Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
It's strange that just when Rob Reiner has come back to perfect directorial form with Flipped [2010] after the assorted and long debacle dealing with the duds of North [1994], The Story of Us [1999], Alex and Emma [2003], Rumor Has It [2005], and The Bucket List [2007], nobody seems to have noticed. This despite some good reviews Flipped got, particularly from film critic Roger Ebert who raved about it. The film, about two teenagers finding love and themselves in 1950s America, is a he-said-she-said story that is long on characters and short on gimmicks, which makes it all the more laudable in this age when sincerity is something to be laughed at. I loved the film. I loved the actors who played Juli Baker and Bryce Loski. "Madeline Carroll and Callan McAuliffe, who both look teeth-achingly vulnerable," Ebert wrote, "are sincere and pure and wholesome, and are characters we believe can be hurt." They have a curious gravity to them, and I felt their story to be my story, too. So I don't know why audiences did come in droves to see this movie last year. It's such a waste, considering that this film, based on the novel by Wendelin Van Draanen, has its heart in the right place -- and it is wise and endearing without being saccharine. It reminds me of Reiner's earlier efforts in When Harry Met Sally [1989] and Stand By Me [1986], of which Flipped seems to be the strange combination of both. Ebert writes: "Maybe what makes Flipped such a warm entertainment is how it re-creates a life we wish we'd had when we were 14. That's true for adults, and also I suspect true for some 14-year-olds. In a way the audience flips, too."
Dinners at Arlene Delloso-Uypitching’s are a performance, a theater to culinary spectacle—and always an occasion for celebration. In Dumaguete, there’s nothing else like it. And sure, we have all been to other dinners thrown by assorted friends, and perhaps we can even say we have had the time of our lives over good food and fine wine and splendid conversation in them. But when I think of throwing dinner in the way I think of fine art, I think of Arlene’s. She defines it.
Sometimes, with others, the food does not offer much in terms of adventure, just the usual staple of bam-i and fresh lumpia and lechon manok and what-not, but the company is nevertheless merry, and there is plenty of beer for the dressed-down lot. Sometimes, the banquet may be an orgy of taste—but the mix of guests is not right, and the night ends up with people in little cliques, each one ignoring the other, with all wrapped up in their own little worlds. Sometimes the host may just be a little too uptight for comfort, or is the illustration of a social disaster of such chatty proportions without the grace and the fierce and quiet intelligence needed to make a good evening feel even better. Sometimes, the place is too oppressive for the necessary vibes to get a party going. And sometimes, everything just plain goes wrong—the rain comes, the electricity goes out, the music is horrendous, the chef is missing, the wine is bad, the dog has run away with the turkey, the guests come in flip-flops to a formal dinner.
Dinner-giving is not a perfect science. It is almost all intuition, with lots of room for good luck. But Arlene seems to know a thing or two about how to make an evening memorable. She plans for it the way a painter sees the outlines of a story on a blank canvas. They are always about something, or for someone. “Let’s throw a party for Marvin and Kuya Bodjie,” she would say. Or: “Let’s do a little Balinese theme, just for friends.” Or: “Let’s look at the blue moon in Mampas.” Then she would invite a local chef of some renown to plan and execute the menu. One time, it was Patrick Chua—otherwise known as the city’s best orthodentist—and his glorious and inventive paella. Another time it was an Uypitching cousin fresh off a culinary school from somewhere else in the world.
Giving good dinners takes practice and time. It also takes a venue that lends itself well to flowing conversation and the orgiastic partaking of delicious food. It also takes a large enough personality that attracts an uncommon crowd, a capacity for imagination that requires dazzle but with a Martha Stewart restraint, and an uncanny sense of chemistry that is able to ascertain a killer guest list and their ability to sustain each other in interesting talk.
For Christmas Eve, Arlene threw a small dinner for friends at the house she shares with husband Don in lower Valencia, an extensive estate done with an unmistakable Balinese sensibility and aesthetics. It has spots suitable for intimate gatherings. We’ve done dinners here before, sometimes alfresco. For this night, she turned a big garage—a garage!—into a kind of Christmas wonderland, with choice picks of linen and comfortable furniture and holiday draperies and candles and carefully designed soft lighting. On one side, she assembled a dining set arranged in a square with a donut hole, which accommodated a jolly bundle of Christmas décor consisting of angels and poinsettia and what-not—with none of the garishness you will find in that other Christmas pit-stop in town. On the other side, she had appointed a lounging area ready for the after-dinner wine-drinking and comfortable boozy talk, and beside it she placed a live Christmas tree filled with 33 candles, which the Colburn and Uypitching kids lit up as dinner progressed to dessert. We played Christmas songs all night.
