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Graceland airs Tuesdays at 9pm on Jack City, Channel 31 on free TV, 27 on Sky, 60 on Destiny, 40 on Cable Link, and 22 on Cignal. Watching the box is so complicated.

When we first heard the title we thought it was a biopic of Elvis in his final years, or a reality show about Elvis impersonators (For authenticity, some of them would have to be Pinoy), or a mystery built on the many Elvis Lives conspiracy theories. In fact Graceland refers to a beachfront house in Southern California that was confiscated from Elvis Presley-loving drug lords. That nice house is now occupied by good-looking undercover agents from the FBI, the DEA, and Customs. In short, it is Melrose Place with guns.

In the last decade, storytelling on TV (mostly cable) has gotten so ambitious that the medium, once the less glamorous cousin of movies, has redefined itself as the movies’ most serious competitor. Free of the constraints of the two-hour format and the need to recoup all costs on opening weekend, TV has been doing what most movies can only hope to do. Can we ever know a movie character as thoroughly as we know Tony Soprano, the monster we loved because we recognized ourselves in him? Would Walter White’s evolution from meek, downtrodden high school chemistry teacher to the drug lord Heisenberg be as terrifying if it unfolded in two hours?

Are people outside of a Shakespeare adaptation even allowed to speak like the characters in Deadwood? Would the Red Wedding have slaughtered the audience so thoroughly if it had been in the middle of a movie trilogy? The carnage took under ten minutes, but the emotional impact took three years to build.

The best TV shows have dropped the hand-holding and the fillers; the audience is plunged right into the story. In the pilot of The Sopranos, we see Tony having an anxiety attack even before we know (though we suspect) his line of work; Breaking Bad opens with Walter running out of a smoking RV in his underwear.

In the first episode of Graceland the characters are introduced to each other (As in, “A, this is B, B, this is A”)…and then they go surfing. (If we wanted to see Baywatch again, we’d look for the old Baywatch Hawaii with Jason Momoa.) And then, before anything’s happened, the episode’s over. It’s the old model of network TV, for people who want something to look at while they’re digesting their dinner. It’ll probably get better—we haven’t even met the bad guys yet. (We wanted to see Pedro Pascal before he turns up in Westeros.) We’ve gotten so used to TV shows in which the protagonist is both good guy and bad guy that when we see the fresh-faced FBI agent and his “maverick” training officer, we wonder who gets to kill whom.

All that stuff about undercover agents and drug lords reminded us of Miami Vice. So we dug up our ancient DVD of the show that caused guys to wear pastel-colored T-shirts with unconstructed white suits and espadrilles. (They were doing that till the early 90s, prompting our friend’s boss to tell one fashion victim: “You don’t understand. Don Johnson is cute.”) We knew that Miami Vice was influential and that its producer Michael Mann has become a brilliant film director. But we hadn’t realized just how influential the show was. The look of 80s yuppie excess, the use of music, morally ambiguous characters, the cynicism towards the powers that be (the CIA protecting arms dealers), the political issues and the endings that didn’t tie everything up neatly or were downright bummers—it told stories in a new way, and other shows followed.

We ended up watching several episodes, and had fun spotting guest stars who went on to bigger things (Bruce Willis, Joan Chen, and we’d forgotten that Crockett’s original partner was Jimmy Smits). Don Johnson (Crockett) was pretty good, Philip Michael Thomas (Tubbs) not—with that acting, his cover would be blown in minutes. The original chief of the Vice squad was the typical sympathetic boss frustrated by his men’s unorthodox ways—he was replaced by Edward James Olmos, who could express an entire range of emotions by glowering.

As a reminder, here is the drum fill that justifies Phil Collins’s existence.

We’d like to thank all the concerned friends who’ve sent us the link to the article, Why are some people mosquito magnets? We have mentioned that mosquitoes love us. Put us in a crowd of thousands and if there is one mosquito in the area it will home in on us. At garden parties a crown of mosquitoes forms over our head, officially proclaiming us the Lord of the Mosquitoes.

