What Happened to the Philippine Film Industry's Imagination?

As part of an internship sort of thing with Lopez Museum, I was given the task of labeling old photos taken from the sets of various LVN Studios movies. So, that's what I did all day.

I was given a set of six LVN movies from the year 1950. I only managed to complete the identification process on two of them, but that's what you get when you have to identify actors and actresses nobody has given a second thought to for at least four decades, and all you've got going for you are a stack of fragile old magazines and some commemorative industry books.

But, going through those magazines and trying to mentally restructure what the industry was like in the 50's (no golden age, to be sure, but not that far removed from the first one in Philippine cinema), I was struck by the sheer breadth of the imagination of the Filipino filmmaker of that time.

From the lavish spectacle of the "costume" movie to the simple love story, these guys had a wide range of themes and stories, and it seemed like the imagination was the only limit. Hell, these guys made films about charging knights and gun-fighting cowboys. They even made a bio picture of Genghis Khan! I can imagine how we'd have been the toast of the cinematic world then...our Genghis Khan prefigured that of Hollywood by several years. These guys even made a film on the Nibelungenlied, which was later dubbed in German and showed in Germany! They even made films in English!

So, what happened? At what point in time did our filmmakers stop believing in the story and started harping on the message? At what point did all our stories, as Dean Francis Alfar put it, boil down to mere derivatives of a boy on his carabao dreaming of escaping his poverty (or, if we look at indie film, expressing his deviant desires)? At what point did we get stuck in this nationalist, social-realist rut that has run our imaginations to the ground for the past two or three decades? At what point did we self-censor our imaginations with ideological blinders? I've gotten tired of seeing the "Filipino way of life" as these pretentious auteurs see it, with the Filipinos being nothing more than obssessively Freudian poor folk. That's why I stopped watching Filipino films.

I don't think I would've stopped in the 50's.

Has anybody tried to take the initiative of restoring these old gems?   

EDIT: i stand corrected. Apparently, the 50's (and the 60's) was the Golden Age for Philippine cinema. Cool.

Because Governments Run Things So Well

Looks like Castro has socialized Cuba all the way back to the the pack animal age.

Castro urges Cubans to start using oxen instead of tractors.

"I am thankful for the revolution," the 52-year-old said. "But we don't get boots, tools, irrigation that works."

So much for bringing power to the people. I didn't know they meant ox power.

So, who again wants government to run healthcare?

Would the Church Baptize E.T.?

The short answer is "yes". Although, the statement has met with some controversy. After all, it is an unfortunate fact that the only intellectual traditions left (in the West, at least) still consistently holding fast to "human exceptionalism" are those associated with churches, with the Catholic Church in the vanguard. Discovering E.T., as conventional wisdom goes, would be the death knell of any religion whose doctrine has even a whiff of human exceptionalism.

However, one look at at Church history will provide some interesting insights into how the Church would deal with previously unknown forms of sentient life. Mike Flynn, author of the novel "Eifelheim", pretty much covers the length, breadth and beauty of it in this blog post. Heck, you could probably just stop reading this one and go over there.

In case you're still here, the short version is this: the Greeks, Romans and Medieval Europeans, immersed in a world of myths and legends, are not quite as unfamiliar with the unknown as we pompously assume. They live in a world where sea worms devour ships, monopods hop about on one gigantic foot in some far-off land in mysterious Asia, and cannibals with table manners exist just off the edges of the known map. The modern Western fascination with extraterrestrial and life on places beyond our own maps likely stem from that ancient curiosity about the unknown. The Church, entwined as She was with all of medieval life, was no stranger to the question of unknown forms of life. The question of what to do with "aliens" has been addressed several times. The most curious case, as seen in Flynn's post, is that of the dogheads, a race of beings with human bodies and canine heads that always seem to live just beyond the known world, be it in farthest India, or in the snowy, shadowy North of Scandinavia. In the 9th century, a missionary named Rimbert planned to go evangelizing north into the Viking heartlands. He commissioned a sort of travel guide for what he thought he might encounter there. For the question on dogheads, he went to a monk named Ratramnus, who gave him a detailed "ethnographic" account of the life of dogheads. In it, he concludes that because the dogheads have rule of law, wear clothes to cover the privy parts, and have domesticated beasts serving them, they must be considered a "degenerate" form of the race of Adam (code for "strange, but still human"), and thus worthy of evangelization and salvation.

