ABNKKBSNPLAko?! the Movie (2014)

Mark Meily's ABNKKBSNPLAko?! the Movie: Fun Overtaking Depth

The pleasures of Bob Ong’s ABNKKBSNPlako?! are not hinged on its generic plot but on its unabashed appreciation of all things close to being forgotten from decades past. While the book namedrops various references to 80’s and 90’s pop culture to tickle its readers’ fancies, what really makes Ong’s first published work so memorable is its depiction of what seems to be a shared attitude towards a recent past. Sure, the book does rely on shallow nostalgia, but at least it does so with such colloquial flair that it is almost impossible not to get hooked into its

It is therefore not surprising that the book is eventually made into a movie. Directed by Mark Meily, the movie version approximates the book’s informal charms with a bit of visual inventiveness. Narrations are accompanied by quickly edited montages. Words of juvenile love letters pop out from the paper with mock elegance. Meily has quite a bag of tricks here, and he’s definitely not scrimping.

Nostalgia is much easier to translate. Meily, armed with the entire arsenal of copyrighted material of Viva at his disposal, has direct references to Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Bagets, the movie that best represents the youth of the 80’s, and Sharon Cuneta’s wispy chirping of George Canseco’s High School Life, a song that is to become an anthem for all things slight and mushy about high school. ABNKKBSNPlako?I the Movie, at least for the part of transporting its viewers to a time when Maricel Soriano and William Martinez’s surprising relationship was the butt of gossip, is quite successful.

Where the movie falters is when it tries to find relevance to its protracted reminiscence. The heart of the film’s narrative seems to be Bob Ong, played during his grade school days by Adrian Cabido and from high school to present by Jericho Rosales who does his best in a role that feels more like a caricature than a challenge, and his on and off love affair with his Special Someone, played by an unsatisfyingly static Andi Eigenmann. Their romance, depicted by Meily with obvious slightness, is tenuous at best and is very hard to root for. Considering that Bob Ong’s relationship with his two best friends, played ably by Vandolph Quizon and Meg Imperial, is given more weight, the romantic angle feels off-tangent and unnecessary.

The movie also attempts to touch on things more pertinent than long-standing crushes. Bob Ong’s journey from an ordinary grade-schooler to a high school teacher is one riddled with challenges that supposedly touch on or replicate experiences that are shared by most Filipinos. There is Bob Ong’s long-suffering mother, played wonderfully by Bing Pimentel, whose doting approach to her son’s heartaches and failures is quite touching. There is Bob Ong’s difficulty to finish college, which is the logical result of youthful uncertainty and emotional distress. There is Bob Ong’s qualms of attending his high school reunion as only a teacher with a paltry salary.

However, the movie’s insistence on evoking certain life lessons is overtaken by visual gimmickry and an overreliance on throwbacks to the past. Meily can never seem to balance nostalgia and depth. He instead throws everything into the mix and comes up with a product that confuses as much as it entertains.

The past few years have produced films that did what ABNKKBSNPLAko!? the Movie was intending to do but with better results. Aureaus Solito’s Pisay (Philippine Science, 2007), about a group of gifted high-schoolers in the Philippines’ national science school, mixes themes on young romance, ambition, defeat, and individuality in a package that is rift with humor and levity. Jerrold Tarog’s lovely Senior Year (2010), which also dealt with an underachiever returning to his high school, is less about nostalgia but about the fragility of growing up among friends and competitors in a school setting.

In the midst of the quality of what has been done before, Meily’s effort to mine on Bob Ong’s popular first book is unfortunately quite lacking in substance. It just severely pales in comparison, forcing it to make up for what it does not have with fun trivialities.

(First published in Rappler.)

El Presidente (2012)

El Presidente (Mark Meily, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Donor (2010)

Donor (Mark Meily, 2010)

There is no doubt that Mark Meily is a proficient observer of the absurdities of Philippine society. His first two films, Crying Ladies (2003) and La Visa Loca (2005), eschew the phenomena of women being paid to mourn for a recently deceased Chinese businessman and a man getting nailed to a cross to get a U.S. Visa respectively of any serious implications for drama and comedy. Baler (2008), a period piece set during the war for independence where several Spanish soldiers are trapped inside a church as Filipino revolutionaries surround the church, is sadly an unsuccessful turn for Meily, who replaces his gift for finding humor in the deepest darkest recesses of society with trite and unconvincing romance. Fortunately, free from the restrictive clutches of a commercial studio, Meily returns to form with Donor, a hard-hitting black comedy that ostensibly tackles the kidney trade and the ridiculousness of the statutes that attempt to prevent it and in turn before criticizing traditional male domination in a society where breadwinner status in the family is steadily shifting to females.

Stuck in a marriage-less relationship with perennial bum Danny (Baron Geisler), Lizette (Meryll Soriano) is barely able to make ends meet with the very little that she gets peddling pirated DVDs. A recent police raid leaves her jobless. She attempts to apply for work abroad but eventually discovers that the simple act of job application will cost her a fortune. Back at home, Danny requests that she fund his gun acquisition. Strapped for cash, she is forced to sell a kidney to a Jordanian businessman for a hundred thousand pesos. One of the conditions of the deal however is for her to marry the Jordanian, in compliance with a law that prohibits the donation of organs to a stranger. The result, surprisingly, is more funny than imminently disarming and troubling, which is, quite frankly, a breath of fresh air in the overdone genre of poverty films that has been far too serious far too long.

