She's Dating the Gangster (2014)

She's Dating the Gangster (Cathy Garcia-Molina, 2014)

The early 90’s was for Philippine cinema a period for transition from the hard-hitting dramas and actioners to the sugary and light romances that are still popular up to today. Carlos Siguion-Reyna’s Hihintayin Kita sa Langit (I Will Wait for You in Heaven, 1991), the quintessential Filipino film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights starring Richard Gomez and Dawn Zulueta as lovers doomed by both man and fate’s cruelty, represented what could probably be the last hurrah for mature romantic tearjerkers, paving the way for stories of teenagers and their first romances.

Cathy Garcia-Molina’s adaptation of Bianca Bernardino’s She’s Dating the Gangster, the Nicholas Spark-esque novelette about another lovesick girl falling for the coolest guy in the campus, could have gone the way all the other commercially successful teen rom-coms went before it. Bernardino’s story, which curiously ends in tragedy, has all the makings of a swoony hit, especially with all its outrageously blatant manifestations of juvenile love.

In the novelette, Athena, a normal girl in campus, is forced by Kenji, the campus’ top mischief-maker, to pretend to be his girlfriend to make his ex, who is also named Athena, jealous enough to want to come back to him. As with all love stories of this type, the pretences dissipate, giving way for what seems to be true love, which would be abruptly stopped by some mean twist of fortune, which in this very unoriginal case, is a fatal disease.

Garcia-Molina, thankfully, has more adventurism than most of her peers who would have gone the route of simply filming the novel as is, as what Andoy Ranay did in his adaptation of Diary ng Panget (2014). Garcia-Molina’s adaptation, which innovates to cover the obvious derivativeness of Bernardino’s text, is simply put, offers a stark improvement over the original material.

A variation of Bernardino’s love story between Athena (Kathryn Bernardo) and Kenji (Daniel Padilla), set in the 90’s instead of the novelette’s original 2004 timeline, is sandwiched within the beginnings of the blossoming romance between Athena’s niece and Kenji’s son, who are also played by Bernardo and Padilla. The niece and the son have been serendipitously forced into a mission to reunite middle-aged Athena and Kenji (played by Hihintayin Kita sa Langit’s Zulueta and Gomez respectively) who have been separated by mysterious circumstances.

Predictably, Athena and Kenji’s love story has more meat. The niece and the son’s romance feels more like an afterthought, a way to further capitalize the masses’ interest on Bernardo and Padilla’s popular love team. Nevertheless, Garcia-Molina drapes Athena and Kenji’s narrative with a crazed mix of kitsch and nostalgia for what the 90’s represented in Philippine pop culture. It is the era of paged messages, tie-dyed tees, gaudy bandanas, garish plaids, and denim vests, all of which are remnants of a generation fed with movies and television shows starring Jolina Magdangal and Marvin Agustin. She’s Dating the Gangster is rightfully colorful, evoking every bit of the 90’s trademark tack.

The tragedy invented by Bernardino has been creatively subdued. Star Cinema undoubtedly protested the grim end of Athena and Kenji, as told by the book. It has to be a happy ending, for the sake of profitable escapism. Thus, instead of death as the payment for love, Garcia-Molina chose the reality of not being with the one you love, of waiting, of eventually settling. It is this ending that separates Bernardino’s juvenilia and Garcia-Molina’s masked maturity, in the midst of studio compromises. There are simply more heartaches more immense than mortality.

The film adaptation of She’s Dating the Gangster is a series of risks taken that paid off quite well. It could have been a straight adaptation and it would still have pre-teens bawling because of the tragic ending. It could have been set in the present with its characters mouthing pop culture references that are hip and relatable to the target audience. It could have been just about Bernardo and Padilla, and not Zulueta and Gomez, whose onscreen love affairs are relics. It could have been just another romantic comedy, the ones that mainstream studios have been churning out for corporate survival ever since the decline of the demand for more serious fare.

It’s good that it’s not. She’s Dating the Gangster is not art. It is still a film designed and crafted for escape, the ones Garcia-Molina, with her knack for fake hairpieces and dreamy fantasies, is so good at making. It is however entertainment that is self-aware. It knows what it is, what it is not, and where it came from. When it concluded with a throwback to one of the most iconic and memorable images from a Filipino romance, the one from Hihintayin Kita sa Langit where Gomez carries a dying Zulueta in their last try at love, it felt right. It knows exactly where it belongs in the long timeline of Filipino cinematic romances.

(First published in Twitch.)

My Illegal Wife (2014)

My Illegal Wife (Tony Y. Reyes, 2014)

The title My Illegal Wife gives it all away. Obviously inspired by hugely famous infidelity porn The Legal Wife which only aired around January and picked up its following a couple of months ago, the film has the feel of a production that was rushed to encash the popularity of the soap opera. The film is propelled by a singular idea of Clarise (Pokwang), a repatriated entertainer in Tokyo, who takes advantage of the plane crash-induced amnesia of Henry (Zanjoe Marudo), the hunk she meets aboard the plane bound to Manila, to trick him to believe that they are wife and husband. From that conceit, the film attempts various things, from inane comedy to gaudy family drama.

The first half of this Tony Y. Reyes is maddeningly daft. It features a lot of Pokwang doing her own brand of physical comedy, which is mostly reliant on the comedienne’s insanely flexible body and uniquely malleable face. Marudo, who hints of some semblance of comedic timing, is sadly less energetic and prevents the hilarious absurdity Reyes was trying to produce with all his illogical set-ups from really taking off. In addition, Ellen Adarna, who plays Marudo’s opportunistic fiancée, is even more static. She serves the purpose of being the film’s eye candy, and is seemingly hired in the production only to flaunt her gorgeous curves to create a wrong impression of maturity in what essentially is an immature film.

It is easy to give up on a film midway when it only provides worthless nonsense after worthless nonsense. After the nth time Pokwang gyrates just to enunciate her rabid desperation to get laid, it felt that Reyes’ film is a hopeless piece of exploitative drivel. Sure, Empoy and Joy Viado manage to force out a few authentic chuckles. However, it all feels utterly lazy. Reyes has done this so many times before, with all the films he directed for Vic Sotto and the rest of his gang. Pokwang has done this repeatedly in her shows, and even in her interviews. Marudo is simply not suited for this kind of comedy. Simply put, there is just nothing about the first half of My Illegal Wife that would urge its audience to stay for more.

