The Wily Filipino

Two Movies with Nothing to Do with Each Other, #10.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) and Ivan Reitman's Juno (2007).

It's something of a paradox to state that Daniel Day-Lewis' towering, fiery oil derrick of a performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's undeniably brilliant There Will Be Blood is both the best and worst thing about this film. His acting, as oilman Daniel Plainview, is amazing, both subtly nuanced and overpowering -- so much of the latter, really, that it tends to swallow the entire epic whole. Plainview is also impenetrably amoral, a man of few sympathies, and consequently the viewer has none in return for his character. It's a tough hook to hang an entire movie on, but the film succeeds despite of it.

We see Daniel Plainview first as a gold and silver prospector (and not a very successful one) in a nearly wordless 20-minute opening sequence. Toting along his cherubic adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), Plainview begins to buy up land, practically for pennies, from under unknowing farmers' feet. It's not a pleasant sight, and it is testimony to the power of Anderson's movie that we find ourselves cheering, at least in the first half, for this robber baron. By 1911 Plainview has become one of the most successful oilmen in the region, though (in a crucial distinction) significantly small fry in relation to the big oil companies.

Plainview is approached by Paul Sunday (played by an excellent Paul Dano), who offers not oil, but information: his family's farm in Little Boston, California, is floating on an "ocean of oil", and would he be interested in scoping it out? Father and son, pretending to hunt for quail, arrive at the Sunday ranch and find not only oil seeping from the ground, but Paul's twin brother Eli Sunday (also played by Dano), a young, charismatic preacher and faith healer, against whom Plainview wrestles for Little Boston's soul. (Full confession: when my friend Eloise and I saw this the other night, we completely missed the point about the twin brother.)

It's clear early on in the film that Plainview and Sunday's different brands of hucksterism run on parallel railroad tracks. But Anderson seems to lack the confidence in his audience to appreciate what little subtleties there are in this presentation and chooses to bludgeon us with this obviousness. The abrupt tonal shift in the last twenty minutes, as Plainview descends into Charles Foster Kane madness, simply seems different from what came before; let's just say that "There Will Be Blood" isn't just the title, but a promise as well.

There's little in Anderson's previous work that suggests the heft of There Will Be Blood, unless you count the Old Testament metaphors made flesh in Magnolia, or the scams in Hard Eight, or Tom Cruise's penis-evangelist in Magnolia. The movie is beautifully photographed, lingering over the fires of hell spurting uncontrollably from the earth, or the sere, rocky ground out of which such black bounty must be forced (and on which Jonny Greenwood's Ligeti-like score falls like rain). It's the visual antithesis, in more ways than one, to Days of Heaven.

This will be the film that Anderson will probably be most remembered for -- for its epic breadth; the conflict between God and Mammon, or of fathers and sons; the invocation of Welles, Polanski, and Huston, or of West and Sinclair; the way it has Great American Movie written all over it. But if you ask me for a favorite Anderson film, I wouldn't hesitate to name the brilliant but flawed Magnolia; despite its stylistic cleverness (and "clever" isn't necessarily a compliment), vague spirituality, and full-on ripoff of / homage to Short Cuts, there was at least something questing, something more vitally human, about Magnolia and its ruined characters. It's certainly more alive than the cold, dead heart in Daniel Plainview.

----------

In the last week alone, at least four people who don't know each other have been sending me links to the Stuff White People Like blog. (Did it suddenly get Dugg last week or something?) I figure that Ivan Reitman's wonderful film Juno -- with its Kimya Dawson / Belle & Sebastian soundtrack*, the Sherman-Palladino & Palladino-style banter**, the Andersonian eccentricities (Wes, not Paul Thomas), plus two (count 'em! two!) cast members from "Arrested Development" -- would certainly be on that list. [Note: as I was writing this, Ver posted a comment on my blog saying it was already on their list. That damn White People blogger!]

None of the above are necessarily characteristics of some sort of White indie-cinema aesthetic, of course. (The idea is as ridiculous as, say, a Black indie-cinema aesthetic, which would be one that encompasses both Tyler Perry and Charles Burnett.) But these are elements that perhaps resonate, even if indirectly, with White liberal middle-class audiences, as strands of some primordial genetic affinity with Whole Foods and L.L. Bean. (As a cultural anthropologist, I'm kidding here.)

But back to Juno. You probably know about the film already: a feisty 16-year old (in indie films the girls are almost always "spunky" or "feisty" -- or Feisty, even) gets knocked up, and she decides to give the baby up for adoption. But -- and I'm about to go out on a limb here because I can't quite articulate this -- the nature of the cinematic fantasy in Juno seems to be discursively White. But after all it's a White world -- a stereotyped world of charmingly kooky middle-classness and sterile (here, in two senses of the word) gated communities -- in which Juno is located.*** (There are a couple of Asian kids though, one of whom protests outside an abortion clinic and yells "All babies want to be borned.")

Juno is unreal in an odd white liberal wish-fulfillment sort of way, surely even by white working-class standards (Juno's father and mother are air-conditioning repairman and "nail technician," respectively). It's a total fantasy, really, because parents aren't generally so forgiving or practical, and such willing adoptive parents aren't found the same week, and accidental fathers probably end up facing the barrel of a shotgun at some point, and health insurance isn't a problem, and her pregnancy allows Juno to not have to drop out of school or flunk her exams. (Young women of color, especially poor and lower middle-class ones, wouldn't be off the hook so easily, as the odds against them rise exponentially.)

But back to Juno again. So can I tell you folks that I really, really loved Juno, even if I'm not white, and despite all the political iffiness? That I loved the breathless, canny dialogue; the giddy intertextuality sprouting cultural parentheses and asterisks everywhere; the musical nerdiness; the nuggets of vulnerable truth; the painstakingly cluttered production design; the glib linguistic archness -- all crammed, sometimes a little queasily, in the first fifteen minutes.

