Vicente-Ignacio S. de Veyra III's
Leaving Las Vegas
Vicente-Ignacio S. de Veyra
III's
Leaving Las Vegas
(film reviews)
IN 1997, Vicente also wrote film reviews designed for The Manila Times and Today that -- except for the one on Mike Figgis' Las Vegas -- did not see print for various reasons.
He provides the War Photos Museum the following backgrounder: "I first became familiar with better cinema products when I learned how to save high school allowance money for Oscar winners that were 'coming soon' in provincial theaters. Later, while a painting student at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, I had the opportunity to be with comrades who were likewise bystanders at the U.P. Film Center, the place where I would also hang out to be near the books and rags there. There I also came into contact with my friend's friend, the now Filipino cult favorite Raymond Red, and visiting lecturers like the German filmmaker Werner Schroeter. Soon, I would be working on Gauguin paintings that were to be used for a scene in the Center's Vice-Director's upcoming film, Boatman. The Vice-Director's name was Tikoy Aguiluz, now famous for later films like Balweg, Segurista, Rizal Sa Dapitan, Bagong Bayani, Biyaheng Langit, and Tatarin."
All the above atmospheres were only a few among many backgrounds in Vicente's life that would nurture his interest in films. Presently, he has in his collection video copies of classics like Vittorio Di Sica's The Bicycle Thief, one of his favorites. So now, without further ado, allow us to share some of his thoughts from the abovementioned reviews, on some films he had contact with that "I thought I needed to add my own thoughts on." Also, we're providing a link below to a comment he made on the Francois Truffaut classic The Bride Wore Black, a comment found at the International Movie Data Base site. Here are the reviews.
Babe.
HIGH technology has made this "study" of nature subjects possible. Using animatronics characters from Jim Henson's Creative Shop, animation and visual effects by Rhythm & Hues, all in cahoots with animal action by trainor Karl Lewis Miller, Australian director Chris Noonan achieves this marvelous, supra-realistic two-hour drama involving animals for actors and humans in support roles.
Based on the book The Sheep-Pig by British children's novelist Dick King-Smith, producers Kennedy Miller and George Miller, screenwriters George Miller and Noonan, and the director, Noonan, may indeed have made the best picture for children this past cinema year. It's a children's film that yet also acts as a metaphor (to adults) for all the animated discourses that visited the issue of animal rights in the US and Europe.... At the Manila premiere of Babe, this reviewer heard his wife mutter, "I think I'm going to be a vegetarian for a while."
But the film's narrative line progresses with the issue of Conventional Wisdom -- discoursing on the way things are, the way things may be, the plasticity of the first, the potential of the latter. This, while telling the pig how things are with pigs vis a vis the way things are with dogs or cats, is the ideal oblique statement on the conventional wisdom of human tradition in regards pork.
Our pig in the story struggles then to find acceptance in roles different from his usual place in the scheme of animals. Ultimately he becomes a "sheep dog," a friend to man as against the duck's escaping man. A statement there?
The film, when seen as a movie for adults, touches on one scientific concern -- immersed though this is within the fantasy -- , namely that animals converse in a complex language not necessarily English. But wait. Babe is not an adult political film, merely that its consequent themes trouble -- at least for the duration of the movie -- the mind of us pork lovers. It is a fantasy film, we know; with its use of pathos vis a vis the adversary Conventional Wisdom, it's not really there for a definite point, apart from the sole virtue of inspiring in children adventure through good deeds.
Therefore, us adults must watch this movie the way our children will. That is, by accepting the fantasy as a curiosity trip into the possibilities of the real (as against the probabilities). For if adults even begin to take this from, say, a left-of-center perspective, then only Hollywood profits; vegetarianism can by itself lead to a movie called Babe II, with an eggplant for a central character.
We must remember that we teach our children possibilities toward imagination and survival within rules. Once inspired, they can be tested with the reality bite of Probability, the spoilsport. Bearing this in mind, we begin to notice that adults' rebellions themselves become conventions when they start to sermonize on their own the-way-things-are's.
What's my point? It's a dog-eat-fish world we live in, all right, but let your children play around and over that for the moment. We may even learn a thing or two, like maybe the law of nature, including the reality of deviants (deviants that are also found in children's litt.). (VSV III)
THE BEST CINEMATIC ARGUMENT AGAINST PRIVATE GUN OWNERSHIP
(see Vicente's "user comments" for Francois Truffaut's Bride Wore Black, The at International Movie Data Base's website [it's at the bottom of that IMDB webpage])
The Good Son.
