The Wily Filipino

Random Movie-Related Stuff.

1. No time to write a real write-up, but Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse is up there with Bong Joon-ho's The Host (and Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence) as one of my favorites this year so far.

(And in case anyone wanted to know: QT's was better than RR's. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and say that Eli Roth's "preview" for Thanksgiving was better than Planet Terror. And indeed I'll go out on another limb and say that Death Proof is probably Tarantino's best work since Pulp Fiction. It's a structural marvel, plus Tarantino lets his characters simply luxuriate in the pleasures of the rhythm of simple conversation. Words, speed and metal -- yeah.)

2. Great roundtable in the L.A. Weekly -- though it's mostly Tarantino yapping -- between various grindhouse auteurs.

I love the shout-out at the end to The Siege of Firebase Gloria, on which a cousin of mine was a producer; that was also when I found myself sitting at my kitchen table with R. Lee Ermey!

3. Reading the latest issue of Cinema Scope. The Rotterdam film fest has all the Filipino films I want to see! (We in SF have only one, and it's not the ones at Rotterdam. It's the latest Auraeus Solito film though.)

4. Plus two missed cinema-related opportunities just about a month ago:

I was out of town (in Austin for the weekend), so I totally missed the Apichatpong Weerasethakul fest in Berkeley, which comprised a showing of his latest film and a shot-by-shot director commentary accompanying Tropical Malady. If that wasn't bad enough, an email arrives on Thursday, inviting me to a small reception for the director. Drat. At least I can console myself with my last moment of director-fanboy interaction a couple of months ago, i.e., holding the bathroom door open for Bong Joon-Ho and stammering about how much I enjoyed Memories of Murder, and he smiled and said "thanks" and ran in, clearly needing to use the facilities.

So back to Austin: I step off the plane and to the Advantage car rental counter and the clerks there (all women) are all excited about something.

Me: What's going on?
Clerk: Oh -- you should have been here ten minutes ago!
Me: What do you mean?
Clerk: Just ten minutes ago, Rosario Dawson was standing right where you are.
Me: Are you serious?
Clerk: Yes, she just left! She was soooo nice.
Other clerk [in a whisper]: And she was stacked.

I figure I would have stammered about how much I enjoyed watching her in Clerks 2, and she would have smiled and said "thanks" and ran off to get her car anyway.

5. Saw Samuel Fuller's White Dog on the big screen. (For those of you who don't know it, it's Fuller's unreleased movie about a German shepherd specifically trained to attack black people.) I still don't know what to make of it -- a somewhat ham-fisted if certainly original attempt to address racism (though movies like Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon were much worse), terrible acting from Kristy McNichol, dialogue (co-written by Curtis Hanson) that's really unable to transcend its pulpy origins -- but there's something about the movie that gets under your skin. (This mainly has to do with the anti-racist dog de-trainer played by Paul Winfield, whose nobility of intentions places him on the continuum of Noble African American Men of Hollywood, but it's a compelling role nonetheless.)

6. Takeshi Furusawa's Ghost Train: sorry -- just dull all around.

7. Hirokazu Kore-eda's superb Hana is that rarest of things: a samurai comedy. Junichi Okada from V6 has sworn to avenge the death of his father -- except that he's something of an incompetent samurai, and prefers teaching the local kids how to write. Romance, drama, legacies passed on from father to son, the theater, the meaning of revenge -- they're all here in this excellent film (although it's not Afterlife, for sure).

8. Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne boasts an excellent ensemble cast -- it's hard to beat Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne -- and this adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story (also borrowed for Robert Altman's Short Cuts, i.e., the unnecessarily misogynist Huey-Lewis-pissing-into-a-river segment) does a fine job of illustrating the domestic frustrations that erupt to the surface when basic human decency is tested. But god almighty, is it ruined by a red herring of a subplot that thankfully goes nowhere and one of the most appallingly mawkish endings I've seen in a while.

9. Unfortunately I popped a Benadryl (my allergies are really awful these days) just before seeing Pedro Costa's exquisite Colossal Youth, which was the movie I was most excited to see during the SF Film Festival. Not good, because Costa stretches his long takes to the absolute breaking point (though I probably only drifted off for only a few seconds each time). Hey, at least I happily stayed through the whole thing; people were leaving in droves!

(I didn't "get it," though I stopped having that reaction to a film a long time ago.) What was certainly most memorable was the rigorously composed frame, mostly with the tall, dazed lead character -- Costa gets a lot of mileage from dressing him in all black -- cutting obliquely across the screen. What a movie though: ghosts refusing to quit haunting burnt-out shells of buildings, shuffling in stained and chipped hallways, reciting letters never sent, standing in ruined pools of light.

Video Quiz #1.

Which music videos did these video captures come from? Post your answers in the comments.

1.

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5.

(Sorry, Last.fm users -- you're officially barred from entering!)

Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence.

There's little I can add to the rapturous reviews of Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence -- an almost three-hour documentary on a Carthusian monastery in France and its monks who have taken a vow to live their lives as silently as possible. It's not nearly as forbidding as it sounds, even if there is no voiceover narration, or hardly any subtitles -- there is no need for them for the most part -- or no artificial light. (Some of the most beautiful passages in the film are set at Vespers, sometimes lit only by a lone candle.)

The monks do speak, for starters, and the part Gröning chooses to show is their rather funny quibbling about certain rituals. But immediately, at the beginning of the film, the audience is already drawn into contemplation: we watch a monk, barely discernible in the dim light, kneeling in prayer, for about half a minute; he stands, adjusts the heater in his bare room, and kneels again.

