The Spy in the Sandwich Eats the Sun

A Renaissance

2012-01-27T01:01:00.004+08:00

First of Two Parts

These days, you can feel a palpable stirring, culture-wise, in Dumaguete City. Not that the arts are dead here. Of course not. It’s just that—starting more or less about half a decade ago—it has never been this alive. And how it sparkles in the kind of life it has now!

There was a time, especially in the early 1990s, when the cultural well seemed on the verge of going dry relatively speaking. (I play safe here, because there will be others with differing opinions. I can imagine somebody writing to me soon, thundering: “That’s not true!”) But for some reason or other, many of Dumaguete’s resident artists, writers, and cultural workers were answering the outside lure of better jobs and bigger cities. (Some stayed. Many more just faded away.) The National Writers Workshop lost the support of the university it had been part of since its founding in 1962, and it floundered like an orphan until the Tiempos found generous institutions which pledged enough to continue the revered workshop’s existence. Around the same time, the Renaissance Man himself, Albert Louis Faurot, died in Dumaguete. A relative came “to settle his affairs,” so goes one story from Moses Joshua Atega, and gathered pieces of his collection—and proceeded to burn them for reasons we can only speculate over. That bonfire seemed quite metaphorical of the state of things. Faurot’s End House, site of many recitals and poetry readings, fell into disrepair. His book collection and paintings were scattered about—and some of us would occasionally wonder during meetings, “Where are those paintings now? And those books?” I saw some of those books. Vintage hardbound copies of the best of literature—some worn to old age by silverfish and dust. Oh, those were dark days. I came into my youth in those early years of the 1990s, and for me these were wisps of once mighty names I had to get to know because largely forgotten.

And yet, look.

Nothing can be farther than the reverse of all that, these days. Our artists and writers are flocking back to Dumaguete once more, making it—in the words of Carmen del Prado’s documentary on the subject matter—“an artists’ haven.” There’s a budding community of young writers and filmmakers starting to make waves. The older visual artists may still be squabbling with each other—but consider Razceljan Salvarita and Hersley-Ven Casero, the vanguards of the new wave: they hold their heads above the vicious sway, and their art is fresh and revitalizing. We have new filmmakers in the making—Hersley’s Paper and Stephen Abanto’s Suga just made it into the roster of SineRehiyon Film Festival, representing the film scene in Dumaguete. There’s a film club in the city now, also a photography club (under the guidance of master photographer Greg Morales), and a fledgling group of young writers. The National Writers Workshop is also back with Silliman University, which has also been in the process of creating a Creative Writing Center to be named after Edilberto and Edith Tiempo. Last year, the workshop celebrated its fiftieth year with a reverent nod to how it has helped shape contemporary Philippine literature. And Faurot has a lecture series named after him, with some of the world’s top artists, writers, and cultural workers—from Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones to poet Marjorie Evasco, from composer Ryan Cayabyab to sociologist Lorna Makil—coming to the city to share their thoughts on art and culture as well as their process, all under the shadow of Faurot’s name and memory.

I first thought of this for real when I was invited last weekend to a dinner being held at the Silliman President’s House last Saturday. Dr. Ben Malayang III and wife Gladys were hosting, and our guest of honor was the environmentalist Nicanor Perlas who was in the city to launch a book. Chef Andreino—Dumaguete’s Pasta King—had prepared a sumptuous dinner for us, a two-course meal punctuated with great dessert and fantastic wine. And so we came: among us, there were Jojo and Myrish Antonio, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Simon and Virginia Stack, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, Esther Windler, John Stevenson, Ian Malayang, the master classical guitarist Michael Dadap, and some others. It was a night of conversation, as scintillating as they come, fueled by the red wine. One knows how that goes. And soon enough Mr. Dadap—the brother-in-law of the cellist Yo Yo Ma—gave us a mini-concert cum lecture. “I am going to play for you two Visayan folk songs,” he said. One is happy, he said, but the song itself is really sad; the other one sounds sad, but it really is happy. “I think we do sadness with a dash of happy attitude—to mask that sadness. And we coat our happiness with a sad tone, because we don’t want other people to take away that happiness.” First he played a masterful rendition of “Dandansoy,” plucking away its melancholic tone, but with a knowing wink that this is about a man who feels assured that his love for a woman is secure enough for him to say a temporary farewell. Then he goes on with “Pobreng Alindahaw,” playfully underscoring its upbeat tone with the song’s story of a dragonfly who is swept away by the wind while flying among flowers. Somebody—I think it was Simon—asked about folk music from Luzon, and Mr. Dadap went on to play a kundiman favorite “Jocelynang Baliwag.” When we start asking him questions about the classical guitar, what we got was a brief and inspired “lecture,” with musical excerpts, escorting us to the world of the Egyptian kithara, the Spanish flamenco, and the consummate artistry of guitar giants Andrés Segovia and Agustín Pío Barrios—“whose genius,” Mr. Dadap proclaimed, “is perhaps equal to Mozart.”

I looked around the sala in the President’s House. This was also where some of us—Sir Ben, Ma’am Gladys, John, Simon, Tata, Annabelle Lee-Adriano, Bron Teves, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Myrna Peña-Reyes, Mariglor Arnaiz, and sometimes RV Escatron and Indian scholar Annie Kuraichan—meet every Wednesday night, to talk about literature over food and drinks, and we have gone from John Donne to Robert Frost to Jorge Luis Borges to William Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg. A literary salon, so to speak. We have a merry time, a once-a-week exercise of our critical abilities as well as our imagination.

It seems fitting that all these stem from this house in Silliman campus. The President’s House as a center of culture, but done in a lovely fit, loose and easy-going. This is art, and its appreciation, with heart. And I am glad I live in this time, with a city buzzing with so many possibilities.

It is a good time to be an artist in Dumaguete. (To be continued…)

[Photo by Arlene Delloso-Uypitching]

The Message of the Tsinelas

2012-01-21T17:10:00.004+08:00

During last week's Tapok 'Ta, La! gig, Rock Ed Dumaguete volunteer Mars Edding had this idea of asking donors of slippers for Sendong victims in Negros Oriental to write a short message for their recipients. As we sorted out the donations -- 475 pairs of slippers in all! plus clothes and books and other things -- this morning at the Oriental Hall in Silliman University, we proceeded to photo-document some of these...

[Photos by Zon Lee]

What the Weekend Was Like

2012-01-17T02:10:00.003+08:00

It was a delicate balance. How to divide one’s body on a Friday night when you are part of the organizing teams behind two events happening simultaneously? At the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, for the Cultural Affairs Committee of Silliman University, the young virtuoso Jimmy Tagala Jr. was making his debut as a solo headliner, with mentors—the legendary violinist Gilopez Kabayao and pianist wife Corazon—in tow. At the Amphitheater, for Rock Ed Dumaguete’s Tsinelas for Sendong Drive, Sandwich was amping it with the pure gusto of Pinoy rock.

Two different kinds of music, poles apart. (And yet, by evening’s end, I would find out the heart for both is the same.)

It was a decision I tossed to the fates—“I would follow where my feet would lead,” I told myself. I settled for considering myself, in a way, lucky: what charmed life one must live to have front row seating to two great things. But somehow I managed to attend both, with my body intact. No dividing or cloning required, helped for the most part for the mere few hundreds of meters that divided the wild openness of the amphitheater and the hallowed hall of the Luce. My feet, it seemed, were quick enough to straddle the divide.

It was important to be at the Sandwich gig. We were raising awareness for Sendong relief, and we were inviting people to come and hear the music for free. But we were encouraging them to come and bring new or usable tsinelas for victims of Sendong. And sure enough, they came by the hordes. The boxes of tsinelas we brought over to sell—just in case anyone in the crowd felt “too lazy” to come with a pair to donate—sold out even before Sandwich took to the stage. And people were donating and donating, some in used clothing and some in money—that it was enough to restore faith in humanity. The shower of donations and good will almost brought some of the Rock Ed volunteers to tears. And there were many of them—young people from all over the city and not just Silliman University—coming in with the fullest intentions to help. I remember Gang Badoy telling me once that this was our ultimate mission in Rock Ed, to plant this seed of civic concern among the young. That it can start out small, but it will pay in big dividends in the future. The tsinelas is just a metaphor, a seed. The real goal is to reinvent people.

By 9 PM, the grounds of the amphitheater would be filled to capacity, if that was possible—but it was enough, it would seem, for lead singer Raimund Marasigan to willingly jump into the moshpit, twice. And the crowd went wild.

There are many people to thank for this, of course. The indefatigable Mahogany Rae Bacon, the irrepressible Mars Edding, the amazing Marita Ong, Rena Ochoco, and Yan Vanslembrouck. Then there’s Anna Katrina Espino, and Cole Geconcillo, Babes and Joey Utzurrum, Hersley Ven Casero, Precious Grace Heradura, Silvin Maceren, Jaimee Duran, Fe An and Fob Sy, Robbie Yasi, Ron Calumpang, Sanda and Sande Fuentes, Duds Tecson, Von Cathleen Panot, among many others. These people are the young heart of Rock Ed volunteerism.

While rock music went full blast in the amphitheater, a few meters away at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, Gilopez Kabayao came back to his alma mater to play and to guest support his protégé, the fantastically talented virtuoso Jim-Jim Tagala. We hurried there to catch the concert in time, and to get some video footage of Mr. Kabayao for a planned video project for the fiftieth anniversary of the Cultural Affairs Committee. The pre-show photo shoot (with Annabelle Lee Adriano) went quite well, and so did the interview we did with the Kabayaos and Jim-Jim.

And when it came to Jim-Jim’s music, we were in for a pleasant shock. How many standing ovations did we give him? Quite a few, and heartily meant, too. For his youth, this violinist managed to wow the Luce crowd with uncommon dexterity and organic connection to the music. His duet with his mentor over Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins was more than worth the price of the ticket, but Jim-Jim’s take on Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Major, Op. 35 brought down the house. He would bring down the house twice more, with Kabayao’s intricate arrangements of Paganini’s Caprice No. 15 as well as Abelardo’s Mutya ng Pasig and the folk song the folk song Bahay Kubo, and finally with a shattering finale with Bizet’s Carmen. To watch Jim-Jim play the violin was to see music breathing.

What a Friday night that was.

[Photos by Hersley-Ven Casero and Annabelle Lee-Adriano]

Making Helping People Easier

2012-01-14T12:48:00.005+08:00

There was a reason why that polar bear—a white stuffed toy that oozed with such joy—felt special. There it was in the LBC box just newly arrived from Bacolod, glistening in its furry whiteness, in the midst of other toys (and underwear) sent in by donors from New York as well as from Negros Occidental. That Tuesday afternoon early in January, fresh off the devastations of December, some members of Rock Ed Dumaguete had gathered in Silliman Church, our meeting place before we’d leave for the mountains of Valencia to distribute the relief goods. And we all felt the strange urge to just hold the bear, to hug it.

Rock Ed Dumaguete, along with Silliman University, was collecting stuff for relief efforts, and one of our volunteers—the amazing Greg Morales, photographer par excellence—once said that during one distribution round for victims of Typhoon Sendong, one thing he had noticed was that kids in the evacuation camps he had visited were getting bored. They had lost everything in the flash flood, and they had nothing to play with. Except perhaps dirt and stones and what-not. “Boredom can be deadly,” he said.

And so when Gang Badoy of Rock Ed Philippines forwarded me a message from Jane Uymatiao, which said that she knew of a guy in Bacolod who wanted to donate toys for the relief efforts in Dumaguete, I jumped at the chance. The guy was Bugsy Bongco, and with help from LBC who waived the fee for delivering the goods, we received the boxes. They were crammed full of fantastic toys, as well as clothes and underwear for children.

Joining me that Tuesday were some Rock Ed volunteers aside from Greg—Ron Jacob Calumpang, Robbie Yasi, Mariekhan Edding, and Arlene Delloso-Uypitching who came with her young daughter Hannah. We saw the polar bear, and we all said, “We’re going to give this to somebody special.” How we would know that we left to the universe. We knew we would just know. And so we went to five barangays that afternoon. By nightfall, we found ourselves in our last stop in one Valencia barangay near Palinpinon. It was full of kids. And one of them was this wee girl, perhaps three or four years old. She was being carried by her ate, and when we saw her, something clicked. This is the kid we were waiting for.

Rock Ed Dumaguete volunteers Ron Jacob Calumpang and Hannah Delloso-Uypitching handing out toys and underwear in Valencia. Photo courtesy of Greg Morales.

Hannah quickly took the stuffed toy from the nearly empty box, and gave it to the girl. The sight of those young eyes beholding this huge toy was priceless.

We would tell Bugsy about this of course, and he felt the need to tell this story: “Ian, let me tell you something about the polar bear—and most of the stuffed toys we sent you. They’re from a very good friend of mine who works as a nanny in New York but has not come home in almost ten years. Her papers expired when she was jobless and penniless, so she’s a TNT, there up to this time. Almost everything she earns goes to her nephews and nieces and her old mom here in the Philippines. Despite all her problems, she has managed—through the years—to collect stuffed toys from her employer who allowed her to bring them home with her. She put them in her small rented room in New Jersey—and that polar bear sat at the foot of her bed for a long, long time. She did not have money to put all the toys in a balikbayan box. But finally, God being good, we found the money to have the balikbayan box shipped to me. I intended to give them to orphans and street kids, according to her instructions. But I couldn’t do it sooner because I teach. I waited for Christmas break. Typhoon Sendong came and... God showed us the way to you through Jane of Philippine Beat (whose email add I stumbled on in Twitter). My New York friend said, before she sent the polar bear here, ‘It’s time for you to have another roommate.’ I am sure she will be happy to know it went to a cute little girl in Dumaguete. Thank you again! I am not wishing for another calamity but, should the need arise, please do not hesitate to let me know and I will do my best to be able to help again.”

This just broke my heart, but in a good way. How sometimes we are moved to restore our faith in humanity because there are countless (mostly anonymous) people out there who do feel the need to reach out and help other people—even when they’re also in circumstances that is less than spectacular.

Which is why I’m quite happy to coordinate Rock Ed Dumaguete with its Manila founders—an amazing bunch that includes Gang Badoy, musician Noel Cabangon, rocker and writer Lourd de Veyra, filmmaker Pepe Diokno, publisher Ani Almario, among many, many other private citizens, entrepreneurs, and creative—visual artists, writers, musicians, and others who feel a deep personal need to help out, in fun and creative ways, the people in our country, most of whom have nothing. Part of Rock Ed’s motto is “to help make helping other people easier for most people,” in a sense to slowly create a culture and mindset of civic mindedness especially among the young. Subtlety and rocking it are all part of the package. Rock Ed’s biggest aim, of course, is alternative education beyond the classroom—essentially finding creative ways to teach people young and old about everything, from entrepreneurship to HIV awareness to solving mathematics problems. And most often with the help of music.

And so far, since Rock Ed’s inception in Dumaguete in the wake of Sendong, the response of many young people wanting to do their part—be it environmentalism or gender education or relief efforts for disasters—have been electrifying. I have never seen these many young people energized to do something for the community. I don’t think it’s just them joining in a trend. There’s genuine concern and enthusiasm here.

It is a good sight to behold, and Dumaguete is so much better for it.

Some members of the core group of Rock Ed Dumaguete: Cole Geconcillo, Mahogany Rae Bacon, Precious Grace Heradura, Mariekhan Edding, Anna Katrina Espino, Robbie Yasi, Ian Rosales Casocot, with Gang Badoy. Photo courtesy of Ms. Badoy.

If you want to become a Rock Ed volunteer, or if you have books, clothes, and other things you can donate for our various drives, please email me at ian.casocot(at)gmail.com. Visit the Rock Ed Philippines website at www.rocked.ph. Like us in Facebook (search for RockEdDumaguete), and follow us on Twitter @RockEd_Dgte.

Today in Culture in Dumaguete: Violinist Jimmy Tagala Jr. in Concert at the Luce and Sandwich in a Benefit Concert at the Amphi

2012-01-13T12:20:00.006+08:00

Jimmy Tagala Jr., first-prize winner of the recently concluded 2011 NAMCYA Violin Category C competitions, will be featured in a solo recital at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium in Silliman University. The gala concert is set on 13 January 2012, Friday at 8 in the evening with a program of classical violin virtuoso works, including Concerto in D by Tschaikowsky, Caprice No. 15 by Paganini, Sonata in D minor for Violin and Piano by Brahms, Mutya ng Pasig and Bahay Kubo arrangements by Gilopez Kabayao, and Carmen Fantasy by Sarasate.

The unique feature for this concert is the special participation of Filipino violin virtuoso and musical crusader, Gilopez Kabayao, as guest artist in Scherzo Tarantelle by Wieniawski and Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor together with the featured soloist. It is one of the rare occasions when Prof. Kabayao will once again be heard in Silliman University. Corazon Pineda Kabayao will be the assisting artist at the piano.

Mr. Tagala has been under the tutelage of Prof. Kabayao since he was 12. He was first place winner at the 2005 NAMCYA Violin Category B at 14 and at 15, and was the youngest among a hundred young musicians from Asia who were accepted to join the 2006 Asian Youth Orchestra in its concert tour of six Asian countries. At 16, Mr. Tagala gave his solo debut concert with a performance of the Beethoven and Khachaturian concertos to critical acclaim. He joined the Kabayao Family Quintet in their European concerts in 2009.

A matinee lecture-recital will be held at 2:00 in the afternoon of January 13 as part of the cultural-education program for the students. Season tickets honored during the gala show. Gala tickets are available at P200 and P300. Matinee tickets are available at P100. All tickets and season passes for Luce Auditorium shows are available for sale at the College of Performing and Visual Arts Office in Guy Hall, and at the theater lobby before the show begins. For inquiries and ticket reservations, call (035) 422-4365 or 0917-323-5953.

Popular Filipino rock band Sandwich, meanwhile, headlines a concert/donation drive for rubber slippers for the Sendong relief efforts in Negros Oriental. The Silliman University Student Government (SUSG) and Rock Ed Philippines Dumaguete Chapter co-sponsor this event to spread the word about Sendong and the relief efforts still necessary to alleviate conditions in affected areas. The concert for a cause, titled “Tapok ‘Ta, La!—A Tsinelas Drive for Victims of Sendong,” is slated at 7 P.M. at the Amphitheater. More details here.

Love and Writing

2012-01-11T05:54:00.005+08:00

“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that is precisely there where you [my beloved] are not—this is the beginning of writing.”

~ ROLAND BARTHES, A Lover’s Discourse

I once dedicated an entire book to declare my love for a boy. Even if he didn't love me back. That much I know, at least now. But oh the pleasures of that heartbreak—and the exquisite knowledge that this book was a singular expression of a distinct passion I would always remember. It didn't matter that he did not love me back, at least not in the way I wanted him to. He led me to words, and somehow that was enough.

I borrow freely from the dictates of Henry Miller, too: that to get over a beloved, one must turn him or her into literature. If I think hard about it, “love me, love me, love me” seems to me the biggest engine of my own writing. And so something like this from Barthes, the guru of pleasure and the text and the beloved, comes to me like a sobering reminder about the sweet and tender futility of it all. But one’s denial of that—well, it keeps me going still in writing.

I write to declare my love.

Love is all.

If I don’t write, I don’t exist.

Sandwich Headlines RockEd Dumaguete's Sendong Tsinelas Concert for a Cause

2012-01-10T13:48:00.003+08:00

A drive for rubber slippers is the target for the latest Sendong relief efforts in Negros Oriental. The Silliman University Student Government (SUSG) and Rock Ed Philippines Dumaguete Chapter are spearheading a concert featuring Sandwich and other bands to spread the word about Sendong and the relief efforts still necessary to alleviate conditions in affected areas. The concert for a cause, titled “Tapok ‘Ta, La!—A Tsinelas Drive for Victims of Sendong,” is slated on Friday, 13 January 2012, at 7 P.M. at the Amphitheater.

“When we scouted around during our previous relief efforts in affected areas around the province, we noted that besides food and water, people needed other important things which we tended to overlook—this includes underwear and slippers,” says Rock Ed Dumaguete Coordinator Ian Rosales Casocot, who is also a faculty member of Silliman University.

According to SUSG President Mahogany Rae Bacon, also a Rock Ed volunteer, the concert is open for free to the public, but encourages everyone to bring donations of new or usable rubber slippers when they come to enjoy the music. “We are particularly interested in people bringing in rubber slippers of all sizes, since usable pairs for kids are usually overlooked in such drives,” Bacon said. Rubber slippers will also be on sale in the concert site to make donations easier.

Rock Ed Philippines was formed in 2005 by Gang Badoy, Noel Cabangon, Lourd de Veyra, and other creatives and private citizens to spearhead—using music and the arts—alternative education campaigns in the country and to coordinate relief efforts during disasters. The Dumaguete chapter includes many of the city’s young artists, musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs.

Local bands such as Motion will also take part in the concert-for-a-cause. The event is also co-sponsored by Globe, Florentina Homes, Bethel Guest House, McDonald’s, and ADS Unlimited.

If you want to become a Rock Ed Dumaguete volunteer, please email us at rocked.dgte@yahoo.com. Or go to our website.

Beginnings

2012-01-03T22:35:00.001+08:00

Let's begin this year right. It will be an interesting year, and it will be good.

[Photo by Greg Morales]

Call for Submission of Manuscripts to the 51st Silliman University National Writers Workshop

2012-01-03T13:26:00.000+08:00

The Silliman University National Writers Workshop is now accepting applications for the 51st National Writers Workshop to be held April 30 to May 18, 2012 in the Silliman University Rose Lamb Sobrepeña Writers Village.

This Writers Workshop is offering fifteen fellowships to promising writers who want to have a chance to hone their craft and refine their style. Fellows will be provided housing, a modest stipend, and a subsidy to partially defray costs of their transportation.

To be considered, applicants should submit manuscripts in English on or before 10 February 2012. All manuscripts should comply with the instructions stated below. (Failure to do so will automatically eliminate their entries):

• Manuscripts should be submitted in hard copy on short-size bond paper, using Times New Roman or Calibri in 12 pt. font type.

• Applicants for Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction fellowships should submit three to five entries. Applicants for Poetry fellowships should submit seven to ten poems.

• Applicants for Drama fellowship should submit at least a One-Act Play. For plays beyond the one-act length, a scene accompanied by a synopsis of the entire work should be included.

• Each fiction, non-fiction, or drama manuscript should not be more than 50 pages, double spaced. We encourage you to stay well below the 50 pages, since a submission half that length is more than sufficient as a critical gauge.

• Manuscripts should be accompanied by at least one letter of recommendation from a literature professor or an established writer.

Along with the manuscripts and the recommendation letter, the following requirements should also be included: resume, a notarized certification that the works are original, and two 2X2 ID pictures.

Send all applications or requests for information to Department of English and Literature, attention Dr. Evelyn F. Mascuñana, Chair, Silliman University, 6200 Dumaguete City. For inquiries, email us at nwworkshop_su@yahoo.com or call us at 035-422-6002 loc. 350.

Feasts and Reminders

2011-12-28T15:43:00.003+08:00

The year that was—2011—has been a strange year. “I’m ambivalent about it,” my good friend Arlene Delloso-Uypitching tells me in a quiet note that tries to register all things in the recent past. I think back as well—and I know that I have been very happy, and I have been very sad. A seeming endlessness of both. Do we talk of the same gradient of things in the world?

And so this December ends, and the old year with it. In the waning days, when we have the strength for it, we also begin to catalogue the lives we’ve lived the past 365 days. The chill in the air is battery for remembrances and for this emotional accounting. As the bed weather—the exquisite remnant of a big storm—drags on, we find ourselves hanging on to the comforts of our beds, the only palpable joy within arm’s reach. We let the Christmas songs we play wash over us, each one underlining with a certain thoroughness what we feel. Happy. Sad. Ambivalent.

(I have taken to listening to Michael Buble’s cover of “All I Want for Christmas is You” from his Christmas album. It veers a long distance away from the manic cheer of Mariah Carey’s version of the song, and carries with it a strange mix of melancholy and hopefulness. I listen to the song in repeat mode, ten thousand times a day. I don’t know what that says about me.)

The brighter side of the year brims with good things. In that sense, it is one year I am not exactly ready to say goodbye to. And yet in the light of the disasters that have dimmed considerably the Christmas festivities, especially in my city of Dumaguete, it is also one that seems best ended, as soon as possible, if only for us to take in the phantom promise of new beginnings.

Everyone needs new beginnings. While the New Year will always be a kind of arbitrary marker—a fiction really to convince ourselves we can control and mark time and the dramatic arcs of our lives—it has become a kind of deeply-ingrained cultural convenience for blank slates. Fresh starts. Fervent resolutions. I think I have come to appreciate this very human wish to start over. The cynics among us call the effort “useless hogwash.” I can’t blame them, given human frailty and the crazy world we live in. But one learns to pity these dried up souls. Because if one has lost hope in our individual capacity to change for the better, what else is there except the abyss?

Sendong has been a sobering experience, if in retrospect. I slept through it, given the marathon of pre-Christmas parties that came before it. While I slept, the city was drowning. The riverbanks and once placid creeks were gorging up a voracious hunger of muddy water and trash. When I woke up that Saturday afternoon, post-storm, it was to an atmosphere of unbearable quiet I could not give a name to. The city was at such a stand still, and when I went out of my apartment in Tubod (which had miraculously escaped from the instant madness of a lake that swelled only a few meters away), the sun was already faintly shining in the sky.

But there was a taste of mustiness and destruction in the ether. I didn’t know it then, of course. I thought it was only a storm giving way slowly to the inevitable sunshine and the humidity that comes after. The water had subsided. I remembered feeling irritated over the closed shops and the tricycles that never materialized. When friends from afar began texting, “How are you in Dumaguete?” with concern laced all over, I innocently replied, “I’m in the mall. But I heard there was a big flood.” I would soon feel guilt, of course, when the horror stories began trickling in. How a colleague almost drowned in her own kitchen. How another colleague’s elderly mother struggled to get up to her roof as the water levels rose. How my mother’s male help had his house demolished by the mad gush of water. How a pregnant waitress we knew in our old watering hole was carried off to her death.

We became subtly schizophrenic about things. How to properly register horror and sadness, while not exactly canceling Christmas? The cheers were muted, and though we still celebrated, it was with a somber underlining to things. And so it was that we dressed to the nines—as planned—to the Sunday party with good friends, something concocted by Mariekhan Edding, Au Tabara, and Anna Katrina Espino. And so it was that we met on Monday with high school classmates as we celebrated both a house blessing and the holidays over at Niña and Eugene Kho’s. And so it was that we went to the festive and traditional Christmas party by my Wednesday reading group, and partook of ham and turkey and pecan pie, a reading of both Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the last chapter of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and singing of Christmas carols till near midnight at President Ben and Gladys Malayang’s. And so it was that we spent our Christmas Eve dinner at Don and Arlene Uypitching’s for their annual holiday feast in Valencia, which was breathtaking as usual. And so it was that we spent the early hours of Christmas morning with mother over the remains of lechon, which had lovingly devoured by family.

And so it was, too, that we began helping mobilize relief efforts—which never seemed enough—for those who could not celebrate because of Sendong. And for this, we have many people to be thankful for: the people at Silliman Church, Greg and Bernie Morales, Jojo Antonio, Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio, Angeline Dy, Babes Utzurrum, among many others. There were many people who rose to the occasion and bought or gathered donations of water, food, clothing (especially underwear), toys, medicine, and distributed them to badly-hit areas all over Negros Oriental. There was also a massive injection of help from Gang Badoy and RockEd Philippines, to whom we give an infinity of thanks. It is enough to restore one’s faith in humanity.

In the final analysis, I guess ambivalence is good. Being both happy and sad, both. They underscore so thoroughly the gravity of the other—and I guess that’s the kind of lesson best learned for the New Year: to embrace all happiness, to weather all sadness, to accept that both are the very fulcrums of our fullest lives.

And for the holiday season, we owe it to ourselves to turn to each other and give great cheer above the bleakness that surrounds us, and to also extend comfort where it’s most needed. I have been blessed to find friends who are capable of doing this precarious balance. Thanks to all of you, and if only because one has friends like you one can truly say one’s year has been blessed.

Here’s to 2012 then, and God bless us all.

Those badly hit by Sendong in Dumaguete need medicine, food, clothing, and water. If you want to extend help and donate to RockEd Dumaguete’s Sendong relief efforts, please email us at ian.casocot@gmail.com. Or call 09166652214.

[Photos courtesy of Hersley Ven Casero and Natasha Irish Reambonanza.]

What Comforts Us

2011-11-09T19:09:00.003+08:00

A few nights ago, in the middle of doing something I can scarcely remember now, the constant dilemma occupying the uncharted grey regions of my waking moments gripped an instance of my consciousness. It goes about its business the way it always does -- subtly, like a terrible and sly underwater tremor that lets loose a tidal wave of existential despair. The way I express it is always in the form of a prayer, a short one. Not being particularly religious myself, I find some comfort in just uttering this as an address to the Divine. "Why, Lord," I remember asking suddenly that night, my head bowed, my dilemma circling me in the usual pattern. "Why me? Why do I still __________?"