From left, May Justine Colburn, John Colburn, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, Don Ramas-Uypitching, Jeremy Schmoll, Antonio Quiogue, Ian Rosales Casocot, and Aaron Jalaon
From left, flanking the Uypitching matriach and patriarch, Maresa Bengochea-Uypitching, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, and Don Ramas-Uypitching
Ritchie Armogenia—of KRI and Likha—was the chef for the occasion, and he had a promising menu for us—herbs-encrusted maya-maya with mustard and basil butter, linguini with shrimp roasted in garlic and chili, Brazilian beef tournedos with potato croquetas and rosemary demi-glace, and finally, a roasted turkey with gravy. It was a banquet to forget diets away. Mister Donuts’ John Colburn appointed himself the bartender for the night—and was passing everyone a delicious concoction he called chocolate patron martini, composed of tequila rose and a wisp of Baileys, then garnished with grated chocolate truffles. “I’m going to give you something else,” he told me when I walked over to the makeshift bar. “This is my cranberry vodka delight,” he said and proceeded to prepare it in front of me. “First, you put in ice,” he said, and into the shaker went in some cubes. “Then you put two ounces of vodka. And then some Old Orchard cranberry juice. And then a touch of Malibu for the coconut taste. And then a little rock and roll.” He shook the entire mix, then poured the contents into glasses for me and another friend. “Then here’s the lemon wedge around the lid, to accent the drink. This is the key. It brings out the flavor,” he finally said. And it was a refreshing drink, subtle in its kick, just the way I liked it, the coconut flavor biting in at the last of every sip.
Don and Arlene with Ritchie Armogenia and his crew
The kids lighting up all thirty-three Christmas tree candles
John’s wife, the irrepressibly charming Justine, made sure the party flow proved dynamic and fun. (And I have to say this: what I like best about Mister Donuts is the Mrs.) And the guests—which included Don’s father and mother, his brother Ngo An and wife Maresa, Esther and Heinz Windler, the artist Karl Aguila, the Davao writer Aaron Jalalon, the photographer and painter Hersley-Ven Casero, and Student Universe’s head honcho Antonio Quiogue and his husband Jeremy Schmoll—proved equal to the merriment. We went beyond small talk into a kind of spell only intimate gatherings can provoke.
And to that, we toasted ourselves a merry Christmas, and toasted Ritchie’s merry spread, and toasted friendships old and new.
There was life in Dumaguete years and years and years ago on New Year's night. The noisemakers don't count. They come every year, their ephemeral brilliance lighting up the night sky to expected oohs and aahs, the evidence of their fiery short life lying in the tattered paper shells and the whiff of sulfuric smoke that litter and fog the city streets. I am talking about the congregation of people that used to meet the new year in our public byways. Those were happier days. The stretch of Rizal Boulevard, in a memory plucked from more than a decade ago, was a smorgasbord of music and merriment: I remember that when the midnight approached, we would break out to that ten-second countdown, and then finally, after the cheer of 12 o'clock struck, there would be that general swell of people singing "Auld Lang Syne," and then would come the hugging, and the kissing, and the breathing-in of the embracing atmosphere of a city alive and gearing up for another year, and the...
What happened?
Last night, we only imagined the countdown, trusting our wristwatches to give us the mark to celebrate the first hour of the new year. There was no "Auld Lang Syne," no throng of merrymakers to party with. The fireworks, projectiled from some distance off the pier, came prematurely at around 10 o'clock. It was a little too early to break into celebration, and so we met the fireworks with both restraint and heavy expectations. "There should be more by midnight," someone said as the sky above us flared. "I do hope so," said another.
We crossed our fingers. But the stretch of the boulevard looked deserted, already a ghost town. It was as if slumber was the way to go to meet 2011, all darkness, no merriment -- perhaps a metaphor for the condition of the city's soul, its psyche. The city was already wet from an early evening rain, and so the concrete streets were browning in that ugly way cement does when pelted with water. The poor tourists -- mostly white -- were huddled here and there, waiting for something to happen. "There should be more by midnight," someone said. "I do hope so," said another.
