the only thing good about my fake american accent was the title.

zai, supporter of local indies, invited a few colleagues to watch the movie in galleria. i have to say i was curious: as a person who works in the industry that the movie is supposed to portray, i wanted to know how the movie will present the call center industry. i was not expecting a very realistic take on it (i mean, we all know doctors and lawyers don't really act that way in really life when we see their screen counterparts, do we?), but i did not expect the movie to be that bad.it was so bad, i'm surprised it was deemed fit for showing. i missed the first 20 minutes when i arrived, but from what i caught afterwards, the story revolves on a small team of call center people. there was the newbie guy, the bland but sensible girl, the efficient SME (subject matter expert), the rebellious semi-gothette, the fashion-conscious guy, and the team leader from hell. right away i know something was missing: where was the token gay person? this is an industry teaming with all sorts gay people and not one of the cast was gay. and by "story", i was stretching things a bit. what passes as the "story" was a series of uninteresting sketches on some of the more common call center stereotypes: getting shouted out by customers, getting mugged, anonymous sex, overbreak stories. one scene jaggedly shifts to another scene without anything making sense. perfunctory dialogues are left hanging in the air and seemed to be part of the movie only because the production team remembered that the characters ought to be talking. i wasn't really expecting too much. i know people who would champion indies as if they are the savior of the philippine movie industry when in fact a of indies are little more than a pile of droppings. sure, there are a couple of indies that presented movies that innovative and free of the formulas of commercial cinema but that was because of a combination of good story, production, acting and post-production. if they had a big production company backing them up without restricting artistic freedom, they would still have made a good movie. being independently produced does not necessarily make a movie better. but i wasn't expecting the movie to be this bad. a movie that presents itself as an "art" film (this movie was part of cinemalaya, after all, and so we could assume it aspire to besome movie) could say something about its subject, maybe distoring reality in the name of artistic license so it could deliver its point. or it could imitate reality and present things as they seem. or it could do both. this movie did neither. or it did things halfway but lost sight of what exactly were they trying to do. oh, to anyone who worked in the call center industry it will look familiar, in the way that an imitation iphone looks familiar. and yet i expect call center agents watching the movie will frequently snigger because what they see onscreen is not how things really happen. not that people would mind that if there was interesting drama shown instead but there wasn't any either. who's the main character in the movie again? i kind of lost it after the eighth subplot. sure, i could complain all i want about the story and people could say i simply have too much expectations. but i will counter, what about minor technicalities? like one should never see cameras reflected on glass in a movie. or is it too much to ask for decent sound editing; one where the dialogue volume is consistent? this is a cinemalaya-sponsored movie; i've seen students films that are way better made than this. it simply was a waste of money. my co-workers asked if i want to stay and watch the beginning of the movie but i said i wasn't willing to waste my time further.