transformers

Three reasons for seeing this film. To hear Optimus Prime's concerned-general's voice. To see how many people are killed in the urban war of the robots. To find out how the Autobots triumph in the end (it's always like that anyway). Haaay. What did you expect anyway?

I liked it. Or at least the comedy and the action didn't leave room enough to yawn and wonder where all this is going. Cars, trucks, planes, tanks will ee-ah-ah-uh-uh into giant robots and pummel each other with fists, buildings, and energy blasts. You knew all that when you saw the movie posters and the trailers. I really went in the theater without my whining brain, because I wanted to be a kid again and just lose myself in CG action.

Thankfully, the explosions and bent-metal noise and the epic-size city-wide destruction, and the simple plot didn't water down the prospect of seeing, well, Transformers talk and do stuff.

The geek-turned-hero gets the girl angle is cute. I love the part where the parents are proud to see a gorgeous girl in their son's bedroom. There's even a slap stick moment when the bigger-than-a-house Prime hides from the parents.

So Megatron is after the Cube so he can build more Decepticons, and Prime is after it to destroy it, but in the end Prime says they can't rebuild their home because the Cube is gone, or at least only a memento-sized chunk is left; leading me to ask why he wanted it destroyed in the first place?

Yep. That's my whining brain kicking in. Complaints now follow. Like how the Autobots said that Autobots stood for something like automated something or other robots. I had waited till the end of the film to hear a Decepticon or two explain what deception stood for (deceptive emoticons?). Never mind.

And then there's that part when Prime says, "Autobots, roll out." But then they are in biped mode so instead of rolling out, they hop to it. Bad CG acting? or bad script? Never mind.

(Oh yeah. They said "More than meets the eye" three times. I was waiting for that.)

As you will have noticed, Bumblebee is not a cute yellow Beetle but a slick yellow Camaro. It's not the same, but it's now awful, too. Let it go. His first scene in the film had him beside an old Beetle, maybe making us hope that Volkswagen had agreed at the last minute to license their car for the film. Not.

Now for the obituaries. They killed Jazz; they killed the Porsche. In exchange, they killed the tank, the helicopter gunship, the CD player, the police car, and threw Megatron back into the cold abyss. The scorpion thing burrowed and escaped. The fighter plane lived, too. And yes the Nokia thing also died.

And because the Autobots have nowhere to go, they are now Earth's mightiest boarders. Let's wait for the sequel.

film review: next

Chris (Nicolas Cage) can see and hear and feel events two minutes into the future, but only if it involves him. He makes a living as a magician in Las Vegas, pretending to trick his audience that he can read minds; something that preps up the common sleight of hand tricks he does on stage. To augment his living, his gambles in calculated proportions--gambles against slot machines and on card tables, preferring to win small so as not to be noticed. Until the night the casino security notices his conservative but consistent winning streak.

Liz (Jessica Biel) is a part-time teacher in an Indian reservation. Chris could only see two minutes into the future, until his reach extended so that he saw her walking into a diner at a precise time every morning, on an uncertain day. He has been waiting for her to come into that diner ever since. The day it happened, Chris "projected" various scenarios, several two minute shows, until he hit one wherein he buys into woman's sympathies. The next morning, waking up in her arms in a motel, he found out that any future occurrences involving her in his life magnified his clairvoyance. Projecting probably some two hours into the future, without leaving her embrace, he realized he made a mistake in his attempt to help the FBI track a nuclear bomb explosion before it happened. In that two hour projection, though Jessica survived and most of the terrorists killed, the bomb still went off.

Next is a film that plays on the premise of a what-if that I love. Guy has powers, wants a normal life, uses it to earn a depressed but hedonistic life, he thought he was ok until a girl came into the picture. It could use some more character development, but then the pace would be affected, and the pace is either two minutes or two hours into the future--tic tock. Chris' voice over narration plays with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the thing about seeing into the future is that once you peek, it changes, because you peeked.

Asteeg sya. I loved it. I am so mababaw. I should be complaining of not enough narrative devices used and so on, but I liked the action and the premise. So Hollywoodishly simple, but not so gross as to be stereotypical. Just good enough for pop corn and small talk, not epic enough to be debated over lunch. (Never a bad thing for an action movie with a cool premise to explore to end quickly.)

