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Here’s one way to clear your reading backlog: Watch the film adaptation, then read the book. You could read the book first, but you’d be setting yourself up for disappointment: in nearly all cases, the movie is unworthy of the novel. The requirements of cinema differ from those of literature; inevitably something is sacrificed in the translation to the screen. Otherwise the characters would be standing around reciting the book to each other, and film adaptations would be twelve hours long. (Film editors should be cold and pitiless.) If the movie is better than its source material, The Godfather 1 and 2 being the prime examples, it is usually because the material merely provides the skeleton or excuse for the filmmaker’s vision.

Example of a great book that became a great movie: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, filmed by Luchino Visconti in 1963, starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale.

The Leopard is a melancholy novel set against the political and social upheavals of the 1860s (the Risorgimento) which led to the whole Italian peninsula being unified for the first time since the Roman Empire. The Leopard—the Prince Salina—understands that his era is coming to an end, and power is shifting from the old aristocracy to a new breed of ambitious, rapacious men.

Visconti, who was himself a count and a Marxist, had a unique insider’s view of the material. In the novel, The Leopard explains to a government emissary why he must decline a nomination to the Senate. That crucial speech is delivered in the movie by Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster in a towering performance).

“This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything…all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood…all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind…”

He’s talking about Sicily, but it sounds strangely familiar.

Is this Rafael Nadal’s outfit for the 2009 ATP season? It’s got sleeves! How will you see his enormous biceps? Nooooo! You will see more leg, though—the shorts (not in photo) are slightly shorter. And the shirt is rather tight and short, as if it were designed to show his abs with every serve.

Looks like the men’s tour is taking a page from the marketing strategy of the women’s tour: Skin.

Roger Federer has unveiled his color scheme for the 2009 season. Blue.

Rafa and Roger were both beaten by Andy Murray at an exhibition tournament in Abu Dhabi.

Nothing about Marat Safin can surprise me, not even the news that he turned up for the Hopman Cup in Australia black-eyed and bruised from a brawl in Moscow. Marat and his sister Dinara are representing Russia in the tournament. He quickly assured reporters that he won the brawl. That’s my first “Oh, Marat” headshake of the year.

Speaking of fashion, in Edinburgh, Scotland a burglar was scared off in the middle of a robbery…by Thor, God of Thunder, in full cape, helmet, and breastplate ensemble, and wielding Mjolnir. The burglar leapt out the window, leaving his shoes, Cinderella fashion. Police Charming is now searching for the rightful owner of the shoes.

The holidays are over, everyone’s gone back to work, sobriety is kicking in. It’s time to ask the question: Should we be having nervous breakdowns over the global financial meltdown?

I put the question to the esteemed economist Adams Myth. His treatise The Wealth Of This Nation, serialized in Flip magazine, appears in its entirety in The Flip Reader. It’s a must-read for people who want to know why the Philippine economy is the way it is.

Adams Myth’s day job

Adams Myth’s night job

Q: How will the financial meltdown affect middle class working Filipinos and how bad will it get?

A: There are first and second-round effects of the crisis. The first, the collapse in asset prices, has already happened and affects only owners of disposable assets (e.g., stocks, bonds, second homes)—in the Philippines, typically no more than 1% of the population. Hence, the ambivalence of most towards the unprecedented tremors in the stock, commodity and currency markets we saw last year.

The second-round effect, economic slowdown, will occur this year and will affect everybody, albeit in different ways. For starters, here at home, job-creation will slow. Mass lay-offs are even a possiblity, depending on the severity of the crisis. Pity this batch of college graduates come March. Few jobs await them, even at the call centers.

On the positive side, the sharp slowdown in economic activity will mean lower prices. Note the fall in the prices of gasoline, transportation and construction materials resulting from what Bloomberg commentators call “demand destruction”. With Christmas over, one might expect to see heavy discounting in clothes, computers, television sets and software items, like DVDs. One should buy slowly. It will be a buyer’s market for sometime. Sales promotions will intensify in line with the crisis.

In sum, the crisis won’t be so bad for those who’ve got jobs, tough for those who haven’t got one.

Do you have a question for Adams Myth? (Is it a good time to buy a condo? Should I sell my designer bags? Should I put my money in dead animals preserved in formaldehyde by famous artists?) Post it in Comments.

