Professional film critic, amateur semiotician, chronicler of Filipino Cinema.
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Happy Hour 2015
Spend enough time with people, and you think you know them. This is one of the greatest follies of being human: the arrogance of believing that by observing another person, one can fully understand the entirety of their existence. We make assumptions based on observable routine: she likes her coffee this way, he walks with this gait, they talk in some manner. And from those bits and pieces of visible behavior, from the scraps of half-remembered conversation, we form some…
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Cleaners 2019
It's worth talking about the process: Glenn Barit and his team shot an entire movie. Then, they took eight frames out of every second and printed them out. Then they photocopied those printouts in black and white. And they took highlighters and physically colored in certain sections of every frame. And then they scanned those images and assembled them back into a movie.
What we get feels like a memory. It is easy enough to dismiss it in the abstract…
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What Happens Later 2023
David Duchovny's looking a lot like Walter Mathau lately. Sadly, his performance style is still as disaffected as ever. There's precious little chemistry between him and Meg Ryan, who in this movie plays a hippy-dippy older woman, prone to new age-y beliefs. She gives it a lot, though it doesn't quite feel right for her either. I missed the strange hard edge that gave her romcom characters an ability to cut down their leading men.
This ends up being pretty…
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Silent Night 2023
The action is unimpeachable, but the rest of it is a problem at best. We can start with the main conceit, with the film foregoing dialogue. The story they tell, however, isn't really the best kind of narrative for the gimmick. There's so much that needs to be said, and the film ends up using text messages and notes and letters to get that through anyway. It just all feels needlessly complicated, when the characters could just be talking sparsely…
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Minions: The Rise of Gru 2022
I do not know how to review this movie. I do not know if I should write about it at all. I can tell you that I saw it, and it defies whatever conventions one might have about what is good and what is bad. There is only Minions, and they are yellow, indestructible and they kind of speak Spanish. At one point in this movie, they are taught kung fu by a character voiced by Michelle Yeoh. At another…
