Really, Speaking Greek

Notes on Aristotle’s Poetics

While some critics primarily consider Poetics a counterattack to Plato’s banishing of poets from [in] theRepublic, Aristotle’s treatise on art, poetry, epic, and tragedy clearly marks out the history of literary criticism. Rather than concluding that poets should be banished from the perfect society, as does Plato, Aristotle attempts to describe the social function and the ethical utility of art.

Poetics places emphasis on the formative nature of art—while predecessor Plato esteems idealism and abstractions as the highest forms of truth to gain wisdom, Aristotle stresses the importance or primacy of the particular imitations of nature.

According to Aristotle, criticism should not be simply the application of unexamined aesthetic principles in its context within the work—but should pay attention to the overall function of feature of a work of art. Therefore, Poetics lays bare the anatomy of art, as in a scientist—carefully accounting for the features of each species cited in the text—most forms by the way are the ones that existed during those times.

Exploring the forms of art during Aristotle’s time, Poetics particularly discusses the practical details of the forms of imitation, which he termed mimesis.  The treatment of the forms or modes of representation is meticulous as Aristotle presents as many definitions as the terms themselves. For instance, Aristotle goes into detail, when he cites the types of tragic plots. He also names specific terms to explicate that unity of plot is indispensably necessary. In Book 17, Aristotle gives poets some pointers on how to construct a tragedy—or how tragedy is constructed by playwrights who were awarded in Dionysian festivals.

Especially drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Aristotle cites the six salient parts of tragedy in order of importance—plot, character, thought, diction, music or melody and spectacle.  Zooming in on the good plots, Poetics prefers the plausibility and logically connected order centered on one unified action, simultaneously frowning on multiple, divergent plots which it also deems unnecessary. Poetics suggests that the best kind of resolution to these plots is one that shows a reversal (peripeteia) of position for the main character—and a character’s recognition (anagnorisis) of his or her fate. For best effect, so to speak, characters should come from high positions in order to render remarkable tragic circumstances, and their fates must be linked to their own error, and not some accident or wickedness (hamartia).

According to Norton’s Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Aristotle’s seminal work on art renders us a number of implications for the modern critics.  First, its systematic categorization of genus and species and its comparison of tragedy and epic are said to now underlie all genre theory—“undergirding modern considerations of the historical movement from epic to the novel. Second, its systematic description of plot and its component parts basically ground contemporary narrative theory, especially the technical field of narratology. 

Third, its scientific examination of poetry—championed by the American New Critics—rather just validates it as a legitimate branch of study.  Next, it affirms that poetry is a source of universal knowledge of human behavior, i.e. unlike history that produces knowledge of specific situations, poetry describes actions of characters who might be any human beings.  Lastly, to which most critics agree, good poetry renders us catharsis, primarily read as purgation of unwieldy emotion. 

Through time, catharsis, roughly a sense of moral purification that arises in an individual from being exposed to tragedy has come to mean ethical or intellectual clarification.

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Aristotle’s Poetics clearly marks out the beginnings of literary theory and criticism. 

In this age-old treatise, Aristotle provides both a history of the development of poetry and drama, and a critical framework for evaluating tragic drama. It is considered the first systematic essay in literary theory because it is full of insight and shows a high degree of flexibility in the application of its general rules.

More inclined to forming categories and organizing them into coherent systems than his teacher Plato (who highly esteemed a cerebral Theory of Forms), Aristotle conversely treated the discussion of poetry as a natural scientist, carefully accounting for the features of each “species” of text.

In the twenty six books perhaps gathered as notes by his pupils, three points stand out as probably the most important. First is the interpretation of poetry as mimesis. In Chapters 1–3, all poetry, Aristotle argues, is imitation or mimesis. Poetry springs from a basic human delight in mimicry. Humans learn through imitating and take pleasure in looking at imitations of the perceived world. The mimetic dimension of the poetic arts is always representational. As artistic representation, mimesis in poetry is the act of telling stories that are set in the real world. The events in the story need not have taken place, but the telling of the story will help the listener or viewer to imagine the events taking place in the real world.

Furthermore, representations of human beings in poetry can be sorted into three categories—depictions of humans as better than they really are, depictions of humans as they are in reality, and depictions of humans as worse than they really are. It then distinguishes three types of poetry—tragedy, comedy and epic poetry, perhaps just like an anatomist labels parts of the human body.

