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From Andrew Leavold at Trash Video: The Search for Weng Weng is a site to promote my forthcoming documentary on my quest for the Philippines’ long-dead midget James Bond. Read the REAL Weng Weng story and interview with Weng Weng’s brother, see stacks of stills from my Philippines shoots – photos with President Marcos’ daughter, WW co-star Dolphy, Eddie Garcia, 80s bold superstar Maria Isabel Lopez, and shots of Weng Weng’s family home, friends and last resting place… the most complete Weng Weng filmography yet, with posters (We’ve found yet another one - a 1981 prequel to For Your Height Only called Agent 00!)… “White Guerrilla In Manila” article on the history of Philippines B-films, Gerry de Leon’s vampire double, Eddie Romero filmography, the Blood Island trilogy reviewed AND MORE!

I was feeling glum for no good reason (which is better than being depressed with good reason) so I thought I’d cheer myself up by watching Wanted. Excellent idea: the movie blew the gloomy thoughts out of my head. Tibur Bekmambetov’s (Russians Russians everywhere I look; really must move to St Petersburg) adaptation of the graphic novel (My sister says they changed it substantially) is ridiculous, exhilarating, insane, and fun for anyone not overly attached to the laws of physics (You mean the trajectory, not the bullet!) or probability. In it, James MacAvoy’s cubicle rat shmoe is recruited for a fraternity of assassins formed in the medieval period. (His minder is Angelina Jolie, who is more lethal than any of the men.) The Fraternity was founded by a weavers’ guild, so I kept imagining the members of the Fashion Designers’ Association of the Philippines hunting down the evil and corrupt and garrotting them with tape measures.

The Fraternity call themselves “the assassins of fate”, “fate” being represented by a loom which churns out cloth, the warp and weft of which they translate into binary code and then into the names of their targets. So if I decide that I am the instrument of fate and I eat a bowl of muesli for breakfast every day (The Bowl of Fate), and I discover a pattern in the cereals which corresponds to the names of actual people…The point being, don’t think too much and you’ll enjoy the flick.

Hulk neat tale about how military-industrial complex always trying to invade academe and turn scientific research into weapons. Everybody need research grant but be careful who gives it to you. Hulk has clever cameo by Stan Lee, posthumous TV appearance by Bill Bixby, and guest bit by Lou Ferrigno who should be in Dancing With The Stars. Best superheroes are always nerds. Now that I think about it, Edward Norton perfect for Hulk. Norton’s breakthrough role as altar boy who turns into monster in Primal Fear. If Marvel making Avengers movie, is Thor next? Thor not nerd. Thor Norse god with hammer and probably gay stalker Loki.

Beastly beastly beastly beastly beastlybeastly weather. And I usually like pouring rain, lashing wind and gloom, but not when it comes with a power outage. I am working on generator power which, given the rocketing cost of diesel and the state of the enviroment, is not good.

Otsu and I saw Get Smart yesterday and laughed and laughed. It’s hilarious in a nerdy-deadpan way, viz the exchange between Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) and Siegfried (Terence Stamp): “If I were Control, you’d already be dead.” “If you were Control, you’d already be dead.” “The fact that neither of us is dead means I am not Control.” Otsu’s complaint: Ken Davitian who played Azamat in Borat is sorely underused as Kaos’s number two. My question: Why is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson not a bigger star? He’s good-looking, funny, self-mocking and a gifted actor, as anyone who’s seen him play Kirsten Dunst’s cheerleader in Bring It On knows. Dwayne stars in Southland Tales, one of most reviled And praised movies of 2007; he’s excellent.

I’ve never seen Grey’s Anatomy, but I can see what the fuss over Patrick Dempsey is about, so I went to see Made Of Honour. Big mistake. Dempsey plays a guy who’s just ten years out of college, so he has to look and act younger than his real age. There’s a reason why he’s a star now, in his 40s, and wasn’t in his 20s: he projects better as the older guy. He’s more attractive when slightly mournful. Then Kevin McKidd, who was Vorenus in Rome, turns up as his Scottish opponent. Patrick is very pretty, as the late Sydney Pollack points out several times in the movie, but I’d pick the guy who can throw a tree while wearing a skirt.

