San Francisco gets Wenged!

If you live in the Bay Area and don't wake tomorrow to find that you have been washed out to sea by the coming superstorm, you might want to head down to San Francisco's Roxie Theater. Taking place there will be the Bay Area premier of friend-of-4DK Andrew Leavold's highly recommended documentary The Search for Weng Weng, which is screening as the opener to the Facine/21: 21st Annual Filipino International Cine Festival. The film screens at 7pm. Andrew will be there and so, nature allowing, will I. Should you swim, paddle, wade, or snorkel, it would behoove you to be there also.

The Search for Weng Weng (Australia, 2013)

To the cult film connoisseurs who will make up its core audience, The Search for Weng Weng has already become something of a legend. Directed by Andrew Leavold, founder of Australia’s largest cult video store and author of the indispensable blog Bamboo Gods and Bionic Boys, the film has been seven years in the making and at times seemed at risk of never being completed at all. There is no underestimating the power of obsession, however, as now, thanks to Leavold’s benign mania and the generosity of his supporters, The Search for Weng Weng is finally in the can and poised to make its festival debut.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am among the many people thanked in The Search for Weng Weng’s closing credits -- and also that I see Leavold as very much a kindred spirit. Perhaps it’s in revolt against our own insignificance that chroniclers of international cult cinema like him and me weave entire histories from footnotes and, in so doing, strive quixotically to rescue our subjects from the grasp of obscurity. In any case, Leavold certainly presents himself a challenge with the diminutive Filipino spy spoof star Weng Weng, a figure whom, if anything, has become even more of an abstraction during the time it has taken Leavold to complete his film, thanks to numerous YouTube clips and novelties like The Chuds’ “Weng Weng Rap” going from being a human casting gimmick to a full blown meme and a punch line to a large number of people who would never, unless prompted, think to consider his humanity.

Though he likely needs no introduction to readers of this blog, I’ll simply say that the 2’9” Weng Weng, after being discovered by husband and wife producers Peter and Cora Caballes, became the star of a string of miniature spy spoofs that made him a sensation of sorts in the Philippines of the 1980s, while at the same time earning him a spot in the Guiness Book of Records as the most diminutive adult actor to appear as the lead in any film. When one of those films, 1981’s For Y’ur Height Only, got picked up for international distribution, Weng Weng, for better or worse, became for a time the most recognizable face of Filipino cinema outside the country’s borders. As Leavold notes in the introduction to his documentary, aside from these scant facts, little is known about the tiny performer beyond what we see on display in the handful of his films that survive; that being the image of a monumentally inexpressive, karate fighting homunculus with a tendency to punch his opponents in the groin before escaping between their legs.

Leavold, over the course of numerous visits to the Philippines -- whose bustling streets he films with an affectionate eye for gritty detail -- structures his excavation of Weng Weng’s past as a classic detective story, with us learning each new revelation, one piling on top of another, as he does. His interview subjects include many figures familiar to Filipino exploitation enthusiasts -- producer/director Bobby Suarez, the One Armed Executioner himself, Franco Guerrero, Silip’s Maria Isabel Lopez -- but it is often the grunts on the ground -- the stuntmen, gophers and grips -- from whom he gleans the most salient clues, among them an editor he stumbles upon completely by chance who turns out to have worked on most of Weng Weng’s movies. There are also, as with most investigations, a fair share of intriguing detours, the most surreal being a visit to the mansion of Imelda Marcos that sees the scruffy Leavold given the VIP treatment at a gala reception for the former first lady’s 83rd birthday. A tour of the grounds, conducted by Imelda herself, follows, during which we’re given a loving look at the glass entombed corpse of her dictator husband.

While displaying a healthy sense of humor about his own nerdy fixations, Leavold’s approach to his subject is refreshingly free of the snark one might expect, and is instead unapologetic about being what ultimately amounts to a serious, compassionate and rigorously competent work of investigative journalism. Given the lack of detail he starts with, the extent to which he is able to color in the broad outlines of Weng Weng’s life and career is remarkable. And despite some picaresque details -- like the possibility that Weng Weng may have actually been employed by the Filipino secret service -- the portrait that emerges is, not surprisingly, the more melancholy one that one might expect in a real world in which child-like, 2’9” tall men don’t typically get to woo a succession of beautiful women and fly around in jet packs.

