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I know a David Lynch fan who watched Inland Empire last year. He enjoyed it, and though he was boggled—not unusual after seeing a David Lynch movie—he felt that he was just about to get it. Any moment, it would all become clear to him. It was like those tip-of-the-tongue experiences, where you’re trying to summon up a word or a name, and you know that you know it, but it won’t occur to you just then. Then when you stop thinking of it, it pops into your head.

This friend of mine, who does think too much, went to sleep after watching Inland Empire and dreamed that he was watching Inland Empire. Clearly he had stepped into some Lynchian universe. In his dream, he was just about to get the meaning of Inland Empire…and then he woke up. But he couldn’t go back to sleep, so he couldn’t get to the end of the dream. Then he developed hellish insomnia and had to get a prescription for tranquilizers. Coincidence, or the Lynchian multiplication of his interior worlds?

When you watch Inland Empire, this may help. Reading Inland Empire: A Mental Toolbox for Interpreting a Lynch film, by Adam C. Walter in Metaphilm.

KC Concepcion is pretty.
Richard Gutierrez is pretty.
Greece is pretty.
The Richard Prince bag is pretty. 

Then the movie has a nervous breakdown, and everything goes to hell. The light romantic comedy suddenly turns into heavy melodrama. Richard makes corny speeches about love that would make greeting cards kill themselves for shame. KC weeps and weeps as if she’s just realized what sort of movie she’s in. Whatever charm the movie had is drowned in mush. The theme song blares incessantly to remind you to buy the ringtone. Philip Salvador is kidnapped by aliens and replaced with a ham and cheese sandwich. 

Like the last six or seven Star Cinema flicks, For The First Time tells us that the ultimate Filipino romantic fantasy is the embarrassing declaration of passion. It’s not enough that the lover profess eternal love, she or he must do it in a highly public manner. With lots of witnesses and in the most humiliating way possible. Truth, depth, and loyalty are beside the point; what matters is that Everybody Knows It. The logic is, If everybody knows it, then it must be real! It’s an obsession with what other people think, a need for the  approval of strangers. As if everyone were running for office. Apparently the most important thing in Philippine society is the palabas.

Very short reviews.

Big Stan. 90-minute sodomy joke.

Clone Wars. Screw you once, shame on George Lucas. Screw you thrice and now again, shame on you.

Death Race. Oh look, directed by Paul Anderson. But not the Paul Thomas Anderson. Wonderfully nasty insane B-movie mayhem. We love Jason Statham: no matter what he’s wearing, he looks naked. Must-see Jason Statham movie: The Bank Job.

The US classification: “Death Race” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Mauling, maiming, bruising, beating, impalement, immolation, detonation, decapitation and a flagrant disregard of automotive etiquette. Hmm, are they warning you or tempting you?

The X-Files 2: I Want To Believe is not nearly as horrendous as the reviews say it is. If you were an X-phile, it’s a pleasant way to pass two hours in the company of old friends—even if somebody onscreen has to say “I want to believe” every 15 minutes to remind us of the characters’ issues. There’s a brilliant moment early on, when Mulder and Scully visit the FBI building and stop in front of a picture of US President George W. Bush. As the grinning president’s photo appears on the screen, we hear the portentous notes of  the X-Files theme. Labyrinthine government conspiracies and unfathomable secrets: The X-Files has taken over reality.

A review of The X-Files 2: I Want To Believe in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star. 

Vertigo, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

“Coupled together, these two words are repeated three times in Vertigo. First, at the twelfth minute by Gavin Elster (’freedom’ under  lined by a move to close-up) who, looking at a picture of Old San Francisco, expresses his nostalgia to Scottie (’San Francisco has changed. The things that spelled San Francisco to me are disappearing fast’), a nostalgia for a time when men - some men at least - had ‘power and freedom’. Second, at the thirty-fifth minute, in the bookstore, where ‘Pop’ Liebel explains how Carlotta Valdes’s rich lover threw her out yet kept her child: ‘Men could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom …”

A free replay (notes on Vertigo) by Chris Marker.

I haven’t seen The X-Files 2 yet. The Alamat Twins bailed on me, citing deadlines at work. You…you…yuppies. Expect a visit from Flukeman any moment.

So I went to see Wall-E instead, and it’s lovely. The Pixar movies work because despite being impressive technological achievements,  they’re never just about the technology; they’re all about The Story.

Wall-E takes place 700 years in the future. The human race has literally trashed the earth and abandoned it. People live on huge starships where everything is done for them by robots. Cut off from their home, they pass the time consuming empty entertainment; they’ve forgotten what it is to be human. Meanwhile, back on the abandoned planet, all the robots left behind to clean up the mountains of garbage have broken down. The only one left is Wall-E, a plucky little machine which repairs itself using salvaged junk. It leads a melancholy existence, watching a videotape of Hello, Dolly! over and over again; its only companion is a cockroach. Then a spacecraft lands and dispatches probes in search of signs of sustainable life. . .

