A film within a film, "Write About Love" tackles the tropes that plague the romance genre as two writers team up to finish a screenplay about love. Unfortunately, the film focuses too much on the fantasy world of its second narrative - completely forgetting to develop its main story in the process. If you have secondary characters that are more interesting and more substantial than your main cast then you're definitely in trouble.
It's ironic that "Write About Love" talks about creating a great love story and in the process under-develops two stories instead. The main story suffers most as there was not only a severe lack of chemistry between Miles Ocampo and Rocco Nacino but the main ideas within this narrative were laughably lacking. And it actually had more tropes than the fake story that they were writing. For example, there's suddenly this development of someone popping out of nowhere, dying due to a critical illness sort of cliched madness. The real saving grace for the film was its supporting cast of Joem Bascon and Yeng Constantino who both acted and performed marvelously. We also won't deny that the film had emotional climactic highlights near its end but the journey to get there was messy, unclear, and not worth it. At the end of the day, "Write About Love" felt like it was banking more on countless quotable quotes than making a real interesting story. It came off as a film trying to look cool and be cool just for the sake of it. It just felt off and an extreme fabrication. What a shame.
Rating: 2 reels
- Yeng Constantino and Joem Bascon performed outstandingly well
- the film had its dramatic peaks in its third act
Why you shouldn't watch it:
- for a film that's about the process of making a great story, this had a bad one
- here's no chemistry between the leads
Tags
Crisanto Aquino
drama
filipino
Joem Bascon
local
Miles Ocampo
MMFF
movie review
Netflix
Rocco Nacino
romance
TBA Studios
Write About Love
Yeng Constantino