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Written in 1890, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce’s is one of the great subjective time stories. Watch the 1962 short above, read the story, read the story while listening to a reading, or listen to the story done as a radio thriller in 1947.

Someone told us that Lav Diaz’s new film Florentina Hubaldo, CTE was four hours long, which in the context of his filmography is a short film. But the Cinemanila 2012 schedule listed its running time at 5 hours. In fact it is 6 hours long, and here’s the amazing thing: It feels longer than six hours, but at no point did we have the urge to walk out. We had to see how it would turn out, and when the credits appeared, we cried, “Bitin!”

We actually wanted more.

Florentina Hubaldo, CTE is brilliant, and we say this though we still don’t know what “CTE”* means. It is both slow and gripping. The point of the 6 hours is to make you feel the passage of time. The black and white photography is stunning (Diaz did his own camera work, apart from writing, directing and editing). There is no acting, nothing that feels contrived or phony. It is not for everyone, but if you commit, you will find yourself richly rewarded.

At this time there are no other screenings scheduled, but check the Cinemanila schedule for updates.

* Checked with the filmmaker. CTE is “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease diagnosed postmortem in individuals with a history of multiple concussions and other forms of head injury.”

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Notes written in the dark, no looking.

(Helpful tips: Bring coffee and snacks. If like us you have difficulty sitting still for a long time, take notes in the dark. Don’t look because you’ll hurt your eyes. We started taking notes on our phone but we switched to pen and paper so we didn’t have to take our eyes off the screen. If you have to, take walks periodically. Go out and buy a banh mi baguette.)

Cinemanila 2012 schedule
Screenings at Market! Market! in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. Tickets Php150.

Halle Berry and Jim Broadbent in the 1936 section.

1. We loved Cloud Atlas the book by David Mitchell—we remember where we were when we read it, and what we were wearing. We have forced it on our friends. But if you ask us for a plot summary, we couldn’t give you one. It’s too vast, with many characters and timelines and seemingly unrelated events that turn out to be connected in the end. (Our favorite was the composer, who sounded very camp.) Mitchell is a writer whose talent matches his ambitions. So when we heard that the Wachowskis and Tykwer were doing a film adaptation, we saluted them for their bravery and wished them luck: the material seems unfilmable.

2. Is this the year of make-up that calls attention to itself? The distracting make-up to flatten Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s features in Looper and make him a plausible younger version of Bruce Willis. (Didn’t they trust his acting to fill in the belief gap?) The old age make-up Guy Pearce wore in Prometheus (They couldn’t hire an actual old person? Yes, there was the fake TED talk, but the looks don’t have to be a perfect match.) Daniel Day-Lewis and Anthony Hopkins as Lincoln and Hitchcock, respectively.

The make-up in Cloud Atlas is in another category altogether. We found most of it risible: Halle Berry as a white Jewish woman; Jim Sturgess and Hugo Weaving as Koreans; Doona Bae as an American from the South; Hugh Grant as the villain in The Last of the Mohicans after he goes on a bender and wakes up in a tattoo parlor…There’s also Hugo Weaving in drag, but we’ve seen that before. (We think of Weaving as being perpetually in drag.)

Halle Berry and Tom Hanks after the apocalypse.

However, there is a point to the funny make-up. The directors’ decision to cast the actors in multiple roles of different ethnicities and time periods has been criticized widely, but it’s a storytelling shortcut. It saves time on exposition, and we’re talking about a movie that clocks in at 2 hours, 51 minutes. It establishes that they are the same souls occupying different bodies. (Your interpretation of the book may be different, but this is the movie’s.)

3. In adapting Cloud Atlas, the main problem is how to shift forth and back between many characters in different timelines without giving the audience whiplash. The Wachowskis and Tykwer deal with this by organizing the action according to theme: love, death, friendship, betrayal, etc. It’s neater, and we like how there’s little explanation of who the characters are and how they got there—just like in the book.

Cloud Atlas is a movie that makes you go “WTF!” every ten minutes.

