Then & Now & Then

Back then, what you had was padalan or pasali, Bikol words for the more familiar Filipino term palabas. This referred to any film showing in the small barangay where you grew up.

This included the comedy flick Max & Jess featuring Panchito and Dolphy shown one summer afternoon in your grade school’s Industrial Arts building. It was probably led by your mother, who was then in charge of raising funds for the school’s non-formal education.

The movie was shown using a projector which flashed the film reel to a very big white mantel probably borrowed from your grandmother’s kitchen collection locked in the platera of the dakulang harong in the libod. The tickets were probably sold at P1.50 each for two features that provided some three hours of quality entertainment to your barrio folk.

There was also the health documentary sponsored by the Ministry of Health top-biled by then Minister Alfredo Bengzon, who gave out health advisories for the barangays. This was in the early 80s before Marcos stepped out of Malacañang. When it was shown in the Triangle, the open barangay hall, it rained heavily, much to the chagrin of some barangay folks who just went home disappointed. The others who did not leave the show made do with umbrellas and raincoats. But back then, the big telon was enough for them to get hooked: talk of being able to watch something on a big screen once in a blue moon. The documentary featured practices that can be adopted by the barangay folk to avoid diarrhea and dysentery, diseases that can be acquired from unsanitary and unhygienic toilet practices.

Then, there were the nightly treats of Betamax showing on black and white and later colored TV monitors in three key areas in the barangay.

There was one in the house of the Molata family which catered to the Baybay and Iraya residents. There, movies were shown inside the cramped sala of the Molatas, which was just inside their big retail store.

Bruce Lee

There was also the one owned by Tiyo Magno San Andres, a distant relative of your parents, who would clear his own bodega of grains and household supplies to make space for the nightly flicks of Bruce Lee, Dante Varona or Ramon Revilla, among many others. But you hardly had the chance to get in there, probably because you already enjoyed the free entry in your relatives’ “bigger movie house.”

This was your Auntie Felia’s bodega movie house where mostly new tapes were shown nightly for the entertainment of the barangay. Used as warehouse for copra transported in your Uncle Harben’s 10-wheeler truck from Tinambac to Naga, that place was in fact the biggest movie house because it could house 75 moviegoers or more at one time, particularly when it had no copra.

Yet, from time to time, moviegoers also sat on top of copra sacks even piled 10 times high while they revelled in Redford White’s antics or Cachupoy’s capers, or while they were kept alive and awake till midnight, enjoying the burugbugan or suruntukan in the movies of Fernando Poe, Jr., Rudy Fernandez, Rey Malonzo or George Estregan and a host of many other action stars. Talk of orchestra and balcony seating at the time.

Aside from the word-of-mouth shared by folks in the barangay, the nightly flicks were announced having their titles written  in chalk on your cousin’s green Alphabet Board displayed in front of their two-storey house just in front of Triangle, which for a long time served as the barangay market.

There was a time when the Acuñas’ bodega served as the official theater for the barangay, catering to the nightly entertainment of the folks—sometimes families (parents and children)—from Baybay to Pantalan and from Tigman and Banat, two bigger sitios situated at the two opposite ends from the Triangle.

When new tapes were brought in for the same movie house, you could expect a Standing Room Only; therefore, you could expect to be uncomfortable being seated or haggling for an inch of space with children your age, some of them even smelling rich of kasag (crabs).

Baad taga-Baybay ta parong-parong pang marhay an pinamanggihan. Linabunan na kasag tapos dai palan nagdamoy. (Probably from Sitio Baybay who had boiled crabs for supper and forgot to wash their hands afterwards.) Nom!

Among others, the Acuña movie house had the most strategic location, serving as the hub where most of the residents converged.

But that movie house would serve the barangay but only up to the time when your folks decided to settle and stay more permanently in the city. The kids, you and your cousins, were all growing up or had to grow up—so some things had to go. Besides, the place had only gotten smaller. (But certainly it was you who had grown bigger.) 

You had been initiated to the world of the movies at a very young age.

Growing up in that small barangay with all these movies you saw, you readily recall the pictures in your head: The loud and bright colors of the characters in Max & Jess, inspired from a komiks cartoon, only complemented the loud mouths of Dolphy and Panchito who raved and ranted against each other all throughout the movie.

There was also the sepia appearance of the Ministry of Health’s documentary flashed on the barangay telon, which only made it look like a news reel further back from the 1960s. You realize now that it was rather a mockumentary because at the time people were being taught on health practices under the rain, which had only ironically endangered their health.

And of course, the many varied colors in the smaller screen of your relatives where you probably saw—through the movies—all the worlds possible.

