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Contest # 2

A copy of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Hunter S. Thompson’s Generation of Swine to the first person who identifies the movies in which these songs are sung. (It’s possible that these songs have been used in more than one movie, so you have to guess which movie I mean.)

1. A Lucky Guy by Rickie Lee Jones
2. A Case Of You by Joni Mitchell, performed by the stars
3. A Quick One While He’s Away by The Who
4. Dusty Springfield’s version of Spooky
5. The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows sung by Rhys Ifans
6. Costello and Bacharach’s God Give Me Strength sung by Ileana Douglas (Kristen Vigard)
7. Logical Song by Supertramp
8. The Heart of Saturday Night by Tom Waits
9. Angel of the Morning played during a beating in a pizzeria

11.13am. Both entries got two items wrong. I will confirm that A Lucky Guy was played in Luc Besson’s Subway. Christopher Lambert and Isabelle Adjani in evening clothes in the bowels of the Paris metro. Subway was cheesy and dated even when it first came out, but I liked it.

Rickie Lee Jones I love. She’ll take a song and wind it around your heart like a noose.

14.14pm. Eep, my mistake, it was not Heart of Saturday Night that Tom Waits sang in the movie, it was only my favorite Tom Waits song ever, Please Call Me, Baby. The movie was Keeping The Faith, Edward Norton’s directorial debut. So erase that item, and we have a winner: Yuie. I’ll email you.

The answers: 1. Subway. 2. Truly, Madly, Deeply. 3. Rushmore. 4. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. 5. Enduring Love. 6. Grace of My Heart. 7. Magnolia. 8. Please Call Me, Baby from Keeping The Faith. 9. Fingers.

To our contest winners: Okay if you get your prizes after the 25th? I just spent the whole day sitting in traffic. The road chaos is not going to ease up till after Xmas.

We were prepared for badness—I was hoping for camp—but not for immobility. Elizabeth: The Golden Age plays like a series of fashion spreads (Why is she wearing a mosquitero?):
the whole budget went to the costumes, so England sends one ship to battle the Spanish Armada (Did they really suicide-bomb the armada?!).

Cate Blanchett works hard—she doesn’t just chew the scenery, Tina says, she swallows it whole—but in many scenes she comes on like an angry drag queen. Clive Owen plays Sir Walter Raleigh, and we’re not convinced he’s from that era. Ted was right: when Raleigh throws his cape over a puddle for the queen to walk on, the cape is so cruddy, it would’ve been more sanitary to step on the puddle. (Remember the first movie, where the Vatican sends an assassin to kill Elizabeth, and he moves through the shadows like a testosterone bullet, hooded and cloaked, with crazy eyes? Haay, first sighting of Daniel Craig. He’ll survive The Golden Compass.) Tina notes that all the Spanish characters are dark and greasy and look like dwarves in Velasquez paintings. Cate delivers a speech before battle to what appears to be a row of cardboard standees. A waste of a first-rate cast that includes Geoffrey Rush as Walsingham and Samantha Morton as Mary Queen of Scots.

Before The Golden Age we saw the trailer of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, and Russell Crowe looks like he’s ready to play. . .the late Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter. It’s the hair. I think there should be a separate Oscar for hair design, because the hair really makes a difference, right, Chus? Note how every review of the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men mentions Javier Bardem’s hair.

This I have to see: There Will Be Blood, the new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Daniel Day-Lewis.  The best-reviewed movies of 2007 have titles with an Old Testament ring: No Country For Old Men (Yeats, but also OT), The Valley of Elah, There Will Be Blood. . .

The first person who answers this question gets a hardcover copy of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River and a paperback of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.

Which movie contains this bit of dialogue:

- When were you most happy?
- Now.
- When were you least happy?
- Now.

Post your answer.

10.01 am. AY! Everyone sent in the correct answer: The English Patient, written and directed by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje. I’m impressed (I’m assuming you actually remember the bit and didn’t do a web search). The winner is Balquis, who posted at 6.11 am. You’ll get email about claiming your books.

Another contest later.

Here’s something for Wricky: “December 19 2007 is the 10th birthday anniversary of … what? Some clues are in order. We are thinking of an entertainment so great that it had broken all records of expenditure, and had thereby incurred a shadow of doom and gloom. When this film was shown to the press in the autumn of 1997, it was with massive forebodings. The people in charge of the screenings believed they were on the verge of losing their jobs - because of this great albatross of a picture on which, finally, two studios had had to combine to share the great load of its making. The film was said to have cost $200m. Some of us came out of the advance screenings, and in a simple effort to spread a little comfort, we said things like “Well, really. It’s not too bad. I think some people may like it.” Happy birthday, Titanic!” David Thomson on the 10th anniversary of the box-office champion.