Thankfully, the film settles down after that (though I laughed really hard anyway). All the caffeinated, superficial quirkiness is peeled off to reveal a surprising, empathic depth -- not just with Juno and Bleeker and her parents, but also the adoptive couple played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. The movie really belongs to Ellen Page; it's a performance that projects a perfectly calibrated smartass vulnerability. But Michael Cera -- who, once again, is just excellent in communicating that mix of cluelessness and discomfort -- and a great ensemble cast (including Allison Janney, Bateman, and a very good Garner) should also share the honors in this hilarious, very sweet film. Even if I'm not white.

*Though a person who counts the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways as her favorite groups of all time wouldn't really use the Moldy Peaches for the soundtrack about her life, would she? (I'm listening to the soundtrack right now and I'm deciding I'm allergic to this.)

**I mean, doesn't Kimya Dawson essentially serve the same function as Sam Phillips' "la la las" on "Gilmore Girls" -- as appropriate / ironic commentaries on the scene? (In fact, it's easy to see Juno's musical debates on 1977 vs. 1993 (i.e., what was the best year for rock and roll) as taking place in Stars Hollow, Connecticut. Remember that episode of "Gilmore Girls" where Lane (okay, she's Asian) was vinyl-shopping her way through that copy of the Mojo Collection? What indiegeekgirl hotness.)

***Come to think of it, Cloverfield was set in a rather White Manhattan as well, but that was probably because all the people of color were smart enough to get the fuck outta there.

Quirky Quirky Quirky.

I was in the middle of writing some entry on Juno and whiteness when I thought I'd Google a couple of phrases. I have to say there's something rather confounding about these results, unless I should use "woman" or "man" instead:

"quirky Asian guy" (9 results)
"quirky Asian girl" (76)
"quirky black guy" (40)
"quirky black girl" (76)
"quirky white girl" (7)
"quirky white guy" (9)
"quirky Latino girl" (2)
"quirky Latino guy" (1)
"quirky Jewish girl" (10)
"quirky Jewish guy" (5)

Unless, of course, "white" is the unmarked category. (Best of all is the fact that a good majority of the hits above are actual self-descriptions on Friendster and MySpace, which strikes me as really, really sad.)

But then you get this:

"quirky sidekick" (1,810)

Now we're talking.

p.s. There are no quirky Filipino girls. Just wanted to let you all know that.

Yo La Tengo, and an Idea.

On Sunday, March 2nd, one of my favorite bands in the world, Yo La Tengo, will once again be doing their fundraising requestathon (their thirteenth, and responsible for the wonderful Yo La Tengo Is Murdering The Classics), where Yo La Tengo plays (or, more important, attempts to play) donors' song requests, for the Jersey City-based radio station WFMU, and, even though I'll be away from the radio, and if I remember, I will, God help me, do the following three things:

1. I will call 1-800-989-9368 between the hours of 5 and 7 Eastern Standard Time.

2. If I get through, I will make my donor pledge.

3. And then I will make a request for my fellow Filipino Renaldo Lapuz's smash hit of 2008, "We're Brothers Forever."

If Yo La Tengo actually plays the song in its entirety -- and it's really only a couple of stanzas -- I think my year will be made. If they somehow make it segue into "Speeding Motorcycle" my head will probably explode from the sheer awesomeness.

If not, maybe some good reader out there can do it for me.

Three Pinoy Books.

1. As my current employer would say, Whoo hoo! Dawn Mabalon's book for Arcadia Publishing, Filipinos in Stockton, is available for ordering on Amazon.com, with a book launching on February 24. But all proceeds go to the Stockton chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society and the Little Manila Foundation if you get it at the Stockton launch. (I'm sure there will be more California signings on the way!)

2. So is Carina Montoya's Filipinos in Hollywood. The photos alone should be great.

3. Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan's Memories of Philippine Kitchens has been out a while, but I only discovered it a couple of weeks ago at Barb and Oscar's. The photographs by Neal Oshima are gorgeous.

Besa and Dorotan are the folks behind the fantastic Cendrillon in SoHo, a restaurant I was lucky to visit twice -- the second time, hobnobbing with the luminaries from Vestiges of War. The dozen of us walked from NYU to Mercer & Broome and happened to be walking behind this guy for a few blocks, and who ended up going to the same restaurant as well. (Apparently he fell in love with Philippine cuisine when he filmed this and this -- the latter film, shot in my hometown, during my high school graduation weekend. Some old high school classmates are still tickled by the fact that a 23-year old Johnny Depp was wandering around our little town in the boondocks before he was Johnny Depp.)

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 5: Hong Sang-Soo's "Woman on the Beach".

Hong Sang-Soo's Woman on the Beach (2006) is a beautifully crafted, minutely observed gem of a film, and I'm at a loss for words, even after a second viewing, to tell you what it's about. I can tell you that it's refreshing to see a film about relationships that isn't an unreal romantic comedy or a lacerating Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? deathmatch.

I can tell you about Woman on the Beach's perfect cinematic architecture: a triangle, turning into a dyad, then to another pairing that's a cracked reflection of the one that came before, then to another triangle, and finally, the image of the heroine driving off into the horizon. There's a wonderful visual symmetry and repetition at work in Hong's film, from one character's encounter with three trees to another's nighttime plunge into the thick woods, to the similar pa jun and soju meals (and there are unbelievable quantities of the latter consumed) that are eaten at crucial junctures in the narrative.

Not much happens in Hong's film, but the small shifts in the relationship dynamics (and the narrative focal point, for that matter) are crucial, if slow, in the context of the movie: a director (Joongrae), a production designer (Changwook) and the production designer's mistress (Moonsook, played by the utterly lovely Ko Hyun-jeong) go to the beach for the weekend and work on a screenplay. She's a composer and a fan of the director's work (he's constantly called "Director Kim" throughout the film), the screenwriter's actually married, and the relationships between them aren't exactly as they seem.

