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I got my copy from Butch Perez at lunchtime, opened to page 1, and did not stop reading until I finished the whole book. So no work was done today, and it was a day very well spent.

Intelligent, wicked, sometimes vicious (Bernal did not spare anyone, especially himself), this anti-biography is presented as a wide-ranging conversation between filmmaker Ishmael Bernal and his closest friend, the scholar and screenwriter Jorge Arago. Mercifully many of Bernal’s targets are long-dead, because he murders them.
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It’s a scream, a hoot and a blast! (Plus lark, riot, barrel of laughs)

It’s anarchic and hilarious! A different kind of funny from Guardians of the Galaxy, which is pop culture-centric. Here the comedy springs from the disconnect between the characters’ ideas of themselves, what they say they’re going to do, and what they actually do. And the brightly colored CGI worlds look grotty, which make them seem more real.

It rescues Thor from the bottom of the Marvel superhero franchises! Yes, Thor is no longer the loser in the pack (I saw Thor: The Dark World in Czech and it still doesn’t work), and they saved it by allowing Chris Hemsworth to fall on his face and be funny.

It’s packed with guest stars, including actors not in the Marvel universe!

It has the rare villain (Cate Blanchett being the Anti-Galadriel) formidable enough to wipe out the heroes, plus planet-shaking consequences!

Led Zeppelin in Valhalla! Immigrant Song should be the Thor theme like Black Sabbath’s Iron Man should be Iron Man’s (it turns up occasionally) and Misty Mountain Hop should be Gollum’s (Yes, we all read the same things).

Jeff Goldblum in gold lame!

Taika Waititi is my favorite director name!

It must be discussed in exclamation points!

It has two credit sequences, FYI.

I don’t need to see another superhero flick until Black Panther! This year I’ve seen five good-to-great superhero flicks and will quit while I’m ahead.

Later.

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I wasn’t the oldest person at the cinema (I saw it in the early afternoon, surrounded by senior citizens), but I was by far the happiest to hear Led Zeppelin in the battle sequences. “Hammer of the gods?” “We are your overlords?” Nothing could be more appropriate, not even Wagner, said my friend, a blues guitarist.

Since watching Ragnarok, I’ve been listening to Zeppelin constantly. I miss them. When I was a kid, they were schoolbus music: it was either Zeppelin or disco. Up to the 90s it seemed to me that on every overpass there was a beggar with a tinny amp singing “Stairway to Heaven”. In every dive where a band played, some drunks would inevitably start yelling “Stairway to Heaven”, which was the cue to take cover as bottles would start flying. Ah, childhood. Here’s a playlist.

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(It’s getting longer and longer.)

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I crawled out of bed and got a coffee IV drip to watch Blade Runner 2049 at the cinema. Now children below 18, go away and play with your toys.

Are they gone?

Holy fuck Blade Runner 2049 is beautiful.

I don’t mean pretty visuals beautiful, I mean sublime. I mean tears and snot in rain. I mean attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

It takes Philip K. Dick’s question about what it means to be human and walks it through Milton and Chris Marker, Stalker and Children of Men. My brain is in a different timezone so pardon my incoherence.

It is church for atheists. I’m going to see it in theaters as many times as I can.

It’s about an individual (He even has the same initial as one of Kafka’s protagonists) who leads a lonely, pointless existence made bearable by artificial entertainments, who suddenly realizes that his life could mean something. But he must make a choice.

If it’s a diversion from life that you want, maybe go see something else. This is a movie that asks: Are you human, or are you a drone?

Now returning to stasis.

Salvador Calvo will open the Festival with his movie 1898, Los últimos de Filipinas. The film tells the story of the Baler siege of 1898, when a group of Spanish soldiers resisted for 337 days without knowing that the Philippine Revolution against Spain was over. Calvo will have a Q&A with the audience on October 6, at 9:30pm.

Sally Gutiérrez will present her documentary Ta acorda ba Tu el Filipinas? on October 6, at 4:30pm.

Read the official catalogue of Pelicula 2017.

Tickets are at Php100. Get them at the Greenbelt 3 box office, or buy them online at sureseats.com.

For more information, log on to the Instituto Cervantes website (www.manila.cervantes.es) or www.facebook.com/InstitutoCervantesManila.

And I don’t know how to process that sentence.