Sunday, May 03, 2026
7:47 PM |
The Devil Still Wears Prada
Fans of the old movie will either love this, or be indifferent to it. As someone who once had a phase in my life where I’d wake up every morning by playing the opening sequences of the 2006 film, to the tune of “Suddenly I See” by KT Tunstall, I am glad to report that I am of the first variety.
I love this film.
It falls short of the perfection of the first one, but who cares? I like that it basically follows the same beats, but explores a sadder [maybe the better phrase is “more serious”?] narrative, particularly the implosion of journalism as we know it, and the takeover of the world by doofusy techbros who want to destroy everything — which is quite reflective of our 2026 realities. I think that for the seriousness of the subject matter, some might find this film a bit off the mark [or a slight disappointment], given the fact that the first one was really a simpler story about a young girl and her post-collegiate coming-of-age surrounded by high fashion.
But I’m glad that this film chose not to delve into similar territory, choosing instead to highlight what bedevils us today, albeit in a lighter way. [I’m sure that if it didn’t, it would attract brickbats about how tone deaf it is to current realities.] But, people, we need to grow up.
But I like that it chose to do this, yet still forges an organic continuity with the older film: previous betrayals find new avenues for redemption, previous anxieties reveal themselves to be analogous to current anxieties [i.e., people never really change, and Andy is still the same Andy], and old comradeships are deepened by astute revelations that do not contradict how the characters were like in the older iteration. [In this instance, it is Stanley Tucci’s Nigel who becomes the film’s heart.]
I love that fashion is very much alive in this film, I love that Emily shouts at Donatella Versace in Italian, and that Lady Gaga hates Miranda. I love that Miranda’s titular devil is purposefully diminished in this movie [she hangs her own robes! she is careful not to say bad words in meetings lest HR intervenes! she flies coach!] — but finally finds a love in a new husband who seems supportive and unfazed by his wife’s power. I love that she still remains wise about how she can survive the demands and the diminishments of the future, that she still remains the vanguard of the beautiful despite the world becoming ugly.
This is a fantastic continuation to an iconic film.
Labels: fashion, film, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, February 15, 2025
3:58 PM |
Ardor for Arbour
We write this in leave-taking. By the time this essay sees print, Arbour—the restaurant along Hibbard Avenue near Bantayan which had delighted the most discriminating food lovers in Dumaguete since its establishment at the height of the pandemic—would have closed, leaving behind its namesake now gracing the restaurant at Silver Reef Resort in Dauin. In a sense, Arbour will still be with us. But that mint green enclave of culinary goodness in Bantayan will be much-missed.
But we caught one of its last services for Valentines Day, so in a sense, this is also a love letter of sorts to chef Jan Schlimme and wife Jen, whom we first met in Dumaguete at the height of the pandemic—in October 2021, to be exact. They were vacationing in Bacolod from restaurant work in Hong Kong when the lockdown happened, and as the tolls of the pandemic turned into a long certainty, both answered a call to do food consulting for Casablanca Restaurant in Dumaguete. It was supposed to be a short stay: just revamp the Casablanca menu to suit pandemic realities, and then go back to Bacolod or elsewhere. But as with the usual, the Schlimmes found themselves “na-dagit” in Dumaguete, and in December of 2021, they found themselves establishing Arbour, what they envisioned to be a modern European restaurant nestled in Dumaguete.
We’ve loved Arbour’s fares since its beginnings, but this Valentine dinner proved to be something else.
One might expect bombast suited for couples celebrating love on love day itself—but what we liked about our Valentine dinner at Arbour was its restraint. There is a quiet artistry to restraint. In the culinary world, where excess is often mistaken for excellence, true mastery lies in knowing when to hold back. Arbour, helmed by the deft hands of head chef Jan Schlimme, understands this. In a city like Dumaguete—where the abundance of imported goods tempts restaurants into over-reliance on the exotic—Arbour does something radical: it trusts its ingredients, it allows them to shine on the plate. Here, the stars of the meal are not the truffle oils or the aged cheeses, but the produce, fresh and immediate, speaking in flavors unmasked by pretense. Arbour makes the flavor of their ingredients their main star attraction, and rather than to mask the basic components, their adept use of seasoning enhances the flavors of each element, pushed to their limit by the addition of just enough salt and pepper.