In particular, Aristotle focuses his discussion on tragedy, which uses dramatic, rather than narrative, form, and deals with agents who are better than us, ourselves. Aristotle writes the famous opening line in Book 6, which sums up the centerpiece of his work—

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.

Aristotle lists six components of tragedy—plot or mythos,character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. While diction and melody are the style of the text or lyrics, and the music to which some of them are set; spectacle refers to staging, lighting, sets, costumes, etc. Thought refers to the indications, given primarily through words but also through other means, of what the characters are thinking.

Of the six parts, Aristotle insisted on the primacy and unity of plot.  While plot as representation of human action can either besimple or complex, Aristotle stresses that complex plots are required for successful tragedies. Here, the plot must be unified, clearly displaying a beginning, a middle, and an end, and must be of sufficient length to fully represent the course of actions but not very long that the audience loses attention and interest.

Unfolding through an internal logic and causality, a complex plot should consist of a hero going from happiness to misery. The hero should be portrayed consistently and in a good light (and the poet should also remain true to what we know of the character).For Aristotle, then, action—represented as the plot—must be consistent with character—and more importantly reveal character.

Furthermore, a number of terms can illuminate how complex plot works successfully for tragedy. Hamartia, translated directly as “error,” is often a “tragic flaw” on the part of the hero that causes his very downfall—this error need not be an overarching moral failing, rather only a matter of not knowing something or forgetting something. Employed along with it is anagnorisis or“recognition,” a part in tragedy—often at the climax—where the hero, or some other character, passes from ignorance to knowledge. This could be a recognition of a long lost friend or family member or a sudden recognition of some fact about oneself, as the case of Oedipus in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Therefore, the concept of mythos is about how the elements of a tragedy come together to form a coherent and unified whole—in such a way that the overall message or impression that we come away with is what is conveyed to us by the mythos of a piece.

Equally prominent in the Aristotelian treatise is the notion of catharsis. For him, such tragic plot must serve to arouse the emotions of pity and fear and effect a catharsis of these emotions. While some critics forever debate the meaning of the term,Aristotle’s reference to the purging of the emotions of pity and fear aroused in the viewer always links it to the positive social function of tragedy—in general, the ethical utility of art.

Thus, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Aristotle’sPoetics established the beginning of literary theory and criticism, in that it started the discussion of poetic art as representation of reality, a contention held true even today.

Its “species-concerned” treatment of the components of poetic art also initiated the recent and ongoing discourses on the classification of literary forms and types or genres, or genre theory, a structuralist approach to literary, film and cultural theories.

Its concept of the three unities—those of action, place and time—was even taken to its most austere limits during the Renaissance and the succeeding European periods.

Above all, it ushered in for the succeeding eras the importance of the value of art itself, which is one of moral instruction, a concept taken always seriously in the discussion of literature.

Speaking Greek

Random Clarifications on Plato’s Republic

All art and poetry—representing what is already an inferior representation of the true original—only leads further away from the truth—and further into a world of illusion and deception.

The above statement is said to sum up Plato’s sentiment in the Republic, an age-old treatise on philosophy which does not recognize the importance of poets and artists in an ideal, well-regulated community promoting respect for law, reason, authority, self-discipline and piety.

Between his student Aristotle and himself, the great Plato is notorious for being the idealist, while the son of the medical doctor is the pragmatic theorist.

Infamous for attacking mimesis, Plato rather explores the nature of knowledge and its proper objects.

Plato thus proclaims that the world we perceive depends on a prior realm of separately existing forms organized beneath the form of Good. According to him, the realm of forms is accessible not through the senses [as is the world of appearances] but only through rigorous philosophic discussion and thought based on mathematical reasoning.

For Plato’s Socrates, measuring, counting and weighing all bring us closer to the realm of forms, and not poetry’s pale representations of nature.

In an effort to censor Homer, Plato’s Socrates often cites Homer’sIliad and Odyssey, calling for the censorship of many passages in these works [because they] represent sacrilegious, sentimental, unlawful and irrational behavior.

Through Republic and his other works, Plato insinuates that literature must teach goodness and grace. Such relentless application of this standard to all literature, however, marks one of the most noteworthy beginnings of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.

thinkingweek2010.blogspot.com

Beautiful Monsters

Save for one poignant scene in Richard Somes’s Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang, the rest of the movie leaves a number of unresolved settings, let’s call them clutter, that only puzzle the audience.

