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Nilalang

English Title: Entity
Alternate Title: Geisha of Death
Additional Language: Japanese
Year of Release: 2015
Director: Pedring Lopez
Screenwriters: Pedring Lopez & Dennis Empalmado
(From a story by Pedring Lopez)
Producers: Welovepost, Parallax Studios, Haunted Tower Pictures

Cast: Cesar Montano, Maria Ozawa, Meg Imperial, Cholo Barretto, Kiko Matos, Dido de la Paz, Ruby Ruiz, Richard Manabat, Yam Concepcion, Arthur Acuña, Bing Villegas, Aubrey Miles, Lui Manansala, Alchris Galura, Benson Dalina, Tony Belmonte, Sacho Yoshi, Noel Blanco, Yoshitomo Inoue, Ranny Comia, Alexandre Charlet, Anna Deorca, Raymond Talavera, Will Devaughn, Christine Te Nano, Jack Lee Ochoa, Jerome Calica, Richard Carvajal, Jaime del Rosario, Stanley Carvajal, Jenny Tee, Aya, Iron Maven, Jooley Shen, Junchun Macaraeg, Nico Paulo Muñoz, Jastine Wesley Buan, Rommel Allen Marasigan, Lito Angelo Reyes Bagtas, Brynne James Menguito, Jaspher Casin, Macki Pineda, Reiniesse Ellen Navarro, Edeline Andres, Salvie Cabalquinto, Mayumi Shimada, Elysha Juarez

During the seventeenth century, in the Tokugawa Shogunate of Aki, members of a samurai clan slay a demon named Zahagur, in order to protect a volume of Ishi written in the blood of ronin. Zahagur is able to escape, however, and commits atrocities through the ages, until in 2013, National Bureau of Investigation agents led by Tony corner Nakazumi, a criminal possessed by Zahagur, who had committed the worst serial killing in Kobe and was in the process of disfiguring his latest victim. The agents succeed in killing Nakazumi, but in the present time (2015), some killings reminiscent of Nakazumi’s crimes are reported. With his partner Jane, Tony uses his ability to speak Japanese to inquire as to what’s happening. Mr. Kazudo warns them that Zahagur has the ability to move from one possessed body to another, and that he has targeted the descendants of the samurai clain who defeated him. He informs Tony that his own daughters are endangered and that the older one, Miyuki, who runs a nightclub, has to retrieve the incomplete volume of Ishi so that it could be completed by the pages in his hands and be used to overpower Zahagur for good.

Nilalang is a sample of the past reclaiming the present: it’s an “independent” feature the way it used to be understood in the 1960s, when star-owned outfits led the charge in dismantling the ramparts of the once-impregnable studio system. Critic-historians, even left-identified ones, contrasted the indies’ products unfavorably vis-à-vis the supposedly more rational Fordist arrangement, resulting in the propagation of, among things, an entrenched conservative outlook regarding available early cinema. The more practical consequence was the negligence with which indie entries of the period were handled, so the best we can do is rely on the remonstrances expressed by observers—to the effect that, with few exceptions, the 1960s films were rampaging profit-oriented affairs, more concerned with pandering to the audience’s baser instincts and stopping at nothing, including pornography, to realize these goals. The few then-contemporary releases I remember watching left pleasurable memories in their wake, although I was still far from being able to evaluate narrative material with any confidence. Nilalang succeeds in hybridizing sources drawn primarily from Japanese pulp culture, inclusive of historical institutions such as ancient shogunates (rendered as anime) and the yakuza syndicate, and features a performer who first made an impact in pornography. Director Pedring Lopez demonstrates a connoisseurship of multiple influences, and remains unapologetic about commingling them in order to attain unpredictable viscerality. Along the way, one can devise a metatextual reading of patriarchal abjection if one is inclined in that direction, although the influx of references would more likely result in stimulatory overload and necessitate some rest and reflection.

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Ang Manananggal sa Unit 23B

English Title: The Woman in Unit 23B
English Title: The Vampire in Unit 23B
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Prime Cruz
Screenwriters: Jenilee Chuaunsu & Prime Cruz
Producers: QCinema International Film Festival, The IdeaFirst Co., Indioboy Productions

Cast: Ryza Cenon, Martin del Rosario, Vangie Labalan, Cholo Barretto, Japo Parcero, Marcus Morales, Gabby Padilla, Dino Pastrano, Aldrico Padilla, Eric Kim, Jeffrey Hayd, Pjay Tayem, Harvie Tayem, John Pedraya, Victor Sanchez, Anjos Rome, Joel Lacap, Jerry Tolentino, Noel Blanco, Jason Conanan, Rosalie Pulitado, Glea Burban, Alain Morata, Nico Gomez, Maqui Farr, Nestor Abrogena Jr., Prime Cruz, Galileo Te, Jenilee Chuaunsu, Chad Angelic Cabigon, Adi Lopez, Angelo Estanol, Robert Ruiz, Erik Reynoso, Rhon Dival, Adrian del Mundo, Red Musni, Halman Lambrento, Nick de Leon, Marol Adelan Eugenio, Hope Eduarte, Ichi Sotto, Peter Matrinez

Newly moved to her new apartment, Jewel makes the acquaintance of Nico. She lives alone while he stays with his hotheaded grandmother. He finds her strange for her appetite for meat, including the duck embryo in balut. Some killings occur in their neighborhood but are attributed to the police prosecution of drug users. Jewel hangs out in dance clubs where a man attempts to pick her up and flirt with her while driving her home. She finds Nico at an outdoor cafeteria and manages to draw him out regarding his ex-girlfriend, then confesses that she never had a relationship because of her evil nature, which Nico finds hard to believe. Later that evening, she experiences pain in her belly and rubs ointment, then returns to the club all dolled up. She finds the man who tried to seduce her and takes him to an isolated place. She dominates him during intercourse and bites through his guts as they climax. Another night, Nico gets drunk in a bar and beaten up by his ex-GF’s companions: Jewel rescues him but stops herself after she tastes the blood from his wounds. Jewel gets along with Nico’s grandmother, but when the latter dies, both of them find themselves increasingly isolated and cornered for different reasons.