You never really expect concrete answers to queries directed at the void like this. In a sense, I've always understood it as just your psyche trying to deal with the minute disorders that mar your inner tranquilities, with the air as your sounding board.

I did not expect then to have a tiny voice, right near the back of my head, whispering back to me an urgent reply. It was unpremeditated, unexpected. It felt like it was God talking right back to me. And what He said was, "Because I have plans for you, and this is not it."

I jumped at that. Where did it come from? Do I even trust it? Is it just my unconsciousness providing an answer I already know but cannot bring myself to accept? Who knows? But it was a comforting answer -- and suddenly, to fret about things that are not meant to be just doesn't seem too important anymore. There are other things, perhaps more important, that are there, just waiting for a chance to happen. And all these -- including the unconsolable quiet and the blankness that transcends this time of my life -- these are things that prepare me for the ultimate. What that is I don't know, but I await it like one does a gift. Is this what you call faith?

If so, it feels very much like comfort.

The Dragon and the Lizard

2011-11-09T09:05:00.005+08:00

The best friend, based in Australia, just released her first children's book The Dragon and the Lizard, a tale she first heard from her mother growing up in Cagayan de Oro. Check it out!

Gatsby for the Young

2011-11-07T17:44:00.002+08:00

Caitlin Macy’s The Fundamentals of Play updates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to New York in the 1980s, and infuses it with the charms and conceits that made Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan such sheer joy. Only this time, the recognizable yuppie-ish characters from a certain segment of high society are a little more lost, a little more existential, a little more hard-edged. It’s a comedy with a bite, and it comes fully dressed in Ralph Lauren. We soon recognize the mishmash of the people (and events) we know from Fitzgerald’s novel, but what Macy does is to turn all these on their heads and our expectations, and gives them a twist — and comes away with a winning novel that also delights because of the sheer beautiful language that graces every single page of this debut novel. This is the kind of novel I wish I have written. I’m not sure there is a real story here actually. There is only an evocation of an attitude and an atmosphere, but so engaging is the experiment that we don’t frankly mind the shallowness in the plot. Because it is certainly not a shallow novel, for some reason. This is a delight.

Undone by Manners

2011-11-07T17:41:00.002+08:00

The classics in literature seem to suffer something from their greatness: the sheer intimidation of their reputations most often propels us to keep them as graceful tokens in our bookshelves, often unread. (Every day I stare at my copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Vladimor Nabokov’s Lolita, to take two examples, and I repeat my mantra: “Someday, someday…”) I think it takes a certain kind of innocence to tackle the classics — which is probably why the great period of my own voracious reading of them (Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and even the more contemporary ones like John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway) was in my grade school years. Later on, we found that just because we were told they were “important” was enough reason to stay away.

I’ve had my copy of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence for a decade now. I was casually reading Anthony Lane’s Nobody’s Perfect, his erudite compilation of New Yorker articles, and one of the articles he included in his book was his review of Martin Scorsese’s adaptation, which I loved — and which he found beautiful, but deficient, but certainly better than the “failures” of The Last Temptation of Christ and Cape Fear, both of which I found exhilarating. I remember howling at this, and when I put down the book, somehow I found myself going to my shelves … and taking down my copy of Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winner from 1921.

I began reading the first chapter, aiming only to skim it and to put it down after sleepiness would take over — but did sleep come? Noooo. I was hooked. I could not stop reading the travails of Newland Archer and his innocent “affair” with Countess Ellen Olenska, even as he tries to make a go with his engagement with May Welland under the eyes of 1870s New York society whose means to uphold strictures of form and manners was a violence of a totally different sort. It was violence, not without guile, but carried out with impeccable courtliness and subtlety — but violence nonetheless, which may be why Scorsese, he of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, probably felt compelled to helm its film adaptation. I love the book, and I loved discovering how faithful to the source Scorsese was. But I found myself surprised that I found the “villainous” May Welland — she of the timid intellectuality but sharp regard for societal propriety — blameless. Didn’t she give Newland so many chances to escape their betrothal? And in the end, after their marriage, wasn’t she only fighting for what was rightfully hers? I found Archer completely like a fool, timid and arrogant and blind, sure only of his indecisions which he mistakes for gentlemanly striving for dignity.

I’m glad I gave this great work of literature a chance. It was an education, and now I’m thinking I will really have to make a go at that Nabokov…

Ho-hum.

2011-11-07T17:37:00.002+08:00

Remember when I was most fanboy-ish when I saw Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese’s HBO documentary about the wit and writer from New York, Fran Lebowitz? I was positively giddy, and I wrote something like: “By the end of this film, I’ve come to this foolish hope: that one day I’d be a companion around her dinner table, and just listen to her talk and talk and talk.” I still have not changed that opinion: it would certainly be such a different kind of theater to watch Ms. Lebowitz talk and talk and give opinion on God-knows-everything-including-the-brand-of-the-kitchen-sink — but when it came to reading the two seminal works of essays that have made her reputation as a funny woman who also happens to be an intellectual (these are Metropolitan Life from 1978 and Social Studies from 1981, combined to one volume called The Fran Lebowitz Reader), I found myself … bored. This was it? These are supposed to be funny essays? They try to be, and they stink of such striving for an Oscar Wilde kind of epigram-making. I like the Introduction where Ms. Lebowitz tries to detail, hour by hour, the non-events that litter her day, but I was soon exasperated by her tendencies for lists, for tables, for the tiresome glee of having pronounced herself anti-nature, anti-work, anti-whatever. I usually find stuff like these rib-tickling (God knows I treasure Woody Allen’s Without Feathers and Getting Even — two very funny books which Lebowitz’s own unconsciously seem to want to equal, but fails), but somehow not these ones. What a tiresome bore this volume was.

The Summer of Desire

2011-11-07T17:34:00.002+08:00

I was waiting for this book forever. I can’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon it. Probably some breathless mention in some blog, or some online article about literatures dissecting desire. But Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name hooked me sight unseen, and samples of its first few pages only whetted my appetite. But I would like to think I am blessed with good friends — even people I have not even met — and one of them is the Filipino-American writer Veronica Montes, who read my tweets about my wanting, like a huge chasm of hunger, to have this book. “I have this book,” she tweeted back. “I’ll send it to you as soon as I find it.” Was that four or five months ago? I don’t exactly remember now — but I knew it was coming. And when it did, about four days ago, I pounced on Aciman’s love story and finished it within the next six hours, from midnight till the bright hours of dawn. And all I can say is: How can someone know me so much, enough to tell my own story? What strange alchemy did Aciman master to give a thorough mapping out of desire and love and time and the games we play in the name of carnal attraction so profound it borders on the spiritual? For his story, about a 17-year-old boy named Elio who falls for the 23-year-old scholar on a six-week summer fellowship in his father’s Italian Riviera home, is muscular, lovely, sexy, and lyrical about its explorations of its themes without once resorting to cheap sentimentalism. This book is a love letter to love, and I am a better man — so much understanding now of my own self — for having read it.

Going Through 1001 Films You Must Watch Before You Die

2011-10-30T00:40:00.000+08:00

[UPDATED MONTHLY]

You must attribute this list to summer boredom or to the impending certainty of 2012, but I've listed down below the films checklisted by Steven Jay Schneider in his book 1001 Films You Must Watch Before You Die (2003), and I have decided to devote time in the foreseeable future to see the titles on this list ... before I die.

I like this list. And like any list, it necessarily leaves out personal favorites ("The Lion King" but no "Little Mermaid"?), and takes in too many things I suspect to be the result of editorial bias (there's too much Paul Verhoeven here than is necessary). But I like this list nonetheless, because it is generous with what it includes and becomes a virtual cineast feast. It includes celebrated short films and not just full-length features, and strange experimental films (it has Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's "Meshes in the Afternoon"!), and strange independent films (it has Ken Jacob's "Blonde Cobra"!), and strange horror films (it has Dario Argento's "Suspiria"!), and strange documentaries (it has Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb"!), and avant-garde or risque films you don't think will make such a list (it has Kenneth Anger's very gay "Scorpio Rising"!), and films representative of major world cinemas (it even has Lino Brocka's "Manila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag"!).

I must take note, however, I've been watching movies my whole life -- and studying them as well -- and so there are titles here that feel like I've seen them, but I'm not exactly so sure of the fact, simply because their legend has made them so familiar my memory now plays tricks on me. So then I've decided to check only those titles I'm really sure I've seen.

I've seen 430 out of 1001 so far culled from the 2003 edition.

So, how many films have you seen from this list?

☑ A Trip to the Moon (Georges Melies, 1902)
☑ The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)
☑ The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)
☐ Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)
☑ Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916)
☑ The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919)
☐ Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919)
☐ Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920)
☐ Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920)
☐ The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)
☐ Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921)
☐ The Smiling Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac, 1922)
☐ Dr. Mabuse, Parts 1 and 2 (Fritz Lang, 1922)
☑ Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)
☑ Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
☐ Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1923)
☐ Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922)
☐ Our Hospitality (John G. Blystone, 1923)
☐ La Roue [The Wheel] (Abel Gance, 1923)
☐ The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)
☑ Strike (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1924)
☐ Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
☐ Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)
☐ The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924)
☐ Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925)
☐ The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925)
☑ The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)
☑ The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)
☐ The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925)
☑ Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
☐ Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
☐ The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1927)
☐ The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)
☐ October (Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1927)
☑ The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927)
☐ Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927)
☐ The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde, 1927)
☐ The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)
☐ The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)
☑ Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928)
☑ The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
☐ Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Charles Reisner, 1928)
☐ Potomok Chingis-Khana [Storm Over Asia] (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928)
☐ Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)
☑ The Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
☐ Pandora's Box (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929)
☐ The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
☐ L'Age D'Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)
☐ Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)
☐ Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930)
☐ All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)
☐ À Nous la Liberté [Freedom For Us] (René Clair, 1931)
☐ Le Million (René Clair, 1931)
☐ Tabu (F.W. Murnau, 1931)
☐ Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)
☑ Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)
☑ City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
☐ The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)
☐ M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
☐ La Chienne [The Bitch] (Jean Renoir, 1931)
☐ Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)
☐ Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932)
☐ Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)
☐ I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)
☐ Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
☐ Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, 1932)
☐ Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)
☐ Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)
☐ Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)
☐ Zero de Conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933)
☐ 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)
☐ Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)
☐ Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)
☐ She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933)
☐ Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
☐ Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)
☐ Land Without Bread (Luis Buñuel, 1933)
☐ King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)
☐ The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1933)
☐ Sons of the Desert (William A. Seiter, 1933)
☐ It's a Gift (Norman Z. McLeod, 1934)
☑ Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1934)
☐ L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
☐ The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)
☐ Judge Priest (John Ford, 1934)
☑ It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)
☐ The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)
☐ Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935)
☐ Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935)
☐ A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935)
☐ The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
☑ Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)
☐ Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)
☐ A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)
☑ Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
☐ Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936)
☐ My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936)
☐ Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936)
☐ Camille (George Cukor, 1936)
☐ Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936)
☐ Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)
☐ Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)
☐ The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, 1936)
☐ Captains Courageous (Victor Fleming, 1937)
☐ Song at Midnight (Weibang Ma-Xu, 1937)
☐ Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
☑ Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)
☑ The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, 1937)
☐ Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
☑ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (William Cottrell and David Hand, 1937)
☐ The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937)
☐ Pepe le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)
☐ Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938)
☐ The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938)
☐ Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938)
☑ Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938)
☐ The Baker's Wife (Marcel Pagnol, 1938)
☐ Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
☐ Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
☐ The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
☐ Babes in Arms (Busby Berkeley, 1939)
☑ Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)
☑ The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
☐ Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939)
☐ Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)
☑ Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
☐ Le Jour Se Lève [Daybreak] (Marcel Carné, 1939)
☐ Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939)
☐ Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)
☐ La Règle du Jeu [The Rules of the Game] (Jean Renoir, 1939)
☐ Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939)
☐ His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
☑ Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
☑ Fantasia (James Algar and Samuel Armstrong, 1940)
☑ The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
☐ The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)
☐ Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)
☑ Pinocchio (Norman Ferguson and T. Hee, 1940)
☐ The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, 1940)
☐ The Bank Dick (Edward F. Cline, 1940)
☑ Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
☐ The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
☐ The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)
☑ The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
☐ Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)
☑ Dumbo (Samuel Armstrong and Norman Ferguson, 1941)
☐ High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941)
☐ Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)
☑ How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)
☐ The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)
☐ Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)
☑ Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
☐ To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
☐ Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
☑ The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
☐ Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
☐ Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943)
☐ Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings, 1943)
☐ The Man in Grey (Leslie Arliss, 1943)
☐ The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
☐ I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
☐ The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)
☐ The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943)
☐ Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)
☐ Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943)
☑ Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
☐ To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)
☐ Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
☑ Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)
☐ Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944)
☐ Ivan the Terrible, Parts One and Two (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1944)
☑ Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
☐ Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)
☐ The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston and Mark W. Clark, 1945)
☑ Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)
☑ Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)
☐ Les Enfants du Paradis [The Children of Paradise] (Marcel Carné, 1945)
☐ Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
☐ The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)
☐ Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)
☐ I Know Where I'm Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945)
☐ The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
☐ Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1946)
☐ Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
☐ The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)
☐ My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
☐ The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946)
☐ Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
☐ The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
☐ The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
☐ A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
☐ Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946)
☑ Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
☐ Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
☑ It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
☐ Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946)
☑ Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)
☐ Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
☑ The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
☐ Odd Man Out (Carol Reed, 1947)
☑ The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
☐ Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)
☐ Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1948)
☐ Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)
☐ Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948)
☑ Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)
☑ Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)
☐ The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak, 1948)
☐ The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1948)
☐ The Paleface (Norman Z. McLeod, 1948)
☑ The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
☐ The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)
☐ Louisiana Story (Robert J. Flaherty, 1948)
☐ The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)
☐ Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
☐ Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)
☑ Adam's Rib (George Cukor, 1949)
☐ Whiskey Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)
☐ White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)
☐ The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949)
☐ The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
☑ On the Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949)
☐ Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1949)
☐ The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)
☑ Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
☐ Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)
☐ Rio Grande (John Ford, 1950)
☑ All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
☑ Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
☐ Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950)
☐ In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
☐ The Big Carnival [Ace in the Hole] (Billy Wilder, 1951)
☑ A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)
☑ Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)
☐ The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951)
☐ Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)
☐ The African Queen (John Huston, 1951)
☐ Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951)
☑ An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)
☐ A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)
☐ The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)
☐ The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952)
☐ Jeux Interdits [Forbidden Games] (René Clément, 1952)
☐ Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1952)
☑ Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
☐ Ikiru [To Live] (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
☐ Europa '51 [The Greatest Love] (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)
☐ The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952)
☐ The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952)
☑ High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
☐ Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
☐ Le Carrosse D'Or [The Golden Coach] (Jean Renoir, 1952)
☐ The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)
☐ The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953)
☐ The Earrings of Madame De… (Max Ophüls, 1953)
☐ From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953)
☑ Tokyo Story (Yasujirô Ozu, 1953)
☑ Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953)
☐ Le Salaire de la Peur [The Wages of Fear] (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
☐ The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953)
☐ Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
☑ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)
☐ The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)
☐ Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)
☐ Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1953)
☐ Tales of Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
☑ Shane (George Stevens, 1953)
☐ Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953)
☐ Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
☑ On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
☐ Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954)
☐ Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1954)
☐ Animal Farm (Joy Batchelor and John Halas, 1954)
☑ Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
☑ A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954)
☐ The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954)
☐ La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
☑ The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
☐ Senso [The Wanton Countess] (Luchino Visconti, 1954)
☐ Silver Lode (Allan Dwan, 1954)
☑ Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954)
☐ Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
☐ Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954)
☐ Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955)
☐ Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955)
☑ Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
☐ Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955)
☐ Les Maîtres Fous [The Mad Masters] (Jean Rouch, 1955)
☐ Giv'a 24 Eina Ona [Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer] (Thorold Dickinson, 1955)
☐ The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955)
☐ Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955)
☐ Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
☐ Bob Le Flambeur [Bob the Gambler] (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1955)
☐ Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)
☐ The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955)
☑ Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
☐ The Phenix City Story (Phil Karlson, 1955)
☐ Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)
☐ Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
☑ The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
☐ The Sins of Lola Montes (Max Ophüls, 1955)
☐ Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)
☐ The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)
☑ The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
☐ A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)
☑ Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)
☑ The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)
☑ Giant (George Stevens, 1956)
☑ All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1956)
☑ Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
☐ The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)
☐ Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
☑ High Society (Charles Walters, 1956)
☑ The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)
☑ 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)
☐ The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
☑ An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957)
☐ Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
☐ Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
☐ Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
☐ The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957)
☐ Aparajito [The Unvanquished] (Satyajit Ray, 1957)
☐ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957)
☑ The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)
☐ Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957)
☐ The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
☐ Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)
☑ Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
☐ Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958)
☑ Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
☐ Bab el Hadid [The Iron Gate/Cairo Station] (Youssef Chahine, 1958)
☑ Gigi (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
☐ The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958)
☑ Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
☐ Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)
☐ Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)
☐ Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)
☐ The Music Room (Satyajit Ray, 1958)
☑ The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
☑ North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
☑ Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
☐ Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)
☐ Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1959)
☐ Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959)
☐ Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959)
☐ Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959)
☑ The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1959)
☐ Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)
☑ Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959)
☐ Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
☑ Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
☐ Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
☐ The Hole (Frank Capra, 1959)
☑ Floating Weeds (Yasujirô Ozu, 1959)
☐ Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960)
☑ La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
☐ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960)
☐ Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)
☑ L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
☐ The Young One (Luis Buñuel, 1960)
☐ Meghe Dhaka Tara [The Cloud-Capped Star] (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960)
☐ Hanyeo [The Housemaid] (Ki-young Kim, 1960)
☑ Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
☐ Revenge of the Vampire/Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)
☑ Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)
☑ The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
☑ Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960)
☐ Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961)
☑ Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
☐ La Jetee [The Pier] (Chris Marker, 1961)
☐ One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando, 1961)
☐ Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961)
☑ Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards, 1961)
☐ La Notte [The Night] (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)
☑ Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1961)
☐ Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)
☐ The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
☐ Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1961)
☐ Chronique d'un Eté [Chronicle of a Summer] (Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, 1961)
☐ The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)
☑ West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961)
☐ Mondo Cane [A Dog's Life] (Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti, 1962)
☐ Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
☐ Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1962)
☑ El Ángel Exterminador [The Exterminating Angel] (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
☐ An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujirô Ozu, 1962)
☐ L'eclisse [The Eclipse] (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
☑ Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
☑ To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962)
☑ The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
☑ Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)
☐ O Pagador de Promessas [Keeper of Promises] (Anselmo Duarte, 1962)
☐ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
☑ What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962)
☐ Vivre sa Vie [My Life to Live] (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
☐ Heaven and Earth Magic (Harry Smith, 1962)
☑ The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
☐ The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis, 1963)
☐ Blonde Cobra (Ken Jacobs, 1963)
☐ The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1963)
☑ 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
☐ Passenger (Andrzej Munk and Witold Lesiewicz, 1963)
☐ Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
☐ Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)
☐ Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)
☐ Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)
☐ The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963)
☐ Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)
☐ Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
☐ Vidas Secas [Barren Lives] (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963)
☐ Méditerranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet and Volker Schlöndorff, 1963)
☐ Khaneh Siah Ast [The House is Black] (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)
☐ The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)
☐ An Actor's Revenge/Revenge of a Kabuki Actor (Kon Ichikawa, 1963)
☐ The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)
☑ Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964)
☑ Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)
☑ Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg] (Jacques Demy, 1964)
☑ Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)
☑ My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)
☑ Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
☑ Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
☑ A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964)
☐ Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)
☐ Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov, 1964)
☐ The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964)
☐ Before the Revolution (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964)
☐ Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964)
☐ The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
☐ Deus e O Diabo Na Terra Do Sol [Black God, White Devil] (Glauber Rocha, 1964)
☐ Onibaba [The Demon] (Kaneto Shindô, 1964)
☐ Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
☐ Obch o Na Korze [The Shop on Main Street] (Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, 1965)
☑ Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965)
☐ The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965)
☐ Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa, 1965)
☐ The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)
☑ The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965)
☐ Rękopis Znaleziony w Saragossie [The Saragossa Manuscript] (Wojciech Has, 1965)
☐ Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
☐ Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)
☑ Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
☐ Giulietta Degli Spiriti [Juliet of the Spirits] (Federico Fellini, 1965)
☐ Pierrot le Fou [Pierrot Goes Wild] (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
☐ Faster, Pussy Cat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965)
☐ Subarnarekha [The Golden River/The Golden Thread] (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965)
☐ De Man Die Zijn Haar Kort Liet Knippen [The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short] (André Delvaux, 1965)
☐ Hold Me While I'm Naked (George Kuchar, 1966)
☐ Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
☑ The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
☐ Sedmikrásky [Daisies] (Vera Chytilová, 1966)
☐ 大醉俠 [Come Drink With Me] (King Hu, 1966)
☐ Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966)
☑ Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966)
☑ Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
☐ Masculin Féminin (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)
☐ Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
☑ In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967)
☐ Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
☑ The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)
☐ Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
☐ Report (Bruce Conner, 1967)
☐ Hombre (Martin Ritt, 1967)
☑ Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)
☐ Les Demoiselles de Rochefort [The Young Girls of Rochefort] (Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, 1967)
☐ Week End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
☑ Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)
☐ Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)
☐ Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)
☐ Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)
☑ Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
☐ Csillagosok, Katonák [The Red and the White] (Miklós Jancsó, 1967)
☐ Marketa Lazarova (Frantisek Vlácil, 1967)
☑ The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967)
☐ The Fireman's Ball (Milos Forman, 1967)
☐ Terra em Transe [Earth Entranced] (Glauber Rocha, 1967)
☐ Ostře Sledované Vlaky [Closely Watched Trains] (Jiri Menzel, 1967)
☐ Vij [Spirit of Evil] (Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov, 1967)
☐ The Cow/Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1968)
☐ Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
☑ Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968)
☐ Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968)
☑ Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
☐ If… (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)
☐ Memorias del Subdesarrollo [Memories of Underdevelopment] (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)
☑ The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1968)
☐ David Holzman's Diary (Jim McBride, 1968)
☐ Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
☑ 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
☐ Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
☐ Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)
☑ Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
☑ My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
☐ Lucia (Humberto Solás, 1969)
☐ A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1969)
☑ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)
☑ Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
☐ Satyricon (Federico Fellini, 1969)
☐ Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)
☐ The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1969)
☑ Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)
☐ High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1969)
☐ In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, 1969)
☑ The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
☐ Andrei Rublev (Andrey Tarkovsky, 1969)
☐ Le Boucher [The Butcher] (Claude Chabrol, 1969)
☐ The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969)
☐ Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)
☐ Tristana (Luis Buñuel, 1970)
☐ Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
☐ El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)
☐ Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970)
☐ Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)
☐ Strategia del Ragno [The Spider's Stratagem] (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
☐ Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970)
☐ Ucho [The Ear] (Karel Kachyna, 1970)
☐ Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970)
☐ M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970)
☐ Performance (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
☐ Gimme Shelter (Albert Maysles and David Maysles, 1970)
☐ Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)
☐ The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970)
☐ The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Vittorio De Sica, 1970)
☐ Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1971)
☐ W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (Dusan Makavejev, 1971)
☑ A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
☐ The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophüls, 1971)
☑ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971)
☐ McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
☐ Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)
☑ Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971)
☐ Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
☐ Még Kér a Nép [Red Psalm] (Miklos Jancso, 1971)
☐ Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971)
☑ The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971)
☐ Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971)
☑ Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971)
☑ Le Souffle au Cœur [Murmur of the Heart] (Louis Malle, 1971)
☐ Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971)
☑ The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
☐ Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
☐ Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)
☑ The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972)
☐ Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
☑ Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)
☑ Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
☐ High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1972)
☐ Sleuth (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1972)
☑ Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)
☑ Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
☑ The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
☑ Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)
☐ Fat City (John Huston, 1972)
☑ Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie [The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie] (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
☐ Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant [The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)
☐ Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)
☑ Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972)
☐ Superfly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)
☑ The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973)
☐ La Maman et la Putain [The Mother and the Whore] (Jean Eustache, 1973)
☐ Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
☑ American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)
☐ Papillon (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)
☑ Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973)
☑ Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
☐ The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)
☑ The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
☑ La Nuit Américaine [Day for Night] (François Truffaut, 1973)
☑ Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
☑ Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973)
☐ Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973)
☑ The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
☐ Turks Fruit [Turkish Delight] (Paul Verhoeven, 1973)
☐ El Espíritu de la Colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive] (Víctor Erice, 1973)
☐ La Planète Sauvage [Fantastic Planet] (René Laloux, 1973)
☐ Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)
☐ The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1973)
☐ Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
☐ Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1974)
☑ The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
☑ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
☐ Zerkalo [The Mirror] (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
☐ A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)
☐ Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)
☑ Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
☐ Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau [Celine and Julie Go Boating] (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
☑ Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974)
☑ The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
☐ Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
☐ Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974)
☑ Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)
☑ One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
☐ Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
☑ The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)
☐ Deewaar [The Wall] (Yash Chopra, 1975)
☑ Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975)
☐ Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
☐ Faustrecht der Freiheit [Fox and His Friends] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975)
☐ India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)
☑ Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
☑ Manila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag [Manila in the Claws of Brightness] (Lino Brocka, 1975)
☑ Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)
☑ Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
☐ Cria! (Carlos Saura, 1975)
☐ O Thiassos [The Travelling Players] (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1975)
☑ Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
☐ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)
☑ Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
☐ The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)
☑ All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)
☑ Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976)
☑ Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
☑ Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)
☐ Voskhozhdeniye [The Ascent] (Larisa Shepitko, 1976)
☑ In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Ôshima, 1976)
☐ 1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)
☐ The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
☑ Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
☑ Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)
☐ The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977)
☑ Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
☐ Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Jon Jost, 1977)
☐ Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977)
☐ Człowiek z Marmuru [Man of Marble] (Andrzej Wajda, 1977)
☑ Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977)
☐ Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
☐ Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
☐ Ceddo (Ousmane Sembene, 1977)
☐ Der Amerikanische Freund [The American Friend] (Wim Wenders, 1977)
☐ The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977)
☐ Soldaat van Oranje [Soldier of Orange] (Paul Verhoeven, 1977)
☑ Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
☐ The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1978)
☐ 五毒 [Five Deadly Venoms] (Cheh Chang, 1978)
☐ L'Albero Degli Zoccoli [The Tree of Wooden Clogs] (Ermanno Olmi, 1978)
☑ The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
☑ Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)
☑ Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
☑ Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)
☐ Shaolin Master Killer/The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Chia-Liang Liu, 1978)
☐ Up in Smoke (Lou Adler, 1978)
☑ Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)
☐ The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)
☐ Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979)
☐ My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)
☐ Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
☑ Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
☐ Breaking Away (Peter Yates, 1979)
☐ Die Blechtrommel [The Tin Drum] (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)
☑ All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
☐ Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)
☑ Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979)
☑ Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979)
☑ Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
☑ The Jerk (Carl Reiner, 1979)
☐ The Muppet Movie (James Frawley, 1979)
☑ Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)
☑ Mad Max (George Miller, 1979)
☑ Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night (Werner Herzog, 1979)
☑ Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980)
☐ Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)
☐ The Last Metro (François Truffaut, 1980)
☑ The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
☑ Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
☐ The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
☐ The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, 1980)
☐ Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)
☑ Airplane! (Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, 1980)
☑ Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
☑ Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
☐ Das Boot [The Boat] (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981)
☐ Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981)
☑ Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981)
☑ Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981)
☑ Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981)
☑ An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)
☐ Tre Fratelli [Three Brothers] (Francesco Rosi, 1981)
☐ Człowiek z Zelaza [Man of Iron] (Andrzej Wajda, 1981)
☐ Trop Tôt, Trop Tard [Too Early, Too Late] (Daniele Huillet and Jean Marie Straub, 1981)
☑ Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Cameron Crowe, 1981)
☑ E.T.: The Extra-Terestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)
☑ The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
☑ Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)
☑ Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
☑ The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1982)
☑ Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
☐ Yol [The Way] (Serif Gören, 1982)
☐ Diner (Barry Levinson, 1982)
☐ Fitzcaraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)
☑ Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982)
☐ La Notte di San Lorenzo [The Night of the Shooting Stars] (Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani, 1982)
☐ De Stilte Rond Christine M. [A Question of Silence] (Marleen Gorris, 1982)
☐ Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
☑ A Christmas Story (Bob Clark, 1983)
☐ El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983)
☑ Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)
☑ Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983)
☑ The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983)
☐ Sans Soleil [Sunless] (Chris Marker, 1983)
☐ Le Dernier Combat [The Last Battle] (Luc Besson, 1983)
☐ L'Argent [Money] (Robert Bresson, 1983)
☐ Utu (Geoff Murphy, 1983)
☑ Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983)
☐ De Vierde Man [The Fourth Man] (Paul Verhoeven, 1983)
☑ The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983)
☑ The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983)
☐ Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983)
☑ Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1983)
☑ Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983)
☐ The Ballad of Narayama (Shôhei Imamura, 1983)
☑ Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984)
☑ The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984)
☑ Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)
☑ A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)
☐ This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)
☑ Beverly Hills Cop (Martin Brest, 1984)
☑ Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984)
☑ A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984)
☐ Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)
☑ The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984)
☑ The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984)
☑ The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)
☑ Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
☐ Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
☐ La Historia Oficial [The Official Story] (Luis Puenzo, 1985)
☑ Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985)
☑ The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985)
☑ Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
☐ 童年往事 [The Time to Live and the Time to Die] (Hsiao-hsien Hou, 1985)
☑ Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
☑ Kiss of the Spider Woman (Hector Babenco, 1985)
☐ The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985)
☐ Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)
☐ Prizzi's Honor (John Huston, 1985)
☐ Sans Toit ni Loi [Vagabond] (Agnès Varda, 1985)
☐ Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
☑ The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985)
☑ Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986)
☑ Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)
☑ Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
☑ Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)
☐ She's Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986)
☐ Le Déclin de L'Empire Américain [The Decline of the American Empire] (Denys Arcand, 1986)
☑ The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)
☑ Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
☑ Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986)
☐ Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)
☑ A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1986)
☑ Children of a Lesser God (Randa Haines, 1986)
☑ Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
☐ Caravaggio (Derek Jarman, 1986)
☐ Tampopo (Jûzô Itami, 1986)
☐ 刀馬旦 [Peking Opera Blues] (Hark Tsui, 1986)
☑ Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986)
☑ Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986)
☐ Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
☐ 盗马贼 [The Horse Thief] (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1986)
☐ Yeelen [Brightness] (Souleymane Cissé, 1987)
☐ Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] (Wim Wenders, 1987)
☐ Project A, Part II (Jackie Chan, 1987)
☑ Babettes Gæstebud [Babette's Feast] (Gabriel Axel, 1987)
☑ Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987)
☑ Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
☑ Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
☑ Good Morning, Vietnam (Barry Levinson, 1987)
☑ Au Revoir Les Enfants [Goodbye, Children] (Louis Malle, 1987)
☑ Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)
☐ Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987)
☑ The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)
☑ Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987)
☑ The Untouchables (Brian De Palma, 1987)
☐ 红高粱 [Red Sorghum] (Yimou Zhang, 1987)
☑ The Dead (John Huston, 1987)
☑ Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987)
☐ 倩女幽魂 [A Chinese Ghost Story] (Siu-Tung Ching, 1987)
☑ Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown] (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)
☑ Spoorloos [The Vanishing] (George Sluizer, 1988)
☑ Bull Durham (Ron Shelton, 1988)
☐ Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988)
☐ The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988)
☑ Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988)
☑ Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
☐ Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls, 1988)
☑ A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, 1988)
☑ The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (David Zucker, 1988)
☑ Big (Penny Marshall, 1988)
☑ Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988)
☑ Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988)
☐ Topio Stin Omichli [Landscape in the Mist] (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1988)
☑ Dekalog [The Decalogue] (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1988)
☑ Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
☐ Une Histoire de Vent [A Tale of the Wind] (Joris Ivens, 1988)
☑ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)
☑ Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988)
☐ Une Affaire de Femmes [The Story of Women] (Claude Chabrol, 1988)
☑ The Accidental Tourist (Lawrence Kasdan, 1988)
☑ Alice (Woody Allen, 1988)
☑ Batman (Tim Burton, 1989)
☑ When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989)
☑ Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989)
☐ The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989)
☑ Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989)
☑ My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989)
☑ 喋血雙雄 [The Killer] (John Woo, 1989)
☑ Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
☑ Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989)
☑ Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989)
☐ Astenicheskiy Sindrom [The Asthenic Syndrome] (Kira Muratova, 1989)
☑ sex, lies and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989)
☑ Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989)
☐ The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)
☐ 悲情城市 [A City of Sadness] (Hsiao-hsien Hou, 1989)
☐ S'en Fout la Mort [No Fear, No Die] (Claire Denis, 1990)
☑ Reversal of Fortune (Barbet Schroeder, 1990)
☑ Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
☐ Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990)
☐ King of New York (Abel Ferrara, 1990)
☑ Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990)
☑ Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1990)
☑ Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990)
☐ Archangel (Guy Maddin, 1990)
☐ Trust (Hal Hartley, 1990)
☐ Nema-ye Nazdik [Close-Up] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
☑ Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990)
☐ Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1990)
☑ Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)
☑ 黃飛鴻 [Once Upon a Time in China] (Hark Tsui, 1991)
☑ Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)
☑ 大红灯笼高高挂 [Raise the Red Lantern] (Yimou Zhang, 1991)
☐ Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)
☐ 牯嶺街少年殺人事件 [A Brighter Summer Day] (Edward Yang, 1991)
☐ Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991)
☐ La Belle Noiseuse [The Beautiful Troublemaker] (Jacques Rivette, 1991)
☑ The Rapture (Michael Tolkin, 1991)
☑ My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)
☑ Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)
☑ Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)
☑ The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
☑ JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991)
☑ Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991)
☐ Tongues Untied (Marlon T. Riggs, 1991)
☑ Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, 1991)
☑ The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
☑ Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992)
☑ The Player (Robert Altman, 1992)
☑ Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)
☐ Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)
☑ Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)
☑ Unforgiven (Cint Eastwood, 1992)
☑ Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
☑ Candy Man (Bernard Rose, 1992)
☐ A Tale of Winter (Eric Rohmer, 1992)
☑ Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, 1992)
☑ The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)
☐ C'est Arrivé Près de Chez Vous [Man Bites Dog] (Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel, 1992)
☐ The Actress (Stanley Kwan, 1992)
☑ 霸王別姬 [Farewell My Concubine] (Chen Kaige, 1993)
☑ Thirty-Two Films about Glenn Gould (François Girard, 1993)
☑ Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
☑ Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993)
☑ Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993)
☑ Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
☑ The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)
☐ 戲夢人生 [The Puppetmaster] (Hsiao-hsien Hou, 1993)
☑ Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
☑ Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)
☑ The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)
☐ 蓝风筝 [The Blue Kite] ( Zhuangzhuang Tian, 1993)
☑ 喜宴 [The Wedding Banquet] (Ang Lee, 1993)
☑ Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994)
☐ Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
☑ Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)
☑ Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994)
☑ Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994)
☑ The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994)
☐ Satantango [Satan's Tango] (Béla Tarr, 1994)
☑ Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)
☑ The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994)
☑ Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
☑ The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)
☑ Les Roseaux Sauvages [Wild Reeds] (André Téchiné, 1994)
☑ 重庆森林 [Chungking Express] (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)
☑ Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994)
☑ Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)
☐ Zire Darakhatan Zeyton [Through the Olive Trees] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)
☐ Riget [The Kingdom] (Lars Von Trier, 1994)
☐ Caro Diario [Dear Diary] (Nanni Moretti, 1994)
☑ Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995)
☐ Deseret (James Benning, 1995)
☑ Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995)
☑ Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)
☑ Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)
☑ Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)
☑ Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
☑ Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995)
☑ Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
☐ Zero Kelvin (Hans Petter Moland, 1995)
☑ Seven (David Fincher, 1995)
☑ Smoke (Wayne Wang, 1995)
☑ Badkonake Sefid [The White Balloon] (Jafar Panahi, 1995)
☐ Cyclo (Anh Hung Tran, 1995)
☐ Podzemlje [Underground] (Emir Kusturica, 1995)
☐ Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge [The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride] (Aditya Chopra, 1995)
☐ Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
☑ The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995)
☑ The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway, 1996)
☐ Trois Vies et Une Seule Mort [Three Lives and Only One Death] (Raoul Ruiz, 1996)
☑ Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)
☑ Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996)
☑ Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996)
☐ Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier, 1996)
☑ The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996)
☐ Gabbeh (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)
☐ Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)
☑ Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)
☑ Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)
☑ Deconstructing Harry (Woody Allen, 1997)
☑ L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
☑ Happy Together (Wong Kar Wai, 1997)
☑ Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)
☐ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (Errol Morris, 1997)
☐ The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997)
☑ The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)
☑ Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
☑ Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997)
☑ The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)
☐ Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)
☐ Ta'm-e Gīlās [Taste of Cherry] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
☑ Abre Los Ojos [Open Your Eyes] (Alejandro Amenábar, 1997)
☐ Mat i Syn [Mother and Son] (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)
☑ Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)
☐ Tetsuo [The Iron Man] (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)
☐ Festen [The Celebration] (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)
☑ Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)
☐ Buffalo 66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998)
☑ Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998)
☐ Lola Rennt [Run Lola Run] (Tom Tykwer, 1998)
☑ Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
☑ Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998)
☑ Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998)
☑ The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)
☐ Idioterne [The Idiots] (Lars Von Trier, 1998)
☐ Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux, 1998)
☑ Ringu [Ring] (Hideo Nakata, 1998)
☑ There's Something About Mary (Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly, 1998)
☑ Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
☐ Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
☑ The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
☐ Gohatto [Taboo] (Nagisa Ôshima, 1999)
☐ Rosetta (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 1999)
☑ Todo Sobre Mi Madre [All About My Mother] (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
☑ Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)
☐ Bād Mā Rā Khāhad Bord [The Wind Will Carry Us] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
☑ Ōdishon [Audition] (Takashi Miike, 1999)
☐ Le Temps Retrouvé [Time Regained] (Raoul Ruiz, 1999)
☑ Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
☑ Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
☑ American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)
☐ Juyuso Seubgyuksageun [Attack the Gas Station!] (Sang-Jin Kim, 1999)
☑ Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
☑ The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
☑ The Matrix (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999)
☐ Nueve Reinas [Nine Queens] (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000)
☐ La Captive [The Captive] (Chantal Akerman, 2000)
☑ In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
☐ Ali Zaoua, Prince de la Rue [Ali Zaoua, Prince of the Streets] (Nabil Ayouch, 2000)
☑ Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
☐ Kippur (Amos Gitai, 2000)
☐ Yi Yi [A One and a Two] (Edward Yang, 2000)
☑ Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)
☑ Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000)
☑ Meet the Parents (Jay Roach, 2000)
☐ Signs & Wonders (Jonathan Nossiter, 2000)
☑ Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
☑ Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000)
☐ The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
☐ Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
☐ Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000)
☑ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen, 2000)
☑ Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
☐ Ni Neibian Jidian [What Time Is It There?] (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
☑ Y Tu Mamá También [And Your Mother, Too] (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
☐ Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001)
☑ Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
☑ La Pianiste [The Piano Teacher] (Michael Haneke, 2001)
☐ La Stanza del Figlio [The Son's Room] (Nanni Moretti, 2001)
☑ Ničija Zemlja [No Man's Land] (Danis Tanovic, 2001)
☑ Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
☑ Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2001)
☑ Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
☑ Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
☑ The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
☑ The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)
☑ A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
☑ Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002)
☑ The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
☑ Hable Con Ella [Talk to Her] (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
☑ Cidade de Deus [City of God] (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)
☑ Russkij Kovcheg [Russian Ark] (Alexandr Sokurov, 2002)
☑ Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002)
☑ Les Invasions Barbares [The Barbarian Invasions] (Denys Arcand, 2003)
☑ Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)

