The King’s Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human-interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history.
Given that The King’s Speech is a lie and The Social Network may be character assassination, the leading nominees will just have to be judged on the basis of cinematic merit. Wait, is historical truth a cinematic merit? If you want 100 percent historical accuracy, go for a work of fiction. Yay, Toy Story 3.
Uro de la Cruz is a director for television (Bubble Gang, Show Me the Manny) and movies (Bahay Ni Lola, Buko Pandan), photographer (RangeFinder Filipinas), screenwriter (Scorpio Nights), and fictionist (Antyng Antyng). A conversation with Uro sounds like this:
– What are you doing now?
– Nothing.
– No Bubble Gang?!
– That, but nothing else.
– No more Manny Pacquiao sitcom?
– Well yes, but really nothing else. . .
Uro’s list:
1. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, the Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1
2. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. About the restoration of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of earliest illuminated Hebrew books.
3. A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong. A thriller about the disappearance of a Red Chinese dancer. US Marshall Rohn and Inspector Chen investigate.
4. The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. A “scholastic” thriller about 2 Princeton students solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a puzzling Renaissance text.
5. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, which led me to also read
6. The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. The concept of God viewed through the prism of archaeology, theology, history, and evolutionary psychology.
7. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
8. A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines by Mary Helen Fee. The memoirs of an American school teacher who came to the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century and worked alongside the Thomasites. She arrived a week before the USS Thomas and prepared the accommodations of the new teachers. She was assigned in Capiz. Some of her observations about the Filipino still ring true today. Funny, amusing, informative and ultimately tragic.
The other day I had lunch with my old friends Michel and Bernard-Henri (not French, just snobs). We were discussing Amigo, the movie set in the Philippine-American War, written, edited, produced and directed by John Sayles. I saw an early cut months ago and the finished version last week.
– After seeing it again I have the overwhelming urge to watch THE movie of the Philippine-American War, Virgin Forest.
– Why thank you.
– Yeah it needs editing but it’s brilliant.
– Virgin Forest embodies a basic truth of the cinema: No historical-political discussion is so profound that it can’t be enhanced by a threesome in the woods.
– Mother Lily made us put that in.
– Haha, I bet Peque pitched it to Regal as a sex epic with virgins being raped in a forest.
– After we screened it for Mother Lily she turned to me and said, “Ako ba talaga ang nag-produce ng pelikulang yan?” (Did I really produce that movie?) I decided to take it as a compliment.
– Amigo has no threesome in the woods.
– What it’s missing is a mad war correspondent character a la Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now who speaks lines from Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist rants.
– I’m reading Mark Twain’s autobiography. He left instructions that it be published 100 years after his death, so it just came out.
– Write your autobiography, and I’ll publish it 100 years after your death.
– Have you seen the Blu-ray edition of Easy Rider? It’s beautiful. They transferred it to digital, cleaned it up, color-graded it. I remember that the original movie was grainy; this transfer is clear and beautiful.
– Who directed Easy Rider, was it Peter Fonda?
– No! Dennis Hopper!
– Now that Dennis Hopper is gone, who will take over the wild man roles?
– Has to be someone who would get through that scene in Blue Velvet without laughing.
– I know, Crispin Glover.
Though from what I’ve heard, he wouldn’t have to act crazy.
– James Franco? He looks like James Dean and James Dean was Dennis Hopper’s friend.
– Matt Dillon. Someone needs to take him aside and say, “Matt, it’s time for the next phase in your career. The matinee idol thing was great, but let’s move on.”
– I thought his performance in There’s Something About Mary signalled a shift in his career direction.
– I know who can take over the Dennis Hopper roles! Dennis Hopper was genius but there is another!
Spader!
* * * * *
At dinner I put the question to Ernie and Bert.
– Here’s a feasible candidate: the current Mel Gibson. The eyes of a wild man.
For context, here is the old Mel Gibson, the beautiful one.
– I know who can do the Dennis Hopper roles. There can be only one.
Shokota Fanning. Previously known as “Dame Judi Dench, watch out!” We are huge fans.
During the Q&A that followed the former US president’s half-hour talk, moderator Maria Ressa asked this question.
“You’ve been a long-time observer of the Philippines. You know first-hand each Filipino’s ability and potential. Why do you think our nation hasn’t yet, after People Power, after everything we’ve gone through, why haven’t we been able to fulfill that potential?”
What the hell. You are asking a foreigner, a former president of a colonial power to which the Philippines maintains ties that may be described as “stifling”, to tell us why we have problems. You ask him in a public forum to pass judgment on us. Are you angling for a lecture on how to behave? (So we can all get indignant at being lectured by the US.)
Mr. Clinton must’ve recognized the wonkiness of the question because he prefaced his response with a longish silence. Then he said, “On the whole it wasn’t a good advantage for the nation to have been colonized, if you will, by Spain and the United States. . .”
Still the smartest guy in the room. No doubt the stories he tells are part of his speaker’s repertoire, but he sounds like he thought of them that minute. Here’s the video.
LONDON — After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave.
After World War II, Eileen Nearne, here in a photo from that era, faded into obscurity.
But after the police looked through her possessions, including a Croix de Guerre medal awarded to her by the French government after World War II, the obscurity Ms. Nearne had cultivated for decades began to slip away.
Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944. . .
Pope Joan giving birth during a procession; the female pope surrounded by cardinals at right, the newborn child on the ground; at left the procession and a fool standing behind a column mocking the scene; illustration to an unidentified publication. Strasbourg, 1539. From Wikimedia Commons.
The story of Pope Joan, the woman who disguised herself as a man and became pope in the 9th century, has long been dismissed by the Church as a legend and anti-Catholic fabrication. This is the Church which recently declared that anyone who attempts to ordain a woman will be excommunicated. That venerable institution also said that allowing women to become priests would be as sinful as child abuse—an unfortunate comparison, given their well-publicized problems.
Tarot card: La Papesse
The Pope Joan story just refuses to die: there’s a new German movie about her. Fake or fact, she is a fascinating subject.
‘”The She-Pope’s story is recorded by some 500 chroniclers of the papacy and matters Catholic, writing from early medieval times until the end of the seventeenth century,” explains Stanford in his book The She-Pope, which sets out to uncover the truth behind the myth. Stanford’s curiosity had first been piqued when, gazing at the view of a modest square in Rome, he noticed a small shrine at the foot of a road leading to the church of Saint John Lateran. It was decorated with what he thought was a faded fresco of the Madonna and Child. On further investigation, though, he discovered that the fresco marked the spot where the legendary Pope Joan had given birth and been killed by the outraged populace and buried by the roadside. So it could well be a representation not of the blessed Virgin but of Joan with her baby. And, according to the English historian Georgina Masson, that explains why papal cavalcades will no longer pass by the shrine, taking a detour to the church rather than being tainted by the shameful association.’Read The Great Pretender by Sally Feldman in Eurozine.
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