As of late last December, Sony Pictures' franchise film The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was the lowest-grossing Marvel comic book adaptation at the U.S. box-office, in a year when there were a total of FIVE movies based on Marvel Comics properties, namely: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Guardians of the Galaxy, Big Hero 6, and TASM 2. Last night, TASM 2 was the only film among those five not to receive a single Oscar nomination, with the others collecting at least one each, and Guardians of the Galaxy managing to pick up two.
Considering the commercial and critical highs which Sony's Spider-Man franchise once enjoyed, this has got to hurt. Once upon a time, Spider-Man was a certified box-office titan; the very first Spider-Man movie was the very first movie to ever gross over $100 million in a single weekend, a feat that not even Harry Potter or any of the Star Wars prequels, then the box-office gold standard, could manage. Spider-Man 2 remains the only film based on a Marvel comic ever to win an Academy Award (visual effects, 2004). Two of the first three Spider-Man movies were the highest grossing films at the global box-office in their respective years of release. Basically, while films like X-Men and Blade established Marvel-based movies as credible box-office players, the towering performances of the Spider-Man movies was what established that putting the "Marvel" logo before a movie was a virtual guarantee of its success.
All of that seems a distant memory now. Even though 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man pulled in surprisingly respectable grosses worldwide for a supposedly unwanted reboot, TASM 2 left no doubt that the once-widely loved series of films has lost a good chunk of its audience.
In the midst of all of this, the recent revelation that Sony has actually been in talks with Marvel for the crossover to happen is at once the most exciting and frustrating bit of movie-related information I have heard in a long time. It's exciting, because I can't honestly think of any other way to describe the thought of Spider-Man becoming part of a shared cinematic universe. It's frustrating, because nothing has come of these talks, except for Sony's clearly hollow boasts that it doesn't need Marvel Studios to keep the character interesting.
The thing is, fanboy hyperbole aside, this is a crossover that has to happen. One needs only look at the success of The Avengers and even non-Marvel projects like The Walking Dead to know that these characters are so much stronger together than they are apart. The goodwill from The Avengers has been nothing short of astonishing; all of the solo "Avenger" movies that came after the 2012 box-office phenomenon saw significant bumps in their international box-office, and all of them, it's worth pointing out, grossed more than the last Spider-Man movie, at least in terms of U.S. box-office. The X-Men franchise got a real shot in the arm this year (and even ended up outgrossing Spidey, once the more favored of the two properties), because of the novel premise of merging the old and new casts. Ensemble is the way to go; even Superman and Batman are learning this particular lesson.
Spider-man is the only major superhero property these days that doesn't involve any kind of team or team-up potential, and it's worth noting that all of the Marvel properties that beat him at the U.S. box office this year either involved teams, or characters who were part of prominent teams. Heck, the Captain America sequel featured one of his Avengers teammates in a pretty pivotal role.
As the saying goes: if you can't beat them, join them.
I think I speak for millions of Spider-Man fans, when I say with all affection and respect to Sony, who are responsible for bringing my favorite character in all of fiction to the big screen:
You can't beat them.
Friday, January 16, 2015
Chemistry is Everything: A Review of English Only Please
directed by Dan Villegas
written by Antoinette Jadaone and Anjeli Pessumal
As a person with limited time and cash but a fervent love for movies, I generally gravitate these days towards movies I either know or believe I will like as well as those I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt. After I saw the trailer, English Only Please became just such a movie.
Julian (Derek Ramsay) an American of Filipino descent (on his mother's side), is about to take a trip to the Philippines, and he has a very specific errand in mind: he wants to tell his ex-girlfriend off in Filipino. He already knows exactly what he wants to say, but his problem is that, having grown up in the United States, he cannot speak a word of Tagalog. He goes online to find a translator, and of all of the candidates, he ends up picking Tere (Jennylyn Mercado) an English tutor who is basically the sex-toy of her ne'er do well "not-boyfriend" (Kean Cipriano). Of course, they meet, get to know each other and...well, it's fairly self-explanatory where the plot goes from this point onward.