Note on the last update (30 October 2011): Been having some progress, although not as much as I want it to be...

Postcard From the Quagmire

2011-10-25T12:03:00.003+08:00

I don’t remember much of the past two or three weeks, except that it was a busy time, and I was under much stress trying to crunch out the grades for my classes in the college term that just ended. It is always a time shrouded in conjectures, missed connections, sweat, and desperate silences; one comes out of it like a patient from a coma would. Of course, many teachers will tell you that they love their job with the passion of a martyr but that the only thing excruciating about it is the grading period.

What can I say? It is a kind of hell no sane person will wish on anyone. The lack of sleep, the endless punching of the calculator keys, the attention to detail demanded, the will to withstand (with humor, if that can be conjured) the student papers that swim in muddled thinking, and even more muddled grammar. (That is, if one does not die seething from the obvious and clumsy borrowings from the Internet. The blatant display of intellectual dishonesty can shrivel the hardiest spirit. Copy-pasting 101, and all that.)

All I remember now of that recent time is feeling like a disembodied thing, a specter almost. I felt myself outside my own body, although I also felt, at the same time, the compounded pains of stress that afflict the physical—the aching back, the bloodshot eyes, the headachy brain, the acidic stomach from too much coffee ingested.

Which is why I still cannot understand how I was able to finish Albert Camus’ The Stranger in one go at the height of one stressful morning. I was already grinding away for close to twelve hours overnight, and outside my window I could see the daylight hours seeping into the quiet of my apartment. I was tired. The work was still unfinished.

And on my way to bed hoping to catch some shut-eye, I felt my hands going over my bookshelves and I felt myself taking out Camus’ book. I felt myself noting that it was a slim book. Something fell out of its pages. I found myself looking at an old boat ticket—transit from Tagbilaran to Dumaguete—from 1999. I found myself sleepily musing over the fact that the last time I tried reading this book was more than a decade ago.

Tired, narcoleptic, I climbed into bed with that volume in hand, and proceeded to read the strange story of a curiously detached man in French Algeria, who fails to feel anything for a newly dead mother, and finally fails to comprehend the justice meted him for what seems like a senseless act of a murder that he has committed. He goes through each day like one dispossessed of care would: detached from all sort of emotional wrangling except the logic of the action required of him at the present. This is supposed to be our hero—an existential one, of course, someone who finally rails against a world who misunderstands him.

Which was also a kind of uncanny serendipity because there were two other instances last week where the word “existential” suddenly just sprang up around me: first, during dinner with an older friend, who took to rationalizing facts in his personal life to his embrace of “existentialism”; and second, during accidental coffee time with a former student who started off with a philosophical rant about how existentialism and relativism are virtually meaningless.

(Was it also serendipity that I would also be reading another book at the same time—The Fundamentals of Play, Caitlin Macy’s Generation X/ Whit Stillman-ish retread of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—where the existential hero proclaims an affinity with Camus’ detached protagonist? Was it also serendipity that I would also be reading still another book at the same time, which is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, his first novel, where the young protagonist is an egoist much in the same vein as the hero of the two other books, only more dapper, a bright young thing from the gilded 1920s? Why am I reading several books at the same time that seem to inform each other in ways I did not foresee? What is the universe telling me? And the universe answered right back: “You are reading too many books when you should be asleep.”)

It was around noontime when I finally put Camus’ tome down, finished. I don’t know how I managed it, or why I even did it. I was quite dog-tired by then, and spent the rest of the day sleeping like the very spectacle of anesthesia. I didn’t dream. Not even of Algerian sands and sensational murders and French prisons and detached young men of strange persuasions. Perhaps, and only perhaps, I only managed to think of one man in my life of similar detachment as Camus’s protagonist. And how sad it all suddenly seemed, but also how heroic in ways only a few can understand.

But one could not care less anymore. One only cared for sleeping, for real, with what hours were left. And then one wakes up.

Boys During the War

2011-10-14T21:51:00.001+08:00

The thing about playing catch-up with old films is that you have more than just a suspicion that everything has always been said about them, and that any utterance from your part is at best an echo with a more contemporary ring to it. But still an echo. The weight of an immense tradition of opinion is an immense one.

What else can I say about Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants [1987] and Lacombe Lucien [1974] that have not already been said? Critics such as Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert have given us thorough evaluations of these films.

And so I am left only to share my personal experience with them. I only stumbled onto these titles the past few nights, in my aimless excursion through my library of films -- most of which remain unseen, given the demands adult life has on one's hours. I've done Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales earlier in the week, and so I thought it best to follow that up with some of Malle's films. I remember planning to watch Au Revoir and Lacombe a few years ago, promising to do so "as soon as time permitted."

Ah, the lies we tell ourselves.

Yesterday, during an unplanned lull, I knew I had no such time to spare at all, and so I promptly pressed the play button of the DVD player. And thank God for such impulsiveness, because these two films absolutely proved devastating for me. At the end of Au Revoir, I surprised myself by breaking into tears -- something I have not done since ... what? Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies [1988]? I knew I had to find it within myself the reason why the films touched me so.

Although filmmed more than a decade apart from each other, these two titles seem like twin bills in Malle's filmmography involving childhood and the loss of innocence during the Second World War. Lacombe, for me, was more a disturbing psychological study of the banality of evil, and the film gave me a rise in the way it was calculated to do -- its subtle scenes involving Lucien's gradual fall to evil and the expressionless banality he seems to project in his comprehension (or miscomprehension?) of the process proved to me more chilling than any horror film. Kael has written once that the film was all about the actor Pierre Blaise's face -- inscrutable, like a blank slate that contains an undefinable malevolence. That the film -- about a young French boy who unwittingly becomes a collaborator in Nazi-occupied France -- also manages to make us see Lucien's humanity is, I think, a triumph in Malle's skills as one of cinema's giants.

But Au Revoir, also a film about how the war can rob children of their innocence, is something a little different. It is not sentimental or melodramatic. It is just a well-observed tale about two boys who come to a tentative friendship in a boarding school ran by priests, chronicling the heedless joys and tumbles of boyhood, until war's ugly head comes crashing in and it is slowly revealed that one of the two friends have a secret that needed urgent keeping. How wrenching this film is. How gloriously poignant and subtle about its dealings with betrayal, with heroism, with the loss of innocence and the beginnings of immortal sadness. But I think I teared up because the film dared to present to us that betrayal often comes easy for all of us, even with the best of people, given a context that systematically dehumanizes us. There are no saints in this film -- not even the priest whose fiery homily about doing the utmost to save those who are less fortunate ends with a devastating scene where he withholds a boy's communion simply because the boy is not Catholic, even if the act can in fact help preserve him and keep his secret. But the film does not condemn, at least not by much. Anybody who will not come to tears at the end of Au Revoir -- with that final farewell, with that deadpan voice-over narration by Malle himself, and with that long, steady shot of Julien's face as the last of his innocence comes crumbling down -- has to go ahead and grow a heart. Ebert once wrote that at the end of one screening of the film, Malle broke down and said to him, "This film is my story. Now it is told at last." And you can indeed feel the personal heartstrings in this wonderful film, so intense it is it can hold you breathless and bothered.

The Name of Hunger

2011-10-14T14:11:00.000+08:00

There is no need for sunsets

When that wavering light, red and dark,

Spins webs tactile like sorrow,

A name for your own darkening hours.

In Celebration of Round Pegs in Square Holes

2011-10-06T18:02:00.003+08:00

As I write this, the news is pouring in and tributes are flying everywhere about the passing of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and visionary behind Apple. It wasn’t exactly news that surprised many of us. We had known of his battle with pancreatic cancer for the longest time, and the evidence of the ravages that the illness wrought could be seen in Mr. Job’s gaunt, emaciated look of late. A few months ago, he stepped down as CEO of Apple. And we knew the day would soon come. And it did. But it didn’t make it any less painful.

Truth to tell, I am myself surprised by the level of grief I have found myself indulging in. I have never been an ardent Steve Jobs fan—my friend JB Lim is, and aside from the fact that he owns virtually every gadget Apple has produced of late (JB also used to be the man behind the Genius Bar of Dumaguete’s iStore), he goes around his every day life in signature black wardrobe inspired by the man.

But I am always, always saddened when visionaries and people of distinguished talent pass away, and most often in the prime of their lives. Because these people contribute so much to the world, and yet they die too soon, I think. Pero si Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile—the architect of the Martial Law and a powerful lawmaker whose latest antics in the Senate (the masturbation brouhaha, for example) could be grounds for speculation on his verging towards senile dementia—bakit buhay pa? Of course, Billy Idol once said that “the good die young,” and such may be the irony of life, which I cannot be bothered with trying to understand.

I must admit there was a profound sadness in the way I greeted my day when I woke to this news this morning. Perhaps no one can understand this level of grief unless one has been touched by the kind of technological lifestyle Apple has given to hipsters, creatives, and forward-thinking people this past decade. For many of us, there is a demarcation between a certain past and then the moment when the magic of Apple’s humanized technology touched us. Once you go Mac, so they say, you can’t go back. I write this article, for example, on a MacBook while listening to a movie score by Michael Giacchino for a Pixar film from my iPod. Mac, Pixar, and the iPod. That’s three instances, all at once, with which Jobs can lay claim to an influence on the way I live.

And yet beyond all these marks of influence, it is Mr. Job’s template of having forged unlikely success in a culture of low-minded thinking that captures my imagination. A hipster to the core—his enduring philosophy advises us to “stay hungry, [and to] stay foolish,” something he got from The Whole Earth Catalog from the hippie culture of the 1960s—his success can be traced to a singular drive to strip everything down to a marriage of technology and design informed by taste, which he knew could not be gleaned from the overpowering marketing notion that the consumer is king. From the New York Times tribute to him, John Markoff writes: “When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: ‘None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.’”

And to this, I say, Thank you very much. This is something that ABS-CBN and other panderers of the quick-profit philosophy of common taste can learn, if they want to stay relevant in the long run. The antithesis to Steve Jobs would be this masa culture awash in Willie Revillame, the Transformers movies, the Kardashians and reality TV shows of their ilk, FoxNews, the Twilight novels, StarCinema’s No Other Woman, and others of their kind, which follow undying formula and get rewarded by the masa for the comfortable conformity they champion—but do not push human civilization any further at all. Why do you think StarCinema gives us the same kind of movies every single time? Because every single frame has been market-researched to death, destined to give what the consumer wants, and all for profit.

What change the world are often people with vision and drive. These are people who don’t follow rules, who could care less for the status quo, who are often unpopular. Or if not unpopular, these are people who rock the boat and send shivers down the spine of people who only have eyes for the bottom-line. I am reminded of Oprah Winfrey when she decided to chuck the template of daytime talk popularized by Phil Donahue back in the day. These are shows, not unlike Jerry Springer’s, glorifying in trashy topics, which does bring in eyeballs and the eventual ratings and dollars. But no, Oprah said; she wanted to do a show that specialized in “elevating the human spirit”—and that must have made the television moneymen cringe then. Who profits from goody-goody daytime television? But guess who has the last laugh.

Of all things that I want to remember most about Steve Jobs, it is this quote: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Think about this. Men and women who have broken the rules have shaped world history. Give me a conformist or a rule-follower who has impacted history, and you will most likely draw a blank. Jesus? He angered the religious authorities of his day, which led to his crucifixion. Gandhi? His unquiet revolution of “passive resistance” molded a nation, and cost him his life. Mother Teresa? She abandoned first world comfort to take care of India’s unwanted—not a career shift anybody “practical” would wish for anybody.

Today we live in a world that forces—or even shames us—to conform, to abide by the strict rules, to surrender to hierarchy instead of merit, to give up the pursuit of creative thinking in favor of “the practical.” I get reprimanded for eschewing these reminders all the time; sometimes they even call this “arrogance.” But I don’t mind. I know who I am.

It takes guts to be a Steve Jobs. But if you have the guts, and you have the courage to follow the promise of your potential, you can change the world in your own small ways. Mr. Jobs said it best: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Farewell, Mr. Jobs. And thank you very much.

The Long Goodbye

2011-09-30T01:31:00.003+08:00

François Ozon's Le Temps Qui Reste [Time to Leave, 2005] is a beautiful film about learning to accept life even as one learns to accept certain death. In it, Melville Poupaud delivers a bravura performance -- which goes from cocky to douchebaggy to affected to frail but triumphant -- as a gay photographer who discovers he has terminal cancer, refuses chemotherapy, quits his job, and proceeds to alienate his family and dump his lover. And then somehow, from the unquiet emotional dreck he puts himself in, he finds his humanity. I make it sound melodramatic. It's not. This is an Ozon film after all, and this prolific fimmaker has never ever been melodramatic. He could be sly and perverted and comedic, but never melodramatic, not even in the fantastic Swimming Pool [2003]. But this is an Ozon film that seems most straitlaced and emotionally raw, even as it tries to haul in the sentimentality with a restraint that shows. Nevertheless. That last sequence on the beach as Poupaid's Romain sees the sunset for the last time is a masterwork of empathy. A painful film to watch, but oh so beautiful.

The Dangers of Comfort, The Theater of Dinner Conversation

2011-09-29T22:51:00.004+08:00

And I don’t mean the pedestrian gossip that slakes over our dinner tables most of these days—although that, too, has its own perverted pleasures. The thrill of finding frail humanity among our kind. Schadenfreude as drama.

“Did you know so-and-so and so-and-so got together over the weekend?”

“Seriously? But what about so-and-so? Aren’t they living together?”

“Well, a little birdie told me that so-and-so has done this-and-that.”

“Oh. Em. Gee.”

Not that.

What I mean is dinner conversation of the illuminating kind—not about politics or religion, those two deadly bores. But about the place of humanity in the scheme of the universe, in philosophy—leavened, of course, by anecdotes from personal experience. Imagine a conversation about art, a painting or sculpture or what-not a friend of yours have seen in a museum which has touched him, which has given him fodder for thought. Imagine that friend as an impresario of talk. Over a three-course meal, pushed by the sweet intoxication of red wine, you hear him give a dramatic musing of what he has seen. You are both surrounded by kindred spirits, and the talk becomes organic, more philosophical, a little bit tipsy from the wine. There are affirmations, counter-arguments, jokes and laughter, more illuminating anecdotes. You leave that dinner table knowing you have learned a little bit more about the nature of humanity. You become, at least for a few hours during and after that dinner, a better human being—because you have partaken of a strange communion, a mix of food and words and friends.

I find myself in rare instances of this in Dumaguete. When the chance presents itself—usually in the delightful company of Dessa Quesada-Palm, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, Esther Windler, Cecilia Hoffman, Annabelle Lee-Adriano, Laurie Raymundo, Margaret Helen Udarbe, Betty McCann, Moses Joshua Atega, Patrick Chua, Myrish Antonio-Cadapan, Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio, Leo Mamicpic, Ben Malayang III and his wife Gladys, Myrna Pena-Reyes, Tata and Simon Stack, John Stevenson, and assorted artists/friends from Manila and elsewhere who would join us—I grab it, and I prepare for a night of scintillating talk, knowing it is good for the soul, and for the mind.

I thought as much when I saw the filmed dinner conversation between André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, playing versions of themselves in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André [1981]. This film, hailed as a unique cinematic experiment and is considered one of the best films to come out of the 1980s, is ripe with witticism, philosophical musings, and provocative thoughts, but this one strain of dialogue between the two struck me the most:

ANDRE: I mean, if you don't have that electric blanket, and your apartment is cold, and you need to put on another blanket or go into the closet and pile up coats on top of the blanket you have, well then you know it's cold. And that sets up a link of things: you have compassion for the p-- ... well, is the person next to you cold? Are there other people in the world who are cold? What a cold night! I like the cold, my God, I never realized, I don't want a blanket, it's fun being cold, I can snuggle up against you even more because it's cold! All sorts of things occur to you. Turn on that electric blanket and it's like taking a tranquilizer, it's like being lobotomized by watching television. I think you enter the dream world again. I mean, what does it do to us, Wally, living in an environment where something as massive as the seasons or winter or cold don't in any way affect us? I mean, we're animals after all. I mean, what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the sky and the stars we're living in a fantasy world of our own making.

WALLY: Yeah, but I mean, I would never give up my electric blanket, André. I mean, because New York is cold in the winter, I mean, our apartment is cold. It's a difficult environment! I mean, our lives are tough enough as it is, I'm not looking for ways to get rid of the few things that provide relief and comfort, I mean, on the contrary! I'm looking for more comfort, because the world is very abrasive, I mean, I'm trying to protect myself, because really there are these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look.

ANDRE: Yeah, but Wally, don't you see that comfort can be dangerous? I mean, you like to be comfortable and I like to be comfortable, too. But comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility. I mean, my mother knew a woman, Lady Hatfield, who was one of the richest women in the world, and she died of starvation because all she would eat was chicken. I mean, she just liked chicken, Wally, and that was all she would eat, and actually, her body was starving but she didn't know it 'cause she was quite happy eating her chicken and so, she finally died! See, I honestly believe that we're all like Lady Hatfield now, we're having a lovely, comfortable time with our electric blankets and our chicken, and meanwhile we're starving because we're so cut off from contact with reality that we're not getting any real sustenance. 'Cause we don't see the world. We don't see ourselves. We don't see how our actions affect other people.

[The transcript of the film can be read here.]

End scene.

The dangers of comfort. That made me take pause. Because I have been thinking about this for some days now. And there it was, the whole notion of it, discussed at length in one of the best films of all time. And I have just stumbled on it, like the “omens” they talk about in the film. Is this film my own form of Wally’s fortune cookie?

A few days ago, I posted this status update in my Facebook wall: “I don’t know what the Universe is trying to tell me these days, but I’m willing to listen.” The things is, I have been out-of-sorts lately, bombarded by tiny problems with magnificent wings which I can’t talk about to anybody, trying to make sense out of ... something. I had no idea what was bothering me, but I have been feeling odd. Strangely sad, feeling blue. And so I popped in this film like I have always promised myself I would. And I’m glad I did.

And what a beautiful film it is. When it ended, I just stared and stared off into space as the end titles rolled over Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, and I was thinking about the things they were talking about: theater, domesticity, the imprisonment of comfort, how life must be lived when one realizes how we have forgotten to connect... I think this is one film one should watch when one turns 36 (Wallace’s age when this was made). I’m 36 now, and I love the film because I feel it now, more thoroughly, because of having have lived. Because the questions it asks are things I have come to know through all those years. I wouldn’t have gotten this film when I was 21.

Amy Taubin in the Criterion website captures exactly what I felt upon finishing: “And then the dinner is over. Nothing is concluded—not for Wally or André, and certainly not for the audience. But on the way home, Wally is surprised to find that something has changed in the way he attends to the city as he sees it from the taxi window. And that slight shift in consciousness is what André ... would have applauded. And we might do the same as the image fades to black.”

The film finally reminds me that I need to have dinner with my good people again. Because you need these little events of gab to go beyond the vapidity of everyday life, the drone of television, the mindless cares of zombies around you. A dinner conversation is a small strike against the electric blanket of life. It is rare when the right talk chemistry sparks, and so when it happens, one has to be of mind to cherish it.

The Threshold of Age

2011-09-22T02:16:00.002+08:00

I have a thirtysomething's fear of growing old: the threshold is coming nearer, yet one still feels incredibly young in a body increasingly betraying itself. Old men have the pleasure of having succumbed to age. Young men have the bliss of ignorance, that exquisite blind faith that old age can never happen to them. The man in his thirties, alas, lives in a constant state of terror and denial.