This kind of thing would become a big deal. It is this sort of reasoning that allowed the Church to conclude, far ahead of everybody else in Europe, that those "indios" in the New World (our ancestors) were human, and thus worthy of the full panoply of rights accorded to human dignity. If it applies to dogheads, it would damn well apply to people whose strangeness is confined to a different skin color and foreign cultural practices.

To further the argument, the Church has not only supposedly baptized them, but has a saint who was a doghead.

St. Christopher the Doghead

Yep, its the St. Christopher of the famous medal, who is most often depicted as carrying the Christ-child across a river. In the Irish account of his life, he received human form as a blessing of his conversion from the pagan cannibalism of the dogheads, and was martyred for the Faith. Unfortunately, he has been taken out of the official lists of Christian saints (though his cult is still allowed), although one can understand why.

Were the dogheads real? Probably not. But if we're allowed to believe in the inevitability of discovering sentient life in the broader universe, who is to say that there isn't a real race of dogheads out there, a group of whom may have already visited Earth? In any case, they have a patron waiting right here for them. Who says the Church cannot do E.T.?

PS

Potential Foundations Topic!!!

Would the Church Baptize E.T.?

Noooo, Joe!!! (spoiler and sailor language warning)

Remember that South Park episode that featured Lucas and Spielberg sodomizing Indiana Jones? Now replace Lucas / Spielberg with Sommers and Indiana Jones with Duke, and you get the idea about what I think happened to G.I. Joe.

Now, my attachment to G.I. Joe is about as strong as my attachment to Transformers. Maybe even stronger, as I had more G.I. Joe toys than I had Transformers. In short, G.I. Joe is a piece of my childhood. Seeing the movie was like watching some auteur take that childhood and piss on it.

I wasn't expecting much. I was expecting no more than the Transformers treatment: a movie dumber than a bag of hammers, but as fun as wielding a chainsaw in a parking lot. I wanted just a little popcorn fun. I don't even mind annoying new characters, because they're at least fun to root against. (Die, Sam Witwicky! Die already, for fuck's sake! Transformers 3, Megan Fox and Robots!)

I could forgive the evisceration of G.I. Joe from awesome Team America (fuck yeah!) to wussy NATO errand boys. What in the world is a "Globally Integrated Joint Operating Entity" anyway? A UN wet dream? Nothing takes the shine out of a cool concept quite like a bureaucratic renaming. Might as well call them Team Synergy.

I can look past the pencil-neck Destro (or, is it Destreaux?) and the Psycho Mantis Cobra Commander. I can look past the revival of stupid Joes (Janes?) like "Cover Girl" (now reincarnated from American super model to East European porn star). I can look past Snake Eyes without his dog. I can even look past a Baroness without the sexy German accent. (Wait a second. No, I can't.)

Prior to watching the movie, I was in Foundations of Humanities class, and one of the examples used to illustrate the  transient nature of earthly beauty is music. Music requires all notes to be in harmony to be considered beautiful. G. I. Joe was not going to be Citizen Kane by any stretch of the imagination. All it had to do was hit a few low notes to create a sort of harmony to please a fanbase with low expectations to begin with. But, like a huge, hairy mole on an otherwise pretty face, all it takes is for one bad note to bring the whole thing crashing down.

G.I. Joe's huge, hairy moles were Baroness and Duke.

Believe it or not, Baroness sucking like a two dollar whore when the sailors come home is not Sienna Miller's fault. It is the fault of whoever dipshit writer thought that Pearl Harbor was a good movie and that implementing Pearl Harbor in G.I. Joe would be a good idea. Not only did the "love" story strike false note after false note, one can see the character being crushed and twisted into unrecognizable mush. Now, Baroness is integral to Cobra's being an effective evil organization, because she's pretty badass herself. And, she's evil. And, she dates a guy with a metal head. Plus, she's integral to practically every goofy Saturday morning Cobra plan that could have succeeded. :D Look at this poster:

Baroness, making Evil and Ugly Dudes look good for over 20 years!

