The Rape of a Goddess

Malena
Guiseppe Tornatore
Italy
2000

The film is not really not about a woman, it is about a 12 year old boy, Renato who couldn’t stop thinking about the town’s most beautiful woman--Malena. From the first time he set his eyes on their Latin language professor’s daughter, Renato, with his newly bought bicycle follows her distantly, from the steps of her door, to the streets, to the plaza, to the most secret places she goes, and even to her most private moments at their house. From then on, Malena has always been in the fantasy of the teenage boy. You will have a lot of flashbacks to the director’s earlier films and Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” and “Shoe Shine”

Directed by Guiseppe Tornatore, the film is promising as it is succulent with the sweet and nostalgic concepts, themes, and subject matters the director has long employed in his  early films such as Cinema Paradiso in 1989. Looking at the charm of childhood, and the excitement of transitioning from a playing child to a masturbating teenager, and the provocation of adult’s irrevocable restrictions to them, it is unthinkable not to create a magical film out of it especially when the form is decorated by a lot of funny and naïve adventures. However, Tornatore doesn’t know how to sharpen his film. It has always been my problem with him even with his award winning “Cinema Paradiso”. He tends to triple the sugar into an already sweet thought, he saturates it, until its thick, and kill his audience with the overindulgence of his childhood films. Tornatore is a master of elements, in an unfortunate way, he includes large doze of elements that irritates the power of his works. They are just so all over the place that you wouldn’t know what to focus on, especially on “Cinema Paradiso”. And in a span of a decade, He hasn’t really improved much, though there is a negligible amount I must say, the coherence of the form of his films is still generally chaotic.

Narrative-wise, it is still also chaotic. You wouldn’t see much scenes about Malena and his father together. The death of her husband could have been the most appropriate time to see the father and daughter relationship. However it has been nayed and we have again missed a huge chance to know more about this woman. Perhaps the basic treatment for Malena’s character is the restriction of her self from the audience, it is understandable since the point of view is with the 12 year old boy who only knew her from a distant. But it shouldn’t be pushed to far, we should still know Malena by creating appropriate scenes to be captured by the subjective eyes of Renato. The part from where her husband died, to the dentist’s controversy, to the suddenly ended love affair with Lieutenant Cadei, the trial and her father’s death is actually the most consistent part in the film for we can thread all this pieces of the puzzle and realize that this is the reason why she has become a prostitute.

Comic treatment has always been at the film, and this confuses me about Italian culture. I need to know why judgment about prostitute is so intense that it even resulted to the town’s women beating up Malena. Narrative-wise it has not been enough to project what those women are accusing her that she is stealing their husbands, and that she is a disgusting human being, and that she deserves to kicked, slapped, and hit by brooms or of something I didn’t get to identify because of the fast editing at that part. Second, she is not the only prostitute in their place, though she may be the most beautiful. Finally, I conclude that this grand, thrilling, and repelling scene where they beat Malena is an inappropriate, disgusting scene pretending to be a brilliant one. The scene itself, without looking into the rest of the entire film, is not even a staggering one. The editing could have been kept calm and embark the minimal editing instead of the usual upbeat transitions for the beating scene. This is the most disappointing scene delivery from a supposedly astounding potential I have ever seen. First and foremost because the motivations for this scene are almost non-existent, and all you could ever ask is why? Second, it didn’t help the film and made it a pretentious film.

The film is also a woman’s nightmare. Aside from being objectified in the entirety of the film by any kind of man, it shows the unfortunate doom of a woman when she loses her husband, or a father, or any man. On the positive side there are two good things about it: one, is that Malena’s beauty has been consistently compared to a goddess as exemplified by the exposure of her breast, and second, there is hope in the point of view of a young man, in Renato’s eyes. Though the latter is a little bit wishful because the film really didn’t show any sign of change that a new patriarch would deal with. I am actually baffled why Renato doesn’t look like he is learning about a woman’s subordination to men, it’s as if the only thing he knows is that he wants to have Malena, that’s all.  He has her in her black and white dreams touching and kissing her. Now that alarms me even more if there is really a development in Renato’s character more than just learning how to masturbate and piss in a woman’s hand bag.

I find the editing a little too flaunty, and just like the director, shows extravagance in their fields and sacrifice its real meaning and contribution to their film. One example I have already mentioned above. There are also some scenes where the film has lapses with the eye level. Cinematography may be better by miles compared to other filmic aspects. The pureness of the Italian sun compliments much the delightful childhood of Renato, and the camera has really captured that pureness. The music has been minimized in “Malena”. You can barely notice music accompanying big scenes. The only exception perhaps would be Josh Groban’s “You’re Still You” on the part where Malena leaves the town and Renato contemplates on a mountain rock overlooking the waters of the sea.

I can’t fully despise the film. I am a fan of these childhood-pinning, nostalgic stories about how much we long for some events that happened in our past. However, the film needs a lot of sharpening in the script, in the treatment, in over-all direction. Therefore I can say that the film is a disappointment. Too bad for the Italians, it has been a long time since a great film came from their nation. Tornatore’s creativity may be grander than De Sica and Fellini, but his films are not even half of De Sica or Fellini’s few mediocre films.

