JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

We shot this off a laptop so the sound is muffled. In this scene: Tesa Celdran, Ronnie Liang, Federico Olbes, and our band of extras.

Last year, filmmaker Elwood Perez (Lipad, Darna, Lipad; Disgrasyada; Diborsyada; Waikiki) asked us to write a movie.

“But we’ve never written a movie from scratch,” we said. “It will be terrible for sure.”

“Only you can write this movie!” Elwood declared.

“What’s it about?”

“Oh you know, East is East and West is West…the different types of gays in Manila…and the lead is Ronnie Liang. And Carlos Celdran must be in it, as himself.”

“Yes, but what’s it about?”

“Bahala ka na diyan,” he said, airily. “Daahling,” he added, like Tennessee Williams by way of Rita Gomez, “I’ll be busy all of next week, so just text.”

“But…but…but…”

The following week.

“Where were you?” we asked Elwood.

“Oh, my partner sold his car and I shot an indie movie,” Elwood said, as if this were something most people did anyway.

“In one week?”

“Yes, and I’ve edited it. The title is Otso. What do you think?”

We were floored by Otso and started working on a synopsis for the next movie. After many lunches and coffees, we had a sequence guide.

“Sige, isulat mo na yan,” Elwood said. “Make it sound like you.”

“Who’d want to watch that?”

“Hahaha, ikaw talaga. Can you add vampires?”

“Vampires??”

Weeks passed. We added vampires.

Elwood skimmed through the sequences. “Puede na ito. Write the screenplay na.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to add anything? Werewolves? Cause once we start writing, we’re not changing the plot.”

“Gawin mo na.”

That night, at 3am, Elwood sent us 10 text messages describing additional characters and changes to the storyline. Ordinarily we hate late revisions, but Elwood’s ideas were so outré, we had to use them. The barrage of text messages continued for weeks. The writing was slow at first, but once we realized that making sense of the whole shebang was not our problem and that the director would throw out most of the script anyway, we finished it in a few days.

“Ang mahal naman ng screenplay mo,” Elwood said. “This is a no-budget movie.”

“You said you wanted parties.”

Elwood’s solution was to call a friend. “Daahling, are you having a party next week? Can I shoot there?”

Elwood started shooting the movie. Next thing we know, the title had been changed from Object of Desire to Esoterica Manila. In January he showed us the trailer.

“I didn’t know Jon Hall was in the movie,” we said.

“That’s footage I shot a long time ago and never used,” Elwood explained. “It works.”

“What are all those socialites doing there?”

“Nag-shoot ako at a cocktail party.”

“Umm…do they know they’re in the movie?”

“They do now.”

Elwood wanted a scene in a bookshop.

“Our hero has a thirst for culture. Literature. Art,” he reminded us.

“We could ask Solidaridad to let us shoot there.”

“Perfect. We’ll need extras.”

So we put out a call for extras, and some readers gamely turned up. This being a no-budget movie, the crew consisted of Elwood, DOP Jopa, and Elwood’s driver Gilbert holding a microphone. Elwood blocked the scene.

“Alright,” he told us, “Turn this way, hold up the book, and sign it at this angle.”

“In mid-air? Isn’t that unnatural?”

“Basta, ako ang direktor!” he declared, turning to our band of intrepid extras. “Hijo, masyado kang matangkad, masisira ang composition. Doon ka sa likod. Okay, when you give her your book to sign, tilt it so we can see the cover, and then hand it to her, slowly.”

“He has to do his own slow-motion?” we laughed.

“Quiet. You there, turn right, crane your neck, that’s your angle. Hold that pose. Dapat maganda kayong lahat, lalo na’t walang bayad ito. Don’t look at the camera. Feel beautiful! Feel gorgeous! Okay, roll!”

Our shoot went quickly. We improvised our lines.

Last week Elwood sent us the rough edit for subtitling in English.

“Uh…Elwood? We don’t recall having written a gay rape scene.”

“No, that’s a movie they’re watching.”

“Did we have transgender characters?”

“Yes, isn’t she gorgeous? I couldn’t get a big star—no budget, remember—so I added her. So much more interesting.”

“There’s full frontal nudity.”

“Ang bongga, diba? That’s why I call it Esoterica. It’s not for everyone.”

“Why are those guys speaking in French?”

“Because they can! So our movie is in Tagalog, English, French and Spanish. Very cosmopolitan ang dating.”

