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After watching the remake of Fame I thought, That’s it, that has to be the worst movie I’ve seen all year. I’ve seen movies that should be condemned as violations of the Geneva Convention, but Fame has to be the nadir: a movie about striving for excellence that really celebrates mediocrity.

So I consulted my list. In January I said I’d watch a movie a day, and started recording the titles and the names of the directors. That didn’t work out: amazingly, there are times when one just doesn’t feel like watching a movie. As of Wednesday, October 7, there were 191 movies on my list, or about 0.67 movie a day. The stat would be higher if I counted each time I went to see a movie, but a title can only be listed once. However, my favorite movies—the ones I watch over and over again—can appear on the list once a year.

Of the total of 191, I saw 33 at the cinema and 158 on dvd or downloads. 173 were seen for the first time, and 18 were favorites that I watch every year. These include To Be Or Not To Be and Ninotchka by Lubitsch, movies starring Cary Grant (I plan to see all of them, I even saw the one about the dancing caterpillar), Preston Sturges’s killer trio Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Lady Eve, Manhattan and The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen’s loveliest movie), and the moral tales of Eric Rohmer, because I like movies in which people are yakking yakking yakking and nothing seems to be happening and then you realize something was happening all along.

Cary Grant hands Joan Fontaine a glass of milk that may contain poison in a scene from Suspicion by Alfred Hitchcock. In a later Hitchcock-Grant collaboration Notorious, it’s Ingrid Bergman who gets the milk laced with poison.

The breakdown by language spoken in the film: English – 131, French – 24, Tagalog – 16, Italian – 7, Others – 13.

It’s not easy deciding which movies were the best, but I can name the ones I hated. Fame – Execrable. Transformers 2 – Made so much worse by the fact that I enjoyed 1. Terminator Salvation – Turns out Christian Bale’s rant during the shoot was the best thing about it. The remake of Brideshead Revisited starring Matthew Goode – Evelyn Waugh should rise from the grave and slap everyone involved in the production. The Reader – Exculpates murderer because she learns to read. Last Year At Marienbad – Alain Resnais movies make me violent, I don’t know why.

Books were among the casualties of the September 26 floods. Given the widespread human tragedy it may seem insensitive to worry about printed matter, but if you love books the loss of a library, no matter how small, is a terrible blow. It is hard to explain to people who only open books when they need answers to specific questions (assuming they cannot consult Google), but those books are our friends. Their characters are as real to us as the people we meet in school or at work, and our relationships with these fictions are often more satisfying than our dealings with flesh and blood humans.

When you survey your water-damaged books you may allow yourself a moment of despair, but do not blame yourself for not being able to save them. What should you have done as the raging floodwaters burst into your ground floor, lift an entire bookshelf up two flights of stairs? You had family and pets to worry about, forgive yourself for not being Superman. It will take more than a cataclysm to kill Falstaff, Odysseus, the Bennets and Karamazovs, Pip, Eustacia Vye, Wart, and all our fictional intimates, including Superman. In the first place many of these characters were already killed off by their own authors, but they live forever in the literary universe.

CPR for Drowned Books in Emotional Weather Report (Gadgets) in the Star.

The winners of last week’s LitWit Challenge: The Fahrenheit 451 Project are:

thysz, who intends to become the Oxford English Dictionary,
20thcenturygirl, who will be American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis,
and romel, Blindness by Jose Saramago.

Winners of the Fahrenheit 451 Project can now claim their prizes at National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati. Go to Customer Service, tell them you’re claiming a prize from the National Bookstore contest in this blog, and give your full name. Sorry I was unable to bring the prizes to the Glorietta 5 branch as my schedule today, Thursday, is shot because Globe Tattoo Prepaid is a worthless piece of crap.

To the winners of the previous LitWit Challenges, Rescue Mission and Your Imaginary Date, your prizes have been waiting for you.

This week’s LitWit Challenge is all about you. In 100 words or less, tell us why we should give you a copy of this book:

The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr, translated from the German by Anthea Bell. It’s a historical adventure about an amazing “invention”: Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing automaton. It’s like Deep Blue in the 18th century—except that it’s not really a machine.

Two winners. We’re accepting entries until Friday, 16 October 2009.

Storaro photographs Caravaggio! This I’ve got to see.

Italian Film Festival 2009
15 – 21 October 2009 at the Shangri-La Mall Cineplex

The screening schedule is posted here.

Barbie’s house at the mall.

From Ige:

The first thing you notice about the Wild Things is that they’re all mixed up. One has a lion’s head and webbed feet; another, a cockatiel’s head and lion’s body; yet another shows scaly, reptilian legs, horns, and a shaggy mane. They recall the hybridized monsters of the Ancient Greek world, complicated in appearance and lineage, who harassed the heroes of myth and bedeviled contemporary taxonomists. For example, the Chimera, a fire-breathing cross between a goat, a snake, and a lion, was said to be the daughter of Typhon (a winged giant with a dragon’s tail) and Echidna (a woman with the body of a serpent) as well as the sister of Cerberus, a three-headed dog. Like the Wild Things, the monsters of classical myth were neither fish nor fowl, but they were always somebody’s relatives.

Monsters ink: How Maurice Sendak made the world safe for monsters, and vice-versa, by Roger White in the Boston Globe.

Some ancestors of the Wild Things: Goya’s Los Caprichos.

In the Examiner: How to make a Where The Wild Things Are Halloween mask. Then again, Halloween came to Metro Manila a month early.