Officially Unofficial

The Official Story
Luis Puenzo
Argentina
1985

 “I just need to know if she is the grandmother of our child or of someone else who doesn’t have the strength to walk in the plaza with a placard.”

Breathtaking in every aspect, that is what “The Official Story” for me is. Winning the Best Foreign Language Film in the 1985 Academy Awards, this film is an outstanding cinematic delivery of concepts such as history, truth, parenting, government coercion, rebellion, friendship and women empowerment. So overwhelming is its discourse about why do we need or want to care about the truth. Is it something that we really need to know to be a better and complete person or is it just that something movies and literature has sugar-coatedly overrated in the disguise of the beauty of emancipation? The content is severely enormous and significant and doing these concepts in film is highly prone to being preachy and obsoletely debative. And the best part of Luis Puenzo’s compelling masterpiece is that it did not fall into the quagmire of becoming a pretentious, know-all, answer-all type of movie when it refused to answer the questions storming the whole film. Existentially-wise, truth is a as relative as anything else and reality is a matter of interpretation, and Puenzo understands that--that the only reality we have is that of uncertainty, and of the unknown.

The combination of feminism and deconstructivism is nevertheless wonderful. Our protagonist, Alicia, is a history professor, she and her husband adopted a child they absolutely treated their own. After a visit from an old friend Anna who has been tortured being a suspected activist and inform Alicia that some pregnant prisoners are killed after they give birth to their babies and give those babies away or even murder as well, Alicia goes into a search for her adopted daughter’s parents. She goes to a church, to a hospital, to a non-Government agency and met an old lady she strongly suspects as her daughter’s grandmother. They never knew if their assumption is correct. We can say Alicia did not triumph over the enigmatic lie the government has created, but the process that she needs to undergo deserves veneration. The awakening, the attempt, and the implied continuous search at the end of the film is what a mother and a wife, whether educated or not, financially-dependent or not,  should need to do to at least feel that they are driving their own lives.

The final scene of “The Official Story” is completely breathtaking and staggering, that single long sequence alone deserves the award bestowed upon on Argentina by the Academy. It is an excellent cornucopia of simple yet intelligent camera movement, subtle lighting, appropriate editing, highlighted sound, feminist battle, knock-out performances, adult and child irony, and most importantly the dialogue about truth. A part of this fantastic sequence is when Alicia’s husband in the most dire confrontation pressed Alicia’s hands against the hedge of their bedroom door and repeatedly hit her head on the door. That sub scene is a loud patriarchal recreation (borrowing the term from my Humanities professor) molded in the socially urgent issue of domestic violence. In every feminist film, there will always be a point where patriarchy (which feminism tries to deconstruct) will be defended and protected. It is usual for a film to have that “point” be shown in the event of a woman’s weakness or indifference, which is very much parallel to how feminists films do it with patriarchy. But the film has brilliantly delineated abusers with men and victims with women. Thus the feminist attack is so straightforward and yet very evident and honest. This is probably the best equation of feminism and patriarchal deconstructivism I’ve ever seen on film especially when taken into consideration the few scenes before and after that. Husbands hurting their wives is not a card down for feminism it is an ace for patriarchal deconstruction which leads to feminism.

Government is driven by politics and is probably the most notorious power the world has ever experienced, and even the most dangerous core to deconstruct even above religion. The “Official Story” is not really scrutinizing government, above all it only deconstructs truth, and government is just a second degree link. The question I have is why Puenzo did not give any insights as to what these desaparecidos (missing ones usually politically) are fighting for. This is very unlikely for a Philippine movie with such theme about political rebellion and killings. All I’ve seen from the film is that people are resisting and the only other characters I’ve known are those who are wanting to know where these desaparecidos are. Maybe Puenzo would not like to touch another earth core-deep issue so he opted to make a boundary of these real desaparecidos out of the film and include only their loved ones looking for them and only speak of them in third person which emphasizes their remoteness. I will not hate Puenzo for that though this allows me to conclude that the film is really about truth and these political issues are more of a background story which for its strong nature seems to be a major element at the foreground but is actually not.

Deconstruction is a rebellion, necessary or capricious, I guess we really don’t need to know. The film is a deconstruction of history in the persona of truth and men representing government but it is not a deconstruction of government. Alicia’s husband works in the government and is a pro-government, anti-activist, rightist person, this somehow represents government but the film plot is not attacking his character as a government representation but as a representation of patriarchy. I never really felt or have seen any scene or sequence where a significant amount of effort is created to show government’s evasion. This may be the consequence of eliminating the real victims (desaparecidos) as it required to eliminate the real suspects which is the government. Thus it created a more solid scope for the film. This is what Puenzo has proved for this film, that he is not persuaded by the tempting dramas around his piece and instead focus on what they need to do. This is not easy because the drama at the circumference of the story is strongly powerful. Yet the resulting product is still awesome.

