Here is where I rant about Pansamantagal and Papa Pogi.

Pansamantagal may actually be Joven Tan's most polished film, given that it actually goes in some sort of clear narrative direction - the same can't be said of his three previous films. This is Tan's version of a mumblecore romance, albeit one made with the budget of 300 pesos and an expired pack of Lucky Me Supreme and the elegance and sophistication of a nine year old's dirty joke; That Thing Called Tadhana with a bunch of dick jokes.

In this film, Gelli de Belen is Agness, a mistress who very clearly wants the D, and that's an upper case D for a reason. She befriends Lorena (DJ Chacha), the proprietor of the resort she's staying in, who is also obsessed with the D, and whose dialogue mostly consists of 1) asking Agnes if she's had sex yet or 2) asking Agnes if they'd had sex yet. The dialogue is supposed to reflect openness and candor, but it ends up being crass instead.

There's also a romance (??) book that clearly references Agnes (and her obsession with large sausages), whose author is the only saving grace for a couple of elderly publishers. Spoiler alert: nothing really happens to this subplot, so it's okay to not care. Agnes also bonds with Leo (Bayani Agbayani) who enjoys ripping up said book in the cliff overlooking the ocean for some mysterious reason. I hope those pages are biodegradable.

There seems to be some sort of (awkward, but it's there) relationship forming between Agnes and Leo, but the film veers straight into a wall (or a house, or a waiting shed) and crashes and burns in its last few minutes. Too bad, since there's just a little bit of earned sentiment near the end, in that the written word may disappear and things may pass, but memories tend to stick somehow - and for a Joven Tan film, that's actually kind of a clever idea.

Romeo (Teddy Corpuz) looks like the product of drunken sex between a horse and a cro-magnon, and there's actually a reason for that: his family was cursed long ago to only give birth to ugly as fuck male kids, as long as they hook up with beautiful women. To try to break this curse, Romeo tries to hook up with less than attractive Venus (Donna Cariaga), and surprise surprise, he actually falls in love with the girl. Unfortunately, she suddenly disappears from his life. But Haruki Murakami this ain't, and Romeo finds a new potential partner in Helena (Myrtle Sarrosa), who hides a mysterious secret. Yeah, I can hear you from a mile away, it's exactly as it looks like.

Papa Pogi purports to play on the notion that personality is better than outward appearances, but its exploration of that notion is only skin deep. If Romeo isn't really concerned with appearances, why try to break the curse in the first place? The women in this story are treated more or less like prizes to be won, objects, or minor annoyances instead of flesh and blood people. Even Venus, the most developed of the female characters in this story, has her life revolve around Romeo? Maybe live independently for a change, girl.

I concede that the movie can be occasionally funny, but I'm not sure if it coheres into a movie I'd spend 250 pesos on. Well, I did for the purposes of this review, but I don't think I'll be doing that again for this film for the rest of eternity.

Dispatches from HK + HKIFF 2019: Pad Man, We Are Legends, Masquerade Hotel, The Load, Manta Ray

The life of Indian inventor and entrepreneur Arunachalam Muruganantham has been covered in films before, from fictional films like 2017's Phullu to documentaries such as Menstrual Man (2013) and the Oscar-winning short Period. End of Sentence. (2018). This latest fictional account of Muruganatham's life, Pad Man, is a crowd pleasing entertainer that captures the philosophy of the real Pad Man's work, as well as extending the conversation about how menstruation is perceived in countries like India.

In this version of the tale, Lakshmikant (Akshay Kumar) works as a mechanic and all around metal worker in his small village. When he learns of his wife's menstrual period (and how she is forced to stay at home because of this) he decides to take action. This will prove to be more of a challenge. India is almost overwhelmingly patriarchal, and menstruation is either taboo or simply not talked about. This is not a new thing in the history of man, and India is no exception.

Because the culture is so ingrained in them, even the women that Lakshmi tries to help are locked into this mentality that they are at fault for their woman-ness. Lakshmi tries again and again to make people understand that this isn't right, and slowly but surely tries to understand why these women think this way (even going as far as to experience for himself what menstruation feel like.) But the true epiphany is when Lakshmi realizes he is part of the problem: it's only when a woman shares the message, and when Lakshmi helps women help and empower themselves that he achieves success.

The film also works as a fun crash course in grassroots R&D and marketing, showing a product from conception to prototyping to mass production. Either way, Pad Man is a fun watch.