We didn't know where else to go. And so we stopped at the only place that seemed festive in the pre-midnight hours: CocoAmigos. I haven't been back to this restobar for almost a year. (In actuality, most of us haven't been back to this place for a long, long time. It has become another spot of our abandonment, the way most of us fled Why Not, for example.) It looked grimy and sad, a far cry from how it was many years ago when this was the city's hub of food and entertainment, when we delighted in its Mexican whimsy and the attention to detail spent on its decor. There were still traces of that old beauty, but the atmosphere had certainly changed -- we felt that in our bones, on our skin; the place now resembled a tawdry saloon peopled with characters of scarlet tendencies. It had certainly seen better days. We took charge of a round table near the restobar's makeshift stage, where we began nursing our bottles of beer as the explosions raged above us. In the shadow of the sparkly lights brightening the sky, two girls -- both in red, one clad in a baby doll dress and the other in a mini-skirt -- climbed up the stage accompanied by an older man, also in red, and the two began singing away our New Year Japayuki-style. Their repertoire was catchy in that Ermita vibe, their dance moves rich in variations of the gyrating bombshell. All that was certainly lacking was a pole. They sang in clipped bar-girl enunciation, ripping with gusto such songs as Lipps Inc.'s "Funky Town" and Van McCoy's "Do the Hussle." ("Do da hassa!" they breathed with affected sultriness.) The old man in red got into the groove of his sad synthesizer like there was no tomorrow. Around them, the men -- mostly white, some with bellies protruding -- held court with their women, some of them feeling like almighty kings of the world. Later, a middle-aged woman, perhaps pushing fifty, long-haired and bespectacled and clad in black leggings, her generous tummy spilling over the edges of her pekpek shorts, took command of the space in front of the stage, and danced with such knowing choreography to the sound of ABBA's "Dancing Queen," among others. She flipped, she flopped, she did the hustle. Later, the women on stage called on a "guest singer" who riffed into a soulful rendition of two Aegis songs. Later, with the dancing queen back on her dance floor, a foreign man waddled in to join her, his Hawaiian shirt open, and he swung his hips and dipped low to her dance moves, and someone -- the foreign man's Filipina companion -- burst out laughing. Perhaps scared or insulted, the dancing queen made a move to get away, offering the man a half-hearted air kiss, and soon retreated to the insides of CocoAmigos. It was sad.
It struck me that most of these people -- the locals, anyway -- must have been someone else in their past: a former dancer, a former singer, a former entertainer in some foreign bar where the lights are kept low -- and this place has become the hub of some forlorn afterlife, where they can gyrate and croon to recapture the seedy glow of past lives in the open air, in this space of personal freedom in the stifling burgis snobbishness of Dumaguete. Here, they dance and they sing on weekend nights, where they get at least some applause, from the foreigners who find all these exotic and striking, from the throng of masa goggling from the sides, enjoying the free show.
In our growing discomfort over the white man's dance, we hurried to pay our tab, and escaped to witness the last of the paltry fireworks that finally ushered in the New Year. We counted down among ourselves, then hugged each other, and then proceeded to the friendlier atmosphere of Hayahay where we got wasted on beer and rum and fried kangkong and sisig to the sounds of Cebuano reggae and Kakay Pamaran singing her sultry version of "Careless Whisper." Later, we made an aborted run to Labeled, where nothing was happening. Later, we descended on El Camino Blanco, where at least there were people dancing. There was more drinking. There was flirtation. There was no talk of resolutions.
This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat.
I love Bob Fosse's Cabaret [1972], that classic campy musical about Berlin in the Roaring '30s, before the Nazi took to power. Much has been said about this film, a bisexual love story between a luminous Liza Minnelli and Michael York (before he became the Anti-Christ in all those Left Behind movies), and I won't add anymore to them, except that I'm happy to note I've seen this film finally, in its entirety, without pause or distraction. All I want to say however is that the resurgent Nazi Party in the film looks and sounds just much like the Tea Party in America right now -- staples of comedy at present, but in danger of taking hold of American future soon enough. (They already have Congress.) I sincerely hope this doesn't happen. In any case, Heil Sarah Palin and Glenn Bleck!
At Arlene's lower Valencia house for Christmas Eve dinner with some of our friends. She's always the perfect hostess, perhaps Dumaguete's best. Photography by Hersley-Ven Casero.
I saw two films in succession that are so similar in story, but are so different in execution -- where execution finally makes one film "art," and the other one a mediocre retread into Hallmark Channel territory. Which leads me to toy once again with the notion that it's not really about the content anymore, it's the form that counts. Because all stories have been told anyway; how you tell one becomes the ultimate game-changer.
Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love [2010] and Chip Hale's Mulligans [2008] are cut from the same cloth. They are stories of a family that has its settled ways, comfortable in affluence. Along comes an outsider -- an interloper, essentially -- whose personality and passion ignite changes in the status quo, leading to tragedy or a shakedown of perfectly preserved pretense. But of course love endures. That's the uniting storyline, but how differently they are told. The same cloth begets different garments.
In Hale's film, we are led along the familiar emotional rhythms we've come to expect in middling dramas such as this, and we respond just so. It tells about a young family, the son of which invites home his best friend from college for the summer. The friend soon comes out gay, which leads to fundamental introspective examination by each one in the family -- including the father, who realizes that he, too, is gay, and in love with his son's best friend. Competently photographed, Mulligans (a term in golf, which becomes a kind of metaphor for the dramatic crisis in the film) rises a little above the average by actors who more or less hit the mark, and there is enough tension in the screenplay that keeps us guessing. In the end, however, it becomes a forgettable melodrama, and a week from now, I will probably have a little difficulty remembering the title, or even remembering I've seen this. It's just not art, although while watching it, I felt it, it moved me a little. (But eating great shawarma can also move me, a little.)
