Crisaldo Pablo's Masukista - Deviancy in Amateur Exposition

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Zig Dulay's Huling Halik - Cinematic Meandering

Ili and JM (Joeffrey Javier and Kenjie Garcia) decide to relive their early days as lovers in Baguio City a day before JM packs his stuff and moves to Manila. Though they’ve parted ways, JM somehow believes this would bring closure (and other things as well) to their tempestuous past; one that on several occasions had him cutting himself.

Amidst revelry of a fogbound Panagbenga Festival, the couple retraces sites they used to frequent: the Botanical Garden, Mines View, the Igorot Park, the little shop selling their favorite meal. Along with friends Ace and Brian (Jayjay Jimenez and Patrick Esteban), they even frolic in the woods. But as the hours drag on, Ili gets seemingly clamorous text messages and calls from his new girl friend, while JM gets impatient and intolerant. We soon witness a glimpse into their past – a heavily invidious JM and an inattentive lover in Ili. Couldn’t they enveigle a more amorous and conciliatory goodbye?

Director Zig M. Dulay follows the former lovers around Baguio with his handheld camera as his characters banter and flirt around with laidback demeanor and easy charm. Imbuing its narrative with a documentary feel, the first quarter is a compelling watch as we are roped into the mechanics of their relationship. We sat with due attention. Joeffrey Javier, Crisaldo Pablo's "it" boy, looks relaxed, not to mention watchable. But when JM repeatedly bawls like a scorned wife every time Ili gets a call, the atmosphere briskly evolves into one that irritates and confuses. After all, their relationship as lovers ceased some time ago. Why the nagging resentment? Isn't JM leaving town for good, making his emotional outbursts nothing but misplaced sentiments?

Further on, this green-eyed scenario becomes redundant and mundane. It becomes clear that the story teller has lost his way as he blindly meanders into cluelessness. At this point, what could have been an exposition on the fleeting nature of relationship turns into the realm of desperate affection - aimless, unfocused, rambling.

Kenjie Garcia gives a spirited performance as he displays his enviable acumen to lacrimate from sun up to sun down. Why not? He won a Best actor Plum from some international award giving body, right? So with more than adequate braggadocio, he shows his audience how it is to cry! I was stunned! I've never seen someone cry this much not even in episodes of MMK, he must be going for a world record! Amazing!

We saw "Huling Halik" during its festival run in Greenbelt 3 and seeing Joeffrey Javier do well in two films (the other one was for Eduardo Roy, Jr.'s "Bahay Bata") gave a smile on our face. There is hope for Pink Film habitues!

"Huling Halik" could have soared with a more legible second half. Unfortunately, their last kiss was nothing but clenched teeth. Someone got lost on his way to narrative denouement.


Joeffrey Javier: Comfortable away from Crisaldo Pablo's exploitative and amateurish film works.


Brian and Ace doing a concupiscent version of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the woods.


JM preps himself up for another round of crying!


"Yun lang ang hinihingi ko sa 'yo, di mo pa maibigay! Isang araw lang!" laments JM. And as earlier forewarned, he cries again like there's no tomorrow! LOL


Kenjie Garcia and Joeffrey Javier


Jayjay Jimenez and Patrick Esteban


Traffic stopping briefs! :)

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

Dose Trese Katorse - MTRCB, Pedophilia & How Not to Make Movies

Experience teaches men to get better; to improve himself; to upgrade his craft. That is a reliable fact of life. But Pink Film producer and director Crisaldo Pablo seems to challenge this because with the number of theatrical releases from his film outfit, it’s becoming evident that his artistic capabilities don’t amount to anything substantial. In fact, Pablo has been churning out cringe-worthy works without an iota of redeeming value. And the more he does them, the worse they get! After “Hinala” and “M2M Eyeball The Movie”, I never thought he could get worse. Guess what!

Director Crisaldo Pablo is becoming prolific in his capacity to release movies for commercial exhibition. In fact, he can probably outnumber Star Cinema's or GMA Films' film output before the year ends. This dubious talent is a sad development considering the stark pedestrian quality on shameless display in any of his films. In Pablo’s latest anthology, “Dose Trese Katorse”, he delves into the realm of pubescent love.

The movie is once again, a trilogy fielded to dutifully accommodate Pablo’s workshop victims, errr, I mean clients.

Joeffrey Javier: sex with a 13 year old.

“Slow Motion” follows the ministrations of best friends Miguel (Jaycob Bulaong) and Edel (Edel Santiago) who are poles apart in their high school’s social strata. While Miguel is popular (he’s running for class governor), Edel is diffident and reluctant. And Miguel pushes Edel to come out of his introverted shell. They devise a plan meant to derail the political ambitions of school rival Maria. But their conspiratorial plan bogs down when they’re eventually found out. That Edel, who’s wooing Maria, is actually gay! What’s a young man to do when he’s more comfortable holding his breath under water?

