The Unknown Girl (2016) (d. Dardenne Brothers)Two Days, One Night (2014) (d. Dardenne Brothers) I wish the Dardennes’ The Unknown Girl was less white savior-y than it is. Why does the victim have to be a young black female immigrant? This is the same world as their La Promesse, which came out 25 years ago. …
Author Archives: orpheusfx28
Duterte cinema
Heneral Luna (2015) (d. Jerrod Tarog)Felix Manolo (2015) (d. Joel Lamangan) Been thinking about the two unlikely blockbuster films in the Philippines: Heneral Luna and Felix Manalo. These two very different biopics seemed to complement one another. Both features outsider-visionaries of the Philippine State (Luna) and the Philippine Church (Manolo). The former is about political …
Mock trials
T-Bird at Ako (1982) (d. Danny Zialcita) Caught a bizarre, enjoyable Tagalog film on TV starring Nora Aunor and Vilma Santos, two of the country’s top leading ladies and box office rivals, with overt lesbian overtones. Both women usually represent the Nation: Aunor is darker-skinned while Santos is much fairer and has the much-prized Hispanic features. …
Final solutions
Avengers: Endgame Game of Thrones 8×3: The Long Night It’s no accident that both the Avengers movie and the much anticipated GoT episode were programmed over the same weekend, ideologically. They both delivered the same message that the masses have accepted the inevitable catastrophe of climate change and that it’s acceptable that the group most …
Disregarding the pain of others
Russian Dolls Season 1 (Netflix) Hear me out. This is regarding the somewhat amusing Netflix comedy Russian Dolls. Spoilers, obviously. At the root of the show is the female protagonist’s trauma living with a mentally unstable mother. She can’t quite move on, dying and reliving her catastrophic 34th birthday. Because she’s now at an age …
King Beto
Game of Thrones Season 8 (HB0) Rushed production made it possible for show runners, who are straight white men, to display their actual POVs this season. No time for introspection and even getting feedback, as if they care for such a thing. What do we get in the final episode where everything else is re-jigged …
Genocidal hippie
Avengers: Endgame (d. Russo Brothers) It is about genocide. For that reason, it’s worth examining who are notably absent or disregarded since it is their very unrepresentability that signals that they are the likely victims of erasure. It’s a bit ironic that for a film about wiping out of half the universe’s population, it is …
Train wrecks
Snowpiercer (2013) (d. Bong Joon-ho) How far can a commercial film with an anti-authoritarian message sustain its narrative momentum? At what point does the train of narrative filmmaking derail from its linear way of storytelling? Traversing the planet to coincide with the length of the year, the film’s train (why not a shinkansen?) is a …
Carrefour
Crossroads (1928) (d. Kinugasa Teinosuke) Spring on an Island (1940) (d. Toyoda Shiro) Quick impressions on two films. Older Japanese works startling in their use of male subjectivity as site of confrontation with nationhood and modernity. Usually, it’s the female consciousness and body that’s at stake. Up first is Crossroads (Jujiro) by the auteur behind …
Fishy marxism
Mermaid Legend (1984) (d. Ikeda Toshiharu) An amazing female revenge fantasy marred by sexploitation and horror tropes. There’s absolutely no reason for the extended sadistic sex scenes and scenes of (blurred) nudity except as box office titillation, which doesn’t make much sense since it’s an art film (ATG-branded) with a quasi Marxist agenda. Wait maybe …
Orpheus in Hell: Unlicensed Film Reviews 