Third World Romance, a review

 

For Alvin (Carlo Aquino) and Bree (Charlie Dizon), every day is a struggle. In the opening sequence of Dwein Baltazar's Third World Romance, this anxiety manifests itself in a restless camera and a single take. There are no cuts, no breaks; you have to be hustling or you risk losing money. There's no time for anything else.

But of course something does happen, and Alvin and Bree make the time for it. They slowly but surely form a relationship together, one that's filled with the well worn but welcome tropes that we've been privy to for as long as cinema has been a thing. But there are no trips to exotic, faraway lands, only familiar, humdrum places. There are no rich future-in laws opposed to the union, just normal people living their own lives. There are no fancy meals, not even at a Samgyupsal place - only the illusion of one, albeit one that is no less 'real' to our couple.

And as they try to navigate through their situation together, even as society is unfair to them, all they want is each other's happiness.  But in these times, even falling in love feels like a radical act. Those at the top would prefer it if those at the bottom would stay divided, fixated on their own survival. At first it would seem that way, and many local films have ended pragmatically (should I say cynically?) But the working class man's strength is his solidarity. One cannot fight for their rights alone. In this film, it works both in terms of Alvin and Bree's relationship and their relationship with their fellow employees.

And as such, for Alvin and Bree, to love despite the odds, to wish for another's happiness, to speak truth to power, takes more than a little bravery. Sure, the world may be unfair, or it may be falling apart, but when you're fighting back against it one little step at a time, it's better if you have someone to hold your hand while you do it.

Cinemalaya 2023 Reviews Day 3: Gitling, Tether

 

My favorite thing about her was that she listened: in the age of landline telephones, we once spent three hours talking about everything and nothing at all, but it was mostly me telling her stories I wrote, while she listened. In its own way, that was my secret language - a way to understand me more deeply as a person. I've never been the best at social cues so communicating through talk has never been my strength. Instead, I used stories. Back then I wasn't any good, and sometimes I think the same of myself even now, but she liked them. "John, keep writing," she told me. I told her the secret behind what would become the name of this blog. Without her, I would never have kept on writing, and this blog would have never existed. I was supposed to type "it ended", but how could something end if it didn't begin in the first place? We no longer talk, mostly thanks to my own stupidity, seeing something that wasn't there. In the end, what doomed our friendship was that while I shared my secret 'language', she didn't share hers.

(Anyway, please make fewer romantic films like this. I only have so many pseudo romantic stories to use as a prelude. I'm running out. haha.)

In Jopy Arnaldo's debut film Gitling, Jamie (Gabby Padilla) works as a translator and interpreter - a conduit between one language to another. She is given the job to interpret for a Japanese filmmaker, Makoto (Ken Yamamura, The Wolverine) as he presents his film in a film festival in Iloilo. The two connect over a shared interest in languages, but they know their time together is limited.

In the process of understanding another person, language forms a crucial part of building that level of understanding. As something that is built by culture and shared experiences, language is a large part of who we are, and it helps us connect to each other in ways no other species on the planet can achieve. Jamie uses an invented language to connect even more with Makoto, as after all, in Makoto's own words, "it's better having someone you can talk to in your own language." It becomes their refuge, as they find comfort in each other. Imagine going to another place and being unable to talk with anyone there? It's like a prison. Makoto's initial discomfort at trying to speak and understand the people around him (including a well meaning but hilariously undecipherable attempt at Japanese) is due to his inability to speak another language. He is relieved when he meets Jamie, who is able to understand and communicate with him.

And yet, there are other ways to communicate a feeling without the need for words: Makoto goes around Bacolod trying every food he can get his hands on, as food and cuisine are an example of non-verbal language. As a filmmaker, Makoto expresses his emotions through his art, whether the films he makes are silent or have sound. Through a shared experience, feelings can be exchanged and an intimate space is created between speaker and listener. 

Gitling also finds ways in its form and in its themes to convey the importance of language. Its subtitles are color-coded, switching between translations of English, Tagalog, Hiligaynon, Nihongo and Jamie's made-up language, and it also adds uses captions to express feelings during certain scenes (though considering the excellent performance of the two leads, it does feel a bit redundant.)

Gitling (a Hyphen) is a symbol that connects two separate words. In the context of Jamie's invented language, the word that results from this joining forms something new and distinct, possessing elements of both root words. The same, Jamie herself muses, can be said of all kinds of relationships: two people coming together, forming something with an entirely new meaning. 

When we speak a language, we often intuit what we intend to say at the end of our sentence, that is, even as we speak the first word of our sentence, we already have a sense of the completed sentence in our minds. Jamie and Makoto know how this is going to end. We know as well, based on our shared language of cinema and the film's tendency to crib from the films it loves to create a familiar (some would say cliched) structure. We know the outcome, but the way to reach that outcome is no less devastating. That leads to some of the most memorable moments in any film I've seen this year.

Gitling is an exquisite film, a skillful exploration of the many ways we communicate with each other, with or without words.

Relationships entail a level of empathy - of sharing your feelings with another person to the point that sometimes you're in sync. In Gian Arre's Tether, that concept is put to its limit.

After a particularly... energetic hookup, Kate (Jorybell Agoto) and Eric (Mikoy Morales) find that they share sensations and feelings between each other - if, say, Kate pinches her leg, Eric will feel his own leg being pinched. If Eric eats something delicious, Kate will feel the sensation of having eaten something delicious. Things take a dark turn when Eric, forever a playboy, makes the boneheaded decision to hookup with someone else, even though he should know that doing the horizontal tango will be felt by Kate as well. Men are stupid.

Tether turns from a fun little premise to a depiction of an extremely toxic relationship: thanks to abandonment issues, Kate becomes extremely possessive and paranoid, while Eric's promiscuous past and insecurities aren't exactly helping either. Their connection becomes something that imprisons them rather than something that makes them closer.

The problem lies in the way this premise is executed: the film's form is, to put it bluntly, bland shot-reverse shot conversations. Most of the (honestly too dragged out for their own good) setpieces are just the characters sitting or standing around somewhere and talking to each other. Had the film's editing or cinematography matched the two actors' intensity it would make for a truly chilling experience instead of the slogfest it ended up being. (If Jorybell Agoto is to win an acting award in this Cinemalaya edition, I think it should be for this film.) Technically, the film also suffers from various other problems, from footage that doesn't look color corrected to sound that can barely be heard (especially during a very crucial scene at the end.)

To be fair to the filmmakers, Tether was a last minute addition to the festival, giving them a very short time to put out a finished film, or at least an approximation of it. A for effort, but Tether ultimately feels unfinished.

Cinemalaya 2023 Reviews Day 2: As If It's True, Iti Mapukpukaw, Shorts A, When This is All Over, Rookie

 

Social media has irrevocably changed the idea of privacy, whether it still exists as we add more and more of ourselves to a curated virtual image, or whether other people are entitled to it or not. For Gemma Stone (Ashley Ortega), that doesn't even seem like a question: after going viral for a rant in a taxi, she has made herself into an influencer. But a rough breakup has left her career in the doldrums, that is until she meets James (Khalil Ramos), a struggling musician who takes to her immediately. The new relationship sparks a renewed interest in Gemma and her relevance in the internet sphere resurges.

I've seen various, often superficial takes on this film as yet another story of social media starring Gen Z millennials, and indeed there is no shortage of such films in the local milieu. I agree to an extent. However, the film is much more complex than it looks, owing to a fantastic usage of form that honestly left me tantalized as the credits rolled.

The fake flower Gemma takes home after her first date with James serves as a visual metaphor for their own relationship - a thing that takes the image of a rose, a symbol of love but one that (in this case) does not possess any of the elements of a real rose - a construct, an artifice representing the real thing. Yet there are hints that James is truly falling in love with his pretend girlfriend, giving her a level of trust that is more intimate than what is implied. But what about Gemma? Is she really only using James as a tool for her own needs?

At first I was sure of the film's outcome, but near the end this notion was put into serious doubt. If you've seen the film, you may have noticed that the soundtrack itself was starting to glitch out. What panache to do this in front of a very attentive Cinemalaya audience, who would question whether it was due to the theater or due to the film itself! Soundtracks are meant to evoke emotion, to guide us towards a certain feeling, as all the formal elements of film are meant to do. But here, it's like the movie is trying to make us question: what does this music want to make you feel? Why does this music want to make you feel? And is it congruent with what you're thinking of at this point in the story? Despite a rather conclusive feeling emotional climax, what follows seems to totally deconstruct it!