The only reason for saying "evil never looked so good" in the poster is because Baroness is in it. No way Emo Shadow and Psycho Mantis Commander make anything look good. For the "evil" and "look good" to work, Baroness must be both.

So, what happened? Oh, yeah. Fucking mind control. The reason Baroness is evil is that she's got fucking nano machines in her brain! Otherwise, she's the cute little DC housewife who was destined to be neglected. Not only is that NOT evil or bad ass, she doesn't even look good anymore. Just pathetic.

Now, I understand the impulse to "humanize" a character. I even understand the need for "redemption" angles. But, redemption angles are for serious movies, and for serious characters. Plus, just because a motivation is evil does not make it not human. Destro / Destreaux seemed human, and his motivations are as fucking evil as any James Bond villain. By turning Baroness into a mind-controlled sex slave who really wants to sleep with the good guys, they've just taken a huge bite out of the evil badass quotient of Cobra. And, a protagonist is only as good as the antagonist he has to overcome. Without Baroness, G.I. Joe might as well be fighting an ugly one-armed retard. So much for evil never looking this good. Plus, they've turned the ultra-cool (in a goofy Saturday morning way) Baroness into one of the dumbest characters ever concieved for a cartoon to movie adaptation. And that's saying something. Way to ruin a perfectly easy cash cow, Sommers and dumbass writer.

Then, there's Duke. Duke was the heart and soul of G.I. Joe. He was the most bad ass of the Joes. He may have been Duke Nukem's daddy. His blond Viking-in-a-crewcut visage was enough to make Cobra soldiers miss with perfectly calibrated laser weapons.

The movie just had to turn Duke into a podunk doofus hillbilly from Nowhere, USA. Sure, he drives a Harley, and beats Snake Eyes in hand-to-hand sparring (by cheating! shame!), but the way he is carried by the actor makes it seem like all those accolades he's getting from his commanders and teammates really come from a filmmaker insecure about how bad ass he managed to make Duke look like. Channing Tatum, who is best known for dancing like a pussy, carries Duke about as well as how Barishnikov would have carried Rambo. It's a match made in casting hell. Gone is iconic blond Duke, replaced by non-blond Ben Affleck Duke who just wants to bang non-Baroness again.

Fuck you, Sommers! And your writing team too!



Final Notes:

Rachel Nichols is smoking hot. So what do they do? Pair her up with the dumbest Wayans brother.

AAAAAAAAAGHHH!!!!!

Have they learned nothing from the mistake of Transformers? Now, I want Ripchord dead.

The only saving grace was Snake Eyes. They should have him replace Duke as lead bad ass. Hell, they should just rename the movie to Snake Eyes 1: The Rise of Snake Eyes. 

I kept waiting for General Hawk's heartwarming story of playing pro baseball at the age of 40. I also want him to get back with his ex-wife for the sake of his adorable twin girls, who will grow up to date androgynous DJ's.

Without Baroness, how can you reasonably say that Cobra rose? In a movie called "The Rise of Cobra", Cobra already lost half the battle. (hah!) It's like saying the Empire struck back by killing Darth Vader.

Throwaway references to G.I. Joe quotes (Real American Hero, Knowing is half the battle, etc.) does not make it G.I. Joe.

What happened to Dr. Mindbender? And why does Zartan look like Im Hotep?

One last time. Fuck you, Sommers and writer/s.

Fan boy rage rant over. :D




 

Days Late for a Eulogy

Former Philippine President Corazon Aquino has been buried for three days, and it is only now that I get to write about it.

I guess I wanted some distance from the actual event. I want some distance from the emotional outpouring and the heavy mourning that has blanketed the nation since she died last week. Emotion and sentiment cloud too many minds as it stands nowadays.

