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Photo by Chris Buck for the New York Times

Jana Prikryl, a senior editor at the New York Review of Books, had a poem about Benedict Cumberbatch published in the London Review of Books.

Thinking of Benedict
Cumberbatch and his mind
(stay with me), I resolved
on the importance
of character, specifically
as a function of the celebrity
interview: that it’s not his face
propelled him into the skin
of a matinée idol but
his quips and winning
earnest wish to answer
every question,
and be very very nice.

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Where is the ode to Tom Hiddleston in the Paris Review or the sonnet about Eddie Redmayne in the Times Literary Supplement? (And the lament on the recent wedding of Joseph Gordon-Levitt?)

In no particular order

Top 10 Books that we read in 2014

1. How to be Both by Ali Smith
2. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
3. The Children Act by Ian McEwan
4. My Struggle Volume 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

5. Life After Life and Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
6. HHhH by Laurent Binet
7. The Blue Flower and Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald
8. The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh-Fermor
9. Isabelo’s Archive by Resil Mojares
10. Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant

Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala’s Top 10 Books he read in 2014

1. The Martian by Andy Weir
2. An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
3. The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
4. The Son by Jo Nesbo
5. The Steady Running of the Hour by Justin Go
6. For Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta
7. The Farm by Tom Rob Smith
8. Dusk by James Salter
9. The Twelve Children of Paris by Tim Willocks
10. The Fun Stuff by James Wood

Jaime’s Top 10 TV Shows he saw in 2014

1. Gracepoint (US BBC) and Broadchurch (BBC)
2. The Roosevelts – An Intimate Portrait (PBS – Documentary)
3. The Vikings
4. True Detective
5. The Knick
6. Wallander (both Swedish and British versions)
7. Hell on Wheels

Martin Freeman in the William H. Macy role in the TV Fargo, which is different from the movie Fargo.
8. Fargo
9. The Bridge
10. House of Cards

Our Top 10 Movies from 2014 that we saw in 2014

1. Snowpiercer. How to choreograph a fight scene with axes.
2. Guardians of the Galaxy starring Chris Pratt as Han Solo, and Captain America: Winter Soldier, a 70s conspiracy thriller with superheroes. We’re going to cheat and consider all movies from the Marvel universe as a single extravaganza, to make room for a movie someone just reminded us about.
3. Boyhood. Time travel for real. Who knew that the passage of the years, marked by the most mundane events, could be so moving?
4. Nightcrawler. Creepy Jake.
5. Stranger by the Lake. Like Nancy Drew with sex and death.
6. The Grand Budapest Hotel. The movie equivalent of a vitrine of macarons.

7. Only Lovers Left Alive. Who but vampires can really appreciate the history of art, literature, music?
8. The Immigrant. James Gray (Two Lovers, We Own the Night) should be more famous.
9. Edge of Tomorrow. In which Tom Cruise gets killed over and over and over again, to the enjoyment of fans and non-fans.
10. Magic in the Moonlight. A better Woody Allen movie than the fluffy Midnight in Paris, which critics and audiences loved.
(Note: Norte was on our 2013 list. We haven’t seen most of the awards contenders, which just opened in the US.)

Top 10 Taxi Names

1. Ozymandias. Look on yon cab, ye mighty, and despair!
2. from Ricky: Shadow of the Almighty. Not a reference to Sauron.
10. Your choices

Saffy’s Top 10 Cat Food Flavors

1. Fancy Feast Seafood Feast
2. Fancy Feast Salmon Feast
3. Vita Pet Tuna with Prawn
4. Fancy Feast Cod, Sole, and Shrimp Feast
5. Canned food from Bow and Wow (basta mahal)
6. Fried chicken (human food)
7. Vita Pet Tuna Nuggets
8. Friskies Mixed Grill Paté
9. Friskies Salmon Feast Classic Paté
10. Sashimi (human food)

Send us your lists.

Absurdity is a given in the rom-com business. We wouldn’t have to point that out except that lots of people still think their lives are rom-coms, and that at some point they will be loudly declaring their love in a public place in front of a cheering crowd. The achievement of English Only, Please, directed by Dan Villegas (Mayohan) is that it keeps the timeworn tropes of the genre but somehow makes them engaging again. We may see the ending coming a mile away, but we need to see it through.

Read our review at InterAksyon.com.

We spent December 25 the way we did last year: hanging out with friends, coaxing Drogon out from under the furniture (sometimes he gets shy), eating leftovers (When will that lechon end?) and watching movies.

This year we saw the biggest talking point of the season: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Interview. It’s stupid and hilarious! Even Juan laughed at it (he doesn’t take to stupid as well as we do)! Thank you, Kim Still Less Famous Than Kardashian, for getting us interested in a movie by making it a rallying cry for free speech. Otherwise we might’ve ignored it.

Katy Perry’s song Firework has a major role in the movie, which reminds us of another movie featuring Firework: Rust and Bone by Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet). In the Audiard, Marion Cotillard plays a whale trainer who loses both her legs in a terrible accident. Sitting in her wheelchair, she recalls the choreography to the whale show, so whenever we hear Firework we remember that moment and our hair stands on end. (Cotillard is sublime, the only time we saw her put in a so-so performance was in the last Nolan Batman.)

It’s the Winter Solstice, which is not a mysterious super-soldier revealed to be someone from Captain America’s past, but the point at which the North Pole is tilted farthest away from the sun. Druids marks it as the sun’s “rebirth” for the New Year.

Fine, we don’t have winter here in the tropics, but we buy the Fall/Winter collections of international retail brands sold in local malls, so we can’t be sure.

To mark the Winter Solstice, here are the lyrics to the song the Princess sang in Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, which all good film nerds know is the basis for Star Wars.

Remember that.

We feel about the limited edition The Hobbit Moleskine clothbound notebook the same way we feel about the third episode in The Hobbit trilogy: We’ll get it because we have the previous editions, and we kind of like it, but we acknowledge that it doesn’t have to exist.

This one is boxed and clothbound. Yay. (Say that exactly the way Sean Bean’s Boromir in the mines of Moria said, “They have a cave troll.”) With a handwriting sample of J.R.R. Tolkien’s on the cover, so more money for his descendants.

And there’s a map in it…just like the earlier notebooks. What a surprise.

The endpapers are facsimiles of the original illustrations by Tolkien, and there are 7 pages of illustrations and 8 quotes inside—the same illustrations and quotes that appear in last year’s notebook and the year before last year’s notebook.

However, this Hobbit Moleskine is available only with lined pages, no version with plain pages. We prefer plain pages because strangely, we can write straight lines, but when there are lines our writing goes in all directions.

The Hobbit Moleskine boxed and clothbound notebook is available at National Bookstores, Php2,240.

Speaking of new isn’t necessarily better, there’s a new Lego Moleskine notebook in blue.

Compare it to the black one that came out a couple of years ago.

True, this one has stickers so you can customize the cover…

Naah, it doesn’t make that much difference. Available at National Bookstores, Php1,580.

It’s back to plain monochromatic Moleskines for us for now.