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Boy Pick-Up: The Movie
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Dominic Zapata [as Dominic C. Zapata]
Screenwriter: Aloy Adlawan
From a concept by Ogie Alcasid & Eri Neeman and a story by Ogie Alcasid & Aloy Adlawan
Producers: GMA Films & Regal Entertainment
Cast: Ogie Alcasid, Solenn Heussaff, Dennis Trillo, Michael V., Antonio Aquitania, Diego Llorico, Eri Neeman, Boy 2 Quizon, Sam Pinto, Sarah Lahbati, Gwen Zamora, Jackie Rice, Maey Bautista, Albert Sumaya Jr., Roadfill, Moymoy, Pepe Smith, Lilia Cuntapay, Kerbie Zamora, Isko Salvador, Caesar Cosme, Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr., Jose Javier Reyes, Boy Abunda, Dingdong Dantes, Victor Aliwalas, Ellen Adarna, Ian Batherson, Kristoffer Martin, Adrian Alandy, Paolo Contis, Vicky Belo, Derek Ramsey, Loonie, Dello, Mike Swift, Reg Rubio, Rhon Henley, Apokz, Abra, Jonan Aguilar
Battle rap mutates into a variation where the contestants freestyle with pickup lines. The long-time winner by acclamation is Boy Pick-Up, who comes off as a doofus who somehow casts a spell whenever he delivers his winning dispatch. His rival Gabbs consoles himself by marrying his girlfriend Queen, but the latter’s so infatuated with Boy that she abandons her fiancé at the altar. The despondent Gabbs leaps into the Pasig River but is fished out by a masked manipulator who transforms him into Bagwis, Boy’s worst nemesis. Boy meanwhile resists his gay landlord Sharona and seeks a job, finally finding it at Heaven’s Bakeshop when he prepares his irresistible fishcake. The shop owner Angel is typically besotted with Boy from first hello, but Bagwis returns to steal her away in order to sabotage Boy’s supremacy in the battle rap competition.
The TV mainstay Bubble Gang has been around for longer than most of its viewers’ lifetimes (three decades and counting) so that it’s easy for older audiences to assume that its purpose ends with the entertainment it dispenses. The disappointing performance of the film adaptation of its otherwise satisfying satirical segment featuring a parentally unsupervised rich daughter and her beleaguered though sexually amorous nanny, titled Yaya and Angelina: The Spoiled Brat Movie (dir. Michael Tuviera, 2019), was not so much a reflection of the source’s limitations as it was further proof of the difficulty of crossover attempts from TV to cinema. By confining itself to the TV property’s elements—including unexpected guest stars, with the late rock legend Pepe Smith’s definitive film appearance—and punching up its potential for spectacle, Boy Pick-Up winds up revealing the tension between forcing a Western cultural innovation to address a developing country’s occasionally imperviable concerns. Proof of the approach’s effectiveness lies in how Boy Pick-Up results in a more holistic unit than the millennium’s other significant battle rap film, Treb Monteras II’s Respeto (Respect, 2017), although then again, it might be able to accommodate the latter’s allegorical ambition only with far more difficulty. Satire has nevertheless rarely been this rewarding since the departure of our Second Golden Age experts, so both films may be counted as essential twinbill immersions in a working-class culture that might not be around for too long from now.
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