Alagwa (2012)

Minggu, 20 Oktober 2013

Alagwa (2012)

Alagwa (Ian Lorenos, 2013)

English Title: Breakaway

Inspired by an urban legend about kidnappers targeting children to be turned into beggars, Ian Lorenos’ Alagwa (Breakaway) tells the story of Robert (Jericho Rosales) and Brian (Bugoy Carino), his son. The film opens with Robert and Brian shopping inside a mall. Brian wanders off, attracted by the various toys being peddled. Seeing that his son is missing, Robert searches the mall, seeing Brian playing with the toys. He pulls away his son from the toys and scolds him, warning him of the syndicates that kidnap children to use them as beggars.

The relationship between Robert and Brian is one that is far from ideal. Robert works as a salesman, struggling to survive within the normally wealthy Filipino-Chinese community with only the meager commissions he earns. Brian reaps the effects of his father’s position in their community’s pecking order. Constantly bullied in his school because of his paltry lot in life, he performs very poorly and is often disciplined for fighting his schoolmates. There seems to be a quiet understanding between them. Although seldom expressed, gestures are shown, signalling affectations both of them hesitate to openly give to each other.

Lorenos does not hide the tragedy that will befall both father and son. In between moments that subtly express the preciousness of their relationship amidst the struggles, Lorenos fast-forwards, showing scenes where Robert is seen searching the streets of Hong Kong for his missing son. The inevitability of separation is absolutely heart-breaking. The film cleverly builds up the tension, juxtaposing sequences of desperation, frustration and loneliness with ones that are bursting with the wonderful chaos of togetherness.

Midway, the film suddenly transforms from a quaint and deliberate portrait of a relationship that is doomed to woe into an unhinged descent down Manila’s secret sinful underbellies, complete with an apartment building populated with drug addicts, lowlifes, and children waiting to be exported to Hong Kong. The kidnapping happens, turning Robert’s cynical father into an impromptu action hero who, within a few nights, crosses paths with abusive pedophiles, inutile cops, and penitent pimps. The unexpected deviation, more an exploration of a father’s desperation than an inability for Lorenos to contain his imagination, only foreshadows the impeccable emotional impact of the film’s ending.

The ending is in fact the film’s starkest contrivance. It is also its crowning glory. With a prolonged embrace, sobs, tears, and an indelible look on Robert’s face that reflects a flurry of heightened emotions ranging from relief to sadness, Alagwa ends without regard to subtlety, and rightfully so. There are moments that deserve silence. The film however deserves such an impassioned bow, one that would drown all the noise and doubts with unstoppable bursts of very well-earned tears.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi (2012)

Minggu, 28 April 2013

Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi (2012)

Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi (Richard Somes, 2012)

English Title: Mariposa in the Cage of the Night

Manila has often found itself a central character in many Filipino films. Manila, in Lino Brocka’s Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975) and Macho Dancer (1988), is a place of failed promises, where innocent men and women from the provinces are sucked into a labyrinth of deceit and violence. On the other hand, Manila, as depicted in Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980), is a city that has become home to the perpetually despaired, depressed, and disillusioned. Brillante Mendoza, in his films set in Manila like Tirador (Slingshot, 2007), Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009) and Lola (Grandmother, 2009), the city is characterized by squalor, where dignity and humanity have become virtues amidst overwhelming corruption. The way Manila has been depicted in films has been rooted to the fact that its allure betrays. The city is a predator that feeds on the need for salvation, for respite.

Richard Somes’ Manila is similar in feel. The difference lies in the way he dresses up Manila. Gone are the hyper-realistic slums and its pitiful dwellers. Instead, he focuses on the labyrinthine alleyways that houses lost souls and strangers. The storyline of Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi (Mariposa in the Cage of the Night) is not unlike the many tales of provincial dreamers traveling from their rural villages to the city for the promise of a better life as depicted both in celluloid and real life. What differentiates Somes’ dark tale from the rest is how he molds his protagonist, a barrio lass in search for her missing sister, into the antithesis of the stereotypical victim.

Maya, played by Erich Gonzalez, one of the very few mainstream young actresses who is able to venture towards playing more complex roles, is not one who easily falls victim to the city’s empty charms. Her mission is not survival, but to ease her gnawing curiosities and suspicions as to the strange fate of her only sister. From there, she uncovers the hidden face of the city, one that ekes its existence out of vanity, greed, and pride, despite the abject lack of resources.

Despite the seemingly fantastic design of Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi, it remains to be one of Somes’ most personal works. It reflects his initial understanding of the big city. Somes, who hails from Bacolod City in one of the islands south of the capital, has moved to Manila to work. Although dark, damp and dreary, his version of Manila is littered with eccentricities that may or may not be exaggerations of what is really happening deep in the metropolis. Sausage factories are lively with flies and other crawlers feasting on fermenting meat and pig intestines scattered all over. Restaurants serve monkeys and other seemingly unpalatable delicacies. Plastic surgeons make do of tire sealants and other dubious liquids, transforming women into monsters, ready to be hired by the most daring of sexual adventurers. Somes’ film bizarrely charms through its showcase of the colorful depravities that thrive in the city. Framed by a deepening mystery that comprehends the outrageousness of it all, the film outlines the very extent and margins of our humanity the same way it depicts the hidden dirt and grime of the city it lives in.

With Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi, Somes adds another dimension in the ever-growing scope of Manila’s character. Brocka showed Manila’s deceit. Bernal showed Manila’s despair. Mendoza showed Manila’s stubborn resilience. Somes showed Manila’s blatant insanity. The film more than just offers a gripping descent into the exotic unknown, it also opens up to a perspective of a city that has too often been relegated by cinema to the boredom of reality.

(First published in the programme of 15th Edition of the Far East Film Festival in Udine.)

I Do Bidoo Bidoo (2012)

Senin, 11 Maret 2013

I Do Bidoo Bidoo (2012)

I Do Bidoo Bidoo (Chris Martinez, 2012)

Chris Martinez’s I Do Bidoo Bidoo is a film whose acclaim is more a product of sentiment than cinematic merit. Its plot is characterized by clichés. Its charm is but a product of nostalgia and novelty. It contents itself in reaping the rewards of its sheer existence, unwilling to push the envelope and to explore areas outside acknowledged comfort zones. It is the kind of crowd-pleaser that is satisfied to exist for the current clamor of a crowd whose addiction to anything from the past has turned into something that resembles more a fad than anything else.

It is quite unfortunate, really. Martinez is perhaps one of the more consistent and reliable screenwriters actively working today. He not only has a gift for humor that transcends genders and social classes, he also has the knack for framing that amiable humor with concepts and storylines that are outrageously unique. However, I Do Bidoo Bidoo seems to be the black sheep in Martinez’s writing credits. It lacks the ingenuity and wit Martinez usually embellishes his screenplays with. Instead, Martinez insists on merely reworking the very tired storyline of young lovers separated by class and family into a musical that makes use of the popular songs of the Apo Hiking Society to hopefully inject color to a hopelessly colorless narrative.

The erstwhile feud between the Polotan and Fuentebella families started when Rock Polotan (Sam Concepcion) and Tracy Fuentebella (Tippy Dos Santos) suddenly decide to get married. In compliance with Philippine pre-wedding traditions, the Polotans, a humble family sustained by the meager royalties earned from the one hit song of patriarch Pol (Ogie Alcasid) and the income from the catering services of matriarch Rosie (Eugene Domingo), decide to pay the Fuentebellas, a wealthy family suffering from the deteriorating relationship between patriarch Nick (Gary Valenciano) and matriarch Elaine (Zsazsa Padilla). As expected, the visit goes awry, creating much tension between the two families, forcing the soon-to-be-wed lovers to do all they can to fight for their love.