Made during the first year of the first fascist presidency since the elder Ferdinand Marcos’s ouster, Ang Manananggal sa Unit 23B directly references the extrajudicial killings that landed Rodrigo Duterte in the custody of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. None of the actual EJK victims were as badly mangled as the vampire’s victims in AMU23B, but their wholesale demonization by the regime and its apologists could have left them in similar conditions and the public would have hesitated to look more closely then, at least initially. The film’s premise also turned on the victims deserving their comeuppance as sexist bourgeois deplorables, and later as hapless victims sacrificed for the sake of feeding the title character. But at roughly midway, a community event allows the characters to disclose themselves, sometimes inadvertently: an outdoor costume party, where the manananggal dresses up as a B-movie winged vampire and ironically assumes the guise of what she carefully hides from everyone. After a declaration of their passion for each other, her beau espies her undertaking her modus operandi as well as its murderous consequence, and has to contend with his own conflicted response. AMU23B wisely desists from further pressing its national-scale irony, where the rural spaces that engendered the fictional manananggal also contrived the horrific war on drugs (inspired actually by right-wing US presidencies). The lovers who lose everything in the film still have each other; the country that acquired a few developmental paces at the expense of some of its most vulnerable citizens will be lucky to regain its soul..

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Water Lemon

Year of Release: 2015
Director: Lemuel Lorca
Screenwriter: Lilit Reyes
Producers: Blue Skies Productions, Quezon City Film Development Commission, Tuko Film Productions

Cast: Junjun Quintana, Tessie Tomas, Alessandra de Rossi, Meryll Soriano, Lou Veloso, Lui Manansala, Menggie Cobarrubias, Daniel Marsh, Mariella Castillo, Yuwin Cruz, Gold Aquino, Jerald Zarsuela, Tristan Jason Herrin, Dorcas Nilooban, Roann Casimiro, Kathlyn Cabaldo, Maria Theresa Pasamba, Mary Grace Virtusios, Lilit Reyes, Reizel Ann S. Guanlea, Joseph G. Rogado, Kathlyn C. Atienza, Beatrice Lombard

In Mauban municipality in Quezon Province, Filemon obsesses over the earth’s ocean surface, measuring the sea level everyday and entering his findings on a chart. He explains his concerns to anyone who cares to listen, which people in his community generally allow him to, in recognition of his autistic condition. He also talks swiftly in English, following the advice of his widowed mother Pina, who’s concerned about the future her son will have after she dies. Because of his inability to focus on assigned work, Filemon loses his job as a filing clerk in a government office. Because of her position as an education supervisor, she asks an old friend to provide a position for Filemon that can make use of his fondness for order and design. Filemon has also taken to hanging out at the internet café, where he makes the online acquaintance of someone he calls “Ms. Seychelles,” since she hails from the country. When his cousin, who runs the café, is actually visited by the American she befriended online and winds up arranging to marry him so she can migrate to England, her father invites Filemon to an all-night drinking session.

Philippine cinema has attained sufficient stature as the equivalent of national literature that it can accommodate an intensely personal issue—autism spectrum disorder, in this instance—and not worry about addressing wider topical questions. The fallacy in this formulation is that any well-developed argument will inevitably be able to draw in contemporary concerns as a matter of course, although these must be read carefully and creatively, as befits any intelligent work of fiction. Water Lemon situates itself in the filmmaker’s own hometown, so that endows it with a fundamental level of credibility, although to Lemuel Lorca’s credit, what he exploited was his familiarity with the place’s scenic locations, specifically those that reveal their wonder from certain vantage points and/or at particular hours of the day. A clue to the film’s unusual appeal lies in the setting’s name (Quezon being the southernmost Tagalog-speaking province, renamed after the nationalist President who hailed from the place): uban refers to hair strands that turn white usually from old age, so the Mauban municipality exhibits a well-kempt vibe despite being situated northernmost geographically and therefore not as distant from Manila as most of the other destinations in the province. The characters in WL speak of professional and financial success as premised on relocating to the metropolitan center, with one of the younger go-getters determined to travel even farther, outside of the country, as a marriage migrant. When the primary character’s mother is complimented for her abilities and achievements, the same hope of Manila-centered fulfillment is expressed for her; her self-awareness is complimented without any tinge of self-pity—in fact, as she confides to a colleague, she worries about what will happen to Filemon, her autistic son, after she passes on. No cure exists for his condition, as anyone familiar with the literature knows. At the presentation’s close, with the predicament of mother and afflicted offspring, as well as other characters carrying on with the processes of living, dying, and leaving, what emerges is a recognizable representation of nation in flux, determined to move forward but also anxious about leaving anyone behind.

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Metamorphosis

Year of Release: 2019
Director: J.E. Tiglao [as Jose Enrique Tiglao]
Screenwriters: J.E. Tiglao & Boo Dabu
(With Ricky Lee as script consultant)
Producers: Cinema One Originals & Rebelde Films

Cast: Gold Aceron, Iana Bernardez, Dylan Ray Talon, Ricky Davao, Yayo Aguila, Germaine de Leon, Bodjie Pascua, Lui Manansala, Sarah Pagcaliwagan, Raqs Regalado, Mae Ann Tiglao, Daryl Zacarias, Jasper Martinez, Christian Sta. Maria, Robert Villar, Arj Acierda, Daniah Alysandra Jamon, Divine Grace Magaru, Len Jamby Malinab, Johna Pasamonte, Karla Luisa Espas, Paola Gumpad, Annie Meting, Trina Sobrepena, Alex Vistro, Patrick Mesiac, Jaelen Greece Merin, Jeffiyl Medina, Erika Jianzid Malinab, Mark Gabrielle Costales, Carl Mesias, Marian Albay, Christian Perez, Harry Reymundo Niño

Adam keeps getting teased by his male classmates for not being as masculine as they are. He calls their leader “supot” (meaning uncircumcised) and manages to beat him up during confrontations. Duriung class, their teacher welcomes Angel, who’s pretty but looks old for her age. Adam keeps hanging out with Angel, who reveals that she’s actually 24 years old; but when they swim in a river, Adam panics and runs home. His parents find him bleeding through his shorts and his father, a church pastor, contacts a doctor in their congregation, who says that Adam will need to be tested to determine his exact genital condition. Angel assures him that she can accept whatever he is and confesses that she performs sex work to be able to live alone. In the course of making out, she discovers Adam’s intersex nature and tells him later that she doesn’t judge him. Adam’s father, however, is convinced that the child he raised should be a daughter and makes plans to raise money and move to a different community. A young doctor stays over at Adam’s residence because of the rain and Adam finds himself getting attracted to the guy.