Another formidable aspect of “The Official Story” is its superb direction resulting to unforgettable ensemble performances whether by veteran actors or as juvenile as a 3 year old kid, aside from the cleanly cut narrative I have already mentioned above. You know that an acting is ineffective when you suddenly or gradually feel awkward every time you catch a glimpse of an actor either with the tone of voice or body movement. I am trying to remember if I ever felt that in this film and I find nay. Perhaps one reason is the thickness of the Spanish accent that it almost automatically carries conviction in these actors throwing their dialogues that is why I feel that I am always compelled to listen. Especially the final scene, I have watched it four times and I find it flawless. The stress on important words, the sighs, the scream, and even the timing of tears rolling down of their cheeks are so amazing that you catch such perfection in a long sequence.

“The Official Story” is one of the closest to perfect films I have ever seen. Nonetheless a sophisticated, powerful and significant film not just of the 80s but even of all time. It has a tumultuously gained perfection of a thought provoking story translated into a well-defined film of a sophisticated and classy visuals. The film employs the quest for the truth storyline and I am deeply satisfied that it has been unresolved in the plotline because the search for answers is continuous. 25 years after the world was in awe of Puenzo’s cinematic intelligence, people are still looking for that elusive word “truth” in their lives and in the world they live in. Will we ever be victorious about that extremely replicated journey? We may not but all I know is that the best questions in life are those that remains unanswered.

The King, the Prince, and the Knights

The Barbarian Invasions

Denys Arcand

Canada

2003

I’ve always had special love about films that are eagerly celebrating life and at the same time scrutinizing it, and “The Barbarian Invasions” is one of those few movies that brim over deep passion over life. The film is not highly plotted, not really eventful to form the larger part of the film but also not that too uneventful to be confused with a head documentary. This sequel to a trilogy of drama-comedy by world famous director Denys Arcand is oozing with Canadian wit that it might have adopted from the French, with strapping opinion about life, and with simple film making investing on great characterization and film content.

The film is highly historical and allegorical which flaunts its intellectual endowment about the world giving these characters’ opinions about the planet we are living in valid, persuading, and something to be thought of. Almost all of the characters, except Nathalie, who is the heroin buddy of Remy, are all highly educated and politically, economically and philosophically opinionated human beings. Most of them are college professors of social sciences that’s why I was not surprised to hear dialogues of resentments like—the history of mankind is a history of horror, which is a statement of scepticism but at the same time declaration of intense observation about the world. The best allegory I have noticed in the film is Remy’s personification of his son Sebastien as “The Prince”—the timeless utopian character of a king by Niccolo Machiavelli. Sebastian, played by Stephan Rousseau, is an estranged son to Remy. Despite that painful fact, and despite his booming career in the international financial scene, and despite his antipathy to the broken family they have because of his father’s mistresses, he still finds it worthwhile to make the remaining days of his father’s life comfortable and forgiving. So Sebastien, using his money, intelligence, and smarts, is able to occupy the whole basement of the hospital for his father, to have a continuous supply of prohibited heroin for his father’s secret medication, to have his father’s previous college students to have paid visits, and accompanied by his charismatic front stage personality, as hugely contributed by Stephan Rousseau’s magnetic performance, he is able to become the epitome of the contemporary “Prince” Macchiavelli has been conceptually formulating centuries ago. The “Barbarians”, as according to Remy are his friends, fellow thinker, fellow socialists. Referring to our history, barbarians are the less civilized human beings, thus making the operational title of the film as the invasion of the less civilized. Since the film is intellectually-compelled, civilization is the intellectual counterpart of the operational title but it is not to say that the group Remy belongs to is a less intellectual bunch of people, rather a group of the alternative and freer thinkers as opposed to the hegemonies such as capitalism perhaps. Therefore, as I understand the film, “The Barbarian Invasions” metaphorically means “The Advent of the Independent Thinkers”.

 

 Liberation and education is at the core of this extremely lovely comedy-drama. Aside from the assistance of the physical element of our protagonist as a college social science professor, and of course his colleagues, and the students, and the university, the film is far above the ground committed to learning and continuous education. The scene where Sebastien asked the police officer what did he study in college and the officer answered Criminology minor in Psychology, and then the officer asked the same question and Sebastien answered Mathematics minor in Economics is the simplest yet most powerful movie scene that insinuated much about a person’s passion and core of intelligence or specialty. The scene where Remy asks his son what particularly he does in his job in London and his son answers him with foreseeable complexity is not a simple question born out of the situation or plain curiosity but more of learning that even on his dying age continues. The scene where Nathalie wanders around the house of Remy where she sees some of the books the now deceased man has used to mention is another powerful scene at least for me. The large acquisition of books all over the wall, Nathalie looking small is like a belated glimpse on who Remy is and its contrast to the seemingly living-in-the-shadow and philosophy/history-allergic Nathalie. Liberation is another significant aspect of the film. Sexual liberation has even been verbally mentioned by Remy which in the conservative and seemingly-virtue-abiding point of view is an immoral aberration, but of course not in Remy’s terms. “The Barbarian Invasions”, which strongly suggests a battle in the title itself, suggests a battle of the liberal against the conformist and what I really admire about the film is that Arcand is still able to make this queer powder keg an adorable and lovely piece of art. The Spanish film which would be released the next year after this one “The Sea Inside” is almost synonymous with “The Barbarian Invasions” in its non-conformist propaganda but the former which is directed by Pedro Almodovar, though visually more superior, is at times verging on obnoxious and subconsciously repelling while the one by Arcand is roughly almost consistently admirable.

