Sunday, March 17, 2024

11:51 AM | The Great American Novels

The Atlantic just dropped their list of The Great American Novels...



Goodness, I have only read 25 of these. Must really go back to serious reading. But happy for Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters making it. I read that book when I was studying in Japan at 21, and I loved it. [I lent it to a Finnish friend, and when she finished, she told me: “Now I understand you much better,” hahaha.] But I’m perplexed with its inclusion in this list, given its “American-ness” conceit: that novel is very much about post-war Philippines. Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart feels like the better fit.

The list, and my reads thus far:

[✓]  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
[   ]  An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (1925)
[   ]  The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein (1925)
[   ]  Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927)
[   ]  A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929)
[   ]  Passing by Nella Larsen (1929)
[   ]  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
[   ]  Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)
[   ]  Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936)
[   ]  East Goes West by Younghill Kang (1937)
[   ]  Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
[   ]  U.S.A. by John Dos Passos (1937)
[   ]  Ask the Dust by John Fante (1939)
[   ]  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
[   ]  The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)
[   ]  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
[   ]  Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
[   ]  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
[   ]  A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell (1942)
[   ]  All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
[   ]  The Street by Ann Petry (1946)
[   ]  In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947)
[   ]  The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford (1947)
[✓]  The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)
[✓]  Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White (1952)
[   ]  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
[   ]  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
[   ]  Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks (1953)
[   ]  The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
[✓]  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
[✓]  Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)
[   ]  Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956)
[   ]  Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith (1957)
[   ]  No-No Boy by John Okada (1957)
[✓]  On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
[✓]  The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
[   ]  Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
[✓]  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)
[✓]  Another Country by James Baldwin (1962)
[   ]  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
[✓]  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
[   ]  The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross Macdonald (1962)
[✓]  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
[   ]  The Group by Mary McCarthy (1963)
[✓]  The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)
[   ]  A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (1967)
[   ]  Couples by John Updike (1968)
[   ]  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)
[   ]  Divorcing by Susan Taubes (1969)
[✓]  Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
[   ]  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
[✓]  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (1970)
[   ]  Desperate Characters by Paula Fox (1970)
[   ]  Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)
[   ]  Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford (1972)
[   ]  Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed (1972)
[   ]  Sula by Toni Morrison (1973)
[   ]  The Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta (1973)
[   ]  Oreo by Fran Ross (1974)
[   ]  The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
[   ]  Winter in the Blood by James Welch (1974)
[   ]  Corregidora by Gayl Jones (1975)
[   ]  Speedboat by Renata Adler (1976)
[   ]  Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)
[   ]  Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
[✓]  A Contract With God by Will Eisner (1978)
[✓]  Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran (1978)
[   ]  The Stand by Stephen King (1978)
[   ]  Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
[   ]  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis (1979)
[✓]  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)
[   ]  The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara (1980)
[   ]  Little, Big: Or, the Fairies’ Parliament by John Crowley (1981)
[   ]  Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson (1982)
[   ]  Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips (1984)
[   ]  Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
[   ] A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1986)
[✓]  Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986)
[   ]  Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
[   ]  Dawn by Octavia E. Butler (1987)
[   ]  Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1989)
[   ]  Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston (1989)
[✓]  Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn (1990)
[✓]  American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
[   ]  How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez (1991)
[   ]  Mating by Norman Rush (1991)
[   ]  Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (1992)
[✓]  The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)
[   ]  So Far From God by Ana Castillo (1993)
[   ]  Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)
[   ]  The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993)
[   ]  Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee (1995)
[   ]  Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth (1995)
[   ]  Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena María Viramontes (1995)
[   ]  Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)
[   ]  I Love Dick by Chris Kraus (1997)
[   ]  Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
[   ]  The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead (1999)
[   ]  Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)
[   ]  House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
[   ]  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)
[✓]  The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (2000)
[   ]  The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams (2000)
[   ]  Erasure by Percival Everett (2001)
[   ]  I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine (2001)
[✓]  The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
[   ]  Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros (2002)
[   ]  Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling (2002)
[   ]  The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart (2002)
[✓]  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)
[   ]  Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (2005)
[✓]  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)
[   ]  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
[   ]  I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (2010)
[   ]  Open City by Teju Cole (2011)
[   ]  Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)
[   ]  The Round House by Louise Erdrich (2012)
[   ]  Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)
[   ]  Nevada by Imogen Binnie (2013)
[   ]  A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (2014)
[   ]  Family Life by Akhil Sharma (2014)
[   ]  Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (2015)
[   ]  The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (2015)
[   ]  The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)
[   ]  The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
[   ]  Amiable With Big Teeth by Claude McKay (2017)
[   ]  Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)
[   ]  Sabrina by Nick Drnaso (2018)
[   ]  Severance by Ling Ma (2018)
[   ]  There There by Tommy Orange (2018)
[   ]  Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (2019)
[   ]  Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (2019)
[   ]  The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (2019)
[   ]  No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)
[   ]  The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (2021)
[   ]  Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (2023)

Labels: books, list, philippine literature, reading

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Tuesday, September 05, 2017

11:08 PM | 50 Greatest Films of All Time

I just completed BBC Culture's comedy list, and I needed a new film-list challenge, so I went to the mothership of film lists, Sight and Sound Magazine's 50 Greatest Films of All Time list, the authoritative once-a-decade listing, which they last held in 2012.

