As Good As It Gets

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I got this from Strand Releasing, which does Independent film distribution and has many great titles."Mala Mala" is the over inflated look at a bunch of boring, egotistically dull men who dress up as women. Vain, monotonous, and tiresome. Most of them work as prostitutes because they say there are no other jobs, but actually, they don't want to work elsewhere because the money is better in prostitution.Many of them have a serious case of self identity disorder, which causes someone to seek plastic surgery constantly, like older women.It plainly is dull.

Mala Mala not only captures the dazzling lives of Puerto Rico's trans gendered community, but also accomplishes the rarest of all documentary missions -- we witness favorable changes in the governmental legal system about a country's treatment of trans gender. America doesn't yet have that legislation; however, with films like Mala Mala, there's hope that one day the world will recognize this community which deserves -- and needs - our support. The film's is shot and edited in a fantastic rhythmic style that opened my eyes to a situation that might take place in another county, but lands on America's doorstep. The story is on point, and I felt privileged to step into the lives of the participants.

Comparing Mala Mala to Paris is Burning does a disservice to Mala Mala. This film presents an exploration of the many forms of gender expression: from those who wear it only on the surface to those who truly believe that they were assigned a different gender at birth. One of the subjects says it best when she says that some of the "trans-gender" girls actually want to be "beauty queens" and not real women because once youth fades and they can no longer be beauty queens, they are no longer interested in being women. Mala Mala presents a complete gradient of the understanding of gender expression with subjects from different backgrounds, social classes, and different ways of verbalizing just what it means to be trans-gender in Puerto Rico in the 2010s. The film conflates drag and trans-gender cultures because in Puerto Rico they are not separate in the same way the are in the United States and other western countries. The filmmakers are very much aware that some subjects are only playing women whereas others are being women. Ultimately the true heart of Mala Mala lies in the back-stories of the women in the film. At the end of the film, Ivana says that the way they can effect real change in society by pushing for a non-discrimination law in PR is not through legalese and statistics but through their own stories and their own struggles. This film delves into those stories precisely. This isn't a social philosophy think-piece that was concocted by people who've taken many critical gender studies classes at a university. Rather, it looks at subjects whose lives and backgrounds more than compensate for the limited vocabulary they have to make sense of who they are and what they do. This is a compelling film more interested in the "how" than in the "what".

This examination of the Puerto Rican trans community is beautifully shot, has gorgeous music, and the director is a star of the indy film world. But ultimately it fails because it's nothing but glitter and pearls. No real HEART to the film.The loose structure follows several divas as they make their way, often from tortured backgrounds, struggling for love, but still respondent in their gowns. The trouble is that the analysis never goes any deeper than what one would expect from a USA Today article of a Hallmark TV show.It is quite bizarre when a film by such a famous director premieres at Tribeca, but then doesn't even get invited to Frameline. Perhaps the San Fran gender folks realized that trans is more than drag... it's about life...an aspect sorely missing here.