Stan Winston, special effects maestro and one of the main reasons we went to the movies (viz to see something we don’t see in real life), is dead. Winston worked on the designs of the Terminator, Predator, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, Edward Scissorhands, more recently Iron Man, and perhaps most terrifyingly, the queen alien in Aliens with H.R. Giger. View a gallery of Stan Winston’s work.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, originally uploaded by Koosama.

“Let me be blunt: “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is the finest post-Zionist action- hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen. That it is the only one I have ever seen — and why is that? what cultural deficiency or ideological conspiracy has prevented this genre from flourishing? — does not much detract from my judgment.” A.O. Scott in the New York Times.

Have I mentioned that I love Adam Sandler, have seen nearly every one of his movies at least twice, and usually catch them on opening day? I mean the really crude, stupid stuff like Little Nicky and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Love them.

Caregiver directed by Chito Roño, written by Chris Martinez, and starring Sharon Cuneta, is a well-intentioned melodrama about the hardships of Filipinos working overseas. It belongs in the tradition of Anak (domestic helpers in Hong Kong), Milan (farm workers in Italy), and Dubai (hotel workers in the UAE), and should probably have been titled London. Caregiver is alright, But

Why do OFW movies always feel like wakes?
Why are the British actors made up to look like cadavers?
Why are the British characters so emotional?

Caregiver tells us that although millions of Filipinos are clamoring to work abroad, an OFW’s life is hard. Um, we already knew that. We appreciate their hardship, and we know that if they had opportunities in our country, they wouldn’t leave their families. Hey, we’re not exactly sitting by the pool sipping banana daiquiris either. Most of us work, all of us have problems. It is also possible to experience alienation and isolation in your homeland. How about a little respect for the Pinoys who stick around and do the best they can in truly trying circumstances? No one has a monopoly on suffering, but everyone has a unique story. We need fresh insights on the Pinoy experience at home and abroad, not recycled cliches.

Speaking of archaeological movies:
1. Here’s a good demonstration of the difference between television and cinema. What works in 30-minute episodes on the small screen cannot be stretched to 142 minutes on the big screen, no matter how many 80’s-style musical montages you throw in.
2. The TV show’s strength was in the writing. After all, its main character was a writer. The women could be silly, vindictive, self-absorbed bitches, but they were endearingly human. The movie’s producers were so engrossed in the clothes and accessories, they forgot to hire writers.
3. Sets a new standard in movie tie-in advertising: at least 5 obvious product placements per scene, and a product mention every five minutes. Not content with having a bag in every other scene, LVMH has apparently sponsored a character named Louise. Oh look, it’s like a Vogue photo spread. Wait, it IS a Vogue photo spread.
4. After the first hour, I began to hope someone would get mugged.
5. The cinematographer likes Big more than Carrie. Big was more interesting when he was a jerk.
6. Are those shoes, or stilts?
7. Looks like the distributors cut the movie to get a PG rating. The cuts are very badly done. One character’s pot belly is deleted entirely, so we don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. So the movie is even more “sanitized” than the version shown on cable.
8. The moral of the story is, If you try to pollute the New York Public Library with your frou-frou, something terrible will happen.
9. Noel: “The title should’ve been Sex and the City: The Final Crusade. If there’s a sequel it should be called Sex And The Pity. It’ll be about mercy sex.”

Truffaut directing Léaud, originally uploaded by 160507.

In their teens they worshipped at the church of Cinema. They called themselves “Hitchcocko-Hawksians”. In their 20s they defined the New Wave in French cinema. They reviewed each other’s work. They promoted each other tirelessly. Then Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had a falling-out. Auteur Wars by Richard Brody. 

