Movie reviews: All 5 Sinag Maynila 2016 feature films

The second edition of the Sinag Maynila Film Festival, which runs from April 21 to 26, has put the spotlight on prolific and up-and-coming filmmakers alike. This year’s films are each unique in its vision and take a variety of approaches and genres. (FULL LIST: Winners, Sinag Maynila Film Festival 2016)

Rappler movie critic Oggs Cruz takes a look at each of the feature-length films. Read his reviews below:

Dyamper review: High in the highway

 

Mes de Guzman’s Dyamper is observably rough on the edges. The imperfections however are strangely charming here. They add a certain candor to the quirky tale of a gang of three enterprising friends who steal from highway-plying trucks by surreptitiously jumping aboard them at night.

Shot almost entirely in monochrome, the film is a buffet of moods, moralities and intentions that all culminate in a pulpy climax that is expected from a film that aspires for social commentary.

Poknat (Timothy Castillo), the plucky kid who heads the film’s central trio of thieves (Alchris Galura and Carlo Aquino), rationalizes their petty crime with class struggle. Each and every time he jumps to steal a sack of rice from Manila-bound trucks is an up-yours to the institutionalized oppressors of the farming class where he and his parents belong.

However, his behavior belies his statement. He smokes weed. He is all too ready to leave for dead a person he bumps. He is in it for self-preservation, and he is in fact, aware of it. There are no victims in this film, just wanderers in a land where survival is the law.

In fact, De Guzman’s film, while donning the usual trappings of a social realist drama, is rife with millennial attitudes that are intriguingly and very cleverly spirited away from the typical affluence that gives birth to them.

Dyamper is all about escape, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual, that pervades a generation that has gotten used to quick fixes. The film is littered with the pleasures of drugs that are coupled with idle conversation and restrained libido, yet it never withdraws from its unique provincial setting where progress is stunted, superstitions exist, and dogs eat dogs.

 

Expressway review: Jazz on loop

 

Ato Bautista’s Expressway opens quite splendidly. Scorer Francis de Veyra’s ultra-cool and jazzy revision of Silent Night accompanies various shots of a tired old man with a gun.

The old man is Ben (Alvin Anson) and he is waiting for the first kill of his last mission as a hitman. His victim is a cop who seems to have angered Ben’s boss, and arrives at the scene horny and in the mood for romance.

He sees Ben waiting for him and asks his lover to leave before pleading for his life. After a few minutes, Ben shoots him dead. Later on, his partner Morris (Aljur Abrenica) enters the scene, telling Ben that he’s killed the girl as well.

It would have been terrific if the rest of Expressway has the same kind of stylized tension the opening possesses. Unfortunately, the initial awe easily wears off. Bautista struggles to maintain the noir-ish aesthetics and mood throughout the film but only succeeds in spurts and moments.

The film is drowning in dialogue, and while Anson maintains a somber and introspective poise, Abrenica overdoes the stereotype to the point of unduly boxing his character within the limits of what is expected out of a trigger-happy psychopath.

That is essentially the problem of Expressway. It delivers nothing new to the formula. It simply fails to surprise. The film feels like a jazz record played on loop. It is easy to ride its grooves because of the familiarity but there is no longer any element of sumptuous discovery.

It is essentially a guns-and-sex-riddled road trip towards death, and Bautista stubbornly refuses to take vital side trips that could have stalled the predictable end. Instead, the film relied heavily on style, which isn’t bad except that the unmeasured dosages of derivative aesthetics can be very tedious.

 

Lila review: Vintage psycho

 

Twenty-something Jess (Janine Gutierrez) enters her new home with wide-eyed fascination. She looks at the various antique pieces that are neatly lined up around the house adoringly, perhaps because they are things that are clearly strange to the fast-paced world that she has gotten accustomed to.

The owner of the house (Sherry Lara), a charismatic matron whose antiquated manner of speaking is easy to fall in love with, greets her with open arms. Jess, of course, instantly warms up to her, and the horror starts from there. 

