Kingdom of Heaven

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

In Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven,” a “spiritual” film released last year but hardly caught our attention perhaps because we were too busy handling our own spiritual crises, Orlando Bloom portrays Balian, a young French knight who assumed his father’s highly reputed knighthood in the time of the Crusades in the 1100s.

The film hews a story of how Christians in the twelfth century defended Jerusalem from the invading Moors. At the time when rulers of the holy land thought of achieving for themselves personal glory instead of preserving human life, Balian stood out to be the redeemer of them all, when he acceded to surrender Jerusalem to the rule of Saladin in order to save more human lives.

When the king and all his other army fell into the trap of moor leader Saladin, Balian was abandoned by his comrade Tiberius and his army (who fled to Cyprus). Now the sole knight in the kingdom, Balian instead knighted hundreds of men in order to defend the people. His idea was to preserve human life, not to protect the city’s walls, which was being bombarded by Saladin’s army. Balian and his “knights” also hid the women and children underground, away from the exploding battlefield, while they went on to defend themselves from thousands of armies of the invaders. Inspired by his being knighted by his “father” Sir Godfrey, who died of a disease before being able to go back to Jerusalem, Balian carried on to sustain and counter Saladin’s attacks, overwhelming a number of Saladin’s men but sacrificing some of his.

When he saw the bodies of his fellowmen in Jerusalem which they burned to get rid of disease which might create a plague, he finally decided to surrender Jerusalem to Saladin, a decision much applauded by his people.

Telling everyone there that the kingdom of God is in the hearts of men and not in the fortresses of the city, Balian inspired everyone to move on. Eventually when Saladin captured the city, Balian along with many Christians were ushered out to the sea to be exiled.

Later, in history, Jerusalem, like other Christian holy places in Palestine, would be recovered by European powers until the 13th century, but all in vain.

For the centuries-old rift in the Holy Land, a crisis which dominates the world headlines, year in and year out—the never-ending bombings in Lebanon and the ensuing social unrest in the Arab countries —Balian’s story gives an example to rendering peace to the people—and even to us, who are constant witnesses but mum spectators of this unending conflict.

If only people could see the inner peace in themselves, they do not have to kill each other to achieve peace among their own race. World leaders like Sharon, Arafat and throngs of political leaders have tried to assume their respective stances, to no avail. Peacemakers and political figures come and go, live and die, without achieving anything peaceable.

Perhaps this troubled land, ironically called the Holy Land, is indeed the land of redemption because here one must come to his senses that the deeper trouble lies within himself, not anywhere else.

And it is never trite to say that change starts within the individual person—the virtue begins with one’s effort to be humble and forego his wants and whims. For it is only through the grace of God that one is steered clear of himself, his own pride and sense of judgment—which is usually narrow-minded and self-oriented—that the inner peace can reign in us. After all, the kingdom of heaven is the human person himself, who is the seat of Godliness, if and only if we recognize it.

Notes on English and Writing

In college I was approached by our neighbors to write letters to their foster parents under the PLAN International. Free of charge, I would write the letter for an American or German benefactor. After I had written the letter, the neighbor’s mother would send to our household food or anything that could pay for what I did. I hardly knew then that good writing skill could already mean business.

I myself was a recipient of a scholarship which required me to write regularly a Japanese benefactor on how I fared in school, how my grades were, and what activities I involved myself in. So I would write letters in English as I should, prolifically.

I also remember the best thing to look forward to in a week was to get a reply from my pen friends. And I would gladly write them back. I even wrote to more than three of them at one time. I enjoyed exchanging ideas and sharing stories with them. They simply made my day. All these nurtured in me the habit of writing letters, and more letters. Initially I was interested in it; but eventually I was hooked in it that it became part of my system.

Normally for a young student like me who preferred writing letters to dunking shots in a basketball court, I was being groomed to becoming a student writer. Having good English skills, in fact, is a prized possession in school, in college and in the world.

In high school, I began writing for the school paper. I wrote letters to friends constantly or whenever I had the time. Sometimes I really had to find time. I also kept a journal on which I recorded a lot of my ideas, observations, and privations and many experimental works.

I was studying for free so I thought I better maximize the opportunity. I borrowed books from the library, and read a lot. English was one subject that I could not trade for any computer game—a leisurely activity which I could hardly afford.

There was also no stopping me from reading books, or from making things out of what I read—poems, puzzles, imitations of sayings, and stories.
But I was not really a recluse. More often than not, I was also playing ball with my cousins. I was also active in school clubs—these included writing cliques, collectors’ groups and similar stuff.

In 1996, I found myself working for a newspaper in Bicol. Then, I also wrote articles for Teodoro Locsin’s Today, a Makati-based national broadsheet which has now merged with the Manila Standard.

Both working and writing, I did not stop writing and learning in English—also Filipino and Bikol. I wrote and sent articles and poems to national periodicals. My submissions were rejected and others were published. I even got paid for the ones published in magazines; but the newspapers hardly paid. The newspaper work did not promise compensation, but I held on to writing news and feature articles because I knew I was making sense.

I just kept writing, and with it, I easily found work in publication desks where I managed the newsletter and more importantly, “got to know some real people” [apologies to Sunday Inquirer Magazine].

For the past years I have been writing, I have been enjoying each moment of it.
While some people say that the knack in writing and perhaps everything related to it are given to rare people, I say it’s not absolutely true. I would like to think that all my choices in the past had collectively done their part to make me like writing, and prefer it to any other occupation or preoccupation.

While it may not be a very lucrative occupation, I also consider that with the power to articulate oneself [in English or any language], I have more chances of being privileged—if at all, not actually being gifted.

Times have changed. Nowadays, people who know how to better communicate cannot just remain disadvantaged or say, underpaid, unlike [what] other people [say].
As editor and journalism teacher, I have been editing my own and other people’s writing. When it comes to expressing ourselves in writing, I find some things which hinder the very purpose for which we write. Let me cite them here.

Verbosity or wordiness
Wordiness results from many things. Regardless of where we are, many of us pad our writing with all sorts of empty phrases perhaps to reach the length required in the school or office. 

