‘FILIPINAS 1941’: PHILSTAGERS INVADE THE MOVIES, CONCERT STAGE

15 November 2014

‘Filipinas 1941’

Philstagers invade the movies, concert stage

A theater review plus by JC Nigado

Filipinas 1941 poster

THE Philippine Stagers Foundation (PSF) continues to nonplus the competition by making waves to challenge other pretenders.  Early this year Vince Tañada, PSF president and artistic director, and his inner circle of performers stormed the movies in Elwood Perez’s Esoterica: Maynila, a localized modern-day reworking of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1309-1320?). The semi-allegorical film journeys through Manila’s current limbo, negotiating the extremes of the triune of existence – paradise, purgatory and hell as we know or we don’t know them.

            As such, Esoterica is a very busy film – ambitious, pretentious, twisted.  It’s like Kris Aquino, a nagging celebrity, who harbors no middle ground: either you like her or you don’t.  Anchored by Ronnie Liang, in a subdued turn minus the usual actor’s treacle, including his “narrative voice,” the film moves and runs its course helter-skelter until it falls flat, not on its face, mind you, but on its butt.  Now, there’s such a thing, as idioms and clichés are engaged and reinvented, just like in many of Perez’s licentious oeuvre.

            A word of caution: Don’t watch Esoterica: Maynila on a full stomach, an easy magnet for indigestion on nausea, as one theater and film veteran put it, after trying to ingest and digest the movie of framed images and ideas. And then, the “unframing” begins...

            On Monday, Nov. 24, the Stagers (stager is an archaic word for actor) will blast the Araneta Smart Coliseum to the rafters, as they break the concert ground in a reported one-hour-and-forty-five-minute celebration of Broadway songs, OPM and foreign pop and tracks of their own original musicals like Bonifacio and Filipinas 1941.

            Already, PSF has booked 14,000 of its captive audiences in schools around Metro Manila, and more tickets are being sold out as the date approaches.  Oh, God, the Devil in Nanding Josef of the CCP’s Tanghalang Pilipino must be salivating and gnashing his teeth, from ear to envious ear.  Can you, or anybody else for that matter, beat that madding and maddening crowd for an audience?

            At any rate, “how dare” Tañada and his whole caboodle of wannabes to be treading sacred grounds where even angels, good or evil, fear to tread. One could almost hear others unable to match the Stagers’ daring and dealing power surely howling, amidst the nonstop ringing of cash in their mendicant mind.  There are many CCPs in the country!

            Well, after the hollering, the Stagers’ singing starts – with or without Plus One!

            By the way, it’s not true that the Cultural Center of the Philippines is cash strapped.  The whole act, according to some CCP insiders, is a Grand Charade, to cover up something or some things.  They said, it’s been going on since Day One, 45 years ago, when Gloria Diaz won the country’s first Miss Universe crown in 1969.

            The entire CCP complex is often booked in advance, one way or the other, they added.  The culture of corruption in this “smallish” government agency is such that even the “clueless” Commission on Audit cannot audit or commit itself to do anything about it.

             So, who’s raking in the rakish money at the CCP – the other Corruption Center of the Philippines?

            Now, let’s go back to the enterprising Philstagers and their ongoing musical on tour. The invitation to watch Vince Tañada’s Filipinas 1941 came with a cautionary text via cellphone: “It’s commercial!” The subtext being: “Please don’t take it seriously...” Coming from the writer-director-producer himself, the advance “excuse” was an unveiled attempt at modesty and humility.

            However, there’s nothing modest and humble about Tañada’s production of Filipinas 1941. Starting with the multi-level set, which looks simple and minimalist to the untrained eye, but is actually an expensive fiberglass of layered “stone walls” that frame the play’s dramatic terrain of parallel narratives. Then, the story begins its three-hour run; an epic spectacle spaced in historical context, fractured by war, and set to functional music.

            “Wala ka man... Wala ka maaaan...” the four leads sing in solo or in quartet, and the house hums to a melodious chorus, proof positive that Pipo Cifra’s music is effective and on target with the right emotion being played out in scene after scene.  But...

