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In The Master, Joaquin Phoenix plays an ex-navy man with post-traumatic stress disorder who falls in with a cult leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who may or may not be based on L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology. It’s an amazing, puzzling movie and Joaquin Phoenix’s approach to his role is the opposite of Daniel Day-Lewis’s in Lincoln. Whereas DDL appears to be in control of everything, including his pores and facial hair, Joaquin doesn’t seem to know what Joaquin is doing—he keeps surprising himself. Where is it coming from? He must be hell to direct but the result is beautiful and terrifying. More on the The Master later.

Noel pointed out the early scene, set in Hawaii, in which Joaquin’s character is drinking his homemade brew with some Pinoys. Tagalog is spoken in the background. Someone sings Dahil Sa ‘Yo, and its composer who, funnily enough, shares the name of the leader of the religious group El Shaddai, Mike Velarde. All is well, until you hear this bit of off-camera dialogue:

“Katabi siya ng artista.” (He’s beside the movie star.)

The artista being Joaquin Phoenix. Apparently the extras were so thrilled to be in the movie, they talked about it during a take, and no one in the editing room could understand Tagalog, tsk tsk.

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper star in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook

There have been many movies about mental illness, and many of them have been Oscar bait, but Silver Linings Playbook starring newly-crowned Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper is the first we can recall that makes being crazy appealing. Sure, the crazy people in this movie can be annoying and unpredictable, but mostly they’re cute and funny and you never really get the impression that they could harm themselves or others. Yes, Patrick (Bradley Cooper) almost beats a man to death, but that man deserved to have the crap kicked out of him. And Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) had sex with everyone at her place of work, but she was depressed plus it only makes her hotter.

Silver Linings Playbook romanticizes manic-depression (We prefer this term to the current “bipolar”) and deftly sidesteps its more disturbing aspects. It almost makes you want to be nuts. In this undeniably entertaining romantic comedy, the one thing a crazy man needs to become sane is the love of a strong woman and some choreography. So she manipulates him, so what, it’s for his own good.

Have you ever spoken to an unmedicated manic-depressive? They talk in loops, and the loops lead to more loops, and it’s frustrating to both of you because you can’t seem to escape from the loop. They can’t stop even if they want to; they are not in control. It’s like they’ve got their mind on their mind and they’re talking to you but watching themselves at the same time. And the scary part is not the possibility that they’ll attack you, but the thought that take a synapse here and there and that could be you.

But why go into the fear and loathing stuff when Patrick and Tiffany are so cute! Early on we get a sense of Patrick’s dangerous rage, but before long he is tamed by drugs and Tiffany. You know why we like Jennifer Lawrence so much? Because in an industry full of fakes, she comes across as a level-headed, real person—a girl with a well-developed bullshit detector. Not for one moment do we believe that she’s loony.

Meanwhile Robert De Niro gives the rare post-Heat performance that doesn’t make us want to club him with ancient Betamax copies of Godfather II and Raging Bull.

Crazy person movie: Puzzle of a Downfall Child by Jerry Schatzberg. Reminds us of people we know, except that they don’t look like Faye Dunaway. Watch it for the insanity, or the outfits.

Celso Ad Castillo shot two endings for Tag-Ulan sa Tag-Araw. The other one was happy: After a long chase, Vilma’s father stops the car and tells her to get out. She walks towards Christopher de Leon, and they meet in front of Malate Church and embrace. Castillo couldn’t decide which ending to use, so he asked his staff to round up the cigarette vendors, balut vendors, watch-your-car boys and hawkers on the street outside the studio. Then he made them watch the movie and the two endings.

“Alin ang mas gusto ninyo?” he asked the impromptu focus group? (Which ending do you prefer?)

“Direk, gusto naming yung nagkatuluyan sila sa may simbahan,” they said. (We like the one where they end up together.)

“Use the other ending,” he told his staff. So the movie ended with the never-ending chase.

Read Celso Ad Castillo: Genius is convulsive, our column at InterAksyon.com.

Or we didn’t care—same thing. Apparently we didn’t miss much: Everyone who was expected to win, won.

How to make the Oscars more thrilling (or just thrilling, period):
1. Don’t announce the nominees until the actual ceremony.
2. Make the nominees pick out their own clothes. Stylists take away all the fun and replace it with correctness. The trashy should be free to be trashy.
3. If Ben Affleck is a sure winner anyway, have Matt Damon present the trophy. (The surprise appearance of Michelle Obama as presenter confirmed that ZD30 had a zero chance of winning. Heyyy no separation of cinema and politics.)

In Sally Potter’s film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Tilda Swinton played the character as female and male. Because she’s Tilda. She should star in the David Bowie biopic.

If you were a person of the opposite sex, what would you be like? How would you dress and behave, what kind of job and relationships would you have? How would your life be different?

We think that if we were a boy, girls would be hurling themselves at us.

* Oops, it’s a long weekend if you’re a student, but not if you have a job. What do we know about official holidays, we’re freelance.

You must have a dvd lying around.

We can’t believe Pulp Fiction is 20 years old. Sign of age: saying things like, “We can’t believe Pulp Fiction is 20 years old.” The first time we saw it our brain was divided between “What the hell is going on!” and “This changes everything.” It did change the movies, though not the Academy, which gave Best Picture that year to Forrest Gump. It certainly changed the way we think and talk about burgers, foot massages, Samuel L. Jackson, cleaning cars, and watches.

Harvey Keitel discusses car-cleaning procedures with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Photo from VF.com.

In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would become Pulp Fiction, about a community of criminals on the fringe of Los Angeles. Written in a dozen school notebooks, which the 30-year-old Tarantino took on the plane to Los Angeles, the screenplay was a mess—hundreds of pages of indecipherable handwriting. “It was about going over it one last time and then giving it to the typist, Linda Chen, who was a really good friend of mine,” Tarantino tells me. “She really helped me.”

“It began with calls where he was just reading pages to me,” she continues. Then came more urgent calls, asking her to join him for midnight dinners. Chen always had to pick him up, since he couldn’t drive as a result of unpaid parking tickets. She knew Tarantino was a “mad genius.” He has said that his first drafts look like “the diaries of a madman,” but Chen says they’re even worse. “His handwriting is atrocious. He’s a functional illiterate. I was averaging about 9,000 grammatical errors per page. After I would correct them, he would try to put back the errors, because he liked them.”

Read The Oral History of Pulp Fiction in Vanity Fair.

Infographic of the death toll in Tarantino movies from VF.com. They misspelled Inglourious Basterds.