I think Theodore Boborol's Vince and Kath and James (2016) is the prototypical love triangle teen romance of the past decade or so. Over time, a handful of films have been done to try to replicate or at least approximate its success. The latest effort is Mae Cruz-Alviar's Love You So Bad, starring PBB... throuple? double couple?? Will Ashley, Bianca De Vera and Dustin Yu. I have no idea who 2/3 of these people are outside of this film, so I'm went into this blind. And I'll be honest here: I didn't like it. Its plot is too messy and I found the whole thing kind of cringey. But I don't think it's bad per se, and I think that says more about me than the film itself, because I think I would've found parts of this entertaining ten years ago. Did I just grow out of it? Well, yes and no.
Vanna (De Vera) is a party girl (an understatement), but she does this because of a host of personal and family issues. She bonds and dates with LA (Yu), the popular star of the college swim team. Both Vanna and LA, self described "mistakes," bond over their brokenness in a wild montage of social media posts, partying and reckless abandon. But then, one day, LA ghosts her, leaving her confused. In order to get back at her boyfriend, she fake dates fellow classmate (and student council president) Vic (Ashley). But Vic has feelings for Vanna, and that feeling soon becomes mutual.
Though LA's romantic arc with Vanna feels undercooked, it's his overall character arc that's the most interesting to me. LA ghosted Vanna for a reason, and he's a far more interesting character to me than Vic, who comes off as scheming and territorial, but completely feckless in the face of his strict mother (Ana Abad Santos). LA's screen time with Vanna is limited aside from the flashback at the beginning, and balancing moments between the two suitors would have made things more fun. Ultimately the end effect on me was that I wasn't invested in either romantic outcome.
The film's central character, Vanna, is just as messy as the film she's in, and the film knows it - there's a scene in the end where Vanna remarks at the absurdity of two hot guys fighting over someone like her - but there's something interesting in how each of her potential boyfriends affects her. The straight-laced Vic arguably makes Vanna a better person, while LA unlocks her wild side. Unfortunately it doesn't follow through with that idea or what Vanna could've become by choosing either, both (spicy!) or neither, opting instead for an ending sequence that would not feel out of place as the finale of a reality show like The Bachelor.
This messiness can be somewhat entertaining, to the point where I wish I had more scenes with Vic and LA vying for Vanna's attention, but I often found myself rolling my eyes at this film more often than not. The younger audience with me loved whatever interactions there were, however. I suppose fans of the loveteams involved will enjoy this, though by the time of that finale I was completely checked out.
The latest entry in Regal Entertainment's Shake, Rattle and Roll series puts a clever spin on the anthology concept: three stories, each in different time periods, telling the story of the rise of an ancient evil and the people who try to fight against it.
The 1775 segment, about a spate of mysterious deaths in a convent, is setup for things to come, but is also a sort of thematic lynchpin for the rest of the film: the origins of evil aren't always because we fail to prevent it from happening, but sometimes because we let it happen thanks to our own inaction or for the sake of order. It's interesting that many of the nuns in this convent are products of our colonial past, figuratively born from that "sin," while the evil entity is a sort of super aswang, though the film doesn't go into depth in that regard.
The 2025 segment may not be as thematically deep as the previous segment, but it is by far the most entertaining, the one that stands alone the best, and the one that's most fun to watch. Personally, it's the best of the three segments in this film. It's a fun genre exercise employing many familiar tropes from the slasher genre, and is incredibly gory to boot. It also stars many popular young celebrities and personalities from various seasons of Pinoy Big Brother, so I guess there's a certain kick to knowing which of your favorites gets their brains smashed into chunks by the segment's masked antagonists.
The final segment in the year 2050 wraps up all the plot threads, and as such is the one that stands alone the least since it depends on lots of context from the previous two segments. It also depends on a lot of contrivances to conclude the story, because what do you mean the main antagonist of the film randomly shows up to the exact place where our protagonists are when he could have stayed in some remote castle in the mountains? It has some fun sequences but the proceedings lean more towards action. I'm not sure if this would've been better as a fleshed out, standalone film with different context and with more buildup towards its rushed conclusion, but it functions less as its own thing and more as a cap to a fairly okay entry to the Shake Rattle and Roll series.
I've been thinking about Manila's Finest recently, wondering how to express my thoughts on what it wants to say in my own words. To start, let us consider another film of the same name, William G. Mayo's Manila's Finest (2016). In that film, a bunch of Manila cops led by Jeric Raval fight against an international terrorist group that happened to come across Manila. It is your stock copaganda film divorced from reality, portraying policemen as supernatural heroes who beat up stock bad guys and keep us safe, it is a film that romanticizes them, and ignores its systemic rot and the many, many times they have upheld the whims of those in power instead of the people they are supposed to serve.
Manila's Finest (2025) is nothing like that. It is a film not primarily about cops, but of memory, but we'll get to that later. Even the "good" cops in this film aren't angels - the supposed paragon of policemen, Homer Magtibay (Piolo Pascual) cheats on his wife with Janette (Jasmine Curtis). Homer and his fellow cops represent a kind of policing partially based on a model from the 1950s - where the cops assigned to the area were locals living in the same neighborhood, and the system existed as primarily a civilian institution rather than something controlled by the state. By the sixties, the patrol car system supplanted this, though not completely as in this case. And even then, both historically and in the film, abuses of power did still occur in some capacity. What then happens over the course of the film is a change from something that's not very good to something much, much worse.
The changes are subtle, insidious. Increasing political unrest was happening at around this time, and officers suddenly gained a level of immunity from personal responsibility, which fostered a culture of impunity. This is a horror film of sorts, an Evil Origins if you may, of the militarization of police leading up to Martial Law. It is a film that gets darker and darker as it goes, and its darkness lies in its inevitability, that unshakeable sense that all this relative idealism at the start is going to go to shit, and our only recourse is to remember so it doesn't happen again, even when, looking at how militarized the police became during the pandemic times and during the last administration, it definitely does happen again. It's fitting that its darkness is made complete when a character surnamed Liwanag is forced out of the service.
In that sense, the film's central arc is not Homer's, but that of Billy Ojeda (Enrique Gil), a young police officer who tags along with Homer and his other cop buddies but soon falls under the influence of Danilo Abad (Cedric Juan), a member of the National Police Commission that represents everything that went wrong with the system. And by the end of the film, the only way to subsist in such a system is to reject it entirely, because everyone who survives to the end of the film is left damaged. Even Homer is affected: the one person who represented his conscience, his daughter Agnes (Ashtine Olviga), in his inaction to do anything meaningful to the system he works in, leaves.
It's a solidly acted production with a strong cast, and Piolo Pascual mostly carries the film's biggest moments. The supporting cast, especially Cedric Juan, Romnick Sarmienta and Ashtine Olviga have great moments on screen, the latter especially in her scenes with Pascual. Raymond Red fills Manila's Finest with silences - the film's score is sparse, dotted only by the occasional vintage song. The film's pace is also slower than its MMFF brethren, though this slow burn ramps up at opportune moments.
It's kind of ballsy to release such a film at a time of festivity, but I think it's wise to remember even in these kinds of moments. As a whole, the film speaks to the power of remembering, because we are so easily led to forget. And it's not just about remembering us sliding into darkness, it's also about remembering what we had, and what we eventually could be.
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