The journey begins with a plate that feels like the memory of an afternoon garden. The roasted beetroot salad, vibrant in its deep magenta, is an ode to the earth’s sweetness. The beets and carrots, slow-roasted until their sugars bloom, find a sharp foil in the herbed goat cheese, its tang cutting through like a breeze. There is a kind of poetry in this contrast—take note of the soft caramelization of root vegetables against the assertive creaminess of cheese. The dill fronds and lettuce greens lend their crispness, a whisper of freshness that lifts the dish from the soil into the air. It is, in many ways, a microcosm of Arbour itself: simplicity rendered with precision, a dish that knows exactly what it wants to be.
Then there is the salmon, pan-seared to that elusive point where the skin crackles but the flesh still yields at the touch of a fork. It comes with creamed potatoes, a comforting counterweight, and cucumbers that sing in cool, clean notes. What is remarkable is how the dish avoids the heaviness often associated with cream and oil. The balance is meticulous—enough seasoning to coax out the natural flavors, never enough to overshadow them. Here, every element has a role to play, and each one performs it to perfection.
The braised beef cheek arrives next, steeped in a red wine sauce that speaks of slow afternoons and patient craftsmanship. The meat falls apart at the suggestion of a spoon, its richness cut by the gentle char of green onion. Julienne carrots, bound in a delicate green ribbon, add a touch of visual poetry. There is nostalgia here—the unshakable warmth of beef and potatoes, a partnership as old as time. Yet, there is also refinement: the subtle elevation of flavor, the understanding that indulgence need not be overwhelming. A slice of bread would have been a welcome addition, something to sop up every last drop of sauce, but even without it, the dish stands whole, assured.
The meal closes with a flourish: a vanilla crème, lush and thick, paired with fresh strawberries, a bright compote, and a dark, silken ganache. It is an elegant echo of childhood indulgence—the trio of vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate familiar yet new. Again, richness versus freshness ebb and flow throughout eating this dish: a spoonful of the vanilla crème and chocolate ganache in one bite then fresh strawberries and mint in the other. The strawberry compote adds a touch of acidity and sweetness. An added element of a salted biscuit crumb would have brought this dessert into new heights, but as is it closes the meal succinctly. Arbour understands when to stop. And that is its magic.
We will miss Arbour as it existed in Bantayan since 2021. European food borne in the tropics has its unique obstacles to overcome. Despite the abundance of suppliers in Dumaguete for processed food like cured meats, cheeses, and dairy products, Arbour never relies on these ingredients as trump cards to make good dishes. We’ve found that these ingredients, in Jan Schlimme’s hands, are supporting characters to the real highlight, which is the fresh produce.
Thank you for three years of good food, Arbour.
[Written with Renz Torres for “Culinary Cuts” for Dumaguete MetroPost, 16 February 2025 issue]
Labels: dumaguete, food, pandemic, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, April 22, 2023
2:20 AM |
A British Tea Shop in Coffee Town
What is afternoon tea? We had to know.
“Afternoon tea,” according to Elaine Lemm of The Spruce Eats, “is a British food tradition of sitting down for an afternoon treat of tea, sandwiches, scones, and cake. Afternoon tea is served around 4 p.m. When afternoon tea became fashionable in the early 19th century thanks to Anna, the Duchess of Bedford, it was never intended to replace dinner but rather to fill in the long gap between lunch and dinner at a time when dinner was served as late as 8 p.m. Lifestyles have changed since those times and afternoon tea is now a treat, rather than a stop-gap.”
That’s good to know, because we have seen so many Merchant Ivory movies and episodes of Downton Abbey—and afternoon tea always seems to be a culinary staple for the genteel people populating those screen entertainments, which was something at once familiar [who has not had tea before?] and foreign [wait, there’s a whole cultural custom over drinking tea?].
With the latter, we take the unfamiliarity as perfectly understandable, since the Philippines never really developed a comparable tea-drinking culture complete with ceremonial flourishes, and although it must be said that the “tsa” has never been an alien component in our ancient pantries. But a heavy tea-drinking culture that is akin to that of China [where tea originated], or Japan [where drinking green tea, or matcha, is a spiritual experience that sometimes even necessitates a whole ceremony], or Morocco [where the Touareg tea, or Moroccan mint tea, is a symbol for hospitality], or Tibet [where the Tibetan po Cha, also known as butter tea, is a beverage popular among nomads to keep themselves warm in wintry climate], or Hong Kong [where the milk tea, actually known as “pantyhose tea,” originated], or India [where the Masala chai comes from]. The closest we have to tea culture, according to Lara Antonio of The Fat Kid Inside, is preparing salabat from ginger. Today, when we want tea, we simply dip a grocery store-sourced bag of it in hot water, and voila!
