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Disconnect, a comic strip by Chris Ware, in the New Yorker.

Photo: Thomas Hardy’s study at Max Gate.

The disembodied book

The age of the printed book is drawing to a close. But there’s no need to mourn its passing, says Jürgen Neffe

In the shadows of the global financial crisis of the early 21st century, another revolution is gathering pace, whose repercussions reach far beyond the current correctable economic buckling. It impact on the world will compare with Gutenberg’s. And with it, the era of the printed book will come to a close. Dissolved digitally like sound and image beforehand, limitlessly copyable, globally downloadable by the million with the click of a mouse, the book is entering the world of multimedia like its disembodied cousins from film, photography and music. This is the disintegration of the oldest serially produced data carrier in terms of form and content. (Continue reading.)

1. Ewan McGregor in a habit! Eeeeeeeeeeee. . . Someone pointed out that in one scene Tom Hanks is in a Speedo. I didn’t notice.

2. Two-hour episode of Amazing Race: Rome. But much less exciting.

3. Tom Hanks, wag kang tatabi kay Ewan, guapo yan. Seriously, Tom is too low-key in this one. During the movie you can entertain yourself by re-casting the male lead. I’d go with Edward Norton or Liev Schreiber. Kermit casts Ben Affleck. Bert wants Leonardo DiCaprio (who’s reportedly been cast in Scorsese’s Sinatra biopic).

4. The female lead really functions as the subtitles. Subtitles for the mentally-impaired.

5. Way too much exposition in the first half-hour, it’s like having the book read to you in a monotone. (I have not read the book. ‘You mean you haven’t read Angels and Demons?’ ‘No, you mean you haven’t read Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard?’) They’re racing to find the explosive device and Tom Hanks spends too much time explaining his research to the CERN physicist. Hoy, di ba nagmamadali kayo?

6. Kermit’s review of Da Vinci Code: If the old man really wanted to protect his secret, he should’ve just died (Instead of contorting himself into the Vitruvian man and so on).

7. Hmm, the Camerlengo McKenna (Ewan) was adopted by the future pope at age 9 and taken to the Vatican where he did his military service. And he still sounds Scottish! Ewan in a habit, eeeeeeeee. My favorite Ewan project: the documentary on polar bears where he kept bursting dementedly into song.

8. It’s the Italians’ turn to be annoyed as hordes of tourists descend on Rome using the Dan Brown as their guidebook. Tom Hanks races to find the secret locations, and they turn out to be the first places tourists would visit.

9. They have under 5 minutes but someone manages to get out of the tomb, run across the huge building, jump in the helicopter and reach sufficient altitude to. . .Ah, whatever.

10. I gather the filmmakers tried their best to goad the Vatican into condemning the film so it would gross a jillion dollars. It didn’t work. Still it looks like a big hit in Makati: by 2pm all the screenings at Greenbelt were full and the next available seats were at 10.30.

11. Super-hitman did all the work by himself, apparently.

12. I learned that an ineligible candidate can still be voted Pope by some kind of general Adoration rule. Pope Barack Obama?

13. Hmm, antimatter in a jar. What happens if it comes into contact with red matter? Ewan McGregor in a habit! Eeeeeeeee.

14. Belle and Krude have compiled a movie Dream Team. Whenever a movie is particularly bad, they look for the following names in the credits: producer George Lucas, director David S. Goyer (Blade Trinity) or M. Night Shyamalan, actors Nicolas Cage or Madonna. If any of these names were involved in the production, then they know whom to blame for the badness. My Dream Team has just one name in it: Akiva Goldsman. Guess who wrote the screenplay of Angels and Demons.

A: The BLUE RATS at HANDLEBAR tonight, Friday, 15 May, at 10pm. Polaris St. (just off Jupiter near Makati Ave.) in Makati. Be there or be square.

J: Join us or be rhombus.
Mingle or be triangle.
Avoid and be trapezoid.

A: Let’s meet pyramid.
Come here or be sphere.
See you there cylinder.
Bring dem all oval.
Don’t be gone hexagon.

J: Get in the act, tesseract.

A: Don’t be barado, quadrado.

J: At ease, isosceles.

BFF opens with a Tagalog movie cliche: the dead man in his coffin, his grieving wife (Sharon Cuneta) standing by, primly dressed in white, his mistress (Ai-Ai de las Alas) arriving all dressed in black topped with a veil. Confrontation is in the air: you wait for wife and mistress to unleash the zingers, it’s all very trite. But director Wenn Deramas proceeds to thwart your expectations. This star vehicle pairing the box-office champions of the 80s-90s and the 00s is funny and sometimes clever—it gives the audience what they want while making fun of their illusions.

I am reminded of a scene in Ishmael Bernal’s underrated sex-comedy Salawahan. (Yes, I’m invoking Bernal in a review of a Star Cinema product.) In this bit, naughty sex researcher Rita Gomez runs into cosmopolitan designer Sandy Andolong, whose boyfriend Jay Ilagan she has just seduced. The two bitches consider each other.

Rita Gomez: Magko-confrontation ba tayo?
Sandy Andolong: Huwag na, nakakapagod.

BFF has a little of that playfulness. Along with a ton of stupid gags, but it’s there. Sharon plays a devoted mother married to John Estrada, who is banging the gym dance instructor played by Ai-Ai. So Sharon decides to enroll at a gym, and as cinematic laws of probability would have it, Ai-Ai becomes her coach and BFF. How do two capable women manage to avoid discovering that they’re talking about the same man? The filmmakers mine this unbelievable premise for laughs—there’s a moment of true absurdity when the revelation is foiled by cellphone snatchers. You have to approve of a movie that says, “The problem is not that your wife’s gotten fat or your mistress jumped you in a moment of weakness. The problem is that you’re a dog.” Apologies to actual canines.

Of course there are the requisite parodies of Sharon movies. The biggest hommage is reserved for the ending. Don’t blink.

(Fabia says Ai-Ai’s Ina Mo movies are funnier.)

Went to an Ayala Foundation-Rockefeller Foundation dinner with a former mayor of Bogota, Colombia. According to the invitation “Former Mayor Penalosa is an accomplished public official, economist and administrator. As a mayor of Bogota, he was responsible for numerous radical improvements as he developed a city model giving priority to children and public spaces, restricting private car use, building hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, greenways and parks.”

I thought, “Great, now the Colombians are giving us advice on how to create sane, humane cities. Two minutes ago they were the subject of every movie and TV series (e.g. Miami Vice) ever produced about drug wars and carnage.” Misha Glenny’s excellent book McMafia, which tackles global organized crime, devotes a chapter to Colombia’s problems. He described the country as one of the most violent places on earth.

Apparently they’ve turned the corner. “They have plenty of natural resources and great exports,” my friend Fabia pointed out. “Besides that.”

“Next the Somalians will be advising us on economic security,” I said. “Their pirates are making the big bucks.”

“I don’t think they even have a government,” Big Bird said. “Somalians are the most beautiful people in the world. They all look like models.”

“Maybe because their governments screwed them and the world forgot them, and they’ve had to evolve out of the need for a regular digestive system.”

Mr. Penalosa, currently senior international advisor to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy of New York, gave a riveting talk on urban planning, mobility, and traffic jams. An excerpt:

“In a good city, you must be able to walk to buy milk or bread. If you have to get into a car to buy milk or bread it means the city is not well-designed.

“What makes the difference between an advanced city and a backward city is not that it has flyovers or elevated highways or subways. What makes the difference is that upper-income people use public transport, use the sidewalks and parks. A good city is one with great sidewalks.”

More details in my column on Friday.