Metro Manila

Oddly enough then I never got around to watch "Metro Manila" before 6 years after its release. And it turned out that I had actually been missing out on some of the more impressive piece of cinema to make it from the Philippines.

"Metro Manila" is a very realistic and in-your-face piece of action crime drama, with some pretty good character portrayals by the likes of Jake Macapagal (playing Oscar Ramirez) and veteran actor John Arcilla (playing Douglas Ong). It is the kind of movie that you quickly get immersed into the storyline and swept away by its quick pacing and director Sean Ellis's ability to keep the movie flowing and keeping it interesting.

"Metro Manila" has a great combination of action and drama, spiced up with a great character gallery. It is characters that come off as being very realistic and being characters that you can relate to on one or more levels.

The movie does have a major setback though, perhaps a flaw even, and that is that the storyline is very predictable, and I had the movie figured out not even halfway through, and it turned out pretty much as I had thought it would. Of course, I am not going to spoil it here and give the storyline and the 'twists' away. You should watch "Metro Manila" and experience that for yourself.

This movie also depicts a very gritty, albeit realistic image of the metropolis that is the capitol of The Philippines. And yeah, that city definitely has a thriving and ever-growing shady side to it.

I was genuinely entertained with "Metro Manila" from start to end. And even if you have an aversion towards non-English movies, then you really should take the time to sit down and watch the 2013 "Metro Manila" movie, because it is quite worth the effort.

I headed into this film with a glowing recommendation off a mate of mine. And it really delivers as story told where the viewer feels the crushingly powerless plight of the family, specifically the Husband. It also has a wider value in the commentary of urbanization of the modern world and the subsistence farmers being forced into leaving their livelihoods and traditions behind. It could double as a documentary!

It begins with the rice farming family not being able to make ends meet with their harvest for the season. They are forced to leave their home and find a means of feeding their children due to substantially lower prices being paid for their crop.

Upon arriving in Manila, a world away from their accustomed lifestyle, they are fish out of water. The hustle and bustle of city life makes any progress hard for them. Even when it seems progress is being made, corruption and greed stifle it.

Both the husband and wife find ways of making money, although the husband is not fond of the wifes choice...he understands from the desperation that no job is too immoral.

The films takes a couple of turns until its absolutely grandiose finale. And what an extraordinary end it has. I'm a heart of steel kinda guy, but this? This had me teary eyed and fully empathizing with the characters...

Brilliantly done, and I highly recommend it. 9/10

Metro Manila won the Audience award for best World Dramatic Competition film at Sundance 2013. This is UK writer/director Sean Ellis's third feature-length film. Set in the Philippines this is a story of a rural farmer, Oscar, who takes his wife and two children to Manila to find employment and a better life. The promises of gainful employment and opportunity however aren't as easily realized and their morals and faith are put to the test. In the Q&A Sean Ellis stated that this plot is a well-tread cliché in the Philippines but here it seems fresh, as is the setting of Manila where we are privy to its desperate slums and seedy underbelly.

Metro Manila is a combination of a family drama, heist movie and crime thriller. There isn't a lot of action but there is always the sense of inevitable violence and danger awaiting our protagonist.

Beyond writing and directing, Sean Ellis also handled the cinematography and operated the Steadicam. The film is shot beautifully with an over the shoulder documentary feel (thankfully not a shaky-cam) which brings you wholly into these characters lives and predicaments. We are constantly trapped in enclosed spaces with Oscar which provides not only intimacy, but complicity in his actions. Oscar Ramirez, played by Jake Macapagal, and his wife Mia, played by Althea Vega, both easily elicit our deepest sympathies. The performances (including our two leads) are lead mainly by native theater actors, the film is very cinematic but they bring a naturalistic presence and their talent on screen is apparent.

Oscar and his wife are devout and have tried honest labor farming. The only job she can find is in a seedy dancing bar and he is lucky to find a job transporting valuables in an armored vehicle which is considered one of the most dangerous jobs as the city is rife with criminals. Soon, he is asked to compromise his morals in the face of being able to provide for his family.

This film is a look at how the poor and disenfranchised are constantly exploited and taken advantage of as well as what greed and desperation can lead to. The sense of poverty and helplessness is palpable and is emotionally staggering. You will feel guilty for complaining about your job and any other first world problems you may have. This is a film that entertains, excites and lets you appreciate and reflect on your own situation.

The tone of "Metro Manila", a brilliant neo-realist drama, is well captured in the bleakness of the opening voice-over, when our lead speaks of how a man condemned to death by hanging needs not fear drowning in the water below him if the gallows are built high enough. The film does not necessarily make for grim, nihilistic viewing, but it is, for a lot of its runtime, very real and very authentic in a rather grim place. Its director, a Briton called Sean Ellis, peppers the film with a very distinct sense that hope, even affluence, is right there, but only if you can uncover it - people seem to be able to carve out decent lives for themselves in a zone that is fairly impoverished, but getting that 'break' remains inherently elusive. It is as if you can reach out and touch the success, but it is always just far away enough.

Aside from anything else, this is a terrifically well-crafted film - its movement from one thing to another, never settling into one genre or deriving its influence from one place for too often, is a joy to behold. Indeed, the places to which "Metro Manila" ends up going nearer the end demonstrate absolutely no evidence of being there for the first half of the piece, which draws on the likes of Iranian film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and even the early films of the Italian neo-realist movement concocted on the streets of post-war Italy.

Jake Macapagal plays Oscar Ramirez, no one any more or less extraordinary than anybody else, who lives on a rudimentary farm in the Filipino countryside with his young wife Mai (Althea Vega) and infant children. Life on the farm is humble, peaceful and simple but complications to do with costs and market forces result in the Ramirez family not earning enough for their rice crop to get by for the next year. As a result, the leads are torn out of their environment and into something very different: the cauldron of the bustling capital of the titular Manila.