Then something happens. My Illegal Wife starts making a little bit of sense. Mind you, that little bit of sense for a Tony Y. Reyes comedy is quite a big deal. The film grows a heart out of the heaps of trash it inexplicably exposed. Again, let’s put some perspective to this so-called heart. It is manipulative and obviously conjured out of formula, but still, it beats enough to affect. What is more surprising is that the film actually attempted to squeak out a political statement. Again, this is not some rousing statement on the current state of the nation but more of a satirical take on loathed national personalities, by way of Mae Paner’s genius impersonations.

Pokwang’s character graduates from being a sketch, with a tinge of novel characterization. The film’s generous servings of caricatures of scenes from other Star Cinema films are suddenly given some perspective, which sort of serves as the film’s belatedly communicated point. My Illegal Wife is not just a string of comedic sketches. It attempts to be a reflection of how the captured market of Star Cinema is completely swallowed by the escapist cinema’s shallow observations about life. Clarise’s sin is but a product of the fantasy that major studios peddle as comfort. She is a victim of both her own gullibility and Star Cinema’s domination of Filipino pop culture.

Of course, as with all Star Cinema movies, things will fall into place. Clarise gets her guy in a finale that is fashioned to celebrate the shrouded bamboozlement. Reyes may not have intended to criticize the industry he has freely committed to but My Illegal Wife projects a nation dangerously addicted to escape and conglomerates that are quick to profit from the addiction. Predictably, most of the audience will likely leave theaters fleetingly amused. Hopefully, a few will absorb this horrid point that is ingeniously veiled in awful jokes and bad filmmaking.

(First published in Spot.ph.)

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.)

Da Possessed (2014)

Da Possessed (Joyce Bernal, 2014)

It would take a special kind of callousness to watch the entirety of Joyce Bernal’s Da Possessed without even acknowledging the suspicious circumstances behind its being made. Just a few of months prior to the movie’ release, its main star, dancer-turned-actor Vhong Navarro, was mauled inside a condominium unit. Speculations were made by the public, who were incessantly bombarded with every bit of news about the sensationalized but most unfortunate event. As of present, Navarro, with the help of his enterprising handlers, has turned into some sort of crusader, using the country’s legal system for retribution.

Navarro is cowardly Ramon, a landscape artist who happens to waken the vengeful spirits of three murdered individuals, played by John Lapus, Empoy Marquez, and Aaliyah Belmoro, while working. Navarro plays Ramon as a veritable underdog, who is incessantly bullied because of his delicate demeanor but will have to prove his mettle and bravery when defending the ones who matter to him, more specifically his family and his love interest, Anna, a Filipinized version of the sexy Shaider sidekick (complete with her trademark yellow-and-white attire that is generous when it comes to panty exposure) and played with such a joyous disregard for any sophistication by Sollenn Heusaff.

Da Possessed, for all the inanity in display, echoes a lot of the themes of Navarro’s present predicament. Beneath the jokes and gags, the movie predominantly tackles revenge against an individual who has eluded the law despite his propensity for violence. Navarro, of course, plays his character with indisputable charm and affect, showcasing his trademark talents, whether it be his comedic timing or his dancing moves, to ensure that the actor does not get lost in the character. Navarro, by donning Ramon’s clothes and quirks, becomes the unlikely hero who will pave the way for justice to triumph despite such an immense desire for the more traditional type of vengeance.

Da Possessed is an unsubtle propaganda that is crafted precisely to woo its audience back into Navarro’s side. It could be an essential part of the damage control being orchestrated for Navarro, showcasing the fact that despite the recent miserable events, he remains to be an effective entertainer.

Of course, while Da Possessed is essentially Navarro’s show, the movie would not have been as convincing if it were not for his support. Beverly Salviejo, who has been relegated to mostly minor roles in previous films, is utterly delightful as Navarro’s mischievous mom. Joy Viado, who plays Anna’s strict aunt, proves to be the perfect match for Salviejo’s mix of physical comedy and wit. Smokey Manaloto, Matet de Leon, and Joey Marquez add further color to the bunch.

Bernal makes most of her cast’s various styles in comedy, and turns Da Possessed into a spectacle of sorts, with lowbrow humor interspersing with slapstick and other types of jokes that are certain to tickle the masses. A lot of the jokes are effective, thanks largely to the cast. The movie only loses steam when it decides to abandon its atmosphere of reckless fun for some degree of logic and the off-putting and totally unnecessary moral lesson that seems to be a requisite for Filipino comedies.

In the end, Da Possessed does what most Navarro-starrers do. It sufficiently entertains. The entertainment the movie delivers might not be as guiltless as let’s say, Erik Matti’s Gagamboy (2004), or Bernal’s D’ Anothers (2005), or Cathy Garcia-Molina’s My Only U (2008), because of the circumstances surrounding its release, but there’s more to it than suspicions of exploitation or discomforting underpinnings. It’s all good.

(First published in Spot.ph.)

Call Center Girl (2013)

Don Cuaresma's Call Center Girl: Graver Than the Graveyard Shift

Don Cuaresma’s Call Center Girl was made to entertain. There is absolutely no question about it. The movie has almost all the elements of a television sitcom. It is pregnant with gags, most of which is gratingly dull and mechanical. Its idea of substance is nothing more than motherhood statements on motherhood, which would have more effect had it been written in a greeting card than in this movie. Bereft of any real substance, it aspires for nothing else but shallow giggles that quickly dissipate once the feeling of being cheated of hard earned money starts settling in.

At the center of the movie is Pokwang who turns her role of Teresa, a recently repatriated mother, into a repetitive spectacle, or worse, a ponderous anomaly. She rapidly mouths supposedly funny nonsense, automatically bursts into tears with superhuman ease, and needlessly performs splits and stunts for no apparent reason. By the middle of the movie, the curiously charismatic comedienne has turned the hapless mother into a circus act, siphoning all humanity out of an already thinly-written character.

Yet Call Center Girl actually begs for sympathy for Teresa, who as directed by Cuaresma and portrayed by Pokwang is woefully immature. She is still insisted to be presented as the pinnacle of Filipino suffering. She is an overseas worker, slaving away in a cruise ship for the survival of her family. She returns just to be widowed and to find out that her youngest daughter (Jessy Mendiola) abhors her. Just to repair her relationship with her wayward daughter, she works with her in a call center, spending her nights selling useless fitness products to depressed Americans just to earn enough money to pay for her daughter’s whims.

If the plot is familiar, it is not because it grossly resembles reality. It is because it has been told and retold, in various other films and shows that portray the Filipino mother as constantly misunderstood and mistreated. Setting the plot within the world of call centers is nothing more than a needless front. Call Center Girl says nothing relevant about the lifestyle and profession it brazenly utilizes for its own generic purposes.