According to the article, these are the factors that make certain people alluring to mosquitoes:

– Blood type O
– Beer ingestion
– Full moon
– Sockless stinky feet
– Pregnancy
– Carbon dioxide exhalation and sweat
– Dark-colored clothing, esp. black and red

Way to go, scientific research! You’ve just narrowed the field of potential mosquito meals to nearly every human in existence. (We especially like the part about exhaling carbon dioxide.) This method of reportage is known as reeeaching, and it is often driven by the desperate desire to meet a deadline—an impetus we know extremely well.

Tarot cards from facade.com

The mosquito magnet article reminds us of our own research in a very different field: manghuhula, fortune-tellers, psychics and tarot card readers.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.

For as mammoth a role it plays in our history, there haven’t been that many movies about slavery in the United States. For as many movies as there are about gladiators and Israelites and subjects as dark and difficult as the Holocaust, the subject has been explored rarely (Amistad, Django Unchained), and often somewhat indirectly (Glory, Beloved), and what movies we have gotten have often focused on white saviors (this category also includes Lincoln, and even to some extent Django). Notably, just about every last one of them has also been directed by a white man—Steven Spielberg, Edward Zwick, Quentin Tarantino, or Jonathan Demme. Watching these, I tend to agree with Roger Ebert, who in 1990 wrote of Glory, “I consider this primarily a story about a black experience and do not know why it has to be seen largely through white eyes.”

Read Trailer Critic in Slate.

In the Podcast episode 2.3, we talk to our friend Jeffrey Jeturian. The film (Kubrador, Tuhog, Pila Balde, etc) and TV (Be Careful With My Heart) has just completed his 9th feature film, Ekstra, starring Vilma Santos. In the first of two episodes, we talk about how he got his start in the movies, and his knack for discovering talents in gas stations and panciteria.

Listen to the podcast, download it, or get it on iTunes.

This podcast was supposed to be uploaded weeks ago, but we had some technical problems. While we were doing the podcast, Garage Band stopped recording. So we opened a new file for the second half of the interview. It seemed fine during recording, but in playback, nothing. So we’ll have to do a Part 2.

Then we sent the file that worked to Ren, and it would only play on iTunes. Aaargh. Fortunately Renly was able to fix it. Enjoy, and don’t forget to watch Ekstra at Cinemalaya. (There will be a theatrical run after the festival.)

Renly’s housemates Sqeeky (white) and Pouncer (demonstrating his doughnut consumption prevention technique). Photo by Ren.

A recent article on Frank Herbert led us to last year’s Wired readers’ poll for the Best Science-Fiction Novels Of All Time.

The results:

1. Dune by Frank Herbert
2.5 TIE: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
4. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
5. 1984 by George Orwell
6. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
7. Neuromancer by William Gibson
8. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
9. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
10. Ringworld by Larry Niven

No shockers on the list. We think Dune is the greatest science-fiction novel and a great novel, period. If it hadn’t been “tainted” with the science-fiction label it would get a lot more respect than it does today. Although one advantage of being viewed as reading matter for nerds is that if someone mentions Dune it’s usually code for “We have a common language”, especially if the speaker segues into the Bene Gesserit litany against fear. The fact that David Lynch’s film adaptation was regarded as a failure only enhances the book’s reputation: It’s Too Weird, even for David Lynch.

If you have not read Dune, do pick it up. There may be difficulties, but hang on because the payoff is worth all the trouble.

Ender’s Game has been adapted for film, and as its theatrical release approaches there have been calls for a boycott. Its author Orson Scott Card has made virulently anti-gay statements, i.e. “(gay people) cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within…society.” We don’t judge authors on the basis of their private lives or their personal beliefs, otherwise we’d have no one left to read. But Card is not helping his own case with his odious pronouncements in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage: “Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”

On one hand he’s not reversing himself to help the movie’s box-office chances; on the other hand he’s saying, “You have to show me the tolerance I’ve never shown you, because you’re supposed to be the open-minded ones.” Sets our teeth on edge.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein has a Filipino protagonist, Juan Rico. When the novel was adapted for film, the protagonist became Casper Van Dien. If that casting decision had been made today, we’d be blogging in outrage. Which Filipino actor would you cast as Johnny Rico?

