Reviews

By Tito Genova Valiente

Perhaps, it is because Alvin Yapan is not a woman that he is able to form a discourse of enchantment around the violence against women. Perhaps, it is because Alvin Yapan is a man that it is enchanting to see him able to put the tormented position of women in our city in a new light, in an acutely searing light that is part magical and part surreal.

The core of the story is very simple: a wife comes home after working for a few years abroad to a husband who seems not to welcome him back. Dante, the husband is protective only in the traditional sense of a man being physically present around a woman. Something, however, seems to bother them. Tension, not love, frames the husband and the wife. Up to that point, the story is common.

This theme about abuse of women has been abused by mainstream cinema to the point that instead of giving voice to those who are abused, those films have simplified the issue at the level of the personal. Yapan’s language is never about simplifying and the simple.Read more

By Lito Zulueta

“KINATAY,” for which Brillante Mendoza won the Best Director Award of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, is one wild nightmare romp though the underbelly of Manila life on the literal level, and a plunge into one of Dante’s Inner circles on the spiritual level. It is the director’s unsentimental Quiapo epic, “Tirador” (2007), recast into something more focused, even harsher, a centripetal drive toward the heart of darkness.

The movie starts off all bright and airy enough. Peping (Coco Martin), a young criminology student, is getting married, and the audience sees him and his fiancée happy and excited as they take their vows and are joined later by kin and kith for a modest reception at a restaurant. Later he goes to a Quiapo school for the day’s classes (perhaps at the Manuel L. Quezon University, which somehow makes references to “Tirador”), and when the audience starts to wonder how he’s going to raise a family now that he’s married but still in school, they see him suddenly pounding the inner-city beat where he does his practicum while earning on the side: he clearly is a runner for the protection racket by the local police.Read more

Ni Roland Tolentino

HINDI ko gustong naririnig ang direktor at manunulat na tinatalakay ang kanilang obra. Parating sobra, wala naman ito sa natunghayan pero mala-magic na ipapaliwanag ng artist na ito ang kanyang layon. Sa literatura, sinasabing “the author is dead” sa akto ng pagbabasa. Walang babalingan na awtor bilang sanggunian kung ano ang kanyang intensyon o kung ano ang dapat nitong afekto sa mambabasa.

Pero naiiba ang open forum na kinatampukan ni Brillante “Dante” Mendoza, dahil masalimuot ang daan tungo sa Philippine premiere ng “Kinatay” (2009) sa UP Cine Adarna. Ito ang gabi ng pagpapakita ng mga ulo ng hydrang administrasyon ni Gloria Arroyo. Una ay ang pagpasok ng MTRCB na lahat ng pelikulang ipinapalabas sa Cine Adarna ay dapat dumaan daw sa kanilang pag-aproba. Ikalawa, na sa kaso ng “Kinatay,” magfa-file sila ng TRO (temporary restraining order) kung hindi ito dadaan sa screening ng kanilang opisina.Read more

By Bienvenido Lumbera

DIRECTOR Arnel Mardoquio whose “Hunghong sa Yuta” (Earth’s Whisper) rated an impressive number of nominations from the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, has a new film. “Hospital Boat” revisits the war in Mindanao, and this time Mardoquio’s script has broader concerns.

The movie, against the background of war, touches on the Muslim fight for independence, the work of health workers in coastal villages of Mindanao, the plight of evacuees and the evils of warlordism. Such concerns call for epic treatment of the problems that make Mindanao a daily hot topic for the national media.

The boat serving as the pathetic central image of the struggle to bring relief to war victims is whatever available banca that can bring the medical doctor and the nun from village to village. Dr. Sittie and Sister Claire are the principals in the narrative that take the viewer from sequence to sequence depicting scenes of poverty and need and the alleviation that outside help can offer.Read more

By Mario A. Hernando

An old newspaper item about a man hijacking a plane and dropping from the sky 5,000 feet below has intrigued filmmaker Raymond Red well enough to imagine the circumstances and details that led a desperado to take this extreme course of action. The result is “Himpapawid,” a well-crafted social drama and thriller that takes us into the life of the wretched of the earth, without wallowing in melodrama and voyeurism that characterize most films about poverty and the downtrodden.

