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As long as we’re recalling the movies of our childhood, remember Meatballs? Bill Murray’s first movie.

The Gates of Hell by Leeroy New. 19 October – 9 November at Manila Contemporary, Whitespace, 2314 Chino Roces Avenue Ext (formerly Pasong Tamo Ext), Makati City. Tel +63 2 576 5024; www.manilacontemporary.com

Why is it so bright in Hell?
So much orange, blue, pastel.

Is this the place where Luci(fer) fell?
Or one where talking mice might dwell?

Who’s that inside the thorny cell
Glued to the floor with spooge-y gel?
Is it lust for art that made them…expel?
Are the people attached if the pieces sell?

Hark as she emits a yell
And struggles to release herself!
Is she free yet? Hard to tell
The artwork is displayed pell-mell.

“You mean you can escape from Hell?”
(Exclaimed our baffled friend Noel.)
Na-ah, get back into your cell
This art demand will not be quelled.

Barely had we posted our 100 favorite books when we began revising it: if we have to choose between a book we admire or a book we love, we pick love. This is not a completely rational list.

We forgot e.e. cummings! Whose poems lurk in our memory banks, emerging at the oddest moments.

Here’s Tom Hiddleston reading May I Feel Said He. Thank you to the lovely Hiddleston fan who posted it.

If someone has the complete works, could you send us the full and correct text of the poem that goes: “The king and queen alighting from their limousine inhabit the Hotel Meurice while I live in a garret and eat aspirine?”

* * * * *

Thanks to sunflowii and richie yap for sending in the complete piece, Poem XVI “?”. The exact quote is:

why are these pipples taking their hets off?
the king & queen alighting from their limousine
inhabit the Hotel Meurice(whereas
i live in a garret and eat aspirine)

Photo of Sissy Spacek and Chloe Moretz as Carrie from the NY Daily News.

– Whyyy?
– WHYYY?
– Why bother remaking a movie when the copy is inferior in every way to the original?
– Okay, name some remakes that are as good as or better than the original.
– Uh…I can’t think of any.
– Because they don’t exist!*
– Kaloka! Ang taas pa naman ng tingin ko kay Kimberley Peirce because of Boys Don’t Cry.
– Is it still believable in this day and age that a teenage girl doesn’t know about her period? Sure, she’s the extremely sheltered daughter of a religious nut, but she goes to school and has internet access.
– Bongga talaga si Sissy Spacek. She was in her 20s and 30s when she played teenagers in Carrie, Badlands and the start of Coal Miner’s Daughter, but we never doubted she was an adolescent.
– Maganda yang actress in the Amy Irving role. Ang kagandahan niya lang ang pinag-iba ng pelikulang ito.
– Yan ang kontrabida?? Si Nancy Allen, gusto mong sampalin, sabunutan at sipain. Her, I can’t even tell her from the other mean girls.
– May igu-guapo pa si Tommy Ross.
– Remember the original Tommy Ross? William Katt at his Redford-est.
– Baka naman tayo lang ang ganito. Maybe viewers who never saw the Brian De Palma Carrie will enjoy this.
– I don’t know. There’s no tension. It’s entirely predictable. I don’t feel anything except Whyyy.
– Ngek. The mirror scene was the eeriest bit in the old movie, and they dumped it.
– “Eerie” doesn’t apply to anything here.
– Isn’t anyone going to sing “I Never Dreamed Someone Like You Could Love Someone Like Me”?
– Korek! Tayo na lang ang kumanta.

– Dapat super-kilig yung prom. From a downtrodden outsider Carrie is raised to great heights, so when the fall happens, we totally understand her wrath.
– Ano ba, walang 360 pan??
– Hindi sapat ang teen angst niya para mangyari yan.
– Aba, superhero ang dating niya. Jumi-Jean Grey??
– Suddenly I understand why Gus van Sant did his shot-for-shot Psycho remake. There’s no point in redoing it!
– What’s your nominee for worst remake ever?
– Sabrina. They even got the dress wrong.
– Wala akong maramdaman.
– Wait, the movie can still redeem itself. Remember that famous last scene?
– (Reaction to the last scene) YECCH!
– The best thing I can say about this remake is that it makes me feel like I’m seeing the original for the first time! Sissy Spacek deserves an Oscar award. I hope they nominate her at least, but I’m not holding my breath since this is a horror movie. Piper Laurie’s over-the-top performance is so enjoyable and somehow fits her character’s over-the-top psychological dysfunction. I hope they nominate her as well.
– Chloe Moretz and Julianne Moore are both wasted in this.
– I love Chloe, but she doesn’t need telekinesis. She could kick all their asses.
– They should’ve made Carrie a boy and cast Dane DeHaan from Chronicle. He has Sissy-like fragility.
– They could’ve made Carrie a girl and still cast Dane DeHaan. Kaya niya!
– Pino Donaggio’s excessively lush, excessively melodramatic score is excessively apt, overscoring the movie’s over-the-topness. It’s one of those rare instances when you don’t miss subtlety at all.
– Yeah, a movie like this calls for music that’s big and operatic. Not that generic stuff.
– And De Palma knows how to make our hearts beat faster with the most excruciatingly slow slo-mos. Better yet, he makes us feel like we’re almost invading a scene with his repeated use of the 360 degree camera pan.
– You can’t take a realistic approach to material as weird as this. It must be over-the-top, or what is the damn point?
– I bet this movie is going to be as hard to remake as…Psycho!
– What’s that other Brian De Palma telekinesis movie?
– The Fury!
– Where Kirk Douglas and Andrew Stevens were perfectly cast as father and son. Pareho silang mga panga na tinubuan ng tao.
– I suddenly realized that the best remake of Carrie is…Chronicle!

