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Yes, we get it 9 days before it opens in the US.

It’s witty, funny, snappy, and it actually has something to say about our relationship with technology. And with Robert Downey, Jr, because this couldn’t possibly work without him. Go!

Don’t forget to sit through the credits. They’re very long, but don’t leave. The cameo is worth it.

Read our review at InterAksyon.com: It’s not the suit, it’s the man. Completely free of anything that might be construed as a spoiler. If it’s in the trailer, it’s not a spoiler.

Method actors are said to be possessed by their characters; Tony Stark is possessed by Robert Downey, Jr. If he seems more substantial than the typical comic-book character, it’s because he mines the actor’s notorious personal history for material. Stark’s personal excesses seem more real because we know of the actor’s past drug addiction. We put up with the character’s arrogance because we know that the actor has been punished for his misdeeds. (This is not an endorsement of drugs. Drugs don’t make you fascinating. Drugs only make boring people even more boring.)

Most of all, Stark/Downey is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. There’s a reason they’re called comic books, you know.

That is not a question the makers of Olympus Has Fallen bother to ask. In this Die-Hard-in-the-White-House action flick directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), Secret Service Agent Banning (Gerald Butler) must save the President (Aaron Eckhart) and the US from Korean terrorists who take over the White House and want America’s nuclear codes.

Olympus Has Fallen is cheap and effective. By “cheap” we mean that when a character we’re supposed to care about dies, someone screams “Nnnoooo!” and starts running towards the body in slow motion. By “effective” we mean that it’s quite exciting—an achievement when you consider that everything we see onscreen has been done before, and better.

This is the second time in two days that we’ve seen Morgan Freeman and Melissa Leo in mediocre action movies, reminding us that Oscar winners have to pay their bills, too. Fuqua sets up stuff, and then seems to forget about them (Major rewrites?). When we first see President Asher he’s boxing with Banning; he doesn’t get to throw a single punch after that. The president’s kid Connor knows the secret passages in the White House; we never see him going through them. The car crash at the start of the movie seems to have been caused by an assassination attempt; we never hear about the attempt again. Asher keeps saying that the terrorists will have to kill him for the nuclear code; suddenly they have the code and we don’t know how they got it.

Still, we’re always happy to see Angela Bassett, even if she’s just sitting at a table looking worried, and Dylan McDermott, even if he’s just standing around looking handsome. If you like square jaws, thick necks and loud explosions, you might enjoy this.

Rating: * * *

As the world’s most famous practitioner of Scientology, a religion founded by a science-fiction writer, Tom Cruise is uniquely qualified to play a science-fiction hero. But does he have to play the live-action Wall-E?

In recent years it’s become the custom to beat up on Tom Cruise—his odd behavior, marriages, control freakiness, even his height. Things haven’t been the same for Tom since he jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch to declare his love for his now ex-wife. The viewers forget that they loved him once. Fickle, fickle. We didn’t love him, not like Ambeth’s sister who drove to Fort Ilocandia when he was shooting Born on the 4th of July so she could get a glimpse of him. (She saw him walking on the beach. He had patay na kuko. Disillusioned, she got back in the van and drove back to Manila.) But we liked him when he was dancing in his underwear (Risky Business) or playing assholes (Magnolia, Maguire). Cruise is effective when he’s not micro-managing his image as the All-American Action Hero. Unfortunately that happens very rarely. He took a huge risk with Rock of Ages and it didn’t pay off.

Oblivion is Tom Cruise sticking very closely to the image of Tom Cruise. It is set in the not-so-distant future, where the Earth has fought off alien invaders with nuclear weapons and destroyed itself in the process. The surviving humans have all moved to Saturn’s moon, Titan. Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, who with his domestic/work partner Vika (Andrea Riseborough) is assigned to Earth to clear the debris from the wasteland, like Wall-E. Their memories have been wiped, like in Total Recall. Jack has recurring memories of an unknown woman (Olga Kurylenko), like in La Jetee (and 12 Monkeys). Periodically Jack’s ship is attacked by “scavengers”, like in Mad Max. Of course things are not what they appear to be, like in The Matrix.

Yes, Oblivion is cobbled together out of bits of better science-fiction movies. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t have a real reason to exist. It looks expensive—the cost of this movie could probably pay for an entire season of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones (and probably all of The Wire), which are much more satisfying experiences for the viewer. (This really is the platinum age of television.)

Our attention had drifted from Oblivion, we were busy answering emails (There was no one near our seat to be annoyed by the lit-up screen) when we spotted a familiar jawline onscreen. Jaime Lannister! Well, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Most of his scenes are in a dark cave; the light just bounces off his bone structure. Too handsome, and yet he seems more real than Cruise.

Rating: * * 1/2

* * * * *

Juan pointed out that Oblivion also borrows from Moon by Duncan Jones. The movie is a sci-fi sampler, down to the 2001-like monolith.

It takes two hours in the make-up chair with the brilliant prosthetics artist Cheryl Cabanos and her team administering pee-smelling latex and shreds of toilet paper to your face.

We play a zombie in Ang Huling Henya (The Last Genius), written and directed by Marlon Rivera. Specifically, ourself as a zombie. Yes, years of bugging our friends to give us cameos in their movies has paid off at last! Marlon warned us that a zombie’s life is hard: you get more make-up on than a drag queen, and sticky with sugar syrup blood. That’s actually what sold us on the part.

The make-up would’ve taken another three hours, but Marlon explained that we were only a 6-hour-old zombie and not yet in total disintegration. Also we could keep our glasses on.

So two hours to apply the prosthetics and just five minutes to rip it off. As a bonus, your zits and blackheads come off with the latex, so it’s like a facial.

Ang Huling Henya opens in late May.

The original manuscript of Ode to A Nightingale in John Keats’s handwriting.

The poem recited by Benedict Cumberbatch, to music by Mahler.

Ben Whishaw as John Keats in Bright Star by Jane Campion.

Commemorative plaque, London. Photo by JZ, 2011.

Keats’s old apartment in Rome, now the Keats-Shelley Museum. Photos by Juan, 2012.

Finally watched It Takes A Man and A Woman, which we are told is a super-mega-turbo-blockbuster hit with bells on. ITAMAAW is the third in a series of romantic comedies starring John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo and directed by Cathy Garcia Molina, a.k.a. Star Cinema Rom-Coms Named After Saccharine Pop Songs.

What is there to say about this movie? The moment you sit down you know how it will turn out. We’ve concluded that that is precisely what the audience wants: the comfort of sameness and predictability, without the jarring surprises that real life tends to deliver. We just have two observations:

1. A dead furry animal fell from the ceiling and landed on Sarah Geronimo’s head. Star, why do you make your biggest star wear such hideous wigs?? She appears in shampoo commercials, she’s supposed to have fabulous hair. You can shoot scenes in New York, but you can’t pay for a proper hairstylist?

2. John Lloyd Cruz plays the publisher of a print media company called Flippage, whose logo is a mirror-image lower-case f.

We published a magazine called Flip, whose logo was a mirror-image lower-case f.

Guess that makes us John Lloyd. Bartender, make it a double. On second thought, leave the bottle. And fetch another case. (Bartender: ‘Fetch’ is not happening!)