As of September 5: 37 out of 52. Not good.



☑   1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
☑   2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
☑   3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
☑   4. La Règle du Jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)
☑   5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
☑   6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
☑   7. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
☑   8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
☐   9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer, 1927)
☐ 10. 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
☑ 11. The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
☑ 12. L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
☐ 13. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
☑ 14. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
☑ 15. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
☐ 16. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
☑ 17. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
☐ 17. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
☐ 19. Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
☑ 20. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951)
☑ 21. L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
☐ 21. Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
☑ 21. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
☐ 24. Ordet (Carl Dreyer, 1955)
☑ 24. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
☑ 26. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
☐ 26. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
☑ 28. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
☐ 29. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
☐ 29. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
☑ 31. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
☑ 31. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
☑ 33. Bicycle Thieves (Vittoria De Sica, 1948)
☑ 34. The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926)
☑ 35. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
☑ 35. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
☑ 35. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
☐ 35. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)
☑ 39. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
☐ 39. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
☑ 41. Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
☑ 42. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
☑ 42. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
☐ 42. Gertrud (Carl Dreyer, 1964)
☐ 42. Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
☑ 42. Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)
☑ 42. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
☑ 48. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
☑ 48. Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)
☑ 50. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
☑ 50. Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
☑ 50. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)

Labels: film, list, pop culture, popular culture

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Monday, August 28, 2017

5:18 PM | Funny Movies

BBC Culture polled 253 film critics from 52 countries to determine the funniest films ever made. Below are the films that made the Top 100 cut [listed from No. 100 to No. 1]. These are the ones I've seen thus far: 101 out of 101. It took a few days to finish them all, but I'm done!



☑ The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982) [tie]
☑ The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961) [tie]
☑ The Jerk (Carl Reiner, 1979)
☑ The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009)
☑ The Music Box (James Parrott, 1932)
☑ Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)
☑ Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984)
☑ Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
☑ South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Trey Parker, 1999)
☑ The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
☑ What's Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972)
☑ A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971)
☑ Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966)
☑ Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001)
☑ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)
☑ Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
☑ Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)
☑ Waiting for Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996)
☑ Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923)
☑ Top Secret! (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, 1984)
☑ There's Something About Mary (Bobby and Peter Farrelly, 1998)
☑ Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999)
☑ The Dinner Game (Francis Veber, 1998)
☑ The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)
☑ Divorce, Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961)
☑ Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
☑ The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)
☑ Trading Places (John Landis, 1983)
☑ The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis, 1963)
☑ The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (David Zucker, 1988)
☑ The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
☑ In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009)
☑ Love and Death (Woody Allen, 1975)
☑ Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)
☑ Sons of the Desert (William A. Seiter, 1933)
☑ Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)
☑ Caddyshack (Harold Ramis, 1980)
☑ Step Brothers (Adam McKay, 2008)
☑ Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944)
☑ What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, 2014)
☑ Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004)
☑ Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004)
☑ Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)
☑ Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983)
☑ Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004)
☑ Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)
☑ Best in Show (Christopher Guest, 2000)
☑ Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
☑ The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980)
☑ My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936)
☑ Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925)
☑ Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)
☑ The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
☑ Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
☑ Animal House (John Landis, 1978)
☑ Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
☑ Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958)
☑ Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011)
☑ M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)
☑ The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937)
☑ Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006)
☑ The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1967)
☑ A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood and Edmund Goulding, 1935)
☑ The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
☑ Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)
☑ A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton and John Cleese, 1988)
☑ Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
☑ Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995)
☑ Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Adam McKay, 2004)
☑ Raising Arizona (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1987)
☑ Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
☑ Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)
☑ When Harry Met Sally... (Rob Reiner, 1989)
☑ It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
☑ The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
☑ Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)
☑ The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)
☑ Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
☑ The Party (Blake Edwards, 1968)
☑ Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)
☑ City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
☑ Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974)
☑ The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
☑ Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
☑ Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
☑ The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin, 1940)
☑ Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975)
☑ His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
☑ To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
☑ Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
☑ The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998)
☑ The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1926)
☑ This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)
☑ Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
☑ Airplane! (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, 1980)
☑ Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)
☑ Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
☑ Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
☑ Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
☑ Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
☑ Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

Labels: film, list, pop culture, popular culture

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Sunday, January 17, 2016

8:02 AM | Film Log 14 ~ 19: The Big Short, Senior Year, Young Frankenstein, Advantageous, American Horror Story: Hotel, and Macbeth