Agent Ferris (Julianne Moore) is the FBI agent who gets wind of Chris' statistically improbable reasoning behind his actions, and has somehow channeled FBI resources to tracking down a magician. Never mind how she got clearance for that. Whatever saves democratic America, one guesses, be it a two-minute fortune teller, or a web slinger. Geeze.

But back to the film. Never mind the incessant talks about do you believe in destiny crap, it only lasts for a few minutes. And then you get to see Chris saving his SWAT-uniformed FBI crew while guiding them through sniper fire and booby traps. Cool.

He can see into the future enough to be mud hole and dirty puddle filthy rich and he chooses to have a normal life, awwww, nobility complex anyone? And promises his girl he'll be back once he helps out in a thing about a bomb.

The ending is the sad part, not because they all got killed. The entire action and chase sequences involving the search for the bomb are all Chris' two hour projection--God that's a spoiler, I have seen one and half hours into the future, towards the end of the film. Sue me.

Anyway, I think the film failed to build some tension into what Chris' voice over had been hinting at since the beginning. The moment you see the future, you are compelled to act on that vision, thereby changing the course of events. This means the scenario wherein the bomb went off anyway, could still happen. The reason he was not able to see a possible future involving his finding the bomb was because he was not able to physically tie himself up with any event involving any physical proximity to the bomb. Now, that is a mouthful. Watch the film and see if you can get my meaning.

If you don't like the film, you can at least talk it over it with me.

Oh yeah, on a side note, Nicolas Cage is taking on slow action movies in his aging years. I think maybe he's seen the future.

stoopid third installment: spiderman 3

It was an origin movie that set the bar for comics-to-film standards. I was talking about the first Spiderman film. Peter Parker was having problems and the first, and also the second film, was all about that: the basic and effective plot of how a character can change. Adolescent coping were both themes in the first two installments, and a theme many can touch-base with. Even without powers, we've all gone through such growing up doubts as Peter did. And even if Peter had powers, he was still human like us: confused, pulled by his desires, forced to make mature decisions.

I have no idea what was mature in Spiderman 3. Peter was there, Aunt May, Mary Jane, and some villains. The absurd but tough, harsh but funny Manhattan ambiance was gone. Take out the Spidey costume and the Spidey tunes and the whole thing would be a Christopher Reeves-Superman movie. New York loves Spidey, right. J. Jonah Jameson has been reduced to an obligatory counterpoint (although his first scene I found funny), and Peter, with the scriptwriter paying no attention to how time works in this universe has "mastered" his life: top of his class (how can he attend classes and study with a near-fulltime vigilante job?), has a police scanner in his room (how does he choose which to respond to?), and seems to be able to make his rent payments on his photographer job alone (something he was barely able to do in Spiderman 2).

For a fulltime photographer, he doesn't seem to be carrying his camera in most scenes. But these are the small things.

The real problem is that there is no plot to talk about. Hence, nothing to hurl a deep character against. Doctor Octopus in contrast was allotted time and dialogue and definitive scenes, enough to make you connect with him, and somewhat hate and later forgive and respect. Can you say that to any of the buffoons Parker fought against in this film?

And so we come to the subproblem. Character development. Forget about the fight scenes in the end. If you give Harry Osborne and Parker a wand each, it would be a Harry Potter movie. Promise.

So first action scene, with Harry and Parker fighting, seemed impressive at first, but only because I had thought it was a seed for complication: Parker was fighting and shooting web and swinging--in his civilian outfit. A witness with a camphone could record it and sell it to the Daily Bugle. Wonder of wonders. It didn't happen.

Oh yeah. Character development. While Spiderman 2 took time to explain Doc Oc's mechanical arms, like how it worked and how it served to be Doc Oc's character flaw (other than pride that is), Spiderman 3 explained nothing about the alien symbiote and how a man can be merged with sand and afterwards become conscious and be able to control the sand.

Giving a sample of the symbiote to Dr. Connor, Parker's Physics teacher doesn't count. Like Connor said himself, he's not a biologist. Plus the scenes where her explains the symbiote's characteristics seen forced. Forget about the Sandman. When he got mixed with water, he adapted and became Mudman, and later on Swampwater man, and when he dried up he was back to being his sand self. Please.

