Sebastian Torrelio, Author at FilmRoot

A Guilty Conscience – Righteous People and Defective Systems

Adrian Lam enters the scene with a sultry sense of calm arrogance, set at the peak of his professional power, circa 2002. Over the course of two hours, his righteousness is challenged, stripped down and laid bare over the negligence of a system that he’s taken rigorous advantage of. A case goes majestically haywire, resulting in Adrian and his cohorts sending an innocent woman off to potential life imprisonment, done unto themselves for a lack of attention, research & forethought.

A Guilty Conscience is a play on fairness, deliberately weaving around the audience’s expectations to showcase a literal conscience at odds ends with its own guilt. Played with strong, dynamic robust by Dayo Wong, Adrian is a regulator of rule-setting who doesn’t greatly accept the logic of the all-too-human scenarios he finds himself in – even beyond the courtroom. The logic strewn through exterior scenes of his friends, providing gambling advice and tradesmanship, seem more willingly appealing than sound or safeguarded.

Like any courtroom show, A Guilty Conscience plays lightly with the effect of those performing outside the emotional structure of goodness. The one who lives with regret, the one facing him, the one juror skeptical of a willing innocence – all factors in a play of one locked from the musical of many. Guilt rides not only alongside our one central person, but on the coattails of the actions we perform, the people we meet, the onlookers of our unimpeded recourse on this ground.

By third act, the trauma show becomes more intimate, casting Adrian in not just a brighter light, but truly any light at all. Once cast into the unknown, direct ties are frequently made to show Adrian’s evolution – making fun of someone’s diet, inhabiting those foods for purchase on a casual day years later. His interactions with every character evolves Adrian in chemistry & screen presence – not bigger, but with more studiousness (or lack thereof) for what they all represent, a holy-coming of justice in the form of moral understanding. Adrian’s legal colleague Evelyn (Renci Yeung) is named after British Marshall Evelyn Wood, and reflects her own set of conscious rules from the onset, paralleling the two in common routine.

A Guilty Conscience is a bit too long, stuffed with theatrical dramatics stepping into the doldrums of a real trial. It does not do a lot to tackle the greater wealth power implications it sets out beyond narrative fuel. What it does contain is an incredibly intriguing case, paced out with baffling levels of subtlety, that lead with utmost concentration to an obvious conclusion.

Adrian eventually learns to let the punches land, rather than speculate where they will go – taking control of his own destiny for once. What his future lacks in surprise or suspense, it makes up for in a message of fairness to the communal present, a treatise against the influential powers of wealth and resource that plays stage-like over a well-reason constitutional drama, emotional and gratifying all the same.

Seen at AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Monterey Park

Someday or One Day – Tragedy Strikes Love in a Puzzling Story

By Sebastian Torrelio

More so than the mystery of where Huang Yu-Xuan (Ko Chia-Yen) and Wang Quan-Sheng (Hsu Kuang-Han) have gone—where their spirits have bounded off too, whom takes the place of which body and how they return—is the mystery of how Someday or One Day, an adaptation of the hit Taiwanese television drama, went so terribly south. Primary director of the original Tien Jen Huang returns here to create a baffling story of dualities reflected against identical-looking dualities, an improbable mess that only rides so far on cute delicacy before the tape unwinds entirely.

At first, things seem steady, though speedy. A wistful camera wanders over pristine decorative interiors like a gift shop, so much of the plot to come only teased through low-budget VFX snapshots. Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan, having met-cute at record pace, are two entities who spend most of their time longingly sighing and staring out into the distance, their vague young adult concerns very present, though indecipherable. Teens at odds with their singularity, so commonplace in the drama of modern Chinese media, cannot just be scanned for relatability – something needs to be presented to the viewer, clearly.

And so enters the plot of Someday or One Day – shocked from the sudden death of Quan-Sheng, Yu-Hsuan spends her years daydreaming away from society, stuck in her own head, before waking up years later in the body of a mutual friend Chen Yun-Ru (also Ko playing a double role) years prior before her love’s demise. Yun-Ru finds herself in the most complicated role perceivable, forced to convince her friends from their past of their oncoming danger, barely able to articulate the hell she’s been pacing through ever since.