Daniel Chan's We Are Legends is nicely shot, giving us some great MMA action scenes. That said, it's far too silly for its own good, and the rest of the film doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Very loosely based on a true story, the film  focuses on two orphaned brothers, Jack (Edward Ma) and Bunny (Lam Yiu-sing). Jack is a straight up successful MMA fighter, training in the dojo headed by their foster father. But Jack lacks discipline and is overall a major asshole, and it gets in the way of his fights. Bunny, on the other hand, is more of a brawler, electing to participate in underground fights rather than fight MMA. When Jack finally eats humble pie thanks to fellow MMA pro Jason (Jason Li), it's time for Bunny to enter the spotlight.

Filled with veteran martial arts actors and martial artists, the film should've been at least fun, but ultimately little of it works. It's hard to relate to Jack's character (a better film probably would've followed Bunny or even Jason instead) and by the time Jack gets better, the film is 10 minutes away from ending. Tonally the film is all over the place, being comedic when it shouldn't be, and being serious when things get a little silly.

In fact, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to describe a film as a dojo full of assholes challenging a decent, reputable martial arts outfit. And when, in a martial arts film of all things, you find yourself rooting for the enemy, you know something's gone wrong somewhere.

From the director that brought us GTO and Hero, Masquerade Hotel feels like a J-drama compressed into the space of two hours, featuring episodic plotlines in addition to its central mystery. In this (star studded) adaptation of Keigo Higashino's novel, Takuya Kimura plays Nitta, a gruff detective tasked with figuring out a series of serial murders. When the location of the next murder is found out to be a local hotel, the police department gets on the case and posts people undercover. Nitta is paired up with Yamagishi (Masami Nagasawa,) one of the hotel's best employees. Through undercover work, Nitta not only investigates the case, but also discovers he's actually not that bad as a hotelier either.

The central mystery isn't that complicated; the film throws out enough clues that it isn't hard to figure out who the culprit is. However, the journey that takes us there is still quite enjoyable. Nagasawa and Kimura have great chemistry, and the variety of mini-cases that make up most of the movie are all interesting.

That said, perhaps it would have been better to make the movie a series, just so that we'd have more time to get to know the characters. What we eventually get isn't so bad, though.

One of the most striking features of Ognjen Glavonic's The Load is how drab it is. Though touted as a thriller, nothing in the film is remotely tense. Even though it shares the same thematic roots as Glavonic's own Depth Two (2016), it explores a different dimension of the Kosovo war. But this drabness reflects something even more profound about the capacity of everyday people for unspeakable evil, and ultimately how mundane it turns out to be.

This road movie follows Vlada, a truck driver tasked with driving mysterious cargo across Serbia to the capital, Belgrade. It's unclear what the cargo contains, or if Vlada really knows what's inside the truck. The film takes us through the Serbian countryside during the height of NATO's bombing runs on the country. Amongst relative peace and calm, there are hints of the destruction in the background: a flaming automobile or two, or maybe shades of artillery in the distance.

When we do learn of the contents of the cargo, things gain a bit more resonance. And an anecdote near the end about a missing lighter becomes a meditation on how people, realizing the evil they've done because of their knowledge of war, decide to pass something else to the next generation instead - a tape signifying the determination to live on instead of a remembrance of death.

We end this year's slew of dispatches with Manta Ray, the  full length directorial debut of cinematographer Phuttiphong Aroonpheng. It begins with a dedication to the Rohingya Muslims, but it is an ode to all refugees. It tells the story of an unnamed fisherman (Wanlop Rungkamjad), who discovers a mute fisherman (Aphisit Hama) in mangroves near his home. The fisherman takes care of his new charge, but it becomes clear that he is somehow complicit in what happened to his new friend, and his actions constitute guilt over what he's done.

Their relationship evolves over the course of the film; the fisherman names his mute friend Thongchai after the popular Thai singer Thongchai McIntyre, based on one of Thongchai's earliest and most popular songs, Hard-Sai Sai-Lom Song-Rao, (Beach, Wind and the Two of Us). He might be the perfect representation of their relationship, as Thongchai is popular in both Thailand and Myanmar, signifying the best of both worlds.

Their relationship becomes something more intimate, yet not overtly so. Their identity seems to blend together at times, especially near the end of the film. But perhaps the real tragedy of the film is at the end, when Thongchai, untethered from the house that gave him back his life, becomes a refugee once more, his cultural identity melding and fading due to constant displacement, adrift in the darkness of the sea.

