Author: JE CC
The Philippines has the longest holiday season in the world. As early as the first day of September, Christmas tunes start to dominate radio airwaves and malls, and children start rounding up houses and streets doing carolings. Bibingka and puto bungbong become best-sellers, and children selling ampaos roam the sidewalks and streets. Giant Christmas trees and similar christmas-themed parks start get lit up. While these traditions strongly represent holiday symbols, Christmas is never really around the corner until the two giant TV Networks –ABS-CBN and GMA Network, that is– released their Christmas station ID’s. Like their past station IDs, ABS-CBN…
It’s difficult to deny that ‘Grindelwald’ is a beautiful movie–at least, in the merit of its technical splendor and thematic complexity. But that portion may be just one of the few things to look at in this sophomore film from a series meant to chronicle the events before Harry Potter. In the film, the story of the evil necromancer, Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), trapped in one of American Ministry of Magic’s highly guarded prisons, is followed. Presumably inescapable, the heavily fortified prison is proven to be futile in the presence of Grindelwald’s nasty allies. While the path rolled out from…
Hope springs in the first trailer of Paul Soriano’s film, ‘First Love.’ Starring Aga Mulach and Bea Alonzo, the film seems to tell the journey of a dying woman to finding her ‘first love.’ Ali (Bea Alonzo) has this heart condition called Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), which is not rare but could be fatal to someone who has it. In the trailer, it is revealed that Ali needs a new heart, and she tries to make the most of what’s left while she can. Nick (Aga Mulach), whose idealistic notions about life may potentially make him the worst specimen of a…
There is a consummate grace in ‘Exes Baggage’ that keeps it afloat amid its oversized sentimentality. Tones and colors are deftly engaged with texture that the form they create reveals striking dynamics between the players and the bittersweet landscape confining them to an emotional love affair. Like ‘That Thing Called Tadhana,’ the film arrives at a cathartic epiphany that comes on the heels of a desire to seek some form of personal liberation. In the film it exists in two people’s effort to free themselves from the unnecessary baggage of both their past relationships and the one they are committing…
Jerrold Tarog’s sophomore bid at re-imagining Philippine heroes in the more contemporary context, is tamed by its restraint to underscore the chaotic parts. Like its predecessor, ‘Heneral Luna’, ‘Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral’ thrives in both its moments of quiet and chaos, but it is in the former where it musters its more powerful sentiments. This choice to keep most of the proceedings with a significantly subdued energy is what separates ‘Goyo’ from ‘Luna’ whose frantic and often dangerous verve essentially defined the character and the film. It sort of lessens the excitement, but the tension it creates is equally compelling.…
The new Cathy Garcia-Molina film is painfully honest and it won’t excuse itself for anybody who comes unprepared. Except, there is no way to be prepared. ‘The Hows of Us’ is squarely designed to rip hearts apart right from the opening frames. Far from the emotional wreckage it delivers, this tribute to adamant love affairs somehow finds a way to build beautifully choreographed barters between the dreamy and sweet moments of auspicious romance and the inevitable days of struggle to keep the flame alive. In the film, George (Kathryn Bernardo) and Primo (Daniel Padilla) are young sweethearts with long-term plans. Their…
Fely Malabaño (Nova Villa) is a feisty and bossy 70-year old woman whose constant nagging caused her daughter-in-law, Angie, so much stress, that it sends the younger woman to the hospital. Her only son, Ramon, decides it was finally time for his mother to be sent in a retirement home where he thinks she’d be happier. To escape the possibility, she wanders through the night and finds a photo studio, whose owner promises her to bring back her 20-year old self. The film never really finds this an anomaly, that Fely literally returns to her younger self, and leaves the…
In A Nutshell: A man and a woman, the latter poor but very beautiful, the former extremely rich (yes, RICH) and princely handsome… a lovely daughter, a huge inheritance, jealous family members, new parents, deaths, lots and lots of deaths…’Ngayon at Kailanman’ is as cliché as traditional pinoy soap operas can get. The debut of Star Creatives’ new flagship primetime series, ‘Ngayon at Kailanman’ is teeming with scenes of people getting killed, most of which by gun shots. Save for the crisp visuals, an overabundance of deaths isn’t entirely a fresh way to pilot a show, but it works in…
