Elle Writes Reviews

She/they/it. a blog where I write about movies and promote my own published work. Currently working on an architectural magazine's website. Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/4zdWT

[ellewritesph]

Hope in The Time of Chaos: How Action Films Make Great Christmas Films

Originally published on December 19, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Christmas films are usually a different beast from the typical movies made with the expressed goal of bringing hope in hopeless times. Normally, the inspirational aspect of these films comes not from extraordinary people or events, but from ordinary people with ordinary morals and failings. They come together in this time of year to find new meaning to their existence through empathy and love for their family and friends; or finding a short respite from the misery of the rest of the year through (as Tennessee Williams would put it) the kindness of strangers, or by a miracle that gives them a reason to continue living.

The season’s morals and reasons for existing are very old-fashioned and, at its core, contain very little cynicism. This gives its makers an unabashed reason to be as schmaltzy and emotional as they want to be, and thus Christmas films are sentimental beasts, targeting the feel-good centers of a person for maximum cheer. Even in such an apocalyptic year as ours, the sentiments that a Christmas film contains are powerful enough to give people joy.

Knowing that, the last genre people would think to pair up with Christmas films would probably be action, especially from the 1980s and 1990s. These films are not sentimental at all, and a significant majority of them do not care about finding the inner good in everyone. Instead, they are violent affairs that largely believe only in the worst that people can give, and sometimes they actively push for and reinforce harmful stereotypes about foreigners and non-white people in an effort to make it easier to root for the antagonists’ deaths. These movies can be great fun of course, and the killings can feel exciting and cathartic in a primal sense, but the issues with their portrayal of non-white cultures do keep them from being fully enjoyable in our more modern, multicultural society.

Yet in the times that action films and Christmas films have crossed, they’ve proven to be potent and transcendent pairings that highlight what makes each genre such crowd-pleasing affairs.

In Lethal Weapon, our two protagonists could not be more: one is widow Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), a war veteran and efficient killing machine whose mind has become unstable, to the point where he is considered by the in-house psychiatrist as too much of a liability to be a cop. The other is Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), a family man biding his time till retirement, who follows the rules of the law as a way of keeping his family safe but who can be as skilled of a fighter as Riggs is.

Shane Black, the writer of the original Lethal Weapon film, likes setting his films in Christmastime. From an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he says, “Christmas represents a little stutter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect our lives.” It’s an interesting observation, one that informs how he utilizes the Christmas setting as a way of forcing the growth of his characters, including Riggs finding a new family to fight for as he reassesses why he bothers living in the first place.

In Christmas films, a big part of where they find hope and meaning is in the idea of family: that the love and support we get from our loved ones can bring us meaning and a drive to go on and do good even as the world itself tries to push us down. The 1946 classic It’s A Wonderful Life contains some truly depressing moments where the protagonist, George Bailey, had sacrificed his ambitions and desires in an effort to make the lives of the people around him much better. In his lowest moments, he was planning on killing himself so that his family can get the $15,000 payout that his life insurance policy had. In the end, he finds his hope and joy in his family and friends, giving his life of sacrifices meaning by seeing how much the people around him appreciate what he has done for their lives.

The Christmastime setting feels especially potent in Martin Riggs’ plotline. This man is legitimately suicidal after his wife’s death, to the point where he has a special hollow-point bullet to use for when he does pull the trigger. In an early scene busting a drug dealer, Riggs gets taken hostage. Does he feel worried or scared? Does he even try to preserve his own life? Nope: he starts taunting the drug dealer and the cops as he tries to get them to shoot him. The desperation that exists in Riggs’ eyes is truly scary stuff, and it undercuts what would be, in normal circumstances, some fist-pump action moments.

Martin Riggs’ moment of hope comes from the importance of family, specifically Murtaugh’s family. It’s not in how he changed them, however, but in how they changed him, giving this man new loved ones to live and die for. Murtaugh and his family remind him of his humanity, and like his wife did beforehand, they give his life meaning, something to fight for. He’s a little goofier with them, a lot more willing to lower his walls. While furthering the friendship he has with Murtaugh, he forms a bond with Murtaugh’s wife Trish (Darlene Love) and daughter Rianne (Traci Wolfe) and allows himself to care about their collective wellbeing. By the time Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne gets kidnapped, it makes absolute sense why Riggs would risk his life to save her.

If Christmas films highlighted the existential desperation that comes in a life that feels meaningless (like in It’s A Wonderful Life), Lethal Weapon shows that desperation in full force while reminding us that the loved ones that we surround ourselves with often give a new focus to that desperation without devaluing the trauma that created it before. It gives action films a much-needed boost of empathy for its characters, without becoming a saccharine show of how family solves all problems.

The dark, violent elements in Lethal Weapon (the trauma of Riggs, the death of Amanda Hunsaker, the continued specter of Vietnam in American society) amplify the contrast of Christmastime and the optimism that Murtaugh and his family represent to Riggs, clearly outlining why Riggs feels a renewed sense of hope with them: in a world of killers, Murtaugh’s kindness and decency stand out. His renewed meaning is found in this new family that has accepted him fully, scars and all, and by the end of the film, he joins them for Christmas as he partakes in the first peaceful moment he experienced in the film.

Die Hard is, of course, a uniquely transcendent film that marked a sea change in how action films were made, making them utterly focused and efficient while paving the way for films like The Fugitive and Speed to exist. It is also a unique Christmas film that shows a true redemption storyline for our main character John McClane while critiquing the culture that existed at the time (and continues to exist in our society).

John McClane is a uniquely human action hero then and now. In the 1980s, he was a subversive character to the emotionally shallow, muscular super-soldiers that were the action heroes popular at the time; the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers who killed armies of humans by their lonesome and survived impossible situations by the strength of their brawn.

As portrayed by Bruce Willis, McClane is a nervous wreck, someone who stands out in the rich corporate landscape that his wife, Holly Gennaro (Bonnie Bedelia), thrived in. Coming into the movie, John looks uncomfortable with the decadence displayed in Nakatomi Plaza, from the limo to the office with the waterfall cascading down to the fancy drinks being served at the Christmas party.

He’s an easy person to sympathize with at this point, and before Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his band of thieves come in, he has a clear emotional problem to solve with his wife Holly: she furthered her career by moving to Los Angeles and using her maiden name, and he chose to be a cop in New York over moving with her to Los Angeles. At some point in the movie, this impasse between them needs to be resolved, or their relationship will not survive. It’s a dilemma that serves as McClane’s motivation throughout the film.

This kind of emotional motivation makes him an effective Christmas film protagonist. Christmas films like 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street or 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas usually revolve around protagonists trying to redeem themselves from mistakes of the past and using the generous and charity-focused season of Christmas as a way of showing their good side while learning how to rise above their failings as a person and be better people, whether it’s helping defend a man who claims to be Santa Claus or saving his wife from a group of thieves-disguised-as-terrorists.

That emotional motivation also stands in contrast to the action stars like Schwarzenegger or Stallone: he’s not this indestructible super-soldier (and we see him visibly get hurt in utterly painful ways, like walking through glass barefooted), but most importantly, he’s motivated by his desire to keep Holly safe. Throughout the movie, as his survival becomes more and more unlikely, he becomes regretful of how he treated Holly as she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her career. Before the big climax, he even asks Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) to tell Holly that he’s sorry, in case he doesn’t make it out alive.

These kinds of emotional stakes ground John McClane in a way that his peers couldn’t do. By 1988, Rambo became a symbol of American masculine strength; the motivations of Schwarzenegger’s characters (like the kidnapping of his daughter in Commando) feel secondary to the kill count or his pre-and-post-kill one-liners, and other action films in the West at the time were more concerned with imitating the two.

McClane, however, is framed as this ordinary man stuck in an extraordinary situation, and his decisions throughout the movie, starting with trying to contact the police the moment he escaped up until his go-for-broke gamble of taping his pistol behind his back as a way of outsmarting Hans Gruber one last time, comes off as desperate but well-thought-of attempts of keeping as many people alive as possible while he figures out how to outsmart the thieves.

It’s the best of both genres at once, offering a focused and heartwarming redemption story whilst keeping the action at a hard-boiled maximum, showing why, 32 years after its release, Die Hard still has a place in the pantheon of great films.

Strange But Effective Bedfellows

At the end of the day, people need relief from the hopeless daily grind that they find themselves in, a way to reconnect with the inner meaning of why they keep going. Christmas films and action films give that kind of relief in a differing way all by themselves. But put together, they make good bedfellows: aspects of Christmas movies ground the film’s emotional stakes in something realistic, while aspects of action films let the adrenaline rush and cathartic bloodletting fly with delirious imagination.

It’s obviously not the only way to tell a hopeful Christmas story by design, but such films show that more Christmas films should consider such an angle in telling their stories of hope and cheer, which may help them find new points-of-views in old Christmas values that they might not have seen before.

And in a time of hopelessness, a new perspective on traditional messages of hope may just be what society needs.

[ellewritesph]

QCinema 2022: ‘Itim’ and the Ghosts of Injustice

Originally published on December 6, 2022 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Itim (also known as The Rites of May), Mike de Leon’s feature film debut released in 1976, revolves around a photographer (Tommy Abuel) who returns to the province to be with his father (Mario Montenegro) and to document the town’s Holy Week practices. During this time, he finds himself drawn to Teresa (played by Charo Santos in her debut role), and they become entangled with the ghosts of their families’ past.

The best ghost stories tend to be rooted in unfinished business, in the quiet darkness that exists between the past and the present. The horror in ghost stories is as much rooted in the existential dread of the unknown—or worse, unknowable—world as it is about scaring people with spectral beings. You can see that in films like The Others (2001) or the Netflix TV adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. Recently, director Scott Derrickson even played around with that thematic string in ghost stories for The Black Phone, to potent crowd-pleasing results.  

It’s an ethos that works effectively, and it’s one that Mike de Leon uses well in Itim, embodying a theme of injustice that can only be remedied by otherworldly powers. The ghost’s unfinished business here is a series of grave crimes that were covered up with ease due to the societal privilege of the criminal, and the screenplay written by Clodualdo Del Mundo Jr. and Gil Quinto thrills at the opportunity to build up that sense of dread and fear as we uncover each piece of the puzzle with patience and methodical grace.

It’s certainly an interesting choice to pair Jun, the photographer, with Teresa, since their chemistry together and the sense of unease that they feel around the world seems almost otherworldly (It’s because it is: their direct relation to the criminal and the ghost, respectively, appears to be what drew them together as much as it was mutual attraction). Tommy Abuel and Charo Santos certainly have a sense of camaraderie together that makes their budding friendship and trust in each other believable despite the short timeline and circumstance. 

The justice-seeking ghost is a very common trope in ghost stories, but de Leon uses it as an allegory of the greater crimes that go unpunished across the nation against women, minorities, and the poor. 

It hints at those larger themes of injustice, and de Leon shows how people seek comfort in their lives through religion: the penitence in churches, the recreation of the torturous whippings that Christ faced while in the journey of crucifixion, the prayers and chants honed through decades of practice. It’s fascinating to watch de Leon implicitly connect these to the main ghost story at hand: akin to how these religious acts are supposed to give the marginalized hope for forgiveness and justice, Rosa, Teresa’s sister and the ghost haunting the story, is using supernatural means to find equal footing and justice after it was denied to her while she was alive. 

There’s also interest in how de Leon uses the parallelisms of religion as a comforting act of penitence and the haunting as an act of a ghost asking to be comforted in the afterlife. The writing and the direction certainly help bring these to the surface, and it makes for a richer viewing experience as de Leon’s direction guides you wordlessly through these acts of penitence, increasing in intensity until the final climactic reveal occurs. 

The film’s restoration for the big screen is very vibrant, and the viewer gets a sense of what awed critics and audiences at the time of its initial release: de Leon uses these great widescreen shots to build tension in the story, and it has a sense of scale in its proceedings that is largely missing from future ghost story films made in the Philippines. 