Cuaresma’s only attempt at originality lies is his effort to juggle within the sordidly schizophrenic narrative his brand of inane comedy with the requirements of sappy melodrama. The attempt is evidently a failure since never once does Call Center Girl evoke anything other than uninspired silliness.

There is very little characterization elsewhere in the movie. Every character is either a stereotype or an ornament, meant to be nothing more than an ingredient to carry on a punchline. The movie is afflicted by atrociously lazy writing. The characters, instead of being shaped from concept or the logic of the story, are just reliant on the offscreen personas and charisma of the actors and actresses playing them.

Consequently, Call Center Girl hardly feels thought out. It has the feel of sterile improvisation. It is what it was set out to be, entertainment, the cheap and horrible kind.

(First published in Rappler.)

She's the One (2013)

Mae Cruz's She's the One: Just One of Too Many

It’s all been done before. Jolina Magdangal, in fact, has made a very lucrative career in the 90’s by playing exaggeratedly chirpy women who harbor secret longings for unassuming best friends, usually played by erstwhile onscreen partner Marvin Agustin.

Then there is Rory B. Quintos’ Mangarap Ka (1995) had Claudine Barretto and Mark Anthony Fernandez play best friends-turned-lovers in a story set amidst competitions and ambitions that only the University of the Philippines can offer. More recent is Ruel S. Bayani’s Paano na Kaya? (2010), based on a hit song that sums up the dilemmas of being consumed by hidden affections for a best friend, where Kim Chiu quietly suffers while Gerald Andersson falls desperately out of his valued relationships. Perhaps the most impressive of the lot is Jose Javier Reyes’ Kung Ako na Lang Sana (2003), where Aga Muhlach and Sharon Cuneta play best friends who only discover they were meant for each other after living through their lives, too busy with careers or failed love stories to acknowledge the fact that they like and love each other.

There is simply something about romances blossoming out of mere friendship that is so attractive to Filipinos. It is perhaps because these love stories represent the most realistic of escapist romances, since there are no requirements of fated romantics facing glaring odds that their truest love will have to withstand. It only requires what most of us might already have: a best friend who we may have fancied as our one true love.

Thus, any expectation for innovation from Mae Cruz’s She’s the One can only lead to disappointment. It briefly delights only because it tells a story that is all too familiar and all too comforting. The film does not have any ambitions of reinventing the wheel. In fact, it is stubbornly precise in following its formula. This stubbornness, relieved only by a few attempts at placing the tired love story into the present day world that is dominated by social media, can only lead to a film with very meager charms, reliant mostly on whatever charisma its leads can muster out of playing boilerplate characters.

Cat (Bea Alonzo) has always loved Wacky (Dingdong Dantes). However, because she knows Wacky is too busy playing playboy with his many women, he relegates herself as his best friend. Little does she know, Wacky actually also has feelings for her. When David (Enrique Gil), a college student who happens to capture a video of Cat changing the tires of her car in the rain, starts expressing his inexplicable love for Cat through social media, things start to fall in place. The three become entangled in a romance that can only be set right by Cat and Wacky admitting the feelings for each other that they have hidden for so long.

Cruz does attempt to excite with only details that allow the story to stray a bit from its all-too-familiar path. Along the way, Cruz details the difficulties of maintaining a relationship that is gapped by a very wide age difference. Also, she situates the love story in a world proliferated by shallow expressions via the ease and convenience of communicating through social media, she touches the surface of how impulsive, and perhaps trivial, relationships, romantic or otherwise, have become.

Predictability, however, is still a given in these kinds of romances. Despite the attempts to color their fictional world, Cat and Wacky will end up together, leaving David, surprisingly selfless all of a sudden, giving up for the sake of a clean resolution. Absent any realistic struggle for love, the film’s easy resolution seems a tad too insincere and manufactures. It seems to be more a result of the impulsive feelings this generation represents than real yearning. Given that, Cat and Wacky may actually deserve the very hollow happy ending they get: cold and drenched in beautiful but fake rain.

(First published in Rappler.)

On the Job (2013)

On the Job (Erik Matti, 2013)

In one scene in Erik Matti’s On the Job, Francis Coronel (Piolo Pascual), an investigator who is close to uncovering an assassination ring within the higher echelons of the Philippine government, confronts Pacheco (Leo Martinez), the retired general-turned-politician ringleader. Coronel, with a swagger reminiscent of those imperfect cops on the verge of a bloody redemption that populate the cinema of John Woo and Johnnie To, readies his handgun, oblivious to the fact that he is clearly outnumbered. There is only one of him, and Pacheco has several armed bodyguards. Pacheco, played by Martinez with the alluring charms of a villainous mastermind, lectures Coronel about learning the ropes of corruption and the timeliness of revenge, effectively talking him out of his fatalist plans, thwarting what could have been an impressive gunfight. Without a single bullet let loose, Pacheco walks away, alive and victorious. Coronel remains the jaded hero, wounded not by gunshots by his acknowledgment that he is absolutely powerless against a force of corruption so blatant that there is no more need for subtlety.

Matti’s far-reaching foray into the unchanging state of Philippine corruption is nestled not in the distant but expository tradition that drew for filmmakers like Brillante Mendoza and Jeffrey Jeturian a certain level of acclaim. Matti intelligently pulls away from Brocka’s social realism, leaving the style and purpose to the many Filipino filmmakers who mix their cinema with some level of journalistic purpose. Matti is clearly an entertainer. On the Job is thoroughly enjoyable, replete with scenes and sequences that are precisely conjured to thrill and excite. Underneath the numerous pleasures it generously serves however is an unflinching observation, aptly pessimistic and bleak, of a society that has become oblivious of the decay that has invaded the lowest of its lows and the highest of its highs.

On the Job tells the stories of several players in an elaborate scheme that enunciates the very rotten core of a government that seems to thrive in crime and intrigue. Coronel, an honest investigator who unknowingly marries into a political family with shady connections, ends up with a murder case file conveniently snatched Joaquin Acosta (Joey Marquez), a low-ranking cop who has been slaving on the case and other similar cases for years, with the help of his influential father-in-law. The perpetrators of the murder, Tatang (Joel Torre) and his overeager trainee Daniel (Gerald Anderson), are prisoners whisked away from their cells every time a target needs to be disposed of. Between Coronel and Tatang are various other personalities, loved ones and protectors, all of whom enlarge the risks and stakes.

