CATNIP (Kevin Dayrit, 2012)

-

There is a big difference between obscure and cluttered. CATNIP, I think is too concerned with trying to impress with visuals, and verbal metaphors and what-have-you that the story is lost in translation. Some parts are funny, others sentimental, and maybe even shocking, but as a whole the film fails neither to impress nor to express. There's too much going on and too loose a narrative for a film that runs just a few minutes past the one-hour mark. The experience is like a Gaspar Noe feature sans the shock value.

Introvert Liv (Lauren Young) who has a history of family abuse finds comfort in seemingly perfect Cieca (Maxene Magalona). Told via a series of flashbacks, segment gaps, and way too much figures of speech for one sitting, the story jumps from documentary to comedy to drama to psychological thriller. If for any comfort, Ramon Bautista's cameo is so outrageous you will remember it for eternity. 

Perhaps there's a target audience for this, what particular group of people though I am currently unaware. I am one against spoon-feeding the story to the audience, dotting the i's and crossing the t's, but give us something to work with. It's like a student whodunit play I saw at my University a couple of months ago where the list of perpetrators of a murder wasn't even narrowed to a shortlist. You just do not reference Samuel Beckett without understanding metaphysics.   

The film's music is kickass though.  

RATING: 2/5

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ANINO SA LIKOD NG BUWAN (Jun Lana, 2015)

-
Image
* English title "Shadow behind the Moon" The best term to describe Jun Lana's latest film would be a cinematic charade- a game of identities, of motives, of suppressed passions, and of uncertainty. Or the film equivalent of a Russian doll, if you will. "Anino sa Likod ng Buwan" only has three characters- husband and wife Nando (Anthony Falcon) and Emma (LJ Reyes) and military man Joel (Luis Alandy). What started as a seemingly routine banter among friends gradually and intensely escalated into an examination of society, where the definition of immorality is blurred during a time of insurgency.  And in fact, the film does discuss the subject of immorality from various paradigms. When does adultery become acceptable, and to whom? Is sexual liberation more heinous than murder? Why is immorality always a double standard? The film plays out the ideas in endless games. Or are they really games at all? Lana could have stopped there, but he didn...
Read more

TUHOG (Jeffrey Jeturian)

-
Image
Film within a film-structured movies are always interesting watch. Not only do they provide a much-needed deconstruction of form and content of cinema itself, but also that much-needed emotional punch a cinephile would surely love.  Like in BAD EDUCATION (Almodovar, 2004), we witness the characters tell the back story via montage, as if we are part of the cast of characters watching an actual movie. The form was successful in evoking pain and regret, and also of empathy. In TUHOG, Jeffrey Jeturian and screenwriter Bing Lao tackles sensational media in the Philippines, especially in cinema. The film opens as a film producer hears a pitch for a possible movie- a story of a grandfather who rapes his own granddaughter.  The director of the film soon after visits the victim of the crime, Floring (Ina Raymundo). Coercing both she and her mother, Perla (Irma Adlawan) to sell them the movie rights to their story, we witness as exploitation cinema unfolds. To think of it, capitaliz...
Read more

BIGKIS (Neal Tan, 2014)

-
Image
As an advocacy film, BIGKIS (INTERTWINED) gets its message across. The state of maternal healthcare in the Philippines is downright depressing, with mothers seated on the floor of public hospitals due to shortage of beds, medical equipment and hospital staff. The baby better be gaping through the birth canal before the mother receives serious medical attention.  Such social issue has been featured countless times in local documentaries and even in a feature film (2011's BAHAY BATA), but BIGKIS pushes the envelope further by bridging a connection between mother and child by means of breastfeeding, and in doing so, promoting breastfeeding in the process.  As a drama, the film tends to squeeze too much tragedy from the downtrodden lives of its characters that a lot of the dialogue feels staged for us to feel sorry for their countless miseries. Mariel (LJ Reyes), a teenage mother deals with an unwanted pregnancy and worse, the abandonment of her baby's father (Pancho ...
Read more