Brillante "Dante" Mendoza’s Serbis opened in US theaters early this week, the movie elicited encouraging reviews from two major US publications, LA Weekly (January 24) and The New York Times (January 30).
In the LA Weekly, writing about a mini-retrospective of three Mendoza films (Foster Child, Tirador, and Serbis) at the University of California in Los Angeles, Nicolas Rapold describes the filmmaker as a "prolific auteur [who] dives headlong into the unglam fracas of poor, bustling [Filipino] families."
(Rapold, who is also a critic for The New York Sun and The Village Voice, finds Foster Child affecting . . . [chronicling] a single day, which is at once ordinary and shattering." He points out that Tirador is "an extended handheld hustle, a Darwinian roundelay through stacked hovels and sewer-lined alleys.")
Another LA Weekly critic, J. Hoberman, describes Mendoza praises Mendoza and the film as well as evident in the excerpt below:
"Mendoza, a successful production designer who made his first low-budget feature four years ago at 45 (and has made six since), considers himself a neorealist. Serbis is his first 35mm film, but it’s scarcely less gritty than its predecessors, as the constantly moving camera keeps close to the action. More outrageous than prurient, Serbis has no shortage of appalling details—its ideal spectator might be John Waters—but there’s probably something for everyone. The Family traffics in excitement. The theater’s staff engages in jealous fistfights and chases a thief around the building until he’s cornered, dangling from the balcony.
"The joke is characteristic of Mendoza’s self-referential humor. So, too, is the movie’s final gag, which collapses narrative and spectacle to literally burn a hole in the screen. For all its gross-outs, Serbis is an essentially modernist enterprise in which figure and ground, character-driven narrative and celluloid spectacle, are in continual flux."
Next month, Serbis competes in the 3rd Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong, where it has three nominations: Pareño and Jose in the Best Supporting Actress race, and Mendoza for Best Director. (AJPress w ith a report from Inquirer.net)
( Published on February 6, 2009 in Asian Journal Red Carpet Magazine p. 2 )
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