http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanMar07.html The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Bulovas, and desktop lint. Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:03:47 +0800 60 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanMar07.html#ssf196448610

FOLLOWING THROUGH on my recent column-pieces, readers have continued writing in to send me their own lists of favorite movies and to comment on the lists I’ve been posting these past couple of weeks. But before I go to some of those comments, let me just acknowledge a couple of corrections and clarifications from sharper-eyed and more knowledgeable correspondents.

As it turns out, for example, Death in Venice wasn’t shot in black and white—as I’d thought I remembered it—but in full color, according to reader Robin Pigue, who adds that “I’m not a big fan of the film. I prefer Visconti’s underrated movie version of Camus’ The Stranger, which was released internationally in 1967. It starred Marcello Mastroianni as Meurseult and the beautiful Anna Karina as the mistress. I’ve seen local VCD copies of Death in Venice in Odyssey and National Bookstore.” I hadn’t seen the movie in more than 15 years, when it was shown in a film class I was a teaching assistant for in the US, so my mind was playing a trick on me, encouraged perhaps by the promotional materials for the movie, which were all in black and white.

Poet Gelo Suarez also sent in an interesting backgrounder on Un Chien Andalou, directed in 1929 by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. Gelo says that “Among that awesome circle of artist-friends was also Federico Garcia Lorca, and Un Chien Andalou was made around the time he had a falling-out with them. According to one theory, the film’s title is an allusive insult to the pseudo-Surrealist (and I do not mean “pseudo” to be derogatory here) poet from Andalusia, and as such furthered the divide between him and Bunuel and Dali. Oh, and Dali happens to be a really fantastic poet too.”

My former student Gina Verdolaga—who reports that she’s “actually a movie critic these days, at least for a monthly teen Catholic zine called Fish”—says she “can’t resist mentioning David Lean’s last film A Passage to India; Noel Coward’s 1945 Brief Encounter; and Hiroshi Inagaki’s samurai trilogy Miyamoto Musashi with Toshiro Mifune. Such grace in love and war films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, a far cry from the present Spartan ode 300.” (I thoroughly enjoyed 300, incidentally, and its powerful, one-track depiction of “Spartans good, Persians bad”—well, except for one or two rotten Spartans outside of the 300.) She adds that “the owners of Que Rico are actually classmates of mine, Rico and Susan Sevilla…. I do recall that the late Doreen Fernandez used to drop by their place for a fish dish that she particularly enjoyed for the homey appeal and wrote about it in her food column.”

Theater director Freddie Santos was moved to recall “Barry Lyndon... as Thomas Hoving put it, not one minute more or less than what was needed. And it ran for 3 hours. Imitation of Life... who knew we could cry that much? Gone With the Wind... will never be. It Happened One Night... and stayed forever. One Night of Love, Song Without End, The Red Shoes... the best classic films on, uh, classics. Cover Girl... because Busby Berkeley wasn’t God. An American in Paris... because Busby Berkeley really was just a man. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father... you just knew Ron Howard would get somewhere. West Side Story, Oliver, and Cabaret... better than the stage musical versions. The Sound of Music... waaaaayyyyy better than the stage musical! Jesus Christ, Superstar... either way, He is God.”

Film critic Noel Bote Vera weighs in on my choices and with his own on his blog, here. Noel also gently corrects my usage of “cineaste” (which means filmmaker) to “cinephile” (lover of film)—thanks for that, Noel!

So the people have spoken. Thanks, all, for your responses.


FOR QUITE some time now, poet-journalist-karaoke fiend Jose “Pete” Lacaba has been undertaking a personal project to translate the best vintage songs into Filipino—not just to provide their equivalent meanings, but also to create stylishly singable alternatives to their English originals.

He calls these versions “salinawit”—literally, translated songs—and he’s come up with about 45 of them so far, covering mostly standards that should be familiar to anyone over 50. (Where were you when Look to Your Heart, I Wish You Love, and You Don't Know Me were No. 1?) Pete’s selections display his unfailingly good taste in lounge music (some of us prefer couches and cocktails to burning guitars and baseball caps, boys and girls) and his translations a poet’s refinement.

