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Weng Weng, originally uploaded by 160507.

Look at this fantastic t-shirt. I was at dinner with a film director and a retired but still fabulous movie queen (my late mother would’ve plotzed with joy) when an Australian video crew arrived. They were doing interviews with the directors and stars of Pinoy cult movies from the 60s and 70s, and they were wearing “The Search for Weng-Weng” t-shirts. I said, Where did you get that shirt, I need to buy one. So they gave me this shirt. It turns out that we all know Pete Tombs, yes, Tombs, what else would a guy who distributes classic cult and horror movies on video be called?

The 80th Academy Awards nominations have been announced. There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Atonement, Michael Clayton, and Juno are nominated for Best Picture. Hmm, best-looking Best Actor race I can remember: Day-Lewis, Mortensen, Clooney and Depp can have a bone structure face-off.

He was 28. He was found dead in his SoHo apartment Tuesday. The cause of death appears to have been an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. This is the initial report in the NYT city room blog.

He was brilliant in Brokeback Mountain, conveying the rage, sadness, and grief that his character could not articulate to himself. He played The Joker in the upcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight, and was working on a Terry Gilliam movie. He also appears as one of the Bob Dylans in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. Remember him in Ten Things I Hate About You? You think you’re in for a typical teen flick, and then you’re going, Who’s that guy?

Last Friday there was a 32 percent increase in the number of subscriptions to this blog. By Saturday the numbers had returned to their normal level. I haven’t analyzed the stats in detail, but I think the surge may be attributed to one or all of these factors:

(a) Carlo’s dates in the last two weeks all logged on to see if they were in his dream.
(b) It was a really slow day.
(c) Lots of people searched for “lithium”.
(d) Lots of people searched for “vitamin C”.
(e) Lots of people searched for “Jaime Augusto and Fernando Zobel”.

Let’s test the hypotheses beginning with (e). Last year I asked Jaime Augusto Zobel to write the foreword to a book. We met at the Starbucks in Ayala Tower One (the mothership). Jaime ordered a latte at the counter. The barista in the Starbucks in the mothership looked at the overlord and said, “Can I have your name, sir?”

I began shrieking with laughter, only silently. Think of all the possible answers to that question.

(a) “Steve Martin.”
(b) “Elvis”. Which is actually the name I use when ordering at Starbucks.
(c) “I am George Clooney’s father.”
(d) “Get out of the mothership! Out!”
(e) “Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala II.” Try writing that on a small latte cup.

But Jaime only said, “Jaime”, so this story has no punchline.
Now let’s see those stats.

1904. Checked the stats, no spike. Nope, it’s not (e).

There’s a scene in Michael Clayton that made me stop the DVD, stand up and clap for the writer-director Tony Gilroy and his star, George Clooney. In the scene, Michael’s 10-year-old son Henry sees his alcoholic uncle Tim weeping and trying to talk to his father. Michael hustles the kid into the car and drives away, then he stops the car and talks to him. That’s not going to happen to you, he says, You’re tougher than that. Then he goes on to say that weakness abounds in the world, but the kid shouldn’t worry because he’s strong. What he’s really saying is, You’re better than I am. I wish parents were that honest with their kids. All they can really do is tell their children the truth: that life is hard but they are tough, and the failures of their elders should not poison their lives.

The movie, by the way, is smart and great fun: the study of a man who figures he’s already sold his soul cheaply, but finds there’s something left. How did Clooney, the prototype of the man who is envied by other men, get so good at playing honorable borderline losers? A star has become an actor.

Visit The First Annual Moleskinerie Exhibit, a retrospective of selected works by Moleskine users from all over. My pocket notebook is the one with the serial killer (freakishly even) handwriting. And I wasn’t even Best in Penmanship. Thanks to Armand and the Moleskinerie team.