            What the script lacks in narrative structure and plot development, the dynamic performance of the entire cast more than makes up for an entertaining and involving show all around. In a sense, the attraction of Filipinas 1941 lies precisely in its flaws, flashing up and bright like familiar failures in a hurry.

            Observes an attentive theater veteran: “Filipinas 1941 is one of the better productions of Philippine Stagers Foundation.  It is much, much better than Nestor Torre’s Katy, the local version of Piaf and Aida; more engaging than Chris Millado’s take on Mario O‘Hara’s Stageshow; and can be compared to the Resort World’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

            “A spectacle; big, big cast; costumes galore; creative lighting; parang painting ni Sanso ang set. Acting is generally okay, as usual.  The four leads are outstanding, particularly the two girls – Adele (Ibarrientos) and Cindy (Liper), and Patrick (Libao), who is the most subdued among them.  Also mentioned is Vince (Tañada), who still occasionally plays to the audience or fans!

             “Chris Lim’s take on Douglas MacArthur is special and novel.  Energy all over is comparable to PETA and Kambayoka of yore.  Script is mishmash though and full of clichés, even the ‘twists’ are pang-komiks.  Para kang nanonood ng Sampaguita or Star Cinema movie (pang-fans).

            “Some scenes are indulgent.  Music, as always, is parang orchestra ang arrangement – thick, full, vibrant and apt, pero hindi ma-recall ang melodies sa first sitting.  The play is epic in length.”

            Need I say more? Indeed, some nominations are in order, but certain choices bear watching.  I’ve seen PETA’s Rak of Aegis (twice), Priscilla (twice) and other musicals this season, but it would be hard to beat the lead performances of Cindy Liper and Patrick Libao.  Then there’s Chris Lim’s parody of the US military, symbolized by MacArthur, in an impressive featured role, an ironic satire of a flawed character whose politics is steeped in blood and cold cash.

            At any rate, Rak of Aegis, despite its hackneyed storyline, would give every musical in town not only a run for their money but also for well-deserved awards. Note the fluid set as it creates a “character” that drives the play’s narrative eloquence.

            Nevertheless, Filipinas 1941 stands a fighting chance in any thorough theater appraisal. For one thing, the fusion of fact and fiction serves to entertain and instruct not only about people, places and events before, during and after the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, but also about the real role of America’s involvement and its imperialist design up to the present.

            Ultimately, the self-proclaimed (“I shall return!”) hero, Gen. Douglas MacArthur is finally “exposed” as a fraud and mercenary.  The play’s epilogue informs us that on Jan. 1, 1942 Commonwealth President Manuel L. Quezon paid MacArthur $500,000 in exchange for his wartime services. (MacArthur was subsequently dismissed by US President Harry S. Truman after his stint as commander in chief of the United Nations in the Korean War, 1950-51. – JCN.)

            Like any other PSF production, Filipinas 1941 carries the company’s hallmark: “To entertain, perchance to educate.”

            Anyone who disagrees with this vision is a disservice to the basic and bigger cause of theater and show business as a whole.  In fact, the successful union of craft and commerce is where the Philippine Stagers Foundation has upstaged, if inadvertently, the competition, many of which are in direful straits.

            Art as the universal leveler, needless to say, is rendered relevant by the sustained and sustainable admission of large mass audiences to its fold, for it to thrive and prevail.

JC Nigado

Tagurabong City, Philippines, 2014

            

‘‪#‎Y’: SUICIDE IN THE AGE OF SELFIE

11 August 2014

‘‪#‎Y’: SUICIDE IN THE AGE OF SELFIE

A film review by JC NIGADO

#Y movie poster

NO ONE’S licensed for suicide,” or so says Nadie Smith, an acclaimed 24-year-old English-Jamaican female author of recent vintage.

Still, some people take liberties with their own lives and knowingly leap into the unknown.

Such is the reality of a self-destructive character that is carefully examined through the lenses of a young filmmaker, who engages the ideas of European and US thinkers, to create a novel film framed in Filipino middle-class setting.

