Floating Clouds (1955)

“Amour fou in post-war Tokyo, with Hideko Takamine – in neurotic playing of almost painful intensity – as a woman who sacrifices everything to follow weak and unstable lover Masayuki Mori. The director’s biggest commercial success and Kinema Jumpo “Best One” – even Ozu raved about it to his diary.”

So states the entry for Mikio Naruse’s Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1955) in the program for the Film Forum’s 5 Japanese Divas retrospective that ran from April 1^st through April 22^nd. And though the film has racked up a plethora of accolades, having won a Blue Ribbon Award for Best Film as well as several prizes for the cast and crew during the Mainichi Film Concours, Floating Clouds really does live up to all the hype. No easy task since Naruse is a well-established master of Japanese cinema with a career that stretches back to the 1930’s and a bevy of masterpieces under his belt by the time of his death in 1969.

Focusing his camera on women as Mizoguchi did and the dissolution of the family as Ozu did, what separates Mikio Naruse’s brand of cinema is his obsessive concern with mundane ephemera like money and a visual style akin to documentary realism, evident in Floating Clouds by Naruse"s use of newsreel footage of repatriated soldiers coming home spliced with studio footage of an emotionally broken Hideko Takamine plus extras taking their first steps onto Japanese soil. Then, of course, is the attention paid to fetishistically capturing the back alleyways and bombed out shantytowns that were ubiquitous with early postwar Japan, a feat not equaled until Kinji Fukasaku’s run of jitsuroku-eiga pictures during the 1970’s. This blending of harsh reality with the dictates of narrative storytelling help to elevate what could have been just a cheap melodrama into high tragedy.

Adapted by Naruse from a novel by his favorite author, Fumiko Hayashi, and starring Takamine, who ultimately ended up starring in over a dozen Naruse films, Floating Clouds is typical of a Hayashi-adapted film in that a strong-willed woman suffers, and ultimately dies, because of her blind devotion to a man who neither loved or cared about her. Set during the immediate postwar years, the film deals with the prescient theme of identity and finding meaning in a society utterly devastated by war. Just as Japan had to redefine itself as a nation after its defeat in the Pacific War, Yukiko Koda (Takamine) must find her place in this new social order where English is a prerequisite for anyone applying for a job and the flood of American soldiers means an easy life for any woman willing to share their bed. Although Yukiko’s financial woes are great and this pursuit of material wealth distracts her for a time from the burden of the past she shared with Kengo Tomioka (Masayuki Mori) during the war, she ultimately finds nothing substantially satisfying about financial prosperity, a topic that later Japanese filmmakers would address after the optimism of the postwar economic boom withered into placid discord.

Running throughout the film’s 123-minute runtime is the motif of wandering or “floating” from one place to another. Yukiko and Kengo go to several inns together or, due to Kengo’s constant restlessness, Yukiko is perpetually trailing after him. Constantly chasing after each other, it’s stating the obvious to say that the both of them have a co-dependent relationship. Living off of a happy past they shared in Indochina, Naruse constantly inserts flashbacks of their relationship in Dalat with the present day action and Ichiro Saito’s score borrows heavily from exotic Southeast Asian melodies. Yukiko takes every abuse and humiliation that Kengo throws at her and though she hates him, she just doesn’t seem to have the strength to completely break away from Kengo, a man she loves more for the happy past he represents rather than the future she should be preparing for. Though, in Yukiko"s defense, after having every belief you"ve held be upturned by an unjust war that was instigated and lost by men, Yukiko may be attracted to Kengo"s effeminate and fickle nature which stands in counterpoint to stereotypical portrayals of the masculine Japanese male.