The characters building this mirror image of our world society are generally endearing, significant, and unforgettable, especially Sebastien, which I have discussed above in his the-end-justifies-the-means philosophy borrowed by the popular passage from Machiavelli. The protagonist Remy is another lovable film character at least of the 21^st century. Though I generally hate patriarchal objectification of women, his likability makes me forgive that side of his nature. Perhaps, to be more specific, the scene where he reminisce all beautiful women in the world that he has seen on TV and movies, from Maria Goretti who dips her adorable toes on the water, to Francoise Hardy singing on TV, to Julie Christie, etc, that scene is nothing less than a bittersweet longing for the past that is the purest recollection of the most pleasurable guilt every man could ever carry on so deeply. That sincere scene is one of the most sincere I have ever witnessed on any national cinema and that is more than enough for me to forget feminism for the mean time and at most realize the beauty of being objectified. 

One of the more important films of the 21st century definitely, "The Barbarian Invasions" is impeccably emotional that compliments the fissures of the intellectual. Showing a lot of astounding awareness and honest interpretation, this film ranges from sweet to bitter and from painful to pleasurable making it an unforgettable cinematic and human experience.

Artificially Sweet, Don’t be Deceived by the Wrapping

Hansel and Gretel

Yim Pil-Sung

South Korea

2007

 

I think this is going to be the first film to be reviewed here negatively, in most parts. The reason is because “Hansel and Gretel” is a pretentious, sugar-coated, and poorly-told dark fairy-tale aspiring to be as good as the Spanish “The Orphanage” or the Mexican “Pan’s Labyrinth” whose mastery in dark fairy-tale genre have been really competitive and impeccable. However, for Yim Pil-Sung’s work, the premise is actually promising and potent but the entire film is so sleepy and to be blatant it is a disappointment for Koreans attempt to do the dark fairy-tale genre. Two movies in my Top 20 favourite ever are actually Koreans—“Brotherhood” and “Joint Security Area”, because they have a genuinely beautiful understanding of the North and South Korea conflict, of friendship, and of brotherhood—but not yet thrillers like this one.

Stranded in the magical (or cursed) forest where the only place to stay in is the House of Happy Children, Eun-soo, a young husband and soon to be a father discovers the horror that is striving in the house. First, with the sudden disappearance of the children’s parents and the eventual learning that these children are looking for appropriate parents and that the ones he thought who are the real parents of these three children are just strangers trapped in the forest like him, and also another victim of the curse, and his quest for refusing to be another victim begins. But I never really felt that quest. The problem of the film first lies with its poor storytelling, and eventually poor directing. I have always been unhappy about films who are seemingly directionless and swirl its viewers around into circles making you lose your grasp in its narrative—which is a significant aspect of film viewing. That must be the reason why I haven’t appreciated “Trainspotting” and hated my friend who recommended it, but at the end of the day, it will always boil down to the viewer’s preferences. I really didn’t hate that friend of mine though, she recommended me “Bridges of Madison County” and I loved it. What I am trying to say here is that even though we have a certain standard of distinguishing good and bad films, at the core of our judgment is a personal aspect that we will inevitably be employing everytime we watch movies. About the circling-effect that I mentioned a while ago, I understand that the purpose of it in the film is for us to feel the slipping sense of time in the character of Eun-soo and the sense of immortality in the children which late we found out I the film that these children died decades ago. The treatment looks faithful to the coherence the film is supposed to possess at the end of it, but its execution in the film looks so amateurish and even more like a mistake more than an intention. The progress of the tension in the film and/or the revelation of the secrets are so serrated making most of its element so idle and obstructive. 

The flashbacks are so unfortunate and unoriginal. They are just simple cuts to the past, and the past is so uninteresting, so well-worn, and so much a catcall—like the brutally treated children in an orphanage with the overdone dirty place and dirty faces. The strength though of the film is its visuals. The first time I scanned though the film, I am jaw-dropped by its deeply fairy-tale inspired cinematography—the yellow-orange-red-gold combination is so melting in the eye, and all the toys all over the house are so charming and pleasant to the eyes which of course is a contrary to the real thing that is happening in the house. The film also employs a lot of jump cuts. It’s too bizarre to see jump cuts nowadays especially when the situation doesn’t really require it. Jump cuts are not recommended when your scene’s energy level is relatively low and if it is not preceding any such scene. 

I hated the film because it fell into the trap of usual storytelling and common directing when in fact the over-all concept of Hansel and Gretel and its dark treatment gives you a huge chance to make it twisted and brilliant. That kind of film is something a director can play on all his creativity and imagination to make this one a hell of a film. But the product is so pale, weak, and this is something you wish should have been done on a different time, and different team because everything has been taken wrong in this film. A total waste of money and time, there are a lot of scripts waiting to be produced out there and yet this one wastes its opportunity.

“Hansel and Gretel” is of course candidly colored, but everything else is a mistake. I did not see anything new about this dark fairy tale. This one should not be compared to “The Orphanage” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”, they are way too superior in any single aspect of filmmaking.

