JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

After the Avatar premiere Leny, Jay and I went to Kozui for green tea lattes.

“You know where Sigourney Weaver got her screen name?” I asked.

“Where?”

“The Great Gatsby.”

Don’t you love it: a piece of trivia that links James Cameron with Scott Fitzgerald. In Chapter III of Gatsby, at one of the parties, Jordan Baker tells Nick Carraway to come see her. She tells him she’s in the phone book, “under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard. . .My aunt. . .”

Many of my friends refer to Meryl Streep as their mother; Sigourney is mine.

These days you can’t just write your book, you have to sell it yourself. I made like a drug dealer and arranged to meet my buyers at the mall. The drop was Wild Ginger at Power Plant, where I could appear to be having lunch because I really was having lunch.

Thanks to Joanne, Ting, and Cha,

Jove,

and Donnie (Sorry I had to leave, had to catch a screening of The Fantastic Mr. Fox at Glorietta 4) for ordering their copies here.

All in all a good day for book sales. For bulk orders (ten or more copies) of Twisted 8 1/2, please post your name and mobile number in Comments (they won’t be published) and we’ll be in touch for the drop.

I’m a big fan of Pilot writing instrument—started using the V5 sign pen 15 years ago, and these days I always carry at least three Pilot VBall 0.5 pens. Today at the Pilot counter I saw this:

A Pilot Frixion pen with eraseable ink! Just rub the plastic tip against the writing and it vanishes.

The Pilot Frixion 0.7 retails for P77.00.

This is the perfect present for politicians who like to disavow any knowledge of their own deeds. It’s easier to erase a signature than a witness.

By the way, thanks to the Commission on Elections for enlightening us as to the real qualification for elective office: Money. Not principles or ideas or an actual program of action, just money. Well, “winnability”. Which is another way of saying, “Money!” Now we are rid of our silly illusions.

Curses! Our plan has been exposed!

But we will proceed nonetheless.

Exposed in Emotional Weather Report, tomorrow (Saturday, in the Pets section) in the Star.

It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless: bookstores quickly run out of copies of Twisted 8 1/2, and it takes a while to restock.

If you can’t find copies of Twisted 8 1/2 at your local National, please drop me a line in Comments.

If you need ten or more copies of Twisted 8 1/2 for Xmas presents (cheap at P100 a pop; it’s like merienda), post your name and mobile number in Comments (they won’t be published) and we’ll be in touch to arrange pickup or delivery. Signed copies, yes.

If the copies you reserved last week have still not arrived, alert me in Comments.

Thank you to everyone who’s bought Twisted 8 1/2. We’ll have book signings in January when the holiday madness has passed and the traffic has returned to its normal insanity.

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Please note that we are no longer accepting reservations for Twisted 8 1/2 since the book is already in stores.

Reserved books are not signed because they come straight from the warehouse to the bookstore and do not pass near my hand.

We are now taking bulk orders of ten copies or more. These copies can be signed since they are coming from our stocks. Please post your full name and mobile number and someone will get back to you this afternoon (Friday). We regret we cannot accommodate orders of less than ten books. (The bookstores can handle one or three orders, but ten at once would empty their shelves.) Thank you.

From the moment the project was announced Avatar has raised expectations that are impossible to meet. And it is fashionable to hate the extremely successful, especially if they are not undeserving of their fame AND they do not bother to hide the fact that they are raving megalomaniacs.

Avatar is huge, overblown, and hokey in parts. It is full of new agey tree-hugger stuff. It is spectacular and absorbing; shock and awe for the jaded viewer. It makes most action movies look stationary. It is the fastest two and a half hours I’ve spent at the movies this year. Though it is primarily a showcase of technology, it never loses its emotional center.

Yes, the elements are familiar: here are the corporations who value profit over life, the very strong women, the strange aliens and the hero’s romance. The environmental message is hardly new, and the indigenous Navi tribe look like tikbalang. But one of James Cameron’s strengths as a filmmaker is that even at his corniest he is always compelling. And who will forge the way if not the self-proclaimed “king of the world”?

So screw the modest and timid. Viva hubris. See Avatar.

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Could someone please design or obtain more ergonomic 3D glasses? I’m talking to you SM IMax North and MOA, and Ayala Digital Cinema. At least the glasses should stay on your face and not fall off every two minutes. Whose head was measured for these things, Mount Rushmore? They’re huge and unwieldy, and do not make for optimal 3D viewing.

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If you’re one of those Academy Award statisticians, could you tell me if a woman has ever been nominated for Best Director? All I remember is the flap when Barbra Streisand wasn’t nominated, for Prince of Tides, I think. The Hurt Locker has just taken the New York, Los Angeles, and Boston Film Critics’ prizes, making Kathryn Bigelow a likely Best Director nominee.

(The answers to my question are Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion, and Sofia Coppola. But no woman has won yet.)

Bigelow’s nomination would be particularly satisfying because she works in a genre traditionally regarded as a male domain: the Action picture. Wow.

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Why Inglorious Basterds was was pulled out of movie theatres: No, it wasn’t the title, it was a disagreement between the distributor and the theatre owners. The amusement tax was lowered, meaning more income for the movies, but the distributor and the theatres could not agree on how to split the added income.

Apparently only Robinson’s struck a deal with the distributor, so you can only watch it there.

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Awards season is in full swing. Meryl Streep fans, commence annual novena: she’s in the running (for Julie and Julia). In her new movie It’s Complicated, Meryl is in a love triangle with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. What a fabulous idea. The revenge of the serious actress: Meryl in date movies!