Spiderman 3 tried the formula that brought the downfall of the Batman enterprise (the one with Michael Keaton in it): more villains, less of a story, more fight scenes, lousy dialogue, and mood forced by a musical score.

The cheapest thing by far is Parker's voice over in the beginning and end; cheap in that instead of telling the story through scenes, the scriptwriters chose to sum it up in words.

Over two hours, this film, and so many parts can be deleted, like Parker's dancing acts, and even Mary Jane's scenes.

Oh crap. This movie botched it up. The story will always hold the film together, but instead we get action scenes and bad dialogue. I should not have gone to the theaters to see this. I had not wanted to believe the reviews. But there it is.

A bad script killed the spider.

mission impossible 3

My friends and I have a joke about Tom Cruise's recent movie. We dub it Mission Impossible 3, subtitled "This time, it just can't be done." Then, we hum the movie theme happily (duhn duhn duhn duhn duhn, dah duuuuuuhn!) and we have a good laugh. The producers, director, and scriptwriters of this film. Who do they think they were kidding?

Impossible Missions Force (IMF) Agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has almost settled down to a life away from the dangers of his job. On the night of his engagement party, he is hauled back into active duty from semi-retirement (IMF agent training) when his former student (Keri Russell) is taken prisoner by a black marketer. Russell dies. Villain kidnaps Hunt's fiancé. He is forced to steal against his agency. The mole surfaces. Hunt kills everyone that matters. End of story.

Why Hunt would retire in the first place was never explained credibly in the film. When he teams up with Ving Raimes, with whom he worked in the first two M:I films, the wind blows through Hunt's hair and he is all smiles: he doesn't look like he has aged at all. A quiet life and that much self-assurance doesn't seem to match. Besides, do you remember a Tom Cruise film wherein Cruise, as the protagonist, actually faced a problem he seemed incapable of solving? Me neither. Cruise can't seem to accept that he can't act. Instead, parts are made for him.

So much for a credible conflict wherein Hunt will face and emerge hurt but triumphant. You sort of get the feeling that Hunt will come out of all this alive, good-looking, smiling, and with his woman. Oh my God, that's exactly how the film ends.

Far fetched scenarios, gadgetry every time, duhn duhn duhn score now and again, a bountiful of explosions, face masks and voice perfectly mimicked, well-coordinated team movements, a villain designed just bad enough but not character-deep so that Hunt remains on top of your waning attention span.

Pretty soon this will be in HBO. Not worth the ticket. If you notice that the pop corn tastes bad during the film, it's not the pop corn, or you, that's a little off. It's the film.

It's just, impossible. (Dah duuuuuuhn!)

x-men 3

Police officers in the lead car in a convoy of black vehicles see a cloaked figure down the road. The figure facing the convoy does not move. The convoy does not slow down. The old man in the middle of the road raises his hand, points it toward the first car. The car is lifted off the ground. The man clenches his raised open palm. The car is crushed. He flicks his upheld arm toward his right. The floating, crushed car is tossed aside like a broken toy. The second car is disposed of in the same manner. The 10-wheeler behind the two front cars, whose freight car contains prisoners, is now visible. The truck will run the lone figure over in seconds. He flicks his hand upward. The freight car is unhinged from the truck. It will skid on the asphalt road until its momentum runs out. The truck surges ahead. The old man raises his other hand and the truck somersaults toward and above him, as though it tripped on an unseen obstacle. It crashes behind him. There are no survivors. The car behind the convoy and its occupants are crushed just as easily. Magneto, now joined by his henchmen, walks toward the back of the truck where locks and hinges burst away from the thick metal door. At the far end of the truck, Mystique, the Master of Magnetism's right hand, stands waiting, now liberated from her captors.

I would not have been able to describe the above scene as tightly if director Brett Ratner had not assembled the entire film as seamlessly, something I did not expect. The previous film (Xmen 2) had one too many mutants. You can't develop character when almost every mutant is allotted some airtime. The first film seemed too focused on Logan (Wolverine), who Xavier had to tame and who Scott Summers (Cyclops) had to keep away from his willing-to-flirt girlfriend Jean Grey.

