Bato Bato sa Langit, ang Tamaan Bakla

Remington: pretty boy, or predatory gay?

Zombadings as a study of why, and how to promote gay killings
Michael David C. Tan
Outrage Magazine
2011

Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington
Director: Jade Castro
Cast: Martin Escudero, Kerbie Zamora, Lauren Young, Roderick Paulate, Janice de Belen, John Regala
2011

What is most troublesome about Michael David C. Tan’s open letter is his claim that “LGBT advocates do not exist because we want to be tolerated – we actually already are.”  This is far from the truth.

Zombadings 1 reminds us that, as Tan rightly (and ironically) describes, we live in a world where homosexuals are killed for being gay, where homosexuals are pressured to act “straight” in order to gain employment, where trannies are ridiculed and barred from certain establishments, where reproductive health and divorce remain a highly contested topic, where same-sex union is still perceived as a lost cause even by the nation’s only gay political party.

The Main-die Malady

E ano kung mukhang haunted house ang bahay ko? Bongga naman ang lighting sa main entrance!

Pilantik (Flick)
Director: Argel Joseph
Cast: Mon Confiado, Maria Isabel Lopez, Pen Medina, Chris Martinez,  Jao Mapa
2010

Pilantik’s poster describes it as “an Argel Joseph first main-die film.” Main-die? I was stumped. Is it because the main character dies or something? I wish some filmmakers would just focus on the material and stop fussing with outlandish labels.

I enter the cinema mulling (in annoyance) why Pilantik’s filmmakers chose to set themselves apart from both mainstream and indie films. What is an indie film anyway? What makes a mainstream film mainstream? With the boom in digital filmmaking, the subject of “independence” has been a continuously contested ground, evading both definition and encouraging debate.

Contesting Visibilities, Contextualizing Desires

The Bakla Review: Ardent chronicler of Philippine gay cinema

Sa The Bakla Review, ang diskurso ay parang brip: itinataas at ibinababa sa akmang panahon. TBR has to be one of our favorite Philippine film blogs. Cris and I were recently chatting about TBR’s astute—and quite provocative—“10 Most Important Filipino Gay Films of the Decade” list. Though there are only a handful of gay films from the past decade which we really loved—among them The Thank You Girls and Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros—we do agree with TBR’s main criterion for the top ten list: indelible impact. Indeed, all the films in the list were important, whether for their breakthrough content, or their socio-political-economic implications for the industry.

Cris and I soon found ourselves going into a slightly lengthy discussion about the new Philippine gay cinema, why it is what it is, and what could possibly be in store for the next decade.