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Jake Gyllenhaal is so good in Southpaw, so terrifyingly committed to the role, that we were prepared to overlook the deficiencies and absurdities of the movie. We were so impressed at his physical transformation (after the skeletal Nightcrawler), his movement, the way he spoke like a guy who’s been hit on the head constantly since childhood, that we went along with what is essentially a retread of the greatest hits of boxing movies. His character can take an inhuman amount of punishment, like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull! He’s fighting for his kid, like all the incarnations of The Champ! He’s the underdog, like Rocky Balboa in Rocky! He’s really after redemption, like every boxing hero in every boxing movie we can think of!

Then came what should’ve been the most exciting shot in the movie, the one that we expected to bring the audience to their feet screaming, “Kill him, Jake!” We nearly got up, alright, to scream, “Cheeeeeap!” !@#$%^& ang baduy.

Three things should’ve warned us that this would happen. First, the movie is directed by Antoine Fuqua, who accidentally directed Denzel Washington to an Oscar in Training Day. Second, the character is named Billy Hope, as in “The Great White Hope”, the white boxer who is supposed to take boxing back from the blacks, Latinos and Filipinos who have dominated it. Third, we learn that the movie is called Southpaw because Billy learns to punch with his left hand. Duh!

And when we saw that shot, everything we chose to ignore because we were rooting for Jake paraded before us like lewd boxing round girls. Billy Hope became the light heavyweight champion of the world with no discernible technique other than to absorb punches until he got so pissed off he fought like a wounded bear? With no notion of defense?? How can he even see through the rivers of blood pouring down his face? (Apparently he sheds several liters of blood in each bout.)

Tragedy strikes, and in a matter of weeks Billy loses everything? Not even a downward spiral, but a full-on splat. He loses wife, child, mansion, cars, all his possessions, his entourage (a tiny fraction of Manny Pacquiao’s—someone take Pac-Man to see this), and goes straight to the flophouse and cleaning toilets in a boxing gym? (As Noel pointed out, he couldn’t rent a smaller house first?) Of course the gym is run by Forrest Whitaker, who becomes his trainer and teaches him strategy—it’s that kind of movie.

Then in a matter of weeks he fights an exhibition match that gets the attention of his scuzzy ex-promoter (50 “Maybe I’m not really bankrupt” Cent) who says he can get his boxing suspension lifted early so that in six weeks he can get a shot at the title against the boxer who caused the tragedy that led directly to his downfall. In case that’s not enough emotion to fuel Billy’s comeback, something bad happens off-screen that is mentioned so casually it might not have happened at all. Cheeeaap.

Naturally we get a training montage featuring a new song by Eminem (the movie was supposed to have been an Eminem project) in which Eminem explains everything to the audience in case they were punch-drunk from being smacked in the face with so many clichés.

At which point we realize that Jake is acting in a vacuum. This movie is completely unworthy of him, or Rachel McAdams who turns in possibly her strongest performance since Mean Girls, or Forest Whitaker whose presence makes up for the clichés he must recite, or Naomie Harris as a child services rep who apparently has only one charge. Jake has brought a bazooka where a flyswatter would’ve been sufficient. All the stuff we see him doing—yelling into a pillow while bleeding, sweating, pouring snot and drooling—is just Acting. Akting na akting.

Of course we are very fond of Jake whom we tend to think of as Heath’s widow. Since Prince of Persia, the franchise that was supposed to make him a box-office star but didn’t, he has been on a roll: Source Code, End of Watch, Enemy, Nightcrawler. Great things are in store for Jake Gyllenhaal, just not Southpaw. Forget it, Jake, it’s Hollywood.

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This is how to make a training montage.

When we were kids in the 1970s and early 80s, Bruce Lee movies clobbered Hollywood flicks at the box office, David Carradine walked the earth every week on TV’s Kung Fu, and Ramon Zamora punched, kicked and yelped his way to stardom. Martial arts masters, male and female, flew across the screens in lush historical epics. By the time we saw Luke Skywalker being trained by Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back we were already familiar with the concept of a student being oppressed, knocked around, and heckled by a Shaolin master, so Yoda seemed too lenient. A friend of mine, one of the smartest people I know, was so impressed by the martial arts ballet in King Hu’s Come Drink With Me that at age 7 he tried to do the moves himself. In the process he took a flying leap off the roof of the family house, fractured his spine, and had to wear a brace for months.

