Professional film critic, amateur semiotician, chronicler of Filipino Cinema.
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllPinned reviews
More-
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…
-
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…
Recent reviews
More-
Penance 2013
Functionally, this works as an anthology series that just happens to have common elements between the stories. The first four episodes look into the very different adult lives of the four witnesses to a brutal crime, each one of them having a pretty different reaction to the trauma. The fifth episode goes back to the crime, following the victim's mother as she follows a lead and discovers a connection to her past.
The thing is, I ended not caring much…
-
Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2022
Basically functions as an unannounced sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which is kind of cool. Doesn't quite have the hardscrabble gumshoe feel, but it keeps the general tenor of the setting: a world where toons co-exist with humans. It doesn't feel like the achievement that Roger Rabbit does, but it's all reasonably clever, updating the world to look into the foibles of modern celebrity.
So it's not bad, but that's about as much enthusiasm as I can muster up…
Popular reviews
More-
-
Burrow 2020
Yeah, this is really cute. But also: it latches on to something profoundly human. This is a little cartoon about feeling inadequate, about the anxiety one feels when first striking out on one's own. And it's about how it's usually okay to ask for help. It can be difficult to ask for help sometimes, because that means showing people that you don't know how to do something. But hey, that's okay: we're all just fumbling around in one way or another.
Just lovely all around.