Early in the film, Joongrae tells the married Changwook that he admires the latter's courage -- and trust in the director's discretion -- to bring his girlfriend along for the weekend. (It's not immediately clear whether Joongrae -- played by an excellent Seung-woo Kim -- is saying this in a "Damn, dawg!" male-solidarity sort of way, or deliberately trying to elicit more information, and it's this constant ambiguity of intention, in all of the characters, that underlies the narrative.)

"By the way, he's not my boyfriend," Moonsook adds.

"Come on! Do we have to have sex to be boyfriend and girlfriend?" asks Changwook, surprised.

"Of course there has to be sex," says Moonsook, then turns to Joongrae and asks, "Don't you agree, Director Kim?" (Joongrae laughs and says, "I love this," and so do we.)

"We're just friends, you and I," she continues calmly, addressing Changwook.

"Do friends kiss?" asks the screenwriter, aghast.

"We kissed once," she reminds him, annoyed. "Big deal."

It's both painful and funny and truthful and shot through with ambiguity all at the same time, and Hong lets all this unspool with a careful patience. (His camera framing is absolutely precise; you can almost tell, depending on the words spoken, when the camera will zoom in to isolate two people in the frame and shut out the third.) There's no real contest in this triangle, though; Director Kim, who is (seemingly) more intelligent and more charming than Changwook, starts asking more probing and seriously disarming questions, and manages to steal Moonsook away.

He turns out, in any case, to be something of a cad and a serial philanderer, as we see him two days later, prowling the same seaside town, ostensibly looking for a woman to interview for a casting project. He picks out Sunhee, a divorcee vacationing at the beach, because she reminds him of a character he's working on. But we are told, at least according to one of the restaurant owners, that Sunhee resembles Moonsook (though not really). We can't tell what this means for sure: is this the director's usual casting-couch method, or has he, in fact, been pierced, Jimmy Stewart-style, by Moonsook's absence, and therefore doomed to obsessive repetition?) And all goes well until... Moonsook returns, for reasons which are, again, not entirely clear.

It's this flirtatious resistance to explanation, the refusal to pin down the characters' motives, and the way words hang expectantly in the air, that makes for fascinating viewing. (In fact this sense of in-betweenness is also reflected in the setting: indeed, we hardly ever see the ocean in all of the actual scenes on the beach -- just people gingerly skirting the edges -- and the weather is this constant cloudy gray, like San Francisco's Ocean Beach in the summer.)

If there's anything the movie is "about" thematically, it's probably about the temporary nature of love and solace, male helplessness and immaturity, and (this is explicitly voiced in the film) female choice. But there's a particularly illustrative scene, which for me sums up the film better: in a subtly comical scene on the beach, when one of the couples kiss for the first time, Moonsook has time to break away from his embrace and put her hand to her forehead in embarrassment.

Woman on the Beach is also about sudden vulnerabilities, calculated confidences, occasional silences, white lies and how they work (or not), moments of discomfort, awkward pauses, or the small, cutting things people say unconsciously (or not), the ways in which people sit or stand, or look at each other, the moment when one touches the other, accidentally or purposefully, or brushes the other's sleeve meaningfully (or not), how people are often accurate or inaccurate readers of character, of stolen embraces in stolen rooms. The gestures of the mating ritual are imbued here, in one of my favorite films of the year, with a heightened, shimmering significance.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 4: Carl-Theodor Dreyer's "Ordet".

I thought it might be fruitless to write about a film that thousands of other people have written about in the past five decades, particularly one which for some reason left me cold the first time. But it was only last year when, after repeated viewings -- to use a quote from Carl-Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955) in a different context -- "something snapped inside me."

Ordet seems, in an odd way, to unfold outside of time, but of course its concerns are as bound to time and place as any other: the action happens in a windswept Danish farmhouse in the fall of 1925. It's a cramped but cozy interior, and probably something of a hothouse for the disappointments, large and small, harbored by the patriarch, Morten Borgen. These inner hurts are revealed slowly, indeed very slowly -- "the nearest thing to immobility that the screen has thus far achieved," Richard Hatch apparently wrote dismissively in The Nation, which is so blastedly wrong in many respects. But the snail's pace also lets the minute, warm intimacies between the family members blossom, and the unfussy camera, in the inimitable Dreyer fashion, patiently records the family dynamics as they move into their respective halos of Dreyer's light. (I say cramped interiors because there's an obvious contrast to the luminous exteriors, with feathers of light descending upon waves of grass.)

The family's characters feel like they're roughly carved directly from Catholic doctrine, i.e., everyone seems to represent something, but I'm not actually sure Dreyer meant to trouble his audiences with doctrinal differences (as explained below). Morten has three sons: there is Mikkel, the agnostic, who is married to the angelic Inger, about to give birth. The youngest son, Anders, is in love with the tailor's daughter, but she is of a different sect -- and those differences are, tellingly, never really spelled out by Dreyer, probably because they do not matter -- and therefore their partnership can never be.

And finally, there is Johannes, the gaunt, bearded son who has gone unblinkingly insane -- how exactly I don't want to reveal, only to point out that it provokes a laugh in a sometimes dryly funny film -- and believes he is Jesus Christ. He is the key figure in this film for different reasons, yet his presence is confined to a perhaps deliberately alienating physical acting: he pops into rooms unannounced to deliver his judgments, shuffling in a trance (like all the main characters), his rapt attention almost always focused on something just off to the audience's side, an ear cocked toward the divine whisperings in his head.

Dreyer opens up Kaj Munk's play with exteriors (and in the final scene the interior is opened up radically), but chooses to leave the theatrical sight-lines intact; people twist away oddly from each other, just like the inquisitors in The Passion of Joan of Arc, or are staring off into space. It is by no means a filmed play, but it's a strangely constrictive move; people have entire conversations without once looking at each other. But it is no less peculiar than, for instance, Johannes' performance, or the surreally casual conversation about death between Johannes and Inger's daughter. (The camera movements aren't stagey, however, as the frame almost always expands in anticipation of new characters entering on either side.)