Charming Devils

2011-09-15T17:59:00.004+08:00

You know what they say about experience, right? That you learn from it? If that is the case, I'd be foolish then not to learn from this realization: charming people -- incredibly polite, outwardly gentle -- are the spawns of the devil. I still hope to find myself in the wrong here, but I'm talking from experience. How many times have I been surprised to find that the many charming people I've come to know are, in private, capable of unfathomable nastiness that borders almost on evil? There's this one guy I used to know who's quite lovable, he charms the hell out of you with such careless pa-cuteness. In private, however, I know him as someone who can carry hours of hateful litany about every person he knows, his paranoia deep, his neurosis almost psychotic. And then he goes out the door brightening like the very sunshine itself. I know many others, seemingly harmless, always soft-spoken, even polite to a fault -- and then you discover in them that wellspring of darkness.

What's up with that?

Then again, let's consider the long list of people who have been described as charismatic, they mesmerize you in their presence: Charles Manson. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Muamar Gaddafi. Adolf Hitler. Lucifer.

Fear charming people. They seduce your soul, in order to eat it.

I Know That Man

2011-09-13T19:46:00.004+08:00

I still feel for that man who mourned. Looking at him, from this distance defined by time, I can see that his heart was so big. So big, I understand why he felt it needed filling. I can understand why he thought he had found the very thing to fill it -- there was lightness, there was laughter, there were the silly promises of kisses, all things we mistake for love. I understand the dark days, where they come from. I understand the swift belief in madness: it was the only available kind of logic. Or so it seemed. I understand. And I understand the mourning, most of all. He mourned for the longest time, that man I see. I can come closer now, see how he deflected all that with rehearsed nonchalance; he wanted the world to know nothing; and so it knew nothing. But his eyes. Look at his eyes. There's a language there that's a cross between deadness and a scream. I see him. Somehow I know though that he knew I'd be here, my own eyes keen on retrospection, a little more grounded, removed beyond mere increments from knowledge of pain. How do I know? Because I look at him now, and he stares straight at me with that tiny dark glow of knowledge. He does not "see" me of course, not from behind that glaze of what should be falling tears -- oh, but he would not cry, that man, not that common drama. Everything surged beneath, all quiet rage, that searching hollowness that screamed, those unanswered questions streaming through his head that began with "Why?" and ended only with echoes, that bitter prayer that demanded a definition of love and loving and was answered only with a certainty of loss. I know that man. But I do not pity him. He would weather all that, I know. I know.

Confounding Fables

2011-09-13T02:00:00.000+08:00

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s สัตว์ประหลาด [Tropical Malady, 2004] divided audiences when it premiered in Cannes more than half a decade ago — and understandably so. It is a confounding experience. The film is the story of two characters (a soldier and a country boy) who inhabit two different worlds and two different storylines in the same film, each one starkly different from the other in narrative and tone — and yet we are asked to regard both halves as organic to each other. And yet one can make the argument for the film’s simplicity. The first half is a simple love story about two men in coy courtship, and the second half is a simple fable about a soldier lost in the forest, placed under a spell by a shape-shifting shaman. And then you, the viewer, read what you can of it. A poetic Rorschach test done in cinematic form, if you ask me. I am not bothered by my confoundment, my logical reach for “What does it all mean?” In its depiction of rural Thai life, in its rumination of a brewing love, in its love affair with fable, in its unspooling of quiet tension in a dark forest tinged with magic, I find enough to be happy about, meaning be damned.

An Accidental John Waters Freak Show, Without John Waters' Wit

2011-09-13T01:55:00.002+08:00

Australian director Ed Aldridge’s Tan Lines [2007] is just the kind of ineptness in filmmaking that gets under your skin simply because this is just the type of film you want to root for but it does every single infuriating thing to shake your very faith in cinema. It is, in other words, a subtly hateful, confused mess of a film that does not know whether it wants to be a surfer film, an angst-ridden coming-of-age film, a gay love story, a social commentary on small lives barely hanging on, a psychedelic fantasia with strange animated sequences of Catholic saints talking, or a John Waters film filled with unbearable, out-of-place grotesques. Don’t take all that in. To understand this kind of confoundment is unworthy of any effort. And yet, at its core, Tan Lines is a simple story about a gangly teenage boy named Midget Hollows (played with deadpan coyness mingled with naivete by a winning Jack Baxter, who alas cannot save this film) who lives in a seaside Australian town and dreams of getting out, to “see the world and shit.” He has reasons to. He is poor and lives in a cramped apartment and shares the same bed with his mother (always seen sleeping, covered with a blanket, with only her long manicured nails to signal there’s life under that slothfulness). His best friend and the rest of their friends are content with an endless cycle of nothingness, surfing, longboarding, and partying. And then Cass, his best friend’s older brother, arrives — a gay boy who ran away from home four years ago. Midget soon finds himself attracted to Cass — but don’t let this development fool you into thinking this will be a film about self-discovery, forbidden love, growing up, or the triumph of friendship through acceptance. It is none of that. It meanders instead into strange anecdotes about freaky adults — there’s a sinister older woman with a penchant for formal tea parties complete with a session of cunnilingus for her niece; there’s a band of elderly couples playing a kind of drunken stripping game after midnight in public; there’s an older female duo out for regular morning exercise complete with conversations running the gamut of sexual hijinks… The whole film seems an indictment against adulthood, and yet it is not heroic of the young either: the older folk are crazy, but the young are aimless zombies with zero ambition, and if they’re not, they’re wont to indulge in manipulation or violence. And yet one continues to root for a semblance of logic, or humanity, in this film — and that may be because beholding Mr. Baxter in such a waste of a role can’t seem possible. But in the end, he is truly wasted, and one ultimately has to throw up one’s hands and proclaim the entire film unwatchable. The acting of the entire supporting cast is worse than horrendous, the script is written on soiled tissue paper, the editing is non-existent, the cinematography is atrocious, the direction is aimless. A similar story, minus the freak show, can be found in Jonah Markowitz’s Shelter [2007]. Forget this one, and find redemption in that one instead.

Serious People.

2011-09-11T22:59:00.002+08:00

Emoting with SPIT Manila. Because we can.

From left, clockwise. Diomar Abrio, Ian Rosales Casocot, Hallona Ember, Linwell Bongcasan, Earnest Hope Tinambacan, Maliksi Zaragoza, Dingdong Rosales, Hendri Go, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Ariel Diccion, Gabe Mercado, Happy Ferraren, Kenneth Keng, Akong Bongcaras, and Aryn Cristobal.

[Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, 10 September 2011. Photo by Darrell Bryan Rosales.]

A Quick Appraisal of a City on the Verge

2011-09-11T21:38:00.005+08:00

The thing about Dumaguete is this: it is so small that all kinds of drama here collide. The personal and the grand spectacles of the world play out before your eyes, each touching the other in the way of a caress. Last Monday, for example, was it only by chance that I decided to have dinner at the new digs of El Amigo—the pesto steak is to die for, by the way—and while the great Filipino poetesses Merlie Alunan and Myrna Peña-Reyes were in the next table spending a quiet evening together with some friends (oh, to be a fly on the wall for that conversation), I had to spend time with two beautiful young friends—former students, actually—dealing with the matters of their romance, about which they have come to me for some advice? (I have no idea why young people come to me for love advice. Is it because I am a veteran from that endless battle?)

And it came to me, slowly at first, that this was how Dumaguete plays out its dramas. The small and the grand converge—the simmering quiet of our city streets is a sweet deception. All the world’s a stage, and its name is Dumaguete. The Palanca-winning poet Mikael Co, visiting Dumaguete over the weekend, said as much. Which was why he felt the need to come back after having been a summer writing fellow here years ago. “I tried to book a flight for Mom Edith’s funeral,” he said, “but it was impossible to get a single plane seat.” All the world’s coming to Dumaguete a lot these days, it seems. That Monday, for lunch, we both had joined Philippine Star columnist and poet Krip Yuson who came to visit the grave of the National Artist for Literature, and with him were the Singaporean writer Kirpal Singh and Dumaguete’s first daughter of literature, Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas. Over the spare ribs and the maya-maya, our conversations mingled and stirred right onto the walls of KRI, kissing the newly-mounted paintings of Hersley Ven Casero.

Later, I would get a message to join Presidential Spokesperson Edwin Lacierda for a media get-together on Tuesday night at Casablanca. There I would meet, for the first time, Manuel L. Quezon III—a longtime online friend. “Let’s have dinner tomorrow,” Manolo tells me. I said yes: “I know just a perfect place.” Of course, his Wednesday would be busy—the President of the Philippines was coming after all, and they were part of the advance party. I would shake President Noynoy Aquino’s hand the very next day during his onsite inspection of the Sy Family’s IT Park near St. Paul’s, on that lot which used to have the haunted Circular House, now gone. (Ah, the horror stories that have been subsequently razed by that very act of disappearance.) While waiting for his helicopter to land in the nearby airport, we went crazy over Ritchie Armogenia’s brownies, and we pondered the coming change in the landscape of this part of town.

And it came to me that Dumaguete is slowly changing before our very eyes. The landscape, the cityscape is changing—and we have been merrily blind to its subtle evolutions, surprised only once in a while by the sight of a shiny new building where once a dilapidated sari-sari store stood. “It’s changing, you just don’t know that it is,” Manolo told me the next night after dinner, while we strolled the Boulevard and I was giving him a quick historical tour of Dumaguete essentials—Silliman Hall, the sugar houses, why there were concrete nuns on the Boulevard, the significance of the palm trees and the acacia trees growing on the Boulevard’s grassy island. I pointed out the spots where the houses that Rizal stayed in once stood. I invoked the old tale of where we got the nickname of “city of gentle people,” although I was quick to point out it’s all hearsay. “There are no historical records of Rizal ever uttering this impression of the place,” I say.

And it came to me that I love this city after all—even with its smallness, with all its pettiness and pain, its generous memory of heartbreaks, the knowledge that the place can be a comfortable prison. But it is one-of-a-kind, and very much so. The other day, I wrote on my Facebook wall: “Welcome to Dumaguete. Where the country’s best writers gather every May for the National Writers Workshop, and the country’s best singers and songwriters gather every November for the Elements Singing and Songwriting Camp. I’m very proud of this city. (And once we get the planned annual film festival going...) Imagine the cultural possibilities. I do hope City Hall recognizes what untapped potential this cultural gold mine has in the long term...” More than fifty people immediately responded with a “like”—an avalanche of agreement over this blessing of a place.

The sociologist Lorna Peña-Reyes Makil tells me: "When we first came to Dumaguete in 1950, we felt we had found home. Twenty years later, in Honolulu for graduate studies, my heart longed for home. And from 1980 to 2002 during my sojourn in Manila, I dreamed of always coming back. Friends could not understand this—until they visited me these past years and were captivated. [But] yes, the rapid change we have now is overwhelming."

Here’s my former student Julienne Fortuna and her own take about the place on her own Facebook wall, with a very recent post: “I need to visit Dumaguete. I need to get away from the chaotic jungle that is Metro Manila and immerse myself in the simple and laidback Dumaguete life. I can already imagine myself walking around Silliman, eating in Neva’s or Habhaban, riding on former crushes’ motorcycles, snorkeling in Apo Island, and hanging out with friends at the Boulevard. After all, I’m one proud transplanted Dumagueteno.”

And then former Weekly Sillimanian editor-in-chief Camille Celeste Go replied: “We’ve come a long way from hating Dumaguete because of how boring it is (compared to Davao), to loving it beyond words. I miss Duma-life too.” Then Julienne posts this rejoinder: “It’s funny how we non-Dumaguetenos initially hated Dumaguete for, well, being the small city that it is. I’m sure most—if not all—of us complained to our parents about sending us there to study instead of Manila or Cebu. But after living there for four years or more, we’ve just grown to appreciate it for what it is and we all found it difficult to leave. I cried so hard about leaving twice: after graduation and when I decided not to enroll in SU Law. The irony gyud. Haaay, Dumaguete and its charm. Guidagit jud ‘tang tanan.”

Manolo, too, told me: “I’m coming back.” And later, over text before his flight back to Manila: “I’m sad to be going!”

And there you go. Gui-dagit.

[Photos by Hersley Ven Casero]

Where Were You Ten Years Ago Today?

2011-09-11T19:46:00.006+08:00

It's true what they say. You never forget where you were when you know your life first changed. Late afternoon of September 11, 2011. Halfway around the world, morning just started. It was a beautiful day. It promised to be a beautiful night. I had just come back from an early dinner with some friends, among them Patrick Chua and Moses Joshua Atega. We were still in a hangover from the monthlong centennial celebrations of Silliman University, and only two days ago, we had just bid farewell to my brother Rey, who was bound back to the United States after spending August at home. That late afternoon, we all went to Cafe Tropini, the bar in Why Not? that would soon become an extension of Le Chalet. We proceeded to order beer. Everybody, we soon noted, was watching the television with profound eagerness, perhaps even excitement -- that avalanche of ambiguous feelings one feels when confronted with the unbelievable.

"What's happening?" one of us asked.

A Caucasian guy drinking beer answered: "The goddamn Twin Towers. A plane just hit one of them."

Another Caucasian guy, drunk and dismissive, answered him, "The goddamn Twin Towers are in San Francisco. This is the World Trade Center."

We didn't care for their exchange. We just looked at the images that flashed before us, and I knew the world has changed. And suddenly, I could not fathom what exactly was in store for all of us in the coming decade. What would change?

Everything changed.

We hurried home.

* * *

I remember visiting Ground Zero in New York last November. I was on my own, going around on foot in lower Manhattan, eager to see what I could of the city before flying back home to the Philippines. I decided to go to Ground Zero.

From the observatory, I could see the grounds in a furor of so much activity. In the midst of the heavy construction machinery, one couldn't help but think, "So much life lost." And for those who witnessed the horror, our own lives over a decade were inevitably reconfigured. Who didn't change? Nobody.

We are all children of 9/11.

Remembering Mom Edith

2011-08-29T20:27:00.003+08:00

I have always wondered why people called National Artist for Literature Dr. Edith Lopez Tiempo “Mom Edith,” always with this measure of intimate familiarity that seems reserved for someone who is more than just a mentor. I was 20 years old when I first met her. I was a campus writer who wrote for the student paper in Silliman University—where she had taught for many years—and in 2000, I was told to apply for the National Writers Workshop.

I was told this was the oldest writing workshop in Asia, founded by her and her husband, the late Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo. I was also told that this workshop has produced many of the best writers in contemporary Philippine literature. When I went in that fateful Monday in the Dragon Room of the College Assurance Plan building in May 2000, I saw them all around that Mount Olympus at the center of the workshop room—Gemino H. Abad, Alfred Yuson, Marjorie Evasco, Susan Lara, DM Reyes, the late Ophelia Dimalanta, Anthony Tan, Jaime An Lim, Ernesto Superal Yee, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Bobby Villasis—and they all looked … normal. They were inexplicably down-to-earth, these gods of literature. They made it easy for me, the intimidated initiate, with my first brush with the highest literary circle of the Philippines.

But Mom Edith was special. She was affectionate, but she was also exactling. She took my juvenile short stories I submitted for that workshop—two of them of controversial graphic nature only a young man with the predictable fetish for shock can write—and she critiqued them with the fine comb and gusto of the best formalist, the standards of the most demanding teacher, and the compassion of a mother. I think she knew that I was—that we were—there to learn, and so, like all the greatest teachers in the world, she poured all knowledge of writing magic she could give and made it sound clear, reachable, if exacting. I first became a better writer because of her. If writing is my life, then I owe much of that life to her. She led the way, she opened the door further, she made writing matter. And often, when you visit her in her house in Montemar, she gives all that with an extra measure of tender loving, complete with mango ice cream and cake.

How then can you not call someone like that “Mom”?

Years later, I too would be publishing my own works. Since 2000, I’ve always made it a point to go to her office in CAP, and later on in her house in Sibulan, where we would sit together for hours—just the two of us—and she would tell me her stories of her girlhood in Nueva Vizcaya, her short stint as a movie actress for Sampaguita Pictures, her fateful correspondence and then courtship with the man from Leyte, her move to Dumaguete, her stay in the hills of Valencia during the Second World War, her stories of Iowa, her children’s stories which she hoped would in the future be compiled into a book. I found all these fascinating, and she delighted in the telling. I must have seemed to have hungered for more, and she must have known this, because later on, in her scrawled dedication to me in her book An Edith Tiempo Reader, she wrote: “For Ian, who likes to hear stories, not just to write them! Mom E.”

And besides the usual care for creative writing, what I have also learned from her is to never forget the people in your life. She never forgot anyone—even in her later years. Anyone could come up to her and say, expecting non-recognition: “Mom, do you remember me? I’m so-and-so. I was in the [place any year here] workshop.” And she would brighten up and say, “Welcome home, son!” or “Welcome back, my dearest!”—and then proceed to recite a line or two of your own poetry, or an image she remembered from your story. She was that amazing.

Years later, when I too would have my turn of going to Iowa as a writer, I almost thought of it as coming home. It was where she blossomed as a writer, and my own sojourn there seemed like a perfect salute to her dedication to us all.

Last Sunday, when I received the call that she was being revived in the emergency room of the Silliman Medical Center, I dropped whatever it was I was doing—and rushed, like a crazed man, to her side. I was five minutes too late. She was gone. But as I helped cover her body with the hospital sheet and brushed back her hair and held her hand which was still warm, I grieved.

All of Philippine literature grieved with me—and we have been grieving many days now. Because it is such deep pain to lose a mother. As a former fellow of the workshop posted only last Monday in our Facebook page: “We have been orphaned.” And that was the simplest truth. We have been orphaned of someone who kept deep faith in our being writers, who knew each one of us and each one of our names like we were always her children.

Goodbye, Mom Edith. All that you were—your fantastic life and your deepest measure of love—are things which you ran and breathlessly handed over to us, your children. And for that, we give our heartfelt thanks.

A Frightful Day

2011-08-09T12:49:00.000+08:00

The world is scary today. The stock markets are plunging, the riots are breaking out, the Catholibans are beating their chests in small victories, and Imelda Marcos has become the ultimate arbiter for what's "good and beautiful." Is it safe to go outside?

Abandoned Rooms

2011-07-29T11:52:00.002+08:00

There are rooms in our houses that we shutter away for some reason. We lock the doors, we forget these spaces exist. And then comes a time -- some point in a future without definition -- when something in you feels a small need to reclaim them, and you do so little by little. Each small act becomes absolution: you open the door, and in that inch of space you make, you let the light and the air in. You go in. You remember the ghosts that live in these rooms, but they don't touch you anymore. You sweep away the cobwebs when you can, when you're ready.

Haven is a Coffee Place

2011-07-25T00:06:00.004+08:00

Part 4 of a series on Dumaguete food

There is a painted poster somewhere near the north entrance of Café Antonio that makes me smile every time I go there for my almost daily caffeine fix. There’s a coffee cup, and a swirling caption says: “Given enough coffee, I can rule the world.”

I always grin like there’s no tomorrow when I see it—because it smacks to me as a kind of hyperbolic truth, give or take a few palpitations. (Coffee rules! and all that. The caffeine freaks among us, and there are legions, can attest to this.) But the theme of world domination is not something you get as a given when you’re around the comforts of Café Antonio. This is a place I come to often, to relax, to feel or to imagine the increasing stress of Dumaguete life fade away. It is a haven.

There is something about the place that speaks to me. That it borrows its charms on the general architectural motif of its building, The Spanish Heritage, does not take away anything from it: in fact, if you ask me about it, the café itself has become the building’s heart. Is it the rustic mix of brick and wood? The carefully placed Spanish-inspired finish, with the gilded edges and the baroque tone? Is it the displays of scooters and musical instruments scattered about? In the air-conditioned confines—separated with walls of glass from the al fresco veranda with its colored-glass windows, its Tifanny-inspired overheard lamps, and its wooden swings—the round tables with their wrought-iron chairs are always filled with a mix of the city’s people—the occasional office folk on their lunch break, the casual Caucasian tourist looking for a quiet place to read a book, the city’s photographers who seem to find in this café an excuse for a headquarters, and the hordes of laptop-armed students deep into their books. It can get crowded sometimes, this place—but when it is quiet it becomes a cocoon. When I think of Café Antonio, I think of a good combination of café latte or fraps and also deep comfort, a refuge. This is where I go to when I want to hide from the world without really hiding from it.

One can’t help but marvel at the change of fortunes for this café, which opened many years ago and struggled for a while to find footing in what was then a largely nonexistent café culture in Dumaguete. There were constant menu changes over the years that reflected a kind of confusion in the kitchen. Then the coffee-and-cigarette crowd (which is the café society—the vocal, usually artistic types who would give the retort, “What? No cigarette over my brewed barako? Are you nuts?”) shunned it for so long for its insistence on banning smoking from the premises. It was, and still is, a beautiful place to come to now and then, but places do develop a magical pull, resistant to formula or earnest effort, that guarantees regular foot traffic and word-of-mouth patronage. For the longest time, it didn’t have that.

And then something happened. Café Antonio, for some reason, suddenly became cool.

What happened? I don’t know much about this café and its efforts at evolution (I’ve started coming back to it only the past year or so), but one can bet on the efforts of the two brothers who run the place, Rochris and Rayvin Piñero, two young men who seem to have the pulse on what the city and its coffee people want—and increasingly a feel for what the rest of everyone else wants. It takes perseverance, one can guess. And also a sense for just making people happy. As Rochris once told me, “Café Antonio is about good food and good coffee, and building relationships. Food should make us happy, feel happy.”

The idea of a café sprang from something a family friend, Dixon Peralta, was mulling over. “He offered the opportunity to start a coffee shop business in the city,” Rochris said. “We started out as a coffee shop, and only that—but eventually we decided to evolve into a coffee shop and restaurant.” And increasingly, it is the food of the place that has people coming back. Among its bestsellers—and what now constitute the signature dishes of Café Antonio—are the grilled pork ribs glazed in hickory sauce, the Cheezy Pork—strips of meat rendered in cheese cream sauce, and herb-marinated lamb steak. And then there is Jamaican grilled pork chop, tenderly marinated in herbs and spices. I can swear by the Jamaican chops: it is meat that overwhelms with a distinct herby flavor, earthy and spicy at the same time. What you now have is a whole new experiment in food, all of the entrees given certain explosive twists—the onion soup with bread and cheese, the garlic shrimp salad, the seafood paella, the grilled squid, the pasta marinara, the pesto pasta with tomato sauce, the pimiento basilica, the carbonara, and the tantalizingly sinful French toast with the caramelized banana (the mango slivers hidden in the bread was a touch of genius). The Fricadel burger with mushroom, one must say, is an experience.

The new menu is courtesy of Chef Eugene Gueverra from Cebu who whisked in, and stayed with the Piñeros for the entire month of April this year, and concocted a definitive change in the menu, and standardized the café’s process. “It was difficult because I am not a chef nor was I trained anywhere,” Rochris said. “Balancing finances and creating a product and service that satisfies the customer is a challenge.”

And then there are the Music Nights, randomly scheduled but increasingly popular. The streams of the café’s now-devoted patrons go through its glass doors unceasingly due in some part to an experiment in music the brothers have hatched. “We love music,” Rochris said, “and Music Night basically started out as an open mic night. And then slowly the members of what now constitutes our regular band got to know each other, with our regular singers Sela Saga, Alex Quilantang, and Reicha Piñero. Our plan is to make café Antonio a haven for aspiring artist, and to provide an avenue in which they could express themselves.”

Music Night is a monthly jamming among its young regulars, which started with a very successful The Beatles Night that had everybody singing “Hey, Jude” by the end. And then it continued on with some other themed nights, including the Apo Hiking Society Night, complete with Buboy Garovillo in the audience. (A Dumagueteño, Mr. Garovillo quickly obliged with everybody’s fevered expectations by singing one song with the band.)

That night, after the APO songs have been played and sung, it was time once more for open mic—and then somebody sang a fevered rendition of “Quando, Quando, Quando,” and transfixed us all with this discovery of a new voice—alluring, confident, graceful. Who was he? But it didn’t matter. He took the song and made it his own, above our familiar memories of Frank Sinatra and Michael Buble. We all turned to him, and knew this was it: how talent can be so divine it can turn any place into a sudden venue for worship. And so, on my own or with a bunch of people all singing, Café Antonio has become what it has become: a place of such comfort, anybody here can burst out into song.

All photography by Urich Calumpang

All That Longing

2011-07-16T19:55:00.004+08:00

The Thais know something about longing. They capture it well on film. The mad surging, the illusion of nobility in denial, the perfect -- if short-lived -- happiness of catching a glance, a smile, or a touch from the beloved. Which is to say I have finally managed to catch Puttipong Pormsaka Na-Sakonnakorn and Wasin Pokpong's สิ่งเล็กเล็ก ที่เรียกว่า..รัก [A Little Thing Called Love, 2010] ... egged on by the sheer popularity of the film among girls (and women) around me who are normally of the even-keeled sort but have been reduced to hysterics by the Tagalog-dubbed version of this film which aired in a network TV station a few months back.

Watching it, I understand the passion of the fans. It is certainly not a perfect film -- everywhere in its narrative, we encounter awkward bumps telling of a inferior acting or directorial or writing choice -- but the film wears its charm lightly and with frank resoluteness, it is hard not to like it. Heck, it is hard not to fall in love with it. Heck, it is hard not to feel the painful longing of Nam (played by Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon, who is the spitting image of Kim Chiu, without the malnourished look) as she gazes into the eyes of Shone (played by Mario Maurer), her object of desire, someone she has fallen for since the beginning of high school and has remained somehow removed from her efforts, this despite the frantic tips she gets from a booklet that promises nine sure-fire methods gleaned from cultures all over the world to get the man of her dreams. [And in that regard, we completely agree with her obsession: Mario Maurer has it in spades, and is perhaps this generation's Asian answer to Alain Delon.]

Truth be told, this is the StarCinema romcom I have always wanted to watch, if only Cathy Garcia-Molina or Olivia Lamasan had enough imagination to get away from the gutter thinking of assembly-line cinema and actually strive enough to create something whimsical like this, or at least to put an original spin on the same old formula. (There is a reason why Jessica Zafra insists that all StarCinema romantic comedies are all virtual remakes of Notting Hill, that 1999 Roger Michell film starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.) Consider that the film is essentially told from one point-of-view, that of Nam's, and her teenage desires are what drives the film and its heart -- and yet what proves wrenching is the twist in the end that subverts our own idea of who actually does all that work in longing, something reminiscent of the kissing film clips near the end of the original version of Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso [1988]. The revelation had naked emotional power that had me reeling. But also like that beloved Italian film, this Thai romance also ends with a coda that goes on too long, made of course to give our protagonists their happily ever after -- but feels too calculated to be truthful. (Consider the sudden swell of music at the end of Shone's final sentence.)

But nonetheless. This is a film that knows very well the music of every lovelorn person's heart. It speaks gently of that unbearable, sweet longing -- and if only for that, it is very much welcome to enter the hidden pantheon of our guilty film favorites.

The Gusto of Presko

2011-07-15T20:22:00.005+08:00

Part 2 of a series on Dumaguete food

Nobody remembers—except perhaps those who have a penchant for nostalgia and have seen Dumaguete evolve over the years—that Lab-as used to be a “floating” restaurant. And not in the spot where it is now. A few meters away, in fact, where Barefoot Bistro is presently. The old al fresco ensemble of coco lumber and wood and nipa, with a running veranda belted around it to set the rustic tone, sat on a man-made pond, a moat really, which was seeded with fish, oyster, and crab. The effect was both visual delight, and source of fresh catch that can directly to the nearby grill and on to the plate of hungry gourmet.

It has been more than twenty years since Lab-as (the Cebuano word for “fresh catch,” or more tellingly, a “freshness of flavor”) was founded on that old spot in 1988. “Back then,” writes Vicente Fuentes of his family’s lasting contribution to Dumaguete’s culinary culture, “the vogue in the dining fare in and around [the city] was either … Chinese or Spanish … with a sprinkling of European and native dishes in some resorts and restaurants… It was thus a bold step for Lab-as to venture into seafood, in a location that was even regarded as a ‘no-no’ in business practice. [We are] situated quite a distance away from the heart of [town], where the convenience of walk-in customers—like shoppers and businessmen of the downtown commercial district—was a built-in come-on.”

The spot, near the crossroads of Escaño Boulevard and Flores Avenue, overlooking Tañon Strait, was—at least in the late 1980s—a kind of no man’s land in Dumaguete: it bordered the shanties of nearby Lo-oc, and at night, it turned into a desert of quiet darkness. It existed in a metaphorical version of the doldrums, the way places in a small city can be, unmeasured by actual standards of distance. Things have changed since then, with Escaño becoming the city’s current throbbing heart of all things you could call the night life. Lab-as might as well be the germ of that transformation. Without the Fuenteses, would life stir in Flores Avenue the way it does now? Probably not.

