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.
in 2006, and just the past week, Nestor Torre had the same complaint about Sam Milby, and the same conclusion. complaint: his lack of Filipino language skills. conclusion: his roles and acting are limited by it. in 2006 he said:
now i know Torre’s generally unhappy with the romantic-comedy, thinking it limits actors such as John Lloyd Cruz’s acting (yes, i will respond to that soon), but it might do him well to go through Sam’s filmography. for even when it is a rom-com, he began doing it better than most from the moment he did the fat guy in Jade Castro’s My Big Love. there also wasn’t much comedy in his character in I Love You Babe where he played an irritable architecture professor, and no comedy at all in And I Love You So where Sam in fact proved he could do a character with not a whole lot of cuteness.
Sam as fat guy Macky Angeles in My Big Love by Jade Castro
now it isn’t clear to me which “shallow balikbayan types” Torre’s saying Sam has played, but there was complexity even in his characters as the policeman-wannabe in You Got Me and the US embassy consul in You Are The One. it might not have been as complex as Torre wanted them to be, but that might be a limitation of the genre more than anything else. a genre, we repeat, that he apparently doesn’t like much.
now of course Sam’s smile shouldn’t be a problem. except that for Torre, it is:
this begs the question: there are no cute smiles in a drama about cancer and dying?* or is it just Sam’s smile that we question? granted he praises Sam as “committed” and “present” here, in the same breath Torre says Sam winged it in his previous films. i’d like to know which ones, and how. because his Chris Panlilio resonates not at all with its darkness but with its free spiritedness, even when yes, he was the dark rocker dude there. his Chef Macky Cordova where he was put in a fat suit has yet to be attempted by any other actor in these shores and is still absolutely enjoyable.
Sam broods as Chris Panlilio in andiloveyouso directed by Laurenti Dyogi
in the end Torre fails at considering the kind of development that’s in Sam’s filmography, which would be fine were he NOT making conclusions and generalizations about Sam’s acting, were he just seeing him in light of this recent film and nothing else. Forever And A Day as he says was a storytelling failure. why drag Sam’s whole film career with it? and why suggest that he stop making movies altogether? that’s to simply look down on all the movies and all the work he’s done so far, yes? i’m the last person who will say Sam’s the best actor in these shores, but i will give him credit for roles, in rom-com and otherwise, that are undoubtedly his. without giving him that credit, all Torre does is criticism un-constructive, and where would we all be with that.
*and while we’re on Forever And A Day, it’s unclear to me why Torre would think this a romantic-comedy when it so obviously wasn’t from the beginning, not when the main female protagonist was revealing so little about herself. had he seen much of the rom-coms we churn out, it would be clear to him that this was farthest from it from the start. too, he obviously didn’t see Chris Martinez’s beautiful glossy portrayal of a cancer patient’s last 100 days which would debunk his idea that medical conditions and gloss don’t go together. goodness.
I’ve been told with disdain that I have too much hope for local movies, puwede namang hintayin na lang na ipalabas saTV ang pelikula.
But it isn’t with hope that I go to the cinemas to watch Pinoy films. It is with excitement, always: I enter a cinema willing to be surprised, having as context what is usual or normal for movies on our shores. It isn’t with notion(s) of hope, as it is with a sense of how things have changed, and how there are still plenty of possibilities.
So I was willing to be surprised by My Valentine Girls (Regal Films and GMA Films), the trailer of which promised a trilogy, one that’s rarely done for romantic comedies these days, unless we count as love stories too the overdone Shake Rattle & Roll horror franchise.
The conclusions for this movie are easy, the enjoyment even more so. I chalk it up to two things: one, the limited amount of time for each episode made for storytelling that was quick, with no minute wasted on long stretches of nothing; two, creative directors are all you need, the ones who have a sense of how love stories are supposed to look, how comfortable love can be, and how sexual tension need not be about pretty boys and girls, and rarely happens in the most ideal of moments. It’s also never easy.
My only question is: who was directing the story beyond the three episodes? Richard Guttierez plays a writer with a deadline, and we are treated to his novel-in-progress by quick shifts to the three love stories within it.
Of course I Miss You Like Crazy had everything going for it. We still remember Popoy and Basha of One More Chance, even know some lines from the movie, and even now speak of UST’s soccer field in relation to it. The three-month rule of breakups has now become law, seeing as Popoy invoked it when he thought Basha had found another guy (and kailangan talaga si Derek Ramsey and mapagsususpetsahang bagong boyfriend). And their barkada, really, was what made that movie. They were macho and bakla, serious and funny, judgmental and liberal, all at the same time. All these were only allowed by the movie’s well-written script that was real to us all, middle class and unapologetic.
Suffice it to say that One More Chance was enough reason to step out and watch I Miss You Like Crazy. But in the first conversation that Mia and Alex have in the movie, something is so obviously off right away. I look at L who’s watching the movie with me, and we realize, it’s Mia’s laughter. It was uncomfortable, obviously put-on, and undoubtedly lost in translation. It wasn’t trying to be ironic, i.e., hiding the sadness through laughter; nor did it sound like real laughter. Parang bad acting lang? (more…)