A Could Have Been Animation Masterpiece

Up

Pete Docter

USA

2009

The 10^th another eye-candy and chicken soup-soul production of PIXAR animations distributed by Walt Disney has kept up to its reputation of being more than a scrumptious visual feast for the children, the young at heart, and for the whole family. “Up” soars way and beyond the sweetest imaginations and talents in this contemporary animation era which I shall call the PIXAR Era. As opposed to the dark and political animations from France, Japan, and even Palestine, American popular animation has for me successfully accomplished the intermediate step of bringing up commercial animations to the pedestal of great films. Entering the more social and bravely the controversial sphere is the subsequent plinth PIXAR could opt though for them not to do it is definitely not a disappointment and could even be one if they do so. The world obviously loves, adores, and more importantly consumes the way they do over the past decade beginning with the lovely “Toy Story” in 1995 to my favourite “Finding Nemo” in 2003 all the way to this Academy Award Best Picture nominee.

A charming entertainment is expected for an old man bringing his house to a mythical Paradise Lost through a hundred thousand balloons together with a chubby and cute grade school boy scout who is a reminiscent of him when he was young.  The film is composed of three parts—the background of the objective, the quest to achieve the objective, and the adjusted objective. Adventure films usually put in most of its strongest elements in the middle part which is the quest. You can take as an example “The Lord of the Rings” and even “Harry Potter”, where the quest for the objective is like 90% of the whole film. In “Up”, the nucleus is its strongest link. Most of the time, adventure films let the quest-part usurp the power of the entire film. “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” perhaps is an example when the journey is triggered by an advanced academic interest by a Geology professor and his nephew’s stride to follow and investigate why his father never came back in the travel to the centre of the earth. The motivation sounds exploratory and sincere but the treatment to the potent of this spur has been taken too negligibly as if the reason looks more of an excuse rather than a real reason. The 180 degree of this narrative flaw is nothing less than “Up”.  

The first part of the film is overflowing with warmth that I have ever witnessed. The childish dreams all of us used to have are simply awakened by the young Carl Fredricksen’s dream of being an explorer to the Paradise Lost and also by his soon-to-be-wife playmate’s imagining of an old house into a flying craft. After a couple of sweet boy-girl playtime on this old house, the two soon grow up, get married, and purchase the old house they used to play at. There are scenes suggesting Carl’s wife’s inability to bear child and those so lovely. There is also a montage where the couple keep s a jar coin-bank with a label reading Paradise Lost, but incidences like tires exploding and trees hitting their roof cause them to break that jar coin-bank and use the coins for something else instead. Until they grow old with their childhood dream of going to the Paradise Lost growing as silver as their hair. Carl finally remembers that romantic adventure to their youthful dream and on an attempt to surprising his wife with a plane ticket to Venezuela, she dies. This is not more than half 40 minutes of the total running time of the film but this part for me is eternal. The visuals are oh so God beautiful. The sophisticated mixture of mushy red, childish yellow and sentimental orange-gold provides the most and best eye-popping pictures I’ve ever seen for an animation. This manipulation of beauty through light, colours, positions, and astounding musical score is completely way beyond my imagination. It is heavenly full of heart and passion, an absolute work of geniuses who deeply adores two simple yet inexplicable human life mystiques—art and love.

With its eye-warming, heart-warming, and soul-warming first part of the film, the hardest thing to do now is not to let the first half eat the rest of the film, which it became short a little. The quest part is not that lovely at least for me. Aside from the fact that it has applied a regular-looking cinematography, the adventures itself is not excellent. To be perfectly honest, I wish the film ends at the part where Mr. Fredricksen’s house flies up and away above the city up until the clouds. I don’t mind seeing it as a short animated feature but for sure PIXAR, Walt Disney and most of the commercial pop-culture consumers would mind. I just wish it could have ended that way, and it would become my favourite short film ever or one of best movies I have seen ever, if not the best. But due to its commercial market and value, that part to where I want to end it is just the beginning of what the public consumers would really consume—the adventure part. 

 

Bringing eternity back in the discussion, I could have felt more eternity for the love of Carl to his wife if it ends that way. The ending could have been heartbreaking, nostalgic, fantastic, and childish. A flying house made possible by a hundred thousand of colourful balloons is the sweetest accolade I could ever employ for my childhood and may also for yours. I love seeing the house soar up high with these helium-filled elastics for this parallels love. That image also is one of the strongest and sweetest imagery I have ever witnessed not just in the history of animation but even in art in general. Mr. Fredrickson is old, he lost his wife even before they could have made their most treasured childhood dream of travelling and exploring Paradise Lost. His wife dreams of building a house beside the top of the falls in Paradise Lost. Their house alone though is endangered of being bought by a multi-million corporate company and even the old man’s stay at their house is at stake after a community incident which made the local government order him to stay at some elderly village. I like to say I know how he feels because it makes me feel alive and more human. On the day that he is supposed to be fetched by the elderly village attendants while as the construction foreman and his boss eyeing for the lot of his house show up with sly faces, the old man launches the balloon out of the chimney, the edges of the house break off against the ground, and with a loud thud of happiness and tone of winning against these people way down of his window, Mr. Fredrickson sets his and his wife’s house into where they really want it to be built. This imagery blows me away, at the same time pierces my heart. We all have childhood-buried dreams and fantasies, and most of them are too fantastic we can literally only take them as a dream. We grow old and our childhood dreams become less and less stellar and brilliant. We wake up one day and we realize how much we want to fulfil a dream that now seems to be extremely distant, and too impossible. I find the film beautifully heartrending because it is a realization that these dreams don’t have a room of achievement in the real world, and that we need a medium to where it may come true—and films provide that, “Up” is a proof. 

