If you are the reviewer of a film, your job is to review the film and not complain about how hard it was to watch a World Premiere of a Lav Diaz film in Berlin, Germany for a film website that you, assumingly, get paid for. Instead of reviewing or analyzing the formal elements of the film (black and white, score-less, camera movements, and the language the film is in) the reviewer just points out how it doesn\’t fit his tastes and makes it difficult for his conformist and small minded views on cinema to challenge and comprehend. Of course: his review, his subjective take, but is that really what should be published on a site that side-by-side is publishing the beautiful and important reviews of Jessica Kiang? Must art be so hard to endure? Must what the Filipinos have gone through have been so hard to endure? Must it have been hard to watch The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (color, scored, camera movements, English, AND so much sense of humor)? Maybe instead of focusing on the length (is the Playlist length shy?) the review should be on the merits and faults of the film alone–the length of his film, like Lav Diaz has noted, is freeing cinema from its restrictions, ones that this review are reinforcing to its readers.

The response from Berlinale has been pretty mixed on this film, so having not watched the film I in no way can attest to this B- level, but it is this kind of hesitation to experimental filmmaking and challenging of its viewers that is sad and depressing to see from this review, that doesn\’t really review anything.
It is not YOUR job to justify the duration of the film, the film is made and it has been presented and it justifies itself. There are many, many difference between reading a book (words to paint images, form and content variations, narrative, plot (if we go on the conventional side)) and watching a film (a medium of images made up of mood, tone, and atmosphere), perhaps this "reviewer\’s" analogy would be more analogous with a TV show. Gomes sees ARABIAN NIGHTS as three separate films, he said it would be to aggressive for someone to watch all of them at the same time. Making you watch it is a part of Lav Diaz\’s experiment and it is the aversion to this type of filmmaking and complaints about time that are the intended results. Perhaps, like life, films should not be wholly compelling all the time, is a bunch of nothing moments that go on too long, challenge and frustrate you, that everything is not neat and comes together perfectly in 90 minutes (kind of like the plight of the Filipino people and the amount of time we spend on wars and Michael Mann and Coen brothers retrospectives)–we\’re in a new era of filmmaking. Film are not mere commodities and should be reviewed based on it as art–analyzed not a catalogue of responses. Just because a film does not fit into your idea of a film, does not mean it is not a good film.

This is a lame excuse of a review.