THE ?OFFICIAL? ENTRIES TO THE METRO MANILA Film Festival give the Filipino movie enthusiast another kind of sinking feeling: that of an inexorable slide to mediocrity. Perhaps the emblematic movie of this particular edition is ?Shake Rattle & Roll XI??that?s 11, surely a measure of the formulaic commercialism that has come to characterize the festival originally designed to encourage quality Filipino movies. ?Mano Po? is in its sixth reincarnation, while ?Ang Panday? is, by one count, the ninth iteration of the by-now over-familiar story.

To be sure, the festival has continued to bring in audiences and showcase a continuing improvement in cinematic special effects, but the overall quality of the movies has been problematic at best. By and large, the official entries reflect the creativity killers that doom the cinemas to small-minded commercialism: an over-emphasis on celebrity actors, a reliance on tired but still-working formulas, above all a shameless dependence on commercial results that undermine the artistic criteria used in the awards rites. Shake, rattle and roll indeed.