Jen and Sam apart–and together

MILBY AND MERCADO. Team up for the first time in “The Prenup.”

JENNYLYN Mercado has been a star for a full decade now, but she’s busier than ever, with a full schedule of TV and film commitments. On TV, she has a daily cooking show, a teleserye (“My Faithful Husband”), and mentors and evaluates this season’s “StarStruck” hopefuls.

That’s like coming full circle for her, because her stellar career was launched when she was voted the female winner of the talent search 10 years ago!

On top of that already demanding schedule, Jennylyn has also been shooting a film, “The Prenup,” with Sam Milby, opening soonest. The rom-com flick comes hot on the heels of her big hit, “English Only, Please,” in which she costarred with Derek Ramsay.

Jun Lana’s film should also do well at the box office, because it’s similar in tone and format to “English Only,” in some strikingly significant ways. For one thing, both Milby and Ramsay play Fil-Am characters who get under Jen’s romantic skin—in different ways.

This is the first time that Jen is acting with Sam—but, upon closer recall, their separate careers turn out to be significantly “conjoined” in various aspects: Like Jen, Sam was discovered in 2005 on another TV talent search, “Pinoy Big Brother.”

He became a Star Cinema and ABS-CBN star right after that, and did really well for some years—until his difficulty with speaking Filipino drastically restricted the roles he could believably play.

He tried to really learn the language well, but it’s remained a problem to this day—which is why, a couple of years ago, he tried to make it in Hollywood—with still iffy results.

We hope that “The Prenup” will turn out to be a popular film, so both Sam and Jen’s now decade-long careers will agreeably and excitingly peak.

Above all, we trust that Sam will finally solve his speech and language problem convincingly enough for him to get tapped to play non-Fil-Am characters—which is what he should have worked hard to qualify for in the first place.

Even slimmer pickings

Our “slim pickings” reaction to this season’s “StarStruck” hopefuls struck some readers as being too harsh, so we caught other telecasts of the tilt, to see if we should adjust our perspective.

Unfortunately, we weren’t encouraged to raise our expectations. In fact, we were even more disappointed to learn that, instead of just announcing its 14 finalists, as promised, the tilt announced a “Dream” batch of 14, and a “Believe” group of another 14—a “temporary” total of 28 survivors!

That hedging decision came out of left field, so we wondered what other viewers thought of that.

In any case, we kept watching the show when it made its female survivors pair up and act in the same dramatic scene, to see how they stood up against the similarly eager-beaver competition.

Alas, only four of the girls we watched acting their hearts out did well—not a very encouraging percentage.

Later, it was the boys’ turn to show off their acting chops—and the results were even less impressive. Quite a number of the male survivors couldn’t even speak Tagalog well, with foreign or Visayan accents getting in the way of an acceptable delivery.

The flaw is so basic that we wonder how some of the boys got as far as they did in the tilt’s winnowing process.

It’s not true, as some of them lamely observed, that the speech problem can be readily addressed—it takes months if not years to completely straighten out diction and enunciation limitations!

If the verbally challenged actors insists on launching their performing careers now, they could end up like many other “imports” whose careers ultimately can’t fly  really high because their key impediment keeps pulling them down and limiting them to “Balikbayan” roles.

Up next

What’s up next for the two teams of survivors? Big cuts into their number will be made soonest, so the original promise to come up with only 14 finalists shall have been (belatedly) kept—well, more or less!

Having seen all of the surviving contenders in thespic action, we think that the 14 “final survivors” will generally still be lacking in exceptional talent and stellar charisma.

Yes, some of them have really good looks, but the local show biz scene is crawling with youths who possess to-die-for beauty—so, what else is really new?

To discover the real stars of tomorrow, TV tilts should generally start with great looks as a given, but go way beyond them and look for  standout talents who also have the unique charisma or appeal that makes fans “fall in love” with them.

Less than that won’t do, and will only add to the glut or “hanggang-starlet-lang” hopefuls who already congest, glut and gorge the local show biz scene!