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98. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, the 1952 adaptation of the crime thriller by Georges Simenon, follows the plot faithfully but doesn’t have the novel’s queasy atmosphere. Claude Rains, whom we regard as a model of urbanity (He is our favorite character in Casablanca. “I’m shocked, shocked that there’s gambling on the premises.” “Your winnings, Sir.” “Oh yes, thank you.”), stars as Kees Popinga, a model citizen who suddenly snaps and goes on a crime spree. Everyone is so polite, especially Marius Goring from The Red Shoes as the detective in pursuit, so we don’t believe anything bad really happened.

99. The Physician (2013). Based on Noah Gordon’s historical novel about an English orphan in the 11th century who travels to Persia to learn medicine. At the time, Europe was in the Dark Ages and the sick were tended to by traveling barbers. The real physicians were Jews trained in Persia. So the English boy pretends to be Jewish (He circumcises himself, that’s how serious he was about becoming a doctor) and travels to Isfahan to train with the great Ibn Sina (Avicenna). There he helps battle an outbreak of the plague, which is not as lethal as religious fundamentalism. Stars Tom Payne and Emma Rigby are the cutest couple we’ve seen in movies this year.

100. The Double. Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s short novel is a very black comedy reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as both the nebbish and the popular new guy whom no one notices looks exactly like him.

101. The Two Faces of January. Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose better-known books have been adapted for film by Wim Wenders, Liliana Cavani, Rene Clement, Anthony Minghella, Alfred Hitchcock. In an interview Viggo Mortensen disparaged the source novel, and we thought, “Ang taray naman ni Viggo”, but he’s right. How dare we doubt Viggo. (No, there is no scene in a Turkish bath, or battles with orcs.) The material’s quite thin, but it’s elevated by the acting and director Hossein Amini doesn’t stint on the nastiness. Why are the characters in movies based on Highsmith novels so well-dressed?

As we reported last week, Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan has been named the official entry of the Philippines to the Academy Awards. Thanks to everyone who saw the movie, who told their friends about it, who spread the word about a 4-hour, 10-minute indie arthouse movie that, on paper, didn’t stand a chance against the heavily-advertised, big budget mainstream productions.

Next, we try to get into the shortlist of five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film.

IndieWire says Norte has a chance. We expect favorable notice from awards prediction sites in the coming weeks. But every country has an entry, and many of them are worthy contenders, too.

Lav Diaz is too cool to campaign for a nomination, but (speaking for ourself) we’re not. We want that nomination. What we need is to be adopted by a major Hollywood player who will throw their weight behind Norte, The End of History and get Academy members to consider supporting it for the Oscars. Maybe throw us a party. And this is the first name that popped into our massive head: Robert Downey, Jr. He’s as major a Hollywood player as it gets, we have a feeling he’ll like Norte, and we do love him.

Robert Downey, Jr., adopt us.

(Does anyone know anyone who knows RDJ? In real life, not in your fan fiction.)

Update: Moira Lang, mother of Norte, spoke to Norte’s US distributor Cinema Guild. They explained how a film gets into the shortlist. Basically, it’s a crapshoot. A small committee chooses the entries out of all the submissions. Often, the film agency of the country which submitted the film hires a PR agency to boost the film’s chances of becoming one of the five nominees.

Once a movie gets into the shortlist, its chances become one in five, so that’s when the producers throw everything they have at selling Norte to Academy voters.

Next week we’ll know if the Philippine government through the Film Development Council will support Norte’s Oscar campaign. It’s in everyone’s best interest.

In this scene, Fabian (Sid Lucero) continues being a dick and lecturing everyone, including his older sister Hoda (Angelina Kanapi).

Thank you.

Next: the campaign to be chosen as one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. Daunting, but who knew we’d get this far?

Field of Foreign-Language Oscar Contenters Begins To Come Into Focus

In this scene Eliza (Angeli Bayani), whose husband Joaquin has been wrongfully imprisoned for murder, confers with the lawyer who advised him to plead guilty.

By popular demand Lav Diaz’s Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan has been extended for one week at Glorietta in Ayala Center, Makati and at Trinoma in Quezon City.

