Ok I'm not gonna lie, this movie isn't all bad [I'll get to that] but the Bakal Boys was not as great as I anticipated. Maret, Lauren, Vania, & I all sawthe Bakal Boys together and I was really intrigued by the films write up on SIFF's website and a blog I found while Google searching the film [http://seattlest.com/2010/05/26/siff_review_-_bakal_boys.php] but when I saw the movie there were several things I disliked about it.
To start off I'll give a short explanation of the movie. It's about 2 boys [Utoy & Bungal] and their friends that I don't remember their names but weren't as important. These boys live in a very impoverished part of Manila Bay in the Philippines and in order to get extra money they go dive in the extremely dirty and poluted bay in search of scrap metal to sell to a junkyard and get paid based on the total weight of the items. One day the boys find an anchor, knowing that once they get it to the junkyard they'll get alot of money because it's very heavy they are so excited that they forget Bungal back out on the gulf that they dive at because he was sunbathing when they left. But once they get back out there Bungal is gone, no where to be found. This happend quite close to the beginning of the 1 hour and 20 minute film and literally for the rest of it Utoy is just in search of Bungal with no luck. Then the movie ends, point blank.
This movie was very confusing to me, I feel like the beginning when most of the activity was happening was very jumbled and would just skip around and not really give more detail for each scene. Then all of the sudden Bungal is just gone, at first I figured that this was a twist in the film and I was actually re-interested after this point. But then he's never found, say what? Are you serious? The whole movie focuses on finding Bungal and in the end there is no explanation as to why he went missing nor did they find him. I thought this was a really lame way to end the movie, actually a lame way to have created this movie in the first place. They could've done so much more and made it a very powerful movie.
The movie highlights on the low class of these people in this part of Manila Bay, starting with the children making it fun to find metal scraps to sell and make money for their family; which unless I was raised wrong, really isn't what normal children do. Touching on this same topic is done by looking at the run down huts they all live in along with the dirtyness of everything around them: their home's floors were either covered in sand/dirt or they were sand/dirt [I can't exactly remember], the water that the children swim in was extremely poluted and that didn't even phase the parents [they were more worried about them getting hit by boats, but still didn't do much to punish them probably because they bring things home to sell], and everybody wore the same clothes thus bluntly highlighting the families poverty.
So I don't 100% hate the movie, I just wish that the creators went further with their ideas because the concept of learning about this culture of people was very interesting to me. Learing about the way the people in this area live their daily lives was my favorite part of the movie, and when they put that on the back burner [in time forget about it] and then focus on the missing boy that never gets found it kind of ruined the movie for me and made it kind of bland. Like I said, I just wish they took it into a different direction by maybe just focusing on the culture and having Bengal's disappearence be a side story and then either find him in the end or gain understanding as to why he went missing.
*first photo http://static.blogo.it/cineblog/BasecoBakalBoys.jpg
*second photo http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TfkgevD-TyQ/0.jpg