Martinez, presumably inspired from the convolutedly plotted and melodramas with too-convenient endings that have plagued and continue to plague Philippine television and film and the forgettably light-hearted, sadly light-headed, and atrociously manic stagings and filming of Mamma Mia!, crafts a story that treads no new ground. Its insights to cross-class relationships are slight. Its examinations of such psyches are skin deep, overpowered by the need to be nothing more than a fleeting piece of entertainment. Fortunately, Martinez’s stylized humor is still in display, especially when he exaggerates the immense gaps between social classes (the Polotans are greeted into Fuentebella mansion by the pirouetting maids who respond in unison), homosexual longing (John Lapuz, in a cameo role as a karaoke host, tearfully expressing the possible future of Rock’s best friend and closeted admirer), and other well-observed realities.

The music, which is supposed to be the film’s strongest suit, is underwhelming. Martinez sets up the songs in a predictable fashion, preparing the scenes with dialogue or circumstances that would logically lead to the appropriate Apo Hiking Society hit. The songs used are those indisputable classics, songs that are incessantly played in cabs and jeepneys around Metro Manila and sung by frustrated singers and wasted lovers in karaoke bars. However, most of the songs were arranged to make them sound dated. They have become shockingly draped with excessive embellishments, exposing how the song’s success is really so intimately intertwined with the sincere and simple singing voices of the original singers. Dramatically belted out by the film’s cast of gifted singers, the songs lose a certain quality, perhaps the very personal meaning of the songs, the true reason why such music has lived longer than expected. The film has turned them into trite novelties.

I Do Bidoo Bidoo has a very specific charm. It is a charm so specific, it tends to go bland, to immediately wear off, to tarnish to those immune to it. To the rest, the film is sure to entertain, the same way a variety show would momentarily entertain before its pleasures are replaced by the next television spectacle. It lacks the elements that would make it linger for a little more time, as it tends to be purposely simplistic, harking to a need of a certain audience clamoring for blunt entertainment and a worldview where love is inexplicably the center of the universe. Sure, its optimism is truly a joy. But its lack of ambition is an annoyance.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Jungle Love (2012)

Sabtu, 16 Februari 2013

Jungle Love (2012)

Jungle Love (Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2012)

At first glance, Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s Jungle Love seems needlessly indulgent. Rebelling against traditional concepts of what is deemed to be acceptable and tasteful in cinema, the film is littered with exposed flesh, dark, wrinkled, blonzed or tattooed, interacting with each other in wild abandon. Its loose narrative deflects any easy reading that could defend the abundant sexuality. If it weren’t for the deliciously ambiguous atmosphere so efficiently conjured by the images framed and lighted by cinematographers Malay Javier and Gym Lumbera and the mystical sounds inflicted by scorer Teresa Barrozo, Sanchez’s film could have been something more akin to exotic erotica than art.

Jungle Love, of course, is far from being plainly titillating. It is draped in irreverence, starting with its repetitious use of a bastardized version of a popular religious song, the lyrics of which is heavy with biting and humorous stabs against the hypocrisy of the church, the most prominent social institution that overvalues sexual morality. The film, with its unabashed exploration of sex without the benefit of love, romance or other man-made emotions, thrusts its audience into a world where men and women are either predators or preys consumed by an inexplicable and inescapable lust. The jungle, aside from being the literal wilderness where the film’s characters get lost into, is also that seductive call to escape from the bounds of what is commonly conceived to be as civilized and to be stripped of society-imposed restraint.

Sanchez succeeds in turning his characters, the well-off hikers (Martin Riffer and Mae Bastes) who find themselves lost in the jungle with their guide (Aldrin Sapitan), the desperate mistress (Gloria Morales) who steals her lover’s baby into the jungle, and the bored soldier (Edgardo Amar) who becomes attracted to a mysterious jungle dweller, into vessels of various repressed longings too outrageous to be let out in the open. The film relishes in sweat and hormones, in things that drive humans to break free from the chains of dull civilization.

Interestingly, for a movie that is unembarrassed in depicting nudity and sexual acts, Jungle Love is most sensual during the moments when it lures its audience to itself intertwined with the characters’ intoxicating indulgences. Its utmost pleasures are experienced during the scenes where the characters are hindered from pleasure, as a result of what seems to be either acts of oppression or playful seduction. The first few sequences feature three of the characters shown alone, but presumably conversing with an offscreen subject. Despite the very limited visuals, Sanchez populates the scenes with a very palpable sense of oppression that is surprisingly erotic. The physical attraction is adequately replaced by mind games, of words and gestures that taunt and tease. The effect is truly remarkable in a way it mirrors how the unseen and the unfelt have a tremendous effects on the deprived psyche.

The film acknowledges sex as a tool for oppression, for power and control. Despite the dissipating traces of social order, of class and religion as the jungle further consumes all the various characters, the film still manages expose the glaring gaps that divide humanity. Sanchez miraculously does it with a wicked sense of humor and a glorious appreciation of the delightful dangers of letting go of human inhibitions and giving into the basest of bodily pleasures. Jungle Love accomplishes the nearly impossible task of turning what could be a lewd and perverted showcase into a mirror of our innate desire to venture into the unknown, to abandon the clutches of good taste, and to get lost in the limitless jungle where men are but beasts among other beasts.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

El Presidente (2012)

Senin, 28 Januari 2013

El Presidente (2012)

El Presidente (Mark Meily, 2012)

A lot has already been said and written about the historical inaccuracies of Mark Meily’s El Presidente, how the glamour project dastardly re-portrayed historical figures to suit enlarged egos and their enlarged pockets. Andres Bonifacio (played with a notable lack of charm by Cesar Montano), the founder of the Philippine revolution who was tragically killed by his fellowmen, is depicted as a severely sore loser. Antonio Luna (played, complete with gritting teeth, by Christopher de Leon), a top-ranking general of the revolutionary government who was murdered, is shown to be cruel, despotic and deserving of his embarrassing death as a matter of narrative logic. Emilio Aguinaldo (played with uncharacteristic and unbelievable nobility by Jorge Estregan), the titular president, reaps all the rewards of Meily’s unapologetic cinematic slander, coming out as an indisputable hero as sanctioned by the motherland herself.

In fairness to Meily, he is simply a writer-director shackled by the demands of producers. He has Aguinaldo’s autobiography, a tome written by the first president late in his life to wash away the sins that have been attributed to him, as blueprint for his screenplay. It is inevitable that the film birthed from the pages of an unabashedly biased account would be sided and slanted.

Meily’s biggest fault is not the fact that it portrays a version of history that is unpopular, but the glaring ineptitude he shapes such portrayal. El Presidente is not only awfully directed, it is also intrinsically confused, unable to determine what it wants to be or what it opts to focus on. The film needlessly details decades’ worth of information within an already overgenerous running time. Such unwise ambitiousness leads it to become unreasonably episodic and absolutely laborious to sit through.

Very telling of the film’s confusion is that it utilizes two introductions. El Presidente opens with an action-packed precursor to the narrative’s turning point, featuring Aguinaldo attempting to evade his eventual capture. After the end of the much-choreographed sequence, Meily proceeds to jump several years before, where Aguinaldo, in his youth, encounters a mysterious old woman who predicts his future in terms of the three women he will be in love with.

The two introductions preview Meily’s intentions with the film. They expose his goal of creating an action-packed historical film that is framed within a storyline that is supposedly laced with romance. The film in turn features plentiful battles, embellished with gunfights and explosions, some of which are played in inexplicable slow motion. Curiously absent is the romance. The women of Aguinaldo’s life are nothing more than decorations, two-dimensional characters that are propelled to the limelight by the sole fact that they are played by famous actresses. El Presidente is just indisputably dull. It is unable to muster enough movement or excitement to be a compelling war film. More importantly, it is sorely drab, unromantic and sexless.

