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Warning: Contains spoilers

1. The Department of Synchronicity says: A South Korean student opens fire and kills 32 people at the Virginia Tech campus. (When you first heard that it was an Asian student, did you say to yourself, Please don’t be Filipino?) Meanwhile the movie Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg as an ex-military sniper, opens in Manila.

2. Shooter is so wrong-headed that it actually advocates killing corrupt public officials. Its solution to abuse of power: Just kill them.

3. Mark’s character is sort of like the Unabomber, with Special Forces training instead of a mathematics background. As far as I’m concerned the direst section of the movie is the one where he’s wearing a plaid shirt and a pony tail. It lasts ten minutes, then he recovers his senses.

4. Ned Beatty’s evil Senator is obviously Dick Cheney. I kept expecting him to spray his hunting buddies with buckshot.

5. Shooter is an anagram of Hooters. Don’t you love it when an underwear model turns out to have real acting talent? Warms the cockles of my vestigial heart. It’s a good thing Mark takes his shirt off in this movie, or it would be a complete waste of time. In fact I started wishing he would get shot, so he would take it off again.

6. This is not the way to follow that brilliant performance in The Departed.

7. The movie is based on Point of Impact, a thriller written by Stephen Hunter, the Washington Post movie critic. I wonder what he thought of it.

8. There’s an interesting story in there, about America’s gun culture. The movie doesn’t do anything with it.

9. Mark Wahlberg shows up at your door with a bullethole in his chest and asks you to stitch him up. Discuss. (Oh no! I can’t sew!)

Twisted Travels, originally uploaded by Koosama.

. . .so we still have three copies of Twisted Travels to give away. Here are descriptions of ten movies about the movies. (The movies are Filipino, Italian, American, and French.) Email answers to emotionalweatherreport@gmail.com. First three to get all the items right, OR the most number of correct answers by Thursday.

1. The narrator is floating face-down in a swimming pool, dead.
2. A director under pressure to deliver a new movie finds himself seriously blocked, checks into a spa, and retreats into his memories and fantasies.
3. A woman who once dreamed of movie stardom becomes a stage mother. Her son appears on a TV variety show singing Black Magic Woman, surrounded by dancers wearing hot pants and lots of fringe.
4. Everything takes place during the filming of Meet Pamela. The kitten will not cooperate.
5. A prostitute becomes an actress, but finds that she cannot take the intrigue and hypocrisy in show business.
6. A ruthless producer does everything he can to succeed, betraying his friends and trampling all who get in his way. When his father dies, he hires extras to show up at the funeral.
7. It’s the advent of the talkies, and one of the silent screen stars turns out to have a really annoying voice.
8. Two cousins debate: Ishmael Bernal or Lino Brocka?
9. During a turbulent time, a young man abroad is befriended by a brother and sister who live in a huge apartment without parental supervision and act out scenes from the movies.
10. Alfredo! Alfredo! Aiuto!

The Movie Quiz is closed as of Monday, April 16, 7pm Manila time, because I have to write my column now.

Of all the entrants, only Eileen Ang and Patrick Llaguno got all 20 items right.

The rest stuttered in the Filipino movie category. Are we the only people to have seen Ishmael Bernal’s ironic classic, Salawahan? It’s been airing on Cinema One for years.

On the other hand all the entrants got Luchino Visconti’s Senso right. Not to cast aspersions on the contestants’ movie knowledge, but I’m guessing Google helped.

Biscuits, originally uploaded by Koosama.

“Filipinos” are sweet, crunchy biscuits with a hole in the middle. They’re available in plain, white chocolate, and dark chocolate varieties. The biscuits are manufactured by Kraft Foods Galletas, S.A, and sold in Spain and Portugal. The package says “Unete a la comunidad. www.filipinos.com.” And “Prueba filipinos despues de 1 hora en la nevera.” Translation: “Try filipinos after one hour in the fridge.”