The way de Leon introduces the church in the province feels very inspired, a way of defamiliarizing what a church is; and the early shots inside of Jun’s family home give a sense of geography that allows the audience to know where everything is, setting up the actual horror scenes later on that rely on the audience’s familiarity with where these rooms are in relation to each other. 

Itim is a confident and assured debut for de Leon, showing his eye for images and his intentional approach to tackling social commentary that will show up in many of his future films. It is also a great film in its own right, with potent imagery and storytelling that stays compelling throughout the film. There’s a timeless appeal with Itim that doesn’t necessarily exist with other horror films, grounded in a societal condition that exists even today, and it’s something that modern audiences can connect with easily.

[ellewritesph]

QCinema 2022: ‘Elehiya’ Review—Grief and Anger in the Crumbling Remains of Imperial Power

Originally published on November 24, 2022 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Elehiya is a 2022 film directed by Loy Arcenas about a grieving widow (played by the late Cherie Gil) who finds herself returning to her husband’s family’s estate on an island in the Philippines to scatter his ashes. During her time back, she is restless about days lost and left behind, and she plays out a fantasy of motherhood with a potential bastard (played by Ross Pesigan) of her husband.

This is a movie preoccupied with the complicated grief that the main protagonist, Doctor Celine de Miranda, feels about their husband. She is understandably sad and alone now that he’s passed, but there’s also a lot of unresolved anger that bubbles up in her interactions with her brother-in-law (played by Miguel Faustmann) and the help that came with the estate. 

There are broad overtures in the early parts of the movie pertaining to how grief affects us and how it manifests in others. The main character is constantly surrounded by the decay of a colonial estate in the country, illustrating that grief in the quiet creaks and empty spaces of the giant house. She has conversations with pictures of him where she argues as if he were alive, spewing out her anger and confusion and sadness like a leaky faucet unable to help itself. And there are a lot of quiet moments where she stares at the sea grieving for a better time. 

It’s a lot of quiet moments that add up to very little, the cinematography showing these bright vistas and panoramic beach views that feel empty. It forces Gil to carry the film’s early thematic focus by imbuing life to the moments of her staring into space, delivering these rambling monologues that come to life more because of Gil’s performance than of any substance in them. 

The film does pick up later on once Celine realizes that one of the help currently living in the house, Jasper, might be the bastard child of her late husband. She becomes preoccupied with a fantasy of being his mother, which can border on uncomfortably incestuous, and which leads her to commit heinous actions in the name of living out that fantasy. 

I do think that Arcenas and co-writer Raquel Villavicencio have a broader point about colonialism in the Philippines in their exploration of Celine’s grief. Setting the film on a formerly-rich estate being sold off to foreigners feels like an intentional choice to foreground this theme. 

The de Mirandas, who appear to be landed hacienderos with noticeable accents and white complexions, continue to lord over the island and its inhabitants despite their glory days being very much behind them. And though Gil’s character Celine is a de Miranda by marriage only, she has the very same entitlement and better-than-thou attitude towards the inhabitants of the island despite admitting to her brother-in-law that she actually veers closer to middle-class in the United States. 

That choice regarding Celine’s background definitely gave a more complicated picture of colonialism in the country, showing that even those considered landed gentry in the Philippines could be seen as lesser-than in the face of higher colonial powers. It also depicts Celine’s attitude towards the de Miranda’s help as a form power-tripping, as if this is the only place where she can feel the power she once had in the past during the waning glory days of the de Mirandas.

The fact that Jasper, the alleged bastard child, is actually offspring of the help—a family that has been with the estate for generations and is treated poorly by Celine and her brother-in-law throughout the film—comes off as pointed commentary towards the lack of values that come with being an imperialistic power and how they would exploit the naivety and lack of power that come with being a native of the country. 

It’s there in the scenes with Celine and her brother-in-law, where they play around and talk about the dynamics of unequal romantic and sexual relationships Filipinos have with foreigners; and it is definitely there in the dynamic that Celine has with the estate’s help, for whom she has little respect except for the potential bastard child of her husband. 

She doesn’t think about the power that she has over them, but her actions and words betray a belief that it is deserved and unquestioned. Every time her bubble with the bastard child gets threatened by his actual mother, she always reverts back to that uneven dynamic to treat her poorly as if reasserting the power she has over them. Eventually she uses it to do a heinous but confusing act that really pushes how much you end up sympathizing with the character during the film. 

Despite all of these themes, the film feels a little undercooked, and I do wonder if the choice of putting our perspective character as the widowed wife of a wealthy estate child put the film in a blind spot; it would have been better served from the perspective of Jasper or his family. 

Elehiya has broad and worthy ideas about grief and colonialism that it wants to tackle, but the screenplay’s unfocused approach to the subject and its slow pacing muddies up what it wants to say. In the end, it feels like nothing has really been explored in the inner lives of the protagonists, and all we have left are empty stares in the distance mimicking the movements of grief that were once felt.

[ellewritesph]

QCinema 2022: ‘Return to Seoul’ Review—To Be Everywhere and Belong Nowhere

Originally published on November 18, 2022 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Return to Seoul is a 2022 drama written and directed by Davy Chou about a young woman attempting to rediscover her heritage by going to an impromptu trip to South Korea. Adopted by French parents after being abandoned by her birth parents, she attempts to connect with the local culture and her biological parents while dealing with the feeling of never quite belonging anywhere. 

The central concept, revolving around the industry of international adoption where babies from foreign countries are shipped to white parents, is very loaded and ripe for exploration, especially at the end of the children. Many of these children grow in white-majority countries with histories of imperialism, possibly against the countries they were adopted from. 

It’s a thorny issue, but the film navigates it with deftness by centering it on the emotions of the adoptee, Freddie (Park Ji-Min). Freddie repeatedly describes herself as “French” to the people around her despite them assuming her Koreanness because of her looks. She appears to have open disdain at some Korean cultural traditions, whether it’s something as innocuous as guest-related drinking traditions or something passively malicious like the patriarchal attitude in Korea where the men around her want her to get married. She sneers at these traditions while wearing her French upbringing proudly in every conversation. 

And yet, Freddie’s time in Seoul is fraught with instability, as she reckons with a biological father (played by Oh Kwang-rok) who feels guilt at not being able to raise her, and a biological mother (played by Cho-woo Choi) who wants nothing to do with her. She’s had great opportunities for educational and social mobility that she likely would not have gotten from her original parents, and yet, as Freddie finds herself in South Korea seeking to understand her origin, there’s a certain amount of loss in her eyes at knowing that she can’t belong in this place, and that she likely never would.   

Chou’s screenplay doesn’t really criticize the international adoption industry explicitly, but he also doesn’t shy away from the emotions one could feel in being forced to go through a system where they effectively remove all the links to your lineage from birth. Chou finds a lot of human moments to focus on as he plays around the odd culture shock that a woman who looks Korean but is culturally Western would experience in the country. 

It’s sometimes very funny (Freddie spending three days with her father was rife with a lot of small hilarious moments of awkwardness between them), but the culture shock morphs into restlessness as Freddie comes to understand that, no matter what she does, she doesn’t belong in Korea​​—and that restlessness turns into loss as she finds herself unsuccessful in plugging in the emptiness in her soul. 

Chou shows the effects of this rootlessness that pervades Freddie’s existence, which includes her taking a job in the international arms trade (a weird tangent in the film) as well as constantly partying and drinking as a way of dulling the sense of emptiness that she has when she’s in Korea. The lifestyle that she’s chosen feels empty and dry, and that seems like an intentional choice towards reflecting how, despite being both French and Korean, Freddie doesn’t actually have strong roots in either side. Her life is lived separate from the cultures she allegedly belongs to, and thus she finds herself immersed in shallow waters, unable to connect with any of the people she cares about no matter how hard she tries.

By the end of the film, there isn’t a sense of closure in the loneliness or separation or unwantedness that she feels deep inside; it just is, and Freddie is forced to live with it forever as no closure seems to ever be enough to keep those feelings at bay. It seems like a very hopeless ending in a film that finds their protagonist attempting to bridge the divide between their nurtured culture and their heritage, but it might also be Chou communicating that there isn’t any satisfactory way to bridge the divide now, and that all the people who find themselves existing in the divide can do is pick up the pieces and live with the consequences.

All of this is rooted in an excellent lead performance by Park Ji-Min, who finds ways of conveying that emptiness and restlessness inside herself through the silence of her stare. Whether it’s the big emotional moments or the small comedic ones, she knows how to get across the loneliness that she feels and the desperation that exists behind every action. 

Return to Seoul is a great look into the tangled emotions that come from feeling separate from the culture and heritage that could’ve and should’ve been your own. It dives into the loneliness of feeling disconnected from an important part of yourself, finding no easy answers to how the change can be addressed in the process. There are questions to be asked about the ethics of the practices that we have, but Seoul reminds us of the restless people at the center of the story, looking for answers in the deep yearnings of their heart and never truly finding anything satisfying in the end.

[ellewritesph]

A Festival in Review: Cinemalaya 2021’s Dokyu Program A

Originally published on August 28, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

I remember reading once this quote about cinema: “The cinema is truth 24 frames per second.” It felt, to me, like it came from the early Soviet filmmakers, perhaps the person who did Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. (The quote comes from Godard, which makes more sense than my first assumption.)

Even in a world where you can deepfake and manipulate images to mean anything you like, something about the quote still rings true. Sometimes, it feels like the cinema is the only way we can truly examine how we feel.

Well, today we’ll look at films that attempt to find the truth in what we experience. It’s the Program A of Cinemalaya 2021’s Dokyu exhibition, and hopefully, you can find a semblance of truth in the stories that Cinemalaya imparts.  

Yugto: Looking Back to A More Hopeful Lockdown

The Philippines has been in lockdown for more than a year. 

As of writing, the country is going through the nth wave of rising COVID-19 cases, and over 30,000+ people in the country have died. Our government’s vaccination numbers are still too low to matter, and the lockdowns haven’t dampened the effects of COVID-19 variants running amok in our society. 

It doesn’t seem like the country will go back to normal anytime soon. 

And it’s not like normal was any good to begin with, but the fact that we risk dying every time we go outside because of a plague that the government can’t control pushes things to the edge.

Filmed in what seems like a more optimistic time when the lockdowns could still be viewed in a positive light, Yugto was directed by Joanna Reyes, Cristy Linga, and Ja Turla with compiled footage from hundreds of people talking about their experiences with the General Community Quarantine in what was presumably early May to late June of 2020. 

The footage edited together is kind of fun, showing us how people coped with the pandemic upending their lives. One person has a small hill of melted wax from all the candles she had lit while meditating. Another wakes up late every day as his school has mostly shut down. People early in the pandemic generally felt caged and useless, and a lot of them just had no idea what to do with their time. 

We get a fun montage of people exercising and doing activities together, while an original rap performed by Dominic Cortes Piodos exemplifies the necessity of wearing masks and social distancing. A lot of people filming here seemed to think that the lockdown is just a temporary thing to suffer through before normal life returns, and that kind of optimism feels especially distant from the tired and sucky vibe that we have today. 

A lot of the footage comes from Filipinos abroad, which juxtaposes the dazed and hopeless feeling that the Philippines went through versus the inspired, fight-like mentality of Filipinos working abroad during the pandemic. 

One of the Filipinos abroad complains that they feel useless because their skillset isn’t frontliner material as they freely run in their city, while a few minutes later someone in the Philippines dejectedly says that they were carpooling to work with their boss because they opened up offices again without allowing public transportation. 

It’s a well-made, hopeful film, but I can’t help but look at it cynically after going through the second August that we have to spend under lockdown. People are still getting infected and dying while the government fumbles around mismanaging funds and barely enforcing quarantine rules and providing vaccines for everybody. 