In Dumaguete, tea certainly could be had. Straight from the grocery shelves, of course, for private consumption at home. Or at most coffee shops which have them on hand, for those customers who stray from the coffee crowd. But we are very much a coffee city, judging from the proliferation of coffee shops suddenly mushrooming everywhere—from a brick-and-mortar air-conditioned cafés to small booths for takeout coffee to sari-sari stores that offer coffee sachets, Styrofoam cups, and hot water. You can very well say that Dumaguete’s beverage of choice is really coffee.
It’s only recently that tea has infused itself into Dumaguete’s beverage culture through the now ubiquitous milk tea, invented in Hong Kong, popularized in Taiwan, and now spreading like wildfire throughout the world: milk tea shops have captured our taste buds with their chewy sweet pearls and their refreshing coolness.
But afternoon tea? British afternoon tea, in Dumaguete? What a quaint idea!
Enter Dudley’s, a British tea shop located at MO Building along Calle San Jose Extension, in barangay Taclobo.
The route it’s on is on our regular way going home to Renz’s place, and our introduction to it were the inviting bright lights emanating from its posh interiors as we’d speed. Its show window promised delectable treats. We knew we had to stop by sooner or later. Plus it was near home.
We found our chance on Holy Thursday, and going in, we were immediately enchanted by the intimacy of the place, the chic finish of its decors, and the surprise of being told the whole thing was a British tea shop.
Of course, we had tea. And since it was the Holy Week, we decided to get their hot cross buns—a British raisin pastry decorated with a cross made from flour paste, which is traditionally eaten over Easter, to symbolize the crucifixion of the Christ. And since we were having afternoon tea, we also ordered their scone with strawberry compote, and their Amaretti cookie. But the best we had was the Japanese muffin its proprietor, Harija Joy Tan, offered us—a muffin filled with a concoction she invented, including Japanese mayo, bacon, and onions. It was delicious. [“Dudley’s” is taken from the surname of her British husband, Robert Dudley; which seemed appropriate since his parents used to run a meat shop with that name in Somerset.]
“My macarons are the best in town,” Joy told us.
Although a Dumaguetnon, Joy had spent the past years working in Dubai, where she first ventured into baking as a hobby sometime in 2018. She wanted to make bread and pastries, because she was amazed by how bread could go from being a flat mass of dough to becoming a structured form. For her first foray into baking, she turned to YouTube tutorials and made a disastrous batch of cinnamon rolls—but she continued on anyway, ultimately learning from some of the best bakers and pâtissiers Dubai could offer.
But baking was always meant to be a hobby—not a business. The reality of Dudley’s was far from Joy’s and Robert’s minds, even as they started considering retiring from their work in Dubai and settling for good in Dumaguete. When they prepared to move to the Philippines in 2020, the pandemic struck just a few days before they decided to tender their resignations—a stroke of luck that made possible their continued stay in Dubai, which also gave them space to consider what business to put up in Dumaguete. They settled on real estate.
But they also both wanted to build a simple tea room, because Joy had already been giving informal afternoon tea parties, showcasing her baked goods, for friends at their house in Dumaguete—and she had been getting suggestions to open up a small shop where people could just come in and buy her bread and pastries. But a feasibility study the couple commissioned informed them that not only would they have problems establishing a tea room in the city, they also would not be able to find a space big enough for the business to flourish. The tea room idea went to the shelf.
That is until something happened: a family member was able to rent a space at MO Building in Taclobo, with the goal of establishing an aluminum and glass shop with the couple. When they finally surveyed the space, they realized it was too small for that kind of business. Alas, the rent had already been paid. Robert suggested opening a pastry shop in its stead. Dudley’s was born.
“What I want to do is push the boundaries of modern baking in Dumaguete by introducing flavors, textures, and concepts that many Dumaguetnons might not have tried yet,” Joy said of her dream. “I also really just want to have a small shop where we can introduce British afternoon tea.”
