Category: Uncategorized

Speedway Junky (1999)

I feel like a pervert for admitting this, but I think Jesse Bradford is hot. The guy is seven years my junior — I don’t usually go for younger guys.

But I’ve said it — Jesse Bradford is hot.

So when it came time to divvy up who was screening what when Austin360 covered aGLIFF back in 1999, I volunteered to do Speedway Junky.

Continue reading »

Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)

Other reviews will probably mention the implausbility of some of this movie’s plot. How, for instance, do a bunch of Asian-American high school overachievers become drug dealers and, in the end, murderers?

Having spent high school with a number of Asian-American overachievers, my question would be, how not?

Continue reading »

The Debut (2000)

[OK. So I’m cribbing Jette’s format for movie reviews. I had even considered jacking her logo and temporarily renaming my site “Celluloid Ears” in tribute. For now, I opt to be an amateur and imitate, rather than be a genius and steal.]

It’s usually not a good sign when the story of how a movie gets made and distributed is more interesting than the movie itself.

In the case of The Debut, that story is so extraordinary, it could be a documentary in and of itself.

Pitched as the very first film to deal with the Filipino-American experience, The Debut managed to snag stars of the Filipino cinema — Eddie Garcia, Tirso Cruz — and won various awards at a few film festivals, including the Hawaiʻi International Film Festival where it won Best of Festival. But no distributor would touch it.

Continue reading »