This scene involves Erich Gonzales’s Corazon fleeing the townsfolk and Derek Ramsey’s Daniel escaping the personal army of the landlord Matias (Mark Gil) in the post-World War II sakadas, most probably in the vast lands of Negros. (Immediately this mention of probability is only one among the many unresolved elements that cloud the essence of the movie. Aside from the landlord-tenant relationship which was prevalent elsewhere in the post-war Philippines, no other elements in the movie can make us infer it happened particularly there.)

In the village of Magdalena, Daniel, the loving farmer husband of the innocently beautiful Corazon, has just murdered the landlord Matias in his own mansion after the couple’s house was burned down by the goons. And the wounded Corazon, after being shot by Matias when she devoured his daughter Melissa in her bed, has also been found (and found out) by one of Daniel’s friends to be the one responsible for the killings of children in the village.

Both Daniel and Corazon are fleeing the enraged townsfolk who want to kill the village murderer. The scene rips your heart because both characters are rather fleeing their own created monsters. Daniel has murdered the landlord in retaliation for having burned their house; while Corazon has just been found out responsible for having devoured the children in the village. What rips your heart more is that the couple only wanted to have a child but the wife’s devotion to San Gerardo failed them—after Corazon delivered a stillborn. So the reality of a dead baby drove the main character Corazon (the could-have been mother) to curse God and throw her faith away to the dark.

The man-on-the-road element in this work of fiction is rendered well in this climactic scene, with the score swelling as the couple flees their pursuers heightening the drama and resolving it to the conclusion—as in the French term denouement (day-no-man)—when the couple vanish in the dark. So there.

Notes on Camp

In the 1960s, American writer Susan Sontag was brought to the world limelight after she pinpointed that camp is the “love of the unnatural, the artifice and exaggeration.” Well, we have seen camp movies proliferate in the horror flicks of the Filipino directors in the 80s—Shake, Rattle and Roll series and tons of other films in the same vein that entertained the generation of that decade. Through time, we have seen tendencies of Filipino movies to make use of camp, which refers to the effects that the film made to scare the audience by propping monsters and supernaturals so they look hideous or horrible only to make them appear outrageously odd or simply outrageous.

In Corazon, these include madwoman Melinda’s (Tetchie Agbayani) over-disheveled wig which rather exaggerates Diana Ross’s afro look. When I saw this, prizewinning fictionist critic Rosario Cruz-Lucero came to mind. In cases like this, Cruz-Lucero hints at the creative sense that an author needs not “overkill” the essence of what he is portraying by overdoing descriptions and attributes that have already been established.

The movie was trapped in the premise that a madwoman must really appear overly unkempt and dirty with her tattered outfit, teeth and all—or totally taong grasa so audience knows she is mad. And mad. And really mad. But there is just no need for Agbayani’s Melinda to appear this ridiculous so she could portray her Sisa character [she’s looking for her daughter who disappeared during the war]. I suppose Agbayani is fairly a good actress that her delivery of lines or a dramatic monologue alone could make us infer without a doubt she is a Sisa who was driven mad because she lost her child to the war.

Furthermore, we cannot see the relevance of Eric Gonzales’s Corazon putting on a baboy-damo mask to cloud her real intentions that she is the village monster preying on the innocent victims. What is Corazon’s reason for doing that? In the first place, where did she get the mask? Even the metallic effect of the face of the mask strikes us like it was stolen from the set of Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld which is too European to be accepted into the Filipino sensibility. Or talk of the masks used by  gladiators in Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Employing all these is more than camp, but more appropriately a rushed second-year high school drama production.

The movie also badly suffers from the complicated plot which requires more show time for them to be unraveled and resolved. Questions. Is Melinda the lost mother of Matias’s daughter Melissa? Or is Corazon the lost daughter of Melinda? We do not know. But it seemed as if the movie showed we knew they were. While it could have just dwelt on the legend of the aswang, or how the first human-eating human being came to be—initially called halimaw in the film—the movie touched on other sensibilities and opened territories where the other characters dwelt but which it did not pursue or explore at all.

Both Beautiful and Monstrous

At the time the halimaw devours the village children one by one, Corazon contorts her head like the way it is done in the Asian horror flicks that became the norm made popular by the Japanese original Ring in early 2000s. Sadly, the movie reeks of this hackneyed style which looked fresh only the first time it’s done in those days.