Rating: Skip.

Noel recalled an Almodovar movie that features telekinesis: What Have I Done To Deserve This?

Get the English translation here.

* * * * *
– Reader diaw says David Cronenberg’s The Fly and John Carpenter’s The Thing are superior to their originals. True, clunky old B-movies can be improved with higher-grade directors and technology.

Noel agrees that the technicals of The Fly remake were a vast improvement, but doesn’t necessarily agree that it’s a better film. There’s nothing more disturbing than that last shot of the man-fly saying “Help me! Help me!”—the kind of disturbing that makes you think about it for years after. (Heelp meeeee!)

– turmukoy writes that Martin Scorsese’s The Departed improves on its source, Lau and Mak’s Infernal Affairs. Expect heavy opposition there, but we think that in this case, outside of the basic premise, the original and the remake are two completely different animals.

– We just remembered James Toback’s Fingers and Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Both intense and brilliantly-acted, but again, different animals. Fingers is about the disintegration of a personality, Beat is a very smart gangster movie.

Thanks to Juan, who lugged this doorstop home from a trip. Read What can W.H. Auden do for you? in Prospect.

In no particular order. Several series are listed as one book. Aaargh we just remembered a bunch of other books. This list changes constantly.

The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Stories of John Cheever
Dune, Frank Herbert
The Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Without Feathers, Woody Allen
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
A Boy and His Dog, Harlan Ellison
The Collected Stories of Paul Bowles
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, Georges Simenon
First Love, Last Rites, Ian McEwan
A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson
Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by Saki, H.H. Munro
The Jeeves stories, P.G. Wodehouse
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo
The Smiley novels, John LeCarre
The Little Drummer Girl, John LeCarre
Watchmen, Alan Moore
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Patrick Melrose novels, Edward St. Aubyn
Another Marvelous Thing, Laurie Colwin
Miss Garnet’s Angel, Salley Vickers
Our Story Begins, New and Selected Stories, Tobias Wolff
Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
From Hell, Alan Moore
Love In A Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
The Separation, Christopher Priest
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
The Decameron, Boccacio
Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson
The Book of J, David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom
Plays, Tom Stoppard
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
The Ogre, Michel Tournier
Burning Your Boats, The Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter
Don’t Look Now, Daphne Du Maurier
Light Years, James Salter
Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
100 Selected Poems, e.e. cummings
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Amphigorey (series), Edward Gorey
Night Soldiers, Alan Furst
History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey
Perfume, Patrick Susskind
The Iliad, Homer
The Odyssey, Homer
The Oresteia, Aeschylus
Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Charles Bukowski
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Ripley’s Game, Patricia Highsmith
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes
Zeno’s Conscience, Italo Svevo
Double Fault, Lionel Shriver
Numbers in the Dark, Italo Calvino
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund De Waal
For Keeps, 30 Years at the Movies, Pauline Kael
Memoirs of An Anti-Semite, Gregor von Rezzori
Stalingrad, Antony Beevor
The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy
Into the Heart of Borneo, Redmond O’Hanlon
America’s Boy, James Hamilton Paterson
Longitude, Dava Sobel
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris
In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Philip Gourevitch
The Drunkard’s Walk, Leonard Mlodinow
Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
The Forger’s Spell, Edward Dolnick
War is a force that gives us meaning, Chris Hedges
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks

The other day on our way to lunch we stopped by the stray cats’ hangout to give them some food. Along with the cranky white and orange cat Merry and the friendly ginger there was a scraggly black and white tuxedo kitten we’d never seen before. There seemed to be a large round lump on its face, and then we realized that the lump was its eye. Dangling out of its socket. We figured it was a goner and gave it some kibble for its last meal. It jumped up and ate. For someone with an eyeball dangling out of its socket, it was pretty energetic.

When we got home that night it was still there, and yesterday it turned up for a late lunch. The guards said that when the kitten turned up it was already in that state. It has a good appetite and seems fine but for the obvious fact.

We got the number of PAWS, the Philippine Animal Welfare Society, and asked if they could pick up the kitten at our building in Makati. PAWS could fetch the kitten the following morning. However, since it was an urgent case, PAWS contacted PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, whose office is in Makati, so they could retrieve the kitten that same day.

Scarcely an hour later, a lady from PETA arrived with a pet carrier to pick up the injured kitten. The kitten allowed itself to be placed in the carrier and taken to the shelter for medical aid. They’ll let us know how the treatment goes. We can’t adopt a cat, our household is still adjusting to Drogon, but we can find some other way to help.

To find out more about PAWS and PETA and to make a donation or volunteer, visit the PAWS and PETA facebook pages.