It's as if As If It's True wants to point out the facility of film itself in presenting a virtual image, a constructed reality where you aren't entirely sure what's right or not. This is a notion that's been explored before by the likes of Wells (F For Fake, for example) but a notion that feels very relevant today, when even "truth" feels pliable. It still gives me goosebumps every time I think about it.

This is a film that requires multiple watches, and in a world full of "turn off your brain" entertainment, hot takes and reductive criticism, maybe take a moment to think about what you've just seen. I may be in the minority here, but I think this film is a fucking breath of fresh air.

Sometimes we cannot find the words for the deepest kinds of pain. Sometimes, in our struggle to articulate profound trauma, something inside of us breaks and silence is the more comfortable option. Sometimes, when we try to rationalize things we do not understand, we lean into irrationality.

For Eric (Carlo Aquino,) that pain is kept deeply behind a veil of silence. It manifests in Carl Joseph Papa's Iti Mapukpukaw as the absence of his mouth, something that is achieved by painstaking rotoscope animation in the style of Carl Linklater's Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). 

Eric lives as an animator and he lives a relatively quiet life. But when he finds out that his uncle has died, aliens arrive to "take" his body. It's clear that Eric's gone through something terrible, although we don't exactly know what. We soon learn what that is, and it is the kind of event that figuratively takes your body and your agency over yourself, an idea that is literalized thanks to the film's medium, one that allows us to see the world of Iti Mapukpukaw through Eric's own eyes.

Besides all that, what shines in Iti Mapukpukaw (and all of Carl Papa's feature lengths, to be honest) is the emotional core at the center of the film. His films make you feel a deep sense of empathy with their central characters, with all their flaws and wounds laid bare; his films often leave your heart heavy but also fill it with an unshakable sense of warmth and hope. What helps Eric on his journey of closure is a support system that tries to understand him even if his visions become harder and harder to understand. It all culminates in the scene depicted in the poster above, a scene that honestly brought a lot of people in the theater to tears. Love, in all its various forms, is also a central theme in Papa's films, love that can stave off death for just one more moment, make memories endure, and allow people to express and articulate deeply held pain.

Cinemalaya 2023 Shorts A Short Shorts Reviews

I don't think I've ever seen an audience so invested in the result of a horse race as I've seen in Mae Tanagon's Sota, a documentary about horse trainers and what happened to them during the pandemic. It's not particularly revolutionary storytelling, but it is an engrossing story. After this film you will believe in Success of Times (and that was not a typo.)

Arvin Belarmino's Hinakdal leans squarely into the absurd: it is about a family of zombies just living normally, eating vegetables and going to zombie school. However, when a normal human tries to steal a chicken, their (un) life changes profoundly. I'm all for absurdist comedies of this type, but when the film's tone veers sharply into melodrama, it feels a bit off, and I'm not sure what the film's trying to say (discrimination? unwarranted violence and dehumanization of the 'other?'), if it wants to say anything at all.

Kokuryo: The Untold Story of BB. Undas 2019 is bound to be an audience favorite. Two friends roam the city in search of a person who might be able to tell them the whereabouts of a sizeable amount of missing prize money won from a pageant. It manages to shed a spotlight on our trans sisters: bigoted attitudes towards them, limitations in terms of meaningful employment (and thus, the importance of any kind of income towards their survival), and the use of that income to fuel their goal of becoming who they truly are.

hm hm mhm would probably make a good double feature with a couple other films in this festival dealing with past trauma. It's interesting to see the interplay of "play" and the usage of dolls (often used to depict an idealized social structure) to depict trauma. Also, flowers with baby heads. I have not yet slept since yesterday. I kid.

The last shot of Januar Yap's Sibuyas ni Perfecto is one of scarecrows in the open field. I think it succinctly depicts how various middlemen and people at the top view common people - not really as people, but as vessels created to do a particular job. It's heartbreaking and sad in all sorts of ways.

While flawed, last Cinemalaya's Blue Room managed to paint a picture of the nature of privilege and how that privilege, drawn via class lines, leads to an unequal and unfair application of the systems and laws that govern us. Kevin Mayuga's When This Is All Over expands on that idea, adding the wrinkle of how class lines were made even more evident during the pandemic.

Stoner film, social drama and comedy all in one, When This is All Over tells the story of The Guy (Juan Karlos) who, pre-pandemic, worked as a fixer and dealers of sorts for all kinds of partygoers. That all came to a screeching halt when COVID lockdowns literally shut down even the slightest idea of a party scene. Now isolated in a condo provided by his mother (Ana Abad Santos), The Guy makes a living selling drugs to his wealthy neighbors. That is until said wealthy neighbors, bored of (their still very comfortable) quarantine, begin to plan a party of their own, and recruit The Guy to find a way to do it.

What follows is a funny, at times raucous comedy that shows just how fucked up we are as a society. The Guy's employers, a bunch of spoiled, vain, wretched individuals who think all things can be solved by power and influence, may just be some of the most evil villains in contemporary local cinema. If there were guillotines set up right now, they'd be some of the first candidates. And, it's not as if they don't know this fact; as one of them confides to The Guy, "yeah, I'm a bad bitch. So what?" it's made clear that they don't really care about other people, and maybe don't see those below them as people in the first place. Money and power have a weird way of changing people like that.

At the same time, The Guy comes across the many employees living in his condominium and befriends Rosemarie (Jorrybell Agoto), a kindhearted employee who is just trying to survive during a global, history-making event. The fact that we know this will not end well unless someone does the right thing is part of the tragedy of the whole enterprise.

The film's uncertain denouement is by no means revolutionary (unfortunately, we're not going to see any obscenely rich little shits get their heads chopped off by the end of the film) but there is the sense that at least to some extent, the law manages to affect everyone eventually (at least for a while). And there is the sense that while we cannot always change the world all by ourselves, we can take accountability for our own actions and make amends in our own ways.

There's just something so lovely about the word "comfort", about something or someone you can trust with all your heart and confide in without judgement, about something or someone that you can seek refuge in, about something or someone that makes you feel seen and heard. For a lot of people, Samantha Lee's Rookie is a  film that embodies that sense of comfort. A sweet, feel-good love story about two people finding that comfort in each other, it's one of the most romantic local movies of the year.

Ace (Pat Tingjuy) is an awkward teen who loves playing basketball and wonders why the boys in her neighborhood aren't too keen on letting her play with them. When she transfers to a new school, she learns that there is no basketball varsity team. Instead, she's recruited by the school's volleyball coach (Agot Isidro). There, she meets the volleyball team captain Jana (Aya Fernandez) who doesn't immediately take to the unskilled rookie. But as Ace learns the sport, Ace and Jana begin to find that comfort in each other.

As a sports film, Rookie has its share of flaws. We don't exactly see why Ace would be a good fit for the volleyball team; the coach seems to only assess Ace's height though we don't see her see Ace's athleticism and she doesn't teach Ace the ins and outs of a completely different sport from the get go. Though we do see her improve, she becomes a starter very fast (though to be fair, anime does this all the time). There's a lot to cover here, but the material is perhaps better suited to something longer (and I would not say no to a Rookie series.)

As a youth romance, Rookie is simply exquisite, a natural evolution from Lee's previous works Baka Bukas and Billie and Emma. Aside from the romance, it also addresses several issues faced by the young women of today, the culture in which they are discriminated against and the difficulties of holding people (especially men) to account for their actions. 

I call this one of the most romantic local films of the year because I haven't rooted for two romantic partners this much for a long time. These are two people, who, in finding comfort in each other, navigate a world that is far from perfect in terms of accepting who they are, and realize their eventual dreams regardless.

Cinemalaya 2023 Reviews Day 1: Bulawan nga Usa, Huling Palabas, Shorts B, Ang Duyan ng Magiting, Maria

 

Local films often depict the mountain as a place of transformation, healing and self discovery. In Pepe Diokno's Above the Clouds (2014), it's a way to grieve; in Ariel Barbarona's The Highest Peak, the film's grieving protagonist also considers what his actions as a mining company employee have done to the Lumad population living there and tries to make amends. 

Makoy (Ron Matthews Espinosa) has just lost his beloved grandfather. He has lived with him for many years, often traversing the mountain ranges near their home. He is estranged from his mother, who has remarried. In the process of grieving, the spirit of his grandfather calls out to him and Makoy sets out and climbs the mountain to find the mythical golden deer, and more importantly, himself.

Bulawan nga Usa (Golden Deer) is the kind of film you only really see in a film fest like Cinemalaya - with a modest budget, but brimming with imagination. Animated sequences tell the story of the titular golden deer, among other myths and stories Makoy tells the children on the mountain. He finds a kindred spirit in the form of a young boy (John Niel Paguntalan), who has his own form of grieving to work through. The kid's sister has gone to the city to study, a rare and celebrated occurrence in the mountain community, but it has left the kid feeling as lonely as Makoy.

