Monday, January 12

Mano Po 2: My Homecoming

Super delayed reaction post, because it's just too funny (at least for me) to pass up:

So last Christmas Day, one of my friends wanted to watch Mano Po 2. Girl goes to the cineplex and sees the snaking line of kids and parents. There were so many people lining up for the superhero movies. All her nephews wanted to watch flying guys in tights, so she thought she'd watch MP2 first before taking them. So she lines up but all the wailing kids got her confused. When the takilyera asked her what movie she was going to watch, she saw the poster with Alessandra de Rossi in it, but some kids were hanging out in front of it and she could only see the part where it says "home." So she pointed to the poster and said "yung My home." Takilyera gave her the ticket and girl went inside theater. There were like twenty of them inside, and as my friend sat down the credits started rolling. She was convinced that she was going to watch the movie Chinese movie with the dead father and which also stars Alessandra de Rossi.

Ten minutes into the film and Ms de Rossi disappears from it. Elizabeth Oropesa is there on screen and my friend starts to wonder when Kris Aquino will come up. She waits and waits and then finally realizes that she's in the wrong movie.

She had the actress right, Alessandra de Rossi. But in the flux of too many wailing kids, all she remembered was that MP2 had a subtitle called "My Home," and seeing Ms de Rossi on the poster and the "home" on it, sent her into the theater with the strangest movie showing during the Metro Manila Film Festival 2003.

Mano Po 2: My Homecoming is about a Chinese girl who works as an OFW. She returns to her small idyllic town only to realize that she's come down with SARS and along the way she acquires three wives who squabble over multi-billion peso estate. Susan Roces stars as the first wife and she mutates years later into Elizabeth Oropesa and nobody notices the difference. Then Eric Quizon hires mourners for the dead girl and they all put Vicks Vaporub (touch-therapy) on their eyes to make it look like they're Chinese. The film is a science fiction indie, which is also an homage to some obscure Chinese film.

Well, go figure.

No comments: