Man and dog

Sa The Grey na binidahan ni Liam Neeson ngonyan na 2012, an walong survivor sa nagbagsak na eroplano haling Alaska— kabali an karakter niyang si John Ottway—nagkagaradan man giraray pagkatapos.

Guardia kan sarong oil drill team sa Alaska si John Ottway. An apod niya sa trabahong ini—“job at the end of the world,” kun sain an kairiba niya mga “fugitives, ex-cons, assholes, men unfit for mankind.” Kadaklan kan mga yaraon duman mga pusakal, hinarabuan kawasa sa danyos ninda sa sociedad.

Patapos na an kontrata ni Ottway, pinapauli na siya. Alagad kan solo-solo siya sarong banggi, nagsurat siya sa agom niya, dangan nagprobar siyang maghugot. Kan babadilon niya na an sadiri nin shotgun sa kadikloman kan niyebe, nag-alulong an mga lobo (wolves). Nakulbaan siya kaini. Dai siya nadagos maghugot.

Pauruli na sinda kan kairiba sa drill team; tapos nag-crash an eroplano. Sa gabos na sakay, walo sana sainda an nagkaburuhay. Sa wreckage, an ibang nagkaburuhay naghaharadit nagngungurulngol ta nagkagaradan sa impact an mga pag-iriba ninda. Si Ottway nakaapon sa harayo. Pero pagkagimata niya, hinaranap niya si iba. Nakabalik siya sa binagsakan.

Dinulok niya si Lewenden, sarong kaibahan na nagtuturawis an dugo sa tulak. Naghaharadit na an ibang mga amigo ninda. Nagngunguruyngoy. Hinapot ni Lewenden si Ottway kun ano an nangyayari. Sabi ni Ottway saiya na magagadan na siya. Pinabagol ni Ottway an luong kan lalaki. Kinaulay niya ni kag pighapot kun siisay an saiyang namomotan. Kinaulay niya pa astang dai nagdugay, nautsan na ni.

Dai naghaloy, pinangenotan ni Ottway an grupo. Hinambal niya sa ilang maggibo sinda nin kalayo, nganing dai sinda magkaragadan sa lipot. Magharanap pagkakan dangan magharali sa crash site.

Pagharanap ninda nin mga nagkataradang kakanon sa wreckage sagkod mga bagay na magagamit, nahiling ni Ottway na ginuguyod kan lobo an sarong pasaherong babae, nag-uungol pa ni kan sagpangon kan layas na ayam. Sinaklolohan kuta ni Ottway alagad gadan na an biktima. Dinulak niya an ayam kaya kinaragat siya kaini. Nagkadarangog kan iba kaya nasaklolohan si Ottway. Kinarne kan lobo an tuhod niya pagkatapos.

Sabi ni Ottway na tibaad kuta nin mga wolves an lugar kun saen nag-crash an saindang eroplano. Piggagadan kan mga hayop na ini an mga tawong nararabay sa saindang balwarte. Hambal pa ni John Ottway sa iba, dai man kinakakan kan mga sapat na ini an mga tawo. Kinakaragat man lang ninda, sagkod ginagadan, sabi niya. Sa layas na kadlagan, tibaad mayo sindang ibang madalaganan.

Minaray logod nindang magharali, magparalarakaw maghanap nin rescue ta harayoon an saindang natubragan. Bago sinda naghali sa crash site ta nganing madulagan an mga wolves na nag-atake sainda, nanganam si Hendrick, sarong doctor. Iyo ni an sabi niya, “I feel like we should say something. I feel like with all these bodies all people have died, it doesn’t seem right for us to walk away. “God bless these men. Some of them are friends we could be lying here with them.” Nagtingag siya dangan naghambal, “Thank you for sparing us; and helping us. O, and keep that up, if you can.” Alagad, sa katapusan kan istorya, mayong naginibo an pangadie kan sarong survivor na doctor. Gabos sinda sa dalan nagkagaradan.

Sobra sa kabanga kan pelikula, nagparararalakaw nagparadurulag nagparatarandayag an mga survivor parayo sa mga lobo; alagad bago man ini natapos, saro saro sindang nagkaurubos. Kan saiya nang toka pagbantay pagka enot na banggi, inatake kan lobo si Hernandez pag-ihi kaini. Siya an enot na nagadan sa grupo. Kaya sabi ni Ottway magharali na sinda duman. Pagparalarakaw kan grupo parayo sa crash site, nawalat man si Flannery sa tahaw kan yelo kawasa dai nakayahan an lipot sagkod an halawig na lakaw. Nawalat-walat siya dangan inatake kan mga lobo.