“Swerte Ni Maxin” centers on Maximo (Roseller Kempis), a fatherless adolescent, who nurtures whimsical attraction with Joewel (Joeffrey Javier), a kanto boy who’s the object of affection of the neighborhood’s fledgling prepubescent gay boys. Maxin and his friends spy on the amused Joe even when he’s bathing. One day, Maxin gets word that Joe is holding a contest (a really ludicrous, albeit campy one involving “long hair” and money) and whoever wins gets to spend a night with Joe. But a gang war erupts and Joe finds himself running for cover – straight into Maxin’s house. Will Maxin find the courage to speak his mind? Will Joe be the accommodating Romeo?

“Luv U Tol” is about Sieg (Joshua Domingo) and Gene (Alvin Notarte) who grew up best friends. Gene is courting Ritz (Kathleen Empleo) and requires Sieg’s help to summon the girl’s attention. Inside a dingy pad they call “tambayan” - an empty room with a single mattress plopped down the floor and nothing else – the three characters exchange their awkward flirtations (if you could call it that). Unknown to Gene, Ritz is really attracted to the bashful Sieg who in turn seems more interested with his best friend than with Ritz.

Roseller Kempis as Maxin.

It is an exhausting routine trying to make sense from these stories when you realize that there’s hardly anything worth picking out from them. These were spur-of-the-moment narratives borne out of incipient whimsy, not talent. The actors are plain awful; they cannot even deliver their lines with adequate verve enough to convince us that they enjoyed what they were doing. This makes watching this opus an exercise in self flagellation. These pseudo-actors deserve to be exiled to Timbuktu just to make sure they won’t have anything to do with films – at least not at the expense of a paying audience. This is P170 shredded into pieces.

In between scenes, like most Cris Pablo flicks, you would hear people shouting, “Cut!”. Even a 3^rd grader, by way of logical deduction, knows that he isn't supposed to hear these things when watching movies. These remediable gaffes (which end up in the film anyway) is a testament to the thoughtless film making process involved here. Artistic bankruptcy, laziness and mediocrity are becoming synonymous with Pablo’s works. Moreover, you find the actors awkwardly waiting for these directions. When basic conventions of film making are blatantly ignored, you wonder about the pointlessness of the whole process. You cease to enjoy “making believe” that this was a re-enactment of a bunch of stories The glaring shortcomings constantly remind you that what's viewable on screen are mere acting class exercises. A bad acting class, that is.

The production value leaves much to be desired mainly because the production outfit doesn’t even try anymore. In “Luv U Tol”, for example, instead of haggling for a real flower, all they were able to come up with was a badly-made “paper flower”. Yup, you better believe it! When you are gearing up for commercial exhibition, i.e. with a paying audience to consider, you can at least up the ante by hiking up your cinematic ambition. And “paper flowers” won’t do the trick. Can't they even find a better place than the dump they used as their "tambayan"? I could swear it might as well be a drug dealer's den. This production is scraping the bottom. Really pathetic.

Kathleen Empleo as Ritz: Torn between friends Sieg and Gene.

Another grave fault is the incongruence of lines and situations. Here’s a dialogue: “May girlfriend ka na?” Reply: “Nag-aaral pa ako eh.” Huh? Even marriage won’t stop anyone from going to school. In fact, young age didn’t stop them from canoodling with each other’s joysticks. While thugs were pursuing Joe, he leisurely knocks on Maxin’s door. No hint of urgency was heard from his voice. “Puwedeng makituloy? May humahabol sa akin eh,” reasoned Joe. He might as well recite Shakespeare: “Let me not into the marriage of true minds admit impediments…” Actors need to be motivated and it’s the job of the director to extract emotions in such counterfeit situations. In this case, it felt like the blind was leading the blind. Or wasn't someone home?

Still on “Luv U Tol”, when the thugs finally catch up with Joe, Maxin simply tells the baddies, “Umalis na kayo. Darating na ang pulis.” And off they go like obedient pups. No resistance of any sort. No threats nor coercion. It felt like a Three Stooges comedy. When Joe finally admits his amorous affection to the shy Maxin (“Eh paano kung ako ang may gusto sa ‘yo?”), the latter becomes adamant because he knew of his friend's similar infatuation towards the twinky kanto boy: “Di kayang ipagpalit ang pagkakaibigan namin dahil sa isang lalaki.” Five seconds later, they copulate. So much for friendship.

Maxin's friends eventually find out about his indiscretions – and “Grace” is livid. (You then hear “Action”.) “Ahas ka talaga!” accuses Grace (who's actually an effete gay boy), then continues, “Pangarap ko pa naman na maka SIX si Joe.” Huh? Yes, you heard it right. He had numerical obsession for Joe; not four, not five, but “six”. Or did he mean “sex?” Haha. But this roller coaster shift of emotions has Grace making a hundred-eighty-degree turn and say,”O sige na nga. Friends na uli tayo. Ang mga lalaking yan, gagamitin lang naman natin sila.” (These are just guys. We’ll just use them.) This is a line coming from a 13 year old. Kuha mo? This steady succession of emotional caterwauling simply takes you straight to Venus and back. This isn’t just drama, but science fiction as well.

