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Speaking of archaeological movies:
1. Here’s a good demonstration of the difference between television and cinema. What works in 30-minute episodes on the small screen cannot be stretched to 142 minutes on the big screen, no matter how many 80’s-style musical montages you throw in.
2. The TV show’s strength was in the writing. After all, its main character was a writer. The women could be silly, vindictive, self-absorbed bitches, but they were endearingly human. The movie’s producers were so engrossed in the clothes and accessories, they forgot to hire writers.
3. Sets a new standard in movie tie-in advertising: at least 5 obvious product placements per scene, and a product mention every five minutes. Not content with having a bag in every other scene, LVMH has apparently sponsored a character named Louise. Oh look, it’s like a Vogue photo spread. Wait, it IS a Vogue photo spread.
4. After the first hour, I began to hope someone would get mugged.
5. The cinematographer likes Big more than Carrie. Big was more interesting when he was a jerk.
6. Are those shoes, or stilts?
7. Looks like the distributors cut the movie to get a PG rating. The cuts are very badly done. One character’s pot belly is deleted entirely, so we don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. So the movie is even more “sanitized” than the version shown on cable.
8. The moral of the story is, If you try to pollute the New York Public Library with your frou-frou, something terrible will happen.
9. Noel: “The title should’ve been Sex and the City: The Final Crusade. If there’s a sequel it should be called Sex And The Pity. It’ll be about mercy sex.”

Some weeks ago a fullscale war erupted in the household of my friend Otsu. Like most wars it was triggered by a seemingly trivial event which indicated more complex issues roiling beneath the emotional landscape. At the heart of the matter was power, the possession of it, and its rightful application. To put it more succinctly: Who was the true master of the house, Otsu the owner, or Torquata the maid?

Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star. 

A series of strange text messages

Grungella: I’ll be in Grimbelt 6ish if anyone wants din-din.

Ernie: I’ll join you if I finish work early.

Big Bird: I can’t join you. Looking for something in my room that may kill me. Tell you bout it later.

Grungella: Killer cockroach? Air Supply albums? Gas leak? Voodoo doll?

Big Bird: A snake entered my room and hid under my bed. The moment I stepped out door to garden, it slipped in. I turned round and saw about 2 ft of it. Yesterday I looked for it but didn’t see it. Got so confused, was thinking someone had bewitched my imagination. But I’m positive I saw it. Been sleeping in my parents’ room. They’re away.

Grungella: Eek! Find it! Call animal control! Get out of the house!

Big Bird: I accidentally nudged it with my foot and it didn’t attack so it must not be poisonous.

Grungella: Indiana Jones has nothing on my snake fear! I couldn’t open the green Walt Disney encyclopedia!

Big Bird: If I still don’t find it I’m consulting the tarot card reader.

Grungella: Big Bird looking for snake in house, literally.

Ernie: He’d have better luck looking in that mall.

Grungella: Maybe he can lure it out with Alice Dixon or Snooky as Galema.

Ernie: Or he could get a mongoose. Do they have mongooses in Bio-Research?

Grungella: Is it mongooses or mongeese?

Truffaut directing Léaud, originally uploaded by 160507.

In their teens they worshipped at the church of Cinema. They called themselves “Hitchcocko-Hawksians”. In their 20s they defined the New Wave in French cinema. They reviewed each other’s work. They promoted each other tirelessly. Then Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had a falling-out. Auteur Wars by Richard Brody. 

Brody quotes from a vitriolic letter Truffaut had written to Godard. More of the letter:

“Jean-Luc. . .I feel the time has come to tell you, at length, that in my opinion you’ve been acting like a shit. . .Phony. Poseur. You’ve always been a poseur, as when you sent a telegram to de Gaulle about his prostate. . .a poseur even now when you claim you’re going to show the truth about the cinema, those who work in the background, who are badly paid, etc. When you had a location, a garage or shop set up by your crew, and then you would arrive and say, ‘I don’t have any ideas today, we won’t shoot’ and the crew would have to take it all back down again, did it never occur to you that the workers might feel completely useless and rejected?. . .You’re the Ursula Andress of militancy, you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery. . .”

