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We need only one reason to see Gods of Egypt, and it’s Nikolaj Coster Waldau in a leather tank top and tight shorts for 80 percent of the movie. The other 20 percent he’s wearing ceremonial robes or turning into a shiny metal CGI beast warrior. Are you interested yet?

Nikolaj darling plays the god Horus, who is the heir presumptive to the throne of Egypt. Yes, it’s not enough that he looks like that and is divine, but he also gets to rule over the mortals, who pretty much have no choice because he’s eight feet tall, has gold running through his veins (ooh a Lannister theme) and when provoked, transforms into said metal flying beast.

In Alex Proyas’s movie loosely based on Egyptian mythology, the gods live among men and set the terms for entry into the afterlife. The creator god Ra, played by Geoffrey Rush who needs no muscles, lives alone on a space station and does battle with the monster, Chaos. His two sons rule over the earth—Osiris (Bryan Brown) is the lord of men, while Set (Gerald Butler) is the lord of the desert. So we understand why Set is pissed and attacks his brother and his brother’s heir (Nikolaj darling). Thrown into the mix are a human thief (Brendon Thwaites) whose name is Bek so every time people say his name we expect the chorus of “Loser”, and his girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton).

The silliness mounts and there are all kinds of subplots that can prove confusing, so take our advice and focus on Nikolaj’s eyepatch. As you know Nikolaj is perfect so his character has to be deformed in some way to keep the audience from hating him. In Game of Thrones his sword hand was cut off (If this is a spoiler it’s your own fault, that was two seasons ago), and now his eyes are gouged out.

Yes, Alex Proyas is the director of Dark City and The Crow. No, we don’t know what happened.

Right from its inception Gods of Egypt was panned for its blinding white cast: a white Dane, a white Scot and a white Australian play the aforementioned deities. In truth the critics should be thankful it was whitewashed because the movie is so cheesy it’s a good thing there are no real Egyptians in it. Darling Nikolaj has pointed out that he’s not even playing an Egyptian, and he’s right: he’s playing an action figure with a CGI mode.

We were surprised to find the cinema full on Wednesday afternoon. What was the attraction? The religious-sounding title? The swords and sandals? The search for a successor to the gayest movie of recent times, 300? What’s that line: Our arrows will block out the sun. Then let’s throw them some shade.

Keanu Reeves narrates. . .from the future.

By the end you will understand quantum mechanics.

Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter collaborated with Trouper Productions to create the short in celebration of its Quantum Summit, an event where experts discuss the future of various quantum technologies. So the short film serves as advertising and entertainment—but it’s also an introduction to the basics of quantum mechanics, which you learn as Paul Rudd does.

“Seven hundred years ago,” future-Reeves intones at the beginning of the video, “Paul Rudd changed the course of history by showing the world that anyone could grapple with the concepts of quantum mechanics.” Rudd achieves this goal through the clever game of quantum chess, where the pieces must obey both the rules of chess and the laws of quantum mechanics. To understand what’s going on in this game, you have to master two quantum principles: superposition and entanglement.

Read on.

1. FINALLY Ryan Reynolds can be a star. Deadpool showcases Reynolds’ best attributes: his comic delivery, his torso, and his ass. They’re not coy about it, either: the poster reads, “Smartass, Badass, Great Ass.” In some scenes he wears no pants. It’s rated R-16, go away, children.

2. It refers openly to the Green Lantern debacle.

3. It is a superhero movie that makes fun of superhero movies. The jokes fly so fast, we have to see the movie more than once to get everything. The credit sequence itself is hysterical.

4. It is horrifically violent, smutty, immature and hilarious—like our teenage comic book-reading selves.

5. Deadpool is obviously low-budget (for a superhero movie) so they can only afford two X-Men and the special effects look cheap, but they make up for it by being extra-nerdy. “The fourth wall just broke the fourth wall,” Deadpool notes, “so that’s like, sixteen walls.”

6. There are no amazing weapons of mass destruction or super-scary villains (Though Gina Carano as herself is not someone you want to cross), but there’s a ton of dick jokes. Final battle. They’re out of weapons. Lead villain Rejected Daario Naharis says, “Fine. Fists.”

“Sounds like your Saturday night,” Deadpool says. Again: Children, go away.

7. It is directed by Erlich from Silicon Valley (who also plays Deadpool’s best friend), and it shares that show’s combination of juvenile humor and intelligence. The action scenes are fairly straightforward and comprehensible.

Correction: Tim Miller the director is not T.J. Miller who is Erlich Bachman on Silicon Valley. But it would’ve killed if he were! Thanks to the readers who pointed this out.

8. There’s a post-credit sequence that makes fun of post-credit sequences.

9. You don’t have to have read a single Deadpool comic book to enjoy it.

10. Excellent use of cheesy pop ballads.

Uro dela Cruz, who died on Thursday, was a brilliant fictionist, screenwriter, film and TV director, photographer and amateur anthropologist. He was 64. He had shelves full of awards, including seven Palancas, that he was grateful for but did not talk about. Crowing about his achievements embarrassed him — the important thing was the work, and even that he barely discussed. It became a running joke: ask him how many TV shows he was directing at the same time, and he would say, “None.” “You don’t direct Bubble Gang anymore?” we would press him. “That show practically directs itself,” he would shrug. After we had peeled away layers of semantic obfuscation, we would learn that in addition to the comedy show he helmed for two decades, he was directing two game shows and a sitcom starring Manny Pacquiao. No wonder it took him ages to reply to texts and phone calls.

All these accomplishments — the shows ranging from Battle of the Brains to Bubble Gang that defined pop culture and Pinoy humor (he wanted to set up a website called Wackipedia as an archive of jokes); the now-classic films he wrote, including Virgin Forest and Scorpio Nights; the amateur urban archeology that led to a trove of photos by Teodulo Protomartir; the novel Antyng-Antyng (Kwadrisentenyal), which remained unpublished until we kidnapped the manuscript and sent it to a publisher — these are sidebars to the life of Rosauro Quevedo Dela Cruz of Lucban, Quezon. What Uro really excelled at was being a human being. He was a devoted husband to Anna, who runs the household with military precision, whom he described as the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. He was a terrific father to Tata, Toto and Dodong, whom he deprived of any issues they can report to a psychiatrist later in life because they could talk about everything. He was a marvelous friend — kind, generous, deadpan funny, fiercely intelligent, a human Google of arcane knowledge, and he would be the first to point out that there are too many adjectives in this sentence. Uro was one of the finest people I’ve ever known. It’s all downhill from here.

Continue reading in the Philippine Star

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi has so many beefy bearded guys in it, we thought we had wandered into a friend’s fantasy sequence. Then we realized that the gratuitous hotness does have a point. Michael Bay’s version of the events at the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012 is so messy, the only way we could know whom to root for was to look for the hot guys. It doesn’t help that in Libya, everyone has facial hair.

The movie’s not awful, and we’re talking about a director who has plumbed new depths of awfulness with the Transformers movies. It’s thrilling in parts, reminding us how much we enjoyed the early Bay movie, The Rock. It also reminds us that there should be a legal limit to how much slow-motion a filmmaker may use. Worse, it has no notion of geography. We don’t know where the American installation is relative to anything, which part of the villa Ambassador Chris Stevens is in, where the attackers are coming from…jeez, we can’t even tell which ones the attackers are. But show us John Krasinski in a tight t-shirt, and immediately we know whose side we’re on. (Good for you, Emily Blunt, please make an action thriller with your husband.)

Read our reviews at InterAksyon.