Jack The Scribbler

Engkwentro is Filipino film noir and social commentary rolled into one.
But instead of hard-drinking gumshoes and peroxide blondes, the film features two brothers, Richard (Felix Roco), a drug-dealing gang leader on the run from a vigilante death squad, and Raymond (Daniel Medrana), a truant schoolboy turned neophyte of a rival gang.
With his life at risk, Richard is determined to join his mother in Manila and perhaps even stay there for a few months, if only to cool off.
While plying his drug route – a move to raise cash for his trip – Richard encounters Raymond and learns that he has joined the Batang Dilim (Kids of the Dark), instead of going to school.
As part of his initiation, Raymond is instructed by the gang leader, Tomas (Zyrus Desamparado) to fetch a gun, which Richard later confiscates and returns to its previous owner for a price.
Tension mounts between the two gang leaders, eventually forcing Raymond to make a choice between his new master or his brother.
These complications end up foiling Richard’s plans, emphasizing the hopelessness, even the inability, of those who seek to leave the slums for arguably better lives.

A downscaled poster of Engkwentro as found in its multiply site. To visit said site, please click on pic.

With its quick narrative pace, Engkwentro is able to dive right into its characters’ motivations and moral ambiguities, doing away with the easy, formulaic dichotomies between good and evil, victims and suspects, masters and slaves.
To complement this steely realism, Engkwentro offers unflattering portrayals of dingy alleys and clapboard shacks located in a Davao City slum, the movie’s setting. The images are so sharp and biting you could almost smell the stench of squalor.
But at the same time, Engkwentro has no qualms about baring its political agenda.
Barely a minute or two into the production, on-screen text about the prevalence of extra-judicial murders in the country give viewers a foretaste of what to expect.
Unlike other productions that serve generous helpings of propaganda, Engkwentro manages to stay on message by focusing on elements that help move the story along.
Take the opening sequence, which is already worth more than the price of the ticket.
With the screen rendered pitch black, viewers hear someone gasping for breath. Seconds later, through flickers of light, Richard is seen running for his life.
Similar chase scenes would later be repeated, emphasizing that everyone who is anyone in the film is more or less on the run from someone – cruel cops and crooked creditors, jilted suitors and jaded friends, envious enemies and evil parents.
Meanwhile, providing an auditory backdrop to the whole film is the city mayor’s disembodied voice from a radio broadcast.
Although he continues to deny involvement in the extrajudicial murders of known criminals, the mayor – played by Celso Ad. Castillo – implicitly supports the death squad’s activities.
Unfortunately, the mayor’s spiel is too strong and too confident to be taken seriously, turning his character into a caricature.
But this inconsistency fails to distract from the overall qualities of the movie, which is a winner.
Engkwentro is dirty, gritty, and real, however anyone looks at it.
It is just about the right film to show in a country that could use a little shock therapy to jolt it back to its senses.

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Engkwentro is directed by Pepe Diokno

Never have I been as enthusiastic about being a Gmail user as I am now.
Or at least not since five years ago when a close friend — someone whom I’ve shared a beer with for roughly half my life — gave me an invitation to open my very own Gmail account.
It was a privilege at that time because being a user of Google.com’s newly-launched free webmail service was strictly by invitation only.
It took me seven months after its April 2004 launch before I got an invite.
The process took longer than I expected — since I had a bunch of tech geeks and netheads as my friends — but it was well worth the wait.
Besides promising to store a gigabyte’s worth of email messages — at a time when owning a 256 MB thumb drive was cool — Gmail’s overall look and feel encouraged people such as myself to enjoy the experience of sending and receiving email messages even on a slow dial-up net connection.

Pop-up box shows Gmail's new enhancement, Drag and Drop Labels, which allow users to better organize their messages

As soon as I got my own Gmail account, I got hooked, ignoring and eventually neglecting my other web-based email addresses such as Yahoo!,
Lycos, and Hotmail.
Moreover, since I had the privilege of inviting 100 other people to enjoy the Gmail experience, I sent invites to myself, opening five or so accounts for work, personal stuff, and various other e-groups.
In February 2007, when Google.com finally made its free email service available to the public, I already was a Gmail veteran, with tons of mail in storage. These ranged from scanned images of Joyce Jimenez and hundreds of spam from Murli Menon, the CEO of Gujarat, India-headquartered PhenoMenon Consultants Inc.