There’s minimal dialogue in Wall-E; the story is told with music and the moving image. Call it pure cinema, a descendant of Fantasia and 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are numerous references to the Kubrick, including machines “dancing” to a Strauss waltz and the “apes” learning to walk upright. Wall-E asks important questions about the future of our species without ever sounding like an essay. It’s a message movie by people who really know how to make a movie. Andrew Stanton directs. The excellent musical score is by Thomas Newman; Peter Gabriel collaborates on the theme song.

Godard and Truffaut, originally uploaded by 160507.

It’s not an either/or proposition. You love him And you hate him. You yell at the screen And you clap at the end of the movie.

Reviewing Richard Brody’s new biography of Jean-Luc Godard, Everything is Cinema, Chris Petit ends with a question. “We know he was great, but was he any good?”

“Cinema comes down to something shown. Godard said as much in 1965: “The important thing is to be aware that one exists. For three-quarters of the time during the day one forgets this truth, which surges up again as you look at houses or a red light, and you have the sensation of existing in that moment.” He repeated the point years later with reference to Hitchcock: “We forget why Janet Leigh stops at the Bates motel . . . what Henry Fonda was not entirely guilty of and exactly why the American government hired Ingrid Bergman. But we remember a glass of milk, the blades of a windmill, a hairbrush.”"

You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is the most perceptive analysis of the Middle East problem in the cinema, with crotch shots, hummus jokes, truly terrible hair, bad early 90s music, and Israeli hiphop. Its astute conclusion: War is 20 years behind the curve, so baduy—like disco with collateral damage. This film may well be the masterpiece of Adam Sandler’s career, which has covered the rage of the golf pro in Happy Gilmore, the agony of the 80s New Wave in The Wedding Singer, the incipient humanity of Satan’s retarded love child in Little Nicky, discrimination against poor reptile-eating white trash in The Waterboy, amnesia and the question of identity in 50 First Dates, and gay rights in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. (My least favorite Sandlers are Mr. Deeds, Click, and Big Daddy even if Jon Stewart was in it.) My sister and I have adored him since his opera singer bits in Saturday Night Live, and he has consistently achieved my highest standard for comedy: his stupid gags make food shoot out of my nose. 

Zohan features the Jewish-American Sandler as an Israeli counter-terrorist, the Italian-American John Turturro as a Palestinian terrorist (the Rocky hommage—brilliant), and the Jewish-American-Filipino Rob Schneider as a Palestinian who does telemarketing while driving a New York taxi. The screenplay seems to have been written by guys who have just survived a Tito, Vic and Joey movie marathon, with choreography straight out of Eat Bulaga. In an industry stifled by political correctness, Zohan delights in racial stereotypes, sexism, and ageism. It’s wonderful.  

On the genesis of Zohan: Remember Ethan Zohn the cute Jewish guy who won Survivor? He had curls and he played hacky sack. Was the character based on him? Then there were those two agents who left Mossad to become hairdressers in America. I sense a Pinoy influence on Sandler’s movie, which co-stars Schneider and Alec Mapa (He’s a scream on Ugly Betty). Apart from the gags that would be perfectly at home in a Joey de Leon movie, there’s the name of the salon at the end of the movie (Oops, spoiler). Dalohan, as in Dalia+Zohan.

Excellent Cyndi Lauper interview at the Times of London.  “That album was a side project,” she says. “But then I wanted to do my own record, and the record company were like, ‘Oh, we want you to do another cover record.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t f***ing think so.’ Then I bumped into Jeff Beck and we had this idea to do a blues album together, but they said no. Then they wanted me to do an Eighties record and I was like, ‘Hey, these songs weren’t even as big as mine in the Eighties. What the hell am I doing covering them? I might as well cover myself.’ What can I tell you? They didn’t have faith in me as an artist. They were just a load of suits, and it was the suits who wrecked the f***ing music business.”

Elsewhere, take acting lessons from James Franco, with a story about Tobey the Cat. 

A Very Special Love, a Star-Viva co-production starring John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo, is not a movie but a series of kilig (”romantic” cheap thrills) moments strung together like those pointless videoke videos. The rudimentary plot concerns an editorial assistant (Sarah) who falls in love with the publisher (John Lloyd), who seems to be suffering a lifelong killer migraine that can only be explained by the fact that the actor endorses a headache tablet. True, Tickle Me Elmo and I were 10 minutes late for the screening, so we must’ve missed something essential to our appreciation of its artistic merits. After all, it was rated A by the Film Ratings Board. One scene captured the essence of the movie for us. It’s the scene in which Dante Rivero and a weeping John Lloyd have a conversation at the cemetery.

Dante Rivero: I’m sorry for your pain.

Tickle Me Elmo: Yeah, what about my pain?

Me: Who will apologize to the audience?

An informed source tells us that based on its opening-day box office this movie is expected to gross P150 million. Which would imply that the audience wants to see this movie, that the lowest common denominator approach to filmmaking works, and that the studios are correct in their assessment of the market’s taste.

