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I don’t care for musical theatre, I never saw Miss Saigon, I didn’t like Rent, I wouldn’t go near an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical unless you paid me a chunk of money to plug my ears with (I have big ears), but I love Stephen Sondheim and I approve of Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Yeah yeah, they took out the song that introduces then sums up the story, and you can’t beat live theatre at portraying carnage (fountains of blood!) and horror (screams from the audience!), but it works for me. The voices of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter are not powerful enough for the stage, but this is not the theatre, it’s the cinema. Actually, Johnny could front a band doing David Bowie covers, and one might say he’s been in training for the role since Edward Scissorhands. The kid who plays Toby is great, the young lovers are so forgettable even the movie forgets them (we never find out if they get away), and Timothy Spall could play the Beadle in his sleep. Alan Rickman I found almost sympathetic as Judge Turpin. (Finally I can trundle out the Rickman story I’ve been hoarding. A few years ago, Yodel was at Old Swiss Inn in Makati when she heard a very familiar voice at a nearby table. She looked, and it was Alan Rickman. He was with some Pinoys who were talking about the Harry Potter flicks, and Yodel wanted to say, “Truly, Madly, Deeply!”) The former Ali G/Borat Sacha Baron Cohen turns up as Pirelli, in pants so tight they must help him hit the high notes. Sweeney Todd is wonderfully horrible. I can’t think of more beautiful songs about the ugliness of humanity. Don’t bring the children.

Bobby Fischer, madman, monster, and chess genius, is dead. He lived in the Philippines for a while, popping up on a local radio station in 2001 to applaud the 9/11 attacks. He died at age 64—the number of squares on a chessboard.

Here’s a Straight Dope classic: “How does one suck in a piece of spaghetti? Think about it. How one sucks milk through a straw is easy. The lowered pressure in the mouth due to sucking causes the air pressure over the milk to force the liquid up. But if one pushes on the end of a piece of spaghetti it just buckles. The mouth is closed and sealed over the sides of the spaghetti, so passing air doesn’t drag it along. Somehow the air very close to the mouth must obliquely communicate a force along the length. . .” It’s more complicated than you think.

From FT via 3Quarks: This little piggy was raised in a cramped barn, castrated, killed at a young age, and turned into bacon with potassium nitrate and sodium nitrite. This other little piggy was allowed to run wild and eat acorns, killed at an oldish age, and cured in sea salt that turned his fat into a substance similar to olive oil. Clearly the second piggy makes for the better meat BUT due to technical reasons he cannot be labeled “organic”. Consumers count on labels to protect their health. Uh-oh.

Carlo and Ricky are walking by Greenbelt 5 when they see Jaime Augusto and Fernando Zobel posing for pictures with a group of men in suits. Carlo says to Ricky: “I’m going to run and stand between those two. You take a picture with your phone, and then I run away.”

Reason prevails and the plan is not executed. But Carlo is adamant. “I have to meet them,” he declares, “And have my picture taken. I have to compete with my mother’s pictures with famous people.”

“Do you ride a motorcycle?” I suggest.

“I had a scooter. A Vespa.”

“Uhh, maybe not. Do you play rugby?”

“I can bake them a cake.”

A few days later Carlo has a dream. “In the dream,” he tells me, “You introduced me to Jaime Augusto, and he turned to this long line of people and said, ‘You have to curtsey to him.’ Then everyone curtsied, including the actress who played Tony Blair’s wife in The Queen starring Helen Mirren. You know, that actress? She curtseys to the queen with this slightly mocking expression? She did that to me, too. And everywhere I turned, people curtsied to me.”

“What was I doing?” I ask.

“I didn’t see, you were in the back.”

“As long as I didn’t curtsey to you,” I say.

“I think not.”

“Are you on Lithium?” Ricky asks.

“No, vitamin C,” Carlo says.

I think we should do a TV show about nothing, except that it’s been done and we have too many Elaines.

A filmmaker and his girlfriend go to Cebu for the Sinulog festival. The filmmaker is shooting a documentary which he hopes to enter in a contest. He gets an interview with a former mayor from Mindanao, who proceeds to give him more information than he expects or wants to hear. The simple interview turns into a harrowing confession from a man who’s looked into the abyss and caught himself looking right back. Witty, deceptively simple, and often hilarious, CONFESSIONAL is a wiseass’s meditation on the nature of Truth itself. Have I mentioned that this movie is hilarious?

I interviewed Jerrold Tarog a.k.a. Ryan Pastor a.k.a. Ramon Ukit a.k.a. Roger TJ Ladro a.k.a. Pats R. Ranyo, who co-directed, wrote, scored, edited, and did the sound design for Confessional. Truthies and Falsies in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.