MIRON

The Echo of Yam Laranas: Horror at its best

Ironically, it was Yam Laranas' horror movie The Echo that made waves in Cannes as an artistic and masterfully directed film. Fellow Filipino Brillante Mendoza's art movie Serbis, on the other hand, was generally described as horrible, achieving with its crude "boil popping scene" new levels of yuckiness.
Yam Laranas wasn't even in the running for awards. The Echo was screened in Cannes to snag more film distributors. Brillantes was gunning for top prize and was a much hyped entry to Director's Fortnight.
As I said, it's truly ironic.
But really not a surprise. The young Laranas is widely recognized as something of a boy genius in Philippine Cinema.
While The Echo was predictably promoted "from the producers of The Ring and The Grudge" causing many to dismiss it as yet another Asian horror remake, early reviews of The Echo promise it is anything but.  The normally snarky reviewers of highly influential horror blogs Twitchfilm.net and Bloody-Disgusting.com wax poetic about The Echo's "art-house" qualities, describing Yam Laranas almost reverentially as a "hugely accomplished cinematographer" who, despite having an outside director of photography on board The Echo, "had his fingerprints all over the visuals and the shooting style" in a movie that was "far more about building mood and tone than piling on shock after shock."
Obviously, the kid's got an almost cult-like following. Watchers of The Echo in film sites like IMDB hold vigil for news of distribution. Yam Laranas's masterful direction may have placed the film in the slim and rarified category occupied by deeply scary but artistically rendered ghost stories like The Others. Not a bad place to be.  And for fans of The Echo and Yam Laranas who probably can't make a mediocre film if his life depended on it, perhaps the only place to be.

THE ECHO (SIGAW): Something to shout about

If you are one of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos "sick of Philippine politics," and "getting tired of being Filipino," here is something to shout about.

Director Yam Laranas's film Sigaw (internationally released as The Echo) has been drawing raves in Hollywood after producer Roy Lee watched the movie and confessed: "I found myself jumping at certain scenes and I have seen many other horror movies where that never happens."

You'll appreciate that quote more if you know who Roy Lee is. He's the hot Hollywood producer who brought Japanese horror movies The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water to Hollywood and turned them into critically acclaimed, international box office hits. Right now, Roy Lee is executive producing The Departed starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Matt Damon, and directed by Martin Scorcese.

How Roy Lee discovered Yam and Sigaw is fast becoming the stuff of legend in filmmaking circles. It is absolute proof of the power of good word of mouth. Roy heard about Sigaw from someone who watched it and loved it and knew other people who saw Sigaw and were raving about it as well.

Without a single centavo spent on Marketing and PR, Sigaw outlived the hype and hysteria of the 2004 Metro Manila Film Festival where it quietly cultivated a cult-like following.

The cult spread far and wide. Before Yam and his producers knew it, Sigaw had been booked to make its Hollywood premiere as The Echo at the ScreamfestLA International Horror Film Festival, the same fest where the original Japanese film The Grudge debuted.

Amidst the buzz, the respected critic Keith Breese of filmcritic.com  reviewed the film, giving The Echo a stunning rating of 3 1/2 stars out of 5. That's the same rating the critics gave Batman Begins, and higher than the ratings of big budget Hollywood movies Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (3 stars),  The  Island (3 stars) and Fantastic Four (2 stars).

According to Breese, Sigaw "has an atmosphere of fear and loneliness that is positively sinking. Sigaw cuts past all the shock and awe of revulsion to really get to the meat of the traditional ghost story: the human element. Ghost stories aren't about cackling bones, they're about people and people's fear, Laranas knows this and preys upon our emotions expertly."

He goes on to say, "American readers may encounter some difficulty in tracking down a copy of Sigaw (try the net), and I doubt the Hollywood machine will be remaking it any time soon. That’s a shame, because Sigaw is a subtle, human ghost tale that will haunt you long after you’ve forgotten Dark Water or The Ring."

Today , Sigaw continues to echo and haunt its followers through its website. The site itself is a pioneering and an impressive display of film and web design by young filmmaker and web wizard Chuck Gutierrez who pretty much invented the technology behind it.

One good work inspiring another...

Exactly what this country needs to start changing for the better.

Flop Sided

An open letter to Nestor Torre, Emmie Velarde, Edmund Sicam, Ricky Lo, and Metro Manila's entertainment editors:

Can you guys watch what your writers and contributors are calling flops? You decry exploitative, purely commercial, technically substandard films and constantly appeal for quality movies. Yet your very own writers and contributors are too quick to label quality films that don't make a certain amount of money as "flops".

It's dismissive, unenlightened, and fixes the value of all films upon the bottomline.

If we sincerely want to uplift the quality of Filipino movies, we've got to create an environment where producers and filmmakers can take risks and make movies that can go global, go regional, or go even for just that one guy sitting in the back.

In other words, we've got to push the agenda beyond the local Takilya.

Hindi lahat ng pelikula dapat patok sa takilya. In today's borderless cinema, a filmmaker can aim for Asia or America or go straight to the viewer's sala (like the irrepressible Jon Red's "Boso" and "Astig"). There are many ways to feed a world that is always hungry for great content. And certainly more ways to measure a movie's success other than its ticket sales.

What about its potential for foreign distribution? Its VCD and DVD sales? Its ability to draw a new audience to the theaters? Its contribution to the craft of filmmaking? Not to mention, its impact on the people who watched it? A big but forgettable hit is surely less impressive than a small movie that built a strong cult following.

Such values are lost on a lazy and narrowminded media with a limited view of the filmmaking industry and an even more limited vocabulary. Writers who, as film critics, (if I may just borrow their word) flop!