Bulawan nga Usa is hampered by its own limitations. The most noticeable of the film's problems is its sound, as most scenes (especially those not taken on the mountain) sound fuzzy and distant. Still, maybe the true golden deer is the golden deer we find along the way, and despite the uncertainty in its conclusion, there is a sense of passing the torch, in that while Makoy's grandfather was once the source of inspiration for a young boy, Makoy himself is one, too.

I don't think I would ever predict how VHS would grow obsolete; not right away and all at once, but slowly, gradually being replaced over time, until you look around and see that everything has changed. That's how the end of an age moves; one small step at a time, till you look back and you see that you've gone a long, long way.

For Andoy (Shun Mark Gomez), his own transformation goes the same way. He spends most of his teenage days renting and watching VHS tapes with his best friend (Bon Andrew Lentejas). The townsfolk think that Andoy is the son of a supernatural creature, maybe a Sigbin; but he is merely a studious boy whose absent mother provides for him (and by extension, his adoptive family.)

Andoy's life shifts when he meets two people - Ariel (played by Serena Juan... and named after the mermaid?) a hairdresser who 'fishes' for local boys, and a mysterious man named Isidro (Cedrick Juan), who also shows films to the local audience on his TV - albeit using a newfangled technology called a "VCD player."

Huling Palabas is a film about the end of ages: of youth, of stereotyped sexual identity, of innocence. It frames the transformation and self realization of a young queer man in the backdrop of a bigger, historical change, while also weaving in elements of myth and folklore. One could only imagine how many people like Andoy were treated as supernatural creatures, and how they are shunned in that community. But in this film, that idea is undergoing its own transition - as (at least for some), fear becomes acceptance.

The final scenes, then, are a way of taking that last step from one age to another, accepting the change that has occurred in its wake, and setting fire to a past 'self' that no longer exists. Huling Palabas captures a sort of magic that Cinemalaya films rarely do. It's one of my favorite films in the fest.

Cinemalaya Shorts B Short Shorts Reviews

Over the better part of two decades, my parents operated a business on their own, in a small, decrepit building in San Marcelino street. I remember many days during my childhood when I ran around its (relatively) spacious offices or helped edit or print business letters and dispatches to employers in the middle east. I felt the same way during the first half of Kurt Soberano's Golden Bells, a film about his family's business in Bacolod. Its first half manages to establish a rich milieu, though as it transitions towards a present-day epilogue, I feel like it skips over a lot of things - this is a rare case of me wanting the proceedings to be expanded further into something longer-form. Nevertheless, it's a deeply personal film about the importance of family and how a single person can shape it for better or worse.

A young man and his younger brother deal with grief in Mayoko sa Baybay, yet even though its lush images suggest at something deeper, for the most part it feels frustratingly surface level. It's not necessarily bad, however, though I'm conflicted if either a longer film or a film of the same length but with more elaboration would have made more sense.

Ang Kining Binalaybay Kag Ambahanon Ko Para sa Imo (These Rhymes and Rhythms Meant for You), on the other hand, has no trouble establishing its story: an old man and his granddaughter travel the land to give said granddaughter a new home. Something bad happened to the granddaughter's  parents and there's still bad blood on the other side of the family for this. But then as the film reaches its emotional climax, it just ends abruptly, which is a shame, as the chemistry and rapport built by the two excellent actors for the past 16 or so minutes needed something more to bring it to a proper conclusion.

On the other hand, Tong Adlaw Nga Nag-Snow sa Pinas uses every second of its five minute runtime surgically and systematically, depicting the lives of two children living through violence and finding ways to escape, "changing" the setting with their own snow and finding refuge in films. It's a fully realized short and an excellent example of what the medium can do.

In Ilocano folklore, the Batibat is a demon that resides in trees. Sometimes, when their tree dwelling is used as building materials for a house, the Batibat stays in what remains of that tree, victimizing anyone who sleeps near them by invading their dreams. In Maudi Nga Arapaap, one of the most beautifully shot films of the year, the Batibat is used as a manifestation of trauma: something that does not leave even you literally try to throw it away, something that leaves you paralyzed even if decades have already passed.

I've been stuck for a long time making a particular video essay, one that ruminates on the ending of Rae Red's Babae at Baril (2019), where the titular character, played by Janine Gutierrez, throws away the gun she just gained in the river to try to end the cycle of violence in which she's been trapped for the past hour and a half or so. In that forever unfinished essay, I explore the two arguments for and against that character's decision. First, there is the argument of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon, who experienced colonial racism first hand in the Caribbean island of Martinique, who argues that violence, or rather, violent resistance, is a necessity imposed by the colonists upon the colonized - extended to those who oppress, and those who are oppressed, because violence is the only language they speak. Second, there is the reaction or extension (not necessarily a rebuttal, mind) of that concept by the educator Paulo Freire, who argues that education that is free from colonial roots be used to elevate critical consciousness and "fight back," in that way, enabling those oppressed to regain their humanity.

Dustin Celestino's Ang Duyan ng Magiting interrogates the necessity of violence in the process of resistance. In more than a dozen chapters, each essentially a one act play on film, Celestino maps out an all too familiar story: two young men (Miggy Jimenez and Dylan Ray Talon) are accused of bombing a church. A social worker (Dolly De Leon) is tasked to help them out, but she meets resistance from the police chief (Paolo O' Hara) who has his personal reasons for keeping the two where they are. Meanwhile, an activist teacher (Jojit Lorenzo) reels from the fallout of a now-viral rant that has left him facing the true implications of what he has done.

In post screening conversations, an idea came up about how Celestino, an accomplished playwright, has often depicted the (often masculine) nature of violence, and how (often repressed) anger leads to it. A mild spoiler, but this film's ending is literally two very angry, very indignant men in the midst of committing violence. In Ang Duyan ng Magiting, he crafts a situation where all the parties concerned are driven by their own beliefs, regardless of whether we agree with those beliefs or not, with all those actions mostly spurred on by the instinct to survive, or to 'other', or to hate. At the same time, it frames anger and violence in the context of nationalism - how the love for country (either as part of the state or as part of a revolution to transform it) sometimes lets those things in. It lays its thesis bare and I think this is the kind of film that merits serious discussion, definitely not something that can be covered in a short time or in a review like this.

The star studded ensemble is given great material to work with, and pretty much everyone shines in their respective roles. As the film moves from set piece to tense set piece, it doesn't let up that tension for a minute. As a cinematic experience, the end product is deeply engrossing and definitely worth watching.

I've always wondered what happened to Mary after Jesus' death; the consensus seems to be that she ascended into heaven after her son's death, as if giving birth to him was her only true raison d'etre. I prefer to believe the Byzantine scholar Hyppolitus of Thebes, who wrote that after her son died on the cross, Mary lived another 11 years. Maybe she lived in quiet solitude and mourning. Maybe she helped spread the teachings her son preached, or taught others teachings of her own. In the wake of unspeakable loss or tragedy, the responsibility of taking care of what's left is left to the widows. The weight they carry is a great burden, but one that many will carry with great effort and patience.

Sheryl Rose Andes' Maria tells the stories of three women who all possess that name as they deal with profound losses of their own. Two of them have lost nearly everything from the "War on Drugs" that has lasted since 2016 until today, and one of them who tried to do something about it.

The film also touches on several other issues happening in our country today: the poor state of our crime investigation system, the lack of accountability of the state and how disinformation, misuse of social media and a lack of education on critical thinking leads to people voting and choosing against their own interests. It's honestly heartbreaking seeing what has happened to our country in the past decade, and the way things are going it doesn't seem to be getting better any time soon.

But, as the film shows, the worst thing anyone could do is to give up. That's probably why I liked Hyppolitus' story about Mary: because she found the strength to live on for just a little longer. Justice or divine retribution (if it ever exists)a is something that is earned, and it is not something that is achieved overnight.

On the other hand, the story of the first Maria is overshadowed by the other two; after a certain point, she disappears from the narrative and doesn't show up again until the credits. It feels like her presence was just to make a (completely valid) point, but the structure feels just a little off.

Maria is one of the most important films to watch this year: albeit flawed, it is a potent reminder to ourselves that the struggle for what is right does not end with any single loss, nor does evil go away on its own.

