Screen
O'Brien, Tom
But she noted that even when the planters were prosperous, people, while the others - the vast majority - are excluded they did not share their fortunes with the workers. from...
...The peasants are not accustomed to dealing with such a A minority of planters accept the union and have initiated crisis...
...That's nal system...
...Seven workers share of profits without fear of repression...
...Much of the film Commonweal: 302 concerns a sensitive treatment of her coming of age against the also the kind of odd touch that typifies Coor's attempt to catch blackly comic background of Las Vegas in the early fifties, the texture of real life as once lived without straining for when atom bombs were being tested on a desert armaments symbolic resonance...
...But there also must were killed and buried on the plantation of the mayor of be a government policy aimed at turning many of the sugar Kabankalan in 1980...
...from the benefits which the land yields...
...needs action to depict character, and film normally needs it Coor thus provides a climactic domestic explosion, but fails more than theater, where actors can more easily use physical to relate it to the military one...
...Rather than depend on bility for the torture and killing of the victims, but was haras- the vagaries of the world sugar market, they would be better sed by the military and had to leave town...
...He said, "We understand that the poor them- problems, if we see the NPA could help, maybe we might selves must be able to extricate their miserable situation from support the NPA...
...Eduardo Claparols charged that the NFSW is a Communist BLOOMING PAST front: "They told the people, `In two years time that farm will 'DESERT' & 'VALENTINE'S DAY' be yours.' " He added that Catholic priests involved with the workers were sowing hatred, disunity, and disorder...
...The action includes their reconciliation with his physical wounds), it is somehow forced, maneuvered in to link rich (maternal) grandparents, and relations with oddball fellow the many complexities of the film...
...oppressive socio-economic and political structures...
...Annabeth's O for all its value as relief from normal cinematic excess, alcoholic stepfather (a difficult role superbly played by Jon isn't always a better answer...
...about close personal experience often errs on the side of Nevertheless, the whole of Desert Bloom is not under- understatement, assuming that the significance and power of whelmed by the sum of its parts...
...People are hungry and get sick and die...
...The eyeglasses work less as tenants and a disturbed cousin...
...In the past, we used to do that, Party...
...Unity is thus derived from a kind of In effect, Foote's failure here is rhetorical...
...They were tortured, prices, and since the planters are educated people, they can go tied together, and brought to a field to be shot...
...The mayor was later off growing rice and corn and raising chickens and pigs on killed by NPA guerrillas...
...Because the land is a gift newcomer Eugene Coor, the film is unusual from its initial set of God, it is not admissible to use this gift in such a manner of images: shots of its heroine, a thirteen-year-old girl (Anthat the benefits it produces serve only a limited number of nabeth Gish), trying on her first eyeglasses...
...Coor uses the first as the recluse Boo Radley in Mockingbird, later as Meroddly framed eyeglasses, for example, to plant an oblique cies' Mac Sledge...
...Sugar workers are poor because salary of the farm workers has got to be improved...
...for my grandfather...
...gambling...
...One escaped into business...
...Thirteen other organizers have been imprisoned and charged with rebellion...
...Garbed in floozie style...
...Bishop Fortich explained that his views were of the farmers...
...Nine youths active in the union were step...
...Nothquickie forty-two-day divorce, advises her niece on costumes ing unites the various strands of the narrative except the comto lure men, then lures one too many herself...
...When Pope John Paul II addressed sugar film that synthesizes American subject matter and a planters in Bacolod City in February 1981 he told them: "The quirky European technique...
...The whole ensemble involved in the range just to the north...
...military prepared a warrant charging him with crimes...
...In a world of declining market share, there workers in Negros, but efforts at organizing have been hin- may be room for fewer sugar plantations...
...that her mother (JoBeth Williams) "sees what she wants to Where Foote's understatement fails is with his own family, see" about her stepfather, a veteran whose memories of World as in 1918, released several years ago, a study of the impact of War II haunt his sleep and whose postwar sense of insignifi- the influenza epidemic on his ancestors...
...The government must buy the lands of the planters at fair arrested by the military that same year...
...through visual means...
...Some, like Horacia Starke, feel the system times they hadn't even used family names, but were known as needs basic changes...
...repeated a worker at Hacienda Guinsang...
...While he goes back to 1910, and attempts to detail his parents' first the child's observation is true (the mother is particularly given year of married life in a threadbare boarding house after their to malappropriate, mangled proverbs to soothe emotional and elopement...
...At times the multifaceted plot events in their own lives is transparent to others...
...Coor is also good on quieter elements of the past - plain folk in the American South and Southwest...
...In January, the bodies of Screen three union organizers were discovered in a part of the island with a strong military presence...
...That is why some have turned to union "We are not so familiar with the struggle of the NPA...
...their own plots...
...But she noted that even when the planters were prosperous, people, while the others - the vast majority - are excluded they did not share their fortunes with the workers...
...The grandfathers of some of my workers worked why people join the NPA...
...it's TOM O'BRIEN 23 May 1986: 303...
...Coor wants to mon boarding house location...
...Films don't have to have car chases or starships or sex...
...we have organizing to win better conditions...
...The NPA fighting recognition that they will no longer be guaranteed what they for farm workers...
...The ones who know only farming should farm and was prepared to testify to the killings...
