Gloomy Retrospective

Copyright © 2015 Universal Music Group Written by Carly Rae Jepsen, Devonté Hynes, and Ariel Rechtshaid Carly Rae Jepsen was a hard sell for me, especially during "Call Me Maybe" and its near-ubiquitous overplay. It seemed like only the asshole kids--like Justin Bieber or a lot of folks from my youth church--liked her, and only for that one song. And anyways, growing up, I was a soul and rock kid, listening to my Smokey Robinsons and Led Zeppelins with equal measure. I wasn't ready for something like the pop songwriting that Carly Rae Jepsen provided. E•MO•TION changed that for me. I mean, to be fair, I was a different person when I heard it. There was an openness to listening to modern pop music, and indie pop shifted to the direction where they were paying homage to the 1980s with their synths and 808s. But Carly Rae Jepsen was also different. She wasn't being this pure ado...

©  1989 Bernadette Associates International  & Special People Productions Activists are not terrorists. This should be an obvious thing, but government administrations and officials have, for probably the entirety of modern history, labelled them as such because governments and their military forces do not like to be held accountable for their actions. Most recently, we can see examples of this in the Duterte administration's Anti-Terror Act that seeks to broaden the definition of who terrorists are (and to reduce the inherent rights that every human being has in the process), in the United States of America where protesters of police brutality has been abused and arrested by the law enforcement officers who are sworn to protect them, and in Hong Kong where the population there is fighting against a general takeover by Mainland China. Governments do not like to be questioned, especially by the people they are ruling over. In the post-People Power environment, a lot...

Copyright © 1989 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks.  [SPOILERS AHEAD]  The point about Do The Right Thing  isn't that Mookie (played by Spike Lee) did or did not do the right thing. The point is that we, as a society, are more willing to create a moment of angry response against social ills rather than participating in a social movement to change the systems and keep something like Radio Raheem's (played by Bill Nunn) death from happening often. I found myself going back to this film after an entire week of my Twitter and Facebook and every social media being filled with pictures of rallies and dumb tweets from both sides and general police brutality as a whole. But mostly it was because of that one video, the one that started everything, of George Floyd begging for air while police officer and certified piece-of-shit Derek Chauvin choked him with his knee--and how it reminded me of the climax of this film. Radio Raheem shows off his philosophy...

Copyright © 2020 Netflix US, LLC. Égalité: Pride Month 2020  is our series commemorating or criticizing pop culture that relates directly to the LGBTQIA+ movement. Done in a non-chronological order, it will span films, music, and even historical events to show a concrete picture of the evolution of the movement from Stonewall onward. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To start off the week, we're commemorating the more recent attempts to pin down the emotional turmoil a child in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum would have.  The Half of It  is a 2020 LGBT romance film written and directed by Alice Wu--her second feature film. Previously, she had made waves with her 2004 film Saving Face , an exploration of the realities of being lesbian and Asian-American that tackles it with the qualities of a great romantic comedy: smart enough to ground the characters' problems and take it seriously, but light enough tonally to be easily rewatc...

Page is on hiatus until further notice. Creator is under a depressive episode. Thank you and have a nice day.

Copyright © 2019 Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino 3, Globe Studios, iFlix, Dokimos Media Studios Inc.,& Ben&Ben. Used under Fair Use laws. [Contains paraphrases of portions of an unpublished paper] LSS (Last Song Syndrome)  is a 2019 romantic drama film by Jade Castro about two music nerds and the band Ben&Ben (yeah, I don't know why, too--just roll with it) and their journeys through life as they try to fulfill their dreams of success, romance, forgiveness, and redemption. Let's get this out of the way: I thought this movie was one of the best movies of last year. I went out of my way to catch during the Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino out of the recommendation of a critic I respect, and it felt like a genuinely magical experience to see. Even if I weren't someone obsessed with music, the way this film constructs its scenes and creates these quiet moments of character development is unique in that it tries to be honest to both the situation of the characters...

©℗ 2017 NPG Records, Inc. under exclusive license to Warner Bros. Records Inc. Used under Fair Use laws. Watching Purple Rain  as a questioning teen was a really unique experience. Nowadays, I'd definitely call what I experienced "attraction," but at the time, seeing as I grew up with nothing but a conservative Christian background, the feelings that Prince made me feel were very foreign and confusing. And I had decades of preparation to handle Prince's music; I wonder how it felt like to live in the moment itself, during the phenomenon that is Purple Rain ? I feel the same way about his music as I did about Prince himself. As an artist, Prince was weird . His love songs weren't romantic; I mean, they were seductive, but there's no thin veneer of romance about it, only this animalistic wail of desire. The closest he gets to romance was "I Would Die 4 U," a song where Prince uses the pop songwriting trick of writing in contradictions and oppos...

Good day! This is a personal blog that will revolve around the critical analysis of popular music and films. Created out of a need to talk about popular culture in a more substantive way, this blog will mostly try to make sense of why something is popular. I have a need to write that is found deep within, an unstoppable force pushing the creation of something--anything--just to keep myself satisfied. This blog is an experiment, an effort to reach out to others so that, for once, I'm not just someone who's screaming my opinions into the void, ignored by everyone around me. Schedule will be posted soon.

Howard Hawks, the director of His Girl Friday, once said that "A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes." And in this modern-day era where a lot of our best media and ideas can be summed up with a short YouTube clip, this kind of ideology becomes important to know and harness. I mean, of course bigger and more ambitious filmmakers would rip their clothes off and set themselves on fire at the very thought of reducing their movie into three good scenes, a bunch of filler, and nothing else; otherwise, the formula would definitely prove interesting to test and know. One of the best movies I know that adheres to this formula well is School of Rock, and boy, does that adherence pay off in a splendid, precisely written movie that, in any other circumstance, would not work at all, but in this case, created this gem of a movie that seems to transcend time more and more as the years go by. School of Rock is a 2003 rock comedy directed by Richard Linklater and starring...

I had a rough 2019, to say the least. I got to see Carly Rae Jepsen live, sure, but after that moment, it was all downhill. Something in me definitely snapped that year, and I'm very much in the suspicion that everything after Carly Rae Jepsen's concert is a vivid Brazil -type mental break, what with the relationship drama I'd created, the world literally going to fucking shit, and also apparently I've reapplied to join this organization that rejected me twice (breaking my rule of not going to places or organizations if they rejected you twice) because I realized that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed to be with the best writers I could find (and yeah, that is definitely me complimenting a few people I know but will not name). So that's my excuse for why this list is so late. I don't usually write reviews and critiques anymore. They're too hard, nobody reads them, and everyone wants an argument afterward. But recently, I've been seeing someone (not ...