Film Post #2: On Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Jose Rizal

Here is the firing squad execution scene. No surprises on the film’s ending. I will say that getting to the execution, post faux trial is well paced and wonderfully wrought.

OK. Back to my original question of who Marilou Diaz-Abaya envisioned as a target audience for Jose Rizal. DVD extras tell us this film’s budget was phenomenal by Philippine standards, and that the film was commissioned by the National Centennial Commission. Producers tell us that they wanted to prove to the rest of the world that Philippine filmmakers could also make meticulous and beautiful (by international standards) works of art. I think this international focus is apparent in the writing, which is something of a comprehensive and poetic historical overview, which is different from a “history lesson.”

Film: Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Jose Rizal

File this under Why Am I Only Watching This Now? We started watching Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Jose Rizal (1998) yesterday evening. We didn’t finish it yesterday evening because the film is nearly three hours long.

I’ve come across Philippines based Francis Cruz’s review of Jose Rizal, and it helps with some of the things I am thinking. As a Filipino American, with only very limited study of the man and his role as a writer whose works helped inspire the Philippine Revolution, I should confess I appreciate the film’s very textbookishness which Cruz criticizes for its being relatively unoriginal. As Cruz discusses the film’s narrative but non-linear, flashback abundant structure as “uncharacteristic for a film that targets the Philippine mass as its audience,” I wonder if the target audience really is the Philippine masses?

Random Quick Thoughts: Reading, Listening, Viewing

(1) Speaking of Arnel Pineda, we just heard a Journey song from the new Revelation album on KFOG, for New Release Thursday yesterday evening. After the song, Big Rick Stuart made it a point to talk about Neil Schon finding their new lead singer Pineda on YouTube, and Stuart also made it a point to mention Pineda is from the Philippines, underscoring the otherwise remote possibility of this meeting between Schon and Pineda. Which brings me to the Internet being as viable a meeting ground as any other place. I actually didn’t know for sure this was Journey I was hearing until Stuart said so; it was definitely characteristically Schon guitar work, and high caliber Steve Perry-like, not exactly Steve Perry vocals. I actually was listening for those bits of familiar accent: “Dohn’t geeve up,” you know. Anyway, I think Pineda is the ultimate OFW, and a “pure product of America.”

(2) From the Netflix queue: I finally saw The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the premise itself of these Victorian literary characters fighting modernity but also moving into modernity, sufficed to keep me interested in the characters’ fates. I like their casting of Captain Nemo as a Southasian man whose anachronistic/futuristic modes of transportation enable the whole mission/quest. I wanted Dorian Gray not to end up being the bad guy; I guess there was always that romanticism of this beautiful and terrible man, from when I read the book back in like sophomore year in high school. The scene where he is riddled with bullets in his library, when his assailant asks him, “What are you?” Gray responds with that lovely flair and vanity, “I’m complicated,” and I want him to continue being complicated, though in the end he’s kind of just not. In the meantime, DVD extras tell us that Sean Connery took this role (his last film before retiring), because he rejected offers for The Matrix and Lord of the Rings. And this perplexes me greatly.

(3) From the Netflix queue: The Fountain (2006). What a fucking hot mess this film is. Its premise could have been very interesting, though I still don’t understand how Queen Isabella’s sending Tomás the conquistador to find the Edenic Tree of Life in savage Mesoamerica was supposed to be efficacious against the Grand Inquisitor. As well, regarding the sexy disjunctiveness of the narrative’s three time periods unraveling simultaneously, I think was disjunctive for sake of its own sexiness. The final revelation with Hugh Jackman in his PJ’s and in lotus position: whatever. And at any rate, his character was all about himself and not really about Queen Isabella/Izzy (his wife) and her cancer, and so all his violent emoting I just didn’t give a shit about.

(4) “Cheap Date” at the Parkway Theater: Forbidden Kingdom, starring Jet Li and Jackie Chan, oh, and some American kid. Trope-filled but this is exactly what was expected. That the clueless, martial arts movie obsessed white teenager is the central character in this narrative ended up not being as offensive as I thought it would be. This quick bit of Mandarin dialogue between Li and Chan regarding the white kid fulfilling the prophecy: “Him? But he’s not even Chinese.” “Yeah, I know.” Then they move on. I really wished that Sparrow did not talk about herself in third person. Then again she was telling her own narrative of herself. Oscar points out that the most racially stereotyped character in the film was the Boston Southie, and I think he’s got a point there.

(5) In preparation for Forbidden Kingdom, I pulled out the Fist of Legend DVD and thought for some reason that Jet Li’s Fearless started the same way, with the ass whupping in the Japanese school. Not true; I am just getting my Jet Li films all confused.

(6) Currently reading Eduardo Galeano’s Faces and Masks (Memory of Fire Trilogy Part 2). Love this! I remember now I was reading part 1 of the trilogy when I started writing Diwata, way back when, and so I am really liking being back in these manageable prose vignettes which comprise this massive epic work.

OK, maybe more to come, on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear.

Akira Kurosawa: Drunken Angel

Thank heaven for the much awaited Criterion DVD of Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948). “Much awaited” for this being the first of the Kurosawa films to feature Toshirô Mifune, and the first to feature Mifune acting the young hothead to Takashi Shimura’s sensei figure.

I swear, I totally was rooting for Mifune’s tubercular character Matsunaga, to really make a break from the yakuza scene, culture, way of life, and in doing so, heal himself. I don’t know that he was made to be a morally conflicted thus sympathetic character, so I am thinking it was in his apparent self-destruction, anxiety (as evidenced by that dream sequence of his dead self chasing his beautiful self through ocean waves, and which actually reminded us of the video for The Cure’s “Close to Me”), and his being rather pathetic, flailing around drunk and flying off the handle in violent fits, becoming increasingly sallow and coughing up blood when he should be winning a knife fight.

Quick thoughts on a couple of Sweeneys

Sweeney #1. Chad Sweeney, An Architecture. This long poem appeals to me initially for its being a long (56-part, book-length) poem, and that it can be read in one substantial, involved sitting. He begins with an epigraph from Heraklitus’ Fragments, and this helps me in understanding how each of the 56 parts is a complete rendering of a (fleeting) moment. And that the compilation of fleeting moments is a complete body. Within each moment, Chad seems to emphasize the long stretches of historical or geological time which must happen in order to make possible the stone or the mineral, material, or political circumstances with which his “I,” “we,” and/or “they” is/are having a momentary encounter, or moment of epiphany. So I dig this much, these contrasts or relativities. As well, it seems to me that Chad is unfettered by (liberated from?) rules of grammar, what completes a sentence or thought. Rather than simply telling us “this is what is being unearthed,” he demonstrates this in form and fragment. Things unearth slowly, fragments coalesce in surprising ways, and this corresponds with that historical or geological time.

Sweeney #2. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Lord! Did I ever think I could become desensitized to so many straight razor throat slashings, gushing jugulars, and human meat pies. And did I ever think that a song and dance could be so dismal, incongruous, and aberrant, thus appealing to my inner goth chick. I love that no one in this film really wins. Ah, tragedy. Well, lovely young sailor boy gets the lovely girl, but I don’t think we really care about that so much, given all the other misfortunes, where we come so very close to the happy endings, only for something to go terribly awry, oftentimes in the bloodiest way possible. So much fun!