Movie: I Love You. Thank You.

I had heard of I Love You. Thank You., which I will (hilariously) shorten to ILYTY, before via word of mouth, but it was one of those things you knew at the back of your mind without keeping it in your consciousness for too long. Tonight, I watched it in the UP Film Center with my friends from my old workplace. To put it shortly, that they were good company is probably the only thing that saved this movie for me.

First of all: have you been to UPFI recently? All the chairs have been replaced with these incredible chairs with plush cushions and sturdy frames. And retractable armrests with cup holders! Is this still UP? One of us went to the bathroom before the movie started, and apparently not only does it now have a flush, each cubicle has a bidet. A bidet! And the faucets are automatic. What is happening!

Anyway, so on to the movie. I have such a backlog of movies to review, so I'm going with this one first since it's the most recent one I've watched.

General Review
I found the film generally awful. The first act was nice and intriguing enough, but whatever potential it managed to build in ~20 minutes, it managed to tear down and beat into a bloody pulp toward the end. While I see the intent of the filmmakers in how they treated the narrative and why they made certain creative decisions, I found the whole thing to be lacking in terms of ... well, in terms of everything, really. Whenever I try to think about what element specifically contributed to the failure of execution of the movie, I end up with just a mess of things to say - which isn't too surprising when I think about it. Films work because different elements work together. Things fall apart when they don't. So simply put, for this film, it didn't come together. At all.

What Worked?
It wasn't all bad. Even though toward the end, I was checking my watch every few minutes and asking myself when this hell might end, I was actually pleasantly entertained at the beginning. There was an interesting enough premise in how Ivan (CJ Reyes) and Red (Prince Stefan) handled their relationship, as well as the cracks that started showing themselves. It was a little over the top in terms of acting, but something like that is easy to excuse if you're trying to establish relationships in a short amount of time.

What Didn't Work?
That's about all that worked for me. Haha. Okay, let's do this one by one.

Plot. Let me just get this out there: if you asked me to summarize the events of this movie, I would not be able to. It was like a mess of tangled relationships toward the end, like a spider who was high decided it absolutely had to craft a web, and another spider decided to make a web on top of that. They might as well have had an orgy or something. It was a mess.

But, hey, let's try to summarize it. It's basically one of those plots where everyone is in love with everyone else, and no one loves anyone else at the time they're supposed to. There was intent to make the plot work cyclically, with themes repeating themselves through the story arcs of different characters. The idea, I think, was that if you juxtaposed these events with each other, you'd find that love is complex and might manifest itself in a similar manner to different people, but different people react differently toward it.

That kind of cyclical plot with repeating themes is something I actually find very interesting, and would have loved to watch unfold, if only it had been executed well. Instead of deepening the audience's identification with Paul (lead, played by Joross Gamboa) by letting him experience similar themes through different people and at different parts of his life, we end up with Paul making the same mistakes as the people before him, as well as pretty much every other character in the film.

Where the plot was supposed to move the film along and aid in character development, it actually only made the character more and more dislikeable and made the story more confusing and eventually annoying.

Characters. The characters in this film are just awful, awful people, and I would not want to engage wth them in any way, shape, or form in real life. Everyone except Tang (Thai actor Ae Pattawan), who plays Paul's Thai one-night-stand-turned-sort-of-lover, displayed some form of douchebaggery that just made me shake my head, sigh, or whisper angrily in my seat.

Paul, who is the main character, ends up more annoying than relatable. Where he begins the film as someone who seems to love photography and cares very much about his friends, he ends up as someone who's wildly unsure of himself and loves to put himself down (despite there being no build up to this strange self-deprecation), martyrs himself for love, and fails to express himself/his feelings to the one person in the film who "did right" by him. Paul is really more of an annoyingly dumb idiot than a lovable one.

Ivan, who is Red's boyfriend in the beginning of the movie, eventually breaks up with him, which causes Red to cut himself (more on this later). Ivan is shown as the son of a rich man, he's in the closet, he works in a fancy hotel, he "always gets what he wants," and he wants to eventually travel the world. All of this character building is invalidated by everything he goes through in the movie - and not in the "he went on a journey" kind of way, but in a "wait, what the f is happening?" way. He breaks up with Red because he feels stifled by Red's often over-the-top ways to express his love, and he felt his life was "too perfect," whatever the heck that means. I mean, if you're not satisfied with it at all, why would you say it's perfect?? Also, after four years together, Ivan leaves Red by shoving all his anniversary gifts on the dining table and running away in the early morning like a coward. It just didn't make sense narratively for his character to make so many of the decisions he made.

