Here's another culture-inspired indie movie about Filipinos that, well, laugh, love, make food, talk about social issues of being Filipino-Americans, and get all heartbroken and stuff. While I don't mind any of that (and indeed was willing to watch this movie), still, I found the characters to be weak and mostly fall into type. The range includes the activist sell-out, closet gay man, womanizer, neurotic old-maid, and unhappy society woman. Of these characters, the only one even remotely interesting is the womanizer because he at least seems like he has a backbone. The rest come up with the most contrived and unproductive reasons to make themselves unhappy so that they can hide their individual nature behind discussions about Filipino culture, which if you think about it isn't a very valuable way to approach it.

I don't know how big the Filipino-American market for this movie is--considering a certain line of dialog, probably not that big and with much worse movies. I found the better parts of this movie were the parts that actually engaged with the characters' culture instead of using it as an excuse to get all sappy, and I actually rather enjoyed the way the dialog went back and forth between Filipino and English almost breathlessly. I would like to see someone take that way of delivering dialog and make a better, more fleshed out movie about it. This one suffered too much from clinging to recognizable types.

--PolarisDiB