If popular thought dictates that Mizoguchi was a director of women’s pictures, Kurosawa an action film stylist, and Ozu was a master tofu-maker of family dramas, then I think it only appropriate to label Naruse as a noir poet, not so much in the sense of visual style, but in the themes and subject matter that he deals with. Just as noir films in America at that time mined the urban underbelly, in Floating Clouds, Naruse stakes his story on schemers, adulterous wives, and scorned men driven to murder, no character in a Narusean drama could ever be mistaken as heroic. Visually, cinematographer Masao Tamai uses the stock-in-trade look of “Venetian blind” lighting to frame Kengo and Yukiko in several scenes, highlighting that both are prisoners of their shared past and chained together by a tragic future that they cannot escape from. Then, of course, is Kengo who is obviously the male equivalent of a femme fatale. Responsible for the deaths of at least three women by the end of the picture, wherever Kengo goes it seems he cuts a vicious path seemingly able to draw a variety of women towards him and then casually dumping them when he’s had enough of their company.

By the end of the tragic affair, Yukiko, Kengo, and we the audience are completely drained of all emotion. With all of their bridges burnt, they run off to a secluded and constantly rainy island, and yet even with no chance for Kengo to escape her, Yukiko’s paranoia keeps her constantly on the alert believing Kengo to be plotting yet another escape attempt. By this time though it’s far too late for either to make a clean break from each other, they both know that death is the only way out for either of them. It is quite ironic then for Kengo and Yukiko that the happiest moment in their lives, a time when their idealistic brand of love was born and could exist, was during the War. Kengo’s tearful denouement over Yukiko’s lifeless body is a bittersweet ending in that now their relationship can exist in the only place it could thrive, as part of a broken nation"s idealized past.

(Originally published on May 9, 2011 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Asian Cinema Origins: Rex Baylon

Editor's note: In the last episode of the VCinema Podcast, we discussed our Asian film origins, the titles that got us into cinema of that region. In this short series of articles, our lead writers talk about their early Asian cinema experiences.

Speaking of origins and where my obsession for film and specifically Asian cinema started, it’s quite difficult to pinpoint the exact time and moment when my cinephilia began, but two films that were pivotal in my viewing experience occurred roughly around the same time. The first occurred during my sophomore year in high school when during my usual ritual of late night channel surfing, looking for something to pique my interest, I stumbled upon Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express (1994) playing on a backend cable channel.

Although arriving in the middle of the first story concerning Takeshi Kaneshiro’s Cop 223’s initial encounter with a blonde femme fatale played by Brigitte Lin, I was immediately sucked in by the film’s visuals. Completely ignorant of Wong’s reputation with the arthouse crowd or how important Christopher Doyle’s contributions to the visual arts were, I just allowed myself to enjoy the film. Expired cans of pineapple, Tony Leung talking to a soapy dish rag, a toy airplane gliding over Valerie Chow’s sweaty body as Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” plays, and, of course, the pixie-like beauty of Faye Wong all contributed to branding Chungking Express onto my retinas. Thinking back to my initial encounter with the film, I think what caught me in rapt attention was the overt romanticism. Wong’s treatment of love, urban ennui, and all the other themes that are discussed ad nauseam by fans and detractors alike were all new and wholly original to me. Although Wong’s cache with cineastes has plummeted, especially after the release of his first English language feature, My Blueberry Nights (2007) and his unique visual style reappropriated by films of varying quality, the run of films he made from A Fei Jingjyuhn (Days Of Being Wild, 1990) to Fa Yeung Nin Wa (In The Mood For Love, 2000) are, in my honest opinion, all still unabashed masterpieces. Though now if I had to pop in a Wong Kar-Wai film into my DVD player, Chungking Express would not be my first choice. The romantic in me would choose In The Mood For Love, the pretentious snob would pick Dung Che Sai Duk (Ashes of Time, 1994), and the part of me that just wants to enjoy a good movie would put on Wong Gok Ka Moon (As Tears Go By, 1988), but nostalgia is a powerful emotion and sometimes I just want to be that kid again.

