the crawl
Manila, 11 November—Oh man, this week has been such a crawl to the weekend—you ever have those? Weeks where Mondays stretch forever, and you're already in a Friday mood by Wednesday? This week was one of those. We hit the ground running right after All Soul's long weekend with back-to-back events in Clark and BGC, just days ahead of the new major player selection on Wednesday and the company's disclosure of financial results on Thursday.
Q4 is usually such a rush—it's true what they say about tissue paper rolls: Toward the end, the risk and likelihood of getting shit on your hand gets greater hahaha so better get ready.
So yeah, just a few things that kept me sane this week.
SERIES REC: Manifest (NBC, 2018)
Here's the long-ish sneak peek that sold NBC show Manifest to me. tl;dr: Flight 828 leaves Jamaica in 2013 and mysteriously disappears for five and a half years, until they land in the US in 2018—many years after they have all been presumed dead.
Oh man, I love me some aviation drama! Manifest focuses on the Stones, whose lives are turned upside down when half the family decides to take another flight to take advantage of overbooking coupons. That other flight? Gets into turbulence, of course. Not just any other turbulence—magical, catapult-into-the-future kind of turbulence. While the disturbance lasts only for about a handful of minutes, when they land, it's already 5 years later. So how does it look like when you've been given up for dead for five years and your familiy suddenly has to take you back in? A+ premise.
TRAILER REC: A Sharon/Richard movie! (2018)
I thought this was for MMFF but no, it's for National Heroes' Day long weekend pala.
I know I've said I'm cancelling Sharon over political differences, but this is just... I cannot unsee Albert and Dianne from Minsan Minahal Kita. Also, this Fake Relationship for the sake of Ageing Parents and Barely Home Children trope just gets to me all the damn time. Pls forgive.
LAST NA: This juskoday moment from earlier this week
iWantTV's Glorious, starring Angel Aquino and Tony Labrusca, puts May-December love affairs front and center.
My interest in Angel Aquino aside, I am also intrigued by their distribution strategy—this goes straight to the newly revamped iWant (formerly iWant TV) video-on-demand platform, which means it will basically skip the cinemas and go straight into viewers' homes ala Netflix original series. This is very attractive for me. I mean, it is far cheaper to pay for a monthly subscription to access hundreds of content on-demand than to shell out upwards of P200 per head per movie every single time.
If this works (meaning if filmmakers and creators are also able to earn from this business model), then it's a win for media consumers like me. It takes some of the gatekeeping power off the cinema operators, for one. This means movies that won't normally be shown in the cinemas because they think "wala namang manonood"—like LGBT films, for instance—will now have a distribution platform. I hope it prospers, the way Netflix has.