Panalo ang akting ni DingDong sa 'Dance of the Steel Bars'

Ni Mario Bautista

We recently saw the premiere night of GMA Films’ “Dance of the Steel Bars” at SM Megamall and we’re not surprised directors Cesar Apolinario and Marnie Manicad got lots of congratulatory greetings after the screening as the film is really worth watching. The film is co-produced by GMA Films with a foreign movie company, Portfolio Films and it's going to be shown worldwide.

Dingdong Dantes delivers a solid performance as Mando, a dance instructor who gets imprisoned for frustrated homicide after he hits a gay dancer who took a pass on him and the gay hit his head on the wall. He's better here than in his award-winning presentations in the mainstream horror film “Segunda Mano” and the sudsy drama “One More Try.”

Filmed inside the Cebu detention and rehabilitation center that got famous for the Cebu Dancing Inmates whose dance performances were a big hit on Youtube, the directors were able to weave a pretty engaging drama story about how all the dancing started. The main conflict is provided by the two villains in the movie: Gabe Mercado as the deputy warden who orders the killing of the present warden (Roy Alvarez) and his chief henchman, Thou Reyes. Gabe expects that he’ll be appointed as the new warden but an outsider was tasked to take over, Ricky Davao.

Ricky wants to institute reforms in the corrupt prison complex and one of them is to give the inmates a physical fitness program through dancing. He appoints a gay inmate to lead this, Joey Paras, who is eventually aided by Dingdong. But the villains try to thwart all his good intentions all the time.

The whole story is told from the point of Frank (Patrick Bergin), a retired fireman from the U.S. who gets married to a Filipina. He’s a basic do-gooder but when he tries to help a teenager stabbed by a gang of thugs, he gets accused of murder instead and ends up in prison. He becomes callous and jaded and is no longer interested in helping others.

Eventually, he relents. He finds a lawyer to help free a female prisoner (Kathleen Hermosa), a nurse who’s wrongly imprisoned because she refused giving sexual favors to a doctor in the hospital she used to work for. The film’s valid message is that even if life doesn’t treat you well and some people become mean and cruel, you should continue to do good because there’s Divine Justice that will eventually make things right again.

The whole cast delivers very fine performances: from Mercado and Reyes as the scheming villains, Mon Confiado as the prison doormat who falls in love with Kathleen, Joey Paras as the gay who pretends to his foreigner pen pal that he’s really a girl (and gets promptly rejected when they meet face to face), Bergin as the narrator who cannot totally forsake his heart of gold, and of course, Dingdong Dantes who gets a big round of applause in his breakdown scene in the bathroom after he learns that his father died while he is in jail. 

You can see they filmed it on a limited budget, but still, the direction is generally superior and technical credits are quite above average. They made the film a crowd-pleaser, not only with the dance sequences but with the way the bad guys subsequently got the comeuppance that they do deserve.

This is really a prison movie with a lot of heart. Presented with English subtitles, we have no doubt this can easily be marketed abroad. But we think it would have been a bigger come on if they started right away with a production number showing the dancing inmates to open the movie, and then Frank as narrator tells the audience how it originated. Then the movie ends again with another big dance number, since it’s really the dancing of the Cebu inmates that inspired the production of this movie. That would have been the most rousing manner that they could have started and concluded the film.

Sarah at John Lloyd panalo uli sa “It Takes a Man and a Woman”

Ni Mario Bautista

EVERYONE predicted that “It Takes a Man and a Woman”, the third installment in the love story of John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo as Miggy and Laida, would be a hit. But even Star Cinema was surprised at how strong it is at the tills, earning P300-M on its second week and still counting.

Just like its predecessors, “A Very Special Love” (2008) and “You Changed My Life” (2009), the third movie is engineered to be a real crowd pleaser. It doesn’t begin where the last one ended.

Miggy and Laida have broken up after Laida saw Miggy kissing his past girlfriend, Belle (Isabelle Daza). She went to New York and works with a top publishing company. The business empire of Miggy’s family, the Montenegro, is having problems. He made a lot of wrong decisions and has been demoted. He’s tasked to save their publishing company by getting the franchise for a prestigious magazine and Laida is requested to return home to help him in this project.

Working with an ex proves to be difficult for both Miggy and Laida, even if Laida insists she has moved on. It’s obvious she’s still very much affected when she sees Miggy being sweet with Belle. The result is plenty of comic scenes between the former lovers.

In the end, we all know they’ll surely still get back into each other’s arms and we’ll get the obligatory happy ending, but Direk Cathy Garcia-Molina and her writers manage to make their journey together quite engaging to watch. They succeed to make even some of the obvious plot contrivances quite easy to swallow, like the two lovers ending up sleeping together in Laida’s very small room in New York and things conspiring for them to go sightseeing around Manhattan like they originally planned when they were still on.

Between the two, it’s Laida who has grown while they were away from each other. She became an independent spirit while working in the Big Apple and has returned to Manila speaking English with a palpable twang. To help them get the magazine’s franchise, it’s decided to feature her personal story with metamorphosis or transformation as the theme.

At the core of the film is the value of learning how to forgive. It’s not only Miggy who went astray here but also Laida’s dad, Al Tantay. But where as her mom, Irma Adlawan, has quickly forgiven her dad’s infidelity, Laida finds it difficult to move on and discard her emotional baggage and feelings of being betrayed.

One touching scene in the film shows her asking her mom: “How do you forgive?” But the movie doesn’t wallow in sentimentality, what with Sarah being truly more adept in doing comic scenes. It quickly shakes off such moments of drama, with the over to the max “kilig” climax, where Miggy officially proposes to Laida, designed to be a true musical show-stopper. At the airport, Laida sees all the people around her, from porters and security guards to janitors and customs and immigration personnel singing Miggy’s song to her, “Kailan.”

Of course, it all works because of the winning screen personas of the lead. JLC is the only actor today we know who can do a “hagulgol” scene on screen without appearing awkward. He also might not be a real singer but he can still charm the viewers if he could barely carry a tune. Coco Martin tried doing something like this in “A Moment in Time” but the scene falls flat. What he needs is JLC’s effortless charisma.

It’s really amazing that JLC is more identified with Bea Alonzo as his original ka-love team but the public has truly embraced his tandem with Sarah more intensely, making his films with Sarah bigger blockbusters than the ones he did with Bea, that are, in all fairness to them, also true box-office bonanzas, like “The Mistress.” Sarah’s basically jologs screen image must really be that appealing and endearing to countless viewers, especially in the end where the bloopers are shown and she just kept on giggling.

They get excellent support from Isabelle Daza as Belle, Al and Irma as Sarah’s parents, plus Matet de Leon, Joross Gamboa and Gio Alvarez as their personal cheering squad.

It’s said this will be the last edition in the Miggy-Laida trilogy but, judging from the public’s very warm response to “It Takes a Man and a Woman”, we won’t be surprised if there’d be another sequel.


The film ends with their wedding and Laida is about to go back to New York to resume her work there. Miggy says he’s willing to join her and be a househusband. So we won’t be surprised if the next installment would show “Miggy and Laida sa Amerika.”