The screenplay is written by Matti with Michiko Yamamoto, who penned Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Magnifico (2003) and Aureaus Solito’s Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005), all of which are films whose underlying observations on society’s ills are masked in their endearing depictions of humanity’s goodness. On the Job is similarly situated, carrying characters whose moral troubles are only reflective of their insistence on being humans despite a society that dehumanizes them. Tatang is only led to become an assassin due to that glimmer of hope he sees in his wife (Angel Aquino) and daughter (Empress), a hardworking law student. Daniel has an abruptly terminated romance to revive through the earnings and erstwhile freedom provided by his clandestine profession. Coronel, stuck in the middle of a war between good and evil, is guided by the virtues of a father who died a hero. Acosta diverts his attentions from his failed family to his unrewarded work as a police officer. Matti and Yamamoto’s characters are amply motivated. They never resemble soulless symbols, and are instead living and breathing characters driven by believable principles and aspirations.

Matti’s recent films feel like reactions towards trends in Philippine cinema. When the mainstream has caught up with Japanese-style horror, Matti release Pa-siyam (2004), a stylized ghost story that takes the best of the horror trend and properly situates it within a distinctly Philippine setting without being too obscure. When inane fantasies became popular after the successes of Peter Jackson in filming J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous trilogy, Matti teamed up with a local theme park to mount Exodus: Tales from the Enchanted Kingdom (2005), a flawed but ambitious display of Matti’s ability to create spectacle. The increase of films being made outside Manila resulted in The Arrival (2009), his personal ode to hometowns. Rigodon (2012) is Matti’s more sober and more morally complex reply to the slew of films that unduly glamorized marital infidelity.

On the Job seems to be Matti’s defiant contribution to the on-going debate between the Philippines’ commercial and artistic cinemas. With the film, he marries the merits of the two seemingly opposing camps, infusing his sharp social commentaries within a style and aesthetic that suit more mainstream intentions. Evidently, Matti’s risks have paid off. His tireless crusade in developing a filmmaking culture that equally values content and craftsmanship has finally culminated in a piece of work that douses all the doubts and suspicions hounding both sides of the tired debate. On the Job is not satisfied in what pundits consider a safe and viable middle-ground. It opts to simply just move forward, always consistent to an aesthetic that is both true to the filmmaker and not manufactured simply to please a market.

Tuhog (2013)

Tuhog (Veronica Velasco, 2013)

English Translation: Skewered

Veronica Velasco has always found humor in the cruelty of fate. Her films have always been grounded on premises where an act of fate results in absurd and sometimes torturous scenarios that test the limits of humanity.

In I Do (2010), the dream wedding of two teens is constantly delayed by occurrences beyond their control, pitting their youthful love against youthful impatience. In Last Supper No. 3 (2009), a props-man turns into the butt of an overextended joke when he misplaces a wall décor he borrowed from an opportunistic family for an ad campaign, forcing him to experience the frustrating inanities of the Philippine judicial system. In Maling Akala (2007), which Velasco co-directed with Pablo Biglangawa, a chance meeting between two strangers results in a set-up that would hint of a budding romance that turns out to be nothing but an erroneous assumption. Velsaco and Biglangawa’s first feature, Inang Yaya (Mother Nanny, 2006), an emergency forces a nanny to choose between being a mother to her estranged daughter and a nanny to her ward.

Tuhog is spawned from that same obsession with fate’s cruelty. This time, the cruelty approaches the macabre, with three random strangers getting impaled by a steel pole when their passenger bus figures in a freak accident. The absurd situation the three find themselves in is that they are now faced with an even crueller responsibility of choosing who among them would have to perish to save the lives of the other two. The rationale for the need to choose is borne out of writer’s conceit: there are only two operating rooms in the hospital, leaving the unlucky unattended victim to simply bleed and suffer to death.

Velasco and co-writer Laurel quickly abandon the morbid image of skewered strangers in an ill-equipped emergency room to explore the three lives that through a twist of fate have become the subjects of a debate of life’s worth. Tonio (Leo Martinez) is a recent retiree who now finds himself either arguing endlessly with his adult children or reminiscing youth with his best friends over games of cards. His only hope from what seems to be a deadened existence is his sudden dream to put up a bakery. Fiesta (Eugene Domingo) is the toughened conductor of a passenger bus. Her hardened front, a result of having live with her alcoholic and suicidal father, is softened when Nato (Jake Cuenca), her replacement driver who has just recovered from a recent break-up, expresses his love for her. Caloy (Enchong Dee), a student who is far too concerned with his hormones to take his studies seriously, is in a long distance relationship his girlfriend. Having contented himself with the passing pleasures of daydreaming and online flirting in an effort to preserve his virginity for their upcoming anniversary, he now has to face the possibility that his girlfriend has already been sleeping around behind his back.

Beyond the mostly clever writing that rarely feels false or forced, there is also something humorously brutal in the way Velasco and Laurel fashion the three stories with linings of hope and forgiveness only to have them be abruptly suspended with the impalement. There is always that threat that death or some sort of sudden conclusion is just looming around, waiting to foil a life plan, to block a resolution, or to douse a passion.

Unfortunately and perhaps because there are limitations as to what is tolerable in commercial filmmaking, Tuhog never really embraces the darkness that could have complemented its gruesome center-piece. There is very little interaction among the suddenly conjoined victims, considering that their dilemma is one that would naturally excite the demons of self-preservation. Instead, it settles for obvious life lessons, as bluntly mouthed in the film's hurried end by its unnecessary mascot, a destitute drummer boy who every now and then appears in the film to vengefully predict death.

Still, Tuhog is something to behold within the context of a mainstream cinema that shuns experimentation and adventurism. Through convictions and compromises, Velasco and Laurel have come up with a film that successfully bridges the gap between smart and sentimental, eccentric and emotional, quirky and conventional.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Four Sisters and a Wedding (2013)

Four Sisters and a Wedding (Cathy Garcia-Molina, 2013)

Predictably, Four Sisters and a Wedding is plagued with all the deficiencies and excesses of a movie that caters to the masses. It suffers from an identity crisis, but that identity crisis is its biggest selling point especially in a country where being all-in-one is a virtue and a movie that offers tears, laughs, and lessons is a prized commodity. Four Sisters and a Wedding is adamantly a comedy, one that uses in unbridled exaggerations and popular wit to earn chuckles. Along the way, it suddenly transforms itself into a drama, with each of the movie’s multiple characters getting their fair share of profusely teary expositions. At the end of the movie, everything is wrapped up almost too neatly and easily with just mouthfuls of motherhood statements that render all issues and conflicts resolved.

