DEATH OF TRADITIONAL CINEMA

Heavens spare us from another fantasy movie featuring love triangles, which goes to show that its target audience, the tween crowd is all about crushes and sorcery, and damsels in distress- which is all right for a moment, but not all the time.  Unfortunately, once you've seen THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES, there is no unseeing it.  Set in modern-day New York City, teenager Clary Fray (the lovely Lily Collins) begins seeing people, or rather otherworldly beings that no one else can see. Her room is filled with drawings of a single insignia, and soon enough her mother Jocelyn (Lena Headey, or Cersei Lannister for us nerds) gets abducted by two hulking men. Obviously they are trying to reach Clary.  Then a guy named Jace Wayland (Jamie Campbell Bower) enters the picture, looking like he stormed out of a punk rock group, or a denim commercial. From the surface, we can already tell Jace is the dashing prince, and Clary is the damsel in distress, and t...

Michael Bay is back in Miami, and we love him when his setting is in Miami. BAD BOYS and BAD BOYS 2 remind us that a genuine filmmaker is somewhere inside Michael Bay, enough to forget that he wasted our money and intellect with the TRANSFORMERS sequels.  Bay shoots Miami beautifully, with his aerial shots and his panoramic sweep of the skyline just before dawn. Watching PAIN AND GAIN reminded me a lot of BAD BOYS (BAD BOYS is one of the best action flicks out there), what with the language, the humor, the editing, and the attitude. Okay, so Bay is known for excessive everything- too much violence, stylized shots, scoring, you name it. In PAIN AND GAIN there is an excess of exposition during the first half of the movie that the pacing drags like a math problem. But the speed picks up once things spiral out of control. I did not expect the film to be this wild, and the characters, despite the jokes are surprisingly dark and demented, okay maybe just Mark Wahlberg's ...

As perhaps the most-anticipated horror film of the year given the amount of buzz it generated, and the numerous mentions that daily appear on my Facebook newsfeed (not including the incidental office conversations of co-workers), THE CONJURING may look like another haunted house movie given its facade, yet strong performances from its leads and a director (James Wan) known for effectively spinning quite an effective suspense yarn make it worth the trip to the cinema. A haunted house. Check. A family moving in. Check. A pair of paranormal experts. Check. A deadly secret. Check. THE CONJURING, for what it's worth is not the best horror movie out there, enough to be leagued with THE EXORCIST, or POLTERGEIST, yet this two hour frightfest centers more on our imagination, by means of creating a chilling atmosphere and slowly unveiling the horror one by one. The scares may be predictable from start to finish (at least some of them are), but with the amount of effo...

That feeling you get when you should have watched the short film first, and saved yourself 100 minutes of anticipating for nothing. MAMA, produced by "the" Guillermo Del Toro is based on the short film with the same name by Andy and Barbara Muschietti. Andy directs, and Barbara produces for the full-length version, and it's quite hard to summarize the story without spoiling the twist that has been the cliche of horror cinema since the dawn of time. Of course, we see Del Toro in the poster, and we immediately go for it, the same way that Spielberg, Scorsese, and James Cameron makes us grab our wallets faster than you can say, "popcorn, please!" MAMA finds Oscar-nominee Jessica Chastain's Annabel (ZERO DARK THIRTY) playing adoptive mother to two abandoned children (Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nelisse) after years of isolation in a remote cabin. Her husband, Lucas (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau of TV's GAME OF THRONES) is uncle to the two girls, and bo...

QUICK CHANGE is a satire of sorts, a peek into what madness has become of Filipinos' obsession with outer beauty, and at the same time a character study of a middle-aged transsexual trying to fit in a world slowly crumbling around her. Played with comic timing and utmost sincerity by Mimi Juareza, the lead character Dorina acts as the means for catharsis. She has an infidel lover (played by Jun Jun Quitana), an age that cannot be denied and cannot seem to withstand competition from prettier and younger gays, and ironically, an underground cosmetic surgery business in peril of one day catching up with her.  In a macro view, Dorina sees it all while being a part of a cruel social phenomena herself. She gives collagen injections to gays who want to buff up their cheeks, or their breasts (and even guys who want to enlarge their "asset"), but at the end of the day she is still in need of acceptance as a woman, or rather as a human being. She understands the demand...