Tag: Zsarlene B. Chua

FAIR-SKINNED, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, Ai-Da speaks with an English accent. She wears a white long-sleeved blouse and black trousers. Since April, she has been studying her subjects and sketching them using her bionic arm in a company in Cornwall, England.

FASHION Arts Business Creatives (F.A.B. Creatives), a school set up by some of the most prominent Filipino designers, will soon be offering an intensive one-year program with courses ranging from sewing and design to merchandising and entrepreneurship. And for those who can’t afford the fees but have the talent, the school has also opened several slots for scholarship students.

KUALA LUMPUR-based video-on-demand (VOD) service, iflix, has announced its partnership with Philippine media and entertainment company, Viva Communications Inc., which includes “a substantial” investment in the streaming service and plans to launch several films and series within the next three years, according to an iflix executive.

ABS-CBN’s music portal, One Music, is set to organize a musical event which “aims to raise awareness on climate change” on July 27 at the La Mesa Ecopark in Quezon City. The concert will feature singers Maris Racal, Sam Mangubat, and AC Bonifacio.

CORREGIDOR, an island that is synonymous with the valor of Filipino and American soldiers during World War II, will soon get a much-needed facelift.

THE Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino — Filipino Film Festival — is back for its third run, this time with 10 full-length feature films which will be shown on Sept. 13 to 19 in cinemas nationwide, coinciding with the celebration of the first 100 years of Philippine cinema.

THE concert of English musician and actor, Sting (Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner), scheduled on Oct. 2 at the Smart Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City, has been canceled according to the concert’s local organizers.

SUREFIRE crowd-pullers once again dominate the first four film entries for this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF), which is set to run from Dec. 25 to Jan. 7 in cinemas nationwide.

THE satirical comedy, Ang Babae sa Septic Tank, is back for a third installment. This time the cult favorite tackles the issue of historical revisionism, with comic Eugene Domingo playing herself as a director and main actress in a Josephine Bracken biopic.

BUSINESS reality TV show The Final Pitch is back for a fourth season featuring judges from previous seasons once again looking for the best Philippine startups from aspiring entrepreneurs.

BACKED BY two years of research into the Philippines’ ongoing drug war led by President Rodrigo R. Duterte, Kolateral is a 12-track rap album that includes the numbers, the stories, and the effects of the war on drugs.

AS NETFLIX starts streaming the third season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, which premiered on July 4, a special pop-up gives fans a taste of the Upside Down.

MULTI-AWARDED English musician Gordon Thomas Matthew Sumner, better known by the mononym, Sting, is coming to Manila to perform in a concert on Oct. 2 at the Smart Araneta Coliseum in Cubao, Quezon City. This is part of his ongoing international tour, My Songs.

CEBU PACIFIC’s backpacking trip contest, Juan for Fun, is back for its eighth year, aiming to “enable today’s generation of passionate travelers to pursue their interests through traveling,” according to a press release.

AFTER months of consultations with industry stakeholders and the general public, the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP) has released a memorandum circular which will move the opening days for local and foreign films from Wednesday to Friday and ensures a minimum seven-day run for every film booked in theaters starting July.

SOUTH KOREAN actor Park Bo Gum concluded his multi-country fan meet tour which started in Seoul and ended in Manila on June 22 at the Mall of Asia Arena (MOA) in Pasay City.

NOW ON its 22^nd year, the Eiga Sai Japanese Film Festival presents a selection of 17 full-length features from a variety of genres to “show not only one side of Japanese culture,” said an organizer.

FILIPINO-DESIGNED noise-cancelling headphones PH3 is now available in select Power Mac Centers (PMC), promising a “sleek and lightweight pair of headphones that mute unwanted outside sound...[and] delivers high audio quality,” according to a press release.

AFTER a major makeover last year, one of the first shopping malls along EDSA — Robinsons Place Galleria — is this year highlighting its many restaurants as it positions itself as one of the city’s foodie destinations.

SINGAPOREAN digital accessories brand Uniq has entered the Philippine market it aims to bring its products known for their “minimalist mobility” and “smart simplicity” to the country’s digitally-connected populace.

AFTER a successful initial run in Indonesia last year, Asian video-on-demand service HOOQ has extended its “freemium” tier to the Philippines, promising over 1,000 pieces of content that can be viewed for free.

SAN FRANCISCO-BASED e-cigarette company, Juul Labs Inc. partnered with the subsidiary of JG Summit Holdings, Inc. to enter the Philippine market, as part of its plans to expand operations in the Asia-Pacific region.

ALV Films’ second film for the year, Because I Love You, is a Cinderella story about a feisty, street-smart firefighter who falls in love with a wealthy heir. It opens in cinemas nationwide on June 26.

THE 2019 AsiaPop Comicon Manila (APCC) which was scheduled for Aug. 2 to 4 at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City has been cancelled due to scheduling conflicts, a statement from the company said.