Also predictably, it is that trait of Four Sisters and a Wedding that would be targeted by detractors. The movie’s insistence to remain within the borders of a cinema that is stubbornly safe for the purpose of commercialism is considered its downfall. Because it aspires to appeal to the majority, its story clunks with unnecessary heft and it confuses with its inconsistent mood and temperament. However, to simply dismiss the movie for its intention to comfortably exist in a market that knows fully well what it wants is short-sighted.

The Salazar sisters (Toni Gonzaga, Bea Alonzo, Angel Locsin and Shaina Magdayao) have been living their lives, connected only by occasional phone calls, until the sudden upcoming wedding of their youngest brother (Enchong Dee) forces them to reunite and join forces for what they think is the good of their family. As it turns out, the Bayags, the family which the youngest Salazar is marrying into, are as tactless as they are wealthy, convincing the sisters to plan together to dissuade their beloved brother from continuing the wedding. From a story by Jose Javier Reyes, whose works are almost always inspired by his sharp commentaries on Filipino middle class faults and aspirations, the screenplay written by Vanessa Valdez manages to simplify and meld various Filipino experiences into a package that is amiable enough.

For what it’s worth, within what may be considered a genre of Philippine escapist cinema that is mostly produced by mainstream studios, Four Sisters and a Wedding is actually quite remarkable. Its indulgent comedy parts are mostly hilarious, its extensively dramatic climax, moving. Director Cathy Garcia-Molina fulfills the requirements of commercial movie-making, balancing the vulgarity and tactlessness that draws laughter and tears with some semblance of predictability with some elegance and restraint, as may become necessary.

It is the movie’s disarming earnestness that is truly admirable. At one point, the sisters suddenly tearfully expose their failures and insecurities, probably in defense of their mostly despicable demeanor throughout the movie. Garcia-Molina forgets all notion of subtlety, allowing her actresses, all of whom are brilliant, to emotionally verbalize regrets and apprehensions that most of us would never dare expose. There are simply no pretensions of depth or insight as it specifically targets the heart, coursing its way to it through its familiar tale whose threads and strands seem to be plucked straight from the sometimes joyful and sometimes painful eccentricities of being Filipino.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

A Moment in Time (2013)

A Moment in Time (Emmanuel Palo, 2013)

Emmanuel Palo’s A Moment in Time is an exercise in barefaced mediocrity. There is absolutely nothing in the film that exhibits any effort from the filmmakers to be anything other than fodder. Like an overgrown child who is unable to free himself of his parents’ smothering care, the film desperately sticks to formula, inexplicably afraid of exploring new ground. Sadly, the formula has been used and reused to the point of tedium. The characters are nothing but predictable reincarnations of the countless perfect men and women whose convoluted backgrounds have temporarily separated them from their fated loves and in turn, bored their audiences to tears. While the trend nowadays is to reinvent the wheel, to tweak the formula to at least feel a bit fresh, Palo stubbornly insists on yawn-worthy safety.

Perhaps, he thinks he can fool his audience with for cosmetics. He does situate a good part of the humdrum love story in Amsterdam where its lovers can chase each other around in bicycles against vistas littered with tulip fields and windmills. Unfortunately, the foreign city is nothing but a stage. Its gorgeous vistas, famous spots and cultural details are nothing more but empty props, hardly different from the nauseating gloss, the vapid sentimental score, and the hammy acting that identify the film as just another one of those romances that are pretty in the outside but are drab in the inside.

The story is miserably flat. It concerns the eventual relationship of Patrick (Coco Martin), a struggling artist, and Jillian (Julia Montes), the musically-inclined daughter of a very wealthy couple. They meet in a commuter train, where Jillian stalks her crush from school, and Patrick chances upon her and instantly falls for her, prompting him to paint portraits of her all over the walls of Manila. After a handful of coincidental meetings, they finally fall in love with each other, but not without the challenges brought about by Jillian’s worrying parents and the looming revelation regarding the accident of Patrick’s mother which eventually killed her.

Martin, whose expressive face used to be Brillante Mendoza’s canvass for his various portrayals of tortured morality, succumbs to being voluntarily cheapened by blatant commercialism. Given a character that is too two-dimensional to be explored, his interpretation of being romantic has been duly limited to either being an embarrassing creep or a reprehensible sadist. Burdened by an unimaginative script that overdoes the fantasy-driven tone of escapist cinema, Martin comes off as morbidly dishonest, not exactly the proper character one roots for in romantic movies. While he manages to make his teary-eyed stares into nothingness evoke a certain pain and longing, he mouths his lines with the earnestness of an obvious swindler, making Montes’ earnest efforts to reciprocate the attention absolutely confounding.

As with all commercial romances, A Moment in Time dwells too much in the convolutions of a relationship that is really not worth telling. The conflicts have the sheen of depth and gravity, but are ultimately betrayed by a resolution that is all too easy and convenient. In the end, the emotion one feels is not akin to love or any of its other manifestations. It is bewilderment and confusion. It is frustration. After all the effort of filmmakers, some of whom share credits in this film, to raise the bar in filmmaking and film watching, films like A Moment in Time are still produced, and worse, released to further dumb down the mainstream audience.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

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.)

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)

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.)

The Healing (2012)

The Healing (Chito Roño, 2012)

Chito Roño’s The Healing is afflicted with a chronic case of indecision. It is viciously a horror film, one that stretches the limits of good taste with very visual and shocking depictions of violence and morbidity. In fact, the film holds the record for being the first Filipino film to be granted two different ratings by local censors, one for the trimmed version that is presumably more suited for teens and another for the version that displays all the acts of depravity Roño’s creative mind can conjure within the limited range of popular cinema.

However, Roño apparently has more ambitions for the film other than trite terror. The film is specifically designed, divided into various parts that are differentiated from one another by color schemes, beginning with white, then blue, then red, and yellow. Such designs are too obscure though. They are more puzzling than elucidating, more annoying than enlightening. The experiments only succeed in diluting the scares, bewildering the sense with what essentially are artsy indulgences that are either infuriatingly empty and shallowly motivated or too inexplicable to matter.