Dispatches from HK + HKIFF 2019: On the Basis of Sex, The Red Phallus, My Masterpiece

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a national treasure, one of the most important figures in contemporary women's rights. In true Oscar Bait Biopic (tm) fashion, On the Basis of Sex examines how Ginsburg and her husband helped make the landmark case declaring gender-based discrimination unconstitutional.

The film is relatively lighthearted, and it hits all the familiar beats we're used to with these types of biopics, though we really don't get to see a complete picture of the woman behind it all. Despite a great performance from Felicity Jones, Ruth Ginsburg the character feels hard to connect to as a flesh and blood character. The documentary RBG is probably a better choice instead.

While we get perspectives about how western women face discrimination and sexism all the tim, we rarely get glimpses from other places. Bhutan's The Red Phallus is such a film, portraying the struggles of one girl, Sangay as she navigates her suffocatingly patriarchal society.

The symbolism is more than overt; the village Sangay lives in is literally packed with phalluses, as their culture engages in a sort of phallus-worship. She is subjected to the whim of her oblivious father, who makes these wooden penises for a living and her lover, a butcher who happens to be married. Even though her lover is of the lowest social class in their village, even he can order Sangay around.

This slow burn smoulders over time, reaching a breaking point of sudden, unexpected violence culinating in a frame that encapsulates the meaning behind the film's title: a phallus destroyed, covered in blood. 

Gaston Duprat's Mi Obra Maestra (My Mastepiece) begins with a shocking confession from Art Agent Arturo Silva: he is, secretly a murderer. What ensues is a tragic yet often hilarious satire of the art scene, buddy movie and critique all in one.

We flash back to five years before the events of the first sequence, when Arturo is stil involved with his artist friend, Renzo Nervi. Renzo is the epitome of the narcissistic, self absorbed artistic genius: arrogant, selfish, ideologically dogmatic and obsessed with his art. Renzo is a dear friend to Arturo yeet is also the source of many of his problems.

the film examines the relationship between art and commerce, with art becoming a twisted parody of its noble self,  commodified instead of made for its own sake. In one scene Renzo asks for a free meal because of is "contributions to the art world." This is absurd to the restaurant manager, and i suspect even to some of us in the audience: we hav become victims of this perverted system as well.

And like in any movie where the system is broken, Renzo and Arturo decides to throw caution to the wind and game the system if they can't beat it, leading to a fun rollercoaster ride of deception, sadness, and hilarity.

Dispatches from HK + HKIFF 2019: Fall in Love at First Kiss, Memory: The Origins of Alien, Too Late to Die Young

Frankie Chen's Fall in Love at First Kiss feels like a Wattpad adaptation from the getgo, and that makes sense since this is actually an adaptation of the Shoujo Manga Itazura na Kiss. And as such, the film is filled with tropes that will be familiar to fans of the genre: extremely segregated, class based private high schools (I'm looking at you, Ouran High School Host Club), bland, every(wo)man female protagonists (easy for audience self insert purposes) and cool, smug perfect pretty boy types with hearts of gold for multitudes of girls to swoon over.

Without the proper context, it's easy to misjudge some of the characters and their motivations; an outsider can interpret the film as a lovable idiot falling in love with a smug asshole who clearly doesn't want the attention. Or does he? In the film, the male lead's motivations are mostly a mystery until the very end, where his smugness hides cowardice and fear of the future. Whether that is enough or not to keep the ilm from being too problematic is up in the air.

That said, the film commits to its zaniness that there's a certain charm to it. It might not be the best movie out there, but Fall in Love at First Kiss is sufficiently entertaining fluff.

Alexandre O. Philippe's films have mostly been commentaries on film, whether it be a prescient analysis of (toxic) fandom and the appropriation of pop culture in The People vs. George Lucas, or an in depth analysis of a film through one scene like in 78/52. Memory: The Origins of Alien, is much more like the latter than the former, though it adds its own spin to the whole thing.

Memory delves into the life of the creative minds behind Alien: Dan O'Bannon, who wrote the script, Ridley Scott, who directed the film, and H.R. Giger, the man who designed the look of the titular Alien. The ilm makes the case that Alien's particular aesthetic and themes draw from a sort of cultural and mythohistorical memory, and that is why it has resonated with so many people then and now.

