Cinema is still around the corner, and I’m planning on coming up with acidreflects merch to support this site.
BUT FIRST, COFFEE.
One can’t start the day properly without having the most important item first – coffee! Even if it’s the end of days.This Coffee Before Comet humorous doodle series is up on my etsy and redbubble stores, which are now available for puchase.
ETSY/ PRINTIFY. These comfy everyday clothing are of top-quality fabric and craftsmanship, so you from Printify so you know they’ll last long. These clothes are available now at my etsy store penpendigital.
Dino Coffee Sport Gray
Dino Coffee White
Dino Coffee White
Dino Coffee Sport Gray
Meteor and Dino Sweater White
Meteor and Dino Sweater Pepper
Meanwhile, home items and knickknacks featuring the same dino design are up on penpen at redbubble.
Just came from seeing the special anniversary cinema release of The Lord of the Rings The Return of the King Extended Edition here in the Philippines, the culmination of several weeks of releasing the entire trilogy again in cinemas that began last February.
I actualy have the Extended Edition DVDs with the multiple Appendices, so this was a special treat to see the Extended Editions onscreen. I’ve seen the trilogy countless times, but not in a cinema since the original threatrical release back in 2002-2004 (released January here, and not at Christmas time like in the US.)
Looking back, the trilogy still stands as a monumental feat of filmmaking, storytelling and craftsmanship to this day, more than twenty years since. A few notes that come with age, as the technology of visual effects have changed: Gollum would have looked even more realistic and embedded (or blended) within the frame better today than he did then. The speed of the movement of the Army of the Dead as they charged into Gondor could have felt more natural today. Two Two Towers had choppy editing, TBH. But the color grading of ROTK remains magical, especially when the colors start popping out in the end montages, in contrast to the bleakness of Sam and Frodo’s journey across Mordor. And the music – Howard Shore’s magnum opus is just glorious to hear in the cinema.
The series was one of the earliest titles that I reviewed during this long hobby of writing about films.
Back in the day, I wrote my reviews for our tabloid version of the Metro in Filipino, as the primary readership were workers and students about to begin their day. I had to simplify film language and discuss the review into concepts that could easily be digested by ages 10 to 70 in less than ten minutes of travel time. Sometimes I would be fortunate to have an entire page for the review, a few times only a fourth of a page.
For ROTK in particular, a colleague had already submitted an English review for our regular broadsheet, which automatically had to appear in our tabloid. Which meant that I had to write something different not just in language but also in form, to break the duplicity in purpose.
What a journey it has been. And I’m here, still doing the same.
It’s a very tricky situation, the business of adapting the page to the screen. What to keep, what to take out, should it be literal, should it be revised. The best ones understand the core of the material, but also understand the audio visual medium of cinema. We’ve all heard stories of the struggles to adapt a book to the screen, especially from sci-fi and fantasy titles: David Lynch’s Dune (1984) (heck, Jodorowsky’s Dune), Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021), Miramax’s suggestion to Peter Jackson to just make one two-hour Lord of the Rings movie. And then we have Andy Weir’s The Martian, a rare commercial and critical success on page and at the boxoffice. That same screenwriter Drew Goddard understood the assignment and deftly translated Andy Weir’s 2021 laboratorial novel Project Hail Mary for the silver screen, visualized into a spectacle by the directing duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. The result is not only a proper adaptation fit for the IMAX screen, but an audacious work that brings the awe back in space mission cinema last experienced in Gravity (2013.)
To fans of the author and the book who expect a sort of The Martian 2.0 (or even those who preferred not to have another Martian) where the main character conducts a barrage of sci-fi procedural McGyverism in order to disentangle himself from the science-problem-of-the-moment (that made The Martian competence porn The Pitt on Mars) – Hail Mary on screen removes almost all of that. Which I liked. Other fans are free to disagree.
SOMESPOILERS AHEAD to readers of the book and to non-readers alike.
Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up in a spaceship not knowing who he is or why he is there. In the course of poking around the ship, Grace experiences flashbacks that tell his journey.
Sometime in the near future, scientists from around the world discover that an alien substance is eating up the sun’s heat, with only thirty years projected before earth is plunged into darkness and all life is extinguished. An international team has been assembled to solve the problem, with the former chief of the European Space Agency Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) in charge with absolute authority.