Barbenheimer part 1: how I learned to hate the bomb

 

1. Fission

Awe is the word I'd use to describe it: that time in the mid nineties when I first saw James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, that time when I watched Sarah Connor scream as she is annihilated by nuclear fire, her flesh torn from her bones as she holds on to a steel fence. She is helpless, only one person against what seems like an unstoppable force; I felt helpless watching her, because at the time I thought the "good guys" always won, that the "good guys" wouldn't lose this badly. I was barely a decade old, and very naive. By this time the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the world was in a relative lull - the old enemies of the Cold War had apparently been defeated. The looming wars to come, wars against a different ideology, were nowhere to be found. Although the danger no longer felt immediate, the fear of nuclear annihilation haunted pre-teen me, so much so that it caused more than a few nightmares. Maybe we can hide on an island while the fallout happens, I thought, trying to dampen my fear. Nah, we're unimportant. No country would ever nuke us.

I would get chills as friends from abroad described their own experiences facing the threat of nuclear war - when one UK based friend recounted watching Barry Hines' Threads (1984) as a child as part of a school activity and being scarred for life, or when older friends recalled practicing nuclear drills in school even knowing deep down that in the event of a nuclear attack, it would help very little. As I would come to find out, in the event of a nuclear strike, the luckiest ones would be the people right in the blast zone, incinerated in an instant. I remembered a scene during Carl Sagan's Cosmos coming home from his ship of the imagination and finding a silenced Earth. There would be no winners in the event of a nuclear exchange: if the third world war was to be fought with nuclear weapons, the next one would be waged among piles of ash.

I am part of a tail end of a generation that lived with a civilization-ending, existential threat, one that is unprecedented in the history of man. As someone who knew of the potential of the nuclear bomb second hand, it existed in my mind as only a vague abstraction. I could only imagine what went through the people who lived during, say, the Cuban Missile crisis, when our collective annihilation was so close it feels like a miracle we didn't all die in the sixties. Awe in itself is reverential, and we often associate the word with wonder. But this particular kind of awe is one mixed with fear and dread, mixed with the helplessness borne from the knowledge of our own insignificance.

Christopher Nolan knows both meanings of the word; there are only a few filmmakers who are as obsessed with the idea of awe as he is. Over the years, his films have striven to create cinematic spectacles of all kinds, from intricate, nested set pieces in Inception (2010) to the propulsive pulpiness of his Dark Knight Trilogy to the spectacle of magic, real or otherwise, in The Prestige (2006). Such spectacle only overtly manifests itself in his latest film, Oppenheimer, in brief flashes of particles and light - abstract depictions of the invisible forces that govern our existence, and in what I believe is the film's emotional climax. Otherwise, the film eschews overt spectacle in favor of a tense political thriller, one that is held in board rooms or in American congress, much in the spirit of films like Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). A long, sprawling biopic of the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's life, made  in the way only Nolan can, it is a film about a man coming to terms with the effects of his own ambition.

The film can be divided into three acts, each roughly corresponding to one hour in the film's runtime: the first act deals with his life in college as an academic, the second act deals with his involvement in the Manhattan Project, and the third deals with the political and personal fallout from the second act, leading to the rehabilitation of his image. But, keeping with his style, Nolan intercuts from one plot thread to another, and scenes are segregated via different points of view that he labels "fission" and "fusion."

It's a story of people whose laser focus on a singular goal prevents them from looking at the bigger picture, their scientific achievements being co-opted to create weapons capable of the most heinous atrocities. It's a story that I've seen play out in the course of human history over and over again: the first thing that comes to mind is Fritz Haber, whose scientific discovery figuratively fed the world. Fritz Haber the German nationalist, who used his scientific expertise to use Chlorine gas during World War 1. Fritz Haber, whose scientific discoveries were used to create Zyklon B. Haber isn't the only one - history is filled with stories like his. Science by itself is noble, aspirational, aiming for things greater than ourselves, but science does not exist in a vacuum. For J. Robert Oppenheimer, his work on the Manhattan Project helped usher in a new age of man, an age of death and perpetual fear.

While that's all good and true, Oppenheimer's greatest weakness is how Nolan elects to portray the film's titular character. Nolan is at his best when he ties spectacle with human stories: Inception had its protagonist come to grips with the death of his wife; Interstellar had the concept of "love" anchor a mission to save humanity, and the Batman movies gave Nolan a fully formed character with decades of backstory to work with.

Beginning with Dunkirk, I've noticed that I've struggled to find an emotional anchor to Nolan's films: while he dealt with the abstract ideas of perseverance and the human spirit, the characters in those films felt impenetrable. In an ironic way, the filmmaker's focus on awe and spectacle leads them to neglect the humanity behind it. Oppenheimer is a cipher in this film, someone who has trouble committing to anything. He donates  to and participates in various causes but does not formally join them. Other than his hatred of the Nazis and his views on atomic weaponry, his views on the war aren't clearly cut out. The only capacity we see him engaging in non-scientific, human social relations is usually with his wife and his tragic mistress, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh.) Aside from a couple of sequences where he checks in his first child with a friend because of his wife's alcoholism, we don't see him interact with his children. In real life (or in the film, albeit not directly) he never did apologize for the use of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The man knew all about politics, and he knew that politics tends to make people lose their convictions in one way or another. But in the process, he makes himself a character that's not just complicated (that's a given for any good biopic) but hard to understand. Even after three hours, I don't really know what the man was about.

I had to read outside the film to see the man as he was: restlessly flitting from one scientific field (or woman) to another, unable to finish research, bored by the tedium of lab work yet engrossed with every kind of scientific idea, a man who, in the words of a friend, felt "difficulty expressing himself completely". It all felt oddly cold in this film, aside from some flashes in the first act.

Perhaps Nolan found an affinity with the subject of his film. Does he consider himself as impenetrable as the subject of his film, perhaps (even subconsciously) as a man who could not see the proverbial forest for the trees? Perhaps Nolan too also feels a level of guilt, though guilt at what, I wouldn't know. Would it be his contributions to filmmaking? His perception of the end of an age - the end of cinema? Nolan's films sometimes touch on the end of ages - to man leaving the earth and going to the stars, or a vigilante passing the torch to the next generation.

In that episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, the very last one, titled "who speaks for Earth?" he quotes from Deuteronomy 30:19, that states:

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live,

Perhaps the most chilling thing in Oppenheimer, a technically impressive, well acted yet fundamentally flawed film is, in that moment, it protagonist, despite his redemption, unwittingly chose death.

 

2. Fusion

Awe is the word I'd use to describe it: that time when my grandfather told me stories when he fought during World War II. He was always a colorful storyteller. While our family hid far from the town where they lived, as the Japanese used our ancestral house as a sort of base, my grandfather suspended his studies and became a guerilla fighter. "Gorilla?" five or six-year-old me asked, thinking that there were Gorillas in our forests during WWII. "No, gue-ri-llas," my grandfather explained, spelling the word out and giving me the definition. He and his brother were eventually caught and joined the Bataan Death March. They escaped by pretending to be dead as the POWs passed through a rice field. After the war, my grandfather became a doctor, while his brother became an air force general. In a twist of fate, my great uncle met and married a Japanese woman. The daughter of a samurai family, my great aunt sold her land and possessions and left Japan to marry my great uncle. She has lived in the Philippines for around half a century now. 

Less than ten years after that talk about guerillas, both my grandfather and great uncle died of cancer - of the lung and colon respectively. Perhaps one of them was diagnosed by an MRI - an invention made thanks to the scientific research by Isidor Isaac Rabi, one of J. Robert Oppenheimer's close friends and colleague in the Manhattan Project.

As my grandfather continued explaining what a guerilla fighter was, we passed by a long tunnel, and a truck sped beside us. He instinctively grabbed me and pulled me towards him. He had developed claustrophobia over the years for some reason. I wondered if it had something to do with the war.

As the years passed, I would hear many more stories from friends and relatives, as well as come across many films and forms of media about the war, and about the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only time a nuclear weapon was used against a human population.

I saw the effects of the war on both sides, indelibly etched into unforgettable frames: the sight of farmers fleeing their homes amidst an infernal background in Peque Gallaga's Oro Plata Mata (1982) or Nora Aunor holding her half-Japanese baby up over a high point, contemplating whether to kill her child in Mario O' Hara's Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (1976), or the climax to Janice O' Hara's Sundalong Kanin (2014).

The Japanese, of course, show their scars from the war in other ways. Nearing death thanks to radiation exposure, Minami (Kumiko Aso) the protagonist of Kiyoshi Sasabe's Yunagi City, Sakura Country (2007) wonders, "Thirteen years afterward, I wonder if those who bombed Hiroshima are looking at me and saying: 'We did it! We were able to kill another person!' They should be." 

