Every year, the country holds the Metro Manila Film Festival. It's that time of year when the regular Hollywood-made garbage is removed from theaters (except IMAX for some reason) to make room for the locally-made garbage. The problem of Philippine films being unable to compete with foreign ones isn't such a problem when you remove the latter altogether. If you can't beat the competition, just kill them! It is the election season after all, so get into the spirit!
I'll be honest, I don't watch any of it. The last MMFF film I saw was Enteng Kabisote way back in 2004 and I think it bore a hole in my brain because I can't remember any of it. I feel somewhat obligated to watch at least one film so that I can bullshit and say I "support the local artists" whenever one of them "Pinoy pride!" spouting autistics roll around.
What's on offer this..er, last year? You have the usual romcoms: All You Need is Pag-Ibig, My Bebe Love: #KilligPaMore and #WalangForever. What the hell is with the hashtags? Seems gauche. Romcoms aren't my cup of tea anyway. I can't relate at all with the saccharine stories about boy meets girl and if the universe is as unkind as I believe it to be, probably never will. Ironically, romcoms have the opposite effect on me; instead of the warm-and-fuzzies, they only drive me deeper into depression and thoughts of experimenting with cocaine. These types of films are more vehicles for the current popular celebrity power couples. Since I don't read the tabloids, I'll probably miss out on the in material.
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| #? |
Horror! That's a staple. At first, I thought Buy Now, Die Later was a horror flick by the title but apparently, I was mistaken. It's a comedy-psychological-horror-thriller. They couldn't decide? Sounds bad. The audience oscillating between laughter, suspense and shock might kill them. Next, we have the unimaginatively titled, Haunted Mansion. It's not good to judge a book by its cover but come on, that's the best title they could come up with? It's like naming an action movie, "Car Chase". Lastly, we have Nilalang, which is a Philippine-Japanese horror thing. Filipinos love half-breeds things or persons with mixed cultural heritage, so it has the advantage of foreign flavor. There's some kind of controversy regarding Nilalang being pulled out of theaters but whatever.
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| Seriously? |
The last film to mention is the presumed "heavy-hitter" film. Let me tell you of my people. Filipinos are emotional and are addicted to catharsis. Happiness and fear explain a lot of the entries but there will always be some directors who want to be taken seriously. See, majority of the films are frivolous affairs; sweet candies to be quickly consumed. So if you wanna go serious, you wanna go heavy and by heavy, I mean stuff people don't want to deal with. Hate, anger, betrayal, justice, crime, good and evil, that sort of thing.
So here comes the lone drama, Honor thy Father, a film about people who lie to each another. From what I gather, the film is remorselessly pessimistic and offers a bleak view of humanity in general as nothing but a collection of predators who feed off one another and won't hesitate to lie, cheat and steal and damn anyone who gets in their way. Sounds delightful. I guess the choice is clear.
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| We need to go deeper. |
MMFF is almost over so maybe I should step on and in it.
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