"Before you watch Jacqueline Comes Home - you better watch Giving Up Tomorrow first!" would be a good thing to say. I thought about that line and didn't realize that a Chiong sisters movie was made. Years ago back when I was in high school - I remembered that there was a plan to make the movie. It was back then I still sympathized with Thelma Chiong not having known anything yet. What do you expect from an angry 14-year-old back then? The film was made by VIVA Films - the same film company that made two other movies namely the award-winning The Flor Contemplacion Story (which is probably their iconic biopic film used by the feeling oppressed) and Vizconde Massacre Story (which came around 1993).
The movie about the late Flor Contemplacion tried to make a guilty woman look innocent. If you noticed - her two sons Joel and Jun Jun starred as themselves in said film. They wouldn't be willing to work on it if the film portrayed their deceased mother as what she was - a person who was rightfully executed on death row. They could have fabricated everything that happened in Singapore with misuse of artistic license. Where was Singapore's side of the story huh VIVA Films? The movie itself was full of inconsistencies. Before that, you had a movie that didn't bother to investigate Hubert Webb's presumed guilt or innocence. It turns out that "witness" Jessica Alfaro was a drug addict which means her being a witness (and she flipped her stance way too many times) is just questionable. It turned out that Hubert himself was actually innocent of the said actual crime. No, it's not even a delaying tactic to request a DNA test to prove your innocence. How many people were misled by those films back in the 90s because the digital age and DNA testing techniques were still at its infancy in contrast to the last decade and this decade? Aren't suspects always presumed innocent until proven guilty? Something fishy there?
The first two movies became huge hits for these reasons. First, the favorite sources of a population that has long been plunged into anti-intellectualism are pelikulas, komiks, and teleseryes over valid documentaries. Second, the information age was still raw. If you've lived in the 90s as a child or a teenager - you may have noticed how you had to be stuck with a dial-up connection before the duopoly that's PLDT and Globe eventually adopted the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and currently we have the fiber technology. Internet was far more costly back then unlike today when even the slowest Internet can still allow people to refute the stupidity of the pelikulas, komiks, and teleseryes. Maybe, that's why all the lies against foreign investors have been made repeatedly in the name of nationalism. It's all a desperate effort to keep Filipinos in the dark. But bad news for them - Filipinos like every other race are capable of evolving away from the stupidity they're stuck in if they choose to!
Did VIVA even think they'd still get a big hit with the Chiong sisters-based movie in this day and age? Fortunately, they didn't and the film got so much criticism. Even CRappler ended up having an article that called said film as problematic for so many reasons. Also, there are problems with movies and series based on real stories - they are very easy to fabricate. Much of the dialogue that happens in a biopic is usually composed of imagined dialogue. The scriptwriters would have not known about the actual conversations or imagined some scenes that could've happened. I have no problem with inserting the imagined dialogues or scenes as long as the truth isn't altered or deviated from when presenting the said film.
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