Tag Archives: Piolo Pascual

kultura

Notes on OPM: Music by the tingi

The question of supporting Original Pilipino Music (OPM) is one that isn’t simple anymore, not in these times when cultural systems are so intricately intertwined, and television networks and cultural empires are kings. In this series I look at contemporary Pinoy music’s production(s) and unpack the contradictions and discriminations inherent in, and the context(s) crucial to, the fight for OPM as we know it.

In the book Culture and History first published in 1988, National Artist Nick Joaquin asserts in his essay “A Heritage of Smallness” how our notions of greatness and grandness and complexity, is represented precisely by our seeming inability to even think on that scale:

“Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. Geography for the Filipino is a small locality: the barrio. History for the Filipino is a small vague saying: matanda pa kay mahoma; noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is a small stall: the sari-sari. Industry and production for the Filipino are the small immediate searchings of each day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino is the smallest degree of retail: the tingi.”

When Mang Nick talked then about our heritage of smallness, he might not have been able to imagine these times for Pinoy music. These times when, for P99 pesos, you can get a prepaid digital album card, much like a prepaid phone card, scratch the back for your PIN, enter that on a website, and get to download four pre-selected songs in lieu of getting the whole CD.

It’s Original Pilipino Music by the tingi.  (more…)

kultura

Manila and the ghosts of directors past

The lady at the ticket booth asks me: “Ok lang po bang black and white yung movie?” When I say yes, she promptly informs me that they’ve received many complaints about the independent film Manila’s lack of color. Produced and starred in by commercial actor Piolo Pascual, this should’ve been expected. The world is in color after all. And all the films that Pascual has done so far have showed all his hunky glory in color.

And yet, there is more to grapple with in Manila than just its lack of color. Made up of two films both entitled Manila by today’s more productive independent directors, this movie had a lot going for it. It’s an ambitious project that wanted to retell classic Martial Law movies City After Dark by Ishmael Bernal and Jaguar by Lino Brocka. With Pascual as producer, Raya Martin became director for a shorter retelling of Bernal’s classic, and Adolf Alix for Brocka’s. Both films had Pascual in the lead, with a supporting cast to reckon with.

Old characters, old narrative

Martin’s and Alix’s Manila were to be distinguished not just by the films that influenced their existence, but by light. Martin’s Manila was mostly in daylight, and the bright lights of accidents and hospitals; Alix’s Manila was dark, noisy and dirty, figuratively at the dance clubs and the Remedios Circle and literally on side streets, squatters’ areas and garbage.

And yet, more than how these two films would’ve melded together into one big film on the urban landscape that is contemporary Manila, it is how they existed independently of each other that seems more important. As a whole, Manila says that its characters are based on the creations of the original movies’ writers.  The question then becomes, how do these characters – and their stories – change? (more…)