The transition quite literally feels like an eviction: the city is busy, noisy - men of working age huddle around noticeboards looking for working opportunities and all manner of danger and thievery are rife. It is when our family lose their remaining currency and residency through a confidence trick that things become desperate, Ellis essentially beginning the film all over again with a second initial incident to re-ignite what life in the city, this time, is all about. It forces the two parents into employment at any cost: Oscar moves into armoured van transportation and Mai into what we shall describe here as bar work.

Oscar's taking of the armoured van job moves the film into an altogether fresh direction - we are aware of the nature of life in Manila at a very grounded level, and so is Oscar. So much so that the audience and character experience them for the first time together: there exist hundreds of people living fairly desperate existences and will be aware of the vast sums of money now sharing a space with our lead. When he senses danger, we sense it with him. His work-colleague and co-rider in the truck is Ong (John Arcilla ), who seems to bury this stark and important reality in his brashness and drinking. Director Ellis' use of the juxtaposition between the classical music Ong listens to, and the rap music a suspicious car of thugs which keeps tailing them blare out, speaks volumes for the contrast we entrust to be true at the time, although is cleverly deceptive for reasons I will not reveal.

Likewise, Mai's position at a local nightspot outlet she must undertake to help with the family finances enables Ellis to break-down certain stereotypes which have become synonymous with young Asian women from this part of the world. Gone is the 'love-you-long-time' cliché; in its place, a very cold composition of the character in her underwear amongst a bevy of other young women staring off into space as she, one assumes, realises this is what she must do to get by. Mai and the other women are not photogenic backdrops to a film about somebody else - Ellis has really got under the skin of who she is and why she is there.

Reading about the production of the film, from the moment Ellis got the inspiration for the piece by looking at two armoured guards having an argument beside a truck during a trip to the Philippines, right the way through to the eight month edit process by way of shooting on a shoestring budget with no real money in a language he didn't speak, it is to everyone's credit that "Metro Manila" is as good as it is. The film is unnerving, heart-wrenching and thoroughly involving; right the way up to its chilling final few scenes and is thoroughly recommended.

Saying that this film could potentially be the best Filipino film ever made is a big statement, perhaps an overstatement, but I think it is. However, there are some things I would like to get off my chest and say that some things in the movie could have been better.

It has been a while since I've seen a Filipino act so good. With this, I wish to extend Jake Macapagal my deepest congratulations. His acting was precise and right on the money and I do not think that there was anyone who could have played the role better.

I don't exactly know what was wrong with the dialogs but perhaps because the original script was written in English and was later on translated to Filipino, that it became apparent that it brought about cultural-linguistic misalignments which made many lines sound fundamentally imprecise. To those who cannot understand spoken Filipino and would only need to rely on subtitles to understand the dialogs, the acting can appear fine. But for those who understand the native language, some actings can appear painfully bad.

Althea Vega was frigid most of the time but there was nothing that she could do worse than when she delivered iconoclastic lines. John Arcilla is a great actor by any measure but how his acting turned out to be unusually tense is a big wonder. He could have simmered his excitement quite a bit and he would have played the role with much more convincing realism.

Of all the actors in the film, only two managed to give life to their lines without unnecessarily giving an underacting or an overacting. Only Jake Macapagal and Miles Canapi, the madamme who played Charlie, were the only two worthy of praise. But everyone deserves to be congratulated, nonetheless. However, I find it quite strange because all the scripts, I believe, were written or translated by the same person. And yet some of the actors gave outstanding performances and some of them gave poor ones. I guess it is safe to say that talent can get the best out of the actors even if the lines are fundamentally flawed.

Many people have noticed that the film painted the capital in a rather unsightly way. I understand that in order to get a good story across, the plot has to tread somewhere in the territories of exaggeration. But believe me, the depiction of Metro Manila as a dirty city with ruthless inhabitants who always acted on their animalistic selfish behavior is chillingly accurate. What is more surprising is that it was written by a foreigner who has not lived in the Philippines for very long and who many consider could not give an accurate account of the locality. But his impressions or observations were excruciatingly accurate which no one can attempt to dispute.

Watching the entire film was exhausting not because it was dull or boring but because the misfortunes of the family always make you wish they could finally catch a break at some point. And when you think that nothing could be worse, along comes another. Imagine yourself in the shoes of those persons in real life and it would give you a whole new sense to the meaning of the word 'living'. I wonder what people in the First World countries feel about their First World problems after watching this.

This movie is so tense, I had to watch it in staggered sessions because I could not handle the suspense. The anticipation was so unbearable that I always jumped off my seat several times.

I grew up in Manila and I have seen it transformed. I have been to all those locations that were shown in the movie but nothing could have prepared me for what I would see in this film. If ever there was a family in Manila that goes through what this family had been through, I wouldn't want to know about it. Honestly, it now gives me second thoughts about getting out of the house when I would be visiting there in the future. Not because I am scared of the place but because I wouldn't want to meet anyone that could remind me of the sad fate of the family in this movie. In a way, I admit that I am affected and I must say that if a film can create such an impact to the viewers, I believe the story teller has achieved his purpose.

While I may not give this film 10 stars due to some dialog flaws, I believe it is the best Filipino film ever made. Only that it really was not made by a Filipino per se but by a British film maker who was trying to make a non-English foreign film. Regardless, I am still glad that someone has done something which many Filipinos can relate to. Yes, it is unfortunate that it would take a foreigner to make the best Filipino film but just like the overall tone of the film, it is sad but true.