In Ian Ganazon and Neill dela Llana’s terrific thriller, Cavite, the Filipino American filmmakers take the tired cliches of the genre and craft an exceptional film. The plot isn’t anything you haven’t seen before, from Cellular to Red Eye (the only one I’ve seen of the four) to Nick of Time to Phone Booth: a man receives a call on a cellphone from a kidnapper, telling him that his mother and sister has been kidnapped and that he has to follow all the kidnapper’s demands or they die. The result is a surprisingly politically complex and gripping suspense movie, made even more interesting for its being set in the Philippines.

What Cavite will also be remembered for is the astonishing constraints under which the film was made: an overall budget of less than $7,000, cameras resold on eBay to pay for editing (which was done completely on a home computer), a practically two-man cast and crew. (Two weeks before they were to fly to the Philippines, they still couldn’t find a lead actress who wanted to accompany them, so they rewrote the script so that Ganazon could play the protagonist, with dela Llana holding the camera the whole time.)

Formally, the film is a marvel in its economy - actor, disembodied voice, circling camera - and the narrative is structured in the classic three-act fashion. Cavite is also clearly more than just a jittery travelogue. As the taunting kidnapper orders Adam to walk through twisted alleyways, crowded markets, squatter camps, and rivers choking with festering garbage, it is clear that he (and the audience) is receiving a political education as well.

The film, however, provides little historical or economic context for the poverty that Adam witnesses, and it is presented as almost being “endemic” to the area. A later scene where the kidnapper gives him a history lesson on the gross injustices experienced by Muslim Filipinos isn’t exactly germane to what Adam sees in Cavite. (We get a possible glimpse of this in two clever digressions from the taut narrative: the camera breaks away momentarily to follow a boy buying a McDonald’s meal for his grandmother, but one of these scenes ingeniously happens at a point when filming may have been impossible.) But we begin to understand, at least, the process of radicalization for the Muslim kidnapper, as we find out halfway through the film that he is a member of the Abu Sayyaf (I’m not spoiling anything here, as this is telegraphed in the opening credits).

Cavite could also be read as quite intelligently following the stereotypical plot as seen in your average Pilipino Cultural Night - confused Filipino American in search of self, “returns” to the Philippines, and discovers one’s self. What further animates this thriller, and elevates it from the genre, is the interweaving of the theme of cultural discovery. (Indeed, the movie could be seen as a suspense-thriller twist on the ethnic-identity film genre, and not the other way around.) Filipino American youth - perhaps like the filmmakers themselves—would no doubt find familiar tropes here, tweaked and heightened: the dizzying confusion, the humidity, the shock of the misery of the Third World, the bewilderment of a half-understood foreign/native language, the balut offered up as a kind of culinary litmus test. The filmmakers make perfect use of the staring bystanders; Adam’s incongruity as he trudges through Cavite City is perhaps only a little less jarring than the presence of the two filmmakers themselves.

In the end, it is significant that the action takes place in the province of Cavite, where Emilio Aguinaldo first proclaimed the independence of the Philippine Republic from Spain. The Muslims of the Philippines, however, failed to receive, and continue to do so, the benefits and rights of any form of independence, and the events in Mindanao of the last three decades certainly bear witness to this.

It’s only April, and I think I already have one of my favorite albums of the year. Up Dharma Down’s Fragmented is an urban soul chronicle from the streets of Manila, both tense and laid back, full of nervous energy one moment and suffused with post-club comedown the next.

I still remember the first time I saw the video for the fantastic first single, “Maybe.” I was idly flipping channels one December night in Los Banos last year when the video came on, and I was transfixed by its evocation of claustrophobia, as the camera followed a near-hysterical woman pacing inside a hotel room, then down a narrow stairwell, tear-smeared mascara on her face.

But it was, of course, the music which kept me glued to the TV: an insistent, propulsive reverbed guitar riff; a skittering, distorted “Amen” break; a bass line turned up way high in the mix; and that voice which stretched “Maybe” into 27 different syllables. (I had to grab paper and pen to scribble down the name of the band; alas, their album wasn’t coming out until a few months later, as the kind women at Odyssey and Tower Records had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.)

The rest of the album doesn’t quite approach the succinct drama of “Maybe,” but it’s quite strong nevertheless, and I suspect more songs will float their way to the top as the year proceeds… I can’t wait to see them live.

“I hope you don’t think this film is about hell on earth,” Michael Glawogger told the audience before the screening of his 2005 documentary Workingman’s Death. It’s hard to see why not: his film - easily the best I’ve seen so far at the San Francisco Film Festival - is a headlong journey into the world of manual labor where, for the most part, workers’ lives are irrevocably yoked with potentially fatal peril. It sure looks like hell, too, whether it’s the unworldly yellow clouds of sulfur from a volcano in Indonesia, or a butcher’s market awash with crimson in Nigeria.