It’s 2015, and the kung movie is on the decline. “The master-disciple tradition is being lost,” declares director Teddy Chen, whose electrifying movie Kung Fu Killer (released in the US and UK as Kung Fu Jungle) is a tribute to the martial arts movie and its best-loved stars. “Tribute” is the word because unless this decline is arrested, we may never see their like again.

Is kung fu dying? at BusinessWorld.

1. From Almost Famous: Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives young rock journalist and Cameron Crowe stand-in William Miller (Patrick Fugit) advice to live by. (Rock journalist: a job description that barely exists anymore.)

We should commit this speech to memory.

You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.

They make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You are not cool.

We’re uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter.

Great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love…and let’s face it, you got a big head start.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.

My advice to you. I know you think those guys are your friends. You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.

Philip Seymour Hoffman would have been 48 years old today. As long as people watch movies PSH will live on.

Another line from Almost Famous, wrongly attributed to Goethe by William’s mom (Frances McDormand):

Be brave and mighty forces will come to your aid.

Papers & Tschai Studio in Cebu produces beautiful hand-stitched leather notebooks with unlined pages. The paper is heavier than Moleskine’s so you can use a fountain pen without the ink bleeding through. This notebook, 11.5cm x 17.5cm, Php850. Contact Papers & Tschai at papersandtschai@gmail.com or text 0927 126 3933 or 0925 886 2598.

In the scary tales of our childhood, the manananggal was a bisected monster with an insatiable craving for human bopis and dinuguan. In the daytime, the manananggal assumed the guise of a woman who lived alone in a hut in the woods. At dusk, she would rub herself with magic oil that caused batwings to grow out of her back, talons to grow out of her fingers, and her upper body to detach from her trunk. Then the upper half would fly around villages in search of fresh human viscera. She was said to be especially fond of fetuses, which she would slurp straight from their mothers’ wombs with her extremely long tongue.

To kill a manananggal (not the title of a third novel from Harper Lee), you had to find the monster’s trunk and sprinkle rock salt in it. This prevented the upper half from returning to its lower body so it was forced to fly around until sunrise, when it would be vaporized by sunlight.

The manananggal story reveals what Filipinos of the past were really afraid of: single women who lived alone. They were suspected of being grotesque hell-creatures who were out to eat other people’s babies.

What if there were manananggal in our midst, living in the city and hanging out with people? They might look like Manananggurlash by Jason Moss, sculptures in metal, ceramic, resin and other materials. Hey, is that Anna Wintour?

Manananggurlash is currently on view at Secret Fresh Gallery, Ronac Art Center, Ortigas Avenue, Greenhills, San Juan. Telephone +63 2 570 9815. The gallery is open from 10am to 7pm everyday except Monday.

You have to hand it to the Wachowskis. The success of their film The Matrix and its convoluted sequels bought them the freedom to do whatever they want, and they have used this freedom. Critics sneered at their post-Matrix movies, and audiences stayed away, but they will not abandon their vision. What this vision is exactly, I can’t tell you, but their work has the scale, ambition, and unpredictability that have largely disappeared from big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. Their failures are more compelling than other people’s successes.

Consider Cloud Atlas, their adaptation (with Tom Tykwer) of David Mitchell’s novel, in which many individuals living in different countries and periods in history are connected in ways not immediately apparent. By having their actors play multiple roles and through some fantastic hair and makeup work, they made those connections clear. They took the spirit of the novel and blew it up on the big screen. The reviews were so dismissive, it seemed that critics were compensating for having overpraised The Matrix. Granted, the recent Jupiter Ascending is a silly retread of the idea of an ordinary person having a great destiny, but is it much sillier than the superhero movies we gorge upon?

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.