Category: Film
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The Ilian in two Baguio films by Mike De Leon
Joey (Christopher de Leon) and Anna (Hilda Koronel) in Mike De Leon’s Moments in a Stolen Dream, LVN/ Cinema Artists Philippines/ ABS-CBN Entertainment, 1977. Photo: Mike de Leon/ MoMA. Covered by fair use, no copyright infringement intended. This essay revisits the films of Mike De Leon (1947—) on the occasion of his retrospective at the…
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Lingua Franca (2019, dir. Isabel Sandoval)
Isabel Sandoval plays Olivia, a caregiver to Olga played by Lynn Cohen. Filipino director and actress Isabel Sandoval paints the portrait of freedom, inspired by her own journey as a transgender migrant in Donald Trump’s America. Alongside filmmakers Lav Diaz and Brillante Mendoza, Sandoval is among a new breed of filmmakers who are committed witnesses…
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Manta Ray (dir. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, 2018)
There is a stealthiness and a dreaminess in Manta Ray (2018), the first feature film by cinematographer Phuttiphong Aroonpheng who was born in 1976. The film is one of the first fiction films to evoke the crisis of the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority in western Burma (Myanmar), from the perspective of Thailand, the land…
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Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
In Cemetery of Splendor, characters dispense zen-like nuggets of wisdom in a lethargic state. Paced like a Buddhist meditation, the plot marches to a slow and subtle but abundant poetic song under the branches of psychotropic jungles, crossed by bizarre animals, tropical diseases, erotic projections, and otherworldly light. Undoubtedly less bewitching than the previous opuses…
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The Lover (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992)
The Lover (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992) is not the typical epic historical romance in the same way as Gone With the Wind might be but it plays on the same elements. While the plot of this well-worn genre revolves around the loss of innocence—which is often an allegory for the colonial experience—and of having…
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Children of Srikandi (2012)
George McT Kahin wrote in his Introduction to Benedict Anderson’s Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (1965) that “anyone interested in contemporary Indonesia, its organization and social and political articulation… comes to realize that in order to achieve any real depth of understanding for these phenomena, it is first necessary to appreciate the enduring…
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(The Eye, dir. Pang & Pang, 2008)
Traumas and wounds become embodied indexes of a nation’s technological and cultural transformation in the film, The Eye (2008). The horror story centers on 20-year old Wong Kar Mun, a Hong kong classical violinist who undergoes an eye cornea transplant. Regaining her sense of sight should be a blessing for Wong, but it becomes more…
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Mae Nak (dir. Pimpaka Towira, 1992)
Images of devotion form the nexus of Thai religions and social life. As shown by Justin McDaniel’s ethnography on the shrines of Mae Nak, a well-known Thai female ghost based on a mother who dies in childbirth during the reign of King Rama IV (1804-1868). In his article, “The Agency Between Images,” McDaniel recounts his…
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Nang Nak (dir. Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)
Nak’s glorious appearance on the world stage made it “possible to ‘think’ the nation”[1] and to perceive the present as a continuation of a historical past. Nang Nak was among the first blockbuster ghost films to circulate in Southeast Asia at the turn of the millennium. This cycle of films touched on the troubled psyche…
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Resistant Spectatorship
Manthia Diawara’s critique of black characters in D.W. Griffin’s Birth of a Nation and Eddie Murphy’s cop movies serves as a template for further examination on the racist depictions in mass media of the African-American male. In considering some Hollywood productions, Diawara makes a case for the problematic ‘identification’ between the black (male) spectator and…
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Catherine Deneuve as an ageing film diva
The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda won the Cannes Palme d’or in 2018 with his film “Shoplifters” about a family of thieves. The following year, the master of family drama made his first film outside of Japan: “La Vérité” with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke. I was immediately impressed by the first appearance of…
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Protected: After the Storm (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, 2016)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Pantasya ng bayan
