Beulah Bram
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
pope_innocentyears
Possible spoilers.The movie LIBERATED which stars Diana Zubiri and Francine Prieto is a futile attempt to make a juvenile drama out of a b-movie, soft-porn flick.Liberated tells the story of a group of friends with focus on the two lead stars Zubiri and Prieto. Zubiri plays a sexually liberated (hence the title) young woman who falls in love with the beau of her morally-inclined best friend (played by Prieto). The discovery of the illicit affair then results to one of the main characters' suicide.The story in itself is lame, seen again as a poor man's attempt at re-creating the tragedy of Peque Gallaga's iconic movie 'Scorpio Nights'. In the first place, Liberated was first conceived as a true soft-porn movie (in the likes of the hundreds of other soft-porn movies currently made), but the writers and producers must have decided that the acting abilities should also stand out. On a brighter note, there is a gradual display of good acting potential from the leads. However, their acting skills have been wasted on the terrible plot, storyline and dialogue. The supposed 'moral values' it tried to convey was wasted miserably. All in all, the movie was abysmal; juvenile at best.The result of the low-budget and audience composition in the Philippine moviemaking is a sex-scene-a-minute soft-porn flick which tried hard to tell a moral story but failed miserably. Its success will lie upon the numerous sex scenes and skin-showing in which the flesh-hungry will feast upon.