Wordiness tends to occur when we are struggling to clarify our ideas or when we’re tired and therefore cannot think clearly. Regardless of our reason for padded writing, we can achieve concise writing if we are aware of the individual patterns of wordiness which is typical of the way we usually write.

Problem comes in when we do not become aware that we are using more words than is necessary. Because we are the authors—we are not inclined to correct ourselves more openly by perhaps slashing the words we have written. We think they are so perfect because they capture what we wish to express so we could get our message across to whoever reads it.

Yet, it’s good when you come to constantly critique your own work—to the extent that pruning words and phrases in your original draft, revising and rewriting your entire work will come naturally. One day, wordiness will be crime to you. Your familiarity with words will tell you whether you have to improve your drafts and can still make it better, even the ones you have written with a colleague.

For one, knowing that language works best by being brief will help you become a more effective communicator.

English is Filipinos’ second language

This issue is nothing new. We Filipinos normally—or more aptly, by heart—speak Hiligaynon, Waray, Bikol, etc., dialect or vernacular, but we are also asked to write and speak English.

Needless to say, we Filipinos are bombarded by so many languages around us—that we find it confusing which to use and how and why. Consider other languages we learned around us, the street language and the television language, aside from our very own vernaculars—modernized Bikol or Hiligaynon, or combined with Taglish, etc.

When we are asked to write in English but we essentially think in the local language—Bikol, Hiligaynon or Filipino—our mother tongue, which we know by heart. Problem sets in because most of the time we are tempted to transliterate: we write in English what we think, know or feel in our mother tongue. Sadly, because a large number of words in our own language have no exact English equivalents, we end up linguistically challenged—we do not realize that, say, not all things in our realities have counterparts in the English language.

All these years of education in the country, our schools must have not succeeded on an effective English language policy. But in the past, our grandfathers and grandmothers must have been well versed in English because they underwent rigid training on the English language, even studying Latin which is the root of [source of the words in] the language.

Today’s schools tell a different story. Despite DepEd’s staunch campaign to use only English or Filipino in the classrooms and schools, everything boils down to what the learners are really comfortable doing—code-switching [speaking combined English with Filipino combined with Bikol or Hiligaynon, etc.]. Moreover, students are overwhelmed by all forms of media; so asking them to speak and write in perfect, flawless English becomes a dream.

It is not cynical to say that young people can learn. In fact, I had students who were inclined to really write well not only because they were inclined—genetically, personally, whatever—but because they chose to do so.

To write and speak good English then is a choice. One simply prefers to do it, for it is something he strives to do—just like someone who endlessly strums the chords, until he masters them, and who later becomes the best guitarist onstage, because he’s strumming most people’s pains away.

Aristotle said we are what we repeatedly do—that excellence therefore is not an act, but a habit. To do something in the best way constantly is to be the very best in it—excel in it.

English is really our second language
Another problem crops up from our unfamiliarity with English. Being Filipinos, let’s face it, we were not born saying, “Oh My God!” or “Ouch!” We rather say things automatically, naturally, using our dialect, depending on our ethnic group.

Despite that some parents today would train their young children to speak English—confident that starting them young might make a difference—it’s the yaya’s English that is rather internalized by their wards. We are naturally born Filipinos, and we live in a country where most people speak countless languages.

This exaggeration is true, given the many kinds of language that we human beings invent to suit their own purposes and eccentricities. [When we were younger, my brothers and cousins themselves communicated in a way only they understood—they reversed words, phrases and sentences until they learned to speak them spontaneously and with finesse. To them it was cool. I was too young to learn it. I did not find it cool either. So I gave up decoding their conversations. But through the years, that has become their bond. Until now, in family gatherings, they would throw jokes and banters that only they understand.]

Because English is our second language, each of us must be familiar with it.
Back in the campus, I used to tell my students to read English and read anything in English. I asked them further to always find the chance to learn anything in English—word, phrase, title of a movie, catchphrase, etc.—and it will become a habit.

Like many other disciplines, English is habit-forming. Despite what others are saying that it is too late for people to do that, if we do this constantly and earnestly, it will do us good.

The problem with legalese

Browsing over documents—whether in schools or offices—makes me think that we are also hindered by the use of jargon, or technical language, like the ones that lawyers use in public and legal documents.

The use of legalese in government communications has been pervasive. Some people who draft them may be lawyers, law teachers, or administrators who have management credits. In other words, such documents are written by people who have been exposed to organizing their work, starting from what they will do to how they will go about in doing and accomplishing them.

Because legalese reads and sounds so foreign we simply dismiss it as difficult. Indeed, it is difficult because ordinary people have not studied law. Everything legalese sounds alien because it reads so formal—and it sounds detached and impersonal.

Thus our attitude towards this kind of language should be open-minded. For instance, if we encounter a document that reads so difficult—we hardly understand anything it says except the names of those who signed them, let us have this resolve that in our own way, or work, we can simplify our expressions so those who will read anything we have written can understand us.

For one, writing is about seeking understanding.

Brokeback Mountain

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

WITH “BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN,” film director Ang Lee presents himself as a symbolist, a minimalist, and a lot more.

Based on Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer-winning novel, “Brokeback Mountain” is an apt label for Lee’s masterpiece on how the lives of two cowboys—the tightlipped Ennis del Mar and the rodeo-loving Jack Twist—are made meaningful and even tragic by their summer experience in the wild. In Brokeback Mountain, the two cowboys have their own Walden experience, or epiphanies—something that they will hold on to for the rest of their lives—but that later turns out to be against social conventions, a dilemma to resolve that it makes tragic heroes out of them.

AS A SYMBOLIST, Ang Lee shows so much by concealing many things. Ennis del Mar’s restrained affectation for his friend Jack Twist with whom he shares a steamy summer in 1963 predominantly figures in the end as tragedy.