Several years ago a politician tried to turn the biscuit into a patriotic issue, but it didn’t catch on. Like the periodic fuss about “filipina” turning up in dictionaries as “maid” or “servant”. Overheard in Rome: “My Mexican filipina is arriving tomorrow.”

During the Spanish colonial era, “filipino” meant a Spanish citizen born in the Philippines. Native Filipinos were called “indios”. Then Jose Rizal and the ilustrados in Europe started calling themselves “Filipinos”.

There are people out there who think we’re biscuits, servants, or Goliath’s tribe in the Old Testament. Clearly we have an image problem.

Here are 20 short synopses of 20 movies set in six different cities. Name the movies. The first five people to get all the answers right will each get a copy of my new book, Twisted Travels. Which, coincidentally, includes these cities.

2. A successful director of movie comedies wants to make a movie about the poor and the homeless in Depression-era America. His producers point out that he knows nothing about poverty, so he sets off to learn about it first-hand. He disguises himself as a hobo and goes off on his adventure. He winds up being jailed for a murder he did not commit.

12. She’s a Venetian aristocrat, he’s a soldier with the occupying Austrian forces. They meet at the opera. She becomes obsessed with him, and he turns out to be a heel. The Italian war of independence begins.

19. Four friends find themselves being tailed by a mysterious four-fingered Japanese hitman, a Chinese gang, and a priest. To unravel the mystery they go to a convent in Baguio and discover that there’s something in those holy wafers. Nuns, hitmen, and dragon ladies burst into song in this comedy-musical from the 1980s. 

Email your answers to emotionalweatherreport@gmail.com.

Kurt Vonnegut ms, originally uploaded by Koosama.

Here’s the Paris Review Interview with Kurt Vonnegut from 1977. He talks in detail about his prisoner of war experience and the bombing of Dresden—scenes that will sound familiar to readers of Slaughterhouse Five.

Kurt Vonnegut died last night in Manhattan. He was 84.

He is survived by his novels Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick, Jailbird, Mother Night, Deadeye Dick, Galapagos, Bluebeard,  Hocus Pocus, and Timequake.

In her review of Mother Night Doris Lessing wrote: “Precisely because in all his work he has made nonsense of the little categories, the unnatural divisions into “real” literature and the rest, because he is comic and sad at once, because his painful seriousness is never solemn, Vonnegut is unique among us; and these same qualities account for the way a few academics still try to patronize him: they cling to the categories. Of course they do: they invented them. But so it has ever gone.

“Ordinary people, with whole imaginations, reading the newspapers, the comic strips and Jane Austen or watching the world reel by on television, keep an eye out for Ice-9 while hoping that we are indeed recognizing the members of our karasses when they come near, try to make sure that we don’t pay more than what is due to the false karasses, and dare to believe that while there is life, there is still life–such readers know that Vonnegut is one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best.”

Koosi, originally uploaded by Koosama.

Today is Koosi’s birthday. She was too busy stalking a lizard on the ceiling to have a proper picture taken. When she is not hunting, she likes to hide under curtains and furniture and take a swipe at whoever walks by.

Pakistani DVD Burner with Megaphone. From Foreign Policy., originally uploaded by Koosama.

From our correspondent: “Just take a stroll around the six blocks or so surrounding the Golden Mosque in Manila. Or any of the tiangge-malls around the city. And then read the news item below. What a difference! And there are myopic bureaucrats who accept “incentives” from Hollywood Big Media and want to close down the censorship-free “Quiapo cinematheque”.

“When the barangay heads of the Muslim quartier were called to a meeting by PGMA to stop selling Godard and Bertolucci films, they pointed out that because of the DVD market the neighborhood was crime-free for the first time in its history.

“Funny that like the site of the DVD-burning in Islamabad, Quiapo is also less than two kilometers away from the Presidential Palace.”

Here’s the piece from the Foreign Policy editors blog. “ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - APRIL 06: Students at an Islamic madrassa burn thousands of DVDs, videos and music CDs April 6, 2007 at the Lal Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan. . .”