Written by the novelist Ian McEwan (although Newsweek's Jack Kroll suspects uncredited rewriting "gutting" the script of McEwan's usual texture)
Directed by Joseph Ruben (replacing Michael Lehmann who left when Mac Culkin's father/manager demanded with threats the role of Henry be given to his son)
Starring Macaulay Culkin, Elijah WoodA FILIPINO reviewer describes Macaulay Culkin's role in The Good Son as that of "a boy with the face of a cherub and the heart of a little imp," as if to describe (I believe not his intention) what might have been the MTRCB's view on this Culkin role. Which is probably as -- in the satiric words of Newsweek's Jack Kroll -- "an adorable predator in Pubescent Park", to be tolerated in our movie houses. And so it is. This coming from Twentieth Century Fox, who accorded "sweet lips" Macky his a-few-million-dollar wage to display onscreen a photogenic bag of violent tricks. Now, we must remember that it was Twentieth Century Fox that exploited an "adultness" in Shirley Temple's image. Fox got offended over the truth when the novelist Graham Greene wrote a review noting Temple's "adult emotions of love and grief (glissading) across the mask of childhood," and a "dubious coquetry" there. Fox sued Greene for libel.
And now Fox is bringing us "bedroom eyes" Culkin to play Henry, a homicidal 12-year-old who in the course of the film we find to have killed his infant brother. Henry demonstrates his kind of fun by killing a dog with a crossbow and causing a highway smash-up by dropping a dummy from a fly-over road. He then shows a type of creativity in trying to kill his sister while they're skating and by trying to poison everybody in the house one evening.
Of course these are brought to us not exactly as pre-planned events, for why would Henry want to kill one of them one moment, all of them in another? The violent creations are more like outbursts, or epileptic attacks of some sort, fits. Like from a manic psycho's hours of insane contemplation. So, okay, the chain of violence in the movie has a reason for being there. It's there not only to demonstrate a logical flow in the development leading to the final crime, but to convince us of a type of juvenile dementia. Let us forget, then, the possibility that Fox was only interested in the entertainment value of the story (by concentrating on the actions instead of on Henry's thoughts) -- sensationalism is, after all, present in all stories in one way or another.
Taking that generous view on the film, I would now say I don't believe the makers of this movie should have made the reason for Henry's abnormality oblique. After all, the simple assumption that a lack of parental attention (or presence) might lead a son to the most sinister forms of rebellion, in this case vengeance, can be amply bloated by newspapers' accounts of daily juvenile crime. And Henry's parents' lack of a talent to listen is illustrated enough by their presumption that children's minds live solely in a world of intangible fantasy or are nothing more than struggling manifestations of ignorance simply to be tolerated. However, to carry on after such conventional wisdom would render a movie's existence rather suspect. Like they say in literature, if you have nothing to say, don't write.
In the meantime, I can only choose to assume this story of "the good son" as something possible, even probable.
My prime complaint, however, is in why the MTRCB -- which has righteously rated this movie R-18 -- tried to keep The Piano from being seen by Filipinos, fearing the people might copy the system of corruption in the movie's story. For that body let The Good Son easily through without fearing these people's wanting to copy the dummy-dropping and other modern pranks, along with the techniques of dispatching humans displayed in the film. The Piano and The Good Son indeed both have "good" messages, oblique though they may be, but that the MTRCB should fear the effects of certain images in the one and not treat the (actually more exploitative sensationalism in the) other with equal concern surely smacks of dead fish. A lot of youths, too, were left wondering why they were being kept from watching their old American idol. (VSV III)
Leaving Las Vegas.
MIKE Figgis shoots a movie like a writer. And because he directs what he "writes", he is able to do better than the best screenwriters in the industry.
In Leaving Las Vegas, for which work he was nominated in this year's Oscars for the Best Director and Best Adapted (from the John O'Brien book) Screenplay trophies and won plums in the LA Critics and National Society of Film Critics Awards, plus many other nominations -- in Leaving, Figgis employs filmic tools commonly seen in MTV videos, pseudo-documentation, and novel music-picture combinations, . . . not for sheer effect, but towards the furtherance of narration. Whereas the early-century novelist John Dos Passos used cinema techniques to stretch the possibilities of story narration on the page, Figgis uses filmic tools to stretch the possibilities of cinematic narrational discourse.
In the black/white film Schindler's List, director Steven Spielberg applied color on a girl's dress in a scene where she walked among corpses, this for an expressionist end. The same with Martin Scorsese in the color wedding scene in the b/w film Raging Bull. Mike Figgis, however, would use filmic elements like these for narrational ends, as it were. In Leaving, he fastforwards actor Nicolas Cage's driving to Las Vegas to shorten the journey while expressing the distance. We may not notice it, but Figgis manipulates the camera and editing to arrive at new, or at least '90s, discourses, e.g. through the classic close-up on an object or body part. But despite his being a director, Figgis' most obvious wit occurs when he's not using filmic devices.
