Reviews

Subservience is a triffic thriller and science fiction movie that tells of what might happen in a dystopian near-future, if a primary user chooses the lingerie-wearing model of AI-robot to help around the home, while the wife is hospitalised, without granting one's spouse primary user status. I was mildly entertained for the films duration. Megan Fox plays the bitchy, jealous android role well, but most of the human characters were dull and unrounded, making it troublesome to empathize with them. R certification seems a bit stringent. I'm glad for a thought provoking movie like this, which raises the issue of whether an artificial heart would be cheaper to acquire and that it would probably have been simpler to develop than a self-repairing, gynoid-cum-sex-doll.

This movie is colorful, a little abstruse, always delicate and each scene acts as a gateway to the next or previous one. Amid a stimulating gallery of supporting roles, lead actor Thomas Scimeca's mix of gloom and assumed excess makes his "Thomas" an access point to the story that's both funny and endearing. The director, Sébastien Betbeder, brings a breath of fresh air to the feel-good comedy genre. Here, he demonstrates his ability to create good feelings from fallow land. Now and then, everything goes to hell in too many directions, too quickly and with too much enthusiasm. But this film is still an incredibly sweet comedy full of generosity, sincerity and originality.

A story that requires the audience to suspend belief. The widow Abie is quick to assume the worst when her husband goes MIA. The previously jealous mistress and business partner, Therese, is curiously absent from Roldan's life between the inappropriate memorial meeting and the happy news of Michael's recovery. Neither did Nurse Darwin exploit this period to make a move for his crush, Abbie. Later, Abbie said she was prepared to work with Michael to overcome his new penchant for strangling his partner during coitus, but she never gave her fiancé the opportunity to try alternative positions, e.g., cowboy or doggie, that would keep some distance between hands and neck. Apple Dy, comes across as a miniature Alexa Ocampo, but with inferior acting ability that hopefully will improve. In my opinion the best acting performance is by Bo Ivann Lo as Anne; I'd like to see more of her. Unsurprisingly, this movie is not as good as its 2001 namesake.

Azi Acosta, is a high-end actress. She has decided that performing in Pinoy erotica is her profession, her life, her means to achieve her dreams and her happiness. She caters to all men, and possibly four of the 'Filipinas', who can afford Vivamax's price. She seems to be establishing herself as Vivamax's "S&M Queen". She has have long jet-black hair, she now has a certain amount of body fat (so restraints leave a skin impression), she can be graceful under torture, with strong facial expressions and here she look good in a kimono or kimono-style robe, thus fulfilling Oniroku Dan's criteria for a perfect actress. Azi's routine performance in this movie is disturbed when Jaclyn Jose, an ageing actress with a a painful past involving Ricky Lee's screenwriting, confronts Azi. This meeting will open the door to Azi's past that she has refused to confront. Her breasts are more prominent in the stomach-punching scene in this movie compared with the equivalent flat scene from Selina's Gold, released only ten months earlier, and truths that will test the values of these two women who have become victims of wealth and men. In the end, Azi and Jaclyn make acting choices that will define them not only as individuals but as women. This historical drama is set at the turn of the last millennium. It deals with working as a prostitute in Manilla during the first third, and attempting to cope with senility in Bataan, in the remaining two thirds. It is shorter than the usual Viva Films production, so it doesn't drag on as much, so if you like bold films with a bit of an S&M theme, it's worth watching.

The Little Nyonya is a composite of Ye Xian and Li Ziqi transplanted to Nanyang. Over seven decades, three families navigate through the minefield of their familial rivalries and sexual hang-ups. Not surprisingly, our heroine is attracted to a Briton. In the meantime a lot of dishes are cooked, much fabric embroided and crockery exchanged, all of it Peranakan. A change from the norm, well worth watching.

The film, The Promised Land or Rakuen, concerns three characters, who were in the vicinity of a fork in the road from where a young girl disappears, the only trace found of her, is her backpack. The first is Takeshi, a lonely young man traumatized by the bullying and violence he and his non-Japanese mother have endured from the locals. Suspicion falls on Takeshi, but Takeshi's mother provides him with a solid alibi. One of his few allies was the grandfather of the disappeared girl, but he turns against him. Twelve years later, a girl disappears near the same fork in the road. Takeshi freaks out calamitously, when he realizes he is a suspect in the recent disappearance. Zenjiro, a middle-aged beekeeper, lives peacefully with his pet dog near the forked road, while trying to cope with his wife's death. A year after the second disappearance occurred, he plans business to revitalize the town, although he not originally from the locality. As a consequence he is shunned by the local people and falls into depression, which leads to violence. Finally there is the flutist Tsumugi (Hana Sugisaki), who was with the first young girl just before her disappearance and is deeply hurt by the event. The two men interact with the attractive Tsumugi, thus she provides the thread that ties the stories together, and after moving away to the city following the second incident, she dutifully returns to her 'paradisiacal' hometown. Through its course, this ironically-named film addresses the decline of rural Japan and the traditional rural ostracism of outsiders, be they Japanese or not. Confusingly there are many shifts back and forth in time, and it's sometimes difficult to empathise with the two weird men, however the viewer should have no trouble persisting to see if things will turn out well for the enigmatic Tsumugi.

Considering it's meant to be a comedy, Jojo Rabbit lacks enough jokes to sustain the entertainment for nearly two hours. Perhaps that's just a sign of these dreary repressive age we are living in, where jokes are considered so potentially offensive, that writers fear to employ them. They did invoke irony though, for example the film opens with a Beatles song then later there is a scene reminiscent of one of those Beatles bonfires they would hold twenty years later in the Great Satan. And then Adolf didn't have strikingly blue eyes, whereas Elsa did. This was about as amusing as SNL, but unlike SNL it was "so white". I didn't notice any GIs of color or oriental Soviets and who is mandating stormtroopers and Gestapo officers have to be played by white men? If you really want to watch humorous drama with an Aotearoan touch, you'd be better off watching the Brokenwood Mysteries.