JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

If we lived in Paris we would hardly ever buy anything new. We would furnish our house with things we found in flea markets and vintage stores. There are some huge flea markets in the city, frequented by professional buyers who snap up the good stuff and sell them to collectors on e-Bay. We went to one in the country, where families who have lived there for generations just want to dispose of their grandparents’ things.

The flea market was the size of a hangar and crammed with relics from other people’s lives. It’s a good thing we had only one hour to spend before catching the train, or we’d still be there now, sifting through years of abandoned possessions. We were hoping to unearth some magic object that would choose us to be its next master.

There were shelves and shelves of china and kitchenware. We found an escargot dish for 50 cents. There was a stack of old porcelain that we kept going back to until Kristin turned over a teacup and saw the Limoges label. Sold! The sticker said 3 euros and we thought it was the price per piece, but it turned out to be the price of the lot. Now our cats can eat out of Limoges china (Thank you, bubble wrap).

We were on the lookout for something we could pass off for a missing Juan Luna and sell for Php55 million pesos (with the proper authentication), but all we found were some fake Renoirs.

There were also some massive tribal masks, if you could stand to have them staring at you all day.

This is a great week for the movies, and we haven’t even seen Nightcrawler or Esprit de Corps at the Cinema One festival (or Esoterika Manila, which we wrote but is totally an Elwood Perez movie).

The Drop is terrific. Tough, unsentimental, uncomplicated, brilliantly-acted, excellent use of the pooch. It’s directed by Belgian filmmaker Michael Roskam and based on the Dennis Lehane short story, Animal Rescue. We’ve never seen a Dennis Lehane adaptation we didn’t like—Mystic River, Gone, Baby Gone, Shutter Island. This time Lehane adapts his own story.

If you choosing between The Drop and Interstellar, here’s a comparison you may find useful.

The Hero
Interstellar: Matthew McConaughey with a space ship
The Drop: Tom Hardy with a puppy. They had us at “woof, woof.”

The Female Lead
Interstellar: Anne Hathaway, who can’t help but make us like her.
The Drop: Noomi Rapace, who doesn’t care what we think.

The Blonde
Interstellar: Jessica Chastain
The Drop: Matthias Schoenaerts. Did you see him in Rust and Bone?

The Ghost who sends messages across space and time
Interstellar: The ghost who moves the books
The Drop: James Gandolfini. We still choke up.

The Setting
Interstellar: The universe.
The Drop: Brooklyn.

The Threat
Interstellar: Desertification, famine, food riots
The Drop: Chechen mobsters with slicked back hair. Aiiieeeeee!

The Hole
Interstellar: The black hole near the planets they plan to colonize.
The Drop: The drop, the slot where bookies place bets.

Spectacle
Interstellar: Wow.
The Drop: Tom Hardy doing something we haven’t seen him do before.

The Emotion
Interstellar: Excitement, wonder, filial love.
The Drop: Dread.

The Future
Interstellar: Bleak.
The Drop: What future? And yet it is strangely uplifting.

Man Vs The Universe
Interstellar: We may not be alone in the universe.
The Drop: We are definitely alone in the universe.

Following the success of the first-ever movie and music festival in the country, Crizal Transitions promises an even more spectacular CinemaJam this year. A full line-up of outdoor movie screenings, fun activities (zipline, bungee, wall-climbing), art installations, and performances by today’s most exciting bands await festival-goers on November 29, Saturday, at the Greenfield District Central Park in Mandaluyong City. Gates open at 10am, with the action building to the concert at midnight.

Featured bands include Pedicab, Franco, Bamboo, Imago, Itchyworms, and Urbandub. On the double-bill on the giant LED TV are the romantic drama Letters to Juliet starring Amanda Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave, and the box-office hit thriller Now You See Me starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman.

CinemaJam will also see the unveiling of Crizal Transitions Signature Green. Essilor, the world’s leading manufacturer of optical lenses, and Transitions Optical have partnered to develop the new Crizal Transitions Signature lenses in graphite green, which provide more natural vision and true color perception in a variety of light conditions. Free eyesight consultations will be offered in the Optical Village booth manned by eyecare experts and showcasing the latest innovations from Crizal Transitions.