The presentation of any precarious human condition will always be the greatest strength of the narrative arts, and Metamorphosis has earned satisfactory notices from the admittedly narrow circle of observers concerned with the condition of intersexuality. The compliments are fully earned, with the film avoiding any dogmatic issue-raising and promoting the easily overlooked principle of allowing the intersex subject to determine their own preference in their own good time. (Those who still believe in intervention should be required to read Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, discovered and published in 1980 by Michel Foucault, where the implementation of a law that required that citizens be classified as only one of two genders resulted in scandal, heartbreak, desolation, and early death.) J.E. Tiglao also devised several means of evading the verbal supplication of understanding their social Otherness, except possibly for the argument of sisterhood articulated by a female sexual outlaw. Adam’s highlight scenes are bathed in a late-afternoon glow that evokes the Japanese concept of mono no aware, or the inevitability of melancholy in realizing beauty. The project also benefits from the execution of Gold Aceron, an extraordinary new talent who, in spite of his real-life cis-het orientation, manages to perform androgynously without any self-consciousness and succeeds in pulling off the several potentially awkward scenes involving the growing awareness of difference and isolation, the unpredictability of sexual desire, and the revelation of taboo body parts; the highest compliment one can pay for such a performative achievement is the mistaken impression of at least one foreign viewer that he must be intersex himself. Deserving to have a wider impact than it had, Metamorphosis is poised to greet a future where its presence will be more than welcome.

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Ligalig

English Translation: Anxiety
Year of Release: 2006
Director: Cesar Montano
Screenwriters: Cesar Montano & Willy Laconsay
(From a story by Cesar Montano)
Producer: CM Films

Cast: Cesar Montano, Sunshine Cruz, Johnny Delgado, Celia Rodriguez, John Regala, Katya Santos, Bayani Agbayani, Alvin Anson, Rommel Montano, Gwen Garci, Kalila Aguilos, Rebecca Lusterio, Manny Calayan, Jun Robles Lana, Jeri Lopez, Ashley Ott, Pia Cristobal, Christian Angelo Montano, Andrew Milallos

A serial killer, whom we learn later is named Damian, stalks couples in motel rooms and kills them after they have sex. The police put tabs on his whereabouts and assign an officer to track and arrest him. Junior, the son of a police officer, wishes to get serious with his girlfriend Trixie, so he assents when she says he has to meet her strict mother. She takes along her friend Toti but while she sleeps in the car, Toti feels up Junior’s leg as he drives. Trixie’s mother disapproves of her relationship, saying she has no future with a mere driver. Meanwhile Damian has followed them to Trixie’s rural hometown and makes plans to annihilate anyone he finds in Trixie’s household.

The host of complaints that greeted Ligalig, centered on its resemblance to Alexandre Aja’s Haute tension (High Tension, 2003), a sample of the New French Extremity, are redolent of the outcries that account for some of Danny L. Zialcita’s career decisions. It’s not the first time that a local product outdid the (admittedly inferior) foreign source from which it derived its story ideas, but the local critical short-mindedness tends to dwell on announcing the resemblance, declaring it an anomaly just for that reason, and abandoning the more difficult challenge of evaluation. Cesar Montano may have also been persistent in his pursuit of prestige and political posts, but then that should make his decision to select offbeat material commendable, a return to his roots in detrital material, with the extensive use of then-new solid-state technology and non-linear postproduction—technical details that account for how the film manages to look and sound not so much different as updated. The final revelation, familiar to know-it-all viewers of the source material, nevertheless manages to work out within the terms of Ligalig, if only because of its more careful attention to causation and motivation.

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I planned a number of mini-articles to accompany the findings, starting with a preliminary quantitative analysis, but the exhausting nature of the completed project as well as a plan for an anthology of metacritical materials convinced me that relieving myself of this burden would match the kindness it would bestow on readers masochistic enough to read the entire text.

11011I also conducted myself as close as possible to a “no title left behind” principle, which intersected perfectly with a world where the open-access practice (in acknowledging the primacy of the public domain) became a value strong enough to contend with capitalist profiteering. Once more, the members of my team of unpaid consultants were assiduous and patient enough to urge me to consider titles I had dismissed or that I still had to watch.

11011Since the project began in the early 2010s, I approached the conclusion of every year with greater anxiety than the typically careless award-givers among my elderly colleagues. Unlike news reports and fan celebrations, book publications exist in a realm where they have the potential to outlast even judgments made about them. But when the second decade of the millennium rolled in, I agreed with several colleagues to announce 2020 as the project’s cutoff year, and was pleasantly surprised at the manifold advantages that temporal distance provided. Any individual who believes that the gaps from 2021 to whatever happens to be the year that you read this, urgently needs to be filled in as perfectly updated a manner, is welcome to take up the challenge.

11011This leads to the final gesture I wish the project to make. Critics and academics in the field of film discourse have been making hay and getting away with mediocrity for far too long, which means that no amount of textual deconstruction or reconstruction will prevent them from persisting in their practice. The book is not for them, fortunately; it is for me (which should go without saying) as well as for all concerned appreciators of Philippine cinema. It is also for world-cinema enthusiasts who might share the same excitement in evaluating other historically and geographically circumscribed realms of practice, and for scholars curious about reading strategies and/or areas for further studies.

11011I recently discussed in an online forum how I went over then-existing critical writing on Philippine cinema, which was how I knew what strengths I could bring and what weaknesses of mine I could work on. The rest won’t matter, and I hope that any future critical practitioner who thinks of attempting a similar project can exert as much effort (and have as much fun) to make what I finished not matter, which is how I’m already regarding it at this point. At this stage, my post-canon life can finally begin.