While the supporting characters of Mon Confiado’s and Epy Quizon’s are comfortable, Maria Isabel Lopez’s Aling Herminia is a revelation. Her portrayal of the relihiyosa in the less-than-two-minuter scene as the partera (quack midwife) is eerie and astonishingly original. The rest is unmemorable.

In some instances, also, both of the main characters deliver their intense scenes well. For one, Erich Gonzales’s childbirth is more convincing than other women who fake their ires and arrays in most films; while Ramsay’s macho tendencies and naturalness are without question.

The mestiza face of Erich Gonzales may be deemed realistic because she was said to be the love child of her mother and an American soldier during the war. But the placing of Derek Ramsay as the farmer Daniel, whose roots we barely know, is farcical. If at all, the movie does not make clear the background of Daniel. He is too sculpted to be just a humble farmer in the barrio—he hunts boars after he works out in the Fil-Am-Jap bodybuilding gym. Funny. Mon Confiado would be the more believable Daniel. Their metropolitan or cosmopolitan twang, could have been reworked to render their rustic characters more realistic. Talk of George VI doing the entire movie reworking his tongue in The King’s Speech. The lead actors are too beautiful to be monstrous because they look too polished for these rustic roles. Ultimately they appear ridiculous. Sadly camp.

“Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang”

Erich Gonzales, Derek Ramsay, Mark Gil, Epi Quizon, Maria Isabel Lopez, Tetchie Agbayani

Directed by Richard Somes

Skylight Films, 2012

Poe3

The Writer Walks to the Podium, And

Today, the writer will (speak about an) elevate (d piece of) himself.  In various other ways he has long tried to do this—talking to himself, discussing with teachers, conversing with friends, or grandstanding.

In the past, he has written letters to friends, brothers and sisters, teachers, classmates, and those people whom he knows and who knows him.  These people are not more than 20 individuals who are either simply familiar (just because he knows their names and faces) or really familiar (because they know him and he knows them better than other people).

The pieces he has written may have either been poetry, or essays mostly authored in first person. Some of them even have included artworks, sketches, variations of famous lyric poetry, short quotes, and even his own verse (which he would rewrite now and then until he feels they are poetry enough).

Most of the time, he insists to give them to these persons because he feels constantly driven to do so. Through a certain poem, essay or excerpt, he conveys aspects of himself. 

In fact, these people would thank him for the effort. They would thank him for the odd opportunity of being written for unexpectedly, but also for the rare chance of receiving a poem for a gift. That something is written for them by him simply surprises or especially flatters them. Some would utterly thank him for the poetry enclosed. While others would relate to him how an artwork made them ponder for a while.

Through such pieces, he honestly conveys himself to them. Through them, he believes he shares his soul, because in these poems and essays, he discloses his thoughts, he articulates his emotion. In all these, he lays bare his sobriety.

On the part of those who receive his “gifts,” they would feel elated and grateful because somebody thinks of them, or because in a way or a hundred others, somebody, to the very least, regards them. On his part, this entails one true thing for which he ought to be thankful himself—his aching desire to draw an idea or enunciate each emotion, spontaneous or contrived, good or otherwise, in fine and creative written form. All this special time he has come to realize that two things in his poems and works are unmistakably consistent, or persistent: pain and glory, or worded otherwise, agony and ecstasy.

These extremes, expressions in themselves, have always been apparent in his metaphors or insinuated in his narration. Though these pieces which he has enjoyed putting on paper do not necessarily conform to the numerous literary standards or rules on style of his day, they have to make sense for perhaps they have been spontaneously written—but always to manifest an undisguised spirit born to pain and redeemed by ecstasy, speaking truth and nothing less.

His poetry, for instance, contains tension, some conflict fragmented either in details or in mixed metaphors. Though one particular poem written out of angst appears to have a forced ending, the person to whom he has given the work would tell him that someone who writes these lines, or even just comes to think about it is one tormented spirit—“a grim soul,” in fact.


A narration on a harrowing experience, meanwhile, may seem scattered or disorganized, but one thing there is the certain choice of words that depict morbidity and everything else it entails. Both forms, poetic or prosaic, say about only one true thing—pain and all it offers, agony and all it gives.

