deducing others

i've been hopping around movie review sites the last week and a half. the surge in blogging technology has made it possible for anybody to write and comment about any movie. in ancient times, we wait long and hard for broadsheets and tabloids, to get a critic's opinion on a certain project. how one qualifies to be a critic is still blurry for me to comprehend. he might be just like an ordinary folk, a movie fan, plucked from the tedious regulars but at least compensated slightly to share his likes and dislikes to a captive audience.

but it's too difficult to be completely objective. a review would always be riddled with all the impartialities embedded in the core. i've dropped upon one director's blog and he's a bit hurt by a few corrosive words against his film written by a former colleague he thought was his friend. what the auteur wrote in response actually hit the target, "if you know so much, why don't you make your own movie?" yeah, why not. let us see the hidden talent earmarked and lifted from quotes from film bibles, authored not by spielberg nor corsese and definitely not by paul thomas anderson, but some rather obscured academes and theorists.

peque gallaga ( i believe it's a sin not to include oro plata mata in the ten best pinoy films) once stated in flip magazine that people who make good reviewers are people like marilou diaz abaya, joey reyes and don escudero who really know their movies. he continues "but they are directors already. so, like, reviewing would be a step down the Food Chain. i'm not being facetious. the tragedy of a lot of film criticism in the philippines is that it is being done by mass com teachers and others who desire to be directors. much of their work is characterized by how they would have handled a cinematic problem. this is real tragedy because no real interchange is going on and directors are not learning parties who really love movies as an end in itself.""

and i totally adore joey reyes as a passionate observer of existential ditties. i wish he finds the time to blog again, with reflections his revering public would surely drool and enjoy. i always look forward to his facebook quizzes. i don't do well but they're quite hard anyway. at the moment i'll just re-read every now and then, midlife outtakes and mistakes, his compilations of essays published a few years ago.

i'm basically a fan. of a dancer. an actress. a comic. a writer. but not necessarily a director. if i don't like the main stars, i'm out. i don't even dare watch. just like anybody with a severe affliction of shameless fanaticism. you cannot rejoice in a gooner win when you're a tottenham supporter. it's my rule that if you have nothing nice to say, just keep your opinions to yourself. i once made a negative review of a favorite star's film once. but it only happened once and it still makes me ruminate whether it was right to comment. however if the director's is your friend and your critique no matter how constructive hurts a lot of people even the lead star who doesn't open her laptop often and i presume, take legitimate criticisms objectively, but replied out of being hurt herself and to defend her director-friend (which is very normal if you're a human being) was branded ungracious by one multiplier. i totally get her drift. the production venture was a laborious process, much more so if you were stranded in an island.

if you will only ruffle feathers with a friend, it's not worth spraying negative remarks just to practice grammar skills. the old adage is right, nobody's perfect. reviews are always personal, it's never only about work (walang personalan, trabaho lang are mere lines in a daboy movie). we all know that work is competitive by nature.