El Presidente (2012)

The Worst Film Ever

Powerful

Fantastic!

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Jeorge "E.R." Ejercito stars in this Filipino historical drama entitled El Presidente a.k.a The President about the biography of General Emilio Aguinaldo, the first President of the Philippines. Nora Aunor,Christopher de Leon and Cesar Montano co-star in this film that was based on the "Memoirs of a Revolution", which was written by Aguinaldo himself.The screenplay starts when Aguinaldo starts to write a letter to the United States for granting full independence to the Philippines.Then flashbacks of stories occurs starting with he was in his teens who receives visions from an old lady about the future of his life.It progresses until he becomes a member of the Katipunan,a revolutionary movement headed by Andres Bonifacio against the country's Spanish colonists.The revolution starts as Filipinos starts to battle the Spaniards and managing to gain victory despite lack in fire arms and armaments.Aguinaldo becomes the leader of the Filipino revolutionaries and becomes their general. After gaining further victories, the Filipinos starts to have a revolutionary government with Aguinaldo being chosen as the first president.This leads to more problems after Aguinaldo's group and the Katipunan has had their quarrels and divisions which led them to fight the Spaniards separately.This leads to Bonifacio being charged for treason and eventually gets death sentence. After the Spaniards have ceded the Philippines, Aguinaldo's revolutionary government battles the Americans.Problems arises when General Antonio Luna instill hatred among the other Filipino soldiers loyal to Aguinaldo. This leads to Luna's assassination.Eventually,the Americans battles against Aguinaldo and his men until the Philippines fall under to their submission to become a new U.S. colony. The film finally concludes showing Aguinaldo leading a quiet life after the Philippines-American war and shows other important events in his life like marrying his second wife Maria after his first wife Hilaria died.The film Bonifacio: Ang Unang Pangulo a.k.a Bonifacio: The First President is what brought me to El Presidente a.k.a The President.While the film about Bonifacio showed that Aguinaldo was feels that Bonifacio is a threat to his position as president which led to having him killed, this movie based on Aguinaldo's memoirs certainly have a different story.It definitely portrayed Bonifacio as an arrogant leader that the Filipino revolutionaries do not need.Also,it shows that he does not possess the kind of military leadership that Aguinaldo have and has made threats to the first president's life to fulfill his desire to become leader of the Filipino revolutionaries.There was a justification for why he needs to be killed and Aguinaldo readily admits to it. On the death of General Antonio Luna,Aguinaldo has made no admission being part of the conspiracy. The film just showed that Luna was an arrogant general that irked many Filipino revolutionary soldiers.Added to that,the film somehow hinted that Luna was a threat to the cause of revolutionaries and that his presence will be a hindrance especially when the Filipinos battled the Americans.Causing the death of these two Filipino heroes - Andres Bonifacio and General Antonio Luna - has somehow hurt the legacy of Aguinaldo as a Filipino hero.What is admirable is that the movies made no means to escape these controversies and gave the position of Aguinaldo based on his memoirs. Evidently,this will head me to another film entitled Heneral Luna a.k.a General Luna to see what his biopic has to say about Aguinaldo in these historical controversies in Philippine history. Controversies aside,I felt that the Aguinaldo biopic being almost three hours was ambitious to present the first Filipino president to become a deserving hero of the Philippines.His military leadership and immense love for the country were definitely highlighted. It just showed how vital was Aguinaldo for the Filipino revolutionaries.As for the performances,I am satisfied with Jeorge "E.R." Ejercito performance as Aguinaldo.He definitely was sincere and genuine. He also tried his best with regards to his acting abilities.As for Christopher De Leon as Luna,I think that he was good enough to portray the general as pretty well.Cesar Montano was definitely great once again as Andres Bonifacio. Many Filipinos would probably not agree on whether he portrayed who Bonifacio truly is since many Filipinos would not regards him as arrogant nor lacking in leadership but at least he managed to portray him extremely well on how Aguinaldo viewed him.Finally, Nora Aunor's performance was definitely forgettable as she played Maria as a cutesy second wife.As for the action scenes,I felt that they were somewhat exaggerated to make it feel like an action movie.It was a good thing that it did not refrain from the controversies involving Aguinaldo which sort of made up for it in a film that really tried to present him to be a worthy Filipino hero in spite of them. I felt that alone is enough for the price of admission.

From the beginning of the movie some of the details are not accurate such as the ammunition used for their revolver during the introduction scene, it displayed a .45 ACP (not existed during that period) instead of .45 LC.Some of the scenes uses slow motion effects kinda like the Matrix stuff which really ruins the movie, the selection of actors are also not matching their character.Their fictional characters such as "Inang bayan" also makes the movie more Sci-Fi or Paranormal, they could have shown the love for the mother land in a different way.There are a lot more unless you are interested on the negative comments about this movie then watch.