A book we love that didn’t make it to the top ten or even the longlist: The Separation by Christopher Priest (best-known novel: The Prestige).

Something drew us to the brown cover with no title or author’s name; maybe we could smell the story. We read it that night, straight through in four or five hours—a compelling tale of doubles that keeps leaving the reader off-balance until she learns to see its fictional universe with the correctly skewed perspective. If you see this book anywhere, buy it and read it. And good luck to you because we bought all the copies we could find and forced them on friends.

Ooh, Snow Crash! One of the most fun science-fiction books we’ve ever read. So delightful, we have to read it again. Once Saffy lets go of our copy. We bought it at A Different Bookstore in Glorietta back in the 90s. We miss that place: it was small, but it had a very astute selection, and the staff—especially Tat the manager—made smart recommendations.

Pacific Rim, the new film by Guillermo del Toro, is very loud and silly and we enjoyed it. We like to think of it as Guillermo’s Revenge, and as the movie got louder and sillier we made up this litany in the voice of Guillermo del Toro.

“You didn’t hire me to make Alien Resurrection, so here’s a bunch of vicious aliens!

“You didn’t hire me to make Transformers, so here’s a bunch of giant robots!

“You didn’t hire me to make Avengers, so here’s a portal between worlds!

“You didn’t hire me to make Godzilla, so here are giant beasts laying waste to an Asian city!

“You didn’t hire me to make Battleship, which is just as well because that was idiotic, but here’s a horde of monsters coming from the bottom of the sea!

“You’re not hiring me to remake Top Gun, so here’s a reenactment of Maverick vs. Ice Man!

“You didn’t hire me to make King Kong, so here’s a monster rampaging through the streets of a big city! (Hmmm, Del Toro was supposed to direct The Hobbit until his falling out with Peter Jackson, who remade King Kong.)

“You never made a live-action version of Voltes V, so let’s volt in! (Stop that. There’ll be no singing of that theme ever again.)

“Let’s set it in the Pacific Rim to get that lucrative Asian market. And let’s mention Manila because the audience in Manila will cheer when they hear “Manila”! (And we did! Hey, we clapped during Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy’s plane flew over the Philippines on a map.)”

Of course he got a five-rating from some of us five minutes into the movie, when we are introduced to Charlie Hunnam and his abs. That’s it, we have to watch Sons of Anarchy. In the near future the earth comes under attack from Kaiju, monsters rising from the deep, and the earthlings defend themselves by building huge robot fighters called Jaegers. (Every time someone said jaeger we thought we were required to take a shot.)

Jaegers are operated by pairs of muscular gesture gamers (not exactly, but sort of). The neural interface requires the pilots to do a kind of mind-meld called “the drift” which requires them to get in each other’s heads. But the monsters get smarter, the jaegers are defeated, and before long the fate of the planet rests on a motley band of fighters led by Stringer Bell from The Wire and featuring Rinko Kikuchi and cast members of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, True Blood, Homeland and The Unit. Go earth! (Now that Hollywood really needs the Asian market to guarantee profitability, we can expect more Asian faces in blockbuster movies. That’s why there are Asians and Anglo-Africans in Thor’s Asgard.)

Idris Elba shouts, speechifies, and gives probably the hammiest performance of his life, but by default (No one else says anything memorable) he is the star of the film. And we like Charlie Day, more so when he’s the resident geek/kaiju groupie.

One of our friends would not get into the spirit of the movie and kept questioning the logic of building giant robots to fight the monsters. Fine, they’re not efficient. Okay, they’re kind of dumb. Here’s a serious question: If you were the President of Earth and hordes of monsters attacked human populations, how would you fight the monsters? Apart from sending fighter jets with nuclear warheads. Any ideas?