Yugto, which would have made me smile a year ago, just reminds me of how much time we lost and how, more than a year later, we’re still stuck in the same goddamn situation as last year. 

A House in Pieces: Where Do We Go From Here?

It’s hard to fathom what extended armed conflict can do to a community. These long-term spurts of violence create wounds in the psyche that never heal, and it scars a community and forces them to live in fear of the next conflict; the one that they may not survive.

The Siege of Marawi is one such harrowing case. When members of the Islamic State attempted and the Maute group tried to claim Marawi for their jihad, a five-month-long firefight and siege between the Philippine military and the Maute fighters ensued. The military ended up winning the fight, but according to Amnesty International, at least 1,000 people died in the conflict, including at least 47 civilians. The government has stated that estimates put the restoration of Marawi to over PhP80 billion and at least 15 years.. 

In A House in Pieces, we reckon with what a tragedy like that really means for the community. Jean Claire Dy and Manuel Domes’ documentary provides an in-depth look at the lives of a family and two individuals as they attempt to return to normal living in Marawi. It’s insightful, as the documentary follows a family from the evacuation center up to their return home, trying to process the trauma of what they experienced.

The man of the family could not fathom how close to death they were, and the family counts themselves lucky to be alive. We see them try to return to normal, as he raises pigeons for competition and chickens for eating. We see the woman cook the chicken, as well as pray while taking care of the children. They talk about the fear that they experienced, and how their city feels permanently scarred–they can’t even go to the market anymore because the siege destroyed the entire place.

One of the subjects was a woman who lived in the center of Ground Zero when the siege began. She barely escaped, and she almost got killed by a Maute fighter for not having her hijab up, but she survived and is now working as a volunteer in the evacuation center where she’s currently living. 

We get to see her react to the remains of her house, and it is just the saddest thing to watch. The quiet grief that engulfs her as she sees the remains of a bedroom-turned-makeshift fortress for the Maute fighters is devastating, and those moments paired with the footage they have of the rubble and the people working to clear it up allows the magnitude of the loss to sink in. Any person would be reduced to a blubbering mess watching this.

It’s hard to fully articulate the kind of generational devastation and trauma that the people of Marawi will have to deal with. But Dy and Domes have a clear perspective, and they are able to convey these stories of ruin and restoration without overwhelming the viewers to the tragic loss of life, culture, and normalcy that the people of the area feel.

Near the end of the movie, the filmmakers interview a Maute fighter who surrendered in the conflict. He talks about how his 17-year-old son died in the firefight–and how he feels good knowing that his son is in paradise. Then, he talks about how he surrendered for his family, a tinge of regret for not being able to join his son dying in jihad and claiming paradise. 

The Maute fighter talks about it as if he has no regret in invading Marawi. And in fact, the film points out that they believe that they were doing the right thing as they claimed the city of Marawi for Allah. It’s complicated, and as someone who is not Muslim, I don’t feel comfortable commenting on what the film insinuates. 

I will, however, say that, for whatever religion, when we put our faith and our desire to enter an afterlife before the welfare of the living, and when we disregard the peace of communities and the lives of others for our own selfish agenda, then instead of flourishing, the world deals with another traumatizing event impeding the lives of others. 

That’s the whole point of the documentary, I think. Your supposedly righteous actions can actually be harmful to ordinary people. Violent actions have violent consequences, and the consequences of the actions in Marawi will affect its citizens for a long time.  

A House in Pieces is an incisive look into the trauma suffered by the people of Marawi, cutting through the government rhetoric and narratives to show what it takes to survive an event of that magnitude–and what parts of yourself you might lose as a consequence of it all.

Cinemalaya films are available to stream on KTX.PH until September 5.

[ellewritesph]

‘The Matrix Resurrections’: Destroying the Illusion of Binaries in Society

Originally published on February 15, 2022 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

In Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections, we find Thomas Anderson, A.K.A. Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), having to choose whether to take the red pill or the blue pill while watching a similar scene from the first Matrix movie projected on the screen of an abandoned theater, with Morpheus (played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) showing up with the set from that same scene.

“Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia,” Morpheus tells Neo, a smirk on his face as if he realizes how silly it is that they have to return to this same process again. 

In a time in pop culture where old favorites and blockbusters are restored, remade, and revived with clockwork frequency, a sequel to The Matrix feels inevitable given how iconic the original still remains. The action, the leather clothes, the screens filled with green scrolling text from a computer era gone by, the strange and surreal concept of a world that’s just not right: it was an instant and enduring cultural artifact that nobody has forgotten. 

Even with the Wachowski Sisters’ less-than-profitable post-Matrix career, it’s more than likely that people will show up to watch it in theaters if just to relive those iconic scenes again. 

But Lana Wachowski has bigger things to say, and her ambitions have led to a sequel to The Matrix that refuses to passively relive the old glories of the franchise. Instead, it refocuses towards its themes of love and the meaning of freedom, all the while challenging the preconceived binaries through which we automatically perceived the first films and rejecting the violence and action that made the movie so popular.

It’s… a lot, and for many, it’s too different to be enjoyable. It’s not as action-packed, everything seems to have a queer subtext, and it shifts its visual style from the cool, green hues of the original in favor of less moody and more natural lighting. 

Yet, I can’t help but find The Matrix Resurrections good because it makes these clear, decisive stances and artistic choices about the personal feelings of the creator to the Matrix and its characters, without caring about alienating entire swatches of viewers or screwing with the future franchise potential of a film. 

Here is Lana Wachowski openly criticizing the conservative groups who co-opted the imagery and iconography of her most iconic film, the culture of films as brands and franchises that are only concerned about setting up the next hit instead of saying anything substantial, and the people who refuse to engage with the messaging of The Matrix just to enjoy the action of the movie. 

It is as divisive and alienating as a $200 million blockbuster can get, and I can’t help but admire a director taking that kind of personal artistic risk to ensure that their work remains uniquely theirs instead of just cashing in on their legacy like many do (not that I’m disparaging artists who do that; it’s hard to get paid and sometimes, that’s the only option left). In a landscape of blockbusters driven by what is starting to feel like rote and repetitive films with an air of self-importance, it is refreshing to watch a movie that seems to be more than about pushing the next movie forward, willingly engaging in the messy desires and contradictions that comes with being human and serving it up on a grander scale.

There’s honestly a lot to tackle here. The Matrix Resurrections is loaded with blunt messaging and imagery, along with layers and layers of tiny details that pile on top of each other to better spotlight the bigger points. Make no mistake, even if only one of the Wachowski Sisters is directing the film, it is still as ambitious and cluttered as all of their other work. 

So, for my own clarity, we’re going to talk a bit about two of the big topics that the film puts forward: one is a commentary on franchise and pop cinema as a whole, and the other is the film being Lana Wachowski’s attempt to reclaim The Matrix as a queer text. With work as loaded with things to talk about as this film is, I imagine that I’ll only be able to scratch the surface of it.

***

Since bringing long-dormant franchises seem to be in vogue now, it feels like this film is supposed to be a legacy sequel in the same vein as Star Wars: The Force Awakens. At the very least, that’s how Warner Bros. seems to be positioning it to the world: as a way to return to these old favorites and enjoy some of those nostalgic times we had together. 

But this film mocks the very idea of being a legacy sequel as well as the concept as a whole.

Legacy sequels are a new-ish trend in today’s film landscape. Of course we’ve had sequels that had long gaps between the last film that was released (The Godfather Part III comes to mind), but these legacy sequels are here less to continue or conclude stories as they are there to restart dormant franchises, done most likely to make studios as much money as possible on a recognizable brand.

These films tend to hold the original up so reverently that they either use meta-commentary to talk about its importance (Jurassic World, Ghostbusters: Afterlife) or they just try to mimic the previous story beats of the original as much as they possibly can (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Terminator: Dark Fate). Stemming from the idea that the fans and casual lovers of the material must be pandered to as much as possible to wring as much money as they can out of the film, it’s a strangely cynical trend that is informed more by the hyper-capitalist film scene today rather than any artistic instincts on the part of the filmmakers. 

That’s probably the trend that got The Matrix Resurrections greenlit. But that’s not the kind of film that we got in the end.

Lana Wachowski does not waste time pretending to even participate in placating previous fans of The Matrix with fan service and pandering. At times, she seems to directly tell the viewers in the most unsubtle way possible that she would rather make anything else than a sequel to The Matrix. One of the biggest laughs of the movie for me was when Smith (played by Jonathan Groff) literally outright tells the audience that Warner Bros. wants a sequel made to the Matrix, represented here as an in-universe video game, that the protagonist had spent years refusing to make, with the threat that the sequel will happen regardless of their participation. 

It’s a meta-joke that many found cringe-worthy, but it helps set the tone of the meta-thread being followed throughout the film: what does a Matrix movie mean in today’s landscape, and how would you even go about making a sequel to it? 

It seems like a conscious choice on Wachowski’s part to start the film by throwing away any of our preconceived notions regarding the franchise as a whole. There are scenes where we get a peek into meetings of people talking about what The Matrix should be, what the audiences loved about it, and what it needs to have. 

The film mocks the idea that there can only be one way to make The Matrix, a limited formula that audiences will recognize and enjoy—which makes sense, considering that the original movie itself ended with Neo’s rallying call of, “A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.”

Of course, the world we currently live in has a very factory-like process in making films—almost like the Machines have won the war. Popular movies are devoid of any singular artistic voice that used to exist within blockbusters in the past. Whether it’s a Marvel film or the new Fast and Furious movie, everything feels like it’s been smoothed out to appeal to the broadest amount of people with the least amount of offense. 

So yeah, they’ll have queer characters and broad general talking points that reference some kind of theme without really committing to it, and maybe they’ll even change the cinematography of the film to match its director’s style. But it never really adds up to anything substantial, and it never really says anything.

Wachowski and her co-writers David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon (both writers for the Wachowski Sisters’ Sense8 TV show) definitely say something about all of these monolithic blockbusters, especially with the scenes where a focus group discusses what The Matrix means using use buzzwords that signify nothing. 

By showing us the emptiness that exists within this world, Wachowski and her co-writers show the alienation at the heart of creating the cultural products of today: propulsion with no direction, innovation without humanity. 

And with that opening third, The Matrix Resurrections sets up a film that takes our binary conceptions of how movies—hell, of how reality is supposed to be—and flipping its meaning from before our very eyes.   

***

“They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial,” Bugs (played by Jessica Henwick) tells Neo somewhere in the middle of the film, around the moment that Neo finally escaped the Matrix once again. 

Within the context of the film, it seems to refer to the way that the Matrix tends to take the true, lived experiences of humanity and turn them into tools that keep the Matrix and its illusion going, to the detriment of the billions of people who live within its confines. It does take on a new meaning, however, when put in the context of how the Wachowskis are one of the few openly trans mainstream filmmakers—and how their work has been misinterpreted and disfigured as an alt-right talking point.

It absolutely makes sense in hindsight to see The Matrix as a film about the trans experience from two filmmakers who were in the closet at the time. And yet, many won’t see it because of how the violence and the action of the films overwhelm the senses to the point where a lot of the subtext of The Matrix is easy to wave away. 

What Wachowski and her co-writers did to remedy this was to focus instead on the love story that was always central to Neo’s journey in the original trilogy: his love and connection with Trinity (played by Carrie-Anne Moss). Their connection to each other keeps the current Matrix powered and working, but most importantly, their love gives them the vision to perceive a world free of the illusions of the Matrix, where they are free to soar together and paint the skies in wonderful hues and colors. 

It’s there that they find themselves in a conclusion that this franchise has been harping on since the beginning: there is no spoon. 

The binary choices that seem to dictate their lives are not the only choices out there; it is merely an illusion that prevents you from exploring further into discoveries and ideas that are equally valid but are hard to pigeonhole in the narrative of good and evil.

