Two weeks in a row, Topel Lee’s movie, Ouija, beats out everybody at the Filipino box office

1 1 Ouija (2007) $535,381 -31.1% 65 -3 $8,237 $1,494,240 2
2 2 Ratatouille $397,897 -33.4% 60 - $6,632 $1,128,942 2
3 4 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix $215,079 -38.3% 69 -21 $3,117 $4,568,721 4
4 3 The Simpsons Movie $185,504 -53.3% 41 -9 $4,524 $646,687 2
5 N License to Wed $138,833 - 23 - $6,036 $138,833 1
6 N Nihon chinbotsu (Sinking of Japan) $61,437 - 17 - $3,614 $61,437 1
7 6 Live Free or Die Hard $53,566 -46.9% 33 -15 $1,623 $2,092,651 5
8 5 Transformers $36,724 -64.1% 17 -37 $2,160 $5,828,226 6
9 N OSS 117: Le Caire nid d’espions $17,378 - 17 - $1,022 $17,378 1
10 7 Blind Dating $7,021 -78.6% 6 -10 $1,170 $53,099 2
11 8 Vacancy $5,023 -69.7% 5 -18 $1,005 $218,431 3

from box office mojo

Quentin Tarantino (and Josh Harnett, for separate reasons) is also in town.  I hope he makes a movie here eventually.

I don’t even know what a Blood Island film is, hehehe.

Okay, now I know.

Well looks like mah boy Topel’s movie topped the box office last weekend.

box office mojo

To be honest, I didn’t think it was that great a movie.  In fact I wasn’t able to finish it.

But I’m always happy when a Pinoy movie beats out its Hollwood rivals.  And The Simpsons and Ratatouille at that.

I’m still looking forward to Topel’s next Shake, Rattle and Roll installment.

Hope he kicks butt.

After Yam Laranas, the other Filipino director I am personally rooting for is Topel Lee.  I saw his short film Bruce around five years ago and have been expecting great things from him ever since.  Too bad no one has uploaded that flick on youtube yet.  Anyway, he did have a few hits and misses since then.  Dilim, at least the version I saw, wasn’t perfect but his short film, Yaya, in the omnibus Shake, Rattle and Roll 8 is just brillant!

Topel’s films are very moody, very textured, like many films nowadays are expected to be but what makes it fun is he is able to insert a very Filipino humor into it.  Sometimes silly but very, very well done and that exactly is my kind of film.  I have a feeling he will develop a cult following around the world, if not necessarily with foreigners but with Filipinos worldwide.  I do hope some other people get it, too.

Ouija seems very much on the right track to be his first great full-length Topel film.  He will be making another short horror film on Christmas called Christmas Tree.  Sounds good already.  I think Ouija will make a lot of money in the box office here in the Philippines thus assuring him of a second and maybe even a third.

We believe in Topel!  Mabuhay ka!

Trailer (You Tube)

Topel Lee’s Ouija movie trailer out.  Will write more about this later.

Trailer (YouTube)

Crappy ending though.  Though most of it looks great.

I think the first movie I watched as a kid was Gus.  I don’t remember anything about it.  All I know is that it was about a donkey that could kick a football.  It was my older sister’s boyfriend who got me into Schwarzenegger and it was my best friend in grade 7 who told me it was cool to watch Arnold.  I was always told that watching action movies were dumb and so this validation was a new thing.  I got to watch Predator, Aliens, Robocop, Total Recall because my sister was going out on dates and she needed a chaperone.

But eventually I stumbled upon something new.  I had borrowed ever single pop laser disc in my disc shop by the time I was around 17 and so I decided to start borrowing the obscure stuff.  What was this Seven Samurai?  What was this Battleship Potemkin?  And Birth of a Nation?  In high school we were privileged enough to get the first film appreciation class in our batch.  Here we learned about panning left and panning right, fade in, fade out.  I saw movies like Stand By Me and what I found incredibly boring back then, The River and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.  Heck, I still remember the boxes of Betamax tapes my uncle used to have that I used to look at with awe.  Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Black Sunday, Coma, Topaz, High Anxiety, I saw all these on Beta.

