My Published Articles for ViewsHound: My Movie Review of Metro Manila

Sunday, November 4, 2018

My Movie Review of Metro Manila

The Bar Scene

I am not an avid movie goer, but a couple of years ago, I rented a movie because I heard so many good reviews about the above film. In addition, the title attracted my attention having resided in Metro Manila for a number of years during my college years.

The movie was advertised as a crime drama and thriller. However, the first hour of the movie was no thriller at all. It was almost like a love story of a poor couple with two young kids from Northern Philippines who went to Manila for a better life. It was only 45 minutes before the end of the movie when the movie fulfilled its label as a crime drama and thriller

The opening scenes in the movie with the Ifugao Rice terraces in Banaue was mesmerizing and beautiful. It makes me feel like visiting the place again. I was in Banaue in 1970.

As the movie progresses the scenes of the poverty and traffic congestion in Manila was filmed so realistically even including the smog from exhaust of thousands of vehicles including Jeepneys, tricycles, buses and cars of all kinds , The movie was filmed entirely in the Philippines, mostly in Manila. This has save thousands of British pounds for movie director and producer Englishman Sean Ellis. As a Filipino-American, the movie brings me some nostalgia even though some of the scenes were filmed in a neighborhood, I will never visit even in broad day light.

The movie starts with farmer Oscar (played by Jake Macapagal) and his wife, Mai (played by Althea Vega), unable to make a living on rice fields of Banaue Province in the Philippines. decided to migrate to Manila to find work, tagging along their two young children . They obtained a ride on a cramped produce and vegetable truck. Immediately after arriving in the city, they encounter a real estate swindler who rented them a house that is government owned. They were forced to live in the streets for a while and witnessed a kidnapping episode.

Later on the story, Oscar was able to move his family to a slum outside of town. After searching for a job for quite sometime, he was so glad to finally get a modestly paying job as an armored car driver. Mai on the other hand finds work in a bar where she’s routinely exploited and harassed by the male clientele. The manager of the Bar is Charlie( played by Angelina Kapati), a masculine woman, who seems sympathetic to Mai needs for money...

Oscar learned very fast of the ways of downtown, or “metro” Manila, after being taught by his driving partner, Ong (played by John Arcilla). Arcilla's acting ability was fantastic and superb.

The movie, Metro Manila offers a realistic view of a crowded and chaotic place where Oscar and Mai struggle against poverty and indifference. Manila is so unforgiving, and their poverty is so desperate. It is no surprise that when the Ramires Family seem to get a happy welcome to the city, their story turns up to a sad and, deadly ending. Watch the movie for a twist in the end.

I recommend this movie to all especially to those who enjoys a love story with a twist at the end. The movie is in Filipino (tagalog) with English subtitles. Since I understandTagalog there was no need for me to look at at subtitles which was hard to read because it was in a small font on my TV screen. Otherwise I enjoyed the movie very much. It was worth more than the $4.99 rental fee that I paid to Comcast Movie in Demand-My Internet and Cable movie Provider.

The film is unrated. It contains profanity, violence, smoking, adult themes and brief nudity, The running time is 115 minutes. It is available through Amazon Google Play, YouTube and Sony Entertainment Network. Metro Manila is 2013 British-Filipino independently produced crime drama film directed by Sean Ellis. Ellis also co-produced and co-wrote the film. The film was selected as the British entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards.

Metro Manila had its International premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival on 20 January 2013. It was also released on 17 July 2013 in France, 28 August 2013 in Belgium, 29 August 2013 in the Netherlands, and 20 September 2013 in the UK. Metro Manila had its Philippine premiere on October 9, 2013. It is now available in Comcast Movie in Demand under Indie and Foreign Films category. The two day rental is $4.99 here in Northern California.

Other Reviews-From the Washington Post

Perhaps inevitably, the complications that ensue in “Metro Manila” begin to look a little contrived and exaggerated. But Ellis has nonetheless created an absorbing, poignant portrait of contemporary life in the Philippines, here pessimistically depicted as a place of cruelty and greed, but also courageous striving. And he’s enlisted a superior group of actors to ground his sometimes schematic story in unguarded sincerity. Macapagal and Arcilla are both solemn and attractive as a young couple the audience never hesitates to root for, and Arcilla handles his character’s own complexities with talky, charismatic flair.

“Metro Manila,” finally, is a sobering portrayal, not just of the abuse of power, but the abuse of hope, which might be even more unforgivable. As Mai tells Oscar at one point, “sometimes the only thing left to hang on to is the blade of the knife.” It cuts even deeper when there’s another human being holding the handle.

Another Review-Telegraph.CO.UK

Metro Manila is so spellbound by its setting that it is a good hour before we discover what kind of film it is going to be. It begins as a swirling drama of survival in the Filipino capital — but then suddenly it slips off down an alleyway, only to emerge a scrupulously engineered, Christopher Nolan-ish crime thriller.

On paper, that sounds awkward: in fact, it’s an entirely logical reflection of the experience of anyone who has ever taken on a city and won. Early in the film, Manila is an inscrutable tangle of bodies and streets, but it gradually takes on the shape of a puzzle that is waiting to be solved. At stake are the life-changing contents of a missing safety deposit box, and a changed life is the reason Oscar Ramirez has come to Manila.

Oscar (Jake Macapagal) is a penniless rice farmer who brings his young family to this city of close to 12 million souls in search of work and food. Slum landlords and brutal employers take an almost overwhelming toll, particularly when Oscar’s pretty wife Mai (Althea Vega) takes a job in a smouldering go-go bar.

Oscar tell his new boss a joke is crisply written and beautifully performed. Moments like that can give you dangerously high hopes for a film, and Metro Manila amply meets them. For details visit the following site.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/10320301/Metro-Manila-review.html

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Sunday, November 4, 2018

My Movie Review of Metro Manila

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