Instead of creating a film that either convinces or creates debates, Meily only stirs emotions because its portrayals are all too easy and convenient for such controversial pronouncements. In the end, El Presidente is nothing more than an annoyance. It does not deserve a riot.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ad Ignorantiam (2012)

Senin, 21 Januari 2013

Ad Ignorantiam (2012)

Ad Ignorantiam (Armando Lao, 2012)

Armando Lao’s Ad Ignorantiam can be divided into three unequal parts. The first part, tediously shot real time, details one afternoon in a busy city intersection where a hapless victim (Ina Feleo) of snatching, and her friend (Kimmy Maclang) confusedly scour nearby nooks and alleyways for the snatcher. They end up accusing a man (Kristoffer King), who was at the wrong place in the wrong time, of the crime.

The second part, which serves to frame the first part within the structure of a court proceeding, displays an methodical and undramatic depiction of what happens inside courtrooms, where the frazzled characters, who are now litigants, of the first part are now joined by lawyers (Raquel Villavicencio and Allan Paule), a judge (Archie Adamos), and the overwrought procedure and decorum required in legal proceedings. The third part has a Supreme Court justice (Laurice Guillen) reciting the decision of the highest court on what seems to be an appeal from the decision of the court as depicted in the second part.

The three parts are arbitrarily weaved together, creating a disjointed narrative that attempts to expose the dangerous inadequacies of the Philippines’ criminal justice system. Lao experiments with moods and textures. The first part is shot enunciating the grit and agitation of the frenzied and stressed participants of that afternoon’s unfortunate incident. The second part is handled with marked sobriety in comparison to the first part’s lack of restraint. Its additional parties, the judge and the lawyers, are depicted with emotionless professionalism, remarkably removed from the litigants’ heightened vulnerability in the first part.

The last part is framed and shot with a hint of sarcasm and irreverence. The litigants have completely disappeared, replaced within a static frame by a mighty magistrate who is reciting her final judgment with an omnipotence that is oblivious to probable truths and personal plights. Lao treads a distance, beginning with the suffocating intimacy of the streets towards the callous and stoic resolve of so-called justice. It emphasizes how much of the humanity, of the compassion, of the truth has been lost to jargon and procedure as the criminal case is passed from one forum to another.

Lao’s experiment is intellectually stimulating, at best. Like a puzzle that takes extreme patience to solve, Ad Ignorantiam is more a chore than anything else. The rewards it promises are however inadequate. It is emotionally impoverished, lacking the anger or desperation to convert its noble goals from a mere artistic springboard into potent advocacy. It exists merely as an inert showcase of a third world inefficiency and its dramatic consequences. Despite the gravity of the issue it decides to tackle, it struggles to be pertinent because it busies itself with its style and technique, no matter how noxious they are to the senses, than actual substance.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Sinapupunan (2012)

Senin, 31 Desember 2012

Sinapupunan (2012)

Sinapupunan (Brillante Mendoza, 2012)

International Title: Thy Womb

Sinapupunan (Thy Womb) opens with a woman giving birth. Shaleha (Nora Aunor), a midwife, accompanied by her husband Bangas-an (Bembol Roco), assists the soon-to-be-mother in delivering her child. Shaleha then routinely requests for the baby’s umbilical cord. She brings the keepsake from the afternoon home, hangs it alongside all the other cords she has collected from the many mothers she helped. The hanging cords in her home are ostensibly a record of her noble profession. Ironically, it also serves as a painful reminder of the one nagging imperfection of her marriage with her husband, which is her inability to bear children for him. Nature has fated her with infertility. However, her culture has given her the opportunity to remedy it. By finding another suitable wife for her husband, she is able to fulfil what for her is the most essential of her familial duties.

Mendoza strips the film of most external conflicts, concentrating instead on the nuances of infertile Shaleha’s relationship with her husband as she sets out to find a second wife for her husband to bear a child for him. Set in Tawi-Tawi, the Philippines’ southernmost isles which have become infamous for being torn by warring government and Muslim secessionist forces, the film valiantly avoids sensationalizing war and instead delves into the human condition of a people who have grown accustomed to military presence. At one point, a wedding dance is abruptly stalled by violence. When the shock and confusion dissipates, the dance continues, almost as if nothing happened. Mendoza has effectively created a believable world wherein military conflict has weaved itself into the culture by sheer familiarity.

Sinapupunan indulges in its depiction both nature and culture. Mendoza does not hide his fascination, relentlessly breaking his storytelling to make way for gorgeous images of endless seascapes and colorful tradition. He takes time revelling at whale sharks under the sea, or turtles’ eggs hidden dearly beneath Tawi-Tawi’s remote beaches. He stages elaborate Muslim ceremonies and rituals. Surprisingly, the film never feels as if it is treading too closely to exoticizing its subject locale. The overt visualization of both nature and culture seems essential to Mendoza’s goals of exploring the interactions of culture and nature and the people who rely heavily on them for both sustenance and identity.

Henry Burgos’ screenplay is admirably spare. It is unafraid of being judged not by the lyricism of the words spoken by the depicted ordinary folk, but by the measured silence. It allows the couple’s relationship to simmer, to take root, to emotionally attach to the peering audience, before exposing the fissures that will unavoidably grow bigger. It masterfully orchestrates heartbreak, without any hint of artifice or machination. It gives Mendoza enough breathing room to scrutinize the world, which he does so without hardly any hesitation.

Aunor, who has been absent from Philippine cinema for several years despite being renowned as one of its living acting treasures, is the film’s beating heart. Her dutiful portrayal of Shaleha is both spontaneous and intelligent. She cleverly interacts with her surroundings, not as an actress inhabiting a role but as a human being naturally reacting to very real scenarios. When the film requires silence, she makes use of her eyes, which seamlessly hypnotize the audience to believe her character’s plight and sacrifice.

Sinapupunan is observably quainter, tamer, and more mannered than Mendoza’s previous works. However, it still resonates with the same removed yet still potent anger that only an artist who wants to depict truth from a distance can evoke. The film ends with more questions than answers, as it has to. The story, which is essentially the film’s element that begs for a proper ending, is but a tool for Mendoza to frame the grand ironies that afflict humanity. When Shaleha asks for that final umbilical cord, she has finally severed the tie that has severely burdened her. We can only cry because we are also human.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Melodrama Negra (2012)

Selasa, 25 Desember 2012

Melodrama Negra (2012)

Melodrama Negra (Maribel Legarda, 2012)

Like Loy Arcenas, Maribel Legarda has several years’ worth of theater experience to guide her first foray into filmmaking. Unlike Arcenas, whose first film is from an original screenplay by Rody Vera, Legarda chose to adapt for the screen an award-winning stageplay by Allan Lopez. Interestingly, Nino, Arcenas’ first film embraces theatricality, limiting most of its moments within the striking dialogues spewed by the characters with such exaggerated extravagance. Legarda’s Melodrama Negra, on the other hand, abandons theatricality in favor of gloss, spectacle and other cinematic excesses. Remnants of the material and Legarda’s stage roots linger, creating an uneasy mix of both theatrical and cinematic excesses.

Melodrama Negra opens with three wandering ghosts (Gee Canlas, Gerald Napoles and Bong Cabrera), wondering what they need to do to move on. Through flashbacks, their respective lives, all of which are typical sob stories designed primarily to grant humanity to those who are no longer human, are revealed. Their deaths are conveniently connected to the individual stories of the film’s living characters: an good-hearted thug (Gerhard Acao) who falls for a prostitute (Sheng Belmonte), a group of high school sociopaths (Nicco Manalo, Cindy Garcia, Ria Garcia) who stage the kidnapping of a congressman’s son and his girlfriend, and their respective respectable parents who have hidden monstrosities. Legarda fervently weaves the stories together, crafting a light-hearted and mostly cinematic take on the innate darkness of humanity.

Eskrimadors-director Kerwin Go turns cinematographer here, giving the material a palatable-enough look, appropriating for the material just enough polish to drown the bleakness. Myke Salomon’s musical score gives the picture a likable upbeat feel. Overall, Melodrama Negra has the tone of a genuine crowd-pleaser. Its humor is amiable. Its drama is relatively efficient.

