But Saturday actually brought us to a group exhibit at a museum in Makati where an acquaintance had two of what he said were old paintings. That done, we ate at a favorite restaurant, dropped by MW to buy “dibidis,” went home, and settled in bed for marathon movie watching. Unfortunately, the pickings were slim in MW. We started the film fest. with As You Like It, directed by Kenneth Branagh. We got really excited when we saw this in MW because Branagh is, to quote P, “Adik kay Shakespeare” and we still have fond memories of a Shakespearean adaptation of his that we were able to watch way back in the early nineties (Much Ado about Nothing).
As You Like It is one of my favorite Shakespearean plays. I even wrote a paper on said comedy in my Drama class. The very popular quote: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" came from this play. Branagh’s film was interestingly set in nineteenth-century Japan and although P and I marveled at the lush look and feel of the movie, we both agreed that we found it too "experimental." It is difficult enough reading Shakespeare’s Elizabethan prose in print, but to watch actors deliver them in staccato speech (Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter and the reading of the stage verses has to have an aural pattern or beat), with some of them careless in their enunciation, is even harder. Compound this with the fact that as one watches Branagh’s adaptation, one can’t help but ask, “What the hell are these people doing in nineteenth-century Japan?” Bryce Howard’s “Rosalind” also failed to sparkle for me. Romola Garai (I first saw and appreciated her as the young lead in the film I Capture the Castle) as Celia almost upstaged her. The film dragged and lacked the witty repartees of the original script. I have yet to finish the film because I fell asleep halfway through. The next movie in our marathon was aptly titled Next (starring Nicolas Cage as a man who can foretell the future), but I was still so sleepy from the first film, I slept through this one, too. P had to nudge me awake. He said, “Ano ka ba tulog ka nang tulog!” I snarled, “E, bakit ka ba nanggigising?”
After my afternoon “nap” of 4 hours, I told P that I was ready for Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom. I first saw this film as a teenager and had chanced upon the film maybe twice or thrice in the cable movie channels in the past. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I can still bear to see it “one more time.” The film just transcends time, plus, I’m really a sucker for “dance” movies. One of my favorite dialogues in the film is “a life lived in fear is no life at all” (this kind of theme echoes in other Luhrmann films, like in Moulin Rouge where the lead actor, in one scene, declares, “A life without love is no life at all.”) Now, whenever I come across something that paralyzes me with dread, like killing a cockroach for example, I tell myself, “A life lived in fear is no life at all!” It helps. It really does.
It surprised me to learn that Luhrmann currently has only three films to his credit (there’s Strictly, then Romeo + Juliet, then Moulin Rouge). As is typical of other Luhrmann movies, Strictly is fast-paced, cinematographically beautiful (and colorful), and has kick-ass music. Here's a scene where the two lead characters dance on the rooftop of their studio (a Coca-Cola billboard as backdrop) with “Time after Time” as score:
According to P, the reason why I only truly like films that are beautifully set, written, acted in, and directed is because watching a film for me is a total experience of the senses. Therefore, in order for me to appreciate any film, it has to blow my mind away. It has to appeal to me both on a cerebral and emotional level. Totoo ba yan?! Boo! He-he-he.
Anyway, since P scoffs at my Korean and Japanese contemporary film fixation, I let him sleep while I watched Isamu Nakae's widely accepted coming-of-age film, Sugar and Spice. It stars two award-winning young actors (Yuya Yagira and Erika Sawajiri) said to be the “future of Japanese cinema.” The film is about a seventeen-year-old boy about to transition into adulthood. It is a bittersweet tale of “firsts”—first love, first heartbreak. I like the film because it is totally relatable, it provides wonderful and real insights into life and relationships, and has beautiful dialogue like:
“Relationships that are allowed to mature over time and effort can be the best kind.”
And, my favorite:
“When something fragile seems about to break, what choice do I have but to treat it gently?”