There really isn't much else to the plot besides jilted boy meets neglected girl, but if there's one thing I know from having watched romantic comedies from four different decades (I started in the eighties), it's that plot is nowhere near as important as a credible chemistry between the two lead actors, and Mercado and Ramsay have it in spades.
I used to follow Mercado when she was still a gangly teenager on the television show Encantadia. I found her portrayal charming enough, and she was as the vernacular goes simpatica, but even though I knew she was a capable enough actress I found myself pleasantly surprised by her performance in this movie. Her comic timing was brilliant, and the best thing about her portrayal was how genuine it felt. Too often in Filipino movies and even in romantic comedies in general actors put on performances that are often cloying and manipulative, but Mercado rarely strayed into that territory, if at all, and even when she did, the conviction of her performance was more than enough to overcome any sense that she was playing it to the hilt.
Ramsay, of whom I have not seen a whole lot of outside of television commercials, was a perfect foil for Mercado; his Julian was the "straight man" to Mercado's somewhat zany Tere, and their dynamic really plays out well, especially since the audience already knows exactly where they're going. Also, I don't really know how well or poorly Ramsay actually speaks Tagalog in real life, but he really did a good job of playing the clueless "Fil-Am," especially in a scene where, having been misled by Tere, he sincerely congratulates a local toughie who has beaten him at checkers by telling him "bakla ka!" At any rate, he was a lot more fun to watch than the insufferable KC Montero in Kubot.
Cipriano is appropriately slimy Tere's not-quite-boyfriend who basically just uses Tere as a sugar mommy, while Cai Cortez is a hoot as Tere's BFF. The fact that her single-mom character is with a different guy in every scene she's in is one of the film's running jokes, the other one being a constant reference to traffic on EDSA as an (often untrue) excuse for being late.
The film's script may not have anything profound to say about the human condition, but it really works well, and the dialogue feels quite natural rolling off the actor's tongues. Sure, some of the jokes might not be the most politically correct, and there overused story tropes all over the place but there is real wit to most of the humor here; it's several cuts above the usual brainless Vic Sotto tripe. The actors really carry the whole thing.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get this review out quite as quickly as I would have liked, which means this movie may not be in as many theaters as it was when I wrote this, but even though the Metro Manila Film Festival is over and the usual Hollywood product is starting to creep back into the market, this is still worth checking out, wherever it may be playing.
8.5/10
written by Antoinette Jadaone and Anjeli Pessumal
As a person with limited time and cash but a fervent love for movies, I generally gravitate these days towards movies I either know or believe I will like as well as those I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt. After I saw the trailer, English Only Please became just such a movie.
Julian (Derek Ramsay) an American of Filipino descent (on his mother's side), is about to take a trip to the Philippines, and he has a very specific errand in mind: he wants to tell his ex-girlfriend off in Filipino. He already knows exactly what he wants to say, but his problem is that, having grown up in the United States, he cannot speak a word of Tagalog. He goes online to find a translator, and of all of the candidates, he ends up picking Tere (Jennylyn Mercado) an English tutor who is basically the sex-toy of her ne'er do well "not-boyfriend" (Kean Cipriano). Of course, they meet, get to know each other and...well, it's fairly self-explanatory where the plot goes from this point onward.
There really isn't much else to the plot besides jilted boy meets neglected girl, but if there's one thing I know from having watched romantic comedies from four different decades (I started in the eighties), it's that plot is nowhere near as important as a credible chemistry between the two lead actors, and Mercado and Ramsay have it in spades.
I used to follow Mercado when she was still a gangly teenager on the television show Encantadia. I found her portrayal charming enough, and she was as the vernacular goes simpatica, but even though I knew she was a capable enough actress I found myself pleasantly surprised by her performance in this movie. Her comic timing was brilliant, and the best thing about her portrayal was how genuine it felt. Too often in Filipino movies and even in romantic comedies in general actors put on performances that are often cloying and manipulative, but Mercado rarely strayed into that territory, if at all, and even when she did, the conviction of her performance was more than enough to overcome any sense that she was playing it to the hilt.