Tickets to CinemaJam are now available at Ticketworld. Call 891 9999, or go to www.ticketworld.com.ph. Part of the proceeds will go to World Vision, a humanitarian organization focused on building a better world for children.

108. The Other Woman. We saw it on the plane while drifting in and out of consciousness, which is the best way to see it.

109. Pulp Fiction. On the plane, for the 10,000th time.

110. Magic In The Moonlight. We love it. Critics only saw the ick factor: the age difference between Colin Firth and Emma Stone. “What do you expect, it’s a Woody Allen movie, etc.” But Colin Firth being sarcastic is hot at any age. Late period Woody has come up with a lovely movie about how the world may not have a smidgin of meaning, but it’s not entirely without magic.

111. Celebrity. The only Woody Allen movie we hadn’t seen, and we saw it on YouTube, thank you. Kenneth Branagh’s impression of Woody Allen was universally vilified, but this 16-year-old movie, made when the inventors of Facebook and Twitter were in high school, was prescient about today’s celebrity culture. You have to have met enough self-important idiot celebrities to know how spot-on it is.

112. Rebecca. Re-watched for Halloween. It’s not scary, but we’re very fond of it.

113. Boyhood. Richard Linklater’s project, shot with the same cast over 12 years so you can see how the characters age and evolve. Amazing and deeply moving.

114. Jersey Boys. We kept expecting Joe Pesci to show up…and he did!

115. The Italian Job. The original starring Michael Caine, the subject of all those Steve Coogan impressions.

* * * * *

We would probably like Christopher Nolan’s movies more if his fans didn’t expect everyone to bow down and cross ourselves every time a new one came out. We like Interstellar, though.

Interstellar is set in the near future, on a ruined earth. Ex-NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey, who discovered a shining new career by losing the cuteness) is recruited to lead a mission to find other habitable planets. The crew members include Wes Bentley (too handsome), Anne Hathaway (whom we kept expecting to break out into “Cabaret” or “L-I-Z-A Liza”), and TARS, a robot who resembles a large chocolate bar or the monolith from 2001. Cooper leaves behind a son, Tom, and a daughter, Murph, who cannot forgive him for abandoning her.

A space travel movie! There should be more of those, if only to remind people to look beyond this speck of cosmic rubble we live on. Those of us who were kids during the 1970s are probably the last generation to take it for granted that we would go to space. What are we still doing here?

There are plot holes, but nothing big enough to swallow the movie. (Don’t ask the question about the advanced civilization using Morse Code.) We had an M. Night Shyamalan moment (like “He’s dead!” five minutes into in The Sixth Sense) early on, when we figured out who the ghost was, but even that couldn’t spoil it for us. Nolan does a good job conveying the sense of wonder, and as the vessel does its Kubrickian ballet in total silence we had goosebumps. We especially like the physical representation of time.

Nolan would probably prefer to be compared to Stanley Kubrick (The scene where the schoolteacher says the Apollo landings were fake refers directly to Kubrick, who is supposed to have directed the moonwalk for TV), but the movie Interstellar reminds us of is Contact, the Robert Zemeckis film based on Carl Sagan’s novel and co-starring McConaughey. The father-daughter bond bridging time and space…cue tears, cue Hans Zimmer score, no, no, cut that blasted score. Something like this calls for silence.

There’s a genuine emotional wallop when Cooper is confronted with the reality of time dilation in years and years of bitter messages from his children (grown into Casey Affleck, the one who can act, and Jessica Chastain, who has the ability to look like a pre-Raphaelite angel and still ground the proceedings in reality).

The movie asks questions like, Do we do things for humanity, or for the people we love? What about those of us who like humanity as a concept but don’t like people very much? And what is the role of human relationships in survival and evolution? We could have a long discussion as to whether we should leave this planet we have trashed so badly, but that would be laying too heavy a burden on what is, after all, an entertainment.

