Great! Just great! I I’m suppose to rest but how could I, if you’re in my room!…Well excuse me it just so happened that I am as tired as a horse and I need to take my rest before the director shouts again…I’ll be acting in about an hour…Well yes…I am…I am an actress…what type of actress? Movie actress…how come you didn’t saw me? Of course you saw me…you’re just to busy drooling over an actress that are more popular but doesn’t have the talent and the guts to perform death defying stunts!…Yes…Yesssssss! I am a stunt woman…is there a problem with that! Gotcha! Impressive huh!!!
There goes that face again, wipe it off, wipe it off!…every time I would tell people about my “profession” they stare at me as though I am the oddest person alive…No, I don’t want to be just a stunt woman…like most struggling actresses, I do aspire to be some type of a star…mega star, superstar, star for all season, star apple, falling star, five star, star fish, star dancer and the likes…me, I want to be- the Universal Star! Nooo…what do you mean it’s a brand of fireworks, Lusis? What Lusis?…hmmm…it means I would be popular both in and out of our country…I would be our country’s pride, our country’s Mascot?…you ha! Nooo…I am a very good actress…in fact back in college I got 1 flat on my drama and reforming arts…my teacher told me that I’ve got potential…ah…the good old days…the days where in I got to recite lines…today I am very lucky if I got to improvise and the director would always take a shot of my back or my 35 degree angle…Sometimes at night…tears would flow from my eyes…a hungering pain would creep in my chest…then I start to sing the aches that I feel…Bongga ka day! Bongga ka day! Sige lang… Sige lang…Itaas ang kilay mo! Ngayon!
Yeah…I feel unhappy at times specially at the rate of the Philippine movie industry…our countrymen is to some extent uncanny when it comes to movie preference…allow me to discuss…
Filipino loves action flicks…action movies where the lead character will never die, immortal would be the precise term…even if there are batallion straying bullets to him…the lead character would always manage to defeat them all…he would carry with him a magical 45 calibre…why magical? Because it will never run out of bullets! have I mentioned that the lead character is always a target shooter…3 to 5 kilometers and he would still hit the target! Is the bullet sometime of a heat sensor?
Of course if there is a lead character then there will be a leading lady…somebody fair, somebody weak, somebody with a nose bridge as high as the Eiffel tower, somebody who has boobs courtesy of Dr. Vicky Be-lank! Hmmm…I am a little carried away…but rest assured that this leading lady needs to be rescued and once rescued this leading lady would fire guns at her abductors not so surprisingly she would always hit them…and get a load a this…she never fired a gun in her life!!! Can we consider that to be a skill?
Of course prior to the kidnap they have to ‘make love’ they would have an opportunity to have physical contact, they would share an ‘unforgettable night’ together…was that the reason why the leading lady needs to be rescued…because they need to share another ‘unforgettable night…hmm…maybe that is the reason why at the end of the movie they would always share a passionate kiss? Would that kiss lead to sex? Can we consider that to be premarital?
And every time she would attempt to escape she would fall down and get hurt making it easy for the bad guys to get her again! Of course, once they catch her, her clothes would be torn into pieces exposing her fine, voluptuous and well characterized form…hmmm…thank you very mush science!
Filipino action flicks always evolve on the theme revenge! Somebody was killed, somebody from the family tree of the action star, his father, mother, sister, brother, grandparents, grandparents of his parents, friends, enemies, pets, acquaintances or somebody he doesn’t know…ahhhh…there goes your plot! And once the lead actor finds out the near dead body of the father, mother, sister, brother, grandparents, grandparents of his parents, friends, enemies, pets, acquaintances or somebody he doesn’t know would still recite a five page dialogue…which will never include the person who executed the crime…every time he would mention the name he would see the glowing light at the far end…
During the stunts there will be ‘unreasonable explosives’ trees would explode, water would explode, grass would explode and if a car would explode it would convert into a junk first! My director calls this cost cutting!
On the duel scene both the antagonist and the protagonist on the middle of gun firing would recite dramatic lines as long as the Sumulong highway…would you believe that, and once face with each other they would both find out that their guns don’t have bullets, so they would throw it away, and begin a fist fight…that would last for about 15 minutes and they would get cuts on the following body parts, the corner of the upper right eye brow, the lower left of their lips and a bleeding cut to the neck…
Naturally one of them would see a gun and they would fight over it, until the antagonist will accidentally pull the trigger towards his body, talk about a loser! Infact, antagonist in our country is poorly developed…picture this, a guy wearing leather jacket, with the temperature in our country…let me remind him we are a ‘tropical’ nation, he has to address his groupies as ‘mga bata’, he would always hold the gangs meeting in an abandoned warehouse or in more popular terms ‘bodega’ and he has to wear shades all the time…is he a vampire?
Lastly, the Philippine movie reflects the Philippine Police as somebody who is always late! The police would arrive after all the bad guys have been killed by our action hero…they would be in uniform or in some silly head ‘do’…
It is bad enough that our country was defined as semi-feudal, semi-colonial in terms of working orientation, it is bad enough that our country values social classes, it is bad enough that our country categorize its people in accordance with the social orientation, it is even worst how the Philippine cinema depicts our lives.
Out of ten cinema’s 8 would be foreign film, which includes pathetic horror films from our neighboring countries and 2 local flick which would only evolve into two main theme an extreme interpretation of life like a family of prostitutes or a massacre gone extremely mad or a fairytale elucidation of the Philippine society…a rich marrying a poor, an educated falling for somebody who wears a leather vest and would recite ‘taas na kamay ko sa iyo, mahal na nga kita palagay ko eh…maging sino ka man!’ totally weird! Our movie industry is like everything you want to happen in your life, it is so ideal…sad to say ideal is synonymous to perfect…in this semi-feudal, semi-colonial world there is no such thing as perfect.
Time for my take…
Entry Bedan Grail
Elocution Category
San Beda College