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PREFACE

The manuscript began as a project with Summit Media. My retirement as tenured professor at Inha University necessitated the sudden uploading of the text I prepared on my blogsite in 2023. That time, the films selected totaled exactly 120. Since that seemed inadequate to me, I picked out several from the titles initially rejected in the original publication project and embarked on an intensive re-viewing of possibly overlooked material. Several owners and distributors were also warming up to the open-access concept and started uploading their holdings on streaming websites, mostly YouTube but also specialized or subscription outlets. For a short spell, the Singapore Film Archives made available its films, including those made for Malay-language distribution by Philippine directors in the 1950s and 1960s; the late Teddy Co alerted me to their availability and forwarded a few others in better or more complete shape. With the advent of artificial intelligence programs, online transcription and/or translation services proliferated online so I was finally able to work out a system for watching these titles, overlooked in all assessments of Philippine cinema except for vague and often incorrect mentions in some historical accounts.

11011I wish to extend thanks to the editor of the now-defunct YES Magazine, Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon, as well as her inhouse staff, for undertaking a film-viewing and deliberation process that was both extensive and intensive. The book title indicates my readiness to let go of canon exercises after this point. I will still be celebrating outstanding work as it comes along, but the practice of determining whether it belongs on an all-time-best list will just have to be taken up by other interested parties—of which I’m sure history will never run out of eager and willing participants. The following are people to whom I owe thanks for calling my attention (whether they were aware of it or not) to titles I may have dismissed or never considered before: Jerome Gomez, Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, Ricky Lee, Jim Paranal, Emmanuel Dela Cruz, and Monchito Nocon. Crucial to the completion of the mechanics of the project are Park In-kyu, Lee Jinhyoung, Lee Sanghun, Jeong Yeongjae, Kim Min Tae, Choi Hyun, Angelo Magat, Eric Magat, and Sinan Çakiltepe.

11011I’d opt to acknowledge, if I could, all the students I ever taught, regardless of how they opted to regard me afterward. I only hope that I’ve managed to seem higher-evolved than I did in the past, although of course several things (starting with the concern for teaching) deserve to remain the same. If I were to pick out just one name to represent the best of the rest, it would be Corina Bedonia Millado, over whom I’d been exultant for the past several decades and who’ll deserve more accolades than I could bestow.

11011I’ll also have to acknowledge the specific founding members of the critics group who provided me with examples worth emulating: Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., for his careful, rigorous, and persistent scholarship, and the late Petronilo Bn. Daroy, for his constant upgrading of his analytic skills and his deployment of wit and humor. Other founding members were also useful in showing me the pitfalls and weaknesses to avoid, but I’m sure readers will understand why their names will be better left unmentioned unless I need to undertake a closer critical assessment of film criticism in the country.

11011An undertaking of this nature requires two forms of indispensable support. The first and more unusual one is constant pampering, which I knew that I could ensure for myself by remaining in Korea after my retirement: I had to be able to watch the film entries in a receptive frame of mind, and accomplish my writing without castigating myself for some overlooked real-life task or other. But it also entailed a hometown support system, which I thought I could avoid calling on if I could complete the project within the lump-sum retirement benefits that I treated as my personal writing grant. When it ran out before I could finalize the writing, I knew that I had to call on my siblings, where we had the unusual and embarrassing understanding that their eldest will have to be their juvenile. Two of my youngest brothers, Aaron and Nides, were ironically the first to depart, but they and my only sister Peewee performed all the considerable support activities that I could not provide for myself. This time around, my next-elder brothers Aris and Nonoy took charge of raising the funds that the completion phase required.

11011The other form of support was reliable expertise in terms of assessing, discussing, and even sourcing materials. Four friends, two of whom I’d never even met yet in person, allowed themselves to be conscripted in various online message threads and responded as close to real time as they could, considering we were all based in various territories (Manila and two US time zones). All of us shared, in varying degrees and sometimes with different objects, faith in progressive politics, gender critique, popular culture, and star scholarship, with each one having sometimes overlapping areas in terms of temporal and regional familiarities: Jek David’s millennial coverage, Jojo Devera’s insider expertise, Epoy Deyto’s fond familiarity with critically neglected cinema, and Mau Tumbocon’s historical and global reach. Our exchanges were sometimes contentious, often funny, always lively—and I maintain that if the capsule reviews I wrote in consultation with this team were to be properly credited, then their names should be part of the book credits. I could not always accommodate everything that they or anyone else recommended, and I’m sure they might have disagreed with some of my choices, but that was always a limitation on my end, not theirs. Anyone familiar with our ad hoc collective will recognize that the full listing is as much theirs as it is mine.

A note on translation: Several of the tech credits and synopses were done by staff members of YES Magazine. I cross-checked as best as I could, with group rescreenings providing opportunities to adjust credit and storyline details that were in error. We referred generally to the Internet Movie Database with caution, but generally relied on what existing film sources evinced. A measure of how seriously Philippine film preservation has suffered from negligence lies in how many basic credits can no longer be reconstructed, even with deep archival research. The historically invaluable collection of critic-archivist Jojo Devera has proved to be the most helpful in terms of rare-film information. The volume Lilas: An Illustrated History of the Golden Ages of Cebuano Cinema by Paul Douglas Grant and Misha Boris Anissimov was likewise a repository of useful data, as were Mike De Leon’s Citizen Jake outlets, the Pelikulove website of feminist output, and the several YouTube channels of major Pinas studios. The Video 48 posts of Simon Santos and the (currently deactivated) Baul ni Juan uploads of James de la Rosa were indispensable for their untampered features of rare print materials. The language specified in each entry will be understood to be the country’s current national languages (English and Filipino), unless the spoken language is exclusively or primarily in English. When provided, additional writing sources will also be mentioned. In a few instances, I listed actors who did not appear in the film credits.

