Movies

Burlesk Queen (1977) Gritty Filipino melodrama. Its star, Vilma Santos, later became a city mayor and is now a provincial governor. Very interesting to me for its scenes of barrio streets and snippets of variety acts on the stage. They seem to have been addressing the same issues as in the US 20 years earlier - attempts to shut down burlesque houses on moral grounds, with the theatre owner defending it as a true artform of the common people who are shut out of elitist amusements like opera and the symphony. Addresses some pretty serious life issues for the main character including her paralyzed self-pitying father and her unwanted pregnancy. Film skills displayed are a cut above the average, and some of the grimmest and most tragic backstage events are unnervingly intercut with the primitive gaiety of the onstage performances. I can't really recommend it as an entertainment, but I found it highly educational. 6/10

Z.P.G. (1972) I had read Max Ehrlich's novel The Edict and was looking forward to seeing this movie based on it - there was even a poster up at a local cinema - but somehow it never appeared. I later learned that its distribution was blocked by a reproductive rights organization of the same name. Now I have seen it. Highly unrealistic and imaginative dystopia in which people stand around in the dense smog listening to continuous public announcements, and their only form of amusement seems to be the museum of how life used to be before the Population Disaster ruined everything. So there is plenty of time to get all the explaining in that the audience needs to hear. People who violate the anti-breeding law are dragged to the nearest execution square and a helicopter flies in a plastic dome and drops it over them so they slowly suffocate. Entertaining sequences of a deranged mob screaming BABY! BABY! and hauling the little family to its dome of doom. Of course the protagonists are depicted as heroic for persisting in their criminality because babies are always good no matter how they ruin everyone else's life. I really liked the restaurant scenes with synthetic food in tubes and little bottles. Pretty ridiculous, but I am happy to have seen it at last. 5/10