The next important film milestone in my cinematic education occurred during the summer after I had graduated from high school. Trapped in New Jersey and with nothing to do, I passed the time by renting tapes from my local library’s film collection.  At two dollars a tape, it was cheaper than borrowing from Blockbuster, not to mention the fact that they had a much better selection. Perusing their stock of foreign films one day I came upon a VHS box with cover art featuring a scraggly looking wild-man clutching a sword and being held at bay by a kimonoed woman kneeling beside him. That bearded man was Toshiro Mifune, the woman Machiko Kyo, the film was Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), and from that day forward I would blindly follow Tenno’s films wherever they would take me, be it the lawless Sengoku era or the inner recesses of dream consciousness. Though a lot of criticism has been thrown at Mifune’s “overacting” and Fumio Hayasaka’s borrowing of the Bolero theme for the film’s score I never, then or now, believed either to be a strike against Kurosawa’s picture. In fact, what drew me in was Mifune’s hyperactive temperament and gorilla-like movements, he didn’t just have a commanding screen presence he practically drowned out the other actor’s that shared the spotlight with him. And as for Hayasaka’s score, that along with Kazuo Miyagawa’s sun dappled lighting and of course the rain storms which I would later discover to be a Kurosawa trademark all went hand-in-hand into creating the perfect period noir film that Rashomon can rightfully call itself.

After having tasted samurai cinema for the first time I was immediately hooked and followed Rashomon with another jidai-geki classic, Shichinin No Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954). Hunger unabated though I searched and found Adam Low’s brilliant documentary Kurosawa (2001) which in turn gave me a long menu of films that I had to see, leading me then to discover The Criterion Collection, which as any card-carrying cinephile knows, has the best home media library in the Western Hemisphere. Takashi Shimura, Ozu, Tatsuya Nakadai, Masahiro Shinoda, Seijun Suzuki, Setsuko Hara, Mizoguchi, etc. etc. without my initial curiosity over Mifune’s image I would never have opened that door and I have the Neptune Public Library to thank for it all since film fans are not born, they are made.  And though the trend now is to convert everything into some sort of digital file or to watch movies through streaming media companies like Netflix or Hulu, we shouldn’t forget brick and mortar institutions which have a wealth of treasures to offer the community, if only a person is willing to dig. Holding a hard copy of a film, be it a DVD or VHS, in your hands, reading a well written essay or paperback study of a little known director/movie/region of cinema , or even admiring poster art. These are the simple pleasures which all cineastes will never want to abandon no matter how advanced the technology gets.

(Originally published on April 29, 2011 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Kadin (2007)

The Republic of the Philippines is a nation comprised of over 7,000 islands with a history and culture that has been intrinsically tied to both its Eastern and Western neighbors since the first wave of Malay and Polynesian tribes first settled on the island over 24,000 years ago. With the influx of external influences constantly shaping and remolding the people and the landscape, to state that the Philippines has had its fair share of turbulent times is not an exaggeration. And, although the country may be quite small, it would be incorrect to assume that all Filipinos share a collective mono-culture. Language, religion, economics, education, skin tone, where you’ve been, and who you know all play a part in dividing the population into smaller and smaller sub-groups, essentially making the struggle to survive the only commonality that all Filipinos share.

Adolfo Alix Jr.’s 2007 film Kadin is a coming-of-age story about a boy, played by Rico Mark Cardona, coming to terms with the sobering fact that a majority of what being an adult entails is learning to deal with the various disappointments that crop up as one tries to live their life. Not a very original theme but the quaintness of the story and the simplicity in execution does harken back to the best films of China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers like Zhang Yimou. Set up somewhat like a fairy tale or parable the premise is quite simple. Peping (Rico Mark Cordona) entrusted by his father to take care of Gima, the family goat, before he left his family to find work in the big city is surprised to find the goat mysteriously gone one morning and soon both Peping and his little sister Lita (Monica Joy Camarillas) launch an island-wide manhunt to find their goat before their grandmother and returning father find out.