At times, because he spontaneously writes these poems and essays, he also makes it a point to revise them before he finally gives them to persons whom he knows and who can relate to them. Revising these unsolicited pieces enables him to be more insightful about every thought, emotion or experience therein. Because spontaneity and therefore truths among these pieces may be sacrificed or unfortunately wasted if he revises his works, he is better convinced that the unrevised ones tell the best thing in this conscious endeavor. 

Every unedited or unpolished piece contains the grim provocation, the raw emotion, the stolid person. Yet, along with the ill forms and sad projections is his heart for the good—the highest hope, the unwavering belief in the ultimate goodness in all things, a constant, optimistic disposition that will banish all the afflictions rendered by reality.

Some three

Jose Garcia Villa

We first meet him as the author of “The Coconut Poem,” a lyric brimming and overflowing with coconut milk and sexual juices whose testosterone-loaded innuendoes caused him his expulsion from the University of the Philippines. Enough said.

But what else could you make of JGV?  Never contented with the commonplaceness of the literary environment he was in, the self-proclaimed Doveglion [dove eagle lion] Jose Garcia Villa literally rose among the ranks of writers to his own ivory tower.

An arrogant literary critic who scathed other writers’ works more than cared for them, JGV gained the ire of other promising sensibilities, perhaps primarily Angela Manalang Gloria whose poetic works he greatly berated. No one cared for his poetry which others had declared no more than intellectual masturbations that made only him orgasmic [and him alone].

But when he started making sense to other people with his comma poetry and philosophy, no one bothered him in his ivory tower. Up there, the self-proclaimed prophet of poetry could have never been more alone.

Henry David Thoreau

When Henry David Thoreau wrote that he is perhaps most anxious when he is in the throngs of people, he did not really complain of agoraphobia nor did he publicly declare that he admires some of them in private. He merely harped on how man can attain wholeness through self-possession.

Living with Ralph Waldo Emerson could not have made him more social—only antisocial. A religious minister who himself fell out from the fold, Emerson’s influence on the young Thoreau helped create the masterpiece titled Walden, an insightful individualistic journal that highlighted how man can go back to his primal nature and still survive civilization.

But Thoreau’s Walden campout is not just an NSTP immersion; it is a return to man's spiritual nature in which  he can rethink his purpose not really by living alone away from the noise or far from the madding crowd—but by practicing simplicity which is man’s true nature.

Emily Dickinson

American recluse Emily Dickinson is one interesting soul who selected her own society, choosing few for many and simplicity for ornament. With her hyphenated—and her Caps and Lowercase intimations about flowers and things, life and death, morbidity and turgidity, she stood out through history as another genius of the language.

Emily Dickinson’s life seemed no more than that of Eleanor Rigby in Paul McCartney’s song—“Aaaaa look at all the lonely people”—and if she were alive today, she would have preferred less than 10 friends on her Facebook account. She would not really refuse a means of networking like FB or even multiply, as she sought to bond and correspond with people following too many deaths in her family.

But would you ever forgive Dickinson for being so selfish she relished her own poetry by herself? Her poetry was made so private by her that her genius was only discovered up on a roof after her death.

Villa, Dickinson and Thoreau must have attended only one school—the University of Solitary where the major graduate paper was an Individual vs. Society thesis. By insisting on individuality in their rhetoric and poetry, consciously or otherwise they defied an existing social order that rather imposed conformity monotony lethargy. All three graduated with highest honors.

All art is imitation

White Lady
Boots Anson-Roa, Angelica Panganiban, Pauleen Luna
Directed by Jeff Tan
Regal Films, 2006

In art and literature, Aristotle is often quoted for having said that all art is imitation—the Greek word for his concept is mimesis. Thus, you have the concept of the word mimicry for the animal behavior of adapting to their environment for survival, or mime, that theater style famous in beauty contests or high school theater arts.

Jeff Tan’s “White Lady” must have taken this definition too literally that the film is a hodgepodge of some ingenious works that we have previously seen onscreen.

“White Lady” opens quite cinematically, with zoom-in shots of the classroom chairs where the sort of epilogue for the story commences. Kind of tells you this is a serious picture to reckon with. Kind of thrills you, really. But as the movie progresses, we are made to infer that the sensibilities being showcased one after another are the ones we must have seen in a number of movies produced in the past.

A number of scenes in the film remind us of those in the Ring, The Grudge, Willard, or even Feng Shui, and all other stuffs horror flicks are made of. Of course, we say an artist can normally be a product of his influences. But for his part, being too imitative to the point of copying quite accurately what was done before is synonymous to plagiarism—an act that encroaches anyone’s right to intellectual property, such as those who made these previous films.