At the same time, and by necessity, Leavold presents a larger portrait of the Philippines’ home grown, Tagalog language film industry that makes his film a welcome counterpoint to Mark Hartley’s fine Machete Maidens Unleashed (to which Leavold also contributed), which focused almost exclusively on the country’s American co-produced contributions to the international exploitation market. Given special focus are the concurrent waves of 1960s James Bond inspired spy pictures, like Tony Ferrer’s long running Tony Falcon series, and irreverent spoofs -- Dolphy vehicles like James Batman being an example-- that dovetailed into the Weng Weng phenomenon. He also touches interestingly upon those aspects of Filipino culture that immunized the makers of Weng Weng’s films from the kind of censure that, in the U.S., greeted Tod Browning’s Freaks, a frequently touched upon film that also exploited its featured performers’ real deformities.

One thing that Leavold comes up against repeatedly in his interviews is the sense that, to many in the Philippines today -- and especially among its cultural proponents -- Weng Weng and his films are something of an embarrassment (in fact, the incredulity of his interview subjects begins to become something of a running gag). A particular sore point seems to be the fact that, at the much touted 1982 Manila International Film Festival, despite the works of the country’s most respected filmmakers being on offer, the only Filipino property to be purchased for distribution outside the P.I. was For Y’ur Height Only. However, it is in this light that I think Leavold’s documentary offers a testament to the worthiness of international pop cinema (or what some, Leavold included, might call “trash” cinema) as a focus of close investigation.

For, indeed, Filipino masters like Lino Brocka might have striven earnestly to show the rest of the world -- or, in most cases, the more or less affluent, predominately white attendees of western art cinemas and film festivals -- what life is like for the Philippines’ impoverished masses. Yet it just might be that a film like For Y’ur Height Only offers us a clearer and less exclusive window into the hearts and minds of those masses. What we then see is both a cheerful lack of pretension and a pronounced generosity of spirit, combined with what Imee Marcos calls the propensity of Filipinos to “turn pain into ridicule”. Given how poignantly The Search for Weng Weng drives this point home, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to consider documentaries like it and Machete Maidens Unleashed as standing alongside “serious” works like Eleanor Coppola’s chronicle of the production of Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness as essential filmic records of the Philippines’ cinematic history. You, of course, might not agree, but that shouldn’t stop you from seeing this film at the soonest opportunity.

Please help... or Weng Weng will kickstart those nutz

We obsessives have to help one another out, because we know better than anybody that compulsively cataloguing, collecting and curating things the way we do eats up resources like nobody's business. Take Andrew Leavold, for example; he's been working on his documentary on miniature Filipino action hero Weng Weng, titled The Search for Weng Weng, for over six years now, and in that time has amassed over 100 hours of footage. Now, unbelievably, he is finally within sight of the finish line, and getting there is just a small matter of you giving him money. To make that as easy for you as possible, he's set up a Kickstarter page for the film, where you can donate as much or as little as you want. Please give, because (A) I really want to see the movie and (B) to do otherwise would be selfish.

You just got Wenged

For those of you who aren't savvy to all the latest, hip Internet lingo, to be "Wenged" means to be dick punched by a dwarf. (See Figure A.) There is no female variation of this phrase, because Weng Weng would never hit a lady, whether she had a dick or not.

Anyway, I just completed the second part of my Weng Weng double header over at Teleport City, filing a detailed analysis of the affect challenged Pinoy homunculus' Western opus D'Wild Wild Weng. It's all part of the B-Masters' latest Roundtable, They Might Be Giants, a celebration of all stars great and small (provided they are all small). Check out my full review here.

I Kid you not

The idea of the latest B-Masters Roundtable is to fondly (and, of course, respectfully) celebrate all of those small folk who've lit up the big screen, be they homunculi, dwarfs, or malevolent circus midgets. For my first contribution, I've posted a slightly revised version of my 4DK review of The Impossible Kid -- that epic of espionage featuring Filipino superstar Weng Weng as the pocket-sized super spy Agent 00 -- over at Teleport City, with an all original review of that film's follow up, D'Wild Wild Weng Weng, to follow soon after. Don't let your eyes fool you; the movies aren't getting smaller, the people are! Read my full review here.

The Impossible Kid (Philippines, 1982)

My guess is that, if you don’t know who Weng Weng is by this point, you’re probably not the kind of person who’s going to care who Weng Weng is anyway. And if that’s the case, you obviously came upon this blog by mistake, perhaps thinking that it was a commercial site for some kind of overzealous pest control company or something.