The choice given to our characters in The Matrix was either to live in the miserable reality of their post-apocalyptic world or to live in the comfort of a lie made by the Machines to keep you compliant. Us versus them, good humans versus bad machines, et cetera, et cetera. But The Matrix Resurrections concludes that whether you’re stuck in the Matrix or outside in the hellscape of real Earth, the story and the choices you have are much broader than we are led to believe. 

We define our community, and we figure out how to move forward in an unjust system that forces us into boxes, that make us cut the complexities of who we are to make us easier to control. We remember that there is no spoon, that we bend reality to suit our inner selves.

That’s a very queer message to impart to your audience, and it strikes harder knowing that it was made by an actual queer director who was given the leeway to create something so unapologetically personal and different from any other blockbuster being made today. It also takes back The Matrix from those redpillers who use it to perpetuate misogyny, racism, and other right-wing extremist values. You don’t free your mind with prejudice, she seems to say; you free it with love.

***

The ambitious scope and personal themes of love and freedom make The Matrix Resurrections a great film to watch, discuss, and dissect. There are a lot of things you can quibble about, like that weird anti-bullet-time effect that looks unconvincing and ugly, or that awful Rage Against the Machine cover in the end credits.  

Yet, in the end, Lana Wachowski successfully created a very personal blockbuster that reclaims the narrative of The Matrix for herself, carving out a unique artistic vision that could only be created by her. It is messy and blunt and achingly sincere and pretentious—but it is also unashamedly proud of that humanity, knowing that without it, without these imperfect impulses, we are nothing.

Whatever comes at the future of The Matrix or either of the Wachowski Sisters (I would love another season of Sense8, but that’s just me), I am glad for this film, if only to remind us of the unexplored possibilities that still exist in film—hell, in art—today. Unambiguously queer, unembarrassed at its sincerity and love for its world and its characters, The Matrix Resurrections is just bursting with ideas for those who are ready to engage with it. 

“Just remind people what a free mind can do.”

[ellewritesph]

‘Blood and Black Lace’: The Yellowed Mysteries of Giallo Films

Originally published on Jaunary 4, 2022 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Watching the opening sequence of Blood and Black Lace, it feels like you’re in for a ride. There’s a hall of mannequins lit in colorful neon lights; jazzy music plays in the background as the camera pans over to show the actors posing like mannequins—perhaps an attempt to foreshadow the kind of ridiculous experience you’ll see where all logic is thrown out the window. It’s groovy and kind of incoherent and absolutely gorgeous to look at.

This is Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace, a 1964 murder mystery and an early example of the giallo film. It’s a bloody and enjoyable feature where half the fun is in how things make so little sense that it feels like a dream; a state of unreality that borders on maddeningly incoherent. It’s very typical of giallo, a genre that helped push the creation of other pulpy genres like slasher films and crafted a place for voyeurism in the language of modern cinema.

Giallo films originated from the cheap paperback detective stories that were popular during the pre- and post-World War II society in Italy. Its name comes either from the yellowed pages of the paper they used to make those books or from the book Il Giallo Mondadori, which is a popular series of detective novels in the 1930s that had covers printed with a yellow background. These are basically Italian pulp fiction, using the trappings of the detective genre to tell wild, scandalous stories.

The giallo film is an early example of a postmodern genre. At its core, the self-reflexive and sometimes nonsensical nature of the stories work with a mise-en-scene that is provocatively unnatural and surreal to create a disorienting experience for the audience. The plot and the experience are fragmented down the center to confuse the audience on who and what we root for.

A lot of giallo is a photocopy of Hitchcock’s films: the flashy camera angles, the murder mystery plots, the obsession with beautiful women, and the gory deaths that capture imaginations. But while Hitchcock tends to build bulletproof narratives around his murder mysteries, giallo films like Blood and Black Lace or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage are twisted in the sense that the narratives are mostly a basic framework where the gruesome murder scenes can tenuously hang onto. 

Also, giallo films take Hitchcock’s obsession with beautiful women to a really uncomfortable place, and a lot of it seems to be laser-focused on punishing women, in an attempt to glamourize the murders. 

It’s a blueprint that’s been tried and copied and improved upon as the history of film trudges on, and a lot of it started out with Mario Bava’s strange and paranoid vision of the detective mystery.

***

Blood and Black Lace’s plot absolutely does not make sense. If it was a detective film, it would be a pretty awful one. But as an exercise in voyeurism, it allows you to watch undeniably gruesome things that surprise you with their violence. 

The film follows a group of models for an ailing fashion house who are being targeted and murdered by an unknown assailant. It starts with one death, then it spirals to one meaningless murder after another, with the police baffled with the connection of each killing and why. 

They throw a lot of red herrings, but the twist of who the killer is feels so inconsequential to the actual plot that spoiling it doesn’t actually ruin the pleasures of watching the film. The logic seems to be—and I’m paraphrasing Dario Argento a bit here)—that a bunch of beautiful women killed in brutal ways will look better than if men did it, and the people watching will be too enamored by the image to question the logic being put forward. 

Giallo films, especially Blood and Black Lace, have very little substance, rarely a message or even a thematic focus to impart to their viewers. A lot of it is just finding new and fantastical ways to kill women, which gives out a sense of sickening taboo-ness as we watch: many times, even as I’ve enjoyed the glorified violence of the genre, I’ve also questioned why it had to be so violent against women, and why there doesn’t seem to be a thematic message around it that could blunt or give meaning to the stylish brutality at hand. 

But, in a weird way, the giallo film’s seeming lack of thematic focus does create a ripe commentary on how we consume our violent media today. Do audiences really care about these characters, or do they care more about the murder itself? The best filmmakers tend to use violence as a force to be reckoned with, whose effects on society can be deadly and permanent. Giallo films show this force as meaningless, an impotent person’s rage made in an effort to find catharsis from the drudgery of life.

The violence against women in these stories—and there are a lot, enough to feel the merit of people who call this genre misogynistic—depicts the crumbling values of a more modern Italy, a nation attempting to hold on to antiquated values and ideas whilst battling with a new world that pushes back against them. 

It feels like a lot of giallo films unintentionally make the same point about how toxic masculinity and holding up old patriarchal attitudes don’t do any good to the world. Instead, toxic masculinity kills people and stalls our progress as a society. It’s the same story, and though giallo films exaggerate it, it’s a great way of showing the world where insecure men try to take down women in an effort to feel cool and powerful. 

In Blood and Black Lace, for example, we learn that the killer is the husband and wife owners of the fashion house the film is centered in. It feels like a commentary on how, in a lot of stories and real-life events, husbands use the implied power men have over women to get them to go against their feelings and morals. They coat it in shallow expressions of love and care, but it’s still the same misogynistic ideals that ensure that their authority always ends up on top. 

He dies in the end, but so does the wife and so do a whole lot of women. Giallo films, without intending to, make a case for how misogyny and the patriarchy destroy women’s lives.

***

In a way, giallo films are self-reflexive reminders of the sensationalistic and taboo thrills that people enjoy. Society has built an interesting culture of tall tales and legends based off of nothing but rumors and gossip. We enjoy hearing stories where people break the rigid rules of society, and we get a secondhand kick out of feeling like we’re doing those forbidden things, too, even if we are certainly not.

People don’t just gravitate towards true crime or pornographic stories about taboo relationships because they are scandalized by it; they also enjoy the idea of partaking in that scandal itself, even if not directly.

So it goes in giallo: it’s not the mystery we enjoy, but the thrill of the forbidden, of participating in a collective bloodlust of pain and misery. It’s the same reason why one would watch pornography, or a romance, or an amusement park ride: the very basic thrills provided by the experience.

A lot of how you can enjoy giallo films comes down to the heightened aesthetic pleasures that the films tend to have, and whether or not those aesthetic pleasures presented by giallo would appeal to you. It’s well-done craft, of course, but it’s also very artificial and very low-budget, which can affect folks who like to get engrossed by what they’re watching. 

The aesthetic focus of the genre really shines through in how it allows us to get lost in this magical, multicolored world that crafts the most stunning visions of death film has ever produced. From the bright red blood to the colorful nondiegetic background lights to the seemingly crumbling old Italian architecture, a lot of giallo films provoke a reaction of unreality, of terror as an art form. 

Ian Olney makes a good point in their book Euro Horror about the giallo genre being “spectatorship-as-performance”. Writing about Blood and Black Lace, he said, “The characters are puppets at the disposal not of the director, primarily, but of the viewer. Bava is encouraging us here to see them as masks to be tried on, worn for a time, and exchanged for others as we progress throughout the movie.”

Speaking about that, there’s always a point in these films where the viewer realizes that, as serious and horrific the actions happening on screen are, they’re not actually supposed to take it seriously. Maybe it’s the fact that the main character likes reading giallo novels so much that she feels like she created a murder mystery in her head (The Girl Who Knew Too Much); or maybe it’s in the fact that the serial killer hides his voice with a stupid Donald Duck impression (Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper, not as easy-to-watch as that Donald Duck impression implies).  

Giallo films always start at the unreality, and the way it is filmed and the aesthetic pieces in place ensure that there’s a level of levity to the performance that allows you to cheer for the murderers instead of cowering in fear or disgust.

People who watch giallo films aren’t here for the plot, but for the voyeuristic thrill that we get at watching these murders take place, which ties into the idea of “spectatorship-as-performance”. It taps into our most monstrous selves and allows us to indulge in these behaviors with little guilt. When we watch these films, we are all murderers, and for once, the viewers are privy to the kind of bloodlust that only exists in frenzied mobs demanding blood or serial killers who get their thrill in death.

Bava surrounds the film with artifice, making sure that the world the film happens in is as surreal as it can be: different settings have weird neon lights that seem to come from nowhere, the spaces they filmed in are constructed like a puzzle and not like anything resembling actual buildings, and the blood is just so bright that it doesn’t even register as blood anymore. Every element of the piece is heightened just to ensure that the audience can actively participate in the bloodlust without feeling guilty about it later. 

It’s a weird thing to commend a film (and a genre) for. But in the right mood, giallo films can be delightfully strange pieces with easy thrills that crib the detective novel without being religiously rigid in how it applies those genre conventions.

***

You can see the influence that giallo films have on slasher films, the way that they put you in the point of view of the killer at times—and pushing forward the idea that audiences themselves are responsible for all the death on screen, that their bloodlust is what contributed to this in the first place.

I love slasher films, and a lot of them were influenced by the violent trappings that the genre has: the unstoppable killer, the twisty and somewhat knotted plotting, the fact that we sympathize more with the killer instead of the victims. Giallo films are grounded in the idea that this world has no internal logic, that everyone is a target to die, and that the killer is unstoppable. In a way, it helped create the tropes that are accepted in slasher films today.

Today’s horror and thriller landscape is different enough that something like giallo wouldn’t translate well today. In the past, however, its bastardization of Hitchcock and focus on visceral, emotional shock and disgust can be seen in a lot of films in the 1970s and 1980s: Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill, John Carpenter’s Halloween and its many imitators, any half-hearted gory 1980s cheap direct-to-VHS features that get distributed exclusively by sleepovers and video store geeks. 

Actually, with the right direction, I do think that giallo could make a comeback. It’s not like people have stopped watching and enjoying gory horror films, and filmmakers have been intentionally exploring the misogynistic ideals of our society with newer horror flicks like It Follows or The Invisible Man. It’s not too hard to imagine younger, hungrier filmmakers taking up the mantle to create something in the vein of giallo to comment on society through horror.

James Wan even made a giallo-inspired film this year with Malignant. Having seen it, the film definitely gets better once it leans into the absurdity of its concept and some of the traditions of giallo films. And, surprisingly, the rhythms of a giallo film work well when combined with Wan’s careful, timing-dependent scares, mostly because it adds a flavor of absurdity and fun to the almost-rote haunted house jump scares that Wan tends to rely on (though that’s another discussion entirely). 