Such act highly resembles the act of photocopying articles from a book, and using them for one’s own purpose. The storyline is not original as it takes off from the white lady myth and the supernatural details we must have head over all our superstitious country.

We can cite instances of the lack of originality. The way all the kontrabidas die in the film reminds you of Kris Aquino’s Feng Shui, in which characters die according to their own year in the Chinese calendar—dragon, horse, snake, boa constrictor?, etc. Similarly in this film lacking originality, antagonists die according to their fear, probably because the White Lady herself knew about all of them, when she hovered in the campout where they phobia session took place.

The white lady coming out of the canvas reminds you of Sadako coming out of the television screen towards the end of the Ring which shocked people in 2002. The white lady spewing out smoke and ashes [right, because she was burned in the tool shed] makes you recall the horror specimen in the Grudge, both films anyway had their Hollywood versions.

The computer graphics work involving rats overwhelming one male character, the playing dolls moving and walking reminding you of 80s horror flicks where monsters and mumus were rolled on wheels, etc., or the mirror being shattered on the face of the lead female kontrabida, have yet to be polished so as to appear realistic, er believable. They have to be so—after all, everything in the film discipline must be make believe, a mimicry, an imitation. Logically, then, we should be made to believe.

Furthermore, Iwa Moto’s Mimi tells us that Moto is not an actress—her coñita twang and even a Koreanovela countenance do not match quite acceptably. Her final scene, though, matches up with her hackneyed acting as she dies of the shattered glass from the mirror. She is supposed to render the story much tension—with her original evil character, but she falls short of evil—just laughable in her cliché performance. Seriously, that is not a good thing for someone newly introduced in the industry, maybe. We can even wonder why she was discovered to act.

Meanwhile, the Ilonggo twang, according to my Ilongga companion, does not even sound believable, as she observed some inaccuracies or un-grammatical Ilonggo sentences in the dialogues. The director must have capitalized on Gian Carlos’ Ilonggo roots, but the un-grammatical sentences in the script did not save the Ilonggo sensibility.

The “Ili-ili” (Ilonggo for lullaby) theme, though, gets both our praise and flak. While it brings to an Ilonggo a sense of nostalgia, the actress’s lip synching another singer’s voice three or four times throughout the film suffices more than enough that he has seen more of such stuffs in television variety shows, where singers are said to be “singing” when they are not. At least in music videos or MTVs, we can forgive the swelling vocals [sounds] because it is timed accurately with the singer’s actual singing.

Citing the flaws of the film should make you curious about it. True. So, there. There’s not much else to say about it then.

TO BE FAIR, though, let’s ask, “What are the film’s sources of redemption, if any? What are its pluses, if applicable?” Pauleen Luna’s Pearl is simply engaging. Luna is a promising actress with her un-hackneyed countenance as the female lead who faces the dilemma, and who closes it satisfactorily in the final scene. Her pretty face does not fail to refresh the audience who is compelled to negotiate an otherwise dark, hackneyed storyline.

Angelica Panganiban’s Christina, the white lady herself, shines in her own way, too. Her portrayal as the innocent victim and a vengeful angel of death is quite portrayed with originality, complementing Boots Anson-Roa’s wicked [or weak-ed] Ilongga Lola Tasya, who gets away with her accent slightly unscathed, and who succumbs to the same predicament as her granddaughter Christina [but who finds herself in the middle of a Tanging Yaman poster in the final scene].

All the other characters, it should be noted, are pathetically stock characters. They are the cliché roles that we see being portrayed day in and day out on soaps [and other suds] on television. There’s nothing new about them.

That the film ends in a melodramatic way [anyway, scenes all throughout vacillate between Love to Love Season 10? and Shake, Rattle and Roll V] tells us that it is not a horror film after all. Perhaps it is something else. Or something else? Makes us think of the film otherwise by asking, “What is the film trying to do, if at all?” Ah.

In all, they say the best thing to constructively critique a badly made film is to ignore it, or not to review it at all. Or cite it at the end of the year as the worst this and that. Razzi Awards, etc. Of course not.

We believe in what the young people can do—so we do not just sit down and be apathetic to it like the rest of the world. At best, we could point out some things for consideration so next time they produce anything, we will not be shortchanged.

All art is imitation, it is said—but some people take it quite literally. Sadly.