Stratt descends upon a nondescript junior high school to recruit science teacher Grace, on the strength of his background on molecular biology and doctoral research paper on non-water related lifeforms. Grace is one of those cool high school teachers whom the students like – in part due to his deftness to explain science concepts in ways that his “kids” would understand and appreciate. Grace is intruiged by the tiny creatures called astrophages eating up the sun’s heat and decides on the spot to join Stratt’s team, if only slightly reluctant as he confesses no expertise on any scientific field. Stratt begs to disagree, but she has no time for small talk.
Back aboard the spacecraft Hail Mary, Grace remembers how he met his crewmates (Yao, played by Ken Leung, and Ilyukhina, played by Milana Vayntrub) both of whom, sadly, never woke up like he did during the spaceflight. He sends them off in a touching and heartfelt space funeral, even though he (and us, the audience) have barely known them. Gosling sells this scene really well.
The Project (or mission) was to send a three-person scientific team to study a distant star Tau Ceti that was not infected by the mysterious astrophages, and find ways based on this new data to stop the phages from completely eating our own solar system’s sun before it’s too late. But such was the distance between Earth and Tau Ceti that the mission was deemed suicidal (one-way) and only probes (like space drones they have dubbed “beetles”) will travel back to earth with the information that the mission has gathered, hopefully with a solution. It’s a long shot with a slim chance of success (hence, Hail Mary) but uninfected Tau Ceti is the only hope that our scientists have.
Without the pilot Yao and the ship engineer Ilyukhina, Grace is left to continue the mission by himself. However, as soon as Hail Mary arrives at the Tau Ceti system, a nearby object decides to blip itself to fly next to the Hail Mary. Soon the “Blip-A” has attached itself with the Hail Mary with a strange umbilical tunnel to Hail Mary. At the far end of that tunnel, separated only by a layer of glass-like panels, Grace meets a spider-like five-armed rock creature whom he nicknames Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz).
Through a series of tests and interactions, Grace and Rocky develop a system of communication based on sound, but also a way to travel between spaceships, despite the biological differences. Rocky is an excellent engineer from the planet Erid, and they can build almost anything, even though their technology is slightly less sophisticated than human tech. Grace learns that Eridani’s sun is also dying due to the astrophages just like Earth’s, and his planet sent them out to find a solution in Tau Ceti, exactly similar to Project Hail Mary’s mission.
Except that Rocky’s original crew of 23 companions have all died under conditions that Rocky could not understand. With a common goal, the Earthling and the Eridanian develop a buddy friendship to use their knowledge of science to solve the mystery of the astrophages together and find a way to stop the microbes from destroying life in their respective solar systems. The scenes between Grace and Rocky are earnest and genuine. Maybe the production’s decision to use a puppet instead of a CGI creature helped Gosling in relating with Rocky’s character on-cam. Rocky is adorabe as a puppy, annoying as a roommate and hyper active as a child. In many ways the creature serves like a robot sidekick in another space cowboy show. Rocky as a character is like an adorable talking pet robot, and that’s largely due to the book. I would want a Rocky of my own right now, thank you.
The question in this story is not whether they find a cure to the astrophage cosmo-demic. It’s whether the buddy aliens (Grace and Rocky of course) are going to survive long enough to save each of their planets. Cue tissues.
Gosling is no stranger to mission to outer space films, having played US astronaut Neil Armstrong at the height of the cold war in Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018). So he already has had fake zero-gravity and ‘spaceship piloting” experience. Reading the book, the sarcastic science teacher Rylan Grace did sound like Gosling – the type of unassuming hero hinding under a facade of science nerd that fits Gosling to a T. Plus, his Academy Award pedigree is a reminder that those sad eyes of his can definitely convey depth and emotion.
I wish the movie Stratt was a little colder like the book Stratt, I found the dragon lady act a lot funnier that way. Movie Stratt evoked a weird sexual tension with Grace, which I found a little off. No question that the talented Ms. Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest) can pull it off, so maybe the “warmer” Stratt is a version by the fimmakers.
