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Pepe insisted we watch this trailer, and now we insist you watch it. You will not regret it. Why didn’t we know about this? Why? Why?

Stop whatever you’re doing and read Charlie Jane Anders’s heartbreaking Six Months, Three Days, Best Novelette winner at the 2012 Hugo Awards for the best science-fiction and fantasy writing of the year. It’s the story of a love affair between two people who can see the future. Reminds us of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, except that they remember things that haven’t happened yet. With a cameo by the Jollibee mascot.

Then read Digger, named Best Graphic Story at the Hugos.

Other winners: Among Others by Jo Walton for Best Novel, Game of Thrones Season 1 for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) and The Doctor’s Wife from Doctor Who for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). The complete list with links to samples is at mediabistro.

WARNING: IN THE WORDS OF THE OLD BOARD OF CENSORS, FOR ADULTS ONLY.

Before we go on we have to say that we feel bad for the kids who have no memory of Charlie Arceo’s movie reviews. Charlie Arceo was a production designer who also reviewed movies on a Sunday afternoon showbiz chismis show. He had strong opinions about the cinema, and his cleft palate (Ngongo; political correctness never caught on in the Philippines) gave him a unique style of delivery. During one Metro Manila filmfest he pronounced all the entries “Munok, mahura” etc. He was especially contemptuous of Payaso, the all-star German Moreno movie directed by Celso Ad. Castillo: “Ang miningunang ino ay munok, mahura…” It made us want to watch Mayaho, este Payaso.

Cut to: favorite movies we’ve never even seen. Not content with his 17-movie Top 10, here is Noel’s list of movie’s he is obsessed about seeing but will likely never see (or see again). As usual, it has more than 10 items.

1. Bagong Hari by Mario O’Hara
2. Super G starring Nora Aunor
3. The Greatest Performance of My Life, starring and directed by Ate Guy. “Everyone who claims to have seen the rushes claims it would ruin her career if it ever gets shown. Of course this just makes me more keen on seeing it.”
4. Bilanggo Sa Dilim by Mike de Leon
(more…)

Periodically we ask readers to review recently-published books. This week’s review is by lestat.

Enchantments, from the author of Poison, Exposure and The Binding Chair

Kathryn Harrison’s Enchantments is the kind of novel best imagined as a movie, produced, written and most importantly, scored with music selected by Sofia Coppola. Because who else would you trust to turn historical fiction into a film about very young people in very adult situations?

It will be perfect. Harrison, like Coppola, has a knack for making privileged subjects seem much more sympathetic than they probably deserve. What Coppola did for teen royalty Marie Antoinette of the lavish parties and pastries, she could do to the Faberge egg-hoarding Romanov children. Sofia Coppola could probably do a Paris Hilton biopic and make her seem sympathetic. Harrison and Coppola are both able to shed the irony in the expression ‘poor little rich girls’ as they are capable of making affluent, attractive people seem like losers deserving of the warmest wishes of the less gifted.

Tsarkoe Selo, country residence of Russian emperors

The novel begins in 1917, towards the end of the Romanov imperial dynasty, as poor Tsar Nikolay Alexandrovich and family await their horrible fate. Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin’s daughter Masha, the storyteller, is to be shipped off to the palace of the imperial family in Tsarskoe Selo with her sister Varya. It’s not exactly the kind of life an 18-year old wishes for herself but if your father is Rasputin and he orders you to live with the royal family, you don’t get to say no. Being the bearer of his unfortunate surname, Masha is believed to have the same healing powers as her father. She is ordained to live with and magically heal the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alyosha, Tsar Nikolay’s only son, and she will do it, god damn it, even though her passion lies not in the medical sciences but in the art of taming animals.

In this thankless trip, Masha ruminates on the death of her father Rasputin—mad monk and alleged sex machine, before she plunges into the impossible role of haemophilia healer. As she soon finds, living with royalty is not easy. There’s the quietly imposing mother, the Tsarina Alexandra, and the royal sisters called OTMA—a cute acronym for Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, to deal with. With the memory of her father’s murder looming over her, Masha’s experience is not unlike being sent to war armed only with rusty bread knives. How is a poor girl from a Siberian province supposed to deal? By making up stories, fictionalizing people’s histories, adding a touch of drama to the lives of people.

Historical fiction is normally cause for the proverbial nosebleed. It sets off snide remarks about how history blended with fiction is for housewives and/or grandmothers with time on their hands. But Enchantments is really a tale of teens.

