Vince Tan's Laro - Comedy Beyond Sex Comedy

Melos (Tofee Calma) is an ISO-certified egotistical, recently out-of-work, albeit flamboyantly swishy director who alienates everyone around him. He is why “cantankerous’ and “shrew” were coined. After having lost yet another account at an advertising firm, Melos finds himself out of people to oppress and “games” to play (thus the title) so he conjures one in the confines of his household.

In the said houselhold, Melos employs Aljur (James Pinca), the driver who moonlights as his gardener and masseur; and Dingdong (Brad Laurente), the houseboy (a former welder) who steadily dismisses his employer’s sexual advances. To concoct a story out of his employees, Melos invites Aljur’s estranged wife Bea (Irish Contreras) to work for him. Aljur and Bea have been married for 4 years, but after a financial debacle with Bea’s father, Aljur storms out of his marriage, departing Isabela and finding a job in Manila. The couple hasn’t seen each other in a year. Aljur is appalled working alongside Bea, but helpless with the turn of events. He has to live and stay with his wife who still has the hots for him. To further thicken the plot, Melos locates Dingdong’s girl friend Angelica (Jenaira Chu) who just finished her contract as a sales clerk at a mall, and is thus, unemployed. Melos offers her a job as housekeeper.

Now that all the characters have been accounted for, the willful director plots a sexual rigodon that would have married Bea seduce Brad, and have Angelica beguile the married Aljur. It’s a perfect scenario worth writing about, right? But little did Melos realize, that such couplings would, errr... “bend” in the most unforeseen manner.

Sex comedy is a rarely dealt cinematic genre mostly because local humor is mostly huddled by the lack of genuine comic ideas and inspired writing. Vince Tan’s “Laro” succeeds in the most unusual manner. It is funny when it shouldn’t be, and is even more hilarious in its technical proficiency. The writer tries hard to fill his story with too much verbal clutter, you do wonder which book of quotations he’s taken them from. This is the other spectrum of a drugged out Danny Zialcita, where everyone is equipped with a badly delivered repartee.

Let’s start with the opening scene at a conference room where a storyboard meeting is taking place. When a presentation displeases Melos, he conflagrates like a daft faggot, mouthing his English lines with ridiculous struggle, I seriously felt sad for the Queen’s language. When will directors learn a simple lesson? If your actor bleeds from his simple English lines, it’s wiser to have him deliver in Tagalog. Or you run the risk of having him dig himself a hole, while uncomfortably writhing in precarious splendor. When the English language sends your actors to anaphylactic shock, throw a lifevest of Tagalog phrases!

Tofee Calma has been in the business for more than a decade (“Divino: Anak ni Totoy Mola”, “Init ng Laman”, “Bawal”, “Magagandang Hayop”, “Paligayahin Mo Ako”, “Dalagang Dagat” – and no, he didn’t play the mermaid), but watching him perform on screen felt like he hasn’t learned much from his enviable resume (where he mostly played the leading man). It was painful to watch him and even more so listening to him. If you’ve always wondered if Calma – playing a homosexual director – is indeed gay, you would have your doubts here. That’s how bad he is as an actor. He is awkward and he articulates as though there’s a gum stuck in his incisors and a furball down his larynx. He fills his persona with wasted facial contortions and lavishly unnecessary animated spiels; it was like a bad drag show in a two-bit comedy bar. When a character eventually quips, “You’re out of ritz” when it’s an easy “reach” – I had goose bumps! These are the personalities who populate the advertising world? Gosh, my yaya can enunciate better! It must have been all those years peeping through windows in my Speech and Drama classes! 

The film generously delivers the requisite nudities – both male and female; lots of them in fact! James Pinca, who registers strongly, enjoys half a dozen shower scenes. What would the Pink Film industry be like if shower scenes were discarded and banned altogether, can you imagine? It would be catastrophic! Each pink film would lose more than 50% of their running time. Shiver! Now back to Pinca; yes, he has several full monties, some in split-second flashes; others in more gratuitous displays. Unfortunately, Pinca’s promise in Vince Tan’s “Private Nights” dwindles into inevitable squander. He throws his lines like a 6 year old and his verbal cadence is almost always a uniform discourse. Pinca’s delivery feels like a dimension of emotionality starkly present in the most sublime experiences – like when buying pork chop! It is sad!