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INTRODUCTION

When a colleague inquired as to what I wanted out of this project, I was stumped. Until we got to talking about some time we shared when I was in graduate school—which was how I remembered a New York icon and blurted out, “To emulate Florence Foster Jenkins and be remembered for a long time, even if I get laughed at for what I’m doing.” I wasn’t kidding, since the many times I hung out at the classical CDs section of the many record shops in the village, the surest way to initiate pleasant, sometimes hysterical, conversations with strangers was by bringing up her name. And though we may have started out laughing, we somehow wound up with some tone of reverence that enabled us to move on and talk about other personal faves.

11011Colleague was expectedly amused, but raised the next stump-worthy question: if you’re the equivalent of FFJ, what does that make of all the other practitioners? After reflecting on and off for months on my reply that “why should that worry me?” I finally realized that there was no other possible valid answer. The older ones will think I was always mistaken and they were right all along, while the younger ones, if they had any ambition, will be looking for ways to equal or supplant this output. The original critics org where I opted to participate for a few formative years organized an event much later that I labeled Stalinistic, in which the oldest conciliatory founder was soon gone, the current oldest said that I should respect critics who hand out awards and never criticize same-statured colleagues (presumably referring to himself), and the current pre-retired elder one claimed I was wrong because I refused to subscribe to his prescription of honoring independent productions that wallowed in poverty depictions that eschewed mainstream appeal and deployed high-art strategies instead.[1]

11011After the near-completion of this project, I realized that the introductory essay I drafted for the original digital edition was too extensive, not to mention defensive, and would be better situated in a collection of articles on critical reflexivity. Hence nothing should stop the curious reader from proceeding forthwith to the canonical choices with their respective writeups, although a recounting of the project’s origins would be helpful. It started as a top-100 listing and soon broke free of that round number. Since the planned print version never came out in time to enable my retirement clearance, I continued making additions and self-publishing the results on my blog—with the clarification that the project was far from finished at that stage.

11011With the present “E-Book Edition,” it can still be further finalized in future, mainly with the remastering of previously damaged or missing files or the recovery of long-presumed-gone prints such as Celso Ad. Castillo’s Burlesk Queen (1977) or Lino Brocka’s Mananayaw (The Dancer, 1978). Ironically, the practice I followed was instilled by the critics group I mentioned, which apparently no longer observes it: repeat screenings to ensure that a work is capable of sustaining long-term appreciation for any number of reasons, with research into production circumstances and discussions with experts to see if we can arrive at any form of consensus. Plus another measure abhorred by the founding members since it challenged their admitted capitalist ideal: the recognition of several possible honorees in any given year, along with the jettisoning of fixed technical or performative categories if these have no relevance to any given text under discussion.

The Quanti-Quali Dilemma

We’ll start at the end, with a rather awkwardly positioned graph of the entries in this study according to year of release. I hope to have made it as scientific as possible via careful selection, but my leftish ideals ensured that a number of titles championed by individuals or institutions would never show up in the text. To make it worse, which is ironically better for me, I conducted this exercise as a final stab, minimizing the possibility of requiring corrections and leaving the task of inspecting post-2020 titles (as well as reinspecting everything from the beginning) up to future interested parties.

11011Regarding the trends that show up in the graph, we can see a partial confirmation of the claim of the founding members of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino or Filipino Film Critics Circle (hereafter FFCC) that 1976, the year of the group’s first awards ceremony, was the best of any such period in Philippine cinema. Their self-serving nature, however, is shown up in the output of the succeeding years: more outstanding films came out during the crisis years comprising the first half of the 1980s, culminating in the people-power protests that followed the assassination of Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr. and leading to the ouster of the Marcos Sr. dictatorship.

11011What makes the record remarkable is that anyone who lived through this era would not remember any critical celebration of the achievements of the country’s film artists. I’d ascribe this appalling negligence to the orthodox-Marxist orientation of film responders, spelled out in a much-reprinted FFCC member’s screed that true artistic progressivity will always be preempted in an antiprogressive system, and therefore the urgent task lies in changing the system itself first. For better or worse, critical thinking had outgrown this constricting reliance on economic determinism as a tool for critical analysis, but the terms of its arrival in the country still had to occur a few years later, accompanied by violent debates instigated by covertly antipopular sectors.

11011The next rising trend, while not as towering as the first one, occurred during the current millennium, peaking up to the cutoff year of this study. A vulgar materialist would probably readily attribute this to the technological shift from celluloid to digital, although the more impressive results from the preceding period raise the obvious question: why then haven’t there been more canonizable works when production costs have significantly diminished? The answer may be overdetermined by technological shifts in production and strategic adjustments in distribution, paralleled globally by the rise in digitalization and internet patronage. But an unforeseen factor lies in the essential lie that fuels award-giving film activities, that only one winner in permanently prearranged categories can be selected every year.

Note

[1] See “On Poetics and Practice of Film Criticism in the Philippines–A Roundtable Discussion,” Plaridel: Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, volume 13, issue 1, June 2016, pp. 148–150.

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1—Radyo

English Title: Radio
Year of Release: 2001
Director: Yam Laranas
Screenwriters: Yam Laranas & Jon Red
Producer: Viva Films

Cast: Rufa Mae Quinto, Jeffrey Quizon, R.J. Leyran, Louie Medel, Tado, Bojo Molina, Katya Santos, Goms Burza, Lucy Quinto, Michelle Mercado, Raul Dillo, Shermaine Santiago, Mardi Gozum, Ronnie Lazaro, Mike Lloren, Soliman Cruz, Jon Red, Randy Punsal, Raul Morit, Ardenia Albarida, Noel Sandoval, Nido de Jesus, Mac Alejandre, Renato del Prado

Mila conducts a popular radio talk program every morning with her co-anchor George. Several listeners phone in to share their dreams and problems. Among them is Ruben, a sales promoter in the hallway of a congested shopping mall, where no one pays him any attention and Myla, a saleslady whom he longs for, mocks him for his lowly position. After he requests Mila to play a song for Myla, whom he calls his girlfriend, she scolds him; when he calls up Mila to narrate what happened, she and George treat him dismissively. He relives the childhood trauma of his mother’s cruel treatment, murders and rapes and dismembers Myla, then calls up the DJ to drop hints about what he did. His killing spree just started, however, and as detectives take an interest in his identity, his begins obsessing over Mila.