She got her wish—a unicorn made of tea in a city full of coffee shops.
[Written with Renz Torres for Culinary Cuts]
Labels: dumaguete, food, review, tea
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, April 21, 2023
There seems to be a whirlwind of pop art brewing in Dumaguete these days.
Last April 5, Arte Gallery Café [2nd Floor, Allegre Building, Rizal Avenue] opened the first solo exhibition of Moshi Dokyo, a testament to delightful chaos the artist calls Proquackstinate. And peering closer into the exhibition, it becomes also a testament to the bewildering “gifts” of anxiety and doubt and rage. Looking at the whole caboodle of it, I can also very well say they are mirrors to the bundle of nerves I call my life. [Perhaps also yours? Welcome to the club!]
Because what do you have here? A rash of confessional works that speak of a chaotic mental state, but acknowledging that chaos with whimsy and artistry, and rendering it into a playful landscape of color and lines. One work in a particular is a triptych of paintings, all portraits, that show the evolution of the subject—most likely the artist himself—from a state of edgy calm to a state of full-on rage, all three marked by fiery all-seeing eye floating, like a signifier of anxiety, on the subject’s head. The eye rages more with its fieriness as the pictures evolve, the rage made even more animated when the flames burst out of the confines of the painting’s frames. This work would have been terrifying if it were not, somehow, also funny. Which I guess is a double-edgedness I see embedded in the very nature of much of pop art: they can contain all sorts of expression, even maddening ones, but somehow the best of them retain an element of playfulness that provide us an ironic distance from the emotions at play. I like that. I like seeing the rage, and acknowledging its anger, but I also like being able to laugh at it. That is a good recipe for catharsis.
The fiery all-seeing eye is a motif that touches most of the works in Proquackstinate, including an installation piece that makes use of it as an emblem to a kind of altar, complete with another triptych set of portrait caricatures—perhaps depicting the artist and his fellow artist friends—in lines that evoke a weariness, a certain madness. Is this the artist’s way of acknowledging the pain that comes about when you come to the worship of the artistic life? I’m not exactly sure, but that’s how I read it. And the subtext everywhere else seems to be pain—we see a bloodied nail, a bisected dog, a plane window surrounded by objects of despair, a wall of graffiti that reminds us of the zany madness of the underground artist Robert Crumb.
And yet, despite all that pain and all that expression of anxiety, what transcends is an antithetical brightness. I like that duality; that is the essence of life—to know that undergirding all our brightness is also a consuming darkness, and vice versa. Life—and mental health—is not a monolith: I can both cry and laugh at the same time.
Moshi Dokyo carries over that playfulness—and thematic duality—in another work that’s part of a group exhibition, Hue, that recently opened in Shelter Gallery [Angatan, Tabuctubig]. In “Moshpit Aftermath,” Moshi’s contribution to the collection, we find the same tortured, fire-ravaged figure on canvas, but it comes with a more sinister twin: a work that reminds you of an emergency box glass casing, but inside, there’s a facsimile of a gun [dolled up in baby blue], and on the casing itself, a message: “Breakdown in Case of Emergency.” I found that play of words chilling: not “break glass” but “breakdown,” like an invitation to despair willingly. Why does Moshi Dokyo’s work feel like therapy?
Many of the other works in the group exhibition also take pop art’s cue, including Jascer Merced’s resin and acrylic renditions of Gandalf and Frodo from The Lord of the Rings; Skye Benito’s “Psyche,” a splendid and expressive portraiture of a woman with butterfly wing ears; and Jonee Jibe’s “Noe’s Space,” a beguiling work of acrylic on canvas that functions very much like a dream: you see a playground swing done up in barber’s stripes occupying beyond a forbidding arc, and silhouetted by either moon or sun, all the while flooded by undulating flesh-colored blobs that feel threatening but have the texture of cotton candy dreams. I live for images like this—because they are truly Rorschach tests. My favorite remains Dolly Sordilla’s “Daisy,” a gorgeous sculptural work from polymer clay, epoxy clay, synthetic glass, synthetic hair, resin, and acrylic paint, which depicts a girl with a sunflower for one eye taking a walk—but walking via the animated tendrils of her blue hair. It speaks nightmare, it speaks delightful anime; it reminds me of the dark fantasies of Neil Gaiman. But the gorgeous details of it all—the sculpted hair, the knitted dress, the blue eye, the sunflower—reminds me once again that Dolly is one of my favorite Dumaguete artists whose work I want to see more and appreciated more.
