Screen Log 4: Fresh Off the Boat Season 3; Maze Runner: The Death Cure; Lady Bird; Columbus; Spoor

"Columbus."

I was so happy with FRESH OFF THE BOAT's Season 3. I had written it off as just another one of those so-so comedies that I might have to drop after maybe one more season (okay, fine, so I'm still watching "Modern Family"), but this season just hit it out of the park every episode. Really, there wasn't a single dud episode--and there were a lot of very hysterical ones, with Constance Wu, Lucille Soong and the kid who plays Evan duking it out for MVP every single time. Hey, "Modern Family," pay attention.

MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE was a pile of steaming shit. They could have cut an hour out of it, and there wouldn't be any difference. I only watched it because it was my cousin's birthday. What a waste of cinema space.

Here I proclaim my love for LADY BIRD, Greta Gerwig's coming-of-age masterpiece. But it's so much more than just coming of age. If you have (had) a mother with whom you share a deep, loving relationship, with whom you seem to bicker every minute, you will see yourself in this movie. If you've had to be in a position where you just felt like everyone around you was so much better and miles ahead, you will see yourself in this movie. If you've had to struggle as a family--and not even just financially--you will see yourself in this movie. I do not know what this says of my tastes (and honestly I don't care), but if you've read A.O. Scott's fawning rave in The New York Times, that's just about all of my sentiments as well. Anyone who says this movie does not deserve the Oscar Best Picture or all the other accolades it has received is being petty and pedantic. If it wins, I will be totally fine with it. Gerwig made me wish I could write such precise, evocative, snappy dialogue. And I am still in love with that cast, hours after watching the screener (don't worry, I will definitely be there when the film opens in local theaters next month). Also, can I just say how perfect the choice for the school musical--Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along"--was?

The rewards of Kogonada's COLUMBUS are unexpectedly immense, if you have the patience to sit through it. Some have compared it to Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy, but I found this one to be more subdued and testing, and the conversations more authentic. There weren't a lot of profound dialogue, which contributed to strengthening its realism, because face it, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's language in the Linklater films sometimes went overboard with the metaphors. The most beguiling thing about Kogonada's film was its use of architecture as a device, how it reflected everyday life, the ups and downs, the beautiful and the ugly, in the asymmetries and imperfections of the landscape and cityscape. "An intimate portrait of human connection for building nerds" would be a choice way to summarize it.

Agnieszka Holland's SPOOR had me rolling my eyes when it finally wrapped up. Okay, are we just suppose to ignore the whole can of moral conundrums opened toward the end of the story? Really? And what was up with that annoying percussive score? I am still trying to figure this out, because yeah, it had my feelings all jumbled, more towards the side of confusion. 

Screen Log 3: The Killing of a Sacred Deer; Detroit; All the Money in the World; Ang Dalawang Mrs. Reyes; Thelma

"Thelma."

I loved Yorgos Lanthimos' last two films--"Dogtooth" and "The Lobster," the latter being my favorite film of 2015. His latest, THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER, left me baffled the way an otter falling from the sky and landing square on your yard would. This is why I usually avoid movies and TV series that have to do with medical stuff: More or less the errors can be distracting. That's particularly true with the stuff that ABS-CBN and GMA feed their audiences on a daily basis. But I did not expect Lanthimos to be so carelessly dramatic. No doctor would see his patient refusing to eat and looking ill and not think right away of giving IV feeding. Setting that aside, what. was. the. deal. with. this. movie. Like I couldn't even. It managed to be both arid and arctic at the same time. Blank and not amusing at all, somewhat akin to a general anesthesia. Overall, a chilling disappointment from one of my favorite directors.

With Kathryn Bigelow's DETROIT, the impulse to look away was blown to smithereens. Granted this is not a perfect film: the latter third didn't quite live up to the other parts, both in terms of dramatic tension and cinematic fluidity. Film critic Bilge Ebiri, writing for the Village Voice, called it the film's own form of "shell shock." Still, what a thrill. Not that the movie's most intense parts--the whole ghastly ordeal at the motel--were enjoyable. Far from it. But they were as close as one could possibly get to the horrors of those times. No looking away, the bloodshed and humiliation and unjustifiable hatred right in front of the viewer's face. You just know it when a modern master delivers.

