PDI Review: 'Break It to Me Gently: Essays on Filipino Film' by Richard Bolisay

In which I review the debut book of someone I idolize and have long fanboyed over--the website version here. 

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Richard Bolisay's 'Break It to Me Gently': Essential reading for anyone who loves Filipino films

If you happen to be a Filipino cinephile who came of age on social media from the late 2000s onwards, you would no doubt be familiar with "Lilok Pelikula," the self-maintained and, sadly, now-defunct blog ran by film critic Richard Bolisay.

You would know that, like any respectable and self-respecting critic, Bolisay doesn't mince his words: His praises are lucid, his pans crafted with surgical precision. But more importantly, you would know that what sets Bolisay apart from his contemporaries--what makes him our most readable film critic--is that rare sort of deep-seated passion for the movies that informs his writing.

To read Bolisay's reviews is to see film in the eyes of someone with a genuine love for and understanding of the medium; someone who embraces emotion and doesn't flinch at the thought of putting it on paper in its rawest forms.

All that is evident in his debut book, "Break It to Me Gently," which is remarkable for being both a collection of incisive criticism and a sweeping survey of the 21st-century Filipino film landscape. The main goal was obviously to gather over a hundred reviews from Bolisay's blog into a single document; the result is a singular documentation, brimming with unfiltered compassion, of our film industry.

Despite covering mostly films of the new millennium, "Break It to Me Gently" never feels time-bound. Bolisay's reviews do not limit themselves to just the movie at hand; they work like tapestries, woven with a keen sense of history and context, and an awareness that, always, it takes a village to make a film. In one way or another, everything and everyone is covered, from Lav Diaz and Ishmael Bernal to Cathy Garcia-Molina and Erik Matti; from "Working Girls" in the 1980s to "On the Job" only six years ago to the numerous film festivals that have dotted the scene of late.

The introduction alone may well be reason enough to get the book: Already, the piece feels like essential reading for anyone who loves Filipino films and anyone who aspires to get into the nasty business of filmmaking and the even nastier business of film criticism. In this manifesto of sorts, Bolisay not only becomes a historian of the movies, but his very own historian as well, writing of the unspoken struggles and frustrations of being an arts critic this side of the world, in the process grounding his reader on the reality that writing about film--and writing in general--is never an easy task.

Everyone's a film critic these days, to go by Twitter and Rotten Tomatoes. To read Bolisay's book, then, is to realize that not everyone is cut out for the job. "Break It to Me Gently" shows us a master at work.