Tres Amigos

From The Star Online.

In high school, pretentious art snob that I was trying to be (some would say precocious, but let's stick to my words), I came across two movies that shookt me to the core at a time when shookt wasn't even sperm and egg. It was the golden age of BluRays and DVDs, and one of my uncles was trying to be Iloilo's next great collector, with his wheeled plastic crates of movies bought from one of those low-key stalls (run by a Chinese immigrant, if this is relevant) inside a legitimate mall. I was consciously trying to make myself "cultured," as if by seeing lots of movies, I'd be one step ahead of everyone else--better, even. And that, I realized years later, wasn't at all an invalid argument, but let's be concerned only with pre-college me, not yet a full inductee into the Church of Theater but so hungry for "class" and "quality" and other words that could wear quotation marks instead of quotation marks wearing them (like how, at the Oscars few days ago, Taraji P. Henson's dress wore her instead of the other way around). At the Silliman workshop last year, a kind of full-circle moment occurred, when my youngest co-fellow asked me, "How do you become cultured?" And we told him it's all a matter of reading and watching and listening to what you can, that being cultured is not something that happens overnight, but what I really wanted to say was, boy, you're so like me at that age, and I'm so proud, this must be how being a father feels like. But back to the movies.

My mom was--still is--my constant movie companion. (Now that I'm back in Iloilo, we've been seeing a lot together: "Ang Dalawang Mrs. Reyes," "Changing Partners," "Mr. and Mrs. Cruz," "Meet Me in St. Gallen," my second round of "Black Panther," etc.) Back when I still didn't have a laptop, and when our TV still didn't have a USB port, DVDs were our heroes. She'd call my uncle (her elder brother) in the morning, and I'd come round his place and pore through his "new releases," and then at night, my mother and I would watch side by side on the living room couch. In one of those movies, a mute Japanese girl tried to seduce a police detective (and eventually attempted suicide on her balcony?), and that was after she'd gone to a bar and the screen was all dizzying strobe lights, which was already a long time after Cate Blanchett got shot by an unknown assailant while inside a bus in the middle of the Moroccan desert. My genuine fear for Miss Blanchett's life, I can still recall, how I panicked on her behalf when I thought help wouldn't arrive, when her fellow passengers decided they'd be better off leaving her and Brad Pitt in some shack to fend for themselves. There was also an infuriatingly reckless nephew in Mexico whom I didn't know was Gael Garcia Bernal (though I didn't get to see "Y Tu Mamá También" until I was a college sophomore). Alejandro G. Iñarritu's "Babel," if you haven't figured it out. I'd look it up years later on Rotten Tomatoes and discover its divisive nature, but it was my first grand taste of what fragmentation can do. How the limits of fiction can be stretched, even though at that time, I barely had a firm grasp of either limits or fiction. How stories can fold into themselves, can be scattered across three, equally spaced points on the globe and still come together, bending time and space and race and language to achieve coherence. If anything, "Babel" made me a hungrier and more curious viewer.  

There was a second movie that summer that made me go "Shit, this is good!" A fairy tale, when I had all but given up on fairy tales, when I had somehow made a pact with myself to watch animated films only when I didn't have anything else to watch. (I know: ignorant prick.) But this one wasn't animated. And it wasn't in English. It's set in Franco's Spain in 1944, though I still didn't know who Franco was at the time. (1944, to me, was the last full year of World War II. You know, Battle of Leyte Gulf?) But the rebellious landscape was only an aside in the movie. The most striking thing about it, the one element that would constantly pop up in my mind for the weeks that followed, was the image of a monster, almost skeletal, with its eyeballs on its palms. That was Guillermo del Toro changing the definition of "nightmares" for me with "Pan's Labyrinth." Wasn't this kind of "Alice in Wonderland," I thought. It was--and this is no exaggeration--unlike anything I'd seen before. The realistic portions were more than tangible; they were convincingly morose, the shadow of despair and loneliness virtually coating the screen. The fantasy, meanwhile, was miles away from Disney and Pixar. The insect-fairies! The deceptive feast on that deceptive table! Fear was more than just a fleeting feeling here; it was constant, side by side with a fascination for the otherworldliness of the labyrinth. This was fairy tale that chucked the viewer's comfort down the drain. The best part: that fierce nanny! My mother and I, we were rooting most for her (or was she the secretary?), who would help the girl escape the labyrinth and be the first to fight back against the nefarious stepfather. And in the end, the little girl died! Gutsy, contextually mind-blowing shit.

"Pan's Labyrinth" and "Babel" were both serious contenders at the 79th Academy Awards, but so was another movie, which is now one of my all-time favorites: "Children of Men." But I was too busy hating on Alfonso Cuarón then. For the longest time, I blamed him for ruining "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," thinking instead that Chris Columbus' takes on the first two installments of the Potterverse were the ideal. My opinions, of course, have since changed and evolved, and I'm now a much better person, thank you very much. Now I can only wonder how much more different--radical?--the year would have been for me if I had also seen "Children of Men." Could I have handled the one-take cinematography (or could I have even appreciated it then)? Could I have processed its dystopia the same way I had committed to memory every available detail of the "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" franchises?

I'd meet Iñárritu again three years later in the Javier Bardem-starrer "Biutiful." Cuáron, I would finally instill in my filmgoing consciousness with "Gravity." As for del Toro, apparently I'd already made his acquaintance two years earlier, with "Hellboy," which I only saw on DVD in the same living room. Rasputin figured in the story, I remember, and also an angsty girl with pyrokinetic abilities. Also, a fish-man of sorts, played by Doug Jones, who would go on to play, more than a decade later, another fish-man in the film that would cap the Tres Amigos' hunt for the Best Director Oscar. Must be nice--it must pay well, rather--to be Hollywood's go-to fish-man.