2—Sigaw

English Title: The Echo
Year of Release: 2004
Director: Yam Laranas
Screenwriters: Roy Iglesias & Yam Laranas
Producers: Megavision Films, Regal Entertainment, GMA Films

Cast: Jomari Yllana, Richard Gutierrez, Iza Calzado, Angel Locsin, James Blanco, Ella Guevara, Lui Manansala, Tessie Villarama, Pocholo Montes, Ronnie Lazaro, Geric Albero

Marvin finally was able to rent his own apartment, where his girlfriend occasionally drops by to visit. He has difficulty sleeping though because he keeps hearing loud noises from the occupants of another room, where a hotheaded police officer shouts at and beats up his wife and their young daughter. One night, the wife knocks on Marvin’s door to ask him to look after her daughter while she tries to calm down her husband, who’ll be arriving soon. Marvin hesitates to get involved but he takes pity on the girl. He tells his GF that he’s starting to see bloody apparitions of the mother and daughter and she confesses that she has started experiencing the same thing. During a particularly scary encounter, the couple decide to leave the apartment and watch a feel-good movie, but the visions find a way to haunt them there as well.

The predicament in approaching whiz-kid product is that the practitioner may be so gifted that younger appreciators as well as foreign observers (who amount to the same thing, when one thinks about it) might wind up fostering the same cycle of formalist appreciation that entraps Western artists in a rut from which they can only escape by rejecting the system wholesale and starting over in another area or activity, if they have the resources for renewal. The evidence played out early enough, when the start of the current millennium encouraged Philippine film critics to name the next Golden-Age harbingers, as if such an era can be heroically determined by any number of individuals. Yam Laranas would be a perfectly archetypal sample, with a pair of films that stirred excitement among responders despite the presence of elements that would have given pause to any past Pinas expert. The delightful and heart-pounding Radyo, for example, proceeds from a traumatization brought about by a Hitchcockian phallic mother, minus Sir Alfred’s usual winky perspective; even more seriously, the film’s entire social world takes a stance against the now-grownup victim, who responds with mountingly perverse cruelty. The later Sigaw is a more sober affair, although at the expense of its women characters turning passive instead of reprising the bullying or taunting that they did in Radyo, and with (once more) the progressive-sanctioned demonization of its distinctly working-class player for being an armed representative of “the system.” With these caveats in mind, one can nevertheless still immerse in impressively conceived settings where Laranas gives himself free rein to disrupt audience expectations and even introduce reflexive moments that comment on the material without enforcing a separation from the onscreen events. In Radyo, the female host spins a hit record made by the actress who plays the character, with her sidekick interjecting a salacious pun; in Sigaw, the lead couple take refuge in a film screening but find even that space haunted. These moments of grace actually induce an unexpected retrospective dimension, allowing discerning audiences to add insight to their pleasure.[1]

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1—Abomination

Year of Release: 2018
Director: Yam Laranas
Screenwriters: Paolo Vacirca & Oscar Fogelström
(From a story by Yam Laranas & Gin de Mesa)
Producers: Unitel Productions, Underground Logic, Hit Productions

Cast: Tippy dos Santos, Maritoni Fernandez, Justine Peña, Paul Holmes, Lukas Enrique, Lexi Fernandez, Lexi Schulze, David Bianco, Leigh Halliwell, Emma Brennan, Kuya Manzano, Spyke Perez, Janelle Olafson, Pinky Amador, Ramon Perez, Andy Kun, Robert Zialcita, James Svendsen, Merhzad Tamadon Khan, Henry Lo, Sam Turner, Dada Hassan, Aaron Hewson, Raul Venigas, Ibu Benedict, Remus Husussan, Anne Feo, John Moseley, Alexandra Santos, Viviana Flores, Manuel Velasco, Eddie Ngo, Mahle.

Rachel is found lying in the middle of an empty road, unconscious. When she awakens, she asks the doctor to contact her mother but the latter refuses to speak to her. A senior doctor informs her that the person she claims to be died a few months earlier so the police are fetching her for questioning. She escapes and attempts to contact her family, then her best friend. She remembers how her mother, as a single parent, had difficulty handling her. When she doesn’t take meds to control her mood swings, she beats up her classmates for imagined slights and her mother has to force her to apologize. One night, she attends a small party thrown by Dan, who’s aware of Rachel’s unstable condition and knows how to take advantage of it.

2—Nightshift

Year of Release: 2020
Director & Screenwriter: Yam Laranas
Producers: Viva Films, Aliud Entertainment, ImaginePerSecond

Cast: Yam Concepcion, Michael de Mesa, Mercedes Cabral, Jeffrey Quizon, Soliman Cruz, Ruby Ruiz, Mayen Estanero, Roman Perez Jr., Irma Adlawan, Caleb Santos, Joel Garcia, Karenina Romualdez, Brian Bamunuachchi, Jonjon Maceda, Maryanne Climaco, Lita Loresco, Sigrid Polon, Christian Villete, Rafael Atun, Jessa Mae Gajo, Shaider Vargas, Mico Akashi Dagaas, Antonio Adlawan, Mary Ann Tan, Liberty Galvez, Red Musni, Edith Monsanto, Gerard Gevera, Jessica Nunez, Brenda Porcadilla, Sofia Nicole Mabalay, Isabel Tepase, Regina Miano, Jackylyn Miano, Prince John Dale Pampanga, Coleen Que, Laline Yulo, Ariel Guevarra, Albert Logacho, Allan June Pampanga, Cherry Favors, Jam Sehani, Richard Macorol

Jessie Pardo reports for her first day of duty as night-time morgue assistant to Doctor Alex. The sight of various dead bodies unsettles her, particularly in their expulsion of gases and cadaveric spasms. Fortunately Doc Alex is patient, considerate, and avuncular, even encouraging her to take breaks, which she refuses. A strong typhoon causes occasional electrical brownouts, worsening Jessie’s jumpiness. Two morgue assistants try to humor her but she catches them stealing from the corpses, she sets some professional distance with them. A mother pleads to be let in so she could see the corpse of her daughter, but the only outsiders allowed after hours are police investigators. When her replacement fails to arrive because of the storm, Doc Alex volunteers to keep her company; he suffers a heart attack, however, and has to be rushed to hospital, thus leaving Jessie alone in the company of the unalive.