The film has five different episodes: the first, on illegal coal miners in the Ukraine (where, lying flat on their backs in a space 16 inches high, they hammer out blocks of coal); the second, on sulfur miners in Indonesia (weightlifting is then exposed for the bourgeois activity that it is, in this segment that looks like a Sebastiao Salgado photograph come to life); the third, on cow and goat slaughterers in Nigeria (“Life is graphic,” Glawogger explained. “You eat meat. Its preparation is just hidden from you.”); the fourth, on Pashtun ship disassemblers in Pakistan (there’s something simply majestic about the sight of 250-feet tall pieces of metal collapse to the sea); and the last, on Chinese foundry workers and a German foundry converted into a theme park. Except for the weaker final episode, all are equally compelling. Glawogger manages to capture the ordinary in succinct ways: Ukrainian miners talking about feeding their goats, a conversation between two miners about Bon Jovi in Indonesia, a souvenir photographer in the shipyard, taking pictures for the workers to send to their families.

There is real poetry to the images and sounds that Workingman’s Death displays: the creaking sound of baskets with about 150 pounds of sulfur slabs, the ripple of cow skin pulled over rocks, the gravelly crunch of coal dragged through a shaft, the disturbingly childlike cries of goats as their necks are slit open, the dazzle of arc welder sparks hurtling down a shaft or to the ocean. For this alone the film achieves a gritty, sensual transcendence.

Like extreme sports, there is perhaps something of the “extreme” in what Glawogger documents. (One can imagine that capturing this on camera constituted a kind of “extreme filmmaking” as well, and there was more than a hint of romanticization in his answers at the Q&A session.) My initial reaction was that the deeply ordinary could be equally fraught with similar danger and/or nastiness, until I realized that these kinds of occupations in the film - some without the benefit of machines, and all of which were surely barely regulated according to any safety standards - were indeed “deeply ordinary” mostly outside of the First World (or willfully ignored here).

I’d like to think, though, that Glawogger meant more for the film than simply to portray the universal dignity of manual labor, even if, as he reiterated, it was not about “hell on earth.” Speaking as an anthropologist, I would have loved to have seen more of a context: the salaries these workers are making and what these wages can buy, how they view their labor (or what it means exactly when the man who considers himself the fastest cleaner of the roasted goat carcasses says that he is proud of the skill that God has given him), who is making a profit off of it, the families (if any) who are being supported, what Glawogger means by “well off” when he says the Ukrainian miners were “well off,” and so on.

His refusal to place the film in a larger cultural / economic context by providing some sort of a “narrative” somewhat defangs the documentary, as it were, by allowing the viewers to simply focus on the images. (Indeed, his response to someone asking this question at the Q&A session was something of a cop-out: “It’s because I’m a filmmaker. If I wanted to do that, I would have written an essay.”) But these criticisms are somewhat unfair. In some instances the workers themselves provide a critique of their own social conditions, though these are quickly smoothened over. In a couple of scenes where the interviewees talk about why they like their jobs, their answers are clearly meant to be sarcastic.

No matter: Claustrophobic, vertiginous, grim, and sometimes oddly exhilarating, Workingman’s Death is a fantastic achievement. It’s certainly the best film I’ve seen all year (and it’s only May!).

So my four-year old daughter is currently obsessed with the Nick Jr. TV show “The Backyardigans.” It’s easy to see why; the show is utterly charming, even for a jaded viewer like me. Five animal friends (a moose, a penguin, a hippo, a kangaroo, and one undefined “unique” creature named Uniqua) have adventures in their backyards which morph, Calvin-and-Hobbes-style, into jungles, Egyptian pyramids, medieval castles and so on. The CGI animation is pretty but rather soulless, but it works.)

The real anchor is the music (and the excellent voice acting), which is just superb for a kiddie TV show: incredibly catchy children’s ditties that are the functional equivalent of Broadway showtunes—each song within the show is totally choreographed, with dancing. The songs are thematically coherent for each episode, but across the series the music runs the gamut from reggae to rockabilly to country to Dixieland to James Brown funk.

Anyhow, I finally got to see the scrolling credits by pausing the DVD (they get reduced to a tiny window when being broadcast), and discovered to my surprise that the list of musicians reads like a Tzadik session roster: Evan Lurie, Doug Weiselman, Greg Cohen, Smokey Hormel, Tony Scherr, Ben Perowsky, Steven Bernstein, Kenny Wollesen… Totally cool. (Best of all, my daughter gets up out of her chair to dance on the carpet everytime the songs come on.)

Povelicious.