To Ko and Hsu’s credit, nothing about their performances here drag, the success of their well-established chemistry is the only real ingredient to make the movie’s breakthrough romantic first kiss come close to operating. Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan relate through their favorite couple song, lifted from the TV series; they incur the abusive collateral of time spent together equal to time spent apart. If everything seems trivially, tonally normal in their lives, maybe it’s because it should be, for the most part.

The most interesting thing at play with Someday, as with a lot of Chinese rom-coms in this vein, is the relationship of everyday individuals to their romantic fate: if it’s coincidence that brought us together, is it coincidence that is keeping us together? Altogether, not a bad question that “Someday asks directly at least once. Huang even guides us to a different existential question: are dreams the barrier to our happiness? The normalcy of a relationship growing into, outward and apart can and has been subject to a more inspective eye than this hundreds of times, on better and easier to ascertain platforms.

The original TV series, spanning 13 episodes that dive deeper into the sinister mystery behind Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan’s body bouncing history and conundrum, gained acclaim for its nourishing continuum, a collective audience experience that intertwines pop tendencies and true-hearted romance. How this film adaptation, branded neither specifically as a sequel nor a creative reboot, functions parallel to that is beyond comprehension.

Seen at AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Monterey Park

Cairo Conspiracy – The Islamic State, Where Hypocrisy and Identity Collide

By Sebastian Torrelio

Adam is the son of a fisherman from Manzala. Played in a state of overwhelming control by Tawfeek Barhom, Adam is a man caught up in the enforcement of parties, privilege and power beyond his own. He studies now at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, a prestigious kingdom of knowledge disparate from his hometown. In his attempts to conform to such a foreign class, Adam will be forced to break away from where he comes from, where he fits in, and what he is.

Barhom conceives Adam with a drowned-out regularity – the world spinning in front of his glazed look, eyes sunken into his rapidly outpaced mind, initially unclear whether this same mind can handle what director Talik Saleh presents as a complex relationship with his father and loved ones. Slowly, a more mysterious mind unravels itself. Adam becomes integral in the election of the University’s Grand Imam, a powerful religious position, that prompts the region’s officials to scrape together what unruly coup-like plots they can muster.

Two key aspects of Cairo Conspiracy lend it strength where the common eye doesn’t see: Roger Rosenberg’s production design examines a colorful swath of royal colors and ambers that take the film out of time, a growing modernity only revealing itself once outside the religious confines of Al-Azhar; and Theis Schmidt’s editing, a frenetic cut that often deletes the bookending pause of a common conversation, depositing the audience mid-instruction. Both lend Saleh the ability to curve his story away from an objective viewpoint, each religious and political sentiment a targeted draw within the limits of only what we’ve been allowed to behold.

The evolution of Adam’s character lends Cairo Conspiracy its most comprehensive themes, circling around the identity of oneself within the ever-splitting world we spend our educational years breaching toward. Though Saleh, no stranger to conspiratorial plotlines and investigative contention, allows hyperbole to sink into his resolutions, his lead’s transformation is deftly carried on bended shoulders by Barhom. A wisdom and judgment fills his intent and mind through the ongoing recourse, filling the gaps with the same likened modernity.

Where identity favors not oneself, outside eyes strengthen their stance. For Adam is often just a fisherman himself – or the son of a fisherman, depending on who you ask. In the face of God, over country, the distinction may finally grow some significance.

Seen at Laemmle Glendale

Kuttey (India) – An Insult to Global Action Influences

By Sebastian Torrelio

A defiant cry: “For the Revolution!” An undramatic cut sharpening a wooden facade, a blade lifted, an obvious prop blood squirter, and suddenly – a face rested decapitated. Kuttey is at least somewhat consistent in such bland motifs and imagery being used to create no motivational action.