A plethora of symbols prevails in the masterpiece. First, the sheep being tended by the two cowboys are the juxtaposition for Ennis del Mar, one whose restraint and silence seems the most deafening to all the other characters. The meekness of the sheep being tended by the two main characters delineates Ennis’ inability to articulate his own preference, living in an otherwise homophobic society. Like the sheep feasted on by the obscure [the unseen social ridicule] wolves, Ennis del Mar confines himself to avoid the stigma from his outward relationship with another man. Second, the bloodied clothes—Ennis’s long-sleeved shirts and Jack’s denim jacket—spells the boys’ distinctive bonding. When Ennis finds the clothes in Jack’s room after his death—with Jack’s denim covering Ennis’s shirt—the viewer is told that Jack has indeed nurtured their friendship and union. Towards the end of the movie, after Ennis gets to know of Jack’s fate through his wife Lorraine, Ennis’s shirt is already covering Jack’s clothes. The living already treasures the memory of the dead. Such cinematic contrivance affords us these symbols of male love and concern.

Also, the movie’s title itself spells the polar tendencies and realities of the two main characters. While “Brokeback” spells their aggressive, masculine tendencies, “mountain” articulates their softer and more feminine sides, as they [get to] love each other.

“Brokeback” perhaps sounds contrived as it accounts for the harsh cowboy life that the Ennis and Jack encounter in the Wyoming ranch. The jobs they took on themselves literally “break” their backs. Yet, something else in the ranch does other things to them.

On the other hand, “mountain” speaks the providence of nature—in the way the camera portrays nature scenes as real-life postcards of lush vegetation, open fields and pristine panoramas of sky and water. While their ranch work entails “breaking their backs” literally, the entire backdrop where they were makes them gentle to themselves.

AS A MINIMALIST, the Asian sensibility of Ang Lee surfaces in the film’s sparse dialogues and its use of panoramic postcards-like shots. Lee’s camera pans out to the poetic and the restrained.

The film zooms in on the ‘corked’ anger and restraint in Ennis del Mar. Ennis del Mar's interesting character later turns out to be the more repressed, the wayward character who needs more redemption just because he cannot fully articulate himself—he thus becomes the disadvantaged protagonist, he is the tragic hero.

Lee’s angles delineate well the characters. Ennis del Mar’s displays the vacillation of a typical human being. While seeking to desire something else, he chooses to do otherwise. He then suffers greatly from not being able to articulate his feelings and aspirations which can get him something good.

Ennis del Mar sustains his inarticulateness through his murky relations with other characters. While he sustains himself as a father to Alma Jr., ironically he has already contradicted himself when he divorces his wife Alma. While he maintains clandestine relations with his “fishing” friend Jack Twist, he suffers greatly from the inability to sustain any sensible one with a serious one. And while Ennis seeks to be conscious of social ridicule all the while—disregarding Jack’s suggestion on cohabitation, he eventually suffers from the pain of it all when Jack finally gives it a go, and leaves him all alone.

When Jack Twist dies towards the end of the story, the dilemma of the protagonists is never resolved. The film then becomes an elegy for the death of love between two males—which—to society—means the death of the self simply because it cannot be, or can it?

Lee presents the audience the widest open spaces for introspection. When he captures the sprawling blue skyline and open waters and streams and fields, he tells them this is how wide the possibilities in the world are—where he lives, where everyone can etch their own notions on morality [or the lack of it].

With this, Lee presents to the audience the option to etch his own notion of right and wrong, his own sense of morality. Lee presents wide, open spaces as he presents options for the human being to take a stand and articulate his convictions. While Jack Twist freely etches his own spectrum of colors in the open pages of Ennis’ life, he is also easy and free to wheeze all these away. But everything he must have done was hinged on self-conviction, despite its not being grounded by the proper sense of right and wrong.

Meanwhile, the driftwood personality of Jack is clear to go against Ennis’s sense of self, which later translates to a dilemma that shall challenge him from one moment onwards. The film is brimming with binary opposites. And these are made clear when Jack Twist’s life rifts from that of Ennis del Mar whose sensibility is all restraint and uncertainty. Now acclaimed by a number of award-giving bodies, Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” will certainly break the back of the moralists, despite the [degree of] sexual liberation prevalent in this country.

The film featuring boys loving boys is certainly a big “no-no”—something scowled upon by traditional social conventions in this only predominantly Catholic country in Asia.

But as lovelorn boys coming of age, characters Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar might hardly gain the ire of any viewer since they present two sincere characters whose dilemma of pursuing their preferences intersects harshly with social conventions.

Together they achieve sense of fulfillment—they fly like angels without wings. They become messengers of their own truths, speaking much of the reality that pervades among us.

Goal! The Dream Begins

Rating:	★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Sports

Just when you feel so harassed or exhausted after a week’s work, here comes one supposedly “feel-good” movie that will rather make you feel bad about many things in the end.

As a “good” movie is supposed to inspire the audience [because it must present something new and fresh, regardless of any trite topic], “Goal: The Dream Begins” falls short in many respects.

In this latest onscreen sports saga—perhaps belonging to a list of Hollywood staples—Kuno Becker’s Santiago Munez dreams big to play in the English premiership and then makes it, period. No more, no less.

Munez appears fresh in his boyish and savvy countenance as a newcomer in England’s Newcastle United, but his clear, pretty-boy looks alone do not account for what he has to do much in the film.

Yet, the entirely boyish smiles and grins and a contrived acting do not convince much, not to mention the film’s simply ordinary storyline.

The actor’s pretty face does not work well for a serious character who can elicit sympathy for his efforts and achievements as a struggling migrant who makes it big in the city and in the world. He fails simply because hid face does not look challenged and as convincing, and does not deliver much.

Coming from a poor Mexican family who once escaped to California, Santiago Munez may have convinced us with his diligence and hard work common in America migrants—but the movie appears to assume so much from the audience.

In other words, one needs to have read American or Mexican Revolution first—so we would understand the temperaments and the racial undertones working in the film. Sadly, not all people would know or want to know about it—thus the film settles with the simple biographical account of this poor boy’s life who becomes professional through a series of ups and downs.

In doing so, it simply reels off as a pastiche of some football history memorabilia—showing football drills under the rain, pristine soccer fields in the British countryside, and jump-packed dome in English cities, one that a social-climbing middle-class father can show to his overeager, disoriented son to dream it big likewise to get to the Western world—where future can be totally uncertain for migrants like Latin Americans, or Asians.

