The thing with a movie like this one is that it promises a kind of darkness. Con artist Greg (played flawlessly by Alex Vincent Medina) and his gay “handler” Marney (played by Joey Paras on painfully loud and angry mode) are preying on the more gullible gays and women on Facebook. The goal is to gain their trust, move from Facebook to mobile phone calls, make them fall in love, get some cash out of them, then conveniently disappear with the change of a sim card. (more…)
What does one do with a movie like Instant Mommy? It took all my will power not to walk out of the cinema, and I can sit through the worst of our local comedies and not care about the time I’m wasting. This film made me think of all the things I could be doing instead of watching it. And no, Eugene Domingo in the lead does not save it. (more…)
Is its age.
There is something extraordinary of course about having the music of “Katy” jammed in my head. Like muscle memory the first strains of music from the live band had me tapping my feet and bobbing my head. The lyrics came rushing back soon enough. (more…)
t is easy to say that the homosexual relationship, if not the homosexual story, is one that’s been overdone and overtold, if not just also something that we should get over at this point. After all, in the same way that we get tired of the romantic-comedies that live off heterosexuality, there has become a tendency at redundancy for the homosexual story. It is not a question of more complex discussions, not even a call for more particularly unique experiences, as it is just less of what has become the stereotype of the gay story.
That is, it is rarely quiet, even less so calm.
That is, until “Owel.” (more…)
…Which, if we think about it, actually makes sense. Its subject matter is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesian novelist, jailed by the Suharto regime for his writings, the closest a Southeast Asian has come to being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (more…)