The unusual yet unobserved progression in Yam Laranas’s filmmaking career was his consistency in working within genre material, despite the fact that even his younger colleagues were collecting trophies from overseas festivals and local critics’ competitions. In so doing, he quietly managed to accumulate a filmography that demonstrated attempts at reworking genre tropes, mostly with qualified success, as these things expectedly turn out. His later projects exhibit a willingness to accept ambitious challenges in some cases, as well as expertise comparable to global practitioners when he opts to flex his abilities. Abomination is an example of the former type of effort, a work that purports to be set in a fictional North American city named Monte Maria but (save for apparent establishing outoor shots) was produced entirely in the Philippines; in addition, it bounces around (occasionally with superimposed announcements) its lead character’s developmental stages, corresponding with her unstable psychological condition. Both these attempts work with such a high degree of credibility that when the mystery’s solution unfolds, it turns out to be far more artificial than the film’s naturalistic accomplishment, much like an M. Night Shyamalan viewing experience feels after everyone and her aunt are already familiar with how the riddles in The Sixth Sense (1999) are going to be answered. The key will be a matter of taking Abomination’s final sequences as part of the earlier time-fragmented journey and regarding these with as much skepticism as the rest of the plot, then look forward to the next Laranas entry. Nightshift, for its part, will be more standard-issue—which means its sources of pleasure will be in the way Laranas extracts time-worn values such as the buildup of dread alongside well-executed jump scares, the direction of actors (notably an atypical Michael de Mesa, whose unexpected benevolence is positively uncanny), and a narrative explication that doesn’t overstay its welcome. More and better work will be in store from this talent, and we can only hope it won’t take too long in coming.

Note

[1] Patrick D. Flores’s commentary on the reflexive element in Sigaw articulates this point in full: “That the cinema is revisited creates another dimension within the scenario, as it finally implicates the institution of spectatorship as party to the conspiracy of representation, of making a particular language of the real utterable at the expense of its impossibility (not yet possible), which as we learn here can never be abandoned” (“The Restive Condition,” Young Critics Circle Film Desk, June 2, 2008, posted online). The Radyo DJ character, on her part, announces that she’ll be playing a hit song by Rufa Mae Quinto titled “Ikikiss Kita” or “I’ll Kiss You,” with her co-anchor adding “sabay hug,” meaning “with a hug.” The actual Quinto song is “Kiss Kita Sabay Hug” (Nonoy Tan & Ed Calumpang, 2002) which, when articulated fast enough to elide the aspirate, sounds like “I’ll kiss your testicle.” The reflexive play proceeds apace when the character sings along to the record and their voices sound exactly alike.

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Vince & Kath & James

Year of Release: 2016
Director: Theodore Boborol
Screenwriters: Daisy Cayanan, Kim Noromor, Anjanette Haw
(From a story by Daisy Cayanan, Kim Noromor, Anjanette Haw, based on the book of the social series Vince & Kath by Jenny Ruth Almocera, writing as Queen Elly)
Producer: Star Cinema

Cast: Julia Barretto, Joshua Garcia, Ronnie Alonte, Maris Racal, Ina Raymundo, Shamaine Buencamino, Ana Abad Santos, Jeric Raval, Alan Paule, Manuel Chua, Joshua Zamora, Axel Torres, Milo Elmido Jr., AJ Urquia, Sarah Carlos, Pontri, Gerry Bricenio, Kim Andaya, Kelley Day, Jessica Marasigan, Jose Sarasola, Rafa Esplana, Paul Pujante, Uajo Manarang, Pamela Gonzales, Pauline Palomique, Jan Urbano, Hessa Isabelle Gonzales, Curse and Bless, Mark Joshua Edrosa

Kath, a campus beauty queen, and James, a varsity basketball player, find each other attractive. Vince, who also fancies Kath, endeavors to keep amusing her, knowing that she finds him annoying. Vince’s mother has a new hubby whom Vince can’t get along with, so she asks James’s mother to allow him to live with his friend. Kath’s mother also has to deal with her husband abandoning his family when he found another partner while working abroad. Kath and Vince enroll in their university’s internship program so Vince uses the opportunity to get close to Kath. But because his varsity practice demands a lot of his time, James asks Vince to impersonate him using his well-developed social-media skills. Because of Vince’s efforts, Kath and James become steadies, although Kath can’t deny Vince’s charm and sincerity.

A loose adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, Vince & Kath & James not only updates the 17th-century setting to the present millennium but also relocates the drama from Paris to Metro Manila. The romantic and comic elements function satisfactorily, although V&K&J has to proceed necessarily wordily, with Vince, the Cyrano equivalent, articulating his sublimated passion using James’s alias as well as an anonymous viral account who expresses himself, haiku-like, in exactly six words every time. Kath, who falls for both of Vince’s ruses, maintains some propriety by having a giggly best friend, Maxine, who comments on everyone’s motivation but most of all on Kath’s emotional development. Kath’s own realization, drawn from her mother’s domestic struggle, that she must learn to look beyond surface attractiveness in men, leads predictably enough to her reassessing James’s maturity and his overreliance on Vince, with her resentment that Vince agreed to masquerade online as James constituting the final obstacle to their happy ending. In fact a more reliable anchor for an appreciation of the narrative is the film’s roots in the briefly popular social-series phenomenon, where it was originally titled Vince & Kath and utilized another updated format, the epistolary narrative, with the story unfolding via screenshots of fictional messages from SMS and chat exchanges between the characters; the series proved popular enough to be spun off into a 24-chapter book version (another now-less-popular format) early the same year that the expanded film version came out. The intertextual references have since extended beyond the film’s originary material. Vince and Kath bond over a shared enthusiasm for Olivia M. Lamasan’s Got 2 Believe (2002), which starred the real-life aunt of the V&K&J leading lady but became a record blockbuster because of the death of the lead actor, allegedly due to depression caused by his breakup with his costar. The Vince and Kath character players would figure out in their own subsequently messy breakup, while the Maxine performer would first be featured in the social-media scandal of the year before recuperating her belated status as extremely capable performer and sensible netizen. These reflexive elements can no longer be regarded as independent of the media product they attend, and it would be specious to insist they don’t impinge on one’s awareness to those with access to such information, much as stars’ personas will always be crucial to the appreciation of their showcase features and just as the actual Cyrano de Bergerac’s biography inevitably haunts the staging of the play (and their adaptations) about him.