We can cite two reasons why this dreck appeals to the audience. The first is the wish fullfillment angle: the lower middle class, not particularly beautiful, spunky girl gets the rich, handsome, masungit (cranky) boy. As in all recent Star Cinema products, the poor are portrayed as warm, cuddly, and happy, while the rich are cold, stuck-up, and unhappy; this is the filmmakers’ way of consoling the audience over their lot (”At least you’re laughing, not like those rich bastards”). The second reason is John Lloyd Cruz, who fulfills the current Pinoy idea of cuteness: boyish, slightly chubby, looks like he’s going to burst into tears any minute. Meaning: He needs someone to look after him, and he’s sensitive. Whenever the thin plot is stretched to breaking, the director simply gives us another close-up of John Lloyd. 

In one sequence, Sarah finds John Lloyd suffering from a fever and she nurses him back to health. This soft-headed movie tells us that the Filipina’s fantasy is to find some cute guy and become his yaya. 

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The Mummy 3 is a waste of time. Not that the two previous Mummy movies were good, but they were dumb fun and this one isn’t. Maria Bello, a fine actress, takes over the role originated by Rachel Weisz, and she doesn’t work as a Brit or a brunette. Maybe they couldn’t find a British actress to play a British woman because all the Brits are playing Americans in Hollywood. The guy who plays Bello and Brendan Fraser’s grown-up son Alex is awful beyond belief. Jet Li as the villain and Michelle Yeoh as his nemesis have been in dozens of costume movies of this type, all of them better. The main reason to see The Mummy 3 (apart from having nothing else to do) is Brendan Fraser, who is The Daddy, even if we suspect a hair weave.

For a couple of months in ‘95 or ‘96,  plain white letter envelopes sealed with a green foil X would arrive at the Today newspaper office for me. They contained not jueteng payoffs (Come to think of it, no one ever offered to bribe me, which shows how much influence I had) but handwritten letters about The X-Files. They were not signed, but as a columnist I was used to anonymous letters, and I was not creeped out by the torn X’s on the flap. I had already declared myself an X-phile, so I was happy to find that the truth was out there. The envelopes provided me with information that I used in my column, particularly the letter of complaint to RPN-9 about how scenes from the show were shortened or deleted to make room for commercials.

Eventually the author of the X-letters turned up at the radio station where I was doing a talk show. He dragged his brother along, and that’s how I met the Alamat Twins (they are not actually twins), Budjette and Brandie, who became unpaid fixtures on my Sunday show. Originally we called them the Nestle Twins, after the old milk ads featuring Richard and Raymond Gutierrez as very large children, but I settled on Alamat, which was the title of the comic books they produced.

The newspaper is gone, the radio show is gone, and Budjette and Brandie are now creative directors at ad agencies. The X-Files is on reruns on Channel 9 at 1am, interspersed with grammatically-dubious ads (Do you mean “I dream to win”, i.e. you dream in order to reach your goal, like a visualization exercise, or do you mean “I dream of winning” or “I dream of victory”?) and I’ve seen my favorite episodes featuring Tooms the liver-eating, limb-stretching mutant, and Peter Boyle as the insurance salesman who could predict when people would die (now there’s an actuarian). The second X-Files movie opens in Metro Manila soon. Never mind the critics, the Alamat Twins and I are watching it on opening day. Then we should do a podcast.

Here’s an appreciation of Scully in Salon: “Sure, Mulder was hot, and made you want to heal and help him and go with him to the Andes in search of the yeti or whatever it was he planning to do with his three-day weekend…But as the show matured, it was Scully–the cerebral head of the X-Files, torn between her Catholic faith, her scientific impulse to explain away the inexplicable and her affection for her partner–who was destined to become the (still cerebral) heart of the show.”

Francis Pasion says, I need a synopsis of Jay, 1400 characters max, including spaces. Voila! The instant synopsis generator.

“Jay, a schoolteacher, is brutally murdered in an apparent sex-crime. Even before his family hears about it, a TV producer—also named Jay—and his camera crew are inside their house to document their shock and grief. The TV producer convinces the family to let him shoot the dead man’s wake and funeral for a “reality show”. This will help them to ferret out the truth about the crime, find the killer, and bring him to justice, he says. However, it soon becomes clear that this concept of “truth” owes much to the entertainment value of the material being shot, and the expectations of the television audience. The “Jay” who emerges from the TV producer’s interviews with the dead man’s mother, sister, ex-lover, friends, and co-workers is less a portrait of the victim than a collection of cliches and stereotypes gleaned from their collective memory of Filipino movie melodramas. Skillfully orchestrating this “reality show” is the dead man’s namesake—a “journalist” who knows that the “truth” is whatever works on camera.”

Jay will compete at this year’s Venice filmfest, along with Lav Diaz’s latest opus. Very apt, since Tuhog was in Venice in 2001, and Jay is of the Tuhog-Bing Lao School.

May I say how refreshing it is to have a Pinoy filmfest entry that does not involve macho dancers (male exotic dancers in gay bars). Like it or not, that’s our “niche” in world cinema. Fact: It’s macho dancer movies that get picked up for international distribution. The first such movie to be shown worldwide: Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer. International filmfests apparently regard them as our contribution to cinema. Besides Rob Schneider, our cultural ambassador.