The film also uses Alien's most iconic scene - the chestburster scene - to explore the film as a whole, discussing how body horror on male characters can be an unconscious manifestation of patriarchal guilt, or how even in 1979 the film captured our hopes and fears for decades to come.

A teenager's coming of age is juxtaposed with a country's coming of age in Dominga Sotomayor's Too Late to Die Young. 

Set in a rural community in Chile, at the very end of Pinochet's rule over the country, the film follows Sofia, a young girl who fiercely wants independence from her instrument maker father, Lucas who also starts dealing with his own burgeoning feelings, and Clara, who spends most of the film looking for her lost dog Frida.

Independence and change is seen as tempting, yet also frightening, a sea of uncertainty. Clinging to the past is also seen as folly, when replacing that which is already gone with something similar, but not quite the same, brings only misery and discontent.

The movie ends with a sort of ritual cleansing - either through fire or water - to mark the passage of one era into the next. And its final frames, mirroring one of its first sequences - that of a dog unleashed, running towards the future - encapsulates the promise and peril of times to come.

Dispatches from HK 2019: G Affairs, The Wandering Earth, Kamen Rider Heisei Generations Forever

We begin this day's set of reviews with the first Category III movie I've seen in ages.  Hng Kong categorizes their movies in a diferent way compared to the Philippines; instead of PG or R-13, Hong Kong uses categories I to III (including some sub categorizations) to rate their films. III is the highest, and in G Affairs, it shows.

The beginning of G Affairs is a whirlwind of absurdity linked tgether in a single shot: classical music violent sex, and a severed head. These things sound like an arthouse director's wet dream, and G Affairs doesn't stop reminding us how arty it is for the remainder of its running time. That said, it's a fascinating film; a withering critique of post-handover Hong Kong disguised as a murder mystery.

The film connects multiple stories of people with tantalizing connections to each other: there is the prostitute without her front teeth, the dirty cop no better than a gangster (played by Chapman To!) The student who in her search for comfort becomes involved with her high school teacher, and an autistic savant.

G Affairs (the "G" means many things, including sounding like the chinese word for prostitute) is bleak and unrelenting, showing how much Hong Kong has changed since the 1997 handover that transformed its destiny forever. "The cleaner the surface, the grimier the inside," one character says and it is quite evident throughout the film; the subtext is staring you right in the face. The two mothers signifying two systems, the child looking to an abusive partner for comfort, the headless corpse of a country with no one to speak up for itself - all signs of a place, an ideal, rotting from the inside out.

Yet the film ends in ambiguity, perhaps one last chance for hope, or one final leap into a dark abyss. The scene is then punctuated by the shot of a lone tourist looking up at the sky, mirroring a scene earlier in the film of a new immigrant to Hong Kong, looking up in the sky at endless possibilities.

Very loosely based on Cixin Liu's novel of the same name, The Wandering Earth is barely an adaptation and more of its own thing. Regardess of its adaptational status, it is one of the most striking science fiction films outside of Hollywood I've ever seen, and a towering achievement in Chinese science fiction.

Borrowing the premise of the original novella, The Wandering Earth skirts the politics and debate of the original material, opting for a fun mishmash of blockbusters like The Day Ater Tomorrow, Armageddon, Sunshine and many others. Due to the impending death of the sun, the nations of eaerth band together to place giant fusion thrusters all over the earth to knock it out of orbit and set a course for Alpha Centauri 4.2 light years away. It's a 2500 year journey, and one that takes up considerable resources and manpower. However, 17 years into the journey, the planet encounters a disaster that threatens to wipe out all humanity for good.

It's fun, high concept stuff, though you can just stop thinking about it and let it take you on a wild ride. The film stuffs itself with melodrama and action and makes you care, even a little bit, bout our motley crew of characters.

There's also much to be said about the film's perspective. The film is consciously non-Hollywood and Americans sshow up for only a few brief scenes. Here's a blockbuster film where the narrative is centered on someone else for a change. There's a scene where a Russian cosmonaut and a Chinese astronaut cooperate for the fate of mankind. A half-European identifies as Chinese. An Asian city (make that three Asian cities) and not Los Angeles or New York, become the cities that will decide the fate of humanity. The Philippines even makes a little cameo, with Tagalog speakers making a short appearance.