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Sa Ilalim ng Cogon

English Title: Beneath the Cogon
Year of Release: 2005
Director: Rico Maria Ilarde
Screenwriters: Rico Maria Ilarde & Mammu Chua
(From a story by Rico Maria Ilarde)
Producers: DuduyPlus Co. & Modern Films Production

Cast: Yul Servo, Julia Clarete, Dido de la Paz, Raul Morit, Eugie Rodriguez, Ramon Bautista, At Maculangan, Rico Orbita, Hector Macaso, R.A. Rivera, Katya Guerrero, Una Ilarde, Jun Sabayton, Joel Torre, Rico Maria Ilarde, Stephanie Lim

During a violent robbery where Pepito betrays his companion Ruel, their getaway driver Sam realizes that he’ll also be rubbed out. His military training enables him to overpower Pepito and he’s able to flee with the money, with Pepito’s body in the trunk. Sam recalls how Pepito conscripted him in the operation during their stint in prison, with the sponsorship of crime boss Johnny-B. Realizing he’ll be in trouble explaining why his companions are dead, Sam takes a turn and finds an abandoned mansion, where he shacks up. He finds a beautiful maiden whom he later learns is named Katia, who leaves wrapped food in front of the house every day, with the package always gone the next day. Sam makes Katia’s acquaintance and they fall for each other, but Sam also realizes that Johnny-B’s conducting a manhunt for him.

After a short spell of creating horror that focuses on the emergence of the monstrous, Pinas-reared and US-trained Rico Maria Ilarde (son of a famous broadcast-media personality) opted for material that centered on citizens continually victimized by the psychosocial horrors visited on them by brutes of patriarchy, with the monster making a full appearance almost as an afterthought. Sa Ilalim ng Cogon nearly stacks its moral dialectics in favor of wholesome innocence, but the underworld where its drama plays out does not permit such oversimplifications, so the film’s main characters conduct a careful recounting of what transgressions they or their loved ones have committed and explain to each other (and to the audience) how their future actuations could help them attain a cleaner, though never a perfect, condition. Such moral clarity extends to the peripheral characters, but never in the typical self-explanatory mode that fulfills humanist principles while raising realist appreciators’ eyebrows. The monster’s begetter is left to subsist in the ruins of his good child’s memory, but the other “family,” comprising a criminal operator and his henchpersons, become miniatures of complex individualities. The leader may be expectedly benevolent in his ruthlessness, but his unruliest and least predictable follower is provided with enough motivation, despite limited screen time, by starting out as the male lead’s prison inmate and ending with a kicker of a closing line. One might also accuse Ilarde of idealizing these personalities, but anyone who’s hung out with a wide variety of antisocial types will recognize that many of them are capable of developing political and globalist perspectives. If ever the moribund action-film genre can somehow restore itself back to dominance, SInC will be one of the most useful templates available.

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Altar

Year of Release: 2007
Director: Rico Maria Ilarde
Screenwriters: Rico Maria Ilarde & Mammu Chua
(From a story by Rico Maria Ilarde)
Producers: Cinema One Originals & DuduyPlus Co.

Cast: Zanjoe Marudo, Nor Domingo, Dimples Romana, Dido de la Paz, Krista Miller, Raul Morit, Anna Marie Faybyshev, Katya Guerrero, Ranny Comia, Edd Toralba, Johnny Barnes, Mildred Formanez

Hoping for an opportunity for construction work, Anton Marquez makes the acquaintance of Lope, but Mang Erning, the contractor, runs out of openings for them. When he recognizes Anton as his favorite boxer, however, he offers the two a live-in position repairing a rundown mansion on the outskirts of the city. It turns out that Anton foreswore the sport after his last opponent died from his blows to the head; Mang Erning warns the two that they have access to all the rooms in the house except the basement. While on an outdoor break, the two make the acquaintance of a pair of domestic help in the neighborhood, with Lope readily making out with one of them. Anton asks his designated partner, Angie, to check out on the internet the meaning of some words found on the entrance to the basement he doesn’t recognize. Anton tells her that he keeps seeing a vision of a girl in white asking for his help, but when she’s finally able to look up the words, she warns him that he and Lope are in danger.

As in the instance of Sa Ilalim ng Cogon (Beneath the Cogon, 2005), the second film collaboration of Rico Maria Ilarde and his producer-scriptwriter Mammu Chua set itself apart from his previous output despite his usual hybrid approach to material. Altar harks back to his concerns with ritualistic supernatural horror, premised on an admonition never to trespass a proscribed area. The Bluebeard reference will be recognizable to fairy-tale enthusiasts, but this time, the damsel in distress is a veteran boxer, traumatized by his own expertise in inadvertently killing a competitor. The implicit feminization of the working-class citizen, already made to line up in the hope of getting selected for paid work, and pledging to follow his employer’s preferences as if he didn’t have any desires of his own, is affirmed by the higher power in the basement when it punishes his high-spirited and hedonistic coworker. The narrative itself takes a few ironic turns but never grants the full triumph that Bluebeard’s last wife attains. But Ilarde’s constancy is just as admirable, if somewhat disconcerting to anyone raised on a diet of Philippine popular narratives: the lowly folk who populate his stories are as casually invested with wisdom as the best of them would be in real life, though the question of why this property should be so rarely realized in film-stories made for them might be worth closer inspection by students of social psychology.

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