Set in the island of Sabtang, which is located in the Batanes island region, Alix and his cinematographer Rodolfo Aves Jr. devote a large majority of the film to capturing the sheer beauty and Edenic qualities of the island. Untouched it seems by the twentieth century, the only markers of modern life are a few appliances and the stray motorbike that makes it into the camera’s eye-line.  For this reason, the film offers a wonderful counterpoint to the grimy urban noir narratives favored by many Filipino storytellers. A prime example of this is the comically understated scene in which Peping goes to the island police station and we are introduced to what I presume to be Sabtang’s only two police officers passing the time by playing chess. Annoyed by Peping interrupting their chess match, a game they’ve been playing day in and day out, they offer him a list of possible scenarios of what could have happened to his goat, not to help the boy but for Peping to go and investigate on his own so that they can finish their chess match in peace. Although Adolfo does stick to the usual clichés of ineffective and somewhat lazy law enforcement, the root of this ineffectiveness is not corruption as it would be in typical crime dramas, but simply that,in an island like Sabtang, crime isn’t a problem.  How can it be a problem when goats outnumber the people?

What Adolfo is trying to tackle with Kadin is not crime and its roots but poverty and its effects on a community minus the harsh social melodrama that one would find in the cinema of an artist like Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, or Brilliante Mendoza. Even though the island is far removed from social issues like crime and pollution, the people struggle on a daily basis just to survive.  Adolfo addresses this during Kadin’s opening, when we are introduced to a small mob holding down a screeching pig as an old man, clasping a blade, offers a prayer and then proceeds to graphically eviscerate the animal. The violence is sobering in that Adolfo doesn’t ever budge his camera from showing the blood and gore and on the audio track, the pig’s screams don’t just stop as soon as the blade enters its body but continues on till the animal finally expires many minutes later. The pig’s liver is read for any clues about whether there will be feast or famine on the island while the rest of the organs are carefully preserved and the meat is carefully divided amongst the men to feed their families. This ritual, though primitive in execution, is performed by men adorned not in robes or “tribal dress”, but in fact clothed in baseball caps and shorts. The men in Kadin’s prologue must “get their hands dirty” to put food on the table just as the characters found in typical urban crime dramas must do and though the violence they commit does not constitute breaking the law it is no less brutal though far fewer films are devoted to their struggles.

This theme of struggle is also reiterated in Peping’s motivation to find Gima. The promise to his father to take care of Gima is compounded with the family’s economic and emotional ties to this one goat. Peping’s father bought Gima from a local shepherd but, because of his meager wages, could only afford the weak and sickly Gima. The goat miraculously survived, but at the cost of its survival, Peping’s mother tragically fell ill while taking care of Gima and died.   Adolfo doesn’t just tell this to the audience to wring some emotional sympathy from them, but to show the cost that many impoverished families have to pay just to survive. Also, it can’t be reiterated enough just how important the figure of the mother is in Filipino cinema. Just as in real life, they can be both nurturers as well as one’s worst enemy, and dramatists in the Philippine film industry have cultivated a rich genre depicting the various effects that a matriarch's presence, or lack thereof, can have. Thus with the loss of Peping’s mother, Gima becomes a makeshift mother for Peping and his sister; its milk not only providing nutritional sustenance but also financial security since the family runs a side business selling Gima's milk to the villagers on the island. This connection makes Gima's vanishing even more painful for Peping because not only could he not save his mother, but now he can't even protect a measly goat tied right outside his home.

Although already far from being a perfect film, Kadin has one flaring error in its ending. After the sad revelation of what happened to Gima, killed and eaten by a bunch of self-satisfied bureaucrats, and Peping’s subsequent arrest for attempted goat theft, the film should have quietly ended. Not a perfect ending, but consistent with the themes Adolfo was dealing with. The real ending, though has Peping waking up the next day to find a new fatter goat in front of his house and the young smug government official who had taken Gima in the first place redeemed, a single tear drop falling from Peping’s eye as a silent thanks to this once cruel man. In my opinion, though this betrays what we just saw and the young bureaucrats “redemption” is too sudden to be believable. Though the philosophy that is espoused by many social dramas that life is hard and only gets harder is nothing new, Kadin’s ending undercuts all that Peping went through since Gima could be so easily replaced. The audience may feel better by this uplifting ending, but the saccharine final scene only offers false hope. Peping’s search for Gima is a story about lost innocence and how a boy became a man as he discovered just how cruel the world could be, but Adolfo’s ending makes the film about an anonymous bureaucrat's redemption through a little boy's suffering and sadly reverts Peping from a mature adult back into the whimpering boy he had started to move away from.

