How TV ate the movies
Serbis, the new film by the prolific Brillante Mendoza, will compete at the Cannes filmfest. The last Filipino movie in competition at Cannes was Lino Brocka’s Orapronobis. Mendoza’s Foster Child was screened at the Directors’ Fortnight last year. This year Raya Martin’s new movie premieres at that event. (Click to see a new short by Raya.) Here’s the annual Pinoy movie roundup.
Seven of the top ten movies at the Philippine box office in 2007 were sequels to Hollywood blockbusters—Spider-Man 3, the fifth Harry Potter movie, the third Pirates of the Caribbean, and in the case of Transformers, the beginning of a hit franchise. Standing in the way of total American domination were three local productions: One More Chance, A Love Story, and Ouija. These three were produced by the two top television networks, featured their contract stars, and were heavily promoted on TV. The mainstream movie industry is surviving, primarily as an adjunct to network programming. Is it any wonder that the most commercially successful Filipino movies today are essentially television shows for the big screen?
Consider the number one Filipino movie of the year (number four overall), a romantic comedy called One More Chance. It stars Bea Alonso and John Lloyd Cruz, who appear on a daily telenovela (soap opera) on ABS-CBN. Directed by Cathy Garcia Molina, One More Chance is about a young couple who separate, fall in love with other people, realize that they are destined for each other, and reunite just in time for the ending. But for the clothes and hairstyles, and the fact that the heroine has a professional career, the movie might have been made in the late 1950s. The combination of light comedy and verbose melodramatic confrontations is one of the oldest working formulas in Filipino cinema; ABS-CBN/Star Cinema has updated it with fast editing, blaring pop songs, and a supporting cast whose entire function is to offer the couple romantic advice. The real-world setting (the lifestyles of young urban professionals and the demands of their jobs) fools no one—in this movie, even the clients ask the leads if they’ve gotten back together yet. To its credit, One More Chance knows exactly what it is: a studio product aimed squarely at the fans of its attractive, “bankable†stars. The target audience demands “kilig†moments — scenes in which the hero and heroine openly express their feelings for each other, preferably in “quotable†lines — and the movie gives it to them. Subtlety is forbidden; everything must be overstated. One More Chance is highly successful as a product and as an advertisement for future TV shows starring Alonso and Cruz; its cinematic qualities are another topic altogether. Box office take: US$3.68 million.