Pag-camping na ninda sa taas kan kabukidan, nahangog sa halangkaw na altitude an negrong si Burke. Sa saindang pigtuytuyan, magdamlag nagparaduros nin makusogon. Pagkaaga, nakua si Burke kan pag-iribang saro nang yeladong bangkay. Si Talget napilay kan makasabit ni sa kahoy pagrulukso ninda pabalyo sa halangkawon na salog. Kan buminagsak na siya sa daga, hiniribunan tulos siya kan mga ayam dangan ginuruyod. Si Diaz napagal na sana man magparalakaw kaya nagpawalat na sa may gilid kan suba.

Sa kadudulag sa naghahapag na mga lobo, naglumpat si Hendrick sa suba tapos nagpaatong sa sulog, nakairarom siya sa dakulang gapo saka duman nalamos. Si Ottway iyo an nakahampang kan alpha male, an pinakahade kan mga wolves sa mismo kaining kuta. Dai na pinahiling an saindang pagdinulak, kan inatake ni Ottway nin kutsilyo an ido. Sa huring ritrato kan pelikula, nakahandusay si Ottway, sagkod an maisog na hadi kan mga ido.

Sa pagdulag kan mga survivor, ginuyod ninda an pamimilosopiya kan kagsurat kan istorya. Linangkaba kan pelikula an konseptong naturalismo na pinadaba kan Pranses na manugsulat na si Emile Zola, sarong pagtubod na an tawo oripon kan saiyang sadiring natura. Mayo nin magigibo an inaapod kan ibang free will, o fighting spirit. Para ki Zola, sagkod sa mga nagsurunod saiya, mayong ibang minapaitok sa buhay kan tawo kundi an saiyang Kalibutan, an gabos-gabos na mga bagay-bagay sa saiyang kinaban. Garo man sana sinabi kaini na mayo nin kapas an kalag na magpapangyari para an tawo maparahay o mabanhaw an saiyang kaugalingon sa katibaadan.

Linangkaba man kan pelikula an vulgarized na konsepto kan survival of the fittest. Sa naturalistang kinaban, an hadi kan kadlagan iyo an layas na ayam. Garo daing kapas an tawong lampas an an isog kan mga hinayupak na mga ayam. Dawa gurano kaisog kan tawong hampangon an saiyang kaiwal niyang ini sa kadlagan, magagadan siya ta magagadan.

Sa climax kan sugilanon, nagprobar si Ottway na tampadan an bagsik kag an isog kan mga lobo. Nagtrayumpo man kuta siya alagad, kawasa an tawo sagkod hayop parehong nagadan, lininaw sa pelikula na nungka madudulagan kan tawo an ungis kan kadlagan, an layas na kabihasnan, kun sain tibaad an hayop, bakong an tawo—an hadi kan kagabsan.

Sinurublian sa Hiligaynon

nakulbaan, nakilaghanan

kag, sagkod

sa ilang, saindang

naghambal, nagsabi

naglumpat, luminukso

manugsulat, parasurat

mabanhaw, masalbar

kaugalingon, sadiri

sugilanon, istorya

Beautiful Monsters

Save for one poignant scene in Richard Somes’s Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang, the rest of the movie leaves a number of unresolved settings, let’s call them clutter, that only puzzle the audience.

This scene involves Erich Gonzales’s Corazon fleeing the townsfolk and Derek Ramsey’s Daniel escaping the personal army of the landlord Matias (Mark Gil) in the post-World War II sakadas, most probably in the vast lands of Negros. (Immediately this mention of probability is only one among the many unresolved elements that cloud the essence of the movie. Aside from the landlord-tenant relationship which was prevalent elsewhere in the post-war Philippines, no other elements in the movie can make us infer it happened particularly there.)

In the village of Magdalena, Daniel, the loving farmer husband of the innocently beautiful Corazon, has just murdered the landlord Matias in his own mansion after the couple’s house was burned down by the goons. And the wounded Corazon, after being shot by Matias when she devoured his daughter Melissa in her bed, has also been found (and found out) by one of Daniel’s friends to be the one responsible for the killings of children in the village.

Both Daniel and Corazon are fleeing the enraged townsfolk who want to kill the village murderer. The scene rips your heart because both characters are rather fleeing their own created monsters. Daniel has murdered the landlord in retaliation for having burned their house; while Corazon has just been found out responsible for having devoured the children in the village. What rips your heart more is that the couple only wanted to have a child but the wife’s devotion to San Gerardo failed them—after Corazon delivered a stillborn. So the reality of a dead baby drove the main character Corazon (the could-have been mother) to curse God and throw her faith away to the dark.

