Balikbayan Box #1—Memories of Overdevelopment Redux #4 (d. Kidlat Tahimik) With a title like that, I should have known how self-indulgent, long-winded, and self-important the work, cobbled together from three working films, was going to be. (The film has a 2 hour 40 minute running time.) Tahimik is the OG of Philippine indie cinema, but …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Black heroes are out of this world
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (d. Persichetti, Ramsey & Rothman) It’s totally fun and beautiful to look at, however, not completely sold on it. First, yes, we finally get a non-white Spidey, one that’s Afro-Latino living in Brooklyn but then look at who made the film: they’re still white guys. A truly diverse Spidey-verse would have …
Bitter identities
Bitter Melon (d. H.P. Medoza)Searching (d. Aneesh Chaganty) Bitter Melon is a comic and rather dark take on Filipino-American life in Nor Cal’s South Bay Area. What is most surprising about the film is that it shows Asian immigrant life that doesn’t revolve around whiteness or being white or assimilating to be white but one …
Too much ego
Gook (d. Justin Chon) The crux of the film is the shared loss of the Korean guys’ father and the African American’s mother. This is what is meant to connect the young Korean-American guys with the black teenage girl. We don’t get to hear much about the incident where they were both killed and it …
No (actual) history
Overlord (d. Julius Avery) Strictly B-movie and doesn’t attempt to be more. Movie should have been more decisive in focusing on who the hero is. The most affable and intelligent character is the black soldier but the movie doesn’t want him to be either the leader or the lover, so that despite genre conventions that …
The good immigrant
Border (d. Ali Abbasi) It’s a mixed bag. It features a potentially outrageous sex scene for vanilla folks that del Toro couldn’t show in his Shape of Water. But, it’s really quite tame for my tastes, way too hetero, despite the switcheroo, way too white, despite the heavy make up. (Currently reading the new Marlon …
Becky vision
A Quiet Passion (d. Terence Davies) It’s not that I don’t like it or that I don’t care much for it because I do, however, it’s also deeply problematic and is no different, ideologically, from recent films about the American past and it’s grip-like insistence that only white trauma matters. Davies, a deeply Catholic fella …
White adjacency
Shirkers (d. Sandi Tan)Minding the Gap (d. Bing Liu) What a disaster. Filmmaker is Singaporean and presents herself and friends as culturally Western, which is fine except there are only the most minimal references of her own culture as Chinese-Singaporean and the most fleeting of visual registers of other ethnicities that make up Singapore. It’s …
French autuers so white
Nocturama (d. Bertrand Bonello) Pretty dumb for a wanna be smart ass movie. So hey, you know about French auteur-ist cinema? where white Parisians, usually hetero, talk, fight, make love, philosophize in chic Parisian apartments? Well this is one of those, except that we’ve got a multicultural cast. Finally! It aims to reflect the diversity …
Fuck this movie
Good Time (d. Safdie Brothers) Reprehensible. These guys are supposed to be the next big thing. Film ranked number one in the Film Comment 2017 poll. They think they’ve made a pretty cool loser heist movie with auteur vibes. And then you watch it. Right from the beginning, it’s filled with black figures who are …
Orpheus in Hell: Unlicensed Film Reviews 