The film instead rolls out time to featuring the addiction of the English people to their own sport. Using the film as payback, or act of gratitude, like Mel Gibson’s own sense of religion in the “Passion of the Christ,” the film’s director must have created the project to enunciate his passion for the sport, or sense of country.

While Stephen Dillane as the talent scout and Alessandro Nivola as Newcastle’s oversexed pro-football main man turn in good, few-lined performances who help the struggling athlete make it to the green field of his dreams, Mike Jefferies and Adrian Butchart flimsy story does not help it deliver to the net of the audience’s satisfaction, as all seems to be left hanging after the movie ends in the Munez’s first and last [so far the biggest] game in London.

This film may not at all solicit any hurrahs or raving reviews from those people who—in their lifetime—have had overdose of similar storylines as in Sean Astin’s "Rudy," or other football or baseball league stories. The movie’s sad fate spells a similar reality in the field of literature, wherein not all writers can experiment or play around with grammar—American poet eccentric e.e. cummings—or reinvent his material—Irish icon James Joyce—and succeed in it.

Not all can succeed in any experiment or hackneyed storyline, unless he does something so clear and unique with it. As an art form, the film propels—or rather “drags”—the viewer through a cliché plot—a marginalized Mexican migrant son who dreams for the stripes on green—is first failed and later challenged by his unrelenting angst-ridden father who would want him to just work in
his own business—but his religious grandmother makes ways and means to make his grandson fly to England—where he is supposed to meet an agent who would later take him to fame. And he simply would.

Not one character is well-explored—even Munez himself—the film is going on as if the main job is to showcase images and histories and encyclopedia input on England’s football and the people’s chalice treatment of it.

While the movie seems to pry open possible sensitive issues such as racial discrimination, it does not pursue them. There are sensible issues or themes better explored—but it stubbornly does not.

Also, cameo appearances such as that by David Beckham do not at all help the film propel to something serious—as the underdeveloped character of the protagonist’s father who would first insist that Santiago remain in Los Angeles, and just “plant kamote” so to speak, but would later become so moved by his son’s prominence when he’d see him playing soccer on international television.

The transformation of his character does not appear convincing because there is not much said or shown about it.

True to its cliché poster blurb—“Every dream has a beginning,” “Goal: The Dream Begins” simply presents the inception of a dream, and nothing much beyond that.

After it rolls out how Munez finally made it to his first game in London, the film rolls up, insensitive to other possibilities—perhaps because it seeks to present something else in the sequel.

It does not present any sensible tension, or serious, realistic conflicts, which—you can argue—can rather provoke introspection from any earnest audience. In fact, some National Geographic or Discovery documentaries featuring the life, times and dramatic stories of athletes the world over might even prove more insightful.

Nothing can be said further.

Jet Li's 'Fearless'

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

“Fearless”
Producer by Bill Kong
Director Ronny Yu
Action Director Yuen Woo Ping
2005


The best of men is like water.
Water benefits all things,
and does not contend with them.
—Lao Tzu

Ronny Yu’s “Fearless” takes us back to the era of Chinese martial arts movies, but this time he does so with a well-thought story that reminds you of your Asian Philo class or Asian literature texts you pored over in college.

This is a filmbio which defies the trite and hackneyed styles emphasizing action sequences and fight scenes as if they’re their entire story. While the film entertains you with its award-winning stunts and martial arts choreography—flawless action sequences that will make you fly with the actors themselves, sharp angles and featuring intense emotions and miens of actors, sprawling panoramas of trees and wind and weathers, clear close-up shots of faces and actions—its English and Chinese subtitles do more than moralize—in every phrase and translations, the logic of the story is explained.

For almost two hours, you’ll have the ringside seat to a martial arts match in the Fight Arena in 1910 Shanghai—where you must face your fears—but later also redeem your soul after it is corrupted by wrong notions about how to do well in this life.

Total entertainment, however, is all you get once you come to know that the fight is only the icing to the cake—when the meat of the matter is that the ultimate fight is within yourself—it is the willingness to stand corrected and eventually change for the better.

The movie is worth watching for a number of grounds. According to one smart review, “Fearless” has ‘awesome fight scenes, expertly choreographed by genre master Yuen Woo Ping.’ “Though at times slightly marred by gimmicky set ups, these moments lend the film a brutal air of realism which has often been lacking in the genre.”

1910 Shanghai was the world’s melting pot of cultures and commerce. Europeans, Frenchmen, British, Arabs, and other nationalities swarmed the Chinese district for business and entertainment. Colonization was at its peak in that part of China. The Fight Arena is one Asian coliseum where one man’s strength and power were shown for the world to see. And this is where one man’s story unfolds and rolls up in all its glory.

Featuring the story of Chinese Martial Arts Master Huo Yuanjiya [1869–1910] from Tianjin, “Fearless” highlights how an individual can attain three virtues that can make sense out of his life.

First, strength entails one’s determination to use his physical ability to face life and all its struggles. Huo Yuanjiya, even as a child exhibited his passion to fight. After a fistfight with one young hooligans after his father’s losing match, he’d vow to never be defeated again. Not yet then would he realize why his father lost the match. Years later he would prove to the rest of the world he is one to reckon with when he becomes the champion of Tianjin. For a long while, he has been overwhelmed by his own strength that he established his name in his own village.

Then, honor is one of life’s blessings you gain through sheer respect and prudence with other people—in your daily affairs, profession, and even preoccupation with the world. Master Huo gains his respectability when he is pursued by a large following—his disciples whom he convinced with his entire philosophy.

Last, courage is poignantly the last—if not the most vital virtue of all—when Huo Yuanjiya realizes that this is all you need to finish and [even win] the ultimate fight within yourself, who is indeed your most mortal enemy.

With such a uniquely tragic story, we would later know of the real biographical account of the spiritual guru of the Jin Wu Sports Federation, a martial arts circuit that has a sizable following.

Yet, it is noteworthy that the film clearly lays out one thing—the Asian philosophy of self-denial or the Western counterpart of self-sacrifice—always seems fresher than the Western theory of self-assertion.

While the West purports affirmation of the self, Eastern beliefs proclaim self-denial, the Asian train of thought glorifies asceticism self-denial—this is how East “meats” the west.