The film opens in a remote village where faith healer Elsa (Daria Ramirez) is busy receiving a crowd of sick people. Seth (Vilma Santos) has brought her father (Robert Arevalo), a stroke victim, for healing. Seth’s father miraculously recovers. Inspired by the miraculous recovery of Seth’s father, her sick friends and neighbors decide to take the trip to Elsa’s house to urge her to also heal them. Cookie (Kim Chiu), the daughter of Seth’s ex-husband who is desperate for a cure for her cancer, also joined the group going to Elsa. They eventually get what they wished for from the faith healer. However, one by one, they become brutal and violent, killing as many as they can before committing suicide.

The Healing spends a great deal of time needlessly attempting to make sense of the plentiful contrivances it filled its plot with. Simplicity is not one of Roño’s priorities. The film indulges in so many points that require tiring explanations and expositions, some of which seem too farfetched to be believed or to be appreciated. While the genre relies heavily on the supernatural and the unexplainable, Roño’s story seems too all over the place, forcing everything to cohere seamlessly like a completed jigsaw puzzle. Unfortunately, the film’s insistence on forcing the details mostly backfires, creating a story that meanders a little bit too much.

The key to good horror is not necessarily what is overtly shown and depicted but the quality and the extent of what is left to the imagination. Roño invests a lot in The Healing’s visual design. Practical effects are abandoned for computer-generated effects, allowing grislier and more deranged sequences to exist with absolute ease. Instead of heightening the tension, the computer-generated effects only deflates it, inviting humor with how closer it resembles cartoons than macabre realism instead of fear. The acting is also unnecessarily pronounced and hysterical, despite the characters’ unnatural reaction to impending amorality and death. There is just too little left for the audience.

The film is just frustratingly cluttered, serving details and elements, motivations and reactions, all of which do not necessarily fit the material they are forced to support. The Healing is commendable only for the fact that it attempted to stray from the inanities of uninspired horror cinema that has occupied Philippine cinema for far too long. It bears ideas and an execution of such ideas that evince an ambition and effort to break away from tired conventions. Sadly, everything ends up in forgettable confusion.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Kimmy Dora and the Temple of Kiyeme (2012)

Kimmy Dora and the Temple of Kiyeme (Joyce Bernal, 2012)

Joyce Bernal’s Kimmy Dora and the Temple of Kiyeme misses the entire point. It is just one humongous mistake that sadly betrays whatever hope the success of Kimmy Dora: Kambal sa Kiyeme (2009) created for the Philippine film industry. Perhaps the first Kimmy Dora offering was simply a tad overrated. It has everything going for it. It featured Eugene Domingo, then an underdog, an actress who has worked her way to the top as its lead. It was also the only film that had guts to take them on, armed only with faith on the untested charms of its lead and its guiltless humor In a market that only welcomed the repetitive romances and inane horrors of the country’s mainstream studios.

It peddled nothing more but nonsense. However, it took that nonsense seriously. From the crafty screenplay that sought to stretch Domingo’s capabilities as both an actress and a comedienne, the film evolved into something that was sincere in its objectives, which was to introduce something new, whether it be the unbounded faith on a talented artist or the emancipated manner of making a commercial film, to the very tired system. Surely, Kambal sa Kiyeme was not overrated. It deserved the rewards it reaped, the acclaim and the several millions of pesos it earned from weeks of filling up local theaters.

Kambal sa Kiyeme’s hyperbolic appreciation of Philippine life, bolstered by Domingo’s equally hyperbolic performances as both Kimmy, the short-tempered and extravagant CEO of her family’s conglomerate, and Dora, her immaculately sweet but mentally retarded twin sister, elevates it from being just a string of gags to something more relatable, something whose humor is more grounded on what was then current. Frustratingly, The Temple of Kiyeme replaces that pleasant hyperbole with unoriginal gimmickry. It abandoned the high-strung realism of the first film with inglorious fantasy, allowing needless ornaments and effects to overshadow Domingo’s earnest efforts to elevate the entire thing.

From the high-stress offices and the posh suburbs of Manila, The Temple of Kiyeme relocates its comedy to the temples of Korea, continuing the story of the twins as they discover their roots and become aware of their duty to be wed to the hideous heir of their family’s business partners in order to eradicate a curse that all of sudden plagued their semi-serene way of life. Horror creeps into the picture through frequent hauntings of a drum-beating ghost, filmed by Bernal like a third-rate J-horror upstart who got into the craze ten years too late. The story, both convoluted and confused plods along painfully, burdened by the futile attempts to both scare and amuse. The jokes, farted out half-heartedly, are surprisingly underwritten, overplayed, and mostly middling.

If The Temple of Kiyeme is what pure entertainment is, then I believe the film’s makers have adopted a skewed sense of what pleasure is. The film is a near torturous event, weighed down further by how it feels like the moral and artistic opposite of Kambal sa Kiyeme. Coming from the same makers with suspicious new economic and creative partners, one can't help but feel that this latest endeavor reeks of plain treachery

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Captive (2012)

Captive (Brillante Mendoza, 2012)

Captive is Brillante’s most political to date, interpreting the kidnapping of several vacationers by Abu Sayyaf members from their resort in Palawan and their months-long hostage deep within the jungles of Basilan. Mendoza has always used the Philippines’ ills as backdrop for his sometimes heart-wrenching but mostly gut-wrenching films. Masahista (The Masseur, 2005), Foster Child (2007), Tirador (Slingshot, 2007), Serbis (Service, 2008), Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009) and Lola (Grandmother, 2009) are all set against decay and poverty, with Mendoza exploring the intertwinement of such deplorable situations with human behavior, how it forces social norms and morals either temporarily or permanently out of the framework of survival.

Like Lino Brocka before him, Mendoza is being revered not for how he sincerely depicts humanity, with all its faults and misgivings, but for the more convenient of his traits, which is to expose cinematically the base conditions of Philippine society. I believe this has led Mendoza into the same trap which Brocka found himself in when he ventured into more blatantly political fare like Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (My Own Country, 1985) and Orapronobis (Fight for Us, 1989), exposing to the world, through the prestigious film festivals, the inutility of local institutions that inevitably create the dilemmas their cinematic characters face.

There seems to an abandonment of the profound examinations of human struggle in exchange the convenience of plain reportage. More alarming is that Mendoza seems to believe that it is his advocacy as a filmmaker to thresh out reality from the escapist limitations of celluloid, forcing him to push the envelope further from merely glossing over the graveness of the Philippine social condition through his delicate human stories to putting the social condition to the forefront.