4. The Neo Seoul story is very The Matrix, which makes us miss Keanu Reeves. As Keanu already looks sort of Asian, he wouldn’t need distracting make-up. The Wachowskis do love their martyr-messiahs. And Tom Tykwer loves the eternal recurrence stuff (Run Lola Run; The Princess and the Warrior).

5. Don’t tax yourself by trying to follow the plot. That is the road to a headache. Just watch the action unfold, eat your popcorn and drink your Coke (or M&Ms and coffee). There’s some great stuff: the surprisingly moving love story of Frobisher and Sixsmith, the hilarious escape from the old folks’ home, the nuclear plant conspiracy. All directed by Tykwer, by the way; the Wachowskis are still over-fond of clutter.

Later, assuming you haven’t zoned out, you’ll see the connections. If you don’t, you can read the book (It’s Wonderful!).

6. We expected to loathe the movie but we ended up enjoying half of it. Not always for the right reasons (Tom Hanks’s hair!), but we’ll take what we can get. Interesting effort. There’s too much cheap pandering in the movies; give us failed ambition.

The New York Film Critics Circle awards were handed out today. The winners are:

Best Film: Zero Dark Thirty
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty)

This is the movie we’re most excited to see. (Yes, even more than The Hobbit. Which opens next week; we’ve already cleared our schedule.)

How does Jessica Chastain’s cryface compare with Claire Danes’s on Homeland? Their characters were probably based on the same person.

Best Screenplay: Tony Kushner (Lincoln)
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln)

We gather the only way Daniel Day-Lewis won’t get his third Academy Award is if the voters realize it will be his third.

Best Actress: Rachel Weisz (The Deep Blue Sea)

She’s incandescent as a woman who throws her life away for a man. Oscar! Oscar! Warning: Watch with strong drink. (Hmm we just mentioned this movie. We are psychic.)

Best Foreign Language Film: Amour by Michael Haneke

White Ribbon turned us into a fan; before that we were afraid of him.

Best Animated Film: Frankenweenie
Best Supporting Actor: Matthew McConaughey (Bernie, Magic Mike)

We said it after watching Magic Mike: McConaughey is good for something, alright alright alright.

Best Supporting Actress: Sally Field (Lincoln)
Best Cinematographer: Greig Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty)
Best Non-Fiction Film (Documentary): The Central Park Five
Best First Film: David France (How to Survive a Plague)

Tom Hiddleston as Henry V: We’d marry him, but we wouldn’t wage war for him.

Royal plots part 1: Q, Picard, Scar and Loki do Shakespeare is here.

The Hollow Crown continues with Henry IV parts 1 and 2, but we’re in the mood to compare the new TV adaptation of Henry V with the movie by Kenneth Branagh.

Henry V is a glorious piece of pro-war English propaganda. The English led by their young king Henry V invaded France to claim land that is “rightfully theirs”, i.e. the whole country. On a narrow field called Agincourt the exhausted and ailing English, outnumbered six to one, won a decisive victory. The heavily-armored French cavalry were confident against the lowly English archers. But English arrows struck the horses of the French, and when the French went down in the thick mud they couldn’t get up. The French lost 10,000 men, the English 29 (modern estimates say 112).

We can’t help but love the young king—he’s brave, humble, modest; he makes great speeches; he forbids looting and maltreating the natives. But Shakespeare’s view of war is closer to our century’s than his. He reveals the politics and opportunism under the grand rhetoric. He’s suspicious of this newly-pious king who rejected his best friend Falstaff and “killed his heart”. This Henry who talks about the “happy few”, the “band of brothers”, had another friend hanged. In violation of the rules of chivalry he ordered the French prisoners killed. These decisions are defensible—they are the acts of a good leader. The more kingly Henry, the less human.

And still we love him. We would kill or die for Henry V. Shakespeare shows us the essence of leadership: charisma, bullshit, the capacity to be cruel and right.

Kenneth Branagh adapted, directed, produced and starred in the film of Henry V in 1989; Tom Hiddleston, who calls Branagh his mentor (they co-starred onstage and in TV’s Wallander, and it was Branagh who gave him the part of Loki in Thor), takes on the role in this episode of The Hollow Crown. The differences between the two versions are summed up by the actors’ interpretations of the most famous speech in the play.
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