In “Fearless,” the Confucian doctrine waxes consistent in the character of the protagonist Yuanjiya. Just like how the Master Hou gets to topple down the “Sick Man of Asia” with his effortless tricks before throngs of spectators in the Fight Arena, the Asian way of life, er, sensibility makes a lot of sense since it proves that, indeed, “it takes too little to move much.”

The Lake House

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock
Directed by Alejandro Agresti
Warner Brothers
2006

Featuring anachronistic elements all throughout an otherwise stale love story, "The Lake House" tackles the subjectivity of time: that time at all is just a perception.

Sandra Bullock's Kate Foster is an emotionally preoccupied Chicago doctor who begins writing letters with Keanu Reeves' Alex Wyler, an architect who is living in the same lake house she rented two years earlier.

Consider that the movie is a series of disjointed facts, events and circumstances relating the present to the past through a magical mailbox. Kate and Alex write letters to each other and later exchange dialogues onscreen as if they're both there present.

Certainly in a film like this, nothing much can make more sense. The film is a big boo for the realists who would always argue art as something that takes off from common sense, logic, and all it entails. The film is devoid of these elements because it rather seeks to do something else.

The use of the time lapse is not in itself a lapse, but a reinforcing element to back up the contention that love defies time. That is all. And when we begin discussing love, thus, we stop asking sensible questions.

And so we proceed to something else. The gist of this melodrama lies in the two-year gap between the two characters' respective time frames. Kate is currently living in 2006; Wyler in 2004. The factor of time lapse is both interesting and tragically conceited. While it thrills us with how two people take liberties at pursuing their romance across time and space, it clouds the whole idea of logic; thus it must be perceived neither as rational nor realistic (which is a usual characteristic of something we watch with our money).

It can rather be appreciated with the way we see the depth of the feelings and emotionality of two people who are estranged from their own worlds but are enamored by a person beyond time and space (it sounds like an extra-terrestrial love story but it's not).

Foster and Wyler are what we may call "may sariling mundo," literally and figuratively because they do not live in the present. They make their own worlds somewhere else; their togetherness is hinged at each other's absence or lack of presence. And in the end they succeed. All in the absence of logic, or common sense.

While the original "Speed" stars make a wonderful chemistry onscreen, the audience is left mesmerized by how he can weave together disjointed facts, lacking sense and even sensibility.

Perhaps falling under the genre now called metafiction, "The Lake House," originally "Il Mare" by an Asian author, tries to demystify the subjectivity [read: relativity] of time, which to some people nowadays is not a reality but a mere perception.

Deconstructing realities is now an apparent trend in the literary field, which permeates books, films, and other available media. Realities are said to be only perceptions, something only perceived by the senses. So if everything is only perceived as everything is only felt made out by all the senses, what is real, therefore?

Of course, we'll leave this question unanswered, as this film leaves us hanging the rest of our movie time. What matters most is the depth of thought or feeling of the human being.

For one, it is so unrealistic for Kate to communicate with Alex, who is living "now" two years earlier. But what really binds them is the affinity to the same lake house, which has perhaps enchanted their persons for life.

"Lake House" shyly tells us that what matters more is the endearment of the heart, not any other preoccupation as time, nature, environment, or circumstances. What must rattle us is what we really feel.

Eight Below

Rating:	★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

"Eight Below"
Paul Walker, Jason Biggs, Bruce Greenwood
Directed by Frank Marshall
Walt Disney Pictures
2006


Loyalty, friendship and love in time of hypothermia: this is the theme of Frank Marshall's latest action adventure drama, "Eight Below," which over a number of weekends has frozen hearts of varied audiences, striking a chord in the heart of any pet-loving human being.

Delineating much of the genre made famous by "Milo and Otis," "Homeward Bound," "Fly Away Home," and similar films that feature animals as protagonists, Paul Walker's starrer highlights much on the survival instincts and the sympathies created in the human protagonists. Paul Walker is Jerry Shepard, Jason Biggs is his best friend, Cooper; and Bruce Greenwood is a rugged American geologist, who are all forced to leave behind their team of beloved sled dogs due to a sudden accident and perilous weather conditions in Antarctica.

During the harsh, Antarctic winter, the dogs must struggle for survival alone in the intense frozen wilderness for over 6 months. This is from where the story propels, in the frozen inability of the master to fend for his dogs' safety, the animal characters would also intensify the storyline. After Shepard takes initiatives to save the dogs during the impending winter, he realizes he cannot do more than that.

After asking help from offices in the mainland States, Shepard makes clear to himself that the attempts to save the dog seem futile. Shepard's character articulates the human instinct to care for creatures lower than himself, say, animals.

In Marshall's film, the young master Shepard carries the entire emotional burden when after being injured in a snowstorm, he unintentionally leaves behind his eight sled dogs for the entire winter. The film showcases much of the human inability to counter the working of Mother Nature. If all else fails, as do Shepards attempts to save his dogs during the entire winter, man is predisposed to leave it all to fate, or luck.

Shepard, after having given up on the crusade to save his dogs, retreats into his camper home, trying hard to forget about the whole thing. The idea of man [and animal] versus nature spells the conflict in the film. The protagonists, both man and beast, cannot do anything much to alter their fates. Nature's wrath and indifference poses a challenge and even creates much problem for the master and his dog-friends who are also his co-workers in the Antarctica laboratory.

The dogs' sweet countenances and cute appearances, the cool and freezing atmospheres and settings in the northern wild are much endearing as they elicit sympathies of any person who can--to the very least--feel.

One significant realization is done by the American scientist in the character of Bruce Greenwood, who was saved by the same pack of dogs who are left to starve in the freezing wild. It is only after the scientist receives award for getting the meteoric rock that he realizes the importance of the animals to himself and not just to Shepard.

The film belongs to a genre that is not new in the industry. American writer Jack London?s hybrid canine protagonist Buck in his classic novel "Call of the Wild" has since moved hearts and encouraged the human spirit when he's portrayed as one who overcomes his own dilemma in the freezing wild of the North America's hinterlands.

