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But all’s not well on the horizon. The Polo Club, their favorite hangout,
was bought by Bernice (Mylene Dizon),
a former club cashier who got hitched to a billionaire. Bernice plans to turn
the club into a Yaya Mall. The girls
are appalled. After all, they couldn't fraternize with the masa. What becomes of their
memories? More importantly, what happens to the employees of the club, some of
whom have worked there half their lives. Lizzie turns to her dad for help, but
he wouldn't budge so she takes matters into her hand. She organizes a picket to
protest against the plan of the new owner. This gets them arrested for their
stunt.
As punishment, Lizzie is sent to the remote town of Sapang Bato to join her lola (Nova Villa) and cousin Becca (Barbie
Forteza). But provincial life is far removed from Lizzie’s cosmopolitan
lifestyle. There are no clubs, no internet or wifi, and phone signal is intermittent, she had to climb a tree to
secure one. Lizzie invites her friends to help get over the tedium of rural
living, but they end up fighting with each other. What’s worse, Lizzie becomes
a big burden, financial and otherwise, to her well meaning grandmother (her lola’s sister) and cousin.
Back in the city, Danielle starts to deal with her own financial
troubles the only way she can. So she devises ways to hook up with Inaki Montinola
(Alden Richards) whose fortune is
legendary. With the help of Santi (Mikael
Daez), a stranger he met at a party, she invites Inaki for dinner. Will she
get an audience with the eligible bachelor? Would Inaki show up? Meanwhile,
Margaux and Claudia are fighting over Benjo (Aljur Abrenica), the club’s good looking stable boy-cum-waiter who seems oblivious to the
girls’ constant flirting. With their internal strife piling up, the fall of the
Polo Club seems inevitable… or is it?
Andoy Ranay’s “Sosy Problems” is riddled with
loopholes, you start to wonder if there were cognitive beings driving this
cinematic vehicle. Aside from the threadbare plot, the motives of the
characters are dubious. If these people truly had a plethora of riches, they
had several options in the drawing room: 1. Hire a lawyer to negotiate their
demands, not that they have proprietary say on a privately owned property; 2. Pool
their resources and gather their amigas
to buy the property from the new owner; 3. Take to the media by bombarding the
public with articles about the poor employees; 4. Purchase another property and
equip it with even better facilities. Planking at the facade is as ridiculous
as the thought of someone purchasing the playground of the rich and famous. Besides,
who did Bernice marry – the Prince of Brunei?
While on sabbatical at the province, Lizzie’s lola had to “steal” from her other granddaughter’s piggy bank because they were
low on resources to support Lizzie’s whims. Didn't Lizzie’s dad (Johnny Revilla), a successful hotelier,
send enough money to finance her daughter’s stay in the province? The lola could have easily asked from Lizzie’s
dad and, surely, he wouldn't mind sending a few thousands of pesos. A lola stealing from her granddaughter is a
grave mistake, even if this were meant for good intentions. Stealing is 8th
of the Ten Commandments, remember? This narrative strain is ill advised and
reminds me of Sef Cadayona’s sexual assault in Emmanuel dela Cruz’s disputable “Slumber Party” where “rape” is horrendously treated with easy
humor. We've never heard of grandmothers acting like juveniles since Australia’s
Oscar-nominated “Animal Kingdom”. This isn't Oscar-worthy.
The movie is, however, made bearable by the delectable turn of its lead
stars portraying some of the most self-absorbed characters in local cinema.
Rhian Ramos hams it up and shows why this role was written for her. She is brilliant and playful as bratty Lizzie. Think Alicia Silverstone's "Cher". Though humor in the film is
a hit-and-miss affair, many of the gags involving our four ladies actually work. Enthusiasm is such an infectious malady.
Take the “pilapil” (dike) scene: the girls wanted to visit the "pilapil” because someone told them it’s beautiful out there. Without an inkling of idea what a “pilapil” is,
they march through dikes with high heels, wide brimmed hats and designer
bags thinking they were heading into some kind of Shangrila when, in fact, they've reached their destination many times over. This really cracked me up.
Another favorite scene was when the girls found a pot of mud they all thought
was a facial regimen. They started rubbing mud all over their faces while Claudia assures
her friends with, “Don’t panic; it’s
organic.” On the other hand, Bianca King’s part was the most sympathetic. Her story was
better told than the rest. And King came out less of a caricature.
Mikael Daez registers
strongly as the mysterious Santi, you couldn’t take your eyes off him. He was
charming and he spoke well. Aljur Abrenica is a fetching Benjo, the club’s
all-around boy, but then he isn't made to do much. There are cameos by Ruffa Gutierrez who plays the role of a lifestyle broadcast executive who wants to run a story about the girls. Tim Yap plays a bigger part (than previous movie roles) as Ruffa's lifestyle reporter.
The film actually stumbles hard as it scrambles into its finish line.
Story telling turned reckless and banked on fast resolutions. The positive comeuppance
felt undeserved because there were untold chapters that needed more narrative
discourse. Elsewhere, the grapevine has tongues wagging: Ranay, the film’s director started
acting flaky (think Angelina Kanapi) because his boyfriend left him.
Sometime November, the still unfinished product was directorless. Grief has a
way of skewing priorities, I know, but isn't Ranay a veteran theater habitue? You’d expect the demeanor of a stage professional, right? This was why Joyce Bernal was allegedly taken into
the fold to finish the unfinished and
do her editing magic. If this is true, then someone clearly doesn't deserve to
work in the business again. Work is work. Oscar Wilde once said, “There’s always something ridiculous about
the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.” With grief, people do ridiculous things. Unfortunately, he didn't suffer alone.
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| Aljur Abrenica. This photo only courtesy of http://raindeocampo.files.wordpress.com |
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| Mikael Daez is Santi aka Santiago Elizalde, lawyer and son of an influential scion. |
4 comments:
maliban sa pagnanakaw ni nova villa, pinalampas din yung magnanakaw sa public funds yung tatay ni bianca king! nahuli nga ng pulis but here comes mikhael daez offering backdoor negotiations, for what? para mapalaya ang isang kurakot na public official?? and that is all okay for the filmmakers? it wasnt even treated satirically. they were like very serious in going about it like the kurakot Dad is some victim of injustice.
-j.lax
Jason:
So true. But you see, this systematic cover up of misdeeds has become so common that most people take them as part of the system, and the moral repercussions are ignored altogether. There are so many erroneous things/concept in this film. :(
ie ranay's boyfriend leaving him...
Learned it here first. Haha. Akala ko GMA-7 said it's finished already so shooting stopped, but ranay protested.
Yeah the film is horrible. I thought it would be the best among the line-up (minus Thy Womb), but it was the worst.
Mark:
I think principal photography was basically done, but it isn't a finished product as such, di ba, since you have to clean the scenes, splice them, and piece them together to make a finished product.
Interesting side story, right? Sometimes I have an inclination to just write "chismis" here because they're easier, and definitely more fun to write. ;)
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