It was a gamble—and it paid off handsomely. And yet it was a risk that was also founded on one sure thing: there was, and still is, a visionary sumptuousness in Lab-as’ fare. They had food—fresh, delectable—you had to keep coming back to. It was worthy of repeated word-of-mouth appraisals—and it is exactly that kind of enthusiastic response from diners over all these years that has sustained the restaurant. And yet, in the beginning, all that Mr. Fuentes wanted was to create something new for Dumaguete, to offer something new for its collective palate. He writes: “We tried to ride the growing tide in health consciousness sweeping the country, to veer away from food rich in cholesterol and animal fats. We conceived of an idea of freshness in seafood, [not only as a healthy alternative but also as something truly appetizing and satisfying.] When seafood, like grilled fish or steamed crabs or oysters and prawns, are eaten al mano—or kamayan style—the satisfaction is doubled.”

Consider the bestsellers in this restaurant.

There’s the talaba, always a succulent experience, which comes in cheese, basil, garlic, or sibuyas dahon. Taken with wasabi, each bite becomes a whole buffet in one swallow. “We prepare them raw with kalamansi or sinamak na suka,” says Vicente’s son Sande, who is Lab-as’ current conjurer, or at least an ambassador, of culinary witchcraft. “They live off from our aqua tanks to purge them before we serve them to customers. They are grilled and then steamed with sinamak, which is native coconut vinegar with garlic ginger, sili, and peppercorns. And then we have them baked with garlic basil and cheese.” The secret to the delectability is that they try to keep the oysters alive—“and it is a challenge now to get big plump ones,” admits Sande, “because Bais is also now supplying restaurants in Cebu and San Carlos.”

You go next with the crispy shrimp, seasoned in kalamansi, salt, pepper, and garlic and then dusted with corn starch; the whole ensemble is then deep-fried quickly, so that the shrimps’ shell becomes crispy but the juiciness of the meat remains, locked in. It comes served—all in delectable crunchiness—with bagoong, tomato, and sibuyas, and the whole thing is best eaten from head to tail, each bite dipped in sinamak with crushed sili.

The halaan or punao clear soup is a favorite starter among diners. The dish primarily consists of fresh clams sautéed in garlic and ginger. Added to the mix are onions, tomatoes, and atsal or red pepper in a clear soup, which is topped with sili espada and sibuyas dahon before it is served. It becomes for many an instant taste of home, something comforting and “makakalma.” Paired with grilled seafood, it becomes almost a complete meal, and also becomes a great match for Filipino guilt-inducing cholesterol-laden favorites like crispy pata or grilled pork belly; the halaan clear soup perfectly counters the oil of these dishes.

The fat chili crabs—sautéed with onions, garlic, and a generous helping of milled pepper, and then served with a dash of tomato sauce (plus Lab-as’ secret hot sauce formula) and a serving of garlic rice—is an invitation to finger licking. It is another one of Lab-as’ favorites. “We keep the crabs alive, ready for the cooking,” says Sande, “and then we have them steamed, then deep fried with a lot of garlic and guinataan....”

There are three grilled dishes in the Lab-as menu that I keep coming back to. The first is the panga of the blue marlin or malasugi, always grilled to perfection, the tenderness of the meat mingling with a smoky flavor that is arresting. The flavors are subtle, bursting only in the back of your tongue.

The second is the sinuglaw, which is my ready favorite in the menu. It is essentially a Dumagueteño version of binakhaw: fresh tangigue cut into cubes, mixed with slices of onions, ginger, and atsal, and then with biasing (a relative of kaffir lime, fresh from Camiguin) thrown in with a measure of fresh coconut milk (“No mayonnaise, please,” Sande says), native coco suka and salt, finally topped with sibuyas dahon and some crushed sili. The final ingredient is sugbang baboy or pork chop hot off the grill, the meat succulently chopped and layered on top of the binakhaw. The contrast in taste and color is a feast for the senses.

Finally, there is the popular Dumaguete Express—Lab-as’ take on the Bicol Express, but something that is inspired by the cuisine of Camiguin—complete with slivered flesh of botong, fish, squid, and shrimp, cooked in coconut milk with malunggay, ginger, and onion, and then topped with lechon kawali. “It is a complete meal,” says Sande, “and it has somehow become a favorite of backpackers…”

That mention of backpackers is testament to Lab-as’ growing popularity, not just among locals, but among traveling gourmets from all over the country, and even the world. Many food critics have proclaimed Lab-as’ menu as something that has perfected a taste for the native—which is enviable because it is a menu arrived at only with the strength of one man’s culinary philosophy. Vicente Fuentes was not a chef, just a food enthusiast who knew what “freshness” was all about. “What we have,” Sande says, “are our trusted kusineras—our manangs who have been with us through the years. We have two chief cooks, Manang Carmen and Manang Tasing, who have been loyal to us since 1988. It is quite a team we have, with five other cooks and what we call as the ‘talaba boys’ and the ‘grill boys.’”

What Lab-as has is a menu that may stick to classic favorites, their quality consistent and unchanging, but is also something that evolves over time with inspiration taken from travels, including surfing and diving, that the Fuentes family does, as well as with their unceasing food trips in karinderias in Bohol, Siargao, and Camiguin. What inspires them in these jaunts across the islands trickles down to variations in the menu, with perhaps a new dish or two to keep the culinary adventure going. And so we keep coming back to Lab-as—and one soon realizes that the beauty of Lab-as food is that it is basically the most basic of home-cooking, but taken to a level that approaches sumptuousness, the detail rich, the taste made more distinct and tantalizing.

It is hard work. “Most important in our menus is a consideration of consistent quality and the availability of seafood, like our tuna panga and belly,” Sande says. “I’m very happy, as of the moment, with their quality. Our supplier exports to Europe. They’re local, too, straight from the seas off Bayawan and Sta. Catalina. There is less travel time when I get my stock of lapu-lapu, maya-maya, and others. Presko gyud.”

Presko. That singular word. Twenty years later, it is a culinary philosophy that has proven to be of the lasting kind. [To be continued...]

[Photography by Greg Morales. Food styling by Arlene Delloso-Uypitching. Coordinated by Moses Joshua Atega. Thanks to Sande Fuentes for the food adventure...]

A Primer for Table-Hopping in Dumaguete

2011-07-15T19:45:00.006+08:00

Part 1 of a series on Dumaguete food

Every time a traveler comes to Negros Oriental, I am always asked the same two things, the first being an inquiry about the local delicacy, some edible pasalubong to take home. That has become a kind of touristic expectation—Cebu with its lechon and chicharon, for example, or Bohol with its kalamay and peanut kisses.

Such query used to vex me. What do we exactly eat in Negros Oriental that is worthy of culinary tourism?

Jutsz Cafe doubles as a space for the city's artists

Over time, it has become easy to answer. My roots being Bayawan, a small city in the southern part of the island looking out towards Sulu Sea, I am ready to pronounce the gustatory delights of baye-baye, a kind of sweet cake made of sticky rice and coconut—and thinking of it now brings on a surfeit of childhood memories. I’m imagining the burst of sticky sweetness that explodes on the tongue, and the way the paste lolls around the mouth.

Then there’s Tanjay’s budbud named after itself or Dumaguete's budbud kabog—the two towns' version of puto bungbung, really. (Alas, why it’s named after the local species of bat is beyond me.)

In Dumaguete, the easy answer has come to be the silvanas from Sans Rival, that quaint cake house near the Rizal Boulevard that has found a solid way to make this frozen delicacy of a pastry last a plane ride by coming in pasalubong variety: its powdery shell is made extra hard, which preserves the quick-melting creamy heaven inside.

The second query, still about food, has nothing to do with pasalubongs, but everything to do with the matter of solving any current pangs of hunger. If one is a stranger to Dumaguete, where do you exactly go that would also define a sense of place? To eat where the locals gather is, in a sense, getting to know well the stirrings of every day life as it exists in this peculiar spot of geography. This one goes beyond considerations of fast food. You do not go to another place to have Jollibee.

But if “definition of a place” must be a criterion, you could always start with this one kind of fast food popular in the city: the “tempura,” a flour-coated something (definitely not shrimp—but it sure does taste a little like it), which is an unhealthy mix of MSG and deep-frying oil. But locals do gravitate towards the tempurahan, how we call this spot at the head of the stretch of paseo, at the corner fronting old Sillliman Hall, which is the city’s picturesque Rizal Boulevard. At night, the place turns into a haven for moon-seekers, its acacia-lined stretch overlooking the dark currents of Tañon Strait lit orange by lights emanating from Corinthian lampposts that dot it. Many years ago, a city mayor once thought of doing away with the “tempura” vendors, their makeshift chairs and colorful beach umbrellas considered an “eyesore” in the midst of the Boulevard’s Spanish/American feel. And then the New York Times, in its travel article about Dumaguete, splashed images of the tempurahan in its pages. It became an instant curiosity of a place, a tourist spot. The order was withdrawn, and so the tempurahan stands where it is until now, gentrified a little bit, the vendors now in uniform. (The tempura is also available with hot sauce, and coupled with a bottle of Coke, it becomes a kind of feast. One has been known to devour fifteen pieces of it in one sitting.)

Dumaguete, for some reason, is in a culinary renaissance of some sort. It is a small revolution, but it sizzles still.

Why a revolution? Consider this. There used to be a time when dining out was a perennial problem in Dumaguete. Essentially a big town with small city airs, it was a place where nobody went out for dinner—and if they did, it was mostly a family affair that was quick, usually undistinguished, lacking the pizzazz of experience the way a place with a culture of dining out has. Which is why, for the longest time, what can be said to sum up a typical Dumaguete dining experience is the outdoor grill. Jo’s Chicken Inato is iconic in that tradition—its grilled chicken, marinated with a secret recipe of herbs and a milky what-not, is almost synonymous with the city. Today, that tradition, always done al fresco, has expanded a little bit with City Burger (which is not known for burgers, but for barbecued chicken dipped in a tantalizingly sweet sauce—a real experience, if you have the patience to spare with its gruffy and belligerent waiters and waitresses, who seem to begrudge your very presence for some reason), and with Atong Kamalig, also near the Boulevard, with its smorgasbord of grilled meat and funky-sounding bands. More recently, there’s Sundown, near the intersection that leads to Robinson’s Place—a beautifully landscaped beer garden, complete with the alfresco feel, that transcends whatever image it wants to project to offer some of the most surprising cooking in town. Surprising because you don’t expect so much from such a small place. Still, it has the imprimatur of Santa Monica’s kitchen, which says a lot about the seriousness of its food.

In consequence, we only had a few restaurants with slim culinary imaginations, coming and going in fashion. The local cheese burger that defined Dumaguete the most had always been the one from Taster’s Delight, an institution now gone, much to the lamentations of several generations of students in this University Town for whom its delectable blend of sauce created magic with its patty. North Pole Emilia and its glorious coco flan are also gone, and so has Dockside with its late-night feasts of tocilog and its other -log cousins. And who remembers Blue Oyster in Sibulan? Jumong, a Korean restaurant in the bowels of Portal West, has also disappeared into kimchi hell. Then most recently, the closing of Gimmik, which prompted an overwhelming response for a sense of loss for its "perfect" sisig, its sun-roasted pork belly, its Peruvian steak, its calamares, its sinugbang isol...

Gone, too, is Sampan Food Haus near Don Bosco, which was the closest Dumagueteños could get to good Hong Kong-type dining—Chinese food with a street flair. Italia, that glorious Italian restaurant near Avenida Sta. Catalina, is also now gone—and all I have left of it are memories of its delicious carpaccio di Resce con verdure marinale—a thin slice of tuna with marinated vegetables that simply melted in my mouth—which I had for antipasti, and the bistecca Italia (succulent beef tenderloin sautéed in extra virgin oil, with carrots, potatoes, and herbs) and bistecca di Pepe (grilled tenderloin steak with black pepper). What proved to be its demise? Its pricey fare, in a city that is quite notorious for wanting its fine dining within the budget of a take-out from McDonald’s.

A growing city—and its increasingly ravenous appetites—changes with time. It is an inevitability. Our favorite food places come and go in fashion. Our shifting standards dictate it. The menu is now a mess, we say. The place has lost its charm. The toilet looks dirty and forbidding, so you can imagine how the kitchen must be. The prices are just a little too steep for what looks like a carinderia. The menu, alas, is now a mess.

But we eat out more and more still, the city changing and becoming more cosmpolitan under our feet, and the restaurants continue to mushroom with much hope—and most of the time, they just vanish like stale French fries.

Some food places and their famous dishes, of course, stay for good: the pinsik from Rago’s; the addicting cheese bread and fruit mix from Silliman Cafeteria; the spaghetti carbonara from Chantilly; the lechon manok from Golden Roy’s and Manok ni San Pedro; the cheese de sal from Mrs. Breadworth in Lee Super Plaza; the steak from Le Chalet in Why Not; the kebab in Persian Palate (now Tandoori); the grilled squid from Mamia’s; the crispy pata from Santa Monica; the tocino from Manang Siony’s; the pastries and cakes from Ana Maria; the cafeteria spread and dimsum from Howyang; the batchoy and arroz ballao from Qyosko (and sometimes its delicious dulce de leche cheesecake, or Oreo white chocomousse, or milk chocomousse); and the homemade ice cream and organic chicken steamed rice from Panda Haus.

There is still the Rosante, along Perdices Street, which after it burned down a few years ago, became the more posh Don Roberto’s, and still serves its famous roasted chicken. La Caviteña may now be a shadow of its former self—but it’s still there, hanging on. Chin Loong, with its pseudo-Chinese menu, has had its ups and downs (and now it looks like it’s in the ups again), and CocoAmigos, with its once delightful Mexican whimsy, has been in steady decline for the past few years, its go-go musical acts on weekends becoming an Angeles City kind of attraction. Baduy. So we stay away.

For dressy fares, you go to Fuh Garden (what used to be Mei Yan); or to Casablanca—or if you had a car, all the way to Atmosphere in Dauin, or to any of the resorts that dot that beach town. (We used to frequent this delightful little Thai restaurant called Sawasdee in Tanjay—which was quaint enough to patronize largely due to the distance and effort, and the food was truly brilliant, never mind the hangers of dreadful RTW crowding out the make-do tables and chairs. Once it made the move to Dumaguete, however, it carried its barriotic eccentricities with it, and was promptly shunned by the AB-aspirational crowd that’s the Dumaguete bourgeoisie. Everything in food, you see, rests on reputation, in a region that takes its sugarlandia air with utter seriousness.)

Most often, we go to La Residencia Hotel’s two restaurants—Don Atilano for its steak or Wakagi for its Japanese fare. I go to Don Atilano sometimes for breakfast, when I am bored and have a hankering for tapa or daing na bangus or danggit or tocino or Spanish chorizo or double-fried adobo, peculiarly prepared the Don Atilano way. (Which is, well, snobbish.) But my most memorable dinner here was not its famous steak—which is as ordinary as they come—but with its sake-marinated Norwegian salmon (complete with roasted shallots, mandarin orange and greens, served with soba glazed in teriyake sauce), coupled with its lengua bordelaise (which is ox tongue braised in bordelaise sauce and cooking wine), its bacalao (cod fish fillet sautéed and simmered in rich tomato and olive oil), its roast chicken with pesto butter, and its seared fillet of dory over shrimp ravioli sautéed on butter and shitake mushroom and topped over shrimp ravioli on heavy cream. That was one truly memorable dinner, something I shared with friends with similar tastes for culinary adventures—but since La Residencia’s latest remodeling, its old charm has been lost to its shiny new chrome and wood finish. Even its brewed coffee, which was once praised by The New York Times as probably one of the best in this part of the world, has lost something of its magic.

Things have changed. That much can be said. The city has changed. Today, with a new Robinson’s mall south of downtown, the choices have become a little more crowded. Not in the same way that Cebu or Manila or Bacolod do it, but nevertheless it’s a stirring of sorts, perhaps a sign of better things to come. There’re already Gabby’s Bistro and Jutz’s Café (formerly Boston Café) and Neva’s and Likha and KRI and Mamia’s and Royal Suite in the mix. Sans Rival has expanded from the small pastry shop of our collective memories, to become a full-fledged restaurant, open even on Sundays. There’s even a new Thai restaurant, an affair called Ti Ban Thai along San Juan Street, a stone’s throw away from Sans Rival, where the waitresses remind me of the girls in Patpong—scantily dressed, luring in a specific kind of customer. (Here, I ordered kai sate for appetizer and pad thai for dinner. The kai sate tasted like an afterthought, its meat brittle-tasting verging on the merely okay. Dipped in generous peanut paste, its pad thai was a little more passable, its noodles had a respectable consistency, and it had the surprising earthy airiness of sprouted mung beans; the whole thing, caked in a mushy layer of fried scrambled eggs, seemed like something concocted with an eagerness to please.)

Over the past year or two, I have gone on random food adventures with three other friends, each of us equipped with a role—Moses Joshua Atega acted as our liaison man for restaurants around town, Greg Morales was food photographer, and Arlene Delloso-Uypitching was newly-discovered food stylist.

The following articles in this series are an account of our tasting trips, which became, in essence, a culinary discovery of some of the best that Dumaguete had to offer.

There are two kinds of articles about food: one talks with such specificity about the dish in consideration and the reach is for the technical, an examination of ingredients and process; the other talks about the experience of the partaking, which is how I approach food appreciation. It is for me a kind of theater of gustatory delight that is part communal act (we call that a “feast”) and part individual meditation, done in bites, for the pleasures that life can offer.

This will be an attempt to do the latter... [To be continued...]

Mooon Cafe, an import from Cebu, has quickly come to capture Dumaguete with its affordable steak and what-not...

[Crossposted in a different form in TravelBook.ph]

The Whirl and the Madness

2011-07-11T15:23:00.000+08:00

I know that I am not the only one who knows how this feels: that sometimes you catch sight of his face, and everything else in the world becomes a whirl in an instant — and you’re so happy and you’re so sad all at the same time, you have to believe there is this one kind of madness in the world that calls itself by your name.

Dark Heart

2011-07-10T22:48:00.003+08:00

There is one simple reason why the horror stories of Yvette Tan come off with such a sense of satisfaction, and can be rightly considered as being among the best in the genre: reading her debut collection Waking the Dead and Other Stories [Anvil, 2009], I soon realize that at their darkest hearts, these stories are really all about love and longing. The malevolence at the center of each story can be quite terrifying, but somehow Tan manages to go above the fray of mere horror to underline the human element that is at its core. This is what makes them transcendent. Consider the title story, where a lovelorn man unlocks a secret language that can summon the dead -- all to call from the other realm the woman of his affections. You read on, and you are confronted by a vast variety of horror -- both human and supernatural -- but it all goes back to this: there's one, and there's the other, and there's the longing to connect or to love, but there's the darkness between them that consumes. This is most darkly exploited in "Stella for Star," where a tiyanak story becomes a dark fable of "motherly" love. In "Delivering the Goods," the precise and unfeeling butchering of a young boy for underworld reasons becomes a reflection for connection and fatherhood. In "Kulog," a kapre makes a connection with a little girl, to his own detriment. In "Daddy," a father's ghost phones in, to leave one last bilin. In "Boss, Ex?," a futuristic contraband movie chip becomes a means of dealing with the ghosts of the past, and loves lost. In the end, while you reel from the horror and the graphic details and the sense of dread of many of these stories, you are pulled in by the strange comfort of knowing that what lies beneath them is a pulsing heart -- bloodied and bruised, yes, but alive and filled with aching longing.

Decisive Moments

2011-07-07T16:03:00.000+08:00

There are those small moments that happen to us that we know will have the pull of gravity on our lives -- and that we know will change some of the ways by which we currently go about living.

In recent memory, there was the encounter with a good friend bearing heartbreaking news in a late afternoon of 29 December 2008, in the gentle airs of Don Atilano while I was reading a book and drinking coffee, which led to a stupendous roller-coaster, which led to so many things, both bad and good, and that finally culminated in my trip to Iowa. I remember feeling a gnawing pain that pierced through me then, which made me stand up and take the first step towards a completely different life. I started with a small goal, which had repercussions on other things. All of which has led to what I have made of myself the past two years.

Today is a similar day, I think. 7 July 2011. A message from another good friend. The same kind of gnawing pain. The same reaction -- standing up from my chair while drinking latte in Cafe Antonio, and taking the first decisive step towards what I know will be a new phase in my life. I don't know what is in store for me in the immediate future, but that will be part of the adventure -- not knowing exactly, but striving towards a workable goal.

And so it goes.

Launch of The Anvil Jose Rizal Reader

2011-06-25T18:41:00.001+08:00

The Anvil Jose Rizal Reader will be launched July 2, Saturday at 4:30 PM at the Filipinas Heritage Library in Makati. The book includes contributions from Frances Alcarez, Christine Bellen, Susie Baclagon-Borrero, Jomar Bulda, Ian Rosales Casocot, Joel Chua, Adrian E. Cristobal, Randy S. David, Conrado de Quiros, Rommel Estanislao, Aaron Felizmenio, Jann Galino, Barbara C. Gonzalez, Ernest Hernandez, Patricia Laurel, Vivian N. Limpin, Mario I. Miclat, Ruben Nacion, Vim Nadera, Ambeth R. Ocampo, Elbert Or, Bryan Anthony C. Paraiso, Vicente L. Rafael, E. San Juan Jr., Randy Valiente, and Rene O. Villanueva. My contribution is my sci-fi piece “The Pepe Report,” which is also included in Heartbreak & Magic: Stories of Fantasy and Horror, also out from Anvil this year.

A Decade of Sound and Dancing (and Zombie) on Hump Day

2011-06-25T17:32:00.004+08:00

You could not escape the tenth anniversary of Reggae Wednesday at Hayahay last June 22.

Passing by Escaño, with a view of Tañon Strait dark as the night, you would not miss, for one thing, the beat and strum of local reggae bands carrying on from early evening what has become almost a tradition of this kind of sound. And for this special night, the bands were pledging their talent fees for a cause, the amount raised matched by Hayahay, with the proceeds going to various soup kitchens around town.

There was, for another thing, that sense of inevitability of a celebration. Already a regular party date on everyone’s weekly calendar (which jumpstarts, one might say, the young Dumaguete crowd’s love affair for a long weekend of surf, sound, and Zombie), celebrating Reggae Wednesday’s almost unbelievable turn a decade older was an excuse to even party harder. As Enchi’s lead singer Bembem Timtim remarked onstage before segueing to the band’s first number around midnight for the anniversary jam: “Who would have thought? Who would have thought that ten years would pass, and we’d still be here doing Reggae Wednesday?”

If you think about it, RW has indeed become an institution of sorts, and almost despite itself, too. Here is a perfect confluence of youthful rebellion, bohemian schtick, endless booze, alternative music, and frenetic dancing—and it has lasted this long. Ten years. Who would have thought?

Thus, a week before festivities even began on that stretch of party called Escaño Boulevard, the tongues were wagging in excitement around town, even as far as Facebook wall shoutouts: “Reggae Wednesday is ten years old!” And so we all went to celebrate. Enchi was playing after all, Bembem being in town from Singapore—and it has been quite a while since we last heard them play together.

You could not escape the RW anniversary anyway. Even when you chose to stay home that Wednesday night, or to stay away hostaged by faraway geography, the whole night was streaming live on video feed in the Internet. Reggae Wednesday has invaded the interwebs, and has indeed entered the digital age. Who would have thought?

But to flashback to 2001, when it all began.

There was no streaming video then. And no one thought it would last ten years. And the whole thing began, curiously enough, on a Monday.

Or at least, the first informal gig was planned for a Monday, with a bunch of friends fiddling with time, alcohol, and the search for an appropriate space to jam. All they wanted was that space—and the best time possible—for a bunch of friends to come together for a musical jam of sorts. “They” included Sande Fuentes and a bunch of his friends from both high school and college days: JM Abregana, Bembem Timtim, JJ Amparo, Gabby Flores, Oswald Singson, Kim Zerrudo, and some other buddies. “We just wanted a place to play music regularly, and back then,” Sande recalls, “the repertoire we used to play a lot consisted of Bob Marley, Sublime, 311… Mostly reggae, but with lot of punk and ska thrown in.”

One particular drinking weekend at Hayahay (which Sande now manages for the family), they all decided to give it a go. On a Monday.

“It was supposed to be Reggae Monday,” Sande says with a laugh, “but everybody was hung-over that Monday, and the easy excuse was: ‘Let’s do it mid-week.’ Do it during Hump Night Wednesday, and then we roll through towards the weekend.”

The plan was then set for Wednesday, certainly considering hangover recovery time. “We did a text brigade,” Sande recalls, “and I drew the announcement on paper napkins and we photocopied them and gave them away as flyers to a bunch to friends to distribute. A bunch of them helped. There were our El Amigo and Memento friends like Babu Wenceslao… The Cuernos de Negros boys… Micky Ybañez… There are too many to mention. A lot of friends helped us and supported us in the beginning.”

Enchi then played every other Wednesday, “and they played on the stage that is right next to the Hayahay restrooms now, beside the aquarium…,” Sande says. After the gig, the boys in the band would chip-in money for drinks, “or whatever else was the choice for the night.” The origin of RW was simply just a pursuit of fun and shared music among friends.

But the whole endeavor soon grew, bit by bit. Enchi and Reggae Wednesday veritably started the music scene for Hayahay, and they then added the Friday lineup with Kakay and the H Project playing jazz. Then there was Saturday Rock with Tracy Teves’ Last Train. And soon, San Miguel was sponsoring the Philippines’ top reggae bands to perform in Dumaguete, from Myra Ruaros-Brownbeat All Stars, Tropical Depression, Junior Kilat, Brownman Revival, and others.

“And thanks to our music friends from abroad,” Sande said, “we got our first international act with dancehall reggae phenomenon Lexie Lee from Los Angeles.” She was doing an Asian tour that included Vietnam and Thailand in 2009, and was more than happy to tuck Manila and Dumaguete in as stopovers. “Our second international act was Malaysia’s Pure Vibracion,” Sande said. “All these musicians and bands gracing our stage encouraged us to keep on playing uncompromised music—and hopefully bring to Dumagueteños even just a small sample of what’s out there musically. Recently, we have brought here some super bands from Manila, like Franco, Urban Dub, and veteran rockers Razorback.”

And what of the immediate future?

"We’re going to have Thursday Eargasm with With DJ Devnic,” Sande says, “and we will be have a peek at underground music scene for techno, house, and tribal beats.”

And Reggae Wednesday?

Easy enough to answer: it’s here to stay, as long as the take remains fresh. And Dumaguete is still willing to rock to the vibes of this sound. Perhaps for another ten years. Ten years. Who would have thought?

Photo of Hayahay by Hersley-Ven Casero. Photos of Enchi by Earnest Hope Tinambacan

Some Sadness

2011-06-24T05:16:00.001+08:00

It is the break of another dawn in a strange week, half of which was spent in a feverish state, and I can’t sleep. Somewhere out of this tiny room I call my apartment, there will be strays of daylight beginning to show—it is, after all, five o’clock and already parts of the city stir.

In the background, Barber’s Adagio tries to comfort me, becoming like the morning air.

It is easy to welcome such small embraces of comfort. I have not had such for what seems like days now. Last night, after writing in a café, I walked the streets of the city towards the spot where I knew I would find tricycles to take me home, and the promise of rest. Between the spaces in the stars when I walked, I wept a little, surprising myself. I suddenly felt alone, and the dark asphalt I was treading underlined only the confounding sorrow. I felt alone. Which wasn't bad in itself—happiness can sometimes be had even in the solitary—but it was a feeling that came with a twin, and it was abandonment.

I didn’t know why I felt that.

I still feel the same, now, even with the sudden chirping of birds outside. Between the spaces of my breathing, the purring and roaring of motor—tricycles by their sounds—signals that morning traffic has began and the streets are waking.

It has been two hours since I’ve tried to sleep, and I knew there was a fraught stretch of minutes where I must have dozed off, lightly, to be awoken by strange flickering images stuck to my shut eyelids, or by strange glimpses of fluttering things in various corners that disappear upon full focus. I found myself, too, saying tiny prayers all night long—and I don’t know why.

There is no other choice but to wake. There is music now. There is the smell of newly-brewed coffee. So I face another dawn. And I am so tired.

And yet, the constant knowledge I have yet to swallow remains this:

There are things in life that are mysteries not even the heart can begin to understand. For instance, how one can love a man with the strength and certainty of stars, but for all that to receive nothing.

What unfathomable sadness.

My Father in a Measure of Memory

2011-06-18T14:55:00.004+08:00

Years ago, I was asked by the writers Gémino H. Abad and Alfred Yuson to submit to an anthology of poetry about fathers and fatherhood in the aptly titled Father Poems (Anvil, 2004). That project, I think, was timed for a Father’s Day release.

The assignment sounded simple—write about your father—but what I had to struggle with, at least initially, was the sudden uncomfortable confrontation of remembering. And remembering is an act fraught with both reconciliation and recounting of past hurts and disappointments—all the dramas any ordinary family is capable of making.