But – if Pinca is misguided by his non-directing director, Brad Laurente does even worse. In fact, Pinca becomes a luminous thespian beside Laurente whose declarative sentences are similar to his interrogative and exclamatory! His character – houseboy Dingdong (carelessly written “Dindong” at the credits) is constantly seduced by his employer Melos. Aljur keeps suggesting that he should take advantage of Melos’ indecent proposal. When it was Bea’s turn to seduce him, he gladly acquiesces with her warning: “Sige tanggihan mo ako, sisigaw ako!” When his girl friend joins him there, this displeased him. Why? The motivation of this character is so sketchy, I might as well benefit from counting the nails on my ceiling than trying to make sense from the narrative at hand!

Irish Contreras, looking heavier than when she was a Viva Hot Babe (see photo somewhere in this post for comparison), fills her character with a lot of – ugh – noise! She’s the scorned wife who’s eventually found her husband – miraculously! She appears in some full frontal scenes – including one where she shares the shower with Pinca. Jenaira Chu offers a mammarian peekaboo while she tries to seduce Pinca.

The lines spouted by the characters are a mere smokescreen of their emptiness. Try this one: “Katulong ka lang dito,” declares Angelica, then further says,”Ako, housekeeper!” I am glad she sees a thin line dividing the two terms. I don’t! In another scene, Melos accuses Dingdong: “Nakatikim ka lang ng bagong putahe, nagbago ka na!” But Dingdong hasn’t really changed. He still rebuffs his employer’s advances. Whatever change Melos is referring to must have been edited out? Or are the director and scriptwriter merely perplexed? There are ominous and repeated references to plants and animals: “Ang pusa kapag nakalingat, maghahanap ng iba!” Then there are allusions on “hilaw na langka”, “hilaw na papaya” and their “dagta”! Aren’t we getting too zoological and botanical? Fun!

There’s more: “Matuto kayong kumilatis ng ginto para ‘di kayo matanso!” Melos advises Bea and Angelica. But he himself was a victim of the boys’ deception, wasn’t he? Bea even describes her genitals as “nasusungkit sa putik” while Angelica’s was straight out of the “burak”. Ano daw? Doesn’t sungkit involve an elevated place? As far as I’m concerned, you wade in the mire; you don’t pick mud. Jos ko! The whole film is filled with such utter nonsense, scrounging the savoir vivre of “No Other Woman” this side of Pink Cinema. Some lines come too soon, like coitus interruptus: when Bea catches Angelica fiddling Aljur’s joystick, she retorts: “Ang galling n’yong mag patay malisya!” – even before they’re able to do just that! How can they feign innocence when they haven’t even seen her yet?

Jenaira Chu masters the "smoldering look". She has exactly similar poses in "Anton Tubero" and "Kubli".

Director Vince Tan has rechristened himself (a symbolic "rebirth" maybe?) , doing away with his old moniker – Neal “Buboy” Tan – the purveyor of dozens of B-exploitation flicks in the 90’s: “Kakaibang Karisma”, “Siya’y Nagdadalaga”, “Pilya”, “Campus Scandal”, “Shirley”, “Maldita”, “Kalabit”, “Puri”, “Check-Inn”, etc. Check those films shown in rundown cinemas in Quiapo, Baclaran, and elsewhere; they’re probably Neal Tan’s masterpieces! As Vince Tan, he has unfortunately fielded 3 flicks this year: “Anton Tubero”, “Private Nights” and “Laro”. Now tell me: how can someone with Tan’s “facility” keep churning out cinematic dregs while brilliant directors like Chris Martinez can only manage one and one-third (“Temptation Island”, “Gunaw” segment of “My Valentine Girls”)?

It is an unjust world.