The unconsummated love affair of Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich, in thirty years of previously unpublished letters. She called him “Papa” (everyone did), he called her “The Kraut” (She fled Nazi Germany). They met on a luxury liner in the 1930s and began a correspondence which only ended with his suicide in 1961. She died fifteen years ago; her daughter decided to postpone publication of the letters until now. Dietrich was cinema’s femme fatale and Hemingway was a womanizer. He said they had an “unsynchronised passion”. The star of The Scarlet Empress and the author of For Whom The Bell Tolls never got together. Wait, isn’t that the plot of The Sun Also Rises?

“Why are we watching Miss Potter?” James asked. “Because Ewan McGregor is in it and he might take his clothes off,” I said. After all he does full frontal nudity at the slightest provocation (he was impressive in the ridiculous Pillow Book). No such luck—everyone in the movie was buttoned-up. Worse, Miss Potter turned out to be a Hallmark movie.

I’m worried about Ewan McGregor’s career. Why is he playing second banana in mediocrities like this? The moment he appeared as Renton not choosing life in Trainspotting it was obvious he was meant for great things. He played a lying, thieving junkie who betrays his friends, and he still had the audience on his side—that takes massive charm and talent. And he has a natural exuberance that just lights up the screen. I saw him in a documentary about polar bears, and even the critters liked him. Then he’s cast in the Star Wars prequels (which I regard as the betrayal of my generation), and before you know it he’s appeared in a string of duds. Maybe he needs to do another Baz Luhrman musical, or reteam with Nicole Kidman since they were fantastic in Moulin Rouge. Ewan! Don’t fritter it away! I know you love the road, but get off that motorcycle and make a great movie!

1. I used to roll my eyeballs and snigger every time I saw the trailer. “They’re going to restart the sun with a bomb?!” Having seen Sunshine, I’m still not sure the science is solid (Can you really restart a dying star with a Big Bang-type chain reaction?) and if it is, whether the math is right (Can a nuclear payload the size of Manhattan island do the trick?). But Sunshine evokes a sense of wonder at the unknowable vastness of the universe, so you agree to ride over potential holes in the fabric.
2. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland don’t waste time with explanations (which might remind us of aforementioned holes). Sunshine takes us straight into the middle of the story: It’s the last 35 million miles of their trip to the sun. No tearful goodbyes or scenes of earthly devastation. That ship is the only world we moviegoers will know, so every procedure becomes a matter of life and death. It’s very intense.
3. “Why would they name the ship Icarus? Isn’t that tempting fate?” Because Nostromo was already taken? I would’ve named the ship the Kubrick. Or the Carl Sagan.
4. What I really like about Sunshine: Despite the emotionally-charged atmosphere, the characters make decisions based on dispassionate logic. Many sacrifices are made, but no one makes a big deal out of it, and no one regards her/himself as a hero. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. No Ben Assfleck yelling, “I love you, man!” as Bruce Willis goes to his death.
6. The cast: one Irish, two American, one Japanese, one Australian, one Kiwi, and two Chinese. And the mainframe, a descendant of HAL.
7. So Danny Boyle has two distinct periods: the Ewan MacGregor-dark comedy period of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and the Cillian Murphy-science fiction period of 28 Days Later and Sunshine. In between, The Beach, which began his collaboration with Alex Garland, and Millions.
8. Marry Cillian Murphy, and fool around with Chris Evans. What is it with Chris Evans and flame? He’s also the Human Torch.
9. And there are jokes! Hommages to 2001, Alien, Aliens, Solaris, and many other movies set in deep space. But not Armageddon, Deep Impact, or The Core (which was set inside the earth, but belongs in this group; they are united by their sheer stupidity).
10. Murphy’s character is named Robert Capa, which was the name of the late Dick Baldovino’s favorite photographer, so I kept remembering Mang Dick, who was one of my Carl Sagans.
I’ve wasted my life! I should’ve gone into physics, then someday I can save the world!