Pablo's seeming cinematic indecisiveness is more blatant in “Luv U Tol” where, during courtship, Ritz suddenly blurts, “Sige, tayo na. Pero pag ayoko na, papayag ka ng walang tanung tanong.” Gene sports a grin wider than the Sea of Galilee. He didn’t even fathom the restrictions of the said relationship. If you have never heard of the perfect deal, this one should be it, right? Are relationships really that easily disposable? Or is the script writer living in fantasy land? If romance is the building block that jumpstarts a relationship, it would scurry out of the window just as fast when it hears of such deal.

The last 5 minutes of this segment was even more alarmingly banal. The characters would argue in their “tambayan”, come out the door, walk the streets, then finish their conversation back in the same dingy hole before concluding with a narrative twist that’s vapid and preposterous. Why they have to carry out the whole discussion in several locations is beyond me. Boredom perhaps? Of course it had to turn up that way so Pablo could have his male leads rolling in the vermin-infested, vandal-ridden “hay”.

“Dose Trese Katorse” is a perfect specimen on how not to make a film, and it even rests on a plot that contentiously portends pedophilia. And this bothers me.

I am wondering why Ms. Grace Poe-Llamanzares and her MTRCB staff haven’t caught up with such ruse. A kanto boy seducing and eventually sodomizing someone whose character is only “trese”? Pornography is indeed a state of mind, as director John Sayles implied, but there are clear-cut boundaries that rational beings shouldn’t cross. Cris Pablo should stop exploiting impressionable young minds. Erotica and minors, deceptively set in the context of coming-of-age, are a taboo! They shouldn't make comfortable bed fellows. It is morally despicable, not to mention "criminal". Makes my skin crawl.

Hinala - Hunches and Artistic Bankruptcy

You would think that after a good number of films released, Crisaldo Pablo would eventually come up with a decent ouvre, right? "Hinala" (Hunch) is a testament to disprove that. In fact, you come out of the cinema with a sense of loss. One is made acutely aware that the only thing great about this work is its theatrical poster: moody and provocative. But the film is anything but.

Once again, Pablo tackles his his oft-repeated theme of homosexual promiscuity as though gay men are incapable of fidelity, of being circumspect. If indeed Pablo is a champion of the Pink movement, why does he paint the third sex in livid lechery and predatory exuberance? But let's leave this rhetoric for now.

Arjay Carreon too much publicity exposure for such a menial part.

In "Hinala", doe-eyed Joeffrey Javier plays Cris who's in a 5 year relationship with Michael (Justin de Leon). Despite appearances and Michael's incessant appeasement, all is not well in the domestic front. Cris gets flustering clues that point to a profligate lover. These seeds flourish into several day dreams that keep repeating into lurid hunches, "mga hinala" if you will. Like a common friend who slips into saying that he expected Michael to leave Cris; or Michael disappearing from the face of the Earth when he was supposed to take a leave from work to celebrate their anniversary together.

These day dreams, murkily filmed like elementary vignettes of incohesive narrative strains, work their way a la "Ground Hog Day", a vicious cycle of different situations of promiscuity showing men in various stages of undress, and all leading to the fact that Cris is really given the run around by Michael.

Justin de Leon and Clyde Cruz as the cheating lovers.

We think of Joeffrey Javier as a pleasant find, with his next door good looks and very Pinoy package, but this interest isn't sustained by Javier's grave dryness of delivery. He speaks in dead monotone, in a voice reminiscent of a mistuned base - broken, hollow, lifeless. Justin de Leon is comfortable as the deceitful cad who's fickle enough to stay in a joyless relationship with clingy Cris. Clyde Cruz, in his first full length feature after his brave and "showy" stint in "Bikini Boys" plays the English-speaking lover who figures in several "bedroom wrestles" with de Leon and Javier (in one scene, he smothers Javier with a pillow during a three-way). Clyde enjoys a lengthier part than Arjay Carreon whose character comes out of nowhere to allay Cris' grief and offers himself up (though his advances were declined). Chamyto Aguedan, Pablo's eternal muse, provides comic relief, as usual.

The most basic observation in "Hinala" is its utter mediocrity - from the narrative progression (which pretty much plateaus 20 minutes into its running time) to the production values. There is absolutely no guidance by way of performance. Pablo's earlier strength ("Duda Doubt", "Circles" "Bathhouse") was his visuals, but this has long been discarded and forgotten. The focus of Pablo's works is in the coital meanderings and how he can flash the requisite genitalia somewhere in the story. This, to me, is a sad case of artistic bankruptcy - the failure to thrive as an artist.

Experience is supposed to make people better artists. Unfortunately, not in Crisaldo Pablo's case. Isn't it sad to be the pariah of mediocrity?

Clyde Cruz makes his first full length feature film after "Bikini Boys".

Joeffrey Javier, Chamyto Aguedan and Arjay Carreon clowning around.

Note:

Please read our post about Cinema Bravo and why we sometimes feel nginig about Web Criticism:
- http://makemeblush2.blogspot.com/2016/10/cinema-bravo-film-criticisms-execrable.html