I was playing with WordPress this morning and thought I’d repost my longer blog entries on movies into a new site. (The category page was getting too unwieldy to load anyhow.)

So: three entries will be uploaded a day until the old posts run out, which will probably be a month. I won’t be editing any of them (regardless of how wrong they might sound to me now), just reposting them as I go.

It’s interesting to see that, in the 11 years or so I’ve been blogging, my writing has actually changed — for the better, I think. Whether it’s an improvement in style (debatable), an acquisition of both writing and cinematic vocabularies, or a genuine attempt in taking the stuff more seriously, it’s a reflection of an ongoing, immersive, giddy education in consuming movies. Or, perhaps more aptly, being consumed by them. I can’t think of any other art form that has given me as much pleasure.

It should be clear that this cinematic “education” is not formal at all; when it comes to movies I’m a total amateur — and yes, in the older sense of the word too. (And I should add that despite the mention of Tarkovsky and Kubrick — and that screen capture from Last Year in Marienbad, which will change from time to time — I’ll still be mostly writing about flicks you can find at your local multiplex.)

The name of the WordPress blog — Film, Eyeballs, Brain — partly comes from an essay in The New Yorker by Jonathan Lethem called “The Beards”. An excerpt from the piece is reproduced in a sidebar, and it should be self-explanatory. (However, I’ve actually taken it a bit out of context. It may be best not to reproduce the succeeding paragraphs as they’re probably a little too revealing — not of Lethem, but of myself. You can find it in anthologized in Lethem’s essay collection The Disappointment Artist, but he rewrote the passage I quote.)

Please add me to your feedreader, link to me on your blogroll, tell friends, and most of all: please leave comments! (And please don’t tell me that the url looks like it’s four separate words (“Film, Eye, Balls, Brain”) — I know that already.

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My summer class got cancelled (long story having to do with new job opportunities in combination with low enrollment), so I guess I get to watch summer movies instead.

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1. My comment boxes have died — I suspect people (or spammers) have been posting something, but I can’t read them somehow, and even some old comments aren’t showing up anymore. So I’ve turned them off, unfortunately. Anyone wanting to leave me a message or a comment can send them to me via the Meebo widget on the upper right-hand side of the main blog index page. (I can get them even if I’m offline.)

2. Arthur Dong’s Hollywood Chinese is one of the best Asian American documentaries I’ve ever seen, period, and one I’d assign to students in a heartbeat if it were out on DVD. It’s also out on a limited theatrical release all across the world, but Bay Area audiences are lucky enough to have it for almost two weeks (April 11-23 at the Kabuki and at the Grand Lake). (Los Angeles viewers have it made though, as it’s part of an entire Hollywood Chinese film series at the Egyptian from May 15-22, including a cast and crew reunion of Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club.)

Hollywood Chinese is a fascinating film all throughout, including jawdropping footage from Marion Wong’s The Curse of Quon Gwon) — the first Chinese American film ever made, in 1916 (!) — plus revealing (and sometimes hilarious) interviews). (It’s also worth noting that Arthur Dong walked off with a Golden Horse for Best Documentary last year — and that two of the other winners (Ang Lee and Joan Chen) are interviewed in his documentary as well.)

3. Up next, to be posted in the next few weeks:

- possibly more movie reviews
- a handy and totally opinionated guide to the San Francisco International Film Festival, whose lineup is coming out next week
- a summer reading and watching list
- my life as the neighborhood invalid
- Pinoy academic porn

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From Manohla Dargis’s review of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, in the New York Times:

Apparently those who live in the water now roam the earth trying to make us listen, though initially it’s rather foggy as to what precisely we are supposed to hear — the crash of the waves, the songs of the sirens, the voice of God — until we realize that of course we’re meant to cup our ear to an even higher power: Mr. Shyamalan.

I still want to see the film — I always subscribe to the motto that I’d probably enjoy a film I’ve been wanting to see despite colossally bad reviews — but Ms. Dargis! I wrote it first! =)

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In Ian Ganazon and Neill dela Llana’s terrific thriller, Cavite, the Filipino American filmmakers take the tired cliches of the genre and craft an exceptional film. The plot isn’t anything you haven’t seen before, from Cellular to Red Eye (the only one I’ve seen of the four) to Nick of Time to Phone Booth: a man receives a call on a cellphone from a kidnapper, telling him that his mother and sister has been kidnapped and that he has to follow all the kidnapper’s demands or they die. The result is a surprisingly politically complex and gripping suspense movie, made even more interesting for its being set in the Philippines.

What Cavite will also be remembered for is the astonishing constraints under which the film was made: an overall budget of less than $7,000, cameras resold on eBay to pay for editing (which was done completely on a home computer), a practically two-man cast and crew. (Two weeks before they were to fly to the Philippines, they still couldn’t find a lead actress who wanted to accompany them, so they rewrote the script so that Ganazon could play the protagonist, with dela Llana holding the camera the whole time.)

Formally, the film is a marvel in its economy — actor, disembodied voice, circling camera — and the narrative is structured in the classic three-act fashion. Cavite is also clearly more than just a jittery travelogue. As the taunting kidnapper orders Adam to walk through twisted alleyways, crowded markets, squatter camps, and rivers choking with festering garbage, it is clear that he (and the audience) is receiving a political education as well.

The film, however, provides little historical or economic context for the poverty that Adam witnesses, and it is presented as almost being “endemic” to the area. A later scene where the kidnapper gives him a history lesson on the gross injustices experienced by Muslim Filipinos isn’t exactly germane to what Adam sees in Cavite. (We get a possible glimpse of this in two clever digressions from the taut narrative: the camera breaks away momentarily to follow a boy buying a McDonald’s meal for his grandmother, but one of these scenes ingeniously happens at a point when filming may have been impossible.) But we begin to understand, at least, the process of radicalization for the Muslim kidnapper, as we find out halfway through the film that he is a member of the Abu Sayyaf (I’m not spoiling anything here, as this is telegraphed in the opening credits).

Cavite could also be read as quite intelligently following the stereotypical plot as seen in your average Pilipino Cultural Night — confused Filipino American in search of self, “returns” to the Philippines, and discovers one’s self. What further animates this thriller, and elevates it from the genre, is the interweaving of the theme of cultural discovery. (Indeed, the movie could be seen as a suspense-thriller twist on the ethnic-identity film genre, and not the other way around.) Filipino American youth — perhaps like the filmmakers themselves — would no doubt find familiar tropes here, tweaked and heightened: the dizzying confusion, the humidity, the shock of the misery of the Third World, the bewilderment of a half-understood foreign/native language, the balut offered up as a kind of culinary litmus test. The filmmakers make perfect use of the staring bystanders; Adam’s incongruity as he trudges through Cavite City is perhaps only a little less jarring than the presence of the two filmmakers themselves.

In the end, it is significant that the action takes place in the province of Cavite, where Emilio Aguinaldo first proclaimed the independence of the Philippine Republic from Spain. The Muslims of the Philippines, however, failed to receive, and continue to do so, the benefits and rights of any form of independence, and the events in Mindanao of the last three decades certainly bear witness to this.

(What makes the film rather politically problematic, on a couple of different levels, is the decision the protagonist makes, and the way the kidnapper is portrayed. Arguably, however, the filmmakers shroud this in moral ambiguity, depending on how one interprets the opening shot. But unfortunately, any further discussion would spoil the film for you folks, so perhaps any spoilers should be mentioned — and explicitly designated so! — in the comments, if any of you readers have seen the film…)

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