Tinimbang ka Ngunit Kulang

Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang is a story of  Kuala (played by Lolita Rodriguez), a woman who wanders about in dirty clothes. Bertong Ketong, ,who is hated to touch by the community because of his disease leprosy, got attracted to Kuala and takes her to his nipa hut in the cemetery. Junior (played by Christopher de Leon)  a teenager who is the secret boyfriend of the town’s prettiest girl, Evangeline and the only one who made friends with the two, defying his father’s demand to stay away from them.
In his short but memorable friendship with these two characters, he learns about human nature especially of society’s treatment of people with disabilities and deformities.

The churc there serves as the community’s censor or the “town’s judge” which dispenses what is morally right and wrong. Scandalized by the pregnancy of Kuala, the Associacion members suggested that Kuala should be under the custody of Lola Jacoba (the town’s rich matriarch and a member of the Associacion ) Junior shows up and helps the pregnant Kuala make her way back to Berto’s shack. He entreats his father to help the hapless Kuala but the latter chided his son for meddling in the life of a demented woman. The father , Cesar Blanco(played by Eddie Garcia) is a womanizing politician who is the former lover of Kuala and who aborted their child.

When Kuala is about to give birth, she found her way to Berto. Berto called a doctor but no one believed him so he has no choice so he just forced the doctor to come but when they were close to the nipa hut, Berto was shot and after a few seconds. There is the sound of the baby crying. Junior went to see what it is and found Kuala and her child. But Kuala died so Junior took the baby.

Its great how they inserted the flashback in the movie. It makes us the audience think. It is quite “bitin” for me but overall the film is great. Except for the English subtitle. It is sometimes wrong.

Mowelfund

Our tour in Mowelfund started pass 9:30 am because we have to wait for the other student and for the guest to arrive so we ate our breakfast first. It was worth the wait because the guest is unexpectedly Ms. Boots Anson-Roa. She told us how Mowelfund has started and some tips on her career.

She also told us what’s inside the mowelfund the exhibits there. And what interests me the most is the Horror room so i quite expected a lot from it that it would be scary and would be like the ones that is on the Star City. So we went directly there and it is quite disappointing because i did not saw what i visualized that it would be but on the other hand it is still cool for me. It has sound and a blue light that makes white t-shirt looks like there glowing in the dark.

Inside the Mowelfund is amazing because we can use the ones that are displayed there. And we can see the dresses that they used in some movies they created. We can also see the faces of the actors and actresses in the 90’s. We are amazed how beautiful and handsome they are back in the days.

All in all the Mowelfund Tour is fun and amazing. I was all worth it.

TRAINSPOTTING

Trainspotting is film much more than drugs. It teaches us how to give importance in our life without taking drugs. It also teaches us what our life would be if we will use drugs or heroin.

The first list begins: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers.” And the final list, really an extension of the first, is set up as follows: “I’m cleaning up and I’m moving on, going straight and choosing life. I’m looking forward to it already. I’m going to be just like you: the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electrical tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage…”

In between are only a few comparable lists — one of them a delightful rundown of what Renton takes out of his shopping bags — but there are strings of episodes and anecdotes, of stories within stories and hallucinated visions within visions, all of which bop along percussively in the same sort of rhythmic patterns. The point of all these accumulations is the verbal, musical, and visual flow they establish; style produces content, including whatever passes for moral content. How we get from one episode to another in this film, from action to reflection, from Edinburgh to London, from addiction to nonaddiction, and from friendship to betrayal isn’t really all that different from how we get from career to family or from washing machine to car.

It’s story is about Renton who is a drug addict that is trying to break his habit while his friends encourage him to use heroin. Trainspotting is the tale of Scottish heroin junkies and their lives in Glasgow. The addict men (Mark Renton, Spud, Alison) whose drug is hurting people (Begbie) and the clean ones, (Tommy, Gail, Lizzy.) Mark Renton makes a decision to quit heroin and is joined by his friends (one of which just comes off it to prove to Mark he can do it easier than he can.) While his friends go through numerous unfavourable events, prompting them to resume their addiction, but a tragic turn of events makes Mark resolve to leave his old life behind and go to work in London, but he soon finds out that he can’t always leave his past behind that easily.