Catzilla, originally uploaded by 160507.

The cure for shopaholism is, obviously, underemployment. When you know exactly how much money you have–or more accurately, don’t have–you’ll learn how easy it is to resist buying stuff. Basically you have no choice. (No fair running to family for help. Be proud.) Six months on a negative budget should be enough to reprogram you. When you achieve solvency, you’ll find that you have become immune to shopping for the sake of shopping. You survived without those things, so they are not essential. Then again, some people are just naturally covetous. In which case you should probably ask what gap in your life is being filled by shopping.

The cure for overeating is to not have any food in the fridge. I discovered this when my sister, who used to do the groceries with me, moved out two years ago. I found that many times, my eating philosophy resembled the famous reason for climbing Mt Everest: Because it’s there. If the food isn’t there, you don’t eat it. Or you’ll have to get dressed and leave the house to buy food, which is an inconvenience, so you just stay in and forget about eating. You may realize that you weren’t even hungry in the first place. All we have in the house are oatmeal, bananas, coffee, and catfood. So far I have not been tempted to try the catfood.

The cure for credit card debt is to cut the damn cards, pay them off, and not use them again until you can pay your monthly balance in full. Lots of people harbor the fantasy that they can pay off their debts while using their cards. Duh, you’re just borrowing more money. The minimum-payment-due thing is particularly insidious; before you know it, your entire income goes to them. The “This card is for emergencies only” plan doesn’t work. It’s amazing how many things you end up classifying as “emergencies”: trips to Paris, handbags, books you still haven’t read. I aspire to live on what old ladies refer to as “kass basis”.

The cure for the unfortunate habit of losing one’s cellphone is, according to a taxi I rode, a fine. A sign posted on the windshield advised passengers to make sure they had their phones when they got out of the cab, because if they left it there, they would be charged P300. The warning went on to say that this was “to give lesson to the owner”. I have a friend who used to lose his phone regularly. I said, Are you sure you lost all those phones, or are you going to start ringing one of these days?

Film director Sydney Pollack is dead. He was 73. He hauled awards for Out of Africa (”I had a coffee faarm in Aafrica”) and permanently iconised Streisand and Redford in The Way We Were (”Your girl is lovely, Hubble”), but my favorite Pollack movie is Tootsie (”I was a better man as a woman than I was as a man. . .), his brilliant comedy about the acting life (and source of perennial Pinoy favorite, “It Might Be You”). He produced a lot of movies, among them The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Recently he delivered great performances himself, in movies like Eyes Wide Shut and Michael Clayton. Sydney Pollack stopped by the Philippines in 2003, on his way to a bicycling trip in Burma with his friends. Mar Roxas gave a dinner for the group. Pollack told us how films get financed and how they make a profit. He said the most profitable movie he’d ever produced (at that time) was Sliding Doors.

Saw The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Richard Burton. Man it’s bleak. Not a laugh in the whole movie. And yet it makes me want to read the entire Le Carre oeuvre. (Alright, the Smiley books. Constant Gardener, ewww.) There are no heroes. The spies are regular schlubs, they don’t carry cool gadgets or drive snazzy cars, and they don’t actually engage in hand-to-hand combat. They wage war with their brains: reading the enemy, predicting their moves, finding exploitable flaws. Double-crosses become triple-crosses become quadruple-crosses. “Intelligence” lives up to its name. One has to admire the cold, calculating bastards who run the agents. I wonder if the fact that the espionage genre has moved on from John Le Carre to the Tom Clancies reflects the decline in “intelligence”. Technology aids the clever, and it also enables the mediocre; it democratises.

I also realized that Russell Crowe wants to be Richard Burton. Same eyes.

New species, originally uploaded by Koosama.

