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The Eggplant Menace |
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(from Barfly, Today, July 6, 1999)
BENG and I went out to the mall and saw two movies last week--one that you probably and predictably saw yourselves ("Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace") and one that you probably and forgivably didn't ("Warat").
Both of them turned out to be more or less what we had expected. As 40-somethings, Beng and I never related to "Star Wars" the way Demi did. But we managed to have a jolly good time watching the costumes, the explosions, and the obligatory intergalactic menagerie (aka the toy-store lineup).
More interesting, from another point of view, was "Warat", the sheer brevity and forthrightness of whose title stood out in contrast to that of the grandiose self-consciousness of the Lucas epic. Sadly, my encomiums end there--although I should be quick to absolve Jomari Yllana and Joyce Jimenez of any major responsibility in this lefthanded tribute to the cinema of the absurd. They performed as bravely as Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia themselves would have had against the dark Empire. To mix up our movie metaphors with gay abandon, they boldly went (or should that be "they went bold"?). Ms. Jimenez, whom I was seeing for the first time, proved to be every nearsighted 14-year-old's dream playmate--especially if she lets you catch her on a flight of stairs, or a rice paddy; Mr. Yllana was asked by the script to squint and to frown 85 times (and 26 times more by the director), and so he did.
Let me just get this straight: like maybe 30 million other Filipino males, I find it extremely difficult to watch--albeit onscreen--a pretty woman disrobing and to chew gum at the same time. You'll get more than enough of Joyce in this movie, all right, but the way it's been put together--including an anticlimactic train crash featuring the slowest oncoming train in the world--this latest iteration of the "Bonnie and Clyde"/"Badlands" genre makes it look like they just had to fill the spaces between the revelations of Joyce's ample assets.
What's that again--you didnt like the title? If you thought "Warat" was saucy, let me introduce you to "Talong." The most enjoyable part of watching "Warat" turned out to be the intermission, during which we were treated to a preview of "Talong"--the story of which takes place in--you guessed it--an eggplant plantation. This provides ample excuse for eggplants to appear everywhere in the movie--peeking out of the hero's shorts, for example. The ponytailed heroine frolics around the plantation in skimpy baby-doll dresses, making an encounter with aggressive aubergines ("The Eggplant Menace") all but inevitable. In one particularly dramatic scene, we realize that she has a name, and one that, all things considered, blends in rather well with the eggplant motif: Tiffany.
The starlets of "Talong" look and act as if they were redeeming, in all earnestness, some extravagant pledge made by some producer or director under the influence of Bacchus, or Venus, or both--proving once again that hereabouts our stars don't get discovered, but uncovered.
At least as promising as "Talong" was the trailer for the newest Redford White comedy, "Isprikitik: Walastik Kung Pumitik", a buddy movie with petty thievery on its mind. Very funny, I thought, was one scene where Redford complains about the P10,000 water bill charged to a squatter home. They uproot the water meter--revealing octopus connections from here to eternity, and prompting a dozen wet and half-clad citizens to emerge from their disrupted showers.
If "Warat" had just half as much wit in it as "Ispirikitik", and the campy innocence of "Talong", it might have been worth the effort of making it, and of watching it for more than my frankly prurient interest. We may have to wait for the next batch of boldies--"Bulatlat" and "Talaba" would make fine titles, if no one's thought of them yet (go ahead and use them, producers, it's no time to be shy)--for more edifying fare. Meanwhile, I can't wait to meet Tiffany, Queen of the Eggplants--can you?
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