Yanggaw: The Affliction in Us All
By Tito Genova Valiente
In a period when the form of anti-cinema seduces the audience, “Yanggaw” asks us to take it because it is relatively recognizable—and arguably the more accessible—of the many films that are lately produced. By accessibility, I am referring to the linear narrative of the film and should not be equated with something that is “facile” or plain. Such linearity, however, even makes more obvious the dimensions “Yanggaw” has recovered for us and reveals the many layers of storytelling that the well-wrought screenplay, because of its construction, is able to accomplish. The director, who is also credited for the screenplay, accomplishes what is difficult to accomplish: embedding the symbolic and the metaphorical in the actions and processes of the film. No stilted dialogues or contrived poses, just a storytelling that explores the many facets of patriarchy and myth-making in our cultures.Read more
Serbis: Cinema purgatorio
By Lito B. Zulueta
“SERBIS,” the first Filipino movie to have competed at the Cannes Film Festival in more than a quarter of a century, opens with what appears to be a commentary on its feat. A very young woman, Jewel (Rosanne Jordan), newly bathed and naked, admires herself in the cracked life-size mirror, moaning with apparent pleasure as if she were making love with her reflection. The camera lingers, perhaps a tad lasciviously, on her body, until she’s woken up from her narcissistic daydream by the catcall of her pesky little brother, who has surreptitiously opened the door to catch her unawares. When he runs away from her to announce to the rest of the family what she has been doing, the viewer learns that they are living in a vast movie house that has seen better days and scarcely survives with a double-feature program of faded sex movies where the actors always find an excuse to undress every 15 minutes. The theater scarcely survives on a diet of sex screenings, but they will do: patrons hardly go there to watch movies, after all; they go there to feast on the lusty images onscreen, rev up their libido, transact for sex with or without payment, and do their lurid acts under the disguise of darkness. It’s literally “service after dark.”Read more
Melancholia: Philippine cinema as meditation and metaphysics
By Lito B. Zulueta
Lav Diaz’s Melancholia provides a sweeping fillip and summing-up to the aesthetics he has stubbornly maintained and that has always baffled audiences. A mordant movie that is part pastorale, part meditation, and part social commentary, there is no other film like it, except for the previous movies he has done— sweeping narrative movies that seem determined to break the standard idea of a regular feature movie that’s all but told in just 90 minutes more or less.
But unlike in his previous movies where the narrative seems a recasting of the picaresque, “Melancholia,” Diaz dispenses with the narrative trajectory altogether, leaving the viewer on tenterhooks but still with a modicum of familiarity with its most basic story line revolving around three characters—a hooker, a pimp and a nun. All of them seem wounded by grief over the deaths of communist rebel friends who had been dashed and killed either by the insurgency conflict or by natural calamity. Everyone is held by the memory of death and destruction.Read more
Melancholia sa 'Melancholia'
Ni Rolando B. Tolentino
Sa mga rebyu ng “Melancholia,” laging dinidiin ang kalungkutan na pumapaimbalot sa mga buhay ng tauhan, ng produksyon ng sining at katotohanan sa gitna ng matinding politikal na panunupil ng komersyal na cinema (negosyo) at ng gobyerno. Ang huling dalawa ang bumubuo ng estado ng bansa, ang black hole na humihigop sa lahat ng mga anak at mamamayan nito sa pagdalumat sa kolektibo at individual na buhay bilang kalungkutan.
Tatlo ang pangunahing seksyon ng “Melancholia”: ang una, sa Sagada, magtatagpo ang isang madre, bugaw at puta na pinag-ugnay ng nakaraan bilang naiwan ng politikal na pinaslang o inaasahang patay na; ang ikalawa, sa Maynila, ang bugaw ay naging publisher, ang puta naging prinsipal ng eskwelahan; at panghuli, sa gubat sa Mindoro, isang rebolusyonaryo, asawa ng puta sa una, ang mamamatay sa digmaan. May epilogo, ang paghahanap ng balo ng rebolusyonaryo sa kadiliman ng parke sa syudad.Read more
Jay: Cinema gets back at television
By Butch Francisco
Media had always been very useful—at disseminating news and information, providing public service and exposing society’s ills, especially corruption in the government.
Unfortunately, media can also be abused in many ways by its practitioners who are corrupt and by those who slant the news, twist and distort the truth and embellish and exaggerate factual events to get readership (for print) and bring in the almighty ratings (for radio and television).
The indie film “Jay” gives us an inside view of what may be happening behind the scenes in the production of news documentaries on television.
Directed by Francis Xavier Pasion, the story of “Jay” begins when a gay schoolteacher is killed in his house and the suspect is a masseur who provides home service. A news program on TV apparently sees the opportunity to bring in the ratings by doing an exclusive feature on the case. A producer, played by Baron Geisler, is sent to the murdered teacher’s hometown in Bacolor, Pampanga to interview the family and to possibly dig whatever dirt they can find there.Read more