Happy Birthday, Saffron Sassafras Saoirse Zafra Safina!
Saffy will answer all questions about your future in Comments. If it please her, she will also grant wishes not pertaining to lottery numbers or finding eternal love with a famous person you’ve never met.
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Saffy renounces her human father, Marat Safin, a member of the Russian parliament, for voting for a bill that stigmatizes gay people in Russia.
We put off watching Man of Steel while we wrestled with laziness, superhero movie fatigue, and various questions. Today we finally went to the cinema and got our answers.
1. Superman is perfect. Perfect is boring.
Solution: The filmmakers give him a very human problem: the fear of being regarded as a freak. Besides the usual existential questions.
2. Man of Steel is directed by Zack Snyder.
Pro: Snyder made 300, which was entertaining.
Con: Snyder made 300, which was stupid.
3. Man of Steel is produced by Christopher Nolan.
Pro: It probably won’t be garbage.
Con: It will be ponderous and take itself very, very seriously.
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Edward Woodward and William Zabka in the TV series The Equalizer. Photo from Eccentric Cinema.
The best way to spend a mid-week holiday is to meet your friends for a long brunch full of wonderfully pointless conversation. That’s how this topic came up. Answers included Ferdie Marcelo of Beach House, Domingo Sabado of Temptation Island, and Lawrence Pineda who is our friend’s brother.
Ours was William Zabka, who played the son of The Equalizer. Not so obscure—he went on to play the bad guy in the first Karate Kid—but not a big star, either. (Another one: Michael Biehn, the hero in Terminator and bad guy in The Abyss.)
We used to watch The Equalizer every week. It was set in scary 80s New York City and starred Edward Woodward as a retired CIA operative who helped people in trouble. The series had an excellent musical score by Stewart Copeland of The Police (whose father was in the CIA, hence the name of the band fronted by Sting).
A movie version of The Equalizer is underway, starring Denzel Washington. Ummm…no. Denzel’s brilliant, but The Equalizer was a heavyset man in late middle age, with a British accent. Every time he had to run after a perp he would lose his breath and shout, “Stop!” And his voice was so commanding, the perp would stop.
And yours was…?
If the video does not appear, click on this link.
Opens December 13.
It’s been 12 years since The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring opened in cinemas. Nine of us had arranged to watch the first screening on the first day. We remember the general intake of breath when Legolas first appeared— “Sino yan?” “Nicholas daw, Nicholas.” And sniggering at the people who cried when Gandalf fell with the Balrog. And still crying over Boromir even if we knew that was coming.
A Song of Ice and Fire is a direct descendant of The Lord of the Rings, with plenty of sex, moral dilemmas, and characters who are neither completely good nor completely evil.
We know exactly how Sherlock fans will react to the last image in the trailer: “Uuuyyyyyy Watson meets Holmes.”
One of the best-known lines in romantic comedy fails to mention a not insignificant fact.
This one: La Mariée by Marc Chagall.
Photo from My Daily Art Display
She had seen a print of the Chagall in his house, the one with the blue door.
So she gave him the painting.
Of course, mentioning valuable gifts in a declaration of love kind of kills the romance.
A Heart So White by Javier Marias, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, Php609 at National Bookstores.
Probably both.
That’s the unfortunate thing about what happens to us and remains unrecorded, or worse still, unknown or unseen or unheard, for later, there’s no way it can be recovered. The day we didn’t spend together we will never have spent together, what someone was going to say to us over the phone when they called and we didn’t answer will never be said, at least not exactly the same thing said in exactly the same spirit; and everything will be slightly different or even completely different because of that lack of courage which dissuades us from talking to you. But even if we were together that day or at home when that person phone or we dared to speak to them, overcoming our fear and forgetting the risks involved, even then, none of that will ever be repeated and consequently a time will come when having been together will be the same as not having been together, and having picked up the phone the same as not having done so, and having dared to speak to you the same as if we’d remained silent. Even the most indelible things are of fixed duration, just like the things that leave no trace or never even happen, and if we’re far-sighted enough to note down or record or film those things, and accumulate loads of souvenirs and mementos and even try to replace what has happened by a simple note or record or statement, so that, right from the start, what in fact happens are our notes or our recordings or our films and nothing more, even in that infinite perfecting of repetition we will have lost the time in which those events actually took place (even if it were only the time it took to note them down) and while we try to relive it or reproduce it or make it come back and prevent it becoming the past, another different time will be happening, and in that other time we will doubtless not be together, we will pick up no phones, we will not dare to do anything, unable to prevent any crime or death (on the other hand, we won’t commit or cause any) because, in our morbid attempt to prevent time from ending, to cause what is over to return, we will be letting that other time slip past us as if it were not ours.
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