The Wily Filipino

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other #1.

I stopped calling movies slow a long time ago, but Ato Bautista's Blackout is sloooow. A psychological thriller about an alcoholic landlord (nicely played by Robin Padilla, complete with greasy hair and ugly glasses) prone to blackouts, the film could use faster pacing to communicate the main character's rising panic -- either that, or the turgidity is meant to represent Padilla's alcohol-addled mind. In any case, it's a bit of a slog, and Bautista squanders the opportunity to mess with the audience's heads: there's some promising scenery-fiddling early in the film that I thought would lead to a good "Can You Spot the Difference?" game, but unfortunately not. Instead we get a more conventional "Is This Alcoholic Delirium, Or Is This Really Happening?"

Lee Yoon-Ki's Ad Lib Night was easily the best film I'd seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival (after Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth). It's a rather moving character study, but I was caught off guard by the initial almost-comic premise: a young woman is stopped in the street by two strange men who ask her to do a favor -- pretend to be the estranged daughter of an old man at his deathbed. Surprisingly, she agrees, and off the film goes, as it segues imperceptibly from an emphasis on the impenetrable protagonist to the harder work of familial mourning and squabbling.