As I have mentioned, the film removes a large portion of the procedurals in the book, but in several ways show a shorthand visual that reference the source. The entire thing about nitrogen-resistant astrophages in the atmosphere of Venus is gone, but the culture of Taumoebas is shown though shortcutted. Developing the language translation is shortcutted, no base-six counting nor explanations why the Eridians have yet to discover time dilations or relativity. There are a few minor changes too, like giving Rocky a partner back home in Erid (I don’t remember that from the book, so if it was there, my bad.)
The entire astrophage retrieval scene in the atmosphere of Adrian was both visually stunning and palpably thrilling. There was complete silence (of the bated breathing type) in the cinema when that scene ended.
Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace in PROJECT HAIL MARY, from Amazon MGM Studios.
Photo credit: Jonathan Olley
It’s a fantastic adaptation with a major handicap – that beyond its “we’re all in this together to save our planets” message, the film could benefit from a little more depth. No philosophical debate between science and religion like Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1997) or alien as a christ-like redeemer warning humans against self-destruction in The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). Maybe I’ve lost some of the symbolisms in the xenonites or Blip-A. Maybe it is just about the amazing journey of two different species together. Just maybe, something not so bleak, for once.
While the book explores a few science ideas that warrant discussion outside the page: thoughts on a shared evolutionary ancestor between Earthlings and Eridians from cosmic panspermia, or Grace’s doctoral thesis that got him the Hail Mary gig in the first place – life that doesn’t require water, H20, the film is about My Buddy from Another Planet.That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just not very deep. The main draw to an Andy Weir story is competence porn from a relatable scientist who makes science experiments of varying complexity for survival not only humorous, but accessible. For this story, maybe “fist my bump” in the face of overwhelming odds is the philosophical message, and that is enough. In the process of adapting page to the screen, the filmmakers of PHM seem to have decided to let go of a huge chunk of the science procedurals to make it less hard science, but also give enough time to amp up the emotions. In so doing, the makers removed a large part of what made it an Andy Weir story while making it more resonant. It was a choice, for sure. I liked it, but it’s less Andy Weir. I say it’s a good adaptation, while this may also sound like it’s a bad one.
A minor gripe is the inclusion of gospel music at the credits, which had no place in the book as well as the film. It was as if some religious interest would not let a sci-fi film go without any mention of Jesus. Honestly, it sticks out like a sore thumb even though the music is lively and uplifting. I’m serious.
I would even dare say that Project Hail Mary as a Best Picture contender in next year’s awards season is an understatement. It is too good to simply say that. It excels in enough cinematic elements to push it to the pinnacle of awards contention. Editing, Music, Sound, Visual Effects, Cinematography, Daniel Pemberton’s musical score. and Gosling’s acting. We’ve seen some Best Picture hopefuls with fewer category achievements.
Somehow, Goddard, Lord and Miller have turned a hard science fiction story about saving planets and their inhabitants into a relatable buddy film that simply overflows with optimism and heart, no matter what lifeform or atmosphere. They may have removed some of the experiments, but they also made sure that teacher Ryland Grace is kept, in a package equally amazing whether seen under a microscope or through a petrovascope. Such audacity to amaze, amaze, amaze.
Project Hail Mary is in Philippine cinemas March 18th nationwide, from Columbia Pictures.
Images and link courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
Saw Project Hail Mary on IMAX and it looked great on a very large screen.
A24’s pop psychological thriller Mother Mary starring Anne Hathaway will hit Philippine cinemas on April 22, 2026, this was recently announced by the Philippine distributor CreaZion Studios.
Hathaway (Interstellar, The Devil Wears Prada) stuns as the titular global pop icon Mother Mary whose long-buried wounds rise to the surface when she reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer Sam Anselm (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Michaela Coel) on the eve of her comeback performance. The film asks, how much of your soul are you willing to lose for fame and vanity?
(TBH this synopsis isn’t giving much. – me)
Mother Mary is written and directed by David Lowery (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story). The filmmaker takes viewers to a musical journey in the backdrop of an unlikely reunion between former friends, while exploring the haunting effect of long-lost formidable connections. The movie features original music by Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs, who also appears in the film.
The singles “Burial”, performed by Hathaway; and “My Mouth is Lonely For You” by Twigs, will be released in March. Meanwhile, the film’s digital soundtrack, featuring seven songs, will drop on Hathaway’s music streaming accounts in April.
