Watcher in the dark

I WATCH movies the first time to relax. I watch movies again to understand why I watch them.

After a friend roped me in this movie-listing chain game that’s been circulating online, I found the game turning into several directions.

First, in searching for movie posters that had to be posted online with the movie I chose each day for 10 days, I realized how a movie’s complicated storytelling techniques—like the folding and folding of the several layers that create that first bite of a perfectly flaky croissant—can be captured in an image or a detail freezing the story or an essence of the story that lingers in the viewer’s mind.

For there is the movie on the screen, and there is the other movie that will play and replay long after in the dark of the viewer’s mind.

In Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern,” the elaborate ritual concerning red lanterns in a rich man’s household dominates the movie but the detail that will not go away in my mind is the sound those tiny metal hammers make as a longtime servant massages the soles of the concubine the master chooses for the night.

In the first scene when the hammers make their castanet-like tapping, I am as curious as the Fourth Mistress about this part in a nocturnal routine. The explanation comes straightforward enough: she who is chosen for the night is privileged with this foot massage, which will make her perform better for the master.

That the foot massage is revealed in the movie as more than priming for sex—that it bestows on the chosen the whimsy to dictate the menu the “morning after,” that it wins for her status over the other mistresses and that household of servants for about 24 hours or until the next evening, that the contest for such “power,” viewed as paltry and mean by today’s standards, holds sway over the struggles, machinations, lives of four women—weaponizes those mallets and makes portentous those deceptively light tapping sounds.

Movies surprise us. And then they seem oddly familiar.

In my list of 10 favorite movies, “family” is the common thread, even in Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” where a space crew fights a non-human creature that wants to lay its eggs inside humans as hosts.

The final match is reduced to an Amazon played by Sigourney Weaver and a creature that, notwithstanding a skull that resembles a dripping postcoital phallus, is unmistakably female.

We think of the maternal as tender and nurturing; what if the maternal is also voracious, predatory, amoral, and singleminded about sex, reproduction, survival of the fittest?

In other words: family values. “Alien” made me rethink my attitudes about procreation, woman as the Other, and, not the least, eggs hatching.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 24, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Picturing the pictures

WHY do I watch movies?

L., a friend with whom I share a love for comic books, recently nominated me to post a movie I like every day for 10 days. The instructions she reposted included “nominating” a person each day to create his or her own list of 10 movies.

Also: no explanations are needed; just post the movie poster.

As I write this, I am on the fourth day of carrying out what seems to have become a series of complications. First, searching for a movie poster turns out to require more time than choosing the movie.

My immediate choice for day 1 was Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love”. There are at least three commercial movie posters, one of which was on the cover of the VCD I bought on regular price, without second thoughts, when I finally found a copy in the mall.

The movie is about longing, the unfulfilled desire that makes the best, the only possible love stories. (After consummation, everything goes downhill, which is true in fact and narrative arc.)

Lush and erotic, the American, Chinese, and Japanese movie posters, specially the ones showing Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung clinching, are misleading and predatory. The alluring cheongsam encasing Cheung in these posters are not cut from the same metaphor as the movie’s finger-hugging costumes engendering the tensile delicacy of the Hong Kong conventions of the 1960s that trap the couple.

I think the movie poster that preserves Wong Kar-wai’s elegy on the ghosting of love is a “fan poster” created by Janet Leigh, which I first read about in Adrian Curry’s article on mubi.com.

Leigh’s poster shows descending streaks of light and shade that still have the solidity of the walls of their adjoining apartments, which, like society, keep these two individuals close but never intimate.

Narrow door frames, thin walls that tremble with betrayal, constricting corridors, stairwells of darkness—Leigh’s “fan poster” captures the architectural details that, like the music, soak up the aches best whispered to a hole in the wall and smothered with earth.

A poster is created to promote the movie. If one likes a movie, the poster should be more than that.

The other movies I have chosen so far—“A Walk to Remember,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” and “The Road Home”—have posters that “competently” capture the movie plots.

Yet, as the late Anthony Bourdain pointed out, there should be no place for “competence” in storytelling.

Applying this rule means segregating the posters that aim to sell tickets from the ones that aspire to freeze “the pictures,” a term used in the past to refer to cinema, through one telling picture or image.

And I have not yet explained how I chose the 10 movies in 10 days.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 17, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”