Guadagnino's hypnotic film, however, shows how cinematic art can be made: through a thorough knowledge of the vocabulary of cinema, the elements keenly manipulated to advance -- in visual and narrative terms -- this story of a Russian woman married to the patriarch of a rich Milanese family, who finds passion and a dream of escape from the stifling contours of her rigidly ordered life in a young chef, the best friend of her son. We somehow know this film will end in tragedy, but even given that, Guadagnino keeps us guessing with every passing scene, so much so that when the tragic finally strikes, it comes out of nowhere, striking us dumb with its brutality and suddenness. This is a beautifully made film, gorgeously shot, and captures the Italian landscape in a washed out but also paradoxically deeply colorful terrible beauty. It is so nuanced and so sure of its every cinematic intentions, and so loving of its influences that include Michaelangelo Antonioni and Alfred Hitchcock and Sally Potter. The key to its success, aside from Tilda Swinton's unbelievable performance as Emma, is the way Guadagnino handles his camera: he uses it as a caress, as a stalking presence, as a detached observer of high society life, as a microscope lens, as a swooping roller coaster that underlines what is not said -- desire, fear, anger, sadness, joy, pain. It is all about the visual choices that make something a masterpiece of an artist who knows what he is going for: in the delicate but also sudden seduction scene between Antonio and Emma in the mountains, for example, we observe Emma taking in the view with a measure of nonchalance dipped in excitement -- and then suddenly, we hear a soft crackling sound from behind her, the camera goes out of focus, and in that blurry vision that approximates desire and giving in, we see their obscure figures kissing hungrily. That cinematographic choice felt right, and underlined some more the consummate artistry that this film is made of. Every detail is not wasted and means something -- the ukha soup, the seating plan for every meticulously prepared dinner, the ritual of taking off clothes and jewelry, the daughter's lesbianism, the pool made of sharply angled marble, the housekeeper's emotional connection with the family, the book that must remain hidden, the names that can't be recalled, the fact that she has been named Emma by her husband who tells her, "You don't exist" -- all these disparate things mean something, and contribute to such throbbing organic whole. In the middle of all these is the incandescent performance of Tilda Swinton, a Scottish actress playing a trapped Russian woman living in Milan and speaks perfect Italian with a Russian accent. That technicality alone, equal to the chameleon-like power of Meryl Streep, amazes me. That Ms. Swinton is able to marshall all of that to a subtle and also devastating performance is a thing of beauty. Every muscle in her, as she does her craft, shouts sheer believability. This is such a sensual film, a work of art in every way. Set side-by-side with the merely passable, mediocrity suddenly seems almost criminal.
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.
Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll.
Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
Here is an uproarious and original comedy that stars one of Hollywood's genuine funnymen (Jim Carrey) and one of cinema's genuine chameleons (Ewan McGregor). Here is a movie that expands the notion of fact being so much weirder and more fantastic than fiction. Here is a movie that a lot of critics loved. But whatever happened to Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's I Love You Philip Morris [2010]? It's Oscar-bait material, but in this season of awards and top-ten lists, it's not being mentioned as a contender. Mr. Carrey is glorious here, and Mr. McGregor is something else. Already though, the film has had a checkered history: it meandered its way to theaters for months and months, but finally did not find an audience, given the haphazard way it has been handled by its distributors. (Nobody wanted to pick it up.) You have to ask: what went wrong? The marketing? The belated distribution? Or perhaps even homophobia? Perhaps. This is after all the story of the real-life Steve Russell, a gay man and a relentlessly inventive con man whose run-ins with the law have become quite legendary -- all of them a result of pursuing the love of his life, Philip Morris, a sweet-natured and blonde Southern boy he meets in prison, while serving a jail sentence for fraud. In a life rife with lies and shape-shifting (manifested as metaphor through moving clouds, a recurring motif in the film), Russell -- an ex-cop and former Bible-swearing family man -- has impersonated lawyers and CFOs and doctors and what-have-you's, and has even faked his own death by AIDS. Underneath all that is a fool for love, the only truth he has come to admit, near the end of the film. This is an extraordinary film of an extraordinary life. It is also relentlessly funny and both Carrey and McGregor deserve accolades for their chemistry and for making us believe that all these lies are the makings of magic. Too bad it is not receiving the kind of attention it deserves.
The anime adaptation of Koh Akizuki's Fujimi Block No. 2 Symphony Orchestra: Cold Front -- The Storm After the Rain [1998] is a curious thing. While it has most of the yaoi elements we have come to expect of this genre of Japanese animation -- the older, talented, dominant, but distant seme; the younger, protesting, but ultimately willing uke; the rape fantasy that titillates and verges on the strangely romantic -- it somehow fails to involve, the way Momo Sakura's Boku no Sekusharu Harasumento [1994-1995] or Shungiku Nakamura's Junjō Romanchika [2008] did. Which is just too bad because it makes great use of classical music, the way Fumi Yoshinaga's manga Antique Bakery did with pastries. You may already know the story, if we follow the formula for yaoi: Tonoin Kei, a talented conductor, has come to lead a small orchestra, and meets the group's first violinist and concert master Morimura Yuuki. Misunderstanding, spiced with yaoi love confessions, ensues. The OVA tells the story through a fragmented time-frame, which makes it a bit difficult to follow. In the end, however, it just falls flat and does not engage. Which may be why it only ran for one episode more than a decade ago in Japanese TV.