I knew I was not exactly my father’s son. I say that in the sense of familial intimacy. For the longest time, when I was growing up, he was estranged to me, first geographically, and later on, before he died when I was turning 20, emotionally. He was a distant old man who seemed to me possessed by some dark gravity, and I had no patience to understand his tantrums, why he was the way he was, or what was going on in his mind when he would wake up very early every morning and go around the house while we were still sleeping. Was he measuring out, in the dark and bluish light of dawn, what he had made of life? Did he feel that we were disappointed with him—this man who was once young and vibrant and ambitious and wealthy, but who was finally beaten down by strange circumstances to become, perhaps to his own estimation, a shadow? I was a young man in the twilight of his years, and the young never know any better about the varieties of human experience: I only knew the depths of my own narcissistic apathy and the shared disappointments I could not even begin to chart. My father’s name was Fermin. I carry that name, too. It felt then like a burden—like I was yoked to this man whom I could not understand.

Years later, I would write a short story about him titled “The Hero of the Snore Tango” (available now in my short story collection published by the University of the Philippines Press titled Beautiful Accidents) and the first few paragraphs of that story constitute something which I have yanked from reality.

I wrote:

When Father died, the family rose to play its parts as kin bereaved with loss, but rehearsed in its grieving. There was no crying, no fretful skirmishes with acknowledging tragedy—we all knew his days had to end some time. We had played his death scene each in our minds all too frequently, in variations of muted drama. I had imagined elaborations of quiet dark dawns and bursts of hysterics—the way Tagalog movies paint us all.

But it all finally came to this: a hurried waking nudge from Mother one early morning, and one sentence fraught with subdued disconsolation:

"’Gâ," she said, "Papa’s not snoring."

We hurried to his room and there he was in bed, mouth slightly open and with eyes closed, his skin already clammy to the touch.

"He’s not breathing," I said, feeling no pulse.

"Is he dead?" Mother asked.

"He’s dead."

"Why don’t you—I don’t know—why don’t you give him CPR, or something?"

"He’s dead."

The rest was my attempt in fiction to understand the man, albeit belatedly. And in retrospect, I think I have. In my growing years, I now understand the unforeseen skirmishes life brings you that can indeed cripple one’s spirit—and I know he must have fought hard and long for honor, for respect, for love.

But I did not understand yet fully all these that afternoon when I got the invitation to write poetry about him. I remember looking at the emailed invitation for what seemed like a long time, and then I sat down in front of a rented computer terminal at Scooby’s San Jose St. and wrote the following:

Because, father, there was no chance to believe
In the impossible: the freshly-dug earth, now
Your home, was mute as was usual, turning away
Even the last howl of mourners coming near.
Their black grieving did not understand, as we did, that
Ties which bound could come loose as the grass that
Would feast on your memory six feet above could, as
Ground swallowed-in the digging for mortal remains.
We are told, as the funeral flowers wilted in the sun, that
Memories should be immortal, but we prayed for no ghosts.
The dead should not speak. We prayed, instead: father, we
Forgive you, for you have sinned. And the burial
Became growing silence as we soon dispersed for lives spent
In battled reflections, the muteness of years bearing down
On children struggling to forget by the bottom of
Beer bottles, or the occasional want for punish. Soon, we
Come, year by year, to some bidding, somehow,
For holy days kept precise—that last excuse—to
Listen to some eternal knell your spirit might tell.
Our candles now burn low to capture some
Semblance of closing, the way the ghostly smoke
Wisp among flowers, down to the carabao grass kept
Trim. We wait, and we wait. And life and silence
Become memories built on flimsy hopes, as they must,
To resound to a kind of winged believing.
And then we learn persistence, by the passing
Of days, that even the living must learn to reclaim
Their dead, to Live, to now close
The prayers with which we can finally love
Our dearly departed.

Imperfect poetry from a fictionist. But still. I think I wrote those lines in white heat, although the poem that originally poured from me is a little different now, after random nights spent revising lines, changing one word or four. What has not changed is the ambiguity I still sometimes feel about the man. But that has mellowed. Life itself has taught me how to understand the man.

And yet I know now that I do love this man despite his frailties. He was human. He was me. In my life he continues to live, and I know I must carry on if I want his memory to live on.

There is a picture of him that I keep on my work table at home. It is a photograph in sepia with white borders. He is a young man there—hair slicked back, face impassive but fierce and handsome, collared shirt carefully pressed—and I am struck by the fact that I very much look like him. That photograph keeps me grounded, and makes me remember that love is real, and that it can endure and even blossom even beyond death.

Father, wherever you are, I salute you.

Nabiyaang Tamawo

2011-06-10T16:21:00.001+08:00

Since last Sunday night, there are spectral figures wading the shallows off the Boulevard in Dumaguete. You can see them as you cruise the street, before you turn right towards Burgos Street. They will strike you as uncanny. Perhaps. The three figures in white -- white plaster bodies in white sheaths -- are tamawos, the artists who made them tell us. To be more specific, "mga nabiyaang tamawo." Left-behind spectral figures of myths; tamawos, according to legend, are a kind of encantos, humanoid creatures of supreme powers, light-skinned, most of whom live in trees where they maintain huge (but invisible to the naked eye) kingdoms of fabulous riches, fantastic realms into which they tempt people they have fallen in love with to enter and leave the human world forever.

These tamawos on the sea, ghostly white and faceless, are somewhat of an indifferent sort: these ones turn their back to us observing them from along the shore or along the cemented walkways of the seaside promenade. Their frozen walk simulates that attentive grazing of shore in lookout for what's hidden beneath sand and beach rocks. They also seem inattentive even of each other, and that stance, looking out (but barely) into the dark vastness and oblivion of the Tañon Strait, seems sad and forlorn and beautiful and evocative of what life can be found in this lively, isolating stretch of this lovely, sad, small city. I can now imagine these figures, once the klieg lights that illuminate them are turned off, to seem ephemeral and lost in the Dumaguete darkness. And what of them in the light of morning tide? Figures wading chest-deep, still inattentive to the fact of the possibility of drowning.

Photography by Razceljan Salvarita.

The Music That Speaks For You

2011-06-09T23:36:00.002+08:00

Ah, my life thus far. The universe does mix it up for you, doesn't it. It puts in a measure of melancholy even in times of triumphs. Maybe it's to remind you that life is really an orchestra of sorts -- it takes all kinds of instruments to make the music hum the way it should.

I use music as a metaphor here because it seems to be the best refuge of all: it speaks for you. Without overly sentimentalizing it, your favorite music does carry your hopes and your loves and your devastations and your anger quite efficiently, and amplifies for you the exquisite drama of it all -- your own soundtrack to a private psychoanalysis, so to speak.

Right now, I am sad and I am drowning the things around me with sound only I can hear and that seeps to my bones like a beautiful kind of anger. I'm listening to The Temper Trap's Conditions album. Their music telegraphs for me an urgency in their beat that underlines a kind of bittersweet knowing. "Drum Song," to cite a particular track, is majestic in its score -- an achingly danceable bit that somehow urges you to reach from deep down, from those recesses of sorrow, all that manic energy urging you to dance and dance and dance -- perhaps on your own, in the solo comforts of your own room -- until everything, all that pain, flings away from you, or gets reduced to a dull throbbing in your chest that you mistake for your heart, the sweat that you wipe away and the breathlessness that you feel being everything that constitute a vocabulary for some things you desperately want to say -- or shout. To shout out, for example, that you love him but he does not care.

But you don't shout.

You just dance and dance and dance instead, the music becomes your dervish, the pain something you tell yourself you will have to live with like the endless refrain of a stupid, marvelous song.

Dumaguete State of Mind

2011-06-06T01:45:00.002+08:00

Photography by Razceljan Salvarita. Here is the city in darkness and light. A lit call center and an unlit ancestral house of the Pastor sisters across the street from each other. The Dumaguete streets at dusk darkening against the setting sky, with the Cuernos de Negros in the distance.

The Moments in The Hours

2011-06-05T21:16:00.005+08:00

I have been thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf lately, for some reason. But only in the most random of ways. I'd be listening to Cesar Ruiz Aquino talking about the modernists, for example, and he'd mention the Bloomsbury Group -- although apparently he does not think much about Woolf herself. I'd be reading a literary blog and I'd come across an argument about who was the better modernist writer, Woolf or James Joyce? I'd be walking one morning down a street in Dumaguete, and I'd see a woman with a bouquet of flowers in her arms, waiting for a tricycle, and I'd think: "How very Mrs. Dalloway." And then I'd remember those days in the late 1990s when I'd sit in the grass somewhere in Tokyo and I'd read the perplexing book about the minutiae of a day in a sad woman's life. (I miss and envy those days.) I'd skim through YouTube and stumble on Tilda Swinton playing the gender-bending title character of Orlando, based on Woolf's elaborate "love letter" of a novel to Vita Sackville-West. Sometimes, I'd go around the house and stumble on my copy of Michael Cunningham's The Hours -- and I would tell myself: I have not seen Stephen Daldry's 2002 film adaptation for almost a decade now. When it first came out, I remember that it left me cold -- and I wondered: after having lived the life I've lived since then, will it find new resonance in me?

Yesterday, finally, I found in Facebook a link to this article by Cunningham in The Guardian. It felt as if the universe was compelling me to do something about this.

Today, unlike Mrs. Dalloway, I woke up quite late. But thoughtful, conscious of the minutes. I still managed to wring out a good day out of this Sunday which involved the readings of essays by Octavio Paz and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison and such. There were sudden encounters and talks with a couple of friends. There was a walk around town under the wicked June half moon. There was the "unveiling" of a new art installation of tamawos -- mythical elementals -- off the Boulevard. And then I went home to watch The Hours.

It moved me afresh, and I think I understand this film much more now, being able now to see the depths of each of these women's unhappiness without a center -- Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore's Laura Brown, and Meryl Streep's Clarissa Vaughan. Sometimes the years do that: they make you see things your own youth cannot comprehend. What is life after ordinary madness and adult compromises? How does one deal with the sorrows of being trapped in a place you have no wish to be in, even when it includes the love of so many people? How does one recognize happiness, or does that recognition only come in hindsight?

There is a scene in The Hours between Meryl Streep's Clarissa and Claire Danes' Julia Vaughan that underscores for me something that I have been trying to understand and come to terms with recently -- like a belated answer or explanation to some of the things I am doing, and yet have found no way to explain. In this scene, Clarissa is preparing for a dinner party for a great poet friend, and her encounter with him early in the day has left her devastated -- but also thoughtful. She has been crying since then, and then her daughter Julia enters, and asks her if she is all right. They retire to the bedroom and then they start to talk...

Clarissa Vaughan: ... If you say to me, "When were you happy...?"

Julia Vaughan: Mom...

Clarissa Vaughan: ... Tell me the moment you were happiest...

Julia Vaughan: I know ... I know, it was years ago.

Clarissa Vaughan: Yeah.

Julia Vaughan: All you're saying is, you were once young.

Clarissa Vaughan: (Smiles and laughs.) I remember one morning, getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself, so this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. (Both laugh.) Never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning, it was happiness. It was The Moment. Right then.

And I understood, and suddenly I so wished that when I was much younger someone had taken me by the shoulders, shook me, and told me: "Live every bit of these moments. You are young. When you're older, these things will define every bit of what you will remember to be happy." Then again, when we were younger, did we ever listen? Alas, no. Youth is too preoccupied with what it thinks is the singularity of its angst. "You don't understand," we all say. But of course we soon understand that they understood. Because we've all been there.

But I am thinking more about my mother, actually. She is in her mid-70s. She's in L.A., and because of her age, she can't really move around so much because she tires out easily even when she tries to be brave about it. And sometimes I ask myself: what made her wait for so long to see the world? When she was in her teens, she made tira-tira to sell just so she could escape the stifling smallness of Bayawan town, where she was born, and dared go to evil Cebu, where, she was warned by her spinster aunts, she was likely to be "devoured." But she did it. She was so brave then -- and then not much else. She married. She stopped the dream of becoming a nurse. She married, and she had children. Was it us? Was it the task of bringing up six boys? Was she happy?

Am I overreading The Hours?

The Sound of Feet Running in Place

2011-06-02T21:42:00.003+08:00

This is a post about gym, but let me start by saying that things sometimes begin because of heartbreak.

In 2008, at the tail-end of living another life, I was weighing close to 185 pounds, the heaviest I have ever been. I was, for lack of a better term, fat. The bulges were generous and spread out everywhere in my body like sly interlopers—they became stubborn residents; my belly was a balloon; my face was a rotund ball without angles; my breathing caught at the mere sight of staircases. I lost my cheekbones.

I used to be a skinny college kid, prey of the common wind, which could topple my thin frame over with a single blow. I had always been thin, and then just like that, I was fat. The slow road to obesity does not contain signposts. No warnings. The destination just happens. One day you try to tie your shoelaces and that simplest act becomes—to your utter surprise—a rigorous Olympic event.

But you get used to the heaviness over time. Its companion—an abundance of delicious food devoured indiscriminately, like one would feast on love—is a darling comforter. And sometimes food is there not just to sate physical hunger but something more. An unacknowledged craving for what one can’t have, perhaps, or a panacea for a hungry hurt. Sometimes food can take place of communication: you and your old lover, you have nothing anymore to talk about, and to fill in the gnawing silence, you go to a 24-hour diner and feast in shared delight over a sinful after-midnight meal. When that happens three or four nights every week, there is nothing else to expect except the growing blubber on your sides they have knowingly named after the handling of love. There are still incriminating photos and videos of me online that speak of that time—a strange figure who sounds exactly like me, but looks…different. Looking at an old Dumaguete episode of QTV’s Ang Pinaka…, for example, I see a guy bearing my name and my voice, but he’s darker, rounder. And sometimes my current heart aches for that guy—I know what he was living through. What I remember about that time is a kind of “comfortable” darkness. The weight I found myself in existed as a kind of symptom to what was going inside. I was, still am, a comfort binger. My weight is twin to sadness.

Before 2008 was over, a necessary breakup. (Even that comes saddled with pain.) In the haze of those December days that followed, I crawled the streets like a lost caterpillar. I was in Don Atilano one day, enjoying a cup of coffee, and an old friend dropped by. One beso beso later, I was told: “I met [named withheld]! Are you both okay now? I met the new boyfriend!” A new boyfriend? I thought. Less than a week after we broke up? My heart sank. But this is my point after this long introduction: I remember picking up my bag; I remember going home fast, following a compulsion and energy new to me; I remember changing clothes; and then I remember heading straight to gym. Under the white-lights of Cellutrim, confronting the reflection in the wall of mirrors, I swore never to be fat again.

What was gym for me? A refuge. It was my sanctuary that afforded me a time and a place to let go, for two hours each day, the painful cares of the world. It “gave” me permission to focus on myself for once. Gym took me in, blubber and all—and I was promised that, with due concentration and sweaty hard work, there would be transformation. I took that as cue to healing. Shedding the pounds was shedding the pain bit by bit. I could tell you I went to the gym for health reasons, but that would be a lie. Being fit was just a wonderful side-effect to nursing a broken heart.

This is why I like gym, and why I still go to the gym, even when sometimes life happens and there are intermissions when focus becomes lost and some pounds come raging back. But I return to it time and again, knowing full well that this how physically I can claim some form of steadfastness to a life that has a tendency for tattering.

Cellutrim, ran by the Sy family, was a good place to begin, and perhaps it still is. At that time, it was the best fitness center in town, and helped me find a good program that identified the body’s muscular regions to develop. “I don’t want muscles,” I told the instructor, “I just want to lose weight.” Cellutrim taught me the basics, although not much the proper form (the instructor, I soon found, was just too busy to tell me what was proper or not). It was a small gym, but it felt like family—and it was there that I got into what is now a familiar rhythm in gym culture: the fraught traffic for the cardio machines; the rudeness of certain foreigners who come in the early morning; the parade of carefully made-up matronas who come not really to work out but to chatter, the machines becoming their own version of the water cooler; the heavy grunts of metal fetishists; the leaner gym bunnies infatuated with mirrors; the endless skirmishes with various kinds of body odor; the constant talk about supplements and protein shakes and the like; the love-hate relationship with the weighing scale; the constant presence of body ache, which you learn to long for.

Less than a year later, I transferred to Fit for Life, ran by the Arzaga family, located at the top floor of Bandera Building. It was in a bigger space, after all; no jostling here. The machines were plentiful; no traffic here, either. And there was the exquisite view of Dumaguete from the top of the world. Have you ever pounded on the treadmill with a view of sky changing colors as day turns to dusk? It adds poetry to your craving for sweat. I met Pete here, my instructor, who told me the way to go for a better fit is a knowledge of form. That one can lift a particular load forever but without doing it right in the correct form, the effort was practically useless. Once I had been doing some lifting for a chest exercise, and found the 70-pound load effortless. “You’re doing it wrong,” he said. “Do it this way.” He demonstrated the correct form for me. And when I did it myself, there was the sudden rush of exquisite pain, totally unfamiliar, something that had the feel of chili and tamarind. “Halang ba?” he grinned. I grinned back.

All in all, I lost 34 pounds.

I go to World Fitness now, on the third floor of Portal West, where Pete has relocated. The gym is owned by two Swiss men—Hans Jorge Schallenberg and Christian Gafner—and for more than a month now, they have opened the gym’s doors for free to anyone wishing to use its premises, pending the final issuance of a permit—but also, in a sense, giving the casual gym bunny a chance to sample the place. What better advertising is there? (And being law-abiding Swiss people, they won’t let anyone pay the fee unless there is an official go-signal to start the business. It has been two months now. And I ask: is this how business can get strangled by the slowness of our bureaucracy?)

I have transferred because the gym is nearer where I live and where I work, and it is also newer, slicker, and wider than the last gym I attended. Sometimes those things do matter.

Almost every day, as much as my schedule can accommodate, I find myself there, waiting to take my turn at running the treadmill. Around me, there are the familiar sounds of people grunting, of metal plates making contact, of dumbbells being dropped on the cushioned floor… When I finally get to run, as the sweat trails across my face and everywhere else, I remember why I’ve been running the treadmill in the first place. Among other sacred places in life, gym was where you go to find yourself. For fitness, or for forgetting what pains you, this is where one kind of transformation can happen. And sometimes that is enough.

The Uses of Anger

2011-06-02T19:15:00.002+08:00

Have better uses of your anger.
Learn to like, for example, how it clarifies
Sometimes what passes for sunsets,
And what sounds like a child
Crying in the dark. Mysterious
Things hide in cool
Running waters. They are not
Fish. Believe
That sometimes everything else
Clouds things as they are.
Learn to seethe.
Make that your oxygen.

Dark Joys

2011-06-01T15:53:00.002+08:00

I don't know why it must be that my occasional happiness always seems to hinge on the knowledge -- which I sometimes willfully deny, the way the moon ignores the darkness in which it must shine -- that I love you. And that I know you do think of me, sometimes. Perhaps accidentally, like a stray thought, more than anything else. And in those moments when we both cannot deny there is this secret world we share, I am most happy.

Small Wishes

2011-06-01T15:45:00.002+08:00

There are small things in life that I constantly wish for. Masahistas who don't constantly look into their cellphones during your massage, for example. Or security guards who don't do their small person's sense of power play. Waitresses who know the exquisite details of the food they are serving. Waiters who actually wait. Teachers who do not treat their classrooms as a version of TMZ, or a Bible study session. Tricycle drivers who wear deodorant. Taxi drivers who do not ask you for directions, or the best way towards your destination, especially in a strange city. Doctors or nurses who have impeccable bedside manners. BPO agents who speak English well. What do I ask for? For people to do their jobs, and to do them well. Anything less is just a complete and perfect waste of our time.

Life in Another Fishbowl

2011-06-01T13:41:00.003+08:00

I love Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. I love how this book is so engaging and delicious, like a perfectly heaped cone of vanilla and chocolate ice cream on a hot summer day. I love its sardonic but wise tone -- that of a woman in her late 20s recalling the angst-ridden minutiae of matriculating in a preppy boarding school in the East Coast, far from the rough and LMC upbringing of South Bend, Indiana. The novel, which is in many ways epic, has the feel and intimacy of a short story -- and Sittenfeld wisely cultivates that feeling by sectioning off her narrative of four years in the life of one Lee Fiora into set pieces, each one an immersive demonstration of a mood and a reflection on high school politics and romances, always with a deep and special knowing of people, places, rituals, and emotions. What keep it grounded are the all-too-human flaws of our heroine -- she is smart and observant, at first painfully shy, often bitter, often unwise, always insecure, constantly flailing to find her place in a universe of seemingly perfect people and circumstances. The book knows human nature so much, and yet also constantly surprises, and does so in prose that is littered with devastating insights, such as this: "There are people we treat wrong, and later, we’re prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out — surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.” Not a lot of books leave me breathless. This is one of them.

Adventures in Caricatures and Blind Direction in a Story of a Regatta

2011-06-01T12:57:00.002+08:00

Marco Kreuzpaintner's Sommersturm [Summer Storm, 2004] is an illustration of two persistent (but certainly not new) ideas: that art's potential greatness lies in the execution more than the message (how very Jose Garcia Villa), and that (as a refinement of the previous), if there must be message, a certainty of that message is required, or else we lose interest. I simply cannot care for the haphazard, for the hodge-podge, especially if the mess is not the message. Here is a story, for example, of a young German boy named Tobi [the uninteresting Robert Standlober, who lacks gravitas]. He is the captain of a rowing crew, and he is secretly enamored by his best friend and teammate Achim [the underused but superb Kostja Ullman]. It is all secret ache and hetero bluffing, with Tobi eventually flirting around with another teammate named Anke [Alicja Bachleda-Curuś] -- until the team finally heads out to the German countryside to train and compete in a rowing regatta for the summer. A gay rowing team arrives and soon begins stirring the simmering sexual tension growing in a camp full of teenage hormones -- soon forcing Tobi to confront his sexuality and attraction towards Achim, all against the backdrop of the titular sudden summer storm. In summary, the narrative seems tidy, but Kreuzpaintner, working from a script co-written by Thomas Bahmann, barges into this story with the sense of direction of a blind man. He creates caricatures out of both gays and straights, dives into meaningless subplots (the flirtation between the rowing coaches), and indulges into senseless mise-en-scenes (the elaborately-staged sex scene between Achim and his girlfriend Sandra, in a quaintly grassy part of the forest, at night, in the middle of a search for a lost camper, in the middle of a storm). Everyone is a stock and flat stereotype supposedly to telegraph the message more -- but what message? That homophobia is common and can only be cured by association with gay men? That unrequited love hurts, and it is foolish to fall in love with your straight best friend? That it is wrong to treat a girl as a mustache? That camaraderie is won by denial? That it is easy to forgive and forget just because the film is ending? Any one of these can be made into an interesting film, and in fact, has been. Not in this film, though. This is a film where everything is spoonfed to you -- yet everything still does not make sense for some reason. There is no shred of human reality in this film. This is a complete and utter waste of time.

Evil People

2011-05-28T03:25:00.001+08:00

There is a reason why I've chosen the snapshot above from David Michôd's Animal Kingdom [2010], the brilliant crime film from Australia that caused much chatter in last year's cinematic bumper crop. (It won Jackie Weaver, who plays evil matriarch Smurf Cody here with such uncanny sweetness, a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars. I now understand completely the acclaim: this film had me gripping my seat from the unrelenting tension of its unspooling, that even a sequence of a car slowly backing out of a doorway seemed the stuff of utter terror.) This is J Cody [played with virtuoso command by James Frencheville], and he has just discovered something terrible and bloody. In this scene -- set in the toilet of his girlfriend's parents' house -- we witness a breakdown and a transformation: he turns from being the naive teenage boy we have come to know him for most of the film, to a young man suddenly coming to terms with his dawning realization of an encounter with evil. He has been the innocent in this portrait of a family steeped in crime, so innocent in fact that when the film opens we find him nonchalantly watching television, his mother's dead body (from a drug overdose) beside him on the sofa. Alone in the word, he is taken to live with his estranged grandmother Smurf, and he gets re-introduced to his uncles -- all of them criminals with psychopathic tendencies, with the police in the city they live in scrambling to gather evidence to put them away. The film is his story -- and the story is about his loss of innocence. I am not going to say much more about how this film goes, but it is an elegant exercise of film form. There is no needless moment in this gripping narrative; everything is essential. The cinematography by Adam Arkapaw is deliberate in its beautifully rendered tracking shots and mise-en-scene, which reminds of a predatory point-of-view. The music by Antony Partos intensifies the action and the emotional turmoil of its characters with a stalking intensity. But it is the actors who make this devastating. They are the proverbial animals in this murderous kingdom -- all preys and predators in this game where the roles are sometimes interchanged. There are good guys, too, but this is basically an anatomy of evil people. Frencheville has the tricky role here: J's naivete could have been been cloying, and a less-gifted actor would have collapsed from the sheer madness of having to tread the fine line between innocence and a wearying nose-dive to hardness. But he gets the balance right, and there are little dramas constantly erupting on Frencheville's face that assure us he has this character down pat. And then there is Weaver: her Smurf Cody is probably the most evil character I have encountered of late in film, but she embodies it with strange rightness that rivals the intensity of a Meryl Streep or a Tilda Swinton. Hers is a role of utter complexity: nurturing and caring (in a Freudian way that's quite disturbing), the way a lioness can be with her pups -- while underneath lies a dark intelligence that has no qualms with intimations of murder. She makes a kind of Sophie's choice here that shocks -- but the way she still goes on with all sweetness and light and huggable motherliness also shocks us into a recognition that in life evil disguises itself in the mundane. When the devastating ending comes, we realize it is the only way to end a film such as this. It made me cry. It made me weep for how we can be robbed of such things as humanity.

Abandonment

2011-05-24T09:31:00.003+08:00

Were it not for Gaspard Ulliel's beautiful face and the strange bewitchment of Melanie Laurent, it could be said that watching Rodolphe Marconi's Le Dernier Jour [The Last Day, 2004] is a complete waste of time. Which is strange to say of a French film. But what else can I say? It is a dour, aimless exploration of a family in tatters and ends with a Deux ex machina so relentless in its own recognition of the sad and the macabre that I was left grasping for meaning, for some foreshadowing. There was none. The story itself is simplicity: a young man named Simon [Ulliel], 18 years old, an artist, makes his way back to the family living in the country and inexplicably brings home with him a beautiful girl named Louise [Laurent], whom he meets in the train, and whom everybody else thinks is his girlfriend. He does not dissuade any of them from making that assumption, but soon we take note that Simon -- always biting and sometimes ferociously sad -- may in fact be pining for his best friend Mathieu [a totally unmemorable Thibault Vinçon, who phones in a performance for an otherwise crucial role as the beloved and the betrayer] who works in the local lighthouse. He watches as Mathieu and Louise become slowly attracted to each other, even as he deals, in an offhand way, with the slow disintegration of his own family -- the sister is morose and cannot wait to get away, the father complains a lot and keeps secrets, and the mother is bored and is suddenly dealing with an unexpected lover from the past. What the film is perhaps trying to say has something to do with how people we love leave us, and how we are always left reeling in their wake. There are more complications, stripped of histrionics and melodrama the way only the French can, but we sit through each one completely uninvolved, and perhaps that may be due to Isabelle Devinck's savage and jarring editing and Marconi's unwise aesthetic choices. Why was this film made? To illustrate the ennui of abandonment? But I didn't care much.

Gaudeamus

2011-05-22T09:29:00.001+08:00

You can now download the souvenir program for Gaudeamus: The 50th Anniversary Gala Night Celebration of the Silliman National Writers Workshop at the website.

Ang Pinaka ... Must Visit Dumaguete Spots

2011-05-15T02:32:00.002+08:00

Wondering what to do in Dumaguete for the summer? Wonder no more! I unearthed an old episode of QTV's Ang Pinaka..., with a show on "Must See Dumaguete Spots." Rovilson Fernandez was then the new host, taking over from Pia Guanio. And there I was, twenty or so more pounds ago, with Mark. I can't believe this was already such a long time ago.

Turn Around

2011-05-14T23:56:00.003+08:00

Dominic Leclerc's Protect Me From What I Want [2009] is simply told, done in broad strokes that make no attempt at depth other than what is cursorily given, and yet despite that, it is an effective small film. Saleem, a young Pakistani boy, cruises -- despite great personal misgivings and overriding guilt -- the streets of a British city, and catches the eye of Daz. He is given Daz's number after an aborted attempt at street seduction -- and then we segue to a kind of Pygmalion scene: Daz breaking through the barriers, and finally being able to give Saleem the titular thing he wants, but is scared of. The seduction is punctuated by editing that's more disruptive than artistic, giving the sequence a rushed embarrassed feel that betrays the efforts of its actors to stay true to their characters (and what we do get here is some fine acting). It all ends with an emotive plea from one character to another, which gives us ... what, hope? I'm not sure, but I smiled when it ended, and I felt my heart fuller than usual. But what does it all mean? Is this just an exercise in overly rushed erotica? A statement film on culture and deeply-inculcated homophobia? Is this a haphazardly done My Lair Lady a la Skins? The film does not exactly say anything new, but I liked it. That's my own life up there on the screen, all told in 13:32 minutes, so I appreciate its reach via the biographical, the reader-response way. But that's just me.

