At the restaurant, I could hear the women’s conversation clearly. My ears perked up when I heard a network’s name and its popular TV show in one breath. “Its finale was GMA’s most watched,” said the woman whose back was to me. “The youth of today are so lucky! They can just watch Jose Rizal’s...
Category: Entertainment
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Hits and misses in the Summer Metro Manila Film Festival
In an earlier face-to-face interview with lawyer Josabeth “Joji” Alonso, chief operating officer of Quantum Films, she casually said that an official entry to the ongoing Summer Metro Manila Film Festival (SMMFF), “About Us But Not About Us,” wouldn’t make money. To think that her office is a co-producer of the project. But then she said...
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Film continues to help Filipinos remember the sins of martial law
Shortly after World War II, many survivors of the attempted annihilation of Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies recalled the final plea of their fellow prisoners while being herded to impending death: “Remember! Do not let the world forget!” It was in honoring that anguished plea that Holocaust survivors set up exhibits and scholarly...
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4 Chinese women show social context of deployment of beauty
Women’s agency is illustrated in how they deploy their beauty as cultural capital. But they do so amid certain factors, which shape, facilitate, and even constrain such deployment. In China, as shown by four famous Chinese women, the deployment of beauty lies at the intersection between individual agency and social, cultural, and even political structures:...
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Kidlat Tahimik’s ‘Balikbayan #1’ reverses the colonialist narrative
The story of humankind is replete with plot twists and unexpected events. Take, for example, the matter of who first circumnavigated the world. The usual answer is Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan who, on Sept. 20, 1519, led a five-ship, 270-strong expedition from Spain to search for a westward route toward the Spice Islands, now the...
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Where is PH in world cinema map?
Hollywood’s 95th presentation of the Oscars—deemed the mother of all movie awards—is the most revealing in decades. Asians won the top awards in the annual derby, with Malaysian Michelle Yeoh taking home the Best Actress plum for the seriocomic “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It was the first time ever for an Asian woman. The...
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They also deserve press coverage
It has become a joke in local show biz—a film suddenly being shown in movie houses without so much as a word about it and its content, or its cast, or its director, to inform viewers and stir their interest. When a producer screens a film without the necessary drum-beating, the biz is abuzz with...
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How will the Metro film festival set in April fare?
The Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the government agency that organizes the annual Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) in December, has no qualms about green-lighting the staging of the event this summer. With health protocols eased as coronavirus cases decline, the first Summer Metro Manila Film Festival (SMMFF) has been scheduled for April 8-18 by...
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What pulls you to K-drama: the actor or the storyline?
It may sound unbelievable but there are still some Filipinos uninterested in K-drama, like my mother and two of my close friends. Of the latter, I conspired with Melie Cruz, a senior adviser for an international development organization, to get our high school buddy Joy Chadwick to watch a series. We got her started on...
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To (finally) launch a Philippine sex cinema book in the US
I had long wanted to launch my new book, “SekSinema (Gender Images in Philippine Sex Cinema Enfolding Pandemia),” not only on our soil but on foreign land as well. A wide distribution of my books has been on my bucket list ever since I was published by UST (University of Santo Tomas) Publishing House in...