James Pinca


James Pinca


Irish Contreras masters the art of devouring


Brad Laurente

Brad Laurente

Brad Laurente

Tofee Calma

Irish Contreras

Irish Contreras

Jenaira Chu

Private Nights & Wanted: Male Boarders - Cursory Tales in Exploitative Flicks

Pink flicks are making hay! The lamentable fact is that these works don’t even try to deliver that untrodden narrative anymore. We’ve heard and seen these stories populated by fresh faces with talent that meander between sixes and sevens. But the “bone of contention” (no pun intended) lies in the way these characters are served like expendable meat on our cinematic platter.

Vince Tan’s “Private Nights” and Crisaldo Pablo’s “Wanted: Male Boarders” are as vacuous as they are exploitative. But one thing sets them apart from the dime-a-dozen gay-themed films these days: Both productions are topbilled by lead actors who aren’t just easy on the eyes - the former’s James Pinca and the latter’s Jakko/Nikko Jacinto, while obviously green, reveal adequately engaging performances, which makes watching Tan and Pablo’s befuddling homoerotic-fairyland flicks a bit more tolerable.

Pinca has the boy-next-door smoulder of JC de Vera. But in “Private Nights,” his promise is all but lost in the maze of his starrer’s beclouded story, cluttered further by Tan’s ineptness to tell a plausible tale. This makes his directorial debut, “Anton Tubero” apocryphal.

Story

Dave (Pinca) is forced to work as a macho dancer after he leaves the home of his elder sister and her abusive husband Diego (Tony Lapena). Despite his aversion to homosexuals, he could only find a “profession” peopled by gay men and horny women. Interestingly, he also ignores the lusty gay-bar owner (Hanni Miller) who has the hots for him.

Life gets easier for Dave after he accepts the invitation of co-dancer Alvin (Jonas Gruet) to live with him in his well-furnished condominium unit. As it turns out, his supposedly 24-year-old colleague (he looks much older) yearns for more than just his brotherly camaraderie. In fact, Alvin lives an affluent lifestyle with a sex-starved flight attendant-girlfriend, but he gets himself hired in the same bar just the same to get close to the object of his desire. Huh?

Dave later finds out about Lapena’s “real” sexual orientation by accident when he catches the latter throwing a jealousy-fueled hissy fit with his boytoy (Dustin Jose) in the gay bar Dave works in. Tan makes this revelation confounding, however, by splicing in a flashback scene showing Dave getting raped by Diego - a truly dumbfounding moment of storytelling lunacy.

The movie wants to explore the dynamics in and economics of the gay-bar business, but it doesn’t really go beyond the surface. 

It merely finds an excuse for its put-upon actors to dangle their assets and shortcomings for all the world (and the movie's director and producers) to see. This peripheral off-tangent perception makes for a mundane tale.

You’ll also see a few of these actors (Lapena, Gruet, Jose) in Archie del Mundo’s well-intentioned (and better-crafted) “Taksikab,” but here, they’re just as dreadful as their exploitative movie. Lapena plays a contravida to the hilt, showing no insight at all about his badder-than-the-gay-devil character. He barks his lines as he contorts his facial muscles with a never-fading sneer. Think Romy Diaz without the latter’s wisdom or villainy charisma.

HEADGEAR COUNTRY

We expected more from Gruet, who showed some promise in “Taksikab.” Here, he plays his “closeted” character in an overtly effete manner. Worse, he is as vapid as the lines he's tasked to deliver. It doesn’t help that he flaunts all sorts of headgears from beginning to end to conceal his expeditiously receding hairline (or broadening bald spot) - name it, you’ll see him in caps, hats, hoods, bonnets, bandanas, scarves, etc. If they stretched the movie’s running time a little longer, we wouldn’t have been surprised to see him wear a Jewish yarmulkes, a Muslim taqiyah, a pope’s mitre, a king’s crown, a beret, a bowler hat, a kepi, a fez, a karakul, a turban or a fedora.

We hope the promising Pinca learns from his costars’ “shortcomings,” because, as Gruet and Lapena very well demonstrate in “Private Nights,” an “actor” is only as good as his last movie.