Watching Thanyatorn Siwanukrow’s Rak Nai Thi Plai Roong [Right By Me, 2005], I am convinced of this: there are no bad stories, only bad storytelling. This effort, purportedly Thailand’s first coming-out film, is such a waste of time that not even the smoldering presence of Palat Ananwattanasiri could remedy an inch of this travesty. I’m not even going to bother describing it, or dwelling more about it.
I don't know what kind of brainstorming happened that paved the way to the final creative choices for Yair Hochner's Antarctica [2008], but parts of this Israeli film are godawful -- the horrendous title design, the hokey coffee house music, the casting of a transvestite to play the part of the mother, the inclusion of an alien invasion subplot, the cheap-looking cinematography, among others. Which is sad because the main story -- about five gay men and two lesbians whose lives unknowingly circle each other in Tel Aviv -- is actually quite interesting and most of the actors quite appealing and talented enough to give the film such a dramatic draw. It is thus a tragic disservice to their talents that they are framed in an enterprise that wastes their efforts with such inept sense of craft. What was Hochner thinking? The film begins with such edge -- an extended 15-minute intro full of in-your-face depictions of one-night stands centering on a guy named Boaz, who turns out to be a minor character. Instead, the film chooses, to our surprised delight, to follow the lives of his four tricks, as they stumble through each other's existences haphazardly -- through blind dates, coincidental meetings, and the like. What the story aims to do is to perhaps create a passable tapestry of gay lives in an Israeli metropolis, and in that regard it is successful. I was drawn in; I found their stories riveting. But to surround those stories with the unnecessary noise of inept filmmaking choices was too distracting for comfort. Which is just too bad.
"No one [is] at the least hungry anymore, but that is precisely what is so good about the moment devoted to pastries: they can only be appreciated to the full extent of their subtlety when they are not eaten to assuage our hunger, when the orgy of their sugary sweetness is not destined to fill some primary need but to coat our palate with all the benevolence of the world."
John Cameron Mitchell has never been one to shy away from the exploration of the rawness of our humanity. He steps into unbearable regions of ourselves with the rapt attention of a poet, and comes out of these explorations with precise, unflinching records of how we deal with all sorts of pain or loss. We see that in both Hedwig and the Angry Inch [2001], his directorial debut about a bitter transgendered rock singer with a botched sex-change operation, and later in Shortbus [2006], his controversial follow-up which is about a disparate group of New Yorkers grappling with sex, human connection, and sexuality, all done in splendidly pornographic details. But both films he did with an amazing command of cinematic poetry, and came off with such striking insights of what makes us human -- our frailty, our courage, our savagery, our hopefulness, our incomprehensible methods of coping with pain.
He carries over that poetic take of the rawness of what makes us tick in his splendid, perfectly-tuned adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire's Tony-winning Broadway play. In Rabbit Hole [2010], we follow Becka and Howie, a young couple dealing with grief, eight months after the death of their young son who was ran over by a drunken teenager. I say "poetic" because Mr. Mitchell does not slap us with the story of their pain in an unwanted avalanche of hysteria. Instead, he pulls us slowly into their dilemma with quietly staged scenes that add and add to the tension as the minutes go by, without us reeling from the horror of it all. Instead, we become engaged in the pain. Mr. Mitchell makes it familiar, even when it seems ultimately unbearable -- and when Becka and Howie finally allow themselves to erupt, we welcome the outbursts as if they were our own. Note for example the scene when Becka rebukes her mother's attempt to comfort her with a talk about God. She retorts: "God is a sadistic prick. 'Worship me and I'll treat you like shit.' No wonder you like him, he's like Dad." A slap in the face, indeed -- but we understand it, we know where it is coming from. It helps that all this pain is being channeled by Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman -- she in a bravura performance that may be the best of her career. It is a terrifying role that can go horribly wrong in less capable hands. But Ms. Kidman manages to make it her own and manages to make it so unflinchingly human that we come to identify well with her struggle, with her outbursts, with her strange ways of coping. Mr. Lindsay-Abaire, who also writes the screenplay, also gives Dianne Wiest's mother a startling and moving monologue about the loss of a child somewhere in the middle of the film -- and it feels and sounds true, the voice of a mother who has come to know that kind of pain, and has tamed it, if only a little. This is a film that must be watched.