 

While I love to dwell on that could-have-been aspect of the film, I would like to talk a bit about the end of the film. I call it an adjusted achievement, Mr. Fredricksen’s goal is to move the house to the Paradise Lost but he ends up doing another adventure and achieving another goal. The part where he sees a note from his wife saying that it is time for him to have a new adventure is another sweet element in the film. This enunciates another endlessly seeming beacon to the old man’s life, with a kid friend, and a yellow retriever, Mr. Fredrickson finds a new dream he never really dreamt of.

I will say that “Finding Nemo” still happens to be my favourite animated film because it is consistently great from the very first 5 minutes until the last second of the movie, and because its background of the quest is heartbreaking, its quest is incredible, and the ending is inspiring. As opposed to “Up” which I totally commend the first part/background of the quest, its quest and ending is good but overshadowed by the first part. Generally I find this blockbuster animation a touching one.

Do you know Bashir?

Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman

Palestine

2008

“Memory fills the holes with things that never happened.”

The film is about the search for lost memories—memories that are traumatic, something that is related to war and or a massacre. Ari, is a filmmaker who has been suffering from dissociative amnesia for 20 years after he experienced being drafted to the Lebanon War in 1982. He talks to his fellow soldiers of the said war and seek professional help from psychologists and professors to lead him get a bigger and fuller picture of his lost memories.

“Waltz with Bashir” is a perturbing yet stylish, intelligent and psychological, and above all else—a hell of a film. The cinematic experience is really fascinating and one of a kind in every aspect. From its solidly coherent form to its timely and haunting content, the film never felt short of successfully translating the cruelty and dreadfulness of any war. I have seen a lot of war films but this one is outstanding, keeping aside the fact that this is animated which actually gave the extravagant amount of surrealism in the film, the film has a poignant reference in the recurrence of war in the society and in its basic unit—family. There is a scene when Ari is talking to his doctor friend and tell him that Ari has been living in the massacre and war even before he has been drafted in the Lebanon war. Ari’s father also experienced war, it is during the 2nd World War, and since Ari was young he has already been living in the terror of any war could ever bring. This realization is of course disputable but the orientation of the present to the past and the past’s connection to the present is observed in vicious cycle that will continuously inhabit people’s psyche. 

The film has a great form. The documentary style supports the search tremendously. It adds slowly building tension and more expectations that are either correct or wrong. The third person point of view or the filmmaker point of view is perfect since it is from the very beginning we already know that this one is going to be a quest movie. I also love the transition from Boaz’s point of view into Ari’s. The opening scene of the 26 angry dogs gives a strong start for the film, Boaz reveals that this is a dream and Ari later on has been revisited by disturbing flashbacks of his memory. It is from other person’s memory that ours are revisited. The motif of kids is made available since the opening sequel when a mother and child are frightened by the 26 angry dogs, and all of Ari’s friends have all their kids. Children are reference to the open ended but most likely to be doomed future of another war that Ari’s children could be then experiencing.

The first question that may arise after watching the film is why this is made animated. The immediate reason maybe is that it is going to be more affordable. With all the explosion and crane-utilizing shots, the film could be so costly—that is the economic perspective. The artistic reason on the other hand could be that expansive and accessible utilization of surrealism that is the fundamental representation of the war as an experience of our protagonist. The montages on the film which I really admire are too expensive and dangerous to be produced. Like the scene where a tank is driving in a narrow street devastating all the walls it is hitting and crashing all the cars it is stepping on. That scene is accompanied by a song I guess is entitled” Good Morning Lebanon”, and the scene is so beautiful as the tank crashes everything on its way as the song goes—“Good morning Lebanon..too much pain to carry on..good morning Lebanon.. may your creams come true..may your nightmares pass..your existence is a blessing.. Lebanon..you are torn to pieces..you bleed to death in my arms..you are the love of my life..oh my short life..tear me to pieces..I’m bleeding. 

The content the film is tackling is very huge, very timeless, and psychological as well as very social. It’s as if every emotion in the film is bone-seated that at times the deepness of these emotions will give you a hard time which is the surreal and which is the real. The film captured the horror of a war, and that is the best compliment a war film could ever get. "Waltz with Bashir" has been effective because everything is set-up to a soldier point-of-view instead of the generals and high-seating officials' idiosyncrasies. Bashir, the president of Lebanon whose assassination triggered the Sabra Massacre has never really been included in the plot. He never spoke in the film, but his assassination impacted drastically lives of many people including our protagonist. Just an asymmetrical realization, ordinary people cries when popular people grasps their last breath, ordinary people lives are changed even without the slightest sight of these powerful person's shadows.