For starters, here’s part of his take on Where Is Your Heart? (lots of you’s and heart’s in these old songs, huh?):

Whenever we kiss,
I worry and wonder.
Your lips may be near,
But where is your heart?
It’s always like this,
I worry and wonder.
You’re close to me here,
But where is your heart?

Ang bawat halik,
May halong ligalig.
Kayakap kita,
Ngunit nasaan ka?
Palagi na lang
Ay may agam-agam.
Kapiling kita,
Ngunit nasaan ka?

And here’s part of All My Tomorrows:

Today I may not have a thing at all
Except for just a dream or two,
But I’ve got lots of plans for tomorrow,
And all my tomorrows belong to you.

Right now it may not seem like spring at all.
We’re drifting and the laughs are few.
But I’ve got rainbows planned for tomorrow,
And all my tomorrows belong to you.

Ngayon, wala akong kahit ano
Maliban sa pangarap ko,
Subalit bukas liligaya tayo.
Lahat ng aking bukas, para sa ‘yo.

Ngayon ay parang laging tag-ulan,
Naghahari ang karimlan.
May bahaghari sa aking plano.
Lahat ng aking bukas, para sa ‘yo.

I’m reminded of the late Rolando Tinio’s exquisite translations for Celeste Legaspi in the 1970s, the most memorable of which for me was Langit Mo, Ulap Ko, Tinio’s take on Michel Legrand’s Summer Me, Winter Me. He also spun The Lady Is a Tramp into Ako’y Bakyang-Bakya. Tinio adapted rather than directly translated, drawing on the sense and the sensibility of the song to locate resonant chords in the Filipino spirit. That Celeste Legaspi album—which I last had a copy of as a cassette tape, long since vanished or disintegrated—is something I’ve been desperately seeking for ages, and I’d be glad to pay a premium for a CD of it.

My favorite salinawit has to be that of the song I’ve asked people to play at my deathbed and during my wake—at least the original bossa nova instrumental—Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Desafinado, which Pete’s been kind enough to allow me to reprint in its entirety:

DISINTUNADO
Music: Antonio Carlos Jobim
Original Portuguese lyrics: Newton Mendonça, 1962
English lyrics: Jon Hendricks and Jessie Cavanaugh

Pagsinta ay awit na walang-hanggan,
Tila ba harana sa kalangitan,
Isang haranang gigising sa puso’t diwa mo,
Pero tayo’y medyo wala sa tono.

Dati ang halik mo ay bumibirit,
Ngayon ay tila tinig na naiipit.
Ibang tugtog na ba ang nasa labi mo,
Nilimot ang kundiman ko sa ‘yo?

Noon ang tiyempo natin ay akmang-akma,
Ngayon ang mga letra ay hindi nagtutugma.
Hindi na maalala’ng himig na kinakanta,
Wala sa tono tayong dalawa.

Pagtugmain muli ang ating damdamin,
Indayog ng duweto ay muli nating buhayin.
Babalik na tayo sa wastong tono,
At di na disintunado
Ang kundimang ating inaawit,
Magiging awit ng anghel
Ang ating pag-ibig!

And for those of us who never quite memorized the original French lyrics (by Edith Piaf herself) nor its English adaptation by Mack David, here’s Pete Lacaba’s version of the immortal La Vie en Rose:

KULAY-ROSAS
Music: Louiguy (Louis Guglielmi)
French Lyrics: Edith Piaf
English Adaptation: Mack David

INTRO:
Akala ko, sa awit lang
Ang tunay na pagmamahal.
Iyon pala ay totoo.
Nadama ko sa halik mo.

Nang ibigin mo ako,
Nagbago ang mundo.
Ito’y nagkulay-rosas.

Sa init ng ‘yong halik,
Yakap na mahigpit,
Mundo’y nagkulay-rosas.

Puso ko’y umaawit,
Pag-ibig ang himig,
Sa tuwing maririnig...

Ang tinig mong
Katulad sa anghel
Na may timyas
Ng tunay na dalangin.

Dahil sa pag-ibig mo,
Ngayon ang buhay ko:
Kulay-rosas.

