So It's You (2014)

So It's You (Jun Lana, 2014)

Inside a bridal car sits Lira (Carla Abellana), excitedly waiting for her groom while warding off her parents’ persistent questions as to whether or not the wedding will push through. Tony (JC de Vera), Lira’s groom, finally enters the bridal car, and looks at his soon-to-be-wife with all the seriousness he can muster. He mumbles phrases, all of which feel all-too-familiar because of how they have been repeated by tired lovers wanting to end a relationship with as little collateral damage as possible. In short, Tony wants to cancel the wedding and still be friends with Lira. Lira, in reaction, has nothing else to do but accept the decision of Tony, but rejects the offered continuation of their friendship.

The main plot of So It’s You stems from this initial and supposedly traumatic rejection that was experience by Lira. After a few months from her non-wedding, she recruits Goryo (Tom Rodriguez), a shoe designer she serendipitously befriends while returning from Baguio, to act as her boyfriend to inflict jealousy on Tony, who has then married another girl. Predictably, from Lira and Goryo’s sham relationship blossoms something real, which is prevented by all the lies they have already committed to everybody around them and of Lira’s nagging infatuation for Tony.

It is integral to dissect the movie’s opening to summarize the movie’s most prevalent failure. It is an opening that sounds grave and serious on paper, but it is portrayed with blatant ridiculousness and capped with a joke that did not work. Here we have a woman whose dream wedding has been shattered by a man who belatedly exclaims his inability to handle commitment. Here we have an opportunity for the movie to properly propose and introduce a rich emotional layer, a reliable backbone if you will, to both its comedic and more serious intentions.

Lana, who presumably feels the pressure of properly mixing drama and comedy as prescribed by the rom-com formula, has squandered the opportunity of creating something more worthwhile than fleeting escapism by sacrificing the realistic portrayal of pain and betrayal for cheap witticism and gaudy humor. So It’s You is afflicted with the same confusion that has hounded a number of rom-coms. The comedic elements frustratingly serve as mere embellishments to a romantic core. At their worst, the comedy of the movie feels completely separated from its entire point.

It is inevitable to compare So It’s You with My Amnesia Girl, the Cathy Garcia-Molina-directed movie that also has a bride left at the altar by her man. Both are romantic comedies, made specifically to entertain. The thing that My Amnesia Girl got right that So It’s You got so wrong is its depiction of emotional pain. Where Lana was content in drawing laughter out of a truly unfortunate situation, Garcia-Molina mined it for aches, which she subsequently utilized to support the entire conceit of her movie. In the end, Garcia-Molina succeeded in creating a film that sufficiently marries romance and situational comedy. On the other hand, Lana’s film just ends up being silly, with infrequent flurries of charm.

It really is unfortunate, since So It’s You is quite well-crafted. Carlo Mendoza, who has worked with Lana to create an appropriately idyllic atmosphere for the story of a cantankerous old man and his beloved dog in Bwakaw, has created a sumptuous enough look for the movie. Von de Guzman, who has scored most of Lana’s commercial efforts, has come up with delightful melodies that eagerly support the visuals.

It is frustrating that notwithstanding all the gloss and grease Lana was able to muster, it all feels empty. It is as if Lana, who has already acquired the ability to merge charm and depth in his non-studio financed films, has contented himself with something that avoids all notions of heft and complexity.

(First published in Spot.ph.)

Bwakaw (2012)

Coming Out Late in Jun Lana's Bwakaw

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

Jun Lana started his career in film writing screenplays for directors Marilou Diaz-Abaya and Maryo J. de los Reyes, among others. In the several years where the country was starving for quality films, he penned films like Diaz-Abaya’s Sa Pusod ng Dagat (In the Navel of the Sea, 1998), Jose Rizal (1998), and Muro-ami (1999), tasteful alternatives to the crass titillating films that were being produced by the dozens.

Interestingly, Gigil (2006), Lana’s directorial debut, capitalized largely on babes clad in bikinis, parading both their bodies and loose morals in the beach. He then dabbled in various other genres, directing disposable horrors like Mag-ingat ka sa… Kulam (2008) and Tarot (2009) and sleazy dramas like Roxxxanne (2007) and My Neighbor’s Wife (2011) for various studios and producers. The career of Lana became a prime example of initial promise gone wrong. His latest, Bwakaw, seems to be his belated apology for the misdirection of his career.