Mother Mary also showcases an impressive cast that includes Hunter Schafer (Euphoria, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), Kaia Gerber (Babylon, Shell) and FKA Twigs.
Mother Mary is the second A24 title CreaZion Studios is bringing to Filipino audiences this year. It has recently announced BACKROOMS with a Philippine release date on June 3. The acquisition of these highly-anticipated films is part of the company’s #KwentoMoTo mission to make “Human Stories and Human Experiences” accessible to Filipino and Southeast Asian audiences.
“Whether you are a fan of elevated genres or you simply want to have a good time watching a movie, CreaZion Studios got you covered with an exciting lineup of film offerings that can be enjoyed on the best screen and great surround sound possible, in cinemas near you,” said RJ San Agustin, President & CEO of CreaZion Studios.
“By bringing in the most disruptive and talked-about films to the country and Southeast Asian (SEA) region, CreaZion Studios hopes to bridge human stories and experiences to this side of the world,” he added.
Press announcement from CreaZion Studios. Trailer link and image from CreaZion Studios.
It’s International Book Day and I’m rushing to finish Project Hail Mary before the press screening soon.
Meanwhile, here’s the trailer to the Phil Lord and Chris Miller adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary which will come out in cinemas in the Philippines on March 18. PG. Distributed by Columbia Pictures Philippines from Amazom MGM Pictures.
It’s par for course for the seventh installment of this teen slasher series, and a worthy return for the original queen of the series, Neve Campbell.
However it is impossible not to mention the calls to boycott this film, which in the current world climate of fuckeroo, actually have some basis. Let me explain.
Filmdom has been rocked recently from Berlinale to the BAFTAs refusing to make categorical political statements on what has been happening in the real world. From a large group of artists such as Tilda Swinton and Javier Bardem calling for the Berlinale to end its institutional silence on the genocide in Gaza, to Paul Thomas Anderson’s refusal to talk politics after his film which has racial politics written all over it won the top prize at the British awards.
The ongoing campaign to boycott Scream 7 comes from the sacking of its lead after her posts on social media, resulting in a $500k rewrite of the screenplay, and the $7M price to bring back the original queen of Scream, Neve Campbell who skipped Scream VI due to a pay dispute.
If we just go by the film on its own, here’s the deal. SPOILERS AHEAD.
In the seventh installment of the anti-teen slasher teen slasher, Ghostface goes on a killing spree once again, this time targeting Sidney’s daughter Tatum (Isabel May).
Sidney has been peacefully living her new life in Pine Grove, Indiana for some time with her husband Mark Evans (Joel McHale) and her children (mentioned, but only Tatum appears – leaving room for further spinoffs related to Sidney.) Sidney owns a coffee shop, Mark is the chief of police, while Tatum is in high school. News of a double murder in the original Macher house in Woodsboro reaches Pine Grove, alerting Sidney. Sidney is almost overprotective of Tatum, and this dynamic strains their mother and daughter relationship – so goes this treatment of the story.
Sidney receives a chilling call from someone who appeared to be Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) threatening Tatum. She rushes to her daughter’s school, only to find Ghostface looming under the body of one of Tatum’s high school friends, Hannah (Mckenna Grace). Sidney and the police lose Ghostface in the chase.
Deciding to make a run for safety, the Evans prepare to leave when Ghostface attacks them in their home. Mark is injured, and Sidney and Tatum barely escape if not for the accidental arrival of Gale. Ghostface is unmasked to be a former psychiatric patient who seemed too random for Gale and Sidney. While the two investigate, the teens – Tatum and her friends, now joined by Gale’s enterprising young interns, try to solve the murders together themselves. But they get attacked by Ghostface too. Towards the end, it is up to mother and daughter cooperating together to put an to end this cycle of murders. Kevin Williamson, writer and producer of previous Scream installments, takes the helm to direct.
Neve Campbell, left, and Director Kevin Williamson on the set of Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s “Scream 7.”
Neve Campbell stars in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s “Scream 7.”
