For a second yr in a row, the Metro Manila Movie Pageant (MMFF) continues its expanded slate of 10 full-length movies, now screened alongside 10 competing scholar shorts, which is a part of the competition’s collaboration with the Movie Growth Council of the Philippines (FDCP).
Like prior to now years, although, this golden version remains to be marred by uneven cinema shares, regardless of the 900 cinemas making room for the competition nationwide. In reality, previous to MMFF’s opening run, the likes of Zig Dulay’s Inexperienced Bones was solely allotted 40 theaters, whereas Pepe Diokno’s Isang Himala needed to make do with 31 slots because of its style and alleged lack of box-office stars. This, whilst Dulay’s Firefly copped final yr’s Greatest Image, whereas Diokno received finest director for GomBurZa. It’s fairly telling for a competition striving to advertise native cinema and tradition.
However, listed below are 5 films which might be price a go to to the theaters for contrasting causes.
Isang Himala (Pepe Diokno)
In his brisk return to MMFF, Pepe Diokno takes on the gargantuan process to reinvent a critically famend Filipino musical primarily based on a traditional that doubles as a testomony to the iconicities of Ricky Lee, Ishmael Bernal, and Nora Aunor as among the many nation’s nationwide artists for cinema.
With Lee nonetheless engaged on the textual content and Aunor having a particular participation, Diokno gathers the identical inventive group that steered the 2018 staging Himala: Isang Musikal, and what he calibrates on this retelling a couple of city eroded by an alleged holy sighting are much more pointed interrogations of religion, womanhood, and precarity.
Although the movie can’t completely eclipse its artifice, it makes up for it by its astounding soundscape, Diokno’s visible recalibrations, and the prowess of its ensemble, led by Aicelle Santos, Bituin Escalante, and Kakki Teodoro, who’re such forces on the large display screen — wow, in lots of senses of the phrase. Above something, what Isang Himala affords us is a piece that places religion in its viewers to need one thing extra, an alternate that calls for to be seen by a wider public.
WATCH: Rappler Discuss Leisure: Pepe Diokno and Bituin Escalante on ‘Isang Himala’
Inexperienced Bones (Zig Dulay)
Zig Dulay’s Inexperienced Bones is by all means a crowd-pleaser. It’s a pensive, bifurcated drama in regards to the vexing penalties of grief and psychology of reality that’s fairly intriguing to mull over post-Duterte regime — a interval once we’re abrasively instructed how one can view sure lives. On the coronary heart of the story is a falsely accused prisoner Domingo Zamora (Dennis Trillo) and corrections officer Xavier Gonzaga (Ruru Madrid), who’re wrestling with opposing views in life sophisticated by circumstances they’ve put up with.
Although nonetheless overindulgent, Dulay’s method right here is much extra helpful than in Firefly, favoring narration, flashbacks, and parallel incidents to current its arguments on justice and the kinds of people that we predict ought to afford it. Like within the director’s previous titles, this newest work is heavy on drone pictures striving to color a portrait of the penal colony as a sweeping ethical terrain, the place freedom is noticed by the hour, although, at occasions, there stays a generic really feel to it. Viewers received’t want some deus ex machina to decipher the place the story is heading, however what makes Inexperienced Bones so infectious is how the performances at its heart discover notes of grace and candor.
READ: Looking for redemption with Zig Dulay’s newest MMFF drama ‘Inexperienced Bones’
Unusual Frequencies: Taiwan Killer Hospital (Kerwin Go)
You could possibly name this discovered footage horror, a rousing remake of the 2018 South Korean film Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, a darkish horse at this yr’s MMFF. Native celebrities and specter hunters in quest of virality led by Enrique Gil, who co-produced the movie and enjoying himself like the remainder of the forged, arrange a visit to a haunted hospital in Tainan, recording every little thing to the terrifying finish. The unsteady, point-of-view camerawork plunges us right into a sensory temper, heightened by the manic modifying. It’s unabashedly meta and spiked with a lot adrenaline, significantly when issues take a dreadful flip, permitting us to bask within the real, at occasions obnoxious psyche of its characters. Even because the script doesn’t arrive at profound solutions about its shape-shifting threats and nonetheless requires some meaty plot, it’s a horror flick that’s fairly assured by itself.