Legarda is clearly in the business of entertaining. However, it is that eagerness to entertain that bars the film from being nothing more than a well-crafted offbeat caper. The film’s morbid impressions are nothing more than embellishments that serve the purpose of satisfying a curiosity or the need to be different. Its descent to the darkness of men feels false, unable to linger beyond the four corners of the darkened theater.

Melodrama Negra stands out when it doesn’t overreach, when it remains grounded, exploring emotions and relationships that are elementarily human. It leaps when it bares the grief of a drag queen who laments his foster son’s death through an impromptu ballad sung among friends. It flies when it exposes a sister’s concern for her younger sister who is traumatized by their sexually abusive father. It radiates when it tells the blossoming romance between a misunderstood bodyguard and his master’s favorite hooker. Unfortunately, these very human scenes are but half of the experience. The rest is enveloped in tolerable but ultimately forgettable artifice, the same artifice that can only work on stage, where the props, the acting, the lighting, and the sets are as large and as loud as the convolutions of Lopez’s theater-bound material.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Slumber Party (2012)

Senin, 17 Desember 2012

Slumber Party (2012)

Slumber Party (Emmanuel dela Cruz, 2012)

Emmanuel dela Cruz’s Slumber Party is a film of undeniable charms. It revels in color. It delights in diversity. It sustains with mainstreamed queer wit, the type that makes use of self-referential humor for much of the laughter earned. The brand of comedy is of course a staple in the Philippines, where there is an abundance of gay entertainers who mine their experiences with intolerance for everybody’s humor. Fortunately, Slumber Party does not limit itself to the stereotypical inanity of its more commercial kin. It attempts to offer the mainstream it seduces with its approachable wit and comedy a slice of homosexual reality in the country.

Perhaps Dela Cruz’s most masterful stroke here is to cast popular straight actors as his film’s tri-beki, the trio of gay friends who find themselves both captors and guardians of a fraternity initiate they caught invading into their yearly Miss Universe vigil. Trusting first, his ability to mold his actors (commercial model RK Bagatsing, singer Markki Stroem, and comedian Archie Alemania) into homosexuals with nary a hint of falseness, and second, his actors’ untested capability to melt into the written characters, Dela Cruz adds a cinematic sheen to the exercise instead of relying on overused realism. He infuses a certain feeling that everything, despite the excellent performance of his cast, all a play, a deliberately engineered romp, a piece of entertainment.

The script, written by dela Cruz alongside gay rights advocates Philippe Salvador Palmos and Troy Espiritu, is a patchwork of inspired ideas and convenient contrivances. It struggles to make every light-hearted moment deep and relevant, pumping each hilarious scene with heavy-handed revelations involving nearly every current queer dilemma and issue. However, the film works best when its celebration is unburdened. There is enough humanity in the characters’ interactions with each other to excuse it from the need to spell out its intentions in a needlessly clear and obvious manner. In turn, Slumber Party becomes overlong, chatty, and bewilderingly redundant.

The very danger of straying from mere entertainment into the territory of advocacy is that every skit, every joke, and every plot point become more open to scrutiny. A film that begs for acceptance cannot take lightly affairs and experiences that are obnoxious as they are and can only be deemed acceptable given more sober and solemn circumstances. The story of Slumber Party already takes many liberties with mainstream sensitivities, given the fact that it essentially revolves around a straight man being denied his freedom by likable homosexuals who are written to commit dastardly deeds draped as comedy.

Dela Cruz and his scribes’ most glaring misstep is to turn an act of sexual assault against the captured straight man into a boisterous act of hilarity that becomes completely forgotten in pursuit of the film’s lofty objectives. Whatever charms and understanding earned are eventually betrayed by a scene that uncomfortably feels very wrong, most especially since its wrongness can easily be glossed over because it is staged for laughs. Slumber Party is a pleasure for the forgiving. It is disconcerting for the rest. It earns as much as it conveniently wastes away.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Taglish (2012)

Rabu, 12 Desember 2012

Taglish (2012)

Taglish (Gym Lumbera, 2012)

In response to a query as to when he felt his feature film was already finished, director Gym Lumbera replied with a statement of disarming practicality. Floodwaters have damaged the prints of Tagalog, prompting Lumbera to use them as the first part of Taglish. It is a physically excruciating watch. Eye-straining stains, scratches and shapes, caused by the untimely deterioration, turn the black and white images into odd shadows of their former forms.

At times, the eerie transformation of the images are enthralling, like when the face of an old man break and melt, turning what was once a comforting visual into something nightmarishly foreign. There is a discomforting absence of sound, further alienating the audience, accomplishing Lumbera’s goals of portraying his distrust with the rapid mutations of his mother tongue and his very own separation from the familiarity of rural life in a cinematic style that is completely his own.

The destroyed prints finally give way to the original film, Tagalog, a hypnotic elegy to provincial life which is a few minutes shy of an hour. Played by Lumbera’s own grandparents, the film’s central figures form part of the landscape of the rural world Lumbera concocts from memory. Except for its suggestions of infidelity, there is hardly a story here. Narrative is of course hardly important. By the very fact that it audaciously opens to a torturous sequence of destroyed film, Taglish does not aim to be pleasurable, at least within the standards of traditional cinema. The seemingly disparate images are linked by Lumbera by instinct, by a primal emotion, perhaps a longing for a distant past, for a quiet land where hurrying is a sin, for those whose photographs populate the ancestral home.

The muted colors of forgotten pornographic films abruptly end the run of Lumbera’s monochrome fantasy. The Caucasian characters, all of whom are parading seductively, are a break from the solitary and serene figures that populate Tagalog. The jarring change in aesthetics is hilarious. The unlikely mix of the two parts seems unlikely and sinful. However, Lumbera adventurously engages his native imaginings with borrowed footage whose rhythm, visuals and intentions are so observably contrasting to his. At once, what was previously elegant and elegiac is transformed into something lewd and lascivious. The sequence ends with a man about to reach an orgasm. The coincidental union has produced one bastard of an offspring.

The title of Lumbera’s film refers to the sub-language that intermittently mixes Tagalog and English, a result of Filipinos’ lack of mastery of either language. It reveals the extent of the country’s cultural infidelity, which manifests in the very way its people converse. With Taglish Lumbera creates, borrows, experiments, and allows to be destroyed cinematic ideas and images, all in the service of a discourse of a culture that seems to be all a result of a history of creation, appropriation, experimentation and destruction, a history that trickles down to the personal experiences of the filmmaker who finds himself torn between the hometown he left behind and the city he reluctantly now calls his home.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Palitan (2012)

Kamis, 06 Desember 2012

Palitan (2012)

Palitan (Ato Bautista, 2012)

English Translation: Exchange

Ato Bautista’s Palitan (Exchange) opens with a business transaction. Ramiro (Mon Confiado, who gives a performance that carries the film from start to finish), the shrewd owner of an electronics shop, is convincing a client to buy his surveillance cameras. The client, troubled by his wife’s brazen infidelity, wants to build proof of her cheating. Ramiro then coolly suggests another one of his wares, a pistol, declaring that the only way for a jealous husband is to kill the cause of jealousy. Ramiro is a convincing businessman. He has a distinct way with words, delivering them with the primary objective of making a sale and enjoying the profit. His client, given the freedom of choosing the surveillance camera or the gun, is hooked and ready to let go of his cash for the peace of mind he desires.

Throughout the film, Ramiro is in the process of bartering and bargaining, to convince Nestor (Alex Medina) to give him videos of his wife (Mara Lopez) showering in exchange for the erasure of his debts, or to woo the wife into having sex with him, and later on, loving him back. Nestor is pitiful, a miserable loser who works in Ramiro’s shop to supposedly pay off his debts that only keep increasing. Nestor’s wife, newly plucked from the province and wasting away in a rundown parlor doing pedicures of horny clients, is the ultimate prize for Ramiro. When Ramiro finally wins the wife, through a marvellous display of gab and cunning, he is rewarded with an indulgently long sex scene, enunciating the near-soulless quality of the newly formed relationship. In the end, he begs to be loved by the confused wife. There is still work to be done, a deal to be closed.