While looking forward to a full-blown concert of these songs as interpreted by some of our finest vocalists (beyond the tasty patikim that was offered on a recent segment of Tina Monzon-Palma’s TV show), I’ve thrown Pete a challenge to translate another of my favorite songs, Sabor a Mi, of which I have five cover versions on my iTunes (Luis Miguel, Lila Downs, Laura Fygi, Javier Solis, and Eydie Gorme & Trio Los Panchos). Pete sent me several English versions of it that I didn’t even know existed.

But whatever Pete does with them, I’m sure it’ll be miles better than the best a pedestrian prose-monger like me can muster, which would be something like Tikman Mo Ako. (Or maybe, when the spirit moves me or poet-translators and after-hours crooners like Marne Kilates, we can do the reverse and translate some of our best OPM songs into English.)

]]> Sun, 25 Mar 2007 01:03:30 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanMar07.html#onv195884689

LAST WEEK'S listing of my top ten favorite movies—which I also posted on my favorite Internet hangout at www.philmug.ph—provoked a torrent of other personal lists from fellow Mac addicts eager to share their viewing preferences. I’d underestimated the natural interest of people in the movies—and the degree to which this has become the “You-are-what-you-watch” generation, where viewing has pretty much taken the place of reading.

Before I give you an idea of what went into these “people’s choice” lists, let me follow through on a promise I made last week to list down more movies: this time, movies I didn’t just enjoy, but which I learned something about filmmaking from, and which any self-respecting film viewer, student, or prospective filmmaker should see at least once. In other words, if you’re relatively new to the art of film or—let’s be honest, now—you just want to be able to drop the right names and titles over cocktails and canapés, then this should be a good list to start with.

But first, and again, an important caveat: I’m not a film critic or even a teacher of film, just someone who’s seen a good number of movies over more than four decades, and has written a few scripts. I expect real film pundits like Noel Vera to weigh in with their own recommendations, if not to take issue with some of my choices. At this time, I’m leaving out Filipino movies and saving them for later.

So let’s begin with ten must-see’s—especially for readers 30 years old and younger whose film memories begin with Star Wars—none of which should be a big surprise for true cineastes:

1. Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang; Alfred Abel, Gustav Froehlich). If you want to know what “expressionism” means and what it looks like, then watch this film. But never mind the –isms; the film is a visual education in how directors work and how film is an art form in itself. As a minor bonus, watch this, and then download and watch a copy of the famous Ridley Scott-directed “Mac 1984” Super Bowl TV advertisement that launched the Macintosh.

2. Un Chien Andalou (1929, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali; Simone Mareuil, Peter Batcheff). I guarantee you’ll never forget the opening scene of this film. This film was strange in 1929 and it remains strange today, which is probably why it’s endured in our questioning imaginations. Heck, MTV can trace its roots to this surrealist work (the title means “An Andalusian Dog,” but don’t ask me why).

3. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles; Orson Welles, Dorothy Comingore). Often hailed as the best film of all time, it’s another great example of how the camera can tell a story better than words, from the first shot to the last.

4. Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz; Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman). A perennial sentimental favorite, this wartime romance is best remembered for its one-liners (“We’ll always have Paris,” “Round up the usual suspects,” “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”), including at least one famous line that was never said in the movie (“Play it again, Sam!”). And then of course there’s that theme song, “As Time Goes By.”

5. The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed; Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten). Speaking of themes, here’s another one that will keep lilting in your head for days after you’ve seen the movie. This is a British take on film noir, a category of physically and psychologically dark movies imbued with intrigue and moral ambiguity, of which Welles himself was a master in such works as The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil.

6. High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann; Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly). There have arguably been better Westerns made, but for sheer iconic power, High Noon is hard to beat, with good and evil squaring off on some dust-blown street. Trivium: the opening scene of the movie has a lone rider silhouetted against the horizon—played by an actor who wouldn’t have a line of dialogue in High Noon but who would go on to become the favorite baddie of the “spaghetti Westerns” of the next decade, Lee Van Cleef.

