MMFF – Reverse Delay

Review: ‘Labs Kita, Okey Ka Lang?’ (1998)

Art, insecurities, and youthful passion drive the classic rom-com starring the famed 1990s love team.

An enthusiastic crowd converged at a cinema complex in Quezon City, on a Tuesday night in early January. The occasion: the premiere of the restored film, Labs Kita, Okey Ka Lang?, which features the ’90s love team of Jolina Magdangal and Marvin Agustin. The people in attendance, many of them barely containing their excitement, proved that the pair can still rally a good crowd of supporters.

The actors may have been glamorous in their presence, but the true star of the night was the film itself, a classic Star Cinema romantic comedy. After the screening, a few guests started comparing the movie to entries from the recently-concluded Metro Manila Film Festival. A fellow guest, with a mixture of disgust and an aficionado’s righteousness, cried, “Don’t compare!” Because it is absurd to label an old film as formulaic, when it hails from a time when such storytelling conventions were still being established.

And that is true. Let us take a closer look at what exactly makes this rom-com a classic.

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‘Ang Babae Sa Septic Tank 2’ (2016): hilarious, perceptive, timely

The sequel is a timely, self-aware parody, justified in its adoption (and adaptation) of the original film’s formula.

The proposition of Ang Babae Sa Septic Tank 2 is simple: to parody mainstream romances, in the same way that the original satirized the indie ‘poverty porn’. (The parody begins in the subtitle, #ForeverIsNotEnough, a tongue-in-cheek take on recent rom-coms’ fondness for hashtags.) The final product utilizes the formula established by the original, but a combination of sharp, self-conscious execution and a perfect setting for the film’s release means that Septic Tank 2, like the first film, has the potential to be effective in a manner that goes beyond the work itself.

Warning: this review shares details of plot and other elements, or ‘spoilers’, both for this film and the original, Ang Babae Sa Septic Tank (2011).

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‘Honor Thy Father’ (2015): a gripping, grounded crime drama

Strong acting, a metaphorical setting, and resonating themes bring this John Lloyd Cruz-starrer to excellence.

Honor Thy Father begins with a shot of the protagonist Edgar (John Lloyd Cruz) breaking the ground in a lawn in the Cordilleran highland city of Baguio. It is foreshadowing, both in a visual sense as Edgar later in the story breaks into a different territory with his brothers, and on a metaphorical level, as he would in the course of the story break and shake up his relationships, with people and with the land.

The setting maintains a strong, and beautiful, presence throughout the film. Baguio subtly comes to represent both the hopes of his family, and the instability and chaos they find themselves facing. Edgar’s wife, Kaye (Meryll Soriano), at one point talks about going to the mountains to escape their problems (a genius bit of characterizing detail, because for most Filipinos who live in lowlands, Baguio is a mountain city, and only highland urban residents would talk of going further up the mountains). Edgar does travel to still-higher and remoter lands of the Cordilleras, where he seeks his parents and brothers for help; his brothers, meanwhile, make a living as miners, blasting their way deeper into the mountains in search of minerals. In Honor Thy Father, the rolling urban terrain is a symbol of conflict; the dusty mine lands, of refuge and strength.

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