As Scream installments go, this edition isn’t short on showing gore and violence in the murders of Ghostface’s victims. It manages to elicit just enough tension to make a few scenes suspenseful. The chase sequence around Pine Grove’s commercial district was interesting in the sense that the streets were completely empty at night (well there was a curfew in effect) but I was thinking maybe this is true in rural America. The school theater stage is once again used as set piece in Scream 7, previously explored in Scream 2. Even though a final girl is expected in the mechanics of this franchise, the audience is not given any clue whether mother or daughter or both would be the last woman standing.
I wish it were wittier, through, that’s one ingredient that didn’t come back from the original. For further nostalgic effect, characters from the previous installments make cameo appearances to haunt Sidney. It was easy to guess who Ghostface was early in the proceedings, but of course there’s always a surprise that gets dumped towards the end.
As Scream installments go, this whodunit falls short on the inventiveness of plot. Maybe because the makers have either run out of ideas, or those ideas were in the story that was scrapped along with Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega’s exit.
Even removing the politics involved in the removal of Barrera and Ortega, Scream 7 is not without scrutiny, with one POC in the cast practically serving the white characters food. Because that just is? Or how the murders are still a circus conducted by news media? Speaking of media, ne minor observation: Gale’s apprentice Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is supposed to be this rookie who is very eager to outgrow Gale’s shoes and become a star reporter herself but is depicted as fumbling in front of the camera when given the chance. This doesn’t track in real life, as Mindy belongs to the Tiktok age – she would have been at ease and natural in front of the camera (in fact she would not have been apprenticing for Gale at all but instead do things on her own) as someone who belongs to the generation that is constantly online.
But horror is political by its very nature. It is a presentation of that thing which social norm rejects or refuses. From the madman who decided to play god in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), to the horrors of the atomic bomb in the original 1954 Godzilla by Ishiro Honda, to race relations and the commentary against mindless consumerism in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968.) The first Scream commented on slasher films that came before it, juxtaposing media that presented massacre as entertainment. 12
“To riff on a George Orwell quote: no literary, film, or artistic mode or genre is free from political bias. That said, the political baggage of horror is considerable, and oftentimes problematic. Many a smart person has argued, and convincingly so, that the horror genre is a conservative/reactionary one, too often with the ugliest political shades on display: misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, ruling-class reimaginings of the other as invading monsters. From Freud’s uncanny to the gender politics of the final girl, perhaps no other genre is as fraught with such political anxiety.” – Paul Tremblay, “The H Word: The Politics of Horror”3
Scream 7 while riding on the coattails of its history tones down all of these, seemingly running out of any new idea to permute its dissection of the slasher film – having done so in the last six installments. It’s like Wiliamson gave up on adding layers to the mythos within the franchise and just opted for the neighbor because, as one Gale Weathers groupie says in the film, “it has to be someone from Woodsboro.” OR, that the production did have an idea to add to this installment, but had to abandon it because the star chose to speak up for Palestine, and the studio didn’t want any of that.
So for those calling for or opting to boycott Scream 7 for political reasons are completely justified to bring politics back into the discussion despite efforts by the studio to steer away from discourse (worse, firing its actor just becasue she voiced her opinion.)
If you do choose to see it, think of it as a worthy return for Sidney and the long history the audience has had with Ms. Campbell and this franchise. Seven screams for Neve.
But the real screams continue in Gaza. Free Palestine.
What’s the difference between a well-dressed thief and a billionaire? The thief knows exactly whose money he’s taking.
That’s not the plot of our movie this week but a crude joke about thieves and billionaires that I asked AI to help me make because in this story, established criminals and criminals in the establishment collide in Bart Layton’s smooth and satisfying L.A. heist thriller Crime 101.
Chris Hemsworth ditches his Oz accent for North American to play the well-dressed jewel thief 101 Robber who is responsible for a string of high-profile robberies in southern California along Highway 101. Davis (Hemsworth) is a methodical professional, scrubbing himself clean at the beginning of each robbery operation, operating on personally-set rules that leave zero trace of evidence that the police can’t work on. But even the most meticulous planner will hit a situation that either chaos or fate could have conjured.
A random encounter (in GenZ parlance an “organic encounter”) with the low-key Maya (Monica Barbaro) intrigues Davis for a life of normalcy and intimacy removed from his crminal grind. He refuses a job from his handler aptly named Money (a very raspy aged Nick Nolte, whose appearance onscreen felt like the sighting of a rare deer in the wild), who wasn’t pleased with Davis’ decision. Naturally, Money would have plans of his own.