I’m a James Cameron fan, and I hated Titanic. I even like True Lies better than Titanic. My favorite James Cameron flicks, in reverse order: Terminator 2, Aliens, Terminator, and The Abyss. Loved The Abyss. That scene where Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio have to swim back to their vessel and they only have one suit and oxygen tank, and she tells him he’ll have to drown her and then revive her when they’re back in their own ship? That’s romantic.

So 3-year-old Pemberley Darcy was welcomed into Zaida’s household. He was a surly child, full of dark looks, and when he was admonished about his behavior, he would engage the speaker in a staring contest. Zaida reminded everyone to be kind to the boy; after all he’d been through, of course he would be distrustful of people. He’d been traumatized, but in time, if treated well, he would get over it.

One day Zaido’s assistant reminded Pemberley to say “po” and “opo” when addressing adults. Pemberley glared at him and yelled, “Putanginamo!” He repeated it several times. This incident was reported to Zaida, who took the 3-year-old aside and explained why he should not say that. In response, Pemberley Darcy mimed a gun with his thumb and two fingers, pressed it against Zaida’s forehead, and said, “Bang!”

“I suddenly thought of the characters in City of God,” Zaida recalls, “Except that those boys were 9 or 11, and this one was 3 years old.”

“Baka pag 5 years old runner na yan ng shabu (He’ll be running drugs by age 5),” Zaida’s friend said. He was not entirely kidding.

“Maybe he’s not really 3 years old,” someone else said, “He’s 15 but looks 3 due to malnutrition.”

Then Zaida’s 7-month-old baby began to look at her piteously, as if he were trying to tell her something.

From popbitch:

Militants I’d Like To… <<
Islamic terrorists have a sense of humour
Filipino separatist fighters the Moro Islamic Liberation Front generally invoke giggles
rather than fear in the West. How scared can one be of a group called MILF? Recently we managed to talk to MILF’s spokesman Eid Kabalu about it, expecting to embarrass him. Instead his reaction was a laugh and the answer, “See - our group has international acceptance and good recall!”
Turns out Islamic terrorists have a sense of humour after all.

Review of Eastern Promises, a film by David Cronenberg, in haiku.

Viggo Mortensen
Fighting in the bath. Naked.
I need oxygen.

Tina: Well that wasn’t quite Borat and Azamat.
Me: He is the King of Gondor.

The rest of the movie was good, too. Crunchy bones, gore, and blood.

Several months ago my friends (Itago mo na lang ako sa pangalang. . .) Zaida and Zaido adopted a baby. They needed help taking care of the child, so they hired a nanny—a stern woman in her 60s who had been recommended by a colleague. The woman had plenty of child-raising experience so they often deferred to her, and even found her fascist tendencies amusing—she would yell at them if she thought they weren’t holding the baby the right way, and she disapproved of their musical choices. She pronounced Beethoven and Mozart lugubrious (”Parang ponyebre!”) and preferred to sing Boom Tarat and other TV hits to the baby.

Everything was fine for a few months, and then one day the nanny returned from her day off dragging a 3-year-old child. “Who is that?” Zaida asked the nanny, remembering to smile lest she be viewed as unwelcoming. “This is my grandson Pemberley Darcy (not his real name, but close),” Nanny announced gruffly. “I had to rescue him and bring him here because his goddamn father isn’t taking care of him.” Apparently Pemberley Darcy’s parents had separated and he’d been left in the care of his father, a construction worker. Every day the father would leave Pemberley in the house with only a bottle of water and a plate of rice with soy sauce. Pemberley would cry and scream his lungs out. Sometimes a neighbor would take pity on him and feed him; sometimes he was left alone. This continued for months, until his grandmother brought him to Zaida and Zaido’s house.

Zaida wasn’t expecting to shelter a 3-year-old child, but he had no one else, and he’d had a rough life for one so young. “Poor kid,” Zaida thought, observing the boy who was hiding behind the nanny’s skirt. “He just needs to be treated well.” She would remember these thoughts of hers very soon.

Cat’s eyes, originally uploaded by 160507.

