Because I envy those award-giving bodies that give out lots of hardware at the end of the year, to give recognition where it is due but also to congratulate themselves on their own impeccable taste, I’ve decided to come up with my own list of favorites for the year just passed.
In the three categories of books, movies, and plays below, I’ve noted the ones I liked the best (barks) and the ones that let me down the most (bites).
Warning: As in all matters of opinion, there is plenty of room for argument whether I’ve made good choices here. My defense is that these choices are mine, and I’ve made them to the best of my ability. If you don’t like them, feel free to write your own column.
First, let’s go to fiction.
Books
Barks: The best novel I read was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Set in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the United States, Gilead tells the story of an aging preacher who writes a long letter to his very young son. Though the pace is deliberate, the prose is mesmerizing. And Robinson finds dramatic import in small, domestic spaces. An amazing book.
I finally took my copy of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume off the shelf where it had languished for years and finally read it. It’s a gripping tale of a freak of nature, a man with an ultrasensitive sense of smell but who has no scent of his own and who becomes an unrepentant murderer. Disturbing and fascinating in turns, it was turned into a fine movie in 2006.
Stone Virgin is the second Barry Unsworth novel I’ve read, and it’s nearly as good as Morality Play, which I read last year. Stone Virgin takes place in three historical periods and concerns the creation of a piece of sculpture that comes to be associated with near-miraculous (and scandalous) powers. My hardcover copy of Unsworth’s Booker Prize–winner Sacred Hunger, all 600 pages of it, beckons. This summer, perhaps.
Other notable novels: The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, my first taste of hard-boiled crime fiction by one of its master practitioners; Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, a slim novel about teenage boys who fall in love with books (and the same girl) while in a “reeducation” camp in China during the Cultural Revolution; Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a charming and sly tale of a boy who survives being stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger for company.
Bites: Death in Holy Orders was my first P.D. James novel, and it’s a bland by-the-numbers whodunit. I’m sure this popular writer of detective fiction has done better. Many people love Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., but this war-slash-sci-fi novel didn’t grab me the way I hoped it would. I might have loved this had I read it when I was younger.
Nonfiction barks: My favorites include a Nick Hornby book about books. I love his 31 Songs, more even than the only novel by this popular novelist that I’ve read (High Fidelity), and so I didn’t hesitate buying his Housekeeping vs The Dirt, a collection of essays he wrote on books for a now-defunct magazine. He’s an astute and exuberant fan of music, and he’s an astute and exuberant reader as well. (I bought Robinson’s Gilead on the strength of Hornby’s recommendation.)
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman is about the joys of living a life in books. Fadiman wittily and gleefully writes about her lifelong love affair with books in all its quirky details.
Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi, the sequel to her coming-of-age story set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq, picks up where the first volume left off, with Satrapi in Europe as a teenager all alone. This second volume features the same childlike drawing style — it’s a nonfiction graphic novel, if there is such a thing — but is richer and more emotionally mature than the first.
Nonfiction bites: I was most let down by The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. She’s my favorite writer of nonfiction, yet this much-praised book left me wanting more. Sometimes the frame of mind we’re in when we come to a book determines our reaction to it, and that may explain my disappointment. I wanted something else at the time I read this. The simple unadorned prose she used to describe her grief and coping with the death of her husband and her daughter’s serious illness — a deliberate departure from her usual, more artful style — didn’t engage me the way she usually does. The thing is, I love her usual, more artful style.
Movies
Here are the best ones I watched that were released before 2007: Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth (though this dark fantasy showed in theaters here last year), Flags of Our Fathers (more stimulating than the overpraised Letters from Iwo Jima), The History Boys, Little Miss Sunshine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Chungking Express, and 2046 (the last two of which continue my exploration of the fascinating work of Wong Kar-Wai). Early in the year my wife and I bought a DVD set of Hayao Miyazaki movies and relived favorites like The Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. We also liked his most recent flick, Howl’s Moving Castle. (The child inside me still loves My Neighbor Totoro more than the rest, however.)
Barks: Among the 2007 releases that I caught on the big screen, my favorite was Persepolis, hands down. With co-director Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi turns her graphic novel–memoir of growing up in Iran into a wonderful animated movie. It’s full of pathos and anguish yet also vibrant and cheeky, aside from being a remarkable achievement in adapting a print source into film. (Persepolis showed briefly at the Metro Manila filmfest in August and opened in the US just this past December. It should be in our theaters soon.)