Perhaps there is little, especially in an explicitly religious film, to appeal to an apostate like myself grown intolerant of Christian piety. When Inger talks reassuringly about God performing small, secret miracles every day, there's something almost cloying in this sentiment. But then why, even on later viewings, was I already sobbing, tears flowing down my face, by the time one of the characters appears at the door in the final scene?

Structurally, artistically, the sheer jawdropping impossibility of Dreyer's ending transmutes itself, especially with repeated viewings, into something so right, so necessary, that it is difficult to see the film culminating in any other way. (One could even argue that it is necessary for the audience's disbelief to make the ending, and the film itself, actually work; you have to make that leap.) Which therefore accounted for my emotional reaction: just knowing what was going to happen next attested, somehow, to the inevitability of amazing grace. Ordet, a genuine miracle of cinema, is simply, stunningly, perfect in every way, inexhaustible in its mysteries.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 3: Philip Gröning's "Into Great Silence".

(Reposted from April 2007.)

There's little I can add to the rapturous reviews of Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence (2005) -- 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.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 2: Bong Joon-Ho's "The Host".

Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, in their book Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, write that South Korea's relationship with the United States, much like that of the U.S. and the Philippines, vacillates on the love-hate continuum. "Through military and civilian contacts," they write, "the United States became at once an object of material longing and materialistic scorn, a heroic savior and a reactionary intruder. Material desire and moral approbation, longing and disdain, have been twin responses to many of the trappings of American culture...."

One wonders what they would have thought of Bong Joon-Ho's The Host (2005), one of the finest movies I saw last year. (Come to think of it, it shouldn't be too difficult to ask.) Monster movies are said to be symbolic of anxieties burbling up from the depths of a murky id, writ large: postwar fears of a rampant industrialism (Gojira), nuclear annihilation (also Gojira), the savage Other (King Kong), Communism (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), untrammeled adolescent sexuality (The Exorcist), or the simple money-driven compulsion to destroy New York City again (Cloverfield). The Host needs no metaphor to hide this fear of the "reactionary intruder": the monster here is a paranoid, militarized American chauvinism gone awry, the teratological result of the deliberate dumping of formaldehyde bottles into the Han river. (Something also happens to the protagonist three-quarters of the way through the movie, which I can't reveal, but how much of him (and what is done to him) represents the Korean body politic is not clear.)

The Host is Bong's third feature film, if I'm counting correctly, and like the first two, he takes a well-worn genre (the police procedural, the urban yuppie comedy) and injects it with unsettling social critique. (Memories of Murder is actually a finer, more nuanced work, but I saw it the year before last. Incidentally, practically the entire cast of Memories appears in The Host in various configurations, which, I swear, already feels like a full third of the entire Korean film industry.) But Bong's forte is the way these films slip uncomfortably into different emotional registers: thus the incongruity of a perfectly-timed pratfall (there are two), or the slapstick of a grief-stricken family collapsing clumsily to the ground and hounded by camera-bearing reporters.

But enough about analysis. The Host is genuinely frightening, and Bong knows how to deliver the thrills in the classic monster movie tradition. The second time I saw the film, grown men in the theater were screaming like little girls. (On my third viewing, I was still holding my breath during an entire sequence -- let's just say it involves a girl, a boy, and a tail.) It's also grimly funny -- with visual gags involving squids here and there -- but it's not funny in the same, schlocky way that American (or British, or Australian) horror-comedies are. Bong has a way of undercutting the sober scenes with humor -- if only to make the genuinely horrific scenes even starker.

But the personal, as they say, is also about the political, and Bong's decision to focus on a family unit (rather than, say, a group of attractive college students on vacation) is a wise one, as it adds an emotional heft to the movie. (Contrast this, for instance, with the young interchangeable heroes' inexplicable decision to return to midtown Manhattan in Cloverfield, to save some woman I barely remember.) Our protagonist -- the perpetually sleeping owner of a food stand, portrayed by the always good Song Kang-ho as something of a simpleton -- is motivated by nothing less than the rescue of his daughter, whom he has witnessed being abducted into the water by the monster. Despite its horror movie trappings, the emotional core of the film, seen most eloquently in its quiet scenes, is a simple family reunification. There's one such scene right in the center of the film: a quiet, haunting, one-minute scene that says more about grief than words could express.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 1: Richard Wong's "Colma: The Musical".

Richard Wong's exhilarating movie Colma: The Musical (2006) is set in a town south of San Francisco most famous for its cemeteries and the fact that it has more dead residents than there are alive. Colma's writer and actor, the ridiculously talented H.P. Mendoza, who plays Rodel, gets a lot of mileage from this central metaphor. The suburban deadness that infects the characters -- fresh high school graduates with nary a clue about what to do with themselves -- is only a little more vital than the graveyards all around them.

Colma revolves around the lives of three characters: an aspiring actor working "the highest-paying shit job" he can find at the mall, an aspiring writer thrown out of his house by his homophobic father, and a woman -- well, it's not really clear what she does, but as the emotional center of the film, the lovely Maribel (L.A. Renigen) does have the best monologue (and taste in interiors, for that matter).

What elevates this from your run-of-the-mill comedy is the fact that it's a musical, perhaps the most cinematic of forms, the combination of its general grounding in reality -- in the case of Colma: The Musical, the enervating flatness of suburbia -- and the unreal compulsion to burst into song. This unaccustomed exteriorization of the characters' emotions, erupting into the narrative, is part of the technique; the viewer is always aware that she or he is watching a movie. But Colma is also quite conscious, and not just in a mocking way, of the absurdity of the genre. (The digs at regional musical theater, for instance, are particularly funny.) The mawkish, sometimes unbearable honesty that accompanies teen angst is lovingly recontextualized here.

"We are so mature for our age," Billy (Jake Moreno) sings to himself after kissing his brand new girlfriend-to-be for the first time. It's something of a joke in the context of the movie: a kind of late-adolescent inflated sense of self, made funnier by the emotional immaturity constantly on display. One has the growing awareness that the way they torment each other, sometimes affectionately (or, in some cases, rail against the shallowness around them), is proof of a couple of things: 1) that there really isn't much of anything else to do in the burbs anyway, and 2) that it reflects their chafing at the bit at the lot that the suburban deities have dealt them.

