The Man in the Lighthouse

Though I laud indie filmmakers and their attempt to make films which are not formulaic and mainstream, I cant help but frown on Ang Lalake sa Parola. I can see the labor of love poured into making this film, the director and writer have good intentions, but they just produced a pretentious, flimsy and dull depiction of what being gay is.

There have been countless movies that deals with homosexuality and majority of this films center on society's view on it. I just cringe when a gay filmmaker makes a gay movie about how gays are treated badly, discriminated, abused and made fun of. I mean, if these gay filmmakers continue on portraying gays as like this on film, when will the prejudice stop if the same people view themselves that way?

The way the whole movie unfolded was just lackluster. Even the cinematography, though not bad, wasn't exciting, they had a good locale but they never took advantage of the raw beauty of it. The writing too was awful. The beach scene where Mateo and Jerome "tell" the audience how great and fun the water was just laughable. We know they're enjoying why even say it?

The music was uninspiring and lifeless. Music should be as equally as powerful as the images, so as to give a "signature" effect of the film making it memorable.

As to the parallelism between the old cemetery guy and Mateo's supposed "journey" of discovering oneself, this is where it got too ambitious, the movie tried to give us a lot but in return became lacking.