This isn't just China making a blockbuster film, this is China asserting its cultural identity through its films. In the future, the US won't be the only one making large scale multimillion dollar hits; even now China and India are fast catching up with their own epics. With this film, China makes their case as a powerhouse of mainstream blockbuster cinema, and they're not going away anytime soon.

The Heisei era is coming to an end later this year, and with it, an era of superheroes (and heroism) that has inspired Japanese children of all ages.

The last installment of the Kamen Rider Heisei Generations series concludes with the crossover of its two most current series, Build and Zi-O. The protagonists of both series find themselves in a strange world where people seem t recognize them. They run across Ataru, a Kamen Rider superfan who tells them they exist in this world as characters in kids' shows and Shingo a cute little boy with a mysterious past and a secret connection to someone else.

It may not be the most action packed Kamen Rider film, but Heisei Generations Forever is one of its more heratfelt, a love letter to the series as a whole. To the outsider, the idea of latex-suited bugmen on motorcylces sounds a little siily, but to many men and women who grew up with this stuff (myself included) they stand for something a whole lot more: a hero they can look up to, a call to be a hero in their own personal way.

Of course, the series pays tribute to its most popular series, Kamen Rider Den-O, as well as its very first series Kamen Rider Kuuga. Lead actors from previous series make voice cameos, and its all low key compared to crossover shows of the past, but it is for some reason, more deeply felt. This is literally the end of an era, and this feels like a final sendoff for dear friends.

It's been more than 18 years since the first episode of Kuuga made it to tv screens; the series, in a way has reached a new stage in its life (and yes, I know that Showa-era riders exist). What will happen in the next age or heroes, no one really knows. I hope the series keeps chugging along and inspires a whole new generation of kids.

Dispatches from HK 2019: Capernaum

The final frames of Nadine Labaki's Capernaum shows the face of a smiling boy, but the film that comes before it tells a different story behind that smile, a story that is emotionally raw and powerfull, but flawed in what it is trying to say.

The premise sounds outlandish, but makes sense once one starts to get into the details. Zain, a Lebanese child, is in jail. We are not told exactly what crime he committed, at least not yet. We learn that he is suing his parents for the 'crime' of giving him life. Again, it sounds preposterous, but the film then spends the rest of its running time selling the audience on this idea by showing us Zain'slife leading to the crime. In the flashbacks that make up most of the film, Zain's life intertwines with that of Rahil, an undocumented Ethiopian woman, and Rahil's son Yonas.

There's a palpable sense of outrage in this film, and the third act is very effective in making viewers empathize with Zain and his plight. The second act in particular reminds one of films like Grave of the Fireflies or Empire of the Sun where wily young kids use their wits to survive a harsh and unforgiving world.

Ultimately, however, while the film generally comes off as well-meaning, the film's central message comes off as muddled at best, reductive at worst. Zain's suffering, if we are to believe the film's thesis finds its roots in poverty. But is that really all there is to it? Do Zain's parents procreate like rabbits just because they are poor, or is it because they are horrible people? Of course poverty in itself is a major root cause, but why does that poverty exist in the first place?

There is the presence of something larger in the film. Within a greater socio-historical context, the displacement of peoples due to ethnic violence, war either internal or external, and even the long term effects of interventionism links these characters together, but the film does not acknowledge this fully and it stays out of reach.

There is merit in the emotional ferocity and rawness of Capernaum, but the message it wants to tell feels incomplete.

Ulan is a clever dissection of love stories and the romantic genre

Why do Filipinos like love stories? The abundance of such stories  in our popular culture exist as a sort of curiosity, but is also understandable. We want to love and be loved, and we want to live this fantasy through stories, it's only human.

Maya (Nadine Lustre) creates these fantasies. She is a storyteller, but she is relegated to making the kind of disposable romantic fiction that saturates our popular culture. Her beliefs are informed by mythology and superstition, and those aspects seep into her daily life. Its depiction is a deft melding of magic and reality that is unlike anything we've seen before in Philippine cinema. Yet on the other hand, Ulan tells us about another kind of mythology, a modern-day kind that we have created for ourselves, the kind seen in Precious Hearts novels and Wattpad scribbles and long, rambling posts on Facebook.

