For a second year in a row, the Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) continues its expanded slate of 10 full-length films, now screened alongside 10 competing student shorts, which is part of the festival’s collaboration with the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP).
Like in the past years, though, this golden edition is still marred by uneven cinema shares, despite the 900 cinemas making room for the festival nationwide. In fact, prior to MMFF’s opening run, the likes of Zig Dulay’s Green Bones was only allotted 40 theaters, while Pepe Diokno’s Isang Himala had to make do with 31 slots due to its genre and alleged lack of box-office stars. This, even as Dulay’s Firefly copped last year’s Best Picture, while Diokno won best director for GomBurZa. It’s quite telling for a festival striving to promote local cinema and culture.
Nevertheless, here are five movies that are worth a visit to the theaters for contrasting reasons.
Isang Himala (Pepe Diokno)
In his brisk return to MMFF, Pepe Diokno takes on the gargantuan task to reinvent a critically renowned Filipino musical based on a classic that doubles as a testament to the iconicities of Ricky Lee, Ishmael Bernal, and Nora Aunor as among the country’s national artists for cinema.
With Lee still working on the text and Aunor having a special participation, Diokno gathers the same artistic team that steered the 2018 staging Himala: Isang Musikal, and what he calibrates in this retelling about a town eroded by an alleged holy sighting are far more pointed interrogations of faith, womanhood, and precarity.
Though the film cannot totally eclipse its artifice, it makes up for it through its astounding soundscape, Diokno’s visual recalibrations, and the prowess of its ensemble, led by Aicelle Santos, Bituin Escalante, and Kakki Teodoro, who are such forces on the big screen — wow, in many senses of the word. Above anything, what Isang Himala offers us is a work that puts faith in its audience to want something more, an alternative that demands to be seen by a wider public.
WATCH: Rappler Talk Entertainment: Pepe Diokno and Bituin Escalante on ‘Isang Himala’
Green Bones (Zig Dulay)
Zig Dulay’s Green Bones is by all means a crowd-pleaser. It’s a pensive, bifurcated drama about the vexing consequences of grief and psychology of truth that’s pretty intriguing to mull over post-Duterte regime — a period when we’re abrasively told how to view certain lives. At the heart of the story is a falsely accused prisoner Domingo Zamora (Dennis Trillo) and corrections officer Xavier Gonzaga (Ruru Madrid), who are wrestling with opposing views in life complicated by circumstances they’ve put up with.
Though still overindulgent, Dulay’s approach here is far more useful than in Firefly, favoring narration, flashbacks, and parallel incidents to present its arguments on justice and the types of people who we think should afford it. Like in the director’s past titles, this latest work is heavy on drone shots striving to paint a portrait of the penal colony as a sweeping moral terrain, where freedom is observed by the hour, though, at times, there remains a generic feel to it. Viewers won’t need some deus ex machina to decipher where the story is heading, but what makes Green Bones so infectious is how the performances at its center find notes of grace and candor.
READ: Seeking redemption with Zig Dulay’s latest MMFF drama ‘Green Bones’
Strange Frequencies: Taiwan Killer Hospital (Kerwin Go)
You could call this found footage horror, a rousing remake of the 2018 South Korean movie Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, a dark horse at this year’s MMFF. Local celebrities and specter hunters in search of virality led by Enrique Gil, who co-produced the film and playing himself like the rest of the cast, set up a trip to a haunted hospital in Tainan, recording everything to the terrifying end. The unsteady, point-of-view camerawork plunges us into a sensory mood, heightened by the manic editing. It is unabashedly meta and spiked with so much adrenaline, particularly when things take a dreadful turn, allowing us to bask in the genuine, at times obnoxious psyche of its characters. Even as the script does not arrive at profound answers about its shape-shifting threats and still requires some meaty plot, it’s a horror flick that’s pretty confident on its own.
And the Breadwinner Is… (Jun Lana)
Much has been said about this long-awaited collaboration between Jun Lana and Vice Ganda, touting it as not only its lead star’s foray into heavy drama but also a rebrand of her body of work post-Wenn Deramas and past blockbuster comedies. But even as Vice tries all her might to spin this tale into a compelling portrait of a breadwinner seeking greener pastures abroad, then returning home only to find that all her efforts are wasted, the movie succumbs to its mounting and text, penned by Lana alongside Daisy Cayanan and Jumbo Albano.
The picture has issues with flow, boasting a torrent of ideas and conflicts in one scene, then conveniently speeding its resolutions in the next. The film could have really reaped something more biting had it committed wholeheartedly to its dramatic conceit and provided the rest of the characters more plotlines instead of treating them as mere vehicles to forge more inciting incidents.
There’s no doubt that Lana can harness the most out of his stars. It’s a question of whether or not he’s willing to liberate himself and, by extension, his actors from the tendencies that thwart the criticality of his recent titles. In this case, And the Breadwinner Is suffers from trying to be too meta, reprising previous roles Vice has played, like a disclaimer about the movie’s inability to imagine past what is readily available to its titular character. To some extent, it’s also too chronically online for its own good. Granted that it’s meant to keep the DNA of a Vice Ganda movie intact, but isn’t that what this whole thing is trying to do away with?
If you could move past all the narrative fat and lapses to bask in a rather long, profoundly crushing juncture in the second half, flexing the ensemble’s strengths and invoking Lana’s gorgeous blocking in Anino Sa Likod ng Buwan, then you may have just found a reason enough to check this one out.
Espantaho (Chito Roño)
Hilarity meets horror in this surreal, near-camp experience about pestilence, marital tensions, and scarecrow-induced killings. Monet (Judy Ann Santos) finds her life upended by a mysterious arrival of a cursed, antique painting, while she oversees the funeral of her dead father, prompting the return of the latter’s legal family, led by the matriarch Adele (Chanda Romero). This, on top of ominous visions the protagonist deals with, as well as the nagging presence of her mother (Lorna Tolentino), who keeps by her side because of her epilepsy.
The result is a movie that asks its audience to partake in some heavy magical thinking for its story to work. The vision of director Chito Roño, of horrors Feng Shui and Sukob, glaringly clashes with the writing of Chris Martinez, most notable for comedies like Kimmy Dora and Ang Babae sa Septic Tank. The text rushes into dispatching its characters, just as Benjo Ferrer’s editing migrates between scenes, without any regard for momentum, thereby making the horror feel only secondary to the dramatic plotlines it unravels. You can practically feel that something bizarre is about to happen when the camera tilts or pans out, paired with a score that simply won’t buckle.
But the acting is pretty full-on. Santos, Romero, and Tolentino go toe to toe with each other, even as their arguments feel so teleserye-coded. At times, they go so over the top for no reason, resulting in an uneven tone. But is it worth the effort? Well, yes! If anything, it’s the lone aspect that tries to make up for the movie’s rather unruly, windswept plotting. I’d go as far as to say that it’s among the best encounters I had at the theaters this year because of how absurdly funny it could get. Espantaho only runs for an hour and a half, which gives the audience just a perfect amount of time to suffer — joyously. – Rappler.com
The Metro Manila Film Festival runs until January 7, 2025.