However giallo films live on, I do hope that it continues to influence many filmmakers with their own takes on the genre. I imagine their postmodern take on murder mysteries and detective stories can be a fertile ground for filmmakers to intentionally explore the effects of misogyny and toxic masculinity in society; possibly even catering directly to its absurd violence as a way to create an enjoyable film.

[ellewritesph]

‘Benedetta’ and How Power Structures Validate The Beliefs We Have

Originally published on December 21, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Spoilers ahead.

Paul Verhoeven might be one of the greatest modern-day iconoclasts in film history. A satirist and provocateur who never lets good taste get in the way of his moral statement, he has made some of the most subversive critiques of Western society while making them fun and accessible to a general audience. 

His new film Benedetta straddles this line well, teasing you with a lesbian nun story while dissecting the systemic hierarchies that exist in institutions of power and making viewers question the basis of their faith. It’s a fun, thought-provoking film to watch in the right mood, which admittedly may not come for devout believers of the faith or people scandalized by sexual behavior.

Benedetta is a French-Dutch biographical film about 17th-century Italian nun Benedetta Carlini (played by Virginie Efira), who is said to be a mystical conduit of Christ. She was arrested and tried for having a lesbian relationship with a woman named Bartolemea (played by Daphne Patakia), though she was able to live up to her 70s. 

Knowing that this is a Verhoeven film and hearing about the outrage felt by the critics and viewers who saw its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, you will be surprised to learn that the first sex scene between Benedetta and Bartolemea happens about halfway through the movie. There is a lot of full-frontal nudity and the sex scenes can get sensual and graphic, but it’s very tastefully done. These scenes move the film forward, as a way to establish the love and connection between Benedetta and Bartolemea as well as implicitly show the possible reason why Benedetta’s visions and miracles occurred in the first place. 

Verhoeven and his co-writer David Birke, who wrote his 2016 thriller Elle, imply that Benedetta’s visions may have started as a ploy to not only take power in the convent, but also as a way to find freedom and enjoy a loving, carnal relationship with Bartolemea. Bartolemea is, at times, the reason for Benedetta’s visions and strange mystical powers: at one point, Benedetta masturbates while looking at Bartolemea’s breasts, and receives a vision of her death when she climaxes. 

Contextualizing the sex scenes with the visions that Benedetta receives is definitely a great choice, plot-wise, because the lesbian sex scenes, while graphic, feel important to the plot and how it progresses. The lesbianism does get Benedetta martyred, but (especially in the context of the film) it’s slyly hinted as the reason for her supposed “connection with God.

The lesbianism moves the plot along, and it’s also important in making us question whether something sacred becomes sacrilegious if it comes from a source that the people in power do not recognize. Because, as we all know, power can come from the most unexpected of places, and the difference between holy and heresy tends to come down to your gender, race, and class status as much as it does to the sacredness of your power.

The film largely dramatizes Benedetta’s visions and mystical “powers,” and it does a really good job of obfuscating whether they were real or not. For example, it’s obvious that the stigmata Benedetta receives might’ve been self-inflicted. At the same time, she claims that the Holy Spirit (or possibly a demonic force) takes over her body and inflicts stigmata upon her. So the question of it being true or not is made irrelevant; instead, it asks us if believing Benedetta’s mystical acts as real is any different from believing in Jesus Christ itself.

That’s a hell of a statement to make, really, but what else can we expect from the man who wrote a book about how the political activism of Jesus Christ was corrupted and blunted by declaring him a deity in the flesh? 

It explores both of those themes well when the Nuncio (played by Lambert Wilson) from Florence comes to the convent in an attempt to invalidate Benedetta’s visions. And how does he try to do that? Why, by using her lesbian relationship with Bartolemea as a way of supposedly proving that she is a false prophet! 

The way that Benedetta weaves both the lesbian storyline as well as the questions of the validity of faith together is absolutely exciting to watch, and any viewer who doesn’t know about the historical figures themselves will be riveted to watch as Bartolemea and Benedetta somehow survive the story. 

They even connect Benedetta’s struggle with Joan of Arc, a supposed French heretic burned at the stake by the English, who was canonized as a saint after centuries of shifting power struggles and beliefs. It’s an absolutely sly and subtle way to suggest to the audience that maybe, in the future, if those in power and their beliefs shift enough, Benedetta herself might be canonized like she seemed to have wanted. That really drives home how easily manipulated the idea of the divine is by human beliefs and desires: we control the narrative of faith, not God. 

Verhoeven’s instincts of social satire and iconoclastic provocation are still strong even at 83, and viewers who are interested in a tasteful yet unabashedly sexual depiction of a lesbian relationship or a rumination on the power structures that dictate the validity of our beliefs will find something to enjoy in Benedetta.

Benedetta is streaming on Upstream PH.

[ellewritesph]

‘Atypical’: Finding and Reclaiming Your Humanity

Originally published on September 6, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Spoilers ahead.

There’s a great scene in the final season of Atypical that provokes a burst of freedom in me every time. Casey (played by Bridgette Lundy-Paine) has just decided to quit track and drop out of Clayton. She was only in that high school in the first place because she runs super fast, but she quickly found the pressure of being the star athlete to be crushing her enjoyment of the sport. 

In the episode, she compares herself a lot to Mighty Moe, or Maureen Wilton, who broke the world record time for a marathon when she was 13. By 17, she quit. But in this scene, pushing against the pressures of school and her break-up with her girlfriend Izzie (played by Fivel Stewart), Casey finally regains the freedom she found in running.

And the way Casey summarizes her feelings about track was by comparing herself to Mighty Moe again, who returned to running when she was middle-aged: “That’s what I want, to run like Mighty Moe after she quit.” Casey wanted the passion and freedom of running, and she wasn’t going to let the expectations and desires of the world push her down once more. 

It really struck me as a standout scene in a show full of standout scenes, because Atypical wasn’t about people becoming “normal” as society defines it. It was about all these people in and out of the spectrum who accept their limitations without allowing it to limit them; instead, they push to change the society around them so that they can function better without masking or overriding who they really are. 

In a world where messages about self-acceptance skew closer to enabler rhetoric and self-righteousness, a show like this where care and empathy for others—even when they seem irredeemable—is the central message hits me in a very personal place. This is a show where the cast of characters refuse to be boxed into and viewed through the lenses of neurotypical, heteronormative narratives. It allows these characters to claim their humanity with kindness and dignity.

First, a primer: Atypical is a sitcom created by Robia Rashid that premiered on Netflix in 2017. It follows Sam Gardner (played by Keir Gilchrist), a teen on the spectrum, as he navigates through real-world challenges. Sam is set on his routines, obsessed with penguins and Antarctica, and his social skills need a lot of work. 

But he’s willing to learn new things to adapt, and he really comes through for the people he cares about, whether it’s his best friend Zahid (played by Nik Dodani) or his on-again, off-again girlfriend Paige (played by Jenna Boyd). 

The interesting thing about Atypical is how it shows how mundane and normal being on the spectrum can be. Decades of media have proliferated stereotypes about autism, but Atypical skewers right through that by showing Sam as a normal kid. He likes penguins and Antarctica and filters everything through that perspective, but he’s also obsessed with girls and sex and getting into college. His desires and the logic he utilizes to actualize them are understandable, and we are allowed an inside look into how Sam thinks, and the logical cues that he uses to get to the conclusions he has. By standing away from the stereotypes of autism, it enables a deeper exploration of the desires and anxieties that people on the spectrum go through. 

And while Sam is funny and absurd at times, the writers ensure that we are laughing with Sam, not at him. That distinct application of empathy for the subject allows for a more nuanced perspective of what people with autism go through, whether it’s discrimination or the r-slur or people triggering their anxieties in real-time. It’s stark and homey at the same time, and you really feel for what Sam goes through as a teenage boy.

As much as the focus has been on Sam, some attention is also given to the Gardner family as a whole: Casey yearns for her independence, and Elsa, their mom, (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) is struggling with Sam’s renewed autonomy as well as her infidelity to her husband Doug (played by Michael Rapaport). 

It’s a really interesting family dynamic because none of these members are inherently unlikable. Seeing the mistakes that they make—which a typical sitcom would make unforgivable—and allowing us to see the messy process of making things right helps the show’s humanity shine through better. We’ve all been in situations like they have, and the show illustrates how flawed people can be, even with the best of intentions; and how those flaws shouldn’t undermine or define people (basically, not defining them at their worst). 

Those themes and ideas come through with Doug, for example. Doug left the family for eight months when Sam was first diagnosed; since then, he’s been working to make up for that mistake. He teaches his son about girls, he’s there when Sam needs help with manual labor, and is genuinely interested in his son’s life and helping him be more independent.

The show doesn’t condemn Doug for his previous actions, because the writers understand that he’s legitimately put in the work to try and make up for it. The show wants us to understand that we shouldn’t define people for how they acted at their worst, but instead give them the benefit of the doubt and allow them to show how much they care. 

On the other side of things, you can see a similarly nonjudgmental tone when we watch Doug and Elsa work through their marriage after her infidelity. Elsa learns to allow people to cope on their own, to not force the outcome you want like she’s been doing for Sam and the family for years. 

The process of atonement, of seeking forgiveness for your mistakes, doesn’t work when you impatiently bulldoze through the feelings—as Elsa learns herself, sometimes she has to be patient and allow people to process their emotions at their own pace.  

This obviously doesn’t apply to every relationship or dynamic—even the show admits that there are some things you just can’t atone for—but as long as the effort is there and it is sincere, then those mistakes shouldn’t define us as people.

Atypical’s characters are fleshed out and flawed in a way that doesn’t excuse their behavior but doesn’t condemn them as well. It’s because the show is trying to illustrate that in the end, the perfect life is nothing more than an illusion. Everybody has flaws and differences that diverge from the standards the world forces upon us. Just because the neurotypicals around Sam can live within that easier doesn’t mean they’re better or that Sam is lesser. 

Those standards that we live by, they’re just a false sense of security for the self. Sam doesn’t get defined by society’s standards; instead, he pushes away from it, forcing the box open so that bigger possibilities not yet considered can be called upon. 

And Sam being allowed to define himself by his own standards enables compelling acts of kindness to happen for the people he cares about. In season 3, Sam had a falling-out with Zahid because he was dating Gretchen (played by Allie Rae Treharne), a person who lived a cavalier, emotionally shallow life. In spite of their falling out, when Sam learned that Zahid was planning on skipping his nursing exam to get married, he dropped everything he was doing to find Zahid and make sure that he got to his exam on time. For Sam, their friendship and bond are always more important than a stupid fight that they may have.  

People can be different, and people can be flawed, but that doesn’t make them less worthy to be loved or their love any less worthy. Atypical affirms the humanity of everyone who is different, whether it’s because of a developmental disorder or queerness or for making mistakes they are atoning for. No matter who you are, Atypical seems to say, you are worthy, all on your own.

Atypical is streaming on Netflix.

[ellewritesph]

‘Malcolm & Marie’ and The Grizzly Business of Inspiration

Originally published on March 23, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Contains Spoilers for the Netflix film Malcolm & Marie

Malcolm & Marie, the 2021 Netflix film written and directed by Euphoria creator Sam Levinson, is the kind of movie that could only be a must-see event during a pandemic. It’s a bare-bones, black-and-white, single-location drama with only two actors on screen, and a script that mostly tackles how films take inspiration from real-life subjects and the toll it has for these inspirations. It’s a typical festival-ready film that would rarely make it to general theaters, rendered a hit because of a dearth of new media.