Now what readily comes to mind? You had the medieval heroine Hundra, which featured axing and butchering of warriors and amazons for most of the film; and the sharp colors of the characters in the animation Pete’s Dragon, which you must have watched with your cousins a hundred times only because unlike the rented copies used for the nightly showing, this was an original Betamax tape sent by the Acuña relatives from the United States.

There was also the flying dog in the Never-Ending Story; and the cyborgs in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.

And of course there was the wave of melodramas favored by the women in your household probably because most of them were tearjerkers—from Dina Bonnevie’s Magdusa Ka to Maricel Soriano’s Pinulot Ka Lang sa Lupa to Jaypee de Guzman’s Mga Batang Yagit to Helen Gamboa’s Mundo Man Ay Magunaw, and a hundred other (melo)dramas.

These were the movies peopled by characters you would remember; characters whom you would, every now and then, find or seek in others; characters whom you would, in later years, see yourself become.

Back then, you got to enjoy a movie and even memorize the scenes in it only because it came once in a blue moon, as it were.

You always looked forward to one weekend when your parents would bring you all to watch the latest release in Bichara Theater in downtown Naga.

The whole week you looked forward to that Saturday or Sunday they promised because it surely would come with a date at the Naga Restaurant where you would be treated to bowls of steaming asado mami and toasted or steamed siopao—not to mention a probable new pair of shoes or a cool shirt from Zenco Footstep or Sampaguita Department Store.

But now, you have already brought home an audio-visual entertainment. You will watch a movie from your USB to your LCD TV, full HD, complete with the frills of the latest technology. Now the movie is only yours to play—and play back again and again and again, as many times as you like.

Back then, if you liked some scene in the film which you’d liked to watch again, you’d have to wait till the next feature so you would wait until you spend some three more hours inside the theater. But now, you won’t worry anymore. With your latest downloaded movie flashing on your 40” LCD screen, you can freeze that scene and relish the drama or action—complete with subtitles—to your heart’s content.

Back then, watching a movie was something to talk about with your siblings or cousins when you got back from the city. Now, watching a Torrentzed film from your USB drive is what you can only do because it would be so hard for you to talk to them who are thousands of cities away from where you are.

King of Pain

I saw Pepeng Kaliwete starring Fernando Poe, Jr. when I was a first-grader.  In those days, Mother was fond of movies that on weekends, she would bring her children to downtown Naga and there we watched all kinds of movies—in Emily, Bichara, Alex or Vic—the movie theaters owned by the Bicharas in Naga City.

Nothing reminds me of the movie except cringing at the sight of Pepe’s hands being twisted by a moving wooden motor—by the goons of the kontrabida led by the proverbial villain Paquito Diaz. Who can ever forget the ngilo just watching that scene? Since then, I have looked forward to watching FPJ’s movies.

Enough said.

Some thirty years later, I feel fine because it is now official. This year, President Benigno Aquino III conferred a posthumous National Artist award to the late Fernando Poe, Jr., King of Philippine Movies.  Aquino’s Proclamation No. 435 only confirmed an earlier declaration of Poe as National Artist in 2006, two years after Poe’s death. But at the time controversy took over.

I recall the award was refused by FPJ’s family from then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom they thought, rigged the 2004 elections in which FPJ ran for president. This year, the family has accepted the recognition from the current president.

I suppose the national recognition of this prolific artist is appropriate. For one, a National Artist is one who has helped “build a Filipino sense of nationhood through the content and form of their works.”  Through some 50 years of his career in the movie industry, FPJ had been a household word for his honest portrayals of the plight of the Filipino, particularly the underprivileged and the marginalized.

An average Filipino like me knows an FPJ movie or the role he portrayed simply because he portrayed the life of the ordinary people, who compose the lot of the population. Whether in film biographies—from Pepeng Kaliwete to Eseng ng Tondo or other movies he produced, directed and acted in, it's he who sacrifices for the other person.

Up to his sixties, FPJ’s roles had been consistently that—particularly favoring the underprivileged or defending the marginalized, but all the while lionizing the good. If at all, FPJ’s movies melodramas helped define the generation to which I belong. But because his roles have been mimicked and parodied by other fellow actors, it only goes to show they touched a chord in the Filipino everyman.  

In some 250 movies where he probably punched all the thugs and gave back the stolen candy bars to their rightful owners, his character was not only our muscle but also our soul, a Robin Hood of sorts in our part of the world who delivered justice for the poor because it was denied them by the privileged and the greedy. His manner of delivering justice the Christian way did not only save us from boredom or tedium, but also “redeemed” us.  And for this, FPJ can hardly be replicated.

We confer on him the award because we seek to immortalize a paragon of the good—whose pains and struggles can inspire us to always seek what is just. We choose to do this because we humans need a(nother) Christ-like figure whom we can emulate.  We take to placing one FPJ as such only because we need to remind ourselves that in everything we do, or despite our perennial struggles, we can always choose to do the good.

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