Both the film and the novel in the limelight render traces of anthropomorphism--that style of placing human attributes in otherwise non-human characters. It is in making animals behave like human beings that human beings indeed realize their importance to them.

Ultimately, animal welfare associations the world over must have since debunked the idea of human superiority to animals, perhaps hinting at co-existence. For, in the bigger scheme of things, human beings will be nothing without the presence and essence of other living creatures like animals.

The film speaks much of the human sympathy or apathy in the ways the characters present themselves as either concerned or apathetic to the plight of the animals.

In the end, Paul Walker's Jerry Shepard makes clear to us that the ability to care for animals runs natural in the human instinct--because it is his inner need to love and be loved.

White Lady

Rating:	★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Horror

“White Lady”
Boots Anson-Roa, Angelica Panganiban, Pauleen Luna
Directed by Jeff Tan
Regal Films, 2006

In art and literature, Aristotle is often quoted for having said that all art is imitation—the Greek word for his concept is mimesis. Thus, you have the concept of the word mimicry for the animal behavior of adapting to their environment for survival, or mime, that theater style famous in beauty contests or high school theater arts.

Jeff Tan’s “White Lady” must have taken this definition too literally that the film is a hodgepodge of some ingenious works that we have previously seen onscreen.

“White Lady” opens quite cinematically, with zoom-in shots of the classroom chairs where the sort of epilogue for the story commences. Kind of tells you this is a serious picture to reckon with. Kind of thrills you, really. But as the movie progresses, we are made to infer that the sensibilities being showcased one after another are the ones we must have seen in a number of movies produced in the past.

A number of scenes in the film remind us of those in the Ring, The Grudge, Willard, or even Feng Shui, and all other stuffs horror flicks are made of.

Of course, we say an artist can normally be a product of his influences. But for his part, being too imitative to the point of copying quite accurately what was done before is synonymous to plagiarism—an act that encroaches anyone’s right to intellectual property, such as those who made these previous films.

Such act highly resembles the act of photocopying articles from a book, and using them for one’s own purpose.

The storyline is not original as it takes off from the white lady myth and the supernatural details we must have head over all our superstitious country.

We can cite instances of the lack of originality.

The way all the kontrabidas die in the film reminds you of Kris Aquino’s Feng Shui, in which characters die according to their own year in the Chinese calendar—dragon, horse, snake, boa constrictor?, etc. Similarly in this film lacking originality, antagonists die according to their fear, probably because the White Lady herself knew about all of them, when she hovered in the campout where they phobia session took place.

The white lady coming out of the canvas reminds you of Sadako coming out of the television screen towards the end of the Ring which shocked people in 2002. The white lady spewing out smoke and ashes [right, because she was burned in the tool shed] makes you recall the horror specimen in the Grudge, both films anyway had their Hollywood
versions.

The computer graphics work involving rats overwhelming one male character, the playing dolls moving and walking reminding you of 80s horror flicks where monsters and mumus were rolled on wheels, etc., or the mirror being shattered on the face of the lead female kontrabida, have yet to be polished so as to appear realistic, er believable. They have to be so—after all, everything in the film discipline must be make believe, a mimicry, an imitation. Logically, then, we should be made to believe.

Furthermore, Iwa Moto’s Mimi tells us that Moto is not an actress—her coñita twang and even a Koreanovela countenance do not match quite acceptably. Her final scene, though, matches up with her hackneyed acting as she dies of the shattered glass from the mirror. She is supposed to render the story much tension—with her original evil character, but she falls short of evil—just laughable in her cliché performance. Seriously, that is not a good thing for someone newly introduced in the industry, maybe. We can even wonder why she was discovered to act.

Meanwhile, the Ilonggo twang, according to my Ilongga companion, does not even sound believable, as she observed some inaccuracies or un-grammatical Ilonggo sentences in the dialogues. The director must have capitalized on Gian Carlos’ Ilonggo roots, but the un-grammatical sentences in the script did not save the Ilonggo sensibility.

The “Ili-ili” (Hiligaynon for lullaby) theme, though, gets both our praise and flak. While it brings to an Ilonggo a sense of nostalgia, the actress’s lip synching another singer’s voice three or four times throughout the film suffices more than enough that he has seen more of such stuffs in television variety shows, where singers are said to be “singing” when they are not. At least in music videos or MTVs, we can forgive the swelling vocals [sounds] because it is timed accurately with the singer’s actual singing.

Citing the flaws of the film should make you curious about it. True. So, there. There’s not much else to say about it then.

To be fair, though, let’s ask, “What are the film’s sources of redemption, if any? What are its pluses, if applicable?”

Pauleen Luna’s Pearl is simply engaging. Luna is a promising actress with her un-hackneyed countenance as the female lead who faces the dilemma, and who closes it satisfactorily in the final scene. Her pretty face does not fail to refresh the audience who is compelled to negotiate an otherwise dark, hackneyed storyline.

Angelica Panganiban’s Christina, the white lady herself, shines in her own way, too. Her portrayal as the innocent victim and a vengeful angel of death is quite portrayed with originality, complementing Boots Anson-Roa’s wicked [or weak-ed] Ilongga Lola Tasya, who gets away with her accent slightly unscathed, and who succumbs to the same predicament as her granddaughter Christina [but who finds herself in the middle of a Tanging Yaman poster in the final scene].

All the other characters, it should be noted, are pathetically stock characters. They are the cliché roles that we see being portrayed day in and day out on soaps [and other suds] on television. There’s nothing new about them.

That the film ends in a melodramatic way [anyway, scenes all throughout vacillate between Love to Love Season 10? and Shake, Rattle and Roll V] tells us that it is not a horror film after all. Perhaps it is something else. Or something else? Makes us think of the film otherwise by asking, “What is the film trying to do, if at all?” Ah.

In all, they say the best thing to constructively critique a badly made film is to ignore it, or not to review it at all. Or cite it at the end of the year as the worst this and that. Razzi Awards, etc. Of course not.

We believe in what the young people can do—so we do not just sit down and be apathetic to it like the rest of the world. At best, we could point out some things for consideration so next time they produce anything, we will not be shortchanged.

