What is Cinema?

" 2 Cool 2 Be 4gotten ", the feature film debut of Pampanga-born Petersen Vargas, won the Best Film award in the recently-concluded Cinema One Originals (Nov. 14-22). Personally, I'm really half-hearted about the film. I was impressed and moved by the young director's short film " Lisyun Qng Geografiya ", a sincerely- and wistfully-rendered tale of male friendship and unrequited love. I can't say the same thing exactly about his feature film. It has its merits and pleasures, there can be no doubt about that, but I'm not sure if they can add up to the whole experience of watching the film. My first problem with the film starts with the main character himself, Felix (Khalil Ramos), a friendless and lonely achiever in  a highschool in Pampanga. Ramos is a good actor, playing his character with enough youthful earnestness and charm. The thing is, I can't fully sympathize with the character himself. He's supposed to be bullied and teased by ev...

Here are some more world cinema features, which premiered in international film festivals like Cannes and Berlin, that I was able to see in the recently-concluded Cinema One Originals (Nov. 14-22). • " Graduation ". Cristian Mungiu. 2016, Romania. The titular event doesn't take place until the very end. But the journey towards it is one such roller-coaster ride, most specifically for the central character of the doctor-father named Romeo (Adrian Titieni, who's present in every scene). Just when his only daughter Eliza (Maria Victoria Dragus) is about to take an examination that will determine if she can study in a prestigious university in England, she is attacked, to the point of being nearly raped, by an unknown stranger near her school. The incident traumatizes the teenage girl to such a degree that makes her unable to take the exam in a proper state of mind. But Romeo, being the loving and caring father that he is, won't let such an incident compromise hi...

A month after QCinema, it was now Cinema One Originals' turn to offer the latest in independent Filipino feature films and documentaries and the best in world cinema, fresh from their triumph in prestigious international film festivals. Here are some of the world cinema features that I was able to see during the festival run (Nov. 14-22). • " Frantz ". François Ozon. 2016, France/Germany. There has always been a consistent homosexual theme in François Ozon's films (his early shorts, " See the Sea ", " Sitcom ", " Water Drops on Burning Rocks ", " A Time to Leave ", " 5x2 ", to name some). But in "Frantz", he seems to "tease" the audience with that theme, in order to connect with the film's overall preoccupation with the twisty dilemma faced by humans in regards choosing between covering up with comforting lies and expressing hurtful truths. Just when we suspected that there's more than ...

Conceptually-speaking, being trapped or confined in a limited space is a common plot device in cinema. It's what happens on the fringes - or if we may say so, above and outside - and how a director can make "most" out of a cramped space that can elevate a film utilizing such a familiar set-up. This is what " Tunnel " (2016, South Korea), written and directed by Kim Seong-hun (" A Hard Day "), succeeds in doing. Just like in the recent " Train to Busan ," the genre cover is meant as a way to lay bare some of the failures and inefficiencies in the government and bureaucratic machinery. It's like these Korean filmmakers are doing their best to entertain us, while making sure that they still manage to vent out their anger towards a dysfunctional society, which is presumably their primary aim when they crafted their respective films. The plot is fairly simple: Lee Jung-soo (Ha Jung-woo of " The Chaser " and " The Yellow Sea ,...

" White " (1994), the second installment in Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, is a strange brew. It's a rags-to-riches drama, an absurdist sketch, a revenge tale and an unconsummated romantic comedy. Its lead character, a Polish immigrant named Karol Karol (portrayed by Zbigniew Zamachowski, hilarious and heartbreaking), is one such down-on-his-luck guy: divorced by his young and pretty wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) because of his impotence and left penniless and homeless in a foreign country. He then begs for alms in an underground subway where he is chanced upon and eventually befriended by a fellow Pole named Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos) who, we later learn, has a "friend" who's willing to pay a large amount of money to someone who's able to help him commit suicide (predates Abbas Kiarostami's " Taste of Cherry ") and through whom Karol is able to return to Poland (in an absurd kind of way). Once there, the Chapli...

It's gradually becoming a tradition of QCinema International Film Festival to showcase a trio of films by a particular world cinema auteur . In 2014, it was South Korean director Park Chan-wook and his trilogy of violent and exacting revenge-driven tales (" Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance ", " Oldboy ", " Lady Vengeance "). Last year, it was French helmer Gaspar Noe and his trio of nihilistic-cum-misantrophic provocations (" Irreversible ", " Enter the Void ", " Love "). For this year's edition (which ran from Oct. 13 to 22), the director in focus was Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski (whose 20th death anniversary is being remembered this year) and his Three Colors trilogy, which deals with the emotional lives of certain individuals in contemporary France. The trilogy is called as such because each of the films represents a color and its corresponding meaning on the French national flag. Unlike some trilogy where one film...

Let's continue with a couple more films that I saw in the just-concluded QCinema International Film Festival (Oct. 13-22). • " Godless ". Ralitza Petrova. 2016, Bulgaria. Ralitza Petrova's debut feature film is not to everyone's taste. Some may find its extreme miserabilism to be totally off-putting, while some may find it viscerally rewarding. But one thing is for certain: we rarely get to encounter a film as gloomy and as downtrodden like this, even if we come up with something from Bergman or Antonioni or from the Romanian New Wave. At best, "Godless" is a prime example of the Cinema of Abjection, letting us right into the skin and bone of destitution and misery. The film couldn't be more intimate with this than with its use of the 4:3 Academy ratio (similar to that used in Lisandro Alonso's " Jauja " and Xavier Dolan's " Mommy ", both shown in a previous edition of QCinema), as it tells the tale of a morbidly sull...

