Useless yapping

Film director Darryl Yap must believe his own propaganda that he is some sort of wunderkind. Sure, his “Maid in Malacañang” made money, but it was not due to any intrinsic merit. In fact, it was bad: badly written, badly edited, with obvious mistakes left in. And the direction was so-so, with only the ever-reliable Cristine Reyes giving her usual good performance. Ella Cruz was the saving grace, proving to be a revelation, but Cesar Montano was ho-hum, and his son Diego Loyzaga showed to all and sundry that his good acting in “Death of a Girlfriend” (with A.J. Raval) was a fluke.

Yap’s timing, though, was impeccable: after having made some amusing shorts aimed at maligning the presidential candidacy of Leni Robredo in 2022, the auteur exhibited the movie in August 2022, right after Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had overwhelmingly won the presidency.

Thus — as my friends in the Cinema Exhibitors Association of the Philippines (CEAP) tell me — those in business and the professions who wished to curry favor with the Marcoses tripped all over themselves to sponsor block screenings of the Yap opus.

For the uninitiated, a block screening is when all the seats of a cinema are paid for in advance of a film’s showing, the tickets given away for free, with the payments counted as box office receipts. Hence, the illusion of a blockbuster. That Yap obliquely encouraged people to think that Imee Marcos was one of the producers of the movie — whether true or not — didn’t hurt the influx of sponsorships either.

Flush with success (in spite of having only made harmless fluff before), Yap tried to follow this up with “Martyr or Murderer,” which did not attain the same success, the novelty having worn off.

Now, in a foolhardy attempt to stay relevant, Yap dredges up supposed past dirt on the political Sotto family by making a movie about a crime that happened 42 years ago: the alleged rape of sexy starlet Pepsi Paloma by successful multimedia star — and father of the Pasig mayor and brother of a former Senate President now running for reelection — Vic Sotto.

Yap craftily claims that he is making the film in the name of “justice.” It doesn’t seem to matter to Yap that the supposed victim had long ago executed an affidavit desisting from further prosecuting the case, or that two persons who had actual, first-hand knowledge of the case had publicly declared that it was all a publicity stunt concocted by their (universally considered to be) shady late manager Rey de la Cruz, or that the statute of limitations had long ago run out on the crime, or that the only possible witness had already died, and by her own hand at that.

None of that mattered to Yap. What matters is that he has made a teaser sensationalizing a reimagining of something that might not have happened, just to lay the blame for the offense directly on Vic Sotto. As expected, until Yap was sued, the video was going viral.

I do not know Vic Sotto personally. I do not like many of his films, although his latest (The Kingdom) is a gem of a movie. But what Yap is doing to him, and his family, offends my sense of justice as a lawyer and my sense of decency, because it is something I would not wish on my worst enemy, let alone a stranger.

Movies like “The Rapists of Pepsi Paloma” exemplify everything that is wrong with local cinema: the desire to gratuitously exploit tragedy, pander to the public’s curiosity about the scurrilous, in total disregard of accuracy for the sake of tabloid journalism.

Bad movies have a right to exist, of course, but there is no justification for a filmmaker yapping uselessly about a topic that has no purpose, not even for the arts.