7. Throne of Blood (1957, Akira Kurosawa; Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada). Seen to be Kurosawa’s version of Macbeth, it’s memorable in its own right in its depiction of fear, ambition, and violence in feudal Japan. Alternatively, you can watch Seven Samurai or Rashomon—but take in at least one early Kurosawa movie before seeing the much-later Kagemusha or Ran.

8. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick; Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood). Again, from the opening scene to the last, this film offers a breathtaking sweep of human evolution to the point when the machines take over. But many will remember it as their first almost-real view of space.

9. Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini; Bruno Zanin). Ah, sweet smalltown Italy—albeit Fascist Italy—seen through the eyes of the great Fellini. Who can forget those enormous, uhm, appendages that nearly suffocate our hero, and that magical cruise ship passing in the night? As with Kurosawa, Fellini may have made more important films (La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8 ½), but Filipinos will find much to relate to in Amarcord and its locale.

10. Don’t Look Now (1973, Nicholas Roeg; Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland). This mystery set in Venice will haunt you with its image of the girl in the red cape, and all that wetness.

I know, I know, great movies didn’t stop being made in 1973, and we could easily list another dozen must-see movies here, with enough left over for another week. (And there are two seminal films that should’ve been on this list but which I didn’t include, for the simple reason that while I’ve heard and read much about them, I have yet to see them: The Birth of a Nation (1915, D. W. Griffith; Lillian Gish) and The Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein).

Just to scratch that itch, let me list another set of movies that I think are also important or memorable in other ways—but again, they’re heavily loaded toward the ‘60s and ‘70s, which should be good for young students of film because these are the modern classics they never saw in the moviehouse:

1. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961, Blake Edwards; Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard). How can you possibly resist Audrey Hepburn and “Moonriver”? And if you’re a Hepburn fan, don’t forget Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road.

2. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962, Tony Richardson; Michael Redgrave, Tom Courtenay). Class, sport, and youthful rebellion come together in this gem of British “Free Cinema.” You’ll be humming that quintessentially British hymn “Jerusalem” afterward.

3. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962, Robert Enrico; Roger Jacquet). Presented as a Twilight Zone episode in 1964, this French version of the Ambrose Bierce short story is a compelling exploration of the power of illusion.

4. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean; Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif). I told you I liked David Lean. Great score, and fantastic scenery, not to mention rousing adventure in the Arabian desert.

5. Cleopatra (1963, Joseph L. Mankiewicz; Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton). I was a bit too young then to understand what all the fuss over Liz Taylor was about, but for sheer spectacle—and the ‘50s and ‘60s seemed to be obsessed with that—Cleopatra might have been matched only by The Ten Commandments. And between Elizabeth Taylor and Charlton Heston….

6. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick; Peter Sellers, George C. Scott). A darkly satirical take on a Cold War that suddenly, madly turns hot.

7. Blow-Up (1966, Michelangelo Antonioni; David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave). Antonioni was supposed to have actually painted the frontage of buildings and even the grass to reflect the intensity of the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings.

8. A Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick; Patrick Magee, Malcolm McDowell). Long before the also-stylish V for Vendetta, this Anthony Burgess take-off explored the mind of the fascist state and of its creatures. And also from this period, for political junkies: Costa Gravas’ Z, and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn!

9. Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1975, Lina Wertmuller; Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato). Love among the castaways, with a strong class element. Lady Chatterley’s Lover meets Survivor. I’m swept away enough by the title.

10. Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Badham; John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney). The next decade would declare disco cheesy, but the kinetic energy of this movie (and of its Bee Gees soundtrack, the best-selling of all time) is electric, and every time I see it I still feel like strutting down the street a la Tony Manero—well, maybe plus 100 pounds.

Sheesh, I haven’t even touched the James Bond movies, Blade Runner, Out of Africa, The Sand Pebbles, and a shelf of other personal favorites. But before I run out of space—speaking of people’s choices—let me share the Internet Movies Data Base (IMDB) top-ten list from the 250 most popular movies of all time, based on votes sent in by several hundred thousand viewers. How closely does this list match your own?

