Epinions Recent Reviews for Ricardo_Ramos

Nothing succeeds like excess

Sun, 1 Jun 2008 01:59:45 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Complications of passing as a different gender are prominent in Shakespeare's comedies, in which there was the further complication that the female characters masquerading as males were played by male actors. Connie (Nia Vardalos) and Carla (Tonni...

B-o-r-i-n-g bathos

Sat, 31 May 2008 22:00:26 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Notes of a Desolate Man is an annoying, bleak postmodernist Taiwanese novel by Chu T'ien-wen that for reasons I can't imagine won the China Times Prize in 1994. Like Y
ou
Look Divine, a much better...

Rekindling (literally!) youthful folly

Sat, 31 May 2008 20:28:25 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - While I was at Steve's last night, we watched one of the non-Hollywood movies he often writes about here. I usually only write epinions about movies if they spotlight gay characters, Filipino characters, or both. The political context of the 2001 German...

An elegy for someone who could not stand the prospects of aging

Sat, 31 May 2008 18:34:02 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - The copy of Christopher Coeâ€™s 1987 novel I Look Divine that we read had previously owned by someone French (at least there is a beginning and an end date in "mars" of 1989). This seems highly appropriate, since the book is what the...

Like Pluto, "Kitten" is far removed from earthly cultures, English or Irish

Sat, 31 May 2008 14:31:22 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - In "Breakfast on Pluto," Patrick "Kitten" is a sweet transvestite Irish boy who wants to find his mother in the movie written and directed by Neil Jordan, who also essayed a major transvestite characters in "Mona Lisa" (Cathy Tyson) and "The Crying...

I thought this infamous alarum would be funnier

Sat, 31 May 2008 03:34:53 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - I was not expecting to learn anything about marihuana -- to use the spelling in the 1936 cautionary melodrama "Reefer Madness." The title is the emblem of panic-mongering. "Reefer Madness" has been called camp. It is certainly both absurd and deadly...

Wallowing in self-loathing

Fri, 30 May 2008 22:39:26 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - To start with, although I have no doubt that sexual adventuring can become a habit, I think that labeling it an "addiction" drains the meaning of "addiction." Nicotine is addictive, caffeine is addictive, and, to a lesser degree, heroin is addictive --...

The Strangers: Yawn or scream -- it's your choice

Fri, 30 May 2008 21:55:59 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Not just the worst horror movie of the summer, "The Strangers" is the leading candidate for the dubious distinction of being the worst movie of the summer. There's this alienated couple (played unsympathetically by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman)...

Tonne Serah - Drop...Dead: The DJ Nurders: A satire of gay Filipinos and dance club culture

Fri, 30 May 2008 20:24:48 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - I feel that I know Joey De Vera, the exceedingly narcissistic "circuit boy" narrator of Tonne Serah's very sarcastic mystery novel Drop Dead: The DJ Murders. Joey is the pampered son of a Daly City family that included eight daughters. No...

Lightly moored -- misfits on land or sea

Fri, 30 May 2008 20:02:59 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - I love the succinct, compassionate novels of Penelope Fitzgerald. I think that my favorite is Offshore, which won the Man Booker Prize in 1979. It is set among those living on barges in the canals of London (Battersea Reach) A.D. 1961. The setting...

Some artful jolts a lot stronger than caffeine

Fri, 30 May 2008 19:57:02 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - When Drinking Coffee Elsewhere was the "On the Same Page" selection of the San Francisco Public Library (two years ago), author ZZ Packer was very charming and very pregnant and said she was working on a novel. I haven't heard of her since. It was...

A group romantic comedy/melodrama not as nourishing as the food shown

Fri, 30 May 2008 13:27:54 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - I was disappointed by the all-too-conventional 2001 soap opera "American Adobo," even though it showed adobo and other Filipino food being prepared. The movie is one of those portrayals of the complicated love lives of a group of friends. In this...