To call Ridley Scott one of the masters of our time wouldn't be inaccurate. But ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, his second feature for 2017 (after "Alien: Covenant"), strangely left me cold. I could not for the life of me figure out why Scott submitted himself into making this terribly prosaic movie. Christopher Plummer was excellent in the Kevin Spacey role--one actually wonders how Spacey could have pulled off that role--but the rest of the film was a blah. Blah, blah, blah we're in Rome. Blah, blah, blah something about family history. Then an ear gets cut off. Michelle Williams cries. Mark Wahlberg does another Mark Wahlberg-ian cop-ish role. The end. It wasn't bad, really, but the final product made you question the point of the whole endeavor.

Jun Robles Lana's ANG DALAWANG MRS. REYES was just so much fun. This is how you do a comedy, guys. Push everything to its limits. I loved this whole experience so much, despite the flaws. Gladys Reyes delivering a no-nonsense Gladys Reyes speech, for starters. And the leads--Juday and Angelica Panganiban--were everything you could possibly hope for, and more. Made you wish, really, that Filipino comedies were always this intelligent.

And on the opposite end of the spectrum is Joachim Trier's THELMA. Now I'm a fan of Trier's last two movies: "Oslo, August 31st" and "Louder than Bombs." This one, styled as a supernatural horror flick, hits its peak pretty early with its first sequence, showing a father aiming a rifle at a deer, only to shift his aim towards the back of his young daughter's head. Cue title card. Not won over by the horror though; felt that the supernatural elements are this movie's weakest. And that's all I really have to say about it, because the ardent fans might come after me with flaming pitchforks.

Screen Log 2: A Quiet Passion; The Crown Season 2; King Charles III; Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle; The Other Side of Hope

"King Charles III."

I was always on the verge of giving up on Terence Davies' A QUIET PASSION, always tempted to tell the movie to drop its stilted nonsense, but then I'd stop myself because of a passage so brilliant and wickedly humorous. Make no mistake: Mostly I was bored and couldn't wait for the movie to end. The writing never really felt organic to me--more a compilation of clever back-and-forths--and the narration of Emily Dickinson's poetry never went beyond feeling like a mere device. But at its best moments, this movie really could send you laughing, especially when Cynthia Nixon was being vicious or when Jennifer Ehle, sublime in her silences, ran away with whatever fraction of the limelight was given her. The following passage should prove my point.

Ehle as Vinnie: Mrs. Todd is about to depart.

Nixon as Emily: This life, or just this house?

The second season of THE CROWN was simply terrific television. Marvelous, acutely observed writing from start to end. Never looked less than royally expensive. The best parts of this season for me were Pip Torrens as Tommy Lascelles, who could deliver a droll monologue and make it sound like the state of the nation address, and Vanessa Kirby as Margaret--smoldering, bruised, feral. Thought the first three episodes, dealing with the Suez Crisis, felt like a world of their own, but then this was followed by the Margaret-centric fourth one, "Beryl," which for me was the season's best. All in all, can't wait for Olivia Colman to take the reins, but also finding it hard to say goodbye to the wonderful Claire Foy.

Which brings me to the TV adaptation of playwright Mike Bartlett's KING CHARLES III, directed to Olivier-winning acclaim and now for the screen by Rupert Goold. My problem with this was the way the conflict was presented. I don't know how they did it onstage, but here, it looked like a whole pile of shite to me. Parliament's trying to pass a law that would regulate the media, and the king doesn't want to sign it unless the prime minister spearheads some changes, which he refuses. So when the king intervenes, the whole country goes into uproar--against the king? Come on, like any self-respecting democracy would recognize the dangers of media regulation. If the show had been clearer on the specifics of the law, which I believe it was onstage, then the crises haunting the new king would have been more gripping. The monarch's always just an assenting voice to the prime minister, but now that he actually stood his ground for the people, the people turned against him, hated for standing by their freedom of speech, the press and information? Huh? I'd like to believe I simply misread--miswatched?--the film, but I didn't, so applause to the script in iambic pentameter, but that's as far as I'd go with my praises.

JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE, a stand-alone sequel to the Robin Williams movie, was a refreshing, unpretentious breath of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole movie, reliant as it was on tropes. Plus, any movie which features a healthy dose of rhinos, hippos, crocs and snakes is a good time for me.

Aki Kaurismäki's THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE reminded me so much of 2011's "Le Havre"--deadpan acting, atmosphere as dry as a European Atacama, actors and scenes moving along like marionettes. It's a movie that initially bored me, gradually grew on me, and finally won me over, shy as it was at the start to reveal its enormous heart. An excellent film which I wouldn't watch again, if this makes sense.

Screen Log 1: Angels in America; A Ghost Story; Deadma Walking; Mudbound

"Mudbound."

I won't be in Manila for most of the year, which means theater reviewing shall take the back seat. Figured resurrecting my TV/movies log would be the best way to keep my non-literary writing brain from rusting.

Really, the first movie I saw this year was Paul Soriano's "Siargao," but I included it (as the last film) in my list for last year, so will no longer talk about it at length. 

Instead, it's the National Theatre's live broadcast of Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA that, um, heralded--pun intended--the new year onscreen for me (thank you, you-who-shall-not-be-named torrent site). And what a magnificent, mesmerizing experience this was. My introduction to this landmark theatrical piece was the HBO adaptation, which was a whole other creature, freed of the physical limitations of the stage yet also, to some extent, watered down emotionally. 

Meanwhile, Marianne Elliott's six-hour-plus staging for the London stage of both parts--"Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika"--raged with an untamable spirit, angry and dazed, wistful and desperate. I particularly liked the set, the multiple turntables and pieces that rose from the ground and entered sideways, and couldn't care less about that one reviewer's sentiment regarding the play not being "grand" enough. The depiction of the angel, I found slyly creative, and oh, that cast! Marvelous in every conceivable meaning of the word, from Andrew Garfield's glamazonian ex-drag queen to Nathan Lane's vitriolic Roy Cohn to Russell Tovey's heartbreaking, conflicted Joe Pitt (the best performance in this mightily performed play, in my opinion). 

If some genie were to barge into my life, I'd ask for a plane to New York and tickets to this show on Broadway in May.

I suppose I'm not the intended audience for David Lowery's A GHOST STORY, where Casey Affleck wears a white cloth over his head for almost the whole film. The concept I found daring (especially in this age of attention span-challenged viewers), but the entirety was more a triumph of craft and conceit than anything. There were bravura sequences (most especially the one that shows the passage of time way into the future in a matter of seconds), and the movie's focus on aftermaths rather than main events made for refreshing storytelling. But overall, I was uninvolved, even after the final, full-circle-ish revelation.

The MMFF entry DEADMA WALKING, directed by Julius Alfonso, has its Palanca-winning screenplay for bait. But I felt the transition from page to screen wasn't very successful; jokes fell flat, editing was awkward, and the narrative just fell apart by the end (which was ironic for something whose biggest asset is supposedly its writing). 

Now Dee Rees' MUDBOUND has been racking up end-of-the-year awards, though far less than it deserves if you asked my favorite Oscars prognosticator and blogger Sasha Stone (of Awards Daily). Earlier today, the cinematographer Rachel Morrison made history as the first woman to be nominated for the theatrical film award by the American Society of Cinematographers--a nomination I wholeheartedly concur with, as I felt it's the visual aspect that really elevated this movie, capturing the mud and rain and heat and heartaches of the rustic, post-war Deep South with animal precision. 

At times, the writing--Rees and Virgil Williams adapted the film from Hillary Jordan's novel--could get poetic, at once beautiful and alien. Carey Mulligan's character, for example: "When I think of the farm, I think of mud, encrusting knees and hair. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the floor. I dreamed in brown." How I'd love to be able to write such a passage in my own fiction. 