The Origins of Trese and the Kambals

2011-05-09T00:27:00.003+08:00

I like Origins stories. In the tradition of graphic literature (komiks to some of you), they're a staple in the narrative, and most superheroes come barging into our consciousness with an Origin story. There's something about knowing where a hero comes from -- what shaped him to become this something -- that's infinitely intriguing and satisfies a hungry curiosity (we all like asking, "Why?"), and when done right, they provide the meat to the mythos without reducing the hero to a caricature of easy motivations. But that's only one thing that I liked about Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo's third installation in their Trese series. Mass Murders, which gives us the curious and very supernatural childhood of Tan and Baldisimo's kick-ass titular female detective of the uncanny, also gives us a look into the origins of Alexandra Trese's fast and furious sidekicks -- the Kambals, those mask-wearing half-breeds who do Trese's bidding with fierce loyalty and an extreme taste for blood. (The horror writer Yvette Tan finds them extremely hot -- and so do I.) There's also the graphic violence which not only takes off from the gut-wrenching ballets of Alan Moore and Quentin Tarantino, but also has the glorious roughness and tumble of old Filipino action movies. But what impresses me most about this volume (two other volumes precede this one) is not just Tan's tight narrative and Baldisimo's concisely conceived black and white world, but also in how they dip into local gods and fantastic monsters and assorted lower mythology creatures of the pre-Spanish Filipino netherworld. In a kind of an afterword, Tan writes: "The works of Neil Gaiman was a major influence when it came to writing Trese, most especially Sandman and American Gods. In those stories, he asked the question, 'What happened to the gods of old? Where are they now?' And he showed us a goddess of love who found her worshippers in a strip club, gods of death who now run a funeral parlor, and gods of mischief still up to their old tricks. Which made me ask the question, 'Where are the gods that were once worshipped by Filipinos before the Spaniards came? Have they found a new place in the city of Manila?'" Which is how they have come up, in this volume, with the bloodthirsty god of war, Talagbusao, whose bloody rituals and wishes to permanently wreck havoc in the mortal realm leads to this book's main plot, as well as to the explanation for the Kambal's existence. I admire this organic and pulsing attempt to bring back the ancient myths and subject them to the creativity, darkness, and demands of the modern world. It was indeed Gaiman who once told us -- when he first came up with the Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards -- that we have a wealth of local legends and lore that are more than ready-made for explorations in local speculative fiction, and Trese is a good example of that. The last time I was this excited over a similar project was Arnold Arre's The Mythology Class. (Similarly, Dean Francis Alfar and the core LitCritters also have a cycle of stories about a land called Hinirang -- and I have long demanded an anthology of such stories, but only the future can tell whether that project comes to fruition.) And yet, despite the horror and fantasy that make stories like this ghettoed into Genreville, you see reflections of real-life issues and conflicts -- the corruption of civil government and military, the salacious criminality of small-town politicians, the clueless desperation of the law, the mud of chaos that has engulfed the country, which can only be explained through the prism of dark enchantment: this is a land bewitched and cursed, and every malevolent detail that erupts in our lives are the secret explosions of aswangs and duendes and the like. That Trese -- both mandirigma and babaylan rolled into one -- is around with the Kambals in tow gives us relief from our ordinary horrors, at least in these pages. I love this book. I bought it today, and consumed it a few hours later in one go. It is simply begging to be made into a very, very good film that does it more than justice.

Some Stories From Fifty Years of Writing

2011-05-08T21:51:00.004+08:00

We begin with stories of how things began.

My own love affair with the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete began eleven years ago, when I was one of nine young writers granted a three-week fellowship to a summer of writing and book talk.

It led me to a discovery—in a very big way—to the treasures of Philippine literature. But before that summer, like many other people of that certain age (I was just graduated from college), I knew nothing. Perhaps a tiny bit of Nick Joaquin, maybe a little Kerima Polotan. I remember reading the entirety of Edilberto Tiempo’s A Stream at Dalton Pass and Other Stories when I was 10, because there was a copy of the book in my house, for some reason—and when I was very young, I devoured all books and magazines I could find.

But I knew I liked writing. Some other people discovered that for me. My teachers in West City Elementary School’s SPED Program for Fast Learners were suitably impressed, I guess, by the compositions I churned out for our theme assignments—you know the sort, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” “My Best Friend,” “My Most Cherished Memory”—that they made me editor-in-chief for the school organ The Western Star, a mimeographed loose-leaf effort that had an indelible impression on me. I am now extremely sorry that cannot remember the name of the paper adviser, but she taught in the regular sections, and she was a kind woman who told me I could write. I didn’t know what she meant by that.

Later on, spurred by the very thorough language lessons of Ms. Bennie Vic Concepcion in grade school and the gentle goading of Prof. Gina Fontejon and Prof. Alejandra Bañas in Silliman High School, I was possessed with the idea that writing was my vocation. After a not-so-delightful detour through the wrong course, I ended up in a discipline that was all about practical writing and modern communications. Somewhere along the way, my college composition teacher, a fictionist by the name of Timothy Montes, one day wrote in the margins of my BC 12 essay: “You must apply to The Weekly Sillimanian.” And so I did.

Tim writes about this time in his introduction to my forthcoming short story collection Beautiful Accidents (published by the University of the Philippines Press): “In the early ‘90s when I started teaching in Silliman, when I myself was always lassoed by the label ‘a promising young writer,’ I came across an essay in my freshman English class that made me think of my own promise. For here, indeed, was someone who wrote better than I did when I was his age. When I asked the student who wrote the essay to stay after class, I was later confronted by a self-conscious impish smile that tried to hide a nerdiness, and a something-else that only teenagers are capable of exuding: a secret hunger that can only be projected onto the night.

“He was, he said, a Mass Com major, and I thought that unless he was going to have the gumption of a maximalist writer like Tom Wolfe, he was not fit to parse out his sentences for the press. For his kind of writing was more literary than journalistic, and he simply could not hide his style. I exempted him from my cut-and-dried lectures and assigned him books to read instead. In return, he submitted the obligatory expository essays even as I encouraged him to do whatever he wanted as he jazzed around in his reading and writing.

“And just as I predicted, complaints from his readers in the student paper where he wrote a column started coming in. They could not understand him; he was verbose; he was obfuscating. And as consolation, I told him he was writing from a Faulknerian tradition, and it was no use cramping his own style in the ideal of Hemingway. At that time I was reading Nabokov and thought style was all.

“I think he actually sought me out in all his English and literature classes for he was there semester after semester, feeding my teacherly ego in return for a confirmation of talent that was not not mine to bestow. I just knew he had the talent to become a writer; the rest was life and hard work. The way he used language as a supple medium made him one of those writers capable of expressing varied experiences that he would face. He was a film buff and organized the cineaste club in the university, and sometime in his junior year he went to Japan as an exchange student. All these qualities and experiences would seep into his writing…”

By the time I graduated from college, it was again Tim who gently took me aside, and said, “You must apply for a slot in the National Writers Workshop.”

I remember asking him, “Why?” when in fact the question that was in my head was “What is that?” I’ve heard only a little of the workshop when I was in college—but my world was small then, and I really knew nothing, even if, as all young people are wont to think, I thought I knew everything.

Tim told me to prepare three stories. Perhaps those stories I’ve already written for his undergraduate Creative Writing class. There was a deadline. There was the wait. Several days later, I got a letter from Dr. Edith Tiempo. It was graceful in its congratulations, and it gave me the details of the fellowship, and told me to make an appearance on the Monday of the first full week of May of 2000, at nine o’clock sharp, at the Dragon Room of the CAP Building along the Boulevard.

That Monday, at the appointed time, I showed up with Jean Claire Dy, a co-fellow from Silliman. I would soon meet the other writing fellows, of various preoccupations, from all over the Philippines and the world (one was from Hawaii, and one was studying to become a priest)— Vincenz Serrano, Isolde Amante, Alex de los Santos, Elmer Pizo, Gerald Feljandro Ramos, Noel Villaflor, Roberto Salva, Francis Ted Limpoco, Ulysses Navarro, and Wayne Mark Lopez. I would soon notice the “Mount Olympus” in the room—the head table where the writing luminaries were. They were to be our panel of writer-critics, a tableau of faces that changed from week to week.

The faces on that first day were all unfamiliar to me, but Claire seemed to know more. “That’s Ophelia Dimalanta,” she pointed out to one writer at the panelists’ table. “That’s Jimmy Abad, I love him. That’s Krip Yuson. That’s Cesar Ruiz Aquino. And that, my dear, is Mom Edith. Edith Tiempo.”

I kept nodding and nodding, filing away the names to memory.

There would be more names in the coming years—because, after that summer of 2000, I too would return to the workshop, first as an auditor wanting to reconnect with a cherished memory, then later as the unofficial yaya of several batches of fellows, and finally as a member of the organizing team at the Dumaguete Literary Arts group, and later Silliman University, that would help put out the annual editions of this longest-running creative writing workshop in Asia.

I had no idea it was going to be the summer my life changed forever.

The story of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete—which celebrates its fiftieth year this May—officially begins in 1962. That was the year it was founded by the late Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo and his wife, the National Artist for Literature Edith L. Tiempo. They became simply Doc Ed and Mom Edith to several generations of Filipino writers, a sort of familiarity that says a lot about the kind of workshop Dumaguete promised.

Its influence is now legendary. The poet Cirilo Bautista once said, “The amount of learning these writers got from this workshop is incalculable, and is measurable only in the way they have contributed to the qualitative and quantitative growth of our literature. Being a pioneer, [it] occupies a premier position in the history of creative writing in the Philippines.”

The Tiempos, together with its first panelists, the National Artists Francisco Arcellana and Nick Joaquin, ushered in a golden age of writing, and Dumaguete in Negros Oriental has somehow become the heart of the country’s literature—everyone’s literary hometown.

But perhaps its true genesis goes even farther back, to the end of World War II.

“In 1946,” Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas once wrote, “my father was offered a scholarship by the Presbyterian Board of Missions, enabling him to do graduate work in the United States, at Stanford. He was readying himself for the scholarly regimen of the classics, and doing a refresher course in Latin, among his preparations, when my father was asked what area he wanted to specialize in at Stanford. ‘Creative writing,’ he said. ‘There are a number of novels I am going to write, and I need to know if I’m writing them effectively and well.’

“’Oh,’ the Presbyterian Board officer told him, ‘then there’s only one place for you to go. Iowa.’ Dad had to look up Iowa in the encyclopedia, and he was a bit puzzled at what he read. ‘Isn’t that where…they grow corn?’”

Iowa, right smack in the cornfields and silos of the American Midwest, indeed grew corn. But Doc Ed was soon to learn there was a man there, a poet named Paul Engle, and that he ran what was and still is considered the best creative writing workshop in the world: the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. “And that is how my Dad,” Rowena Torrevillas continued, “took a freighter across the Pacific, then a train halfway across the continent from San Francisco to Iowa City. And one morning, carrying his belongings in an Army-issue duffel bag, he crossed the Pentacrest on the campus to find the postwar temporary quarters in the Nissen huts, the quonset building where Paul Engle was holding the Writers’ Workshop.”

By 1947, his wife Edith joined her husband to also take part in the program. When they returned to the Philippines in 1951, Silliman was already abuzz with creative writing. The campus was sprouting literary enthusiasts, among them Aida Rivera-Ford, Rodrigo and Dolores Feria, and Ricaredo Demetillo. The Tiempos made creative writing an area of concentration for English majors in the English Department—and soon that paved the way to preparations in 1961 to hold a workshop similar to the one they attended in Iowa. The following year, it became fully operational.

The years to come would bring future luminaries often at the very beginning of their writing careers, people such as Gregorio Brillantes, Rogelio Sicat, Ninotchka Rosca, Elsie Martinez Cosculluela, Federico Licsi Espino, Salvador Bernal, Rene Estella Amper, Virgilio Almario, Ricky Lee, Conrado de Quiros, Leoncio Deriada, Estrella Alfon, Eric Gamalinda, Marjorie Evasco, Danton Remoto, Vicente Groyon III, Ruel S. De Vera, Miguel Syjuco, Lourd Ernest de Veyra, Lakambini Sitoy, Sarge Lacuesta, Dean Alfar, Naya Valdellon, Angelo Suarez, Adam David, among many others...

Today, the workshop’s alumni number above six hundred. Their memories of three weeks in during a Dumaguete summer remain indelible. Timothy Montes writes: “It was a common story we told: meeting Doc Ed was a turning point in life. I remember him, the first time I joined the workshop, taking me aside and saying, ‘You can write.’ And I began to write seriously.”

The poet Cesar Ruiz Aquino tells the story of being the first workshopper: “We were a very young college boy when we came to Dumaguete for the first time in the summer of 1962... It was a letter from a man named Dr. Edilberto Tiempo that brought it about. The letter was an invitation to join the 1962 Workshop in April… We accepted, of course, full of madness and innocence... [He] met us at the wharf, aboard a tartanilla… It was just after dawn. We can’t recall certain details. For instance, we can’t recall how we knew it was him or how he knew it was us. We rode the tartanilla to town, to the English Department at Hibbard, to the Alumni Hall where the workshoppers would be housed, then to the Cafeteria for breakfast.

“How quiet the town was, how still. Even then it felt like memory. Time, a full, primeval river, moved in eddies... It was the morning of creation and the dawn seemed to cling to everything. In the evening, across from our window, played Vic Damone on the jukebox singing, incredibly, ‘Tender is the Night.’ And in the morning of the next day we met the next to come, Willy Sanchez who looked at us with contempt until, in no time, we began tramping through the campus, Katzenjammered the olds, crossed the hooligans, wrote lines under a cypress tree, befriended inanimate objects. Willy performed, we watched. Nick Joaquin exclaimed at the caf: ‘Franz, I think they’re writers!’”

This year, we add 15 more writers to the august list of fellows: Charmaine Carreon, Evangeline Gubat, Jeffrey Javier, Allen Samsuya, Alyza Taguilaso, Glenn Diaz, Christine Lao, Emmanuel Lava, Andrea Macalino, Marius Monsanto, Philline Donggay, Rogelio Garcia Jr., Miguel Sulangi, Elaine Tobias, and Maria Villaruel.

This year’s panel of critics is composed of Director-in-Residence Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas and Dumaguete-based writers Myrna Peña Reyes, Bobby Villasis and Cesar Ruiz Aquino, as well as guest panelists Susan Lara, DM Reyes, Dave Genotiva, Ricky de Ungria, Gemino Abad, and Alfred Yuson. For this summer, internationally-acclaimed Singaporean writer Kirpal Singh will also be sitting in with the panel.

The 50th Silliman University National Writers Workshop, scheduled on May 2-20, is sponsored by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and Silliman University, coordinated by its Department of English and Literature.

First Hour

2011-05-08T21:49:00.000+08:00

By Sharon Olds

That hour, I was most myself. I had shrugged
my mother slowly off, I lay there
taking my first breaths, as if
the air of the room was blowing me
like a bubble. All I had to do
was go out along the line of my gaze and back,
feeling gravity, silk, the
pressure of the air a caress, smelling on
myself her creamy blood. The air
was softly touching my skin and mouth,
entering me and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine.
I was not afraid. I lay in the quiet
and looked, and did the wordless thought,
my mind was getting its oxygen
direct, the rich mix by mouth.
I hated no one. I gazed and gazed,
and everything was interesting, I was
free, not yet in love, I did not
belong to anyone, I had drunk
no milk yet—no one had
my heart. I was not very human. I did not
know there was anyone else. I lay
like a god, for an hour, then they came for me
and took me to my mother.

Even the Stars Die Here

2011-05-01T14:27:00.002+08:00

Grief and sadness are made bearable by beauty. This is why I love sad stories written by the masters: they distill the pain and make it resonate in uncanny loveliness. Jacques Tourner's I Walked With a Zombie [1943] may be a B-movie made in the schlocky tradition we equate with Roger Corman, but listen to those lovely lines. In the film, a young Canadian nurse named Betsy goes to the West Indies to take care of the sick, mentally paralyzed wife of a handsome plantation manager named Paul, whom she eventually falls for, and in her misguided love, uses voodoo to give what she thinks the man wants.

Paul Holland: It's easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer. Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish, they're not leaping for joy, they're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There is no beauty here, only death and decay.

Betsy Connell: You can't really believe that.

Paul Holland: Everything good dies here. Even the stars.

Lights! Camera! Animation!

2011-04-26T09:07:00.002+08:00

SUGA Teaser Trailer from Xteve Severinus on Vimeo.

Teaser trailer for Suga, a forthcoming animated short film by Stephen Abanto, a friend and student from Silliman University. Looks good so far! Have been waiting for this forever, and it’s nearing completion!

April is the Cruelest Month

2011-04-24T22:45:00.000+08:00

April never makes much of an impression on my memory. March is always about wrenching goodbyes and plodding hard work you can't forget. Summer starts blooming for real in May. April is only limbo and taxes and mind-numbing quiet during the high holy days and your body's fight against the sweltering heat.

The Sacrifice

2011-04-24T22:17:00.003+08:00

Every year, around Holy Week, I watch without fail a film that is still officially banned from screening in the Philippines -- Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ [1988], based on the searing and very controversial novel by the Greek writer Nikolas Kazantzakis. What I have always found ironic about the controversies surrounding both texts is that the protests -- always rabid -- seem to come from the camp of fundamentalist Christians who find in Last Temptation the ultimate blasphemy with regards Christianity. (And often they sharpen their knives without even bothering to see the film or read the book. They have only heard about some salacious details -- for example, that the texts show Jesus abandoning the cross and marrying Mary Magdalene, and having a family with her. Sacrilege! But if only they got the point of that pointed deviation from the Gospel.)

And I have always thought that these texts are in themselves the most Christian of all secular attempts to understand God, and every year when I see this film I am reminded again and again about the singular beauty of my faith: that there was Christ who is God made flesh and born in this world; and that there was His bloody sacrifice on the cross on our behalf, "to wash away our sins," as the Bible says.

But we, in all our unquestioning wallowing of dogma, always forget the ultimate dilemma of the Christ: he was part God, part man. The film and the book make us imagine Jesus treading that fine line of his dual nature: he is free from sin -- but that does not mean he is free from all the temptations humans face; he knows he is called to make that final sacrifice -- but why him? why that kind of pain? and for these people? The film's epigraph, taken from Kazantzakis himself, goes: "The dual substance of Christ, the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God... has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh... and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met."

In the end, on the cross, where the clip above takes us, Jesus is confronted by an ethereal child who calls herself his "guardian angel." This is in fact Satan giving him his final temptation -- to give up the cross, to give up being the Messiah, and to live from henceforth a comfortable life, perhaps with Mary Magdalene, perhaps with family. The child knows how to tempt: that soothing, knowing voice, invoking even Scripture -- it knows the thwarted sacrifice of Abraham, for example; it knows how to coat logic and sentimentality into temptation. The child shows Jesus the kind of life he could have, if he gives up the cross. He is tempted. He is, after all, half-human.

What we don't see in this clip is Jesus' final response: he says "no" to the final temptation, denounces the child as Satan in disguise -- and brings to accomplishment God's mission for him on earth: to die for our sins to give us eternal grace.

What a beautiful message that is, and also something that exquisitely paints for us the agony of the Christ's dual nature. Only the truest Christian, if I may say so, can appreciate something like Last Temptation. And learn from it.

The Right Season Always Comes Along

2011-04-24T22:02:00.003+08:00

Summer Finn: Well, you know, I guess it's 'cause I was sitting in a deli and reading Dorian Gray and a guy comes up to me and asks me about it and ... now he's my husband.

Tom Hansen: Yeah. And ... so?

Summer Finn: So, what if I'd gone to the movies? What if I had gone somewhere else for lunch? What if I'd gotten there 10 minutes later? It was -- it was meant to be. And ... I just kept thinking... Tom was right.

Tom Hansen: No. [Disbelieving, a bewildered smile on his face.]

Summer Finn: Yeah, I did. [Laughs.] I did. It just wasn't me that you were right about.

A Quiet World of Useless Pain

2011-04-24T21:27:00.001+08:00

There is a scene in Christian Faure's powerful and surprisingly deft Juste une Question d'Amour [Just a Question of Love, 2000] where a mother tells the lover of her gay son: "You're much too young to carry around all that useless pain." The boy has just been accidentally outed, and has subsequently been told by his very conservative family that he could not go home again.

Despondent, he finds everything else that matters in his life on the verge of collapse. There is only a world -- a vastness of it -- of pain. But Emma (the mother played by the brilliant Eva Darlan) gives that admonition without a tone of dismissiveness. She is not being patronizing either, but says it with that certain kind of knowing (the way the wisest people know) that we all carry in life a lot of "useless" pain; this is sometimes a cross we feel the necessity to carry, most often in consideration for the people we love. How does one not hurt the people we love? Sometimes we lie or we pretend to be someone else to do exactly that -- a well-intentioned, if totally misguided, endeavor. Yet, almost always, the eventual uncovering of this lies ironically ends up hurting more the very same people we vowed never to hurt. I'm not sure if I make sense here. But this is the "uselessness" of the thing: we don't have to bear the cross; bearing the cross never really helps in the long run; and yet, and yet...

This film is the story of an emotionally volatile young man named Laurent (the incandescent Cyrille Thouvenin), an agronomist in training. He's been flailing in school, roughly around the same time his cousin Marc died of hepatitis, after Marc had been thrown out by his parents on the event of his coming out as a gay man. Laurent is shocked and angry by the capacity of his family to do something so cruel -- and knowing that he is himself homosexual, he starts keeping secrets. He starts playing the "hetero game" for his parents, using his best friend and roommate Carole (the beautiful Caroline Veyt) as a kind of mustache. (Don't we know a lot of people exactly like this...) Carole genuinely loves him, but has long since given up on the idea of being with him. Later on, she gives him the ultimatum: that Laurent can't continually use other people just because he can't summon the courage to be exactly who he is. And then Laurent gets assigned by the school to train under Cédric (the wonderful Stéphan Guérin-Tillié), an older botanist of quiet ways and strong convictions.

They fall in love.

And now the drama begins. How does Cédric exactly convince Laurent that staying in the closet is never the answer to things? He tells Laurent, "I'm over with feeling shame now. I'm not ashamed to be with you." It is not that easy for Laurent. Hw does a son who loves his family risk losing them simply because they cannot conceive of the very idea of a gay son? Later on, Emma tells Cédric, her own son, that it is perhaps unfair of him to expect Laurent to run with the same velocity as he him. So you see how this goes: a whole lot of "useless" pain -- just a question of love among everyone involved, but love thwarted by the very idea of not wanting to hurt.

The emotional complexities laid bare in this film are treated with a genuine desire to engage, and it is to the credit of the filmmakers that a film such as this does not fall under the easy sentimentality of a Hallmark TV movie. It is a deftly-handled film that not only takes in the consciousness of our gay protagonists, but also takes into account the weight of everyone else's pain -- the roommate and best friend, the mothers, and the fathers. It also tells, with unwavering commitment, their story, their struggles to accept something that brings them a measure of pain. And that perhaps makes this a superb achievement: the film offers no caricatures or easy solutions, it brings up all the nuances of complicated personal stories such as this, it banishes away easy sentimentality, and it creates totally human characters who are all capable of so much depths. Near the end of the film, a simple declaration of "Je t'aime, je t'aime" has never sounded so emphatic, so real.

Truth to tell, I still cannot believe this is actually a TV movie. A TV movie in France! It has all the epic elegance and emotional weight and the beautiful frankness of a regular French feature film.

A Trip to Triantywoppitygong

2011-04-24T10:20:00.000+08:00

Many years ago in Graduate School, I read Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa." This is her influential essay of post-structuralist feminism where she lays down her description of ecriture feminine, that style -- or form? -- of writing that is distinctively female (although not "owned" exclusively by women), libidinal, freedom-seeking, non-linear, idiosyncratic, the Dark Continent that taunts and devours the linearity of phallocentric literature -- chapters, beginnings, middles, and ends -- which is scared of it and has confined it, like Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic, in history. As Farhan in The Greatest Literary Works blog, in this wonderful short post on Cixous, writes: "This writing is a political act, a writing through the body that would sweep away syntax... The literary text of the libidinal feminine must tolerate freedom from self-limitation and from neat borders, from beginnings, middles, and ends, from chapters. Such texts will be disquieting." I like that word, disquieting, because this is exactly how I feel reading Marguerite Duras's Yann Andréa Steiner [Gallimard, 1992]. Ostensibly a memoir of Duras' love affair with a much-younger man, it hopscotches with narrative, bending time and location at will, like how one deals with recollection, and suddenly she immerses us in parallel storylines that seem to rise out of nowhere -- there's Duras and Steiner, first of all, and then perhaps to make sense of that unconventional relationship, she writes suddenly of a boy and a baseball cap-wearing shark and a singing fountain, and a boy and his sister murdered in the Holocaust, and the "romance" of a six-year-old boy and an 18-year-old female camp counselor in the disquieting end of World War II. It was a bewildering read, a perfect example of ecriture feminine if I may say so. No chapters, just a loose connecting thread where people weep a lot. But I read on, intent on finishing the slim volume, and perhaps fueled by what I can appreciate about Duras' prose: her lyricism. And yet, I couldn't even pretend to know what's going on. The text baffled me. There's a passage in the book where the camp counselor tells the young boy a story about that other young boy and a shark, who takes the boy away to an island called Triantywoppitygong -- and the storyteller does not pretend this is something she has completely made up. Of course, we realize that she is telling both truth-seeking myth and nonsensical narrative at the same time -- but I was ready to take the book as a perfect example of such a trip to nonsense land. But only in the end did I realize I've been reading it the wrong way. This book, like poetry, is meant to be read out loud. Only when I did so did the full force of her story take hold of me, the drama of it, the beauty of it, the cruelty of it, the sheer passionate confoundment of it.

What the World Sounds Like

2011-04-22T09:31:00.002+08:00

I just woke up and I like the Good Friday quiet. It sounds like the music of a world righting itself.

[photo by Razceljan Luis Salvarita]

A Scene of Utter Perfection

2011-04-21T23:21:00.000+08:00

Consider this opening scene from Blake Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's [1961], a lovely film based on the novella by Truman Capote. It is a composition of such lovely well-considered cinematic elements -- a scene so complete in itself and yet also manages to be a good evocation of the film's eventual themes, gently balancing both pathos and comedy, all done with a sense of great style. We open to a shot of New York. Manhattan in the early morning light. The edifices of great buildings, swathed in a scene of utter loneliness. The streets are deserted. There is something romantic about this picture -- lonesomeness in the metropolis. And then a yellow taxi slowly comes towards us, to the foreground. Out steps a beautiful young woman. Audrey Hepburn. Coifed hair. Dressed in stylish black cocktail dress. The camera shifts, and we are behind her. She gingerly goes towards the front doors of Tiffany's, shuttered still but its show windows -- displaying jewelry, perhaps hope -- are already open for window shoppers. In the background, the score for Henry Mancini's "Moon River" swells, lovely and remote. The music paints for us a semblance of the young woman's dreams. It draws us in emotionally. Suddenly, we feel for this character: this stylish young woman who suddenly seems sad to us. She is beautiful, but like all beautiful things, she is sad. She takes out a pack of food. A brown bag. A tumbler of coffee and a bagel. She starts eating as she looks at each display. She moves about casually from window to window. She turns a corner. And when she is done, she throws what remains of her breakfast into a nearby trash bin, and walks away as casually as she had come in. A perfect scene: no dialogue, just a girl, a lonely city, and forlorn music. It's a virtual short story all its own.

That Beautiful Boy Without Eyes

2011-04-20T15:43:00.004+08:00

I finally signed off the cover of Beautiful Accidents: Stories, my short story collection out from the University of the Philippines Press very soon. I designed this together with local photographer Clee Andro Villasor.

With input from the publisher, we had to agree to brush out a little bit of the guy’s shoulders, for modesty’s sake. That was funny. :) It's off to the press right this minute. Final publication and launching details soon. This one contains all my so-called domestic realism, including the Palanca-winning stories "Old Movies," "The Hero of the Snore Tango," and "Things You Don't Know." Please buy, eh?

The Enigma of A, X, and M in Marienbad

2011-04-19T02:46:00.005+08:00

Watching Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad [1961, and you can view the entire film here] reminds me of my earnest college days when I spent so much time and effort digging up obscure film titles from everywhere in the city, hoping to go far in my incredible thirst for a proper film education. (Where did that passion come from?) I devoured everything: film criticism by Pauline Kael and other luminaries, biographies of directors and classic movie stars, available film titles -- gleaned from all those readings -- which I found in Betamax, VHS, and laser disk format from assorted vendors around town who had no idea they had a treasure trove of classics in their midst. (Where are they now?)

