Reviews
Bakal Boys: Decay by the Sea
By Gigi Javier Alfonso
“BAKAL Boys” is about the young metal divers from Baseco, a community by the sea, who are marching and chanting verses of toughness, smallness and pride in being organized. The children metal divers (the bakal boys) are driven to look for better lives for themselves. They present a picture of boys with dreams. They seem to be full of life and always ready to conquer the waters. They may be seen as ridiculous by others at times but certainly they are not losers in their own eyes. They strut around with dignity.Read more
The Arrival: Unvarnished and understated
By Mike Rapatan
AMONG last year’s heady batch of independent films, Erik Matti’s “The Arrival” sticks out like a sore thumb. While other indie films in 2009 predictably focused their lens on abject conditions of economic displacement and hardship (e.g., “Baseco Bakal Boys” by Ralston Jover, “Himpapawid” by Raymond Red, and “Lola” by Brillante Dante Mendoza), human rights abuse (“Engkwentro” by Pepe Diokno and “Kinatay” by Brillante Dante Mendoza), the circuitous government bureaucracy (“Last Supper No. 3” by Veronica Velasco), and political warlordism (“Hospital Boat” by Arnel Mardoquio), “The Arrival” turns its gaze away from the heavy social realism of many indie films. Matti himself also takes a sharp and refreshing detour (hopefully, not just for now) from his commercial directorial style in past mainstream work like “Scorpio Nights 2” (1999), “Ekis” (1999), and “Prosti” (2002) and succeeds in presenting a love story indie style.Read more
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