A stunning breakthrough since Mike de Leon, “#Y” (2014) indicates that Philippine cinema has finally come of age. And this time it’s global, in keeping with the present preoccupation on “borderless” activities that include the economy, education, politics and social media.

The analytic Lav(rente) Diaz cuts a dash in his laborious but literary “Norte: Hangganan ng Kasaysayan” (2013), a four-hour-and-ten-minute peroration on Philippine politics and economy, raising it to significant psychological and spiritual levels.

To do so the fiftysomething Diaz plumbs Russia’s 19th-century classic, “Crime and Punishment” (1866) of Feodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1963), a contemporary classic, also from Russia, and translates them to his own native experience. The resulting film, “Norte,” now stands among the classics of slow-but-seething cinema of, according to certain critics, Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Dreyer, Roberto Rossellini and even Ingmar Bergman.

Comes now 24-year-old Gino M. Santos, wearing chic and clean-cut, and a whole generation and several lifestyles removed from Diaz, right on the latter’s filmic heel. True to his provenance, Santos’s “#Y” shows a curious slice of his own generation’s milieu, with the integrity and power of youth. Together with his also youthful writer, Jeff Stelton, they mine the genius of 20th-century Western literature of alienation, most notably Samuel Becket (“Malone Dies,” 1951, “Waiting for Godot,” 1952), Albert Camus, Jerome David Salinger, Bret Easton Ellis and Stephen Chbosky.

Youth and its achievement are the common threads that connect them. J.D. Salinger was 31 when his famously celebrated “The Catcher in the Rye” first saw print in 1951; Bret Easton Ellis was just 20, and still in college, when he wrote and published “Less than Zero” in 1985; and Stephen Chbosky must have been close to his “chum” Charlie, in years and in substance, in “The Perks of a Wallflower” (1999).

Of course, the then young prodigious talents Becket and Camus predate the three aforementioned US authors in the early part f the 20th century. Becket was 31 when his “largely ignored” –initially, that is—masterpiece, “Murphy,” was first published in 1938; and Camus was 29 when “The Stranger” (or “The Outsider”) first saw the light in 1942.

How the youthful Santos and Stelton have distilled the thoughts, from subtle to deep, of these outstanding literary stalwarts, and then woven them to their film’s tapestry is no mean feat. On the main, “#Y” is not a film with a story to tell, so to speak, but a condition to portray. And though well crafted to its utmost details, including the exquisite sound design and music score, the director rarely resorts to “technical cleverness” to illustrate the theme and advance its narrative.

Santos’s straight simplicity roots the film at once in the actual instance of suicide, for its opening sequence, and then moves to the everyday and the pages of the written word. The skyline shot of the 21-year-old protagonist, Miles Santiago Mendoza (the initials MSM, a play on information technology’s MMS?), perched on the ledge of the 21st story suggests an anxious faith on a free fall.

The edgy scene’s obvious visual reference quickly calls to mind the Chinese movie “Amphetamine’s” similar opening scene and, later, also the same film’s familiar closing shot, with that of Miles’s fatal plunge, sans the surreal and the hallucinatory. Intentional is the filmmaker’s deliberate device to speak through the suicide victim’s mind, in the spirit of an “autobiographical account,” which is alchemy of several selves.

Santos paints with pain his screen canvass, and with seeming ease and familiarity like a life being lived at the moment –from the first hint of foreboding (i.e. Miles’s parents’ bedroom discussion of their son’s delicate condition while the latter eavesdrops from their dividing wall, a fine defining moment) to the climactic fall. Throughout the film, Miles’s fragmented faith wavers as he negotiates between frail and failing relationships that surround him. Dislocated from himself and from others, Miles’s fate is tinged with despair and isolation that grow worse by the day. The banality of his existence, despite relentless partying and peer bonding, reflects the gnawing emptiness of Camus’s anti-hero, Mersault (“The Outsider”), whose character, observes one writer, “demonstrates the meaninglessness of life beyond the meaning one is willing to ascribe o it.”

All this, plus the pang of melancholy passively charged all over Elmo Magalona’s face and his whole persona provide the essence of his affecting performance, quietly ranging it on steady and shifting nuances, from start to finish. Intermittently, the film breaks the fourth wall, whenever Magalona faces and speaks to his therapist (or audience), before he eventually breaks down in silence.