(Author's note: For a subscription price of only $8.99 at Asia Pacific Films you can view Kadin and many other Filipino and Asian films that they provide for online streaming.)

(Originally published on April 7, 2011 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Ghost Shout (2004)

If there’s something strangein your neighborhoodWho ya gonna call?GHOSTBUST…errr…Sotokoba Paranormal Investigations??

Renpei Tsukamoto’s Gosuto Shauto (Ghost Shout, 2004) takes the central premise of popular mainstream genre works like Ghostbusters (1984), The Sixth Sense (1999), and the Ghost Whisperer (2005-2010) and crafts something very familiar to fans of the paranormal with just the right amount of campy fun.

Yoko Sakaki (Saori Takizawa) is your average tough-as-nails woman. If you need something to get done she doesn’t waste time whining about it, she just rolls up her sleeves and jumps into the fray. Of course get to know her a little bit better and you most likely would do a spit-take. You see she’s a Ghost Negotiator. Part of an organization that can hardly pay its bills and whose employees consistently end up in the hospital due to Yoko’s zealous behavior. Yet after only a couple of minutes watching her work you realize what her boss and the people she works with already know…she’s good at her job, damn good.

The rub is, of course, that she hates what she does. It’s bad enough that she can see dead people but Yoko must also deal with the petty squabbles that the deceased have with the living. Her only lifeline to “reality” is her fiancé, Toshio, whose patient and understanding demeanor is a nice counterpoint to Yoko’s rough and unforgiving exterior. And, as befitting their sweet syrupy romance, Yoko dreams of working side by side with her prince charming in the cozy little tofu shop she dreams of one day running. Yet, as anyone who’s seen a fair number of romantic comedies can guess, there is far more to the story than that. You see, to accommodate what the other believes their partner wants, Yoko and Toshio construct alter egos for themselves, Yoko the globe trotting flight attendant and Toshio the honest manager of a rice cooker company. Yoko’s last day on the job, though brings all of these unspoken issues to a boil.

From that premise alone it should come as no surprise that Ghost Shout is more screwball comedy than an X-Files-esque thriller. And although many of the film’s special effects are hokey it ultimately doesn't matter. What Tsukamoto lacked in budget he more than makes up for in his attention to character development and storytelling. Working with the universal theme of love, Tsukamoto makes an intriguing connection between how a base emotion like love can bring people back from the dead. That ultimately lost love, be it the love a dead mother has for her grown child or an idealistic singer has for a homely looking ukulele player, haunts us and though we may eventually forget, those phantom pains can emerge without us even realizing what it is we are feeling and for whom we are feeling such strong passions for. These may not be so original ideas, but rarely has contemporary Hollywood pitched a romantic comedy with themes that adult or even entertaining.  Sticking to tried and true conventions like the masculine female protagonist who finally softens when she finds true love, lowbrow physical comedy reminiscent of a classic Warner Bros. cartoon, and a predictable meet-cute between Yoko and Yanagida (Ken Izawa), a man who not only shares Yoko's affliction of being able to see the dead but also has a past connection to her, where they both seem to be totally mismatched for each other but ultimately we know will end up together before the end credits roll all go blissfully hand in hand to making this an enjoyable popcorn flick.

(Originally published on April 5, 2011 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Cavite (2005)

Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon’s film Cavite (2005) wears its indie film roots on its sleeve for good and bad reasons. As a movie, it fits within the political thriller template since the main story is about Adam, played by Ian Gamazon himself, who must deal with a Muslim extremist group, Abu Sayyaf, who have kidnapped his mother and sister during his return trip back to the Philippines for his father’s funeral. Although influenced by Hollywood crime dramas and thrillers like The Limey (1999), Cellular (2004), Phone Booth (2002), and Narc (2002) Llana and Gamazon strip all the gloss and sheen from those productions and utilize guerilla film tactics to create a very frenetic story. And although this specific style lent Cavite the sense of urgency that all good thrillers need to have, I found myself during my viewing of the film suffering from a mild case of motion sickness. The ever-present use of handheld tracking shots, steadicam, freeze frames and kinetic editing are all de rigeur film school techniques since the early 90’s with the popularity of Wong Kar-Wai and American indie directors like Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith yet Cavite could have benefited from a toning down of style paying more attention to story and character.