To me, the first two films felt obligatory, with characters introduced, even if they had little to do with the story's narrative, and scenes where mutants demonstrated their powers were inserted throughout the films. The action felt stale. You are just glad the film is over.

Understandably, the stage simply had to be set so Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Eric (Magneto) could trade dramatically delivered dialogue, with Xavier espousing the Uncle Ben principle ("With great powers come great responsibility") and Eric paraphrasing Nietzsche's Superman principle (it is a disservice to themselves for Homo Sapiens Superior to curb their powers according to the dictates of mediocre human leaders).

Xmen 3 has no such obligatory feel. With the primary Xavier-Eric conflict and hate/fear toward mutants already established, the third instalment to the mutant franchise explores two interwoven plots. The first is Xavier's delicate gamble: under his care all along was a class 5 mutant more powerful than Magneto and himself--Jean Grey (What if she goes wild?). The second concerns the consequences when a "cure" is mandated by the US Government to be injected on all mutants. The cure claims to lay permanently dormant the genes responsible for mutants' powers and appearances (Would all mutants want a normal life?).

Director Brett Ratner made me forget I had a tumbler-full of cheesed popcorn, until the movie's end credits rolled up the screen.

In a flashback ten years from the film's present, Xavier and Eric, then friends, is talking a young Jean Grey into studying at Xavier's school.

"Oh, Charles, I like this one," Eric said as both men and Jean sat in the Grey family's living room; jut outside the window, several feet from the ground were all the cars in eyesweep. Jean was showing off. "I doubt it," she arrogantly said when told she was not the only one with powers.

Flashforward. Jean's traumatic near-death experience in Xmen 2, when she sacrificed herself to save the Blackbird (the Xmen's plane), had broken the psychic restraints Xavier had used to shackle Jean's desire-filled other personality, Phoenix. Phoenix killed Scott, nearly seduced Logan, and with Magneto watching and unable to stop her, she lifted Xavier from his wheelchair and disintegrated him.

Thrilled with his potential new weapon, Magneto brings the wayward Jean to his secret camp, where she is wooed into coming with Magneto's recruited army of mutants to Alcatraz Island, where the facilities for producing the mutant cure was found, and to help destroy the forces that aim to make mutantdom as mediocre as everyone else.

I am relieved that this time, Jean's telekinesis (the ability to move objects with one's mind) has been promoted--from being merely able to lift and shove people and objects aside, to dismantling and shredding and disintegrating matter (and people), and lifting the silvery ashes upward, in a grand demonstration of conceit and power.

And then there is Sir Ian McKellen's incarnation of Magneto, who majestically wields his powers and elegantly dodges Xavier's rhetoric on the need for all mutants to be good. I have a soft spot for villains whose words sting and linger and wound, and whose mere intent can kill a multitude.

I will not mind a fourth instalment.

comforting prose

When my head's not swirling due to deadlines and the slight fever they trigger, Kerima Polotan keeps me company:

"Sunday comes like a benediction. All week long, life is a rush and a nightmare; you kill yourself trying to beat the alarm clock, to make the deadline, to get to the corner before the traffic jam; or, if you don't have to go anywhere, you hurry everyone out of the house; children to school, husband to work, maid to market, only to prepare for that mad hour when they come rushing back home so you can stuff them with supper and put them to sleep to renew strength for that sprint our of the house the following day. But Sunday lifts the pressure suddenly and one of its little luxuries is to let the alarm clock ring and ring and ring while you turn around and burrow into your pillow for some more sleep."

Kerima Polotan, "The Joys of Sunday,"
Adventures in a Forgotten Country
(UP Press, 1999, p. 117)

Her prose seems to come right out of nowhere, and now that it's here, you don't want to it go away. But it's gone, whatever it is, and you struggle to read and reread to get more of that magic you think belongs to the words, and it does, as much as it belongs, too, to the spaces between them, and somehow, you think, you want to document life like that: so mundane, so familiar, with a sense of things passing, never being what they used to, except maybe in memory.