Colma: The Musical shows Mendoza to be a prodigious wit, both profanely funny and incisively smart, if a little too reliant on a synthesizer, probably recorded in a basement. (This may indeed have been the case.) Lyrically, the easiest comparison that comes to mind is Ben Folds. The writing, in any case, is sharp and all too real, from the stern immigrant father to the cluelessly hilarious way Renigen says the N-word with too much relish. It's hard to pick a favorite scene: the eight-minute uninterrupted camera shot orchestrated by Wong at a drunken college party (ostensibly, a bunch of SF State hipsters), the cheerfully vicious sing-along in a bar, the unexpectedly poignant dance sequence in a cemetery, or even the goofy montage that introduces the movie.

Yes, it's a first film, and it looks like one, and if my mention of that fact makes it sound like a disclaimer, it's not. Wong has a surer, more deft hand here than many other veteran filmmakers. A weaker comedy would have cast "a lovable pack of misfits" -- or if this were a drama, a group of Abercrombie & Fitch models -- so it's quite refreshing to see normal-looking people in this movie. Sometimes they're not entirely lovable, sometimes they sing off-key, but I'd take this over any new Hollywood musical any day.

(If I do have one minor quibble, it's the way the screenplay takes liberties with the geography. Sure, it's fine to pass off The Bitter End or Java On Ocean as being in Colma -- though that's not necessarily implied in the film -- but Serramonte Mall and Westmoor High and all those fogged-out little boxes are in Daly fuckin' City! Plus the cast should have fought to have their real butts on the DVD cover.)

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition.

I'm picking five this year: one from 1955, one from 2005, and three from 2006, to be posted in five parts in alphabetical order.

In case you were wondering what happened to 2007, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep was the best thing I saw on the big screen last year, but I already listed it a couple of years ago, so it doesn't count. I also really liked Danny Boyle's Sunshine, but it didn't quite make the cut. Plus I couldn't get out most of December to see any of the Oscar nominees or other films that dominated the critics lists -- actually, I don't even know what they were. People liked Juno, I'm told.)

These films have nothing in common, either. They're from all over the place (two from Korea, one from Germany, one from Denmark, one from the U.S.), and from totally different genres (one horror film, one documentary, one romantic comedy (kind of), one musical, and one Miracle Play).

At any rate, I'll be posting the entries slowly over the next few days.

The 2006 list.

The 2005 list.

Two Movies with Nothing to Do with Each Other, #9.

Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948) and George Lucas's Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (2005).

So Barb emails me and asks me for my review of Drunken Angel. There's little I can add to what Barb has already said so well, except to note that the real highlight of the evening was culinary rather than cinematic. (Barb, let me tell you that that was the best arroz caldo I have ever had in my life, scout's honor.)

But back to Drunken Angel. The excitement here is seeing a very young Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimizu -- Mifune, in particular, looking oddly like an even more dissolute Bryan Ferry circa 1982 -- gain each other's wary trust. Shimizu is a doctor who lives in the slums not out of any commitment to the downtrodden; it's because he is downtrodden, reeling in a drunken haze most of the day and with no one to call family except for a former gun moll / bar girl he is harboring in his house. That is, until Mifune arrives, as a similarly dissipated Yakuza gangster who has been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

It has all the elements of noir, and it's filmed that way, with oblique shadows and pinstripe suits. In his pre-color films, Kurosawa seems to have a visual fascination for soiled squalor, suggesting the indignity of the proceedings, and there's a knock-down, dragged-out fight scene in spilled white paint, the equivalent of all that mud in Stray Dog and The Seven Samurai.

Drunken Angel has the muscularity of a "character study" film from the '70s -- you can almost imagine an alcoholic Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges (or Nick Nolte, later), gargling with vodka in the morning and flailing around in impotent rage the rest of the day -- and if it sounds somewhat hackneyed, it kind of is. Shimizu, in his inexplicable eagerness to save the dying gangster, will inevitably save himself in the process as well, and he does. In the end, it's probably lesser Kurosawa, which -- considering his body of work -- means that it's better than ninety percent of the films out there. Especially the one below.

----------

It took me all of three evenings to try to finish Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, one of the more unwatchable movies I've seen in a while. More like "Revenge of the Shit", actually.

It's a shame because this is the one episode of the series that had the most potential in terms of character development, because it's not just get-the-Princess-to-the-Hidden-Fortress, but about a psychological and emotional turning point in the series, i.e., how Darth Vader came to be. (In fact it could have been easily subtitled "The Seduction of Anakin Skywalker", and that just might have been a far more interesting film.)

Instead, the last temptation of Christensen is dealt with in a couple of dispensable scenes, dripping with fake, obvious portent, and with many sideways glances IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN: "This Jedi had the power to prevent death NUDGE NUDGE." "You can learn that power, but not from a Jedi WINK WINK." And so on.

We are at least rewarded with the little thrill of recognition at the end: "Look, there's the Death Star!" "Look, it's the dark helmet!" "Listen, it's that heavy breathing!", but, like love, it's fleeting, and takes up only a sixteenth of the screen time accorded to an increasingly ludicrous lightsaber fight on some collapsing big iron thingie at some planet that looks completely uninhabitable because it's, like, made of fire, and at this point I can't even remember why Anakin went here in the first place, and how Obi-Wan managed to track him down, and later on they still manage not to behead each other with their lightsabers or get burned despite the thin clothes they are wearing or slip into the lava or fall off those tiny scraps of metal they're actually surfing on or get beaned by any of the countless hurtling balls of fire, probably because they're not just any kind of Jedi, they're Jedi Masters, except one is Lawful Good and the other is slowly turning into Chaotic Evil, which probably explains why one turns into Alec Guinness and the other into barbecue at the beach.

