After a long time, I’ll be completing my commentary of the three movies I saw from the 30th Metro Manila Film Festival. If you’re interested, you can read my thoughts about Spirit of the Glass and Aishite Imasu. And continue reading on to know more about So… Happy Together, the last MMFF film I saw.

For a film, it’s quite entertaining, but that’s just about it. The story drags on from one episode to another, and the character development is pretty much shallow. Kris Aquino (Lianne) and Eric Quizon (Osmond), as a friend said, seem to be playing themselves in this movie.

As a comedy film, I laughed at the unintentionally funny stuff more than the stuff that’s supposed to be funny. For one thing, how the hell do you tell a computer has a virus by opening up the CPU tower?! Cogie Domingo, who plays Oliver, the religious boytoy of Osmond, reported to Osmond that his computer has a virus while inspecting the motherboard and the cables.

Osmond, having a crush on Oliver, then asks a friend to whip him up a computer virus so that he can have his computer fixed by Cogie again. The resulting virus appears as a tamagotchi-like application that continually spouts “Osmond!” every so often. Good luck to anyone trying to rid that virus with a conventional anti-virus program.

Second, in Osmond’s office, we see an employee doing work on a computer. Except that the computer monitor basically showed the Windows XP logon screen the whole time. WTF? Ok, so Direk Joel Lamangan might probably be technically-inept, but he could have at least made the person use Microsoft Word or something!

Third, we see Kris Aquino’s character, Lianne, not aging in a span of like 30 years? While we see Osmond sprouting progressively tacky prosthetics that’s supposed to make him look older. Ha ha ha.

Fourth, I laughed at the 80’s-movie-style dance scene not because it was funny but because it was cheesy.

Fifth, all the blatant chunky corned beef product placements! I haven’t watched Feng Shui but chunky corned beef seems to be popular with Kris Aquino’s characters. We see three instances of corned beef “ads,” two for Dunkin Donut’s, and several others for Smart. Well at least we don’t have PLDT’s MyDSL “product placement” in Captain Barbell. That one wasn’t a product placement so much as it was an explicit commercial in the middle of a film!

(Then again, if product visibility and brand recognition are the objectives of the placements, then the movie has done extremely well in that regard. Except, don’t bet on me eating chunky corned beef anytime soon.)

So is the film any good? As I’ve said, it’s entertaining and funny (though I know one person who cried because of it). But that’s about it.