I can't believe Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World [2010] did not gain traction with mass audiences when it was released in theaters early this year, because here is an inspired, almost-original take on a comics story that manages to sustain much of its awesomeness in the avalanche of gimmicks and cutesy it tries to drown itself in. What happened? I have a theory about its unforgivable flaw, but that's for later. Let me concentrate on its strengths first, notably Michael Cera in the full power of his trademark nerdy pose equipped with his trademark deadpan line-delivery, surrounded by a world that takes its visual cue from the vocabulary and tropes of video games and comic books. In this film, Mr. Cera plays the embattled title character, a bass guitarist in a struggling band who suddenly becomes besotted with a girl named Ramona Flowers, much to the consternation of a new 17-year old (and in high school) girlfriend named Knives Chau, as well as to the dismay of the rest of his very colorful posse. In pursuit of Ramona, Scott Pilgrim inexplicably finds himself having to fight for the blossoming romance by having to duel to the death with her seven "evil exes" -- a motley crew of inspired lunacy that includes Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, and Jason Schwartzman. Pretty impressive. I enjoyed the film very much, but I felt unimpressed by Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Ramona -- which is crucial. As the film's resident Helen of Troy, for whom deadly battles must be fought over, she comes off -- beyond the almost requisite quirkiness demanded by the role -- as totally undeserving of all that attention. She lacked charm and spark and gravity, the way Zooey Deschanel or Emma Stone might have provided if they had this role. Because no matter how much I wanted to cheer on Scott Pilgrim in his entertaining battles, I found myself scarcely caring for his ultimate goal.
What a pleasant surprise this is. Here is a queer film that defies its niche, dodges the predictable, and becomes a lingering testament about the search for connection in this confusing maze of a world. When I first began viewing Joseph Graham's Strapped [2010], I was ready to dismiss it as one of those mindless gay films that serves more as a flesh buffet without paying much attention to story, to character, to insight about the human condition. We've all seen pictures seemingly like this, and they've all been fruitless exercises in gay excess for the most part. Strapped centers, after all, on an unnamed male hustler (played to perfection by the incandescent and boyish Ben Bonenfant) who follows a trick to his apartment complex, and then after the tryst, spends the rest of the night trying to get out of the maze of a building. Unfortunately, the building does not seem to want him to get out -- its ghostly corridors and confusing dead-ends conspire to keep him trapped. In his wanderings, he meets assorted characters, all gay, who sort out their emotional baggage and personal histories or demons as they transact the fact of their lives with their hustling money. The premise sounds like it was made for a porn movie, but this is the surprising magic of Mr. Graham's directorial debut: it favors an intimacy with each character's story over the sexual entanglement. It becomes a tender, knowing, intelligent film that is also edgy and sexual. And so we see individual tales, courtesy of specific tricks, involving memory, fantasy, neediness, homophobia, the evolution of the gay right's movement, and the want for personal connection -- complete with borrowings from Michel Foucault and William Shakespeare. Mr. Bonenfant's triumph as the lead and the connecting thread of the disparate stories is even more amazing considering that he is able to embody, without a single false note, the projections of all the tricks he meets: he is not exactly a cipher -- this is as much his hustler's story as much as the film is about the stories of his tricks -- but he becomes the throbbing and responsive blank slate for the other characters to connect with. When we get to the denouement, it feels right; everything, no matter how disparate the stories were, leads to it. This is a thinking film. That it is also sexy as hell is just an added bonus.
When I think about the Christmas that is to come, it hits me each passing day with increasing gravity that I will be spending it alone. I take this with dispassion. It does not matter, I tell myself. And somewhere in the fathoms of me, I smile with a firm nonchalance I’ve taken at this idea of exquisite solitariness surrounded by holiday tinsel and cheer.
Of course, when I mention this to people who ask me where I will be for Christmas Eve, I get a look of passing pity, and I know exactly what they are thinking: the holidays are designed for rituals of gathering, and I am the oddball that elicits—what? Pity? Suspicion? I do my best to allay their misgivings. “The thing is, my mother is in Los Angeles,” I tell them, “This will be my first Christmas without her—and I doubt I shall be sharing noche buena with the others in my family.”
(My second Christmas, actually. Years ago, when I knew no better, I spent a solitary Christmas in the dark snowy nighttime of Hokkaido in Japan, where there was no Christmas—and there, at the approach of midnight, in the silence that begat only more silence, I cried myself to sleep. How amusing that young man seems to me now, so brittle with worry and want.)
So yes, I tell them that my mother is somewhere in the sunny wonderland of Los Angeles. When we—the family, which means all my married brothers and their families and I—would gather for noche buena on the twenty-fourth of each December, it was a familial exercise we did for her. She demanded it. But we are such an unsentimental family in many ways. All of us have flown the nest, and to assuage our guilt of having donned so much of Western traditions in the habits of family, we would march to Mother’s place in Bantayan, go through the motions of staying, eat her feast, and before the fireworks threatened to make the highways impassable with noise and smoke and the smell of burnt sulfur, we would kiss her goodbye and goodnight, and off we would go to our individual lives. We don’t do gifts. I don’t remember anybody in my family ever giving me, or each other, Christmas gifts as a matter of course. We give gifts randomly throughout the year, but as a Christmas tradition, no. I do remember one time my brother Edwin buying me a computer, when I was a kid. I do remember making my sister-in-law Daisy a mixed tape once, a recording of Meryl Streep reading The Velveteen Rabbit. I do remember the occasional manito/manita, but it was never set as a rule or tradition. This has been my kind of Christmas for years. Quite unsentimental, which has taught me well. Of course, we make an effort to sweeten it with Christmas songs and decorations and a good feast, perhaps even snapshot opportunities with smiling faces, but…
“But surely,” they will continue, “you’re spending the holidays with others in your family.”