Schedule of daily screenings from September 17 to 23:
Trinoma 12.10
Glorietta 12:30

Thank you for spreading the word. A four-hour indie loosely based on Dostoevsky and directed by one of the leading lights of “slow cinema” (We dislike the term avidly) was always going to be a hard sell, and without your support it might’ve been a first day-last day theatrical run. That the filmmakers were able to make this movie the exactly the way they wanted to was amazing; that it opened in commercial cinemas was amazing; that enough people have come to see it so it gets a second week is amazing.

Essay question: Which character is the most miserable—Fabian, Joaquin, or Eliza?

We had gone to the auction last Saturday expecting something out of North by Northwest.

Given recent news of fraud in the art market—a Luna being sold for Php55 million appears to be in a French auction catalogue for much, much less, only it’s by someone else—we were hoping for someone to yell “Fake!” and start bidding downwards. (Not that we’re suggesting that anything at that auction was less than real. The contested Luna was not part of it.)

Instead, the auction looked like a cockfight, with people in T-shirts and jeans raising numbers on sticks. The paintings were crammed onto the walls, and every plastic chair was taken. “Stay for the Magsaysay-Ho, I bet it goes for Php20M,” said my collector friend, who might as well have been at a basketball championship. (There’s probably a bookie with odds on what the hammer prices will be.)

A small piece listed at Php800,000 went for Php6.9M. It’s enough to make dead artists come back to life and paint some more. In fact they do, except that the actual painting is done by someone else. In a market like this, the genuine-ness of a piece is directly proportional to the price it might fetch: to raise questions of authenticity seems almost rude. You’re killing everyone’s buzz.

We didn’t stay long because the place was packed and we have a horror of crowds. Our friend reports that the Magsaysay-Ho listed at Php2.2M went for Php21M, but the biggest seller that day was the Ronald Ventura painting that went for Php22M.

Watch Vincent and Theo by Robert Altman, which opens with a painting by Van Gogh fetching jillions at an auction in the 1980s, then goes back to Van Gogh’s lifetime when he didn’t sell squat (and his brother Theo was a well-known art dealer).

How does a shut-in consumptive English spinster get to write Wuthering Heights? It is the most intense love story ever written, and Cathy and Heathcliff the craziest lovers in literature. Their relationship goes beyond possession, desire or wanting to live happily ever after: what they call “love” is the stuff of psychotherapy. It’s not just obsessive love—they can’t even be jealous of other people because as Cathy says, “I AM Heathcliff”.

This situation does not make for happy endings, nor do they expect one. Cathy makes an effort at a healthy, “normal” life, marrying a decent man and playing the devoted wife and mother-to-be. Of course it doesn’t work. She basically starves herself to death, but even death will not end her pain. Heathcliff meets her weeping housekeeper and asks if Cathy is dead. The housekeeper says she sleeps with the angels or something, and Heathcliff cries, “May she wake in torment!” Then he bangs his head on a tree, leaving bloodstains. He curses her for leaving him, and then he calls on her to haunt him. He asks her to give him no peace. And the amazing thing about Emily Bronte’s novel is that you believe this extreme emotion could exist.

Writing teachers always advise their students to “write what they know”—what about Wuthering Heights? It is a triumph of the imagination, fueled by powerful feelings that had no other outlet but the written page.

In Abismos de Pasion, Luis Buñuel’s film adaptation from the 1950s, the tale is set in Mexico. This does away with one of the things we love about the Emily Bronte: the atmosphere. Misty moors, howling winds, ghostly faces in the window—it’s not called Wuthering Heights for nothing. (Note that her sister’s novel is called Jane Eyre and not Thornfield Hall, though the sisters both created dark, mysterious, Byronic, unpleasant leading men. We’ve never read their youngest sister Anne—will look up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.)

The Buñuel also dispenses with the “ghost story” and the love story involving the second generation terrorized by Heathcliff, who really is not a nice man. Though if we were to go by national stereotypes, the “passionate” Latin-American nature is a closer match to Bronte’s characters than the “polite, repressed” Brits. Instead of squelching around in the mud and contracting tuberculosis, you’ve got people in arid, dusty farms and blazing sunshine. But the emotion is the same: the passion that drags the lovers to hell.

Writers are already shut-ins by definition, maybe there is something to the reclusive life.

* In Career Girls by Mike Leigh, two friends divine the future by asking a question and opening a copy of Wuthering Heights to a random page.

* * We’re going to read Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own.