I've always wanted to watch Resnais' film -- but this was one of the many titles that were so rarely available then that I had to contend with only hearing or reading about their legendary status on paper. And perhaps that was also one of the reasons why it took me so long to find Marienbad: its reputation as one of cinema's greatest enigmas -- alongside Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura [1960], Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel [1962], and Robert Altman's 3 Women [1977] -- gave me ample reasons to delay my screening. Was I ready? Did I have the time and the concentration to finally watch it? But I've already watched Antonioni's, Buñuel's, and Altman's celebrated films many years ago, and loved them in fact. What was keeping me from watching Marienbad? Fear of being confounded, I guess.

Nevertheless, I finally did. Tonight.

And the critics and the books were right: what a strange film this is. It's overtly formal in composition, it's cold in its looping narrative, but it's also endlessly fascinating. It had a peculiar grip I can't define that had me going to find out what's happening next -- a reception that was perhaps even better than my own take to Resnais' own Hiroshima, Mon Amour [1959], an earlier film whose elliptical style is in display and is even more extended in Marienbad. This film was inexplicably sexy. Cold, but sexy. Mysterious, but sexy. Sure, it won't be everyone's cup of tea -- especially if your idea of a perfectly fine movie is, let's say, the totally vacuous and pedestrian Letters to Juliet [2010]. It loops endlessly in time and narrative; it surrounds itself with the ornate in gilded objects, mirrors, sculptures, and garden shrubs tortured to geometric shapes; it makes strange uses of parlor games and guns; it uses its actors -- all dressed to the nines -- in the repose of mannequins; it presents a kind of dread with its insidious organ music soundtrack; it moves with a camera designated as a vehicle for dreamlike sequences; it riddles itself with subtle symbolisms and startling imageries (the shadowless trees in the sculpture garden, for example, see below); and puts all of these things in the service of a non-story about a man [named X in the screenplay, but never explicitly named in the film] who narrates what happens (or what does not happen), a woman [named A] that the man seems to pursue for some reason and that he's trying to convince they've met a year before, and another mysterious man [named M] that the woman seems to be under the control of. This film begs for the most fervent interpretation.

Resnais has been asked before what it all meant, and he famously said in an interview: "It's not my role to give explanations. For that matter, I don't think the film is a real enigma. By that I mean the spectator can find his own solution, and it will, in all likelihood, be a good one. But what's certain is that the solution won't be the same for everyone, meaning that my solution is of no more interest than that of any viewer."

The video of that interview can be found below:

In other words, the film is a Rorschach experiment. How you read it is a projection of your deepest desires, needs, wants. Or how you read is how you want it to be read.

So what does it all mean to you? In film critic Roger Ebert's Great Movies article on the film, he quotes Gunther Marx, a professor of German at the University of Illinois: "I'll explain it all for you. It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Levi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn't, that they met before, that they didn't, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn't, that he killed her, that he didn't. Any questions?''

Interesting.

But this is the explanation I like best. And perhaps it is because I am a writer endlessly fascinated by the sometimes surprising turns in the lives of the characters I create. It's still from Ebert, and he writes: "Can it be that X is the artist -- the author, the director? That when he speaks in the second person (``You asked me to come to your room ... '') he is speaking to his characters, creating their story? That first he has M fire a pistol, but that when he doesn't like that and changes his mind, M obediently reflects his desires? Isn't this how writers work? Creating characters out of thin air and then ordering them around? Of course even if X is the artist, he seems quite involved in the story. He desperately wants to believe he met A last year at Marienbad, and that she gave him hope -- asked him to meet her again this year. That is why writers create characters: to be able to order them around, and to be loved by them. Of course, sometimes characters have wills of their own. And there is always the problem of M."

Last Year at Marienbad as a metaphor for writing. I'll take that.

The Permanent Foreigner

2011-04-17T14:11:00.003+08:00

I had no idea they adapted Christopher Isherwood's celebrated memoir Christopher and His Kind for the screen last year. I only stumbled onto it while looking for a suitable film to watch on a slow Sunday afternoon in Movie25. But here is Geoffrey Sax's capable film made for BBC 2, which indeed has the feel of smallness of a TV movie production, but transcends that limitation with its witty screenplay, its alluring acting, and the sheer pleasure of recognizing the depictions of real people (that's W.H. Auden! that's Gerald Hamilton!) and the depictions by actors playing real people who are fictionalized in the many stories of Isherwood's that we love. (It's quite meta that way.) That it tells a very personal story in the embrace of sweeping history (Berlin in the 1930s, during the last years of its splendid roaring, as it inches towards the seething dangers of Nazism..., and here we are in that blazing city with Christopher, and his poet friend Wystan, and the early love of his life Heinz) is part of its charms, and provides both the tension and the workable structure often absent in faithful biopics. It certainly does not shy away from its gay subject matter, and in fact begins with an older Christopher tapping away at his typewriter, making this frank confession: "Berlin meant boys." And boys we get. (Take note of that Douglas Booth as Heinz Neddermeyer. So dreamy.) But what I like about it is the way it gives us a glimpse into the writerly life -- and how the trappings of that life seem so similar for many of us: the creative cocoon of cafes, the cannibalizing of lives of people we know for the sake of our fiction, the requisite rebellion against familiarity and staidness, the juice we long for to feed our writings that we can only get by being an outsider. "I like being a permanent foreigner," Matt Smith's Isherwood confesses to Pip Carter's Auden. I feel that way all of the time.

Madame Bovary in Little Children

2011-04-14T21:16:00.004+08:00

This is my favorite scene from Todd Field's Little Children [2006], adapted from the wonderful book by Tom Perrota. In this scene, bored housewife (and secret adulterer) Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) talks about Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, that epic of small French lives and the hankering for better things, with her book club. The other women in the club have attacked the book as a tale of an unrepentant slut who gets her proper comeuppance, but Sarah gets a sudden enlightenment about Emma's plight...

Sarah Pierce: I think I understand your feelings about this book. I used to have some problems with it, myself. When I read it in grad school, Madame Bovary just seemed like a fool. She marries the wrong man ... makes one foolish mistake after another... But when I read it this time, I just fell in love with her. She's trapped! ... She has a choice: she can either accept a life of misery or she can struggle against it. And she chooses to struggle.

Mary Ann: Some struggle. Hop into bed with every guy who says hello.

Sarah Pierce: She fails in the end ... but there's something beautiful and even heroic in her rebellion. My professors would kill me for even thinking this, but in her own strange way, Emma Bovary is a feminist.

Mary Ann: Oh, that's nice. So now cheating on your husband makes you a feminist?

Sarah Pierce: No, no, it's not the cheating. It's the hunger. The hunger for an alternative, and the refusal to accept a life of unhappiness.

Mary Ann: ... Maybe I didn't understand the book.

Reasonable Doubts

2011-04-13T01:30:00.002+08:00

I just finished Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men [1957]. No car chases, no guns, no special effects. Just twelve men talking around a table, all of them members of a jury arguing whether the defendant in a murder case is guilty or not. And yet it is one of the most intense movies I've ever seen. Of course I've heard of this film before -- yet I've never found myself wanting to watch for some reason or other. It has the distinct reputation of a film classic, and alas I still harbor a common pedestrian's misplaced anxiety over watching anything old, in black and white, something that's "reputable," or Good For Me. (For many people, these qualities are a kiss of a death in a movie; something about human nature insists on patronizing the dregs of culture, like the Saw series. Or Willing Willie.) Lumet's death a few days ago eventually pushed me to try this, his first feature film. I've loved other films of his before -- Dog Day Afternoon [1975], Serpico [1973], Network [1976], Murder on the Orient Express [1974], and The Pawnbroker [1964] most of all, a film my friend John Stevenson thrust upon my unwilling hands and said: "Watch this," although I really didn't want to (and came away awed by the movie). I've also seen some of the others, but they were slight works in critical estimation, although entertaining still -- and always pulsating with the theme of social justice. And the blueprint for that is evident in this first film. Here, how Henry Fonda's lone dissenting juror triumphs in his unshakable pursuit of a reasonable doubt is a masterstroke in acting, but it is Lee J. Cobb's devastated and defeated sad-sack of a juror, with sad memories of his own son, that wrings out first our enmity and then later on our deep sympathies. As Fonda's character intones near the end of the film: "It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth." And I think that's what the film is ultimately about -- an examination of what we accept to be Truths in this life. What is Truth? How do we know if something is really truthful? And can we stake human life on something that can easily be obscured by our prejudices? Unfortunately, in this world, that injustice happens every single day. That jury room might as well be a metaphor, a microcosm, for all our lives.

Cherry Blooms in My City

2011-04-12T22:42:00.001+08:00

Kat Michelle Banay's Cherry Trees in Bloom Along Diputado

Love Always Prevails, For Birds and Fate-Escaping Human Beings Alike

2011-04-12T20:35:00.004+08:00

Is it still a spoiler if one reveals the ending of a film to be a cliche you've seen from too many movies? You know the kind. Love prevails. The kiss breaks the spell. Disney has made mountains of moolah from this simple formula we've seen in almost all fairy tales. But watching the same thing unfold in George Nolfi's The Adjustment Bureau [2011] finally felt like a cheat. Did we deserve the ending we got, or was it a kind of shafting, a turn towards unforgivable Deux ex machina after the story had us already cartwheeling through what felt like an original take of a love story? See, we've been through so much already; we've invested so much in the likability of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt's pairing. He is a maverick politician with a bright political future. She is a beautiful dancer. They both live in New York. One night, after an event from the past nipped his chances for a successful Senatorial run, he is ready to call in the towel of politics. Moments before giving his concession speech, he retires to what seems to be an empty bathroom of the hotel his campaign his headquartered in -- and practices his loser's speech. And then she appears from one of the stalls, muttering apologies, batting eyelashes -- and they're in love, just like that. There's something believable about this Meet Cute moment, and that is vital to our interest in the story. See, Damon's would-be Senator comes out of that bathroom energized, and he gives the concession speech that makes his political career, turning a losing run into a future of great promise. But see, the Fates -- patrolled and controlled by a group of men in trench coats and fedoras called, well, "the adjustment bureau" -- only meant them to meet just once for that purpose, and to never meet again, or else they compromise both their potentials. But there's a kink in the system; they do meet -- and both must outrun their fates (quite literally, through magic doors, all over Manhattan) if they are to be united in true love. And we went: Awww.

Hell, the film made us sit at the edges of our seats in the theater asking this question without a trace of irony: "What would you choose, love or fate?" Carlo beside me said "Love." Anna and I said "Fate." It was a haunting question we've asked the Universe forever. We were that involved. And then the ending comes. Happy, yes. But a let-down of utter unoriginality.

Still the film has its heart in the right place. That it tries to do some genre-bending with this film is something to be lauded. It's not every day you get a dramatic love story infused with New York tourism, modern dance, the marketing in a political campaign, the philosophical handwringing over existentialism and questions of fate, and the whole kaboodle of religious readings. (Is The Chairman God?) I can picture Nolfi as the screenwriter pitching this to Hollywood this way: "It's The Bourne Identity meets Dark City meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!" And we do get elements from those: the endless running through city streets of Jason Bourne (and look! it's Matt Damon himself!), the ethereal manipulations of consciousness of the Strangers, and the mind-bending race to escape and preserve love of Joel and Clementine.

But having said all of that, I reckon the film is not an original at all. And so maybe we did deserve that cliche of an ending.

And yet it is different with this other film I saw yesterday. Brazilian director Carlos Saldanha's Rio [2011], the sixth feature film from Blue Sky Studios, was the perfect antidote to a Monday that threatened to collapse under the weight of blah-ness. I caught it on the big screen, as any animated film of such glorious colors as this should be, with Jasper and Anna. We needed this kind of film. It was a delightful romp filled with just-nice-enough songs and a motley crew of lovable animal characters that have the splashy wit of a Brazilian sunshine. There was enough pop culture referentiality in it to delight the adults in us -- such as when the rumble scene started with somebody shouting "Birds versus Monkeys!" (a dig, of course, into the popular game of Angry Birds). But there was also enough romance, and enough side-splitting comedy. It doesn't have the emotional heft of last year's How to Train Your Dragon, but that's perfectly fine. It does say something about the evils of poaching, the tenuous bonds of friendship and trust, the quick iPhone-adaptability of marmosets, and the helpful white lies you can deliver to make your toucan wife allow you to do the Carnaval. It also has something to say about the metaphors of cages and flying. And of course, in the end, when everything else seems to fail, what prevails is true love.

As always.

If only life were that simple.

The Celluloid Community

2011-04-10T18:35:00.001+08:00

“Movies, in other words, were part of what it meant to be modern. Viewers learned to dress and smoke and romance from movies, but they also learned how to be an audience. They were constituents in a new cultural democracy, one in which you voted by buying a ticket. The movies showed people new worlds that they experienced in groups in the nickelodeons, lavish palaces and multiplexes. We still commune with others when we watch a movie alone at home — if only in later conversation, online or in our head. But watching that movie with other people is a discrete experience from watching a clip on YouTube and noticing it has 200,000 hits, each a ghostly trace of someone else.”

~ Manohla Dargis, The New York Times film critic, in “Out There in the Dark, All Alone” on the lost communal experience in the movies

The Stars For the Dreamer

2011-04-10T17:34:00.000+08:00

When I was growing up in our old Villarosa house, the part of the ceiling right above my bed had more than a hundred luminous stickers of stars I had painstakingly arranged in constellations. Those tiny bright lights were the last things I'd see every time I went to sleep each night. They made me a dreamer.

And the Sixth is Out!

2011-04-09T01:13:00.001+08:00

Losing the Bite

2011-04-08T11:04:00.005+08:00

I bought Galt Niederhoffer's The Romantics in BookSale a few days ago based on Janet Maslin's admiring review of the book in The New York Times a few years ago. I've read excerpts of it online, and found the language biting and witty in its satirical take of a WASP wedding set in New England. The story -- about a close-knit, if incestuous, group of nine friends who found each other while matriculating in Yale -- is meant to be an amusing dissection of white upper-class mores, and it is detailed in that regard (comparable perhaps to the taxonomy of the elite class explored by Edith Wharton, but informed by The Official Preppy Handbook), and Niederhoffer rises to the occasion with a sharpened scalpel, expertly treading the fine line between comedy and social butchery. During the rehearsal dinner scene, for example, one character toasts the groom of the WASPy bride this way: "Congratulations! You've social-climbed your first Everest." I enjoyed the book, even when it is about a hoary subject, which is treated a little too lightly. But I like its tone and its expertise of its subject matter; there is no false note here.

Which is something I cannot say about the movie adaptation, starring Kate Holmes, Josh Duhamel, and Anna Paquin -- and megged, incredibly enough, by Niederhoffer herself. It is as if the author, now the film director, forgot entirely what she wanted to do and say in her book, jettisoning much of everything (including the social commentary!) to do a Hollywood-specific focus on the romantic entanglements of the characters, which, if you ask me, are purely incidental in the book.

It is miscast, it is horribly acted by an otherwise capable cast, it is photographed so slovenly and drearily that I winced at every scene raped by cinematic miscalculation. I had to ask: how can Niederhoffer murder her own novel with this travesty?

We All Complete

2011-04-04T01:19:00.003+08:00

Perhaps it was not such a good idea to jump right into Mark Romanek's adaptation of Never Let Me Go [2010], so soon after finishing the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Reading a book allows us complete freedom in the construction of the imagined world presented to us on the page -- and the minute details of Hailsham, the Cottages, Norfolk, and then the anonymous Recovery Centers that dot the landscape of the novel are still fresh in the hold of my imagination.

The exactitude of a cinematic adaptation is often a disappointment, and the things that are excised from the literature to fit the constraints of a feature film's running time is often too glaring. And we always come way saying, "The book is better than the film." But sometimes, some films get a good balance of things, such as Steve Kloves' efforts in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter film series. Screenwriter Christopher Hampton and director Joe Wright, in adapting the Ian McEwan novel Atonement [2007], also get it right: they are able to stage in the regular run of the film all the emotional inflections of the characters, all the right moments of drama and revelation, and all the set pieces [the Tallis mansion, the war-ravaged Dunkirk...] which are sumptuously recreated from the novel; there's faithfulness to the book, but also a vibrant originality all its own that keeps it from being a dry exercise in adaptation.

Alex Garland, also an acclaimed novelist, stays true to the chronology of the Ishiguro story, but must have been at pains in how to exactly put all of that down on paper and on celluloid, and the strain shows. Kathy H.'s tale -- compelling on the page because of its gripping, if too matter-of-fact, rendering of the various lives and secrets in Hailsham and the Cottages, and her unique way of making a veritable cliffhanger out of every incident she tells -- is perhaps difficult to film, since she does not exactly tell her story in a chronological way. She goes about it in a roundabout manner, always sifting through time and memory, plucking details out of the air of what she remembers, as she tells this "story": three friends -- Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy -- share a close-knit childhood in a special private school, where they are sheltered from the realities of the outside world for some reason, where they go through regimented ways and traditions not exactly explained to them, where they are not exactly told about their fates but are conditioned to accept them whatever those fates might turn out to be; and then they "graduate" to the real world in the Cottages where they confront the triangle they form; and then there's the harsher realities of becoming Carers and Donors and the inevitability of Completing and the precarious hope they cultivate for avoiding the fate forced on them...

Garland puts all that in, but does not manage to get us emotionally involved, and maybe that's because he omits what's necessary, and sets to tell the story in a straightforward manner rather than the emotionally informed roller coaster of the book's narrative. Take, for example, the stress on the Art for Madame's Gallery that becomes vital in the last third of the film (and in the book). The foregrounding of the relevance for this plot point is totally absent from the film, which inexplicably rushes through the Hailsham years as if this part of the story is nothing more than an unimportant flashback. What Garland and Romanek do not get is that the very theme of the story is memory. Everything about the Hailsham past and what happens in it informs the actions of the characters, including Ruth's treachery and eventual wish for redemption, and including the importance of the "art" Madame collects for her "Gallery." What foregrounds that in the first third of the film? Just Tommy drawing a misshapen elephant. The film doesn't even explain why it makes Tommy confess to Madame in the end why none of his childhood art ever got chosen for the Gallery.

But I'm quibbling too much. The film has its merits: it is beautiful, the music by Rachel Portman is perfection, and it is well cast. Carey Mulligan as Kathy brings out with such truth the quiet sureness, the knowing fierceness, and the subtle intelligence we glimpsed at from the pages.

In the end [spoiler alert!], the film quotes partly from the book, and has Kathy muttering this melancholy cry of acceptance at the Norfolk countryside -- that place "where all our lost things can be found" (a point the film never picks up): "I come here and imagine that this is the spot where everything I've lost since my childhood is washed out. I tell myself, if that were true, and I waited long enough then a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy. He'd wave. And maybe call. I don't know if the fantasy go beyond that, I can't let it."

The quote from the book stops there, but the film adaptation goes on this way: "I remind myself I was lucky to have had any time with him at all. What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time."

And I found that point devastatingly true, and also ultimately sad.

Lost in Norfolk

2011-04-03T20:46:00.003+08:00

I thought I'd read the book first, and then watch the film adaptation later. I've had the book for so long, but it was just there, among the various unread titles in the bulging bookshelves lining the walls of my apartment, waiting for my attention to wander and perhaps fix on it. The film kicked me towards the effort, and the way the book begins, "My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer for over eleven years...," struck me as strange, a little off-putting perhaps. I've read Kazuo Ishiguro before, in his timeless Remains of the Day, which was a great read, notably the masterpiece of a great stylist, and the deadpan way Never Let Me Go begins, complete with that strange abbreviation for the narrator's surname, did not exactly take to me as Ishiguro territory. But I was wrong. Because this is Ishiguro being a literary virtuoso, conjuring an entire and complete landscape of emotions and memory that had me occasionally gasping for air. Pieces of it are brilliant, they can almost stand as complete short stories themselves. And that section before the end, when Ruth exhorts Kathy and Tommy about what they must do -- that did me in. It was devastating. The whole book is devastating, and it's a cliche to say this but I could see pieces of my own childhood -- its hurts and recriminations, its playfulness and wonder, its consuming worldview -- in Hailsham, where the characters, when they were young, lived a kind of shadowy lives, strangely accepting of their peculiar lot (and fate) in this world. And that ending in that field in Norfolk -- where all lost things can be found -- is a finely-wrought set piece of utter desolation and hope, it was wrenching. The book made me sad, which is not a damning condemnation. It just seemed to me to be an uncanny looking-glass, totally unexpected, not exactly wanted, but it's there, I read through it, and I, left breathless, have nothing else to say.

Why We Write

2011-04-03T15:06:00.000+08:00

"I write down things I don't understand, too. I leave them in my books and reread them later and then they take on a meaning."

~ Marguerite Duras, Yann Andrea Steiner

A Lot of Things Can Happen in Ten Years.

2011-03-30T20:08:00.006+08:00

I leafed through it at first with the detachment of somebody just biding his time. It was there, and my meal was still cooking. I was waiting, and this issue of Vanity Fair was on the magazine stand. It had Tom Cruise on the cover, his hair long, his pose relaxed but studiedly masculine, as if to say, "I am the biggest star of them all, and here you are, picking up this magazine because of me." I did not. I've always liked Vanity Fair, and if it were Adrien Brody on the cover, I'd still pick it up. I glanced at the date. June 2000. I whistled, smiled a bit. How long ago this was. Ten years? A lot of things can happen in ten years. Heck, a lot of things can happen in a year -- and I began to look closely at that. This magazine was a time machine, you can say. Or a snapshot of a moment in popular culture, a little more than a year before things really changed and transformed us all. This issue came out fifteen months before those planes swooped down and flattened the towers -- and changed the world forever. What was I doing in June 2000? Probably starting to get into Graduate School, inching my way into a career in teaching, even as I plotted my way out of my first job as editor of this local newspaper. The plans for the Silliman University centennial celebrations were underway, and Dumaguete was still a quiet town. I looked inside. The pictures inside the pages looked quaint, brushed by some form of innocence in all its brashness and celebration of the commercial and the small. The people in it looked too happy, or too deliriously drugged out. Oblivious. There is an ad with the Sex and the City girls coming off its first season -- all of them still looking buxom and young -- daring us: "Are you ready for more?" In the Hollywood pages, the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party was riddled with pictures of faces that were celebrated as new -- but are now considered vintage, long-gone couplings -- Salma and Edward, Tom and Nicole. (Kidman, apparently, was in Australia filming Moulin Rouge.) Clasping her Oscar, Angeline Jolie is dressed as Morticia Adams, with no hint of the luster that would soon make her the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. The ads for luxury goods come and go, lackluster in appeal, but one ad struck me: Lucky Strikes, and its tag line: "It's Toasted." (Years later, Mad Men would recreate the coining of that line.) The waitress brought me my food, and I began eating, and I turned the pages some more. In one piece, Lance Armstrong chronicles his battle with cancer, and in another, Hillary Clinton takes on Rudy Guiliani. Cameron Crowe interviews Cruise for the issue, and begins with an anecdote about Cruise reading out loud over the phone the lines of Lester Bangs from a movie Crowe is set to direct -- something still called Untitled. (Almost Famous was still a dream.) In the interview, Cruise reflects on the strange reception towards Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. (Kubrick just recently died, his last film a misunderstood masterpiece.) In another story, Helen Gurley Brown gushes about her new book I'm Wild Again, and answers questions about plastic surgery on enhancing the labia. "Does it give girls better orgasm?" she asks. On one editorial fashion spread, Jennifer Lopez, glammed up in a series of scenes, still looks like she is still unscrubbed Jenny from the block -- with none of the incandescence of her American Idol future. (In 2000, there was no American Idol.) So many things. Ten years ago. I finished my food, closed the magazine, and went home.

A Beastly Love Rampage

2011-03-30T11:27:00.004+08:00

Once in a while, when I feel particularly brave, I allow myself to screen a film of such hallucinogenic narrative, absurd premise, or controversial reputation, just to rock my world and see how far I can go in my cinematic experimentations.

Sometimes, the effort is strangely engaging, as in discovering the Italian Mondo documentaries, Nobuhiko Obayashi's House [1977], or Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses [1976], or Alejandro Jodorowski's Santa Sangre [1989], or Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now [1973], or Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl [2001], or Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum [1961], or Dario Argento's Two Evil Eyes [1990], or Tinto Brass' La Chiave [1983], or Sam Raimi's Evil Dead [1981], or Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher [2001], or Joey Gosiengfiao's Temptation Island [1980], or Takashi Miike's Audition [1999], or Fruit Chan's Dumplings [2004], or even Jim Sharman's Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975].

And sometimes, it is dreadful and exhausting, as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo [1975], Herschelle Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast [1963], or Eli Roth's Hostel [2005].

As you can see, the constants are these: extremes in both sex and violence, or in absurdity -- and how much the envelope can be pushed, and still be regarded as art (or at least "camp.")

A few hours ago, I allowed myself to finally screen something I've had for years but never bothered to see: Walerian Borowczyk's La Bestia [1975] -- a strange Italian sexual romp on this side of bestiality that is a loose take on the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale, which it turns on its head. A beautiful young woman comes to a countryside mansion intent on marrying the son of her father's friend -- but the son has a, well, an animalistic dark secret which she soon discovers as she gets haunted by strange sexual dreams of a nubile woman being chased in the woods -- and then raped (or is it rape?) -- by a rampaging beast that is a cross between a bear and a meerkat. The film's matter-of-fact close-up shots of, ummm, beastly and oozing ... appendages prove to be capable of a combination of amusement and shock. By the end of the film, I chuckle, I eject the DVD, and I wonder for the umpteenth time at the strange provocations exploitation cinema sometimes can bring. Was that art? Perhaps not, but it was at least interesting.

Anything For Love

2011-03-30T11:27:00.003+08:00

I don't know what compelled me to screen Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious [1946] again last night. Maybe it was the after-effect of having seen Spellbound [1945] earlier, and still wanting to see Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock territory. But I'm glad I did, because with this second viewing, the tension I felt was more taut, the stakes the characters gamble on even higher. Here is a story of a man who dispatches the love of his life to spy on a target, even marry him to be privy to important secrets -- and she does it for her love of him. Maybe I could identify with that strange sacrifice now that I've had my share of love and losing -- and sacrificing? Hahaha. Maybe. But that last rescue scene fraught with both tension and tenderness -- and that long, long, long kiss somewhere in the middle of the film -- I swoon.

Harsh Milkshake

2011-03-30T11:26:00.002+08:00

I don't know why it took me so long to watch Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood [2007], but here it was -- something that I felt I had to watch very early this morning -- and it was terrifying and epic and inexplicably draws you in with so much power and malevolence, you had to wonder why. Is it the sweeping sureness of Anderson's direction, and Robert Elswit's cinematography? Or the no-holds-barred acting of both Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano as antagonists in this story of oil, the Wild West, greed and speculation, the darkness of human nature, and the vapid venom of organized religion? Or the unsettling musical score by Jonny Greenwood? Maybe the exact reason why it took me long to watch it is because I am sometimes made timid by the prospect of beholding something Important and Powerful, the way the raves went in 2007 and 2008, in time for the film to become a serious Oscar contender. But I'm glad I got over that timidity -- and even if I am still shaken by the wrath of Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview ("I drink your milkshake!"), it was worth the nerves.

Colorful Claustrophobia

2011-03-30T11:22:00.001+08:00

I have yet to see Fantastic Mr. Fox [2009], but why is it that I am beginning to feel that my swooning infatuation with Wes Anderson has come to an end? (God, I hope not.) He piqued my interest, in a minor way, with Bottle Rocket [1996], a strange cinematic tumble with a peculiarity of composition that immediately drew me in; that fascination only strengthened in Rushmore [1998]. But when I saw The Royal Tenenbaums [2001], I was in love. Here was a director with a film syntax all his own, somebody with a curious fascination for elaborate production design [can we call it the vintage New York hotel look?], enhanced color palette, and quirky characters, often very smart people at the end of their ropes hanging only with the bitterest but repressed hopes. [OMGLists has a "Five Signs You're Watching a Wes Anderson Movie" list.] Then The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou [2004] happened, and while the Anderson visual staples and quirks were still evident, it smacked of unribald indulgence. The story, despite having Bill Murray in it, had no heart. And alas, with The Darjeeling Limited [2007], which I saw last night, exactly the same conclusion can be drawn. Why should we care about this trio of brothers traveling across India by rail in both a spiritual quest and a search for the mother who has abandoned them? At the end of it all, I still had no answers. There is no emotional gravity here, and certainly no sense of expansive spirit, just a strange claustrophobia engendered by the cooped up space we had to squeeze into in the title train's corridors and carriages. Which is sad because India -- the country, the people, the culture -- is huge, but here it just becomes an excuse for Anderson to squander his overly saturated production design.