This realization and resignation to one’s essentially meaningless existence are chronicled in today’s cinematic terms through an endless cocktail of drugs, sex, alcohol and parties galore. The intimate and casual conversation about morality, politics and religion, specifically sex, virginity, corruption and Catholicism, renders inoperative the ordinary opinion that “youth is wasted on the young,” thanks to Colleen Garcia’s appropriate acting and pertinent rhetoric.

Indeed, the vast waste and wretchedness that permeate throughout the world are telling legacies of the adult and old order that consume us to this very day. What then is the purpose of life, the film posits, in a world vacated by God?

“#Y” is both a statement and a warning coming not out of the mouth of babes, as it were, but from young lives lived to the fullest of their seemingly limited and limitless experience. George Orwell’s omniscient Big Brother, from the groundbreaking and highly political novel, “1984” (published 1949), appears and disappears like a fleeting “all-seeing eye,” portrayed with surprising turn by the otherwise staid Slater Young, as he scrupulously watches his sibling “ward.” By design, “eye pieces” are literally placed on the set (e.g. Miles’s bedroom), positioned to serve like CCTVs, as if to monitor Miles’s every move and whereabouts. Ironically, that which is consciously being avoided-- even a mere mention (of suicide) -- is that which actually happens to the subject.

Holden Caulfield’s “crazy cliff” in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” is mirrored in the ledge of a towering condominium that proclaims its faith in bold, large letters, though only seen from their fringes: IN GOD WE TRUST –partly and oblique, not unlike the unfull faith of the suicidal Miles. The techie selfie replaces the usual suicide note of yesterday, thus transmitting instant video images of the self-destructive act at the very moment of committing it. Departing from Virginia Woolf’s line of not describing the “experience” Santos (through Miles) instead shows suicide as it happens, sharing intense terror that surely would scar family and friends forever.

All other references, cinematic or otherwise, in the lushly layered film resonate with the here and now of blank commercialism that characterizes Generation Y. In sum, Santos and Stelton’s “#Y” is a direful indictment of a continuing colonial and colonized mind. Only this time around, the colonizers have become native and are our very own, but make us “foreign” in many ways.

In the end, “the city and generation that grew up knowing nothing else, rendered incapable of understanding anything about themselves or those that surround them” merely perpetuates the pleasure principle, as people remain lost in the quagmire of money and material goods. Gorgeous Kit Thompson’s vigorous masturbation scene, shown half-naked and on triple-split screen, and cut in on his occasional lovemaking, reveals a kind of current energy and mindless ethic at work.

They say the act of suicide is intended to punish someone or some people. In “#Y,” the case or the intended to be punished is not personal per se: rather it’s the entire system—society’s dysfunction and not the individual’s—that Miles is “suiciding” against, and therefore scathingly punishes.

As disaffection and emptiness simply float past in the film, an ancient romantic notion is freely dispelled and deconstructed: Love does not conquer all; death does.

JULIO CINCO NIGADO
Tagurabong City, Philippines, 2014

NORA AUNOR: NATIONAL ADDICT, NATIONAL ARTIST?

Biyernes, Nobyembre 8, 2013

NORA AUNOR: NATIONAL ADDICT, NATIONAL ARTIST?

SI NORA Aunor, 61, (Mayo 21, 1952), ay isang certified addict in different degrees.

            Noong Dekada ’70 (1970s) pa lang ay nag-umpisa na siyang magumon sa pera, alak, sigarilyo, sex, sugal at iba pang bisyo.

            Kung kailan siya nabulid sa droga, sa kanyang buong kamalayan at  sistema, ay tanging siya at ang matatalik lang niyang mga kaibigan at kasamahan ang makapagsasabi.  Ano’ng sey nyo, Boboy at Boyet?

            Maraming kuwento noon sa mga shooting ng pelikula at taping sa TV kung pa’no mag-jamming sina Guy at ang mga katropa niya.  Ano ba ang resulta sa kanyang naging relasyon sa mga Richard Merck, John Rendez at iba pang kahanay nila? Di ba, Julio Diaz?