1. The Godfather (1972)
2. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
3. The Godfather: Part II (1974)
4. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
6. Casablanca (1942)
7. Pulp Fiction (1994)
8. Schindler's List (1993)
9. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
10. Seven Samurai (1954)


TURNING BACK to drama in real life, let me take this opportunity to thank some very fine people who’ve sent in donations toward the kidney transplant of Lita Peñalosa: May Flores, Rita Ledesma, Trexie Olvez, James Butial, Grace Saqueton, and others who’ve preferred to remain anonymous. If you have a little something to spare and would like to help someone in real need, you can deposit it directly to the savings account of Julita Peñaflor at any PNB branch; her account is at PNB Cubao, No. 211-575144-4. Many thanks and blessings to you!

]]> Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:24:49 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanMar07.html#cum195289145

SOME FRIENDS and I were chugging beers one midnight a couple of weeks ago, watching the twinkling lights of Marikina from the window of the cheap dive we’d found along that stretch of Katipunan Avenue in front of the poor man’s hospital.

There must be something about a joint that stands across an emergency ward and beside a pharmacy or two that makes you savor your beer a little longer. Or it could be that, at 53, I’m way past my beer-guzzling, bar-crawling prime—that would have been back in the early ‘90s, before Timog Avenue got all gentrified; one day I looked and a bar we knew and appreciated for its propensity to be visited by agents of the law had suddenly become a savings bank. Corner stalls that broiled tasty animals of indeterminate species now offered European delicacies.

This place that my friend and former student Joel Toledo had found was something of a happy throwback to those Timog days—the paper napkins were so thin you could read the menu through them—but I just wasn’t up any longer to the kind of all-drink, no-talk evenings that active barflies can find some joy and inner peace in.

It used to be that Charlson Ong and I would park ourselves in a bar and sit there semi-sullenly all night without so much as ten words exchanged between us, as crazy chapters of racy novels filled the smoky thought-balloons above our heads. Now and then I’d say “Sashimi” and he’d say “French fries,” but we were mumbling that to the waiter, not to each other. But today, Charlson can’t stand silence; he just has to sing, having found his voice the way some people find religion, and it can be safely posited that the shortest distance between two points is that between Charlson and a vacant microphone (unless Pete Lacaba spots it first; but more on Pete and his “Salinawit” songs next week).

I sing, too, after some proper prodding or ten beers, whichever comes first, but what alarms me more is that I now tend to talk, and talk a lot, under the influence. Sometimes I talk about the days when I didn’t talk; sometimes we actually get to talking about the things we should be doing rather than talking about, like writing and literature (most people find the word “literature” hard to say after six or seven beers; it comes out as “litterer” or “lecherer”).

That night at Que Rico—that was the strangely apt name of the place, where you could get a plateful of crispy chicharon bulaklak for about a hundred pesos—the talk around the table somehow got around to movies, favorite movies, and it was to me a sure sign of impending dotage that I was sober enough at that late hour to come up with my personal list on demand.

While I wouldn’t call myself a cineaste or a film buff the way my truly celluloid-crazy friends can remember scenes from obscure French movies made in the 1940s, I do like movies, having spent many an idle afternoon in the 1960s on doubleheaders at Pasig’s flea-friendly Leleng Theater, pining for a massive injection of growth hormones so I could play catch-up with Rosanna Podesta and her sisters.

I know I rattled off some movie titles over another round or two of beer—quite a few of which 30-something Joel had never heard of, prompting him to ask me, “Where’d you learn about all those movies?”—but when I woke up the next day I wasn’t sure what it was exactly that I’d said. That’s the worst part of this new volubility; I talk a lot, then forget what I say.

So in the interest of saving something from that beer-induced disquisition, I tried to recall my list and ran it through the morning-after test to see if three cups of coffee would affect my critical judgment. And they did. I found that, stone sober, I could actually be more honest about what I really liked, which were the movies that made me gasp, sigh, or swoon every time I saw them, no matter how many times I’d seen them and no matter what the critics thought.