“Well, my brothers are everywhere, some place else. Switzerland. There are two in Los Angeles. The ones in Dumaguete—they have their own families to share this Christmas with.” Without the fulcrum that is my mother, it feels remarkably odd to even consider.
“Cousins?”
“I don’t want to bother them.”
“Oh my.”
“It’s all right, really.”
I don’t blame them their worry. I know where it comes from. I’ve been there. Some of my best memories of Christmas involve a halo-halo of family and friends and the magic that sometimes happen when you put together people who truly care for each other in a room or a house. Some accidental merriment is bound to ensue. One time, it was my eldest brother Rocky, fresh from Cebu, deciding to shower us kids those gold 25 centavo coins, all shining and newly-minted. We raised such merry ruckus, all that laughter and elbowing and everything else. Another time, my brother Edwin took all of us on a trek to a department store downtown, and told us: “Choose the best Christmas tree in the store, the one you want.” The merchandise was made of plastic, of course, but it was our first Christmas tree after years and years of poverty—and its huge size and its possibilities for decoration overwhelmed us. We brought the tree home to our old house in Sibulan, decked it with ornaments and light. When it finally twinkled, we gathered around it, like it was a beacon of so much hope.
I was a kid in most of these memories. But Christmas is different when you’re young. It has an inner, throbbing magic for children. When we grow up, we are forever exiled from it, possessed only with the inescapable feeling that Christmasses past were always better, shinier. The things we have left are our nostalgia.
Nostalgia will not be in the cards for me this year. I stake my claim on that alone-ness, that beautiful solitariness. But I don’t mean to make it sound sad: the word “alone” carries with it a universe of ennui—and there’s massive literature out there that has mapped out the word to contain our endless capacities for the morose and the dramatic—and so perhaps the right phrase to use may be “spending it by my lonesome.” In either case, the number is singular. And I shall take that fact with an embrace.
It is a beautiful thing to embrace. It has taught me quiet. It has taught me to appreciate the rare moments of togetherness when they do happen out of the kinetic order of the world, and not out of habit or force. It has taught me to pray. I shall thank my unsentimental family for all that. In a sense, this is the best Christmas gift they’ve ever given me.
If there is a thread we can pounce on with the body of work of filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, it may be this: you die, or at least suffer, for your art or your ideal. That was immediately apparent when I first saw π [Pi, 1998] years and years ago. Pi was about an obsessive number theorist named Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) who struggles to understand the string of numbers hidden in the Torah and with a mysterious 216-digit number his computer not-so-randomly spat out one day. Later on, we see Max's cinematic cousins in Ellen Burstyn's Sara Goldfarb who struggles to fit into an old red dress with the use of amphetamines in Requiem for a Dream [2000], Hugh Jackman's Tommy who struggles to find a cure for his wife's brain tumor in The Fountain [2006], and Mickey Rourke's Robin Ramzinski who struggles with an ailing heart to win one last match in The Wrestler [2008].
Now, in the terrific and terrifying Black Swan [2010], Aronofsky unveils his new obsessive in Natalie Portman's Nina Sayer, a ballet dancer known for perfect technique but not for raw uninhibition needed to truly achieve riveting dance. She begins to lose her mind, in a living nightmare reminiscent of Roman Polanski's Repulsion [1965], as she struggles to lose her straight-laced constraints to truly become the titular ballet role. Her perfection -- dull and unseductive -- slowly cracks.
Mr. Aronofsky knows. He knows the terrible beauty and the exacting nature of artistry or the search for that perfection or ideal. In his previous films, however, one does not get a close-enough cinematic depiction of the need -- or the hunger -- to achieve that artistic ideal. In Black Swan, he finally does. Take note of that transformation scene when Nina finally breathes in her terrible achievement: she glows and menaces and walks around the backstage like a predator in ecstasy. I recognized that walk, that breathing, that deadly seduction set in the eyes. I told myself, that's it -- that's the familiar high we get when we are in the very depths of the artistic zone. Mr. Aronofsky perfectly renders it. Which is why I love this film. It is not subtle, and does not aim to be -- and so one should not fault it for being the visceral assault that it is. It perfectly captures that throbbing sensuality of having to surrender, little by little, all that we are in the service of our art. And if we have to die for it, we do so with the comfort of knowing we have created something immortal in the process, the applause we get becoming a mere trifle in the exquisite bloodletting it requires.