It’s also a tale of very familiar people, and it’s quite a treat seeing people you know in these Romanovs. Amusing to realize your mother-in-law is not so unique, as she is in fact embodied by Tsarina Alexandra’s very own mother-in-law, Marie Fyodorovna. And Harrison, like Coppola, has an unmistakable fondness for her female characters. She loves them too much to give them dialogue less biting than “What is it about the English? They simply can’t, or won’t speak anything but English, not comprehensibly anyway. No matter how many far-flung colonies they claim, they remain provincial. They insist on seeing every acre as another opportunity to replicate their Englishness.”

The Romanovs

Or when talking about her potential daughter-in-law, she has only the choicest things to say: “She can’t dance, can’t smile, can’t make conversation. And she certainly can’t preside over the Russian court with that…that…that preposterous emanation, or whatever you call it, over her head. I can’t abide it when a person insists on making her unhappiness everyone else’s burden.” This woman can go big or small; she is very delightful.

Also familiar is the hopeful mother, Alexandra Fyodorovna, whose biggest handicap is that she is not, or refuses to be, a phony for the Russian court. She wouldn’t rehearse witticisms and repeat risqué anecdotes in the service of social graces. She will not ingratiate herself with Russian nobility even if it means being spared from the vicious barbs of Marie. Just like Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette! But bullheadedness has an expiration date, and it’s nearer when you’re deep in the royal tradition. You’re lying if you claim you’ve never heard of a mother figure in a similar situation.

The novel not so curiously focuses on the budding friendship between Masha and the prince Alyosha. It’s a friendship based on a shared sense of doom, which is one of the sweetest reasons to form one if you think about it. Like The Virgin Suicides’s Lisbon girls, the OTMA girls go through their unique brand of adolescent yearning: to tinker peacefully with their crystal eggs in the comfort of their palatial home, to be spared from execution. A quick trip to your history books will tell you all you need to know about the Romanovs and their unhappy fates. What you won’t get is the more fanciful, more vibrant, living version of the events.

What you won’t get is the strange urge to feel sorry for these affluent kids and their royal parents. You may know how it’s all supposed to end, but you would wish for a Disney kind of ending anyway. If you want the Sofia Coppola version, here it is. As is customary, Kirsten Dunst could play the young and old Masha.

The LitWit Review is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Yes! Yes! Oh yes! Hence the many bookmarks scattered around our house.

This reading habit is something I’d self-diagnosed over the past few years, but this was the first time I had admitted it to anyone. I worry that perhaps it’s a symptom of some larger weakness of character or fatal atrophy of the intellect. On my bedside table, there’s a precarious column of half-read paperbacks that taunts me with the evidence of my own readerly promiscuity. The reason I don’t finish books is not that I don’t like reading enough; it’s that I like reading too much. I can’t say no. I’ll be reading a novel and thoroughly enjoying it. Then I’ll be in a bookshop and I’ll see something I’ve been anticipating, and I’ll buy it. I’ll start reading the new book on the bus home that evening, and that will be the end of the original affair. I’m certainly invested in the relationship with the book that I’m currently reading, but I can’t help myself from pursuing whatever new interest happens to turn my head. Perhaps that’s just a tortuous way of admitting to being a pathetic serial book-adulterer who’ll chase after anything in a dust jacket.

Promiscuous Reading by Mark O’Connell in the New Yorker blogs.

Chocolate santol tart at Chez Karine, photo by Rickyv.

The Jessica Rules the Universe podcast, episode 3, is now available. You can listen to it, download it, or subscribe to it on iTunes.

We sat down for a good, longish yak with Mike from the Walk and Eat blog. You’re right: 15 minutes is too short; a half-hour is better for starting, building, ending a conversation. As we were discussing food, the venue was a quiet corner of Brida’s cafe at Power Plant. (It was the middle of a working day so Budjette was slaving at the office. Do not worry, Budjette fans, he’ll be baaaack.)

What is more fun: having a fantastic meal at a great restaurant then reminiscing about it for the next 3 months while your friends roll their eyeballs, or enduring a terrible dinner in an overpriced dump then complaining about it on your blog where everyone can chime in with their horror stories? It’s called rest au rant you know. Get the podcast now.

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The winner of last week’s book raffle is comment #13, Oliver Twist. Congratulations! Your books have been delivered to the Customer Service desk at National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati (tel 897 4562).

Thanks to National Bookstore for the books.