And the Breadwinner Is… (Jun Lana)
A lot has been stated about this long-awaited collaboration between Jun Lana and Vice Ganda, touting it as not solely its lead star’s foray into heavy drama but in addition a rebrand of her physique of labor post-Wenn Deramas and previous blockbuster comedies. However whilst Vice tries all her may to spin this story right into a compelling portrait of a breadwinner looking for greener pastures overseas, then returning house solely to seek out that each one her efforts are wasted, the film succumbs to its mounting and textual content, penned by Lana alongside Daisy Cayanan and Jumbo Albano.
The image has points with circulation, boasting a torrent of concepts and conflicts in a single scene, then conveniently rushing its resolutions within the subsequent. The movie may have actually reaped one thing extra biting had it dedicated wholeheartedly to its dramatic conceit and offered the remainder of the characters extra plotlines as a substitute of treating them as mere autos to forge extra inciting incidents.
There’s little doubt that Lana can harness essentially the most out of his stars. It’s a query of whether or not or not he’s keen to liberate himself and, by extension, his actors from the tendencies that thwart the criticality of his current titles. On this case, And the Breadwinner Is suffers from attempting to be too meta, reprising earlier roles Vice has performed, like a disclaimer in regards to the film’s incapability to think about previous what’s available to its titular character. To some extent, it’s additionally too chronically on-line for its personal good. Granted that it’s meant to maintain the DNA of a Vice Ganda film intact, however isn’t that what this entire factor is attempting to cast off?
If you happen to may transfer previous all of the narrative fats and lapses to take pleasure in a moderately lengthy, profoundly crushing juncture within the second half, flexing the ensemble’s strengths and invoking Lana’s beautiful blocking in Anino Sa Likod ng Buwan, then you could have simply discovered a motive sufficient to examine this one out.
Espantaho (Chito Roño)
Hilarity meets horror on this surreal, near-camp expertise about pestilence, marital tensions, and scarecrow-induced killings. Monet (Judy Ann Santos) finds her life upended by a mysterious arrival of a cursed, vintage portray, whereas she oversees the funeral of her useless father, prompting the return of the latter’s authorized household, led by the matriarch Adele (Chanda Romero). This, on prime of ominous visions the protagonist offers with, in addition to the nagging presence of her mom (Lorna Tolentino), who retains by her facet due to her epilepsy.
The result’s a film that asks its viewers to partake in some heavy magical pondering for its story to work. The imaginative and prescient of director Chito Roño, of horrors Feng Shui and Sukob, obviously clashes with the writing of Chris Martinez, most notable for comedies like Kimmy Dora and Ang Babae sa Septic Tank. The textual content rushes into dispatching its characters, simply as Benjo Ferrer’s modifying migrates between scenes, with none regard for momentum, thereby making the horror really feel solely secondary to the dramatic plotlines it unravels. You’ll be able to virtually really feel that one thing weird is about to occur when the digital camera tilts or pans out, paired with a rating that merely received’t buckle.
However the performing is fairly full-on. Santos, Romero, and Tolentino go toe to toe with one another, whilst their arguments really feel so teleserye-coded. At occasions, they go so excessive for no motive, leading to an uneven tone. However is it definitely worth the effort? Properly, sure! If something, it’s the lone side that tries to make up for the film’s moderately unruly, windswept plotting. I’d go so far as to say that it’s among the many finest encounters I had on the theaters this yr due to how absurdly humorous it may get. Espantaho solely runs for an hour and a half, which supplies the viewers only a good period of time to undergo — joyously. – Rappler.com
The Metro Manila Movie Pageant runs till January 7, 2025.
