theocinema Reviews

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Clint Eastwood's Million "Duller" Baby

[6/10 · 8 April 2005]

Like "Mystic River", "Million Dollar Baby" confuses in-your-face melodrama with profoundness. Subtlety is definitely not one of Eastwood's directorial strengths. The film also has its motley crew of caricature characters like Maggie's obnoxious "white trash" family who act more like her personal demons than anything. They live only to swing the pendulum of sympathy towards Maggie in very neatly demarcated zones of good and evil.

But sympathy is difficult to give when it is so obviously solicited. Characters wallowing in contrived dramas hardly elicit interest, let alone sympathy. As respected film critic Roger Ebert pointed out, "Deep movie emotions for me usually come not when the characters are sad, but when they are good." In "Million Dollar Baby," the characters are more sad than good.

Nonetheless, the film won awards for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Director. This is not about the Academy paying tribute to a future film classic, it is about the Academy paying its last respects to its favorite 74-year-old cowboy. True enough, in the film's last moments, the Frankie character disappears.

Ultimately, "Million Dollar Baby" is "Rocky"(Progesterone version) meets "Terms of Endearment" (plus the narration cut-and pasted from "The Shawshank Redemption"). How's that for cinematic schizophrenia?

Crying Ladies (2003)

No Tears for CRYING LADIES

[8/10 · 8 April 2005]

Crying Ladies definitely has its moments. The beautifully-shot scenes of a traditional Chinese funeral lend a cultural richness and international appeal to the film. The comedy is raw and unpretentious; a very Filipino sense of humor shines through. There are poignant, delicately human scenes when the characters get drawn by the real tears shed by the bereaved family so that it is difficult to tell whether they were still crying for pay or just being participants of a shared broken humanity. And there is a very endearing, sincere quality about the characters of Crying Ladies, owing a lot to the first-rate portrayal of the lead actors led by Sharon Cuneta. Her conflicted Stella is thoroughly real; with just the right amount of goofball doses to make her likable. Tough critics from the New York Times and Village Voice gave her the "two thumbs up," even when they point out the film's flaws.

And flaws there are, one of which is the film's uneven editing– languishing unnecessarily in some sequences and sloppily breaking narrative continuity here and there.

Nonetheless, Crying Ladies succeeds in presenting a whimsical glimpse of how adept Pinoys are at turning tears into laughter... so seamlessly, and without bitterness.

You fang chu zu (2002)

an overstretched short film

[4/10 · 2 February 2004]

I am totally convinced that "Room to Let" is short film material- 30 mins. max. The Cassavettes mood and the avantgardist attempts may have played out better had James Lee been artistically honest enough to keep it as a short film. What we get instead is more than two hours of 80's angst and an overdose of ennui.