Near the very end of Sunao Katabuchi's In This Corner of the World (2016), a young child holds on to her long dead mother in the aftermath of the atomic explosions. As the days pass, she continues holding onto the corpse until her mother rots away. The young child wanders the desolate streets of what remains of the city, eventually coming across the film's protagonist, Suzu. Earlier, Suzu had lost her drawing arm (and her niece) to one of the bombs dropped by the allies, and her mother and father die during the bomb dropping on Hiroshima. Suzu takes the child in, raising her despite all the things she had lost. Earlier in the film, her (then still very much alive niece) admiringly listens to her uncle talk about the seemingly invincible battleship Yamato; later Suzu is told that the ship had been sunk by the Allies.

Perhaps one of the most affecting pieces of media about the bomb's immediate and long term effects is Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, adapted into a live action film series from 1976 to 1980, and into two anime movies in 1983 and 1986. Nakazawa, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, uses the manga to relate his experiences about the bomb, the years after the end of the war, and the arrival of the American occupation forces.

Perhaps you've already seen some clips from the first anime movie, especially the scene where the bomb drops: a little girl's hair and clothes burning off her body, her eyes melting from their sockets; a mother struggling in vain to cover her child as both are incinerated; the titular Gen getting saved by the initial blast by sheer luck. In the manga there's a scene, soon after Little Boy detonates, where bomb survivors jump into the Ota River to escape the fires engulfing the city. They are all injured and weak, unable to stay afloat. In a vain attempt to keep their spirits up, they try to sing as they drown one by one.

There's been a bit of discourse around Oppenheimer the film, in which the people decry the lack of "representation" from the Japanese. In my opinion, the lack of the Japanese perspective is the point of the film - politicians and maybe even scientists used that emotional distance, that abstraction, to distance themselves from the effects of what they have done. Tellingly, in one scene Oppenheimer and other fellow scientists are shown the immediate effects of the nuclear blast on the populace and he does not look, out of fear, out of guilt. Perhaps awe would not be the word I'd use to describe it.

When a populace is reduced to numbers and statistics, it's easier not to see the humanity behind those numbers until it is too late. In that sense, Nolan's depiction of staid, even boring board rooms filled with self serving, sometimes evil people deciding the fates of millions with little to no accountability for their actions, is effective.

But perhaps, a man's personal guilt is ultimately insignificant, an indication of his own (perhaps inflated) self importance. One of the first pieces of media I've seen regarding the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August (1991), his penultimate feature film. In it, Kurosawa uses the story of a post-war Japanese family to depict how the bomb has affected each generation: for the latest generation, born after the post-war economic miracle, the bomb is a history lesson, one told only via second hand stories. For are the parents, the boomer generation who grew up right after the war and during the American occupation, the bomb is an afterthought, perhaps tying it with their experiences with the Americans. And finally, there is the matriarch of the family, Kane (veteran actress Sachiko Murase), who witnessed the bomb first hand and lost her husband in the blast. In the end of the film, to the tune of a Japanese rendition of Franz Schubert's Heidenröslein, Kane's grandchildren and children, spatially divided into generational lines, chase after their elderly matriarch, holding an upturned umbrella that looks like a black flower.

There is a scene in Rhapsody in August where Kane and her American-born nephew Clark (Richard Gere) talk to each other and Clark ostensibly apologizes for the bomb. Critics have said that this moment dismisses Japan's own role in starting the war, but I personally don't think that's what Kurosawa was trying to convey, and I'm not the only one. I highly recommend reading Brandon Habermeyer's review of the film, wherein he and a bunch of other friends try to deconstruct the scene. Clark isn't apologizing for war crimes, he has zero authority to do so. In their analysis, perhaps Clark is trying to apologize that he didn't know Kane's husband was a bomb victim, and his coming to Hiroshima to invite the family to Hawaii was a moment of bad timing. A single man cannot apologize for the crimes of an entire nation, and deep wounds between both nations cannot be healed overnight, with a single exchange. Perhaps what Kurosawa wanted to communicate was that it all starts with open and honest communication, and that's what Clark and Kane achieved in that short scene.

"Americans dropped the bomb," one of Kane's grandchildren states at one point in the movie. They don't know the names of the pilots who dropped it, or the scientists who named it. Oppenheimer and his ilk are as much abstractions to them as the Japanese were distant abstractions to the Americans. Perhaps Truman was right in Nolan's film when he said that they're not going to care who made the bomb, but they'd care who dropped it - or at least, a figurehead representing who dropped it, and that person wouldn't necessarily be Oppenheimer. The filmic and the real Oppenheimer might have tried to atone for their actions, or cast themselves as martyrs after what they had done, but in the end it was all to assuage their own guilt, rather than engage in the futile act of apologizing for which they had little to no authority to do so.

If you think about it, Oppy himself may have stumbled across this notion by accident. His singular, most famous quote is "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds," as if he implicates himself in the destruction that stemmed from his "invention." But Oppenheimer didn't really invent the bomb all by himself, and once again it feels like he is taking more credit for the creation of the bomb than what he is due. But in the quote's original context in the Bhagavad Gita, the quote has a completely different meaning.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, appears before the prince Arjun and tells him to go to war against his relatives. Arjun resists, but Krishna reveals themselves as the destroyer of worlds, implying that regardless of what Arjun does, the war will be waged, and he is only an instrument of the divine work. Without Oppenheimer someone else would have taken his place, someone else would have developed the bomb, perhaps different people would have died, but they would have died nonetheless. It's a story not about becoming a great destroyer, but how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, how sometimes we can only look helplessly on as events unfold beyond our control, like Sarah Connor beholding nuclear fire. People are inevitably swept up in the winds of war, and in its wake there are no true winners or losers, only waste and destruction and damaged people who live with wounds for the rest of their lives.

July Movie Digest: Litrato, The Cheating Game

 

Edna (Ai Ai delas Alas) lives in a perpetual haze. Suffering from dementia, she lives out her twilight years at an old folks' home, where she serves as the bane of the caregivers and residents there. The only link Edna has to her past is a wall of pictures, full of people she no longer recognizes. After yet another tantrum, she meets Angel (Quinn Carillo), a feisty new caregiver who is more than a match for the cantankerous grandma.

I've seen news articles describe Ai Ai's performance here as "unrecognizable," but if you're familiar with any of her collaborations with Ignacio, her committed performance in this film isn't so unusual. Carillo, on the other hand, has mostly made her mark in Vivamax films, and she shines here in a film outside of the Vivamax ecosystem.

What transpires as Edna and Angel bond is also (mostly) nothing out of the ordinary, though there is a twist that is literally explained by someone implying they have supernatural abilities, Personally, the proceedings feel a little stagey and may not be to everyone's taste. If you can get over that, Litrato has a number of emotional moments that can tug at the heartstrings, moments that affected even this cynical viewer. Otherwise it's not a film I'd freely recommend.

Love stories by their very definition are narratives; they are stories that may grow organically, or may spring from the consequence of intentional, sometimes one-sided efforts. Like any kind of story, love stories are not immune to manipulation. Who controls that story and whether one or both parties are privy to all the information involved (i.e. the truth), is very important.

Hope (Julie Anne San Jose) is privy to all that information... or so she thinks. In a spreadsheet, she neatly outlines all of the evidence she has found of her cheating boyfriend's infidelity. She organizes all of this information into neat little cells, thinking that she's on top of it all, and she resigns - from her job and from her relationship with him. To her, relationship is work, and her subsequent job search makes it clear that to her, it works both ways.

Things are set into motion when a sex video of her now ex boyfriend is leaked on the internet. Hope has nothing to do with it, but her ex thinks so and hounds her to delete it. At the same time, she is hired by a content creation company, where in the process of creating web content she comes across Miguel (Rayver Cruz), a charming businessman with whom Hope takes a liking to.

At first, I was baffled at who produced this particular film: GMA Public Affairs, who is better known for several award winning documentaries. Having split from GMA Integrated News, the division has moved on to produce other forms of media - this is their first foray into fiction film. But after seeing The Cheating Game in its entirety it makes perfect sense. The Cheating Game is a film about truth in all its forms, and how people are affected, for better or worse (mostly the latter) by withholding it, especially in the context of a personal relationship.

