There were no great surprises in the movie industry in the Philippines in 2012. Conventional wisdom prevailed, old formulas reigned, and attempts at the new and unusual were applauded by foreign film festival audiences and ignored by the general public at home.
The box-office was dominated by big-budget Hollywood superhero movies and sequels: The Avengers, and the latest iterations of Twilight, Spider- Man, Batman, Bourne, James Bond, and the (Greek) Titans. Only 25 of the 100 top-grossers (outside of the Metro Manila Film Festival entries) were Filipino productions, and 15 of them were from Star Cinema.
The Mistress, starring the consistently popular “love team” of John Lloyd Cruz and Bea Alonzo, was the highest-earning Filipino movie of the year.
Despite being marketed as a daring and provocative exploration of adultery, the film proved squeamish and timorous: ancient melodrama tropes were exhumed, and the titular mistress portrayed as a kind of martyr (She did it to pay for her grandmother’s surgery!) worthy of canonisation at the Vatican.
If the audience minded, they did not show it: The Mistress grossed US$6.32 million.
Running a close second was the Star Cinema-Viva Films co-production This Guy’s in Love with You, Mare! starring the gay cross-dressing superstar Vice Ganda. Ganda, born Jose Marie Viceral, is the former stand-up comic whose rapid-fire wisecracks, insults and sarcasm, not to mention his outrageous wardrobe, have endeared him to the mainstream audience. He has the distinction of having headlined the most successful Filipino production in history to date: The Unkabogable Praybeyt Benjamin (2011), which grossed US$7.65 million.
In This Guy’s in Love with You, Mare!, Vice Ganda plays a spurned gay man who sets out to make his ex-lover’s fiancée fall in love with him. Taking US$6.08 million, the film grossed less than his record setting movie. But his subsequent project Sisterakas was the undisputed box-office champion at the year-end Metro Manila Film Festival, with an unofficial gross of US$8.34 million.
(The festival grosses are unreliable, so they are not counted in the top ten.) Credit for Sisterakas’ success must be shared with his co-stars Ai-Ai de las Alas and Kris Aquino, who are big draws in their own right, and with director Wenn Deramas, who has directed many of the biggest movies in local history.
Another John Lloyd Cruz vehicle, the romantic sexcomedy Unofficially Yours, co-starring Angel Locsin, made the top 10 with US$3.70 million in earnings.
The mainstream Filipino film industry continues to follow the Hollywood model of the 1980s and 1990s, churning out star-driven vehicles that retread familiar territory and avoid challenging viewers’ expectations.
In the last decade, US commercial cinema has shifted away from star-dependent vehicles towards pop culture properties targeting young adults, like Twilight, Hunger Games, and superheroes. Whether the Filipino movie industry will follow suit remains to be seen. Given that the local movie audience is essentially the same as the audience for television soap operas (the prime difference being the viewer’s willingness to pay to watch the same actors on the big screen), and that the biggest movie producer is also the largest television network, any change will be slow in coming.
Other box-office winners of the past year include Kimmy Dora and the Temple of Kiyeme, the sequel to the comedy hit starring Eugene Domingo and directed by Joyce Bernal; and A Secret Affair, which reunited the stars of the wildly popular adultery melodrama No Other Woman (2011), Anne Curtis and Derek Ramsay.
The most interesting commercial releases of 2012 were a horror-action-comedy and a musical romantic comedy. Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles, by Erik Matti, is a striking update of the aswang film (the aswang is a vampire-like creature), which is a Filipino supernatural horror staple. It has expensive visual effects: at least five groups get producer credit, and post-production reportedly took two years. It’s not particularly scary, but it is fast and amusing, and most unusually, its hero is allowed to be unlikeable. Tiktik grossed US$2.03 million during its fairly long run.
I Do Bidoo Bidoo by Chris Martinez is a charming romantic comedy set to the music of the local pop group, the Apo Hiking Society. A very young couple is set to marry, but as the wedding approaches, unacknowledged issues come to the surface, most of them having to do with the vast gap in their socioeconomic status. The class struggle doesn’t often come with music and witty choreography, and Martinez elicits fine performances from his cast. It’s the kind of movie one thinks of as “very Filipino” – plenty of singing and dancing, laughing and crying, and barbed confrontations between the rich and the not-rich. So its poor box-office (US$310,020) may suggest that it was not promoted as it should have been.
At the annual Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) – the two weeks in December and January when only the eight Filipino entries are shown in local cinemas (although IMAX theatres continued to screen The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, in the absence of a local movie in IMAX format) – there were two surprises. The first was the last-minute addition of Brillante Mendoza’s Thy Womb, starring the great Nora Aunor. Thy Womb, which had won awards at various foreign film festivals, was included in the selection not because it was acclaimed abroad, but because one of the pre-selected entries was not finished in time for the MMFF. As MMFF entries are chosen on the basis of commercial appeal, its lastplace finish was expected.
The second surprise was the controversy surrounding Star Cinema’s One More Try, a melodrama which bore very close resemblance to the Chinese film In Love We Trust. Given the unusual plot of the Chinese film, coincidence would have to be ruled out. Star Cinema did not respond to the issue. The MMFF jury gave One More Try its Best Picture and Best Screenplay awards, and the movie placed second to the aforementioned Sisterakas at the box-office with US$4.15 million Outside of the commercial mainstream, the Cinemalaya film festival continued to be the main showcase for new independent movies. Cinema One of the ABS-CBN network, the Cinemanila festival, and the new Cine Filipino competition also support indie filmmakers.
Three Cinemalaya films landed distribution deals with the studios and had brief runs at local theatres: Bwakaw, Little Secrets (Mga Mumunting Lihim) and Santa Niña.
The Filipino-French production Captive, directed by Brillante Mendoza, and starring Isabelle Huppert as a missionary abducted and held for ransom by a terrorist group in the Mindanao jungles, was released locally by Star Cinema.
In 2012 Filipino cinema reeled from the loss of three of its finest directors: Mario O’Hara, Marilou Diaz- Abaya, and Celso Ad. Castillo.
Jessica Zafra