Gmail's Drag and Drop Labels in action

Just recently, Gmail introduced a new feature that has me going gaga over email again.
It’s called Drag and Drop labels, an enhancement of a previous feature, allowing users organize email messages by category and/or color.
Once a label is named and used, it automatically appears on the screen’s left side, sporting a color — one out of 24 shades — chosen by the user.
Any email dragged into the newly-created category then carries the label and the color of that category.
That’s not all.
Since each category acts like a folder, all emails carrying that label can be accessed by simply clicking on the category itself.
Thanks to this new enhancement, users such as myself are spared from the time-consuming burden of scrolling through various files, many of which have been buried in Gmail’s vast storage space, unlabeled and unaccounted for.
When Drag and Drop Labels were introduced, I went full blast, creating five new categories that covered all manner of email messages I wanted to keep — forwarded novenas from my aunt in West Australia, a chat transcript with a friend way back when we were both living within the US tri-state area, and drafts of unfinished blog entries.
But like all technological advancements, Drag and Drop Labels have a hitch.
To maximize its benefits, you just have to sit down, formulate categories, and decide whether messages from the likes of Menon are really worth keeping.

Facebook is the new Friendster.
That’s what I told a friend of mine.
Or more accurately, that’s what I posted on his wall when he said that people who didn’t share our respect for both the Filipino and English languages — such as it was — were all set to invade and conquer our favorite social networking site.
Since he was an old fart who had a lot of time on his hands — which in turn, indicates the kind of company I keep — he was relentless.
“Friends, the end is near,” he said, continuing our discussion thread by posting on my wall. “Last night I was at a burger joint on Timog and heard two of these youngsters (from different tables) talk about Facebook. We’re finished.”
By youngsters, he was obviously referring to people younger than himself, which just about covered more than half of the Philippine population.

Shown is the Facebook account of this blogger, which may prove to be boring to some.

According to my friend — who is pushing 40 but has the mind and body of a healthy senior citizen — these young ones were about to lay siege on the Facebook community by mangling both languages through atrocious spelling and inelegant turns of phrase.
But I’m not bothered.
Practically no one among my 150++ friends on Facebook can be accused of befouling both languages, save for myself.
This explains why I remain choosy about whom I pick as friends in the said website, a decision that has benefits and drawbacks.
Since my Facebook friends are relatively literate, articulate, and open-minded individuals, I have no need to explain myself whenever the comments I post on  respective statuses, notes, pictures, and whatnot may be considered risqué.
They’re my friends, for crying out loud.
If they disallow and/or discourage me from airing my opinions, however biased (i.e., GMANews.TV is the world’s greatest website of all time) then they deserve being deleted from my A-list.
So far, none of my real friends on Facebook have been eager to curb my enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, I admit having to “unfriend” some of my so-called virtual “friends,” especially those whom I have never met at all. (Why I chose to become their Facebook friends in the first place is a mystery, even to myself. Blame it on alcohol, internet addiction, and plain stupidity.)
This, of course, has qualified me to become a world-class Facebook snob, according to my real friends.
But snob or not, I still am entitled to living the kind of life that I like, a right guaranteed under various international conventions to which this country is a signatory.
This right includes hanging out with people who share the same values and attitudes as I do.
Which explains why I recently looked up two college buddies whom I haven’t heard from in more than a decade.
Using Facebook’s private messaging tool, the three of us exchanged contact details and agreed to meet for dinner just to catch up on each other’s lives.
Details of the reunion — date, time, and place — was decided in just one afternoon, all thanks to the wonders of social media.
Since then, my college buddies and I have been able to organize a get-together on the fly, filling up my fair share of gimmicks and salvaging what remains of my social life.
Thanks, Facebook. You’ve got a friend in me, virtual and otherwise.