So here goes my Top Ten Movies list. I’m not saying in any way that these are the world’s greatest movies—just the ones I’ve liked best from those I’ve seen. It’s impossible for me to even rank them from one to ten, so I’ll just list them chronologically, by date of production (followed by the names of the director and the stars). And I’ve just realized that no movie on this list is older than 1959 and none newer than 1975, so that tells you something either about filmmaking or, more likely, about this listmaker. And the winners are:

1. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock; James Stewart, Kim Novak). I don’t know why I relate so strongly to Stewart’s obsession with Novak’s character; it must be the haunting score that keeps suckering me into this movie about suckers. It has a terribly sad and sorry ending that leaves me depressed every time I see it, but that’s obsession for you.

2. Black Orpheus (1959, Marcel Camus; Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn). This retelling of the Orpheus myth, set in Rio de Janeiro’s Carnaval, left me with a lifelong and still unfulfilled dream to visit Rio. Another tragic love story (are we seeing an early pattern here?), but one lightened up in the right parts by the music of a young fellow on his scoring debut, by the name of Antonio Carlos Jobim.

3. West Side Story (1961, Robert Wise; Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer). Well, we’ve got to have a Broadway musical here, and, guess what, it’s another tragic love story and another adaptation, this time from Shakespeare to Manhattan. But how can you forget the music and the choreography here? I also have a soft spot for South Pacific and Oliver, not to mention Lost Horizon (however silly), but for sheer dramatic energy, love amid the gang wars takes the cake.

4. Sundays and Cybele (1962, Serge Bourguignon; Hardy Kruger, Nicole Courcel). I was so glad to learn that poet Jimmy Abad had also seen this movie and even named one of his daughters after it (no, her name’s not Sunday), because it’s one of those very rare modern classics that haven’t even made it to DVD, pirated or otherwise, and a VHS copy of which starts at $44 used at Amazon. I remember watching this for a whole week on TV in the late ‘60s, fascinated by the odd (and oddly pure) relationship between a guilt-ridden war pilot and a young waif. Oh, and did I tell you it ends tragically? I don’t have $44 to spare just now, but I’d give an arm and a leg to have a copy of this little-known classic.


5. Dr. Zhivago (1965, David Lean; Omar Sharif, Julie Christie). I’m a big David Lean fan (that’s Lean, folks, not Lynch)—sweeping vistas of snow and desert, music that seems to swirl down and around the movie’s dramatic slopes, and let’s not forget Julie Christie, never quite as pretty as a Catherine Deneuve or a Pier Angeli, and therefore more memorable. This is drama writ large, with no less than the Russian Revolution for its background. Put this on your Holy Week list—I swear, sometimes it feels like Calvary.

6. The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols; Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft). One of the wittiest scripts ever, and a terrific soundtrack featuring Simon and Garfunkel. Older woman seduces young man, who gets older woman’s daughter in the end—it was heady stuff for one 13-year-old boy who faked his age to see his first adults-only movie. (Not long after, Jane Fonda as Barbarella would make him even dizzier.)


7. Death in Venice (1971, Luchino Visconti; Dirk Bogarde). You’ll remember this movie not only for Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto (Thomas Mann supposedly based the story’s protagonist on Mahler) but also for what it does with and for Venice, just using black and white cinematography. Not your macho movie: here Bogarde falls for a 14-year-old boy, with whom he never speaks.

8. Summer of ’42 (1971, Robert Mulligan; Jennifer O’Neill, Gary Grimes). I can barely remember this movie, truth to tell, but I can’t forget those ten minutes of silence that lead up to its bittersweet climax. Again, a young boy falls for a beautiful older woman, and comes of age on her bed against the backdrop of a distant but murderous war. Even if you never saw this movie, you’ll recognize its theme, thanks to Michel Legrand.

9. The Godfather, Part 1 (1972, Francis Ford Coppola; Marlon Brando, Al Pacino). I’ve written a whole other column about how—as a political prisoner out on a day pass in 1973—I got to see this movie with my mom, escorted by an Army private with an M-16 (which miraculously got us three seats in a packed moviehouse). But even without that footnote, this movie had several movies’ worth of action to drill itself into your cranium. I also loved Pacino and De Niro (who turned up in The Godfather, Part 2) in 1995’s Heat, which I’ll take anytime over Pulp Fiction and all that postmodern goofiness. The Godfather—all three glorious parts—is all about straight but powerful storytelling, and reminds me why I’m a realist at heart.

10. Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (1975, Lino Brocka; Bembol Roco, Hilda Koronel). I would write more than a dozen screenplays myself for Lino Brocka between 1977 and 1990—most of them fairly forgettable—but my favorite film of his was something someone else wrote. This film’s been criticized, and rightly so, for its depiction of the Chinese Ah Tek as predator, but what I remember most is the figure of Julio Madiaga leaning on a lamppost, looking up at the windows of Misericordia Street for a glimpse of Ligaya Paraiso, his lost love.

So where, you might say, are Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Metropolis, and all the other usual suspects? They’re on my list, too, but a longer one, which I’ll continue with next week.

Meanwhile, looking back on this Top Ten pantheon—and hey, if you don’t like my choices, you can always make up your own list, and maybe I’ll even print it if I find it interesting—I think I know now what makes a great movie, at least on this end of Juan Luna Street in Diliman: a story of tragic, obsessive, or impossible love; a haunting score; some war or revolution brewing in the background; a beautiful woman; and an ordinary-looking guy, preferably younger.

Another round of the frothy stuff, please!

]]> Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:59:04 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanMar07.html#ixj194716290

I WAS doing some research online last week for an essay I was writing on Philippine-American relations (yup, those one hundred years of love and hate) when I found myself wondering just exactly what words President Manuel Luis Quezon had used when he expressed a preference for Filipino misrule, however hellish, over American governance, however heavenly. (I know, I know—a lot of wags out there will say that Quezon got his wish many times over, but that’s not my present point.)

Quezon is often quoted as saying that “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans.” But, as it turns out, the quotation just as often says “I prefer a country run like hell by Filipinos, etc.” So what was it—“country” or “government”? I thought the Internet would solve it for me, but it didn’t. No one seemed to know the exact source of the statement, which users quoted by their best lights.

In a flash of inspiration—something that often hits me a day or two before my deadlines—I turned to the next best thing to MLQ himself: his grandson Manolo, himself a commentator and lover of history, whom I texted my query and who quickly replied: “I prefer a country….” Later, by email, Manolo also sent me some illuminating pieces on Quezon’s legacy.

I realize that it isn’t every day you can pick up your cellphone and call or text for research assistance, and from such unimpeachable sources. That day will surely come, the way the digital future is shaping up, but not just yet. In the meantime we have Google and Wikipedia—indeed perhaps the best two things since sliced bread, and real godsends to people in need of quick answers.

But as useful as these two sites are, they’re far from perfect. By their very nature, they depend on what the public looks for and what the public provides—and while the idea of a free global marketplace of ideas is terrific, it also lends itself to misuse and abuse, to mistakes and distortions deliberate or otherwise.

As a search engine, Google’s speed and reach are hard to beat—but its strength is also its weakness, in that it brings up the most highly visited sites related to your search, not necessarily the most useful or appropriate ones. Wikipedia is a great experiment in democratizing access to and providing knowledge—you can contribute practically anything about anything—but despite some safeguards, it’s prone to errors or fact and interpretation. (And again, to digital mischief: while looking up a popular American writer, I went over his Wikipedia biography, which seemed pretty standard and straightforward, until I reached a short one-sentence paragraph that simply said, “His wife was a slut.” Now, that may have been a fact—if a sad and ultimately irrelevant one—for all I knew, but as it was unattributed and probably maliciously tacked on, it wouldn’t pass scholarly muster.)

The main problem with using the Internet as a research library isn’t only that there’s simply too much out there you can’t double-check; for many people—especially students desperate to get that pesky term paper done—simply too much means more than enough, thank you, which means further that they can just help themselves to all that free information, attributions and citations be damned.

I’m talking here about wholesale and cold-blooded plagiarism, the bane of today’s teachers who have to deal with today’s students. I’m not even thinking of all those Web sites that offer pre-written term papers for the price of a few mouse clicks (leading, of course, to your dad’s or mom’s credit card account).

Or, well, maybe I am thinking about it, not quite sure whether to feel good or bad about the fact that one such Web site has an essay all written out on my short story “Penmanship,” ready for downloading (you can get it and everything else you want—how many term papers can you use in a semester, anyway?—for 30 days at $19.95).