The other works in the group exhibition do not exactly epitomize pop art: two are pure abstraction, including Daniel Vincent Fabros’ “Exotiq 2,” which is a delightful uncut gem of a canvas pulsating in shades of emerald and amethyst and garnet, and Amber Tashiro’s “Liberosis,” which is a ravishing Zen-like work almost delicate in its deliberate use of dots and shades and shape; Sid Labe’s “Mangtaso’ng Kahanas” and “Bulawanong Bahandi,” both of which depict men of the laboring class going about their daily work [one is a potter, and the other is a peddler of plastic wares], are representational works of painstaking photorealism that Sid has become known for [although I still stand on my conviction that his sculptural works made from old ballpens represented a major departure for his art]; and two others are more conceptual—and almost invisible if you do not pay attention: Jan Alix’s “Terminals” occupy ceiling space, an installation of playing cards and strings that for the artist call attention to “the intentions of what we make [which] are evident in the ethics of how we create,” and Ma. Isabel Gutang’s “Work Transfer” occupies the floor space, which litters it with paper on which are printed assorted diagrams and texts and pictures, occasionally threaded by shoe marks. Both are ciphers done well.
Proquackstinate in Arte Gallery runs until April 23, and Hue in Shelter Gallery runs until May 5.
Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, exhibits, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
With Lockdown [2021], Joel Lamangan continues his streak of godawful cinema with such retrograde sensibilities. He recycles his penchant for sex work stories captured with the pornographic zeal he always mistakes for art film aesthetics, and gives the carcass a new COVID mask. It's only a pretense at social relevance because Lamangan has nothing new to say. [Does not even know that in pandemic times, there is such a thing as onlyfans.]Labels: coronavirus, film, philippine cinema, queer, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, February 19, 2021
8:40 PM |
Portraits of Things We Don’t Say
Catharsis is the emotional state with which we arrive at when we suddenly find ourselves at the breathing end of revelation—when we finally allow ourselves expression of the things we cannot say. An
“I’ve always loved you” to someone you’ve been carrying a torch for since forever. An
“I’m sorry” to someone you’ve hurt terribly. A
“This is enough, I’m letting this go” to someone you’ve reached a breaking point with, beggaring separation. You could say “catharsis” is another word for relief.
I like the other words that define “catharsis,” too:
Purgation.
Purification.
Cleansing.
Release.
Relief.
Something that makes me laugh, because strangely apt:
exorcism.
And something that makes me sigh, because poetry:
deliverance.
One of the best things about art is how it can be the greatest conveyor of cathartic raptures, often coming down unexpectedly on the beholder who, gripped in a miasma of unexpressed emotional state, finally finds relief in an art that speaks for him or her.
This is how I feel, they will say.
How to explain, for example, someone I know who could not grieve for a mother’s death, but would finally break down at the instance of hearing
Spiegel im Spiegel, Arvo Pärt’s famously mournful composition? I sometimes find the mutability of music fascinating, depending on my emotional landscape: different songs hit differently on different days. What reduced me to tears last week is just another nice song this week. The last time I felt moved enough by music to cry because of despondence, I was listening to “Mad World” by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews. What was that all about?
And what about being abstractly angry at the world, and them coming across a poem, such as Noor Hindi’s “F***k Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.” Here, she declares: “I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies. / Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. / When I die, I promise to haunt you forever. / One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.”
Paintings and photographs are easily cathartic, their visuals an easy shorthand for our feelings of release. Dorothea Lange’s
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California arouses empathy, the pain on this migrant mother’s face difficult to ignore. Edvard Munch’s
The Scream with its volatile brushstroke and dramatic colors evince the very action of its title. Vincent Van Gogh’s
Starry Night evokes the haziness of life and death. Once at the Art Institute of Chicago, I stood in front of Edward Hopper’s
Nighthawks, and promptly burst into tears.
We swim in an inward world of unsaid things, often emotionally wrought, and art provides release.
