Beer and remembrance (or, my favorite movies)

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 10 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. 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!

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net