Tomorrow is Another Day to Say Goodbye

I Love you Goodbye

Laurice Guillen

Philippines

2009

A beautiful woman in distress meets a kind, rich, and separated man, a heart surgeon and a café waitress in love. With the doctor’s family in high society, intelligent ex-wife, meticulous mother, and hard-headed daughter, everything for this soon to be second wife, step daughter-in-law, and stepmother is turning upside down. The story may quite be typical, but as what we are all explained by our creative writing and scriptwriting professors in college, there is no absolute new story that any person can ever think of, unluckily we are now living in the time of the world after numerous generations of imaginative production, a story will be new by how it is told. And I admire how this story has been told.

“I Love you Goodbye” is a flawlessly fashioned romance. The film has a smart deception in its narrative and is greatly accentuated by dexterous editing. One of the reasons why I think my attention has been following the ideal of being focused to what it is watching is because you never quite won’t know what is going to happen. This uncertainty, this sense of excitement, this activity of participating with expecting where these characters’ capricious understanding and enthralled repressions will lead them is definitely and almost unthinkable in the façade of excessive commercialism reflecting in our local cinema reflected from our local television, and of course our Republic’s predisposition to economics than arts. The film has a major flashback that lasted for like less than 10 minutes, after the first 30% of the film, and it is all about the abruptly ended romance of Gary (Derek Ramsey) and Lizelle (Angelica Panganiban), and the seemingly transient pain of the break-up to the fairy tale-like love story with Adrian (Gabby Concepcion) . It is definitely not an exaggeration, I must argue, that this simple scenes of flashback makes “I Love you Goodbye” a competitive film. I am not saying though that all films with flashback are competitive, it is just that first, no uncompetitive films dare to have such flashbacks, and second, a flashback is an evidence of any film’s attempt to utilize the astounding powers of filmic techniques. In that major flashback, Adrian who plays a major role in the first part of the film and for the rest of the film, becomes a secondary character slowly collecting all the majority of the film story and film plot as that flashback ends and as the film plot returns to the real time. I have a high regard for that shift in point-of-view. If you have read from my previous reviews, I really have that respect for point of views and any form of shifts from it. The film as I have mentioned above has a smart deception, cutting some scenes and projecting it to another scene where its cinematic tension and revelation would be multiplied by ten. I have to mention the scene where Ysa (Kim Chiu) is talking to her dad, we are all waiting if she will show the pictures of Lizelle taken by Gary. The scene is cut after I thought Ysa may have not shown the photos when she showed sincerity in not wanting her father to be hurt, and reading between the lines, her sincerity in wanting her father to be happy, and thus may she accept the fact that her father is really in love Lizelle. Just when I thought also that Ysa’s ace has been buried by her surmised surrender, we found out that she has really shown them to Adrian in a conversation of disclosed secrets between him and Lizelle. “I Love you Goodbye” maintains its excellent hold of viewers’s attention with its playful manipulation of point-of-view. Basically, it is Lizelle’s point-of-view, though we also see point of views from all of the four main characters (or at least four lead ABS-CBN stars, for Kim Chiu’s role is not that significant really). Some revelations work perfectly and just amazing because of this shift in point-of-view. When Lizelle goes to the bus terminal to elope with Gary, the man never showed up, and we never heard of anything from him anymore until one day Gary’s lawyer inform Lizelle about his death. The point-of-view has never exempted Gary buy for that specific scene, he is, and the result is very interesting.

