The thing with a movie like this one is that it promises a kind of darkness. Con artist Greg (played flawlessly by Alex Vincent Medina) and his gay “handler” Marney (played by Joey Paras on painfully loud and angry mode) are preying on the more gullible gays and women on Facebook. The goal is to gain their trust, move from Facebook to mobile phone calls, make them fall in love, get some cash out of them, then conveniently disappear with the change of a sim card. (more…)
What does one do with a movie like Instant Mommy? It took all my will power not to walk out of the cinema, and I can sit through the worst of our local comedies and not care about the time I’m wasting. This film made me think of all the things I could be doing instead of watching it. And no, Eugene Domingo in the lead does not save it. (more…)
Over on Twitter, Teddy Boy Locsin claims credit for suggesting that actor Robin Padilla be brought to Sabah to help resolve the conflict. Locsin’s take on Robin of course is somewhat limited: he is charismatic, he is handsome, he can make people stop doing what they’re doing, Locsin says.
But in fact Robin’s iconography, his history as icon, reveals how while he might be all these adjectives, what is far larger than his charisma and looks is what he’s done, how he’s involved himself in issues political and religious, how these tie together to reveal a whole image that is in fact quite credible. He is after all one of the more sought after product endorsers of, wait for it, health products.
It’s easy to think that we’ve forgotten Robin’s younger more rebellious self. Of course in the landscape of popular culture in this country, it is highly probable that the Bad Boy title is what makes Robin even more credible. After all, how many of our icons can turn their lives around? (more…)
been writing about the Cinemalaya 2012 movies i saw, slowly but surely, sitting on them mainly because i saw the winning new breed film “Diablo” last, and i couldn’t quite wrap my head around the fact that it won.
so as i try (very hard) to get a handle on the results of the Cinemalaya Awards, i write about the rest of the films that i saw, hopefully to write about that winning film last, too. (more…)
It’s difficult to imagine childhood without Dolphy, even when all he was to me was the image of a father on television, even as who I identified with was Maricel Soriano or Claudine Barretto playing his daughters in two different sitcoms, across two different generations. At some point this father image became interwoven with that of Enteng Kabisote, father to Aiza.
The images are real to me, the characterization of fatherhood that was protective but had difficulty providing, that was faced with the rich mother-in-law who disapproved, that struggled financially but had a posse who depended on him, underground as the economy was that they all created and fueled. (more…)