Movies

[halfcactus]

Saw Indah and the Spirits and Some Nights I Feel Like Walking last month and the rest this week, I guess because I was in the mood for movies this week.

Indah and the Spirits (2024)

I thought I was a ghost? Ghosts don’t need friends, do they?

Indonesian-American short film about grief and identity with music as the primary medium for storytelling. Very student project vibes. The sounds are very interesting! Traditional instruments meet punk rock music, quite appropriate for a rebellious art student who's grieving her grandmother. Also features the Balinese folk song Putri Cening Ayu which Google tells me is commonly sung as a lullaby.

IMO, would’ve been more effective if Yuda, the spirit, spoke Indonesian but I suspect the actor + writer aren’t fluent enough to pull it off. (Watched this via QWOCFF 2025)

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Some Nights I Feel Like Walking (2024)

Filipino movie about sex work, queerness, communities, and bodies—bodies to lose, to brand, to reclaim, to return, and to bury.

PLOT: Zion, a teenage runaway new to the trade, crosses paths with Uno and his gang of streetwalkers and joins them in their journey to take a friend's dead body back to the province. Except, of course, that this is Metro Manila and the process entails hopping from jeepney to taxi to bus with a suspiciously large bag.

The first half of the movie was great! The shaky cam makes it feel like you yourself are following the characters as they walk through the muggy night and spill into the mall. The city feels alive and dangerous. The styling makes it easy to tell the boys apart. Midway through, the movie floats away from the realism and takes surreal and heavyhanded metaphorical turns which I thought exposed the lack of groundwork in the writing. Something is learned, but nothing is truly changed. The parting shot was worth it, though, consolidating the PoV by inviting the spectator to participate in skinship rituals.

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青蛇 | Green Snake (1993)

Excellent take on the White Snake legend that questions what it means to be human and to be right; Green Snake discovers that to live as a human is to exist in a man's world and finds it wanting. Stars Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong.

I made a GIFset here.

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Gitling | Hyphen (2023)

A movie that's mostly about movies, and making them. This movie has color-coded subtitles since dialogue is in five languages (Hiligaynon, Japanese, English, Tagalog, and a made-up language).

PLOT: Japanese filmmaker Makoto gets invited to a film festival in Bacolod City. There he meets Jamie, a Filipino woman who was hired to translate for him and add subtitles to his film. The last twenty minutes of his film are silent, which prompt Jamie and Makoto to talk about their respective languages—Makoto's, which is silence, and Jamie's own language that she made up during her Tolkien phase. And the more they talk about language, the more they talk about themselves.

Personally I found the dialogue and writing too navel-gaze-y and lacking in substance (to be honest they give me war flashbacks of the time I was surrounded by movie hipsters), but they're elevated by the themes, the setting, and the synergy of the characters and actors working through multiple languages. I also found the color-coding pedantic but inconsistent; if you're going to count English loanwords in Filipino as English words, shouldn't you also count English loanwords in Japanese as English words...??? It just contradicts my own relationship with / understanding of language. Not to mention the subs were too small to read, but IDK if anyone other than me was having that problem.

Really enjoyed watching this with my mom, though! She's usually not into talk-y movies, but having her hometown be featured lovingly and hearing her native language spoken had her riveted.

I think this movie does work as a movie about movies. It's not shy about its WKW influences and I love how one of its takeaways is the use of food in storytelling. 10/10 food scenes, 10/10 ending scene

I made a GIF set (mostly of food) here.

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Saving Sally (2016)

Animated Filipino film about a comics nerd who needs to diversify his media diet and read more shoujo manga, honestly.

Interestingly enough most of the dialogue in this is in English, which adds to the feeling of distance from reality.

The animation and sets were too good for the script, which did feel representative of the pop culture zeitgeist of the early 2010s (Scott Pilgrim, 500 Days of Summer, the era of "nice guys" and nerds being uncool). The side characters ended up being more fun than the main characters who were written with geekiness as a shorthand for personality.

I strongly believe Marty's inner world and capacity for empathy could have been enriched if shoujo manga were introduced to his comics diet. Or at least more comics by and about women (which Blankets is not; maybe try a little W.I.T.C.H.!!!). His pursuit of Sally is mostly focused on "winning" her and "saving" her as superheroes do, with little regard for how she actually feels. He even lashes out at her for not leaving her abusive household. Because of this, you come out of the movie not feeling that Sally has been saved. Her escape is merely physical and contingent on Marty's interest in her.

Throughout the movie we see Marty agonizing over his unrequited feelings and inability to express them. When he sees her bruises, he gets frustrated not because he's concerned about her, but because he wants her to lean on him. He never actually wonders what he can do to help her, going so far as to ask his parents for romantic advice but not any practical ones. And worse, the narrative doesn't care about Sally either. Why is it that art gives Marty the power to express his feelings and change his circumstances but not Sally? She certainly needs the agency more than he does.

In some ways this movie is an excellent portrayal of how naive and immature teenage boys can be. It shows you a perspective that believes that everything will be okay if you just get the girl which... no lol