My copy of Geraldine Kim’s Povel sits invitingly on the table. The reason for this said interpellation is the very fact that its cover has been gently caressed into a come-hither curl, the said curl aided by the lucky confluence of two forces: one, by the manual endeavors of human hands, i.e., mine, and two, by supernatural agency, i.e., the heat and humidity of the Philippine tropics, though the latter is more appropriately “natural,” but as E.E. Evans-Pritchard reminds us in his writings on the Azande which has graced many an introductory anthropology reading textbook, like the one I’ve been using for a few semesters now, the divide between natural and supernatural varies greatly from culture to culture. But allow me at least to discuss the reasons behind the curl in turn: my hands, first, which have only really opened the book to the very first page, that is, the first page of the “povel” proper, occasionally flipping to the back to consult the footnotes, and lingering on the mug shot of Nick Nolte, and reading Geraldine Kim’s biography, convinced, after repeated readings, that her past tenure as Governor of Texas was indeed within the realm of possibility, though not probability, but it is also likely that I am fudging the semantic / mathematical difference between the two words, that is, “possibility” and “probability,” since the lowest grade I ever received in college, as a Communication Arts major from my agricultural school at the foothills of a Philippine mountain, which by the way, is “bundok” in Tagalog, and is, if one remembers correctly, the only word of Philippine origin to insert itself into English without any specific Philippine denotation, that is, “boondocks,” was a crushing 2.5, which is the equivalent of a B-minus in American terms, for what was in fact the only mathematics-related class I took after high school, which was History of Mathematics, though I have no doubt that Geraldine Kim’s grades when she was at Yale were much lower, since it is common knowledge that she received a so-called “Gentleman’s C” average during her tenure at New Haven. In fact it took me two evenings alone to read the title of her book, staring at it glazed through jetlagged eyes, to which I gave the benefit of the doubt by actually reading it twice, since it was, after all, printed twice, and I am enjoying the book immensely, between bouts of grading and headache and the overall frenzied caloric consumption that characterizes the middle-class Philippine holiday season, though I am somewhat unsure what it is about, that is, the book, not the holiday season, even after closely reading Lyn Hejinian’s, or shall I say, “Lyn Hejinian’s,” explanatory introduction to her book, and I am in fact rather puzzled that Microsoft Word has gone and rudely placed a red squiggly line underneath “Povel” and “Azande” and “bundok” and “Hejinian,” especially since one wonders, shouldn’t “Hejinian” be a household name by now, up there with “Longoria” and “Aguilera,” neither of whom get squiggly lines? Let me discuss the second force behind the curl, that is, the supernatural force, shortly, but right now I am feeling dehydrated and should get up and drink a glass of water. I’ll be right back.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong is grand entertainment in the swashbuckling Saturday matinee B-movie style (not that I saw any of those growing up). It’s also a film that perhaps more explicitly foregrounds the colonial, with knowing nods to Conrad and the historical cinematic / anthropological apparatus. (A poster for Cooper and Schoedsack’s 1927 film Chang appears prominently in the background in an early scene.)

The premise is familiar to everyone: Jack Black plays Werner Herzog, who orders people around to lug his equipment deeper into the jungle—oh wait. Jackson skillfully grounds the film during the Great Depression, with quickly sketched, if sanitized, scenes of hunger and unemployment. It’s a nice contrast to the well-heeled denizens of New York who get swatted around in Times Square near the end of the film. Black and his crew (including the gorgeous Naomi Watts, wonderfully effective in an early scene where she channels her wide-eyed Mulholland Drive performance, plus Adrien Brody as a shanghaied Clifford Odets) head off somewhere in the direction of Indonesia, and end up in a jungly Mordor instead.

It’s not a perfect movie, certainly. It’s too long, for starters, and whatever emotional depth fostered while the cast is still on the ship (showing how everyone falls in love with Watts, basically) is squandered by the long illogical screaming rollercoaster ride in the center. (Illogical because hardly anyone gets injured after being flung, bitten, strangled, swallowed, crushed, machinegunned, dropped, slid, stampeded—you name it.) At least Jackson is clearly enjoying himself, as in the scenes where Gollum’s head is swallowed by a giant pink leech (J-Lu had her hands over her eyes for that one), or when Kong plays with a Tyrannosaurus Rex’s broken jaw.

In any case it’s a smart illustration, already surely argued elsewhere, of how King Kong was American national psychosexual anxiety writ large, the embodiment of the brute native inhabiting the wild, uncolonized interior. (In fact, we get two gleefully egregious depictions of ooga-booga natives: the first, kissing cousins of the Urok-hai; the second, a hilarious mishmash of just about every Savage in the popular repertoire.) In Jackson’s film the narrative thrust (pardon the pun) is in two parallel directions: the cinematic capture of the unexplored frontier, and the fear - or more precisely, the thrill - of miscegenation.

Of course we know what happens: ape meets girl, girl meets ape, they fall in love, and things end badly. After an unexpectedly touching scene in Central Park (if you’re not rooting for the couple at this point, there’s something wrong with you), Kong and Watts end up climbing the Empire State Building. (It’s significant that Jackson uses a smaller scale in the film; here, Kong is still dwarfed by the New York skyline.) Perilously perched on the phallus of Western capitalism, Kong suffers the consequence of his hubris and impossible love; he must be brought down, aided, in this case, by American military might. For a few tantalizing seconds, we see the devastated blonde hesitate at the precipice—but is rescued by her “real” love. Order has returned.

http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/archives/000743.html#000743

See http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/archives/000730.html#000730

‘The man in the wood! The man in the wood!’

Invent / if you / will, a fakebook.