Bhardwaj’s metaphorical tale on the animalistic tendencies of our most low-down gruesome criminals spills itself over three different perspectives, a concurrent narrative of outer-Mumbai seediness broken down into one gang’s interaction with another, and then another, each on the hunt for some dogged on-the-move cash flow.

Edited like a child was let loose with the footage, Kuttey plays a plethora of the book’s tricks: music preempts slowdowns of action for no reason besides to make shootouts seem cool; characters often don’t seem to know why they have to enter dialog scenes when intuition gathers – it would be easier to move onto the next opportunity to confront someone over drugs and guns.

India’s obsession with displaced timeline stories cannot survive an era of filmmakers unwilling to contend with how to keep the storytelling structure interesting, aside from names, gore, song queues and a really pompous intermission break. An action one isn’t interesting when you’re pacing your camera this slowly, when there is so little interaction between targets on-screen hidden by slow pans to other foes shooting from offscreen. Ended again, of course, by the overly dramatic slow-mo.

The film’s central young couple, portrayed by Radhika Madan and Shardul Bharadwaj, stop the film dead in its tracks. Madan brings an unbridled level of perceived mischievousness not only for the crime-adjacent world her family and loved ones place her in, but for her own curious mind, a soul willing to steer the film into a risk-fraught location (read: sex and intrigue) above something spoiled by bullet cases and fake blood splatters. It’s meant to thematically appeal to a traditionally masculine audience yet somehow plays more like a channel flip on an old television set, the brutalist Kuttey unfurled as a more sensitive homestead tale.

If the grand message at play is that crime is indefensible, then maybe so much of the film, namely its resolution, shouldn’t be played with this much animosity. Kuttey doesn’t value its own stock of human emotions well enough to make any considerate plays of its web of characters, choosing instead to let them fall into the pulpy pile of warnings and conflict foreboding.

Seen at Cinemark 18 & XD, Los Angeles

Waltair Veerayya – Telugu Cinema Tackling the Unserious with Confidence

By Sebastian Torrelio

It is perhaps not the most original sentiment in the world to declare a Telugu blockbuster interesting for subverting its tone, audience & subject, yet Waltair Veerayya, the newest from Bobby Kolli, has a blast doing so in spades. Waltair (Chiranjeevi) is a smuggler, often apparently a fisherman, hired by state police to extradite Solomon Caesar (Bobby Simha), a drug kingpin wanted for the murder of a slew of local authorities. Waltair hunts Solomon using his veritible tricks of the trade library – including such tactics as, disguising oneself in the villain’s hotel, wearing extremely noticeable attire, and bumbling around an airport with the crew.

The trailer for Waltair Veerayya, which gives some semblance of how this concept is supposed to come across, is a never-ending barrage of action shots in various settings with our lead placed squarely in the middle, as if kicking his enemies off the barriers of the screen for nearly three hours. What the trailer doesn’t reveal is how disorienting Kolli keeps his layered gang novela: the initial sequence of Solomon’s entrance promises a brutal story of “the beast hunter” meeting his prey. What follows could not be more mistakable for a common Telugu comedy, our lead a scruffy, drunken weirdo making every inconceivably silly intention a happy accident for the trueness of law enforcement.

At its best, Chiranjeevi—an actor no stranger to notoriously strange cinematic environments, but digging himself well into a charismatically aged humor here—leads an ensemble that comes across as tried and practiced with the sort of genre-mixed kerfuffle Kolli wants to embrace. The baffling whiplash from playing pants-down-level punchlines smoothly into serious, spotlight-coordinated corruption busting should be a lot more strained than this, and Waltair Veerayya‘s first half might as well feel part miracle for not allowing the actors to fall into tonal abyss.

Post-intermission leaves a lot to be desired, a commonplace travel back in time to the roots of Waltair’s true enemy, and true origins, that rides action de résistance far more than the wholesomely juggled first half. Where boring plot characters are interjected for sustenance, an entirely jarring final minutes at least makes up for what Kolli seems to be going for – memorable accountability, in spite of wanting so earnestly to play out the class clown role for himself.

Seen at Cinemark 18 & XD, Los Angeles