I don’t care for musical theatre, I never saw Miss Saigon, I didn’t like Rent, I wouldn’t go near an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical unless you paid me a chunk of money to plug my ears with (I have big ears), but I love Stephen Sondheim and I approve of Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Yeah yeah, they took out the song that introduces then sums up the story, and you can’t beat live theatre at portraying carnage (fountains of blood!) and horror (screams from the audience!), but it works for me. The voices of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter are not powerful enough for the stage, but this is not the theatre, it’s the cinema. Actually, Johnny could front a band doing David Bowie covers, and one might say he’s been in training for the role since Edward Scissorhands. The kid who plays Toby is great, the young lovers are so forgettable even the movie forgets them (we never find out if they get away), and Timothy Spall could play the Beadle in his sleep. Alan Rickman I found almost sympathetic as Judge Turpin. (Finally I can trundle out the Rickman story I’ve been hoarding. A few years ago, Yodel was at Old Swiss Inn in Makati when she heard a very familiar voice at a nearby table. She looked, and it was Alan Rickman. He was with some Pinoys who were talking about the Harry Potter flicks, and Yodel wanted to say, “Truly, Madly, Deeply!”) The former Ali G/Borat Sacha Baron Cohen turns up as Pirelli, in pants so tight they must help him hit the high notes. Sweeney Todd is wonderfully horrible. I can’t think of more beautiful songs about the ugliness of humanity. Don’t bring the children.

Bobby Fischer, madman, monster, and chess genius, is dead. He lived in the Philippines for a while, popping up on a local radio station in 2001 to applaud the 9/11 attacks. He died at age 64—the number of squares on a chessboard.

Here’s a Straight Dope classic: “How does one suck in a piece of spaghetti? Think about it. How one sucks milk through a straw is easy. The lowered pressure in the mouth due to sucking causes the air pressure over the milk to force the liquid up. But if one pushes on the end of a piece of spaghetti it just buckles. The mouth is closed and sealed over the sides of the spaghetti, so passing air doesn’t drag it along. Somehow the air very close to the mouth must obliquely communicate a force along the length. . .” It’s more complicated than you think.

From FT via 3Quarks: This little piggy was raised in a cramped barn, castrated, killed at a young age, and turned into bacon with potassium nitrate and sodium nitrite. This other little piggy was allowed to run wild and eat acorns, killed at an oldish age, and cured in sea salt that turned his fat into a substance similar to olive oil. Clearly the second piggy makes for the better meat BUT due to technical reasons he cannot be labeled “organic”. Consumers count on labels to protect their health. Uh-oh.

Carlo and Ricky are walking by Greenbelt 5 when they see Jaime Augusto and Fernando Zobel posing for pictures with a group of men in suits. Carlo says to Ricky: “I’m going to run and stand between those two. You take a picture with your phone, and then I run away.”

Reason prevails and the plan is not executed. But Carlo is adamant. “I have to meet them,” he declares, “And have my picture taken. I have to compete with my mother’s pictures with famous people.”

“Do you ride a motorcycle?” I suggest.

“I had a scooter. A Vespa.”

“Uhh, maybe not. Do you play rugby?”

“I can bake them a cake.”

A few days later Carlo has a dream. “In the dream,” he tells me, “You introduced me to Jaime Augusto, and he turned to this long line of people and said, ‘You have to curtsey to him.’ Then everyone curtsied, including the actress who played Tony Blair’s wife in The Queen starring Helen Mirren. You know, that actress? She curtseys to the queen with this slightly mocking expression? She did that to me, too. And everywhere I turned, people curtsied to me.”

“What was I doing?” I ask.

“I didn’t see, you were in the back.”

“As long as I didn’t curtsey to you,” I say.

“I think not.”

“Are you on Lithium?” Ricky asks.

“No, vitamin C,” Carlo says.

I think we should do a TV show about nothing, except that it’s been done and we have too many Elaines.

A filmmaker and his girlfriend go to Cebu for the Sinulog festival. The filmmaker is shooting a documentary which he hopes to enter in a contest. He gets an interview with a former mayor from Mindanao, who proceeds to give him more information than he expects or wants to hear. The simple interview turns into a harrowing confession from a man who’s looked into the abyss and caught himself looking right back. Witty, deceptively simple, and often hilarious, CONFESSIONAL is a wiseass’s meditation on the nature of Truth itself. Have I mentioned that this movie is hilarious?

I interviewed Jerrold Tarog a.k.a. Ryan Pastor a.k.a. Ramon Ukit a.k.a. Roger TJ Ladro a.k.a. Pats R. Ranyo, who co-directed, wrote, scored, edited, and did the sound design for Confessional. Truthies and Falsies in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.