Destination Unknown

Ever since Meteor Garden,
Chinese, Korean, and now Japanese sitcoms are seeing widespread popularity
among the Filipino masses. In fact, you can pretty much ask anyone on the fly
if they have seen at least one entire Chinese/Korean sitcom (Or Chinovela, the
newly coined moniker for Chinese sitcoms). Chances are, they’d smile and nod.

Currently, Le Robe, a Taiwan
sitcom, airs during weekdays 6:00-6:30 PM. Since most of the time I’m inside
buses with television during these half-hours, I pretty much catch up with most
of the latest episode of Le Robe…

…much to my chagrin!

You see, I don’t have
problems with Taiwan sitcoms seeing widespread popularity. It actually gives
the country where I am citizen some publicity, regardless of whether it’s good
or bad. What comes with that are endless conversations initiated by the
inquisitives regarding what our country’s people are like and whether the
culture the Chinovela is promoting is accurate or not. Honestly, I’m not the
right person to ask, because I’m as unconventional as they come, but this I can
tell you: I’d be severely disappointed if everyone in Taiwan is less than twice
as smart as Francine, one Le Robe’s protagonists.

Please take my opinion of
this sitcom with a grain of salt, because I don’t care what the hell the
company scandals prevalent in the plot is all about. I don’t follow what the
manipulative antagonist’s ulterior motives really are. I don’t know how
important those shady characters involvement to the plot are. If anything, I only
know that Le Robe’s protagonists are a lot of embarrassment to watch!

Let’s start with Katrina.
This girl is actually one of the most watch-able, not merely because she’s
beautiful (though that helps), but because she’s the least idiotic of all the casts.
The opening credits introduce Katrina as one fashion model but honestly, I
don’t understand why then she goes through all the trouble of getting involved
with people from Chinese mafia (ugh! This name reminds me of the band of people
from my most hated college classmate). Not that I actually care. Heh! In fact,
Katrina is as lacking in personality as they come that I’m quite positive the
hurricane of the same name actually had more spunk and a more compelling
character. It doesn’t help too that Katrina is naïve, which adds dumb points to
the ensemble of dumb characters joining Le Robe. Her acting is terrible too,
but so is everyone’s.

Next, we have Harold. He’s
the “bad boy” among the protagonists, though the only reason why I’m convinced
of that is due to the leather jacket getup. Lame, because I get the sneaking
suspicion that that only serves as an obnoxious attempt at adding to his “cool”
factor. He’s not. He’s kewl. Cool? Pishtosh! In fact, Harold is one among the
long line of bad-boys-with-good-heart archetypes used nth times in sitcoms,
mangas and even movies since, well, probably the inception Chinese movies. Not
only that, but he has the tendency to act like a jerk when his
love/crush/girl-of-mutual-understanding/buddy/date-mate/who-knows-what-else is
around. Characters such as these have the following modus operandi: Act like a
jerk until a girl falls in love with you. Idiot girls, that is. Possibly
daughters of George W. Bush. Sorry, couldn’t resist. The cold hard fact is,
strip away the good looks of people like Harold, and they’d be an outcast and a
total loser, not that they aren’t already the latter.

Aaron is the intelligent
rich guy with also a small touch of stupidity since he also fell for an idiot.
(See where this sitcom is leading to?) I watch, or more like, try to not watch
but end up hearing anyway, the Tagalog dub of this show (let’s get back to that
later) Aaron is actually one of the most embarrassing characters to ever grace
Le Robe, though I’d imagine there are a lot more worse characters in other
Chinovelas. Yeah, he’s kindhearted. He’s a “man-of-honor”. He also has no
personality, save spewing out a few pseudo-romantic poetries/monologues, employed by what I call the thought-bubble narration techniques, delivered in lame English, no less, every so
often! What did I do wrong? Why do I fall in love? Why am I forced to endure
this sitcom?

