Ron Does Stuff

I spent the day out today! Which makes it sound like it’s a rare occurrence but it unfortunately is. I do go out of the house but it’s mostly to run errands and I don’t usually hang out with friends.

Today, I went with some A’TIN friends to watch the SB19 documentary, Pagtatag! We had a who debrief session afterwards but that’s not part of the blog!

Right off the bat, I wanna say that I wouldn’t consider myself an A’TIN. I’m more of a casual listener and a casual fan, but I don’t buy the merch or the concerts. I did get to interview Pablo once for work and lemme tell you guys he’s so attentive in person. BUT ANYWAY, all of this to say that I think I wasn’t as susceptible to tugs on my tear ducts because I’m just not as involved in the fandom in that way.

The documentary covers the time from the start of the Pagtatag! tour up until its finale — along with the legal troubles they ran into along the way. It started out pretty well for me as they showed them preparing for concerts all over the country and gearing up for the US and Canada tour.

However, as the documentary progressed, I started to feel like it didn’t know what story it wanted to tell. And ironically, that came about because they wanted to show as much as they could without showing too much, if that makes sense.

At one point it seems like the documentary wants to tackle the physical toll that an international tour takes on the body, which is a valid storyline to cover. It’s clear that the tour does take a toll on the boys, Stell makes numerous references to taking Lola Remedios just so he can push through the tour.

There’s also the emotional toll that the tour takes on them, especially on Pablo who despite being in the industry for years now, still finds it difficult to perform in front of a crowd. One scene in particular, where he flubs a performance in one of the venues in America, is particularly gutting to see and would have made me cry except the documentary just pushes past it.

And then we get to the legal kerfuffle they got into with their former management, something that the fans figured out on their own even with SB19 and their new company trying to be mum about it. I think it’s where we hear the boys voices the most and is also one storyline that could have been the through-line for the documentary, but it wasn’t given as much time as I would like. They don’t even share how it was ultimately settled, although I guess there are legal issues involved that stopped them from doing so.

That isn’t to say that the documentary is bad! As a casual listener, I really felt like I got to know them better and got to take a peek at their lives beyond what everybody else sees. It’s just that they’ve tried to show as much as they can that what could have been emotional moments or story beats to tug at even casual fans’ hearts fall a little flat because they’re not given enough time to breathe since we have to move on to the next thing.

All in all, I didn’t regret watching this in the cinemas and even found myself laughing at some of Stell’s quips. There were even some points in the documentary that I was close to crying. It’s just that it’s a good documentary that had the opportunity to be great but it didn’t take it.