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Was going through the bulletin boards on pinoydvd.com and came across this Yahoo! article.

And looks like Yam himself updated us in his blog with a link to an article in the Hollywood Reporter.

Congratulations, Yam!  You do us proud.  Happy Independence Day, too.

And what do you know, they’ll be shooting in Toronto…

I’m not in Cannes, but a feature film on Joy Division?  Wish I was there.

BBC article

Coming off a boost of Filipino pride, Manny Pacquiao beat Jorge Solis today.

But in other news, Erik Matti’s Rounin is coming out this week.

www.rounin.tv

The Metro Manila Film Festival is still going on. Though, I’ve only seen two, I’m quite happy with the turn-out so far. One of the films I saw was Super Noypi, did not quite turn out as expected. What should’ve turned out to be a nice Quark Henares film got lost along the way. It suffered from the typical mistake of a Filiipino film to just show vignettes instead of have a cohesive story line. Given more time (or actual time) to edit, Quark would’ve turned out a better film.

The second film is Shake, Rattle and Roll 8, an omnibus horror trilogy by three up and coming directors. The first film was s***! But the second one was fantastic and the third was passable. The second one, Yaya, by Topel Lee was just amazing. Considering his very low budget and short shooting time, Topel turned out a very textured film. Mind you, it’s more monster than horror, it was actually also very pretty. I am breathlessly anticipating his next full feature, and it’s nice to know Manila has another new director on the hill.

Merry Christmas everybody! This is not really a movie related post. But there will be a “film festival” here this Christmas. All movie theaters are required to only show Filipino films. And these films are even funded by the government. I’m not sure if this is the best way to promote Filipino film, but it’s a start! Anyway, enjoy your Christmas vacation, don’t eat too much, and those of us who are single, may we get drunk and hit on girls, lol.

Quark Henares’ big budget superhero movie poster, trailer and music video has just been released. Let’s see how our boy does with a lot of money and Mother Lily (our most famous Filipino film producer) breathing down his neck.

All the stuff are located at supernoypi.com.

Or here’s the YouTube trailer.

Well as you might have heard, we had a supertyphoon pass through our country recently, which was supposedly stronger than Hurricane Katrina.  It knocked down our power lines for a week and Internet for two.  Sorry for the delay

Anyway, what I’d like to talk about today is the greatest giant robot series of our youth here in the Philippines.  They were so popular that Ferdinand Marcos had to ban them for their “violent” effects.  So most of us here hate President Marcos not because he was a dictator and stole a lot of money.  Nooo.  It was more because he took away our Voltes V.

Here, anyway, are our greatest giant robot series from our youth.

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In honor of Peter Jackson deciding to do a Dambusters remake, I want to share with you, what I think is, one of the funniest commercials ever made.

Carling Black Label

Without a doubt, this has to be like the best ad ever. Okay, perhaps for this year. It’s an ad for Smooth-E BabyFace Foam. It makes me want to lather up right now. Anyway it comes in four parts,

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

and um,

Part 4

As the person I stole it from said, it’s like the copywriters snorted baby powder before they made this ad. Wait a minute, do you even know what baby powder is?

I am sure many of you have never seen a Filipino film.  And you probably will never get to see one yet for awhile.  But there is a nascent Filipino indie film industry in this country, and I might as well acquaint those of you who are interested.

But first of all, let me set some parameters.  I come to Twitch because of a certain ‚Äútype‚Äù of movie.  Movies with a little mix of zombie, and scifi, a dash of asian, and never pretentious.  I‚Äôm not here for the grand art film (though I do appreciate them) or super-duper mega-blockbuster either (with some exceptions).  I‚Äôm here for the little odd, a little weird, and most certainly intelligent.  And so the directors and films I will try to introduce to you fit in this category.  There are other kinds of directors and films in the Philippines.  But it is the ‚ÄúTwitchy‚Äù kind I now present.

Continue Reading "The Top 5 Filipino Indie Film Directors You’ve Never Heard of"...