But the movie itself could get tedious, going certain places that could have been excised, lingering where movement would have worked better. I'd say the film really hit its stride once the boys came home from the war, and the racial tensions started piling up and seriously affecting both families; the jump from stasis (i.e. the astute observance of struggle in the rustics) to flow (i.e. romantic entanglements! illnesses! the Klan!) seemed only to highlight the disparity between the film's two inadequately reconciled halves. Also, the characters weren't very novel as far as writing went, but this cast was insanely talented and so in sync with each other. SAG Ensemble Award? Sure. But Best Picture? I'm not 100% convinced.

The Year in Film (2017)

What follows are lists of films and performances from this and last year (but which I only saw this year) that touched me, moved me, changed me in some way--more an enumeration of favorites than a best-of proclamation pretending to be definitive. I've spent most of my time in Iloilo now, where the film festival circuit, except the MMFF, is unheard of, hence the noticeable dip in the number of local films I saw. Also not included: the ancients, such as "Paris Is Burning," which is fundamental viewing.

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1. Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

By no means a perfect movie, but a masterclass in thrilling storytelling through and through. This New Yorker review by Anthony Lane perfectly sums up my sentiments.

2. 20th Century Women (dir. Mike Mills)

A specific (i.e. non-Developing World) story in itself, but nonetheless precisely captures the universal pains and pleasures, confusions and convolutions of coming of age.

3. La La Land (dir. Damien Chazelle)

No other film was a more joyful experience than this; saw it twice in the cinema, and emerged brimming with pure happiness both times.

4. Kiko Boksingero (dir. Thop Nazareno)

Small tale packing a mighty emotional punch. 

5. Manchester by the Sea (dir. Kenneth Lonergan)
A masterpiece on sadness.

6. Things to Come (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve)

Elegant, subtly wrenching portrait of First World love breaking apart and blooming anew.

7. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (dir. Noah Baumbach)

Am a sucker for father-and-son stories, and seeing this just days after we buried my dad made it all the more poignant and resonant.

8. Beach Rats (dir. Eliza Hittman)

The bodies! The longing! The incertitude of self in a mean, judgmental world. 

9. The Big Sick (dir. Michael Showalter)

Film reviewer Oggs Cruz on Twitter: "Everybody... should see it, not to copy it but to see how romcoms can feel both fresh and familiar at the same time."

10. Dunkirk (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Nolan deftly alternates between the epic and the intimate, and, in the fewest possible words, plants his viewer right in the midst of ancient fear and uncertainty.

And here are eleven additional titles worth remembering, in alphabetical order: Alien: Covenant (dir. Ridley Scott); American Honey (dir. Andrea Arnold); Bad Genius (dir. Nattawut Poonpiriya); Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele); Hidden Figures (dir. Theodore Melfi); Jackie (dir. Pablo Larraín); Okja (dir. Bong Joon-ho); Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch); Respeto (dir. Treb Monteras II); Silence (dir. Martin Scorsese); Zootopia (dirs. Byron Howard and Rich Moore).

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My favorite performance of the year is the drop-dead fabulous, Violet-Chachki-come-through villainous turn of CATE BLANCHETT in "Thor: Ragnarok." If Marvel gives her a spinoff movie, I will support it fully. Below, a list of 19 other pieces of acting that really stuck with me:

• Naomi Ackie (Lady Macbeth)
• Amy Adams (Arrival)
• Joanna Ampil (Ang Larawan)
• Sônia Braga (Aquarius)
• Noel Comia Jr. (Kiko Boksingero)
• Dido de la Paz (Respeto)
• Harris Dickinson (Beach Rats)
• Michael Fassbender (Alien: Covenant)
• Betty Gabriel (Get Out)
• Lily Gladstone (Certain Women)
• Jake Gyllenhaal (Okja)
• Salma Hayek (Beatriz at Dinner)
• Holly Hunter (The Big Sick)
• Sasha Lane (American Honey)
• Robert Pattinson (Good Time)
• Maja Salvador (I'm Drunk, I Love You)
• Adam Sandler (The Meyerowitz Stories [New and Selected])
• Emma Stone (La La Land)
• Tilda Swinton (Okja)

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SEE ALSO:
The Year in Film (2016)
The Year in Film (2015)
The Year in Film (2014)