It's that time of the year again and QCinema International Film Festival (Oct. 13-22), now on its fourth edition, once more showcases new Filipino films (both full-length and short) and some award-winning foreign-language films. Because of the event's strong line-up, it has already become one of the much-awaited film events in the country, garnering its own avid followers who are always looking for the very best that cinema has to offer. Here are some of the films that I saw: • " Old Stone ". Johnny Ma. 2016, China. In China, it has been reported that pedestrian accidents will be much less of a burden to the culprit if the victim just dies, because the former will not be burdened anymore of the expenses that he needs to shoulder (for a significant amount of time, perhaps even for life) if the latter survives and the claiming of insurance policies is more often than not steeped in bureaucratic machinery. Harrowing as this may sound, it has been claimed to happen...

In a biblical sense, a serpent is regarded as the creature that led Eve to temptation and thereby brought about the first act of sin. Thus, it connotes something negative or evil. In Ciro Guerra's Oscar-nominated " Embrace of the Serpent " (2015, Colombia), we gradually realize as we go through watching the film that the creature in the title actually stands for the origin of life in the universe and thus connotes something positive or good. That's how the Amazonian indigenous tribes look at life and creation - it's being at one with nature. We can say that the film is about life and nature, but that would be too broad a description. To get into the essence of the film itself, we ought to emphasize instead that it depicts how Western colonization can encroach upon the pure quality of this nature as inhabited by the tribes.  As Karamakate (a tribal shaman and inhabitant in the Colombian Amazon) laments, the intrusion of the Western colonizers into their lives only ...

If we put a crime in the context of a country's socio-political state or, more specifically, a government in transition, does it justify the act? Does a crime committed as an act of "defiance" against an "unjust" status quo make it any less evil than that committed with purely personal motive? What if there's really a thin line between them? To be able to make sense of the heinous goings-on in Pablo Trapero's " El clan " (2015, Argentina), recipient of the Best Director award in last year's Venice and part of this year's Spanish Film Festival organized by Instituto Cervantes-Manila, I believe it is important that we view them from the perspective of those questions.  Not so much to condone the horrors depicted onscreen (definitely not) as to deduce the underlying motivations of the Puccios, headed by the strictly-patriarchal yet deeply-psychopathic Arquimedes (Guillermo Francella, chilling) in committing the spate of murderous kidnap-fo...

Somewhere in the mid-section of " Ang Babaeng Humayo " (2016, Philippines), the new film by Lav Diaz and recipient of this year's Golden Lion at Venice, a wealthy and powerful man named Rodrigo (Michael de Mesa) confesses to a town priest how different he really is from the kind of person whom the latter outwardly knows, that he can't really bring it upon himself to be a good person and that he's glad of the fact that he's able to destroy the life of someone whom he hates most. At the end of the "confession", he asks the priest if he believes in God and how can he find Him, to which the latter answers by saying he sees God in every person and Rodrigo has to look for Him. To search, to look or to seek is in fact a key theme of the film. Whether or not the characters are able to find what they are looking for doesn't so much matter as what it is that they've gone through as they make their search. As the saying goes, it's not the destinati...

For my part, it isn't really much of an issue if a film is something that we've already seen countless times before (because after all and whether we like it or not, repetition is part of the nature of cinema). As long as the film is impeccably entertaining or manages to be bold and revolutionary in its own way or perhaps both, I can still regard it as something that can hold on its own, despite treading a familiar and common theme or plot. Antoine Fuqua's " The Magnificent Seven " (2016, USA) mostly leans towards the former. Essentially a "remake of a remake", it may lack the grit of the John Sturges Western pic or the depth of the Akira Kurosawa classic, but it is entertaining nevertheless, which is something that primarily counts in a popcorn flick, especially if it's the kind churned out by Hollywood. If there are dashes of inspired auteurism here and there (which Fuqua's film thankfully has), then it might be regarded as a welcome blessing. ...

While watching " Blair Witch " (2016, USA), directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett (the two are frequent collaborators), one can't help asking if it's a sequel or a remake. Or if it's going to put a new, "post-modern" twist on a horror sub-genre which was already deemed as new and post-modern when the original film first graced the screens about seventeen years ago. Or if the film was even necessary at all, given how the "found-footage" conceit has been followed, imitated, rehashed or even mangled by various directors since " The Blair Witch Project " (a prominent example is the " Paranormal Activity " franchise). But considering how Wingard and Barrett have managed to make the 80s-horror tropes exciting, intriguing and surprising in " You're Next " (home invasion-cum-slasher) and " The Guest " (the mysterious stranger), coming up with another "Blair Witch" might not really be...

" Don't Breathe " (2016, USA), the new film by " Evil Dead " re-creator Fede Alvarez, is one little tricky and subversive animal. How are we supposed to hate a blind man (in the film, played by Stephen Lang) who is just protecting his house from a trio of young burglars (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto)? How is it that the helpless victim has all of a sudden become a murderous villain? And the supposed-to-be criminals are the ones who are gaining our sympathy? In this another specimen of the home invasion sub-genre, the tables are actually turned, somewhat recalling " Shut In ", released earlier this year.  This is where the charm and intrigue of the film lie. What was initially a home invasion set-up for the three burglars becomes an escape plan for them, as they have to make sure that they get out of the veritable house of horrors alive, something that the blind owner is hellbent on not allowing to happen. This might not work if the so-c...