That idea finds itself in all kinds of places in the film: during her job search, Hope asks for transparency in exchange for her labor, transparency that is not always provided by her prospective employers. Her eventual employment in a content farm, headed by Mister Y (Paolo Contis), feels a bit ironic in that sense - to Mister Y, engagement is the bottom line, whether the content's "truth" is manufactured or not. As the film goes on, we see that even engagement itself can be manufactured. Various characters withhold the truth to Hope, sometimes for her own good (at least in their eyes) but without Hope's consent. What becomes most important for Hope (and for all of us watching) is the need to think critically in the midst of the deluge of information given to her. A stubborn commitment to facing the truth, no matter how painful, and the ability to process and think critically is what gets Hope out of her predicament. As opposed to, say, a documentary, it's a subtle but interesting way of communicating that idea to audiences - and transparent, honest communication between people and society is the heart of what public affairs is.

The Cheating Game does have its share of faults. It runs into some awkwardness near the middle of the second and third acts, resorting to a denouement that feels staged right out of an old timey detective show, and although the film tries to build upon the relationship between Miguel and Hope, there are some times when I wished the film wouldn't rush through it so much.

That said, the film's strength is apparent from the very start: Julie Anne San Jose's performance is the film's beating heart. Though she has had several lead roles in television, San Jose has only had one other lead film role (Mac Alejandre's Just One Summer (2012)). San Jose brings a pragmatism to Hope, a sort of world weariness; a character that's tired of all the bullshit and pretense and prefers an ordered, sensible world. It's honestly quite an eye-opening performance; one of my favorites of the year so far. Rayver Cruz isn't a slouch in this film either - there is one scene on a rooftop near the end where he matches his on screen partner beat for beat, effectively selling me on the film.

There's a big ask near the end of The Cheating Game that will likely influence one's appreciation of it - whether a certain character can be forgiven for their mistakes. It's extremely hard to pull this off without making said character very unsympathetic (see The Hows of Us for an example on how not to do it), but in this case, I think The Cheating Game manages to pull it off. It all goes back to one of the film's themes - that a relationship is work, or rather, a work in progress - one that necessitates the continuous, painstaking yet mutually beneficial "labor" of both parties.

Will You Be My Ex? review: Love is a Drug

 

I don't like a lot of breakup movies - it's hard to write characters in the midst of a breakup without making them look like insufferable people, and more often than not the film drags out their inevitable breakup to the point where it gets annoying. But when a movie manages to pull it off, I'm 100% on board. At least in my opinion, that's the case with Real Florido's Will You Be My Ex?.

Joey (Diego Loyzaga) is an architect with ambitions of enhancing his career. Chris (Julia Barretto) is a talented theater actress. They met and fell in love in college and have been together for a while now. It's made quite clear that the two of them are incompatible in terms of what they want from their lives and each other, and there is little to no transparency between them. They recognize this and one day, after a very tumultuous turn of events regarding a pregnancy, Chris leaves Joey and Joey leaves for a job related opportunity in Germany. During this first act, the energy between the two is tense and anxious; the camera mirrors this anxiety with its movement - from one character to another, going in and out with a tentativeness that I can't adequately describe. There's a great shot near the end of this act when the two are separated by frames within frames and Chris literally closes the door on her lover.

Three years later, the two meet again. They're currently considering other partners but the two didn't get closure during their last parting and just can't get enough of each other, their mutual attraction inevitably pushing them back toward each other and towards inevitable heartbreak.

Despite its rather "mainstream" outward appearance, Will You Be My Ex? is a story about the harmful potential of love out of control, without regard for anything else. Despite its cutesy declarations and big gestures towards the end, it is a story of how love can be addicting, leading people into making the worst decisions just to have one more moment with the people they are attracted to, but people that are a bad fit for them relationship-wise. Love is a drug, and this is a film about two addicts in perpetual rehab.

Seeing the movie in that way made me understand (but not excuse) the actions Chris and Joey take throughout the film - unable to let go of each other means getting into lots of half-hearted relationships with other people. Granted, I would have preferred it if Joey had come to this realization on his own without Chris' help, but I'll take it. 

I'm sure a lot of other people will not see eye to eye with me - perhaps they won't attach to the two protagonists as much as I did, and they'd consider the film's proclivity for rushing the proceedings near the end (especially a small but interesting side plot about the human wreckage of consolation partners Joey and Chris leave in their wake), it's quite a different approach than I'm used to from studio-backed "romantic" films, and I have to give an A for effort.

Siglo ng Kalinga review: unsung heroes

 

My family boasts a substantial number of nurses. Most work abroad, and some have even done so for decades at this point. As a medical professional myself, I view nurses as an invaluable and essential part of any healthcare team. In honor of the storied history of nurses in our country, Dr. Carl Balita (himself a nurse), with the help of the Philippine Nurses' Association, produced a feature film called Siglo ng Kalinga.

Directed by Lem Lorca (Water Lemon, among others) Siglo ng Kalinga focuses on the life and career of Anna (Joy M. Ras), a nurse with dreams of helping her family and the small coastal community she lives in. As the film goes on, however, Anna learns that things are not so simple, and in the process (rather inadvertently) the film exposes how our health care system is deeply dysfunctional.

The film is not perfect. It struggles to put things into focus, sometimes segueing into tangentially related sequences about the life and trials of Anastacia Giron-Tupas, Giron-Tupas is one of the country's most distinguished nurses and nurse leaders, but if you come into this blind, you may not be able to tell who she is, much less connect her story to the central narrative. In one sequence, the venerable nurse is met with opposition from her colleagues, but the scene lacks the context behind it, so it was challenging to figure out what was happening. To be fair, I would gladly watch a movie about her eventful life, but it seems out of place here. I personally would have preferred it if they'd stuck to one thing.

Anna's story is inspired by the real life stories of many other nurses: she spends time abroad after a career in the Philippines, she fights for her fellow nurses' rights, especially during the COVID pandemic, and she loses friends and colleagues due to the virus. There are a lot of interesting side stories (for example, the elderly nurse who returns to the COVID wards to serve her family and her country) and some not-so interesting side stories (any of the film's romantic arcs, which collectively feel unnecessary in the grand scheme of things). However, one of my favorite parts of the film happens at the very start.

During her nursing school days, Anna is sent to a seaside community (if I recall correctly, the same community where she grew up) where she and her classmates immediately identify a problem with the town's water supply, which is causing many of the residents to have gastrointestinal problems. Her group immediately goes to the mayor who dismisses her concerns, saying that there is a proper way of doing things, that the local government unit is working on (frankly unrelated) projects and that she should have gone through the proper channels. Although he kind of has a point, because he doesn't prioritize it, most probably more people get sick, Anna is told that she did the right thing but it was out of her purview, and the movie goes on. I had thought that they'd never come back to this plot thread, but Anna later returns to that community and addresses the problem, saying that nothing has changed. That's not even including the fact that the local government didn't address the vulnerability of the community to natural disasters, and that led to even more people dying, including people close to Anna.

It may not be intentional, but it does show that the scriptwriters were aware of how bad our public healthcare system is. For public health problems to play second fiddle to political concerns works to the detriment of everyone in that community, because they can legitimately affect the quality of life of every person living there. The film shows us what eventually happens in real life. It's a pragmatic way of looking at things and although sometimes I'd rather have it be idealistic, it's an interesting approach and one that I consider to be a highlight of the film.

The film ends with an abstract sequence that I initially found to be quite bizarre, but one that I eventually warmed up to due to its abstraction. It's a celebration of all the lives that came before and all the lives that were lost, a visual representation of the human sacrifices our nurses make for the sake of their families and countrymen.

The Revelation Review: nice concept, bad execution

 

The mysterious disappearance of Jake Petersen rattles police officer Vincent (Vin Abrenica.) After all, the two had been close in their childhood; Vincent's mother worked as a tutor for Jake and the two were kind of like brothers in a sense.

Two years have passed and the case remains unsolved. This time, Vincent is investigating a spate of deaths involving GROs (that's club girls or hostesses to non-Filipino viewers.) In alternating sequences, we see who is responsible for these heinous crimes: Lance (Aljur Abrenica,) a man who stalks and captures these women almost at will. While Vincent slowly sets his sights on Lance, it becomes quite clear that something bonds the two together and Lance may have something to do with the mysterious disappearance of Jake Petersen...

On paper, Ray An Dulay's The Revelation sounds like an interesting concept. Serial killer stories are uncommon in Philippine cinema, partially because we don't see a lot of serial killers in real life. Lance's backstory is particularly well fleshed out: he has a pair of very dysfunctional parents and the method of his crimes follow a pattern that feels logically consistent with his own dysfunctions. He has his reasons as to why he kills the people he kills.

