Review of The Debut (2000) by Big F — 12 May 2014

Flaxgirl and I rented [i]Gigli[/i] tonight, in that adventurous "Let's see if it's that bad" spirit that caused us to sit down in Washington and watch all of [i]The Master of Disguise[/i]. [i]Gigli[/i] is not as bad as that. Mind you, it's awful, but it's not 0/10 awful. Just 1/10 awful. Just D- awful. Review below. We also got [i]The Debut[/i], which Flaxgirl has wanted me to watch with her forever. The film is all about Filipino families. She found much of it hilarious in that "it's funny because it's true way." Even I, with my brief few months of indoctrination into the ways of Filipino families, could recognize some traits in the onscreen family that I'd seen in hers. Interesting, at any rate. Review lower down.

[b]Gigli (2003)[/b].

Amazingly, [i]Gigli[/i] manages not to be as bad as all the hype - but at the same time, it's still a truly awful movie. Imagine a bad episode of [i]Seinfeld[/i] stretched out to feature length... then stretched some more. Unconscionably, [i]Gigli[/i] runs 121 minutes, mostly due to a lot of repeated lines and entire scenes that appear to be improvised (and if they weren't, they might as well have been).

Why [i]Seinfeld[/i]? Because all [i]Gigli[/i]'s dialogue can't hide that this is a film about nothing. Larry Gigli (Ben Affleck) is assigned to kidnap Brian (Justin Bartha), the mentally challenged brother of a federal prosecutor. His boss doesn't trust him, so he also assigns Ricki (Jennifer Lopez) to the job of guarding the kid. Then everyone sits around for two hours talking about nothing, and not even in that interesting way that some movies have. The dialogue is painfully bad and every scene drags on far longer than it should. Add to that the utter lack of chemistry between Lopez and Affleck as they're supposedly falling for each other - they do so because that's what movie characters do, but there's never the slightest sense that the situation is at all natural - and you've got a really difficult movie to watch.

There are a couple of amusing sequences, such as when Brian asks Larry to read to him before falling asleep and Larry, with no real reading material in the house, reads the description on the back of a bottle of Tabasco sauce. Most of what seems like it's supposed to be funny isn't really, though - and even worse, the film makes a horrendously executed attempt at being serious, mostly by playing violins during scenes that would seem goofy otherwise (and still do, of course, but now we know it isn't intentional).

The backlash against [i]Gigli[/i] as "the Bennifer movie" was unfortunate, but to suggest the movie doesn't deserve a whole lot of razzing is giving it far too much credit. When you try to salvage a film with no worthwhile plot or dialogue by plugging in a couple of camera-friendly stars and calling in favors to get cameos from actors with actual chops (Christopher Walken I know will appear in anything, but what in God's name was Al Pacino doing in this, even uncredited?), you're still not going to end up with much - [i]Gigli[/i]'s attempts to gloss over its myriad problems are far too evident for it to be anything other than an unmitigated disaster.

[b]The Debut (2001)[/b].

Films that aim stories about particular subcultures at a majority white audience are rarely very novel except in location. [i]Bend It Like Beckham[/i] is a good recent example; it's a fairly standard sports-meets-romance sort of film, except the heroine happens to be an Indian living in Britain. In the case of [i]The Debut[/i], the same is more or less true. It's not like we haven't seen kids breaking away from familial expectations before, we just haven't seen it in the context of Filipino families.

Two basic conflicts spin in opposite directions throughout the movie. At the beginning, Ben (Dante Basco) is clearly attached more to white culture; he draws pictures from white models, has only white friends, is interested in a white woman. At the same time, his parents are resistant to his art and insist that he go to UCLA and become a doctor. By the end, they've met in the middle; Ben is more attached to his family and Filipino culture in general, while his family is more accepting of the idea of him going to art school. Sure, it's utterly rote, and the execution is a tad obvious (look, he's drawing all white models! Oh, and now he's seen the error of his ways and is drawing Asian models!), but it's handled well enough not to offend.

[i]The Debut[/i] practically seems written to be "The White Person's Primer for Asian Subculture," complete with Ben's two white friends who seem enthralled by the novelty of all things Filipino acting as the guides/surrogate audience members. Obviously part of the desire to get the film made was that Filipinos in the United States don't see themselves onscreen all that much - unless you're one of the eight people who saw [i]Surf Ninjas[/i] - but there still seems to be a conscious effort to expose the culture itself to a wider audience. At least, let's hope that's what it was; otherwise, all the dance sequences would feel like padding just to get the film up to its already brisk 88-minute running time.

[i]The Debut[/i] is an easy film to identify with, whether you're Filipino or not; even if your family didn't have big wooden spoons hung up on the wall, you know what it's like to feel embarrassed by your parents, or to want to do something your parents don't think is what you should be doing with your life. Writers Gene Cajayon and John Manal Castro do a good job of mixing that universality with a lot of specifics to the Filipino culture, which keeps a pretty standard plot from seeming too stale. The acting you can take or leave, but it doesn't take much away from the movie despite some performers who aren't really up to snuff. [i]The Debut[/i] is still a passable little film that gets its point across and does so in breezy fashion.