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”

Beings of the liquid

IN Truman Capote’s celebrated “In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences,” where the writing is so sublime, only an out-of-place punctuation would stand out, this passage still curls out at me:

“Among Garden City’s animals are two grey tomcats who are always together—thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of their day is performed at twilight. First they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scrutinize the engine grills of parked automobiles, particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travellers from afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds—crows, chickadees, and sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as though they are surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle.”

On 6 January 1960, while waiting for murder suspects Dick Hickok and Perry Smith to arrive for arraignment, Capote sketched the canny felines that survived the streets—and the birds who didn’t.

In life as in fiction, birds rarely make it. Not even in jokes. Do you know the chicken’s reason for crossing the path of the truck? To get to the other side of the street.

In Silang, Cavite, I have to live with birds. We live at the end of a street facing a row of trees. Our garden is frequently overgrown. You could say we moved in with the birds.

When I am pulling weeds, some birds, with brown scarfs thrown over their heads, soon settle on the ground and start breaking the quiet of the dawn, like neighbours discussing a certain nearby creature. If my mood is fine, I listen. If it is not, I still listen.

Birds are noisy individualists. I wish they would keep talking while swooping and flashing across the garden, just to give fair warning to those of us who don’t have spring running in their veins.

Unflagging, effervescent, chirpy. Then, once, I looked up from the weeds, startled to hear a cat mewling in the trees. It turned out to be an Antulihaw, gold-jacketed, black-striped, red-billed.

When the Black-naped Oriole makes its call, the lament gives me pause: What lies beneath that golden plumage?

One weekend, I came home to find a pile of feathers left by the cat. It was a clean kill, nothing left to draw even the scavenger ants.

I think of birds as creatures of light and liquid while all else is still somnolent and turgid. The cat kill said another thing: bone, feathers, precious little meat. We see only what we want to see.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com. 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 10, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Whodunit reloaded

WHEN a former president and a bestselling writer collaborate, it puts a new spin on the genre of the whodunit.

I came across an essay Craig Fehrman wrote for the “The New York Times International Edition”. On May 26-27, Fehrman revealed that Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s thriller, “The President is Missing,” will be published next month.

Before Bill became recently known as the husband of the woman who came closest to occupying the Oval Office, he was a president of the United States. For those with even more selective memories like mine, Bill’s public life is bookended by actually two women, Hillary and Monica.

Despite these unfond associations, I was curious to know he had co-written a book with, of all writers, James Patterson. Years ago, my older son and I took home one carload of thrillers given by a Korean War veteran who was making room in his apartment for more.

While we were shovelling books inside the family car, PL picked up one copy of a Patterson thriller (I forgot which one; there were several litters of them) and commented that much as he liked a whodunit, Patterson’s habit of “using” unknown writers to “partner” with left PL cold.

Not only did Patterson have first-mention, bigger-font billing on the book cover, the other writer must have written the whole book but received a smaller royalty and an even smaller byline, speculated PL.

I never had a chance to investigate PL’s snarky dismissal of Patterson because, in one of our regular marital reviews when the husband repeated the usual offer I cannot refuse (“those books or me”), I gave away nearly the entire PL hoard, including the cannibalistic Pattersons.

I now wish I had read one of those books so I can judge by next month, if, aside from settling for second-place, smaller-font mention, Patterson does get unplotted by Bill.
Fehrman, who is writing a book about books written by U.S. presidents, observed that “‘The President is Missing’ belongs to a long tradition of chief executives devouring thrillers, mysteries and detective stories.”

Devoted readers include Abraham Lincoln, who could quote passages from Edgar Allan Poe; Woodrow Wilson, “mystery writing’s defender in chief;” and Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, whose wives, I imagine, regularly raided their husband’s bedside stacks of thrillers.

Fehrman also uncovered that Franklin D. Roosevelt once devised a plot that resulted in a book written by several writers, including Erle Stanley Gardener. “The Times” reviewed the thriller as “one of the worst suspense novels ever written”.

Whether I would part with precious pesos for a book by carnivorous Patterson and philanderous Bill, only next month will tell.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 3, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”