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-
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 2023
I feel like there are colors in here that I've never seen before. That somehow, the filmmakers found a whole new spectrum to play with in order to fully do justice of their vision of this multiverse. Perhaps they, too, blew up a super collider to gain access to a whole new realm of color and movement, to give a film that makes every single frame a unique visual treat.
Fundamentally, we are still telling a story about what it…
-
The Torture Club 2014
I think this comes close to being pretty good, but always seems to find some way to back out into less interesting territory. The premise is terrific: a very exclusive high school for girls hides questions in their entrance exam that would show if one is fit to join the Torture Club, which is apparently a very old organization that trains girls to enter the world of espionage by training them to torture and withstand torture.
It is apparently based…
Popular reviews
More-
-
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…