The acting is uniformly terrible, and it's indicative of the film's level of acting that Yoda is the most humanly expressive of the characters. If this were a different film, the actors' delivery might be called "mannered" -- but the context of this film obviates such magnanimity. The humorless, artless dialogue lands with the proverbial thud, and those bleeps you hear in the background is the sound of ATM buttons being pushed, as a group of generally able actors -- MacGregor, Portman, Smits -- deposit their paychecks. Even the beloved Samuel L. Jackson is reduced here to further a plot twist we knew was going to happen anyway. Couldn't George Lucas have at least let him get away with saying something like, "You're Darth Motherfuckin' Vader?" That would have made me happy.

The Best Music I Heard All Year, 2007 Edition.

So yes, this list is awfully late. And it's rather odd, because the two bands I probably listened to most this year -- mostly because I did a massive, expensive-at-import-prices excavation of their discographies -- don't show up on this list. They happen to be two wonderful Japanese bands, Spangle call Lilli line (here's their profile on keikaku.net) and chatmonchy. I suspect this is because both may be best appreciated in terms of some amazing singles, some of which have been featured on this blog before). (Come to think of it, my favorite album of the year is also of Japanese provenance.)

And at the end of this year -- especially since I was so busy in December and January -- I found myself in the depressing position of being part of a weary chorus, led by Pitchfork and the late lamented Stylus and the Village Voice and every other music blogger out there, all trumpeting the praises of the same albums repeatedly and all swooning over "All My Friends". So did I.

Nonetheless, I'm a little reluctant to add to the verbiage, so I broke from tradition and did the next best lazy-ass thing. For a few obvious choices, I just took reviews from the usual places (actually, just the first page of reviews on Google or Metacritic), pasted the text into online software, and generated a word-frequency count. (This exercise would have been a little more productive if I had added more reviews, but again: too lazy.) The results are below, excepting articles and words like "drums" or "guitar", or song titles. And hey, it seems to work.

---------

And now, the best music I heard all year, in alphabetical order:

1. Battles, Mirrored (2007)

6 METAL, 5 JAZZ, 5 WORK, 5 PLAY, 5 SICK, 4 TECHNOLOGY, 4 DANCE, 4 MEN, 3 MATH, 3 ASTOUNDING, 3 AVANT, 3 ELECTRONICS, 3 TOGETHER, 2 HAMMERS, 2 ECSTATIC, 2 FUCK, 2 BOOM, 2 BIG, 2 JUMBLE, 2 VIRTUOSITY, 2 TECHNICAL, 2 PROFICIENCY, 2 LOOPS, 2 THRILLING, 2 BRILLIANT, 2 MACHINE, 2 ROBOT, 2 SKILLS, 2 SYMPHONIC, 2 PROG, 2 PROCESSED, 2 COLLECTIVE, 2 GLORIOUS

Amazon link.
Video for "Atlas" on YouTube.
Official website.

-----

2. Chillitees, Extra Rice (2006)

I don't think I'm the right audience for this album, which seems crafted as background music for making out at 2:30 in the morning with some hottie in your apartment after the bars have closed and the prospect of a snack at Goodah! isn't as appealing, as of course it shouldn't be, as a possible roll in the hay. But that's what Extra Rice sounds like: a polished slice of Pinoy after-club chill, with keyboards that wouldn't be out of place on an early-70s CTI album, and lyrics just lovingly drenched with post-coital afterglow. "Ikaw ang paglunas sa aking pangungulila," Uela Basco sings the morning after to a lover in bed who's not entirely hers to keep, if you know what I mean. Either way, it's consummately performed and produced, and, particularly for the Philippines, just sounds deliciously illicit.

Amazon link.
Video for "Sama Na" on YouTube.
Official website.

-----

3. Anna Järvinen, Jag fick feeling (2007)

It's not easy to write about song-based pop albums when one has no notion of what the lyrics are about. In this case, I'd like to think it's about love. Anna Järvinen used to be one of the lead singers for the band Granada -- pretty music, certainly, but nothing compared to the pristine beauty of her debut album, Jag fick feeling.

But I'll tell you about the songs anyway. It's hard to pick a favorite, and why: there's the torch balladry of "Nedgångslåten", complete with a forlorn whistled riff; the unpredictable flowing verse structure of "Götgatan"; the unashamed "la la la" ending of "PS, Tjörn", lighter than air; a flute intro to the lovely "Svensktalande bättre folk", which feels like a Roger Nichols - Paul Williams track cut for A&M (and I mean that with very high praise).

It's not easy to place a finger on the musical antecedents of this strummed folk-pop -- that's Dungen as her backing band, by the way -- though the inevitable comparisons are to Nina Persson back in the pre-Life days, though not as twee. (If I had to pick a reference point on the vocal-creaminess spectrum: Harriet Wheeler? Bic Runga? Though stylistically they're not even the same.)

Whatever it all means, it's one of my favorite albums of the year. Listening to it the first time, I was looking out my window at the orange leaves falling to the ground and it felt like a lonely love letter from Sweden had just arrived in the mail.

Amazon link.
Video for "Götgatan" on YouTube.
MySpace page.

-----

4. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver (2007)

8 DANCE, 8 PUNK, 7 EMOTIONAL, 4 ELECTRO, 4 DISCO, 4 ACID, 4 SONGWRITING, 4 TEENAGER, 3 RHYTHM, 3 OBSESSIVE, 3 DEPTH, 3 FUNK, 3 MELODIC, 3 TECHNO, 3 GROOVE, 2 CLUB, 2 FUNKY, 2 INFECTIOUS, 2 DETROIT, 2 KRAUTROCK, 2 HIPSTER, 2 EPIPHANIES, 2 LOSS, 2 REMINISCENCE, 2 REGRET

Amazon link.
Video for "All My Friends" on YouTube.
Official website.