Ulan is a story about love stories, and how they shape us. It's structured like a fairy tale, but the things that happen in that fairy tale betray that notion. During the entire first half of the film, we see Maya encounter all sorts of potential romantic partners. These are men that would be solid romantic leads in any other mainstream romantic story, but that's not the case here. The old flame has moved on. The charming and dashing man is selfish and superficial. Maya tries to cry, but she cannot. Her personal mythology (the romantic stories that she has consumed all her life) tells her to cry, but there are no tears, because in the end, her friend is right: she is in love with the notion of love, and not the relationships themselves. Reality and myth don't match up, and this disconnect becomes a problem to Maya.

Ulan also questions why love stories are the way they are. For example, Maya learns that two Tikbalangs cannot marry. Why is that love forbidden, and who decreed that that should not be so? When Maya is told that she doesn't love because she lacks sensuality, why is that a thing? Who creates the rules of love, and why shouldn't we just love freely, regardless of who we are?

It's perfectly valid to consider Ulan as a simplistic film with a straightforward, even predictable plot, but there are too many things going on beneath the surface that I cannot discount the film. The fairy tale is only a facade, an entryway into something deeper, something that reaches beyond the text and into the realm of metafiction. There's a certain loose quality to the film that reminds me of last month's Elise, and how that film viewed memory as a number of disconnected, floaty scenes.

There are other things that come to mind. Maya's creativity is shackled thanks to her chauvinistic boss, the storyteller forced to make stories viewed through a gaze not her own. She finds out that her boss, too, is informed by his own set of mythologies - perhaps harmful ones - and she gains the power to tell her own stories through that realization. Maya's ultimate realization is to come to terms with her own myths - to see the discrepancy between reality and fantasy - and to find out that to love others, one must love one's self first. 

Ulan is admittedly not for everyone; its strangeness can make or break one's appreciation for the film. But it is loaded with so many things that I find it hard to dismiss.

March '19 Reviews (2) : Second Coming, Familia Blondina

In the wake of past evils, how do we recognize evil when it comes again? In Jet Leyco's film Second Coming, that exact question is asked of us. Framed as a story of a family settling into a new home, it is a movie that covers surprising breadth.

The pieces are present from the start, but it takes a while to come together. One begins to see patterns in the noise: isolation, control, violence that is inherited from one generation to the next. There is also fear grounded in domesticity, especially the kind felt when acclimating to new, uncertain surroundings.

The identification of evil walks hand in hand with the tolerance of evil, in that people can be conditioned to ignore it or not notice it until it has consumed everything around it. The greatest horror in Second Coming is conceptual rather than supernatural; true evil from the hearts of men being more terrifying than any ghost or spirit. This concept gathers even more meaning, considering recent contemporary events.

The film does run into a bit of trouble in the first third as it tries to gain its footing, telling (through voiceover) rather than showing. But ultimately, Second Coming can be appreciated either surface level as a standard thriller, or as something much more profound.

The plight of half Filipinos has been touched upon before with films like Manny Palo's David F. (2013) and Ivan Payawal's I America (2016). Borne of two cultures, these people don't exactly belong in one or the other, yet belong to both (the mixing race also playing a part through Filipino perceptions of race). Stories like this tell the tale of a fish out of water that lives in the water too, a weird Schrodinger's fish of sorts.

Those notions don't really have much of a presence in Jerry Sineneng's Familia Blondina, a low-effort comedy from Star Cinema that seems to have been phoned in at the last minute. Although there are some notable performances in the cast, the film as a whole leaves much to be desired.

It looks like the cast and crew of Familia Blondina had a lot of fun making this film, but that fun really didn't extend itself to me. A lot of the filmmaking feels really lazy, with many scenes cut from just the first take. It sometimes makes sense from a comedy perspective, but not in this case. The film often plays fast and loose with continuity as well; a scene involving the characters talking to the town mayor (Lou Veloso) has the mayor's eyewear disappearing every other shot, because they shot two different angles and neglected to consider the glasses.

The brand of comedy embodied by Familia Blondina is the kind popularized by Vice Ganda and her ilk, the kind that builds itself on making fun of people for their appearance or their weight, etc. If insult comedy is not your thing, this will likely be a dud. (Fellow audiences present when I watched this, perhaps still entrenched in that kind of comedy, found the movie funny. Kudos to them I guess?)

To be fair, there are one or two scenes that legitimately elicited a laugh: a flashback scene with the characters as elementary students (yet played as the same actors) was played completely straight, and the absurdity of it all got me. But scenes like this are rare in a film that doesn't really seem to be trying.