In a nutshell: Two childhood best friends, rich girl, poor boy, an arranged marriage, a problematic marriage, family businesses…and oh, yes, infidelity. This new show is practically a hodgepodge of soap opera clichés. And surprise…it still works! ABS-CBN is turning on the tone switch for its late primetime programming a little sooner than expected. Three months ago, the nights were lighter (except for some occasionally mellow episodes, though some overly dramatic) with the Piolo Pascual-Arci Munoz-starrer, Since I Found You, which graced the small screen with its breezy airiness, light humor, and lovely take on modern-day romance. But the network…
“Unli Life” begins with Vhong Navarro’s character, Benedict, getting dumped by his girlfriend Victoria (Winwyn Marquez), on the very day he means to propose to her. He then stumbles upon a strange bar where he gets offered by the bartender with an equally strange drink, which the bartender claims, makes time traveling possible. This literally pulls back the time, sends Benedict to different periods in history, and voila! Time travel! The film would be extremely messy if we were to treat the jokes as fistful seeds strewn across an eccentric narrative. It is a lot of hard hitting humor to take,…
The real beauty in ‘Ang Babaeng Allergic sa WiFi’ barely resides in its interestingly bizarre love story. Charming and gentle, albeit formulaic, this teenage love triangle manages to generate a generous dose of sweetness, enough to sidestep everything it lacks. Here, themes and characters imbue life to this fairytale book, and they make a beautiful cover. In the film, certified nerd and loner, Aries (Jameson Blake) is smitten with Norma (Sue Ramirez) whose off-the-wall charisma makes not falling in love practically impossible. Though hopeless romantic, Aries never really had the grit to reveal his feelings, and it becomes even harder…
There is hardly a moment in Disney’s “Christopher Robin” that cripples the heart. There will be quiet sobs and gasps, but the heartaches this endearing live-action adaptation of A.A. Milne classic, ‘Winnie, The Pooh,’ leave behind are just warm enough to let audiences linger in the nostalgic feeling it manages to elicit. The effect is monumental, yet gentle enough to deliver memory-tickling senses; its exuberance serving as a joyful reminder of a forgotten beautiful past. Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) is now all grown up. Gone are the days of countless adventures with his stuffed animal friends in the Hundred Acre Wood.…
Victor Magtanggol briefly explains the events during and before ‘Ragnarok,’ right within the first few minutes of its pilot episode. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok literally means ‘twilight of the gods,’ a series of catastrophic events where all of Asgard is decimated. To followers of the myth, the uncanny similarity screams out. But perhaps, the extremely evident resemblance will strike harder to fans of its more contemporary iteration–Marvel’s Thor. Showrunners were quick to address accusations that the show is a mere ripoff of Marvel Cinematic Universe’s hammer-wielding superhero, arguing that the show just took some inspirations from the mythology. Their bigger…
‘Kusina Kings’ had few things to say. So few, that the attempt is practically confined within the efforts to make its audience burst into laughter. The fashion through which is delivered, is similarly limited, largely driven by Empoy Marquez’s signature comedic style; it massively works. The humor’s effect is like being tickled when one is in utmost need of a good laugh. Victor Villanueva, the director, barely duplicated the method he employed to his 2016 dark comedy, ‘Patay Na Si Hesus’. This time, the script is practically embracing shallowness. Usual comedy tropes populate his narrative, and frankly, there may have…
Star Cinema’s “I Love You, Hater” hardly manages the entanglements of its narrative right. It is not a deep story, but there are a lot of under-plots it aspires to cover, that didn’t quite earn a proper resolution. That’s an undeniable blemish to this charming anecdote of an overly-familiar teen romance, but the film’s visual and thematic virtues remain adequate to keep everything more than just tolerable. Well-acted and inspired, the film coasts on the charismatic appeal of its leads and their dramatic competence to get the film’s powerful intents, across. In the beginning of the film, Zoey (Julia Barretto), learns…
So much about Since I Found You is typical, utterly mundane in the sense that the light and airy tone it carries has been the same expression that made Philippine Primetime TV shift to a lighter landscape, finally tapping other options aside from oversized and mindblowingly dramatic soap operas, where big and explosive confrontations are the real deal. That changed a few years ago with the introduction of ‘Be Careful With My Heart’, ‘On the Wings of Love’ and other mellow dramas, and almost instantly, the genre becomes conventional. But it’s the conventional you’d like to see in a show—especially a…