FOR THE 9^th installment of its ongoing Of Art and Wine series, the Conrad Manila features the works of Filipino-Chinese artist Elizabeth Anne “Lizanne” Uychaco, who is known for combining modern art and the art of feng shui. It is ongoing until Aug. 11 at the hotel’s Gallery C.

DEEPAK CHANDRAN was an IT engineer based in Singapore when boredom hit him so hard he decided to become a stand-up comedian. Now, together with Indian comedian Sorabh Pant and Australian comedian and actor Imaan Hadchiti, the three are coming to Manila for a one-night, two-hour comedy special on June 22 at the Tent in Enderun Colleges in Taguig City.

SINGAPORE-BASED beauty distribution company, Luxasia Pte. Ltd., has named the Philippines as a potential “growth pillar in the Asia Pacific region in terms of global beauty sales,” according to the company’s chief executive as the company unveils regional expansion plans and introduces more brands to its Philippine portfolio.

AMERICAN direct-selling company Amway has brought to the Philippines the second collection off of its Artistry Studio line which takes its name and design cues from Paris. It features three eyeshadow palettes, cheek and lip duos, liquid lip colors, brow shapers, and a setting spray.

OLDER PEOPLE trying fit in with millennials and eventually finding love with each other is the crux of the story of Rechie del Carmen’s comedy Feelennial which opens on June 19 in cinemas nationwide.

BACK for its landmark 25^th year, Fete de la Musique, once again brings together “the best of the best in the local music scene,” with more than 50 pocket stages and nine main stages scattered across eight cities in the country.

MORE THAN 10 years have passed since Filipino pop-rock group, Orange & Lemons disbanded acrimoniously, but now that most of the members have resolved their differences, the band has reformed and is releasing its first single in more than a decade.

CRIME procedurals have always been a popular TV series genre and with the multitude of such series airing, the main challenge is how to offer something different — and that is what The Inbetween is trying to do as the show combines a crime procedural with the paranormal.

TWENTY years ago, Vicente “Nonoy” S. Quimbo, decided that it was time Filipinos had a wine of their own and he came up with Novellino, a brand of wines created especially for the Filipino palate.

ROBINSONS Hotels and Resorts (RHR) has formally opened the fifth hotel under its full-service Summit Hotels umbrella — the 138-room Summit Hotels Tacloban which serves as the company’s vote of confidence in the provincial capital’s potential for growth especially in the tourism sector.

JUST 45-minutes away from Summit Tacloban sits an Italian restaurant atop a hill with a gorgeous view of the San Juanico Bridge.

ALPHABET Inc.’s Google has announced new privacy measures in a bid to make “privacy work for everyone,” which includes limiting third-party developers’ access to user data on the Google Chrome Store and Google Drive.

WHEN YouTube was started 14 years ago, it was originally intended to be a website where people could shoot, post, and share their videos, and while the original purpose remains, the video-sharing website has become so much more — it is now a platform on which people can build careers.

AFTER clocking in another double-digit growth year in 2018, Epson Philippines Corp. (EPC) remains bullish on its prospects as the company focuses on growing their business-to-business (B2B) segment, according to a company executive.

GLOBAL music streaming service Spotify has rolled out a playlist of local and foreign acts whose music was “discovered” for the first time by Filipinos aged 18-24 in order to encourage more users to listen and be hooked to the music of the new artists.

THE Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) is seeking to ban rapper Shanti Dope’s (real name: Sean Patrick Ramos) song “Amatz” from the airwaves, saying that its lyrics which allegedly promote marijuana use run contrary to the government’s ongoing drug war.

HBO’s Game of Thrones may have finally ended its run after a decade but fans of the show who haven’t yet caught up on the series’ final episodes or those who want to relive it all again by downloading episodes illegally were treated to malware attacks instead of the actual episode, according to a study by Moscow-based cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab.

A LESSER-KNOWN historical event that took place during the administration of President Manuel L. Quezon is the topic of the film Quezon’s Game. Directed by Matthew E. Rosen and produced by ABS-CBN’s Star Cinema, it will be released nationwide on May 29.

ABS-CBN’s afternoon drama Kadenang Ginto, about the conflicts within the affluent Mondragon family, continues to amass a loyal following. The network announced that its daily highlights videos uploaded on the network’s YouTube channel has exceeded 800 million total views while its page on the network’s streaming service records more than 1.5 million views daily.

BECAUSE of the sweltering heat over the past few months, I, who typically include seven to 10 steps in my daily skincare routine, made it my mission to create a simpler routine that is lightweight, that could withstand the heat and yet give me everything my skin needs.

FOR MANY the 1980s were a decade when people could be themselves, from fashion to culture to music — especially the music. As singer Jett Pangan of rock band The Dawn described, the sounds of the decade had “a nice diversity” and “innocence.”