March '19 Reviews: Captain Marvel, Alita Battle Angel

As it turns out, March 9 is International Women's Day, so here are some short reviews of recent mainstream blockbuster films with female protagonists.

The latest movie in the gargantuan Marvel Cinematic Universe takes place in the mid-90's. The Kree warrior Vers (Brie Larson) and her squad is tasked to find one of their undercover operatives, as the operative's location has been compromised by the Skrulls, the shapeshifting archenemies of the Kree. Thanks to a certain series of events, Vers finds herself on Earth, where she discovers a connection to the planet and her mysterious past.

Though the film is a very entertaining two hours, there's not a lot in Captain Marvel that grabs the viewer. As a drama, it's all over the place, the film unable to sustain a good arc. As an action film, it's okay, though the stakes aren't as big as other Marvel movies; this is more Ant-Man than it is Infinity War. As a character study, it comes up a bit incomplete, which is unfortunate considering directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are responsible for character-driven films like Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008). 

But while the Marvel house style predominates in this film, there are bits and pieces of Boden and Fleck's earlier work still present. The problem is, the film doesn't really evoke any unique attributes that set it apart from the other Marvel films, which is kind of disappointing considering last year we had films like Black Panther that are distinct yet still present in the MCU. One particular issue is the setting: the 90's were a particularly bland time in history, so visually the Earth scenes reflect that. On the other hand, the film makes up for that visual blandness with a pretty rockin' soundtrack of 90's tunes.

Ultimately, while the film ends up being average, it's the kind of film that teaches something: for one thing, that we should not judge solely on outside appearances, whether it be a woman or a race of aliens branded as terrorists. I can also see young kids watching this, with them perhaps finding someone to identify with, someone that can tell them that no matter how many times people put you down, no matter how many times men try to tell you what you can or can't do, you stand up and fight.

On the other side of the spectrum comes Alita Battle Angel, the long dormant dream project of Avatar director James Cameron. Based on the first part of the long running manga by Yukito Kishiro, Alita is as good a manga adaptation as it gets: it trims the excess fat while staying relatively true to the source material.

Like the other film in this set of reviews, Alita's main character is also an insomniac: retrieved by scientist Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) from a dumpsite, the cyborg has no recollection of her past. It turns out she's connected to a centuries-old conflict that led to the world being what it is.

The original source material is a vast world with strange, even bizarre characters and an abundance of worldbuilding. The adaptation tells enough to keep the film understandable without getting too deep in the nitty gritty.

The action is fun and propulsive, and the characters are all varied and fun. Alita's relationship with Ido forms one of my favorite arcs of the film. The peculiar aesthetic choice of having Alita's eyes larger than normal to emulate Kishiro's original manga style is initially off-putting, but not as jarring as expected. As the movie went on, I somehow acclimated to the uncanny valley.

The film is however bogged down by a romantic arc that doesn't really gel and finds itself gasping for breath by the last third of the film. This arc was present in the original manga, though it was given a little more time to grow. The ending ends with a rather substantial cliffhanger, though enough loose ends have been tied up to the extent that there's at least some degree of satisfaction to the whole undertaking.

I hope Alita Battle Angel gets a sequel, because if the original manga is any indication, things get a lot more crazy from here on in.

~back to regular programming~

Present Confusion is back in business! It's like I never left. Hehe.

Look forward to more content on the site in the next few days.

I Love You, LC! and fat narratives in film

By all accounts, I Love You, LC! is a standard advocacy film pushing for the benefits of Low Carb Intermittent Fasting. In it, Patty (Jef Gaitan), the proprietor of a restaurant/bakery, falls in love with Lloyd, a handsome and fit man. It's not a particularly well-made film, though advocacy films rarely are in my experience. However, the film lead me to ask some interesting questions about fat people in local films and pop culture.

The narrative of I Love You, LC, reads like a lot of established fat narratives in pop culture. Patty is well off, relatively happy, and is comfortable with her body (more or less.) On the other hand, she is depicted as relatively unhealthy, having recently come from the hospital for problems related to her eating. Her parents have also suffered early deaths, thanks to obesity related problems. She falls in love with Lloyd Corpuz (Marlon Marcia), but she overhears him saying unkind words about her. As a form of revenge, but also due to a combination of internalized subservience to societal expectations and the expectations of a man or men, she decides to lose weight.

