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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Top Gun: Maverick 2022
Part of the fantasy presented here is war that is uncomplicated, with a nameless, faceless enemy that very clearly means to do the entire world harm. There is no worry about civilians getting caught up in the conflict, or the psychological damage accrued by those who take part in the war. Instead, we just have the best and most skilled of heroes, having to go above and beyond in order to protect all of us from this general sense of…
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Aragami 2003
It's got some of that signature Kitamura flair once the swords are drawn. But mainly, it's too guys sitting across from each other in a temple, reiterating the premise of the movie over and over again. The movie is limited by design, of course, as it works within the restraints of the Duel challenge. But as 2LDK shows, you don't really have to be stuck within the fairly cliche paradigm of a fighter looking for someone who can beat him.…
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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.