Ramsay, of whom I have not seen a whole lot of outside of television commercials, was a perfect foil for Mercado; his Julian was the "straight man" to Mercado's somewhat zany Tere, and their dynamic really plays out well, especially since the audience already knows exactly where they're going. Also, I don't really know how well or poorly Ramsay actually speaks Tagalog in real life, but he really did a good job of playing the clueless "Fil-Am," especially in a scene where, having been misled by Tere, he sincerely congratulates a local toughie who has beaten him at checkers by telling him "bakla ka!" At any rate, he was a lot more fun to watch than the insufferable KC Montero in Kubot.
Cipriano is appropriately slimy Tere's not-quite-boyfriend who basically just uses Tere as a sugar mommy, while Cai Cortez is a hoot as Tere's BFF. The fact that her single-mom character is with a different guy in every scene she's in is one of the film's running jokes, the other one being a constant reference to traffic on EDSA as an (often untrue) excuse for being late.
The film's script may not have anything profound to say about the human condition, but it really works well, and the dialogue feels quite natural rolling off the actor's tongues. Sure, some of the jokes might not be the most politically correct, and there overused story tropes all over the place but there is real wit to most of the humor here; it's several cuts above the usual brainless Vic Sotto tripe. The actors really carry the whole thing.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get this review out quite as quickly as I would have liked, which means this movie may not be in as many theaters as it was when I wrote this, but even though the Metro Manila Film Festival is over and the usual Hollywood product is starting to creep back into the market, this is still worth checking out, wherever it may be playing.
8.5/10
Saturday, January 10, 2015
The Raid Meets the Army of Darkness: A Review of Kubot: The Aswang Chronicles II
directed by Erik Matti
written by Michiko Yamamoto, Erik Matti
Every year, starting from Christmas Day until the second week of the new year, residents of Metro Manila area "treated" to the annual Metro Manila Film Festival, during which all foreign movies are barred from release in movie theaters and only local movies, and those entered specifically in the festival, are screened for the public. Given that my movie entertainment usually consists of Hollywood-generated product, this is often a trying time for me (though lately, not so much, as I don't watch movies as often as I used to), but this year in particular, I was determined to go with the flow and basically just enjoy myself.
My wife and I agreed to a double-header; we would watch Erik Matti's Kubot and Dan Villegas' English Only Please, the only two movies on this year's roster we found appealing.
First up was Kubot: The Aswang Chronicles Part II, the sequel to 2012's Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles, a stylized action/horror/comedy hybrid that got rave reviews, and a movie that my wife and I were quite sorry to have missed. Needless to say, expectations were fairly high as we walked into the theater.
Kubot begins where Tiktik ends, with Makoy (Dingdong Dantes) Nestor (Joey Marquez) and the survivors from the first film hopping on a jeep to take them away from Pulupandan and home to Manila, when they are attacked by a band of strange, hairy-looking "kubot" or another form of aswang, who exact terrible revenge on Makoy for his slaughter of the Tiktik from the last film. Years later, sans a wife, a child and his right hand, Makoy lives with Nestor and his wife Nieves (Lotlot de Leon) in Manila, where he also works as a mechanic, when a new aswang menace emerges. It seems a group of aswangs led by the progressive, American-raised Doms (KC Montero) has a terrifying scheme which involves transforming people into aswang by feeding them hot dogs made from ground-up people and aswang saliva. A group of aswang friendly to people are willing to stop them, led by the youthful Dr. Lex (Isabelle Daza) but ultimately they will need the help of Makoy, who may or may not be willing to give it.
