Joey Gosiengfiao is dead. This won’t bring him back.
We have heard the word “Camp” used in connection with. . .this. You force us to get Susan Sontag on your ass.
Excerpt from Sontag’s famous essay, Notes on Camp.
22. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy). An example of the latter: Wilde’s epigrams themselves.
“It’s absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
– Lady Windemere’s Fan
23. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.
24. When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. (“It’s too much,” “It’s too fantastic,” “It’s not to be believed,” are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.)
25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Steinberg’s six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman. . . . In Camp there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself. Gaudí’s lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal — most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia — the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.
26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much.” Titus Andronicus and Strange Interlude are almost Camp, or could be played as Camp. The public manner and rhetoric of de Gaulle, often, are pure Camp.
27. A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds. Eisenstein’s films are seldom Camp because, despite all exaggeration, they do succeed (dramatically) without surplus. If they were a little more “off,” they could be great Camp – particularly Ivan the Terrible I & II. The same for Blake’s drawings and paintings, weird and mannered as they are. They aren’t Camp; though Art Nouveau, influenced by Blake, is.
What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp — what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic. On the barren edge of Camp lie a number of attractive things: the sleek fantasies of Dali, the haute couture preciosity of Albicocco’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes. But the two things – Camp and preciosity – must not be confused.
28. Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture.) Not extraordinary merely in the sense of effort. Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not items are rarely campy. These items, either natural oddities (the two-headed rooster, the eggplant in the shape of a cross) or else the products of immense labor (the man who walked from here to China on his hands, the woman who engraved the New Testament on the head of a pin), lack the visual reward – the glamour, the theatricality – that marks off certain extravagances as Camp.
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Read my um, review (This is what you want? Really??) tomorrow in Interaksyon.com.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 5th, 2011 at 10:13
Truth. Just because a movie has so many quotable quotes doesn’t make it camp.
October 5th, 2011 at 11:43
there wasn’t enough of carmi – and too much derek – in it..
October 5th, 2011 at 11:45
why do you still watch these types of movies, jessica? they have to pay me to watch these.
October 5th, 2011 at 12:15
Hello, we write for a living. We get paid to watch these.
October 5th, 2011 at 12:27
Yeah the most watchable parts are the ones with Carmi Martin in them.
October 5th, 2011 at 12:35
After seeing the Web version of the trailer, I’ve been going around the house reciting “ang buhay ay isang malaking Quiapo” to just about anyone. Even my parents have started quoting it at the dinner table.
On a shallow note: What was UP with Anne Curtis’ lipstick? Did the make-up artists hate her that much?
October 5th, 2011 at 14:13
stellalehua: We got the same impression! Was Anne Curtis being punked? When she had no make-up on she looked spectacular. Cristine Reyes’s outfits were exhumed from an 80s fashion show and Derek Ramsay’s shirts came from the little boys department.
All the good lines were in the trailer. It’s their strategy.
Caught the trailer of the Vice Ganda movie. Is his strategy to remake the Roderick Paulate oeuvre? First Petrang Kabayo and now Kumander Gringa. All we can say is: Nobody replaces Dick.
October 5th, 2011 at 17:12
Derek Ramsey had shirts? I didn’t notice.
October 6th, 2011 at 00:18
We had to walk out of the cinema after an hour of Vice Ganda’s Petrang Kabayo. It was too painful to watch.
My favorite Pinoy movie dealing with “other” women is Salawahan, which I only saw twice on CinemaOne. Ang bongga lang ng confrontation scene ni Rita Gomez and…I forgot the name of the actress…hehe. And Rio Locsin was so funny!
October 6th, 2011 at 00:24
Salawahan by Ishmael Bernal! Memoriado namin yan.
Rita Gomez: Mag ko-confrontation scene ba tayo?
Sandy Andolong: Huwag na, nakakapagod.
Rita Gomez after bagging Jay Ilagan: Napakaligaya ko. Gusto kong magtatatakbo sa Session Road na ngiti lamang ang suot. Gusto kong bumili ng lobo at magpaputok. Pok pok pok pok pok!
October 6th, 2011 at 00:37
Hahaha! Yes! Was wondering if it was Charo Santos (I think I confused it with Kakabakaba ka ba?). Sandy Andolong! I hope they show it again. O kaya sana merong copy available. I think I tried to look for a youtube clip on this when I first saw it so I could encourage my friends to see it, pero wala akong nakita. Pak na pak ang movie na to!
October 6th, 2011 at 00:39
You can get it at Video 48. http://video48.blogspot.com/
October 6th, 2011 at 00:44
Ay bongga! Salamat Jessica!
October 6th, 2011 at 09:39
“Huwag na, nakakapagod.” WINNER. I love Salawahan.
October 6th, 2011 at 23:50
Thanks for the link! Yay! I can watch Salawahan na!!!!