By no means a socialist or ideologue, Red nevertheless sees the futility in venting one’s rage and exasperation without a higher purpose or maybe, without the guiding hand of comrades. That hijacker is Raul, a loner and oppressed laborer who seems to get the lower end of the bargain at every turn. The first time we see him, he is pleading with his boss at a construction site not to fire him. He wants to go home to the province but wants to get his job back when he returns. The foreman wouldn’t budge. This early we see a steaming human volcano, ready to explodeRead more

By Tito Genova Valiente

IN Pepe Diokno’s film “Engkwentro,” youth is not wasted on the young; rather the world of adults creates, imposes, and leaves this system where the youth is bound to destroy the youth. It is a pretty hopeless situation. In “Engkwentro,” this hopelessness is marked by boundaries that are relentlessly oppressive to those watching from the outside. Inside the world of these young boys and girls, the grids and the borders are not even imagined. They seem to be there all the time, this habitat that will never allow anyone to escape.

The film “Engkwentro” begins with two brothers, one a member of a gang in the city and the other about to become a member of the rival gang. This development in the life of the two young boys, the younger deceptively innocent in his school uniform, is stated matter-of-factly. It just happens when the older boy is being haunted by the dreaded vigilante group allegedly headed by the city mayor.Read more

By Bienvenido Lumbera

JOBIN Ballesteros is a new name in the indie scene, but judging from the art and skill he displays in his first film he seems bound to be a director to watch. In “Colorum,” he has fashioned a moving moral fable set in a colorum taxicab on a long journey of escape away from the site of an accident that had killed an American NGO worker. The fable is framed by two men––a good-hearted policeman (Alfred Vargas as Simon), young and benignly good-looking, who doubles illicitly as a cabdriver to earn extra cash in anticipation of setting up a business and marrying his fiancee; and an old man (Lou Veloso as Pedro), an ex-convict, gnarled by 30 years in prison, seeking to connect with an only son whom he had not seen nor heard from in all the years he was in jail.Read more

By Gigi Javier Alfonso

“BAKAL Boys” is about the young metal divers from Baseco, a community by the sea, who are marching and chanting verses of toughness, smallness and pride in being organized. The children metal divers (the bakal boys) are driven to look for better lives for themselves. They present a picture of boys with dreams. They seem to be full of life and always ready to conquer the waters. They may be seen as ridiculous by others at times but certainly they are not losers in their own eyes. They strut around with dignity.Read more

By Mike Rapatan

AMONG last year’s heady batch of independent films, Erik Matti’s “The Arrival” sticks out like a sore thumb. While other indie films in 2009 predictably focused their lens on abject conditions of economic displacement and hardship (e.g., “Baseco Bakal Boys” by Ralston Jover, “Himpapawid” by Raymond Red, and “Lola” by Brillante Dante Mendoza), human rights abuse (“Engkwentro” by Pepe Diokno and “Kinatay” by Brillante Dante Mendoza), the circuitous government bureaucracy (“Last Supper No. 3” by Veronica Velasco), and political warlordism (“Hospital Boat” by Arnel Mardoquio), “The Arrival” turns its gaze away from the heavy social realism of many indie films. Matti himself also takes a sharp and refreshing detour (hopefully, not just for now) from his commercial directorial style in past mainstream work like “Scorpio Nights 2” (1999), “Ekis” (1999), and “Prosti” (2002) and succeeds in presenting a love story indie style.Read more

By Tito Genova Valiente

In a period when the form of anti-cinema seduces the audience, “Yanggaw” asks us to take it because it is relatively recognizable—and arguably the more accessible—of the many films that are lately produced. By accessibility, I am referring to the linear narrative of the film and should not be equated with something that is “facile” or plain. Such linearity, however, even makes more obvious the dimensions “Yanggaw” has recovered for us and reveals the many layers of storytelling that the well-wrought screenplay, because of its construction, is able to accomplish. The director, who is also credited for the screenplay, accomplishes what is difficult to accomplish: embedding the symbolic and the metaphorical in the actions and processes of the film. No stilted dialogues or contrived poses, just a storytelling that explores the many facets of patriarchy and myth-making in our cultures.Read more