“Buy Bust” gets push from Filipino actors, film critic
By Abner Galino, US Asian Post, Weekend Balita

Filipino American actors were among those drumbeating for Filipino movie “Buy Bust” which is currently showing in a theater in Los Angeles.

Among those who have eagerly urged viewers to go see in the theaters was actor Abe Pagtama, who was also the founder of the Los Angeles Philippine International Film Festival (LAPIFF).

“Crazy Rich Asians will be shown for a long time, knowing that Warner Brothers is spending more money in promotion, but Buy Bust will be short lived,” Pagtama said in his Facebook post.

“If you’re an independent filmmaker, you know what I mean,” he added.

Crazy Rich Asians is a romance-comedy movie premiered in Hollywood last week. Popular Filipino actress and former presidential daughter Kris Aquino played one of the significant characters in the said movie.

Going back to the movie Buy Bust, movie critic Jeannette Catsoulis said the movie “is surprisingly funny” despite being “a massacre in progress.”

“Wrapping a political-corruption yarn in a blanket of bullets and blood, the Filipino director and co-writer, Erik Matti, slides visual and textual jokes into the mayhem in ways both sly and blatant. This tongue-in-cheek approach (including a delicious little ditty played over the end credits) doesn’t lessen the impact of his heroine’s journey, but it does significantly ease the tedium of the virtually nonstop slaughter,” wrote Catsoulis in her column for the New York Times.

Catsoulis was impressed by the performance of Filipina actress Anne Curtis and complimented director Erik Matti for the job well done.

“When a raid on a gang-infested Manila slum goes wildly awry, Manigan and her fellow officers battle to extricate themselves from a constantly replenishing army of crazed opponents and maddened residents. Over the course of one endless, dizzying night, cops and criminals and civilians blur and everyday items are creatively weaponized: that poor soul battered by a cactus then decapitated by garden shears probably just wanted to complain about the noise,” narrated Catsoulis of her viewing experience.

Catsoulis also noted Neil Derrick’s Bion’s exhilarating cinematography.

“Zipping through rain-soaked, trash-strewn alleyways, bouncing off walls and leaping skyward as if jet-propelled, his camera dodges every blow and bullet,” Catsoulis wrote of Bion.

Buy Bust attempts to expose the corruption that plagues law enforcement agencies. It also touched on the protection being provided by ranking civilian officials of government to drug lords that enable them to operate almost untouched.

The said narrative was inserted through dialogues between law enforcers, and later on by a drug lord’s own admission, during a confrontation with the movie’s heroine inside the drug lord’s lair.

At the highlight of the movie, an elite team of lawmen that included officer Manigan (played by Anne Curtis) — an honest and dedicated policewoman — was cornered by heavily armed goons in a dilapidated neighborhood.

And how did our good guys escape from that deadly mission in a Manila’s slum?

Well, grab your keys and find out. The movie is still playing at AMC Burbank.

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