Captive prominently displays this movement by Mendoza to mistake his weakness as an inert but brash advocate as his strength, eclipsing his real strength as a director, which is his ability to observe and portray our very fickle humanity. The film’s best parts are when the outside world, the world Mendoza so excitedly depicts through visual slogans delivering religious hate and military ineptitude, are forgotten and the captives and their kidnappers are depicted away from the circumstance that they have found themselves trapped in. In those scenes, Mendoza weaves little stories, tales that are not unfamiliar because notwithstanding the strangeness of their settings, these stories are so deeply entrenched to what the most ordinary of humans are capable of. The tiniest of gestures, the surprising exchanges of biting dialogue, both the urgent and non-urgent interactions among and between the victims and their victimizers add lightness to Mendoza’s lofty but misplaced endeavor.

Absent the propagandizing, the film finally allows its actors, most importantly Isabelle Huppert, who plays one of the kidnapped victims, the flexibility to flesh out their characters, who on the grander scale of Mendoza’s vision, seem to be just pawns in the overextended network of corruption that is the Philippines. However, Mendoza is also able to showcase his mettle as a director in those quieter moments. Where in the scenes where war is shown, violence is paraded, and intolerance is brandished, Mendoza seems to be channelling a desire for charmless grandiosity, especially with his armaments of explosions and spectacular gunfights, all of which are almost always absent in cash-strapped Philippine filmmaking, in the quieter scenes, he displays his capacity for compassion and understanding of the capacity of men and women to be both kind and depraved.

While Captive clearly ambitions discourse on the troubles of Mindanao, it only succeeds in forwarding a concept of the conflict that is problematic in the way it is depicted and from which perspective it is depicted from. Mendoza’s take on the conflict is undoubtedly taken from an outsider’s point of view. The film’s politics is hard to pinpoint precisely because it is draped in inconsistencies and ornamented with cues that are meant to agitate. Bibles are thrown into the sea. Christian icons are destroyed. Muslim captors scream their lungs out, praising Allah, as the news about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center are reported from their transistor radio, unmindful of the queries about the number of people who perished. It paints a picture of a religion that is either the proponent of intolerance or a harsh misunderstanding of a people. The problem lies in the fact that this black and white approach in portraying the conflict is ultimately dangerous, as it disenfranchises an entire ideology that deserves more than the token shades of fair humanity that Mendoza gives its champions.

In the end, Captive is a film only proves Mendoza’s ability to mount productions that are bigger than what he usually does. It still manages to astound as there are some gems of scenes, mostly involving Huppert struggling physically and emotionally through her dire situation, that succeed in mesmerizing and bewildering. Unfortunately, the bad taste of the film’s erratic and possibly damaging posturing counters most of its merits.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Born to Love You (2012)

Born to Love You (Jerome Pobocan, 2012)

Jerome Pobocan’s Born to Love You is hardly anything special. A weepy romance with bits of comedy sprinkled sparingly all throughout, the film aspires nothing but mediocrity. It is plotted awkwardly. The story, about an angst-ridden photographer (Coco Martin) who suddenly falls for a tour guide (Angeline Quinto) while wrestling with issues regarding his family, is stretched via convolutions and coincidences that both arrive out of and lead to nowhere. The pleasures it provides are but momentary, barely enough to repay the superhuman endurance that it asks to be invested.

As just another one of those run-of-the-mill romances that Star Cinema churns out for a quick buck, it bears the same problems as those that came before it that left no dent on the genre they represent or the market they aspire to exploit. It lacks any real sense of imagination or ambition, confident that its captured audience made up of the collected fans of its recently glammed leads would rush to spend their money to watch their idols in the big screen. It is utterly formulaic, moving from one scene to another like the daily turnover of episodes of a rushed melodrama.

The film’s predictable offenses are only compounded by its use of tasteless music, mostly repetitive rearrangements of the karaoke hit I Just Fall in Love Again, that succeeds only to annoy instead of to provide the necessary dramatic push that the film tries so hard to sell. Born to Love You utilizes every trick known in the trade, every trope that has been used and reused. Despite that, the film only succeeds to reveal how tired the genre is, how burdened each and every film that spurts out of the tried and tested formula to bring something new.

Martin makes most of his role. The actor, whose successful transition from being the aptly anonymous face of most of Brillante Mendoza’s portraits of Philippine poverty into the capable darling of the mainstream has compromised his craft, succeeds in exuding an imagined depth to a depthless character, especially in the quieter moments as opposed to where he is forced to deliver dialogue. Quinto, on the other hand, provides much-needed levity to Martin’s trademark brooding with infrequent self-deprecating jokes coupled with shrill side remarks. Still, despite the attempt at balancing seriousness and comedy with the casting, the proposed chemistry fails.

Pobocan and the film’s team of writers are at fault here. The stage and story they built for the love team are drab and ridiculous, respectively. The film forgoes both logic and lyricism for cheap romantic conclusions that seek to tie loose ends with the least amount of creativity. The film’s soap opera mentality is more problematic because it forwards a brand of romance, one that is dangerously intertwined with familial dilemmas, that exists within a vacuum, within a universe where acts of God and misfortunes exist only to dictate lessons and inflict changes for the supposed better.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Every Breath U Take (2012)

Every Breath U Take (Mae Czarina Cruz, 2012)

One fateful Valentine’s night, virginal Majoy (Angelica Panganiban), whose time-bound ovaries are severely in need of a suitable sperm donor lest they never be used again, meets Leo (Piolo Pascual), a bigshot real estate broker whose skill in wooing women can only be matched by his aversion to serious relationships, in the restaurant where she was supposed to meet her Valentine’s date. Majoy’s absentee date is Ji-soon (Ryan Bang), a hopelessly romantic Korean man whose long-awaited and probably well-deserved opportunity to prove his love to Majoy was foiled when on the night of their first date, his car crashes into another car, which just so happens to be driven by the eldest brother (Smokey Manoloto) of Leo’s latest scorned sexual conquest (Wendy Valdez), who, in a streak of post-break-up insanity, contracts the rest of his male siblings (Joross Gamboa and Carlos Agassi) to do everything they can to force Leo back so that they can be wed.

Every Breath U Take is more a carefree screwball than a careless rom-com. Since Star Cinema has cornered the Philippine market with its generic romances that offer a dash of humor and a sliver of drama, it has always been careful in maintaining the formula of unbelievably pretty protagonists, played by actors and actresses who are marketed as love teams, with particular backstories suddenly confronted with the utmost dilemma of falling in love with each other. Thankfully, the film courageously skips key elements of the formula to inject an internal logic of well-timed guffaws and out-of-this world coincidences that are not only unbelievable and farfetched but also fittingly entertaining.