Failing to rise to the occasion leads to a lifetime of regret

Thu, 29 May 2008 22:22:32 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - "Fleeing by Night" is the title of a (Northern) Chinese opera standard about a slandered warrior fleeing from the emperor's troops that is performed within the 2000 movie directed by Hsu Li-Kong and Yin Chi "Fleeing by Night" ("Ya ben" in Mandarin). The...

Bowing to the inevitable

Thu, 29 May 2008 21:31:36 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - I don't have much experience with Windows XP, so am not the person to discourse on how Vista differs from XP. I don't like either one. Both seem far more difficult to use than MAC operating systems. I realize that part of this is that I am familiar with...

Punish Me: A relationship with no hope of enduring happily ever after

Tue, 27 May 2008 14:44:15 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - The 2006 black-and white (or black-and-blue?) German movie "Punish Me" (Verfolgt) clearly was made by director Angelina Maccarone and documentary cinematographer Bernd Meiners on a shoestring budget. It shows more overt dominance/submission relations...

Masseur: An inept Filipino movie about something or another

Tue, 27 May 2008 14:24:02 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - don't know which low-budget foreign-language movie focused on submission I should write about first, but will save the better (P
unish
Me) for later and start with the one where I might be thought to have some extra...

A sort of family of porn-makers

Mon, 26 May 2008 18:55:32 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 movie "Boogie Nights" with its great ensemble cast (many of whose careers have bloomed since then) again, I found Mark Wahlberg's performance more remarkable even than when I first saw the movie. And I thought it was...

As closed-in and tightly-wound as a jack-in-the-box

Mon, 26 May 2008 18:47:40 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Richard Linklater has made such crowd-pleasers as "Dazed and Confused" and "School of Rock," the innovative rotoscoping (mixing animation and live action) "Waking Life," and a number of small character-driven dramas starring Ethan Hawke -- "Before...

Penelope Fitzgerald - The Beginning of Spring: How could someone who wasn't there write so convincingly about a long-gone milieu?

Sat, 24 May 2008 21:27:53 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - The Beginning of Spring is the most likable of the four novels by the late, great Penelope Fitzgerald I've read. (I admire all of them). Her ability to create characters with extreme economy is breath-taking. Perhaps even more impressive is her...

So you can make a 1950s soap-opera like 1950s ones -- so what?

Sat, 24 May 2008 18:54:46 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - I don't understand why Dennis Quaid received so much positive attention (even some awards) for his turn in the 2002 movie "Far from Heaven," a soap opera written and directed by Todd Haynes (whose "Poison" is among the worst movies I've ever seen, and...

Very romantic, pyrotechnic movies with abundant DVD bonus features

Sat, 24 May 2008 18:23:42 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Baz Luhrmann's (1996) "Romeo +Juliet," entertainingly updated Shakespeare's imagined Renaissance Verona to a "Miami Vice" pastel hallucination of Miami Beach, added a punchy soundtrack (that included Prince's "When Doves Cry," Wagner's "Liebstod," and...

The bigger they are, the harder they fall

Sat, 24 May 2008 18:05:50 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Before Nadime Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee came along (and both have won Nobel Prizes for literature), the go-to white South African writer was Alan Paton. His Cry, the Beloved Country, which was first published in 1948, was made into movies twice...

A very honest (and even more self-critical) account of attraction

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:11:31 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - In the chapter on Asian Americans in my friend (and prolific epinion writer) Stephen Murray's book A
merican
Gay he recalls being attracted to the fierce masculinity of Toshiro Mifune before he (Steve, that is)...

An ambitious novel about a star-crossed Filipino emigrant family

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:40:54 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Rereading my review of Noël Alumit's poignant first novel, Le
tters
to Montgomery Clift, published in 2002, I was surprised to find that I stopped and started reading it and was less than convinced by the...

Life Tastes Good: Family dramas wrapped inside a frame of betrayal and homicide

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 03:27:45 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Ricardo_Ramos - Prior to the opening of his new play at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, "After the War," there has been a lot of publicity about Philip Kan Gotanda. Born in 1951 to parents who had been interred in the Manzanar concentration camp on...