SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     Particularly in its early scenes, Director Jun Lana's Bakit Lahat ng Gwapo may Boyfriend?! (Viva Films, IdeaFirst Company, 2016) is extraordinarily funny. The film builds on theatrical direct-address conventions to the point of comic absurdity. Films with direct-to-camera narration, featuring characters who address viewers as if they are part of their universe, are rare for a good reason. Audiences immediately pay attention when they are directly spoken to, but there are downsides to having characters break the fourth wall. These moments draw attention to storytelling contrivances and shatter the window-to-another-world illusion that most filmmakers work hard to create. Kylie (Anne Curtis) has no qualms about turning to the camera and sharing a joke with the audience. She's a true flirt. Kylie bitches with a skill for camp comebacks. Curtis oozes irresistible warmth and humor that literally shape up the film's identity. Her witty remarks are always delivered on time with facial expressions that never feel forced. More importantly, a lot of the risky material becomes harmless precisely because of her perfect management of the funny and the truth. Dennis Trillo is excellent as Diego, the young and sensitive guy who is determined not to wear masks but routinely has to make compromises. Paolo Ballesteros' Benj is the only one who appears slightly out of sync, but his scenes with Curtis are nevertheless quite entertaining. Bakit Lahat ng Gwapo may Boyfriend?! could have been a seriously obnoxious farce full of clichés, fortunately, the film hits all of its targets with such precision, honesty and terrific sense of humor making it an absolute delight to watch.

     The movie's 1080p transfer is gorgeous. It's inherently soft, but details are refined within the image's constraints and context. Skin showcases an array of complexities with ease. Brick, stone and concrete architecture, and accents are home to a wide array of tactile, intimate textures. Heavy suit fabrics or more delicate garments are finely revealing. Colors lack vibrance, but they're exquisitely reproduced within the movie's intended appearance. Nothing particularly pops, but brighter accents stand apart and consistency reigns throughout. Black levels hold firm and reveal positive shadow detail. Skin tones appear accurate, only pushing warm when lighting demands. Compression artifacts and film flaws are few and far between. Soundtrack isn't action-movie engaging but it's well designed and executed. Music is thoroughly rich and detailed with positive instrumental definition, wide front stage spacing. The track carries a wide assortment of complimentary ambient effects throughout, often submerging the listener into the movie's setting. Bustle on the streets, background music and chatter and clatter at a restaurant and other small details richly involve the listener in each location. Bakit Lahat ng Gwapo may Boyfriend?! is a great comedy whose script offers far more than just outrageous camp.

Screenplay: Denoy Navarro-Punio, Renei Dimla, Ivan Andrew Payawal, Percival Intalan

Sound Engineers: Bebet Casas, Immanuel Verona

Musical Directors: Richard Gonzales, Jay Dominguez

Editor: Noah Tonga

Production Designer: Vanessa Uriarte

Director of Photography: Mackie Galvez

Directed By: Jun Robles Lana

     By opening the doom of an obsession analytically understood and predictable, Maging Akin Ka Lamang becomes a meditation on the “woman’s film” rather than a direct experience and skirts the depths and heights of the great tragedies of obsession. Rosita Monteverde embraces her martyrdom from the beginning. There is no dramatic conflict. Tolentino's Rosita begins as an outsider, intersecting with society only to seek a human form for her obsession. Brocka understands that such an obsession is not only magnificent but terrible, not only sublime, but selfish and cruel. He gave us, in the most deeply sympathetic “rejected lover” ever created, (Jay Ilagan's Ernie Azurin), the true measure of this cruelty. Their sense of the wholeness that is forfeited or lost by those who would defy society and live at its edge. They see, with ambivalence, the wholeness that is left behind, but they also see, with ambivalence, the obsession to which love and madness can lead. Loss and gain, the components of paradox, are simultaneously present in the vertiginous daring of style, whereas Brocka’s devotion to the truth has the effect of constantly justifying Rosita’s actions, redeeming them with gravity, without ever plunging her into the abyss of romantic folly and cruelty that might, paradoxically, have given her the dimension of greatness.