I do not get the acclaim for The Big Short (2015), Adam McKay's attempt to clarify the most recent banking meltdown in America, and how several men who foresaw the crisis chose to milk it for what it's worth, as is the American way. It's not a bad film, but it's nothing to crow about. It's, in fact, funny in places, and the cast is a virtual list of Hollywood hunk hotties, new and old, from Ryan Gosling to Brad Pitt, from Christian Bale to Finn Witrock, from Hammish Linklater to John Magaro, from Billy Magnussen to Max Greenfield -- give or take Marisa Tomei and Melissa Leo to make up for the gender disparity in the cast, plus Steve Carrel to remind anyone that McKay has, with this film, graduated to the front rank of Hollywood filmmaking after years of being in the comedy ghetto. (He gave us Anchorman, after all.) Beyond that, it is irritably condescending, underlined most of all by the celebrity cameos courtesy of the likes of Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez, Richard Thaler, and Anthony Bourdain explaining -- without really succeeding -- the shadowy complexities of Wall Street jargon and scandal. Its unbelievable Oscar nominations should have gone to Carol (left out of Best Picture), The Martian's Ridley Scott (left out of Best Director in favour of McKay), and Room's Jacob Tremblay (left out of Best Supporting Actor in favour of Bale). It is, this cannot be denied, a film of its time -- a manageable outrage for recent troubles -- but it's a film that seems destined to be quickly forgotten. ★★★☆☆



It has taken me a while to finish Mel Brook's singular achievement, 1974's Young Frankenstein -- a distinction admitted to by the comedy veteran himself. (It was also the same year that saw the release of Blazing Saddles.) What took so long? It's reputation as a comedy legend, perhaps. And an exhaustion from monster movies, which this film is parodying, especially the Universal Pictures variety. But what a handsomely made work! I loved it even if the laughs came far and few between. ★★★★☆



I finally managed to see Jerrold Tarog's Senior Year (2011), five years after it made some waves in the Philippine independent film scene. I remember it most as the film that sought to embody in fuller form the scintillating promise of Faculty, the short film directed by Tarog that preceded it, which went viral and reminded us once again that Tarog was a filmmaker to watch for. (Heneral Luna is only the most recent reminder of what he can do.) I like Senior Year. It has heart, and it has narrative ambitions reminiscent of Alan Parker's Fame (1980) and Aureaus Solito's Pisay (2007), two preceding films that sought to explore the lives of high school students as they go about the challenges of being teenagers: anxiety for the future, anxiety over love, anxiety about peer acceptance. It skims on many of the narratives it chose to follow, but that's to be expected in a film that's largely an ensemble effort to tell an ensemble story. It's narrative frame -- that of a high school reunion -- fails to ignite cohesion, given the traffic of narratives that already exists, but it does serve an important function to make sense of the epilogue: that our teenage dreams do not always necessarily come true, but high school was fun, wasn't it? ★★★☆☆



I wanted to like Jennifer Phang's Advantageous (2015), the minor Sundance hit written by two Korean-American women which centers on Jacqueline Kim's Gwen, an endorser and "face" for a lifestyle clinic in some futuristic world, who is summarily fired from her job, and is forced to undertake the new and still-to-be-marketed procedure of transferring her consciousness to a younger body in order to make ends meet and send her young girl to a proper school. The issues the film poses simmer -- the ethics of untried technology, the roots of race, the fleetingness of identity. It has ambition, sure -- and you can see the tire marks in its striving to create a fuller sense of execution of that ambition. Instead, you could see its obvious flaws framed and distinguished all the more by that ambition, marking the film as a middling, if noteworthy, effort. Generally, it is just a tiresome, unengaging watch. ★★☆☆☆



Let it be known that this is the first time I have ever completed all episodes of Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy's gothic horror extravaganza. I've tried before. I quit Murder House by the second episode, and Freak Show by its sixth, and skipped Coven and Asylum altogether. I like Murphy's breezy showmanship, but for the love of camp, he doesn't exactly know how to tell a coherent story. He delights in muddled narrative, puts a bow of ribbon on it, perfumes it with a whole flask of designer cologne, and nevertheless manages to call the Frankenstein monster of a product a ratings success. I couldn't be bothered to be hoodwinked. (Couldn't be bothered to stay longer for Scream Queens, either.) But American Horror Story: Hotel (2015-2016), for some reason, I finished. It's still muddled, yes. There are still so many loose strings left untied by the finale, yes. It's main narrative thread -- the vastly uninteresting Ten Commandments serial killings -- was also notable for fizzling out by the very middle of the entire season. But I grew to like small parts of it: Lady Gaga's The Duchess, David O'Hare's Liz, Kathy Bates' Iris, Sarah Paulson's Sally McKenna, Evan Peters' James Patrick March, and Mare Winningham's Hazel Evers. The end, when it came, was far, far, far from perfect -- but it was surprising: it was an episode that was strangely cuddly and warm, if refracted from an AHS lens. It's all about belonging to family, and fighting for it. Awww. Who knew? ★★★☆☆



