Putting heart into action, reality into romance

While readying ourselves for another day of traffic, we were alternately glad and depressed by the front page news on last Thursday’s Philippine STAR, and how it would impact our lives. First was the direct flight of PAL to Europe. Second was the MMDA proposal of no window, twice weekly coding on EDSA.

To ease our mind, we decided to spend time to update ourselves with the latest foreign movies. The latest action picture from the US was White House Down. Rotten Tomatoes states the film “benefits from Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx’s sharp comedic chemistry, but director Roland Emmerich smothers it with narrative clichés and relentless, choppily edited action.”

However, the full house, us including, loved the action and the comedy between Jamie as US President, and Channing who plays a skilled police officer with a faculty for invention, disregard for tradition, whose sub-story is his love for his teenage daughter. We also like the obvious casting of Jamie as an Obama look-alike, which we are certain many would deem in bad taste.

Apparently, there have been two releases this year on attacks on the White House — Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. About.com reported that they appear to be the same movie in plot with major differences in treatment. Olympus is gritty, realistic and brutal. White House is unrealistic with more attention on comedy, thus an R-rating for violence on the former, and a PG-13 on the latter. Not having watched Olympus, we can’t tell; otherwise given our current mindset, we would opt for the action film with more heart in it.

Watching the American romance drama Before Midnight on its third and last installment hit us like a snowball on a hot summer night. We hadn’t watched its first two installments — Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) and we wish we had. It would have prepared us better in facing life’s heartaches; yet, on the other hand, we would have missed out on lessons best learned by living them. 

Like its predecessors, director is Richard Linklater, and stars are Ethan Hawke as Jesse, and Julie Delpy as Celine in this finale of the trilogy where the couple now are 41, wondering belatedly what it was that made them stay together after vicious fights and walkouts. The best thing about this concept is that it offers us film as ultimate reality. We meet Jesse and Celine as beautiful youngsters, watch them age through the years, a concept that demands supreme sacrifice from the actors.

The couple start off meeting on a train in Vienna as romantically inclined youngsters in Part 1; get together in a Paris bookstore nine years after and becomes pregnant with twins in Part 2; now in Before Midnight, Celine spends time guiding youngsters along the straight and narrow path. This finale is when they have reached the end of their patience, with middle age and weariness catching up on them. Life is no longer a romantic walk in the park. Life is now a tedious climb up the hill.

The theater was half full (or half empty) as is the case in many indie movies. The lovely and picturesque hills of Messinia, Greece fail to rekindle in them the spark that their regular walks and discussions had previously succeeded in doing. They reminisce on the past and how their lives have changed since then. At the hotel, they start with lovemaking, end up arguing and Celine storming out. Jesse follows her, saying that he loves her unconditionally, regardless of the good and bad in their relationship. They end up returning to the hotel.

Before Midnight premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, an international premiere out-of-competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, played at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival in New York and will continue its conquest of America, Europe and Asia, now that Reality Multimedia headed by Dondon Monteverde and Leo Po have acquired its distribution rights.

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