Lastly, there’s Francine.
Take note (okay, forget about that), there are a lot more characters in the show, but the four I
introduced here are the ones whose name appear on the opening credits. They’re
also the characters whose name I actually struggled to remember. The rest of
the cast just flew over my mind. Frankly, Francine is the character that’s
least worth knowing, not the least because you’d be seeing her all the time
being that she’s the gist of the story, but also because Francine is high in
the list of girls I don’t want to have as a girlfriend. Honestly, she’s only a
little more intelligent than Bush, like maybe she sports an IQ of 40? But,
well, we’ve seen great movies about dumb people with good intentions. Francine
does not have one. In fact, I doubt she’s got any intentions at all other than
to stall at the TiVo doing dumber things every minute. She’s not even pretty.
All she does is break Aaron’s heart, therefore giving Aaron more reason to spew
out “poetics”. Francine is the evolution of multiple species: she’s got the
brain of a log, the attitude of a bitch, the fickleness of the weather, the
fastidiousness of a cat, and the maturity of a monkey. Charles Darwin please
take note: not all people are predominantly simian. Some are donkeys.

Sure, there are ways to
enjoy youth. One only truly becomes old in stopping to learn and excluding fun in one’s existence. It
is prolonging the joys of youth to go out skiing. It is kindergarten
retardation to throw dolls with Harold in a trip to the department store. It is
excruciating stupidity to take a baseball bat and trying to hit Harold’s friends
thinking this is some sort of “entertainment”. Francine is dumb, dumb, and
dumb.

I really can’t bear watching
Le Robe. In fact, I find it so liberating when I take the bus not telecasting
this stupid “entertainment”. Loath as I may to admit it, I’d rather endure Love
Radio than Le Robe. At least you only expose your ears to retardation. Le Robe
harms both the eyes and the ears of idiocy. In fact, I actually watch Le Robe
with my ears. The scenes are too ridiculous, preposterous, that I blush in
embarrassment whenever any of these four characters do something stupid, which
is pretty much all the time.

To add fuel to the fire, the cinematography is lame too. I’m amazed at how popular freezing the time while moving
the camera to different perspectives has become since The Matrix. Is there ever
a palpable reason to use slow-motion, multiple angle view and time-freezing, complete with accelerating-car sound effect (VROOM!), in
love stories? No. But Le Robe is too stupid to understand that. Note to directors: Where’s the
creativity?!?!?!

I don’t have anything
against love stories. In fact, I loved 50 First Dates because despite mental
incapacities of certain characters of the movie, they don’t act immature,
embarrassing, and gosh, they actually resonate with my heart, something LOVE
STORIES MUST DO! Le Robe doesn’t. It vaults across the borderline of how much
immaturity I can tolerate. What makes it even sadder is: this is a Taiwan
sitcom. I sure don’t hope this is the kind of culture we’re promoting, but
there’s a disturbing trend that a lot of Chinese girls have started to act like
donkeys (not dissimilar to Francine). If this is any indication of what to
expect from other Chinese sitcoms, COUNT ME OUT, I’d rather spend my time doing
something far more productive, like making paperclip chains, licking envelopes,
or collecting mouse pads.

One last thing worthy to
cavil (though I’m not sure if I’m just pointing out petty flaws): What’s with
the Tagalog dub? I’ve actually caught episode of the actual Chinese dub while
channel surfing one weekend. The character’s name doesn’t even come close to
their English name. What’s this supposed to be: westernizing the Asian casts?
But there’s more: what’s up with making bilingual Chinese sitcoms such as the
posh/rich characters have to speak in English? And what’s up with inserting a
by-the-numbers love ballad sung by a (frustrated) Starstruck teen idol in the
opening credits?

Update: I just confirmed that the actress playing Francine is Jolin Tsai. Now that just appends to the reason why I hate this show. I absolutely dislike Jolin Tsai’s music and thought her acting are horrible. I truly think what Taiwan need is a salvation to the music industry oversaturated with ballads containing no ethnic Asian flavor whatsoever!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 23rd, 2006 at 3:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.