Amoeba (2025) Review:

 

       

Choo is a delinquent student at Confucian Girls School. Frustrated by school officials micromanaging their students at every turn, she pushes back by finding ways to fuck things up.

This draws her to fellow misfits Sofia Tay, Vanessa and Gina who hang out at construction sites. A talk w/ Sofia’s driver (and former Triad member) Uncle Phoon provides them with the next step: start a gang. It goes as well as you’d expect.

The film is set in Singapore.

Haven't seen a lot of Singaporean films. Only got into them recently and it's really just these two: "Eating Air" by Kelvin Tong & Jasmine Ng and "7 Stories". Saw Kelvin Tong's "The Maid" before that more than a decade ago. And that's it.

What I noticed is that these are all attempts to humanize Singapore's cold & shiny image by looking at it on a ground level and dealing with its imperfections. And what they would often lean on is the notion that Singapore is a fishing village and hawker haven forced into urbanization & rapid development because it had to be a country in 1965.

Obviously a young country that has to deal with a lot of shit & figure things out about itself.

The film reflects this as it captures Choo at that moment of unease, haunted by the ghosts of the past & the harshness of the future and meeting people who were there at her nation's birth.

But it goes a little further by addressing what these well-intended movies seem to skirt around: that Singapore is ruled by a repressive capitalist regime. Elephant in the room. Or shall we say...merlion?

That's the context we need, especially in terms of these characters and what they & their country are trying to reckon with. The way the film combats mythologization pushes it past Kelvin Tong & into Sonny Liew territory.

Outside of its brilliant discourse, this film is a tour de force. Director Siyou Tan stages the scenes like a veteran in her feature length debut & draws out a lot of mesmerizing images w/ DOP Neus Ollé. '90s-2000s coded in its sound & fury that I'm glad wasn't made in the '90s or 2000s where it would've ended up glorifying American hedonism against the 'stuck up' East, w/c isn't liberating.

It's all about asking the right questions.

- Carlo Cielo

Magellan (2025) Review:

 

The best thing that can be said about this movie is it doesn't glorify Magellan at all. If that's your concern, then you can strike that out.

This ain't no Jerrold Tarog brainrot where the white supremacist is invoked to blame the victim and gaslight the masses with.

Here, he's portrayed as a regular schmuck, a basic scumbag who is not only a product of his time, but a willing conscript of the greedy and corrupt since he doesn't know better.

Circumnavigated the globe not out of a sense of adventure or as a feat of human accomplishment, but because he was trying to avoid the business rivals of the powers-that-be that he was trying to suck up to. Spreading Christianity not out of faith but to win himself favors in the end. He's more of a salesman than a crusader who behaves like a gangster along with his posse the way he shook up the locals and marked the terrain.

He's also not above implementing the medieval backwardness of his country in his own ship, bringing in an executioner in case he needs to deal with sinners at sea.

His smallness is played to perfection by Gael Garcia Bernal who disappears into the role due to a genuine synthesis and collaboration between him and writer & director Lav Diaz, both of whom share a post-colonial point of view. You can tell they had the Global South in mind when they made this.

The rest of the whites would get this same treatment, including a maniacal Portuguese soldier who wants to use Malacca to 'choke the world'.

Hard-nosed realism the way I always knew our cinema is capable of doing since its harsh, documentarian turn when digital indies became a thing. Mixed results, yes, but it has brought a kind of ruthless Third World cinema that's specific to us. For all intents and purposes, we aren't afraid of searing discourse in our works.

You can see this in the pared down way with which it approaches its European period settings. A random corner on a street. No CGI and costume parties here.

Film is not always like this. The last 1/5th of the film is a bit shoddy and undercooked. But when it's superb, it truly feels like a PH filmmaker is standing alongside the likes of Wim Wenders & Akira Kurosawa.

Stuff's legit.

- Carlo Cielo

Bayan ng mga Dakila Vol. 1: Purity and Virtue

Lipad, Pinas, Lipad! Let PH soar!

Still available for only P500 (regular edition) and P1000 (hardcover premium edition). Just message the Shonenbat and/or Bayan ng mga Dakila FB pages.

Post-pandemic superhero series created & written by yours truly with art by Mik Fajardo, F. Maria Regalado and Patrick Rawwrr Enrique.

Weapons (2025)

Hollywood movies that I liked this year have very much kept with the Blumhouse trend and channeled its more righteous attributes. Sinners, for example, is in line with the incendiary and outspoken approach of Get Out and the other Jordan Peele films, while maintaining its own graphic novel-esque approach. There is also a lot in A24’s so-called 'elevated horror' that is worth emulating, with its harrowing art house take on chills, spills and kills. I like the fact that Zach Cregger’s Weapons isn't straight up horror. At least not like the Blumhouse/A24 kind that’s become a template to such a point it has straightjacketed a genre with rigid formalism, when it’s supposed to be messy. There's definitely a LOT of merit in that 2010s template. It encapsulates an era marked by claustrophobic geopolitical impunity since the War on Terror became a thing, with renditions, preemptive strikes and Abu Gharib foreshadowing the imperialist unpleasantness in Gaza, all of which have to be channeled to make the proper horror movie for the times. At least present the kind of nightmare realm that will be recognizable to kids. The Shallows. Get Out. Don't Breathe. The 2018 Halloween remake. Grim. Structured. Single or limited location. Siege and entrapment. With a deep and heavy feeling in the jump scares and kill scenes and a crunchiness to the violence that’s drenched in chiaroscuro light and shadow. Torture chamber in solitary confinement, forever under siege. All of these have since coalesced into a ‘formula’ to deliver this specific brand of horror in whatever context. You can slot in any situation, any story, any topic or metaconcern right in, and it will be a punchy and effective horror once all is said and done. A24 horror hems quite closely along this line, since it is of the same era, too. It’s only a bit more purple prose about it. This has become the genre standard. When mainstream audiences think horror these days, it has to look and sound and feel like THIS. But here's a thing: it's a formula, a template, and it can get bland and boring and lazy after a while. And it did. While Weapons does have the Blumhouse traits (chiaroscuro, limited location, high concept, crunchy violence and grim dark heavy sense of unease), it plays a bit fast and loose with it in ways that are so confident and assured that it’s not po faced about it all the time, and is more of boosted by a drunken love for high concept, cult horror and genre films. So it lets in some humor in its jump scares and kill scenes, albeit the pitch black kind. Admittedly, I was a bit bummed out at first, wishing it was tonally and formally similar to Sinners or the excellent Korean horror movie, Exhuma, but as it plunged headlong toits conclusion like a genocidal missile, its design became much more clear. There's a spontaneity in its approach, and it's fun to see a bit of camp in the proceedings before its bluntly righteous moment. The one we need. Which is to say this is less interested in that Blumhouse/A24 horror structure that we’ve come to expect, and more in drowning in a vast array of influences and basking in them, simulating what it’s like to read tons of Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Stephen King novels, comics, news and obscure macabre stuff and let all of that fry your brain to crispy perfection. Low brow and high brow. Cheap and big budget. Foreign and local. Post-millennial genre geekness for this dark and hyperactive children’s fable. Part of me wishes it went more geopolitical re: the victimization of kids by the fascist geriatrics, but we already have Iran and Superman for that. The other part of me wishes it was more of a bizarre true crime thing. But it's fine. It's all good. There are weapons. - Carlo Cielo