In the film, the characters do fall in love, yet that brand of love they profess is hardly the noble and idealistic type that the mainstream studio repeatedly espouses in its products. The film’s brand of love is not befuddled by weepy needs for fulfilment, whether it comes from the self, parents, or society, but is simply more straightforward, or if we are to be blunt about it, more shallow. Majoy simply wants to find her fated prince charming before her ovaries stop producing eggs. Leo simply wants that diversion where his land-selling skills can also be applied. The other characters are similarly situated. Yet despite the unabashed lack of motivation for their respective romantic endeavors, Mae Czarina Cruz was successful to maintain the same swooning sheen that it shares with Star Cinema’s other romances.

Even the casting of Panganiban and Pascual seems to be unburdened with the ulterior motive of establishing a love duo that would hopefully earn for themselves a few more films together and for the studio several more millions of pesos worth of sold tickets. It feels like Panganiban and Pascual were casted not because their pairing can sell the most tickets and can usher in another lucrative pairing involving very bankable celebrities but simply because they fit their roles. The lack of chemistry between the leads is made up mostly by their willingness to take part in the experimentation.

Panganiban, for example, becomes the antithesis of the Star Cinema heroine, which is simply a character that is so written to be played by any actress because that character is simply a vessel of whatever trait that is forwarded by the usually thin narratives of the typical Star Cinema rom-com. The character of Majoy seems to be precisely a Panganiban vehicle. Although not in the same vein as the ones that are usually lauded by critics and the press in their yearly acting ceremonies, Majoy’s character is an acting piece that requires Panganiban’s fascinating ability to mix the unassuming naiveté of a sexual first-timer and the desperation of a libidinous nympho to great comedic effect. Pascual, on the other hand, gamely allows himself to be objectified.

In reality, Every Breath U Take is nothing to be excited for. It is also nothing to be ashamed of. It is what it is, a well-produced, amply directed, and satisfactorily acted romp. In a climate where the well-fed and patronized mainstream producers have gotten used to the comfort of using less and less imagination and more and more reliance on the elementary parts of a sure-fire hit, a film like this, with all its exaggerations and unforgivably apparent lapses in reality in exchange for laughs and wonderment is as invaluable as a breath of fresh air.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang (2012)

Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang (Richard Somes, 2012)

English Title: Corazon: The First Aswang

In Ang Lihim ng San Joaquin (The Secret of San Joaquin), Richard Somes’ episode in Shake, Rattle and Roll 2k5 (Uro dela Cruz, Rico Maria Ilarde, Somes, 2005), he makes use of popular aswang lore in telling the story of a man and his pregnant wife who find themselves trapped in a town of aswang craving for fresh meat. Although narratively straightforward and seemingly devoid of any sudden twists and turns that usually mark the horror films that fare well in the box office, Somes’ short succeeds in infusing certain techniques and styles borrowed from silent films, resulting in an experience that is not only comfortingly familiar, especially for those who grew up horrified by the many cinematic reincarnations of the local monsters, but also fresh, especially if pitted against the films that was produced that year from both from mainstream studios and the growing independent scene.

Unshackled by the confines of commercialism, Somes expanded the aswang story with Yanggaw (Affliction, 2008). Freed from the sole instruction of capitalist studios to simply terrify and scare, Somes distances the aswang from the territory of horror, creating a story that turns the folklore into an allegory of some socially pertinent issue. In the film, Somes explores the dysfunctions of a provincial family as they witness the transformation of one of its members into an aswang after returning from the city where she worked as a housemaid. While Somes still infuses the film with horror tropes, the film is more inclined to disturb with its declarations of the reality of humanity’s innate monstrosity than imagined monstrosities lurking amongst what is truly real. In a sense, Somes makes use of myths and folktales and the fascination and terror they inevitably manufacture to conjure unspoken truths about the human psyche.

Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang (Corazon: The First Aswang) seems to be borne out of the same inspiration that spawned Yanggaw. Somes stretches the aswang lore further by reimagining the very source of the mythical monster’s existence. Set in an unnamed hacienda after the second World War, the film situates the beginnings of the aswang within an atmosphere of faith and paranoia brought about by war. The hacienda owner’s plan of mortgaging the land has spawned much suspicion within the community. A madwoman, living in the fringes of the hacienda and rumored to have eaten dead people to absorb their powers while fighting during the war, is met with spite and disgust. Untrusting of outsiders and social deviants, the townspeople greet anything and everything that disturbs their families and their newly found peace with suspicion and violence.

Corazon (a surprisingly effective Erich Gonzalez), a woman who is also victimized by the townspeople’s intolerance because of her questionable roots, is fortunate to be married to Daniel (Derek Ramsay), who is mostly respected by everyone. In their desire to have a child, Corazon decides to seek the advice of a faith healer who suggests that she bears the sacrifice of holding a pilgrimage for the patron saint of fertility. When she suddenly becomes pregnant only to lose the child to miscarriage, she decides to take revenge on the faith she heavily relied on, and sought refuge in the forests, attacking every child who comes her way as a way of resentment towards the religion she perceived to have played with her legitimate desire and hope.

Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang is essentially a grandiose romance draped in horror trappings. Corazon and Daniel’s intense love, like most other loves made famous in literature and film, is pitted against forces that would naturally pull the weakest of lovers apart. Somes, in his endeavor to keep the film within his goal to revise local folklore, injects notions of perversions, of a woman in love who succumbs to murdering children and eating their flesh out of insanity and becomes the very first aswang. Unfortunately, the story’s attempt to have its audience believe the romance while becoming shocked by the myriad of atrocities committed by both the lovers and the townspeople judging them fails. In the end, everything feel’s contrived and downright ridiculous, betraying whatever statement the film seems to forward regarding the monstrosities human intolerance can create.

Handsomely produced, with sets apparently built from scratch instead of resourcefully put up, the film has a feel of a manufactured blockbuster. However, the ingenuity of its storytelling, of utilizing traditional horror concepts to forward romantic ends, belongs beyond the realm of the safety dictated by commercial filmmaking. While the attempted convergence is laudable, the film ultimately suffers from being both confused and confusing. While the material challenges genre conventions that are strictly followed by their practitioners, it still decides to spoonfeed its audience with the use of voice-over narrations, no matter how illogical and needless they are. It mixes beautiful images of the countryside and understandably drab interiors of the villagers’ huts and bungalows. In the end, the film just seems to be trapped right there in the middle of various contrasting elements, making it somewhat of a puzzling anomaly whose failures are inevitably more intriguing than its successes.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)