The Top Ten New Species compiled by the International Institute for Species Exploration includes the Mindoro fruit bat at number six.

Name: Styloctenium mindorensis
How it made the Top 10: This large and charismatic fruit bat species is known only from the Philippine island of Mindoro. It is only the second known species in the genus; the other species is known only from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and nearby Togian Islands, and was originally discovered (and named after) Alfred Russell Wallace. Wallace was a colleague of Charles Darwin and coauthor of their famous paper On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection. Among other important contributions, he noted the distinctive faunal break separating Asian and Australian biotas, which is now known as Wallace’s Line. Ironically, the new species occurs on the west side of Wallace’s Line whereas its sister species is on the east side. The new species is threatened by habitat loss and hunting. Its discovery highlights an increasing understanding of endemism on Mindoro, and the need for species exploration and conservation.

There must be hundreds of undiscovered species in the Philippines. Due to depredations on their natural habitats, many of them will die out before they are discovered.

I watched the six-part BBC series Ancient Rome in one sitting (It was the day I did not get a single text message). Unlike the HBO/BBC series Rome, this one was based on actual accounts by Roman writers (which assumes that writers don’t embellish or exaggerate, haha), and does not contain graphic sex and nudity (Blast). Like the fictional series it contains plenty of violence, cause that’s how the Romans achieved world domination.

Stuff I learned from Ancient Rome, the series:

1. According to the series advisers, Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned, he tried to save it. When Rome stopped burning he was advised to move the capital, but he insisted on rebuilding Rome. He envisioned it as a center of art. Unfortunately he was bonkers, and thought of himself as a great artist. He insisted on performing in public. In contemporary terms, that’s like “Queen Elizabeth as a pole dancer”. Try reviewing your emperor’s performance poetry. His reconstruction plans bankrupted Rome.

2. Tiberius Gracchus was the first populist tribune. He pushed for land reform, which angered the aristocrats. The Romans were deeply suspicious of anyone who might aspire to be king (as Julius Caesar would find out). He was clubbed to death with the leg of a stool.

3. Ed Stoppard (Cute!) who played Flavius Josephus, the Jewish revolutionary turned Roman historian, is the son of Tom Stoppard the playwright who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the literary model for Rome with its fictional heroes Vorenus and Titus Pullo.

4. The Goths who sacked Rome were not really barbarians or savages. Their leader Alaric did not want to sack Rome, but after the Goths had served the empire in various campaigns, they were screwed over. Alaric’s brother-in-law Athawulf ended up marrying the emperor’s sister.

5. There were many squabbling Jewish factions during the rebellion against Rome, not unlike the Judaean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judaea.

Star Trek, originally uploaded by Koosama.

io9’s 7 Types of Bad Bosses According to Star Trek and How to Survive Them.

They forgot to add “Terrible ham sucking in gut in tight-fitting clothes as intergalactic hotties for some reason throw themselves at him.”

When I saw the teaser for the next Star Trek at the cinema I shrieked, “NCC-1701!” Karl Urban plays Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy, and I love Karl Urban (We actually watched idiotic Pathfinder), but won’t everyone on the starship be hauling themselves to sickbay at the slightest sneeze?

Chris Farley, originally uploaded by Koosama.

Every time I see the trailer for Kung Fu Panda I think of Chris Farley. Why did I even watch Beverly Hills Ninja? It was singularly unfunny and embarrassing. In fact most of Farley’s work on Saturday Night Live was singularly unfunny and embarrassing. But I liked Chris Farley (and disliked David Spade, and no longer watch SNL). There was something touching about Farley’s performances–a desperate need to be liked, and a sense that he couldn’t help himself, he was out of control. Here was a guy who was ready to kill himself for a laugh. There’s a new biography of Farley by his brother and a biographer of Belushi. Why do comics have such unhappy lives? Or is it backwards: Why does unhappiness produce comedy?

Irony-on T-shirts, originally uploaded by 160507.

Brilliant cartoon, makes coffee spurt out of nose.