The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is In The Movies

GOING BIG TIME Recent films leaning towards the spectacular 

CARS CRASHING AT EACH OTHER. Planes colliding on mid-air. Buildings tumbling on the ground. Volcanoes erupting to high heavens. Crowds in sheer pandemonium. One would think that Armageddon, that last prophetic skirmish between good and evil, is in high gear, only to find out that there is nothing behind that 14- inch tube or that wide imposing, nearly-extinct screen of a theater across the street, as destruction after destruction intensifies each scene, films that make a living out of disasters and devastation.

These catastrophic-induced flicks are now a dime a dozen in DVD shops and movie houses since they made a “Deep Impact” a decade earlier, except for a few precursors which paved the way incidentally for a “Godzilla” of panic-buttons and detonations.

Gone are those nights when watching a movie could stimulate us to a time of poignant introspection, a time when spinsters would wipe away each other’s tears over an intense melodrama, a cutting nostalgia of a scene that a good relaxing movie can offer. Today’s stuff, however, turns on a different coat, as their high-strung mush is accompanied sorely by tidal waves, typhoons and terrorist attacks.

Like Brutus, consoling his conscience with, "Not that I love Caesar less, but that I love Rome more. ...," the present alleged movement in the movie industry of justifying the grandiosity of producing films that aim to flatten everything on its path while making a fragile grip with its intrinsic outcome on the viewers, intentionally or otherwise, is now, and always has been, slowly coming to terms with its supposed claims. To say that a film has a sustained effects on its viewers is moot and academic. What prompted this new wave of films to put to rest the likes of Woody Allen, Richard Linkletter and what remains of that Slacker Generation is, to say the least, grand Roman fashion.

Changing of the guards

Recently, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Philvocs) has intimated that the Mindanao fault line is having its own share of restlessness and agitation over the past few months, and that a possibility of an earthquake could happen similar to that in Haiti, amplifying the effect on those residents whose fault lines are much more made pronounced with the presence of a volcano, such as the one in Kidapawan and its adjoining areas. And what worse way to exaggerate that trepidation than by drowning yourself with films exploding in wild abandon.

Hence, we could almost imagine tricycles flying across that center island along Quezon Street , vendors stampeding outside of the wet market in fear of famished dinosaurs scouring on their vegetables and fellow merchants, or transients finding themselves in horror of crossing bridges as both Nuangan and Saguing rivers are overflowing with liquid fire. Images that go beyond the suspension of disbelief, let alone their instinctive recoil effect on the viewers.

The trend of movie-making lately has now been relegated to the technicians, not to those friendly neighborhood Cotelco wiremen, but those specialists in fleshing out the debacle of what used to be just mere props in filmmaking. Somehow this leaning towards the spectacular has prompted even the local Tinseltown to come up with something of the same milieu, if not to overkill it intentionally (some of which are even explicitly phony) for the sake of competing with the big boys, namely the Hollywood kind.

But this fault, the appeal of this new trend of cheap entertainment, predisposes a quaint liking among some, if not most, of our chronic moviegoers and film devotees. Like an earthquake that stirs up even the most resilient of columns, much to the dismay of those connoisseurs of classic, antiquarian acts, these movies leave the audience with the marauding debris brought about by the likes of “Hulk” and “Optimus Prime” and everything else in that “War of the Worlds”.

Somehow these massive productions of stunning visual effects and indiscriminate annihilation spectacles offers only just a trace above the average of what a film can actually accomplish, not just in providing a never-before-seen stunt, or effects like how well a car mutates itself into a technologically-advanced Leviathan, but also in providing an outlet of an opportunity to transcend themselves beyond natural calamity without the aid even of special effects.

Ettu, Movie

Many people cringed at the sight of so much blood in Mel Gibson’s epic, “Apocalypto”. The film, at the outset, gave us all the reasons to postulate enough conclusions of what it’s like to live among Mayans, much more be one. But what crumbles out the prevailing perception is that the same film suffered in pale contrast, as far marketing as impact is concerned, to another Mayan saga, the recently concluded blockbuster “2012”.

The latter, basking on the concept of natural calamities as having the capacity to annihilate the entire human race, has captured, arrested even, the imagination of our viewers more efficiently than did its gory predecessor “Apocalypto”. Although a close look at the latter film’s intent reveals that the argument Gibson had in mind was quite edged out in “2012”, as if it was the same banana with a different peeling, the audience manage to see a futuristic version of that revelation, that rite of passage into that so-called new era, a new world, that the Mayans sought to interpret and grasp ages ago with the coming of the Admiral of the Mosquitos, a. k. a. Christopher Columbus.

Although far it be to suggest that we should all squirm at these types of films with heavy artillery (though admittedly they’re fun to watch) because they don’t have any real story to tell, or they lack that indispensable authenticity they long to portray, namely that we the audience should also consider not only these movies’ intricate mechanical if supernatural devices, but also allow ourselves to be involved with the complications of human relations we all are familiar with.

And so the announcement that a magnitude 8 earthquake would eventually elicit an immediate response from the community, as attested by those figures calculated by Philvocs, isn’t so much of a news, considering the heap of stirrings that is threatening not only the environment, but the dynamics of an individual’s biases.

These biases, as far as the direction of the movie industry is concerned, is already having their money’s worth. Local film consumers, the ones who religiously attend the screening of the latest picture in town, would choose to let their eyes suffer until “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, and downgrade the curious case of “Benjamin Button” as nothing short of a whimper.

This is the same “fault” that keeps boiling off an array of tremors even in our pirated outlets. The amount of conditioning our entertainment businesses perpetrates, particularly in films catering to a rolling of heads, is so prevalent and altering that it renders us quite indulgent to any forms of destruction as exemplified by the depictions of these cinematic explosions and blowups while at the same time makes us enjoy them just to pass the time. Inasmuch as we want our choices to be taken with a lot of judiciousness and consideration, we should also try to have that pick chosen in our next big picture.

Nonetheless, let’s all watch these movies anyway; on the imagination level these pictures do offer an escape to fob off the quagmires of everyday existence.. But then again we should always be aware of their faults. How fulfilling it would be if we were entertained all along and at the same time made to know that we got something in return, which even the sterner stuff of an earthquake cannot approximate to justify a blockbuster.