Goodbye America (1997)
It is November 1992 and the US Navy is preparing to surrender its largest overseas facility at Subic Bay, Philippines, after almost a century. For both countries, and for the navy, it is a time of change. Violence erupts shortly after the U.S. Navy announces plans to withdraw from a Philippine base in 1992.
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Very disappointing...
Memorable, crazy movie
Best movie of this year hands down!
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Conceived by amateurs executed by ABS CBN known for screwing up, good foreign actors given appalling lines by hack script writers, teamed up with the worst of Filipino talent not the best goes to make a bad movie. This movie together others produced by Mike Sellars have done massive damage to the Philippine film industry, already in turmoil and decline.
This movie brings back fond memories of when I was stationed back down in the good ol' PI. It has all the classic archetypes here. The aging bar girl and her cherry younger sister, the horny young GIs having the time of their lives with their LBFMs. This tells the story of a naive young soldier who gets trapped into a no win situation and so fights back heroically with all his skills, and goes down in a blaze of glory. Things start going bad for our hero when one afternoon he takes a barfine to the beach, but after taking his money she neglects to tell him she's cherry and once things start heating up she changes her mind and starts screaming rape. Confused because he thinks he just paid for a prostitute, he stops immediately but nobody is willing to believe his side of the story. So because of this little misunderstanding the gold-digging Filipina villians of the movie decide to take advantage and squeeze him (for possible ransom money? gangster payoffs? the movies is unclear about this plot point). He is thrown in jail without a trial for harassment against in his words "a bar girl with an attitude" and is about to go before the kangaroo court when he hears that on top of this, he's also charged with murder stemming from an incident in which he accidently kills a seedy criminal in self-defense. Valiantly he seizes a gun from the policeman Santiago and makes a dashing escape from his captors. In the jungle, he slowly plots his revenge for justice. A corrupt American politician is coming to town, and realizing that his time is marked, the hero decides to gun him down to do one final good deed in the world and make his death meaningful. Overall a good movie that perfectly captures the spirit of the Philippines and its people.
The main villain's performance wasn't that bad. The Philippine cast was quite ok especially Nanette Medved and Raymond Bagatsing. The missing points are: the storyline, the photography and the somewhat boring performances of some of the American actors. I'd give it a 4/10 rating.
The sailors and airmen of the U.S. bases in the Philippines at first thought the Filipinas they met in the bars there were nothing more than little brown sex toys. Filipinas, however, have a way of getting under a man's skin. Between 1972 and 1992 23,000 of these little brown sex toys became wives of American servicemen returned home with them, and are now living the American dream as middle class wives and mothers. One of the protagonists in this movie must choose between his Filipina sweetheart and his cheerleader American girlfriend.