I couldn't believe my eyes when I scanned the marquee of our local cineplex and saw that Justin Kurzel's adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth (2015) was screening. For a theatre chain loath to give us in Dumaguete a slate of good films, this was a complete surprise. The film itself is beautiful to look at -- Adam Arkapaw's searing cinematography is comparable to the miracle that John Seale achieved for George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) -- and contains two striking performances by Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard as the murderous royals. But it plods: there is no energy to this adaptation, just an endlessness of emotic glances and whispers. It's a wasted exercise of epic filmmaking. ★★★☆☆

Labels: film, list, review

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Sunday, January 10, 2016

10:18 AM | Personal Best: Forty (Actually 44) of My Favorite Films From 2015, Part 3

A film's greatness, I think, largely depends on chance -- no filmmaker goes about his business telling himself, "I am going to make a bad movie" -- but having an acute sensibility that is able to fuse technology and vision is paramount. Read Part 1 (nos. 40-30) and the explanation for my choices here and Part 2 (nos. 29-20) here. Let's get on to the third batch of movies that delighted me in 2015...


19. Seymour: An Introduction (Ethan Hawke, dir.)

The intriguing question that haunts this film by actor and first-time documentary filmmaker Ethan Hawke is this: what happens if you walk away from it all at the height of one's artistic peak? Meet classical pianist Seymour Bernstein, who abandoned his rising career as a concert pianist to retreat to a more modest and very private life as a music educator and composer. We follow him go about his day, and bit by bit, we get life lessons -- all unforced -- about living the authentic life, and the value of keeping the integrity of our art central to our lives. The film unwinds like the finest chamber piece. I've always loved documentaries that follow artists in the pursuit of their creativity; this is a fantastic exploration of that.



18. 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, dir.) / Grandma (Paul Weitz, dir.) / I’ll See You in My Dreams (Brett Haley, dir.)

Here is a trifecta of films that feels linked for me, and grouped together they afford us varying glimpses into the rich emotional landscape of women of a certain age. I could add a fourth, Paolo Sorrentino's audacious if uneven Youth, which contains a searing cameo by Jane Fonda, but the central performances in that film belong to two old men, so never mind. These three films, however, amply demonstrate the undiminished power of fantastic actresses usually considered past their prime -- and they do so with a subtle measure of heart and wit and beauty. An aching for connection connects the veteran actresses in the three films. In Brett Hartley's I'll See You in My Dreams, Blythe Danner -- gifted in this film with the starring role largely absent from a long and illustrious career as a character actress -- a longtime widow, very independent (she refuses to live in the same assisted living facility like the rest of her friends) slowly comes to terms with the loneliness that starts engulfing her more fully. In Paul Weitz's Grandma, a misanthropic poet played by Lily Tomlin, recently left behind by her lesbian lover, takes to the road with her granddaughter in search of money needed for an abortion. And in Andrew Haigh's incandescent 45 Years, Charlotte Rampling grapples with the slowly dawning knowledge that she can never be loved truly by her husband because of a ghost from the past. (I've written more fully about 45 Years here.) As acting showcases for three beloved actresses, they are sublime.







17. Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, dir.)

This film has been in the ether for so long, it feels weird to still talk about it in 2016. Oliver Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria came out in festivals at the same as Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman but never received proper distribution until 2015 -- and both are practically the same kind of film but made with different sensibilities. Both are about aging actors (Michael Keaton in one, and Juliette Binoche in the other) preparing for plays that promise to redefine their careers, but are unsettled by the ghosts of old roles that defined them in the first place. Assayas' film is the better movie, I think -- it feels like a sturdier study of being human rather than a prolonged technical gimmick, but guess which one had traction? The one about the male actor. Kristen Stewart plays Binoche's assistant and foil -- and reaffirms her mark as a compelling actress beyond the usual and unfair disparagement of her as a one-note actor. (News flash: she's not.)



16. While We’re Young / Mistress America (Noah Baumbach, dir.)

There are three New York filmmakers who best encapsulate the quirky intelligensia of the city that never sleeps -- Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, and Noah Baumbach. All three are great directors, adept at catching the wit and ennui of big city intellectuals, but 2015 just happened to be more of Baumbach's year. Allen's Irrational Man was a scatterbrained waste of an effort, and Whit Stillman's pilot for Amazon Studios, The Cosmopolitans, never made it past the first episode. But consider the year's output by Baumbach: While We’re Young and Mistress America, two films of radically different conceits, are both wonderfully made and wonderfully acted, both trying to answer the ageless question of the restlessness and the diminishing promise of youth of artists in New York.





