Happyland

Another 1 of 'em documentaries. Oh shoot! I forgot. This is a flick. I was just thinkin' that it would've been nicer for it to be a docu. No offense. The cinematography wasn't really top-flite. But I loved the actors!

My favorite of course was the Spanish priest who has the cute Tagalog accent. He's a missionary from Spain who came here a long time ago(I remember it was 50 years ago or something in the movie). He clearly notices the Pinoys' passion for basketball over football.

Or soccer for sissies.

He takes note of the most obvious factor, that Filipinos are just too small to be playing a big man's game.

Don't ask me how these cagers got to the olympics.

On the other hand, he mentions that Pinoys are quick and agile, and don't need height to excel in football, or somethin' to that effect. I actually thought about the exact same thing billions of years ago.

This shit only goes back to the millions.

That Filipinos(or "Philippinos" to some foreigners) are built for the sport. Look at Japan and Korea. We could easily hand their asses to 'em in MMA and boxing. But in football? We're just seedlings, and they're fuckin' sequoia redwoods! Or maybe just acacias, the Brazilians and Europeans are the redwoods. Dickwise though, we're redwoods, and they're bamboos! Or am I just speakin' for a few of us here?

Well anyway, even if this flick ain't perfect, it still did 1 good thing. And that was to spread the gospel of football. It had a heavy load of trivia in it. Like the fact that a Filipino who played for FC Barcelona holds the record for most goals scored in the Spanish League. I forgot the stats, but I did some Math and it came out that this dude scores a goal a game on average!

Even Messi couldn't do that shit!

Another trivia(which actually came from the director himself when he spoke to us after the show) was about Tondo, which was the movie's setting. It was about the football situation there. I thought that only Barotac Nuevo and some other hardcore football town or city had solid fanbases. I didn't know that in Tondo, you could easily create a football league comprising of at least 10 teams!

Take that, Philippine basketball!

The acting wasn't really Gawad Urian level. But I cried when the main protagonist wept towards the end because he remembered his teammate friend who ended up in prison. Any kind of acting that could move me into tears is a good kind of acting! I hope that most of his mainstream contemporaries could do that. You know, act good!

My grade for this flick is a 3 out of 10.
+1 for makin' me a crybaby towards the end.
+2 for spreading the gospel of football.
Overall rating, 6/10.






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