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Photo: Armour of Henry VIII at the Dressed to Kill exhibition, Tower of London. The large codpiece was propaganda for Henry’s virility. Of course one of Henry’s successors had the biggest brass balls of the period. Her name was Elizabeth I.

Hilary Mantel has won the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, a historical novel about Henry VIII’s most trusted adviser/fixer Thomas Cromwell. According to broadcaster Jim Naughtie, who chaired the judging panel, their decision was “based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail.”

There’s an excerpt from Wolf Hall in the New York Review of Books.

Guardian interview with Hilary Mantel: “I accumulated an anger that would rip a roof off.”

In other Tudor news: Anne Boleyn was accused of adultery with five men, including her brother. Was it a stitch-up or was there some truth in the charges? Jessie Childs reviews Alison Weir’s The Lady In The Tower in Literary Review.

The remake makes you want to run out and buy a DVD of the 1980 movie.

I did not know I was a fan of the 1980 Alan Parker movie Fame until we saw the remake which opened yesterday in Metro Manila theatres. Last year I watched Mamma Mia! with mounting horror; this is a movie which makes Mamma Mia! look like a masterpiece. I can say in all certainty that High School Musical is a far better movie than this one, and I haven’t even seen High School Musical.

The opening scenes in which the characters audition for places at the New York High School of Performing Arts tells you everything you need to know about this remake: montage, montage, montage. This is not a movie, it’s not even an extended music video; it’s nearly two hours of the dullest, most unimaginative montages ever committed to celluloid. At first I blamed the director who clearly has no idea how to tell a story, then Bert pointed out a more basic problem: There is no story. There are no real conflicts. Ay, they forgot to hire a screenwriter!

Sitting through the lifeless musical numbers and the boring songs, I realized that I remember not just one or two but six of the songs from the original movie. A musical rises and falls on its songs; this one jettisoned the memorable songs and replaced them with tunes you can’t even remember while you’re hearing them. They kept “Out Here On My Own” and the title track, but removed everything else. No “Is It Okay If I Call You Mine?” or “Dogs In The Yard”. That song in the cafeteria, “Hot Lunch Jam”? It worked because it felt like a real jam—spontaneous, silly, with references to food because duh, they’re in the cafeteria. They took it out. The gospel number, “Never Alone”? They kept the gospel choir, but forgot the song. The now-classic graduation song, “I Sing The Body Electric”? Gone, replaced with something that won’t even make it as the finale on American Idol.

Then I realized that this is not a remake of Alan Parker’s Fame. This is a remake of Auraeus Solito’s Pisay, except that Pisay has ten times the energy and rhythm of this movie…and it’s not even a musical. You have an emotional connection with the characters of Pisay: you root for those kids. In Fame when someone tries to leap onto the train tracks I heard myself shouting, “Jump!” At the very least the kids in Pisay come across as intelligent. The characters in Fame cannot convince the audience that they have talent.

Perhaps the worst thing about this Fame remake—there are so many candidates, I cannot say conclusively which is the worst—is that no one seems particularly interested in cultivating their talent abilities. They’re supposed to be in a highly-competitive high-pressure environment where only the finest survive, and no one so much as worries about their grades. There is no struggle to master their craft. No one is that concerned about graduating. However, they’re all obsessed with becoming famous NOW.

This, I think, is a reflection of the times we live in. Thirty years ago, when Irene Cara was singing “Out Here On My Own”, famous people were famous for doing something. They could break your heart with their singing, or defy gravity when they danced, or sum up the human experience with a line reading. Talent meant something. (True, there have always been useless celebrities, but they were not as visible or influential as they are now.) Today people are famous for being famous. They don’t have to work that hard, they just have to go viral. The audience doesn’t have to admire them, they only have to think, “Hey, I can do that, too.” When anyone can be famous, fame is cheap. Hence this pointless remake.

Even the poster is all wrong. It looks like the poster for Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, only Fame is the real horror.

Thanks to DB, Danielle, and Jane.

I’m on page 141. In a crowd, true, but I get an adjective.

When I learned that the author had brought a folding bicycle and intended to get around Manila on it, I thought it was a dopey idea. It turned out to be a little stroke of genius: it was December, the height of the Xmas rush, there were traffic jams all over the city, and the only guy who wasn’t stuck was the one on the bicycle.

Saffy says: “Look out, here comes a genius.”

Last month my friend Anna Summour (not her real name) attended a party for the NBA Legends who visited Manila and trounced the PBA All-Stars. She knew it would be. . .interesting when she saw one of the PR girls ushering Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the registration desk.

PR girl: Um, are they supposed to register for the event?
Anna’s thought balloon: Honey, they ARE the event.

The program is emceed by a movie starlet who proceeds to demonstrate why he never made it in the movies. There is a video presentation from the Department of Tourism. Video quality is awful, the sound gets on everyone’s nerves, and after a few minutes the video is mercifully stopped.

Emcee: We can’t show the video. . .due to technical difficulties!
Guests: Oh, really?
Emcee: But the video is not pirated!

Later.

Emcee: Now here’s Vlade Divac. He scored 33 points.

The guests await the rest of the sentence. 33 points in a championship game? In an All-Star match? In a tiddlywinks challenge at the local nursery school? In his career?

Sound effect: The chirping of crickets and other nocturnal insects echoing in emcee’s head.

That was the complete sentence.

The high point.

Emcee: Here are the Bayanihan Dancers to perform our national dance, the Tinikling. May we call on the US Ambassador Kristie Kenney to join the dancers?

Ambassador Kenney graciously accedes.

Emcee: Be careful, dancers, don’t hit the ambassador. She may decide to bomb the Philippines!

By this time the media guys are crawling on the floor with laughter.

Ige Ramos compiles the Top 10s of filmmaker Joey Gosiengfiao, singer-songwriter Yoyoy Villame, and radio announcer Kuya Cesar. Paalam Manash, Bai, at Koyang.

BananaQ, KamoteQ. Photo by Ige Ramos.

Yoyoy Villame had a stronger claim to the title of National Artist than most of the actual awardees. His oeuvre includes Butse Kik, Granada, Diklamasyon (Magellan vs. Lapu-Lapu), Laban-Bawi (That noontime show better be paying royalties to the Villame estate), Kuratong Baleleng, and what’s the title of that song that goes, “And every afternoon at three o’clock I read your letter ahay. . .”

Cookie is reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. The Harris series is the basis for the HBO show, True Blood.

The Charlaine Harris books are available at National Bookstores, P299 for the mass-market paperbacks. We got six of the books at the last sale for P239 each. Cookie managed to save them from the flood that swallowed the ground floor of her house. They were still in their plastic shrink-wrap so they were only slightly damaged. Here is the view from the second floor.

While awaiting rescue she kept her sanity by reading Dead Until Dawn and Living Dead In Dallas, and cross-stitching “The mayor is useless”.

I finally cracked open 2666 by the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño.

Paperback available at NBS, P555.

For a doorstop it is a surprisingly easy read. Bolaño is not bothered by problems of construction like “How do you introduce information that has seemingly nothing to do with anything else in the novel?” For starters it is actually five books. The author left instructions for 2666 to be divided into five books and published over five years, but his literary executor decided to publish it in a single volume.

This may not be what Bolaño had wished, but the disobedience of literary executors has served us in the past. If Max Brod had followed the instructions in his friend’s will, Franz Kafka’s works would’ve been incinerated.

Casualty of the flood: My review copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which drowned in my brother-in-law’s car. Typhoon Ondoy was a literary critic.