But “the height of her drug days ay nang masakote siya sa U.S. (March 30, 2005) na may dalang droga sa kanyang bag.  Kung anu-anong mga balita ang lumabas at naligaw, hanggang isang araw nasumpungan na lang ang report na siya’y ikinasal na sa kapwa tomboy na si Nori Sayo, an umano’y siya rin tumatayong manager niya noon. Ang Drug Moll at ang Drag Mule, bow!

            Superstar, Superstir!

            Ang pagiging sugapa ni Nora sa sugal ay naibalita sa halos lahat ng sulok sa U.S. at Pilipinas.  Kamakailan, sa Macau naman siya nabalitang nagliliwaliw at pati ang dating Noranian na si Anthony Solis ay nabubuwisit na umano sa kanya, ayon sa showbiz grapevine.

            Binabanggit ko ang mga ito dahil napapanahon na siguro upang pumili at magbigay-pugay tayo sa modernong Pilipino na sugapa sa maraming bagay.  Tutal, ang Pilipinas ay isa sa mga sentro ng drug, human at sex trafficking sa buong mundo, at ang pagsusugal ay pumalit na yata sa dati nating “pastime” na tsismis.

            Kaya napapanahon na rin na tanghaling “National Addict” si Nora Aunor bilang pagbibigay natin ng halaga sa lahat ng klase ng mga addict sa Pilipinas, kasama na ang mga addict sa pork barrel sa pulitika at gobyerno.

            Kung mayroon tayong “Pork Barrel King” na naturingan at “Pork Barrel Queen” na tinatawag, natural na dapat ay magkaroon din tayo ng “National Addicts,” at “National Scam Artists.”

            At napag-uusapan na rin lang, may mga haka-haka na any moment ay baka i-announce na ng Pork Barrel King ang mga napiling National Artists kuno ng administrasyong ito bilang tugon sa naunang apat na National “Con Artists” ng bilanggong dating Pangulong GMA.

            Dapat ay sabay na parangalang National Artists sina Nora Aunor at Carlo J. Caparas at isama na rin ang dating pinulitikang National Artist na si Eddie Romero.

            Teka nga pala, ano bang pelikula ang maaaring ikarangal nina Romero at Caparas upang matawag silang National Artists for Film? Isa, dalawa, wala!

            Parang si Dophy rin.  Ano bang magandang pelikula mayroon ang yumaong komedyante upang i-consider siya bilang National Aritst for Film?

Wala akong makita kundi pawang potboilers.

            Sa madaling salita, pulos mga pelikula lang na ang tanging dahilan kaya ginawa ay upang kumita at kumita sa takilya.  At na-achieve na nina Carlo at Dolphy ang box-office success noon para sa mga “pekeng” pelikula nila.

            So what do they need the National Artist for? Masyado na bang “commercial” ang kalakaran ng National Artist, maliban sa pagiging “political” at pamumulitika nito? Paging the dying CCP and the corrupt NCCA...

            Pero si Nora Aunor ay karapatdapat na hiranging National Artist, dahil sumisimbolo siya ng maraming mga miserableng Pilipino na walang sapat na trabaho at ikinabubuhay nang matiwasay.

            Hayon nga at pati ang TV5, ang layaw na network na nagkamaling kunin siya ay ‘di na yata nagbabayad sa kanya sa maraming kadahilanan.

            Remiss sa trabaho. Late o wala sa taping.  Umaalis ng bansa nang ‘di nagpapaalam at iniiwang nakatiwangwang ang naka-schedule na trabaho.  Etc, etc, etc.

            Hanggang marami ang ‘di natututo ay tila ‘di rin matututo ang isang Nora Aunor.  Gaya rin ng maraming Pilipino.

            In short, Nora as National Artist may be a “popular choice.”  But we are sending the “wrong signal.”

            Mabuhay ang mga addict sa loob at labas ng gobyerno!

N. B. Lumabas din sa kolum na “Alipato“ ni Jake Villanueva, centerspread, Pasabog, Nobyembre 8, 2013.