Heneral Luna

Many of us, by now, must have seen the sleeper hit of the year, Heneral Luna. You know those Filipino movies that they hype on Facebook and then when you bring yourself to the cinema to watch them, you regret being taken by  all the online buzz? Well, Heneral Luna is  not one of them. So if you haven't had the chance to catch it, I recommend you take the time.

It is surprising, but not altogether unwelcome, that the popularity of the movie has turned just about everyone into amateur historians. Because our respectful and understandably deferential school education has turned all our heroes into staid historical caricatures, it was refreshing to see something like Heneral Luna on the big screen transform the national heroes we see on those postcards from National Bookstore  into regular men faced with the extraordinarily hard task of securing the independence of the first republic in Asia in between the machinations of bigger powers Spain and the United States. And it is compelling to watch.