Then again, I may be wrong about that. After all, those who keep abreast of internet memes and those with a taste for obscure cult movies are not necessarily one and the same. Just as, conversely, it’s a rare type who will go from chuckling at the exploits of Weng Weng or Little Superstar in a two minute YouTube clip to actually seeking out one of their movies. (I am one of these kinds of people. Can you guess which one?)

If you are, in fact, that impossible creature who does not know who Weng Weng is yet actually wants to, I’m not quite sure where to begin. What detailed information there is on the web about him – at least in English – is almost inevitably the result of the efforts of one mad Australian, and any biography I might attempt would merely be a paraphrasing of his words. So here’s a link to Andrew’s blog, and, from yours truly, a thumbnail:

At first an embarrassment to Imelda Marcos – who made a pet project out of promoting Filipino cinema only to see her beloved Manila International Film Festival serve as the launching point for the international success of a zero-budget midget spy film – and later a force to be reckoned with – as evidenced by her later pairing up with him for a famous rendition of “My Way” – Weng Weng, an extremely tiny man with some apparent martial arts training, was a very big deal in the Philippines for a very short time during the 80s. And the starting point for said big deal-ness was For Y’ur Height Only, a 1981 film in which he portrayed a 2 foot, 9 inch tall super spy with the code name Agent 00 – a film whose hastily produced, 1982 sequel, The Impossible Kid, is the subject of my post today.

The first thing to note about The Impossible Kid is that it is actually quite enjoyable. And it is enjoyable because its makers made the wise decision to play everything perfectly straight. As a result, it’s a pretty standard, low budget 80s action movie whose hero – to use the appropriate PC parlance – just so happens to be less than three feet tall. And while the comedic contrasts that result from that fact are inevitable, they are never forced, with our hero’s size more likely to be presented as an asset to his work as a high flying Interpol agent than an impediment. (He is easily concealed, for one thing, and can make narrow escapes that are considerably narrower than what his less compact counterparts can manage.) All of this has the astonishing result that, by the end of The Impossible Kid, you actually find yourself kind of buying into the whole concept.

Of course, when you have Weng Weng fronting your movie, you really don’t have to strive much to underscore its novelty, as the man is as much a human special effect as he is an actor. Though the condition responsible for his size is described as a form of dwarfism, his body is pretty much normally proportioned, which, combined with his face’s apparent inability to assume anything resembling an actual expression, gives him the appearance of being a living action figure. For the viewer, there’s a resulting cognitive dissonance that occurs whenever he steps into a scene alongside normal sized props and actors, and that dissonance is compounded a thousand fold when he then proceeds to spin kick and karate chop everyone in that room as if her were some kind of toddler-sized Battle Top.

Anyone who’s already seen For Y’ur Height Only will have a good idea of what the action in The Impossible Kid comprises. Once again we have lots of Weng Weng being tossed around and punching bad guys in the balls. He also gets a cool toy motorcycle to tear around on, which is used to especially good effect in a scene where he pulls up alongside a big rig filled with bad guys and tries to get them to pull over. Said bad guys this time around are a gang lead by a hooded figure called Cobra, who are responsible for kidnapping and assassinating a number of the P.I.’s leading citizens as part of a sweeping extortion scheme. Once Weng Weng is put on the case, we get the expected roundelay of murder attempts, tight squeezes and fevered chases, all given an added injection of surrealism by the fact that one of the participants is just really, really small.

The Impossible Kid sustains its Bond-in-miniature conceit to the point of going above and beyond to present its hero as pure sexual chocolate, so that Weng Weng can go nowhere without being pursued by besotted, full-sized and full-figured women ready to melt into his diminutive arms. Whether they do this out of some kind of misguided maternal feeling or are simply attracted to the idea of a man who can be fit in his entirety into their vaginas I’m not sure. But the movie’s brassy theme song, featuring the Philippines’ answer to Shirley Bassey hollering “I love you, Weng Weng!”, certainly goes a long way toward putting the exclamation point on the idea.

In closing, my purpose on Earth here today is to tell you people – whether you are ignorant entirely of Weng Weng, or are merely a Weng Weng dilettante whose all like “Oh OF COURSE I know Weng Weng” despite never having sat through one of his films in their entirety – that Weng Weng’s Agent 00 movies are not merely the tiresome novelty items that you very justifiably assume them to be. They’re actually a lot of fun. Now, whether the same can be said of Weng Weng’s crack at the Western genre, D’Wild Wild Weng Weng, is a question that will have to be addressed another day.

Ba-bay!