I'm going to cut to the chase here: is Da One That Ghost Away a good movie?
Nope.
It's corny, cheap fun at best, disposable dreck at worst. But there's something about the movie that still manages to entertain audiences - the screening I attended was accompanied by raucous laughter from the largely senior citizen crowd.
The film's about Carmel (Kim Chiu) and Jeje (Ryan Bang), a duo of fake ghost hunters who scam people by performing fake exorcisms. When the handsome and mysterious JACK COLmenares (Enzo Pineda) recruits their gang to exorcise a bunch of spirits from a legit haunted house, shit begins to hit the proverbial fan. If only Carmel could awaken her legit spiritual powers...
If you noticed the strange capitalization of Jack Colmenares' name in the preceding paragraph, and you got the joke (ha ha), then you more or less know the kind of jokes you're in for when watching Da One That Ghost Away. This is the kind of humor I'd thought had become extinct, the kind of humor that solely exists in bad MMFF movies. But I'm apparently out of touch.
I'd go on about how some of the jokes don't really land, and how the romance between Carmel and Jeje doesn't really work. But I won't waste your time. Da One That Ghost Away is a film that knows its audience and delivers in spades. Perhaps in that regard, the film pays dividends to its core audience, and you can't say that about a lot of local films these days.
Single/Single: Love is Not Enough begins with Joee (Shaina Magdayao) and Joey (Matteo Guidicelli) separately professing their love to each other during a camping trip. It takes a while to get used to the complicated setup, as the film begins in medias res, but the gist of it is: Joee and Joey are currently a couple, but this is complicated by the fact that Joee got pregnant by another guy, Steve, before said couple materialized.
At first this was confusing to me until I found out that this movie is actually the continuation of a popular two-season comedy-drama on cable TV, called Single Single (for those curious, both seasons are available via streaming through the Philstar website.) The original series had a very fresh concept, at least for local television: it chronicles the various problems that millennials face as they begin their adult lives.
The movie extends that concept and shows us the various trials and tribulations newly minted adults face when they try to raise a baby. It looks like the writers did a good job on this end, as they delve into issues such as financial security, difficulties in conception, parental support systems, and the extra complication of being a (technically) single mom raising a kid. As I've said before in my review of Ang Pambansang Third Wheel, single parents often don't get the exposure they deserve in popular media. It's all refreshing, relevant, and decently acted.
On the other hand, Single/Single's main problem is evident from the very start of the movie: the film was obviously patched together from what I can only assume was an aborted third season of the show. Although one can muddle through the movie with little or no knowledge of the show, doing so makes the movie feel incomplete; this film barely survives in a vacuum. Various transitions give the impression that the movie was stitched together from the corpses of 2-3 TV episodes. And the translation from a serial TV series to a feature length film doesn't work out very well - the movie decides to plateau once the conflicts are established, the storyline composed of a seemingly endless array of problems for Joee and Joey with little to no resolution at the end. It feels like a slice of real life, but it doesn't quite fit into the structure of a movie. Although a few lines of dialogue makes the cliffhanger ending a little bit hopeful, it leans toward the possibility of a follow-up episode that may never come.
I do hope that Single/Single continues in some form or another - there's still a lot more to explore in Joee and Joey's lives. It's a concept that bears a lot of promise; I can only hope someone picks this up and does a continuation someday.
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