This is the conceit of
Sana’y Makarating, a solo exhibition of mixed media works by Daniel Vincent Aquarelle, recently launched at the Café Memento Gallery [in El Amigo, Silliman Avenue] for the Valentines Day crowd. The statement of the fascinating exhibition underlines the romantic intentions of the unsaid finally revealed: “This exhibition aims to empower us in celebrating all forms of love on Valentines Day, that by looking through the art pieces while reading the text [sic], we are able to reflect on ourselves, that someone out there has a similar story that we can resonate with. By putting these messages to light, we are not only promoting self love, but also awareness, self-expression, and vulnerability.”
How does the exhibit accomplish this? By pairing computer-encoded missives containing confessional texts with a watercolor painting depicting that letter in the mix of assorted items of fascinating import—some mundane, some provocative—all of them set off by curious singes at the edges with burlap fabric as base. At the level of sheer interest, the exhibition works. It feels made for swoony hearts and Instagram. At the deeper level of metaphor and scrutiny, it more or less fails, but that should not stop anyone from enjoying it. It is highly enjoyable.
What I like about the paintings is the realistic starkness of their watercolor imagery: shoes, books, coffee cups, a thermos, a pair of headphones, a Russian matryoshka doll, a paint palette, kindergarten art, a Cabbage Patch doll, an aparador. More curiously: an assortment of Catholic saints with packets of medicine tablets in one painting, and in another, a urinal taped to which is a hilarious note of affection. There is something powerful and attractive in their assembly—and here we can credit Mr. Aquarelle with his eye for the beautiful detail.
And when he depicts those letters amidst these objects, I am drawn to the drama of the juxtaposition. Often the letters, as depicted in the paintings, have this narrative quality of being tossed and lost among these objects. They feel like they are in the possession of the surprised recipient, who has since abandoned them in household clutter. Or are the letters still unsent, lurking in the everyday ambivalence of the would-be sender?
What does not compute, however, is the seemingly haphazard pairing of painting780 and printed letter. The separate existence of the letters, tacked below their paintings, is necessary as their watercolor representations are often truncated or blurry. When you read through the letters, you get missives of missed connections and regretful declarations. In “Half-ful,” the letter writer is on the cusp of change for the better, the recipient a former, very patient, beloved now somewhat estranged. [Painting: a watch, a drinking glass, a pair of glasses, weeds and garden flowers.] In “Destined,” the letter writer is on a mission of thanksgiving. [Painting: an ukulele, a notebook, two sake cups.] In “You are Golden,” the letter writer is making amends for a recipient who’s broken and needs healing. [Painting: a compact, literary books—one by Neil Gaiman, some polaroids.] In “I Keep Going,” the letter writer is also on a mission of thanksgiving, acknowledging the recipient’s patience through the years: “You’ve always been there for me. There’s [sic] times when I question you, doubt you, and even hated you, but you’ve always been patient with me. And you never gave up on me even when I’ve given up on myself countless times.” [Painting: saints, torn leaves from a notebook, medicine.]
Granted, the letters themselves are pedestrian prose—and there is nothing wrong with that. We do not resort to commonplace correspondence to write poetry. So I never approached them with an eye for scintillating creative writing. [I like their very ordinariness, to be honest.] But my mind tries to connect letter with imagery, hoping for meaningful metaphor, but I come up short and I am left to divorce both—which leaves the mixed media pieces adrift in unfortunate meaninglessness. I find the randomness unsettling.
But at the same time also, to be honest, liberating: if nothing else, the free association is brave. Maybe metaphors are dead. Perhaps what is more important is finally saying the unsaid, for catharsis’ sake.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, exhibits, painting, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, February 08, 2020
3:00 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Subject, 2019
With Bong Jon-hoo's
Parasite and Seung-jun Yi's
In the Absence, we truly see a Korean ascendance in world cinema -- and both have so much alike, to be honest, including their unsparing critique of contemporary Korean society. In this documentary short, we navigate through that via the ineptness that attended the botched rescue of the ferry MV Sewol, which sank off the coast of South Korea in 2014, killing hundreds of passengers, mostly high school students in a field trip. It's a gripping and unsettling fly-on-the-wall documentary, and we are made to witness the hours tick by as the ship sinks slowly, while its passengers patiently await rescue, to their deaths.
I don't want to say much about Kristine Samuelson and John Haptas'
Life Overtakes Me, except that in this documentary, about refugee kids in Sweden falling into a form of sleeping sickness bordering on coma triggered by PTSD over their plight, something feels and smells fishy.