-----

5. Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther (2006)

7 TIME, 7 TEXAS, 6 YOUNG, 6 ART, 4 LOVE, 3 OLD, 3 CONCEPT, 3 LIFE, 3 HARMONIES, 3 MAC, 3 SEVENTIES, 3 EARLY, 3 STORY, 2 FOREST, 2 ACOUSTIC, 2 MEANINGFUL, 2 CLEAR, 2 PASTORAL, 2 FM, 2 VILLAGE, 2 FLEETWOOD, 2 RETROSPECT, 2 MOODY

Amazon link.
Video for "Roscoe" on YouTube.
Official website.

-----

6. MONO & World's End Girlfriend, Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain (2006)

(Reposted from an earlier entry over a year ago, in January.)

A five-part chamber music suite for string quartet and post-rock band. A collaboration between Japanese composer Katsuhiko Maeda and the thunderous Tokyo quartet that is MONO, the album is surely going to be one of my favorites of the year (and it's only January!).

Doubtless a lot of music fans more knowledgeable than I would point to music from a different tradition -- say, Shostakovich, Pärt, or Gorecki -- as more complex, more profoundly moving. But the difference is that MONO rocks: the moment in "Part Three" when MONO's Mogwai-influenced wall of guitar comes crashing down on the orchestra is a cathartic sonic event, only made more poignant by the calm resignation of the finale.

It's hard to describe the widescreen sorrow at the core of this music. It's something as mundane as the inherent loneliness of automobiles stranded on the freeway at sunset. But the ineffable grandeur it evokes is not just exit music for a film, it's Exit Music for real: ruined cities, a threnody for the broken earth, the dying sun's last defiant flare before the beginning of a cold, dead universe. Or as C.K. Williams puts it in his poem "Light," "…everything ends, / world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away / like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain."

Amazon link.
Official MONO website.
MySpace page for World's End Girlfriend.

-----

7. The National, Boxer (2007)

5 BARITONE, 5 SUBTLE, 4 GROWER, 4 BRILLIANT, 3 SPACE, 3 IMAGERY, 3 MOOD, 3 POWERFUL, 2 PRETTY, 2 AMERICAN, 2 DRAMATIC, 2 METAPHOR, 2 BEAUTIFUL, 2 DENSE, 2 RESTRAINT, 2 NIGHT, 2 PERSONAL, 2 JOURNEY, 2 DIFFICULT, 2 ACCLAIM, 2 MASTERPIECE, 2 MODERN, 2 BED, 2 PUNCH, 2 MELANCHOLY, 2 LEONARD, 2 COHEN

Amazon link.
Video for "Mistaken for Strangers" on Youtube.
Official website.

-----

8. Kanye West, Graduation (2007)

9 HIMSELF, 8 LIFE, 7 GREAT, 5 HOT, 5 SOUL, 4 ELECTRONIC, 3 HOOKS, 3 CHICKS, 3 CELEB, 3 CONSISTENT, 3 SUMMER, 3 PRIDE, 2 ELECTRO, 2 TIGHT, 2 COOL, 2 PLEASURE, 2 CELEBRATORY, 2 PERSONAL, 2 SUBSTANTIAL, 2 FAMILIAR, 2 CARTOON, 2 LEGEND, 2 DAMN, 2 STATUS, 2 LOVE, 2 PUBLIC, 2 EGO, 2 ROCKING, 2 BOASTS, 2 JEWELRY, 2 VUITTON

Amazon link.
Video for "The Good Life" on YouTube.
Official website.

-----

The 2006 list, plus the runners-up.

The 2005 list, plus the runners-up.

The 2004 list.

The 2003 list.

The 2002 list.

The 2001 list.

The Best Music I Heard All Year, 2007 Edition: The Runners-Up.

As always, my (very late) list of favorite albums I heard in 2007 is limited to just that, which includes albums I missed the first go-round. (This is why none of these albums are actually from 2007.)

The three runners-up, in alphabetical order:

1. Eluvium, Talk amongst the Trees (2005).

Ghostly, static haze lingering at the portals of perception.

Amazon link.
Official website.

-----

2. Simon Dawes, Carnivore (2006)

Brash, immensely enjoyable power pop.

Amazon link.
Promo video on YouTube.
The Simon Dawes blog.

-----

3. Some Tweetlove, Cafard Mondial (2006)

If only for the shivering beauty of "La Nostalgie Des Hauts-Fourneaux".

Album link (on Matamore).
Official website.

Love Ko 'To!

Image taken from -- oh, you all know where it's from.

So there's this project I've been working on for some time (and to be roundtabled here next month -- oops, they have my affiliation wrong!) that deals with the question of Pinoys and music and how Pinoy performers explain why and how they do what they do. A big excerpt from my writings might explain this better:

In my interviews, Overseas Performing Artist returnees constantly spoke of a spontaneous and naturally Filipino ability to imitate. As a skeptical cultural anthropologist, I initially wanted to dismiss this out of hand. There was, of course, no such thing as a natural ability to imitate, much more a naturally Filipino one.

But the discourse that supported this supposedly inherent mimetic ability could be consistently drawn from over a century's worth of history. What was one to do, for instance, with Dean Worcester's assertion in 1900 that "the Filipino ...is endowed with great talent for imitation.... ...in a short time [the Filipino] learns how to play any sort of an instrument, but the bands...are poor because of their lack of knowledge of principles, and many of them play by ear without understanding a single note?"

Or of the New York Times reporter who wrote in the twenties, "Where music is concerned, the Filipinos are known as the Italians of the East. Add their own barbaric musical strain -- a blend of Oriental and Spanish 'ear culture' -- and you get an idea of their adeptness with the torturous instruments of jazz?" Or of essayist Pico Iyer, and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai after him, who, after watching a Filipino band play the music of John Denver, would pronounce Filipinos as "[creating] a nation of make-believe Americans?"

Or the countless Filipinos who would assert the seeming truism, "Magaling manggaya ang mga Pilipino [Filipinos are great at imitation]?" Or Danny, a keyboardist who had played in Tokyo and Pasadena, who told me, matter-of-factly, "Filipinos can imitate any sound?" Or RJ, a guitarist I interviewed in the summer of 2007, who said, "Ang Pilipino, sila lang ang tanging may dila na katulad nang loro [Filipinos are the only people with tongues like parrots]?"

