May 25th, 2008
Mwahahahaha! Just had to let the cosmic laughter resonate, no, reverberate in my body…
Everything is grace! Even when shit happens… Divine piss, holy shit!
I have always been wary of spirituality/religiosity that denied/denigrated the body. Non summus angeli! (We’re no angels!)
May 17th, 2008
Saw Richard Attenborough’s “Grey Owl” on TV. (Saw “Gandhi” in my elementary school years.) It featured Pierce Brosnan as Archie Belaney, a.k.a. “Grey Owl.” Based on a true story.
Loved the movie. Like “The King of Masks,” it touched on the relationship between living an authentic, passion-filled life and merely “playing” a role/part. Or more derogatorily, merely “faking” it.
Can one live an authentic life when one is engaged in a deception? Can one have “authority” when “authenticity” is lacking? What does it mean to be “authentic”?
May 14th, 2008
The awareness of the shamanic aspect of acting (the actor as an agent of positive change in society) is one of the things that I liked in “The King of Masks.”
Society has always been ambivalent to actors.
On the one hand, people are fascinated by the magical, yes, shamanic capacity of the actor to become other than what and who he is. Acting was first done by priests/shamans. There has always been that mystical/divine/spiritual/religious aspect to acting.
And yet, because of that possibility of entering into the nature of “things,” actors themselves can be waylaid and thrown off, especially by the dark daemonic qualities of persons and things. This is what probably scares a lot of people. Actors get to cross boundaries and societal taboos with some measure of impunity – anyway they’re just fulfilling their roles. But when the iconoclasm breaks through from art to real life… uhuh… that’s where it becomes dangerous and suspicious.
Thus actors too were regarded as immoral people, lumped with the gypsies and criminal elements.
May 7th, 2008
“The King of Masks” (by Wu Tianming), a heart-warming (if a bit melodramatic and, according to a friend, emotionally manipulative) Chinese film with English subtitles.
Loved it. And am recommending that you take the time to watch it.
Reasons to watch it:
) It features a monkey.
2) It has nudity. (Extreme close-up!) Hahaha!
3) It has the “Living Bodhisattva” in it.
4) It underscores the “non-essentiality”/accidentality of some of our societal masks (like gender, for instance) in what truly matters.
5) It’s about having passion and developing compassion.
6) It’s about the interweaving of life, art, and love.
Don’t miss it, especially if you’re an actor/performer.
Best regards,
thesp-ian
April 17th, 2008
Saw Cinema Paradiso years ago. In it, an old man tells a young man this beautiful story about the lover who on the eve of finally fulfilling his desire (i.e., getting his love), left, without so much as a word or explanation.
Why did he leave? Did he resent the fact that his love had to test his love? Did he get scared of the impending success of his quest? Did he tire of the waiting? Lost his love/desire? Gotten what he wanted (proven to himself that he had the capacity to suffer for his love)?
We do not know.
Why would we give up something/someone that we desire (with the whole of our being) just when we’re about to get it/her/him?
That story is what in the film made the deepest impression in me.
Many years later, I got to read this book by Roland Barthes, “A Lover’s Discourse” (1977). In the section entitled “Waiting,” we find this fragment:
“A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. ‘I shall be yours,’ she told him, ‘When you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.’ But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.”
March 3rd, 2008
Jokes for philosophers:
1. Philosophaster: Who’s the most punctual philosopher?
Philosopher: Immanuel Kant.
Philosophaster: And why?
Philosopher: It is said that Immanuel Kant used to take his daily walk in the afternoon in Konigsberg with such regularity and punctuality. It soon came to a point that his townmates knew what time it was when they saw Kant walking.
Philosophaster: Nope.
Philosopher: Who then?
Philosophaster: Martin Heidegger.
Philosopher: Really? And why?
Philosophaster: Because he wrote a book entitled “Being On Time.”
Note: “Sein und Zeit” (“Being and Time”), written by Martin Heidegger, cited by existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre as a seminal work. Heidegger, however, refused the tag “existentialist” as if it were “The Plague.” He was probably thinking: “Camu/s na lang. Wag n’yo na akong idamay.”