Perhaps the most feeling-precious of this year's bunch of documentary short subject nominees is Laura Nix's Walk
Run Cha-Cha, a love story about Vietnamese refugees re-bonding over ballroom dancing in New York in their senior years. You see, they used to be lovers in Vietnam, but were soon separated by the vagaries of war. Meeting once more in America, they try to rekindle their romance by dancing.
Awwww. It's cute, but it's shallow -- and not even the sentimental production number at the end can truly save this film.
Carol Dysinger's
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) is your standard "people in perilous places" documentary, and while its narrative arc and subject matter -- about a school that pains to teach Afghan girls basic school subjects, plus skateboarding -- no longer surprise us, it doesn't disappoint in putting heart to the heroism it depicts.
In Sami Khan and Smriti Mundhra's
St. Louis Superman, we see a strange hybrid of black lives, politics, and rapping. It mostly works, and I like it, but this film was not made for me.
VERDICT: In order of preference,
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) >
In the Absence >
St. Louis Superman >
Walk Run Cha-Cha >
Life Overtakes MeLabels: documentaries, oscar, review, short films
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, February 07, 2020
3:00 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Short Films, 2019
Truth to tell, Marshall Curry's
The Neighbors’ Window feels so much like a nincompoop's idea of a good short film, I cannot actually believe it survived the culling of the Oscar long list at the expense of other contenders like Rémi Allier's gripping
Little Hands. It's a morality tale about a couple who regularly spies on their neighbors across the courtyard they share in their adjacent apartment buildings -- and have come to believe these people lived better lives than they do. Of course it becomes a "the grass is greener..." story, which as an insight feels a little too on-the-nose and obvious. [Didn't Blake Edwards cover this already in
10 in 1979, and better?]
Meryam Joobeu's
Brotherhood is deftly told, socially conscious, and remains gripping from beginning to end, easily making this the best of the lot. It's about a Tunisian farming family who has to contend with the sudden appearance of a prodigal son, newly-returned from fighting for ISIS in Syria, and a new wife in tow clad in a burqa. The father does not trust the son's intentions, and is fearful for the possible influence he might have on his younger brothers -- which is the key to the ultimate tragedy in the film.
I do not get the humor, and the praise it has been getting in, of Yves Pia's
Nefta Football Club. I can accept it as dark comedy, but it overreaches with its quirkiness and resolution that nothing remains believable at all about this story. It has cross-borders drug smuggling, Adele's "Someone Like You," mules, and soccer all intertwined in its conceit, and never quite pulls off everything. I eye-rolled all throughout this film
We are made to feel that what Bryan Buckley tries to do in
Saria is "important." And it is: the film largely dramatizes a real-life Guatemalan tragedy -- about orphaned girls trapped in an institution that is supposed to take care of them, only to be regularly abused, and eventually losing their lives in a fire. All good, and the young actors are committed enough to make this film works. I couldn't help but feel though: is this Bryan Buckley's story to tell?
The set-up of Delphine Girard's
Une Sœur (A Sister) is simple: we have a young woman in a car, driven by a man we assume she knows, and then she makes an ordirnary call, ostensibly to her sister -- and then the film flips on us: she is not calling her sister, she is in fact secretly calling the French version of 911, and asking for help. The tension occurs when the operator slowly realizes the call is coded, and she must do all she can to send help to the woman and rescue her. We don't know exactly the nature of passenger's relations with the man, and what has happened to them that led to this -- but we are on her side all the way, until the end when the film flips us one more time and unsettles us once more.
VERDICT: In order of preference,
Brotherhood >
Une Sœur [A Sister] >
Saria >
Nefta Football Club >
The Neighbors' WindowLabels: oscar, review, short films
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, February 06, 2020
3:00 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films, 2019
In Daria Kashcheeva's contemplative
Dcera [Daughter], the titular character watches over her father who has been taken ill, and slowly her mind wanders through scattered memories of life with him which are not always bright and sunny, painting her father as someone who was not always there for her. But the short film's more than this; it's poetic and complex, and does not give easy answers -- which makes this the best of the lot among the nominees.
We meet a painter and his wife in Bruno Collet's wonderfully affecting
Mémorable. He is slowly suffering through the effects of dementia, and she struggles to keep up with the challenges that come with her husband's condition. That we see his struggle rendered in painterly, impressionistic mode makes this tale transcend its grounding sadness.