We’re pretty sure we didn’t write it, but we can’t wait to see it. Here’s the scene we shot at Solidaridad with our reader-volunteers. Thank you for showing up! (Sinabi nang act natural, eh.)

via i09

The Ghent Altarpiece, one of the priceless artworks the Monuments Men had to recover, is the most stolen artwork of all time.

And we love the story. A small, overworked crew of curators, art historians and conservators lands in Europe to recover works of art looted by the Nazi’s for Hitler’s dream museum. They’re saving civilization itself (though as Leo points out, not from a Marxist perspective).

Pity that the movie is a clunker. George Clooney, who wrote, directed and stars in this adaptation of Robert Edsel’s book, spends too much time explaining why the mission was of vital importance and not enough time engaging the audience. George, darling, if you’re going to give us the basic lecture on art history, it would be better to come to our houses and deliver it in person. The voice-overs with the overbearing musical score telling us how it’s our duty to care about the mission: Ugh.

The Monuments Men is a waste of an excellent cast: Why hire Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Hugh Bonneville, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban and especially Bill Murray if you’re not going to give them anything to work with? Balaban’s character was based on Lincoln Kirstein, founder of the New York City Ballet. Other than a few barbs delivered by the cranky private, the comedic potential of this situation was squandered.

If you want an engrossing account of the Nazis’ wholesale art theft, watch the documentary, The Rape of Europa. It’s more exciting than Monuments Men.

One of the panels of the Ghent Altarpiece is still missing.

And read about Anne Olivier Bell, the last of the Monuments Men—a woman who is not mentioned in the film. (Too bad, they could’ve used another female character.)

We were making a list of Irish movies (The Commitments, The Quiet Man, My Left Foot, Once…) with our Irish friend Kevin when we remembered what could be the finest of them all: John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead.

The Dead is the final story in Joyce’s Dubliners, and its last lines are among the greatest in literature.

Read The Dead.

Movie #11: Frances Ha. Love it! Funny, moving, we have to see it again. Movie #12: Twelve Years A Slave. We’re disturbed that the ugliness that is slavery is presented with such formal beauty.

Spike Jonze’s Her may be the most romantic movie ever made because it dispenses with the trappings of movie romance: the attractive man, the adorable woman, their gregarious friends, long walks and beautiful sunsets, the trauma that nearly rips them apart, the joyous reunion. Those are just the extras, the ambience. Her serves up the real thing: the union of minds irrespective of time, space, and even corporeal existence.

This is what love is. The tragedy is that one of them doesn’t have a body, and the irony is that she’s played by Scarlett Johansson. (It’s kind of like Steve Martin’s The Man With Two Brains, played beyond the laughs.)

Joaquin Phoenix is handsome when he cares to be, but as Theodore Twombly he is the classic socially-inept nerd, in those high-waisted pants that the brilliant production designer has inflicted on the male cast members. Theodore is a sensitive soul who writes beautiful personal letters for other people: he’s seeking emotional connection in a world where everyone is connected but no one really cares. Much like our world with its illusion of connection, promoted by social media and the internet. And then Theodore gets a new computer operating system—an artificial intelligence that evolves at an exponential rate. Her name is Samantha, and it says something about our times that when Theodore and Samantha fall in love, it’s not that surprising.

Deceptively simple and genuinely odd, Her gets to the truth of love: that the beloved is the person you want to be in your head at all times (Being an OS gives her a distinct advantage), that complete honesty is not always helpful, that people have obligations to themselves that cannot be set aside for relationships.

We’ve always admired the work of Spike Jonze, but wondered if he would manage without his usual collaborator, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation). Where the Wild Things Are didn’t work for us—writer Dave Eggers provided whimsy instead of the authentic eccentricity that is the mark of Jonze’s films. As the writer and director of Her, and creator of its unique universe, Spike Jonze reveals emotional depths his previous works had only hinted at. His medium is Phoenix, one of the most amazing actors in the history of cinema. This can’t be the same actor who played Freddie Quell in The Master—that guy was more wild animal than human. Apparently Joaquin Phoenix can do anything, and as Theodore Twombly he breaks your heart by being thoroughly human. Will someone please look after Joaquin Phoenix, because if anything were to happen to him we could not take it.

P.S. Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com has just given us a business idea.

I know this sounds silly, and I know that I might sound ridiculous. Like this is the scene in the movie where the guy is trying to get hold of the long-lost son, you know, but this is that scene. This is that scene. And I think they have those scenes in the movies because they’re true. Because they really happen. And you gotta believe me, this is really happening.

via Biblioklept.