A Mogwai moment

I’ll bet my typing fingers that this is not an unfamiliar sentiment: In the course of soldiering on in the world, there comes a point when it becomes a bit of a challenge to remember the warmth of the fire that, as twentysomething world-conquerors-in-waiting, burned our gut and made our ultimate passion prize seem like an easy waltz away. I like to dream very big, but I’m shy about spilling what I use to fantasize about doing and achieving, so let’s just say the late night, hours-long visualization in front of the mirror included statuettes and Thank You speeches.

But images in the mirror are not as close as they appear when it comes to life goals, and over the years the details of mine have grown hazy. Other dreams have cropped up, variations on the original watered down by reality, physics and sheer loss of energy. I take comfort in the knowledge that I’m not alone. A friend, who, by a series of fortunate events now occupies a glass-walled corner office in one of the country’s top corporations, has just realized that, while her office is approximately six blocks from where she lives, it’s not on her original life map. Her current job is as high-powered and challenging as any she could hope for, but it is, alas, in the wrong industry. Every once in a while, she sits in her office, looks around, and hears, in the air-conditioned silence, the hum of crickets as she wonders how she got there when she was going to become a media mogul, a kind of Rupert Murdoch with soul.

In a slightly different but otherwise similar situation, a filmmaker friend has spent half his life churning out movies (with award-wining TV ads on the side), but has yet to debut a long harbored dream he describes as “guaranteed to be a flop at the box office, but it’s the story I want to tell.” Getting it made is a slow process peppered with interruptions of big-buck jobs and moments of self-doubt, and I can imagine him sitting at pre-prod meetings of yet another commissioned project, his eyes wide and darting with ideas — for something else: his personal project — while the suit drones on and on about brand values. I can imagine my friend trying to concentrate on the client’s lips, now at fast-forward but with the volume turned down, while mentally pursuing a great idea for a movie scene. But lest he miss the point of the whole meeting, he might shake his thoughts off and refer to Slide No. 4 of the Powerpoint presentation.

When your dream becomes the distraction, there is often an overwhelming temptation to just drop it.

Be patient, I’m working on a metaphor…

Every now and then, however, something comes along that prevents the original fire from receding into an altogether forlorn flicker. Along the turn of Cubao Shoe Expo’s U-shaped driveway is a rather unlikely tenant with a curious name — Mogwai. Since opening as a restaurant in July this year, it is where filmmaker Erik Matti has been living out a dream of being a chef (if you have a small stomach and can only eat one dish for dinner, here’s a tip: go for the sole fillet. You’re welcome in advance).

Co-owners Matti and cinematographer Lyle Sacris had originally planned it as a film venue — a small, independent theater showing cinema’s greatest hits, some memorably bad ones, and many movies from all over the world that don’t make it to the mainstream mall theaters by virtue of being “art” — with a coffee shop on the ground floor, presumably as a post-movie powwow space for the opinionated. The cinema is small — the screen occupies one wall and with beanbags for seats, the whole room can accommodate 35 people at most — and is accessible via film club membership (for details, go to www.mogwaifilm.com. A different film is screened every night following a weekly theme. Last week’s was “the cruel ways of the world”, and the movie list included the dark comedy After Hours, Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, and Lost in La Mancha, a documentary on how Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote take never got made (but Johnny Depp met wife Vanessa Paradis on the set).

In the course of development, Matti (who’s a Gordon Ramsay groupie) says he got excited over the menu and couldn’t resist turning the small kitchen and the bar into a main feature. Since then, the small shop has become a capital of sorts. When the second-floor cinema opened on November 17, a crowd turned out in full force despite the drizzle. Apart from peeling many of the Facebook generation from the Internet for the night, Matti and Sacris had done a number of things: poked fun at themselves and art film industry of which they are both in and out (an opening night trailer projected onto a large, outdoor tarpaulin did a good job of setting the cheeky and ironic tone), proven that people will brave Cubao traffic for good food and interesting movies, and fulfilled a dream.

Unlike other watering holes where like-minded, similarly motivated people come together to talk shop, Mogwai is the shop, and apart from the literal shop house finish, it has all the furnishings that make it easier and more inspiring to hatch artistic plots and work out the details. A long, hardwood dining table makes the perfect space for plates of the house specialties as well as several laptops, notebooks, and sheets of paper. A motley ensemble of chairs and couches recall a very “the early years” setting of perhaps the next big rock band. Artworks of various persuasions and inclinations decorate the walls.

I go to Mogwai for the infectious vibe of the plotterati, or people plotting their next personal project in delicious secrecy. Interestingly, these are people appealing to me for that sense of being on the brink of either the big time or a breakdown — the stakes they lay on the table are admirably quite high. It is entirely possible that I am imagining things, and that in fact they’re just all either finishing what they didn’t do at the office or unwinding with Mojitos and small talk, but you can’t discount a feeling. And at Mogwai, I feel surrounded by small, half-hidden dreams, waiting with darting eyes (it could also be thanks to the logo by Dan Matutina, who knows?) for the right time to jump out of the shadows and become the next explosive statement in art, the next acclaimed movie to stir renewed interest in local cinema, the next clever ad to sweep the country, or that something else made entirely at whim and proclaiming absolutely nothing.

Mogwai, a personal project of its owners, is in itself a tribute to big passions that start out small and, caught in the shower of opportune moments, expand, multiply, and turn fierce as wildfire. And yes, mogwais become gremlins. I never thought I would ever relate the experience of recovering an almost-buried dream to the legendary critters of the big screen, but then again, these are strange times. Anything can happen.