The problem with The Revelation, unfortunately, is almost everything else. For one, the film is badly edited. Establishing shots intrude upon several scenes, popping up in the weirdest of places. During a sex scene, the film inexplicably cuts to a shot of two birds. During a conversation, the scene cuts to various exterior drone shots of the place without rhyme or reason. Two separate chase scenes cut to what looks like the same shot of Vin Abrenica saying "nasaan ka na?" in a distressed tone. The editing felt like it was done by a bunch of amateurs.

For a police procedural, no thought seems to be given to how investigations actually work. One of the first scenes in such a procedural should be a rundown of all the victims and their manner of death, to establish the number of victims and manner of crimes committed. That type of scene happens near the middle of the film, right after Lance kills another person, making it seem repetitive. Not only that, but Vincent is in this scene and looks over the evidence and the dead bodies half naked. Why? Vincent's right hand man, Alex (Jelai Andres) goes undercover to keep tabs on Lance and on their very first date she blurts out that she is an NBI agent. And for some reason, it works! It's the stupidest (and apparently most effective) spycraft I've ever seen in a contemporary film.

The Revelation is a baffling film, one that I wouldn't recommend. It looks great on paper but the people behind it have botched nearly everything else.

A Tricycle Driver Movie Review

 

One of the most prominent rotations of a medical intern is community medicine. In that rotation, students are sent to communities (sometimes remote, sometimes very far flung) in order to learn about the various ins and outs of the medical needs and public health concerns of the people living there. Of course, that didn't stop a few classmates and co-interns from spending a couple of nights drinking and having fun, especially towards the end of the rotation, but that's beside the point.

As the only two men in our block, my co-intern and I were both assigned to the farthest, most remote barangay, a small village with a population of a few dozen. next to a mountain. We took our shits in a makeshift outhouse, and we had to prepare water in advance if we had to go. (Because it's pitch black at night, we rarely went out after 7pm). Our one and only method of travel from the barangay to the rest of the municipality was by a 40 minute tricycle ride as walking was not a good idea unless you had a lot of time. Once or twice a week, we'd take the latter and meet up with friends or attend one of the required meetings with our advisers.

What I mean from that extended preamble is: tricycles are a fundamentally important part of transport in our country, specially in the Philippines, whether in rural or urban settings. Yet movies about them are exceedingly rare - I cannot recall one shown in the past decade, while even pedicab drivers had their own short film: Arvin Belarmino's (Tarang (2020))! In other countries, films about the workers who operate cheap public transportation are often framed as working class heroes or everymen fighting against societal conditions brought about by their class: India, in particular, has several films about rickshaw drivers, including the classic 1995 mass film Baasha, and one of my favorite films is Ajantrik (1958) about a talking taxi and the driver that loves it; Japan has films like Hiroshi Imagaki's The Life of Matsu the Untamed (1943); one of the main characters in Tony Bui's ode to contemporary Vietnam Three Seasons (1999) is a cyclo driver; China has Ling Zifeng's film adaptation of Rickshaw Boy (1982); and that's not counting endless documentaries showcasing such transport workers from Egypt to Thailand to everywhere in the world.

Tricycle Driver: Kasangga Mo now joins that pantheon, for better or worse. Directed in tandem (ha!) by Karlo Montero and Samuel Ibarra, the film is about a group of tricycle drivers doing tricycle driver stuff, and by tricycle driver stuff, I mean driving a makeshift ambulance, becoming stooges of the state apparatus, getting into firefights with illegal crime syndicates and helping stop a demonic possession. You know, just normal things tricycle drivers do. But ultimately it's not a film about tricycle drivers - it's about other working class people that aren't tricycle drivers. Confused? I bet. Read on and I'll explain.

The film is produced by Angel Film productions, whose opening logo is so shoddy that not only does it look like it was made 20 years ago, it also (most likely illegally) uses the last few seconds of the end credit music of STAR TREK FIRST CONTACT!

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE EARS OF THE MOST HARDCORE STAR TREK FAN IN THIS COUNTRY. NEVER.

The film begins with Samuel "Sammy" Romero (Vin Abrenica) coming home from his work as a stuntman. Showbiz doesn't have a lot of work for him so he decides to go back to his wife and kid. Along the way, he is stopped by a bunch of would be robbers and he disposes of them by getting into a fistfight (mind you that the robbers are armed with at least one gun.) He wins because of course he does, and in the process confiscates the robbers' gun. Perhaps inspired (?) by these events, he decides to join his sister Rose Ann (Rose Ann Ibarra) and go back to his previous job as a tricycle driver. The next few scenes are about Sammy navigating local bureaucracy to regain the tricycle license that he had in 2013 and his sister getting scammed by someone who offered her a package in exchange for fare money.

People who've seen (or rather, heard) this movie will no doubt notice that the sound in this film is horrendous. The characters are dubbed worse than a Hong Kong English dub in the 1980's, with a sound quality on par with something recorded off Baby's First Microphone:

of course, that's actually a thing

In an out of left field sequence, Sammy's dad (Rogelio Yadao) comes home. He'd left the household for how many years because he cheated on his wife, and now he's back for some reason. Although the film doesn't tell us here in this scene, he's actually a cop. Sammy's dad talks with his family in a very emotional scene, and by "emotional" I mean having the emotional range of a loaf of bread. The actors seem to be emoting, but the dub delivers the dialogue like they were reading aloud a research paper on the multivariate quadratic challenges toward post-quantum generation cryptography. The dad is forgiven by the family (quite quickly, I may add) though he doesn't show up again until near the end of the film - his appearance is literally an afterthought, as if the writer wrote the film in reverse. 

I'd like to segue a little bit and discuss where and when this movie takes place. Based on the presidential picture and several campaign posters still posted to several homes, we can deduce that this was filmed sometime last year, near to or after the 2022 elections in May. In several establishing shots in the film "Davao City Hall" is seen in one of the buildings (at least, as clear as you can see as it looks like it's shot in 240p). The film has a mayor character and a governor character, which points to a provincial setting. HOWEVER, other incidental shots of the film are obviously in Quezon City, and I don't even have to look - "Quezon City" is clearly displayed in front of every tricycle in the film! Not to mention we can clearly see various political posters for local candidates for Quezon City positions! It goes without saying that the film is hilariously inept, but you've probably figured that out anyway.

Look at the writing on the tricycle. I'm just gonna call it Quevao City from now on

In this "Davao City Hall", the vice mayor is shown talking to a bunch of people played by "actors" who they probably just yoinked off the street. The vice mayor, in an effort to fight against rising crime rates, decides to recruit tricycle drivers and use them as police assets! There's a certain kind of twisted logic to his reasoning here: as tricycle drivers are exposed to all manners of people, they will likely be witness to any number of potentially criminal activities, and if they're used by the police, they can narc on their fellow citizens. This motion passes without protest from the rest of the staff, because fuck that. Meanwhile, Sammy and Rose Ann are then shown going on tricycle related escapades, such as delivering a baby. Yes, tricycle drivers are midwives now for some reason. Also, Sammy's fellow tricycle driver Aryong (Pekto) gets really drunk (it looks like they shot the scene at night) and goes out with his (equally drunk) friend in a tricycle with scenes clearly shot DURING THE DAY and crash on an electrical pole. I suppose their drunk tricycle driving caused them to travel near the speed of light, doing time dilation stuff and making them crash 12 hours later.

What comes next is a sequence where an old guy (Bobby Henson) visits the barangay captain's office. It's not entirely clear who he actually is (former cop? former gangster? is there a difference anymore?) but the people refer to him as "FPJ." He looks like an FPJ cosplayer, but other than his body language and costume he doesn't look anything like the guy. To be fair, his credits go all the way back to the eighties, with a lot of his 90s and 2000s roles being an FPJ stand-in. His only relevance in this movie is a subsequent scene of him geriatrically beating up a pair of extortionists like an emaciated, diseased Rocky Balboa.

Aryong makes up for his earlier drunken shenanigans (surprising that he wasn't arrested for it lol) by helping out a man who passed out while driving. He brings the man onto his tricycle and brings him to the hospital. Later on, the man's wife calls Aryong and thanks him for his help. She and the revived husband give him a hefty sum of money to do as he pleases. And what does he do with that moolah? Does he construct a new house? Fund a sari-sari store? Nope! He turns his tricycle into a double decker - the same double decker that you see in this film's poster. People line up to take a ride in it so I guess he made the right choice.

okay, it does look pretty cool

What happens next is one of my favorite moments of the film. Aryong's sister (I think?) is shown to be flailing around like a mad person, and that's apparently because she's being possessed by a demon. While Aryong holds her in place, the other people in the house call an Albularyo, who exorcizes the demon from her body. Is this relevant to anything else in the movie? No. Is the demonic possession ever brought up again? No. I guess tricycle drivers help stop demonic possession now, or maybe Satan and his demonic hordes saw what the movie was about and decided to drop the film like a hot potato. When both God and Satan have abandoned your film, you know some real shit's going on.

