JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

From our friend Tina:

There will be a Glimpse into Zen seminar from 3:00 to 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 21, at the Full Circle zen meditation center in the Good Shepherd Convent compound in Quezon City, near the corner of Aurora Boulevard and Katipunan Avenue.

The green entrance gate of the Good Shepherd compound at 1043 Aurora Boulevard is between the LRT-Katipunan underground station and the multi-story Aurora Milestone. Glimpse Into Zen will be held on the second floor of the building just inside the Good Shepherd gate. There is a secure parking lot located further within the grounds.

For more information or to register for the seminar, leave your name and number in Comments (it won’t be published) and we’ll forward the information to the organizers.

Read Lost Cat: An Illustrated Meditation on Love, Loss and What It Means To Be Human. Thanks, Ige!

Text spam is so much spicier during campaign season. Apart from the real estate offers from people you don’t know, and award notifications from raffles you never joined (Apparently I just won a brand-new car and P350,000, and stand to lose more if I am stupid enough to call their number), there are anonymous messages commending or attacking certain candidates. This spam from last week is so clever, it requires a second reading to determine whether it is praising or slamming the candidate.

“Friends, suportahan natin ang kafatid nating si ______! # ___ sa balota. At huwag kalimutan, Ang Ladlad #28 sa party list!”

What does it mean?

Read Ladlad o Laglag? our column at InterAksyon.com.

That is not a question the makers of Olympus Has Fallen bother to ask. In this Die-Hard-in-the-White-House action flick directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), Secret Service Agent Banning (Gerald Butler) must save the President (Aaron Eckhart) and the US from Korean terrorists who take over the White House and want America’s nuclear codes.

Olympus Has Fallen is cheap and effective. By “cheap” we mean that when a character we’re supposed to care about dies, someone screams “Nnnoooo!” and starts running towards the body in slow motion. By “effective” we mean that it’s quite exciting—an achievement when you consider that everything we see onscreen has been done before, and better.

This is the second time in two days that we’ve seen Morgan Freeman and Melissa Leo in mediocre action movies, reminding us that Oscar winners have to pay their bills, too. Fuqua sets up stuff, and then seems to forget about them (Major rewrites?). When we first see President Asher he’s boxing with Banning; he doesn’t get to throw a single punch after that. The president’s kid Connor knows the secret passages in the White House; we never see him going through them. The car crash at the start of the movie seems to have been caused by an assassination attempt; we never hear about the attempt again. Asher keeps saying that the terrorists will have to kill him for the nuclear code; suddenly they have the code and we don’t know how they got it.

Still, we’re always happy to see Angela Bassett, even if she’s just sitting at a table looking worried, and Dylan McDermott, even if he’s just standing around looking handsome. If you like square jaws, thick necks and loud explosions, you might enjoy this.

Rating: * * *

As the world’s most famous practitioner of Scientology, a religion founded by a science-fiction writer, Tom Cruise is uniquely qualified to play a science-fiction hero. But does he have to play the live-action Wall-E?

In recent years it’s become the custom to beat up on Tom Cruise—his odd behavior, marriages, control freakiness, even his height. Things haven’t been the same for Tom since he jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch to declare his love for his now ex-wife. The viewers forget that they loved him once. Fickle, fickle. We didn’t love him, not like Ambeth’s sister who drove to Fort Ilocandia when he was shooting Born on the 4th of July so she could get a glimpse of him. (She saw him walking on the beach. He had patay na kuko. Disillusioned, she got back in the van and drove back to Manila.) But we liked him when he was dancing in his underwear (Risky Business) or playing assholes (Magnolia, Maguire). Cruise is effective when he’s not micro-managing his image as the All-American Action Hero. Unfortunately that happens very rarely. He took a huge risk with Rock of Ages and it didn’t pay off.

Oblivion is Tom Cruise sticking very closely to the image of Tom Cruise. It is set in the not-so-distant future, where the Earth has fought off alien invaders with nuclear weapons and destroyed itself in the process. The surviving humans have all moved to Saturn’s moon, Titan. Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, who with his domestic/work partner Vika (Andrea Riseborough) is assigned to Earth to clear the debris from the wasteland, like Wall-E. Their memories have been wiped, like in Total Recall. Jack has recurring memories of an unknown woman (Olga Kurylenko), like in La Jetee (and 12 Monkeys). Periodically Jack’s ship is attacked by “scavengers”, like in Mad Max. Of course things are not what they appear to be, like in The Matrix.

Yes, Oblivion is cobbled together out of bits of better science-fiction movies. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t have a real reason to exist. It looks expensive—the cost of this movie could probably pay for an entire season of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones (and probably all of The Wire), which are much more satisfying experiences for the viewer. (This really is the platinum age of television.)

Our attention had drifted from Oblivion, we were busy answering emails (There was no one near our seat to be annoyed by the lit-up screen) when we spotted a familiar jawline onscreen. Jaime Lannister! Well, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Most of his scenes are in a dark cave; the light just bounces off his bone structure. Too handsome, and yet he seems more real than Cruise.

Rating: * * 1/2

* * * * *

Juan pointed out that Oblivion also borrows from Moon by Duncan Jones. The movie is a sci-fi sampler, down to the 2001-like monolith.

It takes two hours in the make-up chair with the brilliant prosthetics artist Cheryl Cabanos and her team administering pee-smelling latex and shreds of toilet paper to your face.

We play a zombie in Ang Huling Henya (The Last Genius), written and directed by Marlon Rivera. Specifically, ourself as a zombie. Yes, years of bugging our friends to give us cameos in their movies has paid off at last! Marlon warned us that a zombie’s life is hard: you get more make-up on than a drag queen, and sticky with sugar syrup blood. That’s actually what sold us on the part.

The make-up would’ve taken another three hours, but Marlon explained that we were only a 6-hour-old zombie and not yet in total disintegration. Also we could keep our glasses on.

So two hours to apply the prosthetics and just five minutes to rip it off. As a bonus, your zits and blackheads come off with the latex, so it’s like a facial.

Ang Huling Henya opens in late May.