Maybe This Time (2014)

Maybe This Time (Jerry Lopez Sineneng, 2014)

Steph (a rather subdued Sarah Geronimo), a Manila-bred lady from a well-to-do family, met Tonyo (Coco Martin), an unsophisticated man with simple dreams and pleasures, during an outreach program in the province. What initially started as a string of flirtatious encounters over between the two developed into what could have been the perfect romance between individuals from opposite worlds. Unfortunately, fate and other realizations intervened. The love affair was aborted before it even began.

Seven years later, Steph, now a public relations professional, is given the task to groom and train her new client to fit into the world of the rich and influential. As it turns out, her new client is Tonyo, who throughout the seven years they were apart has been bequeathed with a lot of wealth and has turned Steph’s boss, Monica (Ruffa Gutierrez), into his girlfriend. Their roles have been reversed, forcing Steph and Tonyo to try their best not to rekindle the romance they have abandoned years ago.

There is absolutely nothing new to Jerry Lopez Sineneng’s Maybe This Time. It strictly follows the rom-com formula with two destined lovers pulled away from each other by fate only to be reunited by the power of love. All the elements are there, including the disposable third wheel who serves as the hindrance to the happy ending, the colorful and humorous support, and the overly concerned family, all to complete the package that would suit the film’s tried and tested market. A bit of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is sprinkled along the way in how Steph trains her rough-on-the-edges student to become more refined, only to end up falling for him throughout their lengthy sessions.

Sineneng, Star Cinema’s go-to director during the late nineties and early 2000’s for its run-of-the-mill products like Flames: The Movie (1997), Esperanza:The Movie (1999) and Otso-otso Pamela-mela Wan (2004), drapes Maybe This Time with the conventional gloss and themed music to accommodate the film’s primary intent to have its audience swoon over again at the rehashed love story. There is really nothing more to say about the production except that it is, like the plot formula, is unexcitingly predictable.

It is all recycled material, much like the driftwood that Tonyo converts into furniture, much like the romance that Steph attempts so hard to forget. There is not a single attempt for adventurism, for the film to stray too far from formula. This is not exactly a bad thing. The familiarity with the narrative arc provides a semblance of comfort to the viewers who are mostly there to follow the careers of the movie’s two stars, who actually performed rather well.

Geronimo is gifted with inherent charm. She plays the underdog with remarkable ease. Pitted against Gutierrez, who mostly channels her real life persona to inhabit a character obsessed with outward appearances and social status, Geronimo has ample space to stretch her acting muscles only for the purpose of making herself look even more deserving of a happily-ever-after.

Martin, who has already proven his acting prowess with his collaborations with Brillante Mendoza has a difficult time transitioning into becoming a matinee idol that he is being groomed by Star Cinema to become. Despite his looks which fit the part, there is a certain something in his demeanor that prevents him from portraying certain roles. In Maybe This Time however, his deficiencies, like his noticeable lisp or his boorish exterior, are melded into the narrative, eventually turning them into instruments to up the rom-com ante instead of distractions.

Maybe This Time is comfort food, the type that you eat not for the nutrients it provides your body but because it is the only thing available that won’t have you throwing up. It is the type of movie that would serve well during an afternoon when there is nothing else left to do. It is harmless, fleeting and forgettable, a veritable thing of the past, especially now when everybody else is attempting to reinvent the wheel or to track new paths within genre conventions. The movie is not exactly trash. It’s just not junk art.

(First published in Spot.ph.)

Wag Kang Lilingon (2006)

Wag Kang Lilingon (Quark Henares & Jerry Lopez Sineneng, 2006)
English Title: Don't Look Back

Star Cinema and Viva's team-up to make Wag Kang Lilingon (Don't Look Back), an omnibus of two horror shorts, might prove worthwhile for the two commercial film production outfits as the film packs on audience-adored twists and shocks (a sure come-on for the typical horror film viewer). Beyond those twists (some of which, I can smell a mile away), there's really nothing much that Wag Kang Lilingon has to offer. It's quite disappointing really, as I adored Quark Henares' previous film Keka (2003), and this is one of the few occasions for which prolific Ricky Lee writes a horror screenplay (Ricky Lee also penned one half of Magandang Hatinggabi (Good Midnight, Laurenti Dyogi, 1998)). I was expecting to be rocked, I left the theater rattled and disturbed (Henares has one more offering this year --- Super Noypi (2006) for this year's Metro Manila Film Festival; should I start lowering my expectations?).

Actually, it is Henares' episode, Uyayi (Lullaby) that proves to be the film's better half. Uyayi explores the investigation of a night shift nurse Melissa (Anne Curtis) on the numerous deaths that have happened and are happening on the hospital grounds. With the help of his journalist boyfriend James (Marvin Agustin) who undercovers as a hospital patient, Melissa starts doubting the sanity of a grumpy and at times autistic doctor (Raymond Bagatsing). It's far from original --- you can actually detect which films Henares picked his inspirations from: There's a scene that eerily resembles Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo (Pulse, 2001), ghosts and mysteries haunting a hospital is also the focal point of Masayuki Ochiai's Infection (2004). Finally, there's also an interesting resemblance with Henares' own student film A Date With Jao Mapa (1999), a short film wherein a lady fan baits famous actor Jao Mapa into a date, only to turn psycho on him.

Henares pervades his half of the film with his trademark quirks (cinematographer Lyle Sacris shoots the film so beautifully that there's such a noticeable divide when the film starts to scare or when it starts to make us swoon). I've always thought that Henares is more convincing in depicting romantic relationships, than genre (Keka (2003) is ultimately a rom-com disguised as a revenge film and erstwhile police procedural). Here, a generous amount of screentime is used to enunciate Melissa and James' relationship: much of it is Henares trademark cute, cuddly and breezy. The horror elements are done sparingly (a few of the imposed shocks, there's a bit of gore, and Romero-inspired undead); it pales in comparison to the Japanese counterparts named, but Henares is a novice in horror, and he's just directing a script that was written for him; a probable cause for the film's downfall as Henares is as good a writer as he is a filmmaker. Ricky Lee's story and script tries so hard to cover all the holes and answer all the questions, thus the numerous excrutiating revalatory sequences. Looking back, I can't help but, again, admire the way Henares ended Keka --- full of questions and possibilities, questions are left as unanswered questions; it works well that way.

The other and longer half is Jerry Lopez Sineneng's Salamin (Mirror). Sineneng is one of Star Cinema's horses in its stable of filmmakers and thus, he has directed almost everything --- melodrama, teenybopper rom-coms, comedy, sitcoms. Salamin, I think, is his first stab at horror and sadly, the episode overflows with excesses. A family moves into a large empty house with suspiciously low rent (the family members should have watched Ishmael Bernal's Fridyider (Frigidaire) before accepting a housing offer that's too good to be true). One night, they discover a large mirror and unwittingly opens a portal to the spirit world. Ghosts of the past and the future now haunt them wherever they go.

There's a huge difference between Henares' tiptop detailry with Sineneng's television quality aesthetics. The production is a mixed bag --- special effects are overdone to the point of hilarity, newly painted walls adorn a supposed decades old mansion. The crispness and glossiness of the cinematography can't simply hide the defects of Sineneng's filmmaking. Moreover, the film is gratingly noisy --- the musical score is uncontrolled; the actors and actresses' scream to their lungs' absolute torture. The acceptable quality of Henares' first episode is betrayed by this one that when the twist (a connection between the two films) is revealed, it forces you to ask the question: Why hire two directors then to make a film that is essentially one? The answer: big studio gimmickry. The result: a half-baked effort; and we all know which half isn't baked properly.