Therefore he appropriates the virtues of stage drama, the documentary confession, film as film, and the written and spoken text, to let them function together for one and only one purpose -- the non-expressionist essaying upon a story. It is by this strategy that Figgis becomes both a realist narrator and a realist film artist. In Leaving, when Elisabeth Shue drops her underwear to pee and later grabs a tissue paper to wipe herself while Cage continues to talk in the near foreground, or when we see the raped Shue on the bathroom floor, we could already hear all the critics raving, "oh! a realist!" Those are nothing. When Figgis picks up expressionist tools from the usually expressionist art media for realist purposes (Figgis also did the music for Leaving), he achieves a directorial revolution that is good both for the visual arts and for stories.
An Expressionist Within: The expressionist item in the film is in the character of the screenwriter-alcoholic Ben (Cage), which is a bit of a poet armed with the intelligence that moves us, and probably also in the lover-prostitute (Shue). The twist in it all is in the fact of the alcoholism's occurring not within a rogue type but in a person carrying around with him the right amount of wit and humor, scruples, and emotional restraint. This restraint falters somewhere, largely in his addiction and the consequent emotional states from this, but not everywhere.
The prostitute, meanwhile, donning a life of "performances" for her clients, becomes the practical, "realist" figure vis a vis the intelligent Ben. However, her name, Sera (serum is the clear, immunized liquid in the blood), as a contrivance later becomes a sneer on her failure to get realistic and get Ben immediate medical attention before his liver explodes. This failure due to a poetic succumbing to the romantic ideal of "accepting him as he is", which is by the way also a realist ideal approached differently.
Accepting things as they are. Yeah. Therein lies the paradox of realism itself. (VSV III)
THE UNIVERSALITY AND TIMELESSNESS OF JANE AUSTEN'S BRITISHISMS
Sense and Sensibility.
TO patriotic culture buffs of "Significance" and "Comparative Values," SENSE & SENSIBILITY the international movie comes to the Philippines via Columbia Pictures with the appearance of dangling that pride and prejudice in Western people's assumptions of how British culture may still be interesting to Asia. These Western people are not exactly wrong. We are often attracted to anything hyped up by marketing departments, in the East and the West, especially those movies with the fine posters and the lovely trailers cinematography.
Curiosity, then, will be the key to selling tickets here, especially with Ms. Emma Thompson's nomination in the American Oscar Awards for Actress of the Year and Screenwriter of the Year. The awe over an actress' screenwriting capability, a capability curious in these parts, may by itself push our Hollywood Stars-worshipping collective to the booths.
English professors and avid Western literature readers in college will certainly protest my first paragraph's tone, but I'm of the mind to ask how such a film may function as anything more than a display of English landscapes and china to the majority of ticket buyers in Manila. So will those who even think anything seen as magical in L.A., U.S.A., will be read as awe-inspiring at SM Megamall.
In light of other Western literary classics' having demonstrated accessibility in their recent movie versions, the average ticket buyer will expect a simplified Jane Austen, this from the "illiterary" assumption that the book must have been difficult or at least boring (Filipinos, in general, are afraid of "fine literature").
THEREFORE, without condescension but rather with sincerity, I ask: What will the average Filipino ticket buyer find in the movie? Firstly, he (generic) will be startled -- if he had not prepared himself -- by a form of English that is distinctly English (decorum, decorum, decorum -- are the Latin words for it). The British retain such decorum to this day, betrayed every now and then by even the bloody Socialist punks of even far Glasgow (read James Kelman's novels of the present British sub-proletariat).
Likewise he will find British manners, e.g. bowing in greeting (familiar to us through the Japanese) which is delayed to the length of a piano etude's intro. All cultures have manners, by the way.
The moviegoer will also feel the British landscape of the period, to the point of making him understand why British china have these flowers on them -- even understand why our gardening grandmothers want the ones with flowers on them.
The moviegoer will understand why poetry was such a hit in a mostly rural country that had yet to hear FM radio. Makes you understand why a person today who owns either a farm space, a house with a garden and no TV, a modest beach house, or a depressing basement pad, would also find affection for a book or more of poems.
You will understand the parallel between such a polished yet provincial culture's sexist discretion and the way women designed their costumes (and their lives). You'll half-understand why 5-1/2 miles would seem like adventurous travel, and even why doctors find cause for panic with ladies' simple chills. You'll feel the worth of a piano forte, and the value of its sound in relation to the vast space of British countryside that it touched.
Mostly, you'll witness a romance story involving seven personas, and others besides, woven with Romantic contrivances jumping out here and then there. This, set within an amusing society of, huh, sense, and of sensibility in the British sense of the word. Though the British arrangement would seem like an extreme example of a setting for the conflict between the individual's heart and the conventions of a conservative surround, the film director's Oriental name (Ang Lee) attests to the universality of Ms. Austen's passions -- useful even in present multicultural, multiracial, quasi-liberal London, or even Manila!
Well, I think the audience's tears, goose bumps, and laughter, at one of the Manila premieres, should already attest to the timelessness of Ms. Austen's proud people. So, now, I can shut my bloody trap and let the awful fine times roll, eh? Korek! (VSV III)
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Copyright © 1999, 2000 Vicente-Ignacio S. de Veyra III. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.