"I bought our bread there from a woman who must have been born old, or it was probably just the flour on her hair and face she never completely washed off. A bakery affects me the way a jewelry store affects other women, I guess--I stand there surrounded by trays of cakes and rolls, inhaling deeply, and I cannot quite make out exactly how I feel, as I am distracted by doors opening in my mind through which darts this little girl with her wild curls and her dark knees, clambering up a stool to point with a dirty wet coin at her favorite bun."

"This Way to the Museum" (Polotan, 1999, p. 131)

I want to just catalogue life like that, in its slow, inching crawl to wherever it's headed, never worrying about plot, everything just a swirl of what I see and hear and touch and what's out there, moving and shouting and standing still, dying, resentful, happy, obscene, naive, benign and evil--all at the same time.

So yeah. Nice book.

pinoy detective fiction

Smaller and Smaller Circles by FH Batacan
Published by the University of the Philippines Press, 2003.

The body count had reached six before the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) sought the services of two Jesuit priests: forensic anthropologist Gus Saenz, to examine the victims' corpses, C.S.I. style; and clinical psychologist Jerome Lucero, to build the killer's profile to hasten the manhunt.

Six teenage boys found dead at the Payatas area had their faces, genitals and internal organs removed. In Saenz's comfy hi-tech lab in Ateneo, the evidence point to the same knife used on the victims, each of whom died on the first Saturday of the month.

The tidy knife job and corpse dumping suggest meticulousness and skill. The consistent date of death, a ritual; something with which to start the month right.

A serial killer is on the prowl, which the NBI can't begin to admit, and can't fathom how to track down.

This is because, Batacan writes, "Little attention is paid to determining patterns: a missing persons' physical type or age, the geographical area in which he or she disappeared or reappeared, the condition in which he or she has been found."

This leads to the prevalent myth that there are no serial killers in the country, even though serial killing, she writes, "is not a solely Western phenomenon...and that the inadequacy and sloppiness of local police methods and intelligence techniques stand in the way of its detection."

In short, no one is watching, except, in this case, two men of the cloth "with no staff, limited resources and often, no official authority, performing the kind of investigative work that very few people in the country--and civilians at that--are capable of doing."

This is an excerpt from my review of Smaller and Smaller Circles. It's an unexpected good-enough read. For a teaser review, click here and here. Try to read the teasers first, because mine gives everything away: judgmental synopsis and all.

The development, or the chase (which is painstakingly slow), is seen through the lives of the characters: the sleuths (two Jesuit priests--recall Umberto Echo's 'In the Name of the Rose'), the victims' mothers, the reporter hot on the serial-murder-scoop and her adopted father/segment producer); the National Bureau of Investigation agent; and of course that of the killer himself (who is from UP Manila--could this be a hint that the freedom to improve is the self-same freedom to degenerate?).

Two things slow down the story's pace. One is the telling of the characters' back stories. Another is the series of lectures on forensic investigation: how date of death is approximated, inferences on weapon type and killer profile based on depth of cuts, manner of mutilation, and so on. Remember, this was written some five years before C.S.I. made it here through cable TV. The book's concept was original at the time; probably why it won the grand prize in the Palanca awards.

Don't expect tense dark alley chases or gun-point drama. The priests are not deputized to make arrests, they carry no guns, and they are relying on their own resources (forensic equipment, air fare, unofficial intelligence sources, etc.--good thing they're Ateneans, they can afford it). One subtle message in the book is that professional forensic-detective work leading to an arrest, in this country, is nearly a miracle. Probably why priests are the detectives--they are morally untainted, at least compared to cops; and they answer to a higher morality, at least as far as their image goes. The ending, where the killer is bullet-holed, and one of the priests offers himself as a killer-negotiator (and nearly gets martyred), is a comforting closure. Justice was not to be served by human courts (a tainted extension of the police), but by heaven. The killer's psyche was too damaged by teenage trauma to do otherwise--his shrewdness evolved out of an inability to cope with the pain. This is his salvation.

The pace of the investigation felt realistic. The book detailed the causes of delay--the NBI investigator wanted to hog media attention; and there was no national database of committed crimes and missing persons, where one could compare and cross-reference cases, and see patterns. This accumulates into: if this is how slow justice comes, we need a miracle; hence the priestly interference. It was as if God was forced to do something.