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Eerie (Philippines, 2019)
Star Cinema’s Eerie, directed by Mikhail Red, is, no doubt, quite an addition to Filipino horror. It delivers what one expects from the genre reasonably well – scares, darkness, ghosts. But it suffers a little too much from its emphasis on scare tactics. These excesses mean that its addition to the genre constitutes nothing more than…
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Chris Fujiwara on Film Criticism and Programming
plus some commentary
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“Cinema is not made of flesh”: an interview by Mara Valle
Around late November last year, a student by the name Mara Valle (MV) approached me for a written interview for her undergraduate (?) thesis. Her topic has something to do with the films directed by Olivia Lamasan and representation of women in her films. I asked for her permission if I can post it here.…
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Red Flowers and Green Leaves (China, 2018)
Liu Miaomiao and Hu Weijie’s Red Flowers and Green Leaves treat a very complicated matter in a very simplified way. While being a story about marriage, the film only explicitly follows one side of the story: it is told from the point of view of the groom, Gubo (Luo Kewang). At first, this might seem…
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Overhauling Identity (part 0)
I’ve been going back and forth to this problem of identity. At first, there seem to be a real issue concerning this problem: that indeed, there are unrests seemingly caused by conflicts brought about by differences on this category of identity. Francis Fukuyama himself, on his latest book, framed contemporary political and economic problems in…
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Regular Film Posting (January 13-20)
Brave (2012) & Aladdin (1992) Been watching Disney films with Olivia for the past months. Instead of commenting on each, will probably just lay down a general observation for both. Disney films, for better or for worse, have been great showcases of white American contemporary culture. Contemporary, being contemporary for each of the films’ releases.…
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Regular Film Posting (January 6-12)
Sorry to Bother You (2018) It is not hard to love this film. On one end, it functions as a (re)affirmation for everyone to see it being about the value of human labor as essential to generation of any sort of value. On another, it’s a real bait for Marxists, probably a more effective bait…
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Regular Film Posting (January 1-5)
Insects (2018) There are three living surrealists in cinema who are still actively working to this day. David Lynch seemed to give up back in 2006 with Inland Empire to focus on his new age campaigns (which he calls transcendental meditation) but were able to make a comeback in 2017 with a new season of…
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The Years of Permanent Midnight and other unedited essays
Starting today, my first anthology, The Years of Permanent Midnight and other unedited essays will be available for online download via archive.org. https://archive.org/details/TheYearsOfPermanentMidnight The physical copies are mostly self-printed which is why I was only able to release 12 copies of the first printing. Some copies are still available, probably, at Cinema Centenario, along…