Brody quotes from a vitriolic letter Truffaut had written to Godard. More of the letter:

“Jean-Luc. . .I feel the time has come to tell you, at length, that in my opinion you’ve been acting like a shit. . .Phony. Poseur. You’ve always been a poseur, as when you sent a telegram to de Gaulle about his prostate. . .a poseur even now when you claim you’re going to show the truth about the cinema, those who work in the background, who are badly paid, etc. When you had a location, a garage or shop set up by your crew, and then you would arrive and say, ‘I don’t have any ideas today, we won’t shoot’ and the crew would have to take it all back down again, did it never occur to you that the workers might feel completely useless and rejected?. . .You’re the Ursula Andress of militancy, you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery. . .”

Film director Sydney Pollack is dead. He was 73. He hauled awards for Out of Africa (”I had a coffee faarm in Aafrica”) and permanently iconised Streisand and Redford in The Way We Were (”Your girl is lovely, Hubble”), but my favorite Pollack movie is Tootsie (”I was a better man as a woman than I was as a man. . .), his brilliant comedy about the acting life (and source of perennial Pinoy favorite, “It Might Be You”). He produced a lot of movies, among them The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Recently he delivered great performances himself, in movies like Eyes Wide Shut and Michael Clayton. Sydney Pollack stopped by the Philippines in 2003, on his way to a bicycling trip in Burma with his friends. Mar Roxas gave a dinner for the group. Pollack told us how films get financed and how they make a profit. He said the most profitable movie he’d ever produced (at that time) was Sliding Doors.

Saw The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Richard Burton. Man it’s bleak. Not a laugh in the whole movie. And yet it makes me want to read the entire Le Carre oeuvre. (Alright, the Smiley books. Constant Gardener, ewww.) There are no heroes. The spies are regular schlubs, they don’t carry cool gadgets or drive snazzy cars, and they don’t actually engage in hand-to-hand combat. They wage war with their brains: reading the enemy, predicting their moves, finding exploitable flaws. Double-crosses become triple-crosses become quadruple-crosses. “Intelligence” lives up to its name. One has to admire the cold, calculating bastards who run the agents. I wonder if the fact that the espionage genre has moved on from John Le Carre to the Tom Clancies reflects the decline in “intelligence”. Technology aids the clever, and it also enables the mediocre; it democratises.

I also realized that Russell Crowe wants to be Richard Burton. Same eyes.

I watched the six-part BBC series Ancient Rome in one sitting (It was the day I did not get a single text message). Unlike the HBO/BBC series Rome, this one was based on actual accounts by Roman writers (which assumes that writers don’t embellish or exaggerate, haha), and does not contain graphic sex and nudity (Blast). Like the fictional series it contains plenty of violence, cause that’s how the Romans achieved world domination.

Stuff I learned from Ancient Rome, the series:

1. According to the series advisers, Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned, he tried to save it. When Rome stopped burning he was advised to move the capital, but he insisted on rebuilding Rome. He envisioned it as a center of art. Unfortunately he was bonkers, and thought of himself as a great artist. He insisted on performing in public. In contemporary terms, that’s like “Queen Elizabeth as a pole dancer”. Try reviewing your emperor’s performance poetry. His reconstruction plans bankrupted Rome.

2. Tiberius Gracchus was the first populist tribune. He pushed for land reform, which angered the aristocrats. The Romans were deeply suspicious of anyone who might aspire to be king (as Julius Caesar would find out). He was clubbed to death with the leg of a stool.

3. Ed Stoppard (Cute!) who played Flavius Josephus, the Jewish revolutionary turned Roman historian, is the son of Tom Stoppard the playwright who wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the literary model for Rome with its fictional heroes Vorenus and Titus Pullo.

4. The Goths who sacked Rome were not really barbarians or savages. Their leader Alaric did not want to sack Rome, but after the Goths had served the empire in various campaigns, they were screwed over. Alaric’s brother-in-law Athawulf ended up marrying the emperor’s sister.

5. There were many squabbling Jewish factions during the rebellion against Rome, not unlike the Judaean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judaea.