15. Room (Lenny Abrahamson, dir.)

Every thing Jacob Trembley does in Lenny Abrahamson's adaptation of Emma Donoghue's Room feels authentic, it is startling. The film itself feels like your regular standard good movie, although much can be admired of Abrahamson's uses of claustrophobic space about this drama about an abducted woman kept hidden by her abductor in a locked shed for ten years, together with the five-year-old kid she bore in her captivity. Brie Larson's Ma is a study of schizophrenic dilemma, but Trembley's Jack goes to town with a searing portrait of a boy who knows no other world except a small room. And that midpoint reunion is calculated to shred you emotionally..



14. The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, dir.)

This is not exactly a sequel to Joshua Oppenheimer's tremendous The Act of Killing (2014), but it is a continuation of the same exploration of Indonesia's mostly untold genocide of communists and other people in the political opposition in the 1970s. It runs shorter than the former film, but it is arguably the better made of the two. Oppenheimer makes a difficult subject bearable by a use of cinema that's breathtaking, and while you can question the forced metaphors (an ophthalmologist opens the film! to make you "see"!), the painstaking effort at documenting the atrocities and the ghosts that remain is admirable and brave.



13. Night Flight (Leesong Hee-il, dir.)

I have a grudging admiration for the films of Leesong Hee-il. The Korean filmmaker is unique in the respect that he remains the sole Korean director who's openly gay, and who's adamant in pursuing frank gay story lines in his films. But there has always been a strange and distasteful undercurrent of violence to his body of work -- No Regret (2006), Break Away (2010), Going South (2012), Suddenly, Last Summer (2012), White Night (2012) -- which could never be erased by the tenderness that is also present. His characters have to be bloodied, tortured, and maimed before they can ever find a hint of (gay) romance in their lives, and it got me asking: is this a reflection of the annihilating conservatism and homophobia in Korean society? Night Flight does not differ from Leesong Hee-il's expected treatment of gay characters, but for some reason, this film becomes a flowering of the director's queer sensibilities. Two childhood friends find themselves growing miles apart in high school -- one becomes the ringleader of a band of bullies, the other the hapless friend of another schoolmate who becomes the object of the bullies' ire. Both are openly antagonistic towards each other, but they maintain an undeniable bond they cannot deny. Then secrets from the past are revealed, and the mayhem begins. Also love. This is a painful film to watch, but it's also beautiful, and in its small ways, quite grand.



12. Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, dir.)

I had to watch this film twice to get the full measure of its unbearable greatness. And it is, for that matter, a great film -- the latest in Denis Villeneuve's efforts to follow the desperate turns in desperate times for regular people, with a gimlet-eyed view of that despair finally spiralling to chilling violence. I held my breath watching Incendies (2011), Prisoners (2013), and Enemy (2013) -- but I gripped my chair to a pulp while watching Sicario. We follow Emily Blunt's FBI agent as she gets involved in the hunt for a notoriously violent Mexican drug lord, and the labyrinthine journey she takes is a nightmare of betrayals and bureaucracy. Benecio del Toro has a star-turn here as an asset of dubious motivations, and how he steals the film in the third act proves what an important, and often unsung, actor he has always been.



11. Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, dir.)

Tom McCarthy's Spotlight is a throwback to class films of journalistic procedurals (think All the President's Men and The Paper) that no longer gets produced by Hollywood. And while it doesn't deliver much in terms of visual delights, it is an important film of the present because it is fearless in pursuing an important issue: the cover-up by the Catholic Church of the abuses of hundreds of children in the hands of pedophile priests. The cast is a scintillating ensemble (save for Mark Ruffalo's irritating choices in characterisation), and the story is evenly paced, written, and edited that "thrilling" almost becomes the byword to describe the usually boring acts of investigation and writing. This is a film that celebrates the best of what investigative journalism can do, and I loved it.



To be continued...

Labels: documentaries, film, life, list, review

[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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Tuesday, January 05, 2016

9:50 AM | Personal Best: Forty (Actually 44) of My Favorite Films From 2015, Part 2

In the films that I come to love, I look for quirk, for a strong narrative line and finish, for brave vision, for respect to human intelligence, for making new of what's old but at the same have great respect for what came before. Read Part 1 (nos. 40-30) and the explanation for my choices here. Let's get on to the second batch of movies that delighted me in 2015...


29. The Peanuts Movie (Steve Martino, dir.)

The idea of this new movie utilising Charles Schulz's beloved comics characters actually getting made was initially galling in two respects: first, the animation was going to be CGI -- a departure from the endearing flatness of the comic strip (and the small movies that it spawned); and second, we would finally see the previously unseen little red-head girl of Charlie Brown's eternal fancy. How dare they mess with a classic? But mess Martino and Blue Sky Studios did -- and the result is a surprisingly faithful take to an old favourite, just with new dressing and a new character.