Admittedly, I did not like Malcolm & Marie. To be fair to the film, Zendaya and John David Washington are excellent performers who bring some of their best work. The direction from Sam Levinson is inventive in making use of its limited setting. But the writing is so strangely formal and dull, filled with regurgitated ideas about filmmaking and criticism that feels so out of place against the more compelling narrative thread about the unseen consequences of taking inspiration from someone for your story. 

The film takes place after the premiere of a film by Malcolm (John David Washington), and while he is feeling victorious because of its positive reception, his girlfriend Marie (Zendaya) is fuming at him because he forgot to thank her for her contributions, including inspiring the story and the main character itself.

What follows is argument after argument where Malcolm defends himself and his film as Marie points out why she deserves the thanks, and the uneven balance that their relationship seems to have. There are lots of pivots, but Marie is basically asking Malcolm why he didn’t give her that bare minimum for all that she did for him—and why she’s in the relationship with him in the first place.

A significant portion of Malcolm & Marie is about how critics (and people) generally interpret movies. Filmmakers have been making movies about how people interpret their films for a long time: off the top of my head, there’s Sullivan’s Travels, a 1941 comedy about a film producer who wants to direct a “serious” film after a career of successful comedies that he doesn’t feel fulfilled making; there’s also 2008’s Tropic Thunder which satirizes Hollywood whilst talking deeply about what it really means to be an artist in society (is it about awards? Prestige? Money?). There’s a lot of films about how we interpret films (Adaptation.? 8½? Cinema Paradiso?), and Malcolm & Marie tries to follow that tradition. 

That thread culminates around the middle of the film, where, after reading a positive review from “the white girl from The LA Times,” Malcolm rants about the state of film criticism today. He argues about the current system’s lack of depth and the tendency of critics to presume the intention of the author as well as projecting their feeling onto the work. He absolutely hates the fact that critics just make his work political when it’s not supposed to be. Marie just listens on and laughs as he screams out his frustrations to the air. 

I disagree with Malcolm, but it’s interesting to note that the film might actually disagree with him in this regard, too: Marie tells him later that the choices he made for the film, including focusing on the crumbling American healthcare system as well as making the story about a drug-addicted woman trying to get clean, does put a lot of political subtext to the story he is telling.

There are also things that are beyond his control—like being born Black, a man, and to an affluent middle-class family—that skews his perspective on the story he told, which showed up visibly onscreen. This is indicated by an implied scene of abuse that he decided to shoot with the woman topless, which Marie argued was unnecessary and distracting the viewers from the gravity of what was happening. Malcolm could not defend it as an artistic choice.

That part of the film in itself was not that compelling. Some of the scenes do feel like the kind written by a filmmaker wanting to strike back at critics giving them badly-written reviews. In one scene, Malcolm disregards (or feigns ignorance to) important ideas of film criticism like The Death of the Author by talking about how critics ignore the intentions of the author and instead inscribe their own meaning to it.

Probably because it’s a terrible opinion that a lot of classrooms can easily refute, the film uses Marie to throw away his complaints in favor of a more nuanced perspective into general film criticism, something about how the critics aren’t wrong but that Malcolm is just sensitive to criticism. And because it takes up a significant time of the narrative, it drags the film down. It’s boring and it’s been done before, and it takes away from the more compelling parts of the narrative.

The really interesting part of Malcolm & Marie digs into Malcolm’s film, which was partially inspired by Marie. This was a movie with some of her experiences and stories, a film that Marie was supposed to star in herself before life got in the way, and one that Malcolm is receiving a lot of acclaim and success for. She argues that the film would not be half as good if it wasn’t for her input and experience—that he’s taken her life story and made it so that she herself cannot tell it when the time comes. Now, she can’t tell her story the way she would want to, and she doesn’t even get to benefit from this film since she doesn’t get thanked for her contributions nor did she get to be the lead like they originally planned. 

It’s an interesting thing to tackle, especially considering how many films out there are “inspired by” or “based on” a true story. What do those people being tackled think about their real, complicated lives being fictionalized and simplified and turned into art? What are some of the consequences that happen when they see something like their own overdose, or a harrowing moment of abuse, depicted onscreen for the entertainment of the public? Would they have told it the same way? Cast the same people? Would they have let the film happen if they had any control over it?

Inspiration is a grizzly thing. Listening to Marie talk about how the movie depicts her life made me think of other films that were based on or inspired by true events: 1993’s What’s Love Got to Do with It is Tina Turner’s biopic, and she is on record as saying she dislikes how the film portrays her as the victim of her own story. Michael Oher, the Super Bowl-winning subject of 2009’s The Blind Side, dislikes the fact that the film “portrayed [him] as dumb,” and has stated that the film made people judge him and might’ve made his football career worse. And while the Notorious B.I.G. had passed away for more than a decade before they made his 2009 biopic Notorious, his protege Lil Kim hates the way she was played in the film and how her relationship with Biggie Smalls was depicted. 

Malcolm & Marie’s best moments try to reckon with the unseen and unintended consequences of using real people as templates for a story. As the film progresses, Malcolm’s slights towards Marie become larger and more heartless: Malcolm forgets to thank Marie publicly for her help; Malcolm decides to hire someone else to portray a role that he wrote for her; Malcolm tries to take full credit for the film without taking into account the unpaid and unsung labor that Marie put into the film to lend it authenticity and a solid emotional core. All of these actions accumulate to Marie feeling used and neglected by the one person she trusts and cares for.

Suddenly, you can see the kind of toll that this film has taken in her life. It’s not hypothetical anymore: her sacrifices and fuck-ups paved the way to his success. To Malcolm, it seems like her life matters less than his film; and beyond any patriarchal readings that this may have, it also makes his proclamations of love ring insincere because it does seem like he was just using her for his benefit, even if it wasn’t conscious. 

Malcolm & Marie is a very average film with some rather dull rehashes against film critics, but its commentary on how filmmakers and storytellers treat their inspirations in favor of a more palatable story and characters is quite insightful. Films are always political, and films will always affect the people that inspired them in ways that might be detrimental to their existence. It’s on the filmmakers and writers themselves to take responsibility for the stories they tell and try to do right by their subjects through handling it with the respect and sensitivity that it deserves.

That doesn’t mean that they should devalue their art and message in favor of making their subject feel good, but it seems like that’s always the struggle in making films about real-life people: you either do right by your subjects or you do right by your story. 

[ellewritesph]

‘Irma Vep’ and the Place of Audacity in Cinema

Originally published on March 2, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

There is something strange and bold about Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film Irma Vep. Even with more than twenty years removed from the subject, the film can still evoke strong feelings about its subject matter. Even in today’s film environment, it finds itself remaining relevant through its outlook on the commercialization of the film industry and the place of artistry in modern-day cinema. 

Irma Vep is about a remake of a classic French film serial Les Vampires, helmed by filmmaker René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a great director whose glory days are far behind them. For the lead role, he casts Maggie Cheung (here playing herself), a move that leaves everybody baffled as to why. What commences is a lot of commentary on the modern French film industry and its place in the more commercial landscape that was slowly taking over the world and leaving France behind.

Even with very little context as to what Les Vampires is or what the remake would signify, the mere casting of Cheung pops out significantly from the very first scene onwards. It is clear that she doesn’t belong in this production to everyone except the director: she’s playing a famous French role, and Vidal sees her casting as a way to modernize the material. It’s a strange artistic choice, mired by the fact that this seems to be the only way that Vidal updated the material for modern times.

The film itself is very funny about the subject, showing a rather bored and tired crew working on a remake that they find pointless or artistically boring, with Cheung being the only person who seems to actually care about the film being made. Assayas shows an industry in stasis, a group of people with no artistic vision, working on a project that they can’t even justify the existence of. They want to make movies that people would actually see, and they understand that this remake is basically just treading water of far more innovative films. 

There’s even a scene in the movie where Cheung is interviewed by someone who seems largely dismissive of French cinema in general, calling it too intellectual–and maybe masturbatory–before heaping praise at the films of John Woo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jean-Claude Van Damme because they are accessible to a broader audience who actually care to watch them. Assayas doesn’t dismiss art films in favor of Hollywood-style action film blockbusters, but he seems to realize that the audience is as important in the discussion of film as the filmmakers themselves.

It makes remaking Les Vampires a deliberate artistic choice, in that regard: Les Vampires didn’t become a classic because it was immediately beloved by critics or intellectuals, but because people went to see it and loved it and allowed it to influence films in a way that resonated through even better films throughout the decades. Assayas sees that as dumb and crowd-pleasing those Schwarzenegger and Woo films are, they will influence a new generation of filmmakers both within the studio system and outside it to make similar, better movies. 

This is a wild, audacious point to have, but it absolutely makes sense considering that Assayas wrote for Cahiers du cinéma, the same film magazine that French New Wave filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut used to write for. This film’s themes and ideas are exactly the kind that critics would have, and Assayas does not mince words as he assails the lack of boldness and artistry that filmmaking has devolved into. 

Of course, he seems to be up to the challenge of being bold and audacious: his film contains some exquisite cinematography that puts us in the alienated eyes of Cheung, with sequences that really ramp up the tension of the film.

There’s one scene where Cheung gets too into the character and robs someone whilst wearing the latex Irma Vep suit, and it’s just full of quiet fear and escalation. There’s also the final scene of the film, which is basically the footage that Vidal shot with Cheung all messed-up and deteriorated, peaking with some disturbing images that really hammer home the artistic bankruptcy that the depicted remake of Les Vampires had.

It’s absolutely stirring stuff, and it can get a reaction from the viewer even decades removed from context. 

Maggie Cheung is fantastic in this film, and her presence adds an extra sense of movie-star glamour that elevates the film further. She’s all easygoing charm and strong professionalism, and it’s easy to root for her and to see the French film landscape through her eyes. She is the only person in the film who believes in what she’s making (even if she doesn’t understand why she herself is in the role), and her belief and commitment for the role shows the kind of cinema that Assayas is rooting for: one where everyone cares about the films they are making, no matter how stupid or unnecessary it seems. While the remake itself is uninspired, seeing her play Irma Vep is a treat in itself and shows how good a remake of Les Vampires could be with her in the main role.

Irma Vep and Assayas’ commentary on the film industry still resonates today because in our modern blockbuster-saturated setting, where a film either has a small, dirt-cheap budget or hundreds of millions of dollars devoted to its existence, it’s important to be daring and adventurous in the stories we tell and the way we tell them, even as the industry contorts towards an inoffensive flavor to cater towards an even-broader (and internationally-oriented) audience. It’s only through those kinds of choices can we keep cinema fresh. 

We may never really reconcile the commercial, money-making aspects of the film industry with the need artists have for their work to have meaning and purpose. But maybe that’s alright: as Cheung says to the French interviewer who called French cinema too intelligent and elitist: “I think there are different audiences who like different films, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Irma Vep is currently streaming on Mubi.

[ellewritesph]

‘MLK/FBI’ Review: No Justice in the Status Quo

Originally published on February 6, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

The system was made to push dissent down. That much is clear while looking into the history of any socially progressive movement across the world in the last century or so. The tendency seems to be that anyone who is not compliant with the trends of the time will be silenced by the ruling class in an effort to keep the status quo—which usually benefits them best, to the detriment of most everyone else in society—intact. Given that knowledge, MLK/FBI exists as another document of injustice in a long history of its existence in the history of mankind.

MLK/FBI is a 2020 documentary about the surveillance that the FBI did on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. between the March on Washington in 1963 and his death in 1968. It was directed by Sam Pollard, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker with a history of making documentaries about the Civil Rights era, including producing the acclaimed Spike Lee documentary 4 Little Girls. 

The film is made up of real footage from the era, ranging from interviews, news reports, films, and photographs that depict the time as it was, with a running narration from a group of knowledgeable people from actual living participants of the era like Andrew Young and Clarence Jones, to former FBI head James Comey and FBI expert and author Beverly Gage. An interesting choice done in the film is that, unlike most documentaries, the footage from the past is not interrupted by the talking heads of experts, which presents a more immersive experience to the era than most documentaries usually provide.  

