The end is near.

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) 

“I wish I had words, man,” says a fidgety Dennis Hopper who plays a photojournalist entranced by the maniacal thwarted brilliance of Col. Kurtz. And perhaps the whole experience of Apocalypse Now is just that — one where you are at a loss with words, and yes brilliance. Clearly, no war film has ever came this close to the face of horror. The setting is Vietnam war, or rather the US involvement to end Communism in the far east. Horror looms.

Fresh from the war itself, Capt. Willard hesitantly takes on a mission to exterminate with ‘extreme prejudice’ Col. Kurtz, a highly revered ex Green Berets officer played with reserved gusto by the incomparable Marlon Brando. Col. Kurtz has reportedly killed Viet intelligentsia and has sought asylum in the Cambodian jungles creating a tribe of his own.

Willard backed by a group of American soldiers — with the all-too-familiar war jitters — traverse the murky, often boring, Ng River, passing what seemed to be jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia. But the coconut palms could only smell of a familiar place — yes Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines. From the onset of the mission to their eventual confrontation, Willard’s sojourn is punctuated by memorable and harrowing scenes: a colonel slipping in death cards on throngs of cadavers while helicopters are bombing a Viet village, a river massacre of what turned out to be innocent people, a Playboy playmates concert swarmed by raging testosterones.

Martin Sheen plays Willard, when he still looked like Charlie. A young Lawrence Fishburne is cast among one of Willard’s crew. A young and unattractive Harrison Ford appears briefly during the opening scenes. Coppola himself turns out as a director of sorts filming the bombings perpetrated by the ballistic military leader Col. Kilgore played by Robert Duvall.

In the Redux edition, Coppola added an hour of deleted footages — more scenes during the river travel and more dialogue in the concluding scenes with Brando which supposedly shed light to an analysis of his character and the justifications of what might seemed a blurry ending.. I haven’t seen the Redux edition, but Redux or not, Apocalypse Now will not only be remembered as a meditation on war and its toll, but a landmark in filmmaking that will forever be etched in the history of cinema.

putting the X back into sexy.

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2001) aka Hua yang nianhua 

This is one of the sexiest, if not, uniquely sexy film, that I've come across. I heard Wong Kar-Wai from one of my close Mass Comm professors who dig his films. I know a few, like the more popular 2046, Happy Together and Chungking Express, but never really gotten the chance, or interest before, to watch any of his films. 

In the Mood for Love pulsates with eroticism and fervor which doesn't necessarily give you a hard-on but shames every bit of compulsion to jerk off. The effectivity lies in everything but the shedding of flesh. It's in the yearning cry of the violin, in Nat King Cole's repititive "Quizas, quizas, quizas", in the warmth of color and light, in the languid pace of the camera, in the voyeuristic angles, in the restrained yet evocative performances of the two leads — Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung.

"H ong Kong, 1962 — it's a restless moment," says the opening statement. Two married opposites moved in an apartment at the same day. Melancholy envelopes the two leads with the growing suspicion of infidelity of their respective partners. Love creeps like a vine across the walls and unfurls into a unique relationship. Mr. Chow wanted to keep his doors open to Mrs. Chan — she's his inspiration as a frustrated martial arts novelist. The setup is also an escapism to the bitter truth that their spouses are actually having an affair with each other. It's important that we don't see either of their spouse as the director wants us to focus on the two. It's a love that's genuine but inevitably short-lived.

The rehearsal scenes are brilliant. Even though it's a foretelling of parting, there's so much beauty in it that it reminds me of Shakespeare's 'parting is such a sweet sorrow'. During the last scenes, we see Chow whispering something in what seemed like a hole. Then he covers it with what seemed to be mud. We are reminded of a scene where he tells Li-zhen how to bury a secret. He disappears in the frame and we watch towards the end, a majestic view of a Cambodian temple.

"It's a restless moment," says the opening statement. A restlessness that sustains towards the end, an emotional storm that doesn't quite leave you just yet.

The Young and the Damned.

Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950) aka The Young and the Damned; The Forgotten Ones

Un Chien Andalou is perhaps one of the most important films of this era, despite it being a 16-minute short. When I was seeing piece by piece the surreal images juxtaposed on film, I can almost hear Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali having a grand time laughing at making a sick joke out of the bummed bourgeois intellectuals, which purportedly it is for. (In the early 70s, Buñuel went to make this cinematic attack on the bourgeoisie in the Oscar-winning The Secret Charm of the Bourgeoisie.) From the moment I read about it on world cinema textbook back in college, I never gotten my mind out of the eye-slicing scenes and other surreal images, that either shock or confound. 

However, Los Olvidados marks a thinly slow departure to his early surrealist beginnings, with a close resemblance to Neo-realism. It is a Mexico that has forgotten its people. It centers on the lives of the children whose innocence robbed off by the squalor surrounding them. We see Ojitos ('little eyes') waiting for his father who would never return. He would then encounter a group of young thugs led by El Jaibo, who mug the blind and helpless. The blind man crippled by the young thugs would later adopt Ojitos. Jaibo would commit a heinous crime. The children will be caught up in an inevitable web of events emphasizing Buñuel's exploration of 'the disenfranchised fight for whatever scraps of power left to them'.

In one of my favorite scenes, the child wakes up to a dream (connoting Freudian humanism), and finds his mother (who has completely disregarded him and deprived him of food) giving him a raw meat — shows a touch of Buñuel's surrealism. (Also, an alternate ending was shot by Buñuel but was shelved for obvious political reasons. The 2-minute sequence is available on YouTube.) However, it is the reality of the streets and the shocking exposition of poverty that would make this film unforgettable.

back off, n*ggah.

American History X (Tony Kaye, 1998)

The tranquil shots of LA beach, some awash in gray, as the opening credits roll, won't prepare you for the oh-shit moments to come. American History X offers the audience with a penchant for violence a full platter. Kaye doesn't tread on Tarantino territory here, but violence come not in the form style, but a sense of moral critique to the more salient subject matter of racism. We're not talking about Crash melodrama here, we're talking old-fashioned -Mr. KKK-white power kind of racism. A hostile war kept alive by its embers.

Sporting a buff physique and a glaring swastika, Edward Norton, whom I regard one of the finest actors around, delivers his best performance to date as Derek Vinyard, a neo-Nazi who lives and breathes White Power. He is the brainchild of a local neo-Nazi Cameron convinced on organizing massive fronts of Hitler disciples across the state and country. Derek is regarded a demi-god, not just to his skinhead minions, but more so by his brother Danny (Edward Furlong) who is becoming a younger version of him. Norton carries the film from start to finish. He completely blows you away with his inscrutability and savagery. 

His speedy transformation is chronicled through Danny's history paper titled American History X to the behest of his black teacher (who was once a teacher of Derek), after Danny wrote a paperr on Mein Kamf. Through this narration, we learned that Derek got a three-year sentence after killing two black men who attempted to steal his car, the other one got a broken skull. It was in prison that Danny got what he need to realize in the end concluding in a savage rape scene. It could have shed more minutes though to stress Derek's espousal of far-right ideals, the only motivational force comes in a father-son table conversation and the ignition with his father's murder by two black men. 

This is one heavy film because of its big message, one that has to rely with the power of its individual scenes to drive home the point — that violence begets violence and hate waste your energies, your time, your life. It's difficult to sit through it not because it's brutal, but it's also kind of horrific — because it's actually real.

Red Carpet 2.0

I am starting a new blog, like as if there's no other thing left to do in this world. Like as if it's a necessity, an unfounded thirst that I suddenly find the need to quench. As if I'm not fucking pressurized by the rigors of work. Dammit. I'm making this feel like a guilty pleasure. It's the C in the OC burning like a 7-year itch.

So this is a film blog, or rather I should be calling it a blog about my movie experiences. I might sound like Ebert, A.O. Scott, or David Denby so I'm not gonna sound like any of those highly-revered critics. I'm just gonna write about films I saw that's it. Oh now I know, this is like fixation back in college because I wrote stupid film analyses about mediocre films in a mediocre film class.

This is a red carpet entry so it should be without-further-ado shit. Besides, my neurons are firing like baby rockets I feel my head is going to explode. But before I head to my limo, I'm gonna pose for the press first.

P.S. I had numerous entries on films on my other blog, linked here.