28. Jess and James (Santiago Giralt, dir.)

What a strange road trip movie from Argentina this is: it's not entirely a successfully made one -- there are the garish uses of sound, for example -- but it's one that has so much faith in its quirkiness, both in the telling and in the characterization, that all you can do is surrender to the ride it promises. Two young men -- both gay, both listless, and both remarkably similar in looks -- meet up, have sex, and for some reason they decide to take to the road together, ostensibly to search for the other one's estranged brother. There are no life-altering lessons to find here, no dramatic or meaningful denouements to make you shudder. But it's a satisfying adventure nonetheless, steeped in unbridled sexuality that feels organic and sinful. The film may have something to say about the restlessness of youth or the plastic appeal of beauty, but maybe not.



27. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, dir.)

Any film from this Greek filmmaker is guaranteed to be a seductive head-scratcher. But Lanthimos mostly succeeds in his presentation of his surreal fantasies because the worlds he creates to be inhabited by his strange characters are so complete and consistent in their own infernal logic that all you can do is follow the inevitable twists and turns. There is a distance or a remove that we feel for the uncanny situations we witness, but once you get the unsettling notion that the fables Lanthimos concocts are allegories of our real world, the discomfort sinks in, and deliciously so. In this film, the most accessible in Lanthimos' body of work, we are thrust into a reality where single people are made to check into a hotel for 45 days, and get turned into an animal of their choosing if they don't find a mate by the deadline. Such an intriguing premise! Films of similar ambition usually botch up the arc of their narrative, challenged by the ridiculousness of their concept -- but strangeness is part of the regular vocabulary of Lanthimos, so he never falters. I loved Dogtooth and Alps; The Lobster only confirms my admiration for him.



26. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (David Zellner and Nathan Zellner, dirs.)

How do you describe this film? A young Japanese woman -- tortured by the alienating confines of Tokyo, stumbles upon a video of the Coens' Fargo, learns from the film about the money that's buried in the snowy landscape of North Dakota, and -- blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined -- proceeds to look for the treasure on her own. Tragedy ensues. It is of course based on a real story, but as told in this film, it speaks a lot about the grating noise of our world, and our longing to escape from it, even if it sometimes kills us. A sad, very moving film.



25. Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Vinterberg, dir.)

Remakes of classic films rarely surpass their originals. So here I am risking everything to proclaim this: Vinterberg's take is even better than John Schlesinger's 1967 original starring Julie Christie. (Both are based on the Thomas Hardy book.) While Christie herself was incandescent in that role, Carey Mulligan is no pale imitation either: she exudes an uncanny tender sexuality to the role of a independently minded young woman who inherits her uncle's farm and decides to manage it herself; Mulligan makes the role her own, and does the comparison to Christie proud. And there is of course the quiet animal stirrings Matthias Schoenaerts brings to the movie. He will make you blush. He will make you press pause many times. Yes, he will.



24. The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, dir.)

Peter Strickland is a divisive Greek-British filmmaker that is the perfect complement to Lanthimos: whereas Lathimos' strangeness are confined to a closed world with its own rules and logic, Strickland releases that strangeness to the world that we are more familiar with. It doesn't always work, like in Berberian Sound Studio (2012), which I nonetheless loved, but in this new sapphic BDSM affair, it works splendidly. The set-up is intriguing: a young, beautiful woman keeps house for a tyrannical older woman, who inflicts all sorts of abuse on her -- and then we find out that nothing really is as they look or seem. Then the drama plunges into something deeper, encasing us in a throbbing sensual world full of silky textures and butterflies and longing and despair. I'm not sure I can watch this film again, but it is memorable.



23. Best of Enemies (Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, dirs.)

It has been a strangely so-so year for documentaries: a lot of good ones, yes, but not a lot that engaged me very thoroughly. The biographies we got about Amy Winehouse, Nina Simone, Kurt Cobain, and Marlon Brando (I have yet to see the ones on Ingrid Bergman and Nora Ephron) were solid documentaries, most of them much-admired -- but they didn't get to me in an emotional or intellectual level. Best of Enemies, the documentary about the popular 1968 televised debates between two intellectuals and authors, the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr., is a bit above the usual fray of nonfiction biographies because it is ultimately about a cultural war, and sheds much light about the role of pundits, the shenanigans of personal politics, and the power of television culture. Because it raises its two personas to the stratosphere of cultural currents, and does a fine job of delineating the genius and intellect of both men, I've come to love this documentary over the rest.



22. Heneral Luna (Jerrold Tarog, dir.)

Much has been said about Heneral Luna, the sole Filipino film in this list, a lot of them admiring and also a lot more critical. I get the potshots thrown at the film, but I remain convinced of its singular power. It's not faultless or flawless, but it does provide a fascinating study of filmmaking vision, something you don't see very often in Philippine cinema. That it proved popular was a kind of a wake-up call to a lot of people in the country. It has to be celebrated if only for that alone.