Ivan's character is the king of inconsistencies and randomness. If he was the son of a rich guy and always "gets what he wants," why was he so concerned about the money Red spent on buying him plane tickets for a nearby country? Scratch that, if his literal dream was to travel together, why did he start screaming at Red for buying plane tickets?? If indeed their relationship fell apart because Ivan was stifled, why did he cheat on him with that weird guy in the bar - someone he and Red apparently knew before, and with whom he had a history, and therefore carried the same emotional baggage he wanted so desperately to escape? Why did he leave instead of talking to Red if they've been together literally four years? Ivan comes back later in the movie and tells Red to move on because he can't love him. He says a bunch of other dick things while casually leaning over a bridge, which I'm surprised Red didn't push him over. Dick.

Red, who is Ivan's loving and well-adjusted boyfriend, starts to show some well-earned suspicion/jealousy when Ivan blows him off for dinner and instead openly makes plans with their mutual friend, who he drunkenly kissed before. Red loves Ivan a lot and showers him with gifts, he works as a bartender, and he's generally a nice guy. His mind understandably starts to collapse on itself when Ivan leaves him without warning and without even a note or text. He then becomes withdrawn, prone to emotionally distant one night stands, and generally desperate. He also cuts himself.

Here's the rub: Red, after a week of (I assume) non-stop sex in a motel, comes home to find Paul fixing a pot of Forget-Me-Nots, which he bought for Ivan before. This somehow sends him into an inexplicable rage, and he storms out of the apartment. Suddenly, Paul's blurting out that he loves Red and Red is literally telling him to fuck off. I was so confused at this part because Paul never actually hinted or said he liked Red. It's like a scene was accidentally cut, and it was like we all missed something. Like, "Oh. Oh! He likes him?? Oh. Okay."

But I mean, whether this was bad story-telling or not, what the heck was with Red's violent reaction? Telling someone to fuck off when they can't help but like you? Triggered by Paul fixing flowers??Paul didn't even do anything creepy or weird. Paul treated Red so much like a good friend that I, as part of the audience, was confused when he said he liked him. That scene only served to make me hate Red.

Then Paul leaves and meets, Tang, who is a Thai twink for lack of better term. Tang is the only good character in this film. He loves and loves and writes and writes and helps out his Alzheimer's-ridden Grandpa without complaint. So, naturally, he gets the worst deal at the end of the film: his grandpa's dead, and the guy he loves, Paul, "can't" love him back. If there's anything worse than asshole characters, it's making good ones suffer through events that are unnecessary for plot or character building. Mess.

Words. Since this features a Thai actor, among other foreign actors, it also featured broken Thai english. This in itself didn't bother me - it's not his mother tongue, and it doesn't have the same phonemes as his mother tongue, so you can't expect him to enunciate properly. But what I hated was that they forced the foreign actors to speak in English when it was totally unnecessary and sometimes even arguably distracting/worse for the plot. For example, when Tang writes things down, he's writing in Thai, but his audio's in English. Why??

Cinematography. While some scenes were shot pretty well, a lot of the scenes seemed very unprofessional and not very well thought out. The actors' postures also hindered their performances and general in-character-ness, I think. The film had a weird obsession with making actors lean over things casually even though they're already having a screaming match. The body language doesn't match the tone of the scene. Some shots were weirdly shaky, and I can't forget this one scene where Red and Paul are in Chillsky, and Red puts his arm over this short transparent fence between him and the view outside the window. The shot was okay from the side in Joross' POV, but it looked so awkward when it was being filmed from the back. I don't know why they kept that shot, but it was pretty jarring.

Acting. I'm half and half about this. Joross was okay at best, if a little over the top and overacting toward the end. He actually had good posture to identify with his character. Red was good in so far as looks were concerned, but not so much with the emotion. Tang would have been great - I mean, looks-wise he already looks like the impossible love child of Ruru Madrid and Robi Domingo, but sadly the language barrier really seemed to hinder him from actually acting. He acted well in scenes wherein his lines were Thai, but he seemed awkward and creepy when he spoke with his accent in english. :/

And of course, there's also this truly hilarious scene where Paul chases after Red and Tang chases after Paul. It was literally just a few minutes of them breaking into a light jog trying to run after each other. Hilarious.

To summarize, this film wasn't cohesive in terms of narrative content nor cinematic form, so it just didn't work at all for me. It often called attention to how bad it was, sometimes hilariously so. If anything, I suppose, at least we still got a good laugh out of the film. It was generally a mess, but the idea behind it had potential - that's about the nicest stay I can say about it.