How Jo-ann Maglipon holds it all, without contradiction

There is a pause, still, in certain rooms, when people find out Jo-ann Maglipon covers showbiz. She has noticed it her whole career — the slight shift in posture, the indulgent half-smile, the way a conversation, without fail, pivots away from “serious” journalism once she enters into it. 

Philippine media has “not quite” stopped treating entertainment journalism as a lesser beat, Maglipon admits. 

“You still get a bit that they’re indulging you.” 

She lets it hang there, then adds: “If it weren’t for the fact that I went underground during Martial Law, and I went to prison, I was interrogated and my life has been lived in communities where activists thrive, I think they may even dismiss me half the time.”

“It’s just that politics, in terms of prison, ideology, and the like, is so deep in my system that it will always be there no matter what I’m doing. Whether I’m doing a cinema book or a children’s book, it will always be there, so I will never be separated from my beliefs,” she continues.

Her résumé makes the case without argument. She studied Comparative English Literature, went underground when Martial Law fell in 1972, and was imprisoned and interrogated by 1974 — after which she spent the better part of three decades covering Filipino stars with the same seriousness she brought to everything else. 

Maglipon has written, among others, expansive Martial Law tableaux in Not On Our Watch and Serve — books that sit in the political bloodstream of the country — alongside decades of covering the brightest, most complicated stars in Philippine entertainment.

That she can hold all of this without contradiction — the glamour and the grief, Nora Aunor’s “bad habits” in her personal life and brilliant showing as the doomed heroine in Himala, two entirely separate things — is not a paradox, but a testament to her attitude toward film. 

“Those will not affect how I will see her as Elsa,” she says. “They’re very different things.”

Recently, Maglipon stepped down as editor-in-chief of entertainment news site PEP, moving to editor-at-large and thus clearing the calendar for books. 

Is there still a story of her own she hasn’t written? She laughed at the abundance of the problem: “There are just too many ideas swimming. I don’t know what to do first.”

There cannot be just 100

Maglipon, who spent 18 years at YES! Magazine and has helmed PEP since its 2007 founding, just co-authored the book 100 Sine. Film. Pelikula with Joel David, a film scholar and critic whose own Amateurish! already canvasses some 250 Filipino films. 

“Honestly, I think it’s a false dichotomy to say that one writer is only… an entertainment writer, is only a political writer, was only a cinema buff,” Maglipon says. 

“I have done books about politics. I have done books about… the cinema, I’ve done other pieces in my lifetime that cover not just movies or show business, but every other aspect of the sociopolitical life. So, I really don’t make that kind of distinction.”

During the launch, Maglipon held up her new book and called it pretty — perfect for a gift, hardbound and full-color, 9 by 9 inches, 300 pages, beautiful enough to display and sturdy enough that you can flip through it carelessly without tearing a page.

It’s a coffee table-sized book with contents that are anything but vacuous, all bound with a cover that had art director Paul Villariba managing to fit characters from 30 films — 30 slivers of memory, and readers are invited to name them all.

“Try the game of identifying the movies via the pictures on the cover,” Maglipon urges, “and see if you get the 30.”

But the book’s subtitle stages its own contradiction: The 100+ Greatest Movies of Philippine Cinema.

Her co-author David calls 100 a “false number” and argues in his introduction that he hopes readers are “eventually liberated from obsessive canonizing”—which only opens the door for how the book proceeds to do exactly that: canonize, across hundreds of pages.

That productive tension, though, is the point. The 127 films were chosen by parameters that Maglipon and David set together: each film had to have an existing, viewable copy (Gerardo de Leon’s Daigdig ng mga Api in 1965, a lost film, was excluded on this basis); had to run at least an hour; had to be the work of Filipino creatives regardless of funding source, shooting location, or language.

Maglipon and David arrived at a list that is also, not-so coincidentally, a directory of Philippine cinema’s most recurring names: Lino Brocka is lauded time and time again with nine films, Ishmael Bernal with 10, and Mike de Leon with six. Actors Nora Aunor and Vilma Santos appear in nine and eight, respectively.

Leading all of them, with 16 writing credits, is National Artist for Film and Broadcast Arts Ricardo “Ricky” Lee.

100’s span is vertiginous — from Fernando Poe Sr. in the 1937 Zamboanga: A Fanciful Tale of Moro Sea Gypsies to gender-fluid director Dolly Dulu’s 2020 queer romance The Boy Foretold by the Stars; from the burning fields of Peque Gallaga’s Oro, Plata, Mata to the gentle, heartbreaking black-and-white of Lino Brocka’s Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang; from the neurotic meet-cute of That Thing Called Tadhana to the twin absurdist comedy of Kimmy Dora: Kambal sa Kiyeme, the book does not further stratify these films by importance nor mood. It simply holds a century’s worth of Filipino film together — the canonical and the crowd-pleasing, the devastating and the delightful — and asks nothing more of them than their greatness.

Every entry comes with photographs and stills, while the reviews accompanying each film are, as Maglipon puts it, “bite-sized” by design and “underwhelming.” 

But they do not hedge. Take, for instance, how the book takes direct aim at Chito Roño’s two entries, reading them as “a chronicle of a country’s continuing descent into social and moral depravity.” 

On Tu Pug Imatuy / The Right to Kill, a 2017 film about a Manobo woman forced at gunpoint to lead soldiers through an unrelenting forest, Maglipon writes of longing “for more stories like this — ethnic peoples unschooled, neglected, tyrannized, rising to their just anger.”

In another entry, Hesus Rebolusyonaryo, a 2002 film set in a military junta’s Philippines, the book’s verdict is unambiguous: what the obra says on the question of dictatorship, no matter the form, “does not hesitate to give one resounding answer. Never.” 

Short they may be, the reviews know exactly where they stand in a nation whose art takes after its climate. It is difficult, after all, to be vague about power when one of the writers has been imprisoned by it.

“Despite the wars going on… you still have a place for the arts to prosper,” Maglipon says. “And besides, it is always true that in times of repression, the artists come out. So, I imagine, if this war Trump started proceeds any further, we’ll have a lot of artwork coming up, whether cinema, painting, essays, novels.” 

“I will have to give it to the generation today that is making film,” she adds. “I think they will show us wonders. We must never undercut what is to come.” She paused. “Except that the economy is so bad. And political conditions are so rough. I don’t know how their struggle will go.”

It is the kind of thing only someone who has lived through her own difficult decade would say — excitement and dread in the same breath, neither one canceling the other out. – Rappler.com