21. The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, dir.)

Talk about filmmaking vision! This is the film that fully embodies that quality and aspiration of artistry that's always difficult to ascertain. And it does this with a simple story: a legendary fur trapper in 1823 Montana and South Dakota leads a band of reckless men in their danger-filled trade (vicious Indians everywhere!). He gets into a bloody rivalry with another trapper, gets mauled by a bear, and then gets left for dead by everyone else. He somehow survives and vows revenge. Not much of a story, but oh how it's cloaked in magnificent, jaw-dropping cinematography and tight, vigorous editing. It is a spell-binding film, if a bit too relentless in its bloody machismo. It has a twin in this regard in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, released in the same season, but Iñárritu's experiment in beautiful desperation is the better movie.



20. Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, dir.)

Edgar Wright's controversial departure from the project looked as if this superhero film was doomed at the get-go, and it came at a time when there was already growing discontent over the relentless over-saturation of films made from comic books. Instead, Peyton Reed's Marvel movie surprised us with its smaller-scaled delights and breathless and tight humour, bolstered by the likeable performances by everyone in the cast. After the mind-numbing spectacle of mayhem and destruction we've suffered through Avengers: Age of Ultron and Man of Steel, the very idea of a final confrontation staged in a child's toy set in a small bedroom is a breath of ironic fresh air.



To be continued...

Labels: documentaries, film, life, list, review

[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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Monday, January 04, 2016

5:14 AM | Personal Best: Forty (Actually 44) of My Favorite Films From 2015, Part 1

Save for one controversial film list I wrote for Spot.ph years ago, I have never attempted to rank the films I have seen for any given year: the whole process is fraught with painful choices, and I am a masochist only for love. (Ha.) Truth to tell, I still have difficulty genuinely answering people who ask me what my favourite film of all time is -- I waver between Tokyo Story and E.T. The ExtraTerrestrial and Citizen Kane and Grave of the Fireflies -- so I do not even want to entertain the notion of having to come up with a list of a film year's best. Which is why, for this inaugural effort, I have chosen 40. Because I tuned 40 this year. Because "best" should always lean towards generosity. Because my choices are informed by an interest to consider not only the artsy, but also the gloriously commercial. Because choosing the traditional ten is largely a reductive exercise in a fine year full of fantastic films. Because there is an increasing cinematic richness that do not only encompass Hollywood: films from other countries populate this list with a regularity that is testament to worldwide abundance. Which makes it quite ironic then that, save for one title, I have not made any effort to include Filipino films -- largely because I have yet to see most of them. I have written about this before. Local movies have a distribution problem that should not be ignored anymore; it is far easier to catch a film made in Mali or India than one from the Philippines. (If you want a list of great Filipino movies from 2015, here is Richard Bolisay's and here is Oggs Cruz's and here is Jonell Estillore's. Their choices, I suspect, are top-notch and well-considered. Long live Philippine cinema!)

What a film year this has indeed been, and one strongly steeped in nostalgia. The best efforts in that backwards-looking exercise are reboots of beloved films including Creed (for Rocky), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (for Star Wars: A New Hope), Sleeping With Other People (for When Harry Met Sally...), and Max Max: Fury Road -- but there are also the disappointing retreads that came courtesy of Terminator Genisys, Jurassic World, Poltergeist, and Point Break, among others. They will remain unmourned, even if one -- Jurassic World -- has become a box office behemoth. And, of course, I do not have words for the utter disappointments of Joy (truly unjoyful), The Hateful Eight (truly hateful), The Good Dinosaur (truly bad, if gorgeous to look at), and The Little Prince (which jettisons our favourite book, and proceeds to create another story that remains unforgivably uninteresting).

So here is my list. To begin, let's start with ten runners-up, which should overall make an even fifty, and these include, in alphabetical order, Bridge of Spies, Chi-raq, Cinderella, Creed, The Danish Girl, The End of the Tour, Ex Machina, The Gift, Spy, and Youth.


40. We Are Your Friends (Max Joseph, dir.)

This was my guilty pleasure of the year, and simply because it is one of those rare films that take a dip into the unexamined world of DJs and EDM. If I had seen Mia Hansen-Løve's Eden, that film would probably take in this spot on my list -- but this one is a witty and tightly constructed film that sings, dances, and just happens to star Zac Efron. A complete surprise of a movie.



39. Sleeping With Other People (Leslye Headland, dir.)

There is no reason to make this film, a loose retread of Rob Reiner's glorious rom com When Harry Met Sally, which came complete with the scintillating screenplay by the late great Nora Ephron, the one-liners of Billy Crystal, and the ascendant luminosity of Meg Ryan. This one has none of that, and is, on the whole, a foul-mouthed homage. It also asks us follow two mostly unsavoury characters with sex on their brains. But for some reason, the homage feels inspired and the film works -- the way a tightrope walker manages to clear a very thin piece of string. Here's one for audacity.