From the 1950s to the late 1990s, the use of the word “pantasya” has acquired a number of meanings. I suppose our grandfathers and grandmothers used the word in its oldest sense, of fantasy or phantasy, which they probably labeled improbable literature. In other words, out of this world. I’ve always been fascinated by the…
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Kung ako’y mahal mo (Gregorio Fernandez, 1960)
Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo (If You Love Me) is a charming romance melodrama with an incredulous narrative plot. I know all melodramas require some stretching of your suspension of disbelief but this one takes the prize. Ramon (Nestor de Villa) is a car mechanic who hears a cry for help from Lydia (Charito Solis). Ramon…
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Azimat (Rolf Bayer, 1958)
I discovered a wonderful website that archives film locations in Singapore called www.sgfilmlocations.com. Browsing through the copious material, I found a rarely-seen 1958 movie called Azimat or Seal of Solomon, written and directed by Rolf Bayer, who did the screenplay for iconic postwar Filipino film, Anak Dalita. The movie stars Pancho Magalona and Tita Duran…
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Sulat galing sa Praga (Angga Dwimas Sasongko, 2016)
Nasa kalagitnaan ng magastos na diborsyo si Larasati (Julie Estelle) at kailangan niyang makipag-ayos sa naghihingalo niyang ina, si Sulastri (Widyawati). Bagama’t hindi naging maganda ang kanilang relasyon mag-ina, ipinamana nito sa kanya ang lahat ng kanyang ari-arian sa kondisyon na ideliber niya ang kahon ng mga sulat kay Jaya (Tio Pakusadewo), isang matandang janitor…
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Portrait of a lady on fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019)
Marianne must cross the rough seas when she is summoned by a countess (Valeria Golino) who would like to have a portrait of her daughter, Heloise. The portrait will be sent to Heloise’s fiancé, an Italian aristocrat, as a confirmation of their arranged marriage. Hoping to save their crumbling estate or move back to an…
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Crash Landing on You (Lee Jeong-hyo, 2020)
Over the spring break I was able to catch up with trends on social media and watched smash-hit K-drama Crash Landing on You (CLOY), a Netflix series directed by Lee Jeong-hyo, starring Hyun Bin, Son Ye-jin, Kim Jung-hyun, and Seo Ji-hye. The hilarious plot begins with Seri, a South Korean chaebol heiress and influencer (think…
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Protected: A rainy day in New York (Woody Allen, 2019)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Cain at Abel (Lino Brocka, 1982)
Sometimes the third world film-maker finds himself before an illiterate public, swamped by American, Egyptian or Indian serials, and karate films, and he has to go through all this, it is this material that he has to work on, to extract from it the elements of a people who are still missing (Lino Brocka). (Gilles…
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The Great Cosmic Detour
On the writings of Kidlat Tahimik When Kidlat Tahimik was named as one of the recipients of the Prince Claus Awards in 2018, I felt two contradictory reactions when I was asked to write a short biographical note about him for the Nikkei Asian Review. On one hand, for a filmmaker who has produced mostly…
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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015)
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel begins The Sympathizer with a riddle “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man with two faces”. What is he? Might we ask. The line was spoken by a double agent working for the North Vietnamese Communists as well as for the United States during and shortly after the…
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Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)
Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary was celebrated as if one had reinvented slice bread. I was skeptical but he was someone who had something interesting to say. He was able to articulate that interesting thing in Midsommar. The horror genre was being reinvented; a good thing but its not slice bread. The promotion materials made…
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Sister Stella L. (Mike De Leon, 1984)
Enlightenment is not a badge, but a wound. Mike De Leon tells of the transformation of a charity worker nun into a politically active front-line soldier. Mike De Leon is next to Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal in the line of master directors of the second golden age of Filipino cinema. Compared to his colleagues,…
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In the mood for love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
Hong Kong 1962: Ambitious newspaper editor Chow (Tony Leung Ka Fai) and shy secretary Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) are among the many immigrants who have fled to the British crown colony after the conquest of Shanghai by the Chinese Communists. Although both are married and receive a regular salary, they can afford only a subleased room…
Geronimo Cristobal 