JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Map of The Shire from The Mirror of Galadriel

People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs: The Cartography of Childhood, in NYRB.

On Monday we mark the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Conspiracy theorists continue to insist in the face of cold hard fact that it was all a hoax done with special effects. We in the Philippines have no such problem. We are absolutely certain that humans landed on the moon. . .because it happened during the 1969 Miss Universe beauty pageant which was won by a Filipina, Gloria Diaz. That Gloria Diaz was crowned Miss Universe is an incontrovertible fact. Moon landing deniers, are you saying that Miss Philippines Gloria Diaz did not win Miss Universe? You insult an entire nation. Our officials will lodge strongly-worded protests at your embassies.

Beauty pageant historians—and there are many, about 1 out of 3 gay Pinoys—like to point out that during the question-and-answer round, Gloria was asked a question about the man on the moon. She answered that she would give him a shave or something. In any case Gloria was the wittiest, cleverest contestant onstage and she became the first Pinay Miss Universe.

Universe, Moon, it’s all cosmic.

Thank you to everyone who sent us a link to the report that Cats Do Control Humans.

We already knew that. In fact you already knew that, but chose to live in denial.

As of 10pm of 14 July 2009, my favorite movie of this year is Adventureland.

Written and directed by Greg Mottola (who made our beloved Superbad), Adventureland is a comedy in the midst of disappointment, anger, and sadness. It should be a massive bummer, but it’s not. Set in 1987, it follows James (Jesse Eisenberg from our beloved The Squid and The Whale), a new comparative lit graduate from Oberlin who has long planned to leave Pittsburgh and take his master’s at Columbia. Then his parents announce that they can no longer afford to send him to New York or pay for his vacation in Europe. Suddenly he has to get a summer job, and the only one he can get despite his sterling academic record is at a fifth-rate amusement park called Adventureland. There he dispenses crappy prizes (the big-ass panda no one can win, the stuffed bananas with googly eyes), meets an assortment of underdogs and outcasts (the pipe-smoking Russian and Slavic languages major, the maintenance guy who claims to have jammed with Lou Reed), and a tough, beautiful girl named Em (played by Kristen Stewart of Twilight, who is too good for Twilight).

I’m watching the press preview thinking, Who are these people? Why are they wearing my old clothes, listening to my favorite bummer music, and staying up till dawn for no reason whatsoever? These characters are deeply likable because they are deeply flawed and they know it. James is self-absorbed and more than a little pretentious (reading Quiet Days In Clichy by the ring-toss game), Em hates her stepmother but punishes herself, even Connell the mechanic (Ryan Reynolds) sees how ridiculous he really is. As in Superbad, Mottola looks upon his losers with pity and kindness; maybe there’s no hope for them, but there will be laughter.

Adventureland reminds us of the power of pop music to encapsulate a moment in stunning detail. They’re in the car, our hero looks at the girl he just met, Lou Reed is singing Pale Blue Eyes, and everything is perfect. On a crappy day at the sad little amusement park, they’re watching the Fourth of July fireworks when Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House comes on, and I will smack anyone who sings that “Hey now, hey now” chorus, but I actually feel my throat tighten up. Later, on the bus, in the rain, The Replacements sum it all up with Unsatisfied. It’s wonderful.

True, maybe I love this movie because it reminds me of Say Anything, another movie with a Replacements song. And because I was an unemployed comparative lit major who had long planned to get out of here.

Adventureland opens on July 22 at Greenbelt 3 and Glorietta 4.

*****
Movies I remembered after seeing Adventureland: Superbad, The Squid and The Whale, Roger Dodger, Margot At The Wedding, Say Anything, and this Australian movie from the early 90s, Flirting.

Photo: Mat’s monster face.

Review of Star Cinema’s Villa Estrella, directed by Rico Maria Ilarde and written by Rico, three other people, and a creative producer, by the kid sitting behind us in Glorietta 4 cinema.

Mommy sana Ice Age na lang ang pinanood natin. (Mommy, we should’ve watched Ice Age.)

Child, I feel your pain. When you get older you won’t be as generous.

*****

Is it unreasonable to demand that a big-budget studio product be entertaining at least? We’re not asking for Art or the Meaning of Life, we just want to be diverted for 90 minutes.

Well if we can’t get entertainment from the movie, we’re just going to have to entertain ourselves. While sitting through Villa Estrella it occurred to us that the movie was just bursting with possibilities, both as a sex-thriller and a screwball comedy. However we noticed that every time there was the slightest whiff of a tinge of a hint of sex or humor the filmmakers would slam the door in our faces like a horrified Mother Superior. So Vivien (not his real name) and I took the plot elements of the movie and rewrote the whole shebang.

Plot elements (You can’t really call them Characters)

Cute girl in short skirt/shorts and push-up bra (Shaina Magdayao)
Cute girl’s cute boyfriend (Geoff Eigenmann)
Cute girl’s abusive father (John Estrada)
Cute girl’s abusive father’s best friend and business partner (John Arcilla)
Cute girl’s hot ex, the son of her abusive father’s best friend and business partner (Jake Cuenca)
Mysterious girl at haunted resort (Maja Salvador)
Extremely vivacious child with leg brace at haunted resort, just like the kid in The Orphanage
Extremely vivacious child’s mother who is not Ai Ai de las Alas
Village idiot caretaker at haunted resort (Ronnie Lazaro)
B-movie Mumu

Our rewrite:

Abusive father John forces Shaina to go to Villa Estrella with her ex Jake. Although they’ve broken up he’s still a dish so she jumps him and feels guilty later. This way when horrible things befall her she feels she deserves them. (That is called motivation, an element the writers forgot.) Unbeknownst to Shaina and Jake, the real reason their fathers John and John are so close is because. . .they’re lovers! Of course!

Geoff worries about Shaina so he follows her to Villa Estrella, where he gets possessed by mysterious Maja and starts embracing and kissing caretaker Ronnie. It turns out Maja can possess any body she wants to, which kind of makes the B-movie Mumu redundant, but we mustn’t waste the creature design so the B-movie Mumu rapes the Johns. Later Maja possesses Geoff and he seduces Jake (My co-writer is gay) then Shaina walks in on them and in her fury turns into the B-movie Mumu. And because there’s so much body-switching going on, everyone forgets which character they’re playing and general boinking ensues.

Now I would pay to watch our movie.

Wait, you ask, what about the extremely vivacious kid with the leg brace and her mom who is not Ai-Ai? Ah, forget about them. The movie certainly did—two-thirds into Villa Estrella, with their stories unresolved, they take off and we never see them again.

Jay Lozada is reading The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, Intellectuals by Paul Johnson, and Cashflow Quadrant by Robert “Rich Dad” Kiyosaki.

Emmanuel Atienza is reading The Year’s Best Science Fiction 2008, the e-book of Kite Runner, Heirloom Baking With The Brass Sisters, and re-reading Gateway by Frederik Pohl. He has not made a serious trip to the bookstore in a long, long time.

Alfred Krip Yuson is reading a bunch of e-books he downloaded recently: Sextus Aurelius Propertius’s Love Elegies Book One, Selected Poems by Antonio Machado, and Feder Jagor’s The Former Philippines Through Foreign Eyes, edited by Austin Craig.

I am reading The Accidental Masterpiece by NYT art critic Michael Kimmelman. After that, The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick.

The Kimmelman with a giant pencil that may also be used as a stake for slaying vampires.

I walked into a plate glass door yesterday; no damage but I look like a unicorn. Or Hellboy. My first thought after impact was ‘Dammit, I got my glasses dirty!’