In one of the film's last "filler arcs" before we go to the meat of the story, we get another unrelated sequence where one tricycle driver returns a bag of lost cash and is accused of keeping the money for himself... while' he's in the barangay captain's office... just as he's giving the bag to the captain for safekeeping?? The funny part is, when all is resolved and the lady who lost her money apologizes for her accusations, she kinda starts flirting with the driver lol.

After an hour of the most random shit ever, we finally get to the main course. While his fellow tricycle drivers were delivering babies and bringing people to the hospital and holding their relative while they're being possessed by a demon, Sammy gets into a lot of fights. For some reason, being a former stuntman is attracting the local toughs like mosquitoes to the color blue. One of the goons who fights Sammy is a huge guy and he throws the poor ex-stuntman around. I guess random fights are part of the hazards of working as a tricycle driver. While Sammy does make up with that giant dude, Sammy gets into another fight with an older tricycle driver who I've never seen before. This guy pulls out a knife and apparently that's a no-no because all of Sammy's colleagues rush in to help him and give him a beating. The police arrive and arrest everyone for making a scene. I guess without half of its tricycle force, Quevao City citizens are going to have to make do with other sources of transportation.

Various people talk with the mayor about this incident. Since no complaints were filed, the majority of the tricycle drivers are free to go... except the older tricycle driver who picked a fight with Sammy. As it turns out, that guy is WANTED FOR KILLING TWO PEOPLE. So after a short musical montage where our tricycle drivers are hobnobbing with non-tricycle driver detainees, they are let go, except for double murder guy (his name is Montecristo).

This is Montecristo. I bet if you entered "Philippine Cinema 90's Criminal Goon" in an AI it would look something like this guy

Sammy's not been at home for at least a couple days because of his incarceration. and apparently news of his imprisonment hasn't reached his family members. He arrives to find his wife sleeping, and I guess to emphasize potential sexytime (and solidarity with Ukraine??), the filmmakers tint the whole frame blue, then yellow. Sammy's wife wakes up and is angry at her husband, accusing him of being unfaithful. Sammy truthfully says that he's been imprisoned, but wifey isn't having it. To prove his innocence, Sammy asks his wife to... smell his shirt?? Dude, in the first place, why would you want to do sexytime when you've been in prison for at least two days? Taka a bath first, you neanderthal! The "characterization" of most of the women in this film is pretty telling - wives who are tied to their spouses and forgive their husbands' indiscretions way too easily, paranoiacs, or the vessels of demonic possession. The only woman in the film who is in any way independent is Rose Ann, who is portrayed as a tomboy.

here's an example of that yellow tint I was talking about

The two make up off screen while various other things go on in the background:  the vice mayor continues to gain political power, visiting the tricycle drivers who were just freed. Aryong is involved in a pretty tasteless trans joke that would've been funny NEVER, tricycle driver police assets help bust what looks like a drug syndicate, and in a not-really unsurprising sequence, Montecristo and a dozen other criminals are broken out of prison by heretofore-unknown individuals. 

We soon learn who is responsible for the jailbreak: the soon-to-be (?) governor of wherever this place is -  a balding crime boss named Don Pepe (Bing Davao) and his stable of goons straight out of the nineties. Although it's implied he's dipped his toes into many different things (presumably including the drug thingy that tricycle drivers helped bring down) he's mostly concerned with illegal gambling operations, running an illegal casino out of someone's garage. As an aside, I found it pretty hilarious to have people all dressed up gambling in this place like it's some swanky joint from James Bond when it's literally just someone's garage. The police raid the establishment and one of the crime boss' lieutenants manages to escape. Don Pepe isn't too pleased and takes it up with the mayor. Apparently the two signed a covenant way back: Don pepe gets to do whatever he wants but mostly under the radar, while the mayor enjoys a (relatively) crime-controlled city. The attack on the casino is a violation of that covenant, so Don pepe begins to move against the mayor, though as we will see as the film nears its end, he doesn't think things all the way through.

Firstly, he removes the biggest threat to his grand schemes. Is it the police chief? The local military, maybe? NOPE! He springs a trap for all of the tricycle drivers under the guise of an award ceremony and imprisons them (sans Sammy) in his mansion. He then kidnaps the mayor (??) and tries to bribe him with 5 million pesos... but why kidnap him though? All that would do is put a giant target on the crime boss' head, because he's the only one with such a motive! While all of this is happening, Sammy's dad dies in a police operation and Sammy mourns his death via a montage of all the times we've seen the guy... which consists mostly of the guy getting shot by criminals lol.

basically this for 30 seconds lol

The police raid Don Pepe' house with a strike force that includes Sammy, who goes into the house dressed in police attire and armed with a gun and a baseball bat. Aside from all the other things tricycle drivers can do, apparently they can also get into firefights with criminals. Don Pepe is defeated, other tricycle drivers are freed, all is good. For reference, this shootout sequence was shot in Bocaue Bulacan, so we got establishing shots in Davao, shots for other sequences in QC, then this shootout scene in Bulacan. Talk about location shooting.

in case you think I'm lying, here's Vin Abrenica, tricycle driver, dressed in police attire with a baseball bat

The vice mayor then confronts the mayor about the covenant, telling him that he'll do everything to bring him down or something to that effect. Does the mayor get any repercussions for this? Does the vice mayor recruit the tricycle drivers to participate in a special recon operation to suss out the mayor's other criminal activities? Nope again! In the very next scene, we see police chief, Sammy and (if I recall correctly) the fucking mayor, LITERALLY THE GUY PARTIALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE being awarded a medal for... defeating the crime boss, I guess? The vice mayor is somewhere in there, but he doesn't say a goddamn word. I'd start pulling my hair out at this point but I was afraid I'd go bald.

The man who gives the award to these people is the ACTUAL governor of this place, played by none other than Karlo Montero (his nameplate here is Karlo M. Conge) in a cameo, almost like he's rewarding himself for doing such a good job. The mind boggles. After a few more unfunny jokes, the film ends. The hilarity doesn't end there as the credits are just as inept - for example, the credit for "script continuity" is spelled as "contenuity" because these boobs can't even get that right.

If the structure of the film feels similar to you - working class dudes doing outlandish things, eventually ending in a firefight and getting awards for their random shenanigans - you're on to something, because these are the same people that made Security Academy. And much like that film, this isn't really about tricycle drivers or security guards - it's about stuntmen and other film workers left by the wayside as Philippine cinema moved away from certain genres. This film was based on a true story and I wouldn't be surprised - Sammy the stuntman might be Sammy Ibarra, the other director of this film. If you look at the credits of the people who worked on this film, a lot of them go waaaaay back: Bing Davao, who played Don Pepe, has credits going all the way back to 1979 - the man's worked with everyone from Vilma to Dolphy; Domingo Zafe, who composed what little music this film had, has composed for films since at least 1980, for people like Carlo J. Caparas; a lot of the older folks are bit players who've acted in various, mostly tough guy roles since the eighties and nineties.

For many years, these people served as the backbone of a prolific industry. But times and tastes change, and the genres they worked in slowly gave way to more budget friendly genres. When FPJ died, the genre he was best known for likely drew its last breaths, and with it followed all of the other workers who supported that industry within an industry. The desire to reach out, to become something more than one's self (or at least, what the industry perceives them to be) finds itself in these two films: ordinary people becoming rich, becoming heroes, becoming the main character in the story of their lives - people who can deliver children without a medical or midwife license, get into firefights without a police badge or help exorcize demons without the blessing of some mountain spirit.

That's probably why one of the directors' responses to a "review" of his film felt so angry - films like this are his attempt to fight back an existential threat. Though undoubtedly inexperienced and technically inept in the art of filmmaking, I see films like this as an earnest, if misguided attempt to reclaim what once was. At the very least, I understand the motivations behind the creation of the film.

On the other hand, the implications of his statement in that response - that ridiculing films like his will cause international (specifically Hollywood) productions to completely eliminate Filipino cinema - are a reach. The threat of competition from other countries' films is not an excuse to watch a bad local film. Yeah it sucks, but them's the breaks - in the Darwinist system we're currently in, local films are at a disadvantage. All sorts of mediocrity or outright garbage - unless there's something there to appeal to some audience - will inevitably be ignored. Sadly, that means some real gems get caught in the crossfire too. I don't know if there's a solution to that other than outright stubbornness, so points for trying I guess. Thanks for reading.