Alessandra de Rossi's directorial debut begins with a Malick-esque shot of a starfield, giving the proceedings a sense of grandeur and self importance that, upon viewing the finished product, doesn't exactly add up. My Amanda is a personal story, told in the smallest scales, about two people who share a special bond.
The film mostly consists of vignettes showing TJ (Piolo Pascual) and Amanda (Alessandra de Rossi) hanging out, engaging in banter, and being the best of friends. Pascual and de Rossi have good chemistry with each other and the scenes are fun, though in real life I probably wouldn't be the kind of person to hang out with Amanda, who I found grating after the first 20 minutes. (That probably says more about me than it says anything about the two main characters.) Amanda is loud, fun, sometimes annoying, sometimes a mess, but TJ hangs out with her anyway and treats her like a dear friend, through thick and thin.
That's basically the entire movie, a premise that could be done in 20 minutes but is stretched out to 90. It's not bad per se, and it's definitely better than the dragged out histrionics of 12 (2017), which was also written by the actress, but it's not for everyone. To its credit it serves as a positive depiction of a heterosexual platonic relationship. I'm glad that TJ isn't revealed to be asexual or gay, because I feel that would diminish the nature of their bond - it will serve as an excuse and another indication that men cannot form meaningful relationships with women without sex being involved.
That said, we don't really know much about TJ at all. Although he is the point of view character, we learn nothing about TJ and everything about Amanda - through his eyes, but without any desire nor viewed through a particular gaze. If anything it reminds me of Joel Ferrer's Elise (2019), though in that film desire definitely was in the picture, and at the same time we know more about the guy (Bert) because that film explores his character as well.
It helps that the film is helmed and written by a woman, though that brings up another point. TJ the character is based on de Rossi's male friends, and Amanda is based on de Rossi herself - in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that was her true personality on display. But all this says something about the filmmaker too - writing and making a film about how your friend/s love/s you, secretly, in your absence - almost like the filmmaker has a deep need to be loved, seeking the validation that comes with it. At the very least, I can relate to that.
If you have read this blog for any substantial amount of time, you'd know that Joel Lamangan isn't exactly my favorite filmmaker. While he did make a couple of decent movies in the nineties, his present output, while prolific, leaves much to be desired. It is with that thought that I begin this "review" of his latest film Silab, a film that is thoroughly baffling, a film that transcends logic or reason, copping elements from older, better films and creating this soup of unintelligible garbage.
The story is about an OFW who comes home after a long absence. His wife is happy to see him and eager to make another child (why she'd want another child given their financial situation is off, but I'm not here to judge.) OFW husband doesn't want that. Frustrated sexually by her husband's unwillingness to reciprocate, she seduces her husband's friend, and they do the sexy stuff. But OFW husband and his friend have secrets that they don't want to reveal to anyone else...
The film evokes sexy films of decades past, but somehow makes it gaudier, trashier, and thoroughly unsexy. The main characters aren't really people, but more like tropes injected into mannequins; singular character traits that don't add up to anything meaningful. The film also has a penchant for plot points that don't go anywhere: in one scene, husband's friend (I don't care to know their names) sees that a cat is chowing on his breakfast. Any normal, sane person would try to scare the cat away with a loud sound. This guy? He shoots the cat with a fucking gun. No one in the small community hears the gunshots (or maybe they're used to random gunshots in the morning) and the gun isn't brought up again later. In another scene, horny wife is boning this random bald dude. She doesn't finish, and bald dude is upset (jeez, just jack off man) so in response she pours boiling water on his peepee. That plot point isn't brought up again, bald dude doesn't show up later to arrest horny wife for assault, and it ends up irrelevant to the bigger plot.
In many other scenes, the characters are either inconsistent or don't act like normal human beings. In one scene, wife wants the D and seduces her husband. Husband is pragmatic and refuses. Later, after getting drunk, husband wants the V and she... rejects him? This is what she wants, isn't it? She slaps him twice and leaves him as he slumps down crying like the pathetic character that he is. Let's not forget the film's overt racism towards horny Arabs, as that's apparently still a thing in 2021.
I can go on for a few more paragraphs, but I won't waste any more of your time. If you need a good wank, just watch porn or use your imagination. The people who made this film either didn't do the latter, or did it too much without thought to what comes next.
I don't really have much to say about Darryl Yap's Ang Babaeng Walang Pakiramdam, and that might be the film's greatest problem. Without all the filler and padding, the film has just enough substance as one of his Vincentiment shorts, which is in itself not enough.
Perhaps those used to Yap's penchant for deliberately being offensive or confrontational to the audience (including a complete lack of sensitivity to the issues at hand) will expect the main character's condition to be used for laughs. It isn't - instead it is the disability of the main supporting character (played by Jerald Napoles) that is used for comedy.
Instead, the protagonist's condition is turned into the punchline of an 83 minute long joke. The film doesn't feel like anything beyond its central idea - the idea of a woman who cannot feel who suddenly feels love. Yap's treatment of the material doesn't make the main character human, she feels like a prop. It's the same thing with his other film Tililing, and in both films there is a preoccupation with an idea without considering all the other things that make a movie work.
In Paglaki Ko, Gusto Kong Maging Pornstar, a dying man wants Ara Mina (who plays a semi-fictionalized version of herself) to make another sexy film. She does so, and recruits three actresses who were known for acting in sexy films to help train a new sexy star.
From the get-go, I find the title to be a bit of a problem. There is a distinction between outright porn and a sexy movie, and treating the latter like the former diminishes the latter. While it could be argued that sexy movies were often made with titillation in mind, the content is far less explicit than actual porn - and nevertheless, some of these films are rife with sociopolitical commentary not present in their porn counterparts. Perhaps the most notable exception to the explicitness of the content would be the "pene" movies of the 1980s that showed unsimulated sex - though of the four main sexy actresses in this film, only Alma Moreno had a career at that time; sexy movies of the 1990s and early 2000s were different beasts entirely in terms of tone and content.
But I digress. The story behind Paglaki Ko, Gusto Kong Maging Pornstar is almost non-existent; the few story elements that exist in the film can be removed to the film's benefit. In fact, some of the best scenes in the film are the ones that are unscripted and involve little to no involvement from the director - those scenes are fascinating little glimpses into a facet of Philippine movie history that not a lot of people talk about today. It would have been interesting to see the trajectories of these ladies' careers - including a frank discussion about exploitation and abuse within the industry - but of course the film doesn't care about any of that.
To be fair, the film does a (decent? maybe just adequate) job in trying to humanize its four characters. But anyone else is either underdeveloped, one dimensional, a caricature, or at worst, just a prop for the story to move forward which is not very surprising given who is in charge.
That said, perhaps the worst movie I've seen in this batch of movies is Yam Laranas' Death of a Girlfriend. This Rashomon like tale about, well, a dead girl and the men who might have killed her is nothing new, full of cliches, and predictable from the first minute. It doesn't help that the film is full of cringey vignettes featuring the girl and her boyfriend. There's a reason for this cringeyness, but that doesn't excuse the fact that a viewer has to go through it to experience the rest of the story.
While it's more technically accomplished than three of the five films I've talked about today, It's simply the kind of film that I don't care about anymore. There are too many of these kinds of films for my taste, using a woman's death as some sort of twist. Even Rashomon considered the victim's point of view, and that was seventy years ago. Here, we don't really get to know the titular girlfriend at all; only the fact that she is now a corpse, and a means to tell a story that honestly didn't need to be told.
