: as a retelling of the Promethean myth, where seagulls replace eagles, where light replaces the knowledge of fire. It can be seen as a treatise on loneliness, on our need and capacity to bond, on masculinity, with the lighthouse serving as a phallic beacon to homoerotic tendencies. It can be seen as the capacity of workers to tolerate labor under unjust conditions, with any promises of hope or compensation dashed by the treachery of man, leading to bloody revolution.

Whether the madness is just that, or a function of something bigger and more mysterious, something Lovecraftian in scope, only we can decide. It's a mesmerizing puzzle that begs to be solved, but eludes concrete meaning.

2019 Spooky Spooktactular reviews: Santigwar, Hellcome Home

Santigwar is about a bunch of Aswang and the people who hunt them, much like a low budget, low quality version of Underworld made with a budget of 25 pesos. Instead of focusing on this generational supernatural war, the film elects to focus on the efforts of four horny bois as they try (and fail) to bang the women they're associated with. It's not hard to see why, since Audrey Miles is one of the Aswang.

The film doesn't make a lot of sense, and there's a bit of silliness along the way. The horny bois come across a tree with ominous symbols carved on the surface. One of those ominous scary symbols is a Star of David. Apparently the film is warning us against the Jewish. In another scene, a blatantly scary old woman encounters the boy gang, none of whom find this development scary at all.

That's too bad, because Santigwar isn't exactly Joven Tan's worst film (it's probably not even his worst horror film, considering Otlum exists). But there's a laziness to the whole thing that turned me off completely from it.

Let me start off by saying Bobby Bonifacio Jr.'s Hellcome Home has a terrible first act. Bonifacio has apparently not learned anything from the making of his previous film, Hospicio, where an attempt to build dread is done by chaining together several jump scares in a row (sometimes, clustered together in the span of five minutes). Nothing about it is scary or dreadful, and the film made me disengage from it after ten minutes.

Once the second act starts, things get a lot more interesting. It flashes back to the past, and its own self-contained story, about a family that tears itself apart thanks to its own neuroses, is quite engaging. This part could stand up on its own, and this segment presented by itself would have been better than what we got.

The third act tries to recontextualize the horror of the first act. It doesn't make the first act any better, but it at least justifies its existence. There are a few great, tense scenes here, and the hyperactive preference towards jump cuts is all but absent.

It's better than Santigwar, but it's deeply flawed in its own way. I'd recommend it over the other film, but hey, Sadako's still showing this week too.

Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2019: Human Lost

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human is considered one of the most highly regarded Japanese novels. For the 110th year of Dazai's birth, Polygon Pictures (the studio behind Blame! and the Godzilla trilogy) makes Human Lost, a sci-fi flavored retelling of the original novel. This is not the first time that the novel has been adapted; the film has been adapted in film more than once, as part of an anime series, and even into several manga.

There's considerable worldbuilding behind the film: in the near future, disease has virtually been made extinct thanks to a society-wide health care system. This has led to some unforseen side effects, and the divide between rich and poor has only widened thanks to the corporatization of the system.

Despite the sheer volume and quality of care taken in crafting the film's dystopian world, the film does not do anything with it and the proceedings come across as pretty standard. Its hero, named after Dazai's novel's own protagonist, is as run of the mill as they come, a 'chosen one' fated to change the world forever. It's not exactly detrimental to the experience, but one hopes the story matched the ambition of the film's worldbuilding.

Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2019: A Beloved Wife, We Are Little Zombies, Flowers and Rain, Motel Acacia

Shin Adachi made waves in 2014 when he wrote the screenplay of the award winning 100 Yen Love, eventually serving as the country's submission to the best foreign film category of that year's Oscars. He has since directed his own feature film, 14 That Night, which premiered at the Tokyo IFF 2 years later. His second directorial feature, A Beloved Wife, is far more autobiographical compared to his earlier films - it's based on Adachi's novel Chibusa ni Ka. 

It's about a struggling screenwriter, Gota (Gaku Hamada) who finally catches a big break. He decides to go on a trip to the countryside for some inspiration, and brings along his daughter and his cantankerous wife Chika (Asami Mizukawa). The two of them don't exactly get along, and their personalities clash repeatedly. Both husband and wife have their frustrations: Chika hates her husband's lack of assertiveness and overall laziness, and Gota is frustrated by a lack of sexual contact. They probably should've separated ages ago, but there's something holding them together, something that - in spite of all the frustration and setbacks, is the basis of their unconventional love.

The casting in this film is perfect; Hamada really is suited to pathetic loser roles, a perfect mix of weirdly cute and pathetic at the same time. Mizukawa towers over him physically and in terms of presence, making her all the more imposing. Their interactions are great, and it felt a lot more natural and a lot less shrill compared to another Tokyo IFF film with similar themes, Miyamoto.

Makoto Nagahisa's We Are Little Zombies is a peculiar, formally creative exploration of grief and finding a place in this world, of growing up and the fickle nature of showbusiness.

Patterned like an oldschool videogame from the Famicom era, it charts how four children, now newly orphaned, processes their emotions (or lack thereof.) Searching for mementoes become quests. Defeating a boss means emotional catharsis. Upon completion of their individual quests, the four of them find solace in each other's lack of emotion and (what else?) form a band. Art is created from this peculiar lack of pain. But the pain is really there all along, and our intrepid group comes to learn that over the course of the film.