Another animated delight was Pixar’s Ratatouille, a movie that, like The Incredibles before it, celebrates excellence while managing to be sprightly, popular entertainment. It also puts wannabe-critics like me in my place. (And how wonderful a name for a critic is Anton Ego?)
Other very good ones: Transformers, Casino Royale (which breathed new life into the Bond franchise, taking it into darker territory where previously it had been content to tread on gloss), The Bourne Ultimatum (the action movie of the year, and which made Matt Damon officially hot), Perfume and The Kingdom (it’s Rambo in the Middle East, morally facile but pulse-pounding entertainment nonetheless).
Notable omission: What about Enchanted, you might ask? My answer: Traffic. On a Friday night. In December. So there. (I’ll watch it on DVD, promise.)
Bites: the third and last installment of The Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The subtitle should have been Tediouser and Tediouser. Johnny Depp’s fey pirate can only hold our interest for so long. Beowulf: a huge waste of acting talent and not even nice to look at. And if you’re going to make a practically naked Angelina Jolie look strangely androgyne (and with stiletto heels!), you’ve lost me. Despite all my students raving about 300, I thought it was dull. Relentless computer graphics plus hypermachismo equals pornotainment. I sat in the cold movie theater for two hours feeling mightily abused. Juvenile beyond belief.
Plays
Last year I fell in love with theater. Funny, because I’ve been teaching drama as part of my first-year literature classes, and so I’ve felt just a little guilty whenever a student asks, “Sir, have you seen this play?” and I would have to sheepishly admit that I hadn’t. The turning point was watching Fluid, written and directed by Floy Quintos and staged by a bunch of students majoring in performing arts in Ateneo in a small campus theater. The performances blew me away, and most of these were by mere college students. (I would choose Trency Caga-anan, JJ Ignacio, and Jean-Pierre Reniva as the most impressive.) A switch flicked on somewhere inside me. I knew I needed to go out and watch more. That’s one reason I’ve tried my hand at writing reviews for this paper over the past several months.
So here’s my best-of list, granting that the number of productions I watched was limited because I missed most of the significant ones staged in the first half of the year.
Barks: Insiang, written by Mario O’Hara, directed by Chris Millado for Tanghalang Pilipino. A gritty, hard-hitting look at life in the slums, yet surprisingly funny and festive at times, the play featured fine turns by Ricky Davao, Mailes Kanapi, Peewee O’Hara, and Sheenly Ver Gener. (Apologies to Mae Paner, who originated the role of Toyang; I wasn’t able to watch her performance.)
Close seconds: After Aida, written by Julian Mitchell, directed by Jaime del Mundo for MusicArtes. This fledgling company starts out with a bang. A play investigating how a genius (Giuseppe Verdi) creates his masterwork (Otello), After Aida is a play with operatic music but fuses it with the drama so seamlessly that the music becomes organic to the story. A stellar team of theater veterans (led by Paul Holme, Nieves Kampa Alvarez, Del Mundo, and Bart Guingona) act out the story while top-flight singers (Randy Gilongo, Rachelle Gerodias, Noel Azcona, and Nenen Espina) take care of the opera passages. A show where everything clicks, and the result is magical.
Also, PETA’s Romulus D’Grayt (highlighted by the wide-ranging performance of Dido dela Paz) and Batang Rizal, the two productions which also featured the most interesting set design of the plays I saw; Ateneo’s Fluid; Atlantis Productions’ Avenue Q, a hilarious send-up of Sesame Street featuring outstanding performances by Felix Rivera, Rachel Alejandro, and Joel Trinidad; and New Voice Company’s delightful Into the Woods. Not surprisingly, the plays I’ve mentioned featured the tightest ensemble acting. And something from early in the year: I was moved by Tanghalang Ateneo’s staging of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, the vehicle by which Laurice Guillen made a triumphant return to the stage. The gala night featured strong supporting performances by Ana Feleo, Jake de Leon, and Randy Villarama.
Other performances I would like to applaud: Ricky Davao’s hilarious turn in Art by Actors’ Actors; Natasha Garrucha and Paolo O’Hara in As You Like It by Dulaang UP; Dianna Laserna in The Death of Memory by Tanghalang Ateneo; and the entire cast of Atlantis Productions’ Dogeaters, especially Chari Arespacochaga.
That’s it for this first edition of “Dogberry Barks and Bites.” Tune in when I give out my awards for 2008. That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it? (But sorry, no hardware.)
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