The Wily Filipino

Scenes from Los Banos, Part 4.

1. It's hot. The pillows radiate heat.

2. It's been threatening to rain for over three days now: sunshine in the morning, dark clouds and terrible humidity in the afternoon, and then -- nothing. More of the same at night.

3. You get what you pay for. The bootleg VCDs were almost unwatchable -- and, in a couple of cases, just about impossible. I didn't have very high expectations for X2, so I could deal with the audience laughter. (Thankfully, Madeline knew all the mutants' powers, so she could fill me in on what was going on.) Gangs of New York was clearly shot from a duffel bag by some guy sitting in the left aisle of the left side of the theater. So Close, a Hong Kong film, had its English subtitles cut off at the bottom. And while watching The Pianist, the CD lens kept slipping a few "grooves" back, as it were, so a pixelled "flashback" from a few scenes before would suddenly pop up. At times it would provide an interesting narrative counterpoint to the images playing on screen -- as if Adrien Brody's interior thoughts would appear, Kirlian camera-like, onto the film -- but I'm sure Polanski wouldn't have wanted it that way. =)

4. I have a week and a half to come up with a best-man toast. For suggestions, please write comments below.

5. Tom Tykwer's Heaven was a delight. (It was a clear copy, what we didn't expect was that the English subtitles would be obscured by the Chinese and Indonesian subtitles superimposed on top of them! Fortunately Madeline knows Mandarin, my Bahasa Indonesia is passable but extremely rusty, and we both know a smattering of tourist Italian, so it worked out fine.) Cate Blanchett, as a mysterious saboteur -- one of the esteemed members of my Pale and Haunted Pantheon, though not up there with Julianne Moore, but now above Judy Davis -- was very good in the beginning, as was Giovanni Ribisi as the carabinieri / interpreter who falls for Blanchett. With a Kieslowski screenplay and gorgeous photography to boot -- it's Italy, after all.

My only real quibble -- okay, there were major plot holes, but this is a parable -- is how lately a few films have been flirting with the vague idea of spirituality and the "metaphysical" with rather shallow intellectual engagement. Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves is a good case in point; it sends you out of the theater thinking you've just witnessed a semi-religious experience and then... what? (There must also be a whole slew of recent films coming out of Europe on the same subject, but I haven't had the time to read subtitles (Philistine!), so I will point to three recent American films: the vacuous Signs, by M. Night Shyamalan, Steven Spielberg's much-misunderstood A.I., which I chose to read more as a twisted Oedipal fable, and the excellent The Pledge, by Sean Penn, in which Jack Nicholson actually plays someone other than himself.)

6. Coming soon: lapdog alert, and the repercussions of the Philippines being the most willing of the coalition of the willing.

Posted by the wily filipino at June 9, 2003 08:24 PM