It becomes a story of a paranoid government police force using all the power at their disposal to remove a leader of a social movement because he was not “moral” enough to their tastes. Martin Luther King was a true subversive, a man of peace whose creed of non-violence encompassed all people of all races, genders, and creeds. That Hoover and the government disliked him because of his refusal to bow to their demands of how they should be protesting and what they should be protesting about shows the internal rot and racism that the American government, and the FBI specifically, had. 

The documentary very compellingly creates a portrait of an agency whose interpretation of law and order leaves no room for protestors or people with differing ideologies, as portrayed by their obsession with trampling the Communists in the country; an agency who built a cultural image of being strong, white protectors against the Communist cause to insulate themselves from any criticisms of overreach or abuse.

The FBI, as shown in this film, evolved to protect only the interests of the status quo government, which means that the moment Martin Luther King did anything out of those parameters, including being an early dissenter of the Vietnam War and his advocacy for the poor in America, they were ready to swoop in to either push him back to the fold or silence his dissent.

People tend to say that the system is broken in the way it disenfranchises and abuses minorities while giving them limited access to rights that the ruling class has. MLK/FBI shows that the system was built this way, built to put everyone who is not in the ruling class at a disadvantage. The abuse and subjugation is the point.

You can even see it now in the United States, where the system actively impedes the government from helping its citizens, whether it’s money they need during a pandemic, or regulations to keep the workplace tolerable, or even just stopping their police force from using brutal force against Black people. It’s a harmful system that, as MLK/FBI documents, has existed for as long as the United States has.

Whether the world will ever get to a point where Martin Luther King’s dream comes true, one thing we know is that there will be no justice in the status quo unless we ourselves push it forward. The Civil Rights era may be decades separated from ours, but the system has remained—and will do so unless the citizenry acts against it.

[ellewritesph]

‘Trese’: Dealing With the Lies of the Past

Originally published on July 30, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Spoilers ahead.

There’s a point in Trese that I find really interesting; something that pops out even outside the messy plot and the extremely convoluted double-twist ending. It’s when Datu Talagbusao (voiced by Steve Blum in the English dub) tells Trese that what she has been defending, the Accords—an agreement between the engkanto and the human world to keep the peace in our modern times—is a lie made up by her father in an attempt to stop the prophecy. 

In a series with many distinct and interesting moments, that moment struck my mind as the most important of the series. It defines Alexandra Trese (voiced by Shay Mitchell in the English dub) and the series because it sums up the conflict that exists in Trese’s frame of mind, between the legacy of her family and the responsibilities that weigh down on her in the entire series. It’s not entirely clear to me yet, though, so I’m trying to figure out why it is so important. 

First, a primer: Trese is the 2021 animated television adaptation of the famous komik series made by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo. It is one of the definitive modern-day Filipino komiks, with an iconic main character in the form of Alexandra Trese. Its neo-noir feel and creative modernizations of old Filipino folk creatures stood out to readers, and it quickly gained a following outside the komiks community. 

I really liked the komiks when I first read them in high school. The black-and-white art was different from the superhero comics I was reading, and its fantastical portrait of Metro Manila felt satirical without being preachy. And since it was a neo-noir, I also gravitated to the fact that a lot of the early releases were case-of-the-week kind of stuff that needed no introduction of Alexandra Trese. 

Trese (2021) works a lot differently from what I read in the komiks. Writers Tanya Yuson, Zig Marasigan, and Mihk Vergara connect the fabrics of the early standalone stories into one big plot, culminating in a terrifically animated finale that tries to tie up all the loose arcs of the story. 

To be clear: I did like the show. The animation is gorgeous, the action scenes are tightly made, and it does the double-duty job of making Metro Manila feel scary without ruining the fun that the viewers could get with these weird and mystical adventures. 

And yet, by the final episode, it felt rather exhausting. The fake-out big bad reveal of the Nuno (voiced by Eric Bauza in the English dub) felt too contrived to really make sense and took the wind out of the sails of the Datu Talagbusao reveal.

The past episodes kept teasing a big confrontation with a manipulator behind the scenes who was pulling the strings, yet the finale struggles with tying up all of that satisfyingly. It failed to resolve the conflict that Trese has with her burden or her father’s actions. I know it’s trying to set up a second season, but the show just leaves Trese in such an unsure place that it’s not clear if anything was actually resolved in her inner conflicts, or if anything that happened to her actually impacted the way she will operate in the future.

I absolutely hated that they just ended up explaining exactly what was going on, with Datu Talagbusao just monologuing for a huge chunk of the final episode. It sure wasn’t visually boring, but it stops all the momentum of the plot when they just explain things like that, hand-holding us through the plot instead of showing it through the story. But I digress. 

From a thematic point of view, the series hints at something interesting. Trese as a series dealt a lot with the idea of generational trauma, especially with how Trese lives in the shadow of her father’s legacy. 

Alexandra was the Sixth Child of the Sixth Child, a person prophesied to bring doom to humanity. Her father, Anton (voiced by Carlos Alazraqui in the English dub) did horrible things to keep that prophecy from happening. Now, Alexandra is the one dealing with those problems firsthand.

So that moment I talked about earlier, where Datu Talagbusao just outright said that the Accords were a lie, stands out because thematically, it addresses the generational trauma where the lies and actions (or inactions) of our past causes harm to the world at present. It’s personified here by Alexandra herself, struggling in the shadows of her father’s unforgivable lies and legacy. 

Does Trese dig down on how this affects Alexandra Trese herself? Well, they keep hovering around that idea, and we do get some insight as to how much these expectations weigh down on her, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. We never see her break, we never see that moment where she questions everything she’s fighting for, and we never see her struggle with the horror of her father’s actions. 

It suffers from the same issue as the finale: we see how Trese got to this point, but there’s no endpoint or even self-reflection to show us how she’s processing all that has happened. I guess they’re leaving that for season two, but it leaves us with a largely incomplete portrait of Alexandra Trese’s emotional journey.

In this dizzying portrait of the engkanto side of Metro Manila, the points about the power-hungry mayor or the guilty soldier who tortured enemy soldiers or Anton Trese killing her own daughter to stop a prophecy felt like a portrait of how the Philippines was built on lies, backdoor dealings, and the fictional myths that men make around themselves. So when Datu Talagbusao called out Anton Trese’s transgressions, it felt like a commentary on how our country’s own heroes and idols—dead or alive—had to do unforgivable things to get that veneration they had.

As a country, the Philippines hasn’t really dealt with that generational trauma of dictators, double-crosses, and colonialism. Trese is burdened with carrying the hopes of the komiks community and the local animation industry; but beyond that, because of the strong political messaging throughout the show, it carries the heavy load of our country’s past as well. You don’t make one of the bad guys a corrupt mayor if you’re not trying to make a statement about the country’s dirty political arena.

Trese is an excellent show. The final episode lags, but it is propulsively paced with some intriguing images and insights on Philippine society today. It’s a distinct product of our fraught history as a nation, one that tries to deal with the emotions of betrayal that we feel for our leaders and our past. 

Trese is streaming on Netflix.

[ellewritesph]

‘Moxie’: Same Formula, Same Tools

Originally published on April 13, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Moxie is a 2021 film directed by Amy Poehler based on a 2015 book by Jennifer Mathieu. It’s about a young girl named Vivian (played by Hadley Robinson) who decides to start an underground zine in her school as a way of promoting feminist ideals in their extremely sexist school and encouraging her classmates to speak out against sexism in the class.

As a coming-of-age film, Moxie is competent and professional, with some exceptionally shot moments that find the right music and tone to underscore the teenage emotions of falling in love. Possibly the most iconic moment of the film is the first date between Vivian and feminist classmate Seth (played by Nico Hiraga), which culminates in an extremely romantic image of the two of them lying down in a coffin together, listening to music. Some of these scenes are entertaining, and they provide a watchable visualization of Vivian’s struggle to become her own person. 

Vivian’s struggle, however, does feel quite uninspired. None of it is new, really, and films about selfish teenagers learning empathy and community have been done better and more insightfully in recent films like Booksmart and Blockers, or past films like Superbad, The Breakfast Club, and Dead Poets Society. To differentiate from those past films, Moxie tries to tie Vivian’s struggles explicitly with the modern-day view of the feminist movement. Theoretically, this should give the film some gravity.

It does not.

The problem with the film is that, while it tries to present an intersectional, fourth-wave view of feminism in action for high schoolers everywhere, it is still centered around a white person. Everyone else acts only as passive observers that serve the plot of Vivian finding herself, and it makes it very frustrating to watch and care about. A story like this would’ve been better from the perspective of Lucy (played by Alycia Pascual-Peña), the new girl in town who gets harassed by popular football player Mitchell (played by Patrick Schwarzenegger), or Claudia (played by Lauren Tsai), a person tied up with familial obligation and expectation, thus unable to protest freely and with little consequence like Vivian is doing. 

Centering it around Vivian pushes away the current discussions about the needs of feminism today, which includes the recognition of transwomen as women, as well as the acknowledgment and tackling of non-Western feminist struggles. If the film was trying to be a critique on how selfish Vivian has been, it’s an ineffective one: all the criticisms that were given to her are swept aside by the finale, where a protest against an anonymous student’s rape becomes a validation of Vivian’s importance, with everyone in the ensemble forgiving her terrible behavior and treatment of them. 

This film feels insulting in how it treats serious topics like rape and targeted harassment. It accidentally makes hollow the story of how Vivian reignited the fires of societal justice inside her classmates, like the “girl power” movement that promoted capitalist success for women without fixing the classist inequality that exists within the current system. It’s feminism that works with the system, not against it, a version of riot grrrl that aims for respectability instead of anger. We should be angry that these women got harassed and raped while keeping silent out of fear, but the movie ends up treating it like a feel-good story with a victory in the end, which is insulting to the many people in the world who never got the justice and happy ending that this film peddles. 

Moxie is a film that is good on paper. In an age of massive social upheaval, where people are battling misinformation to secure their human rights, why shouldn’t we make a film that focuses on updating the text of social movements for a new generation? People still need to be informed, and something like this could inspire younger women to take up the mantle and keep the fight going for future generations. 

But films like these need to be more daring, not less. It shouldn’t be about how we can co-exist with the system as it is, but the ways we can topple the system of injustice. Moxie needed that anger to work. Without it, it’s just another sanitized studio film that pays lip service to social injustices.

We’ve had enough of those. 

Moxie is streaming on Netflix

[ellewritesph]

‘Apocalypse Child’ and Living Under the Specter of Someone Else’s Identity

Originally published on January 8, 2021 at Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

Apocalypse Child is a 2015 film directed and co-written by Mario Cornejo, and it tells the story of Ford (Sid Lucero), a surfing champion from Baler who might be the bastard child of Francis Ford Coppola. This happy-go-lucky surfer goes through a reckoning of his past actions—and inactions—when his childhood friend Rich (RK Bagatsing) comes back to town with resentment and a new fiancée, Serena (Gwen Zamora). They evade talking about their problems by focusing on the simple pleasures of Baler: surfing, alcohol, weed, and sex. Things start to heat up when Ford teaches Serena how to surf and they spend more time together.

It’s not really a plot-centric affair. Even with the early introduction of Rich and Serena, the film itself takes a long time to get going, satisfied with a slower, leisurely pace that seems to match the scenery Baler provides. They mostly tell stories about their lives while drinking or smoking weed, the enjoyment never feeling real as the undercurrent of resentment pulses through even the smallest of interactions.

When it does finally boil over, a lot of it feels unsatisfying, possibly by design. It does seem in-character that Ford, as someone who never had to take responsibility for his own actions, wouldn’t know how to apologize for mistakes he made. Still, while his apology to Rich feels sincere enough, Ford never gets called out for how he treats the women in his life or how little he seems to care about their emotional well-being.