Bautista admittedly pegs Peque Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights (1985) as an inspiration for Palitan. He replicates the design of the film, setting his story within the cramped interiors of the electronics shop or Nestor’s unkempt apartment. Unfortunately, the setting of Palitan is unconvincing. Unlike the tenement in Scorpio Nights where the audience is able to physically map out the mechanics of the characters’ strange sexual affairs and establish the spaces that allow for the possibility of the connections, the setting of Palitan feel like convenient stages that only serve the purpose of approximating claustrophobia. While Gallaga painfully recreates a heightened reality, creating a festering and heat-infested environment where it becomes entirely logical for the characters to be trapped in their sexual longings, Bautista seems satisfied with merely the idea of suffocation, utilizing the most minimum of production design to convey the illusion. Palitan feels too clinical and smart, too removed from the rest of the world. The sweat seems manufactured. The violence becomes only a narrative function. The sex becomes too long and repetitive.

Fortunately, Bautista modifies something new to Gallaga’s masterpiece. He intelligently maneuvers the politics of Scorpio Nights, appropriating the role of the voyeur not to the helpless and powerless but to the moneyed and prone to be abusive. While Gallaga’s desperate voyeur, a struggling student renting the apartment directly above the home of his target, steals his sexual thrills, Bautista’s, the slickly abusive Ramiro, buys his. Despite the variation, the differently situated voyeurs become addicted to the women of their fantasies to the point of falling in love, eventually leading to tragic consequences.

Palitan could be seen as exploitative, especially with its overindulgent bed scenes that seem to overpower what essentially is a thin story. However, the exploitation is an overt part of the milieu Bautista attempts to explore. It is a milieu where everything is traded, judged with whatever commercial value they have. In the absence of love and money, even our souls have a tag price.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (2012)

Rabu, 05 Desember 2012

Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (2012)

Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (Arnel Mardoquio, 2012)

English Translation: A Star's Journey into the Dark Night

Arnel Mardoquio’s Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim is essentially L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had it been set in present-day Mindanao and draped in reality instead of fantasy. Faidal (Irish Karl Monsanto) is suddenly orphaned when his parents, Muslim freedom fighters who end up becoming bandits involved in kidnapping for ransom, are killed, leaving him with a knapsack full of dollars and a band of American and local troops trailing him. He ends up with his aunt Amrayda (Fe Gingging Hyde) and Fatima (Glorypearl Dy), who decide to aid the orphan in his escape. They end up in the house of Baba Indu (Roger Gonzalez), the family patriarch, who joins them to ensure everybody’s safety in their passage away from their embattled home.

Like Dorothy’s companions, each of the characters in Mardoquio’s remarkably directed film are possessed by their individual needs and motives, which seem to align with Faidal’s quest to escape. The tedium of travel is punctuated with poignant revelations. Their military predators appear deliberately, always accompanied by an otherworldly drone that emphasize the innate violence of their mere presence in the land. Mardoquio could have easily staged rousing chases or intense gunfights. Thankfully, restraint overpowers the need to preach and burst. He tells his story with admirable confidence, showing only what needs to be shown, telling only what needs to be told, and trusting subtlety in its pursuit of accomplishing his advocacy. When he allows his characters to talk lengthily, the burden of their words are always well-earned.

Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim is visually arresting. Mardoquio displays his mastery over the spaces of the vast jungles and their surrounding fields. While his camera is often still, capturing the contained drama of his travelling protagonists with hardly any intrusion from the filmmaker, he sometimes deliberately navigates his camera through a wider location, showcasing the fact that the stage of his actions are not limited by the frame of his film. His film feels vaster than what is depicted visually. In a sense, he breaks the illusion of film and keeps his audience repeatedly aware that danger lurks outside his frames.

Mardoquio directs the sequences lyrically. In one beautiful scene where the four travellers take a rest before heading to sea, he has Baba Indu dutifully look for boats for their journey and Faidal, true to his being a child who just found himself in the middle of conflict, take a leisurely swim in the sea. Amrayda and Fatima, fresh from a lover’s quarrel over the harsh realities of their forbidden and impermanent relationship, take the time alone to relish the remnants of their damaged love. Amrayda leaves, allowing Faidal to talk to Fatima, about things that concern most humanity, and not just those endangered by war. They reassure themselves. They have a bagful of money, a new love waiting out there, and a future ahead of themselves. The scene is utterly heartbreaking, summing up the entire conflict in Mindanao within terms that is closer to the heart than the ego.

They nearly reach their Oz, a sea where the horizon is littered with lights emanating from foreigners’ factories and refineries, an indication that they are utterly trapped. They look up. The sky is littered with pale stars and other heavenly objects. Mardoquio conveniently concludes his story with the end of the chase, finally signalling a political stance he has been grooming right from the charged first frame of the film. In the midst of a war that has a national history as its never-ending fuel, there are no wizards, no magic, no steadfast friends, and no easy solutions to abruptly kill the conflict. It is a dreary struggle, where each participant becomes both an unwitting victim and a quiet perpetrator.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Rigodon (2012)

Senin, 03 Desember 2012

Rigodon (2012)

Rigodon (Erik Matti, 2012)

Erik Matti’s Rigodon, unlike the many infidelity films that have plagued local theaters, eschews glamour for grit. Its sex scenes do not have the luscious lighting or the saccharine scoring of the various romantic sequences of its more audience-friendly kin. Instead, the sex is sweaty, raunchy, awkward, and set in either the most ordinary or uncomfortable of locations.

Still reeling from a failed relationship, Sarah (Yam Concepcion) is desperate for a boyfriend who would both please her and her overbearing father. She meets Riki (John James Uy), a reality show contestant who can never seem to convert his erstwhile exposure to bankable fame, in a party. The two hit it off, developing a relationship that sates both Sarah’s needs and Riki’s desire for attention. However, Riki is actually married, to severely domesticated Regine (Max Eigenmann), whose only diversion from mother duties is cupcake-baking.

The plot is hardly novel. It expectedly cautions against the entanglements caused by illicit relationships. Matti, however, does not treat infidelity as the ailment that stains perfect individuals and their perfect relationships. The infidelity in Rigodon is but a symptom of a deeper ill, of the gnawing imperfections of the contorted characters Matti concocts for inevitable tragedy.

The characters are all flawed, but never to the point of caricature. They do not beg to be laughed at and ridiculed, but to be pitied, or perhaps loathed. Yet, the characters’ flaws never feel contrived. Their flaws are but repercussions of a society that seems bereft of moral order, one that is sustained by the jaded equity displayed by Angeline Kanapi’s enigmatic and cruel loan shark, whose near-schizophrenic processes with both her clients and her paraplegic father appears to be the philosophy of the world the film is set in.

The eroticism that is unabashedly displayed in Rigodon, while admittedly a product of capitalistic forces, is not treated carelessly. It is laced with the baggage of guilt and discomfort that are evoked by the characters’ acts of sexual folly and their disastrous repercussions. Its ending, a masterfully crafted long take that exposes the fresh wounds of an embattled relationship from both the perspective of the impulsively vengeful wife and the belatedly apologetic husband, sums up the degree of maturity Matti decides to tackle the dangerously commercialized theme of infidelity with.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

A Secret Affair (2012)

Selasa, 30 Oktober 2012

A Secret Affair (2012)

A Secret Affair (Nuel Naval, 2012)

Nuel Naval’s A Secret Affair makes a lot of noise and drama about nothing. The story revolves around acts of infidelity committed by Anton (Derek Ramsey) against his fiancée Raffy (Anne Curtis) with Sam (Andi Eigenmann), Raffy’s friend and sorority sister. In fairness to Anton, most of his indiscretions with Sam were committed either outside the relationship, such as before he and Raffy met or during that short cool-off period after Raffy withdrew from their wedding, or at the risk of those indiscretions being exposed by obsessive Sam, who will do everything to snatch Anton away from Raffy. The film is essentially a love triangle involving the most naïve, most immature, and most psychotic of characters, made somewhat palatable by commercial film gloss and occasional spurts of wit and humor.