Sound Supervision: Vic Macamay

Production Designer: Edgar Martin Littaua

Musical Director: Willy Cruz

Screenplay: Jose Dalisay, Jr.

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Director of Photography: Rody Lacap

Directed By: Lino Brocka

     At its best, Brillante Mendoza's Serbis (Centerstage Productions, Swift Productions, 2008) is a vibrant slice of life that establishes the theater as a living organism nurturing a society of outcasts. More than just a movie palace, the theater also serves as home for the family that runs it, with tiny, jury-rigged spaces scattered throughout its four floors. Three generations of the family live in the theater and the atmosphere has clearly affected the children, including Jewel (Roxane Jordan), a young woman striking erotic poses in the opening shot and Ronald (Kristofer King), a projectionist getting head from a tranny hooker. The matriarch Nanay Flor, a tough-willed woman played by Gina Pareño, out of the picture much of the time is wrapped up in a bigamy suit against her husband that's dividing the family in half. In the meantime, her daughter Nayda (Jaclyn Jose) minds the fort, presiding over the business while tending to other matters, like cousin Alan (Coco Martin) who's trying to dodge his pregnant girlfriend. But Serbis also has a three-dimensional vividness that makes it come alive. Although Mendoza didn't care to resolve all of the many subplots, the film gives a complete picture of a family, a business, and a city in disarray, and its looming fallout.

     Anyone who saw Serbis theatrically will know that it features a rather soft, often diffused image and that continues with this latest high definition release. The opening sequence looks distressingly soft, while not mind-blowingly sharp, it is certainly a major step up from the old DVD release. Fine detail is best in close-ups, as is to be expected, but some of the establishing shots of the theater and its inhabitants pop rather nicely, all things considered. Grain structure is also well intact and in fact some viewers may be bothered by some of the overly grainy sequences, especially in the more dimly lit scenes. The film does suffer from some noticeable edge enhancement and fairly consistent crush in the dark interior scenes. Serbis never had a very aggressive sound design and that lack of a wow factor carries through to the PCM stereo mix in the original Tagalog with burned-in English subtitles. There's nothing horrible about this mix in any way, shape or form, other than its obvious narrowness. Dialogue is crisp and clear and the evocative score sounds fantastic. The film is rather small scale, from a sound design standpoint and while a 5.1 repurposing may have added some space and depth to the crowd scenes inside the theater, there probably wouldn't have been much to gain from such a surround revision. Serbis feels too surreal and conceptual to be taken as docu-verisimilitude, but it doesn't need to settle for such conventions when every frame is alive, breathing dank sweat and sighing desperation. This house of sin and cinema runs by its own rules.

Sound: Emmanuel Nolet Clemente

Production Design: Benjamin Padero, Carlo Tabije

Editing: Claire Villa-Real

Music: Gian Gianan

Director of Photogrtaphy: Odyssey Flores

Screenplay: Armando Lao

Directed By: Brillante Ma. Mendoza

     Ang Lalaki sa Buhay ni Selya (Star Pacific Cinema, 1997) is very much a chamber piece. It has a strong cast which is sadly lumbered with dialogue that relies too often on well-worn clichés. It’s a low-key drama that works well in its quieter moments, the intimacy between the small cast is palpable at its crucial moments. There are some clunky character exchanges overly expositional dialogue or an extraneous exchange slightly cringeworthy soap-like chit chat, when a clever, quieter, more filmic sequence would have much more impact. Having said this, when Bibeth Orteza's writing is at its best, these problems are non-existent and the wonderful performances by the tightly-knit cast really comes through and definitely make up for a bit of bad dialogue. Rosanna Roces is strong as Selya, aware that something is unsettling her husband but unaware just what. Ricky Davao as Ramon is superb and carries most of the storyline. Director Carlos Sigiuon-Reyna keeps the plot boiling and everything teeters perilously close to soapy drama. He keeps the camera moving but the action fairly barrels along. Ang Lalaki sa Buhay ni Selya is a powerful film that doesn’t live up to its full potential.