There are really humourous scenes, enhanced all the more by the Scottish accents. Some of the better kicks: Renton’s plunge all the way down to “the worst toilet in Scotland” to retrieve a medicine he uses to stop his addiction to heroin. When a baby is crawling in the ceiling and when one of them throws the glass and someone got hurt.

FRENCH IMPRESSIONISM AND SURREALISM

After four years of bloody in the World War I in 1919, France and its film industry was ruined. So, the directors intended to restore the reputation of national cinema. They are looking for way to distinguish them from the rest of the world. Knowing that it couldn’t compete with the big elaborate films of Hollywood, filmmakers turned to inner drama and ways to explore the tortured psyche of man. This idea launched French Impressionist Cinema.

Impressionism

Impressionists use montage. Montage is a technique in film editing in which a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information. They use point-of-view (POV) shots to show what a character saw, and filters to distort that character’s vision or to point out the focus of their attention. They superimposed one image onto another to suggest character’s thought process or to evoke an inner “impression.”

Surrealism

I find Surrealism kind of weird but that is what surrealism is about. It plays the mind of the audience letting them think of the story even though there is none. They sought to blow up the everyday reality with the help of the strange, disturbing images of consciousness. Their films do not always have the plot. Sometimes they simply consist of unrelated expressive frames. In other cases, they were a series of abstract shapes, drawn or etched directly on film.

THE FILM SCHOOL GENERATION

“The Movie Brats”
 

Movies in the Film School Generation

In the end of the 60’s is the beginning of the new decade. A generation of new directors which is also called the movie brats came to power that makes blockbuster movie.

The Film School Generation is also called the New Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood which is sometimes referred to as the “American New Wave”. It started in the late-1960s and ended in the early 1980s when a new generation of young filmmakers came to power in

America, influencing the types of films produced, their production and marketing, and impacted the way major studios approached film making.

The films that the new generations made were part of the studio system and not “independent film makers”, but they introduced subject matter and styles that set them apart from the studio traditions that an earlier generation had established ca. 1920s-1950s. New Hollywood has also been defined as a broader film making movement influenced by this period, which has been called the “Hollywood renaissance”.

This new generation of Hollywood filmmaker was film school-educated, counterculture-bred, and, most importantly from the point of view of the studios, young, and therefore able to reach the youth audience they were losing. This group of young filmmakers which are the actors, writers and directors created the New Hollywood by the press, briefly changed the business from the Hollywood system of the past, and put movies with a jolt of freshness, energy, sexuality, and a passion for the artistic value of film itself.

Film School Generation Documentary

THE FOURTH MAN

THE FOURTH MAN (DE VIERDE MAN)

The Netherlands, 1983

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Stars: Jeroen Krabbé, Renée Soutendijk, Thom Hoffman, Dolf de Vries

FRENCH NEW WAVE

The French New Wave was a group of amazing directors who exploded onto the film scene in the late 1950s. The French new wave gave birth to such ideas as  jump cuts, lack of goal-oriented heroes and the unimportance of linear structure, which is far different and the exact opposite from the Classical Hollywood style. What the French new wave gave, most importantly, was a radical sense of change in cinema that would trickle throughout the world.

French New Wave Cinema rejected traditional linear tropes of storytelling and created a new language of film. Inspired by both depictions of the common, lower class workers of Italian Neorealism and Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’, the French New Wave became a vibrant influence on international cinema which is still being felt today. Without it, film isn’t as open, as free, or as experiemental today. Without the likes of Godard and Truffaut, studios and sets and literature would still limit movies. They freed up cinema to come into it’s own as an art form and differ itself like it never had been before.

 

THE STAR SYSTEM

The star system was the method of creating, promoting and exploiting movie stars in Classical Hollywood cinema. Studios would select promising young actors and would teach them how to become a great artists. The young actors is given screen names and that would be the name that they will be known for. The American star system is one of the most dominant shaping forces in the field of cinema.

The successful entry of any given actor or actress into the path American superstars often has nothing to do with his or her actual talent. Sometimes ambition, luck, looks, and persona can carry the day.  Nevertheless, the star system is a bizarre, often disturbing, but probably permanent part of American and world cinema.