This is the other Facebook movie, the perfect bookend to David Fincher's The Social Network [2010], the slow-burning but incredibly delicious film that has become this year's uncanny mirror of the zeitgeist. (Most of us do live on Facebook now, right?) But while Fincher's film is an intelligent myth-making re-imagination of Facebook's troubled start-up, ostensibly recreating the days of Mark Zuckerberg's life as he deals with the assorted drama of Facebook's creation, Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman's Catfish [2010] depicts the real-life repercussions of our online interactions. The documentary follows Nev, Mr. Schulman's brother. Nev is a New York photographer who covers the dance world, and one day he receives a painting of one of his dance photographs by a girl named Abby from a little Michigan town. A friendship takes root and soon comes to involve Abby's family -- a mother named Angela, a father named Vince, a brother, Abby's friends, and finally, a beautiful half-sister named Megan, a veterinarian who models, paints, sings, and plays the piano. Online romance ensues. And then soon after, already smitten like a boy in a long-distance love affair, Nev starts discovering that some things ... just don't add up.
The film does start off as a kind of Facebook thriller (complemented by much use of YouTube, Gmail, GoogleMaps, iPhones, Google Earth, and the assorted online applications that have come to define our daily lives). But it ends with such quiet and devastating drama about alienation and hope, artistic manipulation, the allure of storytelling, and the slippery boundaries of identity that we use to navigate the unguarded highways of the Internet. This reminds me of a post that I blogged (with a subsequent shorter 140-character version in Twitter) a few days ago : "Sometimes when I look at my own Facebook posts and pictures and videos and stuff, I cannot help but feel a little envy for the life that this online persona, this electronic version of me, seems to have. And of course I feel weird feeling that." It's weird because the Ian Rosales Casocot online, in Facebook and elsewhere, is indeed "me" -- and those are my thoughts, my photos, my videos, my life. And yet, I am also aware that in many ways, what I am "creating" online is a persona a little removed from me -- it's the concentration of the best of who I am, the face I want to present to the world, having edited out the humdrum minutes where I just stare off into space, waiting for something to happen. It is from this acknowledgment of how we live our present-day reality that the film manages to appeal to me. This is happening. And then there is also the film's quiet conclusion, its statement about artists. It broke my heart, and angered me a bit -- but I also found a capacity for empathy. And when we finally get to the part about the catfish of the title, everything else that comes before it makes so much sense.
But of course the film did not make sense for a lot of people who came to screenings of Catfish and expected a twisty thriller in the vein of M. Night Shyamalan. Reading ordinary moviegoers' comments online about the film (or its trailer) is another reason why I have a certain urge to puke over the notion of "the wisdom of the masses," the same mass of herd-thinking people whose idea of enlightenment is the dumbing explosions of Transformers and the saccharine inanities of Twilight. The following comment, from somebody named jocybum* in YouTube, is typical of the many online posts that have been coming out: "I just watched this last night, I was so unbelievably bored and disappointed by what happens after driving to the barn scene. It was so predictable. Plus the fact that they called it a documentary and some people believe this is lolworthy" [unedited].
I look at that, and I feel pity. They don't get it. Most people will not get this movie, and it's sad. It reminds me of what the film critic Roger Ebert once wrote about similar people in his review of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]: “Man is a curious animal. He is uneasy in the face of great experiences, and if he is forced to experience something profound, he starts immediately to cheapen it, to bring it down to his own level.”
* A quick look at jocybum's YouTube profile shows that he or she is 21, from the United Kingdom, and likes the following videos: "Father Christmas Fucked My Pussy (Christmas Pussy Song)," "He Bite Me in My Vagina," and "Fart Trek: The Next Flatulation." I rest my case.
GQ's Alex Pappademas goes into speculative mode in his great profile on Winona Ryder, answering this question: What if the actress never got arrested for shoplifting and never took those pills?
Imagine a parallel universe where there is not this Winona-shaped hole in recent cool-movie history. She'd have been one of the Dylans in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, for sure. Maybe the object of Jim Carrey's amnesia in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She could have been a Tenenbaum.* Maybe even a Cullen.
* Yes, Wes Anderson shot The Royal Tenenbaums before her arrest. But let's say, in this parallel universe, Winona doesn't drop out of Godfather III, which creates a butterfly-effect ripple across the space-time continuum: Sofia Coppola doesn't replace her, which means Sofia Coppola's performance isn't eviscerated by the press, which means she continues to act instead of pursuing a career behind the camera, and the adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides falls to a fresh-off-Rushmore Wes Anderson, delaying Tenenbaums by two years. Winona plays Margot, obviously. During the film's opening weekend, syndicated radio personality Glenn Beck is mauled by a tiger.
I miss Winona Ryder. That girl had subtlety. Take note of her May Welland in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence: so sweet and caring ... and manipulative. Please bring her back, Hollywood.
10:17 PM |
In Love With Juli Baker
