Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Star City will die?

Lisa Macuja, wife of Fred Elizalde, owner of Star City, showed authorities a Twitter post saying "Star City will die."

The Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) on Wednesday assessed that 80 to 90% of the Star City compound in Pasay City, which includes the Manila Broadcasting Company (MBC) building and Aliw Theater, was razed by fire, according to a report by Maki Pulido on GMA News TV’s Balitanghali.

The iconic 28-year-old amusement park, Star City, located in Pasay City was hit by fire early Wednesday.

The massive park, which is located in the reclaimed area of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Complex, is a common destination of school field trips and of children after they receive their cash gifts from godparents during the Christmas season.

The complex also boasts of holding shows, including ballet performances.

Sadly, the site will be closed this Christmas season after 60% of the compound was gutted in the fire that lasted for more than four hours.

Firefighters were wondering why different parts of Star City seemed to have started burning almost at the same time.

The amusement park has 600 workers.

Despite the catastrophe, MBC, which has 300 employees, will continue the regular broadcasting operations of its FM stations Love Radio, Yes the Best, and Easy Rock.

Its AM station dzRH is expected to go back on-air within 48 hours

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Cinemalaya John Denver Trending

The film was shot entirely in Pandan, Antique, Condez’s home province. Only Meryll Soriano and Sunshine Teodoro are professional actors. The rest of the cast members led by neophyte child actor Jansen Magpusao are either Condez’s relatives or childhood friends. Magpusao’s family lives in a mountain resort in Pandan, Antique called Malumpati Cold Spring.

The movie is close to my heart (pounded to the core during the almost two-hour screening) for two reasons: First, the movie is in Kinaray-a, the language of my province- Antique. It has English subtitles for non-Antiqueños. Second, it’s about the scourge of online disinformation – the issue that our group, VERA Files, is actively helping to fight.

The movie was shot in its entirety in Pandan, a town in the northern part of Antique ,where the family of the current representative, Loren Legarda, comes from. The Zaldivar family (the late Supreme Court Justice Calixto Zaldivar, former Governor Enrique Zaldivar, former Governor Sally Perez-Zaldivar) are also from Pandan.

The movie is rich in local sound and color. One even hears in the background the” tiktik.” In our childhood days, we were told that was the sound of the “aswang.”

Also worth noting is Meryll Soriano, who enfleshes John Denver’s mother with the kind of quiet but forceful dignity and devotion that the role requires.

A clear strength of the film is its rural and “regional” world, with its culturally simultaneous reality being succinctly captured in the depiction of communal faith healers paradoxically coexisting with smart phones, thereby suggesting not so much rupture as continuity between the regime of memory and the regime of data, especially where the residual but entirely determinative power of orality is concerned.

The condemnation that falls squarely on the shoulders of the wrongly accused boy is enabled not only by the manipulability—and the selectivity—of video as a medium, but also by this unfortunate boy’s (class) identity, his unimportance and “dispensability” as a marginal person in this world.

The domination of Kinaray-a speaking film “John Denver Trending” during this year’s Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival made a strong statement: stop cyberbullying, which can be disastrous, or worse even fatal.

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