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Usually we hate it when people are talking during the movies, and we have issued picturesque threats to viewers who won’t shut up, but when we saw Before Midnight last week we were surrounded by chatty moviegoers and it felt right. These were not hipsters demonstrating their familiarity with the oeuvre of Richard Linklater (a group that may be even more annoying than fanboys loudly declaring their in-depth knowledge of the source material—If they knew so much, why weren’t they discussing in Klingon?); these were senior citizens at an afternoon screening, married couples who could really relate to the onscreen couple. They weren’t talking amongst themselves, they were talking to the screen, to Celine and Jesse.

“Ayan, inungkat na ang nakaraan!” (There, they’re raking up the past!) someone chortled as Celine reminded Jesse of some fan she had suspected him of sleeping with. “Di pa rin matuloy!” (Interrupted again!) someone else cried as the bickering couple started putting their clothes back on. “Ang ikli!” (Too short!) was the general conclusion as two hours of onscreen talking came to a close. They were into it, they were engaged, they saw themselves in the characters. And they laughed a lot. It was great.

In Before Midnight, the third in the trilogy (Who knows, maybe they’ll make some more) of largely two-character talkathons by director Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, we catch up with Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) nine years after the events in Before Sunset. That one ended with a cliffhanger: Will Jesse miss his flight home to the US and stay in Paris with Celine whom he met on the train to Vienna nine years earlier and spent the night with?

The fact that this movie exists answers that question. Before Midnight rounds out the trilogy beautifully: the first movie is about young love, the second about the possibility of catching the one that got away, and this one is about what happens when you have achieved your romantic ideal. You have to live together, a situation that entails dealing with the fact that the ideal is a real human being with real failings and annoying habits that can drive one to distraction. This is why fairy tales end at “They lived happily ever after”—nobody’s interested in what happens next. What for? Arguing about chores and who gets to pick up the kids from school and living within a budget is not romantic. It is, however, the stuff of comedy, and Before Midnight is the funniest in the trilogy.

So Ethan Hawke looks a bit run-down and paunchy, and it turns out Frenchwomen do put on weight (Butter spares no one), but that’s life. Not those incredible Hollywood romcoms where everyone is perfectly plasticine in their 40s. This is what comes after that sexy Nina Simone impression that changes people’s lives hahahaha! We recommend this movie highly. Unless you don’t like talky movies, in which case: Shut up, no one wants to hear about it.

The housebreakers of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring

The media is supposed to call out these superficial idiots, but they’re too busy pandering to the superficial idiots in the audience. Instead of asking, “How could you do this?” they ask, “When you met someone you had robbed, wasn’t it, like, awkward?” Those who see the shallowness and venality of their actions are punished, while the warped and clueless are celebrated in the media.

Our review is finally up at InterAksyon.com, minus the T.S. Eliot reference in the title.

Artist/UP Fine Arts professor/production designer/our friend and in-house critic Leo Abaya is making his feature film debut at Cinemalaya 2013. Leo is the writer and director of Instant Mommy starring Eugene Domingo, Yuki Matsuzaki and Luis Alandy.

We’ve seen the work-in-progress (in our secret identity as The Subtitlist)—it’s delightful! Deceptively light and diverting, Instant Mommy has much to say about perception, reality, the lies we tell others and the lies we tell ourselves. Watch it.

Screening Schedule

CCP Venues – Main Theater (M), Little Theater(L), MKP Hall (MKP), Huseng Batute (THB)
Other Venues – Makati Greenbelt 3 Cinemas (GBC3), Alabang-Alabang Town Center (ATC) QC- Trinoma Cinemas (TRI)

July 27 Sat 12:45PM/CCP MKP Hall (MKP), 9PM GBC3-3
July 28 Sun 1:30PM/GBC3-5 , 4PM/ATC,
6:15PM/CCP Little Theater (LT)
July 29 Mon 3:30PM GALA/CCP Main Theater (MT) ,
9PM/Teatrong Huseng Batute (THB)
July 30 Tue 4PM/TRI-2, 9PM/TRI-11
July 31 Wed 1:30 PM/TRI 2, 4PM/GBC3-3
Aug 1 Thur 1:30PM/ATC, 9PM/MT
Aug 2 Fri 4PM/TRI-2, 6:15PM/MKP
Aug 3 Sat 4PM/TRI1-1, 9PM/THB
Aug 4 1:30PM/GBC3-5

The good cop, bad cop routine

The Heat is hilarious. Sandra Bullock has always been great at physical comedy, and she’s abandoned many of her “adorable” romcom mannerisms (such as the facepalm and grimace combo). Melissa McCarthy is genius—check out her rant in the closing credits of Judd Apatow’s This is 40, where Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann have collapsed in laughter but she keeps going. Bullock and McCarthy play a stuck-up FBI agent and a maverick Boston cop who have to work together to take down a drug syndicate. Yes, you’ve seen that movie ten thousand times, but this one works on charm. Paul Feig’s (Bridesmaids) directorial approach is to stand back and let the ladies do the work—many comic opportunities slip by casually, and The Heat often feels too loose and formless. The result leaves us wondering what a Bullock and McCarthy movie might’ve been if the filmmakers had ambition.

4. Manhattan by Woody Allen

We must’ve been 10 or 11 when we saw a Woody Allen movie for the first time, on the old Channel 9. It was the crime mockumentary Take the Money and Run, in which he plays an incompetent bank robber. He goes to the bank teller and hands her a note saying “I have a gun”, but his handwriting is so bad, she reads “I have a gub”. For some reason we thought this was hilarious so we watched Take the Money and Run every time it was on and memorized many of the lines (like the one about his father having a brilliant 30-year career in the military which catapulted him to the rank of corporal).

We saw it again a few years ago, and it’s not that funny, but we decided as a child that we wanted to sound just like the typical Woody Allen character: a neurotic Jew from New York. Who the hell knows how kids make these decisions? Our 6-year-old niece loves pink glitter and wants to be a Disney princess, and we’re absolutely certain she didn’t get the idea from us or her mother. Couldn’t we choose to model ourself on a happy, well-adjusted, socially-skilled character, or at least someone closer to our culture? We didn’t even know any neurotic Jewish man from New York, but when we met some they said, “You sound like a neurotic Jewish man from New York.”

Our favorite Woody Allen movies are Manhattan, Annie Hall, Love and Death, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. In Manhattan Woody plays Isaac, a TV comedy writer who quits his lucrative job because he wants to be a serious writer. He’s dating Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) who is waaay too young for him (This would come back to haunt him in his real-life scandal). In this scene at the Metropolitan Museum they run into his best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) and Yale’s mistress Mary (Diane Keaton). Mary proceeds to tear down the artists Isaac loves. Later he sees her at the MoMA and she rips apart his other idols, and by the time they dash into the Museum of Natural History to get out of the rain, he’s in love with her. That’s a lot of museums.

We were maybe 14 when we saw this movie and it completely screwed us up because we thought the point of falling in love was to have someone to argue about Scott Fitzgerald and Fellini with.

5. Bringing Up Baby by Howard Hawks

Cary Grant is the absent-minded paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn is the ditzy heiress who nearly ruins his life in this screwball comedy co-starring a leopard. We love Cary Grant, and he made some of his best movies with Katharine Hepburn, but she always played characters we wanted to punch in the face.

6. Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock

Here’s a column we wrote last year when Vertigo topped the BFI list of greatest movies: Love Makes Suckers Of Us All.

Whenever I watch Vertigo I come away disturbed and disoriented, as if I’d expected a different ending from the one I’d seen before. This is of course the definition of insanity. (I don’t see why we should put spoiler alerts for 64-year-old movies, but here it is.)

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We love movies and museums, and while making notes for a meeting at the Ayala Museum we fell to thinking of movie scenes set in museums. There must be thousands, from those Night at the Museum movies to the meeting between 007 and Q in Skyfall. (A friend of ours tried to shoot some scenes for a forthcoming movie at the National Museum but his request was rejected.)

1. Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas

We saw this for the first time last month. It’s gorgeous. When a well-known art scholar dies, her three children must decide what to do with her substantial art collection and her house outside Paris. They can’t keep the art because the inheritance taxes would wipe them out, and keeping the house is no longer practical when two of them live on other continents. In many Tagalog movies, dead parents and inheritance issues are the trigger for hysterical confrontation scenes and high-decibel raking-up of the past. In Summer Hours everyone is so civilized and articulate, so…French?

Summer Hours is an engaging treatise on art, time, life and death, globalization, and objects—what they represent, our attachment to them, how they mean different things in different contexts. An absolute must-watch.

2. Lovers on the Bridge by Leos Carax

Wrenchingly romantic and beautifully weird: a street performer (Denis Lavant) and a woman who’s going blind (Juliette Binoche) meet and fall in love on the Pont Neuf. It’s not easy. In one scene he sneaks her into the Louvre after closing time so she can look at the paintings one last time before she loses her eyesight.

3. Band of Outsiders by Jean-Luc Godard

Apart from containing one of our favorite dance numbers, Bande a Part (Quentin Tarantino borrowed the name for his production company and the dance scene for Pulp Fiction) has that scene in which the three friends try to set a record for racing across the Louvre. Thirty-nine years later, Bertolucci paid homage to that scene (and to the New Wave in French cinema) in The Dreamers.

And here’s that dance scene.

TO BE CONTINUED