You changed my life.

Another one of those Tagalog movies, with a song title as its title that's remotely connected to the story. So what else is new? But I still went to see it anyway. We were supposed to be doing videoke, but then as the boring Friday at the office went on the consensus, somehow, shifted. And 13 of us from the office ended up watching "You Changed My Life". And I'm the only one in the group who hadn't seen the first one ("A Very Special Love"). These songs are forgettable in themselves and sadly so are the movies that were forced upon them to represent by the Pinoy movie industry.

I've read somewhere that the first movie was the top-grossing Pinoy film of 2008, and some say this could be the top-grosser for 2009. Contrast that to the 2008 top-grossers of Hollywood: "The Dark Knight", "Iron Man", "Indiana Jones 4", "Hancock", and "WALL-E". Okay, so maybe the local movie industry can't and shouldn't be compared to Hollywood. That would be comparing a third world country to a developed or highly-industrialized one. But how about those Hollywood romantic comedies that don't require state of the art special effects, stories like "You've Got Mail", "My Best Friend's Wedding", or "Definitely, Maybe"? Or the Korean stories like "Il Mare" or "The Classic"? Take note, I said "stories" instead of "movies". The local industry can't come up with movies like those due to budget constraints. But good stories are independent of budget. Surely these writers watched those American and Korean hits. They're popular here after all. But why do they time after time come up with movies with titles of forgettable songs as movie titles packed with equally forgettable stories?

Anyhow, the experience itself was fun. There were 13 of us. And we laughed at several corny lines and scenes, complained about the crappy audio track of the movie, notice a drastic change in the color grade between the first and the second half of the movie, and laughed and frowned at the awkwardness and deceit of the very last scene of this John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo vehicle.