Now, I understand that we cannot expect Hollywood-quality visual effects from a local effort, for budgetary reasons if nothing else, but the problems I had with this film really had nothing to do with the computer-generated imagery. No, my problems were with the script that promised so much and yet delivered so little, some atrociously bad acting, and idea after idea cribbed from other action movies. The hero loses a hand and puts on a bad-ass, lethal prosthesis? How Sam Raimi. The hero faces down a whole bunch of bad guys in a dark and dingy corridor and takes them down with hand-to-hand fighting? How Gareth Evans. There are people-friendly aswang who have decided to feed on animals instead? How Stephanie Meyer. Slow-mo wire fu? How Wachowski siblings. And the list goes on. The fact that the movie does not take it seriously is definitely a plus point as it suggests that I might have seen references to all the films I mentioned, instead of plain old ripoffs. I want to believe that these were tongue-in-cheek, deliberate references rather than efforts to make the movie "kewl" with borrowed material, and maybe the fact that part of me does is what keeps me from giving this film a worse score.
Another aspect of the film that made it difficult to sit through was the horrible choice of villain in KC Montero. His inability to speak Tagalog properly may have been written into the script, but it didn't make his line delivery any less cringe-inducing to hear.
Fortunately, though, the film has some plus points: the whole plot of aswang trying to turn people into aswang by feeding them hot dogs is actually a brilliant jab at the processed food industry, which spends millions of pesos trying to convince us that hot dogs, which, to my knowledge, are made from God-only-knows-what, are safe for our children to consume on a daily basis. The scene where the health inspector pigs out on the bad guy's hot dogs and transforms in the process is a pretty funny highlight. Speaking of highlights, though, the scene in which Isabelle Daza's Lex summons her fellow aswang with a series of strange animal noises and dancing is, in a word, priceless. As funny as it is, it's actually integral to the plot as she basically saves their lives by doing it. Also, there's something utterly sexy about an attractive woman making a moderate fool of herself. I applaud Daza for being so incredibly game.
Another plus point, and one which is Matti's incredible ability to create atmosphere. The dingy Manila rooftop (Binondo, to be precise) where Makoy, Nestor and Nieves live is, for me, the best example of this. This particular location is perpetually filmed at night, and with its crumbling skyline it has a wonderfully grungy vibe that perfectly suits the grim and gritty vibe that a movie about fighting aswang should have. This is one of those instances where Matti's "indie" sensibility shines through; most of the film either is, or looks like it was shot on location, rather than in a sound studio (the first film was reportedly filmed entirely against green screen, a la 300), and the film is the better for it. Dingdong's extended monologue late in the film, which Matti filmed with multiple cameras to which he cuts several times, also has an "experimental cinema" vibe, though it didn't much appeal to me.
Overall, this film had the stink of "product" on it, almost as much as the hot dogs it decries, but enough of the director's quirks peek through to make me appreciate the better film hidden under all the least-common-denominator pap. I kind of long for the film that this could have been.
The film sets up another sequel, and as disappointing as this film was, I may give it a shot, even without the benefit of having no other movie to watch.
6/10
written by Michiko Yamamoto, Erik Matti
Every year, starting from Christmas Day until the second week of the new year, residents of Metro Manila area "treated" to the annual Metro Manila Film Festival, during which all foreign movies are barred from release in movie theaters and only local movies, and those entered specifically in the festival, are screened for the public. Given that my movie entertainment usually consists of Hollywood-generated product, this is often a trying time for me (though lately, not so much, as I don't watch movies as often as I used to), but this year in particular, I was determined to go with the flow and basically just enjoy myself.
My wife and I agreed to a double-header; we would watch Erik Matti's Kubot and Dan Villegas' English Only Please, the only two movies on this year's roster we found appealing.
First up was Kubot: The Aswang Chronicles Part II, the sequel to 2012's Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles, a stylized action/horror/comedy hybrid that got rave reviews, and a movie that my wife and I were quite sorry to have missed. Needless to say, expectations were fairly high as we walked into the theater.
