I had started watching CinemalayaX with Carlitos Siguion Reyna’s Hari Ng Tondo, Joseph Alterejos’s Kasal, and Roderick Cabrido’s Children’s Show. It was two good movies out of three, and I thought it was portents of things to come for the rest of the week’s movie viewing frenzy.
After watching all 15 full length films, I realize I had it good that first day. It was downhill from there.
Click here to read the rest of it over at Vera Files.
It seems the only way to start this review is to acknowledge – and praise – the Technical Theater Program Batch 111 students of Benilde for having dared and successfully staged and produced 2014’s Fluid. Were the technical aspects of the production the only point, then this was quite a successful theatrical debut for this batch of students.
It would also, for the most part, be a successful re-write for contemporary times, something that playwright Floy Quintos talks about in his notes for the production. One is reminded by this re-write that many things about art making and production in this country continue to be true 10 years hence. Many things might need re-writing, but the system itself just evolves into viciousness, or devolves into the superficiality that capital demands. (more…)
I tend to imagine that these times of political and socio-economic crises demand of creative work an amount of relevance, where it is easy to pinpoint films and TV shows and writing that tends towards escapism, refusing to speak of issues that are urgent and important.
But escapism is also exactly what we need in times like these, when only the wealthy minority can live oblivious to the rising cost of basic goods and the utter lack of public services, when only the rich might navigate nation and not see the majority who are living below the poverty line. It makes sense to the rest of us who live each day struggling to make ends meet to want to escape by watching Transformers, or uh, Sarah and Coco in Maybe This Time (walang basagan ng trip). (more…)
On doctor-ordered isolation (nothing infectious, just radioactive, long story) and totally missed the June 12 rallies. I would’ve gone as an individual, probably brought along my parents, reminiscent of how we had gone to too many-an-anti-Erap- and anti-GMA-rally in the last decade or so.
But maybe it was good to have been kept away this time around, to have watched it happening without knowing exactly what went into the planning and organizing. It allows for a sense, too, of how limited and limitless the efforts, how diverse and different the groups are, and how it all looks and sounds from the outside.
And how those slogans and soundbites work vis a vis this government’s that has –admit it or not – turned more and more defensive at every turn. (more…)
One rarely thinks about one’s freedoms until one feels it is being impinged upon, where one is being told of the price you pay for insisting on your right to free speech and independent thought.
In the course of this government’s reign in Malacañang, and despite its grand proclamations about how this is a democracy – for look at how they let critics critique and rallies happen! – I have thought more and more about the mortality of the freedoms we hold dear.
I realize that sometimes we so believe that oppression and repression can only wear the same clothes, invoke the same proclamations, that we fail to see how our freedoms are sacrificed as a matter of course, every day, in the more insidious ways that we do not talk about, sometimes, can’t even imagine. (more…)