The Masseur (Masahista)

I had been losing faith in Filipino cinema in recent years, mostly due to the work of Crisaldo Pablo.  He has given the cinematic world such gems as Doubt (Duda), Bathhouse and Circles (Bilog).  These films remind me of a Filipino versions of Richard Anthony Films projects Traveling to Olympia, Revenge in Olympia and Slice of Terror.  All of these films are pseudo soft-core porn/erotica with very weak stories and very uneven acting.  But The Masseur is different.

The story is of a young man who works in a massage parlor to earn money for his family who live in a suburb.  The day before his father dies, he has a client who crosses his professional boundaries and make him re-examine his entire life.

  

This film was both sensual and engaging.  The physical intimacy between the characters was not gratuitous, but instead realistic.  It provided a framework of strangers in the night looking for a moment of human connection.  This connection is in sharp contrast the the distance that exists between the protagonist and his father.  A distance that is ironically shortened since death.

I want to thank director Brillante Mendoza for restoring my faith in modern Filipino queer cinema.  I am looking forward to his future projects to serve as a counter balance to the works of Crisaldo Pablo.

The Aviator

This film is the semi-autobiographical story of Howard Hughes, a precursor to Richard Branson.  Hughes was an aviation giant, movie mogul and one of the most successful people to suffer from OCD.  The film depicts how an early and seemingly innocuous childhood event triggered in Hughes a lifetime obsession with cleanliness.

Overall, The Aviator only covers a short span of the life of Howard Hughes in which the viewer is witness to a glimpse of the final breakdown that caused Hughes to barricade himself away on the top floor of a Las Vegas hotel for the last 1o years of his life. 

The main reason I have always been fascinated with Howard Hughes was that I could relate to a man tortured with so much passion and not enough power or control to execute it.  I often feel a similar powerlessness, minus the OCD issue of course.

However, since I have become a probate paralegal, the drama that surrounded Hughes estate after his death has become an intellectual curiosity for me.  A very good reason why you should keep your friends closer, your enemies closer, and your estate planning up to date.  Even if you have nothing to leave behind.

White Noise

I had avoided White Noise for ages since I was terrified to watch it alone. I finally grew a pair and watched it -- granted first thing in the morning. So the true test will come tonight if I can sleep or not...but that is a different entry for a different blog.

This movie dealt with electronic voice phenomenon (EVP)
which is a way those in the great beyond try to communicate with this world through the white noise of TV and radio. I frankly get freaked out easily on such things but this movie was not so much creepy and just using EVP as an smaller element of a serial killer mystery. This is refreshing since it makes the the movie more than another supernatural cheap trick.

For me this movie does raise the whole question over are people ghost magnets or are the places they live. It seemed Michael Keaton was a magnet of some sort since the malevolent spirits followed him from his own house, to his loft, to the warehouse. I can relate to this, since no matter where we live, Casey (my cat) finds crap to scream and yell at that I cannot see.

Anyway, overall, I give this movie a definite recommendation, since it is if nothing else a beautiful love story with a bit of crime drama thrown in.

Bastoni - The Stickhandlers

While Broadway Video the other night I was looking for a nice foreign movie to kill some time with. I was strolling the Japan section when I found Bastoni. It looked somewhat familiar so I could not remember if I had seen it before in the TLA catalog or actually watched it (and it turns out I had watched it at some far off point but do not remember when).

The basic premise is seeing how to adult film stars try to go from being the top of their game to preparing to have a baby. The movie is graphic-ish, but nothing close to true porn or Short Bus. The complicating factor is the male protagonists ex-girlfriend who for some weird stalker ass reason decide she wants to come between her ex-boyfriend and his new wife/mother of his child.

Well. all hell breaks loose toward the end of the movie and I was just left feeling a sense of sadness. Not for the male protagonist having his world turned up side down, but for the ex-girlfriend's bitchyness. She went out of her way to destroy her ex-boyfriend after they had not seen each other in eight years. And for what?

This is one of those stories that makes you take a step back and take stock of how you deal wit ha break up. I'd like to think I am above high school drama crap at my age. But then again who knows what one is capable of anymore.

Death at a Funeral

I watched this film at the very quaint Seven Gables Theater located in the University District of Seattle. This movie is directed by Frank Oz, the man who before he was directing such gems like In & Out, was a puppeteer giving us Yoda. If you have ever seriously watched a Frank Oz film you can see just how appropriate it is that he was Yoda, the wise, smart ass, crumegeon, who never gives a straight answer. Often times even in his more straight froward work, I find Oz to be the same way.

This film is about a family funeral in which all sorts of hell breaks loose in every way imaginable. I imagine my own funeral happening something like this and I am damn jealous I cannot watch it unfold myself. Almost makes the whole Tom Sawyer faking his own death thing sound perfect.

My only criticism I would have of the movie it would be that for a British black comedy, the black comedy was somewhat sedate and subdued compared to what I was expecting. Granted I was not expecting Ab Fab, but it seemed somewhat slower paced than I would have expected out of Oz. But then again, this was a funeral movie, so maybe a roller coaster of laughing would be slightly inappropriate.

Night Scene

This film supposedly has a linear plot of a son finding out his dad is gay and his own exploration of dating a hustler, but it seems more like a Chinese versions of Wiktor Grodecki's Body Without Soul or Not Angels But Angels. The film views much like a series of interviews and documentary footage of the hustler's with the supposed narrative just being a brief interlude in the middle of the film.

I have to say I was a little disappointed in this movie not just because the synopsis did not seem to follow through, but the quality of the overall film in terms of entertainment or educational value was poor. The subtitle translations were practically non-existent and one could clearly see that they were not capturing the tone or meaning of the dialogue.

While I am a big supporter of new work, I would hope that even a new work has a minimum of production standards in place to ensure that it is of a quality worth a viewer's time. Night Scene has not lived up to that standard.

Halloween

I have been a fan of the Halloween series since I was a teenage. In fact I thought I saw Michael Myers in my kitchen once. But that was just a combination of too many of the series and some bad food making me have hallucinations.

When I heard that there was a remake coming, I was curious how it could be any better than the original. I have seen the wave of remakes in recent years, Psycho, Charlie's Angels, The Producers, to name a few, and I was not sure if it would be worth the cost of admission. But I have to admit, I was blown away.

This version added some valuable history and background into why Michael was the way he was and how Laurie wound up with the Strodes. It also gave Michael an eerie sadism in that his killing in the original series were violent mindless acts of aggression. In the 2007 version, Michael seemed to cherish the slow death of his victims. He seemed to be toying with them as they died. It gave the killings a more true ring to them based on what we have come to learn about how serial killers operate.

There was one additional element that I do not recall ever seeing in the original and that was how the super human strength that Michael exhibited may have be genetic. In this version Laurie takes on a lot more damage than in the 1978 version and keeps on ticking.

Makes one wonder if it is that super human strength that leads to insanity. Or if insanity simply creates a chemical imbalance to lead to god like strength.