Of course the Web site properly proclaims that “All papers are for research and reference purposes only!” and that “turning in someone else's work as your own is unethical and against the law.” But if you believe that this is all that happens in this place, and that its clients take the trouble of citing its URL (Uniform Resource Locator—the Internet address, to the digitally-challenged) in their final papers, then I have three hectares of land smack in the middle of Fort Bonifacio to sell you, cheap (and no, I’m not even related to any retired Army general).

Some students will even claim that they just went ahead and copied material off the Internet (oh, the wonders of cut and paste) without citing sources because they don’t know how. (And guess what, Mom and Dad—all those “Ibid”’s and “Op. cit.”’s we learned in college won’t help these kids now, as most of the rules have changed—toward simplification, to be sure, but you’ll still need to check out the new citation styles, as they’re called.)

Speaking of this problem and of citation styles, let’s take care of one item of business right now. How do you cite an electronic source—a Web page, an e-mail, a newsgroup message, and so on? Well, you can go here and learn all about it.

Take note that most students and scholars will have to choose between the MLA (Modern Language Association—for language and literature types like me) and APA (American Psychological Association—for many social sciences) styles. The Chicago Manual of Style (on which the Turabian guide is based) and the CBE Manual of Style (for scientists) are other popular options.

I didn’t mean for this to be a lecture on bibliography, so I’m going to stop right here as far as citations are concerned. My real topic, which I’ve now hopelessly strayed from, was supposed to be having fun while doing work online. So just to deliver on that promise, let me introduce you to three Web sites I’ve personally visited and gotten both knowledge and pleasure from.

1. Here is a library of free books in many digital formats, usable on your PDA (Palm, Windows, Symbian, etc.). Many of these “ebooks,” as they’re called, were generated by the Gutenberg Project, a massive conversion of books to digital format that has now covered over 20,000 titles. Interestingly, there are 37 Tagalog titles on this site, including Florante at Laura; my cellphone has that, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.

2. Here is an even larger collection of 90,000 ebooks, including the Derbyshire translation of Noli Me Tangere.

3. Here is a delightful little corner of the Internet that contains links to rare photographs of the Philippines from Spanish and American colonial times. A bonus was the discovery of a link that brings us right back to the man whose name started this column. If you’ve never heard Manuel Luis Quezon speak, here’s a truly historic opportunity for you to do so, for nothing more than an Internet connection and a mouse click or two.


FOLLOWING THROUGH on last week’s piece on recovered kidney patient Bong Ulep, I received this letter from his employer, Mo Ordoñez: “Butch, Thanks for featuring Bong in your column. Just to let you know that he and his wife have been doing good works themselves. Bong's nephew, Jonathan, about 6 or 7, had a harelip. (My daughter Ana asked him when she first met him, ‘Bakit dalawa ang ilong mo?’ They've been great friends since then.)

“Despite his inability to speak clearly, the little boy was vibrant and and not self-conscious at all. Bong and his wife took the boy into their home and arranged for him to have corrective surgery, free, by good-hearted foreign and Filipino doctors. Just before leaving for the hospital, Jonathan told his uncle, ‘Pag-uwi ko, gwapo na ako.’ He's back, bandaged, and jumping around.

“Bong told me that he thinks this is why he was allowed to live—so he could help others. And so he has. We are very lucky to have him.” If you want to support more people like Bong, please send some help to kidney patient Lita Peñaflor, whom I wrote about last week. She can be reached by phone at 911-5887. Spread some goodness around; it’s the best way to counter all the bad stuff around us.


LASTLY, LET me invite you to an exhibition of drawings by a bright young artist named Mark Salvatus. Titled “Bibim-POP,” the show goes on this Wednesday, March 7, 7 pm at Pablo, 2nd floor gallery, Shoe Expo Cubao. Mark will be participating in an artist residency program at Goyang Art Studio in Korea from March to June, and proceeds from the exhibit will help support his stay there. For inquiries please call Yo at 0917-8137138 or Osie at 0916-2459221.

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