Gino Santos’ Lila approaches everything that is old and used with the same wonderment as its main character, and that is essentially the source of most of its problems. The techniques are old. The plot is formulaic. The characters are boilerplate. That is all fine. However, Santos and screenwriter Patrick Vinalay doggedly follow the archaic grooves of the genre without ample grasp of logic. So the result is a film rendered almost unenjoyable because of loopholes and inconsistent characterizations.

It’s all a shame. There is promise to Lila. On paper, it feels like a reply or an update to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), where the iconic owner of a road-side hotel who also happens to have a crazed relationship with his mom terrorizes and murders his female guests.

Santos and Vinalay similarly crafted a horrific tale that is grounded on elementary psychology. Their film plays around with the concept of the empty nest syndrome, exaggerating it to the point of building the entire arc of their film around it.

Sadly, Santos’ film isn’t as taut and thrilling. It collapses under the pressure of building up towards a plausible climax and ends up being underwhelming, corny and grossly outdated.

 

Mrs. review: Cracking with grace

 

Adolfo Alix, Jr.’s Mrs. is an elegant portrait of a woman who is struggling to remain normal, notwithstanding the fact that she is living in a world that can only be described as crumbling and lopsided.

At first, there is very little that we know about Virginia (Elizabeth Oropesa). She lives in a crumbling old house that is built on top of a fault line. With her is Delia (Lotlot de Leon), a rather chatty maid who is pregnant and is scheduled to wed the father of the baby she is carrying.

Later on, we discover that Virginia has a sister who has been badgering her about selling the property, and that she has three children – one of which is in Canada, the other in Manila, and the last one gone missing because of his links to communists.

The beauty of Ralston Jover’s screenplay is that it is built around the audience’s discovery of the elements that surround Virginia’s life. As the film plods along, it unravels further aspects of her life, starting from the banal, teetering towards the tragic, and culminating with the absurd.

Along the way, we witness a woman who stands firm despite the constant badgering of elements that would render anybody else feeling victimized by cruel fate. Simply and perhaps cornily put, she is the house with cracks that withstood years of earthquakes.

 

TPO: Anatomy of abuse

 

Domestic violence is a tricky issue to tackle on film. Most filmmakers will dwell on the victim-victimizer aspect of the issue, and pepper the sordid affairs with hefty melodrama to ensure that the hearts of their audience would bleed for the women.

Thankfully, Joselito Altarejos does not opt for convenience. TPO, while initially depicting the battered wife (Mara Lopez) with delicate empathy, does not dwell on her status as the sole victim of the prevalent phenomenon of abuse.

The film’s structure jumps from one person to the next in an effort to give an ample view of a problem that should not be seen as something that is limited within the private lives of the people concerned. The problem is reflective of a bigger malaise. It is social.

The film astounds with its precision. Told through ingeniously framed long takes where a lot of the action is rendered unseen by the lack of movement, TPO cleverly puts the audience in an infuriating situation where information is skewed. The apt aesthetics is complemented by a detailed sound design that gives away a notion that there is a world beyond the limiting frames of the scene.

Altarejos understands the power of restriction, which lends to his discourse on domestic abuse, and how it is essentially a by-product of a patriarchal society that promotes restraint and silence even amidst the most demeaning of exploitation.

TPO is clearly an intelligent film. Its creative wit however does not lessen its emotional impact. Without having to resort to histrionics, the film is quietly poignant in portraying a family that is being torn apart not by the unique traits of individuals but by a culture that has turned complacent toward the elements that give birth to abuse. 

The film’s last shot is telling of Altarejos’ discourse. Outside the quaint and seemingly innocent house where all the abuse happens, a marching band chants the name of Mama Mary. We only see the joy and the colors, because beyond the painted walls of an ordinary looking abode lies a problem that is too complex to be portrayed as simple melodrama. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.