The man-on-the-road element in this work of fiction is rendered well in this climactic scene, with the score swelling as the couple flees their pursuers heightening the drama and resolving it to the conclusion—as in the French term denouement (day-no-man)—when the couple vanish in the dark. So there.

Notes on Camp

In the 1960s, American writer Susan Sontag was brought to the world limelight after she pinpointed that camp is the “love of the unnatural, the artifice and exaggeration.” Well, we have seen camp movies proliferate in the horror flicks of the Filipino directors in the 80s—Shake, Rattle and Roll series and tons of other films in the same vein that entertained the generation of that decade. Through time, we have seen tendencies of Filipino movies to make use of camp, which refers to the effects that the film made to scare the audience by propping monsters and supernaturals so they look hideous or horrible only to make them appear outrageously odd or simply outrageous.

In Corazon, these include madwoman Melinda’s (Tetchie Agbayani) over-disheveled wig which rather exaggerates Diana Ross’s afro look. When I saw this, prizewinning fictionist critic Rosario Cruz-Lucero came to mind. In cases like this, Cruz-Lucero hints at the creative sense that an author needs not “overkill” the essence of what he is portraying by overdoing descriptions and attributes that have already been established.

The movie was trapped in the premise that a madwoman must really appear overly unkempt and dirty with her tattered outfit, teeth and all—or totally taong grasa so audience knows she is mad. And mad. And really mad. But there is just no need for Agbayani’s Melinda to appear this ridiculous so she could portray her Sisa character [she’s looking for her daughter who disappeared during the war]. I suppose Agbayani is fairly a good actress that her delivery of lines or a dramatic monologue alone could make us infer without a doubt she is a Sisa who was driven mad because she lost her child to the war.

Furthermore, we cannot see the relevance of Eric Gonzales’s Corazon putting on a baboy-damo mask to cloud her real intentions that she is the village monster preying on the innocent victims. What is Corazon’s reason for doing that? In the first place, where did she get the mask? Even the metallic effect of the face of the mask strikes us like it was stolen from the set of Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld which is too European to be accepted into the Filipino sensibility. Or talk of the masks used by  gladiators in Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Employing all these is more than camp, but more appropriately a rushed second-year high school drama production.

The movie also badly suffers from the complicated plot which requires more show time for them to be unraveled and resolved. Questions. Is Melinda the lost mother of Matias’s daughter Melissa? Or is Corazon the lost daughter of Melinda? We do not know. But it seemed as if the movie showed we knew they were. While it could have just dwelt on the legend of the aswang, or how the first human-eating human being came to be—initially called halimaw in the film—the movie touched on other sensibilities and opened territories where the other characters dwelt but which it did not pursue or explore at all.

Both Beautiful and Monstrous

At the time the halimaw devours the village children one by one, Corazon contorts her head like the way it is done in the Asian horror flicks that became the norm made popular by the Japanese original Ring in early 2000s. Sadly, the movie reeks of this hackneyed style which looked fresh only the first time it’s done in those days.

While the supporting characters of Mon Confiado’s and Epy Quizon’s are comfortable, Maria Isabel Lopez’s Aling Herminia is a revelation. Her portrayal of the relihiyosa in the less-than-two-minuter scene as the partera (quack midwife) is eerie and astonishingly original. The rest is unmemorable.

In some instances, also, both of the main characters deliver their intense scenes well. For one, Erich Gonzales’s childbirth is more convincing than other women who fake their ires and arrays in most films; while Ramsay’s macho tendencies and naturalness are without question.

The mestiza face of Erich Gonzales may be deemed realistic because she was said to be the love child of her mother and an American soldier during the war. But the placing of Derek Ramsay as the farmer Daniel, whose roots we barely know, is farcical. If at all, the movie does not make clear the background of Daniel. He is too sculpted to be just a humble farmer in the barrio—he hunts boars after he works out in the Fil-Am-Jap bodybuilding gym. Funny. Mon Confiado would be the more believable Daniel. Their metropolitan or cosmopolitan twang, could have been reworked to render their rustic characters more realistic. Talk of George VI doing the entire movie reworking his tongue in The King’s Speech. The lead actors are too beautiful to be monstrous because they look too polished for these rustic roles. Ultimately they appear ridiculous. Sadly camp.

“Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang”

Erich Gonzales, Derek Ramsay, Mark Gil, Epi Quizon, Maria Isabel Lopez, Tetchie Agbayani

Directed by Richard Somes

Skylight Films, 2012

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.