Ian Gamazon’s performance as Adam, although not bad, was severely lacking, especially since, as viewers, we rarely if ever leave the character of Adam throughout the entire film’s runtime, so it was imperative that whoever was going to be playing the role had to have the acting chops to carry the entire film on their shoulders. Especially since Adam interacts with most people through the use of a phone, we are never really privy to any information or reaction shots other than Adam’s. Of course the heavy production workload, besides acting, co-writing and directing the film Gamazon also was in charge of sound during the shooting, may have lent to his performance being less than stellar.

Of course what many people automatically discuss when talking about Cavite is the film’s use of the Philippine’s ongoing conflict between the national government and the Filipino Muslim population on the island of Mindanao. Groups like Al Qaeda and Abu Sayyaf are thrown around and current international hot button issues like global terrorism are bandied about, but as vicious as these rogue separatist groups are, discussions about them usually devolves into a tabloid-like listing of atrocities committed by these groups. Llana and Gamazon’s film doesn’t really do anything new when tackling these same complicated issues and though making Adam a lapsed Muslim did add some depth to his character the third act revelation about his father’s connection to the man pulling Adam’s strings during the film seemed so perfunctory that its introduction so late into the story made it useless and changed nothing about the story or how I viewed Adam.

Also, by making the main antagonist in the story a faceless voice on the phone, the suspense is heightened, but this also reduces the “Muslim threat” into a comic book super villain. Throughout the film, Adam’s tormentor seemingly is able to track every move he makes, knows all his personal history, and has a network of thugs and spies to do his bidding. By turning the Muslim antagonists in the story into bogeymen though, oversimplifies the conflict between the Christians and Muslims in the Philippines into a battle with the innocent Christians against heartless Islamic thugs. Of course, this conflict is anything but simple and, although Llana and Gamazon touch upon it briefly in Cavite, a lot of the conflict is rooted less in a division of religious beliefs but a socio-economic division, with the Mindanao region being one of the poorest in the Philippines.

What interested me most about the film, though, is the travelogue aspect of the story that is buried underneath the suspense film. Both Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon are Filipino Americans who grew up predominantly in the United States and although they do a fine job of capturing the dust and grime of the shantytowns and squatter camps that dot the Philippine landscape, the film does relish too much in poverty porn clichés like rabid barking dogs, crying half naked children, and polluted sumps. I’m not saying that these things don’t exist in the Philippines, sadly they are all part of the country’s urban environment, but as a sharp contrast to Llana and Gamazon’s stark and depressing portrayal of slum life, cinephiles should watch Auraeus Solito’s film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros) released the same year as Cavite. Unlike Llana and Gamazon’s film, Solito takes the Manila slums in his movie and makes it into a community populated with a variety of three-dimensional characters. The slums in Llana and Gamazon’s film, though are a place to be overcome. At least twice in the film there is a shot of a 747 flying over the shantytown that Adam has been dragged to and one can’t help but make the connection that maybe what the filmmakers are trying to say is that escape is the only route towards salvation for these people just as Adam’s family had done. Yet ironically, Adam, far from finding success and opportunity in the United States, is stuck in an unfulfilling dead end job and so although immigration away from the “mother country” may mean an improvement in one’s quality of life, it does not necessarily mean that happiness or a feeling of contentment will follow.