While cleaning out some cabinets Tina found a couple of her mom’s old eyeglasses and gave them to me. They’re from the 50s, in zinc, beautifully-made (note the details etched into the metal), not that mass-produced stuff we get today. I took them to my optometrist (Nella Sarabia, UP Shopping Center) and she replaced the lenses for me. They’re kind of a tight fit—the material is not flexible—so I can only wear them for an hour before I start feeling like Joe Pesci in Casino (where they put his head in a vise). If you ever find your grandmother’s old spectacles and you have no use for the frames, let me know, I’m interested.

Meanwhile, here’s my favorite review of the day: Lucy Mangan surveys critical reception of the Spice Girls tour. “The reviews are in, and everyone is agreed on one thing - the backing dancers were wonderful.”

Totally unrelated P.S. I’ve been to Cyma in Greenbelt, Shangri-La, and Trinoma, and all their menus offer “Greek Coffee” but none of them actually serve coffee. In Greenbelt they used to order coffee from Segafredo next door, but now that Segafredo’s closed, you’ll have to move to another place for your post-meal caffeine.

Just when you thought it was safe to go into a bookstore, TWISTED 8 appears on the shelves! TWISTED 8, the latest collection of seriocomic essays by Jessica Zafra, hits bookstores in the next couple of weeks. Want to get it before everyone else does? We’re taking advance orders at zeus.books@gmail.com, and giving discounts for orders of six books or more. TWISTED 8 is available in book 80 lbs that will not disintegrate after several readings, P250 per copy. Order ten copies and co-publishers Ige Ramos and I will even meet you for coffee to hand over your books. Email us! Now!

We ventured into the elegant new (slight reek of cement dust) Greenbelt 5 to try the Japanese fusion restaurant, John and Yoko. All connection to Lennon and Ono ends with the east-meets-west concept; no Imagine or Oh Yoko in the air, all electronica to go with the red and purple neon circles. We had the California rolls and a ham-and-mango appetizer, both quite good, though the former tasted like dessert. Then we ordered soup, rice, fish, and the Mount Fuji Steak. The dishes arrived in reverse order, main course first: the steak sat alone on our table for a good ten minutes before the soup and rice appeared. The steak was alright, though it resembled neither Mt Fuji nor the picture in the impressively varied menu. It was served with a kitchen knife with a blue plastic handle—did someone forget to order knives to match the dinnerware?

We complained to the waitresses, who wear black mini dresses with jackets and boots, like a splinter group from a fascist army. They were gracious, and apologized profusely. It’s a new restaurant so maybe the systems are not yet in place, but the serving sequence requires only common sense. The Wagyu Rice—a bowl of rice with chunks of beef—was supposed to be good for two. Not. The Wasabi Cream Salmon was a snooze, but the Champion’s Bowl—a spicy soup with tofu, veggies, and meat—is very good. But why does it sound like something you can order in a bowling alley with nachos and beer?

John and Yoko’s concept needs tweaking, but the food is interesting enough to merit a return visit. Our meal cost P1,800, which wasn’t bad for six dishes, and we were stuffed.

At 1am I started watching 3:10 to Yuma. Not a good idea before bedtime; at 3am I was hunched in front of the screen, slightly stiff from not having moved for two hours. And I’m not even a fan of westerns.

3:10 to Yuma is based on an Elmore Leonard story that was previously filmed by Delmer Davies. Christian Bale, one of the current cinema’s leading chameleons, plays Dan Evans, a rancher who’s about to lose his land. He’s a decent man who’s had a run of bad luck, beginning with getting his leg shot off in the Civil War; he’s tormented by the disappointment, reproach, and hunger in the eyes of his wife and two sons. The desperate man signs up for a dangerous task: to deliver the outlaw Ben Wade to the prison train in Yuma for the grand sum of US$200 (Think of the Seven Samurai going to war for a few handfuls of rice). Bad, bad Ben Wade is played by the great Russell Crowe, and when he’s onscreen your eyeballs belong to him. He is utterly charming and utterly nasty.

The posse rides across the wilderness with their lethal cargo, shot at by hostile Apaches, taunted by the Bible-quoting outlaw, and pursued by Wade’s band led by the excellently psychotic Ben Foster. In the course of their ride a bond develops between Evans the loser who wants to do the right thing, and Wade the criminal who revels in his badness. The performances are terrific—Peter Fonda turns up as a Pinkerton—and director James Mangold keeps the action taut and brutal. Hurtling to its violent climax, this western reveals itself as an existential drama about the choices that define a life. You’ve got to see it.