Halle Berry is Sharon, an experienced insurance broker who is beginning to doubt whether pandering to the whims of the ultra rich is worth all the moral degredation surrounding them. Her firm insured the jeweller that Davis robbed at the beginning of the film, so they tell Sharon take the victim to the police for polygraph, basically to exonerate the firm for having to pay off the victim’s claims. Little did Sharon know that Davis has been planning to recruit her for a heist involving one of her billionaire clients.
Mark Ruffalo is Leo, the veteran police detective who has been investigating the 101 Robber for some time. The scruffy, unkempt detective is the complete opposite of Davis. His superiors just want him to deliver what they need, his partner Tillman (Corey Hawkins) just want him to toe the line. To not rock the boat that keeps everone in the system secure. Even his personal life is not in shape, a divorce from wife Angie looming (remember Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Single White Female? her.) In one scene she admits to cheating on Lou.
In this sun-kissed town, everybody seems to be on the road blankly staring at the billboard that asks, “Is it time to live your best life?” to the tune of Summer of ’69 by Bryan Adams.
When Sharon meets with Lou about the jewel robbery insurance, she drops a a nugget of wisdom that gives Leo the clue to finding the elusive 101 Robber.
And then there’s the wildcard, Ormon (Barry Keoghan) – the evil opposite of Davis. Brash, impulsive and prone to temper and violence, Ormon is Money’s alternate to the jobs that Davis has refused. All we know about Ormon is that his father was really good at this same job before. Keoghan gives Ormon such intensity that his mere appearance onscreen is enough signal for tension.
A thief, an accomplice, a detective, the wild card, and one multi-million dollar heist all come together for that chance to live their best lives other than the one they are living right now.
Davis (Chris Hemsworth, right) and Lou (Mark Ruffalo, left) in CRIME 101.
It’s not a painstaking set-up by Layton, adapted from the novella of the same title by Don Winslow published fairly recently in 2021. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t compare. I do not know if the subtlety in politics was there to begin with. But Layton’s screen adaptation is very cinematic. Characters are frequently lensed to be isolated, solitary – in a city full of people struggling to survive the day, it’s to each their own. Scenes build up, and then flow seamlessly into the next with clever match edits or through overlapping dialogue. Scenes weave in and out smoothly. It’s a deliberate pace, there’s no palpable intent to create excitement. But the story does build up nicely, especially in the final moments while the heist is being conducted.
It’s most striking feature is is cold, slick look, designed for a reason, from the eye of an outsider (Layton is British.) Even though the film exposes the grit and cracks of the L.A. social landscape, the film’s look is not gritty but slick, as if to say that no matter the sophistication and gloss and the designer blingbling, dirty is dirty from the inside out. Layton lays this out in the open, though with finesse rather than pulling out an explicit exposition: the billionaire has Spanish-speaking help, Sharon and other women are treated as subjects of male whimsy, those at the bottom of the food chain have no right to go against the flow. Just enough inserts here and there to subtly jab at The Establishment that has everyone under it in a chokehold, politics that the film has veiled under a veneer of cool, blue satin cinematography.
Suffice it to say that the audience is treated to pitch-perfect performances by the entire cast (I’ve already mentioned Keoghan’s visceral demeanor) but notably by a fiery Berry towards the end that gives her Sharon more substance as a character; Ruffalo who is just scruffy enough to tell us how down to earth his Leo is, but far from Jackson Lamb (of Slow Horses) -level of disgusting detective. Nolte, too, even with the short screen exposure. Only veterans of some magnitude can pull off screen presence like that.
The story isn’t particularly unique, nor its characters. It’s not a procedural like Ocean’s 11. It is unmistakeably reminiscent of the gritty ’90s LA crime thriller Heat from Michael Mann. But somehow it’s a pleasant diversion from the regular Hollywood fare of today that thrive on constant escalation and hyper stimulated action edited to the tune of pop music. For once, here’s a movie for grown ups that doesn’t pander to the four-quadrant audience. It just is a crime suspense movie.
So grab your can of cold beer (or glass of Merlot, or scotch) sit back, relax and enjoy the smooth ride.
Crime 101 is now out in Philippine cinemas from Columbia Pictures.
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