Naval does a good job staggering the affair, prolonging the trite story with needless scenes and lazy expositions. From the opening love song that immediately segues to a weepy engagement proposal to the lukewarm ending, the television director eagerly jumps from one style to another, showcasing techniques that more often than not do not work but at least keep the film from being absolutely uneventful.

A Secret Affair expectedly peddles sex and sensuality, what with its overly attractive leads donning near-nothings copulating extravagantly whenever and wherever. Unfortunately, the film’s concept of eroticism is too intertwined with the glamor involved in the near-perfect faces and physiques of its stars to be grounded in reality. All it offers is an erstwhile fantasy, of being involved, at least vicariously through the actions of the films’ characters, in these swoony romances and raunchy flings.

Evidently, Naval’s characters are all irritating spoiled brats, living inside a bubble of their own doing, communicating only with each other through tweets and status updates, and enjoying the very fact that their every action is being watched by everyone outside their exclusive bubble. While the description seems to match a lot of celebrities whose private affairs are now readily available because of social media, Naval only scrapes the surface of such disgusting but prevalent culture, insisting on displaying caricatures for laughs and thrills instead of delving deeper.

Without a doubt, A Secret Affair owes its existence to the commercial success of Ruel Bayani’s No Other Woman (2001), also starring Ramsey and Curtis who find themselves intertwined in an illicit relationship. Insisting on the unwieldy mix of drama and comedy that made Bayani’s film somewhat memorable, screenwriter Mel Mendoza-del Rosario peppers the film with lines, spoken with overreaching conviction by supposed members of Manila’s upper crust, that stray past the borders of good taste and proper conversational etiquette. The film’s techniques are repetitive and lowbrow, which are unfortunately the right elements of a true box office hit in the Philippines.

Sadly, A Secret Affair, even with Naval’s dynamic treatment which criss-crosses from serious to funny and back, Ramsey, Curtis and Eigenmann’s more or less convincing acting, and Mendoza-del Rosario’s forced witticism, is still gratingly dull. Its bare plot essentially revolves around the stupidity of people, but Naval still insists on conjuring obvious lessons on life and marriage out of it. It is as if morality is an afterthought by the filmmakers, who are quick to exploit the very real problem of infidelity for a quick buck.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles (2012)

Minggu, 28 Oktober 2012

Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles (2012)

Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles (Erik Matti, 2012)

The first thing one would notice in Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles is how incredibly gorgeous the computer-generated visuals are, at least compared to other Filipino productions. Opening with a shot of apologetic soon-to-be-father Makoy (Dingdong Dantes) cramped inside a tricycle with an old woman and her haul of various innards, the film immediately showcases how perfectly rendered the digitally-rendered background is, with the overloaded vehicle breezing through vast landscapes that seem to be exaggerated depictions of what is really out there. Matti dutifully maintains the spectacle throughout, struggling only when he decides to replace his actors with computer-generated monsters that are quite unimpressive. Nevertheless, Matti’s efforts to overly stylize what essentially is a redo of the classic aswang tale bring the genre closer to its comic book roots.

Filipino folklore crossed over to pop consciousness through the cheap comic books that mixed humorous sketches with more morbid and horrific tales involving ghosts, aswang, and other monsters. The aswang, which seems to be closest thing the Filipinos have to vampires considering that they both share the ability to morph to creatures and are deathly allergic to garlic and salt, is particularly notable because of its hunger for the young and the unborn.

The typical aswang story, at least the one that has been repeated in popular cinema like Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes’ Aswang and Richard Somes’ Ang Lihim ng San Joaquin (The Secret of San Joaquin) in Shake, Rattle and Roll 2 (1990) and Shake Rattle and Roll 2k5 (2005) respectively, involves a soon-to-be-father suddenly forced to protect his pregnant wife from an onslaught of hungry monsters. The situation the characters fall into emphasizes on the Filipino male’s ability to be more than a provider but a protector. Even the more modern takes like Topel Lee’s Yaya (Nanny) in Shake Rattle and Roll 8 (2006) and Richard Somes’ Yanggaw (Affliction, 2008) on the tale has their heroes (a young boy tasked to protect his baby brother from a nanny who turns out to be an aswang and a father who has to decide what to do with his daughter who develops into an aswang, respectively) forced to abandon traditional roles and muster up courage and conviction to protect their families.

Tiktik repeats the trope. Matti however emphasizes how domesticated and unprepared for battle the Filipino male has become, introducing, aside from Dantes’ irresponsible pretty-boy, a cowardly husband (Joey Marquez) and red-lipped manservant (Ramon Bautista), among pregnant Sonia (Lovi Poe) and her mother Fely (Janice de Belen), all dominant and controlling females. The sudden onslaught of aswang, caused predictably by the brashness and stupidity of the impertinent newcomer, is made all the more thrilling, especially since there seem to be more mishaps in their intended defense of their respective loved ones than successes. Their rapid transformations from brazen or docile men to rightful heroes seem to be the heart of Matti’s well-orchestrated madness. In the end, Matti has made a well-crafted tale wherein men do what men are supposed to do.

Like the comics that sustained the aswang from being obscure participants in regional folklore to something more mainstream, Tiktik indulges in comedy, infusing the tense and suspenseful setups with pockets of levity, whether it is a witty piece of dialogue or a visual joke that pokes fun at the macabre. There is some sort of humanity, a certain sense of cultural identity, and refreshing irreverence amidst Matti’s meticulous craftsmanship. Matti just refuses to be drab and serious, opting to charm and captivite with his impressive grasp of hilarity, horror, and visual spectacle. Tiktik comes with all the right ingredients of an unabashedly entertaining film.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

This Guy's in Love with U Mare! (2012)

Selasa, 16 Oktober 2012

This Guy's in Love with U Mare! (2012)

This Guy's in Love with U Mare! (Wenn Deramas, 2012)

There is this one particular scene in Wenn Deramas’ This Guy’s in Love with U Mare! That sums up the film’s curious and confused take on gender politics. Lester (Vice Ganda) and Gemma (Toni Gonzaga) arrive at a comedy club. True to the culture of local comedy clubs, the trio, composed of two tactless gays and a similarly crude woman, hosting the night’s program suddenly take turns in pouncing on the club’s new guests with supposedly funny insults. Their specific target is Lester, whose fervent pretensions of being a heterosexual male are not very effective against the hosts’ especially keen senses. In unison, the hosts naughtily chant “bakla,” generating much laughter from the audience at the expense of poor Lester.

The blatantly insensitive jokes dodge imputations of political incorrectness because the perpetrators are also homosexuals and the perpetration is never done out of hate or derision but for fun. This self-referential and self-deprecating humor has been a staple in Filipino mainstream entertainment for several decades now. In a way, its existence signals a culture’s openness and acceptance of homosexuality, allowing openly gay entertainers to strut and sashay all in the name of entertaining the masses. On the other hand, it also limits the perception of homosexuals and homosexual relationships within the mainstream as mere objects of hilarity.

This Guy’s in Love with U Mare! is Deramas’ third collaboration with Vice Ganda. All of the director’s previous collaborations with the inexplicably popular gay entertainer, Petrang Kabayo (Petra the Horse, 2010), a reimagining of Luciano Carlos’ 1988 Roderick Paulate-starrer Petrang Kabayo at ang Pilyang Kuting (Petra the Horse and the Naughty Kitten), and Praybeyt Benjamin (2011), a modern restyling of the story of Mulan, instruct on very elementary gay issues such as tolerance or acceptance in what supposedly is a macho society through a narrative that relies too heavily on meandering slapstick and acerbic witticisms. This Guy’s in Love with U Mare! at least invests on some sort of story that allows Vice Ganda to do something more than rehash his tired television antics.