Kubot begins where Tiktik ends, with Makoy (Dingdong Dantes) Nestor (Joey Marquez) and the survivors from the first film hopping on a jeep to take them away from Pulupandan and home to Manila, when they are attacked by a band of strange, hairy-looking "kubot" or another form of aswang, who exact terrible revenge on Makoy for his slaughter of the Tiktik from the last film. Years later, sans a wife, a child and his right hand, Makoy lives with Nestor and his wife Nieves (Lotlot de Leon) in Manila, where he also works as a mechanic, when a new aswang menace emerges. It seems a group of aswangs led by the progressive, American-raised Doms (KC Montero) has a terrifying scheme which involves transforming people into aswang by feeding them hot dogs made from ground-up people and aswang saliva. A group of aswang friendly to people are willing to stop them, led by the youthful Dr. Lex (Isabelle Daza) but ultimately they will need the help of Makoy, who may or may not be willing to give it.
Now, I understand that we cannot expect Hollywood-quality visual effects from a local effort, for budgetary reasons if nothing else, but the problems I had with this film really had nothing to do with the computer-generated imagery. No, my problems were with the script that promised so much and yet delivered so little, some atrociously bad acting, and idea after idea cribbed from other action movies. The hero loses a hand and puts on a bad-ass, lethal prosthesis? How Sam Raimi. The hero faces down a whole bunch of bad guys in a dark and dingy corridor and takes them down with hand-to-hand fighting? How Gareth Evans. There are people-friendly aswang who have decided to feed on animals instead? How Stephanie Meyer. Slow-mo wire fu? How Wachowski siblings. And the list goes on. The fact that the movie does not take it seriously is definitely a plus point as it suggests that I might have seen references to all the films I mentioned, instead of plain old ripoffs. I want to believe that these were tongue-in-cheek, deliberate references rather than efforts to make the movie "kewl" with borrowed material, and maybe the fact that part of me does is what keeps me from giving this film a worse score.
Another aspect of the film that made it difficult to sit through was the horrible choice of villain in KC Montero. His inability to speak Tagalog properly may have been written into the script, but it didn't make his line delivery any less cringe-inducing to hear.
Fortunately, though, the film has some plus points: the whole plot of aswang trying to turn people into aswang by feeding them hot dogs is actually a brilliant jab at the processed food industry, which spends millions of pesos trying to convince us that hot dogs, which, to my knowledge, are made from God-only-knows-what, are safe for our children to consume on a daily basis. The scene where the health inspector pigs out on the bad guy's hot dogs and transforms in the process is a pretty funny highlight. Speaking of highlights, though, the scene in which Isabelle Daza's Lex summons her fellow aswang with a series of strange animal noises and dancing is, in a word, priceless. As funny as it is, it's actually integral to the plot as she basically saves their lives by doing it. Also, there's something utterly sexy about an attractive woman making a moderate fool of herself. I applaud Daza for being so incredibly game.
Another plus point, and one which is Matti's incredible ability to create atmosphere. The dingy Manila rooftop (Binondo, to be precise) where Makoy, Nestor and Nieves live is, for me, the best example of this. This particular location is perpetually filmed at night, and with its crumbling skyline it has a wonderfully grungy vibe that perfectly suits the grim and gritty vibe that a movie about fighting aswang should have. This is one of those instances where Matti's "indie" sensibility shines through; most of the film either is, or looks like it was shot on location, rather than in a sound studio (the first film was reportedly filmed entirely against green screen, a la 300), and the film is the better for it. Dingdong's extended monologue late in the film, which Matti filmed with multiple cameras to which he cuts several times, also has an "experimental cinema" vibe, though it didn't much appeal to me.
Overall, this film had the stink of "product" on it, almost as much as the hot dogs it decries, but enough of the director's quirks peek through to make me appreciate the better film hidden under all the least-common-denominator pap. I kind of long for the film that this could have been.
The film sets up another sequel, and as disappointing as this film was, I may give it a shot, even without the benefit of having no other movie to watch.
6/10
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