These expectations aren't static, and this hasn't always been the case in the history of man. Fatness or added weight was originally seen as a symbol of wealth, good health or privilege*; the logic goes, if you had enough money or resources to feed yourself, you were a desirable mate or partner. Old paintings from classical times reflected this aesthetic. And this wasn't strictly limited to women, either; in some societies men were seen as desirable and more powerful if they were bigger and more hefty, owing to that same logic.

That notion changed when lifestyles turned even more sedentary and people started equating fatness with disease. Scientific evidence pointed to obesity as having a negative effect on health. Aesthetics also changed over time, owing to the fashion industry and the arts. The notion of fatness being equated with wealth also changed. Though one could still equate fatness with wealth (in that one could afford to be fat), it could also be a marker of a lack of wealth, in that fat people have neither the privilege of time or money to exercise, or that their dietary choices are limited by their budget, as healthy foods are usually more expensive than unhealthy foods. 

Fatness became equated with ugliness, and being thin was commodified and sold as fad diets, diet pills or miracle cures for obesity. In movies and popular media, if you were the lead and you were fat, more often than not you had to undergo a transformation (more on that later.) Otherwise, fat characters in films were relegated to supporting characters or comedic relief. In the Philippines, fat comedians and comediennes were aplenty: Dely Atay-atayan, Nanette Inventor, Ruby Rodriguez, Edgar Mortiz and others. The basic premise of Joel Ferrer's Baka Siguro Yata (2015) operates on this foundation as well: had the lead actor been a hunky man instead, the conflict of the story wouldn't have been as effective to audiences operating under such biases.

There is a scene in the middle of I Love You, LC where Lloyd and his gym buddies are working out, the camera fixated on their muscles and male physique. It functions equally as gaze, fantasy and as aesthetic ideal, depending on how the scene is interpreted. Patty undertakes a transformation, a common trope in fat narratives, where she becomes that bodily ideal. Immediately after she transforms, the camera treats her differently. As a female now with a body that conforms to societal ideals, the film fixates on that body A LOT, complete with poolside bikini babe scene. The film's gaze has turned to that particular body, considering it as worthy of that gaze.

The transformation of the fat protagonist into a fitter, healthier person is commonplace in narratives where a fat person is in the lead. It's also prevalent in narratives where the fat person is male (with fat males being even more underrepresented in film than fat women, even though the social stigma for females is arguably more deeply felt.) Take the example of My Big Love, the 2008 Star Cinema rom com starring Sam Milby, where after transforming, our protagonist turns into the most sought after bachelor in town. What was wrong with his character pre transformation? Nothing, other than the fact that he's overweight. In these kinds of narratives, fat people are also given the consolation of being really kind and good natured people, a consolation prize for their fatness, or something written into their characters to "offset" their "ugly" exterior.

One film in particular stands as an exception, subverting the expectations of these kinds of films: Jason Paul Laxamana's Ang Taba Ko Kasi (2016.) In that film, there is no transformation, and the character is as flawed and shallow as her peers. That film stands as the exception to a long standing rule that stigmatizes fatness as undesirable.

In I Love You, LC, there is a bit of a subversion in the final act: Patty had been motivated to lose weight thanks to a guy, but it turns out the guy was not interested in her at all, regardless of her weight - because he is gay. She quickly falls in love with another LC - straight this time - and asks him if he would've loved her if she were fat. He doesn't really give a satisfying answer to the question.

Regardless of whether being fat is healthy or not, such a portrayal in popular media does little or nothing to overweight people in general in terms of making them relate to such narratives.  Too much fatness, of course, isn't healthy at all, but then we have to clearly define what fatness is as the definition sometimes includes normal body type variations. Hollywood is starting to move away from that trend, and other filmmaking cultures still follow their own aesthetics. We, on the other hand, are still caught up in narratives that are outdated and not very understanding towards fat people. 

As for the film, points to it for trying to promote a healthier lifestyle. Thanks to it, I tried researching a bit on intermittent fasting, and if it all works out, who knows? I might give it a try.

*and in some societies and cultures, they still are.

sources: 
http://blog.sermo.com/2015/07/02/history-obesity-renaissance-1910/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1357034X07074780
http://blog.sermo.com/2015/07/15/history-obesity-last-100-years-global/
http://blog.sermo.com/2015/07/10/history-obesity-last-100-years-us/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257663670_Why_Fat_is_a_Feminist_Issue
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464700116666253