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“Which Meryl Streep movie are you? We are Heartburn. No, Plenty. Wait…Adaptation!”

“Noel is Still of the Night and Boboy is Silkwood. Juan, you are not Sophie’s Choice, more like Plenty. Ricky…Postcards From the Edge? Jon, you wish you were The French Lieutenant’s Woman, fall in line. James: Mamma Mia or The Devil Wears Prada. Michael is Out of Africa. Victor, the dingo ate your baby.”

“Ban hammers at shopping malls? That might stop the Martilyo Gang, but won’t it pave the way for the Showerhead Gang or the Paperweight Gang or even the Platform Shoe Gang? Great work, Secretary Mar, let’s see you stop Thor from coming to the mall.”

“Oh no, we are not watching all the Metro Manila filmfest entries this year. Maybe 10,000 Hours, which we think of as One Year, One Month and Three Weeks.”

“Shall we open another bottle? You know what’s a great Xmas movie? Besides It’s A Wonderful Life. Besides Metropolitan. The Shop Around The Corner.”

Model: Drogon Hiddleston-Cumberbatch. Photographer: RickyV.

Books published in 2013:

All That Is, James Salter. We wish we could write like him.
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch. Dickens would be very proud.
Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem
Autobiography of A Corpse, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. We take great pride in being able to spell “Krzhizhanovsky”. Banned by Soviet censors in his lifetime, a master of speculative fiction emerges in a new translation.

Books published in other years that we only read this year:

From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Possibly the greatest graphic novel in the history of humankind.
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories, Saki. Nasty and hilarious.
The Hunters, James Salter
Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household. Possibly the greatest thriller ever written, and certainly the greatest with a feline character.
Beginner’s Greek, James Collins
Any Human Heart, William Boyd. Logan Mountstuart is our favorite fictional character of the year.

Our previous lists:
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006

Lav Diaz’s Norte, Hangganan Ng Kasaysayan screened on Sunday at Cinemanila to a nearly full house.

On the Sunday before Xmas, amid epic traffic, moviegoers paid Php300 each to watch an arthouse film that is four hours and ten minutes long.

On the Sunday before Xmas, amid epic traffic, moviegoers paid Php300 each to watch an arthouse film that is four hours and ten minutes long, and nearly everyone stayed until the very end.

We haven’t seen as many people at a mall screening of a Lav Diaz film since…never.

As the filmmaker would say: Wasak.

We’ve seen Norte thrice and will see it again. The next screenings will be held in January. We will post the dates.

Blue Christmas, an original video essay from the Criterion Collection.

Our jaws still feel a bit loose from having hit the floor every few minutes. The Act of Killing is a work of staggering chutzpah: consider the end credits, in which dozens of crew members prefer to be listed as “Anonymous”.

Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invites the leaders of the Indonesian death squads that terminated millions of suspected communists in the 1960s to direct re-enactments of their killings. They do not deny that they killed people. They are not sorry. They casually, gleefully point out the scenes of the massacres and recall what they were wearing (jeans, never white pants).

They do not make excuses for their actions (No “I did it for my family/country” drama here—they do not have Catholic guilt). “What is true is not always good,” one unrepentant war criminal points out. “War crime is defined by the winner, and we are the winners.”

You’ve heard of “the banality of evil”. A man who figures out a way to kill people without making a bloody mess treats his pet ducks with great tenderness. He has never apologized for his role in the genocide, but he makes his grandson apologize to a duck for hurting its leg. Another murderer wears a series of glittering women’s gowns. In a musical sequence, a victim thanks his killer for sending him to heaven.

It will take us weeks to process what we’ve just seen.

Horrifically funny and extremely disturbing, The Act of Killing starts out as a film about political violence, explores what humans are capable of, then reveals itself to be a film about filmmaking. The killers confront history through the medium of fantasy, cinema, and perhaps the most amazing thing that happens is the sudden, creeping realization that they have committed a great evil.

Here’s the Cinemanila schedule for December 20-22.