Donor is an astoundingly sleek production. From the crisp digital lensing by cinematographer Jay Abello to the believable production design, the film adamantly refuses to surrender glossiness to the demands of grittiness. Indulgences, as with most of Meily’s previous films, are abundant with the overused fade-outs, whatever the supposed intent for such editorial trickery, as the most apparent. Fortunately, these ostentatious displays of directorial know-how hardly function to dissuade the viewer from being enamored by the novelty of Meily’s carefully crafted tale. Also, Soriano, with her subtle but commanding turn, Geisler, with his ability to make stubborn inutility intriguingly entertaining, and the film’s very able support, keep the film rooted despite several instances where the persisting fades and the grating musical score have become too cumbersome to ignore.

Probably the biggest achievement of Meily in Donor is that he manages to invoke a lively amount of levity for its comedic aspirations despite the film’s very grim topic. Of course, it might seem that the film is making a mockery out of the inescapable quagmire of social and domestic inequity that the poor are dwelling in but the film really goes beyond the sheen of insensitivity it seems to portray. Donor, by means of melding stark realism and caricature, manifests the compounding failures of society’s pillars, from moral norms to statutory concepts, to salvage the poor from being poorer. As Lizette goes through the rigors of putting up with Danny, of marrying a stranger, of selling her kidney, and later on, of suffering through the consequences of all the unavoidable staples of her hopeless existence, she still manages to wiggle her way out, not totally unscathed but still able to live and probably hope for another day. Focusing primarily on Lizette’s undeniable survival skills, it seems that it is this inscrutable capacity or stubbornness of the Filipino woman for woe and pain rather than the frivolity of the poor that Meily seems to center on.

The film’s ending, a spectacle of blood and gore that presumably ends Lizette’s tribulations at least for now, shocks primarily because the film has been so mannered and so quaint despite the possible grisliness of its topic. Whether or not Lizette can still wiggle away from the remnants of Danny’s influence and the grip of being moneyless in an age where everything is for sale is a non-issue. As she has learnt with the one hundred thousand pesos that simply dissipated in a matter of days, life and the occasional reprieves it offers are only temporary. Death, on the other hand, is permanent. Nevertheless, as long as we are living, survival, and whatever is needed for it are priceless, nay, price-worthy commodities.

(Cross-published on Twitch.)

Baler (2008)

Baler (Mark Meily, 2008)

If films are judged based on scope and ambition, Mark Meily's Baler, which details a love story set during the final moments of the Philippine war of independence, would be an indubitable masterpiece. However, more often than not, scope and ambition do not necessarily translate into quality. Along the way, things go wrong. Budgetary constrains, studio pressure, inept artists and craftsmen, among a multitude of other reasons, would convert a promising premise into an inevitable mess. That is exactly the case with this film.

Baler's story, written by Roy Iglesias (who wrote several scripts for directors Chito Rono, Joel Lamangan and Erik Matti in the past), is basic. The forbidden romance of Feliza (Anne Curtis, who is a tad too gorgeous for the role; it's quite curious why no diversion came her way while waiting for her amore), a native of the town of Baler, and Celso (Jericho Rosales, a very welcome presence), a soldier of Spanish and Filipino descent, is thwarted by circumstance. Feliza is the daughter of Nanding (Phillip Salvador), a Philippine revolutionary whose personal vendetta against the Spanish colonizers has colored his patriotism with a tinge of irrationality. The bulk of the film covers the siege of Baler Church, where around fifty Spanish soldiers (which includes Celso), believing that reinforcements from Spain would arrive to quell the rebels, use the church as their final fortress before finally realizing after 337 days of hunger, suffering and despair that Spain has lost the war.

As a film, Baler just fails to cohere. The individual technical elements fail to weave into a coherent whole as everything, from the music to the pretty visuals, feels out of place. Vince de Jesus' atrocious music score, a collection of treacly melodies and predictable rhythms, desperately attempts to capture the epic feel of the feature but inevitably falls flat on its face. Lee Meily's cinematography, while astounding at first with the way the pristine greens of the landscapes and the multitude of hues of the skies are painted and how faces are lit to enunciate primary emotions or to simply emphasize the subtle facial contours of the actors and actresses, simply fails to visually communicate the supposedly escalating morbidness of the situation of the Spanish soldiers. A bit of drabness, some shadows, a touch of necessary ugliness would have added depth to Meily's postcard-worthy visuals. The result is quite miserable: a historical epic with the musicality of a deodorant commercial and the visuals of a nineties Mexican soap opera.

Director Mark Meily's two previous features, Crying Ladies (2003), about three women who are employed as mourners for a wealthy Chinese man's funeral, and La Visa Loca (2005), about a man who after being denied an American visa, agrees to have himself nailed on a cross in order to fulfill his lifelong dream to travel to America, are all adorably comedic trifles. Baler, unfortunately, lacks the novel charm and the whimsical ease of Meily's two previous films. Baler is ponderous during its first hour. It certainly feels like Meily is struggling with the serious material as the editing is questionable and the storytelling is inept. Moreover, the battle scenes are ineptly staged and deliriously shot. The film seems devoid of any urgency or passion to sustain any sort of interest for its prolonged duration.

Baler's bittersweet romance borne out of the masses' love for predictability and convention and the pathetic need to mix education with escapist entertainment (it is pathetic mostly because the task of education belongs to schools and not cineplexes, and the fact that the siege of Baler remains a footnote in Philippine history is a failure on the part of our educational system). While Meily largely flunks at the task of putting up a production that merits any serious consideration, it isn't surprising (and I, for one, am not going to say anything against it) that it is getting accolades from several sectors, presumably and hopefully in an effort to showcase the need to divert the logistical and economic energies of mainstream studios into making films that matter.