All art is imitation, it is said—but some people take it quite literally. Sadly.

The Lady In the Water

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy

Previously called “unusual but charmless” film, the mysterious Lady in the Water by India-born American film director M. Night Shyamalan [read: Sha-ma-lan] deserves a second look, asking us to dive and swim deeper into that pool [of water brimming with] meanings and insights.

METAFICTION

An experimental and unconventional work, Lady in the Water falls under metafiction, a work of fiction whose primary “concern is the nature of fiction itself.” A metafiction contains—as one of its structural and thematic dimensions—a testing of fiction itself. The film rolls out as the anatomy of fiction, in the strictest sense of the word—a naming of parts, the structure of [a] Story.

This means that the film itself presents in all its frames what constitutes fiction. For instance, the chief character’s name itself is Story, who just comes to the life of one building manager Cleveland Heep, who later will help resolve her problem, much as a reader would have to make sense of a story that [he reads].

In the film, Story [literary text] and Heep [reader] have a literal encounter. Cleveland Heep, an ordinary man, is thrown the task [so he desperately asks people how] to help Story go back to her own Blue World, just like the common reader who reads a story and has to finish reading [understanding] it.

Featuring fiction within fiction, characteristic of postmodern works, Lady in the Water presents two plots—the first plot is the narf’s incredible story; the second is the story being woven out of the narf’s presence to the life of the building tenants. In all, the film itself presents in all its frames what constitutes fiction, laying out the elements that compose the whimsical and wonderful world of fiction. Whimsical, meaning the author freely makes use of fantastic elements to carry out his purpose; and wonderful, meaning the insights and plethora of realizations we can get from it.

BEDTIME STORY

As stated by the makers of the film itself, Lady in the Water is “a bedtime story.” Therefore, it is indeed a story told to children at bedtime; therefore, a story that entails “a pleasant but unconvincing account or explanation.” More particularly, a bedtime story is something told to lull us into slumber, or usher us in to the dreamland, where we will see more disjointed characters and plots, more insensible events and phantasmagoric images that all defy explanation. Thus, a bedtime story does not seek to convince anyone. And by being a seemingly “unconvincing” film, Lady in the Water delivers its very purpose.

Using bedtime story as its narrative vehicle, though, the film is a potent illustration of a few literary concepts. For one it is fantasy—the literary genre that designates a conscious breaking free from reality. Fantasy applies to a work that “takes place in a nonexistent and unreal world, such as fairyland, or concerns incredible and unreal characters.” Considering the film a fantasy, then, we the audience have to work out their “suspension of disbelief.” This means our willingness to withhold questions about truth, accuracy, or probability in a work.

Taking root from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Bibliographia Literaria, which describes “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes the poetic faith,” it simply means that our willingness to suspend doubt makes possible the temporary acceptance of an author’s imaginative world—however ridiculous it is.

We are transported to the time and place, people and events all created by the author. The relaxed Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) dealing with a young woman stranger Story (Howard) literally illustrates the suspension of disbelief.

Significantly, the film illustrates full suspension of disbelief in the lack of skepticism—acquiescent attitudes—by the other building tenants when Cleveland Heep just turns up with a strange woman Story, and later involves all of them to helping the stranger return to her Blue World.

All throughout the film, we the audience are asked to make sense out of the seemingly insensible things presented in the work. In fact, M. Night Shyamalan seeks to suspend our disbelief to the extremes, asking us to just believe everything in front of our noses. We can also say the film is a fairy tale, “a story relating mysterious pranks and adventures of spirits who possess supernatural wisdom and foresight, a mischievous temperament, the power to regulate the affairs of human beings for good or evil, and the capacity to change their shape.”

In the film, the fantastic character Story obviously lands into the world of men, bothering their very silences, especially Heep and The Cookbook author (the film director himself) and later, comes to effect change in them, conscious or otherwise.

HEEP HELPS NARF, READER MAKES STORY

By and large, we cannot judge a piece of work based on our failure to grasp its meaning. If we cannot particularly make sense of the work because of our lack of knowledge, or our refusal to be open to forms which do not fit or dwell in our comfort zones, we cannot really have a more valuable scrutiny of the work. We cannot care much about the author or director’s sensibility as much as we must interpret meanings for ourselves.

A literary theory called reader-response criticism says that a piece of writing—here translated into film [previously called cinema, or celluloid literature] scarcely exists except as a text designed to be read [in this case—watched]. Shyamalan seemingly disjointed frames to other people can just make sense to the informed reader—the real reader who can appreciate it. The symbolic rescue of Story from the dog monster who ate up the film critic who was talking out a definition of one character tells us that any story therefore is the product of the one who reads it—a film’s meaning is made out by the moviegoer themselves. Considering the film a serious work of art, then, we say it is not the work of the author.

For some literary theorists, the author is dead—what he wrote or made, after being written, is not anymore his. For reader-response theorists, it’s the reader’s perception about the work that says what it is. Nevertheless, the makers of the film can be lauded for their daring to break the stereotypes associated with film and filmmaking.

Risking commercial success for the sake of bringing out some learning in art and literature, M. Night Shyamalan proves consistent to his credo of experimentation that gives the educated audience not just essential points of discussion but also countless insights.

Sukob

Rating:	★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Mystery & Suspense

In the 70s and 80s, films with one-word titles became instant classics and bestsellers. They featured power plots written by academe-learned screenwriters and showcased breakthrough, tour-de-force performances by upcoming actors handled by directors who were strongly driven by advocacies in the midst of repressed martial law environments—all gave rise to these masterpieces, which would later reap awards from all over the world.

The plethora of very good films—"Insiang," "Itim," "Kisapmata," "Jaguar," "Himala," "Bona," to name a few produced by Lino Brocka, Mike de Leon, Ishmael Bernal, and others—has attested to this.

Today, whenever one-word-title films are featured, we come to expect much because we anticipate that at least they might go against the usual popular, formulaic films that only rake profits for the producers. Yet, again, we are also proven wrong. While Feng-shui was quite a box-office in 2004, owing to its freshness, "Sukob" does just as poorly.

Though exploring a theme as local as the superstitious beliefs involving marriage is a brave attempt to seek something new, the manner of presenting the theme, though, is not as new.