Another interesting thing to note is the blatant use of iconic Western franchises, specifically McDonald’s. Twice in the film, Llana and Gamazon stop the narrative cold to follow a little boy who is carrying a bag of McDonald’s and we watch as he eats a meal of burger, fries, and soda pop. The first time alone out in the street and the second time at the boy’s home as he shares his food with an old woman that we presume to be his grandmother. These two “Western meals” stand in contrast with the two “native dishes” that Adam has during his sojourn through Manila. The first is a quick snack of balut, an inexpensive Filipino snack consisting of a fertilized duck egg boiled and eaten, embryo and all. The second meal Adam has is more drink than food, specifically a soda drank Filipino style, that is from a clear plastic bag. The two scenes with the little boy and his meal of McDonald’s is shot so reverently and I’m not quite sure if the boy was coached on how to eat his food, but it’s interesting to watch the little rituals he performs; eyeing the food, unwrapping it, etc. before he goes and takes a bite. This stands in stark contrast to Adam’s two meals of balut and soda in a bag that are presented very matter-of-factly and during both times Adam is shown to be less than happy with what he’s consuming.

Beyond the use of food, another recurring motif in the film is how the faceless antagonist constantly insults Adam with a barrage of homophobic comments. Whenever Adam refuses to do something or reacts negatively to the harsh reality of slum life, the faceless antagonist will automatically question Adam’s masculinity and, then through a show of violence, force Adam into submitting to his will. This addresses an unspoken viewpoint that many Filipinos have, specifically Filipino males, which is that the Filipinos born and raised outside the country are seen as soft, weak and more feminine than the ones who were raised in the “mother country” due to the fact that Filipino Americans had certain luxuries that native-born Filipinos were deprived of. Yet, as Llana and Gamazon illustrate in several scenes within Cavite, the Philippines attraction-repulsion to all things American creates yet another divide within the culture. Thus, although Adam may look Filipino and is fluent in Tagalog, he is easily marked as different or the other by native Filipinos around him.

As a political suspense-thriller, Cavite does a decent enough job, but the film’s simplistic treatment of Christian and Muslim relations is far too heavy-handed to be effective in broaching such a hot button issue. Ultimately what the film succeeds at best is engaging the viewer in the complicated reality facing many returning Filipinos who end up feeling more like foreigners in their own country. By utilizing a Filipino American protagonist just like themselves Llana and Gamazon are allowed to explore a lot of harsh truths in the Philippines and because the protagonist is mainly a stranger to many of the customs, the filmmakers can chock up their naivety as an excuse for their one-sided viewpoint of slum life. Although Filipino cinema has begun to gain some publicity over the years, it is important for filmmakers and audiences alike to realize that, as deplorable as the situation can get in the shanty towns and squatter camps one finds in any third world countr,y this very narrow viewpoint  ignores the fact that strong communities do form and though things like poverty and crime may sadly never be abolished, it does not mean that love, family, and happiness are completely absent.

(Originally published on March 30, 2011 at VCinema Show Podcast and Blog.)

Tales of the Underworld: The Big Boss (Japan, 1959)

Kihachi Okamoto (1924-2005) was a Japanese filmmaker who spent an entire career demolishing the widely accepted viewpoint that there was any honor in violence. Although recognized as a preeminent director of action films for Toho studios his work was constantly being eclipsed by more critically acclaimed directors like Masaki Kobayashi and Akira Kurosawa. Yet, what makes Okamoto’s films prescient is how the theme of history being an invention by those in power runs throughout his oeuvre. The typical Okamoto protagonist is an outcast and victim of the times that they live in, but within this hopelessness came a freedom, be it through death or a rejection of established social codes. So please come join me as we explore the inelegant, the sardonic, the brutal, and the comic films of Kihachi Okamoto.

…

Desperado Outpost (Japan, 1959)

Kihachi Okamoto (1924-2005) was a Japanese filmmaker who spent an entire career demolishing the widely accepted viewpoint that there was any honor in violence. Although recognized as a preeminent director of action films for Toho studios his work was constantly being eclipsed by more critically acclaimed directors like Masaki Kobayashi and Akira Kurosawa. Yet, what makes Okamoto’s films prescient is how the theme of history being an invention by those in power runs throughout his oeuvre. The typical Okamoto protagonist is an outcast and victim of the times that they live in, but within this hopelessness came a freedom, be it through death or a rejection of established social codes. So please come join me as we explore the inelegant, the sardonic, the brutal, and the comic films of Kihachi Okamoto.

…