Mike (Luis Manzano) has just broken up with Lester, his benefactor and boyfriend for several years, to marry Gemma, a bank teller who is clueless about her beau’s past gay relationship. To win Mike back, Lester cooks up a plan to pretend to be straight and woo Gemma away from Mike, forcing Mike to return to him.

Deramas, although working with a tad more restraint, still indulges in the same tricks and gimmicks that peppered his previous works. Popular lines from other movies are still redelivered under more comedic circumstances for cheap chuckles. Action scenes are still sped up, or montaged, backgrounded by either a pop song or a forgettable melody. Despite the lazy repetition, Deramas still manages to display an ability to be truly witty. In a scene where Lester makes a move on Jemma by recruiting his equally flamboyant gay friends to hold-up Jemma so that he can save her, he stages and choreographs the entire fight, inspired by a classic fight scene by gay icon Darna as played by Vilma Santos in one of the superheroine’s movie incarnations.

It is what it is, a disposable piece of entertainment that does not have the will or courage to reinvent the wheel. As a product of commerce, the film understandably insists on being merely lightweight, parading characters that are mere two-dimensional sketches with either a skewed or an overly simplistic understanding of gender roles and morality. The film manages to do be funny within the very same framework that all comedies about self-deprecating gays are funny. Vice Ganda makes most of the role of a gay man desperately pretending to be straight, conveniently overacting at every opportunity to stretch certain stereotypes for easy hilarity. While it is apparent that there are attempts to blur the borders between genders and relationships, it unfortunately misses the opportunity to actually create discourse out of its premise, to graduate from the decades-old subgenre.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Of All the Things (2012)

Senin, 01 Oktober 2012

Of All the Things (2012)

Of All the Things (Joyce Bernal, 2012)

Of All the Things has director Joyce Bernal reunite with Aga Muhlach and Regine Velasquez, who, once upon a time, graced her films like Dahil May Isang Ikaw (Because There’s Just You, 1999) and Pangako… Ikaw Lang (Promise… Just You, 2001) as perfect lovers. Muhlach and Velasquez have considerably aged since their last pairing, lending the characters they portray in Of All the Things a certain semblance of cynicism, frustration and desperation in both love and life. In a sense, Of All the Things, without straying too far from the overused formula of local rom-coms, infuses the genre with some sort of sobriety that supposedly comes with maturity, at least in age. That is not to say that Of All the Things is a sad and depressing picture with aging singles moping about their lack of life and love. It is not. It is as spritely and bubbly as any other rom-com, true to the genre’s escapist intentions.

Muhlach plays Umboy, a bar flunker who now drafts and notarizes documents along the crowded sidewalks surrounding the city hall. Velasquez plays Berns, a professional fixer who finds herself in a legal spat with a shrewd contractor, forcing her to employ Umboy to represent her in an informal meeting. Umboy and Berns eventually join forces, with Berns using her various connections to land Umboy a job that will make it easier for Berns to facilitate her many transactions. They inevitably fall in love with each other, with only their specific lots in life and their differences in morality and integrity playing hindrances to their fated love affair.

The romance is admittedly a bit of a bore, plotted lazily within the conventions of the genre. What makes the love story somewhat interesting is the suggestion that love was never really planned in the two would-be lovers’ lives. Unlike the idealistic and hormone-driven teens and yuppies of most conventional rom-coms, Umboy and Berns have their hearts’ desires as the least of their priorities. The so-called chemistry isn’t carefully developed through the narrative. It just happens, like a sudden nudge by their biological clocks, reminding them that their romantic and sexual urges are soon to expire and that they have to make up, kiss, and get married if they still want to be productive in the reproductive department.

It is essentially a love story between losers, between a professional failure who has resigned himself to be consistently reminded of his nagging incapacities by being a mere notary public and a chronic social climber who hides her insecurities through the connections she has established through her desperate friendliness. The fact that they are to participate in an affair that is usually reserved for the young and promising despite their age merely multiplies the pitifulness of the lives they are living. They are pathetic participants in a society where professional titles, political power, and branded purses are essential symbols of status and success. They are the underdogs that are so easy to love and root for, and the happiness they are to predictably achieve through the machinations of Mel Mendoza-del Rosario’s screenplay feels very well-deserved.

There’s an unusual but lovely tenderness in the way Bernal portrays the domestic lives of her beloved losers. Amidst the requisite jokes and wit that flavor the romance, the underlying drama of disappointed parents and shamed children is quietly beautiful. Tommy Abuel, playing Umboy’s father, a retired law professor who now reviews law graduates for the bar examinations, injects his character with nuances that add layers to the fragile father-son relationship. The vague disappointment and shame that define the relationship between Umboy and his father that is specific to a family conscious of the prestige of professional titles are mostly relegated to the background and whispered. Bernal paints Berns’ familial concerns similarly, draping the insecurities of Bern’s ex-beauty queen mother, played animatedly by Gina Pareño, with humorous histrionics.

Of All the Things clearly struggles in pacing a love story within the context of the very specific culture of hopeful bar examinees and fixers who slyly reduce bureaucratic red tape for a fee. However, the way in which Bernal and Mendoza-del Rosario depicted what could have been sordid and taxing milieu with just the right amount of levity is quite an achievement. The film is consistently delightful, which is enough considering that the film’s most blatant goal is to merely entertain. That it manages to achieve more in the way it paints a realistic and relatable portrait of parents living through the failures and successes of their children is noteworthy.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Pridyider (2012)

Sabtu, 22 September 2012

Pridyider (2012)

Pridyider (Rico Maria Ilarde, 2012)

The first few scenes of Rico Maria Ilarde’s Pridyider immediately reveal a particular milieu that is far removed from the real and the mundane. Tina Benitez (Andi Eigenmann) is first seen aboard a flight back to the Philippines. She is sleeping, dreaming a horrid dream. She immediately wakes up, prompting her seatmate, an amiable old woman who is finally returning to the Philippines from a thirty-year absence, to talk to her, mouthing cryptic statements about looking back to where you came from. She takes a cab driven ominously by Ilarde-regular and frequently used character actor Raul Morit to her new home. A heated discussion on the display of depraved violence in Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay (2009) is heard from the radio. Tina, tired from her trip and unready to be bombarded by third world concerns, politely asks her cab driver to turn the radio off. There is just no room for the grime and guilt of reality in Tina’s story. Her story is one that can only happen in the twisted and more than slightly offbeat world of Ilarde.

Ilarde carefully lays the foundation of his world. Its oddball residents are all mutations of some archetype or stereotype. Tina is the damsel-in-distress, devoured by a mission to discover her family’s history. There is also her knight-in-shining armor (JM de Guzman), a former childhood sweetheart she re-establishes a romance with. The other characters are there to fill a particular role within the confines of Ilarde’s modern fable. The plot itself follows a familiar pattern.

In a way, the predictability of the film’s plot and characters is borne not out of laziness but of Ilarde’s obsession with the genre, an obsession to elevate it without breaking or betraying its time-tested rules. After all, the best of Ilarde’s works, his two indie-charmers Sa Ilalim ng Cogon (Beneath the Cogon, 2005) and Altar (2007) seem to be films created from the same vein, with characters facing similar moral and physical obstructions, inching their way to some sort of redemption.

Pridyider, perhaps owing to its commercial studio backing, is more fleeting in theme, with characters that are less subjugated to moral and spiritual uncertainties. Tina’s motivations are trite at best, nothing as life-threatening or soul-shattering as Ilarde’s previous protagonists. She is mostly passive, urged only to action when it becomes apparent that her most used appliance has some murderous intent. Ilarde is clearly more enamoured by his inanimate villain, establishing a back story that involves more complex human emotions such as jealousy as vengefulness.

