Category Archive for: review

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Soxie Topacio FTW!

I’ve got faith in Soxy Topacio. Always have. Especially after that wonderful comedy that was Ded Na Si Lolo (2009) that could only rock the world of anyone who follows local movies – local comedies in particular. Topacio brilliantly captured the tragicomedy that is death and the family in a lower class setting without making it seem like a judgment, or an apologia for that matter.

Ah, but maybe that was a movie that was by most counts about being an indie, those were the days when Soxy as writer-director could freely demand that his story be told without the limits of network stars and box office success. Such is the tale of his recent comedy Adventures of Pureza, Queen of the Riles (Star Cinema) where Melai Cantiveros is obviously the point, and everything else in the movie is allowed to suffer. Which is to say that the story suffered. Where it could’ve been a swift narration of what’s expected, it became a series of events that wanted to tie together the character of Pureza. And yet there was nothing in Melai as an actress that made this wholeness relevant or crucial, nothing at all that made it seem like it was needed. In fact, given the acting she did here an audience would’ve been happy enough with no resolutions to her persona, and she could’ve moved from beginning to end playing mostly herself: loud and crazy, over-the-top silly, no stretch in characterization at all.

Given these limitations in a lead actress, the decision it seems was to work with everyone – and everything – else other than Melai. This might be why over and above veteran actress Gina Pareño whose tongue-in-cheek kontrabida character just worked as expected , there was some really good acting here, the kind that knew to be ironic, to be absurd, that was conscious of the story as comedy, that knew of the story’s limitations given its genre.

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the brilliance of two left feet

had an infinitely emotional conversation with this non-fiction narrative of a review of Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa.

The teacher of literature, Karen (Jean Garcia), is enigmatic for a reason, but effective like every literature teacher should be. She reads poetry and it comes alive, she asks questions about it with certainty. She is unsurprised by any of her students’ assertions, even as these are necessarily about sexuality and desire, love and intimacy, the act of gazing. Even as she is the object of that gaze.

That Karen is unperturbed becomes part of her enigmatic persona; that this ties cleanly together with the fact of her silence(s) as teacher is the gift that Yapan’s characterization gives us, acknowledging without romanticizing the fact of teaching’s contingent and necessary loneliness, one that isn’t a sad thing at all. Karen’s quiet solitude shines with possibility and freedom, even as it becomes fodder for students’ presumptions about her, even when all it means is that she will never be known.

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Jean Garcia as Karen, the teacher who knew solitude and freedom.
Jean Garcia as Karen, the teacher who knew solitude and freedom.

 

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Rizal as someone who lived

It might be out of the way, and painfully in the middle of the corporate hustle and bustle of Makati, but Rizalizing the Future was a good enough reason to leave anti-corporatism in the car and step into the Yuchengco Museum.

The hook, and one of the more powerful things in this exhibit, is the inclusion of Team Manila’s contemporary renderings on wood of Jose Rizal in shades (and later on their other Pepe products), in colors too vivid you forget he’s national hero. In “Rizal in Shades” one can only thank the heavens for Team Manila’s reconfiguration of history into interesting and viable images that comes from a stable and consistent sense of popular nationalism. Let me forget, of course, that I have yet to be able to afford one of their products.

Truth to tell, in the context of the museum, this was a feat in itself; in the context of the exhibit it would be the portent of the diversity that’s here, only united by notions of Rizal. Contradictions are welcome! Hear! Hear! Your telling of this story is as good as mine!

As it turns out, this works infinitely well with the Rizal heirs’ exhibition of things / correspondence / lives equated with our national hero. At first glance the collection seems too trivial for comfort, but in reality, it is more inspiring than we’d like to admit. Art as inspiration to do better in our lives seems cliché, never mind that it has as market the younger students among us, yet there is an amount of greatness in Rizal that’s difficult to ignore, or not be inspired by, the jaded among us notwithstanding.

At the very least, you must get goose bumps looking at the pencil sketches of portraits Rizal did himself.

the rest is here!

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Chris Martinez, FTW!

on Temptation Island 2.0

It might have been the more apt title, actually, for the benefit of those who are so strict about originals and remakes, and imagine faithfulness to be about keeping to the level of copy. But there’s no crossing the same river twice, and it’s a foregone conclusion that every remake is a retelling, every retelling a different story altogether.

And so the question for Chris Martinez’s remake of Joey Gosiengfiao’s 1981 Temptation Island (Regal Films and GMA Films) is: does it still work? Is campiness something we’d know to be an exaggeration? Would campiness work with this set of five girls, three guys, and a gay man?

Could Martinez make it work?

He apparently can, at least if we take the laughter in that almost filled theater as an indication of success. I myself was familiar with the lines from the original and still found myself laughing, sometimes too loudly or just earlier than the rest of the audience in that cinema. Because there’s a learning curve here, during which the audience seem to warm up to the idea of exaggeration and extremes, the kind that campy relies on.

So when the movie begins with Lovi Poe’s Serafina, with her overtly slow and husky voice, and a body in the eternal act of posing, it was easy to feel the audience’s discomfort: ah, this is this kind of movie? Never mind that it wasn’t clear what kind it was. By the time Marian Rivera was delivering Cristina’s lines while dancing with her crook of a boyfriend, the over-the-top delivery seemed to have sunk in, if not the obvious look and feel of an Austin Powers movie.

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two plays: Virgin Labfest 7

because with a festival pass at P1,000 pesos, these two plays were already value for money. and really it makes you wonder why P1,000 pesos would allow you to watch all 18 plays at Virgin Labfest, yet all it will get you are 4 to 6 movies give or take, at the Cinemalaya. and we wonder where the double standard lies?

on Floy Quintos’ Evening At The Opera

When a stage is filled with a king-size bed, a dresser, and an ottoman you don’t know when to begin feeling uncomfortable: the mere sight of a bed conjures up a sex scene, and sex is always reason for discomfort amongst an immature audience, including the three guys behind me who chatted each other up throughout the play before this one.

But sex as we imagine it wouldn’t be reason for discomfort in that cold little theater; it would be politics that would hush the noisiest of audiences, encapsulated as it is in this bedroom.

Floy Quintos’ Evening at the Opera (directed by Jomari Jose) is the story of rural politics, as we know it, as we hear it in the news, as it has been imagined in movies, presented by documentaries. That this is also the story of dynasties left unquestioned, of marriages of convenience, of political machismo, of class versus crass, of the wealthy and rich among us, are layers that thicken this stage of a stark white bed and a governor’s wife in a bright red dress.

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on Rae Red’s Kawala

What happens when the tiny space that is the Tanghalang Huseng Batute at the country’s cultural center is deemed too large? What happens when it is made into the two walls and two doors of a condominium elevator with the one constant presence within it?

Some really creative funny theater, that’s what.

Written by Rae Red and directed by Paolo O’Hara, Kawala shows us aspects of our urban contemporary life in Manila within an elevator that has no truth other than that of the young man who tends to it, the elevator boy.

Alwin (Cris Pasturan) is a fresh graduate, ready to move on and away from the oppressive walls of the elevator. In the course of a day, he articulates this unfreedom, as he shows how this world revolves around him, trusted as he is by the condominium’s tenants, central as he is to their existence.

Familiarity is easy, friendliness is default. It is here that you realize this boy’s life is beyond that elevator’s walls, because there is much to be said about opening those doors. And so it becomes understandable why the big shot sleazy dirty old man, the ex-bold star turned serious actor, the gold digger stalking her prey all hop into this elevator and demand a friendship of sorts with Alwin. He must hear no evil, see no evil, speak no….

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