March 3rd, 2008
* Off the top of my head, here is a random list of films I’ve seen and liked/loved:
1 Leolo (probably my all-time favorite; a Canadian film in French)
2 Splash (with Tom Hanks and Daryll Hannah, with a beautiful song – One Fine Day or Love
Came for Me? – by Lee Holdridge and Marvin Hamlisch)
3 Insiang, Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, and Ora Pro Nobis (Lino Brocka)
4 Kakabakaba ka ba? (Mike de Leon?)
5 Alapaap (Tata Esteban)
6 Groundhog Day (with Bill Murray)
7 All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar)
8 Carlito’s Way (with Al Pacino, and the beautiful Penelope Ann Miller)
9 Santa Sangre (Axwl Jodorowsky)
10 The Girl on the Bridge (a French film in black and white)
11 Immortal Beloved
… and many others…
January 25th, 2008
Will keep posting old articles until they are all archived here. Will post something new every now and then.
best regards,
ian
Writing in Tongues
By Michael Ian Lomongo, April 29, 2001
(Thoughts on Actors’ Actors Inc.’s production of Paul Stephen Lim’s “Mother Tongue†— with Bart Guingona, Nieves Campa, Miren Alvarez, Ed Feist, Richard Cunanan, Bobbie Greenwood, Kate Fernandez; directed by Chris Millado)
The day I watched AAI’s production of Stephen Paul Lim’s “Mother Tongue,” I had just finished reading Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club.” I’ve long wanted to read the novel after seeing the movie years ago. Some of the people I’ve talked with, who have both read the novel and seen the movie, preferred the novel. As they say, much is lost in any translation (whether it be from one medium to another or from one language to another). For me though, much of the narrative’s visceral impact in the watching wasn’t there in the reading (probably because I was no longer encountering it for the first time).
Anyway, I mentioned “The Joy Luck Club,” because like it, “Mother Tongue” is about finding and defining one’s identity and home in the Land of Promise. The former is about immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters, and how they try to bridge the breach in understanding caused by two disparate cultures; the latter, about a Chinese mother who’s an immigrant to the Philippines and her writer-son who migrates to America, and how this son seeks her mother’s understanding in his freely causing (and embracing) the breach.
January 21st, 2008
My review of the Matrix Trilogy.
best regards,
ian
P.S. By the way, saw a portion of “Dark City” last Saturday on Studio 23. Years ago, I received a forwarded email which compared several scene shots from “Dark City” with “The Matrix.” Homage or (unconscious) plagiarism?
—
Within the Matrix of Love
by Michael Ian Lomongo, December 12, 2003
I know. Many are disappointed with the Matrix Revolutions and the trilogy as a whole. The last two installments didn’t live up to the promise of the original Matrix. And of course, pundits would always say that the whole thing was just a veritable chopsuey: “love story“-cum-”sci-fi”-cum-”martial arts”-cum-”watered-down pop-philosophy.”
Watered-down pop-philosophy? Maybe. But the trilogy can really serve as a stimulating introduction to philosophy for the general public.
Among the major themes we find in the films are questions regarding illusion and reality, freedom and determinism, power and love.
The first installment focuses on the metaphysical and epistemological questions. What is the Matrix? What is the nature of reality? How do we know for sure whether “our reality” is “really real”?
January 21st, 2008
Posting my review of the first two installations of “The Matrix Trilogy.”
best regards,
ian
—
The Matrix, Overloaded
by Michael Ian Lomongo, May 26, 2003
I
Why isn’t “The Matrix: Reloaded” as captivating as “The Matrix”?
I don’t think it’s because the novelty of the original movie’s winning combination of stunning visual effects and intriguing philosophical premise has faded. (We know now what “the Matrix” is. We no longer are as curious when we first watched “The Matrix.”) Neither is it simply because most sequels really do fail to come up to expectations. (Consider the “X-men 2″ which is, to me, infinitely better than the first “X-men” movie.)
I loved “The Matrix” mainly because I thought it was pop-philosophy (metaphysics) in film. The only other sci-fi/superhero film that approximates this achievement in recent times was “Spiderman,” a sort of pop-ethics with Kantian/Dostoyevskian/Nietzschean overtones. (Intrigued by a friend’s blurb that “Existenz” was the thinking man’s “Matrix,” I went out of my way to see it. I didn’t like it.)