Bwakaw is about Rene, a gay old man (Eddie Garcia) who only came out of the closet when he’s already very old and is now coping with the loneliness dealt by his delayed decision. The film is movingly sincere. Lana molds Rene not from stereotype but from accurate perceptions of how a man would be had he lived his life as a lie and decided only to admit his reality when he barely has any years left to enjoy it. Garcia understands the specific nuances of the character he’s portraying. He does not pepper his portrayal with gags and cheap imitations. Instead, he allows his performance to be subtle and low-key, resulting in what essentially is a quiet triumph in acting.

Lana smartly plays Rene’s repulsion towards his friends and acquaintances as the core of the film’s humor. He also purposefully manifests Rene’s repressed guilt with a beautiful sideplot involving a failed romance. While the film’s depiction of an old man’s loneliness is already astute and affecting, it still forces more storylines than the film’s elegant pacing can manage. The result is a screenplay that is a bit too busy and a bit too lenient to the many contrivances in plotting.

The screenplay’s excesses are thankfully grounded by Lana’s surprisingly restrained direction. Set in San Pablo, the film remarkably incorporates a very provincial laidback appreciation of time, perhaps the only thing that both tortures and gives hope to the film’s impossible protagonist. A less sensitive director would rush to forward the story, relish in the big dramatic moments, and exploit the storyline of the titular dog. Lana, on the other hand, allows the story to crawl, to stagger and earn the emotions that have been repressed by the abundance of silence and the occasional jokes.

Delightfully unhurried, Bwakaw manages to make stretches of quietude and nothingness both entertaining and meaningful. It also helps that the film’s images are composed, lighted, and framed exquisitely. The music is sparse but elaborate, starting with light strumming of a native instrument before evolving into something more hopeful, following the eventual restoration of Rene’s faith in life.

The film’s final frame, a long shot of a street where Rene is walking as a former flame drives his tricycle by totally ignoring the old man, is painfully lovely. It depicts a life where fairy tale endings do not exist especially for people who are most susceptible to melancholy yet notwithstanding that, living it still seems to be the most gratifying choice.

(Cross-published in Twitch and ABS-CBNnews.)

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (2011)

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Jun Lana, 2011)

Its prologue, which briefly introduces its bouquet of characters and their curious relationships and situations, is divided into three parts, all of which are introduced by the three words of its generic title followed by sayings that would do better on greeting card than in a movie. Jun Lana’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is very convinced of its complexities that it utilizes these needless storytelling devices that are in reality are just ornaments to a narrative that is as elementary and straightforward as a daytime soap, only cramped within two hours. It is a film that does not say anything about anything, except perhaps to offer a glimpse of the sort of problems a Filipino upper class family, as imagined and fictionalized to cater to the masses, would be involved in.

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is essentially about the Montes family, owners of the country’s largest television network and a sort of hyperbolic representative of the famously wealthy and influential clans whose members’ lives we can only pretend to know. Tackling the sordid lives of the members of the Montes family and the people that are close to them, the film mines entertainment from tragedy, enjoyment from the manufactured tears of its embattled characters, and delight from the all the entanglements and estrangements brought about by the peculiarities of its very many narrative conceits.

Paraplegic Donald, the Montes patriarch, believes that he has a stable family. Agnes (Agot Isidro), his second wife who is decades younger than him, is secretly having an affair with Derek (Dennis Trillo), her personal trainer. Celine (Solenn Heussaff), Donald and Agnes’ daughter, is starting to get bored with Vince (Paulo Avelino), her clingy boyfriend. Mariel (Maricel Soriano), Donald’s eldest daughter from his first marriage and head of the family’s television network, has turned into a sad and mad woman after being separated from Gary (Gabby Concepcion), her ex-husband who is about to be wed to Charlotte (Carla Abellana). Jacob (Jericho Rosales), Donald’s son, is trying to balance the demands of being a family man and an executive for the family’s network. Lory (Lovi Poe), his bored wife, sneaks out of the house at night to sing with her band, leaving their baby with the household help.