Meanwhile, here’s a letter from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. He’s not dying.

Bernard-Henri directed me to an incomplete list of films condemned by the Legion of Decency. The wikipedia entry noted that “Legion-organized boycotts made a C (for Condemned) rating harmful to a film’s distribution and profitability.” Apparently not in Manila, where audiences flocked to “indecent” movies like Rocco and His Brothers, La Dolce Vita, and Les Girls starring the fabulous Cyd Charisse, who possessed probably the longest legs in cinema.

European arthouse movies were popular because you could always count on some nudity. Remember how the MTRCB gave Belle Epoque an X-rating in the Nineties, thereby bringing to the viewers’ attention a subtitled foreign movie they would otherwise have ignored?

The Rated C included Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living and Madame DuBarry, Queen Christina starring Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw, Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (Nuns driven bats by the beauty of the Himalayas!), Jules Dassin’s Rififi, And God Created Woman starring Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Masculin-Feminin, Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana (I’m sure the condemnation made him deeply happy), the James Bond movie From Russia With Love, Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and the Clint Eastwood starrers A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and The Outlaw Josey Wales (Someone doesn’t like westerns). Many filmmakers would be proud to be in that list.

It is vital that you start the year with the right book and movie combination. The wrong choices won’t necessarily ruin your next twelve months, but they won’t get you thrilled about the possibilities, either.

On New Year’s Eve, amid the fireworks, I watched Rocco and His Brothers (1960), directed by Luchino Visconti. It’s about five brothers who leave their dirt-poor village in southern Italy to try to make a decent living in Milan. They endure great hardship, their small-town values are corrupted by big-city greed, and their mother (Katina Paxinou) overacts everyone off the screen. Good brother Rocco (Alain Delon as an Italian Alyosha Karamazov) and bad brother Simone (Renato Salvatori) both fall in love with the prostitute Nadia (Annie Girardot), leading to one of the most melodramatic sequences in cinema. The movie is often overwrought and histrionic, but its grandeur is unshaken even when the brothers, wailing and leaking tears and snot, fall on each other like an operatic rugby team.

In this movie Alain Delon is so beautiful, I expect everyone he meets to shriek and cross themselves. Visconti puts that beautiful face in the boxing ring to be bruised and bloodied: the struggle to survive in the city is a literal violation. I suspect Rocco and His Brothers was a major influence on the movies of Lino Brocka.

According to Bernard-Henri Not Levy, Rocco and His Brothers and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which came out the same year, were SRO box office hits at the Ever Theatre on Avenida Rizal. It helped that both were condemned by the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency.

First book read in 2009: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. It is a heartwarming philosophical discourse—sounds weird but it is possible—on the power of art to elevate lives. There are two narrators who hide their true natures. Outwardly not much happens, but inside they’re whirling. The first narrator, the 54-year-old concierge of an elegant Parisian apartment building, describes herself as ugly, short, cranky, and typical. It’s all an act: she’s one of the most beautiful characters in recent fiction.

Buk-buk, coconut, computer virus, flip, flat nose. These are among the ethnic slurs for Filipinos in this encyclopedia of offensive terms per nationality. Thanks to Noel for the link.

I’m disappointed: the terms are quite innocuous. Is that all the racists can come up with? “You…you…coconut!” or “Beat it, computer virus!” just doesn’t sting. True, the average racist is ignorant and can’t be expected to invent something literary. Shakespeare had some good ones, but he lived in a more hostile, less difference-accepting world; the fact that he isn’t what we now call politically-correct does not diminish his greatness one whit.

More recently the writers of The Simpsons concocted a good one for the French: Cheese-eating surrender monkey.

Kano is listed as an offensive term that originated in the Philippines. Offensive? It’s the short form of Amerikano, which is neither complimentary nor pejorative. The insult derives from the context.

You want to compile ethnic slurs? Talk to more Pinoys. How many of us had yayas (nannies) who routinely scared us by saying, “Hala ka, kukunin ka ng Bumbay/Inchik!” When my friend’s sister first went to Hong Kong as a child and saw a Sikh doorman, she became hysterical and had to be pried out of the taxi.

No doubt some sensitive government official will lodge a protest against the compilers of this encyclopedia.

This cake contains ethnic slurs: Pineapple Coconut Chocolate, from Ricky’s birthday.