Great characters adorably compels every frame and second of this movie to be interesting and worthy. The characters are well fleshed-out, excluding Ysa. Her resentments are seemingly latent and way too under-developed, that’s the exact reason why I think she is not a main character, as what I thought she is considering the movie poster and all the promotions. Adrian, Lizelle, and Gary are adorable characters. With my utmost commendations for Adrian, his character has been one of my most favourite of all time. Half probably of his character’s success is coming from Laurice Guillen’s intelligent control in the over-all of the film. Just when I thought again that Adrian really kills Gary or has something to do with his death, and just when I thought I was on the verge of disappointment to learn Adrian as a person who can really kill, Guillen just expands how lovely Adrian’s character can be. In a confrontation with Gary, the latter got hit by a car, and as Adrian explains to Lizelle, no matter how much he wishes him to die, he just can’t let him die.  The only thing that Lizelle can get mad may be the fact that he doesn’t tell her about it, which she actually accepts right away, perhaps thinking that Adrian is a hero and not the killer, and that maybe she really loves him, or that makes her love her. Gabby Concepcion’s acting is decent. There are some parts though when he is trying to be charismatic or frankly, cute and young that I am not sure if it works, but quite forgivable. Haven’t really watched a Sharon-Gabby movie but I got a funny feeling that that is exactly how he used to get “cute” 20 years ago. Lizelle’s character is of course the heaviest, deepest and most important character and has an enormous chance of getting a Best Actress award for all of the pain the character is enduring. Angelica Panganiban is not the best choice for the role. She did not give a very bad performance but she did very plain. I am not a fan of her but that is not to cancel out my criticism because I do not love her at the first place. I love the character so much and I wouldn’t love the character if I really don’t like her. The reason I think Panganiban is not the perfect choice for the role is because she has a subtle sarcasm in crucial points of her sentences that are bit dissatisfying. Big scenes when she is bursting out in tears with Concepcion, and there are seconds when I thought it has been the best I’ve seen from her but then after that extremely brief moment of believing that completely everything now on this film works, she gives that final syllable of her sentence with a give-up blow that is a bit annoying. The delivery of dialogues for big moments is still not comfortably natural and powerful for me as I used to see from her in other movies. Angel Locsin could have been the perfect Lizelle. Gary is a good character. He is mysterious from the beginning and becomes mysterious again at the end. His passion about photography is the best part of his character for me. I often wonder why I don’t see many artists in Star Cinema movies; he is one of the two I remember. I usually love films that have such characters, because it creates a mirror image of what is in front of the characters we are watching when they are filming it. A little too personal but it has always added an extra spice and interest in me watching those films. Derek Ramsey, I am neither a fan nor a critic. I am not a fan because I always see the same thing from him. His performance is just like playing the role of Derek and not of Gary, like what he just did with his character in “And I Love you So” and “T2”. But he is adorable enough not to be annoying and become an anti-Derek. The reason is clear why Derek landed the role. I don’t need to elaborate on that. Kim Chiu for the first time stars in a film without Gerald Anderson, and I don’t suggest her doing another one. Better have her on the lead with her onscreen sweetheart because she becomes so forgettable as a supporting character. She is still so itsy-bitsy, teeney-weeney in the film and I don’t think she is really ready for any drama of the same intensity especially without Anderson. This is not her fault though, it is also because her character unluckily is not as lovable and well-developed as the other characters, or has any youthful spank perhaps. The problem here is simple—the actress is popular and the role is not, even a bit insignificant resulting to worthless overestimation of the young actress’s attempt to be separated with Anderson for at least a movie. 

The ending is fantastic, almost. I have always wanted love stories to end not with the person they really love, and thus live the rest of their lives miserably, painfully, and regrettably. That is an exaggeration of course, but I enjoy those endings rather than the living happily ever after movies.  Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” is so melancholically romantic because of that. Sometimes, when I feel more inspired I want love stories to end also happily but not with the person they thought they couldn’t live without, so I find Terrence Malick’s “The New World” joyful yet still too gloomy and piercing, so as Jacques Demy’s “Umbrellas of Cherbourg” which is really a heartbreaker. Panganiban and Ramsey working together in this Star Cinema’s official entry to the 2009 Metro Manila Film Festival automatically gives us the idea how are their characters going to be related, definitely not siblings, nor friends, but lovers. I have been praying from the beginning of the film for Lizelle to choose Adrian and for her to dump Gary because it is surely going to be another sickening and tiring love team ended movie in town if ever. Another fantastic technique Guillen used to produce this film is to have the Lizelle in the narrative as fickle-minded to as clueless and totally confused of what she is going to decide as she is to naturally create the tension of whether the film is going to be another love team ended one or a real good, brave, and honest film. I am not saying though that love team ended movies are not honest, it is just that for every single T.V. series and movies from ABS-CBN and Star Cinema that has been produced and this may also apply to all commercial production houses in the world, cute and hunky boy always, no matter what, and magically still ends up with his pretty and sweet girl that the law of reality has always been violated and the plotlines has always been resided. Though the film ended the way I would want it to be, for Adrian be with Lizelle, and not be alone to have Lizelle joining Gary, I just thought it is a bit obliged. Gary died, and so if Gary just appears in the bus terminal then I could have cursed this movie for expecting this is a different film. I would have wanted the film to give Lizelle the obvious will to make the most important decision in her life for I think most of the time she has been so unsure of what she really wants. Her uncertainties though have been cast away by Gary’s death and therefore leave her without the second choice, and continue her life with Adrian. The ending is generally fine with me. It actually is a reminiscent of a familiar 2007 Star Cinema movie “A Love Story” where the lead man (Aga Muhlach) end up with who we thought as the second woman (also Angelica Panganiban), and have who thought as the first wife (Maricel Soriano) as the martyr, the sad, the forgiving, and the hero. I feel good about this quality romance drama Star Cinema is investing for the past couple of years. I just wish more control from individual directors over these movies because “I Love you Goodbye” and “A Love Story” are alarmingly a little similar to think that they are directed by two different directors Maryo J. Delos Reyes for “A Love Story”. I appreciate the fact that a commercial line like Star Cinema is producing such unconventionally ended movies however I wish to notice the line developing auteurs in their well-budgeted films.

I also noticed a trend happening in the line’s recent movies—sudden death. Gary’s death is just so unexpected, not even a single preceding element to get a hint of the nearing death. In Olivia Lamasan’s “In my Life”,  Luis Manzano’s character also died abruptly in the same way as Gary—a hit and run by a car. This is changing the conventional guideline of an effective screenwriting that you can’t have a character die out of the thin air, that you are not an effective screenwriter if you let the audience utterly shocked of a death, and that if an audience scans back at the movie in their DVD player and don’t see any hints of their death then you are not doing it right. I am also glad that Star Cinema is taking a bold step about this.

I am going to say that “I Love you Goodbye” is the best commercial movie of 2009.