Blame the Big Boys

I just read about two Pinoys getting screwed at Cannes. Congrats to them, that's great news. However I did read something that's disconcerting and that kind of irritated me. Somewhere in the article someone blamed Hollywood movies like Iron Man for the lull in the Pinoy film industry. I don't really think that's fair. To acknowledge that people are willing to shell out more for big budget flicks and to say that the media marketing machines behind these movies accounts for filling up the seats is acceptable. But to blame the bland Pinoy mainstream film scene on them is another thing altogether. It would be like blaming Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling for why Filipino writers don't get read as much.

I think that there are quite a few levels to it. First is our belief that the foreign product is superior. Take again the book example. We won't have trouble forking over say 700 bucks for a foreign book with nice publishing value, but then when a Filipino writer comes out with a book that's P250 people will say, Mahal naman. Now the great gap between our local stuff and a lot of Hollywood, even the Hollywood crap, is the production value. Undoubtedly a lot of theater-goers go for that. Effects even. Think, some of the local viewers are impressed with Enteng Kabisote.

Now I watched four films from the MMFF, and they were all pretty much garbage. Throw in artistas (we must draw a line between them and people who can actually act) some marketing gimik, a nice grant, and you've got a crappy MMFF film. A lot of the major studio productions offer similar things. Bland stories or things we've seen before and what advertisers like to refer to as star power.

As for the indie films, well they've got major problems in terms of distribution. There are a lot of talented indie filmmakers out there but they can't tap the market. One of the problems I see is that there is a divide between the indie filmmaker and the local viewer and this is probably one of taste or sensibility.

Think of our local poetry scene and how we have innumerable great poets, but how this seems to fall short in terms of being commercially viable. However people will go out and buy Bob Ong's books because they are entertaining. I'm not saying the poets should stop, in fact they should keep on because what they do is beautiful. And I'm not saying that people should not read Bob Ong. What I'm saying is that it might be possible to find some middle-ground.

I'm thinking this way because the big summer movie season's coming up and there's a lot of great films. I think that a lot of viewers pay to have an experience, to be transported, to feel that magic of movies. Our indie films are wonderful, very artistically made, but they don't really have the appeal of say, an Indian Jones movie. Anyone who's seen the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark knows that scene with the boulder. That's movie magic getting you to jump out of your seat. Or for me, how about the great Star Wars moments with the rousing John Williams score. Or when at the crack of dawn Gandalf arrives with the reinforcements just as Aragorn and his mates look like they'll be overwhelmed. Again there's some big production value involved there. But having watched something like On the Lot, you can see that in little doses there can be some big magic.

Let's see if there are some local filmmakers who can tow the line between indie and big production, if there are any that can deliver big fantastic moments. There is a market for big action adventure, which some feel they should blame for the bland local film production. but we're a country of fantasy, of adventure, of action, of magical stories. We see literature turning to these genres, how about our films going this way?