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Revolutionary Road, adapted from the novel by Richard Yates, is a finely-crafted movie about people who know what they don’t want but don’t know what they want. By my count, that’s 8 out of 10 people on earth. In this case the protagonists are beautiful 30-year-old blond Americans from the 1950s, so they feel more pressure than most to achieve their dreams. If they knew what they were. For a while they think they can find the answer in Paris, but that doesn’t work out, and it doesn’t occur to them to move to Manhattan, which is a train ride away. So they are left with their nice house in Connecticut, their lawn, their healthy children, and his promotion and substantial pay raise at a computer company. Oh the horror.

But what do I know about suburban angst? We’re so much more cheerful out here in the Third World, and we live next to landfills. When well-fed, educated people who can afford orthodontists whine about the hopeless emptiness of their lives, I tell them to move to the depressed neighborhoods in the Philippines, where people have tangible reasons to be depressed.

Revolutionary Road is directed by Sam Mendes, whose previous films include the universally-acclaimed American Beauty. Never understood why people were so ga-ga about that movie. We’ve seen Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks; American Beauty has nothing to say to us. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Christopher De Leon and Kate Winslet as Vilma Santos and Nora Aunor—take that, Meryl. Two minutes into the movie Leo and Kate are already fighting and I tune out because whenever I hear adults squabbling I automatically withdraw and watch them from a great emotional distance. But enough about my childhood. Anyway I had this urge to watch Ishmael Bernal’s Relasyon and Broken Marriage again. I mentioned this to Ernie, who recalls laughing out loud at Broken Marriage’s sarcastic upbeat ending with the matching beautiful sunset.

My favorite character in Revolutionary Road is the real estate lady’s son played by Michael Shannon. He’s out on a pass from an insane asylum, he’s undergone electroshock therapy, and he can see exactly what’s going on. There’s a fact of life: the ones who see too much are conveniently labeled crazy.

Ready for her close-up: one of the vintage movie posters to be auctioned off by Christie’s. I love a movie narrated by a corpse floating face-down in a swimming pool. I read somewhere that three decades before Sunset Blvd, Scott Fitzgerald considered having The Great Gatsby narrated by a corpse.