The theme of the eternal present is movingly raised by an elderly blind monk, testifying joyfully about his blindness and his peaceful embrace of his mortality. There are no distinctions between past or present with God, the monk says; only the present prevails, and when He sees us, he always sees our entire life. In contrast, the ineluctable passage of time is seen outside the monastery: seasons follow one another, the snows end and the blooms appear. (Gröning also presents the monks not as timeless, ahistorical figures: one monk puzzles over bills on an IBM Thinkpad, another practices his singing on a small keyboard, airplanes fly overhead.)

The cinematography, both intimate and grand, is something else: some high-definition video shots echo the Old Masters in their composition; we see, in painstaking detail, new leaves peeking through still-frosted stems, or the slow drop of water from a bucket. (Indeed, the swarming motes in the grainy Super-8 footage -- sometimes, of nothing but blue sky or gray cloud -- suggest a perpetual movement in what is ostensibly still.) Gröning also gets a lot of mileage from close-ups of shaved heads, the camera peering over monks' shoulders as they read or pray, inviting the audience to imagine the secrets inside their skulls, to wonder about what inspires such devotion.

Viewers will come away with different things. For me it was the effortless way in which the deeply ordinary was invested with a deep, spiritual gravity; they shovel snow, feed cats, saw wood, sing, and kneel in prayer, and somehow the divine is felt as a trace, lingering in all their labors. There is a scene, for instance, in which a monk repairs a shoe, and his simple act of blowing on the glue to dry it becomes, in the world of Into Great Silence, the seeming exhalation of a prayer. The less generous will wonder about the political implications of a retreat from all the sorrows of the world. But many will surely remark upon the temporary transformation of the movie theater into an extension of the monastery; indeed, the hush follows you outside into the night as you leave.

SF Film Fans, Start Your Engines.

11 movies at the San Francisco International Film Festival this year:

- Bush, Bruckner and Gentry's The Signal
- Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth
- Takeshi Furusawa's Ghost Train
- Michael Glawogger's Slumming
- Hal Hartley's Fay Grim
- Kon Satoshi's Paprika
- Hirokazu Kore-eda's Hana
- Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne
- Lee Yoon-Ki's Ad Lib Night
- Aureaus Solito's Tuli
- Roar Uthaug's Cold Prey

Sembreak.

Just because I felt like it (okay, there are other undisclosed reasons as well) -- from the 1994 Circus album, this is "Sembreak," arguably the greatest Eraserheads song ever:

Dear kim kamustang bakasyon mo
ako heto pa rin nababato
bad trip talaga itong Meralco
bakit brownout pa rin dito
walang silbi sa bahay
kundi bumabad sa telepono
o kaya'y kasama ng barkada
nakatambay sa may kanto

chorus
naalala kita pag umuulan SEMBREAK
naalala kita pag giniginaw SEMBREAK
naalala kita pag kakain na SEMBREAK
naalala kita ilang bukas pa ba
bago tayo ay magkita
ako'y naiinip na bawa't oras binibilang
sabik na masilayan ka-ha-hah

sira pa rin ang bisikleta
may gas wala namang kotse
naghihintay ng ulan
basketball sa banyo
sana ay may pasok na para at least
meron ng baon
cutting classes dating raket
rock and roll buong taon

chorus

walang kayakap kundi gitara
nangangati sa kaiisip sa 'yo
hanggang sa mabutas 'tong maong ko
tsaka bibili uli ng bago
hanggang dito na lang ang liham ko
salamat sa atensyon mo
tsaka na lang pala ang utang ko
pag nakagkita na lang uli tayo oh wohh

chorus

naalala kita SEMBREAK
naalala kita SEMBREAK
naalala kita SEMBREAK

Check it out.

Jonathan Richman, Running Through My Head.

If I were to walk through the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

Well first I'd go to the room where they keep the Cezannes

But if I had by my side a girl friend

then I could look through the paintings

I could look right through them

because I'd have found something that I understand

I understand a girl friend

that's a girl

friend

that's G-I-R-L-F-R-E-N

that's a girl friend baby,

that's somethin that I understand

From top to bottom: the Chinese furniture gallery (I don't think I was supposed to take pictures though, sorry); the Koch Gallery (though it's the European Old Masters room, and therefore no Cezannes); Thomas Couture's "A Widow" (1840); Catalonian chapel; Catalonian chapel (2); Kara Walker's "The Rich Soil Down There" (2002); a Brian Considine side chair from 1979 (I think); the scholar's room in the Chinese furniture gallery; sorry, can't remember this one; Joan Miro's "The First Spark of Day III" (1966); Paul Delvaux's "The Greeting" (1938), which I actually liked because of a Breton quotation by the painting, where he describes Delvaux as "[turning] the whole universe into a single realm in which one woman, always the same woman, reigns over the great suburbs of the heart;" a Roycroft hanging lantern (1908). Lyrics from The Modern Lovers' "Girl Friend" (1973), of course.

Random Links.

Just so you know this blog is actually still alive (apologies to all the comments piling up in the Kenneth Eng threads, which I haven't gotten to):

1. Matilda Wilbur, 1900-2007.
2. Name-checked by the Poeta.
3. Condo porn.
4. Your Flickr photos, in a museum.
5. My little brother interviews Bryanboy! "Soo gay he sweats glitter!"
6. Two April Fools Day music-related humor links, one a little more esoteric than the other: "What you gon' do with all that junk?" and "Reunited and it feels so good."

Plus a movie roundup and a Boston-related post, coming up sometime.