It is inevitable but useless to compare Ilarde’s Pridyider with Ishmael Bernal’s, the middle episode of the very first Shake, Rattle and Roll (1984) movie. Bernal’s version had a sinister refrigerator charged with sexual frustrations, feeding off the heat-drenched lustful repressions of its new victims. Ilarde’s re-imagining avoids giving the appliance human qualities. It is otherworldly and evil, a manifestation of human distortion instead of a crooked human quality, designed to be utterly reprehensible with various innards, taunting severed heads, and vicious other body parts that inflict harm without respect to relationships. If the biggest threat to the peace of the world is far from human and something innately evil, the proper remedy to that threat is not something within the grasp of human logic or reason, but something particularly Catholic, symbolic and outrageous.

Ilarde filters much of the clutter from the genre and stubbornly goes back to the basics of horror, notwithstanding the fact that his audience clamours for twists and lousy sophistication. He represents that peculiar branch of horror that never swayed to the demands of the evolving market, that refused to follow the movement towards fake subtlety and vapid seriousness, that remained true to Lovecraftian weirdness and the many possibilities of horror it provides if localized and molded to suit the Philippine setting. He and his films will predictably be misunderstood. Despite that, he’ll predictably make the same films over and over. Pridyider is proof that there’s room in this mainstreamed household of repetitive romances and schlocky shockers for his entertaining eccentricities.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

The Mistress (2012)

Senin, 17 September 2012

The Mistress (2012)

The Mistress (Olivia Lamasan, 2012)

The Mistress has a plot that feels taken straight out of one of those cheap trashy novels, the ones with tacky covers promising sleazy escapism with impossible love stories set in unbelievable milieus that enunciate pulpy passions. It is grounded on that very basic story where hapless women are made to choose between two lovers, representing either true love or elusive security. Director Olivia Lamasan and writer Vanessa Valdez overhaul the overused tale, turning the central woman into a mistress of a wealthy businessman, and her other man as that wealthy businessman’s rebellious heir. The film contributes a tad more sophistication to the tired genre, with characters struggling with love that is more the conflict rather than the resolution to the story.

When JD (John Lloyd Cruz), an architect who is wrestling with the prospect of being the heir to his despised father’s businesses, discovers that Sari (Bea Alonzo), the girl he’s been trying so hard to woo, is also the kept mistress of his father (Ronaldo Valdez), he decides to discontinue his plans of winning the girl’s heart out of disgust and disdain. He then unexpectedly gets a glimpse of Sari’s finer qualities that also lured his father to loving her. This gets him drawn further into her, making him fall desperately in love with her to the point of battling with his own father to win the undivided affections of the woman they unwillingly share.

The film only has impressions of complexity. Lamasan and Valdez are more interested in the tearful tragedies of a truncated romance rather than the more thrilling intricacies of characterization. As a result, the characters are solely motivated by amorous passions, despite the sliver and hints of darkness in their narrative arcs. The Mistress has traces of a film with more valid and realistic psychological undertones, with people acting and reacting not solely with their needy hearts but with their brains, hormones, and stomachs. With its interplay of classic archetypes interacting within a setting of familial and corporate power struggle, it could have been something more than the syrupy weeper that it is.

However, to expect more depth and sophistication than necessary from a studio film is utter folly. The Mistress mostly succeeds in delivering what it advertises --- a glossy display of heavily orchestrated romantic entanglements of the extremely rich and goodlooking as only a studio can come up with. Its efforts in glamorizing the courtship game with the leads’ unabashed delivery of bathetic declarations of love during plentiful serendipitous encounters pay off. Cruz and Alonzo play both the roles of joyous lovers and tragic victims of fate effortlessly. It is simply not difficult to get drawn to their characters’ plights, to get absorbed in their individual dramas, to get swept away in their hopeless hearts’ ambitions.

The film’s ending is delightfully ingenious, making use of a previous fantasy set-up to evoke as an impossible dream the scenario that is the happy ending a cynical realist is dreading. It is achingly realistic without being too melancholic. Despite the endeavor for realism in its conclusion, The Mistress is still not dark enough. Its characters, from the family-loving mistress to the apologetic wife, are too good-natured and amiable. Its attempts at sensuality are limited to choreographed seductions within the cramped space of a fitting room or lousily-filmed lovemaking under the spell of a Snow Patrol radio-hit. Although wrapped with a tad more grit and tragedy, the film still peddles the all too familiar fantasy of love conquers all that audiences are too willing to gobble up mindlessly. It aims to simply please. And that, I believe, is the both the film’s biggest strength and downfall.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

The Reunion (2012)

Kamis, 30 Agustus 2012

The Reunion (2012)

The Reunion (Frasco Mortiz, 2012)

In his episode in Cinco (Five, 2010), Star Cinema’s episodic horror that featured body parts in various morbid tales, Frasco Mortiz has a bunch of neophyte fratmen desperately pulling a severed zombie hand from another teenager’s crotch in slow motion while a popular pop song about the pleasures of romantic hand-holding plays in the background. In a matter of a minute or so, Mortiz displayed a youthful wit and a playful appreciation of pop culture that was strange and unusual within the world of commercial filmmaking for which he decided to eke out a career from. The scene was more than clever, it was actually oddly inspired. It was a sketch that merged genre conventions, generational humor, ridicule on traditional concepts of institutionalized machismo, to form something genuinely watchable.

The Reunion, Mortiz’s first feature length film, makes most of the same wit and pop culture appreciation. In fact, he mostly relies on them. The film is largely composed of jokes and gags strung together by an illogical plot about losers (Enchong Dee, Xian Lim, Enrique Gil, and Kean Cipriano) blaming their unsuccessful high school romances for their present misfortunes. It is entertaining enough, unburdened by any baggage to mean anything other than guiltless and shallow amusement. It is as harmless as morning breeze, light, fleeting, but entirely forgettable.

Perhaps Mortiz overdoes the youth bit, or at least the bit that pertains to that portion of the youth who have spent majority of the years they have lives consuming hyperactive music videos and numbing videogames. The Reunion does not have genre limitations to play around with. Youth is the genre. In diluting the film with rapid images, giddy transitions between scenes, and limitless pop culture references, Mortiz risks being vapid and redundant. The film in fact crosses that thin line between tact and tastelessness so often, it becomes confusing whether the film is nothing more than an overblown joke on the paraded promises of a truly promise-less youth.

As with any film that relies on multiple narratives, the inconsistent quality of the stories becomes a too obvious problem. The Reunion, in tackling the quest of its four losers in winning back their high school loves, exposes its inability to nurture storylines. The bit about wannabe-rocker (Cipriano) who is more than surprised to learn that her former beau has opted to model skimpy bikinis for a living is the weakest of the bunch. The most promising is perhaps the thread on the angst-ridden social climber (Lim) who belatedly finds out that he has a son with his high school sweetheart. The other two stories are largely quick plots that are recycled to frame either funny or syrupy sketches.

It is all forgivable. It fascinates with its pedestrian charms. What it does not need is the tremendous weight of being a tribute to the legendary Eraserheads, whose contribution to the local music transcended social classes and generations. The film’s appreciation of the musicality of the beloved band ranges from something as perfunctory as naming characters from the personalities that populated the lyrics of the group’s most famous anthems to something as misplaced as stolid accompaniment to the film’s many unabashedly cheesy moments.

Mortiz never graduates from the trite popularity and instant pleasures of the melodies. He does not go beyond that, neglecting to explore the depth and the darkness of the sad fate of the sweet girl he once danced the El Bimbo with, to dissect the masked poverty in the seemingly inane lyrics about the want to drive a car that one is unable to afford, to display the warped romanticism of falling deeper in love with a former innocent crush-turned-centerfold model. Simply put, The Reunion barely scraped the surface of what the music is about, what the music means to many who treasure it more for how the songs spoke to them rather than how popular they have become over the years. It is but a paltry tribute.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)