     After it's recent restoration the entire film looks healthy and vibrant, boasting an exceptional range of beautiful primaries and excellent nuances. This makes the already striking cinematography look even more impressive and on a larger screen some of the outdoor visuals truly look quite magnificent. Depth and clarity remain very pleasing throughout the entire film, but I must mention that because of location and stylistic choices some minor density fluctuations can be observed. Typically the most obvious ones are during darker footage but even so, it is quite easy to tell that they are part of the original cinematography. There are absolutely no traces of problematic de-graining or sharpening adjustments. Image stability is excellent. The soundtrack incorporates a wide range of organic sounds and noises, so balance and separation are very important. Fortunately, the two-channel track serves the film really well. All of its basic characteristics are solid and without a whiff of age-related anomalies. Ang Lalaki sa Buhay ni Selya isn’t always an easy watch but it’s an interesting and emotional ride.

Original Sound: Joseph Olfindo, Rannie Euloran

Music: Ryan Cayabyab

Production Design: Joey Luna

Edited By: Manet A. Dayrit

Director of Photography: Yam Laranas

Written By: Bibeth Orteza

Directed By: Carlos Sigiuon-Reyna

        Like the brief relationship it portrays, Unfriend’s gut-punch emotional impact depends on just how unexpected its final trajectory is. The pitch builds slowly but with geometric progression, climaxing in an affective register that almost belongs to another genre entirely. The near-final scene would be a total cliché if it weren’t so entirely earned and so seamlessly, devastatingly perfect. I’m worried (really quite anxious) not to oversell the film, to create expectations when it depends so much on surprise. The surprise of this film is just how ambitious it is, how unhurried its characterizations are, surreptitiously setting up backstory that it patiently waits to pay off, how little self-regard the actors betray, never playing the subtext in their emotionally complex performances, how totally the script avoids spelling out its themes, staging a dialogue between its leads that’s of such unpretentious philosophical resonance that you don’t quite realize how exacting it is until long after you’ve seen the movie. There is a last-act revelation captured with ethnographic and empathetic precision in which Jonathan (Angelo Ilagan) and David (Sandino Martin) learn they’re connected in a way that neither had realized. Unfriend (Solar Entertainment, Center Stage Productions, BeyondtheBox, Inc., 2014)  is a film of constant anxiety and agitation. In other words a pretty fair approximation of the teenage mindset. Joselito Altarejos works wonders with crisply framed takes and two astonishingly sincere and nuanced performances. This is a film full of languid moments which are transformed by the context into instances of discovery and revelations of personality. David's outsider status is emphasized by the casting of Martin in the role. As the film wears on and David’s desperation to collapse his divided worlds into one becomes more acute, Martin’s almost ethereal difference becomes intrinsic to our understanding of the character.

     Unfriend looks even better, with a high definition transfer that near-perfectly reproduces Altarejos and cinematographer Arvin Viola's visual whirlwind of texture. The monochromatic scenes that open Unfriend are striking, with deep blacks and brilliant whites, evocative of early 1960s New Wave. Where Viola comes into his own, though, is the way he captures dingy rooms, kitchens lit with bare fluorescent bulbs and low-light nighttime exteriors. Colors are saturated, contrast is pumped and everything looks more real than real. The film's grain structure is fully intact, there's no evidence of digital manipulation of any kind and clarity is exceptional. While not as drastic an improvement as the picture quality, the film's soundtrack gets a significant bolstering thanks to a strong 2-channel mix. The sound design and overall clarity seem somewhat limited by the on-location source recordings, but acoustically there's a nice sense of place and the effects are clean. Voices can occasionally be overwhelmed by the chaos of their surroundings, but most of the dialogue is perfectly mixed. With Unfriend, Altarejos is rapidly becoming a crucial portraitist of the fragility of youth.

Screenplay: Zigcarlo Dulay

Director of Photography: Arvin Viola

Musical Scorer: Richard Gonzales

Film Editors: Zig Dulay, Joselito Altarejos

Production Designer: Lester Jacinto

Sound: Don San Miguel, Andrew Milallos

Director: J. Altarejos