Who was Corazon Aquino, and why does her passing leave such a mark? All the official news organs describe her as a former president. But was her presidency the reason why she is remembered as some democratic Prometheus remade? I was young and stupid then, but I do not remember such a good reign during her term. I remember the coups, but I most especially remember the blackouts. Corazon Aquino's presidency, if it had been any other person, would have been judged a disaster. Her weakness led to her position being threatened militarily no less than seven times. Military adventurists may have gotten a taste of it during the first EDSA revolution, but they honed their craft in the age of Cory. Her economic reform was not much better. Land reform was derailed by her own unwillingness to carve up her family's hacienda (incidentally, the largest in Luzon, I think), and the economy was in bad shape when she left it. Most notably, she left the energy utilities sector in shambles, leading to an age of rationed power and regularly scheduled blackouts befitting a country recovering from war, not a country on the rise after a bloodless revolution. So, if it is by her Presidency that we remember Corazon Aquino, then she must be remembered poorly.

Those who praise her usually abandon the generalized mushy sentiment just long enough to cite two concrete events; her role in  the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the peaceful transition of power after her presidency. But, notice that both events lie outside her presidency, with the former coming before it and the latter coming in its termination. This should give an indication of her place in the collective memory. She is most fondly remembered for taking power and relinquishing it, not for exercising it. In that sense, she is not the Philippine Cicero, trumpeting the virtue and nobility of the Republic from her lips and deeds. If any, Corazon Aquino fulfilled, as practically every other president before her fulfilled, the dream of Manuel Quezon of a Philippines run like hell by Filipinos. (Hey, as long as its not a white guy, am I right?) No, Corazon Aquino is something much greater than that. She is our Cincinnatus, someone whom even power cannot corrupt to the purposes of power. Like Cincinnatus, she will be an icon whose virtues will seem so unbelievable that in the near future, her existence may be dismissed (or elevated, as it may be) as myth. Cincinnatus was a farmer who became a senator and dictator, then relinquished the rods and axe to become a farmer again. Corazon Aquino was a housewife who became president, then became a (sort of) housewife again. This is the stuff myths are made off, and there was no more potent "myth" about the virtues of the Roman Republic than the one embodied by the (very real) virtue of Cincinnatus. The same thing may be said of Corazon Aquino, some day.

What stood out for me the most in my memories of the late Corazon Aquino was how she seemed like the most unfit person for politics as we know it. Her rather "mixed" (to put it as charitably as possible) record of ruling attests to that, but there is something else. She carries herself so unassumingly, and speaks so plainly, that one can tell that power has not eclipsed the person. The last Philippine president to pull that off was the sadly short-lived Magsaysay, and even then, one can speculate that if he had lived to the end of his term, he may have been exposed as someone just like the rest of them. But there will be no such speculation with Mrs. Aquino, who came to power a simple woman of faith and left power a simple woman of faith. There is no taint of the professional politician about her. If only others who enter the corrosive fields of politics were as fortunate, to leave as themselves and not as the creatures the quest for power had turned them into. One glance at the current sad-sack crop of "presidentiable" candidates is enough to give a clue as to the toll professional politics has taken on the ones who purport to master it. One is a glorified hack whose impoverished background provides, not a source of character, but cheap demographic points. Another is a guy who pretends he cares about markets and pedicabs, when his uncalloused hands look like they've never done a decent day's work in his life. Another is a blank slate who will be whatever the voters want him to be. Another is a depraved (alleged!) lesbian masquerading as a moral force. None of these are real people, only simulacra programmed to pursue power like flies to spilt honey. If every generation of political aspirants are but derivatives of these, then I shall not wonder why Corazon Aquino, like Cincinnatus before her, will be considered a "myth" just a few generations down the line. That she kept her own person in both taking and relinquishing power will be an impossibility beyond the wildest dreams of these golems striving for power. This is why I will fondly remember her. Corazon Aquino: person.

Requiscat in Pace

1933 - 2009

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
- Gandalf the Grey, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

   

Why Everything Sucks (also, Why We Have the Jonas Brothers)