38. By the Sea (Angelina Jolie, dir.)

The critics have considered this marital melodrama set in southern France (and starring the real-life married couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt) as a tepid misfire -- but I love the languid narrative of this film, and its unflinching look into the vagaries and temptations of married life. It reminds me of the unhurried sensibility of Bernardo Bertolucci at the height of his cinematic exploration of human frailty and sexuality.



37. Paper Towns (Jake Schreier, dir.)

Regular YA literature, transposed to film, gets no respect, even when the material and the adaptation -- such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Fault in Our Stars -- are masterful and engaging. They get good notices, good box office -- and are then promptly forgotten by critics. For the most part, in Hollywood, YA is all about dystopic worlds with teenagers running away, always, from some fantastic mortal danger. I'm bored with that tendency, and so I love this adaptation of John Green's novel because it sets a different mode about teenage lives, and surprises us because the true love story in its heart is not really between a boy and a girl, although it markets itself as being so. Plus, this was a way better film than the agonising banality of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and the promising but eventually disappointing Dope.



36. The Intern (Nancy Meyers, dir.)

The films of Nancy Meyers don't get any respect either: they are constantly being accused of being aspirational commercials about the lifestyle of rich white people. So what? Is it forbidden to make films about this specific social class? The only failure is film made clumsily, and this film is not clumsy -- and it reminds us that Meyers made the incandescent Something Has to Give. This one, starring Robert de Niro in a gentle turn that has to be considered sterling achievement in the wake of his recent slumming, is a surprising examination of life beyond retirement -- gilded at the edges, yes, but how delicious and funny this film is.



35. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, dir.)

When it ended the first time I saw it, I felt happy and relieved -- convinced that Abrams had done a great job in botching up a franchise that has been hobbling of late. It doesn't exactly hold up upon repeat viewings -- and many people have also accused it for being unoriginal -- but the film works. Period. I've always thought of this latest instalment in the Star Wars saga as a necessary corrective, and a necessary reminder. If it apes the narrative and the vision of A New Hope, I think it was to fulfil two paramount goals: to gently ease us away from the rancid memory of the prequels, and to recalibrate the story to virtual factory settings so that a more ambitious vision of the mythology can arise. The reminder has been accomplished, and we are pleased. Now let's wait for the rest of the new trilogy to astonish us.



34. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, dir.)

The film should have made for prurient story-telling, but it is testament to the sensibility and the creativity of the filmmakers that a story of a young teenage girl's steamy affair with her mother's boyfriend has come off as sympathetic and bold, all at once. It was uncomfortable watching the film, especially the graphic way we see the affair evolve,  but it unfolded in a very sure way, helped by a cinematography that seemed calculated to show us the lush mindset of a teenager brimming with sexuality. You may want to take a shower after, but the film makes you think.



33. Tangerine (Sean S. Baker, dir.)

Famously a film shot by iPhone cameras, and famously a film that gave us the powerhouse performances of two transgendered actresses, it came off to me as shrill and chaotic upon initial viewing -- and I was at a loss for how this DIY effort had captured critics and audiences alike. But by the end of the film, when it quiets down to a fantastic denouement, I realised the film's bold but subtle power. It is not perfect, but there is gold in its imperfections.



32. It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, dir.)

This is not Paranormal Activity nor The Conjuring -- and hence, you must be prepared to enjoy a horror movie that dispels its fright through slowly growing dread instead of jumpscares. The premise is unnerving and smart: a curse is sexually transmitted, and the ghouls that come for you are slow moving figures that look like anyone, coming to you steadily but surely -- until they come at you with certain deadliness. The film is really an experiment in form. It doesn't scare you the normal way -- but it lingers in your consciousness days after.



31. Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, dirs.)

If Michael Haneke and Eli Roth spawned evil together, the result would be this German film. A mother comes home to an isolated country house after having undergone extensive plastic surgery, and her face is all bandaged up. But her young sons are entirely unsure if this woman in their midst is truly their mother. The horror begins, and it deepens because we are completely unsure who the monster is. Or are. There are twists and turns here that are guaranteed to shock, leaving you with only one kind of feeling: delicious devastation.



30. Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen, dirs.)

Pixar redeems itself with this return to form -- this is a compelling story, with fantastic design, and tweaked just right to mess with our emotions. And perhaps that should be the case, given the fact that the film is really a study of one person's emotional life -- in this cafe, a young girl by the name of Riley devastated by the changes wrought by her parents' move to the big city. It felt a little too calculating for me upon first viewing -- but it grows on anyone willing to undertake this emotional adventure.



To be continued...

Labels: film, life, list, review

[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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