 

 

 

THE STUDIO SYSTEM

In the Studio System which is also called “The Golden Age”, stars powered the American Studio System from 1934-1946. Various studios which is called the five major studios was created which are the 20th-Century Fox (1935), Paramount Pictures (1912), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1924), Columbia Pictures (1920), and Warner Brothers (1923). They held a long-term contracts both on directors and stars.

The “major studios” was far more better than the smaller contemporaries. They have big budgets for a film and they have found a much better approach to film making. Each of the Big Five built their own sound stages, bought their own filming equipment, and arranged to have exclusive rights to their movies. They found the most viable and bankable actors they could, and signed them to years-long contracts, ensuring that they would have exclusive rights to use their talent. Each studio had a “stable” of talent.

But then, the Golden Ages did not last long. The beginning of the end for the studio system, and the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age, is the 1948 landmark Supreme Court decision United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. This decision not only outlawed the practice of block booking , it also forced the studios to sell their theater chains. The Studio System also fall down because of independent films and also because of the television.

FILM NOIR AND GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

  

German expressionist films were prevalent in the 1920s. Some of the films remembered in the german expressionism are films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari by Robert Weiner and Metropolis by Fritz Lang, 1927. These films were united by highly stylized visuals, strange asymmetrical camera angles, atmospheric lighting and harsh contrasts between dark and light. Shadows and silhouettes were an important feature of expressionism, to the extent that they were actually painted on to the sets in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Society  were changing, and also the people.  They headed to a more positive and prosperous time they were not as interested in seeing dark, twisted views of the world in films. This brought the death of German Expressionism as it was known. Though German Expressionism was dying and never seen again in this original form, many genres since then have been influenced by its production values. Film Noir is one such genre, which used lighting and design to set the mood of the film with great effect.

Film noir is a style of filmmaking characterized by elements such as distrustful heroes, extreme lighting effects, frequent use of flashbacks, and plots that is hard to understand. The genre was prevalent mostly in American crime dramas of the post-World War II era.

Film noir is also called “The Black Film” it is all about The dark side of society. It refers to a series of downbeat, gritty crime and action movies made in the 1940s and 1950s. It portrays portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption. These movies used a shadowy, moody visual style that was inspired by European movies of the 1920s.

German Expressionism

Example of Film Noir

ROMEO AND JULIET

 

Romeo and Juliet, the 1968 version of Shakespeare’s play, is directed by Franco Zeffirelli.  It Shakespeare’s classic tale of romance and tragedy. I focuses on two families of Verona, the Montagues and the Capulets, have been feuding with each other for years. Young Romeo Montague goes out with his friends to make trouble at a party the Capulets are hosting, Then Young Romeo saw Juliet and he falls in love with her, who is actually being wooed by Paris. They see each other in secret; however Romeo kills Tybalt for murdering his friend Mercuito. The prince banishes Romeo, but he hatches a plan to reunite with Juliet. However, both external circumstances and their flaws lead them to tragedy.

This story was not meant to be an idealized romance. Romeo and Juliet are so reckless in their secret romance that it ruined their families and serves as a warning. With that in mind, Zeffirelli’s adaptation is quite good. The costuming and sets not only fit the time period but is kind of awkward because of the tights the men used. The balcony love scene is quite good with both actors putting their heart and soul in it. When Romeo goes to the Capulet’s tomb to kill himself, there is a creepy aura since the corpses are only covered by a see-through cloth. The ending is good too, showing the families their dead children’s bodies. Though, Their language is quite hard to understand because they talk really fast in Shakespeare’s strange lyrical language.

Related articles

• O, Romeos, Romeos! Montagues and Capulets Take Manhattan (observer.com)
• Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks takes ‘Romeo & Juliet’ apart for audiences (triblive.com)
• Photo Coverage: ROMEO AND JULIET’s Orlando Bloom & Condola Rashad Sign Juliet’s Wall at Richard Rodgers Theatre! (broadwayworld.com)
• Romeo and Juliet Resource Guide (costumediscounters.com)