By sheer luck, I discovered that American Adobo was playing at the Tara (artsy theater around the corner from me) this weekend, so my brother and I went to see it before I dropped him off at the airport.

It's another one of a series of movies that incorporates food (adobo is a popular Filipino dish consisting of braised meat and spices) into the lives of a group of people tied together by their heritage. In this case, it's five Filipino-Americans (primarily in their 30s and 40s) going through a very rocky and eventful year in New York City. Honestly, if this movie wasn't focused on Filipinos, I probably wouldn't have watched it. It's almost like an Asian version of The Big Chill or any number of "coming of age" movies among a group of friends. In this movie, the main characters went to college together in the Philippines in the '70s (thus, they're a few years younger than my parents and their friends). It also reminds me a lot of The Joy Luck Club, at least the scenes involving the younger American-raised women (i.e. not the concubine stuff).

The movie itself has a soap-opera feel to it, and the characters don't have much nuance to them, although the acting is reasonably done. I could see myself trying to picture different friends/relatives/etc. who most closely resembled the ones in the film. I didn't mind the dialogue, although it was clunky at times. But the script was pretty genuine as it had the characters freely switching between Tagalog and English during their conversations. (My parents and their friends do this all the time, although I was raised primarily on English, so Tagalog is actually very foreign to me. It makes me feel awkward, though, when I see people do the free transition around me. They do hit upon this briefly in the film during the cookout scene where there are a couple of non-Filipinos in the group.)

There are themes of the power of friendship, people finding their place in the world and the right person for them. All of those ideas were done adequately enough. Thankfully, there were a few good scenes where you could see the influence of Filipino culture and social mores on the lives of the characters. Those really helped the movie along (in my opinion) and something that would get non-Filipinos thinking about what motivates their behavior. Among the ideas thrown about: Filipinos are often complacent (thus not challenging what's around them, no matter how good or bad -- "That's why Marcos ruled for 20 years and the Spaniards for 300 years); white people seem to treat Filipinos in America better than fellow Filipinos (as seen in the relationship between a wealthy Filipino woman and her cousin who works as a maid in a New York hotel); the influence of religion (especially Catholicism).

The movie does have its moments, and the tone of the film swings wildly from melodramatic to farcical to touching. It had its holes and it really seemed formulaic, but there's enough of the Filipino flavor to make it unique and entertaining enough. The film's official Web site does a good job pretty much giving away most of the plot plus lots of additional stuff, including an adobo recipe.