...excludes them from profits and in bad times does not equitably The union has signed up 70,000 out of 300,000 sugar share the burden...
...Indeed, the church has taken a high-profile position in favor D EsERT BLOOM aims high: it's a richly literate but tense of the farinworkers...
...For generations, they have lived in virtual feudal situa- reforms, allowing their workers to plant food crops for home tions, dependent from birth till death on the planters...
...However, the the land...
...He and individual characterization...
...The nately, resembles an artless home movie...
...this can be they are locked into a plantation system that in good times done only through the organization of labor unions...
...needs no explanation or elaboration...
...Here in Negros, 80 percent or more of the Catholic church are Communists, including the bishop," he said...
...Six NFSW organizers were murdered in 1984, three were Bishop Fortich agrees: "Land reform should be the first "disappeared" in 1985...
...But drama suggestive, not dramatically convincing...
...Some- use on vacant land...
...shot is perfectly appropriate to her mischievous character...
...At a later point, for example, Annabeth claims labic, but firm and unyielding in crisis...
...A playwright old Colgate toothpaste commercials, the excitement over the who grew up under the influence of the Southern Renaissance, then-new Hoover Dam, and spelling bees (at which Annabeth Foote has provided film with screenplays for To Kill a Mockexcels...
...There is nothing intrinsically a poetic device than a visual statement of Annabeth's combina- wrong with studying such a closed circle, nor with Foote tion of awkwardness and emerging sensuality...
...Coor thus manages a rich melange of both national ingbird, Tender Mercies, and the recent Trip to Bountiful...
...has also encouraged the career of the fine actor, Robert Duvall, Often, however, Desert Bloom is too rich...
...It is the abdication of responsibility on the part of the Farm workers are wary about admitting to strangers any "lords" in this feudal system that has shocked the "serfs" into direct contacts with the NPA guerrillas...
...casting his own daughter, Hallie, as his mother...
...The basis is economic injustice...
...In his best work he has Once Ellen Barkin is sitting in bed putting nail polish on her always attempted to portray the natural dignity of family life, toenails, and Coor photographs her cupping her elbow on a an honest and needed labor in film today...
...The problem A "third" parent (a rambunctiously sexual aunt played by is neither nepotism nor narcissism, but a static and unfocused Ellen Barkin) provokes the film's crisis...
...But the connection is merely poetically halting, humane language that Foote provides...
...Anyone writing pseudo-intellectual cinematic painting by numbers...
...Coor here Hallie Foote and Steven Hill as her mad in-law, nobly labor to betrays the weak side of his indebtedness to European di- conceal the diffuseness of the script, but there is just too little rectors, who often strain to create tendentious associations for them to work with...
...Foote has structure and character portrayals seem too diffuse, but Coor written On Valentine's Day as if this kind of quiet memoir always saves the game by some unique, often exciting gesture...
...If we could not find any solution to our "liberational...
...silks of the period, she rampages into Las Vegas to get a Nothing dynamic holds On Valentine's Day together...
...He crisscrosses his heroine's tale with shots of "Miss A-Bomb" swimsuit contests and tapes of radio broad- N VALENTINE'S DAY is an example of how understatement, casters jingling "Rain or shine its A-bomb time...
...The low The solutions are evident...
...That, and the atrocities committed by the military...
...a union lawyer decided to keep him safely out of court, and the case was dropped for lack of witnesses...
...Similarly, the parallel between presence to convey how character issues, per se, are important the young heroine's "blooming" and the final flower-like in themselves...
...heard there is an NPA in the mountains...
...making of the film - especially the actors and production As Coor documents, Las Vegas was proud, at the time of the designers who assembled the fifties sets - share credit for his Korean war, of being known for something beside divorce and success...
...In On Valentine's Day the actors, especially "blooming" of the mushroom cloud is labored...
...nor party," after waiting the required six weeks, and the first should they be void of the rich character presentation and real, A-bomb test nearby...
...On those that condered by violence against union representatives perpetrated by tinue to exist, the union should have the right to demand a fair the military and by thugs hired by the planters...
...A cook testified to the mayor's responsi- plantations into farmland for peasants...
...The names themselves indicate the source of metaphor for the theme of perception with which he tries to Foote's strength: people in his world are spare and monosylunify the film...
...need for subsistence...
...others hope to stave off the NPA insur"Jose of" a certain planter...
...Starke feels that the peoples' misery has turned them because since our grandfathers, the hacienda has been a pater- into guerrillas...
...In Valentine's Day, cance torments him to alcoholism (and child-beating...
...The film is derived from a Voight) renames his dumpy service station "Jack's Atomic screenplay by Horton Foote, the master of down-home underGas" and clamors for letting MacArthur drop the bomb on the statement in his many studies of the quiet, noble endurance of Chinese...
...The workers expect us to do gents who are led by members of the Philippine Communist miracles," Lacson said...
...Written and directed by land is a gift of God to all humanity...
...Nothing drives it except nostalsuggest something about the coincidence of her "divorce gia...
...The NFSW was founded in 1971 with the help of Bacolod But Diosdado Jambongana, thirty-six, the local union secreCity Bishop Antonio Fortich, seventy-two, and some Catholic tary, told me, "We heard that the NPA is protecting the rights seminarians...
...But this, unfortuscooped out orange half precisely balanced on her knee...
Vol. 113 • May 1986 • No. 10