Song Siqi's
Sister is told in stark greyscale that reminds you immediately it is in the territory of retrieved memory, and it is: it is a man's recollection of growing up in a Korean home, with a younger sister who was born to exasperate him. Except that the sister takes on a surreal existence, and the film backtracks with its revelation in
Joker-mode, which is frankly disappointing.
In Rosana Sullivan's
Kitbull, a cantankerous kitten finds a home in a junky backyard, only to realize she is sharing it with a downtrodden bulldog. Enemies soon turn friends, giving us a film that finds comfort in its utter mediocrity.
In Matthew A. Cherry and Everett Downing Jr.'s
Hair Love, a very young African-American girl tries to deal with the everyday challenge of her natural hair, and enlists her clueless father in the task. Hijinks ensues -- but it's so blandly told, it's quite forgettable. And then there's that twist of an ending that's so on the nose with its sentimentality, it's pretty much eye-rolling.
VERDICT: In order of preference,
Dcera (Daughter) >
Memorable >
Sister >
Kitbull >
Hair LoveLabels: cartoons, oscar, review, short films
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, January 10, 2020
Ladies and gentlemen, drum roll please. I went, I saw, and I liked Tom Hooper's adaptation of
Cats, the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber based on the children's poetry by T.S. Eliot. Admittedly, the low expectations helped. Also being familiar with the story -- a simple compendium of various types of Jellicle Cats introducing themselves before going to a ball where one of them gets chosen to go to the Heaviside Layer -- allowed me to suspend logic and disbelief and just lean back and enjoy the sheer madness of the movie, the surreality of every creative choice, the bizarreness of the digital furs, the inexplicable horniness of it all. The film feels very much like Grizabella herself, the former glamour cat, now ostracized and seeking some sort of redemption while waxing nostalgia for the days when she was beautiful. When she sings "Memories," her torch song, I was genuinely moved. Like her,
Cats has its heart in the right place. But I've always loved films that go where the timid dare not go. [I have a special place in my heart for Darren Aronofsky's
mother!] This was sheer camp, a film ready-made to be misunderstood -- and guess what, it indeed was, and received such a fierce critical drubbing from almost everyone that I had to become suspicious of the lynch mob. It is not a great film, but it will become legendary: first for its excesses and camp, and maybe one day, finally for its heart.
Labels: film, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Oh, I finally saw
Joker [2019] last Saturday night in Manila. It was so meh to me, I even forgot I watched it. Such a forgettable movie. Hated its defanging of Joker's villainy -- a far cry from Heath Ledger's "I have no motivation, I just want the world to burn" fright fest. Its "society made me a psychopath" arc feels like the cares of a failed fictionist, and its Marxist stance feels like a garbled missive by a failed fighter for the proletariat. Loved its cinematography. Hated its unironic unoriginality, its cribbing from better movies. Loved Joaquin Phoenix's committed acting. Hated its depiction of mental health. Hated its smug violence. Hated its M. Night Shyamalan-type twist. I went straight to Malate after, where in Remedios Circle, a woman of a certain age was dancing without care to the sound of a nearby band playing covers. That was more entertaining to watch than Todd Phillips' exercise of cinematic vapidity.
Labels: film, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
4:52 PM |
The Griefs of Childhood
Rarely do you find a film that mines fantastically the nuances of childhood. Carla Simón's
Estiu 1993 [
Summer 1993] (2017) does it with naturalistic flair: it follows an orphan in Barcelona whose parents have died of AIDS as she moves to her uncle's family in the Catalan countrysides. There, she negotiates, in her inchoate ways, many things that can easily break us adults: grief, displacement, subtle prejudices, jealousy, alienation -- all in the nebulous language of one who has no clear conception of the world and its cruelties. A huge part of the film's strengths is its characters: the story is peopled with gentle characters -- especially the adoptive family who embodies grace and love. The film presents tension now and then, but always with the knowledge that we are following good people. The film takes its time and follows almost religiously the day-to-day rituals of childhood, and it is not for those without patience -- but when one chooses to be fully in Frida's world, the rewards are infinite. It will break and make your heart full in equal measure.
Labels: children, film, review
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
GO TO OLDER POSTS
