(no subject)

[levity]

The thing about a work of art, any work of art, is that you can look at it from any angle you want to look at it from. I choose to look at this one as a parody.

I'm probably making it sound worse than it was, and I'm not even going to pretend to be wtty and say that that would be an admirable feat. Because I'll tell you the truth: it wasn't that bad. It was chock full of walking stereotypes, the law of conservation of matter is thoroughly ignored, and the villain wasn't even funny. The acting might have been forgiven if it were played upon a stage, where you have to project to every last person seated in the very bad seats. The overused story wasn't even given a new spin, which might be because it was trying to be faithful to its source material (I haven't seen said source material, so I'm going out on a limb here), but in this day and age of countless fantasy ripoffs a bit of self-awareness on the movie's part wouldn't have hurt. The characters were unsympathetic, their actions mostly limited to trying to fulfill what the classic ancient prophecy had proclaimed to be destiny, without even trying to go against said prophecy no matter how much they would like to (for starters, there's Flavio's transformation from "hindi ako ang lalaking papatay kay Lizardo" to "kailangan ko siyang kalabanin", in record time).

And yes, it wasn't that bad. Because they had really nice scenery and I don't pay attention to silly special effects and I'm willing to acknowledge the fact that the Philippines still subscribes to the notion that fantasy is purely kids' territory, and because I didn't enter that cinema expecting much. I expected an old story, walking stereotypes, a funny villain, and popcorn entertainment. I got an old story, walking stereotypes, popcorn entertainment, and an ending left deliberately open for the much-awaited sequel, because there is really nothing quite like show business.

Shame about the funny villain, though, but you can't have everything.