#sugapa

Okay on the one hand I was like 'yay we're letting the old man in on the action!' on the other hand it's...um...it's Lawrence Fajardo. The trailer was very open from the beginning about 1) the ending 2) Ana's various fates. Though not the full nature of how Ben humiliated her, nor the level to which Sarge would Make It Worse.

Plot: Ana and Ben are young and married and in love and have a very healthy sex life. They live in La Union with Ana's mother Rita and they scraped together the money to try to buy Rita's land because even though she inherited it from her mother, her deceased husband remortgaged it etc etc. very David TheBrokenMarriageVow. An evil cousin outbids them and says he'll sell the land back to Rita for half a million pesos. Ana is furious and already sick of how little she gets paid at the local hotel as a cleaner. She and Ben move to the city to earn more money. The city is not kind, but Ben is also very stupid.

This film...I would like Ana to have had more agency. She was angry and spunky and the actress playing her was brilliantly brave, but Ana's choices, or the moments where she is presented with choices that are not in fact choices, aren't shown. The time skip over how she gets involved with Sarge is such a cop-out imo; not that you couldn't do the skip itself, but instead of showing me Ben being miserbale at the rice factory, show me Ana, alone, staying at the epicentre of the fallout of the sex video, putting on all the pride she can muster to get on with her mission to get the land back. We never even found out if they got anywhere near the half a million needed!

Anyway, this basically turned into a horror film in Sarge's compound at the end and I think it should have leaned more into that and also that Ana should have been allowed to kill him. The extent to which I cared about Ben and his oh-so-average crises of masculinity as providor? Absolutely sub zero.

Anyway, see him Sarge?

Powerful moments when he asked for a cigarette, an underling lit it for him, he took one drag and handed it back then went to play at being the most progressive runner of a sexy karaoke bar in town ("No means no!*" *unless it applies to me, Sarge) and when that didn't work beat the ever living daylights out of the 'warden'.

I rode that high straight into the baggy boxers and vest tan-line with old man skin scene, oh yes I did, get those tits out for me grandpa

i love BACK. Unfortunately, Sarge loves...violence and coersion. Fascinated by the 'baring my belly to show I'm not afraid of you and your anger, though I will flinch just in case' body language, but then he stopped pretending to care about being nice and just raped her.

Ben comes back and we enter Horror Mode. Though to be a true Final Girl, as I said, Ana really needed to be allowed to take matters into her own hands more. LOOK at the lighting on those cheekbones DAMN

He did a very 'you made me taste my own blood' grimace after being stabbed in the throat that I am not too proud to admit I really enjoyed >:)

And to think, I didn't watch Nilalang today because I wasn't in the mood for horror movie villain Art!

Rating

Cool movie bro, it should have stopped being about Ben the minute he cleared his debt and left in shame having sold the sex video of his wife. This should have been Ana's film.

Hair situation: clean and close-cropped as always these days. I think all the chest hair and armpit hair has long gone :') sad.

Thirst points: Neck? Exceedingly structural!!! Arms? So wiry. Hands? Not as prominent as they could have been, I'll admit. Punchy.