After a disastrous earthquake, secrets are revealed, relationships are threatened, and emotions are questioned, further complicating these characters’ already complicated lives. Ex-wives are turned into mistresses. Mothers are turned into romantic rivals. Lana crafts a topsy-turvy world in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and attempts to pass it off as a glossier and noisier version of reality, dealing with feelings and circumstances that are beyond belief despite the strange circumstances that they are evoked from. This is unabashed melodrama, spending more effort in mercilessly pitting its characters against calamitous events to allow tearful montages and dramatic exchanges of dialogue than anything else. Lana’s characters seem to be there only for their eye sockets that spew off tears of depression and frustration and mouths that sound off phrases that sound devastating but actually mean nothing. Their motivations are questionable. Their existences are negligible.

Moreover, Lana does not have the eye to make Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow more visually appealing or distinctive. The cinematography, although apt in the sense that scenes are sufficiently framed and lighted, is characterless, contented to only the service the narrative without doing anything else. The result is pretty much a visually uninteresting picture, salvaged only by performances that are consistently competent although out. The film, which is essentially just an expensively mounted “move on” note, is all dull gloss and glitter. Despite the film’s many flaws, there’s satisfaction in the way Lana manages to juggle his sprawling account of a fictional family to its open-ended conclusion, the way he attempted to break away from the expectations of a neatly packaged ending with all loose ends tied together in a lovely knot. It is not all bad. It is just not all good, either.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Mag-Ingat Ka Sa... Kulam (2008)

Mag-Ingat Ka Sa... Kulam (Jun Lana, 2008)
English Translation: Be Careful of... Witchcraft

After surviving a car accident, Mira (Judy Ann Santos) awakens not remembering anything from before her accident. She starts to reconstruct her memories from scratch with the help of her doting husband (Dennis Trillo). As fragments of her pre-accident life start pouring in, she becomes aware of the complexities of her life, including her stagnant relationship with her blind daughter, her decisive love affair with her office-mate (TJ Trinidad), and her incompletely forgotten twin sister Maria (also played by Santos), a witch who she took away to the mental hospital. A ghost resembling her twin sister and remnants of her hidden childhood spent learning the occult start haunting her as she struggles with her memories.

Jun Lana's Mag-Ingat Ka Sa... Kulam (Be Careful of... Witchcraft) is proof that the allure of Ringu's Sadako hasn't entirely faded. Lana's film is nothing more than a derivative of a foregone genre, an attempt to squeeze some profit from an overused formula. Above the staple elements of the genre, the film manages to include a plot twist, two of the biggest stars in the country as leads, and ample technical values. These tactics of the film's unscrupulous producers seem to have worked. Mag-Ingat Ka Sa... Kulam is doing good business, notwithstanding stiff competition from imports from Hollywood. It earned an "A" rating from the local film evaluation board, which is equivalent to a 100% rebate from taxes.

Unfortunately, notwithstanding the audience reception and the stamp of approval of the film evaluation board, Lana's horror flick is really not very good. It is a mishmash of elements from different Asian horror film. The plot twist feels like an imperfect modification of Alone (Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2007). The occult references has already been used in a similar manner in Iain Softley's The Skeleton Key (2005). Some of the scares are repetitions of what has been done countless times before and there's a scene that seems borrowed from the Pang Brothers' The Eye (2002). Whether the similarities are intended or not, the result is unsatisfactory because the execution feels unduly cheap, obviously uninspired, and sometimes, downright idiotic.

I have no idea why it is insisted that the film include computer-generated effects (seriously, is it more expensive to have a real glass break?). Moreover, this insistence on including computer generated effects provide unintended humor (the "evil spirit" coming out of the car airconditioner is reminiscent of a Nickolodeon cartoon fart joke; Santos' make-up as a witch looks like a second-rate Halloween costume). The acting is pretty much flat and uninteresting, even from Santos or Trillo who have done decent work before. Moises Zee's cinematography is too glossy, too calculated to provide the right atmosphere for a horror feature. Von de Guzman, who seems to understand the nuances of horror, creates a musical score that seems to be the only thing correct in the film. Mag-Ingat Ka Sa... Kulam is an abomination. The film is an idiot's guide on how not to make a horror film.

Paraiso: Tatlong Kwento ng Pag-asa (2007)

Paraiso: Tatlong Kwento ng Pag-asa (Ricky Davao, Jun Lana & Joel Ruiz, 2007)
English Title: Paradise: Three Stories of Hope

Gawad Kalinga (its literal English translation is "to give care") is a non-profit organization whose noble goal is to build shelters and communities for millions of poor and homeless Filipinos. It has become some sort of a favorite charity for most affluent benefactors, mostly because the organization actually transmits results (in terms of completed houses and communities) and its method is very personal --- benefactors are permitted to visit the fruits of their kindness and to those who do not have the luxury of spare change, they are given the chance to share their know-how and muscles by actually building homes. To readers of this post, I suggest visiting the website to know more; or if you're really in the mood to make a difference in this world, donate money to their effort ($25,000 will create a community for several families; aptly named after the benefactor).