Kubrick wanted to know what comes after humanity. Nolan brings us back to the comforts of our species. Enjoy the spectacle.

We spent the weekend in the country with friends who look like Kristin Scott-Thomas and Julie Delpy. Every time we looked at them a Coldplay song played in our vestigial heart.

Sunday morning in miserable weather we went to Mont-Saint-Michel, a 40-minute drive on the autoroute. We were directed there by the GPS, which had a bland male voice and was given to mysterious detours (visiting his mistress, perhaps). We took to calling him Gertrud.

It turns out that a day of pouring rain and howling wind is the perfect occasion to visit Mont-Saint-Michel, as it is the only time the place is not covered in tourists.

Mont-Saint-Michel is an island fortress from the medieval period. It is less than a kilometer from the land, so during low tide pilgrims walk on the tidal flats from the coast. The danger from incoming tides and quicksand only makes it more thrilling.

We took the less exciting route, the new bridge. Due to siltation and other environmental changes wrought by progress, the island is barely an island anymore. Efforts are underway to give Mont-Saint-Michel back to the sea in a reverse-reclamation project.

Inside the walls are hotels and restaurants, including La Mere Poulard, where an omelet costs 49 euros. It must be fried in gold. We had the local specialty: mussels and fries and cider. There are bookstores, chapels, old Norman houses, and you can’t take a step without bumping into a souvenir stand.

And you have to climb. We’ve mentioned that Mont-Saint-Michel was the model for Minas Tirith in The Return of the King movie–where was Shadowfax when our quads were crying?

The views are spectacular, and since it was the first Sunday of the month, entrance to the Abbey was free. We decided to sit out the abbey tour to give our lungs a break and reconnoiter.

You don’t need the Paris museum pass. Go to Mariage Freres at the Place de la Madeleine, buy three tins of tea instead.

Serves us right for trying to be practical while on vacation (from which we will need a vacation). We bought a Paris Museum Pass, which promises that we can make unlimited visits to the museums and that we don’t have to fall in line—we can go straight in by just flashing the pass.

Lines at the Louvre. Go on the first Sunday of the month, when admission is free. In the dead of winter, when there are fewer visitors. Then you can imagine that the zombie apocalypse has happened and you are trapped in the Louvre. There are worse fates.

We bought a 2-day pass for 42 euros, with the intention of cramming the 7 exhibitions we wanted to see after we got back from the Austrian sticks. True, experience tells us that we can go to just one or two museums before we get art overload and our brain shuts down, but we figured that by averting our eyes and ignoring everything but the shows we wanted to see, we could fool ourself into staying alert.

The Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in the middle of nowhere, the Bois de Boulogne. Note to Ricky and Raul: We went. The building is the event, as Noel would put it. The collection: Non-event of the year, possibly the decade.

Immediately we found out that the museums we went to were, for some reason or other, not covered by the blasted pass. The Paris Museum Pass IS NOT HONORED at privately-owned museums and temporary exhibitions at public museums. It is not good for the Marchel Duchamp exhibit at the Pompidou, the Garry Winogrand show at Jeu de Paume, the newly-opened Fondation Louis Vuitton, and even the newly-reopened Picasso Museum. It is so useless for our purposes, there should be a line for hapless gits so we could flash the Paris Museum Pass and someone could say, “You can’t use that here.”

We queued up for an hour at the Picasso. Apparently only a certain number of people can be admitted at any given time, or else you can’t see the art for the crowds. The press of humans is useful for staying warm as it is getting very cold.

Only get the Paris Museum Pass IF it’s your first time in Paris, you’re on a package tour, you’ve never seen the permanent exhibits at the Louvre, Orsay, Pompadou and the other majors, and you need to see everything in 2, 4, or 6 CONSECUTIVE DAYS. And you have a car and driver, because getting from one place to the other using public transportation (and we love the metro, though it smells exactly like the Quiapo underpass) will eat into your time budget. And your brain won’t overload and shut down.

We should’ve used the 42 euros to buy lunch with a glass of champagne at Fauchon dammit.