Tag: Movie Review

Citizen Jake is an important film in today’s Pilipinas.

It is a bleak but necessary look at the cycle of abuse and power in the country. It confronts the audience with blatant truths disguised as fiction and offers no way out nor redemption for the characters.

There are no good guys in Citizen Jake. Not even Jake. The film shows us that the people we may regard as evil may be motivated by some sick sense of love for country and are doing what they think is necessary. It shows us that we are all haunted by the ghost of a political past. We are abandoned by our heroes. We are bred from a system that tells us that there is an inescapable divide between a master and a slave; where justice is unattainable. We watch helplessly as life is drained out of our country because we are held down by our own sins. And in the end, just like in real life, it is the little people that always end up dead and fucked.

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It was Jae’s first time to watch Les Miserables. The most he knew of it was of course On My Own and I Dreamed a Dream that were popularized by various artists of late. His reaction to the film was priceless. Check out his review below. – Dale

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Tagged by some critics as a bourgeois-juvenile film and criticized for unapologetically representing the middle-upper class society, Ang Nawawala is actually a beautiful depiction of a young man’s attempt to rejoin a life that has been marred by a death in the family. It is a refreshing departure from movies that exploit and dwell on poverty and from the biased, one-sided way of thinking that seems to believe that this is the only reality that matters.

The film tells the story of the quiet conflict within a family and how this conflict can sometimes be so deafening that we try and cope by retreating within ourselves. It is a universal theme that is much more relatable than the million and one stories told of a person that clings on prostitution, gets involved in crime or sells their children for money. In not so many words, Ang Nawawala tells a story of an attempt to salvage a life by finding solace in friends, losing yourself in the random things that life has to offer and that liberating power of love that makes us forget our worries and ails even for a short time. For most people, regardless of social standing and whether their problems are real or imagined, this film depicts their life. This is not a mere glorification of a lifestyle, it is a life that we have lived at one point or another.

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“I am 40 years old and I haven’t done a thing that I’m proud of.” So says Harvey Milk at the eve of his 40th birthday when he and his then lover decided to move to San Francisco to start a new life together. It is a move inspired by a need to be able to get away from the ‘hate’ that is all too familiar even at present when we, as a society, have supposedly progressed.

Milk tells the story of one of America’s first openly gay public officials who embattled oppression and inspired thousands of gay men and women all across the US to recognize their value and self-worth. This is a story of a man who remained unfazed against all the moralist judgment flung by people who disguise bigotry as an act of God. It is a masterful presentation of a man and a movement in a city where police brutality is described as an imposition of God’s laws and how one person who stood up for the rights of those that are like him risked his own life to get his message across.

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