Paraiso: Tatlong Kwento ng Pag-asa (Paradise: Three Stories of Hope) is an omnibus film that strives to reach possible philantropists from around the world through the power of film. In the United States, the film was shown in several cities (mostly with large Filipino-American communities) to create awareness that such an organization is existing. Three short films, produced by three different film outfits, all trying to achieve an international awareness of the prevailing dilemma in the Philippines. I can't say that the three films are masterpieces, because they are not. If viewed as mere films, they are very much flawed and greatly manipulative. They are, however, very effective commercials for its singular and noble cause.

Jun Lana's Umiyak Man ang Langit (Even If the Skies Cried) begins the triptych with a tragedy: the landslide that completely covered several towns in Leyte with mud. Lana's film concerns Jocelyn (Maricel Soriano), a mother of four and one of the victims of the devastating natural calamity. It's designed to be a tearjerker, and as such, it's quite a success. What it lacks in subtlety, it compensates with pure sincerity (and believable performances by Soriano, and Noni Buencamino). It has one scene that bothered me and which I thought was completely unnecessary: Lana's team decided to recreate the landslide using miniatures. While the effort is understandable, the film could've survived without it. It's a good thing that the subsequent sequence which involves Jocelyn buried underneath the rubbles, groping her surroundings to save her daughters, was effectively heartbreaking.

The middle child of the omnibus is Joel Ruiz's Ang Kapatid Kong si Elvis (My Brother Elvis). It's undoubtedly the most interesting of the three films. The story was conceived by Michiko Yamamoto (writer of Magnifico (Maryo J. delos Reyes, 2003) and Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Auraeus Solito, 2005)) and Monster Jimenez (one half of the reason why Big Time (Monster Jimenez & Mario Cornejo, 2005) is so good), although based from the real experiences of Gawad Kalinga volunteers Jerome and Gina Paner (played by Michael V. and Carmi Martin) of adopting a neglected child from one of the housing projects.

The film doesn't go for a realistic portrayal of the events but instead bursts with youthful and energetic imagination. Elvis (Paulken Bustillo) eats rocks, pilfers little items, and wreaks havoc in the community before he was adopted by the couple. Of course, the newcomer doesn't really go well with the couple's only son, Pepe (Gian Bernabe). Ruiz solves the problem by giving the two siblings the opportunity to bond while traveling provincial Philippines while dragging a doghouse. It's slight, bright, and very whimsical; but beneath all the incoherent comedics (both effective and not-so-effective), is a distinguishable heart.

Marie, actor-turned-director Ricky Davao's contribution to the series, completes the trilogy. Sad to say, it's my least favorite of the bunch. It starts with the startling, and very recognizable, video of the World Trade Center collapsing before giving us a flashback of the wonderful twenty five years of the married life of Rudy (Cesar Montano) and Marie (Lexi Schultze) Abad. It's the tragic event of Marie perishing in the 9/11 tragedy that would give Rudy the inspiration to give to Gawad Kalinga, in memory of his good wife.

My problem with the film is that it lacks subtlety whatsoever. While Lana's short film bathes in melodrama, it is all worth it. Davao embellishes his film with a grandiose score; loud enough to turn the video of the twin buildings collapsing more operatic than it should be. I understand Davao's intention to make everything larger-than-life, but in a short film that should evoke sincerity and noble intentions, less is certainly more. Davao caps the film with a comparison between the colorful Gawad Kalinga homes and the dilapidated shacks on stilts in the Baseco compound. That's something Davao got right: there's still so much to do.

Nevertheless, the omnibus is still a grand success. Men and women are being recruited to fight in bloody wars when the same talents can be used to create homes; or just waste their cash on lifeless commercial efforts with films like Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007) and other loud, proud yet flat Summer flicks when the amount of money to create those films (and to spend to watch them) would be enough to create thousands of communities. The film adequately provides for something more worthwhile than being herded in this derivative life this modern world pushes us to live.