A hundred peso for this piece of art directed by a name I thought I never heard before. Hearing the price makes us want to crawl back to our man caves and just torrent the entire thing--but no we didn't. I remember before the film start I simply told him, "We might as well support independent films." He gave me a silhouette of a nod, the videotheque was underlit of course, or as any film showings. A part of me wants to say to him that I wish it was the local independent filmmakers we are supporting, but we are pretty noisy already.

What I first noticed was the weakness of the screenplay. There are times that the poetry was saturated by the cheesiness of the rendition of it in our language. But that is simply because I am a Filipino. And practically, the guy who made this is creating things from an outside lens. But nevertheless, absent of my Filipino faculties, I couldn't argue that the film was weak in script.

As I've read about it, it turns out that it was really a challenging task for S.E. But he did a remarkable thing by opting to go outside his comfort zone, and make the film in Filipino. On one of his interviews he was asked:

How was it selling the project to financiers?

  “The project generated much interest but the idea to shoot it in Tagalog that made the project hard to sell to financiers. I just couldn’t imagine going to the Philippines and making a film there where the actors spoke English. Great films always transcend their subtitles. I had to at least aim in the same direction, or risk the film’s authenticity.”

On the other hand I think the narrative started with a heavy atmosphere--very poignant if I may attest. I guess anything that tackles poverty is like a Van de Graaf generator to a lot of people, to me at the very least. Then it went from a striking build up to a seemingly endless series of misfits for the characters to the point that it turned already into a poverty porn. But who wouldn't be churned? After all, it's still porn.

As the film rolled, I realized I was looking at it the wrong way. I was fixated with the fact that the picture was trying to make me see Metro Manila and the grass-roots poverty that experienced within it. I guess when they make a film based on the place where you live, you can't help but be territorial about it. But S.E. was good. He made me see that this isn't just poverty porn. He made me see that this wasn't about Metro Manila at all. It was about the trials of the third-world and the centralization that is imminent when people can't fend for themselves in their respective rural areas.

But how effective?

I guess this is the part where you intrigue yourself as to whether watch it or not. But if you want some kind of noir, a heist, an actor that made me believe he was a total amateur simply because he should be a doofus at the start, some melodrama, again tits and of course the adventures of Oscar "puki ng inang" Ramirez in Metro fucking Manila, do i really need to spell the obvious?