Bus entertainment

I spend a lot of time on Victory buses these days, and I have never wanted for good bus entertainment. The conductors I have ridden with so far have shown chutzpah for their taste and knowledge of the current pop culture. I smile as I write this. I think of Victory conductors with fondness.

It was around June that I was lamenting how oblivious I was to Filipino cinema. I was making a resolution to watch more local movies. How opportune it was that on my very first trip to Manila this semester, the conductor decided to grace his audience with Abandonada. The movie is a gripping drama of a woman Gemma (played to emotional perfection by the diamond star Maricel Soriano), who upon returning from working abroad, finds her husband Edwin (played viciously by Edu Manzano) has married another woman. The real kicker is that, in renouncing all connections to his past, he claims that the child he had with Gemma is actually just a nephew and that he was generous enough to adopt him as his own son. Talk about skeletons.

The movie is rife with flashbacks, where we piece together Gemma's domestic imprisonment and subsequent life in Canada. I won't give everything away, since after reading this, you might be feeling adventurous enough to see it. If you do, prepare yourself for high drama, action-packed car chases, edge-of-your-seat shoot-outs, touching jail scenes, and Angelu de Leon really working the furniture in her dramatic scenes. I was impressed. Truly. Everything you could ask for in one two-hour movie. Also, how can anyone say no to Maricel Soriano in a drama? I always thought she had weepy eyes. You know how they're so round and slightly red around the edges? I keep expecting her to burst out sobbing in her Alaska commercials.