Terrible movie. It is historical fiction which copied battle scenes from Robin Hood, Braveheart, and Asiong Salonga... and portrayed Andres Bonifacio as ego-centric, heartless and a traitor- the worst you can do to a national hero. They said they based the story on Aguinaldo's memoir?? But who provided the details?? I don't know if Ambeth Ocampo said something about this movie, I doubt he did. Even the acting was terrible. Anyway, what will you expect when the actors in the movie are also involved in politics.Too bad, I read that Prof. Randy David did not see the lies and intentional errors in the movie. Watching this movie was like allowing The Bonifacio brothers to be murdered over and over again, and be silent about it.

After last year's surprisingly good period gangster film that is "Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story", here is E.R. Ejercito again with an Emilio Aguinaldo biopic entitled "El Presidente", an infinitely trickier film to pull off, scope and exposition-wise. If E.R.'s previous film focuses mainly on gangland altruism, "El Presidente" is all about patriotic resilience amidst imperialism, and it definitely shows on the film's abundant dose of sentimentalism. And if E.R. seems tailor-made for the role of Asiong Salonga (after all, he has already played Asiong in the '90s film "Asiong Salonga: Hari ng Tondo"), he seems feverishly out of place in this whole historical drama, especially when he's surrounded by character actors that are ten times more talented than him. Now do not get me wrong, when I think of a more suitable and relatively bankable actor to play Aguinaldo, I can't really think of anyone save for Ejercito himself (as of the moment, that is). Except for his bulldog-ish cheeks, Ejercito nicely fits the title role specifically because of his relative mass appeal and sense of authority. But then, somebody has seemingly forgotten to remind him that "El Presidente" is, after all, a film and not a theatrical play. With his repetitively oratorical hand gestures and monotonous line deliveries, despite of the stature of the person he's playing, E.R. is easily dwarfed by his co-actors in the film, specifically Cesar Montano, whose brief but strong turn as Andres Bonifacio is a mild cause for celebration. Except for his hair that's anachronistically gelled upwards, Cesar Montano's Bonifacio is so well-portrayed that I wouldn't bother for him to have more screen time than Aguinaldo himself. Granted, "El Presidente" is quite sophisticated with its cinematography and action sequences, but its whole narrative seems fairly derivative and very 'Philippine History 101' that the film's human aspect was left terribly wanting.Complete with cursive texts beneath every establishing scene that continuously remind us that the film is more of a crash course on the history of pre-republic Philippines rather than a fairly humanizing story of a great man (this, of course, depends on who's seeing the film), "El Presidente" never quite connects on the emotional level. Instead, and this is quite saddening, it merely gives out the occasional 'wow' factor with its action set pieces, mammoth scope and nothing more. And although I also liked Baron Geisler's intense performance as a Spanish captain, the film's supporting cast was fairly uninspired and a tad too unconvincing; indeed, a bunch of artificially mustachioed lads sputtering things about independence and going slow-motion on simulated battles is not enough. Well, maybe that is the ultimate downside of a historical drama: the scope is almost always so big that the characters are rendered as nothing but glorified plot details. In a way, "El Presidente" is "Jose Rizal's" (the film, not the man) campy and overly sentimental half-brother who gets into too much unjustified scuffles. If Cesar Montano's portrayal of Jose Rizal is one founded upon complexity, dedication and utter intensity, E.R. Ejercito's Emilio Aguinaldo is founded upon monotony, misplaced emotions and uncalled-for action star-ism. In one action scene when he has suddenly pulled out a very gangster-looking boot knife, I even expected E.R. to suddenly show his ever-wriggling tongue and shout "Ako si Boy Sputnik!" His performance is just so all over the place that at the end of the day, "El Presidente" has made me root more for Andres Bonifacio. Now I have this sudden craving to watch Richard Somes' Bonifacio biopic "Supremo". But in all fairness, the film's final 15 minutes or so is quite powerful. In a way, it reminds me of the final moments of Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" in how both finely convey the elegy of time in the lives of the most powerful and seemingly immortal leaders. The appearance of Nora Aunor as Emilio Aguinaldo's second wife though, who was cast just so she can be put into the posters as a potential crowd-drawer, is a complete non-event. In my opinion, they could have put Lilia Cuntapay in the role and it wouldn't really even make a strand of difference. "El Presidente", although admittedly a grand, sweeping production, is a very clunky film that offers little to nothing that our history text books have not taught us yet. Perhaps showing some of Aguinaldo's trivial humanity wouldn't hurt. And yes, "Manila Kingpin" is better.