The long-range shot of Kris Aquino’s Sandy falling from the belfry is a standout inconsistency in terms of cinematography. It still calls for more effects, for ideally it if can be shot as close as the confrontation between the curse girl and the sisters inside the belfry itself. It could have been given much attention—not haphazardly treated. Moreover, the use of the corpse bride [flower girl motif] appears much like Tim Burton’s Helena Bonham voiced-over character in "The Corpse Bride." Claudine Barreto’s melodramatic acting also does not make the film horrifying at all, while Kris Aquino’s frowns and smirks—in scenes which does not require them [she usually does on TV shows]—do not help much in rendering emotionality in the film. The use of scary characters and situations that go with abrupt sounds of horror tells us that to jolt is scare is to horrify is to make money. Offering no more than jolts and scares, Sukob belongs to the scary movie roster, perhaps a cousin to "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and "Scream."

Nothing much is there to say about the film, except that it features the vulgarly popular "Feng-shui" star Kris Aquino with her popularly known best friend Claudine Barreto. The film either capitalizes on the actress’s bonding or vice-versa. Commercialism in the film industry has never been vulgar as this. Even obviously showing branded products in the films which the actresses themselves endorse tells us that the films being made only cater to the whims of its producers or financiers, not to any purpose of art. This setup is entirely Filipino, as if to perennially say to us, art cannot exist without the interests of the producers and capitalists.

As regards “free plugging,” the film’s use of capitalists’ products in the film itself is paralleled to that of a literary magazine that features advertisement to finance the publication itself. What else is new? Sukob" owes Roño’s previous film "Feng-shui" much of its inspiration and even elements of horror. Even then, a horror film involving the same Kris Aquino will be highly open to comparison.

And as is usually said of trilogies or movies with sequels and prequels, the original movie can never be equaled. In fact, "Feng-shui" can never be repeated because of the freshness it offered few years ago. The second work in the same vein of any film director always suffers the fate of a second best—a copy of the original. We can also say the film defies genre classification as it vacillates between melodrama and horror. In so doing, it ends up uncertain about its purpose, for it does not seek to deliver anything whole in the end.

Film’s auteur theory—one that says a body of works by the same author usually belong to the same vein, much like a singer sings songs with similar melodies in a single album—is shown perfectly clear by Roño in the two films he has recently made. The two films are, shall we say, split personalities of the same identity. Perhaps like other filmmakers who have to be conscious of their art, Roño has to seek new ways of expression using the film medium, if only to make the film discipline as respectable as it is can be.

Now that the scare era is waning, producing a horror film that does not present anything new is not so much a gracious exit as it is an ugly closure. As is proven in the film, moomoos and monotony seem to work well together.

The Departed

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

In Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” all the law enforcers and the gangsters they pursue end up dead at the end. The police—Martin Sheen’s Captain Queenan and Mark Wahlberg’s Sergeant Dignam—in pursuit of the bigwig thug—Jack Nicholson’s Frank Costello—double-crossed both ways by Matt Damon’s Colin Sullivan and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bill Costigan—are all killed.

It is just right that the bidas die since the film tackles an 80s Boston mobsters’ story, or because the film is done by Scorsese [who is world-famous for his sense of gore and glory]. After watching the film, you get a feel that it’s for real, meaning—it is realistic that the main characters die because right from the very start, they have just tricked each other.

While the movie title is perhaps stating the obvious—the word “departed” there connotes another sense. “Departed”—as in the sense of the dead, thus the phrase “our faithful departed”—rather translates into a more sensible meaning of isolation, since every mobster or law enforcer there—and the ones caught in between [Caprio and Damon]—seems to be rallying for his own cause, advancing his own cause, sadly solitarily.

Each one of them is trying to penetrate another’s territory—that inevitably the movie climaxes at the part when the “mole” or the “rat,” who makes a lot of trouble between the outlaws and the pursuers cannot just be easily caught—so confused their characters are they are that they end up pursuing and killing each other. They all end up being isolated. They, indeed, end up departed. Abandoned.

Scorsese’s film provides us similar insights into the present-world realities. The whole drama in this piece spells out man’s isolation which is deeply rooted in his self-interest, if not outright egotism.

At the height of the campaign for his partymates the US Midterm polls this week, US President George W. Bush, for instance, skirted the Iraq issue—instead persuading Americans that the main issues are taxes and terrorism. For this inconsolable war freak, nothing else is new—or worth addressing—but how he wants to get even with Al-Qaeda, or how to make Americans fat so they could forever patronize his war-freak whims.

Meanwhile, in a recent UN report on climate change, renowned economist Nicholas Stern points to the guilt of the industrial countries who have the biggest culpability and liability on the greenhouse gases issue, but who do not staunchly or surely address it. Countries like China, India and the US, so-called the biggest polluters of the world, have yet to be held liable for this.

Having no clear policies in place to address the environmental concern, the Bush administration is not being vocal or straightforward how to address this. International media are skeptical that the issue might not be touched in the president’s remaining term.

And while Indian citizens can only express their personal concern to address global warming, the government will have yet to list it as one of their priorities. But certainly time cannot wait for people to do something in their own time to resuscitate the endangered environment. Time waits for no one, and Mother Earth cannot tarry, either.

In a larger scale, we just await for realities in the films “Waterworld” and The Day After Tomorrow to happen. So any culture of indifference, self-interest or unrest will certainly not make things better.

Our world is continuously at war—the Sri Lankan conflict, Al-Qaeda’s recent attack in Pakistan, among others—the world doesn’t change. All news—we observe—spell discontent and hatred, or plainly, one’s lack of sensitivity to the needs of others.

The world may seem to be at peace when it is not. Isolation, that worst sense of existence caused by not being able to get our message across or seek understanding between and among ourselves—but just standing one’s ground because this is good for us, and only us—may not, at all, get us anywhere. These grim instances of self-interest will only pose to us more adversities in the future.

Man is in the brink because of his own isolation—he is the last ace he has to save himself, but he hardly realizes it. He is too “departed” to know what he must really want, or care for—he ends up needing endlessly.