The film uses a lot of narrative techniques - continuous shots, RPG-style birds eye view shots, sprite graphics, surrealism, stop motion animation, split screens - but the real emotional resonance comes from the contrast of these scenes to something quieter and more somber, glimpses of real life events that break through these childrens' fantasies, hazy memories of the past, distorted by perceptions and time.

Based on rapper Seeda's album of the same name, Hana to Ame (Flowers and Rain) reads on the surface like a Japanese rendition of 8 Mile, where an aspiring rapper (who grew up in London, then moved to Japan) strives to be the very best at what he does.

The journey to that destination isn't easy, however, as the film detours into a long sequence where our protagonist deals drugs and gets into a lot of shady things before finding his groove.

A good rap song has a smooth rhythm and flow; good guidelines to abide by whether one is making a song or a film. But Flowers and Rain struggles to find that flow in its first half, stopping abruptly before potentially great moments. We hardly ever hear our protagonist rap at all until the very end, which would have sold him as someone competent and worthy of making it in the rap world. Instead, it's hard to empathize with him up until a certain point in the film. It's a decent effort, but it comes out a bit short in this case.

Set in a hypothetical dystopian USA, where Trump's vision of the Wall is a living reality and immigrants are on the run everywhere, Motel Acacia is a tense horror-thriller in the vein of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). However, while it does tackle interesting concepts, and while the creature effects and production design of the film are top notch, the film's story doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny.

The film addresses issues of immigration, the effect of colonialist masters on our psyche, how we sacrifice our humanity for the sake of our loved ones, and at the film's root, our capacity to empathize with other people. This is a film very much rooted in the Trumpian era - his voice, or at least an approximation of it, is heard everywhere. Callousness and a tendency to dehumanize trickles down from the top to the bottom, from colonizer to colonized, one link in the hierarchical chain to another, until servant emulates the master too much and becomes him.

But the story of Motel Acacia works better as metaphors rather than anything realistic. Why are these people so desperate to cross the border, even though it's assumed that opportunities on the other side are non existent? Why did the motel owner do the thing he did? How could a woman survive a self inflicted wound that would have otherwise killed her? If you get into the details, a lot of the film doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Regardless, the film is a fine effort from all involved, and considering the quality of the design work at play, it's something to be proud of, at least in that regard.

Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2019: Ultra Q in 4K, Miyamoto

A lot of Filipinos might be familiar with the tokusatsu series Ultraman, where a giant space alien karate chops other space aliens for the sake of mankind. However, Ultraman is actually the second Ultra TV series ever produced; the first series is a strange kaiju/Outer Limits/Twilight Zone hybrid called Ultra Q. Running for just about six months in the mid 1960's, the series was groundbreaking in the way it did special effects, blending cinematic techniques with TV, as well as pulpy, radically different storytelling, especially compared to the Jidaigeki dramas of the time.

Tsuburaya productions showed several episodes of Ultra Q, restored and enhanced to 4K definition, in one of the festival sections. Each episode is followed by a documentary discussing the impact of Ultra Q and anecdotes about the production of the series. The interviews are varied and interesting: it appears that most of the staff of Ultra Q were young people in their 20s or 30s, and most had come from the movie industry.

As for the episodes themselves, I managed to catch episode 19 of the series, Challenge from the Year 2020. It's a strange, body snatchers-flavored episode that is equal parts silly and awesome.  It also features a neat monster whose design is top notch even among other kaiju of the era. Audience members were given a pamphlet promoting a DVD set of the whole series restored to super high definition; one hopes English subtitles are part of the offering.

The 2019 film Miyamoto (also known as Miyamoto kara, kimi e) is actually the sequel to a TV mini-series of the same name, which is itself a manga adaptation of a Hideki Arai 1990's manga. This was a fact that I didn't know going into this film, but aside from a few side characters and background information on the protagonists, one can get by with just this film.

Miyamoto the movie flits between past and present - beginning with the titular character (Sosuke Ikematsu) bloody and missing a few teeth, and bringing his girlfriend Yasuko (Yu Aoi) to his parents with the intention to marry. There's more: Yasuko is pregnant. But there's more to this than meets the eye: flashbacks gradually show the sequence of events that lead to this event, and things are far more darker than it seems.

If you've heard of Hideki Arai somewhere before in this blog, you're right: Ara's other well-known work is Itoshi no Irene, whose movie adaptation released a few years ago (the two movies even share the same production companies.) Like Itoshi no Irene, Miyamoto brings with it the same problems as its sister manga: dated views of masculinity and poor, even cruel treatment of its female characters. It's sure to polarize audiences, especially non-Japanese audiences who are unfamiliar with the source material. Interestingly, the film subverts the trope of the white knight doing everything for the girl he loves: in one revelatory moment, Miyamoto states that everything he does in the film is for his own selfish desire for justice.

It's bound to make more than a few people uneasy, and as with most of Arai's works, unease is the main tool of Miyamoto. The film is shrill, violent, messy, even gory. The protagonists are good people deep inside, but they are heavily flawed, emotionally messed up individuals. These are exceptional performances, especially Yu Aoi who really breaks out of her comfort zone for some intense emotional and physical scenes.

Strangely enough, Miyamoto ends in a hopeful note, still done in the loud and screamy tone that it has sustained for the past two hours (neighborhood associations in real life would've thrown a fit by this time for all the noise). It's a hard pill to swallow, but there's something interesting in there for those who can stomach it.