top ten
i have always known this but sometimes, there are just facts, sweet morsel from one’s provenance, (that outsiders take as emblematic of one’s society) that just feels out and out alien to oneself.
several sundays ago, the new york times magazine (the one with the dishevelled Almodovar on the cover) carried this little sidebar citing Philippines as one of the top ten movie producing countries in the world, way up there with the bigshots of Bolly and Hollywood.
this doesn’t feel right but it is true. must be true. by now, the venerable grey lady must have beefed up its fact checker department after the jayson blair scandale’.
however, there are only a handful of local films that I can still recall watching as a kid growing up just two blocks away from a movie house.
most of my early film memories are only either those of the technicolor hollywood spectacles (think of the parting red sea) if not the slam bang of the hongkong chopsockies (think of drunken shaolin master, the series).
and it’s not just me (okey, I, for those purists). all of my high school and college buddies, we spoke the same filmic idioms stemming from what could only be our shared cinematic upbringing.
religious experience
i grew up in a very remote island off the northern tip of cebu province.
in this preponderantly catholic island town, the local cinema, (before the advent of the clunky betamax), was rightfully considered the other church.
this was when my mother could still dupe me into wearing gabardine shorts. but times, they are hardly a-changin’ in my sweet archipelago.
fast forward to last week.
the location: outside of sto. domingo church along quezon boulevard in urban and sophisticated quezon city.
the scene: fpj’s wake.
action: a big telon was unfurled in the church grounds and on it was projected some of da king’s more arcane movies.
the procession of fpj devotees, after ignoring the tropical heat and the occasional pickpocket along the queue, had two guaranteed major epiphanies upon reaching the sanctum sanctorum of the cavernous church.
one is the religious experience of watching an fpj movie on an old fashioned telon and the other having to be within a frightfully grabbing distance of the corpse of the man animating the silver screen outside.
to celebrate or not, that is the question
every end of the year, nothing drives to apoplexy the movie critics of the media establishments (mostly east coast) here in the states than the intimidating task of coming up with a top ten best movies of the year list.
this is not so much as an exercise in canonizing (although that is the very raison vitale of coming up with an exclusionary list) but rather more as a celebratory exercise, a yearly valentine to cinema in this country.
what totally separates the movie lovers here in the states and us back home is this. there is this palpably tendentious and very partisan urge among cinephiles here to fete the best of the crop for the year.
back home, every end of the year, what we do have instead is more of a movie moron-athon, also known as the metro manila film festival.
we go into this pathetic and economically discredited exercise of nationalizating a particular industry, this time, the film industry, for a week. only filipino produced films being shown in all the theaters in metro manila.
for me and my friends then, this was our hell week. and this during the holidays where it was supposedly our god given right to enjoy comfort and joy.
nothing guarantees mediocrity of an industry really than good old protectionism. so in the absence of competition, off the sleazy local movie producers go, hawking their middling wares and passing them off as “quality films.”
“pinaghirapan namin talaga ito” (we busted our asses for this).
goodbye, dragon inn
ever since I could read newspapers and trashy fan magazines, every movie insider back home has always been prophesying of the inevitable death of the local film industry.
among other reasons, they posited that it is the current species of hollywood movies, with all their computer graphic enhanced spectacles, that would draw down the curtain to the last of pinoy films.
one of the films that easily coasts into this year’s top ten lists of most critics here is this taiwanese movie, the openly elegiac “goodbye, dragon inn.”
in tsai ming-liang’s latest plotless oeuvre, a passing of a world is hauntingly documented almost without any words. or any computer guided imagery, for that matter.
the movie almost breaks your heart by ushering you into the last night of operations of a taiwanese movie house. what was being shown was “goodbye, dragon inn,” a lush sword–fighting epic of the 60’s, a movie that I may have seen as a child.
two of the men who came out for this last showing were the stars of that very movie itself. in the lobby, after the movie, the two wistfully engaged in small talk.
"no one comes to the movies anymore," says the older of the two. "and no one remembers us anymore," responds the other.
sure the movie is mournful, yet it’s hardly depressing at all. it’s a movie that doesn’t dwell too much in mourning the past than being (with trepidation, let me use this adjective) optimistic in the present, almost jubilant.
this is a film for every one who love the movies even if they don't know why.
after the 70’s, well, after brocka and bernal, I should say, the filipino film industry has been in a downward spiral (cliché, I know it is. but what else can I say?). not because the film industry did not get any hefty tax rebates from the government or any other form of state protection.
the filipino film industry will continue its deathly slump not until young filipino directors, as passionate of movies like tsai ming-liang (a taiwanese of malaysian provenance), will be allowed, nay, encouraged, propped up, to make movies that they truly love to make.