A "natural ability to sing" and a "natural ability to imitate" are two different things, of course, but you get the general idea: to sing well is seen as natural for and by Filipinos. (Not me, of course, as my friends can attest. But give me a karaoke mic in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other and I can do the collected oeuvre of Thom Yorke fairly well.)

So I am quite tickled by the idea that 3 out of the 14 finalists for the Voice of McDonald's II competition -- which I found out about via the New York Times -- are Filipino. (The third, if you even had to guess, is the Canadian guy.)

And I just love the fact that Mary Yu -- who does those cute hand gestures (and more) on "Son of a Preacher Man" -- is a choir member and "worship/song leader in our church." Holy Dusty Springfield! That's sure some church -- sign me up!

Meanwhile, speaking of other Filipinos, my friend Carolyn (who isn't Pinay but knows how to spot 'em) sent me this hilarious YouTube video of a Southwest Airlines commercial. That guy's gotta be Pinoy. What's even funnier is that I could totally see a Filipino guy doing this in real life, if I actually went to clubs.

Taken By Cars, "Endings of a New Kind".

My friend Ruthie, who's all the way in Manila, and I (over here in Oakland) have this ongoing exchange over IM: she envies my being able to watch, say, Explosions in the Sky, and I'm envious of her being able to see, for instance, Up Dharma Down, pretty much any evening of the week. She's probably right, of course, but I would love to be able to catch my new favorite Filipino band discovery, Taken by Cars, in concert again.

I do like championing music I hear on this blog, even if everyone already knows who they are, but it's especially cooler to me if they happen to be Filipino (for obvious reasons). I saw Taken by Cars live at saGuijo in June of 2007, and I realize now, looking at my old entry, that I didn't really write anything about them. This was probably because I was being the uber-fanboy with the two other bands, but I do remember asking their lead singer (Was it her, drinking outside? How could I have forgotten that? How much did I have to drink?) about when their debut album was going to be released.

Well, it's finally out. The name Taken by Cars suggests a soundtrack to an abduction. Or escape. Either way (and those contradictions are present in the music), their debut album Endings of a New Kind is a driving record, no question about it. The propulsive rhythms suggest a restless urban energy, speeding metal vehicles, dangerous sideswipes in the dark, streetlights reflected off kilter in windshields, shards of glass twinkling dully on the pavement. In Manila that kind of driving happens anytime, but this is an evening record for sure. There's a chill to this music, but it's great for dancing to: imagine a sweaty tangle of brown limbs on the dance floor, if people weren't so shy at saGuijo (and the place wasn't so small). Cold and hot: those contradictions again.

It's not necessarily groundbreaking music, but if the idea of, say, Bloc Party, fronted by a woman vocalist sounds appealing to you, then Taken By Cars should be worth checking out. Endings of a New Kind is full of a nervous, postpunk energy -- maybe a little too clean to sound like the bruised guitars of Gang of Four, but it's certainly from the same musical gene pool. And it's simply great stuff.

The second track, "Uh Oh" (the album's real beginning) has a perfect opening, as instruments fall rapidly into formation: drum heartbeat, stabbing guitar riff, and suddenly, best of all, a synth refrain parachuted in from 1982. "Here I am in full battle gear," sings Sarah Marco. "Here I am wanting you," she adds, and it's a tribute to her voice -- of limited range, maybe, but perfect for communicating this hovering between desire and defense, between languor and tension. It's slurry and drugged for one song (as on "Colourway"), breathy and poppy on another (as on "The Afterhours", with its swirl of crunchy electronic squiggles). (Her phrasings are from the same era, too -- Anja Huwe? Siouxsie? I can't tell.)

The guitar introduction to "All for a Tuesday" seems to steal a bit from Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" -- there's no hiding their musical influences, which is okay -- but this track showcases the twin guitar attack from Bryce Zialcita and Siopao Chua: chug and jangle on the left, soar and swoop on the right. "Logistical Nightmare" rests on a spiky foundation of driving rhythms and piercing guitar chimes, then positively levitates when it gets to the chorus. "Sexy confrontation" indeed.

If I have one small complaint, it has to do with the sequencing: all the fast songs are in a cramped queue on the first half of the album, with the second half being noticeably brighter and club-oriented than the first. ("Stereolove" is probably the weakest track in the collection, as if some DJ simply took the vocal track and plopped it onto a lackluster techno remix.) But we are at least rewarded with the concluding "Shapeshifter", though it does nothing of the sort, except that it builds into an uncoiling, multivocal crescendo that ends the album on a high note.

p.s. to Ruthie: Go get the album!

p.s.2. While the CD can be purchased at their gigs, mp3s can be downloaded at splintr.com, though I haven't tried it yet.

Song of the Day.

Just because: Eraserheads, "Huwag Mo Nang Itanong" (Cutterpillow, 1995)

Hika ang inabot ko
Nang piliting sumabay sa'yo
Hanggang kanto
Ng isipan mong parang Sweepstakes
Ang hirap manalo

Ngayon pagdating ko sa bahay
Ibaba ang iyong kilay
Ayoko ng ingay

Huwag mo nang itanong sa akin
Di ko rin naman sasabihin
Huwag mo nang itanong sa akin
At di ko na iisipin

Field trip sa may pagawaan ng lapis
Ay katulad ng buhay natin
Isang mahabang pila
Mabagal at walang katuturan

Ewan ko hindi ko alam
Puwede bang huwag na lang
Nating pag-usapan

Huwag mo nang itanong sa akin
Di ko rin naman sasabihin
Huwag mo nang itanong sa akin
At di ko na iisipin

Ewan ko hindi ko alam
Puwede bang huwag na lang
Natin pag-usapan

Huwag mo nang itanong sa akin
Di ko rin naman sasabihin
Huwag mo nang itanong sa akin
At di ko na iisipin

Huwag na lang
Huwag na lang