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As compelling as the drama can get, the film does work better as an allegory on colonialism. Many things have been written about the themes of this film, which seems to allude to how Filipino culture has been created from different leftovers of former colonizers (Spaniards and Americans, primarily). There is a lot to see here about that, yet the best way that the film shows this is in how the citizens of Baler (Ford and Chona especially) are still living under the specter of Apocalypse Now decades after the filming wrapped. It’s a subtle yet damning indictment of how little Baler’s culture has progressed, since a lot of it seems like it’s stuck in the 1970s. This set-up provides the framework for any reading of the film as a post-colonial study.

As a film that lives and dies by its acting, it is good to note that the performances are all great. Ana Abad Santos’ Chona is a stand-out because of how she never lets up on the forced cheer that her character seems accustomed to having, even in moments where we see the cracks of her inner pain and turmoil. However, the most excellent of this talented cast is Annicka Dolonius’ portrayal of Fiona. She is all spunk and confidence, and her feelings of betrayal as Ford pushes her away and replaces her with Serena is fascinating to watch. Dolonius embodies the fears and anxieties of the character without resorting to over-the-top histrionics.

The film is gorgeous to watch, with the film’s cinematographer Ike Avellana capturing Baler like a town lost in time, stuck in the outskirts of society’s modernization, filled with the breathtaking natural beauty of trees and mountains and beaches for miles and miles. In conjunction with the sound design by Corinne de san Jose, the film creates this immersive experience that makes you feel like you are in Baler, swimming in those waters and feeling the heat-soaked exhaustion that the main characters must be feeling. Shooting on location really did wonders for the look of the film.

Stories about people (whether they are adolescent or just in a state of perpetual adolescence) growing up and learning to take responsibility for their actions are plentiful in the history of cinema, but the way Apocalypse Child approaches the subject allows for a broader, more interesting reading of the film as an allegory about Filipino culture and society. Regardless of how you might read the film and its themes, it is an attractive and intriguing experience that comes off as both grand and personal in its scale. However you might take the story, there is an impeccable craft in the acting and filmmaking that seems to dig up something raw and real behind the subterfuge that the characters of the film hide behind.

Apocalypse Child is streaming on Netflix.

[ellewritesph]

‘West Side Story (2021)’: The Dazzled and the Damned

Originally published on November 2, 2022 in Sine Liwanag.

By Elle Yap

The original West Side Story, as a musical film and a cultural touchstone, is strangely both tied to the time period it was made in (seen by the fact that many of the actors were white folks in brownface), and also progressive and timeless and provocative in its message, craft, and presentation. 

A loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in modern-day New York City, West Side Story was made as a stage musical by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (with groundbreaking choreography by Jerome Robbins) in the 1950s. It was their way of experimenting with new musical modes while adding class and social consciousness in the stories that premiered on Broadway. It permeated the public imagination as a musical film in 1961, winning ten Academy Awards and cementing itself as an instant classic. 

And when you watch the movie, it’s understandable why so. The camera slides and swoons over these propulsive dances that feel almost primal and guttural in its ferocity and anger. The musical numbers can feel almost otherworldly in its appeal—the scene where Maria and Tony see each other in the dance and literally everything fades away is still breathtaking to behold. Robert Wise’s direction and Jerome Robbins’ choreography find a way to make the musical so much larger than life; so cinematic in its approach that it’s no wonder the movie is still considered a classic even with all the problematic and racist things about its production. 

Hearing about a remake in the 21st century feels almost sacrilegious because of how good the 1961 movie is. How in the hell are you supposed to modernize a story that’s very much tied to the time period from which it came? West Side Story is the bedrock that influenced many of the important directors of the last 60 years. Michael Bay, for example, cites the movie as the foundation of his style. There probably isn’t any way you can remake the movie without it being disappointing in comparison.

And yet, somehow, it happened. The new West Side Story is, against all odds, not only a great film, but possibly a better film than the foundational 1961 classic. The new film improves on the original on pretty much all fronts, from the themes and message to the propulsive filmmaking that made the original so electrifying to watch. It successfully updates the material to a more-fractured and less hegemonic political world without losing the timeless appeal the source material has. It has done the impossible, and it has done so without breaking a sweat. 

But then again, this shouldn’t be a surprise. The director of the remake is Steven Spielberg, who needs no introduction. The way he directs West Side Story is incomparable to any other director working today: each camera swoop, each precisely-measured frame of the film, is evocatively his style and his alone, and the artistry of his approach shows just how much of a master he is at turning films into an experience, breathlessly anticipating each scene. 

With screenwriter and frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, Spielberg recrafts West Side Story into a more potent film, starting with the social commentary. The most inspired bit of the film is reframing the fight between the Jets and the Sharks in a place where both groups are being kicked out as the area is gentrified. This puts the racial harmony message of the original in stark focus, as it shows the futility of the territory fight between the Jets and the Sharks against the bigger, faceless, insidious powers that control them, and the intersectionality of their struggles in the racist and classist America that they live in. 

The intersectionality is the point, too, because Spielberg does a lot of little scenes where the homogeneity of American society battles with the identities of these marginalized individuals: the Puerto Rican Sharks are told to speak English many times in the company of white people, and they are seen as lesser people by the white society in general. The Jets’ poverty and criminal history are used against them by authorities–and their whiteness is only acknowledged when being compared to the Puerto Ricans. The women are forced to the sidelines as the men indulge in their worst patriarchal instincts in an attempt to dominate each other. And there’s even a transgender character whose identity is invalidated repeatedly throughout the story as he tries to be useful to the Jets.

These small touches and characterizations build towards that larger theme of racial harmony that the original had, but the new film also has this undercurrent that the cultural and material dominance of the hegemonic capitalist powers of American society renders everyone powerless, pushing them to find control and power in the arms of antiquated hierarchies that society perpetuates. 

Spielberg and Kushner understand the original message of the film, and they also understand how it’s relevant in today’s society, where we see the previously-marginalized people push back against society’s hierarchy and how the powers-that-be, from the government to the elites, attempt to keep the structure strong by encouraging many of the marginalized to dip into their worst instincts and humor their worst beliefs as a way of keeping the infighting between the groups going whilst the powers-that-be continue to strengthen their own power and hegemonic wealth. 

Beyond the framing, themes, and messaging, Spielberg also litters the movie with some of the most breathtaking musical scenes ever put to film. Knowing that film has less constraints than stage musicals have, Spielberg goes all-out bonkers on the way he shoots the numbers, from “America” becoming a neighborhood-spanning number that makes up for the less-guttural dance moves, with cinematic touches that energize the number; to the way he introduces the school dance as this one-shot scene that seamlessly floats and glides through the dancers and actors like a god.

My favorite change in the movie is the “Cool” sequence, where Spielberg and Kushner reimagine the number as a tension-filled scene where Tony (Ansel Elgort) attempts to dissuade his friend and the Jets’ leader Riff (Mike Faist) from fighting with the Sharks. Goddamn—I was at the edge of my seat as Tony and Riff battled for the gun in this ballet-inspired dance that feels closer to a fight than anything in the original 1961 movie. At any moment, it felt like anyone in the Jets would blow up, and it really helped set the stage for the actual fight that Tony and the Jets have with the Sharks later on.

Spielberg is a filmmaking legend at this point, and West Side Story basically reaffirms his legacy. He shows through this film that he is very much the same master of tension and suspense who made Jaws and War of the Worlds (2005), and that he is very much still, present tense, one of the most exciting directors currently working today. After watching this movie, it’s hard not to use superlatives when describing Spielberg, because he blows many of his contemporary filmmakers out of the water. Then again, it’s always been hard not to use superlatives to describe a talent like his. 

The acting in front of the camera is top-class, too. Ansel Elgort, despite being a mediocre singer, is really good in bringing out the darkness inherent in a character like Tony, and you can see his appeal and why Maria would fall in love with him so quickly. Rachel Zegler, in her onscreen debut, embodies the innocence of Maria without letting it slip into naivety. She gives Maria a conviction and strength of will that is important in the role. 

The way that Mike Faist put so much charm into his portrayal of Riff really makes him more sympathetic than he ought to be, and I love the cockiness that David Alvarez gives Bernardo, and how easily he can switch from cocky to caring in the same scene. 

The star-making performance, however, is Ariana DeBose as Anita, who feels just as lived-in and assured in her approach to the role as Rita Moreno did decades ago. She’s also the best performer of the bunch when it comes to the musical sequences, the “America” sequence especially as she anchors the whizzing panoramic approach that Spielberg chose; something that would render a lesser actor lost in the wizardry. 

West Side Story (2021) is an incredible achievement in filmmaking, like the 1961 movie decades before. Its precision of intent and execution is amazing to behold, and it showcases not just the unparalleled talents of Spielberg and its cast, but also just how timeless the original musical is. There’s really no way of predicting which film released today will be remembered in the future, but in the moment, as you watch the spectacle and vision unfold in, it’s easy to surmise that Spielberg’s West Side Story will be a classic, canonized film for the future generations.

[ellewritesph]

'Biyernes Santos' review

Originally published for Penlab as part of their GRAILREADS partnership with UP GRAIL.

By Elle Yap

Fear is a powerful weapon, possibly the most powerful weapon any person could have. Though it is imperceptible, what it lacks in physical form it more than makes up on the psychological front. The thing about fear is that it creates holes in our logic which forces us to make bad decisions that affect our life in a way that reverberates through our lifetimes and beyond.  Fear pulls people back, keeps them compliant, and allows them to make up their own monsters to battle as a distraction to the real troubles and monsters that stand in the way. 

In the history of fiction, a lot of the most effective monsters are not always all-powerful murderous psychopaths: sometimes they just strike the right kind of fear to enough people. The monster in Biyernes Santo does not harm the children in any way, and yet the atmosphere of dread looms with the potential for inescapable carnage and death, one that allows its readers to flutter about with the implicit knowledge that nobody might come out of this alive.

Written by JP Palabon with the Art done by Chocnut-san, Biyernes Santo is a one-shot comic about a group of kids being terrorized by a particularly evil yet unknown entity on Good Friday, a day which lives in infamy as the day Jesus Christ died. There is a belief that since a god died that day, evil lurks around freely looking to wreak havoc, and this comic provides an example of how that could work in a more modern context.

The comic’s writing builds its terror slowly and economically, with the monster in the story repeating the same words over and over again as a way to escalate the tension of the moment. The repetitiveness comes off as a single-minded focus on its goal to bring chaos and destruction upon this family. Whatever this creature is, it is not human and it will not stop until it gets what it wants. It effectively raises the tension of the situation without sacrificing the quality or the pacing of the story.

The art of the comic is also exquisite. There’s a lot of emotions to be found in the well-drawn faces of the children, and especially on the main character Nicole, whose youthful determination and despair come across well throughout the panels. There’s also this detail by the artist where the eyelids of the characters are all shaded which brings to mind both shadows and eye bags that accumulate when unable to sleep. 

Even when it is presumably day-time and they presumably have neighbors nearby, the artist creates enough of a shadowy look across the house that it seems to become this lonely and isolated realm straight out of a Gothic narrative. It’s some terrifying and immersive stuff, and it also allows the reader to feel as trapped and threatened by the situation as the kids are in this scenario.

The comic ends openly, the danger still lurking around the corner. We never know if these kids survive, or what kind of monster is waiting just downstairs from the house, or why it wants them in the first place. 

Biyernes Santo is a terrifying comic, one that pries into our deepest fears of the unknown and the desperation that it creates within us. The anxiety never lets up as the monster grows more powerful and vengeful as we continue to read it. It is a truly nightmarish situation, one that lingers in our minds and hearts long after the conclusion of the story.