Tag / michelle yeoh

by Jaime Rebanal

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Review: So Much Said, So Little Time

✯✯✯✯½

The directing duo Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) make their second feature film together with Everything Everywhere All at Once, whose title may just as well be an apt descriptor for what the viewers can expect themselves to experience from watching it. In fact, a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once seems to try and reach out as many people, going from those who were fascinated by the concept of the multiverse to film lovers, and maybe even to the inner child in most of us, for the ride that’s provided goes through most facets of life, from the happy to the mundane, while being thoughtful and ever so frantic. But underneath all of that, there’s something so much sweeter. If anything, it best states the film as a labour of love, all in a package that’s only set to overflow.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Crazy Rich Asians is an Important Step Forward for Asian Representation in Hollywood

✯✯✯½

Kevin Kwan’s novel was a satire written with the intent of showing what life is like in contemporary Asia to a North American audience, so how exactly could a story of excess translate onto the screen by a Hollywood studio? If you’re bringing in Jon M. Chu, the director of Jem and the Holograms and two of the Step Up movies of all people, it’s easy to be skeptical of the result – yet even the expected turns out to be satisfactory. I wasn’t exactly sold from the marketing of Crazy Rich Asians because it looks like just about any other Hollywood romantic comedy, just an Asian-centric one if anything – but maybe that also might have been what I needed for the time being. Yet given what the film stands for, being the first film by a major Hollywood studio directed by an Asian-American to feature a predominantly Asian cast, there’s also something more admirable underneath the surface of Crazy Rich Asians. And of course, speaking as a viewer of Asian descent (my parents are born in the Philippines but we have spent our lives living in Canada), it also felt nice just to see that a story of our very own had its chance to be told.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Morgan – Review

✯

There was a time I remember when Ridley Scott had managed to create one of the most unsettling and thus one of the greatest horror films ever made by playing upon the fear of the unknown with the original Alien film. I’m not even sure if his son, Luke Scott, had gotten a grasp on what it was that made Alien a genre defining work just as it did, because there’s a lot here that almost rings from the beats that made Alien as effective as it was; only numbed down as a result of its attempts to reach out at pseudo-philosophy almost as if it were aping on Alex Garland’s Ex Machina from a year prior. It’s almost like a diet mix of both Alien and Ex Machina in the very worst sense possible, because there’s no thrill to be found within the action they present nor is there anything insightful to come about: Morgan is just a film that lies dead in the water all around.

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