James Pinca smoulders as Dave.

Jakko Jacinto is also wasted in Crisaldo Pablo’s pathetic, exploitative fleshfest, “Wanted: Male Boarders,” where he plays the good-looking straight guy, Alvin, who eventually falls for the charm (and generosity) of self-assured “bisexual” call-center agent, Nate (Joeffrey Javier), who lives with him in the boarding house owned by Pining (Chamyto Aguedan).

Freshman Alvin, who’s from Laguna, thought he hit the jackpot when he found a cheap bed space in the metropolis (P500 a month, with the use of electricity and water on the house - beat that). He unearths a bombshell when he discovers that in this particular boarding house, the tenants’ pastime is - sex (and with one another)! No, Virginia, Chamyto insists that they’re all straight or bisexual men who are just looking for an easy diversion to shake off their melancholy or domestic ennui - but who are they kidding?

What’s hard to deny is the fact that the movie is used by the “prolific” Pablo as another excuse to “showcase” his coterie of “compliant” kanto boys (Francis Sienes, Rusty Adonis, Joshua Domingo) and some hunky men (Brix Jimenez) in various stages of undress and sexual activity.

This time, Pablo aesthetically realizes more of his gay fantasies by letting one of the boys “play” with a papaya (it's good for a skin that's constantly stretching and retracting), or showing the talentless starlets as they tinker with their bells when they’re turned on by porn, or having the “hungry” Chamyto eat his lunch as the supposedly “homophobic” Alvin slow-strips for him, or getting all of the boys in the shower with Jacinto! Director Pablo loves to tintinnabulate their bells indeed.

Jakko Jacinto as fresh-faced Alvin.

Jakko Jacinto and Joeffrey Javier

Of course, the piece de resistance has to be the sexual catharsis of Alvin when he finally (and all-too-willingly) shares Nate’s bed. Brilliant, right? Pablo has always been prone to this unimaginative tack without even integrating a narrative history that makes such couplings believable. Remember best friends Joash and Sieg who turned into bed mates at the end of “Manong Konstru”? Remember the “Luv U Tol” segment of “Dose, Trese, Katorse” where, once again best friends Sieg and Gene end up shagging each other, all without prior hint of romantic attraction in the story? Pablo is so transfixed with this magical idea that guys would just shag each other at the blink of an eye. None of them makes sense - a luminous testament of its makers’ storytelling acumen.

In the film, Pablo shamelessly peddles a supplement called MS Tablet for Men which works into a guy's libido (like Viagra) which we all know has the veracity of believing that the Arroyos are an honest political clan. Everyone who takes the tablet gets too horned up, thus the boarders all engage in pleasuring themselves at all times from dawn until dusk.

Here, Pablo lazily utilizes the same music we've heard a million times from his other clunkers. Moreover, you find his actors stop in mid-sentence, flustered and dazed, as they wait for Pablo (or his assistants) to feed them with their lines.

Fortunately, like Pinca, Jakko Jacinto is not just another pretty face - he actually shows some promise, and one that needs to be realized by someone better-equipped than Pablo as a director. Jacinto looks self-conscious in front of the camera but he’s never awkward, so we hope he does something substantial the next time around - and, please, stay as far away from Pablo and his bromidic effort.

As for Javier, there’s nothing in his performance that gives him away as an English-speaking, call center-trained guy, but then again, what do you expect from these pink-themed yarn? The director always loved to populate his stories with call center agents (he must have done so in half a dozen flicks), yet he continually employs amateurs who can’t even work their way around simple English phrases. They’re mere fodder for homo-fantasia, and nothing about them is credible, except for the fact that they’re merely churned out to get (mostly ugly) men to display their tiny peckers - and effectively demonstrate Pablo’s hopelessness as a filmmaker.

Note:

Please read our featured post on Cinema Bravo and why we sometimes feel nginig about the state of Web Criticism in this country:
- http://makemeblush2.blogspot.com/2016/10/cinema-bravo-film-criticisms-execrable.html